Take A Byte XI

By Tristan Clark

Why do good games so often fall flat towards the end?

Happy new years everybody! Hope you’re all enjoying the summer, or at least all those videogames you got for Christmas.

I finally got round to playing Fahrenheit recently, after several months of being too busy for it. To put it simply, it was one of the best game experiences I have ever had. It’d certainly make my Top Ten list. Basically, if you haven’t played Fahrenheit (sometimes referred to as the Indigo Prophecy), do yourself a favour and get it now. If you have even a passing interest in good storytelling, you’ll really enjoy this one. Granted, the graphics are pretty average and the controls could be better, but I’ve never seen another game that manages to suck you into its world quite as effectively as Fahrenheit does.

The tension in Fahrenheit is so thick that you could stir it with a stick. Right from the start, the plot is full of intensity, and it is built up remarkably well throughout the majority of the game. You slowly piece together bits of the puzzle, only to find there are more pieces than you thought.

But then, all of a sudden, you find that you bought a puzzle that was missing a few crucial pieces, leaving you with an incomplete picture. While the build up towards the end of the game is great, the last 20% or so of Fahrenheit is amazingly disappointing. Suddenly you are thrust into a number of seemingly unrelated scenes, and the characters are talking about things that you have no idea about. By the end, you’re left wondering what the hell just happened there.

It pretty much feels like a number of key scenes were cut out of the final sequence, creating a highly sporadic and unconvincing finale. This is a real shame, as the rest of the game had an amazing sense of continuity and pace. I can only assume that they either ran out of money, or their publisher demanded the game to be released as soon as possible, leaving no time for a number of crucial scenes.

This is something that has been seen in a huge number of games. A developer will be given a year or two to create a game (often) from scratch. A release date will be set fairly early on, giving the publisher a lot of time to get the word out and build up a lot of hype. A few months out, though, the developers are aware that their game simply can’t be finished by the intended target – but unless they are giants like Bioware or Bethesda, they have no power to change anything. The result is a game that is buggy and incomplete.

Consider what happened with Knights of the Old Republic II. The series shifted from Bioware to Obsidian, who obviously didn’t have as much influence with their publishers. The game shipped, and fans were dismayed to find that the ending was terrible. It was obviously incomplete and slapped together quickly, leaving many loose threads. When you think about how the developers would have been working ridiculous hours for at least the final month of developing just to get it up to that stage, you kind of feel that perhaps the deadlines that get set are just a little unrealistic.

Of course, nothing much can really be done about this. At the end of the day, everyone wants to get paid, and this won’t happen if the game isn’t released. And with a stubborn publisher controlling the schedule, the allotted time given to finishing a game will often be too short. Perhaps we could work on sensationalising our favourite developers – turn them into stars to give them a bit more power when facing off against the big bad publishers. Then they could summon a mob of angry fans to protest when an unfair deadline gets forced on them. Of course, we’d probably end up with hundreds of John Romero running around the place, which would be absolutely terrible.

Who knows, maybe the world will one day move away from its love affair with capitalism, and value the quality of products above anything else. Until that happens, though, we’ll probably be seeing a large number of titles that are incomplete and buggy.

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