I'm starting to find combat itself in games boring. This isn't a rant about excessive violence, but more one about assumptions that combat, as a response to the narrative, needs to be the primary way of solving the dramatic problems, because that's what sells. Also sometimes a more measured approach can be more powerful and dramatic, but we rarely see it, as it requires restraint on the part of the devs. A single gunshot or stabbing can devastatingly powerful as a plot device.
Whether its levelling up and buying magic swords to make sure I can kill the dragon, or just saving the world by crouching behind boxes and shooting everything in the head, I'd like to see more games where combat is used rarely, or as a last resort in game-defining moments. For example- I want to stop general x from selling the world to the space-goblins. Why did I need to play 15 levels of killing his men first? Why can't it be a smaller story with more suspense, with more options other than imitating Die Hard again and again? Gameplay that only seems to exist as a training mode for arena deathmatches is just starting to bore me to tears.
Plenty of TV series solve dramatic problems without combat being so prevalent, so why, at the end of LA NOIRE, was I running around killing everyone
when the investigation part of it was the most interesting part of the game, and it made zero sense as a culmination of the story. Any pulp detective story usually has the final chase/standoff/shootout/arrest as the grand finale, I'm not knocking that, but the sheer level of response in game was just disproportionate to the game world that had been visualised, where the whole point that he is a homicide detective (as in real life) is that in a real city, every dead body matters- Videogame approaches to body counts are comically ridiculous outside of a war setting, so why not a finale closer to those of the pulp fiction it's based on?
As an aside to this, on a related point, lets say the story is crying out for a dramatic final shootout with your nemesis. Cool. Sounds awesome. It must be possible to make a shootout with a single enemy just as exciting, dramatic and tactical than killing tens of them, but even Uncharted 2 ballsed it up at the end with the enemy AI turning the final fight into a Benny-Hill style chase rather than something suiting the final one-on-one showdown with the big bad. Are there any games this gen that manage this kind of confrontation well? Alpha Protocol struggled as well, set on a modern world but with bullet-sponge bosses. Is the problem then that game designers don't think a boss fight is satisfying should he be able to be killed with a single well-placed bullet between the eyes, preferring a fight involving rocket launchers and grenades, whereas I think that needing heavy weapons to kill a human is ridiculous?
I realise this is a pointless rant- people like shooting hundreds of generic Mercs in the head and stabbing orcs more than games based around a more subtle approach, which means more sales etc, I know that. but it does seem a bit childish at times that the only response to the antagonists in games is always to be personally harder than them, to pick up a bag of guns or swords and kill everything that moves, before proving that you are personally harder than the enemy leader in a boss fight by killing them, no matter how much martial or political power they may have.
When most of my favourite literary or visual characters use violence occasionally as a measured response to a problem, one of many of their skills, not the first and only choice, it just seems a bit odd that a very small percentage of game protagonists have it as a secondary ability. James Bond is a professional assassin and kills less people in his entire career than Cole Phelps does in a couple of years as a police officer, but most of the novels would make great adventure games with the mix of skills he employs to get through them.
Just to pre-empt responses of 'don't buy games involving lots of combat then!' my answer is that there isn't exactly much choice for RPGs with a measured approach, and loads of AAA games, which seem to be the ones with the budget to tell good stories with good visuals, would benefit from realising that filling the run time with repetitive shootouts isn't fundamentally better than just letting me explore and investigate the world they have painstakingly created before letting me decide which NPCs to remove from it.
Whether its levelling up and buying magic swords to make sure I can kill the dragon, or just saving the world by crouching behind boxes and shooting everything in the head, I'd like to see more games where combat is used rarely, or as a last resort in game-defining moments. For example- I want to stop general x from selling the world to the space-goblins. Why did I need to play 15 levels of killing his men first? Why can't it be a smaller story with more suspense, with more options other than imitating Die Hard again and again? Gameplay that only seems to exist as a training mode for arena deathmatches is just starting to bore me to tears.
Plenty of TV series solve dramatic problems without combat being so prevalent, so why, at the end of LA NOIRE, was I running around killing everyone
with a flamethrower
As an aside to this, on a related point, lets say the story is crying out for a dramatic final shootout with your nemesis. Cool. Sounds awesome. It must be possible to make a shootout with a single enemy just as exciting, dramatic and tactical than killing tens of them, but even Uncharted 2 ballsed it up at the end with the enemy AI turning the final fight into a Benny-Hill style chase rather than something suiting the final one-on-one showdown with the big bad. Are there any games this gen that manage this kind of confrontation well? Alpha Protocol struggled as well, set on a modern world but with bullet-sponge bosses. Is the problem then that game designers don't think a boss fight is satisfying should he be able to be killed with a single well-placed bullet between the eyes, preferring a fight involving rocket launchers and grenades, whereas I think that needing heavy weapons to kill a human is ridiculous?
I realise this is a pointless rant- people like shooting hundreds of generic Mercs in the head and stabbing orcs more than games based around a more subtle approach, which means more sales etc, I know that. but it does seem a bit childish at times that the only response to the antagonists in games is always to be personally harder than them, to pick up a bag of guns or swords and kill everything that moves, before proving that you are personally harder than the enemy leader in a boss fight by killing them, no matter how much martial or political power they may have.
When most of my favourite literary or visual characters use violence occasionally as a measured response to a problem, one of many of their skills, not the first and only choice, it just seems a bit odd that a very small percentage of game protagonists have it as a secondary ability. James Bond is a professional assassin and kills less people in his entire career than Cole Phelps does in a couple of years as a police officer, but most of the novels would make great adventure games with the mix of skills he employs to get through them.
Just to pre-empt responses of 'don't buy games involving lots of combat then!' my answer is that there isn't exactly much choice for RPGs with a measured approach, and loads of AAA games, which seem to be the ones with the budget to tell good stories with good visuals, would benefit from realising that filling the run time with repetitive shootouts isn't fundamentally better than just letting me explore and investigate the world they have painstakingly created before letting me decide which NPCs to remove from it.
