I’ve been collecting a lot recently. No, not old videogames. Well, yes, old videogames, but that’s not what I mean. I mean virtual knick-knacks: Relics. Health upgrades. Ancient scrolls. Chicken meat.
I can see you are admiring my impressive collection. Thank you. Where did I amass such an eclectic hoard, you ask? Oh, from playing today’s new games Tomb Raider and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow — Mirror of Fate. Even though they’re both ostensibly rigidly linear action games, for some reason or another the most compelling part of these games for me is the act of exploring everywhere and collecting everything.
When the games drop their objective markers onto the in-game map screens, little spots of light that show me where I should go next, they appear to me not as beacons but stoplights. I’ll go there, but only after I have gone everywhere else that is not there, to see what I might turn up. And wouldn’t you know, I always find some item that gives my character just enough of an incremental upgrade over what I had before that I’ll go look for the next hidden whatever. If it’s implemented with care, this sort of collection-upgrade cycle can add depth (or the appearance of depth) to an otherwise thin game. The action elements can become secondary, in terms of player enjoyment, to the process of efficiently enhancing your character.
Some games can do this well, some do it badly. I’m only a few levels into Tomb Raider , on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC today, but so far it seems to be doing it well. Tomb Raider has managed to capture the feeling of an open-world-style game like Assassin’s Creed while actually being laid out in a quite linear fashion. To get a sense of what the world of Tomb Raider looks like, imagine a string of pearls: a series of small but open fields connected by narrow action segments. As soon as you get into the second of these, the game opens up a little: You can run straight through the trees, over a rickety wooden Japanese bridge to the shrine where the next story scene will play out, or you can break away and start looking all over the place. Do the latter and you will find salvaged parts to upgrade your weapons, relics and documents that fill in more of the game’s story, and deer and wolves you can kill for experience points that allow you to unlock new skills. The new skills allow you to kill more wolves and find more salvage.
But even if you decide to meticulously drain this little forest clearing of all of its treasure — excepting the unreachable bits that the game places tantalizingly out of your reach — you’ll only be exploring around for 15 minutes or so before there’s nothing else to do but move to the next story beat. In this way, Tomb Raider keeps you on track. You can’t just totally ignore the storyline from there on out, as is the case in many truly open-world games. You can’t buff yourself up like crazy so that the rest of the game becomes a boring cakewalk.
And yet, as soon as you complete the next brief, almost entirely uneventful story bit, it opens back up just a little. Those supply chests that you couldn’t pry open? Now you can. So it’s back across the rickety Japanese bridge, kill a couple more wolves on the way, back to that supply chest. Okay, now you can move on.
In this way, Tomb Raider is a unique blend of linearity and non-linearity: You’re constantly kept progressing from beat to beat, but you’re enticed along the way to take little breaks and explore your immediate surroundings to see what you can turn up. Since the game’s presentation is absolutely stunning, just running around looking at things is entertaining in and of itself.
It does reward a little bit of exploration with extra goodies, but these turn out to be of nebulous value. You can level up your character, but he doesn’t do more damage to enemies — just gains a little bit of hit points and extra moves that you rarely need to use. The game is so laughably easy and forgiving that having all that extra health isn’t really much of a benefit. Then again, you don’t know this until it’s too late and you’ve already hunted down lots of items. Backtracking for the ones you missed seems less like a chance to revisit old locations as it does to pad out a rather short game — I finished in 10 hours, and that was including making my way back through rooms I’d already cleared out to go all the way back to the beginning of the castle to pick up another health upgrade. I don’t feel glad that I collected all these things, I feel kind of stupid.
Not only that, there’s a whole gameplay feature that’s there for meticulous backtrackers — you can open up the game’s map, drop a pin, and type a little note to yourself about what you found there. Besides being decidedly less convenient than just having the damn game do this automatically, it’s also a using-a-sledgehammer-to-swat-a-fly type of solution. You can write a massive paragraph to yourself about your thoughts about the inaccessible location:
Or you could just write “door.”
Speaking of long-windedness, you may think this Nintendo 3DS game has too many subtitles. I will tell you that in actuality it doesn’t have nearly enough. Really it should be called Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate: God of War, considering where it took most of its inspiration. The Belmonts control like Kratos, you’re constantly doing Quick Time Events and the rewards are actually giant treasure chests just like the kind Kratos would open. Good thing this made it out one week before the actual new God of War! Mirror of Fate isn’t a bad game, and maybe that’s all this series’ fans were realistically hoping for, but not this sort of not-bad game.
In both Castlevania and Tomb Raider, convincing the player to go for the bonus items is a matter not only of spreading them around but in showing a player what heights he might hope to achieve by getting them. Both games give you a glimpse of the weapon upgrades you can unlock with extra effort, for example. A game must clue you in to why you’re doing this, and it must also make the first few goals achievable quickly — if reward seems too far off, you might get the die-hard collectors but fail to make any new converts.
A recent example of a game that did this badly was Assassin’s Creed III. Soon after that game begins, you’re set loose in the world and can do sidequests, capture animals, and all manner of other things. This could have been an addicting, enjoyable experience save for the fact that the game gave you absolutely no visible reward for doing these things besides the satisfaction of checking them off a list. With no reason to try, I just flat-out ignored a huge amount of the game and raced through the story.
As games become more and more expensive to make, developers ignore these rules at their peril: You’ve got to make players want to collect your collectibles. Just putting them there isn’t enough.
