To the Shooters I Treated Badly

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

To the Shooters I Treated Badly

Yahtzee wonders if he would enjoy Far Cry 3 as much as he did if this year's crop of shooters weren't so linear.

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[RobfromtheGulag]

It's just nice to see a hero who has to fundamentally change themselves to succeed, rather than the protagonist just being this smug immovable object smacking the status quo back into line.

That's the thing though. He shouldn't have succeeded. There was no way he was going to succeed. But add a magic tattoo and suddenly he's Rambo. His attitude was certainly different, but I don't know if I appreciate it more than the stone faced norm.

Ditto on the wingsuit, it's the only reason I'm playing the game a 2nd time right afterwards. To rush the story up to wingsuit then glide around the island aimlessly.

Bulletstorm is awesome. It's colorful, has rather enjoyable lead characters, and it's a sci-fi setting which is getting rare for shooters nowadays. I replay it regularly, though the combo kills do give me some heartburn. I'd really just rather shoot stuff as I see fit, and if it's accidentally awesome then all the better. Having to f9/f5 repeatedly in one of 3 unique locations I can get a skillshot in the game is rough.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Totally agree.
The only thing about FC 3 that sucks imho is the quicktime event BS that passes for Bosses.
While it's nice to nail the person who causes you grief with a big knife in the chest, it's ten times nicer to actually let ME do it, instead of just giving me the honor to mash the spacebar into oblivion.

Yahtzee calls that "the game being afraid that you'd cramp it's style" in his DMC 4 review and it's one of my top grievances with recent games. You notice it even more in FC 3, because it has so much freedom in all the other places.

If I recall correctly Resident Evil 4 had lots of QTE's, but in the end it was always YOU capping Midget Napoleon in the face in combat with that sweet, sweet high powered revolver.

 

[oldtaku]

Bulletstorm manages to do the gross spectacle thing while also having consistency, focus, pacing, coherent progression, and the ability to nail people to walls.

The most glorious thing about Bulletstorm was how many ways there were to smoothly chain spectacular violence together. For me the actual game was just training for the score levels, where you really get to see just how creative and skilled you are and it's nonstop carnage. I think the story and dialogue distracted from just how well put together the game mechanics was -It was what The Club should have been.

 

[xptn40S]

I'm kinda wondering if, in the future, the Call of Duty series along with other MMS'es of the same caliber will be seen as the "Daikatana" of this generation (what with them slightly lowering the bar of FPS'es and making other games that were previously regarded as below average look good in hindsight).

Heh, and to think that some people from last week thought that you'd failed to acknowledge the existence of the wing-suit in the game, kinda seems like they have to eat their own words now.

 

[Kopikatsu]

Totally agree.
The only thing about FC 3 that sucks imho is the quicktime event BS that passes for Bosses.
While it's nice to nail the person who causes you grief with a big knife in the chest, it's ten times nicer to actually let ME do it, instead of just giving me the honor to mash the spacebar into oblivion.

Yahtzee calls that "the game being afraid that you'd cramp it's style" in his DMC 4 review and it's one of my top grievances with recent games. You notice it even more in FC 3, because it has so much freedom in all the other places.

If I recall correctly Resident Evil 4 had lots of QTE's, but in the end it was always YOU capping Midget Napoleon in the face in combat with that sweet, sweet high powered revolver.

I never really understood this complaint about QTEs. How is hitting a boss with the same three-hit combo fifty times that you've used twelve-hundred times in the past or emptying five clips into a person instead of the usual half more satisfying than, say, tackling the guy off a balcony, punching him in the face repeatedly while sliding down part of the roof, then steal his knife and ram it into his throat while you're in free-fall (as a random example)?

QTEs were probably the best thing to happen to boss fights since ever.

 

[getoffmycloud]

Totally agree.
The only thing about FC 3 that sucks imho is the quicktime event BS that passes for Bosses.
While it's nice to nail the person who causes you grief with a big knife in the chest, it's ten times nicer to actually let ME do it, instead of just giving me the honor to mash the spacebar into oblivion.

Yahtzee calls that "the game being afraid that you'd cramp it's style" in his DMC 4 review and it's one of my top grievances with recent games. You notice it even more in FC 3, because it has so much freedom in all the other places.

If I recall correctly Resident Evil 4 had lots of QTE's, but in the end it was always YOU capping Midget Napoleon in the face in combat with that sweet, sweet high powered revolver.

I never really understood this complaint about QTEs. How is hitting a boss with the same three-hit combo fifty times that you've used twelve-hundred times in the past or emptying five clips into a person instead of the usual half more satisfying than, say, tackling the guy off a balcony, punching him in the face repeatedly while sliding down part of the roof, then steal his knife and ram it into his throat while you're in free-fall (as a random example)?

QTEs were probably the best thing to happen to boss fights since ever.

The problem is they require no real skill, as yahtzee puts it a boss should be an exam on everything we have learned up to that point and there is so much satisfaction in using your skill at the game to defeat an enemy who is more powerful in every way than you than there is in just hammering some buttons while the character has all the fun.

 

[hermes]

I don't understand all the emphasis Yatzhee puts in "character arc" in Far Cry 3. It makes me think he was playing a different game. To me, the character arc was incredible. The main character goes from a smug, shitty tourist to being able to stab people in the eye with a machete from 50 yards in the spam of 1 hour. In the opening he is barely able to run in the jungle and gets freaked out by everything, and 10 minutes later he is able to kill (and skin) a tiger using a bow?

Say what you will about the carrier soldier trope, but at least it makes sense for someone like him to be able to handle a AK47 effortlessly. Brody goes from white boy to ultimate badass in a few hours and no one bats an eye at it. I was expecting some Matrix-like revelation some time along the way.

The whole "arc" reminded me of Prince of Persia 2008, which had the problem that, since the stages could be completed in any order, it looked like the couple dinamic was all over the place, and it only made sense if played like a linear game.

 

[anthony87]

I've been experiencing this with Devil May Cry 2 lately. Maybe it's because I've matured, maybe it's because I haven't played it in so long, maybe it's because it's the ONLY ONE on the HD collection that doesn't have fucking audio sync issues but I'm really enjoying myself with it at the moment, much more than I thought I would.

 

[weirdee]

Totally agree.
The only thing about FC 3 that sucks imho is the quicktime event BS that passes for Bosses.
While it's nice to nail the person who causes you grief with a big knife in the chest, it's ten times nicer to actually let ME do it, instead of just giving me the honor to mash the spacebar into oblivion.

Yahtzee calls that "the game being afraid that you'd cramp it's style" in his DMC 4 review and it's one of my top grievances with recent games. You notice it even more in FC 3, because it has so much freedom in all the other places.

If I recall correctly Resident Evil 4 had lots of QTE's, but in the end it was always YOU capping Midget Napoleon in the face in combat with that sweet, sweet high powered revolver.

I never really understood this complaint about QTEs. How is hitting a boss with the same three-hit combo fifty times that you've used twelve-hundred times in the past or emptying five clips into a person instead of the usual half more satisfying than, say, tackling the guy off a balcony, punching him in the face repeatedly while sliding down part of the roof, then steal his knife and ram it into his throat while you're in free-fall (as a random example)?

QTEs were probably the best thing to happen to boss fights since ever.

It'd be like asking why people play Tetris when it's the same thing hundreds of times over, or why people care about Mario despite the fact that it's just running and jumping, or Megaman when it's running, jumping, and shooting in one fixed direction in front of you.

Which is to say it's unrelated and related at the same time.

I believe the QTEs are more of a break in EXPECTATIONS where one learns to do all sorts of things to progress, and then, in the face of ultimate adversity, you're treated to a series of clips of detached action, in what feels like a cutscene in which instead of mashing a button to progress dialogue, you're doing it to make the animations get over and done with.

QTEs can be used correctly, mind you, if you can draw the player far in enough to become invested in the action. For example, at the end of LoZ spirit tracks, the end of each stage of the boss fight is a QTE. However, there's enough tension in the situation that you don't really see it that way because it's just a result of the previous action (beating the crap out of the boss) and an extension of the boss' determination to resist your efforts that it requires sheer willpower to push him back to the edge.

However, if you just stick it in without any sense of timing or buildup, then you leave everybody feeling like they did at the end of ME3. (which is not to say same situation, but same feeling)

The same can be said of jump scares and plot twists: when you overuse and underutilize, you get an unappetizing paste of schlock.

 

[Bertylicious]

I don't know, dude. I played Wolfenstein and it was taters. Some bloke once said something about a cigar being just a cigar sometimes; a shit game is a shit game even if it's a different kind of shit to what we're currently covered in.

The story in Far Cry 3, and therefore the emotional bond with it, is objectively better than a generic shooter's in both content and delivery. Also you could defeat your enemies by literally releasing the tigers. That counts for a lot.

 

[mjc0961]

Bulletstorm gets no such pass from me. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's not shit. Different shit is still shit, it just maybe smells differently or is a big green instead of brown. But again, still shit. Making your boring military main character swear a whole bunch doesn't make him any less obnoxious than all the other boring military characters like Mason the old and Mason the new. He's just obnoxious while swearing a lot. Swap Grayson from Bulletstorm with Admiral Cocksucker from Black Ops 2 and you wouldn't really notice any difference beyond the fact that the hands holding your gun have suddenly turned from white to black, because both are complete tools who think swearing counts as characterization.

And the gameplay. Oh look you made up a bunch of special ways to kill people for bonus points. Okay, too bad that it's useless because you threw in crap regenerating health, so after I take a few shots I have to promptly abandon doing anything cool and find some cover to snuggle with until the jam disappears from my screen (or the color comes back. can't remember which shit cliche Bulletstorm went with on this one). So you just end up shooting everyone at range with the assault rifle or pulling them close with the whip and shotgunning them because it's the only way to not get killed. As boring as shooting everyone with regular guns is in Call of Battlefield: Warfighter, at least those games aren't constantly teasing you with a gameplay mechanic you can't use like Bulletstorm is.

And most importantly, Bulletstorm is still shit because I played it on PC and it's probably the worst PC port in the universe. When I can't even fully map my controls and am stuck having reload and interact on the same key because they're the same button on the console controller and when I have to download a special INI editing program to edit the encrypted INI files just to turn off mouse acceleration, you have fucking failed. Your game is terrible just on that alone. And at launch you had to set up your graphic card drivers to run the game at certain resolutions or the frame rate would be in the toilet (they did patch this later but it never should have existed in the first place).

 

[Terrible Opinions]

I'm kinda wondering if, in the future, the Call of Duty series along with other MMS'es of the same caliber will be seen as the "Daikatana" of this generation (what with them slightly lowering the bar of FPS'es and making other games that were previously regarded as below average look good in hindsight).

Doubtful, since... that's not really what people remember Daikatana as. It's infamous as a development-hell, over-budget monster with terrible marketing that helped sink a promising young development studio. Aside from the massive budget, that's kind of the opposite of Call of Duty. It didn't make other contemporary FPS look better by comparison because Deus Ex, Thief 2, Quake 3, etc. were legitimately awesome all on their own.

 

[General Vagueness]

Did anyone else think of his Halo 3 review? It sounds like Black Ops 2/MW3/AC3/a few others are what it took to make him finally lower his standards. I'm not sure what to make of that, but there you go.

 

[xptn40S]

I'm kinda wondering if, in the future, the Call of Duty series along with other MMS'es of the same caliber will be seen as the "Daikatana" of this generation (what with them slightly lowering the bar of FPS'es and making other games that were previously regarded as below average look good in hindsight).

Doubtful, since... that's not really what people remember Daikatana as. It's infamous as a development-hell, over-budget monster with terrible marketing that helped sink a promising young development studio. Aside from the massive budget, that's kind of the opposite of Call of Duty. It didn't make other contemporary FPS look better by comparison because Deus Ex, Thief 2, Quake 3, etc. were legitimately awesome all on their own.

Hmm, yeah I guess.
I don't really know why I thought of Daikatana, I guess I was just thinking of how it lowered the bar of what could have been considered acceptable back in the "golden age of PC-gaming" and my mind just drew a parallel with how the MMS'es of today have made Yahtzee more or less lower his standards.

 

[gyroscopeboy]

I'd love to see another quality WWII shooter, haven't had one in a while amidst the sea of "gritty" modern shooters.

Something like MoH:Frontline, with an epic soundtrack and great story...and historical places!

Man, i'm gonna have to whip out the PS2 and play that badboy again!

 

[shrekfan246]

I've been experiencing this with Devil May Cry 2 lately. Maybe it's because I've matured, maybe it's because I haven't played it in so long, maybe it's because it's the ONLY ONE on the HD collection that doesn't have fucking audio sync issues but I'm really enjoying myself with it at the moment, much more than I thought I would.

To be fair, Devil May Cry 2 is a lot more technically sound than Devil May Cry was, you never see anybody bitching about the actual game-play from it. Or at least, I don't.

[sub]But then, I'm still always surprised that people think Capcom actually was writing a good story with the DMC series. An interesting story, sure, but it was never a well-told or well-written story.[/sub]

OT: I got a little lost while playing Bioshock today. It was pretty neat.

I don't mind the linearity of games like Bulletstorm, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't prefer the semi-open levels from Dishonored, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and to a lesser extent, Crysis 2.

 

[Squilookle]

Well that answers the one main question I had about FC3- whether after however many games, the hang gliders can now finally ride thermals to stay aloft or not. Guess that answer is still no.

Far Cry 3 does have its fair share of those [linear checkpoint] missions but also has quite a few others (especially the enemy outposts) that let you scout ahead, plan your approach and use whatever tactics you want.

It also did some interesting things with characters, particularly the main character who had a very clear arc and progression as the story went on. He wasn't just some career soldier who stone-facedly does what he gotta do all the time and he didn't have the backing of all the American military and their technology. It's just nice to see a hero who has to fundamentally change themselves to succeed, rather than the protagonist just being this smug immovable object smacking the status quo back into line.

And the story is presented well, too, it's got great moments, twists and turns, and it keeps the pace up.

...while I slightly miss World War 2 as a realistic shooter setting, I miss fantasy World War 2 even more.

Well then you may as well go and give The Saboteur a reprieve while you're at it- your description of FC3 above fits Saboteur to an absolute T- and while it's not an FPS, it is the ultimate fantasy WW2 sandbox experience, starring a bloke who isn't some highly trained killing machine/assassin (which is why he doesn't climb as well as Ezio- pretty obvious really).

Also I really hope you got a chance to play Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction; unlike it's botched sequel, it pulled off that 'scout ahead, plan your approach and use whatever tactics you want' masterfully- better than any sandbox before or since. I'm sure there's some let's plays floating around out there.