T w e n t y S i d e d

I can understand why the developer would want to cutscene through Polis. It’s a massive space and making it available to the player would have been expensive. You need collision hulls to keep the player from jumping out of the level. You need to populate it with people. You need to voice and lip-sync at least SOME of the people so it doesn’t feel like everyone has been lobotomized. People need to be animated so they aren’t rigid. You’d need to make a couple of new art assets because having the exact same bar with the exact same arrangement of posters in two different towns would likely be immersion-breaking. You’d also need some shopkeepers and sales chatter. (I don’t mean the gun vendors. I mean like the food vendors we see in other towns.)

If you’re worried about budget, Polis is probably the most sensible place to cut corners. Having said that, it really did sting to spend the entire game getting here only to be carried through by cutscene rails.

It’s probably hard to tell from our footage, but the cutscenes are really annoying. The game cuts you loose to shop, but if you get too close to your friend (like, maybe you were hoping to look at the OTHER half of this tiny room?) then it grabs your camera and begins the cutscene that shoves you out of town. It doesn’t even have the decency to give you a “are you ready?” prompt. The shopping is the only interactivity in all of Polis. The rest is cutscene.

A shame, really. Understandable, but a shame.

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.

The Freddie Wong video we mentioned is here: Splinter Cell: Lightbulb Assassin. This ties in nicely with the conversation we had about stealth in Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light. And really, it also relates to stealth in just about every stealth-optional shooter. The stealth is often silly, absurd nonsense.

I think the reason for this is that it’s prohibitively difficult to make stealth mechanics that are both sensible and fun. Stealth is complex and involves a lot of fussing with AI. If I was actually guarding a single dark room all by myself for hours, I would very likely be extremely sensitive to even the slightest sounds. I’d notice if a door was open, a chair was moved, a light was off, a shadow moved, or a friend was missing. I’d hear someone (particularly a grown man with a lot of gear) hitting the ground in the next room. And if anything spooked me I’d likely keep my back to the wall and turn on every light at my disposal. If not out of a sense of duty, then out of a sense of self-preservation and a desire to fill the time. I mean, I literally have nothing else to do. And even if I didn’t find any enemies, I’d be paranoid for the rest of my shift.

And of course, knocking out a human being in a single non-lethal blow is incredibly difficult. It’s very unlikely anyone could do it reliably and silly to imagine they could do it silently. There is no way a full-grown man in combat gear could slink around silently in an unfamiliar building while carrying three full-sized firearms, particularly when the inhabitants are bored, jumpy, and intimately familiar with the space. And if the place is made of crumbling concrete and creaking wood? And everyone spends their days worrying about monsters and ghosts? No way.

But none of this matters. Sneaking around in the dark and knocking people out makes for really fun gameplay. It adds tension. It has a lot of interesting mechanical trade-offs between safety and expediency. It usually adds another whole dimension to what would otherwise be a monotonous shooter. There are already well-established rules for how these systems work and most players have kind of made peace with these contrivances. It’s understood and expected that guards will walk predictable routes, that they will talk to themselves to communicate their current mental state to the player, and that they will drop back into patrol mode after only a minute or two. None of this is realistic, but it’s unrealistic in a familiar way and so it doesn’t shatter immersion the same way that unrealistic but unexpected behavior will.

The point is: It would be incredibly difficult to make stealth realistic, and if you somehow succeeded then it would probably just make stealth gameplay impossible or boring.

So any would-be game designer has to design their game knowing that somewhere, SOMETHING is going to not make any dang sense. Some part of stealth has got to be a silly contrivance.

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.

I like to think that Josh died over and over again on purpose so that the level transition would line up perfectly with the end-of-episode. That was nice of him.

I’ve had a week to think about it, and I still can’t place that movie quote. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it went something like this:

A vampire gets shot in the chest and shrugs it off. He says something along the lines of, “I’ve been stabbed, drowned, burned, and hung, but I’ve never been shot before. [scratches chest] Kind of itches a little.”

The first person to identify the movie gets a single slice of Processed American Orange Cheese-like Product. (Everyone else gets two.)

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.

If you’re new to the show and don’t understand the jokes about going off the map, it’s a reference to Railroad to Nowhere.

I’m playing through Metro: Last Light now, and I’m very glad they retained the “American Cheese” look of the health packs. Which makes me wonder: Is American Cheese available outside of the US? If so, do people actually buy it? What does McDonald’s put on their hamburgers in other countries? Can you buy American Cheese in a store? Has anyone (American or not) ever had American Cheese that wasn’t in pre-sliced, shrink-wrapped form? I’ve never seen it available as anything other than slices.

I used to defend American Cheese, saying they were pretty good on toasted cheese sandwiches. Which is true. But then one day we ran out of American Cheese and I discovered that toasted cheese sandwiches are better with literally any other form of cheese.

This is not to imply I’m some sort of cheese connoisseur. I eat sharp cheddar, which isn’t exactly an exotic cheese.

Anyway, we’re through the rough spot in the middle of Metro 2033. It gets better from here.

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.