I'm not playing Skyrim. I probably won't be for a while. Nerd hype kills any kind of hope in me quicker than Obama throwing the working class under a bus for the fifth time in a row. I'll probably pick it up here in about two years the inevitable Game of the Year edition will be available for under 20 bucks.
Nerd hype never delivers. You remember how hard we wanted The Phantom Menace to kick ass? Or The Crystal Skull? Or the Transformers movie? Or Avatar? Or Final Fantasy XIII? You remember how all that hope congealed into an overly-polished turd, Shia LeBeouf, Shia LeBeouf+Dick Joke, furry porn, and Terrible Anime Everything, respectively? The next time more than one internet nerd tells me something that looks like something I'll enjoy will be something I will enjoy, I'm avoiding that something.
This shouldn't really come as any kind of surprise, since I name 'pathologically contrary' as one of my character assets, but what does surprise me is that more people don't feel like me.
Anyway, today I'm going to talk about some games that should, goddammit, should have been good. Like, it would be hard to mess these games up. You would almost have had to set out with the intention of destroying these ideas beforehand to come up with train wrecks of this caliber. Also probably a lot of illegal drugs.
Dragon Age II
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| Spoiler: Nothing else in the game is this dramatic. |
Dragon Age: Origins (and it's 9 billion expansions,) turned out to be one of the best CRPGs of this generation. What was extra surprising was that the console port was well executed. It's a well-known fact that console gamers think that computer gamers are sticky blobs of pizza and energy drink with 40 fingers and zero reproductive organs, while computer gamers think that console gamers are criminally insane sub-humans that struggle with any concept more complex than A=punch. And if the internet is to be trusted, they're both right.
DA: Origins:Awakening of the Return to the Golem Witch Assassin Spawn walked a very fine line between appealing to most and alienating to half. It pulled this off by having a combat system that could either be live-action button-mashing (with squad-mates AI programmed before-hand,) or constantly paused and micro-managed.
Added to this was a relatively deep character customization system in the Diablo vein, where leveling up would allow for a couple of attribute points and a skill point to be dispersed in one of several different schools of discipline. This led to a variety of viable builds for each character class, with only a couple of builds that were notably broken (such as allowing a mage to use intelligence to meet strength requirements for weapons/armor).
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't completely without fault. Having a rogue in your party was mandatory, since there is exactly one way to open a locked chest or disarm a trap. Bashing the lock with a sword or shooting the trap with a fireball were role-playing options that would have to wait for a sequel.
Bashing locks and shooting traps are not in the sequel.
Nor are the multiple origin paths that made the tutorial levels in Origins so (for once,) engaging. Instead, this has been swapped for the option of importing a save game from Origins to determine how the events in DAII will play out. Only not really.
The world also comes across as quite a bit smaller in the sequel. Granted, Kirkwall is a gigantic-ass town, but there's still only one of it. Add to this the fact that there only appear to be about five dungeons shamelessly recycled to do the work of 20. They attempt to pull this off by blocking off and opening up certain paths on each map, but one look at the mini-map reveals that this haunted mansion is the exact same haunted mansion as the last three.
I mean, come on, Bioware. Randomized dungeons are fine. Reusing the same artwork is even fine, but the same damn corridors? Did you really think moving a chest across the room and switching the giant spider with a demon, and then switching the demon with an assassin and bricking up a passage would fool anyone?
The plot is another area that fell apart from the first game. Origins, despite its many, many subplots, had a clear, distinct goal from the very start: Slay the archdemon and end the blight. DAII has no over-arching plot, just a few not-very-interesting-or-coherent subplots strung together linearly: Reclaim your ancestral home from slavers by partnering in an expedition to the Deep Roads, stop an uprising of the Qunari, end the conflict between the Chantry and the mages.
In all honesty, I don't think any of those narratives should rank above side-quest. And on a practical level, they don't. While running mindlessly between quest markers I realized, more that once, that the main plot and the subplots are so indistinguishable that I had forgotten what the point of the game was.
And that really sucks, because narrative was Dragon Age: Origins strong point. Beyond having the least shitty moral choice system I've encountered in a video game (although it did have a lot of Saint Two-Shoes, Joe Doldrum, Ima Bastard choice options,) It had one of the most interesting worlds that hasn't already seen a dozen different incarnations. And it was fucking enthralling.
When I first played Origins, I was immediately gripped by the narrative. I remember thinking "what the fuck is a Grey Warden? Oh, a cursed knight that kills zombie demons? That's badass!" Origins was a masterpiece of nonlinear storytelling. I could, depending on my actions, ally myself with werewolves, clerics, mages, paladins, elves, dwarves, or even the bastard that betrayed the king when it came to the final showdown with the archdemon. I could, depending on my decisions, recruit a host of fairly interesting and unique characters, and then, depending on how I acted around them, have them idolize me, fight me, or have gay sex with me.
Incidentally, I still maintain that there must be some way to play a dwarf, have sex with an elf, and create the race of halflings, the sickly, bastard mules of fantasy fiction.
It would be logical that in the sequel, since they had spent so much time crafting this wonderful world with a rich culture and history, they would capitalize on that and send the player on a quest not just to save the country, but the world. Instead they decided to focus on petty political struggles (recycled subplot from the first game,) racial and class inequality and misunderstandings (recycled subplot from the first game,) wizards being either possessed by demons or lobotomized (recycled subplot from the first game,) and raising money for a mining expedition. I'm not kidding, like 90% of the first act is spent scrounging up enough change from side quests to buy into what is basically another side quest.
For the entire game, the events of Origins are treated as not-very-important. A couple of characters make an appearance, but they're used in such a way it seems like the developers are almost embarrassed by the original. Flemeth shows up early on, which was exciting, since she's such a kick-ass character, then disappointing, since she just gave me an unimportant side-quest and left for what I presume is a much better game.
Alistair, arguably the central character of the first game, shows up as a drunk in a bar. He then contributes nothing.
Anders, the mage from Awakening makes it all the way into your party. Which would have been nice if he didn't then develop multiple personality syndrome to compensate for everyone else's lack of backstory and development. For the whole game he pinballs wildly from charming ladies man, to militant revolutionary, to whingey self-persecutor, to wimpy shoe-horned in love interest, to psychotic demi-god.
I'm not kidding about the love interest. Getting someone to fall in love with you in Origins took intentional, concentrated effort. Here it just seems to default to Anders-wuvs-you, even when I'm nailing the pirate lady he hates and is constantly treating for orc herpes.
Speaking of the Loose Pirate Lady and personalities: Everyone else you can recruit has matching personalities and job descriptions. The Weird Elf Mage is weird, an elf, and a mage. The Dour Runaway Slave is dour and a runaway slave. The Scheming Dwarven Archer is a dwarven archer that schemes often. It's the old shitty slasher movie formula that focuses on personality traits, instead of personalities. Only there's no Jason Voorhees to root for/try to vanquish.
Another thing that really irked me were the way dragons were treated in the sequel. I mean, I'm not a dragon fetishist or anything, but, look, the name of the game is DRAGON Age. In the first game there were only like 3 dragons that you fought, and each one was a BIG deal. In the sequel they've been moved into the generic sub-boss category. Like, hey, there's a dragon, I wonder what it's guarding? Oh. 27 silver and some not very good pants. Hooray.
Alright, moving on.
Fallout: New Vegas
Something I loved about the first three Fallout games was that it had the best of both worlds, narratively. Not only does the world of Fallout come packaged with a rich backstory to draw from, it's also never tied to any specific storyline or plot thread, so it's always fresh.
While in Fallout two you played the direct descendant of the protagonist from the first Fallout, in Fallout 3 (the one that got made,) was centered around Washington DC. As for the Fallout 3 that ran out of money, it was set to be centered around the Colorado/Utah area.
So, basically, we have an entire radioactive continent from our old future to play around in. Fallout 4 could have gone anywhere. Mutant oil barons in Texas a la the Road Warrior, a dystopian steampunk society built on the remains of New York, drug wars in a nightmarishly hyper-verdant Florida, it could have been anything. I mean the Pitt expansion of Fallout 3 made Pittsburgh awesome. Pittsburgh! You know what else is awesome about Pittsburgh? Me neither.
After Bethesda did the impossible by making a big-budget sequel to a cult classic that was good, they handed the development torch off to Obsidian. This was seen as an ominously smart move, since many employees of Obsidian were with Black Isle for the development of the original Fallout games. Bethesda money and Black Isle design? Fanboys wet themselves in anticipation. Cynical fucks like me waited for the shoe to drop.
Unfortunately, Obsidian made their first mistake at the first opportunity for mistake making, and it went on to ruin everything after. That's just my opinion, but it's the goddamn right opinion to have.
This mistake was this: They took a look at the history of Fallout, the universe they helped create, and then someone said "Hey! Why not, hear me out, instead of setting it in some super-dangerous radioactive wasteland on the bones of a once-great society, why don't we set it in the one location unaffected by the Cold War Where Russia Wasn't Bluffing?"
And no one said "Because we're paying Ron Perlman good money to talk about nuclear war and it's consequences in the opening fucking monologue."
And no one said "Because the fucking game is named "Fallout," not "Red Dead Redemption+Lasers." Idiot."
And no one said "Because the whole "what happens in Vegas" meme is already old and the game will look horribly dated before it's released."
And no one said "Because California and Washington DC are important places in the American subconscious, the way the Hoover Dam and the Vegas Strip aren't."
And no one said "Because the middle of the fucking Mojave desert is a fucking stupid place for man to rebuild society."
And it got green-lighted.
Sooooo, here we are. Hundreds of miles away from the central plot with nothing to go on but a description of the guy that shot me in the opening cinematic and some vague directions along the lines of "Vegas is north, but you'll die if you go north."
Similar to Fallout 3, there were different factions you could ally yourself with. About 12 dozen different factions in fact. In my experience all this added was needless convolution. The 'three main factions' theme of the previous games managed to to be concise, without falling into the Dr. Doom vs. Superman Vs. Deadpool stereotypes most three-choice systems seem to fall into. NCR vs. The Brotherhood of Steel vs. Some Third Thing worked. Adding in The Roman Reenactment Society, Meth Nazi's, Elvis Impersonators and The Impractical Weapon Convicts just turns everything into a mess while devaluing everything that was important by lumping it in with all this other silly bullshit.
The gameplay/graphics/ect. are almost exactly like Fallout 3. This is fine, but they made the odd choice of making odd choices for things to improve. VATS, for example, isn't a magic 'FREEZE TIME" button, but it still freezes the fucking game in the bad way. They added new enemies, but since the most impressive of these was a giant Deathclaw herd that I killed with headshots from 5 miles away it seems like they could have been better implemented. Like, I don't know, put it at the end of a sewer maze, minotaur style.
They added a hardcore mode that made eating and sleeping at certain intervals mandatory, and I totally ignored that option for the same reason I fucking hate fishing minigames. Realism is fine in areas like enemy AI, dialogue, jiggle physics and weapon damage. It's irritating bullshit when when it's used for cooking dinner or using the restroom.
Maybe I've been spoiled by Demon's Souls, or maybe spending like 90 hours playing Fallout 3 made me over-qualified, or maybe it was a childhood spent playing games that fucking hated children, but the difficulty curve seemed to go backwards. It started challenging enough, but about two seconds after I had a sniper rifle and shotgun 'danger' became a thing of the past. Especially since the obnoxiously easy to reach level cap had turned me into a walking Doomsday Weapon two thirds of the way into the game.
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| This motherfucker has killed me WAY more than anything in Fallout ever will. |
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