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It was brought up in the video, but I can expand on it; KOTOR2 had an astoundingly great opening. With the actual gameplay training relegated to a completely optional pre-prologue, the actual opening act goes completely Survival Horror, starting you out basically naked and unarmed in an asteroid-mining station which has been thoroughly and comprehensively sabotaged by a ruthless assassin droid, with your short term memory hazy, everyone dead, and too many things trying to kill you. And then the Sith show up. Besides the well executed survival horror premise, my favourite thing about that opening is that a game that frequently lectures you on the possibility of small, seemingly insignificant acts causing knock-on effects with galactic repercussions happens to begin with a single assassin - well, bounty hunter, really - efficiently and ruthlessly slaughtering the entire population of the station with minimal structural damage by arranging a few well-placed and coincidental "accidents". Then, in escaping, the place is totalled anyway, and over the rest of the game it slowly becomes apparent that this tiny asteroid may have been the only thing keeping the ailing Galactic Republic afloat. In a genre practically characterized by the paying of empty lip service to the notion of action and consequence, KOTOR2 shows us a real story about a personal pursuit with much bigger implications. On top of that it lets you do things like retcon Revan's gender/alignment and features a boss fight that takes place entirely through conversation.
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Jul 21, 2014 00:40
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Yeah, the story this in this game is one thing but even completely disregarding that it does a pretty good job of being an Actual Good Videogame in the Actual Playable Bits. And then there's the multiplayer. The multiplayer redeems this game for a lot of people. Manguard 4 Lyfe™.
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Jul 21, 2014 20:09
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Zedd posted:The Charge -> Nova -> Charge -> Nova -> Charge -> Nova etc Everyone's dead. You have near unlimited shields. Basically no one can actually shoot you. ...kiiiiiinda breaks down at the higher echelons of multiplayer though.
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Jul 24, 2014 11:18
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Judge Tesla posted:The Arrival DLC in ME2, while not the best DLC ever released, was kinda essential for plot reasons, basically the Reapers are about to use the Alpha Relay which is connected to all others, so Shepard blows it up, which results in you being court marshaled for killing an entire star system in the explosion. The full breakdown, for those not keeping track: Backstory: The Reapers purge the galaxy of life every 50,000 years. They are able to do this so effectively because - in addition to being hulking monstrosities with technology and firepower beyond most sentient reckoning - they carefully placed the Mass Relays in a network of their own design to encourage civilization to develop along paths that they can later cut off and isolate. Key to this plan is the Citadel, itself of Reaper construction and - unbeknownst to any species that settles it - also a dormant Mass Relay linking to dark space, where the Reapers chill during their downtime. When the Reapers invade, they signal the Citadel Relay to activate and show up right at the heart of galactic civilization in full force, and therefore can divide and conquer the galaxy. The Protheans, in their last, desperate moments, were able to sabotage the Reaper signal that activates the Citadel - albeit too late to save themselves. Mass Effect 1: The Reaper Sovereign neé Nazara attempts to reactivate the Citadal Relay manually by enlisting rogue Spectre Saren and a small army of Geth to attack it from within as a distraction. He intends to undo the Prothean sabotage so the Reapers can show up and do their thing. Sheperd shows up and, well. Mass Effect 2: The Reapers are now pissed and start flying from their home in dark space to the galaxy. They are quite far away though, so this will take some time. In the meantime, they call up the Collectors and have them start specifically targeting humans to harvest a massive amount of human DNA to turn into a new Reaper because apparently this is a thing they do. Sheperd shows up, and, well. Arrival DLC: In the time it took everything in Mass Effect 2 to happen, the Reapers have gotten from dark space to the edge of the galaxy. The Alpha Relay happens to be the outermost Mass Relay in the galaxy by a big margin and will therefore give the Reapers a massive foothold. The Council is massively unprepared to defend the galaxy, so Sheperd blows up the relay to buy some time. There was some slight collateral damage consisting of, uh, Fedule fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 18:54
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Montegoraon posted:Not quite correct. It wasn't the Batarian homeworld, it was just a colony of a few hundred thousand people. Whoops.
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Jul 29, 2014 20:27
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There's one pretty important mechanical "advantage" Wreav has over Wrex that I'm pretty sure we're going to see in the LP when the time comes.
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Aug 4, 2014 15:22
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The obvious question about Arrival and the trial is; why in the blue holy gently caress was Arrival (or at least a somewhat condensed version of it) not the intro to ME3? Trigger Warning: "What ME3 should have been" brand arguments It sets up the driving force of the plot; holy poo poo guys, the Reapers are here right now. You put your gameplay tutorials in there while Sheperd's poking around investigating, and then bam, you gotta blow up the Alpha Relay and you can't do it without killing a few hundred thousand batarians - this serves as your intro to the new Paragon/Renegade system that prioritizes attitude and outlook over the actual decision, because the decision is non-negotiable. And then, Sheperd gets his rear end hauled to Earth and is put on trial - and bureaucracy can account for the nice two-year timeskip before that happens (this drives home the game's blunt anti-politics message and serves as a demonstration of what Sheperd's up against; he bought the galaxy two years and they imprisoned him and wasted it all). Now the player has to justify it all in retrospect, and settle properly into a "united we stand" or "survive at any cost" mindset. And then the Reapers show up, and you escape on the Normandy without going through the bullshit skyscraper segment because we'll already have had our sweeping space-architecture-porn establishing shots before the trial. From here it's onto Mars and ME3 as normal, with nothing else changed except now we've had an effective introduction that sets the tone for the rest of the game, rather than the empty, contextless husk of an intro we actually got. As a nice bonus, this is pretty much an echo/reversal of the start of ME1, in which Sheperd is wrapped up in the murder of Nihlus by Saren, and must answer for this while also gathering evidence against Saren. I'd really like to know definitively what was going on with BioWare's writing staff during the production of ME3 (and possibly as early as the Arrival DLC). Between the trial segment getting thrown out and the original draft of the ending, I get the impression that huge chunks of ME3 that had actually been planned for somewhat since ME2 were thrown out and hastily replaced by the new lead writers because... of reasons. Of course, the more cynical part of me detects the hand of EA in gutting a key part of ME3's introduction and releasing it as DLC for ME2, but that's just speculation. I know it's pretty well established that the introduction was originally going to be the trial and that that was thrown out, but is there any evidence that Arrival was originally a part of ME3, or was it always going to be a DLC?
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Aug 5, 2014 17:44
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Arglebargle III posted:It isn't until ME3 that they reveal there are a whole demographic of these people and that they're all in jail. To the writers' credit here, the player gets some limited opportunity to point how hosed up this is to the Asari. If it was treated as unproblematic, then it would be more than a little troubling. The Monasteries are mentioned in ME2, but only in the codex. This has confused a lot of people, especially since Samara says before her loyalty mission that "I have three daughters. There are three Ardat-Yakshi at large today. It is as it sounds". (Anyone got the exact line handy? I'm not sure about my paraphrasing but I'm pretty sure she implies that all the Adrat-Yakshi in existence are her daughters).
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Aug 7, 2014 17:56
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Polaron posted:If it were, you'd definitely be able to talk it into shutting itself down somehow Or if this were an Obsidian game. Now I think about it, the entire ending scenario - taken solely as a setpiece - reads exactly like Obsidian. You've got this big, beautifully detailed area full of thematically appropriate decorations and grand backdrops, and there's basically nothing in it except for one [entity] with which you will have a conversation and then leave. Of course, if this were actually an Obsidian gig the conversation would be like fifty times the size and you could have an actual argument and do cool things like turn the guy's argument against itself or convince him of this thing or that thing or find some aspect of his personality to exploit or something. But no, this is New BioWare's Lead Writers operating completely unsupervised, and so we got what we got - which was "what can you tell me about [this colour ending]?" followed by "I should go".
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Aug 13, 2014 22:37
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Waltzing Along posted:I couldn't finish DA:O. I got to the lazy demon and became lazy and never finished the level and never played again. It just didn't stack up to ME1. Why is DA2 so bad? Imagine an entire game's worth of content of the calibre of ME3's ending and about as many art assets.
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Aug 14, 2014 06:42
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2house2fly posted:Without having played it, DA2 seems like kind of a bold experiment- a game where you're a gently caress up, and your whole party is gently caress ups, and instead of saving the world from great evil you just gently caress everything up. There but for the grace of god goes Final Fantasy VII.
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Aug 14, 2014 06:59
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The deaths of major characters in Mass Effect is one of those weird things that's stuck in limbo somewhere between being arbitrarily important and just being arbitrary. We've already seen how Mordin and Wrex being dead causes them to be replaced with Not-Mordin and Not-Wrex, characters who serve entirely the same purposes, send you on entirely the same missions and between them offer exactly one meaningful change to the range of long-term story consequences available to the player. More positively, Not-Mordin and Not-Wrex at least have distinct and sometimes-not-completely-interchangeable voice-acting complete with some of their own unique Designated Character Moments. (After we're done with the Tuchanka arc I'll complain a bit more about the effects Not-Mordin and Not-Wrex are able to exert on the resolution.) Other characters fare even worse. For one, other than their gameplay abilities, Ashley and Kaidan are completely interchangeable once Virmire is done with. For another, the deaths of most of the cast of ME2 - either during ME2 or in ME3 as a result of choices made in ME2 - are almost completely inconsequential. In the fashion to which we are accustomed, if Grunt dies in ME2 he is replaced with Not-Grunt. Then you do the Rachni mission, during which Grunt (or Not-Grunt) might die (I think Not-Grunt will always die though). If Grunt does indeed not die, the only thing that changes (aside from dialogue during designated "check dead characters" sections) is that he is added to your War Assets. Now I think about it, the Rachni Queen is handled in pretty much the same way; not a whole lot really changes based on the decision that isn't rendered in War Assets somehow. Later we will see that this is true of almost every character who can potentially die in ME2. Given how little Grunt's death changes, pretty much the sole difference between one branch and the other is that a character has or has not died and you will or will not be periodically reminded of this. With that in mind, is it really any wonder that people consider these character deaths failure on the part of the player? What other criterion is there by which to judge these decisions? It's not as though either option is really any more or less interesting than the other (Not-Mordin and Not-Wrex excluded); the only two way left to frame it are either Doing ME2 Right vs Not Doing That or Keeping ~My Favourite Character~ Alive vs Not Doing That. It's cool, I guess, that BioWare did all this extra writing and VA for all these options, but for all their effort at ~consequences~ they forgot to make any of the choices worth a drat. So, good for you, you killed Grunt and changed nothing. But that's just my opinion. Just my opinion. It's just my opinion - my opinion, okay? My opinion. Just my opinion. My. Opinion. Okay?
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Aug 18, 2014 00:07
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 01:42 |
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Lt. Danger posted:
Samara has spent her entire life of not-trivial length in perfectly single-minded blind (though considered, sort of) devotion to her vaunted Code. Samara is completely, utterly, authoritarian. The code determines good. What is good is good because it abides by the code. So devoted is she to her code that she is fully prepared to murder Shepard and/or an entire police station on Illium because of a technicality. Her entire recruitment quest is "do this thing so that I will not have to murder everybody around me for doing their jobs". We will later see that she is, at first, prepared to murder her own daughter - her last daughter - in spite of everything she has just seen that speaks to her daughters character, because the code demands it. This is how she has lived, how she has thought, what she has known for a thousand years. We are not going to loving talk her out of it in ten seconds after which she drops the matter entirely. It is contrary to everything about her. Her dying is a fitting conclusion to her arc; at last, at the closing end of her thousand-year life, her absolute belief in her code comes the closest to being shaken as it ever has. And even then, even in her realization that the code is maybe not the utterly perfect perfection she always believed it to be, she still cannot help but follow it to the letter. The cost of this choice is her own life, and she is completely, entirely okay with that, because she will die the way she lived - in perfect, uncompromising compliance with the Justicar Code, but doing good all the same. Samara wouldn't violate her code. She'd never be able to live with it. She'd have killed herself anyway. So let's not make her do that. Miranda has always had this faint air of not always being as perfect as she was cracked up to be. It's so nearly an Actual Tragic Flaw. For reasons beyond her control or moral culpability, she has had perfection expected of her in every aspect of her life. Her rear end in a top hat father spared no expense in giving her every advantage conceivable; but never considered that the reputation this would afflict on her would ensure that the expectations upon her would forever be beyond her actual capability. But Miranda herself buys into this illusion. Listen to her. She's perfect! Perfect intelligence! Perfect body! Perfect looks! Perfect biotics! Perfect training! Every time there's a High Demand, there she is! Pick me Shepard! I'm perfect!. Except... well, she never is. Her involvement in ME2 is a constant parade of slight fuckups that very nearly ruin everything. She failed to spot the traitor who nearly bought down the Lazarus Project at the last minute. Or the one who nearly got her sister killed. Her "perfect biotics" can't keep the seeker swarms at bay (I forget if she volunteers for the vent job). She does alright at leading the teams though, I guess. But the point is; by virtue of her mistaken belief in her own absolute perfection, she frequently falls just short of what's needed and only narrowly averts disaster. As with Samara, I believe it's fitting that she not be casually shoved away from the inevitable conclusion of her arc; she will die at the hand of the beliefs and attitudes she has held for her whole life but she will die in the course of a good act.
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Aug 25, 2014 23:22
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