The opening levels of a game are the most important, if a game fails to grasp your attention in the first hour or two then why are you going to want to play it more? This was a problem Steve encountered with Drakensang (he wrote about it on The Reticule) he found the opening areas of that game so tedious that he threw the box at my head!
After I recovered from the shock of being attacked by Steve I myself tried out Drakensang, and came to the same conclusion as Steve, the opening of the game is so bland that you don’t particularly want to carry on with it. There are similarities between the opening of The Witcher and Drakensang, both feature some mysterious event which prevents you from entering the main first city and the sections in both games can be quite frustrating at times.
However the opening of The Witcher works much better than Drakensag. There is a simple reason for this as before you get to the ‘solve a series of quests in this boring area to get into town’ you have an action packed opening where the story is introduced and the game mechanics are taught. Drakensang starts off limply with you immediately being told that you are stuck in the opening section before you can get to the main city, there is stuff to do, but it is limited and not at all engaging.
I’ll be honest, I found the opening of Drakensang so mind-numbingly boring that I couldn’t bare to keep going even after I reached the main city. The game just didn’t grab my attention in any way, it certainly may have picked up later on but from the start it put me in a negative mindset.
Of course PC gamers will have a greater determination to play a game for greater lengths than their console bretheren purely because the trade-in market is almost non-existent (in the UK at any rate). We don’t have the freedom to start a game and after being totally put off with the opening take it to the nearest games store and trade it in for a decent amount of cash.
We shouldn’t be made to feel like we have to play games for more than an hour to start enjoying them, a game should get your attention within the first hour and make you want to play more, not leave you feeling like you have wasted £30 if you don’t push on in the sometimes vain hope that the game picks up.
People may say that the current younger generations are impatient, and to an extent it is true, but first impressions do count, they are what shape your mindset when playing the rest of the game. Importantly the opening of a game doesn’t necessarily have to be action packed, take Half-Life, you start off on that long train ride then wander through the Black Mesa complex for a while. It is only after you trigger the Resonance Cascade that any action happens, yet the game draws you in and makes you wonder what secrets it is hiding from you.
At the end of the day if the beginning of a game doesn’t draw you in then you are likely to lose interest and stop playing the game. This will deprive people of possible experiencing the great moments that emerge later in the game. Sort out the start of the game and the rest will follow.
I think my favourite opening level is still that in Half Life 2 – it manages to both emulate and thus invoke memories of the HL1 train ride, before setting the scene of this whole oppressive future with the Big Brother aspects. It then provides you with some action while introducing you to the concepts of a game despite the fact it takes such a long time to even get your first weapon.
Yeah in many ways the Half-Life games all follow a similar way of opening the game, and it is one that works really well. They introduce you to your surroundings and provides a context to the game, really they work very well.