Prototype 2 and Serious Silliness

As I said when talking about SR3, I enjoyed Prototype 2. It feels enormously free and empowering the way you can run and glide across the city, shapeshift and get the drop on people, and even knock tanks around. You really feel superhuman compared to most people in the game (though there are still enough challenges you don't completely overpower to keep it interesting). Its a blast.

Ok, thats not what I meant, but also like that.

Exploring the freedom and possibilities of that powerset was interesting enough, it even formed the inspiration for my character in a tabletop RPG campaign.

Now, I stopped playing Prototype 2 and can't right now for technical reasons, but thinking on it I was struck by the disconnect between the fun it is to run around and tear up the world, and gruff, angriness of Heller, your avatar doing these things. No, this isn't about "ludo-narrative dissonance" or at least not entirely; its about a more specific issue that applies to other media that the disconnect highlights here. Its about the way Prototype 2 suggests that its makers thought that to tell a "serious" story with "real drama" things have to be dark and negative all the time. Or perhaps its better to say that the story they wanted to tell involved a character who's angry all the time.

"This is my happy face": if you google "happy james heller", even the fan art is always angry.

The flaw in that thinking is especially apparent here because they knew how to make a fun open, game: the game knows players sometimes want to be serious and sneaky and objective focused and sometimes want to screw around and do things just because they can (like rampage or jump as far as they can off buildings) and allows them to do it. However, the story says the character is serious business all the time, and thats why you get this dissonance.

I'm actually less interested in the dissonance between play and story here than I am in the larger ideas that produced that story, namely that to be serious drama, you can't have fun or be funny. Which we can agree is wrong...

...right?

Right??

Silliness and fun are not mutually exclusive with deep, resonant emotional drama. At minimum it can break tension and add variety so the punches hit harder due to contrast. At best it makes everything more real and affecting. Things can be both fun and deeply moving. There are all kinds of examples from film and literature (not the least of which being Up! with its balloon house and talking dogs), but since I got here thinking about Prototype 2, the examples to bring up seem to be Trigun and Cowboy Bebop. After all, I've  hit comics, video games, and TTRPGs previously, so anime rounds out the nerdity nicely.

Anyone who's seen those and compares Heller to Spike or Vash should know exactly where I'm going with this. For those not familiar, Vash is the central character of Trigun, one of the  best gunfighters on a planet of  wild west, and can level city by himself. When not arguing about the value of life with specific villains, he spends much of the series acting like a complete goof.

Well, maybe not complete; Who doesn't like donuts?

Spike is a similarly super-capable bounty hunter in Bebop, but unless in mortal peril or dealing with his past, treats almost everything as a joke. I bring them up as a possible way a game could reconcile the type of grim revenge story Prototype 2 apparently wants to tell with a main character going on easter eggs hunts between missions; characters that present a fun, interesting face and set of behaviors to the world while still being dramatic when appropriate.

"This is my serious face"

Actually its easier for Heller, even if he does start as a revenge obsessed Angry Black Man; this is a guy whose body just got transformed, and is ingesting a jillion other people's memories over the course of the game, so it would make sense to deal with it by behaving oddly. Playing off Heller doing whatever (in non-specific terms, of course) between missions as part of dealing with the massive changes hes dealing with would both be a more believable character than taking it in stride, more in line with how he is being played (by most people, I suspect), and because of those it would have more impact when he does put his game face on for a mission that means something to him.

As it is, all of Heller's lines kind of blur together; his main characterization is "I am angry", sometimes ranging to "I am confused about who to be angry at", so he becomes very predictable and uninteresting, particularly compared to Mercer and Blackwatch's maneuvering. With a little more variety of tone, the dramatic moments would hit harder since there was more contrast and we identified with him more.

I mean c'mon, even Batman knows you have to have a little fun sometimes.

So do you think that kind of characterization would've made the game more of less enjoyable? Let me know in comments.

PS, when it comes to seriousness, I've always liked the quote:
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. -CS Lewis


photo credit: prototype.wikia.com, ~ahmedshadow.deviantart.com, imgur.com, lidafilmmaker.wordpress.com

Saints Row 3 driving makes me sad

I've been working on my Steam backlog of games lately; first Dishonored, then Prototype 2, I just finished Saints Row 3 (in honor of the spectacular looking 4) and I'm about to start Darksiders. Now, I ended up stopping Prototype 2 before I finished due to technical issues, but I was having allot of fun with it. Going from that to Saints Row 3 highlighted something for me though; the driving is the least fun part of Saints Row 3.

That may just be relative to the rest of the game, and the thing that stood out to me was the specific bounds of this feeling; driving tanks and helicopters and hoverbikes was good, but having to drive a car between objectives was a chore. And there are some obvious factors: this is partly a personal thing because I'm not big on non-mario cart racing games either, and the PC driving controls were not the best (compared to say Borderlands 1 or 2). At least SR3 didn't take a mod to be drivable, like SR2

The default sensitivity range was a bit high for actually staying on a road.

It goes deeper than that though. Conceptually and viscerally, these sections just feel less fulfilling than the rest of SR3, and which is a shame because you have to use driving to get around so much. For example, driving a car and dealing with traffic just seems less cool than flying a jetbike or running up walls and leaping over rooftops. Yet you have to drive to get around the whole game. In theory, later in the game you have the jetbike and could use it to get everywhere....but you only pick it up it at certain places, and you can't fast travel between cribs anymore so you guessed it, you have to drive to those cribs to get the jetbike.

So to do this...

...you have to do this. Try not to hit that truck, too.

However, the bigger issue isn't just the surface appeal, but the actual way behavior is incentivized while driving i.e. it encourages careful driving (or at least not hitting people or cars) and that seems out of place after running around beating pedestrians with a floppy purple dong because you can. Now, there are rewards for doing big jumps, or running over people and other vehicular shenanigans in the game, that's true. While you're screwing around between missions, driving can be fun and the town can be your personal demolition derby or grand prix.

Its when you have to drive to objectives that it becomes arduous, because then the mindset is different; you want to get to the start or objective and all these other cars are in your way. If you hit them or run over a cop or gangmember there's an alert that can create a literal roadblock between you and where you're trying to go (or you could take too much damage and blowup). All the other cars on the road are now hazards rather than targets. So when you're on your way somewhere and just want to get there to do that fun thing, the distance forces you to drive, and to get there without getting bogged you have to actually be careful about your driving.

As opposed to running over rooftops and gliding across the city.

Whee!

The comparison is what really made it stand out as the least enjoyable part of the game for me. Driving was something I had to do to get between places I wanted to be in SR3, while freerunning around the city was enjoyable itself in Prototype 2. You were less constrained about where you could go, there was still some thought to navigating the skyline, and gliding around was cool. I liked running around searching for collectibles. In SR3, I didn't bother cause getting to them was irritating.

To be fair, allot of the stuff around driving is good; vehicle delivery helps, and the fast hijacking does look and feel cool. I think one time I ended up shooting a gang member, then when his backup arrived, jumped through their windshield and sped off in their car, and that's cool to allow. But once I had the car it was less fun and that was sad. Yahtzee Croshaw has pointed out that open worlds are only as good as the way to get around them, and going between these two games, I can definitely see why.  Fortunately, it looks like Saints Row 4 has learned its lesson.

"Whee" you say? Oh you're right, Whee!

photo credits: avideolife.com, g4tv.com, guides.gamepressure.com, co-optimus.com