I bought a new game called Sniper: Ghost Warrior a few days ago on a whim and finished it today. I would give it probably 6 or 7 out of 10. It has a bunch of issues, but by and large I had a fun time. Sniping is my preferred mode of playing action games, and I always love a good stealth game, so any game designed specifically to cater to those niches would get a few free points on that count.

Its structure is pretty simple – you go through a linear series of mostly linear but slightly open missions, switching perspective several times on the way; you primarily control a lone wolf sniper, with the occasional mission putting you in control of a Delta Force operator in a 3-man team or a member of a rebel guerilla group. One mission gives you control of the sniper’s spotter instead, and makes you designate targets for your normal avatar to shoot – it’s fun and adds a lot of variety.

As an action game, it’s surprisingly decent – it’s built with the engine that was written for the brilliant Call of Juarez games, so the weapons have a lot of weight and impact to them, and especially the fully automatics feel chaotic and just the right amount of inaccurate. There’s an on-rails shooting sequence which works really well, there are a couple of slow-motion room clearing sequences, and even the sniper parts occasionally turn all action-y, as in the splendid mission where you have to move along the cliffs and support the Delta Force team as they carry out their mission and make their escape below.

As a stealth game, it’s… all right. It has some problems. The camouflage of your enemies works surprisingly well insofar as you often don’t see them until they start shooting at you, but even though you’re wearing a ghillie suit, it seems like as far as the AI is concerned, you might as well be dressed in an orange vest with reflex strips. This is compounded by the fact that while foliage generally does a decent job of concealing you when the enemies are unaware of your presence, if they know you’re there, they seem to see right through it, leading to those typical Far Cry situations where you can’t see the enemies for the foliage you’re trying to hide behind, but they can see you perfectly fine. That said, enemies usually give you a good window before they spot you until they realise you’re an enemy and attack you, in which to whip your scope around and shoot them in the face. It would be an amazingly frustrating game if it relied on checkpoints, but mercifully it has quicksave and quickload, which makes it a pretty decent experience as a stealth game. You just have to get used to the flow of it.

As a sniper game, it’s almost too detailed for its own good. On higher difficulty levels, you have to manually estimate the effect of wind and gravity over distance on your bullet’s trajectory, which I can’t even imagine doing in some of the more hectic situations. On easy mode, thankfully a little red ring shows up if you hold your scope still for a second, showing you where your bullet is really going to hit. Unfortunately this slightly ruins the connection you feel to the shot – the appeal of placing the crosshairs on an enemy’s head and enjoying the red mist when you press Fire is slightly lost because you don’t feel as much in control; you’re just following the little red ring. A lot of the satisfaction of one shot one kill is retained though, and of course a sniper game would have to have fairly detailed sniping. Further, there is a “focus” mode which slows down time if you hold Shift while looking through your scope, which makes it much easier to pull off the harder shots and take out several targets before anybody has time to react.

The big problem is that the whole game seems kind of glitchy. The AI isn’t generally very good, enemies tend to spawn unpredictably, sometimes you’ll fire a perfect shot and the bullet just seems to vanish, and though I’m all for simulating the unwieldiness of long rifles by raising or lowering your weapon if you get too close to a wall, the implementation in this game seems a little too twitchy. Also I don’t know if this is to be blamed on the game or my hardware, but when I’ve been playing for a while, the game tends to lock up for half a minute when I quicksave, and once in a while all the voice-over and sound effects just disappear – the only way to solve that is to restart the game.

If you get this game, do yourself a favour and disable the bullet cam, because it’s super annoying. Make sure you enable it again at the very end though, when you’re about to shoot the Big Bad Evil General, since the ending is incredibly lame and unsatisfying without it. Oh, and don’t make an Internet profile – if you do, the game kicks you if you lose your Internet connection, but it doesn’t do that if you create a non-Internet profile.

In conclusion, if you really like sniping and you really love stealth games, Sniper: Ghost Warrior has both of those and isn’t too bad. At a mere 30 € on Steam for a respectable 5 and a half hours of singleplayer gameplay plus multiplayer, I’d say it’s worth buying if you’re into either of those things.

Since I prefer to spare you the download, I’m posting the entire paper here, but I have also uploaded it in PDF shape in case you prefer to read it with more sensible margins and page divisions and all that jazz. Note that this paper wasn’t an exam project, it was just an exercise, so I’ve basically not bothered with references, and it’s only 5 pages long. Oh, one more thing: the conclusion is extremely weak. My conclusions always are. Enjoy!

Download the paper as a PDF

Introduction

In this paper, I will look at how Counter-Strike and Red Orchestra create a sense of authenticity to the situations in which they’re set. I’ll start by comparing their iconographies to determine their settings, then I’ll analyse how a degree of authenticity is achieved through the specific mechanics of the game design. The way I use the terms mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics in this paper is taken from the MDA model by Hunicke, LeBlanc & Zubek, 2001-2004.

First, however, an extremely brief explanation of how I use the term “authenticity” in this paper.

Authenticity

I’m purposely avoiding the perhaps more popular term “realism” in this paper, because realism can be used in several very different contexts. It’s most often used to describe the visual fidelity of the game, and is used equally for describing the graphical technology powering them or the stylisation degree of the game’s artwork. Though the stylisation of the artwork is relevant to the topic of this paper, I’m more interested in how the realism paradigm applies to gameplay: as I use the term “authenticity”, it covers the effort to accurately represent (or at the very least invoke) a certain situation through the gameplay mechanics.

Setting

To begin with, I will now take a look at the respective settings of Red Orchestra and Counter-Strike with the central aim of identifying the differences in what the player might expect from each game.

Red Orchestra takes place on the east front of World War 2, where each map represents a battle between German and Soviet forces. I would expect most players to be familiar with this setting primarily through history classes and documentaries as well as fictional works such as films or books. As such, they might expect very harsh conditions with large forces suffering incredibly high casualty rates on both sides. Players might also expect slow and inaccurate weapons (by modern standards), unless they have been playing certain other World War 2 games, and when it becomes clear that tanks are available in many maps, it would not be unreasonable for players to anticipate that these are powerful but offer their crews very little assistance, and so would be difficult to use.

Counter-Strike is set in the modern day, each map representing a fictional encounter between terrorist groups and anti-terrorist forces. I expect that players’ reference frames would be a combination of terrorist fiction a’la Tom Clancy (be it in book, film, or game form) and the occasional news report from the “War on Terror” or events where SWAT teams or similar have been deployed. Whether the scenario is hostage rescue or bomb defusing, players might expect terrorists to strike in small groups, and anti-terrorist assault teams tend to be small and well equipped. Thus, the setting calls for somewhat smaller scenarios than Red Orchestra’s World War 2 setting.

Objectives

Both Counter-Strike and Red Orchestra have designed their gameplay mechanics around the paradigm of authenticity. The most straight-forward manifestation of this is the objectives of the different teams: Red Orchestra maps use capture points which either constantly award a team points while they’re under that team’s control, or start out entirely under control by one team who must then prevent the other team from capturing them. In my own experience, this tends to create a constant back-and-forth between the teams as they struggle for control of all the capture points. It also seems to match the type of conflict we expect from conventional warfare, where largely symmetrical forces vie for dominance over a strategically significant area.

Counter-Strike likewise uses objectives that support the anti-terrorism fiction quite well. Terrorists commonly use explosives to destroy landmarks and kill civilians, and hostage situations occasionally arise when the terrorists are cornered by government forces – these are the two scenario types that Counter-Strike: Source uses by default. Due to the nature of the fiction, scenarios will always be asymmetric: in bomb defusing maps, terrorists must bomb a particular location to win (usually one of a couple of options), while the counter-terrorists must defend this location or move in and defuse the bomb after it’s been placed. In hostage rescue maps, the terrorists start near the hostage and must prevent the counter-terrorist team from reaching the hostages and escorting them out to an extraction point. However, in both cases, the game can also be won by simply killing all members of the opposing team. This is possible due to Counter-Strike’s spawn system, which I will describe later.

Establishing objectives that make sense within the fiction are a fairly uncomplicated way to encourage certain behaviours in the players and achieve a measure of authenticity, but the paradigm of authenticity can also be found on more fundamental levels of the gameplay. Below, I will focus on specific areas of the core gameplay and analyse how authenticity is encouraged on this low level. I’ve chosen to divide the core gameplay mechanics into those pertaining to movement, weapons, and health or death.

Movement

Movement speed tends to be a significant factor in shaping how a game is played. Unashamed tournament games such as Quake or Unreal feature very fast and fluid movement, allowing players a high degree of flexibility and accommodating fast response times.

Counter-Strike has three modes of movement: run, walk, or crouch. The fastest mode of movement – running – is the default, and a key must be pressed to slow down. Crouching while moving has the advantage of making your footsteps silent, making it possible to sneak up on enemies. Though Red Orchestra also defaults to running, this isn’t the fastest movement mode in the game. Red Orchestra has a grand total of 5 movement modes, in order from fastest to slowest: sprint, run, walk, crouch, and prone. The fact that Red Orchestra does not default to the fastest movement mode seems to encourage slightly more cautious gameplay than Counter-Strike, where fast movement is often of the essence.

Both games have a way to limit your movement somewhat, especially to prevent the infamous “bunny-hopping” manoeuvre whereby players in a multiplayer game can repeatedly jump around their enemy to make themselves harder to hit. Counter-Strike’s method is simply yet effectively to slow the player down for a moment when the player lands after a jump. At the same time, the player’s accuracy is reduced slightly while in the air by way of increasing the probabilistic projectile spread of the player’s weapon, indicated by the slight expansion of the crosshairs.

Red Orchestra’s method is a little less subtle, but perhaps somewhat less arbitrary: players in Red Orchestra have a stamina indicator which is filled by physically stressful activity such as jumping or sprinting, while moving slower or standing still will cause it to gradually empty. When the stamina indicator is full, the player will be unable to jump or sprint for some time. Both of these features – Red Orchestra’s stamina bar and Counter-Strike’s momentary accuracy and speed penalties – serve to discourage grossly unauthentic player movement.

Stance plays an important role in Red Orchestra, mainly because several are included, but also because most of the game’s maps feature large expanses of terrain with little cover between objectives, and staying low can be the only way to avoid enemy fire. Much attention has been spent on the details to ensure that the different stances accurately recreate the most important affordances and restrictions that players would expect in real life, and to make sure each stance has its usefulness. For example, when moving while prone – the stance which affords players the smallest chance of being seen (and/or shot) – the player character folds his arms in front of him, making it impossible for players to fire their weapons while crawling. A particularly clever detail is that player characters’ heads are raised slightly when crouched and moving compared to when they’re crouched and stationary, which lets the players look over obstacles and quickly duck behind it for cover by simply ceasing to move if they come under fire. Aiming down the barrel will similarly raise the player characters’ heads a little, allowing the player to shoot from behind cover.

Finally, Red Orchestra has one major functionality in terms of movement which Counter-Strike lacks: leaning. By pressing a button, players can lean their character to the left or right to look around a corner or past a tall obstacle without exposing themselves completely. All these extra options for how to control your character in Red Orchestra support a considerably more slow and cautious play style than Counter-Strike tends to foster.

Weapons

It’s clear that a lot of attention has been put into making the weapons in both games look and behave as players would expect. This is most immediately obvious in the fact that they all represent real weapons such as the AK-47 or the MP5 in Counter-Strike or the MP40 or the Mosin-Nagant in Red Orchestra. More importantly, however, the weapons serve the same general purposes in the game that you’d expect them to do in real life (whether based on first-hand experience, war movies, or Wikipedia). In Counter-Strike, shotguns are useful up close but rubbish at a distance, and vice versa with sniper rifles. In Red Orchestra, bolt-action rifles fire far too slowly to be effective in close quarters, for which a sub-machine gun is preferable, but you’ll appreciate its range and accuracy if you’re fighting across a field.

The really interesting thing is the difference in how each game achieves this authenticity. Because Red Orchestra is so uncompromisingly detailed, it manages to create a lot of its most authentic dynamics by virtue of its simulation, where Counter-Strike must use slightly more artificial means to invoke the same dynamics. Weapon accuracy is a good example of this difference: when a bullet exits a rifle barrel, it will generally do so at a 0 degree angle, unless something is wrong with the bullet or the barrel. Any inaccuracy will be due to poorly adjusted sights, loss of projectile velocity at range, the effects of recoil on rapid fire, or simply bad marksmanship. Whereas Counter-Strike chooses to represent all these factors by the expansion or contraction of the crosshairs, Red Orchestra attempts to simulate most of them. Recoil in Red Orchestra will genuinely shake your aim, bullets will actually begin to drop when fired over great distances, and where the crosshair in Counter-Strike makes it far easier to aim than in real life, Red Orchestra not only provides you with no crosshair if you’re not aiming down the sights, your weapon is also slightly detached from your viewpoint, such that you won’t always be aiming at the centre of your display. Even when you use the iron sights, your aim shakes slightly to simulate your breathing.

Another ruthlessly authentic detail in Red Orchestra is that the game keeps track of the player’s individual clips of ammunition. Where most FPS games (and indeed Counter-Strike) simply divides your ammunition into two bullet “pools” – the bullets in your weapon and the bullets you’re carrying with you – which means you’ll always get a full clip when you reload your gun, Red Orchestra keeps track of how full your clips are, introducing the risk of working through all of them and eventually reloading only to find yourself with less bullets loaded than before.

Finally, I should mention that both games feature several pieces of tactical equipment that help players recreate authentic military tactics. Both games have smoke grenades, which can be especially invaluable in crossing some of those large exposed expanses of land that Red Orchestra usually features. Counter-Strike also gives players access to flash bang grenades, a piece of equipment which is central to modern assault tactics.

Health

The importance of health and death mechanics to shape the pace and feel of a game and to create a sense of participating in an authentic combat situation can probably not be underestimated. Broadly speaking, having more health points tends to make the game seem less realistic (if nothing else then because it encourages reckless behaviour that common sense dictates would get you immediately killed in real combat). Further, locational damage is widely regarded as a base necessity for authentic combat: getting shot in the head should have a greater probability of being fatal than being hit in the leg.

Both Counter-Strike and Red Orchestra give their players very little health compared to tournament games such as Unreal or Quake. Rather than dancing circles around your opponents, chipping away at their health, a single hit will often be enough to kill an enemy in Red Orchestra or Counter-Strike. Needless to say, this makes proper use of cover, tactical equipment, and teamwork much more important. As previously mentioned, Counter-Strike does allow players to buy more health in the form of armour, but in Red Orchestra, the only way to survive is not getting shot.

Both games also feature locational damage, though there’s a great difference in the fidelity of each game’s health systems. Counter-Strike doesn’t keep track of the health of individual body parts, but simply calculates damage taken in certain locations differently – a headshot deals substantially more damage than a shot in the chest, and armour that protects the head is more expensive than an armour upgrade that only covers your torso. By contrast, Red Orchestra shows players specifically where they’ve been shot, and hits to different areas of the player character’s body have additional effects such as making players drop their weapons if they’re shot in the arm.

Death

The re-spawn mechanics are one of the major differences between the gameplay of Counter-Strike and Red Orchestra. The death mechanics of each game are tied closely into their overall structure: Counter-Strike matches consist of a number of (usually fairly short) rounds, at the beginning of each of which most of the game state is reset – only the money and score of individual players as well as the equipment of players who survived the previous round is carried over. Since players only re-spawn at the beginning of a round, it’s not only possible but in my experience quite likely that one team will win the game by simply killing all enemy players.

By contrast, Red Orchestra uses a wave re-spawn system, whereby players are briefly queued for re-spawn such that they’ll usually re-spawn in small groups near the frontlines, ready to return to action. It’s possible for either side to run out of reinforcements if they die too much, allowing one side to win by killing enough enemy soldiers, but there will never be a situation where a single soldier is left on one side to fight a large group of enemies, which ensures that Red Orchestra always feels like a very large fight. This dynamic also means there’s usually a lot less waiting to be done in a Red Orchestra match than in a Counter-Strike match, where a spectator mode is all that keeps you in the game while you wait for the round to end so you may re-spawn.

Conclusion

It’s immediately obvious that Counter-Strike is a faster and in many ways simpler game than Red Orchestra. The difference is great enough that if you only look at these two games, you might even forget that Counter-Strike is meant to be realistic at all. I believe Counter-Strike was designed with enormous concessions to fun and accessibility, whereas Red Orchestra’s design is far more uncompromisingly authentic. However, my analysis of both games has confirmed my early impression that the fundamental difference between Counter-Strike and Red Orchestra is the detail level. The feature set of Red Orchestra is considerably larger than Counter-Strike, which a simple look at the key bindings of each game should be enough to reveal. This fact means that Red Orchestra’s simulation naturally produces a highly authentic aesthetic that the designers of Counter-Strike have had to “brute-force” into the system by introducing somewhat arbitrary features. Of course it seems likely that the authenticity Counter-Strike strives for is less to do with the real world and more to do with the worlds of action films and spy novels.

Haze is interesting. I’d read that it was completely generic, and in terms of gameplay, that’s pretty much true. However, I find the themes in the narrative extremely interesting, and I’m impressed with how they tied some of that into the gameplay.

Major spoilers follow.

The way they play with the first-person perspective is brilliant. Quick summary: you start out as a mercenary working for the “Mantel Corporation” with a bunch of stereotypical idiot infantry-types. You’re apparently there to put a stop to the genocide and war crimes committed by an insurgent organisation called the Promise Hand, so you’ve got justice and righteousness on your side, but it’s immediately clear that something is amiss because you’re constantly being treated to a shot of a soldier stim called “Nectar”.

During these first couple of missions where you work for Mantel, you begin to experience anomalies as your Nectar shots fail. First time this happens, you’re approaching a downed Mantel dropship, and suddenly the game turns greyscale, your hands are covered in blood, you hear a blood-curdling scream, and there are corpses everywhere. You get a new shot of Nectar from your suit, and it goes away – but where are all the troopers from the dropship? All you find is a pilot who looks completely healthy as he dies before your eyes…

This happens more and more frequently (the second time is particularly freaky, I won’t spoil it, but it was a moment of fairly deep horror to me), and you begin to notice that when the Nectar fails, enemies actually bleed when you shoot them and their corpses don’t fade away. I love that detail because disappearing corpses and lack of blood is something you’ll find in plenty of games, either for optimisation reasons or to avoid a high age rating, so it’s not really something you think about until you realise these things (a fairly unavoidable part of shooting people to death in the real world) are only missing because you’re drugged up on Nectar.

You also experience a couple of times that your fellow Mantel soldiers will sometimes overdose on Nectar, which will turn their normally yellow suits red and they will go berserk, shooting everybody – including you. If you don’t take them out before they run out of ammo, they will pull out a grenade and run towards you, blowing themselves up. I found myself wondering if that could happen to me, and of course it did: a staircase collapses while you’re on it, sending you plummeting towards the ground. Then everything turns red, enemies and allies alike are turned into black silhouettes so you can’t tell them apart, and your weapons just start firing on their own. When your rifle runs out of ammo, you automatically switch to your sidearm, and when that’s out of ammo too, you pull out a grenade… and then you have to shake the controller to throw the grenade and regain control before you blow yourself up.

It’s a pretty effective sequence, and really well thought out. I love it when games try to mess with your head and make you question what’s real and what isn’t, and deliberate or not, Haze uses its tricks to make you think a little about how war is usually presented in games.

I think Haze is unfairly maligned. It may not be anything special in terms of gameplay, but it does a lot of cool things thematically and aesthetically, and its narrative is earnest and meaningful, if slightly naive and unsubtle. Once you inevitably switch sides from Mantel to Promise Hand (and what a relief that is, after the drugs have been fucking with your perceptions for 2 missions), the rebels are suddenly extremely idealistic and altruistic and Mantel is implausibly inhuman and cynical and cruel. But I was pretty impressed that they took away all the special abilities you got from your suit and from using Nectar and then replaced it with a new set of more guerilla-like abilities such as planting grenades as mines or playing dead.

In summary: My opinion is that Haze is underrated.

I stroll down the hill towards the road and pick a bush next to the well worn tyre tracks. Making sure my by now somewhat old and patched-up camouflage suit covers everything it needs to, I crouch in the tall savannah grass behind the shrub and wait in the choking African noon heat for the convoy to turn the corner.

I’ve done this before and I know what to expect from these arms convoys: Two armed pick-up trucks on either side of a larger cargo truck with the goods. I need to blow the cargo to complete the contract, but I’ll need to dispatch the armed escort to stay alive. One driver and one gunner in each. I’m looking forward to trying out my new M79.

The first armed truck drives around the corner in the distance. I calmly wipe the dusty sweat from my brow and take aim down the barrel. If I do this right, three grenades will be enough. Otherwise my M249 SAW machine gun is ready to mop up the left-overs.

There’s the cargo truck and the second escort. Just need them a little closer.

Aaaaalmost there.

With a dull whump, I loose the first grenade, and the impact tears apart the leading truck, throwing its burning wreckage several feet into the air before it comes to rest a mere couple of yards from where I hit it. The driver in the cargo truck desperately slams the breaks, barely avoiding the wreck, and prepares to back up and drive around, but with the routined movements that come from years of practice, I eject the spent shell casing and insert a fresh grenade in seconds, lining up a new shot before the driver has a chance to evade.

The second explosion rolls off the surrounding hills, a blazing hellfire completely consuming the truck. My sardonic, satisfied smirk turns to horror as the munitions on the back of the vehicle are set off and launch the several tonnes of smoldering metal directly towards me. Seconds expand into minutes as I stare, frozen, mouth ajar at my unbelievable misfortune. It seems my mind has no reaction prepared for getting crushed by a burning truck, but at the last moment, I throw myself to the ground as heat and darkness engulfs me.

All this war, all these skirmishes – all the people I’ve killed and everything I’ve destroyed, and in the end I’m done in by physics…

Distant gunfire. Panicked shouts. A curse in a language I don’t understand. Somebody is tugging painfully at my arm. I open my eyes as much as I can, and I see Nasreen through the blood. She came to save me. How did she get the truck off me? My legs hurt, they must be broken. The gunfire has stopped, she’s killed the two soldiers in the last escort, but the grass is on fire all around us and I can barely stand, even leaning on her.

“Get up!” she grunts, supporting me only with one arm, unwilling to let go of her rifle. “Watch out, the fire is getting close.”

We limp away from the wreck, blood oozing from my forehead and swimming across my vision. Her jeep is parked just down the road, it’ll take us to the nearest safe house. One day my luck will run out – it seems I cheat death more and more narrowly each time. And this was supposed to be an easy mission.

Though it isn’t quite fair, Call of Duty 5: World at War feels like a rehash. Its one new touch is that half of it takes place in the Japanese theatre with all that entails of guerilla tactics and flamethrowers. Both of these new features work quite well, the Japanese behave noticeably different from the nazis, rushing you with their bayonettes, sniping you from the palm trees, or getting the jump on you from trapdoors in the ground.

Unfortunately this is introduced pretty quickly and then the rest of the American campaign fails to introduce any really remarkable setpieces or surprises. The one exception is a sequence that casts you as a gunner in sea plane, which also proves interesting in contrast to CoD4′s Death From Above mission – it gives you a good idea of how much war has really changed since 1945.

The Russian campaign is very samish – it starts you out in Stalingrad in yet another scenario blatantly stolen from Enemy at the Gates but executed well enough that I can forgive it, and then it quickly takes you into Germany to conclude with yet another damn fight at the Reichstag in Berlin. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t both Call of Duty 1 and Call of Duty 2 end in the Reichstag as well? Isn’t this whole campaign a bit naff? It doesn’t help that the Brits have been completely excised from this installation, which is especially distressing considering I always found the British campaigns to be the best in the CoD games.

I mean don’t get me wrong, World at War is an entertaining game with many well-executed scenes and details, but it feels completely unnecessary. It also doesn’t help that I played through it on Regular difficulty in exactly 6 hours according to Steam – at $60 plus tax, I’ll have to play through it at least once in co-op and really delve into the multiplayer to get my money’s worth. CoD4 wasn’t much longer, but I loved it so much that I started over as soon as I’d completed it the first time.

If you’ve been keeping an eye out for CoD5, I recommend waiting until the price drops a bit. Considering CoD4 is still 60 bucks on Steam though, you’ll probably have to look in the shops if you’re hoping for a better deal.

I would’ve loved to spruce this post up a bit but I have no idea where the game has saved my screenshots.

And yet I keep playing it – testament to its quality. I’ve made good progress, balancing assassinations, faction missions, buddy missions, arms dealer missions, and occasional excursions to restock my malaria medicine. Today I bought a camo suit, and while stealth was virtually impossible in day time before, now I am damn near invisible. I took great joy in sneaking in to assassinate a commander with my silent MP5 and getting back out without anybody ever knowing I was there. Then I proceeded to a cliff overlooking my next objective and wrought chaos with some well tossed molotovs and my dart rifle.

Far Cry 2 is seamless, chaotic, elegant, and the text-book definition of immersive. It’s also completely frustrating at its worst, but since I changed my difficulty to Easy, I’ve been having as much fun fucking up as I have succeeding. And it’s a gorgeous world, proving the validity of Africa as a game setting (I had this idea ages ago, where was Ubisoft with their million dollar budget back then!?) The beautiful landscapes really make you want to take a look around, and the hidden diamond caches are a solid way to reward exploration.

This is the only game I’ve ever been arsed to spend 2 weeks in daily correspondence with tech support to get it to run. I just wish I didn’t have to.

Leonardo Da Vinci will be central to the story of DX3. That sounds good to me, Da Vinci has plenty of conspiracy theories attached to his legacy, and I’m sure they’ll tie very well into the Illuminati and the Knights Templar as they appeared in the original game (since DX3 has been confirmed as a prequel, it’ll be taking place before the Knights Templar were taken out by Manderley, so they’re bound to make an appearance). Additionally, there’s a very real possibility that Eidos Montreal’s French Canadian development team will bring a noticeably French aesthetic to the DX universe, which could end up being really inconsistent with the two previous games in the franchise, but if the story is centered on the European parts of DX’s web of conspiracies, I think it could work out really well.

The new game will cast you as an average security guard who ends up with biological modifications (I’d assume they mean mechanical augs a’la Anna and Gunther, but they could be going for a more biopunk angle). It’s revealed that the game will feature around 20 augmentations, which sounds quite promising – DX had 18 plus the 3 basic augs you start with, Invisible War had 15 plus the default Light aug.

They don’t reveal how many slots you have, however – in Deus Ex you had half as many slots as there were augs, so you could install half in any given game. In Invisible War, they gave you only 5 slots, so you had to choose between 3 augs per slot. Either way is fine by me, but note that IW let you replace augmentations you’d installed, whereas aug choices in DX were permanent – if they give you more than 2 options for each slot, they should probably let you replace them on the fly like in IW so you don’t have to play the game 3 times to try them all.

While we’re on the topic of augs, the two examples they give is an aug that sends tentacles out your back to work as a bungee jump, and an aug that lets you punch through walls. The tentacle aug sounds pretty goofy, but then both DX and IW had some very goofy augs (Spy Drone or Health Leech, anyone?). A greater concern is whether all maps will now have to start you out on top of a skyscraper so players who get the bungee-tentacle aug have a chance to use it. As for the wall-punching, it sounds great on paper, especially combined with the traditional night vision aug that lets you spot enemies through walls, but I fear that it’ll be very arbitrary – they clearly can’t let you punch through the outer walls of a map, lest you walk out into the void, so how will they explain this limitation?

It could end up like the wall-climbing gloves in Thief 3, where the only way to know what walls you could climb was trial and error. These gloves were implemented as a replacement for the excellent rope arrows, which were limited to shooting into wood beams – that’s a limitation that makes immediate sense inside the fiction, since you can’t really shoot an arrow into a brick wall and expect it to stick. By contrast, the wall-climbing gloves almost forced you to meta-play the game, and unless they line every map with reinforced steel walls, I fear the wall-punching aug will suffer from the same problem.

Moving on from the augs, Eidos Montreal says they’ve learned from the criticism of Invisible War and reintroduced different ammunition for different weapons. That’s a pretty much inevitable design decision seeing how much flack IW caught for its unified ammo, but a moment later they reveal that DX3 will use auto-healing in the vein of Call of Duty or Halo, which is the exact same type of design decision as unified ammo in that it removes an element of resource management.

Resource management was a huge gameplay dynamic in Deus Ex. Almost all the game’s strategy and tactics were based on a foundation of resource management. Here’s a quick list of all the different resource types Deus Ex gave you:

• Health – Decreased by eg. getting shot, walking into a room filled with gas, or falling from a great height. Increased by using medkits or activating the Regeneration aug, or restored completely by using medical bots.
• Bioelectric energy – Decreased by using augmentations or getting hit by EMP. Increased by using bioelectrical energy cells or restored completely by using repair bots.
• Augmentations – While augs can’t be “spent”, but instead spend bioelectic energy, choosing between two augs to install is very much a choice between two permanent resources. Augs can also be improved with upgrade canisters which are pretty much the most valuable resource in the game due to their great usefulness and their rarity.
• Skillpoints – Decreased by upgrading skills. Increased by exploring the world or completing missions.
• Expendable items – Medkits and bioelectric cells, lockpicks and multitools, thermoptic camo and night-vision goggles, one-shot weapons and grenades. Each item has a single use, and new items can be acquired by exploring the world, taking them from defeated enemies, or buying them from certain characters.
• Ammunition – Decreased by using weapons. Increased by exploring the world, taking it from defeated enemies (though this is always a poor source of ammunition), or buying it from certain characters.
• Money – Decreased by buying items or ammunition from certain characters. Increased by completing certain objectives, exploring the world, or hacking ATMs. Sometimes even by selling certain items to certain characters.

Invisible War did away with skillpoints entirely, drastically limited the amount of items you could carry with you, and only used a single ammunition type. In other words, the resource management aspect of the game was reduced substantially. While implementing automatic health recovery in DX3 only removes one of the listed resources, it’s still the exact same type of design decision that led to one of the most harshly criticized aspects of Invisible War. In other words, it sounds like the lesson Eidos Montreal took away from IW was the very specific one that players don’t like when all weapons use the same ammunition, but they failed to learn that resource management is a core part of Deus Ex and that reducing its role leads to a very different type of game.

Finally, light/shadow-based stealth is gone.

Maybe this is a good decision. From a business point of view, it almost certainly is – the Thief games never really sold well, and while the Splinter Cell games have been a success, this may be more because of Sam Fisher’s crazy moves than his shadow-based sneakiness. In fact it’s quite possible that the success of the Splinter Cell series is in spite of, rather than because of, its shadow-based stealth.

But on the other hand, it really is giving the finger to Deus Ex’s debts to the Thief series. Deus Ex originally came about as a reaction against the forced stealth in the Thief games – Spector was frustrated that he was forced to run away and hide or just load a savegame every time he was spotted in Thief – he wanted to be able to improvise and fight his way out of the pinch he’d got himself into, but Thief’s protagonist was so vulnerable as to render combat nearly impossible. Thus Deus Ex was developed as “Thief + Combat” (and eventually much more than that). At heart, that’s what both DX and Invisible War was: Stealth games where all-out combat was actually an option. Removing shadow-based stealth from the series is a very, very drastic change to the core gameplay. It’s a bit like removing the platforming from Tomb Raider – sure, that still leaves combat and puzzles as central dynamics, but it’ll be a completely different game.

I think the correct way to build a sequel is to secure the core gameplay of its predecessors and then build on it. Removing basic tenets of the design from previous games will almost certainly alienate your existing fanbase. That’s what happened with Invisible War. Let’s hope Eidos Montreal’s proposed cover-based stealth system will be good enough to make up for it.

I played it for a few days and I got about 5 missions into the game, so I’m not done with it – nor will I ever be, I think. It has some… issues that keep me from completing it. First of all, bugs – if I skip a cutscene (and most of the time I feel compelled to do so because the writing and acting is barely even mediocre and cutscenes repeat every time you restart a mission), the game locks up and I have to quit to the main menu and then load the mission again. I haven’t encountered any other bugs, but that one is frankly bad enough.

Secondly, and mostly, the difficulty is stupid. The problem isn’t really that the game is hard, but that it’s hard for all the wrong reasons. The right way for a shooter to be hard is if the AI is really smart, uses cover well, flanks you, and generally outsmarts you in the most insidious and unexpected ways. In IGI2, the AI is pretty primitive. Its only real trick is that enemies come looking for you if you trip the alarm, but then they stand around dumbly for a while and go back to their patrols.

No, the way IGI2 is difficult is that enemies are really really accurate, and remarkably vigilant. You see, surprisingly, IGI2 is actually a pretty open tactical stealth game. Not knowing the game very well, I expected a bit of a corridor shooter, but it turned out to have large and open levels, patrolling guards, and a nice emphasis on stealth. The problem is, for a game that doesn’t want you to start a fight, it makes sneaking really difficult. Enemies spot you when you’re prone and partially concealed or from half a kilometer away in the dark. And when they spot you, they shoot you, and they hit you.

For some reason, I can’t hit anything more than a couple hundred meters away with my M16, but the enemies can easily shoot me in the face with their pistols at the same distance. In one mission, I accidentally alerted a guard at a bridge before I could take him out, and before I knew it, every enemy on the level was suddenly shooting at me – from half-way across the map. Enemies I couldn’t even see, enemies that took up 4 pixels on my screen, enemies that had been out of sight when I was spotted, all of them were shooting me with shocking accuracy.

In the mission where I stopped playing, I was spotted by a tank that had its side turned to me, half-way across the map, as I was moving on foot through the woods. I could barely even see it through the trees, and thanks to a recent plot point, I was armed with nothing but a knife. It eradicated me.

So I think, if I ever feel like some large-scale modern day special forces combat, I’ll dig out my old Delta Force 2 CD instead.

As far as I can tell, Rare tried to make a stealth action game. In my opinion they failed, and as a bit of a stealth game connoisseur, I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Apart from the fact that the original Perfect Dark had strong stealth gameplay, there are clear indicators in the game that it wants you to be stealthy: The intro to the tutorial shows protagonist Joanna Dark sneaking past some guards, your operator reprimands you in the very first level if you kill a guard or get spotted by him, and the post-mission statistics has a special score for stealth. The game has a couple of different systems to support stealth play: It has patrolling guards who don’t react until they see you, it has a weapon with a built-in cloaking device, and it has a melee attack that gains a massive damage multiplier if your target is unaware of your presence (a sneak attack, if you will).

The overall problem is that PDZ doesn’t really reward stealth. Sure, there’s a stat breakdown at the end of each mission that lets you know how many stealth kills you carried out, and similar achievements, but firefights aren’t dangerous at all – it’s nothing like Thief where swordfights are lethal and the only solution if you’re spotted is to run and hide. If you fail at sneaking in PDZ, half the enemies in the mission will seemingly hear the ruckus and come running, and it’s pretty easy to find good cover and kill them off so you may proceed unhindered. Even in Deus Ex, which was originally conceived out of frustration with Thief’s punishing combat, stealth has clear advantages over assault, probably partially because the combat is so clunky (and of course it does get pretty lethal on higher difficulty levels).

The level design doesn’t really encourage stealth either. Some admirable attempts have been made to open the missions up a little, allowing different paths through them. Especially the first mission stands out as having a very good open layout, but many of the later missions are completely linear. Without spoiling the game too much, some of the later missions even have you fighting alongside allies, which somewhat invalidates a stealth approach.

Even with these weaknesses (I stress that I find the combat pretty enjoyable, with a slightly finicky and unflexible but nonetheless very enjoyable cover system), the stealth gameplay of PDZ could’ve probably been massively improved if the AI had been designed for it. The biggest problem in this department is that it’s pretty damn hard – if not outright impossible – to lose the guards once they’ve spotted you. Combine this with the game’s use of checkpoints (ah yes: Checkpoints, eternal bane of stealth gameplay – no, give a me quicksave, or give me death), and the fact that the only way to avoid guards are to stay out of their field of view, which you have to sort of estimate because it’s – reasonably enough I guess – not made visible to you, and combat starts to look like a really attractive option.

Are you still with me after that sentence? Excellent, onwards then!

Stealth games are usually difficult enough. I have no empirical data with which to back this up, but I’m willing to bet that the average number of quicksaves/loads per level is much higher for a stealth game such as Thief or Splinter Cell than it is for action games like Half-Life or Crysis or even Max Payne, which has a pretty brutal damage model. At least the way I play stealth games, I pretty much quicksave every time I’ve found a safe spot and I often have to make several attempts at passing a single enemy encounter until I find the best way around it. Stealth is tough if you have to hide in the shadows and watch the guards’ patrol paths, it’s damn near impossible if the shadows don’t even help you!

The only time I really felt that the stealth in PDZ worked like it was supposed to was actually in the first level, once I’d accepted that there was no way I could progress without shooting the first guard with a silenced pistol. After running amock on the map following a previous failed stealth attempt, I knew there was a shortcut to a raised helipad that offered a good view of the central, heavily patrolled plaza. From this vantage point, I was able to observe the guards’ patrols from safety and sneak down to achieve my objective before the guards caught me. It was difficult, but it worked pretty well thanks to the safe vantage point they’d provided – such lookout areas are a staple of the stealth genre, but unfortunately this is the only one I remember finding in the entire game.

I can’t help but speculate if PDZ was made by a completely different team than did the original Perfect Dark. It’s like the stealth was included out of a sense of loyalty to the original game rather than because Rare really wanted it to be a valid option. Even the soundtrack supports action gameplay: It’s typically hectic, fast-paced hard rock that pushes you forward. PDZ is a decent action game: I enjoy the cover system, the levels are suitably varied and well constructed, the combat AI is adequate, the co-op is great, and the secondary fire modes of many of the weapons are simply inspired. I was expecting a stealth game with combat options, but I got an action game with half-assed stealth tacked on.

I did only pay about $16 though, and the co-op was quite enjoyable, so I’d say I got my money’s worth. Next up on my to-play list is Overlord, which should be waiting for me when I get home. I’ll strive to let you know how it is when I’ve tried it out.

We’re in a corner of Las Vegas abandoned by civilization. A group of houses still under construction when the economy crashed and the construction was abandoned. It’s tight quarters, and the terrorists are aggressive, but we’re patient players. We keep at it, refining our strategy with each death and each subsequent resurrection.

This time, it’s looking good. There are 3 of them left, and we’re moving cautiously through the ground floor rooms. We stack up on the next door and Nick opens. Three Tangos inside. Nick throws a flashbang and we avert our eyes as it goes off, blinding and deafening our enemies. Nick moves in first, killing one of them with a perfect shot to the face, but somehow one of the terrorists has remained unaffected by the flashbang. He kills Nick with a burst of auto-fire, and I quickly take him out before he turns his gun on me. The third terrorist elects to escape through the door.

I quickly weight my options. There’s only one terrorist left, but in this game, and against me, he might as well be 10 – even if I’m careful. I crouch in a corner and wait for Nick to respawn. “8 seconds”, he helpfully informs me on the voice chat. I don’t know where the last enemy went, and I’m afraid to go see. I want to finally beat this mission. We’re so close, it would be stupid to waste that now. When Nick is back, that last frightened guy won’t have a chance. “I’m just waiting for you to respawn before we go look for that last guy.” I say. “4 seconds. 3… 2…” Nick interrupts his own countdown with a chuckle, “wouldn’t it be hilarious if you died right no–”

He’s cut off. The sound of a shotgun blast tears across the sound of Nick’s voice from beyond the grave. It’s a helpful noise: It’s there to let me know I’m joining Nick in the after-life. The words “Mission Failed” burst uncompromisingly unto the screen accompanied by the groan of my avatar as he expires messily. Nick is laughing hysterically, incredulously on TeamSpeak. I’m laughing with him. We were so close this time.

We respawn and try again.