Steve

Somebody justify Beyond Good & Evil to me

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I'm not (only) trying to be contrarian. I'd honestly like to know why you guys love it so much. What am I missing?

You sir, are my brother.

I've been saying this stuff for a year now, and it's nice to know i'm not the only one who finds major flaws in this game.

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You sir, are my brother.

I've been saying this stuff for a year now, and it's nice to know i'm not the only one who finds major flaws in this game.

(Bitchy comment) You must be his brother. Stupidity often runs in the family :woohoo:

Obviously I do not mean this. Just couldn't pass up the chance.

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You sir, are my brother.

I've been saying this stuff for a year now, and it's nice to know i'm not the only one who finds major flaws in this game.

Not to be a bitch, but you're saying you can find yourself in an opinion that's 90% about "this world doesn't make sense", when it clearly involves a fantasy universe. I'm sorry, but if you can't get past the fact that the inhabitants of the game are anthropomorphic and instead of just enjoying the imaginitive weirdness of the game you're trying to nitpick it to death... well, than you must not enjoy most games that aren't totally based on real life. Getting stuck on stuff like that is saying that designers should be less creative and just make everything realistic. Just enjoy the idiosyncrasies of a gameworld. I could understand it if a world was sloppily executed, but BG&E's universe is very accomplished and artful, polished.

Now it could be that you have other gripes with the game that I'd be less inclined to call bullshit. If so I'd like to hear them. But just remember, this isn't a Spanish inquisition. I'm not trying to bully you out of having your own opinion. But I'm guessing there's more to it than just not liking the bartender to be a cow.

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Not to be a bitch, but you're saying you can find yourself in an opinion that's 90% about "this world doesn't make sense", when it clearly involves a fantasy universe. I'm sorry, but if you can't get past the fact that the inhabitants of the game are anthropomorphic and instead of just enjoying the imaginitive weirdness of the game you're trying to nitpick it to death... well, than you must not enjoy most games that aren't totally based on real life. Getting stuck on stuff like that is saying that designers should be less creative and just make everything realistic. Just enjoy the idiosyncrasies of a gameworld. I could understand it if a world was sloppily executed, but BG&E's universe is very accomplished and artful, polished.

Slow down there.

I said I found major flaws in the game. I didn't say I found the same flaws in the game.

My issues:

- The game was unfinished and clearly rushed. I found the ending bafflingly unsatisfying, and thought I missed a good third of the game.

- The stealth gameplay was simplified to the point of nonexistence and absurdity (the guys who just stood there and rotated were just plain silly).

- While the basic character concepts were appealing, I felt like they were under developed (and major facets of the characters went unexplained -- see reason #1).

These are not small problems, and were this a game that was generally perceived to be average, I would agree with that perception. But somehow the game has garnered this rediculous reputation as being a classic, and it's not. It's a game with good ideas that weren't realized, and stands as an example of how things can go wrong when games are rushed.

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you're saying you can find yourself in an opinion that's 90% about "this world doesn't make sense", when it clearly involves a fantasy universe. I'm sorry, but if you can't get past the fact that the inhabitants of the game are anthropomorphic and instead of just enjoying the imaginitive weirdness of the game you're trying to nitpick it to death... well, than you must not enjoy most games that aren't totally based on real life.

Wow, really jumping to conclusions there, eh? Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my initial post, but I never said I disliked the game because of the anthropomorphic characters or the fantasy world. It was the implementation of them that I found to be lacking. Though I'm no fan of furries, my actual complaint about the setting wasn't the simple presence of animal-people, but the fact that they and the world around them seemed unconsidered and really thin in their arbitrary nature. If a game used anthropomorphic animals as its protagonists but placed them in a world that really had substance and history to it, in a story where the characters were well developed and related to one another in a meaningful way, I'd be all for it.

Hell, I played Animal Crossing for a year; clearly I don't have a problem with being the only human in a world populated by talking animals.

What I've gotten from this thread is that people enjoyed the game because they liked the characters, fanciful setting, and art direction, all of which was wrapped around an enjoyable, well-worn gameplay model. I on the other hand didn't buy the characters or setting, and just found the gameplay to be derivative. IT'S ALL SO CLEAR TO ME, NOW.

Thanks, guys :tup:

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Beyond Good and Evil is Art!!! You shall not defile by expressing rational reasons for disliking parts of it!!! How dare you. How. Dare. You.

:oldman::oldman::oldman::frusty::frusty::fart::barf:

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I feel the need to again point out the coolness of the chase sequence while escaping from that dodgy pearl place in the town.

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Replying to everything ever! Try and guess which one is yours!:

Or driving the hovercraft across a broken bridge to the slaughterhouse. Ancel knows how to do a setpiece.

I may be the most vocal Psychonauts critic around here, but BG&E bashing; that's just blasphemous!

Maybe one reason we believe it's great is because everything else isn't...

also: "noun was verbed to the point of nonexistence" is a stupid phrase, it's stupid! Stop using it!

Stupid!

There's something about the concept of "Art" that requires serifs, it looks naked without them...

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Well sorry for overacting. But the first post only seemed to cover the weird attitude of the world and while typing I only just realized it for the first time. I thought I made it clear that I wasn't trying to overrule your opinions. Loonyboi, what you said made total sense. And it terrifies me to no extent that a game can be in production for 4 years and still be rushed. Brr!

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I call bullshit on the site ...

... can we find out who registered the domain?

SiN

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This is a late reply, but I also loved beyond good and evil and it is one of my favorite games this gen. There are these very few games that engulf you in their world, and you wish you never leave. Beyond Good and Evil was one of them. Imaginative, best female protagonist ever, very fun gameplay, surreal, it got it all. And the game was not rushed at all. The ending was intentional because the game originally was intended to have a sequel. To me, Beyond and Evil represents everything I love about gaming.

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I call bullshit on the site ...

... can we find out who registered the domain?

SiN

It's not really bullshit, it's just unofficial. That is, it's a fan project. It'll probably never get done, but it's not fake.

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And the game was not rushed at all.

I thought it was rushed, actually. How would you explain the dozens of pearls you earned for very simple sidequests later on?

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Economy.

To ensure that you wouldn't buy the garage parts in the wrong order, you'd really need some kind of restriction to ensure that you don't end up with a million pearls in the earlier stages of the game -- otherwise you could just spend some time doing side-quests early on, and then go empty the place. And also, again to ensure that it's bought in the right order, they need to considerably increase the amount required for different parts as you go on.

There's no doubt that they have gone around this in a different way, since it does seem a bit weird getting so many pearls at once, but I wouldn't call it a symptom of rushing -- merely a dodgy design decision. A better way to go about it would have been to simply have different objects hold different worth at the garage. For example, a pearl or few gets you the cheapest vehicle parts, but for the juicier stuff you need more valuable items in a similar quantity.

These juicier items would of course not be findable until the later stages of the game, when the storyline permits the purchasing of those parts. It could possibly even be tied into the storyline, where you come across objects in new regions of the world which only open up during the later IRIS missions. I'm not thinking of making it really linear where you just get, say, an ultra valuable dragon tooth when you complete the slaughterhouse, but perhaps side quests which lead to such an object would open up then.

Man, what a tangent.

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The large pearl batches allows the designer to force the player to buy parts only after completing parts of the game in a particular order. It has the useful side-effect of disguising a linear progression of events

Simplified example:

Part A costs 3 pearls and part B costs 5 pearls.

Task X rewards with 2 pearls

Task Y rewards with 2 pearls

Task Z rewards with 6 pearls but can only be completed with Part A

In this example, you can't get part B without doing X and Y first.

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