Jun

26

Owning the game

June 26, 2007 | 1 Comment

I’ve been playing UFO:Afterlight a bit obsessively lately, if you call 8 hours a day for the past three days “obsessively.”

And although later I might post a review of sorts for the game, this isn’t it.

This is a gripe which applies to Afterlight and a philosophy which pervades games everywhere.

My complaint is that the game will not let me be a part of it. Oh sure, I can play it. I can go through the missions and research the technology and fight the monsters and win, but it’s all according to the developer’s vision, not mine.

UFO:Afterlight is similar to a giant in the PC gaming pantheon: the X-Com franchise. In some respects, it may be a better game than any of the X-Com games, but there is one glaring, nearly unforgivable omission: I can’t put myself in the game. In the original series, you could name your soldiers, level them up and become attached to them. You could make yourself in the game and lead the charge, or cower in the base at your discretion. In Afterlight, you are stuck with the character names they thought up.

The rationale is (I imagine) that there is a story based around those characters, so they need to be the same to preserve the story structure. That’s fine. Some set characters are good, but if I want to have some fresh-faced, new, alien hunter recruit be named Shootja Indaface, where’s the harm? I think it would also be nice to be able to name my base, my spaceship, my weapons, my robots and whatever else I can. In a single player game, where my choices would impact only myself, what’s the difference to the developer?

The cause could be developer hubris, or perhaps laziness. There is also the possibility that they may feel it isn’t a significant point to address, but it is a gripe of mine nonetheless.

It extends beyond the non-ability to name the characters in Afterlight. It’s everywhere. In nearly all games, the developer’s craft a perfect little polyethylene bubble over their creations which won’t let the players “screw them up.” I’ve ranted similary in the past.

In an MMORPG if you want to name your +7 Sword “Death-Pain Slayer with Whipped Cream,” you can… but only in your head and only people you mention it to in passing will know. The game won’t let you enchant the name onto the sword, or engrave it into the blade, permanently marking it so for the rest of the world to see. You have to settle for whatever name the developers have given it like “Windbreaker” or whatever amazingly perfect name they have chosen and is, of course, exactly the same as every other sword of that type. The same applies even if you craft the sword yourself from a lump of iron and a twist of rawhide, mashing and folding the metal into perfection. Yet even before the blade is created, its fate has been determined.

Want to cast a spell you have dubbed “Great Ball of Fire?” Sorry, instead it will read Fireball III, but someday you can aspire to cast the much more creatively named Fireball IV. Some areas of MMORPGs are crying out for creative player additions. And I’m not even at the point where I am asking to record my own voice for a battle cry, put my own image as an insignia on my armor or introduce true user-created content. This is just about customizing things that already exist within the framework of the game.

People will argue that names provided by the game “fit” and player created ones might “ruin immersion,” which I think is a funny concept. Would being able to make the world you play in uniquely reflect the personality of the players in it ruin immersion or increase immersion? I suspect that opening the hermetically sealed cases to the unwashed masses might ruin the immersion of the store display version of the playscape, but it would begin the process of increasing immersion in the new world conceived by the players.

So in MMO space the question really becomes: Is the world the developers create “better” than one the players would create themselves?


 

 

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1 Comment so far

  1. Gravatar noob on October 29, 2008 1:27 am

    I would guess any developer is going to say “yes.” :p

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