As I approach the end of this journey through Command and Conquer, I am growing ever more resolved to never play Gen 3 ever again. It’s not even that they’re bad, because Tiberian Dawn is kinda bad, but it’s ~interestingly~ bad. Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wrath are just boring. Snoozer games. The Nod campaign in 3 is pretty good but that’s it. GDI and Scrin campaign in 3 and the whole campaign in Kane’s Wrath are just macro slugfests.
I didn’t bother with more than one battle in Global Conquest because playing MORE SKIRMISH does not fucking appeal to me. On to Red Alert 3…
was obsessed with these as a kid, with RA2 & Yuri’s Revenge being seminal, and immediately tapped out at Generals when it seemed to have no personality whatsoever, so it’s good to know I wasn’t missing anything
I already did Renegade. It’s bad. Hints of something that could be cool, and I do have a lot of nostalgia for the multiplayer, but it’s just not there.
Sometimes I play old terrible games to better understand the genres I like. Right now I’m playing through Dragon Age 2 for the first time since release, where I dismissed out of hand as further evidence that bioware doesn’t know shit. I wanted to see if maybe my opinions were colored by a general exhaustion with Biowarean dominance of the RPG scene, that perhaps my earlier opinions could use a bit of nuance.
But… I didn’t go far enough in my hatred of this game. It’s not an RPG at all, but a simplistic hack and slash game where you occasionally get linear visual novel cutscenes with your risibly written companions as a ‘reward’ for dealing with 15000 indistinguishable trash mobs. Most quests don’t even have dialogue. You just pick up random loot in one of the 5 dungeons they reuse a dozen times over, deliver it to a random quest marker npc, and get experience points and money. There’s not even a perfunctory conversation. Even the Diablo games put more effort into quest design.
I don’t know who at bioware felt motivated to kill the RPG as a genre but I am glad they failed, despite their efforts with Dragon Age 2.
Also don’t know how anyone put up with the constant miasma of sexual harassment that defines ‘talking to your companions’ but even if you avoid all helpfully tagged ‘flirt’ options the characters will still harass you and get upset with you if you don’t reciprocate. This protagosexual shit is a chilling portrait of why Bioware needed an HR department. Then again, this game came out deep in the xbox 360 edgelord bro-gamer era (as can be recognized by its overall color palette of grey and brown) so maybe they were trying to appeal to readers of lad mags. The entire script is laden with references to sexual violence, usually played for laughs (like your annoying dwarf buddy talking about how he wants to “deflower” a “virginal” dungeon).
Dragon Age 2 really feels like it came from the same place and time as Dante’s Inferno: the Video Game based on the Epic Poem, where rape and digital titties were being put into every mainstream game to signify “mature storytelling”. It is impressive how bioware fans have gaslit themselves into thinking this game was ‘good’ and ‘experimental’ instead of the simplistic, crass, poorly written mess it clearly always was.
Dragon Age is a really fascinating series in that literally all 4 of them are pretty bad – arguably worse than almost every other Bioware game, many of which are flawed but still interesting – but somehow in ways that give them plausible deniability so people can be like “real Dragon Age has never been tried”
like the whole series is a really bad consent manufacturing exercise for “somehow modernized RPG” except they keep modernizing worse stuff less credibly
like it’s a fascinating exercise to try to figure out what is actually compelling people to give them credit or remember them fondly… like yes they invented “scooping a CRPG’s brains out to the point that it resembled a JRPG and casting Jennifer Hale as the lead” but that was kotor, not even dragon age
They’re all bad in unique ways, but I think Dragon Age 2 might be the only bioware game actually worse than Jade Empire
I am glad that we as a society rejected the ridiculous notion that RPGs needed to be ‘modernized’ by removing everything in them that seemed too much like a game where you made choices and had to pay attention to the words that appear on screen. DA:O was pretty bad in this regard (the RPG stuff felt more vestigial than anything) but DA2 simply intensified everything bad about the first game without adding anything new to the mix.
Mass Effect 3 became as playable as it did because they simply admitted that they weren’t making an RPG at all and reconfigured the game design around what they could actually make: a cutscene heavy third person shooter.
my memory of Jade Empire is really funny because my friend who I played kotor with was super excited for it when it was coming out and I remember him watching him play the first two hours of it like, increasingly perplexed and deflated
it’s an amazing example of a game that is horrible in every single way but which somehow passed for pretty good in 2005. like, clearing exclusively the wrong criteria
I’m also playing through Outcast - A New Beginning which has been a real sevenouttaten kinda treat. Great art direction and an open world design that has more to do with what game developers thought open world design would look like in 1999 than with the genre as it developed into its moribund AAA form. It has so many methods of traversal. As if giving me a jetpack glider wasn’t enough, I complete one town’s quests and get an alien dragon that I could ride around anywhere. Rarefied Belgian Stargate Eurojank. A lot of people complain that the protagonist looks like he’s in his 40s but that’s one of the best parts for me. Just a guy who cannot believe the shit he has to deal with today going through a planet straight out of a valerian and laureline comic.
I have a lot of affection for the original Outcast, its insanely goofy military man protagonist, and the kinda weird cosmology and sci-fi shenanigans. I liked how weird the vibes were as a kid and even though adult me now gets all the boomer references and stupid jokes it’s still kind of a weird, neat little thing.
Yeah I replayed the original outcast before trying the new one and I think they definitely made a real followup to it. It is recognizably still outcast
I’ve repeatedly suggested marathoning Jade Empire during a gamer stream to miffy and she’s said “no you are not allowed to do it” every single time but y’know what…I think I should do it…I think I should spend 24 straight hours of my life playing this, even if it kills me
I’d like to think I’ve grown enough as a human being that the shoot 'em up sections would no longer be the thing that offends me most (note: I was offended by all of it when it came out, cuz I’m cool)
