T w e n t y S i d e d
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Look, I’m feeling really sick, I’m in a bad mood, and I’m right in the middle of an X-Com game. I’m in no shape to give you additional commentary. Just watch the show and don’t ask too much of me.
Mass Effect 3 EP20: Unfair Nitpicking
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So Udina somehow contacted Cerberus to enact a plan that made no sense and could never work, even if Cerberus hadn’t stabbed him in the back, which he totally should have seen coming. Then Cerberus overcomes the Citadel defenses, gains control of the entire complex, and manages to do so in such a way that doesn’t leave any incriminating personnel or supply ships hovering around the place. You have a running battle then a car chase takes you to some other random location, and yet no matter where you go the place is filled with Cerberus mooks.
And then Kai Leng.
A good writer – like in Spec Ops – will make you feel like you were outsmarted, fooled, or out-maneuvered by your adversaries. A terrible writer will have his pet bad guy outsmart you by forcing you to be stupid. He’ll overpower you by taking away your powers and making you incompetent in a cutscene. The writers wanted to make Leng some sort of super-adversary, and their first plan was to bend the world and game mechanics to make him fit. Kai Leng has no personality, no world view, no history, no buildup, no connection to the setting, and no visible reason to oppose Shepard. What are the stakes for him? Why does he care? Why does he hate(?) Shepard so much? None of these things are established, because Kai Leng is an antagonist for the player, not for Shepard.
Yes, I know: “Indoctrinated”, the magical get-out-of-characterization-free card. Kai Leng is indoctrinated to some unspecified degree. Compare this to how Saren was portrayed. He was a complicated guy. I might pick at his plan, and not everything he did made perfect sense, but darned if we didn’t get a sense of who he was, what he wanted to accomplish, and why. Saren’s indoctrination was a tragic failing, a fall by a Turian who had more hubris than ability. Kail Leng’s indoctrination is a half-assed hand-wave offered to rebuff people like me who go around insisting characters need things like personality and motivation.
These are the things that BioWare fans love BioWare for: Characterization and world-building. Failing on these points is like a Mario game getting the platforming wrong.
The worst of all possible worlds is to combine BioWare style mechanics with Capcom style storytelling. At least in those games I’m not required to participate in the reason-destroying cutscenes. I can just go slack-jawed and wait for the stupidity to end so I can go back to the shooting.
Spoiler Warning: Now With Playlist!
So I finally got around to updating the Spoiler Warning page this weekend. The Half-Life 2 season should be complete, the Modern Warfare episodes are listed, the Mass Effect 3 episodes have been updated, and I’m setting the Mass Effect 1 season to point to the new episodes. I was going to link the new episodes to the old, but then I realized I’d have to do the same thing for the next 50 or so remaining Viddler orphans. After carefully reviewing my options, I have decided screw that.
Also, I’ve added YouTube playlists for Alan Wake, Half-Life 2, Deus Ex, Assassin’s Creed 2, and Fallout New Vegas.
So we’ve got that going for us.
So… what else? I hate to post these stupid “the site has been updated” posts without saying something worthy of discussion. It feels like using the PA system to let everyone know you did the dishes. I suppose I could mention that I have a super-gigantic post I’m trying to write about Guild Wars 2. I’m not sure when it will be done, but here is a bit of foreshadowing.
Guild Wars 2: Economy
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Guild Wars 2 has the most interesting and sane economy of any MMO I’ve played. It is not without the occasional amusing absurdity, but that’s probably inevitable.
To show off how different this is, let’s just do a few comparisons between this game and you know who.
For simplicity, I’m not going to go around expressing large values as “1 gold, 23 silver, 45 copper”, or 1g 23s 45c. We’ll talk about everything in terms of copper, as in: 12,345 copper. Note that a proper apples-to-apples comparison is probably impossible, but for the sake of pretending this makes sense I’m only going to include stuff up to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which is where I found the level 80 quests. This will let us compare WoW level 80 to GW2 level 80, which is the best we can do.
In World of Warcraft a level 1 quest pays 25 copper. There are a ton of level 80 quests, but this one – chosen basically at random – pays 132,300 copper. So you will make 5,292 times as much money at level 80 compared to what you were making at level 1.
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Mass Effect EP8: Oh Crap, a Popup
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I know I’ve been kind to dear old Mass Effect this second time around, but this thing with the Mako magically appearing in the garage is bonkers. I can’t believe nobody took the time to justify or lampshade this. In fact, it kind of reminds me of Ye Olde Plot Door Rant, where there’s a pointlessly obstructionist NPC who controls access to a painfully contrived locked door. You have to do this long, roundabout quest to get the door open, and when it’s over you discover that the door lock only ever applied to you.
This could have been done better.
Also, when the VI pops up and says, “It looks like you’re trying to restore the facility”, it really makes me think of Clippy The Office Assistant. I never noticed it before, but now I can’t escape the notion that this must have been intentional.
Mass Effect EP7: The Gate’s Guarded, Time for Corporate Espionage!
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You know those little moments when you leave the ship? “Logged. The Commanding officer is ashore. XO Presley has the deck.” I loved those. You know what else I liked? Leaving the ship. Man, I really missed that airlock. I can’t explain why. I mean, it was just another loading screen, but for some reason the quasi-seamless travel from ship to shore really made the ship feel like a craft that went somewhere, and not a really large menu for selecting the next mission. I know I whined and bellyached about that airlock scanner. (And to be fair, it was kind of annoying.) But I really missed it when they switched to using the dropship.
I appreciate the little touches of quasi-military. The really odd thing is, so many videogames embrace the “explosions, bullets, and shouting” military stuff. They model real-world weapons and vehicles. They take you to real-world locations. But they skim over nearly everything to do with military culture. People salute at the wrong times, handle their weapons in the wrong way, address each other incorrectly, forget about the chain of command, and you never get any of the nuances of military culture. In the United States military, there’s a pretty big divide between the officers and the enlisted. There’s also a bit of sneering condescension between the various branches. Then there’s the wall of divide between the military and civilians. This is mostly lost in videogames, where you just have a bunch of young guys running around screaming “sarge!” all the time.
I understand it’s a game, and meticulous simulation would be just as tedious as the real thing. But the little touches of military culture and formality really made me happy. I’d love to have a game where someone would shout “Captain on the bridge!” when you entered the bridge. I guess I’m not asking for a game that gets it all right, I’m just suggesting that a game that sprinkles these details in will be able to make their military seem more lifelike.
Then again, it just might drive people bonkers if they’ve served in the actual military and all they see are all the little details the developers got wrong. So there’s that.
Guild Wars 2: Story Time
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This is a hard game to cover. I keep making notes of stuff I want to discuss or complain about, but before I can assemble the words we get a patch where the dev team changes just enough to render my comments irrelevant. So I make more notes, it gets patched again, and the cycle repeats. In fact, we got a major patch while I was writing this article.
And then we got another patch an hour later!
About a month ago I made the post complaining about the trading post being down for a whole week, but they managed to fix the thing about an hour before the post went live. So at the risk of writing a couple of thousand words about something that might look completely different or be changed in the next patch, let’s talk about the story mode.
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From The Archives:
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Project Octant
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.