I beat Infamous last night. I won’t argue it was a lot of fun, but I have a huge problem with the Karma system. I guess this applies to every game that tries to use a good/evil system. And I know I’m not alone in thinking this (check out Zero Punctuation; he even reviews this game).
For those of you who don’t play video games, or haven’t played one that involves Karma, here’s the deal: Do bad things (steal, murder, commit selfish acts, etc), and there are consequences. Some games will have characters interact with you differently, or even refuse to associate with you. There are often powers, items and missions that only characters with enough bad deeds can use or access. Doing good things, as you can imagine, is essentially the inverse of those things. You can talk to Fred McSaintly, but Tony Stabyouintheface is more likely to… you know.
Anyway, in the case of Infamous, I saw some things that were really annoying.
Good or bad, your choices lead to the same results – True, I haven’t played all that far into my evil path file (I think I’m about halfway done with the Neon District), but I haven’t sensed much of a difference so far.
SPOILERS!
I came to a door that was barred by some poor guy. A gang took his wife hostage, and threatened to kill her if he didn’t lock down the gate (since he’s the engineer). He didn’t know they had already killed her. The Good option was to tell him the truth, which causes him to open the gate and ask you to get revenge for him. The Evil option was to blast him through the gate. I’m not sure why it automatically opened after he was dead. Either way, I got though the gate, and never saw the engineer again. See? The only consequence of that choice was which column the Karma points were added to. Bleh.
/SPOILERS.
Another problem I see is motivation. Why does the character make these choices? Infamous starts out well. Your first mission is to retrieve food provisions that were just dropped via plane into the city you’re quarantined in. When you (Cole) get there, your first Karma Kodak Moment comes up. Cole’s internal dialogue is debating whether to share the food with other citizens, or grab it all for himself, his girlfriend, and his annoying best bud. He would just have to zap one of the strangers with his cool new electricity powers, and they’d scatter. The food would allow Cole and co to live comfortably for a few months, but others would probably starve to death.
That’s a good start. Cole doesn’t strike me as a bad person, but he’s starving, desperate, and now has the power to take what he wants with relative ease. You don’t need a history of puppy kicking and stealing candy from babies, to screw the high ground in this situation. The problem is, he doesn’t change. It’s hard to go through the same game again, doing horrible, evil things, through a character that is as reluctant to do evil as he was when the game started. Seriously, he’s not just “not a bad person.” He has a good heart. He’s no saint, but he downright WOULDN’T do some of the things I’m choosing to do.
There is character development (well, somewhat), but it’s based on the story, not my choices. No matter what choices I make, good or bad, the story doesn’t really change in nature, so neither does Cole. I don’t want a different ending alone. I want more. If a game claims it has replayability, I expect to see something fresh all the way through my second playthrough. If all I get is a different ending, then all the time I spent working my way to the end again does not count towards replayability. Besides, I have a bad feeling that this game falls prey to the mistake I’ve seen other Karma games make (KotOR, for instance). The last choice. The last. God. Damn. Choice.
At least in terms of which ending you get in KotOR (save the galaxy and let peace reign, or become ruler of the Sith and kill all the Jedi), nothing you do matters, except the final choice. Seriously. Be a sadistic freak who feeds his allies to the rancor. Collect protection money from people so poor they have to pay with the money they get their diabetes medication with, and then kill them anyway. In the end, you can still say, “Come on, let’s go save the galaxy!” That pisses me off so much. What was the point of everything else, if in the end it’s all negated?
Ben Croshaw (the guy who does Zero Punctuation) once said something about games while reviewing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, that I like a lot. He stressed the importance of immersion. If there are things in a game that are so wrong, that they pull you out of the experience, and you remember “Oh yeah, I’m sitting in my living room, playing a video game, NOT flying off rooftops, dodging bullets and shooting lighting from my fingertips,” then it fails.
And before you say it, no, the things in that last line do not break immersion. That’s what exposition is for. While giving you backstory and describing the setting, it’s also telling you the RULES of the world you’re about to experience. Sometimes it will use words. Other times, it will be images, or just be implied. Did you get pissed and stop watching The Lion King because lions can’t really talk, or did you just sort of accept it without giving it too much thought? In Infamous, phenomena (how often do you get to use that word?) such as channeling electricity through one’s body, telekinesis, and telepathy, exist, though they are extremely rare. “Gotcha, time to play.”
Let’s say your best friend, whom you’ve known all your life, was a saint (because no one’s perfect in the real world… that’s why there’s Walgreens). One day, he comes into your house, destroys everything, and mugs you. Wouldn’t your first thought be that something weird was going on? Has he gone crazy? Was he drugged? Is someone making him do this? Or is that not Fred at all? That’s how I feel about Cole. Rather than feeling like I am Cole, the main character, I feel like I’m someone with mind control powers, following Cole around and making him do things he wouldn’t do.
Maybe I’m asking too much. I’m essentially demanding a character that starts off totally neutral and apathetic to the world around him, but once the story starts, can be swayed EITHER way in a couple days. That would be even harder to believe. Hmph.
Fu out.
