The pile of shame is a very familiar concept among us enthusiast gamers.
Trying to keep up with everything that comes out these days is more or
less impossible, and yet it becomes all too easy to spend a few bucks
to add a game to your collection despite not knowing when you'll get to
it. My pile is truly embarrassing, but dealing with it has
exposed some insights about the assumptions that game designers
incorporate into their games that aren't readily apparent.
This thought entered my head while going through my PS3 collection and getting back after Heavenly Sword. After trying the demo and seeing the spectacular style from the guys at Ninja Theory I jumped on the chance to grab the game at a decent price last fall. I didn't get more than an hour into the game over that first year of ownership, though, and picking it back up, I realized why.
Much has been written on the various cinematic evolutionary paths in games so I'm going to concentrate on one in particular here. Heavenly Sword was clearly designed in the vein of an epic ancient war picture, and in the name of good character development and good tutorial practices, the game starts you off with a pretty basic battle to get you acclimated to the basic beat 'em up gameplay. The entire tutorial philosophy, while good in spirit, fosters quite a bit of frustration, as the game waits minutes during playable segments to layer in gameplay elements that are necessary for success. As a result, the game feels awkward, pedestrian, and repetitive at the outset, a very bad combination.
I've laid into lengthy passive introductory segments, but active segments, when done like this, can be even worse. If the real game doesn't "get going" until an hour or two into the playable segment of the game, the designer is walking a serious tightrope. While slow and gradual builds from a gameplay standpoint might make sense in theory, a very slow build might give one the impression, as Heavenly Sword gave me, that the game had already started and the good stuff wasn't coming anytime soon.
Seeing as games are inherently an active form of entertainment, motivation as it comes to playing a game versus seeing a movie in terms of motivation works in reverse. In the theater if a movie is not working for you, you must take the initiative to walk out of the theater. In games, it works the other way and you need to muster up the motivation to keep going. For me, that motivation was nowhere to be found, and in the name of well-paced cinematic character development and not overloading the player with gameplay mechanics right out of the gate, two very good ends, the game found itself shelved for a year despite my already having paid for the game in full.
Developers clearly use that $60 entrance fee as an implication that they've got a bit of slack to do whatever they're going to do. In the aforementioned movie comparison, when you pay your money to see a movie in the theater, and it starts off with a long chunk of character exposition, you don't walk out of the theater, do you? It seems reasonable to assume that players won't spend $60 on a game and give up on it after an hour if it's not what they expected. And yet, that's exactly what I did, even after enjoying the demo. The money spent wasn't really a concern to me, not with so many other games staring me in the face, from other games on the pile of shame to timeless classics that I'm always up for. Before decrying this as a problem only affecting the affluent hardcore, consider the extended draw of Madden and Guitar Hero to your run-of-the-mill gamer, or any of the other numerous entertainment choices out there. If a game isn't working for the player from the very beginning, there's very little motivation to keep going.
What I found once I picked the game back up a year later was that once the protagonist has the game's namesake and the full beat 'em up mechanic has finally been introduced, the gameplay is actually pretty fun and only made more impactful by a really top-flight presentation, which takes the best elements out of its cinematic influences and incorporating them to allow for a new split-screen take on the "playable cut scene." This actually works really well, and after a thoroughly enjoyable session, I ended up kind of disappointed that I hadn't got to this game earlier.
Crafting a game out of the image of a film is a fine ideal, and I certainly don't object to games that are willing to go the extra mile to make cinematic cut scenes engaging and impactful. However, when it comes to playable segments, cinematic ideals need to come second to making sure that the gameplay passes the smell test from the first second onward. This is where a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 wildly succeeded, and Heavenly Sword failed. Fortunately, I did go back to the game and I'm finding a lot to like, but in an age of so many options competing for gaming time, designers might not have as much leeway these days as they might think.
