Playing Like It's 1999

1999 was a banner year for me. I got accepted to NYU, I fell in love and the Sega Dreamcast was on store shelves. Indeed, all was right with the world.

As it happens, I wasn't the only one riding high at the end of the millennia. While I was busy crushing people's hopes and dreams in Soul Caliber, the fine men and women of Irrational Games were no doubt popping bottles of Moet in celebration of all the critical acclaim their newly released title, System Shock 2, was garnering. And rightfully so. An ambitious melding of survival horror, FPS and RPG elements, System Shock 2 was a towering triumph by every measurable standard. Tantamount to the game's success was the emphasis it placed on resource management and meaningful player choices - two things that have been increasingly absent from games in the 21st century.

Irrational is hoping to remedy that issue later this year when they release Bioshock Infinite with a newly revealed difficulty setting. Dubbed "1999" as a tip of the hat to their PC gaming classic, the new mode will purportedly require you to make judicious use of your ammunition and make hard, impactful choices regarding how to specialize your character over the course of the game. Irrational's full announcement can be found here. While they don't give any solid specifics about exactly how the minute to minute mechanics are being altered it's clear they haven't settled for the commonly used shortcut of simply upping the damage you take while decreasing the amount you dish out.

This is actually a pretty big deal in my opinion. Over the last 15 years our industry has slowly dropped the wall of exclusivity we used to huddle behind and embraced a policy of inclusiveness. The term "gamer" hardly paints a clear picture of a specific kind of individual any longer, as the age/gender/ethnicity range of people who play in some form or another has widened dramatically. With such a massive influx of new players who lack decades of experience or the energy to improve their skills, it only seems logical that developers would start making their games more forgiving in order to make sure their product appeals to the largest possible pool of consumers. This is one of the great truths of modern gaming. It honestly isn't worth lamenting or discussing any more than it already has been. It is what it is.

But there is a problem here, and it isn't one that I hear anyone talking about, and no, it isn't as simple as "games aren't hard enough anymore". You can go to any message board on the web and hear tons of those complaints, largely from grumpy old gamers like myself who just like sounding grizzly and battle-hardened. But it's largely untrue. Games today are plenty hard. Even something as mind numbing and broadly appealing as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 can be hard. Turn the difficulty all the way up and watch how quickly you get killed for peeking out of cover at the wrong second. I can assure you that Doom was never nearly so punishing.

However, the reason Doom is a much better game (despite being almost 20 years older) is that it actively engages the mind of the player by requiring them to observe and comprehend many more nuances in order to succeed, regardless of how good of a shot you are. You tote around up to 7 different weapons, some of which share a common ammo pool, some of which don't. They all have quirks that make them well suited to different types of engagements and even specific enemy types. Each member of the game's varied bestiary exhibits different behaviors and when faced with a mixed group, you need to assess the relative threat levels of each and decide which ones to take out in what order, and how. You need to factor ammo levels for each weapon into your strategy too, conserving the rarest and most valuable ammo for emergencies or specific kinds of scenarios.

Simply put, modern shooters don't ask you to think like this. Sure, there are different guns. But all of them kill 95% of the fodder sent after you efficiently. It doesn't matter if it's a shotgun, an uzi, an AR or an SMG, if you put the cursor over the bad guy and pull the trigger, he dies. Ammo? May as well be unlimited. Each one of the endless number of corpses you walk over has ammo for you. Don't misunderstand, the games can be PLENTY challenging due to how quickly you can be killed and how good your aim needs to be, but they never make you think and they only seldom call on you to make tactical decisions, no matter how far to the right you push that difficulty slider.

This is a point I have a particularly tough time making to people when trying to explain why most forms of "casual" gaming don't appeal to me. The popular notion is that old timers like myself find this tidal wave of new players threatening, and that we write off super accessible games as some sort of a response to having our identity as "gamers" challenged. I'm willing to concede that there's a bit of that in there for some of us, but it's far from the whole picture. The real issue is that as layers of nuance get removed or marginalized in importance, games require less thought and strategy to play. While that's great for people who are just getting started, it translates into a lot less fun for people who have enjoyed ever escalating levels of sophistication for over two decades.

When Obsidian included a special "Hardcore" mode in Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, they showed that they "get it", and now Irrational joins their ranks in that regard. Ken Levine's studio has a lot of clout in this business and Bioshock Infinite is poised to be one of the years biggest titles. Hopefully "1999 Mode" will bring the right sort of challenge to the table and send a clear message to other developers: Veteran gamers don't want to die more, we want to THINK more, and developers who go the extra mile to cater to us will be rewarded with our dollars and our loyalty.