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I think another part of the problem with not being able to identify with the fact that this is Earth, Where You Keep Your poo poo, getting blown up, is the fact that you don't even really fight through the city. You're fighting through a generic office building and a bunch of downed ships, the city is just an indistinct mass on the horizon. You could replace it with any skybox from any other game, practically speaking, because all you're seeing is a series of interconnected gray boxes. It'd be a lot more effective if you were doing a few minutes of real urban warfare, ducking into people's houses and all that, random personal effects of the people who once lived there strewn about. Empty food boxes, a computer, random knickknacks, children's toys, stuff like that - make it look real lived in. Overturn a dude's couch and use it as cover for a firefight, the building gets zapped and it all goes up in flame. It wouldn't make you weep or anything, but it'd at least create a response. The environments you fight through in this intro look so sterile that it's hard to identify it as a place people actually lived. It looks more like a doctor's office than anything. Endorph fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 04:49
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 21:04 |
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A good tutorial is optional. End of discussion. Forced tutorials are always the worst, because they bog down the game - at the very least, an overly long forced tutorial can make repeat playthroughs a chore. I can think of plenty of games that I liked but would never replay because the first three hours of the game consist of it holding your hand. Also, words have already been said about this, but I really hate how Cerberus is used in ME3. They basically exist solely as an enemy for you to shoot when the game can't justify tossing reapers at you, and it kind of sucks compared to how they were almost interesting antagonists in 2. Endorph fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jul 24, 2014 |
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Jul 24, 2014 21:18
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Waltzing Along posted:So by hour number 3?
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Jul 26, 2014 00:57
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 Weird visual glitch. Is that the game, or your recording? Anyway, I'd say the most iconic locations from the past dozen years or so of video games are Orgrimmar and Stormwind from World of Warcraft. Orgrimmar used to be way too big, a little confusing, and filled with weird sights and sounds. When it was taken over by Garrosh, its design was streamlined, making it much easier to navigate - but from a visual/player response perspective, the place suddenly felt a lot less like home. NPCs were everywhere, but a lot of them filled some sort of purpose, either story or gameplay, there weren't the weird remnants of old quests that didn't exist anymore, like the guy in the inn who you could beat up for no readily apparent reason, or all the vendors/trainers for mechanics that got removed. The place had updated along with the game, but if you'd been going through the same Orgrimmar for years, it suddenly felt strangely oppressive and alien, fitting with how Garrosh had transformed The Horde from 'a bunch of weird dudes who chill out and hang because they're too weird for the Alliance to deal with' into an oppressive but efficient military regime. Part of that is just sheer mechanics, like I said, and I've never been huge on Warcraft's plot to begin with, but I always thought that transformation was neat.
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Jul 27, 2014 18:59
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Yeah, you want actually offensive writing, look at Isabella from DA2. "She's bi, so that means she talks about sex constantly!" Compared to that Traynor isn't so bad, but I agree that a lot of her dialogue feels a little... I wouldn't say offensive, but hollow? She doesn't really actually flirt with a Female Shepard, she just constantly affirms that yes, she would totally be down for taking her revolution. On the one hand, I can appreciate it in the sense that I dislike the school of thought that says gay characters in media should never mention the fact that they're gay and that fact should only be revealed if you look closely at one frame of the background in episode 18, or if you go through their entire dialogue tree while picking very specific options while having a very specific character build - that just seems like they're almost ashamed of having a gay character in their game - but on the other hand, that line about attractive voices was literally just 'I'm the lesbian.' There are way better ways to write a gay character that's obviously gay. Not even in a subtle way, if she's flustered and kind of nervous about the whole thing, you could just have her ramble about her personal affairs a little when you go talk to her in the Normandy and ask her about herself, have her mention breaking up with her girlfriend or something, and you've established that she's gay in a way that also adds a little character, as opposed to 'I found that thing attractive because I am gay.'
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Jul 28, 2014 08:55
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Neruz posted:Eh, it's been awhile since I played DA2 but after finishing it I came away with the impression that Isabella was horribly emotionally scarred due to her past and the sex talk was just her way of hiding that. At first she seems like a pretty transparent male sex fantasy but from memory her backstory involves a shitton of abuse and generally not nice things (and that's just what she's willing to reveal) and her coarse attitude is a coping mechanism for that. Like, you could write a gay character who was constantly talking about fashion and doing the handwave thing and had no real dialogue outside of that, and yeah, some guys actually do do that, and maybe he's doing it as a defense mechanism as a result of his alcoholic father or something, but he's still a stereotypical gay character with nothing to him outside of that, which is part of my problem with Isabella. She's a cool pirate and all, she should have something to her besides all of that, but I can't think of a single moment in the game - even during the backstory dump - where she was hitting a note that wasn't 'sex exists and I want to have some.' If it was just a sometimes thing, it'd be fine, very flirtatious characters can be fun if written the right way, but it's 100% 24/7, go hard and never stop.
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Jul 28, 2014 09:05
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Neruz posted:So what, her characterisation as a person trying to bury their past trauma beneath shallow physical distractions would be acceptible if she was heterosexual but because she's bisexual that's not okay? Neruz posted:Like, the characterisation of 'all sex all the time until you actually talk to her and get her to stop lying and start talking about how she really feels' made sense to me from the perspective of her using all the sex talk to keep from forming deep emotional attachments that might hurt her again; she is deliberately trying to keep everyone uncomfortable and at arms length while at the same time is trying to hide from her own memories by drowning her senses in things like alcohol and sex. That also 'explains' (hurr) her bisexuality; she doesn't really care who she has sex with because for her it's not about having sex with someone it's about drowning out the memories. Just a tool she uses to try and forget her past. And keep in mind you're talking about a character who at one point says 'I like big boats and I cannot lie.'
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Jul 28, 2014 09:18
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Neruz posted:If anything her sexuality is a logical result of her past experiences.
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Jul 28, 2014 09:27
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Dude, my entire point is that I didn't think she was badly written, or rather I didn't really care whether or not she was well-written. Like, I just don't care - I think DA2 is a poorly written game all around, but I'm not going to get into that debate because that isn't my point. I said she was offensive, not that she was badly written - I said 'even if the characterization is good' about five times. And I don't think there are elements of human behavior that should never be explored in fiction, of course not, but I do think that when you are writing about a minority in society, one that faces persecution - even if you are a part of that group - you should consider carefully what you are writing and how it could read to other people, both those who belong to the group and those who don't. I feel like Dragon Age 2 pays a lot of lipservice to being progressive without actually being so, and so I don't think they considered these things as carefully as they could have, but there are plenty of people out there who disagree and think the game is a massive leap forward for gaming. Which, well, comes down to opinion. This all started just because I said I thought she was an offensive character, anyway, which, I mean, can't really be wrong? What offends people is going to change from person to person. I think they shouldn't have written the character that way, but I never said they should be prevented from writing characters that way in the future.
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Jul 28, 2014 09:46
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Neruz posted:Alright I think I see what you're getting at now; I guess it just never occurred to me to see Isabela as a statement about bisexual people in real life, from my pov she's just a character in a piece of fiction But yeah, fair enough. Sorry if I came off a little snippy to you, I didn't mean to imply anything about you as a person or anything.
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Jul 28, 2014 09:58
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Neruz posted:True, but I feel I should point out that it is possible to write a story in which there is a character who is an african-american crazy ax murderer without making a statement that you believe all african-americans are crazy ax murderers (or whatever doing whatever, the concept is pretty much universal) so unless I see actual signs that the writer is trying to suggest that what they've written is a statement about reality I assume it isn't. If there's like five black dudes out of a cast of twelve and one of them murders a dude with an ax, then sure, that doesn't really say anything. If the only black character that exists in the entire story is presented as a violent threat to the protagonist and to society at large, than it does kind of say something, even if the author didn't intend it to. That's the big difference maker to me. And Bioware went out of their way to go 'all the characters are ~hawkesexual~', meaning that their sexuality shifts based on the player's gender, so Isabella is the only real bi character in the game. And she's, well, what she is. That's why I have a problem with her.
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Jul 28, 2014 10:11
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Yeah that was a lot of my problem with ME1 and the council, there were some things they did that were dumb but a lot of it seemed pretty reasonable and the fact that the game seemed to act like they were committing unspeakable acts of pure evil because they were asking for things like 'evidence' or 'logic' made me feel kinda weird about the whole affair.
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Jul 30, 2014 23:00
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Man dude I appreciate your LP and like it but just quoting a bunch of posts and going 'bad!' like you're talking to a disobedient dog because they have a thought or opinion you disagree with has kind of soured me on this.
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Jul 31, 2014 13:57
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 21:04 |
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Lt. Danger posted:It's really dull and bad criticism, that's why. It's predicated entirely on what somebody thinks the story should be, rather than what it is.
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Jul 31, 2014 14:58
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