Sleeping Dogs is fun, but it's a bad open world game

I like Grand Theft Auto IV. 

That might seem like a strange sentence to start a piece about a game that is not Grand Theft Auto IV, but in this case it almost seems like it's required for the sake of "Full Disclosure". Even with my humble 420 (nice) Follower count on Twitter and my humbler by the day Following count it's pretty difficult to participate in any conversation about a recent open world game without someone chiming in something to the effect of "Grand Theft Auto IV blows, man!" 

GTAIV presented you with Niko Bellic, an immigrant with a shady past who came to America looking for a fresh start, but lack of options for a person like him soon get him caught up with the criminal underworld. It's a great setup with all kinds of opportunities for character drama and culture commentary that opens up Liberty City to extensive roleplaying especially when outside of missions. Would you interpret Niko as too damaged to reintegrate into society and make him prone to violent outbursts? Maybe you would not kill people or steal cars at all and make your way around the city exclusively in taxis, maybe even attempt to connect with characters in the story by going bowling with them. Or you could just not care about this in the slightest and do whatever you feel like, the game is bursting with spots that make great spots for organic endless survival modes, my favourite's the hospital! 

All three of these approaches to play were equally viable in GTAIV. It felt like the first genuine attempt to contextualise the violence in a Grand Theft Auto title, as well as pulling enough narrative strings to potentially encourage the player to behave in a certain way even outside of story missions. The vision was bold; here's a huge breathing world where you're free to do whatever you want, but you may end up getting so lost in it that you'll realise on your own that there's things you shouldn't do in it. 

GTAIV did not stick the landing. There was still too much violence, it was perhaps too intentionally miserable for its satire to have any punch, and maybe the story didn't have enough strong enough legs to not buckle under all the weight it was being given to hold up. It was an incredible first attempt though, one that surely would leave everyone optimistic about what was to come? Well...no, despite near perfect initial reviews "gamers" grew to hate Grand Theft Auto IV, and now it's difficult to find a copy of it that isn't encased in three inches of hardened spit.

It doesn't annoy me that people don't like GTAIV, it does somewhat bother me how loud the disapproval for it was. Not only did Rockstar hear you, everyone heard you, and for better or for worse open world games have been running in the opposite direction of GTAIV ever since. 

It's own direct sequel, Grand Theft Auto V, is perhaps the biggest and most cowardly of offenders. The game presents you with a choice of three psychopathic jerks, with the logic being if the characters are psychopaths who act incoherently on their every whim, then everything the player does outside of missions is technically roleplaying! What it leaves you with is three jerks being jerks in a jerk world exclusively inhabited by jerks, where everything has equal consequences so therefore nothing matters. Outside of a few hot sparks here and there it's a miserable, cynical game littered with nasty sub-South Park "satire" which crawls further up my list of "Least Favourite Things" every time I think about it.

I sure did buy it twice and play it for about a hundred hours though. What can I say? Unlike Rockstar I haven't given up on the dream yet.

The more obvious example of digression is the increasingly "wacky" Saints Row games, which started off as a fairly pitiful GTA clone but transcended that into becoming it's own wonderful little thing. I find the Saints Row games fun but not enthralling, I've enjoyed the couple of hours I've spent screwing around in each one but haven't been driven to finish any of them. That reflects my attitude to these games in general, "fun" burns out fast, especially if you're essentially doing the same mediocre (when compared to specialised games) mechanics over and over again, whereas "worlds" can be endlessly fascinating and frictive. 

You could say that the bile for GTAIV has built up and maintained over the last decade is a hangover from the "GAMES ARE ONLY ABOUT FUN" mentality from the mid-2000s that didn't understand how to digest what Rockstar were trying to do. OH NO. That sounds needlessly confrontational, it's a good thing I'm Definitely Not Saying That.

One thing I am going to be confrontational about is that everyone is a bunch of nubs for not embracing GTAIV's cell phone, which might be one of the most subtly innovative contributions to game design in the last decade. Here was a new way to reach out into the world, one that establishes that a space is only as meaningful as the characters that inhabit it, and here's your way to reach out to them (if you want to). It was also a way for those characters to reach out to you; one of my personal all time "Most Memorable Moments" in games was when I was going about my business in Liberty City and the final boss to called me up to punk me out. 

But that's not why the phone gets snarked about so much is it? It's because, hilariously, your cousin calls you up to go bowling. As you're doing your as understated-as-possible-to-not-sound-racist Roman impression, may I ask what is exactly so eye-rolling about this? Why not hang out with one of the major characters in the game to find out more about them? Why not embrace the part of Niko's character where he aches for a peaceful, normal existence? (Note: the answer is because doing this is not "Fun").

Let's not talk about though, let's talk about Sleeping Dogs! Sleeping Dogs has an awful phone in it. The phone is what made me realise I didn't appreciate Sleeping Dogs as an open world game.

Okay maybe we shouldn't talk about that either for now.

Sleeping Dogs is the open world game perhaps most similar to GTAIV in terms of structure and narrative intentions. You play as an undercover police officer Wei Shen who is tasked with infiltrating the triads, he also has a shady past where he is suspected of previously infiltrating and murdering another gang back in America for causing the death of his sister. Wei's allegiance to both the triads and the cops is put under scrutiny throughout the game, and what side the "real" Wei Shen feels more at home with is something you're feel to interpret yourself as you play the game.

I'm not going to talk too much about the actual story, so here's two quick points about it:

1) It regularly swings from being heavy-handed and meandering, somewhat inevitable for open world games that can't control what order the player goes through missions or how much time they leave in between them.

2) In the grand scheme of things, it's perfectly serviceable and not worth dwelling on.

Mercifully, the game is smart enough not to commit the greatest crime a narrative designer can make by presenting aligning with the cops or the triads as a binary moral choice system. Unfortunately, it does commit the second greatest crime by opting to go for a levelling up system instead. As you complete missions the game will keep score, you start off with a complete Cop Meter and an empty Triad meter, hurting innocent people and damaging property will deduct Cop Coins, doing cool stuff will raise your Triad Tokens. At the end of the mission your points for each side are converted into experience, gain enough experience and you'll level up to unlock some new Cop or Triad related skills.

So what side did my playthrough of Wei Shen lean towards? I...have no idea, I could turn on my PlayStation 4 to check, but I'd have to move and it's really hot today. I know I ranked them both up enough to unlock most of the stuff, but I don't know the details. What does this concept hope to achieve ultimately, but make the player aim for both maximum Cop AND Triad points (which is not only possible, but also encouraged through mission replays). There's no struggle here whatsoever, both systems exist entirely separate from each other, as long as you can manage to drive to the mission objective without ploughing through the marketplace you should be fine on the Cop points, and as you're gaining Triad points there's no penalty on the other side for say, burning dudes alive in an open furnace. 

This is where you start to see it, the shadow of GTAIV and its legacy haunting the production. The Cop/Triad thing can't be too thoughtful or critical of the player's actions because that would compromise "the fun factor". Not only that, everything you do must result in some kind of reward, because nothing is its own reward in these games. From the second you start exploring Hong Kong "Social Hub" prompts will clog up the bottom right corner of the screen (you can turn these off, although it took me several hours and a Google search to figure out how) to constantly keep score of how long your wheelies or how long you can drive without knocking into anything. 

I despise it when games insist on turning everything you can do into a feature, it seems to imply no AAA developer values the visceral joy in doing things for their own sake. It makes me think of Sonic 2 and playing around with the spindash. You hold down on the D-Pad to crouch, you mash one of the buttons, Sonic revs up, you let it go, Sonic shoots off to the right, it feels great. Later on in the game you screw up and lose your momentum in front of a steep incline, you crouch and mash the button even faster to SUPER SPINDASH. Later on, or possibly even several playthroughs later, it occurs to you "does mashing the button actually make Sonic go any faster?" After a quick experiment, you discover the answer is "sort of" and that it maxes out after a few hits, but that sure doesn't stop you from mashing that button twice as long as you'll ever need to!

AAA game design seems utterly terrified of such a concept, if Sonic 2 was released today by a major publisher they would definitely have a trophy for hitting the button 100 times on one spindash, plus a visible counter on screen to assure you that you hit the button more times than any of your friends. Everything must have a purpose, everything must indicate some kind of process, everything must have an reward, never let the player feel like any action they perform is superfluous or a waste of time.

The sum total effect of making everything the player character is capable of an acknowledged "thing" in the game is making everything left in between feel hollow. I'm the sort of person who can accidentally get distracted on route to a new mission in GTAV and go hiking in the mountains for two hours, yet if I go more than five minutes without starting a new mission in Sleeping Dogs I feel like I'm playing it wrong.

There's multiple reasons for this, and I'm afraid to say the first one because it's going to make me sound like that guy, but Sleeping Dogs is detrimentally unpolished. It's rendition of Hong Kong is a wonderful aesthetic choice but unfortunately aesthetics is about as far as it goes. Citizen AI is borderline non-existent, occasionally looking horrified or running away as you cause havoc, but they'll forget about you in seconds even if they're walking over a dead body. This is unfortunate, but the game had well documented development issues and no-one has the money to throw around that Rockstar does so I guess you can only expect so much.

However, the generally poor design of the city is less forgiveable. Outside of some token environmental attack objects thrown around it feels like a place designed before anyone on the developmental team knew what the mechanics of the game were going to be. This became distressing when I received a wanted level and was chased by the cops on foot. I thought this would a wonderful opportunity to improvise an organic escape, utilising Wei's rather fun parkour abilities, but to my dismay I couldn't find anywhere to use them. I ran mashing the X button around block after block for about ten minutes with the police failing to gain or lose distance on me, desperately looking for something that wasn't just a sidewalk or a featureless flat alley. Even on spots where there was staircases or some other kind of verticality there was zero options to take any kind of fancy shortcut. It's a frustrating oversight.

More so than any other open world game I've played (Note: I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game in years) Sleeping Dogs gives me major Waypoint Syndrome. The first hour of the game is nothing but following waypoints, and considering how unappealing the city is without a goal and the amount of icons on the map at any one time indicating a new "Thing" for you to do you could argue the entire game is nothing but following waypoints. Waypoints (complete with magical glowing Burnout arrows in the street) are often described as "good design", and although I'm not against them in theory at all it should be pointed out that "good design" in this case actually means "more convenient". 

The danger of encouraging the regular use of waypoints in open world design is you're constantly reducing the space to a destination. Even after playing the game for 20+ hours, I have zero familiarity with the city. Pausing to look at the map once I noticed the city is broken up into three main areas, not that I could tell you which one was which or what happened there, hell I couldn't even tell you which one you start the game in. When a mission ended that dropped me off in a new unfamiliar place, I would look around bemused, maybe throw a few dudes down the stairs for the #banter, then click the L3 to set the waypoint for the next "Thing" to do.

Oh the Things, so many Things. For the retro Banjo Kazooie loving Things fan there are good ol' collectible Things thrown all over the city. For the modern gamer, you have you standard races, side missions, optional story missions, optional melee segments and DRUG BUSTS. You can fight the drug dealers in the city by beating up thugs in a certain area, hacking a camera and returning home to arrest the local drug dealer via the camera feed. Which functionally translates into, doing the same melee combat you're forced to do throughout the game, doing the same minigame every time, and then driving back to your home to look at a camera feed to address the dealer who is always the same guy so you can pick him out immediately. What is this? Aside from something an IGN reviewer would credit as "Strong Side Content" as a plus point in their write up? Does this even count as "extra content"? This is making you do three repetitive and not inherently interesting things for the sake of wiping some icons off a map, or in other words, Doing A Thing to win the prize of Having Done The Thing. This is some extra work you have to do for 100% completion. 

Maybe this says more about my personality than it does about open worlds, but I cannot stand this trend of content obsession in these things. When the main campaign is a collection of set pieces and story elements broken up with various mechanics, taking one of those mechanics out of the equation and giving me the opportunity to do again and again ad nauseam is just adding more potential time not-having-fun to my experience. It might be worth mentioning that one game I did complete all the sidequests for was Deadly Premonition, which is a RIDICULOUS endeavour by the way and I don't recommend it in the slightest. Even though the extra missions weren't "fun" almost all of them rewarded you with more story about Greenvale and the people who live in it. In that game, the story was the town and the town was the story, so exploring the side content felt like genuine part of the experience and fulfilling the character role. In games like Sleeping Dogs, Saints Row or basically anything Ubisoft puts out these days, it's more stuff for you just in case there's a bomb attached to your console that'll go off if you stop playing the game.

Sleeping Dogs sealed its impression on me as a "collection of content" as opposed to a "a story ingrained into a breathing world" as soon as I started paying more attention to its phone.

I hate the phone so much.

You can access the phone at any time during the game by pressing up on the D-Pad (same as GTAIV), although you're unlikely to notice it unless you're on a mission. While on missions a character or an on-screen notice will instruct you to text or call a certain character. Instructions in hand, the game pops a huge pulsating D-Pad icon on the part of the screen the phone occupies with a white arrow pointing to the "Up" button in case you've forgotten how to access the phone. Pressing a button to go to Contacts, the phone will only display the person you need to call or text, if it's a text a press of a button will automatically write out a text, pressing the button again will send it and you'll instantaneously receive a reply...often in near perfect grammar. 

It really struck me how terrified the Sleeping Dogs team must have been of their audience, that they couldn't even be bothered to pretend the phone in this game might actually function as a phone. They probably sat shivering in the corner of their office late into the night during crunch hours, horrified at the possibility that forcing the player to wait a few seconds for a text would cause them to jettison their console out the window in a fit of boredom-induced rage, or that someone's dad might walk past the television when there's textspeak on the screen and start ranting about millennials. This reduces the phone from a fresh way to interact with the world and the characters to an hideous addition to the UI where the only purpose is to tell you the next Thing to do; where the game instructs you to do something with the phone, throws up the button prompt of how to use the phone, and then by hitting the X button a couple of times the phone will do what it needs to do as quickly as possible.
  
In Sleeping Dogs, even when you're on the phone, you're still just following the waypoints.

Of course, the phone can be accessed outside of story missions too, where you can call up characters you've met in the story. Dudes will give you a mission of some variety, gals will go on a date with you. Early on in the game you meet a woman called Tiffany in a club, after performing some karaoke for her you have the option to date her. So I did. Soon, you meet another woman who is only known to you as "Not Ping", I had completely forgotten why but I noticed she had shown up in my contacts list, so I called her to hang out with her which led to a quick side mission involving hacking a camera. Doing this unlocks a new side mission, where you have to track Tiffany as one of your gang members informs you she's been cheating, confronting her she will tell you she did it because you were cheating with "Not Ping"...and Wei admits it immediately.

I don't know what the designers were going for here, perhaps they were trying to create their own little version of Persona 4's Valentine's Day scene. Well unfortunately for them, I happen to have played Persona 4, so I went into the dating thinking maybe I would have to hang out with them a couple of times to learn more about them before anything major would happen. I have unfortunately, also existed within the realms of real life, I didn't assume that continuing to speak to a woman was confirmation of romantic conquest. I was so confused here, I wasn't under the impression I was either character's "boyfriend", I didn't even think the Not Ping hangout was anything other than platonic. Perhaps it's this mentality that leads me to hurt these people so badly. 

Sloppy design aside, there's something even more sinister at work. After this little masterpiece of theirs played out, both characters disappeared from my phone contacts forever. I figured maybe this was because "I screwed up" so they had both cut ties with me. Later on in the game I tried dating two more characters; Stuntcast Emmastone and Fastdriving Lady, after hanging out with both of them exactly once, both of them also disappeared from my contacts list. So there we go, there's no "dating" in Sleeping Dogs whatsoever, the phone is just another mission select screen. These characters are your gateways to more precious content, and once you've extracted it from them, the game cannot even be bothered to acknowledge their existence any more. There are no more Things to do, no more rewards to be gained, no fresh parts of the game left to be found here, therefore these characters serve no purpose. 

Basically they took an idea from GTAIV, recreated the action and look of it, but failed to understand its purpose. In the circles I run in we refer to this process as "WayForwardisation" (Disclaimer: nobody actually calls it that (they should though!))

It occurs to me I've mostly been negative about the Sleepy Dogs so far, which is odd because in all honesty I don't actually dislike the game. Most of its mechanics can be described as "like X but less polished" but all of them serve the game's main campaign well, and I do appreciate little touches like the focus on melee combat and the jumping from car to car ability. But it's presentation of itself and its depiction of Hong Kong, as beautiful as it is, only leaves me cold. 

The game is tightly designed, but in a way that makes you wonder why they bothered. For example, there's health shrines all over the city, finding a certain amount of them will earn you health upgrades. Most of the shrines are planted along the paths of the mandatory missions so there's no way you can miss a lot of them. The same thing can be said of the missing statues, all of which earn you a new melee attack, the only thing stopping you from progressing precisely as the campaign designers want you to is whether or not you can bothered to commute back to the dojo to return the statue each time. Even the levelling up has seeds of mostly pointless progression built into it, for example one of the triad abilities you can unlock will increase your damage...but by the time you can unlock that the game has doubled the amount of enemies you'll fight in one spot anyway. None of this is "bad", it's certainly not "bad design", but it only serves to make the openness of the world feel more artificial and token. Even the stuff that's not a waypoint is subtly hidden right next to one.

Perhaps that's my secret frustration with Sleeping Dogs, I found it mostly enjoyable if unspectacular as a linear set of missions, but the open world feels like a lie, an elaborate Peach's Castle with somehow even less to do in it. Sleeping Dogs feels more like a story of a man's job than a man's life, maybe that's why I don't find the bits in between the missions interesting. Maybe if it haven't bothered with the sandbox shtick at all I would have enjoyed it a lot more, they could have spent the time they used building the city to make the mission set pieces actually functional for one thing! 

I don't want to rag on Sleeping Dogs either way; it had its struggles in development, it still tried really hard and even came up with a few genuinely great ideas. It's worth noting for the record that I did have a much better time with it than either Grand Theft Auto V or Metal Gear Solid V, it definitely wasn't as exhausting as those games. It merely fails to reflect anything I value in these kinds of games, but maybe I'm weird.

When it comes to open worlds, I want to exist in a place not be constantly performing a job. "Sandbox" should imply "play as you'd like" not "keep ticking boxes until there are none left to tick, but hey, there sure are a lot of boxes!" I don't need Things To Do, I need Places to Go, and I shouldn't be compelled to go to places because of a magic glowing icon, I should be making discoveries as I wander. Make a solid 8-15 action-adventure game or make a place that harbours a story, when you walk the line between them like Sleeping Dogs does stretching a basic game over a huge map you're 1) creating a lot more work for yourself and 2) adding a lot of fluff and dead space to your game.

I understand wanting to run away from GTAIV's reaction, maybe even its execution, but can we please stop running away from it's vision?