This is Call of Duty 4, and I’ve carried my crippled superior officer to this extraction point in Pripyat. I put the Captain down by the ferris wheel, where we’re supposed to wait for a helicopter to arrive and get us out of there. Until then we need to hold our ground against the approaching Soviet 1st Respawn Division.The Captain checks out the buildings across the courtyard and instructs me in a level whisper to lay some claymores around the area, then find some cover and take up a sniping position. He starts a timer.
I nod stoically and walk past him, past the ferris wheel, past all the cars, up the steps, back the way we came, into the previous level, until I get to this little corner of an apartment complex where I sit down and hide. Back at the ferris wheel, I start to hear gunshots, explosions and an orchestral score climaxing. The Captain barks over the radio that we are heavily outnumbered. I look at the red dots on the minimap: yeah, definitely.
The chopper takes six and a half minutes to arrive. Six and a half minutes sitting under the sliding window of someone’s abandoned apartment is a long time to think.
To begin with, I notice that I’m speaking in the first person as I go through this story in my head. The reason, I think, is that my character, Price, would never do what I'm doing. Lieutenant Price so absolutely would not desert his comrades at a critical point in battle that, accordingly, the game refuses to recognise it. Captain MacMillan, crippled, abandoned and under fire, keeps calling to me to hold on, hold on for just one more minute, as if I was right there with him. Clearly I've thrown Call of Duty 4 into denial. In this game that’s so scripted and so linear, for the first time I’m calling the shots.
I think about how much I’ve disengaged from the fiction of this game. I’m willing to disregard so much about this heroic fantasy by taking advantage of a cheap exploit.
My Gamertag ought to be scarlet-lettered for what I did, but the game has no idea. This is embarrassing, to a degree; clearly I’m not very hardcore. I’m no Price, for example. But I have lived this exact moment before, multiple times. I’ve tried taking shelter, I’ve tried planting explosives, but no matter what I do, in seconds grenades are landing at my feet, bullets are hitting me in the back and dogs are leaping at my face. I liked Call of Duty 4 and I wanted to continue, but I couldn’t last one more minute in Pripyat.
I’ve been in this kind of place before, in other games, and this is how I know instinctively that a setpiece like this is so far beyond my ability and what the game has required from me to date. It's clear that the only way I can beat a mission like this, with its sparingly-issued checkpoints, is to spend almost the length of the full game on it, being shot in all the same places, hearing all the same soundbites, trying out little variations to come unbearably close to the finish line only to fail once again.I'm at a loss to explain Call of Duty 4's difficulty spike. The heightened pressure builds tension, sure, but unless a player implausibly succeeds on their first attempt, the ensuing repetition and frustration erases it completely. This is not an issue with challenging games generally, but the incongruity of suddenly raising the bar so unusually high and out of nowhere to ratchet up in complexity.
My heart’s not in it, and so I cheat. I’ve cheated before and I know that if Call of Duty 4 has a second mission like this, I won’t hesitate for a second to bail out – and probably wouldn't try as hard to complete it as I might have otherwise. I've established a precedent whereby the rules hold no meaning for me, and my investment in the game’s fiction is pretty much gone. I deliberately screwed up my lines, but nobody noticed. This isn’t real anymore. Right now, the narrative, the atmosphere, the fiction are all losing their power over me. This isn't Pripyat and I'm not Captain Price -- this is just a video game and I'm trying to get through it any way I can.
In this case, I’ve outsmarted the game, and in doing so, I’ve disengaged from it. This game is beneath me now, 'cause I’m not going to give it the courtesy of playing by its rules. I think that this is much the same thing as when I turn down the volume on a video game and instead listen to music or the radio as I play. Even in a game like Far Cry 2 that places a premium on immersion, I’ll do this. It can’t otherwise keep my interest for the 40-hour investment that it asks of me. At these points, I’ve decided that it’s not necessary – or that I’m bored – of the environment and the story. The game becomes nothing more than background entertainment. I tune out the surrounding texture and reduce the gameplay to a series of entirely mechanical and plainly geometric challenges à la the Mirror's Edge time trials.
The change in soundtrack is about gradually being less and less enthralled by a game. Here, in Call of Duty 4, it feels like my hand is forced. I violated reality because of a difficulty spike, and because I’m not good enough to handle it. I broke up with the game, but I don’t believe that it was entirely my fault. I thought about how much I was going to lose if I committed to my cowardice; and conversely how much I cared about investing seriously in the world and fiction of this particular game. Maybe I'll have a change of heart and a genuinely heroic moment, maybe I'll storm into the fray with guns blazing.No, I won’t. After six and a half minutes, the helicopter lands and I crawl out of my hiding place. Picking up the Captain and carrying him into the ‘copter, everyone treats me like I’m a war hero who stuck by his allies and survived against impossible odds. It sounds good, what they’re saying. Maybe next time I’ll try to live up to this kind of praise. Then again, I seriously doubt it.
6 comments:
Games rarely give me the incentive to get through these kind of difficulty spikes nowadays. I'm already putting a whole lot of my time and effort into it - surely that should be enough? I used to try a lot harder, but that belongs to a time when you couldn't look up the rewarding cut-scenes on Youtube or learn about the best shortcuts on Gamefaqs and save yourself all the tedious work that you're really trying to get away from by playing.
There's some pride and manhood at stake here as well. The hardcore community is usually very hard on rookies or unskilled players and the whole high-score culture and the insane things people to do beat a hard game has taught us from the beginning that struggling until your eyes bleed is the right thing to do.
"Hi, my name is Rasmus and I´m a chronic game cheater".
I admit to having done the exact same thing in a ton of games. Pick the easy way out. But i also have to say that my reason for doing so is not because i don't want to experience a high difficulty in a game. Its simply because i don't have the time to repeat a level a million times like i did in the old days. If i had the time, i would likely enjoy spending time trying to beat a game.
But should games then cater for players like us and ignore the more hardcore players? Or vice-versa?
I would love to see more dynamic difficulty systems in games. By that i mean systems like the one seen in L4D where the game´s difficulty actually depends on how well you are doing. I think that a lot of games could learn a lot from that difficulty model.
Didn't you read the instruction manual? All you have to do is burn the rope.
The ease of using internet as a source of information on games and strategies in them has effectively decimated my own initiative on trying to puzzle them out.
While I can appreciate a challenging part of a game to it's fullest, and gain a great deal of satisfaction on completing it, repeating the same part for hours on end is very frustrating. Even more so when I know that a solution which will get me through it in minutes is but a few clicks away.
Completing the challenges that way may not give me as much satisfaction as they would otherwise, but at least I can start experiencing the rest of the game afterwards, a price more than worth my damaged gamer's pride.
That was a bastard part of CoD4, especially since I had already done most of the game easily enough on the toughest difficulty - damn, I should have played at a lower one.
I mainly hid underneath something so the damn dogs and grenades couldn't get me properly.
Ridiculous spike - the running away with him at first was hard (but possible), but that just was so randomly impossible. Makes me wonder why we didn't continue running for 5 minutes in the direction the chopper would come from!
Games sometimes do it - I always couldn't complete certain last-island missions in GTA3, despite completing the other ones before GTA4 in their entirety! (worse still, there is no difficulty selector either for that game, although all of them have their moments of stupid impossibility/sheer luck).
I much prefer in-game abuse and glitches then outright cheating however. Bending the static game rules to my whim, yep, I'm still the hero - after all, my allies are usually invincible, so who cares if the one guy who can actually die hides for a bit?
i loved that part because of mcmillan's accept. swoon!
but yeah, it is a pisser having to play the same part over and over again. now i probably wouldn't be able to finished half of those that i've played in my youth
Post a Comment