My Game Development End-Game
I wrote a late night ramble thing on — WAIT FOR IT — systems design! Kinda. Also ghostbusters and persona and MGS5 and Far Cry 2. Which have so much (nothing) in common.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been dealing with a pretty rough illness of sorts that’s basically had me, more or less, couch-bound, sleeping, low on energy, and incredibly weak/sore. Once I got over the constant sleepiness, I decided to devote the couch time to catching up on a few games that I’ve put aside for the last year — namely, Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain — and, once I got most of the way through that (well, about 2/3 of the way through), I moved on to some games I’ve been anticipating for quite some time: NieR: Automata (vaguely related to the purpose of this article, so I’m largely ignoring it) and Persona 5. These games, aside from being Japanese-developed, have basically nothing in common whatsoever. Their one commonality is that their all sequels to games that I’ve long admired for one reason or another, especially Persona 5 and MGS5. Final Fantasy Tactics also fits into this whole thing, but it’s largely persisted through re-releases, a remaster on the PSP (Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions), and other platform ports.
This article isn’t about these games, but I’ll give a brief summary as to why they’re important. The final game that really changed things for me is Far Cry 2. Which, well, basically all these games have nothing linking them together whatsoever. Bear with me.
Persona 5
Persona was the first Playstation game that I ever bought. It was also my only Playstation game for a long while. I sunk, well, a lot of time into it over the six-nine months that it remained my sole Playstation game. I started it over, oh, about three or four times because I never felt that I did an adequate job of preparing my team for the later stages of the game. And then in one dungeon about 80–85% of the way through the game, I kept getting lost in the maze (Persona was a first-persona dungeon-crawler) and, since I’m incredibly prone to motion sickness, eventually I had to give up at the dungeon time and time again. It’s irrelevant to this article, but I didn’t succeed in getting beyond that point until it was re-released on the PSP about a decade later. It’s a game that bears little resemblance to the way the series has evolved over the years, but it’s a series I’ve stuck to as best I can. Persona 5 is, essentially, the culmination in everything the series has been building up to (including bits that, I assume, Catherine laid the roots for).
What sticks with me from Persona 5, which is a game I completed to its “true ending” (I hate multi-ending games, by the way) earlier today. Without spoiling too much, the game ends up handling its endgame in a way that reminds me a great deal of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2 in a very specific way: the bonds you form with people and the public perception your group earns over the course of the game play an incredibly important role in the emotional and narrative impact of the final sequence of events.
Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain
Similarly, Metal Gear Solid was another Playstation game I was incredibly attached to. At the time, I primarily enjoyed its more “serious” tone and approach to narrative. The gameplay was, at best, loosely interwoven with the overall plot, but the series has made strides to bring gameplay and plot closer and closer together over the years. That is until Metal Gear Solid 4 when the series took an overwhelming turn into being narrative-driven to the point of hour-long cutscenes and frequent cutscene interruptions.
Then Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker came out for PSP. A much lower-budget, “tentpole” title for the series, but one which ultimately laid the groundwork for what became Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain: a very systems-heavy, gameplay-driven game that mixed together high-level strategy (base-building, team assembly, etc.) with low-level, more Metal Gear Solid-esque gameplay that allowed players bite-sized, portable missions that were far closer to the initial glimpses into its gameplay style that the earlier games often left unexplored. And MGS5became a huge turning point for the series in that it’s, largely, a sandbox game where most of the story-telling (most) occurs throughout gameplay, leaving the player to play the game uninterrupted alongside the narrative. It’s an exquisitely-detailed game, to the point where if you leave your horse in a place for too long, eventually it poos. If a vehicle happens to come in contact with said poo, the vehicle will slide out of control and — usually (in this tremendous edge case) — crash. It is wonderful.
Final Fantasy Tactics
Honestly, I don’t have much to say about this game that I haven’t already said before or has been echoed by others. I was quoted in a Kotaku article years back along with other game developers as to why everyone loves Final Fantasy Tactics. Essentially: it is the quintessential realization of systems-driven gameplay. It doesn’t hurt that the narrative around the game’s battles is one of the most interesting ones I’ve seen in games. It’s ludicrous at times, but it attempts to tie together an intricate plot through political subterfuge, class warfare, war-time alliances between friends, and then there’s silly things about the power of the zodiac turning people into ultra-powerful demons.
Point is: the systems and design of the game are largely what govern gameplay to a degree that, I believe, is unprecedented in the games industry. Like I said in the Kotaku article: there’s a mathematician/arithmetician class. It allows you to combine the powers of your secondary class with formulae for targeting enemies/allies on the battlefield. It’s beautiful.
Far Cry 2
Without going too far into detail, as I’ve written about this game excessively in the past (though I’m not sure the articles survived), but it’s essentially the game that made me pursue game design over programming as a career path. Other than my work with LightBox Interactive/Sony Santa Monica on Starhawk