AvP Cross-Comparison: Predator

In the 1999 game, the Predator is probably the most complicated species. From a more mechanically-oriented perspective this is fairly obvious due to the sheer number of keys the Predator actually needs for minimum functionality, but on a more abstract level the Predator has two distinct styles of play depending on whether you're fighting Aliens or Marines, which is conceptually complicated in a way the other two species are not. In both cases, they are united by one common theme: resource management.

When fighting Marines, you're ideally spending much of your time under cloak, which drains your energy meter instead of allowing it to refill. This discourages freely using your energy-burning weaponry like the Plasmacaster and also discourages taking too many hits, since healing is energy-intensive. If you are going to burn energy on a weapon, it should be carefully considered, such as Plasmacastering an enemy you don't think you can get into melee with safely, not simply Plasmacastering everyone because it's convenient. The Speargun burns no energy, but its supply of 30 spears needs to last you throughout the entire mission, so you can't be too free about using it either and in particular you ideally need to make sure to line up the shot perfectly before firing because wasted spears are not coming back. There's a fairly constant balancing act with your resources, and you're strongly encouraged to play the stealth game because sneaking up under cloak and killing someone with your Wristblades just costs you less than any other tactic. (With the semi-exception of tossing the Disc, which can be retrieved for free and costs nothing to fire... but it breaks your cloak, endangering you, and can get stuck, making it something you can't freely toss around)

When fighting Aliens, the cloak becomes worthless, freeing you up to burn energy on healing and weaponry, but any mission with Aliens spawns an infinite supply of them at a fairly steady pace. On Director's Cut, the spawn rate and quantity is so ridiculous in certain missions that you're best off running like crazy as much as possible, because by the time you've finished off the current batch of Aliens more are on the way and quickly killing large groups of Aliens always costs resources. The balancing act here is centered around making judgment calls about whether to burn energy on attacks or try to take out Aliens with your free-but-slow-and-dangerous attacks and heal between waves, all while keeping your actual objectives in mind and moving toward them. The Speargun's limited ammo becomes even more pronounced an issue, because even if you're an aimbot the Aliens are literally unlimited. In conjunction with how tremendously lethal the Speargun is -even Praetorians and Predaliens die instantly when shot in the head or upper chest- as well as how much more difficult it is to successfully line up a shot on an Alien than a human because they're usually in constant motion, you're strongly encouraged to reserve Speargun shots for big threats.

The system isn't perfect and relies on what I call a 'design rule' (The spawning Alien mechanic is not fundamentally embedded into 'you are playing a Predator at all'), with the most notable flaw/risk being that missions purely about fighting Marines are risking the player running low on energy and health and proceeding to spend several minutes waiting for their energy to recover, healing, then waiting for the rest of their energy to recover, which would all be boring and bad... but for the Predator's campaign this isn't really a concern or flaw. Only the first two missions are made entirely of human foes, and they're clearly intended to be somewhat babying the player. Risking some boring sequences is an acceptable consequence of easing a new player into a game.

AvP 2 inherits basically all the mechanics of the 1999 game. It makes some changes here and there, such as modifying the cloak so that activating it eats an initial chunk of energy above and beyond the normal drain rate, but the majority of these changes are only really important as part of a collective pattern of making the Predator even better than it already was. Which is strange, because the 1999 game is probably already biased too strongly in the Predator's favor... but there's only two 'inherent' changes that are particularly important to my point.

The first of these is giving the Predator an Energy Sifter. Where in the 1999 game your only way to get more energy other than waiting a long time was to hope you ran across an energy pickup, of which there was only a limited supply on a given map, in AvP 2 the player can at will pull out the Energy Sifter, at which point they're fairly helpless for two seconds while their energy meter fills to full pretty much instantly.

The Energy Sifter completely breaks the game.

I suspect it's not so big a deal from a multiplayer perspective, as you can't fight while using it, activating it breaks your cloak, you're forced to a slow walking speed while it's out, and it comes with a lightshow that flagrantly gives away your position, but from a single-player perspective it solves the problem I covered a minute ago of 'you know, the player might find that optimal play involves a good chunk of waiting, and that's boring and bad' by directly wrecking 90% of the resource management game. It's no longer important to think carefully about when and where to use a given energy weapon, because you'll just Energy Sifter everything back afterward. It even renders the cloak's surcharge nerf irrelevant because the cloak's energy drain doesn't really matter when, again, you'll just Energy Sifter everything back periodically!

All on its own this does a lot to reduce the AvP 2 Predator campaign to a series of effortless fights where it doesn't matter how bad you are because anything short of death is without consequence... but it's unfortunately not the only change to that effect.

The other notable mechanical change is the Speargun being bolstered: in the 1999 game, the Speargun breaks cloak when fired and you only get the 30 spears per mission, period. There's no such thing as a Speargun ammo pickup, or anything of the sort. In AvP 2, the Speargun does not break cloak when fired -making it trivially easy to snipe Marines without ever being in the slightest bit of danger- and the spears can be picked up afterward to be reused as much as you want. Marine stealth/combat sequences are a complete joke because you can instantly kill basically anything without ever leaving cloak or running out of ammo.

These two mechanical changes are incredibly hurtful to the Predator play experience, but then there's the 'design rule' changes.

In AvP 2's campaign, you don't even fight Aliens that much, but when you do they don't infinitely spawn in small groups. (Which is weird, because most of your anti-Alien combat is inside their hive) Instead, AvP 2 will generate a wave of 6+ Aliens all at once, which you are expected to use your hugely-buffed Plasmacaster on (It costs less, is still horribly lethal, and its shots will turn in midair to chase locked-on targets, removing basically all the challenge of fighting Aliens) to rapidly kill them all, at which point the wave is over and you're free to Medicomp and Energy Sifter away all the consequences with zero fear of danger jumping you while you recover. This is further compounded by AvP 2 choosing to outright signal when attack waves are coming and when they're completely dead by having combat music kick in when a wave spawns and go away when the wave is dead, completely destroying any possibility of eg thinking you're done and then being killed while you're pulling out the Energy Sifter because actually the wave wasn't over.

AvP 2's Predator campaign inherits the mechanics of the 1999 game, but the changes it does make largely serve to ruin the experience. The Alien campaign is at least different. The Predator campaign is just worse, with its only tolerably decent portion being the section shortly after you've been captured and you thus are lacking key equipment, including most critically the Energy Sifter.

AvP 2010, meanwhile, radically overhauls the mechanics, but keeps the 'spirit'. You don't burn energy on cloaking at all, which removes cloaking from the resource management equation, but this is overall a net improvement because the way cloaking worked in the 1999 game strongly encouraged only activating the cloak when you were just about to be encountering humans and turning it off once there were no humans, which was a silly memorization/optimization game that actively detracted from the resource management aspect. The 2010 game's approach to cloaking does away with that bit of dumbness, which particularly serves to make the experience more accessible and less frustrating to new players without substantially changing the experience of someone who's on their third playthrough.

Health and energy have been overhauled to be more explicitly and consistently resource management mechanics: energy no longer recharges on its own, so there's no incentive to sit around and wait, but unlike AvP 2 energy isn't unlimited. Same basic deal with health: instead of burning an unlimited resource on healing yourself with a Medicomp, there's a limited number of Health Shards on a given map for you to heal yourself with. There's even a micro-resource-management game here, since a Health Shard is always a full heal (ie optimally you use a Health Shard when you're down to your last unit of health) but combat can get fairly lethal fairly quickly. (ie it's a judgment call whether you should heal when half-dead to avoid being all-dead in the next fight or wait until you've taken some more damage to avoid wasting as much of the Health Shard's healing)

The Plasmacaster and to a lesser extent the Mines are framed into a paradigm of, essentially, 'you can skip the melee minigame against Aliens and/or the stealth minigame against Aliens, but only so many times due to the energy costs'. This is a bit different from the 1999 game's overall balancing act of your resources, but it's still a resource management balancing act, just one that more explicitly places the burning of your resources as a 'cheat' that lets you skip playing the game 'properly'.

Things do unfortunately break down somewhat as you acquire the Disc and especially the Combistick, which are both unlimited-use tools that let you basically ignore the melee minigame and stealth minigame, respectively. The Combistick is arguably even worse than AvP 2's Speargun, since a sufficiently inept player in AvP 2 could actually run out of ammo and be forced to turn to other measures, where the Combistick's only flaw is that the projectile travels slowly, which would be more of a flaw if enemies would actually track its trajectory back to the player. As-is, it just means bad aim will slow down the endgame, but not inject any real challenge into it.

AvP 2010 is not perfect in this regard, but it's clear that on some level Rebellion was still grasping the same core principles that the 1999 game was built around, where AvP 2 reused the mechanics and yet managed to completely butcher their purpose... and not because it had its own, equally interesting paradigm in mind.

Next time, we wrap up this comparison with the Marine.

Comments

Popular Posts