I don’t play a lot of video games these days. I got out of the habit when I fell seriously into film and TV, and when my son was born, that was pretty much the end of it. Until Christmas, we didn’t have a current-generation console in the house.
I played most of Gears of War late last year, though, at work. It seemed like a decent enough game. It didn’t wow me with its originality, but it was also pretty clear to me why it was popular.
But here’s what really bugged me: The radio voiceover kept telling me to look for something on my left or right, or to move straight ahead, or whatever, without any remote respect for which way I was facing.
How is it possible that it doesn’t occur to anyone during the production of a triple-A console title that the player might turn his character 90 degrees or more during a segment of voiceover, and that this renders relative directions nonsensical?
A modern-day game studio putting together a current-generation video game practically vomits money to assemble a depth of graphic detail that isn’t remotely necessary to create an enjoyable game, but nobody can spend 20 seconds converting “on your right” to a clause that relates the location or object in question to a non-motive element in the environment?
Can this really be rocket science?
Is this common?
Very common. I’m playing a game right now (Mount & Blade) which is, admittedly, from a small publisher, but in which NPCs will say things like “He’s right over there” without mentioning any landmarks or gesturing in any way.
It speaks to the very intriguing tendency of overconfident game developers to assume that the player has followed their breadcrumb trail exactly. There is NO WAY you could be pointing in any direction than the one I intended you to with my superb game design skills.
I imagine it has more to do with the general linearity of the levels in GoW. They’re not all like that, but the overall direction of movement can usually be sussed out from your NPC comrades.
That said, I wasn’t actually crazy about GoW myself. I played it a bit, in search of texture, ambiance, and a visceral action experience, but the machismo, the pacing, and the humungous necks were not for me. Once I’d been able to use the orbital-laser gun a couple of times, I’d sort of done everything I wanted to with it.
One of my responsibilities on the last game I worked on was to edit all the dialog and text. I was *astonished* at how many of the designers in an open-world game would instruct the player to go left or right, and this was a game with NO breadcrumbs. The whole point of the genre was to go anywhere and do anything. They’d also instruct the player to kill someone, when the player could choose to capture them instead. They’d often completely forget not only the overall design of the game, but the design of their *own missions*. Missions they created!
Now, the game came out pretty much crap, and this was in no small part due to the number of enthusiastic amateurs hastily promoted to designers in the desperate hope, by Management, that it would somehow get the game done early when in fact it slowed everything down and substantively impacted the quality of the game, but there you are.
At the end of the day, you don’t play the dialog. So most people working on the game don’t give a shit about it.
At the end of the day, you don’t play the dialog.
I realize that’s a common opinion among the hardcore, but I think it’s like arguing that you don’t watch the sound design of a movie.
Well, yeah it is like that. The sound design guys you know watch movies and say “oh my god the sound design was awful” and you scratch your head and say “really?”
And look who’s complaining about the design/writing of the game. A game designer/writer.
Normal people don’t care about this stuff. I find the attitude of most developers is “hey, there’s dialog playing! That’s one think I can check off the list,” and what the dialog is saying seems to be of tertiary importance.
Well one explanation that springs to mind re: GEARS is co-op mode, a popular way to play through the campaign. In GoW2 you can have four players co-opping on Live. It’s a design choice — do you pick the facing of one player for the audio and leave everyone else with an even more confusing direction, or, since GEARS is pretty much a railroad, do you make an objective reference?
They obviously chose the latter. It’s not necessarily sloppy or lazy design. In GEARS it’s fairly easy to keep track of where you came from and what lies ahead.
Matt, I think that people accumulate a general sense of shoddiness about something even when they don’t know it was bad sound design or sloppy voiceover writing. I don’t think they say “Really?” when their sound designer friend clues them in that the sound design in the movie was crap, I think they say, “Oh, that explains it.”
Trip, I disagree that it’s not sloppy design. Inside the world of the game, if you assume that Voiceover Lass is speaking via radio to the entire team, the commentary is even more inane, and direction like “to your right” makes even less sense. The thing that bothers me is that (as opposed to the case of the sound design analogy) I know exactly how easy it would be to rewrite the sentence so it would (a) make sense and (b) not damage verisimilitude.
Show us, Jeff.
Well, without being able to look at a specific instance, I can’t really critique it further one way or the other. But in principle, I don’t know if giving directions based on facing is a real improvement in a railroad type of game, and specifically in Gears.
A lot of the time in Gears, after you’ve cleared an area, you spend time roaming around looking for ammo or even just exploring. Should I get a different direction just because I turned to look at some art on the wall or bent over to get an ammo box? I know that “behind you” means where I entered the area from and “up ahead on the right” means where I’m advancing to, even if I’m facing the area entrance when I get the direction. Most of the time a direction like that is probably redundant anyway, since it’s usually fairly obvious how you’re supposed to advance. If the V.O. tells me the way forward is “behind you” because I happen to be facing away from it, I think I’m more, not less, likely to be confused.
Furthermore, in Gears, the conceit is that the radio voice is someone who’s, you know, looking at transponder blips on a map in the command center or something. It doesn’t make in-game sense that they’d be able to tell you a direction based on your facing at that exact moment. If you’re moving down a street, “behind you” is where you came from, and “up ahead” is where you’re going, regardless of how you happen to be facing in the moment.
Now if you want to talk about whether or not the whole FPS convention of having an “eye in the sky” giving you exposition throughout the game is a lazy man’s solution, that’s a different conversation.
Jeff, clearly we’ve had different experiences. 🙂 My sound design friends seem to respond randomly. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to which movie/game they’re going to praise and which they’re going to criticize.
It’s not much different for me as a writer. I see stuff with really awful writing and when I criticize it, my non-writer friends just shrug. They don’t know what’s good or bad writing, they only know what they like.
Matt, I’ll admit that my “Shoddiness will out” perspective is as much an article of faith than something I can scientifically say I have observed in some percentage of cases. But at the end of the day, I say that attention to detail matters. You can make back your nut skating by and cutting corners, but you can’t achieve excellence.
Trip, you’ve got a point, for sure. I’m not looking for dialog that response to my actual facing; that’s problematic for the reasons you discuss, and others. What I’m looking for is dialog that’s more like “Near the clocktower” than “On your left.” I think that in 90% of cases, a substitution exactly that simple would do the trick.
I don’t knows whether the FPS eye-in-the-sky convention is lazy, per se. I would say that to adopt it in a game isn’t exactly swinging for the fences.