I fear I've grown so cynical it's the other way around for me. There are many entertaining games but the majority of even the most praised ones, feel like hollow experiences to me.
This is the first gen where I find it hard to discern much passion in nearly any game released.
Our very best games almost unanimously strike me as products of statistics and questonaires rather than labours of love from the industry's driving creative force. +
Mass Effect 2 felt like an emotional rollercoaster orchestrated by someone who's been struggling to care if it stayed on track at all.
Now I'm singling out Bioware here but I feel they're a...... prominent example..... I realize that most system warriors love their storytelling, their characters and their cinematics but it's the same crap we've been presented with in movies since the 80's!
If anyone has ever seen Naruto, they know that just after almost every single climax, we face a long and tedious voyage through filler content, the existance of which is justified by us consumers, wanting to see the characters we love, witness their own ordeals reaching finality.
What does that have to do with ME2? Nothing in terms of content but we do end the game pretty damn close to where we start it... In fact, one could argue that the entire game is one big side quest leading to the conclusion of [spoiler] you, being not very far from where you were when ME1 ended. Not in the way that your nemesis has actually done anything to promote it's plans mind you, they've been busy building a large terminator that happens to be less effective and deadly than the very same sentient, transformer like, spaceship sized and godlike in experience and age than the Reapers, the true antagonists of Mass Effect are supposed to be. [/spoiler]
Was I the only one who ever read those "choose your own adventure" books at the library as a kid? They were storybooks that presented you with the opportunity to branch paths at certain points in order to shape the story to your liking. These books were a major cprg influence, especially in the post aDnD licensing period IE: DAO and onwards.
The Witcher handles the genre inspiration by presenting you with various communities and giving you the standard dialogue UI so what's different? Well, Doing the right thing might completely backfire on you because even the purest of intentions will often be either misguided or downright vanquished in the face of narcissism, cynisism, biggotry, fear and indifference.
Someone wrote that TW2 left him with the thought that inding your own business is sometimes better than taking a stand for justice. That sounds like someone who played an rpg to me.
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Back to ME2 now... So what do we do here? Well, we shoot stuff..... and chat with our super cool gang of misfit asskicker group members.... Does it matter what we talk about then? Nope, just wait and that loyality mission will pop up. How about all those things I did in ME1? Well, the Rachni Queen says hi! Ok, so the crossover choices won't completely change the game, I guess that's understandable considering the exponential rate such a coding nightmare will grow at..... How are the choices by the way? Colour coded is what they are.....
Quick witcher notice: Choice in rpgs is a sweet addition that should be expanded on. Now, my suspension of disbelief evaporates the second I get to decide the fate of kingdoms at a whim... However , if I'm presented with the choice of defending a prostitute from her boyfriend because I can't help but notice that he's being publicly abusive, I might just react. So what will happen?
Defend her while killing him in the process? Will she be greatfull that your just murdered her lover? How's her mental health? Do you do nothing? what if he loses control to such a degree that she's beaten to death? How does the village react to the person who killed that abusive drunk? Sure he was hard to sympathize with but he had an addiction and did he deserve to die? What if I ignored it? Is it acceptable to watch a human being hurt another one without intervention? What do people think of you when you hesistate so long that's she's a bloody pulp before you intervene?
Don't interpret my rant as if I think TW2 has that kind of complexity at every corner you turn, but it does want to..... Games are devolving in that aspect. We're still clicking "yes", "no", or "maybe".
Geralt is the only modern rpg protagonist where the player is actually forced to make contextual choices in the sense that there is no scale to measure your level of evil..... There is however, the people who did'nt see eye to eye with your decision.... Sometimes, they're not bad people either. Sometimes, they're victims themselves, lost in hate and despair....
So back to those "Choose your own adventure" books.... How's Space Cop doing? What to do with all these diseased hostages?
Do I rape them and peal off their skin in order to watch them die slowly while having interraciallesbian sex with aliens of at least two genders to prove just how proactive and indiscriminate I am? Well, as indiscriminiate and bisexual as a sadistic person who consequently insists on saving the galaxy by screwing it over as much as possible can be at least?
or do I choose to richochet my energy bullet off of 40 surfaces in order to kill every terrorist on the planet, leaving every single hostage unharmed?
OR? Do I even care? Do I love CoD so much that I just want to shoot things while pretending I'm made entirely of muscles, will live to see 200 years and am cursed to have sexual relations with teenagers from birth to death?
So why was I singling out Bioware again? Because they're the most depressing product of our times I know of...
TW2 wants you to live in and handle a world that has no intent to adjust itself to your desires just because you saved the king. Being greatfull is one thing, outstaying one's welcome is another.... Especially if you're a foreigner, unattractive, mentally disabled, are disfigured, or are generally deviating from the norm in any way.. Not unlike the reality we live in.
Anything made by this gen's Bioware is close to being the diametrical opposite of that. We're clicking the closest buttons in our vicinities to make our personal Van Dammes do awesome things, and we get to choose between red and blue to decide wether we prefer instakilling or stroking our halos for a bit before shotting all those damn aliens.
Honestly, I love the Mass Effect series... In fact, I'll go as far as saying that I think both 1 and 2 are good games unlike both DAO and DA2 which both suffered from their individual problems:
1: Bland story, enviroments and world. Uninspired cprg mechanics that are vastly inferior to the aDnD rules used in their very own spiritual predecessor.
2: Looks like Bioware wanted to up the ante for their sequel. Taking inspiration from WoW, Making the console interface universal and deciding to make the plot revolve around the evils of circumstance while fireing anyone with even the slightest talent for art design, philosophical thought processing or storytelling was probably a bad idea.
Summary? DAO Wanted to be Baldur's Gate with Bio doing everything themselves this time. Incidently, Noone had any inspiring ideas, but someone had luckily endured an LOTR marathon recently. throwing WoW and aDnD into a bag and keeping them there till they were both obedient and broken also made for functional mechanics. Behold! Leliane and a bunch of other unlikeable morons who do don't grow sympathetic as you get to know them.
The most likeable characters being:
An untrustworthy, manipulative woman with a mother complex, freudian penis envy and an infantile understanding of her own emotions, whoose redeeming feature happens to be that she's sexually attractive and apparently willing to bear your child as long as you suck up to hear and give her preseants along the way. She's supposed to be one of the harder companions to please, guess I'm good with women....
Then we get the male version.... Obviously men don't need emancipation so he's sarcastic and bitter because his blood is noble and he forgot his potential, not to mention destiny, back home in forgetitville.
Now's he's your personal best friend at leisure, your manservant and your physical persuation in conflicts. And there's at least 3 ways to involve him in sex (as if he's the only one). Also, preasents work just as well on him as they do on the multi sexual choice female in the paragraph above this one.
And a dog. Now where was I?
Ah yeah.... I'm approaching this topic from the opposite point of entry. I'm not really a fan of any games that are all that lamented... I love Demon's Souls but reviwers transformed people like me from laughing stock to cool kids in that case....
I suppose I basically feel that gaming has become too pretentious, too mainstream, too high budget, too consumer oriented in the sense that obese people are a great target audience for you new heart attack death burger concept.... Basically too cynical and evenmoreso way too much like the movie industry.....
Does anyone remember Stanley Kubrick? That guy had nearly complete creative control, he had financial backing and he ended up making a bunch of films that depending on your personality would either please you immensely, disgust you, make you indifferent and most often leave you with an ambiguous feeling of having become slightly smarter in an obscure way.
So why do I bring him up at the end of my drunken rant, that I'm not even sure makes sense? Because artists, regardless of media, used to be allowed to remain artists.
Consider CoD for a second.... The game has obviously been a huge financial succes but who actually gained anything? us gamers?
Since Modern warfare, you've (I'll wash my hands of CoD right now, I've always been pure), been served the same sausage, recycled in different intestines untill the very lack of passion gave birth to a monstrosity made of cartilage and emotional death.
All it took was a lot of advertising, a friendly journalist/evil empire relationship, a couple of basic animal instints such as the desire to dominate and the desperate craving for gratification, substabtial or merely speculative.
Activision seems to have been succesful in appealing to the very confidence of humanity in the form of subjective projection, (imposing one's personal feelings, or the opposite onto another entity. A common example would be the average SW console fan's dependancy on maintaining the fictional antagonist: PC Elitist, in order to maintain a sense of identity) while, by way of their MP service, they've managed revolutionize the entire world in terms of hierarchy.
Remember that handsome friend of yours? The one with the great health, succes and social popularity? Time to show that noob that La petite mort can also mean real big death!
In the meantime, I'll remain nerdy in my basement, wondering what kind of nostalgia made me buy the Gabriel Knight series recently. It's not even gfx king!
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