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Unpacking Mass Effect 3’s Forgotten Multiplayer Mode

Intro

For all the hours I’ve spent playing it, I have a hard time explaining precisely why I love Mass Effect’s multiplayer modes so much. In 2021 especially, half-baked multiplayer tacked on to a single-player game feels like a relic of a previous generation, one of those features you forget as time goes on. Does anyone remember the multiplayer mode for Tomb Raider (2013)? So it’s strange that, years after launch, Mass Effect’s multiplayer modes are not only something I remember quite fondly, but something I return to regularly with friends. Even playing today, I feel something compelling about them that Gears of War, it’s closest gameplay competitor, lacks. And I don’t think this comes mostly from the simple pleasure of well-designed combat (though that is certainly a factor), or because I get to spend more time in a universe I love with friends (though, again, that is a factor). And there are many, many more factors that should have prevented it from being enjoyable at all. For starters, it is, charitably, a technical mess. The 3rd game especially, based on early Origin netcode, is filled with inconveniently placed loading screens in menus as it accesses online features. It often requires port forwarding to be able to reliably join games, which are filled with frequent disconnects and crashes. Mass Effect 3 is relatively technically solid otherwise, but the netcode makes the experience of getting into the game a hassle nearly every time. The metagame is also mired in troubling design decisions. As a free add-on to a $60 game that requires server costs, the game has an incredibly slow grind for better and more varied gear, characters, and stat upgrades. These can only be acquired through various forms of random loot boxes, with no way to directly purchase items or characters a player wants with real money or in-game cash. And this is one of the famously slow grinds that helped define the negative reputation of the first loot boxes in the early 2010s. I sunk well over 100 hours into the mode and I still never approached completion of the progression system, or even a relatively high level of power. Going even further, the game itself is a single game mode: ten waves of increasingly difficult enemies, with three of those waves being objective based. There are a few, incredibly simple objectives to accomplish, and the different enemy types become predictable after a few hours in the game. So, with all of this working against it, how could the game possibly appeal for 100 hours without getting boring? I believe the answer isn’t a single magic bullet, but instead a series of smart design decisions that add variety to each match, despite their samey format. First, it translates the complex combat loadouts from the single player into the multiplayer, adding more creative abilities that would have been too complicated to balance in the single player. Next, it implements enemy variety masterfully, with clearly readable and unique enemies. And finally, it polishes these elements with sound and visual design that make it feel incredible to play and experiment. The end result is a strangely cohesive experience that pushes players into exploring the game’s systems, making each match feel unique.

The last time I played with some friends

Loadouts

One of the core challenges of Mass Effect’s multiplayer modes is the lack of gametype variety. As previously mentioned, you’re locked into one game mode, on a set series of static maps, with a few objective-based rounds to mix it up. This means that, generally, the player is accomplishing the exact same goals every game. So, variety is first injected through the tools the players take into each mission. Initially, this means the weapons the player has to choose from. There are multiple categories of weapons, each with their own strengths, and the player will probably be fairly familiar with them from other shooters. Shotguns, assault rifles, pistols, these are things the player already intuitively understands. Fortunately, Mass Effect isn’t afraid to take advantage of its sci-fi setting, putting more conventional modern military-themed weapons alongside more creative alien weapons like the particle beam. Its setting frees it to create weapons that feel genuinely unique. The player isn’t choosing between two assault rifles with a 0.2 second difference in reload time, they’re picking between a marksman rifle and a rifle

that shoots lightning. This makes the decision on which weapons to pick more complicated, which is further increased by the weapon weight system. Taking fewer or lighter weapons decreases the recharge time of the player abilities, creating a tradeoff between weapon effectiveness and ability effectiveness. These tradeoffs make it genuinely interesting to decide on loadouts, and unlocking new weapons can entirely change up your playstyle. Compare that to Rainbow Six Siege, which, while each match plays out in wildly different ways, has rarely encouraged me to change up my loadouts for a character once I’ve settled on one. But the unique weapons are only a part of what makes loadout creation in Mass Effect interesting. Much like the single-player game, it’s the characters that really make the experience shine.

The various character classes of Mass Effect’s multiplayer are where its real value lies. You aren’t just picking another version of a human soldier with a weird gadget, you’re switching between hulking krogan vanguards and a tiny volus biotic god. While many classes share similar abilities, the way those abilities play off each other makes each class combination feel unique, and presents an entirely new playstyle. Switching between them is fairly easy, and the player isn’t penalized with hours of required grinding for doing so. So, players will be switching up their entire playstyle on a game-

to-game basis. Even playing on the same map against the same enemies, no game will feel the same. I’ll talk about this particular class in more detail later, but the Human Vanguard class, for example, is a hyper aggressive melee tank, that charges enemies and drops high-damage AOE melee attacks. A well-played vanguard basically never uses cover, and is always charging around the map. This experience is radically different from playing the salarian engineer, my go-to for high level platinum difficulty runs. This class is much squishier than the vanguard, and has to constantly use cover and longer-ranged weapons. However, his tech abilities have low enough recharge times that the player can set off tech combos on enemies consistently, making him ideal for burning down top-tier enemies at higher difficulties. While he’s nowhere near as aggressive as the vanguard, he can maintain map control in a way that the vanguard, with its high-risk, high-reward play, simply can’t. Not all classes play as wildly different as these two, but with over 30 classes, there are a lot of experiences to pick from. This encourages players to talk to their friends about their favorite builds, partially to optimize their own, but also to discover new playstyles from new classes. The social element continues to enhance this throughout the experience. Get a new class in a loot box that you don’t know how to play? Maybe a friend already has it, and the two of you can swap strategies. I’ve made a few online friends from these multiplayer lobbies, despite the horrific netcode and lack of text chat, and I think this encouraged conversation is a huge part of why.

The Game Field

All the loadout and class variety in the world wouldn’t mean that much if the maps and enemies weren’t designed to make them interesting. And, fortunately, Mass Effect’s maps and enemies do just that. The maps are the more standard of the two, so I’ll start with that. They’re mostly unremarkable, with a few unique environmental quirks in the third game that really stood out. And while I don’t have the level design background to say how the levels do this, they do push the player into consistently risky situations. Even on the highest difficulties, players must be moving constantly, and rarely get to hunker down and camp for more than a minute at a time. Players must regularly shift their position and strategy, engaging enemies at different ranges. Andromeda even took advantage of that game’s new moveset to add greater verticality to the maps, but in a post-Titanfall world, feels much less impressive than it could have been. The maps are mostly there to set the stage for the real stars, the enemies.

The “mail slot” medal unlocks from these guys

While it’s Mass Effect’s character variety that adds the most depth to the multiplayer, it’s the enemy design that really makes the multiplayer click. Each game has the player picking from one of four enemy factions: Cerberus, Geth, Reaper, and Collector. While they do mirror each other at the high levels (foot soldier, tougher foot soldier, sniper, tanky enemy, smaller enemy with an instakill), the specifics are where they really shine. Each faction, and even specific enemies, are weak to specific weapon and ammo types, encouraging the player to mix up which weapons and effects they play with. Going into a game against the synthetic Geth? Better bring disruptor ammo for its bonus damage against shields and synthetics. Hell, maybe play an engineer, with some abilities to control enemy synthetics! Fighting Reapers? Probably best to bring something with fire to burn down those husks and armoreds. Furthering this, each enemy beyond the basic grunt has at least some interesting mechanic to engage with. Sometimes that’s through creative use of weak points, like the slot on the Cerberus Guardian’s shield for easy headshots, or knocking off chunks of armor on reapers. Or it could be actually unique mechanics, such as the cluster grenades dropped by the Geth Bomber to further discourage camping. While this is a horde mode, most enemies are not faceless, each one has a specific role, and the higher the difficulty, the more you have to play to their weaknesses.

Like all good forms of variety in design, these enemies add depth exponentially, making all other decisions more interesting. Unique enemies abilities make the maps have even more of an impact on player positioning and rotation. Some areas of a map may be great for fighting one enemy type but not another, encouraging the player to shift where they’re hunkering down as new enemies appear. Enemies with different weaknesses encourage mixing up your loadout even more to play into that. And with how many unique consumables the game throws at you, players aren’t encouraged to horde useful ones; they’re getting more than they can use after every round. The enemies are the glue that makes all the individual components stick together, and this is highlighted by comparing the game to something like Digital Extreme’s Warframe.

Warframe is a great game in its own right, and one that I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into with friends and on my own. It has map and loadout variety that puts Mass Effect to shame, and it should, it’s a full, games-as-service game! But each match of Warframe…kinda feels the same to me, outside of the more unique raids and events. This is, in part, because the enemies feel very similar, so the player has no real reason to switch to anything but their main character and weapons. Mass Effect, meanwhile, uses the enemies to force the player to engage with the variety in its other systems if they want to progress. And this all comes to a head in the game’s Platinum difficulty.

Platinum difficulty Mass Effect runs are the most genuinely terrifying co-op content I’ve ever played in an action game. Instead of picking from one of four enemy types, platinum difficulty throws all of them at you at once. The toughest enemies from each faction all appear at once, in a grueling fight that tests the player on every aspect of the game’s systems. Here, the player can’t take the anti-geth character on the geth mission, they have to prepare loadouts that are dynamic enough to tackle nearly all of them. They have to coordinate with teammates to make sure they have all potential enemies covered, and that no one is too specialized. With enough grinding and optimization, these interesting decisions can be mitigated or even ignored outright, but until the player reaches that point, platinum is a treat. Players have to stay together, have to be constantly communicating, calling out enemies, and coordinating ability cooldowns. If Mass Effect’s design was not this solid, platinum would become a slog of grinding and finding the most overpowered characters to exploit it. But, because each system plays off one another in all their various incarnations, it ends up being the best version of the game, and by far the most interesting.

A Brief Love Letter to The “Manguard”

Mass Effect’s multiplayer would have been tactically interesting with just the elements I’ve discussed before, but it’s the sound design, VFX, and other “game feel” aspects that really give it the final push. Starting with Mass Effect 2, BioWare really started putting effort into its sound design, making the SFX of the player’s biotic abilities especially punchy, bass-heavy, and satisfying. Mass Effect 3 itered on this wonderfully, but that is most apparent in the previously mentioned “Manguard” class. A community nickname for the human vanguard class, the Manguard has by far the most aggressive playstyle in the game, and the series’ improved game feel and SFX design really helps sell it. Available from the start, the vanguard is a high-risk, high-reward character that zips

around the battlefield dealing catastrophic damage. Play with a well-played vanguard on your team on the lower difficulties, and you’ll be hard-pressed to get a single kill. When specialized correctly, the vanguard opens with a charge attack, which instantly refills their shields and deals massive, single-target damage. They then follow this up with a nova attack, an area of effect attack that deals so much damage it would be overpowered if it didn’t also drop the vanguard’s shields, leaving them vulnerable to a counter-attack if they don’t immediately follow it up with another charge, refilling their shields. The result is an experience that constantly feels on the edge of catastrophic failure, even as it rakes in the kills. And this is cemented in my memory because of the incredible sound and visual design for the vanguard’s charge and nova abilities. Each one feels like a power trip diluted into a few seconds of audio, so much that it’s almost distractingly exciting. Manguards may not be viable at gold difficulty, and especially not at platinum, but the experience of playing on silver is something I’ve genuinely never experienced in another game.

Conclusion

For a game starting with so much against it, including its own tech stack, Mass Effect’s multiplayer ended up being a surprisingly polished experience. Design-wise, it achieved a level of elegance that tacked-on multiplayer has, to my knowledge, never achieved. It pulled from the series’ design strengths to make the experience of playing a 10-round horde mode wildly compelling, even beyond other games in the same space with an actual multiplayer focus and a much bigger budget. It did get a proper sequel in the form of Andromeda’s multiplayer release, but marred as that game was by its own technical failings, it never got the same community as the third game. And, given the recent announcement that 3’s multiplayer will not be included in the upcoming Mass Effect: Legendary Edition release, it looks like the game and its model are probably only going to last the few more years that EA bothers to pay for their server costs. But, while I am disappointed that I won’t get to see more iteration on this idea, I’ve found revisiting 3 and Andromeda to be a fascinating dive into what makes multiplayer games really work, and how to make each round of play feel like a genuinely unique experience.

Toolkit Upgrade: How Below Zero Carries Subnautica’s Design Philosophy Forward

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Intro

By the time it left early access in 2018, Subnautica had a lot going for it. Despite being in the already tired genre of early access survival-craft-em-up, it was committed to a design philosophy that kept it feeling fresh, emphasizing mystery in all its components. I wrote a pretty glowing piece on it shortly after launch, and in it, I mentioned being excited for the potentially Lovecraftian direction of the sequel. While I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t go in that direction, the game we did get – which is currently near the end of its own early access life cycle – ended up being fascinating nonetheless. On the surface, it feels like Subnautica 2.0, an upgraded version of the systems and ideas of the original, but with more polish. It absolutely does do that, brilliantly at times, and I would be more than happy to write another piece in the style of my first one, looking at each component and how it contributes to the intended experience. But I found the most interesting parts of uncovering Below Zero’s many mysteries to be in its comparisons to its predecessor, both in how it improves, and what was sacrificed to attain that improvement. Before I dive in deeper, I do want to clarify that this is not the case of a sequel that sacrificed vision for polish and mass appeal; Below Zero is still confidently its own game. However, there is a slight difference in tone that I think is telling for the future of this design philosophy. Because, while I love Subnautica and Below Zero, its exploration and mystery-focused philosophy is really what I am interested in. In the time since Subnautica, we’ve seen the release of The Outer Wilds, another phenomenal exploration-based game in a similar vein. This gives me some hope that this design philosophy will be adapted beyond just Subnautica, and makes Below Zero’s higher budget attempt feel like a trial run for pumping more money and time into this genre. Fortunately, this first attempt is a very successful one. Below Zero upgrades the toolkit of the original Subnautica substantially, and uses those upgraded tools to create levels more complex and polished than anything in the first game. However, along the way, it sacrifices some of the mystery that made the first game’s systems so compelling to explore. Nonetheless, it stands as an example of how to apply Subnautica’s design philosophy to an experience more in line with contemporary, higher-budget design philosophies, without sacrificing its soul.

The Upgraded Toolkit

Below Zero’s first chunk of upgrades to its predecessor deal with tightening and polishing the core gameplay loop, to the point where it’s probably the best it’s ever been. Minerals in general feel more carefully balanced and useful, with fewer single-use items or poorly explained resources. On my first playthrough, even in early access, I never once had to go to the wiki to figure out where mineral X or blueprint fragment Y was, something I often had to do for some of the many scattered fragments of the cyclops in the base game. Navigation is generally made more interesting as well, strangely through its weather condition system. The first game always had the Aroura on the horizon, a crashed space ship that helped players orient themselves in the mapless game world. Below Zero has multiple above-water landmarks, which do help at times, but during harsh weather conditions, the player’s visibility can be so limited that landmarks become impossible to see. This adds an extra layer of tension, but also probably contributed to the decision to place physical maps in Below Zero’s world. These aren’t comprehensive and don’t show the player’s location, but they do help the player orient themselves, and more interestingly, point to locations the player knows nothing about. A mysterious marker for “Omega Labs” can entice the player to go exploring, as well as help them find out-of-the-way locations that they might otherwise miss. So, improvements are less interesting in patching old problems than they are in adding mystery and tension to even more aspects of the game.

Unfortunately, they didn’t do much to address perhaps the most tedious aspect of the series, inventory management. Nearly all survival games have this problem, but it’s especially difficult for Subnautica, where the player has piles and piles of varied and important resources. In my piece on the previous game, I cited my difficulties moving bases as the apex of that problem, but something I found interesting in Below Zero was that I never tried to move bases or build forward outposts, because the first game had trained me that this was too much of a hassle to be worth it. It would take a decent amount of inertia to get me to overcome those trained instincts, and that will be a recurring theme in this piece. It does seem like the team was aware of the issue, as exemplified by the Quantum Locker item. All quantum lockers, ostensibly, share the same inventory, so you can deploy one near your base, toss some emergency food in it, and carry another locker with you if you ever run out. Due to some early access bugs, I was never able to get this to work, but the idea is solid. However, the storage space of the quantum locker is so limited, it’s closer to an emergency backup than a core feature. So, unfortunately, I ended up installing inventory mods to increase the storage size of the wall-mounted lockers in the game. Once I did this, I felt the pacing of the game dramatically improve. No longer was I shuffling items between different, awkwardly-placed lockers with weird and ever-changing organizational systems. Instead, I just opened the locker, and grabbed what I wanted. I feel like many survival games could benefit from a “one giant locker” item, but I hope future titles try to address this issue in other ways. Because, ultimately, inventory management has very little to do with the core of the Subnautica experience. I could see the game working well with a Resident Evil-style inventory system, where the player’s personal inventory is incredibly limited, but they can find boxes that share the same inventory with infinite space. Maybe the seatruck could be emphasized as a primary storage mechanism. There are no doubt dozens of strategies to make the inventory system thematically interesting, or at least less intrusive, and it’s easy to propose ideas without implementing and testing them. However, this is my biggest sore spot with the series so far, because I have to spend so much of my time on an activity that is ultimately meaningless.

Fortunately, the seatruck had more success in its improvements to the original game. I’ll be blunt: piloting the cyclops in the first game…sucked. Navigating it never felt natural, the camera system was janky and awkward, I kept getting stuck on terrain, and the monster attacks felt more like annoyances than actual threats. And the seatruck is not without its own jank. This is most apparent in the interactions with the Moonpool, a building that docks and charges the player’s vehicles. When the seatruck docks to it, its attached modules detach and float idly nearby. When undocking, the player has to back the seatruck into those modules – a process that has cost me more than one newly-constructed piece – or get out of the ship and manually drag the modules over. Neither system feels natural, and this is the most “early access feeling” part of the game. It felt like the game needed an expanded Moonpool to let you swap out modules on the fly, which would have improved utility in general. Still, once you’re in the seatruck, the experience gets much better. With modules to allow for storage and fabrication, a dock for the prawn suit, and even an aquarium, it does function as a portable mini-base. It even includes a teleportation module, which allows instant teleportation back to the seatruck from any distance. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this module until reading the wiki after completing the game, so I can’t attest to its usefulness personally. Overall, the seatruck feels like a much more customizable and useful version of the cyclops and seamoth. While playing the first game, I regularly wanted to try a cyclops-only playthrough, eschewing a more established base, but it never worked reliably. The seatruck makes that feel actually possible, and is unlocked much earlier in the game. There is still some jank to be fixed, but the seatruck makes the experience of navigating Below Zero, especially the endgame, much more engaging.

Finally, Below Zero features an updated enemy roster, which is a general improvement on the first game’s. The most noticeable difference in early-game enemies is the greater variety of enemies. Below Zero has around the same number of creatures as the first game, but those enemies feel much more unique. In the base game, stalkers, sandfish, and other enemies felt more or less the same, with some slight differences in attack pattern. They were rarely a threat once the player got their seaglide, and were pretty easy to ignore. Fortunately, Below Zero spends most of its time developing these mid-sized enemies, and making them interesting. Brutesharks and Squidsharks attack the player directly, while Brinewings fire freezing projectiles at them and other fauna. Spike traps will grab the player from a distance, with the faster and larger Cryptosuchus charging head on in pairs. And independent of combat, Sea Monkeys will grab the player’s equipped tools, and even trade items with the player later on. This makes the early and mid game much more interesting for the player, because these enemies require different strategies to work around. Unfortunately, the primary leviathan creature does not fare as well. The first game had the terrifying reaper leviathan, a creature with a distinctive movement pattern and roar that still makes me sweat even after multiple playthroughs. But Below Zero’s Chelicerate…doesn’t really stack up. It’s just as mechanically dangerous, but it’s goofier design and more common presence in highly trafficked areas make it feel both more mundane and more unsettling. In the first game, the roar of a reaper leviathan meant it had seen you and was closing in. It was a giant flashing sign in 10-foot-tall letters saying, “GET OUT OF HERE NOW.” But because the Chelicerate hunts nearby fauna and other creatures have a similar roar, the player is almost constantly hearing creature roars in the Thermal Spires, Purple Vents, and Lilly zones. The end result is a sense of constant, mid-level stress, at least in my case, and that makes exploring those zones exhausting. If the Chelicerate spawns were slightly reduced, and the roar frequency reduced, I think they would be much more engaging creatures. Ultimately, while the new enemy roster has its problems, the enemies become a much more active part of the game, all the way through the endgame.

The Performance Impact: How The Tools Are Used

While the upgraded toolkit might have been a mixed bag, the improvements to level design have been almost universally positive, and it all starts with the performance. That’s a strange place to start on level design, but the technical limitations of the first game severely hampered what the designers could actually do with the world. In Below Zero…those issues are gone. Completely. While the first game was full of egregious framerate hitches, stuttering, and pop-in, Below Zero has none of that, and it feels like the level designers have been set free. Without looking at the code, I can’t tell what tricks they pulled to fix this; the only noticeable one is a slightly lower draw distance and more aggressive fog. But, from a player’s perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any tradeoffs, just improvement. Because the increased performance lets them significantly increase the density of assets and create more vertical maps that the series feels like it was made for. The opening zone, the Twisty Bridges, is perhaps the single best example of this new design. Starting as a shallow, cozy area for the player to explore, but with crevices that go down hundreds of meters. In fact, some great mid-late-game upgrades are found by diving down to the lower area of the biome. This introduces the player to one of the core appeals of Subnautica right away: finding a safe area to get established in, but being teased with further depths. And, it introduces the player to this loop even more effectively than the first game did. Without crafting the Rebreather, the player can only descend a hundred meters before severely hampering their oxygen supply. And, before getting the seatruck as a portable source of oxygen,

even having enough oxygen to get to 100 meters is unlikely. This means the player spends more time pushing the limits of their oxygen in the early game, diving just deep enough to grab this new upgrade or that new material. The game rewards this with expanded environmental interaction systems; for example, the oxygen plants that replace the role of brain coral in the first game. Brain coral required the player to sit and wait for it to produce oxygen, while O2 plants just require a simple click, with a longer recharge time. This lets the player keep their momentum while diving deeper and deeper, maybe deeper than they should be.

These levels are not just deep crevices, however. They’re fully fledged cave networks. Exploring around the Lilypad Islands, for example, might have the player start in an area of open water, then duck into a crevice to grab some materials, then entering a small cave network, all within the same area. This makes discoveries and dramatic changes in the environment much more common. In the base game, the player spent the majority of their time in open water, with the sea above them. This made for some great moments of terror when the player was hundreds of meters deep, looked up to the surface of the ocean, and saw nothing but blackness. Below Zero keeps those moments, but the player spends much more time in cave networks or mostly covered areas that provide cover from the more threatening predators. And this is where the performance impact becomes so noticeable, because these zones simply could not have existed in the first game. The closest Subnautica came was the Mushroom Forest zone, which was an infamously performance-heavy area with the worst pop-in in the game causing collisions as items appeared right in front of the player. So, I feel like I can’t overstate the value of these optimizations, because they allowed for the complex and winding levels that really made me fall in love with Below Zero. For example, the previously mentioned Lilypad Islands is Below Zero’s take on the Underwater Islands zone from the first game, a visually gorgeous but otherwise mostly forgettable zone. The Lilypad Islands, however, are much more tense, filled with cave networks, and giant, decaying lily pads that would have brought the previous game to its knees. The end result is a game world that is much more in line with the themes of the game, where mystery and discovery are an even greater part of the core game loop.

Interestingly, however, Below Zero also contains some of the most traditionally linear level design in the series. Many of the experiences feel more tightly controlled and designed, especially on land and near the endgame. This begins with the structure of the critical path, which is a lot more clearly defined. In the first game, you weren’t even aware that there *was* a critical path; you had just crash landed on this planet and needed to survive. The fact that Subnautica had a story at all was sort of a surprise to the player. Below Zero opens with a very clear narrative goal: find out what happened to your character’s sister. This gives the player a more specific focus to follow, and while it does follow the first game’s rule of multiple, concurrent narratives, it’s communicated a lot more clearly to the player. This has its advantages and disadvantages, and I personally prefer the first game’s approach because of how naturalistic your gradual immersion in the story feels. However, from a purely gameplay approach, a clearer critical path does help players get over the early game learning curve. This does not mean that the story is all directed; the player still has multiple leads to follow up on, new areas to explore, a whole on-land segment to tackle, and just new zones to find. If anything, Below Zero’s structure feels more open-ended, especially towards the endgame. This chart showing the depth of the first game’s zone highlights that, while the early and mid game had many zones spanning the available depth ranges, the last few zones all followed a strict, linear progression, basically

preventing exploration. Below Zero’s endgame does contain two linear zones, and I’ll expand on that shortly, but it otherwise feels like a much more explorable world. There is something interesting to be found in nearly every zone at nearly every stage of the game, even the starting zone. Further cementing this is the continuing usefulness of the seatruck. In the first game, you had a clear progression path from seaglide, to seamoth, to cyclops, with each vehicle being useful in specific situations or at specific depths. This meant that, functionally, your seamoth was useless in the endgame, and the cyclops was always the best choice. The seamoth couldn’t even be upgraded to go as deep as the cyclops. However, in Below Zero, the seatruck is the first vehicle the player builds, and it is used until the last moments of the endgame. Which, unfortunately, are where the level design kind of falls apart.

Now the game is technically still a few months out from its full 1.0 release, so it is possible that these zones will be reworked, but the final zones of Below Zero – the Crystal Caves and Fabricator Caverns – are once again the weakest. I previously criticized the linearity of the first game’s ending levels, how they were essentially tunnels to the next story beat. Below Zero takes that to its extreme. While I can’t find any maps of the caves to prove this, these zones felt incredibly linear, with a single point of interest in each zone. Even the Lost River, Inactive Lava Zone, and Lava Lakes from the first game still had points of interest to find, hidden side areas and caches to explore, and more unique assets such as the lava castle and two alien bases. Below Zero’s zones are much shorter, and lack these. The only unique discovery in these zones, other than the two plot-required points of interest, is Kyanite, a resource required for advanced fabrication that only exists in these caves, and a small alien cache. Strangely, however…I still prefer Below Zero’s endgame, because it is so much shorter. I think these kinds of levels are a necessary endpoint for the fantasy Subnautica is presenting, about Diving Too Deep into the mysterious oceans. Both games may have struggled in the execution, but the existence of these lower levels makes the game more imposing, knowing that some eldritch horror lurks further down. And while, systemically, these might not click as well, emotionally, the experience of the caves is much better.

“Proceed with caution. A leviathan class creature is near.”

That is the message that plays when entering the crystal caves. And it nearly got me to turn around and leave. But I kept going deeper, at least partially because I wanted to get the jump scare over with, and see whatever new horror the developer had cooked up. I tried to keep close to the walls, keeping the openings to other caves in my field of vision. Then, a few dozen meters below, I saw it. Slithering through the water with dozens of tiny arms clicking back and forth, and a pulsing, bioluminescent underbody. I panicked, and tried to turn around, but it was too late, the creature had already grabbed my seatruck, and was crushing it. I Alt-F4ed out of the game.

Subnautica’s leviathan creatures inspire a level of pure terror in me that not many games, even dedicated horror games, can match. I don’t know if I was all that afraid of the ocean before I played Subnautica, but after playing it, I most certainly am. And while I take issue with the design of the game’s last two areas, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t one of the most effective horror experiences in the medium. Part of what makes the endgame zones more tolerable is that it doesn’t feel like the game even wants you to explore them. There are so few easy hiding places or options to retreat, that the player basically has to be on alert every second, always watching and listening for these shadow leviathans. Mechanically, at least, these experiences can be smoothed over. Once you realize that the leviathan’s grab attack takes two full hits to kill your ship, they become a lot less of a threat. Mechanically. But emotionally…I cannot be at ease when they’re nearby, even if I know they’re not a threat. So, the majority of the endgame wasn’t a challenge in system mastery, but a challenge of courage. I knew that the optional strategy was to let the leviathan grab you, then trigger your ship’s electric defense system, letting you escape unscathed. Evaluating the threat from the numerical perspective of DPS and health pools, it wouldn’t have even been a consideration. But the terror of a giant sea creature attack made it just as intense as if I were playing a permadeath run. Still, this terror can turn into exhaustion when repeated too much. Because of some unclear signposting, I thought I needed to get to the end of the final zone much earlier than I actually did, and made the treacherous, terror-inducing trip to the bottom only to be greeted with a message from the game that “you should come back here later”. And then, faced with the requirement to swim all the way back to the surface, I felt more exhaustion than dread and terror. Fortunately, if you are playing optimally, you only need to make that trip once, whereas the base game required numerous trips. This continues the trend of these endgame zones being better because they’re shorter, and for future takes on this idea, I do think that’s the approach they should take, if they’re not willing to completely overhaul it. A short, flashy conclusion to an entire game’s worth of building dread. So, when given a choice between shorter or more complicated, it’s fortunate that the on land sections of Below Zero essentially do both.

In stark contrast to its underwater endgame zones, Below Zero’s on land sections are refreshingly terror-free. This makes them some of Below Zero’s most interesting levels because of how they adopt the Subnautica formula to an environment without that extra Z axis. Some are more straightforward replacements: oxygen is replaced by cold, with warmth-refilling plants, the seatruck is replaced by the snowfox, there are mid-sized predators that can mostly be avoided with your vehicle, and larger ones that require stealth. However, each aspect has its own flair to it. The ice worm keeps that leviathan-sized spectacle, but with a more formalized stealth system to deal with them. Noise and elevation all matter when avoiding it, and the player is even given a gadget, called the Thumper, to simulate movement and distract the ice worm. In contrast to the straightforward shadow leviathan encounters, I felt like I could actually plan around the ice worms, and use different tools if I got stuck. The problem was, I almost never got stuck. As cool of an the Thumper is, I never felt the need to use it, and I never got killed by the ice worm or any other hostile fauna. The cold system fares a bit better, and it did actually kill me a few times when I forgot to bring heat-refilling items. Harsh weather conditions can really amplify its effectiveness, and make a totally mundane environment feel as hostile as a leviathan. So, it feels like a bit of a messy first pass that needs more tuning, but for a first pass on a new system in the back half of an already pretty solid game, it’s a damn impressive one.

However, I basically ignored the surface completely until the endgame, and I think this clashes with one of Subnautica’s core approaches to design: giving the player so many different paths to take. The designers specifically cite a desire to have multiple narrative threads running concurrently, and this works wonderfully for encouraging exploration, but can make it possible to ignore some systems until the endgame. Because it surrenders so much agency to the player, the player’s actions are much less predictable, more subject to random whims and habits. For example, I personally didn’t go to the surface because the first game had trained me that on land segments were brief expeditions to grab new technology or plot elements, then return to the ocean. I felt at home under water in this game because 99% of it was already happening under water. Add to this the harshness of the cold weather conditions, and the surface can seem like a hostile but also insignificant place, a roaring blizzard to make you feel more comfortable when you return to the water. The game does have a few earlier tasks pushing you in that direction, but because of how removed it feels from the base game, the player has to overcome a lot of inertia to go there. This, absolutely, has its disadvantages, but I think it comes with the upside of making the surface feel like a sort of forbidden fruit and final arena. By the time the player actually does get there, it’s been built up enough to be intriguing as all hell. It allows the game to drop some of its strongest narrative beats, which are made all the more effective by how long you’ve waited to get there.

Speaking of which, Subnautica has a story now.

A Proper Narrative: How The Tools Are Contextualized

This is it, the part of the game that makes Below Zero a test run, and the core of the game’s structural question: can you apply Subnautica to something with a traditional narrative? Characters, 3 acts, inciting incidents, all that. Like I mentioned previously, the first game did have a story, which was actually a surprise for most players expecting an empty survival game. The existence of a greater narrative at all was one of the first mysteries the player uncovers, and as much as I *love* that trick, it’s not a trick that can work twice. If they released Below Zero with seemingly no story until hour 5, players would be expecting it. So, I understand why they decided to go a different route, and it’s clear they cared very deeply about getting it right. When their first pass on the story didn’t work, they scrapped it entirely, writing an entirely new story pretty late into the early access process at considerable expense. So it’s with that in mind that I say that Below Zero has too much narrative for a Subnautica game. I really enjoy the game’s core story, I even like its core characters, and compared to just about any other game, the narrative to other content ratio is pretty low. But it’s not low enough to keep that lonely feeling that the first game delivered on so well. In Subnautica, you were *incredibly* isolated, perhaps the only sentient being on the planet, and no one knew

you were there. In Below Zero, there are Altera settlements, satellites in orbit, old, abandoned structures, years of history, and even at least two sentient beings active in the same sector as you. The first game had a few old settlements, but they were decaying, from dead explorers, implying that you might meet the same fate. Here, one of those characters from the first game is alive and well, holed up in a base you can visit at any time. It makes the exploration feel just a bit less satisfying, because you often feel like you’re not really discovering anything, just seeing other people’s work. This carries over into the approach to text logs as well. In the first game, I scanned every object and read every scrap of flavor text, just wanting to learn more about this world and its ecosystem. In Below Zero, it feels like far too much narrative content. I’m listening to audio logs of the workplace drama for some dystopian future space company, not learning hidden secrets about alien races. Sifting through pages and pages of contrite fathers who miss their daughters, little workplace romances, and complaining about equipment regulation. This is coupled with an AI companion that starts conversations about history, philosophy, and personal experiences, all while the player is swimming around the overworld. Again, none of these are bad – I actually really like the conversations between AL-AN and the player – it just feels misplaced. If there were fewer audio and text logs, maybe one or two fewer bases, and less frequent dialog, then I think Below Zero could have captured the same feeling of isolation that the first game had, while keeping its narrative ambitions. As it stands, though, the first game just delivers on this narrative mystery better than its predecessor.

So, Below Zero is not as good at narrative mystery as the first game. But so what? Sequels are allowed to go in radically different directions, explore different experiences. Aliens doesn’t feel terrifying in the same way Alien does, but that doesn’t make it a bad film. So, acknowledging the differences between the two, what kind of

experience *is* Below Zero trying to deliver? Well, one that follows many of the same rules as the first one. Those multiple narrative threads I mentioned earlier are still present, with threads of finding out what happened to Robin’s sister, learning about Altrea’s bases, the precursor AI, and the sub-stories of each of the ruined sites, to name a few. And some of those narrative threads are quite good in their own right. I’ve got a particular fondness for the AI storyline, because, while I think the conversations are misplaced and too frequent, they are interesting conversations. Robin is fiercely opinionated, especially for a first-person protagonist, a role usually filed by characters who can’t speak at all or speak sparingly and inoffensively. There’s even a bit of tension when Robin defiantly states sweeping philosophical beliefs that the player might disagree with. The first game’s writing was more functional than good in its own right. It was there to create texture and tone and hint at larger mysteries. Below Zero might lose some of that tone, but the actual quality of the writing itself has improved, and I have to commend how well they did integrate it, even if they often fell flat. Because there is one piece of narrative design that makes me really hope for the future of this franchise and this design philosophy.

Deep in a cave at the northern end of the ice fields, the player stumbles upon the frozen leviathan chamber. While it has an initial moment of shock – the creature is *massive*, after all – it quickly fades towards a different tone. It’s eerie, quiet, cozy, like a good Resident Evil safe room. The massive leviathan is almost fully encased in ice, with scattered lab equipment thrown around the cavern. Safe Cave, one of my favorite tracks on the soundtrack, kicks in, reinforcing the mood that, while everything is calm now, something big happened here. So the player gets to spend time playing detective, scanning every item, looking at the destruction and piecing together how it happened, and, of course, approaching and scanning the creature itself. They learn some very important information about a main story thread, and then quietly leave.

This, to me, is the promise of Below Zero. It’s a narrative moment rendered at a scale and budget that most smaller studios probably wouldn’t be able to pull off in a feature-rich open world game like this one. It has audio logs, text, and other conventional forms of narrative, but primarily entices the player with exploration and extrapolation. It’s one of my favorite moments in the medium, and I don’t think it could have happened in any other game, including Subnautica the first. It takes the strengths of the first game – narrative mystery, player-directed intrigue – and merges them with the strengths of the second – polish, character focus, and narrative clarity. So, while I have spent a lot of this essay criticizing the narrative implementation in Below Zero, moments like these remove my worries that these two styles of design are incompatible. It’s not impossible, it just takes experimentation and iteration, like everything else in this medium. And it shows that, with enough of both, this formula can create great experiences. Unknown Worlds hasn’t announced what their next project will be, but given all the ideas they had for Below Zero, a proper Subnautica 2 doesn’t seem unlikely. I’m hoping that they can take what they learned from Below Zero, and carry it forward into a proper successor, one that delivers on its narrative ambitions. But, for now, the game we have is an exciting look at what’s to come, and a compelling experience in its own right, and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

A Little Closer to the Horizon, Please: Horizon Zero Dawn Review

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Introduction

It’s no secret that Horizon Zero Dawn’s time in the spotlight was cut unfortunately short by releasing three days before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Two exploration-based open world games coming out within three days of each other would be enough of a marketing nightmare on its own, but when one of those games is a critically adored, GOTY-sweeping entry in one gaming’s best-known franchises, I’m amazed Horizon actually broke even. But while torrents of pieces analyzing every facet of Breath of the Wild have been released and continue to get released, Horizon seems to have gone relatively unanalyzed for a game of its scope and creativity. I picked it up hoping to find a hidden gem, but what I found was more of a great blueprint for a hidden gem, that seemed to need a few more redesigns. Still, I think the successes and failures of Horizon make it one of the most interesting games released last year, and the questions it asks about how to make a AAA open world game are especially important in such a static genre. So, how does Horizon shake up the open-world formula? What fundamental assumptions about open world setting and story design does it challenge? And can it turn any of those ideas into engaging systems

Story & Setting

Horizon’s writing is probably its most interesting, back-of-the-box, selling point feature. So it’s a shame that, most of the time the player is actually engaging with it, it’s awkward, bland, or frustrating. “Awkward” is really the best word I can think of to describe the dialog, from Aloy’s teenaged attempts to land a sick burn, to the conversations with Sylens that are basically just them being angry at each other over voice chat, to the strange attempts at stiff, fantasy genre speech that most characters talk

Even in action-adventure games, you can’t escape the dialog wheel

in. It’s telling that I looked up the “Skip Dialog” button about twenty minutes into the game; most of the time when the game is talking at you, you’ll be bored. During the majority of the cutscenes, I found myself groaning with the same frequency I do at most AAA titles, because the characters speak so stiffly. I’m fairly certain that this is a problem with the script, because they’ve hired some fairly talented actors to play the parts. The closest comparison I can find is, appropriately, Dontnod’s 2015 Life is Strange. Voice actor/writer Ashly Burch voices lead characters in both of these games (Aloy in HZD and Chloe in LiS), and appropriately demonstrates the feel of a talented actor with a wooden script, and how that gets translated from page to game. The writing in Horizon feels very similar, with actors struggling to emote around clunky dialog. Part of the awkwardness in Life is Strange’s script comes from it being translated from French, and Guerrilla Games is a Dutch company, so I suppose that could have contributed to a similar feel. However, the game’s lead writer was John Gonzalez, best known for writing for Fallout New Vegas, one of the most fully-realized settings in the history of the medium. So, the cause of the clunky dialog is still a mystery to me.

However, the problems with the script extend beyond the dialog; the major plot points regularly fail to land as well. The game opens with an impeccably directed sequence (like nearly all of its cutscenes) showing Aloy dealing with her outcast status, training, growing up, and preparing to face the world. It introduces Rost, Aloy’s adoptive father (a character so forgettable I just had to Google his name), swiftly kills him off to give Aloy a personal stake in fighting the big bad. Aloy wins membership in the tribe that has treated her as an outcast for her entire life, then goes off on her great adventure. This plot is formulaic enough that it should at least function as an easy setup, but the wooden delivery and awkward structure make each point land less than gracefully. Rost, for example, is barely mentioned for the rest of the game, and because we never really see Aloy enjoying her time with him, he doesn’t work as an effective motivation. And Aloy’s drive to find out who her mother is never quite lines up with the player’s interest in the world (though they did try, and I’ll expand on that later). This results in the player sort of floating from plot event to plot event, not really invested in any of it. The Nora themselves are perhaps the best example of this, because, as an elevator pitch, they work brilliantly. Aloy grows up shunned by them for reasons she cannot understand, and 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.

I really wanted to like Aloy. She’s voiced by Ashly Burch, which already gives her a few dozen points in her favor, she’s got a (theoretically) interesting backstory as a social outcast, and is kind of a badass on top of it. But, in execution, her character is just…bland. I can’t really come up with any of her personality traits other than “determined” and “impulsive”, which are the traits of approximately every video game protagonist since like 2004. She doesn’t really seem to enjoy what she’s doing beyond an occasional satisfied smile, and mostly seems kind of annoyed with people, which makes sense for a social outcast, but isn’t expanded upon in a meaningful enough wya to make it a worthwhile tradeoff. But Aloy’s biggest weakness as a character comes from an element that could have easily been her biggest strength: her motivation. I absolutely understand what they were trying to do; Aloy’s journey to find her mother (cloned genetic progenitor, whatever, she’s functionally her mom) gives her a personal stake in exploring the ruins of the old world. In interviews, lead writer John Gonzalez talked about how, without this personal motivation, Horizon is just a detective story, but the best detective stories are “Ones that the detective really needs to solve”. Thus, he gave Aloy a driving personal reason to dig deeper. However, as a player, I found myself thoroughly uninterested in Aloy’s journey of self because of the weak setup, and more interested in the world itself. So, I was interested in finding out more about the world, but Aloy is only interested in the bits that relate specifically to her birth. She doesn’t seem excited about uncovering some bit of world-defining lore, when the player is on the edge of their seat. She’s looting the stories of the dead world looking for scraps about her mother, and tossing aside everything else. And in her approach to the lore of the world, I really began to understand Aloy, because it lead me to ask a seemingly unrelated question that, in actuality, tells us a lot about Aloy: What point does Sylens serve in the story? This one threw me for a loop until I started combing over the plot summary and looking at his actions. He basically does 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.

So, the dialogue is bad, the low-level plot is bad, and the main character feels underutilized, which just leaves the setting. Fortunately, the setting is Horizon’s greatest strength, and when executed correctly, is genuinely breathtaking. This is first apparent in the game’s visual design, a strange hybrid of ancient and modern styles. Characters have headdresses made of bullet casings, fur clothes with metal flourishes, and ancient makeup and war paint in the shape of circuit boards. This, coupled with the game’s impressive graphical fidelity, makes it consistently gorgeous to look at, and conveys many of the game’s themes with much more subtlety and effectiveness than any of its story beats. The environments of the world reflect this as well, with sprawling, beautiful landscapes littered with the corpses of derelict machines, and the centuries-old ruins of ancient cities. It delivers on one of my favorite promises of the post-post-apocalypse genre (or whatever it’s called): showing a new world flourish in the carcass of the old, no longer concerned with the squabbles, culture and events of their long-dead ancestors. Similar works in this genre include Nier: Automata, and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West,

22680-enslaved-odyssey-to-the-west-1920x1080-game-wallpaper-1.jpg

Seriously, more people need to play Enslaved

the later of which I thoroughly enjoyed. These two games are less backwards-looking than most works in the post-apocalypse genre, and I wish Horizon had committed to that more. Because, by the end of the game, there are really no mysteries left to uncover; the game has already answered everything. The only real question remaining is posted in an after-credits sequel hook where Sylens reveals that someone or something woke HADES up, which wasn’t appropriately set up beforehand (it seemed like HADES had been awake forever and Sylens just stumbled upon him while being an archaeology nerd). And while I think the ending’s lack of mystery does harm the game as a whole, I want to acknowledge the sense of wonder the game does successfully create at its beginning. As Aloy crosses from the safety of her tribe’s sacred land into the outer world at the end of Act 1, the player is burning with so many questions about the nature of the game’s world and presented with a world full of answers. That moment is one of my highlights of the entire game, and even though that mystery is diluted by the ending, it sets up the open world beautifully.While poking around the world, the player will stumble on some of the game’s best bits of world building. These include audio and text logs that describe the workings of the old world without giving away too much, giving the player small anecdotes instead of comprehensive answers. This is reminiscent of Croteam’s The Talos Principle, which never outright states the cause of the apocalypse, and instead describes people living their lives under the shadow of it. As a result, the player feels like an archeologist of their own world, uncovering bits of 21st-century technology and lore that are new and mysterious to Aloy, but not to the player. And this touches on perhaps my favorite theme in the story, that of the tribes of the new world misinterpreting the ideas of the old world. It serves as an interesting twist on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous, often-quoted line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This concept is most often used when the audience cannot understand the technology, making it seem magical, but in Horizon, we see this from the opposite perspective. During the first act,

The Womb of the Mountain/Magical Broken Computer

Aloy presents herself to what the tribe calls “The Goddess”, and ancient structure inside the mountain that they built their capital around. This takes the shape of a metal door, which emanates a red light and scans Aloy, saying, “Identity not verified, data corruption”. The player knows that this is obviously a computer, that it’s using some sort of scan to verify her identity, and that there’s a busted hard drive somewhere in the facility that’s making it throw an error. But the leaders of the Nora treat it as a prophecy, speaking of the corruption as a mythical force that Aloy must conquer. The player is given both perspectives, the technological and the magical, and is able to understand both simultaneously. Aloy’s problem of fixing a broken computer is turned into a mythic quest simply because the Nora think its magic. *That* is a brilliant use of Horizon’s genre, and one that feels fairly unique to Horizon itself.

Exploration & Combat

So how does the player uncover these setting details? Outside of the main plot, the setting is primarily communicated through the design of the world itself. While the late game may suffer from the kind of bloat that seems emblematic of post-Assassin’s Creed open world titles, during early-to-mid game, the size and scope feels just right, and allows for measured exploration. While, at the end of the game, I was fast-traveling from campfire to campfire, during the first few zones, I *loved* the open world. I was searching every corner looking for new enemies to fight, hidden areas to poke around in, and loot to find. The game lets you do something that so few contemporary open world 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.

I have one more anecdote that I think highlights the best and worst of Horizon’s open world, as it was almost one of my favorite moments in the game. I was exploring near one of the game’s northern areas, and I saw that I was nearly at the edge of the map. Curious to see what the edge of the world looked like, I headed north until I found a snowy mountain range. I tried to sneak my way past a few enemies, but made a bad call and blew my cover, resulting in enemy attacks barreling down on me from all directions. Instead of running away, I made the split-second decision to charge the mountain, and climbed it while dodging fire and just barely keeping my health bar topped off. With no healing items to spare, I reached the top, only to be greeted by…a cutscene introducing a giant, flying boss. Here, when just exploring the open world, I had stumbled onto a unique boss encounter totally undirected. It took nearly every bit of ropecaster ammo I had, but I was able to take it down, and Aloy dropped a quick voice hint about seeing what it was guarding. I moved past the machine’s corpse, and saw a series of platforming challenges (ladders, ledges, etc.), that seemed to lead to a nearby cave. I climbed about halfway up the ridge, and…I got stuck. I could not, for the life of me, find the next place to climb. I retraced my steps, tried jumping on every bit of environment that looked even remotely climbable, and even turned on the game’s objective hints. Nothing. After about half an hour of trying, I gave up, and googled a video guide. And, this is where my excitement turned to frustration. Right at the point I had stopped, in my world, there was an empty ledge, with no apparent way up, but in the world of the YouTube video I was watching, there was a ladder neatly placed right there. Apparently, that ladder only appears when you have unlocked that area’s relevant quest. Now, I understand that, in an open world game, you need to gate off certain areas that are mission-specific. But to have that gate be an arbitrary ladder halfway up the path to that

Why?

objective, with no indication to the player that they can’t reach the area? Not even an “I should come back later” voice line from Aloy? If they had simply forgotten to gate off the area, I would have understood, but the removal of this ladder implies that some designer on the team saw the problem, and deliberately implemented this disappearing ladder as a solution to solve the problem. That, I do not understand. Maybe remove the first stepping stone up the mountain, instead of one in the middle? Gate the area off entirely? I can think of dozens of equally cheap design solutions, none of which would have lead to this problem. And while this is a single issue, I think it’s emblematic of how Horizon only half commits to making its world explorable. It gets far, far closer than most games, but isn’t able to go far enough. Which, I suppose, is a good summary of my opinion on the game as a whole.

Before concluding, I do want to briefly touch on the game’s combat. Again, I enjoyed it much more at the beginning of the game than at the end, and I think that has more to do with encounter design than player skill or numerical advantages. A great deal of the campaign involves fighting human enemies, which features a largely uninteresting opening of shallow stealth that transitions irrevocably into shallow combat as soon as you are spotted. You’ve done this before in most AAA action-adventure titles. Combat against machine enemies, meanwhile is much more interesting, especially because of the various traps the game offers. The game does have one combat setup that works brilliantly, and that is when the game lets the player really step into the shoes of a hunter and plan their attack. While most of the campaign missions don’t allow for this kind of play, those that do demonstrate a style of combat that simply cannot be found in other games. Checking enemy movement patterns, scanning for their weaknesses, dropping tripcaster lines, and setting up the perfect trap is a rich tactical treat, especially on the harder difficulties. However, open combat is less tactically engaging, primarily because of the difficulty of deploying the traps mid-combat. Even with a great deal of handling 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.

Conclusion

I feel like I came off a lot more negative towards this game than I intended, so I want to open the conclusion with a reframing of my opinion on the game: I think Horizon Zero Dawn is an incremental improvement on the AAA action-adventure game that greatly raises the bar for what we can expect from the admittedly stale genre. The quality of the cinematic and art direction alone is astonishing, and the idea that these games can explore more creative settings and have gameplay inspired by them is one that the industry is in desperate need of adopting. If every AAA open world title was as creative and risky as Horizon Zero Dawn was, I probably wouldn’t be suffering from genre fatigue. Still, there are tradeoffs to taking risks when making a game this expensive: you’re working with ideas that haven’t been iterated on and polished over multiple sequels. So, whenever Horizon Zero Dawn 2 comes out, I will be looking forward to seeing how Guerilla takes this first game, which was promising but messy, and polishes it up.

The Proto-MMO: RuneScape and Unstructured, Massively Multiplayer Play

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The website of Jagex Ltd. says that I first logged into its seminal MMO Runescape over twelve years ago, on September 11th, 2005. It also says that I’ve spent 827 hours playing the game since then, a number that does embarrass me, but not enough to stop me from playing it. See, Runescape doesn’t have any of the qualities of the games I spend most of my time playing. While most of the games populating my most played list of 2017 have gone all respectable, with coherent and gorgeous art direction, game systems that engage and challenge, and well-crafted narratives that finally made me stop feeling insecure

God, how is that even possible?

about dedicating my professional life to games instead of literature or film or whatever, Runescape is…basically a clicker game with a prettier coat of paint. So, I have a hard time explaining why Runescape is interesting to me other than the patented nostalgia excuse. But I’ve spent a decent amount of those 827 total hours playing the game in the past few weeks, and I think I’ve come up with a rough idea of why I keep coming back. My arc with most games is as follows: buy, binge, give up, move on to the next game. I don’t usually revisit games to complete side content, and I rarely replay them. However, I engage with Runescape differently. In Runescape, I might play for a week here and there, then go back to playing other games. I make a bit of progress, complete a quest, grind some levels, then move on. So, what about Runescape’s design is different from other MMOs? How does it structure its expected playtime to encourage a more casual engagement? And can we still learn something from it when the contemporary MMO is moving closer to “shared world” that “massively multiplayer”?

“Player freedom” has become such an overused industry buzzword in the past decade that I cringe just to mention it, let alone to make it the core of my thesis, but yeah, Runescape offers the least directed experience of any MMO I’ve played (certainly any made since World of WarCraft). Once the player leaves the tutorial, they are basically given the freedom of a Bethesda RPG. The game is so good at this that it actually struggles to give new players a clear direction when they start playing, and I think this is a very good problem to have. WoW popularized this “theme park” style of MMOs that gives the player an exact path to follow through the game, so the player rarely has to decide what to do next. And while there is some benefit to this system (namely, it’s relaxing as hell), Runescape shows how good it can be when you design for the opposite sensibilities.

Here’s an example of a Runescape play session I had the other day: “Okay, I really want to complete the Recipe for Disaster quest because it’s goddamn funny, but in order to do that, I need to complete the Desert Treasure quest to unlock Ancient Magicks. And that would be easy, except finishing that quest requires killing this vampire boss who has been giving me a lot of trouble, but it looks like he’s weak to air spells, so I’m going to train my magic level to 60 so I can use this awesome magic staff that will let me hit him with my toughest air spell. Magic is kind of hard to train, so I’ll pickup some good magic gear and complete a few quests that give magic experience while learning how to use the new magic system. And then I can complete this quest I’ve wanted to do since I was 13.”

Completing this was literally on my bucket list

This is a chain of events that I planned out on my own, a decent amount of which could have been swapped out for other solutions. I didn’t need to do any of it to advance in the game, I just wanted to. Where an average play session for WoW is “I need to do this quest so I can unlock the next quest which unlocks the next quest…” ad nauseam, Runescape’s play sessions are much more dynamic; constructed by players, not developers. The game allows the player to set goals for themselves and accomplish them however they see fit.

The world itself, fortunately, is designed around this. As a kid, I loved that I could never know everything about it. There were entire areas I had never been to and knew very little about, and they carried an air of mystery as a result. For example, the game has this elven city far off to the west, unlocked by an elaborate series of quests that I was never able to complete. However, one of my friends *had* completed the questline, and told fantastical and almost certainly exaggerated stories about how amazing the city was. That story was specific to me, but the game’s world design generates stories like this regularly, and it’s a type of story that other MMOs struggle to generate. In World of WarCraft, my second massively multiplayer love, I have been everywhere in that world. Thanks to dungeon finder, flying mounts, and a hefty amount of time spent unlocking the Explorer Achievement, I have seen all of the secrets Azeroth has to offer. I don’t know if it was always this way, apparently the game was less forthcoming about the details of its world at launch, but contemporary WoW has lost this mystery. This could be part of what makes going back to WoW less engaging: every corner of that world has already been explored.

Runescape never felt that way. There was personality packed into every bit of that world, always waiting for me to find it. And it wasn’t because I didn’t explore the wikis and YouTube videos, I remember spending hours reading about the game and its various locations I never ended up seeing. Runescape’s world was created specifically to be explored, 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.

Runescape has many, many problems. Its combat is still infuriatingly boring, there is still too much grinding, and the control scheme will never feel natural. However, because it gives the player the choice of how to engage with its world, those problems are much less present than they would be in many other games. The combat is bad? Well, the majority of the game’s content is actually non-combat, drawing more from adventure games than action RPGs. Combat is just something else you can do, not the primary driver of the game’s content. There’s too much grinding? If you feel like grinding, you can do that, or you can experiment with more interesting ways to grind, or you can experiences some of the wealth of content that doesn’t involve grinding at all. The control scheme is bad? Well…okay, that one you can’t really avoid. I guess you kind of have to live with that. Regardless, when the game fails, it fails gracefully and often avoidably. That’s one of the advantages of not being laser-focused on one path. It certainly doesn’t seem to be a design philosophy that will be adopted by AAA MMO developers any time soon, but, for students and fans of the medium, it is still wonderfully preserved, just as it was in 2007.

I still kind of prefer Runescape 3 though.

Friends & Fat Loot: Looking at Trick-Or-Treating as a Game Space

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Every Halloween since I’ve gotten too old to trick-or-treat, I make a point of taking a walk around my neighborhood. I obviously can’t participate in the actual acquisition of candy, and I don’t really know any of the other people walking around the streets, but the experience of trick-or-treating, of being in that space, has been one that I’ve valued even when I can’t participate. Before I really got into game design, I had always chalked this up to nostalgia, and it’s true, there is a good deal of nostalgia involved in it, but what keeps me coming back every year isn’t just that. Instead, it has a lot to do with how the social space of trick-or-treating works, with how, for a few hours, neighborhoods work differently than they do for the rest of the year. And since anyone who comes with me on this walk is subjected to my pseudo-intellectual game design babblings about how, no really, this is just like a video game, and I’m running out of friends who will still come with me on this annual walk, I figured I’d try to organize the thoughts a bit and do something productive with them. In short, trick-or-treating creates a social space that both predates contemporary multiplayer video games, yet is incredibly similar to them, and I think learning about one can help us better understand the other.

First, let’s look at how trick-or-treating actually works, and that starts with the setting. Most people (who aren’t really into architecture) don’t actively look at and examine individual houses in our neighborhoods. After we initially enter an area, they fade into the background because we don’t have to interact with them in any way. Frictional Games has an excellent blog post where they talk about a similar concept in game design, where aspects of a game world that the player doesn’t have to engage with complexly aren’t a part of their mental model, and they eventually are ignored. However, on Halloween, these houses that we previously removed from our mental model of a space are wonderfully returned to it with creative decorations. This is also true on Christmas, but I would argue that Halloween’s decorations are more interactive and creative. While walking around the space, trick-or-treaters are encouraged to marvel at the creations and designs of their neighbors, and they become the subject of discussion in a way that unadorned houses almost never are. This sets the stage for the transformative effects of the trick-or-treating space by taking the mundane and making it unique, adding a sense of wonder to moving from house to house. With the stage set, kids gear up and prepare to go out. They prepare elaborate costumes filled with references they expect their friends to get. They get bags to carry their candy, maybe flashlights if they’re taking it really seriously. Then, they enter the space. Maybe they meet up with their friends beforehand, maybe they start out hitting up the houses on their own block before meeting up. With the party fully assembled, kids can take advantage of the entirety of the social space, and it is here where the comparisons to game worlds become the strongest. Kids run from door to door, building up their mountain of candy, but in the process, run into other friends, compliment their costumes and swap locations of the houses with the best candy. It is a space with a clear objective – get the best/most candy – that encourages kids to help each other in best accomplishing this goal. And these systems generate stories, stories that I remember even years later. I have trouble remembering street names in my own neighborhood, but give me a map of the few blocks surrounding my house, and I can show you the places that, ten/fifteen years ago, gave out the full-sized Snickers bar, the one house with the cotton candy machine, and the old train station that was handing out sodas. It’s a hunt for loot, a hunt that everyone in your elementary school is participating in, and that makes for some great stories. Throughout the night, conversations will range from costumes to candy locations to the design of various houses’ decorations. Kids are encouraged to interact, to run into people, and to enjoy themselves while doing it. And at the end of the night, they return home to count their candy haul, and start the week-long process of gorging themselves.

Just from the way I’ve framed these events, the comparisons to game spaces might already be obvious. You gear up, get your party together, go looking for loot, talk about how cool the world design is, run into other players, swap tips, run away from some older kids (who I suppose would be higher-level players in this extended metaphor), then go home and check out your loot. This is the exact same loop as you might get in Destiny or Borderlands. I spend a lot of time trying to compare real-world spaces to game spaces, and while I often find many points of comparison, trick-or-treating is one of the only examples I can think of where real-world spaces replicate this particular type of game space. It is explicitly a space that requires an online multiplayer environment for its video game application, and thus has existed for no more than twenty years. But trick-or-treating has been around for well over eighty years (if my cursory Wikipedia search is to be believed). That set of social systems has been iterated on and tweaked for decades. And best I can tell, neither one influenced the other, it’s simply a product of dumping people into a space with these types of goals (get candy/get loot). This makes trick-or-treating one of the most interesting intersections of game logic and reality, because, even though it predates those types of game spaces by half a century, it gives a glimpse of what a game social space would look like when populated mostly by people who don’t play video games.

Leveling Up Ain’t What It Used To Be: Destiny, RuneScape, and Leveling Systems

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I’ve been playing a decent amount of Destiny 2 over the past few days, and while trying to figure out its particular blend of MMO and “shared world”, I’ve found something interesting about its progression system: the actual player level is mostly insignificant. This is first noticeable in a gameplay sense where, best I can tell, enemies and loot scale exactly to the player’s level. Destiny isn’t the first game to experiment with level scaling by any stretch of the imagination (in fact, I’d say it’s more similar to Guild Wars 2 than World of WarCraft in that regard), but the intensity of the level scaling had some interesting outcomes: by the end of my play session last night, I had no idea what level my character was. I didn’t know what level the friends I played with last night were either. It just never came up, never really factored into any of the decisions we were making. I looked it up later, and I was level 12 while my friends were level 6. Despite 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.

Strangely enough, the experience this reminded me of the most was that of picking up a new World of WarCraft expansion. My character was already at max level, so the five to ten extra levels that each expansion provided served as an introduction to the content rather than the bulk of the game’s content itself. People used to joke, “The game starts at 60” (or whatever the current level cap was at the time), but that was much more of a joke back in 2005 than it is today. Now, WoW really does start at level 110. The vast majority (like 90%) of new content released affects the max level experience. The endgame isn’t an “end”, it’s really just the “game”. And I see how WoW is stuck in that position now, the game has been out for years and they can’t exactly ask people to start over from level 1, but it’s interesting to see Destiny following that same concept with a new game. Because in the original launch of World of WarCraft and it’s first expansion, there wasn’t an expectation that everyone was at the level cap. Getting from level to level took *much* longer than it does today, leading to more grinding than anyone was comfortable with, and a player base spread out across a wide range of levels. This had some benefits, for example, it was much easier to tell at a glance if a player was a threat just by looking at their level. Now, if you want to see how powerful a player is, you have to inspect them and check their item level, which is the real measure of power. And this highlights something important about the problem with WoW, Destiny, and other MMOs/MMO-likes: if everyone is expected to be max level, to the point where WoW is even selling level boosts, why bother with the leveling system at all? Just to satisfy antiquated RPG conventions?

However, I think the solution to this problem could be much more interesting, though it is incompatible with the current, content muncher approach to multiplayer design. Fortunately, this solution gives me an excuse to talk about one of my favorite MMOs, RuneScape. In Runescape, hardly anyone is at the level cap, because, when mapping out the leveling systems, the designers never intended anyone to actually reach the per-skill cap of 99. Each of the game’s 27 skills has its own level, independent of any of the others. Leveling them works the same for each one, regardless if you’re leveling your attack 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.

Ultimately, I don’t expect this solution to be used at any point. MMOs/shared world games seem to be following the same design principles that require all players to be at the same level of power and adjust their content to match it accordingly. And I get that, designers want fights to be balanced to the player’s power level, and don’t want fights to be too easy. But I feel like that kind of design doesn’t fully explore the potential of MMOs in the same way Runescape’s or a similar one does. Runescape has a myriad of problems, not the least of which being that it doesn’t really work as a multiplayer game (which is kind of a deal-breaker for a Massively MULTIPLAYER Online game). But I still think the way it plays with leveling systems to do something other than creating a nicely-balanced treadmill of numbers could be used to create much more interesting experiences.

The Mirror’s Edge Legacy

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Introduction

When Mirror’s Edge released in 2008, the term “first person platforming” was met with, to put it mildly, a great deal of skepticism. Many foundational first-person shooters featured bits of platforming, chief among them Quake and Half-Life, but those sections were almost universally reviled by the time of Mirror’s Edge’s release. It made sense at the time as a way of adding a bit of variety to improve the pacing of these largely linear, single-player experiences. But the awkward controls and janky physics of those titles made those sections incredibly tedious to complete, and are to this day brought up as the worst parts of both of those titles. 3D platforming had become almost exclusively the domain of third-person titles, with old series like Mario still reigning supreme. And as far as first-person games went, movement was incredibly standardized, nothing like the bunnyhopping days of Quake. 2007, the year before Mirror’s Edge’s, saw the release of three shooter classics that codified the rules of first-person games: Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Bioshock. These three games were each wildly innovative in their own way, helping define what many consider one of the greatest years in gaming history. But despite answering the question of “How do you make a first-person shooter” with their own, unique answers, each answered the question of “How do you move in a first-person game” in a fairly similar way. Halo 3 is perhaps the most unique among them, continuing the series’ emphasis on lower-gravity, longer jumps, and at least some strategic value to bunnyhopping. But, largely, each of the games asked the player to move around a 3D space slowly, with a sprint button to speed up the process, and maybe a “vault over object” button if you were lucky. Cut to a decade later Halo 5 has jetpacks, Call of Duty has wall running, and Titanfall 2 has jetpacks AND wall running. Even Destiny, perhaps the biggest FPS in the current market, has movement that encourages jumping and ups the speed and importance of movement as a defensive option. I wouldn’t call any of these games platformers, but they all answer that question of “how do you move in a first-person game” with much more variety and much more complexity. So, what changed in the decade since? Well, I would argue, Mirror’s Edge came out, and developers finally started learning from it.

Mirror’s Edge released in 2008 to relatively little fanfare. It sold poorly, reviewed just above alright, and didn’t get a sequel until eight years later. Mirror’s Edge, commercially, failed, but it is still talked about today despite this. I believe that this is largely because, to the best of my knowledge, it is the only dedicated first-person platformer ever released by a AAA studio. Since its release, a handful of indie games have tried similar experiments (Clustertruck, Deadcore, Refunct, Valley, A Story About My Uncle), and a smaller handful of AAA titles have been inspired by its movement system (Titanfall, Dying Light, Brink), but there has never been an attempt at first-person platforming as purely focused on the technical challenge of the platforming itself as Mirror’s Edge and its sequel. This makes it an incredibly useful reference point for developers experimenting with movement mechanics in first-person games. But, in all the borrowing, remixing and reinterpreting of Mirror’s Edge over the almost decade since its release, I believe that many developers have missed something core to the formula that made the game work, either intentionally to better fit its ideas to the game they were designing, or unintentionally as they simply failed to understand the game itself. And with Mirror’s Edge Catalyst both failing to recapture the strengths of the original and also doing poorly commercially, I doubt we’ll see another focused attempt at a first-person platformer for some time. With that in mind, I think it’s valuable to examine exactly what Mirror’s Edge did, why it worked, where it didn’t, and how other games have interpreted its bold and focused answer to a question that other developers are now answering with more regularity: “How do you move in a first-person game?”

Mirror’s Edge

One of the most commendable, and probably most damning, elements of Mirror’s Edge is its purity of design. In 2017, AAA games with purity of anything are nearly impossible to come by, so this alone makes it unique. Mirror’s Edge is a series of 10 chapters, each a continuous series of obstacle courses. It lasts about six hours on your first playthrough, though I recently completed it in three and I’m not even very good at the game. Its extra modes are a time trial mode that cuts up the 10 chapters into quick levels that can be replayed in 1-3 minutes, and a speedrun version of those 10 same chapters. It had one DLC pack that added a series of extra levels with a new visual aesthetic, and that’s about it. Mirror’s Edge does not have a sprawling open world filled with collectables, it has thirty runner bags hidden throughout the entire game. It doesn’t have a giant features list of multiplayer, single-player, and co-op, it has a linear, single-player campaign. It isn’t packed with new modes and options and torrents of DLC, expansions, and seasons passes, it just has one experimental pack. This dedication to its one, core idea is beyond refreshing in a year when even something as pure as demon killing in Doom comes with a multiplayer modes, a snapmap map creation feature, hundreds of collectables, optional challenges, and the list goes on and on and on. This isn’t to say that variety is bad, or that games shouldn’t try to experiment with their mechanics, but gaming in 2017 has gone far past that point. In contrast, Mirror’s Edge’s ability to know what the engaging core of its game is, and then focus on it, makes it so much easier to play and to think about. However, like I mentioned earlier, it means that you can beat the entire game in three hours. And must of the gaming community is not exactly receptive to a “quality over quantity” argument. Games with that short a runtime get crucified on forums and subreddits. So while I love that Mirror’s Edge is exactly as long as it needs to be and not a single hour longer, it contributed to why it didn’t sell well. And, it also lead to the inclusion of the game’s single worst feature: combat. Everything I’m about to gush about that makes the game flow and feel tight is completely broken during these stilted, awkward combat sections where the player spams an attack button to try to punch armed guards to unconsciousness. No one liked it, the developers didn’t even like it, they just included it because the game was too short without it, and it is the game’s greatest flaw. But, if you load up Mirror’s Edge today, set it to easy mode to make the combat as brief as you can, you’re in for an experience unlike any other. You’re going to experience Mirror’s Edge as a first-person platformer, and little else.

Mirror’s Edge is striking from the first moment you turn it on, welcoming the player with a bold visual aesthetic. Nothing before or since has really captured those same ideas, with its vision of a clean future symbolizing the control of an authoritarian government, contrasted against its grounded setting. Because the game uses almost entirely precomputed lighting and unmoving objects, it still looks gorgeous to this day. Couple that fidelity with a strong visual aesthetic and accompanying political message and Mirror’s Edge feels fiercely contemporary. I’ll talk more about why Catalyst’s sci-fi aesthetic does not fit the design of the first game, but Mirror’s Edge did not feel like a fantasy, nor a stock reimagining of Orwell’s 1984, it feels like something that could happen today. It takes the idea of an authoritarian post-9/11 surveillance state and makes it real and uncomfortably plausible. Keeping the game locked to the first-person perspective made the player feel present in this world, and its commitment to keeping this perspective further enhanced its grounded feel, only cutting to third person in the beginning as the player assumes control of Faith, and the end as the player relinquishes it. The design of the parkour movement added even more to the feel that this was a game that interpreted realism as an actual imperative to design their game around, not a visual aesthetic that necessitated more grime, blood, and forced moral ambiguity. In Mirror’s Edge, huge falls will kill you. If you think you couldn’t make a jump in real life, you probably couldn’t make it in game. Faith isn’t a superhero, she’s just really good at parkour. The animations reinforce this, placing a great deal of emphasis on Faith’s limbs and body positioning as she moves through an environment. This realism lead to a level of mechanical transference that the other games I’m going to discuss simply didn’t. Playing Mirror’s Edge made me see real-world environments as spaces that I could parkour through, if only I had the skill. It encouraged me, in the real world, to try to climb or jump off of things, because Mirror’s Edge had conditioned me to look at spaces like that. Catalyst, Dying Light, Titanfall and Refunct, did not encourage that, because they weren’t as focused on realism as Mirror’s Edge. And it was through understanding this commitment to reality that I found what I believe to be the goal of Mirror’s Edge: to create a grounded, first-person platformer with tight levels that want you to traverse an environment quickly and stylishly, but also allowing you to slow down and think about environments as puzzle spaces. And from this foundational philosophy came the complexity of the game’s mechanics.

I know Dark Souls comparisons have long since passed the threshold of overuse, but while replaying Mirror’s Edge, I constantly found myself making comparisons. Mirror’s Edge requires a commitment to animations that no other game in this piece does. Jumps, rolls, landings and climbing cannot easily be canceled, and are required to play out animations before they allow the player to start their next move. This adds a strategic importance to every decision the player makes, discouraging sloppy play, but also adding a weight and heft to the animations. In general, movement in games isn’t supposed to be a challenge, it’s supposed to feel smooth and effortless. But in Mirror’s Edge, movement isn’t a way for the player to get from point A to point B, it is the core objective of the game itself. This means that conventional approaches to movement won’t often mix well with a game that emphasizes it in this way. For most games, the designer wants the player to feel like they’ve mastered movement as soon as possible, but for Mirror’s Edge to match the arc of a traditional video game, it has to have a gradual sense of mastery, not an instant one. It does this, in part, through its animations. By preventing the player from easily canceling their moves, it requires the player to think more carefully about each move they make, making them engage with systems they might have otherwise ignored. And this is exactly how Dark Souls works, requiring commitment to every input, and punishing sloppy play (though Dark Souls is significantly more punishing than Mirror’s Edge). The result of applying this philosophy to movement, instead of combat, is that it turns movement into a technical challenge, not an easy means of traversal.

However, high-level play in Mirror’s Edge could hardly be described as cautious and stilted, if anything, it looks effortless and flowing. Flow is a concept and a term with a strong relationship to Mirror’s Edge; it’s even name-dropped in the opening cinematic. And I think it’s the only game I’ve looked at that fully commits to getting the player to the flow state. But it’s important to distinguish between flow, the mental state, and flow, the aesthetic. Flow the aesthetic, at least as far as movement is concerned, is a general, uninterrupted traversal. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is probably the best example on this list of that purely as an aesthetic, but the original commits to it as a mental state. That state is one when the challenge is high, but the player’s skill is just as high, and they match every challenge as they are presented with it, not effortlessly, but with focus. Mirror’s Edge commits to this by creating a robust set of mechanics that are constantly testing the player’s timing and coordination. Precise button inputs at the correct time are highly valued, and different moves are strung together to create a sequence of balanced challenges. This is where the level designers had to work carefully to chain different paths together, and balance the difficulty of each obstacle to avoid spikes. This must have taken a great deal of effort, but the result is a game that begs for speedrunning, because once it gets going, it makes the player not way to stop.

However, sometimes it does stop. Be it for narrative pacing, trying to squeeze more hours of their limited amount of levels, or because the designers genuinely find it interesting, the game does have many sections where the player is asked to stop moving quickly. Combat is obviously one of those, but the more successful lulls in the pacing comes from the more puzzle-focused sections. Now, arguably the entire game is a puzzle of exactly which obstacles to travers and in what order, but some sections in the game feel much closer to a traditional puzzle game. In these, the player is asked to give up some of their momentum and really engage with the mechanics at a low level. This puts the player into a planning phase where they figure out a sequence of moves that might work, then try to execute them perfectly. The game wants the player to look for unique solutions, to think of how the mechanics might be used differently, or to see the space they are presented not as a real-world place, but as a series of game pieces. This seems completely out of sync with a game about flow the aesthetic and flow the mental state, but somehow, it works incredibly well. It does help even out the pacing, as previously mentioned, but it also expands the possibility space of the mechanics. If the player is always moving at top speed, they don’t have time to slow down and think about the implications of the mechanics. Giving them these slower sections helps them master more complicated ideas in the faster sections. That is part of the brilliance of these puzzles: once the player knows the solution, they can fly through them just as fast as any other section of the game. They’re almost like invisible tutorial sections, letting the player figure out a specific move or series of moves so that they can recognize sections later in the game that use the same idea. These sections, however, only work in a game that treats movement as something interesting in and of itself, not as a means to an end. And its sequel, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, largely does recreate these sections, but does so with much more compromises.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

Catalyst is a sequel (prequel, reboot, whatever) that I never thought I’d get. Released eight years after the original, it makes me genuinely wonder how this game even got made. Sequels to poorly-selling eight-year-old IPs just do not happen in this industry. So, no matter how much I’m going to tear into Catalyst in the paragraphs to follow, I am still incredibly glad that it exists, and the majority of my complaints about it come from it being a sequel to Mirror’s Edge. Because, unfortunately, Catalyst fell victim to the same style of Ubisoft open world that claimed a sizable chunk of AAA titles in the past few years. In contrast to the original Mirror’s Edge,’s grounded, mechanically-focused approach with careful level design, Catalyst is a sci-fi open world game that treats its platforming more as a cool navigational gimmick to move quickly than a mechanic set in and of itself. And while there is a lot to unpack in the subtle differences between Catalyst and its predecessor, I think the genre change is a good representation of the misunderstandings Catalyst has about what Mirror’s Edge is. Because Mirror’s Edge is not sci-fi. It isn’t set in the future, it’s set in the near-future, and that may seem like a semantic distinction, but I think it’s core to what made Mirror’s Edge work. Catalyst is filled with gadgets, sleek, future buildings, and cyberpunk corporations conspiring to spy on every citizen. The original was thoroughly grounded in the realities of a post-9/11 surveillance state. It felt uncomfortably plausible, like you could see it happening in a city you knew. The city it was set in wasn’t even named, it was just referred to as “the city”, allowing the player to project any city the might be familiar with onto its clean-but-not-too-clean surface. Catalyst, however, is wildly creative with its setting, using vibrant sci-fi architecture where the strong blacks and whites of the original are filled with bold, primary colors. Mirror’s Edge had a very limited color palette, even famously so. But Catalyst is a bustling sci-fi metropolis, filled with strange and varied buildings. Part of it feels like the art team spent so long working on the Battlefield games that they used Catalyst to run wild. And, while I disagree with this particular choice for the Mirror’s Edge series, I want to stress that this is a gorgeous artistic decision. It makes navigating through the game exciting just to see what you can discover next. The overworld feels, in a word, slick. Everything is polished to a mirror (heh) sheen, guiding lines are smooth and flowing, and Faith’s feet make little squeaking noises as she sprints across various surfaces. And, in a similar way, the movement feels great to control. Animations that had long delays in the original now finish instantly, jumps feel tighter and are accompanied by beautifully polished animations and sound design. Out of all the games I’m going to talk about, Mirror’s Edge included, movement feels the best to control in Catalyst. But, to create a game that is outwardly more welcoming to the player, a great deal had to be sacrificed. And here is where Catalyst’s problems begin to emerge.

Perhaps the best example of what separates the tone, mechanics and setting of Mirror’s Edge and Catalyst are two moments I happened to play back-to-back while recently replaying them. The first happens in the original Mirror’s Edge, which begins in a sequence where Faith is being chased by a pack of cops, and is running out of escape routes. However, glancing up, the player sees two cranes, painted in a shade of red the

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The crane in Mirror’s Edge

game uses to highlight objects the player can run off of. Then it hits them. The game wants them to jump between those two cranes. That’s insane! The player has pulled off some crazy jumps before, but nothing like that! As the player climbs to the top of the first crane, dodging gunfire along the way, Merc, the player’s “man in the chair” over an earpiece, warns Faith not to do what he thinks she’s going to. But the player reaches the top of the first crane, holds their breath, then makes the leap. The barely make it, skidding down the side, as Merc shouts in disbelief over the earpiece. The player’s heart is thumping, and the charge towards the nearest rooftop, leaving the cops behind them in disbelief. I finished this sequence, switched over to Catalyst for a bit, and chained a leap over a giant chasm between buildings with a grappling hook ride up dozens of feet in the air, landing with an easy roll to continue moving. I can’t remember much more than that. If the crane jump happened in Catalyst, they wouldn’t even draw attention to it, since actions like it happen so often that it wouldn’t be memorable. Catalyst does draw attention to how crazy of a jump the player is making at one point, where they are walking a tightrope between two huge skyscrapers, gazing down at the vast expanse beneath them. It’s like something out of an action movie. The player could never imagine doing that in the real world.

So Catalyst has a problem with not being grounded. In the same way its sci-fi aesthetics extend wildly beyond the original’s near-future setting, its scope and scale is much more grand. Mirror’s Edge had, to put it charitably, a forgettable story, but it mostly took a backseat to the platforming challenges anyways. Catalyst has cutscenes. Well-animated, voiced and scored cutscenes. Yet the story is a totally forgettable hero’s journey where Faith needs to learn to accept that she’s really a superhero who needs to fight the evil corporations. The original wasn’t entirely realistic, it ends with Faith

Walking between buildings in Catalyst

kicking the big bad out of a helicopter on top of a skyscraper, but the story doesn’t end with her taking down the entire government, it ends with her saving her sister. And, well, Catalyst technically ends the same way, but it makes a much bigger deal out of its revolutionary aspirations. Now, this shift in genre and scope could still be true to the original and be a great game in its own right, but this lack of grounding unfortunately applies to two more areas: the level design, and, most disappointingly, the mechanics.

I mentioned earlier that Catalyst has the best feeling mechanics out of any of these games, and that definitely is valuable in its own right, but it sacrifices a lot to get that better feeling. I’ll be going into more detail about the level design shortly, but I think it might be where a lot of these changes stemmed from. Open worlds, specifically Ubisoft-style open worlds, aren’t a great fit for complex movement mechanics, because the player spends so much time just getting from objective to objective that additional complexity added to the movement system adds work and tedium. If new movement mechanics are included, they need to justify their existence by making traversal easier, not harder. The original Mirror’s Edge has traversal that is, by nature, more difficult than the majority of games, but that’s where it draws its depth from. Catalyst still does this to some extent, but that extent is much lesser than its predecessor. Perhaps the most noticeable change to the movement is that the windows for specific inputs to be entered is much more generous. Where the original might have given the player a one-second window to hit the roll button before hitting the ground, Catalyst would give the player two or three. This, on the surface, seems like it would make traversal easier all around, but I think it might end up making it more difficult. Because the window for input is more generous, the player doesn’t learn the exact timing through muscle memory, which often leads to them playing sloppily, because the game never trained them not to. This can result in the player missing a lot of jumps, rolls and wall runs, because they haven’t been trailed properly to use them. But in addition to occasionally making its systems more unreliable, this change also removes some of the depth and satisfaction from them. Some of the improvements are objectively better than the previous game, with more polish and responsiveness, and I don’t want to undersell that, but the added control sacrificed some of the depth. Now, it would be easy to equate inconvenience with challenge and call it a day, but I think the satisfaction that came uniquely from Mirror’s Edge was a sense of technical challenge that kept you grounded in the movements of Faith as a physical human being, not a video game avatar. When some of that difficulty is removed, the satisfaction inherent to the game’s mechanics is lessened. And, to enhance the problem, the game has an upgrade system that gives the player stat bonuses to running, and unlocks some of the most valuable skills. I’ll touch on this more in the Dying Light section, but, in an open world, if you give the player the option of upgrading to a better mechanic, then you have to design most of your world around the player decided not to unlock it. This means that, because, for example, the quickturn is not given to the player by default, that areas can’t be designed with it specifically in mind, and thus using it makes the environments feel too easy. The result is a mechanics set not suited for anywhere near the amount of depth of the original, and while it does feel better in parts, it overall feels less robust, less satisfying, and less carefully designed. Unfortunately, these mechanical failings are enhanced by the open world the game is set in, and for all the benefits of having an open world game where moving is satisfying on its own, the style and design of the open world does not quite live up to this promise.

The most noticeable impact of the open world in Mirror’s Edge’s design is the longer load times. This is a simple technical reality that will be completely obsolete when Catalyst is as old as its predecessor, but is incredibly frustrating now. Time trials, speed runs, and other trial-and-error sections of the original would often lead to the player falling to their death, causing the game to reload the level, but because the game was just reloading a single level, it didn’t take that long. On modern hardware, the delay is almost unnoticeable. But Catalyst has to reload a chunk of an open world every time the player dies and, even on an SSD with, still takes a decent amount of time to load. This makes every death and mistake even more frustrating, and drives the player away from retrying old levels. Ten years from now, advanced hardware will almost certainly remove this problem, and I really wonder what Catalyst will play like with the removal of those load times, but for now, it stands as a major reason I so often return to the original over Catalyst. And this feeling of compromise and frustration carries into other aspects of the design, namely, the tightness of the design. Mirror’s Edge was a very pure game about very specific challenges. It had exactly one thing it wanted the player to do (I suppose two, if you count the optional runner bag collectables), and that was it. Catalyst gives the player a world filled of instanced challenges, collectables, and story missions, and designs the world so you can more easily get between those objectives. Each of those individual activities is fun in its own right, but it feels hampered by the open world. Obstacle courses aren’t as tightly designed because they have to serve as both that instanced obstacle course, and an easily traversable section of an open world. This would be okay if the game encouraged you to find interesting routes between points, letting the player gain a slow sense of mastery over the world and use those paths more efficiently, but the the racing start and stop points all seem arbitrary, so that mastery never forms.

Additionally, two mechanics designed for ease of use in a traditional open world game kill any familiarity the player might gain with the world: objective pathing and fast travel. Much has been written about how fast travel can prevent the player from engaging with the world in open world games, and it’s doubly true for Catalyst. Fast travel skips the traversal so the player can go to other areas and solve traversal challenges. It’s skipping the core gameplay. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding about why people play a Mirror’s Edge game in the first place. If they want to skip moving from place to place, then they aren’t engaged enough with the mechanics as is. But it also creates a loop of play where the player is fast-traveling between different instanced objectives, so they never get a chance to just be in the world and explore it organically. With this approach, creating a pack of levels instead of an open world would have been much more valuable. And secondly, the game implements an objective pathing system similar to the Clairvoyance spell in Skyrim or the breadcrumbs in Dead Space, having a wispy red line show the player the exact path to take to their next objective. It prevents the player from figuring out where to go or how to navigate the environment. Sure, the player can figure out more interesting ways, but it is usually best to just follow the line. This can be disabled entirely, but without it, the environments are difficult to read and it is incredibly easy to get very, very lost (Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit did a video on this subject in more detail, and I’d highly recommend it if you’re interested in open world design). The world Catalyst creates is simply not designed for you to engage with it as a platforming game. Yes, the original let you press a button and be instantly pointed towards your next objective, but it only showed the player the direction, not how to get there. Finally, the last example of how Catalyst flirts with solid design but isn’t able to commit is how it handles collectables. These have, sadly, become a staple of open-world design, and Catalyst mostly implements them poorly. The most common collectable is an item that requires you to walk up to it, stop moving, press an interact key, watch a couple of seconds of an animation, then return to whatever you were doing. It is totally antithetical to the momentum of a Mirror’s Edge game, killing any sense of flow that the game usually works so hard to preserve. Most of their collectables are like this, but one of them, the gridleaks, actually work very well. Gridleaks are glowing orbs that appear in the world for some sci-fi reason, but are scattered so broadly that they end up serving as little challenges in their own right. Some of them, the player can just run right through on their path to the next objective, but others are tucked away on a seemingly unreachable surface, goading the player into figuring out how to get there. They don’t break the flow, they fit in with the running, and they encourage clever thinking about the mechanics. And it’s the fact that the game still manages to capture some of the puzzle solving of the original that keeps my opinion of it positive, despite all the criticism I’ve been levying against it. It has these wonderful gridNode challenges to unlock new fast travel points, which are basically puzzle sections from the original, but as soon as you finish them, there don’t seem to be any puzzles left except for a few collectables. Some of the designers at DICE clearly know how to make a good Mirror’s Edge level, and some of them clearly know how to create good Mirror’s Edge mechanics and animations, but the greatness in those aspects is so often trumped by an open world design that commits to convenience over challenge.

Dying Light

But what would happen if a team approach those mechanics solely as auxiliary to the main game, and designed its platforming with that in mind? Well, Dying Light is a great example, an open world game with so many features thrown in that “kitchen sink” barely covers it. It treats its platforming not as a challenge in its own right, but as a cool navigational gimmick for avoiding zombies. Loosening rules and easier movement felt like a compromise in Catalyst, but in Dying Light, they feel appropriate, because the player isn’t just focused on the movement. The movement in Dying Light just feels good to control, and a lot of that comes from the easier traversal. By the end of the game, the player can climb unrealistically high walls, jump from insane heights, and vault over a horde of zombies. I wouldn’t want to play the game just as a parkour game, but it works well as a fun way to get from place to place, so much so that I miss it in other open world games. When using the Ubisoft open world design philosophy, even a little bit of depth to the movement makes the hours of traversal so much more fun. It even turns the obligatory tower climbing sections in every one of those games fun! It doesn’t integrate perfectly into combat, which usually ends up with the player just spamming the attack button, but it doesn’t really have to. It does allow for some great moments of jump-kicking zombies in the face, but it doesn’t really deliver on the idea of the combat that Mirror’s Edge and Catalyst hinted at. Those games attempted to make a melee combat system about chaining combat moves into parkour moves, but never really delivered on it. The easiest strategy was to just run up and spam attack. Dying Light’s dropkick move at least tries to do this, but doesn’t get very close. The movement works as a way to manage the horde, not to be explored deeply. So, here is a game that is clearly inspired by Mirror’s Edge and benefited from including some if its ideas. The developers asked themselves how first-person platforming and parkour could improve their game, and they found out that including it as a side option worked fairly well. But what are the limits of taking the ideas from Mirror’s Edge and applying them to a game where platforming isn’t the focus?

At the start of the game, there aren’t many problems. The controls feel tight and grounded, the player character struggles and is overwhelmed by intimidating challenges, they even have a scene where he jumps off a crane and freaks out about it. But, while Mirror’s Edge takes about 6 hours to complete, and Catalyst takes 8-13, Dying Light can last anywhere from 16-40. And twenty hours of running around an open world with platforming not being the focus can start to get tedious. After a certain point, I just want to get to my next objective. So, the game offers stat upgrades, some of them interesting, some of them just pure numerical increases. On the interesting side, the game gives you a roll move to let you jump from higher buildings, it even gives quickturns, a move that added a great deal of depth to Mirror’s Edge. This has a similar problem to Catalyst where, in an open world where you can unlock different abilities, the designers have to assume you haven’t unlocked them. However, they work well as ways to increase the skill ceiling on movement, while not breaking the system. But some of the upgrades are just raw stat boosts. Run faster, jump higher, survive higher falls. The problem with this is that it takes the system from a grounded and tight one and turns it into an unrealistic and floaty one. If I was designing Dying Light and absolutely had to include linear stat upgrades, I would start the player out with mechanics that were a significant amount clunkier than the starting state it shipped with, then have them reach that point at about the mid game, getting only a bit better by the end game. But the actual game starts out at about a Mirror’s Edge 1 level of control then jacks it up to a Catalyst level, then keeps going. By the end of the game you’re zipping across rooftops with a goddamn grappling hook, surviving every fall, flying over every obstacle. It feels great, but it also feels mind-numbingly easy. To their credit, the developers put a lot of work into making this system feel good, with extra bits of polish to animations and sounds, but at the end of the day the core mechanics themselves feel broken by this stat upgrade. At this point, the player feels less like a physical human being with limbs that have weight and and organic positioning, and feels more like a box that zips from place. It does create flow in the aesthetic sense, but never approaches flow, the mental state. It is firmly camped in the “control” mental state, with the player rarely being challenged. The game wants you to relax while moving, to feel good, but not really engaged. And that’s okay, as a design decision from their own open world game, but it does make me wish for a game that really did commit to skill-based movement, that took its AAA budget and applied it to a system as tightly- designed as the original Mirror’s Edge, and did tried to integrate combat well. Well, fortunately, that game exists.

Titanfall

Titanfall and its sequel feels like the games Mirror’s Edge was destine to inspire. First-person shooters are no strangers to skill-based movement, with early examples going as far back as Quake. So, when a developer comes up with a new design for first-person movement, it’s only natural that a that an FPS would try to adapt it (I’m not talking about Brink). Titanfall does this wonderfully, succeeding in its attempts to create a first-person shooter that wants to emulate the crazy-fast movement of old FPS titles, with parkour and jetpacks to improve map versatility and for defensive movement. From the get-go, it is easily the fastest-moving game I’ve talked about so far, letting the player get up to a frankly ridiculous speeds if they chain enough wall runs together. Titanfall emphasises momentum in a way even Catalyst really doesn’t, with the player’s starting speed being the equivalent of a sprint in a normal FPS, and their top speed being the equivalent of maybe the original Doom? However, the player is hard pressed to stay at this top speed for long, so they’re encouraged to plot routes through the map to give them this high speed when they need it. However, because of this speed, mixed with affordances for aiming with a gamepad, aiming in Titanfall is incredibly difficult, and usually requires slowing down and aiming down sights to hit and target farther than a few feet away. This means that there is a constant back and forth between moving fast defensively, and slowing down to line up a few shots. A fast moving player may be able to avoid death for a decent chunk of time, but they won’t be racking up any kills while they’re doing it. However, this movement system isn’t perfect, and often times a player who is just better at aiming can take you down no matter how fast you’re going. Also, while gaining a lot of momentum is incredibly satisfying and strategically valuable, when the levels don’t give the player a clear path to their objective, they can spend the time awkwardly hopping around. Titanfall 2, fortunately, addresses this problem, with the addition of grappling hooks and slide jumps. The grappling hook is an optional ability for some reason, and with how much it adds to the game I am genuinely amazed it wasn’t made standard for all loadouts. It has a strategic depth that the grappling hook in Dying Light simply did not. While that game’s grappling hook mostly existed to skip over parkour segments, Titanfall 2’s exists to speed movement up even more. When used correctly, it becomes another way for the player to create paths through the level, letting them make up some lost momentum or quickly navigate open spaces. Slide jumping also greatly improves this, though is a bit more difficult to master. It requires the player to jump, press the crouch button right before they hit the ground, then jump again before their slide animation completes. I think. I haven’t quite gotten it down yet. Regardless, the process makes the player harder to hit and move faster while crossing open environments, raises the skill ceiling, and allows players good enough to reach it a constant boost to speed.

Unlike Dying Light, Titanfall feels a bit closer to the purity of the original Mirror’s Edge. The combat and the movement are designed around each other, and that really shows in the way it handles upgrade. While Dying Light and Catalyst had stat upgrades to their movement systems, Titanfall’s stays mostly the same, the only exception being an ability

that lets the player shoot while sprinting. The designers at Respawn created a tight, skill-based and expansive movement system, then kept it the way it was, allowing for a purity of design that is admittedly rare in AAA circles. Of course, it has a cacophony of guns, gun upgrades, combat upgrades, titan upgrades, and cosmetics, but movement wise, it is fairly pure. It isn’t the core of the game, combat is still the most important part, but unlike Dying Light, it doesn’t feel tacked on. Titanfall could not exist without its parkour mechanics and still be identifiably Titanfall. Dying Light probably could.

Unfortunately, Titanfall got a great deal of bad press for being part of the 2014 anti-hype cycle, and its sequel sold poorly for a number of reasons, including being sandwiched right in between the launch of the annual Battlefields and Call of Duties. But its influence is still strongly felt. Halo, Destiny, and Call of Duty all have implemented some form of movement that borders on parkour, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 even featuring a parkour obstacle course mode. This mode could not have existed in earlier Call of Duty games, and the fact that it does speaks volumes about how much movement in FPS games has changed since 2008. Titanfall is probably still the most visible inheritor of Mirror’s Edge’s ideas about first-person movement mechanics, but that influence has seeped into other games, and is now firmly established. Despite selling poorly, the game’s design philosophy has a foothold in AAA design. But what about the indie scene?

Refunct

Refunct is a game that clearly would not exist without Mirror’s Edge, but also has a wildly different goal. Rather than being a skill-based parkour game, it’s a relaxing platformer about moving at a brisk pace from platform to platform. Its goal to be a relaxing game is apparent from the moment you open it, with chill electronica playing in the background and a hazy, abstract visual aesthetic. If anything, it feels like the developer is putting their own spin on the Pure Time Trials DLC maps that released for the original Mirror’s Edge. I’ve gone on and on about how Mirror’s Edge being grounded was so important to its design working, but the Pure Time Trials DLC shows that the formula is able to be bent a bit before it completely loses its punch. Refunct is an exploration of an abstract take on grounded mechanics, like the DLC, and uses its laser-focus to rebuild those mechanics around its goal to be relaxing. It does this by altering Mirror’s Edge’s low-level puzzle solving loop, one borrowed from more conventional platformers. Where that mode wanted you to carefully consider each moment, Refunct wants to to keep moving at a brisk but not blinding pace. This means that the fast parkour sections and the puzzle solving sections don’t feel like two separate modes like they did in Mirror’s Edge, it’s a single state of gameplay. The puzzles in Refunct are never complicated enough to have the player seriously considering the implications of the mechanics, they more exist to let the player have a quick moment to say, “Oh, that was interesting.” It lacks some of the more complex mechanics of Mirror’s Edge like the wall run or quickturn, which would have added more complexity than Refunct really needed. It does have a wall jump, but it’s used in situations that don’t require perfect timing. Where Mirror’s Edge wants the player to consider the exact timing of each move, Refunct simply wants the player to know what the correct move to enter is. And while this removes some of feelings of viscerality that Mirror’s Edge was so successful in implimenting, it, again, works with the goal of being calm. The player isn’t getting stuck, or trying the same jump over and over, they just keep moving from objective to objective. That’s not to say there are no pauses to the game, sometimes it’s not great at telegraphing its next objective and I’m left missing Mirror’s Edge “Press Alt to Look at Next Objective” button. However, it mostly keeps the pace at a comfortable level. Refunct’s only failing, if you can call it that, comes from its budget. It’s a $3 game made by a solo developer that can be easily beaten in twenty minutes your first time (the speedrunning achievements have you pushing four minutes). This means that it lacks the polish of the AAA games I’ve been discussing so far. While all other games on this list have emphasized the physical body of the player character, Refunct does not have one, removing a great deal of the physicality associated with this genre. Some mechanics feel very artificial, like you have entered a trigger box, the game stops your momentum, moves you up a few units, and deposits you at the precise location it was programmed to. Of course, all games work like this, but without the sound and animation polish that comes with being a AAA title, Refunct is unable to replicate this. Still, as a game to relax to with an interesting spin on movement, Refunct is an interesting and valuable experiment, and one that would not have existed without Mirror’s Edge.

Conclusion

Despite its own series struggling to find a foothold in the industry, it’s clear that Mirror’s Edge has influenced designers from all different genres. From AAA FPS games to open worlds to indie passion projects, its emphasis on skill-based movement, physicality and flow have lead to what I believe is a much healthier market of first-person games. First-person games just have more complex movement than they did in 2008, be that a result of callbacks to the movement of early FPSes or a reinterpretation of Mirror’s Edge’s ideas. Movement is a part of every first-person game, and when designers are encouraged to experiment with the assumptions that define it, we get games with different focuses, different goals, and different possibility spaces than we would have when these actions were standardized. Mirror’s Edge, unfortunately, never got a true sequel or spiritual successor that carried the torch on its ideas of a more realistic approach to that movement. However, while I wish such a game had been made, I would much rather see a healthier market of games inspired by Mirror’s Edge, but not constrained to it, than a market flooded with Mirror’s Edge clones. I’m glad that developers can apply these ideas to entirely different genres and be confident enough to stray from the genre-defining work. 2007, the year before Mirror’s Edge’s release, saw the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a brilliant game in its own right that inspired an incredible amount of stagnation in FPS market, crippling innovation because of how wildly innovative it was. Designers emulating Modern Warfare rarely deviated substantially from its formula. It took a much longer time for Mirror’s Edge’s influence to be felt, but now that it has, it exists as a jumping off point, not a template to be copied. And, as a fan of first-person game across genres, this makes me hopeful for the future.

Revisiting Soma: Another Kind of Adventure Game

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Ten years ago, Frictional Games made their first foyer into the horror genre when they released Penumbra: Overture; they’ve been iterating and refining that formula ever since. The Penumbra series didn’t break any sales records, but it carved out a comfortable niche for the company of first-person horror games heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft (their in-house engine, the HPL Engine, is even named after him). But the company achieved widespread fame in 2010 after the release of the Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Even though it was little more than a polished iteration on the Penumbra series, it was released at just the right time to become an internet sensation, leading to the creation of YouTube videos reacting to its many jump scare, and helping kickstart the Let’s Play genre. But when I played Amnesia in 2010, and the Penumbra games soon after, the jump scares that had made them so popular weren’t what drew me to the series. Instead, I was drawn in by, well, everything else. The Amnesia and Penumbra games are dripping with originality, atmosphere and mastery of design. Yes, their horror is effective and well-crafted, especially considering the budgets they were produced with, but they are packed with genuinely good writing coupled with carefully-considered puzzle design. With the exception of Penumbra: Overture, their very first game, Frictional’s games do not have combat, which would ordinarily invite cries of having “not enough mechanics” from the self-proclaimed hardcore gamers who deem any game that doesn’t meet a minimum quota of murder a “walking simulator”. But Frictional’s games avoid this criticism by basically being 3D adventure games. With a precious few exceptions, I’ve never been able to get into adventure games, however, so it took Frictional’s meticulous design sensibilities to get me to even play the games. I loved their approach to puzzle design in Penumbra and Amnesia, but in 2015, they released Soma, a game that championed their design philosophy with even greater confidence, even boldly rejecting the jump scare horror mechanics that made Amnesia a bestseller. I genuinely loved the Amnesia and Penumbra games, but Soma has become one of my all-time favorites because of how it approaches the idea of an adventure game, seeing its puzzles not as arbitrary problems to be solved, but as extensions of the setting.

Soma’s basic plot is too deviously complicated to give a quick summary of, but, in short, the player spends most of the game navigating a decaying, underwater research station. They restore power to different areas, reroute around cave-ins, fix electrical problems, and, of course, avoid being killed by the horrific creatures that roam the station. Soma’s excellent writing and voice acting would normally make it the kind of game that I play for the story, and use guide to get through any of the trickier puzzles. However, I found those puzzles to be some of the most engaging parts of the game, largely because of how they were framed. I struggled to explain what distinguished Soma’s puzzles from that of other adventure games, which is largely what prevented me from writing about the game in the past, until Frictional posted an article about this exact design idea in an excellent blog post. It doesn’t talk about puzzles directly, it instead talks about narrative choices, but I think the fact that they frame their gameplay decisions as such is part of what makes their approach to puzzles so much more engaging. Narrative choices in most games, much like puzzles in classic adventure games, are very removed from the game’s core mechanics and verbs. In Mass Effect, if the player is going to make a decision, they are pulled out of the game’s normal controls and into a conversation system, which gives them a list of options to pick from. Given how difficult simulating conversation has proven, this is probably necessary, but it does make the choices feel very explicit and very, to borrow Frictional’s term, digital. Analog choices, as they define them, are choices that use the game’s existing mechanics set instead. They use the example of Spec Ops: The Line’s approach to choices, which eschew the menu-based choices of dialog trees in favor of using the game’s existing mechanics, namely, shooting. Applying this philosophy to narrative choice is incredibly valuable, but Frictional also applies this philosophy to every mechanical and puzzle decision the player makes. The puzzle equivalent of the “press button to make decision” narrative choice is something like the puzzle panels in The Witness, where the player clicks on a panel in the world, and their controls are rebound to those of the specific puzzle they are solving (though the game’s best puzzles subvert this). Soma, however, never changes the player’s controls. They are always given the same set of verbs and controls to solve every problem the game presents them with. Frictional builds out these basic first-person controls with a physics and control system that feels fresh even when played today, despite being pioneered almost a decade ago in Penumbra. If a player wants to turn a wheel, they click and hold on it, then rotate their mouse in a circle, mimicking the player character’s physical actions. If they want to open a door, they click and pull back on the mouse. Complex physics interactions aren’t treated as a novelty, they’re simply how the player interacts with the world. Pulling out electrical cables, throwing switches, moving components around, all become a natural part of the player’s toolkit. The result is a world that the player models complexly, where every item could be potentially useful and could interact with others in interesting ways.

This combination of dozens of small interactions lets the player engage with the world in a way that feels satisfying on a very low level. The puzzles themselves are rarely complicated, which would ordinarily make the game feel rote and boring, but because of the physicality and complexity of every interaction, I found incredibly engaging. Oddly enough, the activity it reminded me of most was building a desktop PC. While PC construction occasionally requires nightmarish Google trips into arcane manuals and ancient forums, I usually know exactly what I need to do, and I just need to find out exactly how to do it. Traditional adventure games go for an “Aha!” moment, where you figure out the solution with a great deal of work, and execute easily, but Soma, Amnesia and Penumbra rarely obscure the solution, and instead present the player with the mechanically satisfying task of executing it. Difficulty and challenge aren’t really important to these games the same way they are to the vast majority of other video games. In a previous piece, I grouped Soma under this genre of “will and wits” that I had invented, with an emphasis on a very procedural form of procedural problem solving in a poorly-maintained environment. However, as I’ve been replaying both Soma and Near Death (another game I group in that genre), I’ve noticed that while both games have failstates, they don’t dictate the majority of the player’s actions. Usually, the player is processing an environment, looking for objects to solve problems, and then solving them, with little in between. This creates a satisfying loop of activity that the designer can subvert when necessary to keep the player on their toes, aware of their environment in a more detailed way than most games ask for. Doom might ask you to be aware of the positions and projectiles of a dozen or so demons, but Near Death and Soma ask you to be aware of all the objects, switches, lights, and loose panels in a room. It takes the awareness that games often demand and shrinks the scope. Soma is probably one of the most influential games for me as a designer (hell, I even made a HTML pretty heavily based on it), because it shows how to encourage players to engage with spaces on a scale that feels both more manageable and more intricate. Games still struggle with making systems other than combat interesting, complex and marketable, but I think Frictional Games and its contemporaries have carved out a design niche where we can engage with spaces more cerebrally, and create problems that require procedural, logical thinking, grounded in the setting, instead of arbitrary challenges for their own sake.

Hacknet and Games as Software

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Video games are pieces of software. They are executables that you run on your computer, just like Google Chrome or Spotify or LibreOffice. For such an obvious fact of the medium, not many games do much with this idea. I previously cited Uplink as a game that did acknowledge this idea by treating the game as a program the player runs to connect to a fantasy hacking world. I briefly mentioned in that piece that Hacknet, a game inspired by Uplink, didn’t try to evoke this aesthetic, but after recently playing their excellent Labyrinths DLC, I was happily proven wrong. When I launched the game after installing the DLC, I found it interesting that, instead of opening the game’s executable directly, it opened a Windows command prompt, which then ran the game’s executable. This seemed like a trivial chain of events that I initially wrote off as bad design, but later, I discovered why it was implemented: to force the player to think of the game itself as a piece of software in order to further the hacker fantasy the game was trying to create. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time I have seen a game directly force this acknowledgment, and how it builds up to this event and executes on it is nothing short of masterful.

Hacknet, like Uplink, styles itself after real-world hacking just enough to give a tech-savvy player a loose sense of verisimilitude. At the game’s lowest level, the player is typing text instructions into a UNIX command line. If the player is familiar with these commands, such as cd, ls, rm, scp, they will enter the game with a wealth of knowledge for navigating its systems already at their disposal. Tricks I learned from using the terminal on my Mac, such as hitting tab to autocomplete a word I was typing, transferred over to the game with a surprisingly consistency. Uplink used a similar trick, but offered additional UI elements that had to be operated outside the command line. Hacknet offers similar, time-saving UI elements, but each one is a shortcut for text commands the player could type out if they wanted. This results in the UI feeling less like, well, a game, and more like an actual UNIX terminal that the player is using. Now, this won’t mean much to someone who doesn’t already know some of the jargon the game is throwing at the player, and a lot of my respect for this game comes from frustration with how poorly films and games usually represent hacking. However, I think it still holds value, even to non-technical players, because it teaches them, at least slightly, real-world computer skills, and doesn’t break the player’s immersion the more they learn about the subject. Additionally, the genuine effort put into making the game feel accurate adds a great deal to its ability to blur the lines between the game and reality, allowing the player to slip into believing its fiction more easily. The base game uses these elements to great effect as the player joins various hacker groups, completes contracts, and improves their hacking arsenal. The player builds up a skillset over the course of the game, and that skillset is put to the test during a beautifully-executed moment where a rival hacker breaks into the player’s system and nearly destroys it, removing all of their acquired graphical aids. The player is forced to revert to only typing text commands to recover their system and take revenge on this rival hacker. This sequence relies entirely on the player’s skill at command line, creating a high-tension moment that similar to the common action game trope of taking away all of the player’s weapons before a climactic encounter (ex. Half-Life 2, Dragon Age: Origins). This is easily the game’s most effective moment, and, like the safe rooms in Resident Evil, serve as a culmination point for all of the game’s systemic and thematic elements. If the rest of Hacknet wasn’t set up to support it, this moment wouldn’t work, but the game’s systems naturally lead to this exact cocktail of emotions.

So, when I picked up Hacknet’s latest DLC, I wasn’t expecting them to be able to top this sequence. It was everything Hacknet was trying to be, how could that be improved upon? The answer the dev team settled on was to take an existing thematic element, namely, the blurry line between reality and the game, and forcefully acknowledge the game’s role as software on the player’s computer. Mid-way through the DLC, the player is hacked by another anonymous hacker, who, again, wipes out the player’s system, forcing a reboot. However, this hacker is more experienced than the one from the main game, and installs a virus that prevents the player’s system from rebooting. So, a friend from the player’s hacking group sends them text instructions on how to remove the virus, which seem fairly straight forward…until the game crashes. Hacknet.exe quits, leaving the player with an actual Windows command prompt, cmd.exe, opened to the folder where the Hacknet game is installed. Everything I have described up until this point was happening fictionally, within Hacknet.exe, but for the next few minutes, the player isn’t engaged with Hacknet.exe at all. These events happen entirely on the player’s operating system, using the same applications they would use outside of the game. Using cmd.exe, and the commands they learned in the game, the player opens the text file sent to them by a fictional character in Hacknet. This opened in Sublime Text, my default text editor, appearing as a text file sent from a real-world friend might. It tells the player to search for a .dll file hidden inside the Hacknet directory and run a few commands on it. Until they do this, Hacknet.exe will not start; it will only re-open that command prompt. The player has to engage with the game as a piece of software with .txt, .dll and .exe files, and until they can do that, they cannot continue the game. This raises a myriad of metatextual questions about if the player is technically still “playing” Hacknet, as they are carrying out instructions that the game is giving to them, but the game itself is not running. But these feelings are taken even further by how the game contextualizes this hack.

My understanding of real-world hacking is severely limited, but from what I have read, the majority of them don’t do their hacking directly from their local machine. Instead, they run a virtual machine of an OS dedicated specifically to hacking, so that all their illicit activities are separated from their physical computer. The developers of Hacknet seemed aware of this, and explain Hacknet.exe as a hacking dedicated VM, so that the player can imagine themselves running it like a real hacker would. Thus, when the rival hacker attacks their system, the player poking around in their actual OS doesn’t feel like a dissonant removal from the game’s fiction, it feels like someone broke their hacking VM and they need to fix it. With all of the attention the game is drawing to this recontextualization, it should break the player’s immersion by forcing them to examine the game-software distinction that is so often unexamined. But because of the efforts to contextualize each action in the mechanics of real-world hacking, the game’s illusion is maintained. I’m hesitant to bring up the “games can do this but other media can’t!” argument, since it usually doesn’t provide any interesting conclusions, but in this case, the game forces the player to understand it as a piece of software before they continue. Other media cannot make sure its audience understands a thematic point before proceeding, but games can require it. Hacknet does this by expanding the boundaries of its fictional world, and in doing so, bumps into a concept that is decades older than the medium of video games itself.

The concept, called the magic circle, was coined by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his book, Homo Ludens. He described the circle as the dividing line between the world of the game and the world of reality. Inside it, concepts like points, teams, winning and losing are all given a value that, outside of the game, is entirely worthless. Points don’t actually mean anything in the real world, but inside the magic circle, they become the keys to victory. Good game designers are consistently using each element of their game to reinforce the magic circle, to avoid breaking the player’s belief in it, the same way writers and filmmakers try to avoid breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief in other media. In Hacknet, I have no earthly idea where the magic circle ends and the real world begins, but I somehow still fully believe in it. Acknowledging that games are pieces of software should completely shatter the magic circle, and I can think of dozens of games where this happened due to graphical glitches, game crashes, or mis-firing quest triggers. Hacknet, by positioning itself so close to reality, preserves its magic circle, while simultaneously calling attention to it. I don’t know if the possibility space of acknowledging games as software is vast, yet unexplored, or small, and Hacknet is using one of its limited applications. Regardless, it is something unique that the medium is capable of, and I’ve found exploring it to be fascinating as both a player and critic.

Thumper, Language, and One Hell of a VR Trip

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I’ve actually written a weird amount about rhythm games this year, considering I’ve played like three of them in my entire life. I talked about how Guitar Hero’s incredibly simple mechanics let the player fantasize about being a rock star, and how Runner2 used multiple, reactive audio tracks to create a sense of flow in gameplay. But recently, I picked up a virtual reality headset, the HTC Vive, and among a litany of legitimately innovating experiments and half-assed Steam games, I found Thumper, a rhythm game that’s mechanically traditional, but incredibly unique in exactly how it executes on those simpler ideas. Those details and simple aesthetic choices make an enormous difference in the player’s experience, despite, on a superficial level, resembling Runner2 or Guitar Hero, but when I tried to put those differences into words, I found myself struggling to do so. Runner2 and Guitar Hero can be wickedly difficult on higher settings, but the average player experience is much more relaxed. Those games are less about pixel-perfect technical execution and more about creating a musical experience. Thumper, by contrast, requires hyperawareness…pretty much constantly. In Guitar Hero, you can make a lot of mistakes and still finish the song with a respectable score. In fact, hitting every note in a song is a fairly impressive achievement if the player is on an appropriate difficulty level. In Thumper, if you make two mistakes, it’s game over. That rule alone is responsible for perhaps the majority of the game’s tension, since the player always feels like they are a split-second away from crashing in an explosive display of lights and distorted audio tracks. This feeling is further intensified after the player has made their first mistake, but the game does give the player a chance to recover their armor (that absorbs the first hit) if they correctly execute a sequence of obstacles. Thus, the player doesn’t feel like they’re irreparably damaged an individual run if they just mess up once. Other attributes of the game contribute to this hostile tone, from the sinister feel of the music to the cosmic horror of the unexplained creatures, shapes, and environments the player faces. The world of Thumper feels like a perilous journey into a twisted, Lovecraftian hell, and the player is shown that from the game’s highest level to its lowest.

This brings me to what I’ve found the most interesting about Thumper: it’s complete separation from language. The game has little in the way of on-screen tutorial prompts, so the player develops their own internal lexicon for the game’s features. This dovetails nicely with the game’s complete focus on the improvise stage of what Extra Credits calls the “plan, practice improvise” types of play. The game doesn’t ask you to build any high-level strategies at all, in fact, each moment is almost entirely disconnected from the previous one. All that matters is if you have missed a note. The game has combo meters and score counters, but the player isn’t forming high-level strategies about how to engage with the scoring system, as the correct response to any given situation is always obvious. Each obstacle in the game world has exactly one correct response, and the player is given points based on if they perform that correctly or not. Every one of these moments is almost entirely self-contained, and demands a level of quick reaction that prevents much in the way of planning. This creates an experience where the player’s focus is entirely on the immediate present; they aren’t even expected to look at the obstacles ahead of them. Any form of hesitation, of removal of thought from the present, can lead to instant death, training the player quickly to reach a state of laser-focus. This prevents the player from reaching any sort of linguistic grounding. Other games might give the player time to plan a strategy cognitively, for example, a player of Rainbow Six Siege might think, “Okay, I’m going to beach this wall, then run around to the other side and shoot the enemies while they are focused on the wall I just breached.” This extra time for planning gives the player a space to repeatedly think about the game abstractly, coming up with words for specific game pieces or inventing them on their own. Thumper, by contrast, prevents the player from planning or thinking about the game abstractly and thus prevents them from having the time to develop terms or concepts independent of each individual moment of play. If you want to think about Thumper at a high level, you need to do it when you’re not playing the game, which makes it very difficult to talk about, because so much of it happens at the lowest possible level. There are times where I execute moves in the game and do not have any conscious memory of doing so; it’s pure, muscular reaction. Games rarely get me to think about my physical actions at such a low level, and Thumper does this by asking me to barely think at all. This is enhanced by the game’s virtual reality support, which removes the player’s peripheral vision and any other stimuli except the game in front of them. Despite being such a physiological experience, this makes Thumper a strangely immerse one, leading to the player feeling like they are this strange beetle ship, flying down a twisted path at a million miles an hour. A decent amount has been written about zen in games, most prominently by designer Ian Bogost, and Thumper does approach this, but it feels more similar to the sense of “oneness with the game” that high level players describe when talking about more physiological arcade titles. Jazz pianist and sociologist David Sudnow perhaps described this best when explaining why he found the early Atari title, Breakout, so addicting: “Thirty seconds of play, and I’m on a whole new plane of being, all my synapses wailing.” If Thumper could be reduced to a single sentence, this would be it, and while I’ve struggled with reaching this state with other games, I achieve it effortlessly within seconds of firing up Thumper. The player isn’t asked to understand the game in any way but the physiological, leaving language behind with the rest of their conscious thoughts. The final result is the player becoming consciously aware of their sense of self slipping away, replaced by a sensory deprivation VR trip that messily projects them onto an abstract game world. I am nowhere near good enough to complete Thumper’s final levels, but I can fire up the game, put on my headset, and, within seconds, feel that “whole new plane of being”. As a designer, that is incredibly difficult to pull off.

Stephen Rubio's Blog

"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box." -Edward R. Murrow, on television

Tag Archives: video games

Unpacking Mass Effect 3’s Forgotten Multiplayer Mode

Toolkit Upgrade: How Below Zero Carries Subnautica’s Design Philosophy Forward

A Little Closer to the Horizon, Please: Horizon Zero Dawn Review

The Proto-MMO: RuneScape and Unstructured, Massively Multiplayer Play

Friends & Fat Loot: Looking at Trick-Or-Treating as a Game Space

Leveling Up Ain’t What It Used To Be: Destiny, RuneScape, and Leveling Systems

The Mirror’s Edge Legacy

Revisiting Soma: Another Kind of Adventure Game

Hacknet and Games as Software

Thumper, Language, and One Hell of a VR Trip