Triple-threat Triumph?

The cover story of the latest Sports Illustrated was of Larry Walker, the Colorado Rockie, who the magazine called a five-dimensional player in that he can hit for average and for power, field throw and run the bases. That got me thinking about games, and more specifically about games which attempt to include many different gameplay modes. Imagine, if you will, a game based on the movie "The Godfather" - it would, if it wanted to be a complete representation, have to include a driving element, a first-or-third person shooter element, some form of role-play style character advancement and at the very least a simple resource management / tactical subgame. The complexity of that last sentence will give you some idea why so few games of that type are developed. It would be akin to creating six or seven different games at once, leading to huge budgets and a game which would almost certainly never be released and which, if it did reach a "reputable retailer" near you, would probably hang together about as well as a $10 cuban suit in a tornado (BAD METAPHOR ALERT!).

It would be kind of cool though... The holy grail of gaming for some time now has been the "complete world" simulation (i.e. the creation of a game in whose universe you could literally perform any action you so desired. Yes, even that....). This was watered down by some companies to the "digital battlefield" as preached by DID and also the "trading and simulations" such as Elite. Why have there been so few games with multiple strings to their bows?

For a number of reasons, the largest of which is that they simply do not seem to review or sell well. Unity of concept seems to be more important to journalists and the buying public alike than variety of gameplay experience - do you remember the cop shooter / driving game Urban Chaos (Mucky Foot) or Fifth Element? Didn't think so. May partly be because when you try to make a game with two discrete elements you either end up making two halves which are half as good or one good half with the other one tacked on. Thus the game will feel either half-cooked or incomplete. This is increasingly being made up for by the multitude of third-party add ons such as Quake Rally which can add extra functionality to a game but still....

Another reason is that many company executives get very scared when a designer mentions any concept which seems to be too complex. there are some brave companies who provide the exception that proves this rule but in general it holds true. Quite apart from anything else many programmers are simply not good enough to pull it off.

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