Editorials and Features
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Editorials and Features |
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Article by: MrCHUPON |
 ARTICLE: 24: The Game - How to Keep it from Sucking [Written 2004-10-18]
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The concept, if you don't already know, is that each full season represents a single day. With 24 episodes, the entire day from hour 1 to hour 24 is covered. Jack Bauer, an agent of Los Angeles' Counter Terrorist Unit, is the center of the story, although emphasis shifts to other characters very frequently. Thus, the show is basically a non-stop day in the life of these characters, who thus far have been involved three different national crises. Whether or not the next season or subsequent seasons need to be on a national scope is irrelevant -- the basis is that Jack Bauer is due for a sleepless day full of action and danger. It's an awesome show that I cannot bear to see destroyed by haphazard development houses and publishers looking to cash in on the show's explosive concept. If you ask me, though, with a little bit of homework and dedication (and having me as a consultant on the project *cough* heehee), 24: The Videogame could be a game almost as excellent as the show itself.  This would be a dream come true. If they do it right. THE POINTS OF ISSUE The Show's High Concept The big gimmick about 24 is the 24 hours, and how everything supposedly happens in real time. We've seen a global time limit imposed in videogames before -- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and Pikmin come to mind, although the Zelda game wasn't truly under a limit per se. So the question is now, how can this be incorporated into the gameplay and not suck balls? The Story Part of what makes 24 so engaging is the story. It may not be necessarily realistic or even well-written (sometimes there's a twist just for the sake of a twist), but it's always enthralling and for me has not been "bad" yet. The issue isn't only, "How do we write a good story?" Other issue here is how you would incorporate the story into the gameplay without disrupting the pacing of the experience, and how to tie it into the time concept I spoke of just above. A cutscene every hour? That's not faithful to the show. A blotillion cutscenes during each hour? That would kill the gameplay. The Gameplay And speaking of the gameplay, how would you emulate Jack Bauer's experience? I'm pretty sure it's tempting for the developers to slap together a poorly implemented game that has you running around and shooting people. Not that this is a bad genre, but it's easy to make it ultimately boring by just throwing a bunch of guys at you and giving you a gun. My worst nightmare would be for 24: The Game be some stupid FMV game or a half-a$$ed investigation game like the CSI or Law & Order games. A Possible Solution Ah, The French Before I even continue, I would have nominated Ubisoft to come in and do the development for the game. From that news byte from the uber-hot Elisha Cuthbert, I know some team from London is already doing it, which is too bad. So I'm hoping it's a respectable developer. But if I had it my way, again: Ubisoft. You'll see why in a minute. Sam Fisher, meet Jack Bauer The character Jack Bauer has done many a covert operation in his day. Viewers will notice that while most of his action is run-and-gun, Jack also employs spy tactics to achieve his goals. Though the emphasis is more on going undercover and acting and less on creeping silently in the dark, a game similar to Splinter Cell which is goal based and not necessarily dependent on gunplay all day every day would fit nicely. Like Sam Fisher, Jack also has to be athletic and capable of controlling his body in ways that will allow to get where he needs to go. Jack was a member of SWAT early in his career and is a freaking counter-terrorist field agent, for chrissakes. He has to be able to get places with minimal weaponry -- watch every season thus far and you'll rarely see Jack run around with more than a small firearms. This would effectively lead 24: The Game from being an absurd platformer or a balls-out shooting game like Gungrave. (While I'm a fan of those games, if you're going to make a 24 game, I want it to be faithful to the show. Otherwise it's not 24.) Gameplay would be objective-based, slow and fast paced depending on the scenario, and versatile. Just like the gameplay of Splinter Cell. Unfortunately this would also make the game very linear, if we were to simply say, "Take Splinter Cell and skin it with 24 textures!" So there should be some well-implemented variety in here, at least to take away from some of the linearity. Like in Deus Ex, Jack could take two or more different routes to accomplish his objectives.  A game where Jack Bauer plays like Sam Fisher has excellent potential. Ultimately I would like for Jack himself to control similar to Sam Fisher, in addition to having the overall gameplay routines resemble Splinter Cell and Deus Ex. Jack, however, has to be more lethal than Sam from a gunplay stand point. The game should allow for more intense firefights, and that means imposing less restrictions on ammo. Sam Fisher is ideally all sneak, all the time; Jack Bauer is not. Consequentially Jack should be able to pick up any enemy's weapons, but a line must be drawn so that Jack is not carring a shotgun, sniper rifle, five pistols, seven grenades and a rocket launcher in his back pocket. And when Jack needs to be covert or do athletic shenanigans, he should have to ditch the bigger weapons should they impede his physical progress. I'm tempted to say that the developers could also implement a dialogue engine that has you choosing responses to questions if you're, say, going undercover and interfacing with the enemy, but then it would be too canned. If the player answers wrong s/he would just keep restarting from a save until s/he got the answer right. No fun, no good. Have we reached the point where we can truly affect the outcome of a videogame with our choices, in a game storyline plays a major role, and not have the game crash or mess up in any strange way? Gamers have seen this somewhat with Deus Ex: Invisible War and, although I personally haven't delved into that game yet, I would say something like the tactics Warren Spector and his team used could be employed. The challenge is keeping it in the 24 hour period. For now, I say nix the dialogue choices as a gameplay element. Goal and Story Setups Which brings me to how our developer should tell the story. First and foremost, the publisher should do anything and everything in its power to get the real writers from the show. They should not be allowed full autonomy to write the script without working closely with the developers, because not all screenwriting works well together in a gameplay scenario. But they should be there so that the story, frankly, doesn't suck. Continuing with the authenticity, anything and everything in the publisher's power should be done to get the real actors to voice the characters, or at the very least, Kiefer Sutherland, to voice Jack. Unless, of course, the story is written for different main characters. The developers should give the liberty of accomplishing certain goals by whenever, but should also set hard stops -- the ability to finish earlier than a non-negotiable deadline. If a terrorist tells Jack he must do something within the hour under penalty of a nationwide attack, then Jack can get it done anytime before that hour is up. Although the show has a dramatic four-second countdown at the end of each hour, this does not have to happen when you accomplish goals. This can simply be dropped in at the end of each hour. Confused? Let's expand the terrorist situation from before. It is 1:00pm. Jack is given until 2:00pm to do something. The terrorist also has something else to be done by 3:00pm, but the player isn't notified of this yet. Jack completes this first task by 1:51pm. It's up to the developer, but the terrorist does not have to wait until 2:00pm to call Jack and say, "Now you must do THIS by 3:00pm." The developer can choose to do this if so desired but doesn't need to be restricted to do this. Of course, the team will have to figure out what to have jack do until the beginning of the next goal. Have him run around to find more ammo? Restore health? Forget the whole real-time thing and just skip to an hour-ending cutscene? I'm fine with all of those options. The main requirement is that a game ending goal has to be done within 24 hours, and the development team should be responsible for figuring out a way to space out all the other goals that have to be accomplished in such a way to give the player the guidance and the ability to achieve this 24-hour goal. It would be massively upsetting if the development team accidentally gave the player an extra half hour to complete a goal during the middle of the game, only to have the player take full advantage of that extra half hour and then be stuck with no way to finish the game before half-past hour 24. This is, in essence, is why I said the developers have to employ hard stops before. Don't dawdle, or the game's over. Presenting... For presentation's sake, the cutscenes could be dropped in every time Jack reaches a goal. The time counter would appear during the cutscene, and it would be real-time; if, from 1:03:03 pm, you took sixteen minutes and thirty-one seconds to achieve a smaller goal, the cutscene would display 1:19:34. Ideally goals and major plot points would be engineered so that they end on the hour, to keep the feel of the show -- but if it makes the gameplay stilted and badly placed, this is a sacrifice that should not be tolerated. I'm confident that the game could work in this hourly manner, though. Jack would receive cell phone calls and interactions with his colleagues from within CTU as a means for getting his goals. None of that boring text introduction at the beginning of an hour. For the sake of gameplay and pacing, though, cutscenes and traveling by car (unless it's a chase scene) should be skippable by the player. I know it cuts into the "real time" aspect, but imagine going through the same cutscene every time you died or made a mistake and had to restart the mission. Nuh uh. I'm not having it. For that reason, every dialogue and piece of information should be recorded by a log. The game absolutely must not be presented like a Grand Theft Auto title unless they can illicit the same kind of tension present in the show. GTA's claim to fame is its non-linearity and liberating openness -- almost to the point where you feel so free to do whatever you so desire. Jack is not free to do anything. Jack has to do his job, to do it fast and do it well. It's a question of whether he will get it done in time. And, there should be room for goal failure, even if it ends up being scripted -- many times, the show has people dying or protagonists failing at some tasks. The idea is to mask this "failure" and present it during a plot point -- the goal could be as simple as reaching a destination, and the actual failure is played out. The player shouldn't think s/he messed up, then restart his game from a save. Can They Do It? Chances are the game is going in a totally different direction, and it will probably suck. I know tons of people who would buy it, but even as avid a fan of the show, I would refuse to buy it just to see Jack Bauer on my PC. The reason is twofold: (a) Regardless of it supporting the show financially, it would be a disgrace to the 24 name from an artistic standpoint. I do not encourage this type of cashing in -- even if it is paying Kiefer's paycheck. Otherwise I would have bought every single sucky Simpsons game out there. (b) It's an insult to videogames, which I value as much as this show. I will not tolerate this, either. Otherwise I would have bought every single sucky Simpsons game out there. (Ok ok, I'll stop ragging on the Simpsons games.) Here's a toast in hoping that whoever is developing 24: The Game won't make a mockery out of the shows and of videogames. |
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