As I struggle to finish Yakuza 3 before all my free time is taken up by 50+ hour RPGs next week, my mind keeps taking me back to the kerfuffle surrounding The Order: 1886 and it’s release. I myself gave it a rather negative review and a few weeks later I still stand by it. The game is a total bore, rarely rising to mediocrity while it goes out of it’s way for us to pay painstaking attention to how expensive-looking their assets are. A recurring aspect of the game is picking up randomly place items and looking at them, nothing more, nothing less.
But mostly what I go back to is just how intriguing the game was and how it kept getting in its own way of being fun. The basic idea is that the Knights of the Round table are psuedo-immortal and can live for hundreds of years, all the while fighting mythical creatures like werewolves and vampires. What I, and I imagine a lot of others, was expecting was a game where you hunt down these mythical creatures in steampunk London. The agelessness of the characters allows you to fight these mythical creatures through any time period or age, Assassin’s Creed style. Technology could change, more contemporary creatures could make appearances as time went on, and locations could vary depending upon where the world powers lie. Potential was what I saw in the series, a saga of humans versus monsters shooting combat with top notch presentation.
After 1886, I don’t really want to see where else this series could go. Not only was most of the game fighting humans, but fighting monsters, the few there were, were some of the most dull parts of the game. The presentation was still top notch, but all that did was drill in the fact that the beautiful rendition of London I was seeing was essentially a set, a stage play. There wasn’t a London to explore, just a really expensive backdrop. This would be fine if the gameplay could back it up, but it couldn’t. Stock action sequences that Gears of War did better almost a decade earlier with nothing else of note to back it up. One game later and all the series still has is potential, only this time with a good helping of skepticism.
My opinion isn’t unique in this regard. The Order was met with heavy criticism, highlighting many of the things I just brought up. But one bit of that criticism I can’t find myself to agree with is the idea that The Order is not, in fact, a game. Or at the very least, The Order is not how games should be. I sympathize with the point that those critics are trying to make, but I can’ agree with that sentiment in full, or at least for the same reasons.
In recent years a large portion of games culture has decided that they have tired of the hand-holding and linear game design, which pigeonholes player’s through expensive looking sets that serve little purpose other than to look good and add some context to the action segments. These games tend to be easy and systems-light, using conventions more often associated with Hollywood to sell their ideas. Cinematic camera angles, cinematic scripts, cinematic “gameplay” (whatever that means), and “cinematic framerates” (this also is not a thing in gaming and is an incredibly stupid thing for both PR and critics to use) mixed with a similar blockbuster-esque advertising campaign, highlighting the games similarities to film. The ire gaming culture has thrown at this method of development is well-deserved, but their conclusions aren’t.
I agree that this form of game development is both rather limiting and most importantly not very conducive to the medium’s strength. Film’s strength lie in the motion picture, how it’s framed, how it’s moves, how it changes, how it looks, juxtaposition, etc. All of these things require a sturdy hand at the helm, a clear vision of the result and absolutely zero interference from the viewer, a static, fixed medium. Gaming is still quite unique in this regard, one that must not only rely on many of the visual elements borrowed from both paintings and film, but it must also account for the viewer being an active part in the experience. Film’s don’t work if the protagonist is standing on the right side of the screen while he should be on the left, but for video games this is standard.
But the common criticism that games like The Order aren’t games or shouldn’t be considered games is just silly. It is quite clearly a game. It requires input from the player in order for progress to continue, which is about all I require for something to be considered a “game” — and no, pressing “Play” on the DVD remote does not count — and should be about all anyone else requires for a “game”. I don’t want to get caught up on the definition, but The Order is a game. It’s just a bad one and for many of the reasons some would argue it isn’t a game.
The other half of this criticism comes in when people begin to discuss what should and should not be the ultimate goal of games. But before I get into that, I want to give an idea of the lens I use for purposes of criticism. As I grew up and became much more interested in the constructive elements of film and video games, I heard two different ideas of what makes good art. The first, which informed my opinion for a long time, felt that art should make a bigger statement on the world than what is immediately present in the text. Art should be about more than itself or have a greater message to impart on the world than immediate context it presents. The second, which I only began to consider more recently, is that good art is a creator setting out with an express purpose in mind and that person’s ability to make that purpose come to fruition. Essentially, how well and how close does the end result reflect the desire of the creator, taking limitations into account of course.
Like I said, these are two different interpretations of good art but I don’t believe they are irreconcilable. The first better encompasses some of the more timeless nature of art but fails to allow for things to be themselves, demanding more from some things that don’t deserve or need to be anything more. The second allows for that, but using only the second means things like The Order are good art, as I’m sure the creators were quite alright making their movie-inspired tripe. I also didn’t want to spend too much time taking about the definition of art, a futile discussion, but I wanted to express my personal outlook on the subject in hopes it may give light to some of my more poorly explained parts.
Lost somewhere in the previous paragraphs is the idea that games should have to be made a certain way. I find this incredibly limiting, narrow-minded, and pedantic, as I’m sure many of the proponents of this idea would feel better if they were called “interactive movies”. But to tie this in with my views on art, which admittedly are still juvenile and underdeveloped, should games be developed with one specific thing in mind: to serve the higher order of systems, the thing which separates the game from so many other, older mediums?
If I had to give a firm yes or no, I would err on the side of no. A game should require systems, but a game shouldn’t have to place the utmost priority on these systems in favor of other aspects. I do believe that the greatest games, the ones which will be remembered and revered as classics, will favor systems over all else — or at least blend all of its elements so expertly that this matter would be irrelevant anyways — but to make this necessary seems a limiting factor to creative design. Uncharted proved that games that borrow numerous elements from cinema can work, and well, all the while still feeling like a game at heart. Sony’s own upcoming Until Dawn looks to have even less gaming elements than The Order all the while looking far more entertaining at this point.
I suppose expectations will have to play a certain part in this as well. Until Dawn is choose-your-own adventure story that’s fully aware it will never sit among the likes of Tetris. The game really only asks the player to make minor inputs to make big decision that will play out for them, but I can see the game getting a much warmer reception than The Order as it promises nothing more.
But as for games like The Order, I feel as though there presence in the gaming world is both a good thing and a bad thing. Well, the bad thing is that the game is literally bad, but everything else about it can be brought up as a positive. It was an important reminder to big game companies that graphics aren’t everything, games need to be fun — or at least interesting — to play too. Games don’t need to be Hollywood, they can be their own thing. But we shouldn’t fault them for trying to be, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of a good game.
If it does, then by all means.