Checkpointification and Storytelling
I tend to be pretty harsh on the stories of a lot of modern shooters.
Checkpointification is why.
What?
Checkpointification works basically like this;
You want to tell a story with your game. You want the player to go through a specific experience, densely packed with reactions as they go, so that they experience it as 'lifelike'.
So, first of all, your game needs to be constrained and controlled. You can't dump a player into an open-ended environment, give them a map with some objective markers, and let them pull it off however they like. No, your game is a glorified series of corridors trying to pretend they're not, so you can funnel the player from one carefully-controlled sequence to the next.
And since your game is really about its story and not the gameplay, you don't really care about ensuring the player can pass the challenges of the game on their own merits. In fact, you don't really want them repeating chunks of the game if you can avoid it -repeating the same twenty minutes of story is irritating and actually gets in the way of the experience, after all. And you've already made the game conveniently linear, so you incorporate checkpoints; now the player never has to repeat more than maybe five minutes at a time unless they actually want to replay the game.
Ah, but now that you've incorporated checkpoints, you have to structure the gameplay appropriately. You can't make resource management a significant mechanic; having the player keep dying on the last battle of a level because they were low on health and out of ammo when they got to the checkpoint is just obnoxious and unfair. Which means you need to either do away with those mechanics entirely -regenerating health, for example- or you need to ensure that every checkpoint throws replacement resources at the player before the next fight, and either way resource management just plain isn't a part of the game.
That's a layer of strategy lost.
You also can't do a lot to really challenge the player. In a non-checkpointed game, it's acceptable design to do something like provide a rocket launcher in the first five minutes of the level, and then thirty-five minutes in they encounter a target that's extremely challenging unless you saved up the rocket launcher for this moment. In a checkpointed game, you have to have the rocket launcher right there. This ends up damaging the ability of the game to really convey a sense of a wide range of threat levels; instead of 'I'm gonna need to break out the rocket launcher for this threat, and boy am I glad I held onto those rockets' being how you respond to big nasties, the response is 'so where did they put the rocket launcher they're going to expect me to kill it with?'
That's another layer of gameplay lost.
Then there's the direct implications of the checkpoints themselves. Completing a single level in a game that lacks checkpoints is generally a pretty good indication that you know what you're doing. Maybe you lucked through part of a level without really understanding why you beat that piece of it, but you certainly didn't blindly fumble through the whole thing. Not so with checkpoints: you can literally beat an entire 40-minute level without ever having any clue what you're doing. After all, each blind, fumbling flailing attempt that happens to get through one fight is promptly rewarded with a checkpoint. A player who doesn't know what they're doing will take longer to beat the game, but they never really have to learn skills.
I don't really have words for how completely this is gutting what makes a game a game.
So:
Checkpointification directly harms the gameplay. It constricts and constrains it, closes off important layers of strategy and even interferes with the core of what makes a game a game, and it's in clear service of supporting using the game as a vehicle to tell a story.
I'm not a big fan of making a video game where you gut the gameplay in the first place, but I could put up with it if these games routinely had amazing stories.
But the fact is, even though so many checkpointified shooters are so obviously focused on their story... their stories are pretty crap.
That's a whole lot of downside from this process, and the payoff is nowhere near worth it.
And that's why I'm generally pretty critical of their stories.
Checkpointification is why.
What?
Checkpointification works basically like this;
You want to tell a story with your game. You want the player to go through a specific experience, densely packed with reactions as they go, so that they experience it as 'lifelike'.
So, first of all, your game needs to be constrained and controlled. You can't dump a player into an open-ended environment, give them a map with some objective markers, and let them pull it off however they like. No, your game is a glorified series of corridors trying to pretend they're not, so you can funnel the player from one carefully-controlled sequence to the next.
And since your game is really about its story and not the gameplay, you don't really care about ensuring the player can pass the challenges of the game on their own merits. In fact, you don't really want them repeating chunks of the game if you can avoid it -repeating the same twenty minutes of story is irritating and actually gets in the way of the experience, after all. And you've already made the game conveniently linear, so you incorporate checkpoints; now the player never has to repeat more than maybe five minutes at a time unless they actually want to replay the game.
Ah, but now that you've incorporated checkpoints, you have to structure the gameplay appropriately. You can't make resource management a significant mechanic; having the player keep dying on the last battle of a level because they were low on health and out of ammo when they got to the checkpoint is just obnoxious and unfair. Which means you need to either do away with those mechanics entirely -regenerating health, for example- or you need to ensure that every checkpoint throws replacement resources at the player before the next fight, and either way resource management just plain isn't a part of the game.
That's a layer of strategy lost.
You also can't do a lot to really challenge the player. In a non-checkpointed game, it's acceptable design to do something like provide a rocket launcher in the first five minutes of the level, and then thirty-five minutes in they encounter a target that's extremely challenging unless you saved up the rocket launcher for this moment. In a checkpointed game, you have to have the rocket launcher right there. This ends up damaging the ability of the game to really convey a sense of a wide range of threat levels; instead of 'I'm gonna need to break out the rocket launcher for this threat, and boy am I glad I held onto those rockets' being how you respond to big nasties, the response is 'so where did they put the rocket launcher they're going to expect me to kill it with?'
That's another layer of gameplay lost.
Then there's the direct implications of the checkpoints themselves. Completing a single level in a game that lacks checkpoints is generally a pretty good indication that you know what you're doing. Maybe you lucked through part of a level without really understanding why you beat that piece of it, but you certainly didn't blindly fumble through the whole thing. Not so with checkpoints: you can literally beat an entire 40-minute level without ever having any clue what you're doing. After all, each blind, fumbling flailing attempt that happens to get through one fight is promptly rewarded with a checkpoint. A player who doesn't know what they're doing will take longer to beat the game, but they never really have to learn skills.
I don't really have words for how completely this is gutting what makes a game a game.
So:
Checkpointification directly harms the gameplay. It constricts and constrains it, closes off important layers of strategy and even interferes with the core of what makes a game a game, and it's in clear service of supporting using the game as a vehicle to tell a story.
I'm not a big fan of making a video game where you gut the gameplay in the first place, but I could put up with it if these games routinely had amazing stories.
But the fact is, even though so many checkpointified shooters are so obviously focused on their story... their stories are pretty crap.
That's a whole lot of downside from this process, and the payoff is nowhere near worth it.
And that's why I'm generally pretty critical of their stories.
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