Tag Archives: games

The Galaxy Needs KOTOR III

Posted by Ross Harrison on

It’s not the first time I’ve written about it, nor will it be the last! This article was originally written for Uproar Comics.

Knights of the Old Republic

A long time ago, not too far far from here, I picked up a gaming magazine of long forgotten origin. This was before I had decent internet or knew how much content I could find therein. Within the glossy pages that made a nasty creaky, squeaky noise against my thumbnail, I saw a Jedi. The Jedi was fighting another Jedi. There was a yellow lightsaber and a red lightsaber. It was a Star Wars game! Oh, but it was an role-playing game. And it was set in the Old Republic, not even the time we’d seen in the films. Never mind then: it would be a bit rubbish. The graphics weren’t even that great.

At the time, I hadn’t played many RPGs, and my gaming knowledge was pretty much limited to things like Half-Life, Doom and Unreal Tournament. And, of course, Jedi Knight 2! The idea of turn-based combat sounded incredibly boring, as did wandering about picking things up and talking to people. If I’m going to play a Star Wars game, I want to be going about cutting people’s limbs off and Force throwing them off ledges, not having a conversation.

So I didn’t buy it when it came out. The only game I knew the developer, BioWare, from was Baldur’s gate. As brilliant as that top-down fantasy game was, I couldn’t see how it could properly translate to a 3rd person Star Wars game and be in any way exciting.

As time went on, I forgot about it. I think it wasn’t until the following year, coming up to Christmas, that I heard about it again. My dad mentioned it a few times, asking if I’d played it yet and saying it had very good reviews, etc. But I still wasn’t interested.

Then Christmas came. I opened my present from my dad, and there was a plastic box with some bald man, a big-headed woman and a General-Akbar-a-like staring at me. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Goddamn it.

I pretended to be pleased and grateful, even though I’d said multiple times that I wasn’t interested in the game. I went and installed it on his PC and started it up. First things first, I had to choose to be male or female. Scoundrel, Scout or Soldier. Then I chose a face from a handful of presets. Next, I had to assign attribute points and choose ‘feats’. Bored already. Name? When the hell do I get to play?!

Finally, the music burst to life and the yellow text started to crawl away from me. At least it felt like Star Wars.

KOTOR - Reven and Malak

For the next eight hours or so, I was glued to the computer. I fought my way off a besieged spaceship, falling out of orbit. I rescued an ungrateful Jedi. I listened to my companion’s whining about his family. And eventually, I became a Jedi myself! Or it felt like it was me, anyway, and not the character.

The combat, while pretty simple, allowed me to give some commands and sit back to watch the fight. I got to dress my character how I wanted, use whatever kind of weapon I wanted, and best of all, talk to people how I wanted. I got to have conversations with my companions and get to know them, almost as though they were real people.

The story was a typically simple Star Wars story. Big, bad Lord Malak is trying to crush the Republic and you’re the only one who can stop him, with the help of your trusty companions.

The game is perhaps most famous, though, for its big twist. Perhaps a little more than 3/4 of the way through the game, some information is revealed to you, which left most of us open-mouthed. I probably shouldn’t overstate the quality of the twist by comparing it to that of The Sixth Sense, but to this day it’s often voted as gaming’s best twist. It’s not the twist itself so much as the fact that you don’t see it coming until the very moment the game wants you to. Even while Malak mocks you for not knowing, you’re trying to work out what it might be.

That is, in any medium, the best kind of twist. Not only do you not see it coming, but when you replay the game, you can’t for the life of you see how you didn’t see it coming. It’s clear as day. They practically spell it out for you. And yet we were all shocked when it was revealed. Kind of like The Sixth Sense…

This was my first experience of an RPG of this kind, and it couldn’t have been a better game. It made me feel like I was that character – even though he wasn’t voiced – and it made me want to be a Jedi! It’s probably just as well that I’d finished my first book before I played the game, or else it may have turned out to be a Star Wars clone.

I must have played KOTOR about 20 times over the next year, seeing how different the conversations would be if I played a woman, seeing how the game and story changed if I fell to the Dark Side, and stopping every now and then to check if my own Force powers were working yet. So far, they haven’t come to be, but I have faith…

KOTOR alignment

Then, just over a year after KOTOR was released, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords came out. I knew it was going to be even bigger and better than the first, and I was prepared to have the longing for my own galactic adventure rekindled!

Unfortunately, however, KOTOR 2 was developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They were to KOTOR what Treyarch was to Call of Duty, or Warner Brothers Montreal was to Batman Arkham [XYZ]. They thoroughly screwed that intergalactic pooch.

Bugs galore, framerate issues, missing content, plot holes, one completely pointless villain (out of three). What could have been a good twist – the reveal of who the real enemy was – didn’t come as any surprise, because you’re basically told that this character is bad within the first few hours. But perhaps that was for the best. I can’t blame Obsidian for not wanting to try to follow the original’s twist.

The thing I couldn’t forgive KOTOR 2 for as I played through it the first couple of times was, as well as an unnecessarily convoluted storyline, the fact that they decided to alter the story of the first game, albeit only slightly. They basically told us that your character in the first game did what he did with motives unknown to us in that game. They even went so far as to practically ignore the fact that my character had been a Jedi. They were quite intent on making it canon that he’d fallen to the Dark Side. Now, that may have suited their own storyline better than him being a Jedi, but I didn’t like them saying that my hundreds of hours of play was kind of irrelevant.

The other problem was that the game was barely finished. In fact, it wasn’t finished. Whole planets were missing from the released product. One of your companions, the much-loved droid HK-47, was missing his side quest. This resulted in gaping plot holes and loose ends.

That wasn’t Obsidian’s fault, though, as LucasArts rushed them and forced them to release the game before it was ready. They were given very little time to make a very big, complex game. Despite this, many people have come round to the idea that KOTOR 2 is actually the better game. I’ll admit that the story, while convoluted, is probably better and more in-depth. It did an even better job of making you feel like a Jedi, albeit an outcast, exiled one. There were several parts of the story where Force powers actually had a place outside of combat – such as using the Force to control your breath while the room is flooded with poison gas. All these things were an improvement over the first game, but I just can’t bring myself to count it above the original. Although, you did get to wear proper Jedi robes in it, which was an unforgivable omission in the first.

But then came…nothing. No more Star Wars. BioWare moved on to other things, claiming not to like making sequels. Of course Dragon Age 2, with 3 upcoming, and the Mass Effect trilogy, with 4 upcoming, don’t count. They don’t like to make sequels. But is that a good thing?

Mass Effect 2 was okay. It was nothing special and I didn’t like how much they changed it from the first, which is still just under KOTOR on my list of all-time favourite games. It was just padding to make Mass Effect a trilogy, really. It didn’t need to exist. The first Dragon Age is probably third on my list of all-time favourite games, but DA2…oh dear. From reused areas, to an overall claustrophobic play area, to magical nuclear bombs, it was pretty damn bad. Then came Mass Effect 3. Now, I could quite literally rant about ME3 for hours – and I have. But for the sake of brevity, let’s just say it was an absolutely abysmal, spit-in-fans’-faces atrocity. And I don’t just mean the controversial ending. From start to finish, it was piss-poor and, frankly, kind of disrespectful.

So do I really want BioWare to make KOTOR 3? Yes. They’ve fallen very far from their previous greatness: Baldur’s Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect. The time that I didn’t even have to think about whether I would buy a BioWare game or not has long passed. But I don’t give a flying f***. It’s Star Wars. It’s Knights of the Old Republic, goddamn it. I need it! Sure, they’d probably simplify the combat and make it mindless button mashing, like DA2, but I don’t really mind that. In fact, I later came to quite like that button mashing. I just want to feel like a Jedi again.

Is it likely? No. I told myself and others that if 2014’s E3 didn’t bring news of Knights of the Old Republic III, then it would probably never happen. After all, the timing couldn’t be more perfect, with the Star Wars hype kicking in once again. But, of course, E3 brought ‘news’ – if you can call it that – of Mass Effect 4 instead, as did E3 2015. It seems BioWare is mastering the art of ignoring their fans desperate pleas and giving everyone what they don’t want instead.

They did make The Old Republic, an MMO that no one really wanted. And when they happily told fans that we didn’t need KOTOR 3 because TOR was essentially KOTOR 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, we knew that our hopes and dreams were doomed. And that BioWare had become delusional f***king idiots.

Lightsaber

Help Us, Obsidian; You’re Our Only Hope

But that’s okay, because the fans aren’t alone. Obsidian Entertainment wants KOTOR 3 just as much as we do. In fact, to this day, more than ten years on, they are still trying to get permission to make it. They nearly did make it. The series was meant to be a trilogy, as the so-called ‘ending’ of KOTOR 2 suggested. And the closing chapter of that trilogy was in pre-production at Obsidian, but LucasArts never gave it the green light. Even Obsidian don’t seem to know why.

But even now, Obsidian are pitching a new Star Wars RPG (or they were – I haven’t heard a thing about it since). It’s not KOTOR 3; it’s set within the timeline of the films. But it is Star Wars, and it is an RPG. So it may not be the Star Wars RPG that we deserve, but it may be the one we need right now. I don’t know why no one has thought that a sequel to two of the most popular and successful games of all time could probably do quite well, but never mind. Not all hope is lost. Even if it will be an Obsidian game.

I don’t have a lot of faith in Obsidian, but after playing a few of their games, I’ve come to the conclusion that they actually have pretty good writers. They have some good ideas for gameplay and systems. They just can’t program. And they can’t seem to get on with each other all that well. The latter is a problem, but they aren’t alone in their inability to program. Look at Bethesda. I’m not even sure their programmers know Dark Basic, let alone all the coding they need to know for AAA games. And yet theirs are some of the most popular and loved games out there: Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout, most famously.

So all is not lost yet. Let’s pray you can help us, Obsidian; you’re our only hope.

Batman: Arkham Knight

Posted by Ross Harrison on

Batman Arkham Knight

I was going to write a blog post about how I don’t think it’s okay for the Ask EL James hashtag to have been hijacked by people just wanting to be abusive, but then I decided, ‘nah, I’ll write about Batman’.

Everyone is aware that I like games and I like superheroes, so it’s no surprise that I like games about superheroes. The best of these games (not that there are that many) is the Arkham series from developer Rocksteady. There is also the one that the publisher made themselves with their own development studio, but that was a bit rubbish, so we tend not to mention it. But I will mention it. Later.

First, we had Arkham Asylum, which took the gaming world by storm, appearing out of the blue from a little known studio with only one other game under their belt. It had Kevin Conroy, THE voice of Batman; it had Mark Hamill, THE voice of Joker; it had you play as the goddamn Batman (I don’t know why I enjoy quoting that so much). It wasn’t just the best superhero game ever made, it was one of the best games. It had the comic book, animated series feel about it, but was darker and grittier than anything a lot of people had seen from the franchise.

Next came Arkham City, where Batman took to the…well, the city. Rather than being cooped up in the Asylum, he was free to exercise his cape and glide about a large portion of Gotham. Fears that it wouldn’t be able to match up to the original were quickly allayed as it turned out to be even better than the first.

So the news that Rocksteady’s third Arkham game would also be their last was bittersweet. Although it would mean no more Batman from the studio who handled him so well, it also meant that the series was sure to go out with a bang (and that something very exciting might come next). Okay, hearing that Scarecrow would be the main villain of the game was a little bizarre, but with him would come a brand new villain – one that had been created alongside DC Comics themselves: the Arkham Knight.

This mysterious new villain seemed to have styled himself after Batman and looked as though he would be the ultimate match for the Dark Knight. Early trailers showed the Arkham Knight getting the upper hand in fights with Batman, and he seemed to have similar tricks and gadgets. We were all sure it was going to be good.

Well, the short version is: it wasn’t good. In my opinion, anyway.

The long version can’t really be put across without spoilers, so I’ll be sure to mention when they’re coming and start with the non-spoilers. As usual, there is no real structure to my ramblings, so let’s just start with, uhh…

The Batmobile

Batmobile

This looked like a promising addition to the series. The Batmobile is an iconic part of Batman’s arsenal, and so far we had only seen it in a few cutscenes in the other games (or game – I can’t remember if it was in City). Arkham Knight was going to take place in a bigger area than City and so Rocksteady were able to bring in the car. Car/tank, that is. The new Batmobile is one designed for this war that Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight have waged on Batman, and it transforms from car to tank in a fancy second. All the better to deal with those pesky drones driving and flying about (drones – i.e. conveniently unmanned so that Batman can blow them up).

My immediate thought was that the Riddler challenges that were sure to reprise their place in the game would be Batmobile-heavy. I was right. In fact, the entire game is Batmobile-heavy. To the point that several boss fights take place purely between your tank and theirs. Finish enough of the side missions and a new, unexpected villain appears to challenge you. One who is so sure of his skills, he would certainly give you a good fight and definitely wouldn’t cower inside a…why is he in that giant tank?

Yes, taking the place of the unique and varied boss fights is driving about trying to get behind powerful tanks to shoot their weak points, then doing pretty much the same on the boss’ tank. Except that each shot to the boss’ tank has to be followed by driving away very fast because it can somehow keep up with your jet fighter on wheels.

And that’s it. That accounts for most of the boss fights. There are two sneaky, ‘predator’ sections later on against two villains, but as far as I can recall, that’s it. Well, there is the Riddler fight too, but you’re not really fighting him in it. But THAT’S it.

It felt like Rocksteady spent so much time with the Batmobile that they couldn’t bear the thought of it being underused by players, so they forced us to use it over and over and over. In very uninteresting ways. Either that or they spent so much time on it they forgot they had to make the rest of the game.

It shows just how important it was to them that it gets damaged and worn over time, but Batman doesn’t. In the other games, his suit and cape get more ripped as the game goes on, they get dirty, his face gets bruised and cut. Not so in Arkham Knight. Not until the last 5% or so of the story.

I also can’t help but feel it’s a little stupid that you can drive into people, but it’s okay because they’re tased. Yes, tased by the front of a tank driving into them at 100mph. They’ll be perfectly fine. Even though Batman just reversed back over their unconscious bodies multiple times.

Disappearing Acts

Not too far into the story, something happens that causes Commissioner Gordon to get all stroppy with Batman and, at the time he needs the Dark Knight most, tells him to stay the hell away from his family. Makes sense. What also makes sense is that Gordon then disappears for most of the rest of the game. Only in the last two sections of the game does he reappear, with no sign of the temper tantrum he threw earlier.

Something similar could be said of other supporting characters. Nightwing, Robin and Catwoman all make an appearance and are all only in very small sections of the game. Robin has an excuse for most of his absence, but Nightwing is out there in the city, yet only appears to help beat up Penguin’s men and then disappear again. Catwoman is used only as bait. As a damsel in distress. Which I’ll complain about in a minute.

This is war. Batman is being targeted by an army. Where the hell are his allies? He had more help in Arkham City.

Underwhelming Villains

Scarecrow

Scarecrow was an odd choice. It was weird from the start. He’s not one of the more menacing villains in the Batman universe, is he? Maybe Rocksteady wanted to change that. Maybe they were just cashing in on how much people liked the Scarecrow fear-toxin-induced sections in Arkham Asylum. Who knows. They did make him a little more unpleasant this time, but they also made him a lot more sane than he seems to be in anything else – including Asylum. He has a very clear plan, a very clear goal and, it seems, a very clear mind.

But Scarecrow isn’t really the main villain, is he? Or is he? I can’t tell. I thought he was more of a backdrop for the Arkham Knight, who is working for him, but then the Knight seems to take the place as the backdrop. I think the real villain is the demon in Batman’s head. I’ll rant more about the Arkham Knight himself later.

[Potential mild spoilers here] Other villains were in the game – Two-Face, Penguin, Harley Quinn, Firefly, etc. – but they were very badly used. And under-used. They were were the result of completing some side missions. Stop a few bank robberies and Two-Face will show to take you down. There’s not even a boss fight: just take out his men and then do the same for him, just like any other enemy. Destroy enough of Penguin’s weapons caches with Nightwing and he’ll show (in a pretty ridiculous way, I might add) to teach you a lesson. Press one button and he’ll be the next one you’re driving to GCPD. It’s pretty pathetic.

Riddler is both the best and the worst of these side-villains. The others are minding their own business until Batman involves himself, but Riddler comes after Batman, just like he does in the other games. Except this time, he has built a very elaborate series of underground race tracks. Because those count as riddles, right? That’s the way to show that he’s smarter than Batman: make him drive the Batmobile round and round irritating courses. But at least there’s some form of boss fight with him…kind of.

Be The Batman

That’s how the game was marketed. It was probably how the other games were marketed too, actually, but whatever. The idea of Arkham Knight was that it was going to be the ‘ultimate Batman game/experience’. Yet, no Batcave, no meetups with Alfred for sage advice, no well-paced, meaningful encounters with other series characters. In fact, the whole game seems rushed. Not in the sense that they rushed to get it made, but that the player is rushed to get to the end. And not in a sense of urgency kind of way. Just in a ‘we can’t really be bothered to write anything much, so go and beat up the next person’ kind of way.

I think the biggest problem of all is down to…

No Paul Dini?!

Paul Dini was a writer for Batman: The Animated Series – the cartoon that is, to this day, considered one of the best animated series ever made. And for good reason. It was dark and scary, despite being for children, and really got the world and atmosphere of Batman across perfectly in those 20 minutes or so.

Batman Nightwing and Robin

Paul Dini knows Batman. He knows the supporting characters. He knows the world. He knows how to write! The same, it seems, cannot be said for the writers of Arkham Knight. According to Dini himself, he asked Warner Interactive (the publisher) about doing the third game and was told that they might not be looking so much to freelance writers for the next game. He took it to mean that if he had anything else interesting coming his way, he should take it. It sounds, then, like someone – whether Warner or Rocksteady – had already decided that they didn’t need to hire Dini for the last game. And what a massive mistake that was.

The writers of Arkham Knight actually wrote the other two games alongside Dini. It seems from this one though that Dini did all the heavy lifting. The writing here is incredibly weak, unsatisfying, nonsensical and lacking in substance and quantity. It feels like they wrote a game half the length of the game they actually made. It’s not just the writing, though; the directing is off a lot of the time. But then, the director is also one of the writers.

Even from the start, something felt off (I only later discovered that Dini hadn’t written it). The game just kind of…is happening. It doesn’t seem to start – you’re just playing. Things happen without explanation, characters know things that they have no reason to know. For [spoilerific] example, Scarecrow kidnaps Oracle at one point, but he doesn’t actually tell Batman she’s been kidnapped. He says ‘Let me go or she dies.’ A quick call to Oracle shows that she is still okay until the feed cuts off with her screaming. Which part of that says ‘kidnap’? Yet Batman starts talking about her having been kidnapped. Not to mention that atrocious writing where Oracle ignores Batman telling her to get out. She just tells him no one knows she’s there. What a moron! She’s Batgirl. She’s Oracle. She’s been Batman’s friend for a long time. She should not be so incredibly stupid and she should know better than most that when Batman shouts at you to ‘get out now’, you get the absolute hell out!

In short, the game was hit badly by Paul Dini’s absence.

Sexism

Yes, when I noticed something on Google about the game’s sexist treatment of women, I rolled my eyes and assumed it was probably Anita whatsherface spewing more hate and lies at anything that will get attention for her. But the more I played, the more I began to agree. ‘Sexism’ might be too strong a term for it – one that people love to use as much as possible for the smallest things, thus diluting it – but it’s certainly bad use of female characters. There are only three female characters of note in the game: Oracle/Barbara Gordon, Catwoman, and Harley Quinn. Harley barely counts, because she’s in it for a very short time. That said, the DLC that gives you 10 minutes playing as her does have her telling Penguin where to stick his umbrella more than once, so that’s…something, I suppose.

[Mild Spoilers] Catwoman is so badly used it’s almost laughable. She is there for no other reason than some weak justification for starting the Riddler’s challenges. He has taken her captive and will detonate a bomb collar around her neck if you don’t complete his challenges and help her get a series of keys to deactivate said collar. So she sits there while her Dark Knight in dull spandex armour goes off, heroically…driving his car round and round underground racetracks.

[Still Mild Spoilers] She does at least help you beat up some of Riddler’s robots, but even her part in some of the ‘riddles’ is as helper. Then as soon as you’ve freed her, she disappears. She comes back to help fight him at the end, but that’s it. Even her dialogue isn’t what it could have been. She tells Batman to be careful and thanks him at one point I think (in a roundabout way at least), which just doesn’t fit her character.

Oracle

[BIG Spoilers] Oracle is the worst though. I already mentioned one part of her awful writing. But even that bit goes a little beyond just bad writing. It’s making her the stereotypical helpless, oblivious female character who doesn’t realise the danger even though it’s being practically spelled out for her. Then, of course, getting herself hurt/killed/kidnapped/whatever. It’s the moronic ‘You’re in danger, you have to run!’, ‘Don’t be silly, I’m fine’ kind of nonsense trope. But it gets so much worse.

[Still BIG spoilers] Let’s not forget that Oracle – aka Barbara Gordon – was Batgirl until Joker shot her through the spine. So to have her kidnapped so easily and then dragged away without a fight is just ridiculous. Yes, she’s in a wheelchair. So the hell what? The character of Oracle has been, as far as I’m aware, something of an inspiration to comic book readers with disabilities. Being wheelchair-bound might have changed her life, but it didn’t destroy her. It put an end to the Batgirl alter ego, but gave birth to Oracle: the leader, among other vital roles, of her own team of superheroes. She makes people pay time and again for underestimating her either for being a girl or for being in a wheelchair. Rocksteady decided to brush that aside and make her just another damsel in distress, whimpering and screaming as she’s taken away.

[Still BIG spoilers] The best she could do while being taken away was cause the car to crash, giving her a chance to leave a clue for Batman. That’s it. No doubt had Rocksteady decided to show us that from inside the car, it would have involved her slapping and scratching the driver ‘like a girl’. But the worst was still to come. When Batman finally caught up with her, [Seriously BIG, BIG spoiler!] Scarecrow releases his fear toxin to make her fear Batman. In order to stop him ‘getting her’, she shoots herself in the head. Now, [Even bigger more seriously BIG spoiler!] I know that later on, it’s revealed that it was actually Batman who was under the influence of the toxin, and she didn’t shoot herself, but that happens so much later that the player is left with that impression of an incredibly weak and pathetic version of Oracle ingrained in their mind. Not to mention Batman should have known she wouldn’t behave like that.

The Arkham Knight

The Arkham Knight

I’m running out of steam, so let’s talk/ramble/rant about the biggest let down. The Arkham Knight is a ludicrously weak villain. From my first encounter with him, I was underwhelmed. Rather than the anti-Batman that I expected from the trailers, he just sounded like a whining, spoilt brat. He didn’t really get the upper hand on Batman, save for one time that had no repercussions at all. For the majority of the game, he just became one of those voices on the other end of the enemies’ earpieces that get on your nerves quite quickly, always throwing insults and empty threats at you – oh, they’re going to kill me this time, just like the last five times you told me that? He was a pitiful, disappointing character as the Arkham Knight and it only got worse once his helmet came off.

I wrote an article about who the Arkham Knight could be. My favourite idea was that he was actually Batman himself. The Dark Knight’s worst fears realised – an evil version of himself. The idea of Scarecrow’s fear toxin creating the villain was an intriguing one, but the moment the two interacted, it was obvious my already far-fetch idea was wrong.

[The BIGGEST spoilers!] I did, accidentally, mention the true identity though. It turns out that the Arkham Knight is none other than Robin number 2, Jason Todd. Which…is absolutely ludicrous. First, there was no mention of Todd in either of the other two games, even though Rocksteady said they had laid down their plans for the entire trilogy from the start. Second, and most important, Jason Todd is already Red Hood! I dismissed the idea as ridiculous, not only for this fact, but for the fact that Red Hood would feature in DLC for the game.

[Still the BIGGEST spoilers] Rocksteady did a stupid twisty thing, where this is kind of Red Hood’s origin story. He comes back as the Arkham Knight (thanks to Joker brainwashing him, rather than killing him), and then goes on to become Red Hood – because Batman talks to him for 10 seconds. It’s insanely stupid and weak. And if I hadn’t been so sure that Rocksteady wouldn’t be that stupid, it would have been blatantly obvious that it was Jason Todd. Not only from all that the Knight knew, but from the fact that Batman keeps seeing flashbacks of Todd in his mind.

The End

Not the end of the article/rant, sorry. The end of the game. I won’t even bother going into detail. I’ll just say it is absolutely atrocious and mildly insulting. There’s not even any proper closure to it, and it even gives rise to questions. Worst of all, it pretty well destroys any chance of an eventual Justice League game, which a lot of players were hoping was the long term goal. And why didn’t Superman have a cameo?!

The Good Bits

Naturally, it wasn’t all rubbish. Just most of it. The switching between characters mid-fight was pretty good, though kind of pointless at the same time. I think they just needed to add new features. The Batmobile was a good addition, just far too heavily featured. The fear takedowns were also very good but, again, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to put them to good use.

[Joint BIGGEST spoiler!] The best thing of all though, was the Joker. Yes, the Joker is dead, but he also lives on in Batman’s mind. A combination of the tainted blood Joker injected him with in City and the fear toxin. Although it gets a bit much at times, his scenes are mostly pretty good. And while I thought the series was over-saturated with Joker, I found myself not minding the way he was in this game. Again he was kind of the main villain, but in a far more interesting way: trying to take over Batman, trying to make him kill.

So, although I really don’t understand how it got so many 10/10s (I think I’d probably give it a 7 at the most), at the end of the day, you get to glide about being vengeance. Being the night. Being Batman.

Batman

No Man’s Sky

Posted by Ross Harrison on

No Man's Sky splashscreen

Science fiction is arguably the most freeing genre to write in. Almost any other genre can be slotted into it, and the range of hard to soft sci-fi means a writer/director/artist can do just about anything he or she wants. It’s one of the main reasons I’m drawn to write sci-fi (science fantasy, in my case).

No Man’s Sky, an upcoming game from Hello Games, seems set to relight the fire under our imaginations and renew our love of sci-fi. This isn’t the bleak dystopian or post-apocalyptic sci-fi that we’ve got used to lately. This is the colourful, vibrant frontier imagined in so many 70s and 80s sci-fi book covers. Sean Murray, the game’s creator, specifically credits the cover artwork of Chris Foss as inspiring the game. That is his view of what science fiction is.

I was watching when the game was first announced and have been looking forward to it ever since. I wrote an article about it not long after, saying:

During Spike’s VGX 2013 awards – catastrophically co-hosted by Joel McHale – a little game studio called Hello Games showed us a glimpse of their new game, No Man’s Sky. In the midst of games such as The Last Of Us, Titanfall, Grand Theft Auto 5, etc., this unknown game – from the tiny group of indie developers of Joe Danger – stole the show.

No Man’s Sky is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. We could buy the game on release day and we’ll have died of old age before we’ve explored every planet in it. A single planet could easily be the size of Earth. Think about that for a moment. Think about a game like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto. It takes a while to wander around them, doesn’t it? No Man’s Sky has Earth-sized planets that you can get out of your spaceship and walk around. You could probably spend a few months exploring every inch of a single planet (on foot). There are billions and billions of these planets. Actually, I think the number is eighteen quintillion, give or take.

This is all made possible by the procedurally generated worlds. To put it simply, it would be impossible for the Hello Games team (initially 4 people) to create the galaxy and planets and lifeforms by hand the way other games are done. The team, therefore, created a system whereby they put in rough blueprints, and then the game takes those blueprints and their constraints to create unique flora and fauna, planets, terrain, weather, etc. The game does this on the fly as you play – it isn’t preloaded. And those constraints ensure that there’s a degree of realism to how and where plants grow, the physiology of animals, and so on. This results in players experiencing worlds that the developers themselves have never seen.

Most importantly to someone like me, it creates a much more real sense of exploration and discovery. You are literally, and quite genuinely, discovering these digital worlds and creatures that no one has come across before. That said, I can imagine the novelty could wear off after a while, especially when you start to recognise elements – ‘oh, look, that mouse has the same head as the dinosaur three planets ago’.

Sean Murray is reluctant to say too much about the lore of the universe and the storyline of the game. Which makes sense – it’s a game about discovery, after all. It sounds, though, like the story will be quite loose and in the background. Rather than having goals, we’ll have reasons to do things. This is where our imaginations will take over.

I’m not too sure what kind of things we’ll be able to do. We can mine, we can shoot things from our spaceship, and we can buy new ships and equipment. Other than that, it’s a bit of a mystery. My biggest concern for the game is that it will rely too much on the player’s sense of wonder and expect us to keep playing for the sense of discovery. As I said, the novelty of this won’t last long, so there needs to be actual gameplay that keeps us playing.

No Man's Sky

That said, we will no doubt end up creating our own storylines, our own narratives to go along with what we’re doing. That will be a fresh take on gaming for some people – we’re used to being told this is who you are, this is what you’re doing, and this is why you’re doing it.

I’ve said before that I hate how most games throw in a story as an excuse for shooting anything that moves, and that proper writers, like Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider, Heavenly Sword, etc.), need to be employed from the start to create an immersive, properly next-gen (now current gen, I suppose) game. I might even write another post ranting about that at some point. But the equal of creating a story-rich game is perhaps to do just what No Man’s Sky seems to be doing: let us create our story.

It won’t surprise regular readers (or as regular as you can be with my infrequent ramblings) to hear that I have my own ideas for games if anyone was foolish enough to give me a game studio. No Man’s Sky is, amongst others, the kind of game I would want to make. Create a rich galaxy, a background story, and let the player do whatever they want. I want to craft a galaxy and its inhabitants and then let the player loose to make their mark on it.

Of course, I would want to go a little further – put more options and whatnot in. That would mean more funding. More funding means more constraints by a publisher. There’s a reason most games these days are so formulaic. The publishers are terrified of putting money into something that isn’t tried and tested. Much better to take a game that sold well, put a new coat of paint on it, change the name slightly, and push it out into the wide world.

Hello Games doesn’t have this problem, because they are indie developers. This is probably the only reason they are able to do what they are doing. Sean Murray worked at EA, so he knows the industry well enough to know to stay away from becoming the industry.

Anyway, there are many articles out there about No Man’s Sky, so there’s not much point in me going on and on. If you’re interested enough to have got to the end of this article, you’ve probably already read some of those other articles.

Suffice to say I am looking forward to become a frontiersman.