Horror is a unique beast amongst entertainment genres like movies and especially games. Everything has to be perfected in order for it to succeed. The visuals have to be compelling while simultaneously disturbing the viewer. The audio has to be suitably creepy. Any slight disturbances in sound can throw the viewer out of the experience and remind him/her that he/she is safe in secure in their chosen venue. Without either of these properties, a horror movie cannot succeed. For horror games, there is an added element: the gameplay must convey the feeling of helplessness and danger while at the same time keep the player immersed in the experience. Two semi-recent RPGs attempted to add horror to their game in the form of downloadable content: Mass Effect 2 with Project Overlord and Fallout 3 with Point Lookout. These two experiences conveyed one thing to me: It is impossible for RPGs to be compelling horror games by their very nature.
Before explaining why, I feel compelled to explain the overall premises of the stories in these two pieces if downloadable content that I am referring to. Mass Effect 2 is a hard science space opera revolving around Commander Sheppard’s struggle to save the galaxy. In the Project Overlord DLC, Sheppard lands on a planet where a rogue AI has taken over a base, after an experiment went horribly wrong, and threatens to expand even further. The commander then has to stop the AI before bad things happen. On the other hand, Fallout 3 takes place in the Capital Wasteland, a post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. that exists two-hundred years after a global thermonuclear war between the United States and China. The player character has spent his formative years in an underground vault and, due to events out of his/her control, had to leave. Point Lookout takes the player character to Point Lookout, Maryland. The land is filled with radioactive swamps, mutated and inbred citizens out for blood, and loads of other spooks. Both DLCs seek to add horror elements to their respective games, but both fail for differing reasons.
The reasons that Project Overlord failed were the due to the player character and the setting of the DLC. As previously stated, the player takes control of Commander Sheppard, as he/she does throughout the main game. The problem with this is that Commander Sheppard, no matter what the player does or what paths the player chooses, is a badass who regularly murders thousands of evil, corrupt aliens or mercenaries on a semi-regular basis. This kind of character is extremely difficult to pull off horror with. A player will go through the DLC unafraid because he/she knows that Sheppard will be able to easily trounce whatever enemies that impede his/her progress. But even if the player was not playing as an awesome space marine, the setting also detracts from the feeling of horror. Throughout the DLC, the rogue AI takes control of computers and watches you as you proceed through the levels. He often yells at you through the screen with an unintelligible squeal. While this seems like it would be scary, I was never even remotely frightened by him. In fact, I grew irritated because the squeals were so much louder than any other sound in the game. All it made me do is turn down the volume so that I would stop hearing it over and over again. The minute that a big scary villain becomes annoying, scary ceases to be part of the equation.
 
Point Lookout has similar reasons as to why the horror did not work at all. To begin, odds are that the player will begin the DLC after they hit level 20 or so. This means that the player has accumulated tons of skill points and equipment at that point. Most enemies, at this level, will be felled quickly by a semi-competent player. By the time I played Point Lookout, I was equipped with indestructible power armor, a sword that is covered by gasoline and on fire, and several high-powered energy weapons. Even if the player came into the DLC with bad equipment, the enemies drop their own powerful weapons. The level-action rifle from the DLC might be one of the most powerful small guns in the game. It also takes cheap and plentiful 10mm ammo, so odds are the player will have thousands of rounds for the weapon. So if the player entered weak and under-leveled, they will be extremely strong by the end of it. Another way they break the horror is by making the world extremely open for exploration. The player is allowed to roam freely, giving them leave to retreat if they need to and look for items they can use. All of this ruins any feeling of powerless and inability the player might experience. Helplessness is the key to creating compelling horror. The games own systems are what prevent Point Lookout from being truly scary.
Horror requires a high degree of subtlety and skill to successfully pull it off. RPGs, by their very nature, undermine any kind of horror. The ability to develop and strengthen the player character gives the player a sense of safety, which is counter-intuitive to horror. To clarify, I would not recommend Project Overlord even as an enhancement to Mass Effect 2. While the plot behind it and the end choice are both interesting, the gameplay was sub-par and the DLC became extremely boring by the mid-point of it. On the other hand, while Point Lookout fails at being scary at all, yet it was still an excellent expansion of Fallout 3 and probably one of my favorites. It has an interesting plot, new and interesting equipment, and while the open-world does not make it scary, it is conducive to Fallout 3 gameplay and strengthens the experience. I would recommend it to any fans of the vanilla game.

Games have evolved in a great variety of ways over the years. Graphically speaking, there is no comparison between the games of today versus the games of yesteryear. Voice Acting and Music have evolved from beeps and boops into amazing vocal performances and sweeping orchestral scores. The advent of motion capture technology has greatly improved animations. Games have also become a great and immersive medium for storytelling. And while gameplay has also evolved along these lines, one holdover from the old days may be beginning to overstay its welcome: Boss Battles.
Every person who plays video games knows about the Boss Battle. After the player has completed the level/dungeon, he/she encounters an enemy more powerful than any other seen before this point. The player is forced to defeat this challenger (whether a person or a creature) in order to advance through the story or on to the next level. Done well, these fights with larger than life enemies can be satisfying while keeping the player immersed in the game world. Poorly executed, they frustrate the player and break a games flow and immersion. These encounters should also serve as a test for all of the skills the player has learned, over the course of either the game or the level in question. The question remains: Has modern gaming outgrown the old Boss Battle, or is there still a place for them? Many games that have been released in the past few years have had poor Boss Battles, but I think that it is possible for Boss Battles to do well: The designers of the game simply have to take the type of game they are making into account.
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the player can play the game with a variety of styles. In any given situation, the player will usually be able to:
  • Fight his/her way out by killing or knocking out the guards.
  • Sneak his/her way out of the situation completely undetected.
  • Hack through security, clearing out a path or obtaining vital information.
  • Talk to people in order to gain information or clearance to explore.
This enables the player to tailor the game to his/her personality or preferred playstyle. In general, the game succeeds at letting any style get through any level. Then the game’s boss battles happen. During a boss battle, the player had the following options:
  • Fight the boss.
  • Go back to a previous save and look for weapons, because he/she has to fight the boss.
The game has gone from four viable play styles, to one. The old school boss battle feels annoying and out-of-place to the vast majority of playstyles.
A boss battle could work in a game like Deus Ex, but it must allow for the breadth of approaches that a player might want to use. It should be possible for a player to sneak past the boss and seal the door behind him, forcing the boss to give up the chase. It should be possible to use hacking skills, either to disable the boss’s equipment or to use the environment against him. Lastly, the player should have the option to convince the boss to let him go or even to side with him. These approaches are allowed to vary in difficulty, but they must all be viable methods of defeating/bypassing the boss. It requires significantly more effort to pull this off, but it transforms a frustrating and potentially difficult chore into gratifying test of skill. Other modern games like Alpha Protocol are equally guilty of similarly poor design choices.
Some other games have different problems with regards to bosses. In Assassin’s Creed 2, the player character has been exceptionally trained in combat, stealth, free-running, and several different types of weapons such as hidden-blades, swords, smoke bombs, poison, a hidden-gun, throwing knives, and daggers. Throughout the game, even the most stealthy and merciful player will slaughter thousands of unnamed, faceless guards who get in his way. Then the game reaches the last part of the game where the player, for story reasons that make sense in context, fights an old man for control of a powerful, ancient artifact. This old man is fat and frail in the game’s story. However, during the fight, he has the more health than any enemy in the game, he is immune to poison, the hidden-gun, and instant assassination using the hidden-blade. Also, he summons guards after the player beats him and then the player immediately has to fight him again at full health with the guards and is quite capable of dodging attacks on occasion. While the fact that the game pigeonholes the player into using the sword or the dagger is a problem, it is not the underlying issue as a decent player will have no trouble getting through this fight even with low-level weapons and armor. The problem in this case is that this fight makes no sense from a plot standpoint. The player is immediately thrown out of the experience and thinks “Ugh. This is a typical video game boss battle.”. A frail old man is stronger and more agile than someone who has trained from most of his life in order to kill the corrupt. No one could believe this. This could be fixed by a little preplanning on behalf of the writers and game designers, but this confrontation did not need to happen.
Boss Battles can work. With a bit of forethought, bosses can present an adequate challenge and test the abilities that the player has learned while making sense from a plot standpoint. That is the key: A boss has to be tailored to test the abilities taught to the player and it has to make sense that the boss would be challenging. Game designer should keep this is mind when making trying to think of boss battles in their games.

Every once in awhile, a game comes along that dares to be different. It dares to stand out from its peers and deliver an experience that is unique to the industry. One such game was made by developer DICE and published by EA in late 2008: That game was Mirror’s Edge. The premise of Mirror’s Edge was that the player would travel through the levels using parkour-inspired moves. The problem with the game is not the overall concept. In fact, the game had the very opposite problem, the last half of the game partially abandons this concept in favor of brief sections of combat-focused gameplay.
In Mirror’s Edge, the characters live in a society where all information is being monitored, so some people hire couriers called “runners” to carry packages and information via the rooftops and other discrete pathways to avoid prying eyes. The player is one of these runners: a young woman named Faith. In the beginning of the game, the player is given the goal of handing off their package to another runner so that the package reaches its client. The player has to navigate a variety of obstacles with a myriad of acrobatic and athletic maneuvers. Along the way, the player encounters the city’s police force, who attack for reasons unknown (and never really stated). Anyway, the player is told that fighting them would be suicide since the cops have weapons and body armor and the player character lacks both. Instead, it is best to conserve energy and momentum by running away from them and continuing to the goal because it would difficult to isolate them and take them out one at a time. Later playthroughs even allow the player to partake in time trials to get to the end before the target time. Other early chapters of the game function similarly, with different justifications for being as swift as possible.
However, in later chapters, as events unfold, the player has to infiltrate various locations in order to find information or complete some other moderately-justified objective. While there is still an emphasis on parkour-inspired platforming, it is occasionally separated by segments where it is difficult, if not impossible, to run through the guards, meaning that the player has to fight them before advancing through the level. This severely breaks the flow of the game and makes playing through these parts a little annoying and very unfun since the player character is fragile (remember, no body armor) and has no weapons of her own. These levels also allow for time trials, but it is noticeably more difficult when the player has to deal with both the level structure and the guards.
This should serve as a very valuable lesson to game developers. Feel free to experiment with new types of games. In fact, I implore you to do so for the sake of the medium. However, should developers do so, they should remember to stick with their idea for the duration of the game. Do not approach a new concept halfheartedly. It is an all or nothing deal. It may be tempting to add things in for “mass appeal”, but doing so will only ruin the final product and leave a bad taste in the consumer’s mouth. Mirror’s Edge would have been a good game had it only kept going with the parkour concept originally laid out. I would have criticized its flimsy plot, but like Assassin’s Creed 2, I would have called it a great game. As it stands now, with the way it partially abandons the core concept, I can only call it mediocre. Nonetheless, I hope this game gets a sequel and the developers learn from their mistake.

(Spoiler Warning: This article discusses the first two Assassin’s Creed games in great detail.)
Story and gameplay are two essential parts to current generation games. People play games not only to have a good time, but also to be immerse in breathtaking narratives and interesting worlds. Many developers struggle to find a balance between these two core pillars of game design. Hideo Kojima has been criticized for his over-emphasis on the storyline of the Metal Gear Solid series and many people believe that the most recent games in Bioware’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age series had weaker plots than their predecessors, in exchange for vast gameplay improvements. In this article, I will be using Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed 2 as my examples for story emphasis and gameplay emphasis because while I believe Assassin’s Creed 2 is a better game, the first one had a much better plot.
But before I get into that, it is important to provide background information on the premise of Assassin’s Creed. The series takes place in September of the year 2012. Most of the action takes place in a machine known as the Animus, which allows its user to relive the memories of his/her ancestor in a computer simulation program. In the first game, protagonist Desmond Miles is kidnapped by the Abstergo Corporation to access the memory of Altair Ibn La-Ahad, an Assassin who fought against the Knights Templar the Third Crusade, for an unknown purpose. Altair is at first shown to be an arrogant and egotistical Assassin with a blatant disregard for his order’s ways. After his transgressions allow the Templars to find the location of the Assassin brotherhood and attack, Altair is disciplined and brought down from Master Assassin to Novice. To restore his rank and his honor, he is assigned nine targets who bring harm to the people of the Holy Land (modern-day Syria). These people are later on revealed to be Templar Knights on both sides of the Crusades and who have their own designs upon the Holy Land. During the game, it is revealed that Abstergo is the modern-day front for the Templars and that the war between the two factions never ended.
In the sequel, the modern-day Assassins rescue him and recruit him. To acquire Assassin training, Desmond relives the memory of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, an Italian noble who joined the Assassin order during the Italian Renaissance. His character arc begins with the death of his father and brothers as the cover up for some sort of conspiracy. Ezio embarks on a quest for revenge beginning with the men directly responsible. During his journey, he is made aware that his father and his ancestors were in the Assassin order and that his father’s death had something to do with the Assassin/Templar war. Ezio’s quest for revenge eventually becomes a quest for truth and he finds himself traveling to many major cities in Italy and bringing many cruel people to justice by killing them.
In my sincerest opinion, the first Assassin’s Creed has an excellent story. One reason is that the player is given sufficient motivation to go after his targets. The way they do this is fairly interesting. Because Assassins are never allowed to just go out and kill their target, they first need to gather information on their target. Before each kill, the player learns both the why as well as the how: The crimes these people have committed as well as the method in which to dispatch them. This gives the player a context for their actions and begin to empathize with the Altair and the people whose lives are to be enriched with the death of his intended victim. This also highlights another reason I love this game’s plot: There is a distinct moral ambiguity between the two factions. As Altair slays his targets, he learns many things from the conversations he has with them as they succumb to their wounds. What they say reveals the big dichotomy in the game. Both factions wish for world peace, yet they disagree with the methods with which to attain that peace. The Assassins believe that peace must be earned by educating the people and celebrating the diversity of the world while removing the arbitrary labels that separate us. To this end, they would murder prominent figures who seek to keep people divided and fan the flames of war. They will also vehemently protect those who would spread knowledge. The Templars, on the other hand, believe that it is impossible to dissolve the barriers between people through normal means. They believe that people cannot know true peace so long as free will exists. To that end, they try to find ways to force people to adhere to a strict order so that they might find peace. Because the player is an Assassin, the story will obviously be told from that viewpoint, but at no time is the player ever told that either side is right or wrong. In fact, it is made very clear that both sides are in the right. This allows the player to ask himself the question: Is it possible to obtain peace and if it is not, is it worth the price of free will? Any story that can get people to think has, at least in some way, succeeded in telling an interesting tale.
On the other hand, where I found that the first game had a strong story, the sequel’s plot was much weaker in comparison. First of all, the Templars in Assassin’s Creed 2 lack the ambiguity of their predecessors. While the Templars are seen committing many of the same crimes the Templars in the previous game, they are never given any redeeming qualities that justify their actions. Not once is it mentioned how these things further the cause of the Templar order. Furthermore, when Pope Alexander VI (He is the leader of the Templars and the final boss. Just go with it.) eventually tells Ezio why he is going to all this trouble, he tells him that he was hoping to open a vault underneath the Vatican and, using a super advanced mind-control device, bend God to his will and conquer the world under the Templar banner. This is a stupidly evil and ridiculous motivation that could never possibly make any sort of sense. Which transitions nicely into the other gripe, many plot points in the game are completely, ridiculously rife with plot holes. Take the Carnival segment for example. Ezio has to kill his target, but he will only come out during his party in Carnival. The party he is throwing is a masquerade ball with special golden masks. He cannot steal a mask because they have numbers on them (Which does not make sense, but I digress.), so he has to win a mask by winning four games. The games are stupid games like Capture the Flag and footraces (Which are not really fun either, but again, I digress.). When the games are rigged and someone else wins, he has to STEAL the mask to get into the party, which he should not be able to do, because they are numbered. And during the segment, Ezio is a wanted man, so he blends in by putting on a silver mask, despite not changing his absolutely, flamboyantly, bright white robes. It was the eyes that gave him away, not the distinct and very easy to see Assassin’s robes. This is the most extreme example, but there are others like a fistfight with the pope, etc. Bottom line, I find the first game’s story to be much better.
With that in mind, it is time to compare the gameplay of the two games. Assassin’s Creed laid out a good groundwork for the game, but it was not perfect. The investigations, while they helped flesh out the story, began to grow repetitive around the time of the third assassination. The player quickly begins to realize that they are playing the same five or six missions over and over again, only in different locations. Players with low tolerance for repetition will be immensely turned off by these missions. This is not the only issue that crops up. Towards the end of the game, the combat system begins to grow tiring and the guards WILL attack the player at the slightest provocation. It can take a very long time to get through fights because the player can easily have over twenty guards fighting them at once. Fights like this can take several minutes and running away from them can be almost as long, if not longer because other guards will spot the player as he/she runs away. This is exacerbated by the end sequence where they throw waves of enemies at the player and enclose the area so that he/she cannot run away.
The sequel did well to improve many of these aspects. There is a variety of missions throughout the game so that it never feels repetitive to the player. There are platforming sections, chariot chases, theft missions, beat-up events, etc. Assassin’s Creed 2 also improves the guard detection system of Assassin’s Creed. The game features a notoriety system so that the player is not bombarded by guards unless he/she deliberately goes out of their way to attract attention. Items like smoke bombs can allow for quick escapes when the player feels overwhelmed and can also be used offensively to blind enemies, leaving them vulnerable. Other new tools like poison, throwing money, and a hidden gun also give the player options when dealing with encounters and assassinations. Combat has also been overhauled and the guards are far less likely to swarm the player. The sequel’s gameplay is vastly superior to the first game’s gameplay.
While Assassin’s Creed has a much better story, Assassin’s Creed 2 greatly improves upon the gameplay. While being in the same series and telling similar stories, the two games each have separate things to add to the table. Both are great games in their own right and future game designers should study these games to perfect their craft.

I have been playing RPGs for a very long time. It is one of my favorite genres. Recently, I bought Final Fantasy V on the PlayStation Store and decided to play it for the very first time. I had heard that the game is one of the most beloved Final Fantasy games to series fans. After playing it, I have come to understand why. The job system allows for great customization of the characters, the story is amusing (not very deep, but interesting and a good excuse for dungeon crawling), and it harkens back to old school game design philosophies budding game designers can learn from. However, one of the well established tropes of this old school philosophy is one of the reasons this game is a hit-or-miss for many people: Random Encounters.
As I played through FF5, I noticed that I was becoming increasingly annoyed by the shear amount of random encounters in the game. It seemed like I could not advance very far without fighting another group of monsters of varying levels of difficulty. It made me think about other RPGs and how random encounters were killed sometime in the middle of the PS2 era. At first, I was thankful for the change, but then I thought about another example of random encounters, one that I did not seem to mind so much.
In September of this year (2011), Atlus released a remake of Persona 2: Innocent Sin for the PSP. Instead of updating it for modern gamers, Atlus decided to leave the game mostly unchanged with the exception of a few graphic updates. This meant the random encounters were left in the game. While my excerpt from Final Fantasy V would suggest that I would dislike this, I ended up loving P2 and now consider it one of my all time favorite games. I wondered why this difference would exist because random encounters are one of the few things that annoy me about old school RPGs. After carefully pondering this, I eventually found an answer.
It has less to do with the system of getting into battles and more to do with the rewards for participating in the system. In Final Fantasy V, the reward for winning a fight is experience, money, and ability points used to advance in your party’s chosen jobs. The only real benefit to gain experience is a level up, which leads to an increase in stats, and while ability points advance the character’s job, the advances eventually become so infrequent that it becomes less a reward and more of a “About TIME!!!” in the player’s eyes.
On the other hand, in Innocent Sin, while the rewards are a little different. Depending on whether or not you won the fight through combat or persuasion (which, admittedly, also might contribute why the random encounters seem less bothersome) the player will be rewarded with either experience points or tarot cards that the player can use to purchase new personae. While leveling also gives the player characters an overall stat boost, it also unlocks new personae for the player to purchase and use. This both encourages the player to change-up their strategy (persuading one group while fighting off another) and makes rewards more frequent over all. Players are given new personae at a rate slow enough that they do not feel like they are constant trading out personae, but fast enough so that the player never feels like the game is beginning to hold out on rewarding the player. By the time this cycle of trading personae and growing in power begins to lose its charm, the game has already reached its final act and the player has become enthralled in the storyline.
The overall point of this is to realize that a game’s overall quality is not determined by what mechanics are being used as much as how these mechanics are being implemented. The overall package must also be considered. To clarify, I think that both games are excellent in their own right and would recommend both to RPG fans. This was more of an analysis than anything else.
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