Big Picture Mode

Industry issues given the widescreen treatment

Nathan Brown on the catch-up feature’s application in games

Love Island is a British reality TV show in which a bunch of horny young attractive people go to a Mediterranean villa for six weeks and are psychologically tortured until they experience emotions. I’d always shunned it, assuming, like many of you I suspect, that it was brainless nonsense. But enough people I like and respect said nice things about it, and in my current state of mind – the miserable middle of the Venn diagram of magazine deadlines and a twomonth-old baby, now further addled by post-E3 jetlag – brainless nonsense is pretty much all I’m capable of.

I’m watching it on Netflix, which got the first two seasons recently as part of the promotional drive for the new series. I’ve never watched reality TV this way before, and as such I’ve never noticed the ‘skip recap’ button that Netflix offers up in such circumstances. My evenings are brief and prone to interruption, so it’s rare for my wife and I to make it through an episode from start to finish in one sitting; we’ll watch the last 20 minutes of one instalment and the first half-hour of the next before we have to switch it off because a child has woken up, or a parent is passing out. So the chance to skip the first couple of minutes of catch-up fluff is most welcome.

The ‘previously on’ segment is taken for granted in TV these days, but it’s still rare in games. Until Dawn did it smartly; before that came Alan Wake. Obviously Telltale has been at it for a while, too. The common denominators there are a focus on story told in the style of TV and film – and in Telltale’s case it’s essential given the often months-long gap between episodes. Yes, it’s important to be caught up with the story, when story is the meat of the thing. But that’s no longer enough. Games are getting bigger and more complicated. They demand more of our time, and their makers want us to keep playing them for years. So why are they still so hard to come back to?

This is hardly a new phenomenon. The main reason I have never finished Okami – along with it being roughly 3,000 years long, of course – is that I got 40 hours or so in to it, then put it to one side and went and played something else. When I finally got around to going back to it I had no idea where I was supposed to be going, what I was supposed to be doing, or what was going on. Developers have tried, in part, to fix that with quest logs and objective markers, but this is an inelegant solution to what, in an era of go-anywhere open-world games, is an increasingly complex problem.

And it’s one that, in this games-asservice age, is more urgently in need of a solution than ever. Like many of you, I assume, I played Tom Clancy’s The Division for a couple of hours at launch and bounced off it. But it’s always niggled at me. I knew it was something I’d probably like if I stuck with it, and after a thoroughly enjoyable E3 session with the forthcoming sequel I thought I’d give it another go.

Heavens, it’s hard work. The Division has been expanded and improved upon tremendously since launch, and if you’ve kept pace with the game that’s a wonderful thing. But to someone coming back after two years, it’s horrible. The map was always busy, in that Ubisoft sort of way. Now it teems: the other night it took me five minutes to find the next story mission. My agent’s backpack is overflowing with materials and resources whose uses are a mystery. There are vendors everywhere, selling things I’m not sure whether I will need in an hour or a couple of months. I bring up the inventory menu and am terrified by its morass of damage numbers, multiple currencies and obtuse terminology. Dialogue windows pop up explaining some new feature in a language that assumes I’ve been at the level cap for 18 months. It’s overwhelming.

I’m the perfect audience for this game. I am precisely the sort of player Ubisoft Massive is targeting with The Division 2: someone with a history of devoting himself to a game for months on end, playing night after night, coughing up blindly for DLC expansions. I am a lapsed Destiny player looking for a fix, and Massive has the hook-up. I’m muddling through, thanks mostly to my knowledge of Destiny and how Ubisoft games tend to fit together. And I am enjoying myself. But many would have walked away by now. Endgames are one of my favourite things in games, but they can’t exist without a beginning.

My agent’s backpack is overflowing with materials and resources whose uses are a mystery