The Decline of Interactivity in Gaming

The Decline of Interactivity in Gaming

By Brian J. Lancaster (January 2021)

Website: www.laughingcoyote.net

Eventually, when you are watching the protagonist of a blockbuster CGI romp like the Star Wars prequels, or any number of modern sci-fi "films", jump around on floating platforms in lava, you start wondering why the hell you are watching this movie and not playing a game.

The good thing about games is that you can play them. By their very definition, games should be interactive. The more interactive it is, the more of a game it is. This includes factors such as movement, dialogue, and actions. You should be allowed to shoot your friend in the face and continue along with the story.

The inventor of the Wasteland

This brings me to the decline of that sweet line of games developed by Interplay (and later Bioware) where you could attack or steal anything you want, and the story continues unbroken: Fallout 1 and 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Neverwinter Nights 1. Sure you may run yourself into a sandpit you can't get out of, but you had nobody to blame but yourself.

In Fallout 2, for example, you can join one of 3 mafia families in New Reno, or become a porn star and be completely shunned by the mafia. Or you could just never go to New Reno at all. I've always liked the idea of slowly learning who you can trust, and capping the backstabber before he backstabs you. Then you pat yourself on the back for not getting backstabbed.

After the glory days of Baldur's Gate, AAA studios began clamping down on what the player could do in order to increase texture size and make the games prettier. The first whiffs of that gaming serfdom came around the time of Knights of the Old Republic (2003) and Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006). That's when you could no longer kick in the door of a shop, shoot the shopkeeper in his face, and take everything your back could carry. In these newer, prettier games, that would break the story.

Freedom decreases as graphics increase, usually to an unnecessary extent. Cyberpunk 2077 is arond 70 GB. Most of that is taken up by textures and sound, as game developers know. Textures then have to be doubled, tripled, etc. to add normal maps so that every rock looks shiny and wet. They could have cut that game down to 25 gigs and I certainly would not have noticed a difference. I don't know about the rest of you. I turn my settings down to minimum anyway so my laptop doesn't melt.

Let's look at Mass Effect. The first one had massive maps, where you could drive a vehicle around a vast expanse of a moon and the main city was a massive single map. Compare that with the second one: everything slightly shinier, the maps half the size. Then in Mass Effect 3, everything was the size of my bathroom. It was also very shiny like my bathroom. I am hygienic as hell and apply normal maps to all the tiles in my poop space. But when I play a game, I don't want to be confined to my bathroom. I want to jump around on roofs and not be completely blocked from a hallway by an overturned office chair.

In Fallout 2, you could be both anti-choice AND anti-life. That's freedom.

What is my overall point? Download Brigand: Oaxaca. It's not shiny, but you can kill (almost) anyone you want.

Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/652410/Brigand_Oaxaca/

GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/brigand_gold

Itch Link: https://blancaster45.itch.io/