Whoops, I did it again!
Game development is never done in a vacuum. Unless you're Toby Fox, in which I case I can only assume you not only build games alone, but harvest your own home-grown food crops to stew in a naturally formed volcanic spring stove inside your hand built wooden log cabin home. There are numerous eyes, ears, voices and ideas that get sprinkled in the development dish in order to whip up that final finished product; ideas that will touch on everything from what sort of visual design standard fits best, how the implementation of this certain feature can be coded in a manner cohesive to systems around it and the ever-elusive; how can the cycle of fun in gameplay be extended over the length of our game? None of these are small questions, and all change the face of the product. Although the wrong fundamentals choice can actually be quite difficult to do when you've an entire team behind you for support. So if that's the case, how are entire AAA games being made so fundamentally wrong recently?
I ask because we've recently had the Superhero dud, Gotham Knights drop on our doorstep and, surprise surprise, the game isn't great. (Who could have possibly seen that coming?) And irrespective of that one technician complaining that the Xbox Series S was holding back the entire generation, this isn't a hardware problem as much as it's a conceptual one. (Unless the Series S grew sentience, crept into WB offices and personally recoded the game to be head-scracthingly badly conceived.) I think we all sort of knew this was going to be the case the very first moment we saw health bars above enemies and went "Uh oh; is this a live service?" Only for the team to turn around and promise it wasn't a live service, and then carry on talking about gear stats. Clearly a game that was born from the potent DNA of an incredible series that demonstrated exactly what a Batman-set superhero game needs to be wouldn't screw up the fundamentals; would it?
But outside of story and dialogue, for which I heard wildly distinct perspectives, Gotham Knights focuses on everything it shouldn't and ends up being the wrong game it needed to be. Focus is put on the repetition of boring dynamic fights, (which are supposed to be the garnish on top of the world, not a gate to progression) the crafting system, (which lacks any ingenuity whatsoever) stats and level numbers (which clash with the superhero fantasy) and a horribly dumbed down fighting system. (Galling when fighting is literally the main way of interacting with the world.) Essentially they needed to make an action adventure game that expanded on the basics of what the Arkham series made and let several players enjoy that experience together; instead we got a live service skin stretched over an entirely single player game! All the downsides and concessions required to make it a live service, none of the benefits and positives. It's as if the team spent their years making the wrong game.
And it's all very similar to how Marvel's Avengers turned out, only at least that game was designed to be a Live Service and actually was. But still, the resounding take away from the Avengers game was that it, too, was the wrong game. People of the time were hungry for a cinematic and linear high-quality narrative featuring the famous cast of the movies. Maybe the casting was a bit out-of-the-question, but the high-quality set-piece strewn exciting video game narrative could have been the slam dunk that the hopeful wanted. It would make sense. Popular Superhero games of the past, the Spiderman games, the Arkham games, Ultimate Alliance; all nailed that sense of overbloated comic-book scale narratives, empowering the user with small units they can crush with their flashy powers and impressive set-piece fights against huge roosters and familiar super villain faces to punctuate the excitement. The basic framework of a solid super hero game is actually fairly formulaic and straight forward.
Instead what we got was, yet again, a power levelling RPG system that made certain units annoying and unintuitive to fight against, strings of copy-paste cookie cutter 'smash the thing' missions that served only to pad out the run time as you grind for gear that is only good for taking on slightly harder variants of those same missions and, worst of all, a campaign which featured only three Super villains which the open world game recycled constantly. All that effort which could have gone into making the ultimate superhero team-up game instead went into calculating gear stat tables, designing grind EXP curves, setting up the players for endgame content that could be added onto, and basically doing all the things that don't improve the fantasy of being a superhero. And when you're making a superhero game, prioritizing the fantasy is a fundamental objective, any design decision that gets in the way of achieving that needs wrought-iron justification for it's existence and if you can't provide that; then maybe the game you're making isn't a superhero game!
And from a very different angle, we can look at another game which wasn't what it was supposed to be with the recent Saints Row Reboot. Now people who were fans of Saints Row would, in turn, be fans of the gangbanger fantasy, even as that vision got slowly watered down as the franchise went on. At the heart was always a focus on irreverent action and, arguably dated, scenes which attempt to depict the player character as the prototypical, cigar smoking gun-toting, embodiment of your pop culture 'badass'. Whether that image was pursued with straight-faced seriousness or ironically, that was pretty much the heart of Saints Row. 'The Playa' is a badass, and at times when they aren't being a badass they're not being true to themselves and need to go through a journey to remind themselves how to be a badass again. That is the moral peak that overrides all else; and within the fiction of the game world that alone makes them superior to the various colourful gangs and existential threats around them even if the Saints are just as murderous and destructive. The game doesn't even conceive of viewing the Saints performances as morally questionable, because the rule of cool is idolised by Saints Row.
Which is all to say that Saints Row Reboot isn't a Saints Row game. It might carry the name, emulate some of objectives and copy the gameplay, (badly) but it lacks that very important ingredient of Saint's Rows 'heart'. (Or any heart, by some critic's accounts.) For the Reboot, the Saints are driven by half-digested morals of anti-capitalism that are explored about as well as Star Wars dives into astrophysics, the protagonist's key principals are togetherness and loyalty to his friends, which is so empty-souled and basic you wonder if anyone was behind the keyboard writing this script at all, and that edge of the player's selfish desire being, even ironically, moralised above bare basic standards of decency is entirely, intentionally, absent. Just like with Ubisoft games, the protagonist has to be the good guy, even if that's in a strangled way, and that sanitation rubs off onto the wider open world itself in a plethora of bizarre and lazy 'censorships'. By trying to distance themselves from the abrasive past of Saints Row's presentation, the Reboot distanced itself from being a Saints Row game. Whatever lukewarm open world romp that Volition created, it wasn't Saints Row but something else entirely.
Making the wrong game is in some ways worse than making a bad or broken game. Because with a bad game at least one can recognise how you knew what was supposed to be created and simply failed on that execution, and a broken one can feasibly be fixed to one-day be great. But a 'wrong' game is symptomatic of a fundamental divide between what the concept of the game demands and the direction you sought to develop. The final product might work and function just fine, but the concept and gameplay will never slide together in that perfect synergy which forms a product that achieves it's vision. Essentially this blog is a treatise on exactly why effective and precise planning is, in many ways, the most important stage of video game development; because anything else that goes wrong can be rectified, but bad schematics underline everything. Always make sure you're making the right game, everybody.
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