Preamble
Recent chucklesome murderfest Army of Two focuses its plot on the pursuit of two villians then shows your characters fighting and offing them in a cutscene. According to the friend to whom I owe this intelligence, it’s as if the final scenes of Die Hard had cut to Grandpa McClane telling the kids all about the time he killed a german terrorist. Indeed, it’s a pervasive complaint that games don’t end properly (usually qualified with a spurious “anymore”).
I agree it’s a major problem for a game that troubles with a plot to leave the player unsatisfied at the end. In fact, it’s a problem in any game at all. If nothing else, it cripples the sense of satisfaction that gives a game real replay value. The type where you play through again because you crave the experience, rather than because your obsessive-compulsive tendencies have been hot-wired with unlocks and achievements.
I think there’s a far more endemic problem spoiling the opposite end of games. The start end. Gamers are fond of talking about what good value games are, judged by a simple calculation of hours per pound. It’s like miles per gallon and, in the same way, is an excellent measure as far as it goes. Eighty miles per gallon is better than twenty, but you’d be a fool to buy a car on that basis without putting in a little bit more research. Bear that in mind as we work our way through the next bit, after which is the best part, which has a stopwatch in it.
Reamble
I’m a particular fan of Massive Entertainment’s 2000 tactical RTS Ground Control. I shan’t go into detail about it except to say: it’s good, it’s aged surprisingly well, nothing before or since is much like it, the plot is best ignored and you can (completely legitimately) download it for free here. The games industry much have taken their orders and synchronised watches at some point in the nineties, because the brief phase of experimentation in RTS that allowed games like Ground Control came to an abrupt end, and the genre neatly subdivided. Everyone settled into making games that were pretty-much-Command-and-Conquer-but-in-3D or pretty-much-Warcraft II-but-in-3D, and everyone was either happy or very bored.
I think it’s safe to say that the last ten years have only seen the acceptance of three new RTS mechanics: point capture; leader units with special abilities; and, uh, being in 3D.
2004′s Ground Control 2 was a disappointment, throwing out some of the core mechanics of the original and, largely as a result, coming across as rather insipid and watered-down.
Massive’s latest game in the Ground Control vein is World In Conflict. It was released in September 2007 to generally favourable reviews and, a mere eleven months later: I heard about it.
Join me as I play it a bit, to make a point.
The fun bit: with pictures (and a stopwatch)
The tutorial is crap, but you can skip it (and will do if you have any sense whatsoever). As such it’s not really fair to draw much attention to it; but since I’ve got the stopwatch out anyway:
The Tutorial
I didn't take any pictures until after I stopped timing, but there's Sgt, Weston at the top!
Stopwatch: 0.00s
The tutorial opens with a nice, sweeping establishing shot of some of the pretty graphics. A portrait at the top of the screen called Master Sergeant Weston gives a nice little speech about teaching me to fight. It’s all very promising, really.
Weston’s actor is giving his all to a solid rendition of the well-known black american military sergeant voice, so it’s a bit surreal when he tells me that the camera can be moved left with the a key, right with the d key, forward with the w key and back with the s key. Then he asks me to move the camera left, so I do. Then right, so I do. Then left, so I do. Then forward, then back. I can’t emphasise enough that he doesn’t care if you’re already doing what he wants long before he finishes talking, and he has such an astonishing amount to say about moving the camera each way that you’ll have floated the camera half way across the level before he’s finished talking.
After congratulating you for your camera moving skills, which really can’t be anything other than patronising, he tells you about tilting the camera left, right, up and down. Then about looking around freely with the mouse. Then about moving your viewpoint up and down. Then clicking on the map to move the camera. I will spare you the blow by blow, but I think you can fill in the gaps yourself.
After pointlessly navigating the camera through a series of floating rings, the irrepressible Sgt. Weston started teaching me about telling units to do stuff by clicking on them, then the stuff you want them to do stuff to. At this point I gracefully quit back to the main menu.
Stopwatch 4 minutes and 12 seconds
The Game Itself
The first thing you see in the game proper, minus the enemy troops who are dispatched without your intervention.
There’s rather a nice intro cinematic and some talking over the load, all to establish that’s it 1989, you’re a junior US officer in Seattle, and the USSR has just commenced a massive land invasion. Eventually the game proper begins, so:
Stopwatch 0.00s
I wasn’t quite right, there’s a little cutscene after you click go. In the interest of fairness I skip it entirely. I’ve been given control of three armoured personnel carriers. A moustachied fellow starts barking at me to kill some soviet soldiers who are harrassing my troops, but the troops have dealt with them all on their own by the time he finishes talking. There’s a swoopy-camera cutscene illustrating the dramatic necessity of moving my troops into a circle a bit down the road, so I select my guys and click in the circle. Mere seconds later they arrive, and there is another cutscene about some plot before I am told to rescue some nearby men, so I click on the vehicle attacking them and, for my efforts, am awarded with a squad of little men to put in one of my personnel carriers. There is another cutscene, showing other people having a big, exciting fight, and I get my next orders: move to a nearby circle. A select, a click and a wait later, it turns out the circle was called a supply depot, and it magically means a helicopter can bring me another empty personnel carrier. There were some enemies attacking the depot, but some friendly troops I had no control over took care of them for me. A cutscene later it is clear that there are civilians in trouble, and it’s my job to save them.
I’m told to “send out scouts”, which means “go to another nearby circle”. This time I have to click once on a tank that’s in my way, then on the circle, so the action is hotting up. It was taking a while to kill the tank, so I had time to notice the “fire a rocket” button and clicked it, destroying the tank immediately.
There’s another cutscene, after which I am instructed to use artillery to clear some buildings, which is quite fun. Presumably in order to avoid having too much of a good thing, the artillery button is swiftly taken away.
Everything you need notice: your stuff, a circle.
To summarise the next little while: CUTSCENE. Go somewhere. New unit. New unit. Go somewhere. Fight. Go to circle. I lose a vehicle through innattention, it is immediately replaced. Wait while new troops arrive. Instructed to set up a perimeter (lit. “go to a circle”). CUTSCENE. More CUTSCENE.
Onscreen text reads “25 minutes later”.
CUTSCENE. Blow up two tanks in whatever order I choose. I am told to use “box formation”, but it turns out I already am. CUTSCENE.
21 minutes in I lose another guy and am immediately reinforced. Then I’m given back the artillery and i use it to clear the way to the final arbitrary circle with no further casualties.
There is another CUTSCENE, and the level ends.
Stopwatch: 25 minutes 33 seconds.
Secret Bonus Footage: Level 2
A summary in pictures:
Two circles transform into...
...six circles!
Way to step it up, there, World In Conflict.
Stopwatch: 55 minutes or so
Will to live: temporarily depleted.
In an effort to spice things up I set some objectives of my own, to be achieved in an order of my choosing: quit to desktop, put the kettle on. Four clicks (including the kettle) and a short walk later both are achieved. There is a short wait, then I make some tea.
Deamble
I’ve been going on for quite a while now, and the bit I said was fun probably wasn’t; so it probably behooves me to get to the point.
Ignoring the tutorial, and the intro video, I’ve charted the first fifty-odd minutes of the game. During that time I made exactly one decision: which of two enemy tanks to attack first. One of them was much closer, and on the way to the other.
None of the fights required anything more than one click per enemy, with the first fighting requiring none whatsoever. Once I’d found the “select all troops” key, most of the objectives were achieved with one keypress, one click, and a little bit of waiting while things blew up. I was reduced, essentially, to the position of a patronised spectator. In the early nineties there was a trend for “interactive movies”, which were roundly pilloried for offering meaningless interactions (“Press up now, or the scene repeats until you do!”), but at least in those you got a movie. World In Conflict is very graphically accomplished but as a film it lacks a certain something compared to, say, Saving Private Ryan.
Of course, it’s all intended to teach you to play the game, but who on Earth needs (at least) fifty minutes of learning to click on a circle?
At last, the conclusion!
I want to make entirely clear that I didn’t pick World of Conflict because it’s especially bad, but because it was especially disappointing. It’s actually quite representative of the standard roll-on of a major title in the last few years. By and large all but the least pretentious of action titles are a glorified cutscene for the first hour or so. Maybe if I’d paid money instead of borrowing it from a friend, I would have felt compelled to keep playing, but I’m not quite so well endowed with free time that I feel inclined to pour hour after hour into finding out if World In Conflict turns into the excellent tactical game it plainly has the capacity to be. I’ve got my fingers crossed someone else will do it for me.
In short: my point is not that an hour or two of not-very-good bits inherently ruin a game that may well have tens to hundreds of hours of play time. My point is that the games industry shouldn’t be making a habit of packing an hour or two of inherently not-very-good bits right at the beginning of every game.
In even shorter: If they can’t trouble themselves to start their games, why should they expect me to?
