T w e n t y S i d e d

How many games use “Detective Vision” these days? The Arkham series is the first usage I know of, but now we also have Witcher, Tomb Raider, and Dishonored. It’s been years since I played Assassins Creed, but I seem to remember some sort of alternate vision in that game. I think one of the Far Cry games used it?

So then the developer comes to the problem: We want the player to be able to use “detective mode” (or whatever it’s called in this game) but we don’t want them to leave it on all the time.

I like the Tomb Raider solution best: It takes a second for the vision to fade in, and it gets canceled when you move. This makes it something you do to survey the space before you act, not something you toggle at will.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Like we mentioned in earlier episodes: The game keeps making callbacks to the original assassination scene. We revisit here in Knife of Dunwall, and (according to the rest of the cast) we get another look at it in Dishonored 2. That’s good, inasmuch as it makes it feel like that one event continues reverberate through the world. History is most interesting as a chain of cascading cause and effect, rather than as a list of isolated events.

But it also means the entire series is kind of hobbled by the rushed and shallow opening of the first game. The story is making callbacks to a moment that had almost no emotional punch. We’re betrayed by people we’ve never heard of, blamed for the death of someone we just met, and lose the honor and prestige of a job we never got to do. Yes, I realize that this is a big moment for Corvo. But that’s my point: The story didn’t give us time to connect with the protagonist and his life before it pulled the rug out from under him. Magnifying the importance of the assassination also magnifies this shortcoming in the story. It’s like if the KOTOR universe turned on the death of short-lived tutorial buddy Trask.

Actually, it’s even worse than that. I mean, we spent a good ten minutes with Trask before he hilariously failed to defeat a Sith. But the empress dies in the same conversation where she’s introduced.

If they’d just spent a little more time on that opening, it would be paying dividends now.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In this episode we were talking about the end of the Brown Age of videogames, when game developers finally stopped acting like mud and concrete dust were the magic ingredients to photorealism. Chris mentioned that Mass Effect 3 and Max Payne 3 both came out the same year. This created the strangest sensation of temporal confusion for me. It was like the time-based version of looking at an optical illusion. I can’t believe those games were contemporary.

If you’d asked me to guess, I’d have said Max Payne 3 came out at least two or three years before Mass Effect 3. I’d also have said that Borderlands 2 was much closer to the present – perhaps 2014 or so. But nope, it was also a 2012 title.

I think the reason for this is that when I can’t remember a specific release date I tend to judge the age of a game by how long it’s been since it was relevant. Certain crazy people were still banging on about Mass Effect 3 as recently as last year. Meanwhile, Max Payne sort of vanished from the conversation right after it came out. It wasn’t a bad game, but it was the equivalent of one of those movies you forget the day after you see it. The lack of serious flaws made it less memorable than the frustrating and divisive Mass Effect 3.

Regardless of my inability to put games on the timeline, I do think that 2012 makes for a pretty good endpoint of the Brown Age. (To be fair, the problem wasn’t really “brown” so much as a lack of saturation and contrast. But “Low Saturation and Contrast Age” isn’t nearly as catchy.) It does seem to be when things began to really brighten up. 2012 was better than 2011, which was better than 2010.

It’s not that I want every game to be some Willy Wonka funhouse of of colors. A low contrast game is fine if that’s what the tone calls for. The problem was that it was used thoughtlessly, to the point where it made games visually indistinguishable, frequently boring, and sometimes even confusing to play. I think we’re in a pretty good place right now, art-wise. So that’s nice.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.