“Could you do me a favor”, rasps the old man? My right hand begins to tremble, my mind begins to race. I begin to pray, oh please, please, please don’t let this be a delivery quest. I click continue on his speech bubble. “I will pay you handsomely”, the old man continues. Oh god, now I have to accept it, why couldn’t it just a crumby token reward so I could abandon this quest and be done with it. I click the speech bubble again and hear the words I dread. “Would you kindly take this package to…”. GOD DAMNIT!!! I cry as I bring my fist down on my keyboard, causing my PC to promptly respond with a Blue Screen. This quest, like many others, provides an objective that has plagued not only RPGs, but most Action games as well.
The objective I speak of is the infamous go from point A to point B and nothing else. No combat, no mini games, no entertainment, just continuous running broken up only by the occasional direction readjustment. The tedium is palpable as you enter a portion of the game that can essentially be played by a dipping bird.
That isn’t to say that there haven’t been exceptions, such as wandering through the chilling environments of Silent Hill or even periodically spotting interesting landmarks in the game as trudge through the game world. All in all however, long periods of unbroken movement in gaming have been an exercise in boredom and little else.
The reason for the aforementioned boredom and tedium comes from the simple fact that their is nothing to require input from the player other than the occasional directional adjustment. Their is no suspense, mini-games, no fighting, and overall, nothing to hold your interest. While the environment might give you pause for admiration, after awhile, many game environments begin to recycle environments and you are left without distractions once more. If it weren’t for a particularly gripping storyline or the promise of a reward at the end of it all, I suspect most gamers would close the game in frustration at this tired old game mechanic for artificially lengthening games.
There is hope however, as games like Assassins Creed, which while by no means a perfect game, has striven to make the long stretches of running fun. This is achieved through the game’s touted Parkour movement system, whereby your character (Altair in the game) can scale and cross virtually any obstacle with protruding objects through a series of acrobatic movements. It’s fluid, challenging, and most of all engaging as you have to constantly make decisions on which route to take as a misjudged jump will result in a nasty fall and potentially death. While Assassin’s Creed loads on the point A to point B objectives, it offers an engaging mini-game alternative to the typical eyes glazed over, one key, one click method prominent in most Action and RPG games on the market currently. I hope game developers will take a page from Assassin’s Creed in how they go about implementing movement in future games. Long periods of movement don’t have to brain killing slog fests, they can be entertaining, engaging, and dare I say, fun.
