Last week I was playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate and, while playing as Alucard, a sudden realisation hit me: why is Symphony of the Night still the superior game? When it’s clearly older, made with technology that is more primitive, developed by a smaller team and with a minimal budget (by today’s standards of budgets at least). That simple question led me to ask myself the same question about the video game industry in general.
Over the past twenty years, ever since we discovered graphics could be bigger than 8-bit, the video game industry plunged headfirst into a race to determine which title can have the prettiest lights and people and things on screen. As a result costs for games have risen extraordinarily high, especially for what we’ve come to know as AAA titles, where budgets have reached ludicrous standards. But you can’t be completely absorbed by something without neglecting or downright sacrificing another and sadly, in the case of video games, the loser is always the content: be it story, characters, gameplay depth or even length and difficulty. It seems that the prettier the games have become, the more shallow they are, with the recently released Ground Zeroes (a title that along with Revengeance proves Kojima has a flair for nonsensical words) being the most egregious example; a title that doesn’t even feel like a full game. Or using more appropriate games for my original observation, take the last three Castlevanias, the Lords of Shadow series, all with fantastic visuals, amazing voice acting, fantastic cinematics; but without even an inch of depth and originality, instead having nonsensical plots and world-crafting, with a mythology that makes less sense than the original Castlevania’s convoluted one. The first Lords of Shadow was a valiant effort and an enjoyable game despite its faults and even Mirror of Fate is passable… by today’s standards.
But compare them to the releases from a decade ago, from the aforementioned Symphony of the Night, the crown jewel of Metroidvania, and the many Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS games that followed it. All so simple in presentation, with nothing in the way of voice acting, but so rich in content all current iterations pale in comparisons. These were the games that punished you for being careless and which didn’t gate or restrict your progress so much, instead giving you most of the tools you’d need to advance almost right away, opening up the different locations almost at once; so you, the player, had the choice of where to go (hence the name Metroidvania, since its design came from Metroid). Of course, you could argue Lords of Shadow isn’t Metroidvania, not in a true sense, but then I’d point you to the original Castlevania and its direct sequels or to Rondo of Blood, all linear games but so complete and complex that current games are an embarrassment.
Looks nice, and it’s not bad, but it’s only an inch deep compared to its predecessors.
Let’s move on to another series, shall we? Let’s take Thief, one of the most successful stealth series ever created. Thief: 1 The Dark Project and Thief II: The Metal Age were highly successful and, while they haven’t aged well and weren’t lookers at the time, they are still among the greatest games ever created. People not only still play them but continue to purchase them, engrossed in their interesting mythologies and depth of gameplay. Thief: Deadly Shadows on the other hand has mixed reviews because while it may look pretty, it’s a simplified and watered down version of the original formula, one of those classic series that suffered in its transition to big budget graphics. Even worse is the new Thief, critically panned and fan-hated. It’s a looker, but on every other count it’s an inferior game to its predecessors.
You might be thinking I’m just going against graphics, but there is a correlation between budget and graphics as that is where most of the money goes during development; and as game developers become more focused on the visual and the cinematic, these departments become even larger and thus the budgets grow exponentially. But the price of such artistic and cinematic endeavours is that the resulting experience is shallow and flawed. Worse still, is that so much of the budget goes on art, that not much money is left to invest in testing and quality assurance, which is why some of the latest lookers have all been accused of being unpolished and seemingly unfinished. Of course, this is a generalisation and there are exceptions, such as the three testing stages implemented by Nintendo for Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, which went into Alpha, Beta and Gamma testing stages before releasing to the public; or the continuous tests Dark Souls 2 went through up until its release.
Looking good… but playing bad!
I would ask if we need such good graphics, if we constantly need them to be bigger and bigger when every gamer out there at some point will return to a SNES era game (for example) and become a fan of old-school titles instead of new releases, enamoured by the amazing design those games had. But I won’t, that’s another topic entirely and worthy of a discussion.
The real question is why does so much of the budget go to art? Or better yet, why are other important areas like testing sacrificed? Games, like any other software should go back to the drawing board if testing proves it’s not fun or engaging or good. Take Blizzard Entertainment’s titles for example, a company famous for delaying its games until ‘they are ready’ and has been known to completely scrap games to start from scratch if they’re not up to snuff. The latest Diablo III 2.0 patch is a clear example of them remaking a game project from the ground up because of how poor the original version was. Their next MMO, Titan, was in development before they decided it was no good, trashed it and started fresh. Sure, not all companies have Blizzard-level resources, but there’s a reason why people blindly buy their games: because there’s an assurance of quality there on all levels, from story (though this might be a contention point) to gameplay depth.
This twenty-year-old game is still superior to most of what the industry makes today.
And if you ever want a proof that big budget does not a good game make, take titles like The Silver Lining by Phoenix Online Studios, a freeware release developed on blood, sweat, tears and pure fandom, and it still kicks some major adventure-game-ass. Take To The Moon; yes, it’s barely a game (almost no gameplay), but its story and music top most high-budget titles. You might be thinking “Oh, those are indie titles” but that has nothing to do with it – it’s just dedication to delivering something you know is good. Let’s go old-school for a moment (and outside the Castlevania series, though the point applies still) and look at for Super Metroid. It’s a AAA release by any standard, and it kicks most current games in their beautiful HD crisp asses, because it delivers; because there was dedication on making it work, on making sure it was the best it could be.
And that’s what games need to do. I’m not saying sacrifice graphics, but developers need to stop focusing so much money and effort on how pretty it looks, and start making sure it works and delivers. Developers need to get their heads out of their artistic behinds and start remembering that as much as video games are an art, they are software and as such quality assurance and testing phases deserve as much money as the pretty visuals, if not more. They should be always prepared to discard their ideas if they prove not to work, from gameplay choices to plot, world, locations, etc. This industry gets away too much with delivering shoddy products and it’s about time that stops.
If there’s one thing The Big N knows how to do, it’s ensure quality in their games.
As parting words I leave you this: if Dragon Age II had gone back to the drawing board after negative feedback on its repetitiveness (at least), what sort of fantastic game would we have received in its stead? We’ll never know.
