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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:Cool, I suspected that they'd be rescuable and that it was for a specific playstyle maybe tied to achievements, but was worried that there was going to be this big narrative turn on me like you MONSTER! when I'm just tryna stay alive and explore/loot every nook and cranny like a normal goddamn person. This spoiler completely ruins everything but this was specifically a thing that bugged me about the game soooo there is literally no penalty whatsoever to killing named Phantoms. They are not human, they can not be saved, there is no uh oh last second reveal that you've been killing people. I don't even remember if the game even goes into any detail as to why they exist beyond the obvious. Also FWIW Serephina I completely agree with what you've said. I've grown really frustrated with modern immersive sim design because morality systems have latched onto the genre like a parasite. Another oft-missed point is that even if said system is actually generous, flexible, or a minor factor none of that matters if it's presented to the player terribly. Dishonored really, really should not have had a big pop up at the end of the tutorial saying that the Chaos System was watching and you'd better not do anything naughty if didn't want to suffer the consequences. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Jan 3, 2022 |
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Jan 3, 2022 05:31
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Twobirds posted:I can't remember if it was a fever dream or what, but while exploring outside the station, I thought Alex says that the coral is manifested from psychic material, that is, it's not made of people, it's made of the mental make-up of people. The Typhon see our brain information as construction material, not as evidence of other sentient beings. So named Typhon have details that we might use to recognize a person, but this is only a facsimile appearance, it's still just a Typhon that ate somebody. That's more or less what I meant, in the sense that broadly speaking Typhons mimic stuff, named Phantoms are them loosely mimicking people but I guess where it falls flat for me is that I'm not really clearly why they would, diagetically speaking, be labeled by someone's name in my HUD. It feels like there should be more going on there, as if it was a dropped plot point. I guess it's conceivable I just missed some detail explaining it over the course of the game but it stuck out to me for the reaction it provoked only to not actually mean anything significant. Twobirds posted:I do think immmersive sims should have choices and consequences, but diluting that into a binary morality system seems to turn complex systems into "do you want to be a Jedi or a Sith". Pretty much, yeah. As was said Deus Ex has choices and consequences but they come naturally from other people's opinions of JC's actions rather than being a constant question of how naughty he is or isn't because the player  non-lethally bonked someone on the head or *gasp* shot them with a gun.This also leads to my other least favorite thing which is that these games keep screaming "don't you dare be naughty!!!" with their mechanics but then make not being naughty the most boring poo poo imaginable. Like Dishonored's whopping TWO means of non-lethal engagement. Though I guess DX3 went in sort of the opposite direction for me where the shooting was painfully boring and phoned in but nonetheless there needed to be a giant armory of weapons available to not use because, poo poo, I dunno. Basically what I always say is that we need more Thiefs that just say gently caress it and go all-in on one style of approach instead of halfheartedly trying to do both for the sake of ~player choice~.
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Jan 4, 2022 05:28
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I guess the stumbling point for me then is not fully understanding the connection between the person killed by Typhon and the Phantom organism itself. Maybe that's just on me for not reading the psychoscope reports closely enough, though.
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Jan 4, 2022 10:25
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Yeah, fair enough, I guess I just straight up didn't make that connection. 
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Jan 4, 2022 11:37
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Being able to knock Phantoms on their asses did a lot for me, but the shine wore off of that too.
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Aug 7, 2022 22:06
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BioMod also fixes or adds so many other little things. It's just a stellar extra layer of polish that modernizes the game.
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Sep 3, 2022 07:43
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Started that first Deus Ex game and it became impossible to put down. What a classic, sort of thing that makes you think about how old it is while playing it and how incredible it must have been at the time. I'm about to start Deus Ex: Human Revolution now, and then the next one. After doing those and Dishonored it should be interesting playing Prey again. Conspicuous lack of an Invisible War playthrough. 
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Sep 13, 2022 13:45
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ToxicFrog posted:Same and same. I played the Liberty Island demo before I got the whole game and it blew me away. While I don't otherwise disagree, I still think it's a stretch to claim that choosing your ending in DX1 is that much more involved than pushing a button. But pretty much anything is leaps and bounds ahead of HR, I suppose.
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Sep 13, 2022 16:11
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It's nothing to do with the approach - I 100% agree with what you're saying, the wiggle room and time to think are good qualities. Maybe I'm being too pedantic but people have a tendency to paint DX1's ending as being vastly more clever than HR's and...it's not though? Mechanically speaking, it's still more or less a push button ending, there's just some busywork involved rather than the game literally putting three buttons in front of you. It's not compelling gameplay either way, is what I'm saying.
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Sep 13, 2022 23:32
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Tbh, I think we're just totally talking past each other. I'm saying that Deus Ex disguises the arbitrary nature of its ending but you're still ultimately pushing buttons to pick between A/B/C. That the buttons were in different rooms and called something different worked out, but the upsides feel like a happy accident more than anything. Like, at least in IW picking your ending involves going off and murdering the faction(s) you don't like. Basically, KillHour posted:It's well known that the last few levels of DX were rushed. The amazing thing is that instead of other games going "We should expand on this and make player-choice endings more involved and integrated" they went "People want to pick from three buttons. Let's literally give them three buttons."
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Sep 14, 2022 03:41
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That was a response to ToxicFrog.  But regardless to put it another way, I found the ending objectives in Deus Ex about as phony and artificial as HR's buttons. It's been a hot minute, but I mostly remember wandering around a by-then depopulated map pressing buttons and pulling switches, just separated by space. That it gives time for characters to talk at you is useful, but otherwise I recall the process being incredibly mundane and not innately compelling. If the game still managed to maintain your immersion, then I feel like that's entirely down to the writing doing the heavy lifting. Otherwise it's only better than three buttons on a console by degrees. And to whit, the reason why HR fumbles it as badly as it does is because for lack of any other way (because HR's conclusion was also hideously rushed; I doubt it was conscious decision) the writing has to hastily and clumsily justify the three buttons and of course it turns out the endings themselves don't really hold up to scrutiny either. If DX had locked me in a room with three buttons, while otherwise maintaining the same quality of philosophical debate, I don't think it would have radically changed my opinion of the endgame for the worse. And naturally, the inverse, if HR had the chops to build to that moment and/or present the choice in a less flatly artificial way (I've said before they could've had Adam debating with the three "cores" of the big machine forex) then it could've sold me on the push buttons. And hence why IW's ending, while not as heady as it wishes it was, stands out to me a smidge more because you conclude the sneaky-shooty game by doing some more sneaky-shooty stuff one last time. Several last times, actually, Omar forever.  Rather than generic busywork making space for the dialogue OR a character near-literally asking you to pick an ending.
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Sep 14, 2022 16:18
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For me, I kinda wish they did because at least IMO Arkane's games always seem to have the (appropriately enough) shadow of Thief looming over them. Like don't get me wrong, I like Dishonored's distinct identity too, but it also always felt like it got bogged down by trying to be more like Thief even when it wasn't all that fitting.
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Nov 14, 2022 08:00
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My experience was unique in that I played the intro to see if the game ran well on my PC, then the initial swerve went down and I was sucked in for a couple of hours. Then I put the game down and forgot about it for a year or two, during which time I heard there was a contentious twist and was able to very easily put 2 and 2 together.
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Jun 14, 2023 13:40
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Building on the above and this:HenryEx posted:The real twist is that the ending isn't actually talking to Morgan, but it's talking to you, the player directly, and trying to get you to evaluate the way you play and interact with games, but a worrying amount of people don't even realize it Basically I find myself in a weird spot because I got exactly what they were going for (I even read the game as an intentional pastiche of the entire immersive sim genre)...but when it was all said and done I just didn't find it compelling at all. Like in that context the twist is to me actually self-defeating and comes off as trying to be overly clever, rather than profound. Maybe it's also because I already ruminate on the exact kind of questions it's trying to ask. Though my answer also tends to be "I wish immersive sims would stop getting so drat hung up on morality". John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jun 16, 2023 |
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Jun 16, 2023 16:04
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100% agreed with Phigs. The funny thing is, I'm the rare soul who will defend "meaningless" choices in RPGs because making the choice is usually more interesting than the outcome. But most of Prey's choices are boring and simplistic with the twist being they were like that on purpose.
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Jun 16, 2023 19:32
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KillHour posted:This was clever on the part of the designers because it made any playstyle fit in-universe, even before the twist ending. That's actually part of what bugs me. Game has too many escape hatches to explain away inconsistencies so that it can avoid saying almost anything truly definitive. With the ending taken into account literally nothing has to be taken at face value outside of maybe some very basic facts. It comes off as one big Rorschach test. (And yes, I know, there's one of those in the intro as well.) Problem is that it results in the game being a collection of interesting ideas and questions that can't actually lead anywhere because doing so would collapse the wave function. I don't need the game to exhaustively spell things out or only be about one specific thing, but it feels like the narrative demands you not only connect the dots but place the dots yourself. Even the ending is ambiguous enough such that it can be twisted and spun into basically whatever you want it to be. And that's why it's ultimately unsatisfying. Compare to say, a Whodunit, where the bulk of the work will involve lies, manipulation, misdirection, and seemingly disconnected threads. Then at the end the detective calls everyone to the parlor so they can lay everything out and point to the murderer. There's a sort of catharsis there, chaos brought into order. Prey...does not offer that sort of catharsis. In fact, it employs one of the most contentious, reviled forms of anti-catharsis an ending can pull. When talking about Prey casually with friends, I very much invoked a particular Simpsons clip... If I was feeling particularly catty, I could say it dovetails with my interpretation of the game as a meta-commentary on immersive sims and say the game as a whole is a Mimic in that it mechanically imitates its forebears but fundamentally lacks the human element that made those stories resonate more. A story about empathy that failed to engender empathy, whoops! At the very least, Morgan's conveniently ambiguous personality by way of neuromod resets/brain damage/typhon blending reads like an in-universe example of an immsersive sim protagonist loading a save game and/or trying different playthroughs.
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Jun 19, 2023 19:06
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I guess I should also say I would respect it more if Prey was an experimental outlier that was tying to be aggressively amorphous, but frankly I've never associated Arkane with strong writing and all of their games tend to have undercooked elements, so it just comes off as business as usual for me to walk away from one of their games feeling unsatisfied.
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Jun 19, 2023 19:12
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Lt. Danger posted:but it's not a story performed badly. it's just a story that, at the end, reminds you that it is a story. per your own words, this was enough to make you dislike the whole thing If you make fun of someone for crying at a movie because it's "just a movie" you're an rear end in a top hat. If you condescendingly pat someone on the head and say good job for crying at a movie even though it was "just a movie"...
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Jun 19, 2023 20:31
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itry posted:But they do neither? All the ending does is ask for your thoughts on what you've just experienced. Did only I get the special ending where they evaluate each and every choice you made over the course of the game and decide if you've figured out that whole empathy thing?
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Jun 19, 2023 20:42
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itry posted:I think that mostly serves as a synopsis of your play time. Presumably for people who take weeks to finish games a couple of hours at a time. Hard to reflect if you don't remember what happened. It's literally the entire basis of the twist, the ending, and ultimately the game as a whole. It's definitely not just a convenient synopsis of events for the sake of reminding the player of what they did. And Fallout's end slides weren't just a synopsis of what you did either. 
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Jun 19, 2023 21:12
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turn off the TV posted:Yeah this is what's confusing me. If the in game books were included for a reason then one of the good endings is basically "canon" since the typhon's decision making and reasoning should be more or less identical to the actual Morgan's. Whatever it does in a recreation of Morgan's memories should be what Morgan actually did, and since every major living character survived then the corresponding ending is the actual course of events. Maybe I've wildly misunderstood something, because the only concrete fact I take from the ending is Alex survived. Not even "Morgan saved Alex" or "Alex survived the events on Talos 1" just literally Alex did not die between point A and point B.
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Jun 19, 2023 22:44
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turn off the TV posted:IIRC the only outcome where Morgan and Alex both live is the one where they escape on the shuttle. What about the Nullwave Transmitter?
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Jun 19, 2023 23:36
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turn off the TV posted:I guess that my issue with that outcome doesn't really make a lot of sense with the ending, but I completely forgot that existed. Guess which ending I picked?  Tbh, I might not be quite as riled by the ending if Alex just clearly explained how we got from Talos to the current situation. Even if it changed depending on what ending you picked or other factors like the escape pod. Basically every time I've seen the ending discussed, people are quick to provide their own explanations for how even the seemingly "good" endings could go wrong. I even have my own for the nullwave one! There just doesn't seem to be a good reason for things to exist in what I find to be a both too ambiguous and too specific state. Same kinda thing with the Operators. If those characters are killed, there you go, easy answer. If they survived, well, suddenly you have to start writing your own explanation for why they only appear as Operators, of which there are many viable interpretations. Why not just have them appear in-person?  Ironically, if they had tripled down on the mind screw elements and made the ending more ambiguous I might've liked it better, because then I wouldn't be waylaid by trying to piece together how anything shown connects back to what happened on Talos.
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Jun 20, 2023 00:56
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Mike the TV posted:They are operators because they died in the real history of events and they were only “saved” in the simulation. The reality is that Morgan was not a super soldier and lost a lot of people. But in the sim you can do whatever. It ends up being very similar to Mooncrash in that sense. Not according to multiple other people itt, which is how we got here. :p
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Jun 20, 2023 02:02
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It's a weird distinction to make considering System Shock is like, what, the third ever immersive sim? It's a sci-fi dungeon crawler with gestures towards being believable even if it doesn't truly attain realism. Its contemporaries are Doom 1&2, which struggled to portray anything more complex than a box-filled warehouse in terms of recognizable, realistic spaces. Duke 3D is something of a relevant stepping stone due to its map design, but it kinda critically lacks a lot of the other elements of an immersive sim.
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Jul 10, 2023 17:34
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Basic Chunnel posted:Yeah all I’m saying is that SS1 and Prey aren’t really comparable — and that even if you scaled the criteria to things that SS1 actually attempts, I still think Prey is better in those respects. Next you're gonna tell me Doom 2016 is better than Wolfenstein 3D.
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Jul 11, 2023 10:47
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ToxicFrog posted:Thinking about it more, I think if Arx Fatalis is the Prey of the UUW lineage, Underworld Ascendant is the Bioshock. That's deeply, deeply unfair to Bioshock.
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Jul 11, 2023 20:59
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