Good morning again. This consistency must be scaring you. Don't worry, it's scaring me too. Shh... Sorry, did that get weird? At present, PAX has just ramped up and Blizzard is debuting it's latest cash grab in the form of a tradable card game for tablets and...otherwise, I would assume. I don't know, I have it muted. More on that tomorrow, probably, as I already feel a rant brewin'. Today we talk about...
I don’t know how many times I’ve walked/driven/parkoured straight into a wall or off the side of a building because of an objective marker. Little glowing bastards. Like a moth to a flame, or a drunkard to a bar, we blindly follow bright yellow or blue or red flashing lights that tell us where to go. Taunting us as they hover in the air near our goal point. At their best, objective markers can give us an idea of where to go within the ever-growing game maps being thrown at us by developers. At their worst, they kill immersion and force us to run down the same alley seven times, because how the fuck am I supposed to know that I need to cut through a sewer to arrive at my goal.
I finally played through the entirety of Deus Ex: Human Revolution recently, and (spoiler alert, by the way) I still couldn’t tell you whether there are three or four regions of the China portion of the game. A map twice visited. I’d just follow the yellow and blue markers, and after some trial and error, I’d arrive at my goal. Certain areas of the map managed to burn themselves into my head after a period of time, but I don’t really know the city in any real way. Take it back a few years, and I can tell you the entire floor plan of Resident Evil 1 or 2, recite the regions of every Zelda map up to and including A Link to the Past, and Yokosuka from Shenmue hangs in my memory like a town I grew up in. None of the latter utilized objective markers, and as a result, I was more immersed in the game world.
 |
| Then I fell into the sewer. |
I’m not saying that objective markers aren’t necessary. It would takes years to play through Grand Theft Auto or Saint’s Row if you had to stop to look at streets signs every block with the police actively trying to kill you. (Saint’s Row wins that war, by the way, with their racing-game-inspired turn markers) But a game like Deus Ex could have benefited from elimination of objective markers, thereby requiring the player to read mission descriptions carefully and study the environment to find their goal.
The only explanation I can think of for use of these things aside from something as simple as “It’s just what we do now,” is a matter of difficulty. The whole game industry seems to be in a race to dumb itself down fast enough to keep up with the atrophied minds of the social media generation. “You mean I actually have to read things and use intuition and situational awareness to find my way around this carefully crafted digital world that took thousands of collective man hours to construct? LAME! I’ve gotta speed run this bitch before the new CoD comes out!”
I don’t think it would be a stretch for game designers to include something like objective markers as at least a toggle option. Or to go a little out of their way during development so that goal areas could be found using subtle clues in the mission outline (ala Shenmue). This isn’t simply a matter of “how convenient is it for the player,” but a matter of immersion. The golden goose of game creation.
Presently, millions of dollars are being spent to develop new, shiny, expensive hardware in a bid to create the next generation of immersion. Oculus Rift, next gen haptics, 3D cards that can render the puss inside of a blackhead on the face of the villain holding you at knife point. All of this effort, when something as simple as taking a glowing yellow icon off of the screen could push us forward by taking us back.
And I’m one failed parkour attempt away from another broken controller, so let’s get this done quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment