Will you please com-plete me!
Never be enough
To fill me up
Never be enough
Never be enough
To fill me up
Never be enough
Never be enough
To fill me up
Never be enough
Never be enough
To fill me up
Never be enough
Never be enough
To fill me up
Never be enough
Never be enough
To fill me up
Never be enough
Never be enough
To fill me up
Never be enough
Never be enough
To fill me up"
Nine Inch Nails - Please
As this blog's history can attest I've got a bee in my bonnet * about the topic of music in computer games, so my recent playthrough of The Age of Decadence brought to mind an old quibble. Game designers, listen up: you need more than one music track. Ok, that's not fair. Literally speaking, AoD does have decent variety of music (apt to its setting but a bit bland) for its low-budget indie title status. Unfortunately, its insistence on monstrously difficult combat encounters (and therefore large numbers of re-re-re-re-re-loads reloaded) ensures you'll be gritting your teeth through the same single combat music track for hours on end. And it's not like tiny, obscure indie games are the only ones prey to such inadvertent repetition. Fifteen years ago I was annoyed at exactly the same problem in Morrowind, sainted Morrowind of all things, probably because you spent most of your days as Nerevarine getting chased up and down the length and breadth of Vvardenfell island by a Hitchcock's worth of hyperaggressive, glitchy, omnipresent, omniscient, omnivorous cliff racers.
Neither is the problem restricted to sound. Here's a daily faction grinding quest in The Lord of the Rings Online.
Wait.
First off, "intriguing filth" is not a phrase I can easily associate with Middle-Earth. "Intriguing filth" is rather the stuff that shows up in my third e-mail account's inbox. You know the one I'm talking about.... the one I don't tell anyone I have. ** It mostly concerns boxes for "in".
More to the point, whoever cookie-cuttered those ridiculous little identical scores upon scores of "kill ten rats" quests really should've taken a second look at the template. While reiterating instructions might help for more complex/obscure/immersive tasks, there was absolutely no point to:
Task: <ITEMNAME>
Collect: <ITEMNAME>
Confirmation: <ITEMNAME>
Background: <BOILERPLATE> <ITEMNAME> <BOILERPLATE>
Reward: <CARROTNAME>
Clutter = "content" amirite game designers?
Of course anyone who's played an MMO is entirely too familiar with the most common form such repetitive reiterative regurgitated reformulated retread redundancy can take: reskinned monsters. In many cases alleviating the problem (e.g. modeling and testing new mobs) would take a hefty amount of work hours, the cost of which would interfere with studios ripping off their customers.
Also, it bears mentioning that repeating patterns are a perfectly valid creative tool which can maintain thematic coherence in otherwise disparate elements by reiterating a particular motif, or can deliberately convey obsessiveness, drudgery or monotony or can build upon a theme gradually by leaving its core element unchanged or can highlight novel elements by eliding familiar ones. Combat music is a good idea. It conveys urgency, excitement... and perhaps more importantly, in some cases, the very fact that you're in combat. Re-skinning monsters can actually help immersion by conveying an evolutionary gradation to an imaginary world's wildlife. A consistent interface helps users find necessary information quickly.
But still... sometimes you really have to marvel at the sheer laziness. How hard could it possibly be to trim down a half-page "quest" template into a two-line "task" template? How much coding could it possibly require to prevent a music track from looping more than, say, thirteen times in a row or within a single hour? While you're re-skinning monsters, would it kill you to also alter their interactions slightly to keep them from being just different-colored C.R.A.P.? Would that really have broken Blizzard Entertainment's bank?
______________________________________________
* note to self: purchase spacious bonnet and singular bee
** Oops.
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