I think I’m getting old. I finally started playing Devil May Cry, which is generally considered the gold standard for third-person action games. It has nice graphics, nifty attacks, etc. etc. Unfortunately, I just can’t play it. Most of the time I can’t tell which way I’m facing, which means that I can’t work the controls properly, which means that all those nifty slash-and-shoot combos that make the game worth playing are lost to me. It also means I can’t dodge attacks particularly well, which leads to embarrassingly short play sessions. Besides: beyond the eye-candy factor — I do love the fact that you’re given a score based on the stylishness of your combos, and not just how much damage you do — I haven’t seen a particular reason I should want to learn to play it anyway.
Contrast the complications of controlling a character in a 3D space with the extremely simplified movement in a tournament fighting game such as Guilty Gear X2, which I’ve also been playing a bit of lately. In GGX2, as with other 2D fighters, your movement is for the most part constrained to walking back and forth along a straight line, and attacking/defending at various heights. 3D fighters (Virtua Fighter, Soul Calibur, etc.) add another degree of movement in that you are able to move around to your opponent’s side, but in most fighters this simply shifts the plane of action around a bit, leaving most of the activity to still continue within the 2D space. On the surface, it seems like DMC should be much more complex than any of these traditional fighting games: after all, you can run and jump all over the place, and not just hop back and forth along a line. But the constraints built into traditional tournament fighters allow the player and designer of this sort of game to develop highly sophisticated systems and techniques for gameplay, ranging from high/low mixup flowcharts to the nuances of using guard cancels to extend combos. As with traditional board games like Go and Chess, the lack of breadth in the mechanics of the game paradoxically leads to an increase in the depth of its strategies.
That sort of depth seems like it would be really hard to develop in a game like DMC, where at any given time you have to stare closely at the TV screen just to tell which way you’re facing — never mind trying to get the controller to do what you want it to — and the only effective strategy is to simply mash buttons and hope for the best. All of which leaves me wondering: is there such a thing as too many degrees of freedom in movement and control, or am I just turning into one of those crusty old “classic gaming” fanboys who doesn’t want to play anything that smacks of modernity?
March 6, 2004 9:34 PM.
Tags: complexity, controls, devil may cry, games.
Category: games.
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