Hi I'm Tommy Thompson and welcome to Design Dive on AI and Games, where I look at how
AI impacts game design and vice versa! In this episode, I'm boost-sliding into the world
of high-octance cover shooter Vanquish. Developed by PlatinumGames and released in 2010, Vanquish
is a third-person cover shooter that at the time caught me off guard by its intensity,
fast-paced gunplay and blistering combat. While originally published on Playstation
3 and Xbox 360 back in 2010, it received a re-release on PC in 2017 to much fanfare,
which was fascinating to watch given the game largely didn't receive that much noise during
it's initial launch, to the point Gamespot deemed it the "Best Game No One Played" of
that year. So here we are almost nine years since its original launch, it's time to visit
the game once more and re-examine the AI behaviour in relation to the games core design; how
it meshes with its core mechanics and builds not just a game that is exciting, challenging
and intense, but also one that is a little unbalanced that tries to be more accessible
for all.
For those who have never played it, Vanquish is a third-person cover shooter where players
take control of Sam Gideon - a DARPA agent armed with an Augmented Reaction combat suit
- who is sent to the space colony Providence sitting in orbit above the earth, to take
down Russian separatists forces who have weaponised the station and threaten to destroy the United
States of America. It's a weird game that loves to relish in its own absurdity whilst
trying to keep a straight face. But while it's incredibly self-aware of the genre trappings
it's adhering to - ranging from dudebro shooters to classic anime tropes - it still manages
it do so without it impacting gameplay and core experience. Steve Blum gives his most
dudebro jingoistic Steve Blum performance he's ever made as Lt. Col. Burns , alongside
edgy good guy Sam by Gideon Emery - a voice actor who strangely has two prominent video
game credits in which his character is named Gideon. It presents main characters that are
pretty much a pastiche of pretty much every cover-shooter protagonist on the market. And
true to form the secondary characters - aka the women - are the budding sidekick on comms
and.... Hilary Clinton, who is found to be a scheemie scheister and kills herself as
a result?
C'mon lads, we can do better than this.
The game relishes ridiculous quicktime events and hiding squeaky voiced Pangloss statues
for you to shoot as collectables. But then leans into this absurdity and builds mechanics
around it. You've got Sam repeatedly trying to come across as hardcore by virtue of smoking
cigarettes, to allowing the player to throw cigarettes as a distraction tactic, which
then becomes a running gag of how he can't catch a break and have a smoke in piece. I
mean come on the closing credits have you shoot the developers as you return to earth
as flying photoboard asteroids. If that doesn't sell to you how tonally inconsistent and kinda
bonkers this game is I don't know what is.
When Vanquish came out in 2010 it was the heyday of the cover shooter, what with the
first two Gears of War entries popularising this particular branch of third-person genre
to great acclaim. It wasn't hard to see that impact on store shelves, from Uncharted and
Grand Theft Auto to Splinter Cell Conviction, Army of Two and 50 Cent Blood on the Sand,
cover shooters were all the rage. But that market saturation pehaps denied Vanquish broader
success despite its innovations in mechanics. Although in saying that it's absurdity, it's
overt anime influences as well as the price tag combined with a relatively short campaign
(which you can complete in under four hours) might have had something to do with it. Despite
its shortcomings there was something endearing about it to me from the get go. The opportunity
to play Gears of War huffed up on two litres of Irn Bru, a bag of skittles and a line of
cocaine sounded like an opportunity too good to pass up - and then playing Vanquish of
course (bad dum tish). It's been acknowledged in interviews by Director Shinji Mikami that
the game sought to embrace the anarchy of Bullet Hell shooters and transpose that reality
onto a cover shooter. The final result is fascinating and merits more than one playthrough
to truly embrace. This is driven in part by the gameplay mechanics working in conjunction
with the AI behaviours and building this fast, often anarchic experience. I remembered the
game fondly from originally playing it back at launch, but it's sat in the back of my
head for many years to a point it needed re-examined (plus I have a YouTube show now so like I
can make loosely constructed justifications for playing games 'for YouTube', go me). So
let's get into that, I wanna talk about what this game does - and doesn't do - that still
makes this rather endearing.
The critical components of Vanquish that help it stand out are the two additional mechanics
you gain courtesy of Gideon's combat suit: the ability to slow down time to take aim
at enemies and the boost slide mechanic that allows players to move across the combat theatre
at blistering pace. Boosting takes the roadie run concept from Gears of War and cranks it
up to 11 by enabling you to move around at high speed, shifting from cover to cover with
precision and urgency. Meanwhile the slowmo allows you to focus on that one target that
is bearing down on you, take the shot you need and remove the pressure imposed upon
you. But what makes it really interesting is that while one or more AI are targeting
you and only you, you'd think these mechanics make the game painfully easy, but they comes
with two caveats.
First, than in order to trigger the slow-mo, you need to move, so while you're reliant
on that cover to keep you alive, you need to push out of cover to save your life. Diving,
sliding or leaping towards enemies are all valid approaches to initiating the slow-mo
attack. The second aspect is the energy meter attached to the combat suit. Both sliding
and slow-mo drain the suit and need to be recharged before they can be used again, but
more critically, in the event you completely exhaust the suits energy, you have to wait
for it to recharge entirely before it can be used again. tPerhaps even more interesting
is that Gideon's melee attack will largely eliminate any immediate threat, but completely
exhausts the energy tank in the process. What's great about this is that the game inherently
wants you to keep moving, but also to stop, take stock, re-evaluate before you move again.
It provides a fresh take on the expertly crafted reload mechanic of Gears of War, providing
an opportunity to make that risky play, but punishes you in the event you fail to control
it.
It's when all of these mechanics come together that it completely changes the game itself,
to a point that the emphasis on the cover shooter is minimised significantly. Your focus
is on the carving around the space, taking out as many enemies as you can, exploiting
the slow-mo to hit some of the more demanding targets only to take a moment to recharge
before dashing around again. What's powerful about this is that it becomes the antithesis
of cover shooters design principles. Unlike Gears of War and it's ilk, you don't need
to hold the defensive line, Vanquish allows you to define the combat zones, the lines
of attack and the safe areas to recover whenever you want and shift the pace of combat on a
dime.
But contrary to this, the game punishes you if you do not respect the authority it provides;
when you burn out the suit you're forced to rely on those more traditional cover-shooter
mechanics to keep yourself alive long enough to move again. It shares a lot of similarities
with DOOM 2016, in that it rewards the player with great agency and control of combat when
in constant motion, but punishes you for doing it too much whilst providing the failsafe
of traditional cover-shooter behaviour if you overindulge.
It's a fun mish mash of idea, given that without the boost and slow-mo mechanics, the game
would be but another cover shooter, but this enhanced mobility and precision fundamentally
changes how the game plays and how we express ourselves within the space. It's interesting
given I'd argue a much maligned title that also sought to achieve the same thing was
Dark Void by Airtight Games. Published by Capcom in the same year as Vanquish, it added
verticality to the cover shooting that mechanically doesn't feel as smooth or as slick as Vanquish
but it's always stood out to me as a fun attempt at innovating in this space.
So my long-held memory of Vanquish was that the AI enemies were challenging and refreshing,
but then on playing it again, I really didn't see that at all. Enemies are competent for
sure, especially the smaller more nimble ones, but fundamentally they're rather dumb. Characters
frequently don't see the player or pay attention to the them, instead prioritising the friendly
non-player characters in the scene.
For me playing through the game it was satisfying but also slightly disappointing, in that the
innovative mechanics I just praised are not challenged sufficiently by the enemy designs.
Games of this ilk require mechanical balance: if the player has some audacious mechanics,
we need to find interesting ways to not just challenge them but in time counteract them.
A great example of AI design counteracting player empowerment can be found in the Batman:
Arkham series, where not just in the original game but in subsqeuent sequels the games introduce
new enemies in the combat sequences that negate or counter player mechanics and force us to
improve our overall mastery of playing as the Dark Knight. This isn't to say Vanquish
doesn't have any variety, nor enemies don't achieve this to some degree. They do and I'm
going to explore that now, but for it seems that they're limited in scope.
We start the game fighting the regular robot grunts, the Gorgie's, either standing out,
in cover or manning turrets, this then expands out into Gorgie's with more powerful weaponry
and riding on MOA walkers by the time you reach level 1-3 - which you can hijack if
you exploit the movement mechanics to get in behind the entrenched forces. This opening
phase of enemy design given it helps players get the feeling for basic shooting, moving
into cover and also - if you're feeling adventurous - the ability to start using the boost and
slow-mo mechanics.
Over time this is expanded such that boost and slow-mo become more prevalent in the subsequent
sequences as target prioritisation becomes increasingly more important, but also maintaining
a defensive lines as larger enemies are introduced. Spheres force us to prioritise targets that
move towards us, the Chicane droids present mobile cover that needs to be watched carefully
while the jellyfish sequence in act 1-6 forces that target prioritisation to begin to employ
the slow-mo for fear of them getting too close the convoy.
Meanwhile the first boss enemies begin to appear, with the first Argus robot as early
as level 1-3. This beast is extremely powerful and forces players to get out of cover and
move. Not just to avoid enemy fire, but also to line up shots against vulnerable areas
of the robot in both it's quadraped and bipedal forms. It also has a defensive mechanism when
damaged that projects arcs of energy that overheat Sam's suit, further reinforcing how
vulnerable you are to counter attack if you're not careful. The number of larger and more
aggressive enemies that force boost movement increases throughout the first act, with the
likes of the Spike Tanks, the Romanovs in act 1 and the Bia robots in act 2.
Now this is all still quite fun, but the problem is that enemy diversity stagnates pretty rapidly
by the end of the first act, with the same enemy types thrown at you and often just placed
out with Gorgie grunts. While new sub-boss enemies appear such as the Buzzard, you fight
each of them several times but largely independently. There is an argument for remixing these enemies
in interesting ways to keep you on your toes: Romanov's and Bia's together? Or perhaps with
Spike Tanks or an Argus? Naturally I can imagine there are overheads with ensuring this all
runs smoothly, given the sheer number of characters involved (be they friend or foe) running in
a game originally intended for Xbox 360 and PS3. But still, it left me wanting something
that really stretched my abilities as the game soldiers on.
All the while there are still aspects of the Gideon's core mechanics that aren't being
challenged. For example, what about creating enemies you deliberately target you while
boosting? Or enemies that can only be attacked or even spotted whilst in augmented slow-mo?
Or do more damage while you're in slow-mo (sure that sounds ridiculous but I imagine
they could come up with sort of rationale for it). No new mechanics are introduced throughout
and a result the gameplay plateaus as early as the middle of act two, with a larger focus
on the variety of different weapons you can use instead of finding new ways to challenge
players and their use of the core mechanics.
This isn't to say it doesn't happen at all, two of the later bosses in the game - the
Unknown from act 3-6 and the Crimson Viper in act 4-4, force players to move around differently.
Each character has attacks that quickly prove fatal, and given their rapid movement you
play more defensively, staying in cover, waiting for an opening and then boosting out the way
once it looks too risky. These stand out as its some of the few moments in the game where
I feel like I'm playing defensively rather than offensively.
Now all that said, I still had a great time playing the game. The game doesn't outstay
it's welcome, but it's arguably a little short and forgettable in some segments. However,
one valuable aspect is the replayability brought on by the variety of difficulty configurations.
I'll readily concede playing through on Normal was simply too easy for me and I needed to
play it again on hard to feel challenged. But I really appreciate both the introduction
of Godhard mode after you complete the game the first time, but also the Casual Auto mode
which is offered straight away.
I wouldn't even give this thought were it not for the recent resurgence of the easy-mode
discussion thanks to the recent release of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
and it seemed prudent to be playing Vanquish at a time that this crops up given it's a
game that requires a lot of dexterity and fidelity, but provides a range of difficulty
modes that cater to different types of players. The casual auto mode is admittedly not for
me, but what's great about it is that it removes the need to handle the fidelity of aiming
and instead prioritise movement, which can prove disorienting if you're boost sliding
around an opponent. Plus while it's a relatively minor issue, the game still enables players
to earn most gameplay achievements or trophies, which is often an implicit method of punishing
players on lower difficuly levels. What is valuable about all of this is that it opens
this game up to players who perhaps couldn't play otherwise. Meanwhile for others, there
are increasingly more demanding modes for players that want an additional challenge.
It works well for a game that only takes 3-5 hours to complete. You can go through it again
on the next higher tier and test your limits.
What is both fantastic and frustrating about this, is that many of the points I made about
remixed enemy layouts is a big part of Godhard mode, but the overall balancing of that mode
is now so overwhelmingly difficulty, I'm kinda put off by it. Perhaps more disappointing
is that these elements are for the most part not even addressed in hard difficutly. Sure
the AI is a little more ruthless and health and damage values are tweaked, but the game
only shifts into something completely different once you crank it up to maximum. It would
be nice if I can balance those distinct difficulty vectors into a more rewarding experience.
As always, difficulty is subjective. What is deemend normal difficulty by the developer
could be beyond the competencies of others for a multitude of reasons. I respect when
teams provide unique difficulty configurations to open a game up to a broader audience. At
the end of the day if people are entertained and get value for money, then what's the problem?
Vanquish still holds ground as a novel take in the cover shooter genre. It's become a
cult classic that arguably deserved better, but the 2017 re-release ensures we can still
enjoy it all over again. There is still no cover shooter like it and the cover shooter
genre largely cooled to a more consistent set of mechanics. But there's still space
to innovate and one day we might see Vanquish's successor in the future.
Thanks for watching this episode on Design Dive, it's the first episode of 2019 but it
won't be the last. I'll be back soon with another patron-voted episode on the legacy
of Goldeneye 007. But for now let us bathe in the glory of my wonderully supportive patrons
Alright, I'm out, gonna go pester someone about adding new difficulty modes to The Adventure
of Little Ralph.