This post was written for Critical Distance‘s Blogs of the Round Table for April, the theme of which is ‘Palette Swap‘. Read other blogs on the topic in the menu below:

This BoRT topic comes at just the right time for me, because being the slow gamer that I am I’ve only just finished Rockstar’s Max Payne 3. Despite it being quite a critic- and user-acclaimed game, I found the gameplay completely failed to excite me. When I tried to remember any particularly enjoyable moments or noteworthy scenes, I came up with only one or two very deliberate set pieces. The rest of the time I had spent playing the game had mostly flown out of my head in a haze of repetition.

How does this relate to palette swaps? When I tried to pin down precisely what I had an issue with in the game, I realised that every single enemy that you encounter in Max Payne 3 is essentially a palette swap of every other. Invaders at a high-class party behaved identically to New York gangsters behaved identically to Spanish paramilitary. With the occasional exception of an armored enemy that required one or two slightly more well-placed shots, every enemy ran the same, shot the same, and was defeated in the same manner.

This is understandable, from a game development point of view. Enemy A.I. is hard to program, and I don’t begrudge the developers the reuse of behaviours in the context of the enemies being essentially the same (i.e. they are all male human beings rather than, say, a gradual evolution of aliens). Enemy A.I. in three dimensions is even more so, and I do think that a considerable amount of the palette swap nature of enemies in 3D games comes from the fact that programming them to do much more than take cover and point their gun’s shooty end at the player is bloody difficult. To help with this, there are numerous guns to help vary up the experience, and the arenas within which you fight the hordes of identical enemies do enough to complicate combat that it didn’t feel like a complete grind while I was playing it. But modifiers such as those can only achieve so much, and if Max Payne 3 didn’t have a pretty-good-for-a-videogame storyline helping it along, I think critics might have been a bit more harsh.

But let’s hold up for a second. I don’t want anyone to think I’m picking on Max Payne 3 specifically. Spec Ops: The Line was a game that impacted many, including myself, but if you thought the enemies were anything but palette swaps you’d be kidding yourself. The Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises often feel like the hordes of insurgents you shoot are really actors getting up behind the camera and running around a backdrop to be shot again in the next section. But again, the variation in weapons, set pieces, and emergent gameplay from the environment/arenas that you are playing in keep it from getting utterly stale as you mow through hundreds, if not thousands, of the same palette swapped A.I.

So what’s the cure? Or, perhaps more prevalently, do we need a cure? After all, it could be argued that the above-mentioned games are entertaining because they promote the feeling of being the hero that makes it through, leaving behind a trail of unworthy foes. Game developer blogs everywhere insist that making the player feel powerful — or at the very least, on par with the enemy power curve — is the key to an engaging gameplay experience. But if that’s the case, how do you explain Bloodborne?

That’s right, I dropped the B-word. I guess the main aim of this post was to point to the fact that while common enemy behaviours might fit within one game design paradigm, there are always games that are willing to break away and try something different. The prevalence of the palette-swapped nature of enemy interactions in many AAA games over the past 5-10 years is what I think has lead to the Bloodborne/DarkSouls series getting so much attention now. The enemies in Bloodborne need to be learned. They need to be analysed, their patterns recognised. Accordingly, player weaponry doesn’t really get that much better. You can’t just hold out to buy a better gun or unlock the ability that overpowers you. It’s a fight for survival every time you encounter an enemy, and your character gets better by you, the player, getting more skillful at those fights.

The funny thing is, the enemy behaviours aren’t exactly complicated. Area attacks and unblockable smashes that need precise timing to avoid are probably easier to program than the reactionary behaviour of enemies in a game like Max Payne 3. But the fact that you have to learn each enemy from scratch, really getting to understand the way they move and interact with the environment, makes for a completely different and, for many gamers, novel experience. Probably the best evidence I can supply to support this is the way that my friends who have played Dark Souls talk about that game. It’s always in reference to a particular enemy or boss who thwarted them for ages before they figured out how to defeat it. They can recall precisely how they juked around it and stabbed it in the butt (a recurring theme in the Souls games). But ask me how I got through the Spanish bordello level in Max Payne 3 and I’d probably shrug and offer something along the lines of “I don’t know, shot a bunch of guys, I guess?”

Thanks for reading, please check out the rest of the contributions from this month’s topic!