Ubisoft needs to stop making the same game over and over again

[Dewar]

JonCole:

 

Yeah, Clara's death felt a little like... well, like we hadn't had a woman riddled with bullets in slow motion up to that point. It would have been unnecessary writing and animation overhead, I know, but I think it would have been super interesting to have the option, when you found the email from Quinn saying "yes, kill her", to choose to be all HOOOOOOLLLLLLLYYYYYYYY SHHIIIIIIIIITTTT (as my mother would say), drop everything and burn rubber to get to her and save her, then find out that Quinn had died of a heart attack on the news afterwards.

 

In some ways, Clara is kind of a sexy lady hacker archetype, but there are elements of her role that become interesting only after that point. Like, you can now see her actions up to this point as being convulsed with guilt about the death of Lena - trying to help Pearce, but also worried about what this terrifying mass-murderer will do if he finds out that she was involved in Lena's death. How two people, both of whom feel guilty about the death of a child neither of them actually killed, could relate to each other after that would be an interesting little narrative. Whereas instead she finds expiation in a piece of go-big symbolism, dying on Lena's grave.

 

On a mechanical level, of course, she's also part of a board-clearing: all Pearce's contacts and enemies have to be cleared off the board so their absence in the open-roaming section after the game story ends is not conspicuous. But she could have taken up her promise and disappeared, with a promise to check in on Pearce in a few years. i.e. Watch_Dogs 2.

 

To bring in a bit of the feminism thread into this one, there's also the popular trope that any semi-major female character should be a love intrest for the main character, and that they should end up together at the end, happily ever after. This leaves big-budget writers in a corner where there options with female characters are either to kill them or ...marry them (to put it in a polite way.)

 

On a less depressing (but still kinda depressing) note, I saw some videos of the Club and I was starting to look forward to it. That's sad that the story ends up being the same old thing,

[BobbyBesar]

You Killed my Wife and Child

Somebody should make a game that's just a sequence of meeting women and then seeing them gunned down tragically in front of you, gradually escalating your need for vengeance. First your wife, then your sister, then the paramedic who tries to save her, then your daughter, then the no-nonsense cop who was helping you investigate all the previous killings. Then it's revealed that you're actually your own female twin and you're really investigating your own death after you were gunned down.

 

At the end, you get gunned down

[kaputt]

Well...

The ending of the game feels like it's closing off all the narrative elements introduced into the game, almost in reverse order. So, Aiden rescues and sends away his family to start a new life where not even he can find them. He kills Iraq. He kills Lucky Quinn. He finds out that Clara was in fact the fixer who located him, and thus was responsible for his niece's death, and had been trying to redeem herself by helping him. Except that by helping him, she has in fact enabled him in alienating himself first emotionally and then physically from his remaining family. Oh, and Lucky Quinn's last act is to call a hit on her, which Pearce is too late to stop, so that's another death.

Then he has to stop Damien, in the process of which he is also attacked by a heel-turned Jordi Chin, and finally revisits the scene at the start with Maurice, except this time around you get the agency that was denied in the first scene fake-out, and can either kill him or leave him. That choice I think is taken in the game's narrative to be a statement on whether Pearce has fallen into moral nihilism as a result of the death or exile of basically everyone he has ever cared about.

He does a fair bit of voice-overed soul-searching after his sister and nephew leave, where he basically acknowledges that everything he has done up to this point has made things worse for them and for him, and that he should probably have just moved on, but at this point he is in too deep, and feels morally and practically obligated to tidy up the various bad guys controlling Chicago, since they all want to kill him. That characteristic of Pearce as a man who cannot stand aside and watch - even when it is in his own and everyone else's best interest for him to do so - is consistent, I guess.

There's also a subplot based around who a mysterious woman in an encrypted video (which turns out to be what Lucky Quinn thought Pearce and Damian were trying to get hold of, and why he called the hit), who feels a bit Kai Leng if you haven't picked up all the audio logs, IYSWIM...

So, I think it does attempt to address the futility of Pearce's plot for revenge in some ways, and the way it has functioned as a maladaptive coping mechanism for his grief, but it has the problem that if you are not making Far Cry 2 or Spec Ops: The Line or similar you have to be careful of telling the player that their labor has been misdirected. So, even if Pearce's grief response is identified as problematic, he has still cleaned up the town. And the scene is being set somewhat for a sequel, also...

I think it's complicated, but IMHO the plot could probably have done with at least one less key player, and maybe one less group of antagonists, and some more on Pearce's inner life and how he has been dealing with the death of his niece up to that point. That said, that would make it more like Gone Home, which may be a good thing for me but is probably not what Ubisoft were aiming for.

Hmm, actually it's better than I thought. However, it seems to create some kind of story for a hero, so it's not exactly a good portrayal of Pierce.

And yeah, the plot seems too convoluted, but I think that's how games writing works lately. The Crysis games, specially the third one, are insane when it comes to names and characters that you can't possibly remember, and betrayals that serves no purpose.

[kaputt]

Well, past the initial reaction, I can say that The Crew is a very enjoyable game. Actually, I'm not playing it as a blazing fast multi-player racer, but as Euro Truck Simulator without a truck.

Despite the graphics being unimpressive for a new gen game, they often offers some pretty landscape of the varied countryside of the US. It's also great when you can see all the lights and buildings when you're getting closer to a big city. I think they put a great effort on this, because even if some of the buildings are just the same assets repeated through the map, they try to reproduce the architecture found in those cities. Everything also got better when I learned that you can unlock the frame rate in the config files.

I went from completely uninterested in this game to consider buying in the first week, if they fix some bugs found in the Beta. I always wanted a game that you could just drive long distances, just admiring the landscapes, the cities, listening to your own music. Euro Truck was good in that, but the landscapes and specially the cities felt lifeless. The Crew doesn't have the same limitation , it's a big publisher, they can afford to focus on those details.

So, it seems that Ubisoft worked it's magic again. I just wished they knew that the best stuff in their games is outside their formula, so they shouldn't feel obligated to repeat the same things in their major titles.

[Architecture]

Also, Splinter Cell: Black List was a pretty decent game. Nothing amazing, but certainly no chocolate turd. 

I was surprised by the writing in this game, weirdly enough. The game itself looks pretty good and plays alright (the side missions are more fun than the story-driven ones), but it's no Chaos Theory.

[lizzyinthesky]

The Crew is pretty alright but man is it ever one of THOSE Ubisoft games. Second mission in and I'm finding a tower to update my map

[kaputt]

The Crew is pretty alright but man is it ever one of THOSE Ubisoft games. Second mission in and I'm finding a tower to update my map

Heh, I'm just free driving, so I'm avoiding these stuff. Went from Detroit to Miami, Miami to LA, La to Seattle... The variation in the scenery is pretty great.

Just realized that The Crew is made by the same studio that worked on Driver San Francisco. That was a pretty good game with a surprisingly great writing, best racing game by far on last gen.

[lizzyinthesky]

Heh, I'm just free driving, so I'm avoiding these stuff. Went from Detroit to Miami, Miami to LA, La to Seattle... The variation in the scenery is pretty great.

Just realized that The Crew is made by the same studio that worked on Driver San Francisco. That was a pretty good game with a surprisingly great writing, best racing game by far on last gen.

I THOUGHT it felt familiar, especially the way the hands were moving on the wheel in first person. I drove Detroit to Seattle and then down the west coast before bed.