Sliders

It's always a special time when there's a new Remedy game, especially for us here at Remap. But we usually take for granted that we're all going to say "and it kicks ass," even if we might have reservations about X, Y, and Z. It's been more complicated with Control Resonant.

Janet and Patrick talked extensively about the ways they bounced off the game on Remap Radio last week. Rob ended up in a similar place on the podcast this week, albeit for slightly different reasons.

Could it all have been fixed by an options menu?

That, among other things, is what Patrick and Rob explore this week.

Patrick: I am nearly clear of the avalanche of video games targeted directly at me. It’s on the horizon. I won’t be spared from other video games I’d like to play in the weeks to come—I’m looking at you Hellraiser and Valor Mortis—but soon enough, I’ll be in a place where I can go back to games that I’ve spent a little time on and make them games I spend a ton of time on.

The game I’m most interested in returning to is Control Resonant. We talked extensively about my time (and Janet’s time) with the game on Remap Radio last week, and by the time people read this, we’ll have an updated chat about the game where you’ve also spent more time with it.

What I’m writing to you about this week is inspired by Resonant but not about Resonant. 

Instead, it’s a question about what we do in an era of more options to customize a game experience, from the perspective of people who play games and people who are game critics.

One of the core criticisms of the game in that discussion was around damage output. You feel weak in the first act of Resonant, an issue compounded by a lack of variety in movement options and a lack of variety in combat options. Then, as you progress, the game gets incrementally harder, essentially stunting your climb on the power ladder. An entirely good faith response I’ve seen from people responding to our Resonant discussion was “hey, the game actually includes an option to increase your damage output, so why not just move that slider?”

My response was two-fold:

• As a critic, I believe it’s my job to engage with a work through whatever appears to be its intended experience. When I’m reporting back after playing a game like Resonant for eight hours, I want to report back with honest reactions to a baseline version of the game
• As a non-critic…well…is there ever a time I’m not playing a game as a critic?

I’m not even sure how to spell out the second one. When does my role as a critic end? Or is that a mistaken way to think of my job in the first place? If I’m following the courage of my convictions that there’s nothing wrong with playing games on easier modes or messing with sliders, that you should find the fun in a game however you like, shouldn’t I do the same thing?

And yet I’m torn. It seems entirely possible I would have a better time with Resonant if I started responding to my own criticism of its design and balance by altering the design and balance of the game. When I share impressions later, I can just share how I tweaked the game, right?

It still feels wrong somehow. That I should continue to spend my time playing Resonant the way Remedy shipped it, and if that experience changes, it’ll happen because Remedy ships a patch that changes how the baseline experience is designed. If that doesn’t happen, I go with god.

Do you see what I’m saying here? Do you feel any of that in your own work these days?

Rob: So in sports games, this has been a necessary part of the experience for almost as long as I can remember. I remember when I started out there was one blogger who released his Madden sliders every fall and sports fans just waited for those settings because it marked the "correct" starting calibration for the game. Now that was always a special case because there is a reasonably objective reality you can measure a football game against to see how well these settings reproduce realistic results independently of how well you can or cannot play it. But the example has always stuck with me: EA left a pretty hefty amount of handwaiving, "You'll figure out what you like" in their flagship franchise, and it's never been controversial.

There's a thing happening in automotive design right now where cars no longer have any inherent feel to them. Everything is mediated. Before power steering, a steering wheel felt and turned the way it did because of the geometry of the steering column and chassis architecture. The gas pedal literally controlled the release of gas into the motor to produce power. Brakes were connected via a cable to the actual brake calipers and wheels. How a car felt was reflective of hard physical realities.

Now everything is electronic. The tuning of your electronic power steering controls how the steering feels. Brakes and accelerators send commands to throttle and brake systems but they aren't directly connected. How they feel is a decision manufacturers make about tuning them. But even the manufacturers hedge: my car has an Eco, Comfort, Sport, and Sport Plus mode in addition to a custom profile. The car drives differently in all those modes and then I can cherry-pick settings for my custom profile.