Ciri's Room is one of many Witcher 3 side quests that consists of so little that, under the hands of a different developer, would be probably be a rote fetch quest. But under the insane directive to make every quest "tell an [interesting] story" and to avoid completely the 'kill 6 rats' templates that hound many RPGs, CD Projekt Red have turned a fetch quest that involves finding an item in one room and walking a very short distance to give that item to its owner in another into a lovely little slice of backstory and character interaction.
Gretka's back!
Here, not only do we get to fill in a few gaps left by the cliffhanger in Bloody Baron, but we also get a nice one-on-one conversation between Geralt and the adorable Gretka, introduced in that last Ciri's Story. We get a little foreshadowing to Ciri's motivations through the book about curses found in Ciri's room and a tiny dose of character development through Gretka's recollections of her time with Ciri. We leave the quest not really knowing much more about what happened to Ciri and instead having a deeper understanding of what type of person she is. And that's it. Which is, still, way more than it could have been.
Ciri's Room is a nice, bite-sized bit of content that delights far more than it should. Even though it just barely fleshes out our characters, it's still something, and the conversations and story details you find along the way are enjoyable enough to make the whole quest worth your five minutes.
Ciri's Story: King of the Wolves is a good if unspectacular introduction to Ciri and her side-story in the Witcher 3. It couples extremely basic combat with a moody backwoods atmosphere and great interactions between Ciri and two foils: Gretka, a child lost in the woods who it's hinted was abandoned by her parents on the Trail of Treats; and the Bloody Baron, who takes Ciri and Gretka in and sees Ciri as a surrogate daughter. This is also the first time in the game we get to play as Ciri, but other than some dope-looking trans-dimensional dodging moves, nothing new is added to Ciri's arsenal.
I'm a little torn on this mission, to be honest. Dropping you in the middle of the woods as one of the most important characters in the game is a great way to get to know Ciri while she's still missing in Geralt's timeline, and I think all the Ciri's Story missions as a whole are pretty good. The problem with this one specifically is that it doesn't include the cool abilities Ciri gets later on and then asks you to fight three identical combat encounters with no 'second layer' to keep things interesting. It's actively less engaging than combat with Geralt: you have no bombs, spells, or oils to apply, no skills to activate, no adrenaline to monitor, just dodge, roll, light attack, heavy attack. At least Ciri can regenerate health, which at least takes away any challenge from the combat that could lead to frustration.
The so-called King of the Wolves
The combat portions end with a breeze of a boss fight against a werewolf that can apparently be much harder if you somehow don't complete the mission objectives before heading into its cave. I think this is an interesting idea, to make the boss fight harder depending on if you missed key items from earlier on in the mission, but the items are so trivially easy to find that I wonder why the developers even decided to include the 'choice'. While for the most part I welcome the subtle variations that CD Projekt put into each mission, some choices like this feel more like the mission designers were trying to check a checkbox instead of creating interesting, engaging choices.
So the combat's not great. Luckily, the rest of the mission picks up the slack. Ciri's a great character and pairing her with Gretka makes for a great introduction to her character. In the short scenes between the two, we get to see immediately what makes Ciri a unique, exciting character on her own as she combines warm empathy with the cold cunning of a Witcher. Even though many of the most exciting parts of the main game's story arc are about Geralt overcoming his mutations and being able to connect empathetically with the people he cares about, it's a nice chance of pace to play as someone who has more relatable emotions for the get-go. And, besides, Gretka is absolutely adorable, well written and acted, a worthy companion to Ciri on this short adventure and privy to some of the best lines of the quest.
#justwitcherthings
After defeating the Wolf King in his cave and saving a man from sure death, Ciri and Gretka get carted away to Crow's Perch to meet the Baron. The man she saves thought she was the Baron's missing daughter and brings her to him hoping to catch some coin; the Baron rebukes him because, well, Ciri's clearly not. The Baron sends the man away but implores Ciri and Gretka to stay, setting up the next few Ciri's Stories and unlocking the side quest Ciri's Room.
This is a nice little scene for a few reasons, the most important being it subtly introduces us to a side of the Baron that we haven't yet seen. By the time we jump into King of the Wolves, we don't know that the Baron's family is missing, and if you don't put two-and-two together from a line at the beginning of the scene, you might totally miss that subtext on your first playthrough. But it's clear on second viewing that the Baron makes a conscious choice to take Ciri in as a 'surrogate daughter' and that his generosity isn't just random happenstance used to forward the plot. From this early scene, it's unclear if he's doing it selfishly or not, if he's adopting Ciri as a daughter figure for the sole purpose to mend his broken heart, but either way the kindness he shows her and Gretka adds another piece to the fantastic puzzle that is the Bloody Baron's character.
In the end, I think this mission overcomes its lame combat with the sheer force of personality that imbues nearly every part of the Witcher 3. So, yeah. Four out of five. By a hair.
I, for no sane reason, have decided to review every single quest in the Witcher 3 and rate them on a 0-5 scale. Here, you can find each of the reviews I've written so far as well as my raison d'etre for the series. New reviews will (hopefully) appear daily!
Introduction
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an almost impossibly huge game. A year and half after its release people are still talking about its missions and its secrets with continued relish, and for my part I have over 200 hours logged in it, the most of any game I've ever played shy of Civ 5. But for as grand and varied as it is, few reviews acknowledge that breathe, instead choosing to focus on the sum of all its disparate parts. I thought it’d be interesting to take the opposite approach and instead review it slightly differently: piecemeal, with a look at every single mission in the entire game.
I’ve always found the Witcher 3 to be a wildly inconsistent game, creating experiences that ranked among the greatest of all time and placing them along side some of gaming’s most confusing, backward, and annoying design choices. I thought it might be interesting to see how each of those experiences stacked up against each other, to see, mathematically even, if the Witcher 3 was more or less than the sum of its parts.
On my first playthrough of the Witcher 3, I made a disastrous decision. After completing Magic Lamp, I decided to eschew the Bloody Baron questline entirely and immediately took up Keira Metz's offer to drop by. I then proceeded to obsessively complete every single one of her quests as well as all the quests surrounding Crookbag Bog and the Ladies of the Wood. At the time, it didn't seem that bad -- that cluster of quests are some of the best in the whole game, after all -- but by ignoring anything from the Bloody Baron until after I had wrapped up The Whispering Hillock, I skipped over key parts of the Baron's storyline and ruined one of the great twists of the Witcher 3. So this time around I'm making sure I do things right, by completing the Baron's storyline before venturing into the Bog. So, without further ado...enjoy Bloody Baron (Peaceful Path). [And take a look at the rest of the entries in the series right here!]
Bloody Baron (Peaceful Path)
Main Quest
Walking a peaceful path into Crow's Perch
Bloody Baron is one of those crazy Witcher 3 quests that will either be entirely routine or excitingly complex depending on a seemingly-inconsequential choice you made hours earlier. For my part, I had no idea this quest was branching until I looked it up on the Witcher 3 wiki. Turns out that if I had chosen to get violent with some bullying, unnamed guards in an encounter some missions previous then their friends would have barred my entrance to Crow's Perch and I would have had to sneak in via an new quest line focusing on a dead boy and an old abandoned well. Which all sounds far more interesting than the peaceful approach! Instead, I was nice to the guards, and Bloody Baron proceeded with little in the way of twists or turns. Still -- the power of choice, and kudos to CD Projekt for making good on it.
Bloody Baron (Peaceful Path), as I'm calling it, is about as straightforward as a main mission can get. Your first objective is to head to Crow's Perch; your second is to follow the Sergeant who will take you to the Bloody Baron; your third and final is to talk to the Bloody Baron himself (oh, and you get a Ciri's Story in the middle, but since that's a separate quest it'll have a separate review). No combat, no Witcher Vision, no real choice. Only scene-setting and conversation, all of which, thankfully, is of the highest quality.
What a face. What a face!
Enough has already been written out there about how good the Bloody Baron storyline is, so I don't think there's much more in that regard that I can add here, but I'd just like to point out how well the character is modeled and voiced. On my first playthrough I bounced off the character a bit, writing him off as a Robert Baratheon wannabe in both look and sound. They both had beards, ruddy British accents, drank heavily, and were self-pitying; sure, as the storyline developed, I thought they did an alright job fleshing him out, but at the time I thought he came off as a caricature. This time, however, I feel totally the opposite. I think they sell the character right out of the gate by the incredible amounts detail they put into his face and clothes. He looks like a mess, a guy who's really been through some shit, and from the salt-and-pepper beard to the bad complexion of his face to the tattered, dirtied clothes, you feel like you can almost smell him through the screen. That, coupled with a great ruddy-British voice actor and dialogue that really pops, goes a long way towards making this simple mission a really good one.
I also think this is the first major questline where the writing in the Witcher 3 begins to shine. Up until now we've had good stuff -- the opening with Vesemir and Geralt at the fire and meeting Yennefer in Vizima being the stand-outs -- but it's here that things really begin to kick into high gear. In fact, pretty much every main quest and major side quest in Southern Velen is incredibly written, with the Bloody Baron's signaling a trend that will continue in Ladies of the Wood and create a dazzling B-story in Keira Metz's quartet of quests. Of all the game's many accomplishments, I think it's the writing, the consistently nuanced and subtle character work and ability to create inventive scenarios and situations, that floats to the top and makes that 'Witcher 3 magic' so hard to replicate in other games.
Welcome to my new series where I -- gulp -- attempt to play and review every single quest in the Witcher 3! Next up: Magic Lamp, a nice palette-cleanser to yesterday's travesty.
Magic Lamp
Side Quest
Lara Dorren's dope-ass memorial
This mission is a nice change of pace from its immediate predecessor, the nigh-unbearable Wandering In The Dark. Instead of making you wander aimlessly through endless dungeons, fending off the same three enemies over and over again until you grind up against two rinse-repeat bosses, Magic Lamp place you in two smalls rooms, makes combat completely optional, and gives you a meaty riddle to chew on. What's this? Do you mean to say that this mission wants me to do more than blindly swinging Witcher Vision across every dungeon wall and scanning for shimmering red lines? Impossible!
Compare Magic Lamp's simple riddle to one of the largest 'riddles' found Wandering In the Dark. Here, an inscription against an ancient door asks us to light the braziers in front of four different statues in the correct order, using clues both positional ("The First...dare not march on the end") and descriptional* ("The Third kept close to his faithful beast"); there, the clue ("Swallow, the obvious route is not always the best. Find Kelpie.") is given and then immediately solved by Geralt, who recognizes Kelpie as the name of Ciri's horse, leaving a pixel-hunt to find a horse-shaped inscription as all that's left to do. While the former's riddle is no great feat to solve, it's at least an actual brain teaser, something that necessitates being solved in order to move on. If you never solve that riddle, then hey, you can't continue with the quest; contrast that with the search for Kelpie, where all that's required is for you to tilt the camera down while in Witcher Vision to see the solution at the bottom of a well, and the basic puzzle design of Magic Lamp is already better than the previous quest.
It would unfair not to mention, however, the different contexts that these puzzles are in. The brazier riddle? In a skippable side quest. The search for Kelpie? In a mandatory main quest. You can't just walk away from Kelpie, flee out the nearest opening and never come back, leaving Keira with the Hunt and hoping for the best. It makes sense, then, that the designers would want to create a 'riddle' that anyone could solve; I just don't think it 100% excuses them from creating a 'riddle' that was uninteresting as it was.
The titular Magic Lamp
Anyway, after you solve the brazier riddle, you are led into a room with a sweet-looking tomb and a conversation. Overall, I found this conversation (which concludes the mission) pretty much better than anything found in Wandering In The Dark, featuring a cool environment, nice lighting, and some interesting story tidbits to ruminate on, despite most of the conversation being about a character who has barely been mentioned up to this point, Lara Dorren. As a whole, this conversation encapsulates one of the best and worst things about the Witcher 3's story sections: the assumption you have intimate knowledge of the Witcher lore, going back three games and countless books. This broadly breaks players down into two camps, where conversations are A) really rewarding for fans of the series, as they offer a greater chance to engage with the universe than other parts focused more on the insular main story, and B) really infuriating for newcomers, since names, places, and sometimes even choices will be thrown at you with little context and next-to-no explanation. This dichotomy, whether you're a seasoned Witcher pro or not, directly leads to how much enjoyment you'll be able to glean from this conversation and this mission as a whole.
On one hand, the 'fan of the series' hand, this conversation is awesome, getting into some juicy drama about if Dorren is well-liked by her fellow elves or not and interesting speculation about the Mysterious Elf's connection to her. On the other, 'wait who's Lara Dorren was she the person they mentioned 5 hours ago' hand, this conversation is incomprehensible. Wait, Lara who? She married Cregennan of what? Why is the Elf interested in her? Why does she have the Sign of the Gull too? Isn't that Ciri's sign? Games force players to piece together who characters are and what's important about them all the time -- there's nothing wrong with that idea by itself -- but the problem here that there is a disconnect between the knowledge of the player and the knowledge of the character they're playing. Geralt knows exactly who Lara Dorren is and what makes her important, and a player new to the Witcher world might have no idea whose grave this is or why it would have any connection to Ciri. On my first playerthrough, I was that newcomer with little intimate knowledge of the lore, and it made times like these where the game refused to explain itself eternally frustrating.
Whatever camp you end up in, however, the mission ends the same way: Keira takes the magic lamp resting on the gravestone and invites you to partake in her line of side quests before leaving the dungeon for the open world outside. You can find an interesting little note about the Mysterious Elf trying to contact Lara Dorren with the magic lamp, to no avail, and that's it. A tiny little quest that I've written entirely too much about. Riddle, conversation, 'come see me', done. 100xp. All in all, good, simple, featuring little more than a five minute brain teaser, conversation of variable quality, and the promise of something more down the line.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an almost impossibly huge game. A year and half after its release people are still talking about its missions and its secrets with continued relish, and for my part I have over 200 hours logged in it, the most of any game I've ever played shy of Civ 5. But for as grand and varied as it is, few reviews acknowledge that breathe, instead choosing to focus on the sum of all its disparate parts. I thought it’d be interesting to take the opposite approach and instead review it slightly differently: piecemeal, with a look at every single mission in the entire game.
I’ve always found the Witcher 3 to be a wildly inconsistent game, creating experiences that ranked among the greatest of all time and placing them along side some of gaming’s most confusing, backward, and annoying design choices. I thought it might be interesting to see how each of those experiences stacked up against each other, to see, mathematically even, if the Witcher 3 was more or less than the sum of its parts. So here’s the first entry in my impossible task to review every single mission in the Witcher 3: welcome to Wandering in the Dark, a Velen mission so bad it inspired me to start this very series.
Wandering in the Dark
Main Quest
Please adjust your gamma until the fun is visible
This mission is interminable, the best example of the worst mission design in the Witcher 3. It’s framed around three main gameplay conceits: tackling packs of enemies, usually in groups of threes or fours, with environmental traps (poison clouds, freezing colds) to worry about; slowly, slowly chipping away the incessantly-long health bars of dungeon bosses using the same hit-hit-dodge combo; and finally searching for pathways and clues in the near-pitch darkness, stumbling around oddly-shaped boulders and spamming Witcher Vision until the blurry red outlines show up and lead you to the next section. At nearly an hour long, It reeks of filler, featuring none of the meaty, satisfying combat or conversations usually associated with the Witcher’s best missions. Choices are minimal, with a lone decision regarding what to do with Keira when she faints poorly explained and incomprehensibly implemented (what exactly does it want me to choose between?); interactions between Geralt and Kiera are slim, with little being revealed about either character other than at the very beginning and very end of the mission and; and the combat has some of the worst design in the entire game. Let’s recap.
It begins with you and Keira heading over to a mysterious-elf-who-just-might-have-seen-Ciri’s dungeon home in order to question him, but you arrive to find the Wild Hunt already ahead of you, searching for the same man. What transpires next is an hour-plus chase to catch them, involving non-functioning portals, nests of rats, a sorta-outta-nowhere protector Golum, the most boring ancient Elven dock imaginable, poison gas, the White Frost, a bunch of poorly explained magic, and finally a showdown with Nithral, a C-tier Wild Hunt stooge who wields a dope axe and can regenerate health. While all those pieces sound alright on paper, monotony soon sets in as each encounter brings neither engaging conflicts nor emotional payoffs to the table. Indicative of the laziness of the design is an abysmal encounter in the later fourth of the mission, when the Wild Hunt opens three portals to the White Frost and forces you and Keira to close them before moving on. To stave off the White Frost, Keira opens a shield around the both of you as she attempts to close the portals. You need to defend her as exactly seven (or eight — around that number) of Hounds of the Wild Hunt come out of each portal, one portal at a time. The whole encounter goes like this: fight four Hounds and kill them; fight three hounds and kill them; Keira closes a portal; rinse, repeat twice. The exact same enemy, the exact same attack pattern, over and over. Once you’ve killed one Hound of the Wild Hunt, you’ve killed ‘em all.
This chucklefuck
Some things of mild interest do still happen, however. This is the first mission where we get to see Avalac in the flesh, after all, and what an anit-climax it is. For one of the most mysterious and motivating forces in the entire game, here he’s little more than a riddle generator, offering up mysterious clues to help Ciri find him. Which, by the way, feels inconsistent: the Wild Hunt is ahead of you in the dungeon the entire time, but Keira mentions that “no one but Ciri and you [Geralt]” would be able to decipher the riddles. Guess not! Because the Hunt totally did. I understand the desire to keep the character in the dark, but so little information is given about him here that I was initially confused if his character was actually important or not.
I can imagine going through this mission on your first playthrough might hold some excitement, as it’s your first real one-on-one with a member of the Wild Hunt, but without that anticipation the mission, and the eventual fight against a Huntsman, really falls flat. That final fight, by the way; oof. Nithral’s got an invincibility shield that he’ll summon twice during the battle, once at 2/3 health and once again at 1/3, both times regenerating him back to full health and sicking another septet of Hounds on you. Hey, remember how fun they were to fight earlier? They’re even better now! The battle takes the ‘fight the same encounter three times’ philosophy from the White Frost encounter and pushes it to its rote extreme. (Also of note: every time you bump into Nithral’s invincibility shield during this section — which can happen a lot, since the Hounds will frequently hang out inside of it — Geralt will get flung back and Keira will yell “GERALT!”, which got pretty funny to hear over and over again in the span of about 15 seconds). It’s also weird how it’s this mission that adds the Erdin entry to your Character journal, despite the fact it doesn’t mention him once.
On top of all that, a lot of dialogue, animation, and effects are really not great. Keira’s protective White Frost shield looks flat and undynamic, an animation where she faints into Geralt’s arms looks straight-up terrible, and the whole affair ends with minimal conclusion (what did the Hunt find? Who is the elf? What does he want with Ciri? Nada). The nicest thing you can say about Wandering in the Dark is that it introduces you to the Witches of Crookbag Bog — both in name and in quest — which offer up some of the best missions in the game. Here’s to them, and better missions ahead.
Listen, I go to college. My Xbox red-ringed two summers ago and I haven't had a chance to get another one. I style a Macbook Pro and spend most of my time on it looking at Steam games I can't run. I was already pumped for Bioshock: Infinite when it came out, but when the praise started rolling in it turned into a full-on frenzy. I needed it - but, alas, how could I get it? Look at me -- I’m a starving college kid with not enough time in the world to play the game even if I had the means to buy it (which I don’t, by the way). I was worried I'd have to wait until the summer (God forbid!) to get my hands on it, and that was just way too long.
So when I stumbled across an Xbox sitting in the second-floor lounge with Bioshock: Infinite already in the drive I chalked it up to divine intervention and played the damn thing. From midnight to 5 am I played it. Nonstop. No breaks. I was dead-set on powering through the whole game in one sitting but at around 4:30 my brain decided to shut down and I figured enough was enough. The next day the Xbox was gone, and withdrawal set in. I had the shivers, the shakes, the nightmares. I figured I'd write down my experience - maybe that'd help exercise the demons, I thought.
Without further ado: the first 5 hours straight of Bioshock Infinite! Unabridged.
Welcome to Raptu- er, Columbia, I mean
First off, don’t play Bioshock Infinite for 5 hours straight. I feel like this is a game that was made to be taken an hour or two at the time, to be sipped like a Earl Grey with a shot of Jameson. Why? Well, in these first few hours I can’t shake the feeling that both the world and the gunplay are constantly overwhelming, blasting my eyeballs with colorful, bloody stimuli -- and not always in a good way. There’s just so much going on, from the intimate details of the opening minutes to the blaze of gunfire from every direction that nips at your heels each time a fight pops off. These two elements -- the world and the combat, which I'll dive into individually later -- are fine on their own, but when you’re trying to contend with both at once, with sky-hooks and giant dirigibles and Big Daddie lookalikes and explosive Vigors and rocket launchers and American Exceptionalism, exhaustion quickly sets in. You're going to want to blast through this game, because the highs are so high, but listen to me: you need a break. Playing it straight with no breaks ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Don't do it.
Second off, a quick recap of the story so far. You’re Booker DeWitt, some guy who’s sent to a lighthouse of the coast of Maine (where all games should start, really), who knows nothing about why he’s there other than the directive to retrieve a girl named Elizabeth so his ‘debt’ can be ‘payed.’ What ‘debt’ and who’s doing the ‘paying’ are kept a secret, probably for some fun third-act twist, but other than that the tale is relatively clear. In an inversion of the first Bioshock’s bathysphere trip to the bottom of the ocean, here Booker takes what can only be described as a sky-bathysphere to a city in the clouds, Columbia, an idyllic, racist commune obsessed with 1920’s-era nostalgia and the Battle of Wounded Knee (for whatever reason). They’ve imprisoned this girl, Elizabeth, in a giant tower the shape of an angel. That’s because, on top of everything else, they’re also religious fanatics, ruled by and following the word of a prophet named Comstock who seemed to really, really hate you, for a reason both myself and the esteemed Mr. DeWitt don’t understand (yet). And all this is told to you in the first thirty minutes. So, yeah. Like I said. “Overwhelming.”
But damn if being overwhelmed has ever felt this good. I spent the first hour or so (and many other times sprinkled along there) in slack-jawed awe at the world, the characters, the art, the sheer grandiosity of absolutely everything around you, the twisted stories suggested by the houses you scurry through and the backdoor hints of something darker at every turn. This game takes the sense of awe at entering an unknown, fully-realized city that was found in the first Bioshock and makes an entire living, breathing world out of it, one that is such a stupendous harmony of idealism, cultism, epicness, history, and surrealism that it is a true achievement for the medium (and any, for that medium). The feeling of stepping into the floating city of Columbia for the first time (which I definitely won't spoil for you, as it needs to be seen to be believed) is one of strongest emotional reactions I've ever had with a game, and gave me a high that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. I would love to slip on an Oculus and get lost in this world -- the details are so dense it practically feels designed for it.
That's one powerful pistol!
While this incredible feeling never entirely went away, the game squanders the potential of these early hours with shooting that feels like a step back from the first Bioshock. Now, I haven't played that game since it came out four years ago so I am no doubt seeing things here through rose-tinted spectacles, but I remember the Bioshock combat being in large, open areas, where experimentation was key and your wide array of powers were vital. Much has been made in previews of Infinite’s linearity, but I never really understood how severe it was until the shooting started. Every encounter that isn’t buoyed by the exhilarating sky-hooks (a device on your arm that lets you hop on rails and rollercoaster your way around some of the combat arenas) feels like a tight, one-way corridor, full of eagle-eyed enemies that will happily pick you off from impossible distances. On top of that, I can't tell you how many times I was getting shot from ten different directions and had no idea where any of them were coming from. Part of this problem is the game's color palette: while terrific in all other regards, the bullets trails that are so key to your survival tend to blend into the environment, and the combat clarity of the original’s yellow bullet trails against the greenish doom of Rapture is lost. The combat is also, ironically, too easy. While, yes, I'm dying a lot because I can't tell where I'm getting shot from and my aiming is like dragging a fork through molasses, I can still one-shot a normal enemy with a shotgun. This ultimately reduces the vast majority of enemies, already lacking the distinct powers and graphical flourishes that made the original’s Splicer’s so memorable, to little more than a nuisance, and makes the game surrounding them more a frustration than a challenge.
Possession, looking surprisingly useful
Compounding the lousy gunplay is one of Infinite’s biggest failures: the powers, which, at the point I'm at, are either useless or nearly identical. You start off with Possession, which does exactly what you think it does. Problem is, other than taking over turrets (it can also take over humans and vending machines, where you buy ammo and upgrade your weapons) it doesn't work. I've Possession-ed a few guys in my time, only for them to lend no support and them kill themselves, as one does. Other times, it doesn't work at all, with no indication why. On top of that, it takes up half your ‘Salts’ (read: magic) bar, which is way too expensive for a power that I could never get to work consistently and never offered a great tactical reason to exist.
The next one you get, Devil's Kiss, is the first offensive one, and truthfully I couldn’t care less about it. What's the point of using a fireball that consumes a huge amount of Salt when you can just shoot your enemies in the face? Sure, you can set a ‘fire trap’ with it, something you definitely can’t do with guns, but the combat is already so linear and incomprehensible that I never felt the need to engage in any power that emphasized careful planning over going in guns blazing. You may actually run out of ammo at some point and be forced to use your offensive powers, but later in the game there's always enough ammo lying around or being thrown to you (I’ll get to that in a second) so I found Devil’s Kiss to be entirely useless. The next three powers - Murder of Crows, Bucking Bronco, and Shock Jockey - all do the same thing: stun ‘em so you can shoot 'em more. Murder of Crows does look awesome, with dope crows coming out of your arms, but there's no need to use one of the stun powers instead of the other unless there's a story reason, which is very disappointing considering the variety and usefulness of the powers found in the first Bioshock.
Another disappointing aspect of the combat (do these ever end?) is the sky-hooks, which I earlier called, quote un quote, "exhilarating." And they are exhilarating -- when they work. The problem is that when you're riding on one the cursor that tells you when you can land or jump off and sever a baddie’s head from his torso is very finicky; I sometimes had to go back and forth three or four times just to get the cursor to show up under the perp's feet so I could trigger the kill, and it doesn't always show up when it should. The whole system, from its UI to its mechanics to its responsiveness, feels bizarrely unpolished for the polished world it exists in.
But never mind about the combat! Sure, it's a massive (too massive) and frequent (too frequent) part of the game, but, pah, that's not what you're here for, is it? You're here for the world, the story, the girl trapped in the tower! Ah, yes, Elizabeth. She’s been called by everyone and their grandmothers the great purveyor of the next generation of AI in video-games. Or something.
Elizabeth, just chillin'
Full stop: Elizabeth is pretty awesome. Yes, she is (in the early goings, at least) basically a Disney princess, complete with Dreamworks-lite facial expressions and a love for Paris, but her and Booker's dialog is great and the way she aids you in combat is seamless and genuinely helpful. It seems pretty easy to form an emotional bond with her, something that, judging by the pre-release interviews, has been hinted at being important. Some of the best parts of the game so far have just been Booker and her walking around these amazing locals, commenting on stuff, soaking in the world, and saying 'huh.' Booker say 'huh' a lot, and I think it's perfect. I've seen people complain about that, but I felt if I was there that would be my exact reaction. Huh. This is weird and a little disturbing.
And, of course, the mystery around Elizabeth is so interesting - I want to learn more about that all the time, of why she was imprisoned, why you were sent to get her, and, of course, why she can open portals to other dimensions. It’s such a compelling forward thrust of a mystery, with all these bizarre and surreal components -- religious symbolism, with a heavy dash of quantum physics and a giant mechanical bird -- combining to create an intoxicating mixture. The question is, however, if the game can maintain that forward momentum so deftly established in the first few hours for the rest of its runtime. The part I'm at right now, a town run by an oft-mentioned entrepreneur named Fink, seems to be a detour in the story arc of the game, focusing less and less on those powerful mysteries mentioned above and more and more on side characters who seem to have little to do with...anything, at the moment. It reminds me of the post-Andrew-Ryan denouement in the first Bioshock, except now taking place within the first four hours instead of the last four. Perhaps every story needs a chance to catch its breath, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve barely even started and the game’s already fallen back on padding.
Anyway, let’s get back on track: Elizabeth. While she's great, she's nowhere near perfect, or even what was promised. First of all, she's not reactive like she was in that first gameplay demo with her, where she would play off you and what you were doing. Now, all of her comments are obviously scripted and only happen on things she's interacting with, not stuff you're looking at. If you let her go and head to another room, she’ll just talk to no one like a normal video game crazy person and then move to the next item of study. This is disappointing, considering how hyped those early interactions were, but the dialog's still good enough that it's not a huge deal. But all the good dialogue in the world can’t fix the fundamental problem that plagues the Booker/Elizabeth dynamic: their relationship is simply underwritten. In each dedicated scene of dialogue between the two of them there is a constant anxiety that seems to be poking at the script, urging it to skip the talking and get to the action. These scenes feel almost scared to give their characters room to breathe and grow, to allow them to share a quiet moment where nothing happens other than their own development and self-expression. By cutting corners like this, character motivations become muddy and character's intelligence become delegitimized: they agree on huge decisions without talking them through, act nonchalantly and chummy one scene and emotionally unhinged the next, reach for emotional depth far too quickly than would be believable, etc.
The game is also littered with the common problem of the characters acting irrationally in order to move the story forward, progressing an entire arc - an escape to Paris - by constantly undermining its characters with just-in-the-nick-of-time bad luck. For example, at one point after you rescue Elizabeth, she gets angry at you just as you find a ship that’ll get you out of the city. Just as you’re about to head out, she clubs you over the head with a wrench and throws you overboard, all for an emotional betrayal that rings hollow because for the past hour or she's been helpfully throwing you ammo and health without every voicing a shred of discontent. Another: when you rescue Elizabeth from the tower she agrees not only to go with you with barely a word of protest but also to actively help you. If a strange man loaded with weapons broke through your ceiling, pissed off the only creature you’ve ever had an emotional attachment to, and told you that he was going to rescue you by destroying everything you’ve ever known, would you follow his every word to the ‘t’? Sure, with the correct establishment of stakes, it would be easy to believe that Elizabeth would do anything, whatever the cost, to leave the tower; but in your brief time observing her (there are weird observation rooms where you watch her do stuff like paint and read and bend space-time) she doesn't exhibit a particularly strong desire to leave. The game certainly tells it to you this enough times, but by doing that it breaks the cardinal rule of storytelling: of showing, not telling. This, along with a few other emotional beats, felt very false to me.
Can't fault the visuals -- they're frequently drop-dead gorgeous
The only reason I'm making such a big deal about this is the rhetoric about how human Elizabeth feels, both by the PR and the reviews. Ken Levine, the creative director, seemed to think that her humanity and your empathy for her is a key component of the game, so when we fall into the same problems reconciling gameplay and story that narrative-driven games have been dealing with from the beginning, it's frustrating. While she is, yes, a step in the right direction, she is not the leap we hoped for.
Wow, you're probably saying right about now, you really don't like Bioshock Infinite. No. I like it. So far, it might even be a great game. I just think it fails in the ways it thinks are important in some very significant ways. Ways that, to be game it needs to be, it needed to nail.
So what does it nail? Pretty much everything I didn't say above. The world is a masterpiece. There's no way you can get around that. It's utterly packed with visually tremendous environments that ooze storytelling. The choice to set the (early goings, at least) game in a pre-fall dystopia is refreshing and even more important in really putting you in the place. You see the people, their lives, their families, their modes of living. It's not all bloody messages scrawled on walls and deformed addicts out for your Adam like the first Bioshock; it’s just a bunch of wealthy racists living in the clouds, which is somehow just as fascinating. You've got this God-fearing, idealist, Tomorrowland-esque society which has all the disturbed aspects of Rapture at the edges - the human experiments, the body-altering potions, the manufactured life - as a showcase to their power. Columbia is a truly prosperous society - at least, that's what it seems to their citizens. You begin looking in the nooks and crannies and you see pipes and pumps churning out manufactured happiness, the dirt and grime that accumulates in a spotless land. It's when the game begins peeling back the layers, showing that, no, this city is impeccable for a reason, that there may be darker things afoot in the areas they don't want you to go, that the barrier between virtual and real breaks down and Columbia becomes a brilliantly twisted take on Disneyland-esque Americana.
In that way, that makes it worth it. All the negative elements I talked about earlier; who cares? This is a place, a real place, and you are in it, exploring it, messing it up, destroying it. It's profound, and it's unlike anything, ever. I hope I can finish the game at some point - I'd like to see how it wraps up, and if the combat gets any better. If not, I can take comfort in how much this game has made me analyze and think. Hell, I just wrote a billion words about it. What other five hour descent into madness makes you do that?
Ok, now that we're done with that horrible pun, I just thought I needed to write this blog out about the beta backlash that's been going on this past weekend. It's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride over here, as an ME diehard: the weekend started with people getting their hands on the game, and realizing that, hey, it was pretty awesome (just as I thought a few months ago), then, as a old script got leaked took a fast nose dive as it became apparent that many of the things Bioware had promised were simple ignored. Though I have not read the script (and have absolutely no intention to), reports are that it is linear, childish, and offers little choice, with one Bioware forum poster comparing it to DA2, which is enough just to send me into a tizzy. Seriously, you say the words Dragon Age 2 in the same sentence with Mass Effect 3 and I get crazy anxious, because, like so many of you, I want this series to end on an awesome note.
This anxiety is not a new thing. It started at the end of ME2, with that last cutscene where the Reapers are approaching and BAMB; it ends. Actually, scratch that: it started just before that, when Shepard's walking down the ship towards the big windows and you can see who's survived and who hasn't. By making it able for any character to die at any time during that suicide mission, it made it basically impossible for Bioware to fully integrate those characters into the next game unless they did a full reset. Think about it; what if you created specific arcs, descisions, and romances that many a player would never see? No developer would want to do that, as awesome as that sounds to the end user. I want ME3 to be good, I want ME3 to have real consiquencial choice, but that's just an unrealistic goal, which the series hasn't really proven to be possible.
But then I begin to think about the linearity of this leaked draft, and how decisions made in previous games are simply retconned or glossed over, something Bioware has promised repeatedly not to do. Game hype is like a presidential campain: awesomness is promised, little of it is fulfilled (normally). And I've bought into the Bioware's earnest...ness on how their going to close out the series, with choice and such. When the hype curtain is pulled back, it makes me scared - ESPECIALLY since for the last few months I've been vehemently defending the game on the internets, saying that Bioware is going to pull it off after all. Now, with this leak, it seems they might not, that they'll succumb to the DA2 route, that they'll...Oh, I'm probably taking this too dramatically, but I just don't want to see a game I've really believed turn out to be a POS.
A continuation of a blog I wrote about my friend's impressions of a few games he played at Comic Con last week. Check out the first half here.
The other game that good old Wookieman46 played was SSX, a game that him and I were bother looking forward to and wary of. SSX, for me at least, a game of my childhood. I used to play 2-player SSX Tricky with my Dad, him Moby and me Psymond, and when the sequel came with an "open world" I was overjoyed. I played more hours of those two games than I can count. SSX On Tour put me off (and apparently may others) with its lack of open world and new introduction of "skis" (what are those?), and ever since the series has been pretty dormant, residing as a nostalgia artifact and not much more.
Well, Wookieman46 is happy to report that SSX is pretty great, at least from the demo he played. It reminded him of SSX Tricky in terms of feel and tricks, with the Uber Trick making a return (did it ever leave?) as well as the great sense of speed. While it appeared to only be one course that Wookiema46 was riding down in the demo, said course had multiple paths that he could have taken to get down. The old characters are back - I can't remember who he said he played as, but he confirmed that you could pick Moby - in what is looking like a return to form. I'm not sure if the game will be an open world in the same style as SSX3, which for me would be entirely welcome, and was something that went unaddressed in that demo. Another thing the demo didn't touch on was the unique aspects to the new SSX, such as the whole Deadly Descents mode with avalanches and such or the awesome-looking "wing suit." The most important thing the demo didn't touch on was, of course, if Run DMC would finally return to the SSX soundtrack. For that I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Well there you are. Two games that, according to Wookieman46, are looking pretty rad. Two games that are also coming out next year, so they both have a lot of time to become even better. In the words of Wookieman46, "awesome."
Awesome.
Want to read more great stuff about games I saw at Comic-Con? Just look below!
So while I've finished my hands-on impressions of games from the floor (and the surrounding hotels) of the San Diego Comic-Con for 2011, my friend and fellow Giantbomb member Wookieman46 got his hands on a pair of games that I didn't have time to see. Yesterday I cornered him and got him to give me his impressions of both SSX and The Darkness II, two games he played while at Comic-Con. Keep in mind that since I didn't get my hands on these games themselves these previews will be both shorter and less precise.
While the line for The Darkness II was quite long when I went on Friday, Sunday yielded a shorter line which Wookieman46 jumped at the chance to wait in. He liked the first one quite a bit if I remember correctly (it did come out some years ago), and The Darkness II seemed to hold similar sway. He said it was "awesome, if a bit chaotic," with sometimes so much action happening onscreen that it was hard to tell what exactly was going on. That, however, was easily forgiven because the action was cool to look at and fun to play (in contrast to the confusing action of Dead Island, which obscured the screen with too many graphics and that darned head bob). The Darkness powers are apparently "much cooler," and the buzzword-friendly "quad-wielding" worked great. You've got your two guns on the triggers and your two Darkness heads (limbs?) on the bumpers, and when you're fully powered I'm going to bet that you're a non-stop killing machine.
He also saw the reboot of SSX, SSX. SSX? SSX!
You can find that here, along with the rest of the games I saw at Comic Con!
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