Crysis 2 Writer: Halo is "Full of Bullsh*t"

[lacktheknack]

And how is exporting characters from KOTOR or Jade Empire possible? Neither have sequels, and to be honest neither are worth putting any extra effort into.

...KotOR 2 exists. Good job.

 

[Starke]

Oddly, I've always classified STALKER as an RPG, and it fits almost none of your defining traits.

The Bioware games are ARPGs, like Dialbo, and others, but they carry with them the illusion of choice.

I couldn't stand STALKER, to be honest. I've been meaning to pick up Call of Prypiat and give that a go, but I played Shadow of Chernobyl, which struck me as a bug-ridden, shit-to-play FPS action adventure. When I want apocalyptic action, I play Fallout 3.

STALKER works by getting you to actually play a role. That said it was pretty damn buggy, Shadow of Chernlbyl and Call of Pripyat are both slower than normal FPSs. The game burns a lot of time building tension and working your nerves. That said Call of Prypiat is more RPG than SoC was.

Molyneux is insane. Almost litterally. We're talking about the man who thinks farting is a way to woo the ladies. (Litterally or not, it's certainly a game mechanic from F2). I do get what Molyneaux is doing, and it's frustring but I can sympathize. He comes up with fantastic grandeous designs, and then fails to deliver. Bethesda is the same way, actually, they're just smart enough not to talk about what they want to do before the game ships.

I remember back before the first Fable was released, Peter saying something along the lines of "You plant an acorn, and by the end of the game it will have grown into a tree". I understand the point he was making, that the world would be evolving as you go, but it wasn't. He made the same claims about Fable 2, that it would be a totally dynamic world, and it wasn't There were two points in the game where things could change, and depending on your actions, one or two settlements would either thrive or go down the shitter. This isn't a dynamic world, this is a dickmove. And from what I hear about Fable 3, it's going to be a political simulator.

Bethesda do make good games, but their pre-release footage and screenshots do seem to mislead the audience a tad.

Molyneaux inteded Fable to have this fully developed world going on. Where as you age the world around you changes, and the NPCs get old... stuff like that. And he talked about it. And then it didn't have it.

Morrowind was supposed to have the blight marching. Once the Sixth House woke up, they were going to start conquering the island. First distant cities you didn't care about, but if you'd advanced the plot to that point and didn't deal with them, they'd have taken Ald'Ruhn and the other house capitals.

Oblivion was suppsed to have an active campaign going, where the Daedra were actually consuming cities, like they did with Kvatch.

In both cases, this got dropped.

As for outright lying about the content of their games? Yes. They said Dragon Age would be dark fantisy. I may be being slightly snide here, but the entire advertising campaign was a sham on that front.

Well technically it has dark fantasy bits, but for the most part it is pretty much straight high fantasy. Genres have always been subjective, though, so that wasn't necessarily meant to mislead the audience. I mean, I classify GTA as an RPG, but everyone I say this to seems to think I'm mentally retarded. Then again I also think School Days is one of the greatest anime ever created whereas the majority of the population think it's shit.

Nevertheless, dark fantasy can be classified as, according to Wikipedia, "a type of horror story where humanity is threatened by forces beyond human understanding", which adequately describes the darkspawn. Even if it's a shallow similarity, it's nonetheless there.

Anyway, I didn't get Dragon Age: Origins for the dark fantasy, I got it because there've been few enough sprawling fantasy RPGs of late, and I felt like killing dragons instead of Geth, Covenant and Super Mutants.

Except, dark is a tone, not a plot element. There's a lot of dark fantisy out there. George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones (which Bioware compared themselves to), the Witcher (both books and games), and so on. What this isn't is dark. At least not in comparison to actually dark settings. I mean Lord of the Rings is darker than this.

I know I harp on it, but its a good example. The Redcliffe ending, there isn't a dark choice. You can choose to give the person responsible a noble sacrifice, choose to let someone who's been posessed die (keep in mind that up until now the game has explicitly told you there's no way to reverse this), or go off and do another quest line and come back to get a good option. None of these are really dark.

The Werewolves thing is almost comical. The stuff in the Deep Roads actually had me laughing as I played through it, because it was so amiturish. Actually, I take that back, I did laugh at the werewolves dialog too.

As for there not being anything else on the market? There's a lot of fantasiy, high and low on the market. The Witcher, also darker than this by a huge margin. Sacred 2, Divinity 2, Two Worlds, Risen, the Gothic games, and Mount and Blade are all out there. If you want DAO's gameplay style specifically there's Dungeon Siege 2, Drakensang and Neverwinter Nights 2.

This isn't even the first time Bioware's done this. Back in the day it was a pretty common feature in RPGs. The early Might and Magic games, for example. Most of this was simply character transfers, something almost every Bioware game has supported in the last 10 years. (Kotor and Jade Empire can support exporting characters, unfortunatly they don't actually do it though.) Now, as for actually importing the story progression? That was a little rarer, but there are examples from back in the 80s though.

That's surprising, although I suppose considering how most of the games at that point would have been, for the most part, text, it would be a less weighty task to adapt the world depending on the players' choices.

And how is exporting characters from KOTOR or Jade Empire possible? Neither have sequels, and to be honest neither are worth putting any extra effort into.

What I was saying was their engine supports it. JE and Kotor are both running on the Aurora engine. The same engine as Neverwinter Nights. So the games could have been set up to export characters. Honestly it's probably just an issue of changing the menu .xmls to enable that.

 

[Starke]

Ya know, I think Yahtzee should meet this guy...

How's that work? Yahtzee needs some tips on writing? Maybe, I guess. Yahtzee needs a friend that doesn't think he's hot shit? Yeah, probably. Remember, aside from Uncharted, they basically have voiced the same gripes.

 

[Starke]

Well, when Crysis 2 gets crushed by Fallout: New Vegas, Portal 2, and, ironically, Halo: Reach, I'll be laughing.

What'll you do if it doesn't? Inquiring minds want to know.

Something tells me that Valve's Best Game Ever (According to Valve themselves) alone will crush the sequel to an average game. A certain Brit may make that even more likely, depending on how good Portal 2 is.

So your saying that unless this game beats out 3 other games that already have massive fan bases its story will be crap. Just because a game doesnt top the charts doesnt mean that the game was bad or that the story sucked. Lots of games have good story and shit gameplay. His points will still be valid the story in the halo trilogy stoped somewhere in the first game after that it was just go to point B and kill everybody inbetween.

Well, and combine that with the fact that New Vegas is coming from Obsidian, a company that's basically built itself off of turning out really well written games...

...and then getting blasted for bugginess, which is funnier when you remember their buggy games are running on Bioware's game engines.

 

[Iron Mal]

I agree with this guy until a certain point.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy having a good narrative and story within a game (I loved Silent Hill 2) but this is until it starts interfering with the game itself, my best example for this has to be Half Life 2 and it's 'gate' system.

For those who don't know, this is basically where the player is required to sit around and wait for an NPC or scripted event to open the path foward. This would be alright if it weren't for the fact that this results in huge breaks in the flow and action of the game (you can't open that door yourself, you have to wait for Captain Exposition there to give you your motivation and grab the handle in a fashion that the door finds agreeable), I understand that they wanted to try and convey a story without cutscenes but in the end this just felt slow and drawn out (and in the end I still was a bit uncertain about what exactly was going on in the world and why).

 

[Ultra_Caboose]

Tomorrow: "Crysis 2 Writer says Gears of War is 'majorly fucking retarded.' "

He does seem to enjoy dissing mainstream games, especially their stories. I supposes Crysis 2 will have to prove that he isn't just talking out of his ass.

I agree.

I don't see how the Halo story is bullshit... It's certainly simplistic, but it works. The Chief's a dude raised, trained and built to kill shit. It's like this guy's surptised that Master Chief has no qualms with just running in and kiling shit. It's what he does!

 

[Starke]

And how is exporting characters from KOTOR or Jade Empire possible? Neither have sequels, and to be honest neither are worth putting any extra effort into.

...KotOR 2 exists. Good job.

Yes, I know that, thanks. Sith Lords. However, it is neither directly related to the first game, nor does it share teh same main character, so what would the point of exporting a character be?

The point I was making was the engine supported it. Not that the game actually used it. Nor that there was any reason to do so.

STALKER works by getting you to actually play a role. That said it was pretty damn buggy, Shadow of Chernlbyl and Call of Pripyat are both slower than normal FPSs. The game burns a lot of time building tension and working your nerves. That said Call of Prypiat is more RPG than SoC was.

-sigh- Goddamn it, I just finished this entire reply and then Opera crashed. Oh well, again I suppose.

I didn't find STALKER tense or nerve-wracking to be honest, just boring and drawn out, with a difficulty curve all over the place.

What I especially didn't like was the ending, and how the player had no real control over it the first time in unless they'd read a walkthrough or something. For exmaple: When I play an RPG, or anything similar really, I tend to hoard all teh equipment I can and sell it off. Fairly common practise, I'd think. Anyhow, because of this, at the end of the game when I went up to the glowing rock thing, I had a lot of spare change (a shitton, if I'm honest) in my pockets. And so, the game calculated that since I had a lot of money, my character was greedy, and my character asked the glowing rock thing for money. Why? He already had a shitton, why ask for what he already had? On top of that, the game has the gall to give me a bad ending, where he thinks gold coins are falling down all around him but it's actually the ceiling. Nice.

I'll call this different strokes for different folks. I found it incredibly atmospheric. If you don't buy into that, there really isn't much here, if you do, the game is fucking spades. I will defend the ending though as one of the most brilliant fuck you's I've seen in gaming... well, ever, certainly since System Shock 2.

At the beginning of the game you're given an objective, track down and off Strelok. Everything the Trader give you as quests are for their goal of getting to the center of the Zone, not tracking down Strelok. The fuck you comes in if you're not paying attention to the game, and what your character's motivations are, and are simply following the Trader's instructions like a well trained lapdog. That said, I'd already taken down the brain scorcher before realizing this, but hadn't actually gone into Pripyat. This was on my first play through without digging around online.

As for which bad ending you get? Yeah, that's almost random. But it's kinda not the point. They all come down to you let yourself get used as a pawn by someone else (again) and that's the end.

And like I said, hoarding and selling is a pretty common thing to do in RPGs, so I imagine a lot of people had a lot of spare money at the end of the game, so that would have happened to a lot of people. Dickmove, I'd say.

Once you get to the Wish Granter you will die. It doesn't matter what you chose to do in the game. You got one of them, but there's no rubric for passing the Wish Granter, the only way to get a good ending is to never approach the damn thing.

It is a very specific fuck you, and it's less forgivable because of the poor translation quality. But a game that slaps you upside the head for playing follow the quest marker is something I can really appreciate as the jaded gamer I am.

Molyneaux inteded Fable to have this fully developed world going on. Where as you age the world around you changes, and the NPCs get old... stuff like that. And he talked about it. And then it didn't have it.

Morrowind was supposed to have the blight marching. Once the Sixth House woke up, they were going to start conquering the island. First distant cities you didn't care about, but if you'd advanced the plot to that point and didn't deal with them, they'd have taken Ald'Ruhn and the other house capitals.

Oblivion was suppsed to have an active campaign going, where the Daedra were actually consuming cities, like they did with Kvatch.

In both cases, this got dropped.

That sort of happens in Dragon Age: Origins, too. After I finished hte Urn of Sacred Ashes quest I glanced at the map and was like "Huh, Lothering's gotten destroyed. Oh shit, what if they keep going? D:" and for a few hours gametime I fucking got my shit together and got a move on with the main story quests. Then I noticed that there'd been no change, and the pressure dropped.

As far as I know, there was never a plan for the blight to spread throughout Ferelden as you played through the game. Had there been, or had there been some Battle For Middle Earth War of the Ring type overworld map with RTS interludes that were influenced by your choices, then I'd probably lay off Dragon Age except in that it's writing is bad. But structurally there isn't a lot of difference with the way Dragon Age closes off early areas from say Kotor or Jade Empire. Even Baldur's Gate pulls this... in both games.

I suppose it makes sense sort of, from the developer's point of view. A lot of people wouldn't be very good at RPGs, and if there was suddenly a big timer hanging over it all saying "THE WORLD IS GONNA GET CONSUMED TOTALLY IF YOU DON'T HURRY UP" I doubt they'd cope well. Hell, I wouldn't. I can't stand timed missions in general, for god's sake. And assuming that the towns and such that would be getting consumed would be fully-functional locations, quests and items and so on would be lost by virtue of the fact that you didn't move fast enough.

There are games that do impose time limits like this, and generally speaking the player hates or resents them. As I mentioned, I could get behind a game that mixes a Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth: War of the Ring mode overmap, where you're guiding armies around and engaging in RTS battles between roleplaying sessions.

If you're not familiar, Battle for Middle Earth 2 introduced a risk type overmap, with a turn based component. You'd fight over contested regions in small skirmish battles, with places like Minas Tirith having unique set piece battle sites. It remains one of my favorite RTSs, despite being mediocre on a lot of counts for this relatively unique campaign format. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever played much of it's conventional standard single player mode.) Dawn of War added something similar in Dark Crusade, but, BfME2 still did it best.

Except, dark is a tone, not a plot element. There's a lot of dark fantisy out there. George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones (which Bioware compared themselves to), the Witcher (both books and games), and so on. What this isn't is dark. At least not in comparison to actually dark settings. I mean Lord of the Rings is darker than this.

I know I harp on it, but its a good example. The Redcliffe ending, there isn't a dark choice. You can choose to give the person responsible a noble sacrifice, choose to let someone who's been posessed die (keep in mind that up until now the game has explicitly told you there's no way to reverse this), or go off and do another quest line and come back to get a good option. None of these are really dark.

Well letting the kid die was a big nasty.

No, it wasn't. It was efficient, and it was safe.

Okay, here's the thought process. The mother created the situation by being a selfish *****. She couldn't accept sending the kid off and loosing her bid for having a claim to the nobility. Never mind that she could have sent the kid off, gotten knocked up again, and hopped rolling the dice a second time would have been more productive. I understand maternal instinct, but she crosses the line into fucked up ***** territory. If you don't kill her, you're leaving the door open for her to fuck you over later, politically. You cannot afford to lose Redcliffe, now or later. So you have to kill her.

The only person who's suggested that you can save an abomination is a Blood Mage. A group reviled by Ferelden's population at large. If you're playing a Mage you know exactly how far he'll go to get what he wants. And, if you die messing around with the kid, that's a bonus for him. So, you cannot trust what he's telling you, even if you know him personally from your origin. That means, the kid is an abomination and must die. Bonus points if you've taken the Templar specialization from Alistair in which case killing the kid is quite literally your day job.

So, now we know both have to die. Problem solved. Now, if you want to be vicious, you can reason that the woman deserves to suffer. To do this, you use your persuade skill to convince her that she is responsible for all the problems that have befallen Redcliffe, which is true, and that only she can end this and save the north, by killing her own son and then killing herself. That is dark, and vicious, and nasty, and entirely in character with someone who will do whatever it takes to save Ferelden.

Now, point to anything in the game that's darker than that.

The Werewolves thing is almost comical. The stuff in the Deep Roads actually had me laughing as I played through it, because it was so amiturish. Actually, I take that back, I did laugh at the werewolves dialog too.

As for there not being anything else on the market? There's a lot of fantasiy, high and low on the market. The Witcher, also darker than this by a huge margin. Sacred 2, Divinity 2, Two Worlds, Risen, the Gothic games, and Mount and Blade are all out there. If you want DAO's gameplay style specifically there's Dungeon Siege 2, Drakensang and Neverwinter Nights 2.

As I said, of late, and something preferably that's fun to play. That rules out the Witcher, which is a single-player MMO, Sacred 2, which is shit, and Two Worlds, which is Oblivion, but with people saying "Nay!" "Thee!" and "Harken!" I have been meaning to pick up Divinity 2 simply because the cover art is so pretty (I'm a sucker for that), Risen just looks terrible. The Gothic games have never appealed to me, no idea why, Mount and Blade has always struck me as too similar to Two Worlds, which made me want to drive forks into my eyes. Played Drakensang and Dungeon Siege 2, which both bored me to tears, and I'm cautious about NWN2 because Obsidian made it, who I'm not fans of. Not looking forward to New Vegas.

Okay, I'm going to take these one at a time.

The Witcher is an MMO line is from Yahtzee. It's hilarious, and true in one respect, there's a lot of fetch me X monster parts quests. At the same time this may be one of the few games I'm aware of where that cliche actually makes sense. It isn't a single player MMO in regards to the writing. Here's a game that really does give you the gray on gray morality Bioware was crowing about, and a choice and consequences system that actually works, really well. The first few are telegraphed pretty openly but after that they start getting slightly subtle, and they have a major impact on the path the story takes.

Sacred and Sacred 2 are shit, but I figured I'd throw them out there as possibles. The point is they remind me of Dragon Age's gameplay, though Sacred 2 has laser pistols as drops, which does endear me to the game a bit.

Two Worlds crows about being Oblivion on steroids on it's back cover. Honestly, I don't see it. It's really more Diabloesque than Oblivion. I'll readily grant that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it is a remarkably fun ARPG in that vein. The writing isn't so much bad as hilariously anachronistic. There's some real intelligence in the way the story plays out that's masked by some of the most bizarre dialog I've ever heard in a game. If you can approach the dialog as, it's not English, but some other language, then it actually works... in a really weird kind of way. For example, this one always cracks me up: "A bold man you say? For what purpose prey?"

Risen and Gothic are basically the same games. They're sort of an adventure type game with RPG elements stuck in. They are also definitely hard core games, with the emphasis on hard.

Mound and Blade is many things, similar to Two Worlds it's not. It's a borderline simulation of medieval combat. There's no magic, no elves or other fantasy creatures. Just a fictional world in the 13th century at war with itself. It's very unique in the context, and really unlike any other RPG on the market.

Dungeon Siege 2 and Drakkensang were both suggestions because of their gameplay similarity to Dragon Age.

Hell maybe I just like BioWare too much.

Don't worry, I can help you through that.

Okay, in all fairness, I don't mean to be too hard on you over this. I used to too, so it's not like I can hold it against you. Bioware's like any fast food chain: its consistent, its got its own flavor, and its not healthy for you.

Alternately take the Big Mac. If you're told consistently that this is the height of what a cheeseburger can be you'll hold that up as the paragon of cheeseburger, and everything else is going to fall short. You could say that's because there's no competition, it is simply the best. But that's simply not true.

The same is true of Bioware's writing. It has a unique tone to it, and if you hold that up as the best writing can ever aspire to, you've changed the scheme of what constitutes good writing, and nothing will be able to compete. But, its not good, its a personal illusion built on Bioware distorting your values.

This isn't a Machiavellian conspiracy by Bioware. They seem to genuinely believe their own hype, but the writing isn't good. Like McDonnalds they're popular. But popularity doesn't equal quality, cases in point.

His points will still be valid the story in the halo trilogy stoped somewhere in the first game after that it was just go to point B and kill everybody inbetween.

Not to seem snippish, but generally wars DO involve going places and killing people. The Call of Duty games are built around the concept.

Just to let you know.

Generally speaking stories about wars DO involve more than simply going places and killing people. It's one of those pesky things.

Apocalypse Now, for example is, in a very real sense, the Vietnam War on screen, but it also has a story that transcends going places and killing people, even when that is very explicit the point of the story.

Russian War Epics tend to be about the suffering and cost of war on the individual, in spite of them being, by synopsis going places and killing people.

In a way it's actually an excellent parallel to a lot of games. Loads of games can be distilled down to going places, killing people/things and taking their shit. Dragon Age being the most apt example. Of my suggestions above, only The Witcher really deviates from that. That doesn't mean that's all a game can be about.

Going back to the Apocalypse Now observation; it and Far Cry 2 are both adaptations of the same work, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What's odd is Far Cry 2 actually has a lot of the thematic elements in common with Apocalypse Now. The writing isn't particularly deep, even when it's literally quoting Nietzsche at you. But the story is about more than going places and killing people.

EDIT: Well... some of it is. Some of it is exactly and only that. FC2 goes both ways.

 

[katsabas]

I do not know. The game may be full of shit (I have never played Halo but I really do not think it blows) but at least it doesn't require a processor originating from the Alpha of Centauri to play it. And frankly, with the exception of Bioshock and Portal, I have never bought a shooter for its writing. Both of these games just screamed 'good story' while Halo screamed 'meh' and Crysis squealed. Between Crysis and Halo, the 1st one is the most generic. Why? Because it focuses on its looks and not substance. Like a 19 year old daddy's girl.

 

[nightwolf667]

Now I've forgotten what I was go-WAIT there it is. As much as you can berate BioWare for leading the audience to believe that the entire universe will shift around their decisions, as far as I know they have never outright lied about the content of one of their games. I, for one, would much prefer a BioWare game to a Lionhead game, because scarcely a word out of Peter Molyneux' mouth that contains the title of an up-and-coming game (COUGH Fable COUGHCOUGH) isn't idle speculation and delusions of grandeur.

You know, I've been following your conversation with Starke but I'd been too busy to respond up until now. Also, I have many points that stretch back to posts you made on page eight or so and I can't be bothered to quote. This particular one stood out to me though. "Delusions of grandeur"? I think both Molyneux and Bioware have that going for them. Bioware sometimes though, is the bigger offender. They don't get quoted on it much, but in interviews they've given to the sci-fi channel and in movies they've put up on their own website they've compared themselves and Mass Effect's story to Isaac Asimov, saying that in the game they talk about the meaning of being human and Dragon Age: Origins to Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien I find funny, especially since they're not taking from the novel itself but instead the movies. While it has nothing to do with their writing (which is riddled with cliched stock character types and narrative choices, most of which they keep reusing from game to game) at least three major cut scenes from DA:O and one set of trailer music are ripped directly out of the trilogy. The cut scenes are almost an exact frame by frame depiction of the action with a few minor changes here and there. Also WWI and WWII not the same thing... even remotely, further more you've made Tolkien roll around in his grave. Twice. It was one of his greatest irritations during his life that people kept attributing LoTR to WWII, when in fact, thematically it was more of a direct correlation to what he experienced while fighting in WWI, dedicated to the friends he'd lost in the trenches (of which he was the only surviving member by the way), and filled with military roles that are specific to Victorian traditions that lingered into the early 20th century that are gone by the 1940s. For example: Frodo and Sam's relationship. Sam is supposed to be Frodo's batman (no relation to the comic book character), something akin to a loyal servant that follows him anywhere and takes care of all his needs, even in battle. This is something that British military officers had in WWI and for Tolkien the relationship between the batman and officer would have been a sacred one. This is also something that the films attempt to replicate out of respect for the material, but because of a shift in cultural mores and values it comes off as the two of them looking gay.

I'm gonna wander off into a random tangent now about reading and writing, because this is what I got my 38,000 dollar a year college education in and I like to think that I'm using it properly. (Also, took a class on Tolkien, another one on C.S. Lewis, and then on King Arthur so you can't say I didn't study only "literary" materials and nothing popular. I suppose that depends on your definition of "literary" though. Oh and a film class, studying film conventions. It's useful when dissecting video games for their content.) When reading anything it's important to know what era it comes from, because the society of the day is plays a foundational role in what the author knows, uses, and, in some cases, subverts. This adds an extra sublayer to the material, in many cases giving it more meaning than it has just as a story. The authors personal feelings on certain issues become known as well as their views on race, religion, the current politics of the day, etc. An important and well known one is Shakespeare (though he is better watched than read), if you said that Shakespeare was from the 1500s instead of the 1600s then you'd miss out on most of the jokes, which monarchy he was satirizing, and what he was saying about English society in general. You'd probably (after a bit of translation because Shakespeare is, in it's own way, a foreign language for which you need footnotes) get the story and you'd think it was neat, but you'd miss out entirely on the sub level and probably the conventions that he's playing with. The person who said this wouldn't look any deeper and in this case, wouldn't stop to ask themselves why this was funny, why this worked, what did Shakespeare do and how did he frame the action in such a way that so perfectly captures the different sides of human nature so that despite a culture gap and a few hundred years his plays become timeless?

Why did I bring this up? Because as one aspiring creative writer to another, I'm telling you that this thought process is essential. It's one that Morgan has and Bioware doesn't, it's what makes Morgan the better writer. (As a game writer, I don't know but he and Drew Karpyshyn have both written several novels so let's judge them on those. Especially since Drew's style is pretty indicative of the basic problems of Bioware's writing as a whole.) It's important for a writer to always be attentive and notice the details of just about everything they come into contact with. What Morgan does in his interview is pretty standard for most professional and published authors, if uncommon in the video game industry. It also shows that he is looking at and evaluating games like Halo and Modern Warfare 2, which he disliked and Drake's Fortune 2 which he did in the way he does for other novels. Now, many people on this site have told me that it's "unfair" to evaluate a video games the way one would a novel. Well sure it is, if you don't take the limitations of the different genre into account but to evaluate and gut, as I like to put it, a game for how it's narrative works you have to. The practical application of critical thinking and the methods used are basically the same, you just readjust your mind from page to screen. It's the same if one were looking at a movie, different genre same process. Morgan shows that he understands this in the entire interview (not just what's quoted in the article) but like I said, Bioware doesn't.

Why don't they? Because they fall into just about every single sci-fi and fantasy cliche without either subverting them or joking about them. The more tools a writer has in their toolbox the better their story. It's not a matter of writing what you know, what you know can be expanded through experience, reading other novels in the same and different genres, research, and sometimes just by reading TV Tropes. It's important to know the cliches so that you can work with them, play with them, change them or keep them the same. But to do that requires a certain element of control over the story, an understanding that everything you put into it from characters to plot twists to insignificant details has must serve the story as a whole. Bioware doesn't do this. They make all the mistakes that novice writers do (because they are novices) while at the same time stealing elements from as many works as they can get their hands on. There's nothing wrong with stealing or borrowing from other works and using them in your own, every author does it even when they don't know they're doing it, it's just that you're supposed to build off of what you've taken. (Which is why the excuse "everything's been done before" doesn't hold any water, there are ways of making a time honored plot cliche seem new and interesting, even to a jaded fantasy veteran. Bioware also doesn't do this.)

What Bioware does is take the concrete story elements, most of the time ripping the characters off whole sale, but they completely miss the underlying value of both it's spirit and the thematic elements behind them. A basic part of LoTR is Tolkien's disgust with industrialization, having been born in South Africa he developed an early love of nature that only grew when his mother took him back to England. The Shire is, obviously, his idea of a perfect civilization while Sarumon and Sauron with their machines are the antagonists and developed a healthy love of racism. The East versus the West, though honestly while having horrible implications was probably unintentional. The rampant sexism wasn't. Tolkien was a chauvinist and it shows with his characters having limited interactions with women in the novels, except when necessary. The only examples of strong women are Galadriel and Eowyn. He created the story to stand as the myths of Britain's past, because unlike other cultures he believed that Britain was sorely lacking those. He also believed that all good stories ended at Beowulf, which makes him more of a snob than anyone in this thread. But at it's heart LoTR is about the evils of industrialization and religion.

Asimov also has a subtext to his works: the nature of man and what makes a human, a human. Star Trek in it's different incarnations also has this same kind of subtext. It's a central theme in most of science fiction. It's also something that's not present in Mass Effect, it's not just that they say it's there, it's that it's not present at all in any significant way. Neither is the theme of man versus machine because as of the second game, the geth are now your frenemies and the Reapers can really only be described as cyborgs. That's me being snide, really though, it's not enough to just have men fighting machines. The writer has to build off of that to make it thematic, it needs to be an important moral and psychological element of the story, even if one only touches on it briefly. Bioware can't even manage that.

They use science fictions conventions in Mass Effect, just like they use them in Dragon Age: Origins but they never go beyond the bare minimum and they never use them in a way that hasn't been done somewhere else and done better. Even in video games, though by the virtue of a greater trend which says a well written game will not be popular or understood by the average gamer most gamers in this thread either saw it and misunderstood or never saw it at all. It's not just that the writers at Bioware are bad, their immature. Their writing style is that of a fourteen year old who thinks what they've just written is the best thing in the world and there's no one around to tell them different. The best examples of this are in their interviews, which can be viewed on their website, of these really fantastic ideas that they will implement in their games and none of those match up with what's actually in them. Morgan on the other hand in his interview doesn't promise the gamer anything huge. At most he says that he's going to take familiar archetypes and build those into genuine characters (also something Bioware doesn't have), but there's nothing more than that. The rest of the interview is a critique of what's really wrong with video game writing and how he plans on avoiding it in Crysis 2. He talks about what he likes and what he doesn't like and that's it. Sure, he swears but given that he's English it's not that unusual or unprofessional, Grant Morrison, who's Scottish, swears in just about every interview I've heard him give. Not an excuse, just a fact.

In short, because I'm heading towards writing an article now and need to go to bed I'll sum it up. Bioware's writing has sex, boobs, and occasionally interesting plot twists but nothing more than that. No depth, usually just saccharine family issues (the same ones) that play out nearly the same way in every game. Mass Effect 2 has the distinction of doing it twice with characters based on the same archetype. I challenge you, find all the characters in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 that don't have parental issues, children issues, or something that acts in the same basic way (party characters, Admiral Kohaku doesn't count and neither does Jenkins, smart ass. ) and come back to me. It's even worse when you realize Jade Empire does the same thing. There are a lot of possible backgrounds for a character, having their deciding motivations be family (or lack thereof) every single time shows a distinctive lack of imagination and characterization. But then again, Bioware's characters that tend to spew out random exposition and cliched dialogue when compared to just about anything else including Halo, so them writing like teenagers who've never had sex and think that horror movies are just about the blood shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Also, if you want to make it as a creative writer (in whatever field) and be good at it, you should know this already.

I did try to read the Mass Effect novels. Ascension I think. I laughed really, really hard. The only way I could make it through the chapter was inter cutting it with the Eye of Argon (one of the worst fantasy pieces ever written), while hilarious it didn't make Karpyshyn's prose any better. The Halo novels on the other hand...well, they hired an actual writer, I think. I haven't read them in a long time. I'll be more coherent tomorrow. Promise.

 

[Starke]

Peter Molyneux on the other hand has, on several occasions, promised things that have not only not appeared in Lionhead's games, but that other members of the Lionhead teams have confirmed were never PLANNED to be in them. Peter isn't up himself in the traditional sense, he doesn't think that he is amazing and that the world should bow at his feet, he is just very, very sure of his games. This could possibly be a compliment to his team, that he believes that they could make all these things happen, but it simply isn't possible at this stage.

It took Lionhead something like twenty years to realize they needed to research "Duct Tape that nutter's gob shut." Molyneux is a bit of a whackjob. I like him because he aspires to do something new and interesting. He fails, absolutely fails face first into concrete, but he is aspiring to something greater. Both are suitably entertaining.

Maybe it's my biased perceptions, but Molyneux really strikes me as a decent individual who's trying to build good games for the people playing them. He's just got fantastically poor impulse control when there's a camera on him. Most of the grandiose claims really look like he's spitballing feature ideas for the project in front of reporters. The problem is, he effectively announces features that will never exist because they popped into his head eight seconds ago, and will be gone long before he gets to a pad of paper.

Put this in contrast to, I think it was Derek Smart who used to crow about how he was making the best goddamn game ever, and it would wipe away everything in its path, and then it was some piece of shit that was barely playable.

The point I was making was the engine supported it. Not that the game actually used it. Nor that there was any reason to do so.

I understood what you were saying, just got a bit snippy that someone thought I was unaware of the existence of KOTOR 2. Not that it was really worth noting anyway.

*Blurgles*

I'll call this different strokes for different folks. I found it incredibly atmospheric. If you don't buy into that, there really isn't much here, if you do, the game is fucking spades. I will defend the ending though as one of the most brilliant fuck you's I've seen in gaming... well, ever, certainly since System Shock 2.

At the beginning of the game you're given an objective, track down and off Strelok. Everything the Trader give you as quests are for their goal of getting to the center of the Zone, not tracking down Strelok. The fuck you comes in if you're not paying attention to the game, and what your character's motivations are, and are simply following the Trader's instructions like a well trained lapdog. That said, I'd already taken down the brain scorcher before realizing this, but hadn't actually gone into Pripyat. This was on my first play through without digging around online.

As for which bad ending you get? Yeah, that's almost random. But it's kinda not the point. They all come down to you let yourself get used as a pawn by someone else (again) and that's the end.

Well I think it's hardly the gamer's fault considering that that's basically what games usually are, anyway. I'm inclined to say this is just Eastern European developers being wankers, but I won't, since I'm soon to lay hands on Metro 2033 and I sure as hell hope they weren't wankers making that.

And I'll accept the Different Strokes explanation, because honestly I didn't find anything about it very good. I had more fun playing Borderlands, to be honest. And that's saying something.

On the first playthrough it's definitely a roulette gamble on regarding if the player will catch it before they get too far. What really makes me love it is how it does something uniquely different on that front. Actually STALKER does a bunch of things that are rather unique, some of them work better than others. And, I'll readily agree the bad ending doesn't really work that well, because most players miss it on their first pass and end up resenting the game. I think it's a brilliant game design choice, I just think the execution needed better handling.

Once you get to the Wish Granter you will die. It doesn't matter what you chose to do in the game. You got one of them, but there's no rubric for passing the Wish Granter, the only way to get a good ending is to never approach the damn thing.

It is a very specific fuck you, and it's less forgivable because of the poor translation quality. But a game that slaps you upside the head for playing follow the quest marker is something I can really appreciate as the jaded gamer I am.

I think in my confused daze endgame, glancing through walkthroughs to see what I did wrong, I read something about there being a positive ending with some very specific requirements. I think it was about that time that I uninstalled it off my hard drive.

Case in point. In the second underground lab you get a message about where you can go to find someone who knows where Strelok is. If you follow that then, you get the resources to open up the true ending. If you don't, then you don't. The catch is, that the positive ending doesn't involve the wish granter at all. You have to go someplace completely different in the plant. So it isn't as arbitrary as what the bad endings are.

As far as I know, there was never a plan for the blight to spread throughout Ferelden as you played through the game. Had there been, or had there been some Battle For Middle Earth War of the Ring type overworld map with RTS interludes that were influenced by your choices, then I'd probably lay off Dragon Age except in that it's writing is bad. But structurally there isn't a lot of difference with the way Dragon Age closes off early areas from say Kotor or Jade Empire. Even Baldur's Gate pulls this... in both games.

Nah, there wasn't a plan to have the Blight spread, it just struck me as similar to how in Oblivion when you find that Kvatch has been wiped out, you're like "Oh, shit, this isn't good", but then it takes another five hours of gametime for you to encounter any Daedra after you take down Kvatch's gate. Anti-climactic would sort of describe it, badly.

There are games that do impose time limits like this, and generally speaking the player hates or resents them. As I mentioned, I could get behind a game that mixes a Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth: War of the Ring mode overmap, where you're guiding armies around and engaging in RTS battles between roleplaying sessions.

If you're not familiar, Battle for Middle Earth 2 introduced a risk type overmap, with a turn based component. You'd fight over contested regions in small skirmish battles, with places like Minas Tirith having unique set piece battle sites. It remains one of my favorite RTSs, despite being mediocre on a lot of counts for this relatively unique campaign format. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever played much of it's conventional standard single player mode.) Dawn of War added something similar in Dark Crusade, but, BfME2 still did it best.

As I was reading your description, I was thinking "This sounds like Dark Crusade or Soulstorm". And Soulstorm had the added bonus of including the Sisters of Battle, my favourite WH40k race bar the Tau. God I hate myself sometimes.

I generally don't like to mix my genres, which is the main reason why I hated Brutal Legend as much as I did. I can't imagine mixing roleplaying with turnbased and RTS, and it doesn't strike me as three things that would mix particularly well. Turn-based and RTS always make good bosom buddies (the Total War games, for example), but I just can't imagine the point of then cutting from that to a single guy. Talk about diminishing scale.

In a random tangent, because we don't have enough of those...

I've seen a couple attempts to blend RTS with RPG, Dawn of War 2 and the Spellforce games being the most prominent examples. I'm convinced there's some kind of holy grail of epic storytelling here somewhere. An epic where the actions of your party influence the larger war you're engaged in and turn the tide, while still letting you have control of that larger war. No one's gotten it right yet, but the potential really does strike me.

The biggest difference between Dawn of War and War of the Ring is that in the latter you command multiple armies, and those armies really are full on armies, not a handful of units you build up over and over again mixed with some honor guard units.

Taking away I think War of the Rings handles the turn based strategy better. Particularly after the expansion. You field large point capped armies and move them around. It also has a slightly better RPG system than Dawn of War 1, you can build a custom hero unit for the game, and can pick out what skills they get at various levels. Also, units level up as they fight in combat, and they can carry upgrades from battle to battle.

Dawn of War is the better tactical combat, and I love the way Dark Crusade makes buildings persistent on the battlefield. The Strategic Point system (particularly in Company of Heroes) makes far more sense than any resource generation system in any other (ground based) RTS I've played.

So, in short, yes, its a slightly weird idea, but I've played around with it, and would love to see it. I think with a little work it could really build into something fantastic, as a game design.

Okay, I'm going to take these one at a time.

The Witcher is an MMO line is from Yahtzee. It's hilarious, and true in one respect, there's a lot of fetch me X monster parts quests. At the same time this may be one of the few games I'm aware of where that cliche actually makes sense. It isn't a single player MMO in regards to the writing. Here's a game that really does give you the gray on gray morality Bioware was crowing about, and a choice and consequences system that actually works, really well. The first few are telegraphed pretty openly but after that they start getting slightly subtle, and they have a major impact on the path the story takes.

Yeah, that's where I got that line itself from, but it doesn't make it any less true. I also liken Dragon Age and the KOTOR games to MMOs slightly because of the point-and-click combat style, but less with the questing and such. I played The Witcher for about four hours and was bored to tears. The only reason I was vaguely interested enough to steal it from a friend of mine was because Yahtzee said that there were naked ladies on playing cards or something, none of which I managed to come across. Apparently I'm as inept with women in-game as I am in real life.

Yahtzee not withstanding, The Witcher is a really deep RPG, with a really complex narrative that really does change based on the choices you make. The writing is excellent, the setting is somewhat unique, and anachronistic, for instance, Witchers are refereed to as being "genetically engineered". At its core it's a really great rewarding game. It just takes for fucking ever to dig through to it. If you have the attention span, it's probably the best RPG on the market in years. I have no idea who has that kind of attention span. I got about 40 hours in before getting distracted and wandering off.

Sacred and Sacred 2 are shit, but I figured I'd throw them out there as possibles. The point is they remind me of Dragon Age's gameplay, though Sacred 2 has laser pistols as drops, which does endear me to the game a bit.

Fair enough. "Looks like you're going to hunt dragons. In the future!"

Yay. Also it has some of the more unique character classes I've seen. The first game is mostly standard fair, a heavy combat fighter, a ranger, a mage, and so on, but then, you also get the Vampire, which handles pretty uniquely. The second game ups the ante a bit. There's a few generic classes, and then an android from some faintly Egyptian civilization, and a separate evil campaign (though I never actually played it.)

For everything the games do wrong, and there's a lot, they do something else unique and interesting.

Two Worlds crows about being Oblivion on steroids on it's back cover. Honestly, I don't see it. It's really more Diabloesque than Oblivion. I'll readily grant that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it is a remarkably fun ARPG in that vein. The writing isn't so much bad as hilariously anachronistic. There's some real intelligence in the way the story plays out that's masked by some of the most bizarre dialog I've ever heard in a game. If you can approach the dialog as, it's not English, but some other language, then it actually works... in a really weird kind of way. For example, this one always cracks me up: "A bold man you say? For what purpose prey?"

I'm not arguing that Two Worlds wasn't hilarious, I'm just arguing that it wasn't worth the money I paid for it. Lately I've actually had a serious craving for it, so I've been keeping my eye out, but everywhere still seems to think it's worth $50 rather than, say, $15.

Yeah, I grabbed it for $50 on release. I can't say I'm upset with the amount I spent on it, but I can see where someone who didn't fall in love with the game would.

Risen and Gothic are basically the same games. They're sort of an adventure type game with RPG elements stuck in. They are also definitely hard core games, with the emphasis on hard.

I'm not that hardcore a gamer, emphasis on hard. I enjoy a challenge, but the sort of challenge that is awesome and tense that you KNOW you're going to win. I'm a pussy like that.

In a rarity, I'm not sure if I've ever finished a Gothic game without turning on god mode. Usually I don't cheat in RPGs unless I'm just messing around seeing what various skills do, but Gothic is the exception to that rule.

Mound and Blade is many things, similar to Two Worlds it's not. It's a borderline simulation of medieval combat. There's no magic, no elves or other fantasy creatures. Just a fictional world in the 13th century at war with itself. It's very unique in the context, and really unlike any other RPG on the market.

Maybe it was just the horses or something then, because it screamed Two Worlds at me. Apart from Oblivion (which wasn't exactly good at it) Two Worlds was the first game I played with some actual horse-riding in it, so maybe my brain just made the connection there. I honestly can't remember much else about it.

Yeah, I can understand that. What I should point out before you think about picking it up is it is very bare bones. It's a brilliant skeleton, but it's also rather lacking in features. It actually has no main story, for example. It really is a sandbox.

Don't worry, I can help you through that.

Okay, in all fairness, I don't mean to be too hard on you over this. I used to too, so it's not like I can hold it against you. Bioware's like any fast food chain: its consistent, its got its own flavor, and its not healthy for you.

But it's SO GOOD.

You say that now, but after they've colonized your arteries...

Alternately take the Big Mac. If you're told consistently that this is the height of what a cheeseburger can be you'll hold that up as the paragon of cheeseburger, and everything else is going to fall short. You could say that's because there's no competition, it is simply the best. But that's simply not true.

Just to let you know, this entire analogy is going to sort of fall flat for me. I've never been a McDonalds boy, and I can't stand Big Macs. Should have gone with Hungry Jack's and Whoppers.

Me either, I'm a Burger King fan. I picked McDonnalds because of their market penetration. That said, fast food in general is a mess.

The same is true of Bioware's writing. It has a unique tone to it, and if you hold that up as the best writing can ever aspire to, you've changed the scheme of what constitutes good writing, and nothing will be able to compete. But, its not good, its a personal illusion built on Bioware distorting your values.

This isn't a Machiavellian conspiracy by Bioware. They seem to genuinely believe their own hype, but the writing isn't good. Like McDonnalds they're popular. But popularity doesn't equal quality, cases in point.

I've honestly found nothing glaringly wrong or bad about any BioWare games' writing. Maybe it's because I was brought up during the 90's and are, therefore, an uncultured heathen, because I can't stand many "brilliant" pieces of writing either. Isaac Asimov comes to mind.

I don't know, I was brought up in the 80s, and generally speaking I'm a highly educated uncultured heathen. The two largest collections of literature in this room are Comic Books and RPGs. It's kind of a question about where you put your priorities. These days I usually don't have time to work through a 300 page novel. I can get through a six issue trade paperback in a couple hours, so the comics win out because I have the time.

That said, I do try to mix up my reading. The last books I read for my own amusement were Nightwatch and The Last Wish (both translated to English), and I've got a Grey Knights Omnibus around here somewhere that I can haul with me this summer.

The thing that may have contributed to my dislike of bioware, and did lead me to not giving a shit about them before Jade Empire came out on PC was that there isn't much variety. Compare this to, say, Obsidian where there's some common themes between Kotor2 and Mask of the Betrayer, but generally speaking all their titles offer something distinct, by flavor.

Apocalypse Now, for example is, in a very real sense, the Vietnam War on screen, but it also has a story that transcends going places and killing people, even when that is very explicit the point of the story.

Well yes, but let's not forget that their overhanging objective throughout the film is to go to where Marlon Brando is and kill him. They just crammed in some anti-war imagery and mindfuck sequences in the gaps.

Well, the first part was what I was alluding to. The goal is an assassination, but there's more going on than just that. As for the film being antiwar? Honestly, I'm not sure I can get behind that analysis. Most of the time when you're looking for antiwar themes it tends to criticize war overtly. Full Metal Jacket comes to mind rather immediately, it focuses on the precise psychological dehumanization. Apocalypse Now is more subtle about it, it has Lance dropping acid and then going on a whole peace not war shtick, but his actions get Mr. Clean killed. The destroyed firebase isn't antiwar so much as it is completely chaotic. And the Ride of the Valkyries is probably one of the most pro-war scenes in cinematic history. Hell, that scene almost defines this generation's Pavlovian response to that piece of music. The final evidence that it isn't antiwar is really Martin Sheen's character's need to get back into the war. By the end of the film he's been changed, and gone native, but he's still a warrior or killer, he's simply ejected a lot of the societal norms that he had clung to at the beginning of the film. He's become more monster than man.

Going back to the Apocalypse Now observation; it and Far Cry 2 are both adaptations of the same work, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What's odd is Far Cry 2 actually has a lot of the thematic elements in common with Apocalypse Now. The writing isn't particularly deep, even when it's literally quoting Nietzsche at you. But the story is about more than going places and killing people.

EDIT: Well... some of it is. Some of it is exactly and only that. FC2 goes both ways.

I read that forever ago, can't remember much of it. Wasn't bad. Couldn't stand Far Cry 2, though. And I'd argue that Far Cry 2's story is exactly about going places and killing people. Just most of it is about going places and the killing people bits are boring. Bit like Assassin's Creed, really.

Well, okay, here's the thing with FC2. For the bulk of the game you're being handed folders full of conflict diamonds to go someplace and fuck some people's shit up, and in a very real sense you approach this without any regard to the morality of what you're doing (particularly in the context of video games). Both factions are illusions, there's no difference, there's no good guys, the message you can extract here is just how pointless this shit is. Most players seem to internalize that and view the game as pointless, but really, its a conscious narrative decision about how this kind of conflict tends to play out. A political statement even.

On the second count we have The Jackal. You're brought in to take him down, and this is one of the places where the game parallels Heart of Darkness most directly, because The Jackal is all the horrible things you've been lead to believe, but he honestly sees himself as the good guy because he's approaching morality from a different perspective, and by the end of the game your character is in agreement with him, even if you, the player, do not.[footnote]One of the more legitimate gripes about the game is that you loose control of your character at the end. You have to sacrifice yourself. It's probably fair to say that this is because its an adaptation, the game doesn't give you a choice here.[/footnote] He's looking to end the series of brush fire wars by killing everyone "infected" by the war. "Quarantine the patient" he says. He does this while blurbling off about Nietzsche and quoting from Beyond Good and Evil[footnote]At least I think it's Beyond Good and Evil, I'm not about to go check to make sure its not from another one of his, but it is a famous Nietzsche quote regardless.[/footnote] the first time you meet him, and in a very rare case, he's actually interpreting Nietzsche from the intended perspective. Nietzsche isn't about the strong survive (though it is an element), its not about personal freedom, its about doing "evil" things for beneficial reasons. Its about rejecting conventional morality for what you know is right.

That I can easily write a full paragraph on each of these points without even stopping, thinking, or really trying to mine out their depths should indicate there's a lot more going on here than just go to point B and kill shit. Its somewhat deceptive, because the game doesn't look that deep at first glance, but there is another layer of material under the surface. So it really is asking relevant questions, something Crysis and Halo really don't do.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, I definitely do not claim that my opinions are well-reasoned or even valid, they're just my opinions. Hell, I can't stand Avatar because a friend of mine was supposed to see it with me, but then they ditched me at the last minute. Avatar IS crap, though. Pocahontas with aliens bullshit.

I wouldn't know, I think the last James Cameron film I watched had Robert Patrick stabbing people in the face and getting shot in the chest with a grenade launcher. Unless he did True Lies... I honestly can't remember now.

 

[skywalkerlion]

Tomorrow: "Crysis 2 Writer says Gears of War is 'majorly fucking retarded.' "

He does seem to enjoy dissing mainstream games, especially their stories. I supposes Crysis 2 will have to prove that he isn't just talking out of his ass.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[v3n0mat3]

*Bows down to Morgan* Someone else agrees with me...

 

[Warped_Ghost]

The only reason I keep buying halo games is because I love the story but it's all in the books. The story in halo games however falls short of satisfying.

 

[robinkom]

I noticed a lot of people don't like it when someone speaks up against something they like or is popular. Unfortunately for you people, he's right. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't responsible for the success of Halo and all that money it raked in.

Mainstream is mainstream for a reason. If it's music, it's people like Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift. If it's television, it's shows like American Idol or Survivor. And if it's a video game, it's IP's like Gears of War and Halo.

If you want to craft a deep narrative and flesh out interesting and multifaceted characters, you make a game for the portion of the audience that looks for that. If you want to make boatloads of money cashing in on the sheep that are the 18-35 Male demographic that get off on supped-up macho soldiers and blowing shit up, you go mainstream.

It comes down to one question: Do you want to make a unique statement and stand out from the rest of the sheep or do you want to make a lot of money?

(The best answer is do the sell-out thing first and make a lot of money. Then you'll have the resources to work on your dream project afterward... provided your fan base doesn't expect more of the same from you.)

 

[Starke]

Molyneux

The man is a genius though, and quite possibly certifiable.

Case in point. In the second underground lab you get a message about where you can go to find someone who knows where Strelok is. If you follow that then, you get the resources to open up the true ending. If you don't, then you don't. The catch is, that the positive ending doesn't involve the wish granter at all. You have to go someplace completely different in the plant. So it isn't as arbitrary as what the bad endings are.

So is this Silent Hill syndrome where you're not told where to go for the good ending and have to stumble across the pre-requisites yourself, or is there actually some logic to it? A map pointing to where you have to go in the plant, for example. I'm all for having explorable environments and different consequences for going various places and such, but when there is absolutely no hint telling you where to go, it can get a bit infuriating.

Not exactly. You get an audio log that plays telling you where to go to find him. And a quest marker. The only thing the game doesn't do is set that quest as primary.

To use Silent Hill as an example again, in the first game, there's a police station. You don't go there in the story, and it's off to the side so you wouldn't even notice it if you weren't looking for it. The game doesn't tell you that you can go there. In an office in there, there's a red liquid spilt on the floor. One of the pre-requisites for getting the best good+ ending is to scoop up some of this red liquid in a bottle. There are ABSOLUTELY no hints to do this.

fffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

As I recall Silent Hill pulls about 3 of these. Another one that comes to mind is some random crap you have to syphen out of a gas tank. You have to use it at the right time or or you'll miss out on the best ending, and you only have one shot to make it work.

But, no, that was something different. STALKER tells you what you need to do to get the best ending, it just doesn't move the quest marker to follow until you tell it to.

In a random tangent, because we don't have enough of those...

I can't even remember why we started. Oh, Halo, right. I think we're keeping this thread in the Most Commented thing just by ourselves at this point.

In the beginning there was darkness. And in the darkness there was a circus midget with a needler...

Yahtzee not withstanding, The Witcher is a really deep RPG, with a really complex narrative that really does change based on the choices you make. The writing is excellent, the setting is somewhat unique, and anachronistic, for instance, Witchers are refereed to as being "genetically engineered". At its core it's a really great rewarding game. It just takes for fucking ever to dig through to it. If you have the attention span, it's probably the best RPG on the market in years. I have no idea who has that kind of attention span. I got about 40 hours in before getting distracted and wandering off.

That's the thing, I like gratification. Not instant gratification, not even speedy gratification, I'll take gratification within 20 hours. Dragon Age, Mass Effect and so on all manage to hint that sweet spot where just as you're starting to get disillusioned with the game and thinking "Okay bored now", you hit your next objective or whatever and you perk up again. In Dragon Age, that's essentially 2 of the main story quests, in Mass Effect, probably two thirds of the game.

In Mass Effect and Dragon Age there's low level gratification for everything you do, though. You get crap to stuff around, new weapons new armor, shit like that. In contrast, the Witcher doesn't do that. New armor is rare, and there's only a handful of new weapons to collect throughout the game (that aren't patently worse than what you start with).

It makes sense in the setting, Witchers are incredibly well trained and equipped, so you shouldn't be finding a sword that's better than your meteoric one on a regular basis, but it does mean that the game can feel unrewarding.

So many games these days are either too short (the majority) or too long (the minority), sacrificing gametime and general replayability for pretty graphics and newer, better engines. Hell, when Mitchello and me did out Modern Warfare 2 commentary, it took us about 6 hours from start to finish. We recently did The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon, which is in no way a fantastic game or huge-budget, but it managed to have 3 hours more gametime than that trundling behemoth that is Call of Duty. The day when a Spyro game, of all things, is more enjoyable than the newest FPS on the market is a sad day indeed.

The worst part is, I remember when people were bitching out Max Payne 2 for being too short. And that was 10 hours minimum.

At the other end of the scale you have games like Two Worlds, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and The Witcher, according to you. If you'll bear with me while I check my Oblivion save file- yes, 179 hours worth of gametime. The difference between Oblivion and Fallout 3, and Two Worlds and The Witcher, is that both the Bethesda games managed to keep me entertained throughout. I was disillusioned with Two Worlds in about six hours, and The Witcher even less time than that.

Yeah, and that's a different issue entirely, does a game appeal to you? For me Two Worlds went from being passable to really addictive when I realized I could stack items, but that was just me... the more I played it the more undocumented features I found, and the more fun I had screwing around and seeing what happened.

I don't know, I was brought up in the 80s, and generally speaking I'm a highly educated uncultured heathen. The two largest collections of literature in this room are Comic Books and RPGs. It's kind of a question about where you put your priorities. These days I usually don't have time to work through a 300 page novel. I can get through a six issue trade paperback in a couple hours, so the comics win out because I have the time.

That said, I do try to mix up my reading. The last books I read for my own amusement were Nightwatch and The Last Wish (both translated to English), and I've got a Grey Knights Omnibus around here somewhere that I can haul with me this summer.

Night Watch is Lukyenanko isn't it? In vaguely related news, I'm hoping to get my hands on the Metro 2033 book soon. As you're not adverse to a proper book now and then, I highly recommend The 120 Days of Sodom any and all Robin Hobb novels. Also, though you probably have already, Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I have. And Homecomming. I'm not a big Card fan.

The thing that may have contributed to my dislike of bioware, and did lead me to not giving a shit about them before Jade Empire came out on PC was that there isn't much variety. Compare this to, say, Obsidian where there's some common themes between Kotor2 and Mask of the Betrayer, but generally speaking all their titles offer something distinct, by flavor.

I did notice Dragon Age felt like KOTOR to play.

And Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire, and even to an extent Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, for me. The feel of the games starts to bleed together over time. A lot of it's because it's the same characters in the same situations over and over again.

This is not a hallmark of good writing.

Well, okay, here's the thing with FC2. For the bulk of the game you're being handed folders full of conflict diamonds to go someplace and fuck some people's shit up, and in a very real sense you approach this without any regard to the morality of what you're doing (particularly in the context of video games). Both factions are illusions, there's no difference, there's no good guys, the message you can extract here is just how pointless this shit is. Most players seem to internalize that and view the game as pointless, but really, its a conscious narrative decision about how this kind of conflict tends to play out. A political statement even.

Boring as all hell, you mean? Because if so, then it's hardly a good idea to make a game out of it, surely. Mercenaries 2 was more entertaining than this, and Mercenaries 2 was utter brine.

Okay, two things.

One: Far Cry 2 may be boring, that doesn't mean there isn't more going on than you perceived. This is precisely the kind of content I'm trained to look for, and Far Cry 2 has it in spades. It's simply too blatant to be an accident.

Two: Roger Ebert is off flame baiting the entire video game community making him either the world's oldest troll, or an ass out of himself. What he's saying is Video Games aren't art. And he's right. In gaming we tend to look for immediate gratification. Whatever we're doing has to pay off right now or we get bored and wander off. I've seen games that skip out on this. Pathologic is the best example I'm aware of, and the fact you've (almost certainly) never heard of it should tell you just how well it went over. It's hard, opaque, doesn't accept any margin for error, will screw you over during a course of (in game) days. And it tells a very disturbing and pointed story about the value of human life, and the scarcity of it. The problem is, very deliberately it is not fun. It's painful, exhausting, emotionally taxing. These are all deliberate design choices. Because, if you were having fun doing this, going through these characters lives, then it wouldn't serve the story. I'm not saying art has to be suffering, I'm saying we're forcing video games to be fun at the cost of potential artistic value. Pathologic is probably the deepest game I've ever played. And it's hell.

On the second count we have The Jackal. You're brought in to take him down, and this is one of the places where the game parallels Heart of Darkness most directly, because The Jackal is all the horrible things you've been lead to believe, but he honestly sees himself as the good guy because he's approaching morality from a different perspective, and by the end of the game your character is in agreement with him, even if you, the player, do not.

But this is hardly a new idea. All over literary and gaming there's examples of the "ruthless" character, and same deal with the people doing terrible things because they believe that they're doing the right thing for everyone. I'm surprised that it's impressed you this much.

No, that doesn't. The idea of a Nietzsche wannabe is fucking everywhere in fiction. The difference is that The Jackal is a genuine adherent, something there's precious few of. Also, unlike most characters who prattle off about Nietzsche he doesn't think he's the Ubermensch.

EDIT: No, seriously. You're demonstrating a staggering lack of familiarity with Nietzsche. Nietzsche isn't morals are irrelevant. It's about doing good things through dubious methods. Not doing evil things through evil methods allegedly for the greater good.

He's looking to end the series of brush fire wars by killing everyone "infected" by the war. "Quarantine the patient" he says. He does this while blurbling off about Nietzsche and quoting from Beyond Good and Evil [At least I think it's Beyond Good and Evil, I'm not about to go check to make sure its not from another one of his, but it is a famous Nietzsche quote regardless.]

Yeah, it was Beyond Good and Evil. ...there's another game I need to get my hands on.

PPPPPP

That I can easily write a full paragraph on each of these points without even stopping, thinking, or really trying to mine out their depths should indicate there's a lot more going on here than just go to point B and kill shit. Its somewhat deceptive, because the game doesn't look that deep at first glance, but there is another layer of material under the surface. So it really is asking relevant questions, something Crysis and Halo really don't do.

Yes, but it's not exactly hard to write a paragraph about the Jackal, he's a wanker and quotes Nietzsche like it's going out of fashion, there's obviously about five psychological reviews worth of material there. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything, I'm sure I could write paragraphs on Halo's story if I felt inclined to.

You're welcome to try. The issue is that Far Cry has some legitimate, and intentional philosophical depth to it. The same really can't be said of Halo (at least not without bringing in the EU.)

I wouldn't know, I think the last James Cameron film I watched had Robert Patrick stabbing people in the face and getting shot in the chest with a grenade launcher. Unless he did True Lies... I honestly can't remember now.

The Abyss was basically his last good movie. Then came Titanic. -shudder-

Wait, so you're saying Strange Days, Terminator 2 and True Lies are bad?