Lunchtime Discussion: Special Powers

With the raft of discussions recently seeming to focus on shooters, and whilst I’ll try and avoid it, I’ve got a horrible feeling that this is going to come back to the same place again. Today we’re going to look at special abilities in games, partly because Chris suggested it on Twitter a while back, partly because I was playing BioShock yesterday. Which is a shooter. Damn.

So if you’ve even seen BioShock as you passed by it with barely a glance towards its underwater world, you’ll be aware of its heavy reliance on your special plasmid based powers. Now I can only speak for about the first hour of the game, after which I got frustrated because I kept dying, decided the game was stupid and stopped playing for the day, but I don’t think there’s an actually a way through the game without using special powers. In my case I can’t actually work out a way to get through the game even with shooting electricity from my hand at every opportunity and smacking people with a wrench.

See the real question here is how much to you use special powers in games? BioShock is a prime example of a game where you really have to use your powers, along with titles like Trine. The special abilities in these games aren’t just something on top of what you can do, a tacked on extra, but are a core mechanic of the game play.

At the other end you’ve got most RPGs, where you can level up your special abilities if you really, really feel like it or you can stab them with your inexplicably large sword that, in all honesty, should behead your enemy along with the surrounding village in one well timed slice. Of course if you’re playing either Mass Effect title replace large sword with your array of firearms. For some reason Mass Effect is the only RPG that I can think of with a lack of swords and a wealth of guns instead. Perhaps Bioware are doing it wrong. Of course I’ve forgotten Knights of the Old Republic, but Bioware made that anyway. Plus it has light sabres, which are the best kind of sword.

So do you go for the special powers? Do you like to use magic in titles, or are you happier lopping off someone’s arm? I mean in the end you run out magic points in most games, you never run out of ‘cut the guy into a mangled mess’ points. Do you prefer games that force these powers onto you, or would you rather choose? And what about games like Modern Warfare 2 that have kill-spree unlocks in the multi-player? Do those count as special abilities in the same way?