2020 Preview - NO MORE TOWERS!
Look in the sky! It's a bird? It's a plane? No, it's my flailing body about to hit the ground at terminal velocity. I guess the game thought I wanted to jump as far away from the next handhold as physically possible and not just climb three feet up...
Far Cry 3 is one of my favourite games ever. I love the story, the characters, the setting, everything. One gameplay feature that does get a little tiring is having to climb radio towers to reveal parts of the map and unlock new weapons. Sure, it was implemented in a way that made sense within the game’s world but that doesn't change the fact that scaling towers in first-person is hit or miss at best.
“But that’s a building not a radio tower”, I hear you say.
IT HAS SCAFFOLDING, it may as well be!
I've been playing Dying Light over the Christmas holiday and I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of towers to scale; all the safehouses bar one are at ground level. However, I've just gotten to a mission where I have to climb multiple towers in order to turn on radio relays to help the various factions communicate better. I have to do this in first-person… with zombies after me… and angry militia… The guy giving me the mission does jab at games like Far Cry and Assassin's Creed, assuring me I won't have to do this often, but still.
I had to double-check this wasn't a Ubisoft game as the towers act the exact same in Far Cry! They even creak and sway the higher up you get, making it even harder to keep climbing!
Enough of this, please. I'm sick of towers in these kinds of games. I've lost count of the number of times I’ve sent Ezio flying to his death because Assassin's Creed misunderstood where I was aiming. Bear in mind it's infinitely easier to aim jumps in third person games than in first-person ones!
Aim for the bushes? Aim for the bushes.
All these towers do is bloat a game's runtime and make it seem like you got more for your money than you really did. They're tedious, fiddly, and add very little to the experience. Hide as many collectables as high as you want, but keep my main mission waypoints away from these creaky death traps.
The reason it bothers me so much, in games like Dying Light, is first-person is simply a cumbersome view through which to climb. Brink had people scratching their heads at the idea of a first-person parkour game but as memory serves, that game didn't make you climb much more than the odd container. Titanfall 2 is first-person but I have no trouble getting across levels or over enemies. Trying to climb to the top of somewhere for a collectable, however, had me falling constantly.
Wow, it has been a minute since I thought about Brink.
Y’all remember Brink?
Dying Light is generally pretty fluid, running over rooftops and through hordes of zombies is great, any small mistakes can be easily corrected. But fall to the ground without an obvious route up and you're screwed. First-person just isn't the optimal view by which to navigate upwards. I had to spend ages looking around for the next route up because of poor FOV (yeah I play on console, sue me) and it just delays the fun parts of the game.
Things could still be unlocked via turning on a radio tower but for the love of God just have the switch at the bottom. Shake things up! Make a weird puzzle or trap in a shack at the base of the tower. Or even make players have to clear out some bad guys protecting the switch. Just please, please stop making me drag characters up these things. Let's move into the new decade without this tiresome trope, or I'll climb the nearest tower and throw my PS4 off it.
