Tunnels of Doom

As a topic both near and dear to my heart as well as something I was in serious need of considering more closely, I watched the discussion initiated by Penny Arcade over the appropriateness of buying used games with great interest.

Obviously, my purchasing habits are in fact part of the problem being described by the game publishers where secondary markets like GameStop’s ubiquitous used selection and trade services like Goozex enable me to continue gaming and in fact keeping up more or less with the state of the hobby in the present tense without succumbing to a tide of expenses. In the past year and a half my activity level in the hobby has cooled considerably (life events and all that) but I’ve managed to play all the way through a number of titles and sample a few oddities as well with only a few token purchases here and there being of the sort that the publishers would record in their tabulated account books. Without these secondary markets, that wouldn’t have been possible.

The question presented here is a valid one, however. Is this sort of thing acceptable? Is it ethical? It’s necessary for me to seriously consider these questions in this context because if the answer is negative, it represents a call to action.

From what I can gather the two camps rally around the following philosophical justifications which, mind you, don’t have much in the way of refutable weakness. They simply are the rationales in play and you can cast your lot with whichever aligns with your personal ethos. The pro-secondary market person says, “If I didn’t have the cost-effective alternatives available to me, I wouldn’t bother. Therefore I represent the non-consumer anyway, outside the target market, who never will contribute to the industry directly anyway.” The anti-secondary market person says, “If you receive entertainment value from something that was produced by creative and technical minds, you owe those people your direct support from an ethical standpoint.”

As I said, neither is particularly wrong and you can’t really argue the face value of either. However, you can sort of eliminate the whole discourse if you can believe the basic tenet of the pro-secondary market position. This is critical because the thesis here is that if you got rid of Goozex and eBay and GameFly and GameStop’s used games—let’s say all game content was seamlessly DRM protected and digitally delivered—these individuals would simply stop playing games. Theoretically the entire industry (we have to leave retail out of the conversation for the sake of the point) would see no noticeable shift in supply or demand. After all, as far as publishers are concerned, secondary market customers represent zero revenue for them. Likewise, the support from those individuals is, if you accept the fact of their abandonment of this sort of entertainment if they cannot control the price structure, non-existent. There can be no ethical dilemma here because the support received by the industry from the supportive consumers is at 100% currently, the secondary market is fundamentally no different from the wide base of non-gamers who never spend a red cent on any games or gaming-related paraphernalia.

The problem is, logic suggests that’s not true at all. For one thing, hardware manufacturers would be impacted: It’s certainly possible some secondary market devotees also get their gaming hardware used, but I’d be shocked out of my penny loafers to find the used hardware market represented even a fraction of the install base for any given platform whereas I’d not be the least bit surprised to find that the percentage of individuals who play any given game for an hour or more without buying the full retail product is well into the double digits. The other issue is that I suspect most gamers who utilize the secondary market are in fact very much like me in that they want to play a lot more games than they can reasonably afford at full retail prices but that doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to pay MSRP at least occasionally. On one platform I can think of at least eight titles I’ve purchased new from retail off the top of my head in the past four years, and there are probably a few more I’ve forgotten as well. Now that’s nothing compared to the number of games I’ve played that I acquired on the secondary market, but the reality is that if there were no Goozex or rental stores I’d perhaps play that handful of games that I picked up on Christmas or from the occasional splurge and nothing else.

Of course the tricky element to this is that maybe that’s not true at all and if there were no way for myself or others like me to engage in cost-management for the hobby, we may very well choose instead to disengage from the hobby (as is threatened by the pro-secondary market position) only in this case the damage to the industry as a whole would not be insignificant but would in fact represent a dramatic shift downward as all these so-labeled leechers suddenly stopped buying hardware, peripherals, and yes, even software occasionally.

Which leads back to the ethics question because what it seems to come down to is whether partial support is ethical enough for a consumer like myself who does, in fact, take advantage of many creative and talented development teams’ work without direct compensation. I mean, I can see from Mike and Jerry’s perspective how that could feel untenable since they don’t just gain leisure value from the work of game designers and producers but they earn a living off the back of that industry. For myself, though, I’m just not sure I can work up enough sympathy for an industry that has painted itself into a corner with the soaring costs of development and then tried to surreptitiously pass those poor judgments along to the consumer with inflated retail prices across the board, only dipping into casual economic brackets once the game has earned “Greatest Hits” status or whatever (basically reached a critical mass for initial retail revenue and now require broadening of the fanbase to secure audience for the inevitable sequel).

And for what it’s worth, secondary market devotees do have to take some concessions for their thrift: One thing that may perhaps surprise you is that I’m all in favor of things like THQ’s one-time codes to reward shrinkwrap purchasers. Give the early adopters some special gifts, I say. I have no problem with value-adding to full price purchases so long as they don’t represent a crippling of the core game. In fact, perhaps the biggest conscience-easing exercise I can take is to imagine what would happen if some publisher did decide to include, say, a download code that provided, say, the game’s final chapter—available only to the first person who bought that copy of the game. I would not play that game. Should all game publishers engage in similar tactics, I would simply walk away from the industry. I believe this would be detrimental to the industry as a whole: As frugal as I am with my hobby activities, I do support the industry in my own way, at my particular level of comfort. Publishers are free to decide they don’t care to retain me as a customer. I won’t take it personally, I’ll just take my disposable income somewhere else.

I really don’t envy people who get paid to review games when open-world titles hit their assignment queues. Having been slowly working my way through Red Faction: Guerrilla for the last couple of months, I can say that trying to digest a game like this in a couple of days would be frustrating at the very least. I mean, I’m certain that you could get the basic idea of the game in that time, playing enough of the different mission types to meet the requirements for advancement from sector to sector and then hitting the mandatory story missions but most of the reward that I can find from open-style games comes from the make-your-own-fun interludes. Which is to say there is perhaps significantly more interest in these types of games from my perspective in not pursing the story, which for a story hound like myself is an odd thing to consider.

Red Faction’s hook is in it’s destructible environments or, more specifically, in it’s destructible buildings. I guess earlier incarnations of the franchise focused on level geometry deformation but the planet in Guerrilla is static, it’s the structures that you can shape in this case. And by “shape” I mean “pulverize.” Since it’s a huge part of the game I might as well get out the way the talk about the building destruction. On the positive notes, destroying buildings is a lot of fun. I mean, practically every weapon you get is basically a building knocker-downer. I guess there are an assortment of machine guns and pistols and laser rifles but honestly I barely ever used them. It’s far more effective to topple a building on a squad of enemy troopers than it is to try to pick them off one by one, plus most of your key destructive devices like explosive charges, rocket launchers and sledgehammers are infinitely more powerful than the piddly guns you find around so early on I decided, “why bother?” Anyway, most of the missions practically demand that you knock something or several somethings over anyway so if the pesky bad guys get crushed while I’m doing my job, so much the better. You also get access to some heavy vehicles including sturdy dump trucks and the ever-thrilling walkers (very reminiscent of the Power Loader from Aliens) which are good at crushing building supports. The physics engine behind the building is cool in that the chunks of cement and metal you blast, knock and bash off of the structures feels solid and real and unlike some other examples I’ve seen of destructible environments the structures feel sturdy as if you really needed all these explosives and heavy machinery to take them down as opposed to, say, a well-aimed belch.

The bad part about the building destruction is that the sense of heft the physics engine conveys is undermined by a faulty series of calculations that permits unrealistic loads can be borne by certain supports which often leads to these strange looking half-destroyed buildings that have no right in the world to remain standing but float in disbelief-defying air while you circle the remaining scraps looking for the one bit of frame that inexplicably holds the thing aloft. Also there are too many cases where certain key support bits have been given additional damage-absorption capacity by the engine algorthims such that you can whack away at them but they won’t fall even though you know it would bring the whole house crashing down. It’s annoying to instead have to go around slapping away at flimsy exterior walls until a specific damage amount has been done and the engine allows the building to finally fall. The last thing is that while knocking over walls is sort of the raison d’être, there are only so many rationales for flattening the Martian landscape they can come up with so eventually you start to laugh at the euphemisms the NPCs use for “bring down a building.”

The combat in Red Faction is acceptable, there’s a crude cover system that is kind of comical since all the chest-high walls fall over within five minutes of entering the sector but like I said most of the time you’re just flattening barracks and office complexes with all the bad guys inside anyway. The vehicle driving is pretty much universally terrible: The game renders the Martian landscape like an establishing shot from Deliverance, lacking much in the way of paved or even straight roads. You spend a lot of time fighting the floaty, terrain-beholden car controls as you careen up the sheer faces of rock walls in an attempt to get where you’re going. It may not surprise you that the missions that gave me the most trouble were the ones where you had to return a stolen vehicle to a safehouse within a specific time frame.

The basic structure is that for each sector you visit there are a number of Guerrilla actions you have to perform in order to decrease the evil empire’s control value on the region. Once the control is low enough you can perform the story missions (there are a total of 20), about three in each sector, to liberate the area. The Guerrilla actions are both fixed-position and also radioed in as you bumble around Mars which kind of bothered me. One thing I get very sick of in open world games is unsolicited missions. GTA IV was terrible about this with various cronies calling me incessantly to come take them on dates or hang out with them or get into mischief or whatever the mini-mission was at the time. At least Red Faction doesn’t punish you with loss of character respect or trust or what have you and they will in fact re-broadcast the mission later on if you miss it the first time, but it’s still annoying to be en route to one activity and be told there is another, more pressing activity you should be doing right now. Excuse me, is this open world or is it not?

In any case the missions aren’t particularly novel: You’re either holding a position against a certain number of enemies, trying to kill or destroy a certain number of enemies within a time limit, trying to knock down a building with a specific kit within a time limit, driving a car back to a safehouse within a time limit, rescuing some hostages, ambushing a convoy, tailing someone and stealing their delivery or manning a mounted gun on a destruction raid. There are plenty of collectibles as expected as well and there are non-mission activities that can result in decreasing the sector control, such as destroying key enemy structures and buildings. There is also a morale system related to the citizens of the sector that influences how they perceive your Red Faction organization. This is used to inspire you not to kill innocents and, also, not to die. The only penalty you get for dying is a small hit to the sector morale. For the most part I never really had to babysit any of these values, my base approach to each new sector was to hit all the stationary Guerrilla missions, blow up all the key structures and then do all three story missions back to back. Sometimes story missions unlock other Guerrilla actions as well, but by doing everything I was able to get all available unlocks and afford their upgrades before the final mission, so it seemed like a solid strategy.

The story missions are a bit better in terms of variety and intrigue, the plot of Red Faction is pretty thin: You’re a new recruit in a resistance movement trying to force the local militarized corporate overlords off the planet. There are some twists involving a gang of raider-type savages who have a macguffin called the Nano Forge but for the most part it’s predictable and straight forward. It would have been nice to see the creativity of the story mission structure explored in the standard missions as well, though. One has you running around a town under artillery fire trying to collect key pieces of data and supplies before the place is razed. Another involves you leading a huge, aggressive army of enemy troops on a chase through the sector as you try to knock out their jamming signal towers within a time limit and before your truck explodes. Overall the game (and its achievements) aren’t affected by the difficulty setting so there’s very little reason not to set it to casual and enjoy the limited damage most enemies can do to you. The game isn’t difficult but like many open world games it does have its frustrating moments so you’ll appreciate the leg up.

Thankfully there is a checkpoint system in the missions but most aren’t long enough to take advantage of it, and while the map has a pathing option, the rally points are limited to “civilized” areas on main roads so if you’re trying to mark an out-of-the-way location you’re basically sunk, plus the algorithm isn’t too hot anyway, frequently giving least-efficient paths especially where destructible structures like bridges and overpasses may still be standing. I guess the map code has no awareness of which possibly impassable routes are still viable.

Overall I enjoyed Red Faction. It’s not as engrossing as Assassin’s Creed II and while getting from point A to point B in ACII was typically as much fun as the place you were going, Red Faction is all about what you do once you finally get there. Some of the later unlockable weapons are very, very cool and the novelty of blasting buildings apart never really wore off for me. I would have liked a better plot maybe, and some more cleverness in the mundane game activities, but I put a fair number of hours into the game and still had enough left in me after the credits rolled to keep logging in looking for last minute collectibles and trying to find missions I’d overlooked (mostly radio-provided).

I should also mention quickly that I actually did play some of the multiplayer for Red Faction (which is rare enough) and it’s pretty decent, although I suck badly at online mulitplayer anything so it’s frustrating to consistently be waxed by unseen opponents. They have a backpack system for granting special powers like jetpacks and charge attacks and stealth that is kind of novel plus the whole destructible environments angle makes for some fun unexpected moments. I probably won’t devote a whole lot of time to it, but I’m sure I’ll try a few more matches and see if I get even a tiny bit better before I quit in frustration.