» Fri Jul 04, 2014 2:24 pm Anyone ever notice just how dumb video games are a lot of the time? I don't mean just the "Big Dumb Games" like Wolfenstein or Call of Duty. I'm talking about game design as a whole. Even in game genres and series renowned for their intelligence and creativity, niche titles like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines and System Shock 2, there exist moments of such startling stupidity that I can't believe the designers didn't see anything wrong with what they were doing. This isn't about budget constraints or marketing, this is about conscious design decisions that can call an otherwise brilliant game's qualities into question.
Fallout is a series famous for it's depth of choice, where in each hub, and often in each quest, you are presented with a series of decisions that influence the world as a whole. At the end of each of the older games, you are shown a slideshow telling you of the often unforeseen consequences of these choices, a slideshow that makes you seriously question choices that at the time seemed straightforward and obvious. Yet, one of the earliest major decisions that you are asked to make in Fallout 3 is anything but deep: the fate of Megaton. You are presented a choice between an uncharismatic character, some cash, and a fancy special effect or the preservation of a major hub of the game world, complete with shops, a player house, large questlines, a potential companion and a mostly likeable population. To anybody with a lick of sense, the choice to betray Burke to Simms and save the town isn't a choice at all. Whereas in the old games, a serious argument would have been made to you as to why Megaton needs to go, or you would be given a reward such that you would actually be tempted, in Fallout 3 the only way you could rationalize the destruction of Megaton is if you wanted to screw around and didn't care about roleplaying at all. Fallout 3 suffers from this assumption throughout: That the only type of player who would choose to be evil while playing the game is only interested in playing the type of ridiculous, psychotic, unthinking evil that is exemplified in GTA-style large scale massacres. They only care about chaos, not consequences. Thinking back, the only decision I had to think deeply about while playing, to examine at a truly moral level while playing Fallout 3 was the key decision in The Pitt. That's not intentional dumbing down or streamlining, that's just plain dumb.
I mentioned Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. This is a great game, once fixed, with one of the best roleplaying systems in electronic media. However, the problem I have isn't with the systems or the game, it's with the story and the world building. First, there's the portrayal of female characters. Literally every female character in the game is treated with the sensitivity and intelligence of a sledgehammer. Thinking back, the only female character given any depth or power within the game world was the Asian chick, and even she was demeaned by that stupid pinup quest reward. Every female was either a complete [censored] (Therese, the Nosferatu former model) or an overly sixualized skank (Jeanette, VV, your ghoul, the chicks at the club). Worse, the only time the game attempted to give any depth to a female, the Therese/Jeanette revelation scene, the issue of child molestation and the psychological damage caused by it is handled so hamfistedly and with such little sensitivity that I can't believe that they weren't actively trying to offend. Then there was the ending. It was the single dumbest thing I have seen in a game, well, ever. Any choice you have made on how to build your character thus far is made irrelevant by the constant combat of the last hour or so, any moral choice is made irrelevant by the lack of choice and influence on the ending, and the entire damn story is wrapped up with a jokey red herring, and an awful one at that. I'm almost tempted to think that some bitter developer decided to sabotage the project since Troika was going out of business anyway. Given the intelligence and quality of writing of Arcanum, I can't believe just how dumb VtM:B ended up being.
I've gone on way, way too long, but I know that people are gonna see System Shock 2 up there and think I've gone nuts. I'll put it simply: the ending. Throughout about the last 20% of the game, the brilliant level design is gone, you're presented with one of the worst final bosses ever, and the final scene... Look, if you have a game as understated, intelligent, and competently designed as SS2, a game so terrifying at times that some can't play it, the last thing you want to do is end it by having your otherwise silent protagonist make a snide one-liner and deliver the coup-de-grace in slow motion. That [censored] belongs in a Duke Nukem game, not System Shock. It makes the whole thing feel cheap.
So why do developers, often developers capable of equally brilliant and well thought out design choice, often make choices so staggeringly dumb in the same game? Why does no one stop them? And why do we, as gamers, often fail to call them out on it?
