Challenge Accepted: Meta challenges
I just can’t stand being told I’m a horrible person too many times in a single day.
As long as we’re talking about challenge, we have to also talk about the things which create more challenge that aren’t a function of any part of game design. They’re not elements of poor design, they’re not fake difficulty, they don’t fall under the header of things that appear to be challenges but really aren’t. Yet they’re still challenging, and they can still knock you flat on your rear just as surely as a genuinely challenging bit of content will.
This is a collection of what I call meta challenges, challenges that are very much there but also have little to nothing to do with the actual challenge level of the game. None of them are coded into the game, but all of them are elements that make playthroughs more difficult, often stalling players entirely despite the fact that they’re obviously not a part of the core experience. Some of them brush up against fake difficulty in a few places, but all of them are still distinct from it by not providing a challenge to every player, just some players.
Easy villains
It’s not as satisfying to say you got yourself into this mess by yourself, but it’s probably more accurate.
I’m leery of anyone who pins the blame for their bad games on someone else.
Most games, especially big ones, are not the product of one person’s ego and hard work. That’s asking a lot. A big-budget game is the result of a whole lot of people working together. In an ideal situation, you have the publisher who handles all of the tedious stuff like funding and promoting, directors who have a unified and fun vision for the end product, and programmers who know how to put everything together. Usually, a few of these people wind up being the face of the project, generally the directors and producers.
But then you get bad games. And an awful lot of big-name directors seem to be unwilling to shoulder any of the blame for those games despite taking all of the credit for the games that people love, never mind that both games were equally reliant upon teams. And that makes me leery of directors blaming publishers or studios or anyone else for a game being crap.
Hard Project: Half-Life
Defiant!
Half-Life is not one of the most voluminous franchises in existence. It consists of the original game, a smattering of expansions for that game, the sequel, and two-thirds of an episodic follow-up to that sequel. Oh, and a whole lot of talk, which puts me in the mind of paying money for an idea, but so long as there’s no Kickstarter my carefully cultivated rage gene doesn’t get activated by pretentious talk by people who cannot get a video game to launch.
Then again, I may be a little harder on Gaben & co. than they deserve. I’ll snark endlessly at the fact that it has taken seven years without so much as a peep about Half-Life 3, but when you think about it, it’s a hard project to start on. Not because of lack of money or licensing rights, but because the game has some pretty huge shoes to fill, and a whole lot of baggage that’s weight the hypothetical down.
DmC and the crossroad
Simultaneously a terrible, bland, generic protagonist and a protagonist of surprising depth and clarity.
DmC: Devil May Cry is a game trying to be two things at once. If I thought it was intentional, it’d be brilliant.
It’s a game that wants to criticize the young male power fantasy and the utter silly emptiness of it while at the same time reveling in the trappings. It wants to be an action film, it wants to be a drama of a war between demonic forces. It wants to create a strong and self-sufficient female lead while at the same time making her a damsel in distress for the protagonist to rescue. It wants maturity and then revels in exploitation, it wants depth and shallowness at once, it wants to be taken seriously and yet has a solid minute of characters yelling obscenities at one another louder and louder.
To say that it’s kind of all over the place even without touching upon the gameplay elements would be understating the matter. And if there’s a game that more perfectly encapsulates the state of gaming and gamer culture at the moment, I certainly can’t think of it.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 