Climbing: the Last Mountain for Video Games to Overcome
Ever since a certain moustachioed Italian plumber taught us how to perform a hop, skip and a jump all within the first 30 seconds of Super Mario Bros., the concept of traversal is something which has played an important role in pretty much every game where you directly control a character.
“Climbing” or the idea of overcoming certain obstacles in video games isn’t an area we often tend to think about, yet for me, I’m still left baffled how so many games often get it wrong.
So, while climbing in a game isn’t exactly the last metaphorical mountain for video games to overcome, it certainly is an important one. Lately I’ve been indulging myself in some good old-fashioned tomb raiding via the excellent Rise of the Tomb Raider, recently released on PS4, and you only need to glance over the history of this one game series just to see how far traversal in games has come.
Rise of the Tomb Raider feels a blast to play even in the moments where there is no element of challenge for the player, instead encouraging you to stop, look back, and embrace the highly detailed world around you. “So what makes the climbing in Rise of the Tomb Raider such a blast to play?” I hear you cry. Well, it goes without saying that the incredibly detailed and gorgeous setting of Siberia doesn’t hurt to look at, but a few simple and subtle systems help to ensure that boredom doesn’t rear its ugly head when playing.
Anyone who has played Rise of the Tomb Raider will know that Lara’s trusty pickaxe plays a vital role in how you progress and interact with the world; somewhat going on to become quite the character itself. Every time Lara is required to leap across a near-impossible distance in a single bound, your attention is always required. As our heroine’s body often crashes into the side of an iced-over wall, an icon will prompt you for input, emphasising the need to steady yourself as you would when mountaineering in the real world.
At the risk of starting a fanboy war, something the equally bombastic and set piece-driven Uncharted series lacks in its traversal is the ability to trust the player to make choice. Almost every time you’re required to climb and traverse in the first three games, Nate is regularly shown a path via a series of conveniently coloured yellow ledges. Whilst this is a great initial mechanic in teaching the player the limits of what they can achieve within that game’s universe, come the end, and this mechanic really starts to become at odds with the idea of exploration.
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End thankfully felt somewhat tamer in this regard, seamlessly merging perfectly with that game’s idea of a more grounded finale for the end of Nathan Drake’s adventures. Just don’t apply this theory to the also awesome The Last of Us, but then again, Joel is but an ordinary survivor, not an intrepid explorer, in this game.
There’s even precedent for first person shooters to learn from the more engaging elements that traversal has to offer. This year’s DOOM introduced a sense of verticality and strategy never before seen in a modern FPS, requiring players to dodge, hop and avoid the enemy not solely in a left-to-right manner as other game’s such as Call of Duty and Destiny often do, but in an up-and-down fashion also. Again, this inherent need to keep your finger on the pulse in order to succeed is a very satisfying way of making traversal or climbing not just meaningful, but fun.
When such great examples like DOOM and Rise of the Tomb Raider now out in the wild, I’m hoping that we never see chore-inducing traversal unnecessarily plague our favourite genres – whether that’s in a completely unintentional manner as in the first Uncharted, or a rather forced fashion that games such as Dark Void and Inversion unsuccessfully presented.
The prospect of traversal in virtual reality quite literally looks to pose another obstacle for game developers to overcome, with not just climbing but movement in general still needing to be perfected, but it is early days. Movement within VR at present never feels truly immersive unless manning a mech a la Battlezone or Scavenger’s Odyssey. I personally refuse to believe that warping is the answer but hey, that’s another debate entirely!
