Sandbox vs. corridor-crawl.
by AC - permalink
I've gone back to Halo recently, and I'm making progress. I thought I was stuck for a while in that tower deal shortly after encountering the Flood for the first time, but it turned out I'd just somehow managed to miss a progress-mandatory waypoint. I had to backtrack a long way before I could convince the game to let me keep playing by triggering the next cutscene. This game is getting really repetitive. Even after continuing, I'm still running down the same hallways I was running down a week ago, just with different things to shoot at. Every now and then Halo lets me think about switching one of my two weapons by depositing a bunch of rockets in front of me, but that's really the end of the variety. Otherwise, the only way to affect the gameplay is deciding whether to use grenades to clear my path, or just running past to the next checkpoint.
In that way, it's not so dissimilar from Half-Life 2, but at least in Half-Life 2 the environments are constantly shifting and changing, and the whole feel of the game is altered. And you can always play every moment with nothing but the gravity gun, which was probably never intended but can be done, because it's such a robust game.
I also started Far Cry from the beginning a little while back, and I've reached the not-so-fun parts in that. Again, it's corridor-crawling, this time against melee-fighters (the early trigens) that can kill you with two hits, even through catwalks and from seven or eight feet away. That's a hit-detection issue, but it's also gameplay-related. Melee fighting plus FPS equals shit. It just doesn't work, ever. It's no fun. The only exceptions in my experience are chainsawing pinkies in Doom and chainsawing zombies in Doom 3. But that's it. Throwing melee fighting into a shooter for variety is just about the worst thing you can do. Look at Quake IV; everything shoots, and you can shoot back at everything. Hence, it's fun. Same deal in UT 2004, Half-Life, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and I could go on and on and on.
The corridor-crawl missions in Far Cry are particularly irritating after mission after mission where the maps are so massive that you can do just about whatever you want. You can blast your way through, via several different routes, or you can sneak your way to a gun emplacement and mow down everyone you bypassed, or you can just sneak your way past everyone. Or you can highjack a boat and use machinegun fire and rockets to take 'em all down from offshore. And that's just one mission. The campaign in Far Cry is enormous, probably the last PC FPS of that size we'll ever see.
They call that "sandbox" gameplay, but that really isn't accurate. You can't do whatever you want, just whatever the game will allow you to do. But in Far Cry, the limitations are so low that you don't notice them.
You might use stealth and a silenced MP5 (if you decided to pick one up - again, up to you), to make your way undetected onto a high point overlooking a couple of enemy strongholds. Then you can use your binocs to lock the position of all the enemy sentries into your HUD's radar screen. And you'll realize there are two or three dozen mercs out there. But without even thinking about how you're doing it - in other words, without breaking the "fourth wall" and thinking outside of the game's rules - you can use stealth to find a good position, then use loud weapons to simultaneously kill nearby mercs and draw in others farther away who heard something but don't know they've been drawn towards your protected and well-armed position. Before you even know it, you've wiped out all the significant resistance between you and your goal.
That's good gameplay, especially when you realize on your next play-through that you could have gone prone in the bushes, taken out a patrol or two, and then snuck past the remaining guards to kill the last few sentries to get to the objective.
But again, it only lasts for so long. It must be either good luck or insane diligence to come up with a shooter that good, which probably explains why there are so few of them out there. Far Cry is one, for a while. Ghost Recon is another. You can probably put Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in that category for select missions, and Half-Life 2 for the same reason.
But corridor-crawling can be fun. Anyone old enough to appreciate Doom II knows that. I'm not talking about Doom 3, which would probably be crawling at it's worst if it wasn't for the suck-you-in visuals or those awesome hell maps. I'm talking about Quake I-style shoot everything five or six times, and if it's still moving, shoot it some more, then keep running and shoot some more. That shit can work very well when it's done right, even in a single-player game. Call of Duty fits into that mold, and the CoD series is in the pantheon of all-time great PC shooters. You can throw in Quake II, the original Doom games, Elite Force, the Half-Life expansions Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and the Serious Sam's.
So which is better? There's no answer to that. I can only tell you that games like Halo drive me fucking crazy because they can't make up their minds. Halo pretends to sandbox by giving you huge maps that let you pretend you're making your own way through until you realize the enemies are just going to keep spawning until you make a beeline for the next checkpoint, tactics be damned. That sucks, and no strategy you come up with will help you until you figure it out.
by AC - permalink
I've gone back to Halo recently, and I'm making progress. I thought I was stuck for a while in that tower deal shortly after encountering the Flood for the first time, but it turned out I'd just somehow managed to miss a progress-mandatory waypoint. I had to backtrack a long way before I could convince the game to let me keep playing by triggering the next cutscene. This game is getting really repetitive. Even after continuing, I'm still running down the same hallways I was running down a week ago, just with different things to shoot at. Every now and then Halo lets me think about switching one of my two weapons by depositing a bunch of rockets in front of me, but that's really the end of the variety. Otherwise, the only way to affect the gameplay is deciding whether to use grenades to clear my path, or just running past to the next checkpoint.
In that way, it's not so dissimilar from Half-Life 2, but at least in Half-Life 2 the environments are constantly shifting and changing, and the whole feel of the game is altered. And you can always play every moment with nothing but the gravity gun, which was probably never intended but can be done, because it's such a robust game.
I also started Far Cry from the beginning a little while back, and I've reached the not-so-fun parts in that. Again, it's corridor-crawling, this time against melee-fighters (the early trigens) that can kill you with two hits, even through catwalks and from seven or eight feet away. That's a hit-detection issue, but it's also gameplay-related. Melee fighting plus FPS equals shit. It just doesn't work, ever. It's no fun. The only exceptions in my experience are chainsawing pinkies in Doom and chainsawing zombies in Doom 3. But that's it. Throwing melee fighting into a shooter for variety is just about the worst thing you can do. Look at Quake IV; everything shoots, and you can shoot back at everything. Hence, it's fun. Same deal in UT 2004, Half-Life, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and I could go on and on and on.
The corridor-crawl missions in Far Cry are particularly irritating after mission after mission where the maps are so massive that you can do just about whatever you want. You can blast your way through, via several different routes, or you can sneak your way to a gun emplacement and mow down everyone you bypassed, or you can just sneak your way past everyone. Or you can highjack a boat and use machinegun fire and rockets to take 'em all down from offshore. And that's just one mission. The campaign in Far Cry is enormous, probably the last PC FPS of that size we'll ever see.
They call that "sandbox" gameplay, but that really isn't accurate. You can't do whatever you want, just whatever the game will allow you to do. But in Far Cry, the limitations are so low that you don't notice them.
You might use stealth and a silenced MP5 (if you decided to pick one up - again, up to you), to make your way undetected onto a high point overlooking a couple of enemy strongholds. Then you can use your binocs to lock the position of all the enemy sentries into your HUD's radar screen. And you'll realize there are two or three dozen mercs out there. But without even thinking about how you're doing it - in other words, without breaking the "fourth wall" and thinking outside of the game's rules - you can use stealth to find a good position, then use loud weapons to simultaneously kill nearby mercs and draw in others farther away who heard something but don't know they've been drawn towards your protected and well-armed position. Before you even know it, you've wiped out all the significant resistance between you and your goal.
That's good gameplay, especially when you realize on your next play-through that you could have gone prone in the bushes, taken out a patrol or two, and then snuck past the remaining guards to kill the last few sentries to get to the objective.
But again, it only lasts for so long. It must be either good luck or insane diligence to come up with a shooter that good, which probably explains why there are so few of them out there. Far Cry is one, for a while. Ghost Recon is another. You can probably put Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in that category for select missions, and Half-Life 2 for the same reason.
But corridor-crawling can be fun. Anyone old enough to appreciate Doom II knows that. I'm not talking about Doom 3, which would probably be crawling at it's worst if it wasn't for the suck-you-in visuals or those awesome hell maps. I'm talking about Quake I-style shoot everything five or six times, and if it's still moving, shoot it some more, then keep running and shoot some more. That shit can work very well when it's done right, even in a single-player game. Call of Duty fits into that mold, and the CoD series is in the pantheon of all-time great PC shooters. You can throw in Quake II, the original Doom games, Elite Force, the Half-Life expansions Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and the Serious Sam's.
So which is better? There's no answer to that. I can only tell you that games like Halo drive me fucking crazy because they can't make up their minds. Halo pretends to sandbox by giving you huge maps that let you pretend you're making your own way through until you realize the enemies are just going to keep spawning until you make a beeline for the next checkpoint, tactics be damned. That sucks, and no strategy you come up with will help you until you figure it out.
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