Bethesda Blues

My particular corner of the internet is full of coverage on the imaginatively titled PlayStation 4 right now. It's exciting, and I missed all of it. I didn't stay up for the livestream, and a day of office-y stuff means that the only PS4 coverage I've been able to catch has been on my phone while on the bus this morning. So, whilst I digest all the (likely) amazing numbers and graphics, a guest post from a friend of mine, who is possibly a bigger gaming nerd than I am. Think of him as my new resident expert in first person RPGs. A genre I tend to stay away from, because I just don't click with them.

Skyrim. Arguably one of the greatest RPGs on the modern day console. Perhaps equally rivalled in my opinion by Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas. Both of which are supremely competent in delivering a fresh, vibrant atmosphere that really draws you in. One flaw however. That moment where you’ve battled through hordes of enemies, used a considerable amount of arrows/ammo open the door to the final boss/leader of a gang and you’re excited to get some awesome loot and get some major experience or possibly an achievement/trophy and then… oh. Its froze on the loading screen. Bugger. Hard resetting the console, load up and…! OH! You haven’t saved for a while and the autosave isn’t from that door! It’s… from a few doors back… you know… through all those enemies?

Frustrating isn’t the word. I’ve been playing video games since I was 5, and the awesome colours and soundtrack to Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive fuelled an obsession that still burns bright now, 19 years on. But since the advent of DLC and extra in game content, the world of video games is as ever changing as the Wasteland. But for some games its more trouble than it’s worth in my opinion.

So, back to my main point… WHYYOUFREEZEEPICGAMES? Fallout 3, epitome of awesomeness, made even more awesome by 5 DLC Quests as it were. Now, I purchased the GOTY edition on PS3 and was pleased as punch! All 5 DLC packs at once. Epic! No. Apparently the code is only strong enough to support 3 of the DLC packs, as 5 prove too much for the game to handle! Constantly freezing, often just going into VATs mode froze the entire game, forcing a hard reset. Ridiculous. I found this happened increasingly often in the Mothership Zeta DLC; potentially because (after googling) it was the last DLC pack I had left to do, and the game struggled to load it. This, coupled with the fact it was actually a bloody hard bit of DLC, meant it forced me to put the game down for a few months! I just couldn’t bear to play it. I did, and bossed it, and now I’m happy again but there’s still that odd moment where I load a new area or enter VATs mode and boom. Frozen. That’s the gripes out the way, but it is relatively minor I guess in comparison to the rest of the game. It’s beautiful. As a quick side point, how awesome is the Cowboy Repeater in Fallout: New Vegas? One of my favourite weapons.

Skyrim is completely the same, beautiful game, delicious storyline, ample sidequests, but it’s a HUGE game. This game froze long before DLC was released. There is always an awkward moment where it freezes on the loading screen for a new area and you think… ‘Do I turn my Xbox on and off? Will it corrupt my save file? (Which is 100 hours +)’ Games shouldn’t do this; it is the responsibility of the studios to ensure the game on the shelf is as close to perfect as it can be. This again was a reason I put Skyrim down for a month or so before completing it… that and Halo: Anniversary. (GrownupGamer's note: That's just on Xbox. Think how the PS3 owners feel. They've had to put up with the famous framerate issue and a huge DLC delay.)

Those games are just two from a possible massive list but they are two that are my favourites and quite frankly have been spoiled on the whole by the incessant glitching and freezing. (Fallout 3 more so, admittedly) but what do they have in common? Bethesda. Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an attack on a fantastic games studio… oh no. Merely a gripe about a major chink in its armour. Bethesda have massive potential, just need to fine tune the DLC problem and I think quite possibly will make it to the coveted top spot of my favourite games developer. (2K currently hold this honour – for their blinding Borderlands and Bioshock games). 

However, the most recent Bethesda game I purchased was Dishonoured. Unfortunately this has not even made it to my disc tray yet! (Which after reading numerous reviews seems an abhorrent idea) but I just simply have not had the time. Although I am eager to scale the heights of Dunwall I am cautious. Cautious of getting so deeply involved in a game that if/(when?) it freezes I will be disenchanted and my faith will have plummeted once again. Hopefully I will be proven wrong. Only time will tell, and with the release of DLC already for Dishonoured, will this be enough or will there be more? Either way; just the look of this game excites me.  

(GrownupGamer's note: Fear not Guest Blogger! Dishonored is only published by Bethesda. All of the developmental heavy lifting was done by Arkane Studios. I've played it and didn't see a single glitch.)

An Honorable Mention

I did something amazing the other day, I finished a game less than six months old. I’m usually way behind with playing the latest releases, simply because it’s hard to find the time to play them all, but I saw Dishonored at half price, and well, you can’t pass up an offer like that can you?

I have to say I’m really, really impressed with Dishonored, both with the game itself and the developers for taking a chance on an ambitious new IP like this. It’s that rarest of beasts, a single player only adventure and a new name on the shelf. And while Dishonored is not quite a masterpiece, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute I spent in the whalerpunk city of Dunwall. After Fable’s Albion, Dunwall is the most English feeling fantasy world I’ve ever set foot in, game, book or movie. It feels like a hyper industrialised Dickensian London, complete with rats, dingy alleys, an uncaring aristocracy and English accents throughout. A fact made even more astounding when you discover that Dunwall’s creators, Arkane Studios, are French.

I say all the time that a great setting helps to make a great game, and it seems that Arkane agree with me. Advertisements for refined whale oil and whiskey are posted to the sides of houses. Propaganda booms over the loudspeakers. Notices about tax and the rat plague appear on street corners, and there is art everywhere. Landscapes of Dunwall, images of whaling ships, portraits of the great and good of the aristocracy pepper abandoned and flooded mansions, and in the Golden Cat , a ‘bathhouse’, portraits of women of ill repute dominate the walls. The art is universally fantastic too. I found myself stopping to get a closer look at many of the paintings I passed on my way through the game. Also scattered around the city are notes and books that help flesh out the history and culture of Dunwall. They can range from the lyrics of “What shall we do with the Drunken Whaler,” to excerpts from plays, to notes on the occult, to Bioshock style audiologs. You can see all the thought and all the work that has gone into giving the game a sense of place. It all serves to make Dunwall feel less like a construction of polygons and textures and more like a lived in, and dying, city.

I get the feeling that Bioshock was quite the influence on Dishonored as it developed. From its first person viewpoint and watery setting, to a couple of pivotal game mechanics. Like Bioshock, the left and right triggers control your left and right hands. In your right hand is a fairly conventional sword. You swing it about in the conventional manner, stabbing people in the conventional way. To me, first person sword combat often never feels like much more than swinging your virtual arm around, hoping to hit something. In Dishonored, the sword combat is slightly better than that. Enemies react to where you hit them, and Corvo, the game’s lead, will often grab his assailants and execute them in a satisfyingly gruesome manner. The left hand is where the Bioshock influence comes. Corvo has supernatural powers, gained from collecting runes, and can augment his abilities with bone charms. Switch Runes for Adam, Bone charms for Gene Tonics and Powers for Plasmids and you will understand everything you need to know about what the left trigger controls. Even the health and mana bars in Dishonoured are the same colours as Bioshock’s health and Eve bars.

The powers aren’t a straight rip off though. Where Bioshock’s plasmids were mostly offensive, Dishonored’s powers are more neutral. They tend to be aimed at helping you traverse Dunwall as quickly and as silently as possible. Key abilities such as the short range teleport, time manipulation and the (brilliantly fun to unleash) Rat Swarm can be chained with offensive moves to create some really interesting and fun combat options. Personally, one of the reasons I’ll be replaying the game will be to experiment more with them.

I had a few minor gripes, the main one being that the game actively encourages a quicksave and retry style of play that might work fine on the PC but is a bit of a pain to do on my Xbox. Frequently flicking in and out of menus to save after a particularly difficult section really breaks the flow of the game and the it breaks the immersion too. I also would like to have been told that my style of play would affect how the game ended after I had finished the game. Being told this in the loading screens meant that I automatically held back on the carnage to make sure I got the good ending. After all, who doesn't like a good ending? I would have preferred to have been surprised. Really though, they are minor things and didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game so much as to ruin the experience. My main issue with Dishonored isn’t a gameplay issue at all. I found my immersion in the world Arkane have created was slightly broken by the wooden animation of the NPCs, particularly the facial animation. Okay, it's leagues better than the typical Bethesda dead from the jaw upwards work, and in freeze frame it can look quite good but it isn’t great, especially when you compare it to the stellar animation in games like Uncharted 3, Enslaved or Final Fantasy XIII. Hell, Portal 2’s personality cores were more expressionate than any character in Dishonored, and personality cores don’t even have faces.

Also, while I’m ranting. Why on earth is Corvo a silent protagonist? He clearly has a personality. You only have to look at the way he treats Emily to see that. He even has lines of dialogue, to a degree, in the options that flash up on screen when you interact with somebody. I would have felt more for Corvo, if he had a voice and a personality, if I understood his motivations and his relationships with the other members of the cast. Denying him a voice seems to be missing a trick. That said, the rest of the cast, and the excellent voice work provided for them, help to deliver a very enjoyable story. It’s simple, yet effective, with a satisfyingly organic and human final act. You can understand why the antagonist has done what he has.

All in all, despite the rant, Dishonored is a fabulous game. My issues may not necessarily be a problem for you, and in the grand scheme of things they aren't a problem for me either. I enjoyed every moment I spent in Dunwall and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who plays games. I’ll be playing it again, and I think I’d like to see a sequel too, if only to visit Dunwall again and see if Arkane have given Corvo a voice. 

Now, I'm finally going to get round to starting Bayonetta. I've only had it for six months...