July 23rd, 2007
Embracing Bad Design…with Zombies
So I’ve been obsessed with two semi-recent zombie games. Once I finally got a 360 the first thing I wanted to play was Dead Rising. Having not finished the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 when the Wii version recently came out I decided to start over and finally see it through as well. I haven’t been let down by either. I think both are truly great experiences for obviously very different reasons. I’ve been on this extreme Zombie kick thanks to reading The Walking Dead (Thanks Joveth and Morgan!) and I can’t get enough of anything zombie themed that is actually good. So on the fantasy fulfillment side of things these two games bring it home ten fold. As you may know already, Dead Rising finally delivers that Dawn of the Dead feel in a real-time sandbox way and RE4 goes straight for the linear amusement park horror film genre. I really can’t say enough about either when it comes to the things they do really well. But that isn’t what this post is about. I’ll leave the gushing for the enthusiast press. The ironic thing about both of these games is that they both have some fundamental flaws that just can’t be ignored. For some, they are so bad that those people put the games down. However, if you do decide to embrace the bad design choices, give in to what the team was trying to do and choose to accept these shortcomings, then and only then will the true game in each case be seen. How is it that a potentially bad design decision can result in not only an off-putting situation for some but also act as the the key to understanding the true nature of the experience. It is almost as if without these flaws the games would not be as great. It is both a designer’s worst nightmare and wildest dream (whoa that was cheesy). Here are some bullets to set things up:
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Dead Rising
- One Save at a time.
- Eroding weapons.
- 100% complete impossible in one playthrough.
- Discourages cautious players trying to never restart.
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Resident Evil 4
- Poor camera controls during combat.
- Unintuitive character controls during combat.
- Out of context characters and situations breaking the experience.
- Random ammo drops for potential weapons you can’t own.
So that just names a few and some are more egregious than others, but they hit the main points. With Dead Rising it basically comes down to the “one save at a time” and the need to power level your character by restarting the game over and over again. With RE4 it is mainly the controls that are called out as the biggest hurdle. In RE4 when in combat you have to aim with the Wii remote, use analog stick to move your camera, hold B down and finally fire with the A button all at the same time. All to shoot one zombie! All of these examples of feature implementation are almost no-brainers for most designers. When you hear them out of context you assume they are really just bad ideas. Bad design. No one wants to stand still while they shoot while fumbling with three other inputs. No one wants to have only one save game in a game where your best tactic is to die and restart the entire game in order to level up your character. No one really wants to worry about their weapons breaking all of the time. And when I say no one, I really mean most. There are always exceptions I know. But don’t take those into account for a second. Plus, no one spends millions of dollars on the “exceptions” anyway.
So all that being said, the games still work. Now putting those bad design ideas into context we start to see a potential method to the madness. In both cases it is almost as if the experiential goals that the teams were trying to achieve bled into the actual interface and shell features. I’m not talking about merely HUD skins to dress up the front end. These are fundamental aspects like save games. These are a very conscious choices to try to achieve a specific feeling. The sense of dread when running through a pack of lumbering zombies, knowing that any of them could grab me and take me down didn’t just come from the traditional tricks of camera angles, music, effects, etc. It actually came in part from the fact that I only have one freakin’ save game. Is that pack really worth the risk? If I fuck this up I might have to load my only game or worse yet, restart the entire game. When I press my B button and plant myself firmly in one place only to wait for the running hooded Spanish zombies to charge me with a chainsaw, I’m really committing to that. I almost feel helpless when I do that. Sure, you can try to run away, but you can’t fire without standing still. When I’m firing a weapon in a game being chased by tens guys with pitchforks, I kinda want to strafe and shit. I’m used to it. But take that strafe-while-firing away and you can bet your ass your heart rate gets going.
There is an extreme emotional relationship with those controls in RE4. Could it be that bad controls (or at least seemingly bad controls) are actually the key to the best horror moments in video games today? How do they get away with that? Or is the entire package in both cases so good, that we look beyond these flaws and embrace them only to later realize that what we assumed was insanity and folly is actually a brilliant assessment of the right designs driven by the right goals at the risk of, at first glance, being huge sacrifices.
It is an enormous burden to try to design something that is against the grain and common sense of today’s standards. I’m not talking revolutionary decisions. Even small ones can change the face of your experience. Only one save game isn’t revolutionary, really, but it is risky. Extremely so. To step out on that limb and embrace that “bad design” for the greater good of the entire package is something that scares me (and has given me ulcers in the past) and though I dread the next time I’m in that situation, I secretly long for it as well.
