Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: entertainment, games, heavy rain, Quantic Dream, The Walking Dead, uncharted, video games, warren spector

Deus Ex Creator Calls Out Uncharted, The Walking Dead And Heavy Rain For Making Low Agency Games.

Published Tue, 03 Nov 2015 05:45:41 -0600

by Patrick Dane

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The idea of player agency is an interesting one. How much each game has varies from game to game, but how much is a developer pushing you through an narrative and how much is the player's own crafted experience is an ever changing line.

According to Deus Ex creator Warren Spector, a lot of popular games aren't doing enough though. In a keynote speech at PAX Australia, as reported by PowerUp Gaming, (via VG247), Spector called out games like Uncharted, The Walking Dead and Heavy Rain for not using the video game medium to its fullest.

On Uncharted, he said:

It's not that games like this are bad, but they limit your ability to interact with the game world, so the story can unfold the way the storyteller wants it to unfold.

You have very limited ability to express yourself; it's about how do you accomplish a predetermined path to get to the next plot point.

It's a great story – a better story than I'll ever tell in a game – but it's not a player story; it's not your story.

On The Walking Dead:

I love The Walking Dead, but the choices you have to make; they're compelling choices… but they're designer driven, not player driven. Every choice in a game like this has been pre-scripted and handwritten by a designer somewhere, and the effects of that choice have been predetermined by the developers.

On Heavy Rain and other Quantic Dream games, he said it was akin to "five movie scripts all mashed together, and you're just picking which script you're telling at any given point in time."

Honestly, I understand where Spector is coming from here. Games are an incredibly strong medium that allow for a lot of input from the user. We should be making use of that when we can, finding new ways to allow players to really express themselves within games. On the other hand though, limiting games to say that they 'have' to make use of, it seems restrictive. The medium is so young, we still don't really know what it is entirely yet. Putting barriers on experiences only limits what it can be.

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