I experienced a moment yesterday, an epiphany if you will, whilst playing the relatively new shooty-bangy-runny game, ‘Titanfall.’ As I sat there in the lobby, listening to six or seven people younger than me, yelling and screaming at each other, wondering why I choose to spend my free time in an online day-care centre, I realised something which I found truly monumental.
I’m doing it wrong.
I don’t know at what point the thing I did became the wrong thing to do. I’m sure that a few years ago I was doing it right. I’m not doing anything different now, am I?
If you’re still reading by this point then I probably need to give you some context. You see, I spent my younger years playing narrative-heavy games. The timeline of plots and character development in terms of their relevance to video games seems to have come full circle. If you go back to the 80’s, most games had a very simple plot. Kill the bad guy; rescue the princess, that sort of thing. Then in the mid 90’s we had an explosion of narrative structure and character development, as games like Baulder’s Gate and the Final Fantasy series really began to ‘push the envelope’ in terms of what you could do with an interactive narrative. I watched that development occur and I dug it.
I became the guy who reads all of the flavour text. In an Elder scrolls game, I’m the studious Breton who finds a library in a building and spends the next two hours reading all of the books in it. I truly believe that these are the greatest moments in any of these games. You can fight a bandit in 9/10 other fantasy RPGs but only in this one, can you then loot his corpse and read in his diary about what specifically motivated him to attack you. It adds a dimension and depth to the experience that I find crucial to my enjoyment of any game and I always try to fully immerse myself in the World of any game I play.
So as I sat in the lobby of another campaign mission in ‘Titanfall’, wishing these annoying people would shut up so that I could listen to the pre-mission dialogue, it dawned on me that only I cared about it. I’m not saying that I’m the only person in the World who enjoys the story-telling element to games. But those of us who hold it in the highest regard are most definitely in the minority. Perhaps we should form a secret society with secret handshakes. The password to our hideout can be the recital of obscure lines of dialog from side-quests in Knights of the old Republic.
The truly sad thing about this is that designers are shoving plot to one side in order to cater to this ever-increasing lack of interest, ‘Titanfall’ being another perfect example. Dialog is almost always done during something which requires your attention. It happens while the lobby talks away, it happens while you pick your load-out, it happens while you fight. As a games designer, I can tell you for a fact that there are many ways to draw a player’s attention to the narrative. You don’t even need to be a designer to know this, just read out some text, Star Wars-style. But the designers of Titanfall opted not to do this at any point.
Titanfall is a great game, I had a lot of fun playing it, but it is indicative of the direction in which the industry is turning. Quick thrills, no soul. And much like the fact that I now have to trim my nose hair occasionally, it is a painful reminder of the fact that I’m getting old and my values are becoming obsolete.