Go to Part 1

Most of the problems in Infamous are the result of its sandbox, but there are a couple of key problems with the main storyline as well, so let’s talk about those.

First, by its very nature, Infamous wants to give you meaningful choice: Do you want to be a supervillain or a superhero? But it runs into a problem because it also has a story to tell, goddamit.

The difficulty here is pretty easy to sum up: Content is expensive. If the game actually diverged every time it gave you a choice, the amount of content required would increase exponentially (and so would the production budget). So, instead, the game gives you the illusion of choice: No matter what you do, the ultimate result on a macro-level is the same and the next stop on the plot’s railroad remains unaltered.

Which is fine.

What you can do, though, is specifically color the events of the plot to suit the type of character the player is choosing to play. This is tricky, but it can be done. Infamous even takes a stab at it: Every so often the gameplay is shunted into a short semi-animated sequence that moves the plot forward. Some of these semi-animated sequences are swapped out depending on whether you’re a superhero or a supervillain.

The problem with Infamous is that the writers just don’t seem to have had their hearts behind the supervillain plot: No matter how villainous the character becomes, the game just can’t seem to shake the underlying themes of savior and redemption.

Fix #1: Develop a meaningful theme and arc for the supervillain side of the story. Most of the necessary pieces are tantalizingly within reach: They just need to be realized.

For example, here’s the end of the game:

Notice the complete disconnect between the end of the semi-animated sequence and the “evil epilogue”? How can you go from “when the time comes, I’ll be ready” to saying “only an idiot thinks I’m going to bother doing that”?

The fix here is simple: The narrative needs to explicitly embrace at every level the irony that Kessler’s efforts to indoctrinate Cole have had exactly the opposite result; that the unspeakable and almost incomprehensible sacrifices he made were all for naught.

More radically, it would be nice if not all of our choices were completely meaningless. (It would certainly improve the replay value of the game: After discovering how completely illusionary the choices in the game were, I didn’t bother going back to finish a replay.)

For example, you can watch the death of Trish in both the good version and the evil version. The different outcomes in this case depend on your morality rating within the game and suffers from the same incoherence as the end of the game: The fact that Trish, in her dying moments, chose to scorn you or to love you should have some sort of lasting impact on how Cole thinks of her. But it doesn’t.

In addition, the death of Trish is couched in a false decision: You can try to save her (evil choice) or you can try to save several innocent hostages (good choice). But, ultimately, the decision is meaningless: Trish is killed either way and the “decision”, like so many others in the game, is ultimately trivial and meaningless. (The game doesn’t even do a good job of giving a distinct framing to each choice.)

Supporting these variations in the death of Trish would be significant because this is a key moment in the game and its impact would be felt in many other places. But precisely because it’s a key moment in the game, a little extra depth here would go a long way towards enriching the entire experience. (And the differences, although pervasive, are cheap: A little extra time recording dialogue and a couple extra yes-no switches in the code.)

Similar changes at other moments in the game would be more isolated than the Trish divergence, and thus easier to implement.

(Tangentially: If you ever have the opportunity to write a video game, please avoid the temptation to include “you have succeeded at goal X in the gameplay, but now we’ll go to a cut-scene and reveal it was all a failure after all”. The discordant gut-punch is not effective. It is merely annoying. Particularly if you follow the example of Infamous and do it over and over and over again.)

After a procrastination of nearly epic proportions, I finally subscribed to GameFly last week. The GameFly queue system is not nearly as elegant as Netflix (since it seems to basically amount to a crap-shoot no matter what priority you actually give the games in your queue), but the result was that Infamous materialized in my mailbox a couple of days ago.

Infamous is a sandbox game of superpowers in which you have the choice to either be a superhero or a supervillain. My initial impression could be summed up as something along the lines of Grand Theft Auto + Knights of the Old Republic + Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. (The inclusion of two Star Wars games might seem excessive: But The Force Unleashed didn’t have KOTOR’s elegant light-vs-dark story arcs, while KOTOR didn’t have The Force Unleashed’s Force lightning powers.)

Where Infamous succeeds is the basic gameplay: Parkour-inspired climbing and leaping combined with an effective and interesting mix of electrical superpowers. Where it fails is the writing, which eventually turns the interesting gameplay into a mind-numbingly endless repetition of “been there, done that”. (In a fit of dark irony, the game even has an achievement trophy called “Oh, So You’ve Done This Before”.)

What I find particularly notable about these failures is the ultimately trivial amount of effort it would have taken to vastly improve the quality of the game: Hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of dollars were spent to make this game a reality, but it would have taken only a few hours from a dedicated writer and a fraction of a percentage of that budget to take a disposable trifle and raise it to the level of the sublime.

Which is what prompted this Rewrite essay. It’s obviously not going to do all the work, but it is going to sketch out the handful of simple fixes that Infamous practically cries out for. (Be warned: There will be SPOILERS.)

FAULT 1: THE SANDBOX

The primary shortcoming in Infamous lies in the design of its sandbox. Like most modern sandboxing games, Infamous draws its basic structure from the tradition of Grand Theft Auto 3. And like most modern sandboxing games, Infamous fails to learn some important lessons from Grand Theft Auto 3 (while also failing to capitalize on the opportunity to improve the format in key ways).

To simplify things, there are four types of content in Grand Theft Auto 3:

(1) The main storyline. (A sequential series of missions designed to be completed one after the other while telling the story of the game.)

(2) Designed side-quests. (Specifically designed mini-missions or mini-quest lines that the player could choose to either play or ignore.)

(3) Procedurally generated missions. (Missions created on-demand by the game engine and, thus, creating a bottom-less supply of semi-variable gameplay. Examples include the taxi- and ambulance-driving missions.)

(4) Self-guided play. (Because the game world responded dynamically to player activity, the player could engage in rewarding self-guided play by, basically, seeing “what happens when I do this”. Grand Theft Auto 3 didn’t have much in the way of dynamic world response, but even something as simple as “police chase you if your wanted rating is high enough” resulted in an endless variety of entertaining car chases.)

The first flaw in the Infamous sandbox is the limited nature of the self-guided play: In general, this play is limited to “there are bad guys roaming the streets, fight them” — basically the random encounters of an old school Final Fantasy game. (Surprisingly, despite the parkour-style climbing, there is little or no attention given to providing massive climbing vistas like those to be found in Assassin’s Creed.) Even worse, the primary sub-quests are designed to make city neighborhoods “safe” so that enemies no longer appear — which means that you’re literally removing content from the game as you play the game.

The second flaw is the complete lack of procedurally-generated missions. This significantly impacts the long-term value of the game. I remember playing Grand Theft Auto 3 for years after “finishing” the game because there was always something interesting to do in Liberty City. By the time I finished Infamous, on the other hand, there was literally nothing left to do.

The most significant flaw, however, is that the designed side-quests are written as if they were procedurally-generated: They are repetitive, forgettable fluff.

Grand Theft Auto 3, on the other hand, used its side-quests to develop either plot or landmarks. The former is self-explanatory: The side-quests were interesting little one act plays standing in contrast or support to the full-length drama of the main storyline. The latter is about providing context for the city: You came to recognize Vinnie’s pizza because that’s where you delivered Leo’s drugs (or whatever, it’s been awhile since I actually played Grand Theft Auto 3). The side-quests helped to bring Liberty City to life. They filled the empty, gray building polygons with life and meaning and identity.

The side-quests of Infamous, on the other hand, have no story or life to them: An anonymous guy asks you to kill 10 bad guys. Or blow up a bus. Or kill 10 bad guys. Or kill 10 bad guys. Or kill 10 bad guys. (Did I mention they’re repetitive?)

If these were actually procedurally-generated content (as they so easily could have been), it wouldn’t be a problem. I understand the limitations of procedural content: You take a half-dozen elements, mix ’em up randomly, and that’s what you’ve got. It’s not going to fool you into thinking that an intelligent mind was authoring it.

But this isn’t procedural content: Every one of these missions has been hand-crafted and hand-placed to fill a specific and non-substitutable place in the game. But if you’re designing this content individually, why not take the effort (and the opportunity) to make it individual? And meaningful?

THE REWRITES

In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip Heath encourages people to copy success instead of trying to solve problems.

In the case of Infamous, what they got right were the Dead Drop missions.

To summarize: In these missions, you hunt down satellite dishes hidden around the city. These satellite dishes were used to make dead drops by an intelligence agent, and by accessing the dishes you’re able to recover the audio logs from his investigations into the strange events plaguing Empire City. These logs, of course, reveal a prequel-like storyline over time. (Although the game allows for a non-linear collection of the satellite dishes, the information is recovered linearly. Of course, one could also take advantage of the mechanic to do truly non-linear storytelling.)

If the Dead Drop missions had been constructed like the other side-quests in the game, the complexity of their programming would not have been noticeably affected: The player would still hunt down the satellite dishes and then push a button to access them. But rather than getting a snippet of story information, the player would just receive a tally of the number of dishes they had found.

The storytelling content that makes the Dead Drop missions work, on the other hand, is almost trivial: Less than a half dozen pages of script and probably a half hour of recording time with a voice actor.

So let’s take a moment and consider how the other mission types might have been made to succeed like the Dead Drop missions.

HIDDEN PACKAGES: Using his electrical powers, Cole is able to “hack” the brain of the recently deceased to see their last memories. At various points in the game, he’s able to use this ability on his enemies, revealing the location of hidden packages they’ve secreted around the city.

In the actual game, these packages are nothing — meaningless fluff to be checked off a quest list. But how much more evocative would it have been if there was actually something worth hiding? Perhaps something that had been split up between the various packages?

The possibilites are almost endless: The schematics for the ray sphere. Records from Kessler’s surveillance of Cole. Evidence pointing to a rebel faction within the First Sons.

TRACKING THE DEAD: Similarly, Cole is able to track the ghost-like ethereal “imprints” of a person’s recent movements. (Intriguingly, this ability is always used on murderers — suggesting perhaps that the violence of their action is responsible for leaving a stronger imprint on the world around them.) This is an evocative and interesting mechanic, but it would have been nice to see some of these end with revelations more interesting than, “That’s the guy who killed Senor Red Shirt! Vengeance!”

If nothing else, having the trails lead somewhere other than “a nondescript alley with a bunch of bad guys in it” would have helped. But it wouldn’t take much effort to explain why some of these people were being particularly targeted by the bad guys.

SURVEILLANCE DEVICES: The bad guys have covered various buildings in town with dozens of surveillance devices. It’s your job to climb the building and blow up the surveillance devices.

Oddly, the game never explains why the bad guys are interested in so heavily surveilling these particular buildings. Change “blowing up” to “hacking” and you (a) effortlessly add a new power for Cole and (b) provide an easy mechanism for revealing the reason for the surveillance.

PRISONER ESCORTS: The police periodically ask us to apprehend various bad guys for “questioning”. In other cases, the bad guys have already been caught and it’s our job to escort them to the nearest police station.

Spicing this one up is pretty easy: Have the cops actually report back what they find out from this questioning. This could foreshadow various developments, point us towards new surveillance missions, and so forth.

PROCEDURAL CONTENT: This suggestion moves somewhat beyond the intended scope of this essay (since they require more than a simple rewrite within the existing strictures of the game), but it would be nice if Infamous contained some legitimate procedural content.

For example, the picture-taking missions would be perfect for procedural generation. Triage missions using our healing abilities at medical centers seems like a no-brainer. A stalker fan that pops up to ask our hero for photographs or kisses or the like (or, for the evil-siders, a would-be assassin who periodically sends robotic drones after us). “Walk me home” protection missions (or muggings for the evil-siders). Bad guys blocking roads or railroad tracks. Bomb threats that need to be defused.

THE CORE CONCEPT

The mistake made in games like Infamous and Assassin’s Creed is thinking that storytelling only needs to happen in the main storyline. I would argue that the design principle behind these GTA-like sandboxes needs to be different: Any time you’re hand-designing content (instead of procedurally generating it), that’s an opportunity to tell part of your story. And you should take it.

In general, side-quests offer you the opportunity to create storylines in addition to your primary storyline. (The successful Dead Drop missions in Infamous do this to great effect.) Some of these storylines may be short (a single quest); others may be long (dozens of missions); others will fall somewhere inbetween (three or four linked sub-quests). But the ways in which these storylines will weave together is an exercise left to the player and your game will be the richer for enabling that level of intrinsic collaboration in the creation of its narrative. The result is a unique gameplay arising out of a complex system, but the actual execution of that system is very, very simple.

Continued Tomorrow…

For the past couple of months I’ve been working as an assistant director on Transdimensional Couriers Union, a new play written and directed by John Heimbuch for Walking Shadow Theater Company. It’s a pretty amazing script that tackles time travel head-on and emerges with something smart, savvy, and perhaps even a little transcendental.

I’ve always wanted to see a true science fiction story given proper justice in the theater. What I’ve found instead are a lot of disappointingly cliche-ridden, illogical, and genre-stupid plays. Transdimensional Couriers Union finally delivers exactly what I’ve been looking for.

But I really shouldn’t be damning it with such faint praise: Screw the comparisons to mediocre theater. I think Transdimensional Couriers Union can be placed side-by-side with Vernor Vinge and Charles Stross and Iain Banks. The script is that good.

Basically, I think you should check it out:

May 7th – May 29th

People’s Center Theatre
425 20th Ave S. Minneapolis, MN 55454 (map)
At the NE corner of Riverside & 20th Avenue, 3rd floor

Post-Show Discussions on May 13, 22, and 27
Pay What You Can performance on Monday, May 10
Audio Decribed performance on Saturday, May 15
ASL-Interpreted performance on Friday, May 21

Go to Part 1

The Bashfanal is one of the lesser cycles of orkish mythology. The story told above forms its core, and is known variously as “Fanal and His Brothers”, “The Fall of the House of Thrush”, or “The Second Birth of Fanal” (among others). The form and content of the cycle varies widely depending upon which orkish tribes are telling the story (based largely on where the stories began, whether they’ve survived, and how they’ve changed over time).

The telling of a tale from the Bashfanal may provide no more than a little local color to a GM’s campaign, but it is also possible to weave the tale of Fanal into the fabric of the campaign itself. The adventure seeds below assume that there is a fundamental truth to the story of Fanal as told above. As a result they will most likely work best in an epic Orkworld campaign, but are also easily adaptable to a realistic or cliché game.

Several of these seeds are incompatible with one another, but many of them can easily work in combination – leading to the possible use of Fanal’s story as a continuing theme and element of the campaign.

GMs are also encouraged to remember that, like the Orkworld game itself, the tale of Fanal – and its off-shoots – can easily be adapted to a variety of other fantasy settings.

THE SWORD OF FANAL

One version of the Bashfanal tells of Fanal’s last journey, which took him deep into the cold lands of the north. There he faced Galathvarl – a foul abomination spawned in the sorcerous joining of elven and orkish spirits.

Abandoned at birth by his elven creator, Galathvarl taught himself the ways of his sorcerous forefathers. Wishing to end the torment of his divided soul, Galathvarl had conceived a plan to summon forth Keethdowmga, the Great Mother of the Orks, and slay her — believing that in the moment of her death his own orkish spirit would be vanquished.

Whether his plan would have succeeded shall never be known, for Fanal was able to prevent the ritual’s completion – but only at the cost of his own life.

Galathvarl, for his own part, survived the mighty explosion which rocked the northern mountains – but only due to the perseverance of his elvish spirit. Through the many years which have passed, he has slowly nursed himself back to health from his nearly destroyed state. Now he is ready to repeat the ritual… but this time with the aid of Bashayla.

(GMs looking for a particularly simple way of incorporating the story of Fanal into their campaigns as a bit of local color could simply strip this idea down to its essential core: The PCs find Bashayla. Imbue it with whatever magical powers you feel appropriate to your campaign and characters.)

THE GRAY SPEAR

Upon the battlefield the Gray Spear was sundered in twain. Legend has it that while the orks retained one half of the spear the other half was stolen away by the elves. Fanal summoned a young ork by the name of Ghurdal to carry his half of the Gray Spear to a place of safety. When the Battle of the Triad came to an end, a search was called to find the other half of the legendary spear – but it had disappeared into the blackened lands of the elves.

Ghurdal carried his half of the Gray Spear to a secret complex of caves, far up in the mountains. He lives there to this day – his life sustained by the life preserving magics of the cave complex – guarding the Gray Spear against all trespassers.

Unfortunately, over the years between then and now, the magical energies unleashed by the sundering of the Gray Spear have slowly been building up in its broken halves. Recently these energies have reached a critical mass, and the mystical connection between the two halves is warping all of reality between the two.

The PCs must track down the two hidden halves of the Spear – one protected still by Ghurdal; the other hidden away inside an elven citadel – and reunite them, or the world of Ghurtha itself may be torn apart.

(A possible complication for risk-taking GMs: Galathvarl could, again, rear his abominable head in this scenario – seeking the two halves of the Gray Spear in order to power his foul experiments.)

THE TRIAD’S REVENGE

Not all of the orks who fought in the Battle of the Triad perished on the battlefield. Those who survived, however, carried with them a lasting curse – and this curse was carried down from one generation to the next… right to one of the PCs. It is said that the only way to rid an ork plagued by the curse is to wash in the blood of Fanal.

THE SPIRIT OF ATHVALSAI

Death has never been an effective barrier when there’s a good story to be told – thus it has been, thus it shall always be. When Athvalsai’s body fell during the Third Battle of the Triad, his spirit was not similarly broken. To this day it haunts the field on which it fell. Recently, however, the spirit seems to have disappeared. Although orks have cautiously moved back into the area, their actions may be more than premature – in truth, Athvalsai is gathering strength (or has gathered strength) in order to possess another host body.

THE RETURN OF FANAL: A TIME OF TROUBLE

When his adventuring days were done it is said that Fanal did not die, but instead crossed bodily into the world of the Otherside. One version of the tale tells how Fanal, with the help of Pugg, tricked Gorlam into letting him pass into the Otherside. Another claims that Fanal had to sacrifice the blade of Bashayla to Gorlam in order to pass (and that the sword resides until this day within the Great Toad’s belly).

Whatever the case, there he waits: Living among the gods and the spirits of the dead, awaiting the day of his Return – when he will save his people from a dire crisis which will threaten all their lives.

(Using this scenario, the return of Fanal should almost certainly be treated as the culmination of a grand campaign: The orkish people are threatened with destruction, and only by securing the return of Fanal will the PCs be able to save their race. It should almost go without saying that such a story could easily include the defeat of Gorlam himself. )

THE RETURN OF FANAL: A SPIRIT TRAPPED IN CRYSTAL

Not all versions of the Bashfanal claim that Fanal passed to the Otherside. Some say that Fanal fell in an act of sacrifice (the stories vary as to whether this was to great purpose or merely a small, but characteristic, act of selflessness). Of these stories, some fraction also claim that Fanal’s spirit was unwilling – or unable – to journey to the Otherside, and instead remained here on the Wakingside.

In this scenario, the PCs discover the dark truth of these latter tales: At the moment of Fanal’s death, his spirit was trapped in a blood red crystal through the foul sorceries of an evil elf. For centuries the orkish hero was forced to serve this dark master, until finally the elven lord was killed during a political machination. The crystal containing Fanal’s spirit was lost, but now it has been recovered by the PCs. In order to free Fanal from his prison, however, the PCs discover that they must secure an artifact created by the dead elven sorceror – and the only way to accomplish that is to venture into the Elven Desert and locate his forgotten citadel.

THE RETURN OF FANAL: A HAUNTED SPIRIT

Recently, forced onto ever-worsening land by the encroachment of man, a lesser household has set up their Winter Home in poor, barren territory which has never been inhabited by any humanoid race in memory. Unfortunately, this new Winter Home seems to be plagued by various forms of poltergeist and spirit activity. Upon some investigation the PCs discover that the troubles are being caused, as a way of attracting attention, by the wandering spirit of Fanal.

It turns out that Fanal was killed in battle before he could return the sword Bashayla to the cave from whence it came – as a result, his spirit has been forced to wander the world. This, of course, is where the PCs enter the picture: They must obtain the sword and return it to its rightful place.

THE BATTLE OF THE TRIAD

In a radically different vein, you might consider of the possibility of setting the campaign in the same time period as the stories of Fanal. In this scenario, the PCs are contemporaries of the Swordbearer and are present during the Battle of the Triad. A number of possible adventure structures suggest themselves within this broad outline:

1.     One of the PCs might take Fanal’s place in “history”, living out the events described above and triggering an entire campaign based upon the structure of the Bashfanal.

2.     Perhaps the PCs accompany Fanal during the Sword Quest to find Bashayla – going down in history as Fanal’s loyal companions and closest friends. This, too, could be used as a triggering event which allows them to accompany Fanal throughout the rest of his adventures.

3.     Another option is to simply use the Battle of the Triad as a backdrop to some other story: The PCs become involved with the battle through events totally unconnected to Fanal (although the deeper events surrounding the battle may have an impact at some later point in the campaign – for example if they encounter Fanal during his wanderings (see below)).

FANAL THE WANDERER

Another possibility in a campaign set contemporary to Fanal’s life is to have the PCs encounter the hero during the later part of his career – when he was a wandering hero among the orkish people. This encounter can be handled in a number of ways.

Go to Part 1

Fanal the Swordbearer
Son of Bama, of the Tribe of the Thrush in the Household of Tildahn

Trouble: 6
Zhoosha: 8
Wounds: 12

Courage: Legendary 2
Darkness: 2
Battle Sense (Navigating Battlefield): 3

Cunning: 4
Make Fire: 1
True Sight (See Invisible/Illusion): 3
Sense of Direction: 3

Endurance: 4
Stay Awake:

Prowess: Legendary 6
Sword: 5
Spear & Shield: 3
Dodge: 4

Strength: Legendary 2
Carry: 2
Endurance (Resist Damage): 4

Continued tomorrow…