- 3 hours ago
What are we, 12 years old?
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00So, despite what all the doom and gloom crowd might tell you, video games are actually better
00:05than ever. There's more diversity, artistry, and choice than in the history of the medium,
00:10and it's only set to get better as time marches on. But that said, the state of things is also
00:15pretty damn far from perfect, which is what we're going to be talking about today,
00:19as I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 outdated video game design tropes
00:24that need to die.
00:2510. Forced Walking Sections Because developers realise that they couldn't
00:30get away with unskippable cutscenes acting as disguised loading screens anymore, over the
00:35last decade or so there's been a steady increase in the amount of forced walking sequences in
00:40narrative-driven video games. These sequences will typically serve as a break in the action,
00:45as the player is forced to slow walk while talking to another character and being spoon-fed plot
00:50exposition. Some really egregious examples include Gears of War, The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption 2,
00:55and, of course, Anthem, which only allowed players to move around their home hub of Fort
01:00Tarsis at an agonising snail's pace, presumably in order to pad out the game's minuscule amount
01:05of launch content. And even if developers aren't doing this to hide loading screens or elongate
01:10the experience, it demonstrates a pure lack of confidence in the game's ability to captivate
01:15the player, or that players will actually want to listen to the story. Slowing the player to a
01:20cruel and forcing a drawn-out spiel on them is never good design, and honestly, you're better
01:25off just giving players a cutscene instead, so that they can at least put down their controller
01:29for a few minutes. Instead, this misguided quest for gameplay that's more immersive and cinematic
01:35means that we have these painful asides that force the player along a rigid, mostly fixed track.
01:409. Detective Vision
01:43Ever since the release of Batman Arkham Asylum, the detective-slash-magic-vision trope has become
01:48exceedingly popular, especially in open-world third-person action games. This mechanic typically
01:54allows players to switch to an alternate viewing mode where they can see an enhanced perspective
01:58of their environment, singling out enemies, combat possibilities, collectibles, and so on.
02:03It's appeared in the likes of Assassin's Creed, Dishonored, The Last of Us, Tomb Raider,
02:07The Witcher 3, and Horizon Zero Dawn, to name just a few. On the one hand, it is a tool for
02:12the developer to hold the player's hand and ensure that everyone can make their way through
02:16the game no matter what, and I'm all for that. I don't like games that are unfairly difficult
02:19and bar people from completing games, but ultimately, it does diminish the incentive of
02:24players just using their own observational faculties to progress, and encourages them to ignore
02:29their beautifully rendered surroundings in favour of the typically washed-out new viewing mode.
02:34It also speaks of bad level design as well. Can you not get the player to interact with
02:38the level in ways other than giving them a see-through walls mode? Though these modes
02:42can usually be toggled on or off, the fact that games are designed around them often means
02:47that players have no choice but to switch up to a neon-tinged view of the action.
02:528. Stopping the Game to Dump Exposition
02:55Exposition-based tell-don't-show storytelling is one of the laziest and most irritating narrative
03:01devices that a game can employ, and you know what? It is used constantly.
03:05While games like Uncharted generally do a solid job of keeping the laboured chit-chat minimal
03:10and allowing a lot of the action to do the real talking, too often games will simply stop the
03:14player dead in their tracks and vomit up reams of robotic information about the plot and characters.
03:20And perhaps no AAA game in recent memory has done this quite as blatantly as Horizon Zero Dawn,
03:25which throughout its campaign required players to watch numerous post-mission hologram recordings,
03:29which ladled out the plot in the driest and most yawn-inducing fashion possible.
03:34For a game otherwise overflowing with creative ideas, this was kind of embarrassing.
03:39The Metal Gear Solid franchise is the undisputed king of this trope, though,
03:43with Hideo Kojima frequently serving up cutscenes of up to an hour in length,
03:47which mechanically outline the hilariously convoluted plots. As entertainingly balmy as
03:52these games are, they're also a prime example of how less can indeed be more. Nobody needed to
03:57sit through a solid 40 minutes of fart-wafting, much of which is in a visually bland codec conversation
04:02just to get to the final boss in Metal Gear Solid 2, for example.
04:067. Pointless Collectathon Tasks
04:09Now, the uptick in open-world games trying to compete for players' time over the last few years
04:14has seen these titles increasingly saddle players with an absurd amount of peripheral content. And
04:20though this is sometimes in the form of meaningful side missions, it too often devolves into developers'
04:25daring players just to hoover up hundreds, if not thousands, of meaningless collectible items that
04:29are just scattered around the map. The Assassin's Creed games have practically taken this up to the
04:34level of self-parody in the past, flooding the map with more icons than any single human being
04:39can possibly keep up with. In actual fact, it's simply an attempt to keep the player glued to the
04:44game as long as possible, and therefore increase the probability that they'll splash out on
04:48microtransactions or become psychologically addicted to the game, and therefore the IP. A player who cuts
04:54through the main questline and moves directly onto another game is a publisher's worst nightmare,
04:59and so the inclusion of junkie tat to be scooped up for tens if not hundreds of hours is often
05:04mandated to developers from on high. It's almost as cynical as gaming gets.
05:106. Tailing Missions
05:12Ah, the tailing mission, where players are tasked with following a perp, but making sure that they
05:17don't get too close, or they'll spook the mark and flee the area. The Grand Theft Auto franchise is
05:23largely credited with originating the tailing mission, where players would follow a perp in
05:27their car and have to maintain a distance where they neither scared them off nor lost sight of
05:32them. Like early stealth, escort, and water missions, GTA's tailing missions were actually
05:36pretty novel and fun, but like any vaguely inventive mechanic, when it was adopted by the
05:41industry as a whole, it was driven towards the Earth's core like a giant tent peg.
05:46The Assassin's Creed series is especially guilty of this, generally using tailing missions to dryly
05:51deliver exposition while failing to complete the tail as the game intends results in a game over.
05:56Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots also features an infamously frustrating tailing
06:01mission in Act 3, and more recently, Sega's judgment misguidedly overindulged in this tedious
06:07tailing. These missions are almost never fun and just feel like bloated dead weight intended to piss
06:12players off, especially as making even minor mistakes can often result in a fail state.
06:175. Story Choices That Ultimately Mean Nothing
06:20If you're playing a game for the story, then there is nothing more infuriating than realising that the
06:25supposed narrative choices that you have made throughout the game have little to no bearing
06:29on the overall outcome of the plot. This was most famously the case in Mass Effect 3,
06:34which took the choices that you'd made over the course of the first three games and effectively
06:38cast them aside in favour of a really rubbish pick-a-colour ending. This wasn't what fans were promised,
06:43and they duly revolted. Hell, FIFA's The Journey Story Mode is even guilty of this,
06:48promising a narrative that will evolve tailored to your footballing success,
06:51only for the game to force the player into contrived, canned, dramatic scenarios that don't
06:56reflect your actual performances. And then there are games that seem to give the player impactful
07:00choices, only for them to amount to nothing. The primer offender of this being Telltale Games,
07:05whose episodic adventure titles, though fun, present a hilariously transparent illusion of choice at best,
07:11because developing enough permutations to give a true impression of freedom presumably isn't that
07:15financially viable.
07:174. The Hero Almost Falling to Their Death
07:19The action-adventure genre loves to tease players by throwing them into mortal peril as much as
07:25possible, but too often these games rehash the same tired shtick to the point that it rouses more of
07:30a groan than a gasp. The Uncharted and Tomb Raider reboot franchises are both terribly guilty of this,
07:36of just leaving the protagonist hanging gingerly off a cliff, or only barely able to reach a platform or
07:40hell even have the platform crumble away beneath them. We as players know that the game isn't just
07:45going to randomly kill the hero out of nowhere, so these desperation beats ultimately come across
07:50as incredibly hollow. At best, it typically requires the player to spam a few buttons in order to free
07:55themselves, and within a few hours of play, it quickly feels totally played out.
08:003. Pandering Fan Service
08:02So what I'm going to do right now is just get the editor to put up images of the following people,
08:07Lara Croft, Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V, Lulu from Final Fantasy X, Catwoman from Batman Arkham City,
08:14and of course, basically anyone from Dead or Alive. Now what we're going to do here is just say,
08:18I wonder, are the costumes that they're wearing right now designed for practicality,
08:23or for a teenage, sexed-up demographic? You tell me.
08:26I'm just saying that this is a medium that is still struggling to be taken seriously by a lot
08:30of the world's adults, so it would sure be nice if developers didn't cynically assume that we
08:35were out-of-control horndogs who won't play a game unless it's full of sexy imagery.
08:402. Forced Optional Missions
08:42Pretty much any major RPG or open-world game these days will feature heaps of additional optional side
08:48content alongside the main campaign, and often these peripheral missions will far outweigh the size
08:54and length of the core story, but optional is the key word here, otherwise why not just make it part
08:59of the core questline? I'm definitely casting a glance over at Ni No Kuni Tooni Revenant Kingdom,
09:04which is a game that is so absolutely flabbed out because it throws up several brick walls over
09:09the course of the story that requires players to complete what were initially suggested to be
09:14optional side missions. The player has to recruit a certain number of citizens to their kingdom
09:18throughout the game, requiring them to participate in short, yet rather soul-sappingly dull
09:23fetch quest missions for hours on end. It's not fun and is clearly just a listless attempt to pad
09:28out a game that didn't have enough meaningful content. It's not too common compared to most of
09:33the other tropes on this list. For example, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 also pulled the same trick way back
09:38in 2017. 1. Unreasonably grindy unlock requirements
09:43Grinding is a core component of so many games, especially RPGs, but in more recent times it's
09:49a practice that's become roped into the gameplay loop of some rather unconventional genres, such as
09:54shooters and sports games. This is entirely the fault of microtransaction-based game economies,
10:00which place desirable unlockables in the far, far distance and present players with just two
10:04options. Tough it out the hard way for potentially hundreds of hours to unlock maybe one thing,
10:09or just buy some virtual currency and unlock it in seconds. 2K's WWE and NBA games are hugely guilty
10:16of this, as was EA's train wreck that was Star Wars Battlefront 2. These games all thoroughly
10:20disrespect paying customers by dangling a carrot miles away from them and allowing them the
10:25opportunity to effectively buy their time back with a workaround. It's pathetic and undermines the sense
10:32of reward that players get, because when you unlock a character or item after giving it your all
10:36and truly earning it, it feels great. But only if that unlock approaches a reasonable runtime.
10:41Knowing that somebody else has just spent 50 quid on tokens and done it with a few clicks
10:46creates a wholly uneven and unsatisfying player dynamic that is, let's face it, just gross.
10:52And there we go my friends, those were 10 outdated video game design tropes that need to die. I hope
10:57that you enjoyed that, and please let me know what you thought about it down in the comments section
11:00below. As always, I've been Jules, you can go follow me over on Twitter at RetroJWithAZero,
11:04or you can swing by LiveAndLet'sDice, where I do all of my streaming outside of work,
11:08and it'd be great to see you over there. But before I go, I just want to say one thing.
11:12Hope you're treating yourself with love and respect, my friend, because you deserve all of
11:15the best things in life, alright? You deserve much better than the tropes these games were trying
11:19to force feed you, let me tell you that. And I want you to go out there with love in your heart for
11:22yourself and your neighbour, because that's the only way that we're going to get through this crazy
11:26thing called life, and that is together as a society. Big love to you, my friend. Now go out there
11:31and utterly smash it. As always, I've been Jules, you have been awesome, never forget that,
11:35and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.
Be the first to comment