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.

Insertion and Recon

The conference started Wednesday, but I went to Malmö (roughly pronounced Marlm-soundthatdoesntexistinEnglish) on Tuesday so I wouldn’t have to rush off to check in half-way through the conference. On my way to the hostel, I realized I could pretty much walk the whole way through parks, just occasionally crossing the road to get from one park to the next. This turned out to be a good thing, because I ended up walking that route 7 times throughout Tuesday.

After I’d dumped my baggage at the hostel around noon, I grabbed some lunch and then headed back to the station to meet Ruben. I was fairly excited about this, since I’ve known Ruben online for years ever since he tested my NWN module and recruited me to play in his massive DM’d campaign. For the best DM I’ve ever had the honour of playing with, I was a little disappointed to find that he wasn’t an enormous immortal being of pure light, but he was a nice guy, so I quickly forgave him for letting down my expectations. (Dunno if Ruben would want me posting a picture of him here, so I won’t). We took a few walks around town, then split up to relax before dinner. We met up again half past 6 and quickly found a nice but affordable place to eat. Then we wandered around a bit, had some coffee, and went back to sleep.

Day 1

Wednesday morning, Ruben and I met up with Rasmus at the conference and registered. Mercifully, there was free coffee and breakfast before the first keynote. Which, incidentally, began with Jonathan Smith and a couple of other guys from Tt Games (they of LEGO Star Wars) being led on-stage by Darth Vader and a couple of Imperial Stormtroopers. The talk was interesting, if nothing special; a rundown of the company’s history, culture, and philosophy – information of no use outside the industry, but of real interest to people like me, who collect such knowledge about various companies.

The next talk I attended (alone) was a two-part rundown of how Massive Entertainment created the story and the graphics, respectively, for World in Conflict. The main thing I took away from there was that it’s completely intimidating how much work goes into a single building in a modern game. After lunch was a talk comparing character design in Eastern and Western games, which was somewhat hampered by sluggish translation. The main thing here was getting to see previously unreleased concept art from two apparently quite secret games that Rare are making! The sci-fi game looked a bit generic, but the fantasy game was extremely interesting – gothic in a Tim Burton meets American McGee’s Alice way. Can’t wait to see what it’ll be all about.

The next talk was The Birth of a Society by three high-ranking CCP people (two of which had Ph.D.’s) about economics, democracy, and emergent gameplay in EVE Online. Just like last year, I left the conference with a sense that I needed to play EVE, but as Jim Rossignol said on the next talk, EVE sometimes seems like a better game to write about than to play. The main point to take away from this presentation was definitely that single-sharded MMOG’s can build far greater worth as a network than games with multiple shards, because sharding an MMOG essentially puts a ceiling on the possible amount of connections and relationships players can form in the game.

The day’s talks were rounded off with a keynote entitled Stories about Stories, wherein Ste Curran read from a short story he’d written in 7 chapters. It was very evocative stuff about a personal experience he’d had with Singstar, and it seemed to be intended to legitimize more “casual” games as a medium to let players create their own stories (not all that surprising considering the profile of his company). Between each chapter, one of Curran’s friends came on-stage to share personal anecdotes, poems, and Jonathan Smith had even composed a song about his dislike for games with long-winded stories that take themselves far too seriously. It was hilarious – it was Jonathan Coulton-grade material.

Intermission

Dinner was interrupted by a largely annoying live broadcast of One Life Left who had been called upon to host the Nordic Game Awards – annoying because they seemed to primarily address their listeners so we who had paid ridiculous sums to attend the conference seemed to take second priority all of a sudden. The awards themselves seemed a little quaint with just three (symbolic?) awards; most hilarious was the fact that Crayon Physics was competing with Kane & Lynch and World in Conflict for the main award for Best Nordic Game.

After the show, we travelled en masse to a club in the inner city where the drinks were free for a few hours. Ruben, Rasmus, and I ended up at the same table as some pretty clever Swedish computer science students that we spent the rest of the party shouting to over the music. Ruben showed them all his Risk-in-space mobile game, Galaxy Conquest, and somehow one of them gave me a pretty handy rundown of various production models. We called it a night around 11 pm and went back to our respective hotels.

Day 2

Getting up slightly later and with no hangover because I never have those (go go super-metabolism!) I attended the first keynote by a couple of the Rock Band developers with Rasmus. Ruben was absent because he had to pick up something he called a “girlfriend” in Copenhagen, so he missed out on a live performance of Queens of the Stone Age’s highly enjoyable Go With the Flow in Rock Band and a chance to win one of 10 instrument bundles they gave away for free (alas, neither of us won anything).

Rock Band’s epicness pushed the next presentation a bit over time: Independence Day was a roundtable with notable industry figures about the histories of their respective independent companies. The stories told were remarkably different with John Chasey’s Finblade being a smaller mobile game studio, Hilmar Pétursson’s CCP being probably the biggest studio in Scandinavia thanks to running EVE Online, and Tameem Antoniades’ Ninja Theory being an honest-to-god independent AAA game studio (apparently they do exist! The legends were true after all). The main lesson I took away from that talk was: Be prepared to go bankrupt once or twice and work for free for months at a time until you finish your first game.

Lunch on day two offered the only hint of fanboyism I allowed myself to exhibit at the conference, as I sat next to Rossignol while he seemed to be interviewing Hilmar Pétursson (presumably about EVE). I wouldn’t honestly call myself a fan of Jim Rossignol because it’s just plain weird to be a fan of a journalist, but I have read a lot of his writing for a while, and I always enjoy his words, so it was neat to see him in person.

After lunch, it turned out I was spending the whole day in Scania, the biggest hall, because the final talk of the conference, Disruptive Design, had been moved in there from the second largest hall, no doubt as a result of the realization that everybody was attending it. Another roundtable presenting four drastically different approaches to its subjects, first that of Harmonix with their disruptive strategy of designing games based on obscure or custom peripherals, then that of Team Silent’s more emotionally disruptive horror games followed by Ninja Theory’s incredibly disruptive experiences with changing a whole game based on the whims of a single big-name mo-cap actor, and finished off with the Team Ico’s fantastically artful games – again a more emotional approach to this elusive “disruptive design”.

Exfiltration

As the disruptive design session ended, we decided to ditch the Northern Lights roundtable on the topic of “What makes Nordic game developers unique in a competitive global games industry?” as we remember it from last year being quite the mutual backslapping session. Ruben went back to attend to that girlfriend of his and Rasmus and I caught the train back to Denmark, deftly beating the crowd. A very interesting trip with lots of new intellectual input. Overall it was Malmö and meeting Ruben that made the greatest impression though, as I felt the conference was slightly too focused on networking and recruiting this year, more than the presentations – not very useful for me, as I have an education to finish before I move to Iceland or something crazy like that.