The First Worthwhile Move Game

When the PS3 released, one of the biggest problems were that there were so few games to take advantage of all that power.  It’s a stigma that followed the PS3 all the way into 2009, even in press reporting, even when the PS3 had more games and better exclusives than the Xbox.  You’d think that Sony learned a lesson from that: having hardware without games leads to frustration, and needs to stop.  With that lesson, we might have expected to see Sony release the Move controller with some truly good games.  Unfortunately, Sony continues to drop the ball with its customers.  In the many months since the Move controller has been out, we have seen NO interesting games!  Sports Champions, which seemed to get good reviews, is nothing more than a longish tech demo.

Well, the first good game for the Move is out — and it’s a Wii game!  I got Dead Space: Extraction for free with the PS3 edition of Dead Space 2.  And boy, it’s fun.  It’s always exciting to have a story-driven game that does something different.  And the Move controls here work really well.

With Killzone 3 coming with Move controls, it seems some exciting times are ahead.  But apart from shooters, everybody is asking for a Move Star Wars game.  What’s truly astounding is why Sony didn’t talk to LucasArts about this in time to get a good game around the time the Move was released.  Does Sony simply not want its platform to do well?  There simply seems to be a lack of due diligence at Sony this generation.

The Characteristics of BioWare RPGs

In December ’09, I uploaded this post detailing what I wanted from an RPG.  At that point, I hadn’t played or read much about Dragon Age: Origins.  Indeed, it had just released.  I bought DA:O sometime in 2010, and have started to play.  As I played, I realized that BioWare gets what I want from an RPG.  No grind, great story, and various other things I demanded in that post all made into DA:O.  It would’ve been like my dream game come true.

But.

There’s a but.  DA:O is not my dream game come true — calling it a nightmare would be going too far, but it’s far from pleasant.  Although DA:O solved many of the major problems I had with RPGs, it introduced so many problems that I consider it nearly unplayable.  In no particular order, these issues are:

1. Muddy graphics.  You can actually make your character look good in DA:O, unlike in say ME2.  But the graphics are so fugly one wonders what this game is doing on current generation consoles.  Everything about the graphics screams low production values — almost as if the devs didn’t even care what the game looked like.
2. Framerate hitches.  During fights, the framerate hitches kill you much more often than your enemies.  This is especially problematic since you often have 10 enemies or so, and can take 5 or more attacks in a second during fights.  The game freezing for half of that time often means you’re already dead by the time it unfreezes.
3. Roll-of-dice fights.  The same fight is sometimes impossible and sometimes trivial based on what your enemies chose to do.  I think this is because the actions of your enemies are randomized; if they happen to act in concert, or if they happen to score a massive critical hit when you’ve got half your health (and wouldn’t normally die), you’re just out of luck.  In long fights this can play a major role.  It makes for good realism, but needs to be balanced better.
4. Poor checkpointing.  I’m not sure what they can do to make things better, but I’d rather not have to repeat the tedious treasure collecting I did.  You’re supposed to save often, but humans are fallible.  They should include a time-based criterion — checkpoint every 5 min, for example — in addition to event or location based checkpointing.
5. Fantastically long load-times.  I’m pretty sure more than 30% of play time is spent staring at load screens.  At particularly tough fights (where you die quickly), the load time can be up to 10 times as long as the fight time.  Maybe more.  Even traveling from one short section to another seems to subject you to these load times.  I accept it is much more difficult to do pre-loading in RPGs than in linear shooters, but no load time should be this long.  Even saving freezes the game for quite a while.
6. Poor interface design.  The menus in this game seem designed to make you struggle to do common tasks instead of make it easier.  A common menu design principle is to minimize the number of button presses for common tasks — DA:O does not care about this.
7. Waste time walking.  You often have to spend huge amounts of time walking through area after area, sometimes enduring load screens along the way, just to get from place A to place B, both of which you’ve visited before.  This is true even if these areas are on the map.  Once you’ve visited a place, the tedium of walking to it should be eliminated.  Long walks in ugly graphically deficient environs are no fun.  Make movement fast and efficient!!
8. Minor annoyances.  There are too many to be listed in separate categories — for example, completely pointless rooms are a personal peeve of mine.

I had all of these pegged as BioWare hallmarks.  But I’ve just started playing Mass Effect 2 (on the PS3, of course), and it seems many of these problems simply don’t exist in ME2.  The people are not ugly, but I can’t get female Shepard to actually look good.  But they’ve fixed almost every one of the problems.  The menu and interface design is especially worth mentioning — this game gives you the feeling that the button you want to press is immediately available whenever you need it!  The game still has roll-of-dice fights to some extent, but these seem to be better balanced with no simultaneous massive damage hits from multiple enemies.  The only time you waste time walking is within the ship.  Load times are not horrendous, and more importantly there are fewer of them.  Saving is quick, done entirely in the background, and doesn’t interfere with gameplay at all.

Checkpointing can occasionally be iffy. And I’ve read online that there are a great many framerate issues, though I’m yet to come across one in over 10 hours of gameplay.

And most amazingly, BioWare managed to make an Unreal Engine game look good.  Every other UE game I’ve played so far, without exception, has an unpleasant wet plastic visual aspect to it.  Bioshock and Batman: Arkham Asylum were, in my opinion, ugly games — though you could say their visuals were technically very proficient.  ME2 changes that for the first time.  (But make no mistake:  ME2 is good looking and has great visual design, but it isn’t even in the same ballpark as Uncharted 2, Killzone 2, or even the first Uncharted in terms of sheer graphical prowess.)

Here’s hoping the DA:O2 team learnt something from the ME2 team before working on their new game!