[perablenta]

buraz kaže:

Sve i jedan recenzent se uhvatio za animacije, glitcheve, MMO side questove i lose performanse. Niko da kaze nesto o prici, odlukama, negativcima?

Od RPS : malo li je

What unites all these different features is the most unrelentingly dull writing, cliches and aphorisms pouring out like the waterfalls they’d use as an analogy in this sentence. I cannot explain this better than by giving a lengthy example from one moment in the first few hours, a chat about the potentially complex and messy subject of faith.

One member of your crew, a scientist, reveals to you that she believes in God. Now, this is old territory for Mass Effect, where in the first game you had a right-wing Christian on your crew, and it was handled especially well. Not so this time! This is genuinely the conversation:

“Just all of it. So alien. A constant reminder of the divine intelligence behind all creation.”

“Divine intelligence? A god?”

“Yes, I believe in a higher power. I know it’s a little odd. But I’m a scientist because science brings me closer to something greater than myself.”

To this you are given two possible responses. Beyond all credibility, they are:

“I feel the same way.”
Or
“There’s no higher power.”

What the hell? You’re given the choice of either emphatically agreeing that you too believe in God, or you rudely tell a woman you barely know that her faith is bullshit. Honestly, I was tempted just to walk away from the game than be forced into picking one of those two answers. But I went for the former, since at least it wasn’t rude, and I was trying to flirt with her anyway. She expresses her pleasure that someone else agrees that it’s possible to believe in science and God at the same time, and then in what must be one of the worst lines of dialogue in gaming history, your character’s option of a flirting reply is:

“You definitely have an interesting perspective on the interplay between faith and science.”

This isn’t how people speak.

This is endemic, permeating from conversations through to grand ideas. Entire races are still described as having a single personality type. “Quick-minded, sharp” someone says of the Angara, as if that’s going to be a common trait across an entire sentient species. A single philosophy is attributed to the entire species, across multiple planets, as if no one would disagree, ever, across space and time.

Giant decisions sproing out of nowhere, with no warning. You’re just idly clearing out yet another identikit ‘dungeon’, and then suddenly you’re asked to decide if you should kill a bunch of innocent people for some potential wider benefit. There’s no flow, no sense of history, just bonkers false choices when a nuanced response would be far more valid (and in BioWare games, previously optional).

There is, as ever, the one crewmate who doesn’t want to talk to you. Who you have to win over by, er, waiting. But this time they’ve ingeniously picked the character from a race who incessantly go on about how they don’t hide their feelings. He won’t talk to you, won’t say why. Everything feels this inconsistent, people explaining their reasons for not liking other people like primary school children, all spats and no sophisticated moral reasoning.

Perhaps most significantly, they made the bold decision to remove good/evil responses that have been a mainstay of the developers’ RPGs, but they’ve failed to replace them with anything close to as meaningful. As a result, they’ve essentially removed the majority of choice at all. At one point you’re offered an extremely significant deal that contains an element that’s tantamount to extortion. In any other BioWare game before you’d argue this, perhaps choose it as the lesser of two evils, or reject it based on principle. Here you get two choices: to accept it, or accept it while making a joke. It’s quite bizarre how far they’ve gone in removing the illusion of autonomy, while still seeming to think they’re offering dialogue choice.

Of all the Mass Effect games to take away the opportunity to be a dick to your crewmates, boy did they pick the wrong time. Having spent dozens and dozens of hours in their company, I can tell you that I neither like nor dislike any of them. I pretend to dislike Liam and Gil, because both are presented as cock-er-nee blokey-blokes, and it’s ghastly, so I try to pick responses that will upset them, but there’s barely anything that could and nothing interesting comes of it.

I’ve never before played a BioWare game where I wasn’t torn about who to take with me in a landing party. Those moments of, “Oh no, but I have to take X on this trip because it’s his home planet, but that means I will miss Y! There’s not even a glimmer of it. I resentfully take two along, not caring what either will add. It’s so, so odd.

Let me give another example that’s emblematic of almost every aspect of the writing: there’s one sidequest on Eos where you find a message from a dude who died in the middle of doing a job, planting radio beacons in various hard-to-reach places. So your task is to finish the job for him, out of respect. With each beacon you place, a message automatically plays, an adult woman’s voice saying empty aphorisms about what a good job her dad is doing. Right, you think, so his daughter recorded him these messages, so she’s probably dead – where is this going to go?

Where it goes is the shocking revelation that – oh no! – she’s dead! And from this we’re asked to feel an emotional response, with your companions leadenly explaining that it’s emotional, you see. Meaningless platitudes from a dead daughter playing out as you complete the task of a dead father. It’s an embarrassment, as if saying, “SOMEONE IS DEAD, SO THERE IS SADNESS!” is how it works. It could have been handled delicately, the messages could have been subtle, messages of genuine complicated love between a father and daughter, a short story playing out as you learn of their trials and their grief. That he never got to hear these messages from his dying daughter should have been the hook, should have tugged at the player, played on our own emotional attachments to parents and children. Instead, as with every part of the game’s writing, it was flat, perfunctory and robotic.