anubite

Assassin's Creed and Hitman: Anything (besides Absolution, possibly) share absolutely nothing in common. Assassin's Creed is not a stealth game. To suggest so is foul.

AC is an action game where you play as a serial killer of big political targets. There's no stealthy-assassination. Gameplay has always been, run up to someone and kill them - run away. That's not stealth. That's not even finesse.

Hitman: Blood Money is a good game. It's the most "action-y" of the Hitman games besides the first, but it blends action with stealth and finesse /so/ incredibly well, that the amount of action in the game is excusable.

Thief 1,2, and 3 are all stealth games with various amounts of possible action to them.

VTMB can be a stealth game. Same with Deus Ex. Both of those games have sublime stealth-design for their respective genres.

Stealth gameplay isn't about the duck-waddle or the "reacting vs the doing" in video games. Stealth gameplay lends itself to an open environment, where designers focus on good level design. Skyrim, for instance, has lame level design. You have some corridors and some enemies placed in them and you just walk forward and kill things. Deus Ex drops you in a zone and says, "Do X". There are 10 ways you can accomplish X, half of which probably involve some amount of stealth. That's what makes Deus Ex fun - I have the control to do what I want and the game is designed well enough that it can be flexible to my whims. Assassin's creed is a lienar roller coster, where you're given one way to do something and expected to do that one thing to accomplish that one mission that feeds into killing that one guy.

If you don't like stealth games, it's for the wrong reasons. Stealth games are their core are how all action games should be designed. I'm sick of rail shooters - they're a cheap game to make and produce. They have no substance. They aren't fun.

yay a longer ending for the shitty endings we got~

It's nice BW's throwing us a bone, but it doesn't redeem them much. Valve, for instance, iterated on Portal 2's ending multiple times. Erik Wolfpaw talks about their design process - they try shit, get some alpha player feedback, and adjust things accordingly. BioWare is unlikely to even have a QA team until the disks are pressed.

@Zithe: The impact on the universe is an illusion though. Because the world ends right there, as far as the player is concerned, and if BioWare ever decides to pick off where things left off - the universe pretty much ends in any of the choices you make. That's of course why they did it, to make the production of the next game cheaper.

The ultimate outcome is the same, even if the means to accomplish it are of different colors. That's partially why everone dislikes the ending. I mean, even Fallout 3 gave you a different series of slideshow information depending upon your choices, and that was hailed as a shitty copout. The ME3 endings were a massive travesty.

In the past, RPGs with choices have offered multiple endings. Of course, games with multiple unique endings have never been truly diverse as ME3 could have promised - but that's what was marketed. That we would get diverse, unique endings.

So we didn't, but it's not even that, it's that they didn't give us what we got in the past. I can open up any other BioWare RPG, even the awful DA2, and get some kind of epilogue that varies by my choice. Or, I could get an even older game, like Fallout 2, which lets me complete the game in 10 different ways and get different endings based on how I completed the game. Or fuck, look at VTMB, which had you going to different levels in the final act depending upon who you sided with, your ending being fairly different depending upon who you sided with.

Big News: Popular Opinion seldom reflects reality.

EA deserves all the negative PR it can get, even if it clearly isn't the worst company on that list. EA is more in-tune with people who use the internet, so it getting this award is more damaging than Bank of America, or whatnot.

Stop using "entitlement" Giantbomb, I don't think you or Entertainment know what it means.

Is EA "Entitled" to my wallet? Fuck no. As long as that's true, I'm not "entitled" to purchase their low-quality games. If they think their ending is so great - that's awesome! Because they can enjoy it all by themselves. I don't want your products anymore. I hope you're enjoying being homless, because you're not entitled to that salary either. You work for it. You work for me. And if I don't like the direction you take with games (ME3 is a joke, with or without its awful ending), I don't give you my money.

I spent last week replaying Baldur's Gate 2 and I'm seriously wondereing why they didn't replace James Vega with Minsc. Fuck, space marine Minsc would be 100x more interesting than "Hey I'm a Mexican-American"-Vega.

Valve spent months iterating its ending for Portal 2. They never gave up. They even playtested the ending, watching for player reaction and feedback. They created an ending that appealed to their testers, making it open enough to facilitate a sequel yet satisfying enough to make the player's feel good about what they'd done.

BioWare gave up. Or at least, that's my feeling. Nobody wanted to create a quality ending so they shoved it out the door. This is unacceptable. BioWare should have more rigorous practices like Valve. But they don't and their profits should suffer for it. Nevermind that they did lie to us - they SAID that the ending would NOT be you simplying chosing the ending - it would culiminate from your choices. They said this multiple times. And the exact opposite happened.