aesthetic will make me god

return of the immersive sim, 2007-2008

bioshock

system shock 2 is one of those seminal games, a cornerstone for future games, something to emulate. quite a few games -- mostly sci-horror -- have drawn from it; aliens vs predator 2, doom 3, and later alien: isolation all take cues from it, which makes its relative obscurity all the sadder. a big part of that, however, is due to the fact that for many years the system shock license -- and indeed the separate licenses for both games -- has been a gigantic fucking mess.

irrational games, the developer of system shock 2 under the auspices of looking glass studios, wanted to do a sequel; however, electronic arts nixed the idea, and irrational, after deciding not to rehash the cyberpunk theme again anyway, decided to make a spiritual sequel instead.

the first couple of drafts were particularly strange -- with themes of cult deprogramming and abandoned nazi bunkers. the main thing left behind from the nazi bunker idea was the concept of genetic manipulation.

the end result, of course, was quite different from the early drafts. an art deco orgy of tremendous opulence, the game attempted to meaningfully tackle concepts like laissez-faire capitalism and objectivism, using a plot centered around genetic manipulation to drive conflict. a pretty ambitious idea, all told, though ken levine is nothing if not ham-fisted, and the game presented a disconnect between what the story seemed to advocate and what the game expected you to do. 

there were other problems with the game. first, the game had been marketed to two separate groups in two separate ways. to old-school PC gamers who remembered 1999′s system shock 2, it’d been touted as a spiritual successor. to everyone else, it’d been marketed as a story about hubris and objectivism with an art deco, 1950s-style setting. it succeeded in the latter -- but the former proved unsatisfactory to the majority of PC gamers -- a wretched, entitled lot if there ever was one.

oh, the flaws were endless! gone was the inventory management (thank fuck.) gone was having to pay money to use the resurrection chambers (which resulted in a ludicrous argument where someone posited that because theoretically you could just charge a big daddy with a wrench and die over and over with no resource loss the game had no challenge. i shit you not, someone actually said that.) gone was the RPG-style character development where you had to put points towards one skill or other with limited points to use (which i honestly thought was kind of silly anyway.) gone was the luck-based hacking, replaced by a pipe dream knockoff -- which could be pretty annoying, but system shock 2′s hacking is utter garbage.

there were other changes but those were the ones that drew the most ire. i won’t lie -- i spent a few years being angry at bioshock for not being system shock 2. then i realized wait no that’s fucking stupid and learned to enjoy bioshock as its own game, and though it’s a little dated now it certainly maintains its own value as a game.

(note: this was written before the remastered version came out, which i have not yet had a chance to play.)

fallout 3

to hear old-school fallout fans tell it, nobody's been more hard done by than them. depending on how puritanical they are, some even consider fallout 2 a slap in the face of the franchise, with its over-reliance on humor and pop culture references. then interplay did its best to drive the franchise into the ground; fallout tactics was an okay squad tactics game in the vein of jagged alliance, but the console-only fallout: brotherhood of steel was like if gauntlet was dropped on its head as a baby and exposed to too much nu-metal, and a planned official third main game, known to fandom by its development name, "van buren" was never finished when interplay shut down 2003 after having attempted to stave off bankruptcy for years. due to years of poor management and struggling to compete, the company had been hemorrhaging money and talent since the 90s -- fargo himself bailed in 2001 to form inXile, leaving caen in charge. under caen, several studios had been closed and projects canceled, and he tried to leverage the company's most popular titles to bring more money in. it failed.

interplay was effectively dead, and so was fallout. the legal proceedings that followed would take years. in an effort to pay off creditors, interplay licensed the fallout IP to bethesda for three games, then sold it entirely a few years later. there's actually a somewhat complex -- and nasty -- legal case surrounding this; the fallout wiki breaks it down rather well.

the fallout fandom immediately lost its shit.

see, bethesda were a bad company. they made bad games. morrowind was kinda okay, but oblivion was consolitis-infected casual shit for babies and not a TRUE RPG because reasons. bethesda would ruin fallout! OBLIVION WITH GUNS!

bethesda ignored the hysteria and had been working on a new fallout game since originally licensing the IP in 2004, released the game in late summer 2008. the first numbered fallout game in 10 years, it was a drastic change in gameplay. where fallout 1 and 2 had been more comparable to the middle ultima games -- isometric RPGs with a point and click interface -- fallout 3 was, essentially, well, oblivion with guns.

there's more to it than that, obviously, but that's about the gist of it: it was a first person (or third person at the touch of a button) action RPG in an open-world sandbox that had far more granularity to it than even fallout 2's sprawling mess of locations.

it had some flaws. for one, the shooting never really felt completely right; a lack of iron-sights was part of it, but there was no sense of "oomph" to it. this is mitigated in part by VATS; in an attempt to recreate the turn-based combat of fallout classic, pressing the appropriate key or button (default V on keyboard) would pause the game and zoom in on an enemy, allowing the player the chance to pick their shots, with a percent chance to miss. for the RPG player this was a somewhat satisfactory confession; the action gamer might find it stifling to be forced to use it to get around the clunky combat.

the engine, of course, was borrowed from oblivion; by this point it was starting to look a little dated. some people complained about the green tint over everything -- an odd artistic choice to be sure, especially when the “real is brown” trend was in full backlash at the time, but in hindsight, it gives a bit of visual character to the game that has persisted. the famous “fellout” mod lays bare the real problem with the game -- a very muted palette in all its texture choices.

probably the chief complaint, common with bethesda games, is the writing; depending on the quest, it was quite spotty at times, and the main quest especially was underwhelming. part of the problem was everything centered around the player, which is a typical problem for bethesda. worse is the player dialogue had an air of stiffness to it -- it didn't seem natural. (though of course there's a difference between speaking naturally and saying "tag-teamed by giant fuckbots.") there's plenty of other criticisms, but this isn't the space for that.

what fallout 3 did have was a game that had far more to explore than its predecessors, or indeed oblivion; an oppressive atmosphere (one that not even a mod to remove the green tint could erase!) and a few genuinely good quests. it also had some decent DLC; point lookout in particular was a moody, atmospheric piece that drew players away from the wasteland surrounding washington DC into the the swamps to the south, and the culmination of the main quest in the pitt gave an early hint at the kind of dillemmas one might expect from new vegas. 

while those of certain temperament would deny it, the influence of deus ex on fallout 3 is blatantly obvious -- and lead designer emil pagliarulo has gone on record saying as such. and it's easy to see where deus ex fits in; depending on how you've built your character, you have multiple methods for dealing with a given situation. skill development is important, and most skills are useful in some fashion. this multifaceted approach is classic deus ex -- hell, it's classic immersive sim, period.

fallout 3 didn’t get everything right, nor did it get everything wrong. but what it did do was introduce fallout to the world; fallout 1 and 2 had been consigned to the mists of 90s PC gaming, clunky by modern standards on top of being difficult to obtain legally (at least until they were released on gog.com -- and then removed due to legal issues, and then put up for sale again... hopefully for good this time!) fallout: brotherhood of steel wound up in landfills where it belongs. fallout 3 was a blockbuster, a multiplatform hit from a company that had scored big on bringing the elder scrolls to console with morrowind. fallout might’ve been doomed to obscurity if not for bethesda’s rescue of the franchise. and whatever your feelings might be on fallout 3, without fallout 3 there never would have been a new vegas.

then again, some people might have preferred that...

metal gear solid 4: guns of the patriots

for pretty much most of the last 30 years, every time hideo kojima released a new metal gear game he would declare it to be the last one. as we all know, that didn't work out. metal gear solid 4 marks no less than the 5th time kojima would go back on his word to revisit the franchise -- and there's been a couple more since! (then again, with his exit from konami, he might have to keep his word this time if only by default!)

in a lot of ways, however, MGS4 feels like a conclusive end to the story that started way back in '87; it's a farewell letter to fans, allowing them to look back on the franchise up to this point and see the long, winding trail that solid snake has travelled, while also exploring new forms of gameplay as well as a further exploration of the links between player, console, and game -- in this case, the console being the playstation 4, the series' first 7th-generation release. in a sense, all this reflects in snake himself, who is rapidly aging, and he's tired, and is keeping on through sheer force of will and new technology to help him.

unlike previous games, the game is divided into several parts; while MGS2 had two separate sections, the first one was far shorter than the latter and served as a prologue more than anything else. MGS4 goes whole hog and just splits the game up into multiple missions, 5 in all, each with their own conceit. on top of this, a few fundamental changes to controls had been made; the legacy of resident evil 4 can be seen when holding down the aim button, as the camera shifts behind snake's shoulder. the camo system that first appeared in MGS3 was expanded upon; snake's sneaking suit now acts like a chameleon, changing its appearance to hide snake provided he stays still. aided by a small helper robot, reminiscent of the tiny metal gear that helped gillian seed in the sega CD adventure classic snatcher, snake hunts for clues to track down revolver ocelot, who has now completely been subsumed by the liquid snake personality, and is at war with the mysterious patriots, who have engineered a global economy based on warfare.

while the first two parts of the game seem to be reminiscent of previous games (and perhaps a bit of call of duty 4, as well), it's the third section where the gameplay really seems to shine. set in a gloomy european city reminiscent of prague at night, it's no less than thief 2's famous "trace the courier" mission writ large. the fourth section sees snake returning to shadow moses island, the setting of metal gear solid 1; it's fallen into disuse and is empty and abandoned, but returning to the place brings back a lot of memories for snake and the player. you're even given a pixellated MGS1 snake mask!

perhaps the single greatest complaint about the game is the heavy use of cutscenes; where MGS3 had toned down extensive cutscene use following criticisms about the end of MGS2, MGS4 returned to it in full force with roughly 8 hours of cutscene time -- the final cutscene alone holding the guinness world record at a whopping 71 minutes. of course, proportionally it's on par with MGS2, with about 12 hours of gameplay, while MGS2 tends to average out at 8 hours gameplay and 6 hours of cutscenes. (and who says games are getting shorter?) it's also important to remember that the game was intended to be a conclusion to a story that was 6 entries long at the time (7 if you include portable ops) so some lengthy wrap-up is to be expected, especially in a franchise as story-heavy as this one.

i'll never actually understand the cutscene complaint. the series has always been experimental, and by MGS1 had become something of an auteur work, weaving multiple disparate thematic elements together to analyze and critique everything from nuclear proliferation to the way gamers idolize and outright fetishize iconic characters. the long cutscenes are part of that, and by this point anyone getting into the franchise knows, or ought to know, what they're signing up for. kojima himself always wanted to make movies anyway; when the playstation 1 gave him the technology to do the next best thing, he took the opportunity and the rest is history.

as a game it's superb, cutscenes and all. as a work of artistic expression it's an incredibly emotional farewell (until peace walker, anyway) for one of the most popular and yet divisive series of all time, and serves as a highwater mark for the playstation 3's library.

HISTORY OF FPS MASTERPOST

immersive sim: a broader look back, 1994-1998

the elder scrolls I: arena

with a proper (re)definition of the term “immersive sim” as a design concept with a clear description of its characteristics, it behooves us to take a more critical eye and re-evaluate what games qualify, because when we actually get serious about defining the design ethos that shaped looking glass studios’ games and their influence it becomes clear that quite a few more games seem to follow along the same trends, coming at them independently.

it’s a generally accepted notion that the immersive sim has roots in ultima underworld, which itself is based on a franchise with roots in tabletop RPGs. quite a few people in western games development in the 80s and 90s were into D&D and other tabletop games; doom was conceived during one of id software’s regular play sessions. many developers had attempted to recreate D&D in video game format; the famous gold box series are one of the most well-known examples, but the elder scrolls is perhaps the most successful at not just bringing a campaign to the screen, but bringing an entire tabletop world to life. (i have a theory that this is literally the case, and the titular elder scrolls themselves, seldom seen, are actually parts of a real-world rulebook.)

this is actually quite ironic if you think about it, though, because arena didn’t start out that way. prior to working on arena bethesda had mostly made wayne gretzky hockey and terminator games; arena was their foray into an original IP, and was initially intended to be, of all things, a gladiator arena game. the player character and his team of fighters would travel from city to city fighting in arenas until they became champions in the imperial city. what started off as doing a few sidequests along the way turned into a drastically expanded game; before long, the game had turned into an RPG, focused on quests and dungeons, and the arena aspect was dropped altogether.

of course, being a 1994 game, and quite expansive for its time, arena, like all of its successors, is prone to bugginess and issues. the sheer size of the game (12 million square miles according to the manual) invariably means that much of the in-game content by necessity has to be randomly generated. this can lead to issues, especially if you exploit the random generation to get a more favorable dungeon condition, due to the game running out of memory. of course, on modern computers using DOSbox memory issues are much less common; however, other bugs remain. it’s kind of a constant with bethesda games, isn’t it?

while games such as legends of valour are cited as influences, a clear line can be drawn from ultima underworld to arena’s final state; both present a first person, free-movement RPG with a mix of dungeon-diving and conversation, letting you develop your own skills as you like, with a consistent world that obeys its own rules (except when the game breaks, of course.) and like ultima underworld it’s quite prototypical, but lays the groundwork for more influential, refined games in the future. this is the game that put bethesda on the map and made it a credible force in the cRPG business, which isn’t bad when you consider that the game sold almost entirely on word-of-mouth.

a word of note: arena and its sequel daggerfall are technically both free on the elder scrolls official website; however, if you buy morrowind on gog.com it comes with the first two games in a more immediately playable state.

king’s field

nowadays, japanese RPGs, particularly 90s ones, are assumed to be final fantasy or dragon quest clones; it’s a fair enough preconception, as they were at one time the dominant form of RPG on consoles for many years. but there was and is an underground fascination in japan with more traditional, first-person dungeon crawler games, dating all the way back to the 80s when ultima was king. wizardry was ultima’s big competition in 1985 and pretty much invented the most-imitated iteration of dungeon crawler that we see in the likes of dungeon master or legend of grimrock; its popularity in japan, along with several of its contemporaries, was immediate, and outlasted any sort of cultural cachet it had in north america, and the series has continued across the pacific long after wizardry 8 closed out the american development. its influence, of course, has persisted in the likes of etrian odyssey and of course shin megami tensei. i could go into detail about how important wizardry was to japanese RPGs but that’s a bit outside the scope of this post.

from software’s king’s field fits perfectly into this timeline; released in 1994, around the same time as the elder scrolls: arena, it hews very close to its dungeon crawler roots, and it shows. you’re alone in a haunted land with only a sword to protect you; the world you traverse is actually quite sprawling, and death lurks at every turn. (anyone remotely familiar with dark souls knows where this is going.) moody and oppressive, much of the game goes by with little fanfare. you have full freedom of where you want to go as long as you can find the necessary keys, but that doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get roflstomped if you take two steps in the wrong direction the minute you start.

the game feels a bit stodgy these days; combat is clunky, magic clunkier, and by today’s standards, its graphics are hideously ugly, but what do you expect? the game was a launch title for the original playstation -- in japan, years before the playstation even came out in the US. (really, though, how many consoles can you name that have a dungeon crawler as a launch title?) but it’s clear that from had a good thing going; three sequels plus a bunch of spinoffs, on top of their smash hit souls series.

it’s not a series for everybody; the 4th game is probably the most palatable, but they’re all quite rare. the first game was never localized in the US; in a classic case of final fantasy renaming, the 2nd game was sold as king’s field and the third game king’s field II. they didn’t even bother tacking a number on the US release of the 4th game. the playstation portable games never made it to the US at all, and the mobile games are almost certainly doomed to japanese obscurity. and none of these games are on the US PSN. a PS1 spinoff game, shadow tower made waves by actually getting a domestic PSN release, but the PS2 sequel, which again never came out in the US, is absent. so is eternal ring, by the way.

there is hope, however. in 2000, from released a game-making tool called sword of moonlight (amusingly titled after a recurring weapon that’s in basically all their games i think.) it’s essentially a development kit for the making of complete KF-style games. after a complete translation in 2009, an english-speaking community has sprung up around SoM and the series proper. it’s thanks to these people, and particularly sword of moonlight translator john osborne, that you can play english translations of KF1 and shadow tower 2, if you know where to look. the link for this game goes to the official community page, but any further digging is up to you. sword of moonlight boasts a remake of KF1, but i’m fairly certain you can find a translated playstation ISO (by osborne) as well. some knowledge of playstation emulation is required, of course.

metal gear solid

hideo kojima is something of a divisive figure in gaming circles. on the one hand he’s hailed as a visionary, known for pushing the envelope and using difficult, mature topics as central themes, such as nuclear warfare and genetic manipulation. on the other hand, he’s been described as a “diva” and difficult to work with, on top of some finding his approach to storytelling a bit much with far more attention to detail than is strictly necessary. and either way, he’s notorious for trolling players and fans.

in 1987, though, he was just a 20-something movie buff who’d decided a career in the video game industry would be more fun than film. his first year at konami was unsatisfying; relegated to the MSX division, he felt constrained by the hardware limitations and wished to work on NES/famicom games. when he was handed a struggling project and asked to make something of it, he quickly changed the project around to work within the constraints of the hardware. what had initially been intended to be a straight action game, the game couldn’t handle more than a few sprites and bullets on-screen at once. inspired by the film the great escape, he changed the game’s focus to stealth, placing it very early in the history of stealth games (sharing space with silas warner’s castle wolfenstein and mindscape’s infiltrator and that’s it) with a reduced focus on combat.

the game was a success, of course. the US version is considered a nintendo classic, despite major changes. it even spawned two separate sequels, both released in 1990. first came the US-only snake’s revenge, which wasn’t developed by kojima. by chance, the project lead happened to meet kojima on the train to work one morning and begged him to make a proper sequel; the result was metal gear 2: solid snake, which further refined the stealth elements and had greater detail both in graphics quality and story, but never saw life outside of japan for many years.

the series lay dormant for about 8 years; metal gear solid was kojima’s return to the series, after releasing policenauts and snatcher and several remakes of both. it was an instant smash hit, and with its success came kojima’s status as an international celebrity. alongside final fantasy 7 the year prior, solid presented an early glimpse of just how crazy video game fandom and anticipation can get. it’s not unusual, now, for blockbuster titles to be treated with the same level of anticipation as catholics waiting for a new pope, but back then video games were still very much a hobbyist pursuit in spite of a growing audience.

so how did a pretty-successful 8-bit stealth series turn into a mega-blockbuster playstation title almost overnight? by taking what by then was considered an established notion of how video game storytelling worked -- especially in the late 90s as full voice acting was becoming increasingly common -- and turning it all on its head. metal gear solid was as much a movie as it was a game; indeed, much of the game was spent either in radio calls, or in cutscenes. kojima’s earlier ambitions as a filmmaker showed through here; cutscenes were fully animated with the in-game engine, directed more like a movie than anything else. with an impressive cast of quirky characters and a deliberate attempt to tackle Serious Topics (as follows: mutually assurred destruction, the proliferation of stolen nuclear material, genetic manipulation, the role of soldiers, the glorification of war and how action movie tropes perpetuate it) with a surprising amount of attention to detail and use of documentary-style footage during cutscenes to emphasize a point, created a particularly unique cinematic vibe that is not often imitated.

the gameplay, however, remained true to the series’ top-down roots; in the normal course of playing, the camera remained top-down, following snake as he snuck about the gameworld, but would occasionally switch angles, either to highlight something, or to give a look of what might be waiting off-screen should snake lean up against a wall. the game also regularly played with the player; there was no fourth wall, with characters actually telling snake, i.e. you, how to use the controls. the game also made use of the playstation hardware in unusual ways. in one cutscene, a character who claimed to be psychic would attempt to read your mind; at this point the game would read what other games you had saves of on your playstation memory card and the character would comment on how many you had and even take special notice of konami-published ones; he would also, if you had the dual shock vibrating controller (which wasn’t standard playstation hardware at the time) make your controller vibrate with his telekinetic powers. it was a surreal scene that illustrated how kojima viewed the relationship between hardware, software and user.

it might seem odd to call metal gear solid an immersive sim. the series itself has been as divisive as its creator; some are turned off by the focus on cutscenes and long discussions on political and cultural issues (which is an interesting approach to take in what’s arguably supposed to be an action game!) it certainly meets the criteria in all the right ways, though. it has a level of interactive detail that allows for some interesting emergent gameplay, with a variety of approaches to most situations. kojima’s attention to detail is historically obsessive; it’s entirely possible, for example, to stick a brick of C4 on an enemy’s back without him noticing, and wait for him to get close to one of his buddies before setting it off. many of the items you come across have a number of different functions or states; your rations (which you use to restore health) can actually get frozen in the frigid climate of the alaskan archipelago. in general, however, in both execution and vibe, metal gear solid and its successors seem to share quite a bit with deus ex, particularly in terms of background detail and system interaction. certainly deus ex human revolution draws obvious visual and thematic influence from its sister series, so it’s not completely an insane idea. (they even share a voice actor, who voices characters that just so happen to be very similar to each other...)

PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THIS SERIES:*

* this will be the last entry in this series to use this list; from here on out i will be linking to a masterpost that i will regularly update.