If you weren’t aware, Rockstar released Red Dead Redemption a few weeks back.  Think Grand Theft Auto in the old west.  The game is damn good.  Here’s a short film made from the game, machinima at it’s best.

It’s only 3 minutes but damn, what a good 3 minutes.

I read the following article and it got me thinking about the progress from the first game to the second.  Potential Spoilers Ahead!

I’ll start of by defining my baseline.  I am an avid RPG fan.  I am not diehard to the point of reading miles upon miles of text to move forward but I like the idea of character progression and having an impact on the world around me.  I like the complexity of the decision trees and the repercussions down the road.  Dragon Age, I am looking squarely at you for setting a new bar in that domain.  I also enjoy 3rd person action/shooters. Gears of War, DarkSiders, Uncharted 2 are good examples.  Style + substance is important.

We’ll go back to ME1.  I replayed it in January to get a new save ready for the sequel so the concepts are still fresh in my mind.  The game was primarily an RPG with shooter elements.  RPG in the sense of lots of equipment choices, skill choices, great decision trees and writing as well as a complex, intertwined story.  You felt as if each step you took had an impact on the next and you could encounter 5 sub-quests on any given main quest.  The linkages between the main quests however, were only superficial.  It was also a shooter but only in the broadest sense.  Baring 2 particular fights, you could essentially just walk around with your finger on the trigger and beat every battle.  It also has some pacing issues and we all remember the Mako (ugh).  The Mako was a main issue of contention with horrid controls (I mean, who tested it and thought it was good?) and no relevance to the game other than to increase speed on terrain travel.  Other sore points were an abundance of skills with little impact (15 ranks of a skill, with 1% gain per point is odd), confusing inventory management (30+ assault rifles, identical to each other except for a marginal gain in damage), the longest elevator rides ever and forgettable teammates (Tali?).  What it did right was a great story, awesome main character progression, immersion and a grey scale of alignment.

The ME2 development team seemingly took every comment, good and bad, about the first game and tried to distill it to something more pure in the sequel.  Mako? Gone. Grenades? Gone.  Mundane companions?  Gone.  Confusing inventory and skills? Gone.  Great story immersion?  Improved.  Decision impacts? Greatly improved.  As the original article mentions, some sacrifices were made in order to address these issues.  The concept of a “hub” of activities has been removed, instead it acts more like a spider-web of places of interest.  The exploration factor has been diminished in favor of more directed progress.  You don’t stumble across a quest on a remote planet as easily.  Compared to the 20-ish explorable planets in ME1, you have nearly 100 in ME2 but only explorable from space.

What you gain in diversity, you lose in detail.  This in turn means that the set pieces themselves are but stages for actors to play in, so each and every item has a meaning and purpose.  Instead of having superfluous items and conversation choices, every decision you make seemingly has an impact somewhere.  Though this definitely improves impact it actually detracts from immersion on the whole.  It’s those little side quests, like getting an exhaust manifold for a truck, that push you deeper into the world.  When you look at a painting, as much as the larger aspect and message is important, you automatically find a particular detail that is unique to your perspective and less important to others.  THIS IS IMMERSION!  You gain value from such perspective and from value comes importance.  When every decision has an impact, none of them do.

ME2 does away with nearly every single technical and gameplay fault from the first game.  Skills are simplified yet still offer diversity.  Weapons are easier to manage.  There are few breaks within a given quest to slow progress.  Everything is related to everything else.  It is truly an amazing game.  But for this amazing accomplishment, the developers had to sacrifice that tiniest sliver of things, purpose.  Purpose is what would have made this game an 11/10 and it’s so close you can taste it.  I am astounded by the accomplishments BioWare has done in their past 2 games.  They have set the bar so high that it is difficult to imagine any other game coming close in the near future.

So AC2 came out yesterday and I was able to play 2-3 hours worth.  Enough to get to the villa part and collect all the tiny treasure chests/quests up until that point.  I realize, story-wise, I am not that far along but gameplay-wise, everything appears to be unlocked from the start (see Counters for an example).  That being said, I have never had such an urge to stop playing a game before.  It’s worse than Kingdom Hearts 2.

I’ll reach my point eventually but I need to state this here.  I liked the first AC.  It was innovative, great parkour (street running), combat was fun and the story was neato.  There were problems with repetition (minor), one zone that no one ever ventured into twice on purpose and combat could become monotone near the end.  You would think this would be a simple matter to fix.

Here we are 2 years later and Ubisoft (and reviewers so far) claim that it’s an improvement.  I am here to say that it is not and it’s a horrible example of shoving a ton of crap into a game and expecting the public to buy it (they will).

AC did parkour wonderfully.  You could run around the entire town without looking down.  If you fell and took damage, wait around and fill that bar back up.  The flow within a zone was amazing, almost like running down a river.  AC2 takes that idea and shoves a stick in your eye.  It is impossible to free run here.  Climbing is improved, getting TO the roofs is improved but that seems to be because you’re ALWAYS falling off them.  There is just a sheer amount of stupidly empty space.  Not huge areas mind you but streets that are just a LITTLE too wide for you to keep running, instead you grab a ledge and the whole game slows to a crawl.  Way to ruin the fun of the first game!

Story.  First one was about assassins and intrigue.  This one, about revenge.  Really?  That’s the best you can do?  The only cool part is the 20 part mini-quest within the game.  The major story line is like reading a children’s book.

Art. I will be the first to admit that AC had character design issues but Altair was superb.  It was literally like watching a bird move with very little closeups.  AC2 is closeup city and the art looks like someone took a magnifying lens to PacMan.  Are there more emotional responses? Sure, but for each one of those there are 10 reactions that make you think you’re talking to a handicapped elf.  The mystery and shadow of the first game is lost.  Why?  Oh and the buildings, let’s get on that for a second.  AC had a bunch of different roofs but they were all pale/off-white with black borders.  Easy to spot.  The roofs in AC2 are all brown and look like the damn ground.  You’ll be running around and all of a sudden there’s no roof anymore with no clue as to how you didn’t notice it leave.  Many many times I found what appeared to be a line running from one building to the next was actually a giant hole of ground.  Arghhh!

Quests.  Same repetitive quests but this time they are harder.  Blending comes to mind.  Before you pressed a button, the game auto-played a scripted blending excercise.  Now you have to actively follow a group that is near guaranteed to NOT go down the path you need to move and guards will attack you.  My thought process now is simply, screw blending, screw the roofs I’m just going to run on the ground and kill everything that moves.  It’s just easier.

Gameplay.  First game was simple in its complexity.  Counters, hard attacks, quick weapons, free heals after combat.  This game, manual healing at all times (potions in 2009 – just wow…), continually losing and acquiring weapons and having to repair gear.  Buying maps to find hidden treasure chests (but not feathers which are arguably more important).  66 synchronization towers.  66!  Who in their right mind thinks that doing this 66 times is fun?  You climb, it finds quests, you dive and NEVER RETURN.  And the views are shit because they are so jammed pack of BROWN!  Oh, and money.  Everything costs money.  Gear, upgrades, health, your home town.  Why in the name of fart would you put money into a stealth/action game?  Why put in stealing that takes 5-10 coins per person when everything costs 5,000 or more?  Think about that for a second, you’d have to steal from 500-1000 people to buy even the most basic upgrade.  And this requires you to bump into people which slows down the game even more.

Summary.  It really feels as if there was some original effort put into improving the game and some boss said “hey, make this go in too”.  There are improvements, surely.  Repetive quests are less noticeable.  Combat is improved.  The depth of the story is more fulfilling (if not more straightforward).  The drawbacks are simply too masive to ignore.  Free running is dead.  Blending is broken.  Stealing is useless.  The art direction is from high school. Reducing noteriety is a simple matter of bringing down posters (!?).

Assassin’s Creed 2 reminds me of Prince of Persia 2.  They took everything that worked in the first one, threw the kitchen sink and “social mood” into the game and threw it at the masses.  I expect the exact same return for Ubisoft for having given us this steaming pile.

If you’re not already aware, Penny-Arcade runs a charity every holiday season called Child’s Play.  Essentially, it gets fund for hospitals across North America so kids can play games.  This year, CHEO is on the list.

I plan on picking a few items from their list and participate.  It was harder in the past giving away to another city when yours was in need as well but this year it’s obviously easier for everyone.

So let’s get on with it shall we?

Every so often a game comes along and it solidifies/perfects the genre as a whole.  You’ve played a bunch of these games over the years.  X-COM started the strategy group games, World of Warcraft exemplifies MMO games at their best, Batman: Arkham Asylum perfected the combat/stealth genre.  Dragon Age: Origins is the best RPG you will have ever played.

Best?  That’s a heavy word.  What about Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Final Fantasy?  I say they are great games in their own right but they are not role playing games.  Elder Scrolls is a grind fest/sandbox where you can do what you want, when you want but the world you live in is empty because of it.  Final Fantasy is you following a laid out story filled in with 20 hours of cutscenes.  You don’t make any decisions in the game, you just follow the cues.  Fallout is closer though but it’s a social critique more than an RPG.  DA:O however, every decision you make has a long term effect on the game.  The race and class, the partners you have and use, the gifts you bring, the people you kill.  It’s hard to imagine any other game making you the principle player in such a large world.

I finished with my first character last night and that took about 70 hours.  I know that I could play a different character, make different choices along the path and have a completely different 70 hours again.  And then again.  It’s almost rediculous that we’ve reached this point in story telling.  Every coversation has voice actors.  75% of them are above average, 24% of them are flat out amazing.  To the people who say voice acting in games is not a priority, play this damn game and turn off the sound and turn on the subtitles.  This is the future of interactive gaming.

Gameplay is tactical.  On the PC at least, you’ll be pausing, isueing commands, moving the camera, targetting particular enemies and sometimes just sit back and enjoy the ride.  This is not a game where you can just watch though.  You need to be active.  You need to keep an eye for that caster in the corner, the archer hiding behind a barricade, the traps on the ground.  A shooter, this is not (*cough* Fallout).

You all know what makes a good game.  You have your own criteria.  What we all have in common is that urge of “one more before bed”.  Civilization started that feeling and I can guarantee that Dragon Age will keep you coming back for more for a very long time.

I saw this trailer from TGS a week ago but the whole thing was in Japanese.  Now here’s the English version.  Of note:

1) Real dialogue?  Meaningful?  Did Squenix actually spend time on this one?!

2) Real voice actors?  Holy toledo!

I am an avid FF fan, always have been.  FFX is my favorite but the story, ugh…FFXII was better, to some degree.  The last bit was wonky and the voice acting was horrible for half the characters.  This actually shows promise!