Rolling the DICE with Battlefield 4 and Mirror's Edge.

This is something that I hadn't really thought about until recently, but I hadn't ever played any games from DICE (or Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment, which I only just learned when I was double checking to make sure they actually made Mirror's Edge). Well, unless playing the demo for the original Bad Company counts, but I don't think that does. Anyway, I went from zero to two recently, and something something blog opening paragraph.

Battlefield 4.

Battlefield 4 is one of those games that I've kinda wanted to get into since its release, but something or another kept stopping me. At first, it was that (like many games), it was kinda broken at launch. And it continued to be kinda broken for what felt like a very long time, at least so far as I could tell from what I heard about it. But even once the game seemed to be working as intended, I had moved on, and wasn't really planning on picking it up unless it was quite cheap. Then it was $12 on PSN, so I downloaded it and started playing it.

And, naturally, the first thing I went to do was play the campaign. Partly because I generally like to start games with the campaign, and also because the game lets you play the campaign before the multiplayer when you're downloading it. But even then it was only the first mission, which I feel like was a glitch or something because the game said the campaign was 100% installed, but I dunno. I ended up waiting for the game to fully install before continuing, and I ended up playing a fair amount online before finishing the campaign.

During the process of playing that campaign, I mentioned to various people that I was doing so, and got some interesting responses. Some people said, "it's not as bad as people say," and others were straight up asking why I would do something like that to myself. And, the answer was that I knew that most people didn't care for it, so I had to experience it for myself. Sometimes it's not enough to just take people's word for it, I have to have hands on experience to really understand what they are talking about. And now I do.

Battlefield 4's campaign is...interesting. Not in the sense that anything that happens in it is interesting, but in the sense that it's quite possibly the most generic single player campaign that I've ever played. To the point where it's a few jokes away from being a parody. Well, not quite, but you get what I mean. There's just zero personality to the game. You play a generic soldier man (who never talks which I hate) fighting with other generic soldier men (and one generic soldier lady) in a generic soldier war with soldier China and soldier Russia. I think. See, despite being as generic and boring as possible, the game doesn't even manage to explain what's going on in a coherent fashion. Let me explain to you what I remember happening in this game, in terms of the story. There's spoilers in the next paragraph, but come on, I know you don't care.

There's that car crash where the leader of the generic soldier group Tombstone dies while that song plays, that's how the game opens. Then it says 13 minutes earlier and I remember that because I spent way more than 13 minutes in that mission leading up to that part with the car. It might have been 15, one of the two. Then they go on a boat and ride a boat to another boat and explosions happen. No, wait, that was after a level in a city where you rescue some people for reasons that aren't "explained" until near the end of the game. Then there's the boat, then they go to another city with a terrible vehicle mission that they never explain what the objective was, then there's a bad stealth mission that is thankfully very short, then some gunfights in some shot up city, a damn gets blown up, then they get Fulton Recovery-ed out, then there's that boat again. And then after a completely underwhelming gunfight the game gins up a terrible excuse to make a "moral" choice about who lives and dies in your squad and the game ends. I skipped the credits so if there was a post credits scene I missed it.

The saddest thing about the game is that the core game play of Battlefield 4 is actually quite enjoyable, and the game is beautiful to look at, even over a year after its release. There's a lot of needless interface getting in the way of the game (I'm looking at you, aiming reticle and minimap), but it looks really good. And I really appreciate the slower, more methodical game play after playing fast paced nonsense (in a good way) last year, like Advanced Warfare. That's actually a thought I had whilst playing BF4 (online). Me rethinking speed and mobility in first person shooters.

Much like Jeff Gerstmann, after playing Advanced Warfare, I was thinking that I wouldn't really want to play online shooters again without any sort of cool mobility stuff like the double jumps and air dashes. But after playing BF4 online, I've realized that isn't the case. I still have the capacity to enjoy slower paced, more methodical gun play in my first person shooters. Not that I see much of that when playing BF4 online, that is.

See, the thing that BF4 excels at is NONSENSE. Things like getting into a helicopter and crashing it seconds later because no matter how many times I check the controls, I'm still terrible at it. Things like driving like an absolute maniac in a jeep, or seeing helicopters falling out of the sky almost constantly. Explosions everywhere, and tanks appearing seemingly out of nowhere to destroy you. It's chaos on a scale I've never been able to experience first hand in an online game before, and I love it. I wish I had bought the game sooner.

Or...maybe I don't, because I don't know how long it was after launch that the game was fixed enough that it worked consistently. At least online, because I did actually have the campaign crash on me once during that bad vehicle mission. Which reminded me that one of my favorite things about the PS4 is that when games crash, they usually don't freeze the console like the older consoles would. That was always super annoying, and made me worry that my dad would see and get upset and worried (because I still live with my dad and still play games in the living room because that's where the 60" TV is). Actually, while I'm on the subject, let me talk about that bad vehicle mission.

Or, rather, one specific part of that mission. The specific problem is how damage with the vehicles works in the game. Now, to be clear, I am not an expert on military vehicles, rockets, missiles, or anything, really. But I do know a thing or two about what makes games fun to play, and the way that damage works with the vehicles in this game made this one part of that mission incredibly frustrating, and not fun at all. It's in a fairly big, wide open area, but pretty foggy so you can't really see very far without using the game's Batman vision. Which you can only do on foot. "Luckily," the game lets you leave the vehicle at any time so you can do that, or use whatever anti-tank weapons you are carrying with you.

This section pits you against at least three (there might have been a fourth, I don't remember) enemy vehicles (mix of tanks and APCs, I think). Not all at once, but close enough that I couldn't reliably take them on one at a time. But remember, you can't tag them to see them through the fog without getting out of the vehicle and using the Batman vision (technically they're binoculars, but it's totally that Batman vision where it highlights things in orange). So I had to get out of the vehicle to look around and tag the enemy vehicles, and then get back in to engage them in the vehicle (at this point my first tank had been destroyed, and I was in some sort of wheeled vehicle, I think).

But the problem is that the enemies do substantially more damage to your vehicle than you do to theirs. Or, at least it feels that way. While the vehicle I was in did have regenerating health, it wasn't nearly fast enough to make it so that I could actually win the fight only using it. I had to get out and use hand held rockets to win and move on. This was after quite a few attempts, I should add. Anyway, fighting several vehicles that feel like they can destroy mine way faster than I can theirs wasn't fun, and that part was super frustrating. Especially the one time when I did it and then managed to die in the on foot section afterward, only to realize that the checkpoint was set BEFORE the vehicle part.

I was quite angry then.

I managed to lose track of what I had been talking about, which I frequently do. Then again, I also feel like I've said everything I need to say about this game. The campaign is a missed opportunity to have been something fun and great (playing this and talking with a friend made me really wish I had actually played the Bad Company games back in the day, because those games sound like they were goofy and fun in the way that Battlefield should be). The online is really fun, and I hope to play more of it in the future. I'm glad I paid $12 to download this game the other day.

Mirror's Edge.

Remember Sony's thing last year where EA arbitrarily made three games free? Mirror's Edge was one of them, but I only just got around to playing it yesterday (as of this writing). I also beat it yesterday. It's been a while since I beat an entire game in one day. For a while I was thinking the last one was Modern Warfare 3, which I almost literally beat in one sitting (which I ruined by getting up to use the toilet at one point). Then I remembered that I played all of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons in day last year. It was the day before my colonoscopy. That was a really crappy day. I'm sorry.

Yesterday was a substantially less crappy day. And why is that? Because count me amongst the people that like Mirror's Edge. Which is not to say that the game doesn't have flaws, because it has a lot of flaws. But when it's working as intended, I like it a lot. Enough that, unlike a lot of people, I think it overcomes its issues and is a game that, like I said, I enjoyed. And I should say that a large part of why I played this game was that it almost always gets strong reactions from people when you talk to them about it. People seem to either hate it, or really like it except for the parts when it's bad.

You don't see a whole lot of games like that these days. At least not in the realm of "big budget" games published by huge publishers like EA. I quoted "big budget" because I don't actually know how big this game's budget was, and I don't really remember how much effort (if any) was put into marketing it or anything. This game came out in 2008. That was quite some time ago.

Anyway, I was very interested in playing the game so I could finally experience it first hand, and I'm glad it did. When this game works, it really clicks with me. There's something thrilling about leaping from building to building and bounding over obstacles in first person that isn't like anything else that I've played in a game before. To the point where it makes core game play that would be fairly simple in a third person game thrilling and exciting. I mean, there really isn't a whole lot to this game, in terms of the base mechanics. It's still more involving than climbing things in games like the Assassin's Creed series, but still pretty simple.

If anything, though, that probably works to its advantage. Given the greatly reduced field of vision (at least compared to third person games), having that stuff be too complex and still move at fun speeds wouldn't work. At least not without putting in tons of time to get to learn everything, whereas I was able to get comfortable and fairly decent with most of the stuff in Mirror's Edge pretty quickly. Which is not to say that I didn't die a few times because I boneheadedly hit X to jump instead of L1 hours into the game because I'm a dummy, but I was still decent at it.

The issue with the game is the combat. Or, rather, the combat encounters in the game. The actual combat itself is fine, at least in the context of fighting against one enemy. It's pretty simple, but it's fine. Also you get to punch and kick guys in the crotch if you do it right, so that's kinda fun. The issue is when there's a bunch of enemies, all shooting at you, and it's not clear where you need to go to progress through an area. There was one room in particular that I was stuck on for quite a while. It was a two level thing with a scaffolding looking thing as the second level, and it was a warehouse looking room with some vans in the back. If you've played the game, I bet it's coming back to you now. The combo of not knowing where to go, and dying repeatedly made that room incredibly frustrating. It didn't help that there were explosive barrels under the staircase that I needed to go up (well, there were other ways up there, but that was the easiest one), and there were many times that the enemies just shot the barrels whilst I was over them, which killed me instantly. But I eventually figured out where to go, and got to a point where I could take down the two enemies that gave me the most trouble, and progress onward.

As frustrating as it was trying to get through there, and as frustrated as I was in other parts when I died because of terrible enemy placement, or because I screwed up a jump, or whatever, I still really liked the game overall. This is a case where if the game didn't have these issues, I'd be overflowing with praise about it. I just want to make that clear if this is sounding overly negative about this game, because this is one of those games that I liked a lot but have more negative things to say about it than positive things. Which might not make a lot of sense at first, but kinda does if the positive things take less time to explain. At least I feel like that's the case, I haven't actually figured out the ratio of positive to negative things that I have to say about the game.

Oh, I should add that part of the reason some of the combat parts of the game were frustrating was because I went for the Trophy for beating the game without shooting any enemies. Which I got! I do think that shooting would have made several of those sections a lot easier, but I got an Ultra Rare Trophy so it was worth it. I might replay the game and actually shoot guys just to see what that's like. Speaking of, I was told that the game has some time trials which don't have any combat in them, and I probably should have played those before writing this so I could have written about them too, because those sound great if they don't have any combat in them.

Though, as much as dying repeatedly was annoying, the added pressure of being shot at did add tension and urgency to a lot of the game. That's a lot of using different words that basically mean the same thing in this context in that sentence. Anyway, not many games simulate running away from gunfire, which is pretty fun in game form. Most games have you running toward gunfire, or running to cover in gunfire so you can shoot back. But running away from gunfire is something that happens a lot in movies, but not so much in video games. At least not as a core mechanic, rather than a big set piece thing that probably has quick time events in it.

Anyway, I liked the game, and it's definitely worth playing if you've never played it before. Now I find myself excited (or at least interested) in this next Mirror's Edge game. Assuming that actually becomes a thing that exists one day. Just because it was announced doesn't mean that I expect it'll come any time soon, or at all. But I hope it does, and I hope it improves upon the first game. It could be something truly special if it's done right.

Anything else?

Not much else is going on, honestly. I've still got other games to play, including a bunch of PlayStation Plus stuff, and I still need to finish Wind Waker HD. I also downloaded Super Mario Galaxy 2 because it was $10. My early analysis: Don't pay more than $10 for this because it's still 480P and I think somehow looks worse than Wii games did running on a Wii. But I'll have to do more "testing" on that front. Seriously though, the game looks pretty bad in "SD" on my HDTV, and I wish I had a good computer so I could just emulate the game in HD instead of playing it like this. But I don't, and I've never played it before, so this is what I'm stuck with.

Oh, there was that podcast I did for The Moosies that I linked to last time. I'm going to link to it again not. I feel like I get a free pass on that since I think only one person actually listened to it, so I can mention it briefly at the end of my blogs for a little bit, at least. I won't shill for it as long as I did my eBooks, at least. I promise you that. We will try to record another podcast at some point, so look out for that!

Linky link! :D

But that's it! I hope you enjoyed this blog, and I'll be back with another at some point.

I've beaten Mirror's Edge multiple times and I've never used guns. Chapters 6 and 7 are a bitch because of how many dudes with machineguns they throw at you but overall I can't imagine playing that game as a shooter.

The time trials are fantastic and the DLC ones are even better because instead of being in the city you are in a featureless void filled with multicoloured blocks that you must parkour the hell out of.

It definitely had a pretty big budget, at least equal to that of Dead Space which was the other new IP EA launched in 08.

BF4 multiplayer is pretty good. If you really like a mode where there is no reticle though there is still a minimap but tagged enemies/vehicles isn't going to show up unless you manually pull up the big map is to play in Hardcore MP lobbies. It's equally satisfying and frustrating and forces you to play a bit more tactically then you normally would in a regular MP match.

Gunplay (intentionally) sucks in Mirror's Edge and the game itself forces you to use the environment to engage those enemies. What I ended up doing was figuring out an optimal route via trial and error to take out enemies in those situations where you had to engage them. It was frustrating having to re-do it over and over but once I pulled it off properly, I felt like a bad ass.

Mirror's Edge. I definitely remember the frustration of repeating a section what felt like a thousand times over but when you did get it, and you would cut through the level like a pro, bullets red hot behind you - it felt pretty damn good.

Thinking about the theme of the game, the combat system fits in very well. For me the problems were basically that I would be underfire and not sure which way to go and get shot looking up at a wall I thought I could climb. Once you know which route to take the vast majority of the combat is a cinch. The exception to that comes later in the game. If I remember correctly - maybe this was a difficulty level thing? - there are a few scenarios later on where you have to disarm the guys in a room and running away immediately isn't an option. In those moments I found the counter timing too demanding, especially when trying not to shoot anybody.

Forgot there was a new one of those coming out.

Brothers is a great game don't hate. Battlefield 4 is lots of fun, it is organized chaos. I think if it wasn't broken for so long people would have enjoyed it a lot more and it would have gotten more recognition for being as good as it is.

I love Mirror's Edge. I really hated it on my first playthrough. I didn't like the concept of it automatically highlighting in red where you need to go so I turned that off, while I also went for the not shooting anyone trophy, and it takes a while to wrap your head around the controls. After beating the game I did some time trials and they are great and really got me to master both the controls and the level layouts. Then I went for the speedruns and discovered that you only need to defeat 3 enemies in the game (plus the bosses) if you're fast enough. I ended up getting the platinum trophy. After my original PS3 died and I bought a replacement it was the first game I went through again to replace my lost save files. The soundtrack is also great, especially if you're reading a book.

I was kinda disappointed by BF3 and heard bad things about BF4 so I never picked it up. BF3's campaign was also super generic. You start out with a bunch of QTEs, then fight middle eastern guys for a bit, then Russians are involved somehow, then there's a turret sequence, yawn. The multiplayer was fun but they got rid of so many things that I originally liked about Battlefield's multiplayer. No commander, no in-game VOIP, smaller squad size, fewer classes which are all capable of running and gunning, way smaller maps, etc. I'm sure that the franchise is more successful due to these changes but I miss the the focus on teamwork that games like BF2 had. I don't want to go full ARMA and Battlefield still does "balls-out crazy" the best but I do like teaming up with my squad and creating our own objective.

I think Mirror's Edge is one of the best games of last generation, but it has a caveat. It does have a learning curve that the game kinda fails to inform you off, sure it shows off a lot of the moves you can do but not how to effectively actually apply it to most situations. Or rather, not that you really need to master it. Lots of people play that game clumsily and get through it like that, and I guess that is fine but I doubt you will very much enjoy it that way. If you manage to learn all the ways you can string together moves, wall-runs, jumps and the various aerial maneuvers. Its nothing short of incredible. That perfect run, after a bunch of restarts usually, when you manage to get it all right is incredibly satisfying. It does real momentum like no other game. The depth is truly fascinating. I really hope the sequel won't be too streamlined so it feels automatic, cause everything you do in the first one you feel you made happen, faults and all. I also genuinely believe that Mirror's Edge is a bad game to play with controllers, it certainly works but once you start going into the speed challenges you need so quick maneuvers with the reticle that the controller just doesn't hold a candle to mouse controls.

I need to get around to finishing the BF4 campaign one of these days. Also you need to be put in jail for that pun.

BF4 ate my campaign save twice. NOT OKAY!

@daveyo520: Teehee! ^_^

I don't think BF4's campaign is the mound of soiI want to dig my heels in on and plant my flag so to speak, because it's honestly not that good, but it's not THAT bad either. Irish is a character with some character, and overly reductive synopses aside, I thought the opening was well done. The shooting is really satisfying, so I probably excuse a lot of its narrative flaws, but it definitely does explain a lot more about the story than you claim. You may have been too bored to care, and I get that, but it's there if you want it. It is extremely short. Like a third of your average CoD campaign short. I guess they figure (rightly so) that most people are there for the multiplayer. When I see screenshots of the multiplayer, I say "hey that looks nice...I want to play that again". Then I remember what a technical shitshow it was and snap out of my delirium.

I need to play Mirror's Edge some day. Faith is doing parkour flips over my pile of shame to get my attention. Some day...

The only thing BF4's campaign was good for was getting those three multiplayer weapons.

@hippie_genocide: You're right, Irish was pretty all right as a character. And the game does explain more than I gave it credit for, I was exaggerating for effect. I still don't think it explains enough for me to have fully understood what was going on. That or it's presented in a way that made it easy to miss a vital piece of information.

I finished Mirror's Edge late last year, like in December or late November. I don't specifically remember any parts that I had trouble with as far as difficulty goes, but far too often I found myself stopping. My biggest problem with that game is actually summed up pretty easily, it's got a great set of mechanics and controls well, but it feels like DICE didn't fully know what they wanted to do with what they had and they really didn't know how to make it exciting and/or interesting, so they put some pretty bad shooting in there. Why is there bad shooting in a DICE game?

I don't hate it. At the very least, I respect it for trying to be different, but it could be so much better with some more thoughtful level design. You stop too much, you're not moving enough, there aren't enough interesting platforming puzzles. You made first person platforming feel good, now do something great with that.

It seems like a lot of the hate camp comes from people who had trouble relating where Faith's body is in relation to the floor, walls, ledges, but I didn't have a problem with that. Use your shadow as a good measuring stick in front of you and look behind you if you feel like you're too close to a ledge.

Mirror's Edge will never let you down. It's a fantastic experience. I play it at least once a year, and it's one of those guilty pleasures.

As one of the people who warned you about the Bf4 campaign it seems like you've come to the right conclusion in the end. I'm surprised you had that much trouble with the tank section. Maybe it's different on consoles?

It's far from being as terrible as Bf3's campaign though.

I liked Battlefield. I was never a player of the first two battlefield games, but when Battlefield Modern Combat showed up on PS2 that was a lot of fun even if it was not real PC Battlefield. In fact, I played so much Battlefield Modern Combat on PS2, that I could even today jump into any map and drive around with my eyes closed. I think I was primed for Battlefield 2 Modern Combat on PS2 mostly because SOCOM 3 was a disaster in my opinion, that game sucking left a shooter vacuum that needed filling and BF:MC was great.

I then moved on to Bad Company and Battlefield 1943 in there somewhere, and I played the HELL out of those games on various systems. It was fun and I really enjoyed the "way of doing things" in those games. Yet, Bad Company 2 felt crappy there was something different Then played Battlefield 3 and I hated it. I tried various time to like it, I had bought it after all, but it just felt wrong and the magic was gone. The last straw really was BF 3 being not fun, but BF 4 coming out broken was the perfect ending for me. I don't even want to talk about Battlefield Hardline...that's just a sick joke that should go away in my opinion.

I miss something about Battlefield, but not enough to make me care about them until DICE cares about them too. (I'm sorry Harline is a really sad fucking idea, a really dumb concept even without the crazy politics the game drags into it.) DICE needs to get some backbone and tell EA to step away, stop looking to the series as some sort of CoD weapon. Let the next BF be BF, make the next one the way they want, polish it to a fault. That will speak for itself if Hardline doesn't poison the well too much.

I wouldn't call it a guilty pleasure at all. A guilty pleasure is something that's terrible but you still like it. Mirror's Edge is a genuinely good game with an amazing sense of style and speed.

I really think the next Mirrors Edge would benefit from not having a story, plant the player in some open world or large map area and give various objectives and missions, Burnout Paradise style, get to point B as fast as possible, climb to the top of that building, out run Parkour Police. Just plant the player in the middle of somewhere, give them some fun shit to do, and don't even bother with linear level design that can confuse the player or that trash they called a story.

@corevi: No arguments here that it's a genuinely good game. The guilty part is due to its minor flaws and frustrations. I can't count how many times I've played through the entire game (it's a lot). There are parts that always frustrate me, but I get through them for all the good parts of the game. Hence: guilty pleasure.

i also got and beat mirror's edge when it was free but thought it was terrible. it's always been a game i thought i'd like and want to really like but it's a game that has a lot of good ideas but does almost all of them badly. it's probably something i would have got behind back in the day if i had played it just based on its uniqueness but playing it recently did not do it any favors.

this should be a game about running, sliding, rolling, jumping, on and off walls at brisk speeds but the controls are never responsive, levels are terribly laid out, and the game constantly forces you into god awful combat. top it off, even though the game is beautiful in game, it choices to tell its stupid story with cartoons brought to you by progressive. i love 1st person games that doesn't make you feel like a floating head but that's just not enough.