For the past few weeks, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword had me doing things that no other video game has. It had me standing for 90% of a 45+ hour adventure because it was more compelling than sitting down. It taught me how to read my enemies’ behaviors, and to reconsider the meaningfulness of my sword (which, in terms of combat and puzzle-solving effectiveness, doesn’t change in a significant way throughout the majority of the game) more often than occasionally reminding me about all the other classic Zelda tools also at my disposal. By the end, it had me convinced that I was a significantly better swordsman than when I first gripped the blade referenced in its subtitle.

Every new idea requires a good explanation, but many of Skyward Sword’s best got away without needing any. Without hand-holding exposition nor repetitive tutorials, the newest execution of the series draws attention to how its design sensibilities were subtle enough to have more than one user in mind. Though by contrast, they also draw attention to every moment that thought otherwise, leaning on a tradition of variety when it least needed to. As I watch the first Zelda in half a decade struggling to soar to the top of most critics’ 2011 Game of the Year lists, deep down inside I think I know why.

Better design, in any form or media, exists for the sake of more effectively communicating something that matters, to those it should matter to. Mostly everything about the swordplay is a stellar example of good design being applied to Link’s agency within the world; it conveys the idea of swordsmanship, and your sword as a multi-purpose tool, better than any previous Zelda. What the sword affords its wielder is more diverse, intuitive, and immediately applicable because its trajectory is no longer restrained to the binary inputs of buttons and/or “waggle”.

The tutorial is succinct, well placed, and manages to teach you every way the sword could be handled throughout the entire game–literally, besides the Skyward Strike (and your own creativity at times), it covers every thing. Slicing through splintered training logs provides an analog for how you’ll behave outside of the Knight’s Hall. It treats you like an eager student who cares to learn more–and just when things start to get fun, it sends you on your way. It humbled me to realize that it would actually take practice, as swinging a sword really ought to, but I could forgive momentary simulation in such an exaggerated experience because it surprised me with an appetite for empowerment. Landing a hit never felt so “up-to-me”, puzzles are more cleverly solved by opening doors with the sword as a gestural key, and obstacles can now approach us at angles we literally couldn’t reach before. Just as a sword is an extension of our arm, Link has become a truer extension of ourselves.

Skyward Sword begins to break down an environment where often-criticized predictability flourishes by also giving the combat some much needed depth, and a healthy potential for error that can register with the player. There’s more fluidity and intelligence in the behavior of enemies as they react to Link’s (your) gestures, making them more believable, threatening, and annoying–and thus, that much more satisfying upon defeat. In a series defined by the inability to miss your target by locking on to it, and guides telling you where to go and what to do next every few minutes, this was the first time in a long time that I felt legitimately challenged to push myself in a Zelda game.

Yet it’s filled with interactive elements that haven’t developed nearly as much as the sword, or in some cases have actually become more cumbersome. Swimming seems to borrow from the same control scheme flight does, but it doesn’t feel as natural. Scooping up potions, water and fairies with an empty bottle doesn’t happen with simple gestures, oddly enough, breaking consistency with a similar action: scooping up bugs with the incredibly gestural bug net. Aiming cursor-based items (the hookshot, the bow, etc.) requires more calibration than Twilight Princess ever did without Wii Motion Plus. Not only is there a lack of consistency with how you interact with the world, but the larger environment of Skyward Sword is not entirely seamless with itself as a world (which is what I’ll be tackling next in this series).

I wouldn’t say these were deal-breakers for my experience with Skyward Sword, but I believe they’re worth thinking about when it comes to how important The Legend of Zelda is to the history of modern game design. These are the symptoms of mingling forward-thinking designs with homage-paying artifacts that matter most to longtime Zelda fans (including myself), perhaps only because their very presence game after game has extended their relevance. At the same time it’s also a game filled with things that’d only matter to players who have no idea what they’re doing nor where they ought to be going: people who’ve obviously never played a Zelda game in their life. There’s a conflict in design philosophies going on here, which I can only assume stems from the realities of a rapidly diverging audience on the Wii. Meanwhile, the sword mechanics struggle to remain at center stage more than they ought to–it’s as if the captivating lead role in a play was written out of scenes that weren’t essential to developing the story anyways.

When I think about the most thrilling and engaging moments for me in Skyward Sword, they all have two things in common: a sword and a shield. It’s too bad that the world itself doesn’t share in this delight as consistently–because when it does, it makes me wonder why it didn’t for the whole adventure. In my next entry to this mini-series, I’ll begin going over those points, starting with Link’s environment: Skyloft, and the surface below.

‎”They dive brashly off the decks of their aerial island, only to be swooped up by their soulbound, gigantic bird mounts mid-plummet. Every time I did this (and boy, did I do it a lot), I fell a little more in love with the conceit. It’s one part Evil Knievel and one part office retreat trust falls, a combination which is equally delightful the first and hundredth times you execute it.” -Griffin McElroy

After spending an afternoon searching for instances of them being shared since PC Gamer’s online-reissuing (originally found in their August 2011 magazine), I was surprised to discover that a fair amount of people are actually interested in the posters, across a number of networks around the internet (Twitter, Tumblr, general blogs, etc.). And while I have no idea who Eric Hawkins is, stuff like this–and especially stuff like this–helps me believe that there’s some truth to what observations I’ve made. It also made me happy to gleam that they hit home with the sort of folks I was hoping: old-school WoW players.

I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly sure how I hope to achieve what I’d like to with this post: making a place for anyone who’s looking to learn more about the posters. Whatever that may be is more or less up to you, the reader–this is just one place to start, for me.  So, if you’re out there and curious, please feel welcome to ask anything and everything about them–I’ll edit/append this post accordingly.

In the meantime, I’ll answer the most frequently asked question I’ve gotten about the posters, that being, “Where can I buy them?” A selection of print options are now available, right here.

Lastly, while PC Gamer was generous enough to include an interview with me on top of the posters in their outlet (many thanks to Josh Augustine for that), there were a few more questions that didn’t run with the final article. So, here’s the rest of what they asked, and what I had to say:

How long have you been playing WoW?
All the way back to when it was just Vanilla, but I haven’t been back to Azeroth in quite some time actually. It’s always been on and off as close friends leave or return to the game. To be honest, it sort of became one of our primary means of keeping in touch when we were geographically split up during college.

Being new to WoW when it was still new to the larger gaming community made it very easy for the old world to leave a strong impression on my perception of it. Not having to rush to catch up with an expansion meant you got to spend a lot of time in plain-old Azeroth, and that experience played a significant role in this project.

Do you do graphics/artwork for a living?
I’ve been designing mobile applications on both tablets and smart phones every day for over a year now. So, while I do art and design for a living, it’s much more about interactive design as opposed to being purely illustrative like the posters are.

My major is actually in game design, and my previous job was the result of an internship where several of us developed a mobile game for one summer. Before that, I was creating levels and prototyping game modes for TF2 and L4D in Valve’s Source SDK to educate myself and alongside my peers.

Even though designing games and making art for them is much different from the demands of most mobile apps, a surprising amount of best-practices are shared between them. The same goes for what I do now: lessons in contemporary graphic design provided me with useful tools, both stylistic and technical, that brought me to what you see now in the posters.

What inspired you to make this series of posters?
I was out of town visiting a friend of mine, with whom I played WoW since day one, right before Cataclysm hit–which no doubt lead to a long discussion about it. At some point in the conversation, I wondered what all this vintage content would look like if it had a deliberate vintage/retro aesthetic to it.

When I returned home I started playing with two-tone illustrations of tableau’s from the old world just to see what it might look like, and got pretty carried away after a couple hours. Integrating the quotes was a result of improvisation, but they really helped compose each subsequent scene. From there, I sort of saw them becoming advertisements to taunt and lure players into revisiting these now-abandoned “hot-spots” one more time.

The article that ran in PC Gamer's August 2011 issue. Hit the image for the full page.

—

If you’d like to see what art & design work I’ve been up to most recently, my Dribbble page is probably the best place to go for that for the time being (it’s more iterations than final drafts, but it’s the most immediate way for me to share new work while renovating my website).

If you’d like to download the posters themselves (at print-ready scale, too) you can find them back at PC Gamer’s original write-up. Just hit the images embedded in the page to bring up the full-resolution file/s. Right-click and save to your heart’s content (you know the drill).

Hope to hear from you, whoever, wherever you are.

You could only ever see a few meters ahead of you, and a few feet behind you (or the opposite, if a boulder/bear was chasing you). Occlusion is something that the thrill of most video games, especially platformers, thrive on. Our television sets become viewfinders, our hands moving them back and forth.

Whether or not the context of a larger world begins to make sense to us is only a side-effect to this layer of interactivity. Crash never asks you to envision that entire space–just what’s up ahead, or around the corner. You couldn’t plan too much ahead even if you wanted to, and the temptation of crashing into/onto a crate, than onto a skunk, then onto a platform and back onto the ground is a rhythm so satisfying in motion you’d rather just keep pressing buttons and moving forward.

The pacing of Crash games (at least those developed by Naughty Dog–I’ve never played the current generation Crash’s) were incremental and moment-to-moment, without completely ignoring the scope of its larger surroundings. Between levels you would leave the more claustrophobic forests and return to larger islands, indicating where you were in Crash’s world. From there the environment also became your interface as you’d pan between which level to play next. As unconcerned as this mode of presentation was with detail or hand-holding tutorials, it still seemed to get the job done.

Crash was pretty satisfying with so little to be said. It was focused, undistracted by duct-taped features creeping in, or a desperate excuse to leverage internet access. It was an ancient tiki island filled with secrets, and that’s how I found them.

Since my Learning to Play column at GameCareerGuide got going, two more installments have been published under it.

#2: Dinner Tables, “considers the design of a game project…and uses Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and more as inspiration.”, can be found here.

Most recently, #3: The Mixing Board goes between two large scale game projects from my time at CIA, comparing the team-dynamics between them to illustrate the up’s and down’s of collaboration. Read all about it!

I’m still mulling over what the fourth issue will discuss. Going back through the archives of my experiences in art school, which only ended a year ago, gets tougher with time. Your mind gets foggier, and aggressively dusting off the hardest lessons learned isn’t the most enjoyable thing to do for an entire article. I’ll get around to it as the spring moves on, unless Cleveland keeps the rain away for longer than a day.

Three of us, alone, made some noise in our dining room for nine months.
Here’s what the result sounds like.

Souvenir
The Commonwealth’s (that’s us) debut album.

Take something home with you at
http://thecommonwealth-music.bandcamp.com/

Or listen right now

Blizzard Entertainment has taken a page out of Dr. Gregory House’s book with Cataclysm, their latest addition to the golden-goose that is World of Warcraft. They had to cause one disaster in order to solve another: half-a-decade-old designs were frozen in place, but still making up a majority of the persistent game-world. They found an icebreaker no greater than the return of Deathwing, a key antagonist from Warcraft-past who happens to be an ancient dragon consisting of shattered rock, molten lava, and rage.

In an age of gaming that’s made a powerful ally out of the internet and fiber optics, you’d think that broken design could be avoided altogether, in theory. When endless tweaks and revisions are part of the business model (free, expanded, and improved content), game developers don’t necessarily have to rely on a sequel to deem any change worthy. Apparently, this one did.

It wasn’t enough for Blizzard to just patch in artificial elegance, nudge some dials up/down, and appease a speedier bar of entry to what has been an increasingly endless experience. New adventures, treasures, and faces would need a reason crazy enough to contextually justify an overhauled user-experience, especially for those working through the original content WoW launched with back in 2004.

Blizzard chose this one: literally destroy the entire world’s virtual geography and, by association, its time-worn features. It’s as if Azeroth literally opened up and swallowed its own flaws lying just beneath the surface, down into the hungry maw of Cataclysm. While twelve million players were all willing to drudge through rapidly aging game-design patterns, for sixty of the now eighty-five levels available, old familiarities grew increasingly awkward next to their progressive successors.

On the arrival of this third expansion and Azeroth’s gaping wounds, the developers positioned themselves to finally do surgery on the most benign tumors plaguing any growth WoW’s population has left in it: a monotonous series of crossroads to the good stuff. As any designer will tell you, first impressions are nearly everything when trying to hook any user to any interface. What was gripping about WoW then and now hasn’t changed when you boil it down, but the means of presentation has significantly.

Presentation is at its best when it uses aesthetics to filter a flood of information. With each spell, story, and continent added to the game, presentation becomes increasingly relevant to nearly every clickable square-inch of what WoW pumps into your computer monitor: non-playable characters, maps, quest-directions, action-bars, etc. If you like the game enough, you’ll eventually “earn the privilege” of keeping your eyes on seven different places at any given moment. Until then, there’s no reason to bombard newcomers with all of it, and less reason to keep them waiting too long for all that good stuff.

It sounds like a backwards advertising trick: tell them what they need to hear, give them what they want to have. In that sense, WoW is like a candy bar that remembered why “Bite-Sized” matters just as much as “Jumbo” or “King”. Maybe it’s a stretch to equate any part of a game of WoW’s scale to the word “small”. That is, until you roll with the Horde’s newest, greediest, and most vertically challenged race: Goblins.

Blizzard knows how to do business, and it’s not much of a surprise that they’d know how to have some fun with it through their little green friends. Goblins are no strangers to the cast of characters that give Azeroth some color, though ironically being the most neutral of them where loyalties lie. There’s no money to be made in discrimination. Want to barter? Repair your armor, or get supplies in a pinch? Have to trade across factions? It seemed like there was always a Goblin for that, right there when you needed them.

Though, that was something ingrained in their character and left to simmer in the background of their culture. They knew the economic hot-spots, the trade routes, the shipping depots, and they even maintained the blimp service for the Horde before being a part of it, bussing players between continents. But they didn’t do all this by telling you–they just did it. That, in and of itself, is what makes a Goblin.

It’s worth pointing this out because, surprise-surprise, the Goblin starting zone certainly does not. Blizzard continues the trend of emergent story-telling, of assuming you “get” what it is about Goblins that makes them relevant in their world by just being among them. Their aesthetic serves what’s left as a platform for some of the most creative (and funniest) story-telling, plot devices, and gameplay yet to arise in WoW.

However, this comes at a potentially lofty price by breaking the “laws” of what WoW can and cannot be. For starters, there’s a severe lack of attention to any sort of cultural norms or rites of passage in the quest lines of Kezan and The Lost Isles. This is a staple common-denominator for every other race’s introduction to the game. They usually have a great deal of interest in how self-aware their people are of their collective values, that you as a player participate in their rituals, if only to send you off into the world never to forget what home is.

The last time we got new races was in the The Burning Crusade and, even then, the quests they delivered were arguably more present with this characteristic than with the original eight. Both the Blood Elves and Draenei actually spent time teaching you the importance of their active racial abilities. As diverse and refreshing as their environments, quests, and story-lines were for the time (and from one another) there was still a strong historical emphasis between the two. Their lore took front and center stage as much as their respective dilemmas.

The Goblins’ own self-interest is almost selfless in the way it benefits the overall player experience. There’s no teaching of their racial abilities, and there’s barely any recognition of the character-class you’ve chosen during your time on Kezan, your industrial homeland and the first half of a two-act introduction. Blizzard has grown increasingly liberal with putting you in over-the-top scenario’s amongst the more rudimentary tasks. Those moments have infested the new starting zones as well now.

To get away with this, they’ve employed swapping out your actions and abilities for an entirely new set that’s pre-determined, tightly constrained, but ridiculously more powerful. Whether you take control of a giant robot, ride on the back of a giant, or jump into an airborne vehicle to drop explosives all over an enemy fleet, these one-time events hurl a jolt of energy into the game’s pacing, but it seldom feels like WoW as you would know it.

Minutes after creating a Goblin, you’re already getting the usual chores. Collect this item, find this person, exterminate this nuisance. It’s an easy blemish to point the pimple-popping-wand at any MMO for, but recently it’s getting tougher as the genre matures. Need to go find something far off in the distance? Well, here’s a hotrod for that. Yes, you get the keys to your very own hotrod before you can barely level up for the first time. Without much warning or anticipation, the game hands over a test-drive to one of its most prized rewards: your very own mount. Your first task? Go find your friends and ride around town like you own the place. Suddenly this isn’t WoW anymore. It’s Grand Theft Auto.

It starts to make sense though: why you’re not being taught your class any more than you’re needed to–because frankly, you don’t need to. You’re a Goblin. You have sophisticated technology, money, and growing fame right at your doorstep. Why spend time casting spells when you can spend money living it up? “Time is money friend!” That they’ll certainly tell you all about, because you’re about to perform a coup on your “Trade Prince” Gallywix, the leader of the Goblins.

One of the first things you’ll learn before any permanent ability, or how to drive a car, is that the Trade Prince has made a lot of enemies. It just so happens that all of them are giving you the quests you need to progress through the Goblin campaign, and that they want you to take his place. Orchestrating a social, economic, and political uprising is about as complicated as any objective in WoW could get, but thankfully the gameplay doesn’t have to suffer the same congestion. If anything, it makes what you’d expect to be a convoluted storyline pretty streamlined.

There’s quite a few ways to experience the moments proceeding Deathwing’s re-emergence. For the Goblins of Kezan, it’s an erupting volcano racing down towards their entire civilization. Even evacuation manages to hold the player’s attention by having the final quest-chain act as a breadcrumb trail to safety and, shortly after, poverty. Long story short, the Trade Prince scams you into a one-way, life-savings only ticket to the slave-pens of his escape yacht. After getting caught in the cross-fire of an Alliance/Horde naval battle, safety turns to shipwreck. Suddenly this isn’t Grand Theft Auto anymore. It’s survival of the fittest.

Galliwyx conveniently behaves as a prime antagonist throughout, and is an almost entirely unsympathetic character. This runs into itself with the way his redemption is handled at the end of act two, which is clumsy and unconvincing. Within one chunk of dialogue, the player is expected to essentially forgive-and-forget ten levels of conflict, treason, and attempted homicide. It’s a damn crime is what it is. Getting to this point, however, is a lush, fun, and rather revelatory swashbuckling affair.

The Lost Isles maintain the Goblin palette, but turn up the color-saturation and swap out industry for a nearly untouched jungle. The soundtrack shifts too, evoking the same kind of scores you might recognize in Pirates of the Caribbean. As a suite, the isles are much larger than Kezan and seethe with a more traditional adventure. With some legitimate motivation to learn how to really shoot a gun, swing a sword, or hurl fireballs, The Lose Isles ease you back into a more familiar WoW without easing up on playful invention.

There’s a great balance of not having to suspend your disbelief and simply having fun. At first your friends need to eat, and nearby raptor eggs sound like the perfect meal. But, the eggs could be bigger, and the results could be tastier. One quest actually has you throwing an oversized egg, acquired by slaying a giant emergency cyborg-chicken gone AWOL, into a nugget generator. Another simply ends by sending you to a neighboring island, but instead of making you swim, one of the escape pods from your shipwreck is recycled into a one-time use goblin launcher. To make matters worse, lost survivors are being turned into zombies by a nearby primitive clan worshipping your favorite dragon. This is quickly fixed by cruising over their heads on fiery rocket-boots, sending them to a very fiery death. I can start to understand why Deathwing enjoys burninating the country-side so mercilessly: it’s really fun.

The Goblins never seem to stop designing and iterating with what they already have to work with. As a working designer who can appreciate complete insanity under these conditions, I’m laughing along with them the whole time. I get it: the Goblins are ridiculous, insatiable, and never know how to take themselves seriously. Then again, these are just fictional characters in a synthetic world; someone made them this way. Maybe this is Blizzard’s way of telling a comedy, and letting loose themselves.

Sarcasm and jokes make up probably fifty percent of the dialogue here. Drinking the Goblins’ inspiration-juice, Kaja’Cola, will make you spout out brilliant ideas such as, “What if we were to ORGANIZE crime? / Giant gnomes! No wait…tiny giants! / Recycling! But, for stuff that’s never been used before.” One “invention” in particular not only had me laughing out loud, but caught my attention as having a double-meaning: “Chocolate-flavored vanilla!”. Blizzard is well-aware that veterans of the original content know it better by the name Vanilla WoW, and this joke sums up exactly what Cataclysm is: chocolate-flavored vanilla WoW. I think they’re on to us.

Just before another volcano goes off and you find yourself being nudged along to the World of Warcraft where everyone else is, I took the time to read what else an NPC, Assistant Greely, had to say (Fig. 1, below). It pretty much explains everything.

“No one ever asks how stuff works. It’s just here, gimme that, I’m gonna blow stuff up. Or, don’t bore me with the details, just let me point and shoot. Or, worse yet, who cares how it works, is it a bigger explosion than last time?…”

This felt familiar, because it’s something I use to complain about regularly when receiving non-constructive criticism on my own designs, especially when it was a game. It’s a pleasant easter egg to stumble upon because it’s Blizzard venting, and besides waking up after the shipwreck, it was my favorite moment in the whole Goblin introduction. It gave the entire journey the perspective of a game designer: make it better, or someone else will. Sure, gamers aren’t expected to pay for games just to pat developers on the back, but that doesn’t change the fact that a human was behind virtually every decision to getting it there. It’s a breath of fresh air to see more and more human moments find their place in WoW, a cultural phenomenon that, without its players, has felt so rigid for so long.

Fig. 1

The further I got into the Goblin introduction, the more I understood it at times as a thickly veiled metaphor for Blizzard’s obsessive process to creating and iterating gameplay, just as Inception disguises/expresses Christopher Nolan’s method to film-making. This isn’t just about Goblins losing their home, it’s about Blizzard reaffirming theirs.

Cataclysm is Blizzard’s success-story at getting away with the game-designer’s brand of organized crime. Each hotfix, patch, and expansion are by nature a response to the last, but also to the reactions players have made a hobby out of having. They’re learning to use their medium to say something back, and just not on troll-infested forum threads, nor by slinging the proverbial mud. Twelve-million and counting have had six years to learn how to pick a knife-fight with WoW’s maker. Like a true Goblin, Blizzard didn’t just bring a gun to it–they made a better one, and they’ll let you shoot it.

If I was a fool, which I am, I would open Photoshop, then proceed to File > Open all of these images at once. Afterwards, I’d choose one as my Photoshop document, slowly drag-and-dropping the rest on top of it, automatically creating their own layers one at a time.

Not to mention this means watching Photoshop suck the life-force out of your computer as it opens a new tab for each image. But no longer. I have learned, and now that my work week is over, I will share.

Note: Before ANYTHING else, if you ever believe there is a better way to do something in software as sophisticated as Photoshop, you’re probably right, and the “way” most likely already exists. Google is your friend. All I had to do was search for something to the degree of, “Photoshop, Importing multiple files into one document”, and within minutes I was on my way.

1.) Open up Photoshop.

2.) At the top of your Photoshop menu, go to File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack…

3.) From there, you’re prompted with a new window that has a few options/actions.

It’s fairly straight forward, but as long as you know where all the images you want to import at once are, you’re pretty much set.

Hit Browse, then select/shift-click/highlight your group of images (whatever you prefer to do for selecting multiple files at once). The images will appear in the empty white space of the window as a list, by their respective file names. Go ahead and hit OK, and watch Photoshop do its magic.

Before long, you’ll have a single Photoshop document, with a layer for each image file you imported on top of one another.

There’s one less fool.

If you know me personally, you’re probably somewhat aware of the latest hurdle I’ve had to overcome in gaming. To my own surprise, it didn’t fall under the creative end of the medium. Instead, it was S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (S:CS), the single most demanding game experience I’ve ever had. The one I came closest to giving up on over a dozen times.

At a point, the game peaked to an emotional train-wreck for me. Half-way across the Zone (what the affected area of the Chernobyl disaster, the theatre of S:CS, is referred to as in-game) and I was stripped of my arsenal. Notorious game-breaking bugs began to surface, enemy AI grew too accurate, and friendly AI fell too inaccurate. With few means for controlling my own fate, I learned to travel one save at a time for every step taken, tip-toeing around eggshells I couldn’t even see.

Seemingly out of nowhere, I was victorious: I beat Clear Sky. I was slightly baffled at coming upon such certainty in a game underscored by ambiguity. All that certainty was then swiftly washed away by the most concentrated dose of ambiguity S:CS had to offer with its ending. “Am I actually done?”, I thought. Was that it for me and Clear Sky? Are my adventures (nightmares) in the Zone stories worth telling, as opposed to crafting them?

Yes, to all of the above. So what was there to put up with, and why did I put up with it for so long?

I’m running low on people to trust. In the Zone, there’s too many sides worth taking, and somehow I remain indecisive unless it results in me being on my way that much faster. I don’t impose on others because that takes even more time, and more trust. I carry too much weight on me because I need something worth selling when I get into town. Sometimes that means a loaded gun, previously used to keep bandits and smugglers at bay. Where I found the weapons isn’t any of your business (it will be later on in this post). All means of defense have become a form of currency at this point.

I can’t see more than a few feet ahead of myself at nighttime. This makes hoarding first aid supplies only possible before it gets too dark to go on such scavenger hunts. The more I carry, the slower I travel. I get the feeling that I shouldn’t stop moving, so I don’t.

Stopping all movement is an important moment in Clear Sky, because it means one of few things. 1. Your eyes are arrested by the view, 2. you’re looking for something to keep you from dieing in the future, or 3. you’re already dieing, and scrambling for a fix. Sometimes this means keeping your head down, ducking for cover, and running into a herd of mutants, but most common of all it will mean reloading your last save. Because guess what, Stalker: you’re already dead.

Clear Sky is an unforgiving game in concept and in practice. I take that as an intention of developer GSC Game World, and a fitting characteristic for Clear Sky‘s environment – one would expect no less from the aftermath of Chernobyl.

We don’t naturally expect games to do this though. Rules serve to build the stability of any game-experience; the clearer the rules, the clearer the game. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series in general chooses to throw much of that motto out the window. Traditional gamer tendencies to collect everything, play pitch-perfect, and win big are not as welcome as we’re use to. In fact, with how emergent the world appears to be, it’s difficult to truly claim that victory is ever neatly achieved.

I was only making my way across a border. I didn’t want any trouble. I found myself in a small outpost I’ve been to before, guarded by two stalwart “comrades” of mine. I wanted, I needed, to trade many of the trinkets and treasures I found while I was gone, but all they seemed to want was bread and vodka.

Then it hit: the emission. Emissions come from the center of the Zone every once in a while, and you have about a good minute to find proper shelter using your PDA. The nearest safe-house marked wasn’t my idea of “close”, but there weren’t any obvious alternatives. I tried booking it to that safe-house, but that plan failed fast when running out of breath is the result of running for five seconds. I had too much weight on my back, but my friends back at the outpost won’t buy anything that could lighten the load.

Multiple failed attempts at this mad dash forced my hand, and I had no choice but to drop my guns at the outpost for now. I’ll just come back for them later – no problem. The amount time it took to figure out which guns were worth throwing down was surprisingly expensive. Eventually I got it down to a timed science, but unfortunately the Zone seemed to outsmart me, tease me, and toy with me every time I’d collapse just feet away from safety. So I decided to try and outsmart the Zone.

Quick-saving during this short-distance sprint was a dangerous move. There was no guarantee it’d hang the event of the emission or not, giving me enough time to reach my haven. It’s as if I was “stopping the clock” for sections at a time, and while it actually worked, a side-effect of this bug was a void of visual signifiers telling me that the emission was here that I was soon to be dead. I had to randomly quick-save, reload, and make it a little bit farther each time before I’d die all over again. Eventually I reached the safe-house, bartered with those inside as the emission passed, and then made my way back to the outpost. “How much simpler this is without all that weight on me”, I thought. Careful what you wish for in the Zone, Stalker.

Upon arrival, I discovered that all of those weapons I had dropped were gone. Now it was just me, and the one handgun I chose to keep.

But some culprits weren’t accounted for. My “comrades”, still standing around like nothing extraordinary had ever happened to them, remained unscathed from the emission unlike me, who couldn’t have been any less safe under the very same roof. Did they take my guns? Did the Zone take them? Did Clear Sky delete them? Am I losing my freaking mind?

None of the answers to these questions seemed liked ones that might actually help me. There was a long journey left ahead of me, and little to survive it with. I needed more than my handgun from here on out, but it was more than enough for making those two hooligans useful…and so, my descent into rage began there. There had been a long standing struggle between myself and Clear Sky for months now, but the past scenario was what did it for me. It was then that I felt I had options the game didn’t need to spell out. Clear Sky gave me all the reasons I needed to take out my anger on it, and I would take every opportunity to do just that – starting now.

Quick-save. Lock. Load. Aim. Fire. Thanks for the new assets, “comrades”.

Taking my allies out was useful practice for a situation I’d have hours later, where I was knocked unconscious, stripped of all my arsenal, and assigned to go find it all again. Guarded by two bandits, reacquiring my loot was between me and my beretta. I stopped relying on the artificial intelligence of Clear Sky over time. In fact, my allies were such consistently bad shots, I was better off killing them, looting them, and making use of their ammo just to not “waste” what they inevitably would have. This all felt disgustingly liberating; an unexpected change of heart I felt about as responsible for as Clear Sky would have – if games had feelings.

What’s kept me engaged in Clear Sky is twofold. First are the scripted events, encounters, whatever you prefer to call them these days in games. They don’t feel over the top, but they do feel authentic. They’re subtle and desaturated in every sense of the word tone, which is a unique route for set-pieces to build immersion from. The situations and settings you’re dropped into are sort of quaint and even pathetic looking, but somehow they work, and that’s when the game has its teeth in you for better or for worse. Knowing that this sort of experience has been sprinkled throughout kept me anticipating the next time I’d run into one, and sometimes that was enough to get over how unfair, or underwhelming, the AI can get.

Secondly, Clear Sky explores a sense of loneliness – the sort of loneliness that occurs when you’re lost and there’s still people around. Being the prequel of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, the game was criticized for being more populated with squads/non-playable characters than its predecessor, Shadow of Chernobyl, which partly won over fans with that purer sense of solitude. Nitpicking aside, I feel that this brand of loneliness, one that is much more reminiscent of my own human experiences of it, or helplessness in that regard, is present in S:CS. There’s nothing quite like feeling mentally alone: Who can I trust? Am I capable of trusting? It’s every man for himself in the Zone.

We’re often around other people, but that doesn’t mean they always make you feel welcomed, which probably leads to the secret ingredient of Clear Sky: its environment. As torn up, muddy, bloody, and polluted as it persists to be, it sort of makes you feel more welcome than the people do. Such moments will land in front of you for barely a minute, only then to take off and almost guaranteed to never be repeated twice. Moments later, you’ll come across the corpse of a fellow mercenary hidden amongst the landscape, ruffle through his pockets for bullets and bread, and be on your way.

There’s the occasional exception though. One particular favorite of mine is the chance for NPC’s to pull out a classical guitar when they’re sat around a camp site and play a song or two. Sure, being a guitarist myself for nearly a decade, I’m fond of the addition by default. This doesn’t change the fact that it added an unexpected layer of character to an otherwise bleak situation, and sometimes that was enough to string me along. With the default music turned all the way down, the only music I heard in the game was generated by the world itself: guitars, radios, etc. Sometimes I would stumble upon a group of mercenaries who looked just as tired as I felt, and I’d take a seat for a few minutes to catch my breath.

These sort of situations encouraged me as a player to keep venturing forth, if not for the haunting discovery of fallen allies than for the contrast to such sobering moments. Breath and beats are crucial affordances that Clear Sky provides. It relies on the tempo of your experience through each objective to keep you interested even when things nearly slow to a halt.

I over think and micromanage just about anything I can get my hands on, and Clear Sky is clearly no exception. However, it was the looser play and carelessness that I learned to value most. The whimsical decisions I chose to make revealed why I enjoy/love/hate the experience that was Clear Sky. And yet, there it is: Clear Sky.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the name outside of its blunt reference to the faction who found and resuscitated you, the player, at the beginning of your experience. There is never a clear sky in this entire game. Considering this, I found it difficult to not take extra notice to the beautifully rendered lighting effects, how the sky illuminated a landscape in contrast to the subtitle Clear Sky, and not reflect for a minute or two.

Clear Sky isn’t brand new – I certainly didn’t go for a day-one purchase here. In an era where games are more closely resembling finely tuned sports with every achievement added (and it should be noted that Clear Sky has no achievements, even through Steam), as a player I begin to lose the sense that I can be creative within many of them [games]. Games have a habit of telling  us how to be creative, and often to their own benefit.

At the same time I feel a growing discomfort in being discouraged to push the playful envelop in some games these days, especially when sprawling worlds are rich for anomalies. It’s probably fair to call me out on this, but given enough time, I honestly feel as though my reactions aren’t entirely mine in some game experiences. Maybe those reactions, and the decisions that follow, were bound to happen. Maybe that’s good design, but sometimes it arguably feels very very boring, atleast for my needs as a gamer. Players are creative people, and whether Clear Sky is doing anything about this or not, it knows it too.

S:CS relishes in its imperfections, and by doing so reinforces both its strengths and weaknesses simultaneously as a user-experience, a game, and a narrative. The entire game was a gutsy decision by the developers, but at the very least it was a consistent one. I find myself personally struggling to sustain longer moments of reprieve in my real life, and less often do I believe this wish will ever come true. What I fail to remind myself often of, though, is how the lack of such moments bears value as well. Clear Sky, as an experience, lives and dies by its ability to provide emergent contrast, and in doing so it grants a familiar metaphor to many things I encounter on a daily basis.

Clear skies are a rare occasion. I’d like it if they stayed that way.

From Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses – p. 98

“At one point in his career, Albert Einstein was asked by a small local organization to be the guest of honor at a luncheon and to give a lecture about his research. He agreed to do so. The luncheon was quite pleasant, and when the time came, the host anxiously announced that Albert Einstein, the famous scientist, was here to talk about his theories of special and general relativity. Einstein took the stage, and looking out a largely non-academic audience consisting of mostly old ladies, he explained to them that he certainly could talk about his work, but it was a bit dull, and he was thinking perhaps instead the audience would prefer to hear him play the violin. The host and audience both agreed that it sounded like a fine idea. Einstein proceeded to play several pieces he knew well, creating a delightful experience the entire audience was able to enjoy, and surely one they remembered for the rest of their lives.

Einstein was able to create such a memorable experience because he knew his audience. As much as he loved thinking and talking about physics, he knew that it wasn’t something that his audience would be really interested in. Sure they asked him to talk about physics, because they thought it would be the best way to get what they really wanted – an intimate encounter with the famous Albert Einstein.

To create a great experience, you must do the same as Einstein. You must know what your audience will and will not like, and you must know it even better than the do. You would think that finding out what people want would be easy, but it isn’t, because in many cases, they don’t really know. They might think they know but often there is a big difference between what they think they want, and what it is they will actually enjoy.

As with everything else in game design, the key here is a kind of listening. You must learn to listen to your players, thoroughly and deeply. You must become intimate with their thoughts, their emotions, their fears, and their desires. Some of these will be so secret that your players themselves are not even consciously aware of them…it is often these that are the most important.”