I recently decided to re-play ‘Max Payne’ for the first time since its initial release. For those of you who don’t know, Max Payne was a no-nonsense 3rd-person action game released in 2001; the kind of over the top, one-man army affair that we used to lovingly refer to as a ‘shoot-em-up’ before we had more sophisticated terminology at our disposal. Whilst blasting my way through room after room of New York’s scummiest residents, I found myself being motivated to play onwards by a feeling that had lay dormant in me since childhood, a kind of entertainment that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I was playing purely for the next cut-scene.
Max Payne is by no means a flawless game and the years have not been good to the old dog. The once impressive visual design pales in comparison to modern games. What seemed like photorealistic facial designs many years ago now look more like low resolution photographs that have been printed off and duct taped around a doll’s head. The weather and particle effects don’t even vaguely resemble snow, fire or water anymore and the character animations have become stiff and awkward. But it would be unfair to make fun of a game’s graphical fidelity when it may well be older than some of the people reading this editorial.
Perhaps even more dated than the graphics are some of the design choices. It came out around the same time as classic sci-fi thriller ‘The Matrix’ and you can really tell. Anyone who was around in 2001 will remember that every single work of digital fiction at that point seemed to include two things; ‘bullet time’ and those long, leather trench-coat things that Neo and his posse wore when they were inside the Matrix. Max Payne took the former and made it pretty much the basis of the entire game. Survival in virtually every fight relies on you leaping endlessly from point to point in a slow-motion hail of gunfire. And do you know what? It’s still totally frigging awesome! Nearly fifteen years since its release, the fun of lifting mobster after mobster off the floor with shotgun spray as you majestically glide through the air, never once gets old. This is good, because since the release of this game we’ve come a long way with the perfection of auto-save points and you end up engaging in the same fights over and over, thanks to a very stingy policy on checkpoints.
But I digress, I had a point. Cut-scenes used to be a big deal. When games came on a CD-Rom or the early DVD disks, there really was a limited amount of space and games that had a lot of cut-scenes were impressive technical achievements. Getting to a cut-scene evoked so many emotions. The pride of realizing that you had beaten another section of the game, relief at knowing that you weren’t about to get killed and weren’t going to have to start the level again, but perhaps most importantly, the excitement of getting to put your controller down and watch some kick-ass narrative unfold. Meeting new characters, getting some key exposition, sometimes hearing actual voice-acted dialogue; all of these things were done in cut-scenes. The Final Fantasy games were particular highlights for this, especially in the PlayStation era, with each game coming on three or four disks, just to accommodate all of the amazing CGI that they packed into each story. Blizzard were also renowned for their cut-scenes, that crow at the beginning of Warcraft 3 is forever etched into my memory.
That’s not to say that modern games don’t have awesome cut-scenes. In fact some of them go overboard on them, Black Ops being a particularly silly example of a game that is about 90% cut-scene. ‘Bioshock Infinite’ kept you in the driving seat and at the head of the action for the whole game, by letting all of the cut-scenes play out through the eyes of the protagonist. It was awesome and I would recommend it to anyone, but it didn’t quite have the same magic that those old games did, where the cut-scenes really represented a milestone. Perhaps this is because the difference in visual quality between cut-scene and actual gameplay used to be huge. Today it isn’t uncommon for cut-scenes to be rendered entirely in the actual game engine itself. Paradoxically, the mass of cut-scenes and high-quality narrative that was once considered the mark of a masterfully designed game is now becoming a turn-off for many gamers.
A great example of this is ‘The Order: 1886,’ a game recently released for the PS4 and promptly praised by IGN for its beautiful cut-scenes and well-developed characters, but then equally as promptly panned and given a fairly mediocre score as a result of its beautiful cut-scenes and well-developed characters. You see, IGN seem to be at the forefront of this hive-mind style of reviewing which seems to have a check-list of things which are good about games and another for all of the game-design faux-pas and if any game tests positive for any of the following; no multiplayer, long cut-scenes or quick-time-events then it has automatically failed.
While it is fine to dislike certain things (I personally have never been a huge fan of driving segments in action games) as a reviewer you really have to attempt to be somewhat objective. Guess what IGN! Some gamers enjoy wandering around an environment, soaking up the atmosphere and listening to dialogue. Some of us still love adventure games like Monkey Island and Broken Sword, which are basically made up entirely of wandering around and talking to people. Some of us don’t have to continually inject crack-cocaine into our eyeballs in order to remain focused on a plot.
I get that ‘The Order: 1886’ could have been longer, but the fact that people are sprinting through it in under 6 hours just goes to show how many gamers are totally missing the point. It is a story-driven game. The fact that you didn’t spend the first hour of the game choosing your race and class does not mean that you have to ignore the World and the characters and most importantly, it doesn’t mean that you should skip the cut-scenes. If you can’t put the controller down for a while and watch the plot unfold then you have bought the wrong game. It isn’t the game’s fault that you just want to extract as much blood and guts as possible and then trade the game in for the next Call of Assassins of FIFA.
Essentially, this is a question of maturity. I know it’s easy enough for an old fart like me to bang on about how we used to enjoy a good ol’ story back in my day and that having three pixels on a black & white TV was wonderful. But the truth is that you have to wade through a lot of retro crap to find the true classic gems of cartridge-based gaming and games are much better in terms of quality now than they were back when I was a kid. Which is why I’m so confused when I see design quality and attention to detail being labelled as a design flaw. We can now fit an epic narrative on a tiny disk and flesh it out with beautifully-rendered visuals and high-quality sound design, so put the pad down for a few minutes and breathe in the hard work of these designers. We’re living in a golden age of gaming and some of us are trading it in for copper.