Syn’s Corner: Difficulty vs. Complexity vs. Accessibility (Crysis 2)

Hi. I’m Syn, and this is my corner. I want to talk about games. To be more exact, with each of these articles, I would like to take a specific title and use it as a point of analysis of its underlying ideas or mechanics, almost as if it were a case study. It may be a bit experimental, but I think it should prove fun for all parties involved. And feel free to start up a discussion below, I’d really love that.

You know, I’m kind of fed up with people on the internet complaining that developers are “dumbing down” their games. You see this allegation made any time a beloved PC game gets “consoleified”, when features that were in a game get removed or consolidated in the sequel, or even occasionally when developers break from an established paradigm a bit. Increasing accessibility and ease of control certainly play a big role in some of these design decisions, but I don’t think they always form the core of the argument at hand. Rather, a lot of the time I feel that the denizens of the internet might not fully understand the game in question’s intent or why said changes were made at all. And thus we have Crysis 2.

Ask anyone I’ve had a lengthy discussion about games with and they will tell you that the original Crysis left a bitter taste in my mouth. Conceptually, I thought the game was pretty magnificent as was its opening level, even without the whole “no machine that exists can run this game at maximum settings” bullet point. It set out to be a sandbox in which you the player could dynamically alter how conflicts played out by using special abilities that, at their core, augmented many of the different facets of first-person shooting. The catch there was that you could only have one active at a time–either Strength, Speed, Armor, or Cloaking. The game promised to give players the tools to handle situations however they pleased, and react accordingly when everything started exploding around them. However, after the opening mission, the level design and overall flow of the game seemed to loose pace with this high concept. It didn’t give you any terribly interesting situations to get into or out of, and eventually funneled you into a lackluster final conflict and a terribly abrupt ending. Mind you, these are my issues with the game, not everyone’s. I’ve actually heard some people had the exact opposite problem with it, thinking it was too open and directionless. In either case, the game had some problems so logically, Crytek set out to make things right in the sequel. And yes, it ultimately is a better game, if perhaps simpler or less ambitions. The weird thing is that it is almost better because of its more straightforward nature, rather than in spite of it. How does that work?

In explaining, I’m going to take a bit of a detour through philosophytown to set up where I’m coming from. Since the idea of “streamlining” has become somewhat of a buzz word these days, I’ve played many games that claim to be streamlined. Thus, I’ve come to the conclusion that in any such game there are three main forces vying for the player’s affection; Accessibility, Complexity, and Difficulty. When a game is streamlined well, it is simultaneously accessible and challenging, while also carrying easy-to-conceive-of yet deep mechanics. Dawn of War 2 serves as an excellent example–the guys at Relic managed to strip down the traditional RTS to its bare essentials, but then adding an role-playing-like layer on top of that while also making its game-flow feel more like a shooter than an RTS, since shooters are less esoteric and easier for a broader audience to access than typical strategy games. These three elements are always interacting with one another in games; someone cannot approach a game with too steep a learning curve, are unfulfilled or unstimulated if it doesn’t provide a challenge, and probably will not continue playing if there is no complexity or depth to it. But there’s more to it than just that. When discussing complexity in games, it is important to define and understand how it is complex. If it’s not already evident, I like groups of three, and thus I think there are three main modes of complexity in games–the mechanical (raw systems the game uses), the design (how they are put together), and the conceptual (the underlying ideas). In the case of Crysis 2, the developers deliberately made the game less mechanically complex (thus making it more accessible, more on this in a bit).  However, some of the aspects of the game’s design became more complex as a result. Now don’t get me wrong, designing the huge maps and multiple routes of approach necessary for a sandbox game like the original Crysis takes more doing than I can fathom and is extremely intricate, but providing the same sort of player agency in a much more focused game is a pretty amazing feat. The thing that I often do not like about shooters is their complete lack of player agency–basically the only decision you as a player are making is where your bullets end up in the enemy’s body. Crysis 2 attempts to provide an answer by setting up what I like to call “microsandboxes”–basically self contained encounters that allow players to find their own means to an end while still keeping forward and directed momentum. The designers are a bit heavy-handed with this, as they literally give players a tool that provides them explicit “tactical options,” or different routes players can take to surmount the encounter. However, all of these options are only suggestions and none of them have to be followed. When discussing accessibility, that’s generally a good design decision–giving players the option to have more direction, but not forcing them into it.

So let’s talk about what Crytek has done with the mechanics. Ultimately, it is maybe one of the least “dumb” things about this particular specimen, even if it appears otherwise. Nothing has been removed from the original game, but functionality has been re-purposed. Rather than being discreet modes, the Speed and Strength powers are now context sensitive, consolidated into functions that the player would use otherwise. As such, when you sprint, you run with nano-augmented speed and when you melee-attack cars you kick them in the direction you’re facing rather than breaking your foot. The only powers that exist as separate functions are Armor and Cloaking, which at their core represent the diametric ways that shooters are thought about these days. How many times through interviews and whatnot have you heard a developer of an “open-ended” shooter say something along the lines of “You can go in guns blazing or take a stealthier approach.” The issue I take with this in most cases goes back to what I was saying about player agency: typically, it is required that you pick one of these approaches and stick with it, not leaving too much room for choices you make to affect the outcome, unless you consider “get caught while sneaking around” a meaningful decision. The system in Crysis 2 makes it easier (i.e. more accessible) to string powers together as the situation arises, but also builds situations and encounters that force the player to actually use them all creatively in order to survive. Even though the game’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it has many elements of good design that actually complement each other and allow the player to be his or her own agent as opposed to simply a pawn for the designers.