When you play the new Syndicate, look up

Full disclosure: EA paid for my travel and hotel expenses during this two-day press event in Las Vegas.

Valve said one of the biggest challenges they faced when developing Portal was encouraging players to look up. Gamers don't view the screen the same way designers do, and in a first-person perspective, they tend to look straight ahead rather than explore the environment.

The only way to combat this is to design around it. In Portal, Valve uses elegant blue lights to draw the player's attention upward. This isn't the method every developer should use, but it's definitely something to keep in mind.

From my limited time playing Syndicate during EA's Las Vegas press event, I can say that Starbreeze Studios could benefit from Valve's discovery.

Syndicate is brutal. It's grim, abusive, and bloody. Death and manipulation are simply facts of life. As a corporate enforcer, you can control non-player characters by hacking the chips in their heads and cause them to kill themselves or turn on their allies.

I was enjoying sending enemies to their deaths by distorting their thoughts and barreling my way through electronic locks until my progress abruptly stopped. I came to a door that I couldn't open, no matter who I killed or what I knocked over. Surely I wasn't stuck....

I toyed around for 15 minutes before finally calling one of the developers over. "So...how do I open that door?" The developer looked shocked. I didn't know?

"Look up."

Now, I'd like to think I'm not a complete idiot. I'd looked around but couldn't figure out what to do. The answer to my problem was to shoot out the glass high above me and then target a switch in the other area with my Gauss rifle. Seems simple in theory, but I honestly had no idea.

Absolutely nothing in the environment indicated that I needed to look up. The doors before and after this were all easily opened by something at eye level.

After this incident, I started noticing other places where a little encouragement to look up would help. I was doing it almost religiously now, but I had the luxury of asking the developer what to do. Not guiding the player's eyes upward through in-game clues could be a very big problem for Syndicate. You might think I'm nit-picking, but it's true.

Beyond this issue, Syndicate is very promising. It's a different beast than the original, but in a time where Call of Duty outsells most everything, turning an old idea into a shooter isn't quite as blasphemous as PC gamers make it sound. But the whole game could collapse if other people spend 15 minutes trying to open a door, or never notice an enemy perched on a precarious ledge far out of frame.

Make me look up, Starbreeze. It's the easiest way to fix this.

Tags: Call of Duty, Portal, Deus Ex, Syndicate

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Matthew Moore

October 15, 2011

The part that alarms me isn't that Starbreeze didn't give you the visual indication necessary to solve the problem, it's that your experience didn't include more situations that required this form of solution. If that's the only time you would have ever needed to look up, then of course you'd never think about doing it, but I believe it's because the game has failed to teach you that's a valuable skill, and it needs more situations where looking up is valuable.

Instead of giving you glowing blue lights that paint a path to the correct path through this door—something that seems to me to inspire lazy gameplay—you should have encountered numerous situations where looking up was important before this point. Bring on the snipers, the security cameras, the signs above doors that indicate whether they're locked, the lightbulbs to shoot out, etc. Teach the player that looking up is valuable and then they won't be "stuck" behind a door that requires them to do something they've done a dozen times before.

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Jasmine Maleficent Rea

yes. I definitely don't think every developer should implement blue lights to make me look up. But that represents an understanding of how to train the player.

To be honest, I was stuck once before this, when I had to figure out which of the three doors in front of me would actually open. I'm hoping this all improves as they look back at their design. There's enough good here to make for an interesting game. But clunky world design could ruin it.