Randomly Mine #12

Narrative is Everywhere

Or at least it can be.

Whether it’s the psychological storytelling of Spec Ops or Hellbade, political films, or even my video’s, there’s always someone to vent frustrations out of feeling that this is all pretentious.

That stories should be straight forward and their purpose is entertainment and nothing else.

That narrative doesn’t belong in games, shows, or videos.

However, while I might’ve seen eye to eye with this view in the past, it’s one that I separate more from as the years go by, because even in the most mindless of entertainment, there’s still a story or fantasy being tapped into.

Multiplayer games tell stories all the time. Gamers will often describe what happened in matches to their friends with excitement just from describing events. Films like Commando utilize their camp and charm to deliver an action romp that wouldn’t be possible in something more serious and savage. And the subjectivity of essay creators give people a personal viewpoint in a market which for years was overruled with two extremes, complete pho-objectivity or agenda driven schemes.

When you have a viewer ask questions, feel tension, or surprise them in the moment, it doesn’t matter if it’s on Youtube, Xbox or the Theatre, you’re telling a story.

And rather than take the extreme approach of telling no story, it’s best to figure out what your story is, and the presence it should have to make your work the best it can be.

Cannot Be Bothered

There’s been a recent scare amongst a portion of the gaming community that Single-Player games have been dying, and in particular with the rumors of Black Ops IV not featuring a campaign, it’s one that was increasing in popularity until God of War.

However, when you really dig through and look at which companies have moved away from Single-Player focused titles, the two heavy hitters are EA and Activision, and here’s why I couldn’t care less about their choices.

When was the last time EA and Activision published a great single-player game?

Titanfall 2 is a multiplayer game that happened to feature a remarkably solid campaign. I enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda at launch but it was one of the companies most controversial in years. A Way Out’s unique, but I wouldn’t currently say it’s the peak of storytelling in gaming.

And Activision? Quake 4, World at War, and Singularity are the last Single-Player focused titles I’d praise without hesitation.

To upset would require disappointment and while I think EA and Activision are fools for putting all of their eggs in one basket, this is a trajectory both have been on for years and frankly, I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.

But the last point is one that Gamer Tron recently pointed out. By panicking and saying that Single-Player games are dead, you’re validating the very falsehood that EA and Activision’s choices have perpetuated. Its pouring gasoline on fireworks, and it’s better to simply purchase what interests you, and enjoy the plethora of single-player focused titles that are available in the market. Ones that are far superior to anything that EA or Activision would come up with in the name of good PR to hopefully please shareholders.

Hotswapping

In previous generations, there was a trend of games that shared a name, but little else. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was one such game. Where Battlefield 2 on PC was a grounded large-scale war, Modern Combat was arcadey and fast. Weapons were dead accurate, hitboxes were large, and featured a campaign with one very unique feature.

Games based on wars have an inherent drawback, and that’s, how do you immerse the player in a warzone when the chances of survival of a warzone are so low? It’s hard to imagine someone in the military today with the bodycount of any Call of Duty protagonist.

Well, Modern Combat found a very clever workaround with one mechanic. One that came with it, a slew of benefits to a shooter focused on large scale conflict.

Hotswapping was attached to the X button on Microsoft’s console. Above every ally soldier was an icon that indicated their location and what class they were. Say you’re playing a Sniper at the back but you’d rather play an engineer or solider on the frontlines, well with this, you look at your ally, press X, the camera cinematically flies to their location, and you take control of that character.

This can be done with every ally on the field. In Modern Combat, you weren’t just playing a Soldier, you were playing the entire army.

And when you inevitably die as one soldier on the Battlefield, the mission continues and you simply take control of another troop.

This also brings a variety in every stage, in missions you’ll be hopping between rushing with machine guns to piloting helicopters and escaping on boats.

The ability to zoom around from solider to soldier not only meant far less time was spent mindlessly traveling, it allowed players to do so on large maps that didn’t follow the linear progression of most shooters at the time.

This mechanic could’ve come to define the Battlefield series in a campaign venture. Being the only Triple A game on the market to cover such a vast landscape with almost every type of contemporary vehicle and weapon being utilized.

But more than that, the mechanic has real potential to realize the horrors of war on a scale no shooter has managed to tackle. Where every mission comes with it death and destruction, the loss of lives over a conflict that never needed to happen. Attach this to a game with characters people got to know and care about, and I think you’d have a very powerful experience. One just as vast as it is intimate.

Modern Combat in general is a game that seemingly tapped into potential by accident, and perhaps I should cover it someday.

I Hate XCOM

But only to piss off Sparky…