Archive for December 12th, 2009

http://www.saintsrow.com/

Developer – Volition

This blog is mostly about films, but I’d like to examine some of the elements of other mediums as well where it is appropriate to my studying. So along that vein I’d like to look at some parts of the PC version of Saints Row 2.

Saints Row 2 is an openworld game where you’re playing an unnamed gang boss who has been unconscious for several years and when they wake up the whole city they took over in the first game has been taken over by rival gangs. The aim of the game is take back the city of Stillwater.

The gameplay itself is a lot of fun, there’s a large variety of missions and distractions which are, for the most part, enjoyable and well rewarded. It’s a game that knows you want to have as much fun as possible and so throws as much at you as it can, it’s not all successful but enough of it works that you can have a good time regardless of the bad parts.

The game engine is buggy as hell and the conversion to PC is ham-fisted at best. Thankfully the majority of bugs, for my time playing, were cosmetic rather than game-altering. The only consistent and aggravating bug was that the game kept forgetting I was holding down accelerate and my car or character would just stop moving forwards. This was manageable though and it seemed to occur in odd situations rather than in common situations.

Those are the basics of play but what I’m interested in examining most is the games attempts at storytelling. The GTA series, which is SR2’s main influence, has tried to advance the quality of its stories in each game and have become highly praised for their cinematic presentation. SR2 tries, in vain, to do the same by having cutscenes before and after missions, unfortunately there is nothing more to the story than “I want to get rid of this other gang! Rargh!” There are some attempts at making a larger story with the death of a character and another getting stabbed but you just don’t care, there is literally nothing to make you involved. The cutscenes attempt to evoke gangster or action films and are generally unsuccessful due to poor direction; it’s a shame because in some of them there is the hint of a good idea that is never realised.

The protagonist is completely customisable: gender, physical appearance, clothes and even the voice can be selected by the player and altered at in-game locations whenever you wish. It is interesting because while the characters actions will never change, the voice style will instantly lend them a different quality. Each person will take different accents and inflections in different ways, leading the player to select part of the story’s atmosphere themselves. I myself made a woman with a comical male cockney accent who would appear, especially in cutscenes, as an entirely different kind of character to a suit-wearing straight laced Mafioso type. It has an impact on the storytelling in way that cannot be accommodated by the developers, which is a story problem, yet the choice for a player is fantastic.

The game highlights one of the issues with storytelling in an interactive medium. The videogames industry is as large as cinema or television these days and has broken through into the mainstream, but it is still very young. It’s evolving at a rate that the creators are having trouble keeping up with and due to the distribution and investment model there has not been a lot of chance to study and answers the questions required for great storytelling. Do you give the player choice and possibly relinquish control of the story or do you take choice away and force them down a single path? How do you tell a story in a first person shooter as opposed to a platformer? How can you handle pacing when the player is in control? Do players want cutscenes or seamless storytelling?

There are no definite answers for these questions, they rely on making a solid judgement on a game-to-game basis, but they do need to be examined and considered. The games industry needs to build a greater bank of knowledge and look towards creators in other arenas that could help them understand the elements they wish to evoke. The medium has great storytelling potential, without losing the crucial interaction, but it is currently mired in financial, distribution and management issues that take away the time for mainstream studios to examine it.