Working up to the mid-September release of Borderlands 2, Gearbox Software has been in full on PR blitz mode. It has all the earmarks of a smash hit. The original was a fast, funny and addicting mix of first person shooter and Diablo-style loot farming. Everything they've released about the sequel so far makes it seem as though they've worked on their weaknesses and expanded on their strengths. I don't think I'm jumping the gun by saying that it's going to be an excellent game. Unfortunately, gender politics in gaming has been picking up speed (as well as pageviews) this year and Gearbox has had to deal with a few mini-crises as a result.
First there was the release of Duke Nuke'em Forever, which was a terrible game by anyone's estimation and really missed the mark on everything, including some creepy scenes involving Duke's bimbo hangers-on. Not kitschy, tongue-in-cheek, exploitation stuff either but legitimately mean and unfunny crap better left unused. Gearbox mostly scooted past criticism because the game was mostly done when they bought it from the defunct company who had previously been developing it. It was a Gearbox game in name only.
Then, a couple of months ago, Gearbox decided that they weren't going to add female Marines into the Aliens: Colonial Marines multiplayer that's due out next year. The assets were there in the single player but for as-yet-undefined reasons, they won't be included in the multiplayer. Women are fundamental to the Alien mythology, both thematically and in characters like Ripley and Vasquez, so their absence was curious. You can get skins of Aliens characters like Hudson and Apone as a pre-order bonus from GameStop, but no Ellen Ripley? A dedicated fan started a petition to have women added that went well beyond expectations (and garnered articles about it on most of the major gaming news sites) but Gearbox is still silent about the issue.
Most recently, in an interview by Eurogamer, lead designer John Hemingway referred to a skill tree for the Borderlands 2 DLC character class, The Mechromancer, as "girlfriend mode" for it's ability to essentially dumb down gameplay for beginners. Because... haha... girls are pretty bad at games. Am I right, guys? Right? Up top! Yeah! Crack a brewski!
It's pretty clear in the interview that Eurogamer was not needlessly sensationalizing Hemingway's comments but merely reporting exactly what he said. At no point did they editorialize, they just printed his quotes. It didn't stop Gearbox head Randy Pitchford from taking to Twitter to defend Hemingway, referring to his use of the "girlfriend mode" phrase as a "personal anecdote" and doing some old fashioned "blame the messenger" PR moves.
To be fair, on the continuum of sexism, Hemingway's comments rank somewhere alongside your average issue of Maxim magazine. As a guy, it seems like a fairly standard dudebro thing to say and I'm not particularly offended by it. The sticking point seemed to be his lunkheaded insistence on repeating the phrase several more times in an attempt to sell the non-joke. Fine. Poor choice of words, questionable judgement, no big deal. A good opportunity to continue the discussion of women in gaming but not all that dire of a situation.
However, if you look at the same article on other sites, the "Girlfriend Mode" comments were completely removed. They just wrote around it. Some sites reported the kerfuffle others, predictably, went the other direction and decried the evils of political correctness that are presenting a clear and present gamer to the future of gamizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. For instance, the typically facepalm-able defense from IGN's Colin Moriarty. (Because it wouldn't be IGN if they didn't find some way to blame the fans for the industry's problems.)
Just as a sidenote: How about we wait until women are better represented in games before we jump straight to the apoplectic shrieks of political correctness killing gaming? Women now represent around half of all gamers but there's no way you'd know that from the games come out every week. The fact that people like Moriarty overreact to even the notion of discussing sexism in games is a pretty clear sign that we're on the right track. It means that the section of people who reflexively fear change are getting worried. That's a good sign and, if nothing else, the precursor to a lot of primo schadenfreude at their expense.
Since I started this blog, my two biggest fascinations have been sexism in the gaming industry and the failures of gaming journalism to accurately represent the fans. This "Girlfriend Mode" issue is a good example of both. Developers and publishers have a reputation for being astonishingly petty and defensive. Give a bad review or bad press and you can kiss your previews, exclusives, review copies, and ad buys goodbye. They can ostensibly hold you hostage for telling the truth. That means that dissenting opinions happen mostly on smaller sites where they are open to smirking accusations of pandering for pageviews. (For a recent example, see Gamefront and the Forbes bloggers in the wake of the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy.)
I'm cynical enough at this point to know that it's not going to change anytime soon. Until developers and publishers start thickening their skin (and stop pretending that they don't know when they're releasing sub par products) and journalists start toughening up and ignoring comments sections trolls and Twitter threats and write for the silent majority, your best bet is supporting the smaller, hungrier people whose sense of self-preservation hasn't kicked in yet. Or making sure you support places like Eurogamer when they refuse to back down for doing their job right. Those big sites aren't going anywhere.
The ball is already rolling in regards to treating women better in games and it will only pick up steam as it goes. The real turning point will happen when enough women join the industry that the casual misogyny that comes with working in a male dominated industry becomes untenable. (And you can believe that guys like Moriarty will be dramatically shaking their fists at the sky the entire time.) This is still a very young industry in a society that still has a bad habit of treating women as weaker or lesser than.
Likewise, the gaming press has a hard route to travel trying to balance staying in the good graces of tetchy developers with being honest with their very mercurial readers. The industry already has a very bad habit of blaming fans to cover for their own fragile egos. It's an easy excuse and usually disingenuous bullshit. In that respect, fans aren't the only ones who need to grow up a little. The difference is that a lot of the worst offenders amongst the angry fans are young enough to possibly learn better. One article with one developer's loose tongue doesn't matter much one way or the other but it's still a conversation worth having, however inconvenient it might be.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Walking The Room
New Media has been pretty awesome for comedians in the last few years. Twitter has proven to be a meritocracy where people like Megan Amram and Rob Delaney can build followings out of one liners. Podcasts have gone from a substitute for terrestrial radio (The Adam Carolla Show), an opportunity to do some long form improv (Comedy Bang Bang) to career rehab (WTF With Marc Maron) and career kickstarters (You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes). Now it's being used as a cheap way for comedians to hone their talent and hang with friends while also, if you play your cards right, being a testing ground for TV show pilots. Comedy Bang Bang is already running on IFC with pilots by guys like Paul F. Thompkins, Jimmy Pardo, Pete Holmes and Marc Maron in various stages of development. Adam fucking Carolla is in the Guinness Book Of World Records because of his podcast.
And then there's Walking The Room.
Y'know what? No. Fuck it. Too easy. I'm going to be that special kind of asshole who talks about comedy seriously. (I'm expecting to write for The Onion A/V Club any day now.) The term "walking the room" is comedic shorthand for bombing so badly that people walk out on you. Cuddlahs, the nickname for hardcore WTR listeners, know all the lingo but I need to ease you in. If I just start blathering about how I'm clown from the neck down and I saw a hobotang shoving oranges into his meat pockets screaming "You got friiiiien'" while wearing Grip-'Em-Ups you're going to think I'm a fucking idiot.
Okay.
Walking The Room is a comedy podcast starring Greg Behrendt and Dave Anthony. They've been friends and stand-up comedians off and on for (and I have no intention of looking this up to make sure it's accurate) I'm going to say about two decades. It's crass and sweet in almost equal measure. More than most podcasts, they talk almost about their lives. This isn't an interview show or an excuse to do long form improv. This is two (sometimes three) funny people sitting in a closet making each other laugh.
About a year ago, I was looking for some new podcasts. After listening to Adam Carolla every day at work for more than a year, I was getting worn out. He used to talk a lot about how friends and family tuned him out after awhile and I found myself doing that exact the same thing. He had a finite number of stories and repeated themselves regularly so I was looking to jump off. All I had known about Greg Behrendt at the time was that he was the He's Just Not That Into You Guy and that he did Loveline with Adam once and allegedly wasn't funny. However, after seeing Greg on Jimmy Pardo's Never Not Funny be very goddamn funny thanks, I reconsidered. Then I heard about Patton Oswalt's tweets about the show and that pushed me over the edge.
With the first episode I listened to, #56, all it took was sitting at my desk and work and listening to them joke about not being mad at Greg's wife for possibly leaving him because she would be "jumping out of the toilet mid-flush" and I was sold. Then, after making Greg laugh so hard he couldn't speak, Dave started shouting "Are you dying? YES! DIE! FINALLY!" I had to run and hide in a bathroom stall for five minutes because I was laughing so hard that people were popping their heads out of their cubicle to stare at me. That was it. I dived in completely. At a rate of about four episodes a day. Which, in retrospect, may not have been either healthy or wise.
Greg and Dave's willingness to talk about their lives, their foibles, neuroses, and career worries is part of what makes the show unique. Greg achieved success with a couple of best selling books (one of which got turned into a movie) and a daytime talk show that spun out of something that wasn't really part of his forte: self-help. He'd been a professional stand-up for over a decade by that point but when he achieved popularity, it wasn't for the things he'd been working at for so long. He could have probably rode the self-help thing into the ground but instead he's been focusing in his surf/ska band, The Reigning Monarchs, and fashion. Trying to find some kind of balance in his post-self-help guy career between comedy and other pursuits is a regular source of content.
Dave, on the other hand, had a lot of promise as a young stand-up but also a penchant for anger and self-sabotage that kept dragging him down. (For a more detailed explanation, you can listen to his episode of Paul Gilmartin's excellent Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast.) He's since course corrected and now has a wife and son and finds work as a writer, stand-up and occasionally a commercial actor. There's also the L.A. Podcast Festival he co-founded that starts in October. He's also an absolute beast on Twitter. Always more the aggressive of the pair and less willing to take shit from people, they get a lot of material out of Dave reacting to other people's stupidity. (It rarely ends well for them.)
When you put them together, the result is a pretty classic comedy dynamic... provided you can take it. The twisted stories that Dave opens most episodes with are designed to weed out the weak and easily offended. Chances are, you'll know in the first five minutes if the show is for you. Compared to shows like Comedy Bang Bang or The Nerdist which, by virtue of their format, keep you at arms length and away from the personal lives of their hosts, WTR gets you uncomfortably close. Their family lives are usually a prominent feature. As you'd expect from comedians who've known each other for so long, their ability to annoy each other is unparallelled. (Listening to Greg get under Dave's skin by merely making a noise is always a joy.) There's also precious little Rogan/Carolla-style macho chestbeating. As you'd expect from a show recorded by two grown men in a closet, there's a lot of aggressive male energy but it's never misogynist or homophobic. Guests like Jen Kirkman, Karen Kilgariff and Nikki Glaser more than hold their own.
One of the most endearing traits about the show is how they don't seem to put themselves above or separate from their fans. You're right there in the clown car with them. Insulting Greg and/or Dave as a joke is practically an initiation ritual. They're accessible via their forums The Hot Dog Thunderdome and The Hot Dog Thunderforum. They're both on Twitter and Facebook. Bonding through failure and sadness is what the podcuddle is all about. There's a lot of other podcasts out there that are just a couple of dudes talking, but the pedigree of Walking The Room and the frankness with which they talk puts them well above the rest. This is mandatory listening for all comedy fans.
Links:
Walking The Room - The homepage which features updates, a webstore and a handy glossary for catching up with all of the in-jokes and short hand that's popped up over the course of over a hundred episodes.
The Walking The Room Tumblr page
The Walking The Room YouTube Channel
The Walking The Room Libsyn page - Direct downloads for those who don't want to subscribe via iTunes.
Suggested listening:
#22: Hobo Orange Thieves - WTR's greatest contribution to the English language, "hobotang," begins here.
#24: Candy Insanity & No Snitching Ellen - Probably the best episode to start with and the easiest way to figure out if the show is for you.
#44: Brian "Piranha" Posehn & Hobotang Skin Pockets / #50: Patton Oswalt / #81: Patton Oswalt & Drop Some Bass: Three more good choices for beginners who need the safety of more popular comedians to help ease them in. Pussies.
#43: Wheelchwitz & The Heckler
#56: Mid Flush Jump & Elephon
#59: A Lift To Babytown & Get Off At Murder
#86: Junk Pics & Napalm Dixon - One of my favorite Greg bits: "He's good, he's good, he's good, he's dead."
#114: Wood Master Paul Gilmartin - In which Dave asks the single worst question of all time.
Live Cuddle #2: What Can Brown Do For You? - A live show for $2 on their website where guest Dave Holmes tells possibly the best shit story of all time.
Get into it, Cuddlah!
And then there's Walking The Room.
Y'know what? No. Fuck it. Too easy. I'm going to be that special kind of asshole who talks about comedy seriously. (I'm expecting to write for The Onion A/V Club any day now.) The term "walking the room" is comedic shorthand for bombing so badly that people walk out on you. Cuddlahs, the nickname for hardcore WTR listeners, know all the lingo but I need to ease you in. If I just start blathering about how I'm clown from the neck down and I saw a hobotang shoving oranges into his meat pockets screaming "You got friiiiien'" while wearing Grip-'Em-Ups you're going to think I'm a fucking idiot.
Okay.
Walking The Room is a comedy podcast starring Greg Behrendt and Dave Anthony. They've been friends and stand-up comedians off and on for (and I have no intention of looking this up to make sure it's accurate) I'm going to say about two decades. It's crass and sweet in almost equal measure. More than most podcasts, they talk almost about their lives. This isn't an interview show or an excuse to do long form improv. This is two (sometimes three) funny people sitting in a closet making each other laugh.
About a year ago, I was looking for some new podcasts. After listening to Adam Carolla every day at work for more than a year, I was getting worn out. He used to talk a lot about how friends and family tuned him out after awhile and I found myself doing that exact the same thing. He had a finite number of stories and repeated themselves regularly so I was looking to jump off. All I had known about Greg Behrendt at the time was that he was the He's Just Not That Into You Guy and that he did Loveline with Adam once and allegedly wasn't funny. However, after seeing Greg on Jimmy Pardo's Never Not Funny be very goddamn funny thanks, I reconsidered. Then I heard about Patton Oswalt's tweets about the show and that pushed me over the edge.
With the first episode I listened to, #56, all it took was sitting at my desk and work and listening to them joke about not being mad at Greg's wife for possibly leaving him because she would be "jumping out of the toilet mid-flush" and I was sold. Then, after making Greg laugh so hard he couldn't speak, Dave started shouting "Are you dying? YES! DIE! FINALLY!" I had to run and hide in a bathroom stall for five minutes because I was laughing so hard that people were popping their heads out of their cubicle to stare at me. That was it. I dived in completely. At a rate of about four episodes a day. Which, in retrospect, may not have been either healthy or wise.
Greg and Dave's willingness to talk about their lives, their foibles, neuroses, and career worries is part of what makes the show unique. Greg achieved success with a couple of best selling books (one of which got turned into a movie) and a daytime talk show that spun out of something that wasn't really part of his forte: self-help. He'd been a professional stand-up for over a decade by that point but when he achieved popularity, it wasn't for the things he'd been working at for so long. He could have probably rode the self-help thing into the ground but instead he's been focusing in his surf/ska band, The Reigning Monarchs, and fashion. Trying to find some kind of balance in his post-self-help guy career between comedy and other pursuits is a regular source of content.
Dave, on the other hand, had a lot of promise as a young stand-up but also a penchant for anger and self-sabotage that kept dragging him down. (For a more detailed explanation, you can listen to his episode of Paul Gilmartin's excellent Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast.) He's since course corrected and now has a wife and son and finds work as a writer, stand-up and occasionally a commercial actor. There's also the L.A. Podcast Festival he co-founded that starts in October. He's also an absolute beast on Twitter. Always more the aggressive of the pair and less willing to take shit from people, they get a lot of material out of Dave reacting to other people's stupidity. (It rarely ends well for them.)
When you put them together, the result is a pretty classic comedy dynamic... provided you can take it. The twisted stories that Dave opens most episodes with are designed to weed out the weak and easily offended. Chances are, you'll know in the first five minutes if the show is for you. Compared to shows like Comedy Bang Bang or The Nerdist which, by virtue of their format, keep you at arms length and away from the personal lives of their hosts, WTR gets you uncomfortably close. Their family lives are usually a prominent feature. As you'd expect from comedians who've known each other for so long, their ability to annoy each other is unparallelled. (Listening to Greg get under Dave's skin by merely making a noise is always a joy.) There's also precious little Rogan/Carolla-style macho chestbeating. As you'd expect from a show recorded by two grown men in a closet, there's a lot of aggressive male energy but it's never misogynist or homophobic. Guests like Jen Kirkman, Karen Kilgariff and Nikki Glaser more than hold their own.
One of the most endearing traits about the show is how they don't seem to put themselves above or separate from their fans. You're right there in the clown car with them. Insulting Greg and/or Dave as a joke is practically an initiation ritual. They're accessible via their forums The Hot Dog Thunderdome and The Hot Dog Thunderforum. They're both on Twitter and Facebook. Bonding through failure and sadness is what the podcuddle is all about. There's a lot of other podcasts out there that are just a couple of dudes talking, but the pedigree of Walking The Room and the frankness with which they talk puts them well above the rest. This is mandatory listening for all comedy fans.
Links:
Walking The Room - The homepage which features updates, a webstore and a handy glossary for catching up with all of the in-jokes and short hand that's popped up over the course of over a hundred episodes.
The Walking The Room Tumblr page
The Walking The Room YouTube Channel
The Walking The Room Libsyn page - Direct downloads for those who don't want to subscribe via iTunes.
Suggested listening:
#22: Hobo Orange Thieves - WTR's greatest contribution to the English language, "hobotang," begins here.
#24: Candy Insanity & No Snitching Ellen - Probably the best episode to start with and the easiest way to figure out if the show is for you.
#44: Brian "Piranha" Posehn & Hobotang Skin Pockets / #50: Patton Oswalt / #81: Patton Oswalt & Drop Some Bass: Three more good choices for beginners who need the safety of more popular comedians to help ease them in. Pussies.
#43: Wheelchwitz & The Heckler
#56: Mid Flush Jump & Elephon
#59: A Lift To Babytown & Get Off At Murder
#86: Junk Pics & Napalm Dixon - One of my favorite Greg bits: "He's good, he's good, he's good, he's dead."
#114: Wood Master Paul Gilmartin - In which Dave asks the single worst question of all time.
Live Cuddle #2: What Can Brown Do For You? - A live show for $2 on their website where guest Dave Holmes tells possibly the best shit story of all time.
Get into it, Cuddlah!
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, July 8, 2012
Quick Hits
I just got back from seeing Twitter phenom Rob Delaney perform stand-up and it was a great time. I'm not just saying that because the first words out of his mouth were to point out the Sleep t-shirt I was wearing which sent him on an anecdote about writing a letter to Glenn Danzig as a child. Or the fact that he's a very handsome man who rocked a Kyuss t-shirt in a room full of plaid hipsters and young professionals. (The guy sitting next to me was wearing slippers. Legit slippers. How I got through the show without putting him in a headlock and driving his skull into the stage I'll never know.) Or the fact that he spent about an hour talking about how much he loves women, boobies, vaginas, buttles and all the wonderful things he can do to them in a consensual sexual context. He's just a flat out great comedian.
First thing you should know: homeboy loves women. All of them. Not in a creepy, misogynist way either. When he talks about sticking his face in a woman's nether regions and motorboating it like a guy in the middle of a violent seizure, it's not coming from a place of objectification, it's coming from a place of real love. In fact, just about all of his stories come from a place of genuine enthusiasm: his wife, his kid, his penis, Serena Williams, all of it.
If you spend enough time around stand-up comedy you can start to get a sense of the comedian's rhythm: set-up, punchline, pause, tag. That sort of thing. If I had to describe Rob's style it would be: set-up, punchline, punchline, punchline, punchline. He's great at raising the stakes and wringing every bit of laughter out of a premise. It helped that this was a genuinely good crowd at a good venue who were really into the performer and the material. If anyone left that show unsatisfied, it's not on Rob.
He's apparently just recently filmed a special that will be released later this year. Keep an eye out because it's good stuff.
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In the video game world, I'm splitting my time between Lollipop Chainsaw, Dragon's Dogma, and an Insane difficulty run on Mass Effect 3 as well as some Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. There's a lot to say about Lollipop Chainsaw and Dragon's Dogma so I'll have articles up about them at length sometime in the near future. I'm currently working 60 hours of mandatory overtime at work this month so my free time is severely limited.
On the news front, I'm finding the story that Gearbox Software has decided not to add female characters to the multiplayer for their upcoming shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines very interesting. Apparently there will be female characters in the single-player but they'll be absent in the multiplayer.
Looking back at my previous articles, female representation in video games is something I'm a lot more interested in than I would have thought. I can't remember ever having a discussion about misogyny in the gaming industry with people in real life. Nonetheless, women are a solid and growing demographic that regularly gets short shrift from guys in the industry whose idea of women is... well, let's just say "naive."
There's no reason to believe that Gearbox is doing this with malicious intent. In fact, their justification is still pretty hazy right now. It could be a matter of time, lack of interest, or perhaps not wanting to risk the perception of violence against women being okay. If it's the later, they may just need a nudge to recognize that violence against women in video games is only questionable if it's mostly women who are the focus of the violence. Gearbox has always been a very solid developer with a track record of quality. Every woman I've ever gamed with has the potential to be every bit as bloodthirsty as the dudes. There's really no reason to mollycoddle or segregate them. If you've ever been in the lobby of a Call Of Duty game, the loud, whiny, obnoxious dudes are the ones you should be looking out for, not women.
To that end, I've been organizing some low level Twitter bombs to try and get Gearbox's attention. There's already a petition out there to be signed and the story has gained a bit of traction on the major gaming news sites. There's really nothing to be gained from not acquiescing, so hopefully either female characters will be available by launch day or as DLC after the fact. Because, honestly, where the hell would the Aliens franchise be without women anyway? Ripley and Vasquez alone are more bad ass then all of the men in the series combined.
You can get more information about the story here: http://www.destructoid.com/aliens-colonial-marines-and-upping-the-female-ante-230535.phtml
You can also contact Gearbox directly here: http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/contact/
Or on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/GearboxSoftware
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Since I've been at work more than usual, I've been listening to a lot more music than usual too. I was lucky enough to see Southern Lord's Black Breath/Martyrdod/Burning Love/Enabler show a couple weeks (unfortunately missing the El-P/Killer Mike/Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire show as a result) back and was totally blown away by Toronto's Burning Love. They played so hard that a dude in the front row stroked out and had to be taken away in an ambulance as a result. At least, that's what I choose to believe caused it.
Burning Love is a punk band featuring vocals from Chris Colohan of cult legends Cursed and holy fucking shit their second record, Rotten Thing To Say, is the best punk record I've heard in years. So much music in that genre is just empty rhetoric and simplistic fist-pumping that when something like this band comes along it retroactively makes other music I listen to seem shitty by comparison.
The lyrics are dense and thoughtful, the music is intense and they aren't afraid of the occasional guitar solo. This track, "Hateful Comforts," is my favorite. It's been on regular rotation since the show:
Also in regular rotation has been Tokyo Jihen, a project headed by Japanese pop star Shiina Ringo. She's one of the rare pop stars in any country who can make a case for being an actual artist rather than a pretty girl with a decent voice pulling a paycheck by singing the same songs over and over again. Compare her recent Tokyo Jihen stuff to her early pop songs and she's clearly come miles since then. There's still a strong jazz and punk influence to her work that comes through.
There's also the new Aesop Rock album, Skelethon, that's due out on Tuesday. I liked the initial video he released, "Zero Dark Thirty," but this new track "ZZZ Top" just nails it. The video is pretty great as well... kung fu, throwing knives and baseball bats. Man, that beat just kills me.
And, finally, there's the mighty Baroness. People are apparently a little worried that they've gone in a more rock and roll direction since Blue Record but that's a load of bull. The band has more than proved themselves worthy of changing and evolving their sound. They were always a little too idiosyncratic to be a straight "metal" band anyway. If the rest of their double album, Yellow & Green, is anything as good as this, then the fairweather fans are more than welcome to suck it:
Hopefully, I'll have an article up in the next week or so about Lollipop Chainsaw or Dragon's Dogma.
First thing you should know: homeboy loves women. All of them. Not in a creepy, misogynist way either. When he talks about sticking his face in a woman's nether regions and motorboating it like a guy in the middle of a violent seizure, it's not coming from a place of objectification, it's coming from a place of real love. In fact, just about all of his stories come from a place of genuine enthusiasm: his wife, his kid, his penis, Serena Williams, all of it.
If you spend enough time around stand-up comedy you can start to get a sense of the comedian's rhythm: set-up, punchline, pause, tag. That sort of thing. If I had to describe Rob's style it would be: set-up, punchline, punchline, punchline, punchline. He's great at raising the stakes and wringing every bit of laughter out of a premise. It helped that this was a genuinely good crowd at a good venue who were really into the performer and the material. If anyone left that show unsatisfied, it's not on Rob.
He's apparently just recently filmed a special that will be released later this year. Keep an eye out because it's good stuff.
---
In the video game world, I'm splitting my time between Lollipop Chainsaw, Dragon's Dogma, and an Insane difficulty run on Mass Effect 3 as well as some Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. There's a lot to say about Lollipop Chainsaw and Dragon's Dogma so I'll have articles up about them at length sometime in the near future. I'm currently working 60 hours of mandatory overtime at work this month so my free time is severely limited.
On the news front, I'm finding the story that Gearbox Software has decided not to add female characters to the multiplayer for their upcoming shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines very interesting. Apparently there will be female characters in the single-player but they'll be absent in the multiplayer.
Looking back at my previous articles, female representation in video games is something I'm a lot more interested in than I would have thought. I can't remember ever having a discussion about misogyny in the gaming industry with people in real life. Nonetheless, women are a solid and growing demographic that regularly gets short shrift from guys in the industry whose idea of women is... well, let's just say "naive."
There's no reason to believe that Gearbox is doing this with malicious intent. In fact, their justification is still pretty hazy right now. It could be a matter of time, lack of interest, or perhaps not wanting to risk the perception of violence against women being okay. If it's the later, they may just need a nudge to recognize that violence against women in video games is only questionable if it's mostly women who are the focus of the violence. Gearbox has always been a very solid developer with a track record of quality. Every woman I've ever gamed with has the potential to be every bit as bloodthirsty as the dudes. There's really no reason to mollycoddle or segregate them. If you've ever been in the lobby of a Call Of Duty game, the loud, whiny, obnoxious dudes are the ones you should be looking out for, not women.
To that end, I've been organizing some low level Twitter bombs to try and get Gearbox's attention. There's already a petition out there to be signed and the story has gained a bit of traction on the major gaming news sites. There's really nothing to be gained from not acquiescing, so hopefully either female characters will be available by launch day or as DLC after the fact. Because, honestly, where the hell would the Aliens franchise be without women anyway? Ripley and Vasquez alone are more bad ass then all of the men in the series combined.
You can get more information about the story here: http://www.destructoid.com/aliens-colonial-marines-and-upping-the-female-ante-230535.phtml
You can also contact Gearbox directly here: http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/contact/
Or on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/GearboxSoftware
---
Since I've been at work more than usual, I've been listening to a lot more music than usual too. I was lucky enough to see Southern Lord's Black Breath/Martyrdod/Burning Love/Enabler show a couple weeks (unfortunately missing the El-P/Killer Mike/Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire show as a result) back and was totally blown away by Toronto's Burning Love. They played so hard that a dude in the front row stroked out and had to be taken away in an ambulance as a result. At least, that's what I choose to believe caused it.
Burning Love is a punk band featuring vocals from Chris Colohan of cult legends Cursed and holy fucking shit their second record, Rotten Thing To Say, is the best punk record I've heard in years. So much music in that genre is just empty rhetoric and simplistic fist-pumping that when something like this band comes along it retroactively makes other music I listen to seem shitty by comparison.
The lyrics are dense and thoughtful, the music is intense and they aren't afraid of the occasional guitar solo. This track, "Hateful Comforts," is my favorite. It's been on regular rotation since the show:
Also in regular rotation has been Tokyo Jihen, a project headed by Japanese pop star Shiina Ringo. She's one of the rare pop stars in any country who can make a case for being an actual artist rather than a pretty girl with a decent voice pulling a paycheck by singing the same songs over and over again. Compare her recent Tokyo Jihen stuff to her early pop songs and she's clearly come miles since then. There's still a strong jazz and punk influence to her work that comes through.
There's also the new Aesop Rock album, Skelethon, that's due out on Tuesday. I liked the initial video he released, "Zero Dark Thirty," but this new track "ZZZ Top" just nails it. The video is pretty great as well... kung fu, throwing knives and baseball bats. Man, that beat just kills me.
And, finally, there's the mighty Baroness. People are apparently a little worried that they've gone in a more rock and roll direction since Blue Record but that's a load of bull. The band has more than proved themselves worthy of changing and evolving their sound. They were always a little too idiosyncratic to be a straight "metal" band anyway. If the rest of their double album, Yellow & Green, is anything as good as this, then the fairweather fans are more than welcome to suck it:
Hopefully, I'll have an article up in the next week or so about Lollipop Chainsaw or Dragon's Dogma.
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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