Noble Failures – The Thing (2002)

Welcome to a new ongoing feature at Bonus Level, Noble Failures. This is an idea I’ve had for a while. Wherein I take a look back into gaming’s past and find those games that did at least one thing that was interesting and should be considered for adoption into future games. Even if these games were complete flops and complete junk otherwise I still felt they held some sort of untapped potential.

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A game that proved flamethrowers can be once again indispensable and not just a hazard to your teammate’s health. It was released on the PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC in 2002 as a type of sequel to the 1982 horror film classic of the same name. At first, it just sounded like budget game third person shooter with aliens as the main antagonist with government stooges in later levels coming in to shoot you up also. Half Life anyone? I’m just saying.

The story follows you and a squad going to the Arctic research faculty where the film took place. Moving though the movies various set pieces, along with the blinding winter weather leaves you with a rising sense of the care that was put into this game. After about 20 minutes of exploring, though, the awe of the movie seems to wash away. The area’s begin to run a little bland and get repetitive. Running from very similar looking buildings in a snow storm gave no real depth to the environment.

The games main selling point is the fear/trust system, which had the A.I teammates trust in you vary depending on what you did. Giving someone ammo or health would boost their trust in you, while removing guns had the opposite effect. Leading them to an area where blood covers the walls also had the chance of having them loosing it (more depth below). Also, large enemies would make your team mates loose it as well. Your teammates, just like in the movie, can be aliens posing as humans and will only turn at predetermined times. And since you WILL lose your original squad, taking on survivors in the field looks to become mandatory. Killing teammates you thought were infected and turned out to be human will lose even more trust. Now what do you ask is the outcome of your teammates losing their sanity? One of three different scenarios – one, they’d simply run away. Two, the teammate starts shooting and flaming with no clear target in sight. Three, teammates will simply loose the will to live and commit suicide. Now some characters that you find in the rotating squad you have are preordained from Thing-Jesus to become monsters. To kill them properly you must first weaken with regular bullets then finish off with a flamethrower.

This fear/trust system on paper sounds like an original thought provoking idea that could give real conflict and high tension to video games. Along with smarter learning A.I, everything sounded just peachy. Unfortunately this post is called Noble Failure for a reason. See the fear/trust system failed because teammates were preset to lose their shit at certain parts no matter how many guns you gave them, and how full their health was. This caused me on multiple walkthroughs to just strip them of their weapons, so they couldn’t cause too much damage later at those preset moments. Adding to this problem was the teammates that were meant to turn into monsters. Playing over again had me knowing who would get all “face biting” so, taking the initiative I shot first and to my surprise they were now human and my team pissed at me. This sounds like some procedural narrative but nope just another preset you can’t avoid. Reloading that save I bring this character to the part where he will turn if he’s a monster and as expected he turns into a monster but killing him before he does this still gives you a dead human teammate. Like the game reaches down and tells you they wanted the story to roll in a certain way taking any type of choice out of the equation.

The remainder of the game aside from the fear/trust system is a run of the mill third person shooter with the same load out of weapons (pistol, machine gun, shotgun, grenade, fire grenade etc). In my opinion, the game loses its stride when government agent’s show up and you’re forced into poorly balanced gunfights with them. I like it when a game is doing its best to at be least passable as a survivor horror-esque game. Flipping it on its head to just shoot up regular humans not only becomes boring but expected. Furthermore in the third act of the game, you hardly ever get any more teammates.  It’s almost as if they saw the inherent flaws of the fear/trust system and tried to yank out of the game, but only remove the tail end of it.

Imagine a modern game where a part of your job would be keeping your unit of soldiers on the straight and narrow. Backing them up and keeping them well stocked allows them to trust you more and further build kinship only seen on the battlefield. Some soldiers would sacrifice themselves for you while others would leave you rot. I can see this idea being seen in a negative light due to generations of stupid A.I. but in this day an age of gaming I believe it is more than possible to get competent A.I assistance. Half life 2 and Left for Dead 2, I think, had really helpful A.I’s. Alyx Vance would always have your back in a fight and constantly kills enemies for you so you could conserve ammo. The Left for Dead 1 survivors in the level “The Passing” constantly gave you weapons and ammo to take on more of the infected. So I guess I shout out to Valve to bring back this system with hopefully better results.

By pretty much abandoning the fear/trust game mechanic so late in the game they left a possibly interesting game idea to drown in its own puss ridden story centric ideology.  It’s still a passable third person shooter, with mediocre atmosphere. It wasn’t a complete failure but fell short of becoming a precursor to more unique and challenging games.