Category: Review

“And That is Why I Succeed”

Posted on - by RaptorFire

Minor Spoilers ahead for Pyre

In life we fail. We fall. Mistakes are made, and no amount of regret or remorse can take away the actions we take, regardless of intentions. As a very wise cartoon man once said: “Whatever happens, happens.” Failure is a hard truth we all must swallow at some point.

Indie game studio Supergiant Games might know a thing or two about hard truths. In 2014, their second game Transistor was released to critical acclaim and tremendous sales success, earning over one million sales by the end of the following year. With this title and its 2010 Game of the Year contender Bastion under the studio’s belt, it’s safe to claim that Supergiant is practically the scale by which all indie games are measured. The hard truth was people were watching carefully, awaiting Supergiant’s next big indie blockbuster. If I were in their shoes, I’d be more than a little nervous.

So the studio, not content to make the same game twice, went back to the drawing board and brainstormed ideas. One of the more interesting ideas was centered around the hard truth of failure.

The concept of a “failure state” in gaming is an ancient one. In Pong, one side had to lose. In Pac-Man, a Game Over would force arcade-goers to feed machines more of those sweet, sweet quarters. The infamous Souls series won its reputation by getting players very familiar with death. (Very.)

Only recently has there been a growing trend in removing failure states from games… or at least rewriting the rules on them. The adventure game Heavy Rain featured not game over screen, only a story that continued to unfold whether the playable characters survived the journey… or didn’t. Most puzzle games only truly “fail” when a player decides to give up on a brain-teaser in frustration. Controversial “walking simulators” like Dear Esther or Firewatch are basically impossible to lose, only asking the player to experience the story by traveling from point A to point B. For years, developers have been experimenting and warping the rules of conventional gaming, with mixed results.

Which brings us to Supergiant’s newest title, Pyre. Pyre’s concept evolved from the studio’s idea to rewrite the conventions of failure in games. Would it be possible to create a game where defeat can happen at any time, and players are forced to face the consequences of their actions rather than be given infinite chances, as is the norm? Well, it should be. Reality is full of unchangeable failures, yet life goes on. With that in mind, the team devised a title crafted around this unique concept to modern video games, a non-violent competition between factions in which failure resulted not in character death, but in lessons to be learned for the next bout. Sound familiar? Think about it. Millions of Americans watch it on TV every week.

Pyre is, for all intents and purposes, a fantasy sports RPG. You play as an un-named exile, banished from his or her homeland for the unforgivable sin of literacy. You are rescued by a crew of fellow exiles who, upon learning of your unique skill, begin putting you to work deciphering a mysterious book detailing a path to freedom from eternal exile. Soon, this path is revealed to be attainable only through “The Rites,” thrusting you into an epic quest to travel the land, gather companions, and win enough Rites to earn your freedom.

The Rites themselves make up the bulk of gameplay. Players select a team of three party members to participate in a competition that can only be described as a cross between blitzball, basketball and lacrosse. The rules are simple: grab the orb at the center of the arena and use teamwork to dunk it into the opponent’s goal (their titular Pyre) enough times to snuff it out. Achieve this before your opponent does the same to your Pyre, and you win. But as with all great sports, the simple rules can make way for some truly impressive tactical depth. Each and every exile you pick up on your journey has his or her own specializations , abilities and upgrades for you to tinker with, as well as a slot for equipment you can buy along the way. I won’t describe any of the options available to you for fear of spoiling surprises, but the customization of your three-member team goes far beyond big/slow/strong characters versus small/fast/fragile combatants.

And said combatants are what make up the meat of the experience. Like a great Bioware game, Pyre is full of memorable, distinct allies and adversaries that are full of both personality and ambitions, which delightfully your character will keep record of in his or her journal as your observations increase. This information-gathering is somewhat optional… but choosing to forego building a bond with your companions will also rob the player of the high stakes at hand when carrying out The Rites. As mentioned above, each encounter you have is a non-lethal ball game, but while life and limb of each character are not in jeopardy, their freedom most certainly is. Victory in each Rite will bring your companions closer to “enlightenment,” which in turn will eventually give you, the player, an opportunity to free one of your friends from the desolation of exile. This will allow your ally to achieve the dream you so desperately want to give them… but will cause your team to lose both a beloved friend and valuable combatant for the remainder of them game (and giving the player the ultimate choice on who stays and who escapes just rubs more salt in the wound). On the other hand, losing in a Rite will increase your opponent’s chance of escaping the wasteland, never to be encountered again. No matter how well or how poorly you perform in the game, a friend or an enemy will return home, and the story’s ultimate conclusion will be twisted to reflect your decisions one way or another.

This is far from a convenient choose-your-own-adventure gimmick, however. Your crew will go up against a variety of different teams of three, each with their own team name, history, emblem, color, captain, quirk, and jamming theme song. Enemy captains are given personalities and motivations just as compelling your companions’, and each adversary will likely hold some form of grudge against your team… or a teammate. The game records your win/loss ratio with each team, and like any good sports game, each encounter provides an opportunity for some compelling rivalries to emerge.

I’m going to give a slightly heavier spoiler warning here to give you one of my more interesting moments during one of these rivalries (so feel free to skip this paragraph if you want as little story spoilers as possible). Roughly midway through the game, my team was sitting pretty. We were undefeated, and ready to send another deserving ally back home. Our rival for the deciding match was a group of ex-terrorists, one of which was an estranged sibling of a different teammate bent on returning home to continue wrecking havoc on the homeland who’d exiled her. Despite my opponent’s relative on our team feeling torn about her sibling’s chance at freedom, we battled them as fiercely as ever… only to suffer our first loss at this critical juncture. Our enemy was released. My friend was forced to continue her unjust sentence because of my failure. The devastating effect of one simple loss was shockingly palpable… and eventually forced me to give up my own chance at freedom. Pyre is filled with situations such as this, each with its own triumphs, tragedies, and everything inbetween.

Pyre’s aesthetic is a beauty to behold, easily the best-looking game to be released this year (and when you’re going up against a game like Persona 5, that’s a very bold statement indeed). Every art asset is gorgeously detailed in vivid watercolor sketches and playful animations. Characters bounce about the battlefield with their own sleek personality. And those environments? Any fan of the popping, bright art styles found in Pyre could easily frame any of those wide, sweeping landscapes on their wall. Plus, I don’t know of another title that better captures the essence of cartoon, colored fire.

The game is bursting with lore at every turn, giving players an obscene number of opportunities to study the histories of this creative, Middle Eastern-flavored culture. This may not appease every gamer (expect to do some reading… a lot of reading), but even to the casual visitor to Pyre’s world, understanding the unfolding events can be as simple as hovering the cursor over a highlighted word of interest (I seriously wish more lore-heavy RPGs would do this sort of thing). On the other side of the spectrum, the hardcore historians in the audience are provided a vibrantly detailed in-game book that is gradually filled with pages upon pages of backstory as the player advances through the game.

Failure is not the end in the world of Pyre, but the effects of loss are no less devastating. By the end of your lengthy journey through the Downside, each of the vibrant characters you meet will be different in some way, and this is reflected in both the epilogue and end-game minstrel song that sings over the credits (once again composed by the fabulous Darren Korb). Like the many, many games that have tried this before, Pyre turns into a tale that is truly yours in the end, one that I shan’t forget anytime soon.

For an experience that can harbor so much bitter failure, I believe there can be no greater triumphant success for Supergiant.

 

References used:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/271161/How_Supergiant_Games_aggressively_prototyped_its_way_into_Pyre.php

The Open Road

Posted on - by RaptorFire

Minor spoilers ahead for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

When I think about what makes the Zelda series so popular, what becomes undeniable is its reputation as the gold standard for adventure gaming. I find it hard to believe that there are many boys and girls who haven’t at some point in their younger days dreamed of a life of daring and discovery. Great dragons to slay. A damsel to rescue. Knights in shining armor. It’s a life, at first glance, of unbridled freedom and wonder.

Whatever Nintendo’s faults as a business may be, I believe it’s safe to say that they’ve always known how to make video games. The Zelda titles have been scratching the adventurous itch for gamers for nearly three decades now, with a consistency in quality that most franchises its size would commit cold-blooded murder for. As a die-hard Zelda fan ever since the 64 came out, I am one of the many gamers to have seen first-hand what all the fuss is about, and it’s always a special occasion when Nintendo’s Zelda team reveals a brand new addition to its legacy. I speak no hyperbole when I say every new mainline Zelda release date sees me dropping everything that isn’t work or family on my way out the door to the nearest retailer. So I always expect great things when a new Zelda hits the streets. Earlier this year, we got a particularly interesting one.

Let’s wind the clocks back a bit first: I liked Skyward Sword. I didn’t really get the divisive attitude many of my friends had towards it, but hindsight is 20/20 and I think I can see their point. I still like it. A lot. In my mind, Nintendo managed to achieve its goal of translating motion control into mainstream gaming, something it had been tinkering with since Metroid Prime 3. The controversially linear nature of the game also provided a tightness of focus on its new combat system, fully utilizing the controller’s one-to-one tracking for every weapon and gadget. As much as Zelda boasts of its prowess as an epic adventure, I’ve also seen it as a puzzle game, with all kinds of brain teasers sprinkled throughout each game’s dungeons. Skyward Sword had the bright idea to take this concept and apply it to its combat system as well, with every different enemy pushing you to adopt a new approach and encouraging the player to refrain from waggling the controller carelessly. It was this commitment to design that I respected and enjoyed so much about the game when it came out.

But as most of you know, not everyone shared this point of view. Nintendo may have even been one of those people. Longtime Zelda producer & manager Eiji Aonuma had long been imagining a truly “open-air” Zelda, a title that would truly return the series to its roots as what series creator Shigeru Miyamoto once described as a “miniature garden” for players to explore and discover. But like many projects, imagination can be kept on a leash by time and resources, and the technology just hadn’t quite caught up to the idea yet. Now though, with open world games coming out a dime a dozen each year and the launch of Nintendo’s first high definition console, the Zelda team decided to give the concept a proper go.

So what’d they come up with?

What first struck me about Breath of the Wild was the abrupt lack of any sort of hand-holding system included in the older 3D Zelda games, usually in the form of the almost universally panned “partner” characters present. Here, though, there’s a noticeable absence of any sort of extraneous help, only a quick cutscene, a brief tutorial, a few words from the princess, then the game says “go.”

Which brings me to what strikes me as the title’s greatest strength, and what I believe makes Breath of the Wild a true achievement in gaming. The game absolutely nails the difficult idea of “if you can see it you can touch it” games, a long-pursued concept for every open world game that had come before it. While we’ve had no shortage of wide-open, lively worlds in the past (Skyrim says hi), Breath of the Wild makes a valiant attempt to break any mechanic or concept holding back the player from truly exploring the world at their own pace. Getting sidetracked into finding a skull-shaped cave with goodies in it or spotting something worthwhile after climbing a mountain peak is nothing new to games, but still pretty neat in this one.

Every major tool in the game is obtainable within the first hour of play, a major departure from the Zelda tradition of opening the world gradually through the drip-feeding of items. On the one hand, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of this map (which has been said to be modeled after the Japanese city of Kyoto in terms of its vastness). On the other, the player has few instructions to follow other than “beat the main bad guy, now pick a direction.” In a world demanding more player choice, this is a very good thing. Every situation requires the player to make a decision. Every choice contributes to the player’s growth, tying everything in beautifully to the age-old Zelda theme of getting stronger to beat the aforementioned main bad guy. It’s this execution and understanding of decades of game design that makes Breath of the Wild such a success.

As mentioned above, Zelda has boasted a wide variety of puzzles requiring exploration and critical thinking, but Breath of the Wild tackles this series staple in a bit of a different way. Gone are the traditional Zelda dungeons (STILL NOT SURE I’M OKAY WITH THIS), and in its place are numerous smaller “shrines,” each holding a unique puzzle and uninspired aesthetics (think TRON with weaker music). Each give the player a good look at the wonderful work Nintendo’s level designers can do when it comes to creating brain teasers, and completing each shrine adds a little bit more to your overall strength in-game.

The puzzle-solving isn’t limited to these shrines, however. Nearly every encounter in the game shares a level of problem solving, a concept that seems to take a page from Skyward Sword’s smaller, more focused surface areas. In Breath of the Wild, it’s difficult to go more than a few yards without running into a buried treasure, a secret cavity, or (most likely) an enemy camp filled with some hilarious baddies. In-game enemies may suffer from a bad case of palette swapping, but their interactions with you as the player has been overhauled from previous titles, and serve as some fantastic visual comedy (try knocking the weapon out of their hand and see what happens). The possible approaches to combat have been beefed up as well. You can do what I did through most of my playthrough and shoot a few bad guys from afar before recklessly rushing in with your sword raised. Or take a stealthier approach and stab everyone in their sleep at night before taking all their food. Or dropping a metal box on their head with magnesis. Or lighting the grass on fire, creating an updraft to glide on before diving headfirst on their captain. Or. Or. Or. In this vein, Zelda can get endlessly creative… for the most part. More on that later.

The land is dotted with things to do and people to meet, packed with content and quests ranging from entertaining assaults on an enemy base to throwaway fetch quests to some truly bizarre tasks… maybe not bizarre for Zelda, but still. You have to draw some kind of line when a game asks you to cross-dress as a woman, break into a desert-dweller’s home and eavesdrop on a bar-goer in order to learn a password into an adult-only shop (not that kind, you creep.) So.

There are problems. A game with the number of framerate drops and sudden freezes that Breath of the Wild suffers from should not be a prefect 10, no matter who you are. And while the game strips away a ton of the weakest aspects of open-world gaming, it sours the dish by throwing in a few bad ingredients of its own. The game’s stamina bar, which dictates nearly every action you take, is just far too anemic at the start of the experience to be terribly useful. What was once a clever bit of problem solving spice added in Skyward Sword now becomes a frustrating shackle for the player without first upgrading the stamina bar (at the expense of upgrading health… by the way.) The number of times I’ve been unable to climb up a cliffside because of my character’s poor endurance is just a tad irritating. Oh, and when it was raining, climbing was impossible anyway since the surface lost all traction too, so there’s that.

Arguably worst of all is the game’s new weapon durability system. You’ve probably heard about it by now… every weapon and shield in the game is now limited to a number of uses before breaking. I can understand Nintendo’s desire to include a wider variety of weapons into this game (which does make the experience better), but the overall longevity of some of these weapons is simply unacceptable. I had more than one encounter where I was forced to burn three weapons in order to kill one dude. THREE.

On the one hand, this does force players to use weapons and tactics out of their comfort zone and get used to improving their skills with an item they wouldn’t normally use. But therein lies the kicker: force players. It doesn’t seem quite right to promise a world of absolute freedom in almost every way, only to yank the player’s enjoyment away just because their favorite weapon broke after five hits (a couple weapons actually last that briefly, yes). The entire combat experience for me ended up ranging from grudging acceptance of the new system and planning around it, to frustrating dullness as I would wail on an enemy and break one weapon… after another… after another.

And yet, despite all that…

The result of the game’s achievements can be felt within every circle of the gaming community. Breath of the Wild has received critical acclaim across the board, tremendous financial success worldwide, and responses from fans that have ranged from over the moon with gratitude to… well, let’s call them “passionate.”

Despite my initial apprehension of the many series’ conventions broken at first, I feel like this title is really where Zelda as a series was always headed. Zelda had always been influenced by Miyamoto’s memories of his childhood exploring caves and hiking through the woods. I think it’s safe to say that the team once under his supervision has truly achieved both a gold standard for open-world gaming and his vision of introducing players to the joys and wonders one experiences on the open road.

With Breath of the Wild, we discover that it’s a road well worth taking.

References:
https://w w w .youtube. com/watch?v=vLMGrmf4xaY
https://web.archive.org/web/20110831131810/http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/hist_zelda/index.html