Prince of Persia finally over; QTEs still boring and annoying; achievements depressing

I did quite like the way the Prince of Persia ending battle was performed through the eyes of the enormous boss. That was both a cool and effective way of conveying the menace of the creature you were fighting.

I also thought it was a spectacularly pretty game, and I loved the soundtrack.

Sadly, however, I didn’t finish the game with the sort of positive feelings towards it that characterised my response to the ending of Sands of Time. There was joy, yes, but only in the sense of relief that the frustrations were finally over.

Here’s me over the last couple of hours of play:

Yes, you’ve said that already.

And again!

Please, please stop saying the same stupid things over and over!

Take that! I pressed the “A” button!

Yes, well may you recoil at my ability to hit the “B” button when bluntly told to do so.

Oh no! My inability to hit “Y” within half a second of suddenly being ordered to do so has caused the villain’s health to entirely regenerate, thereby making the last five minutes entirely pointless!

Yeah! I sure can press “X” when told to!

Watch me press “A”!

Yes, Elika, well may you be impressed by how deftly I risked RSI to hit “X” really quickly.

God I hate quick time events.

Also – like GTA’s stupid “I hope you raced through this sandbox game and didn’t explore at all” time-based achievement, Prince of Persia has two achievements that punish you for enjoying your time in its world (if you were able to). One punishes you for using the Elika checkpoint system (instead of saving and reloading); the other punishes you for taking your time to collect light seeds.

I got both achievements, but only because I wanted it to be over and played as quickly as possible.

Developers: no more of these “here’s a reward for racing through the game” achievements, please. (Particularly ones that are worth more than finishing the game.)

And you know what I think about QTEs.

Putting black goo on the screen to stop players seeing what’s going on: FAIL

Here’s a helpful tip for game designers: say you’re designing a game, and it’s just occurred to you to have the monsters squirt ink or something similarly opaque at the player’s character, which you’ll represent on the screen by COVERING UP EVERYTHING WITH A MASS OF BLACK PIXELS. What should you do?

You should TAKE YOURSELF OUT THE BACK AND SAW YOUR PROGRAMMING FINGERS/WRITING HAND OFF WITH A RUSTY SAW. Then, just to make sure you can’t tell anyone else your unbelievably stupid idea – get someone to PULL YOUR TONGUE OUT WITH TWEEZERS. Also, do something to GET YOURSELF FIRED so you can’t infect anyone else at the company with your embarrassing idiocy.

Seriously, covering up the screen so the player can’t see what’s going on? Who the hell would think that was a good idea?

Prince of Persia designers: Yet another FAIL.

Innovation is nice – but only if it works

The publishers of Mirror’s Edge and the new Prince of Persia have been a little sooky lately over the poor critical reception to those games. “But we tried something different!” they cried. “Why can’t you appreciate that?” Penny Arcade was also mystified, describing the phenomenon as the doings of an “amoral universe”.

The thing is, I loved that both these games were trying new things, and bought them as a result of the promise of those innovations.

Unfortunately, I promptly regretted both purchases, because innovation alone is not enough to make a game enjoyable. It has to be executed properly, which was sadly not the case in either of those titles. Clearly neither had been properly playtested – by which I mean, not just given to testers to check for bugs, but watching testers to see what they were enjoying and what they weren’t. I can’t believe that any testers playing PoP’s interminable and boring QTE-filled boss fights were actually enjoying themselves, or that people were thrilled by being unable to pass a section of Mirror’s Edge because they were expected to tackle endlessly-spawning machine-gun wielding bad guys with a character that was not designed to fight. And without the assistance of adequate save points.

Playtesting needs to be at a sufficiently early stage that bad design decisions can be undone. That’s what Valve does. That’s what Blizzard does. If a bad game concept is locked in early, all the polishing in the world won’t fix it. It will still be unpleasant, and frustrating, and boring, and gamers will discourage their friends from making the same mistake they did in purchasing the title.

It’s like most publishers don’t check that things are working, and fun, until it’s much too late. They are unwilling to spend the time and money throwing sub-par material away, and just assume a large marketing budget will overcome the problems. Who cares if gamers actually enjoy their purchases? By the time they find out that the game’s not actually fun, we’ll already have their money…

As far as innovation goes, it’s a lovely thing. But only if you do it well. We know it’s difficult – but that’s why you need to be doubly careful with the early playtesting. Because you expect us to pay actual money for your experiment.

Prince of Persia killed by QTEs

I loved Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Engaging characters, challenging platforming (but which enabled you to quickly retry if you failed by rewinding the last few seconds) and a well-told, enjoyable, memorable story. (Particularly that ending.) I got a bit bogged down by the nasty changes they made to the sequel, Warrior Within, such that I never finished the thing, and have therefore also never tried The Two Thrones. One day.

In the meantime, we’ve got the new Prince of Persia, a gorgeous-looking game with a magnificent soundtrack, that borrows heavily from another game I loved to bits, Shadow of the Collosus. Only it fucks it up. It does this in two ways:

• Turning the entire game into bloody quick time events – both overt and concealed; and

• Turning the Prince into a complete git.

I’ll deal with the last point first, since it’s probably just a matter of taste. I know I’m not the only one who can’t stand the bland, “action hero by numbers” American Prince (for example) and maybe his failings are most acute just because Ubisoft HAD a great Prince and maybe it’s not fair to contrast the new guy with the ex, but it’s still jarring every time he opens his mouth. I’m embarrassed when someone walks past the 360 while he’s talking. The Prince is a stereotypical jock, and Elika is tarnished by the script’s demands that she overlook his gittishness and fall in love with him by the end of the game.

Anyway, the main problem I have with the new Prince is more fundamental than a bit of dodgy characterisation: it’s the gameplay. Not Elika’s constantly saving you from dying – that’s a great idea. Not as much fun as the quick-rewind system in SoT, but effectively the same thing. Those who complain that “you never die” must give up the moment they die in other games, because if they reload and try again then they’re not dying either. And it’s not as if Elika kindly pops you at the end of the long run-jump sequence – she unhelpfully puts you back at the beginning to try again. Which is fine for the short ones; somewhat irritating on the long ones. It certainly doesn’t make the game “easy” any more than any checkpoint system ever does.

No, the problem with the gameplay is that it’s basically made up of those awful, awful, immersion-killing, fun-destroying Quick Time Events. The overt ones immediately rankle – when you’re fighting a boss and the game demands you suddenly press “A” for no good reason, NOW, BECAUSE I SAID SO! And now you can hit “X” repeatedly until you break your controller or get RSI! FASTER! FASTER I SAID! They rankled in The Force Unleashed, they’ll rankle in the upcoming Aliens game. I don’t know when gamers will rise up and demand the end to these idiotic things, but I hope it’s soon. Game designers who keep inflicting QTEs on us will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

So that’s bad enough. But then you gradually realise that the entire game is made up of QTEs. You have no freedom in the running and jumping – you are essentially required to press ONE unique button at each visual cue and have no choice in the matter. A ring on a wall? PRESS B NOW OR GO BACK TO THE CHECKPOINT. A shiny glowing thing on a wall? PRESS Y NOW OR GO BACK TO THE CHECKPOINT. And so on. There’s a lag between when you press the buttons and when you jump – the game isn’t promptly enacting what you’ve tried to do and seeing if it worked, it’s determining whether you’ve pressed the arbitrary button in the period it wants you to and if you have, starting the correct animation to get to the next bit.

That’s not what platforming games are about.

The game also does some weird stuff with the controls – when you jump to a pillar and the direction that the prince will go when pressing a particular direction on the control pad suddenly reverses for no apparent reason.

But the most crippling thing is realising that you have no freedom at all. You’re in this lush, beautiful world and instead of exploring it and trying new things within it, you’re pressing the buttons you’re told to, at the time you’re told to, and being made to do it again if you don’t do as you’re told. I wanted to like it, I really did, but there’s nothing more than pretty scenery and inspiring music to really like.

It’s a damned shame.