| | Call of Duty 2 and 3
I really don't understand why, but the CoD games are a big fan of infinitely spawning enemies as a means of forcing you to move on. These games are heavily scripted, so every move you make is setting off a trigger for some event to occur. At one point, i was at one end of a catwalk. There were many boxes, barrels, and assorted bits of junk to use as cover. At the other end of the catwalk are Nazis. They run out, take cover, and shoot at you. They always run out in groups of five from behind a tall stack of boxes. When you kill them, five more run out and take their place. You have a very small window of time in which to move forward to the next piece of cover before more enemies appear. Once you finally get to the other side, if you look behind the boxes where the Nazis ran out from you see that there's nothing there. No door, no alley, nothing from which one group of Nazis, much less many, could run out from. They just magically appear until you get far enough along on the catwalk to trigger the event that tells the game to stop spawning enemies.
With most games, there are a finite amount of enemies. If you kill them all in the area you're in, you can usually move forward to the next area without any problem. This seems pretty realistic to me. The only reason I can think of that the CoD games have for these infinitely spawning enemies is to force you to keep moving forward. It's almost like reverse psychology. As punishment for taking cover, sniping at enemies, and trying to kill them from a distance, they keep throwing enemies at you. Maybe they want you to feel the adrenaline of rushing into close range of enemies. I don't know, but it messes up the immersion factor. I want to feel like i'm a badass fighting my way through WWII, not playing a game, if that makes any sense.
Artificially Extending Game Length
I just got done playing a role playing game called Enchanted Arms. It's one of these Japanese anime type of games with a long, drawn out, convoluted storyline. You start out controlling just one character, then as the story progresses you pick up other people to join your party along the way. It takes around 50 hours to complete, which is pretty long compared to action or adventure games. The 50 hour number isn't even totally accurate. The game keeps track of your playtime, but if you have to load a previous game because you died, the game doesn't take into account the amount of time played until you die.
I enjoy long games, it makes me feel like i get my money's worth. However, i don't like it when you can tell that the developers are deliberately padding the game just to make it longer. In this game, there's a guy named Raigar who's a huge tank of a man with superhuman strength. At one point in the the game they showed him lifting a huge boulder out of a well. In the last fourth of the game, you leave a town, walk across a desert, and encounter a huge pile of junk blocking your way. Instead of having Raigar clear a path (which he could have easily done) you're told to walk back the way you came, go back to the town you were at, and find a CHILD who's supposedly good at clearing junk to clear a path. A child. Thankfully, once you find the child, the game transfers you back to the pile blocking your path instead of making you walk all the way back yet again.
There is a possible explanation for this. One of the basic gameplay mechanisms of a role playing game is the concept of leveling up. As you kill more creatures and do more things, you gain more experience and become more powerful as the game progresses. The level 2 rat that gave you such a problem at the beginning of the game isn't even worth looking at when you've reached level 50. Making you walk across the desert a couple times makes you encounter several fights that help you gain experience. I would have preferred, however, that they added new content instead of making me trek back and forth across the same place. I'm sure there are money and time considerations for the developers, but still.
That's all i can think of for now, but i'm sure there will be others later. |
