Grand Theft Pigeon
Jun. 12th, 2008 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayThere is much to enjoy in Grand Theft Auto IV, but also much that makes me shake my head in disgust. For every aspect of gameplay that they advance in revolutionary ways, there's some other aspect that is painfully regressive, where the series is actually getting *worse* as it goes along. Here's a case study of one such element.
GTA III had a mechanic called 'Hidden Packages'. There were 100 of these scattered around the city, in out-of-the-way nooks and crannies. They were designed to reward exploration. Every time you found ten packages, you would get a gameplay reward, usually (always?) in the form of a weapon pickup at your safehouse. There were other ways in the game to arm yourself, but having the weapons be free and convenient was definitely a plus, and felt like a reward worth going to some effort for. The intermittent reward schedule was a classic addictive mechanism, and greatly lengthened the time people spent exploring.
The next installment, GTA Vice City, made only minor tweaks to the hidden package mechanic. Now, the top levels of reward were not weapons, but vehicles, such as a tank and an assault helicopter. Not a bad plan in and of itself, but also not entirely great: while these vehicles were made 'available', they were *not* parked at your safehouse, but at other locations in the city, making them somewhat inconvenient to get to when you wanted to use them. If you weren't using an internet FAQ or a strategy guide, you might not even *know* where they were parked, as the game itself never told you. Of course, few players would find so many packages without using such a guide in the first place, but it was nonetheless a disturbing indicator.
GTA San Andreas made big changes to the system. Firstly, it divided the hidden goodies into several different categories, each with between 50 and 100 elements, some of which involved some player action to trigger, not mere discovery. There were photos to take, graffiti tags to deface, and a few other categories that were just hidden. These did *not* give incremental rewards. You got a reward only when you completed an *entire category*, not missing *any* of them. This amounts to entirely negating the value of this mechanic for everyone who *doesn't* use outside information. Didn't buy the strategy guide? Sorry, Bub, you get nothin'. This entire gameplay mwchanic is just a tease.
In GTA IV, I thought at first that they had dropped the Hidden Packages notion entirely. Nope, it just underwent further mutations. Now, in keeping with their increased 'realism', the packages are pigeons that you have to kill. When you get your first one, you see a message pop up saying "199 flying rats remaining". OK, that's kinda funny. But it turns out that pigeons are completely immune to melee damage -- you have to actually shoot them. And since this game has a staggering density of policemen, odds are about 2 in 3 that a cop will notice the gunfire, and you now have to lose a 1-star wanted level. This makes them more annoying to collect, as a class, than any previous iteration.
I went on-line to see if there was a FAQ explaining why I might want to kill these pigeons. It turns out that there are, again, *no* incremental rewards whatsoever. Get 199 pigeons, and you've earmed squat. Once again, you have no realistic chance of getting all 200 without outside help. Even if you *have* outside help, this is an incredibly tedious chore, requiring literally hours of largely uninteresting gameplay. [One might argue that the police chases add some spice to an otherwise dull task. One would be wrong. One-star wanted ratings are easy enough to lose that they just add more tedium. And since they effectively randomize your location, they make it more difficult to follow the directions in the FAQ.]
And what do you get for all that time investment? There is some disagreement among the FAQ writers on this topic. All do agree that you need to do this to get a 100% game completion rating. By itself, that's a staggeringly small reward. There are also many reports that it unlocks an assault helicopter. But this copter is (allegedly) parked on the roof of a non-safehouse building (again with the inconvenience), and at least one FAQ writer reports being unable to find it after killing all the pigeons.
For that matter, even if you did get it, it's not like an assault heli is all that *useful* in the actual game. Sure, you can cause some fun random havoc with it, but it would only be useful in a tiny handful of actual missions. Most tough parts in missions involve interior combat, prescribed vehicle action, or some 'the plan goes to hell' element which would preclude any use of your heli.
So there's an entire huge game system, that no doubt ate up vast amounts of design and testing time, yet only pays off for the top 1% of obsessive-compulsive players. Something that used to be an fun reward system reduced to a punishing grind. Come *on*, Rockstar, I *know* you can do better than that!
GTA III had a mechanic called 'Hidden Packages'. There were 100 of these scattered around the city, in out-of-the-way nooks and crannies. They were designed to reward exploration. Every time you found ten packages, you would get a gameplay reward, usually (always?) in the form of a weapon pickup at your safehouse. There were other ways in the game to arm yourself, but having the weapons be free and convenient was definitely a plus, and felt like a reward worth going to some effort for. The intermittent reward schedule was a classic addictive mechanism, and greatly lengthened the time people spent exploring.
The next installment, GTA Vice City, made only minor tweaks to the hidden package mechanic. Now, the top levels of reward were not weapons, but vehicles, such as a tank and an assault helicopter. Not a bad plan in and of itself, but also not entirely great: while these vehicles were made 'available', they were *not* parked at your safehouse, but at other locations in the city, making them somewhat inconvenient to get to when you wanted to use them. If you weren't using an internet FAQ or a strategy guide, you might not even *know* where they were parked, as the game itself never told you. Of course, few players would find so many packages without using such a guide in the first place, but it was nonetheless a disturbing indicator.
GTA San Andreas made big changes to the system. Firstly, it divided the hidden goodies into several different categories, each with between 50 and 100 elements, some of which involved some player action to trigger, not mere discovery. There were photos to take, graffiti tags to deface, and a few other categories that were just hidden. These did *not* give incremental rewards. You got a reward only when you completed an *entire category*, not missing *any* of them. This amounts to entirely negating the value of this mechanic for everyone who *doesn't* use outside information. Didn't buy the strategy guide? Sorry, Bub, you get nothin'. This entire gameplay mwchanic is just a tease.
In GTA IV, I thought at first that they had dropped the Hidden Packages notion entirely. Nope, it just underwent further mutations. Now, in keeping with their increased 'realism', the packages are pigeons that you have to kill. When you get your first one, you see a message pop up saying "199 flying rats remaining". OK, that's kinda funny. But it turns out that pigeons are completely immune to melee damage -- you have to actually shoot them. And since this game has a staggering density of policemen, odds are about 2 in 3 that a cop will notice the gunfire, and you now have to lose a 1-star wanted level. This makes them more annoying to collect, as a class, than any previous iteration.
I went on-line to see if there was a FAQ explaining why I might want to kill these pigeons. It turns out that there are, again, *no* incremental rewards whatsoever. Get 199 pigeons, and you've earmed squat. Once again, you have no realistic chance of getting all 200 without outside help. Even if you *have* outside help, this is an incredibly tedious chore, requiring literally hours of largely uninteresting gameplay. [One might argue that the police chases add some spice to an otherwise dull task. One would be wrong. One-star wanted ratings are easy enough to lose that they just add more tedium. And since they effectively randomize your location, they make it more difficult to follow the directions in the FAQ.]
And what do you get for all that time investment? There is some disagreement among the FAQ writers on this topic. All do agree that you need to do this to get a 100% game completion rating. By itself, that's a staggeringly small reward. There are also many reports that it unlocks an assault helicopter. But this copter is (allegedly) parked on the roof of a non-safehouse building (again with the inconvenience), and at least one FAQ writer reports being unable to find it after killing all the pigeons.
For that matter, even if you did get it, it's not like an assault heli is all that *useful* in the actual game. Sure, you can cause some fun random havoc with it, but it would only be useful in a tiny handful of actual missions. Most tough parts in missions involve interior combat, prescribed vehicle action, or some 'the plan goes to hell' element which would preclude any use of your heli.
So there's an entire huge game system, that no doubt ate up vast amounts of design and testing time, yet only pays off for the top 1% of obsessive-compulsive players. Something that used to be an fun reward system reduced to a punishing grind. Come *on*, Rockstar, I *know* you can do better than that!