Tag Archive for 'Metagame'

‘Heavy Rain’ Has Persistant Story, So Don’t Reload

Published
on September 24, 2008
in News
. 0 Comments

Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer promises a non-linear and cinematic which is intended to be play without any reloading according director David Cage, who spoke with CVG this week.

“There will be the opportunity for players to reply as much as they want from where they want, but we would really like to encourage them not to do so — to continue to play with one story bearing with the consequences of their actions,” Cage told CVG.

The story can even survive the deaths of its multiple player-controlled characters, accommodating all player choices, even fatal ones. Is this the end of the Game Over screen?

“This is what’s exciting about it,” said Cage. “This is a story that you told. It’s pretty unique. So why would you want to do everything perfect and change what you’ve done. You will be able to redo what you like but we recommend not to.”

Cage is the founder, CEO and auteur of French studio Quantic Dreams. His last effort was 2005’s Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy), which also featured a non-linear story, told through bare-bones controls and heavily scripted quick time events.

Judging from these early previews, Heavy Rain is a definite improvement over Fahrenheit and may establish new conventions for interactivity in storytelling when it comes out for the Playstation 3 last next year.

Mistakes and pitfalls always break the mood in games. They pressure or outright force the player to flip back a few pages and rewrite the story correctly. Some recent games have broken from the trend of checkpoints and quick-save/quick-load.  BioShock allowed players to continue after dying by restoring the hero at the nearest Vita-Chamber — a kind of in-character checkpoint.

Heavy Rain will liberate players from the constraints of failure by offering in-game consequences rather than a forced reboot and maintaining immersion in the plot rather than ending it.

REVIEW: ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Has Immersive World, Bad Story

Published
on February 21, 2008
in Review
. 1 Comment

“Assassin’s Creed” is more than meets the eye. Behind the roof-jumping, sword-swinging medieval gameplay is a bizarrely science fiction explanation. The modern day setting — where bartending assassin Desmond Miles is kidnapped by a mysterious corporation bent on tapping his genetic memories of medieval assassin Altair (got that?) — not only explains the Holy Land gameplay but also more conventional aspects of the game, aspects normally taken for granted.

[Spoiler Warning: This review covers many aspects of the game's plot, but does not reveal the ending or anything really significant.]

For example, when you die in “Assassin’s Creed,” you revert back to a checkpoint. Sounds normal, but it’s not. Rather than dying, the game says that Miles becomes desynchronized with his genetic memory of Altair. What appears to be a health bar is explained as a synchronization count, and going back to a checkpoint is explained as going back to a previous memory to ensure proper synchronization.

All this seems semantic, but it has the effect of turning player death, which should be a jarring aspect of a storyline, into a fully rational occurrence. (Imagine it in a book: All the main characters just died because you read the chapter wrong, and now you have to read it all over again.)

“Assassin’s Creed” draws from the storytelling technique of its predecessor, “Prince of Persia.” Both games were developed by Ubisoft Montreal, and “Assassin’s Creed” takes the platforming model of “Prince of Persia” and plunks it in an open world with a very much expanded fighting mechanic. When you die in “Prince of Persia,” the Prince tells the story speaks up and says, “That’s not how it happened.” If the Prince plummets to his death during the game, it’s a failure on the player’s part to stick to his plot, just as dying in “Assassin’s Creed” is a failure to adhere to the memories of Miles/Altair.

This “memory” theme of “Assassin’s Creed” lends itself to other aspects of gameplay. Selecting from old assassination missions to replay, while essentially just a level selector, is disguised as a menu of genetic memories. Teleporting from one town to another instantly is fast-forwarding through the memory of Altair’s travels.

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