The Escapist Users have ruined a game for me...

[Adeptus Aspartem]

Tell me about it.
I played ME1 & 2 roughly 10 times and i've never even bothered to buy ME3 because the internet & the escapist ruined it for me.

 

[Nieroshai]

Far Cry 4 suffers from the same problem RAGE did.

You're fighting the government from the start of the game for no clear reason.

He stabbed a guy with a pen? Well, that guy DID almost kill you, and people on the bus died. Extreme response, but maybe there's a death penalty for such actions.

He stabbed a chap at dinner? Well, he WAS a member of a terrorist organisation, was he not? Sure, proceeding to torture the guy was a bit on the iffy side, but... not 100% convincing.

In Far Cry 3, Vaas shoots your brother and then tells you to run for your life. His malice is immediately established. You are given clear motivations.

(I think FC3 has vastly better writing than FC4, despite FC3 being self-indulgently arty-farty.)

Well you see, there's a reason Pagan can be let go in the end (basically letting you inherit what's his) and you can immediately shoot the faction leader who double-crosses you in their ending. The hidden Choice 3: Fuck Everyone!

 

[Evonisia]

Well, the only game that ever came close to being ruined for me by, not just the Escapist, but gamers everywhere, was Portal. And that's because nobody could shut the fuck up about it and stop being so delightfully witty with those goddamn cake references. Also they ruined the companion cube by turning it into a freaking mascotte. It was Pyramid Head all over again.

B-b-but, the companion cube is bae ;-(

Luckily I missed all this hype, only played Portal (and TF2) because I wanted to play Half-Life 2, so the Portal hype still lives within me.

These forums brought up how good of a character Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite is like everyone else. Infinite bores the fuck out of me anyway, but I imagine I would have found the characters a bit enjoyable if people didn't bring up how she's not really a damsel in distress, or how it's her game and you're the escort target or that she's not a Mary Sue, honest.

Her just being an evil ***** was a jarring experience throughout the whole game; I kept waiting for the point where all these compliments would hold actual weight but it never came. It could have been interesting to see Booker so devoted to a ***** of this level, but that's not where my mind was. Booker isn't strong enough to hold the game up on his own. Thank Christ that Ellie turned out to be a good character so the forums didn't spoil The Last of Us for me, too.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Am I the only one who doesn't get the Gary joke?

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

So...you're upset that the community pointed out games have plot holes?
I hate to be snarky, but what games have you been playing where Far Cry 4 is the first one you've seen a plot hole? Basically, if a game has a plot, assume there is at least one plot hole.
So I guess Candy Crush and maybe Roller Coaster Tycoon wouldn't have them.

As for me the game that was ruined by all the "Snort! Elegant debates on the nature of narrative story telling and game mechanics over glasses of aged brandy! Snort!" that the community kept having was The Stanley Parable.

I thought it was great, and still do, but I hate talking about it. People always bring up "Its not a game!" and "Gone Home sucks!" and the absolute worst in my opinion, "You just don't get it."

Its a game. A fun and clever game, to be sure. But a game none the less. There isn't a whole lot to get outside of its a game, enjoy it.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Her just being an evil ***** was a jarring experience throughout the whole game; I kept waiting for the point where all these compliments would hold actual weight but it never came. It could have been interesting to see Booker so devoted to a ***** of this level, but that's not where my mind was. Booker isn't strong enough to hold the game up on his own. Thank Christ that Ellie turned out to be a good character so the forums didn't spoil The Last of Us for me, too.

Actually I got incredibly sick of the Ellie hype right before TLoU got released, what with all the 'Ooh look, she's a girl and she's on the front cover'. It got to a point where I really fucking hated her before I even touched the game, because of all the articles hyping up how special she was. Yet this ended up working to the game's advantage in my case, because at the start Joel doesn't want to have anything to do with this fucking kid and neither did I. So it really helped to put me in his mindset.

 

[happyninja42]

snip

I wouldn't say it's our fault that you noticed the poorly designed plot for that game. xD I would say it's the fact that you are a reasonably intelligent being who can tell a thin, poorly constructed plot with a total lack of realistic motivation for the actions taking place. So don't blame us for your keen intelligence!....on second thought, YES! Blame us! It's our fault that you are now more skilled in noticing poor writing/storytelling. YOU'RE WELCOME!! xD

 

[webkilla]

It never makes much sense that a single person should be fighting and winning a whole war - that just doesn't make sense.

Yeah, that one irritates me a bit too.

Not so much that it's one person doing all the fighting, but that the story often has to bend over backwards to provide some kind of 'We Win' button so that the world can conceivably be saved by the direct actions of just 1-10 heavily armed people.

That said - there are several games that come to mind that have execute that plot fairly well

any game where its clear that you're just one soldier among many, usually ofc a super special force one, but none the less..

Games like C&C Renegade comes to mind, or even Half Life 2 where the whole damn point was that you weren't winning the war, as much as inspiring the popular revolt.

 

[happyninja42]

It never makes much sense that a single person should be fighting and winning a whole war - that just doesn't make sense.

Yeah, that one irritates me a bit too.

Not so much that it's one person doing all the fighting, but that the story often has to bend over backwards to provide some kind of 'We Win' button so that the world can conceivably be saved by the direct actions of just 1-10 heavily armed people.

That said - there are several games that come to mind that have execute that plot fairly well

any game where its clear that you're just one soldier among many, usually ofc a super special force one, but none the less..

Games like C&C Renegade comes to mind, or even Half Life 2 where the whole damn point was that you weren't winning the war, as much as inspiring the popular revolt.

I chalk a lot of that up to the apparent difficulty in writing truly challenging opponent/ally AI in shooter style games. It's just really hard to code the number of creative methods by which a player might try and fight a battle, and also to convey those ideas to a large force. So, in most cases, the ally AI is just sort of on autopilot, meaning the player has to actually be the driving wedge in the battle. Also, none of them have access to the players healing abilities, so they just die after they get hurt. So yeah, the reality of the game itself, is that the driving agency is almost exclusively the player, which sadly translates into a "you won the war for us!" kind of scenario, even with how unrealistic that is.

 

[CaitSeith]

eh there are VERY few games in life that I don't notice gripes/inconsistencies, but I usually can ignore them and just have fun, I have a very low maintenance style of enjoyment when it comes to entertainment (this applies to movies/games/tv shows/etc..) so the little things don't tend to bug me much or I just ignore them.

All that said, there are some games that have been "ruined" for me. Such as hearthstone, I used to play the game just for fun and to try out interesting card combos, but anytime I've seen someone talk about it on here (and been seeing it in the game more lately) it seems like everyone is fucking HARDCORE as possible about winning and couldn't give two shits about if the game is fun or if they came up with anything themselves. If they aren't playing the exact card combos the pros are playing, then they are failing miserably and insist on scrounging over pro decks until they find the next "lol, win" deck.

So as of late, the game just hasn't been much fun at all, it's gotten way too edgy for my tastes and the game isn't accounting for bigger playstyles so I'll probably be done with it.

the next one could be a bit flame baity, but meh, my opinion, so whatever

Mass effect 3

I read up on spoiler-less reviews before playing the game, so my bar was already set pretty low...played through the game myself, absorbing just about everything an average rpg player would in their first playthrough, and thought "ehh...that ending was pretty fucking shit, but the rest of the game wasn't too bad...so overall I didn't mind it, I suppose."

huge mistake to get on the forums after that...there were so many plotholes and choices from previous games that I hadn't thought about that were either retro-actively destroyed/changed/didn't matter based on what the third game did, so not only was my view now skewed about the third games trash it had brought with it, but it almost ruined the previous two games as well for me, thankfully I came to terms with the bullshit and have just kept the first two games separate from the third one and retconned it. But in all my years of gaming, I've never had something bug me like that did; after combing back over the plot, the choices, and all the other shit that happened back then, it just put one hell of a sour taste in my mouth and I've all but sworn off mass effect besides the first two games.


(that wasn't mean to stir up anyone, so if you enjoyed mass effect 3, by all means, great! I don't want to take away from your enjoyment of it.)

OK. I missed the ME train (and ME3 trainwreak). So I decided to play the first two games before getting into the third one, so I could understand why everybody was so freaked up about the ending. But as you're telling me, it wasn't just the ending, but several other things I never heard about. Now I want to check it out more than before...

OT: Not the forum, but Zero Punctuation. I was still playing Amnesia: Machine for Pigs at that time, when I decided to watch the episode, and he spoiled the game for me (thank you, Yatzhee). Since then, I don't watch ZP for games I'm interested in playing.

 

[Therumancer]

Far Cry 4 suffers from the same problem RAGE did.

You're fighting the government from the start of the game for no clear reason.

He stabbed a guy with a pen? Well, that guy DID almost kill you, and people on the bus died. Extreme response, but maybe there's a death penalty for such actions.

He stabbed a chap at dinner? Well, he WAS a member of a terrorist organisation, was he not? Sure, proceeding to torture the guy was a bit on the iffy side, but... not 100% convincing.

In Far Cry 3, Vaas shoots your brother and then tells you to run for your life. His malice is immediately established. You are given clear motivations.

(I think FC3 has vastly better writing than FC4, despite FC3 being self-indulgently arty-farty.)

To be honest with you I think Ubi-Soft as a whole has been too artsy with their games in recent years. I've noticed this whole tendency towards wanting to play surreal games with perception, whether it's using encoded DNA to have people re-live previous lives (which is actually a plot by super computers from a precursor race to plant clues experienced through time so people in the present can avert a disaster), or constantly having characters pump themselves full of drugs to experience hallucinogenic altered states of consciousness. I haven't played Far Cry 4 (though I have heard mention this trend considered) it seemed to me that in Far Cry 3 the game conspired to have Jason high out of his brain as much as possible, I mean the stuff with Citra was at least plot centric (and sort of sold her not being a nice person despite attempts to butter you up), but less than an hour in the game had the hero stumbling through a cave full of hallucinogenic mushrooms and going coo-coo for some pretty thin reasons. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Ubisoft is run by a bunch of old school hippy LSD maniacs.

That said I do have to agree that I do have a few questions about the morality expressed in some of these games. For example in Assassin's Creed The Templars might be ruthless but I can't entirely see what's so bad about them as an organization, individuals seem to vary, and at the end of the day the Assassin's seem just as bad or worse. I remember in AC IV walking around with Captain Kidd and she sits there and pretty much quotes "The Satanic Bible", the whole "... and the only law shall be do as you will" or something very close to it, to which Edward reasonably asks the same thing I was wondering in the terms of "well, how do you run global society that way" to which the answer is "well, it's a work in progress". In the previous game I come running up and kill some Templar for being brutal with the Native Americans only to learn he was being ruthless but was trying to save them and was actually supposed to have predicted what was going to happen, in a way this means Connor became responsible for the seeds that lead to later genocide and extermination. In most of these games it seems to be a general case of some trippy ancient super computers suggesting they like the Assassin's better, but otherwise the good guys go around fighting the other guys without much in the way of forethought or a plan. The only thing they ever achieved was Desmond saving the world and that was less him than a couple of super computers not wanting to be straightforward and say leaving a giant stone monument saying in English (given their capabilities) "Solar Flare coming on these dates, here is the solution".

That said I'll get around to playing FC4 but from what I've heard the explanation for why everyone looks to you as some great savior is how your family was prominent in the region, and while the character has never been there, his bloodline has meaning, and when he returns for the funeral (I think that's what it's supposed to be) he's largely brought in as the leader specifically to resolve the deadlock due to the lineage and specifically because he has the clear perspective of looking in from the outside. That said from what people have also told me, what choices you make do very little to actually change anything in terms of how the game plays out. It's pretty much a recycling of the whole "Chosen One" thing from FC3 except it's sincere, as opposed to being part of a plot by some insane jungle priestess, who your told pretty early on by Vaas is even crazier than he is.

That said the biggest criticisms of FC4 that I've been hearing is that despite the different local the whole "Golden Path" idea is too much of an analogy to the whole "Shining Path" movement in Peru who while wearing the mantle of freedom fighters are a pretty nasty group of terrorists in their own right. I sort of let the whole bit with the first AC character and the one who started it all being an Arab killing Crusaders go despite some initial comments, but as time goes on it seems like Ubisoft likes to go out of it's way to pick things that are going to be controversial if you get the real world analogies or what certain groups are based off of, even if the stories themselves wind up being very black and white and stereotypical in the way they play out.

I've also been wondering in AC in particular if the eventual reveal down the road is going to be that despite some real bastards in the Templars (Assassins have them too) you've been fighting for the wrong side in the various games. I can't help but think that quoting the Satanic Bible was not an accident in AC IV, nor pointing out that for all their belief in freedom the Assassins have no real plan, spreading and tearing things down, while hoping the rest of the world will pick up the shattered pieces.

That said I'm waiting to see if the rumors are true and Ubisoft is setting an upcoming game in Imperial China, which could be interesting if done correctly.

 

[Evonisia]

Her just being an evil ***** was a jarring experience throughout the whole game; I kept waiting for the point where all these compliments would hold actual weight but it never came. It could have been interesting to see Booker so devoted to a ***** of this level, but that's not where my mind was. Booker isn't strong enough to hold the game up on his own. Thank Christ that Ellie turned out to be a good character so the forums didn't spoil The Last of Us for me, too.

Actually I got incredibly sick of the Ellie hype right before TLoU got released, what with all the 'Ooh look, she's a girl and she's on the front cover'. It got to a point where I really fucking hated her before I even touched the game, because of all the articles hyping up how special she was. Yet this ended up working to the game's advantage in my case, because at the start Joel doesn't want to have anything to do with this fucking kid and neither did I. So it really helped to put me in his mindset.

I read most of The Last of Us hype post-launch, so my perspective from like July 2013 until I got play it last June or whenever it was that Ellie and Joel had a really strong father-daughter type relationship and the game largely focused on that. So I was just thinking for the first five or so hours "this must be building up to it" and I did get my fill and then some.

In fact it was the father/daughter relationship that would have redeemed BioShock Infinite's characters, given that the only other characters of focus are the cartoon villain and the totally-not Good and Evil Angel characters.

For all my nits to pick from The Last of Us, Joel and Ellie's relationship wasn't one of them, but thanks for trying to spoil it beforehand Escapist <3

 

[deathbydeath]

Well, the only game that ever came close to being ruined for me by, not just the Escapist, but gamers everywhere, was Portal. And that's because nobody could shut the fuck up about it and stop being so delightfully witty with those goddamn cake references. Also they ruined the companion cube by turning it into a freaking mascotte. It was Pyramid Head all over again.

Oh my Jepus Christ this. They didn't even qualify as jokes because they were all "cake lolz"! It's the same thing with Mass Effect 2+. Sure it's cute that Bioware's excuse for not giving Garrus more dialogue is lazy but "lel Garrus calibrates things" is not a joke by any rational definition!

 

[Casual Shinji]

Oh my Jepus Christ this. They didn't even qualify as jokes because they were all "cake lolz"! It's the same thing with Mass Effect 2+. Sure it's cute that Bioware's excuse for not giving Garrus more dialogue is lazy but "lel Garrus calibrates things" is not a joke by any rational definition!

You know, I played the Mass Effect games quite a bit, and I honestly never caught on to Garrus' calibrating obsession till people started making jokes about. Even now when replaying the games I have to really pay attention to catch it.

 

[Batou667]

Far Cry 4 suffers from the same problem RAGE did.

Oh God, thiiiis. I know ultimately every game is just a set of interactive mechanics governed by gameplay rules overlaid with a pretty facade of buildings, corridors and skyboxes, but Rage was just so damn transparent about it - and after such a promising intro, too. You go from venerated, quasi-mythical vault dweller to some schmuck getting fetch quests barked at him in precisely four minutes. Fuck, and indeed, that.

 

[Denamic]

If that bothers you then you are going to get that in a lot of games because "hey random person I just meet and who I should give no fucks about the opinion of! Can you make this important decision for me?" seems fairly common, at least it is if you play RPGs.

The worst time I encountered that was in Season 2 of The Walking Dead. So, we're this group of grown up survivors that just escaped from some terrible guy, and we're really worried about our security, since there's a pregnant woman and a young girl with some degree of psychological issues, so what should we do now...

Well I dunno! Let's ask this random 10yr old girl for life or death decisions I guess!!!

I loved the game, but this gets too stupid, to the point of a grown man armed with a rifle asking for Clementine of all people, if he should take the shot. "Hey child that is already scarred enough, what is your opinion on blowing that man's head to kingdom come? Bear in mind that I will only shoot if you say that's a good idea, so the decision is on you!".

One does not survive travelling through the zombie apocalypse unless they're at least somewhat capable, child or not. It's survival of the fittest, and she's survived a lot. That means something. And asking someone else about whether they should go through with something significant is a common psychological tactic used to absolve yourself of some of the responsibility.

 

[regalphantom]

I know that feeling. I was expecting a pretty big backlash from the Krogans in my "evil Shep" playthrough but nope. Nothing.

Then there was me picking Anderson to be human councillor suddenly ME3 Udina. WTF?

To be honest I personally feel that Udina becoming the Councillor actually makes a bit of sense. Anderson was never really happy being on the counsel (he's a soldier not a politician) and its not surprising, particularly after Shepard's arrest, and Udina is the only obvious candidate to replace him, already being an insider on council politics. Its also possible that Udina was manipulating Anderson into seeing more and more reason to return to the field.

Then again, I feel that Mass Effect can best be interpreted as a story about the conflict between destiny and choice (since most of your choices have little impact on the overall wellbeing of the galaxy).

 

[tippy2k2]

Am I the only one who doesn't get the Gary joke?

It's a joke that I stole from Zero Punctuation way back in the day when he blamed a specific name for something with the joke being that that particular person would be confused.

It seems like you've finally stumble upon Ludonarrative Disco Biscuits. Jim has that covered.

Gary was here.

[sub]Tippy2k is a loser[/sub]

That's the video that basically ruined my ability to ignore issues like this (specifically the Tomb Raider stuff).

Also, I hate that tippy2k guy too! He's not nearly as awesome and sexy as I, tippy2k2!

 

[esserin]

For tomb raider, I just told myself that the reason for the dissonance is because the magic island is messing with your head. It wants everybody to become murder happy and "ooh, new people to drive insane."