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In my post on Halo from last month I mentioned that Clint Hocking's work on the Far Cry franchise probably deserved its own essay. In the process of researching that essay I discovered that another YouTuber had already beaten me to the scoop, covering much of the same ground that I had planned to.
I'm going to link his video below, but I still want to get this out because I find the franchise's central theme of choice, consequence, and the role that we as individuals often play in our own destruction/salvation, are highly relevant to conversations that have been happening elsewhere on this forum.
For the uninitiated Far Cry is a series of single player first person shooters produced by Ubisoft. The series follows an anthology format with each new game introducing a new setting and set of characters.
The first Far Cry game released in 2004 was essentially a glorified tech demo for Cervat Yerli's scalable dynamic rendering engine which he had developed in partnership with Nvidia and would later market under the CryEngine name. This technology enabled highly detailed and expansive exterior scenes with functionally infinite draw distances to be rendered on the hardware of the day without the need to rely on pre-baked lighting/shaders and forced perspective tricks the way contemporary 3D games like Half-Life 2 did.
If the first Far Cry was essentially a tech demo, Far Cry 2 released in 2008 was a gameplay demo. What narrative there is, is paper thin, but what Far Cry 2 did was codify the genre of the "3D open-world action game with crafting and collectibles". Blazing the trail that games like Skyrim, the Assassin's Creed series, Batman Arkham City, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Cyberpunk 2077, would all follow. It may be one of the most low-key influential video games of the last two decades.
The third game is where everything clicked. Far Cry 3 released in 2012 was the first Far Cry to have a proper narrative with fully realized characters who were more than stock archetypes like "Generic Action Hero Guy", "Mad Scientist", and "Femme Fatale". A lot of effort went into facial animation and voice acting to the point that it still holds up surprisingly well for a game that is over a decade old. Which brings us to the thesis of this essay.
If the measure of a piece of "literature" or "art" is the ability to tackle a complex or challenging ideas and make them accessible to the masses, Far Cry 3 deserve to be regarded as high art for how deftly it uses its own medium to convey and amplify the themes of the story it is trying to tell. Or as DJ Peach Cobbler puts it Far Cry 3 tells a story that only a video game could tell
You play as Jason Brody, a pampered rich douche-bro on vacation in Ersatz-Indonesia who, along with his friends, is kidnapped and held for ransom by pirates after they stray too far from the relative safety of their beachfront resort. Jason, with the assistance of his older brother Grant, manages free himself and escape into the jungle but Grant gets shot and killed during the escape, leaving Jason to face the Jungle alone and unprepared.
This is our first hint that the game might be operating on a deeper level than your conventional shoot-em-up. Grant is presented to us as the quintessential hero protagonist, handsome, charismatic, capable, brave, and he dies an ugly gurgling death bleeding out in the mud while his little brother panics. This all happens in the first 10 minutes of the game and the message is clear. You, the limp wristed trust-fund kid, are going to have to level up if you are to have any hope of surviving the jungle much less freeing your friends from captivity. And with that the game releases you into its world.
As you progress through the game, discovering landmarks, hunting animals, crafting equipment, and completing quests, you unlock new abilities, new weapons, better stats. You become more and more capable, and more and more of a killer till by the end John Rambo 'aint got nothing on Jason Brody.
This where things get interesting because without getting into spoilers it is made abundantly clear throughout the narrative that all this killing and "leveling up" is taking a toll on Jason's mind, that it is damaging his relationships with his friends, his family, society, morality, and ultimately reality. At the same time Jason isn't the one doing the killing, we are. YOU, the player, not Jason, are the one positioning the crosshairs and pulling the trigger. You, the player, are the one who made the decision to complete that extra side-quest so that you could unlock that sweet triple knife take-down, and having unlocked it, by God we're going to use it, because dopamine's a hell of a drug. By playing the game we have been manipulated into being willing and enthusiastic participants in Jason's descent into violence and madness. The daemon on his shoulder whispering "Yah, we got this" as we pursue our own destruction.
...and this is why I believe that that the infamous "bad ending" is the canonically correct ending for Jason's story, and that the people who complain about how the game "punishes the player" for making the thematic choice by wanting to keep playing are missing the forest for the trees. The fact that game gives you one last chance to reject the path of violence is what makes the ending so impactful.
These themes of player agency and choice would be explored and expanded upon in Far Cry 4 and 5 (4's "Secret Ending" being a notable example of this) but if you are going to play just one of the Far Cry games please play Far Cry 3. It is worth your time.
Um, no. Skyrim isn't copying Far Cry 2; it's copying Morrowind, which came out in 2002. Like, come on, I know Arena and Daggerfall are pretty obscure (and don't fit that description), but Morrowind is pretty well-known and Skyrim's literally a sequel to it.
This.
Some open-world-ish 1st and (close) 3rd person games:
(Also, there were only four fricking years between Morrowind and Oblivion? Damn, video game progress was fast back then.)
Yeah video game development has slowed to a crawl. It's genuinely bad; I would much much rather have games that look 50% as good (still very good!) and take only a year or two to develop instead of the status quo where they take a decade.
I agree, but Elder Scrolls isn't actually a great example. The fact that they still haven't released a new mainline title seems to be largely down to the stupidity (or genius, depending on how you view the extra juice they squeezed from Skyrim) of their development choices. After Oblivion, it was 2 years to Fallout 3, 3 years to Skyrim, 4 years to Fallout 4, 3 years to Fallout 76, and 5 years to Starfield. Pretty consistent
Another thing is that Bethesda is tiny in comparison to most AAA devs. They have 450 employees in comparison to the 9000 at Blizzard that worked on Diablo 4 and Ubisoft has like 17000 thousand.
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Well darn. Now you make me want to dig out my own personal screed of a time when the game 'punishing the player' was actually the better writing. For me it's Mass Effect 3.
For those not familiar, ME3 was the divisive end for the Mass Effect trilogy which premised a meta-narrative of your choices mattering and having consequences over a trilogy of games with choice carry-over being designed from the start. Except many of the characters were a mix of woobie and sycophant, and the developers hadn't actually written out or designed a trilogy structure, or even figured out how they were going to overcome their own overpowering arch enemy. They were making up a series and key lore as they went along, and wrote themselves into a corner where the end-game solution to an unstoppable fleet was a macguffin from precursors that, if built, can kill them before they kill you. This culminated in ME3's controversial ending of the player basically choosing to nuke galactic civilization in one of three colors of techno-magic. And the only ending where survival was potentially implied was the one where galactic civilization couldn't be put back together again via an army of genocidal squid-machines or the involuntary organic-AI interfusion of everyone.
For a series that to date had basically no blow back to any of the moral highroad / 'damn the risks, I'm doing what's right' decisions that were the audience and writer's preferred Paragon playstyle, it was a sharp whiplash of tone. Mass Effect to date had rarely been about having to make hard decisions, because it had always let you avoid the hard parts if you just picked the golden route / nice thing, while the most common consequence of not doing the nice thing in a previous game was less content in the next. Hard consequences were the consequence of being a jerk, which is why surviving a suicide mission with no casualties was by far the most common import state between ME2 and ME3.
But if you were willing to take the less-than-golden route from the start...
To this day, I maintain Mass Effect 3 works best as a war story if you go into it with a lot of the fan-favorite characters dead from the previous games. Doing so denied players the opportunity for golden-path 'flawless' successes along the way, and so reframed the ME3 ending from being an out-of-place anamoly to tonally and thematically consistent.
A large part of this was the lack of trilogy design though put into the cast of characters introduced into ME2, a game built around recruiting and exploring a cast of characters for a suicide mission where Anyone Can Die. A lot of thought and care went into the character designs and their missions and such, but at a design level the mere fact that they could die meant that any sequel had to be designed around the possibility that they would not be there. No one could be entirely load-carrying for the plot, because the plot has to happen. So if they are to play a role in a later game, they need a substitute who can do it for them.
This can be done by using other characters already existing in the narrative. In Mass Effect 1, for example, one of the genuinely best choices of the series is when you can only save one of your two starting marine companions on a planet called Virmire, made juicier that one of them may be your primary love interest. There is no golden way to save both, and it can be gripping. However, post-Virmire the Virmire Survivors collapse into a single character in the narrative, and fulfill eachother's roles almost identically. So in ME2 they are a cameo character investigating the big bad and your mysterious post-death return, whether they are your former flame or not, in ME3 there's a generally identical reconciliation arc (or not), and so on.
But you can also fill the narrative hole by introducing new characters. For example, another ME1 character is Wrex, a jaded warlord of a species that's been genocided for warmongering by a bioweapon known as the genophage. It basically reduces the once hyper-fertility race that overwhelmed with numbers to such a degree that the race's own disregard for life is dooming it to extinction. Wrex has matured past the worst of the species hyper-aggressive warmongering ways, but in ME1 when he hears the antagonist has been working on a cure he sees the salvation of his species as too precious to lose. You can talk him down if you've invested enough in the persuasion / morality system, but if it's your first run you may have to put him down- or your marine companion may put him down. This is also on Virmire, so this is the mission that could kill two companions, and your Virmire survivor decision may be shaped by who puts Wrex down.
But if Wrex dies, he is replaced by his otherwise-never-referenced brother Wreave. And Wreave is as awesome a narrative foil as he is a terrible person. He is the sort of short-sighted, hyper-aggresive, civilizationally ruinous warlord that makes you understand why the genophage was employed in the first place. Where Wrex has mellowed out and likes a good brawl but will try things like 'diplomacy' and 'restraint,' Wreave is a vicious and brutal warlord with the sort of cunning to also rise in power, but makes it clear any good relations are transactional and probably temporary. Put another way- Wrex is a noble-savage king who might ally with a female clan in a deliberate breeding alliance that is barely breakinng above replacement rates by reigning in their worst impulses, and Wreave is a savage-savage who monopolizes the females with all that implies.
Which makes the ME3 core plot arc of 'build a galactic alliance against the Reapers' so much more juicy, since both Wrex and Wreave are basically holding out on alliance in exchange for the same bribe: a cure to the genophage. This is pure crisis bartering for both of them, a demand they know will only be given in an existential crisis. They'll be your army if you remove the shackles driving them to extinction, except the extinction is because they'd be able to survive regardless if they weren't so self-destructive. But while Wrex is a guy you can see has been trying to make a society that maybe you could trust to not rampage across the galaxy, Wreave makes no such pretensions- it's just that that is the next generation's problem if you can survive the current apocalypse.
Which is what makes the story arc's big decision- do you sabotage the genophage cure- such an interesting option. You have the option to secretly sabotage the genophage, but let the Krogan think it worked for a time. Eventually the evidence will be clear, but that is the next generation's problem if they can survive the current apocalypse.
Saving Wrex and delivering the genuine genophage clear is part of that paragon golden route, and it's not even subtle about it. Basically all the cultural drawbacks and survival-through-reform themes from before are thrown out and not mentioned again. The morally nuanced and internally conflicted alien doctor Mordin, from the species that made- and re-enforced- the genophage, goes from grappling with his conscience and competing ethical complications and responsibility to a moral certainty that this is the right thing. There's even a 2010s feminist Krogan female who's introduced, subtly named Eve, who is wise and virtuous and the key to saving the hyper-masculine testosterone-poisoned species. If you do this golden route, despite the genophage being about reigning in massive broods, the post-credits slide (after the 'improved' endings post-controversy) show a nuclear family of two parents and a single child. All is good, and nothing is implied to happen.
Have Wreave, though, and the context changes. He's clearly not interested in listening to the advice of the wonderful woman that is Eve. He fantasizes of the wars he's going to fight. He is a giant alarm bell of the future, and even the guilt-plagued genophage doctor Mordin can be convinced that, no, sabotaging the cure is for the best. This is treachery, no doubt about it, but it's for the best. It doesn't hurt that Wreave is an idiot. He won't know until it's well, well too late.
But Wrex isn't an idiot. And the best / most deliciously painful writing in the arc comes from if you betray him. Your friend. Your homeboy. And your other homeboy, Mordin.
See, Mordin's character arc has always been grappling with the genophage, something he felt was necessary because of how bad the Krogan had become, but regretted all the same. With the golden route of Wrex and Eve, he doesn't think it's necessary anymore. In the culmination of the genophage arc, if you try to sabotage the genophage, Mordin does something almost no companion character franchise does-
He defies you, and disregards your choice. Rather than submit to your take-as-long-as-you-need dialogue option to decide the fate of the species, Mordin goes 'no,' and moves to cure the genophage anyway. The actual choice to sabotage the golden path is if you literally shoot your companion in the back via a special in-cutscene decision. He dies, gasping, in the fires that consume his hopes for the krogan species. Your sacrifice for a bitter-sweet betrayal of the golden path.
And when Wrex puts the pieces together, he is furious, and tries to murder you in the middle of the galactic capital. No evasion, no dialogue checks. He even brings up how you talked your way out of that Virmire situation long ago. He's throw accusations, and you've really no choice (other than death) but to kill him. Two friends lost to the same narrative decision.
But what makes it best? The local police chief (who you know) who comes to assist asks what's going on. And accepts a lie because, well, everyone knows Krogan are irrationally aggressive. There was no helping it. Life goes on, despite the loss. This is the sort of narrative tone for the early and into mid-game that makes the ME3 ending feel in place, and not shoehorned in for 'forced tragedy.'
But the meta-mechanics of 'why' this tension worked- why Wrex was better than Wreave- apply elsewhere.
Go back to survivability design. If a character can die, future stories must exist without them. If the character is absent, another must fill in. Put another way, though, the future plots exist without the killable-character, and the returning character is just a cameo in their own episode plot.
But, Mass Effect was a franchise built around the characters. They are the central appeal in otherwise middling writing. Moreover, the characters from ME2 were introduced as 'the best of the best.' They are awesome, far more awesome than random replacements. But they've also generally arrived at the end of their character arcs, since most characters from ME2 had self-contained character arcs that were concluded by the suicide mission they could die in. Because, for narrative purposes, helping them find closure is the secret ingredient for them surviving the suicide mission.
So you have characters, who have already concluded their character arcs, who may or may not be coming back as cameos. How do you make those cameos the fan-servicey things they are?
In short, by making things turn out better when they are around. New sympathetic characters who have to be introduced in ME3 can survive if fan-favorite returns from ME2. Menacing threats can be dealt with just in time with returning champion. The AI who learned what it meant to have friends becomes the key to saving two species from an AI-vs-organic war. ME2 cameo characters, in other words, become the key to the golden path.
But the golden path leads to narrative dissonance with the ending. And often isn't better writing, as much as saccharine.
For another example- take the character of Jack.
Jack is the ultimate woobie, destroyer of worlds. If you remember that scene from the first Deadpool movie where Deadpool and his love interest trade who has the worse childhood abuse backstory, that's Jack, except played striaght instead of laughs. Jack has the most powerful space-magic telekenitics in the galaxy because of how much she was abused as a child by inhuman experiments, which were done for the sake of giving her the most powerful space-magic telekenitcs in the galaxy. Don't ask how human child abuse by human specist-extremists makes a woman strong, it's symbolic and characteristic of that era of Bioware. Jack's ME2 character arc is about overcoming personal trauma and starting to heal. (Naturally, this progresses most explicitly comes out in the romance scene if you sleep with the traumatized girl.)
Jack's ME3 cameo is that she goes to a school for other space-telekinetics, and became the cool teacher. The school is attacked by the same human-extremist that kidnapped and traumatized her, and whose current style is to take people and make cybernentic slave-soldiers out of them. Its up to you and Jack to save the kids, but really this is Jack's epilogue story and you're just enabling her. With Jack on board, the mission is a triumph over past abusers, an unmitigated victory, and Jack basks in the adoration of her adoring students. Those students exist merely as background cheerleaders as she trounces the enemies, and at the very end one over-eager one has to be saved to give Jack her big goddamn hero moments. At the end, the moral decision is whether your conscript these young adult-age level telekinetics into the space army against the apocalypse, which Jack doesn't like the thought of but hey, she'll be there to make sure the worst doesn't happen.
If Jack is dead, the academy is still attacked, and those students have to save themselves, learning to fight for themselves or be enslaved to fight for others. A cathartic victory romp is instead becomes a harrowing school shooting / hostage rescue, as the students band together to try and resist an overpowering opponent systemically dismantling their defenses. The students are cracking, but under pressure from adversity the models that would have been caricatures of adoring fans in another timeline have to develop into actual characters in another. It's not the longest mission, but it's long enough for one of them to stand up and emerge as a potential leader, someone who can hold the team together and get them safe.
In another timeline, this is the student who Jack saves in her big goddamn hero moment. In this timeline, he still needs a big goddamn hero of his own, as he's being a hero to others. But Jack isn't here, and he is shot. The other students are saved, but traumatized all over again- the rising hero that was inspiring them cut down, as so many are in the greater apocalyptic war.
Now do you conscript these traumatized, but blooded, teens to be soldiers instead of students during the apocalypse?
As with the genophage, this is the sort of writing that makes a hail-mary play with no ideal outcomes feel tonally consistent.
In your golden route paths, nuking civilization galaxy-wide is so jarring because it feels it should be unnecessary. You basically roll from victory to victory, and if it's not enough that just means you should just keep playing and saving the day more. You've always taken the high road to date- why should it fail you now? It's only when it fails that the saccharine sweetness becomes apparent.
But in your 'inferior' routes, the routes you get by 'failing' to save people before, you are already steeped in losses. Your world is 'objectively worse' than the golden route, but also much more visceral and gripping. You get character drama and tragedy, as competing visions of greater goods leads to betrayal, and as the promising potential of the future dies and the survivors are scarred/corrupted just to keep fighting. Survival at a cost, at almost any cost, without losing your humanity even if human nature isn't as noble as you'd like.
But then, I'm also one of the minority of people who unironically enjoyed Mass Effect: Andromeda as a deliberately campy B-flick story of alien first contact and exploration, so what do I know.
I've never been much for the perfectionist completions. Mostly I just didn't want to spend so much time stuck in guides when I could be playing the game.
As a result I did not get a golden path completion in mass effect 2. I think I might have lost only one or two of them though. I'm not sure how many cuz I might have been looking to sacrifice two of them that I didn't like and just only managed to find a good sacrifice for one of them. Jack and Wrex were definitely on the chopping block. Jack was aesthetically annoying to me. It always seemed correct to genocide the krogans to me. The geth robot was cool, but he also seemed like he wouldn't mind getting sacrificed.
I never did buy mass effect 3. At that point I had started waiting for game reviews before purchasing, and the story was heavily panned.
Having not gotten the golden path in the game also gave me more of a sense of completion, or at least finality.
A similar thing happened when I played the Witcher 3. I got the bad ending where Ciri dies. I was too overprotective apparently. It meant I had no interest in going back and playing the DLC. Which was by review apparently really awesome.
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My preferred example of this is Dragon Age 2, which deserves a longer post than I can make right now, but which I much prefer to read as a tragedy, and therefore is accentuated and heightened by 'bad' decisions.
I think DA2 is a tragedy even if you play it 'optimally', for the best outcomes. Even in the best possible version, DA2 is a story about Hawke, the protagonist, seeking his/her fortune in a new city, rising from a penniless refugee to the height of political power, and none of it being worth a damn. No matter how good your decisions, or how diligent you are about sidequests and doing all the content, the city of Kirkwall is doomed to descend into anarchy and civil war. It does not matter how good your judgement is, or how canny a political operator, or even how skilled you are with a sword. The forces of social division and entropy tearing this city apart were set long before you ever arrived. Moreover, no matter your choices, you are going to lose friends and loved ones. This city will chew up and destroy everyone you ever cared for.
In some ways I see the game summarised well in the character of Gamlen. Gamlen is the player character's uncle, someone you were hoping to make contact with and ask for help in your desperate flight at the start of the game. Instead you discover that he is a washed-up drunk and a gambler, who has lost the family's wealth and even sold their estate to cover his debts. It is easy to feel contempt for him as you set about rebuilding the fortune and reclaiming your estate.
Even so, by the conclusion of DA2, well, at least one of your siblings has been killed by monsters, the other has either been killed by monsters or has been lost to you by joining/being-conscripted-into an isolated organisation of fanatics, your dead father's legacy is in disgrace, your mother has been murdered by a serial killer, and your friends have mostly fallen apart as well. By the end of the game I wanted to head down to Lowtown and say to Gamlen, "...I get it now. Pass me a bottle."
If you try your hardest to make optimal choices you can take the edge off the tragedy a little, but to me that always feels like missing the point of the game. Both your siblings should die. Merrill should end up killing her entire clan. Isabela should end up fleeing the city, feeling guilty and abandoned, while the qunari burn the city searching for a book that isn't even there. Anders should die on a bloody block, killed by someone he thought was a friend. This is miserable, but the game is about misery.
DA2 is a game about losing what you love, about betrayal, and entropy, and being the last one standing, hands covered in blood, amid the burning wreckage of everything you were trying to defend. The more strongly that theme comes through, the better and more affecting the game is, and that means that I think the 'good' choices, which let you salvage small bits of success from amid the wreckage, make the game weaker as a whole. DA2 is, unavoidably, a game where you the player lose. Kirkwall defeats you. The game is better if it leans into that.
Another point of comparison might be Rannoch in ME3, which I notice you didn't mention. I think the Rannoch section works vastly better if, in the end, only one race can survive. I have my objections to the actual writing of the Rannoch segment, which is mostly bad, but I like the final choice. The quarians will survive or the geth will survive. Choose. It is a genuinely difficult and even heartbreaking choice. Unfortunately, BioWare are cowards and give you an option to just save everyone, which I think is frankly pretty pathetic.
To an extent I have the same objection to Tuchanka. Both Tuchanka and Rannoch have more-or-less the same premise. You have two very sympathetic characters, Wrex/Mordin and Tali/Legion, both of whom are fan favourites, both of whom the player has probably come to really care about in previous games, and who are on opposite sides of a contentious, morally complicated issue. Wrex wants to cure the genophage; Mordin wants to preserve it. Tali wants the quarians to survive and prosper; Legion wants the geth to survive and prosper. They cannot both get what they want. The case for each side has been made to you at length by a sympathetic, emotionally compelling character. Now choose.
Unfortunately in both cases ME3 wimps out. For Tuchanka it just has Mordin change his mind and become anti-genophage despite that being the opposite of his position in ME2; and for Rannoch it just lets you convince the geth and the quarians to put a history of genocide behind them and make up. You can argue Mordin changing his mind is justified if you pushed him in that direction in ME2, but he changes his mind even if in ME2 you encouraged him to believe that what he did was right and justified. It reminds me of how Garrus in ME2 is always a rogue who's quit C-Sec to become a vigilante, even though his entire character arc in ME1 was about choosing whether to go rogue or play it straight and stay in C-Sec, and both options were supported there. There are a lot of places where BioWare handles player choice very well, but that just makes these failures all the more jarring, especially when they go against the ME series' promise to give you genuinely hard choices. What is the point of promising hard decisions if the games are always going to back out and give you a third option? The golden routes are BioWare losing their nerve and failing their own games.
I have similar vibes on DA2, including empathy for Gamlen. Who- despite being the character encouraged to be viewed with contempt- is a bit of a tragic character in his own right who was the unfavored child who none the less shared what he had when his long-absconded sister showed up asking for aid.
For ME3, I think the Rannoch arc is one of those where it gets much, much better if you let a ME2 character die. Namely, Legion. With Legion, the Geth are cast as extremely sympathetic 'we didn't mean to do that / we don't want conflict.' Without Legion, the ME3 Geth are just as much the original victims, but far more menacing.
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Dragon Age 2 really is BioWare’s best ever game. Even while playing recent highly rated RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk I come back to it as a far better written and interesting story, with better and more meaningful choices (the levels are copy-pasted, but the game is reactive in a way the others either aren’t or play for laughs). The decline in writing afterwards (and it really was many of the same people who wrote Inquisition and Veilguard, so it can’t be explained away by staffing changes) beggars belief. The final conversation with Gamlen in Act 3, where you’re both trying to somehow find a little meaning in this extraordinary tragedy (which I like to think ends, in Inquisition, with the final extinguishing of the Hawke line), and really in life itself, and it all feels so pathetic, is just extraordinary. I could probably quote half the game from memory. Other games have their moments; if you play Witcher 3 with the Yennefer relationship there is something of the world-weary love story of two people who have known each other for a long time that I love, and I think the epilogue in the DLC is sweet without being saccharine. But yeah, Dragon Age 2, man, makes me want to drop everything and play it again right now.
Personally I wouldn't go so far as saying that DA2 is a great game, or even a good game. It might be BioWare's most interesting game, but taken as a whole, I think it has to be judged a failure. It's a mess mechanically, its line-to-line writing is frequently bad, and its setting struggles for coherence. DA2 is not a game I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone.
However, for those willing to sift through it, there is a lot there to like. Act two is easily the best part of it, with the qunari a fantastic depiction of the genuine appeal of fanatical religious asceticism. Sometimes I hear people wonder what drives people to support the Taliban, and the answer I want to give every time is, "play DA2". The Arishok and the qunari are deeply repulsive to liberal values. They preach strict conformity, obedience, and discipline. But they exist in a context where everything else is falling apart. In comparison to Kirkwall, they have solidarity with each other. They do not tear and bite at each other, as everyone else does. Each person works for the good of the whole, and each person is looked after. What hardship exists is shared, and when successes are achieved, they are also shared. The qunari have an aura of righteousness - they sit there above the strife, perhaps the only non-hypocritical faction in the city, issuing judgements of the degeneracy around them. They are an island of order in a sea of chaos and you can understand why people would choose them. You cannot choose them yourself, of course, but the Arishok's respect matters to me, and I care about winning it.
Unfortunately, most of the game does not reach that height. The mage/templar debate that dominates the third act is only engaged with on a surface level, and the game's final sequence feels unfinished (why do you fight Orsino if you side with the mages? it feels like it was intended that the final boss be either Orsino or Meredith depending on your choice, but instead they just both go insane?), and is too reliant on contrivances like the red lyrium idol.
And again a lot of the writing on a more immediate level is unimpressive. The doormat/jerk/clown dialogue options are unsatisfying, and Friendship/Rivalry, while an interesting idea, did not work in practice at all, never mind leading to inconsistent results by bundling together positions in unintuitive ways. (Suppose you're both anti-slavery and pro-mage - this leads to odd results with Fenris.)
I would not say that DA2 is a good game, but it's a bad game with enough good pieces that I wish it were better.
This is probably a better position to be in than Veilguard, which is bad and boring, but it is still, I think, a significant step down from the much superior Origins.
Origins to me struggled with dullness. I think the closest game to origins tonally is probably Pillars of Eternity, the first one, in part because it’s the only Obsidian game since Alpha Protocol to largely avoid the ‘zany Le CraZy 🤪’ “humor” that marred every other game they released from them onward. But like Pillars, I think Origins is flawed. The combat is MMO lite with limited strategic depth and very bad effects and animations, much of the dialogue is wooden and dull and feels more suited to a WoW quest text box than an interactive cutscene, and the voiceless protagonist (which I also felt fatally wounded BG3) works in a sandbox like Skyrim but not really in a BioWare game. I also thought the art style always came across as very cheap, like a “art assets pack - dark fantasy edition” you could pick up off the Unreal Store or something (I don’t know if it works like that, but I believe it does). The overall story, despite some good moments around Loghain, the excellent Deep Roads segment, and a couple of the companions, is also pretty generic and predictable.
2 really improves on every aspect of 1. The 10 (well, 7) year framing is grand and ambitious, and the game has a good sense of time passing given they didn’t even have the budget for different weather in each year. The story within a story bookend of Varric’s interrogation isn’t obtrusive but adds some intrigue. The companions are too the man and woman, with the possible exception of Fenris, great and have great stories and perspectives on the world in a way no other set of RPG companions in a AAA game have ever had. One might have more affection for the Normandy crew, but they’re not as interesting or multifaceted.
Kirkwall is magnificent. It’s a shame that putting the longtime franchise art director in charge of Veilguard allegedly ruined the creative direction of that game (according to Jason Schreier) because if he’d stuck to art he would have done great work. Byzantine-Brutalist Fantasy, heavy on the concrete and stone, hugely referential of 1840s gothic revival - you can see the Houses of Parliament and a solid part of Mayfair in the building design. It’s unlike anything else. The dull haze of the Wounded Coast, the brilliant mossy green of the mountain around the Dalish camp, the work in color alone is stunning, and each location is graded beautifully, such that the Deep Roads feel deeper and more mysterious in 2 than they do in any other game. Given the limitations of the age, I think a lot of the object work was also great, notably the Lyrium idol which of course became central to the franchise’s overall plot (and I love that, that ruining the world and causing the deaths of millions is arguably Hawke’s ultimate legacy). Hawke’s mansion is one of the coziest houses in RPGs, the hall, the decoration of the bedroom. With the exception of the “iconic” act 3 armor, the gear is dull but not mostly ugly, down to earth but not as unstylish as in Origins where you really have to mod to get anything not horrific.
The music in 2 is extraordinary. Inon Zur has a reputation as a workmanlike composer who churns out passable genre themes, but in 2 he’s at his most creative, he brings in new instruments, he’s inspired by Eastern Orthodox music, by middle eastern instruments. The sound of Kirkwall isn’t quite European but it’s not “Asiatic” or “African” or “Mayan” in the cringe way fantasy games are when they go to another biome. Rogue Heart, Mage Pride, the Wounded Coast theme (which had a brief play in Origins at the edge of the mage like), all timers.
I think 2’s dialogue is very good. There are cringe lines, but far fewer than anything by Larian or Obsidian in the last decade. And even widely praised Disco Elysium has mountains of unintentionally cringe dialogue where it’s like yes it’s nice you’ve read Baudrillard and yes it’s nice you’re commenting on what’s happened to European green parties since 1991 but also this just isn’t compelling or good writing. Anders is a really good depiction of an extremist, especially when you’re arguing with him (especially in a romance). Sebastian is an almost George W Bush type of figure tempered by a Presbyterian Scottishness and played magnificently. The regional accents are great. The acting is some of BioWare’s best across the board. The Qunari aren’t “reactionary” of course, they’re closer to communists. Unlike Disco Elysium they’re not a simple analogue for a faction at the second international or whatever. They’re not Islamists. They’re not China. They’re zealous egalitarians, central planners, ruled by a matriarchy, hate and afraid of magic, vaguely Buddhist maybe, but with a strong early church influence. They’re ideologically idiosyncratic in a fantastic way.
The gameplay is a mixed bag. I love 2’s combat and think returning to aspects of its rock-paper-scissors dynamic is one of the only good creative decisions Veilguard made. Chaining together combos, freezing, smashing, disorienting, it’s one of the best pure tab-targeting implementations ever. It might be the best RTwP combat of all time. The ability to chain together IFTT statements in the AI page for companions is also great, you can program relatively complex behaviors yourself.
You’re right about Friendship/Rivalry. I do think the whole game sets up mages/templars well - the Qunari are part of that, too, it’s central to their ongoing war with the northern humans; the game is pretty nuanced. The other Dragon Ages overwhelmingly sympathize with mages, 2 has tons of examples of psycho rapist murderer mages abusing their power and treating the muggle population awfully. 2 has a certain briskness, David Gaider has said most of the game was written and edited in one pass, essentially, no real review, you’d write a line of dialogue and production was so fast that nobody was really looking at it. I think that gives it a confidence that’s so rare in AAA games outside of Rockstar where they think they are (and are) above the critics. Made in a year, thoroughly compelling, and one of very few games made about politics by committed progressives that limits its preachiness to some extent and has a real ideological depth. We’ll never see anything else like it, although if and when AI generation gets good enough I’ll generate another 250 hours.
Sometimes I think you're deliberately trolling us with your ludic preferences.
It’s a slog in the best way. It’s a slog in the way that Rockstar clearly thought very carefully about the fact that you have to suffer through a 30 second animation when looting someone in Red Dead 2 is. Its deliberate. You really do feel like you’re far, far underground, at least 5 or 6 loading screens away from civilization. The old CRPGs had more of that.
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My main issue with DA2 is how it dropped the pretence, story-wise, of being anything else than a game with a strictly structured narrative.
Of course, games usually benefit from some kind of narrative structure, while real life typically doesn't have one, but good writing smoothes over the seams and makes the story still flow in a realistic way. Now Bioware, since their beginnings, have seen people enjoy when the writing in their games forces them to engage with difficult philosophical, ethical and moral questions with no obviously good answer. But up until ME2 and DA2, it still felt like those choices happened fairly organically. Sure, most storylines had them, but sometimes they were subtle, or the deeply held morality of the player made it so that the player would not even notice they were there. Up to that point, Bioware seemingly understood these moral questions were in the service of worldbuilding; it adds a layer of realism when the two sides of an issue are not saints vs comic book villains, when at least the comic book villains make a good point once in a while, or when perfect is the enemy of good.
ME2 and especially DA2 laid bare the narrative structure; the whole game world felt like a contrivance to push those toy moral puzzles rather than something that would have happened in a consistent, well-written world. It felt, to me at least, like the narrative equivalents of being told "You can defeat this asshole who is oppressing people, but it requires you to personally skin every puppy in Kirkwall with a potato peeler and roll them in salt, how do you feel about that, player? Huh?" or "You have a choice, do the right thing or not, but if you do all your family and friends will be raped, tortured and murdered". It feels like they created the story backwards from the dillema they wanted to push on the player, rather than build a coherent universe that has dillemas.
Would you say it happened organically in Knights of the Old Republic or Jade Empire?
I'd agree that it felt fairly organic in Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, but those aren't really games about morality. BG is sort of about whether you choose to turn away from or embrace the power of Bhaal, but those games are so sidequest-heavy that you don't spend most of the game thinking about it, and for the most part you just make decisions based on what seems sensible at the time. Baldur's Gate does not even track your moral decisions systematically in any way - the closest it has is reputation, which is clearly more about how you are perceived. NWN does have alignment shift slightly in response in your choices, but in a very granular way (loot a house, +5 to Chaotic, etc.).
However, KotOR and JE both sell themselves as games about morality, and have a big moral choice system that their mechanics are structured around. I thought that both of them do present you with a series of contrived moral dilemmas just so you always have a Light Side/Dark Side or an Open Palm/Closed Fist choice. They were usually cartoonish and silly, but they were unmissable.
Perhaps it felt less jarring then because KotOR is a Star Wars game, and very blatant LS/DS choices are part of that franchise? But Jade Empire starts to give you the idea that OP is not good and CF is not evil, and while that was laughable as implemented in JE itself, it's clearly a prototype for Paragon/Renegade.
I suppose my perception is that BioWare sort of flanderised themselves over time. Baldur's Gate doesn't really have a morality system but it does have themes of the protagonist struggling with his/her evil nature. KotOR and JE externalise it, ME built the whole game around it, and...
So I think Dragon Age is an interesting comparison, because Dragon Age does not have a morality system as such. Dragon Age replaces morality with a more granular system of companion approval. There aren't objectively good or evil choices, just choices that different companions like or don't like. In theory this fits well with the early DA games' attempt to be dark fantasy, emphasising necessary evils, sacrifice, complicity, and murky situations where there are no good options. At times it even works well. Do you execute Loghain or not? There isn't a clear right or wrong answer to that question, but your choice will have consequences either way, especially for your companions.
However, you can tell that Dragon Age is written by people who have the KotOR/JE/ME script still in their heads, and they keep presenting you with contrived dilemmas that feel like they're from earlier games. There aren't little blue or red icons, but obviously sparing the mages is the LS/OP/Paragon/blue option, and the Rite of Annulment is the DS/CF/Renegade/red option. Saving the elves is blue and recruiting the werewolves is red. Destroying the Anvil is blue and making the golems is red. DA's promise of more interesting choices is usually not lived up to. Helping Caridin is the good choice and helping Branka is the evil choice. It's not subtle.
And the same in DA2, and then by Inquisition I think Dragon Age has more-or-less given up on being dark fantasy entirely. It is a pity, because while it was certainly imperfect, I did think Origins was on to something.
The whole concept of the series is exploring this aspect of the Star Wars universe; how can normal, realistic human beings can become what appeared to be comic book villains, so it felt like the morality system and its difficult questions was in service of the world building. Yes, the Sith are comic book villains, but the comic book villains occasionally make a good point. And I'm reminded of that planet in KOTOR where a Republic officer is decidedly guilty of murder; this is the kind of realistic dillema that helps the world building. KOTOR2 also works a lot to knock the Jedi down a peg, not intervening against the mandalorians was a problematic decision that with the benefit of hindsight the Jedi love to act all superior about, nothing says that it needed to have happened that way, especially if the Jedi had been led into the war by wiser masters rather than hothead Revan. I don't remember much of Jade Empire, I remember the thesis of closed fist being not exactly evil made sense when it came up in the game, but as applied in the game it felt disconnected (it would have made sense if CF was about letting or empowering people to deal with their own problems, but in the game it felt more like inflicting additional cruelty for the lulz)
Yeah, Bioware of that era was high on their own supply in that regard (and in the LGBT romances department) due to the praise they were getting. It's not the morality system I resent, but the contrivances made to force you to engage with the moral dilemmas. In the KOTOR murder case I mentioned, the murderer doesn't also randomly kidnaps your dog and forces you to chose between losing your dog or helping him off the hook; the reason why you would hesitate are utilitarian calculus (his condemnation could affect the balance of power on that planet), or perhaps an extremist belief that all Siths deserve death because the ideology they willingly embrace would spread it, etc... The story doesn't feel the need to twist itself to try and make the choice harder.
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I agree about the fantastic aesthetics, and wish we'd seen a Tevinter more inspired by Kirkwall than whatever it was Veilguard was trying to do. The music is solid though I think Inon Zur did better work on Origins, a game I would like to defend at length but won't attempt to do so tonight.
I think my main disagreement with you is about the writing. I agree that it's better than Larian or Obsidian's recent output, like The Outer Worlds, but I feel that's a pretty low bar. I'll agree that it's better than Disco Elysium, but I hated Disco Elysium, so I would consider almost anything better than sitting through another page of Disco Elysium trying to be clever.
It is worse, I think, than Origins, or Obsidian games like Fallout: New Vegas or Knights of the Old Republic II. I think the combination of a dialogue wheel and the three colour-coded personalities for Hawke really hurt the writing. I suppose one of my spicier opinions might be that the Mass Effect dialogue wheel has been a disaster for game writing. The three options are just never enough to express a nuanced opinion on anything, especially because they are always locked to the blue, purple, and red options. No matter what's going on, my options are always limited to a polite yes, an angry yes, and a 'funny' non sequitur.
I'm not sure I agree about mages, and in fact I think the Dragon Age fandom has distorted and flanderised mage issues. Origins presents the issue as genuinely complicated - the templars serve a necessary but unpleasant role, justified by the obvious threat of magical crime, but their ruthlessness makes them hard to like. Greagoir and Irving are colleagues who mostly work together well, but with a subtext of threat - Greagoir knows that Irving and his mages might be possessed or turn into monsters at any point, and Irving knows that Greagoir and his templars are their jailers and legally empowered to kill them, so there can never be complete trust between them. I feel that DA2 was a step back from that in favour of making both sides almost cartoonishly evil. Almost every single mage who slips the Circle becomes a blood mage or abomination, and meanwhile the templars have gone from necessarily ruthless to just plain abusive. Fortunately Inquisition dialled it back and instead showed a world where the breaking of the Circles has left both mages and templars in crisis, to the detriment of each order. It is obvious that mages are people who should not be abused or imprisoned; it is also obvious that either the templars or something like the templars are necessary because of the immense risk posed by magic. Inquisition generally refuses to demonise either group, and I also give it some credit for, in a move that surprised me, the templar sidequest being vastly better than the mage sidequest.
Unfortunately, in my experience, the BioWare fanbase is extremely progressive, identify heavily with mages, and have a flattened, 'All Templars are Bastards' level of understanding of the issues that the games evoke.
DA2 disappointed me because, well, the actual issue with mages is fairly straightforward. Mages are innocent people who are not responsible for their own powers; it doesn't seem like they deserve to be brutally oppressed. However, intensive training is necessary in order for mages to not be a threat to everyone around them, and magic is incredibly dangerous and a threat to everyone. Even leaving aside the everyday risks of possession, or the maddening influence of blood magic, one can hardly forget that magic were the ones who tainted the Golden City and unleash the Blights. It is very reasonable for the people of this world to want to control and regulate magic. So the question is - how should those concerns be balanced? How can magic be regulated, mages taught to use their powers constructively and punished if they go wrong, without threatening the rest of society? Unfortunately DA2 mostly flattens it to "do you like mages or do you hate mages?", and that's just the wrong question.
Interesting. I enjoy New Vegas but think it overrelies on zaniness and a certain kind of 1990s Mad Magazine humor, maybe almost Jim Goadesque, that has had its day and had had it long before that game was written. Knights 2 is good but so compromised by the development cycle, lack of voiced protagonist etc that it’s hard to evaluate. I like it as the most cogent criticism of Star Wars that is still, officially, Star Wars, but beyond that it’s more of a showcase that games Can Say Things than a great game, in my opinion. Maybe I just hate turn based games, which I do.
I like the dialogue wheel, or rather I like what the dialogue wheel enabled, which is a fully voiced protagonist. Here is the hidden subtext of the unvoiced protagonist - you too often play yourself. Commander Shepard, Hawke, Geralt, V, they have to sound like someone else for you to be ripped out of the isekai thing. If Mask of the Betrayer had had a voiced protagonist with a good backstory it would probably be one of the best RPGs of all time but of course it couldn’t - it was too tied to the ‘choose your own adventure’ format pioneered in the 70s that I find deeply uncompelling. Give me a woman, a man, a story, an identity. The Witcher and Cyberpunk lack a wheel, but I don’t think it makes those games better.
I am really lucky that I picked a Bleak Walker Paladin for my first and only Pillars playthrough. Too many games let you do the "let me talk to the other side first" back-and-forth dance that results in the best possible solution to the quest. Then at the end you refuse the money and are rewarded with a much more valuable unique item.
Doing either of these things as a Bleak Walker literally makes you weaker. Having to avoid benevolent or diplomatic choices was at the same time limiting and immensely liberating. You no longer feel obligated to explore the whole solution space because you'd be cheating yourself out of content otherwise, no, you are now engaging with it the way your character should.
Maybe in a different game, when trying to defuse a hostage situation, you would learn that the hostage-taker has been unfairly persecuted by the corrupt captain of the guard, would break into his mansion to search for evidence and would ultimately expose the real criminal, earning the praise of everyone. But now you are free to answer "(Unsheathe your weapon)" when the hostage-taker tells you not to approach him and then convince the grieving parents of the dead hostage that they still owe you the reward.
I think more games should push you to roleplay a character mechanically.
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I appreciate that you made that emphasis of the appeal of ascetisim, because while I fully agree on how the Qunari present a coherent society that takes care of its own, the game also does a good job on letting you scratch a little deeper to see that, no, the Qunari are just as dysfunctional and failing a society as everyone else.'
The Qunari in DA2 are a shipwreck remnant because the supreme military authority of the state had to lead the pursuit for a relic-book, which in turn means the rest of the Qunari state is working without one of its three key leaders. The Qunari maintain a 100% non-defection rate by categorically re-categorizing all defectors as no-longer-Qunari, and thus not acknowledging or dealing with the issues driving the desertions. The Qunari, supposedly the most rational and scientific of all the peoples of the continent, are also the most primitive and superstitious when dealing with the subject of magic, indulging in superstitions such as cutting out the tongues of mages to prevent their words from spreading demonic possession, when everyone else inn the setting has known it doesn't work like that for millennia. Even in the penultimate act of Act 2, the takeover of the city, the Qunari variously are willing to walk away from the coup-that-could-cause-a-world-war if they get a book and a prisoner, or let their supreme leader fight a one-on-one duel to the death to decide.
The Qunari are interesting society, and they work well in part because they can point to how bad the rest of the setting is, but they're beyond fananticism and just stupid in their own right. But that contrast / pointing at the ills of the others really does demonstrate the appeal of ascetism, even if the proposed alternative is even worse.
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Can I add a description of the type of gameplay a person will be subjected to while playing DA2? Here it is: you walk through a town street and you are ambushed by the enemies. No worries, you have all your abilities ready and quickly dispatch them, BUT WAIT, there is a second wave incoming, literally teleporting behind your backline. Okay, you didn't want to have your mage/archer involved in melee but you can deal with this wave even if some abilities are on cooldown, BUT WAIT, we have another wave of enemies incoming..... You might ask what is going on with the teleporting enemies in the city, but the only real question you are going to ask yourself repeatedly is "surely there won't be a 4th wave, right?".
Yep...
It sounds interesting when you talk about themes and character, but man, it is a tedious pain in the ass to play through. For everything that works, there's some baffling design decision adjacent to it that lets it all down.
One positive element I forgot to mention earlier was the setting. Kirkwall in premise is a really interesting place. This free city built on top of what used to be a slaving outpost of a cruel empire, the City of Chains where you sail in past statues of broken slaves, is a really evocative setting, and the eventual revelation that this was the site of the Magisters' great sacrifice in order to breach the Fade, thousands of slaves slaughtered on bloody altars in a crime that still echoes through the heavens, just feels natural. Of course it was here. Of course.
And from a game design perspective, the idea of zooming in on a single location and watching it develop over time is a good one. The city of Baldur's Gate was under-used in BG1, but Athkatla was easily the best part of the Baldur's Gate series, and it had similar themes, getting to know this wealthy city built on injustice, with a lively underworld, gang war, ruthless magic police, and so on. DA:O was famously a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and I wouldn't be surprised if Dragon Age 2 started with someone saying, "What if we made an entire game about Athkatla?" It's not identical, and Kirkwall has deeper shadows, putting the themes of slavery and oppression more centre-stage (which is itself compatible with DA:O's dark tone and fascination with corruption and moral compromise), but I can see the evolution.
Every time I talk about DA2 I end up frustrated because I can see the good game you could make out of these parts.
It's just that DA2 itself is not that game. DA2 is broken and annoying to play and un-fun. I am glad that I played it and I will never play it again.
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Nothing much to say except awesome analysis. I quite liked DA2 despite the copy-paste, the scaling of it worked well and the characters were great. But your write-up is better.
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Good post. But I think you're off base when it comes to why people don't like ME3. It isn't because the ending is a dire stakes, Hail Mary play which has a huge cost for the galaxy. No, it's because the ending a) is the culmination of a plot that existed only in ME3 and is retarded anyway, b) it gives you a decision that has nothing at all to do with what came before, and c) it makes no sense with the previous rules of the setting anyway.
First, the Crucible. This partly comes down to that you said about how the writers didn't have a plan for the trilogy (more accurately: they had a tentative plan, but the writer in charge left/got kicked off the project and his ideas got rejected so they threw out the plot threads they had built). But they don't get a pass for that. So the Crucible never gets mentioned until ME3, and players quite reasonably go "wait what" when the plan to stop the Reapers is something they've never heard of before. But even if the writers had brought it up sooner... it's retarded. There is no way in hell that you could have a tech project where every Reaper cycle progresses it a little bit further. The researchers of all these different species wouldn't even be able to understand what came before (remember: Shepard is literally the only one in the galaxy who can speak Prothean, no way a research team is going to be able to decipher Prothean blueprints), not to mention the fact that it's going to be nigh impossible to do tech development while in the midst of a galactic genocide, not to mention that it's going to be nigh impossible to keep it secret every single cycle so that the Reapers never discover it. So even if they had started to build up the Crucible earlier, it's a bad idea.
Then we have the continuity with what came before. Your previous choices don't matter to the Star Child. It's not the natural consequence of the rest of the game's narrative. It's this completely separate thing tacked onto the end which has no relation at all to your adventures with your space homies. People want the ending to come from somewhere, especially in a series which prides itself on being responsive to player choice, and this didn't.
But even if the ending had related to what came before, it would still suck because it disregards the rules of the setting. First of all, the supposed reason that the Reapers kill everyone is... because otherwise organic and inorganic life will kill each other and the Reapers would rather cull the universe every so often than have a dead universe. But that makes no sense. The game shows you, time and again, that organics and inorganics can learn to get along. It's not easy (as with any people who have tension), but it is possible. Legion and Tali learn to get along and respect each other. Joker is banging your ship. It's clearly possible for the two sides to get along, but the game contradicts itself and says "no it's not"without any evidence to support that. Then you have the mass relays blowing up. In the Arrival DLC for ME2, we are told that such an explosion is so violent that it would kill everyone in the system. And yet, at the end your people land on a planet which is pretty close to a mass relay, but they... somehow survive the cataclysmic explosion. The ending is simply not playing by the rules of the setting on multiple levels.
One very common criticism leveled at ME fans at the time ME3 came out was "you just want a happy ending". But that isn't what people really wanted. They wanted an ending that made some semblance of narrative sense, and which cohered with the things that came up to that point in the series. The ME3 ending did neither of those things, which was the real problem.
I just want to say I agree with you much more than I would quibble, and fully confess to moving past the ending specifically because I wanted to address the thematic alignment and how the 'punish the player' trope in earlier parts made the story thematically work better than the issues with the ending itself.
Which, as you demonstrated, is a load more text, lol.
That said, there were more than a small number of players who were more upset about the end of their power fantasy than the writing rigour. Mass Effect was always pretty squishy on the writing rigour, and this was well apparent even in ME2. For a lot of people, arguments like your above- which I agree with!- were excuses to justify/validate how they felt... when they were acting far more akin to scorned lovers. Hence how one of the 'fixes' of the post-ending fracas was the medical evac goodbye scene at the finish line.
Fair, I didn't encounter players who just wanted a feel good ending but I'm not surprised that some existed. And yeah it's a lot more text, but if there's one thing the Internet doesn't have enough of, it's nerds spewing words about Mass Effect. ;)
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First I'm gonna go ahead and nitpick your summary of the Far Cry series.
I really don't agree that Far Cry 2 codified anything genre-wise. It was a really interesting game, to be sure, but ultimately an interesting failure, and it was 3 that defined all of those successors you name. The original Far Cry isn't worth mentioning here; its sequel was Crysis, and the only reason Far Cry 2 shares a name is because it was easier for Ubisoft to slap a recognized IP on an entirely new FPS (worth mentioning as well that Ubi made like 4 FarCry:Spinoff titles in between Far Cry and Far Cry 2. I really liked Far Cry:Instincts)
It's been a long time since I played Far Cry 2, but I don't think anyone would recognize it as being a game of "crafting and collectables". It was a really ambitious game, and I was super hyped leading up to the release. I think the closest parallel was probably GTA4. Both made big promises of being much more realistic, grounded games, with a strong emphasis on story and loads of interesting interactivity and AI. Both failed to deliver, with mediocre stories and gameplay that got so bogged down in realism it made them bad to actually play.
Second, I don't really agree that Far Cry 3 is particularly essential. There's a lot to recognize of 2 in Far Cry 3, but they are still quite different games. 3 used 2 as a base, but cut out a lot of fat, and a lot of good stuff, for something much more streamlined and 'gamified'. I remember an anecdote on a podcast once where someone was getting involved in this important, sombre cutscene. They get control back, and immediately the first thing they see is this big, jarring "Gun Vending machine" and it immediately throws them out. Far Cry 2 was at pains to craft a fully believable world for the player and would never have placed something like that. Which did mean a lot of irritation, but the storytelling was stronger for it.
My abiding memory of Far Cry 3 is rescuing Jason's girlfriend. You end up in this cave, and I can't remember why but the girlfriend ends up bursting into tears. You regain control with her quietly sobbing, and all you can do is leave to go back to killing. Except, except, there are also these optional flashbacks in the cave, which you can access by finding pills and going on a 'trip'. And it just so happened I found one, went on a drug-fuelled trip, and obviously passed out in the cave. But when my character came to, there was still the girlfriend, still sobbing away. And all I could think about was the hilarious juxtaposition of this traumatised girl crying her eyes out while her boyfriend is just trippin' balls 20 feet away, before he finally comes down and goes out to buy more guns from the gun vending machine.
Anyway, I do think it is a much better game than 2, but I don't think it's really interesting beyond the fact that it influenced so many other titles with the approach to open world crafting and collectables. Like other responses have mentioned, there are other titles like Spec Ops which did the whole player agency story a lot better.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Spec Ops: The Line but I also agree with much of @RobertLiguori's critique of it and that is why i would argue that Far Cry 3 is the superior execution.
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I'm still desperate for a Far Cry 2 remake that adds more combat variety, and some of the quality of life upgrades from the subsequent entries, but keeps the core, raw immersive difficulty elements.
FC2 remains one of the few games I've ever played that balances out the "One Man Army" power fantasy with the "actually you can very easily die because you are all alone, in a hostile environment, with crappy weapons/tools and aggressively outnumbered by people who want you dead." Which is to say, it natively encouraged 'sensible' strategic and tactical approaches and punished you if you got too wild. At least, outside of explicit survival/horror games.
Also remains the best AI enemies ever had in the series... and in almost any other game I've ever played.
I have a distinct memory of aggroing a small group of enemies at an encampment by a river. I shelter in a small shack, firing out the windows. The enemies actually started flanking my position and then, to my absolute shock, lobbed a grenade right through the window practically into my lap. That was a tactic I would attribute to a human player. And I still rarely see that done by AI in even more modern games.
They were trying to flush me out of cover so they could mow me down.
Also the only game I know of where injuring an enemy and waiting for a comrade to come and rescue him so you can kill both was a viable tactic!
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First, I absolutely agree with the 3 is best Far Cry; I feel like it has the cleanest gameplay and tries to tell its story as well as it can, and even though I disagreed with a lot of what I felt the devs were doing, I could recognize that they were including X bit to evoke Y theme and so on.
But I do have some plot quibbles. First, there are some significant clues that Jason Brody has a bit more to him than his first impression implies. You've got the voice hallucination of his brother telling him that he's a natural with a gun, and there is a club flashback sequence where you knock someone the fuck out.
I also think that for games like Far Cry 3, there are really only two valid readings. First, everything the game shows happened. Yes, you killed literally hundreds of people. Yes, you got shot hundreds or thousands of times and walked it off with some very grim healing animations. Yes, the tatau representing your skill tree glows and redraws itself when you master a skill. Yes, the wildlife is absurdly hostile and yes, it does include extremely rare or outright-thought-to-be-extinct species. Yes, Buck is actually teleporting around. Yes, you did have crazy QTE murder-battles. And yes, if you do the Bad End,you don't just respawn to let you 100% the game, that actually happened, you just pop back up exactly like every other time you've died (both in gameplay and with Vaas), that is also entirely diagetic, and Citra is about very, very briefly have the Full Jason Brody Experience this time.
The other is to accept that there is enough weird drug and hallucination crap that you can't actually say what happened to anything, so it doesn't matter!
But the game is fun, and Blood Dragon by itself is worth the price of admission, so I also heartily endorse checking it out for yourselves.
While I enjoyed the Stone Age spinoff the most and I think 4 is the highest point of the franchise altogether, I agree that 3 was the game that codified and immortalized the series.
I still remember two moments from it. One is more player-centric, when you learn that Willis is not just a crazy guy pretending he's a CIA agent, he's a crazy CIA agent.
The other one is a moment of perfect ludonarrative unity, when you rescue one of the girls, force her to be the getaway driver and start mowing down the waves of pirates chasing you. It's an awesome action scene, Jason enthusiastically agrees with you, and the girl's completely horrified you find blowing up cars and killing people by the dozen elating.
Tend to agree that 4 was the one where everything they'd learned came together and had the fewest annoyances overall.
And it achieved strong variety of gameplay and challenges, and the open world and fetch quests didn't feel too tedious 90% of the time.
Indeed, can't think of any part of it I genuinely dislike, other than the radio host guy, and mostly because of how repetitive he was.
I see 4 as the Empire Strikes Back to 3's Star Wars, it is in many respects the superior Film/Game but much of its impact comes from having the core ideas and themes established beforehand.
The crab rangoon really is fantastic.
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I still prefer Farcry 4, though. Even if the DLCs did kind of ruin Pagan Min. A little.
But, yes, Farcry 3 is definitely in it's own category for what can only be termed as unreliable narrator. There's a big, open question as to whether or not the game is one drug-fuled hallucination or there is actually some mystical bullshit going on. You can argue in both directions, and the game never really gives you a definite answer.
Count me among those that feels like the Bad Ending is severely lack-luster, though. A part of me can't help but wonder if the writers couldn't quite seal the deal on the type of story they wanted to show and just had to wuss outin demonstrating how much of a monster Jason had become, only to get backstabbed by Vaas' sister because... what, Jason was sniffing for a crumb of pussy? Come on. On top of this is the game literally screaming at you that Vaas' sister has done this shit before, and you'd think Jason would pick up on that. A better ending, albeit cliched, would have had Jason slowly devolving into Vaas himself, only to have a snap-cut-to-black to finish the game off when that realization hits home.
Yes a sane, rational, moral person should see the "bad end" coming from a mile away but niether Jason nor the player are sane, rational, or moral.
That's the point that I think people who complain about the ending are missing.
Well, that's the problem. See, Jason is acting very sane, rational, and moral for the circumstance he's currently enmeshed in. IMO.
People like to play up the entire 'Rambo in a sandbox' aspect of Farcry 3 while ignoring the big driving part of Jason's actions is to save his friends from horrible things. Now, it's been a while since I've played Farcry 3, and maybe you could argue that this shifts when Jason gets to the second island and they could have skedaddled after hekilled Vaas, but there's the flipside of Jason being atleast a little bit grateful for all the help that the Islander's did for him to save his friends and he doesn't mind paying them back, just a little...?
There's this trend in video games as of recent that started with Bioshock. Writers have become far, far too enamoured with being clever and leaning heavily on video game mechanics and tropes in order to tell a story. It worked in Bioshock, but after that it always just kind of falls flat. People seem to really want to play up the idea that the 'charachter' or 'player' is just doing things because the pretty/cute/appealing/charismatic NPC is telling them to do it without any thought or reason beyond 'video game'. I even see this in relatively recent games; while playing Cyberpunk 2077 and dealing with the entire Songbird/President Meyer bullshit, I get an earful of Silverhand going on about how 'They're just using you!', and just once I'd love to have your charachter turn around and go 'No shit, sherlock, did you just now figure this out? Cause, guess what, I'm using them to get what I want! This is a mutally abusive relationship, if you haven't noticed, and thanks for fucking reminding me!'
Ahem.
The 'bad end' just feels like a scolding from the Game Devs with no real meat on it. If you want to paint the player character as a monster, go all the way, don't just pussy-foot around the matter and then have him get stabbed in the back by the group he's been helping all this time. That's not effective story-telling, that's just a bland cop-out.
Yeah, it seems like some game devs like to treat the player as a sucker for... playing the game that they bought. When the player is railroaded (as he basically always in video games, with varying degrees of success in hiding the rails), and you shove the player's face in "haha look how awful it is when you did the things we forced you to", the player is going to resent that.
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This is part of why I can't start playing FC4. I know that the correct way to play the game is the ending where you don't play the game, and I also know that there's no "well fuck you, I guess I'll just kill everyone and become Pagan Twin" ending like there should have been.
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Counter point: as you yourself said...the game is literally screaming at you that Vaas' sister has done this shit before, and you'd think Jason would pick up on that.
A sane rational and moral person would have picked up on that and seenCitra's sudden but inevitable betrayal coming a mile away. But the person who chooses to abandon thier friends and stay on the island to "keep playing the game" is niether sane rational nor moral. That's the point.
The path of violence and self-destruction leading to violence and self-destruction? Who could've imagined?
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Yes, that's all good and well, but how can I pass up an opportunity to direct others toward Blood Dragon?
If I ever replay any of the series it'll be that one and it's not even close.
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Of the three Far Crys I've played (the first three), 3 was the best and it wasn't even close. Far Cry is a completely different beast to the franchise it spawned, being a relatively straightforward shooter with no pretensions to philosophical themes or complex characterisation. Far Cry 2 was trying to do the edgy confrontational you're-no-better-than-the-people-you're-fighting deconstructed power fantasy thing, and had one legitimately compelling character in the Jackal – but didn't quite pull it off, and the gameplay design is awfully lazy in ways that disrupt the immersion. Far Cry 3 is where everything came together, with satisfying gameplay and an engaging, thought-provoking story with fleshed-out and believeable characters.
Like I said the first was a glorified tech demo, the second had strong ludic elements but weak narrative, and the third is where everything "clicked". 3, 4, and 5 are all excellent IMO and kind of form a trilogy in their own right, exploring the themes of choice, consequence, and how "He who fights monsters must be careful lest he become one...", but the latter two are really just alternative takes on 3 which is why I hold up 3 as the one to play.
As for 6, as fun as it is to watch Gus Fring chew the scenery, Hocking and a bunch of the other developers who'd been involved in 2 - 5 had either retired or moved on to other projects and I feel like it shows in the quality of both the writing and the gameplay.
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To calibrate, how did you feel about Spec Ops: The Line, and the "bad"/high chaos ending of Dishonored?
Man, Spec Ops was bullshit. (Spoilers for Spec Ops and Dishonored below, spoiler tags seem to be wonky.)
My tl;dr for why Spec Ops is bullshit:
The game is trying to make you, the player, feel bad about doing all of these horrible things, that you cannot advance the game without doing, and the smug retort whenever you point this out is that you could have actually chosen to quit the game.
Excuse me? I'm supposed to delete the game I paid for instead of experiencing it to its conclusion?
For me it worked, because I genuinely started to get carried away during the white phosphorous scene just like in the support mission in CoD: Modern Warfare, and when a big white blob appeared on the screen I enthusiastically went "Ha! Got you all!" before really thinking. So the reveal that I just killed a bunch of civilians felt like me and Walker were to blame. I guess you and @Dean have better fire control .
Nah, not at all. That scene is precisely where I think Spec Ops was strongest as a deconstruction of the COD formula, and as art in its own right. The getting caught up in the momentum is a key part of the moment, and not knowing the consequences has a merited sting. Walker and you being in alignment is what makes it work.
For me, the point where The Line approaches the line is the much-later twist, which recontextualizes Walker from understandable to deluded from the start. Here the alignment between the player and Walker turns into a jab at the player, because there's a sharp difference between 'kept pressing on a questionable mission' and 'was clearly deluded and having conversations with no one.'
Part of the drama/tension of going forth with a questionable mission is that there's an actual conflict over the decision. There are reasons to not go, but also reasons to go. A good deconstruction / reflection on the tragedies of war accepts responsibility for the decision- either decision- despite the sentiment (and flaws) leading to it. Walker can work perfectly fine getting his team risked / killed because he wants to be the hero, and the ending where he stops fighting and goes back home is a glorious defeat.
But that tension fails when the player-avatar is forced to be the unreasonable person in a reasonable-standard test. Then it's not a question of 'did he do the right thing for the wrong reasons' or 'did he do the wrong thing for the right reasons.' It's just a question of 'should this guy be in a sanitorium?'
That's a pretty direct question with a pretty boring answer. And when the subject in question is more or less explicitly a proxy for the player, it's an implied judgement on the player as well.
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There's more than a nugget to this.
Commercial art as a message partly depends on people recognizing the message they'll be seeing in advance. Video game purchases aren't a random loot box dynamic where you know in advance that you don't know what is coming out. Player's money, and time, is limited, and so they're trying to select for their desires. If you want a horror game, you don't look for a highschool rom-com game, or vice versa. There's a reason even Doki Doki Literature Club has great big warning labels, just in case you are confused.
Subverting expectations is a delicate balance between surprising and delighting the audience with a twist they didn't see coming, and the writer being a pretentious twat. When people went to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, they wanted a sequel to a known property. And when they went back for episode 8 after the fanservice feel-good nostalgia baiting of episode 7, it's because they had an expectation of what they were going to get. However, Rian Johnson was a pretentious twat who thought subverting expectations was a pass to shit on the audience's interests, and low and behold interest in the Star Wars properties, and merchandise, and everything else promptly and sharply declined.
Spec Ops: The Line isn't Rian Johnson tier subverting expectations, but it very much is a product that does a bait-and-hook. Come for the modern warfare shooter gameplay, stay for the... warcrime simulator? Emotional masochism?
Don't get me wrong. On balance, I like Spec Ops: The Line. I think it has some artistic merit. But that artistic merit is when it's focused on the central character, not the player who doesn't know what's coming. The player is being carried along by pre-commitment bias, not agency of deliberate choice. They don't know what's coming, and that's not their fault when it's the artist doing the bait-and-hook.
I am extremely sympathetic to the people angered by the 'you could stop playing any time' after they paid. I am more sympathetic than I would be if, say, the developers got an attendance commission to go to a convention, and then got pissed on with the threat their attenndance commission being forfeit if they left rather than take it. At least the developers would have been led there with the prospect of something they wanted, money, if they put up with it. The Spec Ops players already got their money taken. Making them the subject of ridicule by proxy is just rubbing salt in a wound they weren't expecting and were misled into paying for.
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Just to correct you, the Outsider didn't cause the plague, the Lord Regent did. The plague originates from Pandyssia which is an uncharted landamass with extremely hostile and deadly fauna and flora.
But yes, that's what Corvo could've have thought, since that's the point of view that the Abbey would use. And probably the one he would believe too at that point.
On Spec Ops, I think the game's story is good, but the issue is that the game presents the choices as mattering to the player, but they only matter to Walker. It's a story that really doesn't take advantage of being a game.
But also the media talking about also I think made a huge disservice to it because they tried to present it as some kind of commentary to shooters in general, when it really doesn't work like that, and if you look at it from that perspective the game becomes much worse.
Like the way Dishonored gives you all these cool toys and then gives you a bad ending if you misuse them works way better as a game narrative than the white phosphorus scene where you don't have a choice to do anything else. Walker chooses it. He's the protagonist of that game. Meanwhile in Dishonored the player's actions that shape the narrative instead.
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The bad high chaos ending is the best one. Corvo in his lust for revenge abuses his new powers and slaughters his way through the city killing everyone in his path, in the end even letting Emily die, never knowing she was his daughter. The city burns and his revenge is sated. Mostly because this is the kind of story you will never see in a AAA game because of how dark it is, but if it's a side route it's fine.
I will never understand people who complain about the chaos mechanic in Dishonored when it was one of the best parts of the game, and the fact that they tone it down in the sequel and then just removed it in DotO is a travesty and a sign that Arkane was going downhill.
Since most people don't seem to even consider the idea that killing could have consequences. Like yeah, the guard in Dunwall is shit, but if you kill the one real force keeping what's left of the peace, it's not surprising that things will get even worse.
I didn't like Spec Ops' ending anywhere as much, because in Dishonored, the player chooses to kill, while in Spec Ops Walker chooses it for you. The story is still good taken on its own terms, but overall it's not as good of a "game story" in the sense that it takes responsibility away from the player. Dishonored 1 is good precisely because you will have a tougher time if you choose to do the right thing.
The chaos mechanic is one of the biggest examples of ludonarrative dissonance in a video game for me. Dishonored gives you, a literal assassin, a massive array of cool abilities and toys to play with, makes most of them lethal and then goes, "ackshyually, using them was baaad, you should have played the game like it was Thief!"
I haven't played Dishonoured but from reading the description and other people's comments here I get the impression that this is not "Ludonarrative Dissonance" as much as it is simply the narrative.
Like i said in the op, Jason Brody didn't kill those people, YOU killed those people and if you're complaining that the game is punishing you for playing like a murder-hobo maybe that says more about you than it does the game.
(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.) The game doesn't punish you for being a murder-hobo. That being said, I'd be delighted if Far Cry 3 gave an honest Far Cry 4 secret ending in the beginning, and treated you to a "Congratulations! You did the reasonable thing and didn't engage in violence. Here's a fully-animated spread of Vaas raping and murdering you and all of your friends to death! Sure is a good thing you didn't try to fight back, right?"
Can't do spoiler tags multi-paragraph, I think. You need separate tags per paragraph. The preview operates on slightly different rules. Click 'view source' on my post.
(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.) The game doesn't punish you for being a murder-hobo. That being said, I'd be delighted if Far Cry 3 gave an honest Far Cry 4 secret ending in the beginning, and treated you to a "Congratulations! You did the reasonable thing and didn't engage in violence. Here's a fully-animated spread of Vaas raping and murdering you and all of your friends to death! Sure is a good thing you didn't try to fight back, right?"
Great, that fixed it. Thanks.
You’re welcome :)
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Have to spoiler-tag each paragraph individually. Dunno why it's better-behaved in the preview than in post. Use escaped control characters or periods to keep the paragraphs separate after.
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There was some dark humor in Dishonored in that the nonlethal ways to eliminate your targets were stuff like them being sold as slaves with their tongues cut out or getting locked in a rape dungeon for life, that quite possibly left them wishing you'd just killed them instead.
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You don't have to play the game like Thief, you can kill up to 30% of all the enemies in each level. You can easily kill all the targets and their guards, but if you're killing every guard on the way, then yes, you do kind of deserve the bad ending.
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I enjoyed Spec Ops: The Line and have not played Dishonored
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