Xemu's Long-Winded Game Industry Ramblings :: Ending with the Beginning

As you might know if you've finished either game, or just followed 'net scuttlebutt, they both have rather... abbreviated... endings. Both games caused a lot of uproar among their hardcore fans as a result, but having finally gone through the start-to-finish process on both games myself, I think it's a bit overblown.

Halo 2 clearly is setting up for a sequel, and although the recent announcement of an expansion pack didn't promise any single player content I've still got my hopes up. Alas, being employed at Microsoft doesn't give me any magic insight into what our MGS brethren at Bungie will be doing next. But ultimately while it was a cliffhanger, the ending of Halo 2 felt pretty good to me in terms of pacing and really ending the game on a high note. Honestly, I was bothered much more by the plot twist that happens much earlier in the game (which I won't reveal in an attempt to keep this entrry about game endings spoiler free).

Half Life 2, on the other hand, caught me a little more off guard. The chapters early in the midgame take a lot of time to playthrough, so I wasn't expecting the last three to just fly through in a single play session. So when suddenly the credits rolled I was knocked for a loop. Half Life 1 didn't have the clearest ending either, but at least I felt like a sense of closure.

Ultimately though, I'm not sure a bad ending is ever really all that bad. Of course, I'm plenty guilty of this myself -- we were literally scrapping and redesigning the ending of System Shock 1 in the last two months of the project. Our original plan for the end of SS1 was going to involve knocking you out to a fake DOS prompt and making you think SHODAN had taken over your machine, but it was both too "meta" and cut for time reasons. But the endings to Halo 2 and Half Life 2 didn't diminish the fantastic time I had with the games themselves. As they say, it's the journey, not the destination.

I don't think this is true for all games, but it is for most. If Final Fantasy X had never resolved the plotlines about the nature of Sin, Tidus, and Zanarkand, I think it might've tainted my whole enjoyment of that game. I think that style of game is clearly the exception and not the rule.

The reality of the matter is that far, far more people will see the first few levels of your game than the last. So it really makes good development sense to focus a lot of your effort there. Your hardcore fanbase will finish the game, and it's important to keep those folks energized, so having a tremendous finale is still a laudable goal. But if it comes down to polishing one or the other, there's no question that having a strong opening is one of the most vital things for a game.

One of the little "dev tricks" I've picked up over the years to try and tackle this problem is to re-order how you actually build the content. A natural, straightforward approach is to build all your levels in the order that the player will play them. However, unless you have a very mature codebase and toolset, usually the levels you build first are where you are still learning the tools and all the features of the game aren't in yet. So start with the levels in the middle of the game, and save the opening level for last -- that way when you implement it you will have the best possible knowledge about your game's capabilities and how to put it through it's paces.

I picked up a PSP on Thursday... perfect timing as I was flying out for business that very day. Wow! Don't get me wrong, I like my DS and GBA-SP (especially the SP), but the PSP is just a fantastic piece of kit. The thing is all screen, and I'm continually wowed at the visual quality of what it can put out. Every game I picked up supports multiplayer, and actually using it is a breeze. Assuming the core demographic issues don't cause problems for it, Sony has another great game machine.

Here are my micro-reviews of the launch games I played.

Lumines -- Fantastic. I'm a big fan of Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Rez, Space Channel 5) so a stylish puzzle game with a strong musical element is all I could ask for. The way multiplayer works is just perfect.

Metal Gear Acid -- Well, it's Metal Gear Solid implemented as a turn based card game. Given that strange reality, it manages to capture the Metal Gear vibe pretty well. Plus, I'm a sucker for card battle games. I've been enjoying it a lot though it is starting to bog down a little 6-7 missions in.

Wipeout Pure -- On the good side, it's Wipeout, brought to you in all it's Wipeout-y glory. Techno beats, fast gameplay, cool designs. On the bad side, it's Wipeout, yet again. Playing it on the PSP is cool, but it definitely is cut from the exact same cloth as the previous Wipeout games. Load times are a bit of a problem, but the 8-player tournament multiplayer is a lot of fun.

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Re: Ending with the Beginning

by Anonymous on Mon 28 Mar 2005 02:55 AM CST | Permanent Link

I'd heard that the Halo 2 ending was because they had to cut stuff, and it really was rushed. Whereas the Half-Life 2 ending seemed utterly intended--just poorly chosen pacing-wise. That framing story is just annoying in its intentional confusingness and disruptiveness.

To be fair, I really really liked the ending gameplay of HL2. I think it's wrong for games to end with their hardest section; the ending is the time to make the game really fun, not really frustrating. You want an emotional climax, but game designers too often translate that into making it really hard, which isn't the same thing at all. [System Shock 1 was totally guilty of this, unfortunately, and probably unintentionally (we should have just tuned the ending a lot more)--too many people played through on low cyberspace difficulty and just couldn't cope. I literally went and did the final boss battle for a number of people. Then again, I did the level leading up to the final boss of Mario 64 for quite a few people too.] So I thought HL2's final gameplay style was very fun, very funny, and quite an appropriate way to end--plus a final tension clock that reminds me now of Ultima Underworld's ending.

--Sean

Re: Ending with the Beginning

by Anonymous on Mon 28 Mar 2005 05:55 AM CST | Permanent Link

"The reality of the matter is that far, far more people will see the first few levels of your game than the last."
Hmm I'm not too sure this is as true as it used to be, games have been getting shorter, and they also tend to have shallower learning curves nowadays. This is particularly prominant in HL2, IMHO it seems to have the exact same difficulty all the way though, with easier bits at the start and the end. The same applies for most of the current crop of 'narrative' FPSs.

Re: Ending with the Beginning

by Anonymous on Mon 28 Mar 2005 05:56 AM CST | Permanent Link

Oh, erm, I forgot..

- Factory :)

Re: Ending with the Beginning

by Jamie Fristrom on Mon 28 Mar 2005 10:47 PM CST | Profile | Permanent Link

On the other hand, if you do your first level first, you can revise it and revise it and revise it all the way to your ship date, and it becomes the level that got the most work. The first two levels of *Die By The Sword* were the best for that reason...well, that and the fact that we were more ambitious before we realized how fast the clock was counting down. "We're never doing a raft ride where you can be alone or in a box carried by kobolds that spans two levels again!" Wrong lesson to learn...that raft ride was cool.

Re: Ending with the Beginning

by Xemu on Tue 29 Mar 2005 01:13 AM CST | Profile | Permanent Link

Jamie: Yeah, I definitely agree that you want time to iterate on your first few levels and they will naturally be what you want to put in front of people the most. Coming back and revisiting them to add great polish after they are "done" the first time is also good. I was mostly pointing out the numerous times in my experience the first few levels get "done" first and then just aren't as tricked out with detailed knowledge of the engine as the later levels.

On AOM we revised the tutorial at least 5 times based on fairly methodical playtesting and data from our test lab (which runs real super-inexperienced people through it). I know AOK was similar. Of course those games run into a different but related problem of wanting to convey tutorial info and that being at odds with the ideal pacing of your early levels...

Factory: I agree that more people are finishing games now that they are shorter (even if they are finishing them via rental, a rant for another day). Much like good writing, you want to start and end with your most memorable stuff. But even with shorter games, I think you get a lot more mileage out of an awesome start than an awesome finish. I do think shorter games are a great trend though, since often times what is extending game length is just padding that dilutes the game experience -- obviously this is sort of genre-dependant though.

Re: Ending with the Beginning

by Xemu on Tue 29 Mar 2005 01:18 AM CST | Profile | Permanent Link

Sean: I totally agree that the cyberspace thing was poorly chosen on our part because it was just way too skippable before then. I think there were lots of cool things about cyberspace, certainly.

I though the Underworld 1 ending was far better... the tension of fleeing from the demon and the sheer unexpectedness of how it played out made it incredibly memorable at the time. In contrast in HL2 while the sequence was fun, I thought there were far more compelling moments all throughout the game. I did love bouncing those energy cores around though. So yeah, in terms of pure gameplay I can't complain too much... in fact Halo 2 is much weaker there I think just because of the way the AI can defeat the final boss while you aren't looking.

You're right that the whole fiction of HL is just inherently more obfuscated than Halo's. They had some great character resolution moments before the ending and I think they were all set up to tie things off but then really missed the mark, IMO.

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