This One Weird Modded Speedrun Shows All That's Wrong with GTA's Game Design.
Ah, mods. For many, they're the bread and butter of PC gaming. Modders can turn a game into something completely different, be it turning a fantasy romp into a Roman-themed groundhog day story, a realistic military simulator into the zombie apocalypse, or the primordial first-person shooter into a friggin't Sonic kart racer. Modders can fix a game that was released broken, or mock it with its own mechanics. Modders can develop a game's mechanics to their breaking point, and can even comment on development choices.
That last one is what I want to focus on... but not done deliberately.
GTA design is pretty bad. Smarter people than me have explained very eloquently why. The games have an incredible sense of place, and the worlds they take place in are things of wonder, full of realistic actors and environments that create beautiful, immersive naturalistic tableaux. And yet, when you go to do the things the game actually wants you to do, it seems to always fall short. Most of the missions boil down to 'do this thing in this vehicle that's quite bad for it' or 'imitate this cool thing from a movie', and very rarely they take into account the intricate clockwork of the world that is the game's main draw. That may not be so obvious for a player, since Rockstar is very apt at using things like scripted traffic to hide what amounts to playable cutscenes, but speedrunners, for instance, will quickly learn these tricks so they can flip the game on its head.
Enter DarkViperAU's Chaos Mod speedrun of GTAV.
OK, it's fine to be thinking "I know what those words mean, but in this order, they don't make any sense". Let's take it from the top. The Chaos Mod for GTAV is a super fun mod that, every thirty seconds, creates a random effect on the game. What kind of effect? Look, there are literally hundreds of them, so if the game engine can handle it, it probably can be done. Start with stuff you can do with a trainer (a simple mod that can do lots of useful things): it can teleport the player, spawn vehicles and NPCs, change weather and time of day. All very basic stuff, although of course the mod does these things by itself, without player input (or consent). Now it goes wilder. How about changing physics so cars are faster, slower, or accelerate unceasingly? Maybe fling everyone to the air, or make gravity bone-breaking. Turn everyone into cops. Make everyone hate you, then give everyone all weapons. Have your character be surrounded by a repulsion field that flungs away anything not nailed down. Make whales rain from the sky. Plop a DVD screensaver on the screen. Put everyone on a scooter - everyone, even the animals - and have them drive towards your characters. Scoop your character to the passenger seat so Jesus can take the wheel. This mod is great fun, and shows the extent to which the game's excellent physics engine can be pushed.
Now, how can a game be speedran under these circumstances? It can't, of course. However, the person creating this playthrough, DarkViperAU, is a speedrunner, someone who knows how to finish the game as fast as possible. (That still takes upwards of five hours, presently.) This means that this person will use special tactics to finish missions faster, usually tricking the game into skipping parts of it. Even though he knows that every thirty seconds his plans will be ruined by a random effect (or, worse, an effect voted on by his Twitch chat) he still tries to follow the strategies used in a speedrun, defaulting to actually playing the game if they fail.
(I should also mention there's polemic surrounding DarkViperAU - he was embroiled in the suicide of fellow speedrunner Apollo Legend. I have neither the knowledge nor the inclination to investigate this matter further, so I won't. This article is not and endorsement of him - he just happens to be the one who did this thing first.)
Looking in from outside, the chaos mod and speedrun tactics seem a match made for each other, in the sense that they match each other effects' perfectly. Both are ways to pervert the game's intentions and have it do things it's not meant to while still abiding by its rules; however, the latter intends to be efficient and precise, while the former intends to be haphazard and frustrating. The chaos mod is also more fun if the player is trying to do something and is not a passive observer, so what better thing to do than play the game normally? And, in most other games, this would be a correct conclusion. But while watching this series, I was struck by how often effect after effect would result into a game over. For instance, an early mission requires the player to drive a car to a spot without damaging it. Almost any effect that wasn't completely cosmetic would ruin this mission. Making the cars too fast would wreck them. Spawning anything would damage it. Teleporting the player would trigger a 'left mission area' loss condition. Things were even worse in a stealth mission; almost any entity would either broke its progression or immediately notice the player and cause a mission failure.
The reason for these frequent failures is easy to understand. GTA missions don't usually make use of the intrincacies of the game's brilliant engine. Very rarely is the player allowed any scope in how they are to approach an objective. Instead, the player must follow specific directives, which must be engaged with in a precise manner. Because of that, any unexpected intrusion frustrates the game more than it does the player. Anyone playing the game can get a glimpse of this, but the modded shenanigans bring it into unexpected relief by exaggerating its effects. If, during a mission, you fire an entire machine gun clip at an enemy you're supposed to be trying to kill, and it does nothing because that enemy is invulnerable, you may not even notice it - you may think that you missed, or that the enemy is unusually powerful. If you try to take a shortcut and the game fails the mission because you're not supposed to, you may believe that the shortcut didn't lead to the right location until you get to it and see that it did. But if a mission fails suddenly and immediately because a rifle-toting ape plopped out of nowhere - or even because there is a car where there should be no car - it becomes more clear where the failure lies. A mission failure always seems to be the player's fault; but if it fails due to something outside of the player's input, it's clear that what's failed is the game.
The Chaos mod seems to be speaking to the game engine in a language completely different than the game's own missions, and it's more fluent in it. Compare the speedrun series to this video by FailRace. He's doing a very similar thing, but he set a different goal for himself: rob as many banks as he can while the mod is active. These videos shouldn't be so different: they're both about trying to achieve a very normal goal using the game's mechanics, while the mod throws flying cows and angry aliens at the player. And yet, FailRunner's video has entirely different vibes. He's still often flummoxed by the Chaos Mod's shenanigans, but this frustration comes naturally. For instance, early in the video, he becomes unable to enter the bank he's trying to rob because a spawned car is stuck at the entrance. Were this a regular mission, this would most likely cause a game over screen to immediately appear. If not, the two separate times in which he's teleported away certainly would. But because it's not, he's allowed to get back there and try to move the car, only to... well, let's not spoil the ending.
Did I mention that the bank robbing activity he was trying to complete is not in the actual game and comes from another mod? Did I even need to mention this?
Ultimately, this disparity is easy to understand. Modders need to work with the tools they are given. Spunk and creativity go a long way, but there's only so far that a game's code will be stretched. (Far Cry 2's infinitely respawning checkpoints are widely hated, but modders can't remove that feature - it's hardcoded.) This restriction does not extend to the people responsible for the game's story, which notoriously include Dan Houser, one of Rockstar's co-founders. If Houser wants to have a stealth mission in the game, the fact that the engine can barely support it is no impediment - there's an entire team at his behest to make sure it works, or at least works well enough to provide the sensation desired, even if the game's engine needs to be twisted and turned to make that work. Modders have no such support. They cannot force the game to do what they want. They must charm it.
I wish I could end this article with message of hope, but I can't. Modders will still exist for the foreseeable future, and they will still improve many games. But GTA will continue to be GTA, and even though Houser is out of the company, I very much doubt it'll make the slightest difference to their game design team. I'd bet good money on GTAVI being a brilliant open world that's forced into sterility during missions, as its two predecessors have been. And, given the emphasis that's been given on online play for the current game, I wouldn't be surprised if the next game couldn't be modded at all. Maybe this is the last GTA game in which someone will be able to truly talk to the world.
August's Link Roundup
Usually, a speculative biology image of an intelligent dinosaur is the highlight of a post; in this case it's the preamble, as the intro to a study of how an intelligent dionosaur tribe that evolved in an alternate world without the Cretatious-Paleogene extinction even (y'know, the big meteor). Schewing both humanoid dinosaurs and the Dinotopia style approach 'just let the dinos hold pens', these two men have created a visual guide to intelligent dinosaur based on raven-like tool use. It's quite striking.
Shirts That Go Hard’s creator is now going a little less hard
While Twitter is an unredeemeable hellsite, i find that gimmick accounts make it a little more bearable. However, the people behind those accounts don't always have a great time - as one can expect not to when they rely on an algorithm designed to maximize profit for a soulless corporation. The person behind the (very fun) Shirts That Go Hard twitter account talks about the trouble he went through when Twitter decided to put his twitters in front of so many people that they got annoyed, then they cut his reach to stop people from becoming annoyed.
Where did these holes in the ocean floor come from? 'Nobody knows,' says scientist
Usually stories that say 'scientists are flummoxed by this strange event!' actually mean 'we asked an unprepared scientist about this event, and they said they don't know much about it yet'. This isn't such a different case from that - when scientists found strangely regular holes in the bottom of the ocean, they didn't realize we are just pawns in Cthulhu's great plan and started a death cult, but they certainly don't know what the heck they are... yet. And they are loving it.
How to Befriend Crows and Turn Them Against Your Enemies
If that title isn't enough to make you click that link, I don't know what I can write here that could be.