Why Atomic Heart Fails To Live Up To Its Inspiration

atomic heart is a video game that isn't particularly subtle about its influences it's got a very Resident Evil approach to survival horror combat and resource conservation the main character has more than a few Echoes of belligerent foul-mouthed 90 shooter protagonists and the setting is fairly in debt to fall out with its cutesy 50 Star menu mascot satirical sci-fi approach to the Cold War and Landscape filled with underground bunkers each dedicated to individual harebrained science experiments and of course that's not to mention the Game's real life influences everything from error appropriate Soviet architecture to remixes of Soviet pop songs to Recreations of the very real nelcograds secret science cities built by slave labor make an appearance in atomic heart but that's actually not what I'm here to talk about today no because Atomic heart's most obvious influence is a little game that came out in 2007 that you may have heard of it's called Bioshock where Bioshock has power granting plasmids that allow you to shoot stuff out of your hands atomic heart has polymers which give you powers and let you shoot stuff out of your hands where Bioshock starts you off with a big weighty wrench and an electric shock power Atomic hard gives you a big weighty ax and an electric shock power and of course where Bioshock has its iconic big daddies for a mascot atomic heart has big uh I think you know where I'm going with this actually before we go any further I just want to say that don't worry I won't be spoiling any of atomic heart story and I'll also only be showing footage from maybe the first third of the game additionally while I don't think atomic heart is a propaganda game by any respect I'd feel bad if I didn't balance out some unfortunate real-life geopolitical Vibes by donating to a Ukrainian relief charity and encouraging you to do the same there's a link in the description anyway on with the video unfortunately the thing that really stuck out of me when actually playing atomic heart is that while it clearly tries to modernize and improve a lot of bioshock's Aging systems and ideas it strangely ends up losing something about what made that game so fun in the process and nowhere is this more evident than in how both titles handle character progression and the more strategic side of gameplay see bioshock's combat AI your controls are all pretty awful even by the standards of the time but the one thing that ties its gameplay together is the way that Bioshock gives you a lot of agency when it comes to formulating strategies and deciding how you want to play Bioshock sets up some cool challenges in the form of the big daddies traps and security systems and asks you to use the tools you have available to you to figure out a way around them with the way that you spend your limited Adam and upgrades leaving you with a character that you feel very attached to because it represents the culmination of a lot of interesting strategic choices whether you become a fiery Grenadier a sneaky Trixie hacker or an immortal overpowered wrench Maniac Bioshock manages to compensate for its weak combat by using this creative big picture element to make thinking about how best to use your weapons and plasmids fun and appropriately rewarding you for creating interesting synergies so when atomic heart came along and promised all of those ideas but with mechanics from the 21st century I was excited both for that and for some expansions on some of bioshock's existing ideas with whole skill trees to go through with low the customization options a fully fleshed out crafting system for added complexity and good enough balance to make every weapon viable if you spec into it but in spite of how appealing those ideas sounded in theory I really didn't enjoy Atomic heart's character building at all no matter how much I tinkered and how many decisions I made nothing in atomic heart really felt like it rewarded me for thinking outside the box nor can I find any fun strategies to play around the game appears to be a straightforward modernization of those same action RPG ideas and yet atomic heart completely failed to give me that same feeling of attachment and rewarding strategy that the comparatively primitive bowshock creates so easily what's going on here well in order to answer that question we need to have a conversation about a little idea called meta gaming which is something you may have heard of before metagaming taken as literally as possible means the game beyond the game but practically speaking its colloquial internet shorthand for that very practice of approaching games for a more zoomed out strategic perspective thinking not about the moment to moment mechanical decisions of a single encounter or even a single level the composition of your armies and economy in a strategy game the best routes to optimize your times in our racing game and yes the interplay between your abilities gear and character upgrades in an RPG meta gaming is a term that's most often used in competitive games and tabletop role-playing but I think it's got applications almost everywhere basically if you've ever had fun with a game by not actually playing it and instead found yourself messing around in menus coming up with cool synergies and setting up elaborate plans to achieve your goals you've enjoyed meta gaming and it's this big picture kind of thinking that makes games with meta level challenges that test our deeper knowledge of a game systems through abstract problem solving so fulfilling to take on unfortunately it's the abstract nature of metagami theory crafty fun that makes it so hard for games to facilitate this kind of player reliably what might seem like an interesting set of big picture problems to overcome and a set of satisfying systems to figure out might just turn out to be incredibly boring as I found out when it came to bio an atomic heart so uh what does make meta gaming work well I think it's got a lot to do with the idea that figuring out the solution to a problem and the challenge to implement it are often more fun than the solution itself which means the games need to give us players challenges that aren't just difficult but interesting to solve and they need to arm us with interesting ways to solve them which as you might imagine is often easier said than done consider that first bit creating interesting problems making fun challenges for metacentric games is ironically much more challenging than it is for other titles because it's not enough to create an abstract problem with only one solution in order for a challenge to really Flex our meta gaming muscles it needs to have multiple Avenues towards Victory when a game only has one real answer to its problems it doesn't matter how strategically demanding or fun to overcome they actually are the solve will always be kind of disappointing and I think the best example of this is weakness exploitation mechanics which are very easy to get wrong Pokemon's Gym Battles for example are completely hard countered by bringing one super effective Pokemon removing the necessity of coming up with a more interesting strategy Doom Eternal upset some players by introducing a bunch of scripted weaknesses to enemies like making Kaku demon swallow grenades that reduce the need to think of your own tactics and gimmick weapon fights in Souls like games such as Dark Souls 3's yorm and Eldon Rings reichardt where they have a bunch of Health but specific weaknesses to a single weapon are great fights but there's no enjoyment to be found thinking your way around these problems like there is with every other encounter because here the answer is so obvious use the gimmick weapons or have fun with a 20-minute boss fight instead by designing problems that contain multiple potential routes to Victory with none of them being necessarily favored by the game players are given a much more fun challenge in cooking up their own Solutions which feel much more rewarding than simply hunting for the Magic Eye winbun that have been hidden by the developers this I think is the key to making a competitive game with a solid potential for meta gaming there can be no one of obvious best strategy but equally each individual strategy can't itself only be counted one way the best competitive games have a rich web of interactions between each of their constituent parts that make every matchup unique and necessitating Mastery of a bunch of different approaches in order to win games reliably in Starcraft a Terran player would play completely differently against the protos player than they would against the Zerg and differently again against the fellow Terror in the best fighting games no one character is allowed to dominate because players can simply counter-bake someone that's strong against them and aeon of strife clones like DOTA have so many Heroes that statistically speaking each combination of 5v5 is totally unique and thus requires totally different tactics every single game or of course they could just pick outward Navarro with meteor Hammer again who's the same these games are so long lived because they present a problem with no easy solution but a bunch of potential ones creating a fantastic self-perpetuating challenge of course games with a meta level gameplay do need to actually guide players in the direction of the fun solutions from time to time in many immersive Sims it's possible to cheat yourself out of having multi-angle problems to solve either by picking something that's so bad that is useless like swimming in Deus Ex or by not really seeing any fun ideas to latch onto and just going for something boring and generic like in death Loop which has a bunch of interesting systemic mechanics but no obvious use cases for them meaning you often just end up slouching into a boring shoot everyone's strategy and having less fun than you could be to prevent this and point players towards the most fertile possible grounds for Theory crafting many games give up a small amount of their open-endedness in order to create strategic signposts that give players a nice starting point to work from this is something that happens in trading card games quite a lot often they'll include specific build around cards that are powerfully synergistic but only as part of a larger strategy challenging players to make the most of these cards and incentivizing the most fun kind of play in the process for example Catalyst in slay the Spire does literally nothing on its own but could be a centerpiece of a poison-based strategy giving players inspiration and a nice payoff to work towards as they build their deck Magic the Gathering even goes a step further and includes 10 dual color uncommon cards one for each color pair in most of its sets intended to help guide players towards the most fun strategies in its draft modes which can otherwise be a little bit overwhelming to take Shadows over innistrad remastered as an example just because I've got footage for it you've got this guy who wants you to cast lots of instance and sorceries in the same turn this edgy card which can form the Cornerstone of a very nice edge control strategy and this little dude who just wants to hang out with the rest of his wolf friends ah even if you've got no idea what you're doing like me these cards give you a cool deck idea to latch onto and thus an interesting problem to solve it's also worth mentioning that a single open-ended problem isn't the only way to create a fun meta level challenge it can be just as interesting to give players a bunch of more simplistic straightforward problems to solve and then ask them to deal with all of them at once challenging players to be efficient prioritize and devise clever Solutions using the tools they have available this is really the domain of survival games they dump you with a load of quite simple long-term problems but developing means to fight them efficiently requires juggling each problem at the same time in a way that generates a lot of fun emerging complexity and thus fun metal level gameplay in Don't Starve for example you've got to do stuff like balance foraging at night time with not going insane figure out strategies to take on Monsters like tolberts to NAB efficient food without dying and balance the location of your base such that you're close to or can find other sources of all the most critical resources dealing with these problems requires the application of both long-term thinking as you you decide where to allocate resources to mitigate particular issues and lateral application of the lessons you've learned like using fire to take care of spiders early game without needing to waste precious resources on weapons and armor making it a really satisfying combination of your efforts when you pull things off and manage to not starve oh that's where that comes from of course while setting up a bunch of interesting metal level obstacles is important for any game that relies on Big Picture thinking some consideration does need to be made towards a more immediate gameplay which is to say that while much of the fun and challenge of metagami titles comes from thinking about them in the abstract games do need to make the experience of actually making these decisions interesting and empowering as well to loop back around the survival game topic this is a need that's abundantly clear in Ark survival evolved a title best described as a great video game trapped inside a terrible one the way you actually make strategic level decisions in Arc is through the engram system which involves you spending skill points gained upon leveling up to choose which recipes you want to learn and thus which options you want to make available to you this could be be a really fun way to specialize into particular things and maybe even Force collaboration with other players but in reality this system has you making a lot of non-decisions that don't feel particularly empowering to make the vast majority of engrams are either useless like the blood pack compass and many of the armor types also powerful so as to be essentially mandatory like narcotics or the fabricator what this means is the wall Arc has a lot of fun potential for planning out how to use its dinosaurs to explore and survive with all of them having cool abilities you never really feel rewarded for making a good plan because they're invariably dependent on a handful of crucial engrams and then a bunch of other decisions that barely feel like they matter in order for a decision to be fun to implement it needs to feel like the work you put into it was worthwhile and like it has a genuine impact on the way you play a game if it feels like you had no choice or like the work you put in didn't visibly affect anything then a meta-level decision is going to feel boring no matter how much fun it was to figure out look at games that use item levels and gear scores to determine your power sure you're making a lot of decisions and there are a lot of different ways to do so but because you're basically just making a number go up it's way less satisfying than a game that offers fewer choices but where each character building decision has a profound impact on the way you play I think one great way that titles with a metagamy element give your decisions nice visible consequences is to make each of your choices come at the expense of something else with that Gap in your strategy being a constant reminder of the choice you made this is weirdly something I found in Phantom Brigade a fantastic Mech tactics game my high level decisions of which types of magnet field and what guns to give them were strangely more fun when I only had two of them and thus couldn't cover all my bases but when I had the full Squad of four my team was much more well-rounded which gave it less of a feeling of identity the tactics were still great fun but the meta element was just less meaningful this is also something that affects games that give you enough currencies to buy out all their character building options you start with a fun strategy and interesting weaknesses but the more you play the more generic your build becomes as you buy more and more stuff and your strategy just progresses to the main city builders on the other hand are great for obvious reasons at showing the consequences of any decision you've made not only do your actions usually result in a nice obvious physical reminder but each of your solutions to various issues usually end up contributing to whatever the next challenge is creating this great sense of coherence the links together or your big picture plans in oxygen not included so many of your decisions involve manipulating fluids and gases but you get to see them affect the terrain in really satisfying ways often with them causing brand new problems in the future like when I solved my sewage buildup Problem by building a massive piss pull only to discover it was right over a promising copper vein a good thing my duplicates can hold their breath and in City skylines choosing an early game power system drastically changes how you end up building your city either near to a hill with your growing Bank of wind turbines or around the pollution hotspots that get created by your oil power plants with both providing a constant mechanical pressure that continues to shape your strategy long after you've built them Often by nagging you to build war windmills it's also worth mentioning that another way to make your decisions feel that they matter is to change our strategic perspective once in a while file and get us to work with different tools and pursue different aims something like path of Exiles Mighty passive skill tree is a fantastic meta level challenge to take on as you spot cool options and plan your route forwards but eventually want you to sort of going through the motions implementing a build you've already decided upon and not really making any new decisions that fun tapers off quite dramatically compare that to roguelikes which as a consequence of their design are constantly resetting you to zero and asking you to build an entirely new strategy out of new fresh tools the progression mechanics in say Hades might actually be pretty simple but each decision feels like it matters way more because you're often using them to build a brand new strategy from scratch and Against The Storm might be a little bit more basic than traditional city builders but the fact that each attempt sees you with totally different resources means you have to build your economy differently every time rather than just falling back on the same tried and tested strategies this is also why I'm not a huge fan of roguelikes with meta progression elements that directly increase your power something both Hades and Against The Storm have they not only mean that you don't fully reset to zero in you die but they also create a single overriding strategy that supersedes any fun decision making you could be making during a run and that's to maximize your between runs progression at all costs actually speaking of Superfluous systems that make the Strategic experience worse I think we're finally ready to loop back around and look at how Atomic heart's improvements to bioshock's more simplistic formula don't actually make it more fun to Theory craft with let's start with what kinds of challenges it creates Atomic heart's main obstacles come in the form of its enemies which occupy two factions Mustachio robots and plant Zombies they're not quite that but let's just roll with them having different enemy factions that are weak to different things in addition to variations within factions is a cool idea as it forces you to account for more potential problems when Theory crafting but when all robots are weak to electricity and all zombos are weak to fire that challenge basically goes out the window in atomic art most weapons have an upgrade path that specifically increases damage against robots or one that specifically increases damage to Organics and because you can carry a bunch of different weapons there's no reason not to have specialized tools for use against particular factions some weapons even have both so you can just respect them for free between areas and that's not to mention how basically every weapon can just be cheaply charged with the appropriate element to insta-counter every enemy anyway in trying to create a more clear-cut strategic challenge atomic heart actually just oversimplifies things to the point that the game provides almost no metagame challenge at all the same is true for how fun those meta game choices feel to make sure atomic heart offers a lot of them but more often than not their imperceptible changes to damage your accuracy stats that are difficult to gauge with only the first upgrades in any given weapons tree really mattering at all and both your weapons and abilities having such generic functions and being broadly applicable in all circumstances that you never really feel like you're specializing look at the oddly seminal polymer jetability it squirts white goo on enemies that just universally amplifies all Elemental damage it's not oil you can set on fire or water you can shop people with it's just a catch-all more damage option that's good in all circumstances chances making it way less interesting to strategize with not only that because there's an infinite number of upgrade resources up for grams each of those decisions is really just choosing which one you want to get first meaning that you never really get to feel like your strategy came at the expense of something else this is all in stock contrast to Bioshock which uses its limited choices to its Advantage by making them all total game changers with most of the game's upgrades giving dramatic immediately noticeable improvements to Stats or creating brand new effects that change how each item is used but balancing all of that out with limited resources forcing you to choose which crazy upgrade you want to spec into with even stuff like extra plasmid slots for bonus utility costing precious Adam just as an aside literally the first upgrade you get access to increases wrench damage by 350 it is Bonkers and contributes a lot to how overpowered that weapon is but equally it does make the wrench very fun to build around so is it bad design who knows actually in general Bioshock leverages its weapons weird often bad balance by giving them specific functions that allow smart players to really take advantage of them in ways that aren't immediately obvious you can set up traps with the crossbow and then knock enemies into them for lethal damage many of the plasmids have non-combat functions like how the ice one makes hacking easier the chemical thrower is an inefficient bootleg version of the three Elemental plasmids meaning you could use it to save a slot in a pinch and no one weapon is good against all enemies the machine gun is efficient below damage especially against armor the shotgun is bad against ranged enemies and the crossbow has such slow reloading that it sucks against anything that it can't kill in one hit this is all straightforward stuff by modern standards but the way Bioshock rewards you for getting clever still works to this day in spite of how archaic a lot of the game is bioshock's combat might not be good on a mechanical level but on an abstract one it offers something far smarter and more intellectually stimulating that the technically Superior Atomic art simply can't and I think that's what meta gaming is all about right the fun of meta gaming and solving problems doesn't exist on the screen or even in the engine but in our heads it's about the way we manipulate and come to understand game mechanics and the irrational attachments we create to our choices and so all atomic heart actually does is double down on that game's weakest elements like it's lame anti-armor antibiological bullets for the machine gun and Pistol and its no-brainer electric shock ability which atomic heart bafflingly makes free and mandatory instead of trying to fix metagaming is a weird Beast because it exists outside the Realms of obvious mechanical game design it's more player driven and harder to predict than almost anything else some of the greatest competitive games out there with Rich ever shifting metagames and deeply nuanced interplay and strategies whenever intended to be competitive to begin with and others that were designed from the ground up to facilitate this kind of play ended up falling flat on their faces ultimately meta-level gameplay is to a certain degree kind of outside the controller developers they can set up the pieces advise players and help making getting into the groove as easy as possible but only we can make the most of what an experiences meta-level tactics have to offer and I think that's cool all it takes is an open mind a creative spirit and a keen sense for what can be exploited for maximum fun value and any game can Sprout entirely new layers of gameplay that exists entirely within our heads as you play with systems and master how they fit together though it does bear mentioning that that's not to say that thinking outside the box is always a good thing when the people who made atomic heart tried that they ended up with the um I guess I want to call it molestation fridge and let's be honest the less sad about that the better what they were thinking I don't want to know well hello there and welcome to the after the video segment a very special part of the video which occurs after the rest of the video and it basically exists so I can tell you all about some people who are much more interesting and beautiful than me all in an attempt to atone for my horrible sins against video games that's um that's my tragic backstory anyway the first person I'd like to recommend is a cool YouTube person and in a slight change from the norm I'd like to show you Umami who's an animator and is responsible for a bunch of incredibly unique surreal and occasionally just plain upsetting videos that I've recently spent my time watching the back catalog of umami stuff ranges from funny to profound and all of it is weird as hell plus he's even put together a feature-length movie and is working on a second there's loads of stuff to keep you occupied I would recommend starting with some of the shorter videos because they're slightly more accessible but please do give it a watch though uh maybe with the lights on next and even more importantly is my obligatory mention of some of my lovely delicious patrons they are responsible more so than anyone else for ensuring that I'm able to take my time making these videos and not feeling obligated to chase clouds or do ridiculous clickbait nonsense for that me and my Integrity are eternally grateful if you would like to join them in supporting the channel then all you have to do is head over to my patreon page down there in the description and send me some money plus optionally a blood sacrifice of your choice in exchange you'll get cool stuff like early access to videos behind the scenes stuff extra analysis that I just couldn't fit into this video and of course permission to Adblock my stuff because you know you've already given me money so it wouldn't really be fair to make you pay twice by then watching ads right of course the most special patrons of all are the ones who support at the highly prized 10 a month tier otherwise known as my mysterious benefactors they're the ones who get a special voice shout out at the end and those people are algebroot Ali Wright Andrew lebrono asaran alner 94 bardik Dragoon Brennan Spalding Brian ottoriani Constantine amend cosmics 360 Daniel metches Das kangaroo David Setzer Dirk and Jan karambeld diglettier dotwo ekton Edward of Franklin Woods Eugene balkin Gasco isaw donno ifo 93 Jacob Dillon riddle Jordan gear Justin Dent Lee Berman mace 154 Mark valant nwdd Nate Graf Patrick rumberg Peter D tomasak Reddit X Regal regex Rey's dad Sean seen Maddox Sheldon Hearn Simon Jacobson so snakespeare Steve Riley strategy in Ultima The Forbidden shrimp tin markovic tiguran t corn Tyler Duncan Uprising whimsical wisp Zach brantmeyer Zach Grendel and ciao that's me done thank you for watching uh now if you don't mind I'm off to go and play more Tara nil because it's awesome bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 147,067

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, guide, New Games, Elden Ring, Elden Ring DLC, Hi Fi Rush, Metal Gear Rising, Mario Kart, Counter Strike, Counter Strike Global Offensive, CS:GO, Smash Bros, SSBU, Counter Strike 2, Atomic Heart, Atomic Heart Twins, Nora, Bioshock, Bioshock 2, metagaming, fighting games, Citybuilders, Warhammer, Total War, Deus Ex, Terra Nil, Big Daddy

Id: J7RFL7rllMU

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023