The Ringer: All Posts by Jeremy Gordon2022-03-03T06:20:00-05:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/jeremy-gordon/rss2022-03-03T06:20:00-05:002022-03-03T06:20:00-05:00The Beauty and Terror of Exploring ‘Elden Ring’
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<p>FromSoftware’s expansive and stunning new take on a tried-and-true template challenges players and the conventions of open-world games</p> <p id="PBPArk">It was around the time I searched, in vain, to locate the hidden city of Nokron, or the time I found myself hopelessly lost in the fetid, crimson swamps of the Caelid region, or the time I got swarmed to death by a mob of psychotic perfumers in the royal capital Leyndell, or the time I met Gideon Ofnir the All-Knowing, Ranni the Witch, Alexander the Iron Fist, D, Hunter of the Dead, Gurranq Beast Clergyman, Blyndon Blyghtstone, Favreau the Fire Eater, the dreaded pirate Xynnx, Red Lion Ritrempertine, and several other characters whose fantastical names blended into a glossolalic and indistinguishable slurry of Germanic history, Norse mythology, and Japanese anime (and in fact, several of those names I just made up altogether), or most literally, when I reached the 30-hour mark with several chunks of the world map yet unrevealed, that I accepted that I was not going to finish <em>Elden Ring</em> anytime soon. Not that I was expecting to. The editors at <em>The Ringer</em> are kind, but more importantly, they lack the perverse instinct to demand that a writer choke down the entirety of a game that casuals, committed aficionados, and outright nerds will probably spend years trying to perceive in full, in just a week’s time. An <em>Elden Ring</em> reviewer for <em>IGN</em> <a href="https://twitter.com/MIDImyers/status/1496524089472786437">logged 87 hours in nine days</a>, and while he turned in a lovely piece of copy, my heart aches for his sleep schedule and social life.</p>
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<p id="7A2OAk">To back up a bit: <em>Elden Ring</em> is the brand-new video game by Japanese developer FromSoftware, previously known as the architects of <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/5/13/22432544/dark-souls-sequels-gaming-in-pandemic">the notoriously punishing <em>Dark Souls</em> franchise</a>. Like many video games, the studio’s offerings—including <em>Elden Ring</em>—are set in an unreal and unsettling fantasy world, in which you navigate hostile terrain and fight all sorts of frightening beasts and bosses using a series of increasingly powerful weapons and skills. (You play as cover versions of the typical D&D/video game classes—a knight, a bandit, a mage, etc., each with their own tweaks—and fight with physical armaments like swords and axes, or spells.) But the games are calibrated to prioritize patience and mastery of your surroundings. The ethos of a FromSoftware game can be roughly summarized as “finding joy through pain”—“I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy that comes from overcoming hardship,” FromSoftware head honcho Hidetaka Miyazaki recently told <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/hidetaka-miyazaki-sees-death-as-a-feature-not-a-bug"><em>The New Yorker</em></a>. Even with a high-level character, a common enemy is capable of killing you if you don’t take it seriously; a tight corridor might trap you between two of those common enemies, who then pin you down and definitely kill you. The more you play the more you will feel you are strong and wizened enough to weather the challenges, at which point you’ll inevitably be humbled by an unexpectedly tough boss. You die a lot, and every time you die the unspent experience points you’ve collected are lost. Returning to the spot of death allows you to regain them, but if you die again before that happens, they’re lost forever. </p>
<p id="dQHGhN">This forces the gamer to play especially thoughtfully, to be conscientious of where the next threat might be and how a particular level is constructed. With enough skill and enough repetition, progress is possible—and the triumph of finally overcoming a particularly difficult boss has, on multiple occasions, evoked physical joy for me. This is a silly thing to admit, because gaming culture is so frequently goofy and off-putting in a way that makes me hesitant to identify as a “gamer,” but it is true. For me, the feeling is almost never encountered; I’ve never trembled when mopping up the homies at <em>Super Smash Bros.</em>, or executing a kickflip in <em>Tony Hawk</em>, or playing out some sentimental plot line in a <em>Final Fantasy</em>. Since I beat my first FromSoftware title, 2015’s <em>Bloodborne</em>, chasing this sensation is what’s pulled me to each of the studio’s games, all of which (even the allegedly lesser entries) have been memorably and immersively fun. And I am not alone in this, which is why <em>Elden Ring</em>—the studio’s first game for the “next generation” of video game consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, though it’s also available via PS4, Xbox One, and Windows—had built up so much anticipation since it was announced in 2019. (It also received writing contributions from <em>Game of Thrones</em> author George R.R. Martin, but if I’m being honest, whatever he added is impossible to separate from FromSoftware’s preexisting aesthetic preoccupations; Martin himself has admitted to playing only <a href="https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2022/02/28/grab-for-the-ring/">a “small” role</a> in the game’s gestation, so one shouldn’t overinterpret his input or blame FromSoftware for denying you <a href="https://www.theringer.com/game-of-thrones/2021/4/16/22386932/why-cant-george-rr-martin-finish-winds-of-winter"><em>The Winds of Winter</em></a>.)</p>
<p id="df0sJX">FromSoftware broke with studio tradition by making <em>Elden Ring</em> “<a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/10/22/22737333/grand-theft-auto-gta-rockstar-open-world-assassins-creed">open world</a>,” industry shorthand for “a game where you explore a big map in whatever manner you see fit.” The <em>Dark Souls</em> games were, essentially, linear—you had a few options for where to go at any given point, and experienced gamers could attempt challenging areas ahead of time, but everything tended to point you in one direction. <em>Elden Ring</em>, meanwhile, is set in a sprawling, readily explored world that, on its surface, resembles the sprawling, readily explored worlds found in numerous franchises (<em>Assassin’s Creed</em>, <em>Far Cry</em>, <em>Horizon Zero Dawn</em>, etc). But <em>Elden Ring</em>’s innovation is twofold: First, despite how gigantic the map is, the developers have woven unique secrets, surprises, and mysteries into nearly every nook and cranny. At the 30-hour mark, I’m still regularly stumbling across unbelievable shit that would be a defining moment in any other game but here is just “another incredible thing to enjoy.” (I’m thinking of one area I glimpsed only a fraction of, after entering a transporting portal that I stumbled across; when the screen loaded, and I looked around for 30 seconds at a landscape of crumbling buildings suspended in midair, surrounded by whirling tornados and criss-crossing dragons, I muttered out loud to my fiancée, “This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a video game,” which she very patiently absorbed.) And second, the in-game world map, a new addition, retains FromSoftware’s general commitment to respecting the gamer’s curiosity and time (provided you’re willing to invest a lot of the latter). Unlike other open-world games, there are almost none of the glowing map icons imploring you to check them out, which over time turns a recreational activity into a series of obligations. None of the unrealistically accurate distance markers calculating exactly how far you have to go until you hit the next stage of a quest, either. No quest log, even—players must remember every supporting character they meet, and every location where they might appear, if they want to see a series of side stories to fruition. (Alternately, you can keep a physical log of such encounters, as I have.) “<em>Elden Ring</em> = <em>Dark Souls</em> + <em>The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild</em>” has become a minor meme in the past week, but an easy comparison can still be the truest one.</p>
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<p id="2xN1rr"><br>Here’s one example. Early on, I was riding my horse (another new addition) around Limgrave, the game’s opening area. I knew, theoretically, that I needed to head north in the direction of Stormveil Castle, an imposing fortress containing what I assumed would be a challenging boss. But for now, I just wanted to look around—so instead, I went east where I came across a misty forest that turned out to house several terrifying and powerful bears, and I ran the hell away. Not far beyond the bears, I found an elevator nestled inside a well that, when I stepped on it, plunged me hundreds of feet underground into a physics-defying area: I was beneath the earth, but when I looked up I saw a starry night sky. Faced with a decrepit series of temples demanding my exploration, I ran around for a while, fought some burly spectral Norsemen, died a lot, and decided to head back above ground. Near the forest, I saw a man in a regal cape standing on top of a collapsed building lodged in the ground. When I approached him, he introduced himself as Kenneth Haight, informed me he was the true ruler of Limgrave, and asked for my help taking back his ancestral fort, which was somewhere farther to the east. So I went farther east. Eventually I made my way to a fort that seemed like what Kenneth was talking about and spent a half-hour clearing its enemies until I was pretty sure he would be able to return home. I galloped back on my horse, told Kenneth I’d taken care of the problem, and was rewarded with a fancy dagger. Eventually I decided to warp back to the fort to see if conditions had improved, and I found a dejected Kenneth surrounded by zombified humans. He informed me that despite my efforts, he was unable to restore the fort to its former glory. But eventually he might find someone who could, in which case he hoped I might pledge myself into the fort’s service. </p>
<p id="WbrbsQ">Whether that’s the end of old Kenneth remains to be seen. But I would’ve missed all this had I just committed to Stormveil the moment it revealed itself, rather than running around to see what was going on. The more impressive feat is that none of this is mandatory: You can power through and beat the game without having completed even one of the narratives branching off the main story. But the more you scratch, the more you reveal, and then all of a sudden you’re at the 30-hour mark with just a fraction completed. This doesn’t necessarily feel like an obligation or an imposition but something almost overwhelming, in the sense that I personally felt overwhelmed. Seriously: Around my fourth day playing, I realized that I had too many threads to pull on, and too many potential places to go, and while none of this felt meaningfully stressful because I was, after all, just playing a video game, it was momentarily dizzying to consider that all the fun I’d had in the past four days was about to multiply into more fun. There’s something intoxicating about consuming too much frictionless entertainment, even if one is writing on a deadline, so I just had to turn it off and do something else. The difference here, compared with other open-world games, is that nothing on the map was explicitly demanding my attention; there was no interface reminding me of all I had yet to <a href="https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/elderscrolls/images/7/71/Quests_%28Skyrim%29_Interface.png/revision/latest?cb=20120812221158">complete in the game</a>, thus depressing me with a visual representation of how much more I had to play. Subtly, the game had created the illusion that I didn’t have that much to do and could play however I felt. A few hours later, all these potential threads had narrowed into one direction I definitely wanted to explore the more I allowed myself to think about it, and so I resumed my exploration at my own pace. </p>
<p id="MrTfCZ">There is a plot in <em>Elden Ring</em>, technically. Eventually I will care enough about the lore to unpack it in Reddit threads and online encyclopedia entries, and even to describe it myself without the benefit of a user-created summary, but my brief engagement with it thus far only follows the game’s own roundabout approach to storytelling. An opening cinematic lays out the strands of the narrative, but it’s all “choose your own adventure” once the action begins. Character motivations hide in item descriptions; a stray line of dialogue might unlock a mystery but only if you’re paying attention; a landscape pockmarked with signs of war and ruin invites you to guess what’s going on in any given location, but rarely states it out loud. I know that I’m playing as one of the Tarnished, in search of a series of magical talismans that will restore the broken land, which I may only obtain by defeating a series of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te8OFfHJGU4">comically dramatic bosses</a>, but it’s no more a compelling reason to keep playing than wondering, “Hey, what’s over there?” And so far, “Hey, what’s over there?” has been profoundly rewarding.</p>
<p id="gJa1Sd">On a gameplay level, <em>Elden Ring</em> is as challenging as the <em>Dark Souls</em> series, but FromSoftware has incorporated several quality of life improvements. There are more checkpoints (or “sites of grace,” as they’re known) in each world area, so you rarely have to spend several minutes traipsing back to where you died. There’s the world map, which allows you to see how each region physically connects and instantaneously travel between the sites of grace you’ve unlocked. That horse I mentioned allows you to move across the map faster, but it also expands the means of combat (several bosses are designed to be fought on horseback, for example). You can <a href="https://www.thegamer.com/elden-ring-jump-button-platforming-secrets/">jump</a> with a dedicated button, which is true of virtually every game <em>except</em> for most of FromSoftware’s; the horse can <em>double jump</em> when you’re riding it, which is tactically valuable. There are also several new wrinkles to fighting that would’ve made previous games a whole lot easier—to explain just one, successfully blocking an enemy’s attack allows you to unleash a “guard counter,” a powerful counterattack that leaves them ripe for a damaging followup hit.</p>
<p id="5JusA4">Despite their difficulty, FromSoftware’s games have been both critically and commercially successful. Something about the pathology of this “if at first you don’t succeed, die, die again” approach has sucked in millions of gamers, which is how a remake of 2009’s <em>Demon’s Souls</em>, rather than something easier, became one of the PlayStation 5’s headlining launch titles. For <em>Elden Ring</em>, FromSoftware had the added bonus of good will accrued over more than a decade of releases: The studio had earned the latitude to build a much bigger game than any of the <em>Souls</em> offerings, with the understanding that it would be aimed at the largest possible audience. Miyazaki has <a href="https://www.gamesradar.com/elden-ring-fromsoftware-hidetaka-miyazaki-interview/">called</a> <em>Elden Ring</em> a culmination of the studio’s previous work, which is why it reuses several enemies, weapons, and spells from prior games—less of a lazy reliance on existing assets than an acknowledgement that it’d gotten it right the first time. So why not let new players catch up? </p>
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<p id="yp0YIj">It was fair to call the <em>Souls</em> games cult pursuits, despite their juicy sales, but <em>Elden Ring</em> is a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Years of hype, combined with a well-received closed beta and generous sharing of game footage in the months leading up to release, had gamers bubbling over with contagious expectation; the <em>Elden Ring</em> subreddit turned nearly feral, and I’m convinced that a slew of new players were persuaded to download it just because they couldn’t understand why so many other people wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it. (This is how I talked at least one of my friends into playing.) This has led to an influx of newcomers brushing up against FromSoftware’s style, which might be dismaying when you consider that nearly every other big-budget game on the market allows one to toggle the difficulty settings from Easy to Normal to Hard. Not everyone is “good” at a video game, and <em>Elden Ring</em> and its forebears require a level of baseline competency that many games simply do not. At the same time, the difficulty is <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2022/2/18/22939801/sifu-playstation-sloclap-difficult-kung-fu-brawler">part of the rush</a>. Many games are hard, but everything in <em>Elden Ring</em> is finetuned to fit the game’s mechanical logic—it’s punishing but rarely unfair, as almost every cause of death is something that I could’ve prevented, had I just been a little better or anticipated a threat based on context clues. And when it clicks, or at least when it clicks enough that you can avoid the typical bad luck that might happen in any fight—I accidentally rolled off a platform to my death, because I was frustrated; I forgot to block a devastating magical attack because I thought I’d dodged it—the feeling of accomplishment surpasses anything else I’ve encountered in video games. It just wouldn’t work the same if you could artificially lower the difficulty: I’m happy when I turn out to be stronger than a boss I’m facing, but those encounters aren’t nearly as memorable as the ones that demand mastery. </p>
<p id="wTu4px">I could spend another several thousand words detailing everything I’ve seen so far; scrolling the notes I’ve taken only reminds me of how many amazing things I’ve come across, which have already passed into my rearview. (Sample note: “This fucked up looking big sword cat-dog thing guarding a twisted fusillade of bodies.”) I know I’ll continue to play this game in the coming weeks; I’ve already mentally committed to future builds and runs that will tease out more of what it has to offer. If you’ve ever enjoyed an adventure game and are prepared for the process of unlearning long-ingrained habits in order to meet <em>Elden Ring</em> on its own terms, it’s worth checking out. My prediction is that it’ll be so successful—already the reviews are <a href="https://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-5/elden-ring">immaculate</a>, with the sales sure to follow—that studios around the world will say, <em>Hey, why don’t we make a game like that?</em> They may try, and they may succeed to a degree, but there’s a reason <em>Dark Souls </em>patented a genre called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soulslike">“Soulslike”</a>—because every attempt to follow in that franchise’s direction, no matter how notable (<em>Nioh</em>, <em>Salt and Sanctuary</em>) or not (<em>Lords of the Fallen</em>), still felt like a pale imitation. An open-world game this full, with this much organic material to explore, isn’t easily replicable—if it were, more studios would’ve succeeded. (Before this, there was really just <em>Breath of the Wild</em>, which adhered to Nintendo’s more accessible and family-friendly standards—but hey, if you want to play an easier <em>Elden Ring</em>, it’s very <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/3/10/16046832/video-games-nintendo-switch-the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-review-40bf803b75ac">worth your while</a>.)</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="82008M">The friend I mentioned above, whom I’d convinced to play <em>Elden Ring</em> just by talking about it, was initially put off by the battle mechanics and the mercilessness of the death cycle. After a few more days with the game, he’s figured out which style of play works for him and is now telling his friends why they should check it out, while also texting me videos of game footage and ongoing commentary about the uniquely cool stuff he’s uncovering and the agonies he’s learning to overcome. <em>Elden Ring</em> will stick in your mind if you give it the proper space, and from there you’ll find yourself sucked into a game that’s really like nothing else on the market. That deserves a little (or a lot) of your time, if you’re prepared for the challenge.</p>
<p id="yVVc17"><a href="https://jeremygordon.xyz/"><em>Jeremy Gordon</em></a><em> is a writer from Chicago who contributes to </em>The New York Times<em>, </em>The New York Times Magazine<em>, and </em>The Nation<em>. He lives in Brooklyn.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2022/3/3/22958621/elden-ring-fromsoftware-dark-souls-open-worldJeremy Gordon2021-10-22T06:20:00-04:002021-10-22T06:20:00-04:00After ‘Grand Theft Auto III,’ Open-World Games Were Never (and Always) the Same
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.bartlettstudio.com" target="_blank">Jonathan Bartlett</a></figcaption>
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<p>Twenty years ago, ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ set a new standard for open-world video games. The titles it inspired have grown bigger and busier, but it takes more than massive maps to give gamers the freedom they felt on their first trip to 3-D Liberty City.</p> <p id="STqke4"><em>On October 22, 2001, Rockstar Games released </em>Grand Theft Auto III<em>, a game that transported the publisher’s trademark criminal mayhem to an unimaginably immersive 3-D Liberty City. </em>GTA III<em> became a bestselling sensation that defined the open-world genre, spawning several sequels, inspiring countless imitators, and causing a cultural uproar. Twenty years later, we’re taking a look at its legacy while we wait for the upcoming </em>GTA <em>trilogy</em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_The_Trilogy_%E2%80%93_The_Definitive_Edition"><em> remaster</em></a><em>, prepare to purchase</em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2020/11/19/21574726/grand-theft-auto-5-sales-records"><em> yet another version</em></a><em> of </em>GTA V,<em> and read</em><a href="https://kotaku.com/gta-6-keeps-trending-despite-zero-new-info-1847207034"><em> rumors</em></a><em> about the still-unannounced </em>GTA VI<em>. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2021/10/22/22740178/welcome-to-gta-day"><em>Welcome to </em>GTA <em>Day</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="t9BRqL">A smattering of memories from 2001, the year I turned 13: the death of my paternal grandmother, following several years of declining health; the Italian exchange student who emailed me a computer virus, following several weeks of uneasy cohabitation at my parents’ apartment; the high-level online <em>Pokémon</em> tournament I was forced to quit because of my duties hosting that exchange student; 9/11, of course. Not a whole lot more than that, I’m afraid. Time passes, memory fades, the accumulative effects of alcohol, marijuana, and Twitter conspire to pull a fast one on your brain, and so on, and so forth—the stuff great novels, and occasionally great movies, are made of.</p>
<p id="ZlDWWL">Thus it’s with some mild surprise that within two seconds of thinking about it I located a firm memory of the first time I played Rockstar Games’ <em>Grand Theft Auto III</em>, a game that rewired my—and possibly your—conception of what video games could look and play like, which is perhaps why I shouldn’t be so surprised to remember the moment even though I haven’t thought about it in 20 years. My buddy Steve and I have walked over to our buddy Tully’s house, where we’re going to sit with our buddy Tully’s older brother Ian in their parents’ living room, congregated around their boulder-sized television. My buddy Tully’s older brother Ian is hanging out with his own buddies, and while no one here is outwardly contemptuous, the kid brother’s snot-nosed friends merit no attention as history unfurls before us.</p>
<p id="OITPIh">Not to make it sound like the moon landing. But kids today—to date myself by earnestly writing “kids today”—can’t exactly know what it was like to boot up a PlayStation 2 and drop into a three-dimensional world that looked just like ours, populated with skyscrapers and taxi cabs and passersby ambling down the street. Only none of this was window dressing, or walled off by the same invisible barriers preventing true movement in most video games we’d played—you could go <em>here</em>, you could go <em>there</em>, you could hop into a car and drive off the street onto the sidewalks, before launching yourself off a ramp and hurtling through the air and crashing into another car. You could play through the main story, about a lifelong criminal eking his way up the hierarchy of organized crime, or you could just roam for hours, unpacking every tucked-away secret inside this surprisingly detailed city. You could steal a police car and lead the cops on a wild and violent chase through that city, escalating the chaos until the military showed up with tanks and most likely put your joyriding crime spree to an end. Unless you stole the tank, too. </p>
<p id="BDZZHQ">As a tween, all of this felt like the most unbelievable, incredible thing—an event worth crowding around the TV at my friend’s for, and hoping his brother would let me hold the controller for just a few minutes. But I am aware of the way that everything is magnified at that age, when your accumulated life experiences fit into a brochure. To confirm that my memories weren’t just accelerated nostalgia for an era when my concerns started and ended with “can I finish homework in time to play video games,” I dialed up video game developer Chris Stockman—best known as the design director on the original <em>Saints Row</em>—and asked him how he recalled <em>GTA III</em>’s release.</p>
<p id="L6bAL7">Stockman, who was in his 20s in 2001, had no great love for the first two <em>Grand Theft Auto </em>games—“terrible,” he called them. But he did buy everything new, and so he picked up <em>GTA III </em>at launch despite some hesitation. “I remember firing it up at home, and I was just stunned,” he said. At the time, he was working at Ritual Entertainment, a small video game company based in Dallas that was responsible for shooters like <em>SiN </em>and <em>Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2</em>. “I came into work the next day, and I told my company that this was a game-changer. ... It unshackled games, at least from a 3-D perspective.”</p>
<p id="PCeRAh">Douglass Perry, who was the editor-in-chief of IGN’s PlayStation websites at the time, agrees—to an extent. Like me, Perry was wary of misrepresenting the truth just to make a point. “I do not want to look back on this and think sentimentally about it, or exaggerate it in any way,” he said over Zoom. He said there was no way of anticipating the impact <em>GTA III </em>would have, not in a year filled with watershed games—<em>Metal Gear Solid 2</em>, <em>Halo</em>, and <em>Super Smash Bros. Melee</em>, just to name a few. But from the first time he played <em>GTA III</em>, during a press trip in the months before the game’s release, there was no doubt about its quality. “There hadn’t really been a game as big, and as filled with cool stuff to do. ... There were so many well-thought-out details that it just kept opening up my idea of what a game actually was.” He gave it a 9.6 out of 10 in <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/10/22/grand-theft-auto-iii-3">his firmly effusive review</a>, concluding, “the game is absolutely, insanely good, and is truly one of the best titles of the year, on PlayStation 2, or on any system.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="FFX0yx"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Every 3-D ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Game, Ranked","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2021/10/22/22739264/gta-grand-theft-auto-3d-ranking"},{"title":"How Does ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ Hold Up in 2021?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2021/10/22/22737777/gta-grand-theft-auto-iii-liberty-city-2001-first-time"},{"title":"How ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ Became Ground Zero for a Moral Panic","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2021/10/22/22739871/grand-theft-auto-iii-controversy-revisited"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="TPQ1NA">Millions of other gamers agreed. <em>GTA III </em>became the highest-selling game of 2001 and the second-highest-selling game of 2002—just behind <em>Grand Theft Auto: Vice City</em>, a sequel that transposed all of this crime gameplay into the neon 1980s. An iconic franchise was cemented into mainstream culture. By some metrics, <em>Grand Theft Auto</em> is now the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game_franchises">sixth-best-selling video game franchise of all time</a>; an original installment hasn’t come out since 2013’s <em>Grand Theft Auto V</em>, but hundreds of thousands of players worldwide still flood into that game’s online component, which generated nearly a billion dollars in revenue last year. </p>
<p id="uUqVmJ">The games are synonymous with lots of things—violence-driven gameplay; an outré sense of humor that often shades into misogyny or homophobia; quality, given the franchise’s consistency over the past 20 years; the <a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/rockstars-culture-of-crunch-is-changing-as-gta-6-picks-up-speed-employees-say/">culture of crunch</a>, given the thousands of hours required to make a game this deep; agony, given the wait for <em>Grand Theft Auto VI</em>—but its biggest legacy is this sense of freedom that Stockman and Perry and myself and many more remember from their first encounter with this pivotal installment. <em>GTA III </em>wasn’t the first open-world game—a sandbox environment in which you, the player, wander around a gigantic map exploring and completing tasks—but it was by far the most expansive and fully recognized up until that point. The open-world game is now the standard format of numerous franchises, such as <em>Spider-Man</em>, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/5/1/17305938/god-of-war-how-cory-barlog-avoided-pitfalls"><em>God of War</em></a>, <em>Assassin’s Creed</em>, <em>The Legend of Zelda</em>, Rockstar’s own <em>Red Dead Redemption</em>,<em> </em>and many more, and <em>Grand Theft Auto III </em>was the inflection point. Its success would shape not just the genre over the next 20 years, but with it, the entire video game industry.</p>
<p id="N4D7Pi"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="j4LD6Q">In the interest of research, I downloaded <em>Grand Theft Auto III </em>on my PlayStation 5 and played it seriously for the first time in nearly 20 years. (Though I did give it a short go in 2012 when I discovered the game had been ported to iOS, only to be stymied upon discovering that it’s basically totally fucking unplayable with touch controls.) The first thing that surprised me was how stripped down the game feels. The map is much smaller, especially since you start out with access to just one of Liberty City’s islands. There’s no dedicated minimap beyond the small, circular HUD in the corner, <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=gta3+minimap&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS968US968&oq=gta3+minimap&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i13j0i22i30l7j0i8i13i30.1366j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">inspiring confusion</a> across the internet as modern-day players realize they have to memorize where everything is. There aren’t many cars or people, relatively speaking—sometimes you’ll walk for what feels like hours, trying to find something to steal. </p>
<p id="CNjA72">The list goes on. There are few of the fully fledged minigames like the darts, pool, tennis, or golf options that would dot subsequent <em>GTA</em> offerings. You can’t swing the camera around when you’re in motion, which makes aiming a nightmare. You can’t buy houses. You can’t buy anything besides guns, really—not even your protagonist’s outfit. Your protagonist’s name, by the way, is never mentioned, and he never talks. (His name would be revealed as Claude in <em>Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas</em>.)</p>
<p id="2ejx5c">At the time, when <em>GTA III</em> was the first of its kind, none of this mattered. Previous games had featured open maps driven by exploration (<em>The Legend of Zelda</em>), and some games had incorporated this dynamic into 3-D gameplay (uh, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/23/18012564/legend-of-zelda-ocarina-time-best-game-ever-1998"><em>The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time</em></a>), and some games even did all of that in a modern-day city (<em>Shenmue</em>). But <em>GTA III</em>’s innovation was to build its game around a transgressive identity—the criminal—and let you loose. There were no real directives about what to do—some icons on the map indicated missions, but no artificial timer or series of in-game prompts nudged you to attempt progress. Many of the game’s secrets, like the ramps allowing you to attempt physics-defying jumps with your car, or the secret packages tucked down alleys and behind warehouses and on top of buildings, could be discovered only by roaming. And because Claude is such an anonymous cipher, you could play however you wanted—as a by-the-books hitman, an ace driver, a sociopathic murderer—without feeling any disconnect between the story and gameplay. (A contrast with some of the later editions, where an attempt to graft a basic sense of morality onto the protagonists clashed with the ability to equip a flamethrower and melt scores of citizens down to the bone.)</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="z8xRLI"><q>“We wouldn’t be talking about the open-world genre if not for <em>GTA III.” —</em>Nifty Games CCO Pete Wanat</q></aside></div>
<p id="qbeFII">Perry, who had a front-row seat to what the industry was doing at the time, affirmed all this. “It was very violent, but it was also really open; you had the choices to do things that you could do in other games, but not with the huge geography and the amount of side stories and the random things you can do,” he said. “There was so much to explore that when you did the exploring, it was worth it. … The idea that you’re free to do any of those things meant that you could create a certain amount of chaos in the city without ever having to follow the story line. That freedom of being able to do whatever you want to do was really fully realized, unlike any game before.”</p>
<p id="x4JvH6">This freedom was epitomized through the game’s embrace of an industry term called “emergent gameplay,” wherein the player is allowed to solve a situation through several means. During one mission where he was supposed to pursue someone in a high-speed chase, Stockman recounted, he parked a row of cars on the street beforehand, in order to block his quarry’s path. “I bet the designers had no idea that people were going to do that, because they really wanted you to chase the car down,” he said. “But I found a way to sort of break the game, and to me, it wasn’t even breaking the game. It was just trying to find a more efficient way of killing this bad guy.” This sense of experimentation animated the impetus to mess around and see what you could accomplish with the provided tools.</p>
<p id="FDVKuc">DMA Design, the game’s developer, had mapped out a blueprint for what to do by way of the franchise’s earlier success. The first two <em>Grand Theft Auto </em>games were built around a similar formula: You, a criminal, traverse a fictional city and complete missions to climb the hierarchy within several interconnecting gangs. The sense of humor is louche; the violence is extravagant; the emphasis on the “grand theft auto” element is paramount. Those games were shot from an overhead perspective, owing to the technical limitations of the first PlayStation, but despite middling reviews they were embraced by players, with <em>Grand Theft Auto </em>and <em>Grand Theft Auto 2</em> selling about 5 million copies combined around the world. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="qthYDz"><q>“I came on board, and I said, ‘We’re going after <em>GTA.</em> I don’t care if we’re labeled a clone.’” —Video game developer Chris Stockman </q></aside></div>
<p id="luu8pm">The leap forward that <em>GTA III </em>took was just a natural evolution of the franchise’s formula. “With the power and technology of PlayStation 2, we were able to bring the former 2-D, top-down world into full 3-D,” DMA lead producer Leslie Benzies <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/23/grand-theft-auto-3-interview-with-dma">told Perry</a> in 2001. This technology allowed the world of Liberty City to continuously stream without interruption; while entering a building or starting a mission would lead to a loading screen, you could drive around the city with no break in the action. It also allowed for the incorporation of a 24-hour schedule, with the weather and sunlight changing depending on the time of day. Combined with an array of radio stations loaded with recognizable music, alongside some faux shock jocks, the player could have a truly unique experience—a moment when only they were driving around to a particular song, at a particular time of day, watching some drama unfold.</p>
<p id="DaRYJw">Patrice Désilets, the creator of <em>Assassin’s Creed</em>, brought up one such situation. Early on, a mission asks you to pick up the paramour of a mob boss and drive her around. “I was in a limousine, and there was opera on the radio, and it was raining at night,” he said. “Maybe other people in the world were experiencing that, but because of when I picked the limousine—that’s me.” With such a range of dynamic scenarios, the game’s violence didn’t need to take center stage. Désilets, for example, said he was more preoccupied with finding the best place to watch the sun rise. With some regret, he noted he was never able to put that into <em>Assassin’s Creed</em>.</p>
<p id="YnKwhx"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="qF6nMq">Influence is difficult to quantify. It isn’t as though <em>Grand Theft Auto III </em>flipped a switch in every single studio and developer brain across the country, leading them to uniformly conclude, “Yes, yes, we must make a game that is just like this.” While there was a surge of <a href="https://www.gamesradar.com/battle-of-the-gta-clones/">open-world, crime-based games</a> that came out in the following years—<em>Mafia</em>, <em>True Crime: Streets of LA</em>, <em>The Getaway</em>—these games were still just a sliver of the wider landscape. More accurately, <em>GTA III</em> raised the bar: Now, any crime-based game that didn’t offer total mobility, committed voice acting, a gigantic city, addictive gameplay, and a compelling narrative would feel hopelessly inadequate. </p>
<p id="mSHFq2">In many cases, though, <em>GTA III</em> did serve as an explicit influence. <em>Assassin’s Creed</em> initially began as an installment of the <em>Prince of Persia</em> franchise, following Désilets’s stewardship of 2003’s series-reviving <em>Prince of Persia</em>: <em>The</em> <em>Sands of Time</em>. “<em>GTA III</em> came out not long before, and I said it would be nice if the main character was the car,” he said. “This time, it would be a third-person character that you could go anywhere with, and use all these acrobatic powers in order to move.” The development team revived a cut bit of material from <em>The Sands of Time</em>—a village at the bottom of the palace where the story takes place—and expanded it into a city where the character could move around. It kept expanding, and eventually the game split off from <em>Prince of Persia</em> to become its own franchise.</p>
<p id="Who85d">Chris Stockman was similarly direct about <em>GTA III</em>’s influence on <em>Saints Row</em>, probably the best and most successful of all the <em>GTA</em> successors. Stockman was hired at Volition when <em>Saints Row</em>—originally called <em>Bling Bling—</em>was already in development, albeit in a muddled state resembling more of a third-person shooter than an open-world game. “I came on board, and I said, ‘We’re going after <em>GTA</em>,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t care if we’re labeled a clone.’ We were going to be on the Xbox 360. ... There was all this stuff we were doing that was brand new, and I was like, people are going to love that. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so why reinvent the wheel?” Aided by next-gen technology and a riotously stupid sense of humor, <em>Saints Row</em> was an immediate hit that spawned multiple sequels (and a forthcoming <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Row_(2022_video_game)">reboot</a>).</p>
<p id="CnWfp4">Even licensed games could lift from <em>Grand Theft Auto</em> to give their properties a boost. The official tie-in game for the 2004 movie <em>Spider-Man 2</em> was set in an open-world city environment, allowing you to swing anywhere as Spider-Man—a novelty of superhero wish fulfillment that sold millions of copies and generated massive critical acclaim. The <em>Tony Hawk </em>franchise formally adopted an open-world setting for 2005’s <em>American Wasteland</em>; 2005’s <em>The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction</em> placed the Hulk in a city and let him wreak havoc; 2006’s <em>The Godfather</em> had you play as a fictional Corleone foot soldier, tasked with maintaining the family’s territory across a smudged version of New York City. Even 2003’s <em>The Simpsons: Hit & Run</em> was a shameless <em>GTA III</em> clone, repurposing <em>GTA</em>’s gameplay to create a shockingly engaging version of Springfield that’s still appreciated today as a cult classic. </p>
<p id="0f1VMz">Radical Entertainment’s 2006 release <em>Scarface: The World Is Yours</em> was one of these licensed successes, set in an alternate timeline where Tony Montana doesn’t die in a fiery shootout and must rebuild his Miami criminal empire one mission at a time. Pete Wanat, the game’s executive producer, said the decision to place the game in an open-world setting was simply common sense: If you’re going to take over a world, it has to feel like a world. Still, it was clear whose lead Radical, not to mention the entire industry, was following. “The notion that we were going to make a better open-world game than <em>GTA</em> was like, ‘Nah,’” he said. Most crucially, he said that <em>GTA </em>invented the language for how these games should handle. That’s why the triangle button (on the PlayStation controller) almost always correlates to “drive this vehicle,” whether it’s a car or a horse, no matter what game you’re playing. </p>
<p id="YCvyfj">As Wanat pointed out, the open world was a natural fit for many of these game’s premises—who wouldn’t want to <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/9/24/17895602/marvels-spider-man-swing-success">swing around a city</a> as Spider-Man? But there was another, more practical calculus at play. As the console wars settled into a three-way race with the introduction of the Xbox in 2001, the fight to catch gamers’ attention—and generate massive profits in the process—escalated dramatically. <a href="https://www.newspapers.com/clip/84459172/game-controversy-nothing-new/">Within a year of release</a>, <em>GTA III</em> sold 6 million copies and earned more than $250 million in revenue—a financial success that publishers across the industry grew eager to emulate. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="kxDuvb"><q>“More and more people are looking for something that can be finished.” —Nesting Games CCO Jordane Thiboust</q></aside></div>
<p id="u5tYRH">Games set in these larger worlds could pack in an impressive amount of gameplay, stretching play time toward the dozens and even hundreds of hours as players sought to complete side missions, find all the collectibles, and explore every nook and cranny of an immaculately realized fictional world. The logic at bigger companies went something like this: Longer games with lots of content are more likely to sell, because gamers were looking to get value for their buck. Therefore, these sandbox games were worth prioritizing over more modest projects. (This financial calculus has continued to ascend to the present day, as developers <a href="https://kotaku.com/top-video-game-companies-wont-stop-talking-about-games-1795663927">increasingly</a> <a href="https://kotaku.com/why-ubisoft-is-obsessed-with-games-as-a-service-1822938255">shift</a> toward a “games as a service” model built around endless online play and microtransactions.) </p>
<p id="2JPxV8">“THQ was hell-bent on proving themselves at that time,” Stockman confirmed. At first, he said, the company didn’t even want <em>Saints Row</em> to have a story: “There was a big part of leadership that just wanted a loose collection of things that you do, and you take over the city somehow. How do you do that? No one knows!” Even Rockstar fell prey to the sprawl, with 2004’s <em>Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas</em> boasting a map that clocked in <a href="https://www.thegamer.com/which-grand-theft-auto-has-the-biggest-world-map/">at nearly five times</a> bigger than <em>Grand Theft Auto III</em>, and <a href="https://imgur.com/a/GTDH7jO">roughly doubled</a> play time. </p>
<p id="J3n1o2">Video games aren’t cheap or easy to develop, and open-world games in particular are incredibly difficult to make well, considering the amount of content and graphical detail they contain. The demand for these more and more oversized games <a href="https://kotaku.com/the-video-game-industry-cant-go-on-like-this-1836606033">fundamentally</a> <a href="https://kotaku.com/god-of-war-ragnarok-will-wrap-story-because-trilogies-t-1847691005">altered</a> the development cycle. <em>GTA III </em>was made by <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/23/grand-theft-auto-3-interview-with-dma">two dozen people</a>; more than 1,000 worked on <em>GTA V</em>. Patrice Désilets saw his team expand from around 200 people on the first <em>Assassin’s Creed</em> to more than 800 by the time of <em>Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood</em>, the third and final installment he’d work on. “It was on <em>Assassin’s Creed 2</em> that we decided to do a monster game,” he said, a direction the franchise would permanently steer toward. “After I’d cut a third of the game because it was too big, I remember receiving the call that said ‘No, no, no.’ And then we put more stuff in.”</p>
<p id="hViYtx">By that point, the team was spread across the world, leading to what was essentially a 24/7 development cycle across multiple time zones. With middle management fastidiously tracking progress, and new, unfamiliar staff seemingly added to the team every time he turned around, the creative process swelled beyond recognition. “As a creative director, suddenly there’s a lot of parts, and it has to make sense,” he said. “And so you would say, ‘Well, you know, fuck it, I don’t care anymore.’” <em>Brotherhood</em> sold fantastically and received rave reviews, but from one vantage point there was almost too much content—<a href="https://kotaku.com/review-assassins-creed-brotherhood-is-the-best-assassi-5690186">“nearly bloated with fun things to do,”</a> <em>Kotaku</em> wrote in its positive review. Désilets left Ubisoft shortly thereafter, and after <a href="https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/patrice-desilets-tells-his-side-of-the-ubisoft-firing-story">a brief, tumultuous reunion</a> with his former employer, ended up launching Panache, his own studio.</p>
<p id="upqaKc">From the player’s standpoint, the frisson from that first encounter with an open-world game diminished with each subsequent offering. Suddenly, it just became <em>standard</em> to find yourself in a giant world with tons of stuff to do. (The phrase <a href="https://www.thegamer.com/best-ubisoft-games-open-world/">“Ubisoft game”</a> has even become a shorthand for this experience.) “It’s not about accepting and going through the challenges put [in] by level designers; there’s a sense of, ‘Oh, I’m the actor,’” Désilets said. “Once you’ve experienced that, it’s tough to go back.” This is a subjective evaluation—Stockman and Perry stressed they still loved the open-world genre even as they pointed out its flaws, citing last year’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2020/7/17/21328209/ghost-of-tsushima-review"><em>Ghost of Tsushima</em></a> as a high mark—but with these games running longer and longer, finishing them morphed into a full-time commitment. In-game maps <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/6prfp8/is_anyone_else_sick_of_cluttered_maps_in_open/">grew heavy with icons and checklists</a> of tasks to complete, and while that might not be a problem for every player, it sure was tougher for the developers, many of whom now outsource some of the less glamorous world-creation work to <a href="https://80.lv/articles/building-the-world-of-assassins-creed-origins/">AI</a> or <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/3087/outsourcing-blockbuster-video-games-made-in-china-horizon-zero-dawn">outside companies</a>.</p>
<p id="1SpH5m">The struggle to build on previous success was epitomized by the disastrous launch of 2020’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2020/12/31/22207618/cyberpunk-2077-dystopia-costume"><em>Cyberpunk 2077</em></a>, the most hyped video game in some time. CD Projekt Red, <em>Cyberpunk</em>’s developer, had struck massive gold with <em>The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt</em>, a fantasy RPG packed with hundreds of quests to complete. Like <em>Grand Theft Auto III</em>, <em>The Witcher 3</em> didn’t necessarily invent anything: It just did everything bigger and better, with more detail. <em>Cyberpunk</em> was sold as being even bigger and better and more detailed, but with the team unable to hit quality-control benchmarks even after months of delay, it shipped with hundreds of glitches and became an instant meme for its myriad faults. CD Projekt Red’s stock cratered, and though the game has subsequently been patched to some level of playability, it will never be able to satisfy those initial promises.</p>
<p id="y3GbNT"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="kEyMyd">In September, a new development studio called Nesting Games announced its formation with a somewhat feisty mission statement. “We want to go back to creating RPGs that are focused on immersion, great characters, powerful storytelling, and strong gameplay,” chief creative officer Jordane Thiboust said in a press release. “We are moving away from the ‘massive open world’ model, full of icons to clean up, and returning to experiences that are content-driven and ultimately respect the player’s time.”</p>
<p id="ViBpjO">What made this statement notable was Thiboust’s bona fides: He was lead game designer on <em>Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey</em> and <em>Assassin’s Creed Syndicate</em>, as well as the associate game director on <em>Immortals Fenyx Rising</em> (though he left halfway through production). His six years at Ubisoft gave him firsthand knowledge of the way big-budget games are conceived at the corporate level, and the experience left him wanting more—or, actually, less. Like Désilets, he pointed out how the massive development teams on <em>Assassin’s Creed</em> increasingly left him and his peers with a feeling of alienation. “At some point, ownership among the team is diluted; people start losing focus, start losing motivation, and that’s pretty sad,” he said. “That’s why people are joining us at Nesting—they want to go back to having an impact on the game they produced, instead of feeling like a cog in the machine that’s so big no one can see it completely.” </p>
<p id="pMr2GA">As Thiboust described it, the wheel is turning throughout the industry: Over the past few years, more and more development studios composed of industry veterans have opened up, citing burnout and the resurgent need to work on games with a narrower focus. The rise of the indie developer <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/7220/indie-game-auteurs-stardew-valley-hollow-knight-golf-story">is nothing new</a>, but Thiboust’s statement was an explicit shot at the bloat that characterizes even the best open-world games. He and chief operations officer Fred Brassard were tight-lipped about the games Nesting is developing but said that they’ll be single-player RPGs in the mode of something like <em>Deus Ex</em>. “That’s the issue when you make a massive open world—it’s completely unsustainable to have high-quality content,” Thiboust said. “Playing an hour of our games should feel like watching a good episode of your favorite TV show. ... More and more people are looking for something <a href="https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/former-sony-exec-says-games-too-long/">that can be finished</a>.” </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="49bHFu"><q>“That freedom of being able to do whatever you want to do was really fully realized, unlike any game before.” —Former IGN editor-in-chief Douglass Perry</q></aside></div>
<p id="l1fROC">Our conversation had me thinking about a potentially naive question: Why aren’t there more <em>different</em> kinds of open-world games? Twenty years out from <em>GTA III</em>, why are most of them still glossy murder simulators? Even a game like <em>Ghost of Tsushima</em>, breathtaking in its visuals and meditative rendering of feudal Japan, is built around killing scores of enemies. The answer largely has to do with the cost and time of developing these games: Given the financial investment, the big studios tend to veer away from experimentation in favor of something familiar and safe, especially as more and more people get involved at the management level. “You want to make sure that it’s vanilla enough so more people can actually get into it,” Désilets said. More often than not, that means killing shit. </p>
<p id="sf8vEJ">The indie studio route offers more conceptual wiggle room. <em>No Man’s Sky</em>, an open-world space simulator where you explore dozens of procedurally generated planets, was built by a six-person team at British developer Hello Games. Though its initial launch inspired derision from gamers who noted its missing features, the game has been steadily patched and upgraded over the last five years to become a <a href="https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/07/15/looking-at-how-far-no-mans-sky-has-come">bona fide success</a>, prioritizing exploration and discovery over the violence that a bigger studio might have included. Désilets himself led the development of <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2019/9/13/20863705/ancestors-humankind-odyssey-genetics-evolution-in-video-games"><em>Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey</em></a>, a stunningly ambitious game where you explore the dawn of human evolution by trying to help a pre-human tribe survive a predatory jungle world. </p>
<p id="OKGb6X"><em>Ancestors</em>, which came out in 2019, is like no other game I’ve ever played. It has all the surface production values of a big-budget, open-world game, but its experimentative gameplay resists categorization and offers few hints about how to master its interlocking systems—“Good luck, we won’t help you much,” a title card reads toward the beginning. Désilets said that the familiarity of most open-world games allows players to “see the Matrix” the moment they start playing, but <em>Ancestors </em>pointedly resists that transparency in an effort to create something new. The goal isn’t even to <em>finish the game</em>, he said—just to play around, and see where your brain goes. <em>Ancestors</em> has been downloaded over a million times since its launch, Désilets said, and he was personally validated by the amount of feedback he received from players about how the game had helped spark thoughts about the origin of our species.</p>
<p id="T59Ldv"><em>Ancestors</em> is, in most ways, completely different from <em>GTA III</em>. But as I messed around with its controls, attempting to figure out what this or that button would actually do and define the parameters of my exploration in this unfamiliar world, I sensed a kind of spiritual through line between the two games. When DMA and Rockstar developed <em>GTA III</em> more than 20 years ago, they were operating on a leap of faith that gamers would take the time and interest to navigate this colossal, detailed world unlike anything that had existed in the industry.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="yo16IC">That gambit paid off, and now here we are. “We wouldn’t be talking about the open-world genre if not for <em>GTA III</em>,” Pete Wanat stressed. “They made the toughest possible genre, and they made it great.” The next paradigm-shifting open-world game may look nothing like it, but it will inspire the same sense of awe and discovery that all of us felt back in 2001. That’s a feeling no amount of time can dull.</p>
<p id="PSNhRT"><em>Jeremy Gordon is a writer from Chicago who contributes to </em>The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine<em>, and </em>The Nation<em>. He lives in Brooklyn.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/10/22/22737333/grand-theft-auto-gta-rockstar-open-world-assassins-creedJeremy Gordon2021-05-13T06:30:00-04:002021-05-13T06:30:00-04:00“Don’t You Dare Go Hollow”: How the Ultra-Challenging ‘Dark Souls’ Became a Pandemic Balm
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<p>At the spiritual nadir of one of the darkest years in recent history, I found solace in one the most trying video games ever </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="R3A9Si">Over several hours I had slogged my way through the Iron Keep, making mental note of the Alonne Knights, the Ironclad Soldiers, the Greatbow Knights—the fucking Greatbow Knights, I couldn’t forget them, not after I’d located what I thought was a peaceful refuge away from the action, only for a javelin-sized arrow to vault through the air and into my sternum, knocking me off the edge, where I plummeted helplessly until I hit the ground, which was also, for what felt like pointedly antagonistic reasons, covered with lava. Instant death, as it had been when the Ironclad Soldier pinned me against a wall and pancaked me with his mace; as it had been when a swarm of those Alonne Knights advanced upon me as I attempted to retreat to the start of the level, only to backstep once too far and fall into the lava, again; as it had been when I spotted the fuzzy glow of a potentially rare item resting on a column below me and inched ever so slightly toward it, so that I might roll off the bridge I was standing on and fall delicately onto this lower platform, allowing me to collect this potentially rare and possibly even <em>crucial</em> item (a new sword? a new piece of armor?) only to miss my mark, and plummet—you guessed it—into the lava.</p>
<p id="ju4WOM">These were merely a handful of ways I had died in the Iron Keep, a series of endings altogether surprising and humiliating and plainly unfair, wrenching a series of sounds from my body that I would charitably describe as “sexually repellant.” So when I reached the end of the level, I was ready to move on. A thin layer of fog separated my character, an adventurous knight whom I named Patch, from what I hoped would be the final boss. But was I actually ready for this? Really, actually ready? I had intermittently Googled things about <em>Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin</em>, the game I was playing, in order to anticipate items I might want to collect or characters I might want to meet, but whatever lay ahead of me at the end of the Iron Keep was unknown. And if I died again, as I had so many times, I’d have to slog back through those Alonne Knights and Ironclad Soldiers and Greatbow Knights—something I dearly wanted to avoid, lest I produce more of those sexually repellent exhortations.</p>
<p id="ZIJvtZ">I was not alone in my nervousness. Google <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=hardest+game+of+all+time&oq=hardest&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j0j69i60j69i61j69i60j69i65j69i61.991j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">“the hardest game of all time,”</a> and <em>Dark Souls</em> is the first result that pops up. Like many games, <em>Dark Souls </em>forces you to explore a dangerous and unfriendly series of interconnected environments, fighting difficult enemies with the goal of fighting an even more difficult boss at the end of each level. Defeating these enemies and bosses earns “experience points” (here they’re called “souls”), which you spend to increase statistics like health and stamina. <em>Dark Souls</em> puts a particularly painful spin on this format: If you die, you’re warped back to your checkpoint, and lose all of the unspent souls you’ve collected. You must then retrace your steps to where you died in order to get them back, but you have to clear out the enemies again, and because they’re so good at killing you, and because the environment itself is also hostile (poison, arrows, more lava, random pitfalls to nowhere), and because the game is always semi-arbitrarily declaring “Hey, fuck you,” it’s possible to get stuck in a death loop where all you can do is sort of throw your hands up and feel a transient despair at your own failure. Also, you can’t pause the game. It’s a lot of fun. </p>
<p id="lIThNj">(Some boring facts for context, sorry: The <em>Dark Souls</em> series was created by Japanese developer FromSoftware. It launched in 2009 with the game <em>Demon’s Souls</em>, a sort of thematic predecessor built around the ultra-intense formula I’ve described above that the first <em>Dark Souls</em>, released in 2011, would perfect. That game was followed by <em>Dark Souls II</em> in 2014, and <em>Dark Souls III </em>in 2016. Beyond that, FromSoftware also released 2015’s <em>Bloodborne</em> and 2019’s <em>Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice</em>, games that take place outside the shared <em>Dark Souls</em> universe, and provide their own mechanical twists on that ultra-intense formula. A new game, <em>Elden Ring</em>, cocreated by <em>Game of Thrones </em>author George R.R. Martin, is forthcoming. I have beaten three of these games, multiple times; I’m currently playing the <em>Demon’s Souls</em> remake for the PlayStation 5, and yelling a lot; I have beaten <em>Dark Souls II</em> once; <em>Sekiro</em> still scares me, for now.)</p>
<p id="R9YoeC">Over the years I had dabbled in the series, but at the spiritual nadir of the pandemic, when the slowly freezing weather had sapped all my desire for outdoor social engagement, I picked up <em>Dark Souls II </em>because it was $4.99 in the PlayStation Store (never underestimate the siren call of a discount). Though this installment is unanimously considered “the not-as-good one” for reasons <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/49dyiz/dark_souls_2_really_that_bad/">you can also Google</a>, my passing interest quickly morphed into full-blown obsession. I don’t know what happened. One moment I said, “Hmmm, this seems too hard, I’m an adult, this isn’t worth it,” and the next I was deep in the shit, playing whenever I had a justifiably free moment even as I kept dying over and over again, at one point actually falling off my couch in response to my latest failure and pressing my forehead to the ground, where I uttered the painful groan of a grizzly bear pumped full of buckshot. The bosses would wipe the floor with me, so I’d look up how to beat them on YouTube, and eventually I was watching videos like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNETAnhXsfM">“Ranking the <em>Dark Souls 2</em> Bosses From Easiest to Hardest - Part 1 [#20-41]”</a> (16 minutes and 46 seconds long), and then I’d wonder what the entire deal with those bosses was so I moved on to videos like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNo9Ow6XG10">“<em>Dark Souls 2</em>’s Story: Explained!”</a> (21 minutes and 38 seconds minutes long), all while desperately texting and messaging my friends to see which ones had played it. I started lurking on Reddit. I started <em>posting to Reddit</em>. </p>
<p id="OioBz4">I was physically alone for all of this, but while they’re intended as single-player experiences, the <em>Dark Souls</em> games incorporate an online network that allows players to leave rudimentary messages for each other—“item ahead,” “be wary of enemy,” stuff like that—and, after fulfilling a set of in-game requirements, summon other human players into their own world, in order to help out. As I worked my way through the series over a six-month period, there was never any shortage of helpful messages and other players to summon. Why do so many people still engage with a notoriously challenging franchise that last released a game when Barack Obama was president? </p>
<p id="EoumyA">For me, it was partly—and perversely—the difficulty. There was no shortage of astonishingly cruel and upsetting ways to die in <em>Dark Souls</em>, all of which elicited a sliding scale of emotional reactions. Dash across a hallway, only for a gigantic skeleton ball to roll out of nowhere and crush you to death? (The winding Catacombs of Carthus of <em>Dark Souls III</em>.) Maybe a six out of 10—annoying as hell, but something to be avoided on your next run. Spend 15 minutes whittling down a boss’s health, only to bite it when he’s a couple of hits away? (My third time facing the infamous Ornstein and Smough of the first <em>Dark Souls</em>.) That’s a 10 out of 10, likely to produce some of those sexually repellent noises I mentioned. Block an enemy’s attack, only for the impact to push you back <em>juuuuust</em> far enough to fall off the edge of a cliff, to your doom? (Far too many times to count, in every game.) LOL/10—the type of bullshit you could only laugh about.</p>
<p id="PsE9Bn">Yet there was only one solution to these issues: I had to “get good,” stylized as “git gud” within the message boards and video channels and general online discourse dedicated to <em>Dark Souls</em>. “‘Get good’ isn’t meant to be demoralizing, or unhelpful advice,” a YouTuber named <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/theDeModcracy/videos">theDeModcracy</a> told me. “It’s more of an encouragement. They want you to push harder.” By “they” he means the broad and robust <em>Dark Souls</em> community, like the 900,000 or so combined users subscribed to the franchise’s quite active subreddits. TheDeModcracy, who lives in Washington, D.C., had logged a few thousand subscribers during his first year as a creator. But it wasn’t until he actively courted the game’s Reddit fandom that his channel really took off—he now boasts nearly 341,000 subscribers, good enough to make sure he’ll never go back to his former career as an accountant.</p>
<p id="wpTDnF">Though he focuses on other games these days, for a long time theDeModcracy’s bread and butter was videos in which he ranked the games’ bosses—“Ranking the <em>Dark Souls 2</em> Bosses From Easiest to Hardest - Part 1 [#20-41],” mentioned above, was one of his. When I watched this video, and others in his series, invariably my interest would peak as he got closer to the harder challenges. Something like curiosity: “Which of the bosses that gave me a fit <em>also</em> gave everyone else a fit?” Accompanied, next, by pride: “Wow, that wasn’t as hard as everyone thought it was.” Because accountability was an appeal of these games, too. Whenever I died, I’d be anywhere from furious to irritated to annoyed to totally upset with the inimitable cruelty at the heart of the human experience, but I always wanted to keep playing. The game was difficult, yes, but calibrated in such a way that I could imagine beating it, if only I could … git gud. </p>
<p id="E76yi7">Almost always I understood why I had failed, why I’d watch “YOU DIED” scrawl across my screen yet again. During one level of <em>Dark Souls II</em>, the pirate-themed No-Man’s Wharf, I must have eaten it over three dozen times before I reached the boss. Yet I never stopped. And when I finally did overcome an especially infuriating boss, after however many hours and however many tries, the endorphin rush—actual endorphins, not exaggerating, resulting in tingly arms and a brief head rush—was unmatched by that of any other game I’d been playing, or had ever played, in fact. (I am not too much of an adult to admit that, on occasion, an involuntary and guttural and quite reasonably volumed, all things considered, “fuck yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooou” would escape my lips.) </p>
<p id="6Ei4zJ">TheDeModcracy affirmed this sense of responsibility to keep going, and the thrill of success. “Whenever something went wrong, it was almost always on my end,” he said of his first experiences with the game. “The game had a very deliberate way of presenting lessons you would learn early on—like don’t just run into a room without looking around the corner first, make sure you’re paying attention to what enemies are in a room. You just gotta keep pushing against the challenge and see how much you can improve, and that became really, really addicting.” </p>
<p id="8PMXma">He was right about that addictive quality, the thing I’d sought most in my video games ever since I was a teenager. I had no interest in passive gaming, in playing the kind of games you put on because you’re bored and just want to distract yourself for a few hours—I only wanted the pure shit, the games I couldn’t stop thinking about until I’d reached the end. I knew when something had really hit because I’d visualize the maps and enemy patterns and ongoing challenges as I was falling asleep, invent excuses for taking breaks so I could squeeze in another 20 to 30 minutes—possibly unhealthy, but something I was desperate for as the pandemic stretched on. Gaming was the perfect distraction, whenever I craved distraction from what continued to be a very bad stretch of American life.</p>
<p id="VxADL7">I don’t want to awkwardly segue into another writerly invocation of just how much the pandemic changed things for me, especially since I am talking about a video game. But it was nice to think about other things, when possible. In particular, the overarching mythology of the series felt relevant: <em>Dark Souls</em> takes place in a fictional fantasy universe where all life is sparked by a mythical flame that burns for eons, allowing for the creations of gods and monsters and men and entire civilizations, before sputtering out. Your job, as the mythologically chosen one of this world (who is also incapable of dying), is to ensure that flame doesn’t go out, so that another cycle of life might continue, allowing for more gods and monsters and men and civilizations to flourish. (This is called “linking the flame,” in the game’s parlance.)</p>
<p id="43fzMB">These cycles of death and rebirth, taking place over thousands of years, implying the infinite timeline on which all of our actions unfold, render our lives existentially meaningless until they’re suddenly meaningful—something to think about. Every <em>Dark Souls </em>game unfolds in a post-ruin kingdom—a place where there was once life but now there’s just decay, as the world slows to an end. Evidence abounds that things used to be good, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSkrhQiwFcE">but now are bad</a>. And yet … maybe you can change that? And maybe you can change the constitution of the fantasy worlds themselves, bearing ominous Teutonic names like Lordran and Drangleic, populated with zombie knights, skeleton dogs, ax-bearing were-men, cannibal gods, eldritch nightmares, and more. One boss is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6TOL0e0dLI">a giant wolf</a> with a sword in his mouth. When you see him, your first thought is “Holy shit, that is a giant wolf with a sword in his mouth.” Then you get to kill it. </p>
<p id="90GktH">Not inherently unique stuff, given what generally goes into fantasy, but <em>Dark Souls</em> submerges nearly all of this lore and mythos under the surface, a narrative decision at flagrant odds with contemporaries like <em>The Elder Scrolls</em> or <em>Dragon Age</em> in which the player practically drowns under the weight of provided textual context. <em>Dark Souls</em> has no lengthy cinematics, no encyclopedia of terminology to keep abreast of. Here, the story is pushed firmly into the background, there to be more or less ignored until, possibly, your curiosity is piqued—maybe it’s a name you keep seeing, or a boss design that catches your eye—and you start noticing how the pieces ever so subtly fit together … which brings you, inevitably, to the internet.</p>
<p id="fLtUpF"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/TheAshenHollow/videos">The Ashen Hollow</a> is another video creator who carved out a strong audience within the <em>Dark Souls</em> community, by stitching together all of the available information to dredge something resembling a story. Take Irina and Eygon, a pair of tertiary characters you might meet in <em>Dark Souls III</em>. Irina is a penitent monk, of some strain. Eygon is an intense knight tasked with defending her life. It’s a little sweet, but also a little ominous for reasons that jump out from the first encounter. It’s also entirely possible to glimpse just a fraction of their story line, even if you play it through and pay attention. You might just miss them altogether, with no penalty—the game also works like that. But using item descriptions and visual hints and ambient context, creators like the Ashen Hollow can gesture at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdkT2jnHkN4">the full and heartbreaking truth of these characters</a>, and how they’ve ended up in these games—a demand that’s allowed him to rack up over 111,000 subscribers. (The king of this genre is probably the creator VaatiVidya, who counts <em>1.73 million subscribers</em>—mostly just by talking about what’s going on in these games. Seriously, there’s a demand.)</p>
<p id="nZPCS9">The Ashen Hollow, who lives in Tennessee, told me his channel started out as a by-product of shooting the shit with his friends, who collectively became obsessed with the series around 2011. But he was immediately able to locate the underlying themes pulling him, and so many others, into this world. “It’s the tragedy of it all,” he said, pointing to his own struggles with mental health. “I didn’t relate to it in the sense that I know what it’s like to be undead, and I’m never linking the flame, but it resonated with me—the idea of seeing that light at the end of all these depression tunnels that I’d go through.” </p>
<p id="vrS8Z3">And through the nontraditional online system—the messages and summonable characters I mentioned above—you never quite feel like you’re alone, as you undergo this perilous quest to link the flame. Back in the Iron Keep, right before the fog door of the boss, I spotted the glowing scribble of unknown language that prompts you to summon another player into your world. Traditional online gaming has never appealed to me—I never took to the necessary mechanic of strapping on a headset so you can yell at friends and strangers, and perhaps be cussed out by a racist Oklahoman tween just because you beat him.</p>
<p id="kxpknU">But <em>Dark Souls</em> does it differently. When I requested that a real human player join me in the Iron Keep, we had no linguistic way of communicating—no headset coordination, no keyboard text field. Instead we could only gesture at each other: pointing, waving, lying down, and several other preprogrammed physical movements meant to help us stay on track. Here is what I knew about this other player: He had a big sword. That was it. His online handle has been lost to memory; so has the way he looked. But the sword sticks with me, as does the way we waved at each other, before he proceeded to follow me through the fog wall and into the unknown.</p>
<p id="h1OC91">Beyond the fog was a gigantic, yawning lake of even more lava, out of which a buff and winged demon emerged—the Old Iron King, according to the health bar that stretched across the bottom of my screen. The Old Iron King began marching toward me and my new friend, who stood on a narrow strip of stone, as I swiveled the camera to adjust to my surroundings. When the boss got closer, I noticed a gap between where I stood and where the other player stood—between us, of course, was lava, into which I might fall if I didn’t keep an eye on my footing. </p>
<p id="tpKuRF">I did not want to die. But I also had no idea how to avoid dying, at the hands of this fearsome demon. I got as close as I could, and swung my (not as big) sword at his body; a direct hit, but the demon immediately raised his hands and slammed them down into the ground, knocking me back. I backpedaled a bit, and he spewed a stream of fire across my field of vision, forcing me to roll to the side until it was over. I ran all the way over to the other side of the platform, and he used his arms to sweep the ground, nearly knocking me into the lava. </p>
<p id="0XVF88">Then I noticed something. My new friend, the knight, wasn’t running back and forth like some dumbass, but instead picking his spots, waiting for the Old Demon King to position himself in a particular place before attacking. While I was trying to figure out just what was happening, he’d managed to shave off a healthy chunk of that health bar. Though we had no means of communicating, I realized that all I needed to do was <em>follow him</em>. So when he moved to the left, I moved to the left. When he stood back from the flames, I stood back from the flames; when he moved in to attack, I moved in to attack. He had been here before, I now understood, and knew exactly how to beat this boss—had none of my first-time nerves or confusion about what to do. Now we were like synchronized swimmers, coordinating in silence as the health bar dropped lower and lower—and when the last blow was struck, and the Old Demon King slumped back into the fiery chasm from whence it came, I allowed myself to feel triumph at the victory.</p>
<p id="SKChNi">It wasn’t just triumph at the possibility of moving on. It was <em>gratitude</em>. For no other reason than the kindness of his heart, this anonymous player had decided to help me out—and though we could not talk, we had worked together well enough to win on the first try. After we won, he waved at me again, before disappearing from my world. We’d never interact again. It was December, and it was very cold outside, and by this point I—like most people around the country—had been more or less stuck inside for a very long time. I had managed to maintain some semblance of my old routines, but shed many of them in the adjustment to pandemic life. And here was a stranger, who I didn’t know at all, facilitating what I hoped would be an eventual victory over the entire game. </p>
<p id="Nt2Gg0">I was moved, I really was. Throughout <em>Dark Souls</em>, the concept of “going hollow” is constantly referenced—it’s what happens when undead characters like you degenerate entirely into mindless husks. The cycle of life and death and rebirth ends; they are just dead, incapable of moving on. In a meta sense, giving up at <em>Dark Souls</em> because it’s too hard is the moment you, the human, go hollow. Like your in-game avatar, the cycle ends, and you move on to another game (or perhaps, infuriated at the entire concept of gaming, you take up crocheting). </p>
<p id="0ylqRp">But here was this community of players, many of whom would never exchange meaningful words with each other, or any form of communication beyond the intuitive physical cues allowing them to play together. (There is even a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SummonSign/">subreddit</a> solely dedicated to requesting help, where the response time is usually just a matter of minutes.) “I think people remember their experiences and are able to be excited for people who are able to have the same experiences,” theDeModcracy told me, about why he thinks the broader community is, relatively speaking, eager to help each other out. “I don’t know that all games quite have that—they might have it in different ways, but I think with <em>Dark Souls</em>, it specifically does relate to overcoming those hurdles.” Everything in this game is engineered to make you want to quit, but with a little help, you can keep going. You’ll never go hollow, because the world won’t let you. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="xwkeJZ">This was resonant for me as well. It was communal catharsis—a shared experience of these blood-curdling games, set within this dark and depressing universe, whose mastery was nonetheless possible through the help of others. Other games were less upsetting, but beating these felt like a real psychic accomplishment, a navigation of a journey meant to discourage you at every step. I only hoped I could repay the favor for someone else who was struggling, when the time came, so they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by their own frustration. The cycle of rebirth would continue, for someone else not quite ready to give up. </p>
<p id="vLHDNg"><a href="http://jeremygordon.xyz/"><em>Jeremy Gordon</em></a><em> is a writer from Chicago who contributes to</em> The New York Times<em>, </em>The New York Times Magazine<em>,</em> <em>and</em> The Nation. </p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/5/13/22432544/dark-souls-sequels-gaming-in-pandemicJeremy Gordon