Sometimes the smallest, most incremental changes can have a major impact on a game from either a design or visual standpoint. A system does not need to be rewritten from the ground up if it's not performing to the desired standard. Care and attention to such details can make a world of difference, as can a lack of them.

I recently had a chance to play and (force myself to) complete Tomb Raider: Legend, a game which had caught my interest after being touted as a return to form for the series. Having never played any of the prior releases I felt a need to experience a series which had heralded the re-emergence of the action-adventure game in full 3D. To remain unknowing of such a thing would be equal to any other sense of cultural ignorance. They add up, though - the words you can't pronounce, the events you haven't heard of, the ideas with which you are not and do not wish to be acquainted. To remain ignorant is to lose any sense of intellectual stimuli, to be immersed in feeling of utter weariness and discontent. This ennui is so often endemic of 'intellectual' and 'cultural' circles but wherever an art form resides, so such a condition is ever possible. Yet to remain aware of one's own shortcomings and then do nothing leads to what can be better described as the alienation of the intellectual. At some point the accumulation of missing information and curiosity amounts to your not being in the world at all.

Games as much as literature are dialogic works, if not more so due to the amount of borrowing and copying prevalent in the industry. They find themselves in a continual dialogue with other works and other developers. Such a state does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by it. This is rarely limited to just one example but such a communication is often with multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions. Just as Legend was so obviously influenced by a variety of other games, so it to will have an impact on others. Or at least I hope the mistakes it made won't be repeated in the future. Even the bad works of art, whether in gaming, literature or on canvas, still help shape other works.

A game world has rules and systems in place which most players will learn throughout the course of their play through. Each game has a set logic which the player ascribes to and hopefully feels comfortable manipulating. A good game gradual builds causal relationships in such a way that they become second nature to the player. Legend does not fall under this banner. Throughout the entire game, every use of the grappling hook was prompted, blazed across the screen in such a way as to ingrain itself into the very back of your retina. The prompt appeared and only then would you ever need to use the item. As the places where the hook would attach were often small and hard to find, such an approach, while visually ugly in an area of minimalist HUDs and UIs, made sense. Yet three quarters of the way through the game, it disappeared for the duration of one level. As a dependence had been built on prompts and this one item, I felt lost. I could not move forward and found myself stuck in a large, vacant cavern, desperately trying to find the exit. The makers of Portal experienced similar difficulties in designing one of their puzzles. In an early chapter, the player was faced with a rather simple solution but due to the co-dependency the designers had created on switches and boxes, testers got confused and attempted elaborate solutions which kept failing. For the final release, the puzzle was changed and the box was removed from the room. A simple solution to a major problem. Legend did not have such care placed upon it. The player was never slowly weaned off the prompts and their disappearance only began happening late into the game and at random times with no logic to it.

Such confusion was not limited to just one area. Context sensitive actions only work when the conditions for them to do so are simple and clearly marked. When there is little margin for error or miscommunication on the game's part. Yet the latter was apparent in the final confrontation. The use of QTEs (Quick Time Events) is becoming over used and sterile. While an arbitrary reflex test may seem as good a means as any to test players reactions, unless they are an integral part of gameplay, they become frustrating and pointless. The boss at the end could only truly be damaged by initiating an animation sequence by pressing a certain button when prompted. This button would be grayed out when not in range. Or at least it would part of the time. At others, it flashed and I would attempt to follow through. Only the button it was tied to also controlled general environmental interaction. Mistakenly pressing it at the wrong time would leave Lara waving about and immobile for enough time for the boss to regain its composure and recommence attacking.

While a novel idea and allowing the player to pull off showy moves usually not available or which would prove difficult to carry out, QTEs are not the only answer to these issues. As previously mentioned, all a game need to is build a link for the players with no need to prompt or hold them by the hand. All one need to is set these different combinations to memory (a simplistic example would be Ninja Gaiden 2's Y finishers for de-limbed enemies where the visual cue is visible enough without necessitating flashing icons or other mood ruining devices). There's little need to switch things up as God of War does and randomise the prompts for an added challenge. If the player is taught what combinations to input early on in order to pull such feats off, as long as they are kept simple, such coddling is not needed. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within did so with the mini-boss battles sprinkled throughout where the Prince climbed the giants and then would need to be moved from side to side to avoid the monster's hands reaching up and stopping him from hitting its weak spot. A visual cue was given in the raising of the hand, indicating where the player need move to and it felt all the more natural for it. Just because a mechanic's in vogue, adhering to it may not always be the best method.

Such blatant sign posting does little other than kill the atmosphere the game is trying to build. When we play, we expect the game to draw us into the world it's created but seeing such prompts only helps push us back out. This death of ambience was not only inflicted on Legend through the fisher price looking button cues during certain scenes but also a lack of attention paid to general audio and visual design. When your comrades are kidnapped and you're meant to be left deserted and feeling desolate in dark, mystic caverns, the last thing I want to happen is for the audio file of their chants and encouragements to kick in just because I performed a perfectly executed triple back flip with text book landing. It kills the atmosphere and turns the entire thing into some sort of ghastly pantomime where I continue to play just to see what other gaffs the design team felt the need to commit.