Mad Max

[brkl]

It seems to me like the most applicable bits of Mad Max have been incorporated into different games long ago. I don't know what more a license can give us.

[Twig]

don't worry

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Sq1BliEZg

 

mad max has a love interest now

[Merus]

yyyyyyyyeah there wasn't a lot about this I liked

 

there wasn't a lot about the Darksiders storyline I liked, either, but I'm willing to look past that if the rest of it is really good

 

but it's probably too late for Miller to swoop in and give them some pointers on how to wrench the tone in the right direction

[Twig]

I'm not convinced it's even possible to make an open-world double-digit-hours long Mad Max game that actually has a tone like Fury Road. I feel like the second you let the player control Max, you're stuck in this world where Max has a ton of agency and that agency is just Being a Bad Ass All Day Long.

 

It still looks like it'll be fun to play. But then again it's a trailer so it may still turn out shit. Who knows!

[melmer]

1st September. Same day MGSV comes out, oh dear :/ I'll pick this up in the December/January lull

[Kolzig]

Never cared about Just Cause that much but I am optimistic about this one. I just loved the movie so much when I saw it in the premiere.

Hopefully they can reach the level of George Miller's insanity.

[Merus]

I feel like the second you let the player control Max, you're stuck in this world where Max has a ton of agency and that agency is just Being a Bad Ass All Day Long.

 

Yeah, you're probably right - like, a lot of the tone of Mad Max is that he adamantly refuses to get involved in other people's problems, and the movies are very clever about how they show him being trapped into helping. You'd have to balance it like a survival game, except you also have obligations as a resource. Of course, you can't kill Mad Max, but survival games are all about killing the player so that the player knows that death is never far away.

 

(Wait, what if instead of Max dying, he fainted, and turned up in a settlement where there were People there who Needed His Help, so 'obligations' became a death mechanic as well.)

 

Still, there's other problems - the Ozploitation tone's definitely not there (the names in that trailer are absolutely not silly enough, and the 'awesome' stuff needs to cross the line twice a little more). It's going to be a problem if Borderlands out-crazies Mad Max.

[osmosisch]

Just watched Mad Max 1 in preparation for tonight. Holy moly, that's depressing.

[Bjorn]

It's going to be a problem if Borderlands out-crazies Mad Max.

 

I hadn't really thought about Borderlands basically being a Mad Max game, but it is.  They also (at least 2 and the Pre-Sequel) draw on feminism influences a lot more than I expect any Mad Max game too. 

[Dewar]

Just watched Mad Max 1 in preparation for tonight. Holy moly, that's depressing.

 

Mad Max 2 would have probably been more appropriate. 

 

In other news, Jeff Gerstmann, fresh from E3 judges week, reports a pretty solid "meh" on this week's Bombcast. While some of the things he's talking about do concern me (Assasin's Creed tower climbing to reveal the map for instance) I'm still willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Jeff is "meh" about most everything.

[natellite]

I'm not trying to be a negative Nancy just on principle, but... it's a post-apocalyptic open-world driving game with batman combat, a gruff stubbly white protagonist, and tower scaling to reveal the map. It's like a laundry list of features from annualized games that everyone has already played to death. 

[BobbyBesar]

But are there zombies?

[Twig]

Don't radiated war boys basically fill the role of fast zombies?

 

so... yes!!!

[Gaizokubanou]

I'm not convinced it's even possible to make an open-world double-digit-hours long Mad Max game that actually has a tone like Fury Road. I feel like the second you let the player control Max, you're stuck in this world where Max has a ton of agency and that agency is just Being a Bad Ass All Day Long.

 

It still looks like it'll be fun to play. But then again it's a trailer so it may still turn out shit. Who knows!

 

What if NPC raiders vigilantly pursued after you?  Kinda like say, having minimum of 2 stars in a GTA game.  Sparse resource on top of that with most of your tool being mobility focused... maybe that might get too tedious but maybe something like that perhaps?

[Merus]

I hadn't really thought about Borderlands basically being a Mad Max game, but it is.  They also (at least 2 and the Pre-Sequel) draw on feminism influences a lot more than I expect any Mad Max game too. 

 

I was really pleased when I noticed that comparison - I think the feminism influences come partly from Anthony Burch doing the writing for a AAA game, and it being useful for Borderlands as a setting to have its own unique value system. But even little things like the over-the-top names are much closer to Mad Max than the licensed Mad Max game is - a Tiny Tina would fit right in with The Splendid Angharad, Aunty Entity and The Feral Kid.

 

Fury Road goes further by making toxic masculinity the thing people are running from, and it looks like the game is drawing from the plot ideas Miller laid out when doing worldbuilding for Fury Road, so maybe it's just a bad trailer? I kind of doubt it, though.

[Erkki]

I guess I'm the only one here who is mildly excited about playing this tomorrow?

[Ben X]

The feeling I get from the player and journo communities is "it looks like it won't be as bad as we feared., but it probably won't be more than adequate".

[Atlantic]

The feeling I get is "Mad Max is coming out on the same day as MGSV!?"

 

What a lovely day.

[Erkki]

First impressions: it captures the feel of Mad Max in audio and video, being a sort of a mixture of the aesthetics of Mad Max 2, 3 and Fury Road. That's good, but the game is buggy and somewhat crappy. The controls feel weird -- I guess they feel somewhat like Just Cause, in where I also wasn't fond of them. It just feels like they took controls made for the flighty action of Just Cause, whereas Mad Max requires more down-to-earth and heavier controls. The Batmany combat actually works well, though.

 

Car controls are totally fucked. They are so far from what I would expect from a Mad Max game that it makes me want to give up and wait if perhaps people could fix them with a mod. Even id's Rage was better than this. I was kind of hoping the car would handle something like Bugbear's games (FlatOut, Wreckfest), which have awesome physicality to them, but this is so far from physically correct that I just want to write this off. I mean, it's not totally unplayable, just doesn't fit the legacy of Mad Max. Turning is really weird and unrealistic, there's no way to drift. It's too quick so when you need precision you are likely to just overshoot and compensate all the time. Fucked.

 

But just maybe I can forgive this bit and try to enjoy the game anyway. The rest of it seems to be at least somewhat promising. I also have problems with sounds disappearing, some dialogue options seem to be triggered and then untriggered immediately, only showing up as split-second subtitles. Sometimes subtitles disappear along with the sound, leaving only mouth movement. Some sounds will play long past their natural life. etc. I accidentally cut the power while the game was decrypting so I think I'll redownload just to be sure it isn't caused by that.

[Erkki]

I've played a bit more now and I can see myself getting used to it. It's definitely not the Mad Max we need, maybe it's the one we deserve for buying all that Assassin's Creed? Yeah, it's definitely full of those elements, although they don't fill up the hud in this game. I don't even think the Assassin's Creed / Far Cry 3 way is a bad way to structure an open world, but it's a bit obvious in this one when looking at the map. It doesn't even feel that off. I don't know, I heard some say that the world is too little populated, you're just driving too much. I think it's too over-populated with stuff to find, convoys etc. From an interpretation of Mad Max I would expect something that stands more on it's own than follows a set path established by genres. Max occasionally feels more like a Guybrush Threepwood in the "I wanna be a pirate!" sense, rather than someone who is already knowledgeable about the wasteland. But then, I guess he is in a new corner of it he hasn't seen before. The game looks good, sounds good, the visuals are right what I would expect most of the time (map excluded). My sound problems disappeared after reinstall, but one review also mentioned similar problems so they might come back. Max speaks more than I expected. Chumbucket is weird, a cross between gollum, the grave robber from Red Dead Redemption, and someone else I can't recall. I kind of like him as a character, but not the way Max often responds to him. Doesn't feel like the Max from the movies. In general, there's a lack of characterisation in everything. Visually most things look about right, but the overall game-tone is more "Far Cry 3 (clone) in the waste" than Max "Mad Max" Rockatansky.

 

Damn, I almost want to delete this post, I know the above isn't very coherent. Anyway, it isn't a bad game, but probably wait for the Winter sale.

[Irishjohn]

I've played a bit more now and I can see myself getting used to it. It's definitely not the Mad Max we need, maybe it's the one we deserve for buying all that Assassin's Creed? Yeah, it's definitely full of those elements, although they don't fill up the hud in this game. I don't even think the Assassin's Creed / Far Cry 3 way is a bad way to structure an open world, but it's a bit obvious in this one when looking at the map. It doesn't even feel that off. I don't know, I heard some say that the world is too little populated, you're just driving too much. I think it's too over-populated with stuff to find, convoys etc. From an interpretation of Mad Max I would expect something that stands more on it's own than follows a set path established by genres. Max occasionally feels more like a Guybrush Threepwood in the "I wanna be a pirate!" sense, rather than someone who is already knowledgeable about the wasteland. But then, I guess he is in a new corner of it he hasn't seen before. The game looks good, sounds good, the visuals are right what I would expect most of the time (map excluded). My sound problems disappeared after reinstall, but one review also mentioned similar problems so they might come back. Max speaks more than I expected. Chumbucket is weird, a cross between gollum, the grave robber from Red Dead Redemption, and someone else I can't recall. I kind of like him as a character, but not the way Max often responds to him. Doesn't feel like the Max from the movies. In general, there's a lack of characterisation in everything. Visually most things look about right, but the overall game-tone is more "Far Cry 3 (clone) in the waste" than Max "Mad Max" Rockatansky.

 

Damn, I almost want to delete this post, I know the above isn't very coherent. Anyway, it isn't a bad game, but probably wait for the Winter sale.

 

No, it's pretty coherent. I found it helpful!

[Erkki]

The more I play this, the more I like it. It's at least better than Far Cry 3, which was a total teenage male power fantasy. At least this is not that, I think. Max is kind of lost again, with a vague goal of crossing the plains of silence, but really he is mostly acting according to Chumbucket's plans. The magnum opus is also more about Chumbucket than Max. Actually, this Max is kind of growing on me. He doesn't speak as much as in the beginning and can grow a beard almost as long as he had in the beginning of Fury Road. And I think the ties of Fury Road are well done -- there are the Warboys with their thundersticks, and a villain who is a son of Immortan Joe. Gastown is always on the horizon for a big part of the game -- we saw just as much of it in Fury Road (in the game you will actually go there, though, I just haven't yet). So it clearly puts this in the proximity of the places and people of Fury Road, but it's still separate.

 

The game looks really good most of the time (except through the binoculars) and occasionally sounds great. There are cool details everywhere, like a letter E from a neon sign hanging from a ceiling, used as an interior light. So far there isn't a lot of the repetition I read mentioned in reviews and truly the comments about the world being too empty are baffling me. My ideal Mad Max would be way emptier than this. Actually the frequency of traffic in the world is 1) annoying, because some of the armored cars are hard to deal with, and they often appear in a trio 2) somewhat ruins the post-apocalypticness of the world, because it appears to be as populated as the modern (tropical island) world in a game like Far Cry 3. If they had the guts to actually make it less populated, maybe it would have been a lot better (and shorter) game.

 

Some reviews complain about the lack of challenge in the combat as well. I don't know, it's kind of enough for me. I have died perhaps about 10 times in total so far, and I prefer it this way because dying often could make you restart from quite a far. A related complaint was that the increase of challenge is mostly from increasing number of enemies. True, but there is variety as well -- I can count at least 10 types of enemies. And even the Batman games, which are lauded for doing combat great and which started this type of combat, I think it was rather the same -- the number of enemies was always escalating. Same in Shadow of Mordor. That said, I would prefer to see fewer enemies, as some camps have a truly ridiculous number of them.

 

So yeah, it's not the ideal Fury Road or even Mad Max game one could hope for, but at the moment it is working quite well for me. I just spent an entire day playing it and Steam tells me I've been playing for 19 hours already.

 

[edit] Besides Far Cry 3, the game kind of gives me vibes of Dead Island and I Am Alive, both of which I liked a lot.

[Erkki]

The more I play it, the more baffled I am by the negative reviews that give it 5/10 (e.g. Polygon - and the same guy gave Far Cry 3 9/10). This game is in no way inferior to Far Cry 3, IMHO. The variety of the environments is actually pretty good, considering it all takes place in a wasteland. Every large base you take down is different (even if containing similar elements, but duh!), almost every minor hole someone crawled into and left their scrap behind is different. Only after 25 hours have I seen 2 places where I thought -- I have been to another place with this exact same layout before. Granted, the wrecked ships in the Great White are perhaps a bit overused. The landscape can look a bit samey, but after a while I started recognizing landmarks better and now it feels like I'm getting to know the place.

 

The game also does a few things really well, better than most games

• The way enemies respawn (well, they do it only as war parties on wheels), or how stuff disappears, is close to perfect. I've never seen a moment when something suddenly pops in or loot disappears while I take a small detour (car bodies and corpses do suddenly disappear, though). Still I'm sure the things don't stay forever. But for an open world game, it's very well done.
• The weather effects. I think the big storms here are more awesome than the blow-outs in Stalker, or well, they would be if NPCs would also react to them. Sadly NPCs go about their things as if the storm wasn't even there.
• Car combat -- well, so few games even try to do this, it's obvious that a Mad Max game would, but I think it's really well done especially considering that I didn't like the car physics at all at first.

I think this might actually end up being my game of the year (although I've yet to play MGS V, which I think I will.

[Architecture]

MGS V is definitely one of the greatest video games ever made, so I'm not sure how Mad Max will stack up, but I'm still interested in playing it. Phil Kollar holds perhaps the least compatible views on games of anyone I've ever come across--his review of The Last of Us made me want to bash my head against concrete for hours.

 

Sounds like a Winter Steam Sale purchase (assuming I'm not knee-deep in Avalanche's other game this year).

[Erkki]

I think I also forgot The Witcher 3 when thinking GOTY, and the fact that this is perhaps only the 5th or so game I've played this year.