Publisher: Deep Silver
Developer(s): Techland
Platforms: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Dead Island is an easy series to criticize. A resolutely B level zombie game from relatively little known European developer, Techland, it only made it's way into the average gamer's radar thanks to a head turning zombie-attack-in-reverse cinematic trailer going viral. Up until that point, the only other console offering from Techland had been the middling Western shooter, Call Of Juarez. The trailer for Dead Island was a huge stroke of luck for a game that likely would have come and gone without making much of a ripple. It also raised expectations to an absurd level given the developers previous output.
Reviewers slapped it for it's graphics, it's clunky interface, a plethora of bugs, uninteresting characters, laughable dialogue and a nearly non-existent story. I even heard people complaining that the game wasn't like the trailer which boggled my mind because... how would that even work? (Does anyone think that the live action trailer for Call Of Duty: Ghosts means you're going to be able to play as an aborigine warrior? It was just a cinematic trailer, guys.) The game was carried mostly by it's melee-focused action/RPG combat. Guns and ammo were very hard to find and almost useless to anyone who wasn't playing the gun specialist character, Purna. Hitting zombies in the face with electric sledgehammers and poison katanas was a surprising amount of fun, even if the charm started to wear off by the last fourth of the game. This was enough, however, to carry the game onto being a modest hit.
I wasn't at all surprised when they announced Dead Island: Riptide last year. Careful to frame it as more of an expansion than a sequel, with a slightly lowered price point to match, it seems meant to serve as a place holder until a proper sequel can be released down the line. It features the same cast of character, with one new character who specializes in fist fighting, on a new island fighting the same zombie threat.
Most of the criticisms of the game are, in fact, pretty accurate and not much has changed for Riptide. The story is still very silly and the plot is advanced mostly through your characters being very, very dumb. There's still plenty of bugs to be found including glitchy weather effects that stop and start at random, very hinky frame rate drops when things get crowded, weird collision detection moments and a mini-map that has regressed into near uselessness whenever you're out in the forest or boating.
Techland hasn't completely ignored our pleas, though. We now have a proper reticule. Importing your character allows for a raise in your level cap to even further buff up your character. There are also additional leveling you can do in each of the weapon types, hand-to-hand, blunt, sharp, and firearms, that will increase the more you use them, meaning finding that sledgehammer when you wanted a machete doesn't mean it has to be completely useless. Co-op play scales so that your level 66 Xian can play with someone else's level 10 John with no ill effects. Something you can't even do in a snazzier, higher profile co-op game like Borderlands 2. Guns and ammo are more plentiful and once you level them up a bit you can explode heads with your shotgun like a champ no matter which character you play. They've also added Dead Zones which are separate areas ruled by a much-tougher-than-normal mini-boss. These mini-bosses all have roughly the same abilities, though, so it would have been nice if Techland put a little more effort into giving these mini-bosses some extra flavor.
As is becoming the trend, the game also introduces a number of different holdout sequences with options like electrified fences, minigun placements and environmental hazards to slow down the horde. They game also introduces mines as a grenade type for some additional defense. Unfortunately, after the first couple, it starts to feel like a chore. It doesn't help that there are never enough zombies at one time for you to feel like you're in danger. Even on single player I never lost an NPC. Siege sequences like this need stronger direction so that it feels like you're barely keeping everything together as you rescue NPC's, erect new barriers or lay down some covering fire with a minigun. Without that, they feel kind of tepid and overlong.
That said, if you liked the first game, Riptide is an ever-so-slightly more streamlined expansion of the original. The quality I like the most about it is precisely the thing that keeps it's Metacritic rating in the mid-60's. While recent games like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon trade on silly 80's nostalgia, complete with ironic homophobia and sexual encounters of questionable consent, the Dead Island games are what Blood Dragon tries so hard to be: the modern video game equivalent of a grindhouse movie.
As someone who grew up on weird cult movies, the one trait that they all share is the earnestness with which they were made. It's the difference between Evil Dead and House Of 1000 Corpses. Dead Island wants very badly to be a tense, gripping action/horror game. It isn't. From Sam B's omnipresent one hit wonder "Who Do You Voodoo, Bitch?" to the frighteningly cross- and dead-eyed woman in the makeshift hospital who drones her sad life story every time you pass her by, it lures you into it's absurdity so often that it's impossible to take it seriously.
However, just when you think the whole thing is a joke, you take a trip through some pitch black sewer or sparsely-lighted building that surprises you with some real tension. You can hear the zombies moaning and your flashlight is almost dead, so you hurl a flare ahead of you to see a small squad of zombies standing there, staring at nothing and just waiting until you get close enough for them to lurch at you. Then it's back to the comedy as you pop it's head like a grape with a shotgun blast and kick it's still teetering corpse to the ground as it's arms weave around where it's head used to be, as if asking itself "wait, it was just here a second ago..."
I'm not sure if the debt Dead Island and Riptide owe to Italian horror movies by guys like Umberto Lenzi or Ruggero Deodato (or even Lucio Fulci if we're feeling generous) are deliberate but the parallels are certainly there. Other franchises base their zombie games firmly in the early George Romero model as far as clarity of tone and the simplicity of the concept. In Italian horror, the result is the thing. Whatever it takes to shock or appall, that's what they'll do. Slow zombies? Fast zombies? Big, hulking monsters in straightjackets? Sure, throw 'em all in. Left 4 Dead has the same approach but the setting and the atmosphere is vintage Romero.
Dead Island, on the other hand, is total Eurosleaze. The severed torso special edition that the gaming commentariat got so incensed over a few months ago is straight out of something like Cannibal Ferox or one of Sergio Martino's Giallo films. They can't go nearly as far as a Fulci movie without getting slapped with an AO rating but the basic components are all there: boobs, blood, bad acting, sub par design and copious gore wrapped around a little nothing of a story. And that final scene? Straight out of something like Nightmare City.
If you've been on the fence about the Dead Island series, that's all you really need to know going in. It's purely cheap thrills and low brow fun. If you can revel in the B movie cheese of it, you'll have a blast... especially with a team of four friends and a couple of beers. Riptide, in particular, cuts the fat that weighed down the first game so that it never wears out it's welcome. If Techland continues to release Dead _____ games of roughly this length at this slightly reduced price point, I think they could really be on to something.
If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it's genuinely not. The slightly sleazy Euro edge to the series is what makes it stand out in a crowded field of zombie games. I hope Techland delves further into that end of the pool for it's inevitable next gen sequel. I can be moved to tears by something like Telltale's The Walking Dead and still appreciate smashing a zombie's head into paste with a giant sledgehammer in Dead Island. The game is critic-proof, really, because it does exactly what it says on the tin. So long as Techland keeps the series fresh, they can have a perennial hit on their hands. It may never win awards but it can certainly be satisfying.
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
On CliffyB, Micro-Transactions, and EA vs. Valve
You've probably already read this. Just about anyone who follows gaming news sites has read and developed an opinion about ex-Epic design director and video game gadfly Cliff Bleszinski's Tumblr post about micro-transactions. Some sites, like Kotaku, printed the article without comment, which reads like a public co-sign. Other places, like Destructoid, wrote a polite but assertive counter-argument. Comment threads have grown bloated with rage. Fingers have been waggled at people on both sides of the argument. It's a thing.
Regardless of whether or not I agree with Bleszinski (I don't), I do respect the man's candor. Developers and publishers are notoriously squirrely about doing anything openly. The fact that Cliff is willing to let us look behind the curtain at what a AAA game developer really thinks is undoubtedly a good thing. He has a top down perspective of the industry most of us never get to hear about. However, as informative as it can be, it also illustrates how disconnected he and his peers are from your average rank and file gamer.
It's very eye-opening how little sympathy he seems to have for his audience, shrugging off valid complaints as the simple mechanics of doing business and laying blame on the shoulders of the people buying his games for the state of the industry, ignoring that we're only working with the tool they are giving us. At any rate, given that he's stepped down from his position at Epic in his prime, he's also rich enough to not give a fuck what anyone thinks of him.
One of the major points of his argument, about the encroachment of micro-transactions in AAA titles, is not something that's going away. For better or for worse. Nonetheless, where Cliff (and many of his colleagues, I'm sure) see this as some kind of inevitability, guys like me see the kind of myopic, single-minded, fear-based corporate thinking that's hobbling the industry. It's greed, rationalized.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with micro-transactions in games, just in how they're being implemented. Micro-transactions are a tool. Multiplayer is a tool. Basic common sense dictates that you use your tools efficiently depending on the project you're tackling. If you try to install a window using only a hammer, you'll likely end up with a lot of blood and swearing. And no window. Cliff has a history of missing the point on this issue, like insisting that games like Shadows Of The Damned would have been improved by multiplayer despite Grasshopper Manufacture not having a large enough team, funding or any kind of logical in to justify it.
For years now we've been in a vicious circle, watching publishers chase after Activision's omnipresent Call Of Duty franchise in hopes of mimicking their success. EA threw more money than I'd care to count, including a PR blitz that seemed to last for months, at Battlefield 3 in hopes of unseating the champ and still fell short. Yet they keep trying the same tricks over and over again on every franchise under their umbrella expecting a different result. You don't need me to tell you what that's the definition of.
So when Cliff gets exasperated at the terribly low opinion people have about EA, I get exasperated right back because I cannot understand how any intelligent person doesn't get it. This isn't a question of people picking on poor, poor multi-billion dollar corporations like EA over something as ridiculous as marketing... this is people catching on to a company that insists on making the exact same mistakes over and over and over again. No one is blaming EA for wanting to make money, they're blaming EA for being bad at it in the long term. They're blaming EA for introducing cynicism into something they love. For reminding us that the industry is owned and managed largely by giant corporations who look at us as walking billfolds rather than people with brains and the ability to walk away from something we don't like. Respect must be earned and maintained.
The argument against EA is multifacited. EA wants uniformity. They want the same rules to apply to everything, because to approach each property or franchise differently would require thought and long-term planning. Simply sayings "add micro-transactions and multiplayer" is something a bunch of shareholders who know nothing about games can understand. It may mitigate risk but it also results in burning their bridges as they're building them. It gets much harder to build a head of steam when everyone is waiting for the day where someone makes a big tentpole, franchise game that can't be beaten without micro-transactions. Because, based on their history, that is the exact kind of thing EA would do.
The Call Of Duty bubble is going to burst. Every year there are contenders and every year they're knocked out but people will eventually tire of the feedback loop. And right now, the video game industry doesn't have anything else to pick up the slack other than the seemingly evergreen sports franchises. Millions and millions of dollars have been thrown at MMO's that have under-performed and been shuttered. The handheld market has given way to smartphones and tablets that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo don't own. We have a new generation of consoles coming and rumors of Microsoft releasing an online-only, EA-partnered system swirling that will likely hand the console crown back to Sony. A good PR team can dazzle but it only takes one well-informed friend to kill the buzz.
And when the dust settles, Valve will still be there. Not because they are inherently good and righteous people but because, as others have mentioned, they're smart and they're privately-owned. They make bucketloads of money because they treat their audience like people who will leave if they feel they aren't getting a fair deal. Other people have broken down the differences between EA's approach to DLC and Valve's, but it boils down to respect. Valve's Team Fortress 2 micro-transactions do not hinder the game, they personalize it.
While EA is confused at why they're being voted the worst company in America, Valve seems to understand the power of not underestimating your audience. (I quoted Valve head Gabe Newell in a Tumblr post not too long ago that illustrates the kind of thinking EA has yet to grok.) Being a Capitalist doesn't mean you have license to treat your audience as disposable and there's no rule that you can't be richer than God and also well-liked. So long as Valve remains a private company, you can expect their hot streak to continue.
People use the term "vocal minority" like it's derogative. They tend to forget the operative word there, which is "vocal." Your average casual gamer who buys only Madden and Halo and Call Of Duty may not have an opinion about Day One DLC or micro-transactions but you can be sure he has a friend who does. If that friend tells him not to buy the next Xbox because you have to be online at all times to use it, he'll listen. These aren't numbers you can plug into a spreadsheet. It's a human factor and it's an area corporations like EA have a damnably hard time understanding. Get enough people crowing about something and others will listen.
So, while I respect Bleszinski for providing gamers with an insight into how high level suits in this industry think and I admire him for the foresight to take a step back to see how the chips fall before making his next move, his insistence on blaming his audience for his own short-sightedness means that, even after the future of the industry has been written, there will people waiting in the wings to bring that bad old cynicism back. And the whole thing will start all over again.
Regardless of whether or not I agree with Bleszinski (I don't), I do respect the man's candor. Developers and publishers are notoriously squirrely about doing anything openly. The fact that Cliff is willing to let us look behind the curtain at what a AAA game developer really thinks is undoubtedly a good thing. He has a top down perspective of the industry most of us never get to hear about. However, as informative as it can be, it also illustrates how disconnected he and his peers are from your average rank and file gamer.
It's very eye-opening how little sympathy he seems to have for his audience, shrugging off valid complaints as the simple mechanics of doing business and laying blame on the shoulders of the people buying his games for the state of the industry, ignoring that we're only working with the tool they are giving us. At any rate, given that he's stepped down from his position at Epic in his prime, he's also rich enough to not give a fuck what anyone thinks of him.
One of the major points of his argument, about the encroachment of micro-transactions in AAA titles, is not something that's going away. For better or for worse. Nonetheless, where Cliff (and many of his colleagues, I'm sure) see this as some kind of inevitability, guys like me see the kind of myopic, single-minded, fear-based corporate thinking that's hobbling the industry. It's greed, rationalized.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with micro-transactions in games, just in how they're being implemented. Micro-transactions are a tool. Multiplayer is a tool. Basic common sense dictates that you use your tools efficiently depending on the project you're tackling. If you try to install a window using only a hammer, you'll likely end up with a lot of blood and swearing. And no window. Cliff has a history of missing the point on this issue, like insisting that games like Shadows Of The Damned would have been improved by multiplayer despite Grasshopper Manufacture not having a large enough team, funding or any kind of logical in to justify it.
For years now we've been in a vicious circle, watching publishers chase after Activision's omnipresent Call Of Duty franchise in hopes of mimicking their success. EA threw more money than I'd care to count, including a PR blitz that seemed to last for months, at Battlefield 3 in hopes of unseating the champ and still fell short. Yet they keep trying the same tricks over and over again on every franchise under their umbrella expecting a different result. You don't need me to tell you what that's the definition of.
So when Cliff gets exasperated at the terribly low opinion people have about EA, I get exasperated right back because I cannot understand how any intelligent person doesn't get it. This isn't a question of people picking on poor, poor multi-billion dollar corporations like EA over something as ridiculous as marketing... this is people catching on to a company that insists on making the exact same mistakes over and over and over again. No one is blaming EA for wanting to make money, they're blaming EA for being bad at it in the long term. They're blaming EA for introducing cynicism into something they love. For reminding us that the industry is owned and managed largely by giant corporations who look at us as walking billfolds rather than people with brains and the ability to walk away from something we don't like. Respect must be earned and maintained.
The argument against EA is multifacited. EA wants uniformity. They want the same rules to apply to everything, because to approach each property or franchise differently would require thought and long-term planning. Simply sayings "add micro-transactions and multiplayer" is something a bunch of shareholders who know nothing about games can understand. It may mitigate risk but it also results in burning their bridges as they're building them. It gets much harder to build a head of steam when everyone is waiting for the day where someone makes a big tentpole, franchise game that can't be beaten without micro-transactions. Because, based on their history, that is the exact kind of thing EA would do.
The Call Of Duty bubble is going to burst. Every year there are contenders and every year they're knocked out but people will eventually tire of the feedback loop. And right now, the video game industry doesn't have anything else to pick up the slack other than the seemingly evergreen sports franchises. Millions and millions of dollars have been thrown at MMO's that have under-performed and been shuttered. The handheld market has given way to smartphones and tablets that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo don't own. We have a new generation of consoles coming and rumors of Microsoft releasing an online-only, EA-partnered system swirling that will likely hand the console crown back to Sony. A good PR team can dazzle but it only takes one well-informed friend to kill the buzz.
And when the dust settles, Valve will still be there. Not because they are inherently good and righteous people but because, as others have mentioned, they're smart and they're privately-owned. They make bucketloads of money because they treat their audience like people who will leave if they feel they aren't getting a fair deal. Other people have broken down the differences between EA's approach to DLC and Valve's, but it boils down to respect. Valve's Team Fortress 2 micro-transactions do not hinder the game, they personalize it.
While EA is confused at why they're being voted the worst company in America, Valve seems to understand the power of not underestimating your audience. (I quoted Valve head Gabe Newell in a Tumblr post not too long ago that illustrates the kind of thinking EA has yet to grok.) Being a Capitalist doesn't mean you have license to treat your audience as disposable and there's no rule that you can't be richer than God and also well-liked. So long as Valve remains a private company, you can expect their hot streak to continue.
People use the term "vocal minority" like it's derogative. They tend to forget the operative word there, which is "vocal." Your average casual gamer who buys only Madden and Halo and Call Of Duty may not have an opinion about Day One DLC or micro-transactions but you can be sure he has a friend who does. If that friend tells him not to buy the next Xbox because you have to be online at all times to use it, he'll listen. These aren't numbers you can plug into a spreadsheet. It's a human factor and it's an area corporations like EA have a damnably hard time understanding. Get enough people crowing about something and others will listen.
So, while I respect Bleszinski for providing gamers with an insight into how high level suits in this industry think and I admire him for the foresight to take a step back to see how the chips fall before making his next move, his insistence on blaming his audience for his own short-sightedness means that, even after the future of the industry has been written, there will people waiting in the wings to bring that bad old cynicism back. And the whole thing will start all over again.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Dishonored
It's kinda crazy how many dudes I've choked out while they took a pee. Don't get me wrong, it was fun. Still: lots of dudes were waking up in dark corners with their pants around their ankles. I try to rationalize that their confusion and sense of violation was earned by the fact that the clockwork heart I've been carrying around keeps telling me that they are violent, fascistic douchebags. They kind of deserve it.
These are the kinds of thoughts you might have during the course of Arkane Studios excellent stealth/action game, Dishonored.
As stuffed with ideas as the game is, they never overwhelm you with exposition or cut-scenes. It's a world absorbed through books, visuals and overheard conversations. This allows for people like me, hiding in nooks and crannies, to develop my own story as I play. For instance, I used an item given to you towards the beginning of the game as a way to track down collectibles, the aforementioned clockwork heart, as a way of weeding out the people just doing their jobs from the willfully evil and visiting bloody retribution upon them. As events in the game turned and I got more invested in the fates of certain characters, I found myself getting more and more unhinged and violent, silently wiping out anyone and everyone until the entire level was empty except for me, blinking across the rooftops in search of more prey.
Keep in mind, this narrative was entirely in my own head. The clockwork heart spits out a series of canned responses whenever you click it on someone so you'll hear the same phrase repeated over and over again. It just seemed like a neat way to approach a game that offers so much freedom in how you approach it. Once you enter a stage, there's no hand-holding whatsoever. You can explore and find optional side missions and collectibles that enhance your abilities or you can beeline right for your target. The game becomes whatever you want it to be. I chose to create my own story-within-a-story to go along with my "avenging angel" playstyle. By the end, my desire to burn down the entire dying, corrupt city and everyone in it was reflected by increased guard patrols, plague-infected Weepers and swarms of carnivorous rats. Once I became conscious to how my approach to the game was changing, I embraced it. I did a completely non-lethal second playthrough but damned if the game didn't give you plenty of good reasons to murder everything in your path.
That's not a coincidence either. Morality is a very important aspect of the game. As Lord Protector Corvo Attano, framed for the murder your Empress, you are always given a choice on how to go about achieving your vengeance. People are watching you and some react to you differently depending on how much death you deal out. Every main target has a non-lethal option, usually fates worse than death, if you can find out how. I knew how far down the rabbit hole I had gone when a young girl I talked to told me that she wanted people to fear her the way they feared me. From that point on, I knew there was no going back.
The game allows a bit of leeway between, as they call it, Low Chaos and High Chaos. You only have to do a completely non-lethal route if you want the 100 point/Platinum achievement. Otherwise, a couple of deaths here and there, by accident or necessity, can be tolerated, so you don't have to worry about absolutist morality. Between the overarching story and some of the things you read and overhear, you'll probably find it hard to avoid wanting to toss these people screaming into the Void. A minor complaint would be that the High Chaos route feels more fulfilling, not in the sense that YOU are acting as an agent of their death but that the characters who have wronged you meet ends more appropriate to their levels of ego and hubris. (It didn't slip by me that my initial attempt to kill only those I felt deserved it was eventually twisted into something much darker, making for an excellent symmetry at the end.) The final scene of the Low Chaos path has a nice, well-acted monologue about what you lose in pursuit of what you think is right when you stop considering the consequences of your actions but it felt comparatively anti-climactic when compared to the more brutal High Chaos route. Seeing the people responsible for your misery and betrayal implode and destroy themselves felt more appropriate. Being a witness to other people's well-earned self-destruction might have made a better ending than the people involved just sort of... giving up.
Another complaint about the game is some very hit or miss voice acting. Dishonored boasts a very high powered cast of actors that, unfortunately, reinforce the idea that great actors don't necessarily mean great voice actors. John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling) does an excellent job as the resistance leader Admiral Havelock and Chloë Grace Moretz (a/k/a Hit-Girl from Kick Ass) does the unthinkable by making a child character in a video game likable and someone you actually want to save. Others don't fare so well, including Susan Sarandon badly miscast as the insane Granny Rags. There isn't a whole lot for her to do, so she doesn't do much of anything. A professional voice actress might have given the doddering yet dangerous character a little more... well, character. Compare that to voice actress April Stewart (one of the go to cast for South Park) who gives a chilling performance as both the Empress and the clockwork heart and you wonder why people would rather hire "name" actors versus people who do this for a living. However, in a world so fully realized, it's pretty small quibble.
I've seen some criticism about the game being too overstuffed with ideas but I think they're coming from the wrong point of view. The Steampunk-ish setting, the magic, the whale oil, virulent plagues, the capricious demigod figure, teleporting assassins in death masks, the stilt-waking robot men firing explosive arrows... it can all be a little too much but it felt more to me that Arkane Studios are trying to world build here. Any one of those aspects could be central to another game in the series. Given that even surefire concepts can fail once the game is in stores, throwing every single fucking thing they can think of at you given them plenty to build on in sequels. The game even goes out of it's way to tie off Corvo's story with a big red bow, so they aren't forced to use him as a protagonist in any future games. (He's treated as a player avatar and not an actual character, so there's no great loss there.) Arkane now has a very interesting world to revisit depending on it's success.
The gameplay itself is solid but has some curious choices. The game is presented in the first person so you are unable to lock into cover and rely mostly on leaning in and out of cover to get a sense of your surroundings and enemy routes. There's a designated stealth/crouch button but the game gives no clear idea as to whether you're able to be seen. Twitchy enemy AI has led to multiple situations where I can either sidle right up to someone from a position where I should be in their line or sight or others where an enemy spots me from behind cover from across the room. It doesn't occur very often but using the convention of a blue screen tint or on-screen prompt to designated being in stealth mode would have solved a lot of problems. When stealth fails, combat holds up pretty well. Put a couple levels into stopping time and you'll easily slice through any unfortunates who catch you creeping around before they can raise an alarm or call for reinforcements. You'll probably rely on your sword and crossbow more than anything else but there's also proximity devices and a pistol for more desperate encounters.
The actual set pieces are never less than strong. You have multiple points of entry and lots of variety in how you approach your targets. Usually, you aren't just restricted to a lethal or non-lethal option. Many stages have varying modes of dispatching your target. Sure, you can creep up behind him and slit his throat but maybe you can sneak into his room and trick him into drinking poison or possess a guard and get him to do your dirty work for you. I was partial to siccing a swarm of rats on them and letting them get eaten to death while screaming for help that never arrived. (I did warn you about my propensity for bloody retribution.) One standout moment was during a mission where you infiltrate a costume party. You're dressed as yourself, the creepy killer terrorizing the city, but the nobility at the soiree simply compliment you on your provocative costume. After doing my dark business, I sauntered back in, signed the guest register in my own name, and walked casually out the front door. Much evil cackling was had.
Little moments like this, things you could easily never catch, make the overall experience that much more fun. All missions are available from the stage select screen at the main menu after completion. The only thing the game is really missing is a proper New Game+. I didn't have much trouble on Normal difficulty. Enemy AI is dumb enough that you usually only have yourself to blame for mistakes. You can decimate an entire barracks worth of guards and the last remaining guy will just note that more people should be patrolling and never change their routine. This is something I wish more stealth games would rectify on harder difficulty levels. Having your enemies react to squadmates who disappear would promote better situational awareness, planning and quicker, more decisive action or just force you to not engage anyone at all.
Taking my time and exploring everything I could means my initial run took me almost twenty hours, including restarts. Having a firm idea of enemy placement means my non-lethal speed run took me less than eight hours but I've heard people have been able to beat it in as few as five. The length of the game will be entirely dependent on your approach.
I keep coming back to the worldview of Dishonored when I think about it. The writers managed to hit just the right notes. It doesn't matter what political views you have but throwing such sharp criticism onto the idea that the kinds of people who actively seek power being the ones least qualified to hold it is an idea I think a lot of people can rally behind. Not only is the world of Dishonored very full and fleshed out, the ideas behind it work just as well.
Ultimately, this is an odd game to review since so much of it's story is dependent on whatever is going on in your head (which was pretty fucking fantastic, thanks) and your patience for waiting around for the best time to strike. If you approach this as an action game and stealth elements, you'll likely find it short and unsatisfying with a perfunctory plot. As a stealth game, minus some small issues easily ironed out in a sequel, it offers a lot of very satisfying sneaking and combat. Dishonored might very well be the best new IP of the year.
These are the kinds of thoughts you might have during the course of Arkane Studios excellent stealth/action game, Dishonored.
As stuffed with ideas as the game is, they never overwhelm you with exposition or cut-scenes. It's a world absorbed through books, visuals and overheard conversations. This allows for people like me, hiding in nooks and crannies, to develop my own story as I play. For instance, I used an item given to you towards the beginning of the game as a way to track down collectibles, the aforementioned clockwork heart, as a way of weeding out the people just doing their jobs from the willfully evil and visiting bloody retribution upon them. As events in the game turned and I got more invested in the fates of certain characters, I found myself getting more and more unhinged and violent, silently wiping out anyone and everyone until the entire level was empty except for me, blinking across the rooftops in search of more prey.
Keep in mind, this narrative was entirely in my own head. The clockwork heart spits out a series of canned responses whenever you click it on someone so you'll hear the same phrase repeated over and over again. It just seemed like a neat way to approach a game that offers so much freedom in how you approach it. Once you enter a stage, there's no hand-holding whatsoever. You can explore and find optional side missions and collectibles that enhance your abilities or you can beeline right for your target. The game becomes whatever you want it to be. I chose to create my own story-within-a-story to go along with my "avenging angel" playstyle. By the end, my desire to burn down the entire dying, corrupt city and everyone in it was reflected by increased guard patrols, plague-infected Weepers and swarms of carnivorous rats. Once I became conscious to how my approach to the game was changing, I embraced it. I did a completely non-lethal second playthrough but damned if the game didn't give you plenty of good reasons to murder everything in your path.
That's not a coincidence either. Morality is a very important aspect of the game. As Lord Protector Corvo Attano, framed for the murder your Empress, you are always given a choice on how to go about achieving your vengeance. People are watching you and some react to you differently depending on how much death you deal out. Every main target has a non-lethal option, usually fates worse than death, if you can find out how. I knew how far down the rabbit hole I had gone when a young girl I talked to told me that she wanted people to fear her the way they feared me. From that point on, I knew there was no going back.
The game allows a bit of leeway between, as they call it, Low Chaos and High Chaos. You only have to do a completely non-lethal route if you want the 100 point/Platinum achievement. Otherwise, a couple of deaths here and there, by accident or necessity, can be tolerated, so you don't have to worry about absolutist morality. Between the overarching story and some of the things you read and overhear, you'll probably find it hard to avoid wanting to toss these people screaming into the Void. A minor complaint would be that the High Chaos route feels more fulfilling, not in the sense that YOU are acting as an agent of their death but that the characters who have wronged you meet ends more appropriate to their levels of ego and hubris. (It didn't slip by me that my initial attempt to kill only those I felt deserved it was eventually twisted into something much darker, making for an excellent symmetry at the end.) The final scene of the Low Chaos path has a nice, well-acted monologue about what you lose in pursuit of what you think is right when you stop considering the consequences of your actions but it felt comparatively anti-climactic when compared to the more brutal High Chaos route. Seeing the people responsible for your misery and betrayal implode and destroy themselves felt more appropriate. Being a witness to other people's well-earned self-destruction might have made a better ending than the people involved just sort of... giving up.
Another complaint about the game is some very hit or miss voice acting. Dishonored boasts a very high powered cast of actors that, unfortunately, reinforce the idea that great actors don't necessarily mean great voice actors. John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling) does an excellent job as the resistance leader Admiral Havelock and Chloë Grace Moretz (a/k/a Hit-Girl from Kick Ass) does the unthinkable by making a child character in a video game likable and someone you actually want to save. Others don't fare so well, including Susan Sarandon badly miscast as the insane Granny Rags. There isn't a whole lot for her to do, so she doesn't do much of anything. A professional voice actress might have given the doddering yet dangerous character a little more... well, character. Compare that to voice actress April Stewart (one of the go to cast for South Park) who gives a chilling performance as both the Empress and the clockwork heart and you wonder why people would rather hire "name" actors versus people who do this for a living. However, in a world so fully realized, it's pretty small quibble.
I've seen some criticism about the game being too overstuffed with ideas but I think they're coming from the wrong point of view. The Steampunk-ish setting, the magic, the whale oil, virulent plagues, the capricious demigod figure, teleporting assassins in death masks, the stilt-waking robot men firing explosive arrows... it can all be a little too much but it felt more to me that Arkane Studios are trying to world build here. Any one of those aspects could be central to another game in the series. Given that even surefire concepts can fail once the game is in stores, throwing every single fucking thing they can think of at you given them plenty to build on in sequels. The game even goes out of it's way to tie off Corvo's story with a big red bow, so they aren't forced to use him as a protagonist in any future games. (He's treated as a player avatar and not an actual character, so there's no great loss there.) Arkane now has a very interesting world to revisit depending on it's success.
The gameplay itself is solid but has some curious choices. The game is presented in the first person so you are unable to lock into cover and rely mostly on leaning in and out of cover to get a sense of your surroundings and enemy routes. There's a designated stealth/crouch button but the game gives no clear idea as to whether you're able to be seen. Twitchy enemy AI has led to multiple situations where I can either sidle right up to someone from a position where I should be in their line or sight or others where an enemy spots me from behind cover from across the room. It doesn't occur very often but using the convention of a blue screen tint or on-screen prompt to designated being in stealth mode would have solved a lot of problems. When stealth fails, combat holds up pretty well. Put a couple levels into stopping time and you'll easily slice through any unfortunates who catch you creeping around before they can raise an alarm or call for reinforcements. You'll probably rely on your sword and crossbow more than anything else but there's also proximity devices and a pistol for more desperate encounters.
The actual set pieces are never less than strong. You have multiple points of entry and lots of variety in how you approach your targets. Usually, you aren't just restricted to a lethal or non-lethal option. Many stages have varying modes of dispatching your target. Sure, you can creep up behind him and slit his throat but maybe you can sneak into his room and trick him into drinking poison or possess a guard and get him to do your dirty work for you. I was partial to siccing a swarm of rats on them and letting them get eaten to death while screaming for help that never arrived. (I did warn you about my propensity for bloody retribution.) One standout moment was during a mission where you infiltrate a costume party. You're dressed as yourself, the creepy killer terrorizing the city, but the nobility at the soiree simply compliment you on your provocative costume. After doing my dark business, I sauntered back in, signed the guest register in my own name, and walked casually out the front door. Much evil cackling was had.
Little moments like this, things you could easily never catch, make the overall experience that much more fun. All missions are available from the stage select screen at the main menu after completion. The only thing the game is really missing is a proper New Game+. I didn't have much trouble on Normal difficulty. Enemy AI is dumb enough that you usually only have yourself to blame for mistakes. You can decimate an entire barracks worth of guards and the last remaining guy will just note that more people should be patrolling and never change their routine. This is something I wish more stealth games would rectify on harder difficulty levels. Having your enemies react to squadmates who disappear would promote better situational awareness, planning and quicker, more decisive action or just force you to not engage anyone at all.
Taking my time and exploring everything I could means my initial run took me almost twenty hours, including restarts. Having a firm idea of enemy placement means my non-lethal speed run took me less than eight hours but I've heard people have been able to beat it in as few as five. The length of the game will be entirely dependent on your approach.
I keep coming back to the worldview of Dishonored when I think about it. The writers managed to hit just the right notes. It doesn't matter what political views you have but throwing such sharp criticism onto the idea that the kinds of people who actively seek power being the ones least qualified to hold it is an idea I think a lot of people can rally behind. Not only is the world of Dishonored very full and fleshed out, the ideas behind it work just as well.
Ultimately, this is an odd game to review since so much of it's story is dependent on whatever is going on in your head (which was pretty fucking fantastic, thanks) and your patience for waiting around for the best time to strike. If you approach this as an action game and stealth elements, you'll likely find it short and unsatisfying with a perfunctory plot. As a stealth game, minus some small issues easily ironed out in a sequel, it offers a lot of very satisfying sneaking and combat. Dishonored might very well be the best new IP of the year.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Mass Effect 3: Failure To Communicate
Spoilers! Everywhere!
Okay, so I deleted my initial review of the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut. Honestly, it hadn't been sitting well with me since I posted it. It was cathartic at the time but, in retrospect, it wasn't fair to the things BioWare got right and only harped on them for the things they got wrong. In my defense, I wrote it after being awake for about 30 hours non-stop... which isn't helpful for anything let alone gathering your thoughts and writing about them. I hadn't allowed myself time (or a good night's sleep) to think about what I had experienced, I just went straight for the throat. At any rate, it was a bad, hacky piece of writing and I'd rather it went away. So I deleted it. I still want to write out my thoughts but in a slightly less sleep deprived, angry and spiteful way. So let's try this again:
More than three months, eighty thousand dollars donated to charity, sixty thousand plus Likes on the Retake Mass Effect Facebook page, countless blog posts, news story comments, and message board posts, BioWare has released the final final word in their landmark sci-fi/action/role playing trilogy Mass Effect 3 with the Extended Cut DLC. It comprises of some additional scenes, dialogue choices, an epilogue sequence and a brief additional ending fleshing out a finale that many felt was perfunctory at best and broken at worst.
BioWare and EA were hammered for months by outraged fans on every front. While there was a lot of disappointment over their previous offering, the rushed, buggy and unsatisfying Dragon Age II, those feelings never really went beyond message board posts and the occasional middling review. This was another beast entirely. Over $80,000 was donated to charity in protest. Fans organized letter campaigns, cupcake and M&M drives, and even reported them to places like the BBB with complaints of "false advertisement." Very much against their will, gaming websites were forced to cover the story ad nauseum. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that BioWare had to offer some kind of substantive response. They were understandably defensive in the press, citing the plethora of critical praise they received and passive/aggressively blaming fans for not understanding the ending. (For more on how gaming journalists failed gamers on this subject, see my first entry in the archives from March.)
It wasn't always like this. BioWare was a much loved company with a lot of experience mixing storytelling and role playing into memorable games. They're also one of the most progressive companies out there in terms of portraying women and the LGBT community as equal to men. They were often mentioned in the same breath as companies like Bethesda, Valve and Gearbox for their commitment to quality and their close relationship with fans. For things to go this badly wrong this fast, BioWare had to act. But is it enough?
Well, as with everything on the internet, it's seen as a mixed bag. For the people who really only wanted clarification and a proper epilogue, the fight seems to be over. They're as content with the endings as they can be... in the sense that it's gone from abominable to merely bad. For everyone else, like myself, who see a much bigger, deeper problem with the endings, we have to resign ourselves to calling the game an artistic failure.
The problem with the endings starts at the beginning. On the run after the Reapers (the Big Bads of this universe who are bent on consuming and repurposing all organic life to their own ends) the hero, Shepard, meets a young boy hiding in a vent. The boy makes a portentious statement about not being able to be saved and runs off. Later, as Shepard is leaving Earth, he sees the boy again as he crawls into a departing spaceship... which is then destroyed as it tries to escape. This apparently affects Shepard deeply as he has nightmares over the course of the game where he's chasing after the kid only to see him go up in flames.
This is where they screwed the pooch. Not only does it foreshadow the events of the ending but also the exact mistakes BioWare will end up making.
It's a good scene and illustrates the horrors of war in an effective way... but making the assumption that all players care deeply for this anonymous kid they've known only for a minute shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of game they were making. Mass Effect is a series built around the concept of player choice. The only way it works is if you don't force the players to accept your own morality. By presenting them with different options on how to unfold the story, they get to choose how they feel about things. The writers and developers are simply following those choices to their logical conclusion. The idea that Renegade Shepards who have willingly sacrificed friends, teammates and innocent lives in the pursuit of destroying the Reaper threat will suddenly be struck with this heavy guilt because of one kid is silly. Even my Shepard, a humanist who is loyal to his friends and innocents, willing to give a second chance but merciless towards his enemies, didn't spare an extra thought to a single dead kid. Until they forced it on me. Naturally the game had to get you into the chute and sliding towards the endgame but there are hundreds of ways to do that without speaking for the player.
It's telling that between the Mass Effect games, Shepard is always put on ice somehow. In Mass Effect 2 he was dead and in Mass Effect 3 he was grounded and confined to quarters following the destruction of a star system. As a character, he does not exist until you pick up the controller. He doesn't have a life that he's living in-between games. BioWare have gone out of their way to make sure you think of Shepard as an extension of yourself. Which makes their sudden decision to force guilt onto you for narrative reasons all the more confusing and wrong-headed.
Fast forward to the last ten minutes of the game. Shepard is presented with three options by a Virtual Intelligence in the form and voice of the dead child from the beginning of the game. Two of them are poison pills that will end the Reaper threat and the last is presented as the best ending despite have the creepiest subtext. It breaks down like this: Control (a/k/a The Creepy Space Jesus Ending), Destroy (a/k/a Genocide) and Synthesis (a/k/a Happy Happy Good Times With Puppy Dogs and Rainbows). Again, BioWare makes the same mistake. Either all of the endings need to be poison pills or none of them. For one ending to be the "perfect" one, you're tacitly punishing players for choosing anything else. It's no longer their ending, it's the wrong ending.
It doesn't help that the implications of the endings are all an utter mess.
Let's start with Control. Control is what the secondary villain, The Illusive Man, has been after since he was introduced in the second game. By controlling the Reapers, Shepard dies and has his consciousness added to the Reapers where we will take control of them and use their power to rebuild the galaxy. Now, put aside the fact that there are exactly zero people in the universe who would trust the Reapers just because they stop killing everyone and say "Oh, hey, it's cool, bro. It's Shepard. I got this." We have watched every single character over the course of the series who has come in close contact to the Reapers become "Indoctrinated." No matter how strong they are, if you're too close to them for too long the Reapers will eventually turn you into a slave via mind control. It's implied that Shepard may be immune to Indoctrination due to events in the first game but it's never made implicit. And considering the voice over narration that happens during this ending of Shepard with a dead, monotone, slightly auto-tuned voice and the creepy music that accompanies it, you have to wonder if Shepard doesn't eventually lose it. It's not actually Shepard in the Reapers, it's just a copy of his consciousness so it stands to reason there's a finite length on his control. In which case the Reapers come back and kill everyone all over again. So clearly, for those reasons, Control is not the "good" ending.
Destroy. This is the option I think most people would like the best if not for the elephant in the room: you have to kill all synthetic creatures in the galaxy, including your teammate and friend EDI, in order to do it. It's easily the cleanest, most utilitarian option. You kill the Reapers, everything goes back to relative normalcy. The cycle of violence is broken. There's even a chance Shepard survives, though it's only a brief scene where a body lies in rubble and takes a breath and only really seems to be there to make that choice a little less bleak. The Destroy ending won't be a problem if you've chosen to play a Renegade Shepard where the ends justify the means, but if you're a Humanist and you're not interested in impregnating the galaxy with your essence against their will or becoming an immortal synthetic space God, this is clearly the best ending.
This illustrates the other big problem with the endings: BioWare's insistence that "Synthetics will always be at war with Organics." Over the course of the series there have been conversations about the role of synthetics and missions involving VI run amok and the centuries long conflict between the Geth and the Quarians. The Reapers themselves are even synthetic/organic hybrids. The problem crops up because the game always gives you more than one way to resolve the issue. Most famously, in the case of the Geth and Quarians, the third game allows you to broker a peace between them. Which means the game actively works against it's own assertion.
The entire idea is incredibly arbitrary and naive. If Mass Effect is a series that allows us to essentially build a universe out of our own actions, why is BioWare stepping in at the very last second to yank it out of your hands? Why is it working against itself to present a flawed premise that is easily dismissed? Most of the excuses organics use to go to war (religion, money, land) are completely useless to synthetics. The Geth only went to war with the Quarians because they were pushed into it. What's more, so what if synthetics will eventually go to war with organics? Organics will always go to war with organics. It's our nature. It's the risk you take for having free will. If you take the route of giving the Geth the ability to self-determinate, to give them "souls," then the biggest distinction between synthetics and organics is rendered moot. Because they can think for themselves, you'll never get the full force of the Geth going to war, you'll get a faction of them. Which also fundamentally ruins BioWare's point. The idea that they're putting all their weight behind this idea is forehead-slappingly ridiculous.
It doesn't help that the Starchild itself is an untrustworthy character. It created the Reapers and has a vested interest in seeing it's own ends brought to fruition yet BioWare uses it like an omniscient narrator and not an antagonist to be overcome. Which is what he actually is. Worse, it openly advocates a particular ending: Synthesis. This goes back to the problem at the beginning of the game of BioWare essentially forcing their morality on you. If Synthesis is the ending that BioWare wants you to pick, what's the point of having other endings? Not only does the Starchild want you to choose it, it's only available if your War Assets rating is high enough, making it "special." Both in execution and content, the other endings are clearly inferior. Synthesis is the reward, Control and Destroy are the punishment.
So let's talk about the Synthesis ending. Creepy, creepy Synthesis. BioWare positioned the endings to make a case for capital "A" Art, so I don't think I'm out of line judging the series as such and picking through it looking for subtext. Because what's important to note about the creepiness of Synthesis isn't on the screen, it's just underneath the surface.
What Synthesis means is essentially that all sentient life in the galaxy is smooshed together to create a single hybrid race of synthetic/organic beings. BioWare uses this as a jump off to tell you that everything turns out great: no more war, everyone likes each other and is now immortal. Yay! If all you are looking for is a generic happy ending, nevermind the subtext, this is the one to pick.
Unfortunately for BioWare, they can't have it both ways. They don't get to make Art and then tell us to ignore the obvious ramifications of their "happy ending." What they don't tell you in selling you the Synthesis ending is that you are making this change for every sentient being in the galaxy against their will. We're talking about genetic rape. Forced eugenics. It's presented as a Utopia but the whole thing reads like a sci-fi Nuremberg deposition. Hilariously, it's also what the main bad guy of the first game, Saren, wanted. So essentially the guy you killed a few years ago was right all along. Oops?
Either they didn't know what they were saying (in which case it's crystal clear that the writing team at BioWare was fighting way above their weight class) or they actually believe it... in which case: ugh. Until one of the writers is willing to comment otherwise, I'm going to assume that they just didn't see that pretty obvious spin on what they presented. They wanted a rainbows-and-puppy-dogs happy ending and thought that this was somehow the best way to go about it, heedless of the really, really obvious subtext. Which makes me wish they would stop using the words "artistic integrity." They haven't earned it.
It feels like a bunch of people living in a bubble, working insanely long hours and drinking the corporate middle-management Kool Aid of "everyone should get along and work together and everything will be great." It's painfully naive and has no real application outside of a corporate culture. Hell, I work for a big corporation and even the people promoting "synergy" don't believe it. It's a tool they use to keep people in line. That's it. It's not about kindness, it's about control.
If we were all a part of some big, homogenous society, then there's nowhere you can go from there. You need differences and diversity. You need conflict. That's how you grow and learn. This is ultimately where BioWare's failings lie: hubris. Ego. If they had made all three of the endings "happy endings" then there would be plenty of room for speculation and discussion about the merits of each one versus the others. Instead, BioWare chose to advocate one over the others and it's blown up in their face.
None of this was a foregone conclusion. The former lead writer for the Mass Effect series, Drew Karpyshyn, had a much different idea on how to end the series but he left halfway through the development of Mass Effect 2 in order to work on Star Wars: The Old Republic before retiring from BioWare entirely to focus on his own work. In his place, BioWare installed Mac Walters as a lead writer. This is purely a matter of opinion but, having read some of Mac Walters solo Mass Effect work, the best thing I can say about it is that it's "workmanlike." I've personally found it to be very stiff and boring with very generic characters. The character in the third game he's most responsible for writing, James Vega, is the definition of a generic space marine. His only real personality trait is his propensity for giving people nicknames. He was salvaged somewhat by a good voice acting performance from Freddie Prinze, Jr. (yeah, I just said that) but he's hardly the most popular member of the cast.
Corporations are not a meritocracy, and I'm sure the position of Head Writer is as much about management as anything else, so it ultimately doesn't matter. Maybe he's just a really good Big Picture guy. Compared to Karpyshyn however, a talented and well-respected sci-fi writer, it's hard not to see it as a step down. The end results go a long way to proving that theory. Especially when it was hinted that he and Executive Producer Casey Hudson wrote the endings separately from the rest of the writers. BioWare and the writer who allegedly talked out of turn have both denied that it was him but... well, that depends on how much trust you have in a company that was already in serious damage control.
Neither Walters nor Hudson have endeared themselves to fans in the time between the game's release and now by insisting on sticking to their "artistic integrity" and passing off the litany of problems with the game by passive/aggressively telling fans that they didn't get it. I have never met a writer who was completely confident of his writing. Not once. They almost universally think they could have done something different or better. So when Walters and Hudson refuse to show the slightest bit of humility or humanity by addressing angry fans like people and not children, they've only made the situation worse. Fans are baying for blood and no amount of free multiplayer DLC is going to change that.
This situation casts a pall over the entire Mass Effect series, over BioWare's next game Dragon Age III, and over the entire company going forward. This is an albatross they'll be dragging around for ages. It also didn't help their parent company EA won Worst Company In America while the controversy over the ending raged. To paraphrase a writer I'm quite fond of (who, ironically, liked the endings), corporations are beasts... and beasts need to be fed. If you don't feed them enough, you become the food. When you consider the amount of money BioWare left on the table with Mass Effect 3, you better believe that someone at BioWare is going to become a snack.
If they had stuck the landing to this game, BioWare would still be doing victory laps. They'd be on all the year end Best Of lists. Good word of mouth would sell even more copies. The multiplayer packs they've been releasing for free could easily have been sold for five bucks a pop and if I enjoyed the game all the way through, I would have been happy to pay it.
Artistic integrity doesn't keep the lights on. While they have paid single player DLC lined up for the future and micro transactions in the multiplayer, there's a lot of money that BioWare isn't making right now. The game was marked down to half price about a month into it's release (to compare, Bethesda's Skyrim was released in November and still sells at the full $60) and stores like GameStop were coming up with all kinds of desperate marketing to get people buy it.
I deliberately avoided mentioning that final ending BioWare added to the Extended Cut until now for a reason. It's the Refusal ending and, intentionally or not, it's BioWare blowing a raspberry at fans. One of the most popular complaints was that no matter what, you had to blindly follow the Starchild's choices even though it didn't seem logical and none of them were appetizing. Not having the option to just say "no" seemed really out of place. To that end, you can now either shoot the Starchild or plead your case to him. As a result, he tells you "so be it" in a creepy voice and walks off. The entire galaxy then goes down fighting. The epilogue involves a beacon left by your teammate Liara giving all of the information on how to defeat the Reapers for the next cycle which they use to defeat the Reapers on their own. It was revealed in a tweet from one of BioWare's community managers, though, that the next cycle doesn't somehow preempt the Reaper invasion, they build the Crucible and use it themselves. Which means that not only does Shepard doom the galaxy, he dies a coward who couldn't pull the trigger.
What's interesting about the ending isn't so much the content but the meta idea behind it: fans now have a chance to give BioWare the high hard one and reject the game and all of the botched endings it contains. It gives you a chance to beat the game your way and damn the consequences. You're not just rejecting the game, you're rejecting BioWare. Despite the low blow they give you on your way out the door, you still get to walk away. It was probably the most cathartic ending in the game to me. Their petulant reaction to your denial ("So be it!") actually made me feel better for choosing it. Like BioWare was saying "Fine! Screw you! Just leave! We don't need you! We don't need any of you!"
Regardless of the critical praise heaped on it (mostly by journalists who have vested interest in staying on EA's good side) the ultimate fate of Mass Effect will always be seen by fans as a giant, glaring missed opportunity. Ambition is a motherfucker if you can't pull it off. While the stakes for the Dragon Age series aren't as high (they don't have the benefit of a single protagonist or overarching conflict that players have been sitting with throughout the series) we will hopefully see a game that learns the lessons of Mass Effect and makes a better game for it. Then maybe BioWare can start to win back the fans they so badly let down. If not? So be it.
Okay, so I deleted my initial review of the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut. Honestly, it hadn't been sitting well with me since I posted it. It was cathartic at the time but, in retrospect, it wasn't fair to the things BioWare got right and only harped on them for the things they got wrong. In my defense, I wrote it after being awake for about 30 hours non-stop... which isn't helpful for anything let alone gathering your thoughts and writing about them. I hadn't allowed myself time (or a good night's sleep) to think about what I had experienced, I just went straight for the throat. At any rate, it was a bad, hacky piece of writing and I'd rather it went away. So I deleted it. I still want to write out my thoughts but in a slightly less sleep deprived, angry and spiteful way. So let's try this again:
More than three months, eighty thousand dollars donated to charity, sixty thousand plus Likes on the Retake Mass Effect Facebook page, countless blog posts, news story comments, and message board posts, BioWare has released the final final word in their landmark sci-fi/action/role playing trilogy Mass Effect 3 with the Extended Cut DLC. It comprises of some additional scenes, dialogue choices, an epilogue sequence and a brief additional ending fleshing out a finale that many felt was perfunctory at best and broken at worst.
BioWare and EA were hammered for months by outraged fans on every front. While there was a lot of disappointment over their previous offering, the rushed, buggy and unsatisfying Dragon Age II, those feelings never really went beyond message board posts and the occasional middling review. This was another beast entirely. Over $80,000 was donated to charity in protest. Fans organized letter campaigns, cupcake and M&M drives, and even reported them to places like the BBB with complaints of "false advertisement." Very much against their will, gaming websites were forced to cover the story ad nauseum. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that BioWare had to offer some kind of substantive response. They were understandably defensive in the press, citing the plethora of critical praise they received and passive/aggressively blaming fans for not understanding the ending. (For more on how gaming journalists failed gamers on this subject, see my first entry in the archives from March.)
It wasn't always like this. BioWare was a much loved company with a lot of experience mixing storytelling and role playing into memorable games. They're also one of the most progressive companies out there in terms of portraying women and the LGBT community as equal to men. They were often mentioned in the same breath as companies like Bethesda, Valve and Gearbox for their commitment to quality and their close relationship with fans. For things to go this badly wrong this fast, BioWare had to act. But is it enough?
Well, as with everything on the internet, it's seen as a mixed bag. For the people who really only wanted clarification and a proper epilogue, the fight seems to be over. They're as content with the endings as they can be... in the sense that it's gone from abominable to merely bad. For everyone else, like myself, who see a much bigger, deeper problem with the endings, we have to resign ourselves to calling the game an artistic failure.
The problem with the endings starts at the beginning. On the run after the Reapers (the Big Bads of this universe who are bent on consuming and repurposing all organic life to their own ends) the hero, Shepard, meets a young boy hiding in a vent. The boy makes a portentious statement about not being able to be saved and runs off. Later, as Shepard is leaving Earth, he sees the boy again as he crawls into a departing spaceship... which is then destroyed as it tries to escape. This apparently affects Shepard deeply as he has nightmares over the course of the game where he's chasing after the kid only to see him go up in flames.
This is where they screwed the pooch. Not only does it foreshadow the events of the ending but also the exact mistakes BioWare will end up making.
It's a good scene and illustrates the horrors of war in an effective way... but making the assumption that all players care deeply for this anonymous kid they've known only for a minute shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of game they were making. Mass Effect is a series built around the concept of player choice. The only way it works is if you don't force the players to accept your own morality. By presenting them with different options on how to unfold the story, they get to choose how they feel about things. The writers and developers are simply following those choices to their logical conclusion. The idea that Renegade Shepards who have willingly sacrificed friends, teammates and innocent lives in the pursuit of destroying the Reaper threat will suddenly be struck with this heavy guilt because of one kid is silly. Even my Shepard, a humanist who is loyal to his friends and innocents, willing to give a second chance but merciless towards his enemies, didn't spare an extra thought to a single dead kid. Until they forced it on me. Naturally the game had to get you into the chute and sliding towards the endgame but there are hundreds of ways to do that without speaking for the player.
It's telling that between the Mass Effect games, Shepard is always put on ice somehow. In Mass Effect 2 he was dead and in Mass Effect 3 he was grounded and confined to quarters following the destruction of a star system. As a character, he does not exist until you pick up the controller. He doesn't have a life that he's living in-between games. BioWare have gone out of their way to make sure you think of Shepard as an extension of yourself. Which makes their sudden decision to force guilt onto you for narrative reasons all the more confusing and wrong-headed.
Fast forward to the last ten minutes of the game. Shepard is presented with three options by a Virtual Intelligence in the form and voice of the dead child from the beginning of the game. Two of them are poison pills that will end the Reaper threat and the last is presented as the best ending despite have the creepiest subtext. It breaks down like this: Control (a/k/a The Creepy Space Jesus Ending), Destroy (a/k/a Genocide) and Synthesis (a/k/a Happy Happy Good Times With Puppy Dogs and Rainbows). Again, BioWare makes the same mistake. Either all of the endings need to be poison pills or none of them. For one ending to be the "perfect" one, you're tacitly punishing players for choosing anything else. It's no longer their ending, it's the wrong ending.
It doesn't help that the implications of the endings are all an utter mess.
Let's start with Control. Control is what the secondary villain, The Illusive Man, has been after since he was introduced in the second game. By controlling the Reapers, Shepard dies and has his consciousness added to the Reapers where we will take control of them and use their power to rebuild the galaxy. Now, put aside the fact that there are exactly zero people in the universe who would trust the Reapers just because they stop killing everyone and say "Oh, hey, it's cool, bro. It's Shepard. I got this." We have watched every single character over the course of the series who has come in close contact to the Reapers become "Indoctrinated." No matter how strong they are, if you're too close to them for too long the Reapers will eventually turn you into a slave via mind control. It's implied that Shepard may be immune to Indoctrination due to events in the first game but it's never made implicit. And considering the voice over narration that happens during this ending of Shepard with a dead, monotone, slightly auto-tuned voice and the creepy music that accompanies it, you have to wonder if Shepard doesn't eventually lose it. It's not actually Shepard in the Reapers, it's just a copy of his consciousness so it stands to reason there's a finite length on his control. In which case the Reapers come back and kill everyone all over again. So clearly, for those reasons, Control is not the "good" ending.
Destroy. This is the option I think most people would like the best if not for the elephant in the room: you have to kill all synthetic creatures in the galaxy, including your teammate and friend EDI, in order to do it. It's easily the cleanest, most utilitarian option. You kill the Reapers, everything goes back to relative normalcy. The cycle of violence is broken. There's even a chance Shepard survives, though it's only a brief scene where a body lies in rubble and takes a breath and only really seems to be there to make that choice a little less bleak. The Destroy ending won't be a problem if you've chosen to play a Renegade Shepard where the ends justify the means, but if you're a Humanist and you're not interested in impregnating the galaxy with your essence against their will or becoming an immortal synthetic space God, this is clearly the best ending.
This illustrates the other big problem with the endings: BioWare's insistence that "Synthetics will always be at war with Organics." Over the course of the series there have been conversations about the role of synthetics and missions involving VI run amok and the centuries long conflict between the Geth and the Quarians. The Reapers themselves are even synthetic/organic hybrids. The problem crops up because the game always gives you more than one way to resolve the issue. Most famously, in the case of the Geth and Quarians, the third game allows you to broker a peace between them. Which means the game actively works against it's own assertion.
The entire idea is incredibly arbitrary and naive. If Mass Effect is a series that allows us to essentially build a universe out of our own actions, why is BioWare stepping in at the very last second to yank it out of your hands? Why is it working against itself to present a flawed premise that is easily dismissed? Most of the excuses organics use to go to war (religion, money, land) are completely useless to synthetics. The Geth only went to war with the Quarians because they were pushed into it. What's more, so what if synthetics will eventually go to war with organics? Organics will always go to war with organics. It's our nature. It's the risk you take for having free will. If you take the route of giving the Geth the ability to self-determinate, to give them "souls," then the biggest distinction between synthetics and organics is rendered moot. Because they can think for themselves, you'll never get the full force of the Geth going to war, you'll get a faction of them. Which also fundamentally ruins BioWare's point. The idea that they're putting all their weight behind this idea is forehead-slappingly ridiculous.
It doesn't help that the Starchild itself is an untrustworthy character. It created the Reapers and has a vested interest in seeing it's own ends brought to fruition yet BioWare uses it like an omniscient narrator and not an antagonist to be overcome. Which is what he actually is. Worse, it openly advocates a particular ending: Synthesis. This goes back to the problem at the beginning of the game of BioWare essentially forcing their morality on you. If Synthesis is the ending that BioWare wants you to pick, what's the point of having other endings? Not only does the Starchild want you to choose it, it's only available if your War Assets rating is high enough, making it "special." Both in execution and content, the other endings are clearly inferior. Synthesis is the reward, Control and Destroy are the punishment.
So let's talk about the Synthesis ending. Creepy, creepy Synthesis. BioWare positioned the endings to make a case for capital "A" Art, so I don't think I'm out of line judging the series as such and picking through it looking for subtext. Because what's important to note about the creepiness of Synthesis isn't on the screen, it's just underneath the surface.
What Synthesis means is essentially that all sentient life in the galaxy is smooshed together to create a single hybrid race of synthetic/organic beings. BioWare uses this as a jump off to tell you that everything turns out great: no more war, everyone likes each other and is now immortal. Yay! If all you are looking for is a generic happy ending, nevermind the subtext, this is the one to pick.
Unfortunately for BioWare, they can't have it both ways. They don't get to make Art and then tell us to ignore the obvious ramifications of their "happy ending." What they don't tell you in selling you the Synthesis ending is that you are making this change for every sentient being in the galaxy against their will. We're talking about genetic rape. Forced eugenics. It's presented as a Utopia but the whole thing reads like a sci-fi Nuremberg deposition. Hilariously, it's also what the main bad guy of the first game, Saren, wanted. So essentially the guy you killed a few years ago was right all along. Oops?
Either they didn't know what they were saying (in which case it's crystal clear that the writing team at BioWare was fighting way above their weight class) or they actually believe it... in which case: ugh. Until one of the writers is willing to comment otherwise, I'm going to assume that they just didn't see that pretty obvious spin on what they presented. They wanted a rainbows-and-puppy-dogs happy ending and thought that this was somehow the best way to go about it, heedless of the really, really obvious subtext. Which makes me wish they would stop using the words "artistic integrity." They haven't earned it.
It feels like a bunch of people living in a bubble, working insanely long hours and drinking the corporate middle-management Kool Aid of "everyone should get along and work together and everything will be great." It's painfully naive and has no real application outside of a corporate culture. Hell, I work for a big corporation and even the people promoting "synergy" don't believe it. It's a tool they use to keep people in line. That's it. It's not about kindness, it's about control.
If we were all a part of some big, homogenous society, then there's nowhere you can go from there. You need differences and diversity. You need conflict. That's how you grow and learn. This is ultimately where BioWare's failings lie: hubris. Ego. If they had made all three of the endings "happy endings" then there would be plenty of room for speculation and discussion about the merits of each one versus the others. Instead, BioWare chose to advocate one over the others and it's blown up in their face.
None of this was a foregone conclusion. The former lead writer for the Mass Effect series, Drew Karpyshyn, had a much different idea on how to end the series but he left halfway through the development of Mass Effect 2 in order to work on Star Wars: The Old Republic before retiring from BioWare entirely to focus on his own work. In his place, BioWare installed Mac Walters as a lead writer. This is purely a matter of opinion but, having read some of Mac Walters solo Mass Effect work, the best thing I can say about it is that it's "workmanlike." I've personally found it to be very stiff and boring with very generic characters. The character in the third game he's most responsible for writing, James Vega, is the definition of a generic space marine. His only real personality trait is his propensity for giving people nicknames. He was salvaged somewhat by a good voice acting performance from Freddie Prinze, Jr. (yeah, I just said that) but he's hardly the most popular member of the cast.
Corporations are not a meritocracy, and I'm sure the position of Head Writer is as much about management as anything else, so it ultimately doesn't matter. Maybe he's just a really good Big Picture guy. Compared to Karpyshyn however, a talented and well-respected sci-fi writer, it's hard not to see it as a step down. The end results go a long way to proving that theory. Especially when it was hinted that he and Executive Producer Casey Hudson wrote the endings separately from the rest of the writers. BioWare and the writer who allegedly talked out of turn have both denied that it was him but... well, that depends on how much trust you have in a company that was already in serious damage control.
Neither Walters nor Hudson have endeared themselves to fans in the time between the game's release and now by insisting on sticking to their "artistic integrity" and passing off the litany of problems with the game by passive/aggressively telling fans that they didn't get it. I have never met a writer who was completely confident of his writing. Not once. They almost universally think they could have done something different or better. So when Walters and Hudson refuse to show the slightest bit of humility or humanity by addressing angry fans like people and not children, they've only made the situation worse. Fans are baying for blood and no amount of free multiplayer DLC is going to change that.
This situation casts a pall over the entire Mass Effect series, over BioWare's next game Dragon Age III, and over the entire company going forward. This is an albatross they'll be dragging around for ages. It also didn't help their parent company EA won Worst Company In America while the controversy over the ending raged. To paraphrase a writer I'm quite fond of (who, ironically, liked the endings), corporations are beasts... and beasts need to be fed. If you don't feed them enough, you become the food. When you consider the amount of money BioWare left on the table with Mass Effect 3, you better believe that someone at BioWare is going to become a snack.
If they had stuck the landing to this game, BioWare would still be doing victory laps. They'd be on all the year end Best Of lists. Good word of mouth would sell even more copies. The multiplayer packs they've been releasing for free could easily have been sold for five bucks a pop and if I enjoyed the game all the way through, I would have been happy to pay it.
Artistic integrity doesn't keep the lights on. While they have paid single player DLC lined up for the future and micro transactions in the multiplayer, there's a lot of money that BioWare isn't making right now. The game was marked down to half price about a month into it's release (to compare, Bethesda's Skyrim was released in November and still sells at the full $60) and stores like GameStop were coming up with all kinds of desperate marketing to get people buy it.
I deliberately avoided mentioning that final ending BioWare added to the Extended Cut until now for a reason. It's the Refusal ending and, intentionally or not, it's BioWare blowing a raspberry at fans. One of the most popular complaints was that no matter what, you had to blindly follow the Starchild's choices even though it didn't seem logical and none of them were appetizing. Not having the option to just say "no" seemed really out of place. To that end, you can now either shoot the Starchild or plead your case to him. As a result, he tells you "so be it" in a creepy voice and walks off. The entire galaxy then goes down fighting. The epilogue involves a beacon left by your teammate Liara giving all of the information on how to defeat the Reapers for the next cycle which they use to defeat the Reapers on their own. It was revealed in a tweet from one of BioWare's community managers, though, that the next cycle doesn't somehow preempt the Reaper invasion, they build the Crucible and use it themselves. Which means that not only does Shepard doom the galaxy, he dies a coward who couldn't pull the trigger.
What's interesting about the ending isn't so much the content but the meta idea behind it: fans now have a chance to give BioWare the high hard one and reject the game and all of the botched endings it contains. It gives you a chance to beat the game your way and damn the consequences. You're not just rejecting the game, you're rejecting BioWare. Despite the low blow they give you on your way out the door, you still get to walk away. It was probably the most cathartic ending in the game to me. Their petulant reaction to your denial ("So be it!") actually made me feel better for choosing it. Like BioWare was saying "Fine! Screw you! Just leave! We don't need you! We don't need any of you!"
Regardless of the critical praise heaped on it (mostly by journalists who have vested interest in staying on EA's good side) the ultimate fate of Mass Effect will always be seen by fans as a giant, glaring missed opportunity. Ambition is a motherfucker if you can't pull it off. While the stakes for the Dragon Age series aren't as high (they don't have the benefit of a single protagonist or overarching conflict that players have been sitting with throughout the series) we will hopefully see a game that learns the lessons of Mass Effect and makes a better game for it. Then maybe BioWare can start to win back the fans they so badly let down. If not? So be it.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
E3 Impressions, Pt. 2: Assorted Announcements & Dead Space 3 Lamentations
Continuing from my last entry running down some of the biggest and most interesting announcements from this year's E3, there's plenty more to talk about so let me just jump right into it.
SimCity is still a thing, if city building games are your bag. I haven't played a SimCity game since middle school but I'm kind of happy to know they still exist. Oregon Trail wasn't as lucky. In typical EA fashion, you need to be constantly connected to the internet even for the single player, so buyer beware. New Skyrim DLC was always going to happen but I was much more surprised to hear about an expansion for Dark Souls. Which will unmercifully kill me over and over again until I cry a little and give up. Again. The game already beat me into submission once but I'll gladly give it another go to check out the new areas and enemies. That game is no joke. I still have a copy of Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow that I never played much of but, oddly, I never traded it in either. So I guess that means I'm down to give the sequel a try. I like the fact that they're trying to rebuild the franchise into a single, coherent universe rather than the plethora of seemingly unrelated games that it has been for well over a decade now.
One of the big announcements, which certainly brought a smile to my face, was Gears Of War: Judgment which will be co-developed with Epic by People Can Fly, who gave us the very fun and very underrated Bulletstorm. I watched the E3 footage and read the cover story in the July issue of Game Informer and I have a lot of reason for hope.
For one, they've visibly toned down the beefy, superhuman character models so that the they look like actual people. For another, the game is focusing on my two favorite characters in the series, Baird and Cole. Granted, they were my favorite characters because they seemed to be the only ones in the game who had any sort of personality, even if that personality was just "sarcastic asshole" and "over-enthusiastic goofball cartoon character" respectively. (Watch the Terry Tate videos on YouTube if you want to see Cole's voice actor tackling people and screaming "woooo!" in real life. It's really hard not to like the guy based on that alone.)
If Naughty Dog and the Uncharted series are my baseline for good storytelling, Epic and Gears Of War are my whipping boy for doing it poorly. A lot of people would consider the Gears Of War series critic-proof in that it's a big, stupid action game. Who the fuck cares if it's dumb? Fair point. Most people seem to be fine with it, but looking at big, dumb action movies, there's a difference between something like The Rock and Transformers. The former is a fast, funny, action-packed rollercoaster with likable characters. The latter is a giant fucking mess of loud noises and shit blowing up.
I mentioned this in my [Prototype 2] review but there's an acceptable level of stupidity you can have in an action game. The more serious you take the game you're making, the less stupidity you can get away with. Lollipop Chainsaw or Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad can be as gleefully dumb as it wants to be because we all understand what we're buying. Conversely, if you're a Triple A marquee title like Gears Of War, you should probably make at least a token attempt at decent dialogue, likable characters and storytelling.
When I say that GOW3 telegraphed the Big Character Death halfway through, I mean that literally. I got a postcard in the mail months in advance warning me what was going to happen. They deserve credit for knowing enough to give you a long period of silence afterwards to digest the event but it would have worked better if they had given me a reason to care more. Let's not even get into the last second flirting with a twist on the Locust that was ultimately abandoned. Oh, and if you were able to listen to any of Tai's dialogue in the "RAAM's Shadow" DLC without either wincing audibly or laughing your ass off at it... I dunno, man. Congratulations? He's supposed to be a "tough, spiritual warrior" but ended up sounding like an steroid-enhanced autistic guy repeating shit he read in his parents' philosophy books.
As much as I shit on them, I still really like the Gears Of War games for the big set pieces, the unimpeachable gameplay, the bang for your buck that they give with different game modes and the amount of replayability they offer. If you add People Can Fly to that mix, I think we may get the best Gears game yet. Especially if they bring ex-F.E.A.R. Agent and current X-Force writer Rick Remender back to script it. Bulletstorm was definitely on the right side of stupid. It was just crass and funny and unsentimental enough to work. I doubt they'd outsource that to someone outside of Epic but I can hope.
This plays into my biggest disappointment with this year's E3: Dead Space 3. Man, where to start? I watched all the footage from E3 and read the coverage that was also in July's Game Informer and I got progressively more bummed as I went on.
I know I will be a minority here. I should probably state that in advance. I expect the game will be very well reviewed. If it gets less than an 80% on Metacritic, I will be shocked. It's clearly a good looking game made by an experienced team. It's just not a Dead Space game anymore. Let me explain.
Dead Space was always on the more action-y end of the survival horror spectrum. That's something that comes with the times. It's widely acknowledged that the survival horror genre is now a niche market. The more people you have playing games, the more people you have with no attention span and even less brains who simply won't tolerate a game where something isn't blowing up every five minutes. I've reconciled the fact that my love for survival horror will have to be confined to small, indie PC titles. (Please Silent Hill, just stop.) For the brand to survive, embracing the mainstream action aspects of gaming was inevitable. That said, you have a choice in how you embrace it and that seems to be where things are going off the rails.
There were always definite elements of old school survival horror in the Dead Space DNA: the corridor crawls, the claustrophobic atmosphere, inventory management and relative scarcity of ammo and health (on higher difficulty levels). Watch the E3 footage. Watch the 20 minute gameplay video they released. Do you see any of that left?
It's now a co-op focused game. Which means the fear factor will take a huge nosedive. It's impossible to get immersed in something when you have a friend talking in your ear. What's more, and I think this is an important fact that hasn't been talked about much yet, level design. Designing a level for a single-player game and a co-op game are entirely different. You can't do a corridor crawl with two players because you'll constantly be getting in each others way. That means big, open spaces where both characters can run around independently. That also means another drop in scares because there's no way to have an enemy take you by surprise if you have a full 360 degree view of your surroundings and room to move and anticipate them. Watching the footage, they seem to be utilizing the "dead bodies hidden by snow" trick but there's only so many times they can pull that before everyone catches on.
There will also be many more human antagonists which brings up the question how the two can co-exist in the same place. Necromorphs do not give a single shit about the Unitologists even if the Uni's believe that the necromorphs are religiously significant. Logically, either the Uni's would kill themselves so that they necromorphs could transform them, like so many did in the first two Dead Space games, or just get the fuck out. That's the problem with being a member of a militant death cult: if you don't kill yourself, you kinda seem like a pussy. Also, it will be yet another drop in scares because, as a player, there's nothing less scary than another asshole with a gun shooting at you. I'm sure this will be explained in game, I'm just not sure I trust them to give it any kind of logic.
They're also gimping inventory management by making a single universal form of ammo for all weapons. So there will be no more sweating about which weapons to bring along, you just grab whatever you can carry and shoot until your heart's content. No more will you realize that you only have a plasma cutter and a pulse rifle when what you really needed was that line gun you left in storage.
The obvious choice to me would have been to completely segregate the single-player and co-op experiences, a la Portal 2. Let them share locations but give them both entirely unique areas as well. Tell two different stories with two sets of characters that intertwine so that you get the whole story. Make the single player more of a classic survival horror/action game and make the co-op more action packed. They seem to be trying to think around that problem by making the co-op drop in/drop out but that really doesn't help. It's still a co-op designed game, you're just playing it solo.
Which leaves the most annoying aspect (to me, at least) of this new co-op focused action game approach they're taking: all the blatantly obvious storytelling and character choices. The character of Issac Clarke was a total cipher in the first game, which worked in context. The second game notably gave him a voice and the beginnings of a personality but he was still very much a cipher. It was a success mostly because they didn't screw it up. He was still a lowly engineer massively unprepared for all of the shit he was forced to do. They also introduced Ellie Langford, a pilot and new friend as confused and unprepared as Issac who was a good foil for our quiet, contemplative man of action. In Dead Space 3 we get Issac Clarke, Generic Action Hero.
If Ellie were your co-op partner, I think that would go a little ways towards making a game that skewed a little closer to the survival horror/action mix they had already established. Neither of them are trained soldiers which allows for a sense of danger in combat situations and allows for controls that are a little heavier and less responsive to illustrate that. That's always been another aspect of survival horror: slower controls make you more susceptible to attacks and force to to try and think ahead. Plus, from a visual sense, having a woman in one of those exo-suits Issac wears could be a really cool visual. As it stands, your co-op partner is a soldier, so they'll have to adjust the controls to make things more responsive to the action. They've definitely already added things like dodge rolls (In a heavy exo-suit? Seriously?) and cover-based shooting so you can probably expect other standard action game controls as well. (If you're still keeping track, that's another notch in the "not scary" column.) And, really, Ellie couldn't be your co-op partner because Ellie is a woman and women are icky. Besides, as we already established in my last entry about the Tomb Raider remake, all men are really dumb and can't project themselves onto a female character. We certainly would not want to ruin some guys' post-game high five by making one of them play a girl. We also don't want to acknowledge female gamers at all because... well, we just don't.
Let's talk about our new soldier friend, by the way, because he really pisses me off. He's indicative of everything I hate about this new direction. His name is Carver. Because we're dumb and all military types need really obvious on-the-nose names to show you what a bad ass they are. (Why not just call him "Killerberg" or "Murderstein?" At least then he'd be Jewish which would be some kind of atypical trait.) He's also gruff and scarred and doesn't much care for Issac because, as I said, we're all dumb and every male co-op game relationship needs to be a carbon copy of every buddy cop movie you've ever seen. "Oh, the Captain just made them partners... but, oooh, they have a personality conflict and don't get along... but, hey, they bond over mutual enemies... then, awwww, they come to an understanding and develop a mutual respect." There's roughly following basic literary tropes and then there's using them as a crutch and a time-saver. Carver is the latter. There's also nothing scarier than traveling around with a stone cold, tough talking killer with a gun. One more for the "not scary" column.
Everything about Dead Space 3 feels like Visceral Games is taking the easiest possible approach. They could take any aspect of the complaints I've mentioned thus far and twist them somehow to make the fresh. Instead, they seem to be dragging along every sorry cliche they can find in search of mainstream success on par with that other third person co-op action series (and license to print money) Gears Of War. Hell, the swallowed-by-a-giant-monster-and-you-have-to-fight-your-way-out scene from the E3 demo was something that featured prominently in Gears 2.
Dead Space 3 is not an evolution, it's a regression into an entirely different genre. Either they're going to have to market Dead Space 3 as an action game with some horror movie window dressing or risk the backlash when long time fans like me realize that the game just isn't what it was. If they try to market it as a horror game, they're shooting themselves repeatedly in the foot. They're trying to have it both ways and that almost always ends up in a muddy, unfocused project that fails at both. It won't matter to me either way because I've just cashed out on the series. Aliens: Colonial Marines is coming out within a couple weeks of Dead Space 3 and that looks much more interesting. It'll be an co-op action/horror shooter just like Dead Space 3 but at least they won't have completely compromised themselves making it.
SimCity is still a thing, if city building games are your bag. I haven't played a SimCity game since middle school but I'm kind of happy to know they still exist. Oregon Trail wasn't as lucky. In typical EA fashion, you need to be constantly connected to the internet even for the single player, so buyer beware. New Skyrim DLC was always going to happen but I was much more surprised to hear about an expansion for Dark Souls. Which will unmercifully kill me over and over again until I cry a little and give up. Again. The game already beat me into submission once but I'll gladly give it another go to check out the new areas and enemies. That game is no joke. I still have a copy of Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow that I never played much of but, oddly, I never traded it in either. So I guess that means I'm down to give the sequel a try. I like the fact that they're trying to rebuild the franchise into a single, coherent universe rather than the plethora of seemingly unrelated games that it has been for well over a decade now.
One of the big announcements, which certainly brought a smile to my face, was Gears Of War: Judgment which will be co-developed with Epic by People Can Fly, who gave us the very fun and very underrated Bulletstorm. I watched the E3 footage and read the cover story in the July issue of Game Informer and I have a lot of reason for hope.
For one, they've visibly toned down the beefy, superhuman character models so that the they look like actual people. For another, the game is focusing on my two favorite characters in the series, Baird and Cole. Granted, they were my favorite characters because they seemed to be the only ones in the game who had any sort of personality, even if that personality was just "sarcastic asshole" and "over-enthusiastic goofball cartoon character" respectively. (Watch the Terry Tate videos on YouTube if you want to see Cole's voice actor tackling people and screaming "woooo!" in real life. It's really hard not to like the guy based on that alone.)
If Naughty Dog and the Uncharted series are my baseline for good storytelling, Epic and Gears Of War are my whipping boy for doing it poorly. A lot of people would consider the Gears Of War series critic-proof in that it's a big, stupid action game. Who the fuck cares if it's dumb? Fair point. Most people seem to be fine with it, but looking at big, dumb action movies, there's a difference between something like The Rock and Transformers. The former is a fast, funny, action-packed rollercoaster with likable characters. The latter is a giant fucking mess of loud noises and shit blowing up.
I mentioned this in my [Prototype 2] review but there's an acceptable level of stupidity you can have in an action game. The more serious you take the game you're making, the less stupidity you can get away with. Lollipop Chainsaw or Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad can be as gleefully dumb as it wants to be because we all understand what we're buying. Conversely, if you're a Triple A marquee title like Gears Of War, you should probably make at least a token attempt at decent dialogue, likable characters and storytelling.
When I say that GOW3 telegraphed the Big Character Death halfway through, I mean that literally. I got a postcard in the mail months in advance warning me what was going to happen. They deserve credit for knowing enough to give you a long period of silence afterwards to digest the event but it would have worked better if they had given me a reason to care more. Let's not even get into the last second flirting with a twist on the Locust that was ultimately abandoned. Oh, and if you were able to listen to any of Tai's dialogue in the "RAAM's Shadow" DLC without either wincing audibly or laughing your ass off at it... I dunno, man. Congratulations? He's supposed to be a "tough, spiritual warrior" but ended up sounding like an steroid-enhanced autistic guy repeating shit he read in his parents' philosophy books.
As much as I shit on them, I still really like the Gears Of War games for the big set pieces, the unimpeachable gameplay, the bang for your buck that they give with different game modes and the amount of replayability they offer. If you add People Can Fly to that mix, I think we may get the best Gears game yet. Especially if they bring ex-F.E.A.R. Agent and current X-Force writer Rick Remender back to script it. Bulletstorm was definitely on the right side of stupid. It was just crass and funny and unsentimental enough to work. I doubt they'd outsource that to someone outside of Epic but I can hope.
This plays into my biggest disappointment with this year's E3: Dead Space 3. Man, where to start? I watched all the footage from E3 and read the coverage that was also in July's Game Informer and I got progressively more bummed as I went on.
I know I will be a minority here. I should probably state that in advance. I expect the game will be very well reviewed. If it gets less than an 80% on Metacritic, I will be shocked. It's clearly a good looking game made by an experienced team. It's just not a Dead Space game anymore. Let me explain.
Dead Space was always on the more action-y end of the survival horror spectrum. That's something that comes with the times. It's widely acknowledged that the survival horror genre is now a niche market. The more people you have playing games, the more people you have with no attention span and even less brains who simply won't tolerate a game where something isn't blowing up every five minutes. I've reconciled the fact that my love for survival horror will have to be confined to small, indie PC titles. (Please Silent Hill, just stop.) For the brand to survive, embracing the mainstream action aspects of gaming was inevitable. That said, you have a choice in how you embrace it and that seems to be where things are going off the rails.
There were always definite elements of old school survival horror in the Dead Space DNA: the corridor crawls, the claustrophobic atmosphere, inventory management and relative scarcity of ammo and health (on higher difficulty levels). Watch the E3 footage. Watch the 20 minute gameplay video they released. Do you see any of that left?
It's now a co-op focused game. Which means the fear factor will take a huge nosedive. It's impossible to get immersed in something when you have a friend talking in your ear. What's more, and I think this is an important fact that hasn't been talked about much yet, level design. Designing a level for a single-player game and a co-op game are entirely different. You can't do a corridor crawl with two players because you'll constantly be getting in each others way. That means big, open spaces where both characters can run around independently. That also means another drop in scares because there's no way to have an enemy take you by surprise if you have a full 360 degree view of your surroundings and room to move and anticipate them. Watching the footage, they seem to be utilizing the "dead bodies hidden by snow" trick but there's only so many times they can pull that before everyone catches on.
There will also be many more human antagonists which brings up the question how the two can co-exist in the same place. Necromorphs do not give a single shit about the Unitologists even if the Uni's believe that the necromorphs are religiously significant. Logically, either the Uni's would kill themselves so that they necromorphs could transform them, like so many did in the first two Dead Space games, or just get the fuck out. That's the problem with being a member of a militant death cult: if you don't kill yourself, you kinda seem like a pussy. Also, it will be yet another drop in scares because, as a player, there's nothing less scary than another asshole with a gun shooting at you. I'm sure this will be explained in game, I'm just not sure I trust them to give it any kind of logic.
They're also gimping inventory management by making a single universal form of ammo for all weapons. So there will be no more sweating about which weapons to bring along, you just grab whatever you can carry and shoot until your heart's content. No more will you realize that you only have a plasma cutter and a pulse rifle when what you really needed was that line gun you left in storage.
The obvious choice to me would have been to completely segregate the single-player and co-op experiences, a la Portal 2. Let them share locations but give them both entirely unique areas as well. Tell two different stories with two sets of characters that intertwine so that you get the whole story. Make the single player more of a classic survival horror/action game and make the co-op more action packed. They seem to be trying to think around that problem by making the co-op drop in/drop out but that really doesn't help. It's still a co-op designed game, you're just playing it solo.
Which leaves the most annoying aspect (to me, at least) of this new co-op focused action game approach they're taking: all the blatantly obvious storytelling and character choices. The character of Issac Clarke was a total cipher in the first game, which worked in context. The second game notably gave him a voice and the beginnings of a personality but he was still very much a cipher. It was a success mostly because they didn't screw it up. He was still a lowly engineer massively unprepared for all of the shit he was forced to do. They also introduced Ellie Langford, a pilot and new friend as confused and unprepared as Issac who was a good foil for our quiet, contemplative man of action. In Dead Space 3 we get Issac Clarke, Generic Action Hero.
If Ellie were your co-op partner, I think that would go a little ways towards making a game that skewed a little closer to the survival horror/action mix they had already established. Neither of them are trained soldiers which allows for a sense of danger in combat situations and allows for controls that are a little heavier and less responsive to illustrate that. That's always been another aspect of survival horror: slower controls make you more susceptible to attacks and force to to try and think ahead. Plus, from a visual sense, having a woman in one of those exo-suits Issac wears could be a really cool visual. As it stands, your co-op partner is a soldier, so they'll have to adjust the controls to make things more responsive to the action. They've definitely already added things like dodge rolls (In a heavy exo-suit? Seriously?) and cover-based shooting so you can probably expect other standard action game controls as well. (If you're still keeping track, that's another notch in the "not scary" column.) And, really, Ellie couldn't be your co-op partner because Ellie is a woman and women are icky. Besides, as we already established in my last entry about the Tomb Raider remake, all men are really dumb and can't project themselves onto a female character. We certainly would not want to ruin some guys' post-game high five by making one of them play a girl. We also don't want to acknowledge female gamers at all because... well, we just don't.
Let's talk about our new soldier friend, by the way, because he really pisses me off. He's indicative of everything I hate about this new direction. His name is Carver. Because we're dumb and all military types need really obvious on-the-nose names to show you what a bad ass they are. (Why not just call him "Killerberg" or "Murderstein?" At least then he'd be Jewish which would be some kind of atypical trait.) He's also gruff and scarred and doesn't much care for Issac because, as I said, we're all dumb and every male co-op game relationship needs to be a carbon copy of every buddy cop movie you've ever seen. "Oh, the Captain just made them partners... but, oooh, they have a personality conflict and don't get along... but, hey, they bond over mutual enemies... then, awwww, they come to an understanding and develop a mutual respect." There's roughly following basic literary tropes and then there's using them as a crutch and a time-saver. Carver is the latter. There's also nothing scarier than traveling around with a stone cold, tough talking killer with a gun. One more for the "not scary" column.
Everything about Dead Space 3 feels like Visceral Games is taking the easiest possible approach. They could take any aspect of the complaints I've mentioned thus far and twist them somehow to make the fresh. Instead, they seem to be dragging along every sorry cliche they can find in search of mainstream success on par with that other third person co-op action series (and license to print money) Gears Of War. Hell, the swallowed-by-a-giant-monster-and-you-have-to-fight-your-way-out scene from the E3 demo was something that featured prominently in Gears 2.
Dead Space 3 is not an evolution, it's a regression into an entirely different genre. Either they're going to have to market Dead Space 3 as an action game with some horror movie window dressing or risk the backlash when long time fans like me realize that the game just isn't what it was. If they try to market it as a horror game, they're shooting themselves repeatedly in the foot. They're trying to have it both ways and that almost always ends up in a muddy, unfocused project that fails at both. It won't matter to me either way because I've just cashed out on the series. Aliens: Colonial Marines is coming out within a couple weeks of Dead Space 3 and that looks much more interesting. It'll be an co-op action/horror shooter just like Dead Space 3 but at least they won't have completely compromised themselves making it.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
E3 Impressions, Pt. 1: Attempted Rape & Assorted Ephemera
I've already heard people talking about how underwhelming this year's E3 was... and if you're talking in terms of razzle dazzle or Big Huge Announcements then, I guess they have a point. That said, there was plenty of information floating around about next year's biggest titles and most of them are at least worth a mention.
Titles like Halo 4 and God Of War: Ascension were no-brainers and straight-forward enough that I don't need to go into much detail. They'll do exactly what it says on the tin. Far Cry 3 has boobs in it. Dante's character redesign makes him look like a bigger douchebag than he did before in the DmC reboot. Metro: Last Light and XCOM: Enemy Unknown both look fantastic but will no doubt be cult games due to the fact that they expect you to pay attention and try. There's not a lot of substance to say about Watch Dogs right now so you'll have to settle for "wow" and "holy shit" for the time being. I'm still leery about CAPCOM after some sketchy business practices around their disc locked content and charging customers for the "true" ending of Asura's Wrath which, coupled with a fairly stagnant Resident Evil 5, make the prospects for Resident Evil 6 kind of grim. "Cross-over mode" looks like it could be an interesting gimmick but I'll need to see more to judge accurately. The RE franchise is perilously behind the times and just being able to move and shoot at the same time is not exactly a genre-changing event.
The Tomb Raider reboot looks interesting, if a bit rape-y. At one point in the demo, Lara gets fondled (sans permission) by a creepy guy while tied up... which is totally necessary to her development as a character or serves some definite plot purposes that will be revealed later, I'm sure. (Right, guys?) Honestly, I'm worried that Crystal Dynamics still don't understand how to write a female character. I respect them for trying to give Lara Croft a Nathan Drake-ish makeover (God knows other developers should be following suit...) but the key to what made Drake work was a sense of intelligence and charm and fallibility. Playing the Uncharted games, I believed that the characters had multifaceted personalities and lives of their own. That's what made me care about them.
Particularly worrying was the producer on the show floor who went on about how men can't project themselves onto a female character and how guys want to "protect" Lara. Um, no. There are some chauvinistic assholes whose idea of women is more "Madonna" than "whore," but you're still focusing on the fact that the character has boobs as a fundamental trait. You get people on her side by making her a strong, likable character or at least giving her the potential for strength, not by subjecting her to horror after horror in order to force us to sympathize with her. Still using the Uncharted games as a baseline, no on tried to rape Chloe or Elena and they are both much loved characters. Going right to "attempted rape" is the nuclear option. Not only is it an easy shortcut, it opens a can of worms I'm not sure an action/adventure video game is ready to deal with. If you need this explained to you, Crystal Dynamics, then maybe you're the wrong people for the job.
If people can't even write believable male protagonists these days then they're completely screwed when it comes to writing women. I'm starting to wonder if the real problem is that Amy Hennig, lead writer on the Uncharted games, just doesn't have the time to write every single video game character ever.
In more cheerful news: The two games I'm most excited for out of this year's E3 are easily Quantic Dream's Beyond: Two Souls and Naughty Dog's The Last Of Us. Both developers have a reputation for ambition and quality that most lack. They could be doing Donkey Konga reboots and I'd still show up for the midnight release.
Quantic Dream is not a high output studio. They choose their properties very carefully. When Beyond gets released in 2013, it will be only their fourth game in fourteen years. Since Heavy Rain, the only thing they've released was a fascinating tech demo called Kara that I think people assumed would be the basis for their next project. The robot aspect may be gone but concept of a young girl in danger is front and center for Beyond which will feature a motion captured Ellen Page on the run and span over fifteen years in the character's life. (Which should be interesting because I can't imagine Ellen Page looking like anything other than a tiny little cherub.)
As original and interesting as Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain were, they were certainly not perfect games. The former was perhaps a little too simplistic, from a gameplay perspective, and Heavy Rain was a victim of the story and the technology not quite being there. The script sounded very much like it was written by a Frenchman who learned English as a second language (which it was) and, paired with the technology which rendered stiff character models and some flat performances, made everything feel a bit distant and unreal. The story often overcame the handicap but the issues were certainly there. It also made screaming "SHAUN!" repeatedly a low level meme. Hopefully having American actors with real chops and some upgraded tech will result in a more seamless integration.
The story seems to build more on the supernatural angle of Indigo Prophecy where you go from controlling Ellen Page's character of Jody to the mysterious invisible ghost/presence/force Aiden. It's my hope that this will also result in controls that aren't entirely in the Heavy Rain style when engaging in what looks to be fairly frequent combat situations.
Naughty Dog comes back in 2013 with The Last Of Us, a post-apocalyptic action/adventure game of a somewhat different breed than we're used to. It's a post-pandemic America so the setting seems to be more about crumbling cities where nature is taking over rather than your more typical nuclear wasteland. The gameplay seems to build off of the rock solid combat in Uncharted without the exploration/puzzle aspects. Story has always been one of Naughty Dog's strong points so I'm expecting good things as lead character Joel escorts his young charge Ellie on their trip. From the footage they've shown, Joel doesn't seem like he's only a gruff, cynical anti-hero and Ellie doesn't come off as some helpless naif who needs her hand held the entire time.
I talk a lot (and I'm sure I'll talk more in the future) about Naughty Dog's approach to character-driven storytelling, and how good they are at it, because it's such a contrast to other developers. Other than Naughty Dog and certain writers at BioWare, most developers are perfectly content to offer characters who are nothing more than cardboard cutouts. Maybe time restraints keep them from fleshing out characters or maybe they just aren't particularly good writers. Either way, it's hard not to get fatigued by the blatant adherence to stereotypes in the industry be it the rape-y attitude towards women or your lazily written macho douchebag.
This fatigue towards lazy characterization is part of the issue I have with another series that seems to be making a big play for the middle ground, so I'll hold my tongue until I finish my next blog post in a couple days.
Titles like Halo 4 and God Of War: Ascension were no-brainers and straight-forward enough that I don't need to go into much detail. They'll do exactly what it says on the tin. Far Cry 3 has boobs in it. Dante's character redesign makes him look like a bigger douchebag than he did before in the DmC reboot. Metro: Last Light and XCOM: Enemy Unknown both look fantastic but will no doubt be cult games due to the fact that they expect you to pay attention and try. There's not a lot of substance to say about Watch Dogs right now so you'll have to settle for "wow" and "holy shit" for the time being. I'm still leery about CAPCOM after some sketchy business practices around their disc locked content and charging customers for the "true" ending of Asura's Wrath which, coupled with a fairly stagnant Resident Evil 5, make the prospects for Resident Evil 6 kind of grim. "Cross-over mode" looks like it could be an interesting gimmick but I'll need to see more to judge accurately. The RE franchise is perilously behind the times and just being able to move and shoot at the same time is not exactly a genre-changing event.
The Tomb Raider reboot looks interesting, if a bit rape-y. At one point in the demo, Lara gets fondled (sans permission) by a creepy guy while tied up... which is totally necessary to her development as a character or serves some definite plot purposes that will be revealed later, I'm sure. (Right, guys?) Honestly, I'm worried that Crystal Dynamics still don't understand how to write a female character. I respect them for trying to give Lara Croft a Nathan Drake-ish makeover (God knows other developers should be following suit...) but the key to what made Drake work was a sense of intelligence and charm and fallibility. Playing the Uncharted games, I believed that the characters had multifaceted personalities and lives of their own. That's what made me care about them.
Particularly worrying was the producer on the show floor who went on about how men can't project themselves onto a female character and how guys want to "protect" Lara. Um, no. There are some chauvinistic assholes whose idea of women is more "Madonna" than "whore," but you're still focusing on the fact that the character has boobs as a fundamental trait. You get people on her side by making her a strong, likable character or at least giving her the potential for strength, not by subjecting her to horror after horror in order to force us to sympathize with her. Still using the Uncharted games as a baseline, no on tried to rape Chloe or Elena and they are both much loved characters. Going right to "attempted rape" is the nuclear option. Not only is it an easy shortcut, it opens a can of worms I'm not sure an action/adventure video game is ready to deal with. If you need this explained to you, Crystal Dynamics, then maybe you're the wrong people for the job.
If people can't even write believable male protagonists these days then they're completely screwed when it comes to writing women. I'm starting to wonder if the real problem is that Amy Hennig, lead writer on the Uncharted games, just doesn't have the time to write every single video game character ever.
In more cheerful news: The two games I'm most excited for out of this year's E3 are easily Quantic Dream's Beyond: Two Souls and Naughty Dog's The Last Of Us. Both developers have a reputation for ambition and quality that most lack. They could be doing Donkey Konga reboots and I'd still show up for the midnight release.
Quantic Dream is not a high output studio. They choose their properties very carefully. When Beyond gets released in 2013, it will be only their fourth game in fourteen years. Since Heavy Rain, the only thing they've released was a fascinating tech demo called Kara that I think people assumed would be the basis for their next project. The robot aspect may be gone but concept of a young girl in danger is front and center for Beyond which will feature a motion captured Ellen Page on the run and span over fifteen years in the character's life. (Which should be interesting because I can't imagine Ellen Page looking like anything other than a tiny little cherub.)
As original and interesting as Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain were, they were certainly not perfect games. The former was perhaps a little too simplistic, from a gameplay perspective, and Heavy Rain was a victim of the story and the technology not quite being there. The script sounded very much like it was written by a Frenchman who learned English as a second language (which it was) and, paired with the technology which rendered stiff character models and some flat performances, made everything feel a bit distant and unreal. The story often overcame the handicap but the issues were certainly there. It also made screaming "SHAUN!" repeatedly a low level meme. Hopefully having American actors with real chops and some upgraded tech will result in a more seamless integration.
The story seems to build more on the supernatural angle of Indigo Prophecy where you go from controlling Ellen Page's character of Jody to the mysterious invisible ghost/presence/force Aiden. It's my hope that this will also result in controls that aren't entirely in the Heavy Rain style when engaging in what looks to be fairly frequent combat situations.
Naughty Dog comes back in 2013 with The Last Of Us, a post-apocalyptic action/adventure game of a somewhat different breed than we're used to. It's a post-pandemic America so the setting seems to be more about crumbling cities where nature is taking over rather than your more typical nuclear wasteland. The gameplay seems to build off of the rock solid combat in Uncharted without the exploration/puzzle aspects. Story has always been one of Naughty Dog's strong points so I'm expecting good things as lead character Joel escorts his young charge Ellie on their trip. From the footage they've shown, Joel doesn't seem like he's only a gruff, cynical anti-hero and Ellie doesn't come off as some helpless naif who needs her hand held the entire time.
I talk a lot (and I'm sure I'll talk more in the future) about Naughty Dog's approach to character-driven storytelling, and how good they are at it, because it's such a contrast to other developers. Other than Naughty Dog and certain writers at BioWare, most developers are perfectly content to offer characters who are nothing more than cardboard cutouts. Maybe time restraints keep them from fleshing out characters or maybe they just aren't particularly good writers. Either way, it's hard not to get fatigued by the blatant adherence to stereotypes in the industry be it the rape-y attitude towards women or your lazily written macho douchebag.
This fatigue towards lazy characterization is part of the issue I have with another series that seems to be making a big play for the middle ground, so I'll hold my tongue until I finish my next blog post in a couple days.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
[Prototype 2] (2012)
I wasn't overly psyched to try out the sequel to Radical Entertainment's 2009 hit [Prototype]. It was a fine game with an interesting premise and some good action. Nonetheless, I was willing to step up and see how the series had grown for the sequel.
The first [Prototype] was an open-world action game centered around a lead character, Alex Mercer, a super-powered amnesiac in a New York City in the middle of a zombie infection brought on by a biological weapon explosion. There was plenty of hacking and slashing, free running, and Stuff Blowing Up around the city. It was all good, mindless fun. Nothing that stuck with you but still a worth twelve to fifteen hours of your time.
On the technical front, [Prototype 2] has all the improvements you'd expect. The visuals are sharper, it looks and sounds great, everything blows up nicely. The lead character switched from Alex Mercer to soldier James Heller, which is not altogether surprising given the revelations of the first game. There's also the usual RPG elements and character building. However, the game industry's habit of streamlining everything to make it easier and more accessible is readily apparent.
The first game gave you an entire city to play around in, but [Prototype 2] takes place in three much smaller zones entirely separate from each other. They jettisoned the first game's "Web Of Intriuge," a non-linear storytelling device revealing plot and character details by "eating" marked passersby, for generic collectibles in the form of black boxes and brief mini-games like Field Ops and underground lairs. The collectibles don't really add a lot of additional playtime and they're gimped by the game providing a GPS ping in your world map and alerts you whenever you get close. Fortunately, [P2] retains the mini-games from the first game and adds a leaderboard to track your friends' progress.
The biggest addition to the sequel are side missions called "//Blacknet Dossiers." They all work roughly the same way: consume a marked target to start a mission with a small, rotating number of objectives. Completing them rewards you with a power boost. They aren't particularly interesting and usually just feature the same tasks: checkpoint runs, destroy this base, consume that person. It extends gameplay by a couple hours but doesn't add much in the way of fun.
If there's an issue with the game, it's not the gameplay. That's rock solid. At no point during playing it did I get frustrated that the game wasn't reacting the way it should or that something was broken. The issues start cropping up whenever someone talks.
Simply put, [Prototype 2] is really dumb. Almost insultingly dumb. Start with our new anti-hero, Heller: He is every video game protagonist cliche imaginable. He's a Big, Hyper-Masculine Soldier Avenging His Family's Murder. He doesn't Play By The Rules. He has his own Code Of Honor. He's On The Edge and Takes No Crap. He's Mean and Cynical but still has a Soft Spot For Kids. He's also Incredibly Boring.
By contrast, Alex Mercer, the anti-hero of the first game, was much more interesting. Co-written by long time comic book writer Paul Jenkins, it borrowed liberally from Alan Moore's re-interpretation of the Swamp Thing origin story. While Mercer himself was fairly bland, the story around him was surprisingly interesting. It wasn't without it's problems, sure, but it's a narrative issue in both games. You can't expect a gamer to kill hundreds and hundreds of people and then expect them to care about the fate of a stranger. One character even changes allegiances towards the end of the game and it's so ridiculous and nonsensical given your prior relationship that I actually face-palmed when it happened.
There's an acceptable level of stupidity you can expect in an action game. Sometimes it's even endearing. Gears Of War is a good example. It's an incredibly stupid, obvious, lunkheaded, openly manipulative story but it works because the gameplay is so goddamn smooth and the set pieces are so big that it doesn't matter. [P2] isn't as lucky. It lacks the big "Wow!" moments you need to forget how awful the story and the dialogue are.
The opening of the game has Heller talking to his wife in a cut-scene while he's out of the country on a mission. He implores her and their daughter to stay in New York despite the biological weapon outbreak that's happened because he'll be back in just a couple of days. Which is an incredibly stupid move that gets his wife and daughter killed. You might expect the game to even casually address a sense of guilt for his decision but... nope. That would require something beyond a surface level. The character of Kratos worked in God Of War because he was almost a mythological figure, the personification of rage. Heller just comes off like a complete asshole.
This attitude is systemic throughout the game's story and characters. It's aggressively, willfully dumb. Everyone is exactly who you expect them to be and the twists are telegraphed miles in advance. The soldiers, always men, are one-dimensional thugs and killers. The scientists and corporate types, almost entirely men, are completely immoral. Of course the game needs antagonists but there was ample opportunity for any kind of nuance that the game completely ignores. By the end of the game I wanted to start skipping the cut-scenes entirely and only held back because I knew I was going to write about it.
Maybe you don't need a story to like a game. In which case, [Prototype 2] should be right up your alley. However, if you want any entertainment out of your games outside of the gameplay, I just can't recommend it.
The first [Prototype] was an open-world action game centered around a lead character, Alex Mercer, a super-powered amnesiac in a New York City in the middle of a zombie infection brought on by a biological weapon explosion. There was plenty of hacking and slashing, free running, and Stuff Blowing Up around the city. It was all good, mindless fun. Nothing that stuck with you but still a worth twelve to fifteen hours of your time.
On the technical front, [Prototype 2] has all the improvements you'd expect. The visuals are sharper, it looks and sounds great, everything blows up nicely. The lead character switched from Alex Mercer to soldier James Heller, which is not altogether surprising given the revelations of the first game. There's also the usual RPG elements and character building. However, the game industry's habit of streamlining everything to make it easier and more accessible is readily apparent.
The first game gave you an entire city to play around in, but [Prototype 2] takes place in three much smaller zones entirely separate from each other. They jettisoned the first game's "Web Of Intriuge," a non-linear storytelling device revealing plot and character details by "eating" marked passersby, for generic collectibles in the form of black boxes and brief mini-games like Field Ops and underground lairs. The collectibles don't really add a lot of additional playtime and they're gimped by the game providing a GPS ping in your world map and alerts you whenever you get close. Fortunately, [P2] retains the mini-games from the first game and adds a leaderboard to track your friends' progress.
The biggest addition to the sequel are side missions called "//Blacknet Dossiers." They all work roughly the same way: consume a marked target to start a mission with a small, rotating number of objectives. Completing them rewards you with a power boost. They aren't particularly interesting and usually just feature the same tasks: checkpoint runs, destroy this base, consume that person. It extends gameplay by a couple hours but doesn't add much in the way of fun.
If there's an issue with the game, it's not the gameplay. That's rock solid. At no point during playing it did I get frustrated that the game wasn't reacting the way it should or that something was broken. The issues start cropping up whenever someone talks.
Simply put, [Prototype 2] is really dumb. Almost insultingly dumb. Start with our new anti-hero, Heller: He is every video game protagonist cliche imaginable. He's a Big, Hyper-Masculine Soldier Avenging His Family's Murder. He doesn't Play By The Rules. He has his own Code Of Honor. He's On The Edge and Takes No Crap. He's Mean and Cynical but still has a Soft Spot For Kids. He's also Incredibly Boring.
By contrast, Alex Mercer, the anti-hero of the first game, was much more interesting. Co-written by long time comic book writer Paul Jenkins, it borrowed liberally from Alan Moore's re-interpretation of the Swamp Thing origin story. While Mercer himself was fairly bland, the story around him was surprisingly interesting. It wasn't without it's problems, sure, but it's a narrative issue in both games. You can't expect a gamer to kill hundreds and hundreds of people and then expect them to care about the fate of a stranger. One character even changes allegiances towards the end of the game and it's so ridiculous and nonsensical given your prior relationship that I actually face-palmed when it happened.
There's an acceptable level of stupidity you can expect in an action game. Sometimes it's even endearing. Gears Of War is a good example. It's an incredibly stupid, obvious, lunkheaded, openly manipulative story but it works because the gameplay is so goddamn smooth and the set pieces are so big that it doesn't matter. [P2] isn't as lucky. It lacks the big "Wow!" moments you need to forget how awful the story and the dialogue are.
The opening of the game has Heller talking to his wife in a cut-scene while he's out of the country on a mission. He implores her and their daughter to stay in New York despite the biological weapon outbreak that's happened because he'll be back in just a couple of days. Which is an incredibly stupid move that gets his wife and daughter killed. You might expect the game to even casually address a sense of guilt for his decision but... nope. That would require something beyond a surface level. The character of Kratos worked in God Of War because he was almost a mythological figure, the personification of rage. Heller just comes off like a complete asshole.
This attitude is systemic throughout the game's story and characters. It's aggressively, willfully dumb. Everyone is exactly who you expect them to be and the twists are telegraphed miles in advance. The soldiers, always men, are one-dimensional thugs and killers. The scientists and corporate types, almost entirely men, are completely immoral. Of course the game needs antagonists but there was ample opportunity for any kind of nuance that the game completely ignores. By the end of the game I wanted to start skipping the cut-scenes entirely and only held back because I knew I was going to write about it.
Maybe you don't need a story to like a game. In which case, [Prototype 2] should be right up your alley. However, if you want any entertainment out of your games outside of the gameplay, I just can't recommend it.
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