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Telling the story through the game is what I was driving at before - immersion.
'Collect 10 goblin pelts' tells me a story about dev laziness / managerial dictatorship, not the world. Just playing through Bioshock for the first time now, and the theme is precise and well conceived. Everything in the world feels like it belongs there. "Dead City in RAGE was more immersive than anything in any previous ID game."
Dead City was definitely cool! It also has a proper name and was built up as a scary place in the game before you went. Immersion doesn't just happen, people. :) City 17! Gordon! Dog! With names so bland, it's obvious that Valve didn't give a shit about Half Life 2!
Never mind. I forgot how obstinate this board can be. Fuck.
I apologize for questioning the almighty id. Gordon!
It's definitely a lot less bland than, say, Jack, though. When I see that name pop up too often as the main protagonist's name in games (or even film), I just feel sad that they couldn't just flip through a baby name book or do a simple google search to find a more interesting alternative. Whether you were kidding or serious, it's still something I just had to mention regarding this subject...
I take your point about the realism/immersion factor being a little lacking because of lame ass naming of stuff. And the incoherency of the travel element.
But (IMO) the environments and AI were great! I just mean that the 'shooting sections' seemed fast and fun to play. The guns felt good. "Indeed. You fit in well here."
Right. Look, I see now in hindsight that arguing this sort of thing on a message board filled with people who love and adore a 16 year old shooter was probably a mistake. In that design context, yes, names and world cohesion and that sort of thing are basically irrelevant. I get that now, sorry. Ricky's post sums it up. World was pretty and guns felt good. That's the benchmark, OK. But the thing is, on the other hand, if you intend on finding alledged immersion-breakers such as names and start looking around, you can find them everywhere in one way or another.
You do have a point - but it doesn't exclude the possibility that other people may be well immersed regardless of such things, maybe even appreciate the simple, to-the-point hooks that such stereotype names suggest. From a personal viewpoint, I enjoyed Rage about as much as I enjoyed Duke Nukem Forever.
Spent 15-20 hours on them roughly. Skyrim - 130hrs Battlefeild Bad Company 2 - 200hrs or something. Left 4 Dead - 150hrs maybe. UT3 - played that quite a lot too I guess. GOW (1) - must have spent 60 or 70 hours on that on the 360 when it came out. But yeah - world was pretty and guns felt good, like Quake (very incoherent immersion but great graphics and gameplay), and Doom (for it's time) - great graphics and gameplay, but not much of a backstory either. Not to say that the fact that the stories were lacking is a good thing, it isn't, but did I enjoy them - YES! Metro 2033 is another example. It had all three factors - great graphics, good gameplay and a very cohesive and immersive backstory/theme. But did I play it loads? NO! not really. I dunno, it just seemed a little stressful and dingy. I fully agree with you about Rage on most levels. TBH the English wasteland punk enemies from Rage were just downright terrible! Fake English accents yelling 'Wankahh!' at me all the time. Felt good to shoot the annoying little bastards in the face, just to shut them up. But the visuals in Rage were great. Just not when you were up-close. Then they looked pixelated. I hope Doom 4 is better. From the look of some of those leaked screenshots, it possibly could be. But hopefully they wont fill the game with annoying cockney enemies that yell 'Wankahh!' all the time. I'd rather go and play dynamic, squad based games of the uber-pretty BFBC2. Now that is fun. And immersive. And the backstory kinda sucks (WWIII - ruskies v yanks). But it's really fun. Yeah, it's sort of a top down problem. If they can't even be bothered to come up with decent names for factions, what are the chances the rest of the game is good? Think it over.
I take issue with the logic that 'bland names = designers don't care.' That's just shitty logic. Feel however you want about Rage, I don't think anyone here gives a shit about that, but that kind of thinking just doesn't make sense. The names may not be interesting (perhaps they were interesting to id) but imo they fit the wasteland extremely well. They are short, to the point, and they accurately describe the faction in question. Sure, that may be less interesting, but it better fits in with a wasteland scenario. When someone says 'the Authority' you can get a pretty good idea right away about who they are - that kind of thing fits in well in a place where danger is around every corner. So if the names are uninteresting, fine, I'm not arguing that, I'm arguing against your terrible, terrible logic. Reviewed Call of Duty 4. Pretty cool game, but a bit overrated with all the "game of the year" awards. Crysis was better.
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/reviews/2012/call_of_duty4_modern_warfare.php 8.5/10 Shrek racing game, our speed boost pickup was called ROCKET PANTS.
The publisher took it upon themselves to rename it to "fairy dust". Know where the awesome is there.
But hey, the industry got rid of distributors quite efficiently, it shouldn't take long to bin the large publishing firms that cause this committee design shite. The indy and garage developers are taking a non-marginal slice of the pie, and growing, as quickly as the big boys are laying off 00's of staff. I've just finished this.
What a bad game. I can not remember ever having played a game in which I did not die once. Well, I did one time when I went too far from the objective. The game decided to kill me, out of the blue. I actually tried it again and got killed the same way. All the fights are more or less the same. Get behind something and shoot at the bad guys from behind there. There is absolutely no need to upgrade your weapons, the normal pistol could get you true the whole game. At one time I was supposed to activate 2, ehm, things in the map. There were lots of enemies around. I just ignored them and pushed the buttons and that triggered a cutscene. If you look at the game stripped to the core basics, you are left with mostly random shooting bits in very very simple made maps. The maps look nice (decent anyway...), but you can only walk as far as the invisible walls allow you to. The playable part of the maps are so bad that they wouldn't even be rated on Quaddicted. Often it's just hallways surrounded by inaccessible map areas. The sidemissions are the dumbest thing I've ever seen in games. You walk in the Citadel and overhear people talking about stuff they want. That stuff you can get from doing planet scanning, a part of the game most doable after smoking some cannabis sativa. If you already did all the planet scanning thing, you don't have to search for anything anymore and just collect your reward from the people with the red squares around there head. And then there is the interaction part. Maybe it's got something to do with my being Dutch and not having a degree in English, but it looks very much open to interpretation. I can't recall a specific moment in 3, but I've got one from 2: At one point an alien spoke to me about a spider queen I released in the 1st game. One of the options was to say: "Tell her to be good". I choose that one. I thought it was a nice thing to say but my character made it into a warning ! And then there is the love aspect in the game. I chose to save the games being a faithful and a not cheating partner to the blue girl. Sure, she was nice to me for the pre-endgame battle, but before that she used to greet me by saying "Shepard", or "Nice to see you". That's fucking love for you And then there is the ending. It is so mindbogglingly stupid that I regret not only playing part 3, but the whole series. But the point I'm trying to make is this: The game gets stupidly great reviews from almost all the gaming media. One of the best games ever, they dare say. The reviews I've seen on the internet say more about the state of our planet then about Mass Effect's, I'm afraid My score, for what it's worth 04/10 Got very bored very quickly, and never played it again. But the character you play in the game is annoying, the shooting is *ahem* CRAP, and the LD is frustrating.
So yeah - nice to see an honest review of the game, from someone who shares my opinion of it:)
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