#99: When Will You Stop Playing Undertale?

(Spoiler Alert: This article discusses important plot points and twists in Undertale.)

I've begun to notice a new trend in video games, especially in RPGs. The current generation of game designers grew up on the games that built the genre, like Final Fantasy and Ultima. When they entered the industry, they took with them an appreciation and understanding of the tropes created and used by these RPGs. Manifesting itself within their works, this understanding allows them to make games that are more self-aware. Some games are content to just lampshade and acknowledge those very tropes, laughing them off as an in-joke between the designers and the players. Others exist to show the potential implications behind them; to demonstrate the potential horrors of a world where those tropes we take for granted in games are reality. Undertale is one such game, and it has a damning, if not subtle, message to deliver to its player base.

Created by Toby Fox, Undertale is an RPG, inspired by the likes of Earthbound. What separates it from other small-budget, independently-developed RPGs is that it bills itself as a “friendly” game. Though the player encounters random enemies while exploring, they never have to kill any one of them. This isn't necessary new, as Shin Megami Tensei has frequently allowed players to converse with and recruit demons. However, Undertale takes this basic concept to a logical extreme. Every enemy, even the bosses, can be dealt with without dealing a lethal blow. This is the way in which Undertale helps set the stage for its moral lessons.

In most RPGs, players fight and kill hundreds, if not thousands, of creatures over the course of the game, with little regard for their lives. To the players, and to the protagonists, they are nothing more than speed bumps in the road to their objective. Undertale asks what kind of person is this protagonist, and what kind of effect would that person have on those around him. If the player chooses to murder every enemy they encounter, they'll begin to see the effects quickly. Towns and areas will become depopulated, devoid of life. Shopkeepers will abandon their stores and their stock before the protagonist arrives in an effort to escape the carnage with their lives intact. City guards and brave heroes will attempt to stop them in their tracks.

In other words, the player who murders every enemy they encounter, who acts like any other RPG protagonist, is a complete genocidal-maniac. To rack up such a high kill count and slaughter so many, they would have to be. By implication, Undertale is saying that this would be true of the lead protagonists of most RPGs and the company those “heroes” keep. Simply by adventuring and fighting against all these creatures, they are complicit in mass homicide. Even if the opponents aren't sapient, the kind of damage that would ensue on the ecosystem would make life nearly unsustainable. Undertale claims that although we see them as heroes from our viewpoint, the damage they do would only make a bad situation worse. As players, we take for granted that we are in the right, or at least trying to do good. Undertale questions the wisdom of saying that we are morally correct just because we are playing as the protagonist.

But that is not the only RPG mechanic Undertale challenges by exploring its implications. The idea of replaying games with multiple endings, and seeing “all that a game has to offer” also comes into close scrutiny. At any point before beating the game, the player is allowed to start over from the beginning. However, characters in the story will remember and comment on what choices they made in their previous playthrough. Most will discover this in the same way I did. The first boss in the game is your maternal figure, Toriel, who guides you and protects you at the start. In my first run, I had not realized that the trick to saving her is to constantly use the Spare option until she gives up, and my ignorance killed her. Regretting my actions, I consulted the wiki and learned how to keep her from dying. I reset my playthrough and used the non-lethal method to win the boss fight. Immediately afterward, the next character I spoke to mocked me for “growing a conscience” and redoing that section of the game to spare her. For going back to see the alternate outcome, I was chastised by the very game I was playing.

Continuing along this theme, should the player get the Pacifist ending, for never killing a single thing and completing all the prerequisite side content, they are given the option to perform a True Reset, essentially erasing not only the current save, but any record that previous runs ever occurred, returning the game to a factory-standard. When the player launches the game after unlocking this option, one character appears on screen begging them not to use it. By doing so, they claim that the player would be erasing the happy endings that the cast had earned throughout the game, a fate more cruel than anything else that could happen to them.

In the Genocide run of the game, the player has a conversation with the only other major villain aside from themselves. During this discussion, this person praises the player for their willingness to give in to their murderous instincts and show no mercy. Then, something strange happens. He begins to talk about the people who “want to go through with this, but don't have the guts to do it themselves.” Taunting them, he claims that there are “Probably watching a video of this right now.” (A fact that I learned, fittingly enough, by watching someone else's Let's Play of a Genocide run.)

All of this boils down to Undertale's one, overarching message: Even though the content exists in the game's files, it isn’t something the audience necessarily needs to see. The game is blatant in the way that it encourages its players to save everyone and avoiding making even a single kill. That said, the option to ignore its warnings and embark on a bloody campaign exists. It's there, but it is something that players absolutely have to experience this content? Do they have to sacrifice the good times they had with the friends they made along the way in the service of seeing every bit of content on offer? Are all those lives the player took worth the Genocide ending? And if they aren't, is it even worth the time it takes to look up a YouTube video showing the differences? Undertale ponders these questions and answers with a definitive “no”. All these choices exist, but in reality the game considers the first playthrough to be the only thing worth the player’s time. Anything else being needless fluff padding out your time with it.

Though Undertale lacks a subtlety regarding the way it challenges these tropes used in the vast majority of RPG game design, there is no denying that is does challenge them. Lately, there have been more and more games that deconstruct and analyze their own medium. Given that the generation that grew up on gaming has finally matured to the point where it can enter the industry proper, I expect to see more of these deconstructions as time goes on. Like Undertale, their creators have something to say about the games they played growing up, and now they have the means and opportunity to express those thoughts.

Impressions #2: Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea: Episode 2

Warning: Though I try to be vague, there may be general spoilers for the game. I take no responsibility for this. Read at your own risk.

Continuing my impressions series, this week I will talk about another game that has been on my mind since I finished playing it. Recently, I used my Bioshock: Infinite season pass to get Burial at Sea: Episode 2. Partly to see the conclusion of Burial at Sea, and partly to see how the new stealth-based gameplay altered the overall experience, I braved Rapture one last time.

One of the things that surprised me the most was how competent the stealth mechanics of the game were. Enemies have decent cones of vision, so players need to be fairly aware of enemy positions and the environment in order to avoid detection. Further, the game does a decent job of giving players the tools to sneak around. Lockpicks can be found all around, and sleep darts can incapacitate enemies non-lethally. Groups can be handled with knockout gas darts and noisemakers can be used to lure enemies away from their usual patrols. There are also hazards like shattered glass that will create lots of noise and attract enemies to the player's position if they are stepped on. The Hand Cannon and Shotgun also make their return, but I cannot comment on them as I played in 1998 Mode and did not have access to them.

Even the plasmid selection has been changed to favor more indirect approaches. The one I ended up using the most, Peeping Tom, has the dual effect of cloaking Elizabeth and allowing her to see enemies through walls. Possession also returns, except the upgraded version knocks-out enemies when it runs out instead of killing them like in the previous episode. Old Man Winter makes an appearance, allowing players to freeze enemies in place. Lastly, Ironsides is a new plasmid that makes its debut in Burial At Sea: Episode 2. That plasmid can be used to catch projectiles in mid-air and add them to the player's own ammo pool.

However, while all the stealth mechanics are there and fully functional, the game itself still falls victim to the AI of the original Bioshock: Infinite. What I mean by this is that when players do get detected, the AI does not seem to know exactly how to handle that. Enemies do fire weapons and launch melee attacks when players are noticed, and they do a good job of quickly alerting the entire room to your presence. However, I never found getting away from them to be too difficult. Vents and grappling hooks seemed to be everywhere, allowing for easy escape since foes had no way of inspecting these areas. Also, no matter how tough the enemy was, a simple sleep dart would almost always knock them out. It was trivial to incapacitate the foe that detected me before they alerted everyone else. Most of the time, I could even reclaim the sleep dart that I used off their corpse for late reuse.

In later half of the DLC, the gameplay became even easier once I obtained upgrades to the Peeping Tom plasmid that negated its otherwise massive Eve cost when standing still. The enemies knew I was there and they knew I was cloaked, but proceeded to march forward anyway because they did not have an exact line-of-sight. This left them wide-open to a sneak attack, especially since when cloaked, a sneak attack from the front is a viable option. Even with the extremely limited health and offensive options inherit to 1998 Mode, it became extremely easy to knock out entire rooms of guards without breaking a sweat. I would cloak, knock a guard out, cloak, watch his friend come to inspect the body, knock HIM out, and then rinse and repeat.

On the positive side, the focus on stealth and avoidance actually encourages exploration in order to look for resources and supplies, especially in the early game. Money is extremely rare, and even large stashes of it will rarely have more than 10 coins. Players can also only hold a maximum of 4 sleep darts and 2 gas darts on their person as well, so poor aim will be punished severely. Health kits can be carried on hand (up to a maximum of 5), instead of being use immediately on pickup. Since, especially on higher difficulties, Elizabeth takes a lot of damage on hit, this is almost necessary.

Eve cannot be carried around in the same way, so that resource ends up being much more precious. All the Plasmids take up a great amount of Eve, so they need to be used conservatively. Instead of being something players rely on, they are really designed to be used in order to turn otherwise terrible situations around at the last minute. While it is overall not as good as Thief or some other high-profile stealth games, it is pretty surprisingly well done on the whole.

As for the story, it leaves me with a weird feeling overall. It feels like many elements to the game's story feel like they specifically put in to address criticisms towards some aspects to both the vanilla campaign of Bioshock: Infinite and Burial at Sea: Episode 1. Did you think Daisy Fitzroy's actions in the later half of Bioshock: Infinite made no sense? Burial at Sea explains exactly why she did what she did (and the explanation is honestly pretty bad). Did you cry foul at the fact that the plasmids in Burial at Sea: Episode 1 were of the drinkable variety seen in Columbia? There is an explanation for that too. Other, more spoiler-y elements explain other inconsistencies in the DLC make it come across as, to quote certain others, very “fix-fic-y”.

At the same time, Burial at Sea: Episode 2 does a lot of things right with it's story and world. For example, whenever Elizabeth picks a lock or plans out her next move in the plot, the game changes the visuals to look more like the pages of a book. This helps players better enter Elizabeth's mind and understand how and where she obtains all of her knowledge. There are also numerous instances where Elizabeth finds codes and ciphers. As she cracks the code for their hidden messages, the cipher is decoded into plain English in real time before the player's eyes. When combined with the tone and feel of general gameplay, this really helps sell sell Elizabeth as a more thoughtful character than Booker.

Another thing that is done well is the character-focused nature of the plot. Although the game is set in Rapture and ultimately leads into the original Bioshock, the story itself is clearly one about and centering around Elizabeth and her thoughts and actions. Story events early in the game rid Elizabeth of her powers. However, the nature of what it is like to be all-seeing and all-knowing thanks to having the combined knowledge of every possible incarnation of yourself is explored. Characters from the original Bioshock, like Atlus, Suchong and Andrew Ryan also play large parts in the narrative. Others from Columbia, like Fink, also make appearances. One of the more interesting subplots involves a bit of a trans-dimensional partnership and idea stealing between the two as they continue to one up each other in their fields of study. On the whole, these characters really add to the game and tie up both the original Bioshock and its Columbian successor quite nicely. Though the ending can be seen coming from a mile away, it is satisfying in its own way, especially to fans of the first Bioshock.

Overall, fans of the Bioshock franchise are bound to get a kick out of Burial at Sea: Episode 2. Stealth game enthusiasts might find what they are looking for here. Although better implementations of these systems exist, the underlying mechanics are solid enough to derive enjoyment from. Odds are by the time this comes out, those who were going to buy it already have and those who were not have already definitely decided to skip out on it, but it is still worth it to think about how this DLC came together. It gets some things wrong as most games do, but it gets so much right that it is hard to think badly about it.

#55: Dishonored: The “Non-Lethal” Option and the Inherent Flaws

(A Spoiler Warning is in effect on Dishonored and the entirety of its campaign.)

Recently, I went back and complete my high chaos, highly lethal playthrough of Dishonored. While this playthrough made me feel like a complete jerk (thanks to all of the destruction and devastation I caused) it also became the perfect opportunity to reflect upon morality and how it is viewed through games like Dishonored. When it comes down to it, the moral choices expressed in these kinds of games can be considered juvenile, showing a lack of understanding of nuance and ambiguity that many of these situations entail. In particular, I take issue with the fact that “non-lethal” options are almost always considered objectively good and just. The two main reasons I have for this are the topic for this week's posting.

The first of these reasons is that, for all the talk of moral superiority, non-lethal gameplay styles are not inherently any more moral than their lethal cousins. As Chris Franklin, aka Campster, already explained much earlier in this video on Dishonored, many of the things players do in a non-lethal playthrough can be seen as “bad” or “wrong,” including theft of personal property (pickpocketing/looting), forced injection of toxins (crossbow with sleep darts), choking enemies to unconsciousness, and forced invasion of the mind and body (possession). From a certain standpoint, all of these things are transgressions against all of the various people players will encounter. The problem here arises when the game only judges the audience based only on the number of kills made. If the player kills roughly less than 20% of the people in the game, then they are considered Low Chaos and the game ends with Princess Emily guiding Dunwall into a golden age under protagonist Corvo Attano's tutelage. Any more than that, then Emily either grows into a ineffectual dictator of an empire ravaged by plague or dies, leaving ruins in her wake (depending on what happens in the final mission). Corvo, who is nothing more than a supernatural assassin, is either a Bastion of moral purity or a bastard leading a nation into ruin, solely depending on the number of people he killed. This gets even more hazy when the types of non-lethal takedowns of many of the game's targets are taken into account, because almost all of them are fates worse than death. When facing High Overseer Cromwell, head of a group of religious zealots, players are asked to either kill him, or burn his face with a specific branding called the Heretic's Brand, which forbids anyone in the city from being nice to him in any way. Likewise, the Pendleton twins, rich noblemen, can either be assassinated or forced to work in their own silver mines with their tongues removed and their heads shaved. Sure, the fate of these people are rather awful in the non-lethal versions, but according to the game, it is all okay because they are not dead. In fact, players will often be rewarded by NPCs who drop gifts off for him because they opted to “show restraint” and not kill them. Whether one choice over the other is inherently better is an open ended question, but we cannot deny that neither one should be considered objectively good or inherently better than the other without close scrutiny.

While that is indeed bothersome and honestly does not make much sense, it is far from the only issue I take with that kind of dualistic moral choice. The other problem I have with Dishonored is that its lethal and non-lethal divide really inhibits the number of options developers have at their disposal. Like many of its gaming contemporaries, such as Bioshock, inFamous, or even Mass Effect, the complex subject of morality was rendered into a binary choice that lasts for the duration of the game. When the only thing that is tracked is the number of kills, it prevents the game from truly reacting to the way that people play it. No one bats an eye when every single guard in a level has either been choked to sleep or pumped full of sleep darts, but a group of dead bodies causes a massive backlash from the world. This type of binary thinking can break an otherwise strong illusion of a coherent and reactive world. It even seeps into the gameplay as well. When dealing with his targets, the game will only acknowledge whether Corvo killed them or took the non-lethal route given by the game designers. This closes off many avenues of possible problem solving that could would otherwise be possible in a real world scenario. One such example comes from one of the missions that takes place in Act 2 of the game, Lady Boyle's Last Party. The gist of the mission is that Lady Boyle is the mistress of the Lord Regent who has taken power in Dunwall, financing his military as well, so the player has to infiltrate the party she and her two sisters are throwing, figure out which one is the Regent's mistress, and take her out through lethal or non-lethal methods. To the game designers credit, they allow for more than a few ways to go through this mission. Players have the choice of discovering the identity of the mistress, either through sneaking around or by blending in and talking with the guests at the party, and taking her out exclusively. Alternatively, they could kill off all three Ladies Boyle, ensuring that the true target is also eliminated, or knock out the target and sell her off to her creepy stalker who promises Dunwall will “neither see nor hear from her ever again.” Ignoring the potential implications behind that last option, this does drastically reduce the number of options left available, especially for those attempting a non-lethal run of the game. If Corvo speaks with the real Lady Boyle and asks to see her in her bedchambers, she reveals that she has no particular love for the Lord Regent and only sleeps with him to further her own family's social status. That makes all of the methods of dispatching her seem unappealing and unnecessarily punishing her for circumstances beyond her control. It would be nice to allow for options that leave a better taste in the player's mouth like convincing the good lady to drop support for the Regent's cause, either by persuasive or coercive means. Perhaps players could even reduce the Boyle family's sphere of influence in some way, making her support and financial backing less significant. The point is that by forcing a binary “Kill target or take the designated non-lethal approach,” the game is not challenging players to think outside the box as much as they could. It would be interesting to see games track other things besides whether or not people are killed, like maybe how violent players are or how much they stole throughout their run of the game or level. Players who only strike against their targets, yet do so with lethal force, would be treated as a Hitman-esque Silent Assassin, while those who keep their presence and influence as hidden from the world as they can would be treated like a Ghost. It seems like only allowing one single stat to affect everything in the game is naive in a way, given the people are rarely so singularly influenced.

Before I wrap this up, I do not want people to be under the impression that Dishonored is a bad game by any means. While the story is weak and I do criticize the game for not offering a lot in terms of choice, the amount of options and approaches players are given is significantly more than what most even attempt in other modern games. The exploration and focus on moment-to-moment gameplay are the strongest points of the game. It should also be noted that the Blink mechanic, which allows players to use short-range teleportation to jump to areas within their field of view is revolutionary and dramatically hastens the pace and verticality when roaming or sneaking through the fairly large and wide open (by today's standards) levels thrown at players. It is a remarkable throwback to the likes of Thief with a dash of Deus Ex thrown in; A decent start to a new budding franchise. I only hope that the developers were taking notes and learn from the feedback generated by the game's audience.

Update: Shortly after publishing this post, I showed it to Dishonored's lead designer Harvey Smith, who I follow on Twitter. He disagreed with the notions I asserted in the second paragraph of this post, where I talk about the morality of it. From his perspective, he released this game with the message that "mass murders inevitably lead to instability," which was a guiding though behind the Chaos system and a notion that I can agree with. It was a commentary on the nature of violence in gaming and gaming culture. The conversation had about this was interesting, as we both lamented how little consumers and even designers think about the amount of death in the games we play. While this does really help me to understand the rationale and reason behind the Chaos system, I still maintain that using more than primarily killing as the means to track Chaos is not something I entirely agree. (And, to be fair, I am being almost willfully ignorant of the fact that players of Dishonored can lower their Chaos by doing things that help out the common folk.) I write this addendum so that you may get the full story and judge for yourself. It feels disingenuous to have a conversation with the lead designer and not include the fruits of that conversation for you to see.