Attempting to Appreciate Gears of War

Original Post: August 24, 2010

Where to begin with Gears of War? Yes, its a big-budget, AAA console action type game, which are meant to be just the kind of thing I’m mostly focused on, but I have only just played through it.  Having played it now, I feel only slightly more inspired to write about it than I did before playing it.  Tom Bissell explores videogames in a deeply personal way in his book Extra Lives, and comes to the conclusion that Resident Evil made it possible for videogames to be stupid.  If Resident Evil paved the Roman road, this makes Gears of War a German autobahn. Yet in the same book, Bissell makes a long claim for Gears of War as something slightly more than what it appears to be on a superficial, surface level.  Can this game serve as a case for critics to put their ludological money where their mouth is?  What do we find if we look past the aesthetics of the game, to the purportedly more important mechanics?

These COGs, armoured piles of man-meat with voices so guttural they would make the movie voice-over guy sound about as tough as Orlando Bloom are just about as uninspiring characters as I have ever personally witnessed.  I couldn’t be farther from ‘identifying’ with these creatures, nor do I even want to.  Many commentators have observed the power fantasies that videogames tend to offer–this certainly is one, but it is not mine.  This hyper-masculinity screams homo-eroticism to me, in the same way that I never understood locker room behaviour.  Indeed, the parallel this videogame shares with sport, particularly American NFL is and spelled out in the first 20 minutes or so by the ‘Cole Train.’  In some sort of hideously mutated hero-worship we see a sports star transformed into a war machine; equating the senseless headlong charging into one another on the football field with the senseless charging into each other on the battlefield.  That Cole’s voice sounds very much like it has been passed through a pitch-shifter to make it even more manly than the actor’s voice presumably is did not go unnoticed either.

Physically these men could not possibly exist–no more than Barbie could.  I spent a lot of time during the game trying to decide if their armour and other gear bulked them up, or if I was to believe they really were that buff, and I am undecided.  The necks and bare arms seem to indicate hefty size, but the impossible size of their feet makes me picture ogres or Sasquatch.  The COGs were, for all intents, identical to their enemies, another sporting parallel.  The bipedal Locusts would have even been based on the same wireframes and animation skeletons the COGs were.  Their similarity brings me back to the opposing teams of the football field.  These huge lumbering beasts of similar attire and build squaring off against one another in some noble conflict the purpose of which is a forgone conclusion.

I have yet to do any further research or reading on Gears, other than what is found in Bissell’s book, and at this point, I have no idea what the Locusts are, what that device Baird picked up that had all the map data in it was, when the Lightmass Bomb wound up on a train, how the hell a footsoldier like Marcus Fenix was in possession of an estate as large as his, or why that estate looked like it had been hit by a tsunami.  I don’t know why a Lightmass Bomb was able to destroy those Locusts it did, when the only ones seemingly affected by UV light were the Kryll.  I haven’t got a clue what imulsion is or why it would be valuable, other than to the Locusts who might use it to mutate various kinds of Wretches. All this is to say that despite the game’s rich graphics and eye-catching presentation layer, there’s very little substance to the game at all.

This all culminates in my initial assessment of Gears as exactly what Bleszinski says it is, “cool.”  The trouble is, I don’t like what the American mainstream thinks is cool most of the time, things like football, guns, Wipeout, beer in cans and Hooters.  I don’t have a hero-worship complex for sports stars and I don’t confuse quarterbacks with military tacticians.  Bleszinski says in Extra Lives that he feels his job is to make gaming cool–part of his whole gamer image being coupled with a ‘cool guy’ persona that drives a sports car and likes guns and other macho stuff.  Fine, I say.  That’s great.  But that means that this game will appeal to exactly the kind of person I’ve spent most of my life not being.  I’ve never worried about the coolness of whatever hobbies I pursued, and I pursued a number of decidedly un-cool past-times (videogames, reading, writing, etc etc).

While Bissell goes some way to redeem both the game and the designer, I still can’t help but dislike the game.  The most telling quotes from Bleszinski are when he speaks of being in a purgatory between geeky and cool, where he seems to find himself today.  The game that Gears is presents little more than the mad-dash testosterone-fest.  Yet Bleszinski speaks of a melancholy embedded in it, especially within Marcus Fenix.  The advertisement backed by Gary Jules’ version of Mad World does speak of something “else” within the mind of the developer, but his game doesn’t.  Not loudly enough.  Not in the language of videogames.  In the end Marcus and the other COGs are too brutal, too masculine, and too effective to be viewed as tragic in any way.  Why am I to believe that Marcus has any sense of loss or pain, why would he ever question his motives or methods when they prove so unrelentingly efficacious?  The mantra of “show don’t tell” instructs us to look for demonstrations of Fenix’s weaknesses, and I don’t see them.

Perhaps this game is decidedly intertextual, and can be saved.  Perhaps one must view this game in and of its time: the very early 7th generation title, that followed hot on the heals of Epic Games’ own Unreal Tournament frag-fests, but also Halo 1 and 2, early Call of Duty, and of course Quake 3, Doom 3 and other frantic, competitive PC-based shooters.  Is the cover mechanic, so banal now as to be difficult to even notice, the hint of Fenix’s weakness?  Despite his seemingly impregnable armour and hyper-masculine toughness, he hides as often as he shoots.  No player could get through Gears without hiding from most of the enemies he encounters at least briefly.  This, as opposed to the literal headlong charge into battle typified by earlier shooters, where there was no such built-in mechanic suggesting to the player that taking cover might be advisable, rather than simply holding down the fire button.  Perhaps the painfully long reload times are a commentary on Fenix’s dependence on his equipment, especially when he fails to ‘active reload’ it properly.  Could the outward hyper-masculinity and toughness be a facade for the more accurate, mechanic-based description of Fenix as a vulnerable target entirely dependent on his not-so-perfect Lancer rifle?

Possibly.

Something About Starcraft

Original Post: August 2, 2010

To jump on a hyped-up bandwagon: StarCraft.  That long-awaited sequel to a game I did actually play, rather religiously, back when it was current.  I can’t say that I was among those eagerly awaiting its return, but it is a bit like an old friend you haven’t seen in a long time, and he’s aged rather well. That said, SC2 is a wonderful example for any of those theorists still in the games-aren’t-stories camp, because SC2, despite its substantial overhaul of narrative delivery technique, still doesn’t do it very well.  The “game” bit of StarCraft really, really does not want to tell a story, while the story bits aren’t game-like at all.

I will keep the recap very very brief as I’m sure most of us are familiar with the narratology vs. ludology ‘debate’ that took place–and if you aren’t, look up First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, and you’ll get the gist.  Essentially the argument is that because narratives are constructed by an author to be accessed by a reader in a particular order and at a particular pace, they deliver story in a very precise, author-controlled way.  Games on the other hand are rule-bound systems which are by their nature very unpredictable and largely place control in the hands of the player.  While neither of these statements are unequivocally true, StarCraft would be a great example of how stories-in-videogames simply doesn’t work.  (I have maintained for a while now that videogames are not just games, so we can’t judge them purely on their game-like qualities.  Keep that in mind.)

What is the game of StarCraft?  Mostly when we ask this question we can refer to rules, as in basketball or poker.  We can say that the former is a sport played by two teams of 5 players, on a court with a ball and two hoops.  You put the ball in the hoop and stop the opposition from doing the same etc.  The rules of the game are spelled out pretty clearly in handbooks and such.  The ‘game’ of StarCraft is really problematic to define.  Usually, one would describe it as a real-time strategy game about base construction, resource management and large-scale combat tactics.  The Terran, Protoss and Zerg factions are defined in certain ways by their units and building possibilities.  Yet throughout the campaign portion of the game, the rules change quite dramatically.  Where is the resource management or base-building in the missions revolving around Zeratul?  Several of those involve controlling him, and only him, throughout much of the mission.

The Prophecy missions focusing on Zeratul are probably the most plot-heavy in the game, where Jim Raynor is actually reliving the memory of the Protoss Templar.  So essentially, Raynor and the player are ‘hearing a story’ in so far as the events have already happened and are being relayed as a narrative.  To do this, Blizzard remove all the player’s capacity to strategize–a fairly large chunk of the game–and we are left with a crappy third-person action-adventure sequence that I’d much rather play the way I play Assassin’s Creed (for example) and not in a top-down click-click-click format.  Through these missions, we proceed through a very narrow set of objectives, moving from Point A to Point B mostly.  We, as Zeratul, are really just moving across a number of different planets to consult with various important NPCs, from the Immortal Protoss historians to the dying Zerg Overmind.  These tasks are reminiscent of the story-filling quests in any number of RPG-styled videogames.

The other major storytelling device is the ever-popular cinematic.  Admittedly these 2010 cinematics are quite a bit more pleasant to sit through than the between-mission briefing screen conversations throughout the first game, but they leave something to be desired.  They fall far behind in terms of aesthetic competence in comparison to contemporary videogames, like Uncharted 2 or even Assassin’s Creed (I have yet to see anything that compares to Uncharted 2, just quietly).

The sum of these two elements is the ‘proof’ that an RTS can’t actually tell a story, because to do the story-telling stuff you have to remove all the RTS.  First pare back all the in-game abilities that typify the genre, by eliminating the base, the construction, and the resources and bind the player to one character.  Then just take out the game altogether and use the trusty cinematic.

This kind of talk would come as a surprise to anyone familiar with my general stance that videogames can be quite capable story-telling media.  I still believe that to be the case, only that the kind of story they tell needs to agree with the kind of game they are.  Videogames are a communicative medium, no doubt, but they rely on a systematic, functional logic that will inevitably govern how the aesthetic content is experienced.  Novels have a systematic rule also, they just happen to (almost) all be the same rule: read from page one to the last page, top to bottom left to right.  Those are rules that govern how the narrative is experience.  Videogames can change those rules, play with them, activate them and make them part of the experience.  StarCraft has those rules, but chooses to tell a story that runs across the grain rather than with it.

The game of StarCraft is about war–the story is about individuals.  The game of StarCraft teaches the player not to care much for the individuals, the story asks us to identify with their personalities, or empathise with their desires, fears and ambitions.  The videogame asks something rather difficult when we are meant to empathise with Raynor, or even Tychus, immediately following a battle in which we ‘build’ then send hundreds marines charging into the open maw of doom in the middle of a Zerg base.  The gameplay experience, during the missions, is largely detached from the ‘humanity’ of warfare, as we are suspended as an omniscient non-presence above the battlefield.  There is no suggestion that we are occupying Raynor himself while controlling the flow of battle, as he himself turns up (as a Marine, rather than a Vulture, perhaps trying to humanise him from vehicle into identifiable man?) on the battlefield early on.

The tentative questions I ask here are what else do we do?  Narratives about war are almost inevitably about the individuals.  Especially modern war films, such as Blackhawk Down or Saving Private Ryan are all about the individual humans caught up in a larger-than-them conflict.  Television series like M*A*S*H were shot almost entirely on the hospital site, and never depicted actual battle–it was about the people there, not about the war.  The game of StarCraft is absolutely about the war, in a more engaging way than a film or novel probably can be.  A forty-minute long battle scene in a movie would be pretty excruciating, where a forty-minute StarCraft battle can be gripping.  Especially given the medium’s ability to suspend us over the battlefield, and put us in control, we are able to experience what a large-scale battle is, in and of itself, as opposed to the individual’s experience of that chaos.  The player of an RTS is not experiencing an individual’s perspective on warfare, because no individual, not even the commanding general, can have the kind of perfect perspective over everything, in real time, that the computer-chair general can.

The key is to communicate through that experience, not the supposed introspection of Raynor as portrayed in the cinematics.  There was one point in which I felt this was executed: in Zeratul’s final mission, the Fall of Aiur.  This mission puts the player in command over the last of the Protoss forces–a considerable army, with considerable resources–to defend their home planet from the Zerg onslaught.  The mission is designed to fail, and so the player simply does not have enough time/resources to actually overcome the Zerg army.  Nothing in the system changes, the player doesn’t lose abilities, or through some other deus ex machina lose half their base, they are simply overrun.  The mineral deposits finally run out, and the player can’t build reinforcements.  They lose the mission naturally, as it were, and instead of being told: “The Zerg attack was relentless, it seemed as though for every one that fell, two more would take its place,” this experience is actually shown to the player, on a large scale.

The question I have is how do we position the player?  Could the player become a Commander who through some technological conceit (I’m thinking Ender’s Game here) can be aware and in control of the whole battlefield?  Is that where we could place Raynor, and then the player inside his head?  If so, could we tell story through some introspective audio ‘thoughts’ in a similar way that Bioshock et al. use the audio logs?  Or do we continue to develop along the disembodied presence above-it-all logic and attempt to transcend the human character with which the player will identify and empathise with?

Kerrigan, Queen of Blades

Kerrigan, Queen of Blades

Final note is that when many people speak of StarCraft, they speak of the multiplayer aspect of the game, which is, to me, another wholly different experience.  The rules change again, down to the available machines of war.  There are quite a few more in the campaign than there are in the ranked matches I’ve played, to ensure a balanced play experience one assumes–or simplifying the experience for those in the lower leagues.  I honestly do not know at this point.

There simply must be a more nuanced use of the word ‘game’ when talking about videogames.  Videogames are not only games, and may in fact contain several ‘games’ in the traditional sense, within the software.  StarCraft is indeed a great game–its more than one great game in fact–but it is also going to be a poster boy for critics (such as myself) explaining why story doesn’t work in videogames.

Red Dead Reflections

Original Post: June 11, 2010

Yes, I’ve been waiting weeks to use that title.

I actually had a very brief review of this game published at Kotaku so check it out there.  What we have here will be a longer version with more elaborations than the 500 words allowed me there.

Read Dead Redemption is the spiritual successor to Red Dead Revolver by Rockstar (San Diego).  Using the same basic open-world framework and gameplay mechanics as Grand Theft Auto 4, the player is John Marston: an outlaw trying to turn over a new leaf, but being played like a hand of cards by higher powers.

Wide Open Spaces: Red Dead Redemption has presented a truly beautiful, detailed and convincing representation of the  American West.  I lived in Arizona for many years and can personally vouch for the authenticity of most of the landscapes presented.  Of course, Rockstar have not built a world quite the right size for all the things in it, but they learned how to approximate reality through a kind of architectural metaphor in Grand Theft Auto.  As is rightly noted by Bogost and Klainbaum, in a videogame, cartographic accuracy is less important than getting the ‘feel’ right.  That feel is based on a cultural understanding of the pieces that the overall place is made up of.  The American frontier, as a place, is composed of deserts, mountains (of the particular red shade), prairie, and forested highlands.  If these areas are present, we will understand the concept of the frontier.  The vagueness of New Austin as a place is precisely because it is an abstraction of several places, combined together in a distilled format.  Something like making a video documentary of New York and quickly filming Queens, the Bronx, Little Italy and Times Square in succession.  The experience of New York will be condensed in time.  The equivalent for a game is to compress the space.

Procedural Encounters: Sometimes the desert is empty, hauntingly so.  Other times its teeming with wildlife and random strangers to divert your attention.  This is a remarkably entertaining variety of experience.  The various behavioural engine technology first applied in GTA4 is obviously in effect here.  But the signalling of interaction in that game was really only just that: a signal, a sign without referent.  In RDR, I was actually (virtually) interacted with by many strangers who invited me to sit down with them, asked me for help, and occasionally stole my horse.  These interactions went rather deeper than the greetings and exclamations made by the citizens of Liberty City.  The soft, opt-in/opt-out mechanical structure of these tiny missions (the ‘get my carriage back’ or ‘stop the thief’ type) was very welcome as it achieved two goals: firstly it made the world feel more alive, inhabited by real people with goals and motivations beyond making the world seem more alive!  Secondly, by allowing me to not assist everyone, I was allowed to remain in control, and so blast through story missions more quickly if that was what I wanted to do.

The more formal Stranger missions were equally well-handled.  Being able to pursue them in the middle of other missions was a great example of learning from other games and refining the mechanics of quest administration to a very smooth experience.

The experience of hunting seems fairly genuine, unlike an MMO where there are always animals everywhere.  There was a real sense of adventure when I attempted to break the American Standardbred.  It was the single hardest thing I had to do in the game—partially because I was hunting for them in a more difficult area, I came to discover, that was heavily populated by cougars.  I could have found one in another area, but I didn’t know that at the time.  Instead I chased a single horse across the map for a solid half-hour.  This is after I initially lassoed it, only to be dragged down a cliff when it reared and bolted.  The fact that I didn’t die from the fall (I sort of rolled and tumbled down a steep slope rather than free-falling) meant I could call my own trusty steed, and set off in pursuit of the same horse.  It felt like I was actually chasing a genuine individual, not a computer subroutine, replaceable with any other predictable copy of itself.

Gunplay: There are lots and lots of guns in this game, but none of them are out of place.  In a gaming world of plasma cannons and multiple assault rifles, the economy of a single-shot rifle was really refreshing.  There were the repeater rifles, but these weren’t fully automatic weapons either.  The sound effects on the various kinds of weapons combined with the one-or-two shot kills gave the shoot outs some real oomph!  I am going to make the call here: best gun sound effects since the Goldeneye:007 Dostovei pistol.  I can’t even pick on that I think is better, because I think they might (almost) all be.

Riding Shotgun: Seriously, riding in a stagecoach flying down dirt tracks blasting rustlers or outlaws with my Winchester never got old.

Rookie Mistakes: The storytelling here is not as refined as I’ve come to expect in these big-budget titles.  One of the first rules of effective storytelling is “Show, don’t tell.”  The game gets off on a bad foot when we are simply told that Marston’s family have been kidnapped, so we’re obliged to carry out their orders.  This fundamental error troubles the entire plot, as it establishes (or rather, doesn’t) Marston’s motivations for doing anything.  I as a player had no idea what is family were like, I never saw them, didn’t see them kidnapped and so have no emotional connection to them at all.  This could have been rectified with a simple cut-scene, or better yet, with a Mass Effect 2 style opening episode.

Arguably, videogames actually introduce a third ‘-esis’ which I’m not sure there is a name for yet.  The first is diegesis, that is, the explanation or verbalisation of a fact or explanation.  This is the ‘telling’ of expression that we use in daily life, in art and media, and its obviously where we get the word ‘dialog’ to mean some kind of interactive communication.  Mimesis is the sort of ‘showing’ I recommend above, and is the ‘miming’ or ‘mimicking’ of reality rather than a verbal rhetoric.  This is the fundamental principle of stage theatre, where stating “Lear was upset” is ridiculous and the idea is to show how upset poor King Lear is through acting.

Both of these modes of expression rely on a clear boundary between ‘expresser’ and receiver or observer.  The orator must be telling something to someone for the concept to make sense.  A dramatic performance must have an external observer to interpret the presentation of information.  Games, including live-action role-play and other sorts of participatory fiction, enable a new kind of simulated experience of the “narrative” (for lack of a better word).  The fiction can be not just seen, but played at from the inside.  Of course, actors, or players, in drama are experiencing the fiction from the inside themselves as they seek to identify with their characters, understand their motivations, etc., but they do so for the benefit of the audience.  In Gaming, we do so for our own benefit as one of the players.  Furthermore, we are not simply experiencing the fact that Lear is upset, we are manipulating and being manipulated by a series of functional rules.  Whether these are algorithmic code in a computer, conventions of a LARP group, or the mixture of code and convention used in a session of Dungeons and Dragons, we the players are learning, and having our understanding tested, as part of the game system.  This should be a fundamental goal of the game designer: do not only tell or show, but cause the player to experience and understand.

Grit in my Spaghetti: (Full disclosure: I am not a film scholar with no claim to understand the Western or spaghetti Western genres.)  The game is a bit confused between the comedy of an over-the-top spaghetti Western and the grit and something darker and more meaningful.  The entire cast of the first chapter (other than the MacFarlanes) are painful caricatures that a hardened outlaw like Marston wouldn’t have allied himself with in a million years.  He certainly wouldn’t have made himself errand-boy for them.  This is related to one of the other problems that doesn’t really have to do with characters, but with action: why doesn’t Marston just go looking for his quarry himself?  There are only so many places to hide in New Austin and Mexico.  Couldn’t he have just walked away from the crazy people in Hannigen’s Stead, and had a look around himself?  Failing that, why wouldn’t he just pull a gun on that ass West Dickens and tell him to get on with it?  I really, really wanted him to.  You can, of course, tell me he needed the machine gun, but that fails to convince me that Marston couldn’t have ridden in with the marshal and taken care of business without all the fooling around beforehand.

The middle chapter is more balanced—and by balanced I mean ambivalent.  The disconnect between Marston killing a couple hundred rebels, then being invited to join them and lead a counter-attack seems very strange.  The numbers just don’t add up.  How many rebels are there that they can suffer the kind of losses that Marston inflicts on them while working with the Mexican Army, and they are immediately prepared to actually take the city?  Simply spin these questions around, and ask the same: how many soldiers were there occupying the various strongholds in Mexico that the battalion (or whatever the division name would be) wouldn’t have fallen apart and abandoned some of their territory, at least long enough to regroup and reinforce?

The third becomes increasingly dark, and this is the only one where I believe in Marston’s deference.  He is at the mercy of the Federal agents, so when they tell him to go run errands, he has little choice.  The cocaine addicted professor is a bit caricature-esque as well, but at least realised he was out of place and ran back to the East.

The final chapter I found truly remarkable.  GTA4 has the problem of ‘after the story’ the world simply stops.  Obviously, it doesn’t ‘stop’ but there is no place for Niko there, the world stops interacting with him, and Niko is naught but an observer (maybe that’s the whole point of the game, haven’t decided  yet).  The idea that Marston was working on building up his farm, giving him a place to settle, as the player begins to sense an end to the game, is wonderful.  Then the real climax hits, and it’s a genuine surprise.  The gentle slow-down Rockstar give us on the ranch lulls the player into a false sense of security, then capitalises on it.  That is what I mean by showing, not telling.

Drama ex Machina: The Desperation Meter

Original Post: April 11, 2010

This post is a speculative solution to a problem I noticed in Assassin’s Creed, both I and II, but could equally be used in other vaguely similar games.  Firstly, let me outline the problem as I see it, and then describe my mechanical solution.

I loved both Assassin’s Creed games, the first was a revelation, and the second made the first look like a tech demonstration.  However, there was a basic problem for me: it was too easy.  Both Ezio and Altair were far too strong, essentially able to ignore the sneaking and barrel headlong into any number of guards with a reasonable expectation of survival.  In AC2 it was even worse because arguably the most efficient method of dealing with an enemy would be to go in unarmed and use the disarm/kill combo to insta-gib the baddies.  In either case, armed with the longsword, both assassins could simply back up to a wall and deal with the enemies one by one.

This broke the fiction for me, as my concept of an assassin is a killer who doesn’t ever fight, let alone face off with heavily armed and armoured troops.  Assassins come in the night, and their victims die without ever seeing them.  Perhaps like in the Hitman series, the assassin isn’t even there when the victim is killed; instead a series of traps are laid and the killing might seem accidental.  The cost for this is that assassins must travel light, to go unnoticed they must blend in and disappear.  They cannot carry heavy weapons, wear armour etc.  Their economy of power, if you like, is squarely situated in the surprise attack, not in battle prowess.  If Altair/Ezio were a unit in an RTS, they would be clearly over-powered.  They should be like a rogue or thief in RPGs: deadly from behind but unable to take much of a direct attack.

The word thief brings me to my next point: Thief (capital T) had the right idea.  In that game, being caught was death.  It introduced the light/shadow mechanic that many stealth games utilize today, in combination with standard line of sight mechanics. The configuration of Altair/Ezio’s talents begged the question: why do they worry about stealth, subtlety or planning when barging in and fighting out are just as effective?

Of course, this indicates that the game overall would end up being much, much harder.  It would also remove one of the joys of the game: those quick counter-combo take-downs that are fun.  So how do we keep this, but enhance the drama, the pressure, on the player?

The first thing that would have to change would be a significant upgrade to the speed and strength of the guards, relative to our hero’s “normal” fighting abilities.  Our assassin should still be able to back-stab and throat-slit for instant kills, but face-to-face, a group of 2 or 3 guards would have to be (much) more likely to kill our assassin than be defeated.  (I even loved the dual wristblade action in AC2, so I’m happy for the hero to be able to kill more than one baddie, provided he stays stealthy.)  In any group larger than this, “normal” Ezio/Altair would be a dead man for sure.  So when the player misses that jump, or pulls himself up onto the wrong balcony and the squad of guards sees him, there is real fear, there is desperation.

Desperation is a key element that I feel was missing from both games.  I suggest introducing a ‘desperation meter’ which increases as the assassin takes damage.  Something like power meters in fighting games, this resource would open up new moves for the assassin to perform, but only when running low on health.  (Perhaps simply being spotted would grant a small amount of desperation, just enough for basic maneuvers.)  So, normally, Ezio would not be able to perform the spectacular counter maneuvers that disarm the guard and dispatch him with his own weapon–but if he is below say, 20% health, he becomes desperate, the adrenaline starts pumping, and he attempts a high-risk, high-payoff move to save his skin.  Success means Ezio escapes certain death, but also costs a significant amount of the desperation bar: he can’t do it over and over.  Failure (the player misses the correct keypress or timing) and the assassin dies.

Performing such an escape maneuver successfully actually means something when the risk of failure is real.  Being able to pull it off all the time dilutes the drama significantly.  Narrative drama uses this kind of scenario all the time: the hero tries standard actions but this fails to stop the impending danger, until the very last minute when s/he tries something crazy that works.  The ‘all-or-nothing’ risks are obvious, and this is what makes the action dramatic.  I never felt that I risked much in either Assassin’s Creed game… well, ever.  I never doubted my ability to fight off however many guards were about to attack me.  Not because I am some spectacular player though; as an experiment I just stood still and waited for them to beat me to death.  It took a ridiculously long time.

There are other mechanics that could be incorporated into a desperation meter, and some play-testing would be necessary to balance them properly, but the following are some examples:

Bullet time: as the hero becomes more desperate, the game slows down to give the player a greater chance to dispatch whatever the problem is.

Smoke Grenade: perhaps an early one that doesn’t cost much could be the smoke bombs (or flashbangs for other game settings) Ezio carries.  As the meter starts to fill up, simply tap the button to drop a smoke bomb right at the assassin’s feet and make a run for it.  This could be one of the earliest moves available, maybe simply for coming into the line-of-sight of an enemy, to give the player a chance to ‘reset’ the attempt at infiltration.

Super jump: Parkour bonus that allows the hero to escape by running at then jumping off the shoulders/back of an enemy to reach a handhold he wouldn’t be able to normally.  Or the wall-run, where the hero will run as if fleeing, then run up the wall a couple steps, and backflip to land behind the attacker.  Our hero can then either kill his opponent from behind, or simply run away.

Disarm and kill counter: as is already in Assassin’s Creed 2, but make this a significantly risky move.  It would have to cost most of a full desperation meter and result in death if the player fails to pull it off.  If he succeeds though, the hero gains a weapon and loses an enemy: good pay-off.

Environmental: Probably the hardest to actually implement: setting something on fire, causing an explosion, or knocking over a cart of melons/ball bearings/logs while fleeing.  Perhaps grabbing a torch and throwing it at the pursuing guard, knocking over a burning brazier across your path, forcing the guards to go around. The exploding red barrel comes to mind here, but again, they must only become active when the desperation is high, or its just another fight mechanic.  Not everything in the environment should be related to desperation, that limits the creativity of the player too much.  But some things certainly could be.  This is a lot like the sand in the eyes trick in AC2, which is also not far off the smoke bomb effect, but relies on there being sand on the floor.

Combinations: disarm and kill with a smoke bomb, especially useful when a group of enemies is attacking.  Kill the one that is about to kill the hero, then throw the smoke to escape the rest of them.  Again, must be risky with a high chance of failure leading to death because the pay-off is so high.  Perhaps a smoke bomb then a super jump off the back of a confused enemy, less costly because none of the enemies are dead, but a good escape technique.

Anyone who has played a videogame or seen an action movie will probably find these ideas very familiar.  I don’t pretend like the actions themselves are innovative, in fact many of them exist in Assassin’s Creed already.  The important part is limiting their use to the really desperate moments of the game, during fights where things are going badly.  So, we first have to establish that fights can go badly–which in my experience they really didn’t.  I got tired of fighting more than I got killed.  That’s a very bad thing in this kind of game.

To further ensure that the desperation meter increases drama, hook it up to regenerative health.  This way, a player cannot jump off a building to lower his health, then run around with 3/10 bars on his health bar, with a full desperation meter all the time.  We could also cause the desperation meter to decay over time, though that might be somewhat redundant if the health bar increases.  One might have to make the decision at a design level that eventually our hero will have to escape: the number of guards will continue to increase perhaps, or they will perform a phalanx-style charge eventually that will kill our hero, so the player knows he can’t just fight indefinitely.  This adds pressure to use a couple of the mechanics, and also reminds the player that their character is not invincible, which Altair and his cousin Ezio ultimately are.

So in conclusion, if this sounds like a laundry list of cool new powers for Ezio, Altair and any other (mostly hand to hand) videogame fighter, it is with the one caveat that you have to be almost dead before you can use them!  This would reward the player who plans well and avoids getting into nasty fights where he will most likely die, but also give those kinds of fights a dramatic element that they don’t have currently.

As a side note, the thought occurs to me that this kind of mechanic can be used in reverse quite effectively also.  World of Warcraft makes extensive use of the stealth mechanics for rogues and druids, but this could be extrapolated into an action game as well.  I haven’t played Splinter Cell: Conviction yet, so forgive me if this is exactly what they do, but: an agent like Sam Fisher might have a set of very deadly abilities that he can only use when he is not desperate.  As he is seen, so loses his advantage of stealth and surprise, he loses some moves (just like rogues in WoW).  As he takes damage and/or attracts more attention he loses some other abilities, but perhaps gains others–more escape-centric.  I am not sure how this would pan out in a very linear-based game, as opposed to the more open-world situation Altair and Ezio are in.  Worth consideration though.  Perhaps after playing more Splinter Cell, I will do so.