Traversal is the subject of the day, and I was recently reminded in the course of playing the eternally awkwardly named Bomb Rush Cyberfunk just how much I appreciate games with a strong traversal focus, that find a way to make the mere act of getting from point A to point B fun and interesting, not just the act of slaughtering the monsters that have taken up residence at point B. And I fear traversal is one of many things that is frequently overlooked in the smashed together genre smorgasbord that is the big-name overly scoped triple-A experience these days.

Back in retro times when genres were more distinct traversal was an entire subset of genres. You had platformers of course, your Mario and your Sonic where obviously it’s fine if you want to stop and murder everything you pass but getting all the way to the right of the starting point is what actually progresses you and where most of the skill challenge lies. I have a personal specific fondness for those old games where you’re flying or travelling down a linear tunnel and have to dodge obstacles as they fly at you. Like the bonus minigame from Sonic 2, or Skyroads. I have fond memories of playing an Amiga game from a magazine coverdisk along these lines in the early 90s that I seem to remember was called Technozone. And I’d be gratified if anyone else knows what the hell I’m taking about because Google sure as hell doesn’t.

In slightly more recent times the first king of traversal in a 3D open world setting was, for me, Spider-Man 2, the movie adaptation on the PS2 and Gamecube. I could web swing around that city all day. Something I got no satisfaction from in later Spider-Man sandboxes like Web of Shadows and the Amazing Spider-Mans, largely because traversal in those was usually just “point in a direction and hold down the web swing button.” And the essence of fun traversal in video games is that it has to be a skill challenge, because what makes it satisfying to pull off is the possibility of completely screwing it up. In Spider-Man 2 and, gratifyingly, the recent Spider-Man games, if you run out of buildings or mistime a change of direction then you’re going to leave primary coloured smears all over the brickwork.

Superhero sandboxes are usually the go-to for fun traversal in my experience, games like Infamous, Prototype, Just Cause and Gravity Rush have all found their own ways to make it fun, but even Grand Theft Auto and its imitators make traversal interesting. The challenge in GTA traversal was to find-stroke-steal a car and drive it to the mission objective without dinging someone’s brake light and getting forced off the road by gun-toting twitchy cops. Feels like I’ve played a lot of triple-A open world games in the recent age, for some reason Horizon: Zero West is what’s currently leaping to mind, where traversal consists mostly of lining yourself up with the objective marker and pushing forwards.
Without interesting traversal, you end up with what I tend to think of as “commute” games, where you’re just arbitrarily obliged to hike across the map in between the actual gameplay. Gotham Knights would be another perfect example. It’s the sure fire sign of a game having gone in an open world direction purely for the status it brings and not because they’ve given any cocking thought as to what the open world actually adds to the experience.

Little surprise then that we’re seeing the indie sphere doing what it does best and filling the genre void that triple-A leaves behind, with such traversal-focused games as Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Exo One and Neon White bubbling to the surface in recent years. Actually, speaking of Neon White, my interest in video game traversal seems to be related to my growing interest in speedrunning culture. Those nutty shitheads found a way to turn Quake 1 into a skill traversal game as long as you’re willing to learn how to jump on the exact right frame 9,000 times for the one time you get a 0.01 second boost from a random enemy bullet.

It is worth considering in the age of professional streaming that, as well as being fun to play, skillful traversal is a hell of a lot more interesting to watch. I’m not about to start Quake speedrunning myself anytime soon, I used up all my wrist muscle memory on masturbation techniques.

But let’s bring things back around to the start. Hypothetically, could we add the element of fun traversal to Starfield and Baldurs Gate 3? Well, I’d say Baldurs Gate 3 gets a hall pass out of this. Let’s not forget that context can take the place of challenge and catharsis, in accordance with my three C’s theory of game appeal. While the mere act of travelling through Baldur’s Gate 3’s world isn’t much to write to your DM about at best and kinda frustrating at worst, especially when I’m trying to get the whole party to sneak through an owlbear cave, but the thrust of that game is a sense of constant discovery. You’re constantly making decisions on what path to take next and stumbling into little random encounters, so it rarely feels like hiking across needlessly long distances to get to the stuff that matters.

But then there’s Starfield, and oh goodness, if there’s any game that clearly wasn’t willing to put the effort into making traversal fun. You can tell, because they gave up. You basically go to places exclusively by fast travelling from the menu. And perhaps that’s understandable, because Starfield is also going for a generally realistic tone, and if there’s a way to make realistic space travel interesting on a moment to moment level, it certainly escapes me. Oh sure, space can have grandeur, you can drink in the sublime majesty of the cosmos, but when you gotta get somewhere in it, all you’re doing is lining up with the objective and pressing forwards again. Because there’s nothing in space. That’s why it’s called space.

You could add some asteroids for the player to dodge around, but it’s not a very interesting challenge. What will I do now?? Oh, I guess I’ll move to this other bit of infinite space that doesn’t have an asteroid in it. No, I can’t pick on Starfield for its lack of fun traversal in the space travel. So I’ll pick on it for the lack of it in the planet exploring, instead.

I found some low-key, contemplative entertainment in surveying planets for specific features, but most of what that entailed was walking across kilometres of randomly generated rocky landscape, sometimes bunny hopping if it was one of those planets with fun gravity, and it wasn’t long before I was sorely hankering for a ground vehicle. The one thing you didn’t rip off from No Man’s Sky and probably should’ve. I wanted a motorbike or a hovercraft or a little Mars rover strapped to each foot. And at the risk of over-scoping the game even further, maybe some kind of Tony Hawk style system that awards you for doing sweet jumps off of craters. And because it wouldn’t be a fun challenge without the possibility of failure, maybe if you faceplanted spectacularly into the rocks it’d leave a mysterious bloodstained dent for the local primitive aliens to base a religion around.

But something I’ve brought up many times in various different avenues is that Bioshock has, in my view, the best beginning of any game ever. I mean that entirely without hyperbole, so understand how significant an accolade that is considering the thousands of games I’ve played in my life. Shame it can’t keep the momentum going, but statistically only about 20% of players actually finish games, so a good beginning goes a long way. And the best approach to take when kicking things off to ensure maximum player engagement has multiple schools of thought.

A surprisingly popular method is to make us watch nineteen legally mandated unskippable company idents, and then tick a little box that says, while we don’t want to have our identity stolen, we’re not averse to giving the publisher the opportunity to do so as long as it means we can shoot some monsters for a bit. That aside, one school of thought states that a game’s opening should have a slow burn to let us gently sink into the shoes of the protagonist and learn about their place in the world, such as in Fallout 3 or Assassin’s Creed 2 which both literally begin with the main character being born, and that’s about as immersed in a character one can possibly get.

The diametric opposite viewpoint believes that a game should kick off with an exciting action sequence to immediately seize the attention of the easily distracted dumb dumbs. Mid-story if necessary. Many, many games have done that thing where they start with a flash forward to the big action scene in the third act before rewinding back to the actual start of the plot. I kinda hate that, because it’s immediately killing suspense. We now know exactly where the plot’s going to end up and how high the peak of the action is willing to go. I prefer to be surprised. Imagine if, at the start of Saint’s Row, there was a flash forward to Saints Row 4, and you saw yourself as the president fighting aliens before suddenly getting dragged right back to slightly shonky crime sandboxing. You’d have been confused, at best.

Another popular approach is to begin in a vehicle travelling to the game’s main setting, pioneered of course by the opening train ride in the original Half-Life and the roughly ninety billion games that start with flying in on a helicopter with the side doors left rather irresponsibly wide open. The upshots of this method include being able to establish the setting with a nice sightseeing tour of where we’re going to spend the rest of the game, and to create a sense of isolation when the vehicle we’re in finally drops us off or, more often than not, crashes. There’s a related technique popular in horror games like Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 7 and Blair Witch that I like to call the “forest walk”, where the game starts with a relatively peaceful hike through a forest, creating a sense that the hero is unwittingly getting further and further from safety with every step.

And part of what makes the start of Bioshock so effective is that it employs every single one of the techniques I’ve just listed. Except for the flash forward thing. But it does open with a bit of attention-grabbing action. It starts with a plane crash, but one that you more hear than see. It stays rigidly fixed in the first person perspective from the word go for immersion’s sake, and spoiler alert, the plot has a little bit of unreliable narration going on, so we get one shot of the back of an airline seat before there’s a blackout in your character’s memories, catastrophic noises, screaming, and the next thing you know you’re underwater, surrounded by sinking debris, desperately fighting your way to the surface for air and bursting up, gasping, amid an ocean wreathed in flames.

But then, the tone flips on a dime. You wonder why your character isn’t moving for a few moments until you experimentally touch the mouse and realise you’re now in control. And this is very deliberate. It’s why I love this as a game intro, because it does things that are only possible with interactive narrative. There’s a reason why the game doesn’t automatically steer our character out of the wreckage and up the lighthouse steps. Because whipping the leash off at this point is intended to convey the same thing as the infinite ocean stretching to the horizon, the total absence of other survivors, and the remnants of the plane still sinking below the waves – the sense of being abandoned, even by the guiding hand of prerendered narrative. The moment of desperate survival has passed. You’ve no resources, no one’s coming to help, what now, twattypants?

And in this moment of total bewilderment, we gravitate to the one thing that represents stability: a lighthouse extruding from the waves. We leave to one side the question of what a lighthouse is doing here without a crumb of dry land in sight, because we can tell from our protagonist’s laboured breathing that he is in dire need of a towel and some hot cocoa. But we don’t find that once we get inside the lighthouse, do we. No, the lights pop on and suddenly we’re getting disapprovingly stared at by a huge statue holding out a slogan on a banner as if daring us to disagree. And that quickly the tone has flipped again. Now we’re not a desperate lonely survivor, we’re an interloper descending an immaculately decorated rabbit hole. We’re herded into a bathysphere and thus begins the “vehicle ride towards the main setting” portion of the intro.

But hold your horses, because first a projector screen needs to drop and Andrew Ryan needs to do his impeccably written opening monologue. Is a man not entitled to the et of his cetera and all that. And I can only imagine what must be going through the mind of the poor sod we’re controlling at this point. He’s just narrowly escaped death, he’s soaking wet and freezing cold, his mind is fizzing with fear, adrenaline and confusion, and now he’s getting bombarded with philosophical rhetoric by a dude who comes across like a 1950’s girlfriend’s dad we’re meeting for the first time and evidently failing to impress.

But just as we might get completely overwhelmed, go into a foetal position and cry yes, fine, I’ll become an objectivist, just stop yelling at me, the projector screen whips away and we are awestruck by our first sight of Rapture. An impossible city on the sea bed, glittering with neon signs and lighted windows – oh look there’s a whale. See, the beauty of the Bioshock intro is that it’s such a beautifully paced rollercoaster of feelings. Explosion, danger, desperation, then strange calm, sinking despair, loneliness, then confusion, getting yelled at by a bloke who looks like Walt Disney, then dumbstruck awe, and we’re not even done, the tone settles down as the bathysphere arrives at the station, then bam, horror and violence again with the first sploicer encounter, then reassurance when we first contact Atlas, a bit of intrigue as we explore the first area and see the discarded picket signs – the sine wave between exciting action and quiet contemplation continues and we are very firmly off on the right foot. Pity the game can’t keep that foot glued on for the whole runtime, but that’s what happens when you peak early, I suppose

So, I challenge you, commenters, can anyone think of a better beginning of a video game, now we’ve established I can’t? I think Bioshock Infinite’s up there, mainly because it’s basically the same sequence beat for beat, just moving in a different geographical direction. It’s possible that it overdoes things a bit. I preferred it when I was a silent protagonist. I don’t like how Bioshock Infinite’s main character, Booker Dewitt, keeps feeling the need to comment on stuff. Yes, it’s a city in the clouds, very impressive, I didn’t need to hear Booker Dewitt making impressed noises to know when to be impressed, I’m not a cocking sitcom audience.

And to the game’s credit there were plenty of chances for Mortimer to wave his astonishingly large and turgid Deception bonus, as well as opportunities to live up to his reputation for banging anything warmer than room temperature. The first such opportunity came weirdly quickly in the form of that one angry lizard lady party member. You know, the one on the box art with the pointy nose. I forget her name – which is completely in character for Mortimer – but I think she started getting warm for his form because of all the times the two of them had to violently murder their way out of a situation. Perhaps under the mistaken impression that he’d intended things to go that way. Whatever the case, their talk was getting flirty and Mortimer never says no to a nice bit o’ strange, so before long he was getting dragged from his bedroll one night to see to the missus.

Naturally I’d left adult content on because, pff, I like tits, why lie? And watching the act play out brought on a bit of a game critic moment. As I watched my protagonist semi-explicitly perform cunnilingus on a muscular lady with skin like a slightly underripe banana, I asked myself, what is actually the point of this?

Now, rest assured this isn’t coming from a place of prudishness. If anything, the sex scene wasn’t titillating enough. Video game graphics still struggle with getting two in-engine models to physically interact in a way that doesn’t come across off-putting. There’s not enough give and squishiness to the physicality. Even kissing and shaking hands looks a bit off, so a full on sex scene looks like two mannequins jostling around next to each other in the back of a speeding truck. I think it’s only the Witcher 3 I’ve seen manage to bring it off. I mean, pull it off. I mean, oh forget it, move on.

I assume some amount of titillation was intended because when the pointy lady first got her kit off the camera does a slightly pervy track up her body, yeah, sorry Matt, you’re probably gonna have to pixelate a lot of this. But there was no use framing it like it was a big reveal, I’d already seen all my party members naked by unequipping their gear out of impish curiosity. Not that that was very titillating, either, ‘cos it was a completely non-sexual context. It’d be like getting turned on by seeing a vagina in a gynaeocologist’s office.

Recent high level western RPGs like Baldurs Gate 3 and Cyberpunk have taken a rather unflinching approach to nudity. “Yes,” the character creation page seems to say. “Here’s your character’s giggle zone. We’re all grown ups here, everyone’s got one, it’s nothing silly, it’s part of the human condition. Now, how many inches do you want?” I can’t imagine it ever mattering, game, but I suppose I would’ve said the same about micro managing eyebrow distance, so fine, seventeen. You have completely spoiled the mystique, though, so don’t expect me to be impressed when you whip it out later in a sex scene all coyly framed and moodily lit.

No, obviously sex in these games serves a purpose beyond porn. If you want porn, just search online. I hear there’s some very industrious fellows who know how to extract game models and do some jolly creative things with them in Blender. And then you don’t have to play through hours and hours of an RPG selecting the right dialog options to see it. The other purpose that a sex scene serves beyond letting us get our nasty little rocks off is to pay off a developing relationship between characters that we’re invested in.

Much as the sex scene in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time does, as discussed in my previous video on the subject. But that didn’t apply, here. Old lizardy-chops had jumped fairly rapidly from angry contempt to wanting to be a sexhaver. Maybe that was the point, she’s from a race that flirts by threatening to cut each other’s goolies off, but still, when I was watching the knobbing scene, I didn’t feel any sense of satisfaction from a character arc getting paid off. I mostly felt a sense of proxy embarrassment for everyone involved.

Even back when the flirty dialogue had started, something hadn’t felt right. When you make camp and you chinwag with your party members around the fire while they’re dressed in their pyjamas, the flirtation always seemed to be happening with this unspoken vibe of inevitability. Like it was a given that I was prowling around for some action. And that led me to wonder if letting us knob our party members in western RPGs is something being included more for the sake of tradition than because it’s actually justified?

I suppose this is another thing we can blame on Bioware. I wanna say it was Mass Effect that first won itself some headlines by including full on sex scenes with party members, and its stablemate Dragon Age of course, and now it almost feels like knobbing the party members is now expected in certain kinds of RPGs. Yes, the Witcher did it as well, but that was always justified as part of Geralt’s personality, i.e., a lonely, horny git. It’s party member shagging combined with blank slate protagonist that doesn’t work for me. I can’t get invested in a romance if I know one participant could’ve been replaced by literally anyone else as long as they took the right dialog options. I discussed that in my previous video on romance, too, sort of takes something away from the shaggable characters to know that they don’t really have any preferences of their own. That they’ll always be physically attracted and down to clown with you no matter how much time you spent in the character creator making yourself look like Pete Postlethwaite with a hunchback.

That’s the other thing, it feels reductive that the only way to express that you’re in good with the character is to let you shag them. There’s another party member in Baldur’s Gate 3, the wizard bloke, and one of his campfire friendship building scenes involves having a bit of a magic mind meld. And the game invites you to project a mental image to him to convey your intentions. But I’m pretty sure the only options it gives you are “picture yourself kissing him full on the mouth” or “picture yourself kicking him in the nuts.” And I was like, couldn’t I just imagine the two of us having a nice drink and a chat? Surely the full scope of human relationships has more of a spectrum than shag or hate. I’m perfectly capable of liking, respecting, being interested in, wanting to hang out with, even loving people I have no interest in shagging.

“So don’t shag them, Yahtz.” What’s that, Mr. Socky? “It’s called a role playing game for a reason. You could always just not take the shag option if you don’t think it would be in character. I’m pretty sure there were, like, nine opportunities in the runup to shagging the lizard lady where Mortimer could take the dialog option where he suddenly comes over all coy and slams on the brakes. And throughout the game there’re plenty of ways to express esteem for a character without also implying you want to jiggle their naughties. If you want, you could play through Baldur’s Gate 3 as a prudish little schoolmarm who flinches at the very mention of naughty oscillation.”

See, this is the thing, Mr. Socky, I’m not sure you can. It’s the dialog trees. Dialog options convey things about a character even when they don’t actually say them. I always liked how Lucasarts adventure games would use dialog trees to make the protagonist come across as scatterbrained and indecisive for a gag. Like you’d click on the option to say something brave and defiant in the face of danger, but the character would only make some frightened squeaking noises because they chickened out at the last moment. And taking the “I think we should just be friends” option is kinda tainted when just under it you can clearly see the option to say “Bite down on this wooden spoon, baby, I’m coming in dry.” Because even if I don’t say it, I know it at least crossed my mind to say it. So no matter how I try to play them, the protagonists of these games always come across like massive horndogs.

I suppose that gets to the bottom of why the romance in games like Baldur’s Gate 3 just isn’t clicking the pilot light for me, anymore. Maybe it works for some people and I shouldn’t grouse about something that is after all just a bit of non-essential fun on the side, but I generally take the stance that it’s valid to criticise optional content because work had to go into it that could’ve been spent on something else. There’s a sequence in Mass Effect Andromeda where, through an exhaustively circuitous series of fetch quests, you can organize a team building movie night with your party members. And you know what, that scene with the lot of them just bullshitting on a couch did a hell of a lot more to make me engage with them as characters than any of their individual knobbing sessions.

Goes to show there’s a lot more interesting things you can do with characters when you’re not just treating them like sex fruit machines that eventually dispense a knobbing scene if you keep pulling the right levers. Use your imagination. Maybe the relationship track could culminate with a scene where the two of us go to the bank to take out a joint business loan. Or to the housewares shop to buy more wooden spoons.

Well, just to make all our positions clear, here’s specifically what I mean when I refer to a game as a JRPG: A narrative-focussed game with an anime visual style and at the very least the common RPG trappings of levelling up, character stats and equippable gear. With a protagonist who’s something of a blank slate teaming up with a number of well-established NPC party members and a menu driven combat system of some kind. I’m content to classify Final Fantasy XVI as more of a hack and slash or spectacle fighter than an RPG if everyone else is.

And of course there’ll be a grandiose plot that will almost inevitably end with teenagers using the power of friendship to kill God. That’s a pretty vintage observation of mine, but it still surprises me how it continues to be relevant. Now, as noted in previous episodes, I’m no fan of JRPGs, I’ve only personally completed four of the buggers: Earthbound, Paper Mario 2, Persona 4 and Persona 5. And it’s weird how it’s not just that they all end with using the power of friendship to kill God; all four of them also have a bit near the end where God almost kills the party but then the heroes imagine and/or solicit help from every NPC they’ve met over the course of the game and their combined positive energy gives them the power to prevail. Quite literally using the power of friendship, y’see.

But as I say, these are the only four I’ve finished myself. I know the endings of other JRPGs from watching Youtube videos and general cultural osmosis and I’m aware that there are outliers, some that only loosely fit the description of “teenagers using the power of friendship to kill God.” Chrono Trigger’s main villain is Lavos, which is more of an all-powerful destructive beast than a God, but I’d argue the distinction between “God” and “most powerful being known to exist” is more semantics than anything else. And the heroes don’t gather the power of all their friends at the end to kill it, although success only coming because of everyone working together is a prevailing theme, especially in that whole sequence where Crono stone cold dies and his allies have to work to bring him back.

So even if they’re not literally using the power of friendship as in the four examples I’ve played, there’s usually some lip service given to it. Usually someone will at least mention that it is their friends that give them their strength, or emphasis will be placed on the villain being a lonely figure trying to impose their personal will without caring about others. And I suppose I bring all this up to express my disappointment that JRPGs seem to constantly fall back on this one set of themes.

Don’t worry, I’ll supply my own counter-argument with this sock puppet on my hand. “Oh Yahtz, surely what you’re describing here are fairly universal storytelling themes, some of which are an inevitability of the medium. Is it so strange that games featuring as a central element of gameplay the player characters gradually becoming stronger fighters taking on more and more powerful monsters, should culminate with them having to fight the most powerful being in the world? That is to say, God?” Well, perhaps you’re right. “And as for using the power of friendship, you yourself said that a characteristic of the genre is acquiring a party of NPC allies, surely the theme of relying on others would also arise naturally from the format?” Yes, okay… “And as for teenagers, seems unfair to pick on the RPGs considering how much of Japanese culture generally is fixated on characters of high school age. Come to think of it’s unfair to pick on the Japanese, since young people at the age of awakening not yet self-realised or hardened by experience are natural candidates for a hero’s journey in any culture. Look at Dune, Game of Thrones. Hell, Luke Skywalker definitely wasn’t old enough to shave.”

ALRIGHT, SHUT UP, MR. SOCKY. True as all of that might be, I don’t buy that always ending with teenagers using the power of friendship to etc is some inescapable necessity of the format to which we can only throw up our hands and cry “oh well.” I know, because I’ve seen alternatives. In both Persona 4 and Persona 5, funnily enough.

Save world from evil god is an element of the plot of Persona 4 that at best takes a back seat. For the most part you’re investigating a series of murders being carried out through the Midnight Channel, a shadowy otherworld that manifests the collective unconscious that only you and the killer knows about. You follow a lead to what turns out to be a copycat killer, finally uncover the real killer as they start threatening you and your adorable blameless little sister directly, then turns out there’s another real killer who’s someone you know and thought was a friend and you have to defeat them in the Midnight Channel as well as the source of their power – hang on, I think I forgot something. Oh yeah. Spoiler alert. And you know what, if the game had ended there – which indeed it does if you can’t figure out how to get the 100% good ending – I’d have been perfectly happy. But then it turns out there’s another real villain even realer than the last who is god and wants to destroy the world and you have to defeat them with the power of friendship before you can finally piss off home. Almost feels like the game itself knew of my criteria for JRPGs and felt it had to sellotape on the standard ending at the last minute.

Then there’s Persona 5, which is a fairly straight case of the teenage protagonists using the power of acquaintanceship to assassinate Jehovah, but then there’s the extra semester that gets added on after that in Persona 5 Royal. Where a new threat emerges in the form of, again, a character we know, who is attempting to impose their will upon the world. Except it turns out the world they want to create is a nice one where everyone’s happy. And you might even agree with him. You have the option of agreeing with him and getting an early ending. But if you want the full experience you have to battle him in the Metaverse and there’s your prerequisite epic fight but then in the ending the villain shows up again to say “Welp, guess you were right all along. No hard feelings. Bye!”

Both these plots represent viable alternatives to evil god trying to destroy world gets friendshipped to death. And the connecting factor between the two is characters. Persona 4 and 5 are very good at characters. Characters we understand and watch develop and want to see succeed. Villains with complex motives that we want to act against but at the same time can see their point of view. The plot of Persona 4 would have worked perfectly well if the supernatural element were entirely removed. If the murderer’s weapon of choice was a big stick with a nail in the end rather than a metaphorical shadow realm. Because what matters is that all the peril and drama is created by interactions between characters. At least right up until the bit where you have to kill God.

It’s not that I flat out object to gregariousness-fueled deicide and think it’s always bad. There are plenty of games that have done fun things with it, Undertale for one, it’s just a plot device, but at the same time, there’s something inherently lazy about it. Sod it, let’s broaden this out beyond JRPGs to any plot that culminates in “stop evil powerful being from destroying the world,” like about 90% of filler Doctor Who episodes. It’s disappointing because it’s so mind-numbingly broad.
Wanting to save the world is a universally understandable motive that the audience is automatically on side for. No-one in their right mind would oppose it. But that makes it a crutch for lazy storytelling. The challenge is to build characters well enough that we can relate to them or take an interest in them and want to see them achieve their goals even if that benefits no-one else. I mean, the plot of Silent Hill 1 was “evil god wants to destroy the world,” and I always found that a bit cheesy. Meanwhile, broadly speaking, the plot of Silent Hill 2 is “Sad man gets more sad.” And it’s the best psychological horror game ever made, piss off.

And remember what I said when I was praising the writing in most of Rockstar’s games: almost none of Rockstar’s protagonists get called upon to save the world. The rest of the world couldn’t care less if they live or die. But we get invested because of the strength of the characters, and our attachment to them is far greater because of it.

As I say, stop destruction of world is a perfectly functional plot, but that’s all it is. Functional. It can make for a very nice foundation on which to explore some deeper concepts, but I do get disappointed when a game falls back on it. ‘Cos it instantly broadcasts not just a lack of imagination, but a lack of confidence in its own characters and their ability to engage. It’s arguably detrimental to character building on a personal level, ‘cos it kinda bulldozes everyone’s problems out of the way, doesn’t it. Sorry, hot girl party member number 2, much as I’d love to help you overcome the lack of closure you feel for your father’s unrealistic expectations, the world’s about to sodding explode. And I’d rather it didn’t because I have to live on that.

Thus, dialogue scenes. But the strange thing is, Final Fantasy 16 has multiple levels of dialogue scene. There’ll be the main ones, the fully voice acted cutscenes with all the cinematic camera angles and dramatic animation, usually the cutscenes on the critical path, and then you’ll have less important dialogue scenes that I tend to think of as “in engine cutscenes,” even though they’re all in-engine, strictly speaking: the sort of thing that’s used for basic interactions and sidequests. Where the two characters maintain eye contact, plant their feet and the camera remains at eye level flipping from one to the other as they exchange lines. With no voice acting, just a text display with some kind of generic vocalisation at the start as shorthand for “person is talking now.”

It’s always an awkward lurch when the game switches from one mode to the other, partly because one has voice acting and one doesn’t, partly because the first kind of cutscene, the actually cinematic ones, seem to have recorded motion capture animation at the same time as the speech. If you watch people talking you’ll note they tend to emphasise their words with all kinds of subtle movements and facial cues that they more often than not have no idea that they’re doing, and mocapping all of that gives a cutscene a much more realistic feel. So if you take all of that out and replace it with stock standing still animations, occasionally switching to stock gesture animations that don’t match up with the words, it’s extremely noticeable. It’s like everyone turned into a Captain Scarlet puppet while the game was fading out and fading up.

A lot of games do this. Some have even more levels of dialogue scene. They’ll have fully mocapped fully voiced scenes for the really important bits, and then fully voiced scenes with stock animations, and then scenes with no voice acting or mocapping for the stuff that I assume was really veering upon the end of the development schedule. I think it was one of the Yakuza games that had a fourth mode of dialogue scene even below that. Every now and again it would switch to visual novel style with just the text and still images of the speaker.

Now, I absolutely know the reason for all of this. It’s because, as I say, these games are aiming to be huge epic stories full of side activity and throwaway dialogue, and as such they absolutely cannot afford to fully produce every single minor exchange as a full on cutscene. You need a semi-automated system you can hammer a million random dialogues out of to act as the mortar between all the gameplay bricks. We’ve all been trained to accept this over many years. Just as we accepted back in the PS2 days that most of the cutscenes would be in-engine but a handful of important ones would be pre-rendered FMVs, frequently made by a completely different studio with a distinctly different look.

But then I wondered if this is one of the things that’s worth stepping back from and trying to view from the perspective of a non-smartarse long term gaming insider. Think of a credulous child who only knows video games as magical gateways to worlds of fantasy to wile away the dreary hours of summer. Would they understand why Final Fantasy XVI is dynamically and vocally performed some of the time but then mysteriously switches to the exact same characters standing stiffly around like coconuts at a shy, lips emotionlessly moving like two slow-dancing slugs?

‘Cos I think back to my own credulous childhood growing up in England reading Beano comics, wondering why two different strips had a distinctly similar art style. Too young and immersed in the world of the fiction to be willing to consider possibilities like “the strips were drawn by the same artist,” I decided this was indication that the two strips occupied a shared reality and off screen the characters probably hung out together.

What does that sort of pliable mind think when a game has multiple levels of cutscene quality? Do they think the characters have gotten tired from having to act properly and are taking a breather for a couple of scenes? I feel like we insiders have been unconsciously letting this scoot by thinking “Oh it has to be like that because of the way they’re made” but the fact is this is hurting the experience and it wouldn’t fly in any other medium. If half the scenes of a film were well directed and the rest were massively incompetently lit and framed critics wouldn’t go “Oh well we happen to know the budget ran out and the second unit director was a literal baboon, so we’ll just ignore all that.” No, they’d rake it over the coals. Because noticing the nuts and bolts of the film’s production is the death of immersion.

The difference in quality between mocapped dialogue scenes and the other kind really is night and day. I almost think, if you can’t do every scene fully mocapped, it might be better to do them all in the second style just so you don’t have the comparison constantly taking the audience out of things. Then again, maybe not.

What I’m talking about when I talk about stiff, boring non-mocapped dialogue scenes is what I’ve referred to now and again over the years as Bioware Face. Because I always associate it with your Mass Effects and your Dragon Ages. Although one might also call it Bethesda Face because it’s most glaring in games like Oblivion and Fallout 3. You talk to an NPC and the camera dramatically zooms right into a full on shot of their face and they maintain unbreaking eye contact with you the entire conversation. I hate this for the same reason I don’t get on with dialogue trees – real people just don’t talk like this. I’m seeing the workings and getting pulled out again.

You don’t just stand opposite someone, maintain eye contact and take it in turns to speak. You nurse your drink, you pace around, you look out the window, you talk while walking somewhere together, you nod, you go “uh huh,” you gesture to emphasise what you’re saying. It’s all in the little things. And I know it’s possible to avoid Bioware Face even if you aren’t able to mocap every dialogue. I know because I’ve played The Witcher 3.

The Witcher 3 doesn’t use full mocap for every conversation and isn’t above a bit of the old Bioware Face creeping in now and again, but characters mostly don’t just stare at each other. They walk around, sit around, do a lot of subtle things with their faces, shag each other on unicorns – it does just enough. Just enough that I’m willing to overlook the stiffer moments and remain immersed. I want to be immersed, damn it, I want to meet you halfway and enjoy the story, I can’t do that if I’m spending most of my time with NPCs trying to kill me with their eye beams.

Still, I understand that even doing just enough would have been a lot of work. There’s probably millions of little touches you barely notice that would make it come across stiff and awkward if they weren’t there. But I for one appreciate the result.

Better to spread the extra work across the entire game than save it all up for a cutscene once in a blue moon and leave everything else looking like lollipop stick puppets. That’s like massively overtraining one side of your body so you’ve got one really beefy arm and one noodly one. Just doesn’t look right. And then for the rest of your life you have to keep hearing the same masturbation joke.

I say that knowing full well they absolutely will still print and ship fifty million cases around the world, in which to put download codes on pieces of paper, and after that we, I dunno, prop them up on the mantelpiece like a sodding birthday card. I suppose the idea is that I can display it on my game shelf so that family and passers-by will know that I am a savvy consumer who buys quality products. At least until someone decides to take the game off digital stores for whatever reason, after which family and passers-by will know I’m a twat who paid seventy bucks for a piece of paper in a box.

It’s the ephemeral nature of digital media that rubs people up the wrong way. If you have a physical copy of a game on a disk and a platform on which to run it then you can go up to your isolated cabin with a portable generator and play it as much as you like, and theoretically still do it a hundred years from now as long as you can keep the wildlife and insane survivalists away. Digital media is reliant upon there always being internet access and the game’s controllers always being inclined to maintain availability and as such we don’t so much own games as pay to temporarily host them on our hard drives.

The opposition to always-online gaming has gradually softened over the years as it got more and more tiring to keep complaining about it, and dig in our heels against the unstoppable force of society in general becoming more and more internet dependent, to the point that most first world nations consider it a basic necessity like hot and cold running water and access to poo pipes, so it’s harder to argue for the necessity of gaming offline when most people are always connected anyway. I mean, the internet no longer working is basically an apocalypse scenario at this point, and if it comes to that humanity will have bigger problems than game preservation to worry about. We’ll be sitting around the campfire trying to explain Hideo Kojima’s body of work and no one’s going to believe us.

But being able to actually own and play games is about more than just having access to them. For one thing, a lack of ownership denigrates gaming as a whole. Almost every other form of creative medium can be engaged with on either an ephemeral or permanent basis. Books can be rented from a library or bought from a shop. Movies can be watched on TV and streaming or bought on DVD. The first way is just for the experience or to pass the time, but when something really speaks to you, and you want to support it and make it part of your identity, you can buy a permanent copy and know you will always have it whenever you want to experience it again. It’s two different levels of engagement. That’s why libraries have never driven bookshops out of business. To only have ephemeral options for video games is to imply that no one would ever want to engage with them on a higher level. That it’s all throwaway junk.

Oh, Yahtzee, stop grousing, you’re perfectly capable of wallpapering your house with copies of Silent Hill 2 if you really must. Oh sure, the PS2 is practically an antique at this point, the collector’s market is driving up prices of what original copies remain, and the remastered PS3 version is liquid dogshit on a cream cracker, but if you wanna download a pirated version, burn it to a disc, print out the cover art and make a homemade box for it for your living room, nothing’s stopping you, except laws. Laws that, let’s face it, the authorities almost certainly won’t bother to enforce. And besides, why should we care so much about preserving the original Silent Hill 2 when we’re going to have a shiny new remake from Bloober Team soon.

Well, now you’re just trying to get a rise out of me, viewer, but that is a point. The release schedule is packed densely with remakes and remasters these days and surely that’s doing the job of preservation. Well, I might have more faith in that if I thought preservation was the motive. If we’re just talking a rerelease tweaked for modern hardware with maybe a resolution upgrade and more accessibility options then sure, but full on remakes like Silent Hill 2 and the RE4Make, those are just cashing in on nostalgic name recognition, and are the opposite of preservation, if anything, ‘cos they tend to replace the original, at least in popular availability, and the originals have value beyond their basic plot and gameplay framework.

Again, it’s denigrating games as a whole by implying that they only have value as throwaway timesink entertainment. Old games are important as cultural touchstones, they let us see how far we’ve come. They give an insight into the minds and attitudes of the people who made them. And most importantly, they preserve the cockups. The ugly art, the dodgy gameplay trends like RE4’s QTEs, the outdated sexual politics, when remakes and remasters spruce these things up and sand down the edges they’re pushing a lie that games were always good. And you can learn a hell of a lot more from a failure than a success.

That’s why you can’t rely on the whims of remasterers and remakers for preservation because it’s a meritocratic system that will only preserve that which is still fondly remembered. When the real educational value lies in crap. All those third party PS2 shovelware games. All those German pornographic adventures from the 90s. There’s lessons to be learned from all those. Like, don’t make shovelware. He who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it. That’s as true of video games as it is of anti-vaccination movements. Maybe if we’d done a better job preserving Treasure Island Dizzy Balan Wonderworld wouldn’t have used its bloody awful inventory system, or any of the other ways it buggered the porcupine.

Also, when we forget our past, new video games have a habit of coming up with ideas that they think are new and innovative but are in fact very old and thoroughly tested. I always think of LA Noire, that came out saying “Hey, we’ve invented this amazing new concept called a detective adventure game. And because it’s so new we didn’t feel the need to bother innovating in the story area, and hacked out the most generic neo-noir plot and setting imaginable.”

And meanwhile I was thinking back to playing detective adventure games like Under a Killing Moon, in which you’re a detective in post-apocalyptic San Francisco who has to go into space to stop a doomsday cult and scare the shit out of a dude with a robot clown. Not that there’s much else you can do with a robot clown. And while LA Noire spent countless millions trying to pioneer a new level of realistic facial motion capture that ended up making every character look like photos pasted onto spoons, Under a Killing Moon was FMV, and as such succeeded at achieving precisely the same end, just by, y’know, filming some dudes.

And this felt like a misstep, to me. Certainly at the time because I had absolutely no intention of putting myself through that wringer again anytime soon. Like any good horror game it’s a harrowing, claustrophobic experience that fills you with adrenaline from the simulated threat, and it frequently took me a while even to work up the courage to leave the safe room, and without the motivation of seeing the story ending and discovering where it was all leading I didn’t see much appeal in going back.

Mystery is one of the main things that makes horror effective beyond simple jumpscares, and the mystery would only lessen the more one played The Bunker. In the one playthrough I did, I thought that despite the monster’s appearances being unscripted the game did a rather good job of never letting me get a good look at the bastard. It was always just a shadowy glimpse before I turned tail and legged it. The best look I got was on one occasion when I hid in a fenced off area on the assumption the monster wouldn’t be able to navigate the vent I’d used to access it. Spoiler alert: I was wrong in this assumption. But if I’d kept playing and kept making incredibly stupid errors like those I’d see the monster more and more, as well as its janky animations and Weetabix-like flesh. And how something looks in your imagination will always be more effectively scary than how it looks in actuality.

Also, the promise to rearrange all the pickups and traps in future playthroughs wasn’t a terribly effective draw because the item conservation and the trap avoidance weren’t the interesting parts. What doesn’t change from playthrough to playthrough are certain specific inventory puzzles – the finding of keys to go in doors or of the bolt cutters to open the doors locked with chains – as well as general understandings of where in the bunker you need to go and when, and the pleasure of figuring all of that out is something that can only be had once. On all future playthroughs you’re just going through the motions.

If the point of these procedural elements was to add replay value then it misses the mark. I don’t believe anyone could credibly argue that The Bunker offers a new experience with every single playthrough. The game’s important story points, puzzle locations and general sequence of where you need to go never changes, and those are the parts you remember, not the ground level fiddling about in between.

There was an indie game, CHASM, that purported to be a procedurally generated metroidvania, but after I’d finished it, I started it again to test that claim, and honestly couldn’t tell if anything had been moved around. Metroidvanias tend to require a tight structuring, you have to find and collect items or abilities that open up the map in a specific sequence, so I’m pretty sure CHASM was just swapping around a few nondescript rooms in between each significant progress point. And I didn’t feel terribly inclined to replay that, either.

I feel like, if you’re shooting for procedural mechanics in the name of infinite replay value, you either go whole hog or not at all. Make something like The Binding of Isaac where everything is randomized each run and every playthrough can be different. Either that or just make a PvP multiplayer only game, that’s as good as procedural because human enemies will always come up with new and exciting ways to torment each other. But you can’t do that if you also want to tell a story. A story you hope to have any control over, at any rate.

So what am I saying, that a single player story based game should give up on any hope of replay value? That they should resign to being cast aside like a rubber johnny the moment they’re finished and supplanted with the next new hotness? That they should forfeit any ambition for the prolonged player engagement demanded by publishers unless they’re willing to drag the story out fifty hours too long like Last of Us 2 or God of War Ragnarok in the desperate hope of retaining our attention?

Not at all! What we’re doing here is making the mistake of conflating “replay value” with “making every playthrough different.” The same mistake a lot of those previously discussed Choose Your Own Adventure Book games make. I mean, I replay games, when schedule permits. Which admittedly isn’t very often but I can certainly dedicate at least one hour to it per fortnight. Most recently, I’ve been replaying We Love Katamari, now it’s been ported to Steam. Because I think it’s really fun. I also think they could easily have brought it out the same time they ported the first game because it’s basically the same game but slightly more polished with more ideas, but never mind, it’s here now. And I’m not replaying it expecting anything new.

I mean, it does have some new levels but I haven’t really engaged with them. I’m replaying it ‘cos I used to play the shit out of it back on my old PS2 and I wanted to bask in its great soundtrack and cathartic town destroying action again. And it’s the same with everything else I ever replay – I’m after a nice comfortable familiar experience. I don’t have the energy to electrify myself with novelty all the bloody time.

Now, my habits don’t apply to everyone, I know. Some people, speedrunners for example and other lunatics, like to replay their favourite games while imposing extrinsic conditions on themselves to milk a bit more novelty out of them. Playing them the fastest or with the lowest possible completion score or with a breeze block strapped to their head. Hell, a lot of people will just bump the difficulty level up a notch when they replay a game. I usually don’t. More often than not I replay games on the same difficulty level as before, doing exactly the same things as before. It doesn’t matter to me that it isn’t different, if I wanted a new experience I’m spoilt for sodding choice on Steam and in the world in general, the whole point of replaying is to return to an established comfort zone.

And I suspect those of you who do bump the difficulty up or play with your nostril hair tied to a swingball set or whatever are primarily motivated by the fact that you like playing the game, and secondarily by the twist of novelty. So when I see single player games going out of their way to design themselves around this notion of “replay value = different,” with their procedural elements and their branching storylines, that feels off. I think ultimately what gives a game “replay value” is, at heart, being fun to play and having an interesting story. A story that is very rarely made more interesting from being diluted across multiple paths.

I mean, I know a lot of my viewers rewatch my old ZPs a lot. I doubt many of them would care that much if I redid them all in a high-pitched West Country accent. Well. Some of them might. Maybe it is time I set up that Cameo account.

And if I could address them all collectively, I’d ask the people doing that if they seriously think Tears of the Kingdom is perfect and couldn’t be improved upon. ‘Cos I can think of a few ways. It could’ve had an engaging story and characters like what Majora’s Mask had. Or a main character who’s actually expressive and loveable, like what Wind Waker had. And maybe the much beloved new sandbox physics mechanics could have been a touch sandier.

Not to reiterate my whole ZP review, but I felt oddly disappointed by the weapon fusion mechanic. In contrast to the physics object fusing that has fueled so many hilarious penis robots on Youtube in recent weeks, the weapon fusing just lets you add a few points of damage to your sword by gluing a pinecone to the end. And I suppose, having had time to think, I’ve realised what I actually wanted from the weapon fusing: I wanted Link to have the ability to use literally anything as a melee weapon.

Imagine if one of the special physics objects you could manipulate and stick to things was some kind of hilt or handle, and anything you stuck it to Link would pick up by wherever you put the hilt and try to swing. Then anything that got in the way of any part of it would take damage in accordance with its weight and how fast it was moving. Including Link himself. So you could make an improvised flail out of a stick, a bit of a rope and a dining room chair and watch Link give himself a concussion with it.

I’m sure eventually the creative spark would fade and you’d gravitate to whatever weapon build proved the most efficient every time, just as in the existing game you eventually stop trying to make fancy vehicles and just scotch tape two fans to a steering column whenever you need to get somewhere. But this degree of freedom to experiment sells itself. Imagine the hilarious Youtube potential of watching Link charge into battle waving six feet of picket fence with a screaming Korok stuck to the end.

So there you go, that’s just one way a hypothetical sequel to Tears of the Kingdom could build upon it. And if one ever comes along, won’t you feel bloody stupid for demanding perfect review scores for the original.
Spoiler warning: they will not feel stupid about it. Fanboys kicking up a stink about the big new Zelda game being denigrated with mere 9s out of 10s has happened reliably enough to be a running joke in the reviewing world. This video’s opening paragraph could easily have been talking about the response to Breath of the Wild. Or Twilight Princess. Or Wind Waker. Or Ocarina of Time. Although that far back the phrase “downvote bombs” might’ve confused people. This could be something worth analysing.

I’m not prepared to dismiss it as just Zelda fanboys being fanboys. It doesn’t match up with the kind of passion other properties engender. I’m thinking, of course, of Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic fans are as passionate as they come and grousing about 8 out of 10 scores has never been standard practice for them. Let’s face it, most of them would be overjoyed by an 8, these days. So whence the passion for Zelda, which is just a stock fantasy adventure about a voiceless twink? With none of the specific mix of teenage angst and furry humanoid nudity that causes certain people to get overly attached to Sonic during their awkward years of sexual awakening.

Then I think of the way gamers have historically become overprotective of whichever brand of games machine they grew up with because it was easier than admitting they’d blown their birthday money on an inferior platform. Nintendo have certainly benefited from that effect over the years, but I don’t know if that fully explains it, either. Mario’s the far more visible Nintendo franchise, and I don’t think Mario games attract rabid metacritic score protectionism the way Zelda games do.

But then Mario has always been the silly, more commercial franchise, and Zelda has more of an air of prestige about it. It’s too dignified to be milked for kart racing spinoffs and typing tutors the way Mario is. And I think I’m getting warmer when I think of the word “prestigious.” I think the combination of its long history, its sheer number of high quality instalments, and the lofty, epic tone of its story and presentation, make Zelda something of an exemplar for all of video gaming.

I think these people have gotten it into their heads that Zelda is gaming’s representative, its ambassador, and anything less than a perfect score is somehow denigrating the entire medium. If Zelda isn’t setting the highest standard then what does that say for everything else that doesn’t have its resources or foundation? Well, that’s my bluesky theory, anyway, and whether or not Zelda is the embodiment of all gaming isn’t something I care to argue. The point I wanted to make is that you shouldn’t care if it gets perfect scores or not because review scores are completely sodding meaningless.

Yeah, I’m banging this drum again. Maybe a five star rating could be justified as giving a broad sense of the reviewer’s enthusiasm, but ten point ratings, or god forbid percentages, no review of a purely subjective experience calls for that degree of exactitude. And if a reviewer gave a game 10 out of 10, what does that even mean? That they really like the game? What if another game comes out that they like more? They haven’t given themselves the room to express that numerically. Or does it mean they literally think the game is perfect and absolutely nothing could have been done to improve upon it? ‘Cos that smacks of a failure of imagination on their part.

For these and other reasons, most reviewers would be understandably cagey about giving anything a perfect score because they must always give themselves wiggle room, but if you can’t cite an example of what would be a 100% game – or indeed what would be a 0% game – then there’s no frame of reference. It’s all meaningless. Yes, congratulations to all you geniuses out there who already figured that out.

I know of only one case of a media outlet awarding a game a 100% score. Mayhem in Monsterland on the Commodore 64 was awarded one by the print magazine Commodore Format. This was well after the end of the Commodore 64’s peak, so my cynical side feels this was more about trying to prop up an ailing system and its magazines with some headlines. Or maybe they genuinely did think Mayhem in Monsterland was the best game that could possibly be made for the Commodore 64. I guess the standards could’ve been low enough.

But that’s my point. The general standards at the time of the review or for the platform is just one example of the kind of context that a numerical score can never provide. And if I were to feed the review data into Metacritic, it would go around telling everyone that Mayhem in Monsterland was a better game than Red Dead Redemption 2. Imagine that. A game without a single shitting horse.

All of which certainly helps with immersion, but sooner or later a real life simulator rubs up against the one aspect of video games that will never, ever, be truly realistic. And that is healing. You can traumatize your art team by making them render a photorealistic bullet wound in a character’s once handsome face, but then they regenerate like the T-1000 after they swallow an entire bottle of ibuprofen and suddenly the whole futility of the exercise is laid bare.

Oh, there have been plenty of video games that have tried to inject some verisimilitude into the process. Some games will have a suite of different healing items depending on the wound, such as Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, or Metal Gear Solid 3, in which a lit cigar is great for cauterizing a bullet wound, not so good for splinting a broken limb. Or for treating pink eye. Some immersive RPGs like Deus Ex do that thing where different body parts have different health scores, so you can only cripple a dude from shooting them in the legs and never actually kill them. But the point is, there’s no realistic way for that dude to go back to sprinting at full speed later that same day no matter how many cold compresses they rub on their thighs.

And all these elaborate healing systems are just different language and complications layered on top of the process of eating a box of health and regenerating instantly. And we might as well accept that it’s never going to make sense. Might as well just lean into it like what Mortal Kombat does. Have special attacks that involve getting stabbed fifteen times and getting a stalactite through your eye socket, fall on the ground and stay there for all of three frames before popping back up for more.

The fact is, the quest for realism will always rub up against this because health and healing are a fundamental requirement to gameplay structure, before any notions of theming can even be considered. It’s essential at least in any game that has any kind of challenge. Or more specifically a failure state. Visual novels, walking sims and LucasArts adventure games can go back to sleep.

Because when you have a failure state, you also need a mechanism that shows the player how close they are to that failure state, to allow for human error, training, intuiting the mechanics and a certain amount of suspense. This goes back to the earliest imaginable days of video games. It’s the reason why Space Invaders gives you three lives. It predates video games, actually: pinball tables let you have three goes. You could argue that in chess, your remaining pieces constitute your health bar.

So health is really just a word for the fundamentally vital game design aspect of being able to signal to the player that they’re losing. Basically the same reason pain exists in everyday life. Follow that to its logical conclusion and you’ll realise that restoring it would also be useful for signalling that the player’s doing something right, and so was invented the extra life, and with it the mechanic of healing.
The concept of the health bar or health as a percentage was an evolution of lives because lives is a language that can only say one thing: you fucked up. Don’t do that. Health is a much more fluid concept, you can start playing with the idea that there are degrees of mistakes. You can remove a small amount of health for a mild error like dropping down a ledge that was slightly too high for comfort, and a larger amount of health for something like absent-mindedly sitting on a frag grenade.

And with that, the concept was just about perfected. Since then there’s been very little alteration in the fundamental premise of health as a stopgap between you and failure. Although I would like it noted that I’ve always admired Sonic the Hedgehog’s health system. It’s so unique, and works so perfectly for the intended feel of the game. You collect rings, and if you get hit all the rings fall out, and if you get hit with no rings you die. So simple, and yet so elegant, because it captures the purpose of health in a much more organic fashion. Having more rings makes you naturally safer because if you drop them all it’ll be much more likely you’ll be able to pick some of them back up before you get hit again.

Also, if you’re smart and quick enough to grab most of your rings back before they all fly away, you can get yourself back into a strong position, health-wise. Which works really well with the fast pace intended by the game. Never worked so well when Sonic moved to 3D graphics because the rings bouncing off in three dimensional space made grabbing them back again much more awkward, and it’s just one of the horrible things that happened after Sonic moved to 3D.

But it does illustrate how, while health as a failure buffer is a fairly universal concept, HEALING, regaining health, can be done in lots of different ways, and because it’s such a fundamental part of the core gameplay loop, the method you pick has a huge impact on the tone and feel of the game. So Sonic with the ring-regrabbing emphasises speed and getting stuck back into the action. I think the only healing mechanic I can think of that has a similar effect is the rally system from Bloodborne, where you can get some health back if you quickly hit your tormentor back, possibly while crying and gibbering in desperation.

But then you have Bloodborne’s forebear Dark Souls, with its Estus Flasks, a system wherein healing becomes more of an inexorable countdown to doomsday that constantly hangs over the player and incentivises them to seek the shelter of a bonfire. In something like Doom or Half-Life where the player has to find first aid kits lying around the level, low health is an incentive to focus on exploration and cautious advancement, force the player to think about their environment. And then of course there’s the auto-regeneration so popular in the meathead shooters of the 2010s, aimed at players who, and let’s try not to sound cruel, react poorly to being obliged to actually think.

In the age of gear grinding, health is frequently just another resource, another number for the crunching, to be strategically risked for equivalent gains and boosted by 5.64% percent by an artfully selected hat. Which does take some of the joy out of the process for me.

Here’s a fun idea – how about instead of bodily integrity, you refer to health as “luck,” and every time you’re about to get shot, the bullet just barely misses and you lose some of your “luck” bar. It runs out and you finally get hit for real. There, that could for work a realistic setting, disregarding the magical good fortune that’s somehow numerically quantifiable.

Or, if you’re in a war setting, have no healing at all but if your character dies or gets seriously wounded, you have to replace them with a virtually identical soldier who’s still healthy. Sort of like what ZombiU does. This would really fit something like a World War 1 setting because it would reinforce how relentlessly fucking bleak everything is.

Of course both of these ideas are just another changing of language, and isn’t doing anything new mechanically speaking. I suppose my overall point is that designing games is ultimately one long list of decisions between what would be realistic and immersive, and what would be necessary for the functioning of gameplay, and healing is going to be ground that the first side of that conflict is always going to have to cede. Still, it’s something I find fun to think about. Some people tell me I have strange ideas of what’s fun, but that’s between them and the FBI profiling unit.