Hit the Apex

Games these days probably average between 8 to 10 hours in length, give or take, not including any sort of multiplayer component. A fair number of releases get flack for their length, especially if they’re on the lower end of my guesstimated average. Regardless, that’s 8+ hours of interactive content where you’re constantly manipulating a character, vehicle or some such on the screen, and most of the time your interactions can be explained with a single page in an instruction manual.

In other words, that’s 8-10 hours of performing the same basic actions over and over and over again. If that core action set isn’t fun in and of itself, you’ve got a problem.

In a first-person shooter, for example, aside from titles that allow you to interact with objects in ways other than shooting them (which, beyond the simple on/off toggle of a switch, is very rare), all you’re doing is firing various types of bullet-spewing weaponry for 8+ hours. Maybe there’s a cover system or something else to add some complexity, but that basic action of pulling the trigger is all you’re really doing for those many hours. This sort of very rough abstraction can be applied to a large percentage of games today (though certainly not all).

So how do you keep things fresh? With eye candy. Most brain-wielding folks, myself included, will argue at length that slick graphics do not make a game great alone, and that the pure gameplay is the most important aspect. Parallax mapping, deferred lighting and procedurally generated, physics-driven animations aren’t what I’m talking about, though they can most certainly help (if used well).

The eye candy I’m referring to is simply interesting things to see, backdrops to your repetitive actions that make you think you’re doing different stuff the entire game, when you’re really not. Great overall design that’s planned well from the start can provide the gamer with enough interesting locales and situations that, even though they’re doing the same few basic actions for hours on end, will make them feel like their repetitive actions are still fresh.

You can look to franchises like Uncharted and God of War for great examples of how they keep the player hooked despite the fact that you’re doing the same thing for the entire game. In Uncharted, you have every skill that you’re ever going to get at the start (sans weapon types), and while Kratos can get stronger, earn a handful of new attacks and acquire magic abilities, the same is essentially true of God of War as well.

Some people say that great game design is just creating something that’s fun enough to repeat for 10 hours, but that’s not really true. Yes, you need to make a combat system or what have you that can hold up that long, but that’s not what keeps people playing. A large part of it is the scenery and setting, and how well they can keep the player interested. The opening level in God of War II (well, all of them for that matter) was incredible, but would you want to repeat that 10 times rather than continue on and see what else there is? Hell no – that would get really boring.

So then it’s what you’re seeing while you perform the same actions over and over again that keeps you interested. The more eye candy the developer can give you and the more enthralling the setting, the better and fresher the gameplay seems, even if you’ve already been doing the same actions for eight hours or more.

A great example of this is the platforming sections in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. By and large there isn’t a difference between what you can do in the first and second game in terms of platforming, but for my money, the platforming segments in the second are way more exciting than in the first because my eyes were drawn around the environment much more than they were in the first title. In some sections, stuff falls apart as you move around the scene, and even though you’re at little to no risk of actually falling, it adds a sense of suspense to what might otherwise be you simply watching a climbing animation cycle a few times.

Obviously there’s a whole lot more to making a great game than just putting players in a cool scene, but there’s also a whole lot to be said for it. It’s pretty clear when developers take the time to stand back, objectively look at their work and make sure every pixel and every second gives something to the player, even if you can’t actually interact with most of it.