How to make looting fun.

Tinkering with tidbits

Looting is one of those facts of life by this point- wait, no actually I'm going to have to think about that statement a little harder now aren't I? Looting is a video game fact of life; since the time that RPGs became something of a mainstay genre that every other style of game under the sun decided to borrow from we eventually reached the point where the pilfering of one's enemies, of various boxes and of the earth herself, became a cliché of game design. Perhaps it's a little gauche to turn around and blame Ubisoft for this one too, but they're so often the faceless monocrop responsible for proliferation other people's ideas that they then proceed to plaster all over every single property they have in an unending march towards turning every franchise into clones of one another. Besides, when I think back I do remember seeing this aspect of looting crates in Far Cry 3 and thinking how novel that was...

But where was I? Oh yeah, the practice kind of sucks and is boring. Not that the actual act of getting items is boring- I think the hoarder in all of us can appreciate the muted thrill of filling up our bags with goodies- but with so many different games playing up the 'looting' of area chests for boring crafting materials and 'valuables' that you slap together for ridiculous crafted items: it's just all the same! The idea of crafting something homemade and valuable out of junk you find in the game world sounds crafty and resourceful on paper- but so many of these modern open world cookie-cutter games resort to implementing these ideas in the most boring way possible. You'll pick up plants in the world, or auto-loot corpses or rummage through ancient chests and be afforded items that exists only as notaries. Empty Lighters, Tin cans, cigarette packets? Doesn't matter what the item is, because to you it's just mulch to be shoved together into... a pipe bomb? Yeah, doesn't matter if that makes any sense, those containers are now a pipe bomb- deal with it. Nothing in these systems are at all important for what they are but for what they can make. At least a scant few games do away with the lip services of trying to make varied loot and just label pilfered goods under the catch-all label 'crafting materials'.

And every modern open world title feeds into the 'looting to craft' gameplay 'system' by some basic degree to the point where crafting systems are becoming something of an industry-wide cliché. It bothers me so much because the idea of clutter and what that brings to the world of your game is worth so much more than these companies allow it be. Bethesda's open world series', The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have both featured worlds full of interactable loot and junk, sometimes with crafting systems to take advantage of- but the simple difference here is that every item in those worlds are tangible. That is to say, they have 3d models and can be placed into the world. They populate the shelves of blown out post apocalyptic Super Duper Mart or the fantastical medieval kitchens of Castle Dour. That simple step, of making these items real set-dressing props for the world, allows them to mean so much more when you pilfer a few and turn your home into a shrine from Giddyup Buttercup or whatever other insanity takes you.

Even when Fallout 4 came around with it's catch-all crafting systems that allowed these items to be mulched into their 'raw components' in the crafting of stupidly advanced nonsense like fusion generators and explosive turrets- the fact that each item existed outside of loot menus made the collecting of those resources more interesting. You wouldn't just thumb through a menu, but dig up and down shelves, turn over wooden crates- searching for that extra bit of adhesive or copper. Just this extra touch of interactable tangibility turned what was otherwise a tacked on and forgettable side system into an active activity that players engaged with. Having it all be optional is just another boon of a game like Fallout, where your play style is largely your own choice. 

A recent new contender to the pantheon of open worlds has opened up a whole new potential avenue in crafting that I simply have to talk about right quick, because Tears of the Kingdom really has rewritten the rules with this sort of thing. In Tears pretty much every object in the game world can be manipulated and fused with anything else, which turns the entire game world into something of a tool kit to be played around with. Everything from planks of wood to rocks on the road to ferns in the bushes can be attached to your weapon to some unique effect, which has the consequence of making the very art of exploration itself the fun draw of what we can charitably call 'looting', but which might be better classified as 'world crafting'. I get my kicks out of seeing what combinations work best, and that is the childlike joy a system as robust as Tears of the Kingdom's can bring.

But if we can't commit to the large-scale clutter filled world of Fallout or the totally revolutionary 'combine anything' world of Tears of the Kingdom, there's still some measures that the every day open world can take to ensure that crafting doesn't get stale quite so quickly. In fact, I think one of the Assassin's Creed games pulled this off decently well. Moderation is the word of the day. Simply by toning back on the number of crafting items you need to get or can get from the world, and making the sources for getting these materials more interesting activities- that can infer more value to the process. When upgrading your ship in 'Assassin's Creed: Black Flag' required the player to engage with the whaling side activity to get the whale hides, that was whole 'worlds' more engaging than the 'loot chests for random nicks nacks and hope you get something good' system that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood employed before it.

Perhaps the worst way these systems go wrong, and I see it often in the games I play from Ghost Recon Breakpoint to vanilla Cyberpunk, is when these materials are placed with so little care that they make no thematic sense within the world around them. Even just having these materials be listed loot items instead in 3d modelled clutter is disappointing enough, but refusing to manage loot tables so thatdildos start spawning in the middle of Arasaka bases? Or that you'll find caches of crypto currency in aboriginal native chests? Talk about a slap in the face to let everyone know how little you care about implementing these junk systems. I know they're mandated by the publisher and no one on the team cares enough to even brainstorm how these systems might fit in with their respective games anymore, but for the sake of everyone you need to at least feign an effort!

Looting is a fact of life just like crafting systems, online cosmetic stores for single player games and battle passes; but that doesn't mean we have to turn into automatons going through the motions when we implement them in our games. Innovation comes from tackling the same problems from a new angle, and if you've already given up in the face of cliché the moment you face it then you'll never get a chance to overcome it but rather just fumble and fall. Anyone who thought that looting is inherently overplayed and lacking in creative potential had their mouths shut tight when Tear of the Kingdom dropped, and Nintendo may be the best of the best but in my mind- exceptionalism is just a reminder for everyone that the world isn't brought and sold completely just yet.

The gaming tech race-ism

 

Technology is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Ever improving, ever developing, ever scaring the absolute daylights out of everyone who just wants the world to move a little slower so they can get used to all of the AI written scripts and AI produced images before the AI designed videos and AI mind-reading rat experiments start up. (That last one is a trip, I suggest looking it up.) Sometimes it can feel like tech is caught in a massive arms race against itself to forever improve under fear of being left in some sort of terrifying 'dust' that will render the subject utterly useless in the face of far more capable, and forever arriving alternatives. It's a perception that leaks out of tech development rooms and into the minds of the public, because why use old slow technology when you can use new faster stuff? It seems like a very linear and unambiguous mindset, but everything changes when we look at art, doesn't it?

Because art, in this case video games, uses quite a lot of technology in it's construction, and yet the definition of a 'good game' doesn't begin and stop with whichever title uses the most terraflops to render the most impressive raytraced hair follicle bouncing off a raindrop- because there's more to game development and art than who wields the bigger stick. But bizarrely this is a thorny issue among game enjoyers as the argument of 'better graphics means better game' has persisted for decades and flared up at certain points time and time again. In the time of the disc drives for the original Playstation, the increased processing power meant far more impressive renders could be constructed than what the cartridge based Nintendo console of the time could manage, leading some to believe that Nintendo were soon to be left in the dust. (FYI: The Switch uses Cartridges to this day. Albeit, vastly improved derivatives.) Saints Row 2 versus GTA 4 was simplified in the minds of some by the fact that GTA 4 took several steps towards looking realistic whilst Saints Row remained stylistically cartoonish and exaggerated; and yet the Saints Franchise would go on to last several years and many sequels later before killing itself last year. You see where I'm going with this.

These days the graphic debate is not quite as loud as it was back in the day, because we've got a new representative of graphical authority; frame rate. The rate at which frames are projected onto our screens thus improving the smoothness of the video quality- and a badge of superiority lauded by the PC master race. Better hardware components allow for more frames resulting in smoother gameplay making for, in an apparently objective fashion according to these people, a better game. And to be utterly fair, there's a cohesive logic there. A game that runs faster will generally be a better experience for the player to enjoy and as 60 FPS tech becomes more prevalent the lack of any gameplay option towards reaching that smoothness can be a telltale sign of bad optimisation leading up to launch. But is that the be-all-end-all?

No, of course it isn't; there's more to gaming than that as we've covered. And yet to this day you'll find people chuckling into their sleeves whilst posting that one bearded wojack meme that at this point is becoming more pathetically oversaturated than the rick roll; slamming those loving 'The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' which runs in the paltry 30fps capable of the Switch, instead of a real game that can hit 60 with 2K! Like... Fortnite? Wait, that's really the comparison we've going for here? Fortnite? The Internet's whipping boy? First off, Fortnite is a competitive multiplayer shooter, so 60fps is kind of like a requirement for fair competition, and secondly- Fortnite is entirely stylised in an, increasingly bland, bubblegum-cartoon animation style- what can that really benefit from being 2K? Tears of the Kingdom looks as gorgeous as Breath of the Wild did- how would upscaling evolve that experience? Would it? 

Now I love a good graphical masterpiece of a product, don't get me wrong; which is partially why I've come to really love this new generation of consoles. Now being able to choose between a 'commonly accepted' decent framerate and the beauty of 4k visuals is a feature built into most every current generation game, and when it comes down to it I'm going to choose to buff the graphics every single time. (Assuming, of course, that the game still hits at least 30 even in 'quality mode') Because at the end of the day I want to be impressed and drawn in by the visuals- but then, I am someone who likes to use my current gen console pretty much exclusively for those titles that lean the direction of realistic visual depictions that actually benefit from higher resolutions, whereas my trusty PC can handle pretty much anything else.

Take, for example, Resident Evil 4 Remake and it's utterly resplendent visual mastery that renders everything from the muddy pools of water forming in the boot treads in the ground to the squirming mass of living carnal tentacles frothing out of the stump of recently removed limbs. It's a spectacular action-packed roller coaster of gory blood- but it's also a single player only survival game. Whilst not exactly slow-paced by any stretch of the imagination, Resident Evil 4 isn't ever throwing it's players into situations of split-second reaction times against enemies who will slay you the very second you fail to do the exact same to them, it's not that sort of game. In such an instance, how important really is 60 frames per second when 30 is totally workable?

On the flipside you have a game like Redfall, which has a little more nuance to it. Again, Redfall is an non competitive PVE shooter game that will never quite throw it's users into totally unwinnable 'split second or death' moments of gun duelling- but it is a first person shooter. Games like that, where you're thrust into the head of the player character, have a different set of operating rules than most others. When your actions are meant to line-up one-to-one with the avatar, even the slightest latency delay can throw you off just that little bit, it's one of the responsibilities of creating a First Person Shooter in the modern age. It's a difference that is really hard to 'just get used to' after experiencing what the alternative could feasibly be in another other 60 FPS hitting game. Which is probably why the choice to launch without it was another of Redfall's many serious blunders.

There's a theory that the hypothetical 'final generation of games consoles' will be turning consoles into specialised gaming computers that can be upgraded with parts like any desktop can be- and in that age the tech race will explode into the stratosphere, but I wonder what might get lost in the actual development process along the way. Some of the greatest games of any generation are created at the tailend of the generational life span, when tech is reaching it's breaking point and artists have to be clever with how they make their dreams come true. Adversity breeds perseverence which breeds quality genre-defining games, and that's the kind of will power that can't be replicated in a machine by a trained AI running on a thousand processors.

Tears of the Kingdom is something else...

 King Charles tie in game is a heavier hitter than I expected!

Zelda is one of those franchises that has walked proudly throughout the rivers of time never truly sleeping from it's duties to excite, provoke and intrigue by being different. Dispel that idea of sequelisation established by Ubisoft, since practically it's inception 'The Legend of Zelda' refuses to fall into the rut of remaking the same basic title over and over. Just play the original Legend of Zelda as it's top down dungeon crawling exploration self and then follow it up with the random encounter strewn side scrolling platformer of it's immediate follow-up. Then fast forward to one of the most important entries in it's line-up and simultaneously one of the most important games of all time; Ocarina of Time and then the vastly thematically distinct and darkly twisted 'Majora's Mask'. And now we can throw onto that pile the open world exploration swan song of Breath of the Wild, and the robust creatively enriched current entry; Tears of the Kingdom.

When Breath of the Wild first dropped, it was clear that it was a title on a different level to what most had assumed when 'open world Zelda game' was first poised. Even back then the idea of open world design had become delineated down to rough-and-tumble 'clichés' devoid of the freeing passion of artistic exploration. Chief culprit of that being Ubisoft who would periodically turn their beautiful open worlds into limp collect-a-thons that shuttled players across uninspired gameplay pockets that ground away at their patience the more they endured. Breath of the Wild dispelled that malaise. It was vibrant, refreshing, designed to evoke mystery and wonder, brimming with life and peculiarity and love of design. It was a waterfall where before there were stillwaters. And fool that I am, I believed that the Zelda formula had reached it's pinnacle.

I mean don't get me wrong, there were still a few nagging issues with Breath of the Wild which I would have preferred if they weren't there. The story has that annoying "follow the footsteps of another story" structure which allows for a narrative to be freeform but also robs all immediate narrative stake to the proceedings. The major dungeons you explored felt a little bit more like giant puzzle boxes than grand adventure snippets to frame your entire journey around. Oh- and you couldn't make a giant space laser death machine which floated around the enemy firing rainy death on their heads. Not that I really expected anything like that at all when I played through Breath of the Wild, but recent experiences have shown me what I've been missing all this time.

For a game I knew I would eventually buy, I took it upon myself to go radio silent during all the lead-up for Tears of the Kingdom after that initial trailer. The trailer for Breath of the Wild was what sold me on that game back when all I knew of Zelda was second hand knowledge, so that's all I wanted going into Tears of the Kingdom, that same aura of mysterious wonder. Even then I'd seen bits and pieces; I knew the game was going to be set in basically the same world-space as Breath of the Wild, which I was disappointed about, and Nintendo were being annoying vague about whether this was going to be a sequel to Breath of the Wild or the newly introduced alternative timeline to Breath of the Wild created by 'Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity'. Which was something I was also prepared to be disappointed about. But in all that I somehow missed just how important the building aspect of this new game would end up being.

As you can likely guess, I've delved my toes into the waters as of now and the temperature at this moment feels just right. The robustness of Tears of the Kingdom and how it handles the character's ability to weld and make anything they can think of just blows my little mind to pieces. Being able to attach practically anything to one another, be it woodplanks to metal hooks, wheels to jet engines, lasers to shields, rocks to swords- it recontextualized everything I thought I learnt from Breath of the Wild. In that game I was chuffed if I managed to beat a difficult fight against a big crowd by leading them into the path of a rolling boulder explosive trap I had laid in planning, now I can feasibly create a spinning fire cartwheel to demolish entire raiding parties before they even know I'm in the area. The step up in creative potential for the player to mess around with is like stepping up from Tetris to Minecraft- I'm just flabbergasted by how well everything works.

So many of Breath of the Wild's systems have been clever paired back and reworked into a more malleable gameplay system of mix and match. Elemental arrows are completely gone, in their place comes the ability to pick up certain effect-tied flowers and tie them to the end of your arrow to replicate the effect of a fire arrow, or a bomb arrow, or a poison smoke arrow. But whereas that in itself might be a cool idea to play around with as a sort of 'arrow customisation' garnish system, it's actually just the basis of the weapon play as a whole. Relatively early on you'll be introduced to the rather dizzying prospect that everything in your possession can be 'fused' with anything you find. You can stick a boulder on the end of your long sword to make it a slightly more powerful bludgeon, spike growths to the end of your shield to make it a bash weapon. You can attach a fire spouting proximity trap to the end of your sword and spin around as a fiery Catherine wheel of death- the possibilities are unexhaustive!

And that's just with the equipment! The 'Ultrahand' power allows the bit-by-bit construction of anything your creativity, and the game's spawn limit, can conjure- which actually leaves a dizzying amount of wiggle room. You'll be making skyhooks in the first hour and working vehicles out of timber and glue by the fifth hour. And simply browsing on Tiktok for a bit shows what mastery of this system can achieve. Flying drone strike weapon platforms, pilotable air bombers, reinforced turret tanks- this is the kind of robust mechanic you'd find an entire game designed and marketed around if this were any other series developed by any other studio, but for Zelda it's just another highly complex side of it's already comprehensively designed face. 'Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts' has finally had it's concept vindicated, albeit by a team who achieved more than the development studio of that game could have ever even dreamed of at the time.

Of course, there are still issues that I hold with the game in these early hours. As I've already stated, the dual divorced narrative structure never sits well with me, and it appears to be largely alive and well in this game too. I also wish that the game were a little less strict with it's despawn limit. I would like to build a car I can ride around in for a good bit, but TotK snatches it away from me whenever I leave the realm to go do a shrine- it's annoying, but the game is robust enough that you can whip up another without too much effort, to be fair. And I'm slightly annoyed by how this brand new ancient race, the  Zonai, have been thrown into the narrative as though they've always been there, snatching the role of 'once super advanced but now fallen ancient civilisation' from the Sheikah- with the narrative simply pretending that the Sheikah didn't exist to begin with. They even renamed the 'Sheikah slate' into the 'Purah pad', replaced all the Sheikah towers with Purah brand derivatives and apparently scrubbed clean all the giant Sheikah Guardian robot wrecks from the face of the land in however long after the last game this one is supposed to be set. (Long enough for Purah to age from a child into a young woman, at least.)

At least I can celebrate a fact that finally I can confirm for myself that this is indeed, a sequel to Breath of the Wild and not to 'Age of Calamity'. And do you know why I can affirm that? Simple- because the stable of horses I built up in my several years playing Breath were seamlessly ported to this new game to my joy and surprise! Case closed- mystery solved: I can carry on knowing that the adventures we endured in the first game haven't been totally wiped from history like I feared. With only having dipped my toes, it's impossible to summarise everything about this title into a review, but I have a feeling I'm going to be plaything through this one for a while, so this brief overview of my early hours will have to do for now. But I will say for the moment that between this, RE4R and Dead Space- this is turning out to be a blinding year for games! Don't screw up the streak, Starfield!