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Comments
Is it just me, or has 2012 been a damn good year for gaming?
elaborate
Just seems like a lot of good games came out this year. Off the top of my head, in no particular order...
Fallen Enchantress. Dragon's Dogma. Journey. FTL. Grimrock. Amalur. The Walking Dead. SOTL. Dishonored. Virtue's Last Reward.
And probably a lot more that I'm not thinking of.
I just wanted to know which games should I be buying, that's all. :P
was Amalur actually good, though
Amalur is...the worst game on that list by far, but I liked it. I'd call it at least on the level of TES.
You should buy Fallen Enchantress though.
Yes.
Fallen Enchantress is so good I had to uninstall it because I was actually legitimately afraid that I wouldn't get anything done for months if I didn't.
>$26.79 USD
no
Admittedly, I paid less than that for it.
Still really awesome.
Let it get to 75% off and then we'll talk.
That's what I bought it for, I think. Fall sale.
Yep. $10 over the last sale.
Friggin' PlanetSide 2 and its instability.
Got DKCR for Christmas. Gon play the crap out of it with my bro.
And then play DKC2 on laptop.
So I beat the Arthropod in Ys, and now I'm on Toal. I came close to beating him the first time, but the irritating part is that you have to sit through an unskippable cutscene every time you attempt it, and a second very long one before you can reload if you fail.
Like, it's faster to tab out of the game, close it back to Steam, and restart the application.
Man, I love the way Dragon Age incentives (or doesn't incentivise) various choices in quests in the game.
Usually, being an asshole will even result in better mechanical rewards in the game, but worse narrative results, foring you to constantly make a choice between optimizing your character and getting the best end result.
That's usually how morality systems work in games and a part of the reason they tend to suck.
I mean, very few people go through life actively choosing to be "bad", for whatever traits you want to ascribe to that term. Most people will make some mistakes, or occasionally do things they're uncomfortable with by necessity or the excessiveness of the reward, but will largely prefer to act according to their definition of "good". So I always feel as though these binary morality systems miss a part of the point and are too mechanical as a result, you know?
Games like Deus Ex and The Witcher, I feel, succeed where other games fail for taking into account the fact that "good" will be different for different people, so they only give you choices of goods (or evils, in which case they encourage you to choose the lesser of them). I find that kind of choice is much more organic because it encourages you to act as a person with a perspective on morality rather than acting in distance to the game. Because most people don't, say, threaten random strangers for money. Someone might to do because they're desperate, or because they exist in a context where that's regular survival behaviour, but most people don't hold an active interest in screwing others over, even if there's rewards to be had.
You mean like... if they're expected to stop an army of monsters while being hunted by every legitimate authority out there on desperately limited funds?
We both know that most games don't make any reference to one's circumstances -- otherwise it'd count as variations on good rather than a good/evil dichotomy. And BioWare in particular have never been particularly great when it comes to handling morality, which probably has a lot to do with their tabletop gaming perspective (especially concerning D&D). Tabletop games are diverse, but BioWare has always been using D&D as its basis, and D&D's morality has always been very set in stone, right down to mechanical interactions -- some forms of magic or abilities are "evil", for instance.
And really, most evil actions in vidya RPGs come down to petty abrasiveness with some coercive force thrown in. Rarely do you have the opportunity to enact actual, widespread evil that comes from the establishment of a sick policy or system.
No, but I am not talking about most games. I stated that I like the way Dragon Age, one particular game made by Bioware, handles this.
Dragon Age does do this, but unfortunately pretty badly.
You can, for instance, choose- well, it's not really a choice. But no matter whether you back Harrowmont or Bhelen, you're doing something horrible to the Dwarves- either enforcing their caste system and forcing them further into solitude, or enabling a tyrant to gain the throne and eliminating their attempts at democracy.
You can also set yourself up as a tyrant in Dragon Age 2, and cause Kirkwall to descend into a pretty dark place, but who actually does that
You do have more limited examples, in the game, which offer differing mechanical rewards. Choosing to enact the Right of Annulment when you get to the Tower kills the Mages, for instance, which eliminates Mages from your army but adds Templars. You can choose to have the werewolves slaughter the Dalish due to Zathrian's curse, enforcing their cycle of hatred and eliminating Dalish from your army in favour of Werewolves.
Perhaps not destroying the Anvil of the Void would count, as it's... well, enslaving people's souls to make the Dwarves an army.
Mostly, though, it's just limited opportunities to be a dick. You can pressure people to increase monetary quest rewards, for instance, or not grant someone mercy because you can get a better weapon or something out of it.
Which fits in perfectly with the theme of the Grey Wardens; you will end the Blight, by any means necessary. What this means is debated in the game, with Sten's straightforward attitude towards ending the Blight contrasting with Wynne's opinion that being a Grey Warden means serving your country and trying to make it a better place.
Basically, the way it's handled in Dragon Age works perfectly with the game's theme and how it contrasts mechanical benefits with narrative benefits, and I like that.
Except the implicit contract of a contemporary game is that your actions won't render you incapable of completing it. There's no doubt that we can succeed at this task, rendering what would otherwise be moral ambiguity just another case of binary vidya morality.
No, but acting in a morally-clear manner certainly does make your task much more difficult. You can't get the best gear for your companions (I was forced to using any weapons I found with runic slots, plus a couple of weapons I found that actually didn't suck, plus a couple of sets of armour that story and major side quests guide you into getting the sets, plus a hodgepodge of gear I looted and bought), you get less effective rewards for the last battle, and so on, so forth. Going through the game being a dickhead and going through acting nicely creates a very clear difference in how difficult the end battle is (and even how difficult lesser battles are, through having more/less gear).
And then there's Awakening, where in order to prevent Amaranthine Keep from being destroyed and several of your companions from dying, you need to sacrifice a massive part of the gold you actually get, leaving you with something like 70% of your gold gone- so acting like a dick to get enhanced quest rewards actually helps.
Then, of course, DLC comes along and wrecks everything I just said by giving you awesome gear.
@Bee: Which Ys game?
what is this and why did literally everyone recommend it to me.
VLR is the sequel.
I'm really bad at Escape The Room games though.
Actually, after a point in Virtue's Last Reward I stopped even trying to do the puzzles on my own, just because the story was so many orders of magnitude more interesting.
Agreed completely.
That's one thing I like about Bioshock Infinite.