Final Fantasy 13. I didn't like the feeling of playing a tutorial that lasted until the damn endgame... Also, while all FF games had unlikeable characters, I didn't find one in 13 that I didn't want to murder... I actually preferred Tidus over any other character in 13, hell I ALMOST would have taken Vaan over any other character in 13... thats how bad it was to me. Battle system was weak and boring and the whole ranking after battle thing just irked me to no end...
I actually would have taken another X2 over 13... I mean I could go on and on, I even liked Mass Effect 3's endings more than the ENTIRE GAME OF FF13. And thats not hyperbole for me.
A game I was certainly burnt by was RAGE, this game turned out to be rather good, nice gameplay mechanics, cool scavenging and I ended up hoarding tons of materials for missions I never had to use them for and you know why? Because at what appears to be a halfway point through the game it ends, boom just like that. You don't need money, metals, materials, gadgets or anything, they hand you a big ass gatling gun, you run through a couple hallways and then boom the game ends just like that. It wasn't even a good ending, it was literally a 13 second cutscene with no explanation and then its over. Biggest waste of potential I have ever seen in my life.
SHORT VERSION: It's the most overhyped, buggy ass piece of shit I've played in the last decade.
I played it brand new on PC, on a brand new PC so I was subject to the...
What's the Bethesda Lottery? Well, either you have the hardware that Gamebryo likes and the game works fine, or you don't and deal with frequent random crashes and hilarious glitches. It has less to do with the quality of your GPU, and more of how close it is to the Xbox 360, because just like Oblivion, the 360 version was the ONLY version Bethesda gave a fuck about and optimized for.
...all over again just like Oblivion.
And this was inspite of Bethesda claiming that they were going to fix their buggy ass Gamebryo engine...ha!
Joke's on me, once again I get to deal with crashes every 30 minutes! QUALITY CONTROL? OPTIMIZATION? ON PC???
The fuck are those? Turns out Pete Hines was just talking out of his ass again. Last Bethesda game I ever bought and it appears that I've missed fuck-all since then.
*Ahem*, well even playing the more stable 360 version at a friend's, the game was still grossly overrated.
Playing through, I was treated to one of the most stupid, plot-hole ridden, stories in AAA gaming with a fantastically stupid ending. (so bad that the community backlash caused Bethesda to change it; in hindsight, this almost seems like a quaint prelude to what would come year later with Mass Effect 3)
And worse: "consequence-free role playing".
OK, to understand my anger, you have to realize that at the time, when Fallout 3 was new, there was immensely positive buzz over Fallout 3; proclaiming loudly about the depth of its "immersion". Even our resident "I act like I hate everything because it makes for easy comedy [sub](despite my claims to the contrary)"[/sub] Yahtzee Croshaw gushed over Fallout 3.
...Yeah, that turned out to be bullshit, as Fallout 3 has the "immersion" of a rain-gutter.
Because nothing the player does really matters.
I will do my best to describe why with something I call...
Early on, the player encounters a small walled town called "Megaton", so named because the folk curiously (by which I mean INCREDIBLY FOOLISHLY) built their town around an undetonated Atomic Bomb.
In town, you are approached by two individuals, effectively asking if you can defuse the bomb, or rig it to remotely detonate. The latter of which is this slimy 1950s suit like a gangster or shady G-man, who represents a heartless entrepreneur named "Tenpenny". He wants Megaton eliminated since it's competition to the development of his Tenpenny Tower.
Fine, Tenpenny is an evil selfish bastard but that FITS in a post-apocalyptic setting. Cool.
I played it both ways, defuse it and you get a shanty in Megaton with a few minor perks. It's the, boring safe "nice choice".
Besides, apart from Moira Brown, everyone else in Megaton is as memorable and important as mud.
So, upon reloading, I instead rig the bomb to explode in exchange for some blood money and a safe haven at Tenpenny Tower.
Cool; I'm helping a kind of cool villain and his right hand man clear some land of competition, I wonder what he wants me to do next?
ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING.
This sums up the biggest problem I have with the entire game. NOTHING THE PLAYER DOES REALLY MATTERS AT ALL.
You would think eliminating one of the few established, stable communities in the area would have some sort of impact. Nope! Just some Bad Karma and a free room at Tenpenny Tower. Not a soul even comments on the recent nearby nuclear detonation, and this is supposedly several decades after the bombs fell. People shouldn't be THAT familiar with them anymore.
Really, Tenpenny does NOTHING ELSE going forward with his plans. He just sits in his highrise chair looking like a smug git for the rest of the game. Fuck, you can just put a bullet in his head right there, and it changes NOTHING. Nobody cares. You get some Good Karma, and go about your business. Nobody cares that the head of one of the most exclusionary, safe communities in the wasteland is dead.
There is literally NO POINT to destroying Megaton except to watch a cheap ingame cutscene of watching a bomb go off. Blow it up, reload your game. There, you've missed absolutely nothing.
Whoopty fucking doo.
And the Bad Karma? Easily fixed by chucking some clean water at a beggar in front of Rivet City.
Like going to some perverse form of Confessional. (this is some World of Darkness Lankte Sanctum shit)
Upon realizing just how stupid the game was, I made a new character to make a point.
He was the Culligan Man Crusader, whose sole goal in life was to annihilate every unique NPC the game would let me save for those in need of water. And so I did; I went on a mass-murdering spree across the greater DC Area, stole their clean water and gave it all to Carlos out in front of Rivet City.
And the hell of it was that I was lauded as a SAINT in the ending because of my high Good Karma.
Clean Bottles of Water outnumbered the number of dead innocents I left in my wake. So as far as the game was concerned, I was a "Nice Guy". (yes, I realize how stupid the Karma System was; that was part of the point behind the Culligan Man Crusader)
Honestly, without a hint of sarcasm, this was the closest I could come to role playing in Fallout 3, where choice is ultimately inconsequential because of the bipolar design. Hell, even the main story ultimately revolves around a Water Purifier. (and some batshit insane writing and reasoning; not the good type either, the really really stupid type)
I use Megaton because it was their big lead-in in Fallout 3. It was pitched a major choice.
I distinctly remember how it was showcased in their live demo the week before launch.
This was their best foot forward, and it ultimately amounts to nothing.
Ultimately, there is no significant permanent consequence for virtually anything.
Maybe a missed perk here, or a unique weapon there, but never anything that really matters because Bethesda is just so afraid of alienating players by making them feel things like regret, worry, or tension.
Once I realized how inconsequential and pointless everything is, any sense of immersion vanished completely.
And most of my first playthrough was looking for things of consequence. I'll spare you further examples and just say that I found nothing, and I combed the fucking world pretty thoroughly looking.
At that point, all I could do was hunt for unique collectibles (guns, armor, magazines and bobble heads).
Because the story sure as fuck isn't leading up to anything good.
Yahtzee said the game spreads itself too thin, and quite frankly, he was being far too kind.
Beneath the nifty setting (which Bethesda can't really take credit for) is a hollow shell of a game.
And that more than anything pisses me off about Fallout 3. It's a colossal waste of potential.
And this coming from someone who didn't play either of the previous Fallout titles prior to Fallout 3; I went into the series with no previous biases either for or against it. This is evaluating Fallout 3 purely on its own merits.
I remember original fans being a bit pissed back when Fallout was new, but I couldn't claim to know why.
Since then I have played a bit of Fallout 1, I could tell immediately, within the first fucking HOUR of play why many fans of the originals called Fallout 3 watered down shit. Because during my brief play time, the role-playing actually mattered. Far more than it ever did in the entirety of Fallout 3. At least there were some consequences for my actions.
I remember foolishly telling a "water delivery service" the location of my vault, still trapped in the consequence-free mindset, and it ultimately cost me precious time and threatened an attack.
While I haven't played Fallout 1 to its conclusion yet, at least what I saw showed that there was purpose to it beyond being an utterly hollow, overly elaborate graphical tech demo.
Quite frankly, I'll be stunned if anyone reads this through. Though I will say for once, I'm not just ranting; I have reasons why I hated Fallout 3, and how it "burned" me.
Happened a lot more when I was younger, I would see that a game was coming out and go buy it launch day based on name value alone. The best example I have was Goldeneye Rogue Agent, my brother and I each had our own Gamecubes and we both bought it on release day, we took it home, went to our rooms, then after a few hours were very unhappy. I never even beat the game, I just got sick of the terrible AI and boring levels, my brother beat it and told me I didn't miss anything.
As for recently, I was burned when I bought the Splinter Cell collection on Steam because I knew that Conviction was very different from the original game I loved but I didn't expected Double Agent to um, not work. It literally doesn't work properly, SC1 and Chaos Theory had excellent controls with really smooth graphics and interfaces, Double Agent feels like I am playing an xbox emulator, the game doesn't allow you to rebind many controls for keyboard, lost a lot of the extra movement options that were necessary, SC1 and Chaos Theory used the mousewheel to overcome the lack of joysticks, press W and then spin the mousewheel to control how fast you walk, which was nice for sneaking and didn't limit things to the basic 3 run modes of sprint, walk, or run like many games have. Double Agent didn't have this, at least as far as I could tell, also the graphics were bugged, they looked like they were stolen from Borderland's art style with cartoony low-res versions of environments that felt like they were missing their textures, I stared at a wall thinking the texture would pop in but it never did, that was the proper texture and it looked like Borderlands being run on a Gameboy. Also, since keys couldn't be rebound it required a controller to play properly and I didn't have one at the time and have no intention of going back now that I have one.
Also, I feel emotionally burned by Mass Effect 3, I am one of the people who was completely blind-sided by the ending, I played through it, was really attached to the characters, so much so that ME2 was dreadful because I had pursued Ashley as the LI and hated how empty ME2 was without her, and then the story in ME3 took her away for a long time and then the ending happened and I was the only one of my friends who had the boring enough life to beat the game without 48hours of release. I spent a few weeks really depressed while my friends were talking about how great the story was. When one friend walked in to school the next day he looked like his dad had died or something and we asked him what was wrong and he said he finished ME3, we spent the whole day being extra nice to him. Even though I never got the nice treatment .
I have games that I bought that I regret paying any large amount of money for but other than ME3 and Double Agent, most of my purchases haven't left me burned as of late, I am wondering if I should buy the Season Pass for Bioshock Infinite and playthrough Episode 1 or if I should wait until Episode 2 comes out because I hear Episode 1 is short and ends on a cliffhanger and I have an aversion to cliffhangers after ME3 ruined it for me and I am still very nervous about Witcher 3
Team Ninja...I don't know what you did to Metroid, but I don't think I can ever love again. (I'm sorry Retro Studios, I know they gave the franchise back to you but...I don't think my heart can take another one...)
MvC3. I needed a Megaman fix and this happened to look pretty nice... but what I got was a 60 dollar beta. I'm now quite aware that you never buy a non-Monster-Hunter Capcom title on release, just wait a year for the Ultimate-Super-Ultimate-Arcade-Ultimate-Gold-Ultimate version.
Worst thing is that they didn't even have Megaman, or add him into the Ultimate version. Had a small amount of fun with Johnny Young Zero though I suppose...
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