Games I Love: Skies of Arcadia

I think it’s time for what will be a recurring feature here on Ask Me About Grim Fandango: I’m going to gush about games I love and why I love them.

 

My absolute favorite game of all time, bar none, is Skies of Arcadia. Originally released for the Dreamcast and later re-released for the Gamecube, Skies of Arcadia was an oddity. Final Fantasy VII arrived 3 years ago and brought about an era of darker, moodier RPGs. At the time, developers were trying to capitalize on the trend by making characters with tragic pasts and enough angst to choke an elephant.

Skies of Arcadia balked at that. The world of Arcadia is bright and cheery. The protagonists are unflinchingly optimistic. The music is upbeat, and even the poverty-stricken sections of the Evil Empire’s capital have life to them. Skies of Arcadia remembers something that far too many games forget – you’re supposed to be having fun, and it wants to have fun with you.

It’s certainly not perfect. Random battles happen far too often, even in the fixed remake. The combat isn’t as deep as it could be. The story is incredibly predictable, and some of the characters are horribly 2-dimensional.

But the game has its tone down perfectly. Like its hero, Skies of Arcadia understands that moping for more than a minute or two is obnoxious. It decides that rather than dwelling on the negative, it’s going to accentuate the positive. And its charm is infectious. It’s impossible to listen to the music swelling and see the protagonists grinning and not feel better yourself. And that’s why I love Skies of Arcadia.

A Case for Linearity

A growing trend I keep finding as I converse with other gamers is a belief that linearity in games is inherently bad – that being linear is automatically worse than being nonlinear. It’s particularly frustrating, particularly because I can’t have a reasonable argument about it. Whenever someone begins talking about linearity, they immediately jump to the conclusion that the developers are trying to dictate the way they play.

I’ve never been a big fan of nonlinear games; whenever a new sandbox game launches, I think that I haven’t given them a fair shake, I try it, and I end up disappointed. I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something, as the rest of the world goes absolutely nuts over the latest Grand Theft Auto, or Red Dead Redemption, or whatever it is this month. I really want to enjoy them as much as everyone else seems to, but I just don’t get the appeal. After some thought, I managed to pull together exactly why I dislike them.

When someone praises a game for being “nonlinear”, they mean that the game is a wide-open world that lets the player do anything they could possibly want! Huzzah! No restrictions, no obnoxious rules getting in the way. Just run around, shoot people, run them over, and go wild! Unfortunately, that seems to be the entire appeal. And while I can get behind that for a short time, it gets dull after about an hour. At that point, I start asking, “Okay, so now what?” And there usually isn’t a very good answer.

Nonlinearity also cripples the ability to tell a good story. When the player can decide to drop the plot to screw around for a few hours, the pacing gets thrown out the window. Giving the player so much control over the protagonist’s actions creates a massive mood dissonance. Niko Bellic of GTA IV talks in almost every cutscene about how he hates being forced to kill, and how the war was a terrible slaughterhouse, and then as soon as the player gets control, they can kick a guy out of his car and run over pedestrians like bowling pins.

Admittedly, part of my complaint comes from my emphasis on story and characterization. I adore games as a storytelling medium, so giving the player the ability to destroy the story being told rubs me the wrong way. But I’d rather the developers take away some of my options in order to tell a good story than give me complete freedom and nothing to do with it.

Illusion of Choice

One of the biggest issues I run into with far too many games is what I call the Illusion of Choice. When a game offers you the choice between two options that are terribly unequal, the choice might as well not exist. If I offer you the choice between 100 dollars and 100 yen, I haven't really given you a choice at all.

Lately, I've been making my way through Dragon Age: Origins, and I've been meeting this problem in spades. Your party in DA consists of four characters, each of which is one of three classes. Theoretically, you can choose any of the eight (nine, if you include the DLC) main characters to make up this party. In reality, you're going to need a Warrior who can take hits, and Alistair tends to be better than the other two; a Mage to do magic damage, and only Morrigan fits that bill; a Mage to heal and buff, and only Wynne can do that; and someone to do physical damage, which means the rest of the cast. The player character can be built to fill any of those slots, but it only frees you to take one other person. The game gives you the choice of eight, but at least two of those are all but required.

Bioshock suffers from a similar problem. While you have the choice of filling your slots with any plasmids you wish, one of them had better be Electro Bolt. It stuns enemies, it electrocutes anyone standing in water (and in Rapture, there are a lot of puddles), it opens doors, and it drops security drones better than anything else. On the other hand, slotting Cyclone Trap is a waste of a slot. It doesn't do enough damage or provide enough control to warrant filling one of your few plasmid slots with it. If you need to lay traps, you can draw enemies into puddles for Electro Bolt, or draw them into an oil slick and use Incinerate, or fire trap bolts from the crossbow.

Generally, Illusion of Choice tends to appear because the developers misjudged the usefulness of certain tactics or abilities. In Dragon Age, because mages can provide damage, control, and healing in ways that no other class can replicate, they become the best choice for party members. In Bioshock, Cyclone Trap doesn't provide anything that other plasmids or weapons can't do better.

The answer to avoiding the Illusion of Choice is to ensure that all options are equally useful. This tends to require a lot of analysis, as the more choices you have, the greater the chance that one will be more valuable than the others.

The alternative is to not allow choices at all. Please don't do that.

Criteria

For the past few months, my comrades and I have been working to remake the City of Heroes pen-and-paper RPG. It was originally started by Eden Studios, but something fell through (I don't know the specifics; the license, maybe?), and the project was scrapped. They did release the quick play kit they had demoed at Origins; we downloaded it and were disappointed at how clunky it felt. We decided to salvage Eden's good ideas and convert their foundation into a game that better matched the feel of the MMO.


As I've been working on this, I've started to get a feel for some of the necessary qualities a game designer needs. I'll admit that this list is skewed towards pen-and-paper design, as my mind is still in that frame, but I think it works for all mediums well enough.

1. A game designer needs to be creative.
This one is a little obvious. To be a game designer, you have to have a idea to design around. Where I see a lot of other hopeful designers trip up is in only being creative in the big picture. It's not enough to have a pitch for the broad strokes; you have to be able to fill in the cracks, especially because you need to be making those cracks. As soon as you have an idea, you need to shoot as many holes into it as possible, and then you need to fill in those holes.

2. A game designer needs to be analytical.
The greatest tool a game designer has is the rest of the medium. Hundreds of games have come before you, and they all had strengths and faults. In any genre there are fantastic games and terrible games, and a game designer needs to be able to tell the difference between them. Once you know what makes games in a particular genre good, you need to be able to find a way to adapt them into your work.

3. A game designer needs to be able to argue.
Whenever my team comes up with an idea, the first thing we do is try to break it. When we received suggestions we didn't like, I immediately asked, "What does this do for us that we don't have? Why do we want that? Why don't we?" Every idea should have to fight for its life, and a game designer needs to be able to both support and attack it. Nothing should be added to a game that hasn't be viciously debated and torn to shreds.

4. A game designer needs to be able to do math.
Game mechanics can be broken down into systems of equations and mathematical models. A game designer needs to be able to model a potential change and fully understand the consequences. For a while, my team tried to fake this by playtesting extensively to get a handle on the effects of every change we wanted to make. Eventually, I realized that we'd either have to spend every waking minute testing every possible situation to make sure we hadn't broken anything, or I'd have to run the numbers.

5. A game designer needs to be able to work in a team.
Game design isn't a solo job. No one can properly debate with themselves, and no one will be able to see every potential situation. Working in a group means that every member can provide something different, and more eyes and minds on a project will catch problems and find solutions that one man can't.

So there you have it.

Ask Away

Hello. My name is Brandon, and I'm an armchair game designer.

In modern nerd society, everyone wants to be a game designer. Everyone has a pitch, everyone has a dream, and everyone knows that they're going to explain their brilliant game to Nintendo or Bioware or Infinity Ward and the listener is going to place their hand against their forehead and say, "Oh deary me! You, sir, are a genius. Our studio has been searching for someone like you! Please, come to our offices and think up more earth-shattering ideas."


I'm not going to say that I don't have one of those pitches. But, I'm not here to talk about that. I want to talk about game design in general. Issues that many games run into, terrible decisions that too many games make, and games that I think do things right. I'll run over games I love, games I hate, and the reasons behind my feelings. I'll talk about what I think a game designer should be, and what I think games to aspire to be.

So go ahead. Ask me about Grim Fandango.