Tag: life is strange

Morality and Choices

infamous2

The world is not black and white. It is a wide rainbow of different shades of gray. There’s no such thing as good and evil. Morality is subjective and can be different for everyone. The best fiction, in my opinion, explores this concept. With very few exceptions (Lord of the Rings, for example), I dislike any story that deals with a clear purely good heroes fighting purely evil villains. Those stories tend to be boring, unrealistic, and simplistic. Good stories take human nature and explore both the good and the bad. Morality is a subject that I wish was explored more in games. Most games that explore morality tend to just be telling a specific story, and does not offer choices. The Last of Us is a good example of this. When it comes to offering moral choices to the player, most games don’t touch it, and many that do tend to boil moral choices down into a clearly good choice and a clearly bad choice. The few times I have experienced truly interesting moral choices in gaming are some of my absolute favorite moments in games.

I don’t need every game to allow me to forge my own story through choices. If a developer has a specific story that they want to tell, then they should feel free to. I mentioned the Last of Us briefly before, but I think that it was a masterpiece of storytelling and offering choices could have easily ruined it. The player was not meant to play Joel as they would act in his place. The player was meant to experience this story through Joel’s eyes. His character is specific and unambiguous. Other games that do this are Bioshock, Uncharted, Wolfenstein, and many more. As long as the story is good, I am fine with not having true agency.

There are some games that are story based but fail to explore any kind of interesting morality. I think that these games have boring and unrealistic stories. Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor is an example of this. The gameplay is fun and the nemesis system was fantastic, but the story, itself was boring. I couldn’t care less about the main character. The outcome is predetermined because everyone knows the Lord of the Rings story, so there are no real stakes in that respect, and there is no exploration into the morality of the characters. Sauron and the orcs are clearly evil, and the humans are clearly good. The only character with any amount of moral ambiguity is Celebrimbor, and he was really just a good person manipulated by evil.

Most games that include moral choices take the simplest and easiest path, that of a binary morality system where you are given a good choice and a bad choice. It becomes more of a role playing decision where you decide if the player character is a good person or a bad person. Infamous does this. I love the first and second Infamous games but when you either choose to be Good Cole or Bad Cole, it doesn’t make you, the player, really think about what the moral choice is. You just decide that you want the evil powers or the good powers this playthrough and decide accordingly. Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic do this as well. You can never truly place yourself in the shoes of the player character because the immersion is broken by an unrealistic morality system. If you were truly in that situation, it wouldn’t even be a question. You wouldn’t ask yourself: “Hmm, should I steal all of the food from the starving people or nah?”.

Occasionally a game will come along that really makes you think about what is the right decision. These are amazing moments. One of my favorite examples of this was in the Witcher 3. You come across a small settlement that was almost entirely massacred. Geralt assumes, at first, that it was some monster that did this, but after examining the bodies, he discovers that they were killed with a sword. He followed the killer’s tracks to a wounded witcher. The wounded witcher reveals that he was contracted to kill monsters by the settlement but after he finished the contract they tried to get out of paying him by trying to stab him in the back. Wounded and furious, he killed most of the settlement. He knows that what he did was wrong and is prepared for you to execute him. But Geralt has experienced the discrimination and hate that most people have for witchers every day. He understands the pain and frustration of the constant mistrust and disdain that could lead to this mindset, and Geralt has not always done the right thing in the past. The player is given the option to duel the other witcher to the death or to let him live. I sat and looked at the screen thinking about the situation for at least 20 minutes. It really made me think and consider every factor. I loved it. The Witcher 3 had several really good moral choices like this.

Prey 2017 has several interesting choices as well. Spoiler warning for any game I mention, by the way. In the end you have to choose if you will sacrifice yourself and any remaining humans on the Talos 1 space station in the chance that you will stop the alien threat from spreading to Earth or if you will find an escape pod and try to return with help. The whole game, you have multiple characters insisting on the correct choice, including videos of yourself before your memory was wiped. Prey does an excellent job of making you mistrust every single person and thing on the space station, including yourself. You have no idea who to believe, so it’s a choice you must make for yourself. Life is Strange has some interesting choices as well. In the alternate timeline where Chloe’s dad is alive but she is paralyzed. After spending time with her, she asks you to help her end her life. The choice is agonizing, which makes it amazing. Some people criticized that moment because since Max immediately changes the timeline back, the choice ultimately doesn’t matter. I disagree. Perhaps it doesn’t affect gameplay, but it is a choice that Max will have to live with. I like to live through the characters I play and empathize with them, so Max’s impossible decision is my impossible decision. When a game truly makes me think deeply about my own personal morality, those are the moments that I remember.

Sometimes games create choices that have potential to create either gameplay or emotional impact, but ultimately fail to. Wolfenstein New Order and its expansion Old Blood have these choices. In both of these, you are forced to choose to save one of two people. Unfortunately, these choices come ten minutes after meeting the characters so you have no emotional investment, and the gameplay doesn’t change based on your decision, so the decision is also not functionally different. These feel like missed opportunities for powerful moments.

Ultimately I love when a game explores human nature and morality, but not when the morality is binary and simplistic. I also love having gameplay consequences to my choices.

Difficulty in Games

you-died-dsThe subject of difficulty in video games was discussed extensively a few months ago when Cuphead was released, but I think it is an interesting topic and worth speaking about. I have yet to play Cuphead, but I have played and loved the Dark Souls series, which is always brought up when discussing difficulty. My opinion on the subject, in its simplest form, is that difficult games are fine, easy games are fine, and games with multiple difficulty options are fine. Not every game has to appeal to every player. There are so many games, enough that every gamer can find plenty that appeal to their tastes.

When it comes to difficulty, I think that there is a fine line between frustrating and challenging. A challenging task is one that requires you to exercise your skills and strategy in a way that you normally don’t. When you overcome the task, you are filled with excitement and pride. A frustrating task is one where you aren’t forced to change your tactics, but you are simply required to be perfect or have more stamina. These tasks don’t make you exhilarated or proud(except maybe the satisfaction that others don’t have the skill to accomplish the same task), just a mounting sense of unfairness and bitterness.

Many shooter games err on the side of frustrating. On harder difficulties, enemies take more bullets to kill and you take fewer bullets to die so it becomes about staying alive long enough to shoot enough bullets into the enemies. The difficulty relies on taking longer and punishing mistakes. The Last of Us is an interesting case because not only does it make you die almost instantly, it starts to remove or change features. You have no UI(no health bar, no ammo indicator, it removes the ability to listen(see through walls) entirely, and it makes ammo and materials far less common. You really have to conserve ammo, choose which encounters are necessary to engage in rather than sneak past, and which upgrades or skills you want since there are not enough to upgrade everything. The way you play changes drastically. Nier Automata, while not a shooter game, does this poorly. On the hardest difficulty, you die in one hit, so you have to play perfectly. It often forces you to fight enemies by keeping distance and shooting enemies with your pod, which takes forever.

When it comes to Dark Souls, I think that its reputation does it a disservice. The series is challenging, but only until you learn it. Most players struggle through a game for 50 or more hours the first time, then complete a second playthrough in 10 hours. Dark Souls is fairly easy if you’re willing to learn its systems. Each boss will be difficult at first, until you learn their attack patterns and weaknesses. When you kill a boss, you feel proud because, even though you fail over and over again, you learn to progress further each time until you finally succeed. Dark Souls is challenging, but not frustrating (at least not usually…I’m looking at you Bed of Chaos…). Difficult games are good because they make beating them a true accomplishment.

The Dark Souls series also has several bosses that are known for being very easy. Examples of these are The Fool’s Idol from Demons’ Souls, Pinwheel from Dark Souls, The Covetous Demon from Dark Souls 2, Micolash from Bloodborne, and The Deacons of the Deep from Dark Souls 3. These are arguably the least popular bosses from each game because they offer no challenge. Personally, I love them because they usually have a new mechanic or story element that is interesting and unique. The Fool’s Idol has an NPC guardian who lies to you and makes the boss invincible until you kill him. Pinwheel has a heartbreaking backstory and amazing music. The Covetous Demon has an attack where he literally swallows you and spits you out naked after un-equipping all of your gear and armor. How goofy and amazing is that? Micolash is a huge troll. He immediately runs away from you while laughing like maniac until you can corner him. Yakety Sax would be perfect music for it. Deacons of the Deep is a giant crowd of pushover enemies where only one affects the health bar and they keep passing the boss health bar back and forth, like a game of keep away.

Another one of my favorite games is Journey. Journey takes a few hours to complete, there is no fail condition, and the puzzles are simple. The game is a masterpiece of environmental and emotional storytelling. The scenery, music and animations are beautiful and draw the emotion out of you. Journey is not hard, but it is unique and evocative. Life is Strange is another good example of a game that is easy but doesn’t suffer because of it. These illustrate why I think that not every game needs to be difficult. If a game, or part of a game, is interesting, entertaining, and evocative, then it doesn’t need to be challenging to be fun. Not every game is about overcoming challenge, nor do they need to be. Some games give you satisfaction from succeeding challenging tasks, some from an emotional release, and some from intellectual engagement.

The amazing thing about gaming is that the primary purpose is entertainment. If a game is fun or satisfying to play, then it is successful as a game. Not every person is going to like every game and that’s OK. There will be plenty geared towards them. Any time a game tries to appeal to every audience, it usually fails to succeed with any of them. Final Fantasy XV is an example of this.

To return to Cuphead and the controversy surrounding it, the situation all started with Dean Takahashi’s infamous poor gameplay of the demo. The subject of games journalism and the fiasco around Dean Takahashi requires its own post, but the fallout from that event spawned several articles talking about how games should not be hard, or that they should have a “Skip Boss” button. I disagree with this idea on many levels. Hard games are not bad, they just are not for everyone. It’s fine to dislike a game, but it’s not fine to claim it is a bad game simply because it wasn’t for you. As for the skip boss button. My immediate reaction is that it is a ridiculous overreaction. If you are frustrated with a game to a point where you want to skip content (especially in Cuphead, where the entire point of the game is to fight bosses) then you should just stop playing it. If a game is not fun, don’t play it. Simple as that.