tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83338558531838727452024-03-18T20:59:28.613-04:00The Nocturnal Rambler<center><b>A blog dedicated to in-depth video game reviews and analysis.</b></center>Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.comBlogger344125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-8397814347907750602021-02-20T10:29:00.003-05:002021-02-20T10:29:39.231-05:00The Witcher 3 - Review | The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Updated v1.1)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Note: This article is an updated version of my previous review from 2016, with extra sections and edits from my recent replay. You can view the original article <a href="https://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-witcher-3-good-bad-and-ugly_30.html" target="_blank">here</a>, or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-jAu5dZo8" target="_blank">watch this article in video format on my YouTube channel</a>. </i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">
I've had nothing but tremendous respect for Polish developer CD Projekt RED ever since I played their 2007 debut, <i>The Witcher</i>. That game quickly vaulted its way into my short list of all-time favorite RPGs because of its deeply sophisticated quest design and its uniquely dark-fantasy-folklore atmosphere. Their 2011 followup, <i>The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings</i>, lost some of the original game's charm and appeal for me, but was still a solid game in most respects, and I especially admired how the middle portion of the game branched in completely separate directions depending on your choices. What they and their parent company have been doing with <a href="https://www.gog.com/">GOG.com</a>, meanwhile -- picking up licenses for older games, updating them to work on modern platforms, and selling them completely DRM-free at reasonable prices -- combined with their continued support for <i>TW1</i> and <i>TW2</i> by putting a ton of effort into the Enhanced Edition of both games and releasing the updates completely free, has made them a shining example of a game company doing good within the industry and treating their customers right -- current controversies with Cyberpunk 2077 notwithstanding.</div>
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The 2013 and 2014 E3 previews for <i>The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt</i> generated a ton of hype, leading many publications to declare it their <a href="http://www.gamesradar.com/winners-and-trailers-32nd-golden-joysticks-awards/">most</a> <a href="http://www.polygon.com/2014/12/5/7343105/the-game-awards-2014-winners">anticipated</a> <a href="https://www.vg247.com/2015/01/05/most-anticipated-games-of-2015/3/">game</a> of 2015 and cumulatively bestowing it with <a href="https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-exceeds-1-million-pre-orders-worldwide/">over 200 awards before it even released</a>. Understandably so -- how could you not be excited over the prospect of CD Projekt's masterful storytelling and quest design applied to a vast open world, with such fantastic-looking preview footage and such high production value? I was skeptical when it was first announced that the game would be open-world, because I already knew from first-hand experience how badly the process can go when trying to adapt a beloved series to a huge open-world format in its third installment, but I held out hope that CD Projekt could pull it off, given their track record of success and how much they seem to understand game design. <i>The Witcher 3</i> was subsequently released in May of 2015 to universal acclaim, and <a href="http://www.gamerevolution.com/news/the-witcher-3-has-won-more-game-of-the-year-awards-than-any-other-game-36313">shattered records</a> for the most "Game of the Year" awards ever bestowed upon one game. I figured, at that point, that CD Projekt had defied my expectations and managed to craft a huge open-world RPG that captured all the best elements of open-world games while still retaining the unique soul and elements that made <i>The Witcher</i> series so great in the previous two installments. And then I actually played it.</div>
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It turns out that <i>The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt</i> is not the perfect masterpiece so many people claim it to be. It's still pretty good, mind you, and I'd say it easily deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best open-world action-adventure-RPGs ever created, especially in terms of games with mainstream appeal. Though not among my personal favorites, I can definitely see the appeal that leads so many people to enjoy it so thoroughly. But that sort of praise and distinction don't shield it from criticism, and the fact remains that there are a lot of critical areas in which <i>TW3</i> comes up short, outright disappoints, or else simply isn't as good as it could've been. There's a lot of stuff to talk about with a game this size, so I won't even try to craft this review into a paragraph-by-paragraph flowing essay; instead, I'll break it down into more targeted bullet points and categorize them based on three of Clint Eastwood's timeless criteria: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.<br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="275" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GE-jAu5dZo8" width="490"></iframe> <div style="text-align: center;">Watch this article in video format.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">D</span><span style="font-size: large;">ISCLAIMER</span><br />
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Before jumping into the full review, I want to point out that I'll be making some seemingly contradictory statements throughout the review; I might say one thing and then later state the opposite, because some issues are a double-edged sword, with two sides to every coin, both positive and negative, and other similar idiomatic expressions, and I wanted to make sure I was covering every valid angle when I could or found it appropriate to do so, especially over subjects that left me with mixed or conflicting opinions. I also make a lot of generalizations because this is a long game and I can't always remember every little detail about it, even though I take a lot of notes on specific things that I notice as I'm playing. These statements are not absolutes; they're generalizations because they tend to apply a significant amount of the time, or often enough to be noteworthy, even though there are typically exceptions to those claims, which I try to acknowledge as often as possible, though they sometimes appear in different sections. Because this review is so long, with so many random topics of interest, I've put timestamps in the description for each category and each specific topic, so feel free to jump around to whatever sections interest you most. If you understandably don't want to watch the entire video, I'd encourage you to at least look over the topic statements for each section, or else watch the conclusion for an overview of the main ideas presented in this review. If you haven't already played the game, let it be known now that this review will be spoiling a lot of quests and main story elements, and I can't tag every possible spoiler individually so just treat the entire thing as spoilers. Also note that I haven't read any of the books or watched the TV show, so I'm approaching all of this purely from the perspective of the games themselves. The bulk of this review is adapted from my original written review from the summer of 2016, but I've updated it with extra sections and details from my recent replay in late 2020. Finally, this review is based on playing just the plain, "vanilla" version with all of the latest official patches, with the sole exception of a hair mod to add extra customization options for Geralt's grooming. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#1</span>: The audiovisual aesthetics are outstanding.</span><br />
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<i>The Witcher 3</i> has some of the best graphics I've ever seen in a video game, especially for a game of its time. Mind you, I didn't have a blistering rig that could run everything at UltraMaxx4KHD™ back when it first came out, and I don't play a lot of modern, cutting-edge games against which to judge it. I'm also not someone who cares much about graphics; I rarely write about graphics in my reviews because I'm ultimately much more interested in how a game feels to play than how it is to look at, unless I have something noteworthy to say about how the visual design contributes to the atmosphere or something like that, but in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, I must stress how good <i>TW3</i> really is in this department. It looked amazing on my PC build from 2016 on mostly high and medium settings, and replaying it with modern hardware at 1440p and all settings at max, with a framerate of 80+, it all looks really good and still holds up extremely well five years after release.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">Typically in large open-world games like this, draw distances can be an issue, with things in the horizon rendered at such low detail that they look like blurry smudges, and things fading in and out of existence as you move towards or away from them. When a game is rendering a ton of things over a long distance, it has to cut corners somewhere for the sake of performance; <i>TW3</i> implements these typical performance-saving measures, but it's in such a subtly smooth and effective way that I rarely ever noticed it. If I stopped for a moment and really focused on a building or some trees in the distance, I could tell that it wasn't being rendered in full detail, but everything looks so good, even in low detail, that I never gave it any notice. Shadows and vegetation extend far enough that I almost never saw the cut-off point, where the game stops rendering them, unless I was at a really high altitude looking down on everything. Even then, the transition between rendered and un-rendered vegetation was smooth enough that it never stood out to me, and never pulled me out of the experience.</div>
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The amount of stuff that's crammed into every frame, everywhere you look, is simply astounding. Never before have I seen so much vegetation and underbrush in a video game; it's so thick in some areas you can't even see the ground beneath it. There's so much stuff in people's houses, littering shelves and tables, crammed into corners, and even hanging from the rafters. When you walk into Novigrad, the big city in the North, you find so many NPCs bustling around market squares, shipping docks, and other major hubs of activity that you can't even walk down the street without bumping into someone, or someone bumping into you. I was impressed when I zoomed in on Geralt's shoulder and could vividly see every individual link in his chainmail armor in high detail. Nvidia's HairWorks adds tens of thousands of tessellated strands to characters' hair, allowing each strand to react to movement independently of one another, but even with it turned off (for the sake of performance), hair still looks really good thanks to the multiple layered meshes that still flow and react to movement.</div>
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Dialogue scenes are really engaging because they have such a strong cinematic style to them, not just in terms of camera angles and the like, but also in terms of "acting" and directing -- in other words, all the deliberate decisions someone had to make in terms of how a character should be acting during a scene, and crafting their animations to capture that feeling and framing the camera in an interesting way that also highlights different elements of a scene. I usually don't like it when games strive to be like movies, because it tends to ruin the gameplay when an invisible game director yanks the camera and controls away from you to show you something exactly as he envisioned it, instead of letting you just be in the game experiencing things for yourself, but it really works in <i>TW3</i> because it's such a heavily story-driven game, and it helps to make the characters and the story itself more interesting. And ultimately, the dialogue and cutscenes make up only a small percentage of how you spend your time in the game, so they feel more like pleasant additions to the game, instead of an obnoxious detraction.</div>
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The dialogue sequences also showcase all of the great facial expressions and animations. When you think about it, the difference between emotions and how they appear on one's face can be incredibly subtle, and I'd imagine it's one of the most difficult things to do when it comes to graphic design in video games. And CD Projekt pulls it off really well, conveying several dynamic emotional ranges for a single character within just one scene. Just take a look at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdnSsiSOgHA">this conversation</a> between Geralt and Yennefer; in just a few seconds she goes from exasperation to concern, which then becomes almost pleading optimism. She then becomes pointed when discussing what must be done, and when she mentions there being one more thing, she gives a look of annoyance before addressing it. Finally, there's that look in her eyes when she realizes that Geralt interpreted her instructions for how to use the detector with sexual innuendo. It all makes going back to <i>The Witcher 2</i>, which looked great for its time, feel much older and more primitive with its NPCs often staring into the void with dead-eyed, empty, expressionless faces most of the time, in comparison to <i>The Witcher 3's</i> vastly superior animations. Other games have handled facial animations better, of course, but those tend to be in pre-rendered cutscenes, or else are much smaller, more linear games with a budget for motion-capturing -- not massive open-world games with hundreds of characters being designed concurrently for multiple languages, which makes it all the more impressive in <i>The Witcher 3</i>. </div>
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The music is top of the line as well. The soundtrack uses a lot of traditional folk instruments to capture the sort of medieval, folklore-fantasy atmosphere in which <i>The Witcher</i> is set, and in fact, a lot of the music was actually composed and performed by a real Polish folk band that took its name and inspiration from <i>The Witcher</i> novels. They actually perform a lot of their music from the game during <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqYUXgLw-rs">live concerts</a>. This song of theirs, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQS4o_bYA_M">Silver for Monsters</a>, is used as combat music, and it has this really awesome, raw tone that just gets me so pumped, with that primal scream and the vocal chanting over top of the droning tones, pounding drums, and accented string rhythms. Other songs, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gokhBJWSjeM">The Fields of Ard Skellig</a> by CD Projekt's own composer, are just so beautiful and tranquil that, when I washed up on the shores of Skellige, I stopped everything and just slowly trotted around on horseback in awe of the sights and sounds. Likewise, any time I warped to outside of Novigrad, I'd often linger in the outskirts for a moment just to appreciate the music outside the Tretogor Gate, which might be my favorite track of the entire game. I love how weirdly moody and atmospheric it sounds, with the contrasting styles of the typical city-scape lute, flute, piano, and clavichord melodies juxtaposed against that ethereal, other-worldly vocal line, which I feel perfectly captures the unique tone and atmosphere that these games are supposed to strive for. The Ladies of the Wood, likewise, has a really haunting and foreboding sound to it that really brings the grotesque horror and impending dread of that whole questline to life. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#2</span>: All characters have personality and motivation.</span><br />
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Every, single, character in <i>TW3</i> is fully voiced. That itself is not unusual in this day and age (in fact, it's expected from any major studio), but the scale to which it applies, here, is almost beyond comprehension. According to <a href="http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/05/29/this-is-how-big-the-script-was-for-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt">information gathered by IGN</a>, the script had over 450,000 words of dialogue (supposedly four novels' worth of text), and 950 speaking roles. It took 2.5 years just to record all the dialogue. Even that, though, really isn't all that impressive; that just means it took a lot of time and resources. What's impressive is that every single character, from Geralt's most important and closest companions down to the most insignificant of random people asking for help by the side of the road, has some kind of personality and motivation that shows based on how they talk, and how they behave in the dialogue.</div>
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When you have a world made up of thousands of people, with 950 people who will deliver some sort of vocal lines, it's really easy for the writing to devolve into terse exchanges that simply check the boxes of what needs to be accomplished in the conversation, and it can start to feel bland and repetitive after a while. But the writing and voice acting in <i>TW3</i> brings every character to life in such a believable and engaging way; even if a character is someone you'll only ever talk to once, for just a few minutes, they feel genuine because someone (whether it be the writer, the director, or the actor) made a conscious decision about why a character is saying the things he or she is saying, and why a character is the way that he or she is. Not every character is totally unique or memorable, but every character fits in where they belong in the grand scheme of things, and none of them stand out in a negative way.</div>
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The main characters, in particular, are fleshed out extremely well, showing all different sides of their personalities and often struggling with internal conflicts over what they want and how they should act. Yennefer, for instance, is rather brusque and pragmatic -- she's short and to-the-point with people, not caring how her words or tone might affect someone's feelings, and resorts to dark sorceries, breaking the law, and sabotaging ancient mystical relics without a second thought when it serves her interests in a more efficient manner than another alternative -- but most of her actions in the game are guided by a deep love and concern for Ciri and Geralt. While others typically only see her as a cold, manipulative witch who's always scheming behind people's backs, usually for her own self-gain, we see her getting into whimsical pun battles with Geralt, crying out and worrying when Ciri is in danger, and yearning to put the sorceress politics aside and settle down with Geralt and grow old together.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#3</span>: Recurring characters keep the story connected.</span><br />
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Most of your usual friends from the previous games like Vesemir, Lambert, Eskel, Dandelion, Zoltan, and Triss make appearances in <i>TW3</i> and help you out on your main quest of finding Ciri, and most of the main characters stay with you over the course of the entire game, coming and going as quests and meet-ups call for their presence. A lot of side characters, like Cerys and Hjalmar for injstance, end up involved in multiple quests and main story cutscenes that take place in different acts of the game, which helps to build a rapport with them so that you care when they're involved in later events, because it's something happening to someone you know and care about as opposed to some new person you've just met, or some other generic NPC. Similarly, a lot of characters you meet and help out over the first half of the game come back to help you later when you have to cash in a favor for a favor, which lets you see how people's situations have changed since you last saw them 50 or 100 hours ago, thus giving the world a greater feeling of lasting permanence, that things exist beyond your own limited scope as the player-character.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#4</span>: Small details make the world feel more real.</span><br />
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With a lot of these big open-world games, there's a common tendency for the worlds themselves to feel phony and artificial, like theater stages built solely to accommodate the main player-character, because the designers just churn out landscapes and paste a bunch of content all over the map with little concern for how anything relates to anything else, why things are the way they are, or how the world exists and operates independent of the player character. The world in <i>TW3</i> has a very precise, hand-crafted feel to it -- there's something interesting to see just about everywhere you look, environments rarely feel like they've been copy-pasted or procedurally-generated, and seemingly everything inhabiting the world exists for some kind of logical or narrative purpose, whether it's explicitly stated by the game or to be assumed by the player. The amount of stuff that happens around you, meanwhile, sometimes beyond your control or whether you're there or not, really helps to make the world feel much more real, natural, and immersive. What's really interesting, though, is how much backstory and atmosphere you pick up just from all the subtle, ambient details.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For instance, when you visit the Bits in the big city of Novigrad, you see a lot of houses in major states of disrepair, one of which is precariously leaning to the side but is being held up by support braces, obviously added sometime after the fact to keep it from falling over. At first glance it just seems to be a bit of environmental storytelling meant to showcase how poor, miserable, and neglected this whole district of the city is, but then you can actually overhear a conversation that explains the backstory of why that house is in such bad shape. So, not only does this house do a good job of visually showcasing the current state that this world is in, but the game also goes so far as to establish the "how" and "why" behind this area for deeper world-building. Furthermore, you see workers up on those beams actively trying to shore it up and reinforce it, which helps to make the world feel more alive and lived-in, when you see people actively trying to fix problems in the world. </div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OEb1ZtTXYYk/V-4qzK9lDjI/AAAAAAAAHmQ/JwYF3UQufqkSxP7t7A_ZXNuAZ4XjirO7ACLcB/s1600/Witcher3TalkinBoutWaar.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OEb1ZtTXYYk/V-4qzK9lDjI/AAAAAAAAHmQ/JwYF3UQufqkSxP7t7A_ZXNuAZ4XjirO7ACLcB/s400/Witcher3TalkinBoutWaar.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On a larger scale, the game is also set during a time of war, with the Nilfgaardian empire trying to push its control further north. The game doesn't beat you over the head about being a war game, however -- you simply see the effects of the war, never actually taking part in it, as if you were any common citizen. You see scorched battlefields where the dead are left to rot in their suits of armor. You see villages that were once raided by invading armies, still struggling to recover. You encounter wounded soldiers from either side seeking refuge in an abandoned shed, or about to be lynched by villagers. You see squabbles and brawls in bars over which kingdom's insignia should be on display. You find a ton of currency from the previous regime, which is completely worthless until you take it to a bank to exchange for real money. And so on. It's a cohesive theme that permeates almost everything in the game, and it gives you a strong feeling that, even though you're not actually seeing the battles being fought, this war is serious and is taking its toll.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><span style="color: lime;">#5</span>: Fast-travel and horseback from the beginning.</span><br style="text-align: left;" /><br style="text-align: left;" /><div>The size of the world map in <i>TW3</i> is <a href="http://gamingbolt.com/witcher-3-map-size-compared-to-gta5-skyrim-far-cry-4-new-screens-show-different-visual-settings">supposedly</a> bigger than <i>GTAV</i> and <i>Skyrim</i> combined. I'm not sure I believe those numbers, but I do know that <i>TW3</i> is pretty damn big. With a world that big, there need to be measures in place to help you get across it quickly and conveniently, because it's not very fun to have to spend 10 minutes at a time holding down the "forward" key to get anywhere. On the other hand, you don't want to make alternative means of travel too quick or convenient, because you want players to feel rooted in the game world as opposed to continually skipping by it. <i>The Witcher 3</i> balances these two issues pretty well with its inclusion of fast-travel and horseback, both of which are available to you from the very beginning of the game.</div><br style="text-align: left;" /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6AbV9Y_D7b8/V-4bCdceWtI/AAAAAAAAHjU/6FLNvjdhhjMSm0goyL0HJ2oNXysOUPnOQCLcB/s1600/Witcher3Roach.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6AbV9Y_D7b8/V-4bCdceWtI/AAAAAAAAHjU/6FLNvjdhhjMSm0goyL0HJ2oNXysOUPnOQCLcB/s400/Witcher3Roach.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br style="text-align: left;" /><div>Fast-travel is restricted to the use of signposts, which are present outside of cities and villages, and also found at major roadside intersections. If you want to warp somewhere instantly, you have to make your way to a signpost first, and you can only warp to other signposts you've already discovered. You therefore have to explore the entire world on-foot -- even if you warp somewhere, the signposts aren't at every single location on the map, so you still need to get to your final destination the old-fashioned way -- which helps you to become more familiar with the world and feel more physically attached to it. And yet, getting around without the benefit of fast-travel is never a tedious, time-wasting endeavor because you always have access to your trusty horse companion, Roach. Just whistle and she'll run in from somewhere off-screen, ready to help speed you along to your next destination. So even though the world is really big, it's never a chore to get around it, and yet the various fast-travel options still give you a sense of physical connection to the world itself.</div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#6</span>: The world shows signs of dynamic elements.</span><br />
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With worlds this big, they tend to remain pretty static throughout the game, rarely reacting to your presence in any kind of significant way. This, I imagine, is because the sandbox nature of these games typically requires that the designers allow for any possibility at any time -- if you change the world-state too much, or too drastically, then it could start to conflict with other quests. <i>The Witcher 3</i>, being itself one of these vast open-world games, can only change the world so much and still allow you to access all of its content, but it still manages to change its façade over the course of the game, sprinkling in enough changes to make the world seem like it's reacting to your presence and even affecting quests in a few ways.</div>
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The biggest examples center around the city of Novigrad. With King Radovid turning the city upside down in search of witches to burn at the stake, he eventually puts the city under lockdown while you're away so that, when you come back, the guards deny your access unless you can produce a gate pass. Later, if you complete a side-quest to help the mages sneak out of town, the witch hunt sets its sights on non-humans, and you're greeted with elves and dwarves being executed outside the main gate as you return to town. If you've completed that side-quest before getting to a certain point in the main quest, then it affects your options since your dwarven friend Zoltan is no longer able to roam around the city, because he's afraid of being lynched by the city guard. Likewise, many side quests can be affected by the main quest and become unavailable if you advance too far in the main quest before completing them, because the condition of the world will have changed somehow. </div>
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Similarly, your actions in one area can affect your interactions somewhere else nearby. When you arrive in Velen, the point in the game when they take the training wheels off and let you loose in the giant open world, your first objective takes you to a local tavern to gather information. Once you're there, you're confronted by some of the Bloody Baron's henchmen, the self-proclaimed ruler of Velen whom you have to go through to progress the main quest. How you deal with his henchmen affects your relationship and interactions with the Baron before you've even met him, and can make the initial goings tougher or easier when trying to get into town to talk to him. </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#7</span>: Interesting quests with engaging storylines.</span><br />
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Most of the quests, whether they're part of the main story or trivially inconsequential side-quests, have something interesting going on, with some reason for you to care about seeing them through to their conclusions. In one quest, you accompany Triss to an elegant, high-class masquerade ball to help an alchemist get out of town before the witch hunters come for him, but all you really do is walk around talking to people, not even making a lot of important decisions. It's a pretty simple quest in terms of gameplay, but it's fun just to be there witnessing the events, listening to conversations, and simply appreciating the unique atmosphere. Plus, because this quest has such heavy involvement with a recurring character like Triss, who has played a pretty major role in the previous two games, you have more reason to care about helping her out than if you were to do this for a random, contracted employer. If the unique setting and premise of the quest doesn't capture your interest, then the character interactions with Triss would surely make up for that. </div>
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One of my favorite quests, "A Towerful of Mice," has you working with the sorceress Keira Metz, who wants your help lifting a plague-like curse that's afflicted Fyke Island, where the former lord of Velen and his daughter died. The island itself has this really ominous, spooky vibe about it, with you using a magic lamp to hunt for ghosts and trying to piece together the island's history while weird, supernatural things seem to happen around you. Eventually, you meet the ghost of Annabelle, the lord's daughter, who asks you to take her bones to her beloved, whom you discover lives in a nearby fishing village. With her bones buried by her lover, the curse, she says, will be lifted. At that point you have a couple different options about how to proceed, both of which result in a somewhat tragic success.</div>
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I remember one quest in which a village asked me to help defend one of their people from bandits, and I almost rolled my eyes at such a cliche premise, but went along with it. The bandits showed up and their leader tried to explain her side of things, but I wasn't going to be persuaded that easily and fought them off. It turned out she was a werewolf, and upon looting her corpse I discovered a letter from her parents that gave her an entire backstory. Apparently, she was born of a human and werewolf, and lost both of her parents to a show-trial execution because one of the villagers snitched on them. Her parents wrote to her before their deaths telling her that they loved her, that they believed lycanthropy was not a thing of evil, and implored her to lead a good life. She was just out to avenge her parents' deaths, and I felt kind of bad about killing her. What I thought was going to be a simple one-and-done, forgettable quest ended up having a surprising amount of narrative purpose to it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even the game's infamous frying pan quest, where you simply fetch an item from a house literally right next to the quest-giver in what is mechanically the most simple and mundane of all quests ever created, has some interesting and engaging elements going on, what with the character's backstory of how she came to lose her pan, fun interactions when she comments on why Geralt's talking to himself, the detective element of deciphering the scene and figuring out what happened, and some foreshadowing for a plot point that will come into fruition later in the game. If you boil the quests down to their most basic and fundamental gameplay elements, they're ultimately no better than most other games of this style, as it consists primarily of the usual "go here, talk to this person, fetch this, kill that" type of gameplay scenarios, but the quests are all elevated by the wonderfully rich and detailed narrative framing that contextualizes what you're doing in this world -- and why you should care -- in a far more engaging and interesting way than so many other, similar types of games. <br /></div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#8</span>: Tough moral dilemmas.</span><br />
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There was a time when games had a bad habit of portraying moral and ethical issues in pure black and white, emphasizing "good versus evil" with little room for anything in-between. When <i>The Witcher</i> came along in 2007, it made a deliberate effort to blur those lines into more realistic shades of gray with no clear right or wrong -- just two choices, and two different outcomes, which will often have some sort of unintended consequence sometime down the road. <i>The Witcher 3</i> continues to carry that torch by frequently placing you in situations when you have to make a tough choice, which adds a lot of extra weight to the gameplay and forces you to think long and deep about what you're doing.</div>
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At one point you come across a Nilfgaardian soldier about to by lynched by three locals; if you choose to stay out of it and let him be killed, you can check his corpse and find a letter on him that reveals him to be an honest, well-intentioned family man who was deserting the army to go back to his wife and child. If you decide to stand up for him, before learning any of this, then you have to kill the three villagers in self-defense, and Geralt makes a comment to the soldier, when he expresses his gratitude, that if he hadn't have gotten involved only one person would've died instead of three. In this situation, knowing the two outcomes, would you choose the option that results in the loss of less life, or the one that saves one life you think to be good at the expense of three others that you don't really know? It's a classic "lesser of two evils" situation where there's really not a right answer. </div>
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In another quest, you come across another witcher from the school of the cat, who slaughtered an entire village after being cheated out of payment for a contract and getting stabbed in the side with a pitchfork. The guy was clearly way out of line and did not warrant killing all those innocents, but when faced with a decision, I couldn't bring myself to kill him because I didn't feel like it was my place to judge him. Later on, you meet up with some old friends who're conspiring to assassinate King Radovid because his madness is leading to a lot of civil unrest and war-torn bloodshed, and you have the option to go along with their plan or back out, and I struggled big time trying to figure out if regicide was really the right choice or not. One of the best examples comes during the Whispering Hillock quest, in which you're given the choice to kill or free the spirit trapped under the Great Oak Tree -- the thing just feels like pure evil, but it's bargaining to help rescue orphaned children if you release it, so can you really trust it or will something incredibly bad happen if you do? Plus, you also have to question the Crones' motives for why they would want you to kill this thing. Some of the game's books will shed more light on this situation, if you've read them and remember the stories told therein, but you just can't know what'll actually happen when making that decision and will just have to live with whatever consequences appear down the road. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#9</span>: Meaningful consequences for decisions and actions.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many quests require you to make some kind of choice about how to resolve it that will lead to branching outcomes, but even when decisions are ultimately superficial and have no lasting impact on anything beyond their own self-contained storyline, the great atmosphere, storytelling, and tough moral dilemmas do a good job of adding significant weight to the decision. A quest like Wild at Heart gives you options about whether to spare people's lives when a werewolf is tricked into murdering his wife while under the influence of his beastly transformation; the outcome of that quest won't affect anything beyond the fate of those characters involved, but it still feels like a meaningful choice because you're making such stark decisions in those characters' lives, who're surprisingly well-developed and realized for being minor characters in a minor side quest with such little screen time. Even though the choice doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, it can still weigh on your conscience if you've found yourself immersed in the setting and story of this world, which is pretty easy to do because of the rich narrative framing of these quests. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A lot of other quests, however, can have lasting effects that will influence character relationships, main story events, and future quests. Most quests involving Triss, for example, will yield meaningful outcomes -- whether you choose to help her or not will determine the course of events in Novigrad, with the witch hunters either continuing their hunt for the witches in town or changing their sights to persecute nonhumans; whether you let her leave or tell her to stay will impact her availability for other side quests, like the transformation statues or in deciphering Philippa Eilhart's megascope crystal; and whether you romance her or not affects how she and Yen will act around Geralt in future cutscenes. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The choice of whether to free or slay the spirit trapped under the Great Oak Tree in the Whispering Hillock quest affects the outcome of the Bloody Baron's questline and what becomes of his wife, what happens to the orphans in Crookback bog, how the Crones treat you, and the fate of the local village Downwarren. How you respond in dialogue -- like when Madman Lugos is making inappropriate remarks about Yen -- can open up or close off other questing opportunities, change how scenes play out, or alter your relationship with that character. If you fight him in that situation, you can get an extra sub-quest and earn his respect in the process, whereas he'll remain a bit of an antagonist if you drop the subject and move on. Some seemingly small decisions can even come back to affect you later on, such as with Skellige's Most Wanted -- a quest in which you're confronted by sentient monsters trying to scare you away from their turf because of your famed reputation as a monster-slayer. That quest plays as sort of a cumulative effect for how you've treated sentient monsters in previous quests; if you've chosen to help sentient monsters previously, or spared their lives, then you're able to argue your case and avoid a bigger confrontation. Other quests like Reason of State, in which you have the possibility of assassinating King Radovid, or the King's Gambit in which you determine whether Cerys, Hjalmar, or Svanrige will become the next ruler of Skellige, each have a major influence on the war with Nilfgaard and thus affect the ending slideshows. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><span style="color: lime;">#10</span>: Three different endings.</span><br style="text-align: left;" /><br style="text-align: left;" /><div>Multiple endings is kind of a standard thing in RPGs because it's one of the prime ways developers can show different outcomes for your actions, to show that your decisions had a significant impact on the game. This happens all the time with individual quests, but a lot of games still tend to force a single outcome on its main story. <i>The Witcher 3</i> allows you to experience one of three different endings, which is nice in and of itself, but what's really impressive about the three endings is that their seeds are sown throughout the entire game, with each ending being the culmination of several small, seemingly insignificant moments based on how you interact with Ciri. This isn't a matter of simply playing the game and then picking one of three branching paths near the very end; you're stuck with your outcome based on decisions you made previously, and you never could have known, at the time, that the decisions you were making were actually going to influence the ending. That, I feel, makes the endings much more natural and organic, because it's all based on how you role-played Geralt over the entire story, not just at the very end or at obvious critical branches. </div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><span style="color: lime;">#11</span>: A satisfying epilogue.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>It feels like, with a lot of games, you spend the entire game building up towards the final boss fight, and then everything abruptly ends soon after the final boss's health drops to zero, with the game going right into an ending cutscene or rolling the credits. That can feel pretty anticlimactic in a lot of games because of how suddenly the game comes to an end, without really giving you a chance to exhale and let the dust settle on your grand adventure. <i>The Witcher 3</i> breaks that trend by actually offering a satisfyingly calm resolution to the main story, where it gives you the opportunity to see the resulting aftermath of the main plot's resolution and some of the more notable effects of your role-playing decisions, based on which of the three endings you got. It's especially nice to see this happen through actual gameplay since it makes the ending feel like a continuation of the actual game and story, as opposed to something that's been superfluously tacked on to the end, and it makes the ending feel much more poignant since you're not just being told what happened -- you're getting to see and experience it for yourself. The three epilogues, meanwhile, all feel like equally satisfying and valid conclusions to the story; even the "bad" ending, which is horribly depressing, has a lot of artistic merit and feels beautifully tragic. Even though it's arguably the worst ending, it's probably my favorite just because of the strong emotions conveyed through that ending. </div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#12</span>: Strong character building elements.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>One of the things I find most satisfying with RPG-style leveling systems is deciding how I'm going to build my character to maximize efficiency within my desired playstyle, and <i>The Witcher 3</i> does a pretty good job of providing interesting and meaningful decisions when it comes to character building. Skills and playstyles are generally broken into three main categories: swordplay, magic signs, and alchemy, each of which has its own dedicated skill tree and various equipment types and modifications meant to further enhance those playstyles. Ostensibly, it's a pretty simple system with you simply allocating a limited amount of skill points into a limited amount of skill slots, but those limitations are what make it so compelling, because there are way more skills than you have active slots for, and so you have to really think hard about what skills you actually want to invest in, knowing that you'll have to forfeit a lot of others that might be equally compelling to you. More advanced skills deeper in the tree require increasing amounts of points invested in that tree to unlock them, and so you have to plan out a roadmap to get you those requisite points invested, and whether it's even worth it at all to go deeper into a particular tree just to unlock an extra tier of skills. </div><div><br /></div><div>These skills combine with other things like mutagen slots, decoctions, and equipment sets to further incentivize clever allocation of limited resources. If you want to maximize the skill bonuses you get from mutagen slots, since they give extra bonuses for matching skills from the same set, then you want to efficiently group skills together as you unlock more slots and gain access to new skills, which can affect the timing for when you choose to learn skills as you level up, based on what slots are currently open. Decoctions can have a pretty strong effect on gameplay and your statistical prowess, but even with maximum toxicity you can only have about three active at a time, so with dozens of decoctions to choose from you have to whittle the selection down to two or three that seem most useful, or that synergize best with other skills and decoctions. Equipment sets, likewise, provide different bonuses based on their own individual attributes, sometimes enhancing specific magic signs or providing other unique bonuses, but the various armor skills add an extra dimension to the character building since the type of armor you equip can enhance certain stats by 20% or more. </div><div><br /></div><div>All of these different dimensions combine to create a really engaging system that rewards ingenuity and clever allocation of your limited resources. Unlike some other games where you just mindlessly take the next available skill along the tree, or that have little restrictions preventing you from just indiscriminately learning everything you could possibly want, <i>The Witcher 3's</i> leveling system has an almost puzzle-like element to it, ensuring that you'll only get the best results if you play smart and solve the puzzle, so to speak. That, I feel, makes leveling up and making build decisions much more compelling than other, similar types of games. </div><div><br /></div></div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#13</span>: There is a ton of content.</span><br />
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<i>The Witcher 3</i> is a long game, with a lot of stuff to do in it. It's so long that it took me 134 hours over the course of three-and-a-half months to "finish" the base game when I played it for the first time in 2016. Normally, I don't find that to be indicative of a game's quality, because a lot of games in this genre can pad their total playtime with tediously repetitive content and designs meant to deliberately waste your time, but I rarely ever felt bored or disinterested along the way to completing this game. Even though some of its side content, like monster nests and smuggler's caches and bandit camps can be extremely simple and repetitive, other things, like hidden treasures still manage to inject a bit of story and character into the simple process of searching a nearby area for some loot, each of which has its own unique premise. The landscapes are all generally interesting to traverse, with some decent exploration to be had in areas if you disable all of the mini-map icons, and the quests, of course, are all so engaging that it felt compelling for me to seek out as much content as possible. In this case, it's not just the amount of content that creates the value -- it's the fact that so much of it is of such high-quality, with so much attention to detail. <br /></div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#14</span>: A buttery-smooth, well-polished experience.</span><br />
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I originally played <i>TW3</i> over a year after its initial release, in the summer of 2016, so it had received extensive patching long before I even started playing, and even received a few major updates while I was playing, one of which was a major overhaul of the user interface. I can't vouch for how the game felt at launch, but in its current state, <i>TW3</i> ran buttery smooth for me and felt almost completely bug-free and well-polished.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">Other than a few crashes, most of the problems I encountered were minor graphical glitches that happened in such highly specific, idiosyncratic situations that I really can't fault the designers for their appearance in the game, although some of them were extremely bizarre and really pulled me out of the game when they occurred. The worst bugs that I encountered, mechanically, was a moment when the dialogue interface disappeared and I had to navigate out of it through trial-and-error and guessing as to what I was selecting; Triss's pathing glitched out during a major quest with her, causing her to hang back the entire time and not follow me through the sewers; and I had a boat awkwardly sink underwater like it was falling into quicksand while still in good sea-worthy condition. Obviously, the game isn't perfect, and I'd guess it's practically impossible to iron out every single potential bug in a game of this size, with this many systems and moving elements to it, but it feels like CDProjekt tried to take care of everything they possibly could, and so I'm willing to excuse most of the remaining issues given how much extra time and effort they've put into enhancing the game post-release, at no extra cost to the player.<br /></div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#15</span>: I really like the Skellige isles.</span><br />
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The bulk of the game takes place in Velen and Novigrad, which consist of one giant map with zero loading zones. Both of these areas have good atmospheres and theming, with Velen's murky swamps and dreary half-dead forests really bringing out its reputation as "No Man's Land" and Novigrad being one of the biggest and most well-realized cities I've ever seen in a fantasy RPG, but I found myself especially enamored with the Skellige isles out west, which evoke a strong Nordic vibe with their snowy mountains and honor-bound clans of warrior-societies. After spending 60 or 80 hours slogging through a swampy hell-hole and a dense, contemporary city, it was a breath of fresh air to explore such beautiful islands in an all new map. In keeping with the great audiovisual aesthetics elsewhere in the game, Skellige looks and sounds as fantastic as you'd expect, but I find its landscapes far more visually pleasing to look at, especially in conjunction with that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gokhBJWSjeM">wistful music</a>.</div>
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Skellige also sets itself apart from the other regions of the game in terms of its gameplay mechanics. The mountainous terrain gives each island a lot of vertical space to explore, which literally adds extra depth to the exploration since you're not just exploring forward, back, left, and right, but also up and down. The vertical levels hide a bunch of content out of sight, on the other side of a mountain face, or underground, or in a narrow ravine, whereas practically everywhere else in the game is relatively flat, where exploration is a more simplistic process of seeing something on the horizon and simply making a bee line for it. So discovering places and exploring the world in Skellige feels like a much more engaging and involved process. I also appreciate the islands being divided into smaller spaces, while still giving you a pretty sizeable main island at the center, since that helps to guide exploration when you have more defined areas with some sort of central focus; each island is designed around its own main quest and storyline, so besides just having a more structured area to explore, it feels like there's a greater purpose to everything you encounter in that space. Whereas I felt compelled to turn on the "Undiscovered Points of Interest" icons in Velen and Novigrad, because of how big and spread out those maps are, I turned them off for the bulk of my time in Skellige and had a lot more fun just exploring and discovering things on my own, which felt more realistically feasible given the smaller size and greater density of content in the Skellige isles. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#16</span>: Lots of tie-ins and references to <i>TW1.</i></span><br />
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One of my biggest issues with <i>TW2</i> is that it didn't really feel like a <i>Witcher</i> game to me because of how much it strayed from the themes and gameplay mechanics that were established in the first game. <i>The Witcher 3</i> feels pretty similar to the second game, in terms of gameplay and presentation, but I really appreciate how much effort CD Projekt went through to tie it in with the first game. Given how old and (arguably) out-dated the first game was by 2015, it would've been easy and maybe even justified to sweep it under the rug and ignore it as the black sheep of the series, but CD Projekt went out of their way to add a bunch of content that would appeal to fans of the original game. It was really nostalgic to go back to Kaer Morhen and spend time catching up with your fellow witchers Vesemir, Eskel, and Lambert, who were all completely absent in the second game, and it was cool how that whole section of the game dealt so heavily with what life is like as a witcher, and how it shed new light on things like the trials of becoming a witcher. The central premise of <i>TW3's</i> main plot, meanwhile, is incidentally laid out by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swEC4gMvCN4">a specific line of dialogue</a> said by the King of the Wild Hunt to Geralt in <i>TW1</i>. There's also a really neat easter egg in the bookshop of Novigrad in which you receive a letter from one of the main characters of the first game,<i> </i>plus references to other characters like Kalkstein, Berengar, and other things like getting to visit Leo's grave, and finding Salamandra notes describing their plan to attack Kaer Morhen before the start of the first game. As a big fan of the first game, I loved seeing all these references. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#17</span>: Humor and easter eggs.</span><br />
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You wouldn't expect, in a world as serious as the entire <i>Witcher</i> saga, to find as much humor and fun off-the-wall moments as there are in <i>TW3</i>. Geralt himself can be a wise-ass at times, dropping <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B76tIgSKYQ">witty one-liners</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxUbFR1cfpM">insults</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZiiRyHEhcY">dry puns</a> at the drop of a hat. You're in for some smiles any time you <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBe_wLV74p0">interact with a troll</a>, and basically any quest with Dandelion is sure to end up with some kind of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOkkxb-HDRw">theatrical absurdity</a>. Other scenes go in hilariously unexpected directions depending on what you do, like if you try to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSp5IcQAMB0">romance both Yennefer and Triss</a>, or if you decide to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv-fDIgiVlQ">get drunk with Lambert and Eskel</a>. All-the-while you run into a ton of <a href="http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/The_Witcher_3_Easter_Eggs_%26_Pop_Culture_References">easter eggs and pop-culture references</a>, like the killer rabbit from Monty Python and Holy Grail, Jango Fett from Star Wars, what might be the skeletal corpse of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, Tyler Durden from Fight Club, and more, which are all fun and amusing discoveries that add little bits of excitement to the exploration. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#18</span>: Elaborate journal, beastiary, and quest entries.</span><br />
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There's a ton of information to process in <i>TW3</i>, some of which is backstory and lore to which we're never actually witness through the games, given that so many characters and events are lifted from the novel source material, but thankfully the user interface does a great job of helping you keep track of everything. From the menu, you can access detailed character biographies (helpful in case you forget who certain characters are, or if you've never played the previous games and therefore never met them, and want to learn more about them), beastiary entries that let you read up on the lore of all of the <i>Witcher</i> universe's unique monsters, and quest entries that narrate each step of the quest in the form of a story. None of this is absolutely essential for the game, and it all has zero effect on the actual gameplay, but it's a really nice touch just to have this information available if you desire to enlighten yourself more. In a game as big as <i>The Witcher 3</i>, it's easy to forget certain details, or even who certain people are sometimes, so it's great to have a type of in-game encyclopedia to consult as reference. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#19</span>: A more useful inventory screen.</span><br />
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<i>The Witcher 1</i> had a pretty solid grid-based inventory system that let you see everything at a glance, just by looking at the icons for every item. Then, for some reason, <i>TW2</i> turned the inventory into a text-based list with abstract item weights attached to everything. It was a pain and a bother to use. Thankfully, CD Projekt went with a more <i>TW1</i>-style inventory this time around, giving us grids with graphic icons for items, and even allowing us to sort items by tabs like in <i>TW2</i>. It's a small thing to be sure, but since you spend so much time dealing with your inventory in this game, it's a nice quality of life feature that the inventory screen be sleek and easy to use.<br />
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#20</span>: Custom map markers.</span><br />
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This is something I've been asking games to do for a long time, and relatively few actually do this; <i>The Witcher 3</i> lets you put custom markers on the map to keep track of things you've found but need to remember to come back to later, as well as waypoints to help set your own personal destination on your mini-map navigation. The markers can be yellow exclamation points, like if you think it's something quest-related, blue inverted triangles if you simply want to mark a spot, or red skulls if there's a strong enemy in the area. With a world this big, it's a tremendous blessing to be able to place your own reminders, because without them, it would be near impossible to remember where everything is that you want to come back to. There could stand to be more varied types of markers, of course, but the mere fact that we get any at all is to be praised. <br />
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: lime;">#21</span>: Alchemy is much more accessible.</span><br />
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A lot of people complained about the alchemy systems in the first two games, saying they were too convoluted, too inaccessible, and just generally not very appealing gameplay options. CD Projekt took those criticisms into consideration with <i>TW3</i> and revamped the system to make potions and blade oils a viable option for all playstyles. Potions, blade oils, bombs, and decoctions are a lot easier to brew, and maintaining your supply is almost effortless, with the game automatically refilling everything as long as you have alcohol in your inventory when you meditate, meaning you can focus your efforts on just playing the game (and using your alchemical creations) instead of spending a bunch of time hunting down resources and staring at a menu screen to brew everything all the time. You don't have to invest a bunch of points in alchemy to make good use of potions, and you can brew them anywhere and use them at any time for constant, convenient access to that whole gameplay element.<br />
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<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#1</span>: Horrible first impressions.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">When I played the game originally in 2016, I was really put-off by the early stages of the tutorial because everything felt like a horrendous mess. Movement controls felt stiff, clunky, and unresponsive, causing me to constantly bump into things and struggle simply walking through a doorway, in addition to the intro featuring a ton of heavy-handed tutorials that pause the game in the middle of the action to bombard you with walls of text explaining how things work, even going so far as to describe background lore that isn't relevant to what's actually happening in-game at that moment. The heads up display looked so cluttered and busy with five different gauges clustered into one corner and a bunch of different icons everywhere, that I didn't really understand what was going on with all of it. And the combat was so rough trying to get a feel for everything that I spent 15 minutes dying and loading my save, just trying to survive the first fight that happens literally seconds after you finish the tutorial and are finally let loose in the world, with no checkpoint save before the fight thus forcing me to skip through the long dialogue sequence with Vesemir every single time I died and had to try again.</div>
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Were I not a seasoned gamer with the patience to endure rough starts and put in the time getting used to things, I might not have made it past the opening 30 minutes. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I didn't feel start to comfortable with the game until I was over an hour into it, and didn't really start enjoying myself until about two or three hours into it. In the grand scheme of a 134 hour playthrough, those first couple of hours are pretty insignificant, but it's never a good thing to start off a new experience on bad footing, because some people might not have the patience to stick around until it supposedly "gets better." It's worth pointing out that none of these issues really bothered me when I replayed it four years later, in 2020, probably because I was already familiar and comfortable with everything, but it definitely bothered me during my first playthrough. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#2</span>: Game balance is non-existent.</span><br />
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Typical game balance involves easing the player into the game by making things slower and simpler at the start, giving you time to figure out how the game works as you start getting your feet wet, and then slowly increasing the difficulty towards the game's ending so that, as you become more experienced and develop greater mastery of the game, it gets harder to match your increasing skill level, thereby pushing you to get better over the course of the game. <i>The Witcher 3</i> is almost the exact opposite of this; it starts the difficulty out at its absolute hardest, right from the start, and maintains a decent amount of challenge for only 10-20 hours. Around that point in the game you start crafting your first set of witcher's gear and finally start unlocking enough skill slots to finally get some decent bonuses, thereby resulting in a steep drop-off in difficulty as the game instantly gets easier, even more so as you get the hang of subjective things like the feel of combat, and continues to get progressively easier over the entire rest of the game as you continue to level up.</div>
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While it's true that there's some satisfaction in getting stronger and eventually breezing your way past all the obstacles that were giving you so much difficulty in the beginning, that point happens so ridiculously early in <i>TW3</i> that it's more pitiful than satisfying. It's like playing a game of basketball where you're up by 60 points at halftime, and don't even need to play the second half. In my first playthrough in 2016, I started out on the hardest difficulty, "Death March," and had to take it down a notch almost immediately because the game was kicking my ass so badly while I was still struggling to get a feel for the combat. But then, around 30-40 hours in, the supposed hard difficulty ("Blood and Broken Bones") started to feel more like easy mode. I considered bumping the difficulty back up to Death March, but felt like that would just prolong every fight by simply inflating enemy health values and making every fight longer. When I replayed the game just now in late 2020, I started on Death March and played through the whole way with hardly any trouble at all -- I was routinely killing enemies 10 or 20 levels higher than me just by virtue of my understanding of the combat system and the enemy AI, because the game's difficulty curve apparently deals more with just getting used to the rhythm and flow of combat and figuring out how the various systems work together, as opposed to through proper mechanical and statistical balancing of the leveling system. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So not only is the game simply not hard enough in general, but it doesn't ramp the difficulty up sufficiently as the game progresses to properly match the pace at which you improve as a player, or statistically as a character, while the fact that player skill can completely trump statistical deficiencies of the player-character almost defeats the entire purpose of the leveling system in an RPG like this. To be clear, I'm not advocating for level-scaling enemies to keep the difficulty level up, and I'm not saying that the game getting progressively easier is inherently a bad thing -- rather, it's that leveling up doesn't really feel necessary because not enough content is gated behind level progression. Once you get the feel for how combat works and figure out a few basic strategies, there's almost nothing stopping you from defeating any enemy and completing any quest you might come across, other than the possible limitations of your own patience sitting through horrendously long and drawn-out fights. Getting stronger doesn't really unlock access to new content or more difficult challenges, in other words, it just makes what you're already doing faster and easier. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#3</span>: Combat is shallow and boring.</span><br />
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Combat has never been all that sophisticated in this series, but it's mindlessly simple in <i>TW3</i>. Melee combat, at its core, consists of five main actions: fast attack, strong attack, parry, dodge, and roll. That's not a bad foundation to work with, but sadly it all boils down to button-mashing; every fight against almost every enemy basically amounts to spamming fast attacks and hitting the dodge button when an enemy is about to attack you (which is blatantly telegraphed by their health-bar flashing red at you), and then going right back to spamming fast attacks. There are exceptions, of course, such as if an enemy has a shield, or if it's a weird monster with a unique special ability, but you spend the vast majority of the game fighting the same basic enemies over and over again, all of which fall victim to this simplistic, repetitive pattern of attack attack dodge, attack attack dodge, attack attack dodge.</div>
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Enemy AI is just so simple that you almost never have to deviate from that successful pattern, because most enemies behave exactly the same. It doesn't really matter whether you're fighting a wolf, a bear, a drowner, a nekker, a ghoul, or even a werewolf because they all just come straight at you and do some generic close-range one-or-two-hit attack. Against most enemies, you don't have to worry about what type of attack they're doing, or where they're aiming it -- you just dodge or parry when you see them telegraph an attack. Some enemies fall victim to really simple, repetitive stun-locking patterns that leave them almost completely helpless to defend themselves. Meanwhile, you don't have a lot of different attack options at your disposal; with only two types of sword attacks, the system is even further limited by the fact that there's hardly any reason to use strong attacks (unless you invest heavily into those skills) because they're so much slower and are therefore easier for enemies to interrupt, while fast attacks do roughly the same damage-per-second and are harder to interrupt because they keep enemies stun-locked longer.</div>
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The inclusion of potions, bombs, blade oils, magic signs, and a crossbow are supposed to add extra depth and variety to the system, but these aren't particularly exciting options, either. The crossbow is insanely under-powered and only ever worth using to knock airborne foes out of the air, or to one-shot underwater foes. Blade oils and potions are all passive stat-boosters that don't change the gameplay all that significantly, with the possible exception of the Blizzard potion that slows time around you, while you move at normal speed, for a time after each kill. Bombs can be thrown like a grenade to cause damage or special effects to an area, like freezing enemies in place, or preventing the use of magic, which can certainly be helpful against large groups of enemies or against tougher boss-like enemies, but I rarely felt the need to use them, even in harder difficulty modes.</div>
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Magic signs would seem like they're more fun, since there are five of them and each one gets an alternate casting mode (for essentially 10 different signs), but they, too, become shallow and repetitive after just a little while. As a pure mage in my original playthrough, I discovered that signs made combat even simpler and more boring, because I spent basically the whole game using Aard to knock enemies down and killing them with a one-hit finisher, or spamming Igni as often as possible and dodging until my stamina regenerated enough to cast it again. Against some of the stronger enemies in the game, it was faster and more effective just to cast Quen and reflect their damage back at them instead of actually fighting -- I just stood there and let them kill themselves. As with the melee combat, every single fight was just a matter of repeating the same basic strategy, rinsing and repeating until everything was dead.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ultimately, I feel like you basically have to play as an alchemy/sign build hybrid in order to get any fun depth or satisfaction out of the combat system, since melee combat is so rudimentary in general and the sword skills so generally bland and uninteresting. There are only two skills in the entire combat tree that grant new sword attacks, while everything else consists of passive stat boosts and weird, gimmicky stuff with adrenaline, the crossbow, and dodging. As previously mentioned, the crossbow is basically worthless making 20% of the Combat tree worthless by extension, while adrenaline just passively boosts damage and isn't actively used by very many skills. At least with a sign build, you get 5 or 10 active abilities to use in combat, and have an extra dimension of tactics involved with managing your stamina gauge, while the toxicity bonuses from the alchemy tree can let you use more decoctions at a time, which can have pretty fun and serious effects on combat strategy, depending on which you choose to use. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#4</span>: Gameplay doesn't evolve as you level-up.</span><br />
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A cardinal sin for an RPG, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't feel like your character evolves as you get stronger. You can invest in 80 different skills, most of which have 2-5 tiers of investment that unlock extra effects as you put more points into that individual skill, thereby allowing you a ton of freedom to customize Geralt into your own unique build. The vast majority of these skills, however, are passive modifiers that don't actually change your gameplay; deal 5% more damage when using fast attacks, increase maximum toxicity by 1 for every known level 1 formula, extend the duration of Yrden sign traps by five seconds, and so on. Sure, they all make you better and stronger at the game, and these skills have a tremendous cumulative effect as you rack up more and more of them, but few of them add new abilities to the game. For the most part, the skills simply make you more effective at what you're already capable of doing.</div>
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Once you gain access to the crossbow a few hours into the starting area, you'll have seen and experienced 90% of what the combat system has to offer. From that point on, the only variety comes from different bombs, potions, and blade oils you unlock, but again, with the exception of a few bombs and potions, these are mostly just passive stat boosters. Of the 80 skills, only 9-10 of them introduce new abilities; five of these are the alternate sign-casting modes, which can be unlocked relatively early, while the two new melee attacks, whirl and rend, are buried deep in the skill tree. The only skill that does anything new outside of combat, meanwhile, is the Axii skill "delusion," which lets you jedi mind trick people in dialogue, and can also be obtained pretty early in the game. As a pure mage, I unlocked all of the game-changing skills in that tree about a quarter of the way through the game and just passively watched my stats go up for the remaining 90 hours. When replaying the game, the only variety and evolution that I experienced in my build was on two occasions when I chose to completely re-spec into all-new fields and different hybrid combinations, the variety of which stemmed entirely from me undoing previous decisions as opposed to making new decisions along my current trajectory. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#5</span>: Progression is slow and unrewarding.</span><br />
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The rate at which you play the game by exploring the world, defeating enemies, completing quests, and so on, doesn't match the rate at which you level-up and gain skills. <i>The Witcher 3</i> is an incredibly long game with a massive world to explore and a ton of content to complete -- people spend an <a href="https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=10270">average of 100 hours</a> playing this game, but the leveling system feels like something from a 50-hour game that's been stretched to fit a game twice that length, by virtue of simply slowing down the rate at which you unlock new skill slots as you level up, and down-scaling quest rewards as you inevitably out-level the game's content to the point that they just stop giving experience rewards altogether. The game's scale is so big that progress just feels incredibly slow. </div>
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<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Every time you level up (or discover a new Place of Power) you earn a new skill point, which you can invest in any of the game's three primary skill trees (or the fourth auxiliary branch). Skill points by themselves are fairly insignificant, however, since individually they only grant a meager 3-5% boost in something, but sometimes acquiring a new skill point won't give any bonus at all if you've maxed out your currently-active skills and don't have an open skill slot. Early on you unlock new skill slots every two levels, but this rate slows down as you level up, first increasing to every three levels around mid-way through the game, and then every four levels in the final quarter, meaning it's possible and frequently likely that you'll wind up in situations where you go several level-ups at a time before being able to actually use your skill points. And as a result of new skill slots becoming more and more scarce later in the game, you effectively hit a soft level cap well before the game officially ends; although you can easily reach level 35+ by doing everything the game has to offer, everything slows down so much around the early-to-mid-20s, with the final skill slot unlocking at level 30, that it feels like progression just comes to a complete halt with not much left to look forward to, and still dozens of hours of gameplay left to complete. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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It's also possible that, depending on how you've been building your character, you may find yourself in a position where new upgrades don't even benefit you that much. After 80 hours of my original playthrough, having still not been to Skellige or even completed chapter one, I found that I just had no reason to upgrade anymore, with still 54 hours left in the base game. As a pure mage, my sign intensity was already so off the charts that upgrading my signs any further would just give me diminished returns, and branching out into one of the other two skill trees (physical combat or alchemy) would result in less benefit from my mutagen slots, until I achieved another 10-12 level-ups to unlock a new mutagen slot. In that playthrough, I finished the base game at level 34 with 15 skill points that I literally couldn't even use in my sign build, because there just weren't enough active slots for me to continue learning new skills. </div>
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Ultimately, it's a little disappointing that, of the 80 skills you can choose from, you can only ever equip 12 of them, meaning you hit a hard cap at level 30 and can no longer equip any additional skills. You can still learn other skills, of course, but you're always limited to only having 12 active at one time, meaning any new skills you learn will require you to swap out an old one to activate it. Normally I like those kinds of limitations in games, and I specifically praised it earlier in this review because of how it forces you into tough decisions, weighing the pros and cons of different abilities and forming your own more-specialized build, but it feels almost criminal to spend so much time in this game building towards such few abilities. When replaying the game, I found myself wanting to jump into the DLC expansions halfway through the base game if only to give myself new ways to upgrade my character via Runewright abilities and the new Mutagen enhancements, because the base game's progression felt like it was already running out of steam with still half the game left to play. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's also frustrating how the mutagen slots kind of force you into specializing early on, since they only give a bonus to matching skills from the same skill tree, effectively punishing hybrid builds until you're half or three-quarters of the way through the game, when you finally have enough mutagen slots to group skills together to take proper advantage of the mutagen bonuses. Simply put, if you try to branch out too early in the game, then you're just deliberately handicapping yourself, and that can be a little <i>too</i> restrictive to feel like you're being arbitrarily forced into specializing in one field instead of doing something more varied that you might ultimately prefer. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#6</span>: The world is too big, with too much content.</span><br />
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I know I praised the game earlier for having so much quality content and for being such a good value for your money, but there are two sides to this coin, and in the case of <i>TW3</i>, having such a big world and having so much content in it can also be a bad thing. When you create a world this big, there's necessarily going to be dead space because you can't fill every area with interesting content; the world is as big as it is to create a more realistic sense of scale and geography, but that comes with the consequence of spreading everything out and forcing players to spend more time traveling across it, and to spend more time than really should be necessary searching for the good and worthwhile content.</div>
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For every hour I spent doing a fun quest, or tracking a unique monster to its lair and having an epic showdown with it, or discovering some cool area off the beaten path with a hidden treasure chest, I spent half an hour wandering around the wilderness picking flowers and generally finding nothing of interest. A lot of times I'd discover a cool-looking place that simply had nothing going on in it. Even major landmarks on the map, like the Wolven Glade or the Devil's Pit, for instance, had all these interesting structures that looked like they should've been part of some quest, but ended up serving no purpose whatsoever in either of my playthroughs.</div>
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On the flipside, I frequently ran into situations when I was being overwhelmed with quests and things of interest popping up from everywhere, all the time. In trying to get to a quest marker across unexplored terrain, I stumbled into a bandit camp and had to defend myself, and ended up picking up a quest to find a family sword. So I figure "I may as well do this quest while I'm here," bring up the journal, and discover it's pointing me far away in the opposite direction. So I head that way and stumble into another quest because a cyclops ambushes me on the side of the road. So I investigate the area and find a note which sends me off in yet another direction to complete the quest, at which point I gave up and ignore both of the quests I just picked up, opting to go back to what I was doing originally. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then you've got the abundance of marked locations like Monster Nests, Smuggler's Caches, Bandit Camps, Hidden Treasures, and similar such encounters that basically just amount to "Go to a place, fight some enemies, and open a treasure chest" in what might be some of the most simple, shallow, and repetitive content in the entire game. The majority of map markers in Skellige are literally just submerged treasure chests that you have to spend minutes at a time sailing across completely empty seascapes with nothing else to see or do along the way, where you're then forced to awkwardly fight a bunch of airborne enemies with hardly any solid footing on which to stand, or else dive underwater and mindlessly one-shot everything with the crossbow's auto-target feature. You'd seriously have to put a gun to my head to make me want to go around clearing that map of all its content. </div>
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The effect of having so much content in one game is that it dilutes the overall experience. With a game this size, some of the content is just going to be better than all the rest, and a lot of other stuff is going to end up being completely forgettable. Even though nearly every quest has some kind of decent setup and characterization relative to other games of this scale, a lot of these less-significant side-quests pale in comparison to what else is in the same game, or compared to smaller, more tightly-focused games. You could argue that, if the boring stuff is truly that boring, then just don't do it because it's all optional, but you never know what quests or points of interest are going to be outstanding or mundane until you complete them, so you basically have to explore everywhere and do everything you come across if you want to experience all of the best content that the game has to offer, which means wading through a lot of relatively boring content to find the good stuff.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#7</span>: Exploration is unrewarding.</span><br />
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As a result of the world being too big for its own good, exploration doesn't feel all that rewarding. The thing that makes exploration satisfying in games is that feeling of discovery you get when you find something off the beaten path that others might possibly miss, thus making your experience potentially different from someone else playing the same game. These discoveries can be cool quests, special loot, or just fun easter eggs, but a lot of stuff that you find in <i>TW3</i> ends up being either completely worthless or completely pointless.</div>
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All of the best gear in the game, for instance, is witcher gear that you craft yourself, and then upgrade over the rest of the game. I made my first set of witcher gear at level 11 and eventually realized that nothing I was ever going to find in my adventures would ever be better than what I already had, which somewhat hurt my motivation to go out exploring. It makes me wish the game didn't have witcher sets at all, and instead made all of the equipment like the non-witcher sets, which use a <i>Diablo</i>-style rarity system with random attributes; early on it was fun to find new pieces of equipment and weighing the trade-off of different extra effects, but once I started crafting witcher gear that whole dimension of equipment progression just completely vanished, because nothing ever really seemed to out-class the Griffin set for a magic-heavy sign build. Most of what you find, otherwise, is just worthless junk that only exists to clog up your inventory as vendor trash, or blueprints for gear you won't be able to use for another 20-40 hours because the level requirements to use them, once crafted, are so much higher than when you find them. </div>
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Meanwhile, you get so little experience for killing monsters and discovering locations that you can spend several hours exploring and make virtually no progress towards leveling up. And with the map as big as it is, you spend a lot of time running all over it just looking for content, sometimes in vain. I'd often spend 5-10 minutes at a time running around an interesting-looking area finding nothing but useless plants and maybe a few random crates full of junk, or some random low-level enemies. So, you either put up with spending all this time aimlessly wandering around, or you cut to the chase and just follow the marked points of interest on your map that tell you where basically everything worth finding is before you've even been there -- useful for cutting down all the wasted time, but they make exploration feel like accounting, like you're just going around checking boxes off a list, as opposed to actually exploring and engaging with the world on your own.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#8</span>: The world doesn't always feel alive.</span><br />
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Earlier I praised the game world for feeling real and showing signs of dynamic elements, but that doesn't mean it always feels alive. There are thousands of NPCs in this game, but 95% of them can't be interacted with in any kind of way whatsoever. Not that you'd want to, of course, but it makes a lot of them feel like lifeless filler characters pasted into the environment to occupy space. Although many can be seen performing ambient activities in their daily lives, others just stand in place not really doing anything, and they don't always react to your presence or actions very realistically, either, seeing as no one bats an eye when you go barging into their homes and stealing everything out from under their noses. It sometimes feels like running around in an MMORPG with how many generic, nameless, lifeless NPCs you encounter, and by virtue of people standing around with an exclamation point over their head waiting for you to come by and initiate dialogue with them. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There's a small camp near the starting area in Velen, for instance, where prisoners of war are being put to work mining rocks or something. The area, I suppose, is meant to showcase some of the harsh consequences of war and the toll that Nilfgaard's conquest is having on the region, but it feels like window dressing in a display case because there's no interactive or immersive way to engage with that area. You can't talk to anyone or pick up any quests associated with this area, and there aren't any meaningful conversations to overhear, or scripted scenes to watch, either. It seems like you should be able to witness guards ordering the prisoners around and keeping them in line, or maybe they'd yell at you for getting too close to the prisoners or trying to talk to them. Maybe you'd hear prisoners grumbling under their breath about how difficult the work is or lamenting why they're there in the first place, or local peasants might comment on the state of the war and how it's affected their work in the local quarry -- just something, anything to bring this area to life in an interesting way. As it is, everyone just seems to go about their business like animatronic robots at a theme park, with the only deliberately scripted activity going on being two women talking about Nilfgaardian genitalia -- everything else is just random, generic commentary. They do sprinkle a tiny bit of world-building and characterization into some of the dialogue, but it's drowned out by everyone else saying random unrelated things, or deliberately ignoring you, or making odd bodily noises, instead of doing things more appropriate for this particular area and situation. Without those little details, it was hard for me to suspend my disbelief that this was a real place and not just a phony video game backdrop, or some place that they'd started designing and then kind of forgot about. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#9</span>: Simple, repetitive quest mechanics.</span><br />
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The quests in <i>TW3</i> may have a lot of engaging storylines and characters in them, but the actual mechanics for solving quests tend to be pretty shallow and repetitive. A strong majority of quests follow a simple formula of "talk to the quest-giver, go to the location marked on your map, investigate using your witcher senses, follow a glowing trail, fight something, and return to the quest-giver." Other quests consist of a lot of straightforward dialogue where you just walk to the objective, watch long cutscenes, cycle through all dialogue options, watch more cutscenes, walk to the next location, and repeat. Occasionally, they'll throw some kind of utterly trivial, pointless, unrelated fight at you just to give you something to do between walking to your next objective.</div>
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Witcher senses, in particular, feel like a lot of missed potential. On the one hand, it's cool that you can press a button to hone in on things a witcher's heightened senses would pick up on, that we as mere ordinary humans would never notice, like subtle animal tracks on the ground or scent trails, but this takes a lot of self-satisfaction out of the quests because you're not actually solving the quest yourself -- you're just pressing a button to highlight the solution and following a dotted-line to its conclusion. There's one quest, for instance, that tasks you with solving a puzzle by putting a wine bottle in the correct spot based on its year to open a hidden passage -- Geralt suggests it might be based on Dandelion or Ciri's birth year, but instead of having the player recall information they've been told previously, or find another clue in the environment, or cross-reference information in the glossary, or decipher the layout of the wine rack to find the right spot, you just hold right-click to highlight the solution, and then left-click to interact with it. Even though the game explicitly tells you to "solve the riddle" you don't actually do anything to solve it, as it all happens automatically. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Another quest tasks you with tracking down a serial killer, but there's no active decision-making or problem-solving on the player's end, because all you do is use witcher senses to let Geralt make all of the critical observations and deductions on his own, with only one real decision coming at the very end with a painfully obvious correct option. You're not really solving a murder mystery, in that case, you're just being told a story with passive gameplay that merely moves you from one plot point to the next. Compare that to a similar quest in <i>The Witcher 1</i>, when you're trying to figure out who's working with Salamandra by interviewing multiple suspects, interpreting evidence, cross-referencing their alibis and evaluating their possible motivations before picking a suspect -- it's a complicated web of quests with tons of branching paths and outcomes based on how you choose to approach each step of the quest with you making connections entirely on your own, and with ample opportunities to get it wrong if you aren't diligent, whereas <i>The Witcher 3</i> is basically just a linear trail of bread crumbs where you just walk around using witcher senses clicking on everything and exhausting all of the dialogue options, that eventually leads to an obvious red herring where the correct choice is the only logical, sensible option -- that being to remain inquisitive when you have the suspect cornered instead of automatically jumping to conclusions and launching into a vindictive rampage. And even if you make the right choice in that situation, figuring out the "Whodunnit" is still a passive, reactive process as you're merely <i>told</i> at that point who's responsible. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And unfortunately, witcher senses are a mandatory part of the game, they're not just there as a crutch for more casual gamers who don't want to put in the work figuring things out for themselves; you typically have to use witcher senses to solve these things because there's literally no other information to go off of. Without them, you'd just be bumbling around aimlessly, hoping to stumble into solutions randomly. So in effect, they cause you to just shut your brain off while mindlessly following highlights to make the game move forward on its set trajectory. Consider that the bulk of quests in this game revolve around Geralt performing some sort of detective work to solve a problem -- he has to investigate a scene, collect evidence, talk to witnesses, figure out where to go, get suspects to cooperate with him, and so on -- and yet you do barely any detective work as a player, since the game forcibly guides you along the path the entire way while Geralt does all the work himself. That's fine if all you want is a context for interesting stories to be told through an interactive medium, but misses out on a lot of the unique problem-solving appeal that these types of games can provide. And even if you like the stories that are being told within this type of quest structure, it can still get to feel repetitive and degrading far too quickly in such a long and drawn-out game. <br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#10</span>: Decisions often feel trivial and unimportant.</span><br />
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While it's true that you can make a lot of important decisions that can affect the outcomes of major characters and even lead you to one of three different endings, most of the decisions you make in <i>TW3</i> have little effect on anything, either because the outcomes are utterly inconsequential and only exist for role-playing purposes (which is totally fine, I suppose -- it's better than having no choice at all) or because you actually, in fact, have no choice at all and are forced to do exactly what the game intended all along, regardless of the fact that you were given an apparent "choice."</div>
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At one point in the main story, I thought I had a chance to effect a major branch in the main quest line, to pursue a hint of Ciri's whereabouts by pursuing either Dandelion or Triss and Yennefer. I decided to go with Triss and Yennefer, because that seemed like the more logical guess -- I couldn't recall any mention previously that Dandelion even knew Ciri, and I knew that Triss was in the city and that Yennefer had a history with Ciri -- only for the game to say "That was the wrong answer, you're gonna go after Dandelion for help." Why even give the player a choice in that situation, if Geralt is ultimately going to make that decision himself, or if there isn't going to be any sort of consequence for picking the wrong choice? If you're intending for the scene to play out a certain way, regardless of the player's input, then just show it how you envisioned it instead of putting a meaningless false choice into the mix. </div>
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Meanwhile, a lot of your dialogue options are considered flat-out wrong, according to the script. In one major conversation after finding Ciri, I said I didn't want to get the Lodge of Sorceresses involved because I didn't trust them and was told "Too bad, we're doing it." Ciri then protested, saying that she should have some say in things and that she can take care of herself, so I said "You're right," and was promptly told "No, she needs to be kept completely out of danger." She got angry and ran off, so I said "I'll go after her," and was then told "No, she needs to work this out on her own." This was three things, all in a row, where the game slapped my wrist and said "no you're wrong, this is how this cutscene is going to play out," and I was left to wonder why I was even given a choice if nothing I said was actually going to matter.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#11</span>: A lot of restrictive gameplay.</span><br />
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Like with the dialogue options, there are a ton of instances in the ordinary gameplay when the game forces you to play a certain way, either by arbitrarily restricting your actions or by preventing you from doing anything else. Every now and then you run into situations where the game just doesn't let you run, and you have to walk to your next destination, or you end up in places where you can't jump, draw your weapon, or cast signs. Particularly infuriating is how combat is a completely different gameplay mode from non-combat, since it completely alters the way movement, controls, and inputs work; while in combat you can't jump or interact with anything, which often led to me getting stuck in places because I couldn't jump or climb a ladder to get to the enemy so I could kill it and get out of combat mode. I remember trying to complete a quest in Skellige where flying enemies suddenly ambushed me from out of nowhere, sending me into "combat mode" right before I pressed the "jump" button, which resulted in Geralt performing a roll-dodge off a cliff instead of doing the jump I intended him to do, and also got stuck on a tiny little platform unable to jump or move off of it because the game just wouldn't let me perform normal platforming actions with enemies nearby. </div>
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There was another time when I walked into an NPC's house and found it being ransacked by looters who then attacked me, and the game forced me into a fist-fighting mini-game. When I tried to draw my swords, or cast signs on them, that familiar message popped on screen saying "You can't do that here." And I thought, "Why not? They're criminals, I don't want to give them a fair fight or take it easy on them." Even if the game is trying to force a non-lethal outcome to that fight, why can't you use Quen to protect yourself, or Axii to stun them, or Aard to knock them back? What about using a Samum bomb, which acts like a flash-bang to daze and temporarily blind them? It's annoying when any game does this type of thing, but I think it's even worse in an open-world RPG, the whole point of which is having the freedom to play the game how you want, which is not always the case in <i>TW3</i>.</div>
<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#12</span>: Too much reliance on linear scripting.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Continuing with the previous point, the restrictive gameplay often feels like you're being shoe-horned into following highly-scripted storyboards, where you're only allowed to do things in a very specific order, or in the one way that CDProjekt intended you to do it. In many cases, deviating from the intended order of operations, or trying things outside of the script's limited scope, results in a clunky, awkward, unsatisfying, immersion-breaking dead end. In White Orchard, for instance, I remembered from my first playthrough that an herbalist lived in a certain hut, and thought I'd go there to buy and sell alchemy supplies, only to discover her door locked and her absent from her hut because she apparently isn't spawned into the world until a main quest sends you to talk to the local herbalist. Likewise, while exploring I ran into a guy with a bloody wound in obvious distress, but couldn't interact with him in any capacity whatsoever because I hadn't picked up the requisite side quest to be able say "Hey, are you alright? What's wrong with your arm?" At the very least, there there should've been some kind of programmed response where you try to interact with him, and he says "I'm fine... leave me alone" until you have the right quest active to know there's something else going on.</div><div><br /></div><div>Later on, there's a major side quest where you're tracking down a serial killer by following a trail of clues, and finally catch him in the act, thus triggering a frantic chase through the grounds of a noble's estate where you're eventually confronted by the guards who believe you to be the assassin. According to the game's script, you're supposed to stop and fight these guards to trigger a cutscene in which the killer gets away, and the deceased's daughter rushes in to clear your name. But, if you do the only logical, sensible thing and instead choose to ignore the guards (because you don't want to spill innocent blood and realize that doing so would slow down your progress of apprehending the culprit), then the trail of footprints just abruptly vanishes and the quest comes to a screeching halt, leaving you to awkwardly wander around with no more clues to follow and the quest no longer advancing, as you wonder what's going on and what you're actually expected to be doing. In lots of other occasions, you discover areas during exploration that are apparently intended to be used for some quest, but which are inexplicably closed off without the requisite quest active, and which inexplicably open up once you're doing the right quest. And there are tons of situations where it would be most practical for Geralt to jedi mind trick someone into cooperation, but because that would ruin the wonderfully-crafted script you inexplicably can't use that option. </div><div><br /></div><div>This type of stuff is really frustrating to encounter in a supposed RPG, especially an open-world one, the whole point of which is typically to allow players the opportunity to explore the world and solve quests in their own unique way. But because of the game's heavy-handed reliance on following these linear scripts, by virtue of everything being so heavily story-driven with gameplay sequences that seem to exist primarily as a means to move the player from one storyboard moment to the next, that whole element of player agency gets reduced significantly. Instead of being presented with a problem and using your own wits and character skills to solve the problem, you're basically just along for the ride passively following the script and watching scenes play out, until the game expects you to fight something or make a critical choice in dialogue. To be fair, that works in this type of game where the goal was clearly to tell a story (or a bunch of short stories set in an open-world), but it's a little deflating if you're coming into it expecting more mechanically-driven quests where the story emerges from your own gameplay, like you'd find in more mechanical, systems-based RPGs and immersive-sims, or else if you enjoy the stories being told but want to play a more active role within that story.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#13</span>: The main story bogs down like crazy.</span><br />
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The game begins with a pretty clear and concise objective: find Ciri. Finding her is not that simple, however, as you have to go to every single region of the Continent and speak to a variety of people in each location, usually doing some obligatory sub-quest for each and every person you find just so they'll point you in the next direction. This premise is fine for a little while, at least in the early stages of the game when you have little to no information to go on and are dealing with what I consider to be some of the better main quests with the Ladies of the Wood and the Bloody Baron, but it really bogs down once you finish the main quests in Velen and you get to the big city in Novigrad.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">So you spend dozens of hours in Velen looking for Ciri and doing a bunch of arbitrary sub-goals for other people, where a major character is deliberately withholding information and stringing you along, only to have her trail go completely cold with the Bloody Baron finally saying "She's not here anymore, go look in Novigrad." The Velen quests don't end on any sort of compelling cliff-hanger, as they effectively wrap up almost every loose end in that area, and they don't lead or continue directly into Novigrad as there's a clear separation between the two stories and the two environments, since they're actually intended to be doable in either order, despite the game clearly starting you in Velen. Once you realize that the quests in Velen conclude in a huge dead end, it makes all of the preceding effort feel like a waste of time, and the realization that you now have to start the search all over again with zero leads in an all new environment, just brings the game's momentum to a screeching halt. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So then you go Novigrad, and have to turn the entire city upside down looking for her while following an endless string of wild goose chases looking for other people all-the-while feeling like you're not making any progress towards actually finding Ciri, because the main plot almost seems to forget about her at this point. The whole point of the quests in Novigrad is that you're trying to find Dandelion, because he supposedly met up with her and might know her current whereabouts, but it turns out that he's missing, too, which triggers a quest to work with Sigi Reuven (aka Dijkstra) to find Whoreson Junior, so that you can find Dudu, so that you can find Dandelion, so that you can find Ciri. There's like four degrees of separation from the main quest at that point, and I got so fed up with it that I quit playing early one night and impulsively started reading <i>The Last Wish</i>, the introductory book in the series, because I was losing all interest in the game's story. It was a real chore to get through the game's first act, at times, the entirety of which consists of finding Ciri, because it just bogs down with so many roadblocks and arbitrary sub-goals from unrelated people in unrelated areas that it stops feeling like a story and starts feeling like tedious video game busywork.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">#14</span>: </span>Meandering, conflicting pace.</span><br style="text-align: left;" /><br style="text-align: left;" /><div>The whole point of finding Ciri is that the world is at risk of an apocalyptic event should the Wild Hunt ever catch up with her, and she's also Geralt's adopted daughter whom he cares deeply about and doesn't want to come to any harm. That should be a pretty big deal, either way you look at it, and yet the game (and the rest of the world and all of its inhabitants) don't really care if you find her or not because the whole purpose of an open-world game like this is to take your time exploring random places and seeking out side content. In fact, you're mechanically obligated to ignore the main quest if you actually want to get the most out of the game's open-world design, since many side quests will get cancelled if you advance the main story too far before completing them. Geralt, meanwhile, is content to lie around brothels with random prostitutes, work his way up the ranks in horse-racing and fistfighting tournaments, and pursue a life becoming world champion of a collectible card game instead of looking for his daughter. The main story is at direct odds with the core gameplay design, in other words, with the meandering pace of the open-world design taking a lot of narrative thrust out of the main story and basically every other quest. </div><div><br /></div><div>In effect, the game just doesn't know if it wants to be a laid-back open-world sandbox experience, or a narrative-driven story game; it tries to do both, but they don't really work together in the same context. In order for the story to work as written, the rest of the world and the side content needs to be greatly streamlined to facilitate a more accelerated pace appropriate for saving a loved one and the entire world from an impending cataclysm, and in order for the open-world design to work as intended the story needs to have less of a pressing, time-sensitive, and highly personal element to it. As it is, everything just feels really incongruous, like those two conflicting design aspects are constantly undermining one another.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's all very inconsistent, too. During main quests, we're treated to frequent moments where characters like Yennefer are throwing out cliches about how there's "no time" to explain her plans or to take more delicate measures, while also berating Geralt for wanting to take on witchers' work instead of focusing on finding Ciri, as if she fully understands the gravity of the situation and that they should be trying to find Ciri as quickly as possible. But then on the flipside, she's alright with putting their search for Ciri on hold to resolve personal matters like her romantic connection with Geralt, and even makes comments in brazen defiance of the main story's ticking clock element -- when she's been implying the exact opposite throughout other quests. She seems like she's in a big rush to find Ciri, but then is perfectly alright with Geralt taking a week to ride to Kaer Morhen by horseback instead of insisting that she warp him (and Roach and Uma) there in less time. To be fair, she makes a comment about how she can't warp all three of them there at once in order for the game to justify Geralt's week-long journey, but I don't see why she can't just warp them there one at a time, even if takes a couple days recharging her power to do so -- it would still be faster than waiting an entire week. Is Ciri in grave danger or not? Which one is it?</div><div><br /></div><br style="text-align: left;" /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CQT4i8MT7j0/V-4s94cOiEI/AAAAAAAAHms/I_6XGsXzLbEbQJbcc40A-_TU2ppuIyHGACLcB/s1600/Witcher3FacePalm.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CQT4i8MT7j0/V-4s94cOiEI/AAAAAAAAHms/I_6XGsXzLbEbQJbcc40A-_TU2ppuIyHGACLcB/s400/Witcher3FacePalm.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#15</span>: </span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;">The whole third act is underwhelming.</span><br /><br />The main story is broken into three segments, with Act 1 being the search for Ciri, Act 2 being the preparation and eventual Battle of Kaer Morhen, and Act 3 being the retaliation against and final confrontation with the Wild hunt. Act 1 takes up the bulk of the gameplay, with finding Ciri being the longest, most involved process of the entire game, complete with the most open-world, side-quest hunting gameplay. The fact that finding Ciri takes so long makes it feel like the game is building up to this grand, epic showdown with the Wild Hunt, leading into the Battle of Kaer Morhen which feels like the game's climax, and then Act 3 feels incredibly simple, mundane, and straightforward in comparison to all of the preceding action and build-up. Most of what you do in Act 3 is small tasks here and there, like fetching a Sunstone from an elven crypt, visiting Avallach's lab, or talking to the Emperor, before launching into a heavily scripted, highly linear final battle where you fight or run past a few groups of enemies, face a couple of bosses, and then it's basically over. The final battle is extremely anticlimactic, without much engaging gameplay or interesting story elements going on, and practically zero meaningful character interaction between Geralt and Eredin, the main baddie. Afterwards, there's no resolution to the actual battle, with no opportunity to talk to your friends to see who made it out alive, what happened elsewhere in the battle, and so on. Even though there's more preparation and build-up to the final battle in Act 3, the Battle of Kaer Morhen in Act 2 feels way more epic with much higher stakes, and does give you a proper resolution with lots of character moments along the way. In comparison, Act 3 feels like it's rushing towards the end of the game while running out of steam. <br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: red;">#16</span>: Alchemy is oversimplified.</span><br /><br />By streamlining alchemy to make it a more appealing gameplay option, they removed almost all of its depth and complexity. Potions now have zero negative side-effects, so there's absolutely no reason <i>not</i> to use them, and you no longer have to stop fighting to uncork a potion and actually drink it, meaning you don't have to worry about positioning yourself and finding the right moment when you can afford to drink a potion -- you just press the hotkey and the effect triggers instantly. There's no more variety in brewing a potion by mixing your own ingredients with dominant substances to create special versions with bonus secondary effects, or using trial-and-error to brew your own potions without a formula, and you only really have to brew a potion once, because from then on everything will automatically replenish every time you rest, as long as you have a single bottle of alcohol in your inventory, which you find <i>everywhere</i> in your travels -- in other words, there's virtually no cost for brewing and replenishing your supplies. The fact that you can brew potions anywhere, at any time, also reduces elements of survival and resource-management, since you no longer have to plan out or make critical decisions about when you use your limited substances. Similarly, there's no consequence for applying oil to your blades, so you may as well run around with a constant damage boost and swap the oils out every time you start a fight against a new enemy type. And even though the blade oils have a limited number of uses per application, there's no limit to the number of times you can apply the oil (which happens instantly during the pause screen), thereby making those arbitrary limitations completely pointless. All of which combines to make alchemy feel like a bunch of generic, passive buffs instead of a fully-developed gameplay system, since there's no more realistic grounding with how you have to prepare and maintain your supplies. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#1</span>: Movement controls feel weird.</span><br />
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One of the hardest things to get used to, when I played the game originally in 2016, was simply moving Geralt around. Geralt has a significant weight to his movements, with momentum affecting how he starts moving, comes to a stop, and even changes direction. This has the benefit of making you feel more realistically rooted to the game world, but it also makes simple tasks like walking through doors or turning around more of a nuisance than they should be, since it takes so much effort to get Geralt moving to make minor corrections to your positioning, and Geralt's momentum will frequently make him stop short of what you expected, or push him further than you intended to. You can turn this movement scheme off and enable an alternative system, but then Geralt stops feeling like a real person and just floats around like a video game character. Interestingly, I didn't have as much of a problem with the movement scheme on my recent replay, either because I was subconsciously used to it already, or because I was playing with a controller instead of the keyboard, which might handle the inputs a little differently and possibly a little better than a keyboard. Regardless of your chosen input method, trying to control your movement while swimming is an absolute nightmare, since Geralt seems to have the turning radius of a luxury yacht, and you can't aim his movement up or down at precise enough angles to get out of tight spots easily. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, the physics for movement just feel uncooperative in general. The game likes to force a lot of physics-based reactions on the movement, independent of your actual inputs, which constantly leads Geralt to doing weird things you didn't intend. Sometimes it makes sense, like how he'll slow down when walking up a steeper incline, but this effect seems to trigger at inappropriate times when you were moving fine over a similar incline and then get suddenly forced into a slow walk when there was no perceptible change in the slope, and then he'll stubbornly refuse to even attempt to move faster while you're mashing on the sprint button. But then he'll randomly lose his footing and just slide all the way down the hill, and there's no way for you to halt his momentum or "catch yourself" other than to awkwardly jump, possibly resulting in him rolling some weird direction when he lands. Trying to get out of a body of water by walking up a steep incline an act of obnoxious futility, where Geralt will slowly trudge out of the water, only to slide backwards and then launch into a diving face-first animation back into the water and swim several strokes out from land. It's especially frustrating how often you find yourself incapable of jumping or climbing out of a shallow body of water. Sometimes you try to jump onto or over something and the game decides that, instead of just doing a normal jump it's going to shift into a climbing animation. The whole effect is that movement just feels inconsistent and unresponsive a lot of the time. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#2</span>: Imprecise combat controls.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">When I played the game originally in 2016, I noticed major issues with dropped inputs not registering, leading Geralt to stand around awkwardly not doing anything after I'd clearly pressed a button intending for him to do something while coming out of another action. I'm not sure if that was due to problems with the input queuing system (if there even was one), or if it was some sort of input lag that caused the input to not register, but it made the combat feel extremely clunky and unresponsive. Fortunately I didn't run into that problem in my recent replay. I can't verify if that was a problem with my hardware back in the day, or an actual problem in the game's code that has subsequently been fixed in later patches, but I'm mentioning it here because I know other people had similar issues, at the time, and it had a serious impact on my enjoyment of the combat system when I played the game initially. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Unfortunately, the combat system is still not without problems. The fact that Geralt has so many different attack animations still messes with timing and positioning a little, since you might be intending Geralt to perform a quick attack only to find him going into something with a longer wind-up that covers more distance than you expected, which can leave you exposed to enemy hits or cause you to miss a window of opportunity. The targeting system isn't especially helpful, either, since the lock-on feature prevents you from positioning the camera to see behind you, so against groups of enemies you basically have to play unlocked to tell what's going on around you, at which point you're at the mercy of the game's soft-lock auto-targeting system to decide which enemy Geralt's actually going to move to attack when you press the attack button. As previously mentioned, I especially dislike the fact that combat controls are a completely different "game state" from normal gameplay, since it prevents you from performing basic actions like jumping, and awkwardly slows Geralt's movement to a snail's pace and prevents you from freely running around the battlefield and weaving in and out of enemy attacks, short of using the built-in roll and dodge buttons or spending limited stamina to sprint. Overall, the combat controls aren't bad, but don't feel as tight or consistent as some other, similar games out there. <br /></div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#3</span>: Witchers aint got time for these trivial tasks.</span><br />
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Witchers are not altruistic paladins crusading for the good of all living beings, protecting the down-trodden and the oppressed while fighting for social justice. They're monster-hunters for hire. They stay out of politics, mind their own business, and don't intervene unless there's significant pay involved, or else have personal reasons to, or if a confrontation is simply unavoidable. As Geralt so eloquently stated in the first game: "I'm a witcher, neutral as all hell." In actuality, Geralt's moral compass is far more complex than that, and yet, you basically have to be an altruistic paladin if you want to experience as much content as possible, or else you'll end up just skipping a lot of quests and events altogether, thereby missing their stories, experience points, and rewards. Geralt shouldn't have the time (or the interest) to stand up for every troubled person he comes across, or to do menial chores for people, and yet the bulk of quests in the game consist of going out of your way to help other people, or doing simple favors for random people that any non-witcher could be doing. Why, for instance, is famed witcher and alleged kingslayer Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, the Butcher of Blaviken, looking for someone's stolen horse, or stopping by the side of the road to help someone fix shrines? If you were to play as a true witcher and only do the monster-hunting contracts, main story quests, and favors for personal friends, you'd probably end up skipping over half of what the game has to offer. So besides feeling out-of-character for a witcher, it feels like the game is forcing you into role-playing a certain way just to see more of the game's content. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#4</span>: No penalty for stealing from people's homes.</span><br />
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<i>The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt</i>, alternatively sub-titled as <i>The Witcher 3: Petty Theft Simulator</i>, is a game in which you can steal everything that isn't nailed down, from every peasant and noble citizen's home, right in front of their eyes, with no repercussions whatsoever. This is part of the reason the world doesn't always feel alive, because no one makes any reaction to you barging into their homes and taking everything off their shelves. The only time it matters is if you steal within sight of the city guard, but that situation almost never comes into play because the city guard isn't stationed inside people's homes, and a lot of containers that are within sight of guards aren't marked as personal property, so the game doesn't consider it stealing when you loot their contents. Even then, when the goods are specifically marked as personal property, it's inconsistent whether the guards will actually care to apprehend you or not, and there's not enough of a warning that you're about to actually steal something to be able to back out of the interface in time if you don't expect it and are just going through the motions on auto-pilot. It's not a game-breaking issue, but it does break my suspension of disbelief that no one cares about their personal property, or even their privacy, and it can be frustratingly inconsistent at times.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#5</span>: Too much useless junk cluttering inventory.</span><br />
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You loot a ton of stuff in this game, most of which is completely pointless junk like forks, plates, broken rakes, or melted candles, to name just a few, or components like plants, leather, minerals, and monster parts used in alchemy and crafting. Everything in the game technically has a use; junk can be sold to shopkeepers to increase your income, or can be dismantled to form crafting components, which are themselves used to create new gear and other, more advanced crafting components. The problem, here, is that you're simply bombarded with an excessive, overwhelming amount of stuff, most of which you'll never actually use, and then it just sits around cluttering your inventory. I actually reached a point in the game when I had so many crafting and alchemy items that the game would lag out for a moment every time I opened that tab of my inventory screen and tried to deposit stuff into my storage box.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#6</span>: Nothing to spend money on.</span><br />
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Since you either find or craft all of the good stuff you'd ever use in the game, money has essentially no value and no purpose. The only things worth spending money on are recipes for potions, bombs, and blade oils (but these become fewer and fewer as you play the game), rare herbs that you can't find in the wild or that simply don't exist elsewhere, strong alcohol for creating more advanced alchemical substances and potions, and repairs for your weapons and armor (which becomes less of a necessity as you accumulate more and more repair kits). These purchases make up only a tiny fraction of your total income. You end up with tens of thousands of coins and nothing to spend them on, which contributes to the overall feeling of not progressing and not getting stronger that permeates the entire game, because gold is treated like a reward for quests and exploration but in reality it does you no practical good.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#7</span>: Quest rewards scale down as you level up.</span><br />
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Point of fact: you are going to become over-leveled in this game, even more so if you're a diligent explorer and completionist who does everything he can before moving on to another area. When this inevitably happens, quests that are deemed too low-level for you start giving less experience and less reward to a point when they eventually stop giving you rewards altogether. The intent, I suppose, is to slow down your leveling so you don't out-level everything in sight, but that still happens at an alarmingly fast rate, even with this down-scaling, which yet again contributes to the overall feeling of slow progression. And because there are so many quests in the game, it's inevitable that you'll end up with greyed-out quests in your journal that you've simply out-leveled, that you know will give practically zero reward for completing them. That's not such a big deal if the quest at least has an interesting story to make it worthwhile, but can feel like a waste of time for shorter, simpler, less interesting quests. </div>
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<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#8</span>: Long, frequent cutscenes hold players hostage.</span><br />
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I encountered what felt like a lot of instances when the game forced me to keep playing much longer than I intended because cutscenes, dialogue, and story sequences would seize all control from me and force me to sit through everything before putting me back in control so I could save and exit the game. On one occasion, I wanted to just turn in a quest and go to sleep, but upon doing so I ended up having to sit through 20 minutes of cutscenes, and then got dropped into a five-minute gameplay segment which didn't feel right to interrupt by saving and quitting because it would've ruined the narrative pacing to delay the story's continuation until the next day, and then had to watch another 5-10 minutes of cutscenes before it was all finally over. On a night when I had to be up early the next morning, the game unexpectedly forced me to stay up an extra 30 minutes later than I wanted. By the same token, I'd often be in situations where I only had a limited time to play and just opted to not even start playing at all, because I couldn't be sure the game wouldn't lock me into long story sequences at inopportune moments. Similarly, it's fairly common to get stuck skipping through tons and tons of mandatory cutscenes if you make a mistake in dialogue or else want to go back and see a different outcome, or trigger a cutscene you didn't mean to trigger, because the game likes to string multiple cutscenes together, back-to-back-to-back-to-back, and there's no way to interrupt those cutscenes to bring up the menu so you can load a save or exit out of them. </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#9</span>: The Battle of Kaer Morhen is a little disappointing.</span><br />
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The Battle of Kaer Morhen is the main climax that the game spends up to 100 hours building towards, the grand culmination of your quest to find Ciri and fight off the Wild Hunt. You go back to everyone you've met over the course of the game cashing in favors so that they'll come help you, assembling a Super Team of badass allies. When you're ready to start preparing for the fight, you meet everyone one-by-one as you work your way from the entrance of Kaer Morhen up to the inner keep, and get to see what everyone's planning and how each individual will offer unique assistance. You then get to make a few seemingly important decisions about how to prepare for the battle (such as to either brew some potions or lay traps around the castle's exterior, or to either reinforce the walls or clear the way to the armory). But then you don't actually get to do any of the prep work yourself, a lot of stuff seems to have little to no effect on the actual battle, and the entire fight is broken into a bunch of tiny, self-contained sections separated by loading screens, cutscenes, and linear, highly-scripted objectives that force you to focus on one little thing at a time, one after another.</div>
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As with the dialogue and storyboarding of the main quest-line, it felt to me like the Battle of Kaer Morhen was designed to play out in a very specific way, with only a couple variables changing the outcome (or the path to the outcome) in any significant way. It was supposed to be this grand, epic castle siege as you try to fight off hordes and waves of Wild Hunt soldiers, but the scale felt so tiny and claustrophobic to me because you're always in these tiny, instanced scenarios: "Go here and kill that, go there and close that portal, go there and flip the lever," and so on, with no concern whatsoever for any greater, over-arching goal, because the instanced scenarios made it clear nothing was ever going to happen off-screen, and you never had to worry about possibly failing. Plus, having the game inexplicably deactivate my various buffs and decoctions after switching back from controlling Ciri was kind of frustrating. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I would've much rather preferred if the Battle of Kaer Morhen had been just one, big fight with you having to defend multiple angles of entry, perhaps with status meters indicating when a side was getting overrun, or when a wall was about to collapse, thus forcing you to react to these different situations and making your own choices, kind of like a tower defense game, instead of simply following a linear series of events that are totally scripted beyond your control. Maybe you could set up defenses yourself before hand, or assign different characters to different spots, use special quest-items to call down magic support from Triss, or individual characters could have their own limited health bars and get knocked out of the fight, making it subsequently harder if you don't defend them in time or properly assist them, and so on -- just something to make it feel more like an epic siege with meaningful gameplay, as opposed to a glorified interactive cutscene. I mean, there are literal fights scenes where I'm sitting there going "Boy that looks cool, I wish I could play out this fight and actually experience it for myself instead of just watching it happen." </div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#10</span>: Playing as Ciri.</span><br />
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Occasionally throughout the main story you get to play flashbacks as Ciri, to see from her perspective what she went through at each step of her journey, while Geralt is always two or three steps behind her. Some people might like getting to play as Ciri, but I always found it jarring; you spend 100 or more hours as Geralt building an association with that character and tailoring his skills and equipment to your own desires, and then suddenly the game says "Ok, now you're a completely different person, and none of the stuff you've been doing to improve your character applies here." It's kind of cool that you get to feel how Ciri gets stronger over the course of the game through actual hands-on experience, but I still found it annoying every time I switched to her, and it was kind of boring playing as her in the second half of the story when she's one-shotting everything with lightning-quick ninja moves that take no effort on your part to pull off.</div>
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<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#11</span>: Minimal exposition for new characters.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>The Witcher</i> games are based on a series of books, with a lot of characters, locations, history, and backstory being lifted directly from (or else inspired by) what came before in the books. However, the games were originally meant to serve as sequels to the books, essentially setting themselves apart from the source material so as to have the freedom to tell their own stories without conflicting with established precedents, while also helping to ease the player into the world without any prior understanding of the written novels -- that's the whole reason Geralt has amnesia in the first game, so that he can be reintroduced to the setting and characters at the same rate at which the player is. When I played the first two games, it was always clear that there was more to the world and story than what was being shown in the games, but it felt like the games did a good enough job establishing themselves that you didn't need to have read the books to understand or appreciate the games. I'm sure being familiar with the books makes the first two games more enjoyable to play, but to my ignorant perspective it felt like I was mostly missing out on references and easter eggs while not having as deep of a familiarity with the greater world in which these stories are set, and I was fine with that. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then suddenly with <i>The Witcher 3</i>, CDProjekt decided that they wanted to start incorporating more canonical, main story elements from the book series, which had been almost completely ignored in the previous games. Yennefer and Ciri, for instance, made no appearances in either <i>The Witcher 1</i> or <i>The Witcher 2;</i> they're only briefly mentioned during animated flashbacks and certain dialogue sequences, and frankly I'd forgotten a lot of that by the time I'd played <i>The Witcher 3</i> because it was fairly meaningless to me in <i>The Witcher 2</i>. So going into the third game in this trilogy, having not read any of the books and being rusty on the finer details of the second game, I had no firm grasp of these important characters because they were never fully established in the games. The game makes it clear that Geralt has a long and deep personal history with Yen and Ciri, but I had no prior experience with either of them, which made their sudden involvement in <i>The Witcher 3</i> feel awkward and jarring to me. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Besides not being set up very much in the previous games, the beginning of the third game offers barely any exposition to actually introduce these characters to the player -- all we get is one brief flashback of Geralt and Yen making playful banter with each other, and then a flashback of Geralt training Ciri, before those characters are dropped almost completely from the story while also serving as the ultimate point of Geralt's quest. After another brief business-like meeting with Yen in Vizima, she runs off to Skellige and isn't seen again for 60 or 80 hours of gameplay, throughout which you're given extensive role-playing options to romance other characters or remain faithful to Yen, and having to make reactions to how other characters talk about her while having had hardly any meaningful interaction with her as a player. The whole time I felt like I wasn't actually role-playing as Geralt, but was trying to guess what the game considered the "correct," canonical choices for his character based on what little it had told me about him and Yen. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">You can read up on some of their history through in-game books, but unless you've actually read the original source material then I feel like you can't properly understand who Yennefer is and what she's supposed to mean to Geralt to make informed role-playing decisions. Even the helpful glossary, which normally helps to explain some of the characters' backstories, isn't very informative -- you can certainly fill in some of the gaps with logical reasoning, but it feels like a case of the game merely <i>telling</i> us that Geralt is supposed to be deeply in love with Yen, without ever showing us that or letting us get to feel it ourselves until much, much later in the game, after many of those critical role-playing moments have already passed. It's really weird, for instance, to have spent two whole games with Triss, even possibly romancing her in both games, to then have the third game come along and say "No, Geralt loves Yen." You're still given the option to romance Triss, if you'd prefer, but it feels like the game is always pushing you towards Yen the whole time because "that's what Geralt would do." Even if that's more accurate to the source material, it's not really supported by the games themselves and feels awkwardly forced. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then there's the fact that Yen is supposed to have an entire backstory with Ciri and Geralt, where they were like a family to one another with Yen and Geralt acting as Ciri's parents, which is barely explored in the game at all, since we're never treated to any flashbacks of Yen and Ciri interacting together, and I don't think there are even any in-game books that explore their relationship, either. All we get are off-hand comments here and there, some of which only come about after you've already found Ciri, which made me wonder why she cared so much about finding Ciri when their relationship had never been established in the actual game; you just have to take the game at its word that they were like a mother and daughter to one another, because it's never really portrayed that way, even after they're reunited. Similarly, when Geralt finally catches up to Ciri and thinks she's dead, it's supposed to be a deeply tragic and heartbreaking moment for him, but I couldn't really empathize with him because I, as a player, am nowhere near as privy to their relationship as he is as a character -- I understood his emotions in that situation, but I couldn't feel any of it myself. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All of that is just for characters like Yen and Ciri, but there are plenty others that show up out of nowhere with no exposition. When Dijkstra is introduced, for instance, they make reference to some previous encounter where Geralt left him crippled, and all of their subsequent interactions are based on an established history; he's a fun character and you can definitely get a good feel for him throughout the game, but it was really jarring to me playing the game originally and trying to remember if he was some minor character in the second game that I'd forgotten about, or if this was some brand new history they'd pulled from the books that I'd never seen before. Likewise, when Avallach is introduced, Geralt makes some comment about how he's met him before and that Avallach can't be trusted, but again, this is never established in any of the other games so I'm spending the entire second and third act of the game wondering what's supposed to be so sketchy about Avallach and why Geralt would be instantly distrustful of him. Even the Wild Hunt goes without much exposition, which is problematic when they're supposed to be the main antagonist threat in the game. I get that they're supposed to be ancient beings who are seen as an omen of war, and who're likely playing a role in the impending White Frost and thus should be considered a serious threat, but the game doesn't do much to establish why they're so feared, and doesn't give us much reason to be scared of them as the bad guys. All we see is the aftermath of a few villages being attacked, but it kind of looks like just a basic slaughter that could've been performed by any group of armed bandits, and you can read a few books about how they're supposed to be a sign of the end times, but it all feels rather unsubstantiated, like they're a vague abstract concept the entire time as opposed to an actual threat. It's another case of the game telling us they're a big deal, without ever showing it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">To be clear, I'm perfectly ok with the games leaving details out from the book series, and there's enough in the games that you can follow along without being completely lost. However, I feel like the game could've done a better job introducing new characters and plot elements to the player so that they could exist as more stand-alone elements in the game series, as opposed to requiring you to read the books to properly understand character arcs, motivations, relationships, backstories, timelines, and so on, all of which play a pretty important role in this game's story. Like why, for instance, are there not more flashbacks of Geralt with Yen and Ciri? Why do all of the major quests with Yen happen so late in the game instead of getting sprinkled in a little bit earlier? Why couldn't Geralt still have had some lingering amnesia about characters like Avallach and Dijkstra to better introduce them to the player? In lieu of that, why don't he and Dijkstra reminisce about their past adventures a little more, or why doesn't Geralt explain to the other characters what happened in the past that makes him distrustful of Avallach? This isn't a huge deal or a game-breaking issue, but it's something that bothers me and thus earns a spot in the "ugly" section for things that I feel could've been executed better.</div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#12</span>: Lots of repeated ambient conversations.</span><br /><br />As you explore populated areas, you frequently overhear conversations between NPCs; these do a tremendous job in helping to flesh out the world with bits of lore and backstory, besides just making the world seem a little more lively, but unfortunately these conversations seem to repeat themselves indefinitely, leading to you hearing a lot of the same bits of background dialogue in the same exact places, over and over and over again. I guess the idea behind repeating them is to give players a chance to catch the dialogue if they missed it initially, but it gets pretty grating hearing the same exchanges in high-traffic areas that you frequently have to return to -- like that kid singing the nursery rhyme about Emperor Emhyr in White Orchard every time I make a trip to visit the blacksmith. Really, I wish these conversations could be more varied, or else if they just wouldn't play literally every single time you walked past them. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#13</span>: Gwent is pay-to-win.</span><br />
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Gwent is a card game that CD Projekt designed and put into <i>TW3</i> to replace the dice poker mini-game from the previous games. It now exists as its own <a href="https://www.playgwent.com/en">stand-alone game</a>, and you could even, <a href="http://redeemgwent.com/">for a time</a>, buy physical decks to play in real life. It's a fun little game that reminds me a lot of <i><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/147154/blue-moon-legends">Blue Moon Legends</a></i>, an actual card game by Reiner Knizia that I own and rather enjoy, which made me really intrigued once I realized that the card game in <i>TW3</i> is actually a good, interesting game system, and not just some gimicky mini-game. That said, as it exists in <i>TW3</i>, Gwent is pay-to-win with no real system for balancing the strength of one's deck of cards, which I find fundamentally flawed in a competitive card game.</div>
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In a nutshell, Gwent works by playing cards from your hand, which you draw from your pre-built deck, with the ultimate goal of having a higher total value of cards in play than your opponent at the end of a round. The game lasts up to three rounds, with the winner being whomever wins two of the three rounds. You draw all of the cards you'll have for the entire game at the beginning, so there's a strategic element about which cards to play during which rounds so that you don't waste too many cards and also save enough for later rounds. So, the crux of the gameplay is baiting your opponent to play cards a certain way so that you can, essentially, spring a trap on him, while also making sure that you're pacing yourself for all three rounds, possibly forfeiting a battle so that you can win the war. It's a fine enough system, and like I said it's worked well in real life card games, so I like the core mechanics of Gwent. </div>
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The problem, as it's implemented in the game, is that there are relatively few restrictions on how you can build your deck, and with different cards simply being more powerful than others, a deck that's loaded with higher-value cards will basically always win against a weaker deck. They start you out with a crappy beginner deck, and if you want to make your deck stronger you have to spend in-game currency buying better cards, or else win better cards by beating other players, which is kind of a catch-22 because you often need better cards in your deck to beat certain players in order to win better cards. In competitive games like this, there need to be rules for balancing the playing field for each player -- it's why boxing uses weight classes to group fighters into similar strength and size ranges, or why miniature games like Warhammer implement point systems so that both players will field armies of similar strength values -- but Gwent doesn't have any sort of balancing like this, meaning that it's possible for one player's deck to be simply stronger than another's, having been loaded with higher-value units with more devastating special effects. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In a way, Gwent's implementation in <i>The Witcher 3</i> feels like an extension of the RPG mechanics, where you start as a low-level player and have to level-up to face more difficult opponents, with some being just so high-level that you stand no chance against them until much later in the game. When viewed in that light, the lack of balancing is an acceptable way to translate that feeling of leveling up and getting stronger, kind of like you do in a Pokemon game, but just looking at it in the context of a stand-alone, competitive card game, I find the lack of balancing fundamentally ruins the fun and satisfaction for me. In my original playthrough, I had fun playing a few matches early on, but once I realized that individual decks can be so highly imbalanced and that you have to spend a lot of money buying better cards, I swore it off and never touched it again, and made no subsequent attempt to get into it during my replay. Ultimately, I'm not playing an open-world RPG like this for its mini-games, and if I want to play a competitive card game like Gwent, then I'd rather just play <i>Blue Moon Legends</i> in real life, instead. </div>
<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: yellow;">#14</span><span>: Not much variety in builds and playstyles</span></span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Given how many different skills there are in this game, and how few skill slots you unlock over the course of the game, it would seem like there's a lot of potential for creating unique build varieties to offer uniquely different gameplay experiences. While the skill system does provide for tons of different unique combinations that can have a fun effect on gameplay, the whole system is still limited to such a narrow scope of options that different builds really don't change your playstyle or what you actually do in the game all that significantly, because it's all based around one pre-conceived notion of what a witcher's gameplay should be like. In essence, your build mostly just determines how effective your character is at different things that you're already capable of doing, and what portion of the gameplay systems you'll put a little bit more of your focus on, because even though you might choose to specialize in one of three different fields, you're still going to be using the core elements of the other two due to a combination of pure necessity and a simple lack of restrictions on the other, unused fields. </div><div><br /></div><div>As a pure melee character, for instance, you don't have much use for stamina throughout most of the game, until you unlock Rend or Whirl, so there's no reason not to throw occasional magic signs out there whenever you have the opportunity, because there's no real detriment or cost to using magic signs and they only contribute extra firepower to your arsenal. Likewise, you have plenty of toxicity at the start of the game to make use of multiple performance-enhancing potions at a time, in addition to things like blade oils and bombs, all of which can improve in strength over the course of the game independently of your build decisions -- once again, it costs you practically nothing to use alchemy options and they only increase your total damage output, so you may as well use them. Conversely, an alchemy build is still going to have to rely on swordplay for basic damage output, and the same principle as magic signs still applies in that case -- you have stamina that you're not using for anything else, so you may as well use it to give yourself extra damage, defense, or crowd control options. A pure mage, meanwhile, only has one sign that applies direct offensive damage, and you typically have a few seconds of downtime between casting while you're waiting for stamina to recharge, so you may as well occupy that time dealing extra damage-per-second with your sword, while other signs like Axii, Aard, and Yrden still rely on you getting in close with your sword to deal damage. All-the-while that toxicity gauge is sitting there completely un-used so you may as well benefit from potions that further enhance your sign-casting abilities or whatever else you might desire. </div><div><br /></div><div>In practice, no matter how you choose to build your character, you're still going to be a prototypical witcher using some combination of swords, signs, and alchemy in basically every situation with practically every build, unless you deliberately choose to handicap yourself for no real reason. We can obviously justify or excuse this because you're playing a preset character in a preset profession, so of course gameplay is going to be based around a certain preset archetype, and we can also argue that it's basically always been this way throughout the entire series, but it still seems like the different branches should be able to provide more significant, gameplay-altering effects that actually branch out in completely different directions as opposed to being more like minor extensions from a single core path. Why, for instance, are there not more active skills in each tree that actually alter the gameplay in a significant way, or more restrictions preventing you from effectively performing different types of actions without investing sufficiently into those fields or abilities? After playing through the entire game twice and trying several different build combinations that focused on completely different things, ranging from pure mage to pure melee to pure alchemy and various hybrid combinations, it felt like I was always doing the same basic things in each instance with only minor variations, because it's all based around the same core gameplay formula from which you don't have very much freedom to deviate. This isn't an inherently bad thing, per se, seeing as this was clearly an intentional design choice based on the type of character and story they wanted to portray, and there's still enough different skills to allow for interesting decisions and unique combinations when it comes to character-building, but it can get to feel a little stale and monotonous over the long haul. <br /></div><br />
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That was a lot of criticism in both "the bad" and "the ugly" sections, and perhaps "the good" section didn't do the game enough justice, so let me be clear at the top of my conclusion by saying that I liked <i>The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt</i>. It has a lot of good things going for it, and in a lot of ways it deserves its reputation as one of the better open-world action-adventure RPGs ever made, but that almost says more about the state of open-world games than it does about the game itself. Open-world games tend to have a lot of inherent problems, usually to do with pacing, balance, and depth of mechanics that frequently aren't compensated for by more sensible design choices, and <i>TW3</i> suffers from nearly all of them, albeit not as badly as some other games. The sheer size and length of the game, meanwhile, make all of its weaker elements stand out even more as the game drags on and begins to outstay its welcome.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As it stands, the story elements, quests, and characters are all strong enough to keep the game engaging all the way through, while the small details in the environmental storytelling help to flesh out the world in an interesting way, but a lot of the actual gameplay proves to be somewhat crude and deceptively shallow. Although the quests usually tell interesting stories with meaningful consequences for your role-playing decisions, the actual gameplay in solving them tends to be a simplistic matter of following glowing highlights and clicking on everything in sight with little regard for your actual input, until reaching a critical decision point. Combat feels like an incredibly simplistic and rudimentary system of mashing the attack button and periodically dodging when the enemy's health bar flashes red, with hardly any challenge to be experienced once you get a feel for the timing, even on the hardest difficulty setting against vastly higher-level enemies. The leveling system presents some interesting decision-making in terms of how you allocate limited skill points into limited slots, with fun combinations of various stacking effects, but feels dreadfully slow and unrewarding with how sparsely those points and skill slots are spread out over the second half of the game. The massive world offers a ton of quality content to experience, but feels like it's been stretched a little too thin with a little too much filler in places, and with too much of a reliance on icon-hunting to facilitate exploration. All-the-while, the game's disparate blending of open-world gameplay design with a heavily narrative-driven story premise feel at odds with each other and prevent either one from excelling as much as they could have. </div>
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I firmly believe that <i>TW3</i> could've been a leaner, tighter, and more satisfying game if CD Projekt had trimmed some more of the fat and given us a somewhat smaller but more tightly-focused game. Both of the previous <i>Witcher</i> games, for instance, used a semi-open hub-based world design which gave you a lot of open areas to explore with plenty of opportunity for non-linear questing, but tied those areas into the main quest a little better so that everything flowed with the heavily narrative-driven story, which I feel is a better fit for what they're trying to accomplish by combining open-ended exploration with a heavy emphasis on storytelling. I'm not saying <i>The Witcher 3</i> needed to take that same approach, as I'm fine with the concept of the third game being truly open-world, but it was hard for me to appreciate the open-world design due to the looming threat of a cataclysmic event that I was mechanically obligated to ignore in order to experience the game to its fullest, and the main story lost a lot of its narrative thrust because of all the distractions in the open-world design. In other words, I feel like they could have struck a better balance between the two, by either giving the main story a less pressing threat, or else by making the world design tie in to the progression of the main story a little more closely. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Consequently, I don't find it as fun or enjoyable as some other, similar types of games that I've ultimately enjoyed more, but none of those games come close to matching the epic scale or production value of <i>TW3</i>. And there are, in fact, plenty of valid reasons to praise and celebrate <i>The Witcher 3</i> -- if you're looking for an RPG-style game with great characters and storytelling, or want to play a huge open-world action-adventure-RPG with a lot of high-quality content, or want to get lost in a fairly immersive and uniquely captivating fantasy-folklore setting, then you'd be hard pressed to find anything significantly better than this. Lots of games are better at those things individually, but few wrap them all together with such high production value and accessibility. Plus, it is a fairly unique, one-of-a-kind experience despite having so many superficial similarities to similar types of games. Perhaps most importantly, of all the other massive open-world games to have come out in the wake of <i>Skyrim</i>, at least of those that I've played, <i>The Witcher 3</i> is one of the best at making your choices and actions feel like they have some kind of meaningful impact on the world. Sadly, its gameplay mechanics don't always live up to the rest of its high aspirations, so I can't claim it to be some kind of masterpiece against which all other games of this type should be judged. It's still not what I would consider ideal for this sort of game, and it certainly has its fair share of problems and shortcomings, but I still find it more appealing than most of the other, popular alternatives in the genre. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">D</span><span style="font-size: large;">LC </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">R</span><span style="font-size: large;">EVIEWS</span><br />
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If you're interested in my thoughts on the two DLC expansions for <i>The Witcher 3</i>, check out my separate articles on each one:<br />
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<a href="http://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-witcher-3-hearts-of-stone-review.html"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone</i> - Review</span></a><br />
<a href="http://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-witcher-3-blood-wine-review.html"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine</i> - Review</span></a></div>
<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><center><a href="https://www.patreon.com/thenocturnalrambler" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/I78wqqC.jpg" /></a></center></div></div></div>Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-86707134670520422402020-05-11T17:54:00.000-04:002020-05-11T17:54:47.089-04:00Beginner's Guide to Elex: Tips and Advice (Updated Ver 1.1)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>(Note: This article is an updated version of <a href="https://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/2017/11/beginners-guide-to-elex-tips-and-advice.html">an article I posted in November 2017</a>, with extra tips and a full embedded video of this article.)</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Helping you get the most enjoyment out of <i>Elex's</i> sometimes rough and daunting beginning.</span></div>
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<i>Elex</i> is a third-person open-world action-RPG from Piranha Bytes, a small German studio, that blends traditional fantasy, science fiction, and post-apocalypse themes. Set on a world 200 years after a comet wipes out nearly all life on the planet, the survivors have split into three factions that use elex, a mysterious substance that appeared with the comet, in their own unique way to fulfill their own goals and agendas. You can be a <i>Dungeons & Dragons</i>-style berserker who wields swords and casts fireballs, or a <i>Mass Effect</i>-style cleric who uses plasma rifles and psionic mind control, or a <i>Mad Max</i>-style outlaw who makes their own gear from scrap and enhances their abilities with powerful stims. It's got a huge world full of diverse environments, tons of quests, lasting consequences for decisions you make, and three different factions you can join, all of which radically alter your gameplay experience by offering unique equipment and skills.</div>
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It's surprisingly good, but like other Piranha Bytes games, it has a lot of quirks and idiosyncrasies that can make it difficult for unseasoned initiates to figure out how the game actually works, what you should be doing, and so on, combined with a really steep difficulty curve that makes no effort to hold your hand. For many players, this can lead to a lot of confusion and frustration right at the start of the game, which is never a good thing, obviously, but is especially unfortunate because <i>Elex</i> offers an extremely compelling, rich, and rewarding experience for those who can get into it. As a long-time Piranha Bytes veteran, I still struggled with a few things in my first playthrough, and had some of my expectations subverted when I realized, dozens of hours into it, that I wished I had done things a little differently.</div>
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The purpose of this article, therefore, is to help new (or prospective) players with general tips and advice about how the game works and what you should expect, with a few basic, spoiler-free strategies to facilitate a better gameplay experience. A large part of the fun in these games is the satisfaction and reward that comes from exploring the world and discovering things on your own, so I won't be going into specific detail about "go here and get this item, then do this quest and pick these choices, build your character exactly like this, etc," because I want to leave you that room to figure things out for yourself. But some things are tough to figure out without doing a lot of trial-and-error and seeing how things pan out over the course of a 50-100 hour playthrough. So, here are some of my thoughts and observations after pouring 223 hours into four different playthroughs, which I think should be helpful to other new players.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Elex </i>has a very steep difficulty curve. It is intentional.</span><br />
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Understand up front: you will die a lot in this game. Most enemies will be too strong for you to even think about fighting in the beginning. Lots of enemies will kill you in only one or two hits. Some quests that you pick up early on will be basically impossible to complete until much later because of the enemies they expect you to face. This is an intentional aspect of the game's balancing and ecosystem; you're meant to start out feeling incredibly weak and helpless so that as you level up and get stronger, you actually feel like you're getting stronger. You're supposed to feel yourself working your way up the food chain, so to speak, and it's meant to be satisfying when you come back to kill enemies that were giving you a tough time in the beginning. It's also part of making the world feel dangerous and hostile, which adds tension to exploration and quests because you never know what dangerous threats lie in wait and which NPCs could betray you and kick your ass at any time. So if you feel like you're struggling a lot in the beginning and can't kill anything, don't get discouraged; that's how it's supposed to be.</div>
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Watch this beginner's guide in video format.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Save now, save often.</span><br />
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If you're not pressing F5 every 30 seconds to save your game, you're gonna have a bad time. Death can be instantaneous in this game, and it can come rather unexpectedly, whether that be from an enemy you didn't expect one-shotting you, or an NPC ambushing you after dialogue, or getting overwhelmed in what should be a simple fight, or if you mis-judged a landing with the jetpack and ended up falling to your death. Knowing that you're going to be dying a lot, you should be saving your progress frequently so that you lose less progress when you inevitably get killed. This might be obvious advice for many of you, but it's worth pointing out just in case.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Avoid combat early on; level up by completing quests.</span><br />
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With the game's steep difficulty curve in mind, you need to accept the fact that you won't be a badass killing machine at the start of the game, and therefore need to pick your battles. In the beginning, this means avoiding combat basically whenever possible, because you're too weak to fight anything but the absolute weakest variants of the weakest enemies in the game. Even these ones can pose a serious threat, and the reward you get for killing enemies really isn't worth the time, effort, or risk of killing them. A typical enemy that you stand a reasonable chance of killing may only give you 10 experience and net you a single piece of raw meat; this pales in comparison to the hundreds of experience and shards (the game's currency) you can earn by doing a single quest within the safe confines of the first town, Goliet. Duras, the first NPC you meet on your way down from the radio tower, will escort you there; follow him, and do as many quests in town as you can. If a quest tells you to fight a tough enemy, save it for later. If a quest sends you into dangerous territory, try to complete the objective while avoiding the enemies, as sometimes a quest will imply combat that actually isn't necessary. Basically, don't even bother trying to fight until you've leveled up several times and have put significant upgrades into your equipment and abilities.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Focus early skill points on combat and money-making.</span><br />
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Your biggest impediment to exploring the world and experiencing all of the content that the game has to offer is the fact that basically everything in the world starts off significantly stronger than you, so to make the early stages of the game less frustrating, and with less frantically running away from enemies, you should focus on closing that gap as quickly as possible. The early stages of the game give you a decent variety of weaponry to choose from, so you basically just want to pick something you like and then strive towards equipping a stronger version of that weapon type, which you can either buy from a merchant, or upgrade yourself from weaponry you already have, or discover while exploring the world. Then you simply have to increase your attributes to meet the minimum requirements of the stronger weapon, and put some skill points into whatever combat field you've chosen. If you've chosen ranged weapons, then the "Ranged Weapons" skill is all you need, but melee fighters will have a choice of "Melee Weapons" which increases damage by 10% for each level, and "Heavy Punch" that increases damage from special attacks. "Attack Strength" seems to enhance your ability to stagger opponents, which can be helpful but that doesn't do you any good if you aren't doing enough damage to beat the opponent's armor value.<br />
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The next hurdle is the fact that everything in this game is also insanely expensive, not just in terms of buying new equipment and supplies but also paying skill trainers to teach you new skills. You will be needing a lot of money in this game, plain and simple, and so the earlier you can start fattening your wallet the quicker you can afford expensive gear and skills. Skills like lock-picking and pick-pocketing are always good options to increase your income, but you can "learn" at least one level of these skills simply by equipping the right pieces of jewelry, which can be found relatively early in the game (one is near the starting radio tower, before you leave, and another is outside the Domed City), so you don't necessarily have to invest points in these skills, but it's not a bad idea to put a point into lock-picking early on since higher levels of lock-picking will allow you to open more valuable chests as you find them, instead of having to remember where they are and returning to them later. Higher values of pick-pocketing aren't as essential because it only improves your chances of success, which you can circumvent by simply reloading your save file. You do need at least one point (either from a skill trainer, or from jewelry) to pick pockets, however. </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Learn the "animal trophies" skill as soon as possible.</span><br />
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As previously mentioned, you'll be needing a lot of money in this game, and it's often in short supply. The "animal trophies" skill is one of the best ways to earn money, because it grants you extra rewards like claws, teeth, pelts, and so on for every animal, monster, and mutant that you kill, which can be sold to merchants for money and/or used in crafting. The earlier you get this skill, the more animal trophies you can accrue over the course of the game, meaning more money in your pockets. You can go for the second level of this ability right away, if you desire, since it'll grant you even more trophies over the course of the game, but you should definitely get at least the first skill level, possibly even as the very first skill you learn. Hold on to a small supply of each trophy type (say, 20-30), because you'll want to have some available for crafting, and then sell the excess. </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Attributes don't give the benefits they suggest.</span></div>
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Each attribute gives a brief description of its function in the game. For example, strength says it increases melee damage, and constitution it says it increases your health. This makes it sound like each point you put into these attributes will also improve your melee damage or health by a small amount. That is simply not the case. People have tested this, and if there is any increase it's so minuscule as to have no practical benefit. For that reason, you should treat the attribute points as simply requirements necessary to equip better gear and to learn new abilities, and therefore don't have to push your attributes any further than the minimum necessary for your next upgrade. With that in mind, don't feel obligated to spend attribute points just because you have some, as they're effectively worthless unless those points allow you to learn a new skill or equip a stronger weapon.<br />
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At the start of the game, it costs one attribute point to increase an attribute by one, or in other words, you increase your attributes at a one-to-one ratio. Once an attribute hits 31, it starts costing two points to increase the attribute, a two-to-one ratio. At 61, it's five points per attribute, and at 91, it's 10 points per attribute. This is easy enough to discover on your own, but I want to warn you in advance, because it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "I just need 20 more attribute points to learn this new skill, which means I can learn it in two levels," when in actuality you're looking at three or four levels because you didn't realize the costs would increase. </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">You can increase attributes and skills with jewelry, but...</span></div>
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Rings and amulets (and even sunglasses) can give you a lot of good benefits, like increasing your attributes or allowing you to use or benefit from certain skills (like +1 lockpicking, or highlighting items in the environment) as long as you have them equipped. These can be extremely useful, especially if equipping a ring or amulet will give you enough of an attribute boost to equip a new weapon, but these attribute boosts do not apply when learning new skills at a trainer. If your base strength is at 15 and you've improved it to 20 with a ring, then a trainer's skill window might show that you meet the minimum requirements to learn a new skill, but when you click on the skill, you won't actually be able to learn it, and the game won't tell you why. This is because learning skills requires your base attributes to meet the requirements, meaning you have to get your natural strength to 20, without the aid of rings or amulets, to learn that skill. You can still use those extra attribute points to equip weapons and armor, but not to learn skills. Note that any skill for which you meet the base requirements will be marked with an exclamation point to the left of the list; if that exclamation point isn't there, even though your stats appear to match the requirements, then they're being boosted by equipment and thus you won't be able to learn the skill.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Get a companion as soon as possible. </span></div>
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One of the quickest and easiest ways to mitigate the game's tough difficulty curve is to get an NPC companion who will follow you on your adventures. They each have their own quests associated with them, interject in conversations, and react to the way you behave in the game, but their main function early on is that they're all decently competent fighters who can tank hits for you and dish out a lot more damage than you're capable of, making difficult fights much more manageable. Duras, the first NPC, can become a companion if you work on the quest associated with him. You can also find CRONY U4, one of your combat drones who became separated from you when your raider crashes in the opening cutscene, somewhere in Goliet, though he's a little harder to find. In each case you'll have to trek long distances across the map through dangerous territory to advance the quest, but you don't actually have to fight anything to complete their quests (Duras's is much easier in this regard), so remember that you can avoid combat by sneaking past or simply out-running enemies, and just focus on getting to your destination and completing the objectives. Another companion can be found relatively early in the game and you don't even need to do an associated quest for him; he's just hanging out under some shelter on the side of the road leading up to the Domed City, so he's even quicker and easier to recruit than Duras or CRONY. </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Time your attacks to take advantage of the combo system.</span><br />
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When you attack, a blue meter in the bottom left of the screen progressively fills up; this represents your combo meter, which on all difficulties except for easy, requires you to time your attacks just right to build the meter faster. After it crosses the light blue line in the middle (and you see the flashing "Q" prompt above the meter), you can execute a special attack, which does extra damage. These special attacks are really important, especially early on, because of the way armor works. Armor seems to enable a flat reduction in damage, so if your regular attacks deal 25 damage and your enemy has 20 armor, then you'll only be doing 5 points of damage per hit. But, if your special attack deals 50 points of damage, then suddenly you're hitting for 30 points, or six times as much damage as you were previously. For some enemies, that's your only reliable way of actually dealing damage to them as their armor values will otherwise soak up your weaker attacks for little to no damage, and so it's important that you learn how to build your combo meter and use those special attacks.<br />
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In a safe area, practice clicking and watching that bar fill up, and then click again once it reaches the white line. Note that if you click too early or too quickly then the bar will fill up more slowly and you might run out of stamina before you unlock the special attack, and if you click too late, then you'll stop attacking for a brief moment and will have to restart the attack animations having gained no progress on your combo meter. Get a feel for how how that timing works with your attack animations and sound effects so that you can time your attacks more naturally without having to glue your eyes to that meter. Typically, you want to click again right as your attack follows through. Also bear in mind that you need to monitor your stamina, since each attack, dodge, parry, and block will consume stamina, and you can't perform any actions except basic movement when your stamina is depleted. Early on you don't have a lot of stamina to work with and it'll take almost your entire stamina gauge just to build the combo meter, so you want to find moments in the battle that you can start a full combo with a full stamina gauge so that you can actually pull off those special attacks.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Consider putting a skill point into stamina.</span><br />
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At the start of the game you have just barely enough stamina to execute a full attack combo, if you start from full, but doing so leaves you completely drained afterward and therefore unable to dodge, block, or parry possible counter-attacks from enemies. With a single skill point invested into stamina, you can boost your total high enough to leave you with a little bit after a full combo, which gives you a lot more flexibility and control over your options in a fight. You don't really need this skill to get by with melee combat, as there are other ways to increase your stamina (such as with jewelry and permanent potions) but if you find yourself struggling or want to focus more heavily on playing a melee build, then you should consider investing in it. Ranged builds don't really need this skill as you don't consume stamina firing a ranged weapon.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Make sure "close combat focus" is set to manual.</span><br />
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On normal and easy modes, when you approach an enemy the game will automatically lock on to the target, which focuses the camera on them and alters your movement patterns so that you stay facing that enemy at all times. While this can help keep your eye on the target and ensure your attacks are more likely to hit, it's extremely problematic when facing multiple enemies. First of all, it hampers your mobility because your movement speed gets lowered slightly, and you lose the ability to sprint, or turn and run, which is necessary to get out of a difficult fight or else to buy yourself some space to regenerate stamina or to chug a healing potion. Plus, it just becomes awkward trying to weave in and out of enemy attacks and switching target locks with the rigid lock-on system. With it set to manual, you can choose when you lock on to enemies, instead of being forced to. You may still want to use the lock-on feature against single targets, but against groups you're generally better playing unlocked; it just improves the feeling of movement and gives you a little more control of your positioning and what you're attacking for virtually no downside, as long as you're capable of manually adjusting your facing and the camera orientation when you attack.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">If you don't like melee combat, use ranged options.</span><br />
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The melee combat system has some really interesting ideas and actively engaging elements with the way the stamina gauge and combo meter work together to create a system that values player input and requires more skill than similar types of games, but unfortunately the whole thing can feel clunky due to stiff animations, weird hit boxes and targeting system, and sometimes unresponsive controls. It also doesn't really change over the course of the game -- although things do get easier as you level up and get better armor and weapons, and as you gain a better understanding of things like timing and reactions, it's still the same basic system from beginning to end. So if you're definitely not liking the melee combat, then don't stubbornly persist with it on the hope that it will get better, because it won't -- you might get better at it, but the actual system won't change or improve much. Keep in mind you don't have to use melee weapons as there are a plethora of ranged options at your disposal, ranging from bows to laser rifles to flamethrowers to shotguns to rocket launchers, and, if you join the berserkers or clerics, several different types of magic spells. Most ranged weaponry is usually a simple matter of "point and click," so it's not particularly sophisticated, but it's functional and would let you get through the game without messing with the melee combat, and the different types of magic spells can help mix things up with some interesting variety.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Join a faction sooner rather than later.</span><br />
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Don't be afraid to join a faction relatively early in the game because you think you'll miss out on other factions' quests. Although there are many quests that you can do in each faction before joining them, only the faction leader's official membership quest will be canceled if you join another faction, first; every other faction quest will still be available to you, later, even if you've already joined another faction. I'd still advise visiting all of the factions and checking out their skills before making a decision (don't just rush into it), but the faction armor and abilities give you a pretty big boost early in the game, which means the sooner you join a faction the sooner you can get into enjoying all of their benefits and having a somewhat easier time with the game's tough difficulty curve. If you wait to join a faction until you've already done everything else, then you'll just be unnecessarily handicapping yourself and missing out on the fun, unique faction stuff.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Periodically advance the main quest; don't put it off.</span><br />
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Likewise, don't put off advancing the main quest until the very end of the game. You can continue playing after you complete the main quest (though how it resolves will have consequences for how different NPCs and factions treat you), so you don't have to save it for last. But really, the reason I say you should advance the main quest is because a lot of the objectives send you out to explore wide swaths of the world map, and a lot of these objectives can be completed or discovered long before you pick up the quest to actually do them. This, I feel, has a negative effect on the pacing of the story when you meet an important NPC and they task you with a list of objectives, and you tell him then and there that you've already done all of it, because then there's no build up for the next section of the plot. In some cases you might have to return to a hidden place you've already discovered to do something that wasn't possible previously, which can make it feel like you're wasting time backtracking. So, since you're going to be exploring all these areas, anyway, you may as well have the actual quest for them active so that you discover things when the main quest expects you to, rather than basically spoiling the plot for yourself and finishing most of the main plot objectives before actually beginning the main story.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Understand how the "Cold" meter works.</span><br />
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Based on how you act in dialogue and how you choose to solve certain quests, you'll see "Cold increased" or "Cold decreased" messages appear on screen. "Coldness" represents Jax's stunted emotions as the result of his heavy use of elex as an Alb commander. Your coldness level begins at "neutral," after most of the elex has waned from Jax's system following the failed execution at the start of the game, and decreases as you choose more emotional responses, or increases as you choose more cold-hearted, machine-like responses. It's not a morality system, and it's neither good nor bad. Getting mad at someone and yelling at them is an emotional response that will decrease your cold level, but obviously may hurt your relationship with that person; while cold responses may be dispassionate to the human condition of others around you, they tend to be guided by reason and logic, and therefore could be the most practical solution. It's mainly a tool that allows you to role-play as Jax, but it also affects your relationships with companions and can have serious consequences for how certain main quest events play out, while also being the primary factor in determining which ending you get, based on what your net coldness level is at the end of the game.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">You have a jetpack; use it.</span><br />
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<i>Elex</i> has an extremely varied topography with a lot of hills, mountains, ravines, canyons, and so on, meaning a lot of areas are hidden out of view by being on a completely different plane from the one you're standing on. The jetpack, which you gain in the starting area and remains with you for the entire game, gives you a ton of freedom to explore vertically. You can find a lot of useful items, cool hidden areas, and fun easter eggs by descending into obscure low points or flying on top of things that you would never be able to reach in other games. You can even use it in combat; with ranged weapons, you can hover in mid-air and fire down on opponents, and with the jetpack attack skill you can do a devastating plunging attack on enemies with your melee weapon. It can also be useful for evading attacks and getting out of a tough spot when you run out of stamina, but be careful because many enemies have ranged attacks and will try to shoot you down if you spend too much time in the air or get too far away from them. If you want to cross a large chasm, then you might consider using the hover function with a ranged-weapon equipped, since hovering with that method consumes less fuel than propelling yourself upward, so you can travel farther lateral distances that way. </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Consider exploring at night.</span><br />
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Normally in these types of games, exploring at night can be an extreme detriment due to low visibility, but there are some benefits in this case. A lot of beasts and monsters go to sleep at night, which can make it easier to sneak past them or avoid them if you're trying to complete quests in dangerous territory, or else want to get into an area and snag some valuable loot. Plus, rare plants like golden whispers (which are used to brew permanent stat-boosting potions) glow very brightly at night, making them much easier to spot at a distance.<br />
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I also want to take a moment during this section to recommend installing a "darker nights" mod, because it seems like at some point during Elex's post-release patching, the developers changed the way the weather and lighting system works, which had the side effect of making nights way too bright, to the point that it feels like you're just running around in the daylight with sunglasses on. Seriously, visibility is not at all impacted, as you can see everywhere, even all the way to the horizon, with perfect clarity -- everything is just shaded in a dark blue hue. That can certainly help with gameplay functionality, but it really ruined the atmosphere and immersion for me. I installed the "<a href="https://www.nexusmods.com/elex/mods/55">Darker Nights and Fixed Broken HDR</a>" mod from the Nexus, which reverts the graphics back to how they were pre-patch and it all just looks so, so much better. You can see for yourself in the comparison footage how the game looks pre-patch and post-patch, so if that looks better to you, then go ahead and install that mod.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Plan to learn (and use) crafting skills.</span><br />
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Modify weapons, chemistry, and each faction's unique weapon enhancement skill, all give a huge benefit and should be learned by every character build. Chemistry lets you brew your own potions from the plethora of plants that you find out in the wild, but more importantly, it gives you access to permanent stat upgrade potions, which can give you a ton of free boosts for a minor skill investment. Modify weapons lets you upgrade your weaponry, which is by far the most reliable way to improve your damage output; it's faster and easier to improve a weapon you're already using than to hope you can find something better, and weapons that you upgrade to max often perform as good or better than legendaries that you can find in exploration. Each faction also gets an ability to add extra damage types to their weapons (fire, energy, radiation, etc), which act as damage-over-time in addition to the weapon's base damage, further enhancing your weapon's total damage output, which can only be done with that skill unless you luck out and find something good that already has a damage effect on it. Goldsmith is a little less important, but allows you to craft skill-boosting jewelry that will sometimes be stronger than what you can find normally. Gem socketing is even less important because not all weapons will have gem sockets on them, and you generally don't find enough gems to get a big enough boost, but it can still be a nice benefit later in the game if you've got nothing else to spend skill points on.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Pick up everything you find.</span><br />
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This might seem like obvious advice, but I feel like it's worth pointing out: you have no inventory restrictions, so you can (and should) pick up everything you find, because everything in the game has some sort of value. Most items can be sold to merchants for extra money, and since money is hard to come by and a lot of things are really expensive, you'll need all the money you can get. Plus, you never know when a particular item might come in handy.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Junk items have no use; sell them.</span><br />
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Mugs, forks, cigarettes, toilet paper -- basically everything that appears in your "other" tab of the items screen is completely useless except to sell to vendors, with one exception: old coins can be used to buy food and drinks in vending machines at the clerics' headquarters, which you might consider doing for healing potions or other ingredients for cooking recipes. There's not a single NPC who will ask for a few packs of cigarettes, or a dozen rolls of toilet paper, to complete a quest. These things only exist to populate the world with "stuff" and to give you things to sell to vendors for extra cash. This also applies to items in the "other" tab marked "valuables" like chalices and caskets. Quest items also get lumped into this section, but they're specifically marked as "missions items" and cannot be sold, anyway. Hold on to any old coins you find, because you may actually want to use them at some point, but sell literally everything else in this tab.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Don't automatically sell "weaker" weapons.</span><br />
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With the way the crafting system in this game works, weapons have overlapping tiers of performance as they're upgraded, with huge jumps happening every time you upgrade a weapon as it effectively skips several tiers of progression, while weaker weapons fit into those gaps as they're upgraded. In those situations, upgrading a weapon that you're currently using wouldn't make any sense because it would become unusable due to the higher requirements, in which case you're better off upgrading a weaker weapon. For example, if you're currently using a Hunting Bow and want to get a stronger bow, the War Bow would be the next obvious step up, however its requirements are much higher and would take several level-ups before you could equip it, and upgrading the Hunting Bow would actually push it beyond the War Bow in terms of both damage and stat requirements. The solution, therefore, is to upgrade the Cultivator's Bow -- a much weaker weapon at base value -- which might only take a single level-up before you can equip it, while being only slightly less powerful than the War Bow. For that reason, it's a good idea to hold onto a few different weapons that might appear to be weaker and therefore obsolete, because they actually become more viable when they're upgraded.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Basically every attribute is useful.</span><br />
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Typically in RPGs, you're encouraged to specialize in only a few stats, even going so far as to engage in "dump stats" where you specifically lower less useful stats in order to pump up more useful ones. That's not really the case in <i>Elex</i>, because every attribute has some kind of use for basically every playstyle. Every faction, build, and playstyle is going to require some of strength and constitution to equip better armor, for instance. Likewise, crafting skills are going to require an assortment of intelligence, cunning, and dexterity. Combat skills and faction skills use various combinations of everything. All of which is to say that you're eventually going to end up with at least a moderate amount of points invested in every attribute, so don't expect to have any "dump stats" that you can ignore in favor of more desirable ones. It's still a good idea to specialize in two or three primary attributes, however, because you don't really have enough points to pump every attribute up to 60 or higher, and some of those higher-level skills and equipment will need 85 or more to use. But if you put 20 or 30 points into an attribute early on and then decide to change your playstyle, it's not the end of the world and probably not worth starting over because you would eventually end up with those points there, anyway.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Personality skills aren't really worth it.</span><br />
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Most of the skills in the "personality" tab are about boosting skill checks in dialogue and giving you other such social rewards for how you interact with the world. These skill checks grant you a little extra experience and a small reward -- in some cases, alternate solutions to quests or extra story-telling from NPCs, which can be fun but aren't that crucial, and the skills that enhance those social stats aren't worth the early skill point costs. You'll see a lot of skill checks in dialogue early on, when they're either low enough for you to meet without needing the extra boosts, or so high that you'll never meet them in time, in which case the personality skills don't really help. Worse yet, these opportunities become pretty rare in the second half of the game. The skills that grant extra attributes are kind of nice, but you can achieve the same effect through standard elex potions. The skills that grant extra experience points also seem nice, but this amounts to a meager 5% -- against most enemies that means an extra one or five points. The skills that reward you for your coldness level are kind of nice, but are situational depending on your build and playstyle, and sort of force you to meta-game your role-playing so that you stay within a specific range. A few of the skills in this tab can be useful, of course, but you should be prioritizing other skills first.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-10035488945050404882020-04-17T20:47:00.000-04:002020-04-17T20:47:04.713-04:00Horizon Zero Dawn - Great Ideas, Boring Open-World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Horizon: Zero Dawn</i> is an open-world action-adventure game with RPG elements, set in a post-apocalyptic future after a cataclysmic event wipes out virtually all life on the planet, leaving humanity to start over as basically prehistoric civilizations while beastly machines roam the earth. You play as Aloy, an outcast orphan from a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe, who, while performing a Rite of Passage to join the tribe, gets attacked by a group of assassins who believe her to have a genetic link to one of the ancient ones who built the sealed metal vaults embedded in the mountains. The rest of the game sees Aloy exploring the world beyond her tribe's Sacred Lands, doing battle with fearsome machines, completing quests and favors for various people, gaining experience to improve her fighting and survival prowess, and collecting natural resources and machine parts to craft upgrades to her equipment or to trade with merchants, all while tracking down the assassins who tried to kill her, uncovering the mystery of what happened to humanity 1000 years ago, discovering her own identity and why she was orphaned at birth, and ultimately saving the world from another apocalypse.</div>
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There's a lot to enjoy in a game like this, with such a compellingly beautiful world full of interesting lore and backstory and a bunch of tactically exciting combat encounters against uniquely-designed robot dinosaurs, but there's also a lot holding it back and preventing it from reaching its full potential. The RPG elements and melee combat system feel underdeveloped and therefore a little underwhelming, for instance, but the bulk of the issues deal with its open-world design, where it feels like the developers relied a little too much on genre tropes when creating this world, while not putting a whole lot of interesting or worthwhile things to do in it. Admittedly, Guerrilla Games executed a lot more restraint with their open-world than some other developers, and the game is better for it, but I still had this lingering feeling throughout my whole playthrough like it wasn't quite as good as it could've been.</div>
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The game begins with you playing Aloy as a child during a lengthy tutorial section in which your adopted father, Rost -- a fellow outcast -- takes you on your first hunt and teaches you the basics of harvesting resources from the wild to craft basic supplies, as well as how to sneak past and take down machines. During this sequence she falls through a hole in the ground and winds up inside an old pre-apocalypse bunker -- a remnant structure from the pre-historic "Metal World" as it's known to the local tribes -- and discovers a device called a "Focus," which allows her the unique ability to read old-world messages and interact with the various doors and mechanisms inside the bunker. Just as the Nora tribe shuns Aloy for being an outcast, so too do they shun the use and exploration of Metal World technologies, but since Aloy is not bound to the Nora traditions she develops an affinity for it and insists on using its perception-enhancing abilities to great effect. At one point she witnesses a group of other Nora children gathering berries and, wanting to belong, gathers a small harvest of berries herself. She presents them to the Nora mother who promptly rejects her offering and hurries off with the other children, leaving Aloy with heartbroken determination to figure out why she's been outcast and who her parents were. This prompts her life-long resolve to train in the ways of the Hunt so that she can participate in a Rite of Passage known as the Proving so that she can join the tribe as a hunter, when she'll be able to talk to the matriarchs who know more about who her mother was and why she was orphaned.</div>
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Watch this same review in video format.</div>
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The catalyst that sets the game in motion is therefore a personal quest of self-discovery -- even though she's attacked by assassins who seem to be involved in some kind of greater plot or conspiracy, the whole reason she follows through on tracking the assassins down and avenging the Nora is really because they have potential clues that might help Aloy discover her own identity. And that's what comprises the bulk of the main story -- Aloy simply following leads and trying to find information about who she really is. It's a pleasant change of pace for a game of this style to center the main plot around the protagonist's character rather than some sort of forced conflict with some sort of evil super villain you don't know or care about, or the main character being told from the outset that they have to save the world and that for some reason they're the only one who can. It turns out that both of those latter tropes come into play with this game, as you eventually discover that Helis, the leader of the assassin organization, Eclipse, had nefarious motives for trying to kill you, and as you can already guess there's a reason Aloy is special enough for him to want to kill you -- Helis is basically trying to seize tyrannical control over the world, and you're the only one who can stop him. On a surface level that's kind of a boring, cliche premise, but by the time we get to those revelations, the cliche premise feels earned because the game has taken the time to establish the main character's motivation, and the narrative progressively builds to the point that "becoming the destined hero to save the world" feels like a natural extension of the character's journey as opposed to simply being an awkwardly forced video game trope.</div>
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That being said, I wasn't fully on board with the story, for a few reasons. The first is that it felt really slow in the early stages and took a long time before it reached a point when it started to actually hook my interest. It takes the better part of an hour sitting through the title cutscene and childhood tutorial sequence before it gets to something resembling the start of the actual game, and then it takes a few more hours before it gets to the catalyst that actually sets the main plot in motion. From there it's several hours of following quest markers so that you can follow some lead to reach the next remote location to find some person or thing so that you can get one step closer to getting answers for why the Eclipse tried to kill you. It's not until halfway through the main missions that it starts getting into the backstory of how this world came to be and how events of the past relate to current events, when it starts setting up the main threat that I found myself finally caring about the main plot. That point came like 20 or 30 hours into my playthrough because I was also exploring and doing side-quests with each step in the main quest line, which is a long time to go in a video game before the story presents any kind of compelling hook. Obviously there was enough interesting things going on in the world to hold my interest for that long, but I persisted in spite of the main plot, which wasn't doing much for me until it started getting into deeper concepts beyond the basic revenge premise that it initially sets up. Maybe the main plot has better pacing if you were to ignore side-quests and exploration and just focus on the main missions, but that mid-point in the story would still take a dozen or so hours to reach doing that, and those peripheral bits of content are important for fleshing out the world and setting, so you would also miss out on other things by skipping the optional stuff.</div>
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My second issue is that I wasn't really sold on Aloy as a character. The whole point of her background is that she spent her entire life in complete isolation from society, with her only human interaction throughout her 19 years of existence being with her adopted father, Rost, plus a few odd interactions with one or two individual tribe folk who broke taboo to speak with her, and yet she grows up to be a perfectly well-adjusted and socially affluent person. She's had pretty much zero experience in her entire life meeting new people, interacting with strangers, talking in a group setting, or being in society, and yet she makes friends with new people easily, understands subtle social cues, psychology, humor, and group dynamics, makes witty retorts, and can be extremely empathetic to people she doesn't even know, which all seem like things you wouldn't necessarily learn growing up with a single parent as your only source of human interaction. Rost, in particular, doesn't seem like a socially affable person as seemingly all of his interactions with Aloy are rigidly pragmatic, so it seems like she would take after Rost and be more withdrawn and to-the-point around other people, and should be more awkward in unfamiliar social situations -- like in groups, or when someone is flirting with her. So by the time we get to see her as a grown adult she acts like a stereotypical quippy video game protagonist and actually seems more social and outgoing than the average person, when she should really be more of a fish out of water struggling at least a little bit to understand and cope with a society she's only ever seen from a distance but never actually been a part of.</div>
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Besides being more logically appropriate, it would also give her an opportunity to grow as a character by starting the game as a socially awkward fledgling who becomes more socially competent as the game progresses. Although she does grow mechanically through the leveling system that grants her new perks and abilities to become a more capable hunter, and she does gain newfound knowledge of the greater world outside the Nora's sacred lands, her character writing maintains a relatively flat trajectory over the entire game where she seems to act about the same from beginning to end. It's like she comes into adulthood at the beginning of the game already fully developed as a character when the Proving should realistically be the start of a whole new life for her and she should change more radically, not just compared to her previous life before the Proving, but also over the rest of her adventures. In essence, she starts the game as an already amiable, confident, assertive, effective badass when it would be far more engaging from a writing standpoint to show her struggling and having to overcome obstacles early on. It's understandable that she would be a highly proficient hunter by the time we take control of her as an adult, since she's been training for the Proving her whole life, and to be fair she does go through a lot of hardship growing up ostracized by society, but it's mostly stuff that we don't get to see or experience ourselves and none of that really pertains to the events of the main story from the Proving onward, which is where the main plot actually begins. It's extremely contrived, for instance, that a kid who threw a rock at Aloy when she was six year old grows up to be her main rival in the Proving, and that that kid is still holding a grudge against her after all these years, based on a single interaction they had as children. A lot of her preliminary growth as a character is actually glossed over in the form of an expository training montage where we get only the briefest glimpses of her struggling before it instantly cuts to her doing all these awesome badass moves that we don't get to experience for ourselves through actual gameplay at that point, because it's merely shown to us in a cutscene while interactions with other characters like Karst are merely implied off-screen.</div>
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Part of the problem might be that the game's open world design just doesn't allow for very dynamic character writing. A more linear game like <i>The Last of Us</i> is able to portray substantial character growth and development because the writers have complete control over the order in which events occur as well as the overall pace of the story -- the story and gameplay are interwoven and follow along the same trajectory, in other words -- but if you're free to go off and experience content in whatever order you desire, then you might run into inconsistencies with how Aloy is written by doing things out of the intended order, because the gameplay and story are more independent of one another. If Aloy's character development is tied to the main quest, for instance, and you chose to put it off in favor of completing a bunch of side-content and leveling up a bunch, then it would be jarring to return to the main quest later in the game and discover that Aloy is suddenly acting awkward and naive when she should have more worldly experience at that point by virtue of your other adventures. The solution, therefore, is to have her be the exact same character at all times so that she'll always act consistently no matter what order you've done things in, with major character moments being mostly self-contained within specific quests. It's fine and effective in the context of an open world game, but felt like a missed opportunity to do something deeper and more meaningful with the character.</div>
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That being said, she also has a couple odd moments of dialogue that completely threw me out of the game because I just could not follow along with the game's logic. There comes a point in the story where Aloy is befriended by a mysterious ally named Sylens, who communicates with her remotely over her Focus, and the two are trying to find a way to disable the Eclipses' focuses so that she can infiltrate their base undetected. Sylens is trying to tell her that he can't just deactivate their focuses, and tries to explain the concept of a "network" to her by describing it as a giant invisible web connecting every focus together. So she tells him to just cut down the web, and he goes "Oh, that might work." And it just seems really implausible to me that the character who didn't even know what a network was until about five seconds ago would realize that the solution to their problem is to simply disable the network, and that the tech-savvy hacker couldn't even conceive of that option until an ignorant layman suggested it. I get that she's supposed to be really smart for plot reasons, but did the other, far more knowledgeable and experienced character have to be so stupid in this situation to portray her supposed genius? Then later, at the end of the game when faced with a world-destroying cataclysmic event, a bunch of old acquaintances show up offering their assistance in taking down the final boss, and Aloy says "this is my fight, I can't ask you to come with me." Which would make sense if she were talking about fighting Helis to get personal vengeance on him for murdering her father, but not when she's talking about fighting a generic robot enemy so that they can stop a computer program that's about to destroy the entire world. Like, does she not understand that every single person on the planet will die if this thing isn't stopped? It isn't just some personal matter, these people have as much at stake as she does. And mind you, this line happens AFTER she specifically seeks aid from other people to help defend against the onslaught, so it's just a pure WTF moment that had me literally yelling at her through the screen. This isn't the only time I blatantly disagreed with Aloy's interpretation of things, mind you, but this was definitely the most notable example.</div>
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Now don't get me wrong -- I found her actual personality to be pretty likable and relatable, and generally speaking I enjoyed playing as her. It's nice to play a protagonist who's kind-hearted and well-intentioned enough to be willing to help people in need, but who's also capable of experiencing impatience and frustration with other people's ineptitude or dishonesty. In fact, she demonstrates a pretty wide range of emotions, which helps to flesh her out and make her reactions feel more real and appropriate. More often than not her reactions to things felt similar to how I might handle situations, and her confidence, determination, grounded approach to situations, and her general indignation over how she was treated as a child made it really easy for me to root for her. Her growth and performance are both par for the course for most video game protagonists who're depicted as incredibly capable and competent heroes from the start, so I really can't criticize her flat arc too much, but it just seems like if they were going to put so much emphasis into the writing, and animating all of these elaborate cutscenes, and giving her so much of a developed backstory, even going so far as to have us play as a six-year old version of that character with a story spanning literally her entire life, that they could have or maybe should have done something a little more interesting and developed with her character. She's a decent character as it is, but it just felt like something was missing the whole time, like there either should've been more focus and time spent on her growing up, or she should've been a little different than she was presented by the time we cut to her as an adult, or else they could've just dropped the whole "telling her saga from birth" angle if they were just going to skip past 98% of it, and just started us off with Aloy as an adult preparing for the Proving, progressively filling in the necessary backstory through interactions with Rost and other Nora, and maybe occasional flashbacks.</div>
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The other thing that held the story back for me is that all of its major twists felt incredibly predictable, which is problematic when the entire point of the story is the mystery of figuring out who Aloy is and where she came from, and also what happened to humanity a thousand years ago to cause a mass extinction of nearly all life on the planet. The game tries to string you along on both of these fronts for serious chunks of the main quest line, attempting to be vague with hints and teasers meant to pique your curiosity while never fully answering your questions until the grand revelation several quests later. Unfortunately those early hints are just so on-the-nose that I was instantly able to figure out where the plot was going, which then made it somewhat tedious and uninteresting going through the motions of uncovering more information to confirm what I already knew while watching Aloy struggle to cope with things that I intuitively understood from the beginning.</div>
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After Aloy is attacked at the Proving, she takes a cultist's Focus and discovers she was specifically targeted because she has a 99.47% DNA match to an unnamed woman who looks exactly like her and has the same voice actor, and I was immediately like "Well, that woman is obviously not Aloy's mother because then her DNA would only be a 50% match, and we saw Aloy grow up as a child so that rules out the possibility of her being that same woman coming out of cryostasis with amnesia or something, which is also reinforced by the fact that the DNA is not a perfect 100% match, so she must be a clone of that woman, with an expected margin of error in the cloning process. These vaults seem built to withstand any sort of disaster and apparently have the technology to create new life, so I'm guessing this was part of humanity's plan to survive the apocalypse. That woman must have played an important role in that process if her DNA is being used as a security key to enter these vaults, and Aloy having a near identical DNA match means she's probably the only one who can do something to stop the bad guys' plans." All of which turned out to be true, and I was able to draw those conclusions based entirely on a single number. Thus the game's central mystery unraveled and the suspense deflated before I'd even left the starting area. It takes Aloy far longer to figure all of this out, which created a disconnect between myself and my character because we were never on the same page and were basically always experiencing very different emotions and reactions to how the story unfolded. That's understandable, of course, since she has a unique background that I can't relate to -- she is going to react to things differently than I would in her situation -- but since I'd already solved the mystery I wasn't even along for the ride, so to speak, and couldn't even share in her shock or surprise at these perception-altering discoveries.</div>
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Later on we discover that a military arms corporation named after its founder, Ted Faro, had been building peacekeeping war machines whose programming essentially glitched out, causing them to become sentient and turn against humanity. Critically, these robots had the ability to self-replicate using biomatter as fuel, thus causing the swarm to grow exponentially larger while rapidly consuming the earth's natural resources and killing more and more life on the planet. After numerous failed attempts to stop them, Faro turned to Elisabet Sobeck -- the woman whose DNA Aloy shares -- for an alternative solution. The game progressively builds up the backstory with rather engaging detail as you encounter assorted logs from various perspectives at different stages of the Faro plague, as it was known at the time, but then it skips over the explanation of Sobeck's plan to save humanity in the interest of creating more drama and suspense while only teasing its name -- Project Zero Dawn. All we see are Faro's stunned and horrified reactions, with him saying that the cure is worse than the disease while Sobeck insists that, although it may be grim, it's their only chance. And I immediately concluded that the name "Zero Dawn" is supposed to foreshadow that there's no future in store for these people, and that her plan is therefore to cause an extinction event of her own to exterminate not just the machines, but all life on the planet, or possibly to let the machines run their course and eventually shut down once they've harvested all resources from the planet, thus wiping the slate completely clean for life to begin anew, which would presumably happen in the vaults where Aloy was created. Which is basically what Zero Dawn entailed, and I was able to draw those conclusions based entirely on a single proper noun. Once again, a simple teaser meant to add to the suspense ended up having the opposite effect by spoiling its own mystery before getting to the grand revelation.</div>
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The final battle likewise proved extremely anticlimactic and underwhelming. The whole game builds towards the finale where we discover that Helis has been unwittingly working for HADES, a subroutine of Sobeck's Zero Dawn in charge of creating new extinction events to reset the earth again if new attempts at creating sustainable life prove unsuccessful. It turns out HADES was maliciously awakened and went rogue, now creating hordes of new war machines to start tearing down the ecosystem, and Aloy -- as the only person with Sobeck's genes, created by the GAIA protocol to be the savior of the new world -- is the only one capable of stopping it. This sets up a final showdown where Aloy works with the Carja Sundom to shore up defenses to fight against the horde of war machines and to stop HADES from taking control of a broadcasting tower to send out the extinction signal, while also getting vengeance over Helis for killing her father, Rost. And then the fight against Helis plays out like an ordinary battle against an ordinary human opponent in a relatively small and mundane environment, and the defense of Meridian -- a massive city with hundreds of guards -- only involves a half-dozen other NPCs fighting by your side while you basically just lob an infinite number of OP-bombs at a handful of enemies that come at you in small waves, and then the final boss is just another Deathbringer, of which you've already fought close to a dozen previously. They had three opportunities to do something exciting and interesting in the finale, with an entire "calm before the storm" segment as you prep for the final battle getting you hyped up for an epic conclusion, and none of them paid off in a satisfying way.</div>
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Where the story really excels is its detailed lore, backstory, and worldbuilding. Beneath the main plot of Aloy trying to discover her own identity and save the world, there are two entire other stories: one detailing the events of the old world with Sobeck, Faro, and assorted other minor characters leading up to the apocalypse as the Faro plague comes into form and humanity tries unsuccessfully to stop it, while also setting up the Zero Dawn project, and a second one detailing the history of how civilization evolved from early life in the vaults to the tribes and societies they've formed today. You can actually read up on hundreds of years of recorded history if you so choose, which just goes to show how much care and effort went into creating this unique fictional world. What's most impressive is that this history plays an important role in current events, with the current political landscape and cultural tensions having been shaped by the past few generations of leadership -- people actively talk about and reference these historical events, weaving the lore into the very fabric of the world as opposed to being something irrelevant that's been superfluously added on.</div>
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All of this world-building happens through a variety of different media, too, from news articles to text logs and audio logs to holographic recordings, such that the delivery of lore never gets to feel repetitive, but unfortunately the quality of the world-building can vary greatly depending on the delivery method. The vantage points are great because they show you what dilapidated old ruins used to look like before the apocalypse, while also telling the story of an aerospace engineer leaving a trail of diaries, basically, during what he calls his "Apocashitstorm Tour." The history of the Carja Sundom can likewise be really interesting if you care to read up on it, but a lot of it occurs through incredibly long tomes that read like dry history text books. A good portion of datapoints depicting what life was like in the old world, before the apocalypse, occurs through advertisements for different fictional products and services, which don't tie into the plot and can feel pretty uninteresting. Knowing that the Metal World had dating apps with RPG-style leveling systems, or virtual reality gloves with tactile feedback, or that you could get a pizza delivered to you by drone, didn't add anything to my enjoyment of the world or the gameplay, so they got to feel more annoying than enjoyable over time.</div>
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<i>Horizon: Zero Dawn</i> takes place in an open world, post-apocalyptic version of the Southwestern United States, with many of its in-game landmarks and environments being based on real locations, which I imagine would be fun easter eggs for anyone familiar with Colorado and Utah landmarks. I'm a huge sucker for this type of imagery, where human structures and machinations have crumbled into ruins and been overtaken by nature, and so it's a pleasant experience to play a post-apocalyptic video game with a lot of natural beauty in it, as opposed to a lot of similar games where it feels like you're wading through trash and rubble the entire time, which can get to feel pretty miserable after a while. The world, here, is full of scenic vistas and awe-inspiring landscapes enhanced by a realistic -- if somewhat idealized -- sensibility. You can tell they took liberties with the actual geography to create denser, more visually interesting environments than what you would find in real life, but they're still guided by that realistic design where it feels like these could be real places, just enhanced slightly for the sake of video game functionality. It's not exactly realistic, for instance, that you can run from green plains into a snowy mountain pass, then into a desert and then a jungle in the span of 15 minutes, but the transitions are gradual enough that it works in the context of a video game and feels pretty natural and seamless. Those different environments also lend the game a lot of atmospheric variety while still feeling cohesively tied together by a consistent visual aesthetic.</div>
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The size of the world, likewise, strikes a reasonably good balance of being large enough to create a more realistic sense of scale for the world and its lore, while still having enough structure in its layout to guide exploration, such that it doesn't get to feel overwhelmingly large. You can't have the Carja Sundom right next to the heart of the Nora Sacred Lands if they're supposed to be distant cultures who never interact with each other, so there's a giant mountain separating them, and to get from one place to the other requires a long, circuitous route that feels like an actual journey, as opposed to just walking to the next town. At the start of the game, before the Proving, you're confined to a relatively small area in Nora territory called the Embrace, which is still big enough to allow plenty of open-ended freedom in exploration while tying all of its content to that area's central narrative, and then once you become a Seeker and gain authorization to leave the Embrace, the map has a somewhat linear progression from area to area as you work your way counter-clockwise around the map towards the Carja Sundom. These areas are effectively divided into different zones that you can tackle in a sequential order, with the main quest guiding you through this counter-clockwise path from the starting area to the capital city of the Carja, Meridian, thus lending the exploration a feeling of direction and momentum such that you feel actual progress exploring the world, as opposed to just wandering around in aimless directions as you would in a more open, unrestricted world.</div>
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After a certain point in my playthrough, however, I began to wonder if this game really needed to be set in such a large open world to facilitate its two main focal points: that being its richly detailed story and its intense, highly tactical combat against robot dinosaurs. After all, it seems like you could tell the same story and facilitate the same type of combat system in a more linearly structured game, but there are definite positives to putting this story and combat system in an open world setting. For one thing, the size of the world plays an important role in establishing the scale of the main plot -- the stakes of a potential world-ending cataclysm feel much more dire and consequential when you've had the opportunity to travel the world to see it for all its beauty, and to freely experience all of the different cultures that would be lost to time if the world were to suddenly end; it's a lot more difficult to grasp that sense of grandeur and worldliness in a more linear game where you're constricted to more corridor-like environments as you simply go from mission to mission, as if you're running around a series of movie sets as opposed to exploring an actual world. A more linear structure can work well or even better with a simpler, more personal story (such as Joel and Ellie's budding relationship in <i>The Last of Us</i>), but for a story of this nature where the world itself is practically its own character and the main plot has major consequences for the entire world, then I think you really do need an open world to bring that characteristic to life and to depict the epic scale of the plot.</div>
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With regards to the combat system, the open world also gives you freedom to focus on the combat as much as you desire. A more linear world design can set up some really unique and interesting setpiece encounters, but it's usually impossible to re-experience those encounters without replaying the whole game, whereas with <i>Horizon</i>, if you have a fun encounter with a special type of enemy that you want to experience again, you can just go find another one somewhere else in the world. And even though it's the same enemy, it'll be in a different environment with different combinations of nearby enemies, thereby creating its own unique situation such that it doesn't feel like you're just doing the same thing again. With respawning enemies, that means there's always freedom to just go off hunting whenever or wherever you feel like -- it was not uncommon for me to spend 30 minutes at the start of any given session just fighting random robots for the fun of it before getting on with whatever quest or task I was intending to do from the start. That freedom doesn't just apply to the combat, either, since the open world allows you the freedom to spend your time doing whatever it is you really want, whether that be fighting robot dinosaurs, or hunting local wildlife to craft upgrades, or just wandering around taking in the sights.</div>
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The problem, however, is that if you don't enjoy those things then they can create a pretty substantial impediment towards reaching content you might find greater interest in, because they literally get in the way of other things you might enjoy more. Even though that kind of side content is technically optional, you're still forced to engage with it whether you want to or not. Say you don't care about all the open world fluff and just want to focus on the story and characters -- you're going to have to make long treks across the map to reach your next quest destination because you're probably not going to be exploring the world fully enough to have nearby warp points, and you're going to have to make large detours around herds of enemies or mountain ranges that force you off the shortest path to reaching your destination, and you might even have to stop to fight certain enemies that are literally faster than you or that can shoot you at range, which slows down your progress even more. Then, between every quest you'll probably need to scavenge the environment at least a little bit for plants, animal parts, and/or machine parts to craft more supplies and restock on things like potions, healing salves, fast-travel packs, or ammunition that you spent in the previous quest, before you can set off on a new quest.</div>
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Even when these sorts of things are purely optional, they're still kind of required if you want the game to be less of a tedious slog, which is ironic because making the game less of a tedious slog requires a fair amount of tedious busywork and item farming. If you want to be able to fast-travel places to save time instead of running everywhere all the time, then you'll have to periodically go hunting animals for meat to craft more fast-travel kits (until you unlock the option to buy an unlimited fast travel pack, which again, doesn't happen until you reach Meridian more than halfway through the game); if you want to be able to actually survive during combat, then you'll have to periodically forage the wilds for healing plants; if you want to use some of the game's more fun and interesting weaponry, you'll have to periodically go hunting machines to get parts so you can craft more ammunition (at least, until you amass such a vast stockpile of resources that that no longer becomes a necessity); if you don't want to be constantly making trips back to merchants to sell off excess materials, then you'll have to go hunting animals for parts to craft greater and greater carrying capacity. Sometimes an optional side quest will task you with harvesting a particular machine part, at which point the game devolves into an RNG-festival as you have to kill the same enemy type over and over again until you randomly get the part you need -- the same goes for the upgrade system that requires randomly-dropped bones and skins from specific types of animals. Even if you enjoy all of this stuff -- foraging for plants, hunting wild animals, battling machines, traversing the world, crafting new supplies and upgrades -- you do so much of it over the course of the game that it all starts to feel tedious and repetitive after a while. This might be an exaggeration, but it felt like I spent about a quarter of my time in this game just foraging for materials as basic upkeep just so that I could keep playing, and I got particularly sick of how much time I had to spend wandering around looking for healing plants.</div>
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Making matters worse is that there aren't a whole lot of other worthwhile activities to do in the world besides going around fighting random enemies and collecting resources. Besides that, you can clear out Corrupted Zones and Bandit Camps, which are just concentrated areas with tougher enemies, and once you've done one the rest are essentially the same concept but with different enemies; or you can climb Tallnecks, which are mobile map towers that reveal the fog of war in that area and are all simply a matter of climbing to a high point in the map and then jumping on the Tallneck as it walks by; or you can clear out Cauldrons, which are kind of like subterranean dungeons where you fight your way through a short, linear environment to reach a boss chamber, and after the first one the rest are all pretty similar in design; or you can do Hunting Ground challenges which task you with completing gimmicky objectives like "kill three machines while they're frozen" under certain time limits; or you can collect a bunch of pointless, worthless collectibles like Metal Flowers, Ancient Vessels, and Banuk Figures; or you can visit Vantage Points to see holographic images of what the world used to look like before the apocalypse; and that's about it, apart from side quests which I'll cover in more detail in its own section.</div>
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That sounds like a decent amount of variety, but the problem is that these activities make up a relatively small portion of the game's open world content, in terms of the time and space dedicated to them, and each one gets to be repetitive rather quickly. The only one of these that offers any sort of notable mechanical variety are the Hunting Grounds, since each one has three radically different objectives, and the Vantage Points at least have some interesting storytelling told from the perspective of the guy leaving those logs behind, but everything else is pretty bland to begin with and just gets more and more bland as the game goes on. In the game's defense, it shows a little bit of restraint by not going completely overboard peppering the landscape with these things; compared to other, similar types of games, there are only five map towers to climb, as opposed to literally dozens, and only 48 collectibles, as opposed to literally hundreds, so these activities thankfully don't wear out their welcome nearly as much as they do in other games. The problem is that there just isn't enough mechanical variety in terms of how you complete each type of activity or how you earn each type of collectible, as they're all mostly the same process each time but with slightly different level layouts and slightly different enemies in your way. <i>Breath of the Wild</i>, for instance, has an absurd 900 korok seeds to collect, but they're tied to over a dozen different categories of puzzles, each with its own somewhat unique solution, so you can easily collect 50-100 seeds before it starts to feel like you're doing the same things over and over again. Whereas in <i>Horizon</i>, collecting Metal Flowers is the exact same gameplay for every single one -- walk to a point marked on the map, look around for it, and press X to pick it up -- which gets to feel samey after only a half-dozen, and doesn't feel as actively engaging as solving a puzzle in <i>Breath of the Wild</i>.</div>
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There's not much reward for doing any of these activities, either, which makes them feel especially pointless if you aren't already enjoying the activities themselves. When you complete a Hunting Grounds challenge, all you get is a generic reward box filled with random, generic crafting materials which you find literally everywhere, and it's possible that you might have spent more resources completing the challenge than you got back as a reward. Depending on the challenge, you might actually get better rewards from just defeating the machines and harvesting their corpses than you do from actually completing the objective. The reason you would want to do these challenges (apart from the thrill of the challenge itself) is to unlock special Hunting Lodge weapons, which are stronger versions of normal weaponry, but you only get these weapons once you've completed every single challenge at every single Hunting Ground. These Hunting Grounds are spread out in every corner of the map, so you have to play the vast majority of the game before you can start to get any real reward from the Hunting Grounds, and by that point you may have already unlocked better weapons, anyway, especially if you own (and have played) the <i>Frozen Wilds</i> expansion. Those weapons really should have been doled out more progressively, with each individual Hunting Ground granting its own unique weapon once you complete all three of its challenges at the highest level; that would give you incentive to actually do them as you encounter them, while also giving you a taste of what's in store for later Hunting Grounds, with the expectation that you'll likely get a similar (but even better) reward with each new one you discover.</div>
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In fact, there's absolutely zero new equipment to discover while exploring, because all weapons and armor are exclusively purchased from merchants. That makes sense, since realistically there should be tons of other hunters and scavengers picking the world clean of valuables before you come along, and people aren't going to leave a bunch of valuable equipment just lying around for no reason. It does mean, however, that there's almost zero practical reward for exploring the world because all you'll ever find are random crafting materials and pointless collectibles. If you're lucky, maybe you'll find a new random equipment modification that will give you a minor, invisible, passive boost to mundane stats, but that's about it. Otherwise, all you're really doing to acquire new gear is farming money and crafting materials so that you can buy something at a marked, predictable location, which doesn't have that same moment of euphoria as when you find a cool weapon at the end of a dungeon or after defeating a difficult enemy in a hidden area.</div>
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On a similar level, the various collectible items you can find scattered about the world are completely worthless until you gather an entire set and deliver them to Meridian, which is located on the other side of the world from the starting point. So you don't start getting any kind of reward for them until you're about 75% of the way through with the game, and even then your reward is just a generic reward box where most of the time you'll just get a relatively common, less useful equipment modification than what you already have. They don't even come with much in the way of interesting stories or bits of lore attached to them; the Ancient Vessels are just ruined coffee mugs with a logo of one of the old world's corporations printed on them, and the Metal Flowers just give you random excerpts from poetry taken out of context, which was of no interest to me personally. There is some decent storytelling with the Banuk figures, since collectively they serve as spiritual offerings from a man to a son he'll never meet, and that backstory gets told one offering at a time, one paragraph at a time. And really, it's surprisingly poignant for how simple his story is, and how little text there is to convey it, so that's nice. Unfortunately, there're only six Banuk figures in the game, meaning they make up only 12.5% of the set collectibles you can find in the world. At least the Hunting Grounds have some sort of exciting gameplay premise surrounding them, which can make them decently fun even if you don't care about the rewards, but the rest of the set collectibles mostly amount to to "go to the icon marked on your map and search around the environment for a thing to pick up which will be completely useless to you until you've explored almost the entire world already."</div>
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Which leads me to my next point: exploration in this game relies way too heavily on icon hunting. <i>Horizon </i>uses an <i>Elder Scrolls</i>-style compass bar to assist in navigation, not only showing you what direction you're facing in the world but also showing icons to indicate interactive content somewhere nearby that you can't quite see yet. I typically don't like it when games do this, because it often feels like a crutch to compensate for poor world/game design, but it's almost a necessity in this case, especially if you want to stand any chance at discovering any of the game's assorted datapoints -- the little bits of text logs that expand on the game's lore. Those things are incredibly tiny, being about the size of a smartphone, and they're often sitting around random locations in the huge open world, often in piles of rubble, making them incredibly difficult to spot unless you see the icon on your compass or happen to wander within a few meters of one. Sidequests likewise pop up on your compass as a green exclamation point, usually before you even have an opportunity to see the quest-giver, telling you pre-emptively that you should go a certain direction so that you can do a thing. Otherwise, Tallnecks reveal every major point of interest on your map in their respective area and you can also buy treasure maps that indicate where you can find other important things, such that there's essentially always an icon somewhere in the game guiding you to the next Thing Worth Doing. You don't have to follow them, of course, but without them you stand little chance of even noticing a lot of the game's content because so much of it is so small and blends into the rest of the world design, and you're unlikely to find much of interest if you ignore them and go off searching for content in unmarked areas.</div>
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I'm a huge fan of exploration in video games, especially in open-world games because that gives you the freedom to shape your play experience into something more unique since no two players will ever go to the same places and do the same things in the same order. It's particularly satisfying to stumble into hidden content that feels like a secret that other people might not discover as easily, and it's rewarding to find something in a hidden area that might give you a unique edge as compared to someone else's playthrough, whether that be some type of mechanical bonus like a new weapon or rare crafting material, or just a special quest that grants you an unusually fun gameplay scenario. I love that feeling of "what's around the next corner," and being able to find something intriguing off in the distance and then actually going there and discovering what it is. But those feelings were mostly non-existent in <i>Horizon</i>, as I never really had the opportunity to discover things on my own since there was always an icon specifically marking all of the game's content, and more often than not I found myself disappointed when exploring interesting areas between icons that looked like promising places to find special items or hidden quests, only to be rewarded with nothing at all.</div>
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So many potentially fun and exciting places in this world are just empty wastes of space that only exist to look pretty on the horizon, or possibly to imply deeper lore and world-building elements while never giving you the opportunity to actively engage with those elements. There's no greater example of this than the Spire, a huge monolithic tower twisting in upon itself that acted as a sort of guiding beacon for the Carja people of where they should settle when they were wandering in the desert. It's an incredibly important artifact from the old world and is mentioned a few times by characters and in Carja glyphs -- people even seem to worship it, with Meridian's temple built facing towards the Spire -- and yet when you go there, it's completely empty with not a single soul there to interact with. You can't enter any buildings, you can't talk to anyone there, there's no worthwhile loot to pick up, there's just literally nothing there. It seems like something as important as the Spire, which is regarded as a holy symbol of worship, would have at least a couple stewards and guards there tending to the grounds around it, and would even serve as a sort of Mecca where Meridian citizens would occasionally make pilgrimage to offer their prayers more directly to the Sun. It seems like a place where you should be able to at least talk to someone to learn about its lore through a more interactive way than just reading about it in a dry history text book, and where you might even be able to pick up an interesting side-quest, but apart from its role in establishing part of this world's history, it basically only exists as an elaborate arena for the final battle, sitting there completely lifeless and inactive until it gets "activated" for the final boss battle.</div>
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This same principle applies on a smaller scale to a plethora of other areas as well. There's a pretty sizable harbor near a market place, for instance, with a dozen or so guards posted there and a large building you can actually enter (which is a rarity in and of itself), and yet there's not a single interactive thing to do there apart from saving your progress at a bonfire, and trading with a generic merchant. At one point an NPC spawns there for a quest, and then you go there and talk to him for a minute, and there's a glyph somewhere that you can scan to learn more about Carja history, and that's about all the "content" I was ever able to find in that harbor. Then you've got other places like outposts and huge, cordoned-off fields that seem like there should be something of interest to do in those areas, which likewise sit completely idle and inactive unless you go there following a specific quest objective, leaving you with nothing to discover if you set off to explore those areas on your own. Even some of the towns and settlements end up feeling oddly lifeless and devoid of meaningful interactivity, being filled to the brim with NPCs you can't talk to and buildings you can't enter, with maybe only a single generic merchant (who has the exact same stock as every other merchant in the region) and, if you're lucky, a single quest-giver. Mother's Cradle, for instance, seems to only exist so that everyone there can die in a main quest event, making the loss of that settlement feel pretty inconsequential when you had no opportunity to do anything there previously to develop any sort of familiarity or attachment to anyone (or anything) in that settlement.</div>
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The worst offender when it comes to exploration is its archaic restrictions on mobility that prevent Aloy from climbing onto or over surfaces that she realistically should be able to. Instead of using a free-form system that would give you the freedom to explore the world in whatever creative means you desire, <i>Horizon </i>opts to use an <i>Uncharted</i>-style of climbing and platforming, where you can only climb very specific surfaces that you're specifically intended to be able to climb, and which are marked by either white paint or yellow ropes. This system is almost a complete deal-breaker for me, because a world this beautiful just begs to be explored in a more intimate fashion, and so it becomes incredibly deflating to feel so restricted on where you can go and how you get places. Instead of finding a cool thing somewhere and devising your own clever means of reaching it, the gameplay becomes a matter of "find the one specific climbing path," effectively turning this huge open-world game into a "hidden object" game where you just scour cliff walls in search of the one, specific rock that Aloy can actually grab onto. I seriously had numerous occasions when I was trying all kinds of sensible options to reach a certain location but was stumped because I didn't notice the one brick jutting out from the wall, or where I had to run nearly halfway around a mountain to find the one specific path that would let me actually ascend the mountain. Likewise, there's no convenient way to descend a mountain except to follow that specific path in reverse order, unless the designers were kind enough to leave a grapple point somewhere, which are incredibly rare and, as with everything else, you're only able to use the grapple hook in those exact, specific places.</div>
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And it's not like the platforming is particularly fun or engaging gameplay, either, because it all happens automatically with practically zero regard for your own input. All you have to do is be standing in the general vicinity of a platforming hotspot, then press either "forward" or the "jump" button to watch Aloy automatically do everything herself. You don't have to gauge distance or direction for yourself, or time your jumps, or toggle a button to grip onto a ledge, or manage a stamina gauge, or anything that would qualify as active gameplay, because it's entirely passive and feels almost like a cutscene masquerading as gameplay. This is no more evident than when the game decides it's going to shift into slow-motion for particularly large jumps, as if to make those jumps more tense, dramatic, or exciting, but it's impossible for me to feel any of those emotions when I have zero control over whether Aloy makes that jump successfully or not, and when I know she's going to succeed every time. In fact, it's almost impossible to fail at the platforming because the game takes so much control over it that you can only really fail if you do something that the game didn't anticipate -- like trying to jump a gap from a weird angle -- which prevents the game from going into "auto-pilot mode," and thus doesn't even allow you to succeed on your own because the game <i>has</i> to be in "auto-pilot mode" for Aloy to actually grab onto the ledge.</div>
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This maybe wouldn't be so much of an issue if it weren't for that fact that 2017 also saw the release of <i>Breath of the Wild</i> and <i>Elex </i>-- two similarly large, open-world games that gave you immensely more free-form mobility to explore their worlds at your own pace, in your own creative way. <i>Breath of the Wild</i> famously has the whole "climb anything" system where you can climb basically any surface, of any height, as long as you have enough stamina for it (which you can supplement by cooking certain recipes with the right ingredients, or by gathering certain equipment sets, or by trading extra hearts for extra stamina), and it even gives you the paraglider so that you can drop from any height and catch the air for a soft landing, or even coast all the way across huge expanses of terrain. <i>Elex </i>allows you to jump and grab onto most ledges that look like climbable, but then it also gives you a jetpack with recharging fuel so that you can literally fly up to higher terrain or across the map. That's not even to mention the plethora of <i>Assassin's Creed</i> games to have come out before <i>Horizon</i>, with their "free-running parkour" that let you climb up to the top of buildings from just about any angle. Hell, even <i>Thief: The Dark Project</i> from 1998 had better mobility than <i>Horizon</i>, since that game let you climb onto any flat surface that you could reach by hand with a simple jump, and it even gave you rope arrows to use creatively to access out-of-reach areas. It may not have flowed as smoothly or looked as nice as <i>Horizon's </i>platforming, but it was far more engaging and gave you more freedom to explore off the intended path for secrets, as opposed to <i>Horizon's</i> platforming that only allows you to do the exact, specific things they intended you to be able to do, unless you do the old <i>Elder Scrolls</i> trick of flinging yourself against collision meshes until you land on enough surfaces to "climb" somewhere.</div>
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Combined with things like the occasional invisible wall or otherwise out-of-bounds areas, and it all just seems to actively discourage exploration, because you frequently don't have the means to explore places you might want to, while interesting-looking places often end up being completely empty and pointless, or else anything worth doing is typically revealed on your map in advance of you actually discovering it, and there's barely ever anything rewarding to discover when you're out exploring, anyway. Exploration, therefore, felt rather unsatisfying to me, like the gameplay just wasn't doing the open-world formula (or the game's beautiful world design) proper justice. </div>
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Besides exploration, side quests are typically the main appeal of open world games for me. A lot of these games treat the main quest as a bit of an after-thought -- an obligatory chore that ironically ends up being entirely optional, and which often doesn't live up to what you would expect of a main quest, with many of the best and most memorable quests being the side quests. That pattern is actually reversed in <i>Horizon</i>, where the main quest line is clearly the main focus, and the side quests are the obligatory inclusion to give you more Things to Do™ in the open world. Unlike some other open-world games, the main quest actually works well with its open-world format, because it doesn't start things off with some type of impending cataclysm that completely breaks the narrative pacing when you choose to ignore the time-sensitive threat for hours on end doing utterly trivial things like hunting fish with a bow and arrow or go mountain climbing just to revel in the scenic vistas.</div>
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The main quest does a good enough job stringing you along with narrative details that progressively reveal the game's lore and backstory (even if its major twists are all easily predictable), but it also sets up some decently interesting scenarios with unique level designs and gameplay elements that give those missions a sort of dramatic spectacle -- like in "To Curse the Darkness" when you have to sneakily infiltrate an Eclipse base to disable the Focus network and then suddenly have to mount a quick exit once you're caught by frantically running from hordes of enemies, or in "The Terror of the Sun" when you're dropped into a gladiator ring and have to defeat a massive Behemoth without any of your usual skills or equipment. The main quest, therefore, is pretty engaging to follow, not just because of how it expands upon the game's richly detailed backstory, but because you're almost always doing something new and different that you don't typically get to experience elsewhere in the game.</div>
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Side quests and errands, on the other hand, tend to follow a basic pattern where the quest-giver presents you with a problem, and then you follow a quest marker to a starting point and bring up Focus Vision to examine the environment for clues, and then follow the trail to another location where you'll have to fight something fairly mundane and ordinary, much like you experience just by encountering random enemies as you explore the world. The only mechanical "twist" is that these quests give Aloy the opportunity to show off her tracking skills, and I have to stress that these are <i>her</i> skills and not your own, because the game doesn't give you any opportunity to solve quests on your own. The idea is that, much like Geralt's "witcher senses" in <i>The Witcher 3</i>, you press a button to bring up a viewing mode that enhances the protagonist's perception, allowing them to see things that would ordinarily go unnoticed to regular people. This effectively turns gameplay into a matter of pressing a button to highlight all of the important things in an area, walking up to each one, and then pressing the action button to let Aloy make all of the critical deductions on her own, and then following a glowing trail to your next destination -- procedures so simple a five year old could do them. There's no critical thought or observation required on the player's end, as it essentially plays out like an interactive cutscene; until you have to fight something, you are an entirely passive agent pressing basic inputs to make the game move forward on its set trajectory.</div>
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It would be one thing if the Focus Vision were simply a crutch that you could use to help you when you're stuck, but it's practically a required part of solving quests because all of the quest solutions were designed with Focus Vision in mind. The quest objectives even specifically tell you to scan areas with the Focus. Although there are sometimes physical trails that you can actually observe and follow on your own, they tend to be so incredibly subtle that you might never notice them and would have to slow down to a snail's pace to keep track of them, or else are so spread apart that you have to guess where the next bread crumb is and hope you don't wander too far off from your previous one and lose track. Most of the time, however, the footprints you're supposed to be following don't actually exist anywhere in the world, meaning you're forced to bring up Focus Vision and highlight the track. It's incredibly shallow gameplay and gets to be pretty boring most of the time, when it would feel far more satisfying and engaging to have to make logical connections on your own, or else use some sort of actual problem-solving ability to resolve the issue. As it is, you're literally following a glowing line on the ground to your next objective, which is even more degrading than following a waypoint marker on your compass.</div>
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The side quests at least attempt to set up interesting scenarios for each one, usually in some kind of context that expands upon the world-building, or by giving you some kind of special character interaction. In "Honor the Fallen," for instance, you learn more about the Carja religion and history by talking to various priests and outsiders in the process of purifying religious shrines, and "The Forgotten" involves helping a woman find her mentally ill brother who may or may not pose an inadvertent danger to her where you eventually get to make a choice about whether to let the brother into his sister's care, or convince him to retreat further into self-isolation. However, the actual gameplay involved in these quests is simply a matter of following waypoint markers and glowing trails on the ground, and killing a bunch of incidental enemies who just kind of happen to be in the area, while the finer details of their narrative premises are delivered through relatively rigid dialogue sequences by completely forgettable characters.</div>
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One of the game's more interesting side quests, in terms of its premise, revolves around a sort of deranged lunatic who sees visions of how the various machines came into being by drinking their blood (or rather, their oil), but the gameplay loop for this quest is a repetitive string of "Go kill this machine you've already killed dozens or hundreds of times and bring him a special thing that only drops now that this quest is active, and then return to the quest-giver so that you can listen to him spout dialogue while he stands almost completely still, and where you can only see his lips and nose, and then repeat the process four more times." The expanded lore of those visions can be decently interesting if you believe them to be true, but the actual gameplay involved in unlocking those visions is tediously shallow, repetitive, and completely unexciting, while the presentation of those visions proves to be pretty dull as well. This guy could've been an interesting character that made this quest worthwhile and interesting, but they wasted the potential of having an actual character that you could interact with by treating him basically like an audio log. To be fair, his vocal delivery is sufficiently macabre that it really sells this guy as a disturbing weirdo, and his hut has a creepy, almost horrific vibe with all of the machine parts strewn about the place like gory innards illuminated by ritualistic candles. I suppose his headdress is visually symbolic, as well, with the red accents looking a bit like blood dripping from the machine skull. So there's that, at least, but I would've liked to have seen him animated a little more theatrically as if he's reenacting parts of his vision, or else if he could've done some kind of actual ritual with the "blood" that we'd actually get to see, or if he could've drawn cave paintings on his walls to illustrate his visions with dynamic camera pans across them, or if Aloy's Focus could magically let her see those visions, too. As it was, I feel like they could've just given me a paragraph of plain text and it would've had the same effect as the guy just standing there talking and doing nothing.</div>
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Another quest seems like it would be of extreme importance in terms of its story, since it involves you liberating a child king from the nefarious grip of a splinter faction of Carja, who were still loyal to the previous regime and were using the deposed king's youngest son as a figurehead to represent the true Sun King lineage, and so reuniting him with the rest of the royal family is supposed to help unify the Carja and put an end to the rogue Shadow Carja's legitimacy. However, this quest plays out with utterly mundane gameplay consisting of "talk to a guy you don't know, kill a sand worm, fight off a wave of dudes, then fight a thunderjaw" -- all stuff you've likely already done several times previously. Granted, the sand worm and thunderjaw are more rare, special enemies who're usually pretty fun to fight in any context, but the whole quest is nothing special in terms of its gameplay. Meanwhile, I never felt invested in the narrative premise of the quest because you spend around 75% of it fighting generic enemies that barely have anything to do with the plot, and the other 25% talking to people you don't know because you only just met them five minutes ago. And really, a quest like this should probably be the second-most important, consequential thing you do in the world, apart from saving the world from total destruction at the end of the main quest, but it's treated like a random one-off side mission that comes out of nowhere and only lasts about 15 minutes. Something as important as this should really be a much longer quest, perhaps spanning multiple quests so that you can have more time to develop familiarity and camaraderie with the characters, and so that it can actually build towards its grand, epic conclusion. It would be a lot more fun and engaging, for instance, to have to rescue Vanasha from a Shadow Carja prison after she's been found out for a spy, then work with her to sneak into Sunfall and find a discrete way to sneak the child king out of town, before cutting to the final chase where you're being pursued by the Eclipse and have to fight off machines while getting to the river. But instead of something like that, we basically skip all of the buildup and cut right to the climax, which makes the climax by itself actually anti-climactic.</div>
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Sadly, those two side quests are probably two of the best that the game has to offer, and yet they fell completely flat for me. Of the game's 36 side quests and errands, there're only three that I'd say I actually kind of enjoyed: "Sunstone Rock," where you arrive at a new outpost as it's being attacked by a pack of Ravagers, which then leads to a quest where you take up bounty hunting on three criminals who escaped during the attack, leading to three different scenarios as you encounter each of the three convicts; "Sun and Shadow," which acts as sort of a Romeo & Juliet-style romance story about star-crossed lovers, where it's hinted that the woman was planning to kill herself with poison after discovering the fate of her lover; and "Robbing the Rich," which is ostensibly a matter of retrieving a stolen heirloom sword but ends up taking several twists along the way. In fact, when looking back over the game's 36 side quests and errands, I struggle to recall any more than the ones I've listed here in the review; most of the quests are just incredibly short scenarios with simplistic, repetitive gameplay, given to you by people you only ever interact with for a few minutes in the entire game, all of which happens during the span of that one quest.</div>
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They become even more forgettable when you factor in that the actual gameplay objectives are practically interchangeable -- apart from the unique narrative bookends framing the quest at the beginning and end, you could probably swap out the middle portions of most quests and it wouldn't affect their stories, because those middle chunks tend to just be "go to an area, follow a trail, fight generic enemies" as minor speed bumps along the way to completing the overarching goal. And fighting enemies really does get to be wearisome; by the time I got around to doing quests for the Hunter's Lodge in Meridian, for instance, I was already long burned-out from pointlessly fighting machines while exploring 75% of the world, which then made it exasperating to have all of their initial quests sending me out hunting a bunch of machines I'd already killed countless times just to "prove myself" before I could eventually go and fight a supposedly unique, special, super-strong Thunderjaw which wasn't really any different from previous Thunderjaws I'd fought, and which was actually much easier by virtue of having a quest companion fighting alongside me. Petra's quest, likewise, is decently interesting because she's such a strong and likable character, and it even gives you a somewhat unique tower defense gameplay scenario using an over-powered Oseram cannon to fight off waves of bandits, but because I didn't discover it until near the end of my playthrough I ended up completely bored and disinterested any time I wasn't interacting with Petra.</div>
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There also aren't that many side quests in the game, as the official tally comes to only 22 full side quests and 14 "errands," the latter of which are much shorter, simpler tasks with less story and character interaction. The errands tend to be more basic fetch quests where a character simply declares a need for a particular machine part for some quick reason, and then you set out to retrieve it for them, although some have a few extra steps like following trails or talking to someone else en route to completing the main objective. Ultimately these errands feel more like filler content because they realized that 22 side quests probably wasn't enough for a world of this size, and thus needed to create some more, but didn't have any more good ideas for stories, characters, or gameplay scenarios to flesh out the extra quests. I guess I'm glad they're specifically marked as "lesser quests" because that way it doesn't give them any pretense of being more than just basic tasks, and so it's easier to skip them if you don't want to bother with them. In the grand scheme of things I'd rather have 30-some mediocre side quests than hundreds of bad ones, but normally when you sacrifice quantity like that you're able to improve quality -- by not having to work on as many side quests you're able to put more time and focus into the quests you do have -- and so it's kind of disappointing that there are so few in general, and that they're still not remarkably good.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Combat</span><br />
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Most of the game's combat centers around fighting beastly machines, many of which are wild animals like robo-deer, robo-horses, and robo-cattle that are pretty docile and tend to run away if you get close enough, although they will occasionally turn and fight. These tend to be pretty easy to defeat in a raw fight, but the difficulty stems from trying to take them down before they run away. As such, combat in the early stages deals more with stealth tactics where you try to sneak up on enemies or lure them into traps so that you can eliminate them silently one-by-one. You don't have to take that approach, of course, as the whole combat system is completely free-form and allows you use whatever tactics and weaponry suit your enjoyment best, but I found that stealthy approach to be most effective in the early stages of the game because it conserved resources, kept me out of harm's way, and allowed me to take out entire herds just by hiding in some bushes and whistling. Which, admittedly isn't very fun or engaging gameplay to spend most of your time sitting around waiting for enemies to slowly walk over to you so that you can press a button to effectively one-shot them. They're not meant to pose much of a danger to you, as they're meant to be weaker enemies that you hunt at lower levels for machine parts to craft ammunition and equipment upgrades, so they're not especially fun to fight unless they're mixed in with other enemies or if you're trying to complete a particular challenge in a Hunting Ground.</div>
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Where the real fun comes into play is when you start fighting bigger, more aggressive machines like Sawtooths, Stalkers, Bellowbacks, Ravagers, Behemoths, and Thunderjaws, among others. Combat against these enemies has a uniquely exciting and engaging quality that isn't found in a lot of other games for what I would consider to be three main reasons: 1) enemies all behave differently, as indicated by their unique mechanical designs, which leads to 2) a lot of tactical play in terms of how you engage each enemy's individual weakpoints, with 3) a variety of weapons allowing for a variety of different approaches to every combat situation.</div>
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In most other games, enemies are just giant health bars that deplete every time you damage them, with some body parts like headshots dealing more total damage, and thus winning the fight is simply a matter of dealing more damage to the enemy than they deal to you; in <i>Horizon</i>, enemies are built from specific mechanical components that dictate what they're capable of doing, and so targeting different parts of an enemy will disable different types of attacks, which can give you more of a tactical advantage depending on how you disable enemy components. You can see most components plainly just by looking at them -- Ravagers, for instance, have a very obvious cannon mounted on their shoulder blades, and Bellowbacks have giant sacs and gullets from which they spew elemental attacks at you -- but you can learn a lot more about each enemy's capabilities by scanning them with your Focus, which will highlight the individual components while telling you what each one does as well as their damage resistances and weaknesses. It might not be as obvious, for instance, that if you shoot out a Longleg's antennae, you can disable its ability to call in reinforcements, or that shooting it in its wings instead of its legs will disable its charge attack.</div>
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There's a great deal of tactics involved since each fight can play out a little differently depending on how you engage enemy weak points. Fighting a Stalker presents a bit of a unique challenge, for instance; they constantly drop mines throughout the area which greatly hampers your mobility, but they can also shoot you at range and turn invisible -- so when you catch a glimpse of them uncloaked, which component are you going to try to disable first? You might want to prioritize its stealth generator, but you might not have a clear shot at it because of the way the Stalker is moving, so do you hone in on the stealth generator and wait for an opportunity to take it out, or switch up your tactics to try to expose the stealth generator, or shift gears entirely and focus on something else? When fighting a Thunderjaw, do you target the freeze canisters first so that you can inflict greater damage on all subsequent attacks, or go for its disc launcher so that you can disable some of its ranged attacks while also allowing you to run in and grab the disc launcher to shoot back at it? If so, will you try to disable its tail attacks before getting in close, or try to keep a safe distance and expose high damage weak points like its data nexus or heart?</div>
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Variety is key, here, because you have 24 different machine enemies to fight, every one of which has its own unique weak points and special capabilities that affects how you fight each one individually, and the game does a pretty good job of introducing new enemy types at a reasonable pace such that for a good portion of the game it feels like you're always encountering something new, which will require a different approach. But then, you've also got a variety of different weapons and ammunition types at your disposal that can also alter your approach. The bow and arrow is your bread and butter for dealing basic damage, and you can also shoot fire arrows to inflict damage over time; freeze arrows to make enemies take greater damage while frozen; shock arrows to stun enemies; corruption arrows to turn enemies against other machines; tearblast arrows for knocking machine parts off; harvest arrows for producing greater resources from machines; plus more powerful (but more expensive to craft) regular arrows. Then you've got slingshots that fire different types of explosives like impacting grenades, proximity grenades, and timed grenades, or AOE blasts in all three primary elements; a ropecaster for tying down enemies and pinning them to the ground, thus making it easier to target specific components or simply to remove a machine from a fight for a little while; a tripcaster that can do fire, lightning, or blast damage if you can lure an enemy into the wire; the rattler that acts kind of like a shot-gun with a spread-pattern of bolts; and various types of traps that you lay. That's six different main weapon categories, each of which has a few different subcategories yielding around two-dozen different firing modes based on ammunition types, thus offering you a ton of different possibilities for desired loadouts, plus lots and lots of options for how you'll take down enemies.</div>
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Impressively, the tactics aren't just limited to sniping those obvious glowing weak points; the game also rewards you for trying things that might not seem so obvious when you scan an enemy. When fighting Shell-Walkers, for instance, if you can knock the armor plating off one of their legs and then shoot their leg for enough damage, they'll fall over onto their backs for several seconds, giving you opportunity to take out other weak points, or else shift your focus to another enemy. Similarly, when they have their shield up they're almost completely guarded behind it, except for their lightning gun poking out around the edge of the shield, but what do you do if they're guarding and you've already destroyed their lightning gun? What I figured out was that I could aim an explosive slingshot at the ground slightly to the side and behind the shield, which would damage them enough to possibly disable their shield, or else damage other components or just get them to switch up their tactics and lower their guard. If I'd just been aiming for glowing weak points the whole time, those fights against Shell-Walkers would've been a lot harder, but the combat system has a surprising amount of room for creativity such that it rarely feels straightforward.</div>
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New encounters against new enemies are particularly exhilarating, because they all behave so differently and you have no idea what they're going to do until you see them in action. You can scan them in advance to learn more about what they might be capable of, which can help you plan a better strategy, but that doesn't tell you how they move around, how quick they are, or what other types of melee attacks they might have. There's an improvisational element to it as well, even against enemies you're familiar with, because you might set up an elaborate plan to try to lure it into some tripwires and traps only to find it suddenly going a different direction and ignoring your traps. Other times you'll be in a fight with a common enemy and then suddenly have a new enemy type wander into the battle and catch you completely off guard, where you're frantically trying to scan them in the middle of an intense battle while avoiding attacks and shooting at things that look like they might be weak points while not really knowing whether they actually are or what mechanical function they might serve. That balance between planning and improvising is pretty strong, here, because you're usually capable of seeing enemies in the distance before you engage them, which gives you time to plan a course of action, but then things rarely go according to the plan, at which point you have to think and react quickly under extreme duress.</div>
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Unfortunately, combat can sometimes move a little too frantically to the point that it starts feeling like a chaotic mess. It's not uncommon to wind up in situations where you have multiple enemies unleashing an incessant barrage of attacks at you, thus forcing you to constantly mash on the dodge button while rarely getting an opportunity to slow down to line up a shot. Granted, that's sometimes your fault for allowing yourself to get caught up in that sort of situation, but other times enemies just seem to go berserk, or completely unpredictable things happen in the fight, and once you get into that clusterfuck everything moves so fast it's a literal struggle just to get the camera spun around to face where you need to be looking as things run circles around you and race past you. Even with the game's handy slow-motion "concentration mode" meant for lining up more precise shots, things still move so fast and erratically that you can have a perfect shot lined up and the enemy will suddenly jerk out of the way right before you release the trigger. It seems like slow-motion slows everything down at the same rate, including Aloy, so you still have the same issues as before but now with a little bit more reaction time, which is certainly better than nothing, but it might've helped to slow the rest of the world down a little more relative to Aloy so you can have a little bit more of a control advantage during those brief moments of limited concentration.</div>
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In fact, the general lack of gyroscopic aiming feels needlessly antiquated and makes combat a little more challenging than it ought to be. Per the story Aloy is supposed to be an elite hunter, but then when you're put in control of combat her aiming prowess is artificially restricted by the limitations of the joystick's rigid speeds and simulated acceleration. Joystick aiming is notoriously imprecise compared to mouse aiming, but console games have been innovating lately with gyroscopic accelerometers that allow you to make quick, fluid adjustments to your aim simply by tilting the controller, which gives you quasi-mouse-like control over speed, distance, and acceleration based on how far and how quickly you tilt the device. It's way more precise and responsive than simply relying on a joystick, and it's not like this is some kind of new phenomenon that <i>Horizon </i>coincidentally happened to miss out on, as it's been around since at least 2011 (if not earlier) with <i>Ocarina of Time 3DS</i>, and PlayStation Vita games from 2012 like <i>Gravity Rush, Killzone Mercenary,</i> and <i>Uncharted: Golden Abyss</i>. Hell, <i>Breath of the Wild</i>, which <i>Horizon </i>is constantly compared to by virtue of them releasing within days of each other, has gyroscopic aiming. And yet, <i>Horizon </i>is stuck with 2000's-era joystick aiming. Normally I wouldn't complain about that sort of thing because it's kind of what I expect from console games, but it's problematic in this case because of how quickly and erratically things move around, while also requiring you to hit really small weak points with extremely limited windows of opportunity -- it's a game that begs to be played with gyroscopic aiming or a mouse. Incidentally, a PC port was announced early this year which would completely rectify this issue, but it was unfortunately too little too late for me as I was already nearly finished with my PS4 playthrough when the PC port was announced.</div>
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Melee combat also suffers by virtue of extreme simplicity. Aloy only has two types of melee attacks -- a quick attack and a heavy attack -- and you can't really string attacks together for fluid combos, so it often feels like you're just whacking enemies with a baseball bat. There's not a whole lot of concern for timing or positioning, either, since the game has a sort of soft auto-target effect where the game will automatically move Aloy in to the nearest enemy when you press the attack button, closing the distance and turning however much is necessary to hit the target, as long as you're in the general vicinity of the enemy when you press the trigger. You can't really use melee combat to aim for specific components and it does so much less damage with none of the versatility that your ranged weaponry has, so it's not worth relying on in any capacity and feels like an underdeveloped concept.</div>
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Combat against human enemies likewise fails to live up to the grand spectacle and frenetic intensity of fighting machines. Unlike the machines, human enemies are all basically the same and follow the same AI patterns, with not much concern for self-preservation as melee fighters continually charge straight at you and easily get picked off with a ranged weapon, while bow-users tend to stand out in the open or else predictably duck in and out of cover. Also unlike the machines, they don't have a bunch of unique body parts and weaknesses -- you just aim for the head like in every other shooter ever made. It all feels rote and formulaic, and brings absolutely nothing new to the table, with generally simple and boring mechanics. The only real value that I found with human enemies is that it can be decently fun to try to wipe out an entire bandit camp with stealth -- watching enemy patrols, waiting for the right opportunity to swoop in for a stealth kill, picking off lone enemies at range with the bow and arrow, and so on.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">RPG Elements</span><br />
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<i>Horizon </i>isn't strictly an RPG, but it has some notable RPG elements. The main thing is its leveling system, where you gain experience points towards leveling up with every defeated enemy and completed quest, leading to a new skill point with each level-up that can be spent in a few different skill trees to learn new abilities. It's an "ok" system in the sense that it has several different starting points and a few branching paths, with more advanced skills costing two and three times as many skill points to learn, all of which requires you to think strategically and prioritize your skill points based on your desired playstyle and what benefits interest you the most.</div>
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Unfortunately, the whole thing felt kind of bland to me, in large part because there aren't a whole lot of active skills that alter the way you play the game. The majority of skills are simply passive modifiers that enhance the output or efficiency of things you're already doing, such as "Low Profile" which further reduces your visibility to enemies when crouching, or "Heavy Lifter" that lets you move faster while wielding a heavy weapon, or "Gatherer" which grants you extra plants when foraging, among others. Other skills continue to enhance other skills with even more passive modifiers, like "Strong Strike" and "Strong Strike+," "Concentration+," "Critical Hit+," "Precision+," "Combat Override+," "Scavenger+," and so on. Some skills like "Balanced Aim" are almost completely worthless because of how infrequently you actually encounter rope bridges, while skills such as "Strike From Above/Below" have somewhat restricted viability by virtue of the game's restricted climbing system that doesn't allow you to climb outside of prescribed hotspots. A few skills even feel like they shouldn't even be skills at all, but rather feel like ordinary gameplay features that got shoe-horned into the progression system; why, for instance, do you need to spend a skill point to be able to pick something up while on horseback? It feels like a waste of a skill point just to get the game to stop wasting your time dismounting and remounting every time you need to pick something up. Likewise, not being able to remove equipment modifications without the "Tinker" skill (which is, for some reason, a max-level skill) means you almost can't use your best modifications in your weapons for most of the game because you never know when you'll get newer, better weaponry that will render your modifications obsolete.</div>
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So out of all the game's skills, there are really only five types of skills that felt like they altered the game in any significant way. Those would be the various "Strike" skills that let you execute critical hit animations under various circumstances (like when an enemy is downed, or un-alerted to your presence), "Double Shot" and "Triple Shot" that let you nock extra arrows to deal double or triple damage, "Lure Call" that lets you whistle to call unsuspecting enemies towards your position for stealth take-downs, "Concentration" and "Hunter Reflexes" that enable slow-motion for more accurate aiming, and "Call Mount" that summons a mount out of nowhere. And really, even those ones aren't all that exciting. The various "Strike" skills, for instance, are all basically the same gameplay function -- press R1 to watch a special attack animation -- they're just enabled under different circumstances. "Call Mount" and "Lure Call" are like time-saving shortcut skills that spare you the hassle of sneaking up on and overriding a robo-horse or throwing rocks to get enemies' attention. I really would have liked to have seen more varied and more active skills thrown into the mix, that would allow you to do more radically different and engaging things in the world.</div>
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As a result, the progression system felt somewhat bland and stagnant to me; I could definitely tell I was getting stronger as the game went on, but it all felt so passive that it was rarely affecting gameplay, apart from moments when I acquired a new type of weapon that let me do something different. Mostly, it just felt like my stats were increasing in the background, a lot of which could be attributed to simply acquiring better gear and better equipment modifications. It doesn't help that the somewhat linear map design means enemies follow a similar strength curve where they get progressively stronger the more you work your way counter-clockwise towards the Carja region, meaning that you're pretty much always going to be at an appropriate level to handle anything you might encounter as long as you're not skipping past content to go straight to higher-level areas. There's almost no opportunity, in other words, to encounter barometer-setting enemies that you're completely incapable of fighting at a low level, thus providing you with a gauge for how strong or weak you are relative to the rest of the world so that you feel some kind of goal or incentive to get stronger. Rather, you go about encountering enemies in a prescribed, intended order as they're presented to you without much opportunity to deviate from the main path of progression.</div>
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The other main RPG element is that you occasionally get to pick emotional responses in dialogue so that you can somewhat shape Aloy's personality over the course of the game. In certain situations, you're given the choice of reacting with your brain, heart, or fist -- or in other words, cleverly, compassionately, or aggressively. It doesn't really matter which one you pick, as there aren't any social stats governing Aloy's personality, although it does change the outcome of certain scenes in a superficial way, sometimes a little ways down the road. For instance, how you choose to respond after Aloy's hit in the face with a rock thrown by a Nora child affects how the scene plays out later on once you meet that boy again, before the Proving. The cosmetic effects of these choices are nice, to be sure, but there's not a lot of mechanical consequence for what you choose, except in a handful of situations. This is where the game really starts creeping into RPG territory, and while the inclusion is fine for just an open-world action game the strong emphasis on story and characterization makes me want to see more mechanical effects of these decisions -- either with branching consequences in quests, or with systems that affect Aloy's statistics or personality more substantially.</div>
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I should also mention there can be a dissonant dichotomy between Aloy's moralistic world view and your own role-playing options, where it feels like there's a separation in the character between gameplay and cutscenes. Sometimes the game gives you the option to show mercy or enact vengeance, or to take the moral high road or be petty, or fight fire with fire or let bygones be bygones, but then other times in cutscenes she's making bold declarative statements that I don't necessarily agree with, with no input from the player. There was one section of the game where Aloy was reacting all on her own and I found myself agreeing with Sylens (her remote ally who talks to her over her Focus) more than I did with my own character. If nothing else, it's weird that you play such a well-defined and established character as Aloy, but are then given random, sporadic control of her personality. It feels like it should be more of one versus the other; like either don't give us choices and just make her a stand-alone, independent character (a la Nathan Drake or Lara Croft), or else give us more consistent control over role-playing options and characterization in dialogue (as you would in an actual RPG). The whole "playing it both ways" just makes it feel jarring when those options show up unexpectedly, and then jarring when they inexplicably aren't there in other situations.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Controls/UI</span><br />
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Being a PS4-exclusive (at the time of this review -- again, the PC port was just recently announced) I don't expect to have the most elaborate or comprehensive controls available for a gamepad -- you only have so many buttons to work with, as opposed to a keyboard and mouse which give you a hundred more buttons and a fast, free-moving cursor -- but there are still some weird decisions with the controls and user interface in <i>Horizon </i>that don't even make sense to me from a console perspective.</div>
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For example: the game limits you to only four equipped weapons at a time -- you press L1 to bring up the weapon select sub-screen, and then aim the control stick up, down, left, or right to switch weapons. That four-directional item slot system is something you'd commonly see with directional pads which are physically limited to only four directions, but when it's tied to its own sub-menu and navigated with a joystick you have a full 360-degree radius in which you can slot items -- you don't have to arbitrarily limit yourself to only four spots since you can easily fill in multiple diagonals with the joystick. <i>Prey</i>, also from 2017, for instance, has a full-scrolling hotwheel that you can equip a practically infinite amount of items onto. In <i>Horizon</i>, you get four slots, and that's it. I suppose the argument could be that having only four active equipment slots forces you to plan ahead, such that you bring the correct tools for the desired job or else have to improvise on the spot with sub-optimal tools in hand, but in reality there's nothing stopping you from simply pausing the game and swapping weapons out at a moment's notice, even in the middle of a fight. You can effectively equip and swap between any and all weapons you might want in a fight; there's just a pointless, gameplay-disrupting extra step involved in doing so, all because of that arbitrary four-weapon limit on the quick-swap menu.</div>
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The actual directional-pad has its own separate function for cycling between consumable items like potions, traps, rocks, and so on; you press left and right to cycle between items, and press down to use the selected item. Pressing up will always use healing medicine from your salve pouch. This system is more typical of what you'd expect from a console game, except it's a nightmare to use because they automatically lump all of your consumable items (and even a few actions like "Lure Call" or "Summon Mount") into that one item wheel. Meaning that at any point you could be 6-12 button-presses away from selecting the thing you actually want which becomes extremely problematic in the middle of an intense fight where you're frantically trying to switch to a healing potion or a particular elemental resistance potion and have to furiously mash on the left and right buttons while simultaneously being unable to move except by rolling, cycling through two or three items, and repeating the process until you get what you want. As far as I can tell there's no way to unequip particular items, so you always have to scroll through everything at any given moment you want to use something, when it seems like they could've easily let you equip only what you want, or else put it into a similar time-slowing item-wheel like the weapons. For that matter, you're also incapable of using these consumable items from the pause screen, so unlike swapping weapons you're stuck fumbling around with awkward controls in real time.</div>
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The actual inventory system is without a doubt the worst offender. The icons don't always do a good enough job indicating what's what at a quick glance, seeing as all of the machine hearts and lenses look incredibly similar, so unless you meticulously memorize each and every symbol you can't tell at a glance whether you have a particular lens or heart without scrolling through each and every option to read the pop-up text. The sorting options are extremely limited, too, with no way to sort weapons and armor as they're all forcibly organized in the order you acquire them, meaning that towards the end of the game your primary weapons and armor are always going to be near the bottom of the window, thus requiring an extra button press to get to your desired weapons, or worse, they could end up in the middle if you held off buying certain weapons until later in the game. Different types of weapons and armor get scattered around essentially at random, instead of clumping all weapons of a certain rarity together, or of a certain classification together, with no way to sort them by any prominent category, or even to manually drag and drop into whatever spots you'd like. It would be nice, for instance, to put the top six weapons that I use most frequently at the top of the list, instead of having three kind of close together and then the other three spread out randomly where I have to hunt a little bit to find what I want. Equipment modifications at least sort by type, and then by relative strength values, so there's that at least, but the actual equipment sorting is non-existent. Granted, with only 20-some weapons and armor it's not a huge mess to sort through, but this is a really simple Quality of Life feature that would've been easy enough to implement, and which is sorely missing.</div>
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The resources window, on the other hand, is a huge mess because it lumps all kinds of different animal parts, machine parts, natural resources, certain consumable items, crafting components, and sell-able junk items into one giant window, when there really should be different sub-sections to better separate the different sub-categories of resources. As with the modifications tab they do auto-sort into like groups, and they do at least give you the option to sort by item value, rarity, and sell popularity, but those are simply not enough options. Old World trinkets and machine cores, for instance, only exist to sell to vendors for money, as they aren't used in any crafting recipes and aren't exchanged for more specific goods, and yet they sort into completely different spots of the window based on their sell value so you have to go hunting for each one individually every time you want to sell off your excess junk. These items are specifically marked as being only useful for "selling for metal shards," but they don't auto-sort into a "junk" tab, or give you a "sell all junk" option. It's nice that the game indicates what each type of resource is used for, but this information is sometimes so incredibly vague that it's of practically zero value; you can sell almost anything for metal shards, but likewise almost everything is also supposedly "used for trading with merchants," except there's really no indication of where, how, when, or in what capacity you might use those items in order to trade with merchants. This easily leads to a hoarder's mentality because you have no idea when you might need a particular item for a quest, or to trade for something of better value. I, for instance, held onto multiple stacks of Slagshine Glass, Desert Glass, Processed Metal Blocks, and other things throughout most of my playthrough because merchants supposedly would trade for them, and it turns out I barely needed to use any at all, so they just sat there wasting space in my inventory the entire game.</div>
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You're further incentivized to hold onto everything because NPC's sometimes request specific parts for quests or in trade, and those parts have a variable drop rate so you never know when a rare or uncommon item is going to drop, and if you have something already then you don't want to have to go out wasting time farming it again if you sell it and then discover later that you actually needed it. This issue is compounded by the fact that you don't have a whole lot of inventory space to begin with, which quickly fills up because of arbitrary stack limits for items, such that you're constantly running out of inventory space and having to drop, disassemble, or make a trip to a merchant to sell off excess goods, with no clear indication of what's worth keeping or not. I made an early decision to invest in skills that would grant me extra materials from gathered resources or downed enemies, realizing that the earlier I got those skills the more resources I would have in the long run, which ultimately just ended up cluttering my inventory even more and making me constantly stop what I was doing to scroll through the inventory one-by-one looking for junk to disassemble so that I could continue playing the game. Unlike games such as <i>STALKER</i>, or <i>Resident Evil 4</i>, or <i>System Shock 2</i>, where inventory management plays an important role in the gameplay by providing a fun, challenging puzzle with meaningful decisions, the inventory management in <i>Horizon </i>just feels like an obnoxious, tedious chore that simply gets in the way of the fun.</div>
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Of all the content in <i>Horizon</i>, I enjoyed its expansion DLC <i>The Frozen Wilds</i> the most, because it stepped up the overall quality of its content while also delivering it in a smaller, more concise package. It's basically the same gameplay formula as the base game except in a far more rewarding, engaging experience. You still have a bunch of collectibles to collect, for instance, but whereas the collectibles served practically zero purpose in the base game, the Bluegleam in <i>The Frozen Wilds</i> is used to trade for really powerful weapons and armor, and collecting Pigment is guaranteed to get you several high-level modifications and even more Bluegleam. The side quests are generally more interesting and memorable, with the game's single best quest coming in the expansion, when you explore an old water processing facility with an eccentric Oseram, working in tandem to navigate across platforming obstacles. It's a quest with mechanical character interaction and an actually memorable character, with audio logs that tell a fairly interesting story of the last girls on earth who form a punk rock band using the machinery as instruments. The other side quests likewise relate to the main plot of the expansion a little more closely and set up some other interesting environments to traverse. The platforming even shows hints of improvement, with whaterwheel-esque ledges that require you to time your jump at the right moment to cross the gap successfully -- it's a platforming challenge that you can actually fail at, and that requires actual user input to progress. Likewise, there's a little bit more of an emphasis on active problem-solving, with certain quests having actual puzzles that you need to solve to advance the quest. And the fact that it happens in its own self-contained zone means that it doesn't feel excessively spread out, while its smaller size limits the amount of tedious filler that you have to go through to get the good stuff.</div>
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Unfortunately it can have a pretty drastic effect on the progression depending on when you do it, because it gives you so much extra opportunity for experience and more powerful weapons, armor, and modifications that you can become insanely over-powered too early in the game, if you do like I did and complete <i>The Frozen Wilds</i> before entering the Carja Sundom. I went into <i>The Frozen Wilds</i> a little earlier than I should've because I was already becoming over-leveled for the main quest line, and figured I wanted to experience a little more of a challenge by jumping into more difficult content, which of course made me even more over-leveled for the main quest. And since I ended up enjoying the content in the expansion much more than almost anything else in the base game, it meant that I hit the game's high point (for me, anyway) about halfway through my playthrough, meaning that completing the rest of the game was all downhill from there. That's partly my fault for choosing to do that, but it doesn't help that the entrance to the DLC is placed tangentially along the main route to Meridian; it might have been better for the sake of pacing and progression to put the DLC on the opposite side of the map so that it's only accessible after entering the Carja Sundom, but I'll admit it makes better geographic sense to have your snowy tundra in the northeast, as opposed to somewhere out west jutting off from a sandy desert. Conversely, I suppose it's possible that finishing the base game first and then going into <i>The Frozen Wilds</i> might've still left me over-leveled for the expansion, but at least it would've left the more interesting content for last.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In Conclusion</span><br />
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<i>Horizon: Zero Dawn</i> is a decently enjoyable game with some really strong elements, which is made all the more impressive by the fact that developer Guerrilla Games had no previous experience working on open-world games like this, but at the same time you can also tell that they had never worked on anything like this before. The story, world-building, and combat are all excellent -- it's worth it to play <i>Horizon </i>if all you do is rush your way through the main quest and a few side quests so that you can get the major plot elements and fight some of the cooler robo-dinosaurs -- but the open-world gameplay formula felt like a missed opportunity to do something more substantial or more engaging with the experience. Most of the time, the open-world design just felt like it got in the way of my fun; even though I do think that the game benefits from being open-world as opposed to purely linear, the open-world is not executed in a way that takes full advantage of the open-world formula. Repetitive combat encounters, unrewarding exploration, forgettable quests from forgettable NPCs, tedious crafting, survival, and inventory management systems, and stagnant, mostly passive character progression made large chunks of the game feel noticeably bland and unsatisfying to me. I don't regret playing it and did have some really fun moments along the way to completion, but it's probably not something I'll remember too fondly, or ever feel the desire to replay in the future.</div>
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I would be interested in seeing a sequel, however, as the base game showed enough promise that I can't help but wonder what it might have been like with more fleshed-out gameplay ideas and better execution. The limited content in <i>The Frozen Wilds</i> expansion is already a noticeable improvement over the base game, albeit in small, targeted increments, which leaves me more optimistic about what might be doable with a whole new game starting from the ground up. With a pretty solid foundation already on their hands, they can pretty much keep the combat system the exact same, except add new weapons and enemies, continue the story with Sylens and the Horus Titans (which were merely teased throughout the base game), add more variety in activities in the over world, make exploration more rewarding, implement a more free-form climbing system with more tools to facilitate exploration, and tighten up the interface, among other things, while keeping the world about the same size (possibly even a tad smaller, as long as there's more worthwhile content in it), and it would be a significant improvement over the original, and would likely leave a better, more lasting impression with me. That's something I would look forward to playing. As it stands, however, I can only give a mild recommendation for the existing game, as it has some really great ideas and gameplay elements that are unfortunately in service of a fairly boring open world that ultimately left me feeling more underwhelmed than satisfied.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-21681416958412718732020-01-18T14:19:00.000-05:002020-01-18T14:19:30.364-05:00Until Dawn - Review | A Uniquely Chilling Horror Experience<div>
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<i>Note: Until Dawn is best enjoyed going into it completely blind. This review has minor spoilers for specific situations and outcomes but does not spoil any main plot elements or twists.</i></div>
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<i>Until Dawn</i> is a cinematic horror game in which you play as a group of teenagers attempting to survive the night in a snowy mountain lodge after their winter getaway takes a sinister turn. Returning to the same lodge where two of their friends went missing one year prior, the group reunites and soon finds themselves trapped on the mountain with a murderous psychopath who's trying to torture and kill them off one-by-one. You play as one character at a time, usually partnered with someone else, switching characters between chapters and even between scenes, with a main objective of trying to make every character survive until dawn. To do so, you'll have to make smart decisions with quick reaction speeds, as the game's "butterfly effect" system can create far-reaching consequences for seemingly innocuous decisions that could ultimately lead to a character's death. The game plays like an interactive movie, where the bulk of the gameplay consists of making decisions and reacting to quick-time-events during cutscenes, alternating with sequences that give you freedom to explore your surroundings for story clues while trying to complete an objective. While lacking conventional survival-horror mechanics like health bars or resource management, each character has various stats that can be influenced by your decisions and which can affect the outcome of certain interactions. Ultimately, the potential life and death of each of the game's eight characters acts as a sort of resource management system of its own, and it's here where the game derives most of its survival-horror tension, since you'll fail the game (or at least get an unsatisfying ending) if none of them make it out alive.</div>
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I'm a huge fan of horror in all forms of media, and yet despite my love for the genre I find that horror games can be really hit or miss, usually missing more often than they hit for me. Part of the problem is that I'm just so desensitized to the genre that the usual tricks of jump scares, violent gore, and spooky imagery just don't phase me much; while I appreciate a good horror aesthetic, I find that I need strong gameplay mechanics to invoke a sense of fear or dread in me, which often isn't the case with a lot of modern horror games that basically amount to "haunted house ride, jump-scare simulators" where you walk around creepy environments while scary things happen at you. With <i>Until Dawn's</i> heavy reliance on cutscenes, quick-time events, and gameplay sequences that border on "walking simulator" territory, I was a little worried this might be the case, but it turns out the game's central "butterfly effect" system, coupled with the fact that the characters can all die in a variety of different ways, at different stages of the game, actually made this one of the more tensely engaging horror games that I've played in a long time.</div>
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Watch this review in video format.</div>
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As a cinematic horror game, <i>Until Dawn</i> molds itself pretty closely after teen slasher movies or TV shows in an effort to make it feel more like an interactive movie. There's a heavy reliance on cutscenes with dynamic camera angles and camera movement, of course, and every single character is not only voiced but also motion-capped by real actors including Hayden Panettiere, Peter Stormare, and the academy award-winning Rami Malek. In that regard it definitely has the look of a real movie, but it also feels like a movie, too; the prologue sequence functions like a typical pre-credits sequence that's meant to set the tone and act as a mini-teaser for what the audience can expect in the full movie before the story actually begins, and then it goes right into an actual opening credits and title sequence. The game's use of chapters, meanwhile, act as baked-in stopping points with designed cliff-hangers like you'd find in episodic television, with each chapter opening with a "previously on <i>Until Dawn</i>" sequence as most long-form shows do. The story likewise follows a typical three-act structure (split into 10 chapters) where the first act is used heavily as exposition to introduce the characters and the setting before the main threat appears, which leads into act two where the group has to investigate the threat and try to find ways to avoid dying, and then act three where the mystery is revealed and the group hatches their plan to escape their situation.</div>
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With the story and cinematic presentation being arguably the game's main focus, <i>Until Dawn</i> spends a lot of time early on establishing its tone and atmosphere before the horror kicks in and the characters' lives become at stake. The game spans 10 chapters, plus a prologue, with each chapter representing roughly one hour of in-game time over the course of a single night. The prologue takes place one year prior to the real start of the game, and gives us a glimpse into how two of the group's friends went missing -- the group had been playing a prank on Hannah by tricking her into a fake setup with Mike, whom she had a huge crush on, only to pop out and surprise her as she started taking her top off. Embarrassed, Hannah runs out of the lodge with her sister Beth chasing after her in hopes of consoling her, when they're suddenly attacked by someone (or some<i>thing</i>) in the woods, fall off a cliff, and are never seen or heard from again. One year later, their brother Josh invites everyone back to his family's lodge as a way to honor their memory by partying like old times because, as he says, "it's what Hannah and Beth would've wanted."</div>
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That's where the game starts in proper, with chapter one showing everyone arriving at the lodge and awkwardly dancing around the subject of Hannah and Beth, and chapter two putting the characters into their respective situations where they start to split off and eventually have to face different assortments of terror throughout the night based on their own unique situations. The game is sure to drop hints throughout both of these chapters that foreshadow the looming horror, like seeing wanted posters for an escaped criminal in the area, newspaper clippings about a disgruntled Washington family employee who seems to have an agenda against Josh's family, and a missing fire axe, among other things, along with the usual B-movie horror tropes of harmless fake-out jumpscares by the characters startling each other or wild animals suddenly jumping out of nowhere, but no one is actually attacked until chapter three and the real danger doesn't really kick in until chapter four, so the first couple chapters are really all about introducing the characters and setting the mood with a slow and steady buildup to the horror.</div>
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At first glance the characters seem intentionally set up to fit into stereotypical "teen slasher movie" roles -- Sam is the compassionate vegan, Mike is Mr Popularity and Class President, Jessica is the hot girl who knows it and takes advantage of it, Emily is the conceited honor roll student, Matt is the kind-hearted and well-intentioned athlete, Ashley is the quiet bookworm, Chris is the comedic class-clown, and Josh is the wild party animal -- but as the game progresses those cliche roles start to fade away and the characters just start to become like real people. Although those basic character traits remain consistent for each character, they aren't solely defined by those traits -- in other words, they aren't shoe-horned into situations with ham-fisted dialogue meant to exaggerate or draw attention to those traits. The fact that Matt is a letterman-jacket-wearing athlete doesn't really play into his character and the game doesn't do anything stupid like having him use some sort of football maneuver to juke past the psycho, or drawing up a football play while strategizing a plan with the rest of the group. Rather, he's just a guy who's maybe not the most out-going socially and a little whipped by his girlfriend as a result of wanting to be a people-pleaser. Likewise, it would've been too easy to write Jessica like a spoiled princess who complains about every little thing, or as a useless bimbo who just gets in the way with her ineptitude, but they made her fun and capable, showing her winning a snowball fight against Mike and in my case, surviving in the mines all on her own, with no help from anyone else. They also added a little extra depth and complexity to her character by having her reveal to Mike during a moment of intimacy that her outward confidence and "I'm a sexy babe and I know it" attitude are really just a facade to hide the fact that she's actually very insecure and anxious about herself.</div>
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What's most impressive about the characters is that I found myself rooting for and caring about people that I initially didn't like, because they actually started to grow on me. Mike, for instance, seemed like a bit of an insensitive, inconsiderate jerk at first, what with him scaring Matt and Emily and patronizing them when they rebuke him, not taking things seriously, and then being seen possibly cheating on his current girlfriend Jessica with his ex-girlfriend, Emily. But, throughout the game he rises to being the most heroic, courageous, and level-headed thinker of the group, risking his life racing after Jess when she's violently abducted from the guest cabin, using the best judgment of what to do once they've apprehended the psycho, and volunteering to go off searching for the gondola lift keys. Josh, likewise, started off on my "hate list" because "partying like pornstars" seems like a totally inappropriate tone and mindset to have considering what happened to his sisters a year ago, and then he does some other questionable things that make it seem like he's out of touch with reality, but later in the game you get to see a little backstory into what he's been going through over the past year, and I started to sympathize with him. In fact, I found myself really attached to each and every character, caring about their relationships with one another and genuinely wanting each and every one of them to not only survive, but with the best possible psychological outcomes. The only one that really bothered me from either a character or writing standpoint is Emily because she's constantly and excessively condescending to her supposed friends and boyfriend, but even then I still found myself compelled to try to keep her alive.</div>
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The story is actually framed by trips to a psychotherapist's office where you, as the player, get evaluated and questioned by a therapist between chapters with dialogue that just straight up breaks the fourth wall. These segments have ostensibly nothing to do with the actual gameplay, but they give you opportunities to slow down and reflect on your decisions, and to give more thought to characters or situations that you might easily gloss over otherwise. He'll ask whether you value honesty or loyalty more in other people, for instance, which can possibly influence the way you play the game now that you're thinking about it and he'll later judge you if you aren't sticking with your chosen principle. Some of your responses to his surveys actually end up being implemented in the game later on; if, for example, you say that you're afraid of needles, then the psycho will use a syringe injection to tranquilize Sam instead of sleeping gas, or if you say you're afraid of scarecrows then a spring-loaded trap in the woods will be styled like a scarecrow. Besides offering moments of reflective respite from the horror, these scenes also help to set the tone of upcoming chapters; as the game progresses and the horror elements become more and more prominent, Dr Hill's office progressively deteriorates and fills with disturbing horror imagery, somewhat matching the descent into madness that the characters go through over the course of the game.</div>
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The first few chapters will likely feel pretty boring to anyone seeking instant thrills, since most of what you do is simply walk around and talk to people while trying to complete straightforward objectives like "find the spray deodorant in the bathroom" (so that you can use it as a flamethrower to melt the ice off the lock on the front door) and "get the water heater in the basement running" (so that Sam can take her precious bath), while the fake-out jumpscares could be seen as a cheap and ineffectual way to inject horror into otherwise mundane situations, but I for one really appreciate the slow pacing in the early chapters because all that time spent interacting with the characters and exploring the lodge gives you time to become invested in the characters and immersed in the setting before the stakes begin ramping up, which is a big part in making the horror actually effective because it's pretty hard to feel scared if you aren't immersed in the game and don't care about what's happening. Many of those "false alarm" jumpscares, likewise, aren't necessarily meant to scare you -- the player -- but rather to scare the characters and put them a little on edge, while maintaining a suspenseful tone by implying that, although these scares are safe and harmless for now, they soon won't be -- you as a player just don't know when -- as we've already been shown in the prologue sequence that there is real danger to these characters, and as the story clues picked up while exploring the early chapters point your mind towards expecting something sinister.</div>
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The story presents a pretty strong mystery that starts out grounded in reality, where early indications suggest there's a grudged psycho on the loose and are later confirmed when you actually start encountering this psycho, but as the game progresses and you discover more and more story clues, you begin to realize there's something else also happening on the mountain, out in the woods, which ultimately poses a bigger threat to the group's survival. For various reasons, characters end up having to leave the lodge to explore the surrounding mountain range and discover an old mine and sanatorium, both of which have been abandoned for 60 years and have interconnected backstories that relate to what's happening to the group in the present time. These areas provide a nice change of pace in terms of the environments, but it's here that the story really starts to come into full form by expanding the mystery into whole new areas as you try to piece together how these dilapidated old areas relate to one another, and to the Washington family lodge. The mystery, then, is about figuring out who the psycho is, what his motivations are, and how the old mine and sanatorium connect to the current events, and then later, what's happening out in the woods on the rest of the mountain.</div>
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The mystery is pretty solid, here, with there being enough hints offered through the various clues you discover during exploration to guide you towards the solution, but only if you pay close attention and take the time to study the evidence with relation to everything else, because there are also a few good twists and red herrings to keep you guessing even when you think you've started to figure everything out. In other words, the evidence gives you enough information to form reasonable theories without making the solutions too predictable. I, for instance, was able to figure out most of the game's major plot twists before their big revelations, but that was with me periodically stopping to review and cross-reference evidence and actively trying to fill in the gaps as best I could, and I still had one major twist completely elude me while an early theory proved to be completely false. Even though I'd already figured out many of the important twists beforehand, it was still satisfying to come to those conclusions on my own and see how it all played out.</div>
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Finding evidence isn't too hard, since it mostly amounts to checking everywhere in an area for the telltale item sparkle before moving on, but whereas other games would treat this gameplay element as pure filler for the sake of item-collecting achievements that only vaguely add backstory to irrelevant things you don't care about, <i>Until Dawn</i> weaves the item collecting directly into the main story. Most pieces of evidence have something important to say about the story, or about the other pieces of evidence, and how much evidence you collect actually influences the outcome of certain scenes, with characters commenting on things you've noticed or acting even more confused by what's going on if you've missed key pieces of evidence. One clue subtly warns you about a potential threat that could lead to a character's death, and another character dies if you don't find enough evidence to reveal what actually happened one year prior. So besides cluing you into the story, it also clues the characters into what's going on and can have practical effects on the outcome of the story.</div>
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Besides clues, you can also find various totems, which act as more meta, fourth-wall breaking premonitions of things you can expect up ahead, like danger totems that warn you of risky situations, or guidance totems that suggest favorable actions you should take, or fortune totems that show potential positive outcomes, among others. These totems show a brief glimpse of a potential future cutscene, and can help you to make smart decisions if you can find them, and more importantly, if you can interpret them correctly. Most of the time the snippets are so short that you can't really gleam much information from them, like for instance, when you see a shot of Ashley's decapitated head rolling on the floor in the mines -- it does nothing to clue you into how she dies, and basically just says "hey watch out, this character can die sometime in the mines." In some cases they're taken so far out of context that you have no hope of guessing their purpose until moments before the scene actually plays out, when the puzzle piece finally drops into place and you can see the full picture, so to speak.</div>
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It's an interesting system because it gives you genuinely helpful rewards for thoroughly exploring your environments, but at the same time they're sometimes not really helpful at all, or are more confusing than if you just never saw them in the first place. Various decisions that you can make in the game lead to branching consequences, and so you might acquire totems that are straight up wrong, or that will never happen, depending on what choices you've made. There's a point in the story, for instance, where Jessica disappears off-screen and isn't seen or heard from for several chapters, while two totems show directly contradicting outcomes of her fate; a "loss" totem shows her dead with half her face missing, and a "fortune" totem shows her waking up in the same location, alive and seemingly unharmed. The whole thing is like a Schroedinger's Jessica because she's apparently both alive and dead with no way of knowing which one is true until you find her much later. Another one shows some character getting their head or eyes crushed, but there's no context to indicate when, where, or how this might happen, or even who it is in the first place, so it's of practically zero value in helping you make any sort of decision, especially when none of the decisions you make have obvious implications that a certain action might lead to getting your head crushed in.</div>
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Sometimes they're just straight-up confusing, like when a danger totem warns of Ashley getting punched in the face, which makes you think later on when you find a pair of scissors "I should hold on to these and use them to stop the psycho from attacking Ashley," which is apparently what <i>causes</i> her to get punched in the first place. The worst offender has to be a guidance totem that shows Emily handing some type of gun to Matt, insinuating that this is something you should do to ensure these characters' survival, but depending on what you said as Matt a few scenes prior, giving him the flare gun is actually the wrong decision and can lead directly to Matt's death while also significantly lowering Emily's chances at survival. As per the game's logic, if you (as Matt) agree with Emily that the two of you should go to the radio tower to try to call for help, then he'll choose to shoot the flare gun immediately if you give it to him, while you're controlling Emily, meaning that neither of them has the flare gun available when faced with dangerous situations.</div>
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This situation is particularly frustrating because there's no logical connection between "agreeing to go to the radio tower" and "shooting the flare gun." For starters, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to fire the flare gun in that moment, in the middle of a snow storm with low visibility and while no one knows to be actively looking for a distress signal, meaning it's a complete waste to use it there at all, and secondly, just because you agree with Emily that going to the radio tower to call for help is a good idea doesn't mean you think it's a good idea to randomly shoot a flare gun. When it comes to these types of games that emphasize choices and consequences, it's important that those choices lead to logical conclusions so that you feel like you have some degree of predictive control over what transpires, and so that a wrong decision feels like an error in judgment as opposed to getting randomly screwed for no reason. When a game's central gameplay focus revolves around making smart decisions, it should be possible to actually make smart decisions based on information provided to you, which isn't always the case with <i>Until Dawn</i>. I guess that's actually the whole point of the "butterfly effect" system, but while there are times when the game's unforseen consequences feel like a logical progression that at least makes sense in retrospect, there are also plenty of other times when they feel somewhat random and arbitrary. </div>
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Early on, for instance, you're given a choice as Chris to shoot a squirrel who runs onto the shooting range; if you do so, it startles birds in the area who attack Sam and cut her above her eyebrow. Then later, when she's being pursued by the psycho and falls, the wound opens up and starts bleeding, leaving enough of a blood trail for the psycho to find her once she goes into hiding. There's no way you could've known that shooting the squirrel would lead to Sam getting caught by the psycho, but the chain of events at least makes sense, and you probably should've known that killing a harmless animal for show would be a bad decision with no real benefit. In contrast, there's no reason to believe that giving Matt the flare gun would be a bad decision, especially since a guidance totem specifically advises you to do so, and so "failing" that decision feels like you just got screwed by bad game design instead of making a bad choice.</div>
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Naming the consequences of these decisions after the butterfly effect feels somewhat pretentious, because they ultimately don't have that much of an impact on how the game plays out, in the grand scheme of things. The term "butterfly effect" is named after the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the planet can have a rippling effect that influences thousands of exponentially compounding variables eventually leading to a hurricane forming on the other side of the planet -- huge, far-reaching and unforeseen consequences for a small innocuous stimulus -- but the story in <i>Until Dawn</i> is rigidly programmed to follow a particular script and never really branches from the main path. You can't really change the story -- just how dialogue plays out in each scene, and which characters live or die, with a few short scenes or situations unlocking if you do everything just right, or getting closed off if you make a mistake or if characters die before getting to them. Most of the choices, therefore, don't have a very profound effect on the game, but I think it's unrealistic to expect fully branching storylines in a game of this length, with this much production value. Complex situations have to get distilled into narrower choices with more streamlined outcomes because it's just way too expensive to motion-cap and animate hundreds of different scenes that won't ever get triggered in a single playthrough. The limitations are understandable, in other words, but I think it does a good enough job masking the occasional linearity of its choices that you generally don't notice until you replay the game and have the opportunity to dissect it a little closer. During your first playthrough, the only time the choices feel limiting is when you think of a solution that the designers never thought about, or for whatever reason never put into the game as a viable option.</div>
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For example, when Mike comes to a suspicious-looking contraption with a piece of evidence on it, a totem has already warned you that "hey, there's a bear trap under there that'll catch your fingers if you try to grab at it," but despite knowing this your only options are to stick your hand in there like an idiot, or else ignore it completely, when the logical solution should be to use the machete (which you already have) to lift out or cut away the evidence from a distance. When Ash comes to a suspicious-looking trap door banging like something's trying to escape, your only options are to open it or ignore it, when the logical solution should be to try interacting with whoever (or whatever) is behind the door, such as saying "Hey Jess, is that you" before making a decision. Decisions like these aren't really satisfying to make, because the options are either "do something" or "do nothing," with doing something being the obviously bad decision and doing nothing leading to, well, nothing as you sort of awkwardly wander around the area wondering what else you can possibly do in that situation, and then awkwardly wander off with no resolution to that stimulus. The game makes a point during one of the tutorials that "sometimes doing nothing is the best course of action," but that idea is executed better in situations where they expect you to make a quick reaction during a cutscene, like whether to throw a rock into the woods where you saw suspicious movement, or whether you should strike a wolf when it's lunging at you, because then you have a clear definition of your options as opposed to a somewhat open-ended situation where doing nothing doesn't really feel like a gameplay decision so much as ignoring content, and there's usually a cutscene immediately following your decision to show an actual resolution for what "doing nothing" actually led to.</div>
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The social stats don't seem to have any sort of logical correlation to your actions, either, since different sliders seem to go up or down at random with every decision. If Chris finds a bloody note from the psycho in a hidden room and chooses to conceal it from Ashley, say, so as not to cause her extra worry or panic, then his honesty stat predictably goes down while his charatability goes up, but then apparently the game also considers that to be a "funny" option, among other things, which just doesn't make any sense at all. If Mike goes bravely chasing after Jess when he's abducted from the cabin, that apparently increasing his relationship with Josh, even though Josh is nowhere near them and has zero involvement with that encounter. If Ashley suggests they're not totally at fault for Hannah and Beth's disappearance because Hannah overreacted and didn't have to run out into the woods, then that's apparently considered funny, brave, and romantic. These stats don't play a major role in the game, since they're mainly meant to show the cumulative effects of your various role-playing decisions -- you don't perform RPG-style skill checks based on your social traits -- but some scenes can play out a little differently depending on these stats. If, for instance, Matt's relationship with Emily isn't high enough, then she'll refuse to climb through a window and force Matt to break the door open with a fire axe, and if Mike's relationship with Jess isn't high enough then she'll resist his sexual advances.</div>
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In that sense, decisions do actually matter -- even if they don't change the course or general outcome of the story, they do affect how you get there, and in many cases they do show lasting consequences for various decisions. It doesn't really matter whether you, as Matt, agree with Emily that you should go to the radio tower, or if you think it's better to return to the lodge, because you're going to end up at the radio tower regardless, but it does affect their relationship with one another, what they're willing to do for each other, what you're willing to do for them, and how they talk about each other to other characters, and a critical decision with the flare gun can potentially determine whether they both live or die. When Mike is chasing after Jess, you get several choices to take short cuts with more frequent and more challenging quick-time events, or slower but safer routes with less demanding QTEs; if you take too many safe routes, or fail too many QTEs, then you don't catch up to her in time and she dies. Even when a decision has no real consequence, the way the cutscenes are scripted, shot, and edited adds genuine tension to the scene. When Mike's hand gets caught in the bear trap, for instance, it doesn't really matter whether you choose to cut your fingers off, or sacrifice the machete to pry it open, because losing his fingers won't have any adverse effect on his performance, and losing the machete just means he'll use other options in critical scenarios later on, but that scene implies an immediate threat to Mike's livelihood by cutting to wolf (or monster) vision while he's stuck in the trap -- obviously you'd prefer not to permanently amputate your fingers in that scenario, but with a threat closing in you might feel that you don't have time to pry your fingers out and might choose the quicker, more devastating loss if it means saving your life. It turns out Mike's life isn't actually in danger in this scenario, because even if you take the slower, safer route you'll still get out in time -- but you don't know that when you're in that situation, and the game has already established earlier that there are potential life-or-death consequences for not moving quickly enough.</div>
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And really, that's what makes the choices and consequences in this game so effective -- it's a combination of really immersive atmospheres, mixed with the constant threat of real and dire consequences for these characters. The scene composition, motion-captured animation, and voice acting all do a great job of pulling you into the experience and making it all feel more plausibly real and tangible so that you can feel the conflict and tension that the characters are supposed to be feeling in these situations, so I found myself deeply engaged with each and every situation and genuinely caring about each and every character's fate. Normally it's pretty easy for me to shrug and think "it's just a video game, there's no real danger" but the great characterization and cinematic production-quality combined with the fact that it was largely my decisions leading to each character's outcome, made me care a lot more when Mike was hacking his fingers off with a machete to escape a bear trap than, say, a game like <i>Outlast</i> where I don't know anything about the protagonist and have no influence over whether or not he gets his fingers cut off by a deranged psycho. Despite feeling more like a movie than a typical video game, where you have no real identity within the actual game world since those characters on screen aren't supposed to be you, the way that <i>Until Dawn</i> shapes its events around your decisions adds a greater degree of personal attachment to its horror, as opposed to certain other games where you're more of a spectator witnessing horrific things happening to other people.</div>
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For me, horror games are best when they aren't just about spooky atmospheres with disturbing imagery and thematic concepts, but when they have a strong element of dread. Being confronted by an armed burglar in your house is scary, but the even more unsettling moment comes before, when you hear something and wonder "Is someone in the house? Did I lock the door last night? Are they going to hurt me? What do I do?" Those moments are scary because the fear is completely internalized -- before you've even encountered the threat, you're anxious and worried about what it might be or what might happen, and even if it turns out to have been a false alarm with no actual threat, the fear you experienced was absolutely real. <i>Until Dawn</i> captures that feeling of dread pretty well by virtue of having so many consequences for your decisions; knowing that every decision could possibly lead to one of the characters' deaths, but not knowing how, when, or if it might happen, adds a lot of weight and tension to every decision, especially since the game forces you to live with whatever consequences arise since it doesn't allow you to save scum. Even if you could reload a save to pick a different option, the consequences are often so far delayed that it would be impractical to go back and change a decision once you know the outcome. Furthermore, we know that there's a very real threat in the form of the psycho and whatever is happening out in the woods because we've already experienced Hannah and Beth's disappearance, and so there's also a lot of suspense waiting for something that we know is going to happen, but just don't know when.</div>
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The main blemish with the game's design that I can point to, other than a few mechanically disjointed butterfly effects, is that certain story elements don't make any sense and almost ruin the immersion. It's pretty contrived, for instance, that the group decides to split into four different pairs almost as soon as they arrive; we only get to see the whole group all together for two or three minutes at the very beginning of chapter one, and even then it's limited to two or four people squabbling about their relationships with no acknowledgement of Hannah or Beth or why they're all there in the first place. Who, for instance, shows up at a social gathering and then immediately decides to go spend an hour taking a bath listening to music by themselves? Why are teenagers so adamantly seeking out a Ouija board as the main event for the night's entertainment? Why is there a remote-controlled electronic gate way up on a secluded mountain path? Why can't you climb over that tiny little gate when it locks behind you after the game has already established that characters are capable of climbing much bigger gates? Why is the guest cabin a mile or more away from the main lodge when there's an abandoned ramshackle hunk of junk shack on the main path to the cabin? Why does an abandoned shack have functioning electricity but not the guest house? Is that abandoned shack somehow on the same power circuit as the electronic gate a mile away, that's being powered by the generator? Why don't characters use obvious tools and weapons lying around the environment? How did a baby wolverine get inside a locked house and then close itself inside a bathroom vanity cabinet? How does the psycho run all the way around to ambush you through another door when he was literally right behind you three seconds ago when you slammed the door in his face? There are a lot of little things like this that feel like they were designed because of gameplay/story constrictions that just don't work in the context of the world if you actually stop to think about them.</div>
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One more nitpick is that movement controls and input don't always feel very tight. In an effort to make the game look more cinematic it'll sometimes override control of your character's movement to steer them a certain way, or else forcibly bring your movement to a halt when it looks like there should be clear space ahead of you, so that we don't see the old video game trope of characters walking in place while butting up against an obstacle. I guess it looks better than the alternative, but every so often it creates a weird disconnect between your brain and what's happening on screen when you think you're doing one thing and then something slightly different happens. With all of the constantly-changing cinematic camera angles, I think I likewise would've preferred to have had more consistent "tank" controls where "up" is always forward, and "left" is always left, and so on. The actual movement system is fairly generous in allowing you to continue holding whatever direction you were pressing to continue moving in the same direction after a camera change, so the context-sensitive directional movement is never really an issue as it is, but did cause a few occasional moments when I lost my orientation and then struggled for a brief second to get back on track, or when I was trying to aim my light a certain direction and the game struggled to interpret what I meant by "up." I do like how seamless the transitions between cutscenes and gameplay are, though, because it's usually pretty easy to tell when the game has shifted perspective and control back over to you, and in situations when it isn't so clear they just throw a little joystick icon on the bottom of the screen to let you know in a fairly un-intrusive way.</div>
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There's also a pretty neat control feature that uses the PS4's motion controls to force you to stay still during moments where your character is trying to stay still as well, and it functions as a decently effective way of translating your physical input to what the character on screen is doing. It's a cool idea, and I could see it being particularly trying for more squeamish gamers who tend to recoil in fear when scary things are happening on screen, but it didn't really do anything for me other than make me frustrated and annoyed in moments where I apparently failed to stay still will feeling perfectly calm and with the controller resting perfectly still in my lap. What the game doesn't tell you, and which you have to figure out for yourself, is that it's not so much a matter of "don't move" as it is "keep the blue icon inside the lines," which means you're actually <i>supposed</i> to move if the icon starts drifting, in direct contradiction to the instructions that you're explicitly told at the start of those sequences, and it took me a couple of failures to figure that out. In those situations, it felt like I ultimately moved more trying to adjust the icon than I was apparently moving to cause it to drift in the first place. This thought might be a little cruel, but I kind of wish they'd thrown a jump scare into one of them, or alternated "don't move" segments with QTE gameplay or other motion-controlled segments to make them a little more challenging.</div>
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I also have to decry the amount of time that the game is apt to hit you with surprise one-way paths and points of no return. Often times you'll walk up to something and press X to examine it, or you walk a little too far forward and cross an invisible threshold, and then find yourself in a cutscene that ends up transitioning you to a new area when you still had other things to examine or places to explore in the area you were now leaving. I hate it when games do this in general, but it's particularly frustrating in a game where so much of the backstory is derived from searching the environment for clues, and where the only real gameplay consists of exploring environments for totems and clues. It left me constantly anxious about what order I was expected to interact with things so as not to inadvertently advance into a new area before examining everything else in that area. Sometimes (but not always) these transitions are specifically telegraphed to you with a message under the screen-prompt that says something like "Press X to Crawl Through," but you spend so much time pressing X when you see the "Press X" icon appear to examine things that it's easy to get in the habit of just pressing X when you're up against a sparkle and see the "Press X" icon appear because you want to look at something more closely and don't realize the character is going to "crawl through" or whatever because you didn't see the message appear in time.</div>
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Finally, I wish the game had a little more active gameplay. I realize that the style of gameplay in <i>Until Dawn</i> is pretty typical of these types of games, but I think they could've put a little more active problem-solving into the game by giving you more actual puzzles to solve, or obstacles that required a little more active player input to overcome. Adventure games, for instance, rely heavily on story, cutscenes, and dialogue, much like <i>Until Dawn</i>, but also require you to solve puzzles -- either with clever use of inventory items, or by doing something in the environment -- to advance. Most of the time when you're given an objective in <i>Until Dawn</i>, like "find a way into the lodge" or "start the generator," the gameplay ends up being a matter of "walk to the intended area and press X to watch a cutscene," when it would feel far more engaging to have to do something yourself to complete those objectives, like needing to figure out for yourself that you can use the lighter in conjunction with the spray deodorant to melt the ice off the lock by combining them as inventory items, or by doing some kind of basic repair work on the generator like fixing a loose electrical connection. The closest we get is when starting the water heater, where all you have to do is press a button when the gauge is in the right spot, which isn't very complicated and not particularly satisfying. It doesn't have to be much, but just a little something to make you feel a little more involved in the gameplay than just walking from place to place and making decisions/reactions during cutscenes.</div>
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I was a little skeptical of <i>Until Dawn</i> going into it, because I thought the heavy reliance on cutscenes and QTEs would make the gameplay feel a little too passive, but the story presentation combined with the choice and consequence system did a really good job of pulling me into the experience and making me care about every little thing that happened, which made it easy for me to suspend disbelief and become a willing participant in its horror premise. For as much as I enjoy horror games, that's not something that happens easily with me, so it's a great compliment to say that <i>Until Dawn</i> made me feel actual moments of dread and tension. I was so captivated by it that I blitzed through the entire game in a single weekend, and then immediately went back to replay it -- in fact, it's probably one of my top 10 favorite horror games I've ever played, so it's easily worth a recommendation from me if you enjoy horror games and own a PS4.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-19636189746460076552019-12-22T12:23:00.000-05:002019-12-22T12:23:40.674-05:00Gothic Remake Playable Teaser - Feedback and Review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In a surprise news release that seemingly no one saw coming, THQ Nordic announced that they're looking to remake the original <i>Gothic</i>, and released a lengthy demo (or as they call it, a "playable teaser") as proof of concept, available for free on Steam to anyone who owns any of Piranha Bytes' games on Steam. This news follows seven months after THQ Nordic acquired Piranha Bytes, the small German studio responsible for the original <i>Gothic </i>trilogy, making them and all of their IPs official subsidiaries of THQ Nordic. The remake, however, is not being designed by Piranha Bytes, as they're presumably busy working on <i>Elex 2</i> -- rather, it's being handled by THQ's Barcelona studio. The demo opens with a few slides of text from the designers stating that they're huge fans of <i>Gothic </i>and wanted to revamp some of its clunkier, more out-dated designs while "maintaining and strengthening" the "amazing atmosphere" of the original game, but rather than simply doing a straight one-to-one remaster, they wanted to treat the project like more of a re-imagining, adding a bunch of new content and expanding on existing ideas while putting their own unique twist on what they consider to be a "legendary game." The purpose of the demo is to showcase early ideas they're working with and to gain feedback from fans about the direction they're going with the remake -- upon completing the demo, it actually links to a survey where you can fill out responses and grade them on their efforts.</div>
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In essence, this development process feels like a more open form of Early Access and will hopefully provide the Barcelona studio the opportunity to shape the remake into something that will live up to the great legacy of <i>Gothic</i>, and which will satisfy fans of the original game while also introducing it to a new audience. While the demo showcases some promising new ideas, and I'm absolutely ecstatic for the opportunity to play a brand new <i>Gothic </i>game heavily-inspired by the original, the current version of the demo isn't really what I would want out of a <i>Gothic </i>remake, or even a re-imagining. Supposedly they're still very early in the alpha stages of development and nothing is set in stone -- a full release isn't even a guarantee at this point -- but early impressions suggest to me that, although they may have a lot of love and respect for <i>Gothic</i>, it seems like they don't fully understand what it was that made <i>Gothic </i>so unique and special in the first place, because there are a lot of design elements that seem to go directly against the core design philosophies of <i>Gothic </i>and which make it hard for this demo to truly feel like <i>Gothic</i>.</div>
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<i>Gothic </i>did a lot of great things back in 2001 which still hold up incredibly well to this day, and there are a lot of specific things you can point to when trying to define what it was that made <i>Gothic </i>so special, but I think it ultimately comes down to three main elements: its incredibly immersive design, its almost complete lack of hand-holding, and its unique prison atmosphere. Unfortunately, the demo for the remake seems to completely miss the mark on all three of these core design elements. (In truth, world design would probably be a fourth main element, but the remake seems like it's sticking pretty close to the original map so that's much less of a concern.) Now obviously, with a re-imagined remake there are going to be differences from the original game, and I'm of the opinion that change can actually be fun and exciting by giving fans of the original game a chance to re-experience their favorite game for the first time, but at the same time there are some things that absolutely shouldn't be changed because they're an integral part of the original game's unique appeal -- a remake of a beloved classic should pay tribute to the things that made the original so good in the first place, and if you start changing or doing away with those core design elements then it stops feeling like a tribute and starts feeling more like a lame bastardization.</div>
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<i>Gothic 1's</i> main appeal to me is that practically everything about it was designed to facilitate immersion, not just from a lore and world-building perspective but from a mechanical gameplay standpoint as well, and pretty much everything in the remake stands in blatant defiance of immersive design. Right off the bat you're hit with invisible walls and artificial barriers, restricted hot-spot climbing, tons of intrusive UI elements like on-screen button prompts, icons over items, exclamation points over NPCs, a lockpicking speed gauge, white outlines highlighting interactible objects, console-style dialogue windows, a combat system that relies heavily on icon-watching, quest logs immediately popping up telling you what to do, a main character constantly narrating his thoughts and actions, game-stopping tutorial windows, an inventory screen in a separate window that also completely pauses the game, items being consumed instantly from the inventory without animations, a radioactive green glow over your entire body when you heal, notifications telling you in advance that NPCs will remember certain choices, chime sounds and floating messages whenever you pick up new loot, cutscenes yanking control away from the character, moments when the game decides for you whether you'll be walking or running, characters not caring whatsoever if you swing your weapon at them, and so on.</div>
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None of this stuff was ever present in the original game, and for good reason -- because they don't make any sort of contextual sense in the world you're supposed to occupy, and thus serve to disrupt immersion by reminding you that you're playing a video game. Things like icons over items, outlines around characters, floating messages telling you what to do, button prompts telling you how you to interact with the world, and so on, don't actually exist in the game world, and really shouldn't be visible or present at all -- we should be able to know intuitively that these are things we can interact with, and the controls should be consistent enough that we know what to expect when we press a button, or how to interact with something, without the game throwing an icon or a message on screen to tell you how to do something that should be pretty obvious. Approaching Diego, for instance, shows not one, but two floating messages telling you what button to press to interact with him, and what that button press will do, when you should just know that E is the action button, and that taking an action in this situation means talking to him, because if you wanted to do something different like attack him then that would be a different button -- pressing R to draw your sword and then clicking to attack. Having even a single floating message like that is unnecessary, and having two is utterly redundant.</div>
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Ladders in the original game didn't have any sort of button prompt appear because it was pretty obvious that the action button is what you would press to climb it, whereas the remake puts a key cap icon over the ladder to indicate not only that you can interact with it, but how to interact with it. Climbable ledges do the same thing, with the space bar icon appearing on screen to indicate that you can climb something, when in the original game you simply knew to press the climb button to try to climb something, and if you could climb it then the camera would pan up in an immersive way like your character was looking up a the ledge rather than throwing UI elements at you.</div>
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Meanwhile, the remake uses a white outline that shows through everything -- even your own character model -- to indicate that you're targeting something, which again, is not something your character would ever see in the world, and so the player shouldn't be able to see it either. The original game was far more subtle with its UI elements on both fronts, since it kept the controls completely behind the scenes so that interacting with the world felt like a natural extension of being in the world, as opposed to the user interacting with the software, and used an almost subliminal high-lighting effect on the model to indicate what you were targeting, which roughly translates into the game engine how your eyes might focus on something in real life to make it more clear. It also displayed the name of whatever you were targeting in plain text, without a graphic window around it, so that it didn't stand out quite as much. With today's hyper-realistic high-definition graphics, I'm not sure that high-lighting effect would work as well as it did back in 2001 -- it never felt distracting or immersion-breaking back then, but it could now -- however, I'd imagine it would have to be better than getting superhero vision to see white outlines around objects. I'm not even sure name tags need to have that graphic around them, since high-contrast, bordered text should show up just fine. </div>
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I should also point out that the original game didn't put those tags on every single interactible object, I think because they realized it would be distracting to have tags constantly popping up over things you could interact with, but likely weren't going to -- like chairs or barrels or torches or wooden slats and what not -- rather, they relied on the old high-lighting system to indicate that you were targeting something you could interact with, which was far more subtle and less likely to actively draw your attention towards them, unless you were specifically looking at them. The amount of interactible items in the remake seems drastically reduced, but I would hate to see icons popping up over everything if they were to make a come back, and that's where something like the high-lighting system might be beneficial.</div>
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The remake's use of hot-spot climbing, where you can only climb in designated hot-spots that the designers specifically intended you to climb, is almost a deal-breaker, because the original game was all about freedom of exploration. If you saw something that looked climbable, then you could climb it, and the primary limitation on where you could go was simply the range of your curiosity, because you could realistically go anywhere that was realistically accessible by hand or by foot, even if it meant going outside of the intended play area. Sometimes you were even rewarded for doing this, especially in <i>Gothic 2</i> where you would often find valuable hidden loot or amusing easter eggs in out-of-the-way and seemingly out-of-bounds areas. You could even swim and dive underwater, which was sometimes necessary to access certain areas of the game. The only real barriers were if a cliff was too tall to reach by hand, or too steep to walk on, and of course, the actual barrier enclosing the penal colony that would zap you if you got too close to it. The remake, on the other hand, puts all kinds of invisible walls and artificial barriers around that prevent you from going places you would realistically be able to access under normal circumstances -- early in the prologue, for instance, they use stacked crates and wagons to funnel your exploration down a particular path, when in <i>Gothic 1</i> you would've been easily able to climb over those things. Later there's a locked gate that you should be easily able to climb around, but the remake puts up invisible walls so that you have to access this area in the one way it's intended to be accessed -- through the locked gate. It's worth pointing out that <i>Gothic 1's</i> introductory area also used somewhat linear level design to funnel your progress down the mountain path from the exchange zone to the river, but it accomplished this via natural and plausible constrictions of the world design -- you had to follow the path because you were in a canyon, basically, not because there were three-foot stacks of crates blocking your way.</div>
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The early stages of the demo are the worst offender because they're clearly forcing you into following a particular script based around cutscenes, and thus some of those artificial barriers go away once you get through the scripted intro sequence, but the invisible walls and hot-spot climbing and complete lack of swimming remain persistent throughout the entire demo. Invisible walls are a bane in practically every video game ever, but they especially don't belong in a <i>Gothic </i>game, and there's really no excuse or justification for them being here. The lack of swimming combined with the hot-spot climbing greatly reduces the explorable area of the demo and makes exploration a little more straightforward because explorable spaces are more specifically telegraphed to you, like when you see an obvious set of staircase-looking ledges that scream "come climb me." And if that wasn't obvious enough to indicate that there might be loot up there, you've also got those obnoxious icons pinpointing items before you even have line of sight to see them. So instead of being about your own curiosity to explore and your ingenuity in finding creative ways into hidden areas, it's more about simply finding the intended paths of exploration and then playing the game as expected. In the demo's defense, there are apparently still some hidden areas that even I -- an avid explorer -- managed to miss, and the new inclusion of using crouching as a way to navigate through tighter areas both show that there is promise to make exploration as good and satisfying as it was in the original game, if the invisible walls and artificial barriers could just be removed. I'm not sure how feasible the freeform climbing system of the original game is to implement, but making the climbable ledges a little more discreet would probably be to the remake's benefit.</div>
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Going back to the user interface, <i>Gothic 1</i> had a fairly minimalistic HUD that only showed your health bar and that of your current target, and discreetly placed them on the edges of the screen so that the information was there when you needed it, but out of the way when you didn't. The remake, in contrast, puts the health and stamina bars right on your character model, right in the middle of the screen so that it's impossible not to notice them whenever they're active. I like that they auto-hide when not in use, because it's ultimately more immersive to have no visible HUD whatsoever if it's not necessary, but it's a little distracting having floating bars following your character around when they're active, especially with the way they suddenly jump into view from out nowhere, right in the middle of your screen where your vision is usually focused, and the way that they follow your character's movement within the screen. It would be nice if that information could be put back on the edge of the screen so that there's a little bit more of a physical separation between the HUD and the game world and so that you can look past the HUD if you so desire.</div>
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The inventory in the original game likewise displayed as bars on the side of the screen so that you maintained a consistent perspective of the world when you looked through your inventory, thus making it feel like you were more connected to the world even when using the interface, which was important because the game didn't pause when you brought up the inventory -- searching for items and using them took place in real time, so you were vulnerable while doing those things, which not only makes sense because that's how actions work in real life, but also added a little depth and challenge to the gameplay since you had to find moments of safety in the middle of a fight to grab a potion and then play out the animation of drinking it -- you couldn't just pause the game and magically heal back to full health in an instant. If there's any flaw with the original inventory system it's that it didn't display enough items at a time, with each tab being displayed in a single column meaning you had to do a lot of scrolling once you accumulated a lot of stuff. Other windows like the character sheet, journal, map screens, and so on likewise weren't displayed as full screens based around a universal interface system, but rather as overlays that also maintained continuity with your perspective of the game world, as if they were a close-up view of something your character was actually looking at.</div>
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In the remake, the inventory screen completely pauses the game and reduces the challenge of combat by allowing you to spam healing items with no consequence, while enemies apparently stand around patiently waiting for you to dig through your inventory and munch on a dozen berries before attacking you again, but it also takes you completely away from the game world and your perspective in it to put you in a completely separate screen that doesn't or shouldn't exist anywhere in the game world, and that also shows your character model staring back at you. What's interesting is that the demo already has a quasi-side bar inventory screen when looting corpses and chests, so it'd be nice to see that system expanded and pushed further to the edges so that it could function similarly to the original inventory system. I like the way the journal looks, since it has the appearance of being a hand-written notebook that the character is actually writing in -- the notes are actually written from the character's perspective, like they were in the original game, and it actually goes into more detail than what was present in <i>Gothic 1</i> by noting the character's observations on other characters and locations as well -- I just wish that it and your quest log could be removed from that heavy-handed interface hub and be made to feel more like physical items your character holds onto and uses, as opposed to a well-illustrated interface screen. They could, for instance, use the old <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> system where books and maps are actual inventory items that you can press hotkeys to bring up, which then get displayed as overlays, with more immersive tabs and bookmarks to flip to desired sections like quests or characters or whatever.</div>
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It's a little concerning, meanwhile, that the quest log already has a system in place to "track active quests" -- as of right now it doesn't seem to bring up quest markers, but the fact that the toggles are there are at all raise some yellow flags. Quests in the original games were great in large part because they didn't spoil their solutions for you by showing quest-tracking waypoints or GPS markers, thus requiring you to explore and figure things out on your own, using immersive directions and leads given to you by characters in the world, so it would be another huge disservice to the <i>Gothic </i>feel if those were to make an appearance in future versions of the remake. We're fortunate not to have a mini-map constantly active on screen, and that we don't magically start the game with a map of the Colony, so those are two things they got right in this department.</div>
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Then we've got a bunch of distracting notifications popping up to tell you things that you probably should already know, like when a chime sounds in accompaniment with a text window saying that you picked up a new type of item (when really it should be up to your own memory to know if the thing you've just picked up is something you've seen before or not), or when quest logs immediately pop up during dialogue telling you what to do (basically just reiterating what the character has just told you in a bullet-point format), or when a notification informs you that a character will remember a certain decision you've made when it seems obvious that they would remember something important like your witness testimonial regarding a catastrophic event, or that you literally saved their life. As with all the other overbearing UI elements, none of this stuff was ever present in the original <i>Gothic</i>, and they all tend to draw your attention away from the game world towards the UI -- especially when it's throwing multiple pop-ups at you, like to tell you that you've picked up a new quest, and then showing you the quest objectives, and then popping it up again to indicate that you've already made progress in it, and giving you experience for the objectives you've already completed, and saying that an NPC will remember that, and also hitting you with a Steam achievement, all at once. When this happened to me near the end of the demo with Bloodwyn I literally lost focus on the actual conversation that I was having with him, because I was reading and trying to keep up with all this information being thrown at me instead of the game just letting the dialogue play out. The actual dialogue system, by the way, uses console-style inputs where it only displays four options at a time, and even then only shows a vague idea of what your character is going to say -- unless have subtitles turned on, in which case it shows the actual line underneath. This is less than ideal to me, because those directional inputs call attention to the method of control and also forces you into sub-menus to access more information, when it would be a lot smoother to just show a full list of options like we had in the original games.</div>
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The remake also uses a lot of heavy-handed tutorials to explain game mechanics to you, which pause the game and pull you out of the world to show videos and a bunch of text that the character would never see. The original game didn't have any strict tutorials about things like controls, but it did teach you important lessons about the world and how to interact with it through immersive means -- notably, with early characters like Drax and Ratford informing you that you can't use a map until you acquire one and that items can often be stolen from NPCs, or that you can draw enemies away from a group by getting close enough to agitate a single one and then waiting until it charges at you, or that the sooner you learn how to take animal trophies the more valuable that skill will be because animal corpses rot and disappear meaning that unharvested trophies will go to waste. These sorts of tutorials are great because they don't just teach you -- the player -- things, but the character as well, and they happen through the context of the actual game world. The remake introduces a new mechanism where you can drop food on the ground as a means to try to lure animals to a certain position -- an interesting idea in and of itself -- but explains this to you through a game-pausing tutorial window, when it would be far more immersive to have the character find a note sitting on a table next to the meat trough that's meant to act as instructions for the guards about how to use the meat. Likewise, the game feels that it needs a game-pausing tutorial window to explain that you can cook food at a campfire but that you'll need recipes, when in the original games (specifically <i>Gothic 2</i>) the character would clue you into the fact that you lack a requisite item or skill to do something, such as by saying "What with?" if you try to use a stove without raw meat, or "I know nothing about picking locks" if you try to open a locked chest.</div>
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The remake, in contrast, has the main character talking to himself way too much and thereby making it harder to put yourself in his role and to become immersed in the gameplay. The whole reason a lot of games take the "silent protagonist" approach is so that it leaves the character as a blank slate for you to fill in with your own emotions and reactions to situations, rather than depicting the character a certain way that might not mesh with the way you might feel as a player. The original game gave the Nameless Hero a bit of a snarky, sarcastic personality, but it was usually only in situations where you specifically chose those dialogue options, or in situations where it felt thematically appropriate. For the most part, however, he was portrayed with a relatively dry and straightforward personality during dialogue sequences and kept almost completely silent during ordinary gameplay -- usually whenever he made active commentary it was to convey gameplay information, like that there was no loot left on a corpse and therefore "nothing to plunder." His inner monologue was mostly restricted to the journal system, which makes sense because most people don't vocalize their thoughts, especially to nobody, unless they're exclaiming interjections. The Nameless Hero in <i>Gothic </i>struck a solid balance of being enough of an empty vessel that emotional reactions during gameplay were typically your own, and also having enough of a personality during certain moments in dialogue to actually have a bit of character about him.</div>
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The "Rookie" (as he's called in the remake) spends the first 15 minutes of the demo talking like he's a "Let's Play" streamer, not only narrating his thoughts and actions at practically every passing opportunity, but also speaking in first person plural as if he's including his audience (or the player) in his narrations with comments like "Let's light this up," "Where are we?" and "Let's get out of here." At the very beginning he says "Now it's just you and me my friend," which is particularly bizarre because there's no one else there for him to be talking to, and no item of importance that he could possibly be personifying by calling it "friend," so he's either suffering from schizophrenia or else is referring to the player directly and thus breaking the fourth wall by openly acknowledging the player's existence when he's supposed to be a representation of us in the game world; it's a lot harder to identify the avatar as the player-character when the character is making a point of separating the player from the character. Likewise, it's virtually impossible to inject your own emotional reactions and feelings into situations when the character is constantly conveying his own emotions, especially when those emotions feel like they're deliberately exaggerated to give the character even more of a personality.</div>
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A lot of this happens during cutscenes where the game yanks all control of the character away from you, which is a cardinal sin when it comes to immersive design because when you lose control of the character you stop being that character. <i>Gothic 1</i> only had like three cutscenes in the entire game -- that being during the introduction when you're first thrown into the Colony, then when you restore power to Uriziel, and then at the very end when you defeat the Sleeper. Except for those three cutscenes, you were basically in constant control of the character. Although it had a few moments where it took control of the camera away to show you something, it was almost always other characters doing those actions, while the main character's dialogue typically remained part of the usual dialogue system where you got to choose what he'd say -- if he spoke out of turn it was usually in a way that advanced or contributed to the plot, like when he comments that Baal Lukor has gone crazy in the orc cemetery, not to convey character emotion like acting tough while trying to cover up how scared he is. In a similar vein, the remake also has random times when it decides to restrict your movement to a slow walk, presumably so that the game can give those moments a more cinematic look/feel, which again creates another disconnect between the player and the character when the character randomly stops responding to your controls and starts doing his own thing.</div>
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The combat system shows a little bit of promise in terms of how it aims to implement the directional inputs of the original game's control scheme in a more modern fashion -- with the new system, you can still attack left, right, or forward like you could in the original games, except that now instead of just blocking at the right time you also have to block in those directions, in addition to being able to counter-parry if you press the parry button at the right time while also being aimed in the right direction, in addition to performing light versus heavy attacks. You can also perform quick-step dodges laterally and backward, as opposed to just backward in the original. There's also a stamina meter that depletes every time you perform one of these actions. That, in theory, is all an improvement over the original game since it adds a little extra complexity to how you avoid attacks and try to attack around enemy defenses, but like everything else it's a bane for immersion because so much of it relies on simply watching and reacting to icons to know where an enemy is attacking or blocking, instead of something more immersive like simply letting you discern that information by watching their animations. While it's possible to tell how a human enemy is guarding to know how you should try to attack them, there's way too much reliance on the red icon telegraphing where an enemy is going to attack before they actually attack, thus making it so that you spend basically every fight against every type of enemy just watching those icons with little regard for that enemy's specific attack patterns or animations. In a way, it feels like a gimmicky quick-time-event mini-game as opposed to a more natural, organic combat system.</div>
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The system also feels very sluggish and unresponsive right now. You could actually move pretty fast in the original game by strafing, but in the remake the character moves very slowly when locked on to an enemy, which then makes trying to position yourself in a group of enemies extremely cumbersome unless you unlock from the enemy which then prevents you from being able to block directionally and thus makes you unable to block certain attacks. A lot of times I'd find inputs just not registering, like if I pressed an attack right after a counter-parry, or when I'd feel confident that I pressed the dodge button before the enemy followed through with their attack only to find myself standing still and getting hit. Sometimes attacks would seem to just completely whiff even though I was supposedly attacking an exposed direction. Ultimately, I found it was easier to just ignore dodging and parrying and just focus on blocking attacks, because the timing for pulling those maneuvers off was a little unforgiving and hard to perfect, if not a little inconsistent, and I also found that it was easier just to attack a random different spot than the enemy was guarding because you'd either hit (if they didn't change their guard in time) or get blocked, which was really no penalty to you. And so if you just kept the offense up, backing away occasionally to regenerate stamina, you'd eventually whittle the enemy down without having to worry too much about quick reflexes or reading the icons properly.</div>
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I'm also not fond of the way the camera works during fights, since it hugs so closely to your shoulder that it makes it hard to see anything that's happening around you, with things like trees and obstacles either tripping you up or getting in your way and completely blocking your view. Plus, with your health and stamina bars being attached to your character model, it means that they bounce around an awful lot as the character and camera both move somewhat independently of one another, so in the one situation where you really need to see that information clearly, it's hard to see clearly. The controls don't feel very satisfying, either, since it seems like the inputs for directional aiming were designed around controller inputs as opposed to a mouse. With a controller you get more tactile feedback about how the stick is oriented relative to the neutral position, with spring tension always trying to move it back to neutral and with an audible and tangible click when the stick bumps into the edge of the controller, but with the mouse, you don't get that tactile feedback, and therefore it never really feels like you've moved your sword into the right position based on your input because the mouse feels the same whether it's in the left, right, or forward position -- you can only tell that you've moved it correctly because the icons indicate as much, which again brings your attention back to the icons to make sure your sword is actually aligning the way you need it to because you can't confidently feel it with the mouse.</div>
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It's hard to tell right now how much of the combat system's clunkiness is due to lack of polish, or questionable design decisions, or because this is how your character is supposed to fight when he's untrained in sword combat. In the original game, after all, your character fought like a buffoon before investing points into combat training, and the light attack animation in the remake seems pretty similar to the untrained forward attack in the original. It seems like you're also incapable of performing any combos in the remake, which was also the case in the original until you learned level 1 sword training. So it's possible that the system might improve down the line with training, say by giving you faster attack animations and allowing you to execute different combos, but with the demo being presumably based on untrained combat I don't want to judge it too harshly because the original game's combat was extremely rough in the beginning by design, to make your character's growth as a fighter feel more dramatic given how bad he was at the start.</div>
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It seems feasible to make it fun and engaging if they could just get rid of those icons and make the animations a little more broad so that you have to actually pay attention to the enemy's attack animations to learn where each type of attack is going to go, and how to time blocks around the animations, with different enemies having different animations, timings, and combos, thus requiring you to learn specific strategies and tendencies for each type of enemy. There's also the possibility to have more advanced enemies perform feints and ripostes and multi-hit combos which would of course probably be more interesting to try to defend against than lazily drifting the mouse to a new spot every few seconds, as it is currently. I'd be perfectly happy with having encounters with new enemies rely on a lot of trial-and-error learning their movesets and committing those animations to memory, as opposed to simply staring at icons, because it feels far more natural and engaging to interact with the character models as opposed to a piece of interface. It would probably also help to speed the combat up just a little bit, in terms of animation speeds, movement speed, and damage ratios, so that it can match the pace of the original game a little better, and so that it feels more like a visceral blitz of action as opposed to a drawn-out chess match. And also, pull the camera out a little bit and stabilize it. I think the whole point of the camera being so closely zoomed in and moving so much during combat is to give it a more intense feel, sort of like how action scenes are filmed in movies; it certainly works in that regard, but it feels a little extreme right now, and so I'd like there to be a little more continuity between how the camera functions while you're exploring and while you're in combat.</div>
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Of all the changes to the original game, the new combat system is probably the most extreme, and so a lot of people probably won't like it just because it's different, but I kind of like the approach they took with it -- just not the execution. With some modifications and sword training, I think it could work pretty well, but at the same time I probably wouldn't be too upset if it was scrapped altogether and they went with something more like <i>Risen </i>or <i>Elex</i>. The biggest thing is that the combat needs to maintain the feel of dynamically evolving attack animations as you get better sword training, and there needs to be steep damage thresholds preventing you from fighting tougher enemies until you get stronger yourself, because that's what made the original combat system so satisfying since it gave you a tangible feeling of growth and progress as you got stronger.</div>
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The second core philosophy guiding the original <i>Gothic's </i>design is its almost complete lack of hand-holding. That kind of ties in with the third point, about its unique prison atmosphere where the game isn't afraid to beat you down and treat you like the low man on the totem pole in a brutally harsh prison colony, but it also just goes into the basic gameplay design, where the game is open enough to let you figure things out for yourself and to try whatever strategies you think might work, even if that means making mistakes and dying constantly. As I said previously, the original game didn't hit you with heavy-handed tutorials teaching you how to play the game, and although it warned you that going into the forest or certain dead end areas was dangerous, it made no effort to stop you if you chose to venture in anyway. Likewise, if you mouthed-off to guards they made no hesitation in kicking your ass. The remake, in contrast, seems to go completely overboard with excessive hand-holding, the likes of which were never present in the original game.</div>
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The demo mostly consists of a prologue sequence based around a greatly expanded exchange zone, before you would normally head down the mountain path towards the river, and this entire prologue feels like a streamlined, railroaded tutorial where gameplay is restricted until the game allows you to do things. Before meeting Diego, for instance, you're completely incapable of even interacting with the world unless it pertains to the heavily-scripted storyboard -- you find meatbugs that you can't kill, berries you can't pick up, a dead guy whose inventory you can't loot, and so on -- and then you can't leave the exchange zone area to go exploring the rest of the world until you complete Diego's quests to find a better sword, and then to complete tasks for Bloodwyn. Diego, in particular, makes a strong point that he's taking you under his wing as an apprentice and seems to be deliberately escorting you all the way to the Old Camp, whereas in <i>Gothic 1</i> he gives you a few guiding directions and then basically says "good luck" and leaves, specifically saying to meet him at the Old Camp, and then you're entirely on your own. In fact, once you're done with Diego's opening dialogue you have full reign of the entire map (except a few dungeons that don't open until later chapters).</div>
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In the original game, there wasn't a giant objective window popping up commanding you to find a better sword -- it was just a suggestion conveyed immersively through dialogue, and then it was up to you to seek out better weapons because of your own initiative and determination. Actually acquiring better weapons was something you sought out organically by exploring the world -- someone tells you there's an old pick-axe lying around the derelict mine, and so you set out looking for a pick-axe, but you can also find a rusty sword lying on a skeletal corpse elsewhere. In the remake, a large point of the tutorial area is to complete a quest line to acquire a new sword, and the only way to get a new sword is to follow through with a specific quest line that Diego deliberately sets you on, and then doesn't let you advance further in the game until you complete it. Even when faced with an opportunity to simply steal a sword when an NPC isn't looking, the game restricts your options and forces you to go through with the quest line. If this demo had been designed with the original game's philosophies in mind, you would've been able to just take that sword and then face the consequences -- either Cayden would kick your butt and take the sword back, or you'd run away and he'd remain hostile towards you until you came back and either beat him up, or else let him beat you up. The game doesn't even let you attack him at this point, which also goes to break the immersion when characters don't react to you drawing your weapon around them, or even attacking them, which caused NPCs in the original game to immediately draw their weapons in self-defense and threaten to attack you if you didn't lower your weapon.</div>
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Furthermore, everything you encounter in the starting area is capable of being defeated with just the basic, crappy, broken sword, which is technically the case in <i>Gothic</i> <i>1</i> as well since everything on the path down the mountain consists of weaker "juvenile" versions of even the most basic enemies, but the difficulty curve in the remake is all wrong since it makes wolves and snappers perfectly beatable targets at level 0 without any combat training whatsoever, when in the original game you can't even begin to think of fighting wolves until you join a camp and get some armor and a substantially better weapon, and snappers are more of a mid-game enemy. Both of these enemies one-shot you at level 0 in <i>Gothic 1</i>, and a successful hit against them with the basic starting weaponry barely knocks even a sliver of their health off. Hell, you can't even take on a group of adult scavengers in the original game without getting seriously wrecked, and the remake makes adult scavengers complete pushovers once you get get an actual sword. Human enemies likewise would absolutely destroy you, and yet in the remake the first human enemy who attacks you is intended to be beaten as part of a tutorial (granted, he's partially weakened, but still -- you shouldn't be fighting and beating trained guards at level 0 with a broken sword). Once you get the actual starter sword, you're even capable of beating Cayden, although he's apparently coded as immortal because his health immediately resets to full as soon as you would've beaten him.</div>
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I suppose the intention is to make the early stages of the game easier and more accessible, because new players would die frequently in the original game and could get discouraged, but that steep upfront challenge is what really makes <i>Gothic </i>so satisfying, because it makes leveling up and getting stronger feel so much more rewarding when you're able to come back later and defeat enemies that were once impossible for you to handle. And having enemies that are way stronger than you makes the Colony feel much more dangerous and scary, and also further emphasizes the "zero to hero" arc that the main character goes through. While I'm sure a full version of the remake would make tougher enemies that we haven't seen yet actually too tough to fight at level zero, the fact that they already have us successfully fighting snappers in the prologue leaves a lot less room for vertical growth unless they go back and completely re-scale the enemy stats.</div>
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(As an aside, why do scavengers and snappers look so similar? I'm alright with redesigning enemies in the remake, but scavengers and snappers are very different creatures in <i>Gothic</i>, and yet in the remake it looks like they share the exact same model just with minor variations in textures and meshes. This also seems like a good opportunity to point out that creatures like wolves and scavengers are now instantly aggressive and come at you with the intent to kill as soon as you get close enough, as opposed getting defensive and trying to scare you away from their turf like they did in the original game, which was way more immersive than the auto-aggro in the remake.)</div>
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Furthermore, I have to wonder why snappers even appear near the exchange zone at all. Enemy placement in the original games made logical sense, with every enemy type having a sort of natural habitat that they would naturally inhabit. Lurkers lived near water, shadowbeasts in dark caves and forests, swampsharks in swamps, minecrawlers in mines, skeletons in crypts, harpies on mountain tops, snappers in rocky canyons, and so on. While the rocky canyon of the exchange zone is consistent with typical snapper habitats, it's also an area with a lot of human activity since it's a major trading post and there are always multiple guards stationed in that area, whose primary job is to guard the exchange zone. In the original game we see guards stationed throughout the Colony for the explicit purpose of keeping dangerous beasts out of populated areas, and so the exchange zone where Gomez does all of his dealing with the King should be a top priority to keep clear of such threats. Roads between major locations are likewise usually clear of any sort of serious danger, with only pesky varmints like molerats, scavengers, and bloodflies occupying those spaces, which all feel more like wild animals as opposed to apex predators like snappers -- it makes sense why human traffic would drive creatures like snappers away but leave generally more passive wildlife who aren't deemed as anything more than a nuisance. Unless there's some plot point yet to be revealed that the New Camp wrangled some snappers and let them loose in the exchange zone as part of the attack on the lift, then there really shouldn't be any snappers in that area. There is a throw-away line from Diego about this, where he says that monsters are starting to act more strangely at night, but that's not really a satisfying explanation and doesn't explain why the snappers are there in the first place. It kind of feels like the developers just wanted a tougher enemy to put into the area and tossed a bunch of snappers in, and makes about as much sense as there being snappers stationed right outside the entrance to the Old Camp.</div>
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I also have to question the main plot element of the New Camp sabotaging the lift right at the beginning of the game, because that potentially causes issues down the line when it comes to the Old Mine collapsing. According to the original game's story, when the old mine collapsed Gomez lost his bargaining power with the King since he no longer had access to magic ore, which is what prompts him to murder the fire mages and seize tyrannical control over the Old Camp while also launching an assault on the New Mine, because he fears that he'll lose his position of power if he's unable to continue trading with the King. But, if the lift at the exchange zone is already destroyed at the start of the game, then that would seem to make the sudden loss of Gomez's ore supply a little less pressing, since he's already unable to do trade with the King while the lift is out of service. Certainly, losing his ore supply would cause him to act more drastically, and he might still feel justified in attacking the New Mine to regain an income of ore, but with trade already on hold there's less of an urgent need for him to take such drastic measures, which would lessen the shock value of that moment in the story because it would make less sense for him to act that way.</div>
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While on the subject of the story, I should also point out that the main quest loses a lot of its narrative thrust without being shown the scene where the main character is given the scroll, and told what he's supposed to do with it. In the original game, you're about to be thrown into the barrier when a mage shows up with an urgent letter to be delivered to the mages in the castle -- the Nameless Hero refuses to cooperate at first, but then accepts the mission because he's promised a great reward from the mages if he makes the delivery. So right from the beginning of the game, before you even take control of your character, you're given a clear goal to guide the rest of your actions with a clear motivation for why should care about fulfilling this task, and you even have a bit of a role-playing option with the scroll regarding whether you'll break the seal and read it yourself, or keep it confidential in hopes of a better reward. If you do read it, it gives a little foreshadowing to the main plot about the true nature of the god that the Sect Camp is worshipping. In the remake, you're simply thrown a scroll right as you step onto the lift with no explanation of what it is or what you're supposed to do with it, and it's not until later when Diego tells you that it bears the seal of the fire magicians that you know to take it to the castle. So the game does get there eventually, but you'd think if the scroll contains such an important message then they would want to give clear directions to their messenger instead of just putting blind faith in him figuring it out, or in someone else finding it and knowing what to do with it. Depending on what dialogue option you choose with Diego, there's not even a promise of any reward, which makes delivering the message a more selfless act and thus gives you less motivation to pursue that quest line, or else paints the main character as more of a hero from the beginning as opposed to having him start as a common criminal who evolves into the role of the hero over the course of the game.</div>
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This is probably a good time to talk about the barrier, too. In the original game, the barrier looked like a plasma field with occasional lightning bolts and thunder claps -- it was fairly ominous, and its presence felt more tangible in the world because we got opportunities to see it in action, and even to interact with it ourselves. During the intro cinematic, for instance, we see goods being lowered through the barrier into the camp -- the slave woman seems to get a brief shock when she passes through -- which helps to visually show the idea that living things can enter the barrier, but can't leave. And then, at the edge of the trading zone, you also get the opportunity to walk to the edge of the barrier where you could see blue light building around you before it eventually zaps you and knocks out a chunk of your health so that you, as a player, get to feel the presence of the barrier and also the practical effects of being trapped inside of it. In the remake, the barrier looks more like a soap bubble, which is not only harder to notice against the blinding white sky and clouds but just doesn't look as menacing. Plus, the exchange zone seems to be entirely contained within the barrier so you don't get any opportunity to interact with the barrier, or to see goods or characters being lowered into the Colony. With the barrier being the defining characteristic of the setting it should probably be featured a little more prominently than it currently is in the remake.</div>
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Anyway, the third main design element of the original <i>Gothic </i>is its unique prison atmosphere, which it achieved by making the world feel genuinely grim, dark, dangerous, and hostile. The whole Colony had a pretty bleak and dreary look to it with its dull, muted, washed-out color palette featuring a bunch of dried-up looking grass, plenty of dead or dying trees, a mostly sunless sky overcast with gray clouds, flat low-contrast lighting, dark forests, and grayish fog limiting your view distance, whereas the remake gives the Colony a much brighter look with tons of sunlight reflecting off everything, a bluer sky, greener vegetation, blue and yellow flowers, pure white mist everywhere, glowing bloom and post-processing effects, and so on. Everything is just literally too bright -- sometimes so much so that it's painful on the eyes. Diego's camp looks particularly out of place, because you wake up and you're presented with this glorious, majestic view of a beautiful waterfall glistening in the mist and sunlight, thus making your first impression of the Colony during the day time that of serene beauty, which is really the opposite of what the Colony is supposed to be -- it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy, a dreaded hellhole that men fear to be cast into, a place once ruled by evil orcs who still occupy the neighboring lands inside the barrier. This new Colony doesn't look gloomy or scary, and doesn't really feel like a prison -- and yet, by disabling some of the post-processing effects it immediately bears a closer resemblance to the tone and style of the original game, so there's clearly potential for this visual style to work with some modifications to lighting and post-processing.</div>
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Otherwise, the Colony in the original game felt like a brutally harsh and dangerous place, with deadly beasts around seemingly ever corner and with even the weakest of basic wildlife capable of killing you if you weren't careful. In the remake, they tell you the Colony is dangerous, but it doesn't really feel dangerous because every enemy you encounter is intended to be beatable when you first encounter it. That first encounter with the three snappers is supposed to establish how dangerous and scary the Colony is, but it doesn't really succeed at that when A) the main character is making playful banter and heroically trying to fight them, and B) when the game doesn't even give you the chance to fail at the encounter. I, for instance, felt like I was doing alright in that first battle -- I was avoiding hits and managing to land occasional hits of my own, and felt like I could maybe get through the fight if I was careful enough not to make any mistakes -- but then before I could even take one hit of damage, a cutscene butted in to show my character getting overwhelmed (which is yet another massive break in immersion to not only lose control of my character, but to have him suddenly performing far worse than when I was controlling him) and then Diego rushing in to save me.</div>
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If this had been <i>Gothic 1</i>, there wouldn't have been any cutscene at all -- the snappers would've just been really tough enemies placed in the environment that I chose to engage, and then quickly learned my lesson against, with the dangers of this world being something I learned through my own curiosity and exploration. Really, if the cutscene has to be here, then the character should talk a lot less so that the player can internalize the fear and threat posed by the snappers, and it should force you to have to actually fail in combat before Diego comes in to rescue you -- either the snappers should be so tough that you do practically zero damage to them because you haven't leveled your strength or sword training and are using a crappy broken sword, and/or they should be much faster and more aggressive so that you're way more likely to take damage without having leveled up your stamina enough to block or dodge every attack, and/or they should be able to out-run you if you try to run away, all so that you actually get to feel how dangerous and challenging the Colony is through first-hand, mechanical gameplay experience, as opposed to simply being shown in a cutscene or told by an NPC in dialogue.</div>
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In fact, the whole intro sequence before you meet Diego feels like a weak attempt to make the Colony seem hostile and scary with a bunch of mostly superficial aesthetics -- it's dark, you hear spooky noises, see the mauled and bloody remains of a guard, catch a glimpse of a terrifying monster, and then get attacked by a whole group of them. It's window dressing, a bunch of fabrications made up specifically for this highly-scripted quasi-walking-simulator theme park ride from the lift to the amphitheater, and doesn't represent what the ordinary gameplay feel is like, as is evidenced by the fact that all normal gameplay functions are turned off during this sequence and how bright and cheery everything looks when you wake up in the morning. Whatever effect that intro was going for is lost as soon your character wakes up the next morning and you realize it was all a theatrical production and doesn't translate to how the world actually is in practice. And those snappers, which are supposed to be the big bad scary threat, turn out to be not much of a threat at all since the game has you beating them with relative ease as soon as you get an actual sword.</div>
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Human NPCs in the remake likewise aren't as intimidating as they were in the original game. The original game made a point of treating you like a worthless scrub in the beginning because you were the new guy, and as the new guy in the Colony you were everyone else's bitch. Hence, Bullit's "Standing Godfather" hazing ritual, bouncers calling you derogatory names like "boy" and "kid," guards trying to shake you down for protection money, people treating you with utter contempt and not giving you the time of day, taunting your prospects, yelling at you to get lost and get out of their sight, ridiculing you for your ignorance, clobbering you for making smart-assed comments, forcing you into doing menial tasks, and luring you into traps to rob you. In the remake, everyone is surprisingly nice and courteous to you, they praise your abilities and talk about how much potential you show for a new guy, and speak promisingly of your future. It's like everyone is patting you on the back in encouragement, as opposed to knocking you down and spitting on you.</div>
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Diego, for instance, is too nice and helping in the remake. Sure, he was one of few good guys who didn't treat you like crap in the original game, but that was part of his job to recruit new members to the Old Camp, and it never felt like he was going out of his way to help you or give you special treatment; here he gives you an endearing nick-name and makes it clear that he's taking you under his wing as his apprentice, and doesn't let you leave the starting area until you're properly equipped and even then insists on escorting you around the Colony. I mean, he just gives the letter for the mages right back to you because he's just such a nice guy in the remake, when in the original he made it clear that he would've mugged you for it if not for the fact that he was in bad standing with the mages and couldn't show his face around them anymore. Bloodwyn, likewise, used to be one of the main antagonists in the Old Camp, as he was the primary guy trying to extort money out of you and scheming with other convicts to beat you and rob you, but in the remake he's a totally chill, nonchalant guy just standing around doing his job who harbors no ill-will towards you and also seems to think very highly of you after completing a mandatory quest for him.</div>
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The voice acting doesn't do much to suggest that this is a prison colony full of criminals, either. In the original game, a lot of the NPCs spoke with a rough and gruff tone of voice like you would expect from hardened criminals, and the fact that they spoke with American accents (in the English version, at least) lent the world a more unique charm since you don't see a lot of fantasy games with American accents. In the remake, the NPCs tend to sound a little too prim and proper, like they're wealthy noblemen who only got thrown in the Colony for being a day late paying their taxes, as opposed to being a bunch of thieves and murderers. Diego is easily the worst offender in this regard, especially when you combine his voice with his fancy wardrobe, formal bowing, Shakespearean posturing, and ornate flourishing of his rapier. (He also puts a lot of absurdly unnecessary pauses between lines and even between words, which seriously degrades the quality of the actor's performance.) Orry and Bloodwyn's voices sound somewhat similar to the tone characters had in the original game (although Bloodwyn's mannerisms and way of talking don't match the role and personality he was supposed to have in the original), and I kind of like how sniveling Sarus sounds, but the others -- Diego, Cayden, and main character -- don't really do it for me. The main character, in particular, acts a little too exuberant with his witticisms and commentary, especially for someone who's brand new to the Colony, and as I've said before, giving him so much blatant, over-the-top personality can be a detriment to immersion. It doesn't help that everyone speaks with a vaguely English accent in the remake, either, since that makes it sound more like it's taking place in a generic fantasy land as opposed to a thuggish prison.</div>
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The new quests show some decent quest design, where you actually get branching choices that would seem to have lasting consequences for future quests and interactions. The quest with Cayden and Sarus, for instance, gives you a few choices -- do you spare Sarus, or kill him? Do you tell Cayden that you killed Sarus, or that he's still alive? Do you give Cayden the dice box, or not? Depending on your choices, Sarus can live or die (either by your own hand, or by Cayden's) which could lead to or close off more questing opportunities with Sarus in the New Camp, and you could make a friend or an enemy out of Cayden which could make things easier or harder when trying to join the Old Camp. The quest itself is relatively straightforward in terms of what you're expected to do in it, but the choices add an interesting dynamic to the quest with several different outcomes.</div>
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Other quests, however, end up being pretty shallow, mindless fetch quests without a whole lot of narrative compulsion behind them. Fetching a seraphis for Sarus works because you nearly killed him and he's too weak to get one himself, plus he's portrayed as a sympathetic character who got caught up in some shady business that he now wants to get out of so you might care enough about him to make sure he survives, but fetching a wolf tusk (tooth?) and snapper meat for Bloodwyn feels forced, especially as a mandatory main quest. The idea with Bloodwyn is that he's guarding the gate down the mountain path, but can't leave his post until he's gathered a few animal trophies for Drax and Ratford, and for some reason that means he can't open the gate to let you and Diego go through, and then for some reason means that you have to go get that stuff yourself. Once you finish that, it triggers another main quest where they send you to douse the beacon from the same area you were just at, when in reality it seems like the beacon was the reason Bloodwyn should've been reluctant to open the gate, and that the quest to fetch him the animal trophies should've been an optional side quest you did along the way to dousing the beacon.</div>
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The music is alright but doesn't have quite the same charm as the original soundtrack, which I think actually played one of the biggest roles in establishing the great tone and atmosphere of the original games. In a previous video I experimented with replacing music from <i>Gothic 2</i> with generic stock fantasy music and found that, while the new music worked reasonably well the game basically stopped feeling like <i>Gothic</i>, and that's kind of the case with the remake. The original theme gets reprised at the end of the demo, and there's a nice easter egg for fans of the German version, with a guard playing Herr Mannelig on a lute, but that's about it for original music -- everything else is brand new, and most of the music that plays during cutscenes feels excessively dramatic and over-orchestrated which stands in stark contrast to the original soundtrack's more subdued compositions with simpler instrumentation. The ambient exploration music comes close to the <i>Gothic </i>vibe, with it mostly consisting of a slow flute melody accompanied by simple chord progressions on classical strings, plucked arpeggios on a lute, and percussive accents from hand drums. It's not bad, and I could definitely see it growing on me, but as of right now it feels like a pretty short loop that periodically fades in and out.</div>
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The combat music, on the other hand, is completely over-the-top and sounds like something out of <i>The Witcher 3</i>, and it doesn't make any sort of immersive sense for such intense combat music to come out of nowhere just because you drew your weapon. The original games didn't even use combat music much or at all, which worked out fine because that made combat feel like a more natural part of the world as opposed to putting you in a completely different game state. Ultimately, however, I can't help but wish they'd just remaster and record new versions of the original music because of how iconic it is -- if, for instance, the music for Old Camp ends up being anything other than the original composition, then I'll be busting out a torch and pitchfork. New music is fine in areas, but at the very least some of the more iconic tracks need to be remade for the remake, if only for the sake of nostalgia, but also because they were just so perfect originally and there's no need to change or do away with perfection. Even better would be if they could hire Kai Rosenkranz, who did all of the original music, to come back and write new music for the remake.</div>
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Then we've got some technical issues, which is to be expected in a work in progress like this, so I won't go into much detail other than to list them out: there's no mouse support in menus, and different menus use different inputs which gets a little confusing (E is the action button normally, but then becomes "next tab" in the menu screen, where you have to press Z to use something and the jump button to equip something); the character sheet shows two different experience thresholds for when your next level-up is; the lockpicking skill shows a 100% failure rate at picking locks and yet I never failed a single one; Nordmar Soup claims to restore vitality in one window, but then says it boosts stamina in another; the item wheel seems broken and doesn't let you use items from the upper left slot; health displayed on the pause screen is often inconsistent with your health bar displayed in the world; quest progress sometimes tracks incorrectly; manual saving doesn't seem to work at all as you always revert back to a checkpoint; and finally, the optimization is absolutely terrible, as I felt no practical difference in performance whether I had all the options set to epic or low.</div>
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Despite an overwhelming amount of things that need to be improved for the remake to feel like a true <i>Gothic </i>game, I'm still incredibly excited for this opportunity, and I had a lot of fun once the demo got into familiar territory and I could start playing "spot the difference" to see how they adapted the old map into a new game. Some of the changes they've made are actually good ideas, I feel, since the remake gives the developers an opportunity to expand on lore, mechanics, and other ideas that were hinted at in the original but never really touched on -- like, for instance Gomez using signal fires to communicate with the exchange zone, actually getting to see the New Camp raid the Old Camp supply lines, more interactions between camps (what with Bloodwyn having new involvement with Drax and Ratford), and the idea that creatures are actually more dangerous at night, as just a few examples already present in the demo. There's also the opportunity to retroactively tie <i>Gothic 1</i> to <i>Gothic 2</i> a little more, since a lot of the series lore that we consider canon wasn't established until <i>Gothic 2 </i>and was therefore notably absent in <i>Gothic 1</i> -- in a lot of cases it doesn't really matter, but it's nice to see an old shrine to Beliar in the remake because that hints at the cyclical war of the gods earlier in the series, and it's also a nice little touch to have Diego reference Gerbrandt.</div>
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There's clearly good potential in this remake, and they've already shown some good ideas -- I think if they can eliminate most of the graphical elements of the UI, ditch the heavy reliance on cutscenes and leave the player in control of the character more consistently, get rid of the invisible walls and artificial barriers and reinstate freeform climbing and swimming, tone down the excessively bright graphics to make the Colony look more bleak and grim, rework the combat system a bit, bring back the steep difficulty curve, and rewrite a lot of the dialogue to make NPCs more hostile towards you and to lessen some of the main character's personality, then we could have something special here. Here's hoping the developers get the opportunity to make it into a full game, and that they take a serious look at the fan feedback to shape it into something we can all be proud to call <i>Gothic</i>.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-88663887831464761522019-12-03T16:50:00.001-05:002019-12-03T16:50:20.090-05:00Metroid: Samus Returns - Classic 2D Gameplay with a Modern Finish<div dir="ltr">
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<i>Metroid</i> is one of Nintendo's most iconic and long-running series, though its releases have been somewhat sporadic over the decades, with frequent gaps between major installments and with development largely being handed over to studios outside of Nintendo, starting in 2002 with Retro Studios taking the reigns for the <i>Prime</i> trilogy, Team Ninja handling <i>Other M</i> in 2012, and now MercurySteam (known for their <i>Castlevania: Lords of Shadow</i> games) developing <i>Metroid: Samus Returns</i>, a 2017 remake of 1991's <i>Metroid 2: Return of Samus</i>. Starring the usual series protagonist Samus Aran, Galactic Federation bounty hunter, <i>Metroid 2</i> takes place after the events of the first game, and sends you to the metroid homeworld, planet SR388 to wipe out the rest of the metroids. With that simple premise, <i>Samus Returns</i> plays like any typical <i>Metroid</i> game, where you explore a series of complexly-interconnected levels while gaining assorted power-ups that grant access to new upgrades and new areas, in addition to opening up new gameplay possibilities, all in the form of a two-dimensional puzzle-platform-shooter.</div>
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I'm pleased to say that, unlike other recent games in the series, <i>Samus Returns</i> feels like a real <i>Metroid</i> game and actually seems to understand the appeal these games can have and, most importantly, why people play <i>Metroid</i> games in the first place. That should all make sense, however, seeing as it's a remake of one of the earliest games in the series, which actually proves to be the crux of most of its greatest strengths and weaknesses. Despite feeling like a genuine return to form and being one of the better <i>Metroid</i> games to have come out in the last 15 years, it also feels a bit like a formulaic "paint by numbers" entry in the series. I never played the original <i>Metroid 2</i>, but the remake feels so incredibly similar to other 2D entries in the series that I almost feel like I've played this game before since it reincorporates many of the exact same tools, concepts, and gameplay elements that we've already seen before in other games, like the missiles, super missiles, power bomb, grapple hook, ice beam, wave beam, Varia suit, gravity suit, screw attack, and so on.</div>
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The new features this time around include a dedicated melee-counter button that allows you to knock-back enemies as they get close to hitting you with certain attacks, thus stunning them and allowing you to vanquish them with a quick burst from your gun, and four Aieon abilities that consume energy from a shared pool to allow you to scan the environment to reveal portions of the map while highlighting destructible blocks of terrain, or erect a shield that will divert physical damage from your health to your Aieon meter, or enable a rapid-fire shooting mode for your cannon, or slow time around you while you still move normally. These are all welcome additions, although most of them don't feel as well-implemented as they could've been. Of the four Aieon abilities, for instance, the only ones I found myself using with any sort of regularity were the environment scanner and the shield, because the other two use so much energy so quickly that they're best used only when absolutely necessary -- basically as "keys" to get past enemies or obstacles that can only be defeated or circumvented with those specific abilities. The shield is functionally pretty useful since it can help save you from death if you're ever low on health, but for me it was mostly just an extra health bar to use against bosses, and as yet another "key" to access areas that would kill me without the shield engaged.</div>
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The environment scanner is something I actually enjoy, since it effectively widens your field of view by allowing you to see the layout of the map several squares beyond what you can currently see on-screen, which I find absolutely clutch when deciding where to go while exploring. Often times in these sorts of games you find yourself in a room with multiple doorways leading out in multiple directions, but you can never tell which paths are going to be dead-ends that you should explore before venturing into the other ones, which continue further and deeper into the level, until you go through and explore all options. Which can be kind of annoying when you arbitrarily choose the "wrong" door and find yourself advancing much further into the level and constantly have to second-guess yourself and wonder when or if you should backtrack to check out those other doors you passed. It's also nice that it cuts out on time spent hunting for destructible terrain, since a sound effect when you ping the scanner will tell you if there are hidden blocks to destroy in the room you're in, and they'll even flash if you can get them on screen while the scanner is pinging. I can see some people maybe not liking this, if you're someone who enjoys the challenge of trying to find hidden secrets on your own, but it felt like most of the hidden areas were things I could have or would have found on my own, eventually, and the scanner just cut down on the amount of tedious trial-and-error bombing every square around a suspicious area trying to find the exact spot that connects to a hidden alcove, so I was certainly alright with using it a lot.</div>
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Unlike other 2D <i>Metroid</i> games, <i>Samus Returns</i> adds a 360-degree aiming mode to the arm cannon, allowing you to press the left trigger to go into "aiming mode" where you stand (or crouch) in place and have full freedom to aim anywhere you want, as opposed to being restricted to firing straight forward, up, and diagonally. This is another new feature that I absolutely love since it gives you way more precision in aiming so that you can actually hit certain pesky targets, but at the expense of mobility since you can't shoot and move at the same time.</div>
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I really liked the melee counter at first, because you're often kind of defenseless in these games if something ever gets in close, so having that ability to knock something back if it's dangerously close to you and, if timed properly, fully counter an attack allows the combat to flow more fluidly instead of falling into that awkward stumbling dance that often happens when something in close range is hitting you and you can't quite get away from it while also shooting it with your weapon. The more I played, however, the more gimmicky and formulaic it got to be. Most enemies are most easily dispatched by waiting for them to flash and then hitting the counter attack button so that you can subsequently one-shot them, which turns the combat into a more passive, reactionary system where you just stand around waiting for the enemy to do something so that you can press two buttons and kill it automatically without having to worry about positioning or aiming your weapon -- all that matters is that you press the button when you see the obvious, universal flash that an enemy is about to attack you. It's also kind of annoying how certain bosses and sub-bosses are virtually impervious to any form of damage, during certain phases, until you counter-attack them, which often leads into a highly cinematic quasi-cutscene where you still have enough control to fire your weapon while watching the scene play out, so that battles and the whole counter-attack system by extension feels like it's just a more subtle quick-time event.</div>
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The bosses, unfortunately, all pretty much suck. Basically all of them are "puzzle-pattern" bosses where they give an obvious cue for a highly specific attack they're going to do, with a very specific way to avoid the attack, and so succeeding at these bosses is just a matter of learning the cues and learning the exact, specific thing you need to do to avoid each attack in a rote process of trial-and-error and memorization. What's worse is that they all have multiple phases, where later phases add new attacks and even modify familiar attacks by adding extra effects to them or just changing the pattern slightly, so with each phase you have to learn and memorize new cues and get hammered for a ton of damage until you figure out what each cue is, what it will lead to, and what you have to do when you see that cue. Essentially, you have to die multiple times in each boss fight, usually at least once in each phase, just to learn these things, and once you learn it all, the fight loses any sort of compelling challenge because the solution for how to avoid each attack is incredibly simple and easy, once you connect all the dots. So when you die in phase three of a boss fight, it's then a rote exercise in tedium going through the same formulaic patterns in the first two phases over and over again just to get back to where you were. And on top of that, they almost all have limited time windows in which you can damage them, where you're stuck just going through the motions dodging attacks waiting for the predictable moment when they lower their defenses for a few seconds so that you can get a few attacks in before spending another minute dodging attacks and waiting for the next window. Every one follows this pattern, and it just gets to be a tedious pain in the ass.</div>
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The whole game, in fact, is tediously repetitive. The basic plot premise is of course to "wipe out the metroids" and so the whole game is a hunt to kill 40+ metroids, most of which take the form of mini-boss battles that get repeated a dozen or more times, steadily adding new attacks and evolving into more advanced forms. The only real variety is a couple of later forms, and a couple instances where the metroid runs away mid-fight and then you have to hunt it down in an adjacent area and fight it again, before repeating that process yet again, effectively turning one fight against one metroid into three different fights spread out over a wide area, where each fight plays out exactly the same as the last but for whatever reason you have to do it three times. Meanwhile, every area in the game has the same formula for how you progress through it -- arrive in a new area (which are mundanely called "Area 1, Area 2, Area 3, and so on), kill a requisite number of metroids, return to the metroid mate to lower the poisonous fluid, and descend until you eventually find an elevator to a lower area, rinse and repeat seven more times until the final boss. The areas themselves don't feel mechanically or even atmospherically distinct from one another, either. Each area gives a couple upgrades that change how you can move around or access certain areas, yes, but there's rarely a central gimmick or "twist" to each area that changes the way you play and approach the game. Most areas look and feel pretty similar, too, since the music doesn't always do a good job of creating an interesting or immersive atmosphere (most of the time the music is somewhat bland and forgettable, with the best tracks almost always being based on tracks from other games in the series), and the foreground terrain -- the stuff you actually walk on and interact with -- looks pretty similar from area to area, with any sort of unique theme happening way off in the background, and with the same enemies appearing in virtually every area, just re-colored and with tweaked stats. </div>
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The <i>Metroid </i>series is known for having a strong backtracking element, where you're rewarded for returning to areas you'd previously explored with new tools and equipment to unlock more upgrades or gain access to new areas, and usually that's something I enjoy in games, but like a lot of other things in <i>Samus Returns</i>, the backtracking gets to feel a little tedious here, too. There are just so many upgrades and things that you're incapable of accessing your first time through an area, so basically each time you get a new upgrade you have to go back to three or four different areas in each level if you want to be a completionist about finding all the things and unlocking all the upgrades. And really, it just makes exploring new areas a bit annoying and unrewarding when about half the time you're encountering things you can't do anything with yet. Most of the time, it's just a missile tank upgrade that'll increase your maximum capacity by three (as opposed to the usual five in other games), so individually they're pretty insignificant, especially since you really don't need that many missiles to beat the game. By the time I was in the last two or three levels of the game I basically just gave up on seeking out the optional upgrades because they just didn't seem worth the time and effort to track them down again. At least the game lets you drop custom markers on the map to help you remember where things are, but just getting back to them can be a bit tedious with how spread apart the warp points are and having to go through more linear, restrictive environments with a lot of meticulous platforming or morph ball sequences or one-way paths.</div>
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The overall level progression is pretty linear, too, since you have to go through the eight levels in sequential order, starting at the top with Area 1 and working your way down to Area 8, with each area having a single entrance and exit to the next area. Although you have the constant ability to backtrack to previous areas via handy warp points, there's no real reason to other than to track down those optional upgrades, since the only way forward in the game is down. That isn't so much of a problem, however, because the areas themselves are fairly large and open-ended, giving you complete freedom to explore on your own, discovering upgrades and encountering metroids in any order within those specific areas. Although the game doesn't allow you so much freedom as to be able to sequence-break and speed run the game in clever ways, the feeling of exploring uncharted areas that branch out in all directions and trying to figure out what you need to go where can still be pretty engaging.</div>
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The 3DS controls work decently well, except that it's all sometimes a bit of a literal pain since the 3DS isn't the most ergonomic device to hold, even with the larger XL model. The device does suffer, however, from a general lack of buttons, which means a lot of toggling triggers and switching firing modes to enable different subsets of controls, meaning you're frequently holding both triggers down at the same time while using both thumbs on two different sets of controls (the circle pad and d-pad with the left thumb, and face-buttons and touch-pad with the right thumb) all at once. After even a short while it gets to be a strain contorting your hands to operate all the buttons you need, and it's easy to fumble controls while trying to keep track of what "mode" or active toggles you have enabled at any given moment. Getting in and out of the morph ball is particularly annoying, since your only options are to double-tap on the circle-pad (down to go into morph ball, and up to go out), which isn't really designed for rapid double-tapping like that, or take your thumb completely off the circle pad to tap the map screen on the touch-pad -- neither of which is ideal and can be a little frustrating when the controls don't respond the way you wanted them to. The game also crashed on me after I beat the final boss, completely freezing the 3DS and forcing me to do a hard reset on the device. It wasn't a huge deal since I was literally finished playing the game at that point, but would've locked me out of "hard mode" and other features that unlock after beating the game, if I cared about any of that stuff, without having to go back and repeat the prolonged final boss fight again and hope it wouldn't continue to crash in subsequent attempts.</div>
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Ultimately, <i>Samus Returns</i> is a decently enjoyable game, and it's certainly nice to have a competent, two-dimensional <i>Metroid</i> game that feels pretty close in style to the older classics. It's easily the best <i>Metroid</i> game we've had since 2004, but unfortunately it feels a little too formulaic and repetitive to be any more than decent. That's still high praise considering what we've had lately in the series, but it feels like just about everything noteworthy in <i>Samus Returns</i> has been done before in its predecessors, but this time with less charm and personality, while other elements like the pattern bosses and generally bland, forgettable atmosphere prove a little disappointing. Some of the game's issues, like the tedious repetition and linear progression of levels, are unfortunately baked into the original game that it's remaking, but that's the sort of thing a remake a quarter of a century later should have the opportunity to address and improve upon. <i>Samus Returns</i> gets the core formula of a <i>Metroid</i> game right, but it doesn't do much to innovate or mix things up. So while it proves satisfying and engaging on a basic level required of a <i>Metroid</i> game, it doesn't do anything transcendent or extraordinary for it to rise above the competition, either within its own series or outside of it. If you like <i>Metroid</i> and want an actually decent <i>Metroid</i> game to play, then you could do a lot worse than <i>Samus Returns</i>, but if you're new the series and want something to start with I'd probably have to recommend <i>Zero Mission</i>, <i>Super Metroid</i>, or <i>Metroid Prime</i> as better starting points.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-58231972417881650542019-11-16T13:06:00.000-05:002019-11-16T13:06:23.412-05:00Risen - Review | A 10-Year Retrospective<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Risen</i> is a fantasy-themed open-world action-RPG by Piranha Bytes, a small German studio who were previously responsible for the first three <i>Gothic</i> games -- the first two of which are some of the best RPGs of all time. Following the colossal mess that was <i>Gothic 3</i>, Piranha Bytes split from their publisher, JoWood, who retained the rights to the <i>Gothic</i> name, thus forcing Piranha Bytes to create a new series which would serve as a spiritual successor to their beloved <i>Gothic</i> series. As such, <i>Risen</i> sticks pretty closely to the formula set up by<i> Gothic 1 and 2</i>, so if you're at all familiar with those games then you should know pretty much exactly what to expect with <i>Risen</i>.<br />
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For the uninitiated, the <i>Gothic </i>games, and by extension <i>Risen</i>, are more old-school computer-RPGs that aim to create highly immersive worlds that also challenge you to learn their systems and to improve your character before tackling more difficult aspects of their open-world designs, which in the early stages of the games are pretty much everything, everywhere. In all three games you start out as a pathetic weakling before joining one of three factions, which grants access to better armor, weapons, and skills, and then you get stronger by exploring the world, defeating enemies, and completing quests, spending Skill Points that you earn with each level-up to improve your character's stats and skills with various trainers. Despite offering relatively large open worlds, the main quest is ultimately the main focus of these games; it advances through a series of chapters, with each new chapter bringing dynamic changes to the world. All-the-while you're free to explore the world as freely as you desire, finding hidden secrets and completing assorted side quests, with the only restrictions being that some areas may be off-limits until they're unlocked via the main quest, or might have enemies that are too difficult for you to handle.</div>
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<i>Risen </i>takes place in a world in which humanity banished their gods from existence, which had the consequence of also releasing the formerly-imprisoned titans to wreak havoc on the world. With the mainland and coastal islands now being literally torn apart by violent earthquakes and storms caused by the titans, one island seems to be protected from the ensuing devastation, although it has been witness to the strange appearance of ancient ruins rising out of the ground. The island hosts a small harbor town, normally run by Don Esteban, but with the arrival of the Warriors of the Inquisition, led by Inquisitor Mendoza who've come to investigate the circumstances around the island, the Inquisition has basically taken over the city and forced the Don and his men to retreat into the swamp. There's also a monastery where a group of mages live and practice their arts. You play as a nameless stowaway on a ship bound for this island, who washes ashore after his ship is attacked and subsequently wrecked by a titan. Starting on the beach with nothing more than the clothes on your back and a tree branch for a weapon, you set out to explore the island and soon find yourself wrapped up in the mystery of uncovering what lies at the heart of the volcano keep at the center of the island, and saving the island from its eventual destruction.<br />
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The game gives the island an alluring element of mystery to it; it looks like a relatively ordinary tropical island but you just get this pervasive sense that there's something mystical lying just underneath the surface, waiting to erupt. That element is symbolized quite literally by the presence of the volcano and the ancient ruins rising from the ground, but there's also the Holy Flame which is a literal source of magic that the mages have built their monastery around as a means to protect it. With the island somehow being protected from the violent storms ravaging the rest of the world, likely as a result of whatever strange magic seems to radiate from the heart of the island, the story is initially about discovering the source of this strange magic, and ultimately finding a way to stop it once you realize that unleashing it could prove disastrous for the island. This quest is set off by Inquisitor Mendoza, who's searching for a way to defeat the titans and suspects that there's an ancient power hidden inside the volcano keep that might help.</div>
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It's a decent premise for a story, but unfortunately the story never really develops into anything more substantial -- it always feels like it's just a premise the entire game, a simple backdrop to setup video game objectives in place of a real story. In a nutshell, this is the basic plot progression of <i>Risen</i>: wash up on the island, join a faction, collect five items, enter the main dungeon, collect five more items, fight the final boss. There is backstory explaining the presence of the final dungeon, what's inside it, and even why you have to collect the various items, but a lot of it feels like retrofitted explanations to justify the item collecting, and there aren't many story beats along the way that contribute to the rising action, or that add extra complications or challenges for the main character. Meanwhile, the stakes never really feel like they're all that high because you never get to see or experience the destruction that the titans are supposedly wreaking on the mainland, and a convenient plot device explains that the island will remain safe indefinitely, as long as you don't act to unleash whatever power is hidden in the volcano.</div>
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As it turns out, there's actually a fire titan still imprisoned in the volcano, which is why the other titans don't attack the island; Mendoza suspected this, and was intending to try to control the fire titan to fight the other titans, with no solid guarantee that he'd actually be able to control it and being willing to risk the destruction of the entire island if it meant saving the rest of the world. You join forces with him early on, before he reveals his full intentions, to find a way inside the volcano, which has been sealed for hundreds or thousands of years by an ancient lock, which then sets you on a quest to explore a bunch of smaller ruins that have risen out of the ground in search of five golden disks, which act as keys to open the door into the volcano. Once inside, you explore the fortress and learn that it (and the other ruins rising up across the island) were made by an ancient race of lizard people, and that this is where the gods originally trapped the fire titan, with the spirit of a man named Ursegor who helped to imprison the titan bound to the fortress to be its eternal guardian. At that point, Mendoza reveals his plans and goes rogue on you, which then sets you on another quest to assume Ursegor's role by assembling his ancient armor set and releasing his spirit so that you can enter the titan's lair, stop Mendoza, and defeat the titan.</div>
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Again, it's a decent story premise but it doesn't feel as fleshed out as it probably could've been. For starters, the story is only four chapters long, compared to the usual six in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>, and you spend the entire first chapter exploring the island and joining a faction, which is something you do entirely of your own initiative with no story element driving any of that action forward. So the story is really only three chapters long, with chapter two being a preliminary collect-a-thon to get inside the main dungeon, meaning that it doesn't really even start until chapter three, when you start exploring the main dungeon and actually uncovering the island's backstory and the central conflict with Mendoza, which is about two hours long, and then chapter four is another collect-a-thon to gather all of the pieces of titan armor to fight the final boss, another process that takes about two or three hours. You spend probably three quarters of the game in the first two chapters, before the story even gets itself going, and then the game rushes through the story so quickly that it feels like it ends almost as soon as it begins. The final cutscene doesn't even offer any resolution, as it simply shows your character walking away from the camera after defeating the fire titan before fading to black screen where a voice quickly summarizes the lore about humanity banishing the gods, and then proclaims that "humanity has risen" because one person managed to defeat a titan, and then rolling the credits.</div>
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There also aren't a whole lot of memorable events in either the main story or any of the various side quests, other than, say, when the lizardmen invade the monastery and start killing a bunch NPC's unless you can move quickly enough to stop them, or the entire quest line with Patty hunting for her father's buried treasure. A lot of the story, and by extension, the gameplay you perform in service of the story, feels somewhat mundane and subdued -- the game doesn't set up a lot of unique or interesting scenarios, and when it does they tend to blend into the ordinary gameplay and with everything else because so many of the game's more unique scenarios deal with exploring the risen ruins and ancient Saurian temples. Exploring the eastern temple and rescuing the triplets is fun and interesting because of your interactions with the triplets, but at the end of the day you're just exploring another ruin using the same tools to solve the same puzzles that you do a dozen or more times elsewhere throughout the game. Finding the druid Eldric is interesting since you have to follow his trail by searching for clues, even enlisting the aid of a wolf, but ultimately he's locked inside another temple where you use the same tools to solve the same puzzles as elsewhere in the game. Retrieving the stolen delivery from the gnomes on the ruined peninsula offers a unique and interesting environment at first, but ultimately winds up with you inside another fortress like the ones in the monastery or any of the other half-dozen fortresses scattered around the island. Finding the five pieces of titan armor is just a matter of going through basically the same dungeon five times but with remixed puzzle solutions.</div>
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None of this really compares to similar quests in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>, which despite being much older games with less technical capabilities somehow managed to offer more spectacle, variety, and excitement in their main quests. Getting the four remaining focus stones for Saturas by transforming into a meat bug to get inside the old monastery and hunting snappers with Gorn, getting past the rock golem and exploring the stone fortress with Lester, using divine magic with Milten to fight skeletons in an ancient crypt, and doing battle with a troll by using magic to shrink it down with Diego are all shorter, simpler affairs than what you do in <i>Risen</i> to retrieve the four remaining golden disks for Mendoza, but they feel more unique and memorable. Restoring power to the Eye of Innos involved repairing the eye socket, which required freeing Bennett from jail by proving his innocence in a framed murder, and then convincing Vatras, Pyrokar, and Xardas to meet at the sun circle to perform a ritual, which involved fetching a special book to deliver to Pyrokar and making sure you have enough swamp weed for them, and then meeting them in a special altar in a remote location where they perform a spectacular-looking ritual. In <i>Risen</i>, restoring power to the disk involves grabbing a magic crystal from a chest in Eldric's hut literally right behind him, walking 15 seconds to an altar, and then watching a two-second animation where you do nothing of importance in the whole process, other than rescuing Eldric from the temple, which was already part of getting the disk in the first place.</div>
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The most interesting aspect of the story probably has to be the presentation of Mendoza as the villain, in the sense that he's not a conventional villain. Mendoza actually has noble intentions in trying to save the world and stop the other titans, which is more than can be said about the other faction leaders, since Don Esteban has more selfish goals with regaining control of Harbor Town while fattening his wallet with gold from the temples, and Master Ignatius and the rest of the leaders of the monastery would rather not get involved as they only want to focus on protecting the Holy Flame. Mendoza starts out as a good guy, who's seen actually trying to fight off a titan, and seems to be the only person on the island with any interest in trying to stop the threat that the titans pose to the rest of the world -- it's just that he's willing to sacrifice the entire island (and everyone on it) to do so. Which, of course, is a moral grey area of whether the ends justify the means or if it's "right" to kill 100 people to save 1000.</div>
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In fact, it's really nice that all three factions (or at least the two opposing ones, the Don and the Inquisition) are painted in a moral grey area where there's no clear right or wrong. Both sides will try to badmouth the other and convince you that their faction is the one with the noble intentions, and both sides really do make a reasonable argument in their own favor -- the Don's men have been wrongfully exiled from their own town and are supposedly looking out for the good of the townspeople who're being repressed by the Inquisition's martial law, while the Inquisition are trying to look out for the island's safety by keeping everyone in town and keeping the monsters spewing from the ruins at bay. Ultimately it's up to you to decide which faction's story and ideology you believe in most, but there are also strong gameplay implications since the faction you choose to join will determine what skills become available to you. Don Esteban's bandits are basically the melee combat specialists, the mages have access to both crystal and rune magic, and the Warriors of the Order are a sort of hybrid with access to crystal magic, but not rune magic.</div>
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As an RPG, stats and skills are pretty important to your character development, and you get a variety of different fields to invest skill points in, ranging from three different types of melee combat specializations, ranged combat with bows and crossbows, to assorted crafting skills like blacksmithing, alchemy, animal skinning, and ore prospecting, to thieving skills like sneaking, lockpicking, acrobatics, and pickpocketing, to magic skills like rune magic, crystal magic, and scroll writing, in addition to basic stats like strength, dexterity, and mana. It's pretty much exactly what we had in <i>Gothic 2</i>, except with a little more depth since there are more tiers for most skills. Instead of only having two levels of melee combat proficiency, <i>Risen </i>offers 10 for three different types of weapons (as opposed to two), with each new level granting one new attack or ability, or with locked doors and chests requiring higher tiers of proficiency to pick more difficult locks. The only place where the skill system seems to get streamlined is the animal skinning, where you only have to invest a mere five points into a single umbrella skill that teaches you everything, as long as you have the right tools, as opposed to learning how to take individual trophies separately by putting points into teeth, claws, furs, lizard skins, and so on. <i>Gothic 3</i> added a magic stat that determined what spells you could learn, which makes a come back in <i>Risen </i>except now it's no longer a trainable stat; rather it's something you increase by exploring the world and finding stone tablets and books to read, which is kind of an interesting idea since it gives direct skill rewards for exploration while also being a way for the developers to restrict your character's Wisdom to certain values at certain stages of the game by locking some of those items behind main quest barriers.</div>
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This might be a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," but I do find it a little bland that the skill system is basically lifted straight out of <i>Gothic 2</i> without too many notable twists or additions. One thing I neglected to mention in my <i>Gothic 3</i> video is that I liked how that game added a bunch of auxiliary "perk" skills that gave you more situational bonuses, like doing extra damage to orcs, or having to learn a separate skill to sneak up on animals, or regenerating health and mana, or being able to sprint further by consuming less stamina, and so on. Overall, I prefer the system in <i>Risen</i>, but it would've been nice if they could've retained some of these fun side skills to give you a little more variety in terms of character builds. As it is, it's a little too easy to learn every skill you could possibly want, since there are plenty of skill points to go around, not a whole lot of skills to invest in, and opportunities to use jewelry to enhance skills further, or even to use skills you don't even have. As a mage, for instance, I was able to max out the fireball crystal, sword combat (as far as I could go without being a bandit), and rune magic, while learning every utility skill except level three pickpocketing (only because that skill is restricted to bandits), level three smithing (only because I didn't like any of the options for level three crafting), and acrobatics (because I had a ring that I could equip any time I needed to fall a great distance). So I was effectively a master magician, master craftsman, master thief, and advanced swordsman using the best bastard sword in the game.</div>
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On the bright side, the leveling system is at least spread out sufficiently that I was still making interesting skill point decisions right up until the final boss -- it wasn't like I'd hit a soft level cap where I had no more worthwhile skills to learn thus rendering future level ups pointless. And even though it was possible to learn every skill I wanted, it still required me to make strategic choices about how I should prioritize different stats and skills, and that I invest points carefully and deliberately so as not to waste them. It's also nice that every skill in the game is legitimately useful, as there aren't any "dump stats" or skills you should obviously avoid due to them being straight-up inferior to other options -- if you learn a skill, it will be significantly useful to you. In fact, you basically can't waste skill points in this game unless you go halfway into swords and then decide to switch to axes, or something like that, since you can only ever use one type of melee weapon at a time, or likewise spread skill points among three different crystals and never becoming a master of any of them.</div>
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Skills don't generally play a role in how you solve quests, but that's not really how these games operate. These aren't like the Fallout games, for instance, where you get skill checks in dialogue and while attempting to perform certain actions in the world that will lead to branching outcomes in the questline; rather, quests in <i>Risen </i>follow more of an adventure game logic where success and progression is based more on your decision-making as a player than your abilities as a character. In most cases, solving a quest simply involves going to the right place and finding the right person or thing, and doing what the game expects you to do in that situation, with occasional choices about how to resolve the outcome of the quest. In the monastery, for instance, a novice is murdered just before you arrive, and so as the only person definitively ruled out as a suspect you're placed in charge of the investigation, which involves searching the crime scene for evidence and talking to various people to identify the evidence and what it could mean, discovering that he was involved in smuggling drugs in from outside and checking alibis and motives of people with authority to leave the monastery, figuring out who might have beef with the victim, then posing as a drug-dealer to bring the killer out of hiding and finally confronting him, with a choice of whether to let him go, kill him, or report him to the masters. Mechanically speaking, this quest is just a simple matter of finding the right things in the environment and talking to the right people, sometimes saying the right things to make it easier, but the game doesn't drag you through it every step of the way with obnoxious quest arrows or journal entries or "witcher senses" spoiling the solutions for you; it's a quest that requires you to think logically and connect the dots on your own.</div>
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Patty's questline, likewise, showcases interesting quest design where it follows a multi-step process spanning multiple chapters with twists along the way. In Harbor Town you run into Patty, who runs the tavern in the harbor district; she tells you that she's the illegitimate child of a famous sailor whom she's trying to find, which leads you into two other quests dealing with Romanov -- a pirate who's locked in the jail cell, which requires you to figure out a way inside to talk to him (and also likely sets you on another side-quest to find Romanov's treasure in town) -- and another with one of Romanov's henchmen, whom the ladies in the brothel want you to get rid of. These interwoven quests lead you to a house in town which apparently belonged to the infamous pirate Gregorius Steelbeard, confirming that Patty's father was a pirate who had a history with Romanov. This triggers another quest to help Patty get out of town, which then leads to another quest where you help Patty search for Steelbeard's treasure by seeking out buried chests scattered over the island, which serve as clues to his final treasure, which requires a little bit of puzzle-solving logic to figure out which chest is the safe one to open. Patty then gets kidnapped by Romanov, who's bartering Patty's life in exchange for the treasure, which brings up a decision about what to do with the treasure. If you give it up in exchange for Patty's freedom, then you have to rescue her, and then set off with her for revenge against Romanov. Again, these are pretty simple quests mechanically, since for the most part it's just a matter of going places and talking to people, and they don't have a whole lot of dramatic spectacle to them, but in this case there's at least an interesting story with strong characters who're also involved in other quests.</div>
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A lot of quests actually overlap with other quests, which really helps to make the world design feel more rich and complex since the various quests and characters coexist and relate to one another so closely. In the swamp, for instance, you have to obtain a golden sword fragment from Brogar so that Oscar can craft a sword as an offering for Don Esteban, while Rachel thinks that Brogar is trying to undermine the Don's order and wants to figure out what he's up to, while Sam is being put to work doing Brogar's tasks around the camp and can't hunt to provide food for the camp, while Brogar acts as the final test in the arena and sets you to do various quests of his own, which ends up being part of what you need to do to fulfill Rachel and Sam's quests while also getting you involved with a bunch of other characters involved in Beppo's quest to get the workers working again. Pretty much every character in the swamp has some involvement in at least two different quests, and so whenever you make progress in one quest it often means progress in another quest as well, or at least flows directly into another quest. When Rachel tasks you with getting the hunters hunting again, that takes you to Sam which then triggers his portion of the quest with Brogar, but then you also have to talk to Luis, which then leads you into a cave where you find evidence for Rachel's "Power Struggle" quest with Brogar, which then leads back to doing quests as Brogar's lackey. The actual gameplay involved in solving these quests isn't the most exciting thing in the world (as with everything else, it's mostly a matter of "go here, talk to this person, find this item, etc") but all these interactions create a really engaging pace of play that keeps the game flowing smoothly while also adding extra significance to every quest and everything you do in this area.</div>
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Most quests in Harbor Town have some sort of overlap between the two opposing factions, since you typically have the option to side with either the Don's bandits or the Inquisition when completing them. Three valuable golden bowls have made it into town from the ruins but have subsequently gone missing, and both the Don and the Inquisition want to get their hands on them, and so once you acquire them it's up to you choose who gets them; the Don wants a valuable heirloom amulet from a hidden room in his house, which is currently occupied by the Inquisition, and once you acquire it you can either give it to one of the Don's men or turn it over to the Inquisition; the alchemist's apprentice is working with someone to smuggle weed into the town, and once you get the package you can give it to the Don's men or to the Inquisition; the list goes on. These aren't exactly interesting decisions, since it's ultimately a binary choice and you're sort of told to pick one side and do all the quests in that faction's favor to pick which faction you join, but it does cause dynamic changes in the world by completely changing the NPC occupation of Harbor Town. If, for instance, you side with the Inquisition, then all of the Don's men get kicked out of town and make their way back to the swamp where they no longer like you -- one of them actually dies on the way back. Likewise, if you do quests against Brogar in the bandit's camp, then he later comes back to confront you before one of the final temples, which again shows lasting consequences for certain decisions that you make in the game.</div>
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Mind you, <i>Risen </i>has its fair share of boring, mindless fetch quests and menial tasks; some of the earliest quests in the game, for instance, come from the novices' farm outside of town, where the novices task you with helping one of them farm his wheat field (by going around picking up pieces of wheat off the ground) and killing five wolves. The objectives themselves are pretty shallow, but these interactions are used as opportunities for lore and world-building, since the novices inform you that their farm was taken over by the Inquisition as a means to sustain their Warriors investigating the ruins throughout the island, and so harvesting wheat for them ties directly into that plot point. They also inform you that the Inquisition has decreed it illegal for anyone to leave town without proper authorization and that if you're caught by the Inquisition they'll draft you into their service, so when you come back from hunting wolves you find an Warrior of the Inquisition there on the farm who's come to collect their daily harvest, and the novices tell you to hide, thus reinforcing both of these story elements. The fact that the Inquisition demands tribute from the farmers, without offering any protection from the wolves, also offers characterization for the Inquisition as a less-than-noble organization. One of the game's more notorious quests involves sweeping up piles of dirt in the monastery, but this quest is done for narrative role-playing purposes that help to establish the tone of the setting and its characters, since it's a consequence for disrespecting Master Aric, which other characters specifically warn you not to do.</div>
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World design and exploration have always been Piranha Bytes' greatest strengths as a developer, and it's here that they succeed once again with <i>Risen</i>. The world in <i>Risen </i>takes place entirely on one, singular island, which probably lies somewhere between <i>Gothic 1</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i> in terms of size. This, I feel, provides an excellent middle ground between being large enough to offer open-world freedom and the possibility to simply get lost within the world, while also being small enough that exploring it is actually a manageable feat, since it's easier to keep track of where you have and have not been and it doesn't overwhelm you with too many options at one time. In true open-world fashion you're free to go anywhere you want on the island, right from the start of the game (except for some of the bigger temples, which are restricted by magic barriers until later in the story), but the reality is you won't be strong enough to go certain places until you level up and get better stats and equipment to handle more difficult enemies. Thus, any time you encounter a more powerful enemy (like skeleton warriors, or ash beasts, or ghouls) you have to remember where they are and come back for them later, once you've leveled up sufficiently.</div>
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Leveling up, therefore, feels pretty rewarding since it takes actual time and effort to improve your character enough to tackle these tougher obstacles. As you explore the world and find better gear and crafting materials, and as you defeat enemies and complete quests, you gain experience towards getting stronger, which at certain stages allows you to explore new areas of the world that were previously too dangerous for you, which in turn opens up new opportunities to gain more experience. And since nothing scales with you in level, and the map isn't designed to be done in any sort of sequential order, exploring the world and figuring out what you can do in it has a pretty organic feel to it where you learn things naturally through your own curiosity and determination -- not because the game is guiding you towards certain areas. And you really do find a lot of genuinely rewarding discoveries tucked away in discreetly hidden areas, like for instance, a little alcove behind some vegetation near the starting beach that'll get you off to an easier start by giving you a shield and a healing potion, or a buried treasure chest tucked into a niche next to a house in Harbor Town that'll give you the sneaking ability, or a fragment of a special sword in a remote corner of an optional beach.</div>
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The island's physical design does a great job of creating alluring spaces to explore, which are pretty satisfying to discover on their own, thanks to its twisting pathways and mountainous heights. There's a lot of verticality in this world, with the island quickly rising up in elevation as you go from sea level on the outer beaches up towards the volcano that towers over everything else at the center of the island; meanwhile, there are a lot of canyons, cliffs, and plateaus all over the island which has the interesting effect of allowing you to see certain areas while also blocking them from view based on your vantage point. At lower elevations you can't see what's above you very well because, well, there's a mountain blocking your view, and so you have to climb higher to get a better view, which then lets you see areas below you with a lot more visibility than you had before, but then you usually have to find a circuitous route to get down to them. Trees and rock formations likewise block areas from view until you turn the corner to see what's over there, and so there's often an element of mystery involved in exploring the island as you wonder what's around the next corner, or as you discover intriguing areas off in the distance that you can't quite reach that easily.</div>
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I particularly love how things on the island look almost completely different depending on your perspective; above Harbor Town, for instance, you can make out the crumbled remnants of some kind of man-made structure, but from up close it's hard to tell what it really is, until you get some distance away to realize that it's the lower legs of what used to be a colossal statue. Likewise, the monastery which sits against the volcano doesn't seem like it's all that big or all that far away when you're standing at the farm outside the monastery, but when you view it from the eastern plains it looks like a mammoth structure way up in the mountains. The island looks really pretty, too, with its lush vegetation swaying in the breeze, the constant dust, pollen, and spores floating through the air, and rays from the sun all being dynamically affected by clouds and mountains, and the glowing crystals inside of caves, all giving the island a strong feeling of liveliness and brilliance. Even its less pretty areas, like its dank swamps and dark crypts do a good job of creating dense atmospheres that make you feel like you could be in a real swamp or crypt. Although technically inferior to some other games of this era in terms of graphical power, the art design and physical composition of the world look pretty striking.</div>
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Where the world design suffers is that the whole island tends to look kind of similar, with the same types of trees, plants, dirt paths, and rocky cliffs everywhere you go. That makes sense, since an island this small isn't going to have any diversity in its climate or ecosystems in real life, but it makes this fictional video game world a little stale to explore because everywhere kind of blurs together after a while. Even while you're discovering interesting new areas that you hadn't seen before, they still have the same general look as everywhere else. Some places, like roads and intersections, are somehow completely devoid of any distinguishing features thus making them almost identical to other roads and intersections, and thus making it harder to tell where you are or where you're going without consulting the map. Wooded areas aren't much better, since the dense vegetation often likes to put a bunch of trees and plants in your face so that you can't really see the forest for the trees, literally. Making matters worse is that all of the ruins and fortresses look pretty much identical to one another, since they're all made from the same palette of assets -- once you've seen one, you've seen all the rest, and the game is going to have you going through these ruins a lot, just with different layouts and combinations of features. Except for the main dungeon, you could probably take a screenshot from each ruin, mix them up, and there'd be no way to tell which goes with which ruin.</div>
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The ruins do function well, however, as dungeons in this game, and it's nice that we get a fair amount of dungeon crawling in <i>Risen</i>, seeing as <i>Gothic 3</i> didn't really have much to offer in this department. I'm always a big advocate of having dungeons or more linearly-structured "levels" in open-world games because it provides a contrasting change of pace to the rhythm of gameplay, and the dungeons in <i>Risen </i>work well to mix up the feel of the gameplay. The ruins all have various types of traps and blocked passages that require some type of observant puzzle-solving to circumvent, like noticing that there are cracks on the floor and that a column is going to drop from the ceiling to crush you, or that the stone tiles here look suspiciously symmetrical, like they're part of a trap floor, or that there's a tiny hole in the wall that you can crawl through if you use the transform into nautilus spell, or that you can deactivate the spike trap by activating a hidden switch. Often times you'll have to track down lizard busts from different areas of the ruin to use as keys to unlock other doors, and sometimes you get branching paths that lead into different areas where you have to do different things elsewhere to open the main path forward. Later ruins are actually a little bit challenging in some areas and had me really slowing down to observe the environments more closely looking for solutions I might've missed when I came to an impasse. It's just a bummer that they all recycle the same gameplay mechanics and look pretty much the same, because after a while of crawling through ruins -- especially in chapter four where that's practically all you do -- it gets to feel pretty monotonous and repetitive.</div>
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The lack of variety is especially disappointing considering that all three <i>Gothic </i>games managed to have a lot of diverse areas that not only looked different but that provided more unique gameplay scenarios. <i>Gothic 3</i> obviously had the vastly different climates with the snowy mountains in Nordmar, the green plains and forests in Myrtana, and the sandy desert in Varant, and <i>Gothic 2</i> managed to have even more diversity with the main map of Khorinis, the old Valley of Mines map, Jharkendar (which itself had a lot of pretty diverse elements ranging from pirate beaches to fetid swamps to rocky canyons to winding cliffs) and finally the Isle of Irdorath. Even <i>Gothic 1</i>, which was the smallest and most primitive game of the series managed to create different atmospheres and environments -- the orc lands legitimately look and feel different from the rest of the colony because of the washed out colors and dying vegetation, while the old monastery, stone fortress, fog tower, orc shrine, and Xardas's old tower (all of which function similarly to the ruined fortresses scattered about in <i>Risen</i>, as being smaller mini-dungeons embedded in the overworld), all have a unique theme both in their physical appearance and the mythology behind them -- they don't feel like they've been randomly generated from the same building blocks. That's not even to mention its actual dungeons with the old mine and new mine, the orc cemetery, or the temple of Sleeper which offer even more unique variety.</div>
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Besides simply adding aesthetic variety to the games, a lot of these environments were also used to add on to the world as you played, such that the world expanded into new areas and literally got bigger as you advanced through the main story. The size of the world in <i>Gothic 2 </i>practically doubles once you enter the Valley of Mines, and then if you have the expansion, <i>Night of the Raven</i> nearly triples it. <i>Risen </i>being set entirely on the one island means that the world doesn't expand in any way as the game progresses -- what you see in chapter one is what you get for the entire game, apart from accessing some of the locked ruins, which are sort of anticlimactic since they all look and function similarly to smaller ruins that you've already explored in the open world. Combined with the rushed story that really only spans the last two chapters of the game, and which has you mostly retreading the same paths on the island that you've already explored multiple times previously, but with a bunch of lizardmen now pasted all over the map, the second half of the game ends up feeling underwhelming because there isn't a lot of new content to experience, and what little new stuff there is feels like stuff we've already seen and done before, or just gets copy/pasted across the map.</div>
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This game is really begging to have one more extra chapter somewhere before the final boss where we get to explore a new, different area of the island (say, you have to find a secret passage through the northern mountains to reach the north coast), just to give the game a little more variety, a more expensive world, and a little more extra content in its second half. It would've been really nice to get a new quest hub of NPC's, for instance, because once you finish doing quests in Harbor Town in chapter one it's pretty much done for the rest of the game. If the extra chapter couldn't be part of the main game, then this is where a Night of the Raven-style expansion with an interesting side-quest on a remote, undiscovered part of the island would've helped flesh the game out a little further. Knowing now that <i>Risen 2</i> would be largely pirate-themed, they could've had a pirate camp hidden on the north coast, that might bridge the gap between the two games a little better or give extra clues leading towards Steelbeard's whereabouts. This is all wishful thinking, of course, but the problem remains that chapters three and four feel noticeably underdeveloped.</div>
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The combat system in <i>Risen </i>is pretty good in concept but feels a little too rough around the edges. After <i>Gothic 3's</i> combat proved to be complete garbage, Piranha Bytes thankfully decided to move on from that system completely, but rather than going back to <i>Gothic 1 and 2's</i> combat they went with something entirely new that actually kind of resembles Souls combat, but without a stamina meter. With <i>Risen</i>, you press the left mouse button to do standard attacks in three-hit combos, and can hold the right mouse button to block attacks, using either your weapon or a shield, or double-tap the movement keys to perform quick-dodges. That's all you can do at first, but as you put skill points into the different types of melee weapons, you gain the ability to parry enemy attacks, perform lateral side swipes, charge up attacks for extra damage, perform an extra fourth hit in the combo, do offensive counter-attacks, or use bastard swords and two-handers with one hand. It's a fun and satisfying leveling system since the combat changes and evolve over the course of the game as you put points into combat training, much like in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>. The changes aren't quite as dramatic as in those games, but they're more gradual and spread out a little better over the full game. It's also nice that the system adds all new inputs to the equations; in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>, better combat training basically just meant you could attack with faster and longer combos, whereas <i>Risen </i>gives you more active abilities and decisions to make in combat, like whether you're going to charge up an attack to try to break through an opponent's defenses, or wait for them to attack so you can counter their attack, and so on.</div>
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The system relies heavily on timing and positioning. To perform attacks more quickly, you have to time your mouse clicks just right; if your timing is off then the attacks slow down considerably and you become more likely to get interrupted, or have an enemy dodge out of the attack. Likewise, landing hits and avoiding attacks involves careful positioning to make sure you're close to land hits, or far enough away to avoid hits. Ideally, you want to be able to dodge to an opponent's flank when they attack, so that you can get out of the way of their attacks while also putting yourself in position to strike them. Ultimately, it's a pretty active system that requires a lot of personal skill to execute the controls just right, at the right times, while making good decisions about how you approach a fight, much like the systems in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>. Unfortunately, the system is not without some major faults.</div>
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The main issue is that attack and dodge animations, for both you and your enemies, are just so fast that it feels like there's rarely any opportunity to react to anything because you just don't get to see animations develop -- they just kind of happen. You might be attacking an enemy and then suddenly find they've teleported to your flank, at which point you have about half-a-second to spin the camera around and throw up a block, or you'll be standing there waiting for an enemy to attack so you can parry them and then they come leaping at you with no preparatory animation to indicate they're about to lunge and only like six frames of animation time before they hit you. Some enemies are just literally faster than you, meaning the enemy can start their attack after you've already initiated yours and still hit you first. Even dodging is kind of questionable. Despite the animation being so fast it's still surprisingly easy to get hit in the middle of a dodge because there don't seem to be any sort of invincibility frames to reward the timing of your dodge -- all that seems to matter is the physical position of your dodge, meaning that you really need to be dodging before the enemy even attacks to be completely out of the way by the time their animation follows through (which again, is almost impossible because of how fast the attack animations are in the first place).</div>
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The camera and lock-on system don't help much, either. As with the previous games, <i>Risen </i>uses a lock-on system where the game focuses on one target at a time, directing all attacks towards that enemy and all dodges around them. The problem, here, is that there's no way to manually toggle your lock-on, or to choose which target you want to lock onto -- the game decides for itself which target it thinks you want to focus on, and often picks the wrong target or switches rapidly and unpredictably between targets, even in the middle of an attack combo. So if you have an enemy who's near death and want to get a quick attack to kill it, the game might randomly decide to target the enemy to its left, or you might be in the middle of an attack combo on a certain enemy who dodges out of the way, thus causing the game to direct its focus to some other target and fully exposing your backside to other enemies, or you'll be in a tight choke point and the game will lock on to a target behind the one in front of you so that you can't see the health bar or position yourself relative to the one that's actually a danger to you. It's beyond frustrating, and there's really no excuse for not allowing manual lock-on when it was already in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>. The actual controls for certain inputs aren't very consistent, either, since blocking and parrying both use the same button -- you long click to block, and short click to parry -- which sometimes leads the game to interpret your inputs differently than you intended, where you block an attack you meant to parry and miss your opportunity. Even dodging is sometimes problematic, since double-tapping the movement keys adds a slight delay in a system where you already aren't given a lot of reaction time, and if you use the space bar you sometimes end up jumping straight up in the air instead of actually dodging, if, say, you were in the middle of changing direction and didn't have the movement key fully pressed when you hit the space bar.</div>
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On top of that, enemies don't follow any sort of predictable patterns where you can reliably anticipate what they're going to do to exploit your knowledge and familiarity of their movesets. Sometimes an enemy will attack you once or twice and then stop, patiently standing around waiting for you to attack them, and other times they'll attack four or five times in a row, forcing you to sit there with your shield up indefinitely waiting and not knowing when they're going to stop. And if there are any sort of tells to indicate that the enemy is going to do one attack or four attacks then they're incredibly subtle and not telegraphed very well. So sometimes you're going "okay, they attacked three times, I haven't seen them attack more than three times, so this is my opportunity to attack" and then suddenly they hit you with a surprise fourth attack, or they finish a second attack and you're still sitting there waiting for a third before realizing "oh, they stopped attacking, let me try to get an attack in," and then they start a new combo up because you waited too long while trying to read what they were doing. Even with a firm understanding of how the combat system works, and having good timing and reaction speeds, it often feels like you're just guessing and hoping for the best because the enemy behavior is so random, which makes melee combat kind of frustrating sometimes.</div>
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It's really shocking when you consider that <i>Risen </i>and <i>Demon's Souls</i> came out four days apart from one another, and how much better the combat in <i>Demon's Souls</i> is compared to <i>Risen</i>. Part of the reason combat works so well in the <i>Souls </i>games is because they emphasize predictable tells that will lead to predictable attacks; if the enemy pulls their sword back a certain way, you know they'll be performing a certain type of attack and can plan ahead to avoid it. The difficulty stems from learning what these tells are so that you can react appropriately when you see each one and not get caught off guard. Once you learn the telegraphs, the fight is simply a matter of executing attacks and dodges with the right timing and positioning. Fundamentally, <i>Risen </i>and <i>Demon's Souls</i> have incredibly similar combat systems, and yet <i>Demon's Souls's</i> combat feels so much better because the animations are a lot more smoother, with more obvious tells and wind-ups, and with consistent enemy behavior, whereas in <i>Risen </i>the animations feel choppy and disjointed, and enemies seem to do random things at random times with practically no warning of what they're going to do, or that they're going to do anything at all. Even in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>, the enemies follow predictable patterns with consistent AI. Truth be told, the attack animations in those games are sometimes just as fast, if not faster than in <i>Risen</i>, but once you figure out how the AI works you can use consistent and reliable strategies to fight the different enemies. With <i>Risen</i>, it's kind of a crapshoot every time.</div>
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The magic system in <i>Risen </i>has likewise been revamped, this time for the worse. Gone are the variety of offensive spells from <i>Gothic 2</i> like Fire Storm, Ice Wave, Ball Lightning, Wind Fist, Destroy Undead, Geyser, Root Snare, Insect Swarm, and countless others, in favor of distilling that game's vast arsenal of spells down to three: fireball, magic bullet, and ice lance. Each spell functions like a basic point-and-click projectile, and so you basically just pick one of them and then spend the entire game using that one spell, improving its damage and casting speed by investing skill points into it. At two points along each spell's upgrade path it gains extra bonuses, but these just enhance existing properties, like enhancing the AOE radius of fireball, or enhancing the length of time a target will be frozen with ice lance. This is pretty boring, because once you gain access to magic crystals near the end of chapter one, you'll be casting the exact same spell over and over again for the entire remainder of the game, as opposed to progressively learning new spells that add to your arsenal in new and different ways.</div>
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As a magician, you do gain access to rune magic, which allows you to cast other types of spells like telekinesis, levitation, transform into nautilus, healing, light, speed, and so on, but these are mostly utility spells that help you interact with the world and are easily replaced with scrolls by non-mages, thanks to the inclusion of the scroll-making skill. I really like the functionality of those utility spells and the role they play in dungeon crawling, but the fact that they're kind of mandatory and so easily accessible via scrolls diminishes their value to mages somewhat. The only combat-related rune spells are two buffs that boost your melee strength and damage resistances, a transform into ashbeast spell, a summon skeleton spell, and the inferno spell. These latter three are decently interesting options, but the inferno spell (which is unlocked in chapter four as the "ultimate" offensive spell) seems to do considerably less damage than a fully-leveled fireball while costing ten times as much mana, and by the time you get the transform into ashbeast spell it performs about the same as your basic melee weapons and armor do, but with fewer attack options, so it's really only an upgrade if you've been completely ignoring melee combat. Those are the only tier four runes in the entire game, and they're both basically worse than options you've likely already unlocked well before gaining access to them, making them a pretty unsatisfying reward for maxing out rune magic. The open locks spell likewise comes so late in the game, after you've already explored the entire island, meaning you're better off learning the thief skills in chapter one so that you can actually open locked chests as you find them, instead of having to come back to them much later after their contents will likely be obsolete for you. Summon skeleton is nice just to have a meatshield to distract enemies, and the speed spell saves a lot of time running around the island, but that's about as exciting as the rune magic gets, other than the utility spells.</div>
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The final boss might be the best one in any Piranha Bytes game, at least at the time of its release, because it actually has the feel of a final boss, as opposed to a glorified battle against a normal enemy. <i>Gothic 1's</i> Sleeper was interesting story-wise, but mechanically just amounted to interacting with a few hotspots while dodging fireballs and demons; <i>Gothic 2's</i> Undead Dragon was just another dragon fight, of which you'd already fought five previously; and <i>Gothic 3</i> didn't even have a final boss, unless you count killing Rhobar or Zuben, which are just mundane NPCs. The fire titan in <i>Risen </i>plays more like a puzzle-platformer boss like you'd see in a modern <i>Zelda </i>game; it has a few special attacks you need to dodge, but mainly you need to watch the floor and make sure you're not standing on any platforms as they're glowing so that you don't drop to your death when they disappear, then reflect attacks back at it with the shield and rush in to hit it when it's weakened. It's fine, and actually kind of interesting, especially for a Piranha Bytes game, but the whole fight is kind of ruined by the floating tutorial messages telling you exactly how to avoid its attacks and how to damage it. And once you know what to do, the fight becomes pretty shallow and repetitive. It's also mechanically bizarre in the sense that it forces you into a warrior archetype at the very end of the game, even if you were playing as a pure mage the entire time. It would've been nice if they could've gotten rid of those tutorial messages and had a better, more immersive feedback system to guide you towards figuring out how to damage him, and if he could've had an extra phase or two with different attacks, and had some kind of option for mages to fight the final boss like an actual mage.</div>
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The fight itself is a little anticlimactic, too, because the fire titan just doesn't look or feel like a titan to me. Titans in Greek mythology are supposed to be the sons and daughters of primordial gods, who basically personify the natural aspects of the world. In popular media, they're usually depicted as powerful human deities, or as monstrous golems, but in <i>Risen </i>the fire titan looks like some kind of goofy reject from the <i>Aliens vs Predator</i> universe. Granted, <i>Risen </i>could be doing its own original thing with the concept of titans, but this thing looks more silly than intimidating to me. Plus, the music during this fight is pretty underwhelming -- it's barely even noticeable, and doesn't do a whole lot to bring out the epic stakes of this battle.</div>
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Other than that final boss fight, the soundtrack in <i>Risen </i>might be my favorite of Kai Rosenkranz's work with Piranha Bytes. I've already talked at length about how great the music is in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> and how, even though the compositions in <i>Gothic 3</i> are technically superior they tend to break the immersion for me by being a little overbearing -- <i>Risen </i>strikes a good balance between the two, where it uses simple instrumentation reminiscent of the first two <i>Gothic </i>games to create a more grounded, down-to-earth tone and atmosphere appropriate for the setting, while having a sprinkling of some of those more majestic, stand-out melodies like he used in<i> Gothic 3</i>. I'm also pleased to say he learned his lesson from <i>Gothic 3</i> and made the combat music not only more subdued, but also more varied -- there's a different combat theme for each area of the island and they all quote the main theme of their respective area, so by gradually fading in the combat music (which usually starts with a few bars of percussion before layering in chords and then finally the main theme) the transition from ambient exploration music to intense combat music is seamless and almost unnoticeable.</div>
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Finally, I should point out that the English localization of <i>Risen </i>is surprisingly good, especially considering the history that Piranha Bytes has with translators and voice actors in the <i>Gothic </i>games delivering bizarre lines of dialogue with weird accents and odd cadences and inconsistent pronunciations. In <i>Risen</i>, the voice actors do a really good job with their lines, and the translations make sense for native English speakers -- they even pull off some clever wordplay that might not have come through as naturally in a direct translation. They even managed to hire some big name voice actors, with John Rhys-Davies voicing Don Esteban, Andy Serkis voicing Inquisitor Mendoza, and Lena Heady voicing Patty. The main character's voice is a little dry and monotone but I feel like that's part of making him a more accessible character by understating his vocal presence within the world, relative to the cast around him. At the same time, however, he's a bit of a wise-cracking smartass sometimes, so he's not devoid of personality. The facial animations and lip syncing are pretty mediocre, even for 2009 standards, but the characters are brought to life extremely well by their respective voice actors. I just wish Patty would wear some more practical clothes than... whatever that outfit is.</div>
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Ultimately, <i>Risen </i>feels like a solid step in the right direction after <i>Gothic 3</i>, that just didn't step quite as far forward as it could have. You can tell that Piranha Bytes were playing it safe with <i>Risen </i>-- going back to the successful formula from <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> that they knew would work, while keeping the scope of the project small enough that they wouldn't stretch themselves too thin and risk running out of time and resources like they did with <i>Gothic 3</i>. That managed effort is certainly respectable, and <i>Risen </i>is truly a solid game that feels very close in both style and quality to the first two <i>Gothic </i>games. It may not say it in the title, but this is a <i>Gothic </i>game. It's not as good as <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>, but those games were lightning in a bottle and nothing may ever achieve the level of magic that those games achieved. I certainly have some complaints with <i>Risen </i>-- the magic system is too streamlined, melee combat is a little frustrating, there's not enough variety of environments on the island, and most notably, the second half of the game feels underdeveloped and could've benefited from having more content and story twists -- but otherwise the fact that it feels like a <i>Gothic </i>game, from its world design and atmosphere to its quests and characters to its leveling system and character progression, is enough to put <i>Risen </i>on a pedestal and sing its praises.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-67125794099727090692019-10-21T20:12:00.001-04:002019-10-21T20:12:22.088-04:00Link's Awakening: A 25+ Year Retrospective<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening</i> was originally released in 1993, and I vividly remember playing <i>Link's Awakening</i> on that bulky, unlit, green-screened Game Boy while sitting in church and on long car rides as a young boy. It's probably safe to say that it was one of my favorite games in my early childhood, and I was overjoyed when it was re-released on the Game Boy Color a few years later with extra content. With the 2019 remake for the Nintendo Switch coming out, I figured it was time to go back and re-examine a classic that I used to love so much as a kid, and see how well it holds up 25+ years later.</div>
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As it turns out, <i>Link's Awakening</i> is still really good. Surprisingly good, actually, considering it's one of the oldest games in the series on one of the most primitive Nintendo devices. The only thing really holding it back is the sheer limitations of the Game Boy, only being able to render a very small resolution and only having two buttons to work with; otherwise, the actual game designs feel timelessly classic, which makes sense seeing as later games in the series seem to have taken a strong influence from <i>Link's Awakening</i>. Its impact on the series is especially noteworthy considering it originated a lot of elements that have now become <i>Zelda </i>staples, like playing songs on the ocarina for various effects, trading sequences, collectibles that lead to extra rewards, fishing, owl and companion characters, and more. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a quintessential <i>Zelda </i>game and ranks among the series' best, easily making my top five, and maybe even having a case for top three.</div>
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The thing I love the most about <i>Link's Awakening</i> is its unique setting and story premise. I've said before in other <i>Zelda </i>reviews that I find the usual tropes of Zelda, Ganon, Hyrule, and Triforces to be kind of tiring and uninteresting when seemingly every game just rehashes the same, familiar beats, and that it's always nice when these games choose to break the mold and show that the <i>Zelda </i>formula can work without those cliched mainstays.</div>
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My video review of <i>Link's Awakening</i>.</div>
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Instead, <i>Link's Awakening</i> sees Link crash his ship while sailing the ocean and washing ashore on an uncharted, mysterious island known as Koholint, which as he soon discovers is apparently guarded by a slumbering deity known as the Wind Fish, who resides in a giant egg atop the tallest mountain. The island is home to a small village of men, women, and children, and also an Animal Village of sentient, talking animals, all of whom have lived their entire lives on the island and have never seen anyone new arrive, or anyone leave, with the island being threatened as of late by the strange appearance of more sinister monsters (called nightmares) around the island. According to rumors, the only way to leave the island is to wake the Wind Fish, which then sets Link on his quest to assemble the eight instruments of the sirens by defeating the nightmares and thus saving Koholint in the process, in order to play the Ballad of the Wind Fish atop Mount Tamaranch. Over the course of the game, Link has various interactions, encounters, and adventures with the Koholint natives, and through uncovering ancient, cryptic clues, we begin to realize that Koholint may not actually be a real place, and that awakening the Wind Fish might cause everyone and everything in this world to vanish out of existence, as if they were merely a figment of the slumbering Wind Fish's dream.</div>
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This is such a cool concept to me. The whole "it's all dream" premise can be pretty trite if not executed properly, but here they do a great job of giving the island this mystical, almost ethereal quality through the music, visuals, and little bits of lore that you stumble upon via owl statues, and the owl himself. Even though it seems like it could be an ordinary place at first glance -- basically just a knock-off version of Hyrule -- those little bits of lore are enough to make you question what's going on, here, while some of its more bizarre elements like all the talking animals and the odd breaks in the fourth wall, both from tutorial characters as well as the appearance of characters and creatures from other Nintendo games, give it this subtle other-worldly atmosphere. It's right on the edge of the uncanny valley, where the world is almost familiar to us, but at the same time it's uniquely strange, and that makes it a little hard to reconcile the reality or fiction of this place.</div>
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Over the course of the game you help out pretty much all of the island's various inhabitants in some direct, personal way, and begin to develop actual relationships with them -- you rescue Tarin when he's transformed into a raccoon, you rescue Papahl when he's stranded on the mountain, you retrieve Richard's golden leaves from his castle, you lay to rest the spirit of a ghost who hasn't been able to pass on to the afterlife, you rescue Bow-Wow from moblins, and you help various characters achieve minor goals and happiness through the various stages of the trading sequence, like getting a Yoshi doll for the newborn baby to stop it from crying, or finally delivering a response letter to Mr Write who laments that no one ever writes him back. Interactions with Marin are particularly personal, as she's the one there to rescue you on the beach and takes you home to nurse you back to health. You take her to the Animal Village and listen to her sing, you rescue her when she's kidnapped by monsters, and you sit by the beach with her and listen to her dreams of becoming a seagull so she can fly across the ocean and discover a new world. It's a surprisingly touching bit of character development, considering how primitive the game's presentation is and how relatively little dialogue there is in the game. Marin develops a bit of a crush on you, and it's hard not to feel some sentiment for her as well, and so as the game progresses you begin to realize that, once you awaken the Wind Fish, this world and all of these people will cease to exist, which can make you question your motive to continue on your quest.</div>
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The fascinating part about all of this is that the "it's all a dream" premise isn't treated as a surprising twist near the end of the game -- it's not a sudden revelation meant to make you reconsider everything that's happened previously -- but more as a matter of fact that is slowly uncovered and revealed well before the end, thus causing you to reconsider everything you're going to do. The game is sure to instill a minor element of doubt about all of this, emphasizing the fact that no one's ever woken the Wind Fish before, and so who knows what will actually happen if you do? The nightmares, who serve as bosses in each of the dungeons, progressively taunt you and try to convince you that, by waking the Wind Fish you'll be destroying this world, which, in a way, makes you kind of a bad guy in this scenario, since you would be seemingly causing more harm to the island than even the nightmares. It paints your heroic journey to save Koholint and find a way back home in a much more questionable light and makes you really wonder if what you're doing is actually the right thing, because all of the characters in this world are brought to life with such genuine authenticity, particularly for a <i>Zelda </i>game in 1993, with personalities and activities completely independent of Link's adventures, that ending their existence here on Koholint seems almost inhumane. Even if it is just a dream, these characters feel much more alive than characters in previous <i>Zelda </i>games, and even in some of the more recent ones.</div>
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Mind you, the game is 26 years old and has a fairly primitive presentation -- dialogue is minimal and to the point, and characters are rendered in low-res sprites with barely any facial features and only basic animations. To put it simply, <i>Link's Awakening</i> is not winning any awards for dramatic characterization in 2019, but the simplicity is kind of charming here, because it gives you enough details to set the stage for your imagination to fill in the gaps; it's not hard to imagine this being a real place populated by real people. The graphics don't even look that bad or out of place in 2019, seeing as pixel graphics and retro visual styles have been making a comeback in the modern indie scene. Even though it at all looks and sounds relatively primitive, it's aged pretty well, and it still manages to portray some decently cinematic scenes with its basic sprites -- the scene on the beach with Marin is a perfect example, but we still get fun moments with Tarin when he's transformed into a raccoon, or when he tries to knock a honeycomb down with a stick and then gets attacked by bees.</div>
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Likewise, the world design feels authentically real and interesting. Koholint has the usual <i>Zelda </i>staples of diverse environments ranging from tropical beaches to dark, mysterious woods to rocky mountain paths to dismal swamps to arid deserts to river rapids and bay areas. The diversity alone is enough to keep the world engaging, but I also find it fairly immersive that these areas connect to each other so well, as if they're all part of one greater world. It's common in 3D <i>Zelda </i>games for the different biomes to feel completely separate and isolated from the rest of the world, with you having to go through bottlenecked transition points and loading zones with a lot of virtual dead space around them, but because <i>Link's Awakening</i> uses a two-dimensional grid-based map where you can go to each and every one of its 16x16 squares, it means that each square usually has to connect to the other squares around it in some sort of plausible way.</div>
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Sometimes areas are cordoned off from the rest of the world, like the Yarna Desert which is in the corner of the map, can only be entered through one square, and has canyon ridges surrounding it on all sides, but it still has to fit into the space of the world around it, and even though it's only three little squares we do get a tiny bit of overlap between the desert and the fields around the Animal Village. Most areas usually have more of a gradual transition, though, like going from Mabe Village to the Toronbo Shores, where the ground tiles progressively switch from solid green with patches of dense grass that you can cut with your sword, to mostly green with spotty patches of thin, almost yellow grass, to a brown and beige mixture of dirt and sand with no grass in sight, and finally to wavy coastal sand, all while you progressively drop in elevation as you descend towards sea level. Something like this really shouldn't be noteworthy, but remember this is 1993 on the primitive Game Boy Brick, and details like these help a lot to make the world feel more plausibly real and immersive.</div>
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The world itself is ultimately smaller than, say, <i>A Link the Past</i>, but it doesn't feel all that small because it's relatively dense. A lot of the time, squares on the map have multiple entrances and exits with obstructions preventing you from simply moving to the next square up, down, left, or right -- you'll usually see a place on one square and then have to go through multiple other squares to find a path to reach that place. Sometimes it's a bit like navigating a maze, since you can't see the next screens over until you move into them to know where each path will lead to, thus creating an element of trial-and-error as you try to figure out how different areas of the map connect to one another. Exploration, therefore, feels pretty satisfying and engaging because it takes actual thought and effort to navigate around the world -- you don't just simply walk to the next area, but rather you have to figure out a way to actually get there. So even though the map only has so many squares on it, it takes quite a bit more time and effort to actually explore the world than simply going to each of its 256 squares.</div>
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As is typical with <i>Zelda </i>games, various obstructions that block your path are intended to be circumvented with items obtained from dungeons, with each new item you gain granting access to new areas of the map, which will lead to a new dungeon which will lead to a new item, thus perpetuating the cycle. At the start of the game, for instance, you're blocked from going into the mysterious woods until you get the sword to cut down some shrubbery, you're blocked from going into the swamp until you get the Roc's Feather to jump over some pitfalls, and you're blocked from going into the prairie or bay area until you get the power bracelet to lift boulders. These items also grant access to extra upgrades and collectibles in previously unlocked areas that you could obviously see but couldn't reach. Here, the smaller size of the world works in the game's favor as well; with fewer total squares to explore, and fewer collectibles to collect, it's far easier to remember where specific things are and how to get back to them after you passed them by several hours ago. By having only 12 heart pieces (as opposed to 24 in <i>A Link to the Past</i>, or 36 in Ocarina of Time) and only 26 secret seashells (as opposed to 50-100 Gold Skulltulas in <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, or 900 korok seeds in <i>Breath of the Wild</i>) it makes each individual discovery feel more special and rewarding because the game isn't diluting the experience with the same thing over and over again. Plus, each discovery feels genuinely earned, because even though there are fewer in total, that doesn't always mean they're easy to find or acquire -- I, for instance, ended up missing a few heart pieces and several secret seashells in my recent playthrough, despite being a pretty thorough explorer and always looking out for those sorts of things.</div>
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The game's overall progression is pretty linear, with most areas in the world being closed off until you're supposed to go there and having to go through the dungeons in a prescribed order, but the linearity doesn't feel as restricting as it does in some other <i>Zelda </i>games, in large part because the world itself feels so interconnected. With the map being comprised of a single seamless, uninterrupted landscape, it makes figuring out where you have to go next a little bit harder because different areas of the map just kind of blend into the rest of the world, rather than being obviously sectioned off into isolated zones with a single entrance, thus distilling your options into fewer possibilities where you can more easily use process of elimination to determine your next destination. <i>Link's Awakening</i> is sure to indicate the general area of your next objective every time you complete a dungeon, but it's ultimately up to you to figure out where that is and how to get there, and then you still have to explore that area to figure out where the dungeon is and how to get inside of it.</div>
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In previous <i>Zelda </i>games, the dungeons often felt like they were just kind of there, and accessing them was mostly a matter of just physically getting to them, which sometimes required a special item and other times not, but <i>Link's Awakening</i> makes the process of accessing each dungeon a little more involved. To access the Key Cavern, for example, you have to retrieve Richard's five golden leaves from Kanalet Castle, and then navigate his hedge maze to get the Slime Key; to access the Angler's Tunnel, you have to defeat a mini-boss in the Yarna Desert, but before you can do that you have to bring Marin to the Animal Village to wake the sleeping walrus who's blocking the way; to access the Face Shrine, you have to visit the Southern Face Shrine and defeat a mini-boss there to get the Face Key; and so on. Completing these preliminary tasks adds an extra sense of adventure to the overworld exploration, especially since they usually involve a lot of interactions with other characters, and it helps to make each dungeon feel more connected to the world because it has some sort of relation to something else. Plus, it creates a satisfying amount of build-up to each dungeon; just getting to the dungeon feels like an accomplishment on its own, and it makes completing the dungeon feel more momentous.</div>
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The alternating overworld exploration and dungeon crawling cycle in this game creates a really engaging pace of play where it feels like you're always moving forward in the game and always making actual progress towards achieving your goals, while still giving you a lot of freedom to go off exploring on your own. It strikes a good balance, in other words, of providing semi-open-world freedom alongside a more linearly-structured experience, which I find helps to make each one of those dichotomous elements more interesting since it makes the gameplay feel more varied while also providing a contrast that accentuates the positive qualities of each element. In other words, going into a claustrophobic dungeon where you have to solve puzzles and find keys to advance is more striking because you've just come out of a large overworld where you have a lot more freedom to roam about each square of the map and to go off wherever you want. Even <i>Breath of the Wild</i>, which focused entirely on its overworld, with very little emphasis put on its dungeons, realized that you can't have just overworld in a <i>Zelda</i> game, hence why it has a hundred mini-dungeon shrines spread all over the map. Those shrines served their purpose in <i>Breath of the Wild</i>, but ultimately I prefer the balance present in <i>Link's Awakening</i>, where the dungeons have a greater, more equal share of the focus.</div>
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It helps, of course, that the dungeons in <i>Link's Awakening</i> are all really good. They start out relatively simple and straightforward but get progressively bigger, longer, and more complicated the further you get in the game, with dungeons in the second half usually being 45 minutes to an hour long. Most dungeons are fairly non-linear, with maps that branch out in all directions requiring you to get keys and items or to manipulate a mechanism from one side of the dungeon in order to be able to progress on the other side. Whenever you get a key, you typically have multiple options of where to use it -- even though you'll eventually get all the keys you need to open all of the doors, your progression through the dungeon can shape up a little differently depending on where you choose to go first, which makes it feel like you have a lot more control over the process of beating the dungeon, rather than following an obvious dotted line from beginning to end.</div>
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I particularly enjoy that <i>Link's Awakening</i> doesn't telegraph its dungeon puzzles. Modern <i>Zelda </i>games (starting with <i>Ocarina of Time</i> onward) have a tendency to show or explain things to you in a very explicit fashion -- you walk into a room and the game yanks the camera away from you to pan across the room showing you the path you have to take to reach the door on the other side, or a monster will operate a mechanism to block your path and then run out the room thereby showing you exactly what it does and how it works, or a companion character will forcibly interrupt the game to tell you things that you could probably easily deduce on your own if they just gave you an opportunity. <i>Link's Awakening</i> doesn't do any of this -- when you walk into a room, the puzzles are just sitting there waiting to be interacted with, and it's entirely up to you to figure out not only what they do, but what you're supposed to do with them.</div>
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The puzzles themselves can be pretty devious, too, with really tricky solutions to things like having to find hidden entrances to secret rooms based on the suggestive layout of the map grid, or having to kill enemies in a room in a certain order, or figuring out how to move the giant ball through Eagle's Tower while having to take alternate routes to get places yourself, or diving underwater at a place where torch lines intersect, and so on. Although some of these solutions can be pretty obscure, the game does give you hints, and even outright solutions to some of them, in the form of the owl statues, however these statues require that you first find the beak in each dungeon before they'll tell you their secret, and are often found in a different room than where their secret applies, so it still takes effort to unlock those hints, and a little bit of brainpower to understand what it's talking about and how/where to apply that knowledge. Some of the later dungeons are still pretty challenging, even today, and required me to look up solutions in a guide on at least two occasions.</div>
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At first glance, the dungeons don't have as much theme as, say, <i>Ocarina of Time's</i>, or perhaps even <i>A Link to the Past's</i>, but each dungeon still gives off a unique identity that sets it apart from the rest in a memorable way. The Tail Cave is somewhat generic, but it does a good job of demonstrating how all of the dungeon mechanics work in a relatively safe and easy to understand environment. The Bottle Grotto uses bottles to block your progress until you get the power bracelet, and then requires you to use bottles to defeat certain enemies and to get past other obstacles in more creative ways, and has a map layout shaped like a bottle. The Key Cavern has a ton of locked doors that you have to navigate by finding keys scattered all throughout the dungeons, with a map layout shaped like two keys. Angler's Tunnel is the "water dungeon" where you have to swim and dive through water, and has a map layout shaped like a flipper, or a fin, or a fish head -- I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it probably has something to do with water.</div>
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Otherwise, most of the dungeons unfortunately tend to look and sound pretty similar. They all use different color palettes and have slightly different ground and wall patterns, but every dungeon has the same square, blocky design to it with a lot of the exact same pushable blocks, flippable switches, wall torches, doors, blade traps, statues, and so on. Unless you happen to remember what color each dungeon is, or have each dungeon completely memorized, it would be pretty hard to identify a screenshot of a random room taken out of context and attribute it to the correct dungeon. Dungeon music, likewise, isn't very memorable, since most of the tracks are all spin-offs of the basic cave music -- one of them is literally just the same thing but higher and faster -- so rather than creating unique tones and atmospheres for each dungeon, they basically set the same tone and atmosphere, but with minor variations to keep it from getting repetitive. It's a welcome change, seeing as the previous games all reused the exact same music for every dungeon, but it's only a small step forward compared to the huge leap <i>Ocarina of Time</i> would take in this department a few years later. The soundtrack for the Face Dungeon is the only one that really stands out in a positive way, since that's when it finally breaks away from the Cave theme motifs to give us something more radically different, which also coincides with the biggest revelation in the story that Koholint is just a dream, thus marking the home stretch of the game.</div>
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Of all the dungeons, the Color Dungeon (added in the Game Boy Color re-release as a new "hidden dungeon") probably represents its theme best, with most or all of its puzzles and mechanics dealing with the newfound addition of color to the game's visuals. As such, you have to toss colored enemies into a space with the matching color, or flip switches so that the colors are all the same, and fight enemies that blend in with the colored floor tiles. There's also these weird, bouncy tiles that progressively changed from green, to yellow, to red before they eventually break and disappear. Other than the unique theme, the rest of the dungeon is unfortunately pretty lackluster. The puzzles aren't very challenging and take hardly any effort to solve; the boss is basically just a DPS check where you spam arrows at it; its hidden location in the graveyard maybe doesn't make a whole lot of sense; and the dungeon reward, where you get the choice of either a red or blue tunic, which will double your attack power or reduce incoming damage by half, respectively, is a little game-breaking. The final dungeon, likewise, where you finally get inside the Wind Fish's egg, is incredibly anticlimactic since it's basically just a single repeating room with four exits, where you have to go through the exits in a prescribed sequence much like the Lost Woods in the original <i>Legend of Zelda</i>. The boss rush nightmares within the final dungeon are tough and pretty interesting, but actually getting to them is utterly bland and underwhelming.</div>
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It's kind of interesting that the trading sequence in this game is actually mandatory, since you need to see it through to completion to get the Magnifying Glass, which is required to read the tiny print in one of the library books which tells you the secret path through the Windfish's Egg. Likewise, you'll need the bananas in order to get the monkeys to build a bridge for you to access Kanalet Castle, which is a prerequisite for getting into the Key Cavern. Fortunately, the trading sequence in <i>Link's Awakening</i> works pretty smoothly since characters are sure to indicate in advance that they're interested in particular items -- just talking to people around the island you learn that the mom wants the Yoshi doll from the game shop, little BowWow likes stylish accessories, Sale (the alligator) collects canned food, Christine (the goat)'s favorite flower is a hibiscus, and so on, so each time you get a new item you should have already received some kind of hint about who might want it. Some exchanges aren't explicitly hinted at, but they're at least logically intuitive, like that the fisherman under the bridge might want a fishing hook, or that Grandma Ulrira might use a broom.</div>
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Collecting the Secret Seashells is more of a mixed bag. I like the idea of collectible items in <i>Zelda </i>games, because that adds extra little rewards to exploration, and the fact that there are only 26 seashells makes the task of finding all of them more manageable, but it's kind of disappointing that you don't get any reward whatsoever until you get enough to claim the final reward -- an upgraded sword that does double damage. That's certainly a worthwhile reward, but it means you spend the entire game collecting seashells with no real indication of what purpose they actually serve until you're already done with the collect-a-thon. <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, for instance, gives you smaller rewards in progressive intervals as you obtain more Gold Skultulla tokens, until you eventually get the big prize when the collect-a-thon effectively ends, which helps to build excitement and anticipation with each token you acquire and wonder what your next reward will be, with a little bit of context in assuming it'll be something better than what you got at the previous interval. In <i>Link's Awakening</i>, there's no buildup to the grand prize because it's essentially an "all or none" ordeal; you do get two smaller rewards before reaching the 20 seashell grand prize, at the 5 and 10 shell marks, but these only give you more seashells and require you to be carrying exactly 5 or 10 -- no more, no less -- so those preliminary rewards are easy to miss and aren't really that rewarding anyway.</div>
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Combat plays like you'd expect for a 2D <i>Zelda</i> game, but it actually works better than in the previous top-down games due to the greater functionality of the sword and shield. The sword is bigger than the one in <i>A Link to the Past</i>, so it has longer reach and also hits at a wider angle to the side as you swing it, which makes it easier to hit enemies without bumping into them, and the shield now functions as a manual toggle that you equip to one of the two buttons, meaning you have to defend attacks manually rather than just standing there and letting the shield block attacks automatically, in addition to also blocking more types of damage thus making it generally more useful and more engaging. One major twist in <i>Link's Awakening</i> is the inclusion of the Guardian Acorn and Piece of Power, two temporary upgrades that drop from defeated enemies at certain intervals and which grant temporary buffs to your offense and defense, halving incoming damage and doubling outgoing damage respectively. I don't really care for these. For starters, the music that plays while these buffs are active is obnoxiously repetitive and extremely grating to listen to, and they almost randomly make the game easier -- by sheer coincidence I happened to have a Piece of Power active while fighting each of the first three dungeons' bosses which made them die almost instantly. After a while I just stopped picking them up whenever they dropped because I didn't want to get blasted by that annoying music, and just wanted to play with the normal combat difficulty.</div>
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It's also annoying that you have to sit through the descriptive text window that tells you what they do each and every time you pick them up. That's kind of a recurring problem with <i>Link's Awakening</i>, since those types of messages pop up basically everywhere, all the time, for almost everything you do. Every time you get a compass in a dungeon, the game needs to remind you that it has a new feature that will make a chime sound whenever you enter a room with a hidden key; every time you bump even slightly into an object you can't lift without the power bracelet, a window pops up telling you it's much too heavy to lift. These are minor annoyances, but they shouldn't have been there in the first place -- just tell us about the compass chime in the first dungeon, and only tell us something is too heavy to lift with our bare hands if we actively try to pick it up without the bracelet equipped.</div>
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Despite these recurring tutorial messages that continually explain game mechanics to you that you've already learned, I appreciate that you don't have an obnoxious companion character following you around doing the same thing. The closest we get to that in this game is the owl, who only appears briefly in sporadic moments, usually to deliver narrative exposition, rather than to explain game mechanics to you or explicitly telling you where to go or what to do next, all-the-while disrupting the flow of gameplay. <i>Link's Awakening</i> still has optional hand-holding elements -- if you're stuck in the overworld, you can always call Old Man Ulrira in Mabe Village, who'll give you more direct instructions on what you're supposed to be doing at that particular moment, and inside dungeons you can seek out the owl statues to get hints on some of the dungeons' more dastardly puzzles -- but both of these are optional and require effort to seek out those means of assistance, since you have to find a telephone booth to call Ulrira and have to first acquire the stone beak before the owl statues will speak to you.</div>
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The most interesting thing about <i>Link's Awakening</i>, other than the story premise, has to be the bizarre inclusion of so many non-canonical elements and references from other Nintendo games. Right off the bat we see a Chain Chomp and Yoshi doll in Mabe Village, and later encounter Piranha Plants, Bloopers, Goombas, and Thwomps in side-view underground sections, all of which look and behave exactly like they do in the classic <i>Mario </i>games. There are tons of others beyond those, including a detailed photograph of Princess Peach -- all of which sort of break the fourth wall in a way that adds to the whimsical dream-like quality of this world. These sorts of things are obviously not normal in a <i>Zelda </i>game, and so it's like a blurring of reality to see them so nonchalantly present in <i>Link's Awakening</i>. Then you've got other silly, somewhat zany elements like an alligator who's a collector and connoisseur of canned foods, all of the comical interactions with Tarin, a bat-like demon who ironically helps you by casting a curse on you that forces you to carry more "junk" around, the shop-keeper going Super Saiyan and zapping you to death if you steal from him, the rat photographer who follows you around snapping comical photographs of cartoony situations, an acapella trio of singing frogs, and more. As a game sandwiched between <i>A Link to the Past</i> and <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, both of which take themselves pretty seriously, <i>Link's Awakening's</i> more lighthearted nature offers a nice change of pace from the usual tone of the series and makes it a genuinely fun environment to be in.</div>
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The question for me, as it usually is any time a remake is announced, is "does this game actually need to be remade?" In terms of financial incentive, the answer is obviously "yes" because a remake is guaranteed to sell more copies at a higher price point than if they were to simply re-release the original version as a port to a new console, but in this case, the game doesn't feel so out-dated as to need modernized updates to make it playable. Most of the time, the benefit of remaking a beloved classic is to improve the overall quality by enhancing graphics and gameplay features that were limited by the technology of the time -- that's certainly the case with <i>Link's Awakening</i>, considering the 8-bit graphics, chiptune sounds, and two-button inputs on the Game Boy, but the core gameplay design remains fundamentally enjoyable to this day, even 26 years after its initial release. Maybe my perspective on this is a little skewed since I played it as a child 25 years ago, so maybe it doesn't feel as out-dated to me, but I feel confident that you could hand the original version to someone who's never played it before, and they would still get as much satisfaction out of playing it now as I did back then. I know I certainly enjoyed replaying it for the first time since my childhood, and some of its design elements are as good as or even better than some of its successors.</div>
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I haven't played or really even looked into the Switch remake to know what all it does, but just going off of the original version, these are the sorts of things I would want to see in the remake:</div>
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(1) Better button-mapping with dedicated sword and shield buttons and extra buttons for equippable items. This seems like an obvious thing that is guaranteed to happen, since the Switch has way more buttons than the Game Boy and it would be foolish not to make use of them. Of all the technical limitations of the Game Boy, this is the only one that I feel actually detracts from gameplay in a significant way, just because of the tedium involved with constantly pausing the game to switch out items.</div>
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(2) A better Secret Seashell system. Mainly, I'd like to see more iterative rewards as you gain increasing amounts of seashells so that you can feel progression building towards the final prize. They could basically copy the Golden Skultulla rewards from <i>Ocarina of Time</i> and give you things like rupees, or minor upgrades to existing items (like a bigger wallet), or a Stone of Agony-type thing that helps you find secrets in the world.</div>
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(3) Get rid of the repetitive tutorial messages. We don't need to be told how the compass works every time we find it in a dungeon, and we don't need those damn messages constantly popping up telling us that certain obstacles require a certain item to be circumvented every time we graze against one. It's just annoying and needs to go.</div>
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(4) No more Guardian Acorns and Pieces of Power. I just don't care for the variable nature that these buffs add to the game's difficulty. They're meant to be a reward for doing well in the game -- buffing your defense when you defeat a certain number of enemies without getting hit, for instance -- but the end result is they make the game significantly easier, and even if they happen at fixed intervals based on your specific actions it still comes off feeling pretty random. Plus, the music is annoying. If these must stick around, then I'd like to see their frequency reduced, alter the music so it's less grating, or maybe just change how they trigger altogether, such as being a super rare buff that you carry around as an inventory item with enough limitations that you can't stock up on them before facing every boss.</div>
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(5) Better mini-games. In Link's Awakening we have three mini-games -- the claw game, fishing, and river rafting -- and they're all kind of mediocre. The claw is pretty simple and straightforward once you understand the timing, and fishing is basically just a matter of mashing a single button over and over again. The river rafting involves a fun bit of exploration trying to navigate the different currents, but the only substantial reward within this whole section is but a single Secret Seashell. For these, I'd like to see the mechanics tweaked to make them more interesting, and in the case of the river rafting, just something more rewarding.</div>
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(6) A better final dungeon. I don't like the Windfish's Egg being so drab-looking and mechanically simple. The mega-boss-rush is cool, but getting to those boss fights is boring and anticlimactic just walking through empty rooms in the proper sequence, so I'd like for that first section of the Egg to have a little bit more puzzle-solving and platforming involved to make it more actively engaging and challenging than simply looking up the solution in the library and walking through doorways. I mean, they could basically just recreate the Lost Woods from <i>Ocarina of Time</i> with some sort of trick to figuring out the sequence on your own, where wrong turns punish you with difficult enemies or make the final boss rush harder.</div>
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(7) Just generally more content. When it comes to remakes, I don't want to play basically just the exact same game but with better graphics and controls -- I want new things to experience so that it can feel like a brand new experience, even if only in small quantities. It doesn't need to be anything too major, since you don't want a bunch of extraneous content distracting from the base game, but things like extra heart pieces and secret seashells, an extra mini-game or two, a new character with a new side-quest, or a new hidden dungeon seem like they would all be pretty feasible.</div>
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As I said before, I haven't played or even looked into the Switch remake, other than watching the initial announcement trailer, so it's entirely possible that Nintendo is already doing some of these things with the Switch remake -- some of them seem like expected guarantees, while others may just be wishful thinking. Seeing as I don't own a Switch, I won't be able to see for myself any time soon.</div>
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Anyway, the point of this review is not to focus on the remake, but rather to examine the original game in the context of why it's being remade. I find it interesting that Nintendo chose to remake <i>Link's Awakening</i> and not, say, the original <i>Legend of Zelda</i>, which I think is a testament to the lasting appeal of <i>Link's Awakening</i> and its overall quality, that Nintendo would decide that this game is what deserves a modern update and that this game is worth introducing to a newer generation who likely never played the original version. That's no disrespect to the original <i>Legend of Zelda</i>, but <i>Link's Awakening</i> is the game that really defined the "<i>Zelda</i> formula" according to how we understand it today, maybe even more so than <i>A Link to the Past</i>. And besides that, it's just a really good game in general, with solid dungeon design and complexity, a tight and satisfying overworld design, and a good and interestingly unique story. It's one of my favorite <i>Zelda </i>games, and the original version still holds up extremely well, even 26 years later.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-41713545588477438462019-09-17T18:31:00.000-04:002019-09-17T18:31:41.202-04:00Gothic 3 Sucks -- A Critique From a Longtime Gothic Fan (Updated Ver 1.1)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Note: This article was originally published in January 2018, but has since been updated with extra content, including a full video review.</i><br />
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<i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i> are two of my favorite games of all time, being two of the games that had the most influence on my young and developing mind when I first played them in the early 2000s. And yet I harbor virtually no love for <i>Gothic 3</i>. I've barely mentioned it in any of my <i><a href="https://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/search/label/Gothic">Gothic</a></i> articles because I don't even like to consider it part of the series; it doesn't connect to <i>Gothic 2</i> very well, and the whole gameplay formula is a radical departure from what made <i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i> so great. Even though it was made by the same developer, Piranha Bytes, <i>Gothic 3</i> feels like a different game by a different group of people who had only a vague understanding of what the <i>Gothic</i> games were, and who were told to make everything "bigger and more epic" in order to compete with the likes of <i>Morrowind</i> and <i>Oblivion</i>. Spoiler alert: they failed miserably.</div>
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<i>Gothic 3</i> is a classic case of a game being ruined by ambition, of a developer trying to reach beyond their own means and biting off more than they could chew. The game, besides being unfinished and under-developed, was a buggy mess upon its release, and it took years of fan-made patches to supposedly "fix" the game and make it functional. The community patch is now almost one-third the file size of the base game, and contains numerous bug fixes and stability tweaks, and also attempts to completely redesign and rebalance the combat system. I played the game at launch (late 2006) before the community patch even existed, and again a few years later with it, and while the patch truly does a lot to improve the game's overall playability, it doesn't (and simply cannot) fix the core gameplay design and story problems, which are the real reasons <i>Gothic 3</i> sucks -- not just the bugs and broken combat that the patch supposedly fixes.</div>
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Normally I'd be content to dismiss the issue and move on with life (the game's over a decade old, after all, and I haven't even played it in about eight or nine years), but I find it surprising that, even today, people still speak highly of <i>Gothic 3</i>. With the recent release of <i><a href="https://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/search/label/Elex">Elex</a></i>, newcomers to Piranha Bytes games frequently ask about their previous games and which ones are worth playing, and people readily leap to defend (or even recommend) <i>Gothic 3, </i>usually with the caveat that you need to play with the community patch. That's sound advice, of course, but I just can't justify recommending <i>Gothic 3</i> to anyone because of how bad of a <i>Gothic</i> game it is, and how mediocre it is, just as a game in general. So in this article I'll be explaining my opinion on <i>Gothic 3</i> and why I think it sucks.</div>
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The video version of this article.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#1 U</span><span style="font-size: large;">NIMMERSIVE DESIGN</span><br />
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The first thing that stands out when one starts playing <i>Gothic 3</i>, apart from the completely different engine, is that its core design philosophy feels fundamentally different from the previous two games, where Piranha Bytes strove to make everything as immersive as possible, not only from a world-building perspective but also from a mechanical standpoint. With Gothic 3, that emphasis is apparently no longer an emphasis, seeing as you're blasted with awkwardly slapped-together tutorial windows as soon as you launch the game telling you there's a hotbar in the center of the screen, and that you can press "1" to draw your sword, and click the left and right mouse buttons to attack and block. These windows continue popping up in the early stages of the game explaining things to you, until eventually it's saying "Very good! Next, you should talk to your old buddy Lester. Walk out of the village and follow the path to the left that leads to the coast. There you can find Lester who will give you more information. Talk to Lester on the beach!" And it's like, do they really need to tell you this through an obnoxious immersion-breaking tutorial window? If this were Gothic 1 or 2, they would've had a character say something like "Hey, where's Lester? He might know more. I saw him leave town a little while ago, looked like he was heading for the coast" but because it's Gothic 3 there's no in-world mention of where to find Lester -- just an omniscient tutorial window.</div>
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The rest of the HUD likewise throws a lot more information at you. Whereas previously the HUD only showed you your health bar and that of your current target, in addition to your mana bar only while actively using magic, Gothic 3 adds your mana meter to the HUD permanently and also adds a stamina bar, in addition to a compass and a 10-key hotbar. While these serve useful mechanical purposes and are certainly a welcome convenience in a world this big, they're decidedly more intrusive than the previous games' HUDs. When picking up quests in the previous games, your quest log would track information in a journal format, as if the character were writing information down to help him remember things, but in Gothic 3 the quest log simply pastes the dialogue script from the conversation when you picked up the quest, as if the character is running around with a voice recorder. Then you got more "video gamey" elements, like how the reputation system works, where you gain percentage points towards increasing your standing with each faction and town by doing quests for people, but it's just an obscure, abstract number where you ask to speak to the town leader and a guard says practically says "You're still missing 10% reputation with us before we'll trust you." And on top of that, people psychically know when you've stolen things or murdered people, even if it happened outside of town with no witnesses.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#2 T</span><span style="font-size: large;">HE WORLD IS TOO BIG</span><br />
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<i>Gothic 3</i> abandoned the tight, compact world design of its predecessors in favor of going for a massive <i>Elder Scrolls</i>-style world with dozens of towns and hundreds of quests. A large world isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is when it isn't filled with interesting content, and <i>Gothic 3's</i> world feels needlessly stretched-out. The central area of Myrtana, which comprises roughly one-third of the map, is at least decently-populated with towns and caves and monsters and so on, but Nordmar and Varant, the two areas to the north and south, are noticeably lacking in content compared to Myrtana. Varant is just a sprawling, barren desert with huge stretches of absolutely nothing but sand, and Nordmar, while having a far more deep and complex topography, is mostly a bunch of combat encounters where you just run around twisting pathways fighting enemies and looting things, like it's an over-sized level from a hack-n-slash game like <i>Diablo </i>or<i> Icewind Dale</i>. Because of the huge size of the world, exploration becomes incredibly tedious and time-consuming because you have to waste so much time just traversing the map, and in a lot of cases there isn't anything interesting to reward you for your effort or time invested in exploring this over-sized world.</div>
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Leaving the first town in Myrtana.</div>
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What's even worse is that the world is designed to be done in sequence, going from one town to the next, completing each one as you move across the map with no real need to return to previous areas. Each town is pretty much self-contained (sometimes an orc-controlled town is tied to a nearby rebel-controlled outpost), meaning what you do in one town won't affect anything in another town (except to block quests in the other, opposite town/outpost, if you take too strong of a side in the orc/rebel conflict, say, by liberating a town and killing all of the orcs within it). Once you "complete" an area, it may as well cease to exist, and most of the towns/areas only exist in the first place to pad the game with repetitive stat-grinding as you complete mundane tasks for a minuscule amount of faction reputation. Exploring the world, therefore, feels like you're categorically checking off boxes on a list instead of actually exploring the world, and it makes the world feel incredibly fleeting because you only ever really see a place once, and then move on to the next area once you've completed it.</div>
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Varant: The Land of Near-Infinite Nothingness.</div>
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<i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i> were ultimately much smaller, more intimate-feeling games. Their worlds were a mere fraction the size of <i>Gothic 3's</i>, but they were more densely-packed with unique and interesting content. You didn't have to run somewhere for minutes at a time just to find something remotely interesting on the horizon; there was interesting stuff everywhere you looked, often to the point that you might feel overwhelmed with possibilities, just within your immediate surroundings, in terms of where to go and what to do. As a result, they were more fun to explore because you were constantly engaged with interesting terrain and structures (as opposed to wandering across huge empty fields), and the landscapes and their overall layout felt much more memorable, partly because the worlds were smaller but also because they were far more detailed. Their worlds were also designed around the central focus of the story, which helped to make every area feel significant, as if it tied in with everything else in a meaningful way, because they actually did. With <i>Gothic 3</i>, it feels like they made the world first and then came up with stories and quests and such afterwards, and so most of the game's content feels like it's just kind of pasted onto the world like a sticker, with a whole bunch of boring, tedious filler in-between. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#3 MMO-S</span><span style="font-size: large;">TYLE QUESTS</span><br />
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Virtually every town is filled to the brim with simplistic MMO-style quests, which consist entirely of tedious objectives meant to give you a repetitive bunch of tasks to do so that you can grind experience and faction reputation, and so the back of the box can proudly say that it has "over 500 quests" to complete. Things like "kill 5 wild boars" or "collect 10 healing plants" or "escort so-and-so to such-a-place" -- pointless objectives for random people you've only just met, who serve no purpose in the story or even in the world itself except to hand out busy work to the player, who'll become completely obsolete once the quest is complete. There's no interesting story behind these quests, no narrative or worldly context for them, and no reason to care except to satisfy an obsessive compulsion for completionism. There are no meaningful decisions to make, either -- nearly every quest follows an entirely straightforward, linear progression from beginning to end with completely mindless gameplay amounting to nothing more than cliche errand boy fetch quests.</div>
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New Quest: Harek wants some meat.</div>
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Quests in <i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i> were never that ground-breaking, in the grand scheme of RPGs, but they at least gave you a reason to care about them, or a plausible reason within the context of the world for why you would be doing those things. In <i>Gothic 1</i>, when Cor Angar sends you to fetch healing plants from the swamp, it's to help save Y'Berrion after he almost dies conjuring the vision of the Sleeper, so the quest is centered around a spectacular event with apparent stakes actually on the line, since Y'Berrion could theoretically die if you aren't quick enough (even though you know it's a video game and it'll maintain a status quo until you advance the quest further). It's also a quest given to you by characters you have established relationships and a bunch of previous interactions with, since you've already worked with Y'Berrion extensively to prepare the ritual. Plus, it creates a unique gameplay scenario where you have to sneak through the swamps in the middle of the night avoiding dangerous swampsharks who're much too strong for you to fight at that stage of the game, thus making it a more challenging and more interesting task than simply walking down the road and picking some healing points off the ground. There's a reason you would want to do this quest, and a reason to care, since it has a meaningful impact on the characters and the story.<br />
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In <i>Gothic 3</i>, when Sebastian sends you to fetch 10 healing plants, it's because he's out of supplies and needs more healing plants. That's it. There's no pressing need for healing plants and no real consequences at stake if you don't fetch them, and no interesting story element to back up why this character needs you to fetch him the plants. The actual mechanics of this quest are pretty mundane and boring, too, since he's sure to stress that "they grow almost everywhere" and that "you shouldn't have a problem finding them." And so all you do is walk right outside the rebel camp and there are healing plants abundantly growing everywhere, which then begs the question of why this guy is even out of supplies in the first place if they're so easy to acquire. These are, ultimately, the same type of quest on a superficial level, but <i>Gothic 1</i> creates a sense of drama around the simple task of fetching healing plants, with an interesting mechanical challenge involved of having to find rare, special plants in a dangerous area, as opposed to <i>Gothic 3</i> which gives you no story element whatsoever with finding completely mundane, ordinary plants in a completely mundane, ordinary area in a completely mundane, ordinary way.<br />
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In fact, pretty much every single quest is a shallow two-step "Point A to Point B" affair where you're given a task, go there and do it, and then return to the quest-giver. They don't develop into more elaborate ordeals with interesting twists along the way, or present you with a dilemma that you have to solve through your own creative means -- they're just completely on-rails and practically resolve themselves with little regard for your own input. Gothic 1 and 2's quests are by no means a gold standard of sophistication in terms of their actual mechanics, but they do at least like to give you open-ended objectives like "retrieve Matteo's money from Gritta" where can beat it out of her, steal it from her, or get Thorben to pay for her, where you get actual choices about how you'll solve the quest, or much broader objectives like figuring out who's been supplying the bandits with weapons where you have to figure things out on your own by talking to people, exploring the world, putting clues together, and following leads. Very few quests in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> are shallow two-step affairs, and even when they are they have some sort of meaningful story or character element behind them which makes them interesting, as opposed to <i>Gothic 3</i> where the quests are basically churned out by an assembly line to meet a quota. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#4 R</span><span style="font-size: large;">ANDOMIZED/SCRIPTED LOOT PROGRESSION</span><br />
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The majority of loot in <i>Gothic 3</i> is randomized inside of chests. A select few items are hand-placed in the environment, but these tend to be useless junk or otherwise so rare that they barely deserve mention. Chests aren't even scaled to a certain value, meaning the rewards for discovering a hidden area or getting past a tough enemy are essentially a dice roll of whether get something actually good and valuable, or a bunch of mostly worthless junk. Rewards, therefore, are generally tied more to random chance than to specific actions or challenges. Some chests, noted as either "old" or "heavy" chests, are programmed to give you fixed rewards in ascending value, based on how many of those specific types of chests you've opened previously. In other words, the core loot progression through these special chests is completely fixed, and earning better rewards isn't a matter of overcoming more difficult challenges or discovering obscure, hidden areas of the map, but is simply a matter of grinding chests. Near the start of the game, for instance, there are some special chests being guarded by dragons, which should be the most challenging enemies in the world guarding the most valuable treasure to be found, but if you go there at level 1 and find a clever way past them then you'll be rewarded with crappy, worthless loot in those special chests because you haven't opened any previously. There are no shortcuts, either -- end-game loot will always be restricted until end-game because you have to go through the entire process, hunting down every single chest in the game to get the best loot.</div>
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All the loot from all those skeletons is in those two chests.</div>
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Absolutely nothing in <i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i> was randomized, or followed a scripted scaling system -- every item was individually and uniquely hand-placed by the designers. Getting good loot wasn't a matter of rolling the dice and hoping for something good, or about grinding chests; it was about deliberately pushing yourself into dangerous territory where you could expect to find more valuable loot. The more dangerous the challenge, the greater the likelihood of finding greater rewards. It felt more exciting to get a unique reward for a unique challenge, and also allowed for satisfying meta-gaming on future replays because, if you remembered where the good loot was, you could go out of your way and push yourself to achieve more powerful loot earlier in the game. Plus, there were often fun narrative and lore explanations for why you would find special loot in special places, like the legendary Dragonslayer being found in a knight's crypt, floating in blue light above a certain casket, guarded by two skeleton knights, or a dexterity-boosting amulet being found in the mountains on the decayed corpse of an adventurer who fell and met an untimely demise. You don't get that kind of world-building when all the items are randomly found inside random chests.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#5 B</span><span style="font-size: large;">ORING, BROKEN COMBAT SYSTEM</span><br />
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Combat in the first two <i>Gothic</i> games was ahead of its time, being one of the first fully three-dimensional, third-person combat systems in an open-world action-RPG. Those games had some issues, like the somewhat cumbersome, idiosyncratic tank-like control scheme, but the combat played at a pretty satisfyingly fast pace with quick animations and response times, while still following a grounded, realistic tempo that had a good back-and-forth rhythm to it. The system demanded precise timing and positioning, with you having to time each and every attack, block, and dodge just right else you'd stutter in your attacks or get hit. You could also string attacks together in different ways, chaining forward-momentum attacks with left and right swipes, and the attack animations changed and improved as you gained better training with your weapons. Doing well in this system required a high degree of skill, both in terms of learning enemy attack patterns so you knew how to exploit their movesets, but also in terms of having good hand-eye coordination and reflexes, with being able to execute the controls just right, at the right time.</div>
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The brawl in the first town.</div>
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<i>Gothic 3's</i> combat is complete rubbish. Attack animations feel slow and awkward, like the hero is spreading butter on toast with a giant sword, and the recoil from being hit is obnoxiously excessive. You no longer have to time your attacks or blocks, as you can just spam the attack buttons or hold down the block key indefinitely. The stamina meter, meanwhile, does practically nothing as you can still block and perform most attacks even with no stamina. The game adds a distinction between light and heavy attacks, but there's no real reason to use heavy attacks because light attacks will stunlock enemies better, and the special attacks (which consume stamina) tend to be absurdly over-powered, like the 360-spin with polearms. There's no more upgrading movesets, and enemy AI is so painfully miserable, with every fight against humanoid enemies turning into a one-on-one where you spam attacks against the one enemy, who's powerless to interrupt your infinite combo, while everyone else stands around watching. There's no innate skill threshold, whatsoever -- you just spam right-click. There's also way too many enemies in this game, to the point that you're having to fight literally dozens of enemies at once, all by yourself, turning the game into something more like Dynasty Warriors and making certain playstyles like archery borderline unusable. The community patch helps the combat, to a certain degree, like by preventing creatures from being able to stun-lock you and vice versa, but against humanoid enemies it makes combat more meticulously involved to the point that if feels like you're really just exploiting the broken AI, as opposed to fighting in a sensibly intuitive system. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#6 N</span><span style="font-size: large;">ONSENSICAL ENEMY HIERARCHY</span><br />
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In <i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i>, there's a very clear hierarchy for enemies; as you get stronger and work your way up the ranks, you know what's beatable and what's not. Perhaps more importantly, you feel like there's an intuitive reason why a shadowbeast would be more powerful than a snapper, or why a lurker would be more powerful than a field raider. And with the way those games handle damage resistances, it meant that certain enemies were literally unbeatable until you reached certain offensive thresholds, so there was a tangible feeling of progress as you got stronger and eclipsed a new threshold when you could finally take on certain types of enemies. <i>Gothic 3's</i> enemy hierarchy doesn't make a lot of sense, because different types of enemies are randomly much stronger or weaker than they would seem. Wolves, for instance, are presented as some of the earliest and easiest enemies in the game but are ironically some of the most powerful because of their broken stun-locking attack animations. Never mind that the same enemy types get recycled with slightly different names and skins, further blurring those lines (ie, is a sneaky goblin more or less strong than a thieving goblin?). Ironically, orcs (who should be the main threat per the story) are some of the weakest enemies in the game, while basic wolves were far more devastating enemies than skeleton warriors or any other tough enemy, just because their attack animations were so ridiculously fast. Every fight is a crapshoot because you rarely know how strong you'll actually be against a certain type of enemy, just because of how inconsistent they are. Meanwhile, there aren't many damage thresholds preventing you from tackling different types of enemies, since pretty much every enemy can be killed the first time you encounter them, and so getting stronger doesn't feel that rewarding.</div>
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A cave full of zombies.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#7 U</span><span style="font-size: large;">NREWARDING</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">CHARACTER PROGRESSION</span><br />
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Getting stronger and progressing as a character doesn't really feel that satisfying. Similar to the game world being stretched too thin, it's like the progression system is stretched so thin that it takes long chunks of time and leveling (ie, grinding) before you make any kind of noticeable progress towards actually getting stronger. With the scripted loot progression you're forced to get stronger in small increments at a time, while end-game gear isn't really that much better than some of the starting gear.<br />
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Magic is a prime example of this; in <i>Gothic 3</i>, the basic fireball spell that you can learn in the first town is the main and only offensive spell you'll be using the entire game because there's no upgrade path for magic projectiles. Flamewave is practically worthless because of its long casting time and needing to be nearly in melee range for it to hit, meaning you'll almost always get interrupted trying to cast it, and Meteor is restricted until near the very end of the main quest, so you basically use Fireball the entire game until you get eventually get Rain of Fire, and then you're done. In <i>Gothic 2</i>, you started with Fire Arrow and worked your way up to Fireball and Large Fireball, with Firestorm and Large Firestorm also being in the mix as viable alternatives that could do AOE splash damage around its target. Each spell looked and behaved a little differently in addition to simply having better stats, whereas <i>Gothic 3</i> gives you basically one spell and then has you improve its damage very slowly over the course of the game by increasing your magic stat, which is something entirely passive and only happens in the background math, rather than actually affecting gameplay in a meaningful way like learning new and different spells.<br />
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The skills and stats window.</div>
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In a similar vein, melee combat's not much different, since the basic Halberd you can get in the first town is arguably the best weapon in the game since it does above-average damage and has the longest reach of any other weapon. Weapons you get much later on do more damage, but not by all that much, in exchange for having much shorter reach, so generally speaking finding new melee weapons isn't that rewarding because they're always either inferior to what you already have, or are only marginally better. Meanwhile, increasing your melee combat skills serves as basically only a threshold to equip stronger weapons, since improved combat training doesn't unlock new abilities or enhanced attack animations, such that melee combat remains basically the same from the beginning of the game until the very end, and actually mastering a particular type of weapon is actually a downgrade since it causes enemies to get knocked down all the time, where they become invincible until they stand back up.<br />
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The game world is also designed to be conquered in sequence, starting on the east coast of Myrtana and working your way west, so while the game's enemies technically don't scale with your level, they tend to get stronger as you work your way further west; unless you veer really far off the game's intended path, most enemies in an area will likely be within your level range as you reach them. Then, after a certain point much too early in the game's overall length, you become insanely over-powered and leveling up any further then becomes pointless. If you do most of the game's quests and explore most everywhere you'll eventually have enough skill points to become a master magician, master swordsman, master archer, master thief, master alchemist, and so on. In fact, there's no reason to even invest points in alchemy because you can learn all you need from just reading random books. While it's decently satisfying to become an all-powerful god, essentially, it's pretty unsatisfying to reach that point far too early in the game where you cap out your progression in your desired field and then have nothing else to build towards, except branching out into other fields that you won't really use. The community patch addresses this, but "solves" the problem primarily by slowing down level-ups and limiting your skill points to such a degree that you're forced into picking one specialization and sticking with it for the entire game, which is perhaps counter-intuitive in a world built around having the freedom to explore, and also just slows progression down so much that it rarely feels like you're making any progress at all.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#8 T</span><span style="font-size: large;">HE REALLY LOOSE FACTION SYSTEM</span><br />
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One of the coolest features of the original two <i>Gothic</i> games was how both of them forced you to pick from one of three different factions to play as, which would change the way you played the game by unlocking unique skills, equipment, and even quests. This not only gave you a more uniquely personal feeling of playing the game, but also allowed for some good replay value since you could replay it and experience a whole new perspective on the same game. In <i>Gothic 3</i>, you never really join a faction -- you're sort of a freelance hero the entire game, doing whatever quests for whatever faction you want, whenever you want. Even though you might pick a side in the orcs versus rebels conflict, doing quests exclusively for one side, you never actually join them. In fact, if you want to maximize experience points and get the most out of the game in a single playthrough, then you'll end up doing quests for every faction, anyway, except for the major tipping points like choosing to wipe out a rival faction. Although the reputation system can unlock rewards with each faction, as you complete quests for that faction and improve your reputation with them, it feels more like an abstract number -- a stat, if you will -- then actually joining that faction, and the only real benefit to gaining reputation with any faction is being able to equip their special armor sets, which really aren't that good or interesting. How you build your character is also completely independent of which faction you choose to support since no skills or abilities are tied to specific faction.<br />
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Quest log showing faction reputation; one more stat to grind.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#9 N</span><span style="font-size: large;">O REGARD FOR LORE AND BACKSTORY</span><br />
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In <i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i>, orcs were a primitive tribal society. They used crude weaponry, wore minimalistic gladiator-style loin cloths, lived in tipis, ate from their bare hands around campfires, believed in arcane gods, practiced spiritual mysticism, and spoke a guttural beast-like language. They were incredibly tough warriors and felt genuinely intimidating. In <i>Gothic 3</i>, they all suddenly speak English, they wear normal human-looking clothes and armor, live in normal human buildings using normal human tools and furniture, and have a fully organized societal and military structure. They look and sound kind of like they were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo2SNtFofWI">made by Dreamworks</a>, and most of them are push-overs in combat (it's easier to kill an entire platoon of heavily-armed battle-trained orcs than a couple wild animals). They're almost completely different, and utterly ruin the fearsome aesthetic of the orcs in the original games by becoming ordinary, mundane humanoid enemies in <i>Gothic 3</i>. Even if we were to say that these are supposedly a different race of orcs (allegedly "northern orcs" versus "southern orcs") it's still a jarring change that completely undermines the established relationship with the villains that we've developed over the previous two games. They did this, of course, so that you could actually interact with the orcs and take quests from them, and maybe also have incentive to support them, but this gameplay design doesn't really work with the story that's already been set up, unless we choose to ignore the events of <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> and treat this like a stand-alone game. Which, it might as well be.</div>
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These orcs are much too regimented.</div>
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At the end of <i>Gothic 2</i>, the nameless hero set off from Khorinis (and subsequently Irdorath) with a boat full of friends and allies. At the start of <i>Gothic 3</i>, suddenly Lee, Lares, Vatras, Angar, and assorted other NPCs are all inexplicably missing, nowehere to be seen in the intro cinematic and disappearing as quickly and inexplicably as the ship disappears, scattering all over the world where they become just generic quest NPCs with no interesting quests or interactions. Everyone looks and sounds different than they did before, and they even act differently. At the end of <i>Gothic 2</i>, Angar wanted to retire to a life of peace as a farmer, and then in <i>Gothic 3</i> he's inexplicably living it up as an arena champion in Mora Sul. Lares was just a roguish adventurer in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>, and now apparently he's a renowned thief. Diego, Milten, Gorn, and Lester, despite being your closest allies from the first two games, all decide to split up and go their own ways and do absolutely nothing to help you with the main quest, with Gorn and Lester having motivations that seem to come out of nowhere. In <i>Gothic 2</i>, you're said to be the avatar of Innos and Xardas becomes the avatar of Beliar, and suddenly in <i>Gothic 3</i> those roles are inexplicably switched to King Rhobar and Some Hashishin Guy, respectively, while the gods themselves (Innos, Beliar, and Adanos) seem to be worshiped completely differently than they were in Khorinis, seeing as there's an entire race of humans worshipping Beliar, a god who supposedly wants to see humanity eradicated from the world. Throughout <i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i> you keep hearing about the mainland being a war zone with the orcs on the cusp of winning and enslaving all of humanity, and then you get there in <i>Gothic 3</i> and it seems like a relatively peaceful stalemate where the orcs are content to let you -- a free human -- wander through their occupied cities like their equal. Basically, it feels like they started from scratch with <i>Gothic 3</i> and tried miserably to tie it in with the established lore of the series, since very little in <i>Gothic 3</i> feels "right" from a <i>Gothic</i> and <i>Gothic 2</i> standpoint.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#10 T</span><span style="font-size: large;">HERE'S NO MAIN STORY</span><br />
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<i>Gothic 3</i> is basically just a fantasy sandbox game with a very limited scope of what you can actually do in its huge open world. Whereas most games of this sort (e.g., <i>The Elder Scrolls</i>) give you a main quest line to follow which is ultimately optional and should by no means be your main focus in the game, <i>Gothic 3</i> pretty much skips the whole concept of a main quest altogether -- there's no main story and hardly any main quest line to pursue, even if you wanted to. There's an opening premise about finding Xardas (your necromancer friend turned badguy) accompanied with the general suggestion of "pick a side in the orcs versus rebels conflict" and that's basically it. You spend essentially the whole game on a giant side-quest (liberate orc-controlled cities or destroy rebel outposts) for your own reasons (improve your character by gaining experience and better gear through factions) and because it's really the only thing in the game to do besides wandering around killing random enemies. Then you find Xardas, collect a few items for him, kill a couple people, and then the game abruptly ends. The whole story premise is that you're supposed to be picking a side in the war of the gods, a concept introduced as far back as the first game, but this whole aspect of the story plays out in the span of just a couple quests that only last an hour if you've already explored the world. I really must stress that there's no actual story element to this, and hardly any quest line to follow -- it's just a bunch of random, arbitrary tasks until the game eventually ends.</div>
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The main story collect-a-thon.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#11 I</span><span style="font-size: large;">LLOGICAL DESIGN ELEMENTS</span><br />
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So many things in this game don't make any sort of logical sense, which then makes it difficult to get into the experience because you're constantly having to question things. Early on you ask a hunter if he can train you, and his immediate response is "What's in it for me?" and I'm just thinking "Well, I assume you're going to charge me for your services like every other trainer in the world, so I'll obviously be paying you a hefty sum to share your knowledge." But, ultimately, I have to steal a bunch of wolf pelts for him before he'll train me, and he still charges me anyway. In Geldern, a character wants to meet Lares, "one of the greatest thieves in Myrtana" and would pay 1000 gold to meet him, but in reality Lares is sitting literally right outside this guy's building and he could easily just walk outside and introduce himself without having to pay a middle-man a seemingly large fee. In Cape Dun, a mercenary complains about how they now have to guard the slaves after one of them ran away, implying that they weren't guarding slaves before because I guess it didn't occur to them that slaves might try to run away? The rebels want to rebuild the ruined city of Gotha, and need 1000 gold to do so, when in the actual game's economy 1000 gold is just enough to buy a single set of leather clothes for one person. How is that going to be enough to rebuild an entire city? Why is there no harbor or port anywhere on the coast of Myrtana, where the capital ship Esmeralda supposedly came from? If, according to <i>Gothic 2</i>, dragons are supposed to be mythical creatures no one has seen or heard of in hundreds of years, who were summoned to Khorinis as armies of Beliar with the Sleeper's dying breath, then why are there two just hanging around in a random cave literally underneath a major coastal town?</div>
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A main plot point is that Xardas destroyed rune magic, thereby eliminating all the mages' and paladins' ability to use magic, and so everyone's lamenting their newfound magical impotence, but it seems like all the mages know enough about ancient magic to be able to train you in it, and learning spells is easier than ever before because all you have to do is pray at a shrine, so why is everyone so concerned. Orcs in Nordmar are forcibly hostile and attack you on sight, even if you've been siding with them in Myrtana. The rebels, orcs, and hashshin all have large infrastructures and tons of spare bodies, and they're sending me, a random unknown stranger, to do important work that seems like it should already be covered by someone in their operation. The orcs are trying to conquer all of humanity and yet they don't seem to care when you, a free human, start wandering around their camps. Another main point is that the orcs are trying to uncover the five Artifact of Adanos by excavating the temples in Varant, which requires them to find five keys to unlock the front door to each one, but they all have a completely open roof and so all you really need is a ladder or some rope, so why is getting through the front door such a big deal? At a certain point in video games, you have to suspend disbelief and understand that certain gameplay elements are going to necessarily defy logic in order for gameplay to happen, but this game just stretches it to an extreme, both on the larger scale of the story as well as in many of its smaller details.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">#12 V</span><span style="font-size: large;">ENGARD, KING RHOBAR, AND LEE</span><br />
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This subject gets a special entry because there's just so much wrong with it, and it's supposed to be an epic, grand culmination in both <i>Gothic 3's</i> story and also one of the more interesting backstories spanning all the way back to <i>Gothic 1</i>, and so I feel like everything going on in Vengard is just perfectly emblematic of what all is wrong with <i>Gothic 3</i>. Nothing in this section of the game makes sense within the setting of the world they've created, nothing lives up to the expectations of the main story premise, and it does nothing to satisfy or expand upon established lore and backstory, in addition to having some of the most shallow and uninspired gameplay of the entire game.</div>
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<i>Gothic 1's</i> intro cinematic tells us there's a war against the orcs being spearheaded by King Rhobar, and <i>Gothic 2</i> advances the plot by suggesting that the orcs are on the verge of winning the war, having pushed all the way to the capital city, and that the king may have already fallen. When we get to Vengard in <i>Gothic 3</i> we see that the orcs have indeed laid waste to the capital city and are camped literally right outside the castle walls, where the last of the human survivors have fallen back to. The visuals depict the crumbling and burning remnants of this city, while the soundtrack plays an extremely somber piece meant to emphasize the dramatic loss that humanity has suffered here. So you fight your way through hordes of orcs and make it to the castle, and none of the guards or NPC's make any sort of reaction to the fact that an unknown person just made it through the orcs to reach the castle, when they've been completely cutoff from the rest of the world for who knows how long. They should all be shocked and surprised, rushing to get you to the king knowing that you might have information from the outside. But they just stand there and give no reaction to this dramatic change of situation.</div>
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So you go into the castle and the first NPC starts calling you a scumbag and a no-good hero, when he should have no idea who you even are, and should be elated at seeing a fresh face who's managed to get past the orcs. He says that everyone's been hyping you up as some kind of savior who'll defeat the orcs ever since they saw your ship approach the mainland, but how does anyone anywhere even know who you are since all of your heroic exploits happened on the island of Khorinis, and no other ships have been coming or going from there for word to have even reached the mainland that there's a supposed hero on the way? Secondly, how do they even recognize you personally as the captain of the <i>Esmeralda</i>? This is the first that any of them should have actually seen your face, since they were only seeing your ship on the horizon, where they surely can't see your face. The only way any of this makes sense is if word somehow made it from Ardea, where you first land at the start of the game, to Vengard, but how could that be when Vengard is completely cutoff from the rest of the continent by virtue of the magic barrier, and everyone is keen to stress that they've had no contact with the outside? And furthermore, why is this guy's merchant stand set up literally right next to the barricaded entrance to the outer courtyard? That seems like the least secure and most dangerous place to possibly be, and yet they have the guy in charge of distributing and rationing all of their food right next to the barricade.</div>
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The next guy finally has some kind of semi-appropriate reaction to the fact that a new guy just made it into the castle, but he doesn't stop you to address this point, you actually have to talk to him to initiate the conversation. And apparently he's heard that a man with a lot of promise arrived from outside, but, who told him that? Did the guys at the temple that you warped into somehow send a message, and if so, how? Did they fold up a paper airplane and throw it over the castle walls? For that matter, why are those guys in the temple, where you first warped into, even trapped there? That temple is literally right next to the castle walls, so the guys inside the castle could easily lower a rope or something and lift those guys into the castle. While we're on the subject, why haven't these people already been wiped out? There's literally dozens of orcs a mere stone's throw away from this temple, some standing within plain eyesight of the guys guarding the temple, and there's only a half-dozen people there so the orcs could easily storm the temple and wipe them out. It's not like they're in an unreachable spot, or a highly defensive fortress, either, since that temple has a wide opening that they've made no effort to close off. They barricaded one tiny little side door and a window, but not the huge gaping hole in their defenses? They have a few palisades set up outside the temple, but what good are those when they're not really blocking anything?</div>
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Anyway, back to the castle. You make it into the inner fortress and it looks like ramshackle slums with a bunch of makeshift living arrangements as freed slaves and guards sit around campfires and sleep on the ground, but no one that you can talk to in this area gives any real indication that they're under any sort of distress other than being low on supplies. The few voice actors in this area deliver lines exactly like any other NPC anywhere else in the game when they should sound far more weary and down-trodden. No one tells interesting stories about how they came to be in this situation, or what life has been like the last few weeks trapped inside the castle with orcs bearing down on them from outside, and you get no quests that allow you to interact with the survivors in any sort of meaningful way, other than fetching a metric crap-ton of stuff for them. This is the capital city that's been literally razed to the ground, and it should be under extreme duress, and all you do to help the survivors, apart from killing all of the orcs, is fetch them 30 bread, 30 meat, 20 bundles of weapons, 20 pickaxes, 10 hammers, and 5 saws. There's no story element behind these quests other than to establish that they're low on supplies, but there's no real indication that these supplies are really all that necessary, or that there will be consequences if you don't bring them, since we're only told about how desperate their situation is -- not shown through gameplay mechanics or visual storytelling. It doesn't feel like their situation is all that grim because this may as well be any other town anywhere else in the game.</div>
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Let's take just a moment to compare this situation in Vengard with a similar one in <i>Gothic 2</i>, where the paladins are holed up in the castle with the orcs laying siege to the castle right outside. In <i>Gothic 2</i>, there's a logical reason the orcs aren't just storming the castle -- because the paladins are on higher ground and have solid walls all around them, meaning there's nowhere for the orcs to actually break through without more advanced equipment. They already took out part of a wall with the battering ram, but they can only go up that one at a time and will get mowed down by archers, so they're effectively locked out of the castle. Meanwhile, the first three NPCs you meet once you get inside all stress the fact that, "Hey, there's someone new here! This could be good news!" One of them actually stops you in your tracks to ask about you, and pretty much every subsequent character acknowledges the fact that you're the new guy, out of place here.</div>
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Then, you can ask people about what's been going on, and they tell you stories, like about the time Tandor was out with a reconnaissance unit who was attacked by orcs, or how Brutus's assistant got scared and fled the castle during the last orc attack. Books and other characters shed more light on what's been happening in the Valley of Mines in the meantime since and even during <i>Gothic 1</i>. When you ask about training, they offer to teach you in the context of the situation they're in, like needing more men to help defend against the orcs. You still get a few mechanically simple fetch quests, but there's more reason to care about doing the tasks and helping them out, and they also have more interesting objectives than just "bring me 30 loaves of bread and 20 pickaxes," like getting the ore reports for Garond, meeting Gerold at midnight to sneak him some food, getting Gorn out of prison, passing a message on to Oric from a guy near the pass, retrieving valuable goods that Den absconded with, and so on. It's the exact same premise as what's in <i>Gothic 3</i>, but they actually bother to paint an immersive picture and contextualize the situation for you, thereby bolstering the grim, dire atmosphere and making the quests and character interactions feel much more real and plausible.</div>
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So you enter the castle proper and finally get to meet King Rhobar, the most prestigious person in the entire realm and the most important figure in the orc war, the person you had to fight your way through an entire battalion of orcs to reach, and you're rewarded with 75 seconds of dialogue where he tells you things you already know in a completely straightforward, matter-of-fact way with no further elaboration, and sets you on a quest to find Xardas which you were already doing anyway. There should be a wealth of history and backstory to gain from the king, in terms of what led to the war, how and why he set up the mining colony in Khorinis, how the war was faring before Xardas showed up and destroyed the rune magic, how they've been faring after losing their magic, and so on. But because this is <i>Gothic 3</i>, we get none of this and the conversation is completely anticlimactic and underwhelming. He also goes on to retcon <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> by saying he sent the Esmeralda to Khorinis per a divine message from Innos that "a ship would bring salvation," when the paladins in <i>Gothic 2</i> made it clear that they were there just to get the ore, which was the whole point of setting up the mining colony in <i>Gothic 1</i> in the first place. So even though the paladins were there to get the ore that Rhobar already wanted anyway, and had strict orders not to return to Myrtana until they had the ore, it was apparently because Rhobar knew that you, specifically, would steal the ship and return to the mainland to save them from the orcs. If he knew that their salvation was going to take the form of a hero, instead of some ore, then why were the paladins so intent on getting the ore and doing everything possible to prevent you from coming aboard their ship and returning to the mainland? It kind of seems like this is all one big coincidence and Rhobar is trying to take credit for it.</div>
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Meanwhile, one of Rhobar's best generals, Lee, has been locked up in Khorinis ever since <i>Gothic 1</i>, when a bunch of nobles in Rhobar's court conspired to murder the queen and frame Lee for it, because they apparently didn't like that Rhobar heeded Lee's counsel more than their own. Lee tells you this story in <i>Gothic 1</i> in a fairly dramatic moment while peering over the dam in the New Camp, vowing that one day he'll get his revenge. But according to the story as he tells it, he doesn't blame the king for what happened because the king didn't know any better and had no choice; his real beef was with the nobles who framed him. In <i>Gothic 2</i>, when you recruit Lee to join you on the ship, he agrees, saying he still has "some old scores [plural] to settle on the mainland," which again seems to be referring to the nobles. Then, in <i>Gothic 3</i>, for whatever reason his vendetta is suddenly against the king himself, even though he references the king's "toadies" who made him lose his graces with the king, with no mention of the murder for which he was framed. So I guess we're going back on the whole nobles thing and suddenly Rhobar is the one at fault, even though he had nothing to do with the queen's murder, had no personal grudge or grievance against Lee, was just going off the evidence he had, and was basically just an innocent bystander in the whole ordeal.</div>
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So, then you set out to kill Rhobar. Okay, whatever, we'll roll with it. Remember that Lee was supposed to be the best general in Rhobar's army, meaning he must have been a great strategist and tactician, and yet his plan to kill Rhobar is just to brazenly walk into the throne room and attack him on sight, in plain view of all of his guards and fire magicians, where you get aggro'd by literally every NPC in Vengard. It seems like there should have been a smarter plan like to lure the king out of the castle, or sneak into his chambers when he's sleeping, but instead we just walk in and attack him, without even any sort of dialogue from Lee. And when the fight's over, all he has to say are two lines: "My revenge is complete. I will stay here for a while." No resolution or followup to this epic journey whatsoever. We've been following this subplot for three whole games, and it was honestly one of the more interesting backstories of any character in the entire series, and when it came time to resolve it in <i>Gothic 3</i> they basically did nothing at all. Ultimately, we got way more story, character, and drama from a simple teaser in <i>Gothic 1</i> than we did from actually fulfilling this quest in <i>Gothic 3</i>.</div>
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There really should have been a verbal confrontation between Lee and Rhobar, where Lee gets to accuse Rhobar of betraying him, and then Rhobar could defend himself by saying Lee betrayed him by murdering his wife, and then Lee drops the truth bomb on Rhobar who's not sure what to believe, and maybe finally starts to understand and is willing to pardon Lee, but Lee is so blinded by rage that he kills him anyway. Revenge stories need that final confrontation between the characters, where the protagonist gets to proclaim their justice over the antagonist and make the antagonist realize what's about to happen and why -- the "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die" moment. That scene in The Princess Bride is so poignant not because Montoya shows up and kills the Six-Fingered Man, but because of the powerful character interactions between them in those final moments, as it should be with any revenge story. With this quest, <i>Gothic 3</i> fails not only in terms of upholding the established backstory, but also in terms of basic storytelling. Not to mention that the quest itself is yet another utterly shallow, 30-second "Point A to Point B" quest where we warp into the castle, kill Rhobar, and then it's over. This quest is perhaps the ultimate disappointment in all of <i>Gothic 3</i>.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">S</span><span style="font-size: large;">O WHAT'S ACTUALLY GOOD ABOUT <i>GOTHIC 3</i></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">?</span><br />
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I would be remiss to not give <i>Gothic 3</i> credit where it deserves. <i>Gothic 3</i> isn't all bad, it's just mostly bad. So here are some things for which I feel like it actually deserve some praise.</div>
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<i><br /></i><i><span style="font-size: large;">#1 T</span>RULY OPEN-WORLD, NO LOADING SCREENS</i><br />
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<i>Gothic 3</i> was released in 2006, and the world is absolutely huge. What's most impressive about that is that it has absolutely zero loading screen, beyond the initial load. Unlike <i>Oblivion</i>, for instance, which came out around the same time and forced you to sit through a loading screen every time you used a door, <i>Gothic 3</i> lets you go everywhere on the map, from one corner to the next, and even inside buildings, loading everything in the background as you go. It was a major resource hog at the time, of course, but is still an impressive feat considering newer games, even today, still divide their playing areas into smaller loading zones. And it is a truly open world, with completely non-linear exploration and questing and complete freedom to go wherever you want from the very start of the game.</div>
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Waterfalls in the distance.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">#2 G</span>REAT SOUNDTRACK</i><br />
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Kai Rosenkranz is one of the few video game composers whose name I actually know, and that's entirely because of his work with the original <i>Gothic</i> series. I liked his soundtracks a lot in the first two games, being perfectly atmospheric to set the mood for those games' environments, while having just enough melody and musical structure to keep it interesting, without having too much of that stuff to make it stand out or become repetitive. His soundtrack for <i>Gothic 3</i> goes a little too far sometimes, in terms of being a little too prominent and repetitive to the point that it actually starts to interfere with atmosphere and immersion, but the actual compositions are great and are usually a pleasure just to listen to. <i>Gothic 3</i> received a ton of negative backlack from professional reviewers and gamers alike, but the soundtrack was one thing that everyone unanimously praised. Tracks like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLyqSQhS6E0">Vista Point</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6pfstI4A2A">Exploring Myrtana</a> have become emblematic of the game itself. I also like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCtV4DYZkK0">Geldern Night</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc2CE9Nu_ho">Trelis Liberate</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAS7iDDCZKc">Castle of Faring</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym_ya5Tj9Kk">Sad Strings</a>, but seriously everything in the full soundtrack is great.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">#3 G</span>OOD VISUALS AND ATMOSPHERE</i><br />
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The level designers and artists at Piranha Bytes have always been great at crafting outstanding-looking environments, and <i>Gothic 3</i> is no exception. Though hampered by performance issues with having such a large view-able area, parts of the game looked truly beautiful at the time, if you had a rig powerful enough to render everything in high detail and longer distances. Other things, like character models, armor, and animations weren't so good, but the overall look and general aesthetic of the environments (combined with the great soundtrack) make <i>Gothic 3</i> pretty satisfying just walking around and taking in the sights. The atmosphere of being out in the wild is pretty strong, just from an audiovisual standpoint alone, and the design of the world can be pretty interesting to explore just because of the landscapes themselves being so intriguing and alluring.</div>
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A picturesque castle in the mountains.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">#4 A</span>RCHERY AND RANGED COMBAT</i><br />
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Bows and crossbows in the first two <i>Gothic</i> games were never that great, and I always recommended against those playstyles for new players because they weren't very fun and were also difficult to make effective. In those games you were heavily restricted by limited ammunition which made it tough to specialize early on, but the actual gameplay for archery amounted to simply locking on to your target and pressing attack to automatically shoot the enemy. There was no aiming and enemies made no effort to dodge. In <i>Gothic 3</i>, you finally have to aim ranged attacks manually, which makes them so much more engaging, especially when you have to lead targets and compensate for gravity's curved trajectory of an arrow. Unfortunately, archery is a little too slow to be viable in most situations where you're fighting dozens of enemies at a time, but the actual mechanics are a lot more satisfying than they used to be.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">#5 S</span>OLVING QUESTS BEFORE YOU PICK THEM UP</i><br />
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As boring and tedious as the quests are, it's nice that you can actually complete most of them before being issued the quests from the quest-giver. If you've already gathered the items they need, or killed the enemies they want killing, you gain the experience the moment you finish the objective, and then if you stumble into an NPC who asks you to do something you've already done, you can say so then and there and collect your reward immediately. Not the most exciting thing, but it's a nice quality-of-life thing nonetheless, since a lot of similar games would wait to spawn quest objectives until after you've already picked up the quest, which can be pretty tedious when you've already thoroughly explored an area and have to go back now that the quest is enabled.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span><span style="font-size: large;">N CONCLUSION</span><br />
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<i>Gothic 3</i> probably isn't so bad as to warrant the "<i>Gothic 3</i> Sucks" title, but it's a game that's so thoroughly mediocre and generally underwhelming, while feeling needlessly bloated and excessively long, with some really illogical design elements and things that just don't make sense given the history of the first two games, that I can't recommend it to anyone in good conscience. There's some good stuff to enjoy in <i>Gothic 3</i>, and it still has some of that unique Piranha Bytes charm, but it's all buried under tons of bad design choices and horrible execution, and the good stuff just isn't good enough to justify sifting through all the bad stuff just to find it. And while some people insist that it's a fine, decent, or even good game with the community patch, the patch is simply that -- a patch, a bandage over a huge gaping wound that stops the bleeding but doesn't suture or disinfect the wound. The community patch, while admirable and definitely worth using, only goes so far as to make the game playable by fixing so many of the glaring bugs and tweaking the combat enough to bring it up from "completely broken" to "at least functional." It doesn't (and cannot) change things like the core combat mechanics, or the boring, tedious quest design, or the bland and shallow world design, or the almost complete lack of a main story. It's just not a very good game, and it's a horrible conclusion to what was, until <i>Gothic 3</i>, an utterly brilliant and masterful series.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-53738167033499719472019-08-20T19:26:00.000-04:002019-08-21T23:41:21.226-04:00My Personal Ranking of the Soulsborne Games<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Dark Souls</i> has been one of the most culturally significant video game series over the last decade, spawning a new sub-genre of games like it and basically setting a new standard of comparison for melee combat, level design, and difficulty. The series has been so popular that it really needs no introduction -- if you haven't heard of <i>Dark Souls</i> by now then you've been living under a rock, and even if you've never played any of them you surely know what kind of games they are. I began playing the series with the original <i>Demon's Souls</i> and have kept up with every release since, though it took me a while to get around to <i>Bloodborne</i> and I still haven't played <i>Sekiro</i>, although from what I understand <i>Sekiro</i> is more an evolution of <i>Tenchu</i> than <i>Dark Souls</i>, so it maybe doesn't fully belong in the "Soulsborne" category of games. With each release of a new <i>Soulsborne</i> game I usually find myself having mixed opinions -- while usually enjoying each one, there's usually some aspect that leaves me a little unsatisfied or subtly disappointed. So I thought it would be fun to review all five games against one another, comparing their relative strengths and weaknesses while attempting to rank them in terms of my personal favorites.</div>
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When brainstorming this list and trying to figure out how I'd actually order them, I went back and replayed large chunks of each game, just to refresh my memory, and so I decided to base these rankings on a combination of how much I remember enjoying each game the first time I played it, how much I enjoyed replaying it, and finally how well it compares to the other games in the series mechanically. So in other words, this is not a purely objective ranking of how good the games are technically, since I'm putting a lot of weight in my own subjective feelings in addition to their more technical design elements. If it were purely objective, then believe me they would be in a very different order. All of which is to say that this is my personal opinion, so don't get offended if I don't have the exact same feelings as you do.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">#5</span> <i>Dark Souls 2 </i></span><br />
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This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been following my blog these last several years, considering <a href="https://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/2014/05/dark-souls-2-sucks-so-much-disappoint.html">how much I hated it</a> when it originally came out. Its last-place position in these rankings isn't very controversial, either, since it's commonly regarded as the black sheep of the series, and for good reason. As it turned out, <i>Dark Souls 2</i> was actually developed by an almost completely different team within From Software -- essentially the "B Team" -- while series director Hidetaka Miyazaki and the rest of the "A Team" were off working on <i>Bloodborne</i>, which is probably the main factor in why <i>Dark Souls 2</i> feels so weird and different compared to the other games. Normally I'm all for experimentation and handing the reigns over to someone with a fresh and different perspective, because video game series can often begin to feel stagnant without that spark of creativity, but the experimentation in this case feels less like a matter of "what can we do to improve the game" and more of "let's just change things for the hell of it."</div>
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The main issue with <i>Dark Souls 2</i> is that it controls differently, and thus feels "wrong" to me because the natural instincts I've developed from all of the other <i>Soulsborne </i>games just don't apply in this game. Attack animations feel really sluggish and lock you into long recovery frames that prevent you from doing anything for almost an entire second after the attack finishes, and getting hit seems to lock you into longer recoil animations where you can't move or do anything. Roll dodging, likewise, seems to have slightly different timing where it feels like I'm always getting hit in the middle of a successful dodge, and you're also restricted to eight-directional movement so just walking around feels janky and stuttery. It also feels like there's no weight or momentum to things like attacking or rolling since there's no acceleration at the apex of swinging your weapon or jumping into a roll. So basically, everything feels like you're either floating on ice or have your feet rooted into the ground, and the timing for pulling off successful attacks and dodges is different enough to throw me off from every natural instinct that I have from the other games.</div>
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What's weird is every other <i>Soulsborne </i>game controls a little differently but I can usually jump straight into them or else adapt really quickly, but I just can't get the hang of <i>Dark Souls 2</i> and I don't have the patience to try to Git Gud at what feels like a broken system. Part of the issue, it seems, is that they tied animation speeds and invincibility frames to the "adaptability" and "agility" stats -- the higher your adaptability, the faster you perform certain actions and the more invincibility frames you have during roll dodges. While I'm usually cool with having more weight and emphasis on stats in RPGs, in terms of their effect on your mechanical performance, <i>Dark Souls 2</i> is an action game first and foremost, in a series renowned for its tight, responsive controls and fluid combat system, and so changing that core feeling is like taking <i>Doom</i> and adding a one-second delay to every action and forcing you to only aim your gun in eight directions.</div>
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Besides that, the level design feels incredibly linear, with many levels being singular paths from the starting point to the boss chamber, and the world design makes no logical sense in terms of how the world is actually built, considering that different areas are literally built on top of each other, in addition to other weird, nonsensical things like how you ride an elevator up from the top of a mountain and find yourself at a castle in a lake of lava, or how you ride an elevator hundreds of feet down from a ruined castle already at sea level and arrive at a wharf that's somehow also still at sea level. For that matter, the connections between areas don't feel as fluid as in other games, since many of them are just long tunnels or elevator shafts. Then on top of all that, the difficulty feels really cheap this time around, with annoyingly-placed archers everywhere, enemies having perfect tracking and literally spinning in place doing instant 180-turns, and areas where they just spam a bunch of enemies at you in a lame effort to ramp up the difficulty. There's plenty more I could talk about, but I think the fact that From Software felt the need to completely overhaul and remaster the game a mere year later with the <i>Scholar of the First Sin</i> edition just goes to show that even they realized it wasn't that good.</div>
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(1) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my initial playthrough</span></i><span style="color: #f1c232;">?</span> Not very much, but I was at least able to get through the whole game, and did find it decently enjoyable at the time -- just incredibly sub-par compared to the previous two games. I said in my original review that "a bad <i>Souls </i>game is still a better gaming experience than the average video game" and that it was "as mechanically satisfying as either of its predecessors" even though it ultimately let me down in a lot of ways.</div>
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(2) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my recent replay?</span></i> Absolutely not at all. It's hard to believe that I actually kind of enjoyed it originally, and that I didn't notice as many issues with the controls and the general feel of combat. Every other game took a little bit of time to adjust to, but I just couldn't do it with <i>Dark Souls 2</i> and basically rage quit before getting to the second boss.</div>
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(3) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How good is it comparatively?</span></i> <i>Dark Souls 2</i> does some unique and interesting things and improved over the previous two games in some key ways, like the improved functionality of covenants, dual-wielding, and remixed New Game Plus mode, but then it has some pretty dumb systems like soul memory. Overall, it has probably the worst level design, the worst world design, and the worst-feeling combat of the entire series, which is not a good combination when those are some of the biggest and most important factors in these games' enjoyability.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">#4</span> <i>Bloodborne</i></span><br />
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It's a shame that <i>Bloodborne </i>has to come in so low on this list because it does so many things so well, and I really want to like it, but I just didn't have as much fun playing it as I feel like I should have. Part of that is simply <i>Dark Souls</i> fatigue, getting exhausted from playing basically the same game for the fifth time in the last seven years -- six times if you count <i>The Surge</i> which is basically just a straight-up <i>Dark Souls</i> clone. With <i>Bloodborne </i>being a brand new IP I was hoping that it would do more to set itself apart from the <i>Souls </i>series, by putting a brand new spin on the familiar formula, but it turned out to be basically the exact same game but with a bunch of mostly cosmetic tweaks, like a Victorian Gothic setting instead of dark fantasy, and a story dealing with ancient eldritch space gods instead of the usual ordeal with rekindling the Age of Fire.</div>
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I actually really, really like the story and setting in this game, probably the most of every other game in the series, since <i>Bloodborne </i>takes a stronger turn towards the realm of horror and feels somewhat Lovecraftian in its lore and backstory, which are two things I really appreciate. The Victorian Gothic setting likewise feels more unique and interesting to me, but unfortunately the game's visual design can feel a little monotonous because there's not as much thematic or aesthetic variety between different locations. In a similar vein, there isn't much variety in terms of weapons or armor -- while I love the added functionality and versatility of trick weapons, the fact that there are only 15 in the base game severely diminishes strategic decision-making in terms of weapon selection and build diversity. Armor sets, meanwhile, all look kind of similar and have only minor variations in stats so finding new armor sets rarely feels all that rewarding.</div>
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Making matters worse is that, because there are so few weapons and armors in the game, there's not a lot of rewarding discovery when it comes to exploration; <i>Bloodborne </i>has some of the best level design in the entire series, in terms of its overall complexity and the amount of branching paths available to you, but you don't find much in the way of rewarding equipment or loot because it's mostly all just consumable items, which are pretty mundane. The bosses are fun, but like the game's visual design they get to feel a little repetitive because so many of them are over-sized rampaging beasts with similar movesets, so most of the time they all look and feel somewhat similar.</div>
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The combat system, however, is undoubtedly the best in the entire series -- I love how quick and snappy everything is, not to mention the incredible fun of the trick weapons. Plus, new systems like the rally system which lets you heal by attacking an enemy after you get hit further helps to promote a faster pace of play by encouraging you to get right back into a fight when you take damage, and adds an incredibly engaging element of "risk versus reward." Despite a lot of general improvements, they took some odd steps backwards, however, like with the blood vial healing system and the online PVP scene. Although I found the game pretty engaging all the way through, actually finishing it felt almost like an obligation because it wasn't gripping me as much as some other games in the series. I suspect I maybe didn't like it as much as so many other people did when it first launched because I'd already played <i>Demon's Souls</i> and <i>Dark Souls 3</i>, whereas most other people hadn't played <i>Demon's Souls</i> and <i>Dark Souls 3</i> didn't even exist at the time. Those two games have some strong similarities with <i>Bloodborne </i>and so it's possible that <i>Bloodborne </i>just didn't feel as original to me as it did to others who were playing it at release in 2015.</div>
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(1) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my initial playthrough?</span></i> I was sort of lukewarm on the whole experience -- I enjoyed it a lot in the early goings because of all the refreshing changes it bought to the table, but the more I played the more stale and monotonous it got to feel, as I realized there weren't many interesting surprises in store down the line and as it became clear that it was really just another version of a <i>Dark Souls</i> game as opposed to something radically different.</div>
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(2) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my recent replay?</span></i> Not applicable, since I played <i>Bloodborne </i>for the first time just now. However, I suppose it's possible that I might appreciate it more if I were to come back and replay it later, after having sufficient time off from the series, but I wonder if it would feel even more monotonous on a replay because of the general lack of weapons, armors, and spells. I'm not sure.</div>
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(3) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How good is it comparatively? </span></i>Objectively speaking, <i>Bloodborne </i>could be argued as the best game in the entire series, since it has the best and most responsive combat system, some of the best level design, and the most interesting world and backstory, but for every positive claim in those departments there's at least one notable caveat. If it had a little more overall variety and a more compelling story hook up front then it would probably rank higher on this list for me.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">#3</span> <i>Dark Souls</i></span><br />
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For a lot of people,<i> Dark Souls</i> was their introduction to the <i>Souls </i>series; since <i>Demon's Souls</i> was a PS3 exclusive and had barely any sort of marketing behind it, most people didn't have any exposure to it or opportunity to play it, whereas <i>Dark Souls</i> was released cross-platform on both of Sony and Microsoft's consoles and later ported to the PC, and had a larger marketing push behind it to drum up interest. I'd wager that most people consider the first <i>Dark Souls</i> to be their personal favorite by virtue of it being their first <i>Souls</i> game, but with me having already played <i>Demon's Souls</i> it didn't have as much of an impact on me. It's a solid game, though, and it's a fantastic sequel considering how much From Software improved on the formula going from <i>Demon's Souls</i>.</div>
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<i>Dark Souls's</i> world design is unquestionably its best feature, since it introduced the concept of a persistent, interconnected world where all of the game's different areas were linked to one another through actual level design in a highly immersive, thematic, and atmospheric way. With bonfires scattered throughout the world acting as respawn points and not having a way to warp around the world at the start of the game, it made the world feel a lot more demanding to explore because you had to get everywhere on foot, and meant that you might get stuck in an area if you went down a one-way path and rested at a bonfire because you had no way to backtrack -- you had to advance forward. I absolutely love how many different areas you have accessible to you right from the start of the game, with the Undead Burg, Catacombs, New Londo Ruins, and, if you have the Master Key, the Valley of Drakes and Blighttown all being just a short walk from Firelink Shrine.</div>
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The estus flask system, tied to the bonfires, is one of its best improvements over <i>Demon's Souls</i> since it helped to streamline the gameplay by getting rid of the need to farm healing items by always giving you a minimum amount every time you rested at a bonfire, and being restricted to only a limited number of heals forced you to "Git Gud" at the game and improve the quality of your play if you wanted to get through an area because you couldn't just stock up on a near-infinite supply of healing items. Other improvements include being able to jump and perform jumping attacks, and also being able to perform plunging attacks while dropping down from a higher ledge. Poise is a little broken when it comes to PVP, but at least gives incentive to use heavy armor, and the inclusion of a mid-weight roll dodge is certainly a welcome addition. Although the combat is a little slower and more sluggish, compared to other games, it's still a fairly robust and responsive system.</div>
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The biggest issue with <i>Dark Souls</i> is that its second half feels a little rushed and lacking in overall quality compared to the first half, with some areas feeling pretty lame, frustrating, or just straight up unfinished. Lost Izalith and the Bed of Chaos are the worst offenders, of course, but even other areas pale in comparison to the early stages of the game. And speaking as someone who had already played <i>Demon's Souls</i>, a lot of <i>Dark Souls's</i> content felt like an uninspired rehash of things I'd already seen and done in <i>Demon's Souls</i>, which made them lose a lot of their charm and interest when I saw them again in <i>Dark Souls</i> -- Lautrec, Bell Gargoyle, Patches, Blighttown, Catacombs, Pinwheel, Phalanx, and more are all just blatantly recycled from <i>Demon's Souls</i>.</div>
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(1) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my initial playthrough?</span></i> I was pretty deeply engrossed by my first playthrough. It felt like a pretty strong sequel that understood the appeal of <i>Demon's Souls</i> and also knew how to fix some of its predecessor's issues, and with it only being the second game in the series I was pumped just to have more <i>Souls </i>to experience. I didn't like it as much as <i>Demon's Souls</i>, at the time, but it was still a lot of fun.</div>
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(2) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my recent replay?</span></i> It started out great, with me having a blast exploring a bunch of areas that I knew I wasn't supposed to be in yet, like the Catacombs and Valley and Drakes, going around grabbing a bunch of great loot and equipment before tackling the true start of the game in the Undead Burg. However, once I got to the Depths and Blighttown I kind of decided I was done because I just didn't want to deal with the hassle of exploring those levels, and knew there weren't too many other fun areas to look forward to.</div>
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(3) <span style="color: #f1c232;">How good is it comparatively?</span> <i>Dark Souls's</i> world design I think easily stands at the top of the list considering how tightly it weaves in upon itself, and how sensibly everything connects to everything else. Plus, it has some of the best variety in the entire series. Unfortunately, the second half of the game is pretty underwhelming and it loses major points for so blatantly rehashing familiar encounters that had already been done in <i>Demon's Souls.</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">#2</span> <i>Demon's Souls</i></span><br />
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<i>Demon's Souls</i> was the first of these games that I played, and so it's long held the top spot in my personal rankings based purely on how much of a unique experience it was, and as evidenced by its position in this list I still believe it to be a better, more interesting game than either <i>Dark Souls</i> or <i>Dark Souls 2</i> in a lot of important ways. It's slipped from the top spot, however, because after replaying it I've realized that it hasn't aged as well as some of the other games. As the first game in what would eventually become a five-game series, you can tell that From Software was still finding their footing, and so it's pretty crude and unrefined in some important ways. The lack of jump attacks, plunging attacks, and R2 combos combined with the four-directional roll-dodging is enough to make the combat feel pretty rudimentary, and the level design also has an annoying tendency of forcing you into incredibly tight, claustrophobic corridors where your weapon constantly clangs off the walls and the camera gets pushed into tight corners, and where you have no room to move to avoid enemy attacks or to even run past the enemies at all if you're just trying to get back to a boss chamber.</div>
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Then you've got other tedious things in the mechanical design, like how healing works, with you having to periodically stop playing the game to farm healing items when your supply runs out, or how upgrading weapons requires increasingly absurd amounts of resources, with you needing 74 shards, 36 large shards, 18 chunks, and 1 pure stone to fully upgrade a weapon to +10, and with pure stones like bladestone being an extremely rare drop from one enemy behind an illusory wall. The game also has an utterly obtuse system in place called "World Tendency" where each of the five worlds can shift their alignment from "Pure Black" to "Pure White" depending on various factors like dying or killing bosses. These tendency shifts can have strong effects on gameplay like making enemies easier or more difficult, and most importantly enabling unique events that only occur in Pure Black or Pure White tendency. It's a fun concept in theory, but the game offers zero explanation for how it works or what it even is, and maintaining certain world tendencies is nearly impossible and a real pain in the butt to keep track of.</div>
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Where <i>Demon's Souls</i> outshines all the other games in the series is that pretty much every level has some kind of unique mechanical twist that makes it feel unique and distinct from all the others, whether that be dodging dragon fire while running across the bridge in the Boletarian Palace, or dropping down mine shafts in the Stonefang Tunnel, or searching for keys to unlock cells in the Tower of Latria, or dealing with infinitely-respawning enemies until you find the necromancer in the Shrine of Storms, or navigating the great poison swamp of the Valley of Defilement, and so on. This extends to the bosses as well; later games in the series latched onto the idea of tough, challenging 1-on-1 "duels" where you just have to learn the boss's movesets and figure out the right timing to attack or avoid attacks, turning every fight into basically the same strategy, whereas <i>Demon's Souls </i>gives every boss some type of unique and interesting gimmick, like whittling down the shields on Phalanx, or getting down the tunnel to reach the Armored Spider, or finding the correct Fool's Idol, or moving silently so the blind Old Hero can't hear you, or besting Garl Vinland so that you can claim Maiden Astraea's soul, and so on.</div>
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Image from <a href="http://operationrainfall.com/2015/04/25/review-demons-souls/">OperationRainfall</a>.</div>
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<i>Demon's Souls</i> also has some of the best atmosphere in the entire series, with all of its worlds feeling incredibly bleak and depressing. The <i>Dark Souls</i> games all depict a dying civilization as the Age of Fire wanes, but<i> Demon's Souls</i> really captures that dying spirit through not only its world design, but also its characters. Everyone in <i>Demon's Souls</i> feels horribly beaten-down and on the verge giving up, whereas literally every character in <i>Dark Souls 1</i> has some kind of silly laugh at the end of their dialogue. Stockpile Thomas's line "You have a heart of gold, don't let them take it from you," still gives me chills. The Valley of Defilement blows Blighttown (and every subsequent poison swamp in other games) out of the water in terms of its horrifyingly oppressive atmosphere, and the Tower of Latria -- especially its second stage -- might be the best area in the entire series. While the actual gameplay mechanics have aged more poorly, compared to the sequels, <i>Demon's Souls</i> still has the most charm and soul in my eyes, and gets a major boost for nostalgia and originality.</div>
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(1) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my initial playthrough?</span></i> <i>Demon's Souls</i> ranks at the top in this department, considering it was my first <i>Souls </i>game, so everything felt completely new and refreshingly eye-opening. It was a genuine revelation for me. </div>
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(2) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my recent replay?</span></i> Things started off pretty rocky as I struggled a bit with some of its more crude and out-dated design elements, but it was the only game that I ended up replaying in its entirety. Part of that was simply because it had been so long since the last time I played, but I also found myself strangely compelled to re-conquer these worlds and slay all the archdemons.</div>
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(3) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How good is it comparatively?</span></i> You could probably argue that <i>Demon's Souls</i> is technically the worst game in the series, and that would still be respectable considering it was the first and had nothing to build off of, but surprisingly I think it still sits near the top of the list in terms of level design and boss design, while also having some of the best and most memorable moments. Plus, it set the stage for everything to come and established many long-running staples within the series, so it deserves a lot of credit for that.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">#1</span> <i>Dark Souls 3</i></span><br />
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I wasn't really sure what to make of <i>Dark Souls 3</i> when I played it originally -- it was a lot more enjoyable and seemed like a generally better game than <i>Dark Souls 2</i>, and I easily sank twice as much time into <i>Dark Souls 3</i> than I did any previous <i>Souls </i>game, but it also felt a little uninspired at times since almost everything in it feels reminiscent of things from other games. It's also a little too linear in terms of how you progress through the game, since the first half of it has to be played in a relatively rigid order before you get any sort of serious options when it comes to branching paths to alternate or otherwise optional areas, and when you do, it's usually only a short detour that quickly terminates in a dead end, or just leads to another linear progression of areas. Plus, it feels like the second half of the game is a little lacking in content, because once you make it halfway through the game's main objectives (to defeat the four Lords of Cinder) there isn't a whole lot of stuff left to do other than quickly knock out the final two Lords and explore a couple of optional side areas.</div>
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Despite those flaws, <i>Dark Souls 3</i> feels like the least rushed and most polished of all the <i>Souls </i>games, save for maybe <i>Bloodborne</i>, which makes sense seeing as they had four previous games to use as a foundation -- with a successful formula already on their hands, all they had to do was make iterative updates and polish a few blemishes. The combat system is a lot faster this time around (again, second only to <i>Bloodborne</i>) and feels really fluid and responsive, with satisfyingly challenging enemy designs, too, which makes conquering its levels and defeating its bosses really engaging and rewarding. The level design is decently complex, too, with a lot of different areas to explore within levels, and the levels themselves have some pleasant visual designs that make them decently interesting to look at. I particularly enjoy the Undead Settlement, the Cathedral of the Deep, and Irithyll Valley, all of which are some of my favorite levels in the entire series. It also introduces some fun and interesting concepts to the series, like Weapon Arts that grant weapons extra special abilities that consume Focus Points -- a true return of the magic meter from <i>Demon's Souls</i>, along with an Ashen Estus flask where you have to choose how many of your limited flasks to allot between health or mana -- and Purple Phantoms who can invade or be summoned as a "wild card."</div>
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Ultimately, <i>Dark Souls 3</i> earns the top spot in my book not for excelling at any one thing, but for being a generally good mixture of above-average elements. It's got pretty good level design with interesting visuals and decent atmosphere, a snappy and responsive combat system, a good amount of satisfying challenge, online multiplayer and covenants that work pretty well (except the Blue Sentinels), and a good amount of mechanical variety. Generally speaking, all of these things it does well, some other game in the series does better, but while its peaks aren't as high as others, its valleys aren't as low. In a way, it feels like a compilation of the best features and assets from the entire series, but without the uniqueness or originality that those features had in their respective games. It doesn't have as much of a creative spark as other games in the series, in other words, but it feels like a consistently good and enjoyable game that doesn't irritate, disappoint, or underwhelm me in key ways like the others sometimes do. And really, I just feel the most "at home" with <i>Dark Souls 3</i>, as evidenced by my much higher playtime with it, versus any other <i>Soulsborne</i> game.</div>
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(1) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my initial playthrough?</span></i> I thought it was decently satisfying, but it didn't blow me away or grip me quite as much as <i>Demon's Souls</i> or <i>Dark Souls</i> did. Still, it was engaging enough for me to put over 200 hours into it across multiple playthroughs and sticking around for the end-game PVP scene.</div>
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(2) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How much did I enjoy my recent replay?</span></i> Of all the <i>Souls </i>games, this is the one that I was able to jump back into the most easily, although that may be simply because it's the one I'd played most recently, and it's also the one that had been inspired a little by <i>Bloodborne</i>, which of course I also just played.</div>
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(3) <i><span style="color: #f1c232;">How good is it comparatively?</span></i> <i>Dark Souls 3</i> feels like the best overall embodiment of what the <i>Soulsborne </i>series represents, since it takes a lot of different elements from all of the other games and blends them into a fairly polished and successful package. I wish it were a little less linear, and had carried over certain elements from <i>Dark Souls 2</i> and <i>Bloodborne</i>, like power stancing and rally healing, but it's basically the quintessential <i>Soulsborne </i>game, and probably the one I'll go back to years down the line when I need to scratch that <i>Soulsborne</i> itch.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In Conclusion</span><br />
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I want to point out once again that this ranking is heavily influenced by my own personal bias, in terms of what I enjoy in these games and the general feelings I had while playing these games, both originally and recently. This is not meant to be a definitive ranking of what games are objectively "best" in the series -- if it were, <i>Demon's Souls</i> would be a lot lower, and <i>Bloodborne</i> would be a lot higher -- it's more a measure of the satisfaction and enjoyment I got out of playing these games. Different people will have different tastes and opinions, of course, seeing as some people rank <i>Dark Souls 2</i> as one of the best -- if not the best -- in the series, whereas it falls in last place for me by a huge margin. I should also point out that just because some games are ranked lower in this list doesn't mean I don't like them -- even though <i>Bloodborne </i>comes in at #4 for me, I still enjoyed playing it, just not as much as other games ranked higher in the list.</div>
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And, that's all I got folks. I'm sure many of you would rank these games in a different order than I did, so if you have strong disagreements with anywhere I placed a particular game feel free to comment and explain why.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-7289101916718393452019-07-22T20:32:00.000-04:002019-07-22T20:32:54.239-04:00Bloodborne Review: Interesting, but Ultimately Disappointing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Dark Souls</i> has been one of the most influential video games over the last decade, with its unique gameplay formula and pantiresentation becoming a standard of comparison whenever people talk about melee combat, level design, and difficulty in other video games. The <i>Souls </i>series has been such a cultural phenomenon that it's essentially become its own sub-genre of games, with the "<i>Souls</i>-like" term catching on as a way to describe other, similar types of games who've taken clear inspiration from <i>Dark Souls</i>. In 2015, between the release of <i>Dark Souls 2</i> and <i>Dark Souls 3</i>, developer From Software released <i>Bloodborne</i>, a main-entry "<i>Souls</i>-like" (or <i>Soulsborne</i>) game, which is basically just a spin-off from <i>Dark Souls</i>, taking the core gameplay concepts and mechanics from <i>Dark Souls</i> and giving them a complete make-over with a whole new setting and a bunch of mechanical tweaks on the familiar formula.</div>
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Speaking as someone who's played all four of the <i>Souls</i> games in order, starting with the original <i>Demon's Souls</i>, <i>Bloodborne</i> breathes a lot of new life into a gameplay formula that's become a little too tired and repetitive over the years, but ultimately doesn't set itself apart from the <i>Souls</i> series as much as I would have liked it to. In practice, my experience playing <i>Bloodborne</i> started with excited optimism as I relished the positive effect many of its changes had on the core gameplay formula, until about halfway through when I started to feel like I was just playing Yet Another Version of the exact same game I've already played four times previously over the last decade -- this now being the fifth. And the more I played, the more I started to feel subtly disappointed and underwhelmed by some of the game's other design elements, and by the missed opportunities to do something more with the potential that a spin-off game could have.</div>
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<i>Bloodborne</i> takes place in a Victorian Gothic setting called Yharnam, where some of its scholars have discovered an eldritch race of alien gods, and have begun to worship them and enact blood rituals in order to commune and become one with the Great Ones. As a side effect of these rituals, portions of the population began to turn into literal beasts, and so Yharnam has periodic "hunts" where so-called "hunters" seek to eradicate the beasts. You play as one of these hunters, an outsider come to Yharnam in search of "paleblood" who undergoes a blood transfusion to become imbibed with Yharnamite blood, signs a contract, and becomes bound to the Hunter's Dream, a transient dream-like place from which you awaken to slay the nightmares of the real world. The rest of the game has you exploring Yharnam and learning about its history while fighting grotesque beasts and monsters in the process of seeking out the "paleblood."</div>
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There's a lot of really interesting things going on within this world, but in true <i>Dark Souls</i> fashion, the backstory, lore, and even the current events to which you are witness throughout your actual playthrough are so heavily obfuscated behind vague hints and clues that it's hard to really decipher what's actually going on. <i>Bloodborne </i>uses the classic <i>Souls </i>style of storytelling where there isn't much overt storytelling that explains what's happening or why you're doing the things you're doing; rather, you have to piece everything together yourself by reading item descriptions and interpreting random off-hand comments made in passing by other characters. In contrast to other <i>Souls </i>games, however, <i>Bloodborne</i> gives you practically zero introduction to any of its characters, locations, or concepts before thrusting you right into gameplay on a main quest to find some nebulous MacGuffin known as "paleblood" so that you can "transcend the hunt," an objective which is only given to you by a scrawled piece of paper when you wake up. The introductory cutscene gives zero explanation of Yharnam's history, what blood ministration is, what the purpose of a contract or a blood transfusion is supposed to be, what a "hunter" is and why you've become one, what the "hunt" is supposed to be, what those zombie-children are or what they did when they crawled on top of you, why a beastly monster spawned from a pool of blood and was set on fire, and most importantly, what paleblood is and why you should care about finding it.</div>
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This sort of cold-start intro where you're dumped into the world and gameplay with zero explanation can be good for creating a more interesting and compelling mystery for inquisitive minds, since it forces you to seek out answers to these questions and can make the world seem more alluring when you don't know anything about it upfront, but that can also backfire and make the player less interested when you're given zero context for what anything is or why you should care. Consequently, I spent my first several hours just feeling confused and awkwardly stumbling around, viewing everything from a purely gameplay-oriented mindset, mindlessly killing enemies and advancing to new areas just so I could beat the level and move on to the next one. It almost took me out of the world, in other words, instead of helping to immerse me within it. <i>Demon's Souls</i>, in contrast, explains the plight of Boletaria to you and how it came to be, while also giving you a clear goal and motivation for what you're trying to accomplish, all before you ever set foot in its world, so that you can move through its world with purpose and understanding, even though the intro holds back many of its details and still expects you to figure most things out for yourself. Having at least some context at the start of a game can make it easier to get into it and find motivation to continue, as opposed to what <i>Bloodborne</i> does which is like starting a movie 30 minutes in and having to figure out what's going on without any of the first act exposition.</div>
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Despite my contempt for the lack of any sort of exposition whatsoever, I ultimately prefer the story elements, themes, concepts, and imagery of <i>Bloodborne</i> to those of the <i>Dark Souls</i> games. The Victorian Gothic setting feels more unique and interesting to me than <i>Dark Souls'</i> take on the usual "dark fantasy" genre, and I feel like there's a more interesting backstory of what's happening in Yharnam than there is (or was) in Lordran, Drangleic, or Lothric. The <i>Dark Souls</i> games are all about rekindling the Age of Fire, which I guess is supposed to be the spark of life and prosperity or something, as if the fire has simply burned out over time, whereas <i>Bloodborne</i> is all about the horrifying consequences of humanity trying to ascend to a higher plane of existence by communing with ancient eldritch gods. The other games have their moments of horror, but they ultimately feel like fantasy games; <i>Bloodborne</i>, on the other hand, takes a much stronger turn towards the realm of horror, with its story feeling like something from an HP Lovecraft novel that's been adapted to film by John Carpenter. As a fan of the horror genre, and of the concepts Lovecraft explored in a lot of his stories with cosmic space gods being so alien and unfathomable to the human mind that their mere existence is enough to drive one insane, I found the story elements in <i>Bloodborne</i> really interesting, once the story actually got itself going in the second half of the game.</div>
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I particularly enjoyed the ending and the implications it had on the entire game, where after vanquishing the nightmare I refused Gehrman's final wish to help me awaken from the Hunter's Dream, and an Elder God descended from the moon to embrace me, putting me in Gehrman's role as the new First Hunter for a new cycle of a new Hunt. It was fittingly appropriate that I was wearing a Mensis Cage during the final boss fight with Gehrman, and thus was wearing it while bound to Gehrman's wheelchair in the final cutscene. I don't know if that's considered the "bad ending" or whatever, since apparently there are multiple endings, but I feel like it sets up the cyclical nature of the Dream and Hunt, and the eldritch gods' control over these realms, in a far more concrete way than <i>Dark Souls'</i> usual depictions of the cyclical Ages of Fire. Plus, it's a bit of a dark, depressing ending where it feels like the elder gods ultimately won and that I was just a pawn in their grand scheme, and I tend to like those sorts of dark endings in entertainment media. The ending felt incredibly anti-climactic, however, because it seemed to come out of nowhere to me. It did not feel like that moment, when you're confronted by Gehrman in the Hunter's Dream, was what the whole game had been building towards. The whole time I was supposed to be seeking out the paleblood to transcend the hunt, but it was never really clear that I had found the paleblood, or what the paleblood actually was, and so the ending just seemed really abrupt to me. The only reason I even refused Gehrman at the apparent end of the game was because I thought I still had to find the paleblood and that there was still more game left to play, and so I didn't want to go through with what seemed like a definite Game Over cutscene.</div>
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The game's obtuseness with the storytelling extends to the gameplay mechanics as well, which again is par for the course for From Software but yet again it feels like they exceeded themselves with <i>Bloodborne</i>. Unlike other <i>Souls</i> games, there's basically no tutorial area -- you're dropped right into the first level with floor messages that tell you how to do light attacks, and how to lock-on to an enemy, and that's about it. There's no gradual buildup as the game introduces mechanics and concepts one at a time in a safe testing environment so that you can really understand how the game works before "the true <i><strike>Demon's Souls</strike></i> <i>Bloodborne</i> starts here" -- it just pushes you right into the deep end of the pool. Any and all tutorial messages about how the combat works are in the hub area of the Hunter's Dream, so at least there are messages somewhere, but they're given to you completely out of context with no way to test them out. Other things, like Insight (what it is, how it works, why you would want it), how to upgrade weapons and unlock gem slots, and even super important things like invasions or how to level up, are never explained to you. I played for four hours before figuring out how to level up because it wasn't even an available option to me, and had to be told how in a YouTube comment, and still never found out how to invade other players because I was apparently expected to buy a co-op item first, which I had no interest in, before the PVP item would even become available to me.</div>
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Quests and other important world interactions are likewise incredibly obtuse. At one point a character sends you looking for her sister, who's apparently gone missing, but with no indication of where she might have gone or where you should even start looking. Apparently, to resolve this quest, you have to play the game for a while, kill a boss in a separate level several stages later, then come back and re-explore an area you had previously cleared and kill an enemy you've probably already killed a few times before, with no real indication that this enemy would now drop a new item. Many of the character interactions, in fact, have really obtuse and highly specific trigger conditions that can be incredibly easy to miss, even for thorough explorers; even though I'd discovered every location, killed every boss, and felt like I'd explored every area, I still missed several characters and questlines that I feel like I just never had the opportunity to even trigger because I didn't psychically know that I had to backtrack through previous areas after killing a requisite amount of bosses to trigger extra content. To my credit, I did try to seek out those extra interactions, but after a few failed attempts that led nowhere I gave up because I wasn't getting any sort of positive feedback and didn't want to continue pointlessly wasting time on wild goose chases or barking up the wrong trees in a fruitless effort to seek out extra content that, for all I knew, might not even exist.</div>
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A similar thing happens with the summons letter to Cainhurst. At one point you find an invitation addressed to you personally, with a vague message about seeking a stagecoach in Hemwick Crossing -- except that Hemwick Crossing is not an actual, named location in the game, and there is no physical stagecoach anywhere that you can actually discover in Hemwick Charnel Lane to help you find where you're supposed to go. The stagecoach only appears when you've already found the exact, specific location you need to be in to trigger the cutscene that transports you to Cainhurst, and the activation area to trigger this cutscene is so narrow that you can be standing at and walking all around the crossroads in Hemwick Charnel Lane and never trigger the cutscene. I, for instance, correctly guessed where I had to go and ran right past it, missing the cutscene entirely, because I didn't realize I had to be practically touching a random spire for the cutscene to trigger until I looked the solution up later. There's plenty of other examples of weird, inexplicable things that seem like they should be important but about which you're given zero hints, such as a spider-like altar that you can interact with after beating a boss but with the only option being to "do nothing," with no indication of what else you might possibly be able to do at that location or why you can even interact with it at all, or when you get the "Make Contact" gesture in a highly suggestive area that apparently doesn't work in that level at all -- only in a much later level in a completely optional, hidden area after you've long forgotten that you even have that gesture.</div>
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As with the <i>Dark Souls</i> games, you basically have to play this game with a guide, or else waste dozens of hours through tedious trial-and-error trying literally everything possible to get the most out of it. To be clear, I'm totally on board with the game having hidden secrets and not spelling everything out to you, because there's genuinely rewarding satisfaction in discovering some of these hidden things for the specific reason that they <i><u>are</u></i> so well-hidden -- some discoveries are actually pretty mind-blowing, and it's pretty refreshing playing a game that isn't dragging you by the nose to show you all of its content, where you have to put in actual work to figure out and discover its secrets -- but at the same time I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect players to be able to figure some of this stuff out on your own without any sort of reasonable clues (or even positive feedback when you're on the right track) from the game itself. Mind you, this isn't an issue unique to <i>Bloodborne</i>, since every <i>Souls </i>game has had heaps of obtuse gameplay designs that necessitated a guide to figure out, but that doesn't really excuse or justify these design elements just because the other games did it, too -- it's something I've taken issue with ever since <i>Demon's Souls'</i> utterly incomprehensible "world tendency" system, and it's something I wish could've been less of an issue in <i>Bloodborne</i>, as opposed to being seemingly even more extreme in some cases.</div>
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The level design in <i>Bloodborne</i> is, fortunately, some of the best in the entire series. There are a ton of different areas to explore, and it always feels like you have two or three different areas unlocked at any given time, which you can explore in whatever order you wish -- a pleasant change of pace from <i>Dark Souls 2 and 3</i>, both of which often felt a little too linear and restrictive in terms of how you explored levels or how you progressed from area to area. With <i>Bloodborne</i>, I felt like I spent most of my playthrough just trying to keep track of all the different side paths and alternate areas that I noticed but had to make a mental note to come back to, because the game is always putting you in situations where you have to decide between this path or that path, and for every path you choose there are two or three others you've had to ignore for the time being. Some areas of the game, like Central Yharnam, the Forbidden Woods, Yahar'gul, the Nightmare Frontier, and pretty much everywhere in the <i>Old Hunters</i> DLC, are absolutely massive and harken back to the level design of <i>Demon's Souls</i>, where each area is a sprawling web of interconnected pathways where you make progress by unlocking a variety of shortcuts from a more centrally-located focal point, a task that takes a bit more thinking and observation than simply following the path forward to the next bonfire.</div>
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Despite the deeply complex and engaging level design, exploration feels really lacking in discovery. That is to say, you don't find much in the way of interesting loot while exploring levels because it's all mostly consumable items, most of which are blood echoes, blood vials, or quicksilver bullets. It feels like there are significantly fewer weapons and armors in <i>Bloodborne</i>, as compared to the <i>Souls </i>games, which already hurts the feeling of discovery somewhat by the sheer fact that there are fewer pieces of equipment to actually discover, but making matters worse is that a lot of them are only obtained by buying them from a merchant after beating a boss, or completing a quest, or obtaining a "badge," all of which unlock new items from the merchants in the Hunter's Dream. So most of the time there's no moment of fanfare where the new item is bestowed upon you immediately after getting past a difficult foe or after keenly wandering into a hidden area as a direct reward for that accomplishment. Most of the time your reward is a few extra blood echoes, or maybe some Bolt Paper or Madmen's Knowledge, while the major rewards are withheld until later and relegated to the merchant windows, where the new items become dissociated from the environment and the task you accomplished to unlock them. It is, I believe, less inherently satisfying to overcome a tough challenge and be presented with what is essentially a voucher to be able to buy a reward at a later time, as opposed to getting the thematic reward then and there, and that can make long portions of the game feel mechanically unrewarding. It's usually pretty satisfying to defeat a boss and clear a level, and that inherent satisfaction should be all the motivation you need to continue, but there's not much mechanical reward for doing so, other than being able to progress to a new area to repeat the process with new enemies and a new boss at the end.</div>
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The bosses, meanwhile, aren't always that fun. As with the <i>Souls </i>games, <i>Bloodborne's </i>bosses should be its highlights, but they range in quality from super intense and exciting, to clunky and awkward, to weird and gimmicky. It's unreasonable to expect every single boss to be a home run, but it's at least fortunate there aren't any that I particularly disliked, except for a somewhat uninspired design pattern I noticed where it felt like almost half of the bosses were over-sized, beast-like, rampaging blobs of flesh. The prevalence of beast bosses makes sense considering the nature of the story, but it made a lot of them feel a little too similar to the point that I couldn't even identify which boss was which when going down a list of names in a wiki article. Many of these bosses seem to have pretty similar movesets (stomping at the ground underneath them, charging straight forward, doing wide arm swipes in front of them, or otherwise just flailing and thrashing and smashing about wildly), and fall victim to similar strategies where it felt like I was always just getting up underneath them, attacking two or three times, and dodging away to avoid a predictable counter-spam maneuver, and then going back in to repeat the process. For some, like The One Reborn, Ebrietas, and the Amygdala, I was able to basically just stand behind or underneath them the whole time spamming attacks. These similar appearances, similar movesets, and similar overall combat techniques made many of them blur together in my mind.</div>
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The more enjoyable bosses, to me, were the ones that would probably be considered the gimmick bosses, like the Witch of Hemwick, who turns invisible and so you have to listen and watch out for subtle signs of her whereabouts, or Micolash whom you have to chase through a bunch of labyrinthine corridors, or the Shadow of Yharnam which has three mages shooting fireballs and summoning giant snakes, or the Living Failures which is a type of mob boss that occasionally drops blue meteors from the sky, or Rom the Vacuous Spider which summons hordes of spiders. While these bosses aren't particularly challenging, they're at least memorable and interesting to me, as opposed to a lot of the others that end up looking and feeling pretty similar. Some of the more satisfying bosses like Father Gascoigne, Martyr Logarius, Gehrman, Lady Maria, and Orphan Kos (all of which seem to be <a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/all-bloodborne-bosses-ranked-best-to-worst/reference">some of the more popular ones</a>), are all fairly standard humanoid enemies with more player-like movesets, which is what the <i>Soulsborne</i> combat system is designed best for, mainly because the camera actually cooperates with you and lets you see what's actually happening in these fights. The main challenge with the larger beast bosses is that they take up so much screen space that, once you get in close enough to attack, they end up going almost completely off-screen so you can't see what they're doing. If you use the lock-on system then the camera tends to pan up towards its center of mass, which then makes it so you can't see yourself or your environment, so you're just kind of screwed either way.</div>
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The game's overall visual design follows a more consistent style and tone than other <i>Souls</i> games, meaning that the levels adhere to the game's setting more closely and thus give the world a more coherent look. That makes sense, seeing as the game is mostly set in one city -- Yharnam -- and its surrounding areas, all of which took direct inspiration from the city itself, but that does have the consequence of making a lot of areas look and feel somewhat similar to other areas because you spend so much of the game exploring Victorian Gothic architecture with the same cold, de-saturated blue color temperature and a bunch of repeated graphical assets. After a while, it didn't really matter to me if I was in a city, or a mansion, or a church, or a college, or a castle, or a clinic -- it all started to blur together and made it difficult to feel like I was in those specific locations because the interior of the college looked and felt a lot like the interior of the castle, which felt a lot like the interior of the upper cathedral ward, and so on. I'm sure for some people "sticking to the theme" would be considered a positive aspect in <i>Bloodborne's</i> favor, but one of the things I appreciated most about the first <i>Dark Souls</i> was how much thematic and aesthetic variety it had between its levels, with the scenery changing dramatically as you went from Anor Londo to the Duke's Archives to the Crystal Caves to the Darkroot Basin to the Demon Ruins, and so on. These changes helped to keep the game feeling fresh and interesting to me, whereas <i>Bloodborne</i> gets to feel a little stale and monotonous over time.</div>
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The monotonous visual design can make even navigating the levels themselves a bit of a chore, since even places within levels can start to look pretty samey. Central Yharnam is probably the worst offender since a lot of it takes place in cramped city streets and back alleys, all of which recycle the same assets and have the same general look. If you're trying to get back to a specific area, either for the sake of a quest or just to explore another path you had to save for later, it's even more difficult because many of the back alleys and side paths are hidden around sharp corners, with tall buildings everywhere literally hiding places from view so that you can't actually see places or how they connect until you're already at your destination. Mind you, this is the area of the game with about a half-dozen or more NPC's who're all hiding in their homes as disembodied voices whom you don't actually see, and whose presence as an interactive NPC is only denoted by a red lantern outside their building. So when you get a quest from someone asking for you to find them a "safe place" and you later have to return to that NPC once you've actually found one, good luck remembering which red lantern it was, since all the lanterns and all the buildings look virtually identical. Even if you remember which specific building it was, and what the streetview around it looked like, it can still be a challenge to remember how to get back to that specific one since these interactive buildings are all tucked away in all different spots of the level. Maybe it's just a personal issue I had with having to take sporadic breaks, but it felt like a perfect storm of confusing level design, homogeneous visual design, and non-existent character design leading to a whole bunch of near unmemorable blurs.</div>
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The combat system plays almost identically to <i>Dark Souls</i>, except with a few key twists. For starters, everything feels a little faster; attack animations start and play out more quickly, and roll-dodging (or quick-step dodging, as it functions when you're locked-on to an enemy) moves you a greater distance at a faster rate, increasing the general pace of combat by giving you shorter windows of reaction time in which to avoid an attack or to execute an attack of your own. The other major change is the almost complete removal of shields, which have now been replaced with guns in the left-hand equipment slot, effectively removing highly defensive combat tactics like shield turtling and promoting a stronger degree of offensive gameplay, with the left-hand gun being able to perform ranged attacks that damage and stagger your opponent and, if timed correctly to interrupt an enemy attack, can function exactly a shield parry leaving your enemy vulnerable to a high-damage counter-attack riposte. Critical backstabs, likewise, take more deliberate effort to pull off since they only trigger by staggering an enemy by hitting them in a weak point with a fully-charged R2 attack. Other tweaks include a quasi-return of the magic meter in the form of silver bullets, which fuel guns and other arcane attacks, a "rally" system that allows you to recover lost health after being hit by an enemy if you successfully hit them back within a limited time window, and a move away from the old Estus-based healing system to something closer in style to the farm-able Moon Grass healing system of <i>Demon's Souls</i>. Right-hand weapons also have more dynamic stances, similar to how you could one-hand or two-hand a weapon in <i>Dark Souls</i>, except now the weapon "transforms" into a completely different weapon with a radically different moveset.</div>
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Generally speaking, these are all excellent changes that I enjoy. Ever since the original <i>Dark Souls</i> first came out, its combat felt much slower and more sluggish to me, compared to <i>Demon's Souls</i>, and <i>Dark Souls 2</i> kind of continued that trend, and so I find it extremely refreshing for <i>Bloodborne</i> to go back to the faster speed and more aggressive style of <i>Demon's Souls</i>. It even seems to one-up <i>Demon's Souls</i> in this department, considering the overall increase in speed and the complete absence of shields. Some people may consider the lack of shields to be a knock against <i>Bloodborne</i>, but I personally never used shields in any previous <i>Souls </i>games because I always found timing dodges to be more satisfying and rewarding, as opposed to just standing there with a raised shield. Backstabs were always ridiculously broken in the previous <i>Souls </i>games (<i>Dark Souls 1</i> PVP was basically a cesspool of backstab fishing), and so it's nice that it takes more time and careful positioning to set up a backstab. The rally system, in particular, creates a really engaging element of "risk versus reward" where it encourages you to jump right back into a fight and keep attacking after you get hit so that you can get some free health recovery, but that also puts you at greater risk to take more damage in the process. You can play it safe by backing away and using a blood vial to heal, but those are limited and so there's a possibility you might eventually run out. It's therefore always tempting to try to get as much free healing as possible, but if you're too reckless it could backfire and get you killed.</div>
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While I like the rally system, I don't care much for the blood vial system. The Estus system introduced in the first <i>Dark Souls</i> was one of the single best improvements <i>Dark Souls</i> made over <i>Demon's Souls</i>, with the new limitations on healing adding a stronger element of survival to the core gameplay and forcing you to "git gud" enough to be able to make it through a particular level with only a certain amount of heals because you couldn't just farm Moon Grass and have a near infinite supply to help you get through a tough level or encounter. In addition, the Estus system also completely removed grass farming from the game because your Estus flasks always replenished back to maximum capacity any time you rested at a bonfire, so that you always had the minimum number of healing items From Soft intended for you to be able to have any time you attempted a particular boss or level. It was pretty rewarding, therefore, to find an upgrade that would let you carry more Estus flasks, or that would make them more effective. <i>Bloodborne </i>instead opts to give you a maximum allotment of 20 blood vials that can be carried with you into a level, right from the start of the game, with basically no way to improve them, but doesn't give you free refills when you rest at lantern. Rather, you have to farm more blood vials by defeating enemies, or by purchasing them from a store with blood echoes -- the game's currency analogous to souls from the <i>Souls </i>games. While you can only carry 20 at a time, your excess will be put in storage and automatically withdrawn when you return to the Hunter's Dream, the game's hub.</div>
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The problem with this system is two-fold. The first is that it removes a lot of tension from trying to make it through a level with only a limited number of healing items when enemies frequently replenish your supply -- they're no longer a limited supply and so you can easily find yourself at or near your maximum allotment while exploring a level because you just keep picking up more vials as you use them. The second problem is that you can easily run out if you find yourself up against a challenging boss that keeps killing you, because at that point you're only <i><u>spending</u></i> blood vials and never actually accruing more -- your supply just steadily dwindles until you have none left and are then forced to stop what you're doing to go farm more. I suppose this could be viewed as a fair consequence for repeated failure, but in practice all it does is force you to stop attempting to "git gud" at the boss and waste your time with tedious, mindless repetition, which is really just adding salt to the wound, kicking you while you're down. In practice, the blood vial system feels like it's on an inverted bell curve where you're always either at full supply or completely out, with very little in-between. I, for one, usually always had more than enough to get through any given level until I suddenly found myself completely out when butting my head repeatedly against a challenging boss. Throughout the whole game I only ran into a handful of occasions when I felt any sort of tension where I was running low on blood vials while exploring an unfamiliar area, anxiously hoping to unlock the next shortcut or reach the next lamp before I ran out, which was a much more prevalent feeling in the first <i>Dark Souls</i> and one of its better qualities.</div>
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Guns, likewise, are tied to a limited ammunition system where you can only carry 20 silver bullets at a time, with excess being placed in storage until you return to the Hunter's Dream. As with blood vials, enemies drop silver bullets and you can also buy more, but you can also forcibly replenish five extra bullets by sacrificing a portion of your health. Guns are another thing I enjoy in <i>Bloodborne</i>, since they add a ranged element to the combat system that synergizes well with melee combat by slotting into the left hand and being able to fire quickly and easily, even in the middle of a melee combo. Bows and crossbows always felt clunky and awkward in the <i>Souls </i>games, but I found myself actually desiring to use guns from time to time in <i>Bloodborne</i>, even though I was completely ignoring the Bloodtinge stat which governs their efficacy. I particularly enjoy how parrying is now tied to guns, which have an ammo limit, since it prevents players from endlessly parry-spamming in PVP, while also making the parry action a little less punishing if you get the timing wrong because you'll at least do some damage and might still get the chance to stagger your opponent and interrupt their attack, as opposed to simply whiffing with your shield and getting walloped for full damage. The bullets are also multi-functional and act as ammunition for arcane abilities, basically like magic spells in <i>Dark Souls</i>. This is a welcome change since it gives you a generic pool of "mana" to use however you wish, whether that be using a few powerful abilities a few times or using weaker abilities more often, like the old mana meter in <i>Demon's Souls,</i> as opposed to having arbitrary restrictions on each individual spell like in <i>Dark Souls</i>.</div>
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Unfortunately, there don't seem to be very many arcane abilities in the game. I've never been a huge fan of spellcasting in the <i>Souls </i>games, but I thought I might give it a try in <i>Bloodborne</i>, since it was a new IP and might handle things a little differently, but it was pretty disappointing to realize that I had literally zero chance to even try out arcane abilities before feeling like I had to start committing to a particular build, because arcane abilities don't even start showing up until almost halfway through the game. By that point I'd already invested so heavily into strength and dexterity that I couldn't justify branching out to the arcane stat just to experiment with a couple of highly situational-looking spells like AOE knockback, or a weapon buff that just added extra damage like any ordinary item. Likewise, I wanted to keep the possibility open that maybe I would try out Skill weapons -- although I normally like to play these games with ultra greatswords and giant hammers, I figured maybe the faster pace of combat would make Dexterity-esque weapons more satisfying -- but after several hours spread across multiple play sessions I simply wasn't finding any Skill weapons other than the Threaded Cane, which was one of the three starter weapons, and which I didn't like that much. But because I wasn't finding other Skill weapons I had no way of knowing whether I just didn't like that particular weapon, or if I didn't like Skill weapons in general.</div>
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It turns out there aren't a whole lot of weapons in <i>Bloodborne</i>, with only 15 melee weapons and six guns in the base game. To be fair, those 15 weapons effectively double to 30 since every melee weapon has two radically different forms; a single weapon equipped to the right hand can transform from a one-handed axe into a halberd, or from a blunt walking cane into a serrated whip. This is a cool feature, since it gives a single weapon slot much greater versatility -- instead of having to swap your stance between one-handed and two-handed to unlock alternate movesets, or completely switch equipped weapons, both of which interrupt the flow of combat, <i>Bloodborne's </i>trick weapons allow you to switch forms right in the middle of a fight, and even right in the middle of a combo with complete fluidity. This is an evolution that I wholeheartedly enjoy, especially since it allows certain builds to use weapon types that wouldn't typically be part of those playstyles in the <i>Souls </i>games (like a Strength character being able to make good use of a one-handed straight sword to back up his giant hammer against quicker foes), but I do wish there were a few more total melee weapons than just 15.</div>
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In comparison, <i>Dark Souls</i> had over 100 melee weapons; <i>Dark Souls 2</i> had almost twice that many. To be fair, a lot of the weapons in those games were essentially clones of other, similar weapons with only minor variations in stats, which rendered many of them objectively obsolete or inferior to other weapons that were the exact same but better, and only a few weapons within a particular subcategory had unique or slightly different movesets. So the total number in <i>Dark Souls</i> is a little inflated, but at least that gave you a sense of anticipation as you explored and progressed through the game, because you knew there would be more weapons to acquire down the road, but not exactly what, where, or when. It also meant there was actual variety and choices to make when it came to build diversity. If I wanted to use a Great Hammer in <i>Dark Souls 2</i>, I had a choice between 12 different options, as opposed to exactly one in <i>Bloodborne</i>, and that choice could be based on any number of factors from stat scaling, damage values, weight values, movesets, upgrade paths, reach, or even just how it looked. That choice added an extra strategic element to the gameplay, especially in terms of equipment load, because you had to weigh the pros and cons of each weapon -- a strong weapon might deal a ton of damage but weigh so much that you'd lose mobility, or have better range but weaker stagger ability. With <i>Bloodborne</i>, those types of decisions are streamlined to such a degree that there's barely any choice.</div>
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It follows logically that, the fewer total weapons exist in a game, the fewer choices you have, but the choice gets even narrower when you consider that the selection of weapons is further narrowed by their stat-scaling, meaning that about half of the weapons available will likely not scale well with whatever type of build you're specializing in. I chose to focus on Strength, for instance, meaning that only five of the 15 weapons had B-scaling or higher with Strength. Of those five, I never found one of them because it was a reward for an NPC questline that I never followed up on because I forgot all about him, and I absolutely didn't like another one, so in practice I only ever had a real choice of three weapons, one of which was a starter weapon that I got near the very beginning of the game, meaning I really only got to discover two new fun, interesting weapons that I enjoyed and that actually worked well with my stats. Eventually I started putting points into Skill because I was getting diminishing returns on Strength, but by that point I was near the end of the game, and too locked in with my choice of weapons and didn't have enough materials to upgrade any Skill weapons to the point that they'd become as viable as my primary weapons. At least, not without a bunch of tedious, repetitive farming.</div>
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Which brings up another minor complaint: the relative lack of upper-tier upgrade materials further narrows your decision space of what weapons to use because there just aren't enough Blood Stone Chunks to experiment with weapons willy-nilly. And since they're restricted towards the later stages of the game, it's possible that you may find new interesting weapons that just aren't viable because you've already upgraded other weapons and aren't able to upgrade any more new ones. Some of the <i>Old Hunters</i> DLC weapons are pretty cool and exciting, for instance, but since the DLC is considered to be more of a late-game area you don't get any of them until near the end of your playthrough, which by that point meant I only had enough Chunks to upgrade a single DLC weapon and not much time to actually enjoy it. The <i>Old Hunters</i> helps to rectify some of the game's equipment issues, however, since it nearly doubles the total melee weapon count from 15 to 26, and unlike the base game you acquire them as actual rewards for defeating bosses or thoroughly exploring levels -- you don't just buy them in a store at a later time. It feels more like <i>Dark Souls</i> in that regard, and that makes exploring the DLC areas a lot more rewarding because there are actual things to discover.</div>
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Armor sets, likewise, are equally limited, which puts a serious damper on the game's <i>Fashion Souls</i> potential, especially considering many of them seem to implement similar styles with long-flowing overcoats. In other words, there's basically only one style of armor in the game, two if you count the fact that some of them look more like robes; as with the rest of the game's visual design it feels like a bunch of different flavors of the same thing. They all have pretty similar stats, too, so most of the time it feels like your decision of what to wear doesn't really matter unless you're trying to stack a specific resistance like frenzy, poison, or fire, or something. Consequently, every time I discovered a new armor set I was a little underwhelmed realizing "Oh, it's a little better in some ways, and a little worse in others." Which I guess is actually to the benefit of <i>Fashion Souls</i> when the stats have so little variation that you generally wear whatever looks coolest, and you don't even have to worry about equipment load anymore, either. But just like the weapons, it took away from the feeling of progression because it rarely felt like I was discovering better armor sets; I played a lot of the game wearing the basic starter equipment because it seemed reasonably well-rounded, and found it hard to justify spending tens of thousands of blood echoes buying new armor just for the looks, since the stats on them never seemed that enticing either.</div>
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Another good change from <i>Dark Souls</i> is the rune and gem system, which sort of replace weapon infusions, ring slots, and covenant items. Rune slots function similar to rings, with you being able to equip up to three, which typically serve as passive modifiers to stats like increasing your health or stamina, letting you recover more health during rally attacks, letting you carry more blood vials, increasing certain types of resistances, and so on. A fourth slot is reserved for covenant runes, which signifies you as being bound to a particular covenant for online multiplayer purposes while also granting a particular bonus associated with that covenant, like how the Executioners get more powerful blood vials, or the Hunter of Hunters get increased stamina recovery, or the Lumenwood Kin get to transform into an eldritch monster, among others. Gems are used to upgrade weapons -- each weapon progressively unlocks three gem slots, which you can freely swap gems in and out of by using a workstation in the Hunter's Dream. These function similarly to infusions from <i>Dark Souls</i>, since you can use the gems to convert damage to different types of elements, or to add extra stat scaling, or to simply increase the damage, among other possibilities. This is a fun system because it offers a lot more freedom and flexibility in terms of weapon modifications, since you aren't permanently locked in with one specific choice of infusion, and you can even combine different types of gems for a variety of simultaneous effects. Finding new gems is therefore probably the most rewarding aspect of exploration, but it's unfortunate that many of the better, more powerful ones are tucked away in the Chalice Dungeons, which are some of the least interesting content that From Software has ever put into a <i>Soulsborne </i>game.</div>
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Chalice Dungeons are basically randomly-generated dungeons where you have to descend through a series of floors with sprawling layouts of rooms, trying to find a special lever somewhere on each floor to unlock the way down to the next floor, with a boss waiting at the end of each floor. The actual layouts and contents of all these rooms can be somewhat randomized, with different combinations of rooms and enemies in each dungeon. I like this concept in theory, since it gives you a bunch of extra side content with enough randomization that you can't rely on meta-gaming foresight to know what to expect up ahead, and best of all it has several unique bosses that aren't found anywhere in the rest of the game. Plus, I have been known to enjoy more straightforward, sort of old-school style dungeon crawlers, so that concept crossed with <i>Dark Souls</i> combat seemed like a cool idea. Unfortunately, the dungeons just feel so stale, bland, artificial, and repetitive that I got bored and lost all interest after only my second one, though I did a third one just as an obligation, and then went back to do two more after finishing the game, just for the sake of this review. To put it simply, the Chalice Dungeons feel like some other developer had access to the <i>Dark Souls</i> combat system, but otherwise had no idea how to actually make a <i>Souls </i>game. They have the function of a <i>Souls </i>game, but without the actual soul of a <i>Souls </i>game.</div>
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The main issue is that they're just, so, damn, repetitive. Every dungeon has similar combinations of the exact same rooms and the exact same enemies, just pieced together in different orders and combinations, and so it always feels like you're just doing the same thing over and over again. Later dungeons seem to at least mix up the visual style, but it's basically just by re-texturing the existing rooms and layouts, which just feels like the cheapest, laziest way to mix up the dungeons. Making matters even worse is that rooms aren't just repeated between dungeons, but also between floors of the same dungeon, and even many of the bosses are just stronger versions of basic enemies or straight-up rehashes of other bosses you've already fought. And generally speaking, there aren't any satisfying rewards to find within these dungeons until you start getting into the later and deeper dungeons; until then, you're mainly rewarded with more ritual materials to create more dungeons, which you have to slog your way through in order to get to the later, deeper dungeons that actually introduce new equipment, interesting bosses, and more powerful gems. Unfortunately, the earlier dungeons are just so lame that I had zero patience to grind my way through dungeons just to get to the good part of it all. It's hard to complain about optional side content, but I really feel like they should have cut out all the BS earlier dungeons, or at least put more interesting bosses and rewards in the earlier ones so that there's some kind of actual incentive to do them, and some early indication of why you should consider sticking with them.</div>
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The gems that you get from these dungeons, meanwhile, are somewhat game-breaking in terms of their effect on PVP. Gems farmed from the deepest dungeons can increase your total damage output by 25% or more, and you can stack multiples of these gems for an insane boost in damage. That's all fine and good when it comes to solo gameplay, but creates a horribly imbalanced playing field when it comes to online PVP, since a player who has grinded through dungeons and farmed all of the best gems and gotten the luckiest drops through RNG will have a huge advantage over someone who hasn't put in that time and effort. Hardcore PVP'ers will go through that effort to get the best rewards, which means that if you want to be competitive in online PVP, and not get brutally destroyed, then you basically have to do so as well. The <i>Souls </i>games always had a "meta" element where players could do all the right things to give themselves a competitive advantage, but if you were good enough at the game then you could still get by and hang with the hardcore meta-PVP'ers with just the basic stuff you acquire through the main game, through skill alone, whereas <i>Bloodborne </i>adds an almost MMORPG-style grind element where, given two players with similar skillsets, the one who's effectively "higher level" by virtue of having higher-level gear will be able to beat the other through sheer stats alone.</div>
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Ignoring these potential statistical imbalances, the actual PVP systems in <i>Bloodborne </i>leave a lot to be desired. I've always been a big fan of the invasion system that <i>Demon's Souls</i> invented, where you can be playing the game by yourself and be invaded by another player trying to kill you, since other players can be more challenging than NPC's, and it can also lead to a lot of unique and memorable, unscripted experiences. Whereas you could be invaded practically anywhere in the other games, <i>Bloodborne </i>only allows invasions in a handful of areas with Bell Maiden enemies, whose bell-ringing calls to other players to invade, and only as long as those Bell Maidens are still alive -- once you kill the Bell Maiden, all invasions are off in that area -- which significantly reduces the potential number of invasions you might experience in a normal playthrough. Invaders also seem to be prioritized to match with hosts who've summoned co-op allies, reducing the frequency with which solo hosts get invaded. I played my entire game in Online Mode, never engaging in any co-op, and only got invaded four times, by only two different players (technically I got invaded at least five times, by a third player, but I fell of a cliff before he actually spawned into the world). Meanwhile, I experienced really bad latency issues in those fights, with obvious hits that I landed either not hitting at all, or not registering the damage until several seconds later, while I seemed to get hit by phantom attacks or not get damaged by attacks that looked like they should have hit me, making it basically impossible to fight with any kind of control because I may as well have been pressing buttons randomly.</div>
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I'm also not sure how I feel about guns in PVP. Earlier in this review I mentioned that I liked having an ammo limit tied to the parry ability, since <i>Dark Souls</i> PVP was often ruined by passive, reactionary parry-spammers, but with <i>Bloodborne </i>adding ranged damage to the parry skill, it seems like a would be even easier to punish reckless offense by just keeping your distance and only attacking after the opponent attacks. If you do it right, you'll either be out of range of the attack, or can sneak an attack in during or after their attack, and if you're lucky you'll even get a parry off and can then run in for a critical riposte. One thing that I've absolutely detested about Souls PVP is how much it rewards passive, reactive play styles while punishing aggressive offense, because then you get into fights where both of you just awkwardly dance around never actually attacking or doing anything risky. That seems to still be the case with <i>Bloodborne</i>, which is a real shame considering it was supposed to be all about promoting faster action and more aggressive playstyles. One of my two invaders, for instance, was using Simon's Bowblade to spam arrows at me, and I felt like I had no real chance to land any attacks because they were playing that passive, reactionary game and shooting me with arrows the whole time. Granted, I was years removed from <i>Souls </i>PVP at that point and had practically zero experience PVP'ing in <i>Bloodborne </i>so of course I was doing terribly, but it seems like you could just spam the gun with near impunity; even if you don't time the parry right, you'll still deal damage and stagger the opponent. At the very least, R1-spamming a gun seems a lot more feasible than R1-spamming a melee weapon.</div>
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This is all theoretical, of course, and I could be completely wrong about this, but I have very little desire to experiment with or "git gud" at PVP in <i>Bloodborne </i>because I just don't find it very appealing, whereas the other <i>Souls </i>games usually had me interested in trying out different PVP builds and doing end-game duels and setting up characters to invade specific areas. Maybe it's because the covenants seemed so obtuse and I had so little exposure to PVP in my first playthrough, but it kind of feels like PVP in <i>Bloodborne </i>was a bit of an afterthought. There's no PVP arena, no PVP-related boss (like the Old Monk from <i>Demon's Souls</i>, or the Looking Glass Knight in <i>Dark Souls 2</i>), only three areas with Bell Maidens, no way to re-spec your character for different builds, and seemingly no leveling up covenants. I can't even begin to describe covenants properly because they made no intuitive sense to me, based on the in-game item descriptions, and I never really understood what purpose they even served in the game. </div>
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Other technical things bother me, too, like the fact that <i>Bloodborne </i>felt the need to implement a bunch of redundant loading screens that weren't previously in any <i>Souls </i>game. The lamps act like bonfires from <i>Dark Souls</i>, allowing you to warp to and from them while also serving as check points, but you can't "rest" at the lamps to restock your supplies or to reset the level, so any time you want to do either of those things you have to warp back to the Hunter's Dream, sit through a loading screen, then walk over to a tomb stone and cycle through a list, warp back to the previous area, and sit through another loading screen. When, previously, restocking supplies and repopulating the level happen instantly when you sat down at a bonfire, so I'm not sure why they needed to change things in <i>Bloodborne</i>. Next up are issues with the controls. The primary issue is that the jump function is forcibly mapped to the circle button -- the same as the sprint button -- meaning it's really easy to find yourself in situations where you're sprinting and suddenly have to dodge an attack, only to find yourself doing a silly jump which not only makes you more vulnerable to attack because of its lower (or non-existent) invincibility frames but also moves you much further out of the way and locks you into a much longer animation. This is another area where From Soft took a step backward, since they'd already "fixed" this issue in <i>Dark Souls 2</i> by letting you jump by clicking the left stick, instead of the sprint button.</div>
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Meanwhile, I find the game's input queueing system a little frustrating sometimes, since it can often lead to a lot of unintended, extra actions happening after the situation has changed. For instance, I might dodge a boss's attack and press the attack button twice, planning to perform two attacks, but the boss recovers faster than I expected and suddenly I need to dodge an attack, and even though I've pressed the circle button the game still thinks I want to attack again and so I get stuck attacking, which leads me to pressing the circle button again to try to dodge, which just queues up a second dodge that I didn't want to perform and puts me too far out of position to attack. This has been the case with every <i>Souls </i>game, so maybe it's more of a "feature" than an issue, but it's annoyed me in every other game and it annoys me here, too. Then there are random issues where the controls either don't queue at all, or simply don't register, like when I'm dodging out of an enemy's attack and press the triangle button so I can heal, only to find my character calmly walking around and not healing, or I'll queue up an attack with plenty of stamina and watch as my character stands perfectly still while getting a sword in the face. Often times while trying to dodge, I'll indicate a particular direction like "diagonally left" or "to the right" only to find my character doing something different like "straight forward" or "straight back." This one could conceivably be my fault, if my angle on the joystick was a little bit off and the game registered it differently, but it felt a little too prevalent to just be occasional user error, like the trigger zones on the joystick are a little too narrow or unforgiving, or lock you into only eight directions on the cardinal axes and their diagonals, as opposed to having full reign of the 360-degree radius. I don't know, it just frequently felt off to me.</div>
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My overall feeling on <i>Bloodborne </i>is that it's a game I want to like since it has some good ideas and improves on the <i>Dark Souls</i> formula in some key ways, like with the rally system and the cool functionality of trick weapons, but at the same it also changes some things for the worse, which had been perfect (or at least decent) as they were in the previous games, like the new blood vial healing system and the way online PVP works. Other things, like the lack of equipment variety and the fact that there isn't much in the way of rewarding discovery when it comes to exploration, feel pretty underwhelming, while new features like the Chalice Dungeons feel like wasted potential. While I absolutely love the theme and setting, it all started to blur together as the game went on, and the lore and backstory, while vastly more interesting to me than that of the <i>Souls </i>games, lacks any sort of focus or direction, which is made worse by the complete lack of any sort of expositional grounding in the intro cinematic or early stages of the game. I'm maybe also starting to grow a little weary of these games, having already played all four of the <i>Souls</i> games and even <i>The Surge</i> (a surprisingly good <i>Dark Souls</i> clone by Deck 13) before playing <i>Bloodborne</i>, and so the experience is no longer the unique, refreshing, eye-opening experience it once was, and the whole thing is maybe starting to become a little stale to me. With <i>Bloodborne </i>being a brand new IP I guess I was hoping it could change things up more substantially, instead of just being "more of the same" with a new coat of paint on it. Maybe <i>Sekiro </i>will satisfy that craving, but the end result of <i>Bloodborne </i>is somewhat disappointing and underwhelming to me despite (or perhaps because of) its great potential.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-38111330536670014872019-05-27T17:50:00.000-04:002020-04-11T14:41:35.081-04:00Gothic 1+2: Masterpieces in Immersive Design<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RDNf1OlM7Fs/XOxXjN9AcmI/AAAAAAAARpU/giJtnxevLgE4QatLaNr1BN5uPNvwz6TvACLcBGAs/s1600/GothicImmersionBanner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="246" data-original-width="490" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RDNf1OlM7Fs/XOxXjN9AcmI/AAAAAAAARpU/giJtnxevLgE4QatLaNr1BN5uPNvwz6TvACLcBGAs/s1600/GothicImmersionBanner.jpg" /></a><br />
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<i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> are some of the best open-world action-adventure-RPGs of all time, and part of the reason why is their uniquely immersive gameplay designs. Developed by the small German studio Piranha Bytes and released in 2000 and 2002 in their native Germany, <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> were truly ahead of their time; while not the first to implement scripted NPC scheduling and reactions, they were already doing so years before Bethesda supposedly pioneered that concept with <i>Oblivion</i>, while some of their other design elements like in-world skill trainers and the process of forging weapons aren't really seen in other games, even to this day with almost two decades of industry advancements since the original <i>Gothic</i>. Some of their design elements may be a little quaint or antiquated at this point, but for the most part the immersive design of <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> is timelessly brilliant and contributes to a feeling of atmospheric immersion that often isn't found in other games.</div>
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It begins with the lore and backstory. The early <i>Gothic</i> games create fleshed-out, believable worlds that feel like they could be real places and not just staging for video game action. <i>Gothic 1</i> is set inside a magically encapsulated prison colony run in total anarchy by the convicts -- a bit similar in concept to John Carpenter's <i>Escape From New York</i> -- originally set up by the king as a place to send criminals to mine magic ore used to forge weapons to fuel the war against the orcs. After a successful revolt, the prisoners killed the king's guards and took control of the colony, eventually splitting into three different faction, each governed by their own ideologies and sustaining themselves through their own practical means.</div>
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In the Old Camp, where the king's mining operation was originally set up, the new ore barons are content to live as kings inside the barrier by continuing the ore mining and bartering the ore for outside goods. We see the exchange in the intro cinematics, and we as players get to experience the ore mining by visiting the Old Mine. There's a clear hierarchy within the actual camp, with the ore barons on top and living the high life in the castle, while the ore miners live in the slums of the outer ring -- it's an authoritarian system where the miners are content to be exploited by the ore barons because living in the safety of a controlled camp and getting to partake in outside goods is a better alternative to surviving on one's own in the wild where you could become the meal for any number of dangerous beasts. With the wilds being as genuinely dangerous as they are -- you get absolutely destroyed by even basic creatures in the early stages of the game -- you can understand the motivations people would have to band together in the Old Camp, and its infrastructure operates in a way that makes logistical sense.</div>
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In the New Camp, the water mages -- who helped erect the magic barrier, along with the fire mages who've remained in the Old Camp as the ore barons' counselors -- are less content with being trapped inside the barrier, and are working to find a way to free themselves, and everyone else, by blowing up the barrier with what would be essentially a giant ore bomb. To that end, the New Camp runs its own mining operation, but since they don't trade the ore with the outside world, they have to sustain themselves through agriculture. We see them farming rice, and even help distribute water to keep the farmers hydrated. Besides eating the rice, they also use it to brew schnapps which they trade with other camps, and occasionally raid supply lines from the Old Camp. It's supposed to be a more free-form society with no strict rulers -- while the amenities and living conditions may not be as cushy as the Old Camp (as long as you're not a digger), you don't have to be bossed around by the ore barons and their guards. As long as you contribute and don't cause problems, anyone is welcome. And if the idea of freedom from the barrier appeals to you, the New Camp and its plan to blow up the barrier is probably your best option.</div>
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Meanwhile, those who were dissatisfied with both camps chose to break off and form their own Sect Camp in the swamp, where its members are able to forage for food with the swamp's natural vegetation. They also harvest and produce swampweed reefers, which they smoke to induce a high much like marijuana, and use it to trade goods with the other camps. Their heavy use of swampweed lends some of its users an enlightened state, granting them limited control over the magical realm, almost like the fire mages and water mages. Through meditation, their gurus began to see visions of a god known as the Sleeper, who promised to set them free, and so the camp grew into a cult-like worship of the Sleeper. Life in the Swamp Camp is ultimately easier than the others, as long as you're willing to buy-in on or at least play along with the concept of worshiping a strange god -- many of its members join up just to laze around smoking swamp weed all day.</div>
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<i>Gothic 2</i> features a harbor town in Khorinis, known for its shipping trade with the main land. The city is run by a governor, but because of the orc war and the king's need for ore, the city has been placed under martial law, now run by the leader of the paladins and the town's militia. The city itself operates on various trades, with master craftsmen like Harad the blacksmith, Constantino the alchemist, Bosper the bowyer, Thorben the carpenter, and Matteo the merchant and leatherworker. Some common folk work as apprentices for these masters, while most other citizens work at the docks, although the war has led to fewer and fewer ships coming into the harbor and leaving most people out of work and struggling to make ends meet. The majority of land outside of town is occupied by farmers, who supply most of the food for the island, but with the influx of the king's paladins demanding more food from the farmers (and not paying for it), the largest landowner, Onar, has formed a rebellion against the paladins and hired mercenaries to defend his land. The smaller farmers in closer proximity to the city have torn allegiances but have little choice but to work with the paladins.</div>
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The sum effect is that these worlds make logical sense; they have a clear structure and societal organization, guided by realistic and understandable motives, where people do actual work in the world to produce the goods and resources necessary to survive. The games don't just tell us these critical world-building details, they show us. Harad, for instance, doesn't just stand behind a store counter all day telling us how he's the best blacksmith in town -- we actually see him working throughout the day, and he can actually show us his expertise by teaching us how to become a blacksmith ourselves. It's not just a piece of abstract narrative, it's backed up through actual gameplay mechanics. Likewise, we don't just hear about the farmers outside of town working to supply the city with food -- we get to go to the actual farms and do quests for the farmers, even helping one of them harvest his field of turnips. Virtually every NPC has some kind of job or occupation within these worlds, and in most cases we see them actually doing their jobs -- Thorben sawing wood, Ratford and Drax hunting scavengers, diggers mining ore, farmers tending their fields, and so on.</div>
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It helps the atmosphere and immersion immensely when you see even generic, ordinary NPCs participating in mundane, ambient activities because it makes them feel more like real people. Ambient characters will have idle conversations with each other, allowing you to catch random snippets and watch as they gesture towards each other; they'll sit at campfires at night, cook meat at frying pans, or stir cauldrons; some can be seen fixing up their huts, or manning a forge; they eat, drink, smoke, and even go to the bathroom; they scrub the floors, and play musical instruments; they practice their swordsmanship and study literature; the list goes on. They also follow a realistic schedule, with NPCs going to sleep or congregating in taverns or around campfires at night. They even react to your presence and actions in a fairly realistic way: draw your weapon around them and they'll become defensive, drawing their weapons and telling you to lower yours; step in their huts and they come running to defend their property, weapons drawn, telling you to leave or they'll call the guards; stand in their way while they're walking and they'll tell you to move aside.</div>
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Even wild animals behave in a realistic way, with a lot of creatures visibly foraging or hunting for food -- scavengers peck at the dirt for bugs or whatever, and wolves hunt scavengers, showing that there's even an actual food chain within this world. Most wild beasts aren't hard-coded to aggro you on sight; if you get close, most of them will adopt a defensive state, growling and gesturing at you to try to scare you into leaving them alone, and will only attack if you don't back away. Many creatures will also go to sleep at night, allowing you to sneak up on them and get them jump on them. Furthermore, it makes sense why different creatures would be of different relative strength values, in part because of their physical designs and also because of that established food-chain -- you can tell just by looking at a lurker that it's going to tougher than a molerat, and likewise you can tell a snapper is going to be tougher than a wolf, or a shadowbeast tougher than a bloodhound. Meanwhile, enemies don't scale to your level; every enemy type has a fixed level and fixed stats, which really accentuates that feeling of climbing up the food chain, so to speak, as you get stronger and find yourself now able to handle tougher enemies that you previously stood no chance against.</div>
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It's equally impressive that every single NPC, from important named characters to generic filler characters, is fully voice-acted, and that you can talk to every single character in the game. Fully voiced characters wasn't a new thing in 2000, but it was usually only being done in smaller games with only a handful of characters -- not large, open-world RPGs with a hundred or more NPCs. In truth, the English voice acting isn't very good; some NPCs are putting on horrible accents, and there's no consistency to what type of accents the actors are using -- one guy sounds like he's Texan, another Irish, another Cajun, and I don't even know what's going on with Bromor. Besides that, the actors also mispronounce words or don't say certain names or words consistently, and you hear some easily recognizable voices get repeated between characters, like with the voice actor for Xardas also playing Saturas, Jack, and later the dragons. It's not all bad -- some of it's actually pretty good -- but the problems can distract from the immersion for some people. It never really bothered me, however, and I for one appreciate the use of full voice acting, since it helps to bring the characters and the world itself to life more, rather than using text or only voicing important NPCs.</div>
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Quests, likewise, also have a lot of immersive elements to them. Quests in video games, particularly open-world RPGs, can often feel like tedious chores completely detached from the world you're in -- shallow busy work to give the player more Things To Do -- but Gothic's quests don't really fall into this category. Even the simplest, most banal fetch quests are given meaningful context that makes you care about doing them. At the start of <i>Gothic 2</i>, for instance, you're given a quest from Lobart to farm turnips, which is obviously just a dumb fetch quest and might not seem like fun or exciting gameplay, but the city is under lockdown and you need a way in, and Lobart is offering to let you pose as one of his farmers by buying some clothes from him. Since you're starting from scratch and have no money, you can work for him to help lower the price -- there's a clear motivation for why you would want to help him farm his fields, and for why he would have you doing this quest. Later in the game, Lobart's wife Hilda falls ill, and Lobart sends you into town to fetch a healing potion (again, another utterly basic fetch quest) but it's a quest given to you by established characters you know and like -- these are people who literally fed you, clothed you, and gave you a place to sleep when you just starting out in the game. It's not just a random NPC whom you've never met before asking you, a random stranger for a favor like so many quests in other RPGs are.</div>
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The world design and user interface also do a good job of immersing you in the gameplay. You've got no mini-map constantly guiding you and showing you everything before you actually see it in person, and you don't even have access to a world map until you buy or steal an actual, physical map in the game world which you access from your inventory. The world map doesn't even show you the full detail of the world; it's more of a hand-drawn approximation much like a cartographer of that era would actually produce. When you pick up a quest, you don't get a GPS waypoint marker telling you where to go and spoiling the solution for you. Rather, the quest-giver will give you an in-world description of where you have to go, like "leave town through the north gate, turn right at the fork and follow the road until you get to some steps on your left, then take them up and turn left to head into the forest." What's more impressive is that the world has enough design and structure to it that you can actually follow these types of directions, using in-world signage and landmarks to navigate. When Pedro steals the Eye of Innos and you're tasked with finding him, for instance, you're told that someone saw him jump off the bridge and swim up the river; from there, you use in-world clues to track him down, like following the trail of dead novices who were sent after him, and asking bystanders if they've seen him pass by.</div>
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The population and distribution of creatures within the world also feels pretty natural. With few exceptions, the world isn't divided into "zones" tailored for specific levels that you progress through in a relatively linear fashion as you get stronger and move across the map, as if the world is just an artifice built around you. The only place where this really feels like the case is the starting area for each game, where the path from your starting point to the first major location has nothing but "young" and otherwise weaker versions of basic enemies to sort of ease you into the game a little bit. Otherwise, enemies just sort of exist wherever happens to make sense for them. Roads between major locations are usually pretty safe and only have a handful of pesky varmints like bloodflies, molerates, or scavengers, who pose more of a nuisance than any real danger, which makes sense since the roads are traveled frequently and that would keep the wildlife population there to a minimum. Lurkers can generally be found near water; shadowbeasts usually live in caves or dense forestry, basically wherever there's not much natural light; snappers are often found near rocky cliffs; field raiders show up near farmlands; harpies in places of high altitudes; minecrawlers in mine shafts; swampsharks in swamps; zombies and skeletons around graveyards; and so on. Enemies aren't just pasted around the map to fill out space or to create artificial challenges; they feel like an integral part of the world design, and just live within this world.</div>
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Different areas of the game thus have varying degrees of difficulty to explore, not just because of the type of enemies you typically find within those locations, but because of the sensible logic behind the actual world design. And even within those specific biomes, there are varying degrees of difficult enemies. The swamps behind the Swamp Camp, for instance, have an assortment of bloodflies (which are pretty easy to kill even for low-level players) and swamp sharks (which are much tougher enemies better saved for later in the game); forests will often have basic wildlife like wolves near the outer edges, and shadowbeasts deeper inside. In the context of an open-world game, this creates a really organic difficulty curve where you're free to go wherever you want, and most areas in the game will have enemies of some sort that are appropriate for whatever level you happen to be, without the game scaling enemies to your level, and with always some tougher enemy just around the corner. It allows you to create your own difficulty based on how you choose to explore the world and how far you push yourself to get past or around tough obstacles. As a new player you're generally safest on main roads and in the immediate surroundings of populated areas, but as you explore and become more familiar with the world you start to get a feel for the rules that govern what sort of enemies will appear where, and as you get stronger you can start to experiment with exploring areas that were previously too tough.</div>
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<i>Gothic 2</i> makes a point of sending you into the orc-infested Valley of Mines way before you're strong enough to actually fight them, thereby creating an interesting gameplay scenario where you have to explore the map while finding ways to avoid or get around really tough enemies seemingly everywhere you look. It does a great job of making you actually feel like a weak and inexperienced fighter, which you're supposed to be at that point in the game, and further exemplifies the game's "show, don't tell" philosophy when it comes to tying narrative elements with gameplay mechanics. Instead of just telling us that the orcs pose some sort of theoretical threat and must be stopped, we get to see through our own eyes and first-hand experience just how powerful they really are, which makes the threat feel that much more dire and palpable while also setting a strong barometer for just how far you'll have to climb in order to fight them.</div>
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Improving your character is also done in an immersive way that ties your character-building to in-world actions. Instead of pressing a hotkey to bring up an abstract character window where you click an icon to learn a new skill, you have to seek out skill trainers -- NPCs who are knowledgeable experts and who will teach you what they know. When improving your melee combat skills, for instance, Scatty actually teaches you how to hold a sword properly, which you'll notice your character had been doing improperly all along. When you upgrade your melee combat again you're taught a specific stance to initiate an attack faster, and how to perform a spinning attack at the end of a combo. When learning to skin animals you need an expert to teach you where to start the cut and how to pull the skin off in one piece. You see, your character doesn't just magically improve; he learns through the context of the actual game world and his interactions within it, all in a way that makes logical and contextual sense. Other activities like crafting are also tied to in-world actions, rather than a generic interface. Forging a sword, for instance, requires you to heat up a sword blank at a forge, hammer it into shape on an anvil, dunk it in water to harden it, and then sharpen it on a grinding stone.</div>
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The combat system can seem clunky and unwieldy at first, but it too contributes to the great immersive design of <i>Gothic</i>. As previously mentioned, your attack animations change as you increase your character's combat skills, so there's a type of synergy where, as you get better at handling the combat system, your character also improves. Instead of just increasing damage values, <i>Gothic</i> actually shows that your character now has a greater understanding of how to fight with a particular type of weapon, which leads to being able to execute faster and longer combos, in addition to having a higher chance to land critical blows. Instead of just being an abstract change that only reflects in the behind-the-scenes math, it's a much more tangible, physically present change that affects actual in-world application.</div>
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It's also really cool that, when you knock a human enemy's health down to zero, they don't just die -- they just get knocked out for a bit, allowing you to take their weapon and anything else they might be carrying. Then, if you desire to kill them permanently, you have the option to execute a killing blow while they're down. It's a great system, since it lets you beat up NPC's without having to commit murder, which is something that you can't do in a lot of other, similar types of games, and is something that you would realistically be able to do in real life. So if someone is really ticking you off, or is bullying you, or simply has something you want and won't give it up, <i>Gothic</i> actually allows you to flex your muscles and teach them a lesson, and when they get back up they'll acknowledge the fact that you just kicked their butt. If, for instance, you beat up a guard in the Old Camp and then attack a merchant, and that guard sees you doing so, they'll turn their back and pretend not to notice because they don't want to get beat up again. It makes sense, and further helps to make these characters feel more alive when they have that aspect of self-preservation, and that you have the freedom to use a show of force on virtually every NPC who isn't an important part of the main quest.</div>
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Then you've got all the smaller details with the user interface, like the fact that you have a fairly unobtrusive heads-up display that only shows your health bar, and that of your current target -- no other distracting bells and whistles. When you take damage, the health bar doesn't even flash red, it just discreetly depletes. Switching weapons and spells is done by physically cycling through options in the game world, although you can just press a hotkey from the number row, though again there's no HUD showing you this. Dialogue screens use non-invasive camera angles and don't do anything crazy like artificially widening the aspect ratio with obnoxious black bars, or bringing up ridiculous dialogue selection windows -- it's just a tiny little window with subtitles and your options. Opening your inventory doesn't pause the game, and eating some food or drinking a potion to increase your health takes time to play out the animation -- you can't effectively pause the game and heal back up to full health in an instant.</div>
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There's plenty more I could talk about when it comes to why <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> are such great games, but I feel like these immersive design elements are some of their most important and unique qualities. While other games of this era, and even a lot of modern games, are content to resort to more "video gamey" designs that remind you you're playing a video game, perhaps in the interest of convenience (either for the player or the designers themselves), <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> took the extra steps to make sure that everything was as immersive as they could possibly be. The world operates in a logical and intuitive way, in terms of how society is built and what all the NPCs do within it, and the gameplay mechanics make sure that most of your basic gameplay functions play out through actual in-world actions so as not to pull you out of the world you're in by directing your attention towards an interface. Even to this day, after nearly two decades of industry advancements, <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> are some of the best and most immersive open-world RPGs ever created; even though they show their age in some ways, their immersive design is timelessly classic, and has yet to be replicated by any other game I've experienced.</div>
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<a href="https://www.patreon.com/thenocturnalrambler" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/I78wqqC.jpg" /></a></center>
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Mods used in this playthrough/review include the latest SystemPack, PlayerKit, and DX11 enhancements, which you can find by following these links: <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484664831">Gothic 1</a>, <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=636014226">Gothic 2</a>. I did not use the Riisis texture mod or L'Hiver, which are mentioned in these guides.</center>
Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-31565753716110512532019-05-07T20:34:00.003-04:002020-04-11T14:42:44.206-04:00Gothic 1 vs Gothic 2 - Which is Better?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KMAdhGY3OjA/XNIfeI7armI/AAAAAAAARi0/i3_cS8fCgpQCfgrBj02gsgpFLlKtD8TKQCLcBGAs/s1600/GothicvsGothic2Banner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="235" data-original-width="490" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KMAdhGY3OjA/XNIfeI7armI/AAAAAAAARi0/i3_cS8fCgpQCfgrBj02gsgpFLlKtD8TKQCLcBGAs/s1600/GothicvsGothic2Banner.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> are some of my favorite games of all time, being some of the most deeply satisfying and immersive action-adventure-RPGs that I've ever played. While most people in the early 2000s were raving about how great <i>Morrowind</i> was, I was busy playing <i>Gothic</i>, and my experience with those games fundamentally altered my ability to appreciate other, similar types of games because the early <i>Gothic</i> games were truly ahead of their time and did some really impressive things that other developers weren't doing at the time, and still aren't doing to this day. I sometimes struggle, however, to decide which of the two <i>Gothic</i> games I like better. With <i>Gothic 2</i> being a direct sequel to the first game, directly continuing the story with many of the exact same characters in the exact same world, and being built on the exact same game engine, they're about as similar as two games in a series can be, and so I often like to think of them as essentially one game broken into two parts. At the end of the day, however, they are separate games with some key differences, so I thought I'd take some time to review the two games against one another and discuss the relative pro's and con's of each game.</div>
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Common wisdom argues that <i>Gothic 2</i> is the definitively better game, since it had the opportunity to build and improve upon the successful foundation set by the first game, which was not only the first game in the series, but also Piranha Bytes' very first game. Whereas Piranha Bytes had to build the entire concept of the <i>Gothic</i> series from scratch with the first game, they had all the important pieces already in place for the sequel and could therefore focus on improving the overall quality of the gameplay while also expanding the breadth and depth of its content. After playing the two games back-to-back it's clear that <i>Gothic 1</i> is a little unrefined and a little lacking in overall content compared to its sequel, but it does actually do a few things better than <i>Gothic 2</i>.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Gothic 1</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>A more unique atmosphere</i></span><br />
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Whereas <i>Gothic 2</i> takes place in a relatively generic (albeit incredibly well-realized) medieval fantasy setting which is ultimately more similar to other fantasy-RPGs than it is dissimilar, <i>Gothic 1</i> is set inside a magically-encapsulated prison colony run in total anarchy by the convicts. That's really all I should have to say, since so few games have ever been set inside a prison, and as far as I'm aware, none other than <i>Gothic </i>have been fantasy-RPGs. While it doesn't really resemble a modern prison, it definitely gives off that prison-esque feeling in terms of the way the other convicts treat you. This is truly a dog-eat-dog world where the strongest make the rules and everyone else falls in line. The game really drives this aspect home, with the opening cutscene showing you getting punched in the face as you're welcomed to the colony, and then as other convicts try to beat you up, lure you into traps, force you into doing repetitive mundane chores, and extort money from you.</div>
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The video version of this article.</div>
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Then you've got the way the convicts have split into three factions, each with their own lifestyle and ideologies, from the Old Camp where the ore barons are content to live as kings inside the barrier by mining magic ore and negotiating the ore trade for outside goods, to the New Camp where they farm rice and brew schnapps while the water mages work to find a way to blow up the barrier, to the Sect Camp where they harvest and smoke swampweed while praying to a god known as the Sleeper, who they believe will set them free. The whole world, in fact, is relatively dark and dangerous, filled with exotic, dangerous beasts, ancient crumbling ruins, savage orc lands, and a weird sense of the occult. <i>Gothic 2</i>, in contrast, consists of a more conventional harbor city and neighboring farmlands, which isn't all that unique, and the faction system with the town militia, the farmers' mercenaries, and the magicians of fire, don't play as interesting of a role in establishing the world's lore and backstory like the factions from <i>Gothic 1</i>.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>A better story</i></span><br />
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<i>Gothic 2's</i> story is more of a broad concept ("defeat the dragons") with a bunch of preliminary road blocks and unrelated sub-goals for other people before you can actually fight the dragons ("find a way into town, get into the upper quarter, retrieve Garond's situation report for Lord Hagen, get the ore reports for Garond, retrieve the Eye of Innos, recharge the Eye of Innos"). It does have a few twists and turns in the story -- notably, when the seekers are sent to hunt you down, and when the Eye of Innos is stolen and subsequently destroyed, plus the ending cutscene where we get to see Xardas's true motives -- but it doesn't really feel like a story. Rather, it's more like a series of video game objectives pieced together in a linear fashion vaguely resembling a story. It's enough to keep you engaged and to keep the gameplay moving forward, but the story is more about setting up gameplay scenarios than telling a story.</div>
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The story in <i>Gothic 1</i> plays out more like an actual story, with the Nameless Hero arriving in the colony simply trying to find a way to survive before getting wrapped up in a plot to stop the orcs from summoning a god that will destroy all human life inside the barrier. Except for one moment when you're sent to retrieve five Focus Stones, it never really feels like cliche video game objectives in place of plot, since the story flows logically and organically from gaining admission to a camp, to being sent on your first mission, to investigating the curious goings-on at the swamp camp, to helping them prepare for a ritual to commune with their god, to seeking out the orcish graveyard seen in the ritual's vision, and to realizing that the swamp camp's Sleeper is really an orcish god and that you have to stop him from awakening. There's a lot more exposition and buildup to the main plot in <i>Gothic 1</i>, and it has a way stronger progression as you go through the various stages of the story and uncover new information.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>More interesting quests</i></span><br />
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<i>Gothic 2 </i>has a ton of quests, and they're all pretty good, mechanically, but the subject matter of those quests isn't always the most interesting. A lot of them are usually pretty mundane ("Harvest turnips for Lobart," "get Matteo's money from Gritta," "chase down the thief Rengaru," "kill the bandits at Jack's lighthouse," etc) or devolve into tedious busy work ("purify all the shrines," "kill all the orc warlords"). Even more important quests that seem like they should be interesting come off feeling a little simple. Recharging the Eye of Innos, for example, just amounts to fetching a book from Sekob's farm, gathering some swampweed, and telling Pyrokar, Vatras, and Xardas to meet at the Sun Circle. You don't actively do anything -- you just fetch items and talk to people. Even fighting the dragons is a little underwhelming, since the Eye of Innos really only lets you talk to them, and forces them to tell you the truth, while the actual fights are kind of broken -- getting <i><u>to</u></i> the dragons is ultimately more interesting than fighting them.</div>
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<i>Gothic 1</i> certainly has its share of utterly banal quests, but its main quests almost always have some element of spectacle to them, which makes them far more interesting. Obtaining the focus stones, for instance, has you bumping into Diego, Milten, Lester, and Gorn, who're all out minding their own business, and tag-teaming the task with them and usually using some type of spell to do something -- like Telekinesis to grab the stone from an unreachable ledge, or Shrink Monster to reduce a gargantuan troll down to a more diminutive size, or Transform Into Meatbug to fit under the crack in the wall. Crafting the Ulu-Mulu lets you roam freely around the orc camp, which is interesting in and of itself, while other things, like exploring the orcish cemetery with Baal Lukor and witnessing his descent into madness when he realizes there's nothing there and that the Sleeper has led them astray, or having the entire Old Camp turn hostile when the old mine collapses, are all genuinely interesting things. Whereas Gothic 2's quests generally happen in the ordinary context of ordinary gameplay (which is great for immersion), <i>Gothic 1</i> creates more unique scenarios for its quests, thereby making them truly stand out.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>More dungeons</i></span><br />
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Both <i>Gothic</i> games are open world and offer a lot of freedom to explore wherever you want, at your own pace, and they both feature what I consider "dungeons," a bit similar to those in a typical <i>Zelda</i> game, where you have to enter a contained space with a more linear structure to solve puzzles so that you can advance through the level to complete an objective. The problem with Gothic 2 is it really only has one of these dungeons, and that's the Halls of Irdorath which happens at the very end of the game, in the last chapter. If you include the <i>Night of the Raven</i> expansion, it has two with the Temple of Adanos in Jharkendar. Meanwhile, <i>Gothic 1</i> has four in the Old Mine, the New Mine, the Orc Cemetery, and the Temple of the Sleeper, the latter of which is the biggest and most elaborate in the entire series. As much as I love exploring the open world, I find these dungeons are good for providing balance, since a more structured environment to explore with more concrete goals to solve can be more directly engaging than aimlessly meandering through forests or open fields, and <i>Gothic 1 </i>strikes a better balance in this department.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Less and less side content</i></span><br />
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The <i>Gothic</i> games use a chapter progression system tied to the main quest -- as you advance the main quest, you advance the game into new chapters where the state of the world can be dynamically altered, opening up new areas for exploration, introducing new threats and challenges, and changing the circumstances around certain NPCs. While <i>Gothic 1</i> has a lot of content in its first chapter, the amount of side content becomes practically zero once you advance to chapter two and beyond, leaving you with no choice but to progress through the main quest, which becomes a matter of running back and forth across the map to get to your next objective. It's fine because the main story is solid, and the main quests are all pretty interesting, with unique gameplay scenarios and fun situations, but it doesn't really take advantage of the open world format when, for the bulk of the game, you can only really go through a linear sequence of main quests.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Not a lot of mechanical depth</i></span><br />
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This is one of the main areas where <i>Gothic 2</i> made tremendous improvements over the original, since the RPG and character-building portion of <i>Gothic 1</i> was, in truth, a little simplistic since it didn't have a whole lot of skills, and some of them were kind of useless. Animal skinning is mostly only used in both games as a way to earn money, but money is incredibly easy to come by in the first game, and so it's kind of worthless; you don't need to actually learn lock-picking to be able to pick locks, and pickpocketing doesn't really work well; you can forge crude swords with the blacksmithing skill, but that's about it. So really, the only skills worth learning are combat skills, and it's pretty easy to max out your character's stats and combat skills in the early stages of the game, leaving you with nowhere else to grow over the rest of the game. <i>Gothic 2</i>, in contrast, expands weapon forging into something more useful, makes thieving skills actually require skill points to learn while also making them incredibly useful, makes learning magic spells and increasing combat skills a more involved process, and adds other skills like potion-making and rune-making. The expansion adds even more things to spend skill points on, and balances the pacing of the level progression to better match the chapter progression and game length.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Gothic 2</b></span><br />
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I think it's pretty easy to argue that <i>Gothic 2</i> is the objectively better game, because it's basically the same thing as <i>Gothic 1</i> but with way more total content and better mechanical depth. I especially love how it reuses characters and locations from the first game, since it establishes a strong sense of continuity between the two -- returning to the colony from <i>Gothic 1</i> and seeing how much it's changed from the orc invasion and the dragons is truly stunning, and is one of my all-time favorite gaming memories. So here are some of the ways that <i>Gothic 2</i> improved upon <i>Gothic 1's</i> already successful formula.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>More non-linearity</i></span><br />
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As I already mentioned, <i>Gothic 1</i> became pretty linear after its first chapter since there wasn't much else to do in the world but follow the main quest line. <i>Gothic 2</i> also uses a linear main quest line tied to chapter progression, but more of its quests allow for non-linear progression, like when you're tasked with getting into town and have multiple ways to do that based on how you choose to explore and interact with the world, along with other quests like doing the stone circles, or exploring the mansions of the builders, or killing dragons, or getting the blood chalices in whatever order you want. Many of its quests give you broad objectives that don't necessarily follow a step-by-step progression from Point A to Point B (or C, or D) -- they're fairly open-ended in terms how you arrive at the solution, even if there is only one intended solution. Meanwhile, the world itself is a lot more open, with more diverse areas to explore and a less centrally-focused design, which makes it easier to get lost, literally, in its world. Plus, it also opens itself up the more you play, with the Valley of Mines, Jharkendar, and the Halls of Irdorath all being introduced in later chapters, thus providing you with constant opportunities to explore new areas and to veer off the main path.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>A more dynamic game world</i></span><br />
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<i>Gothic 1</i> has some strong dynamic elements, notably with how the entire Old Camp gets shut down after the old mine collapses, and how the water mages turn hostile after you drain the magical energy from the ore mound, but <i>Gothic 2</i> takes this concept one step further by more radically altering the world and changing the situation of various areas and characters as the chapters advance. Normally in <i>Gothic 1</i>, all advancing a chapter does is cause a few enemies to respawn while allowing the main quest to advance to the next stage; in <i>Gothic 2</i>, returning to Khorinis in Chapter 3 adds Seekers -- the black mage henchmen of Beliar -- all over the map, and the various farmers and townsfolk have all new quests and interactions related to the appearance of these Seekers. In Chapter 4, when you return to the Valley of Mines, the paladins have been further decimated while the dragon hunters have now arrived, thus introducing new quests and interactions with them. In Chapter 5, when you return to Khorinis again, orcs and/or lizardmen have invaded the outskirts of town, once again introducing new threats and new quests/character interactions. The effect is that the world feels more alive because of how much it changes and reacts to the main story.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>More intricate questing networks</i></span><br />
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Many of <i>Gothic 2's</i> quests overlap with some other quest, or have NPC's involved with multiple ongoing quests. Becoming an apprentice in town, for instance, involves gaining the favor of the various master craftsmen, which means doing quests for each of them to prove your worth. Gaining Matteo's favor involves getting the money he's owed from the carpenter Thorben's niece, and so you can talk to Thorben about the money, and also learn that he's indebted to Lehmar, the loan shark, which can trigger another quest to help clear Thorben's debt, and Thorben is also part of the "Missing People" quest, since his apprentice Elvrich has gone missing, in addition to having his own quest to earn his favor by proving your devotion to the god of light, Innos. By just talking to one person, you end up involved an entire network of quests. In fact, pretty much everything in town is somehow related to something else, so it's nearly impossible to talk to someone or do something without also making progress in another quest. <i>Gothic 1</i> has some overlap in its quests, or situations where one quest will unexpectedly lead to another one, like when Thorus tasks you with getting rid of Mordrag (which is also part of joining the Old Camp) and you end up picking up a quest from him to visit the New Camp, but these tend to be more incidental and aren't as pervasive as the ones in <i>Gothic 2's</i> main hub areas.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>A bigger, denser map</i></span><br />
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Some areas in <i>Gothic 1</i> can be a little sparse, with not much to really see or do within them -- not many enemies to fight, not much loot to find, and not much interesting terrain to explore. Plus, the relatively small size of the world means you can easily explore most everywhere in the first chapter and have little else to discover over the rest of the game. <i>Gothic 2's</i> map, besides being much bigger, is also a lot more densely packed with content, with something interesting to see or do around every corner and everywhere you look. It's also full of rewarding secrets that make it really worth your while to check behind every tree and under every rock. A lot of times, they're just skeletal corpses with a few worthwhile supplies, like potions, spell scrolls, or even a weapon or jewelry, but other times you discover more elaborate areas like hidden caves and secret chambers with more valuable riches awaiting inside. The world, therefore, is a lot more engaging, rewarding, and satisfying to explore in <i>Gothic 2</i>, than in <i>Gothic 1</i>.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Some really tedious repetition</i></span><br />
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The only real criticism I can level against <i>Gothic 2</i> is that some of its content, and therefore some of its total play time, can be tediously repetitive. The Valley of Mines, for instance, has orcs plastered all over the map, admittedly for good reason, since they're supposed to be laying siege to the castle, having overrun the entire colony -- it makes narrative sense, and it also serves the mechanical purpose of literally overwhelming you with tough enemies -- but that makes exploring the Valley of Mines a real chore when you have to spend hours just fighting orcs to get anywhere. Likewise, as much as I appreciate the dynamic changes to the main maps as chapters progress, it does get a bit annoying having to basically re-explore all of Khorinis in chapter three, and again in chapter five, because of the new quests and enemies introduced in those chapters. A similar thing happens in chapter four when you return to the Valley of Mines, although it's not quite as egregious. As much as I appreciate the size of the world and all the dynamic changes that occur within it as the game progresses, I got a little annoyed in the second half of my recent playthrough by feeling like I was retreading a lot of the same paths and doing the same things over and over again.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>In Conclusion</b></span><br />
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Both games are really good and I like them equally -- as I said before, I like to consider them as essentially one game, indistinguishable from the other -- but if I had to pick one as the definitively better game, I think I'd have to give the nod to <i>Gothic 2</i> for its superior gameplay. I really appreciate the original setting and unique atmosphere of the first game, plus its more interesting story, but you can definitely tell that Piranha Bytes were still figuring out the gameplay formula, what with it being their first game. A perfect game would essentially take the gameplay of <i>Gothic 2</i>, and drop it into <i>Gothic 1's</i> world and story. Such a game doesn't exist, however, so really the best option is just to play both games back-to-back as two parts of a single game, and enjoy each of them for their own individual strengths and the complete package they provide together.</div>
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<center style="text-align: justify;">
Mods used in this playthrough/review include the latest SystemPack, PlayerKit, and DX11 enhancements, which you can find by following these links: <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484664831">Gothic 1</a>, <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=636014226">Gothic 2</a>. I did not use the Riisis texture mod or L'Hiver, which are mentioned in these guides.</center>
Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-75937999556086852272019-04-30T19:24:00.000-04:002020-04-11T14:42:26.065-04:00The Importance of Gothic 1+2's Music: A Review of Kai Rosenkranz's Soundtracks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RIaxNBs6c5U/XMjN9pMdeCI/AAAAAAAARiA/G5-dmOAJkQovGwpg5TxQB-FS-0GKsHuXgCLcBGAs/s1600/gothic2musicbanner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="239" data-original-width="490" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RIaxNBs6c5U/XMjN9pMdeCI/AAAAAAAARiA/G5-dmOAJkQovGwpg5TxQB-FS-0GKsHuXgCLcBGAs/s1600/gothic2musicbanner.jpg" /></a></div>
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A lot of different components go into making <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> such great games, but one of its more subtle, understated triumphs is the excellent quality of its soundtrack, composed by Kai Rosenkranz. Music is something that I feel often gets overlooked when it comes to video game reviews, because most gamers aren't music critics, and aren't very knowledgeable about what goes into making great music -- we just know what sounds good, and what doesn't. The thing that makes <i>Gothic's</i> soundtrack so good, to me, is that it strikes a perfect balance between melody and ambiance -- it has enough melodic structure that you can pick out themes and quickly come to recognize its motifs, while also serving as an ideal backdrop to set the tone of your adventures, without crossing too boldly into the foreground and calling too much attention to itself.</div>
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Some games have really awesome soundtracks that don't always blend well with the gameplay, or that end up sticking out a little too much. Sometimes that latter "issue" is actually the point and can be a good thing, such as Mick Gordon's compositions for <i>Doom 2016</i>, or Chris Christodoulou's with <i>Risk of Rain</i>, since those tracks are so prominently a part of those games' style, and even their very DNA, but it can have the unintended consequence in other games of making the soundtrack a little obnoxious when it has really overt melodies that pierce through the rest of the soundscape and pull your attention away from the rest of the game. Repetition can also be a problem; open-world RPGs can last a hundred hours or more, which is a lot of time for a composer to try to fill out with a soundtrack, and so music will necessarily get repeated a lot. With these types of games usually having huge, sprawling landscapes, those tracks also have to cover a lot of literal ground, too, with individual tracks playing over a very wide area, and playing continuously with little regard for more specific circumstances of what you're doing, unless there's a dramatic shift like entering combat. It can be pretty jarring, for instance, when the soundtrack builds to a majestic swelling fanfare while you're doing something completely mundane like looting cutlery from a dining table -- even if sounds nice, it doesn't really match what you're doing and feels out of place.</div>
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The video version of this article with all the music on demonstration.
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<i>Gothic 3's</i> soundtrack creeps into this territory a bit, where Rosenkranz decided to step up his compositions to be fully orchestrated, with much more prominent melodies, denser harmonies and countermelodies, and far more bombastic phrases. Critics and audiences panned the game for its weak gameplay and broken technical state upon launch, but everyone unanimously praised the soundtrack as its best quality. Taken on its own, <i>Gothic 3's</i> soundtrack is a marvelous masterpiece in composition, capturing the whimsical thrill of running across rolling hills, and the foreboding unease of treading through dark forests -- and all the emotional tones in-between -- but in the context of the actual game, it sticks out so much that I find it actually distracting from the immersion because the whole thing is so overdone. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhFDdJsSylU">The combat music</a> is particularly grating with its repetitive low brass lick kicking off every single fight in the exact same way. Don't get me wrong, the soundtrack is great, with pieces like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6pfstI4A2A">Exploring Myrtana</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLyqSQhS6E0">Vista Point</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym_ya5Tj9Kk">Sad Strings</a> all being salient enough to evoke strong imagery and memories of playing, but even though it's arguably superior to <i>Gothic 1 and 2's</i> soundtracks in pure technical prowess, I prefer the more subtle, nuanced, and underscored feel of the first two games.</div>
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With these types of open-world games, a good soundtrack should be like wallpaper: it should add accents and character to a scene, but should ultimately blend into the background and not distract from more important elements like gameplay and immersion. <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> accomplish this tremendously well, with many of its tracks being simply chords or arpeggios plucked on a lute or harp, and droning tones played on a fiddle with occasional percussive accents from a hand drum. As a track builds, it'll often add a melodic line, usually by a flute, which doesn't have a ton of movement and sticks to really simple note progressions. There's a distinguishable melody to each track, in most cases, but it's subtle, and the stuff happening underneath it is merely a framework to support the simple melody. Mostly, it's musical ambiance -- it sets the tone for an area, and manages to be pleasant to listen to without ever becoming repetitive or ostentatious. The motifs, meanwhile, provide enough of a hook to catch your interest with a sense of musicality, and to make each track distinctly memorable.</div>
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I also appreciate that <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> don't use a typical orchestral instrumentation, which has become somewhat cliche in fantasy soundtracks, especially after Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, which were being released around the same time as <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i>, and may have possibly been an influence on <i>Gothic 3</i>. Rather, Rosenkranz uses a lot of medieval instruments like the lute, mandolin, harp, fiddle, hurdy gurdy, flute, recorder, ocarina, bagpipes, sackbut, and so on to give the game's music a more authentic, era-appropriate sound. For the most part, it sounds like music that could actually be played by this world's inhabitants -- in the German release, they actually featured a cameo by the real life folk metal band In Extremo, playing a concert on stage in the Old Camp. The actual <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j_TFyrPsfI&list=PL35AAC2E612AF722E&index=5">music for the Old Camp</a> very much sounds to me like a couple guys sitting around a camp fire plunking on instruments in a super chill jam session, and I can easily picture the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8uJBYdXVsk&list=PL35AAC2E612AF722E&index=9">music for the Swamp Camp</a> being just a percussionist and a flutist improvising around a weed masher with a chanting vocalist, all of whom may or may not be high on swamp weed. Overall, it sounds more like atmospheric folk music than a classical score, and the instrumentation feels more organic for this type of game.</div>
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A cameo by real life folk metal band, In Extremo.
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The <span id="goog_288714130"></span>monastery<span id="goog_288714131"></span>, for instance, uses <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpvT97bQGk&list=PL32115ED29BFDD722&index=20">bell tones</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBxeiMoYQZ0&list=PL32115ED29BFDD722&index=19">pipe organs</a> prominently in its soundtrack, which is of course perfectly representative of the type of instruments a church would use, thereby giving the monastery a genuinely religious tone. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV2PpfxfvMU&list=PL32115ED29BFDD722&index=27">pyramid valley soundtrack</a>, where the crumbling ruins of an ancient civilization are found, is played entirely on a set of (what sound like) congas and a wooden flute, lending the area a more primitive sound to match that of a more primitive culture.</div>
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Besides that, these tracks all do a really good job of capturing the specific tone of each specific area. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBJ4NuDmV1s&list=PL32115ED29BFDD722&index=10">music for Khorinis</a> uses brass horns to lend the area a sense of regal dignity as a once prosperous shipping town for the king, but with long sustained tones in a minor key that ultimately give it a more somber tone, reflecting the fact that the city's economy is in shambles and everyone's worried about their livelihoods, both in terms of making ends meet and also because of the impending threat of the orcs. The plucked arpeggios and counter-melodies on the lute, meanwhile, give the piece some motion, symbolic of the every day hustle and bustle of a major hub of civilization as different entities all go about their daily operations. The use of the lute also contrasts the timbre of the brass horns, providing a more commonplace sound for the area that would be more readily heard in taverns and on city streets, where most of the city's activity occurs. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm2p7vIoJYM&list=PL32115ED29BFDD722&index=30">old Valley of Mines map</a>, which has been absolutely devastated by the orcs, uses sparse instrumentation featuring a slow eighth-note plucking on a classical guitar (or something similar) with a wistful flute melody and occasional accents from a bass drum, using the relative emptiness of the track to capture the desolate feel of the area and the hopelessness that the knights in the castle feel, while the drums serve as a steady reminder of the threat the orcs pose right outside the castle walls.</div>
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It's possible that I'm reading too much into all of this, and might just be making stuff up to fit the ideas I have in my head about the soundtrack's intentions, or what I think Rosenkranz was thinking when he wrote this music, but even if that's the case and this is all nonsense, I think it still speaks to the strength of the soundtrack that I'm able to pick out these kinds of themes and ideas in the music, and relate it to the actual gameplay and story. The music in these games is so powerful, really, that it practically killed the mood, atmosphere, and immersion any time I ran into a glitch that caused the music to stop playing, leaving me with only the ambient background noises. That approach can certainly work in some games -- <i>Dark Souls</i> is a prime example of a game using only ambient sound effects to immerse the player and set the tone for its levels, to great effect -- but the music in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> is such an integral part in establishing these games' unique atmospheres that, if you were to replace the music with generic fantasy music, I feel they would lose a lot of their unique charm and character.</div>
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To test that theory, I recorded a short gameplay sequence from Jharkendar, where I first had the idea, and replaced the original soundtrack with free music from public domain, just to see how much the tone and atmosphere would change. The following footage shows Nameless Hero running through the ancient ruins of Jharkendar, talking to an NPC, and fighting some basic enemies, first with the original soundtrack, then with two different public domain fantasy pieces, and finally with no music -- just the background effects. See the embedded video below.</div>
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Gothic 2 soundtrack comparison</div>
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My first observation is that the "no music" version is easily the least interesting, but it could maybe work with some more ambient sound effects, like rustling foliage, or distant animal noises, or more dynamic wind sounds, or an occasional rock crumbling and falling to the ground, and so on. The game was designed with a soundtrack in mind so they probably realized they didn't need to go too far making a full background soundscape -- the game was clearly intended to be played with music, and so the "no music" version seems like an obviously inferior version.</div>
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Next, I should point out that this isn't really a fair comparison, since the original soundtrack was tailored specifically for this game, and for this specific area, whereas the two public domain tracks are generic "catch-all" compositions with only vague ideas for intended application, so naturally they aren't going to fit this specific area as well. With that being said, I actually kind of like "<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/magical-theme">Magical Theme</a>," and "<a href="https://opengameart.org/content/soliloquy">Soliloquy</a>" works surprisingly well, too, even though it feels like it belongs in some other game, like <i>Morrowind</i> or something. Neither of these really compares to the original "Forgotten World" in my opinion, however, since the original has a slightly more exotic, mysterious quality about it. It could just be that I'm so used to hearing the original version that it just sounds "right" to me, and nothing else can ever really take its place for me, so I'm curious to know what other people think. Do any of the other versions sound better to you, and if so, why? Let me know in the comments.</div>
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I don't really have a conclusion for this article, other than to reiterate that I really enjoy the soundtracks for these two games, and feel like they play a bit of an unheralded role in establishing these games' strong and unique atmospheres, without really drawing attention to themselves. They're quality compositions by Kai Rosenkranz, and I actually prefer his earlier work in <i>Gothic 1 and 2</i> to his technically superior work in <i>Gothic 3</i>, and wanted to take some time to showcase why I think these soundtracks are so good.</div>
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<a href="https://www.patreon.com/thenocturnalrambler" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/I78wqqC.jpg" /></a></center>
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Mods used in this playthrough/review include the latest SystemPack, PlayerKit, and DX11 enhancements, which you can find by following these links: <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=484664831">Gothic 1</a>, <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=636014226">Gothic 2</a>. I did not use the Riisis texture mod or L'Hiver, which are mentioned in these guides.</center>
Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-62794402712902541552019-03-06T20:36:00.000-05:002019-03-06T20:37:20.205-05:00Resident Evil 2: Great, But Imperfect<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a6TRZaUvYEw/XH9UndHRRwI/AAAAAAAARNo/_gHKxSsjMDkT-89FafVlPEf35IumOpmlACLcBGAs/s1600/RE2ReviewThumbnail2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="226" data-original-width="490" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a6TRZaUvYEw/XH9UndHRRwI/AAAAAAAARNo/_gHKxSsjMDkT-89FafVlPEf35IumOpmlACLcBGAs/s1600/RE2ReviewThumbnail2.jpg" /></a></div>
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The <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake has been possibly the most-anticipated release in the <i>Resident Evil</i> series, considering how well the original game is beloved by fans. Ever since the first game got remade on the GameCube in 2002, fans have been clamoring for a similar treatment of the sequel, which many actually consider to be the better game. Two decades later, we finally have the <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake, but it's maybe not quite what people really wanted, at least not initially. Gone are the pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed camera angles, and awkward tank-controls that were so iconic and representative of the first three games; in their place we now have an over-the-shoulder <i>Resident Evil 4</i> style third-person shooter perspective in a fully three-dimensional environment. While the shift in perspective may make it seem to have more in common with some of the more recent <i>Resident Evil</i> games, rather than the game it's supposed to be based on, the remake is definitely more of a classic survival-horror game in the vein of the original trilogy than a modern action shooter. In fact, it's probably the most old-school survival-horror game to be released by a major publisher since, well, <i>Resident Evil 7</i>, and the remake is even more of an old-school survival-horror than <i>Resident Evil 7 </i>was.</div>
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Before getting any further into this review, I should point out that I don't have a lot of familiarity or any sort of personal attachment to the original version. I didn't have a PlayStation growing up, and so my only experience with the original game was many years later when it got ported to the GameCube, but even then I only played for about 20-30 minutes before giving up and losing interest, though I have been replaying some of it lately to give myself some more context for the remake. I'm also not a hardcore super-fan of the <i>Resident Evil</i> series, although I have played a lot of them including the GameCube and DS remakes of the first game, plus <i>Resident Evil 4, 5, 7,</i> and the first <i>Revelations</i>. Although I don't have a ton of experience with the original trilogy, I really like the first game and have a strong appreciation for "classic survival-horror." I don't mention that to say that I'm any sort of credentialed expert, but rather to give you some context for my history with the series so that you can maybe better understand where I'm coming from with my thoughts and observations. Since I never truly played the original version, I'll be reviewing the <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake as basically a stand-alone title, although some comparisons to other <i>Resident Evil</i> games will certainly be inevitable.<br />
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Whereas <i>Resident Evil 1</i> told the story of Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, and the rest of STARS Bravo Squad exploring the Spencer Mansion and encountering the early stages of the zombie outbreak (which as they discover was fueled by Umbrella Corporation's T-Virus), <i>Resident Evil 2</i> takes place a little later and shows how the outbreak has expanded beyond the mansion in the Arklay Mountains and reached the neighboring Raccoon City. Rather than taking place in the confined spaces of a mansion and its surrounding areas, <i>Resident Evil 2</i> has you exploring downtown city streets, the Raccoon City Police Department, and the city sewers before eventually making your way to a secret Umbrella laboratory, where they've been concocting a new strain of virus called the G-Virus. As with the first game, you get to play as one of two protagonists -- Leon Kennedy, rookie cop arriving at Raccoon City on his first day on the job, or Claire Redfield, sister to Chris from the first game who's come to look for him -- who meet at a gas station outside of town as they're both attacked by zombies. They head into the city together before getting separated when a tanker truck crashes into their vehicle, agreeing to meet up at the Police Department. From there, each character plays out their own separate scenario meant to complement each other as part of one greater story. When you finish one character's campaign, you can play the other's in a "second run" which will offer remixed level layouts, enemy placements, and puzzle solutions, in addition to showcasing each character's unique stories and side characters.<br />
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My video review of <i>Resident Evil 2</i></div>
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While I found the gameplay strong enough to keep me constantly engaged all the way through and eager to press onward, the story didn't really help me much in that department because I never found myself actually engrossed by the story. The setup is a basic survival scenario where you're trapped in an area and have to find a way out while not getting killed by zombies, except without any characterization to make me care about the situation. There's not a lot of exposition before the game is dropping you into dire survival situations, and we no longer get to examine things from the character's perspective, bringing up a text description of their thoughts and observations which at least gave you glimpses into their psyches and personalities. Both Leon and Claire have a reason that gets them into town to become part of the main narrative, but the fact that they're involved in the story at all is almost incidental -- they don't really have a clear motivation either way until almost halfway through each character's respective story, when Claire meets Sherry and Leon meets Ada, and so until then you're just kind of aimlessly exploring the police department looking for keys and puzzle pieces to advance because you know you're playing a video game and that's what you're supposed to do. Even though the game gives you clear objectives of what you're supposed to be doing at all times, there's no over-arching goal guiding your actions from the onset, like for instance "rescue the president's daughter" or "find your presumed-dead wife."<br />
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The game makes it seem like your goal at first is to find a way to reunite with whichever character you're not currently playing, but then the game (and the characters themselves) just completely forget about that whole idea as they each get distracted with something completely unrelated that just pops out of nowhere. I can at least relate to and empathize with Claire's motivation to rescue and take care of Sherry -- you can tell that she cares, and that makes it easier for me to care, plus there are some decent character interactions between Claire, Sherry, Police Chief Irons, and Sherry's mother Annette -- but I wasn't as sold by Leon's naivete in trying to play the hero and bring Umbrella to justice with just the aid of one random woman he just met. His motivation feels more like generic good-guy protagonist stuff ("Umbrella bad, we must stop them") and shallow ignorance ("Yo Ada's kind cute and flirting with me, maybe once this is all over we can do some overtime"). I figured Claire and Leon's stories would intertwine a little more than they do, since they do actually bump into each other at various times in the original version, but except for one scene where you meet the other, who's locked out of the police department, you don't see or hear from them again until the very end of the game. While playing as Claire in my first run, I legitimately forgot that Leon was even in the game until I got a random radio call from him in the final sequence.<br />
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Meanwhile, each character's scenario has a random spot in the middle where you shift perspectives to another character -- Claire's campaign will have her shift over to controlling Sherry after she becomes separated from Claire, and Leon's campaign will have him shift over to Ada after he gets knocked unconscious. These sections come off feeling awkwardly forced, and I wasn't really a fan of either one. The shift over to Ada at least makes sense, since Leon's incapacitated and she's right there with him so the transition is fairly seamless, but switching over to Sherry is a bit jarring because they have to make Chief Irons call you over a phone so the switch doesn't feel quite so random and out of place. Ada's scenario plays fairly close to normal gameplay, except she's given a hacking tool where you're supposed to scan the environment for hotspots to hack, but this whole gameplay element felt shallow and gimmicky to me -- it's like they were trying to make it a puzzle, but in reality you just hold down right-click and follow a highlighted conduit to a hotspot multiple times. As Sherry you have to play more of a stealth sequence, since she's too small and young to really fight back, but her scenario falls into a weird lull where there's no clear objective other than "don't get caught." You're supposed to be escaping the place you're in, but there's a very particular script you're supposed to follow, and if you deviate from that script then you fail and have to start over, which is frustrating when you try to do something logical that apparently isn't in the script, causing you to have to sort of aimlessly trial-and-error your way into avoiding fail-states with no real indication of what the game expects you to actually be doing.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y6nM_T-AW1A/XH9VrqgxluI/AAAAAAAARN0/voJirAkdxU8uPFC_lFMZVEKUHpOJwRsgQCLcBGAs/s1600/RE202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y6nM_T-AW1A/XH9VrqgxluI/AAAAAAAARN0/voJirAkdxU8uPFC_lFMZVEKUHpOJwRsgQCLcBGAs/s400/RE202.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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When you finish your first playthrough, the game strongly implies that you need to do a "second run" as the opposite character in order to get the true ending, because the ending you get from the first character is so abruptly underwhelming and unsatisfying, with Leon and Claire finally meeting up for the first time since the very start of the game and then talking for five seconds over black screen, while also giving you like a two second teaser that there's something else yet to happen. Unfortunately, there's an awful lot of overlap, since the second character will end up going through a lot of the exact same beats as the first -- solving the same puzzles (but with different solutions), finding certain items in the exact same places, fighting the same bosses, and having similar encounters with certain characters. That's all fine and good if you treat the second run as more of an "Arrange Mode" than a true "B Campaign," where it's essentially just a remixed version of the same scenario but with a new character who'll get different weapons, meet different characters, visit a few different areas, and encounter some things in different places, as if these two stories are happening in parallel universes, but the game really makes it seem like these are supposed to be two different perspectives happening concurrently in the same setting because it clearly shows that the other character was already present in the game world by the time you get to certain areas.</div>
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While playing as Claire, I entered an area and found some lickers eating the corpses of zombie dogs, and then when I played as Leon, the lickers were gone and I was ambushed by zombie dogs, meaning that by the time Claire got there Leon had already killed the dogs, and the lickers had come out to feed on the remains. There's a point in the game when Leon has to grab a key item from a vault, and when he gets there it's already unlocked with the item still there that Claire used to unlock it. When entering a room as Claire I got ambushed by a licker crashing through a window, and then when I went back as Leon I found that window already smashed, with no licker present anymore. Your first character gets rescued early on by Marvin, one of the surviving police officers who's already been bitten, and he urges you to leave him behind because it's too late to save him, and when you come back as the second character Marvin has already turned into a zombie. Office Elliot, whom you try to rescue in your first run, gets chewed in half by a zombie, and when you get to that same location in your second run he's already been chewed in half. Your second character will find that the control box in the main lobby has already been cut open by the first character, and will occasionally find notes left behind by the first character instructing you on what they've done and what they're up to. The list goes on, these are just examples off the top of my head.</div>
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Things like this indicate that the two characters are supposed to exist in the same world at the same time, but that idea is contradicted by the fact that so many other elements like puzzles, unlocked doors, boss battles, items, and so on get randomly reset between characters, requiring the other character to go through the whole ordeal all over again. For instance, even though Claire has already gathered all three medallions and opened the secret path beneath the goddess statue (Marvin is already a zombie by the time Leon gets there so we should already be at or past this point), for some reason the medallions are all moved back to their respective locations, and the wall that Claire blew up with C4 to get the maiden medallion has been repaired and has a new block of C4 on it. Even though Claire should have already repaired the clock tower, for some reason all of the gears are back in their original places when Leon gets there. Some things like this I can easily excuse because of gameplay requirements, but it's hard to suspend disbelief in certain other situations like when an important character dies twice in two different cutscenes, meaning there's no possible way that that could be just the other character's perspective on things because there's no conceivable way those two events could occur in the same universe.</div>
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As I understand it, the original version had a lot of overlap, too, but maybe not quite to this extent, and it did at least have the "zapping system" where certain specific actions that you took as one character directly affected the other character's scenario, like if you use the cord to repair the shutter controls as one character those windows will remain blocked off for the other, or if you loot everything in the armory as one character there won't be anything there for the next. In the remake, if you board up windows they'll be gone by the next scenario, and different weapons randomly and inexplicably appear in the armory depending on which character you are. The execution in the remake is just logically inconsistent, since it goes both ways about making it seem like the second run is meant to cohere with the first by referencing specific things that already happened in the first (and vice versa), while also implying that the two take place in alternate universes since so many things are either the same but slightly different or act as if they never happened at all in the other run. If nothing else, it just seems like a missed opportunity for Capcom to improve upon the original game. As it stands, it almost seems like they made the remake worse in this regard, but I can't vouch for that personally because I haven't played the original game in its entirety. These issues with the characters, story, and the two scenarios aren't deal-breakers for me by any means, but I feel like they are legitimate blemishes and shortcomings that could've been better.</div>
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As I said earlier, I found the gameplay so engaging that I didn't really care about the story too much while playing. <i>Resident Evil 2</i> feels like genuine, old-school survival-horror dressed up in a modern skin. All of the classic staples of the original games are present here, including limited ammunition and healing supplies, inventory management, tough enemies that pose an actual threat, more enemies than you can afford to kill, backtracking through complex levels, using keys and other items to solve puzzles, needing ink ribbons to save your progress (at least in hardcore mode), and so on. I and many others trumpeted <i>Resident Evil 7</i> as feeling like a true return to form for the series, and while I still think that's true considering where the series was coming from at that time (<i>Resident Evil 6</i>), <i>Resident Evil 2</i> is even more of a return to form with more of an emphasis on puzzles, more elaborate level design, a classic story that deals directly with Umbrella and Raccoon City, and all-around greater difficulty leading to better survival-horror tension, thanks to the fact that, unlike <i>Resident Evil 7</i>, it can be played on its hardest difficulty right from the beginning. That should all make sense, though, seeing as it's based on the second <i>Resident Evil</i> game ever created, arguably the best in the series.</div>
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There's a good amount of exploration involved in this game, with plenty of satisfying backtracking. The police department is a fairly large and complex environment with three floors and multiple wings, plus multiple convoluted routes to get around it based on what areas you've unlocked. At the start of the game a lot of areas are locked off and require you to find keys, both literal and figurative, to gain access to those areas. It starts out relatively limited in scope with only ever one viable path to follow, but it quickly opens up as you unlock areas and soon have multiple ways to get from one side of the map to the other. All-the-while you're constantly encountering things you can't yet use, or can't yet access, and so that creates a fairly satisfying degree of engagement as you start piecing together what goes where and finally get into places that have been locked off for so long. I love that feeling of finally finding that key item I've been looking for, or realizing that this item I just picked up goes with another thing I have in my inventory which will let me do something new and open up all new possibilities. It also makes the environment feel more immersive when you have the freedom to come and go as you please -- you have persistent access to the entire map that you've unlocked, until you cross the point of no return near the end and head into the end game level.</div>
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Unfortunately, as it is with many <i>Resident Evil</i> games, I feel like the game is at its best in the first half when you're still in the starting area, and goes a little downhill once you leave the police department. The parking garage is a relatively small area with just a few rooms and only a couple of key items -- while fine and serviceable, it's a bit simple and a little bland, and the whole area goes so quickly that it's over before you really get into it. The sewers are a bit bigger and more complicated than the parking garage, with one of the game's more elaborate puzzles, but the layout is a bit confusing and the two-dimensional maps make it hard to figure out how all the different floors and areas connect to each other. Plus, it's the only area in the game with poison effects, and it is a sewer, after all, so even though there's a lot of detail that makes it all look really good from a technical perspective, and some areas are even actually pretty artistic in their appearance, the whole area looks like literal crap. Conversely, the Umbrella lab is a little too square and well-lit. That makes sense, of course, since it is a research lab but it just doesn't seem to have the same charm or personality as other areas in the game, other than looking a bit like a comical caricature of a cartoon villain's lair.</div>
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In order to progress through the game, you'll have to solve puzzles in virtually every area. The majority of these consist of basic "lock and key" puzzles where you have to bring a specific key or special item to a particular place to unlock a new area, or to gain access to a new item, some of which might be new weapons to use in combat, or they might be yet more puzzle items that you'll require later. Some areas are marked as requiring a specific type of door key like a heart, diamond, club, or spade, while other areas require things like a fuse for the electronic gate, a knife to cut open a control box, a crank handle for the fire escape, and so on. For the most part, these are all completely straightforward and simple affairs, and could barely qualify as puzzles, although some of them do require a bit of recognition and memory recall to realize that "Hey, I found a jewel box with a missing gem slot in it, maybe the ruby I pulled out of the scepter will fit in here," or "This police badge looks kind of like it might fit in the lock box downstairs, but wait a minute it's also a USB drive so that's probably what I need to access the armory in the STARS office." So really, it's not complicated but there are at least steps involved in connecting the dots, which can be pretty satisfying.</div>
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The map helps with keeping track of these things like where you've been, where you've yet to go, what doors need what, where special interactable items are, what items you had to pass by but couldn't pick up at the time, and so on. It's a tremendous help when you find an item that you were looking for hours ago and need to remember where to take it, and it's also a nice reminder to be able to scroll through the map and see what things you still have yet to do, that you now might be able to do with newfound items. There's a part of me that wishes the map weren't quite so detailed, however, as I often spent a lot of time in the game simply staring at the map screen trying to figure out where to go, what route I should take to get there, looking for things I might have missed, and so on. It'll even tell you if you've looted all the items in a room, or if there's still things left to do -- turning the room from red to blue once it's "completed" -- which is an extremely convenient tool to prevent you from wasting too much time scouring environments or risking more health and resource losses by going back to check areas again, but I feel like that takes away from the survival-horror tension a bit when the character is able to psychically know that they're done in a room just by a single button press. It's a little minor hand-holding element that I'm sure some and even many people will appreciate, but it felt almost like a crutch to me, and I wish that it either weren't quite so helpful, or that I had the restraint to not rely on it so much.</div>
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Most puzzle solutions, likewise, are straight up given to you by things in the environment if you explore enough. Early on you're given a notebook that tells you the combination you need to unlock some of the medallion pieces, and you find random notes that just tell you what the combinations should be for certain safes and padlocks. Sometimes you develop a roll of film and it explicitly shows you a picture with high-lighted objects so that you know where a particular item is supposed to belong. While I'd say it's decently satisfying to get these solutions, since it does take some actual work to achieve them -- you have to explore and put yourself at risk in dangerous situations to find memos and tucked-away items and what not -- I have to say that I wish they were a little more vague about their solutions. I wish, for instance, that they would make you solve riddles, or give meager hints about what you have to do so that you can come to solution on your own, rather than having the game explicitly tell you. In the original game, getting one of the red jewels is a pretty simple matter of simply using the lighter on the fireplace to burn the painting, but there's nothing telling you that -- you just have to make an educated guess based on the title of the painting: "A sacrifice to the hell fire." I feel like the closest we get to this with the remake is when Marvin leaves a note telling Leon how to unlock his desk, saying that the combinations are in the first letters of his fellow police officers' first names, but he's still blatantly telling you "Hey, this is how you solve this puzzle, and the solution is conveniently on the name plates sitting right next to this puzzle."</div>
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Every now and then, you do get to bump into actual logic puzzles, however, and these do a fairly good job of challenging your brain and getting you thinking. There are a couple of puzzle boxes, for instance, where you have to deduce the correct sequence of button presses to open the lockbox, trying to make the green lights indicate in a counter-clockwise pattern, and also chess pieces in the sewers that require you to deduce the correct placement of pieces based on hints and clues like "The queen is across from the knight, but not next to the king, and the king and the knight are not on the same wall," and so on. There's a good section where you're using those chess pieces as keys to open doors and have to figure out the right path that will let you leave the area while also taking both chess pieces with you. One puzzle had me going for several minutes trying to figure out how to combine vials of some fluid to get them into the correct measurement. Sometimes you have to sit there and wonder about the plausibility of some of these puzzles -- why would scientists concoct a convoluted puzzle system to measure and pour substances when it would be far more efficient to just let them do that stuff manually -- and sometimes the game falls victim to "adventure game logic" where you have to do things in an exact, specific way, even when there should be a sensible alternative -- why do you have to make a complete, uninterrupted line of bookcases in the library, when you should be able to easily step over a missing bookcase -- but you need to have that kind of stuff for gameplay purposes and so that's something I can easily suspend my disbelief on, though it did annoy me on occasion.</div>
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While the puzzles and exploration are certainly a big part of establishing the game's old-school survival-horror feel, the resource management and deadly threat of the enemies are what really make the game stand out. Zombified enemies are seemingly everywhere in this game, and while they only appear in small groups most of the time, that's really all it takes to ruin your day because each individual zombie in this game poses a real threat, since it only takes a few hits before you're dead, or on the verge of death. So they deal a lot of damage, and they also take a lot of damage, too -- average zombies can take 10 bullets or more to kill permanently, and with you typically having 20-30 bullets at your disposal you can't afford to try to kill every zombie you come across. Which means, most of the time you'll be forced to simply avoid zombies by taking a wide berth around them. Most of the maps aren't really conducive for this, however, since they're generally designed around tight corridors, cluttered rooms, dead ends, and claustrophobic choke points, which doesn't leave a lot of room to maneuver around zombies. So when faced with a few zombies in a tight space, you have to shoot them a few times until they stagger, giving you a few seconds of freedom to run past them. This creates a lot of genuine stress and tension with every encounter -- you want to avoid shooting zombies to conserve your limited ammunition, because you'll surely need it for bigger threats later on, but you also don't want to get too close and risk taking damage so that you can conserve your limited healing supplies and defensive items. It all feels like a delicate balancing act, and that's where the survival-horror feeling is at its strongest.</div>
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Resource management is a big part of survival-horror since it plays such a strong role in providing both long-term and short-term tension. You can only carry so many items with you at once, since there just isn't enough room in your inventory to carry a full armory of weapons and an entire garden of herbs, in addition to the various key items you need to haul around, which means that you might find yourself in situations where you've run out of healing items or ammunition and have to desperately navigate your way back to a storage container, or press onward and hope you can find something useful. While in this state, you feel incredibly vulnerable because those items that you no longer have were basically the only things standing between you and a game over screen, and the game gets so much harder when you're out of resources. Even though you might make it through an encounter alive, you can still find yourself adversely affected by it, leaving you worse off than you were before if you ended up having to use too many resources to survive the encounter. There's also long-term tension you have to consider, you see, of making sure you're saving enough resources to get through future encounters -- if you're too careless or wasteful now, it could come back to hurt you later when you're in a difficult situation and don't have the resources to make it easier. You don't, for instance, want to be going into a boss battle with nothing but 10 handgun bullets and a single blue herb to your name, and it's entirely possible that you might back yourself into a corner, metaphorically speaking, and have no hope to advance the game any further. In general it's best to conserve ammo, which means leaving zombies alive in certain areas and thereby creating an element of strategy in deciding which ones are best to kill permanently, and what windows are best to board up, while also trying to remember and keep track of which rooms have what zombies in them. This makes exploration both exciting and rewarding, while also keeping up a constant layer of tension in the back of your mind as you monitor your supplies and hope you'll have enough to survive.</div>
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The horror tension gets ratcheted up with the addition of more advanced enemies. Lickers can move a lot faster than regular zombies, and also hit much harder, with some attacks I think even being one-hit kills if you aren't armed with a defensive sub-weapon like a knife or grenade, but they're completely blind and therefore can only hone in on your location by following your sounds, meaning it's best to move slowly and avoid firing weapons at other enemies so they can't find you. It's pretty nerve-wracking trying to move silently around the lickers while they slink around and make sudden movements that make you think they just became alerted to your presence. I love how the game basically forces you to slowly inch closer and closer towards certain death, and deliberately tries to evoke panicked reactions out of you by throwing those false positives your way, which will only make the situation worse if you do panic. And by that time, you're probably so close that you might not have room to run or aim your weapon properly, which ups the thrill even more. They don't seem to follow a consistent set of rules, however, which can make some encounters with them a little frustrating. The game makes it clear early on that they can't see, and so as long as you don't make noise you can safely walk around them, but then other times they randomly lash out at you, leaping from all the way across the room when you were clearly walking. I think some of them might be programmed to aggro you in a type of ambush, and others might just be lashing out randomly. The unpredictability makes them a little scarier, I guess, since you can never be totally confident that they won't attack you randomly, but it does feel cheap and unfair sometimes, considering how devastating a single hit from them can be, especially in hardcore mode where you have even less room for error.</div>
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Then we've got the tyrant, aka Mr X, an unstoppable, hulking monster of a man who continually patrols the police department once he's introduced, and once he catches sight or sound of you will pursue you through the level until you eventually lose him. He's big, imposing, and downright intimidating in your first encounters with him. By himself, he's not much of a threat unless he corners you in a dead end, because you can always out-run him, but his presence adds a timed element to the gameplay, effectively forcing you to rush through dangerous situations because he will likely kill you or severely mess you up if he catches you. Being chased by Mr X through a room full of zombies -- or worse, lickers -- is great for the horror vibe because you can't stop to deal with the zombies, you can't run from Mr X without alerting the lickers, and you can't walk slowly to sneak past the lickers or Mr X will catch up to you. Sometimes, you end up with all three in one area, which creates some of the most intense moments in the entire game because there's so many different variables all happening at once, each requiring a different strategy to take care of, but you just don't have the time or space to deal with them all at once -- it's literally overwhelming, and that's how survival-horror should feel. Some areas have environmental puzzles where you're trying to move objects in the environment, which would ordinarily be a pretty mundane task but becomes incredibly distressing once Mr X enters the room, because as usual you can't stop to focus on the puzzle -- you either have to lure Mr X away and come back, or try to kite him through the room making progress on the puzzle in small increments.</div>
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It's a nice touch that he remains a persistent threat in the police department -- he's always active somewhere, you just don't know where exactly, until you hear his footsteps start getting louder. Once you've gotten far enough in the game to trigger his appearance, he can show up pretty much anywhere at anytime, so there's a good deal of anxiety as you explore and hope he doesn't show up in a tough spot, and then surprise when you open a door and find him standing there waiting for you. If he were just a scripted event who only occurred in specific moments then I think the effect would be lost -- as it is, he feels like an organic part of the world. He does have a few scripted moments, however, like when he busts through a wall unexpectedly, plus a few occasions when he shows up in areas that he previously couldn't get into, which are really some of the more surprising moments in the game. Mr X won't follow you into save rooms and certain other dead-end rooms, so it comes as a shocking surprise when you run for the safety of the main hall, which had previously been a safe haven to escape from zombies and lickers, only to find him open a door and continue after you. This completely alters the dynamic of the game when you realize that your central hub is no longer safe and have to go further out of your way to access a save point or storage container.</div>
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Unfortunately, while Mr X feels incredibly menacing and imposing at first, the effect dulls drastically as the game goes on because you become over-exposed to his presence. It's a phenomenon that afflicts monsters in horror movies particularly, where they're scariest in the first half when you don't see them, and then they stop being scary once they get the full reveal and are on screen all the time. Essentially, as you become more exposed to something, you become more comfortable with it and eventually become desensitized to it. That's how I felt with Mr X, and the desensitization happened really quickly with me. After a very short while I realized he basically wasn't any threat at all, outside of a few scenarios, as long as I kept moving and minded where I was going -- most of the time he felt like more of a minor inconvenience than an intimidating threat, as I ran circles around him while just feeling annoyed that he was making me go out of my way, or making a simple task take way more time than it should. From what I understand of the original game, he was only present in the "B" scenario -- the second run -- which I imagine made for an interesting and refreshing change on the familiar formula. In the remake, he's present in both the first and second run, and shows up even earlier in the second run, which really just feels like too much exposure to me. He stopped being scary well before I'd finished my first run as Claire, which then made his increased presence in my second run as Leon simply tedious.</div>
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I'm also not sure that they mixed or recorded the sounds of his footsteps correctly. I keep reading comments online about how great his sound design is, with the nuanced mixing of his footsteps allowing you to pinpoint his exact location in the police department, but I could never get any sort of consistent read on his location based on what I could hear while playing, even while using headphones and enabling high dynamic range and surround sound options in the settings menu. The stereo mixing does a good job of indicating whether he's on your left or right, but not really whether he's above, below, in front, or behind you. The problem is that there seem to be only two different types of sound effects for his footsteps -- a loud and clear sound when he's in the same room as you, and a dull, muffled sound when he's not in the same room. Meaning, he could be pretty much anywhere and you have no way to tell. Sometimes the game even gets confused about what type of sound effect he's supposed to be producing and switches sounds even when you have a clear view of him. Maybe it's intentional, and maybe the sound mixing is supposed to be vague so that you never quite know exactly where he is -- just that he's close -- so that it builds tension as you listen to the footsteps and wonder when, where, or if you'll run into him, which can then make it a little startling when he appears. To be fair, it does have that effect sometimes, but most of the time I just found myself annoyed at the immersion-breaking lack of realism in not being able to tell whether he's a floor above me, or a floor below me, or around the corner and down the hall when it would be pretty easy to tell basic things like that in real life, especially considering how loud his footsteps are.</div>
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In hardcore mode, the need to use limited ink ribbons to save your progress creates a whole new element in the survival-horror feel by introducing a greater risk-versus-reward system. The core gameplay already has that element in the form of basic encounters -- do you use your resources preemptively to make things easier for yourself, like by spending a bunch of ammo wiping out a room full of enemies, which might come back to bite you later if you run out of resources, or conserve resources and risk making things harder for yourself now by just trying to maneuver around them -- but that element gets amplified by a significant magnitude when it comes to saving your progress because entire series of decisions compound on one another in a larger scale of risk-versus-reward when it comes to deciding when to use your saves. You only get so many ink ribbons in the course of the game, and so it makes you want to use them sparingly and strategically to maximize their efficacy. This can mean going 30 minutes at a time without saving, and then getting to a point where you feel like it would be a good time to save but you're in a pretty safe area and want to try to get just a little further before saving so that, if you die, you have less game to have to repeat, but then the longer you go without saving the more game you have to repeat if you die, and thus the more tense and dire each and every moment becomes. As with the resource management, it's a delicate balancing act that has you constantly engaged in making interesting decisions about what to do, where to go, and how to play, which all feels pretty consequential.</div>
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Unless you're a complete novice to <i>Resident Evil</i> and survival-horror games in general, then I have to give a strong recommendation to do your first playthrough on Hardcore mode because lower difficulties completely remove this entire dimension of survival-horror tension and strategic gameplay. With constant checkpoint auto-saves before new encounters or transitioning into new areas, and the ability to save your game as frivolously as you desire, the fear of death gets severely diminished when a game over screen only sends you back a few minutes, or in some cases, only a few seconds, drastically reducing the consequences of death and ruining a lot of the tension that comes with trying to go long stretches without dying. The limited save system also forces you to live with your mistakes more often, because if you screw up or do something stupid that results in a huge loss of resources, you can't save-scum your progress as easily because it would mean going back 30 minutes or more where you could possibly make other, worse mistakes catching back up. Plus, there's that whole aspect of having to decide how to portion out your saves, which is more tense when you're playing the game for the first time and don't know when or where the next typewriter is going to show up, or what would be optimal times to use ink ribbons. I suppose there's replay value in stepping up from normal difficulty to hardcore, but if you've already played before then you'll already know where all the save rooms are and what to expect up ahead, which makes deciding when and how to use your saves significantly easier, which almost defeats the point of the limited save system to me. With that being said, it would've been nice if ink ribbons could've been a separate option, so that people could have the choice to need ink ribbon saves without having to deal with the inflated health and damage values of the hardcore zombies.</div>
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The new over-the-shoulder perspective makes combat feel much more fluid and responsive, while also upping the intensity by putting you closer to the action. It's now possible to aim your weapons directly and precisely, which makes it easier to line up headshots rather than just pointing your character in the general direction of a zombie and hitting the "shoot" button repeatedly until it dies. Make no mistake, however -- while it looks and controls like a typical third-person shooter, and might seem to have been taking some influence from more recent <i>Resident Evil</i> games, this isn't really an action shooter. The classic survival-horror feel is still strong in this game, mainly due to the level design, enemy placement, and resource management -- putting you in tight levels that will require you to move back and forth between areas constantly, with inconveniently-placed enemies that all individually pose a genuine threat to your survival, and not giving you nearly enough ammunition to fight each and every enemy you come across -- but the actual combat also feels a lot like the old games, despite the modern perspective and controls. In fact, it's almost like they took the basic combat mechanics from the original game and just dropped them into a brand new, updated engine and made everything look and control better. And that, I feel, is a bit of a problem.</div>
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One main issue is that it feels like zombies take way too many bullets to make any sort of reaction to being shot in the face, sometimes needing as many as five headshots before they stagger, a sort of temporary stun lasting just a couple seconds, usually enough to run past them, and even more headshots before they fall down, where they usually stay dormant for a little longer before inevitably getting back up. If you miss one or two shots, or have a shot hit them in the fingertips while they're reaching out to grab you (which, by the way, I don't think counts as a headshot even if the bullet should realistically still hit the head after going through the fingers), that can mean firing almost 10 bullets before they stagger. It's not only an annoying waste of ammo, but it's incredibly frustrating when you just want to stun one stupid zombie so you can run past it and it ends up becoming this whole drawn-out ordeal. If a zombie is lunging forward to bite you, you can fire three shots at point-blank range right into its brain and it'll tank through those bullets and grab you anyway, making it feel like your bullets did nothing at all and that the game isn't responding to your actions. Actually killing a zombie sometimes needs 15 or more headshots while they get knocked down and get back up two or three more times. The actual number of shots required varies wildly, with some occasions when the very first shot yields a "critical hit" where the zombie's head explodes, or times when they stagger from each of the first two shots, but you never know going into an encounter if it's going to take one or two shots, or one or two magazines. In general, however, especially in hardcore mode, the enemies lean more towards bullet sponges which doesn't feel realistic and isn't very satisfying.</div>
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I mean, I get it: I was playing on "hardcore" mode and so of course the zombies are going to take more damage, and these aren't just ordinary zombies -- they're bio-organic weapons created by a super-villainous organization so they're supposed to be stronger and more resilient than a typical dead corpse brought back to life -- and that's also how it was back in the original games. I never felt like it was an issue in the original games, however, because they weren't really action games. That's not to say that this remake is, either, but its gameplay is way more action-based than the originals, where killing a zombie really took no amount of personal skill because all you could do was face the general direction of an enemy and press the shoot button over and over again until it dies. You had literally far less control over the character, and so the fixed camera angles and imprecise aiming made it feel like when a zombie took 7-10 shots before it fell to the ground, it was because your <i>character</i> was missing shots or not hitting critical body parts. It was kind of like how RPGs use statistical abstraction to represent action, where you're not the one actively swinging a sword, you're issuing commands and letting your character play out those actions. Which frankly was fine for the time that the original games were released, but with this remake now having hyper-realistic graphics and giving you so much more control over your character and making you feel more like you're the one in the game performing the actions, having zombies be bullet sponges "because that's how it was in the original" doesn't feel appropriate because you're mixing old mechanics with a bunch of new ones. It's a bit like remaking a 20-year old movie and recasting all of the characters, except keeping the original lead actor in the same role -- sure, he was in the original movie so there's legitimacy to that, but he's aged 20 years and no longer fits the part, and looks out of place.</div>
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It's also pretty annoying how zombies "play dead" in blatant defiance of real logic and game rules, just so the game can have "gotcha moments" when a zombie that you felt 100% sure was dead springs back to life to suddenly ambush you and knock off a huge chunk of your health. As you explore levels, you find a lot of zombified corpses littering the ground, and a lot of these will lie there perfectly still even as you get close and walk all over them, and even as you fire gunshots within inches of their bodies, only to decide hours later when you come back that they suddenly want to wake up or whatever to get you with a jump scare. If you shoot a zombie multiple times and knock it down multiple times, it'll sometimes lie there perfectly inanimate, even going into ragdoll physics mode -- a classically iconic sign that an enemy has been defeated -- only to come back to life later when you walk over their corpse, sometimes getting you in an instant grab as they chomp at your leg. It basically means that you have to shoot or stab literally every single corpse that you see, if you want to be sure, which is obviously not practical for your ammunition and sub-weapons, and is also just way too tedious. Really, it just feels like cheap manipulation -- it's something that sticks out to me as un-immersive because you can tell it's the handiwork of designers deliberately playing around with the rules and formulas to catch you by surprise and screw you over.</div>
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Their grab radius and tracking ability are a little generous in their favor, too, sometimes making it feel like being grabbed and bitten by a zombie is completely unavoidable even when it seems like you're doing everything correctly to dodge them. Sometimes you get past them and feel like you're in the clear, but then they're able to spin around on a dime and get you, or it seems like you should be well out of their range and then they get a second burst accompanied by a speed boost and actually outrun you for a moment to catch you. Sometimes you try to curve a wide path around them, and they track your movement perfectly and deftly cut the gaps to snag you. When they grab you, the game triggers a cutscene animation and takes all control away from you, but this nearly always triggers a half-second or more before they've actually grabbed you, which takes a split second of time away from you when you should realistically still be able to defend yourself. There's likewise a long recovery period as you get out of the cutscene, in which you still have no control of your character but other enemies are still capable of grabbing you again, leading to a chain-stun phenomenon where you get bit multiple times beyond your control. All of which is, needless to say, incredibly frustrating and feels incredibly unfair at times. Granted, sometimes getting bit or chain-stunned like that is entirely your fault for putting yourself in a position for that to happen, but it sometimes just feels so random and out of your control. It's possible, for instance, to bait them into their grab lunge, dodge the grab, and then run around them, but it's extremely inconsistent whether they're going to completely ignore you, or do a quick 180-turn-in-place, or slowly walk a wide circle to turn around, or do a second burst, or lunge straight or turn to keep up with you, and so on, which can make many times when they bite you feel annoying just because of how unpredictable it is.</div>
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There are also elements of "gameplay logic vs cutscene logic" at play, which is likewise a little annoying. While it routinely takes you a dozen bullets or more to kill enemies, any time anyone shoots something in a cutscene it either dies or gets knocked down and out in a single bullet, like when Leon shoots a zombie at the gas station, or when Ada shoots a zombie dog in the parking garage. When a zombie grabs on to you, you have zero ability to push it away or execute any kind of basic self-defense unless you have a knife or grenade in your inventory, and yet while escaping from the gas station in the opening cutscene Claire is seen pushing a zombie away, and later on Officer Elliot can easily throw a zombie off of him with one arm, while distracted. While Leon is routinely able to withstand massive bloody chomps and slashes from various enemies and recover immediately just by eating some herbs or spraying himself with antiseptic, he gets completely incapacitated when shot in the arm by an NPC in a cutscene. This kind of stuff isn't a huge deal but it definitely bothered me every time I saw something like that.</div>
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Then you've got issues where enemies will sometimes decide to hug the other side of doors, which creates a near-impossible situation for you to deal with. When you open the door, it'll push them back around the other side, which blocks your view and prevents you from shooting them, and if you try to run through the doorway they're so close at that point that they can easily grab you before you even see them. If the door doesn't push them back and they're just right in front of you, you might consider backing up a few steps to shoot them, but then the door automatically closes and blocks your shot, so you can't stay in the doorway to shoot because they'll surely grab you, and you can't back up to shoot because then the door will close. This whole issue would be solved if they could let you kick open doors to stun zombies who're in its path, like you could in <i>Resident Evil 4</i>, but you inexplicably don't have that option, here, even though the <i>zombies</i> can do it to <i>you</i>. It often feels like a lose-lose situation, purely because of a design oversight.</div>
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While I don't like how the combat feels in terms of the action side of things, I think it works pretty well in terms of survival-horror, which is probably what's more important, here. One could argue that it shouldn't have to take 12 bullets to kill a zombie -- make them take only three or four instead and compensate by giving the player one-third as much ammunition -- but there's something to be said about how much <i>time</i> it takes to kill zombies which makes fighting them in certain situations more prohibitive than the ammo costs. For instance, it would make it a bit trivial to get through certain sequences when you're literally swarmed by zombies, or when you have a licker or Mr X or zombie dogs chasing you and have to deal with a few zombies while running away, if you could stun zombies with a single headshot, and kill or knock them down in two or three. With Mr X having a near constant presence in the police department there's a definite emphasis on timed actions -- having only a limited amount of time to move through an area before he catches you -- and so the enemy design with them soaking up so many bullets works in making you spend more time dealing with them while other threats -- even other zombies -- creep in to get you. Likewise, the randomness in terms of how many bullets a zombie is going to take to stagger or go down, or which ones are going to come to life or whether one will come back to life, or how any random zombie will behave at any given moment, adds a lot of suspense and tension to each encounter because of the uncertainty -- you can't predict what's going to happen so the game keeps you on your toes in anticipation and catches you off guard a lot. Plus, the enemies being an unstoppable force that can take bullet after bullet and keep coming for you is I guess in the true spirit of survival-horror.</div>
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Bosses, on the other hand, are pure bullet sponges and don't contribute much to that argument of time-based actions or the tension of not knowing how many shots it's going to take to bring it down. It's to be expected that bosses will be tougher and soak up more damage than average enemies in order to show a sense of scale, with them simply being stronger and more powerful enemies, but except for one instance you have no sort of time sensitivity in boss battles and the game is sure to load you up with a ton of what you need right before the fight, so there's no real stress or tension in the fights. And pretty much all of them go on so long that they quickly get to feel rote and repetitive. The first boss which both Leon and Claire fight, plus Claire's fourth boss, for instance, are mindlessly simple affairs of simply running circles around an area occasionally turning around to take pot-shots at the boss. There's practically no risk of even taking damage as long as you don't stand there too long attacking, and so the whole thing is just an exercise in patience and tedium -- doing the same thing over and over again until the boss eventually goes down. The third boss is somewhat similar, except you're basically running circles around him instead of around the level, and the second boss is more of a puzzle boss that relies a little too heavily on tedious trial-and-error to figure out the exact timing and order of operation to make things work correctly. Once you understand the mechanics, the fight becomes incredibly simple and shallow, and figuring out the solution is just kind of frustrating. The fifth "bonus" boss you get at the end of the second run seems more like a spectacle boss that you basically can't fail, as if it's just there to look cool more than to pose any sort of gameplay challenge.</div>
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So really, the only boss that I actually kind of liked was Leon's fourth boss, because you have to fight him in such a small arena that progressively gets smaller and smaller and they don't give you Leon's super-powered end-game boss-killing weapon right away, like they do with Claire's fourth boss. Meanwhile, it's kind of lame that nearly every single boss in the game is just a slight variation on the same enemy, since you fight different stages of mutations of the same guy every time. The third boss, for instance, is kind of a decent fight but by the time it comes around I feel like I've seen and done this whole deal before, and the only real difference is that the level layout is a bit more open and the boss occasionally throws easily-dodgeable objects at you, and so it feels pretty similar to other iterations. In fact, literally every boss battle is just a matter of simply shooting at their big, orange, glowing weak points, which look like ginormous eyeballs, so there's no real subtlety or nuance in figuring out what you have to do. So ultimately, they all follow pretty much the same basic strategy and come off feeling disappointingly straightforward. They're not satisfying to fight because of interesting mechanics or unique scenarios, and they're not really menacing, difficult challenges to drive home the survival-horror tension, either, so they just feel like a complete missed opportunity.</div>
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Leon and Claire fight the exact same bosses throughout both of their scenarios (except for their unique final boss), and in fact their runs are actually pretty similar in most ways. I already touched on this earlier when discussing the story implications of the second run, but I have to stress here that there's not as much replay value as I had originally figured. I kept hearing in forum posts and reviews that the game has essentially four different campaigns and that, if you want to get the full experience you can do both of Leon and Claire's first and second runs (ie, LeonA ClaireB, and ClaireA LeonB), when in reality that just seems like a huge waste of time to me. Maybe in the original game there were enough key differences to justify doing four entire playthroughs (and it would seem to be, since from what I understand the <i>Resident Evil</i> canon is based around something that only happens in ClaireA, not LeonA or ClaireB), but in the remake if you've done a first and second run then I would wager a guess that you've seen at least 98% of what the game has to offer, because the two variables -- Leon or Claire, first run or second run -- are almost completely independent of one another. After finishing my second run as Leon, I went back to play his first run and felt like I had already seen everything by having already done a first run, and by having already played as Leon. The puzzles and level progression were the same as what I'd already done as Claire in her first run, while Leon had the same unique areas and side story cutscenes with Ada as in his second run. The only noticeable difference was that I actually got to see the conversation with Marvin as Leon. However, it followed the same structure as Claire's, while Leon said a lot of similar lines as Claire and Marvin even repeated a few lines, which really wasn't substantial to see. It's possible that there could be other minor differences but after playing through half of the game and not finding anything else I didn't want to sit through any more to find out.</div>
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The rest of the replay value is unfortunately based entirely around speed-running, which just doesn't strike my fancy. In true <i>Resident Evil</i> fashion you can unlock a bunch of extra bonuses like infinite ammo, an unbreakable knife, special weapons, and so on, mostly by earning certain rankings on different difficulties, but the rankings seem primarily determined by completion time -- the faster you beat the game, the better your ranking. I know that's been a series standard ever since the beginning, but I don't find any satisfaction in rushing to complete a game in as little time as possible. The rest of the bonus game modes like 4th Survivor (unlocked when you complete the second run) and the assorted Ghost Survivor scenarios (free DLC) are all short, 10-minute remixed game modes where you have to get from Point A to Point B using existing levels from the base game, but with different enemy placements and obstacles. I find it interesting how many different scenarios they're able to create from a relatively limited set of assets, and the Ghost Survivor scenarios at least introduce some new mechanisms like special enemy variants and item dispensers that let you take one of three items on offer, but it still feels like a bunch of variations on the same thing: speed-running through the same basic levels and against the same basic enemies with the same basic weapons that you've already experienced twice before in your first and second runs. Doing those areas a third and even fourth time in the bonus content just got to feel tedious and repetitive to me, and I felt no real desire to complete any of the bonus content. I basically hated the 4th Survivor mode, and while the Ghost Survivor scenarios do a little to improve upon that formula, it's disappointing that they're basically just more of the same. It might be ungrateful to complain about free content, but I just wish that it weren't all designed exclusively for speed-runners.</div>
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The game looks great, of course, which is no surprise considering how great <i>Resident Evil 7</i> was in this department, and this game is being done on the same engine. The RE Engine does a great job with dim, moody lighting and strikes a perfect balance between being dark enough to actually depict darkness, while still providing enough illumination to see details in the environment and to tell where you're going. Light beams, like from your flashlight, look particularly good with their soft edges and the way that objects and the environment slowly come into illumination as you get closer. Then you've got all the fantastic little details like how characters react to stepping out into the rain, and later wipe excess water off their arms, their facial animations when they're dangerously wounded, having all of your equipped weapons visibly equipped on the character model (including seeing the actual straps holding a shotgun to your back), the gore system that shows graphic detail as zombies heads explode, the fact that the game remembers and keeps track of the damage zombies have sustained and where those zombies are positioned in the map, zombies tripping over other zombies, and so on. Unfortunately, it has some rough spots when it comes to the visuals. Reflections often look a little wonky, like they're being overly pixellated; gore on the character models sometimes looks like stickers slapped on their clothes; some textures and meshes get repeated a little too closely; some areas have a distinct filter over them which changes the color scheme and lighting drastically as you move in and out of them, which then looks incredibly distracting once you notice it; there's really not enough variety in zombie faces and looks, because you see a lot of the same faces and outfits and things everywhere you go; and Claire sometimes dangles her toes into the uncanny valley, in terms of her facial animations.</div>
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It sounds pretty good, too, with excellent voice acting that blows the original game's acting out of the water and a rich, thick layer of ambient sound to immerse you in the settings. I'm not a big fan of the gunshots, however, as they tend to sound pretty mild, high-pitched, and somewhat muted to me. Guns are insanely loud in real life and have more of a "boom" to them than what this game does with its basic pistols, which sound a bit like glorified cap guns to me. As I mentioned previously, I also don't think the sound recording and mixing on Mr X's footsteps is very good, as there aren't enough different types of sounds or nuanced enough mixing to get a good enough idea of where he actually is when you hear his footsteps. The music, meanwhile, is practically non-existent. I guess they were going for a more subtle, subdued, ambient, "atmospheric" sound for the remake, but the effect is that you go long stretches of the game feeling like there's no music whatsoever, and generally speaking whenever it kicks in it's so generic that it may as well not even exist at all. The save room music is good, for instance, but only seems to play the very first time you discover a save room, and then never comes up again when returning to that location. The only tracks I actually noticed and enjoyed in the remake are Mr X's theme, and the shredding guitar track that plays in the Tofu Survivor bonus scenario. The original 1998 soundtrack that you can buy and play with as a $3 DLC completely outshines the remake's, and actually adds tone to certain scenes that were completely missing it with the remake soundtrack. It's a little shady, however, that you have to pay $3 for that option, and that it isn't included in the game as an unlockable for beating the game, for instance.</div>
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Other aspects of the game's technical design and implementation bother me, too. Movement feels slightly unresponsive to me, as sometimes your character will make gradual diagonal and circular turns and will other times make sharp cuts in a straight line. When trying to take a wide curving turn around the zombie, I hit a strafe key while turning the camera to look at it and the character ends up dashing right into the zombie. And whenever you trigger that little dash move, it locks up your controls for a second or so, while also moving you further out of your way than you intended, which can spell disaster for you. I think it's supposed to be there as a quasi-dodge move, but the fact that it's so easy to trigger while doing what feels like basic movement is not ideal, since it pops up so unexpectedly so often. Climbing up and down ladders happens automatically, when it seems like that should be something you'd rather have to activate manually, and it took me more trial-and-error than it should've to figure out how to change directions while on the ladder, if I accidentally used one. Sometimes the game is a bit finicky about your positioning when trying to pick up items in the environment -- sometimes I had to bump the character around repeatedly to find the exact spot that would let me actually pick up an item, or I'd be standing right in front of something and left-click, only to find myself interacting with the thing behind me because I was apparently closer to that than the thing I was facing -- and I don't appreciate how the Tab key closes your inventory normally, and then sorts the inventory when you're in your storage chest, because they gave the same button two different functions in similar windows.</div>
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The PC version has a rather extensive options menu and takes a lot of considerations into making the game feel properly-adapted for keyboard and mouse controls, but it has random artifacts of consolitis that feel weird and out of place. The weapon selection hotkeys, for instance, show a typical controller plus-pad interface, but then actually assigns them to the number row (as you'd expect for a PC game), except it defaults your first weapon to the 2 key, then the next into the 4 key, then 1, then 3, which is highly illogical to me when it would just make more sense to go 1-4. When interacting with your inventory, you have two separate cursors visible on screen -- one following your mouse movement, and one that stays locked onto the item grid, as if that's left-over from console navigation. The map does something similar, where it shows your cursor and lets you click to drag the map around, but then also brings up what looks like a joystick crosshair that you have to position to actually highlight something on the map, instead of just hovering over it with your mouse. Sometimes the mouse gets locked up if you accidentally move a picked up item to a different slot while trying to click on the "combine" option in the drop-down menu, thus requiring you to use the WASD keys (ie, directional inputs like from a controller) to move it back to the correct stack.</div>
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I've leveled a fair amount of criticism against <i>Resident Evil 2</i> in this review, but I need to stress that a lot of that is basically just nitpicking. A lot of these issues are minor and don't really affect the game in a significant way, and sometimes just amount to wishful thinking. It would've been nice, for instance, if the two characters' campaigns could've been a little more differentiated, or just been more consistent one way or the other about whether they're supposed to be concurrent perspectives in the same timeline, or if the puzzles relied a little more on vague clues and riddles to solve instead of simply finding the solutions through exploration. Other things I got used to and they stopped bothering me after a while. I was pretty annoyed by some of the zombie mechanics during my playthrough, for instance, but realized in retrospect that it was actually working in the game's favor in some ways -- even if it didn't feel right, it was doing its job. Some things do feel like genuine issues, however, like the fact that you're over-exposed to Mr X throughout both the first and second runs to the point that I feel like he stops being an intimidating threat way too quickly, even if he does a good job of keeping the mechanical pressure on you, and the boss battles are pretty lame all across the board.</div>
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The <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake feels like a pretty faithful remake and adaptation of the original game, from what I can tell based on the hour or so that I've played of the original, even though a lot has been radically overhauled in the process of bringing a 20+ year old game back to life. As much as I love the style of the original games, with the fixed camera angles and tank controls, I appreciate Capcom deciding to do something different with the over-the-shoulder perspective instead of going for a true one-to-one remake. After all, the original game is always going to be there, and it still holds up really well, so I don't feel like we really needed to take that approach a second time. Don't get me wrong, it would be great to have more modern games in the style of the original <i>Resident Evil</i> games, but I'm totally fine with this remake deviating from that formula, if only for the sake of variety. As it stands, I really liked the <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake -- it's a great rendition of old-school, classic survival-horror design elements, but dressed up in a modern skin, and should satisfy fans of the original game as well as those who're brand new to the series. Despite that high praise, I have to admit that it's probably only my fourth favorite <i>Resident Evil</i> game, coming in behind <i>Resident Evil 7</i>, the original <i>REmake</i>, and <i>Resident Evil 4</i>. It's a good, solid game, but it just didn't capture my interest as much as those other games. Each of those games had me fanatically obsessing over going back to unlock everything possible and to experience every little thing that I could; with the <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake, once I finished it I was pretty content to be done with it, and just couldn't get myself motivated to get into the bonus modes or go after all the unlockables. Those things aren't necessary to enjoy or recommend the game, but I think does show that I really just didn't enjoy this game as much as some of the others. Still, it's an easy game to recommend, and I hope future DLC will do even more to improve my opinion on it.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-60272324289389840222019-02-17T03:06:00.001-05:002019-02-20T19:27:30.392-05:00Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Review - Interactive Storytelling in a Movie Done Right<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Netflix's <i>Black Mirror: Bandersnatch</i> is an interactive movie about an aspiring video game developer in 1984 trying to finish his first major game release while feeling like his life is spinning out of control. The movie plays like a "choose your own adventure" book or game where, at certain points in a scene, an interface will appear on screen asking you to make a binary choice for the character, which is then played out in the following shots and can lead to a lot of different pathways to over five different endings. As the story continues, the main character, Stefan, begins to realize there are weird forces controlling his life; he begins to relive past traumas, starts having demonic visions and conspiratorial dreams, and slowly descends into a surreal madness as reality crumbles around him, all while struggling with the normal tribulations and speed bumps to meet the deadline to release his first game, <i>Bandersnatch</i>.</div>
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For anyone unfamiliar with the series, <i>Black Mirror</i> is a dark science-fiction anthology series on Netflix, a bit similar in tone and style to <i>The Twilight Zone</i>, where each episode explores a concept about the darker possibilities of technology. Iconic episodes deal with being able to "block" people in real life (like on social media), using reality television as a form of criminal punishment, using memory implants for police investigations, and having one's consciousness uploaded to a virtual reality mainframe after you die, among many others. <i>Bandersnatch</i> functions as a feature-length stand-alone episode that can last 90 minutes or more, depending on your choices and how much of it you choose to explore. I don't normally review movies on this blog (although I have on a few occasions, and I used to have my old Video Games in TV series), but this movie deals directly with video game themes and its interactive nature makes it feel almost like a game, so I figured I'd share my thoughts and observations on it for those who're interested.</div>
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The movie begins with 19-year old Stefan waking up in his home, where he lives with his dad (his mother passed away when he was five) on the morning that he's to meet with the CEO of a major video game publisher to pitch his video game, <i>Bandersnatch</i>. The game is based on a fictional book of the same name, which followed the "choose your own adventure" format, and is apparently well-known and well-regarded within this fictional world. The book is perhaps more known, however, for the fact that its author was taking a lot of hallucinogenic drugs during its production and later went crazy and murdered his wife. Stefan shows off an alpha demo of gameplay and it resembles a first-person wireframe dungeon-crawler (a bit like early <i>Wizardry</i> games) where the player encounters various things and has to make choices. After striking a deal with the publisher, Stefan is left to finish developing his game with a deadline looming in just a few months, and that's where the interactive portion of the movie gets going and begins to branch in all directions as you make decisions for him, and as he starts to go a little insane.</div>
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My video review of <i>Bandersnatch</i>.</div>
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In most "choose your own adventure" books and story games, you're capable of going back to previous choices to undo your decisions, if you realized you picked a bad option or just wanted to see a different alternative. In books, this is done by leaving your finger as a bookmark in the previous section, after you'd flipped forward to the next section, and in games you could always load a previous save point; in both cases, your progress is undone and the material acts as if you never went down those routes at all. <i>Bandersnatch</i> (the movie) realizes that viewers are probably going to want to make different choices in this medium as well (in fact, you'll have to as some choices lead to what are effectively "game over" screens, as opposed to official endings), but adds a creative twist where the game remembers certain events that happen along aborted timelines; if you go back to make different decisions, characters will remember things from the future that haven't happened yet, and familiar scenes will be altered or will lead to new, unexpected directions.</div>
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The story deals with themes of infinite realities and the idea that free will is but an illusion, because according to theory all of our actions and decisions are preordained to happen in a prescribed way due to an infinite number of parallel universes that exist to account for every possible combination of actions and decisions that might ever exist in our lives. In this universe I watch <i>Bandersnatch</i> and then decide to write an article about it, but in another universe I watch <i>Bandersnatch</i> and then forget about it and move on. In the movie, when you go back to make different decisions you're essentially jumping into a parallel universe where certain things may have occurred or be prescribed to occur differently, and different characters will remember different events. It all gets a bit confusing, but the point of the story is that Stefan is literally not in control of his life because we are making his decisions for him, and so his choices aren't really choices.</div>
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The fact that Stefan is developing a video game makes this all more interesting, because choice in video games draws a nice parallel to the subject matter of the movie. In video games, our decisions often times aren't really our own, because we're choosing from a limited selection of options prescribed by the designer, and sometimes we don't even have choices at all. For example, in <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, you simply cannot say "no" to Zelda; you have to say "yes" (at multiple points in the conversation) or else the game simply won't advance. <i>Bandersnatch</i> takes this concept and runs with it, giving you in one instance two apparent choices where only one of them is actually intended to be followed; picking the other option leads to what is essentially a "game over" screen while a character says you picked "wrong path," and the interface tells you to try again. I was a little annoyed with that design at first, but then I realized that it specifically mirrored Stefan's early design in the game where he hadn't even coded a decision path because he couldn't fathom the player picking a particular option. The movie was making a deliberate point about how the things happening to the character are happening to you, as a viewer/player as well, and that you're also feeling the first-hand effects of the type of things the main character is talking about.</div>
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There are even instances where the movie gives you an apparent choice with similar options that will seemingly (and inevitably do) lead to the exact same outcome, and one instance where it actually takes away the binary choice interface to give you but a single choice that you <i><u>have</u></i> to pick. That last example occurs in a flashback, and another character talks about how we can't change the past, but the game is all about changing what's already been done, and later goes back to let you change that scene, so I think that's supposed to be a contrast between actual reality and video game reality while the movie starts becoming increasingly meta and the character starts realizing that he's being controlled by a strange being from the future called Netflix. It's this breaking of the fourth wall that makes this movie so fascinating to me because it makes an effort to involve you, the viewer, in the narrative. You play an active role in shaping the outcome of the story, and the characters begin to acknowledge your presence and you even get to interact with Stefan fairly directly, talking to him through his computer monitor at one point.</div>
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The interactivity seemed like it would be a gimmick early on, and some viewers might even wonder why it needed to take this approach, but I feel like it's almost necessary to drive the point home about free will. Stefan doesn't feel like he's in control of his actions, but at times you're not even in control of the decisions you make in the episode; the movie calls attention to subtle design tropes in video games and then shows them in action in the form of an interactive TV episode. It felt like the more I went back to try and change things or see different outcomes, the more twisted and psychotic it became, almost like the movie was forcing me to go down the darkest paths to advance the story, which is kind of reflected in video game design about how players are sometimes railroaded into specific choices to make the story play out the way the developers intend, and to do that they effectively take choices away from you. Since the show <i>Black Mirror</i> is supposed to be all about the sometimes darker interaction between technology and humanity, it's cool to have an extended episode that makes you feel and experience some of the very themes and subjects that it's dealing with in its story.</div>
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The movie is set in the 1980s, but unlike a lot of other popular media these days, the fact that it's set in 1984 is almost incidental. The movie doesn't call attention to its setting too much, except for one scene where Stefan goes to a shopping mall to buy albums and we're treated to a wider swath of fashion, hairstyles, and music, but it does feel like authentic 1980s thanks to the appropriate use of technology and clothing styles, without coming off as a gimmicky nostalgia trip. In fact, a story of this nature almost needs to be set in the 1980s, because that was the time when a person could design a major blockbuster video game all by themselves in their bedroom. A story like this, for instance, wouldn't work in 2019 because games nowadays are made by teams of 100+ and cost millions of dollars to produce -- the only way a popular video game is being made by one, singular person is if it's a super small indie game, and I'd imagine those types of games don't have enough critical demand from publishers to make life stressful for the designer (the type of thing that leads Stefan to his psychotic breakdowns), especially since these days independent developers can self-publish their games online.</div>
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It's also pleasing to note that the episode handles the subject of video games with care and sensibility. The series creator and lead writer, Charlie Brooker, is a gamer himself, and so the script doesn't go for any of the usual misguided, uninformed stereotypes and cliches like I'm used to from bad serialized TV shows. There are no depictions of gamers as obsessive fanatics who can't tell the difference between video games and reality, and although the movie invents a lot of fictional games, what little actual gameplay we see seems genuinely appropriate for the era. They even use and reference real systems -- I was a bit surprised when the story skipped forward to modern times and someone mentioned playing older games from the 80s with an emulator, naming RetroArch specifically. I'm no programmer, but what Stefan programs for his game looks reasonable to me, and the one line of techno jargon describes a crash as being because certain animated sprites were overloading the video memory, which makes sense.</div>
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The story is perhaps not the most exciting thing that <i>Black Mirror</i> has ever put out, but the interactive nature adds a lot of depth to the experience which kept me deeply engaged for far longer than the suggested 90 minute run time. I think I watched/played it for three hours, or more. This isn't the first time we've seen an interactive movie before, but it's probably one of the better executions, and it's also likely the most popular and widespread instance of an interactive movie. It kind of reminded me of FMV games from the 90s, actually, but with far less actual gameplay. I liked the interactivity of this movie, and I like <i>Black Mirror</i> a lot, so it's something I'd probably welcome in other settings and series, but it's so novel in this instance that I might actually prefer not to see it for a while; this seems like the type of thing that would be easy to screw up, and that wouldn't feel so interesting or satisfying if it's not in the right hands. Making choices for the character, for instance, probably wouldn't work as well if it's not directly paralleling what the character is going through in their own world.</div>
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So if you have a Netflix subscription and you're someone who enjoys video games and science fiction, then <i>Bandersnatch</i> is something I can easily recommend -- the video game subject matter is touched upon in an interesting way, and watching the movie almost feels like playing a story game, at times. Couple those aspects with the usual dark sci-fi tone and execution of <i>Black Mirror</i>, and I found it so engaging that I had to keep exploring as much of it as I could, until I eventually ran out of things to see. Seriously, check this movie out.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-83798821960286026742019-01-25T20:12:00.002-05:002019-01-25T20:12:33.712-05:00Dead Space - A 10 Year Retrospective<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Dead Space</i> hails from 2008 as a bit of a cross between <i>System Shock 2</i> and <i>Resident Evil 4</i>, if you were to take the slow-paced over-the-shoulder combat system from <i>RE4</i> and put it in a space horror setting reminiscent of <i>SS2</i>. According to <a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/how-resident-evil-4-turned-system-shock-3-into-dead-space/">interviews</a> with the development team, Visceral Games, <i>Dead Space</i> was originally being designed with the hope that it could become <i>System Shock 3</i>, but after playing <i>Resident Evil 4</i>, their eyes were opened to new possibilities, and thus the game shifted from more of an RPG focus to an action-horror focus.</div>
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This was around the time that horror games started shifting from more traditional survival-horror games where players controlled a feeble survivor with limited resources, to controlling badass killing machines with a full arsenal of weapons, when the focus shifted more from making the player feel so scared and vulnerable that you might prefer to avoid combat whenever possible, to glorifying the combat and making the thrill of killing these terrifying enemies the main reward. <i>Resident Evil 4</i> ushered in this new era of action-centric horror games, and <i>Dead Space</i> was one of many subsequent games to pick up that torch and carry the trend onward.</div>
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I played <i>Dead Space</i> for the first time in 2010, but that was so long ago that I don't remember much about it. I know that I liked the game, generally speaking, but wished that it could've focused a little more on its horror side of the equation, instead of leaning so heavily on action and jumpscares. With my newsfeed recently filling up with articles celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the original <i>Dead Space</i>, I figured it was time to refresh my memory and see how much my opinion on it has changed, if at all, and to see how well the game holds up a decade later.</div>
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My video review of <i>Dead Space</i></div>
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<i>Dead Space</i> begins as many horror games do, with a slow and gradual introduction that aims to lay the atmosphere on as thick as possible before the threat becomes apparent and the monsters start coming out in droves to murder you. Playing as a spaceship engineer by the name of Isaac Clarke, you arrive with a small crew on board the USG Ishimura, a colossal "planet-cracker" mining vessel orbiting a remote planet that sent out a distress signal before cutting all radio contact, with the ostensible goal of figuring out what went wrong and repairing the Ishimura. Once on board, you find the bloody remains of crew members and discover audio logs suggesting some type of alien incursion, and before long you're being attacked by the reanimated corpses of the crew, now sprouting alien appendages. Predictably, things go wrong and you get trapped on board the Ishimura, thus cuing the rest of the game where you have to explore the ship, get its various systems working, kill a bunch of aliens, and find a way off without getting yourself killed.</div>
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The story doesn't do much for me because the whole thing feels like a standard horror setup, where the design focus was clearly to make a scary action game more so than to tell a good story -- the story is just a premise to get you into these tense and frightening situations, and a vehicle to advance the gameplay forward into new scenarios. The game has two main things going on, in terms of the story: the underlying mystery of how the alien Necromorphs™ came to be on the Ishimura, and Isaac's motivation to be there in the first place, that being the fact that his girlfriend Nicole was stationed on the Ishimura when the outbreak occurred. So, throughout the game you get glimpses of contact from Nicole, who's seemingly still alive, and unearth hints that the Ishimura may have knowingly been someplace they weren't supposed to be, doing something they weren't supposed to be doing.</div>
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That's all fine and good -- you can actually read a lot into the Nicole side of things, if you really think about it -- but both sides of the main story have major twists that feel way too predictable because there aren't enough red herrings to make you think otherwise. Spoiler alert: if the game is consistently going out of its way to explain Unitology to you, it's probably because they're behind the alien incursion; if the game is making repeated references to an artifact found on an alien planet called the Marker, it probably has something to do with the aliens who're now onboard the ship; seeing spooky visions of Nicole randomly appear out of nowhere and hearing random whisperings while she beckons for you to "make us whole again" probably means that she's either dead or possessed by aliens; if one of your partners is constantly undermining the other and passive-aggressively trying to steer the mission a certain way, they probably have ulterior motives.</div>
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I'm especially annoyed with how often the game puts you on the other side of some barrier when interacting with other living NPCs. It's almost like they wanted to leave the player constantly in control of the character, for the sake of immersion, but didn't trust the player not to shoot important NPCs, or they wanted the player to be alone and isolated all the time, for the sake of the horror atmosphere, but needed other living characters to be part of their story. It's a bit like trying to mix water and oil, only to find that they don't really go together; you still end up with both water and oil in one container, but they don't blend very well. There's a moment early on, for instance, when you conveniently get separated from your partners, and they send you to go fix the tram system so that you all can get around the ship, only to leave you behind instead of waiting a few more minutes for you to catch up. I could understand if they were being attacked and had to do so for their own safety, but at that moment there's no threat and they're actually the safest they've ever been since arriving. Maybe that's their goal, though, seeing as one of them is secretly a mole there for nefarious purposes, but it feels more like a contrived excuse from a design standpoint to make sure you stay by yourself for a while longer.</div>
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Still, the lore and world-building are pretty good, here, and deserve some recognition. Even though most of the entire crew is dead by the time you arrive, you can get a pretty good feel for what kind of vessel the Ishimura is and what goes on in it, thanks to the variety of audio and text logs available to you. None of the characters or situations in these logs are particularly memorable, but they give you enough glimpses into the operations and functions of the Ishimura that, taken in conjunction with the environmental design, you get a good idea of the type of universe that this game takes place in. There's a sub-plot, for instance, about a popular religion called Unitology that eventually becomes a main plot point, and it comes off feeling pretty natural in the context of the world. Sometimes, these audio and text logs can feel awkwardly forced in games, and I hate it when games rely on these logs as their main source of storytelling, but fortunately <i>Dead Space</i> avoids these two pitfalls by making their logs feel more like supplemental material. Then you've got all the signage indicating popular movies, products, and magazines that people in this world would indulge themselves in, and it becomes a little easier to believe that this is a real place.</div>
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The atmosphere does a great job of immersing you in the setting, too. I love the complete lack of on-screen HUD, with all the information you need being logically placed on your character model, and your menu screens being holographic projections in the 3D space for your character to see. Sound design is particularly on point, with constant ambient sound effects like clanking and groaning metal that makes it feel like the ship is literally alive, and makes you anxious of what monsters might pop out, when and where. The sound effects are so good that they turn perfectly <a href="https://youtu.be/ic9nHHaHziw?t=6886">harmless, empty rooms</a> into some of the most tense and stressful areas of the game. Meanwhile there's plenty of moody lighting and fog, although I wish everything could be even darker and use more dynamic lighting. It looks great for its time and still holds up well, but this is a game just begging for a modern remaster or graphical overhaul to bring its great atmosphere to its full potential. The visual aesthetics can get a little bland at times, though. There are some standout moments like the control deck and the green rooms, but you spend the bulk of the game staring at dark gray, industrial designs that make it look like the ship was deliberately designed by its engineers to be a horribly depressing place to live and work, and which would eventually become the backdrop for a space horror game.</div>
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The ship's actual design doesn't strike me as logically immersive, either, since it feels more like video game level design than an actual, functioning ship. A lot of areas feel nonsensical and impractical when looked at from an in-world perspective, like the medical wing which seems to have a waiting lobby with a view looking directly into open surgery tables, and which also requires you to walk through the surgery room to reach any other area in the medical wing like the long-term patient beds or the intensive care unit. Then you've got a lot of pointlessly twisting hallways, oddly-placed doors, an elevator that opens into another door, incomplete walkways that can only be crossed by moving giant magnetic energy beam platforms into position, the need to go through an airlock into the exposed vacuum of space just to take a 10 second walk into another airlock to reach another interior room where part of the engines is housed, and so on. It all gives me flashbacks to the <a href="http://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot.com/2011/07/horrible-architectureengineering-in.html">horrifying level design and architecture in the original <i>Half-Life</i></a>. To top it all off, the whole ship feels like it's connected by linear hallways as opposed to a more circuited hub system, so getting around the ship can be a bit of a nuisance. You have to backtrack to previously explored areas a few times, but side routes and doors randomly lock and get sealed off, so it doesn't feel like a free-form exploration system because you're literally being routed through linear paths the whole time. Consequently, the Ishimura doesn't feel as immersive as something like the Von Braun from <i>System Shock 2</i>, or Talos I from <i>Prey</i> (2017).</div>
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None of that really matters too much, though, considering the action and the horror are the two main selling points. As an action game, <i>Dead Space</i> is pretty good; the weapons are all pretty satisfying to use, and the game's Dismemberment System™ makes for a fun and unique way to battle enemies. Instead of the usual "aim for the head or torso" gameplay ordeal, in <i>Dead Space</i> you're looking for appendages to hack off using plasma cutters, rotary saws, line beams, and so on, and with the game's variety of enemy types you're always being introduced to some new threat that has slightly different attacks and weak points. This makes the first encounter with each of the various necromorphs a little unsettling because you have no idea what they're capable of, or even what you have to do to kill them, except through experimentation; it's a bit like a mini-puzzle, except it's actively engaging with a grotesque monster that wants to kill you. The controls feel tight and responsive, if you're using a controller, at least, and enemies react quite viscerally to being shredded to bits, so it's generally pretty satisfying to kill the enemies in this game.</div>
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As a horror game, however, I don't find it that horrifying. It's gory and grotesque, sure, and some moments can be kind of spooky or unsettling, but they give you so many tools and resources to deal with the necromorphs that they cease to feel scary after your first encounter. In fact, they start to become more annoying than scary after a very short while on account of the predictable pattern of "things spawning out of nowhere in front of you while something also silently appears behind you." The whole game is basically a linear monster-closet corridor-crawler with enemies popping out from vents and walls to jump scare you, which feels like cheap scare tactics. It also makes exploration somewhat routine when you can predict when and where enemies will appear, because pretty much any time you see a hallway with a sparkly item at the end of it you can safely guess something will drop suddenly out of the ceiling to ambush you, while something else slowly moves in from where you just were. Perhaps ironically, the game is at its scariest when you aren't being ambushed by monsters, like when one is mysteriously already present in the level when you walk into a room, and then slowly turns the corner and leaves, or when the game breaks its patterns and surprisingly doesn't spawn an enemy in a predictable spot. Besides that, there's no real tension in the survival-horror aspect because the game loads you up with so much ammo and supplies that, even in hard mode, I was constantly swimming in resources.</div>
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It's really cool how the weapons are all supposed to be tools a space engineer would use (except for the combat rifle, which is just obviously a weapon), being repurposed to fight aliens, and I love the branching upgrade paths that require you to decide routes to reach your desired upgrades, and which types of upgrades you want to prioritize (rather than just linearly upgrading damage, you have to upgrade other things along the way) but unfortunately it's all rendered moot by the fact that they're pretty much all inferior to the starter weapon, the Plasma Cutter. Other weapons can be fun and useful, too, but the starting pistol is just so useful and so versatile that it made it hard for me to justify branching out to other weapons because they weren't as effective at killing enemies, or required extensive upgrading before becoming practical (but you don't know that until you upgrade them all the way), or their ammo was too rare/expensive/space-consuming.</div>
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The game throws a steady supply of small mechanical changes your way, periodically introducing new weapons, new enemies, and new scripted gameplay mechanics (like zero gravity, rail shooting sequences, escort missions, a couple of big bosses, etc) which should in theory help to keep the game interesting from start to finish, but it all feels like a bunch of variations on the same things. Once you've fought an enemy once, it'll follow the same strategy and pattern for the rest of the game, and the environments don't often do much to mix things up, since you're typically either in a tight hallway or a wide open room. There is mechanical variety, certainly, but the changes never feel so drastic as to breathe all new life into the game because it always feels like you're in the same environments fighting the same enemies with the same weapons the whole game. Compare this to <i>Resident Evil 4</i>, which <i>Dead Space</i> was clearly influenced by -- that game changes locations multiple times, going from the village to the castle to the mercenary island, completely changes the type of enemies in each location, and has something like 50-100% more bosses, and (in my opinion) better, more memorable setpieces.</div>
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<i>Dead Space's</i> unique setpieces come off feeling awkward and forced, and in each case I came out of it thinking "that was weird" or "I'm glad that's over." Things like running along the exterior hull of the ship dodging asteroids while having to replenish a waning oxygen supply amounted to "run to the next wall, stand there for 10 seconds, then run to the next one, stand there for 10 seconds, repeat until you reach the other side." Shooting down asteroids with the turrets controlled awkwardly, and felt like so much of a break from the core gameplay that it didn't belong. Others aren't so bad, but none of them really stand up to <i>Resident Evil 4's</i> best moments, and I've apparently forgotten most of the others a month and a half after finishing the game. Every now and then you need to solve puzzles to advance, but these mostly amount to "put a thing in a thing" using kinesis, which lets you pick up and move objects remotely, and/or stasis, which slows an object's movement to a halt, and therefore aren't very satisfying. Some setpieces and formula changes are actually pretty good, like when you have to hunt down the plague bearers, or when you fight the leviathan, or when the tentacle grabs you and pulls you through the hallway, but that last setpiece gets repeated two more times so it loses its luster rather quickly. The final boss, for instance, is an awesome spectacle, but is a complete push-over and therefore fell completely flat for me.</div>
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The PC port leaves a lot to be desired as well, feeling at times like a broken afterthought. Mouse aiming feels horribly slow and imprecise, almost like it's emulating a control stick -- it takes huge movements with the mouse to move your aim even slightly, and it doesn't seem to account for different speeds of movement, either, apart from needing to be above a certain minimum threshold to even move at all, meaning that trying to make small adjustments to your aim can sometimes lead to you not moving your aim at all. I tried various fixes, but in the end I felt like I had to use a controller to get any kind of bearable performance out of the aiming. A lot of keyboard controls are also permanently bound to specific buttons and can't be remapped, some of which are a bit awkward and nonsensical like having to shift your hand over to the arrow keys to navigate your inventory and other holo-projected screens. Vertical sync screws the game up, too, forcing the game into a stuttery and unbearable 30 frames-per-second that also increases load times ten-fold or more -- loading a save file usually took me about 30 seconds, and opening a door would sometimes take 10 seconds or more. With v-sync turned off, both of those actions were practically instant. Unfortunately, turning v-sync off seemed to break some of the physics, leading to a lot of graphical glitches that were at times more disturbing than some of the game's horror imagery.</div>
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Playing <i>Dead Space</i> 10 years after its release, it's clear that it was a good game for its time, and it still holds up well. Despite its age, it feels like a modern game, and its design elements feel timelessly well-executed. I had some issues with it back when I played it in 2010 (namely, the over-reliance on jump scares and monster closet level design) that still hold true today, but that might just be me wishing the game were something it isn't. It isn't the horror masterpiece everyone claims it to be, at least not in my eyes -- it probably wouldn't make it into my top 10 favorite horror games, but I can see why it appeals to a lot of people. When viewed as an action game with strong sci-fi horror theming, however, it works really well, and in that light I think it deserves the legacy it's achieved over the past decade, and probably is one of the stronger games to come out of that console generation.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-23181232517323074132019-01-15T05:39:00.000-05:002019-01-15T05:58:28.208-05:00Impressions of the Resident Evil 2 Remake: One Shot Demo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake is right around the corner, and so Capcom have launched a 30-minute demo featuring a slice of gameplay from the full game, in which you control Leon Kennedy exploring the Raccoon City Police Department fighting zombies and solving puzzles to find a way to advance. As the "One Shot" title implies, you have one shot to play this 30-minute scenario; a timer starts counting down once you launch into the game, and once your 30 minutes are up you get booted out to the menu with a "Thanks for playing" message. You cannot start over for a new 30 minutes, unless you launch the demo on a new account.</div>
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I'm not a big fan of the 30-minute time limit, because I usually like to play these games pretty slowly, making sure I'm taking in all the details, exploring everywhere possible, and trying all of the outcomes. The side-effect of the timer is that I played the game a little differently than I would have a normal demo, since I was essentially rushing to get through as much of it as I could, and so my mind was less focused on the game itself and more on my playing of the demo. There's potential with a time limit in a survival-horror game to enhance the stress and tension, and to force more interesting decisions when it comes to risk-versus-reward, but I never really felt that in this demo, so it feels more like a marketing gimmick to stir up hype and get people more interested in the game.</div>
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The remake seems to have been done in the engine used for <i>Resident Evil 7</i>, so it has the sleek and smooth feel of <i>RE7</i>, but in a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective (a bit like <i>Resident Evil 4</i>) with <i>Resident Evil 2</i>-style puzzles and exploration. <i>Resident Evil 7</i> already felt like a return to form for the series, with the Baker estate feeling reminiscent of the mansion from <i>RE1</i>, but <i>RE2</i> seems to be taking it one step further in going back to the roots, which would make sense since it is a remake of <i>RE2</i>, after all, arguably the best game in the original series. So on first impressions, it seems like the remake will blend a bunch of different elements from three of the best games in the series.<br />
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My video review of the demo</div>
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The remake seems to emphasize puzzles and exploration more than the more recent <i>Resident Evils</i>, with a lot of backtracking and wandering into different areas to find key items that will be used in previously explored areas. The puzzles, so far, aren't all that tricky, and basically just amount to picture matching and recognition (the spade key will open the spade door, match the combination on the lock to the pictures in the sketch) but there's a hint of logical reasoning involved, like in realizing that you can cut some tape to open a control box now that you have a knife. This is the kind of stuff I'd like to see more of, but so far it looks like the puzzles will all be telegraphed "lock and key" puzzles, or "match the picture" puzzles based on obvious hints given to you by inventory or intel items. As such, none of the puzzles in the demo were particularly satisfying to solve, although one did take a few more minutes to figure out than I'd like to admit.</div>
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Combat is supposed to be the major improvement in the remake. Combat was always a little clunky and imprecise in the originals, with fixed camera angles and no way to accurately aim your weapon leading to a lot of pointing your character in the general direction and hitting the "shoot" button while hoping the target dies in time. With the remake's over-the-shoulder perspective, it's now possible to aim far more accurately, meaning success or failure lies more on your own personal skill with the combat system. While this does make the combat feel far more responsive, it also has the side-effect of making combat much easier -- in the demo I was able to land a 90% headshot rate, and basically never felt challenged or stressed by any enemy encounters. The zombies don't move very fast, or stagger around unpredictably enough to make headshots any bit of a challenge. The only time I took damage was when a zombie ambushed me from out of nowhere, or when I mistakenly thought I'd killed a zombie that later got back up.</div>
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Shooting a zombo in an office</div>
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The controls for combat feel a little weird, too, with a slightly floaty quality to the mouse aiming. I think it has to do with the fact that your character's arms (and therefore, the gun and Leon's head) move at a different rate than your camera and targeting reticle, so it always feels like Leon's lagging a little behind. It might also just be that it doesn't feel as tight or rigid as I'm used to from other, similar games like <i>RE4</i> and <i>Dead Space</i>. The game has a ton of options and settings, which is a welcome feature for a PC game that often gets the short end of the stick when it comes to these console ports, but I don't think any settings will change the general feel of those animations and movements.</div>
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Besides that, the combat just doesn't feel weighty or satisfying to me. Part of that's the floaty feeling of the aiming, but the weapons (pistol, shotgun) don't seem to pack much of a punch; there's no recoil when firing the pistol, it sounds kind of like a capgun, and zombies barely react to being shot in the head. It worked out alright in the original games because of those low-poly models and the imprecise aiming (it felt logical that when the zombies didn't react, it was because your character wasn't landing critical shots), but in this game with the hyper-realistic and gory graphics, combined with the close-up view from your own character's perspective, it looks and feels weird when you land several headshots on a zombie and it just kind of flinches slightly. Their animations feel vaguely similar to the molded from <i>RE7</i>, but it kind of worked <i>RE7</i> because they were, well, molded, and not regular humans being brought back to life, so it's easier to suspend disbelief that a black moldy blob could survive a bullet to the "head" than a zombie in <i>RE2</i>.</div>
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As I said previously, the combat never felt challenging or stressful to me, and that extends to the whole demo -- the only stress I felt was trying to finish the demo in under 30 minutes. It's supposed to be a survival-horror game, but I never once felt scared for my safety, or worried about what I'd encounter up ahead, or disturbed by any of the events. You only encounter zombies in limited numbers at a time (usually 1-3) which is normally what I prefer in these types of games because that usually makes each individual encounter more important, but the zombies in this demo pose no real threat, and the game loads you up with so much ammo and healing items that you could easily dispatch every enemy you come across with zero concern for conserving resources, or worrying about your health. Maybe that's just because it's a demo, and it'll be harder in the full game, but there was no way to tell from just the demo itself. Fortunately, the game seems to be using typewriter saves, but I'm assuming they won't limit your saves via ink ribbons like in the originals -- I encountered no ink ribbons in the demo, and you had unlimited saving in <i>RE7</i> until unlocking harder difficulties, so Capcom may follow that precedent in <i>RE2</i>.</div>
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A safe room with typewriter and stash</div>
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I'm also not fond of the way the third-person camera randomly switches positions; sometimes it's off to the right of Leon's shoulder, other times it centers perfectly behind him. I think it can also zoom in a little closer or pull back depending on the environment, which is fine but I don't like it when it's centered because then your body blocks your view of where you're going. Plus, the game doesn't let you control when you use your flashlight, and I don't like the game turning my flashlight off because I like having that dynamic range when I'm exploring -- it helps to see, of course, but it just looks nice having a light illuminating a dark area. Even when the game turns the flashlight off, it's sometimes in rooms that are evenly lit with really dim light, or that only have a single desk lamp illuminating the room, to the point that I feel like having the flashlight on would be beneficial for the character.</div>
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Despite these criticisms, I enjoyed the <i>One Shot</i> demo overall, and it does seem to paint a promising picture for the <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake. I like how it seems to blend styles and elements from three of my favorite <i>Resident Evil</i> games, but it wasn't so gripping or compelling as to make me want to go spend $60 on the full game. I think if I were to play <i>Resident Evil 2</i>, I'd rather just play the original game for now, and come back to the remake once it's on sale and has had its routine share of updates and DLC already added to it, so that I don't miss out on those patches and extra content in my first playthrough. Still, <i>Resident Evil 7</i> was such a great experience when it first came out, that I might possibly feel tempted to buy in and give the <i>Resident Evil 2</i> remake a shot.<br />
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-57268026783574894392019-01-08T17:38:00.001-05:002019-01-08T17:38:54.391-05:00Introducing Live Streaming on Twitch, YouTube<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm pleased to announce that as of yesterday, <i>The Nocturnal Rambler</i> is now also on <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/thenocturnalrambler">Twitch</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClNe40Z_ufT3GOdR3Jirbvw">YouTube</a>, where I'm currently live streaming a playthrough of <i>Gothic</i>, one of my all-time favorite games. Video content had never really interested me in the past, but I've decided to give it a shot as a way to hopefully grow and expand, while also just having some extra fun. Right now I'm basically just doing a live "let's play" format where I talk to myself and give commentary about the game as I play, and I'll be doing that for a full playthrough of <i>Gothic,</i> and for most or all the PC games that I play in the future.</div>
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Last night I played <i>Gothic</i> for about four hours while <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/thenocturnalrambler/videos">live streaming on Twitch</a>, and am also in the process of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dKhVqW6Ij8&list=PLmb8lFvHN49MkW3mvM5l_IxkW8uTFLGRl">uploading those videos to YouTube</a>, so if you're interested in watching me play and hearing me talk, you can follow me on Twitch to be notified when I go live or subscribe on YouTube if you'd rather watch at your own leisure. I'll be playing most nights and some random afternoons (I'm on the east coast of the US, GMT-5), so be on the lookout because there'll be new videos on a pretty regular basis. And who knows, maybe with this new recorded footage I can start doing video reviews to supplement my written ones. </div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-31285052594274906192018-11-27T20:36:00.001-05:002018-11-28T02:44:41.927-05:00A Review of the Majora's Mask 3DS Remake, and Why Majora's Mask is My Favorite Zelda Game<div dir="ltr">
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<i>Majora's Mask</i> is a bit of a black sheep in the <i>Legend of Zelda</i> series; some absolutely love it, while others find it too cumbersome and weird to enjoy. As a direct sequel to <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, <i>Majora's Mask</i> reuses the same engine and similar gameplay elements while recycling a ton of graphical and mechanical assets from <i>OOT</i>, but places them all in a new world, Termina, with a central gimmick of having a three day time limit constantly ticking in the background as you work to save the world from total destruction while the moon slowly falls on a collision course towards Termina. A bit like the Harold Ramis and Bill Murray film <i>Groundhog Day</i>, all of Termina's NPCs follow the same scripted schedule over those three days, and you have the power to reset time to the beginning of the cycle to do things differently and change people's lives, if only temporarily, until the next reset.</div>
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With a fairly dark, depressing atmosphere, a story that has nothing to do with the usual Zelda, Ganon, and Hyrule motifs, and more demanding, sometimes obtuse gameplay, it's no surprise that <i>Majora's Mask</i> isn't universally loved. It's a pretty weird game, after all, and I can totally understand it not being everyone's cup of tea, but it's those uniquely weird idiosyncrasies that make it my favorite <i>Zelda</i> game. It is a bit of an acquired taste, though; I actually didn't like it much at first, because it felt like too much of a weird departure from <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, a game with which I was fanatically obsessed at the time. But over time I came to appreciate its differences, and realized that it's actually better than even the more modern <i>Zelda</i> games in a lot of ways. As I was playing <i>Breath of the Wild</i>, for instance, I couldn't help but occasionally wish I were playing <i>Majora's Mask</i>, instead.</div>
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With the N64 quickly becoming more and more obsolete, the <i>Majora's Mask 3DS</i> remake aims to bring <i>Majora's Mask</i> to a new audience on a platform that is both readily available and also playable, while also improving the original game's accessibility with a bunch of quality of life improvements that make it not only easier to play, but also easier to understand. I was inclined at first to say that the 3DS remake is now the definitive way to play <i>Majora's Mask</i> due to the superior graphical quality, technical performance, and user interface, but unfortunately Nintendo also decided to make some radical changes to things like overall difficulty, boss fights, and transformation masks, which leaves me more conflicted about whether I'd actually recommend <i>Majora's Mask 3DS</i> to first time players.</div>
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">W</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">HY</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <i><span style="font-size: x-large;">M</span></i></span><i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">AJORA'S</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">M</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">ASK</span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">IS MY FAVORITE</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">Z</span></i></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>ELDA</i></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">GAME</span></span><br />
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Before we get into my review of the 3DS remake, I want to take a moment to establish the basics of what makes <i>Majora's Mask</i> such a good <i>Zelda</i> game and why I like it so much. These following statements apply equally to the original game as well as the remake.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>A rare direct sequel in the Zelda universe</i></span><br />
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The <i>Zelda</i> timeline is notoriously convoluted, with so many games in the series retelling the same story but in a fresh new rendition (basically a "soft reboot") or being completely unrelated to other games in the series. Even when a game seems to follow established lore from previous games, it's often so far removed, being set hundreds or thousands of years later, that it almost feels like its own entity. <i>Majora's Mask</i> is a rare case of a direct sequel taking place immediately after the previous game, and definitively featuring the exact same incarnation of Link. And it's not even open for debate; the intro text teases that Link is possibly beginning this adventure seeking out his former fairy companion, Navi, following the conclusion of <i>Ocarina of Time's</i> finale when she's seen flying off and leaving him in the Temple of Time; a flashback shows Zelda teaching Link the Song of Time as a parting gift as he leaves Hyrule; and the Skull Kid (who acts as the primary antagonist of the game) later references a specific event in <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, in which you play Saria's Song for him to earn a piece of heart.</div>
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This may not seem like a big deal, but it's a pretty rare occurrence in the <i>Zelda</i> series and adds a lot more emotional weight to the game. I feel more attachment to this Link, for instance, and more inclined to act the hero and see him through his quest because this Link and I have already been through so much in <i>Ocarina of Time</i>. This Link actually has a backstory that I know about and experienced first hand, unlike for instance the Link in <i>Breath of Wild</i>, who for all intents and purposes is the usual "blank slate hero" whose background we only learn about through random, sporadic flashbacks. Again, it's not a major selling point or even a defining feature, but it's a small touch that I really appreciate. </div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Recycled Ocarina of Time assets</i></span></div>
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Some may actually consider this aspect a negative, arguing that it's cheap and derivative ("these lazy game designers just reused all the stuff they already made in <i>OOT</i> instead of making a whole new game") but this is yet another thing that I find fascinating about <i>Majora's Mask</i>. I find it interesting to see alternate versions of the same characters in what is kind of a parallel universe, because it expands on the creativity and scope of the original source material when you see old faces and assets being used in brand new ways, like the bosses from the Spirit Temple now being potion-brewing business partners, or the random guy running around Hyrule Field whom you sell the bunny hood to now being the town mailman. Besides, it's fun to recognize familiar things, since so many things in this game feel like easter eggs, even if they're fairly obvious. In a way, it almost feels like a <i>Master Quest</i> style nostalgia trip, taking the same game we already know and love and remixing it into something completely different.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>No Ganon or Zelda or Hyrule or Triforces</i></span><br />
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With most games in the <i>Zelda</i> series dealing with the same tired premise of having to get the Master Sword to earn the Triforce to stop Ganon and rescue Princess Zelda and save Hyrule, it's just so refreshing to play a <i>Zelda</i> game that doesn't have a single ounce of those same old cliches (Zelda does make an appearance, but it's for like 10 seconds in a flashback). Despite the reused assets from <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, <i>Majora's Mask</i> feels like a completely unique setting with a unique antagonist and a unique goal and unique central gameplay mechanism.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>It's just so weird</i></span><br />
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I think it's safe to say that <i>Majora's Mask</i> is easily the weirdest <i>Zelda</i> game ever made (though <i>Link's Awakening</i> might come close with its fourth-wall breaking <i>Mario</i> references making it sometimes feel like it's almost not a <i>Zelda</i> game). We've got things like the hand in the toilet, carrying the Deku Princess back to the Palace in a bottle, the general look of the giants (basically being giant heads with no bodies), aliens abducting cows, a dying zora getting up and telling you his story in the form of a guitar solo rock ballad, talking to stalchildren, sniffing someone's underwear to find mushrooms, pretty much everything about Tingle, the Elegy of Emptiness statues, and so on. A lot of things in this game feel almost out of place in a <i>Zelda</i> game, and are downright bizarre regardless of the context.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Darker, heavier, more mature atmosphere</i></span><br />
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Piggybacking on the overall weirdness of <i>Majora's Mask</i> is how relatively dark it is, not only for a <i>Zelda</i> game but for a game in general. Its main themes deal heavily with death and grief, and it treats these themes with a very serious tone. With the threat of the moon about to destroy the world, you see people going through various stages of panic and denial, and it makes the game's central premise feel so much more real and grave. All of Ikana Canyon reeks of death, and the little girl hiding her father-turned-gibdo in a closet may be one of the most disturbing images in any <i>Zelda</i> game. The moment when, on the third night, Cremia implies that she's going to get Romani drunk so that she won't have to suffer when they all die horribly is shockingly grim. When Skull Kid curses Link and turns him into a deku scrub, it feels like something out of an artistic horror movie. This is of course not to mention all of the people who die before your very eyes, or the spirits of the dead with whom you commune to try to solve their unfinished business. There's a lot of emotion here, too, which is impressive considering how relatively simple the character interactions are. With the <i>Zelda</i> series being mostly light-hearted, kid-friendly affairs, it's just interesting to see a <i>Zelda</i> game break the mold so intensely.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Shows you actual consequences for failure</i></span><br />
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In a lot of games, the main threat is merely an implication of something that might happen if you don't fulfill your role as a hero and save the day. But, in the end, these games are scripted in such a way that you literally can't fail, and so that everything will eventually turn out right no matter what you do. The repeating three day time limit in <i>Majora's Mask</i>, in which everything in the game continues forward on its own schedule regardless of what you do, ensures that you won't have enough time to solve everybody's problems, or even to save the world, meaning you will constantly encounter fail states for quests and characters that you just couldn't get to in time. The first time you enter Romani Ranch, for instance, will likely be on the third day before you have access to powder kegs to get there earlier, at which point the alien invasion has already happened and Romani has already been abducted, left in a permanently dazed and confused state by the time you arrive.</div>
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You see a lot of consequences for things you missed off-screen, but it's also possible for you to outright fail a lot of the game's scenarios and be stuck with those consequences until resetting the cycle and trying again. Anju and Kafei's questline, for instance, spans the entire three day cycle and requires a bunch of different actions at specific times on your part, and it's possible to screw it up in multiple different ways, each of which will have a unique outcome for those characters. If you're playing through a main dungeon and simply run out of time, then you won't get to finish it and will have to start all over again on a new cycle. If you wait for time to completely expire, or play the Oath to Order before recruiting all four of the giants, then you actually watch the world get destroyed. The fact that <i>Majora's Mask</i> actually allows you to fail, and shows you a variety of outcomes for those failures, gives your actions so much more of an impact.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>A truly dynamic world</i></span><br />
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The world in <i>Majora's Mask</i> constantly changes, with or without your input. All of its NPCs go about their daily routines, which change from day to day, and world conditions will also change from day to day. You can see the construction for the Carnival of Time progress each day, as well as watch the townsfolk become progressively more concerned over the threat of the moon crashing until most of the town eventually evacuates by the third day. Interactions and quest opportunities at Romani Ranch will be completely different if you're there on the first day, or the third day. Besides that, you actually effect real change in the world as you complete quests; when you beat Snowhead Temple you end the winter and bring spring back to the mountain, which not only changes the look of everything but also opens up new gameplay possibilities. Compare this to, say, <i>Ocarina of Time</i> where beating the Water Temple never unfreezes Zora's Domain, or <i>Breath of the Wild</i> where beating the Vah Medoh dungeon does practically nothing.</div>
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<i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">So many side quests</i><br />
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One of my favorite things in <i>Zelda</i> games is exploring off the main path for optional side content, and <i>Majora's Mask</i> really shines in this department since most of it actually consists of optional side quests and activities. There's such a strong emphasis on side content that I honestly feel like, if you're skipping the optional content in favor of simply following the main progression through the story, then you're missing the entire point of the game and robbing yourself of the game's unique experience. The side content is plentiful, here, but it's also of great quality, with so many quests and activities tying directly in with the game's central premise, providing opportunities for lore and world-building which helps to make the world feel more real and lived-in, in addition to adding more weight and significance to the main plot. And unlike the side content in some other games, the quests and activities here are generally pretty interesting. The spider houses are all fun mini-dungeons with self-contained item collecting challenges; the Anju and Kafei questline is probably the best side quest in any <i>Zelda</i> game; I love collecting all the masks and finding out their unique uses; and so on.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Difficulty and challenge</i></span><br />
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<i>Majora's Mask</i> is more challenging than your typical <i>Zelda</i> game, and this, I feel, makes it more rewarding to play. Yeah, sometimes the difficulty is a little cumbersome -- the limited save system is certainly a culprit, and figuring out what to do to trigger and/or solve some side quests can be incredibly obtuse -- but I find it more satisfying to discover these things on my own in a game world that isn't going to hold my hand than when I'm being dragged by the nose through all of the game's content. There may be only four dungeons in this game, but they're all bigger and harder than typical <i>Zelda</i> dungeons, usually with a central gimmick (the central column in Snowhead, water flow in Great Bay, and the gravity inversion in the Stone Tower) adding extra depth and complexity to the challenge. Not to mention, collecting the 15 fairies in each dungeon and having to do it all under a time limit. Getting to 100% in this game feels like a real accomplishment.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Masks and transformations</i></span><br />
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Except for the repeating three-day time cycle, the masks and transformations are <i>Majora's Mask's</i> primary gimmick -- the word "mask" is even right in the title. I like the mask system because it's a collectible item system that also adds gameplay functionality to the mix, like using the bunny hood to run faster, or the bomb mask if you're out of bombs, or the stone mask to avoid detection. A lot of them are just "lock and key" puzzles where you wear a mask to earn a heart piece, basically a self-fulfilling reward for earning the mask which will then become useless, but the transformation masks are pretty exciting and add a lot of interesting mechanical variety to the gameplay, essentially quadrupling the amount of actions and maneuvers you can perform as Link. Coming from <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, it's such a cool concept to be able to play as a zora or goron (and even a deku, which was completely unexpected), and it's also nice how those transformations play into platforming and puzzle-solving in and out of dungeons, with each mask playing an important role in and leading up to its respective dungeon in addition to its usual versatility elsewhere.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>So many hidden possibilities</i></span><br />
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With the world state having so many different variable conditions based on what day it is, what quest stages you’re on, what character interactions you’ve had previously in that cycle, and even what mask you’re wearing, there are a ton of little interactions and exchanges that you might never see if you’re not meticulously checking every possibility, or looking things up with a guide. You could, for instance, talk to the same NPC multiple times every day wearing different masks and after completing various stages of various quests and get a different reaction from them every time. Even having played the game multiple times over the years and feeling confident in knowing about every possibility, I was still surprised at little things I hadn’t seen before because I never thought to go back to talk to certain NPCs at certain times. This amount of detail just adds to the feeling of discovery and the fun of exploration.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>In summary</i></span><br />
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<i>Majora's Mask</i> is fairly unique in the <i>Zelda</i> series, and I like it because of its differences. Each <i>Zelda</i> game has something that makes it stand out from the rest of them, but it's usually just one or two defining traits, whereas <i>Majora's Mask</i> feels a little more removed from the formula. This is somewhat ironic considering it shares so many similarities with <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, but I have to respect Nintendo's decision to do something radically different with <i>Majora's Mask</i> rather than just churning out another <i>Ocarina of Time</i>. After all, innovation is the thing that has kept this series alive and interesting for so long, and I would consider <i>Majora's Mask</i> to be one the most innovative and original in the entire series. I like most <i>Zelda</i> games, but <i>Majora’s Mask</i> just has a special charm, a unique personality that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the series, or in other games for that matter. I particularly love the “repeating time loop” gameplay system, because even though everything is rigidly scripted to happen the same way every time, it makes the world feel so much more dynamic and alive because things actually change as time passes and as you do things in the world.</div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span><span style="font-size: large;"> REVIEW OF THE </span><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">M</span><span style="font-size: large;">AJORA'S </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">M</span><span style="font-size: large;">ASK 3DS</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"> REMAKE</span></span><br />
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For the most part, the 3DS remake remains the same <i>Majora’s Mask</i> as the original N64 release from 2000, but with better graphics and performance. The original was so resource-intensive that it actually required <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_accessories#Expansion_Pak_(NUS-007)">the memory expansion</a>, but even then it still pushed the N64 to its limits; I still remember it struggling to maintain a stable framerate at times, and still having to deal with low draw distances. The remake increases the resolution, adds higher-resolution textures, and has smoother, less-polygonal models, all while also increasing the framerate. Link’s model is one of the biggest changes, with him now having a more realistic face and more details in his tunic. Wandering around Termina Field now has the pleasant change of being able to see all the way to the horizon in full detail. Water surfaces now have a ripply shimmer to them. As you would expect from the remake coming out 15 years after the original, it all looks much better than it did originally.</div>
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Unfortunately, not all of the graphical changes are for the better. The moon’s face has been redone, and its new expression just doesn’t look the same anymore. Originally, it looked like it was expressing some combination of terror, anger, and remorse, but now it looks like it’s just pissed off, or struggling really hard to pass a bowel movement. The lighting is a bit better in the 3DS version, but this has the consequence of making some areas of the game literally brighter than they used to be, which goes against the game’s literally dark atmosphere. They added an animation when Link slides on ice, causing him to flail his arms and upper torso around as he catches his balance, which seems fine enough but looks ridiculous when he does that exaggerated reaction every time he moves, even when you’re being careful to move at a slower pace. Other changes are just odd and questionable, like how Deku Link’s spin attack now causes thorny roots to come out of the tip of his hat; it makes logical sense, but it just seems unnecessary.</div>
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The best changes come in the game’s controls and user interface. The inventory screen got a major overhaul with a pair of buttons on the DS touchpad that take you directly to the mask screen, or the equipment screen -- no more having to pause the game, wait a second for the menus to show up, then cycle through animated windows to get where you want to be. If you try to equip an item onto a button that’s already bound to an equipped mask, the game will automatically unequip the mask instead of blasting you with an error sound and forcing you to close the menu and manually unequip the mask before rebinding the button. Plus, the 3DS version adds extra item buttons to the touch pad -- instead of only having the three C buttons to equip items to, you’ve now got four item buttons (X and Y, plus the I and II buttons on the touch pad) with things like the Ocarina and Photo Box permanently bound to other touch pad buttons, clearing up even more real estate for items.</div>
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This change makes swapping and managing items much more convenient than in the original <i>Majora’s Mask</i>, but unfortunately there’s still a fair amount of pausing the game to switch masks and items by still being limited to only four item buttons. When doing dungeons, for instance, I had the Great Fairy mask permanently bound to the top button and the dungeon’s respective transformation mask permanently bound to the bottom one, since I was using those items in practically every room, which left only two buttons for other items like the bow, hook shot, deku sticks, and so on. This gets especially problematic in the Stone Tower where you frequently have to have all three transformation masks and the hook shot equipped. It would’ve been nice to have the transformation masks permanently bound somewhere else, like on the D-Pad or elsewhere on the touch pad. I’m also not fond of how the new 3DS control scheme changes the note inputs for songs; I’m so used to using C button inputs that I have the songs memorized based on buttons, and now having all of the notes remapped to L, R, Y, X, and A meant that I had to essentially re-learn the songs all over again.</div>
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The Bomber’s Notebook has now been completely reworked to make it more like a conventional quest log in more modern games. The old interface is still available, showing you NPCs’ availability throughout their three day schedule and keeping track of when you’ve booked appointments or completed their quests, but there’s now a secondary screen that tracks individual quests with step-by-step entries, as well as a “rumors” tab that gives you hints about side quests and events that you might not ever discover short of randomly stumbling into them. These rumors are given to you by the Bomber kids as you talk to them, and they’re a nice way of guiding players towards content they might ordinarily miss, without spoiling anything or leading you right to the conclusion. They also just give you the notebook at the start of the second cycle, rather than forcing you to go through the rigmarole of finding the bomber kids again, or pre-emptively using the password that you hopefully remembered.</div>
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There’s even a new feature to set reminders and alarms with Tatl so that, if you make an appointment with someone later that day, she’ll remind you about it at whatever time you request. Probably the best change, in regards to controlling time, is that the Song of Double Time now lets you advance time directly to any hour you desire, rather than only allowing you to advance to the beginning of the next night or the next morning. One of the worst aspects of the original N64 game was how much time you’d spend simply standing around waiting for time to pass; if you had an appointment to meet someone at 4:30pm, you couldn’t play the Song of Double time because that would warp you to 6:00pm, and so you had to stand there for 10+ in-game hours doing nothing, or find some way to pass the time productively and hope you didn’t lose track of time. Now, you can skip right to 4:00 and only have to wait a minute or so of real time. Likewise, saving the game is now much easier than ever before, with the Owl Statues now allowing you to save and continue, rather than save and quit, so that you can load a save from earlier in the cycle instead of having to reset to the beginning each time, and there are now new save points littered across the map, like at the beginning of dungeons.</div>
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These kinds of features help to make the game easier to play, which seems to have been a major goal with the remake considering Nintendo even went so far as to add a Sheikah Stone to the Clock Tower, which shows fourth-wall-breaking pre-recorded gameplay footage of solutions to what you’re supposed to do next, or how you’re supposed to do things. This thing’s inclusion is boderline insulting because it’s pretty much like having an in-game video walkthrough, but fortunately its usage is at least optional, and it’s tucked away in an area you basically never have to return to after you finish the introduction sequences. Other changes to the game’s difficulty are not optional, however, as they’ve gone and forcibly made certain gameplay scenarios easier. The moving platforms in the Deku Palace that you had to land on in a platforming challenge are now completely stationary; ice arrows now only work in pre-marked hotspots so that you can only use them in the correct location; the skeleton Captain Keeta is now way slower so you can catch him more easily; the flame walls that shoot out at you if you take a wrong turn in the Deku Butler race are now just normal fences; many dungeon fairies have been moved into more obvious and more easily attainable locations; the list goes on.</div>
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I understand why they made these kinds of changes; the original game was maybe a little too obtuse in some of its solutions, and maybe a little too punishing if you made a mistake. Sneaking into the Deku Palace, for instance, would force you start the whole process over again from the beginning if you missed a single jump, and that can be a little frustrating if you made it through the whole process only to fail on the final one. So, by making the section easier they just made it less tedious for less-skilled players, but it takes away some of the rewarding feeling of beating that section now that it’s easier. As I mentioned in the previous section about why <i>Majora’s Mask</i> is my favorite <i>Zelda</i> game, part of the reason for that is because it’s generally a tougher game than other <i>Zelda</i> games, which tend to be a little too easy for my tastes. And it’s not like <i>Majora’s Mask</i> was was so brutally challenging that it was impossible to beat; I think I was about 12 years old when I played the original game for the first time and I did just fine (albeit using a guide to find some of the more obscure heart pieces).</div>
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Other changes are curiously head-scratching. It used to be that you could get a reservation at the Stock Pot Inn by talking to Anju at a certain time of day, when she was expecting a visitor who coincidentally had your exact name, but due to a quirk in his speech she misinterprets his name as being “(your name)-goro” as opposed to just “(your name).” It was an amusing little mix-up that Link stumbles into accidentally and coincidentally, but now in the 3DS version the only way to get that room is to be wearing the goron transformation mask, because Anju now knows in advance that the visitor is a goron. In a rare twist, they actually made something more difficult than in the original, since you now have to wait until after gaining the goron mask to do this, but it now means that Link has to knowingly screw over that other goron to get the room, which is a less than noble act for a supposed hero to be perpetrating. I was always kind of amused by the interaction in the N64 version when the other goron arrives and falls victim to the miscommunication about his name, but in the 3DS version I felt kind of bad for him.</div>
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They also radically altered the swimming controls for Zora Link, making him swim like a slow, boring, normal ol’ human by default unless you spend magic to enable the old dolphin-like zora controls from the original version. This change is just completely baffling to me, because they’ve put a resource limit on one of the most fun parts of the original game, effectively discouraging people from using the fun swimming controls. And it’s not like Zora Link’s moveset was over-powered or anything -- I can only presume they nerfed the moveset to make it easier to control for people who can’t keep up with the faster movement speed and the need for faster, more precise inputs -- so I don’t see why they couldn’t simply add the slower movement scheme as an optional toggle rather than forcing it on everyone. Deku Link is also not quite as fast as he used to be, with a slow start up to his movement animation halting his forward momentum a bit when he goes to jump off a small platform, like the lily pads in the Southern Swamp. Goron Link's attacks are, fortunately, faster and more fluid, rather than the clunky imprecise mess that they were in the N64 version, so although Nintendo made two of the transformations arguably worse they did at least improve one of them.</div>
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Then we’ve got the radically altered boss fights, which changes them from one-on-one duels where you have to learn their moves and simply out-damage them, using whatever tools you desire, to formulaic “pattern bosses” where you have to perform a very particular action to expose their new weakpoints -- a giant orange eyeball that pops out of nowhere. The fight with Goht is virtually unchanged, except now you have to run over and punch/stab the exposed eyeball instead of continuing to roll into him in spike form. The others, though, are almost completely different. With Odolwa, you now have to transform into Deku Link, burrow into a flower, float over his head, and drop a deku nut on him to expose the eyeball -- you do that three times and you win. With Gyorg, you now have to use the zora fins to dislodge an underwater mine while Gyorg is sucking in water to expose the eyeball -- you do that three times and you win. The Twinmold fight is actually kind of cool at first, since you have to use the light arrows to hit the weakpoints on the first one while dodging attacks from the second one, but the second phase when they randomly give you the giant’s mask just looks absurd as Link suddenly becomes a hulking monstrosity performing wrestling moves on the boss like a buffoon. I guess I appreciate that the boss battles now incorporate the transformation masks a little more prominently, but I dislike how formulaic they’ve become.</div>
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There are plenty of other, smaller changes, but these are mostly just more examples to reinforce general statements I've already made, like about the game being easier, or the graphics being better/different, and so on. I don’t have much else to say on that front -- for a full list of changes, you’ll have to consult a search engine. The only conclusion I really have for the <i>Majora’s Mask</i> 3DS remake is that I’m not wholly impressed with it, and it’s not really what I wanted out of a remake. I would’ve preferred that they either keep the game the exact same, and just improve the interface and graphics, or give it a <i>Master Quest</i> or <i>Link’s Awakening DX</i> treatment by giving it a bunch of brand new content, rather than arbitrarily changing things for no reason. I think the only genuinely new content we get in the 3DS remake are the two fishing holes, which add practically nothing to the game, and an extra questline with the Gorman Troupe Leader, which leads to an extra bottle. Some of the changes are fun to spot from a veteran standpoint, but while half of them made sense I found myself annoyed by the other half. All-in-all, the 3DS remake is a bit of a mixed bag for me, and if I were recommending the game to a first-time player I might be inclined to suggest the original N64 version, either on the actual N64 or by emulation on the <a href="https://zelda.gamepedia.com/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Collector%27s_Edition">GameCube Collector’s Edition</a> or a Virtual Console download.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(I did not take my own screenshots for this review. Most of these images are from the <a href="https://zelda.gamepedia.com/Category:Majora%27s_Mask_3D_Screenshots">Zelda Wiki</a>.)</span></center>
Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-59405116409968179832018-11-01T12:54:00.000-04:002020-01-25T12:07:05.421-05:00The Surge: A Surprisingly Good Dark Souls Clone<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The term "souls-like" is starting to catch on as a genre-defining label for games that recreate or otherwise emulate aspects of the <i>Dark Souls</i> games. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much agreement as to what characteristics should qualify a game as souls-like; is it tough difficulty, harsh penalties for dying, strong emphasis on rewarding player skill, a dark and oppressing atmosphere, vague and obtuse storytelling, or still other qualities? The type of games that get described by people as "souls-like" vary wildly from <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/283640/Salt_and_Sanctuary/">side-scrolling brawlers</a> to <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/297130/Titan_Souls/">top-down boss rush games</a> to <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/789950/INFERNIUM/">first-person horror games</a> to <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/262060/Darkest_Dungeon/">turn-based dungeon crawlers</a>, all of which would seem to have more in common with other, more-established genres than <i>Dark Souls</i>. As much as I like <i>Dark Souls</i>, I find the "souls-like" label to be generally unhelpful in determining whether I'll like a game because so many "souls-like" games seem to be more dissimilar than similar to <i>Dark Souls</i>.</div>
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<i>The Surge</i> (2017) is about as close to <i>Dark Souls</i> as you can get without actually being <i>Dark Souls</i>. The similarities are so on-the-nose that I wouldn't even describe it as "souls-like" -- rather, I'd simply call it a <i>Dark Souls</i> clone, if you lifted pretty much everything about <i>Dark Souls</i> and dropped it into an industrial sci-fi setting. Developed by Deck13, who were also responsible for <i>Lords of the Fallen</i> (another <i>Dark Souls</i> clone), <i>The Surge</i> is a third-person action-RPG whose main gameplay loop consists of exploring complexly inter-woven levels and fighting enemies to make your way to the level's boss, collecting tech scrap from defeated enemies along the way so that you can increase your character's level and therefore his stats and abilities. Combat is the main draw, here, and it uses a pretty weighty system with a variety of attacks and dodge maneuvers, all based around a stamina meter that you have to manage while reading enemy attack patterns.</div>
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<i>Dark Souls</i> has been one of the most influential games of the past decade, and with FromSoftware declaring in 2016 that <i>Dark Souls 3</i> would be the end of the <i>Souls</i> series, it pleases me to see other developers trying to recreate the magic of those games. As much as I love <i>Dark Souls</i>, those games can get to feel kind of repetitive between iterations, so having someone else approach the <i>Dark Souls</i> formula with fresh eyes and a fresh coat of paint is a good thing to me. There's certainly a risk that such an attempt would end up feeling merely like a lame impersonation of the real thing, and some may deride it as being purely derivative of other, perhaps better games, but I can fortunately say that <i>The Surge</i> is actually surprisingly good. Some rough edges here and there suggest Deck13 doesn't have quite the mastery of the system as FromSoftware does, but it actually improves on the <i>Dark Souls</i> formula in some key ways, and I feel like it's a good enough experience to stand on its own, despite the obvious connection to <i>Dark</i> <i>Souls</i>.</div>
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<i>The Surge</i> takes place in a dystopian future run by mega corporations who produce advanced technologies like neural implants and cybernetic exo-skeletons. With the earth's ecosystem rapidly circling the drain, one of the largest corporations, CREO, is promising to save the world through Project Resolve, which aims to restore the earth's ozone layer by detonating rockets carrying a special payload in the atmosphere. You play as Warren, a paraplegic man arriving at the CREO on-boarding station for new hires; you watch some promotional videos, choose your job designation, and get fitted for an exo-suit frame. A glitch in the installation program marks you for disposal, and after falling unconscious you awaken in a scrapyard where sentry bots are already working to dismantle you. Now able to walk, thanks to the exo-suit, you grab a pipe and get to work defending yourself while exploring the junkyard for a way out. You're soon contacted by a woman named Sally, who explains that something has gone horribly wrong at the CREO facility, causing many of its systems to shut down and severing the neural link that binds employees' brains to their exo-suits, and to the CREO network, thus turning many employees into mindless drones who will attack you on sight. The rest of the game has you moving throughout the CREO facility trying to gain access to the board room so that you can set things right, while uncovering the sinister truth of what's really been going on behind closed doors at CREO.</div>
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There isn't much overt substance to the story, since it's mostly just a framework to put you in combat situations with loose objectives leading you to the next area. It happens mostly through audio logs, item descriptions, and CREO's own PR videos, but a lot of the lore and backstory is intentionally obfuscated to create a sense of mystery and intrigue, both from an external design standpoint as well as from an in-world perspective. Deck13 seem to have deliberately made things vague and obscure by leaving tiny breadcrumbs here and there while never explicitly explaining things to the players, just to get people talking and trying to "solve" the story, whereas in-game a lot of what you see and hear about is what CREO puts forward in its public relations campaigns, because they're obviously up to something sketchy and don't want you to know about it. As such, it's kind of difficult to understand the story as you're playing unless you're paying really close attention and actively trying to assemble the puzzle pieces, and so it's pretty easy to go on auto-pilot and just focus on getting to your next objective. If you do stop to think about things, however, then you might be stuck wondering and might never reach a definitive conclusion. Even after watching a bunch of videos and reading forum discussions, I'm still not entirely clear on what certain characters' motivations were, or what the whole point of certain plot elements were supposed to be.</div>
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Talking to a random survivor.</div>
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There's some decent character interaction, at least, with Sally guiding you remotely via communication stations and you occasionally bumping into other survivors who task you with assorted side-quests. Unlike <i>Dark Souls</i>, which features a silent player-made protagonist, <i>The Surge</i> has you playing a pre-made character, Warren, who is fully voiced and delivers spoken lines in dialogue, with you actually getting to select dialogue options. Mind you, this isn't <i>Planescape: Torment</i> or <i>Vampire: Bloodlines</i>, so the dialogue choices aren't that elaborate and they don't really lead to branching consequences, but it's nice to have some degree of control over what's said in a conversation, and it gives the player-character more presence in the game. The side characters aren't very deep, fleshed out, or even that memorable (surprising considering how few there are), but there are some good stories and interactions with some of them, like Irina who starts out as a resourceful survivor scavenging for tech scrap, then joins the security forces and eventually loses her identity. Their quests aren't very sophisticated, either, usually amounting to some type of basic fetch quest, but they fit pretty well in the context of the world and do provide ways to interact with NPCs besides just listening to them talk. One guy, for instance, needs some medicine which you figure out might actually be a psychoactive drug, and when you find it you have the choice to give it to him to stop his withdrawal symptoms, or withhold it so that he can get clean, and the character's fate will turn out differently depending on what you do.</div>
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The industrial sci-fi setting seems to be realized pretty strongly here, with the level design and graphic style sometimes feeling reminiscent of <i>Blade Runner</i> and <i>Alien</i>. Most levels are shrouded in thick darkness, often forcing you to see by the flashlights on your exo-rig, with scattered light sources illuminating only sparse corners of the environment in dim, moody ambiance, with light fog accentuating the lighting with heavy god rays and lens flares. As with <i>Dark Souls</i>, there's no music in the game except at each area's hub and during boss fights, so you're generally only hearing atmospheric ambiance anywhere you go -- usually the dull hum of droning machinery. Meanwhile, you encounter a lot of corpses of CREO employees who died gruesomely, splattered in buckets of blood, and the story deals with the surviving employees losing their minds and becoming essentially droning zombies. It almost feels like a sci-fi horror game at times, what with the dark, sometimes claustrophobic levels seemingly designed to house enemies that jump out at you from hidden corners. The game's atmosphere is pretty dark, both literally and thematically, and it really succeeds at creating an immersive environment.</div>
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Exploring the greenhouse in Biolabs.</div>
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The game is based around a series of levels, each of which houses a hub area called the Ops Station, where you can return to craft or upgrade equipment, re-spec your character, heal back to full health, and restore all of your consumable items. Each level presents you with an Ops Station near the beginning and then has you explore a bunch of branching paths that inter-twine and eventually lead back to Ops, allowing you to unlock short-cuts back to different areas while you continue exploring towards that level's boss. Once you defeat the boss, you're then free to move on to the next level, where this formula will be repeated in a new area. The level design can become surprisingly complex, with each level having so many branching paths that lead to so many different areas, with sometimes multiple ways in and out of individual areas. I also like there being only one hub area, with the levels folding in on themselves, since this makes the levels feel more compact, and therefore more dense. It's a nice change of pace from <i>Dark Souls</i>, for instance, particularly later games in the series, where levels tend to branch out in linear paths and you just move from bonfire to bonfire, and it's usually pretty clear where you have to go to move forward in the level. With <i>The Surge</i>, the levels are much harder to navigate because there are so many more interconnected paths within them.</div>
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The downside to the level design, unfortunately, is that levels are sometimes too convoluted, to the point that it becomes difficult to keep track of where you've been and where you've yet to go. A lot of areas tend to look pretty similar, even between levels, since everywhere you go has a similar industrial sci-fi look to it. That is to say, there aren't enough differentiated themes and aesthetic styles to make each area or even each level feel unique and memorable. It doesn't help, either, that so many areas are connected by maintenance tunnels. These tunnels look literally exactly the same everywhere they appear, in every level, and they're so narrow with their branching paths usually coming around sharp corner turns that you can never see where each path leads until you follow it all the way to its conclusion. This same problem occurs with the numerous lift-shafts, which act kind of like ladders (but are fortunately faster than climbing ladders in <i>Dark Souls</i>) and are often connected to the maintenance tunnels. With no in-game map system, it's pretty easy to get lost, and then you're stuck wandering around hoping you can find your way back to Ops. It was pretty bad one time when I spent about 20 minutes exploring one of the levels and got myself killed, then realized that I had no idea how to even start getting back to where I was.</div>
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These damn maintenance tunnels all look the exact same.</div>
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On the plus side, this makes exploration a bit more actively engaging, since you have to put more effort into learning the level layouts and remembering how to get to certain places, and I like that feeling of getting literally lost in a game world. In that regard, I kind of like not having an in-game map and having to navigate purely based on sign posts; they're integrated in a contextually sensible manner, and it's pretty euphoric to find a sign pointing you the direction back towards Ops after you've been exploring for a while, because you know you're going to unlock a shortcut, so there's genuine anticipation in seeking out those signs and following their paths. It's not always clear, however, where you have to go or what you have to do in each level. Usually a character will say something like "get to the med lab," but that objective doesn't get written down anywhere, so if you weren't paying attention, or forgot after not playing the game for several days, then the game can lose some momentum when you have no idea what you're actually doing, since you're basically just wandering around until you stumble into an area that triggers a boss, or a cutscene, or a short cut. The maps do have a lot of hidden secrets, though, where you're encouraged to explore off the beaten paths and think outside the box to find hidden scrap, equipment, and implant rewards, so exploring the maps is genuinely pretty interesting.</div>
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Combat is, of course, the real center of attention, and if you've ever played <i>Dark Souls</i> then you'll immediately feel right at home with <i>The Surge</i> and know pretty much what to expect from it. Combat in <i>The Surge</i> involves a lock-on system typically against one or (at most) three enemies at a time, with a realistic amount of weight and speed to it. Enemy attacks all have a brief wind-up animation giving you a half-second to react, either with a well-timed dodge or block, and so fighting an enemy involves watching their moves and finding openings in which to attack. Almost everything you do costs stamina, which slowly regenerates as you go without taking actions, and so you have to balance your offense and defense and make each attack and defensive maneuver count. As with <i>Dark Souls</i>, you have multiple types of attacks at your disposal, except instead of being "light" and "heavy" attacks they're horizontal and vertical, plus the usual array of running, jumping, charged, and dodge attacks, and these can all be combined together in different patterns to create different types of attack combos. It's an extremely engaging system because there's a lot of tension in every fight, with each hit you land and receive carrying significant consequences.</div>
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Fighting an enemy with a Heavy Duty weapon.</div>
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Some of the notable changes from <i>Dark Souls</i> include limb targeting and the energy meter. With <i>The Surge</i>, you can choose to target specific enemy body parts (head, body, either arm, and either leg), and you'll do more or less damage depending on what you target because enemies usually have different types of armor equipped. If an enemy's not wearing a helmet, they'll take more damage to their head, for instance, however, if you do enough damage to an armored part of an enemy you'll be able to then take that piece of equipment from them (or at least, a broken piece that you can use to craft it). This is a wonderful, wonderful change because it makes farming equipment more deterministic -- if you see a piece of equipment that you want on an enemy, you know exactly how to get it, and can acquire it then and there, no hoping for random item drops. With the energy meter, you build energy from zero by successfully attacking enemies, and this acts kind of like a magic or focus meter for different types of abilities; unlike the stamina meter which slowly replenishes back to full through inaction, the energy meter slowly diminishes back to zero through inaction. You can summon different types of drones that do different things (light the ground in front of you on fire, pull an enemy towards you, shoot a ranged laser, etc), or activate certain types of buffs (some of which actively consume energy, others of which activate passively as long as your energy is above a certain threshold), or execute finishing maneuvers that will bypass the last chunk of the enemy's health and grant you extra tech scrap.</div>
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Tech scrap is <i>The Surge's</i> version of souls -- it's the currency you spend to increase your level, as well as to craft and upgrade your equipment. Character development in <i>The Surge</i> works pretty similarly to <i>Dark Souls</i>, except instead of spending scrap (souls) to increase individual stats, you increase the core power of your exo-suit, which allows you to equip more implants and/or more powerful implants. If drones are loosely analogous to magic spells, the implants are loosely analogous to ring slots, except instead of having only two or four, you can have up to 16 installed (starting with four slots and unlocking more as you play). Some of these do basic things like increasing your health or stamina (with scaling values based on your core power); others grant consumable healing items (that refresh when you visit the med bay at Ops), or give you ways to spend energy to buff yourself, or add passive stat bonuses when your energy is high enough; some increase the rate at which you gain energy, or reduce the energy cost of different abilities; one will let you heal a percentage of your health when you perform an execution move; the list goes on. I like the character progression here more than in <i>Dark Souls</i>, because I feel like the implants allow for a lot more build diversity which can lead to more actively different play styles, and you're always free to change things up at any time.</div>
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A look at the implant screen, and one of my installed implants.</div>
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In <i>Dark Souls</i>, you're locked in with whatever stat increases you give yourself, and your build and play style are both determined primarily by the type of weapon you choose. In both games, different weapons have different types of movesets and therefore control completely differently, but armor selection in <i>Dark Souls</i> doesn't really matter that much, whereas armor in <i>The Surge</i> gives you interesting set bonuses that truly differentiate one set from another (e.g., the Proteus set gives passive health regeneration and increases all healing by 25%, the Ogre set adds a seismic shockwave effect to all attacks that hit the ground, etc), in addition to affecting more stats like attack speed, stamina use, and energy consumption, than simply damage resistances. There's less customization to the equipment since you can't infuse weapons with elements or refinements (all weapons and armor have linear upgrade paths, in fact) but I feel like my choices of what armor and implants to equip make a lot more of a difference in <i>The Surge</i> than what infusions and rings I use in <i>Dark Souls</i>. One questionable design in <i>The Surge</i> is the weapon proficiencies, which increase your damage with individual weapon types the more you use those types of weapons; in other words, it rewards you for picking a singular weapon type and sticking with it for the entire game. While you're free to swap weapon styles at any time, you'll lose the extra damage bonus and might then feel compelled to switch back to what you were using.</div>
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<i>Dark Souls</i> made a reputation for itself by being hard, but <i>The Surge</i> might actually be more challenging than <i>Dark Souls</i> for the simple reason that it has practically zero "trash mobs" -- weaker enemies who're intended to be killed easily by the player, and who pose no real threat except to slowly whittle down the health and resources of more reckless players. Pretty much every enemy in <i>The Surge</i> is analogous to Silver Knights and Black Knights in <i>Dark Souls</i>, both in difficulty and design; most enemies are humanoid and use the exact same weapons and armor as a player would, meaning they have the same movesets and even similar (if not better) stats as a player. This lends them a little bit of predictability, since you should always know what they're capable of depending on what type of weapon they're using, and they're also not as smart as a human player would be; however, they have a lot of health so it takes more time and effort to kill them, and they do a ton of damage so mistakes get punished hard. It's not uncommon for common enemies to be able to kill you in just two or three hits while you have to land five or six hits to kill them. This makes each individual fight feel much more tense and engaging than average fights in <i>Dark Souls</i>, since every enemy feels kind of like a mini-boss and therefore requires careful attention and precise reactions.</div>
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More combat, and a nice blood spatter. </div>
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While this does make the game feel incredibly difficult at the start, it can also have the downside of making the gameplay feel a little tedious at times. On their own, the fights are super tense and exciting, but when you're facing a bunch of these enemy encounters in a row as you explore a level, and as you encounter more and more of them, it can easily start to feel like a protracted slog-fest. Besides just having a lot of health, enemies also seem to have a ton of poise, meaning they don't get staggered or have their attack animations interrupted until you hit them enough times. You, meanwhile, get staggered pretty easily, even when wearing super heavy, high stability armor, which means most of the time you start attacking an enemy, get a few hits in, then see them wind up an attack, and are then forced to dodge away and avoid them for several seconds while they exhaust their attack combos, then move back in to repeat the process. This can make a lot of fights feel somewhat formulaic, and it gets to be a little annoying when you feel like you've leveled up sufficiently that basic enemies in a level no longer pose a serious threat, but you're stilled forced to sit there and play along with their movesets. </div>
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Enemies can stunlock you pretty easily but it's basically impossible to do the same to them, and so you're forced into a more passive, reactive gameplay approach. That's good for making the combat feel more interactive, where you have to pay close attention to enemy attack patterns and learn their tendencies, properly timing your blocks and dodges and picking the right moment to attack, but that gets kind of tedious over time, especially if you die and then have to work your way through the same fights multiple times to get back to where you were. I'm compelled in these types of games to defeat every enemy, but any time I died I found it too tedious to fight through everything again and just ran past everything until I made it back to new territory. The fact that most humanoid enemies use normal player equipment also unfortunately means that throughout the entire game most enemies are going to behave very similarly, based purely on the type of weapon they're using. There are different types of enemies, certainly, like the various manufacturing bots and bosses, but most of the common enemies are just CREO employees in different equipment loadouts, which means that you're effectively fighting the same enemies in the first level of the game as you are all the way through the end of the game, which obviously can make combat feel even more repetitive.</div>
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The firebug boss fight. </div>
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The bosses, fortunately, mix things up significantly with highly atypical designs. The first one is a typical two-legged, mechanized robot thing, but then you encounter one that's just a series of assembly line arms that drop down in different patterns, and one that flies around with spinning rotary arms. Others are a little more familiar, but by the third game in the <i>Dark Souls</i> series a lot of bosses were starting to feel a little similar (a lot of sword-wielding humanoid enemies), so these few in <i>The Surge</i> feel uniquely refreshing. Some of them are pretty hard to beat, too, with devastating attack combos that require you to really learn their moves to know how to avoid attacks and when to attack, yourself. One boss took a dozen or more tries for me to defeat, which then felt immensely satisfying once I "mastered" it and was able to get through the encounter. </div>
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Although the combat feels generally pretty tight and responsive, it has a few minor issues that make it feel just a little unrefined. Notably, there's no input cancelling, so if you press an attack button and realize a half-second later that you need to dodge or block, you're stuck seeing that attack all the way through. This wouldn't be so bad if the attack animations were of a similar, consistent length, but the attacks combo together in sequence so that some attacks will randomly launch you into a long multi-hit whirling combo that you can't stop, which might even cause your character to move forward and step into a pit of death completely beyond your control. I'm also not sure that the game gives you invulnerability during recovery animations, like when your character is knocked down and getting back up off the ground; I'm pretty sure I was sometimes taking damage from enemies while lying on the ground, and then immediately got knocked back down to the ground while furiously spamming the dodge button as my character stood back up, meaning I had no chance to dodge and got chain-stunned to death.</div>
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It's not a perfect game to be sure, but it offers a surprisingly good experience for fans of the <i>Dark Souls</i> series who're looking for more, similar types of games to fill the void now that the <i>Souls</i> series has ended. I wish there were more enemy and level variety, because it kind of feels like you spend most of the game in similar environments fighting similar enemies, but it actually improves on the <i>Souls</i> formula in some interesting ways, notably with the limb-targeting system, and I actually like the implant system better than pumping stats and equipping rings in <i>Dark Souls</i>. Plus, after three straight dark fantasy <i>Souls</i> games and so many other games out there occupying the dark fantasy genre space, it's refreshing to play an industrial sci-fi game in this style. 2017 was a great year for games, and <i>The Surge</i> is another one to come out of that year as one of my favorite games of recent memory.</div>
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The main plaza at CREO World, from the <i>A Walk in the Park</i> DLC. </div>
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If you end up playing <i>The Surge</i> and like it by the time you're nearing the end of the second level, then I'd recommend picking up the <i>CREO World: A Walk in the Park</i> DLC, since it integrates into the main game, unlocking in or shortly after the second level with enemies designed for that level range, rather than taking place at the end. It's a fun diversion since you get to visit a defunct amusement park and fight mechanized park mascots like Iron Maus and Carbon Cat, while also riding a roller coaster and using other rides and attractions to get around. The bright colors and more lighthearted atmosphere make for a pleasant change of pace from the dark corridors and industrial manufacturing levels of the base game, plus I just feel like it's a great level design with solid progression around a centralized area and different branching paths. It fits in well with the lore and pacing of the base game and honestly feels like it belongs. It is, essentially, a continuation of the base game gameplay mechanics but in a fun new environment with amusing side stories, new equipment, new enemies, and probably the best level design in the entire game.</div>
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The second, recently-released DLC <i>The Good, The Bad, and The Augmented</i> earns less of a recommendation from me -- it doesn't integrate with the base game as well, and I'm not fond of its execution. It's basically a new game mode based around Wild West levels, broken into nine missions, each of which has you going through two rooms to reach a boss encounter, except the rooms and bosses are recycled between missions. The twist is that you can enable game-breaking modifiers that radically alter the gameplay; for instance, one prevents you from healing, but when you take damage you drop chunks of cheese that will restore a portion of your lost health when you pick them back up, and another one turns enemies invisible so you just see floating weapons. Enabling these grants extra rewards like super-powered implants and extra scrap bonuses. These are fun, amusing changes, but I didn't care for the repetitive room-based format, and I'm not sure the rewards are really worth it because they're either stupidly imbalanced, or so expensive to equip that you basically can't use them. I kind of regret spending the money on it, so I'd probably recommend against purchasing it.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-19199749877467540392018-10-13T02:08:00.000-04:002018-11-14T13:41:16.124-05:00The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild -- Better Than Expected, But Still Overrated<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Breath of the Wild</i> took the world by storm last year, with many people proclaiming it to be not only the best game of the year, but also the best <i>Zelda</i> game of all time and the best open-world game ever made. Those are some pretty lofty claims, so naturally I was skeptical that it would actually live up to that kind of hype. I've played a fair number of open-world games, after all, and while I generally enjoy the genre, they're difficult to pull off well and usually leave me feeling unsatisfied. Meanwhile, there's only been one <i>Zelda</i> game in the last 15 years that I've actually enjoyed (that being <i>A Link Between Worlds</i>, mostly because of its classic non-linear design and it being an homage to <i>A Link to the Past</i>), so I didn't exactly have confidence that Nintendo would hit such a home run with a new <i>Zelda</i>. Even watching streams and gameplay footage, it all looked kind of boring to me. Still, when the opportunity presented itself to borrow a coworker's Switch for a few weeks (thank you Dom), I couldn't pass on the chance to play it and see for myself.</div>
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I'm pleased to say that <i>Breath of the Wild</i> is indeed one of the best <i>Zelda </i>games that I've played in a long time. Although it deviates from the typical "<i>Zelda </i>formula" we've grown accustomed to lately, the open-world exploration feels reminiscent of older games in the series (specifically the original <i>Legend of Zelda</i>, and to a lesser extent <i>A Link to the Past</i>), but on a much bigger and more sophisticated scale. It's also one of the better open-world games to have come out recently, with a world that feels mysteriously intriguing and therefore genuinely interesting to explore; other open-world designers could learn a few lessons from Nintendo. I certainly enjoyed <i>Breath of the Wild</i>, but unlike seemingly every other person in the world, I didn't love it -- it's not my new favorite <i>Zelda </i>game (it might not even crack my top five), and I've enjoyed other open-world games better. And even despite liking the game, it has some major issues that seriously disappointed me.</div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">H</span><span style="font-size: large;">UGE WORLD, HUGE WASTE OF TIME</span></span></div>
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The first thing people usually talk about with <i>BOTW</i> is how incredibly huge its world is, so of course that means it's the first thing I have to address. Yes, it's the biggest world ever created for a <i>Zelda </i>game, rivaling the likes of a typical Bethesda game in sheer size, and yes there's a ton of sights to see and things to do in this world, but it's all spread out to such a degree that you have to spend serious chunks of time in tediously shallow, boring gameplay simply traversing from point A to point B, doing little more than holding the joystick forward for 30-60 seconds (or more) at a time. It's especially boring when it comes to climbing -- while the new "climb anything" mechanic opens up a tremendous amount of verticality in exploration, it isn't very fun to sit there for prolonged periods of time doing nothing with the controller while you watch your character ascend a wall with the speed of a slightly energized sloth. Depending on where you go, you'll find huge, sprawling fields and mountain ranges (or deserts, or tundras, or bodies of water) that feel practically empty and that force you to waste your time wandering around just looking for something to do, or waiting passively until you can reach the next thing worth doing.</div>
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Huge, wide open fields with nothing but grass.</div>
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The size of the world isn't necessarily the problem, here. I actually kind of like the world being so massive and so spread out, with mountains towering over the landscape like skyscrapers and with you having to trek long distances to reach a destination, because it creates a more epic sense of scale where you feel like a tiny speck against the backdrop of this colossal world. Climbing to the top of a mountain feels like a tremendous accomplishment perhaps for the sole fact that it takes so much time and effort and to do so, and the satisfaction of being able to look out over a sprawling landscape that seems to stretch on for miles, and knowing that you can go anywhere and everywhere you see, is rewarding in and of itself. Conquering a world this size is an epic feat, and the euphoria of doing so is similar to felling a boss in <i>Shadow of the Colossus</i> simply because the thing you're up against is so much bigger than you, and because the game doesn't give you an inflated sense of ego by making you feel any bigger than you are -- it actually does the opposite by emphasizing how small and insignificant you are, which again makes each achievement feel that much more monumental because of the sheer distance you had to travel (literally and metaphorically) to overcome an obstacle.</div>
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The issue, therefore, has less to do with size and more to do with how the world is populated with content. There are some truly awesome, breath-taking things to discover in this world, but you typically have to wade through a ton of repetitive, shallow, boring, and tedious filler to find them. The vast majority of what you can do in the world (besides wandering around spaciously open fields of nothing) is fight groups of bokoblins/moblins/lizalfos, solve one-room puzzles in "mini-dungeon" shrines, complete mini-challenges to collect korok seeds, and collect random rocks/plants/critters -- all of which is either pretty short, simple, or repetitively copy-pasted across the map. Once you've encountered a single "rearrange the blocks" puzzle to obtain a korok seed, you'll have basically seen every one like it for the rest of the game, and while there are hundreds of korok seeds to find they all fall into one of maybe a dozen different categories, in terms of what you have to do to obtain them. There's a general lack of enemy variety in the world, and so the majority of what you'll encounter, from one corner of the world map to the other, are basic varieties of the same basic enemies. Shrines all have the same look and feel, and all use the exact same puzzle mechanics. So, basically, after the first dozen or so hours of gameplay you'll have seen a lot of what the game has to offer already, and then you're just repeatedly going through the same motions for the next 100 hours, doing the same things over and over again, but in new locations.</div>
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About to get a face-full of boko-stick and boko-nuts.</div>
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One might say "if something is boring or repetitive, then just don't do it, and only focus on the good parts of the game that you like," but a lot of this stuff is kind of required if you want to get the most out of the game. A lot of other activities require large sums of resources that you gain from these simple, repetitive actions, so if you want to upgrade your armor to achieve fun new set bonuses you'll need a ton of resources collected from killing enemies, and collecting random items; if you pick up a quest from someone they'll probably ask for a bunch of resources, and if you want to see where that story goes then you have to go collect them all. If you want to dye your clothes, you'll need resources; if you want to climb a huge mountain, you'll need more stamina so you'll need to do as many shrines as possible; if you want to fight tougher enemies, you'll need more hearts so do more shrines; if you want to actually be able to carry all the cool new equipment you'll find then you'll need more inventory space, so make sure to collect as many korok seeds as possible; if you want to be able to heal yourself and actually survive then you'll need a bunch of cooking ingredients. As such, when you see random enemies, or plants, or critters, or shrines, or korok puzzles, you'll likely feel compelled to do them all because you'll likely be needing their rewards at some point in the future.</div>
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A freshly discovered shrine entrance.</div>
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None of this is particularly fun or interesting after a while (with shrines being the one exception, though they too can feel shallow and repetitive), and so exploring the world can sometimes feel like a huge waste of time because you simply aren't finding a lot of interesting, worthwhile content. I'd often play for 20-30 minutes at a time and feel like I'd accomplished nothing at all. "Well, I picked some apples, fought some bokoblins, found a treasure chest on top of a pillar with five arrows in it, cooked some mushrooms, and put a rock in the missing spot of a circle." I once spent 30 minutes exploring a stretch of mountains in the north, and all I really did was mine some ore, fight some random chuchus, avoid some lynels, and collect a few korok seeds -- there wasn't even a shrine to complete, and the one interesting thing I found (a massive dinosaur-looking skeleton, many times bigger than King Dodongo from <i>OOT</i>) had absolutely nothing going on with it, except a bunch of random bokoblins to fight and a moderately decent sword to loot. So yes, while the world is huge and you can spend hundreds of hours exploring everything there is to see and do within it, it's not necessarily time well spent because so much of that time is spent traversing vacant areas that only exist to spread the world out, or wading through filler that only exists as content padding.</div>
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">U</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">NSATISFYING PROGRESSION</span></span></div>
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<i>Zelda </i>games typically rely on a progression system where you gain new items, abilities, and power-ups throughout the game that not only make you feel stronger, but that also unlock new avenues for exploration and new gameplay possibilities. In games like <i>Ocarina of Time</i> and <i>Majora's Mask</i>, these act as hard gates that prevent you from going to certain areas or doing certain things until the game allows it, typically in a highly prescribed order -- you can't go to Zora's Domain until you get the bombs from Death Mountain, and you can't enter the Great Bay until you get your horse Epona (which requires getting the powder kegs from Snowhead). Other games like <i>A Link Between Worlds</i>, <i>A Link to the Past</i>, and the original <i>Legend of Zelda</i> still use gated progression where you need certain upgrades to do certain things, but they're far less strict about the order in which you do things, allowing you far more freedom to decide where you go while allowing the world to open up based on how you choose to interact with the world, as opposed to whether or not you're following the game's intended script.</div>
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A Great Fairy Fountain, where you can upgrade your armor.</div>
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<i>Breath of the Wild's</i> calling card is its truly open world where you can go anywhere and do anything at any time. It accomplishes this by giving you all of the tools at the start of the game and by ensuring there are no hard gates to restrict progress or exploration -- you can do the four dungeons in any order, and you can even go fight the final boss as soon as you finish the tutorial area, if you so desire. Even the side content, from the assorted side quests to the 120 mini-dungeon shrines can be done whenever you desire -- there are no restrictions whatsoever, except that some enemies may be a little too strong to fight at the beginning, which is a much softer gate because you can usually find ways around them, or alternate ways to deal with them. This incredible amount of freedom may seem like a good thing, but that also means there’s no feeling of progression and no satisfaction that comes from opening the world up as you play, because the entire world is already completely unlocked before you even set foot in it.</div>
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All of the exploration and all of the game’s content is based around the starting toolset they give to every player, and nothing you gain after the tutorial area has any kind of radically game-altering effect because they want to make sure there’s an equal opportunity to do all the content you might come across, and not be locked out of something by not having the correct “key” to unlock it. Most of the upgrades you acquire simply enhance actions you’re already doing by simply tweaking some numbers -- you find a sword that does more damage, you get some korok seeds that let you carry more swords, you get some spirit orbs that let you have more health or stamina, you find clothes that make you swim faster, etc. Even the special powers that you gain from completing the four main dungeons generally act as passive upgrades to existing actions; Daruuk’s Protection adds a counter-attack to your normal shield block, Mipha’s Grace acts like a supercharged fairy that resurrects you on death, and Urbosa’s Fury causes lightning strikes when you charge a spin attack with your sword. None of these change the way you play the game, and none of them open new areas for exploration or gameplay -- they just make you stronger. The only fun, game-changing upgrades you get are <strike>Ravioli's</strike> Revali's Gale, which creates an updraft so that you can ride your paraglider straight up in the air, and the zora's tunic which lets you swim up waterfalls.</div>
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The Korok guy who upgrades your inventory spaces.</div>
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Progression, therefore, feels awfully stagnant. You certainly get stronger over the course of the game, and it’s arguably required that you get stronger before exploring certain areas or doing certain things (for instance, you stand practically no chance of beating Ganon until you get strong enough weapons and gain enough hearts to survive some hits), but it all happens so slowly and in such small increments at a time that it rarely feels like you’re actually getting stronger, with basically no tangible rewards for exploration. Most of what you’re rewarded with are korok seeds, which aren’t very exciting since they just give you extra inventory space, but also because they become less valuable the more of them you find because it costs more and more seeds the more you upgrade your inventory, to the point that you find a korok seed and say “great, I’m 1/35th of the way to a new inventory slot,” or you get new weapons that will break in one or two fights and which basically only replace the ones you just broke getting them, or spirit orbs that act like heart piece containers (that can also upgrade your stamina, instead of health), except you always know exactly where to find them because they can only be found in shrines. Otherwise, all you really get are rupees and random supplies/ingredients, and that’s about it.</div>
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Getting an item that allows you to go places and do things that you couldn’t previously is a big part of the <i>Zelda </i>experience for me, and there’s practically none of that in <i>BOTW</i>. To be clear, I’m not advocating for the <i>Ocarina of Time</i> approach, here, because I find that game’s gated progression too restricting because you’re forced to go through the game in a relatively linear fashion. Rather, I feel like <i>A Link Between Worlds</i> serves as a good template for open-world exploration in a <i>Zelda </i>game, because even though they give you all of the important tools right at the start of the game and allow you to go pretty much anywhere and complete dungeons in any order, there are still tons of interesting, practical, and game-changing rewards to be found in the open world, as well as in dungeons. Things like the flippers that let you swim, the power gloves that let you lift huge boulders, the pegasus boots that allow you to sprint and bash into things, the net that lets you catch fairies and insects, and bottles that let you carry things are all acquired progressively via your own exploration, and they all open up new quests and new areas for exploration in addition to leading to extra rewards like heart pieces and equipment upgrades.</div>
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Exchanging spirit orbs for heart containers and stamina vessels.</div>
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Practically nothing new gets added to the world or to your arsenal as you play; you fight basically the same enemies with basically the same equipment the whole game, except all of the common enemies (which comprise maybe 80% of what you encounter) scale with you in level (the game introduces stronger versions of the same enemies as you kill more of them) so you’re always on a roughly even footing with the rest of the world, and all that really happens is some numbers get tweaked until you’re just stronger than pretty much everything. There’s a steep difficulty curve at the beginning when seemingly everything can one-shot you and you have hardly any equipment or resources to do much of anything, but once you get past that initial difficulty hurdle the curve flattens out tremendously, with only guardians and lynels posing any real threat. Consequently, the game just gets easier and easier as you play. That’s a good thing in the sense that it makes you feel like you’re getting stronger when common enemies are no longer a danger to you and you can actually defeat guardians and lynels, but there aren’t enough thresholds of “getting stronger” because there aren’t enough different types of enemies; you overcome the initial difficulty hurdle and then it’s pretty much a status quo until you can fight guardians and lynels, so you spend large chunks of time not actually feeling like you’re getting stronger.</div>
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">D</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">ISAPPOINTING, UNDERWHELMING DUNGEONS</span></span></div>
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Dungeons are a big part of the <i>Zelda </i>formula for me, and it’s here that <i>BOTW </i>disappoints the most. To me, a large part of the charm in a <i>Zelda </i>game is how the gameplay alternates between relatively free-form overworld exploration and more-structured dungeons, each of which introduces new gameplay mechanisms (usually via a new item) and has some kind of story and unique theme surrounding it. In <i>BOTW</i>, all four of the main dungeons are giant piloted mechs built to resemble different types of animals (kind of like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7pHy2MB6HM">zords in <i>Power Rangers</i></a>), but while the exterior shapes and interior layouts are different, they all look and feel the same, especially once you're inside, because they all have the same textures and models and aesthetic designs. The only real difference is in how they're controlled, since each one allows you to manipulate the shape or layout of the dungeon by moving different parts of the divine beast. For example, you can raise or lower the trunk of the elephant, tilt the bird's wingspan left or right, rotate the cylinders of the camel's body, and turn the lizard horizontal or vertical. This is a neat idea, but it's literally the only thing differentiating the four dungeons with any kind of unique personality, because everything else about them is pretty much identical, with the exception of the lizard whose interior is initially bathed in complete darkness.</div>
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Looking up at the bird Divine Beast, flying high in the sky.</div>
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Consider in <i>Ocarina of Time</i>, for instance, where each dungeon had a unique theme which granted it a unique visual design, unique music, unique enemies, unique puzzles, and a unique boss. This not only gave a uniquely interesting charm and personality to each dungeon, but it also helped to keep the gameplay feeling fresh with constant new twists. Being inside the Great Deku Tree shooting spiders with the sling shot and burning webs with torch-lit deku sticks is both mechanically and aesthetically different from being inside Dodongo's Cavern stabbing dodongos in the tail and blowing up walls with bombs. The puzzles all tie directly into the area's theme and are based heavily around a new item, like using the hookshot and iron boots to navigate the Water Temple, which is mechanically different from using the hover boots and lens of truth to navigate the Shadow Temple. More importantly, these areas feel like what they're supposed to represent; the Forest Temple <i><u>feels</u></i> like, well, a forest temple. In <i>BOTW</i>, being inside a giant mechanical camel doesn't feel like being inside a camel because it all looks and feels like every other beast; you fight the same lesser guardians and floating skull monsters in every dungeon, you fight similar variations on the same boss in every dungeon, you have the same "activate five terminals" objective in every dungeon, and you solve a lot of similar puzzles. Except for the unique way in which your rotate or manipulate the dungeon's orientation, I feel like you could swap pretty much everything else between dungeons (even the music) and it wouldn't make a difference.</div>
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Each dungeon follows the same formulaic script: arrive at the local town hosting the divine beast, talk to the elder, go find someone/something, follow a highly scripted "get inside the beast" sequence with a temporary companion, then once inside get to the map terminal that shows the layout of the beast and lets you manipulate it, then find five more terminals, then fight the boss. The bosses are perhaps some of the least challenging, least enjoyable, and least memorable in any <i>Zelda </i>game ever since they're all just purple blobs and they can all be defeated with the exact same strategy, of just shooting them repeatedly with arrows. The “get inside” portions are all pretty lame because they're just gimmicky rail-shooter mini-games that remove a lot of your own creativity and input. The only one that’s kind of good is when you have to escort a goron through a quasi-stealth section up a mountain because you have actual control over what you’re doing and have some freedom to choose how you get past the patrolling sentry guardians. Inside the divine beasts, there are practically no enemies and all of the puzzles pretty much consist of “rotate the dungeon to get to the platform.” It’s kind of cool being able to manipulate the layout/orientation of the dungeon, but “reach the five terminals” feels like a pretty simple and straightforward objective, especially considering the dungeons are all pretty short -- I was in and out of most of them in about 20 minutes.</div>
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Inside one of the divine beasts.</div>
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There's a bit of a story and buildup leading to each divine beast, with the beasts having been built 100 years ago to fight Ganon, but having since become corrupted while they now terrorize their former hosts; while you're ostensibly trying to regain control of them to fight Ganon, you're also doing it to help out the local populations, except that the divine beasts aren't really much of a threat and so the story element here falls completely flat in a classic case of a game "telling" you something rather than "showing" it to you. In each case, they tell you about some horrible thing happening with each beast, but it rarely affects gameplay and you never really see it causing problems for them, either. The camel in the Gerudo desert is causing devastating sand storms, but it stays way off in the distance the entire time and never affects anything except its immediate surroundings, so just stay away from it and there's no problem; the bird flying around the Rito village does absolutely nothing except shoot the Rito down if they fly too high, so just don't fly so high and there's no problem; and so on. In most cases, the problems actually seem more like minor inconveniences than any serious threat they need saving from, and regaining control of the beast ends up effecting no practical change in the world. (The main exception here is the elephant in Zora's Domain, which will make it stop raining in the area so that you can actually climb things.)</div>
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Compare this to <i>Majora's Mask</i>, for instance, where you see gorons literally frozen solid and you help individual NPCs directly deal with those issues, like by unfreezing them and rescuing their friends, bringing them food when they're trapped and can't get back to town, reuniting a crying baby with his father, and so on, and then when you clear the dungeon you bring spring back to the mountain, which also opens up new gameplay opportunities for you in the form of goron racing and the blacksmith, in addition to just thawing out the ice and giving you new areas to explore that were previously blocked by snow and ice. Helping the gorons in <i>Breath of the Wild</i>, in contrast, amounts to rescuing one goron who somehow got himself trapped in a cave-in, and then making it so fireballs (which are pretty easy to dodge, do very little damage, and never seem to hit the goron city) will stop occasionally falling from the sky. Consequently, there's no narrative or mechanical thrust behind doing the dungeons and so they come off feeling incredibly hollow.</div>
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The camel Divine Beast, way off in the distance.</div>
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The dungeons no longer grant you a new item to be used solving puzzles within the dungeon, or against the dungeon's boss for that matter, so the puzzles all rely on similar mechanics based mostly around manipulating the level orientation. Typically this boils down to "move the dungeon to reach a new area, then move it back to reach another new area," which doesn't always feel like a puzzle to me because it's often just a short, simple one-or-two-step process where you reach the solution and go "that's it? That's all I had to do?" The dungeons themselves aren't that big, either, and with the absence of things like door keys and mini-bosses you don't get that feeling of progression you'd get in a typical <i>Zelda </i>dungeon. That is to say, they're more open-ended and less linear in the sense that you can go after the five terminals in any order you want, generally, as once you've gained the map (the very first thing you do in the dungeon) the whole level is pretty much open to you. That's certainly in keeping with the game's emphasis on open-ended freedom, but in a world that's already overflowing with an excessively abundant amount of freedom, I think it would've been nice to have some elements of more linear structure in the dungeons, which only comprise a tiny percentage of the game's content, anyway.</div>
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With only four dungeons tying a record low for the series (and these four are all-around shorter and smaller than the four in <i>Majora's Mask</i>), <i>BOTW </i>makes up for it with 120 shrines spread throughout the overworld, which act like "mini-dungeons" that typically contain just a single puzzle. These facilitate a satisfyingly brisk pace during exploration since they give you an appetizing little challenge without forcing you to spend too much time on them (they typically only last 5-10 minutes), which is especially good if you're playing the Switch handheld on-the-go where you might only be able to play in shorter increments. However, much like the full divine beast dungeons, they suffer from monotonous repetition because they all use the exact same textures, models, assets, puzzles, and music. It's impressive how many different puzzles they were able to create using the same limited toolset, but there's quite a bit of repetition here as well, as it often feels like you're just playing slight variations on something you've already done before. I don't care much for their aesthetic design, either, since they all look pretty bland with their perfectly right-angle edges and everything being a drab tan color. With there being 120 of them it means you could be spending up to 20 hours solving puzzles in a bunch of similar ways in the exact same environment, which needless to say gets to feel awfully shallow and repetitive after a while, and can make them feel a bit like a chore.</div>
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Inside a shrine, classic puzzle mechanisms at work.</div>
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The one cool dungeon/area that I actually liked is Hyrule Castle, which acts kind of like a final dungeon on your way to fighting Ganon. It's probably the most realistic-feeling castle in any <i>Zelda </i>game, with it being a sprawling network of interconnected rooms, tunnels, towers, and courtyards, each of which seems to serve some logical function -- the guard barracks, the armory, the library, the dining hall, the dungeon, Zelda's bedroom, and so on, all leading up to the castle proper where you arrive in the throne room to fight Ganon. It's pretty friggin' big, and unlike other dungeons in the game you feel like there's actual progression as you work your way from the lowly outskirts of the main gate up the ramparts, past bastions, and through the interior to reach the throne room. There's a ton of cool loot and secrets to find if you're inclined to explore, and it's a lot of fun just taking in the sights and seeing what all you can find. Interestingly, the entire Hyrule Castle is pretty much optional, as you don't need to find any keys or defeat any mini-bosses to reach the throne room -- you can pretty much just walk straight into the throne room, ignoring everything else -- so while this area has more of the general structure of a traditional <i>Zelda </i>dungeon, it doesn't quite feel like it mechanically.</div>
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">B</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">ORING QUESTS, CHARACTERS, AND STORY</span></span></div>
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Side quests are yet another staple of the <i>Zelda </i>formula for me, and while they usually take more of a backseat role to other, more important things (like item progression and dungeons) I think they're incredibly important for fleshing out the world and giving you more adventurous things to do besides killing random enemies and collecting rupees. Sometimes these side quests deal with a lot of human interaction (e.g., Anju and Kafei in <i>Majora's Mask</i>), or item collecting (e.g., maimai in <i>A Link Between Worlds</i>), or trading sequences (e.g., getting the Biggoron Sword in <i>Ocarina of Time</i>), or mini-games (e.g., digging for treasure in <i>A Link to the Past</i>), or just present you with random challenges (e.g., the Savage Labyrinth in <i>Wind Waker</i>), but there's almost always an interesting story involved, or at the very least an interesting reward. With <i>BOTW </i>almost completely removing all forms of upgrades and relegating heart piece containers exclusively to shrines, side quests rarely give you any kind of worthwhile reward -- usually you get a sword or a shield that will immediately break, or rupees that you can get pretty much everywhere.</div>
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"Now fetch me 30 wood and 3000 rupees!"</div>
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Too many quests in <i>BOTW </i>unfortunately amount to tedious, shallow, MMO-style item collecting. A guy in town has a crush on the inn keeper, and we're supposed to play cupid by finding out what she likes so that he has a way to talk to her; instead of doing something interesting like observing her on her daily routine, or sneaking into her room to look at her belongings or diary, you just walk up to her and ask what she likes, and then go collect 10 crickets, and the guy gives you 100 rupees. Nothing else ever happens from that quest, as the guy will never leave his spot to actually talk to the inn keeper and she'll never comment on it. An old man talks about how he used to be a champion mountain climber or some such story, but now that he's older he's lost his edge and needs <strike>performance enhancing drugs</strike> 55 rushrooms, so you fetch him 55 rushrooms and he gives you a diamond. A newlywed Hylian couple has arrived at the Rito village on a honeymoon, but it doesn't seem to be going well for either of them, and the solution to their pending divorce is ... to bring the husband some flint and the wife some baked apples, and they each pay you 100 rupees. There's potential in all of these quests for unique stories and gameplay possibilities, but they all amount to essentially the same thing -- boring gameplay, with practically no story, and unrewarding rewards.</div>
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Basically none of the characters have any kind of interesting backstory or personality, as most of the ones you can interact with are only there to hand out these tedious, shallow fetch quests, or to provide a service. They're all instantly forgettable, except for the handful of characters who recur across the map like Beedle the merchant, who shows up at every stable, or Pikango the painter who gives you hints about where to find memory locations, or Kass the Rito musician who hands out most of the riddles for the shrine quests. I have vague memories of Purah, the scientist of ancient tech who accidentally turned herself into an anime loli girl, the flamboyantly effeminate construction leader Bolson, Impa's handmaiden (though I can't remember her name) who has an awkward sense of duty to Link, the comically clown-like leader of the Yiga clan, and that's about it, as far as side characters go -- the rest may as well be cardboard cutouts. Main characters aren't much better; most of them are perfunctory and only stand out because of the role they play in the main story, and if they have any sort of personality it's entirely one-dimensional and over-played, like the zora prince's overwhelming charm and confidence, or the goron companion's skittish cowardice.</div>
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A memory cutscene featuring Girl Zelda and <strike>Boy Zelda</strike> Link.</div>
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I actually really like the approach they took with <i>BOTW </i>by giving the main characters voice acting and leaving everyone else silent, as I feel like it's the perfect way of injecting more personality into important characters while not having to deal with the headache of voicing every single NPC. Unfortunately I don't think they did the voice acting quite right. Zelda's voice, in particular, bugs me to no end because it sounds like the actress is trying too hard to put on an air of refined regality by using an awkwardly forced, posh British accent, which comes off feeling cheesy and cliche to me. Not to mention, I don't care much for the general timbre of her voice -- it's too high pitched and thin, and sounds a bit like a young girly-girl voice to me, which is not what I've imagined it to sound like for all these decades. Maybe it's just me, but I've always pictured her as a bit of a tomboy (a gossip stone in <i>OOT</i> specifically says this, and she does have a propensity for being depicted in more tomboyish roles like Sheik and Tetra) and a rebel who doesn't necessarily embrace the princess lifestyle, which doesn't match the voice they gave her. Mipha's voice, for the female zora champion, is in a similar boat where it's that high-pitched, refined, soft-spoken, ultra-feminine sound that maybe isn't appropriate for a fish-person? The Great Deku Tree's voice sounds like he could be any random Hylian dude and doesn't at all strike me as being that of a massive anthropomorphic tree.</div>
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The main story is practically non-existent, though that's not necessarily a knock against <i>BOTW </i>because I don't play <i>Zelda </i>games for the story, but it's a bit disappointing that there isn't one. The actual story in <i>BOTW </i>happened 100 years ago, and you spend most of the game simply picking up scattered pieces of it as you go around the world regaining your lost memories. Due to the game's non-linear open-world design, it means you can pick these memories up in any order, and so they all represent random snapshots in time and what happens in one cutscene doesn't really affect your perception of other cutscenes, because they're designed to be intentionally unrelated. Except for the character development of Zelda (which depicts her budding relationship with Link and her inadequate attempts to live up to her heritage and legacy as the holder of the Triforce of Wisdom), they don't really tell a story -- they're just thematic window dressing, a bit like audio logs that only exist in games to flesh out some of the lore. Meanwhile, the whole point of the game is to defeat Ganon, per usual, but there's absolutely zero characterization for Ganon -- he's just a swirling reddish-purple blob sitting around Hyrule Castle doing nothing. In fact, it kind of seems like he's no real threat at all, since all of the civilizations around Hyrule Castle seem to be doing just fine 100 years later as they're almost completely unaffected by Ganon.</div>
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The spirit of the king, aka Exposition Man.</div>
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Thus, there's no real weight to the main story. It makes sense that the story would take a backseat role to the open-world exploration because you can't have impending doom looming over the world and then have the player free to spend two months of in-game time cutting grass and catching lizards, because then you've effectively undermined your own story, but I think doing the opposite and pushing the story so far into the background that it doesn't even exist is just as bad. I like the idea that the story is set 100 years after a catastrophic failure, and that you're now going around seeing the after-effects and trying to set everything right, but they don't even capitalize on this basic idea. As I mentioned previously in the section on dungeons, freeing the divine beasts from Ganon's corruption has no practical effect on the world (except for making it stop raining in Zora's Domain so that you can actually climb things) so you're not really saving people and you're not even changing the world, like you do with every region for every dungeon in <i>Majora's Mask</i>. You see glimpses of what the world used to be like through the memory flashbacks, so it would've been cool if they made it so your actions would actually revert parts of the world back to the way it used to be, even if only superficially. As it is, there's practically no narrative purpose to any of the gameplay, which makes most of it feel like obligatory video game objectives like "defeat four bosses so you can defeat the final boss" or "collect 13 hearts so you can gain the Master Sword." </div>
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">E</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">XPLORATION IS ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD</span></span></div>
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My one major compliment for <i>BOTW </i>(and I think the reason is deserves a lot of the praise it's received) is how good the exploration actually is, and how much interesting stuff there is to discover in this world. There's still a lot of empty space and a lot of time wasted on tedious filler, but it's almost worth it because the good stuff in this game feels so magical and special. The world is simply gorgeous to observe, in large part because of the art style that blends realistic Twilight Princess graphics with the cel-shaded Wind Waker art style, not to mention the rustic charm of a verdant, run-down world after 100 years of decay, where much of the world is overrun by wild lands while the former glory of man-made structures sit unattended, uninhabited, and crumbling into ruins. Add to this the highly varied topography of the world with tons of mountains, cliffs, hills, canyons, and ravines, with a lot of diverse environments ranging from green grasslands to snowy tundras to arid deserts to tropical forests to volcanic mountains, and you could have hours of enjoyment just playing <i>BOTW </i>as a walking simulator, simply wandering around and appreciating the landscapes and all the majestic vistas, irrespective of whatever gameplay content you might hope to find inhabiting the world.</div>
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A gorgeous sunrise over an enormous landscape.</div>
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You can play the game with a mini-map to help with navigation, but fortunately the game doesn't bombard you with icons that lead you directly to every one of its hidden mysteries, like a lot of open-world games tend to do. That's something I really appreciate, because it makes each discovery feel that much more rewarding when it's something you found all on your own, based on your own curiosity of what that strange thing might be, or what might lie on the other side of that turn, in combination with your determination to overcome steep hurdles and long distance treks. For once in a mainstream production, the game doesn't care if you experience all of its content and won't drag you by the nose to show you everything -- a lot of things in this world are so discreetly hidden, either behind physical obstructions or through enigmatic riddles that you could spend a hundred or more hours exploring the world and still not find (or solve) a bunch of things.</div>
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It almost takes me back to a more sanguine time in gaming history, back before we had the internet to reveal all the secrets and spoil everything for us, just a click or two away, when finding secret areas was meant to feel like an actual accomplishment that not everyone would achieve. I remember playing games in my childhood with a sense of wonder about what kind of discoveries I'd find in the world and being in awe when I realized how certain aspects of the game worked, like making something unexpected happen by doing something completely unconventional. There was a sense of euphoria at figuring these things out. All of the solutions to <i>BOTW's </i>secrets are, of course, spoiled online if you care to seek them out, but the way they're handled in-game made me want to solve them on my own, which made seeking the answers out online feel like cheating. And because there are no icons telling where to go to find everything, or stats screens telling you what percentage of things you've collected or whatever, I never got struck by obsessive-compulsive completionism to do literally everything possible. Consequently, there's a lot of stuff that I simply never figured out and had to leave unfinished when I decided it was time to face Ganon. It was actually quite refreshing to feel that level of fulfillment where I could walk away from the game feeling satisfied, even knowing there was still a ton of stuff I never completed.</div>
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A shrine pops out at you over the cliff top.</div>
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I’m particularly surprised by how much organized structure actually exists in this world. It’s a common problem for huge open-world games to feel like an unorganized mess of random features, which makes them almost completely un-navigable without a mini-map and quest markers guiding you. Most of <i>BOTW’s </i>quests don’t even give you GPS markers; when you bring up a quest in your journal, you get one or two sentences describing a location (e.g., “near the top of the twin summits, under a tree with rocks at its base”) which is surprisingly all you need to find that exact location. One of the major story quests shows you photographs of landscapes with some notable feature in both the foreground and background, and tasks you with finding the exact spot that that photo was taken from (without a quest marker), and this is surprisingly doable as well because it’s usually pretty easy to identify a major landmark in the photo; once you recognize that landmark you start using context clues to help guide you (e.g., the shape makes it look like you should be viewing it from the left, and it’s from a higher vantage point looking down, so maybe start looking over in this direction and see if things start lining up). The map, likewise, labels a lot of specific areas which helps point you in the right direction when a quest says something is in a specific region, without ever leading you straight to your destination.</div>
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Maybe this is where the map feeling so big and empty a lot of times actually works in the game’s favor, since that makes it easier to pick out specific locations on your own when they aren’t buried under mountains of pointless crap. For example, when you’re looking for a giant statue of a goddess that’s supposedly been lost somewhere in the snowy mountains, it could be seemingly anywhere because those mountains are absolutely huge and cover a pretty wide area, but it’s pretty easy to run up a hill and survey a wide swath of land and realize that it isn’t there, and then you can move on to the next area and try again. Even though it’s a daunting and time-consuming task, it doesn’t feel impossible because you can make easy progress surveying terrain until you find it. It also helps, of course, that these locations actually stand out from the environment (when they aren’t deliberately hidden, that is); often times you’ll be wandering around and see something seemingly pop out at you on the horizon, and so you naturally gravitate towards that interesting structure. </div>
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"What is this weird painting on the face of this mountain?"</div>
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The shrine quests may be some of my favorite things in the open world, since they provide you with cryptic riddles of some task that you need to do to access the shrine, like solving a puzzle. Most shrines end up feeling pretty similar because they always put you in the same environment to solve similar puzzles, but the shrine quests happen in the open world and usually involve a unique scenario you won’t encounter elsewhere. Some of these riddles are pretty obvious and just take some effort finding the intended solution (like the one where you have to find the correct vantage point that will let you shoot an arrow through two rock holes), while others are more vague and take some creative interpretation to figure out what you’re supposed to do (like when it hints at requiring a certain type of shadow to be cast on an object, and you have to figure out what kind of object and at what time of day). Others involve a more elaborate setup, like Eventide Isle where they strip you of all your items and equipment and force you to make due with limited options, or the forest that’s bathed in complete darkness where you have to use a torch to navigate and set up bonfires as guiding points. These are usually pretty satisfying, in part due to their creativity, but they also provide you with interesting gameplay scenarios that you don’t find in other open-world games. </div>
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Dinraal, one of the three dragons. </div>
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Other things in the world are just so mysterious that they have a certain intriguing allure, and I love that they tease you with their existence for so long while not presenting a quick or easy answer to what they are or why they’re there. The first time I saw a dragon randomly flying around the sky, for instance, came as a complete surprise to me -- “What is that thing? Is it hostile? Where’s it going, and what’s it doing?” It looked so majestic and awe-inspiring that I had to know more, but it disappeared into a vortex in the sky before I could get closer. I kept seeing them appear occasionally but could never get close enough to do anything. Eventually I stumbled upon another one flying towards me while cutting through a river canyon and across a waterfall; I finally got close enough to shoot an arrow at it and something sparkly dropped from its hide and started washing away in the river, leading to a frantic chase as I go “Ooh, what’s that?” Other times, I’d randomly see a huge glowing light on a mountain top, and when I eventually went to investigate I became even more intrigued when I found a congregation of spirit animals who scattered as soon as I arrived. These kinds of things are just so weird and unexpected that they make you want to keep playing, just to figure them out.</div>
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">S</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">OME SMALLER OBSERVATIONS</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Not enough emphasis on climbing</i></span></div>
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For a game who’s main gimmick seems to be “you can climb [nearly] anything,” I wish it served more utility besides being essentially a shortcut to let you get around or up mountains more easily. I would’ve liked, for instance, to see more battles with larger enemies that allowed (or even required) you to climb them to reach their weak spots, <i>Shadow of the Colossus</i> style. You can do this with Stone Taluses, but that’s about it. The Divine Beasts, for instance, would’ve been a lot cooler if you’d have had to scale them from the ground up to get inside, as some sort of puzzle-platforming sequence with actual climbing involved, as opposed to just following a dumb scripted rail-shooter sequence where you get dropped off at the entrance in a cutscene.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Weather is more annoying than atmospheric</i></span></div>
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Whenever it rains you become basically unable to climb because surfaces become too slick to grip onto, and you will inevitably slide down further than you were able to climb. And whenever you’re in a thunderstorm, you’ll get struck by lightning if you have any metal equipped, which is pretty much most of the equipment in the game. I think the idea of these weather patterns is to force you to randomly have to change your strategy and adapt to changing circumstances, but in practice it just means “stop playing the game for a while and wait for it to stop.” You can still climb, of course, but way less efficiently, and you can still fight if you have wooden equipment, but I usually found that it wasn't worth dealing with these things, and thought it was more of a nuisance like the game was saying "stop having fun." </div>
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Bokoblins getting boko-blowed up by lightning.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Annoying hand-holding</i></span></div>
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Another serious ding against the Divine Beasts as dungeons is that your temporary companion characters (both the physical ones who help you get into the beast as well as the spirits of the beasts' former champions) are obnoxious about telling you things that should either be blatantly obvious, or that would be more fun to figure out on your own. You see four glowing points on the beast's feet and the character yells "Shoot him in the feet!" As soon as the dungeon boss gets introduced the companion yells "Watch out for his spear! It has a long reach!" and then the boss immediately does a lunging thrust attack at you. Like, thanks, I kind of enjoy figuring these things out for myself, and you're ruining that experience. At least they don't pause the game to tell you these things, but it's still annoying.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>No pretense about heroes and legends</i></span></div>
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Other <i>Zelda </i>games like to set up Link as an ordinary boy who is suddenly thrust into the role of the hero, who has to muster the courage to save the day, but it's usually in vain when it's later revealed that he's the Chosen Hero after all, and it's kind of pointless to begin with since Link is an established character -- even if this Link is different we already know he's going to rise to power and fulfill some divine prophesy. <i>BOTW </i>cuts out any pretense that this is anything other than a typical <i>Zelda </i>game plot by saying upfront "you are the legendary Link, the hero who will save us all," while also acknowledging that this is a basic premise of "destroy Ganon, rescue Zelda." You don't even get to name your character, because you're just straight up Link in this game. I kind of like that because it cuts right to the chase and doesn't waste our time with pointless buildup.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Why is Link Spider-Man?</i></span></div>
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This is a minor point, but it bugs me that it's never explained how or why Link is able to grip onto surfaces so easily. Realistically, he shouldn't be able to do anything remotely close to what he does in this game, and it just seems to be an innate ability -- they don't even give you Ancient Climbing Gloves or anything like that at the start of the game. I really wish they would've done this, just for the sake of making logical sense, but they could've also then let you upgrade your climbing equipment to make climbing better, like giving you a hook shot that would let you zip up a distance before climbing, or a grapple hook that you could throw and then climb the rope, or a gun that would let you shoot hand-holds onto walls. I get that there's already the climbing armor set, but that's kind of boring because it's just passive number tweaking.</div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUtziaZlDeE">Is he strong? Listen bud; he's got radioactive blood</a>.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Horses and seals control poorly</i></span><br />
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Instead of being assigned or earning the iconic Epona horse, you tame wild horses and build a bond with them the longer you use them, as you soothe them and pat them for doing what you want. It's an interesting mechanism, but as part of the Horse Bond system, they act far more independently of you and tend to do their own thing, sometimes veering off in a direction you didn't intend or coming to an abrupt stop, sometimes even refusing to move without the right coaxing. This happens even when you maximize your bond with them, albeit to a lesser extent. So they don't handle very well, and since you obviously can't climb with them anywhere, or fast-travel with them, I found myself often leaving them behind because it was more hassle to keep track of them than it was worth. Sand seals, meanwhile, are just a nuisance, and I was pretty pissed off when I went into a shrine in the middle of the desert and had my seal disappear when I came back out, leaving me with no transportation.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Gyroscopic tilting puzzles suck</i></span><br />
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Some of the shrine puzzles involve using the motion controls on the switch controls, and they're pretty much the worst thing ever. I dislike motion controls in general because I find they disrupt immersion, but also because there's usually not enough tactile feedback to make accurate movements with the controller (the one exception where I like motion controls is aiming projectile weapons). Fortunately <i>BOTW </i>doesn't cram motion controls down our throats like <i>Skyward Sword</i> did, but man those tilting puzzles just suck. They were particularly bad for me because I was using the Switch as a handheld tablet, and when you're rotating the device it becomes harder to see the screen, until you're eventually contorting your whole body to see, or else you remove the controllers and rest the Switch in your lap where it's less secure.</div>
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Burn it with fire, then smash the Switch device.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Target sensor</i></span><br />
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One cool feature I really like is how you can take photographs of different things in the world, ranging from plants to monsters to weapons, and then set your map to scan for a specific type of thing and alert you when one is near. So, when I was trying to find hightail lizards so that I could upgrade my climbing gear, I didn't have to waste a bunch of time hunting them down with no idea where to find them; I could just go about my business and go grab one when the sensor started chirping. Unfortunately, the sensor doesn't give you any indication of how close you are to the thing, just if you're heading in the correct direction, which can lead you really far off course of where you were going, and kind of forces you to move slowly or sneak for longer distances because you don't know when it'll appear and you don't want to scare it off by moving too quickly or too loudly.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Combat system and weapon durability</i></span><br />
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I'm not a huge fan of the combat system. It's fine and generally pretty functional for a <i>Zelda </i>game (though I dislike how inconsistent the flurry rush dodge mechanism is), but I don't really care for how much of the game's difficulty progression is based on equipment. Tough enemies like lynels and guardians are difficult in the early game primarily because they're huge damage sponges and you simply don't have enough weapons that will do enough damage or last long enough to kill them -- you basically run out of offense long before you can beat those enemies, even if you perfectly execute all of your attacks and dodges, and that's a bit disappointing that personal skill plays arguably less of a role in success than your gear. I actually kind of like that weapons can break, but it does take away some of the satisfaction of finding new weapons when you know they're just going to break, and it makes combat somewhat pointless when a lot of the time you're just breaking your own weapons to be rewarded with similar replacements.</div>
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Enjoy spamming this shallow mechanism for the entire game.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>The final boss is pretty lame</i></span><br />
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The whole game builds up to fighting Calamity Ganon, and he ends up being a complete push-over. Not only is he weaker than some of the regular enemies you can encounter in the wild (I'm pretty sure savage lynels deal more damage and are harder to dodge), if you've done the four Divine Beasts then he starts at half health, making an already easy fight even easier. For his final phase, when he assumes the Dark Beast form and you ride around on your horse shooting light arrows at him, he just kind of stands there doing nothing while you wait for targeting spots to appear from Zelda. It's kind of boring and anticlimactic.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Lame, underwhelming music</i></span><br />
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Music has always been an iconic element of the <i>Zelda </i>games, with many of them featuring musical instruments as key items in your tool belt. Generally speaking, though, the <i>Zelda </i>games tend to have prominent soundtracks that set a particular mood for specific areas and that really help to bring certain areas or emotions to life. It's hard not to feel a nostalgic pull at the heart strings when you hear Saria's song in <i>Twilight Princess</i> while chasing a skull kid through the Sacred Grove, for example. <i>BOTW </i>has pretty much no music whatsoever, and what little music actually exists in the game is usually some type of minimalistic thing with hardly any melody or rhythm. Most of the time in the wild you're just hearing random plinking of piano chords, and other more prominent themes just sound generic to me. The only music I actually remember is Kass's accordion, the shrine music (mostly because I spent 12-15 hours listening to that same 2-minute track), the stable music (which is loosely based on Epona's theme, an already familiar theme), and the medley/mashups in Hyrule Castle (which again calls back to familiar themes like Ganondorf's organ, Zelda's Lullaby, the original overworld theme, etc). I couldn't even recall what <i>BOTW's</i> main theme sounds like, and I don't recognize it when I listen to it now.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Cooking is pointless</i></span></div>
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Another major addition to <i>BOTW </i>is cooking; as part of living off the (breath of the) wild, you’re able to collect a lot of random ingredients and materials and then cook food and brew elixirs, which will help you to restore lost health or give you stat bonuses like dealing extra damage or granting extra protection against cold environments, among many other things. There are a ton of different ingredients that you can use to make a ton of different recipes, but it’s all pretty much pointless. You don’t need recipes for environmental protection because there’s always a set of armor available to counteract extreme environments, and you don’t need to cook any of the more advanced recipes for healing items because all you really need is one hearty vegetable to restore full health, and until you get to the point where it's worth using hearty vegetables you'll find more than enough meat and regular vegetables that you can throw them in a pot and cook them by themselves. </div>
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Even this recipe goes above and beyond what you'd ever need.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Why are arrows so expensive?</i></span><br />
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The bow and arrow is supposed to be one of your primary weapons in the game, but I often found myself running out of arrows and having seemingly no way to replenish my supply. As is tradition in <i>Zelda </i>games, if you need more bombs or arrows or whatever, you go smash some pots or cut some grass, but now you can only get arrows by buying them from stores, where they're really expensive or not sold in large enough quantities, or you have to farm bokoblin archers and hope they drop arrows. Sometimes I randomly found myself with hundreds of arrows just from exploring the world, whereas other times I found myself completely strapped for arrows and having to shell out hundreds of rupees just to buy a small amount to get by. For something as essential as arrows, I feel like they should be pretty much always available to you -- you always have an infinite supply of bombs, for example, so why should arrows be limited? Maybe it's because of balance, but you can cheese pretty much every enemy in the game by spamming bombs, so I don't get what the harm would be in making arrows cheaper or more readily available.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Long, tedious load times and cutscenes</i></span><br />
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The world is obviously huge so obviously it's going to take a bit of time to load the game, but fortunately you don't have to go through any load screens to cross from one side of the map to the other. Unfortunately, you do have to load every time you enter and exit a shrine, any time you fast-travel, and any time you die. That's still not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things (at least we don't have to sit through load screens every time we open a door, like in Bethesda's games), but the load screens for the shrines get to be pretty unbearable, because you have to sit through load screens and unskippable cutscenes in such quick succession -- on entering the shrine, on obtaining the spirit orb, and on exiting. It's even more annoying for the shrine quests where you solve the puzzle in the open world, then sit through load screens and unskippable cutscenes just to grab the immediate reward in a matter of seconds, then sit through those same load screens and unskippable cutscenes again.</div>
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Get used to seeing this screen. </div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Why are Great Fairies prostitutes?</i></span><br />
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So you find a great fairy fountain, and they're feverishly begging for money. You just see a hand stick out of a giant bulb and they're like "Give me your rupees! Hand them over, quickly!" Which is a little odd and off-putting, but then when you get your armor upgraded they <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHNJOnkYWM4">literally blow you</a> and make oddly sexual noises. I guess they were already kind of sexualized when they appeared in <i>OOT</i>, but it seems a little on-the-nose in <i>BOTW</i>, especially with having to pay them money for their services. I don't really mind it, but it's odd, to say the least. I especially hate that unlocking them is simply a matter of "give them a bunch of rupees," when there could've been a more interesting quest involved, like solving a shrine riddle or finding her lesser fairies, like other <i>Zelda </i>games have done.</div>
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No comment.</div>
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">I</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">N CONCLUSION</span></span><br />
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I went into <i>BOTW </i>expecting to be utterly bored and disappointed by it; while I did experience a lot of boredom and disappointment, I'd say I generally enjoyed my time with <i>BOTW </i>-- I just wasn't completely enamored with it like a lot of other people were. I was surprised at how much fun the exploration could be, and I was also really impressed with the world design, not to mention how special and magical some of its content can be, but that's about where my praise for the game begins and ends; everything else about it was either mediocre or downright bad to me. The dungeons were all disappointing, the progression didn't feel satisfying, there wasn't enough unique, interesting content populating its huge open world, and the story, quests, and characters were all underwhelming. Some of this is particularly surprising to me, because I'd consider some of these things to be highly important, staple <i>Zelda </i>elements, and to see them get such poor treatment is alarming. There's enough good stuff in this game to warrant a favorable review score, and enough to warrant a playthrough, but I kind of regret spending so much time on it. While it's a decent game, and one of the better <i>Zelda </i>games I've played in a long time, it definitely doesn't qualify to me as one of the best <i>Zelda </i>games of all time; time will tell, but I'd be very surprised if it ever cracked my top five.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(None of these screenshots are mine, since I was playing on a borrowed Switch; all of these are from <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/03/04/36-gorgeous-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-screenshots">IGN</a>, <a href="http://www.nintendolife.com/games/nintendo-switch/legend_of_zelda_breath_of_the_wild/screenshots">Nintendo Life</a>, <a href="https://www.giantbomb.com/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild/3030-41355/images/">GiantBomb</a>, and <a href="https://www.zeldadungeon.net/breath-of-the-wild-walkthrough/vah-medoh-dungeon/">Zelda Dungeon</a>.)</span></center>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-39325169196964346622018-10-08T17:51:00.000-04:002018-10-08T21:08:10.938-04:00Board Game Review: The Island of El Dorado<div dir="ltr">
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<i>The Island of El Dorado</i> (by Daniel Aronson) is a tile-laying exploration board game for 2-4 players (60-90 minutes) in which players are 16th century explorers discovering the island of El Dorado and competing to be the first to lay claim to all four shrines, which is said to grant the explorer access to untold wealth and power. A typical turn goes through a two-step process of first rolling two dice to determine how many spaces you can move your explorer as well as how many resources you produce at the beginning of your turn, and then going through your “explore phase” in which you move your explorer and/or villagers (who serve double-duty as both army units for combat as well as workers for resource-production) and spend resources to build structures, recruit more villagers, or give offerings to shrines. Players may also confront each other in direct combat by moving their explorer or army figures onto another player's space, rolling dice based on each player's total strength in the battle to determine a victor. Three of the shrines can be found scattered around the island, but the fourth is hidden inside a cave that must be explored separately, and which also houses assorted monsters and dangerous encounters. The first player to control all four shrines wins the game.</div>
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In practice, <i>The Island of El Dorado</i> plays like a cross between <i>The Settlers of Catan</i> and <i>Risk</i>, with a tile-laying exploration element like <i>Betrayal at House on the Hill</i> or <i>Escape: Curse of the Temple</i> where you build the map as you play. As a game with relatively light, simple rules and a high degree of luck, it's intended to be more of a family-weight game for families and more casual gamers, though the designer has since published rules for a "Hardcore Mode" intended for more strategic gamers who dislike how much of a factor luck plays in the standard rules. I backed the first Kickstarter because I hoped it would serve as a more pleasant alternative to <i>Catan</i>, since it fits in the same weight class and has so many superficial similarities (plus, I'm a sucker for exploration games) but I find that I just don't like it very much, or at least not with any of the current rules. Even for a family-weight game, the luck element is just too prevalent in this game, and I feel like it runs too long for such a simple, luck-dependent game. The "Hardcore Mode" rules help, but I have some issues with those, too. The bulk of this review will deal with the standard rules, and then I'll discuss the "Hardcore Mode" rules separately.</div>
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My biggest issue with the standard rules is that pretty much everything in this game is random: how many spaces you can move per turn is random, how many resources you can gather per turn is random, how the board shapes up is random, where the shrines appear is random, what you encounter in the cave is random, how you win battles is random, and so on. It's so random that practically no amount of strategy will help you win, because so much of it comes down to random luck in terms of who can get to the shrines first, and who can win key battles. So many times in this game I've felt like I had a great plan for my turn, only to roll the dice and get stuck with low rolls that prevent me from doing much of anything, or I confidently move in to attack someone with a vastly superior army and lose because I rolled poorly on the dice. I've had players win because they were the ones constantly discovering the shrines while everyone else was discovering nothing in the opposite direction and having to waste turns moving back into position just to catch up. And every single game I've played came down to a situation where a single roll of the dice or a single tile draw (both of which you have very little to no control over as a player) was the only thing separating three or more players from first place.</div>
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A three-player game in progress.</div>
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Every game follows roughly the same pattern; players take turns exploring the island until they find a good spot to set up a farmhouse and/or until they discover a shrine, then players take turns building up their pool of resources and moving to give offerings to shrines, then once a player has all or most of the island shrines and a big enough army they go into the cave to try to find the cave shrine, which is the most important one since it grants its owner +2 strength in combat (as opposed to +1 for the other three shrines) and is the only one with exclusive ownership -- whereas multiple players can share control of the normal shrines, only one player can ever possess the cave shrine at a time, passing it to someone else if their explorer is defeated. And since finding the cave shrine requires you to (likely) fight assorted monsters, it's a task better saved for later in the game after you've gained combat strength through other shrine offerings, and/or by stockpiling enough resources that you can give up on resource production and take your villagers into the cave with you as an army. Typically, the winner is whoever discovers the cave shrine first, or whoever defeats the cave shrine possessor in combat.</div>
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It seems like every game I play, everyone ends up roughly neck-and-neck towards the finish line, with all players controlling three of the four shrines and needing just one more to win. That sounds like a good thing, since that means the players are all fairly evenly matched and everyone should feel like they're in it for the whole game (no one's ever so far behind that they can't catch up, or no one's the clear runaway leader), but here's the problem: when everyone is that close at the end of the game, all it takes is a small bit of random luck to swing a victory. Usually, in the games I've played, the person who wins is the player who got the luckiest at the very end of the game; someone wanders into the cave and happens to find the last shrine without ever having to fight any tough cave dwellers and wins the game, or someone rolls better results in combat thus taking the cave shrine from its current owner and wins the game, or someone rolls better results in combat and thus has an unchallenged path to their final shrine and wins the game. Consequently, most games tend to end rather abruptly and anticlimactically, with players often feeling like they didn't do anything to earn or deserve their outcome.</div>
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"King-making" can play a role in the end-game, since a player out of contention can potentially choose the victor depending on whom they attack in the final rounds, while "bash the leader" also comes into play, since players are basically forced to target a specific player if someone's making a strong push for their final shrine just to prevent another player from winning. On the one hand, that's kind of exciting having to react to other players and make a last ditch effort to stop someone else, but on the other hand it gets kind of tedious when all you're really doing is prolonging the game just so you can keep knocking each other around until someone gets lucky on a critical dice roll or tile draw. And it's not like these are deep, interesting, tactical decisions you're making -- in these instances, you're reacting to the game state and doing essentially what the game mandates must be done in order for you to continue having a chance to win. "This doesn't really help me, but I need to move over here and fight this player just to prevent them from winning" isn't a very satisfying decision to me, especially when the outcome is determined almost entirely through a single dice roll over which I have no influence, other than bringing a larger army so I can roll more dice and hopefully roll better results than my opponent.</div>
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Blue rolls a 5 on three dice, white rolls a 4 on five dice.</div>
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Combat is particularly egregious when it comes to random luck, largely because there's no real strategy, but also because the dice are so highly variable. The game uses regular six-sided dice (numbered 1-6) to determine your movement and production points each turn, but uses <i>Betrayal at House on the Hill</i> dice for combat (sides numbered 0,0,1,1,2,2). While that lower range of numbers should help in theory to keep the variance to a minimum, you have the same chance on every die of rolling a 0 or a 2, and when you're only rolling 3-4 dice it's not uncommon for one player to roll a couple 0's while the other rolls a couple 2's. If two players are committing the same (or similar) strength to a fight and they're therefore rolling a similar number of dice, then it's pure random luck who wins.</div>
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Your only way to influence the outcome of the fight is to simply bring a bigger army so that you can roll more dice, but the fact that you can still roll blanks doesn't guarantee a better roll -- adding more dice to the pool raises the ceiling of your roll, but not the floor. With the 001122 dice, if you're rolling four dice against your opponent's two dice, then your results can range anywhere from 0-8, versus their roll of 0-4; if you roll slightly below average, you score a 3, and if they roll slightly above average, they score a 3, and you'd tie, meaning that all it takes is a slight difference in a random dice roll to determine a victor. If the dice had sides of, say, 112233 instead, then you'd be rolling between 4-12, versus their 2-6; if you roll slightly below average, you score a 7, and if they roll slightly above average, they score a 5, meaning that rolling more dice would actually reward you with generally better results, and it would take more extreme rolls to swing the outcome. You could, alternatively, achieve the same results by adding your strength to your final roll, which is a rule I might consider implementing in the future.</div>
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The production dice aren’t much better, since a random dice roll determines basically how good your turn is going to be. Roll high and you can produce a ton of resources and swoop across the board to fight someone or lay claim to a shrine; roll low and you can’t do much of anything and feel like you basically just lost a turn. While it’s true that dice rolls will generally average out over a period of time, they’re still vulnerable to good or bad streaks where a player might get multiple good or bad rolls in a row, and it’s not fun to spend multiple turns rolling nothing but 1's and 2's while someone else consistently lands on the upper half of the dice rolls. The official “less random” variant for your production roll helps a bit (instead of rolling 2d6, players roll 1d6 and use the face-up side and the face-down side as the two results, so that you always have a sum total of seven points on your turn; the dice just determine the ratio), but you still run into issues where you’re like “man I really need a five or a six this turn” or “a four and a three would be an ideal combo” and you just don’t get the results you need, thereby throwing a bit of a wrench in your plans. And even then, you’re still stuck with the even worse combat dice.</div>
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Losing just a single battle can have pretty dire consequences, and can knock you completely out of the game if it happens at the right time. Pretty much every session I've played had the victor determined by whomever won the last combat, because it either gave them the victory right then and there or left a clear path for them to reach victory. When you lose a fight, all of your villagers in the battle die, you lose half of your resources, and your explorer gets moved to somewhere of the winner's choosing, usually the most remote space on the opposite side of the board. If you had any structures attached to that space (like a farmhouse necessary for resource production) then they will likely destroy it, too. So, if your home base of operations just got attacked and you lose the dice roll by a single point, then you lose practically all of your pieces on the board, plus half the cards in your hand, and have to rebuild everything with now fewer resources than you had, in a remote corner of the board far away from everything else. It’s not completely crippling because buildings and villagers are pretty cheap to produce, but it effectively sets you back several turns and that can be enough to knock you out if it's near the end of the game, when you might not have enough turns left to get back into it.</div>
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I just played a two-player game, for instance, where we went from being tied at two shrines a piece midway through the race to me losing in the span of two turns. I had just found the cave shrine (putting me at two shrines), and my opponent (who had both of the revealed island shrines) decided to camp on the cave entrance and form a blockade, forcing me to attack him to get out. I did so on my turn and lost the fight, purely due to bad luck (we were both rolling eight dice, the maximum we could commit to the fight), and thus lost the cave shrine to my opponent (putting me at one of four shrines and him at three of four) plus all my pieces on the board and half of my resources. On the very next turn, he went exploring and stumbled upon the final island shrine, and had enough resources on hand to give an offering then and there, ending the game in a sudden victory (for him). And there was nothing I could do about it, because I had lost pretty much everything in that one fight. He felt like it was a hollow victory, and we both agreed it was stupid that we went from being tied roughly halfway through the race to me losing, all in the span of 30 seconds, all because of one random dice roll and one random tile draw. </div>
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The reason I get so hung up on the highly random combat dice is that it feels like you have no control over the outcome, and that's generally a bad feeling to have in a game. I understand that it's supposed to make the game more family-friendly, since the luck aspect should balance the playing field over time and give less experienced or less strategic players a chance of winning, even when they'd realistically be completely out-matched, but losing a game because of random dice rolls is really deflating, and winning because of them devalues the victory. We played a game where one player went undefeated in every fight he was involved in, despite the fact that the other player and I were consistently rolling more dice than him (sometimes twice as many), and so we were constantly bereft of resources and never in a good position on the board, while he had an overabundance of resources and practically free-roam of the board -- all because of random luck. I've played all ten or so of my sessions with relatively light gamers who’re only used to games like <i>Catan</i> and <i>Ticket to Ride</i>, and even they complained to me about how random everything felt, and how much of a role luck plays in winning. </div>
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Explorer cards are all double-sided for 10 unique explorers.</div>
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The asymmetric explorer abilities may not be fully balanced, either. While they all seem to have interesting abilities and I generally enjoy trying a different character and making their ability work to my strategy, I've found some to be just more useful than others. Tizoc's free food and Victoria's extra starting resources come in handy early on, but then give you practically zero benefit in the second half of the game. Emma's ability to look at and rearrange the top three island tiles gives her more control of exploration, but only really comes in handy on rare occasions when she draws an ocean or shrine tile. Stella's +1 speed seems pretty nice, but I sometimes find myself not using my full movement because I want to end my turn on a certain terrain or don't want to stray too far from my army, in which case the extra movement is wasted. When playing as William, I found that I rarely needed to use his discounted exchange rate. And so, in a game with as much chaotic dice rolling as <i>El Dorado</i>, I usually find myself wanting to play as Nicolas (or is it Nicholas? It's printed two different ways on the player board and in the manual) or Pedro, the two characters who give you benefits to dice-rolling.</div>
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I feel like the game suffers a bit from "<i>Betrayal at House on the Hill</i> Syndrome," where the quality of each individual session and therefore the amount of fun players can have can vary wildly depending on how the board happens to shape up. Sometimes you end up producing interesting maps with tactical bottlenecks between shrines, where players are encouraged to set up defensive blockades and have to plan their movements more meticulously, and other times the shrines all appear right next to each other and it ends up being a quick skirmish where someone jumps out to a quick lead and then the game ends. Sometimes everything lays out conveniently for one player and does no favors for anyone else, or other times someone goes into the cave and randomly finds the cave shrine in one of the first tiles, abruptly winning the game in an unsatisfying anticlimax. Point is, some games just end up being better or worse than others, largely due to random elements, and while the good games can be fairly decent the bad games have little to no redeeming value. At least with bad games of <i>Betrayal</i> you get a unique scenario you haven’t seen before, and maybe some kind of memorable story, but with <i>El Dorado</i> you get basically the exact same game but with less fun.</div>
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Despite whatever strategy you may think you have going into the game, all players have the exact same objective (be the first to claim all four shrines) and have to go through the exact same steps (deliver two of each resource to all three of the island shrines, and either find or steal the cave shrine) to achieve that goal. Consequently, there aren't a lot of decisions to make in this game, and the few that exist all lead directly to very short-term, surface-level goals. That is to say, decisions and gameplay mechanisms don't really lead to branching strategies where players might try to do different things to win the game in different ways, because everyone's forcibly railroaded into very similar strategies, and whether or not you win largely comes down to circumstances beyond your control -- random dice rolls and random tile draws. Compare this to, say, <i>Viticulture</i>, which isn't that much heavier than <i>El Dorado</i> in terms of rules complexity or total length; while everyone has the same objective of "be the first to reach 20 victory points," <i>Viticulture</i> gives you a lot of different ways to earn points, so when things don't go your way you have other options to fall back on. Not to mention, it allows you to go into the game with different long-term and short-term strategies that could vary from game to game, because it gives you a lot more choices about how to play the game and how to achieve your goals. <i>El Dorado</i>, in contrast, says "play the game in this exact way, and if that doesn't work then try again and hope for better results."</div>
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Green and blue are both producing all three types of resources.</div>
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Besides combat and exploration, there’s also a light economic element with building structures, recruiting villagers, and managing resources, almost like an engine-building game. Unfortunately, like everything else in the game, this dimension of gameplay feels incredibly shallow and underwhelming. Setting up your economy is as simple as building one farmhouse and recruiting a handful of villagers onto adjacent tiles, and that’s all you need to do for the entire game, which can be accomplished in one or two turns. This process can be expedited even further by finding one of the garden tiles, which count as "wild" and produce all three resources on a single tile, meaning you only ever need to commit a single villager to produce any and all resources you could ever need. If no one ever attacks your farm, then it just sits there the entire time passively collecting resources. So, it’s not really engine-building since your economy doesn’t progressively evolve over the course of the game, which is fine I guess for a light, simple, family-weight game, but there’s no real satisfaction to setting up your economy because there aren’t any extra layers of decision-making going into it -- your economy is perpetually in a binary of state of either existing or not existing, which isn't very exciting and feels like a missed opportunity to do something more engaging with the gameplay.</div>
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Meanwhile, there’s no limit to the amount of resources you can have at any time (ie, a hand limit) so the whole process of gathering resources only usually matters in the early stages of the game, because after a while people will start accumulating so many excessive resources that production no longer becomes as necessary, and also because certain resources become progressively less useful as the game goes on. Food is basically only used to recruit villagers, and wood is basically only used to build farmhouses. These resources are only used sporadically after the early stages of the game, if you lose your farm or your villagers (or still have a shrine offering to give), making gold the only resource with any late game value since you have to spend gold to move your army, and it’s usually being spent in large quantities to move your army greater distances. Not to mention its usefulness in building forts, which are perhaps more important in the second half of the game when there's usually more combat. Decision-making, therefore, is further reduced to a single dimension because after a certain point there’s practically no reason to take anything other than gold.</div>
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And because there’s no hand limit, it’s entirely possible for a particular resource to be completely drained from the supply, with one or two players hoarding all of them, leaving you with no way to gain those resources except by beating someone in combat (which might not be possible if you don’t have any gold to move your army) and hoping they choose to give you whatever resource you need (likely gold), which they might not even have to give if they have enough other useless resources lying around (likely gained from another player they beat in combat). In one game, a player decided to turtle up in a remote corner of the map and spent half the game slowly taking the entire gold supply until eventually she had practically all of it, leaving hardly any gold for me or the other player to move our armies, which then put us at a severe disadvantage trying to take it from her because we couldn't bring our armies with us. In another game we somehow drained the entire supply of food, and so the player with the explorer ability to gain one free food at the start of every turn went several turns in a row gaining no benefit from his explorer ability. Maybe this is an intended strategy and it’s all just a part of the gameplay (because maybe it promotes combat, or encourages trading between players), but it just seems like a weird oversight to me, especially since the "Hardcore Mode" rules aim to "fix" this problem by implementing a hand limit.</div>
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All three shrines randomly ended up right next to each other.</div>
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With the "Hardcore Mode" rules, players have a hand limit of 10 cards, which I kind of like because it makes the decision about what resources to take more interesting, since you not only need to think about how many you need, but how many you can hold. It forces you to plan at least one turn ahead, most of the time, and puts you in situations where you have to decide between holding on to enough resources to give a shrine offering, or holding on to a bunch of gold so that you can move your armies and re-roll dice in combat. Using gold to re-roll combat dice is another nice change, since it gives you more decisions to make during a fight, and adds a bit of a "push your luck" element to the gameplay -- you can re-roll as many dice as you want, spending one gold per die, but you only get one re-roll, so do you re-roll those 1's that could possibly turn up as 0's? I also like how the attacker has to complete their roll (and possible re-roll) before the defender even takes their first roll, because then you have that thought process of "my roll is pretty high, what're the odds he can roll better than me? Should I bother to re-roll anything at all?" (This, by the way, makes gold even more valuable, which is a bit questionable since it was already far and away the most valuable resource in the game.)</div>
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The third major change in "Hardcore Mode" is that you don't roll dice to determine movement and production; you're simply allotted six "points" to spend either way; you get to choose exactly how many you spend moving or producing, giving you a lot more strategic control over your turns. Finally, each player gets assigned one of the shrine tiles at the start of the game and gets to choose where they place it, as long as they do so within three turns, guaranteeing that each player will at least have an equal opportunity to discover a shrine, rather than possibly being burned wasting turns exploring and finding nothing. Besides that, a minor tweak of "Hardcore Mode" is to shuffle the cave shrine into the bottom half of the cave stack so that players are more likely to have to encounter cave dwellers, and will have to actually explore part of the cave to find the cave shrine.</div>
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These are all positive changes that I enjoy since they help reduce the extreme randomness and make the game a little more strategic, but in practice I still have issues with them. My biggest gripe is that they inflate the total playtime even further, since the hand limit now forces you to spend multiple turns doing something that might've only taken one turn previously in addition to having to spend more time thinking and planning out future turns. Other things like re-rolling dice in combat and having to explore at least half of the cave add extra time taking more actions and also calculating odds in one's head, and each player getting to choose where to place a shrine almost guarantees they'll all get placed on opposite corners of the board creating a larger, more spread-out island. The game ran about 90 minutes or more in a three player game with just the base rules, which was already a little too long for what was supposed to be a family/gatewaty game, but the hardcore rules added an extra half-hour with the same group, which is simply too long for this kind of game even if the "Hardcore Mode" is supposed to make it more of a "gamer's game." It's still the same game and it still comes down to "who can roll the best in the final moments." So while I like the intention of the hardcore rules, I think they're a bit of a mixed bag, and if I continue to play <i>El Dorado</i> in the future I'll probably pick and choose what rules I use and may even house-rule a few things.</div>
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Exploring the cave and encountering the thieves.</div>
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The rule book is pretty bad, by the way, at actually explaining the rules. The garden tile isn’t even mentioned in the rule book, except in a graphic summary on the back cover of the rules, which doesn't even clarify how it functions. Can it produce multiple different types of resources at once, or do you choose only one type to produce that turn? The rules for building a fort specify that it must be built on a corner between three tiles adjacent to your explorer where all three adjacent tiles are "unoccupied," but your explorer "occupies" the tile he's on, so clearly that's an exception that isn't mentioned anywhere in the rules, but what about your villagers? Can you build a fort on a tile if it's "occupied" by your own villagers, or is it only opponent pieces "occupying" spaces that blocks building? If you lose a fight to a cave dweller, you're supposed to shuffle the cave dweller back into the cave stack, but it doesn't say what to do with your explorer; does it follow normal combat rules between players where you get moved back to a shrine you control, or do you move back one hex to your previous tile, like in the explanation for what happens in the event of a tie? The thieves are found inside the cave, but they have their own entry in the rules, separate from the “cave dwellers” entry so are they technically cave dwellers and do they follow the rules for cave dwellers? Can there be more than two people in a fight, and if so, how does that work?</div>
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Other rules just don't make intuitive sense. Farmhouses are listed as having 1 strength, but for some reason they don’t add their strength to combat on adjacent tiles, so players constantly get hung up on the fact that “well my farmhouse is there, why isn’t it part of the combat? Why does the player board even list a strength value if it doesn't participate in combat?" The “move army” action is particularly confusing, since it says that armies can move "to an adjacent tile" out of turn, but must be done "after any explorer or army movement" but "before an opponent buys offerings, buildings, or villagers." The timing here is incredibly vague; if an opponent is moving their explorer multiple spaces, do I have to wait for them to finish an entire movement or can I basically interrupt their turn, but only if they interrupt their own movement to do something? How is movement even defined in this context? If they're going to build something, do I have to move my army before they actually declare a build action, or do I wait for them to say "I'm building something" and then go "Actually, before you do that, I'm moving my army and attacking you"? Whose action takes priority in that case? Can you spend multiple gold to move your army multiple spaces at a time, or are you restricted to moving your armies at a one-to-one ratio with your opponent's movement?</div>
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I'd watched a few video overviews and a full playthrough and thus thought I had a pretty good understanding of everything, but then became immensely confused when reading the actual rules for the first time, and even more so when playing for the first time, because so many things either weren't explained clearly, or didn't make intuitive sense, or weren't covered at all. The above examples are just some of the more egregious ones; there are plenty more to be found in the rule book, which I'm not sure was ever blind-tested. The rule book seems to assume you already know things about how the game works, and doesn't bother to clarify exceptions to the rule, or rule out alternative interpretations of the rules. Some important rules are never stated at all, while others are merely implied. Some rules are just poorly explained and difficult to understand. Learning to play the game correctly, therefore, requires a bunch of research checking the online FAQ (which only addresses a few of the more glaring issues) and digging through forum posts to find answers from the designer, whose rule explanations sometimes seem to contradict what the printed rulebook would imply. </div>
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Apparently they finally posted an updated rulebook a few days ago (here on BGG and on the second Kickstarter) while I've been writing this review. It seems to add some much needed clarity in terms of how certain rules are supposed to function, though I'm still not convinced the new explanation for army movement is as clear as it could be -- it looks like they added restrictions to moving armies out of turn, but I can't tell if that's an intended rule change or just poor wording. Interestingly, some rules from the hardcore mode have made their way into the normal rules. Notably, there's now an enforced hand limit of nine resource cards even in the standard rules, which is even more extreme than the 10 card limit in the hardcore rules, and you're also required in the normal rules to shuffle the cave shrine into the bottom half of the cave stack. Other things were also added to the rules, like being able to pay to tear down your own structures. I appreciate the designer's willingness to listen to community feedback, plus his continued dedication to the game, but I feel like these are the kinds of tweaks that could have (or rather, should have) been made during play-testing, because it's not like these are radical, sweeping changes -- they're just minor tweaks and a few extra sentences of clarification. It's better late than never, but I can't say I'm fond of paying to essentially beta-test a product.<br />
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Sharp corners get scratched easily, plus there's no art anywhere. </div>
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The components are generally pretty nice -- the custom-cut explorer meeples and the painted-resin shrines are both exquisite, the terrain hexes are made from a nice thick, dense cardboard, not to mention the color-coded, cloth draw-string component baggies and the card tuck box -- but I have some gripes here, too.<br />
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Mainly, I just hate the box. People tell me that the solid black box with reflective gold lettering looks fancy and elegant, but to me it looks bland and boring. There’s no art anywhere on it to inspire any imagery of the game's theme or what it's like to actually play, and the thin gold lettering can be difficult to read under certain lighting conditions. Usually people just see a black box and have to ask “Hey, what’s that game?” And then when I go to explain it to them, I can’t just show them the back of the box to give a visual demonstration, I have to open it up and start pulling components out, or give them an abstract description with no visuals, neither of which is particularly ideal. The solid black exterior also makes every scratch, nick, and cut on the box stand out more visibly, and those sharp corners and edges scratch really easily, leading to a lot of obnoxious white gash marks. The magnetic lid-flap seems like yet another luxurious touch, but I find it highly impractical because it doesn’t fully enclose (or even seal) the interior contents of the box, meaning that thinner components like terrain hexes easily come loose and slide out between the lid and the top lip of the box, ruling out vertical storage and making me paranoid that I'm going to randomly lose terrain hexes in transit if I take the game anywhere, because I actually have had tiles slide out.</div>
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As a nice touch, all of the artwork (printed on terrain hexes, resource cards, and on your explorer board) consists of vintage paintings from the 16th century; while this lends some authenticity to the visual flair of the game, it's a bit like using stock art to make your game -- even though the art looks really nice, it was not created with a board game in mind and therefore doesn't necessarily reflect or facilitate the actual gameplay. The terrain tiles, for instance, are cropped, monochromatic closeups of paintings that, at a glance, look like blurry color palettes to me, and so in practice the board just looks like an abstract combination of colored hexes, like you're playing an abstract strategy game. It doesn't matter thematically that it's a mountain yielding gold, because it's just "yellow" to me. The tiles also don't connect or line up in any kind of interesting way (like in <i>Carcassonne</i>, or <i>The Cave</i>, or <i>Taluva</i>, where elements of one tile bleed into the next to instill a sense of continuity between tiles); instead we get a generic brown border that visually separates the tiles. I'll concede and even admit that the island tiles do look visibly striking when they're set up on the table, even in spite of (or perhaps because of) their relative simplicity, so maybe I'm over-thinking this, but the graphic design just doesn't impress me.</div>
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I'm also not fond of how the designer chose to launch an expansion on Kickstarter mere weeks after finishing fulfillment of the original game. Some of the expansion ideas feel like they probably should've been in the base game already (namely, more things to flesh out the cave), and so I have to wonder why they didn't make the first cut and whether they were intentionally held out to pad out an expansion, though maybe I'm just being cynical. But really, I'm just annoyed that I felt like the designer was rushing me into a decision to back an expansion for a game that I'd barely even had a chance to play, especially with the veiled implication that these games may never come to retail. Will there be more reprint campaigns on Kickstarter in the future? Who knows, make sure you buy the expansion now to guarantee your copy! I get that the designer was probably just excited and wanted to share (what he thought was) good news right away, but it feels like a pushy sales tactic, especially when the game has only been out for a few weeks and people haven't had enough time to let the game digest. I'd only played three or four games at the time, so how was I supposed to know if I even wanted the expansion? Normally I buy an expansion because I've played the base game to death and want to breathe new life into it, not because I'm being rushed/pressured into an impulse purchase before I've even had a chance to evaluate the base game. (For the record, I opted out of the expansion and I think I'm glad I did.)</div>
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It just feels like the base game wasn’t very well thought out, like they had this cool idea and came up with some basic rules, then play-tested them with a limited audience of close friends and released the game to the public. That may not be what actually happened, but the poorly-written rulebook, the un-intuitive rules, and the minor balance issues suggest a crude level of refinement. I personally detest the insane amount of random luck in this game, but I could tolerate or possibly even appreciate it if there were at least interesting decisions to make that could allow you to mitigate luck, but it almost feels like the game plays itself. Many decisions feel completely obvious and therefore aren’t satisfying to make, while other decisions don’t even really matter. There’s not enough deep strategy to appeal to heavy gamers, and the luck element is so prevalent that even light gamers complained to me about it. None of the people I've played with (in a few different groups, at various player counts) particularly enjoyed it, while some people actively disliked it.</div>
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I like the concept, particularly the first half of the game as you’re exploring the map and wondering how the board is going to shape up, but once you get into the meat of the actual game (ie, the race aspect of trying to be the first to claim all four shrines) then it loses a lot of appeal to me. I feel like there's a good game to be made with the components and the basic gameplay concepts, but neither the core rules nor the "Hardcore Mode" rules feel that great to me and so I'd rather just play something else instead. I might still play it occasionally, to see if I can find the hidden charm that the designer sees in it, or to see if I can work out my own worthwhile tweaks to the rules, but doing so would be purely experimental, not for love of the game itself. Though to be honest, after about 10 plays I don't think I care to give it any more chances.</div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-73587018191481871622018-09-14T00:32:00.000-04:002018-09-17T14:29:42.502-04:00Prey's "Mooncrash" DLC Perfects the Immersive-Sim Gameplay Formula of the Base Game in a Unique Roguelite Mode<div dir="ltr">
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Arkane Studios’ <i>Prey</i> (2017) was a surprise hit for me, mostly because it was such a great experience but also because it seemed to come out of nowhere with no real hype. I had barely heard anything about it when it was released, but the promise of it being a spiritual successor to <i>System Shock 2</i> (one of my all-time favorite FPS games and one of the most highly regarded immersive sims ever created) immediately caught my interest. I figured it would be a good game, knowing Arkane’s pedigree (I’ve enjoyed every game of theirs that I’ve played) but I wasn’t expecting to be so thoroughly enamored with it or to have my mind blown by its creative twists and clever open-ended design. Sadly, I don’t think it sold very well, and so I was fully expecting it to be considered done and over with by publisher Bethesda, which then made the sudden <i>Mooncrash</i> DLC announcement even more shocking. After about a year of radio silence from Arkane and Bethesda, they began vaguely teasing something <i>Prey</i>-releated and then a few weeks later made the official announcement the very same day the DLC launched.</div>
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<i>Mooncrash</i> is a quasi-roguelite game mode featuring a new protagonist on a new level, the Pytheas moon base operated by TransStar rival Kasma Corp. You play as Some Guy in a small one-man satellite orbiting the moon, running through simulations as various characters trying to escape from a Typhon outbreak on the moon base. As a roguelite game mode, death is permanent and you can't save, while a lot of elements like item spawns, enemy placement, environmental hazards, and so on get randomized every time you start a new run, although the level layouts and the general objectives you’re trying to complete remain the same. The twist, compared to other roguelite games, is that you play multiple characters successively in a shared, persistent world -- what you do as one character affects how things will play out for another character, since someone else has already gone through and changed things by the time the next character’s run begins. Each of the five characters has their own unique skill trees, stats, and abilities which affect how you play the game as each character. Your goal is to find a way to escape with all five characters in one run, but you’ll have to run the simulation multiple times to unlock each of them, as well as to complete their story missions and to figure out a good strategy to ensure successful escape attempts.</div>
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This DLC is a very different experience than the base game. While they share similar settings and have a lot of the exact same gameplay mechanics, the base game focused more on slow-burn atmosphere and exploration with a lot of carefully scripted events, a linear main story, and a wealth of side characters, side stories, and side missions to flesh out the rest of the world. <i>Mooncrash</i> focuses less on the story and plays more like an immersive-sim sandbox; you’re dropped into four adjoining maps (which are themselves fairly spacious and open) with a bunch of randomized variables and given a single primary objective -- escape. There’s still a backstory that you can gleam from assorted emails, audio logs, notes, and even the five main characters’ personal story missions, but there’s no “main story” to speak of, since it doesn’t play like a straightforward campaign -- it’s a mashup of gameplay mechanics meant to bring out the best elements of emergent gameplay and fast-paced, improvisational thinking. In essence, <i>Mooncrash</i> takes the gameplay elements of the base game and cranks them up to eleven.</div>
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I’ll say upfront that I’m not normally a fan of roguelite games because I don’t always find satisfaction in just trying to see how far I can get before dying, and then doing it all over again and hoping to get a little further than last time in an all new randomized scenario where lessons learned in your previous attempts don’t necessarily carry over. Meanwhile, I’m also not generally fond of main objectives that consist solely of “beat the game” because it can often make the experience feel shallow and rote to me. <i>Mooncrash</i>, fortunately, addresses some of these key concerns I have with the genre by giving your characters concrete narrative-driven objectives (they each have a story objective they’re trying to complete) and because a lot of what you do and learn about as one character can have a lasting impact on future attempts, since the world state will persist between characters within a single run and because figuring out what you actually have to do is a bit like solving a puzzle; the more you play, the more you know, the better you do.</div>
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Although most things reset to a new randomized state when you reset the scenario, your character progression remains persistent; that is, all of the neuromods (ie, skills) that you unlock with a character remain permanently unlocked, even if you restart the simulation. Likewise, you can unlock schematics that allow you to use credits (earned by completing in-game actions, like killing typhon or discovering duplicate schematics or completing a story objective) to purchase upgrades before the start of a run, like starting your character out with a weapon already in hand, or buying extra medkits, or giving yourself a suit chipset to enhance your psi abilities. Fabrication plans (which allow you to craft items from base resources during the simulation) also remain permanently unlocked. These types of progression systems aren’t unique to <i>Mooncrash</i>, in comparison to other roguelites, but they help to ensure that you feel like you’re still making progress even when you fail. Meanwhile, the scope of the scenario is relatively small, at least compared to the base game and some other roguelites (it’s a 2-3 hour scenario that you’ll be running multiple times) with a lot of fixed elements, which means that when you die or when something goes wrong, it’s a bit easier to learn from the experience and use that knowledge to your benefit in future runs because certain elements will be the same every time you play.</div>
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These fixed elements apply mainly in terms of the level design and objectives -- some things (like enemy spawns and item drops) will be randomized, but you’ll always know where the medbot in the Pytheas Labs is, or where the security locker in the Crew Annex is, or that you need to collect a certain amount of food and drinks to escape in the mass driver, or that you have to hack the terminal as the custodian before trying to escape through the mimic portal, and so on. As you become more familiar with the simulation, knowledge of these aspects can help you be more successful in future runs, but every time you run the simulation it also adds new variables -- one area will randomly be without power so you can't use any machines or powered doors until you get the power back on or find alternative ways around, or some areas will randomly be affected with different hazards like being on fire or overflowing with radioactive waste, or the location of the last remaining escape pod will change from run to run, and so on, in addition to a bunch of other variables. The game starts out in its most basic form and becomes increasingly more difficult and varied the longer you play, providing an almost perfect counter-balance by raising the challenge as you get better at the game. It's kind of surprising how many variables the game throws at you, actually; I had been playing for a dozen or more hours, and it was still throwing crazy new changes at me.</div>
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These stairs, for instance, are randomly on fire and crumbling.</div>
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It's not always great about explaining its rules and mechanisms, however, sometimes to your detriment. In my first run, for instance, it wasn't clear to me that the world state would persist from character to character, so I took my time looting everyone on my first character and then got on the escape pod with a full inventory, leaving pretty much zero loot or equipment for the next character. Then, when the corruption meter gets introduced, it says something to the effect of how the meter will continue to build while you're in the simulation, but I didn't realize those effects would be cumulative across all characters, so I took my time with my first character in a new run thoroughly exploring everywhere and then had very little time to do anything with subsequent characters. In both of these instances, it sort of forced me to start over, rendering a lot of what I was doing with subsequent characters in that run kind of pointless.</div>
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The most important change, which gets introduced early on, is the time limit. Dubbed the "corruption meter," the longer you spend in the simulation the more corrupt it gets, and thus the harder it gets before eventually crashing and kicking you out, forcing you to start over again. The corruption meter goes through five stages, refreshing each area with new, stronger enemies each time it reaches a new level, until eventually it's spawning Nightmares (the strongest enemy in the base game, who only showed up sporadically) to hunt you down. I was a little skeptical of this element at first, since the time limit seemed at direct odds with the base game's slow, careful, and deliberate pacing, but I came to realize that the time limit is a large part of what makes <i>Mooncrash</i> work so well, at least in the beginning when you don't have a lot of ways to reverse time. You see, the time limit forces you to think on your feet and act quickly, with a lot more of an improvisational feel, because when something bad or unexpected happens you don't always have time to do the most optimal thing. It's yet another resource that you have to manage, and I'm of course a big fan of resource management, especially in immersive-sims and survival-horror games, since it typically adds a lot more weight to your decisions, while also significantly boosting the tension and excitement as you race to get everything done in time.</div>
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Reading an email while the corruption level increases.</div>
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<i>Mooncrash</i> also introduces a number of survival systems that further enhance the feeling of stakes and tension. Now you can suffer various types of status conditions like concussions that affect your vision and accuracy, or broken limbs that hobble your movement speed, or hemorrhages that cause you to suffer damage when sprinting or jumping, and so on, and which all require specific items to cure. These add greater consequences for potential recklessness because the side-effects are such a hindrance, and also because the cures are relatively expensive or hard to come by. Weapons now have durability and eventually break from too much usage, which makes inventory management more interesting because you have to decide whether it's better to haul a backup shotgun for when your current one breaks, or not carry a spare and use the extra space to carry more crafting components or key items, and then improvise when your shotgun breaks. Weapons also have variable stats and rarities, so you have to go through the decision-making process of "This weapon has better stats but is in worse condition, so should I use it now or save it for later?" Plus, your inventory space is far more limited in <i>Mooncrash</i>, which makes the decision about what to carry that much harder, especially since anything you pick up will potentially become unavailable for future characters.</div>
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Combine all of these elements (randomized item drops, enemy placements, and hazards, status conditions, weapon durability with variable stats and rarities, limited inventory space, world states that persist between characters, a time limit that makes the game progressively harder the longer you play) with no-save perma-death gameplay, and you get a game that's genuinely tense and exciting. You never know what to expect because of all the randomized elements, but also because the game is constantly evolving and introducing new variables as you play (every time you start to think you understand the game, or think you've "solved it," it throws you another curve ball), which has you constantly thinking on your feet and having to react to new situations in a quick and efficient manner. Every little decision gets amplified because you can't backtrack to correct mistakes, and because everything you do on one character will have lasting consequences for future characters. It's "risk versus reward" at the height of its execution, since the steep difficulty begs you to play it safely while the time limit forces you to be a little reckless, with decisions that either pay off immensely or that backfire horrendously, all based on how well you play the game.</div>
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Encountering a moonshark, a massive enemy that burrows underground.</div>
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The roguelite aspect does mean that the quality of a particular run will be somewhat dependent on how hard or easy the random variables combine to be, however. If you encounter a lot of technopaths while never finding a disruptor stun gun, you're going to struggle in combat, or if you suffer a bad hit from a moonshark (a new type of enemy introduced in the DLC) at the very beginning of a run and don't have access to coagulating gel, then you basically can't run or jump for the entirety of that run. This is where the real fun kicks in, though, because these random elements force you to think outside the box and find unusual solutions to problems that you normally wouldn't have even sought out. Maybe you'll sneak past those technopaths, or lure a static mimic into its vicinity, instead of just killing it. The five characters all have their own unique skill trees and abilities, too -- the mechanic is the only one with the repair skill, and the spy is the only one with the hacking skill, and so on -- and so they, too, put you in situations where a problem occurs and you have to find clever solutions that you never would've considered. In the base game, you were free to custom-tailor Morgan to whatever playstyle you wanted, so you could usually devise solutions in whatever way you wanted, but in <i>Mooncrash</i> the character limitations (combined with all the random elements) create more extreme decisions since you likely won't have a convenient solution built into your character's abilities, or for the inventory you happen to be carrying.</div>
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The flip-side to character limitations is that they also take away from your decision-making, sometimes in ways that defy the intentions of immersive-sim gameplay. Immersive-sims are supposed to be about giving you the freedom to solve problems in whatever logical way you might devise, but with <i>Mooncrash</i> you're sometimes railroaded into doing things an exactly specific way, particularly when it comes to certain escape methods or story objectives. Some things need to be done by specific characters in specific orders, which sometimes means you receive an objective and can't complete it because you aren't playing the right character, in which case it's less about your own creativity in solving problems and more about deducing the game's intended logic and order of operations, and having the right character with the right skills for the job, a bit like needing to have the blue key to open the blue door. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since there is still satisfaction in figuring these things out and coming to the intended solution on your own, a bit like solving a puzzle, but it can be annoying to face such restrictions in a game that's typically all about creative freedom and open-ended gameplay.</div>
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The character selection screen showcasing Andrius, who specializes in psi abilities.</div>
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My only real complaint with <i>Mooncrash</i> is that it can be a bit grindy and repetitive. Despite all the randomized variables, you're still going through the exact same maps every time, and any changes to the level design aren't that significant until near the very end when they start introducing major variables like certain areas being completely powerless, or engulfed in flames. Although item drops and enemy spawns are variable, they still occur in the same preset locations, so you always know where to find a valuable stash of loot, or where a strong enemy type will appear, which causes you to develop a bit of a routine as you become more familiar with the game, and go through a lot of the same motions in each attempted run. Meanwhile, certain characters require specific abilities to do their (or other characters') story missions, thus forcing you to spend a few runs basically farming neuromods just so that you can get the requisite skills to advance the game. Story objectives, likewise, usually take two or three runs to complete, since you first have to do a run to unlock a new character, then do a second run to escape with that character, then do a third run to do their story mission, and hope you didn't need to do something with a specific character before doing the story mission, in which case you might have to do yet another run just to set yourself up to actually complete the story mission on yet another run.</div>
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While the story elements are certainly present, the story is not a major point of emphasis in <i>Mooncrash</i>. It's entirely possible, in fact, to complete the whole game without even noticing the story, if you aren't paying attention to every little detail that you can gleam from emails, audio logs, or the characters' story missions. The story is more implied than told in this DLC, and it’s not the easiest to follow since the time limit is constantly pushing you to keep moving forward and doesn’t allow you much time to slow down and focus on the story. Not that it matters, since the DLC isn’t really a continuation of the base game’s story, but more of a new type of gameplay mode -- I don’t think you’re meant to dwell or focus on the story, as it’s just a backdrop for the gameplay and a way to subtly expand on the lore of the universe.</div>
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The simulation chair in the satellite orbiting the moon base.</div>
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What frustrates me about the story is the framework in which it happens. Since you play as Some Guy in a small satellite pod orbiting the moon running simulations of what happened on the moon base (as five different people), you have the over-arching story of what’s happening to Guy in the satellite juxtaposed with the story of what happened to the five moon base survivors, and it gets really annoying having the game constantly pull you out of the simulation to read an email as Guy, or go flip a switch to fix the gravity, and then go right back into the simulation. You spend 95% of the game in the simulation and so that would seem like the main focus of the game, but the framework constantly breaks the flow of the gameplay and disrupts immersion by pulling you out of the fun part of the game to go do tedious chores as Guy.</div>
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<i>Mooncrash</i> is absolutely not what I was expecting from a <i>Prey</i> DLC -- I was basically expecting something pretty similar to the base game, but in a new, smaller environment and with a shorter campaign -- but I’m glad Arkane chose to do something almost completely different with the DLC because it might not have been as unique if it had just been “more of the same.” By being something radically different, it offers a brand new experience while still retaining a lot of the same mechanics (plus the general atmosphere/feeling) that made the base game so enjoyable. It’s even more impressive how much I enjoy it, considering how strong of a roguelite feeling it has, because I don’t normally care for these types of games. Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s <i>Prey</i> and Arkane Studios (two things that I love), but I kind of feel like <i>Mooncrash</i> breathes some refreshing new life into a genre that was always a little stale (or just generally unappealing) in my eyes. This is immersive-sim gameplay distilled down to its purest and most potent form, with all the mechanical systems ratcheted up to exciting new heights.</div>
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Unlocking a new playable character by discovering his corpse. </div>
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As an added benefit, some of the survival mechanisms from the DLC have now been patched into the base game as free upgrades, adding things like weapon durability, oxygen limits, and the status condition traumas in to the base game’s campaign as part of the new “Survival Mode.” One of the few major complaints I had about the base game was that it just didn’t feel hard enough, and I wrote specifically in my review that things like weapon durability and oxygen limits could go a long way in bolstering the survival tension that I felt was sometimes lacking in just the base game. There’s also a New Game Plus mode that allows you to begin a new game with all of your Neuromods and chipsets already unlocked, enabling you to sequence-break the game and do things in a whole new way, thanks to having all of your previous abilities already unlocked from the get-go. So, even if you have no intentions of buying the DLC, these new features might just be incentive to go back and replay the base game again, while Survival Mode, I think, would make the base game even more enjoyable for a first playthrough.</div>
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If you enjoyed the base game, then I think you’ll enjoy the <i>Mooncrash</i> DLC. I’m not sure I’d call it “essential,” considering it’s basically just an optional game mode, and what little story there is in this DLC doesn’t expand on the base game’s lore that significantly. But man, I sure had a lot of fun playing it, and with an extra 15-20 hours of content it certainly felt worth it to me.<br />
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333855853183872745.post-67378757293804878242018-07-06T21:25:00.004-04:002018-07-06T21:25:57.037-04:00DreadOut -- An Indie Horror Game That's Actually (Surprisingly) Good<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>DreadOut</i> (2014) is an indie horror game in which you play as Linda, a school girl on a field trip that takes a wrong turn and gets her (along with her teacher and classmates) trapped in a literal ghost town where seemingly every spirit is out to kill or possess you. As the rest of your classmates are picked off one by one, your goal is to find a way to rescue your friend Ira and, eventually, a way to escape the ghost town without succumbing to the ghosts' malicious intentions.</div>
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In practice, it plays a bit like a cross between <i>Silent Hill</i> (you're wandering around a creepy abandoned town) and <i>Fatal Frame</i> (taking pictures of ghosts to vanquish them), but without any sort of survival-horror health systems or resource management. Although it has a quasi sort of combat system vaguely reminiscent of a first-person shooter (if you substitute your camera for a gun, it's kind of the same principle), this is more of what you'd consider a "pure" horror game where it's not at all about the action -- it's more about the atmosphere and the scares, with hints of light puzzle solving sprinkled into the equation.</div>
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The game is split into three chapters; an introductory dream sequence that acts as kind of a prologue or teaser for the full game, and two full chapters where you're trapped in a location (one is set in a school, the other in a mansion) and trying to find a way out. Each chapter has some kind of vague over-arching goal you're trying to accomplish, but it's really just a matter of "try to find the next thing you have to do to advance the game" while dodging ghosts or taking pictures of them in the right way to vanquish them, solving puzzles (sometimes by finding and using inventory items like keys, or by taking pictures of things from the correct angle), and facing a sort of boss encounter at the end of each chapter.</div>
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As a low-budget indie game, it definitely looks the part -- low-resolution textures, blocky models, stiff animations, flat voice acting, weird user interface, stiff and sometimes unresponsive controls, random poor design choices, etc -- but it actually works surprisingly well as a horror game, not just aesthetically but mechanically as well. I went into <i>DreadOut</i> with no real expectations, other than my own desire to enjoy it since I like horror games so much and am always looking forward to finding horror games that are actually scary (or at least entertaining), and came away really pleased with the experience. It's not perfect, mind you -- even in terms of its horror elements, it has some rough spots -- but if you like horror games then this is one I can absolutely recommend.</div>
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Arriving on the outskirts of the ghost town.</div>
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Despite its obviously low-budget jankiness, <i>DreadOut</i> manages to pull off a pretty convincing atmosphere and proved quite immersive for me, which is probably the most important thing a horror game has to do because if it doesn't make you feel immersed then it's probably not going to do a very good job of scaring you. The graphics obviously look pretty dated, even for 2014 standards, but the style is effective at making the environments feel dead and lifeless, and they actually have an uncanny effect of making things look slightly weird and creepy (this is especially true of facial animations when people get possessed by ghosts, though this is likely an intentional effect). The soundtrack, meanwhile, has enough thick and heavy ambiance to really set the mood and bring the scene to life, even when the visuals are making everything look dead and lifeless.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="more"></a></div>
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The ghost town vibe comes across really strong in this game, and I think it does a good job of balancing a realistic interpretation of the real world with the fantastical elements of ghosts. It starts very grounded in reality, with the school characters (your player-character Linda, plus a few other students and their teacher) driving somewhere on a field trip, perhaps a little lost, when they come to a ruined bridge and decide to go exploring on foot in search of a way around it. From there the group wanders into the ghost town, which is completely deserted and feels strongly reminiscent of <i>Silent Hill</i> with its muted colors and light fog. This section is pretty drawn out, with no action or confrontation as you simply wander around exploring the town in broad daylight, until the sun sets and you wind up trapped in the school, representing a sort of gradual descent into the hellish madness you'll soon encounter. The rest of the game shows a steady escalation of the tension as your classmates go insane, get possessed, and get killed off by the ghosts.</div>
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A dialogue sequence with Ira, who's been possessed. </div>
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This is the part in the review where, with most horror games, I'd start complaining about how ineffective the horror is, how it's not scary, or how it's not tense or stressful, because I'm so desensitized to horror games that most of them barely do anything for me when it comes to evoking feelings of actual horror in me (or because they're just bad, boring games where you basically just walk around while scary things happen at you), but <i>DreadOut</i> does some pretty interesting things in this department. Some of its scares are actually pretty creative and effective, which is surprising to me because it doesn't have any sort of survival systems or inventory management -- two mechanics that usually make you feel vulnerable and thus scared of dying or getting hurt by encounters.</div>
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Your cameras (one is a smart phone, the other is a DSLR camera) have seemingly infinite battery life, so you never have to worry about being out of "ammunition" for your "weapon" or being unable to power your phone's flashlight to see in the darkness, and you don't need to use film rolls to limit the amount of pictures you can take. There's no need for healing items since you have regenerating health, and there really isn't any consequence for dying, except that you have to spend 10-15 seconds in Limbo running towards the light so that you can jump right back into the game where you left off, which is more of a minor inconvenience than anything adverse. The save system is based entirely on auto-saves, too, so you don't get the stress of having to choose when to use your ink ribbons (or some other limited item used to save your progress), and since there's no setback for dying, making it to the next checkpoint isn't something you have to worry about, either.</div>
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Encountering a corpse monster outside. </div>
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Despite these mechanical shortcomings, which I'd normally consider essential for creating tension in a survival-horror game, <i>DreadOut</i> still manages to instill a sense of horror into its gameplay through actual mechanical gameplay elements. The game is weirdly manipulative, obscure, and obtuse about its gameplay systems, with the rules sometimes changing from situation to situation so that you don't always understand what's going on or why things aren't working the way you'd expect. For instance, the game trains you to think that when you take a picture of a ghost and see a special effect, followed by it disappearing from the screen, that it's been vanquished, but then it later tricks you by doing that same pattern and having the ghost respawn behind you, which is then pretty startling when it attacks you. One of the boss encounters switches the inputs on your control stick by 90-degrees so that "right" is now "forward," and you have to run around dodging attacks with screwed-up controls; it's not really scary, but it's mechanically disorienting and makes the situation a little terrifying. At other times it places you in no-win situations where you're expected to die, or "fail" the scenario, and it's legitimately stressful trying to figure out what you have to do to "win" while running for your life and everything you try seems futile.</div>
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That aspect of things can be a little frustrating, awkward, and annoying, however. Picture a scenario where you're supposed to die, and so you're just awkwardly getting hit by enemies, unable to do anything about it, and you're just kind of confused by the whole situation. Sometimes the scenario works out effectively and you're genuinely scared of what's going on, but other times it's deflating and anticlimactic. The vague instructions about how to fight ghosts, likewise, can have a similar effect -- sometimes taking their picture works, but when it doesn't you're just like "Well, what do I do," and then it becomes awkward and the game doesn't always give you good feedback or hints about what you actually have to do.</div>
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Taking a photograph from the right perspective to form the complete picture.</div>
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The "puzzles" tend to suffer even worse from this because there's even less feedback about what you're doing right or wrong in any given scenario. Most of the puzzles require you to take pictures of something in the environment, usually from a very specific angle, but it's incredibly finicky about what constitutes the exact perfect angle, and so when you try to take the picture two or three times and nothing happens, you have no idea if that's because you're just not getting the correct angle, or if it's because you're not actually supposed to be taking a picture there at all. Sometimes you take a picture of something and the scene changes for just a brief moment and then immediately resets, and you have absolutely no way of knowing that you're supposed to turn around and backtrack all the way to the beginning of the area just to fight a couple random back-spawning enemies, until you give up in frustration and decide to just start wandering around.</div>
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The camera acts as lens through which you can view the spirit world, and so some of the puzzles require you to pull out your camera and look through it to see something you couldn't have seen otherwise, like an invisible door or ghostly apparitions. This is kind of a cool concept, but it's not a very prominent gameplay mechanism, and so it can make it a little harder to remember that you have this ability when you need it, because the game doesn't do much to reinforce the fact that you even have this ability. I was completely stumped by one puzzle early on because I hadn't yet made the mental connection that, if I'm stuck somewhere, I should be looking around with the camera, or perhaps because I just coindicentally never used the camera to look at this one specific thing while wandering around a fairly large and spread out area. </div>
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The game's horror atmosphere and scares, however, make up for its shortcomings; I play a horror game to be spooked out and scared by things, not necessarily to solve puzzles or to marvel at great graphics or localization efforts, and it succeeds pretty well when it comes to horror. As I've said repeatedly (in this review and others) I'm so desensitized to horror that nothing ever really scares me in these kinds of games, but <i>DreadOut</i> managed to both startle and creep me out, while also maintaining a level of mechanical tension mixed with an immersive atmosphere. </div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RbfcTkOA5YI/W0AGeS3KWpI/AAAAAAAAPiU/bJ82XUqNOmkobahRnwYTQhr9uB0-baQhQCLcBGAs/s1600/DreadOut06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RbfcTkOA5YI/W0AGeS3KWpI/AAAAAAAAPiU/bJ82XUqNOmkobahRnwYTQhr9uB0-baQhQCLcBGAs/s400/DreadOut06.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Spying a creepy ghost around the corner.</div>
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These scares range from subtle moments of creepiness where you hear a noise off-screen and spin the camera around to find a ghost standing in a corner (who wasn't there before) staring straight down at the floor, or walking down an infinitely repeating hallway and then turning around to find a giant spider-like woman with a face the size of your entire body taking up the entire hallway steadily crawling its way towards you, to more frantic moments where you're being chased by a ghost through an invisible maze that you can only see by bringing up your camera view, which slows your movement speed to a slow walk, and so you can't really tell where you're going and it feels like the ghost is always right about to get you because it looks like it's right next to you, even when it's on the other side of an invisible spirit wall. Some moments of horror can feel a little marred by the game's sometimes obtuse logic or just generally poor design choices (like an enemy who can effectively chain-stun you to death before you can even get a chance to do anything about it), but these instances are few in number and generally pretty minor. </div>
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I, for one, felt like <i>DreadOut</i> did some things I haven't seen before in a horror game, or at least, that I'm not used to seeing in horror games, and that, combined with its Indonesian development roots and its emphasis on Indonesian culture and folklore (for instance, at one point you actually get attacked by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penanggalan">Penanggalan</a> -- decapitated heads with all of their guts and entrails dangling out from their neck) made <i>DreadOut</i> feel like a unique and refreshing experience for me. It's obviously a very low-budget, janky-looking and janky-playing game, but the atmosphere and horror elements are both pretty good in this game, and that makes it easy to recommend if you're looking for a good horror game. Plus, it's relatively short, with a total playtime clocking in around five or six hours, which I actually consider a good thing, since it cuts right to the chase and doesn't waste your time with a bunch of tedious filler content. It's pretty rough around the edges, but I seriously admire its horror content and might consider putting it in my list of top 10 favorite horror games. I guess we'll see how well it holds up in my memory as time goes by. </div>
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Nick Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14868067860713839916noreply@blogger.com0