An examination of what can we learn from this year's flatlined Highguard (and its unflattering comparison to the dazzlingly successful Deadlock).
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'Twas a rough year for titanic game failures.
You can gaze at such train wrecks almost infinitely (indeed, it seems that the voyeuristic armchair dissections of such things are an entire cottage industry on YouTube), but I'm not here to harp on business models and executive hubris and how anything less than quadruple D bosoms on your character models is a social Marxist plot to sap American testosterone reserves and make the frogs pursue alternative lifestyles.
That said, I am interested in how games* make us feel, and how the art of evoking feeling can make them better.
*And movies and books and paintings and essays about the satanic origins of white chocolate and small sculptures of googly-eyed dinosaurs with blunderbusses, etc. ad infinitum.
"Unreal Engine" is not a player fantasy (and "epic" is not an emotion)
One of the many games that went through the ringer this year was something called Highguard, which progressed all the way from massive launch to dead game and closed studio within a shockingly short time span.
I don't normally like to poop on the downtrodden (I prefer to defy gravity and poop upwards, onto my betters), but I do think that the game is an interesting example of something made, seemingly, without a player fantasy in either its characters or the world itself (and, to compound these matters, a complete lack of iconic anything.)
These problems are actually shockingly common across modern games. I see people jokingly refer to it as "The art direction is 'Unreal Engine.'" (For those of you who have never dipped your toes into the self devouring waters of game development, Unreal Engine is an increasingly popular third-party game engine geared towards 3D action games which developers can license in order to not have to create all of the foundational engineering that goes into making a playable three-dimensional environment. We're on the 5th edition at this point, and it comes with a ton of features baked in, down to lighting. This has resulted in many games all getting the same "Unreal Engine Look," because they're all using the exact same lighting, etc. straight out of the tube. After all, you paid for the thing, and it's already done. Only a madman would license this and then rebuild what they've already got. Is a unique product that does exactly what you want it to do with style and optimization that means that it can run at more than 15 frames a second on any computer that came out before yesterday really worth remaking good enough?!
Anyways! Highguard is just the latest and most tragic example.
Here's what the game looks like:
Let me ask you… What is the player fantasy here? What dream does this let me live out? Is this a world that I imagined when I was a child? Are these characters things I wanted to be?
By comparison, here's Valve's unfinished game, Deadlock:
This is something of an unfair comparison, seeing as Valve is a mercurial fey god with infinite money pouring in from its borderline monopolistic Steam Storefront marketplace, which is more or less where the entirety of the PC game market is bought and sold, and the developers of Highguard were a new studio (albeit one made of veterans) making a debut project.
(Valve also has a strange, semi-distributist company structure which allows for small teams of employees to launch an insane passion project if they want.)
HOWEVER! A lot of what's fundamentally different between these games comes down to decisions which have very little to do with the resources on hand.
Deadlock is made of icons and player fantasy.
The world of Deadlock has a clear player fantasy: be in a pulpy, cartoony 20th Century Spiritualism world of eldritch adventure and supernatural peril! It's Tim Burton's New York, and the secret world of Hellboy is fighting in the streets.
With this lens in place, everything in the game – every character, every weapon, every piece of user interface – is created to reinforce that. Does it make me feel like an over-the-top 19XXs supernatural demimonde denizen?
Each character in the roster is a new player fantasy within the larger established theme. What would players want to be in a 19XXs supernatural adventure world full of arcane forces secretly (or not so) battling for the fate of humanity?
Bad ass vampire hunting priest?
Elegant vampire lady?
Mutant lizard man with a gun?
Mountain man?
Gentlemen magician?
Etc., etc., etc.
The list practically writes itself.
The entire roster offers new, individual player fantasies that all feed into the larger player fantasy of the world.
Then, each of these characters is built in classic minimalist style:
Know the essential nature of your character.
Communicate that essential nature with a handful of iconic elements.
Have no competing details.
As I like to say, the icons are made of icons.
At a glance, you know exactly what is being promised. (Or what terrible foe you are facing off against.)
Even the world is assembled like this: Streetlamps, crates, cathedral windows – every element that forms the environment is boiled down to the minimum necessary to communicate its essential nature.
(Remember: An icon is a window. The pure idea is on the other side. Don't smear stuff on the glass and block the view.)
You don't need money to do any of this. In order to have a great, thematic player fantasy that guides the vision of everything else in your game, all you have to do is, well, think about it.
And then stick to it with every single asset you create.
Heck, just listen to Deadlock's music for a second.
Now that we've finished polishing the shoes of our betters, let's go back to pooping on the little guy.
Here's Highguard again:
Let me ask – what is the player fantasy of this world? What dream am I getting to live out? What do these characters let me be? What is the minimum amount of design required to trigger the idea "weapon crate"?
If I squint and rack my brains, the world appears to be some kind of swords and armor + space guns + magic + fantastical beasts + sci-fi machines Science-Fantasy affair, maybe?
I'm not sure. I, for one, know exactly what that's supposed to look like:
(It is my firm belief that all games could be improved by the addition of Brian-Blessed-with-wings as a playable character.)
Highguard's world does not feel like it was created with any thematic lens in place. It mostly feels like it was made by gluing disparate assets together. Here's an assault rifle! Here's a magical horse! Here's chrome hockey pads!
The characters are similarly unguided.
What does this guy let me be? What childhood dream do I get to live out when I choose to play as him?
Like the world, he seems to be a collection of disparate assets glued together and called done when there wasn't room for anymore.
(More than anything else, the characters remind me of the generic pretend game art that graphics cards would put on their boxes – characters that weren't actually from anything specific and existed only to show off that this graphics card could render cool stuff (TM) that kinda felt like a game, maybe, but, you know, nothing too definite. ...Or maybe it's just that they also tended to favor spicy redheads and generic chrome props.)
ANYWAYS!
I've never worked in Unreal Engine myself, but looking at the number of characters who appear to be a default human model with doohickeys glued onto them that populate games made with it, I suspect that this approach is a default thing that the engine's tools lean towards.
When you don't actively try to be anything else, a world made of clashing, disparate elements glued together, full of characters who are exactly the same, is what you get by default.
EVEN IF IT'S ACTUALLY MORE WORK.
Indie-developed Highguard is far more graphically complex than monolithic Valve-backed Deadlock.
While I am not in the trenches at either studio, I have difficulty imagining that it is more time-consuming to make this:
Than it is to make this:
Hey there! It's me, your old pal unnecessary geometry. I know that I'm more work to do, but get this: I also make the game harder to run and more difficult to understand while playing!
Incidentally, this unfocused, generic SOMETHING-GOES-HERE-THIS-IS-SOMETHING-JOB-DONE direction comes through even in the nonvisual assets. Here's Highguard's music:
Other than "off-brand Hans Zimmer is feeling epic today," what emotion is this thing communicating?
It's all very well technically implemented, it just has no flavor. That's what happens when you have no identity, when you take talented people and don't tell them anything other than "make it good": you get technically well executed forgettable generica.
Generic is the gravity which pulls at all collaborative creative endeavor. It's where you will end up if you don't actively try to go anywhere else.
Meanwhile, Deadlock won't even let you select a character without immersing you in high-octane player fantasy fuel:
So what can we learn from this?
It doesn't feel good to compare a vision-less unsuccessful game to a super-stylish smash hit that's still only in early access (or rather, it feels good in the wrong ways.)
Mocking something in an unfavorable comparison is the kind of schadenfreude that powers too much of the Internet. Eventually, I find that I can't even talk about how much I love something that's fantastic without pulling out a punching bag to stack against it and laugh at.
So, let's toss away our sneering Online Critic (TM) hats and don something far more frightening:
The dunce cap of Indie Developer.
How can we take the lessons that we've just seen so highlighted by these two projects and apply them TO OUR OWN WORK?
I don't have Unreal Engine 5.
I do have Game Maker Studio, passable pixel art programs, and the ADHD siren draw of taking a quick break from Wake Up, Dead Kosmonaut to work on another project.
I've always liked multiplayer party games – there's just something delightful about having some friends over, tossing everyone a controller, and piling onto the couch to communally blow stuff up.
I'm not gonna try to make anything three-dimensional, so we're going to start by applying some minimalism to the game itself:
What's the minimum that I can do to make a multiplayer game with selectable characters?
A simple, two-dimensional, top-down-ish wave defense game is pretty darn straightforward:
Little pixel enemies spawn from the edges of the screen.
They want to destroy some central structure.
The players run around as little pixel heroes blasting them with little pixel bullets.
I know that I can whip up all of that stuff up in only 20x the time that I think it will!
So, what's the player fantasy of this world?
Well, right off the bat, that sounds like a great "A group of random people are trapped in a place and have to hold off waves of monsters for X amount of time."
We could do a classic zombie movie set up and put everybody in a mall or something. Heck, we could even slather some retro nostalgia bait on there and make it an 80s mall with a bunch of synthwave stereotypes. Jock! Skater chick! Rich girl mall rat! Nerd!
On the other hand, that's so boring that it makes me want to swallow my own tongue and die.
So, what's a player fantasy that I actually care about and think that my players would actually enjoy/wouldn't look like a pixel regurgitation of everything that I was already sick of in 2011?
Is there anything that's more flavorful while still providing a clear vision?
How about…
A small village holds off the supernatural minions of a vampire over the course of three nights?
It's not like vampires are some stunning novelty. Heck, I think Luc Besson* just made a movie.
*(Of Fifth Element, District B-13, and marrying his teenage leading ladies fame.)
[Pooping upwards, accomplished.]
I mean, we know what this game looks like: either it's katanas and trench coats and Wesley Snipes, or Victorian gentlemen and revolvers and maybe – if we're feeling really spicy – a wandering cowboy. Or, because this is a videogame, Castlevania.
But what about…
Remembering where all of this came from?
A small 18th-century Balkan* village holds off the supernatural minions of a vampire over the course of three nights?
*Don't worry, it will all take place in the safely fictional country of Estovapikania so as to not spark any pedantic lectures on historical accuracy and/or fratricidal brawling amongst my Balkan friends. We can steal to our hearts' content from the entire region (and toss in whatever stuff we want from neighboring regions!) Also, "Estovapikania" is an inside joke with a friend of mine whose Tourette's syndrome once hit him with a tic that involved screaming the word "Spaghetti!" repeatedly in an accent that I can only describe as "Count Dracula gargling thumbtacks." When I asked him where the accent came from, Tourette's kindly gave me an entire linguistic history of Estovapikania, and it has been seared into my imagination ever since. (In Estovapikanian, "Moscow" means "little fancy pig," in case you were wondering.)
ANYWAYS!
We have a massively underutilized flavor (which I happen to be already semi-familiar with). The slight change in time period (Napoleonic over Victorian) and location (the place where vampires actually came from) gives us a much more unique edge which is still entirely appropriate for the theme.
Plus! This lens gives us FANTASTIC player fantasies for characters:
Be a dashing cavalry officer!
Be a priest that isn't Catholic and therefore looks wild and interesting and exotic*!
Be a tortured poet wasting away from tortured-poet-ness!
Be a flouncy-shirted dandy!
Be a wandering Cossack!
Be a babushka with a blunderbuss!
Be a traveling Romani circus acrobat!
Be a balalaika-brandishing folk minstrel who's definitely not just Eugene Hutz from Gogol Bordello!
Be a maniac orphan with an ax!
Be a stronk like bull sailor!
Be a fur-hatted wolf hunter!
Be an even-bigger-fur-hatted shepherdess with a giant mastiff!
Be a feral child riding a bear!
Etc. etc. etc.
*Unless you happen to be attending a Greek, Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian, Lebanese, Moldovan, literally-anywhere-east-of-Italy-ian Orthodox church, in which case it will just be hilarious.
All of these things are fun player fantasies that feed into the larger player fantasy of the world. Also, I can draw them.
I mean, if this doesn't make you want to battle the forces of hell, you are dead inside.
Some vampires are about to get messed up.
Because I'm not starting with a default human model and gluing parts onto it, I can also make these characters wildly different sizes with different postures and different gaits to be more instantly recognizable in the middle of frenetic gameplay (another thing that you will note Deadlock is absolutely fantastic at). After all, a mincing dandy is going to move totally differently than a hulking wolf hunter or a skipping ax-crazy orphan.
And there you have it: for the low, low price of rambling about it instead of doing my laundry like I was supposed to, I have a striking player fantasy that focuses and guides everything about the project.
That's the great thing about player fantasy: it's free.
Well, except for the fact that I'm not going to have socks tomorrow.
The world is full of fantasies
P.S. This is just me grabbing from my personal knowledge and interests.
What about a Mexican Pueblo defending itself from chupacabras? Desperados, Luciadors, Federales, Friars, etc. etc. etc.
Or a coastal village in Cape Cod defending itself from waves of Fishmen? Whalers, lobster traps, oil skins, Queequeg, sea captains – the list goes on.
French foreign legionnaires holding out against mummies? Appalachian moonshiners vs. flying saucer men? MIT grad students vs. accidentally murderous robots? Asteroid belt space station diner patrons vs. Cthulhu in space? Cavemen vs. War of the Worlds Martians? Dino Riders vs. mutant bug swarm? New Zealand ranchers vs. zombie sheep? A philosophy department in Texas attempting to teach Plato vs. the state government?
Heck, why not trot out that good old Science Fantasy? Just, you know, dial it in to an actual specific fantasy rather than just magic + assault rifles. (I, for one, would love to see a Seekers of Truth and Penitence guildhouse defending itself from the forces beneath the river Gyoll.)
Everywhere you look, the world is full of untapped player fantasies. It seems a terrible shame to go into the dangerous world of game development without one.
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