Don't Walk

Surveying the shelves in Game, or looking up any new release on Amazon, it’s hard not to feel underwhelmed by a profusion of choices you neither want nor need. And that’s before you get to the endless Wii shovelware or copycat wannabe franchise games.

Special editions are everywhere: some including posters, cards or figurines; others in pointless extra sleeves, tins or themed boxes, as if the packaging will in some way improve the identical code on the shiny disc inside; yet more even come with varying downloadable content codes, which appear to be there solely to undermine the resale market (which developers currently get nothing from) by punishing people who buy the game second-hand. Isn’t that nice of our friends in the industry?

Some game art and collectables are, however, very cool

Marvelling at the sheer profusion of multi-packaged special guff, you could be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing that can prevent a gamer lusting after a pile of limited-edition tat.

Which is why another unavoidable element of any big new release-bundle is a walkthrough, those increasingly glossy and less throwaway collection of spoilers, strategies and large-print filler. Walkthroughs are presumably there to help you get the most out of a game, although you’d hope that the game has already been designed for you to get the most out of it.

Gamefaqs is rank with them in their many and various forms; it also could provide a student of the language with an almost baffling amount of evidence of grammatical hopelessness and the decline of the written word. And regardless of the cheapness of mocking the style, you can’t help but marvel at the amount of work and dedication the walkthrough authors give to the community, effectively for free.

Official walkthroughs are obviously more lavish affairs, with Piggyback’s Final Fantasy range, for example, coming sodden in the artwork of the game, and effectively being a collectable in its own right. Let’s not dwell on the fact that they charge you so much so they can license artwork that you have already paid for in the game (and that costs little extra to produce); let’s initially just recognise them as a more useful and higher calibre of multi-packaged special guff.

But whether you pay for your walkthrough, or get it for free on Gamefaqs (or You Tube, or a game-specific wiki), the end result of using them is the same: disappointment.

This is from a site dedicated to published walkthroughs. Hooray.

They all play to two important facets of a gamer’s outlook. The first is a compulsion to complete everything so you can enjoy the smugness rewards (even if you haven’t earned them). The second is a fundamental laziness that leads to gamers complaining, say, about how a certain skill or attack is game-breakingly overpowerful, while at the same time trying to find exactly such a shortcut and then relying almost exclusively on it to finish the game.

Maximum reward for minimal effort is many a gamer’s creed, even if that means reducing the game to a number of stage directions taken from outside the game, and written by an American teenager too easily confounded by apostrophes.

RPGs are the type of game that seem to need walkthroughs most, yet that suffer the most from them. It’s partly because RPGs are usually based around complex systems of obtuse stat-buffing, magic and skill ability paths, weapon maximisation trees, unending and arcane sidequests, and a plot more balmy and indecipherable (for all the linearity) than you could find in Tristram Shandy.

Unlike games like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry where your in-game power is a reflection of your ability and co-ordination, RPGs reward the time you put in rather than any manual skill which you improve or develop. It’s the combination of obscurity and the reward for an investment of time that inevitably tends toward walkthroughs. Why not maximise the way you spend it and get all the good stuff?

Equally, it’s not uncommon (or unreasonable) to feel hemmed in by (or resentful of) a game that forces you to make irreversible character-development choices without allowing you to explore and evaluate them first. This is particularly true when you end up 15 hours into a game with the realisation that your character is irredeemably rubbish through absolutely no fault of your own. How were you to know that Spambuttress was not as effective an area attack as it promised to be? How could you know in advance that Beanflicker would actually have helped you to defeat Sephasteroth in his second incarnation, and obtain the Jade Bead of Valour +4? Bastards.

And there’s more than that, too: these games are designed to keep their secrets from you more effectively than any thriller, Government agency, or paedophile’s encrypted hard drive. In fact, such secrecy almost makes a walkthrough necessary, rather than an additional extra. But while walkthroughs offer a recipe for success, don’t you feel a little hollow completing a glorified to-do list? Mightn't you just as well download someone else’s completed save file as do it yourself?

Laharl from Disgaea, a game so utterly, unendingly compulsive and deep that it defies traditional walkthroughs.Image from http://www.creativeuncut.com/

You could argue that if someone wants to enjoy their game this way, then it’s their choice; in fact, some people may indeed find the completion and the mastery satisfying, regardless of if they’re wearing training wheels. And at the end, they do indeed get to see everything (even if the game is badly designed and structured), whereas some purist playing it for themselves will inevitably miss out. In fact, one of the worst things about walkthroughs is picking one up when you’re a third of the way into a game and discovering how much irretrievable content you’ve missed that you wouldn’t have known about... without a walkthrough. Suddenly you’re missing things you didn’t even care about, and it’s infuriating. Even the most tedious and woeful sidequest  can seem insanely alluring when it’s no longer available.

And this is the fundamental problem with the walkthrough mentality: if developers can safely assume that a player will be using a walkthrough, it changes how a game’s designed, and not for the better. The game can get away with bad design because a walkthrough will guide you through it. And a prime example of this is Final Fantasy XII which, for all its excellence, is a game riddled with terrible design decisions at every level. 

Take the ultimate weapon, the Zodiac Spear. It’s fair to assume that, in a game like this, it will involve some extra legwork, and be hidden somewhere crawling with heavily-armed bastards. But no. Apologies for the spoiler here, but it’s a lot simpler and harsher than that. There are four chests in the game: normal chests, everyday chests, chests that are indistinguishable from all other chests, chests that no-one refers to in the game in any way, shape, or form to let you know that they’re different, chests, in fact, that are the universally accepted symbols of ‘open this to get a reward’. And these four chests are all on the path of the main quest so you will see them, and assume ‘here’s a nice reward’ because, y’know, they’re chests. But if you open any one of them, then the chest with the ultimate weapon will disappear, and you will never be able to get it. 

Let’s ignore the profusion of the word ‘chests’ for a second and spell it out: if you play the game normally you will not get the ultimate weapon. And the game will not tell you this. And so the only way you can find this out is by using a walkthrough. The design effectively means that you cannot assume a reward is a reward – even if they appear in a game that has fundamentally exploited and defined this reward mechanic for its entire history.

Nice.

Of course, the ultimate weapon isn’t a necessary part of the game, and so it doesn’t have to be obvious or straightforward. And Final Fantasy games have consistently instituted mechanics that relied on recourse to a walkthrough – getting to the final chest within 10 hours for the equivalent weapon in FFIX; the Queen of Cards sidequest in FFVIII – but these could still be done without one, and they didn’t punish you for the information they withheld – that a chest may not be a chest.

It’s the absolute lack of any hint or feedback in the gameworld that is the problem here, combined with gamebreaking anti-logic. If nothing in the game tells you that it works this way, then it destroys your connection to the world, and forces you to look outside the game for solutions to problems designed to exist within it.

'Unboxing' photospreads and videos are an unnerving and growing new form of gadget-porn. This is from joystiq.com

It also shows how game design is predicated on assumptions that have nothing to do with making the best of a game idea in game terms. I talked about bundling online content with retail games at launch, earlier. Arguably, this inclusion of online unlockable content is the real way that the industry is using downloadable content to change their retail distribution model. Instead of cutting off the traditional retailer, they get them to sell the very things that will end up making them redundant – online-only unlocks that get consumers used to the new shops and make them wary of the old ones. It’s an approach that says as much about business models as all the freemium and miscrotransaction games in the world, and that might end up having far more of an impact than either.

Which brings us back to walkthroughs, and their universal acceptance and ubiquity, and how it allows bad design to be lived-with. Official walkthroughs are one part marketing, one part laziness, but most of all they’re about playing to our compulsion to complete everything, to miss nothing, like collecting special editions. And yet, for me, they’re indelibly bound up with missing out in a different way.

I remember, for example, in the first FF game I played, FF8, I trundled off and started exploring the Tomb where the Brothers lived, late one night when my computer was broken but my Playstation was anything but. The walkthrough I’d printed out stopped at Galbadia, and so I was, for the first time in the game, properly working things out for myself. That tiny and unremarkable dungeon with its optional GFs is still one of my standout memories of that game – not because it was difficult or even particularly good, but because it marked the first genuine exploration and discovery I had made in the game – some 15 or so hours in, at least. Who knows how many similar moments of genuine connection and immersion I’ve missed out on by knowing what’s coming next and how to fight it?

Nowadays, I’d rather have the experience and miss out on the completion. And anything that changes the structure of a game away from being self-contained and as well realised as it can be, is bad for games. So put down your special editions and boss guides and walkthroughs; for all the extra gubbins surrounding the game that you might buy or own, you really have no idea what you’re missing…