Ben X

The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

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I'll grant that the game endings (unlike most of the rest of the game) support the "non-lethal is better" thing but I honestly don't see why that's a huge deal for someone playing through the game, unless everyone except me watched the ends of games on YouTube before playing. You have no way of knowing what the ending of the game looks like, so how can you say the game's trying to keep you from using all your lethal weapons, or your Lethal Weapons 2 staring Mel Gibson?

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57 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I'll grant that the game endings (unlike most of the rest of the game) support the "non-lethal is better" thing but I honestly don't see why that's a huge deal for someone playing through the game, unless everyone except me watched the ends of games on YouTube before playing. You have no way of knowing what the ending of the game looks like, so how can you say the game's trying to keep you from using all your lethal weapons, or your Lethal Weapons 2 staring Mel Gibson?

Maybe they're just too old for this shit?

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9 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I'll grant that the game endings (unlike most of the rest of the game) support the "non-lethal is better" thing but I honestly don't see why that's a huge deal for someone playing through the game, unless everyone except me watched the ends of games on YouTube before playing. You have no way of knowing what the ending of the game looks like, so how can you say the game's trying to keep you from using all your lethal weapons, or your Lethal Weapons 2 staring Mel Gibson?

Okay, I know that you're strongly invested in believing that the game's signalling throughout the game isn't intended to suggest that "non-lethal is better", but can you consider this:

 

Firstly: you're entitled to interpret media any way you want - but it's also the case that there's an authorial intent associated with any work (which you're allowed to disagree with). 

 

Secondly: the arguments we've (the people who think that the authorial intent is to suggest that "non-lethal is better") been making all hang together.

Your arguments basically require a lot of "ah, but this is specials" - we should ignore the changed reactions of NPCs because they're morally compromised (except for Samuel and Emily - the closest things the game has to "neutral observers", or "everyman figures", which are often used to suggest the moral baseline of the world in fiction - but you just discount them because you don't like that their reactions also suggest "non-lethal is bad") - we should assume that "the order of the world decaying" with more violence is a morally neutral signal - we can "accept" that the ending indicate a moral stance on "non-lethality", but assume that this has nothing to do with the authorial intent in the rest of the work at all, it's just a non-sequitur. 

Our argument - that every signal the game gives you can be interpreted as an indicator that "non-lethal is better" - doesn't need any picking and choosing. It doesn't need any special pleading or wriggling. I submit, then, that it's almost certainly what the authors intended.

 

Thirdly, though: to address your specific point (assuming that someone, like you, interprets all the other signals of the game as being morally-neutral statements about violence), taking the endings by themselves... It's disingenuous in the extreme to assume that your (or anyone's) experience of a game exists in a vacuum. Even someone who hasn't watched the endings on YouTube or whatever will likely hear about the experiences of other people playing the game, including their experience of the ending they got (even if the description is vague or allusive). There are these things called "Reviews" and "Articles" which other humans write and publish, concerning their opinions about their experiences of Video Games - and almost all the pieces about Dishonored of a general nature, and many of the specific pieces about aspects of it, discuss the endings as part of the general response of the game to the players' agency. Again, they may not go into detail, but it's very easy for someone to come to Dishonored any have even a vague idea that "if I want to get the good ending, I need to not messily kill everyone". In fact, I would expect anyone interested in any piece of media to have participated in the community discussion around it before experiencing it to some extent, so I'd say it's actually very odd for someone to encounter a game they want to play without having picked up a sense of its systems, including moral systems, ambiently, before play.

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13 hours ago, aoanla said:

So, sure, I agree that, at least, Dishonored avoids the "traditional ludonarrative dissonance" of having it be perfectly okay to be a mass murdering psychopath in the course of your interactions with the world. And, actually, I am just as put off by the strongly physical representations of the results of sword combat that Dishonored depicts as I am by the wider "things get bad" response of the world, and of NPCs; however, that seems to be a matter of taste (there are games - see Brutal Doom - where strongly detailed unpleasant representations of physical damage are a reward, not a penalty) and so it seems that the more general argument about authorial intent is more grounded when talking about the mechanical way in which the game reacts to your actions, not the artistic representation of you being a horrible brute.

 

It seems like you're suggesting that because the player can never have completely clean hands, that this reduces the moral agency of the player. But that is equally problematic - knocking someone out is clearly less horrible than murdering them; and there's something to be said for removing potentially brutal dictators in a surgical way without "collateral damage". (I'd also argue that most of the nonlethal "takedowns" of the principals aren't necessarily fates-worse-than-death - although, of course, the game being aimed towards the Gothic Revenge, they're not *pleasant* - but they are also, at least, targeted towards people directly involved in your own harm, rather than simply bystanders.)

I think you understand my position. Just to clarify some points:

 - For me a crucial distinction between Dishonored and Doom is the type of enemies you are facing. There is a gigantic difference between killing humans and by-definition evil beings. Even then, the way that you learn how much Demons fear the Doom Guy actually made me enjoy that game less. Similarly, I enjoy Destiny, with its existential struggle versus aliens, but could not stomach The Division or modern Call of Duty. This is a position that's grown over the years, and there's plenty of manshoots I have fond memories of, but I would not buy or play those games any more.

- I am absolutely fine with the game telling you explicitly you did bad shit when you most definitely did.

- I understand that it can feel weird or frustrating to be explicitly handed lethal tools/options and then have exercising those options have bad consequences. However, I see this as a valuable life lesson and a sign of an internally consistent world, rather than a problem.

- I would have been vastly happier if the nonlethal resolutions of the Dishonored missions involved things like capture and trial, rather than condemning, say, a person to be locked up in a rape dungeon or become a mute slave. Poetic justice only goes so far in my book. I don't think moral agency enters into it, I just don't like having no good option.

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2 minutes ago, osmosisch said:

I think you understand my position. Just to clarify some points:

 - For me a crucial distinction between Dishonored and Doom is the type of enemies you are facing. There is a gigantic difference between killing humans and by-definition evil beings. Even then, the way that you learn how much Demons fear the Doom Guy actually made me enjoy that game less. Similarly, I enjoy Destiny, with its existential struggle versus aliens, but could not stomach The Division or modern Call of Duty. This is a position that's grown over the years, and there's plenty of manshoots I have fond memories of, but I would not buy or play those games any more.

- I am absolutely fine with the game telling you explicitly you did bad shit when you most definitely did.

- I understand that it can feel weird or frustrating to be explicitly handed lethal tools/options and then have exercising those options have bad consequences. However, I see this as a valuable life lesson and a sign of an internally consistent world, rather than a problem.

- I would have been vastly happier if the nonlethal resolutions of the Dishonored missions involved things like capture and trial, rather than condemning, say, a person to be locked up in a rape dungeon or become a mute slave. Poetic justice only goes so far in my book. I don't think moral agency enters into it, I just don't like having no good option.

 

I mean, yeah, we agree on most of this (although if I were going to quibble, I'd note that we're mostly just told that demons are "wholly evil", we don't know that most of the rank-and-file aren't just being driven into battle by their commanders - Vortigaunts in HL are a good example of this - and in fact, the history of justification for killing the enemy throughout the ages has been that the enemy are inhuman monsters, not "like us"; however, Doom, being fantasy, gets to have its cake and eat it mostly unproblematically, less so than, say Shadow of Mordor! But I think we agree on this too - I've made a similar journey in my approach to Video game violence, and I remember strongly being horrified by the gratuitous cutscene torture/death of one of the setpiece monsters in Quake 4, which really cemented this perspective for me.)

 

I think Dishonored is problematic mostly because it's caught somewhere between two perspectives - on the one hand, they wanted to make a Gothic Revenge Fantasy game, and the whole point of such a setting is that the protagonist is not necessarily a Hero, and the audience learns a moral lesson about what the singleminded pursuit of revenge does to you and those around you (the ur-example being The Count of Monte Cristo, of course), and so the mechanics of the setting must show that being a brutal, indiscriminate, killer is wrong; but also that all revenge is, to some degree, morally transgressive - to seek justice is precisely to sublimate your desire for revenge into something greater and less selfish, and so it can't be an option allowed to you in the setting. You're not Batman; you're The Punisher.

 

On the other hand, they also wanted to let you choose to be a maximally violent psychopath - partly because the traditions of the game genre, as we discussed, are all about the ultraviolence being an option (even, way back when, Thief couldn't escape having some very-hard-to-avoid combat bits against the undead, because it's what people expected, and this hasn't changed much) - and being a much more focussed, scalpel of an avenging figure. The problem is here in terms of the narrative/mechanical dissonance: it's not that they give you some tools to make you a more effective mass murderer - it's that they give you far fewer tools to make you an effective scalpel (and being a scalpel is harder than being a (careful) bludgeon in the first place).

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I think you're inferring a tad too much authorial intent that I'm not convinced is there with most of your "they wanted" statements, but besides that, I don't have much to add anymore.

 

 

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4 hours ago, aoanla said:

Secondly: the arguments we've (the people who think that the authorial intent is to suggest that "non-lethal is better") been making all hang together.

Your arguments basically require a lot of "ah, but this is specials" - we should ignore the changed reactions of NPCs because they're morally compromised (except for Samuel and Emily - the closest things the game has to "neutral observers", or "everyman figures", which are often used to suggest the moral baseline of the world in fiction - but you just discount them because you don't like that their reactions also suggest "non-lethal is bad") - we should assume that "the order of the world decaying" with more violence is a morally neutral signal - we can "accept" that the ending indicate a moral stance on "non-lethality", but assume that this has nothing to do with the authorial intent in the rest of the work at all, it's just a non-sequitur. 

Your argument requires just as many "ah, but this is specials" as mine does. How do you explain the fact that the non-lethal solutions are almost universally so terrible as to make death almost preferable? How do you explain the fact that you have a magic talking psychic heart that seems to exist to generate an infinite number of reasons to murder nameless NPCs? How do you explain the fact that even if you go entirely non-lethal, the Outsider treats you as an agent of chaos? How do you explain the fact that most of your powers and gear are oriented around killing lots of people? And, by the way,

 

I think it's perfectly sensible to discount the reactions of the NPCs (aside from Emily and Samuel) because as I've pointed out, they're lying to you, and they end up betraying you and each other no matter whether you're lethal or non-lethal, so its not like the game is trying to make you feel bad when those guys start wigging out at your killing acumen. That's just a hint that they're worried they're next. If you don't go around killing everyone, they're a bit more relaxed, but ultimately they still betray you and kill each other. We're clearly not supposed to take their reactions as indicating anything like a sound moral compass. It's entirely just a matter of whether they're worried that you're going to slice them up.

 

I'm not saying the game is totally fine with murder, but your point about the game being caught between showing murder is wrong and wanting to let you be maximally violent is a bit off-course. The game's stance on murder isn't so much that it's wrong and you should feel bad for doing it and why are you even playing Dishonored (it's not Spec Ops: The Line) but that it has a bunch of pretty gruesome effects, like more bodies for the rats to eat. I think that's a pretty reasonable stance to take on murder. Frankly the game has more or less the same take on non-murderous revenge, given the generally dour tone of everything, the severity of most of the non-lethal solutions, etc. As you point out, it's sort of a gothic revenge fantasy game.

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19 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

Your argument requires just as many "ah, but this is specials" as mine does. How do you explain the fact that the non-lethal solutions are almost universally so terrible as to make death almost preferable? How do you explain the fact that you have a magic talking psychic heart that seems to exist to generate an infinite number of reasons to murder nameless NPCs? How do you explain the fact that even if you go entirely non-lethal, the Outsider treats you as an agent of chaos? How do you explain the fact that most of your powers and gear are oriented around killing lots of people? And, by the way,

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

I think it's perfectly sensible to discount the reactions of the NPCs (aside from Emily and Samuel) because as I've pointed out, they're lying to you, and they end up betraying you and each other no matter whether you're lethal or non-lethal, so its not like the game is trying to make you feel bad when those guys start wigging out at your killing acumen. That's just a hint that they're worried they're next. If you don't go around killing everyone, they're a bit more relaxed, but ultimately they still betray you and kill each other. We're clearly not supposed to take their reactions as indicating anything like a sound moral compass. It's entirely just a matter of whether they're worried that you're going to slice them up.

 

 

I'm not saying the game is totally fine with murder, but your point about the game being caught between showing murder is wrong and wanting to let you be maximally violent is a bit off-course. The game's stance on murder isn't so much that it's wrong and you should feel bad for doing it and why are you even playing Dishonored (it's not Spec Ops: The Line) but that it has a bunch of pretty gruesome effects, like more bodies for the rats to eat. I think that's a pretty reasonable stance to take on murder. Frankly the game has more or less the same take on non-murderous revenge, given the generally dour tone of everything, the severity of most of the non-lethal solutions, etc. As you point out, it's sort of a gothic revenge fantasy game.

 

So, taking this in order: IIRC, if you kill only the targets in each mission, and no-one else, then you will never hit High Chaos - Dishonoured doesn't like messy brutal mass murder, it doesn't have a problem with you being a scalpel. That said: of the villains, only two have fates which are inescapably worse than death in the detail you expect them to have when you apply them:

Spoiler

The elder Pendeltons, and whichever Lady Boyle you need to eliminate, all have unpleasant lives ahead of them, and I agree with you on them. Campbell experiences the closest thing to a natural justice in the game, as he's genuinely suffering the actual penalty of his church for his actual actions, it's just that the church ignored/were unaware of his actual nature, and your branding of him makes it inescapable. Similarly, the Regent just gets what would happen to him if he were exposed any other way. So, 50% of the non-lethal solutions are potentially unjustifiably harsh, not "almost universally".

The magic talking psychic heart tells you that some people are bad people (it also tells you that some people aren't, I note - not every secret it gives you about a person is bad - unless you think that "He taught himself to read" is a terrible sin)... but if you think brutal murder is the correct response to every single person you encounter who has a dark secret, then you might just be looking for excuses too hard.

The Outsider expresses more interest in you if you go Low Chaos - he seems kind of unsurprised by your High Chaos actions (including killing targets), but surprised, mildly positively, by your Low Chaos actions. And he's the narrator of all 3 endings, and definitely seems more approving of your Low Chaos ending, as we've agreed.

 

So, of those, one is mixed but (as I noted above, in fitting for a Gothic Revenge Fantasy), one is very mixed (and doesn't really justify murdering everyone, in any case), and one supports not killing messily more than killing messily.

(Plus, you're still pointedly ignoring Samuel and Emily's responses, which are the core of the "normal people's moral response" signalling.)

 

And, given that what I, and others, are complaining is dissonant, is the very fact that you're given lots of ways to kill people messily, when the game mostly tells you that killing people messily is bad, I'm totally happy with you bringing up that incongruity again. :) I agree, it's incongruous and problematic!

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6 hours ago, osmosisch said:

- I would have been vastly happier if the nonlethal resolutions of the Dishonored missions involved things like capture and trial, rather than condemning, say, a person to be locked up in a rape dungeon or become a mute slave. Poetic justice only goes so far in my book. I don't think moral agency enters into it, I just don't like having no good option.

 

It's explicitly a revenge story, told through the eyes of the man who was successfully framed for the brutal murder of his country's ruler and his lover. This story isn't a Law and Order episode, it's reclaiming the throne by the most effective methods 6 people can manage. Unless you're motivated by extrinsic factors (achievements that tell you not to kill anyone, or a desire to mess around with all the outsider powers, say), it's on you as the character to decide whether a fate worse than death is a warranted action. There aren't any "good" options.

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Sorry I haven't updated in a while. I'm hoping to get back to this over Christmas.

 

In the meantime, Homefront is free on Humble at the mo. Seems it got mixed reviews, and it's a 2011 game, so I'm not sure if I'll slot it into this playthrough, but it's going in my Steam library!

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IIRC Homefront mainly got criticised from being really short (howlongtobeat says its 4,5h) which wouldn't be that much of a shortcoming for a free game. I say give it a go! Mainly because I also just picked it up and dunno if I can be bothered actually playing it. Be my canary in the coalmine plz.

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I enjoyed Homefront The Revolution. It wasn't perfect but the semi-open world urban shooting was nice. I would love a open world shooter set entirely in a ruined city where most buildings can be entered. Homefront The Revolution was the closest a game has come to that. Also being able to customize guns on the fly was super fun.

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Well, I finally got back to Dishonored today (aka "Dishonored tomorrow"). And I'm still a little bored by it. I took out the Regent, got back and was (utterly unsurprisingly) double-crossed by the dudes at the pub. Then it was the old 'recover your gear' level plus a ton of zombies and spitting plants in a sewer level. There's still some stuff that is consistently fun, like pulling off some nice swordplay or blinking around the place, but I'm not finding the story or characters particularly interesting (although I do like Emily and Samuel, so I am at least invested in rescuing the former and sad that the latter is disappointed in me just because I essentially helped invent the atomic bomb), and when I see a level swarming with enemies, I don't get that buzz of anticipation I got from the Crytek games for example, because I'm just not enjoying the combat or stealth that much, it's all too fiddly.

 

I'm on the last level now, it's a dreary dark rocky bit. I think I might try to finish this evening, then I think I'll blast through Homefront on Easy for a bit of simple shooting before I get into Bioshock Infinite.

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Done. Quite disappointed overall, for all the reasons I've gone into. Lovely art design, although even that started to get a bit dull by the end, but the story and gameplay just didn't click for me.

Watching the credits, though: wow, that voice cast. Susan Sarandon, Lena Headey, Carrie Fisher, John Slattery, Brad Dourif, Michael Madsen and Chloë Grace Moretz!

 

Forum thread

Making of

A video by that one guy (contains spoilers for the whole franchise, I think):

 

 

Alrighty, onto Homefront.

 

EDIT: ugh, there's some problem where it says it needs to instal PhysX but then doesn't do it. I'm going to try updating my Nvidia drivers, though I suspect that won't help. (It may even hurt, depending on whether this is one of the more unstable updates) I really don't want to have to start uninstalling and reinstalling various components of my graphics setup, especially if I've got to install the 2011 version of it then remember to update it afterwards and all that.

EDIT2: jesus, Nvidia update failed. Tried 'GeForce Experience' and that's installed a shitty front-end thing that I need to register with to use. And Nvidia's site itself is impenetrable.

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Okay, that got it working. Looks pretty nice, if rather blandly realistic, especially after Dishonored. It has a COD:MW feel to it, and much like that game it's a mix of cheesy - big pyrotechnics, fighting North Korean forces in the US through suburban back-gardens littered with passenger jet debris and past White Castles, the idyllic all-American rebel hideout with kids on swings and delicious home-cooking - and some pretty affecting stuff like a convincing lead-in to the North Korean invasion (especially unnerving these days), a toddler watching his parents getting executed and a firefight with a Korean mother and baby cowering the corner and both screaming. As with Modern Warfare though, the cheesiness is winning out so far.

 

There's no difficulty setting and it's auto-save only. The shooting is a little wooly but pretty forgiving to make up for it, especially with health regen. I'll likely barrel through this until it gets irritating or boring (though at around 5 hours it may not get the chance).

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The latest Humble Bundle has the sequel if you want to take the extraordinarily ill-advised step of making your list longer rather than shorter.

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Ha, I am tempted to try the DLCs and sequel, as this game was really close to letting me enjoy it and I hear they improve on it, but unless they go down to silly prices I can't justify it with such a massive backlog.

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Oh, ha ha, I thought you meant Dishonored! Nah, I wouldn't bother with the sequel to Homefront unless it got extremely good reviews (and went down to silly prices). It's a relatively good follow-em-up, but nothing special. (Oh, and to be pedantic, this one was set in future America with all the build-up starting in 2011.)

 

"Press E to jump in mass grave" pretty much sums this game up. Some attempts at 'war is hell' but a lot more 'war is hella exciting!' gamey stuff. They at least put a Korean-American on your team (though he is the tech nerd) and have you stand off against some nutso survivalists. But then they do give the female member tight jeans and a top with the sleeves rolled up and the midriff burnt off, and all the "oh the humanity!" dialogue. It lacks polish, too - lots of wonky AI, glitching and uncanny valley moments. That said, the shooting's fine if basic and there are lots of exciting things happening throughout. I almost quit at the incredibly frustrating helicopter level, though. Worse than the tank level in Crysis. If FPSes really want to give you a vehicle section, they should make damn sure it handles well and is a fun respite rather than a fiddly and overly-demanding challenge.

 

Onto Bioshock Infinite! I've played the first ten or so minutes of this to test some hardware, and I remember the production values being hugely impressive. I think it's mostly fallen out of favour as a game and a philosophical discussion, but hopefully I'll find stuff to enjoy.

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Yes. It's a game I felt like I sort of forced myself to like while playing because I was so excited by it. I remember looking back on it after finishing it and thinking the story was a confusing nonsensical mess and the gameplay was a massive step back.

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