the menus are genuinely nice on a controller too. It even has inventory tetris! I really cherish a nice menu.
idk. There were plenty of teams on this project who did a nearly perfect job, the end result is just so uninteresting.
It’s an amazingly disappointing sum of parts! And though I’ve said again and again it’s the most obvious mid-project-rescoped game at this scale I’ve seen in years, it doesn’t have the minor bugs and lack of spit 'n polish you’d normally expect from something with these production problems, like Mass Effect: Andromeda.
It’s like the crisis mode was early enough that everyone just lowered their expectations a year out and went, well, it’s good enough.
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it’s very strange to be in the position of appreciating the completeness of its weapon upgrade system without really expecting it to bear on anything
Complete with the same bone-headed philosophy of the first game, You Can Upgrade Everything And Don’t Really Need to Make Hard Choices.
should I uninstall it now that I’m in the middle of the second Prague section at night? I think I probably should.
You guys aren’t wrong but I’m still enjoying going back and pushing through the main quest to see the aug ghetto. Last night I stole the digital evidence thumb drive thing from the site of the train station explosion. Jensen is currently loitering in hq putting off his psychiatric appointment and I decided within the first ten minutes or so of starting this new game that I was not going to use any guns at all if I could avoid it.
So it’s been a lot of creeping past guards, crawling through vents and making liberal use of my knock-you-the-fuck-out button. I am playing non lethally as much as possible though I accidentally electrocuted some cops who were guarding the evidence in the last level. I’m not save scumming it though. Just going to own those goof ups.
The dialogue is terrible and I usually skip most of it but now I’m thinking about just turning the voice volume all the way down. My main problem with the whole way these games handle in-game conversations between characters is that I can read the subtitle faster than the actors can spit out the lines and it is incredibly dull watching a so-called “cinematic” where all that happens is the camera cuts back and forth between two people droning on at each face to face while slowly shifting about in place. How would Hitchcock direct these little scenes? I bet he would at least find one or two good, visually interesting camera angles to use while cutting back and forth. If they had still been taking cues from Metal Gear Solid I’d even be able to move and zoom the camera around a bit.
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I need to go and play one of the other dozen games whose voiced dialogue I’ve really enjoyed in the past few years just to figure out what drove them to be so literal minded here, because I actually can’t put my finger on what is so terrible about that part.
The Witcher has dozens of highly transactional side quests and every single one of them is more interesting. Meanwhile Jensen’s entire persona seems to be, like, a running gag that’s never even funny.
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The Witcher has the benefit of a well-defined main character who can tell jokes within the strict jacket of a game protagonist, who is a professional who we can take pleasure in watching work (as he reveals that knowledge to us), and always has the benefit of mystery plots to work in. He’s basically a private eye character (or Batman) and I think that provides an extremely sturdy frame to write quests off of, and when a dozen writers share him they can avoid breaking his character.
I was continuously impressed in Witcher 3 at the budget for unique reaction anims on Geralt in minor quests, too – they understood like no one else the benefit of cutting to him and—no reaction. Game characters never do nothing! They always flail around and in Witcher 3 we finally see some restraint without woodenness, which is very impressive.
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These types of games are such sweet nectar to me that I happily buried myself in it for 2 weeks on launch, but I can’t deny it retreats into every mediocrity possible.
Make sure you get to the Aug ghetto, Mr_Mech, it’s my favorite part of the game.
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Tell me I can quit now. I need your absolution.
Hmm, the third Prague act is notable (as you probably suspected was coming, it makes the entire city into a danger/stealth zone swarming with robocops, finally making all the cover and airvents meaningful) so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that if you’ve made it this far.
The dungeon in between the second and third Prague section is a lowlight — it’s like a pastiche of Half-Life and MGS instead of feeling Deus Ex at all. So there’s a case for quitting just not to deal with that part, but it’s not too long at least. The final dungeon after that is OK and has a couple of fresh ideas but basically at the average quality of the game, so skippable.
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Would have been better if most conversations were like the “verbal battles” that show up when the game presents you with Choices What Bear Consequences Later On. I’m actually looking forward to the psych appointment because I know it’ll be one of those and I specifically haven’t taken the social analyzer aug so that those will stay at least a little bit unpredictable.
Much like other AAAs with an upgrade system the game is only mechanically interesting if you explicitly set out to restrict which ones you use. They start out kind of like that with the unstable augs and making it so you can’t use one without disabling another one first but as soon they introduce that they give you a side quest that lets you eventually get everything without consequence.
It’s nice that they have all these options but you usually don’t go into it expecting to have to find the fun yourself. The way we’re naturally wired we take the maximalist approach of just doing everything because we want to “see it all” and its the most rational way to go or whatever while often not noticing that with a little bit of forethought and some restraint we could be playing a way more interesting version of the game than the one we usually end up playing.
Is it better to have that choice, as a player, or should the developer actually force meaningful consequences to our actions? Obviously they’ll offer the choice to play a game the boring way since they’re going for mass appeal but I’m more curious about whether or not the player should have to carry that responsibility.
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I am totally for having the choice - it makes the things you’re doing on the limited canvas presented by a game actually “worthwhile”, in a way.
Like, if you are searching for a challenge, you’ll most likely find one by simply restricting the toolset that is given to you to interact with the game.
Games also do this themselves by making you grind for tools that change the way you interact with them, e. g. you gain access to the most powerful tools at the end of the game where it does not matter as much as it’d before, since you already managed to get to check one important goal already without those tools, by finishing the game. Most players stop there, so it feels like a bit of a waste tbh, but that might just be me.
Still, if the player feels like the way towards this point is too “easy”, why take away the chance to make his investment worthwhile for her?
(i, for one, end up going for the challenge when playing racing games and made it a habit to rarely turn up with the best (nominally) racing car. If I do, I tend to either turn up the difficulty slider/setting/value or make sure some balancing factor is enforced, e. g. by pitting more often, waiting for a minute before starting racing seriously, etc.pp.
This, obviously, does not work out all the time, but I’d rather lose a race than just cruise around to collect a hollow victory that has been decided from the getgo… i’m weird, i know).
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In these cases, they usually don’t have enough budget to script the camerawork of every single conversation, so they just script the more central cutscenes and the others are taken care of with an automatic system. I haven’t seen any of these systems that’s sophisticated enough beyond what we saw in for example, Outcast
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it’s somehow worse here than elsewhere, though (this is one of the few aspects of the game that’s actively bad) – somehow, the pace of the dialog is slightly slower, the turn-taking is more pronounced, jensen himself isn’t particularly interesting to listen to and basically just repeats what other people are saying to him, etc.
Those “battles” were in HR were indeed good, and mostly because the format is simply good, standard pulp writing technique. For example, I noticed the last time I read Dune that almost every dialogue in the (first) book is crackling with tension because whichever characters are conversing have been somehow set up in opposition to each other – information dumps are weaved in while they’re trying to manipulate, coerce, deceive, prove themselves, etc.
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As long as you completely explored the bank, I’d say call it a day. I finished it the game, but I don’t feel like it’s mandatory.