Israirie said:
Dragon Age. How it got such amazing ratings is beyond me. It was utterly generic, shallow, limited and pointless in every way. There is nothing even mildly entertaining or even interesting throughout the entire game.
I don't get mad easily. I have a really long fuse. But by the end of this one... all I felt was contempt. And anger. The anger being mostly due to the fact they called this piece of shit "the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate", which was a blatant, massive lie to get people to buy it, and I'm the sucker. They are both set in fantasy worlds, that is where the similarities end.
Basically I've never felt more cheated and that's why for me DAO gets my worst game of the generation vote. Over a year later and still thinking about this puts me in a bad mood.
I'm not sure I understand. It
is a spiritual sequel to Baldur's gate. It shares the same mechanical concepts, the same genre features, and the same tropes - everything that defines a spiritual sequel. And I don't really see how it was generic unless you mean the concepts that
were the same as Baldur's Gate. The world is fairly unique with a decaying fantasy world, a strong sense of hopelessness and despair, ruthless (but perhaps justified) persecution of magic, and enslaved rather than enlightened elves. The story has so many possible outcomes that it's awfully hard to say that it's not unique (sure some of them are generic fantasy endings, but you have to aim for a generic fantasy ending to get one). I really just don't understand how you could possibly find absolutely nothing of value, it was a unique take on fantasy while still keeping firmly within the bounds of the genre using a beloved set of mechanics that were similar to the older mechanics, but more varied and polished. Also, the characters were wonderfully varied if you took the time to get to know them in the game.
OT: Brotherhood. Assassin's Creed 2 is probably my favourite game of this generation, but Brotherhood disappointed me at almost every turn. The story and the settings (both the variation between the cities and the cities themselves with special events like the carnivale) of AC2 never left me feeling like the game was repetitive and I was constantly wishing to know what came next. Every upgrade I got made me feel like even more of a badass and I felt like I was following an interesting progression. Every sidequest was justified by the plot and the game only seemed like it was trying to be "extreme" at climactic moments rather than just trying to be "hardcore" all over the place. The mechanics were simple, but the polish was unbelievable. I wasn't sure if I was just overly fond of it in hindsight, but having replayed it a few times now, I'm pretty sure that I wasn't.
But Brotherhood, despite the addition of what I found to be an incredibly fun multiplayer, had a boring storyline with no real momentum. I didn't care about any of the characters overly much and the tutorials were shoehorned into the gameplay with considerably less care than in AC2 (it made sense to carry stuff for someone when you were a kid, less so when you were the master assassin who ruled the city in badass black armour openly carrying all manner of weapons). In general, it just lacked polish (TONS of lazy animation glitches). The decision to put it all in one large city was a poor one that hurt variety and meant that the extremely brief sojourns into other areas for sidequests felt tacked on. This was made even worse by the fact that the sidequests themselves felt tacked on. Why am I collecting feathers again? It made sense to do so earlier while I was making the cape in Ezio's brother's memory, but what precisely was the point this time? Why on EARTH am I collecting these Romulus key things? In AC2, you knew why you were collecting Assassin's Seals and the reward was made perfect sense within the series's continuity. In Brotherhood, you get jumped by a pack of wolf men for no discernable reason, abandon your current mission to follow them into a dark hole in some ruins, find a key, and suddenly decide that some mythical armour exists and you need more keys to get it. And then the upgrades - making them purchasable through Da Vinci rather than related to the plot felt cheap and many of the later abilities just seemed silly. When you can poison people, shoot people, stab people, and throw daggers at people, do you REALLY need an ability to use a projectile weapon to poison people at range? And then there's the amount of effort that went into making things "hardcore
all the time" to the point where none of it feels special anymore at all. By the end, you'd be hard pressed to be impressed by anything the game can throw at you.
Edit: Jesus, next time I decide to try my hand at NaNoWriMo, maybe I should just write a novel complaining about Brotherhood...
Edit the second: People think MW2 is the WORST GAME OF THIS GENERATION?
MADNESS. Any game that lets you defend American suburbs and burger shops against an invading Russia
CANNOT be a bad game, much less the
worst game. I simply have to assume that anyone who dislikes that game has never seen Red Dawn.
