Force Unleashed 2 Is Too Much

[VondeVon]

The most amusing part this week was the side rant about Indiana Jones. The escapes orchestrated by a clairvoyant lunatic were the best parts!

 

[SageRuffin]

If I may go on a tangent, I still believe that SW:tFU, as well as Galen by extension, would probably be better accepted if it wasn't tied to the Rise of the Empire; like, if it was set long after the Legacy era or something. That way, instead of trying to shoehorn characters from the original saga into the storyline/gameplay, it instead only has to make indirect references, like how you can easily refer to Yoda by saying something like:

"One's power in the force is not measured solely by the appearance of the individual. There once lived a great Jedi master, the smallest thing you ever saw... he could as easily control the world around him as any other."

You know, something like that. Pardon me if I sound like a lobotomized retard for even trying to defend SW:tFU (of which you can kiss my ass since I actually enjoy the games and am eagerly waiting for more DLC to drop), but I think the one saving grace the series needed was to not set between episodes 3 and 4. Hell, I have a video on YouTube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2CsU9TKOAM] where me and a friend are playing a nice little game of SCIV (you know, that featured very choice Star Wars characters), and everyone freaked out at the fact that Galen was even created and might be as powerful if not more so than Darth Vader; I've since disallowed comments because people wouldn't stop being fucking morons about it (feel free to ask for specifics).

I'm starting to ramble, so I'm gonna stop here and get back to achievement grinding.

Addendum: And for the record, Galen didn't so much pull the Star Destroyer out of the sky as he just redirected its trajectory.

 

[I forgot]

As usual another excellent article that isnt meant for mere laughs but to actually change the industry, a true observation of human fallacies.

Yahtzee Croshaw is the John Stewart of Gaming, give it a couple more years and I see Yahtzee leaving the simple internet media and branching out into the public's eye.

Actually, I kind of dread that day because he's still an amateur at game criticism. Almost all of his works are filled with fallacies, even now.
The problem with both of these cases is that they don't want to put fear, they want to empower. You're not supposed to be afraid with Kratos because he's a god killer with amazing strength. Plus, he's comparing this to Condemned, which is a Horror game. No duh you're more likely to be afraid. He misses the point of these games. I want to know what gave him the idea that a game where you beat up monsters, gods and titans wanted to instill fear?

If he's an amateur, you're not even in scratching distance of him.
Horror game or not, you want to feel your emotions evoked, to find yourself in front of a challenge that you may be apprehensive to approach. You have to be realistic and relatable if you want the player to feel even remotely connected to the characters and the process at hand. Games that pride themselves as ridiculous don't have to deal with this. Saints Row 2's reckless abandon of realism and Team Fortress 2's charming art style can attest to this. But any game that wants to have a semblance of realistic struggle needs to have some sense of scope. "Empowerment"? Hardly. Whatever empowerment God of War 3 grants is easily offset by the amount of detachment to the game you feel once you become to powerful.

To put this into perpective, can you imagine playing Grand Theft Auto 4 as the mayor of SimCity? No, you can't. You can't imagine that kind of gritty realism when you're conjuring up tornadoes. The struggles in Max Payne become laughable. When you're a god among men, there are no interesting men.

Seriously, I think you're just mad because of what I said about Yahtzee. In a way, I'm not even disagreeing with you (you don't get a sense of apprehension from Kratos because he's so damn strong) so I don't know who you're responding to. If this was about a game like Dead Space, I'd find nothing wrong with his point. I only found something wrong with his example and him insinuating that games should be more realistic.

I'm as mad as you're pretending not to be, smartass.
And you're missing the point. A good struggle needs to be not only interesting, but understandable. You take down ships of unfathomable size in Force Unleashed 2, to the extent at which you just don't care anymore, and the kind of emotions you intended to evoke is missed completely as you take them down Star Destroyers like anything else. Where do you go from there? Lifting a star fighter out of a swamp looks pretty fuckin' wimpy in comparison. You just overshadowed an entire franchise's worth of scope just to impress someone for thirty seconds. It's called moderation, and that game doesn't have it. You don't need to pull a rabbit out of your ass to impress people. Jules from Pulp Fiction can do it with a gun and a random bible verse. He didn't kill a spaceship; he just showed complexity of character. There is a time and a place for everything. And that "everything" is not interchangeable with "Deus Ex Machina".

I said in a way I agree with you and you're still going on. You're making arguments with an imaginary person. You sure showed me you weren't mad at what I said.

 

[ImprovizoR]

You complain that those bosses are too big yet a few weeks ago you praised shadow of the colossus. I see a little inconsistency in your ramblings.

In Shadow of The Colossus you weren't an overpowered Jedi with 2 lightsabers. You're just a dude. It's ridiculous how Starkiller is overpowered. Even a monster 100 times bigger than him can be easily defeated. And then you're supposed to feel tension when you fight stormtroopers afterwards?
I know exactly what Yahtzee is saying. Just play TFU2 and then go play Jedi Knight 2 and see for yourself how a Star Wars game should be made. In Jedi Knight you're constantly struggling to be just a little more powerful and skillful because it can save your life. In TFU2 you just press buttons randomly and everything around you dies. On top of that you have something like Kratos in God of War that allows you to be even more powerful for a limited amount of time after you kill enough enemies. And that move allows you to kill everything in one hit!

 

[NeoShinGundam]

This is how Final Fantasy XIII was turned into a train-wreck. Square-Enix concentrated SO much on making every battle an EPIC CLASH OF SUPER-MEGA EPICNESS. Yeah they look really great, but they last FOREVER!!! Playing the game, it feels like everything else (the characters, the plot, linear level design) are after thoughts only there to move you from one overly-cinematic fight scene to the next.

Here's a little tip for game designers: when you make every encounter "special" in the exact same way, special will eventually lose its luster and become the new Average.

 

[Doomcat]

I agree with what Yahtzee says...im actually more scared of monsters in Minecraft then i am of monsters such as giants or ogres or whatever you want to call those gigantic things that they put in everywhere.

Minecraft makes you Vulnerable and makes the monsters plausibly strong. it makes afraid to go out at night. enough said.

 

[Atmos Duality]

"Design by committee".

That's a more generalized version of the precise answer: "Design by Marketing"

The Force Unleashed (1 and 2) is about marketing a power trip to children. So few games specifically demonstrate what their goal is than this one (ESRB ratings be damned).
You do flashy things, and people fall down. That's it. That's the level of depth they needed to achieve in order to sell.

If you go into any deeper territory, you encounter two problems:
1) You begin to alienate the younger audience, as you move towards topics that require a higher mental maturity.
2) It takes effort, which means time and money. You don't have those after blowing your budget on special effects.

This is the exact manner in which the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was written, and it's the manner in which most games are made today.

The industry will not change unless faced with inevitable collapse. American TV is facing a similar crisis, culminating in the relatively recent Writer's Strike.
Why are there so many utterly worthless, stupid reality TV shows? Because the TV executives have discovered the lowest common denominator: Bruckheimer Cop-Shows and stupid people doing stupid things in front of a camera.

 

[Azrael the Cat]

Anyone remembers Darth Nihilius from Kotor 2?

That guy was said to be a able to destroy planets. This guy was practically a deathstar on legs with serious roid abuse related problems.

That's why I don't see much sense in the Starkiller is overpowered argument. He is not the worst example. Yet Yahtzee is right how this could evolve in such a way.
The modern additions to the Star Wars myth just undermines the consistency of the first trilogy.

2 big things with Nilhus, explaining why you cannot compare him as a contradiction to normal starwars power. Starkiller is a Sith/Jedi - a straight up user of the force. Nilhus, Sion, Kreia and the PC are NOT. They are something....else....as explained in the game.

Nihlus, and almost all the main antagonists and protagonists in KoTOR2 are accidents - not truly Jedis. Nihlus is unsustainable - he is a force vampire, that must keep feeding and feeding or wither away and die. He is neither a true jedi nor sith - just something horrible created by the monstrosity the PC did at Malachor 5.

Similarly for Darth Sion. He is seemingly invulnerable, but also a side-effect, a monstrosity of limited lifespan created by the monstrosity of Malachor 5.

And, of course, (made far more obvious with the restoration patch) so is the PC. He NEVER got his force powers back. He is a hole in the force, which went unnoticed when he was in exile in the outer planes. When he returned he started sucking the force out of the lifeforce of the planets he was on. Then due to his nature, he started gathering force sensitives to him without even realising it, both light and dark, and wielding unexplained influence over them. As is revealed later, he is draining them, whether he wants to or not. He's neither a sith nor a Jedi - the Jedi SUCCEEDED in cutting him off from the force after what he did at Malachor 5. He's become a hole in the force, draining all around him, which is why he is so powereful. You can't measure him, or Nilhus, or Sion, by ordinary Jedi or Sith rules because they aren't Jedi or Sith. They are something far more horrible - so horrible that the remaining Jedi Masters risk their lives to try to kill the protagonist even if he is complete light side, as he is just too dangerous, draining all around him even if he doesn't want to.

And Kreia? She's an odd one, and the hardest to explain. She's the only one I'm aware of who has truly managed to walk the neutral path between Sith and Jedi. At different stages (there's a walkthrough on the web that traces this brilliantly, as it's hard to follow in the game, as so much crucial info is shown momentarily, or put in hints at near-opposite ends of the game, or requires you to combine info you can only get from ultra high or ultra low rep with some characters. But she is only pretending to be Sith when she kills the Jedi masters and kidnaps your companions later. Just like she pretended to be kind-of-Jedi earlier. She is neither, and she knows what you are. She realises - correctly - that the universe will be doomed to repeat these wars, destroying itself time and time again as the Jedi and Sith fight for power. Moreover, she points out the troubling feature of the Star Wars universe - both Jedi and Sith are determinist philosophies, while any Jedi or Sith exist the rest of the galaxy has no free will.

So she hopes that Nihlus - the force vampire - can destroy all the big centres of Jedi, while the PC - the force black hole - can destroy all the Sith, and that when they meet the force black hole will kill the force vampire of starvation. And that once these creations of Malachor 5 - these things that THINK they are jedi or sith, but are really neither - once they kill every single remaining jedi and sith in the galaxy, and the PC (the force black hole) kills Sion and Nihlus, then Kreia can kill him and then herself, freeing the galaxy from eternal cycles of war, and giving it free will away from the Jedi/Sith cycle.

Of course, things don't go that way. The PC not only gathers force sensitives - he trains them. And as Kreia recognises they will form the future Jedi - the council that we see in the Star Wars 1-3 movies - something more warlike and ready to act than the council we see in KoTOR 1. Nonetheless, Kreia's last words: the PC, whatever he is, is not a Jedi, nor a Sith, and that gives her hope.

 

[Woodsey]

You complain that those bosses are too big yet a few weeks ago you praised shadow of the colossus. I see a little inconsistency in your ramblings.

You're missing the point.

He's saying that the barrage of awesome-o means that nothing actually stands out. You need to take it down to 5 for 10 to be impressive.

Large amounts of Shadow of the Colossus are spent wandering around on a horse not doing anything.

 

[EightGaugeHippo]

I dont think the Lucas had Realism in mind when they designed her Chewie...

 

[RobCoxxy]

You know what's sad about Force Unleashed 2? When I first heard about it was only a day or two before the street date. And honestly the first thing that went through my mind. "He's dead! TFU was supposed to be canon, how in god's name do you bring him back? Cloning? Jesus Jumped-up Christ, Lucas! ENOUGH WITH THE CLONES!"

Now we see the point of the whole cloning nonsense. Boba Fett is a clone, Starkiller is cloned and reborn. Lucas has introduced cloning as freaking retcon white-out. And when these new Star Wars films come out supposedly set thousands of years in the future. What? Emperor Palpatine? They cloned him?

*facepalm*

Anyway there's no possible way TFU could have been good. TFU was basically the Jedi Knight series cranked up to 11, so you know TFU2 was gonna be the same thing. And the story was gonna suck and... Yeah, no point in dragging this out.

You know what I miss? Dark Forces. You know the one star wars game that doesn't have any Jedi nonsense. Where you shoot stormtroopers with blaster rifles and throw thermal detonators at them? Seriously, that was a fun game. Why has the "non-Jedi" aspect of the Star Wars universe been so dismissed? Where are the stories about Han, Chewie, Lando, Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt?

Wait, don't do that Lucas. You'll just f**k it up.

Don't! HE'LL GET IDEAS.

And I miss Dark Forces/Jedi Knight.
Give me Kyle Katarn back, Lucas, you beardy weirdo.

 

[ExileNZ]

On the subject of good and bad endings though, who else thought the dark-side ending to Jedi Academy was far more interesting?

I'm still waiting for Jedi Knight 5: The Hunt for Jaden, where a beleagured Kyle Katarn gets back on his proverbial bike and hunts down the murderous shit that was his apprentice.
Now that's a game I would gladly buy.

 

[ExileNZ]

Anyone remembers Darth Nihilius from Kotor 2?

-SNIP-

Of course, things don't go that way. The PC not only gathers force sensitives - he trains them. And as Kreia recognises they will form the future Jedi - the council that we see in the Star Wars 1-3 movies - something more warlike and ready to act than the council we see in KoTOR 1. Nonetheless, Kreia's last words: the PC, whatever he is, is not a Jedi, nor a Sith, and that gives her hope.

Okay, so I just spoiled myself for a lot of KOTOR 2, but since I've already seen the (lackluster) ending I don't really care.

But from what you've described that's totally ripped off from Dune, with the Golden Path. Muad'dib didn't merely SEE the future, but by seeing it he actually CREATED it, thus robbing every living thing in the universe of free will or choice. It took 10,000 Idaho clones (oh look, clones! There they are again!) and a rebellion which Leto II aided in overthrowing himself, to break free of this prison.

 

[DarthYam]

I suspect that vader probably threw the fight. Fett does follow at the end and the dark apprentice doesn't get involved. in fairness, the clone wins partially due to dumb luck in the novelization.

 

[TheRocketeer]

I've always been bothered by this, definitely more than most people, and probably to an extent I can admit is unreasonable.

This is why I've never been able to get into Lovecraft. He has uncanny skill at writing, but at the end of the day the subject matter is the kind of thing 'that kid' no one hung out with in elementary school drew in his notebook when he should have been learning long division. I just can't take the supposedly hair-raising events of the books seriously while the threat is essentially a betentacled level-5 super-saiyan.

Give me a story where the stakes are as comparatively 'low' as the safety of someone's family or just getting through the day with something to eat, or even look forward to, and I'm hooked. Making something like that work takes talent, or at least more work, and watching a talented or dedicated artist at work is nearly always worthwhile.

 

[DarthYam]

one thing that's scary? The novelization used to promote the game is less wanked. The clone wins due to dumb luck (juno accidentally grazes vader, and the clone focuses his lightning into the small breach in vader's armour.) Though vader's taunts and the final line he gives are quite badass. it show's he's over wifey's death, and that he really has grown into the mold of sith.

 

[Therealgijoe]

You know what I miss? Dark Forces. You know the one star wars game that doesn't have any Jedi nonsense. Where you shoot stormtroopers with blaster rifles and throw thermal detonators at them? Seriously, that was a fun game. Why has the "non-Jedi" aspect of the Star Wars universe been so dismissed?

Hell yeah! A good Star Wars shooter would be welcome. Republic Commando tried to do that, but was bogged down with very linear gameplay (hallways and only hallways, were the form of transport) and repetitive combat sequences, whereas Dark Forces had nonlinear levels with linear objectives (run around a destroyed town until you can find the red key), and there weren't 4 enemy types. Republic Commando also tried too hard to make some Halo-esque multiplayer mode.

 

[Hyakunin Isshu]

(I already said this in "Zero Punctuation: Portal 2" But since my quotes mostly comes from this page, I'm C&P it here too)

To Ben Croshaw:

You don't care what I have to say about graphics, but, damn it, I'm going to try.

There is so many problems with you, Mr. Croshaw, but I'm just going to start with this one:

"Visual effects technology in both videogames and films have advanced to the point that what is put on screen is limited only by the director's imagination"

"Oh, for the days of the last console generation, when technology sat on the very agreeable fence between high-techitude and accessibility, when developers weren't so slow to ask themselves questions like "Strictly speaking do we really need a physics engine in a Championship Manager game? Is it so important that the league tables slide realistically down the screen?""

"Now, Last Crusade achieved this effect because it was a real stunt occurring in reality between real, physical objects, which is virtually impossible to fully simulate in pixel space because of the millions of factors you can't possibly predict, like the movements of the thousands of dust and grit particles that cloud up and get in Harrison Ford's face."

It seems you are trying to tell everyone that graphics in games will never get any better, and movie CGI can almost never be as good as the real thing, so it's pointless to even try. What an awful thing to tell people! We didn't get here by throwing up our hands and saying "too hard! we give up!" Technology *NEVER* works like that! You just want to go back to the "good OLD days".

And what the Hell is it with you calling it "pixels"? You sound like an old man who reviews movies then a gamer. Why didn't you call it CGI, or graphics, or polygons , like most of us do?

Let me get to the point: You say games are now "limited only by the director's imagination". That is complete nonsense! If that was true in anyway, then please show me this game, with no canned-animation or scripted sequence:

--In this photorealistic game, the Player is on top of a mountain looking down on a huge city. In the city, the Player sees 100,000 Cyborg Demon Ninjas, rampaging through the city, killing everyone in sight. On top of that, there is Giant Robots and motherships destroying all the buildings. The city itself can be dynamically destroyed; better then anything seen in both Red Faction or Minecraft (See the movie 2012). This photorealistic game is also a Open World game with real rooms in all the buildings, meaning, if I wanted to, I can hide in a fridge from all those CDNs in a apartment....--

Do you know any 360 or PS3 games like that? No, you don't. The only thing near to that, is Red Faction: Guerrilla, and even then, you can only destroy something that has 2 floors and 5 rooms. It's not like you can destroy something the size of Black Mesa or anything. In fact, some games can't even have more then 5 bad guys on the ground, because of bad programming, and or the way the game engine works. They get around it by using tricks, but I can always tell when they are using those tricks. And here's a big secret: programing gets much easier when computers are a lot more powerful. I'm a programmer, so I know what I'm talking about.

So please stop talking as if we hit the holy motherland, because we can barely have a photorealistic human in a room, much less an army of photorealistic humans destroying a city in a non scripted way.

For anyone thinks this can't happen in the next 5 to 10 years, think again:

Physic tech demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuWuTc5agVA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bKphYfUk-M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlcc9wJAzFQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grIVUDH4FIM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87qdmuOesRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsMjRmaJOqo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrb8PSpkhkQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwoJ-upjeKo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JrM4ujLY_A

real-time ray tracing and path tracing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbokPe4_-mY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyoHvNpuaK4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnXW0CitlIA


real-time in-game graphics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_YNR38H-kM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjXCae4Gu0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GckOkpeJ3BY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvI1l0nAd1c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GmrdHxpYxk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBJIpQsecB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THaam5mwIR8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i_mgF7Vas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZjzSQgBrg


I'll end this by saying, I know my words will fall on deaf ears, and if Mr. Croshaw ever sees this, he is just going to make fun of my bad grammer, and all my stupid links. Well, sorry for wanting to go to the future, but I can't live forever, and I can think of a million fun things in games, that you just can't do in this seventh generation of consoles. Sure, we have Portal and Mindcraft, but do you really want to wait 20 years on the seventh generation, hoping someone is going to make a super game to come-out, while playing Gears Of War 12, or Modern Warfare 7? Because even Ubisoft said they don't want to make anything new until the next-gen comes a calling:
http://scrawlfx.com/2011/04/ubisoft-ceo-industry-needs-new-consoles


And Mr. Croshaw? If you really want to try new and weird games, why don't you try all the Wii games you never played? Or all the games that came out in the 90s? Or all the indie games? Or the great iphone games? Or all the mods? Why do you *always* have to talk about the most popular games? Why not review Star Control 2? Why not? It's sad you openly lie to try to move the gaming industry your way. You say you want weirder games, but you only seem to enjoy shooters, and sometimes RPGs.

( P.S. You, Mr. Croshaw, give gamers everywhere a bad name.)