If you grew up playing games in the late 90s and early 2000s like me, then congratulations, we have been overwhelmingly spoiled about how quickly games can evolve. During that time period, when developers were finally starting to get a handle on early 3D tech, each year brought *wildly* new experiences from AAA studios. Games at the time would look radically different from games even five years earlier. So, if you were a gaming enthusiast, or even just had a passing interest in the medium, you were in for radically new experiences pretty much every year.
The 2010s have…not been like that. Games from this generation look and play pretty similarly to games from last generation. There are still incredible games being released every year, and the indie scene is more vibrant and creative than it’s ever been, but we aren’t getting too many of these technologically innovative, genre-defining, titles on a year-by-year basis. And, to a certain extent, that’s okay. It’s not like every year we’re seeing formally and technically revolutionary works of film or literature, certainly in the consumer sphere. Once a medium reaches a certain level of technological maturity, technological creativity is less enticing. You already have the tools to do most of what you want.
But with games, a medium that is perhaps the most closely linked with new technology, it does feel slightly disappointing. While I’ll probably be playing new Bioware games until EA eventually shuts down the studio, I’m not looking for Mass Effect 5, I’m looking for an experience that evokes what it felt like to play Mass Effect for the first time. Figuring out 
what Mass Effect did well is pretty straightforward; figuring out how to recreate the experience of playing it for the first time is much more difficult. It relies on some level of technological and design-focused novelty.
So that’s what makes AI Dungeon 2, my favorite game of this year, so strange. Like Mass Effect 1, it’s a fairly janky experience, but in all other areas, from writing to visuals to tone, it is absolutely nothing like Mass Effect. But the novelty of its approach to narrative evoked how I felt playing Mass Effect for the first time. But, unlike Mass Effect, AI Dungeon…truly is unlike anything else I’ve ever played. It’s like playing Zork with a dying computer. It’s like playing D&D drunk with your friends. It’s like going to an improve comedy show that is heavy on audience participation. It’s…well, it’s like playing Mass Effect for the first time. All of these experiences gesture in the direction of AI Dungeon, but don’t fully capture it, because the game is so unique that it eludes comparison. And that, more than anything the game does in its own right, is what makes it so exciting to me. I am so excited, not just for this game itself, but for the genres of games that could be built around it. For the bits of its tech other genres could steal. Like playing season one of The Walking Dead, playing this made me imagine what others could do with this template. But as excited as I am for the future, I have loved my time just with what we have now.
So. Playing AI Dungeon made me feel like I was playing Mass Effect for the first time because it defined a new (or, at least, new to me) style of interactive narrative. What is that style? The style is the honestly unparalleled possibility space of the system. AI Dungeon’s machine learning model will respond uniquely to almost all player input, creating an experience that, for the player, is functionally infinite. Repetition does happen, but there are always new system states for the player to explore. As such, this is the closest a game has ever gotten to the “go anywhere, do anything” promise, but it’s worth acknowledging that that promise is often fickle. Sometimes, everything will click and the system responds perfectly to what the player writes. However, it’s very easy to break. Repeating lines, loops, crashes, or the system just not getting what you want it to do. For example, in a recent run my friends and I did, we were under attack from the CIA, so we called Bernie Sanders, who we had just made pr
esident, and asked him to abolish the CIA so the attacks would stop. We had to repeat the request multiple times with limited responses, and even after, the game didn’t understand in a systemic sense what the CIA was and that it was abolished. The narrative was mostly in our head. And this is where AI Dungeon actually does have a sort of progression curve, though it’s very different from those in other games. Instead of learning how the systems work and learning to conquer them, you’re learning how to work with the AI to generate the best stories. You learn what types of phrases to avoid, what types of requests the system is more comfortable with, and when to bail because it looks like you’re headed into a loop. These skills make AI Dungeon less a game in the traditional sense, with explicit win and lose states, but rather a collaborative storytelling platform. Your collaborators can include other human players, but the AI is your primary storytelling companion. And that’s pretty unusual for games. I keep pulling from comparisons outside the world of games, because video games are really bad at this type of loose storytelling. In the majority of games, everything has to be pre-programmed, so players never learn to think this creatively, they learn to figure out what the designer wants them to do. A system can only have so many states, right? So, in terms of pure storytelling structure, AI Dungeon isn’t much like Mass Effect at all, with its finite system states and limited reactivity. The experience I’ve had that’s closest to AI Dungeon is doing an improv comedy set with a partner without any prep time. You can’t pause the story and talk about where you want to go next, you’re both just flying by the seat of your pants, trying to signal to the other what to do, but mostly replying with, “Yes, and” to everything they say. As a result, AI Dungeon doesn’t really have win and lose states. You can die and get a game over screen, but that’s pretty rare and easily reversible. The game isn’t about winning, it’s about telling great stories. And that’s an approach to creativity I would love to see more of.
Going into a new decade, it’s tempting to wish for dozens of games using AI Dungeon’s model. But, right now, it simply isn’t profitable. It its current form, the game costs around $10,000 per day to run servers for. No one is going to be making money off that any time soon. But I would love to see games try this more expressive storytelling, because new technical improvements that primarily benefit storytelling are pretty rare in this medium, especially in the last two generations. The potential for new permutations is quite literally endless.
way that most other Spider-Man writing doesn’t. Because, Spider-Man is a dork. He’s making bad jokes at criminals because he genuinely finds them funny; it’s not done out of malice. Fortunately, Insomniac’s Spider-Man follows this mold. In a very important distinction, Spider-Man is cracking jokes to himself, not to the people he’s beating up. And, also in keeping with other good Spider-Man writing, these joke are 
May exists as a character outside of Peter. In 
to cure him have turned Harry into the goblin. Either way, the game is setting up a hell of a sequel. But Norman himself is an interesting character, even without his goblin-focused pursuits. Going off of the pre-release media, a lot of fans, myself included, thought they were setting up Norman as 
the game continues, and portable oxygen reserves in the form of vehicles. It helps add to the pacing and tension of early environments in the early game, and then quietly exits when it is no longer necessary.
ocean floor. Some rocks have strange, organic objects attached to them that cause them to float, and the player can take those objects and use them to make any other physics-enabled object float. Unfortunately, in the late game areas, this environmental interaction seems to decrease. These areas are much larger and less finely detailed. An area that might take a player ten minutes to fully explore, scan, and loot in the early game might be cruised over in a matter of seconds in the late game. This is partially because of how much the player’s speed has increased by the end game, but it does also seem like a deliberate choice on the part of the designers. Many of the late game environments do look genuinely impressive, but feel systemically more empty.
Metal Gear. This is forgivable for Metal Gear Solid, an early 3D game, but many contemporary games can still be played surprisingly well just by looking at this minimap. Because 2D maps are more easily readable than 3D environments, this can encourage the player to just look at their minimap, pulling them out of the 3D world. To avoid this problem, Subnautica does away with the map entirely. This means the player has to get more familiar with the landscape itself, and navigate it accordingly. The player’s vision can’t be drawn to a mini map in the corner, it has to be figuring out how the environment itself works. Additionally, because Subnautica is set underwater, traditional 2D maps might not work as well, since the player has to navigate complex, vertically-oriented cave structures. The combination of complex environments that emphasize 3D navigation and the lack of any sort of mapping system to mitigate that complexity makes navigation in Subnautica a very intentional and involved process, which is surprisingly unusual in contemporary games. The player puts effort into navigating winding caves, avoiding ambushing predators, and ducking back to the surface or their vehicle for oxygen. I’ve said this before, but making traversal engaging is perhaps the most important factor for making open world games interesting over their long runtimes, and Subnautica does this by consistently forcing the player to interact with it in ways they aren’t used to.
map is something I praised earlier in this section. But, near the end game, it becomes incredibly cumbersome. Trying to find a specific resource or blueprint fragment is engaging when there are just a few zones to search, but less so when you need this one item to progress and you have no idea where to find it. This means that, by the end game, I usually end up caving and looking up a map or wiki entry, rather than spend hours scanning every environment for something I might have missed. So, how could it be improved? Well, the game already has a system I think this could be built on top of, the scanner room. This is unlocked fairly late in the game, right around the time the player would start to feel the slog of the game’s lack of map. By this point, the player has started to expand into a space that is larger than they can reasonably keep a mental map of, especially with the lack of distant landmarks other than the Aurora. So, I’d propose turning that scanning room into a map room, that the player can only access from the scanner room itself. Their scanning room maps some of the area after a few minutes, and they can build portable scanners to place in other areas of the map to increase that radius. Existing buoys would also show up as the map expanded. Maybe they could use the cyclops to generate mapping data as well. I think this works because it keeps the early game feeling of the unknown, but by the mid-to-late game when the player is probably looking up maps on the wiki already, it makes mapping and exploration an active progress. The player would have to go out of their way to do this, it wouldn’t happen automatically. I think that’s consistent with the feel the game is going for, helps remove some late-game frustration, and actually adds more exciting actions.
Adding more narrative beats would dilute that experience. And, additionally, it means that the player doesn’t go in *expecting* a story. Most survival games on the market barely have a narrative at all, and Subnautica’s opening is about as complex as they get. There is an implied narrative beat of reaching the Aurora in the future, but nothing explicitly story-focused. From here, the story is eased onto the player, giving them the audio logs of other survivors, which at first seem almost narratively empty; just glorified quest markers. But then the player starts realizing that all of the life pods have been destroyed. Maybe they don’t put it together on their own that something is hunting these characters, but some of them might. But, this is still light enough that the player isn’t expecting a larger story. Even reaching the Aurora and disabling the ship’s reactor doesn’t provide much of a narrative resolution, it just makes the area nearby safer. The player is being driven by systemic and explorative mystery, and the last bit of narrative possibility has been removed from their mind. But, after finding the Aurora, the player gets a message with a rendezvous point for survivors. Confused, they’ll head to the coordinates, and this is where the narrative finally reveals itself.
the player is already expecting it; most games can’t even manage to do this once. This puts the player into a specific mindset that Subnautica evokes intensely during just a few narrative beats: investigative wonder. The player’s scanner becomes their primary means of interacting with the environment, learning bits and pieces for each blueprint or hidden audio log. During these sections, the game becomes less of a survival game, and more of an adventure game, which dovetails Subnautica’s mystery genre effortlessly. Having popups with links to in-game descriptions of items is not uncommon in contemporary games, but Subnautica is one of the few that has me to actually read them. These entries provide actually valuable information, and stoke the player’s curiosity on just what they imply. And, in a genre-appropriate touch, almost every entry ends with the phrase “Further analysis needed”.
game is going to have characters at all, they’re usually introduced early in the first act, but here Subnautica is, adding them in right before the endgame. And while the final story missions of the game are…basically a glorified fetch quest, the narrative does conclude in a satisfying way. Building a rocket to leave the planet is as time-consuming an undertaking as it needs to be to feel momentus, and the sequence of saying goodbye to the planet (and the adorable cuddlefish pet), dropping a time capsule for another player to find, and going through the launch sequence feels final and satisfying in a way few endings from systems-focused games ever are. The narrative may not be the foundation of Subnautica, but the restraint with which its beats are delivered to the player and the subtlety with which they are conveyed make it stand out.
fights for their acceptance not because she actually wants it, but because she wants to know why they treat her so horribly. Once she gains access to the community’s secrets, she discovers that they are misinterpreting the will of a dying AI, treating it as a religious faith, and that Aloy’s exile was a result of this misinterpretation. As Aloy explores the world, she learns more about how mistaken the Nora are, and returns to them with knowledge that makes her an almost mythic figure, all while dealing with the emotional confusion of being revered by the people who once shunned her. Did you get excited reading that? Because I got excited writing it. That sounds like an incredible story! I’d love to play that game! But that does not feel like the game I got to play. Almost everything with the Nora is brought up in a beautifully-rendered cutscene, then forgotten as Aloy goes and fights some boring apocalypse cult. You’ve fought a billion like them in every video game ever made. And given how forgettable that plotline is, most of your direct experience with the story is just hanging out with Aloy. And, umm. Okay, let’s talk about Aloy.
everything interesting in the story. He does the archeological digging, uncovers ancient secrets, pieces together where to go next, and scours the world looking for new dig sites. He even kicks off the primary events of the story by awakening HADES. Basically, he figures everything out so that all Aloy needs to do is kill the people between her and Sylens’ next objective. And this is where I began to understand Aloy. Like so many video game protagonists, she is good at killing, and little else. I get that, by the nature of this being a AAA action-adventure game, she has to be good at killing, but that’s really the only thing she’s good at. But Sylens highlights what she could have been. An archeologist who knows her way around weapons, like Nathan Drake or (more appropriately, given her personality) the rebooted Laura Croft. If Aloy had done everything that Sylens did, there could have been an even tighter connection between setting and story. Sylens’ motivations of curiosity about the old world and a driving desire to explore its mysteries are so much more compatible with what the player wants to do (namely, explore) that it seems like a perfect match, in stark contrast to Aloy’s motivation of “Who’s my mom, who I guess happens to be related to the setting?” So, while playing as a character more like Sylens wouldn’t have had that same personal connection to the mystery, it would have at least made the player feel like their interest in every scrap of the old world wasn’t out of character. Giving Aloy even a bit of that archeological predisposition could have done so much to improve this.
games actually do: stumble upon something mysterious. The first Cauldron level I did was one of my favorite experiences in the entire game, because I was just wandering the open world when I found it. No one directed me there, I wasn’t given a quest to “Clear Cauldron 1 of X”, I just found it. While I was exploring it, I was burning with curiosity about what could be behind every new corner, and the game delivered on it. That was the discovery the game should have focused on, because it put you in the headspace of discovering an ancient, abandoned world. Unfortunately, by the late game, that mystery had begun to dissipate, and I was just Clearing Cauldron 6 of X. As the world grew in size, it felt less important to explore all of it. I already knew what I would find because icons for them were plastered all over my map. When I arrived at new zones, it wasn’t introduced with a cutscene or any exposition about what made it unique, I just kind of ran through it while following my objective marker. I tried to turn off as many of those markers as I could, and let myself get distracted as much as possible, but the game was just not built for it past its first two zones. The world was better when it was smaller.
mods on my tripcaster, I found keeping track of enemies while setting them up is incredibly difficult, and often for little reward, at least on Hard mode. This is made worse by how clunky avoiding enemy attacks is even when not trying to place traps. The player’s primary means of avoiding damage is a dodge roll that never seemed to reliably be able to avoid damage. This is used in the face of enemy attacks that are difficult to predict, because of the visually busy design of the enemies, the raw number of enemies the player will be fighting at any given time, and the fact that the player’s focus is often narrowed on weak points, making them miss subtle movements of the enemies. Additionally, enemies often attack in multi-hit combos that would put a Bloodborne boss to shame. Often times, I would see a telegraph, dodge away from the enemy, and still get him by later attacks in a combo, even if I spammed the upgraded dodge roll. Because this makes trap deployment difficult, I ended up using traps less, turning combat into a fairly standard third-person shooter. The ropecaster can do a lot to alleviate this problem, but if ever a game was calling out for some sort of Shadow of the Colossus-style enemy climbing while searching for weak points, this was it. Still, when the level designers give you a suite of tactical options, Horizon’s combat truly embraces its setting in a way that most other AAA titles simply can’t, and does feel genuinely unique and interesting to engage with. I just wish that same amount of depth could have been applied to open combat as well.
, maybe not to the extent that Skyrim was, but closer to that than any post-WoW MMO. Like Skyrim, Runescape walks a fine line between a present- and absent-feeling designer. I never feel like I am being told what to do, but I do see the designer’s personality packed into every corner of the world, from the tongue-in-cheek dialog of the quests (that borrow more from Shrek than Tolkien), to the flavor text provided when using a herring on a tree (which is, of course, a Monty Python reference). The designer wasn’t giving me a list of options, they were just responding when I acted out what *I* wanted to do. They felt more like a dungeon master than a chore-giver, a distinction that a great deal of contemporary games, MMO and otherwise, seem to be missing.
being double the level of my friends, it just didn’t affect our experience at all. Now, on the one hand, this level scaling meant that I could still play with my friends and make progress even though they were lower level than me, and I appreciate that design tradeoff. But if the level doesn’t play into my decision making at any time except when I am picking skill points (of which, at level 12, I had already spent all the ones I needed for my build), what was the point of including it? It’s pretty easy to breeze through in a few hours, so it serves more as an extended tutorial than a real marker of progression.
skill or your farming skill. However, the game does approximate a player’s combat effectiveness through a combat level that gives a rough sense of how tough they might be. But, most importantly, other skills, items and strategies can be used to circumvent this. In WarCraft, if you are a level 60 character fighting a level 70 character, you are going to lose. No matter what. It is mathematically impossible for you to do any damage to them because of the math behind the hit rating stat. Doesn’t matter if you’re the best player in the game, if they’re literally naked and you’ve got the best level-available gear, you will lose. In Runescape, a combat level 60 character could wipe the floor with a combat level 70 character if they had 1) better gear 2) better food 3) a better prayer stat 4) a better sense of the combat and movement statistics or 5) a high magic or ranged stat. Higher levels do undeniably increase combat effectiveness, but it doesn’t make it mathematically impossible for you to lose. This allows for more creative solutions to combat problems other than “do they have higher numbers than me, if yes, I lose, if no, I win.” So, this solution solves both problems: players can get a rough estimate of an enemy’s power by looking at combat level in a way they couldn’t by looking at character level in WoW or Destiny, but that level also doesn’t mathematically guarantee a victory. It improves player knowledge and increases variety.
Reapers, and, especially if you have chosen her romance option, she talks about Sheaprd so that another civilization might know about her, and her lines change based on your class and alignment, creating something that feels uncomfortably personal. It doesn’t make a big deal out of itself, it doesn’t have any explosions or giant battle sequences, it just tries to figure out why people like Liara so much. A bit later in the game, in an optional encounter with her on The Citadel, Liara talks about her mother, who you both killed together in the first game, and speaks of her as though she was a regular person, not some video game boss in a sci-fi epic. She tells a very relatable story about her mother taking her to a park so she could dig, a practice that sparked her interest in archeology, and with that as a starting point, she talks with Shepard about very normal things, like home and growing up, about sometime in the future settling down and starting a family. These should feel so out of place in a game about defeating crab gods from outer space, but they don’t. The game has built itself a cast of characters who feel like real, fully fleshed-out people. And, when it is at its peak, it can tell wonderful stories about them.
protagonist is going to come out on top, and if you’ve seen/read/played enough, it will start to get predictable. Citadel knows this, and it turns what could have been another self-serious save-the-galaxy plot into a self-aware comedy about Shepard and her friends going on a wacky adventure. And it isn’t without its technical accomplishments as well. For really the first time in the series, The Citadel feels massive. While fighting the clone and her mercenaries, Shepard gets to see parts of The Citadel that hint at an even grander scale, making the player really feel like they are on a massive, city-sized space station. This makes the shootouts that now are missing narrative tension more engaging because the player has never been in firefights in places that look just like this. You start to be reminded of the scale of the galaxy you have become so accustom to, and seeing a new side of a place that the player has seen in three separate games keeps the player from getting bored. But really, the writing is what carries these action sequences. The characters rag on Shepard for this and that and joke about how many people Shepard kills (because it’s a video game and Shepard murders hundreds of people). The game takes the time to be in love with its genre and its characters and just have fun with it. They make callbacks to throwaway lines from earlier in the game and use them as actual main drivers of the plot, like Traynor’s ridiculously expensive and complex tooth brush being the one tool they need to break into the Normandy after CloneShep steals it. They make jokes about how it’s really contrived that Shepard can never have more than two squadmates, but then break that rule when they have your entire team fighting beside you, something I really wish the main game’s final mission could have done. They even make a joke about Shepard saying, “I should go”, a line that reached meme status after the second game’s release. A great deal of Mass Effect 3 felt like it was made by committee, by people who didn’t quite understand how the game worked and why people loved it. Citadel feels like it was made by people who love the game as much as I do, and want to spend a few hours celebrating that. One of my notes that I took while playing through this DLC was, “This single-handed makes up for everything the main game did wrong”, and I genuinely think it does. While the main game had its share of powerful moments, Citadel feels defined by its greatness, having a purity of vision that the main game just lacked. And I felt that before the game’s crowning achievement began: Shepard throwing a party.
them. Events include walking on set of the Blasto movie, to watching a terrible romance movie that Tali is in love with, to spending a bit of time with your Shepard’s love interest. And they don’t limit themselves to squad members in the third game, they bring back *everyone*, which is really great if you romanced a character who wasn’t too present in the third game. They put a great deal of effort into making the dialog feel reactive to how you treat each one of your characters, like with James asks if his flirting might make Liara (or whoever your Shepard is getting it on with) uncomfortable, and it’s written so casually and naturally that it didn’t appear to be some token bit of interactivity, but the setting reacting to your decisions. Again, it shows the game understanding what players are about, and putting the effort into that. But once these individual character events end, the party begins, and I cannot think of a single section in any video game where I was smiling more.
The original Mirror’s Edge game came out some eight years ago, and has been one of my all-time favorites ever since I first played the demo at a friend’s house. In the time since then, there has never quite been anything like it. Sure, Brink had some parkour, Titanfall took the basic stylings and made it crazy fast (and added jetpacks, which is always nice), and Dying Light applied it to a Ubisoft-styled open world on their own, but while I love all of those games (except Brink, c’mon, Bethesda, what were you thinking?), none of them even come close to Mirror’s Edge. Because as fun as their movement systems are, at the end of the day, the feel just a bit too floaty, too removed, and, most importantly, too easy. Movement is never the core gameplay of those games. In Mirror’s Edge, it was basically all you had (I’m not going to talk about the shooting mechanics, and no one else should either). While Ubisoft games had me hating going from Point A to Point B, Mirror’s Edge is basically nothing but that. So, they figured, if our game is entirely about getting from one place to another, why not make that really freaking fun? And they did! The movement in Mirror’s Edge is filled with this flow, heft and weight. Faith can get up to some serious speed, but she lands with a thud, will get hurt if you don’t time your roll right, and fall to the ground with a sickening crunch if you miss a ledge grab. The game asked you to be constantly aware, not just to stay alive, but to move as fast as you can and look as cool as you can while doing it. The aesthetics of parkour, of traversing a complicated space in a unique way and making it look effortless, translated so well into gameplay that I am amazed that, eight years later, NO ONE ELSE HAS GOTTEN IT RIGHT. But the first Mirror’s Edge was a linear, level-to-level game, and while I really admire and enjoy its purity, this year, when we *finally* got a sequel, they changed that.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is a straight-up, Ubisoft-inspired, checkbox-ridden, collectible-filled open world. It has an overall completion rate, barfs icons for random tasks onto your map, and doesn’t provide and mechanical incentive to do any of those things. And I freaking love it. Most open world games get very tedious, very fast, because a decent chunk of your game time is just walking from objective to objective, but in Mirror’s Edge, running everywhere is the core gameplay, so they focus on making it as engaging as possible. I had a blast finding out different routes from the various points of interest in the game, felt amazing whenever I found a new shortcut to shave off some travel time, and got genuinely, shout-an-exclamation-of-joy-at-two-in-the-morning-and-piss-off-my-parents excited when I unlocked a new upgrade that let me double wall jump. I didn’t care if I was parkouring to a fixed objective on the map that added to my overall completion, I was doing parkour! I wish I had more to say about it than that, but all it took to make this style of open world enjoyable was to just make going from place to place exciting. The walking wasn’t a chore anymore. I learned every detail of the environments because they were useful to me. And a type of game that I had *hated* for years suddenly was something I was raving to friends about again. Except this time, the honeymoon phase didn’t wear off.
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