Trailer Roundup: Quantum Break, Bloodborne, and More

Gamescom was overflowing with trailers. At 35 minutes, I’d question the categorization of one of them as a “trailer,” but either way, this is at least a movie’s worth of watching time now. Several dozen trailers have overwhelmed the dam, so this is really just a smattering of what I found interesting. I’m sure many of you will disagree with what is going to be excluded, but hey, you could have also just watched the Pokémon World Championships, too.

Quantum Break

There was a trailer leading up to this gameplay demo, but why watch that when you can watch eight minutes of Quantum Break in motion? Finally seeing how the mechanical side of the game is going to work is pretty cool. The general fighting of fodder enemies looks like it could become trivial quite quickly, but that boss battle came across as quite interesting. I’m actually looking forward to playing it now. Comes out 2015 for Xbox One.

Bloodborne

Ugh, I hate that Sony’s YouTube channel is calling every announcement video an “announce trailer.” It’s a grammatical terror, sure, but it just feels awful to say. But aside from that, how are you not intrigued by Bloodborne? Coming from Hidetaka Miyazaki, this game just looks cool. And even as inviting as the gameplay teaser is, this six minutes of solid demo shenanigans is even better. Comes out 2015 for PlayStation 4.

The Order: 1886

Woo, this is a gorgeous-looking game. Even from the trailer, I can tell that the feeling of shooting the weapons in The Order: 1886 is going to be a highlight. It looks so immediate and reactive and powerful. Hopefully the game actually manages to be worth playing and not just something that looks good in a video. This will be the first original solo venture from Ready at Dawn, so here’s hoping. Comes out February 20, 2015 for PlayStation 4.

Below

At this point, my desire to play Below is far outpaced by my desire to simply know more about it. If they were two mutually exclusive options in my entire lifetime but I could ask any question about it and get the answer right now, I would take that deal. Okay, probably not, but seriously. TELL ME MORE, CAPY. Comes out, uh, sometime for Xbox One and Steam.

Shadow Realms

Surprise! That mystery BioWare teaser from a few weeks ago was actually for BioWare Austin’s upcoming 4v1 online action RPG. It’s a structure that sounds a bit like Evolve and the trailer feels an awful lot like a more serious John Dies at the End, so I have no idea what point I’m trying to make here other than “Shadow Realms” is a super generic title, but put me down as super tepid right now.

WiLD

Well this is certainly the last thing I would have expected from Michel Ancel. Leading a new indie shop called Wild Sheep Studios, this survival adventure game is a huge departure from Rayman. But as the trailer goes on, it becomes strangely apparent that 1) WiLD is French, and 2) WiLD is at least partly infused with Ancel’s latent insanity.

Hellblade

If Ninja Theory said they were making a Barbie game for graphing calculators, I would be onboard. After making Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, anything they make will always be welcome with open arms here. Not to say they can do no wrong, but I’m willing to give them a chance. Granted, this trailer tells us basically nothing about Hellblade (with this “introduction” trailer somehow divulging even less), but the premise at least seems interesting.

The Tomorrow Children

Talk about inscrutable. This trailer is the single most confusing thing I’ve seen all week. It all sums up to mean basically nothing. I had to read this just to get some semblance of an idea of what The Tomorrow Children might be about. The gist is that it involves mining, bettering an online social community, and Marxist parody, which is everybody’s favorite genre of anything.

Battlefield Hardline

For a developer commentary video, there isn’t actually a lot of commentary going on in this 12-minute demo of Battlefield Hardline. However, I am excited about this game solely because it looks so little like any other Battlefield game. It’s something I appreciate about that franchise. While they have the staple (and stale) numbered series, they aren’t afraid to branch off into Bad Company and Heroes territory. Comes out 2015 for PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.

Donut County

“Donut County is a whimsical physics toy that gives players control of a mysterious hole that gets bigger each time they swallow something.” That’s all you had to say, Ben Esposito.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Sweet jesus. 35 minutes. Of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. At least the commentary is good. Comes out February 24, 2015 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

VA-11 HALL-A

Cyberpunk bartending simulator. That’s all you need to know. Get on that VA-11 HALL-A tip, dawg.

A Voyeur for September

I have no idea what a “live action stealth game” is, but I would love to find out. Give it to me, Team Meat. Give me A Voyeur for September.

A Sense Of Place

For being totally and utterly at the mercy of the whims of any number of artists and creative types, video games sure can be boring. Or rather, they sure can look boring. Though nothing explicitly ties our little interactive industry to realism, we still adhere to it, and for good reason: it helps keep an already abstract thing relatable. That doesn’t mean that instigating the feel of otherworldliness should be taken off the table, and yet it seems to always be kept out of reach.

There’s a fellow named Jon Brouchoud. He describes himself as a freelance architect and 3D designer and he wrote this thing about architecture in video games. He admits it himself that the post is “disjointed and meander”—as mine sometimes are—but he brings up several good points, most of which are backed up by literature and photographs.

Most structures and buildings and landscapes in games are designed by artists, not architects, which usually means that many fundamental elements are missing. The examples Brouchoud uses include how digital courtyards usually lack a spatial anchoring point like a monument or statue and how buildings almost always go straight into the ground without a plinth (the slab upon which things are built). The first one helps orient people as they wander around, whether in the virtual or the real world, and the second can help convey a subconscious notion of quality. They are small things but pile up enough pebbles and you have a mountain; these details matter.

Then those artists’ renderings have to go through several layers of mashing and bashing by technical artists to make it into the game under memory and level design constraints. That is a problem where technical limitations take precedent over the artistic. Either the console or the engine or something can’t handle the design as the original artist intended or the gameplay itself will suffer for strict adherence to the art. The artistic design is first to go because that is, by and large, not what makes the game go; it not crashing or it being playable is.

The biggest problem, however, that Brouchoud correctly points out is that most video game architecture lacks a sense of place, and that is what architecture is at its very core, at its very essence. Even from the scant few years I spent thinking I wanted to be an architect, one of the first things impressed upon you through teaching and reading is that this is a practice that is hard to define. It is mostly about buildings and how they are built, yes, but it is also about how everything around a building—the trees, the type of brick, how the walkway stones are laid—comes together to induce a very specific feeling.

Frank Lloyd Wright is famous for this. He manages to marry many psychological and artistic concepts together in his designs that many of his pieces are still revered and studied to this day. Many of his buildings have a structure to it that you would find in narratives or music where there is a build and a reveal and climaxes and so on and so on. Wright’s foyers open gradually and layer on spectacle until grandeur hits in a Skrillex-esque drop of awe. Our eyes are drawn along directing lines that make us think or move a certain way and then expectations are simultaneously met, exceeded, and defied.

That is what video games are missing. We are missing that narrative structure in our designs (and, in some cases, our narratives). This is why sewer levels are universally abhorred; they are so one-note. You enter underground and you don’t come up until it’s over. It’s the same as if you were punished with busywork at your 9-to-5 where you keep your head down until it’s quittin’ time.

The underground section in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, for instance, almost single-handedly ruined what was an otherwise excellent game. There was no structure or sense of place down there. Hallways and corridors lead right back into hallways and corridors you just saw and nothing is ever built up in anticipation and nothing is ever resolved. You are simply down in a place with no lights and it kind of sucks. You have nothing to orient yourself with and everything just feels the same.

Contrast that with Dead Space 3. The ice planet is, well, kind of forgettable, but the space bits are most excellent because the design itself of wandering has pacing and beats to hit and feels more than the sum of its parts. You start out in a room that, relative to the rest of the ship, at least has some light. While not a guarantee, we psychologically feel safer in a well-lit environment, and this room provides that. As we open the door and step out, we see a claustrophobic, dark hall, and it instinctively feels dangerous. We are hesitant to even leave the light because the little lizard part of our brain is telling us to stay in the light.

We trudge forward, cautiously, until the inevitable jump scare hits. Tension has been building and building and suddenly there is an immense release of adrenaline to meet the fright of a necromorph trundling and screaming towards you. The battle over and hearts still pounding, we come across another door and open it: relief. It is an airlock and we are sucked into the serenity of a silent space and slow, soothing movements of free-floating debris. Air rushes by you into the vacuum, as does all your tension.

That is a narrative in microcosm. We have build up, climax, and denouement. It is the perfect representation of how the architecture of the ship and feed into the gameplay and reinforce how we feel about the simple act of exploring or playing the game.

This feel trumps many of the things that games otherwise recklessly and heedlessly try. The Syndicate remake from last year, for instance, tried many things in terms of architecture and, for the most part, failed at inciting any sort of sense of place. Things looked futuristic, but that was about it. The light bloom and lens flares all checked the aesthetic points off the list, but the structures were bland and unfortunately normal. Stairs simply led to the second story you can see through the translucent floor, not some unknown room of future tech and tools. Warehouses were floating in the sky, but they sort of felt like normal warehouses with encompassing structure of industry.

The slums, if anything, were where Syndicate succeeded. Everything felt rundown and gross, and the way multiple floors fed into cluttered, broken-windowed hallways only to open up into wide-open but caged courtyards had the perfect mix of fancy and trashy to really give you the sense that these buildings used to be something more than monthly leased coffins and drug dens.

Don’t take it to mean that the actual framework of video game buildings are lackluster because they are not (Mass Effect and Halo have giant planet-humping monoliths for goodness sake). But that doesn’t mean that they are good at giving the player a sense of place, which is what really lies at the core of architecture. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days actually was one of the best at ginning up that feeling despite being based in the preset, real world. Architecture is more than foundations and beams and roof styles. Architecture is about making you feel like you’ve gone somewhere you’ve never been, the same feeling that video games should be the best at. So why aren’t they?

Dead Space 3’s New Direction

I’m only about halfway (probably?) through Dead Space 3, the latest entry in Visceral Games’ survival horror series, and I’m here to tell you that all the reviews you’ve read so far are right; it’s a different game. Just about every complaint and every compliment I’ve heard from other reviewers holds true from what I can tell, but just to a greater degree with the good and lesser degree with the bad; I think Dead Space 3 is a great game.

In ways here and there, I can tell people who hold one prejudice going into the game will be in another camp by the end, but there’s one flag that some just will never give up: the horror. The addition of co-op sounded off some warnings to me, too, but I approached it with an open mind and was rewarded (it’s good stuff) despite being a staunch supporter of how totally crazy scary the first Dead Space was. To others, it is an interminable branding of where the franchise went off the horror rails and landed in Candy Land.

Which, in a way, is true because Dead Space 3 is the least scary of the Dead Space bunch, and that includes the mobile and rail shooter titles. But that’s for good reason; Dead Space 3 is just a really good third-person action game. Even from Dead Space 2, the series has been top of the list for slower, non-Call of Duty shooters in terms of just the feel and satisfaction of actually playing the game. From moving around to the feedback—both audio and visual—you get for shooting to the absolutely brutal kill sequences, the franchise is at least close to being best-in-class.

That, however, will not quell the horror fans. There is little to no horror here no matter how dark you turn your room or how late and alone you play it. But I managed to accept that Dead Space 3 is different, and I’ll tell you how: Mission: Impossible.

Also, Aliens, but we’ll get to that in a second.

Mission: Impossible, while originally a television series, first took the jump to the big screen in 1996 with the help of Carrie, Scarface, and The Untouchables director Brian De Palma. It was a somewhat subtle and stylish film that only had the occasional jump into the overt action realm. It went for the cerebral and unfortunately fell short, but the intended feel of the movie was there. That much was a success on De Palma’s part.

Then you go to Mission: Impossible II which, from its opening moments where Ethan Hunt is hanging from a cliff while receiving his next mission, is a drastic departure from its predecessor. Directed by famed Chinese director John Woo, it’s easy to understand why: this is what Woo does. He applies this strange, otherworldly sheen to his movies that look, sound, and act like reality but feel like some ethereal plane where a much broader range of things is possible. The action just feels…clean, in a word (and ridiculous for another), that ties into sufficient, if categorically less, character development.

The series then takes a dirtier slant with J.J. Abrams’ stab in Mission: Impossible III where not only there a constant grime applied to every scene but also it is what I would call mindless. Things just sort of happen for the sake of happening and you don’t really mind it because of all the different kind of things happening. And most recently, former The Incredibles and Ratatouille director Brad Bird gives us Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, which actually succeeds in being a thriller as well as an action film.

What I’m getting at is that every Mission: Impossible film, while still involving the Impossible Missions Force and Ethan Hunt, had a different director and every Mission: Impossible film was as drastically different as you could get in terms of summer blockbusters. Being a fan of one would not necessarily make you a fan of the next, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude you from liking all of them, either.

If you look at the Dead Space series, you can find a similar thread. The original designer duo from the first game in Glen Schofield and Bret Robbins never worked on Dead Space 2 or Dead Space 3 (they then went on to develop Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 with Sledgehammer Games), and it was a horror game through and through.

But its horror was dramatically different from that of Dead Space 2. The sequel was more about disturbing imagery (the eye laser and the mother with the baby and—sweet Jesus—the opening scene) with the occasional slow burn tension while the maiden voyage with Isaac Clarke was more about the buildup and eventual massive release. And of course you go from the sparse and isolated USG Ishimura to the abandoned but hardly empty Sprawl and you can see where the directions of the two games diverged.

Once I made the logical connection of continually shifting game directions with how the Mission: Impossible franchise operates, it bothered me less and less how Dead Space 3 was a straight-up action game. Perhaps a more appropriate comparison would be the Aliens franchise: Alien was claustrophobic in its terror; Aliens was a banger of an action film that still managed to maintain much of the original’s tension; and Alien 3, well, David Fincher tried, I guess.

As a fan of the first two, I obviously miss the horror and jumps, but that shouldn’t stop me from enjoying the cap to the Isaac Clark trilogy, nor should it stop you. New directions should never be a reason to not enjoy something. For all the legitimate complaints about Dead Space 3, “not scary” should not be among them; that is just a fact. I don’t hold anything against (500) Days of Summer for not being scary or refuse to watch The Orphanage because it doesn’t have any invading armies that shoot at each other. They are just different visions for different stories. Once you wrap your mind around that, I think you’ll also come around on Dead Space 3.

That, or want to watch Aliens again.