At a time where video game productions are getting more outrageously expansive every year, Dishonored 1 and even the more recent Deathloop (2021, also Arkane) remind us that games are meant to be FUN.
I recently played through deathloop for the second time and am now approaching the end of dishonored 1 for the third time, and at every step I’ve been thinking, it’s just a fun game. It doesn’t try to punch above its weight and do stuff it can’t manage, it’s just a solid gameplay experience that doesn’t hate the player, which is a rarity these days.
When talking about fun in video games, I am always reminded of David Sirlin’s philosophy to approaching Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Yes, that’s what the game was called lol. Instead of trying to put on a grandiose show or wowing audiences with graphics, he focused on making solid gameplay, and he did this through balance. His idea was that if the game was balanced, people would ultimately find their fun (considering it’s a 2-player versus game). He made the controls easier so that skill came not from knowing the weird and hard combos like quarter-circles, but from the strategic gameplay, i.e. Yomi. Good players were still good, but newer players reached the intermediate level much faster. Ultimately, this is good for everyone: less frustration to new players, and more opponents to experienced players.
My fellow co-admin was asking about Death Stranding a few days ago which got me to boot the game up again and, let’s be honest, it’s a movie that pretends to be a game. You may disagree and that’s fine haha. Kojima doesn’t hide his affection for cinema, but playing DS just got me asking… why not make a movie at that point? The gameplay of DS is often reduced to being a ‘walking sim’ but I didn’t find it boring like the name walking sim implies. Rather, I felt like the gameplay was only a glorified countdown until I could unlock the next cutscene. And sorry but that’s just not what I’m looking for in a game, nor what I think games ought to be, because they don’t have to compete with movies!
In Dishonored, the story is only a pretext for more gameplay (it’s basically the count of monte cristo with extra steps), the characters are one-dimensional and it’s not a super long game. Because of that, themes don’t have time to develop and the story has no real climactic or impactful moments.
BUT… it works. It’s fun, it’s a solid experience, and it’s one of the few games that can catch my attention for hours at a time.
Its level system, which was getting outdated by 2013 standards already, basically drops you into a self-contained sandbox with an objective: kill your target. How you get to your target and how you take them out is up to you. A nonlethal option is always possible, if you find it. And that’s all you get. Once you’re in a level, it’s basically you and the objective. There’s no new cutscenes or exposition or people endlessly yapping in your ear about how to complete your objective. The game leaves you to it and doesn’t try to shoehorn you into doing one thing or another.
There’s some collectible stuff but nowhere near the level of what you see in modern games, e.g. having to dismount from your horse every 15 meters so you can pick up a brightly glowing plant that you’ll use to make some potion in a menu. I think one thing that makes the levels work is that you also can’t go in a straight line; they are crafted to make every method to your objective viable. In contrast, in open world games you usually end up walking in a straight line to the next objective marker because you just want to get to the game. Nobody takes the train just for the sake of taking the train: you travel to go place. In Dishonored, the level is the objective so it doesn’t feel like you’re traveling so much as you’re completing an objective.
In other words, it doesn’t sidetrack you with bullshit every 10 seconds trying to get you to do something different. I think this is something games are sorely missing nowadays; in an industry that has so much competition, a lot of the overall effort is put into the graphics and into retaining the player’s attention. This is a mistake, as Dishonored shows the player will invest their attention in a game naturally; it doesn’t need to keep yelling “hey! hey! do this! do that! go get this! upgrade that!” all the time.
The pacing is sometimes very fast, but it’s fine because the game keeps moving forward to the next set piece. It’s level after level and you keep asking for more.
There’s more I could say but this is getting long lol. In closing I would like to say please make games that are fun, not tedious. The purpose of a game - video or not - is to be fun, and fun comes from different places. A story can be told through a variety of mediums, but only a game is interactive.
If I can be “old man yells out cloud” for a second here, I despise the term “walking simulator” and other terms that demean story focussed games.
A.Its never actually properly defined. What makes one game a “walking simulator” and another a “game?” I see this a lot on the r/patientgamers subreddit and it bugs the fuck out of me. I think you’re better and admitting this is personal preference (kind of, but I’ll get to that in point 2). But I despise when people moan and groan about a game leaning into the cinematic elements and not being “just a game.” It demeans the medium as being “lesser at story telling” and that it ought to stick to just being about action and gameplay and such. I mean, imagine if people thought about TV the same way, that you can’t make a very in depth story based and slow TV show because “why didn’t you just male a movie?”
B.For the most part this seems to be a personal preference for you, but one part bugged me, “nor what I think games ought to be, because they don’t have to compete with movies!” Why do games “ought” to be anything? Games can tell incredible stories through the very medium of interactivity. In the literal sense there’s games like undertale and oneshot that tie their stories (somewhat) to the literal fact that they are video games. Spec ops the line directly interacts with you, the player, in a way that you couldn’t do for a TV show movie or maybe even a book. And why not have games be cinema? If it works, if it’s fun or interesting for some people then why not have your red dead redemptions and death strandings? A game can be a multi hour long cinematic epic or it can be a 2 1/2 dimensional shooter about shooting demons. I think that improves and gives credit to the medium rather than the latter “not being what a game ought to be.”
ahem sorry, that went on longer than I expected. Really I do agree with most of the rest of the post. It reminds me a lot of my experience with Deus Ex. If you have the opportunity you should definitely go and play the original game (it’s literally like, a couple dollars on steam). I even think it has a pretty good story. But it has a lot of what you had for dishonored, plus having commentary on capitalism and society and yada yada. Or Alternatively the “Hitman:world of assassination” trilogy can be good. It does have the same “gives you a level you need to kill someone in” formula (although no non lethal options, sorry). Actually, really any hitman game might be up your alley (personally I loved blood money, but I think all of them after the first one are definitely good to check out)
I think the trap is putting such an emphasis on stories x) when this is not what makes a game different from a movie etc – that is, telling a story is not where the medium shines. Any story can be told through literature, cinema, theater, painting (comics), audio, etc. several have been adapted over the years in these various formats even.
This is actually my principal point, that amounting games to their storytelling is restraining what the medium is capable of and what sets it apart. What drives the choice of a medium over another when starting to craft a story? I write because it’s easy for me to do so, I only need a keyboard and my imagination to start typing – and actually I think a trap writers fall a lot into nowadays is to imagine their stories as movies in their head and then write that on paper. But the paper medium is capable of telling things in a very different way that a movie can.
Is a story really the principal drive to make a game? Does chess have in-universe lore? Would the experience of playing Tetris be improved by introducing each piece as a character with their own backstories? I think the medium has lost a lot of uniqueness over this, as if games needed to have a story on par with the best to be considered a success (not in terms of sales but more in terms of acceptance as a valid medium).
I don’t even think cinema needs a story to count as a movie either tbh. You could show me a sequence of cool shots and I’d love that just on its own haha. Kojima does a lot of cool photography stuff (the way of setting up your camera) and he is inspired by cinema in his games, which is cool, I just kinda wish he also remembered to make a game around it. Because I can also look at cool camera angles in any movie!
In a roundabout way (I cut out a lot and actually rewrote the first review in the OP because it was so long lol), what I’m saying is that what gives meaning to a medium is what sets it apart – its uniqueness compared to other medium. The camera, for example, was for a long time unique to cinema: the way you set it up to capture a scene, how you tone the colors, crop things out of frame, angle it, travel it, etc. With the advent of 3D games the differences started to blur, and so it’s natural that game studios, when experimenting with their digital cameras, took to cinema for inspiration. Likewise early on in the history of cinema (very early on), movies were shot as if it was photography, with a static camera that captured the entire stage, and there was also very little editing done in the overall film.
I agree undertale benefits from being a game, but I think we could make the argument that even for undertale, the game comes before the story. In this case, it would be difficult to tell the story successfully using another medium. I didn’t play undertale a whole lot, I played more of Spec Ops and while I love what they tried to do, I have to admit the fourth wall kinda fails when the game tells you you could quit at any time… after you bought the game for $60 on release. But that’s for another time lol.
I think my point is that it can be both. There a plenty of games that come out with meh stories with excellent gameplay. Hitman for example. It’s story is meh but it has excellent gameplay. And it doesnt need a great story, it’s fine without it. But why can’t the reverse be true? Why can a game not have okay-ish gameplay to tell an amazing story?
Since we’re talking about movies, one example of a similar discussion I can think of comes from Tom Hooper’s 2012 adaptation of Les Miserables to the big screen. The problem with the film was that they wanted to make a musical and a movie at the same time. They would have the actors method act, have one actress legitimately look and sound like she was dying during one of her performances, etc. For film this would’ve been great, but it made for horrible music performances. And some reply with “well of course she sounds like a woman who is dying, her character is literally dying in that scene.” Which is literally correct but misses the point. If they wanted to be realistic and grounded, make a movie, not a musical. If they wanted to make a musical, lay off the “realism” elements.
Why do i bring this up? Doesn’t it disprove my point? No. Because you can make movie musicals, and you can obviously make realistic movies (I’m using realistic due to lack of a better word). But you have to choose. My point in bringing this up is asking if death stranding would be better with a gameplay system more to your preference. Because things are more than the sum of their parts. To use an easy example, Deus Ex Human Revolution objectively made the gameplay better, with better shooting, good cover mechanics, etc. But it didn’t make it’s gameplay better because it didn’t account for what making something better actually meant (for a more in depth explanation i reccomend Hbomberguy’s video on the game).
And I say a gameplay system you prefer, not one that is better. Because some people do like that kind of gameplay. I haven’t played death stranding myself, but I often have this conversation talking about red dead redemption 2. I find that people will often complain about the main character being slow and can’t move at max speed all the time, or that you can’t fast travel*, or that the shooting is worse than Max Payne 3. But would RDR2 be better if you had the shooting system of Max Payne 3? Sure it would objectivly improve the feel, but would the rest of the game cope with the fact that you were less human than the world surrounding you. Or would it be better if you could skip around the world however you wanted instead of experiencing said world? (*There actually are two ways to fast travel. There are the trains, obviously, but you can actually get a camp upgrade allowing you to fast travel to places without a rail connection. And also, in your original post you say “no body takes a train for the sake of taking a train.” I do, that’s me, I take a train because it’s there and I want to.)
And I want to reiterate a point because sometimes people really don’t understand this. I don’t mind that you like a different game genre than me, or that you like a game for different reasons. But I like the games I like too, and I don’t want games like them to just be made into movies instead. I like RDR2 as it is, being able to explore the world, find interesting plants and hunt rare animals. I like being able to engross myself in the chilly snow or search through a dark forest. I don’t think it would’ve been as fun if it was a movie, or if it felt like it needed to be GTA or something. I dont think every game needs to be like this (this is another impression I’m confused by. Just because one game might be good with deep in depth lore doesn’t mean chess needs deep lore [although the history of chess is interesting]. It’s antithetical to my point.) but just that games are more than their gameplay and that you and I have differing preferences and have different things that keep our attention.