After letting it languish on my hard drive for several months, I finally
uninstalled Arx Fatalis today. I'd made it (I think) about half-way through the
game before losing interest and never getting back to it, which was
disappointing. One of my all-time favorite computer games is Ultima Underworld,
which the Arx designers said in interviews they were trying to emulate.
Unfortunately, while they borrowed much of the interface logic and much of the
basic plot of Underworld, somewhere along the line it lost whatever it was that
made Underworld such an awesome game.
I think one of the biggest problems with these kinds of games today is that
they end up focusing on trying to give the player a detailed world rather
than an enjoyable story. Comparing Arx and Underworld, the former has a
much more detailed world, both in terms of backstory and in terms of physical
reality. Whereas the Stygian Abyss in Underworld was nothing more than a crude
approximation of a real space - I think the dwarf "city" was just one big room
with a couple of dwarves in it - the city of Arx has architecture, a castle,
denizens who have jobs, etc. But the designers get so caught up in creating
someplace "real" that they start to forget about what makes a game actually
fun. (There are also some really practical problems with creating spaces
that approximate the real world, namely that you end up spending a lot of really
uninteresting time backtracking through areas that you've already visited to get
to somewhere else. If I want to do that, I can go take a hike in the real
world.)
This same problem also really ruined another game I should have loved, Deus
Ex. After all, it was created by the same guy who oversaw my hands-down favorite
game ever, System Shock. As a side plug, if you've never played System Shock, I
highly recommend tracking down a CD of it in a remainder bin somewhere and doing
whatever you have to do to your computer to get it run. It was the most amazing
game I've ever played, not the least of which because I really felt like I was
there on Citadel Station. Even now, I can recall a tactile sense of the
layout of the station and some of the more important locations. And all this
with a graphics engine that would be laughable today.
When I first heard about Deux Ex, I was very excited although I was worried
by the interviews in which the team went on and on about how they adapted
real-world locations in loving detail for the game. Sure enough, the game does
render futuristic versions of real locations in great detail. The game starts in
New York City on Liberty Island, and when I was in New York recently I found
myself on a boat sailing past Liberty Island. I was idly staring at a dock on
the far side of island when I suddenly had a shock of recognition - I'd been
there! Well, not really, I'd just been there in the game, but the game had been
accurate enough that I actually could recognize the layout of the island. But
even though the game was so "real" in this sense, from a game perspective, the
world was... well... empty. As accurate as they were, all the real world
locations in Deus Ex felt like disconnected set pieces. This was compounded by
the fact that I ended up not giving a damn about the character I was playing. I
mean, the guy's brother is being offed by an evil group bent on world
domination, and all I'm thinking is "Damn, couldn't they get a better voice
actor for this gig?" Contrast that with, say, Max Payne, which had exactly the
same kind of New York set pieces and the same over-the-top mythical pretensions
(while Deus Ex steals from Christianity, Max Payne steals heavily from Norse
mythology). Even though the places in Max Payne were less realistic than those
in Deux Ex, it kept my attention throughout the entire game. And whereas I
uninstalled Deus Ex halfway through, I had a great time with Max Payne through
the very last gun battle.
Ultimately, I think how "real" a game is has nothing to do with whether the
game is any good. The good games out there make me identify with the protagonist
or the story, just like a good movie, book or TV show. They feel more real in an
emotional sense... more human. Clichéd as he was, Max Payne was
much closer to a real person than the robotic J.C. Denton. And the "how the hell
do I get out of here?" plot of Underworld was much more accessible than the "I'm
a messenger from the gods from another plane sent to stop another god from blah,
blah, blah, blah" plot of Arx.
Now if someone would just rebuild System Shock and Underworld on top of the
latest Unreal engine, I'd be as happy as a clam...