Twin Sector demo: it sucks

[Zixinus]

What follows is a rant about a new game demo. You can find it here: http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/09/11/ ... ctor-demo/

I've noticed the trailers for this game and saw the idea: you have telekinetic gloves, nothing else. A logical alteration of the gravity gun, but it still seemed like a good idea as any.

I've heard that the demo came out for it so I decided to try it. Seemed like the game was a bit of a puzzle-FPS or something, so I decided it was worth a try.

The first warning sign was the loading screen: a close up at the female protagonist. While she's not exactly ugly, its not a face so terribly pretty that I want to stare at it while the game loads its bloated engine. I'm suspicious of games that overtly displays its female protagonists, as I usually find it to be an effort to hide shortcomings. I was right.

Now, I get the gloves immediately. Left mouse makes you attract things while right mouse lets you push things. An added thing that if you aren't targeting any movable objects, you move yourself and the game takes advantage of it. You can cancel out your falling momentum by pushing yourself away from the ground as you fall. Nifty twist.

The problem however starts when you discover that this is a first-person perspective game.

Why is it that developing games seems like an effort that requires some intelligence yet developers never seem to grasp certain obvious annoyances? Or in this cases, mayor game flaw:

Please among you here, raise your hands that ever experienced first person platformers? No? Raise your hand if you ever experienced a sudden platforming element in a FPS?

Was it annoying, unintuitive and hard? Of course it was! You can't see your feet or body. You don't feel the game character's sense of motion and can't compensate because you can't see their goddamn feet.

This immediately turns a twist into an annoyance. The only thing you can do in first person shooters, is fall well. Jumping is a complicated problem precisely because you can't tell the exact distance, not even in midair. Since the FPS Development Conspiracy has outlawed the ability to grab unto ledges and pull your character up, this makes platforming effectively an extremely annoying task if not outright impossible.

So why the hell do it anyway?

But that's just the beginning.

The game begins by scoring a -10000 or so by using the most worst and usually badly-written cliché possible: amnesia. Yes, amnesia. I have yet to find a good use of amnesia that didn't feel like the writer fucking with the reader because he couldn't have bothered to make a proper introductions. But what's worse, its needless here: the character suddenly remembers her name, why she's here and she is told why she's awake. She remembers getting to the underground complex the game is set in. She just doesn't remember the rest of her life. Which would be needless to tell us even if we knew.

The voice acting for the computer is fine, because I guess it was supposed to be monotone but somehow sounds like its trying to express emotions. The protagonist however, sounds capable of expressing only two emotions: confusion and anxiety, when she should be going trough terror, pain, horror, determination and curiosity. I guess those two emotions must have come easily to the first decently-speaking English voice actor the developers could find at the lowest price.

Another problem, is that you crouch extremely slowly and don't have a flashlight. You'd think there would be a flashlight around among the bundle of telekinetic gloves.

Another strange thing is that there are alternative buttons for the door. On the ceiling. I can believe the telekinetic gloves but I can't fathom why would there be buttons for doors on the ceiling.

The main level of the demo is going to the generator and switching it on, because it switched off somehow. There are still lights, the AI-like computer is still yapping but the doors stopped working. Because in the future, we will use power-draining electric doors with no manual override. Yeah. Whatever.

The next problem I found after braking some glass, is that there are still death-lasers-of-death on.

Yes, the AI is telling me that he has routed all backup power to the cryochambers but there is still a wall of lasers in my way.

Which tells you that the AI is really incompetent and unable to cut the power from the lasers or that he genuinely doesn't care to do anything.

Which brings me to another inevitable thing when it comes to physics-based puzzles: stacking things. It seems that the lasers that will instantly kill your character will not cut trough the conveniently available heavy boxes and barrels (why is it always barrels? boxes can always contain a variety of things, but why barrels? and why can't you open boxes at any one time).

Naturally, the game naturally tries to help you by giving you awkward control over the spin of the item and making it block your entire view. What's worse, is that the item is magically forced to the centre of the screen in a very stiff fashion. This worked with HL2 where stacking was done with small items and you didn't need much precision, but is an annoyance when you need to precisely stack several barrels just to get past a wall of lasers in a relatively tight hallway.

Like with the platforming, it turns out to be an annoyance rather than a challenge due to awkwardness.

Then we go to the most strange and unambiguous generator in the world. You have a stairway to the top of the room, which has nothing there; you can't tell how the hell the thing is supposed to generate electricity; there are two lasers blocking your path.

You go up and see that there is an opening hatch in the middle of the generator. Let me repeat that: there is a room within the generator that you have to fall in. The generator of course, not producing power and all, still manages to light up and use an electric display to tell you that its off. And the problem that you had to be woken up for is solved by simply pressing a button.

Then you meet your first and in the demo, only enemy: a floating security robot, that rather than use a taser or warn you for trespassing, simply bumps into you and somehow burn you. You were told to run, but with the awkward control scheme, it was simpler to just simply lure the stupid thing in the lasers. It once again shows that the AI that either is completely incompetent and unable to communicate with the robot or doesn't care to help you.

Then you go back to the lift you came in and the demo ends.

In summary, the game is unimaginative, badly implanted (it would have been far better to make it a over-the-shoulder platformer), uninteresting and empty levels that use up-to-date graphics to show you a shiny concrete wall, extremely awkward controls, a story that might have had a good idea but is stupidly written and generally predictable puzzles.

[Sarevok]

So it is like Portal with a gravity gun instead as the gimmick and none of the hype campaign ?

[Zixinus]

My guess the aim somewhere was to create something like Portal, but if the demo is any judge, it failed. Portal didn't insult your intelligence with the worst cliché in storytelling history, had controls that weren't awkward as hell and the gameplay was quite easy to figure out.

[Stark]

Wow, it sounds like they made a game out of a 5 year-old UT2004 mod weapon; the IAM. It had what you describe; push and pull on items although it used a beam. You could 'push' away the ground to fly/pole-vault your way across the map or climb up places, you could throw enemies away or crush them with tanks, etc. They didn't try to make it a careful platform game though; it was just in multi like the exploding dolls and black hole gun. Good times.

[Zixinus]

Then I can cross out one of the few good points I have reserved for the game.

Oh, and another thing: when the AI tells you that the power is out, you find that none of the door switches work, as you'd expect. So you work your way around that and I arrive at a room. The door's switch doesn't work, as you'd expect but there is a grate-like looking entrance that a walkway made out of pipelines seem to lead. There are also glass windows but I can't seem to crack them with the lying-about barrels.

After some tries, I get up and find that I can't do shit all with the grate. I go down. I see a button. Being a human being, I push it. Above me the grate slides open. When there wasn't supposed to be any fucking power.

So, I enter this room and find some shiny thing on the floor that I pick up. I thought it was a fuse, because that's what I picked up so far and bugger all if I could tell or if the game would bother to tell you to. The inventory won't tell you either, as you can only only do two things beside jump and run: walk, usually an extremely useless move in most FPSs, and crouch which the game didn't get right.

Anyway, I find some big metal-looking box and find the game tells me that this can brake the glass windows. I am. Why can't an apparently empty metal barrel be unable to crack glass but a metal case can? Whatever. I also find an alarming gas leak that is burning and the game informs me that I can light glass bottles with them. I don't see any.

So I go out and I'm back where I'm started only with what I thought was a fuse. I suddenly don't know where to go. I see no hatch or something that I should be able to use. I wonder back to the beginning of the level and back again, still not finding anything.

Until I absent-mindedly press a door-switch opposite the room where I got the shiny thing. In which is the afromentioned lasers. I die. Try again.

It turns out that the shiny thing was a keycard.

When the power is supposedly out. You need a keycard, for a lock that uses electricity it doesn't have, to open a door to a room that so you can turn on a device that supplies the electricity that its security lasers use and its locks use so you can turn it on....

Yeah. It was that point that my opinion solidified.

Oh, and the best place to store gas cannisters? Right on top of a grating with a button on the ceiling so they'll fall to the ground for you to use. I tennis ball would have probably made more damage to this place than a bored demolition engineer with a few satchels of C4.

[Covenant]

Metroid Prime was a first person platformer in many places and it worked fine. What you're encountering is shoddy level design, not a bad concept. A first person platformer can work just fine if they shift away from the need to land on miniscule platforms and more on the problem of nagivation in a three dimensional space.

Also, a neglected mechanic is the bodyspace system used in Thief III, which physically represented your body. When you looked down you saw your feet, when you looked right you saw your arms and shoulders, and you certainly could grab and climb up on ledges. If someone wants to make a platformer in 3D they literally have ancient technology that they could copy to basically re-revolutionize the genre.

[Stark]

It's even funnier because 'climb over things' instantly makes problem-solving more natural... and level design harder. What do you mean you can't force the player to go where you want with a waist-high fence???

[Covenant]

It's even funnier because 'climb over things' instantly makes problem-solving more natural... and level design harder. What do you mean you can't force the player to go where you want with a waist-high fence???

I'd say it's because they do things backwards. Generally, a chest-high wall is just thrown in because they want to encourage you to play along without bothering to uglify the environment with ten foot walls, but really, why do they want to stop you from going X direction? Because they didn't build any terrain over there?

Honestly, why have that area then? Think of the situations with these walls--they're nearly always pointless corridor crawl, or just wasting space by making we walk around an obviously uninteresting barrier. What's so bad about letting me scale these things? Nearly any game that uses these can be improved by removing them and giving a little more room on the edges. Fallout's a good example--there's a lot of pointless barriers in that game. Instead of making these rubble heaps just big barriers, why not make them legitimately dangerous? Put mines on them. Have raiders or dangerous mutants patrol them like ancient fortifications. Why reduce the game when you can balance it through the mechanisms you already have in place to try and liven it up?

It's just lazy design. If you're planning a relatively linear experience for your game, just don't throw in a lot of freeform movement. Stop over-designing things you need to over-design an antidote to.

[Stark]

Well it's like unopenable doors. They're there so the player can't leave the play area. So... why are they there? As you say, any 'traditional' game barrier can be made interesting, but I'm pretty sure developers don't care to try.

[Zixinus]

What you're encountering is shoddy level design, not a bad concept. A first person platformer can work just fine if they shift away from the need to land on miniscule platforms and more on the problem of nagivation in a three dimensional space.

What you say is essentially true. It is not impossible to make a decent FPS platformer. This game is not on the case for it though.

Like I mentioned, if only you would be be to see your body and be able to grab unto ledges (or even to the platform walls) it would be possible for the platforming sections to be an enjoyable experience.

However, in this case, its not just the level design, but the lack of these two features or any features that help you compensate for the player's lack of momentum sensing/experiencing that undermine the gameplay. Your best bet is guesswork and practise, not something that's reliable in say, a chase scene.

What annoys me is that the same thing is true for health too, if I'm allowed to go off-topic a bit.
Why do most games insist on using red borders and heavy breathing to indicate your health? Even Arma 2, a game that displays how much bullets you have in your clip, will refuse to tell you how you are injured (and it really matters there because you can bleed out). Why? Why can we have magical bullet counters but not a simple doll telling you where you are hurt and how fast you are bleeding?

EDIT: Oh, and I agree with Stark's sentiment. Nothing annoys me more than seeing a house and making a dash for in hope of shelter only to be one of those arbitrary houses that are magically bulletproof and you can't enter. Or doors that would give you a neat tactical advantage but are just permanently locked. This becomes especially jarring when you are collecting keys or when you have enough firepower to not only take out the door but the surrounding wall.

[salm]

What annoys me is that the same thing is true for health too, if I'm allowed to go off-topic a bit.
Why do most games insist on using red borders and heavy breathing to indicate your health? Even Arma 2, a game that displays how much bullets you have in your clip, will refuse to tell you how you are injured (and it really matters there because you can bleed out). Why? Why can we have magical bullet counters but not a simple doll telling you where you are hurt and how fast you are bleeding?

Most games don´t need that degree of realism and are better off with a more abstract damage system. Where exactly you are hurt doesn´t matter for the vast majority of games.
Metal Gear Solid 3 had a system where you could get injured in different body parts and also had to heal them. It was the most annoying thing about the game.

[Zixinus]

If it doesn't matter where the damage is, then a health bar could also be sufficient. My point is that the drive for minimal HUD can and has gone too far where you can't tell how hurt you are. Minimal HUD does help immersion, but immersion can brake when there is a significant vital-information (read: stuff you really, really should know) dissonance between you and the played character.

The played character should knew how hurt you are and in say a gunfight, you can't be sure because there are too many flashes and noise during play for you to notice the red bordering or the heavy breathing. Even a simple, contrasted red bar or circle or something that tells you in a quick glance whether you should pursue your enemy or leave them is quite necessary.

And please, observe that my specific suggestion for a solution was limited to one game, where hit location is indeed significant. I may be misreading the very post I've written, but I didn't suggest to use the same scheme for every game.

[Covenant]

I didn't think you did--you just said that in a game where hit location is important, it would be nice to know where you have been hit. That seems reasonable.

Am I the only one who liked MGS3's wound system? I was sad when they yanked it (and the other survivalist mechanics) from the successor game, though I was not terribly surprised I didn't have to hunt down goats to eat in Afghanistan. I liked the idea of a complex would mechanic because all too often nowadays damage is simply a time penalty. Get hurt, find a corner, crouch down, heal. Having actual wounds (and a rather unrealistic need to eat) made the game's combat feel far more dangerous, since you actually did have a secondary factor to worry about when wounded.

MGS3, as a game with a heavy survival-and-stealth element unique to that one and not the others benefited from the damage model they used. If they had just kept the same ol' Eat Ration To Heal system... eh. That or you can play with the No Ration game, which I like, but having an actual wounding mechanic saved me the trouble of deliberately gimping myself to avoid feeling like a cheater.

Anyway, your average game doesn't need it, I will agree. But for games that want to pit you against your environment and not just make you into a massive slab-jawed armor-wearing wolverine-healing-factored bullet magnet... I think that complicated mechanics serve them better than simple ones.

[salm]

If it doesn't matter where the damage is, then a health bar could also be sufficient. My point is that the drive for minimal HUD can and has gone too far where you can't tell how hurt you are. Minimal HUD does help immersion, but immersion can brake when there is a significant vital-information (read: stuff you really, really should know) dissonance between you and the played character.

The played character should knew how hurt you are and in say a gunfight, you can't be sure because there are too many flashes and noise during play for you to notice the red bordering or the heavy breathing. Even a simple, contrasted red bar or circle or something that tells you in a quick glance whether you should pursue your enemy or leave them is quite necessary.

Then i mostly agree with you. I generelly prefer a good old health bar, too. However, i don´t think this red flashes and heavy breathing thing is that bad either.

And please, observe that my specific suggestion for a solution was limited to one game, where hit location is indeed significant. I may be misreading the very post I've written, but I didn't suggest to use the same scheme for every game.

Ah, ok. It´s because you said this:

What annoys me is that the same thing is true for health too, if I'm allowed to go off-topic a bit.
Why do most games insist on using red borders and heavy breathing to indicate your health? Even Arma 2, a game that displays how much bullets you have in your clip, will refuse to tell you how you are injured (and it really matters there because you can bleed out). Why? Why can we have magical bullet counters but not a simple doll telling you where you are hurt and how fast you are bleeding?

I interpreted that as you being annoyed by red borders and the lack of damage zones in general while using Arma 2 only as an example.

[Oskuro]

Well it's like unopenable doors. They're there so the player can't leave the play area. So... why are they there? As you say, any 'traditional' game barrier can be made interesting, but I'm pretty sure developers don't care to try.

Just suddenly had a flashback to the original Alone in the Dark and what happened when you tried to leave the game area by opening the main entrance doors.

[Zixinus]

However, i don´t think this red flashes and heavy breathing thing is that bad either.

It isn't when you have so little "simple" health that there is no ambiougity (say, in Penumbra IIRC, where you had the state of not-hurt, being hurt and being dead). The problems starts where there is, like in a very visual-heavy game with lots of flashes and thunderous shots, where you can't pick up the sublte cues in time.

Despite its failings as a horror game, Dead Space had done this right: you were only told stuff when you needed it

Since you always needed to know your health, it was almost always in plain sight, on the played character's shoulder. This seems to me a rather simple and obvious game design idea. Why can't it be more troughly followed?

My guess is fashion and pressure for blatant mimicing rather than deeper understanding and implementing. Some successful game had no on-screen hud. Therefore, every other game that wanted desperately to be successful also implemented no-onscreen HUD just for the sake of it. Some designer somewhere probably opened his mouth to say that then the player couldn't know a vital fact but immedeatly recognised that then he would have to bump heads with management. Since the designer wanted to get paid, he shut up, swallowed down his bitterness and went on copying.

I interpreted that as you being annoyed by red borders and the lack of damage zones in general while using Arma 2 only as an example.

Good that we cleared up this misunderstanding.