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Games telegraphing story beats through level design.
- Thread starter Mineshaft_Gap
- Start date
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
Whenever a game drops a ton of supplies onto you, it's a boss fight or setpiece battle.
Also whenever you suddenly start finding RPGs and Antitank Rifles in an action game and you're like "ok, Tank's just around the corner, good to know".
Not strictly "level design" but it's similar.
Also whenever you suddenly start finding RPGs and Antitank Rifles in an action game and you're like "ok, Tank's just around the corner, good to know".
Not strictly "level design" but it's similar.
Shrike_Priest
Member
For an area designed to teach the player to use the cover system, it's fricking solid design. Having the first encounterin an "organic cover" environment, where each cover isn't obvious, is poor design. This area serves the gameplay and if any area in the game should be filled with obvious cover, it's this one.
Magic Mushroom
Member
Same.
Though TLoU does have some excellent environmental storytelling. Ish, the sewers, etc.
I think what ruins experience is when you have a mission to get something, you enter the room nothing happens and up till now pretty much you didn't have to fight at all but you noticed that every step to that objective is with waist high objects. It pretty much ruins narrative because you already know, the moment you will touch that mission objective, there will be ambush and you will have to fight your way out. That is exactly what OP is pointing out naming all those games. This is really bad level design from narrative point of view because you know what will happen.
TheRedSnifit
Member
I do think the guy you responded to has a point.
The actual problem is that TLoU is a linear shooter, where the only way to interact with the game is to shoot things. The way the game is designed means it literally cannot sustain a plot thread that ends with anything but "Bad guys show up and you have to kill them all." It's like that guy earlier here said, a story can't surprise you when it's tied to something so predictable.
How about mix up situations. For example do one without bad guys showing up? The predictability will be not so obvious. Make 2-3 missions where it is setup like always, you expect to be it as always but nothing happens? It just makes better game from narrative point of view that not always shit happens. There have been games that make something like this inbetween combat missions. For example make that level a bit more scary with typincal fake scare elements like something breaks/loud noise but no bad guys.
AtomskEater
Member
Boss locations being broadcasted when you go from narrow corridors to a sudden wide open, suspiciously clear place is a pretty common one.
Revolutionary
Member
The first time you fight enemies in TLOU really stands out to me. The entire experience up to that point felt very organic and natural, and then you stumble into this obvious video game area.
It's the tutorial.
I hope you never make a videogame.
SuperStiltzkin
Member
But TLoU already does do that. A lot. Sometimes you're running from bad guys. Sometimes you're sneaking around. Sometimes there are large platforming sections. Sometimes there are just large exploration sections without any enemies and you just take in the sights and talk with Ellie while scavenging for stuff. There's tons of huge environments that are designed simply for exploring and character moments and you never go back for combat encounters. The initial part of Bill's town is largely devoid of enemies except a handful of wandering clickers. The university section has huge areas devoid of enemies. The beginning areas of Salt Lake City where you're going through an abandoned highway full of cars and a Winnebago and going through the bus station and the medical camp don't have enemies. The very beginning of the game where you're following Tess is mostly world building where you see how people live in the apocalypse. The Last of Us is always throwing in tons of gameplay and pacing variety.
The3DGameArtist
Member
I think since it's a linear game introducing random isn't really great for the flow of the game. It's obvious that it has highs and lows that are part of the design itself. A lot of areas you can just sneak past the monsters etc so you don't actually have to fight same goes for some of the human bad-guys.
SuperStiltzkin
Member
I think knowing the peaks and valleys formula of game design isn't the fault of the game. The game not throwing a wrench in the gears of a proven formula isn't a failing on the developers' part. Does knowing the 3-act structure of film making make a film worse? Like, oh there's gotta be rising action so I know the movie's gonna have some kind of conflict coming. Oh, it's been over an hour, we must be entering the third act. Does that ruin the movie for you?
CadetMahoney
Member
dead on target, in RE7 it actually made me kinda upset how telegraphed it was.
Heh heh, that reminds me of cartoons where part of a hand-painted background is drawn in a simpler, less detailed style, so you immediately know something's going to happen to it.
SuperStiltzkin
Member
Long bridge? Must be a dragon waiting for me.
Naughty Dog's super cliche too, which doesn't help. Their storytelling's so absurdly predictable that even if the level design were good enough to prevent you from anticipating what's up, the writing's way too obvious about it.
Half-Life 2's level design does this a lot, though. Hey, is that a crate full of INFINITE ROCKETS? Welp, guess I'm fighting either a Strider or one of those flyin things. Again. For the eightieth time.
Half-Life 2's level design does this a lot, though. Hey, is that a crate full of INFINITE ROCKETS? Welp, guess I'm fighting either a Strider or one of those flyin things. Again. For the eightieth time.
With The Last of Us specifically the cover was pretty noticeable but I was generally able to get past it because it's part of the genre rather than the game itself. I thought the Pallettes stuck out a lot more.
Resident Evil 4 is one that comes to mind and I thought it was handled quite well. Outside of safe-rooms there was no immediate indication as to where you could expect to find combat. Still, you would develop a feel for it and could get good at predicting some of them. It might be that that it's been calm for a little too long and you're flipping a lever, or maybe you're backtracking through an area and there's been a change to the presentation of the environment.
Resident Evil 4 is one that comes to mind and I thought it was handled quite well. Outside of safe-rooms there was no immediate indication as to where you could expect to find combat. Still, you would develop a feel for it and could get good at predicting some of them. It might be that that it's been calm for a little too long and you're flipping a lever, or maybe you're backtracking through an area and there's been a change to the presentation of the environment.
I hope you joking because almost every great narrative wise does that what i mentioned.
How does that ruin the narrative though? By virtue of the genre, you know there's going to be a given amount of regular combat and that the combat is cover-based. As was mentioned in the original post about Uncharted, it's basically a guarantee that finishing a puzzle area that leads to a new destination is going to turn into a combat encounter of some sort. That's the nature and flow of these games.
Does the existence of cover necessarily spoil exactly who the combat will involve in a given situation? No.
Does the existence of cover spoil that combat will happen? Yes.
Is that a problem in a game where the core gameplay mechanic is combat? Not in my opinion.
I'd actually argue in the given example that it doesn't even matter if there is cover littering your way to the objective. The alternative is that you complete the objective, leave the area, and enter combat shortly afterward anyway. These games are paced in a specific way that it's still easy to tell when combat is coming. If we want to take the element of predictability into it, I guess you can argue the entire game is really poorly designed simply because you know combat will happen at certain regular intervals throughout. But it's not bad design, it's simply the result of appropriate pacing for a game in its genre.
The games already have plenty of sections without combat. Once you start adding false positives for combat sections, you shift the balance of the game's pacing. Messing with the pacing just to make the game more unpredictable would be a mistake. While the element of predictability can be a bit unsatisfying, poor pacing can be absolutely devastating to a game.
TheRedSnifit
Member
I don't think that's comparable. In TLoU, you know that every plot thread is going to turn into a shootout within ten minutes, because the game is literally unable to throw anything else at you, and interrupting the gameplay with forced walking and climbing segments (as Uncharted 4 is fond of doing) tends to mess up the flow, which is a problem in itself. It's more like when you're watching Fate of the Furious and you know shit's about to go south because there hasn't been an explosion in five minutes.
I'm not saying we should abandon efforts at telling serious stories, but I don't think shackling them to linear shooters is the best way to go about it.
Though on the collector ship in ME2 I think it actually helps build a tense atmosphere.
The chest high walls have been the one that has bothered me the most. It's not like they couldn't have designed some of those to be a bit higher occasionally or have more natural looking parts to them so they don't look like the same concrete block cover all the time.
DOOM also went heavily for that terrible corridor, locked arena, corridor, locked arena level design as the game went on and you could tell when a section like that was coming. It's such a departure from the start where they had levels that let you explore in multiple directions more organically.
DOOM also went heavily for that terrible corridor, locked arena, corridor, locked arena level design as the game went on and you could tell when a section like that was coming. It's such a departure from the start where they had levels that let you explore in multiple directions more organically.
It is. You know there will be boss battle or arena type ambush, where multiple waves of enemies will be coming. The old formula of every fps game (doom, quake, serious sam etc.)
Maintaining pacing is good thing unless you overdo that and for me most of those games tend to do that. I just start to feel bored and most of the time annoyed by repetition of all that. It's like "here we go again". In the end I just throw down games difficulty and just run through all that part because the only thing that makes me to continue is narrative. I feel tired of same do that and fight, do that and fight. In the end I sometimes glad all those games are not that long to make me feel like that.
SuperStiltzkin
Member
I think it absolutely is comparable. In a shooting game, the fundamental mechanic is shooting. So yes, there will be regularly be sections where you shoot people. It's expected. TLoU breaks it up a lot to the benefit of the pacing. As I said, there are tons of exploration sections and stealth sections and platforming sections and sections where you just spend time with the characters. That's pretty good for a game where you primarily interact with it by shooting at things. I think it's disingenuous to dismiss those parts as "forced walking and climbing" segments.
For a positive example of this and since someone brought up Dead Space, Dead Space 2 actually shines in some ways. Firstly, aside from one fade-out pretty late game that's there for a technical reason (I think), it's all effectively "one-take". Almost no camera cuts for loading and whatnot at all, and because of that the spaces have more weight.
Secondly, there's a chapter in the game that is specifically designed to play on your expectations of the series. Spoilers for the setting of DS2:
Secondly, there's a chapter in the game that is specifically designed to play on your expectations of the series. Spoilers for the setting of DS2:
In Chapter 10, you return to the Ishimura, the space ship that is the setting for almost the entirety of the first game. For most of that chapter you encounter nothing at all, and if you still remembered the first game you'd see specific areas and go "yep, that grating" and "there were false corpses here before", but for most of the time it was just tension, tension, tension. Eventually of course it turns into shootbang but it was pretty impressive how it kept me on the edge of my seat.
TheRedSnifit
Member
This is literally what I said.
If they aren't optional segments, then they're forced. Words mean things.
Anyways, these segments are fine, they were much better handled than in UC4, but eventually you hit the "Ten minutes without someone getting shot" threshold and the plot has a shocking twist where a bunch of bandits or zombies show up out of nowhere.
It doesn't need to be this way, linear cover shooters are not the only genre in gaming.
mcz117chief
Member
Gee, I wonder what is on the other side of that teleporter
SuperStiltzkin
Member
Words have meanings beyond their definition as well. "Forced" has a negative connotation to it. If we're going purely by definition, TLoU has forced shooting segments too. Not shooting something for 10 minutes is actually a pretty long time to not shoot something in the context of every other third person shooter game.
Linear cover shooters are the genre we're talking about with TLoU though. I'm not discussing the genres that serious stories should be told or whether a third person shooter is the best genre to be telling a story like TLoU. But rather debating the validity of the criticism that a shooting game has shooting in it and has cover to accommodate and telegraph said shooting.
Explain yourself
The first time you fight enemies in TLOU really stands out to me. The entire experience up to that point felt very organic and natural, and then you stumble into this obvious video game area.
That part was a perfectly fine transition.
It /is/ a video game, and there needs to be clarity within the gamespace so players know exactly what will work when they engage with that space.
Bedsides, If this game were not a cover shooter that section really wouldn't look out of place or any more "gamey" than the rest of the game.
I don't get this. I see nothing shitty about this area, like at all.
SuperStiltzkin
Member
There's some great stuff out there, but if people are looking to studios like Naughty Dog to be doing it, I feel like they're looking in the wrong place. You need to look at the smaller projects, the indie devs. I think the only big budget AAA developer who is trying is David Cage.
It's like looking to Marvel to make an avant garde blockbuster film. It ain't happening. And that's not to say some really good serious human drama films aren't possible from those superhero genres. Logan is an amazing film. But it's still a superhero film with a very blockbuster climactic ending. You don't get anything experimental. It's probably the most arthouse you'll ever see in a blockbuster superhero film though. And The Last of Us is the most serious attempt you'll ever see out of Naughty Dog in trying to mesh serious story telling with gameplay in a way that's palatable for general audiences.
I mean, I get how blatant it is. It's boxes stacked conveniently like perfect tetrominos. But it's a tutorial area where you have your first encounter with gun toting enemies and it's one room. Calling it a "level" is really generous.
justsomeguy
Member
Cover shooters ALWAYS put a bunch of cover in 'interesting' places just before an attack.
Or, that moment when you see a Rocket Launcher in any game (especially Halos) and think "I'm probably gonna need this soon".
Or, that moment when you see a Rocket Launcher in any game (especially Halos) and think "I'm probably gonna need this soon".
It's not quite what you're suggesting - because it's working to a known storyline anyway, so the story beats weren't ever going to be a surprise - but one of the first really huge Doom total conversions was based on Aliens, and they took the bold move of having no enemies in the first level - it's all atmosphere and small bits of creepy imagery. It really works well to build anticipation.
feint_ruled
Member
Case in point : the Vita version of Uncharted. The devs chopped and changed level format, ending up having multiple puzzle sections in a row, a fact they felt they had to apologise for.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/181082/postmortem_sony_bend_studios_.php?page=3
D.Lo
Member
It's like if you see a good weapon or save room, you know there's a boss around the corner lol. I don't mind it in games that are not afraid to be a game (Devil May Cry, Metroid Prome ect). But it's stupid feeling in games that think they are movies like most AAA stuff nowadays.
Also related: when you mow down 50 enemies, absorbing 23 bullets along the way, but now all of a sudden someone has you hostage with a single handgun because you triggerd a cutscene lol
Also related: when you mow down 50 enemies, absorbing 23 bullets along the way, but now all of a sudden someone has you hostage with a single handgun because you triggerd a cutscene lol
TheRedSnifit
Member
This is the comment chain you responded to:
I was specifically talking about how I believe its story is harmed by it being shackled to a linear shooter. If you don't want to have that discussion, then don't jump into it.
Savantcore
Unconfirmed Member
Isn't there a bit in Gears of War where you pull a switch and wait-high cover literally comes out of the ground? It's bizarre.
The Last of Us and Uncharted have some questionable moments but they're not the worst offenders.
The Last of Us and Uncharted have some questionable moments but they're not the worst offenders.
SuperStiltzkin
Member
I was responding to him because he was suggesting a possible solution that TLoU already does in spades. ie. Breaking up shooting sections with...not shooting sections.
hemo memo
Gold Member
To be honest The Last of Us was the first game that made me think of that. You know an encounter just by the layout of the area and it take you out of the experience sometimes.
I always assumed this was intentional? Either for the sake of "foreshadowing" or to give you a chance to get a feel for the layout of an area before the fighting starts (not a good or bad thing but something you wouldn't normally be able to do, so it makes those encounters slightly different).
If they didn't want you to have this feeling they would just arrange the levels differently so that you never fight when backtracking through a previously quiet area. So in that dam area they could make you fight your way in and then back out again, or simply ylhave you enter via a different route so that you don't see the "fight area" beforehand.
kqedequalsvolvo
Member
Same - though interestingly, it ended up being for a very different reason than I guessed at...a far bleaker reason!
It doesn't ruin the narrative, it ruins the "surprise".
But "surprise" obviously wasn't intended or the layout would have been different. Instead we get foreshadowing, something that's probably rarer in games than surprise. It's a different device but no less valid.
For a movie example, look at the Final Destination films. You know this seemingly inconsequential object is about to kill someone because of the way the camera pauses on it for a second, it builds its own kind of tension and can even still lead to surprise (with misdirection, as you can see in the post above this one).
kqedequalsvolvo
Member
I think the issue is that if you do away with cover that's partially signposted it then has to go all or nothing. Either the environments look more organic but you snap to cover in a predictable/reliable way on absolutely everything or you end up confusing and frustrating the player by making it too ambiguous - this waist high wall let me snap to cover but why not this window ledge etc.
The point about TLOU is really interesting - it certainly does break the immersion to some extent though like others have said, I feel like the combat/sneaking sections are often enough for the mild spoilers to be bearable.
It's a pain in strongly narrative-focused experiences but it's certainly been helpful to me in other games. There's definitely been times where I've looked into a room before triggering a new scene in a game and saw upturned benches, waist high walls etc. and realised a firefight was coming so have made sure I was all stocked up on health and ammo etc. When wanting to complete something and the moment to moment gameplay trumps the narrative in a game, I actually welcome the slightly ham-fisted foreshadowing haha.