Prototype (Xbox 360)
How not to make an open-world action game
6/16/2009 5:06 PM | 34 Comments | Page 3 of 4
What's Hot: Dynamically generated urban chaos; Some inventive combat powers
What's Not: Aimless game world; Pointless game progression; Lots of stuff that doesn't matter
All these potentially nifty abilities just get dumped into your lap with the game design's characteristic shrug. "Here's some stuff we thought of,"
Prototype says. "You can use it if you want to. You don't have to. Something to do." I imagine
Prototype looks like Eeyore when it says this. It has very little energy or enthusiasm as a game design. Sure, there's lot of stuff happening randomly on-screen. Civilians run pell-mell. A car bangs plastically into another car. Some dudes shoot at other dudes. A rocket knocks me over. I buy a hammer-punch upgrade in which I fling myself for a city block and smack into something. Yeah, cool, whatever. I just walloped a soldier. I could have just as well stuck him with my giant unlikely tendril or hijacked a tank to drive over him or shot him with a gun or just glided over him with my silly flying ability, ignoring him altogether. I run up a wall and jump over a street and I don't care at all. It's just something to do. Or not. If you don't want to. Whatever. The problem isn't the variety. The problem is that it leads nowhere.
Prototype is smothered by its own existentialism. I toggle my vision mode. Some people glow. Others don't. Whatever.
Then there are the story missions, full of rigidly scripted stuff you have to do -- like fighting a goo monster come to Times Square straight out of a Metroid game. There are plenty of terrible gimmicks involving some one-off system of staying near a helicopter, or keeping the attention of a monster, or scanning water towers.
Prototype goes from strangely passive and uncaring to demanding and linear. One moment it's a sad little Eeyore of a game, and the next it's the girlfriend from hell expecting you to read her mind and know exactly what to do. Until then: You. Shall. Not. Pass. That's when you'll yell at your cat.
Another thing to do
This is something else you can do, but I'm not exactly sure what it is.
There's shapeshifting, which a better design would have harnessed to give the game a touch of John Carpenter's "The Thing." That's obviously what the developers intended. Instead, it's just a way to drop some forced stealth missionry into the game. The stealth kills look absolutely absurd. You walk around military bases, swallowing soldiers in plain sight to unlock pointless weapon upgrades. Four levels of upgrade for an assault rifle I never needed and only used a couple of times out of idle curiosity? Something to do. You can eat people to steal their memories. In reality, this is just a pointless collectible system that doles out bits of the story. It has no gameplay implications. Something to do.
All the while,
Prototype is tracking the amount of money I've cost the military, and the number and types of casualties I've inflicted, as if I should care, as if it has an effect on gameplay. It doesn't. But there it is anyway, in my face after every single mission and every single shoot-out, keeping count as if it mattered.
Prototype is full of things that don't matter. In fact, I'd say it consists almost entirely of things that don't matter. It's a worst-case example of how to do an open-world action game: Create an uninspired Devil May Cry fighting system with a dozen different types of punches, create a set of linear scripted missions, and then build around them a lot of pointless filler. Open-world shouldn't mean inconsequential. Freedom shouldn't mean aimless. And variety is never a stand-in for game design. Ultimately, these are the things that made me yell at my cat. Twenty hours with a game this poorly made will put anyone in a bad mood.
