They don't call me Johnny "Late to the Party" Novgorod for nothing.
A while back I bought a copy of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, the PS3 port. I knew it was a last-gen port of a current-gen game, but fuck it right? I mean I've seen the Far Cry 4 screen comparisons, you get wavy lil flags in the PS4 version and those flags get removed for the PS3. Whatever. I'm the last person to ***** about graphics in a game. Did you say good gameplay? You had me at good gameplay.
But dear god if this isn't the buggiest, glitchiest, utterly malfunctioning piece of crap I've ever played in my life, and I've played Arkham Origins (also by Warner Bros - joke's on me). It's an encyclopedia of malfunctions. It got developed by Monolith for the PS4 and ported by Behaviour Interactive to the PS3, but looks like it's on the PS2 and plays like it's on the PS1.
This is all for shame. You can tell at its core that this is a fun game, but whatever fun I had while playing this broken mess was always in spite of the game rather than because of it. To be fair - fairer than the game was to me - the combat is serviceable and the Nemesis System is engaging. I also liked the use of Tolkien's body of work as part of the game's lore, even if the story doesn't do it much justice. But here I am reviewing Monolith's game, not Behaviour Interactive's, who can only be commended for all the things they didn't completely fuck up.
Anyway, I wrote Behaviour Interactive detailing a list of bugs/glitches and asking if they were going to patch it.
I wrote BI back and I'll post if they reply, though I think they're out of fucks at the moment.
So here I am wondering, ok, what next? "Yeah that was like a year ago, we don't work on the game anymore"? Is that it? What's the statute of limitations for faulty software? Am I supposed to take this to the publisher, the retailer, Anais Renevey (Head of QA according to the game's credits, though none of her online resumes mention it), what? It's "only" $30 but I feel scammed like I've never felt scammed before.
What do you do in a situation like this? What have you done in a situation like this? Feel free to chip in with your stories of discontent, for discussion value.
A while back I bought a copy of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, the PS3 port. I knew it was a last-gen port of a current-gen game, but fuck it right? I mean I've seen the Far Cry 4 screen comparisons, you get wavy lil flags in the PS4 version and those flags get removed for the PS3. Whatever. I'm the last person to ***** about graphics in a game. Did you say good gameplay? You had me at good gameplay.
But dear god if this isn't the buggiest, glitchiest, utterly malfunctioning piece of crap I've ever played in my life, and I've played Arkham Origins (also by Warner Bros - joke's on me). It's an encyclopedia of malfunctions. It got developed by Monolith for the PS4 and ported by Behaviour Interactive to the PS3, but looks like it's on the PS2 and plays like it's on the PS1.
The game crashes, the character freezes; he clips through the ground and into nothingness, he clips into mountains and remains landlocked within. Orcs spawn out of thin air, their dialogue loops up to three times, and they gently float down to the ground, sans animation, when jumping from above. Caragors clip through the ground when climbing ledges, and Graugs have been removed all but from the story missions that feature them.
When characters are showcased in in-game cutscenes and such, they appear to be wearing the scrambling suits from A Scanner Darkly as layers of textures pop in and out, rendering them truly formless. The landscape itself is riddled with texture pop-ins - you can stand by a boulder in the middle of nowhere and simply gaze at it for minutes at a time as it loads texture upon texture and doesn't decide on any.
It's also a game that requires lots of loading, and not just from booting up the game or loading up a new area. Unpausing the game alone can take as long as half a minute. Wanna check the map again real quick? That's another half a minute. In any other game this wouldn't be as aggravating, but it's an RPG - you're gonna spend a lot of time surfing menus, upgrading, customizing, etc. And every time you wanna do any of it it's going to take forever. Pausing the game ended up being like laundry day for me - pile as much dirty underwear as you can, so you save yourself as many trips as possible.
There's also the issue of the in-game cutscenes that play whenever you start a side mission or extra challenge. These are, in theory, 5 second previews showing you the location, the enemies, the goal, etc. In practice, however, these go on for as a long as a full minute: cutscenes load and play one shot at a time. So you get a shot of a prisoner, and then a black screen as the game buffers, and another shot of another prisoner, and another black screen as the game buffers, etc. Pre-rendered cutscenes play just fine, though music tends to carry over from gameplay (usually war drums), which upsets the tone of cutscenes and also drowns out the dialogue.
The list goes one. The low resolution. The hideous graphics. The screen tearing. The draw distance. The invisible walls. The inexistent animation. The lip-syncing, or lack thereof. Worst of all are the inconsistent frame rates. Of all the glitches and all the malfunctions, FPS is what makes the game borderline unplayable. Even as the ending credits roll by, the frame rate goes up and down. Never have I seen this level of incompetence in a game.
When characters are showcased in in-game cutscenes and such, they appear to be wearing the scrambling suits from A Scanner Darkly as layers of textures pop in and out, rendering them truly formless. The landscape itself is riddled with texture pop-ins - you can stand by a boulder in the middle of nowhere and simply gaze at it for minutes at a time as it loads texture upon texture and doesn't decide on any.
It's also a game that requires lots of loading, and not just from booting up the game or loading up a new area. Unpausing the game alone can take as long as half a minute. Wanna check the map again real quick? That's another half a minute. In any other game this wouldn't be as aggravating, but it's an RPG - you're gonna spend a lot of time surfing menus, upgrading, customizing, etc. And every time you wanna do any of it it's going to take forever. Pausing the game ended up being like laundry day for me - pile as much dirty underwear as you can, so you save yourself as many trips as possible.
There's also the issue of the in-game cutscenes that play whenever you start a side mission or extra challenge. These are, in theory, 5 second previews showing you the location, the enemies, the goal, etc. In practice, however, these go on for as a long as a full minute: cutscenes load and play one shot at a time. So you get a shot of a prisoner, and then a black screen as the game buffers, and another shot of another prisoner, and another black screen as the game buffers, etc. Pre-rendered cutscenes play just fine, though music tends to carry over from gameplay (usually war drums), which upsets the tone of cutscenes and also drowns out the dialogue.
The list goes one. The low resolution. The hideous graphics. The screen tearing. The draw distance. The invisible walls. The inexistent animation. The lip-syncing, or lack thereof. Worst of all are the inconsistent frame rates. Of all the glitches and all the malfunctions, FPS is what makes the game borderline unplayable. Even as the ending credits roll by, the frame rate goes up and down. Never have I seen this level of incompetence in a game.
This is all for shame. You can tell at its core that this is a fun game, but whatever fun I had while playing this broken mess was always in spite of the game rather than because of it. To be fair - fairer than the game was to me - the combat is serviceable and the Nemesis System is engaging. I also liked the use of Tolkien's body of work as part of the game's lore, even if the story doesn't do it much justice. But here I am reviewing Monolith's game, not Behaviour Interactive's, who can only be commended for all the things they didn't completely fuck up.
Anyway, I wrote Behaviour Interactive detailing a list of bugs/glitches and asking if they were going to patch it.
Thank you for the great feedback. Unfortunately, there's no team working on the game anymore at Behaviour. We are sorry to hear that you are experiencing difficulties with the game.
Sincerely,
Behaviour Team
Sincerely,
Behaviour Team
I wrote BI back and I'll post if they reply, though I think they're out of fucks at the moment.
So here I am wondering, ok, what next? "Yeah that was like a year ago, we don't work on the game anymore"? Is that it? What's the statute of limitations for faulty software? Am I supposed to take this to the publisher, the retailer, Anais Renevey (Head of QA according to the game's credits, though none of her online resumes mention it), what? It's "only" $30 but I feel scammed like I've never felt scammed before.
What do you do in a situation like this? What have you done in a situation like this? Feel free to chip in with your stories of discontent, for discussion value.
