After hitting a few rough spots in formulating my thesis, I’ve decided to try and frame the elements of level design that I am interested in via a few blog posts, beginning with this one.
Disclaimer: I haven’t played any of the games in the Uncharted series, but hope to soon.
About a month ago, I watched this trailer for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune 3. The level revolves around a pretty obvious central concept – the interior of a sinking ship. The game’s assets (an asset is just a piece of a digital “set” like a table, a chair, or in this case, MASSIVE, swinging chandeliers) are gorgeous and rich with visual influence from countless sources. The red carpeting, the water leaking into the ship, the insane waves, it’s like The Poseidon Adventure come to life, but instead of Ernest Borgnine you’re Indiana Jones.
The entire level exists on a tilting and pitching plane (the ship, duh) and the player’s path is situated firmly on a linear path. The Uncharted games are notorious for their impeccable art design and spot-on tone/ambiance. However, criticism focuses on the series’ poor game mechanics. Translation: It’s pretty to look at, but not really more than empty fun. Another consistent criticism of the game is its inherent “stick-to-the-rails” formula when it comes to player choice. Uncharted may look closer aesthetically to a Hollywood narrative and consistently treat its levels or spaces like gigantic set pieces, but it falls short when it comes to establishing a narrative in a manner that is anything beyond a typical action-adventure movie. Its levels are produced and refined to an extremely high visual standard, but overall, it seems that the levels only function as set-pieces and not as engaging, or to borrow from Michael Nitsche, “evocative narrative elements,” which are elements “that are implemented in the game world to assist in . . . comprehension . . . because they do not contain a story themselves but trigger important parts of the narrative process in the player. These elements, according to Nitsche, eventually add up and can assemble into what he deems “a form of narrative” (all above from Nitsche 2008, 3).
I’ve never played the game, and having only seen demos, walkthroughs, and read reviews, I can say with confidence that the games, (particularly the latest iteration) are visually sumptious and one can assume pretty technically impressive. However, something tells me that this series won’t ever be remembered quite as fondly and will be studied far less than another game that’s gotten a ton of buzz lately – Minecraft. Minecraft is a game that utilizes a unique visual style but one that is without flair and fluff, and as an independent beta version (which is a pre-release build of a game) it has sold 4 million units according to Markus Persson, the creator of the game. The game world is procedurally-generated (it is created “on-demand” and not by a human) and allows players to move various elements, like dirt, water, and wood, around on a grid-based 3D space. When these items are combined with specific tools (like shovels and pickaxes), they create different elements. There’s also hostile and non-hostile non-player characters (NPCs) that add conflict.
Persson explains in a blog post titled Terrain generation, Part 1 that the computer-generated worlds in Minecraft can’t be infinite per se, but vast – so vast that players would have to be pretty persistent to reach the point in a world where the game would get buggy from saving and recalling so much of the environment. I’m not familiar with the technical aspects of this, but it seems quite interesting as a way to see the “limits” of design on computers. I won’t explore Minecraft further here, but hope to in subsequent posts.
Related links:
Drake’s Reception: Uncharted 3 and video game criticism: How gaming culture informs gaming criticism” by Matt Singer
