Xbox One: Will "the cloud" appreciably change gaming?

Update: And in the course of writing this I came across a Eurogamer article that basically says what I say only much better and more deeply with actual numbers to back it up.

  Microsoft and select "friends" have, since their console reveal, come out beating the drums around the advantages of cloud gaming. So far, reading into all the hyperbole, their message is as confusing and nebulous as the Xbox One's DRM and shared game situation was. The cloud, apparently, enables games to make use of dedicated servers, better AI, physics and lighting through distributed processing power. On the surface, these all sound like great things that we should be excited about as these advances in technology should lead to better gaming experiences that are more realistic, deep and appropriately challenging to play.

  As per usual, I'm not convinced.

  Leaving aside the possible and probable hot air that usually accompanies these sorts of announcements (from every company that's trying to sell you their product) I'm just not seeing the benefits on the large scale.

  Dedicated servers have been around forever and they're not difficult to implement. They can be expensive to maintain over a long period of time due to the permanent assignment of specific hardware to the task in question by they're easy to integrate into a game's net code (as easy as player hosting, if not slightly easier due to missing out the whole host transfer issue). However, they lose their expense to the company if the players are paying for the access - which historically doesn't tend to happen all that often for the official releases (yes, players and clans often get their own servers but usually companies start off a game launch with "official" servers. Shifting dedicated servers to the cloud is beneficial here because they can scale dynamically based on the number required at any moment in time - this results in them being cheaper to operate, though, with XBO and the Live fees they're being paid for by the players anyway... even though Microsoft is also charging the developers/publishers a fee to also run them. (Seems a bit like double-dipping to me - but what do I know?!)

  A parallel downside to the player host server mechanic is that your distance and ping to the server is also important - as much as your distance (zero for the host) to the player host is. Yes, you lose the player host advantage but gain a "fastest/nearest connection" advantage that we've always experienced on the PC side of things since before 2000. Fair enough, you say, ping isn't that important (even in twitch games) as long as your latency is constant and it's not jumping up and down and around about as you're trying to play because you can manually compensate for that if you're a good player - and I agree. But let's not kid ourselves that you couldn't already do that with the player host situation.

  Moving on to AI calculations: there's a really good reason why we don't tend to stick calculations for single player games on a server - especially when it's a time-sensitive game - and why we don't tend to have complex human-like bots in MP games... well, let me correct that: two reasons.

  The first is latency (again): AI needs to update multiple times a second based on the entire game state it's interacting with (which will be different depending on how the programmer decided to deal with the omniscience problem) and behave according to whatever behavioural weighting and handicap measures it is laden with. That's a lot of stuff to keep track of and even worse for multiple AI opponents and to then send all this info over a network connection to a server with potentially 100+ ms ping you'll have a constant 200+ ms (higher with all the processing on the server end) delay for things happening in your game. It's going to be really noticeable and not going to work for games and mechanics that require immediate results.

  I'm pretty sure you'd be able to run up behind an enemy and wait and watch as it sits there doing nothing before starting to respond to you, in which time you've already killed it. So, given all the power in the new consoles there's not really much reason why you'd shift all this calculation into the cloud because you already get pretty good AI from mid-range PC hardware without trying and there's very few people who, in their right minds, would want to add in another layer of latency to the player experience.

  The second reason is that really good AI is hard and computationally expensive. There's a reason why many games still don't have good AI but have almost photorealistic graphics and that's because there are very real diminishing returns on the time and effect (and thus cost) in implementing a really smart AI. So, instead engineers/programmers make use of behavioural short hands and cognitive cheats. These cost relatively little in terms of processing power and also help standardise the actions of every class of enemy in a game which results in a more fun and rewarding experience for the players... but that's a different topic. Many games have the AI know everything about their environment (including player health and position) but make them selectively amnesic when choosing what action to take instead of having a cognitive function that analyses the pretend audio/visual interactions with the AI, for instance. There are times when this sort of partitioning breaks down such as the infamous FarCry sniper bots or how when enemies have the memory of a goldfish  in many games or even, more recently, in The Last of Us - which has the AI completely ignore any friendly NPC except for the one you're controlling when you're being stealthy.

  The point here is that you gain either nothing or very little in real terms from shifting AI calculations into the cloud because this smoke and mirrors act that developers use to make games fun and interesting doesn't require all that much processing power anyway and, as I pointed out, developers probably aren't going to start spending years developing some really complex AI when the games just do not require it. It's a waste of energy.

  Physics and lighting calculations also suffer from the same reasons against shifting AI into the cloud - no one wants to wait whilst their objects in game are hanging in mid-air due to a bit of lag to take a moment to decide how they're going to move once the server updates their vectors and acceleration. Similarly, lighting techniques make use of many short cuts that cut down on required processing power and storage of this information. Sending that to the cloud won't help and there's really not any benefit gained from raytracing a scene on the cloud in "real time" and sending it through the pipes of the internet as opposed to having performed that during production and storing the information in the game files on the disc or HDD.

  Not even mentioning that graphics card architecture is highly parallelised already to deal with very quick geometry, lighting and physics calculations so it may as well do the job it was designed to do, eh?

  One potentially positive aspect of the cloud was highlighted by the developers of Forza 5 - Drivatars. The premise is to take your driving data and analyse it to determine your habits, then apply this to a "ghost" in your acquaintances' games for them to race against. The problem with this has nothing to do with speed or latency as it can be an asynchronous process but difficulty. I'm very sketpical of this feature because this will need, I think, a real person to analyse this data so that it's not just some big horrible mess of a car throwing itself off of the track all the time or, through selection via an algorithm (genetic maybe?), being unbeatable because it's picked all the best parts of a player's race on a particular track.

  Imagine one of your friends is awesome at the racing game - his Drivatar will absolutely trounce you each and every time you play against it and, unless you can turn the feature off (I predict you will be able to or Drivatars will be in their own little mode) this would frustrate the player and hinder their advancement in the singleplayer portion of the game. Because of this frustration and waste of time developing a very complex feature I predict that Drivatars are going to be a trumped up version of "ghost" cars that are saved by the player at the end of a race and then uploaded - against which your friends will play against. That's actually relatively easy to implement as you'd have to apply the characteristics of the "recorded lap" to a normal AI (which is how the current racing AIs are constructed) so that it would know what to do when it was shoved out of position or whatever.

  So why do I think, skeptical as I am, that this is potentially good? Well, for one, the developers are getting feedback datasets on real people's driving and this can be pushed into updates to the game's or future game's AI to result in better and more realistic opponents. Imagine all the thrills of similarly skilled people racing against each other in an MP game but instead applied to an SP game. This is, IMO, very likely and is quite exciting for the future development of the medium than the present and future "cloud" applications.

Post thoughts: Tomb Raider

Be warned: I enjoyed playing this game but am very critical of the choices they made in this "reboot" of the Tomb Raider series. I am a fan of Tomb Raider, almost as much as I am of Prince of Persia, so I may come off as a little put-out in the following progression of thoughts... however, these principles should and could be applied to any game in a critical frame of mind and are, to the best of my knowledge, not tainted by how I feel about the series as a whole.

Characters:

The Island itself is a pretty big character in the game and it is beautifully rendered and constructed. The levels are, for the most part, well thought out and they interconnect in a believable manner. However, and it's a big however, there is very little believable infrastructure in this game. 

Enemies are able to appear in regions that require the player to traverse using climbing and rope arrow mechanics - there's no bridges or walkways or roads and this completely undermines the realism that the designers aimed for when constructing the island environment. 

There's so many cultists (hundreds!) that there just would be no way that there would not be ways that they constructed to get around more easily. Humans are, by and large, lazy creatures and we tend to take the path of least resistance unless we think there will be some sort of pay-off at the end of a more challenging path... so to think that these cultists were building up their numbers for over 60 years and never once even tried to build walk ways or rope bridges over areas that they tend to travel and patrol is just unbelievable.

I understand that the designers wanted clambering and environmental traversal to be a big thing for Lara Croft and the player to experience but this could still have been accomplished even with putting these missing elements into the game.

Character growth doesn't mean hurting the protagonist and then shrugging it off...

Unfortunately, the rest of the characters are not so well fleshed-out. There are no character arcs in this game - not even for the protagonist, Lara Croft. Now, I realise that there will be people who disagree with me... so bear with me whilst I explain:

Lara starts off as a professional, competent and resourceful person. She is young and so is a bit shy and doesn't believe in her academic qualities - even though she is always right - as evidenced in the first 2 minutes of cutscene in the game. However, apart from that one instance, she never questions her ability as a researcher and archaeologist. You see this throughout the game whereby she already knows everything about every artefact that can be found from across a whole range of time periods and countries, which is quite an accomplishment for a graduate fresh out of university. Lara starts off being correct about everything and ends up being correct about everything. The only thing she does is unshackle herself from people who are older than her and who would doubt her abilities.

Her physical skills are never even in question though... you begin the game as able to scramble, climb and survive as well as you do at the end. Even your fighting ability is exactly the same throughout only that you gain equipment upgrades which allow you to do more damage - which is not the same as the character getting better or more proficient. There is no mechanistic difference between holding a piece of detritus in Half Life 2 by using the interact button and holding it via the gravity gun. The code is the same but the forces and animations are modified. Similarly, there is no difference between killing a guy in close combat with a (magically appearing) rock or with your climbing axe. Yes, the axe does more damage and looks different but the mechanics are the same.

Lara does get two more combat skills but then all the other ones are just improved versions of those two... and to unlock those skills no combat is required because you do not accrue experience from combat but from collecting "salvage" and that is what you unlock the abilities through.

Getting back to Lara as a character: she feels guilt over deaths that she has no ability (due to deus ex artifex*) to avoid and even the crew blaming her for bringing them to the island - the island that they were all seeking - is just ridiculous and stupid. These are seasoned adults and their immediately childish reaction to a difficult situation is disappointing.

None of the other characters grow either. Whether it's "I'm puerile and self-serving" or "benign" or "gutsy" or "love-struck underdog".... they start and end the same and their harrowing experience has taught them nothing as far as I can see.

Story:

Roth: "You think they'll believe this crap?"
Lara: "Heh. Look at them! They're idiots... as long as I have large boobs they can stare at they won't notice the ridiculously contrived story and game play stolen from Uncharted."

There was a lot of commentary about the progression of Lara as a character. I never saw this. Lara didn't show any sort of difficulty in her first human kill and the post-kill reaction looked more like nerves and adrenaline (including the retching). Nowhere in there was there any sort of long-term reflection that you would normally get from this sort of situation... never was it mentioned in the "Lara's Diaries" that generate when she reaches a new campsite and describe her frame of mind. In fact when you get to the first camp site you see her shaking, not just from the cold but also from the trauma of the events that had only just unfolded... not to mention the shock her body must be going into from having a huge spike puncture her midriff!

The wounding of Lara is largely inconsequential as well - she shrugs off injuries that would have crippled any normal person several times in the game except for one arbitrary instance where all of a sudden she needed to superficially hurt herself even more to get better. "No, no! Never mind possible internal bleeding, as long as I sear the entry point with a hot piece of metal I'll be all better and right as rain in no time at all!" Though, to be fair, the game tends to treat all physical injuries in this unrealistic and highly arbitrary manner.

This first huge encounter doesn't make much sense either... why is the village where that "first kill" happens on fire? The cult has no reason to set it all alight and even less reason to do so right this instant. I mean, they've been there for at least 60 years... and it's been raining heavily... all that wood wouldn't just go up in flames like that. There's zero motivation or explanation for that fire. Also, it's very weird how women aren't a commodity in this island situation. It's stated multiple times that the head cultist picks the girls he wants and then let's his men do as he wishes with the rest. There's no onerous requirements on these guys to kill everyone they meet as soon as they meet them. In fact, in that situation it's very easy to imagine that sex would win out over murder-lust afforded by sporadic deaths of the people stranded on the island.

Speaking of which this whole story is nonsense rubbish packed tightly in a wrapping of disbelief. The player is asked to believe that, literally, hundreds of people have been stranded on this island through shipwrecks, plane crashes and from the occupation during World War 2... and I mean hundreds!

The selection process for people to be able to get into the cult is so harrowing that most people die. Let's go over it: People are stranded on the island, most killed if they are deemed to be a threat or weak or women, then they're put in the catacombs for weeks or months in a survival-of-the-fittest cannibalistic ritual... the survivors of which then go along and repeat the process and somehow manage to accrue hundreds of members to their cult (the unending waves of which Lara will clash against throughout the game).

So there are two HUGE reasons why this is unbelievable. The first is that there just isn't the fauna or supplies from washed-up wrecks to be able to support such a population without horticulture or some sort of animal husbandry - none of which is in evidence in the shanty town or anywhere else we visit on the island. The second reason is that this is supposed to be a "lost" island which no one knows anything about. You don't think governments or even companies would inform the routing of shipping lanes or even send research/exploration/rescue sorties to find out where all these ships and people were going?

"How many ships?!!"

Then there is the whole logistics of the cultist operation: they are able to maintain and run equipment from the war (the gondolas), they have the resources to break up ships into their component parts and salvage them to use in the building of...? Something! Part of the shanty town can be explained this way but it's all the way up near the top of the mountains. I'm not sure how much oxy-acetylene is kept on the average ship... but it's not going to be enough to break up a whole vessel.

Player agency is one of the things that this game lacks entirely: Lara is catapulted from one scene to another without player input and every time something big happens it is always down to a moment of deus ex machina - quite literally in this instance as it is usually a mechanical device, a bridge for example - that results in plot progression, not Lara's actions. This is one of the reasons why I can see no character arc for Lara in the game.

A further thing that killed the immersion for me was the continual splashing of things on the screen: water, blood, dirt - everything that gets on a persons eyes does not do that! Worse still: I'm just a ghostly camera that floats behind Lara - I'm not Lara in the first person, so it makes no sense for me to be getting water coursing over the screen when she's out from under the cascade of a waterfall or even when she is and I'm not! I really wish games would stop this unless there's an in-game reason for it (e.g. Master Chief or Samus Aran's armour).

Another thing that also broke the realism for me was encountering all these mostly complete plane wrecks that conveniently spanned gaps that I wouldn't be able to cross without them being there. I don't know if the designers have ever seen the site of a plane crash but generally they do not end up in one piece with the wings all attached and etc. Each time I got to one of these parts I mentally cringed because they just made no logical sense. If they'd have replaced each of these with a tree or logs and debris that had been washed downstream in the storm then that would have made more thematic sense to me and I would have been completely fine with it. I understand why they put the planes in though because they showed off the island's history... if, albeit, in a very ham-fisted manner.

The inclusion of the Nazi/Japanese army WW2 occult weapon idea was actually pretty lazy writing overall. We've seen it before in Indiana Jones and Uncharted (and they're just the pieces in this genre!)... it doesn't add anything to the story or Lara's character arc. It doesn't need to be in this game and the trope has been done to death by now.

Gameplay:

In the time it took her to grab the parachute and put it on she could have grabbed ahold of the metal frame of the window and moved off of the glass... I guess that would have been less exciting though.

Quick-time events... the dreaded "interactive movie" aspect of modern gaming. Early in the game there are too many very close together which really ruined the flow of the game for me though later on it gets much better with respect to QTE placement. 

This game just continues to push forward lazy, uninmaginative QTEs: you miss a button and you immediately fail the event and die, resulting in having to retry again from the beginning. We have moved on from these simplistic QTEs and there are a number of shining examples of what developers who put QTEs should do to improve the player experience - especially since you don't get a chance to "practice" a QTE before it happens.

Much in the same way that a combat encounter with an enemy can have multiple outcomes with regards to health, ammo and gameplay experience so, too, should QTEs. This is most easily demonstrated by Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain - a game that is essentially almost entirely comprised of QTEs. QD allow for the player to not only recover from a missed prompt with minimal fuss but also allow for multiple end states without resorting to a simple "game over" screen.

Another way you could improve the experience is to not start the player from the beginning every time but instead play a "recorded" segment of the perfect outcome for especially long or difficult sequences and then throw you back into the sequence where your input is counted once more.

A particularly bad example of the QTEs in Tomb Raider was one point at which I was hurtling down a flow of water; there were spikes and other obstacles in the way ahead but, because of the angle of the camera and the foggy/misty effect on the screen I was unable to clearly see where I was supposed to go... which resulted in retry after retry until I had memorised the exact turn of events that gave a perfect outcome. That isn't fun.

The traversal and combat mechanics are really good and they pretty much carry the game considering that there are virtually no puzzles on the entire island. That lack of puzzles is also inversely represented in the dissonance I had with the presentation of the game and its internal logic. The old Tomb Raider titles were blatantly gamey, they were openly fantastical and not really holding to the logic of the real world so there were many aspects that, placed in a more realistic game just wouldn't make any sense or would be immediately out of place and reduce player immersion. However, since this Tomb Raider is more realistic and bases itself in a real world setting and not just "some massive temple in Nepal that everyone happened to overlook" it can't and, in my opinion shouldn't, use those same tropes, mechanics or macguffins.

There was one particularly egregious point in the game that immediately set off my bullshit meter where Roth was injured by a wolf pack. The wolves not only left his leg opened up to the bone but they also stole the completely inedible and positively tasteless med kit supplies he had on him. First "WTF" moment. Then, traversing the village after saying she'll get the kit (despite his leg being untreatable using basic equipment, along with all the bacteria and other nasties in dog's mouths), Lara looks up at the sheer cliff face that is not traversable by any human without climbing equipment and states that it must be where the wolves went. Second "WTF" moment. These sorts of things can't be let into a game designed to be like this - they don't fit any more than a "gritty" character does in Peggle.

This whole sequence finally resulted in an onerous scene (in the wolf lair) whereby the game restricts you to the use of your gun - not that you can shoot anything because it then takes it off you in a cutscene moments later. So, why bother? It really caught me off guard when I couldn't switch out to the bow... in fact, I think that whole wolf-med kit sequence was pretty flawed.

Yeah, you have to be careful: Wolves love them some tasty hardware. Like how bears love to dress in hats and ties...

I also wasn't a fan of the "action cam" in the game. It shifts and bobs around all the time when you're moving. It made me feel a little motion sick. Fair enough, do it when Lara is in danger and may be about to die... that would add something to the ordeal but don't do it when the player is just walking around exploring an area as it doesn't make any sense... 

This sort of thing is fine in films like the Blair Witch because you're just watching the action taking place on a screen. In a game, though, you're actively trying to control a character and to have the game punish you for not clearly seeing an insta-death moment (either from jumping too soon to reach a ledge or helicopter or avoiding some spikes in a QTE) due to the camera is just poor game design.

What I did like was the map implementation. First off, places and items/collectibles you found would be marked on the map (+1 point). Secondly, they made it so that you could get a local area map that showed all their locations (+2 points) and finally, they made it so that you could see immediately whether the place or item was reachable with your current skill set... (+10 points). This effectively negated the player from banging their head against a problem that they were not equipped to solve - not to mention endless searching of areas for collectibles if the player wants to collect them. Though there was one GPS cache I had to look at a youtube walkthrough to find its location because, for whatever reason, it wasn't flashing up the prompt to pick it up when I'd run over it multiple times. Overall, very well-implemented.

Tomb Raider also suffers from the dreaded "cutscene ambush" wherein all your items are confiscated. I really, really wish that developers would find a way around this problem without deus ex'ing the player through use of a non-interactive medium within an interactive skill-based medium.

The biggest flaw of Tomb Raider is that it is too gamey when its stated goal is to provide a more realistic character and thus world for her to inhabit. In the other Tomb Raider games Lara is a superhero and her actions are fantastic compared to the mundane world we inhabit. This makes sense within the world of Tomb Raider as much as Superman makes sense in the DC universe but in the process of trying to make a more realistic and relatable Lara Croft they failed to also transition the world in this regard. There are too many instances where the realistic world of Tomb Raider is torn asunder by completely unrealistic events: explosive barrels halfway up a tower for no reason, villages on fire before you arrive, unnecessary or unfathomable deaths, overtly supernatural beings and ridiculous near-misses (I'm looking at you, rotor blades!).

Yes, these things were Lara Croft... but that Lara Croft is supposed to no longer exist. The purpose of a reboot is not to just put a new sheen of graphics over the same game play and world - it is to remake the world and character in a new image. In this respect Tomb Raider 2013 is an abject failure and although it may have been popular with critics and gamers (metacritic of around 86) the only aspects I think are good are the game play mechanics.

Technical aspects:

It's 2013 and we still can't achieve 'rounded shapes' like Carmack was able to in Quake 3 Arena?

In-game cutscenes crashed and failed to load a couple of times throughout the game. These are controlled environments where the player has no input and it is ridiculous that this was allowed through QA. Worse still, I was playing on the PS3 so there's even LESS opportunity for excuse based on hardware differences of the platform.

Other than that, though, the game was stable and well presented. I thought the vistas you are presented with were fantastic... it's an incredible shame that they never placed a screenshot feature in this game and I miss the functionality after playing games on Steam and also Dragon's Dogma. I realise that the PS4 is bringing enhanced functionality to this aspect of playing games but I also hear that developers can choose to block it. My hope is that they don't. This is why I'm using stock images for this review.

Summary:

The game part of Tomb Raider 2013 is good. The interaction of the skills and abilities is pretty tightly designed and exploring the island habitats using the traversal mechanics is great. I'm not really a fan of more cover-based shooters as we have enough of them - especially Uncharted being the only contender in this genre - but this one is at least implemented well. 

Unfortunately that's about as good as it gets. If you start to think in any way about the story or events in this game it all falls apart and it quickly becomes apparent that the game is poorly constructed. It's a blockbuster movie and in many ways it reminds me of the duality of films vs reality in Last Action Hero, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Only, in this piece, Lara gets the flesh wounds and ridiculous movie reality in the real world.

Back-seat designing:

I'm putting the current game design out in the cold and starting from scratch!

I would make it so that your decisions have multiple fail states that would affect the game in minor ways. As I noted above, player agency is lacking in this game and I want to put that back in - even if it is invisible.

I would also have an actual character arc for Lara at least. I would have her being headstrong and cocky in the beginning of the game. The other archaeologist and her interpret some artefact differently that points to the island that they want to reach. The more experienced archaeologist, arse though he is, is correct but Lara's father's friends basically support her and go forth in her recommended direction. Thus the island that they end up on is the wrong island. 

Therefore it really is Lara's fault for their predicament and she really should feel guilty about the deaths of her friends and acquaintances. Her character growth would come from realising that she was wrong and also wrong to lean on the ties of her family to gain the advantage. She would grow in knowledge about artefacts, tombs and interpreting data through a series of personal mishaps as she gains experience "in the field" during the game. This experience could also be called upon in future releases as a reason for the way her character deals with different situations: e.g. "I work alone because I can't fail someone else again and have their lives on my head!"

Speaking of which, Lara would not be physically fit as she is in the current game. She'd be weak and unable to jump or climb far and she would not be very good in a combat situation. These traits I would increase over the period of the game and it would happen invisibly to the player, behind the scenes, whereby experience points would be generated based on the play style of each player such that each Lara would end up competent at the end of the game, though not necessarily identical. This wouldn't be that hard to implement technically but it would require a reworking of the island structure and game world logic.

The island and the cult would have to change: this was supposed to be a game about survival and growth of the character based in a more realistic world. So, to facilitate that, the island would lose its supernatural element: There would be no god-queen-body-hopping rubbish. No weather control powers, only one unfortunate storm that sent them into a reef and set their ship sinking. The island itself would be in the disputed waters between Japan, China and Taiwan and be uninhabited - giving a reason for the lack of knowledge of the island interior and the currents and weather around it. It would also be a risk heading to it because any intervention of help to a distress call from any government would be met with suspicion and potential confrontation by the others.

There also wouldn't be very many cultists, maybe 20-30 in total. These would all be hardy survivors from a couple of wrecks that occurred decades ago. Thus there would be no huge shanty town... though there would be world war 2 bunkers on the island and a radio mast/tower but it would not be working without a lot of maintenance and repair. The cultists would not be indiscriminate killers... though they would want to capture and control the women on the crew - an act that would probably result in the deaths of the members of the crew that tried to stop this and a set-up for the resulting continued conflict between the crew and the cultists. The other important thing about the cultists would be that they are all 40-60; these are not young men who are going to go around jumping and whooping. They will be calculating, conniving and maybe a little feral.

Lara not only has to learn to survive the dangers of the island but also to rescue her colleagues and crew members. To build into the multiple fail state design that I'm advocating, rescuing your crew members would not be a definite thing. I.e. you could sneak into an outpost and rescue your crew stationed there, killing the enemy that was guarding them. However, if it doesn't go to plan and you're about to die, the crew member will rescue Lara in a cutscene, forfeiting their own life.

One thing about the dangers of the island, as I put it just above, is that there would be a second storm approaching the island with a building gloom and darkness from clouds massing on the horizon. Pelting rain storms would grow stronger towards the end of the game, affecting clambering (by slowing it down) and movement with Lara (and the enemy) slipping and sliding around in muddy areas. This would add to the thematic "battle against the odds" climactic feeling as Lara reached the end-goals of the game.

Fixing the radio tower would be the reason and use for collecting salvage, not to upgrade weapons but to achieve your goal of being rescued and this would be the final part of the game with a build-up to re-activating the radio, calling in help ("We'll be there in four hours. Make sure you're ready as we'll only get one pass at this before the next big storm rolls over the island!") and then rescuing your remaining comrades after or before facing off against the leader of the cultists - who you defeat as the final enemy. The game climaxes with you achieving survival and a new recognition in the eyes of your surviving colleagues and in you escaping on the rescue helicopter.

The end.

* God from the maker/developer

Somewhere over the Rainbow...

There's an excellent article by Alec Meer over at RockPaperShotgun detailing how analogues can be drawn between Bioshock: Infinite and The Wizard of Oz and Sky Island novels by L. Frank Baum.

He puts forth a convincing argument that all of the characters are represented in the game and, the world itself is very similar to that of the Sky Island novel in it's segregation and problems. I'll list the characters he outlines here because I actually want to make a few changes:

Dorothy: Booker DeWitt
Toto: Songbird
The Ruby Slippers: The Lutece twins
Glinda the good witch: Elizabeth/Anna
The Wicked Witch of the East: Lady Comstock
The Wicked Witch of the West: Daisy Fitzroy
The Wizard: Father Zachary Hale Comstock
The Scarecrow: First Zealot of the Fraternal Order of the Raven
The Tin Man: Cornelius Slate
The Lion: Jeremiah Fink
The Munchkins: The upper class populace of Columbia

First off, I think you really need to think of the imagery, introduction and roles of the characters and I think this is where Alec gets it a bit wrong. I think it's safe to say that Glinda is actually the Lutece twins and I come to this conclusion from the representation and entrances of Glinda from the movie version.

They greet you when you enter the world of Infinite, and come and go as they please as does Glinda - all the while providing cryptic assessments and helpful statements without really interfering with the natural course of events too much. They take you to the lighthouse which is the representation of the tornado in all Bioshock games (as alluded to near the end of the game): that force which transports the protagonist to their new fantasy land. However, they don't make you get in the chair or perform the tasks to get there: they only start you on the journey.

They interact similarly with Elizabeth and when meeting her to give her the choker they appear to be repeatedly asking: "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?". Do you lose or retain control?

If you watch the Wizard of Oz scene in total you see that Dorothy says that "I'm not a witch at all! Witches are old and ugly..." (around 1:27 in the clip). In the game you see that one version of Elizabeth, the old version, is the witch. She is evil compared to her younger self, though she wishes to change all that and have her younger, pre-witch self saved from the same fate. Just as Dorothy's adventure in Oz prevents her from running away from home and bringing her to the realisation of how selfish she is...

Old? Check. Ugly? Well, if I'm being unkind...

This, of course, means that Elizabeth is Dorothy and that Booker is Toto. Booker being Toto is one of the central aspects of the theory because he is always following Elizabeth: often when you're running along, Elizabeth will get in front of you and there's no way to catch her. She also leads you around between worlds and she is the reason that he is in this whole adventure in the first place. He is the faithful follower, dutifully going wherever Elizabeth does and endeavouring to protect her - even if, in reality, she is the more powerful of the duo.

You can see the parallels (or perhaps, more accurately, I see the parallels! :) ) in this clip from the film. The Wicked Witch of the West captures Dorothy and wants the slippers. She takes away Toto and Dorothy pleads for his safety. Toto escapes but Dorothy is left to have her magical slippers stripped from her through her death when the hourglass runs out.

This is reflected in the scene where Elizabeth tells Songbird to leave Booker alone and she goes along with him to the place where she will "die", have her powers removed and be reborn as the future destroyer.

Similarly, Dorothy wakes up in bed at the end of the film - as does Anna/Elizabeth after wishing to be home and for the nightmare to be over. She had left home (though in the game, she was given away by Booker) but was now there again. This also means that the slippers are Elizabeth's reality-bending powers and that, once home, they disappear along with the magic that they brought.

The easiest reference is the Songbird who is a "winged monkey" - sent to take Dorothy/Elizabeth to the witch's tower where she will be imprisoned and lose all hope/be killed.

The problem then is that who are the wicked witches?

Surprisingly it might be Fink and Slate. One of the big things about The Wizard of Oz is that the land was ruled by the Wizard and his daughter Witches (if Oz the Great and Powerful is true to the books!). The Wizard was murdered and the family fell apart.

Well, in Infinite, the Wizard is dying due to being "poisoned" accidentally by the Lutece twins. The organisation that helped found the city, Comstock, Lutece, Slate and Fink are falling apart in disagreements and treachery. Slate has renounced his affiliation with Comstock and has rebelled, questioning the validity of his superior. We also find him, finally, "crushed" by his actions and fight, sprawled on the floor in a pose reminiscent of the Wicked Witch of the East in the film.

No house though... maybe it floated away?

Unfortunately this is where the theory, and similarities end. Fink is just a coward and is killed by Fitzroy. I also find myself swayed by Alec's analysis of the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion imagery in the game. However, his alternatives: Lady Comstock and Fiztroy don't fit for the Witches.

I guess the real answer to all of this is that it's all just a coincidence. There is stereotypical imagery used in this game, imagery that just happens to be similar to that found in The Wizard of Oz... but I doubt there is any real inspiration for one from the other. This is, in my opinion, one of the facets of a strong and interesting story - that parallels, discussion and analysis can be drawn out of the work. It makes the story live on and not just become discarded as some throwaway piece of media consumption.

While Bioshock might be the more coherent game, Infinite shoots higher and may well be remembered more clearly.

Post thoughts: Bioshock Infinite

I, as perhaps per usual, find myself disagreeing with the vast majority of the world on Bioshock Infinite's quality as a game. It is a good product; a great piece of artistry, don't get me wrong, but I think that it's a poor game.

Beware: thar be spoilers!!

Characters:

Yo! (Actually, I just put this kid in here because I thought he was cool, like the Fonz!)

Booker is neither here nor there in the game. He's a mumbling, stoic anti-hero whose story and character is told and explored through his cutscene actions and other people's dialogue. I think the decision to not make him a mute was perfect but I think he needed some more exposition to really shine. Since the voice actor does a completely adequate job, there's nothing more to really even nitpick about him. The main emphasis of the game is on other people though:

Elizabeth is a great character. She's the perfect companion to be exploring a strange and confusing world with - primarily because it's the first time she's seeing it as well. This makes a big difference. Even for a game like Prince of Persia 2008 where the character interactions work well to set the tone of the relationship, Elika knows the world - she knows its secrets and inner workings. If Elizabeth had been any less incredulous and surprised by what you encounter together then I think it would have reduced the engagement the player feels with her because her biggest positive trait is that she grows as you do and so there is very little distance emotionally and in knowledge between the player and her.

Comstock is a sort of Dr Eggman/Robotnik. He shows up, occasionally, to remind the player as to who the antagonist is but otherwise isn't really fully explored and, similarly to Booker, is understood through his interactions with other people in their voxmachines and the adulation of the general upper class populace in Columbia.

The other two big characters of note are the Lutece twins... however, these aren't even really fleshed out beyond being inquisitive and wanting to be together which I think is a bit of a shame as their intervention is the hinge upon which the whole premise of the game is founded.

While there are other, smaller character parts (such as Daisy Fitzroy) I never really felt that the game wanted to focus on them in any greater aspect than as a means to get to the next plot point by driving the player forward with either a taunting jibe or a stick lash from behind. So, they basically became unimportant and very two-dimensional.

Story:

Prescient?

The world of Bioshock Infnite is amazing - that's not hyperbole, either - it truly is! I thought that Bioshock was a very well-crafted world but Infinite is at the apex of the art as an example of world-building in games. It's a coherent, beautifully realised piece that transcends the sum of its limited parts... and that is why I think the emotional impact of the discrimination is so great. I'd love to see some stats from Steam players to see how many people chose to do which path of each moral choice presented to them like you do with the choices from The Walking Dead Telltale game.


I love the various artistic changes per universe: they are great touches that really allow the world to tell a story without everything being explicitly spelled out to you. Along with the general story elements whereby everything has its time and place and isn't outright alluded to before the designers are ready to engage you on it. An example of this is the finger issue: In polite society we tend not to bring up those things but we'll be observing and thinking "what is up with that?!". In a lot of other games, that sort of thing is brought up post haste and removed of all myth. In Bioshock Infinite a less well-trodden route is taken.

However, the game can lose its impact sometimes because the designers overlooked small things in the dialogue. One such instance is when you first get to the airship and tell Elizabeth the reason you're there for her and she reacts really badly... the only problem with this is that you basically say exactly the same thing in the gondola up to the dock when you tell her that someone will take your debt off your head if you bring them Elizabeth. That really dulled the intensity of the moment for me... but those are minor issues that are akin to non-game-stopping bugs in gameplay.

I think the most egregious problem with the story is with the pace that it wraps up. So many things are addressed and so much information is flung at the player that it's actually quite difficult to digest. I actually have a good analogy here so bear with me.

Recently, I've been watching a lot of 1980s films (a nostalgia trip from my childhood) and they really sucked. I mean, okay, they're not like the rudimentary black and white films of the 1920s and 1930s but they're not as well-structured, scripted or written as the films of today are. What I have found is that a lot of films from the 1980s and early 1990s are a bunch of scenes stitched together with a very, very quick roundup at the end to close off the story. It's actually quite jarring when going back and watching them from the world of today.

I think that's Bioshock Infinite's story in a nutshell: It's so far ahead of its contemporaries but ultimately it's still far away from where it needs to be in terms of quality. It's shocking to have come to this conclusion because all the way through the game I was ready to just out-and-out praise the writing and construction of this game story only to reach the last 45 minutes of gameplay and simultaneously be wowed at the twists (which I didn't see coming) but felt completely let down in the explanation, or at least presentation, of those twists.

To put it this way, I have no idea if I missed out on some sound bite from a voxmachine or an first person cutscene but I only realised that the two central characters were the same person after re-watching the ending on youtube because the actor who played Booker DeWitt mumbled and spat out one of the most important lines in the game (actually, it was the last line spoken). I didn't know that before that point... I'm presuming I missed something there? I've no idea and I don't have the stamina to go back through and play it again in such a short period of time as it was quite a long game for me...

I'm not going to lie, though the story is good, there are some weird, unexplained plot points that I couldn't account for by using the game-world logic but I won't drag them into the discussion.

So many vistas to choose from but I'll just leave this one right here...

Gameplay:

I think that the whole collectathon aspect of the game, in regards to the coins and upgrades actually detracts from the story experience and exploration of the world for me. It's a constant thought in my mind if I'm overlooking or actively searching for these things instead of just playing the actual game - and, no, I don't consider collecting items to be gameplay.

This item collection also simultaneously undermines the art direction whilst elevating the gameplay. Without objects being given a highlight through their blinking shininess you'd miss 90% of them... but at the same time this same highlighting mechanic draws your attention from the rest of the game and world and pulls you out of your immersion. Given a choice, the only solution is to remove item collection altogether because I can't think of a better way to have this in the game than its current form. It's a design win and lose.

I also think that the implementation of the "ooh look here (hold F to look)" prompts were poorly implemented as, each and every single time I pressed that button I missed out on the majority of what was happening - if not all of it. The prompt itself was distracting and immersion-breaking but the fact that they continued on with the action while you weren't looking at it and then highlighted that fact that you missed something without giving you the opportunity to go back and watch it from the start was just really annoying. Not knowing you missed something is better than someone going, "OMG, look at that coo- oh, nevermind. You missed it.". This needs to be improved in future games... or removed.

As a contrast, I don't think anyone minds missing out on secrets or easter eggs in games - that's part of the excitement of replaying the game. If I'd missed the guitar scene I wouldn't have been annoyed.... but if I'd got out of the bar and the game had told me I'd missed something I'd want to go back and try it... only in this example the bar is inexplicably closed.

Yes, designers want players to see all the cool stuff they made - but you can't hold the player's hand completely. If you wanted to do that then you should have got into cinematography instead. You need to craft a level and the action to guide a player to see what you want them to see, not make it so that the level design is so busy that the player has a high probability to be looking elsewhere. This is another instance where the collectathon causes game design issues.

Speaking of letting the designers show you what they made without obstruction... maybe they could have made the freaking weapons take up less of the screen and had an option to remove the HUD and gun so I could take nice screenshots!

Death is handled in an interesting and very streamlined manner. It's basically the method used in Prince of Persia (2008). You know: the one that everyone and their dog complained about (including EDGE). However, for some reason this method of not interrupting gameplay by having an in-world reason why you don't just die is nowadays overlooked as it always should have been. I don't remember people berating Prey for basically performing the same mechanic, although a lot more long-winded so I never understood why it was a problem for PoP. I guess people are pretty Irrational... right? ....Get it?! ;)

In fact they pretty much cribbed the spec sheet for dual character gameplay from Prince of Persia (2008) which I will henceforth refer to as Prince of Persia or PoP. Elika and Elizabeth provide the same context, emotional ties and mechanics to the player. They are open-hearted, full of hope and joy while the player character is a grumpy, self-centred stuck in the mud who has a secret past that they don't like to talk about. The only thing that's lacking in Infinite is the optional, player initiated conversations that blossom a nice little friendly relationship between the two characters; something that I feel would have really elevated this game to a higher level.

Ah, well... not every game can be PoP-levels of awesome!

To be fair, I never pulled a coin from out of Elika's ear! So Infinite has that going for it...

One of the big let-downs for me of Infinite is the player controls. The control mechanics feel loose: There is a disconnect between my pressing forward on the controller and actually going forward. There's no delay, I'm not talking about that, but there's no head-bob, no physicality in my movement or interaction with the world; I'm just floating there like a cloud and it's very disconcerting and removes my engagement with the character I am controlling.

This is a bit of an unusual situation for me because I'm usually reducing the head-bob effect in games. I know both Bioshock 1 & 2 had the same movement interface but I guess I expect more realism from my games these days since playing so many more physically-representative games. This disconnect is especially highlighted when I run as it just feels like I'm gliding slightly faster (though there is some bobbing!), making no effort and not ever getting exhausted. Connected to this is the no body thing: I see myself get into the rocket chair thingy at the beginning of the game and I see my legs and arms but when I finally arrive and get out I'm just a disembodied shadow blob on the floor.

These things were fine in Doom's era but not in 2013 when the world of Bioshock Infinite is so realistically managed in virtually every other way!

Another thing is the combat: It's unimaginative... Frankly, it's terrible. It's the worst shooter that I've played in a long time because, once again, there's a huge disconnect from a lack of feedback generated from your actions: You shoot a gun and there's nothing, no reaction - you may as well be firing a light beam from a laser. The enemies don't react to being hit either and it's a big step backwards in immersion and interaction with the game world since playing many games (e.g. Tomb Raider etc) over the last few years.

While the guns sounded good for the most part I found the plasmids (or whatever they're called) underwhelming and their switching and selection is really not that great using PC controls as compared to the selection wheel when using a controller. Setting a second vigor to switch between could be unnecesarily fiddly if you accidentally swapped out the one that wasn't in the foreground - not that I ever saw that they explained that you could switch between two of them like you could your weapons.

The decision to limit the player to only two weapons was a bit strange given all the rest of the old-school gameplay choices in this game. Are we worried about carry weight, or what? I'm not really bothered by the decision as I found all the weapons to be useful except for a couple of the late game additions that appeared to be very situational and, apart from that fact, I didn't have money or the time to put into them to really get the best out of them... so they may as well not have been there at all. It seemed like a bit of a waste in hindsight.

Personally, given all the other old style gameplay nods, I feel that they may as well have allowed you to carry all the weaopons you wanted and it wouldn't have adversely affected the game. You pick up and collect all the ammo for those guns you don't currently have anyway so why not the guns themselves since you appear to have the pockets of Mary Poppins?

One of Mary Poppin's lost loves... a.k.a. the saddest person in Columbia.

In fact I got around 3-4 hours into the game and just stopped because although I loved the world and wanted to find out more of the story I just had no interest in slogging through the gamey parts to get to its conclusion. I left Bioshock Infinite for almost two weeks, languishing on my hard drive for the same reason I never bothered finishing Bioshock 2 and I took twice as long to finish the post-Ryan sequence in Bioshock 1 to the preceding 2/3 of the game - the gameplay is uninteresting and, for the most part, uninspired.

The one saving grace are the sky rails. These really add so much mobility to an otherwise stuffy game. There's not a lot of strategic or tactical depth given from them, though I often see people saying they think that there is, as you can't approach a problem from different angles any more than you could by making the wide "corridor" of a level laterally wider for you to walk upon. As I said, they provide a huge amount of mobility: they are this game's dodge button, a way out of dire situations and a way for you to get from point A to point B much faster than if you ran or sprinted and they prove invaluable whenever you face off against a handyman or a large number of enemies.

Needless to say, I think they were a genius addition to the game and saved the combat from being completely dull and boring. Especially when considering that difficulty isn't based on enemy behaviour but on their ability to take damage and the player's ability to deal it.

I did, however, find that they were a bit finicky sometimes with when they would and wouldn't let you jump to the skylines. Sometimes you could be a mile away and others you had to be almost on top of the nearest line. It never resulted in my death but it panicked me a bit and distracted from what was otherwise a perfect getaway!

Technical aspects:

It's like they didn't have time to finish off the placeholder female faces or something... Just look at the difference in quality of shading and construction/realism between the guy and the ladies!

I don't know what it is about Irrational Games but they somehow have trouble making "people": somehow they always come out plastic-looking and alien. In Bioshock they got around this acknowledged problem (I remember it from an interview with Levine, I think) by not having too many people for you to interact with. At best, outside of the enemies, your allies were only viewed from behind glass - with the notable exception of Andrew Ryan. In this game, the problem is more egregious because there are so many non-combatants to interact and be around. 

Funnily enough, the men were crafted reasonably well and fit with the art style but the women, with the exception of Elizabeth and the leader of the Vox Populi, all look like child-aliens wearing human skin. It's a bit disconcerting - especially when you see a portrait of someone and they have only a passing resemblance to how they look in the game.

There seems to be some small bugs as well in the game: at one point when I was blowing up an airship I had to escape and so jumped down on to a zip line... I had noticed that Elizabeth was looking out the window of the airship but assumed she would follow. She did not. So, I'm there on the ground, able to zap things into existence by calling out to nobody. It was a little bit lonely! 

How was I able to tell she was gone completely? Well, usually when you look at a rift you see a beam of light extend from Elizabeth to the rift which then shows what will be summoned. That didn't happen anymore and instead the object would just appear. She respawned a few minutes later so everything was back to normal quite quickly. Still a bit strange though!

The music and sound production in this game is, for the majority, very, very good. From the little dashes of noise when you make a head shot to the way the most important bit of information is highlighted and the rest of the sound is pushed to the back (e.g. when you're listening to a recording or Elizabeth or another important character starts talking). You usually never miss the important information like you sometimes do in other games. In fact, this was the first game in a long time that I didn't turn subtitles on, though I later wished that I had.

The game is very pretty and it runs really well on my system at first but after a few hours play it starts to bog down when loading the environment into memory. Restarting appears to fix this stuttering issue but be aware that it can happen.

Summary:

I think the fact that Infinite can get me so emotionally worked up over in-game events is a masterpiece of design and story-telling and will be the legacy of this game rather than the mostly stale gameplay.

Yeeeeaah... Not touching this one with a 10 ft bargepole. Still, very brave to stick this stuff in the game!

I saw that Bill Harris would have preferred this as a point and click adventure game. Personally, I wouldn't, but I would have liked it to be a first person exploration/RPG in the vein of a more linear Elder Scrolls game (I can't think of any examples of this genre off the top of my head so if you know of any post in the comments and help an old man out!).

What would I have done differently?

I would have kept first person. I would have stuck in a body like in Dishonored and made movement more interactive and physical to provide feedback to the player. I would have made it so that Booker was human - so he would run out of breath and, indeed, pant like you find in Far Cry 2/3. I would have kept the combat - you would still have guns, the powers and the skyline melee (and skylines) but encounters would be few and far between.

I would have put in light conversation trees (akin to those found in Skyrim) and had the story still revolve around discovering the mystery of the city and Elizabeth and made combat mainly a consequence of angering the wrong people or choosing the wrong roads to go down - i.e. like it is in the real world, combat would be a reaction to events, instead of just being a consequence of your presence.

I'd have kept the story and pacing of the story mostly the same with the exception of the ending which I would have drawn out a bit more to really hammer home certain points (though without the huge amount of combat the game length would be truncated somewhat as that aspect provides a LOT of padding in this game).

Speaking of Elizabeth, I'd have kept her and kept when and how she was introduced but reduced the curve with with she trusts and engages emotionally with Booker, enlarging her interactions with the player and given her optional conversations that expand and enhance Booker's and Elizabeth's relationships like those in Prince of Persia 2009 in order to compensate for this lower curve of the relationship. As it currently stands in the game I feel that it's too much of a switch from "Oh, hai, intruder!" to complete trust. I know that she is presented as naive and child-like but she's also very savvy and these two qualities do not fit all that well together - especially with regards to not trusting the prophet... If she's naive and child-like in her trust then she's more likely to trust those that have been around her and "been good" to her from the start than some random stranger from "outside".

See? Just like Elika! Magic!

Overall, though. I think that Irrational did well to not spell everything out throughout the game - to leave the players guessing, talking and wanting more closure, but not too much. If I compare the four best game stories I can think of, they all have the same main elements in common: beauty and imagination, intrigue and passion/conflict.

Out of those four two are western games with a western sensibility of storytelling and the other two are eastern games with the respective storytelling style: Bioshock 1 & Infinite; Ico & Shadow of the Colossus.

I think it's telling that the two best regional story-driven games for me come from basically the same studios. No one else is really coming close - and that's a real shame. Before anyone gets uppity, I think The Walking Dead Telltale game is a great character study but it's not that good a story: it's just very simplistic.

However, for me this strength in world-building and storytelling really highlights how much the gameplay takes away from the experience. It's a real shame.

Final summary: Get this game and play it. If you hate the combat, stick it on easy.

AAA: The definition of... (for the games industry)

There's been a lot of frustration and a lot of anger recently in the games' press regarding recent releases and there have also been many comments regarding this particular subject that have basically forced me to illuminate this particular aspect of the industry.

What is AAA?

That's the question that I'm seeing here (and by "here" I mean "the internet")... but the thing is, for me, it's a straight forward answer - and I DO NOT understand the reasoning behind those that answer differently.

Let me start by positioning my argument:

How do we define success and quality? Seriously, have a look around your life and answer this question honestly. What's the best grade you could get in a subject? A? AA? A+? A*?

An "A" grade is the epitome of achievement. It is the pinnacle of the mountain that any academic climbs.

Let's switch to food and accommodation... AAA or 5 Star is the best you can get in a given market. Now, yes, those demarcations are dependent on the market that they are within, but otherwise they are a coherent sign of what is good and what is bad.

So maybe there are more examples out there but I think that those two are ubiquitous enough to kickstart this article; this opinion piece.

AAA is purely a quality-driven derivative. It is a measure of what the market considers to be good as opposed to bad. Most recently I have seen many people within the industry stating without doubt that AAA is related solely to budget. This is not the case. It never was. In the past, with little to no middleware and only proprietary engines to go on AAA tended to be the most expensive development choice because of it's difficulty. So let me get this out there uncategorically: AAA was historically about being the most expensive product to develop because it took the most expensive tools and team to develop it.

This is no longer true and hasn't been for a long time.

AAA is a measure of quality. That is what the majority of the population will understand by the term given their own experience from education and business. I mean, look at the goddamn ratings agencies for chrissakes... AAA is the epitome of the perfect investment. It's nothing to do with how well invested the country or industry is but is only about the anticipated and known quality that exists therein. AAA isn't an indication of investment already allocated to it. That's how it works...

So what IS AAA?

AAA is the perception that a game released is of the highest quality possible. It does not matter on length, nor visual aspects, nor animation... It matters purely on the completely subjective aspect of whether consumers like it a whole lot or not. Same as it does for every other time AAA is applied to any other industry out there.

That is it.

So please, game makers, stop foisting this ludicrous notion that AAA means a multi-hundred million budget and a huge team regardless of final release quality... because AAA isn't what you define it to be but what your customers define it to be.

Same as a 5 star hotel is not 5 star if none of the customers believe it is... neither is your very expensive, overrated game.