Breaking Paradigms

Been a while since I posted here. Here's a real short version; worked a lot on Mass Effect 2. (I'll talk about that in later posts.) Started idly looking for a job, since I felt blocked in terms of horizontal/vertical mobility at BioWare. Was offered a new job at ZeniMax Online working on their unannounced MMORPG. After some debate, took said job.

After five years in Edmonton, we've moved back to the US. After five years of doing nothing but writing, I'm back to doing a combination of writing, tech design, and systems design. After five years of comprehensive, inexpensive health care, we're back to paying three times as much for inferior coverage. But you can't have everything; where would you put it?

But what does have to do with Shadowbane^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Red Faction: Guerilla?

I'm a fan of Volition mostly on the basis of the FreeSpace games. The titles they've released in the last decade haven't really interested me -- the last I bought was the original Red Faction, which I played most of the way through. The first time I loaded RF:G, the quality of the graphics, voice acting, and cutscenes came as a complete surprise. The last work I'd seen from these guys had blocky graphics and some of the worst cutscenes I've seen in games (sorry, V).

But I want to talk about a specific moment.

In the first mission, your brother sends you down to collect salvage in an abandoned camp. I walk down and I'm confronted with a wall. Following my instincts, I start to look around. I look to either side. No, the wall is flush with the canyon walls. No way around. Maybe over? I look for rocks that offer a platform to jump off of. Nothing is remotely high enough.

I perform this assessment in a second, without conscious thought, a pattern learned from countless other games.

When I get closer to the wall, a popup message says to click the LMB or RMB to swing my sledgehammer. I do. My character winds up, grunts, and cracks the sledgehammer into the wall. It crumbles around my strike zone, rebar and chicken wire hidden within exploding out on the landscape. There's a giant hole in the wall. I can walk through it.

In one small moment, the mental rules I've followed when playing FPS for the last five years went out the window. Walls aren't a clue to find another path here; they're something you knock down and move through.

It was one of the rare moments when I could feel a paradigm breaking.