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Over the years on this channel I’ve found myself gravitating more and more towards games
that tell their stories through mechanics rather than relying too heavily on the narrative
techniques of other media. What makes games special is their interactivity, so why not
use it in the storytelling process? After all, a conclusion you draw through your own
actions is far more likely to mean more to you than one explained at you via text.
It doesn’t even need to be some hyper-complex, interconnected web where every little aspect
of your interaction with a game relates directly to its plot. Rather, all it takes is one system
that can get you subtly rethinking your entire experience, deepening your connection to whatever
you’re playing. For example, Sleeping Dogs’ morality system,
rather than merely judging your actions as either binary good or evil, instead views
everything you do as a combination of the two; rewarding creative destruction while
simultaneously punishing you for the most minute of infractions; framing the Triad lifestyle
as thrilling, while protagonist Wei Shen’s duties as an undercover cop become a leash
around his neck, perfectly representing the character’s central struggle—the inner
battle at the heart of so many of its cinematic inspirations—directly through your gameplay.
You’re incentivised to keep both your triad and cop scores as high as possible in order
to access new abilities on separate upgrade trees, but you quickly butt up against the
inherent contradiction between the two. Suddenly, thanks to the way the game handles something
as simple as morality and upgrades, what would otherwise be a bombastic mess of player-driven
chaos takes on a deeper layer of meaning, without sacrificing any of the aforementioned
thrills. OK, we get it, Sleeping Dogs is more meaningful
than some might think, some might say it remains a vastly underrated masterpiece, but what’s
your point? Well, when I actually thought about it, I guess I found it a little odd
that when it comes to the notion of the upgrade system—not merely the act of buying a better
gun or sword but directly improving your character themselves through new abilities and the like—Sleeping
Dogs is one of the few games I can think of that uses this feature to highlight the themes
of its story. The unlocking of new skills based on how a
player wants to build their own character has become a key component of many different
RPGs; the upgrade tree as a concept is so ubiquitous that it’s part of the much lamented
Ubisoft sandbox formula, and yet the vast majority of these systems you come across
are remarkably abstract and distant from the story actually being told. How many games
can you really think of where any context is given as to why you get these experience
points? What is it you’re collecting here? What do these points actually mean? How do
they relate to your character and the skills they are somehow now learning?
Indeed, for the most part, it’s all just a series of abstract points on a weird, barely
coherent path. Click button to gain new ability, with little thought given to the process of
actually learning said ability. To return to Sleeping Dogs, while most upgrades fall
under the aforementioned upgrade paths, a separate tree rewards you for collecting and
returning stolen statues to your former instructor, whereby you select what move you want to unlock
and a small tutorial sees you physically learn it within the confines of the dojo, emphasising
and lending weight to the game’s martial arts aesthetic. Your character goes through
the process of learning a new ability as a reward for collecting an in-game item. In
the vast majority of other upgrade trees, however, you simply wander around a bunch,
you kill an arbitrary number of enemies and that means your health instantaneously goes
up or you can do a better kick now for some reason.
To be clear this isn’t something that kills my enjoyment of games by any means. Hell,
for some games it might make total sense to keep a system like this as out of the player’s
way as possible (as found in something like the move from awkwardly priced money-based
upgrades in Tony Hawk 2 to straight up stat points in Tony Hawk 3, trimming as much fat
separating you from that delightfully pure gameplay as possible). That said, when thinking
about the concept more broadly, I find it strange that almost every other element of
a game, from morality to action to death to the mere act of movement itself has been used
in multiple titles to tell various different kinds of stories, and yet something as widespread
as the upgrade system seems to stand separate from everything else, remaining wholly unquestioned
and telling just the one story—get the numbers up to get stronger, I guess.
Not all upgrade systems are created equal, however. NieR: Automata does feature a typical
XP system but bolsters it by rendering its upgrades in a remarkably physical way, in
the form of collectible chips that you install into your blank slate of a body, giving you
total control over the buffs you want to apply to your character; whether it be health, damage
or your ability to automatically heal for example. In the heat of combat these can drastically
affect the tide of a battle, so it can be a little disconcerting to die, then retry
an encounter realising you have none of your upgrades equipped. This is because those upgrade
chips are real, physical objects attached to the fallen body.
You aren’t rewinding the clock by hitting “continue” here, your consciousness is
merely transferred to a new body and if you want those upgrades back, you have to go and
get them. And like basically everything in NieR Automata, it’s one more element linking
back to the game’s central questions of what it truly means to be conscious, to exist
when bodies are treated so disposably, when you can just casually respawn in another hunk
of flesh like it was nothing while your previous body is still out there somewhere. The process
of improving your character, it turns out, can be incredibly meaningful.
And going even further in the direction of machines, maybe my favourite upgrade system
ever is found within one of my favourite games generally, Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture’s
Killer7. Its outwardly wacky story that melds incredibly dense, heavy themes of political
tension between the US and Japan with lucha masked assassins and anime power rangers belies
the fact that, as I’ve previously discussed on this channel, its oddities goes way beyond
the surface level, with gameplay that was advertised as a fast paced action game but
ended up as a lurching survival-adventure-puzzle-shooter. It’s easy to view the game’s upgrade system
in that same subversive light. Essentially, you encounter an enemy, you scan the room
to make them visible, then you attack them in order to collect thick blood (which is
different from thin blood which is used for healing), which you then take to a floating
TV found within the various Harman’s rooms dotted throughout each level and change the
channel to get to the creepy doctor with a machine that slowly converts that thick blood
into blood vials you can then spend on upgrading each member of the Killer7 separately.
The wildest part about this though is that you will eventually reach an unseen cap of
how much blood you can convert in a level (so as not to break the game through endless
grinding in the first area, I imagine) where the machine will slowly sputter out before
the aforementioned creepy doctor bangs on it, hangs a closed sign and walks away like
it was nothing, saying nothing to you in the process, simply leaving you to deal with all
this blood you now can’t spend. And what I love about this is the fact that,
moreso than perhaps anything else in Killer7, this system is the thing that makes me think
“in a game so extremely odd otherwise, is this really that strange?” See, here we
have a system whereby you collect a physical, measurable item from a real, physical being,
insert it into a physical machine that works (and importantly breaks and requires maintenance)
just like a normal machine does. The in-world creatures and objects filling in those blanks
might be a floating television and blood from exploding terrorist zombies, but all of it
exists as part of a process which follows an understandable real-world logic. I guess
I just love that out of something so wild and obtuse can emerge a process this delightfully…
mundane. It’s clunky, but it’s funny—a cheeky jab at the way upgrades are supposed
to work in games. But it occurs to me that, thinking about all
this, perhaps there’s a reason upgrade systems in particular haven’t been super widely
utilised when it comes to mechanical storytelling. When I consider the examples that really work
for me in this regard, the majority of them can be seen to be kind of annoying out of
context. In a world where games are often made to be as streamlined as possible (doubtless
in certain cases to provide the clearest path to get players paying for arbitrarily higher
numbers), titles like this come along and make things deliberately more difficult for
you. A machine breaks, you have to traverse great distances and physically learn new abilities;
adding more steps to a traditionally one-step process and at worst, straight up blocking
you out of certain things you might want to do.
But crucially, what makes all the difference here is that they are tangible. They add a
physical weight and provide logic to their worlds; they make new skills feel earned,
rather than some illusion of power you just expect when you level up for some reason;
and this is all stuff you just don’t get when upgrades are so instantaneous. A deeper,
more engaged upgrade system might be inherently more cumbersome, requiring more work from
players, but maybe it’s precisely that struggle that makes any kind of self-improvement feel
meaningful, and perhaps there are ways games could more effectively represent that journey.
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