Metroid: Dread - How Metroid Lost its Way
May 23rd, 2024This will not be a Feel Good story about Metroid: Dread finally correcting course. I am here today to be a hater.
Not a hater out of spite, or to be a contrarian, or even to shame people for liking the popular thing. Metroid: Dread is many people's(Even John Cena's) favorite Metroid game. The game is a critical and commercial darling. I'm not here to try and make you feel stupid for liking a game I don't enjoy. My values are likely very different from yours and that's fine. A lot of folks I respect deeply enjoy this game. I've lived through enough forum arguments like "Is Metroid Fusion a good game?"(It isn't 😒) to care about winning the Video Game Opinion War.
I'm writing this because my feelings come from the heart. Because 2D Constructed Worlds get into my fucking soul. I can't help but to feel very strongly about them. If I just think a game is bad, I simply stop playing it(Bad is kinda a weasel word here. Bad for me usually means 'Boring' and I love some bad, awful TRASH games). I walk away. Hate happens when I care and I find Metroid is especially good at getting me to care a lot.
I don't want you to hate Metroid: Dread, I wan't you to understand why someone would.
An Over Designed Game with an Under Designed World
To claim the Map of Metroid: Dread is, in any sense "Under Designed" is a tall order. Game Maker's Toolkit has an excellent video on all the tricks and design techniques Dread utilizes to keep you progressing through the game. Regardless of my overall opinion of this game, It's a genuinely impressive technical feat to balance so many moving parts... To keep Dread's guiding hand invisible and frictionless.
But sadly, the invisible hand of Dread is not invisible to everyone and I found myself fighting its constricting bounds frequently.
The ever changing early hours of Dread are a hot stove, punishing you for caring. Every time you think there's a point where you should go back and check, a waist high hole turns things into a one way trip. Water flowed out of a hole, making jumping impossible, or a stupid flaming plant appeared to arbitrarily say "Nope, not today". This type of control over the available play space is a common and useful tool in Metroidvanias, but Dread keeps the leash obscenely short.
If you try to engage with the world presented to you, the world shrugs and tells you to keep moving forward. Even when you finish what feels like a heroic little loop around the starting area of the game, you are forced immediately on a new railroad track. Areas bleed into each other, winding mazes of tunnels with no grounding structure. Why even try and look for structure? The right way is forward and what you assume about the world now might not be the same 3 rooms for now. I'm not sure if you get to explore an optional area once in the first hour of the game.
... Then you get Morph Ball and the game massively opens up. Suddenly you are given freedom and that freedom is suffocating. Nothing in the world has been established. No familiarity has been built up. It's like you've been dropped off in a town you've seen your friends drive through, but haven't driven through yourself. You recognize some things, but you are fundamentally lost.
Dread's progression is tightly designed, but its world is not... Or at least the structure of the world. That Game Maker's Toolkit to me is interesting because it talks about all the tricks Dread uses, but doesn't talk about all the tricks it forgoes. What fundamentals it forgoes.
Metroid Dread's map lacks bones and connective tissue. Prime cut moving, platforming, and gunning. A clean cut of meat might be great when making a steak, but this is game design. We need functional muscle that does work.
Intimacy through Repetition
Super Metroid is a game anchored by vertical space. Long, towering screens(And I'll include the 'fat' hubs of Pink Brinstar and Bubble Norfair) act as important points of exploration and progression, presenting players with a series of doors. These areas operate as hubs and waymarkers the players can use to navigate around. Need a save point? It's probably off a hub tower. Need to progress? The next place you have to go is probably directly off a hub tower(if not, it's usually connected to another set piece). These towers give room to explore. Many doors will be a dead end that will provide the player with a power up. Usually, there is only one way forward, often at the top or bottom of a tower.
Depending on how you count, there are almost a dozen of these important guidance structures in the game. Much of the more tangly, interconnected, complicated rooms take place between these "fence posts". Exploring is a horizontal activity, and Navigating is often a vertical one. The repetition of this pattern is key in helping players intuit their way around. You know when you see certain types vertical spaces there will be a save point somewhere. We slowly understand the logic of world. We begin having discourse with the designers. You don't need magical Golden Pathway butterflies when the world itself is guiding you.
But then there is Maridia. Why is Maridia so confusing?
Because it's one of the few areas in the game that lack this structure. It has structure, big hub rooms that funnel down into an almost "drainage ditch" horizontal hallway. But since the design language is different, the area feels claustrophobic, oppressive, and confusing. Whether it's too confusing is debatable(Even a lot of Super Metroid fans don't exactly love Maridia), but it is both clearly intentional and a wonderful example of how powerful these tools are. It also shows that things don't have to be one way.
Hardware nerds will look at the design pattern and think of course, because the NES Metroid had to be this way. Vertical rooms were the only way to have more than two doors. Super Metroid is only echoing a convenient limitation. It's doing it because that's how Metroid is supposed to feel.
Metroid II was as much of an influence on Super Metroid as the original, but it takes a very different approach. Metroid II(Until Mercury Steam ruined it) forwent the use of elevators and most doors, focusing more on sprawling, winding tunnels. The focal point navigation elements besides besides the ever shrinking arterial acid chasms would be the "Big Room" Chozo ruins. Big open areas serve as Metroid II's hubs. Until an area is clear, the hub is where you start exploring from and where you return to when you are done. The large hubs on such a small screen benefit both exploration and navigation. You can always orient yourself off them. there are never two ruins in the same area. Like moss growing on the north facing side of a tree, when you emerge from a tunnel seeing Chozo wall tiles to your left, you know you're on the right side of the big room. The repetition inspires trust in the explorer.
This is practically the structure of the original Dark Souls, which still stands as the best interconnected 3d Map ever made. Large points of action and exploration connected through linear roadways, almost like a flowchart diagram.
Castlevania games employ all these elements. the Outer Wall of Symphony of the Night is the ultimate "Hub Tower", being a complete area in it's own right. Hub rooms like the one in Orlox's Lair look the part, almost appearing as a great foyer. The Marble Gallery, which serves as one of the main horizontal movement highways in the game, styles itself as a literal hallway. Aria of Sorrow's Castle Corridor invokes this design while connecting to 6 different areas and a teleporter.
One may fairly criticize the IGAvania's overused of flat hallways but many do get used to serve critical purposes. They do the work needed to keep the chaotic mess that is Dracula's castle organized. Tools like these are used in virtually all Metroidvanias. Even Fusion, a game I loathe, will use Hub Towers. Even Hollow Knight, a game designed to literally get you lost has visible structure when you stare at the map. How does Dread structure itself?
The Tangled Guts of Metroid Dread
Winding, piled up, and folded in on itself. Rooms laid out like intestines. Linear, yet looped up into convoluted knots. Things that seem close are miles away. The things that seem far and impossible to reach to are inevitable. They are inevitable because of the structure, which exists but is kept secret from the player. What does look like structure are more likely a Shinespark puzzle than a means of navigation. The carefully laid out and ever changing locks and keys of Dread keep you moving forward, even as you feel like you are passing by everything. You are never given time to build intimacy with the world, because you don't get to truly interact with it. Sure, you're bombing walls, and shooting "secrets", but is Metroid supposed to be about Breaking Blocks?.
You are interacting with the world not as a carpenter building a table, but like how one would assemble IKEA furniture. There are patterns and repetition, but they aren't spatial. Dread's repetition is a matter of timing. You can't look at a map midway through Dread and predict where save points will be. Because save points aren't a factor of location, they are a factor of time. If its been a long time between saves, one is coming up. They deliver the plot, so you can't miss them, they are littered reliably along the golden path. This isn't inherently a bad thing, maybe save points are things you don't want players to miss, but there is exceedingly little in the game to reward curiosity. You don't discover missiles and E-Tanks. You see them, along the path, and then decipher the puzzle you need to solve to get them. So many of Mercury Steam's design decisions seem to try and push things toward puzzle solving. Obviously puzzle solving has a solid place in Metroid, but is puzzle solving an appropriate replacement for exploration?
Eternally Lost, but always On Track
So when you get that morph ball, mentioned all those paragraphs back, you are left with no context. No structure. No goals. Sure there are Meta goals. "Samus, you have to get back to your ship!", but you are not given long term goals you can actively work toward. In Super Metroid, when you first reach Norfair, you are confronted by hot rooms that you cannot get past. You get the high jump boots and leave for Kraid's Hideout. But you put a mental pin in it. When you get the varia suit of COURSE you're going to go back to Norfair. It's a whole, complete area you get to explore. You have the mental problem to solve "Get something that resists heat so I can explore Norfair".
This works because Norfair is very singular. The player has only encountered hot rooms there. They likely haven't encountered lava or acid(You see, it's not lava on the top of Crateria, it's ACID, and it's ACID because the world has been ruined by acid rain, likely caused by the destruction of Tourian I. This, you see, is why it's raining on the surface and all the biological growth happens in the deeper parts of Brinstar and WHERE ARE YOU GOING--!). You'll be fairly close to it when you get the varia suit. What's more, when you get the ice beam in Norfair, you have a solution for another problem, getting out of the Red Tower in Brinstar. Super Metroid is using One Way Gates like Dread is, but by keeping it's gates simple, memorable, and obvious, it's no longer a confusing sleight on hand. It's not trying to trick you with a waist high hole. You fell in a pit. You remember things like that. Things don't suddenly change behind you for no reason.
Meanwhile, Dread is a blur. When you get a power-up, you cannot trust your memory and say "I remember all these places I could roll through back at the beginning of the game", because the way back is gone... Or is it? You can't be sure. Even if you figure that out, how can you even keep track when there are almost a dozen different types of door. You can only refer to the map... but without context, the map is like being reliant on GPS. You get around, but without actually learning about what's around you.
Got the Varia suit? Well hot and cold rooms are practically everywhere, dotted around almost randomly(I could defend some of this and how ZDR is very volcanically active. They use it for power. The places that have lava outside of Cataris are relatively close. I think there is actually a lot of good world building elements that are technically going on with this particular aspect of Dread's design. Sadly, I don't have a good place to say this without going into the weeds and... well, frankly the design of the rest of the game just turns this into a failed idea. Cold rooms on the other hand are 90% just arbitrary and make me think I'm giving them too much credit for their lava.). You see the hot and cold emanating off the door. They have, in many ways, simply become a new set of locks and keys. You don't get to explore the dark fiery depths of Norfair, you get pass through the red room, which itself probably isn't that important on it's own. Just a stepping stone to somewhere else.
This distinction seems to be splitting hairs, but it's very real. The Varia and Gravity suit in Super Metroid granted a real genuine sense of freedom. You had new possibilities. In Dread, even the Space Jump, the most powerful movement item in Metroid... is primarily used to progress in the water? The progression is so locked down that to make the Space Jump work, they have to force you to use it as if it was you were playing some strange romhack, building puzzles out of odd tertiary physics behaviors. Teleporters don't serve as convenient fast travel(How many times did you use one outside of the 'One time you're obviously supposed to use it'? Be honest.) through the world, they serve as fistulas, connecting areas of the progression that won't fit together neatly otherwise. At worst a crude patch to fix a progression problem they couldn't solve otherwise, and at best a way to add to your disorientation. Because if you're confused and feel lost, then you must be exploring, right?
But ultimately, your progression was Ordained. The way forward has been written. Even if you deviate, that too was part of the plan. Stop worrying, and keep moving forward.
The Impossible Task of E.M.M.I
Another feature that dominates each area are the E.M.M.I zones, which contain the indestructible research robots that are supposed to stalk you like a horror movie monster. The E.M.M.I are, I think, the one thing that even fans of the game will willingly critique. They are, to be fair, the exact type of flawed mechanic I would forgive in a game I enjoyed. They even have a few neat ideas... But unless you're willing to hold up your arms and scream as if it were a rollercoaster... They're not scary. They're not tense, and as for annoying as they are, they're not a challenge.
Yet a quarter of the map is dedicated to them. Dedicated zones, right in the middle of every area, bifurcating an already disconnected maps. Yet this isn't wasted space. E.M.M.I's allow the illusion that you are running frantically through so much space you could explore if you were brave enough. But you can't. Not because the E.M.M.I's are too hard to avoid, but because there only one way to go. There may be multiple doors, but those doors only serve as makeshift checkpoints. Because with the E.M.M.Is, there are no stakes. Past all the pantomimed horror, and "scary" grabbing animations, all you have is a goofy robot that sends you back to the last door you came in from. So, if you wise up to the illusion, you realize that all you have to do, 90% of the time, is to just take a brisk jog through. Sure, you'll be caught now and then, but it doesn't matter. Back to the door to try again. There is a randomized QTE, a true second chance, that is conceptually neat but given the stakes, doesn't add much. Sometimes it can allow you to brute force the few challenging(and honestly, stupid) segments. Neat, but clearly doesn't hit the vibe they were hoping for(Well... There is an exception to this, but we'll get there).
I think I ultimately like the E.M.M.Is more than SA-X... but I am a SA-X hater. Still, they both have strengths and weaknesses. Neither are scary(Okay I realize some of you played Fusion as children and it was scary then, but it ain't scary if you're an adult), and E.M.M.I's interactive nature is more interesting to me. Though in my opinion, it's insta-kill nature makes it paradoxically less scary when compared to the inevitable attrition of SA-X finding you. The SA-X is also more thematically horrifying, where the E.M.M.I's make absolutely no sense. Ah yes research robots that the most powerful bounty hunter in the universe can't stop, with a weird Mother Brain AI that got there... somehow??? and that control the E.M.M.Is even when destroyed, and why are they limited to certain areas and... it's just stupid and unexplained. It's there because Sakamoto(A man who hasn't had a good idea about Metroid in the past 30 years.) wanted a Horror element and they did their best. For a lot of people in games, you can't scare them unless they buy a game wanting to be scared. Most people aren't buying Metroid for "horror".
Surprisingly, one of the few bits of "sinew" that exists in Dread comes from defeating an E.M.M.I. All their little tunnels suddenly become usable morphball paths. Suddenly the whole area becomes more open and explorable, with disconnected sections of the map suddenly become connected. Now... This comes with all the same "jumble of door and confusing rooms" as the rest of the game, but it's still good.
Unfortunately, destroying an E.M.M.I makes for a clumsy set piece. The Central Unit boss fights are fine. Simple, but with a little bit of fun dodging. Also a fun way to measure your ever increasing power level (you eventually just one-shot one with a screw attack). Once the Central Unit is destroyed you unlock the OMEGA CANNON, the epic gun you need to use to kill these things. You run, find a place that's long and flat, stumble with the goofy omega cannon controls you barely use, die, reload, do it again.... Blow off the mask with the omega machine gun fire, okay charge and SHOOT THE CHARGE BEAM wait shit no I let go of the charge beam button because I thought it was like every other game where you charge and release to shoot a charged shot, but whatever. Okay third time is the charm!
It's an... okay set piece, whose tension is often lost because failure is usually an awkward fumble and not some tense horror movie showdown. If you die, you just try again.
It's not the end of the world. Heck, ultimately this is just a Skill Issue... Yet it's so common for Mercury Steam to get in the way of their own set pieces by over complicating them. On the last E.M.M.I, they add a bit with a slow elevator, only to then shove you into a super cramped space. It's like they regretted the lack of stakes and wanted to add some at the end, even if the stakes were small. Other times they're crutching on cutscenes, QTEs, and obtuse boss gimmicks. Always trying to be clever, in constant fear of being too straight forward.
Mercury Steam, their Terrible Combat, and their Flimsy Bosses and their Quest for Cinematic Action
I must start with a digression. I played Lords of Shadow around 14 years ago and it was one of the few games I've gotten deep into and still just dropped. I know this is distressingly normal for some people, but if I get 5 or 10 hours into a game, I tend to finish it.(Y'all gotta stop dropping games just to play a new release. 'But my friends are playing the new thing and I'll get FOMO' yeah great now you have two games you have shallow experiences with and now you can't have meaningful conversations about either of them. Was it really worth it just to be able to say 'Yeah I thought the first boss was hard too' on a discord call? Do you have to be talking about the same games to have meaningful conversations with your friends? Do you want to speed run all the media in your life just so you can say 'me too' rather than letting yourself enjoy something and form deep feelings about it? I feel like this game I hate is more meaningful to me than most of the stuff y'all consume because you don't let yourself slow down and take the time to -actually engage with it-. Finish your god damned plate or put it in the trash. You got food in the fridge so old it's going to give you botulism. 'Oh I'll get back to it', bitch you don't even remember where you were or what the buttons are! Don't act like it's 2 or 3 games you're working a rotation through, you use a whole website to track how bad you are at finishing shit! Play less games, but play them with your WHOLE HEART!) Just because I dislike a game doesn't mean I don't value the experience of playing it. I want to finish something so I can formulate complete opinions and understand why I felt how I felt.
Lords of Shadow was, at the time, artistically compelling, narratively bizarre(in good and bad ways), and also a Greatest Hits Collections of all the AAA trends at the time. Bad climbing, bad swinging, bad QTEs... The game constantly felt like they wanted to have Cool Set Pieces but worried about them being "too easy". You'd be left trying to figure out which way or how hard the game wanted you to spin the analog stick to hurl a boulder(It's amazing how they turned their epic SoTC ice golem titan boss into some frustrating and boring trial and error nonsense) in a one-off Boss battle. These awkward fumbles, like many of the elements involving E.M.M.I, would deflate the moment.
It's not that set pieces need to be easy, but challenging set pieces usually leverage your game's established mechanics. But when you're shallowly touring a bunch of AAA gimmicks, cool moments become more about guessing what the developer's intention was, much like trying to answer a 5 Year Old's sketchy riddle.
The worst offender of this was The Evil Butcher, a minor Boss about 10 hours into the game. At this point, the mechanics of the game are well established and a key one is... You grab things with a button. It's been 14 years, I forget which , But We're going to say L1. The titan is throwing big flashing stones at you? Press L1. Giant head boss is stunned? Press L1 to bang it's head into the ground. Or take an enemies weapon away, or whatever.
So when the Evil Butcher, a man sized chump, puts a pot on his head to make him invincible, well how do you take it off him? You hit L1 right? No...? Okay maybe I gotta wail on him to stun him and THEN hit L1? No??? He's just pointing at the pot on his head as a pity hint?? No, I KNOW about the pot!! How do I get the pot off?? Maybe I need to hit him with like, really vertical attacks and come DOWN on the pot? No. Do I need to drop things on him? No...
I probably spent an hour wailing on this jerk, only to look up the answer. You have to jump. Never mind the boss is relatively small and your whip hits everywhere Never mind the fact that... Well... attacking the thing that makes him invulnerable makes no sense. Never mind everything else. "You have to be airborne" is not something the game established in the last 10 hours. 10 hours is how long it took me to get through Dread, an entire other video game. And now, because they whored out their "Grab Stuff" button(Insert a picture Roman Reigns Kneeling next to Cody Rhodes at Wrestlemania, saying 'That move don't beat nobody') and regret it, I gotta just mash buttons like an idiot until something works.
Mercury Steam seems to constantly fear that if something is too easy or straight forward, people won't be engaged. They constantly try to have their cake and eat it too, trying to impress with shallow flash, while adding needless complexity to try and make that flash seem substantial.
While they have gotten better at this whole video game thing, the same design quirks keep coming up. If our combat doesn't have "mechanics" it'll be boring... okay add a parry system... but if we make the parries too easy that'll be boring too, so gotta add some attack variety or even randomness... but if we do that, they might not actually engage with the parry system, so we have to make the parry sequences do WAY more damage than everything else. But if we do that our bosses will be short so we need ot make the bosses extra tanky and make the counters do the majority of the damage! They're so fixated on trying to make sure they have "Deep combat"(Big finger quotes on this one.) that they loose sight of the fact that Samus has a giant cannon for an arm.
The Robot Chozo Soldier(Imagine making this enemy and being like 'yeah this is so good you should fight it 10 times')s make for a good example what I think they feel like they're fighting against. The soldiers have a pretty boring ranged attack and two dash attacks. One is an overhead elbow thing and the other is a big fiery red blade attack. They want you to counter -- they always want you to counter -- but they don't want to make it easy. Or worse, simple. So they overtuned the big red dash attack, making it too fast and giving it too much range. It's hard(though not impossible) to stand at a range and react fast enough to react to both(Homie, I gotta save those reaction speeds for reacting to Drive Impacts, I'm not wasting that shit on your wack mid-boss). This makes the most reasonable option, at least for me, to just... grind them out, as tedious as it is. The fear of you doing this -- just walking away and doing the safe thing -- is why bosses seem completely undefeatable without performing counters.
They want simple systems, all while being insecure about possibly having "shallow gameplay". It feels like a lack of confidence, that they don't trust their content to be engaging without that extra kick. Extra Kick can be good -- I love me some rough, hard games -- but unconfident design is defensive design. You're no longer trying to enrich the player, you're trying maintain them by dangling shiny keys.
There is a fear of simplicity that permeates Mercury Steam's work. Nothing is allowed to breathe. Everything must be a little puzzle, be interactive. We can't let you retread the same area a few times, to let you build familiarity, because you might start complaining about "backtracking"(I have played few games with too much backtracking, but have met plenty of gamers who are too weak). Who could tolerate a simple hallway? Sauce, there has to be sauce everywhere. If we don't slather your food with sauce, how will you know it tastes good?
Like a strong sauce, it can be used to mask the weakness of your core ingredients. Mercury Steam will rob you of the simple joy of picking up an item to play a cutscene of you picking it up instead. It will give the boss kill to the Action Star Samus Aran that animates on your screen and not to the one you control with your hands. I'd say they know they didn't build on a solid foundation, but I'm not sure if Mercury Steam knows what a solid foundation is. For a studio who came up trying to make flashy AAA 3d games, they continue to bring their lack of substance down to 2D, covering for their faults by simply being a lot. The sauce is good, but the meat is lacking.
You all Gaslit me about the Bosses in this Game
One thing that people kept telling me about Dread was "at least the bosses are good. A big improvement from the older games!"
I reject this notion. The simple bosses of Super Metroid are memorable, with clear gimmicks, and present reasonable platforming and shooting challenges. They're more than set pieces but they're not huge skill tests. They are designed to be engaging moments. There is a common trend, even among games I like, that bosses have to be these challenging multiple form slogs. More complicated, challenging, rewarding bosses are cool, but sometimes a boss can be a capstone. A single concept to explore. You shoot Crocomire in the mouth a bunch and he walks back into the lava. You have a cool moment, and you move on. The difficulty and pacing of the bosses are in sync with the exploration. These aren't huge, imposing content walls, they are added texture to your journey. You find Kraid. You fight his head. You get the surprise of him standing up and becoming huge. You then get a fun platforming and resource management segment, relying on the skills you have been using to get through the game.
We look at Kraid in Dread, and... the first phase is pretty good! It rewards positioning, and aiming and managing projectiles. I was pretty jazzed! But then you get to phase two and you're... standing there, staring at his belly button, watching beach balls bounce around, trying to figure out Mercury Steam's riddles. How to precisely jump up his weird stomach platforms, why sometimes he shoots out a fake 'attack' set, oh I fell because I didn't know I needed to grab something on top, oh I fell because I didn't know he was going to do a swipe... OH I need to counter the swipe...
Is this really better than Super Metroid? Is figuring out the boss fight's awkward bread crumbs more engaging than a more active platforming and shooting challenge, where Kraid is stomping around the level while you're juggling on screen projectiles with having chances to deal damage? A very analog experience has been reduced to call and response puzzle sequence. Even dealing with his weird tummy attacks are more about knowing the solution than engaging with a real enemy design. It's Call and Response gameplay in a game that isn't otherwise about that. It might be easy to go "Well isn't Crocomire a puzzle?", but figuring out "You shoot him to make him retreat" is a small puzzle, where then the majority of the boss fight is about surviving and scoring the necessary hits. The difficulty of the boss fight is proportional to the gimmick. It doesn't overstay its welcome.
Dread lacks the more sensible progression between "Exploration" and "Boss" that Super Metroid had. In Dread, bosses represent a huge shift in not only difficulty, but the kind of gameplay you're experiencing. The last part is the important one. Dark Souls is a game with huge challenging bosses... but the rest of the game is challenging too. The bosses interact with you like a big enemy. The skills you used to fight them are similar to the skills you use to explore and survive in the world. Shifts in gameplay can be fun, an action game suddenly becoming a shmup can be fun... but is the shift good when you're shifting to play Simon Says?(I bet a cool indie game could make a funny boss segment where you literally play Simon Says)
Kraid is, among Dread's bosses, one of the better ones(Raven Beak > Z-57 >> Kraid > Everything else is Eh or Trash Tier >>>> Drogyga. So two good bosses, an okay boss, some eh bosses, and one of the worst modern bosses.). Drogyga, the water boss, must be one of the worst bosses I have played in a modern game. A boss excessively about waiting, dropping slow, floating orbs down at you, over and over again, before doing a big, telegraphed tentacle swipe. Eventually you stun him (after he's done his two attacks half a dozen times), grab the overhead magnet thing and... have it slowly move down the track until you hit the boss, damaging you.
Maybe you notice the green orb light up on the wall the first time, maybe you're like me and it takes 2 or 3 reps of this but you realize if you shoot THAT after he's stunned, the water drains. You do it again and... okay wait one of these is on the other side and I gotta do BOTH in one go and... okay not this time, maybe next time and...
Okay you got that, you hit him a bunch and ooooh you didn't parry the tongue attack back to square one. Back to waiting. Oh wait now he's doing new tentacle attacks? Congrats, you died. Time to go back to square one. Time to wait.
Not a single thing this boss does is challenging or hard to deal with. The challenge is simply a matter of knowing. Not even in a Dark Souls "Know what telegraphed moves to dodge or counter attack on", but like, simple problem/solution answers for tentacle attacks that you have little hope of avoiding the first few times but are completely trivial afterward. It is all Call and Response and figuring out Mercury Steam's stupid little "puzzle" with no substance. Just a lot of down time, waiting, and trial and error.
Raven Beak is... a good boss fight. Sure, it's tiring how a red cape(Slave Knight Gael is at best a Mid Fromsoft boss and you're all just marks for epic music and flashy effects. Dude isn't even cool, he looks like a rejected MOBA character.) and a cool background is all you need to be called "epic", but he has more going on than most. He has attacks that compliment each other, attacks that overlap, causing problems that have creative solutions. He requires that you utilize your movement skills, You have to balance defensive play vs offense(such as attacking his black or gold orbs) and he's... generally pretty cool? Last Bosses (or other special key boss fights) often get more latitude in deviating from the main game, but Raven Beak doesn't need that. He is more in sync with the base game. I'm not nearly as in awe as other people about him, but whatever.
The problem comes from the parries. It's always the parries. The fact that phase 1 needs 3 parries under normal conditions(Though doing it in 2 with a setup is reasonable, and 1 if you're a sicko. This game DOES have cool speedrun tech.) makes learning phase 2 and 3 tedious. Eventually it isn't hard, but it's boring, and a little frustrating because it's like "Oh wait THIS is the parry where I gotta wait to do a SECOND parry and this one is the one where I mash shoot on shit I didn't mash shoot, guess I wasted that chance". Again, we are left trying to psychically infer what Mercury Steam wants.
The lack of required parries in phase 2 and most of 3 actually create a boss fight that actually rewards more traditional platforming action skills. It's like as if Raven Beak's reception is because the whole rest of the game has you shadowboxing much more vapid bosses. Now you have a boss that asks you to actually engage with the what he's doing in a meaningful way. Now, because he's contrasting with the shallow bosses who came before him, Good seems like Excellence.
Despite these problems, Raven Beak is the one truly good boss(Like a B+??) in Metroid Dread. For a hater to have any credibility, they have to be able to give credit where credit is due. Just ignore the part where Samus turns into an angry watermelon(She looks like Gut's Berserk Armor fucked a Watermelon).
Parry is the Albatross hanging around the Neck of Metroid Dread
Ultimately after all this, we have to ask... why the parry? Why is gun lady swinging her cannon around like it's a main gauche? What are the benefits of this?
The main benefit is obvious. Parrying is cool. Parrying is so cool it makes people blind to the dumb shit they're forced to put up with. Waiting for bosses to expose their weak spot is something that people have been complaining about for three decades now, but if you turn it into a parry people eat it up. Waiting is boring, but parrying is skill, man.
Even I love a good parry(Unless it's in 3rd Strike. That game is ass.). I love superfluous abilities. I love that Bunny in Bunny Must Die has a Street Fighter-esque parry. I love that she can parry spikes and FIRE. I love that you NEVER have to use it and that nothing tells you it exists. It feels almost like Super Metroid's Wall Jump, a weird game breaking extra for the weirdos who want to master it. You can do whole Souls builds based on parries, or never engage with the system at all.
Sekiro is a whole game based on parries(Okay but IS it? Are they parries? or is Sekiro a RHYTHM GAME, and the parry in the game is the Mikiri Counter??? Are you playing Sword DDR while parrying up arrows????). The problem is that Dread wants parries to be a core game mechanic in a game about shooting and exploring. We have to ask what that adds to the game? What does it take away? What supports it as a major mechanic? Would the game be worse if the parry was just some fun extra you could do to REALLY murder an enemy?
I don't think there is a good case to be made for Dread's parry, even as a "fun extra". Through most of the game it's mostly a way to quickly cheese large enemies without dealing them with the other options available in the game, flattening the designs of some of your more detailed enemies. For smaller enemies it's largely pointless. For Bosses, it's more Simon Says than Dark Souls. But that desire for parries, that Ex-AAA lust for "Rich Combat"(3rd Strike fans will say 'Parries are Deep' while they invalidate half the moves in the game) causes Mercury Steam to actually flatten the game, making it more tedious, and make much shallower.
I don't hate the Parry button. I hate the repercussions it's existence has on the rest of the game.
What did Dread do Right(by the standards of a weirdo who hates a wildly successful game)
There were a few good bits in this game I genuinely enjoyed. I love that every major boss is hinted at or often even seen in the background(or in Kraid's case, in audio). I liked the lava doors. That might sound funny, but genuinely, when I hit the lever for my first lava door I was like "Okay and WHERE would the door be?" before realizing I had to follow a winding lava pipe that had continuity over multiple screens. I enjoy when level design elements span across multiple screens. It makes the world feel more collected.
I think the general moving and shooting feel pretty good. I generally hate ledge grabbing(I feel like if people ask for ledge grabbing in your game the real answer is to just make the character jump higher. You use ledge grabs when you WANT to slow down transversal and add weight to movement). It's one of those features that sound nice but lead to games where you're pulling yourself up more than you are jumping on things. It breaks the flow. These... these were fast enough that it didn't bother me much? It helped that height was rarely an issue in the game. They didn't have to design the game around the limits of your Max Jump Height(Honestly this is also a sign that the map sucked, but I'm trying to be positive) as hard as other games. I liked that you got the morphball late. I don't necessary love the concessions made for that to happen, but it's cool and reminds me of the Metroid romhack Metroid X.
I liked the cutscene where your metroid-sucky-hand grabs the last E.M.M.I's attack. I like that by invoking the Last Chance QTE animation, 90% of players probably were SLAMMING the button to try and stop it. I like that this time it wasn't a QTE, even an easy one, because you got this. Simply letting it play out automatically had great tension and release. It felt triumphant to finally finally be finished with them.
Seeing an Actual fleshy chozo? Having it speak to Samus? Hearing Samus talk back? That's something I didn't know I needed. It felt nice.
I kinda generally like Samus's design? I don't like how much neck she has... or more accurately, how her shoulders and chest have been so slimmed down so that it now looks like her head is floating. But you don't see that in ugly angles a lot. She seems "feminine" but in a sporty, strong way. It's not the design choices I would make, but despite what you might think I think after reading this, things aren't always about what I'd want.
I also think, as messed up as I think Mercury Steam's design value system is... It ain't easy to design a game that railroads you like this. This might sound like a backhanded complement, and it halfway is, but I couldn't do that. I wouldn't want to, but I couldn't even if I had to. Juggling so many moving parts is insane. They did that, made a game that's fun to move in, and made combat that could at least trick people into thinking it was good. This is video games, the illusion is always more important than the reality.
People love this game and I gotta hold that.
Metroid didn't have to be Like this
The part about this that hurts me the most is that things didn't need to turn out like this. As much as I hate Dread, I don't hold the game responsible for the state of Metroid. Because as much as I hate to say it...
Metroid is about Breaking Blocks.
Metroid is about shooting color coded Doors. It's about Biomes. It's about game specific Special Suits. It is about Puzzle Solving, and weird Shine Spark Puzzles.
Metroid hasn't been about anything I've cared about for 30 years. Did it start with my most hated Metroid, Fusion?(I thought Dread would beat it out but I've softened a little while writing this.) Or was it Prime, a great game that's not for me(If I want a weird slow exploratory game that plays like a 3rd person game just in a first person perspective, I'll play King's Field)? Retro Studios deeply cared about Metroid and I respect their work, but they may have solidified the vision of Metroid in fans minds.
I don't love Dread's art style, but not due to incompetence(Mercury Steam, if anything, are artists first) but because the prevailing style of Metroid has gone from dark, weird, and textured, to shiny and pristine. By being slavish to the iconography of Metroid, they solidified these elements as permanent.
... Nah, I'd rather blame Fusion.
I think a lot about biomes. Metroid didn't really have biomes. It had areas, and one of them was hot, but it didn't have biomes. Metroid II had biomes, but they were gentle. Limitations or no, Metroid II was a cave system. It had local Biomes. You didn't go from Hot Land to Cold Land, you went from gravel to loamy sand, with Chozo ruins peppered in for a bit more contrast.
Super Metroid was the first game to really have biomes, and it still handled them gently, blending between them, setting them up, making them make sense as you transitioned between the world. Crateria is ruined by acid rain, covered with craters. Underground you find a Brinstar full of life. Head closer to Norfair and it starts trying out, only to moisten a bit when it intersects with Maridia.
Prime and Fusion are about biomes. Sakamoto thought they were so essential tht he made two games with the 'every biome on a research station' concept. Retro did good work, but didn't have the drive or maybe technology to have the biomes of the world effect each other. They were just like "Maybe we can have a snow place this time too". This is Metroid's fate forever now.
Samus Returns is filled with biomes, coded doors, and elevators. They butchered Metroid II, as if it had nothing to contribute to the series. A game that had atmosphere, a game that had different goals. A game that was rough. Maybe you could remake the game, but they chose not to engage with what the original had to say. Even the much more forgivable and good AM2R(Credit to AM2R for not adding too many doors though. This will make sense a few lines down.) still looks at Metroid II as a mistake to be rectified. Because Metroid is Fusion and Zero Mission now. We cannot engage the with Metroid II as intentional art.
I think a lot about doors. Dread has like a dozen types of doors? How many types doors did Metroid II have? How many doors did it have... at all? Not many. Only missile doors, protecting Chozo artifacts, in Chozo ruins. The door is a cultural artifact. You're in a long forgotten cave, occupied only by the occasional ruins of a forgotten civilization. Why would there be any other doors?
Metroid II even told stories through its omission of doors. An unguarded room. A destroyed statue.(Mercury Steam doesn't even invoke this room in Metroid II. They don't even invoke the big weird empty room that leads to it. They fill it with stuff because... they... they don't know what they're doing??) A metroid attacking what it thought was an ancestral enemy. The ice beam, it's weakness, scattered on the floor, as if even merely touching the item orb brought it pain. These doors protect chozo artifacts. They have a purpose.
In Ceres Station, how do you open doors? Well, you walk into them. This is a human ship. It's not designed around Samus. Normal people walk through doors. Of course we get to Fusion, and that attention to detail is already thrown away. Metroid is about opening doors. It's branding.
Do I think Dread would be better without doors? No, ZDR is a developed Chozo planet. Of course it would have shootable doors! But you can tell what they think by how they made Samus Returns and how many door types they had in Dread. To be metroid is to have colored doors. The Universe conforms to Samus Aran. Everything is gun and ball shaped. They have doors, but they don't think about doors. They don't think about the world.
Despite the myth building, despite all the cutscenes, the world of Metroid gets smaller and smaller with each release. It's like a star collapsing under it's own gravity. We can't escape Metroids, we can't escape biomes, we can't escape colored doors. Metroid has calcified. It's about playing the Greatest Hits. It's about Shinespark puzzles(Speedbooster was a mistake), and fighting the same bosses, and canned pre-designed sequence breaks. Because you see, ages ago we lost the plot.
Metroid isn't about "Exploration", it's about "Sequence Breaking".
We confused the pleasures of a game like Super Metroid with being able to mockball to get early super missiles and not the genuine act of exploration. Sequence Breaking is awesome, but it came as a side effect of the freedom we were given in those earlier games. Now Sequence Breaking is just another box on the Metroid Checklist. So now, when you complain about the linear of nature of a game, a Nintendo fanboy can materialize out of the firmament to whisper...
"There are Sequence Breaks, actually."
I'm not sad that Metroid has changed. I'm not pining nostalgically for crunchy pixels. In fact, "staying the same" is what killed it. Inbred, like a dog without a nose, each generation getting more and more exaggerated until it's features border on parody. I've, for the most part, moved on. Thinking about all of this makes me sad, but I have no need for a True Metroid. That isn't something real, and that ship has sailed. Other games have picked up the mantle. I loved Hollow Knight, but maybe I'll hate Silk Song. Does it matter? Someone else will be there after with a new take on the genre.
Sometimes when I read opinions on Fromsoft games, I find myself thinking... "Do we like the same game? Are you even engaging with the game at all? What do you actually like about this?" I've made fun of dodge roll combat for being basic, saying it's not the point of Fromsoft games. That their combat is merely a means to an end. Yet sometimes it feels like all people want is some epic fantasy and a good roll. Not engaging with the world, the lore, the sense of place, the environment. Playing with complete incuriosity, rolling around on the floor to dodge a giant boss because it's hardcore.
Reading peoples opinions on Metroid II or even Super Metroid make me feel the same way. Not that people need to like these games(not liking Metroid II is very easy), but it's more when you talk to people who claim that they do. I find myself asking... What do you actually like about Metroid?
In a sense, this isn't about Metroid. I want to understand why people like things. Why I like things. I don't want to convince you Dread is bad, or that Metroid as a franchise is hopeless, even if that's how I feel. I want to understand why I feel that, when everyone else seems so satisfied. All I can hope for is that, after all this, you at least understand where I'm coming from, even if you disagree.
Go enjoy Metroid: Dread.
(Also, thank you to Mirai for helping me proof read almost 8000 words and keeping me coherent)
It’s Not About Yellow Paint
February 17th, 2024Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth released a demo and... there are yellow painted cliffs, reigniting a conversation that keeps coming up every few months. Now, I have no exact opinion on it's use in FF7R. It seems to be explained in universe (it's a temporary route, purposefully marked), and marking paths is hardly a sin. Hinting at the so called Golden Path is a fundamental aspect of level design. This isn't about FF7R.
... But oh god did it unfortunately choose that yellow paint that has come to symbolize a type of hand holding that has been wearing on players over the last decade. It has started to feel similar to the ancient Old Man Murray "Start to Crate" system, judging a game on "How long it took to see a crate", representing the point where "the developers ran out of ideas".
This standard wasn't exactly fair and neither is judging a game on using yellow paint. FF7R is probably fine, because again, this isn't about FF7R. It is, of course, not even about the yellow paint. It's about what the yellow paint represents.
It's Not About Leaving the Player to Struggle
A lot of people have responded to this pushback saying of COURSE modern games have to do this. They have to appeal to everyone. People didn't spend $60 dollars on a game just to get lost. Companies have to do this to make money you know!
But they don't have to. People will quickly point to Souls games, and while that works, those games always seem like they don't count. The exception, no matter how much they sell. You can't actually learn from them (even if you obviously can)... but I'm going to talk about Nintendo. Nintendo has played around on all fronts of tutorialization. Nintendo has many different kind of designers working for them. They can fall into bad habits like all of us but they tend to be ahead of the curve. Even going back to Super Mario Odyssey you can see what they chose to and what they chose not to communicate. You get your magic hat. It tells you to use it immediately. On the side of the screen is a video of human hands, doing the motion to throw your hat. The game wants to make sure you know how to use this basic ability.
... But then it doesn't tell you what to do with it. It doesn't even tell you what it does. It just surrounds you with things that can interact with this ability. It creates a space for play. You're here to play the game, right? "Oh here is a ledge that is too tall? Try catching this frog" ... and then what? Like obviously you know, and the game isn't even trying to make you feel clever for using the ability to jump without being told. You're not being told what to do because there isn't any rush. You'll jump up when you're ready. Because you're here to play... right?
Nintendo games will do things to help stuck player, to nudge them along. They'll use, like everyone else, basic level design to guide you around, but the goal usually isn't to get you to go The right way but to show you all the places you can go so you can play.
... And Dark Souls isn't much different. We might want to pretend the game is negligently unconcerned with our enjoyment but it is merely doing as much as it feels it needs to do to encourage play. Getting lost is part of the play, so you are given enough room to get lost. But discovery is also an important part of the experience so there needs to be enough things to entertain yourself finding before you stumble onto the right path. The game isn't indifferent to you, it's trying to enrich you and give you what it sees to be a good experience.
It's Not About Tricking Players into Thinking They're Smart
A type of response I saw from a lot of fellow game designers who didn't immediately dismiss the issue went kinda like this... "Okay look, players don't mind being lead around! They just don't like when it's obvious! They want to be lead around! So we have to trick them better so they think they're clever."
The painful thing here is that the general idea isn't wrong. The framing though... it bugs me. It bugs me a lot. People would accuse me and I Wanna be the Guy of adversarial game design, but honestly, no. I think this is adversarial. Not having a fun, playful relationship with the player, but looking at the player as an obstacle between us and our intended experience.
A designer friend of mine, Zara, said "Maybe it'd help if we didn't see players as a particularly stubborn breed of dog" and I feel like that's how a lot of designers look at game design. Like we're magicians, trying to fake emotions and accomplishments. We will lead the horse to water, and we will make them drink their $60+ worth of game. Nobody thinks they're smart for finding the ladder... and sure, they might feel dumb if they can't find the ladder. But we all feel dumb when we don't feel like we're trusted enough to even try.
If we design our games with the assumption that the player is an idiot, then they will feel that resentment when we hold their hand.
Enrichment, Agency, and Overly Paternalistic Game Design
As a kid, did you ever plan on doing something useful without being asked? Taking out the trash, or doing the dishes unprompted? Being proactive, showing thoughtfulness? ... and as you walk out of your room to do to the thing, a parent turns to you and goes "Hey, can you take out the trash?"
Maybe it's not with a parent. Maybe it's a boss, or a loved one. Regardless, no one in this situation is doing anything wrong but gosh does it feel like something was taken away... Worse, it often isn't as enjoyable as it would have been if you just went out and did it without them saying anything. It has been turned back into work. Repeat this too often and a person might feel like no one thinks they're capable of making the right choices on their own. They lose their feeling of agency.
Game Designers force this situation a lot in modern times. Overly aggressive popups, color coding, 'helpful' partners who bark the solution to a puzzle at you while you're just looking around for a moment. Waypoints for everything, markers for everything. All of these things good in their own context, useful design elements when appropriately applied, stacked upon each other until the game designer becomes a hover parent trying to ensure the perfect experience. You must be protected from yourself. What if you get lost? What if you don't know what to do?
Hinting through level design is not new. It's ancient technology. Super Mario Bros' coins, Donkey Kong Country's bananas, every aspect of Doom's level design always tries to give you some idea where you should be going. Dark Souls does not lead you to grope blindly. Buildings convey their importance in the distance. Lighting cues help guide you. Even enemies can be a way to funnel you were you should go. The thing is though... Most of these old things aren't 'compulsory'. They are used to set the expectation. To get you to try new things. Mario will use coins to get you to jump places to do things you don't even expect to happen. Oh, what, I can break out of the ceiling? And I only noticed because I tried to get some coins? You are taught what to look for, and then you are allowed to find it later on your own. Games like DKC, or something like Super Metroid create a relationship with the player. These hints get played with, subverted, omitted, and inverted, all to slowly expand the problem space in your mind to help you have enriching play.
A lot of modern, condescending game design fails to create enrichment. It's about going on the ride. It's the overly scheduled trip to Europe your friend planned that has an itinerary down to the hour. Homie, we're not going to Europe again for years! We gotta MAXIMIZE. But by maximizing, you miss the real experience. You miss the lazy morning in Paris, wandering around until you find an espresso place. You don't look at the reviews, you just go in. You have an authentic, human experience. Could you have gotten better coffee? Could you have planned to take a bus at 8:45 over across the city to have coffee at the 3rd best reviewed espresso place in all of France? Sure, but are you here for the coffee, or are you here for the experience? It is the down time, the space between the notes that make experiences special. You don't get that when your character is telling you what you should be doing every 10 steps in whatever current grey goo ubisoft game is out right now.
People worry about games now being made for stupid people. Dumbed down for idiots. I don't like that kind of disdainful thinking, judging peoples intelligence by how they interact with mainstream videogames. No, instead, we make games for the uninvested. Games for the people who want the sampler plater of the current zeitgeist. A child, with an brain not yet fully developed, will get through these games. They will look up answers. They aren't getting every release. It isn't about intelligence. They are getting through these games because they care more, and they have been doing this since home consoles were a thing. Meanwhile, most of my peers are more concerned with avoiding FOMO.
Do players get stuck on the simplest things? Absolutely. But no one buys a 60 dollar game and gives up on it because of some easy problem that can be solved with a google search. They give up because they have 3 other 60 dollar games waiting to be played. I am left wondering if game devs are more concerned with fun experiences, or avoiding negative ones. That when you don't finish their game, you at least remember it fondly. That you come back for the DLC. That you consider the sequel. If you have to make too many decisions, you might make unfun ones, so they keep you on a tight gameplay loop.
It's not the made-up mythical "stupid gamers" (we all get stuck in silly ways and no one should be ashamed of that) bringing things down for everyone. It is our peers, who care more about being current than taking in an experience. Because we'll all get through whatever game ultimately catches our interest, no matter how obtuse it gets. But game devs can't count on that, so they keep you moving. It's Speed, with Keanu Reeves. Drop under 50 MPH and the player gets bored and moves on to the next Call of Duty game. Players will buy a game but don't play it with respect, instead turning a lot of their playtime into some weird cultural obligation, like watching the next marvel movie.
Game developers have a problem too. A huge problem is that watching someone get stuck is a thousand times worse than being stuck. This isn't just a developer problem, look at any twitch chat while someone is playing Dark Souls. Now imagine you made the game and you're watching. It's torture. My friend who conducts testing has to tell game devs to stay hands off. No interfering with the test!! The urge is there though. Every spot must be sanded down because watching someone get stuck for even a minute is worse than having a grain of sand stuck in your eye. But testing has it's limitations. It can help you see how intuitive a menu is, or how well new players can understand your mechanics, but you can't recreate the moment of a bunch of people buying a new game and talking about it. Or recreate the focus and stubbornness of someone who has been waiting for this game for five years. It's the same reason you get a lot of weird stories about successful movies having bad test screenings. You cannot simulate your release audience. But you can polish a game until all texture is gone, and the experience is like a line at disneyland. Well designed, impressively built, highly detailed, but still... a vapid experience, cosplaying as a richer one.
Players don't respect the games they play enough to let themselves get stuck, and designers don't trust them enough to get stuck. This is the end result of a relationship built on disrespect, condescending parents speaking down to their disinterested children, who are so used to being micromanaged that they've gone numb. Testing can tell you a lot of things, but not what years of disrespect will cause in the player base.
It's not about yellow paint, it's about the fact the modern AAA space has forgotten how to have a dialog with the player. It has forgotten how to enrich and has instead decided to only try and wow. Most players don't even notice. They're so far behind in their backlog that they want content that can go down easily, not because they're not capable, but because they're overwhelmed. Culture moves so fast.
The yellow paint is just a reminder. Another unneeded reminder to do the dishes.
Nostalgia vs Having an Active Relationship With Your Media
December 15th, 2023If you worked with raspberry pi emulators, or retro gaming handhelds you'll notice a common theme pop up a lot in comments and on reddit boards. Setting up these devices can be a hobby unto themselves. Curating roms, downloading logos and screenshots, scraping data, picking themes, tweaking and customizing until... you realize your done. Maybe you should actually play a something.
... And then you'll see threads of people talking about the same thing.
Hey, have any of you guys actually played anything? I mean I messed around with mine and loaded a few classics, but now that I'm done, I... don't know what to do with it. I feel like I had more fun setting it up than playing with it.
Now, there is nothing wrong with enjoying the process more than the end product. A garage carpenter doesn't necessarily make a chair for the pleasure of sitting. They can make it for the pleasure of making. Sitting is a bonus. That part isn't the problem. The problem is... the sadness that comes after, the sense of loss someone feels when you're not prepared for this.
You'll see this with nintendo themed "man caves" or whatever, where having the games... having the right screen and the right connectors, isn't enough... having the games of your childhood aren't enough. Gotta collect more, gotta try and get everything. Satisfaction isn't playing a new game, satisfaction is "New in Box". The hobby switches form. The hobby is no longer playing video games. The hobby is paying tribute to the memories of your past, the aesthetics of video games. What they can't force themselves to play anymore was still, at some point, formative and important to them. They can't let it go. The music, the pictures, the symbols of these old game still resonate in their heart.
So instead of actually playing, they construct shrines of worship to the warm, comfortable memories of their youth. This is, of course, nostalgia.
I hate on nostalgia a lot but there isn't anything inherently wrong with it. In most places, it doesn't matter. The people whose love of Star Wars hasn't grown in decades can still watch the movies they like and enjoy them. A few hours, a few times a year, relaxed on a couch...
Gaming, on the other hand, takes some stubbornness. It takes some skill. Investing Effort. Investing the increasingly scarce resource of time.
It's more than understandable. We grow an change with time. The problem is when that they don't recognize any of this. So when they go back... there is nothing but a weird emptiness and frustration. For those who don't even realize they've grown out of gaming entirely, gaming becomes an endless line of disappointing games, and growing backlogs, scattered with a few high points. We don't know how to manage nostalgia in the gaming space.
Hell, by we, I feel like I'm only speak to my fellow Millennials. Those of us who have been on the content treadmill from the start, back when games advanced so quickly, year by year, that we never had a moment to stop and collect our feelings. Deeply influential pieces of media in our lives got let go off within years, or even months, because the next thing was that much crazier. Whenever I look at the release timeline of the 90s I feel like I'm going insane. "All those things couldn't have happened that quickly."
We call things retro and they feel retro because our whole timeline was stretched by the insane technological race we grew up in. We'll argue up and down, comparing eras and design styles but... I don't think I've ever seen a Zoomer refer to a game as retro. Some games are merely old. These new gamers exist, seemingly, at the end of time, free to pick from the fruits of the past. A lot of them aren't too technologically savvy, but those who are use emulators end up using them more freely and explore more deeply than a lot of my peers. The peers who don't emulate "because it just doesn't feel right". On their couch, in their pajamas, on a sunday, playing on a fuzzy CRT. They're not burdened by our memories. They're us, picking through our parents vinyl, free from context. Their childhood memories aren't being rushed out the door for the next thing like ours were. They're... kinda free?
But we exist at the same time as them. At the end of time. The freedom to reach back to the past at our leisure has been there since NESticle came out in 1997.
I'm not even sure who I'm talking to. While I personally know too many peers who have fallen into this nostalgia trap, most of them don't follow me in places like this. And not every zoomer is some super media literate history hunter either. Most aren't. Most people aren't. But my interactions with these groups and how they contrast each other keeps rattling in my head. I'd much rather talk to a 20something about the SNES than someone of my age group. Because if a 20something is playing old games, they probably have a cool attitude and curiosity while... many of my peers cling to the past like a childhood blanket they've long outgrown. They don't need to throw the blanket away -- it's a precious memory. But they also need something to actually cover them up. They don't realize they're freezing to death.
I said on twitter (those threads are... here, here, and here) that if your favorite NES games now were the same as they were 30 years ago then I don't want to talk to you about old games. Not that you're hurting anyone, not that you're taste must be bad, but... 30 years is a long time. The games might not change, but you will. If your opinions haven't changed in any major ways (even if it's as simple as 'I played Mother 10 years ago and it's in my top 5 now!') that implies that... you haven't had any active growth in your gaming tastes and opinions.
Which is fine! We can talk about something else! Not everyone should care about old games, but too many people who say they care have let their emotions stagnant for decades. They say they care because gaming became their identity and now they're stuck. Stuck regurgitating the same canon they are too incurious to stray from and that they themselves can barely manage to replay. You have to let the relationship you have with these games change. You don't have to throw out your blanket, but you can't rely on it to keep you warm. You've grown too much.
The biggest issue with those twitter threads was... accidentally implying that the change was the point. That you need to cast away everything you loved, painfully, to grow and to find the 'correct opinions'. Instead what I'm saying is... the change should be unavoidable. The relationship you have with your long term friends, the family you still have in your life, changes, year to year, decade to decade. You both change, and the context of your relationship changes. You feel like nothings changed, but the vibe now vs 10 years ago has shifted. You can't stay the same. At best things are similar. Heck, if it hasn't changed at all, something is probably wrong. Every interaction is a chance for tiny changes that enrich and build upon what was there before.
I always hated the notion of "wishing you could experience something again for the first time". To me, it always felt like wishing you could start a friendship again from scratch. My relationship with media is active. Each time I replay a game my experience with it grows. Our relationship grows. People say you only get to do something for the first time once, treating your first time like this precious, ephemeral experience that must be protected at all cost. But how can that compare to an experience developed over years or decades? Like sex, the first time has all the memories, but it's also usually some of the worst you'll ever have.
Every game you play, every movie you watch, every book you read is context and experience that changes, even if only minutely, how you feel about everything else. You don't have to replay something a million times, you can think about it after new experiences, wondering about how it re-contextualizes what you felt the last time you played. As you understand the history surrounding things, as you get better at judging, appreciating and naturally enjoying things with their context and historic place in mind... your opinions on other things will change. It's not that 8 year old you liked dogshit and now you like The Good Stuff -- you will probably like some good things less while developing an appreciation for things you used to hate. Hell, you might end up loving a few things that are objectively bad. But you'll be somewhere new, emotionally, exploring, and developing deeper, richer relationships with the things that are important to you. Nothing gets thrown away, it simply changes. Just because an old top 5 favorite game is now in your top 50 doesn't mean that relationship is gone or that you hate it. Things simply change. People change.
I make new games that draw from old games... but I can't say I really feel nostalgia for these titles because to miss something, it has to go away. IWBTG isn't about games I loved in my childhood, IWBTG is about games I love. I didn't like NES Castlevania games until I was almost 30 and now I'm 40 making the same quasi-fan game I've been making for over a decade.
(If you think an opinion on a game can change a lot in 10 years, imagine how you feel about a game you started 10 years ago)
I still feel nostalgia. When I go to upstate New York, to my grandma's house I barely see, laying in the moss I barely get to touch, looking at the sights I barely get to see, I feel something. When I hear a pop punk song that meant the world to me in 95' that I haven't thought about in 20 years... hearing the opening notes when I'm not expecting it hits something deep inside me. There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. But if I love something enough to make it an active part of my personality, to make it a part of my whole life... I owe it a real, active relationship.
Inconsistency is Beautiful: In Defense of Fighting Game Jank
September 7th, 2023This is a repost of an article from my cohost, posted on august 23rd, 2023. People seemed to like it a lot though, so I'm reposting it on my blog.
Gonna babble for a bit and hope this is coherent:
I was weirdly saddened today reading Strive's patch notes. A removal of the character weight system. A younger version of me would be SO RELIEVED by this. "Oh god I don't have to memorize a million different combos"! Yet now, an older me, is oddly sad?
Now, I'm not gonna hate on or argue about Strive, or any other game. Plenty of games I like have equal character weights and consistent hurt boxes. I'd rather game designers do what they want to do, rather than pander to me.
(Granted, I do wish more people were pandering to me, but that's a me problem.)
... Instead I want to be more positive about the stuff. So much of this conversation gets caught up in arguments about gatekeeping and "git gud" "Baby Game" BS but not a lot of people really go into why they might like some of these arcane systems.
A nice and polite twitter follower, immediately after I tweeted my disappointment, asked...
Why would you want combos to fail randomly per character performed on
... which like lol, when you put it like that, it sounds super silly. But it's that framing -- a framing I've seen many times. I remember being on a forum... very appropriately, it was David Sirlin's forum (thank god you can't name search on cohost)(edit: uh oh). Being the Sirlin forums, you expect a... certain type of person and player. Very big anti-execution crowd and I was like the only real execution defender (at least who was a semi respected member of the community and not a random SRK troll). I remember one exchange talking about GG combos and the comment "Well what's fun about just doing the same rote thing over and over again?"
"Well you're not? Like I'm adjusting my combos as we go, depending on how high they are and stuff"
"I don't believe you."
Now, this is mid 2000s. I don't think anyone now would deny that's a thing that players do... but I think it still highlights a way a lot of people still feel. Combos as this discrete thing, these bits of work you get through to get to the Real Game (that forum LOVED talking about the "Real Game"). You learn your combos, so you get to play brain chess.
But instead the whole thing is very fluid, especially in a system rich game like the older Guilty Gears. You never stop learning, and that combo you learn isn't a discrete unit. It's a lot of different smaller parts and that perfect hit you need to do your idealized BnB is actually kinda hard to land. You need to learn how to put these things together in different ways. Combos are less raw memorization, and more a matter of a little memorization, but a lot of developed intuition.
This is no surprise to anyone whose played a lot of really nutty fighting games. But the important thing is more the mentality of "Combos are a thing that you need to have, and you fucked up if you weren't optimal" vs looking then as an extra and not taking them for granted.
"... Wait, can I convert to this route off this hit?"
Often in games with open ended combo, you'll get a hit and you won't actually know what you can get off it. I recognized the situation 3 hits in.. what's the gravity scaling like? What's their character weight? This route doesn't work on her hitboxes usually, but I think it might because of the weird height I hit at??
From there you gotta bet on yourself. Take the easy knockdown? Try to extend to a damaging route? What are the stakes of the match? How much life do you have? Is it worth maybe eating shit just to find out? Those sorts of situational, high speed valuation processes, for some people like me, are extremely fun and with games like +R or Rev2, I'm still, after thousands of hours, guessing and developing my intuition. Every matchup has new things to teach me not only in neutral, but on what to do when I even hit someone.
I don't like character weight because I like dropping my BnBs, or because I want to make the game harder for new players, but because they always keep me on my toes and give me great moments where I am rewarded for my intuition. I like it because I can do cooler combos.
... What if input buffers made games harder?
I was playing one day with Lofo, a really incredible +R Dizzy player and a former (lol, recovered?) Sirlin forum poster who ended up a huge execution lover. One day we're talking about Rev2 vs +R and hit me with something that has been in my head for like 2 years. Something to the extent of...
"Yeah, I don't like Rev2's input buffer. I feel like it makes the game harder, because everything is more consistent... I... don't think I like input buffers?"
Which to me at the moment felt like an insane position. Like there was a lot of simplifications made to fighting games I didn't like, but that one seemed like a clear win. That just makes games better, right?
But Lofo kept talking, about things that are borderline impossible in +R that would be consistent in Xrd and how one of the things that keeps +R reasonable is that everyone drops stuff all the time. Not just in combos, but in pressure. There is always wiggle room... and then talking about mashing to tech.
Mashing to tech feels like a vestigial part of Xrd. It doesn't bother me much (I come from X2), but if you're trying to tech and there's a gap, you're gonna get it. +R, much less so. It's almost an analog skill check between you and your opponent. Your ability to mash, vs their timing during the hardest parts of their combo. Defender can piano, so there is a bit of an advantage
Then that got me thinking about ST. "It's fucked up that you need to do a 1f reversal to beat tick throws in that game."
... But you don't. You need to have better timing than your opponent to beat tick throws. Can they time to 1f input? If you're playing someone great, probably, but when you watch mid level play, most DPed tick throw attempts aren't usually reversals. That analog sense of timing is part of the game's skill expression.
This goes into why people didn't care about exact frame data back in the day or players playing "by feel". A move being +1 really didn't matter unless both of you have sick timing. We HAD the frame data. We had Yoga Book Hyper for ST. It did help. But it's influence was different because the play conditions are were different.
In modern games, a +1 situation is often pretty rigidly defined. We have buffers. Our responses will come out on he fastest frame. If my opponent is slow and my suboptimal option keeps winning, people will call that fake... because it is. The expectation is that verse most players, even low ranked players, people will get their moves out as soon as possible. Meanwhile in older games, you can't take that as a certainty even with the best players. They'll hit a lot of frame perfect inputs, but not all of them. Finding where your opponent is being sloppy helps a ton. No one is clean all the time even in modern games, but it's so SO much harder in old games.
I even think a lot about setplay characters. In older games 'perfect knockdown into oki that grants an auto timed safe jump' is actually super hard (or really lucky happenstance). Heck, this is also where GG's variable wake up timing stuff also comes in. You could do it, but it would be so hard that it can never be the expectation. Now safe jumps are so easy once labbbed that if you whiff a normal before doing your oki people will just assume it's a safe jump even if it isn't. You get stronger setplay because frame perfect repeatability, while not at all trivial, is extremely practical.
Buffers help turn is into robots and, depending on your taste, that can be a good or bad thing.
ALRIGHT THE TAKE AWAY
One thing that I've also thought a lot about is... new players seem to have an easier time getting into +R than Rev2? Part of this might also be the lobby system and speed to matches, but part of it is, in Rev2, even a mid level player can be pretty scarily consistent, but +R... Welcome to the scramble zone, lol. And like granted you can run into cryptids with 10,000+ hours of play time who will Burst Safe Sidewinder Loop you into the negaverse, but even THEY fuck up or get wilded out by weird interactions. And I say this maybe liking Rev2 more than +R.
In a weird way, making games easier, also makes them harder, because you make them more consistent for everyone... and when everything is more consistent, the game is more rigid and unyielding. You're not making an old experience accessible to new people, you're making something new, with it's own pros and cons.
Again, this isn't a judgment zone. I'm okay with Strive. I'm actively loving SF6. But a rigid games forces players to play it how it was intended. This can help new players learn a lot faster. Hell, such design has lead to games that have even taught me lots of stuff! I don't hate these games.
... But I miss that looseness. I miss how you can have a combo so hard that only like 2 people can do it reliably and just this really hazy, unclear idea of what's even possible. Infinite weird, crufty interactions between interactions. Feeling like I wasn't just playing my opponent, but exploring a rich, emergent design space.
Fighting games as a genre increasingly feel like they're (metaphorically) moving from "analog" to "digital".. and like most of those changes, there are usually more advantages and disadvantages, but, even with the new advantages... there are always gonna be people who miss how the old analog models used to feel.
E.V.O – The Theory of Evolution
May 3rd, 2018
E.V.O: Search for Eden (Known in Japan as 46 Okunen Monogatari: Harukanaru Eden e) was a strange game. A lot of us have very fond memories of it, but it’s also kinda… bad. Just… shallow and really grindy. But by god was there some weird, quirky goodness to it. The game was charming in a way that made it easy (or… easier) to overcome its faults. I’d jokingly call it “One of my favorite games that isn’t actually any good”. But all the elements of Search for Eden came together to be greater than the sum of its parts. The Evolution (even though there wasn’t really any REAL decisions), the weird quirky writing, the strange alternative history aliens and bird men or whatever… the weird way it’d be sincerely sad or dark. It was one of those things where just… as an experience, it was really compelling. Even if grinding for EVO points was kinda boring…
For the last few years I’d been vaguely aware of 46 Okunen Monogatari: THE Shinka Ron, a PC98 game that was the predecessor to E.V.O: Search For Eden. But it was in Japanese and was a turned based RPG (which I have a hard time stomaching now) and was on a tricky to emulate platform. But as time went on, more and more weird screenshots would come out from it and I’d wonder “What is the deal with this game???”
Fortunately the fine folks at https://46okumen.com/ made a beautiful translation. Localized as E.V.O: The Theory of Evolution, the game is an expert translation that contains all the joy and weirdness of the SNES game. In fact, it’s… even more Search for Eden than Search for Eden. This is a strange game, taking the alternative history and weird tangents of Search for Eden to another level. it seems improbable to say, but I feel like we got the much more… normal game of the two.
The RPG nature works to this game’s favor. The writing and weird scenarios was a strength of Search for Eden. The RPG combat is… basic. Basic to both be a flaw and s strength. It’s pretty brain dead but, with text speed set to 0, grinding and fighting become… brisk. There aren’t really any boss fights either. There are no random encounters either. Enemies wander the world map and often disappear from areas after awhile. There isn’t a lot of friction to exploration and backtracking. All experience gained can be spent immediately on either Attack, Endurance, Vitality or wisdom.
The incredible part of the design is… it’s hard to do this wrong? In almost every game there seems to be ‘the suckers strategy’. “Oh never put points into wisdom!” or whatever. But everything is good, it’s just a matter of priority. Would the foes coming up be better with more strength or more health? Even wisdom which might be the least useful influences the power of your healing abilities which can be incredibly good. So while the game pushes you to be an all arounder, it allows you to influence yourself by which way you move on the evolution chart. When a stat is raised to its limit, you evolve and the limit goes up. So maybe you want to level up all your attributes, but you always max out attack, pushing you toward more damaging evolutions. Or more defensive or whatever. And they all seem viable. There are certainly better evolutions but the game is never so demanding that it matters. Instead it’s fine to mess around. Infact if you evolve off the chart (see the evolution chart picture) you can get odd “bad” endings.
The story is surreal. The translated manual includes timelines talking about Interplanetary wars with the Devil, the death of “The Fifth Planet”, Martian coups by Anti Devil Factions… all this while The Earth is still developing oxygen. Oh, also The Devil is hot and does the anime noble lady laugh. Seriously. The second sun, Nemesis, messes with evolution, Lunarians found and sink Atlantas. You can skip mammals and evolve into POWERFUL LIZARD MEN until becoming a gnome. It’s a weird, brisk experience that only gets tedious when you aren’t sure what the game wants from you… which almost always involves ‘talking to an NPC’. “But I wanna push this boulder” yeah okay you gotta talk to the NPC that will give you the idea.
It’s a wild game that goes farther and deeper than anything in Search for Eden, overlapping with sci-fi and fantasy elements as if they were just… normal. It’s funny when it needs to be funny, sad when it needs to be sad, creative in ways you won’t expect and… oddly affecting, emotionally, even when you barely have spent time with the characters in the game. Is it a shallow gameplay experience? Yes. But I hate jRPGs and I loved the hell out of this game so if you’re tempted… try it. I feel like you’ll know pretty quicky if it’s a game you’d like. For me though, this is the exactly the type of charming, obscure game I live to find, even if it’s a genre I don’t really care for. Just be sure to set Text Speed to 0.