When developers make the wrong game

Whoops, I did it again!

Game development is never done in a vacuum. Unless you're Toby Fox, in which I case I can only assume you not only build games alone, but harvest your own home-grown food crops to stew in a naturally formed volcanic spring stove inside your hand built wooden log cabin home. There are numerous eyes, ears, voices and ideas that get sprinkled in the development dish in order to whip up that final finished product; ideas that will touch on everything from what sort of visual design standard fits best, how the implementation of this certain feature can be coded in a manner cohesive to systems around it and the ever-elusive; how can the cycle of fun in gameplay be extended over the length of our game? None of these are small questions, and all change the face of the product. Although the wrong fundamentals choice can actually be quite difficult to do when you've an entire team behind you for support. So if that's the case, how are entire AAA games being made so fundamentally wrong recently?

I ask because we've recently had the Superhero dud, Gotham Knights drop on our doorstep and, surprise surprise, the game isn't great. (Who could have possibly seen that coming?) And irrespective of that one technician complaining that the Xbox Series S was holding back the entire generation, this isn't a hardware problem as much as it's a conceptual one. (Unless the Series S grew sentience, crept into WB offices and personally recoded the game to be head-scracthingly badly conceived.) I think we all sort of knew this was going to be the case the very first moment we saw health bars above enemies and went "Uh oh; is this a live service?" Only for the team to turn around and promise it wasn't a live service, and then carry on talking about gear stats. Clearly a game that was born from the potent DNA of an incredible series that demonstrated exactly what a Batman-set superhero game needs to be wouldn't screw up the fundamentals; would it? 

But outside of story and dialogue, for which I heard wildly distinct perspectives, Gotham Knights focuses on everything it shouldn't and ends up being the wrong game it needed to be. Focus is put on the repetition of boring dynamic fights, (which are supposed to be the garnish on top of the world, not a gate to progression) the crafting system, (which lacks any ingenuity whatsoever) stats and level numbers (which clash with the superhero fantasy) and a horribly dumbed down fighting system. (Galling when fighting is literally the main way of interacting with the world.) Essentially they needed to make an action adventure game that expanded on the basics of what the Arkham series made and let several players enjoy that experience together; instead we got a live service skin stretched over an entirely single player game! All the downsides and concessions required to make it a live service, none of the benefits and positives. It's as if the team spent their years making the wrong game. 

And it's all very similar to how Marvel's Avengers turned out, only at least that game was designed to be a Live Service and actually was. But still, the resounding take away from the Avengers game was that it, too, was the wrong game. People of the time were hungry for a cinematic and linear high-quality narrative featuring the famous cast of the movies. Maybe the casting was a bit out-of-the-question, but the high-quality set-piece strewn exciting video game narrative could have been the slam dunk that the hopeful wanted. It would make sense. Popular Superhero games of the past, the Spiderman games, the Arkham games, Ultimate Alliance; all nailed that sense of overbloated comic-book scale narratives, empowering the user with small units they can crush with their flashy powers and impressive set-piece fights against huge roosters and familiar super villain faces to punctuate the excitement. The basic framework of a solid super hero game is actually fairly formulaic and straight forward.

Instead what we got was, yet again, a power levelling RPG system that made certain units annoying and unintuitive to fight against, strings of copy-paste cookie cutter 'smash the thing' missions that served only to pad out the run time as you grind for gear that is only good for taking on slightly harder variants of those same missions and, worst of all, a campaign which featured only three Super villains which the open world game recycled constantly. All that effort which could have gone into making the ultimate superhero team-up game instead went into calculating gear stat tables, designing grind EXP curves, setting up the players for endgame content that could be added onto, and basically doing all the things that don't improve the fantasy of being a superhero. And when you're making a superhero game, prioritizing the fantasy is a fundamental objective, any design decision that gets in the way of achieving that needs wrought-iron justification for it's existence and if you can't provide that; then maybe the game you're making isn't a superhero game!

And from a very different angle, we can look at another game which wasn't what it was supposed to be with the recent Saints Row Reboot. Now people who were fans of Saints Row would, in turn, be fans of the gangbanger fantasy, even as that vision got slowly watered down as the franchise went on. At the heart was always a focus on irreverent action and, arguably dated, scenes which attempt to depict the player character as the prototypical, cigar smoking gun-toting, embodiment of your pop culture 'badass'. Whether that image was pursued with straight-faced seriousness or ironically, that was pretty much the heart of Saints Row. 'The Playa' is a badass, and at times when they aren't being a badass they're not being true to themselves and need to go through a journey to remind themselves how to be a badass again. That is the moral peak that overrides all else; and within the fiction of the game world that alone makes them superior to the various colourful gangs and existential threats around them even if the Saints are just as murderous and destructive. The game doesn't even conceive of viewing the Saints performances as morally questionable, because the rule of cool is idolised by Saints Row.

Which is all to say that Saints Row Reboot isn't a Saints Row game. It might carry the name, emulate some of objectives and copy the gameplay, (badly) but it lacks that very important ingredient of Saint's Rows 'heart'. (Or any heart, by some critic's accounts.) For the Reboot, the Saints are driven by half-digested morals of anti-capitalism that are explored about as well as Star Wars dives into astrophysics, the protagonist's key principals are togetherness and loyalty to his friends, which is so empty-souled and basic you wonder if anyone was behind the keyboard writing this script at all, and that edge of the player's selfish desire being, even ironically, moralised above bare basic standards of decency is entirely, intentionally, absent. Just like with Ubisoft games, the protagonist has to be the good guy, even if that's in a strangled way, and that sanitation rubs off onto the wider open world itself in a plethora of bizarre and lazy 'censorships'. By trying to distance themselves from the abrasive past of Saints Row's presentation, the Reboot distanced itself from being a Saints Row game. Whatever lukewarm open world romp that Volition created, it wasn't Saints Row but something else entirely.

Making the wrong game is in some ways worse than making a bad or broken game. Because with a bad game at least one can recognise how you knew what was supposed to be created and simply failed on that execution, and a broken one can feasibly be fixed to one-day be great. But a 'wrong' game is symptomatic of a fundamental divide between what the concept of the game demands and the direction you sought to develop. The final product might work and function just fine, but the concept and gameplay will never slide together in that perfect synergy which forms a product that achieves it's vision. Essentially this blog is a treatise on exactly why effective and precise planning is, in many ways, the most important stage of video game development; because anything else that goes wrong can be rectified, but bad schematics underline everything. Always make sure you're making the right game, everybody.

Limited lives

Who wants to live forever?

Given the ever growing and changing art of gaming it's inevitable that some of the cliches and trends of the day would get whittled out as the years went by. It is, afterall, the course of life to be forever evolving, and art initiates life, no? Still, the consequence is that sometimes the things we love slowly become unrecognisable, and that's the sentiment I hear some people who played the video games of yesteryear share. Most typically people will note that games have become easier, which is true for many a reason, and that back in day there used to be habit for limited lives. And doesn't that seem odd, why oh why was limited lives such a universal thing in the old school of gaming? Especially as nowadays such features are indicative of super hardcore and unforgiving gamemodes. Well, let's postulate.

The first most obvious answer is the most sensible, as it comes down to money. Lacking the home consoles and mobile phone games of the modern age, when gaming started to first become commercially viable it did so through arcade cabinets which kids would spend their money on in order to play. You'd sink some money, play for a bit, die brutally and then slap in some more money; the cycle of arcade machines. Arcade games, for purely financial reasons, would be in their best interest to be both hard and punishing, so that they could extract as money nickle and dimes from their customer base as humanely possible. These almost hostile relationships between consumer and product created an environment where players had to challenge themselves with superior reaction times in order to save on their money, as well as for pure entertainment. Titles like Dragon's Lair, in which death was forever just a single miss-input away, raked in the most income, which shows you the the model to which game difficulty intentionally trended.

Of course, even when games started to get their home console releases, this bitter difficulty followed the game industry well into it's first few generations. Even when we started getting save systems after the innovation of The Legend of Zelda, limited lives were still a stable of just about every game until about the mid to late nineties. Now some of that is waste and leftover from the way that games used to be made, but another is a hold-on of design that fit in line with the way that video games were evolving even on home console. What you must remember is that those early game cartridges and consoles had very limited capabilities in terms of RAM and storage. No game could be a large enough adventure to warrant repeated play sessions, not just because of the lack of saving as a concept. Games retaining the lives system and their trial and failure difficulty helped pad out the length of these products so they engaged the customer for longer.

And after saving was introduced? Well then it started to become more of just a hold-on piece of technology from an antiquated style of game development. As games started becoming capable of being longer, difficulty fell off as a key focusing factor of design, now there was such a thing as replayability and several game play loops stitched together. Even further down the line and the idea of narrative stories being told through gaming started to become popular, at which point throwing in a 'lives' system and 'game over' screen seemed somewhat juvenile when compared to the barriers that the industry was clearing over in it's path to self improvement. As gameplay became more complex and involved, factors started to be shaved off the game development package as they became deemed 'unnecessary'. Limited lives proved to be more annoying than enriching in more modern products, and now the world of norms has flipped completely; games with limited lives are the outliers of society today!

Sonic is a franchise that has stayed staunchly married to it's old school ideals of a life system, even when the rest of the game has modernised and out grown it. In Sonic Adventure, despite that game being a mostly narrative driven story, you have lives to maintain; although when you run out it isn't game over; you just have to start from the beginning of the level instead of from that level's checkpoint. (Which is still pretty damn inconvenient; that final boss is a life siphon!) And even more modern games like Sonic Generations have a life system, even though it mixes 2d gameplay philosophy with 3d game design philosophy which often clashes. Lost World went so far as to thrown in a 25 extra lives preorder bonus, and Sonic Forces kept itself staunchly married to the antiquated Sonic gimmick of a level timer. Even though the limit of that timer was one hour per mission, in a game with missions that average the length of one minute to two. So perhaps modern Sonic Team weren't so invested in making sensible design choices.

But just because lives have gone away, that doesn't mean the world has lost all interest in the idea of death consequences. In fact, I'd argue that 'permadeath' and 'Roguelikes' are ideals that bring us back to the same sort of mindset as live systems in games. Roguelikes are typically more condensed and highly tweaked games that focus around replayability and the fun of starting over from the beginning again and again. With the added bonus that for most of the best rougelikes, failure spawns advantages that can be used in your next run making sure that your time playing the game never truly feels wasted, thus fixing one of the key flaws with the Lives system. This allows some Roguelikes to be tough as nails without feeling demoralising and a waste of effort.

Permadeath is typically even more hardcore and leans heavily on the idea of immutable consequence. The weight of what you have to lose can be enough to scare the player into being more clever and measured in their approach to problem solving, with the threat of a noose hanging over their heads ready to take all progress in an instant. This can be limited to permadeath of a character within a rooster, such as for squad based games, or maybe even the entire player character overall. (Typically found more in indie experiences. Mainstream games aren't quite brave enough to go there.) And maybe even just characters that can die if you screw up enough in a story based game, such as is the case with Quantic Dreams style games... it was actually one of the big selling points of Heavy Rain.

The Arcade beginnings of mainstream gaming still do have their routes in the modern psychology of game design, and not always in obvious ways. The essence of limited lives and what it meant for games of it's time, is still well and alive in conscious design choices that are made today. It's one of the many reasons why I roll my eyes whenever people say that 'New games are too easy, old games used to have difficulty to them'; typically conflating intentional frustration and antiquated design concepts with compelling and insightful complexity. Some of the best games of today can keep their simple mechanics and others can loose themselves in deep complexity, creating some of the most challenging and intriguing experiences in gaming today, all with their new framework of unlimited lives.

Watch_Dogs Review

Guess what, it's not the pizza guy!

There was time of innocence, long ago, where I used to believe it when adults told me lies. It was very different time, a time when the sky was bluer, the evenings less cold, and the future a lot brighter. But then everything changed, after Watch_Dogs attacked. You have to understand, it had been such a long time since anyone had the last big discrepancy between an E3 trailer and the offerings of the full game that most couldn't even remember what it felt like to be betrayed like that. So when we saw the footage of Watch_Dogs' Chicago with it's dynamic wind bustling detritus across the street and stunningly realised human animations not just from the main character but the living residents around him, topped off with an impressive ear soothing sound scape, we just assumed that was the game which Ubisoft was going to deliver. Obviously is was not, by quite a margin, and so began the spiral of distrust and backwards glances that has plagued the player/developer relationship ever since.

It was such a shame because on it's surface, the proposition of Watch_Dogs seemed so effortlessly promising. It presented a open world similar in grit and realism to Grand Theft Auto but spruced up with a Big-brother style surveillance system called ctOS that governed all the world, directed traffic, ran the phones, kept all the doors locked and powered every camera. And you, the bug crawling in the middle of this well-oiled machine, influencing it however you dare with powerful and unquantifiable technical wizardry. Hacking was the in-word for this game, and though the developers over at Ubisoft seemed content boiling the art of security breeching into little more than a single button press; the idea of interacting with the world on such a level that you could freely and dynamically influence the rules of the world felt like it was putting us in the shoes of the conductor of the world's play. As such, that larvae of a concept wiggled it's way deep into people's minds and grew into a hype parasite.

But like with everything that Ubisoft have ever promised in their entire history, that hacking system turned out to not be quite as 'freeform' and 'player empowering' as were led to believe. Hacking with the touch of a button does permit the player to create traffic accidents, set off grenades in enemies pockets, blow steam valves and even switch out the lights of entire city block; but the design of the game caters towards the most intractability in specified and designed pockets of action. You felt less like a conductor and more like a talented trumpeteer who flourishes their part at times but otherwise sticks to the clearly laid-out sheet music. That being said then and even now, the actual gameplay of hacking and combat fit together surprisingly neatly save for a few niggling 'dynamic snapping' issues that occurs when two interactable targets are close together. And the ability to sit in one corner of the map and jump from camera to camera, not only spotting your targets but identifying opportunities to manipulate them, is just as empowering as it sounds. It added a very fun new approach to the typical Ubisoft stealth play premise.

Whilst that is all well and good, however; the real reason I came back to Watch_Dogs after all this time was because I was spurred on by my recent playthrough of Grand Theft Auto 4. That grounded and gritty journey through the criminal underworld reminded me of taking down gangsters in the back alleys and blown-out factories of urban Chicago as the imposing Vigilante. (Who I keep forgetting is nicknamed 'The Fox'. That moniker is desperately under-represented throughout Watch_Dogs) For some reason my mind equated the two experiences as equitable to one another, with the understated but effective violence of GTA IV matching the street-level grounded action of the original Watch_Dogs. And did my compunctions serve me well? In part.

I always forget about the how Ubisoft games never quite feel the best that they can be in your hands. In the case of Watch_Dogs, cars lack the proper weight and either float across the road too much or refuse to turn like a stubborn brick. Aiden Pearce, the protagonist, sticks too staunchly to cover sometimes, and can dash about too much when you're attempting precise and specific movements. But it's not terrible by any regard. Just not ideal for the style of game that is being attempted, which GTA, on the otherhand, is a lot better at. (Rockstar had been at their craft for decades longer at the point of IV, so I guess that makes sense.) But what about the really important element of the gunplay that I remembered; the actual loop of trading gunfire?

Watch_Dogs has a decently satisfying third-person aim and shoot gameplay set-up that benefits from a mobile and versatile player character to give you lots of options in confrontations. Sliding over cover, performing takedowns, hacking the cameras to get the lay of the land, tracking enemies through walls; all of these tools are handy and oft used tools in the players arsenal that make the abundance of combat the game presents feel fresh for a bit longer than they might in another game. Stealth is a very important aspect too and Ubisoft leveraged their experience with Assassin's Creed to make this feel intuitive and functional, mostly. There are some small technical bugs, such as the fact that the enemy AI can't distinguish between aggro targets so in the very few instances in game when you're with another character, the second they get spotted the enemy will instantly know where you are too. (Magic) The actual aiming and shooting feels nice on the thumbstick, and is benefitted by a great, if thematically bizarre, focus fire bullet-time mode. Though most encounters are functionally the same, the ways you can approach them are distinct enough to feel dynamic and impressive in moderation. The very deliberate nature of how hacking is set up can feel limiting in less directed action scenes; such as if you get into a fight after a car chase that led you away from a designated encounter arena, but if you paint between the lines there's some leeway for fun times.

Unfortunately, Watch_Dogs' gunplay does suffer from offering too many guns to the player, such as to the point where not enough of them feel like they have a purpose to exist beyond "The number of stars in it's description say this gun is better than that one." Bizarrely, despite going to the effort of ranking every gun with a quality rating, Watch_Dogs offers absolutely no restriction on what guns you can pick up at any point during game progression. (Outside of some special guns that are almost always less impressive than whatever gun you used to earn them.) What this means is that as soon as you can afford them, which isn't very long at all if you play any of the side content, you can buy the best guns and then never need to pick up another one again as long as the game runs. Less guns with greater emphasis on distinct rates of fire or firing modes, and a more clever distribution of those guns would have been preferable.

Watch_Dogs also boosts a Ubisoft staple; a half-assed RPG-light system which has you unlocking abilities on a web-tree using EXP you earn from killing people and completing missions. There's a web of abilities, and some of them are pretty good and interesting, but there's no justification, or in-universe explanation, for gating off hacking or combat abilities for arbitrary skill point windows. It does nothing to enrich the flow of progression and aside from experienced players going 'Why can't I do this? Ah, I forgot to unlock it in the stupid tree'; you'll totally forget the system is there. I wish I could critique this as an oddity misstep of Ubisoft's past; but unfortunately the lunatics insist on making their games like this even to this day. (#killRPGlightsystems!)

The hacking is really the highlight of Watch_Dogs, it's flagship feature that sold all the copies and launched this franchise to begin with. And it all starts with the Profiler, one of those flagship symbols of power that make this franchise special. The Profiler is a phone that connects to every electronic item in the world and can interact with most all of them, or just present information on the subject for your voyeuristic pleasure. People at the time went crazy over the way the Profiler provides basic details on every NPC in the world including name, income, occupation and one random fact about them. Maybe they have a particular fetish or recently get arrested for stealing garden gnomes. The Profiler knows about it. The Profiler knows all. It's just a shame that this only serves as window dressing because there's no way to interact with most of these NPCs beyond shooting them, which is frowned on by Ubisoft through their morality system.

Where the gameplay really falls off, in my opinion, is when it comes to driving and vehicular combat; which this game focuses on a lot. Several missions will task you with driving away from pursuers or hunting down a car-bound enemy and disabling their car, and Ubisoft lean obnoxiously hard on their hacking gimmick to make these sections work. A dynamic prompt will appear on your screen if a nearby vehicle in pursuit happens to drive into the danger zone of a potential road pipe burst hack or traffic light switch, but this is more reactionary from the player instead of active steps the player is taking. Which, incidentally, makes the resulting carnage feel less like an achievement of skill or ingenuity. And if you're wondering, Ubisoft made it impossible to drive and fire your gun at the same time; killing the possibility of replicating 90% of movie car chases. (I really missed trading gunfire during high speed chases like I did in GTA IV.)

Visually the world that Ubisoft bought to life is actually quite pretty with a decently large and distinct rendition of actual Chicago. This isn't some fictional city based on Chicago but called something else for legal reasons, Ubisoft actually made a microcosm of Chicago to serve as the backdrop to their tense action drama with a hacking twist; and their world builders did as fine a job as they always do. I particularly liked the night-time lighting and the way that independent light sources really popped in the dark; specifically car headlights. Even today I think the game is quite visually strong and pretty in a manner that is very grounded to the reality of depicting a city. You're going to be surrounded by concrete high-rises and steel beams, but there's a personality and heart to the city that you won't find in similar built-up open worlds of this era such as Saints Row 3's Steelport. (One of the advantages of borrowing the land and culture from a real place, I suppose.)

I also found the sound effects to be very punchy but mediated; again feeding into that illusion of reality over flamboyance. Guns in particular are great for highlighting this, for the way they pop and rattle in a manner that feels quite authentic. But ambient traffic and city sounds can be just as stark, with the nearby screeching of a speeding car carrying on the wind with an energy that evokes strong curiosity. I never remembering noticing other NPC's traffic incidents by sound alone in a GTA game! And a few of the hacks have very pleasing, if a bit more sci-fi and less realistic, sound effects applied to them, such as the shutting-down fizzle of the Blackout hack; reinforced by the near iconic (thanks to that original gameplay trailer) visual of the city power shutting off block by block. 

All of which makes this game on the very surface feel like something of a successor to Grand Theft Auto IV as the world waited for V to come out and take back the series crown; but unfortunately as with a lot of Ubisoft open worlds; that veneer is skin deep. Civilian AI is that Ubisoft brand of dumb where people amble about their pointless lives until the player does literally anything, at which point they lose their minds and react. Pull out a gun, they react, hop a fence, they react, dare to crouch down in their presence, they react. It breaks the illusion of being an individual in a bustling city when you constantly appear to be the main character of everybody else's stage play. Also, as with any Ubisoft game, the majority of activities in the world are giant icons that litter up the world map and present identical gameplay challenges forever until you lose your mind. Watch_Dogs does offer a few genuine minigames to fill in the void, but they are largely unpolished and forgettable. The Drinking minigame is awful and boring, the AR Space Invaders game is fun for about a single playthrough and the various 'fully encompassing minigame' Digital Trips are such a waste of development effort it hurts.

Let me focus on this for a bit because I still get annoyed about it. These digital trips all offer fundamentally unique gameplay scenarios where you're doing something crazy like flying through the air trying to pick up icons or jumping about the city as a giant robot spider that sticks to walls. These all should be great additions to the player's repertoire of gameplay. But every one of them prioritizes style and flash over substance and purpose. They look great but play like bare basic minigames that never left the brainstorming stage of idea creation, and they each offer absolutely zero effect on the main game. No transferrable rewards, no stat increase; nothing. It's an absolute crime that Ubisoft sold a whole digital trip as a DLC as though it's worth that separate price tag. I'd feel insulted if I didn't get it as a bundle deal with Watch_Dogs Legion. (Yeah, I might be reviewing the whole series. Send help.)

But enough going on about the side activities that don't work with the game, what about the one's that do? Well you've got the Fixer Contracts, which are all vehicle based challanges that range from increadibly boring checkpoint races to comparatively less-boring 'tail the target than kill them' missions. Criminal Convoys which task you with interfering with a conga line of badguy cars to get to a target, which are pretty fun overall. And you have the best activity, the Gang Hideouts which are small guarded areas of enemies that you get to clear out in whatever manner you so please. These are the moments when the game's toolset is free to be manipulated however you can work them and the player can really start having fun approaching the game's more branching gameplay options. If only the game didn't repeat all of the side activities far beyond their entertainment value! Trying to complete every one of these missions for completion percentage is like pulling teeth when you have to do forty bloody driving contracts! In comparison, you only get about 15 gang hideouts and even less criminal convoys. (So they made the most boring side activity the most plentiful one; genius?)

There's also an online mode fitted into the game which, beyond the typical deathmatch premise, (I found that mode was always hampered by the lack of meaningful weapon variety) comes to life through 'invasions'. Other players can join your world in order to spy on you or 'hack' your data. It's actually a very cool system where other players, disguised as NPCs, have to pretend to be fixtures of the host game world as they can remain undetected within a circle of hacking for a few concentrated minutes, meanwhile the player host can spot them if they either shoot or highlight them with the profiler. It's a fantastic game of cat and mouse that evolves upon the 'Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood' multiplayer mode (which I loved back in the day) and is so well made that on PC, at least, you can still expect to be invaded to this very day. I dealt with maybe 20 or more intruders during my playthrough and even learned how to figure out when my world was invaded before they triggered any hacks by pausing every now and then. (When someone invades, the game live pauses.)

All of these are the building blocks that make up the game around the drama narrative that Watch_Dogs presents; which is the next aspect of this game that I want to dive into with detail. That's because I really wanted to confront the way that Ubisoft chooses to characterise this franchise of theirs with analysis and examples to try and present how I feel about the theming of this hacking revenge story framed around a world of hacking exploitation, systemic corruption and a bit of low-stakes conspiracy to complete this trope pie. Maybe by the end of my in-depth dive you'll be able to see for yourself why I feel the way I do about this game and you won't even have to hear my opinion in the summary. But I'm still going to give it anyway, because that's me.

Watch_Dogs follows the hard-edged and lightly haunted Aiden Pearce as he acts as the one-man stalker of the streets of Chicago under his alter-ego: the Vigilante. Pearce has been thrust into this world ever since a hacking heist job with his old partner, Damian, went awry and in retaliation his six-year old Niece was killed in a hit attempt. Since then he's been trying to keep his secret life of hunting the people who attacked his family separate from his public life as the uncle who dotes on his nephew and his sister. He's not very good at it, clearly lacking the conviction to emotionally connect with the two of them who are trying to move on from a loss he refuses to, but it's a very valiant effort when you take into the account that the media who have been following his vigilante antics know his full name and spout it on air often.

You read that right; the media know who the Vigilante is, by name, and thus so do the cops; and yet his family have no idea about his double life. Jacks, his Nephew, is even said to be a fan of the vigilante and roll-played as him during his birthday party; but I guess everyone just turns-off the TV when it comes to the boring news reporter mentioning his name! I can only assume that there was supposed to be a point in the narrative where Pearce's name becomes public, but it must have been entirely written out. It feels pretty stupid, however, especially considering the entire first act finale of the game presents Aiden breaking into a prison in order to intimidate a felon into not identifying him. What's the point; everyone knows who you are!

One thing you'll notice very quickly about the dialogue of Watch_Dogs, is that a lot of it seeped in that boring jargon that sounds impressive from a distance, but very easily makes the player switch off from the specifics of conversation. If you can't follow the words that are being regularly thrown around then the dialogue will start to feel like it's lacking the substance to be worthy and engaging. And the writers use hacker jargon as an excuse not to actually delve into specifics; because when they do the narrative starts getting wavy and plotpoints start to slip. I seriously wonder what the team thinks an 'encryption' is, and why they seem to think that an incomplete corrupted file just needs an encryption key to fix the file. Unless I'm missing something from the three times I've played this game; that's not how data works.

Luckily when the player starts to tune out of specifics they won't be missing a whole lot of substance, because Watch_Dogs is built on the bones of a prototypical 'revenge' plot that plays heavy on the cliché-dialogue in some of the early emotional scenes. Hearing him reminisce about Lena (the dead Niece) and how she used to sing Happy Birthday off-key just makes my brow twitch. What kind of neo-noir, half-drunk, edge-sucking protagonist notices and recounts the timbre of his Six-year-old Niece's singing prowess? I get what they're trying to do with his dialogue, but the specific execution feels hollow and manufactured.

In fact, I felt that a lot with the early dialogue of the game, such as in the way Aiden's sister Nicky interacts with her surviving child in a manner that sounds pitch perfect for how every adult speaks to children in those low-budget horror movies from the 2000's. You know, in that really limp and unnatural way that seems to exist only to fill script space by playing lip service to a character bond that is already implied by the familial link and so the writer doesn't care enough to put intent behind their dialogue. I'm nit-picking here, but when it comes to dialogue and character relationships I can't help myself. There's more dimensions to the relationship between a mother and child than- "we are related". And it's so weird because they knew how to present Aiden as this kind-of surrogate parent to Jackson who can't break through the boy's protective emotional shell and so spends most of their time on screen together talking at him with the distance representative of the walls Aiden spent the past year erecting between himself and his family. So why couldn't they do the bear minimum for Nicky and Jacks? Yes, I know they are only in three scenes together and I'm being neurotic about this; but dammit, this annoyed me!

I'm also not a fan of the forced drama between Aiden and his Sister. Their friction is important and needed to be introduced, but they could have found a much better way than 'Hey Aiden, I know this guy over the phone is threatening to break into my house and kill me and my son, but why are you getting involved!' The literal line is "Please stop trying to fix our problems! You're always doing this!" Which is just... utterly ridiculous writing. Her life has been threatened, at the very least she should be saying 'Don't get involved, just leave this to the police.' But then I guess that would take some of the wind out the moment where Nicky, in the very late game, realises that her brother is the Vigilante! Yes, she has to realise this; even when his name has been plastered on the front page of every news report for half of the game by that point... the whole start of this game's narrative upsets me.

Morality is a creeping presence over this game that bothered me greatly throughout this, distinctly more introspective, playthrough of Watch_Dogs. Ubisoft have a terrible fear of presenting the player in a position that can ever be considered morally dubious, even when they're playing a vigilante who murders criminals instead of letting them face the justice system. For Watch_Dogs they even implemented a 'morality bar' to reward and encourage the player to do 'good' things like stop crimes and help panicking civilians out of their cars during gunfights. And then punish and get upset at bad activities such as running over civilians, engaging with cops in firefights, (even when the game literally forces you to) and shooting a surrendered criminal in the face. (He was a career crook; he'd have been back to gangbanging in a week! I make no apologies!)

The problem with this is, whilst Ubisoft likes to think this system merely enriches the player's choice to be as 'moral' as they so choose, in reality it's just the backbone that reinforces Ubisoft's very specific ideas on what it is to be the 'good guy'. There's one hilariously ham-fisted moment wherein Aiden, on his way to clear his first ctOS station so he can partake in this game's version of 'Synchronisation towers', is subjected to a randomly pertinent news report over the radio where it's made explicitly clear that all the personnel acting as guards for the ctOS stations are actually hired-gun mercenaries, all of whom are ex-military. Some with criminal records. You hear that player? That makes it totally morally okay to shoot them! Except...

As with many instances of Ubisoft straw-manning the morality question, there's holes here. We don't know what criminal records these mercenaries have, so they might have just been done for smoking once when they were fifteen and now have a target on their backs. Also, only some have criminal records? So then the rest are just ex military. Is being ex military in itself a heinous enough sin to justify your prompt execution by the Vigilante of Chicago? (Damn, I didn't know Americans meant it to be so final when they say "Thank you for your service.") Also, going back to that mission where you have to intimidate a con into not revealing your identity; the more sensible course of action, which the game even brings up, would be to kill him, but this strikes against the moral cord of the game. 'He's just a passer-by' Aiden says 'he doesn't deserve to die'. That passerby was a gangbanger from the same gang he happily slaughtered, who just happened to be out getting groceries when everyone else was being murdered. Aiden's morality is really touch and go, which might have been a character trait if Ubisoft's writers was smart enough to notice their inconsistency; instead Aiden is said to have a 'curiously strong moral fibre'. (My ass.) 

All of which makes it insane that the game has the absolute balls to turn around and do the 'am I the bad guy' question at a couple points in the narrative. One time in particular being after wiping out a gang hideout in order to save a character in trouble who watched the whole thing on the camera. Aiden has a real moment where he has to ask himself "What have I done? I killed all of them." And I'm just there thinking; 'nah, Ubisoft says your still the good guy bro. I can tell because out of everyone you just killed the 'morality' bar didn't slide down once. You good.' You really take the bite out of the moral weight of your narrative when you lack the conviction to really commit. I don't buy Aiden's moral panic because he's never slipped up from his own softy standards, he's as immutable as a literal superhero; it's nauseating. 

  

Ubisoft did however, despite themselves, manage to go dark during one quest chain in particular that takes you to the centre of a human trafficking ring, during auction time. It's perhaps the furthest this franchise will ever go into dark topics, but even then there's that aura of Ubisoft lameness dampening the whole thing. Why are there random dressed-up mannequins all over the auction house? Oh, I'm sorry; was the fact that these rich asshats kidnap, drug up and then sell young women as 'love' slaves not adequately getting across the point that these guys are kind of creepy? We needed to be introduced to the idea that these guys play dress-up with human sized dolls to seal the deal? 'I wasn't sure about that sex pest, but the second he whipped out his freshly manicured ken doll I knew he had to go! You can't be playing with dolls as a grown man!'

The narrative does, however, have it's highlights. Jordi is a totally amoral fixer who's dialogue is fast paced and funny due to the fact he seems utterly uncaring to literally anything but his own idle musings and anecdotes. The entire chapter with the Rossi-Fremont is damn near perfect from set-up, having the player camera hop up the whole building to get an idea of it's intimidating size, build up, several missions around the place, to pay off, assaulting it in a campaign highlight set piece. And sometimes you get to make those unforgettable moments for yourself thanks to the solid hacking tools the game provides you. Such as, for me, the time when I cleared out a whole car showroom of enemies by switching out the lights, taking out my silenced pistol and wiping out the whole place before the lights kicked back on again. That's just a badass moment that will stay with you, possible because of the decent bones this game is built on.

To build on the positivity, I think that the building blocks of Aiden's narrative are actually very solid and the general main story of the game has great understanding of pacing and flow. I just don't buy a lot of emotional moments beside from Nicky's last scene with Aiden. When Clara has her little twist moment with Aiden, it's brushed over so quickly despite it being such a huge confrontation that when the consequences of that came to roost in the penultimate mission, the moment doesn't land like it really should. (Being as vague as I can to avoid massive spoilers) Also, I think the cohesion of the story starts to unravel near the end, specifically with the introduction of 'The Bellweather' as a random plotpoint that is shoved into the narrative as a literal footnote with no elaboration as to what it even is. To be fair, there are clues hidden in tapes about what it is, but the concept only really gets explored in Watch_Dogs 2 so it didn't really need to be mentioned. (It's not even that crazy of a concept anyway, I don't know why Ubisoft thought they had to be so cagey and conspiratorial about it. Maybe they were just used to doing that from the early Assassin's Creed games, back when that franchise still had mysteries to unravel.)

And finally there's the finale, which I have to admit was actually alright. Nothing amazing, but not a resounding disappointment either. I liked the way that they choose to slightly nudge at the forth wall by having your navigation markers be hacked into and twisted about. (Very cute.) I was also pleasantly surprised to, in this final mission, have a line of insight addressing why it was Aiden became the Vigilante and tying it to those specific finale events. "Not anymore, now when I see a problem: I step in." It wasn't a question hanging over the narrative like an absent parent, most people probably didn't care why he made the decision  to don the mask by that point, but I think it's a very nice way to bookend the narrative and present some character insight. But I can hardly wrap up my impressions without another nitpick- can I?

Why does every thematically important building in this game have an inexplicable speaker system built into it? The blown-out rooftop of the Rossi-Fremont housing complex? Damian's dilapidated Lighthouse getaway? It seems a tad contrived. But no, seriously; my real gripe is with the ending voice over that shoots off immediately after the final confrontation. During which the writers, I can only hope unintentionally, recreated the absolute sin that the theatre release of Bladerunner did in it's final moments. They write a voice-over in which the protagonist dumbly goes over his suppositions of the blindingly obvious character motivations that just played out in front of him. To be fair, in Bladerunner it was worse because that was the literal entire purpose of the story being laid out in front of the audience like they had just slept through the movie, but Ubisoft still managed to leave us on a decently sour note.

The Badblood DLC set after the events of Watch_Dogs and featuring 'fan favourite' returning character T-Bone, fixes up that sour note right proper. In all my previous playthroughs of Watch_Dogs I never actually played Badblood before, and I didn't intend to this time until I accidentally got the DLC for 'free' alongside yet another copy of Watch_Dogs 1 when I bought Legion. (I own four copies of this game now: 1 physical, 3 digital. What is wrong with me?) I remember hearing good things about the DLC at the time, but I always found 'Character Swap DLC' to be usually quite gimmicky and underwhelming; (Who remembers the 'Joe's Adventures' DLC from Mafia 2) but I'm rather surprised to say I was very wrong with Badblood.

T-Bone might play largely the same as Aiden, but he has new animations which are pretty cool, a genuine character arc that builds upon his story from the main game and a brand new gameplay feature in his RC car that turned out to be so good that Ubisoft expanded and bought it back for Watch_Dogs 2. (In Badblood is does suffer greatly without the jump button, I must say.) I was also amazed to see that the team learnt how to better create story missions that have value to them, instead of having story missions just being exactly the same as side objectives with cutscenes strapped onto them. (Which Watch_Dogs actually did a few times.) The team also learnt how to stretch out car rides so that characters can interact with one another during the ride; GTA mission design 101! (Too bad they forgot that for Watch_Dogs 2)

Ubisoft also shattered my understanding of when these DLCs are usually conceived of by actually focusing on all the best side content of Watch_Dogs and bringing it back better for Badblood. Gang Hideouts are now a totally revamped mode called 'Street Sweeps' which adds optional objectives like 'don't get detected', 'don't use guns' and 'complete in five minutes' to make these already fun side missions more interesting. They also did something innovative, which is a word I never thought went with Ubisoft in any circumstance ever! They tied these side missions with an ongoing side narrative where these three gangs are being investigated and every hideout T-Bone clears pushes the investigation along. A really clever way of tying narrative and free-form gameplay together in a manner that makes these side activities feel important. If only the game didn't ask you to do sixty of them straight. That's no typo. It seems the same lunatic behind the overcooked bouncer missions in Yakuza Kiwami 2 struck again with Street Sweeping. How the heck did they expect any game mode to be engaging for sixty runs? I got bored after nine.

T-Bone's narrative is appropriately condensed in concept and scale to fit within the smaller game, whilst still being meaty enough to warrant this DLC outing in the first place. The cohesion of events is a bit weaker, there were times when I literally had no idea why I was going to a certain location until I got there, even with how much more interesting and impressive those missions were. The new machine gun turrets are a nice idea, but the best thing about them is the fact that AI doesn't know how to register them and so those enemies just get gunned down whilst standing there gobsmacked. And I really liked the back and forth dynamic of T-Bone and Tobias; two characters I would have never have thought worked together but absolutely did. Not just because of their history, but their clashing personalities too.

My only hanging point, and this is mostly due to my own issues, is the main villain being Defalt. Here's my problem with that. In the main game, after you've hacked your data back from Defalt the game asks you to deal with him; which in my playthrough meant shooting him in the back of head with a pistol. So imagine my surprise when he popped up again in this DLC as the new big bad! (If you didn't want me to kill him; why let me?) Still, I like the way that T-Bone was actually able to confront his past in a way I didn't expect the writers to address, and although there's no great revolution of this sort of formula on screen; there doesn't need to be for the DLC to feel satisfying. So overall I was pleasantly impressed with the Badblood expansion, and I'm glad I gave it a chance.

In summary

Watch_Dogs was a deeply ambitious modern day spin on the Ubisoft formula that didn't quite live up to it's promise back in the day. But divorced from that E3 trailer and looking back with the gift of hindsight, the game presented was actually decently serviceable with one blindly interesting gameplay gimmick backed up by solid mechanics and a, mostly serviceable, narrative. What pains myself, and a great many who liked this game, is the many points at which Watch_Dogs seemed to brush at something better but pulled back, whether in scope of design or narrative, to be an above average game instead of an exceptional one. At the very least I can say this with the power of hindsight; I don't think Aiden is a boring protagonist, just not an exceptionally unique one. I wouldn't actually recommend this game to anyone who isn't already a Watch_Dogs fan as 2 better realises the promise of this concept, but I am going to give the game an arbitrary C grade with a more solid raise to C+ if you include the Badblood DLC. I quite enjoyed myself and look forward to moving onto my second playthrough of Watch_Dogs 2 in what I guess is now a series retrospective. Wish me luck.

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City Review

"I'm the only man in history to have the hottest gay and straight club at the same time, and I'm about to lose everything!"

If Grand Theft Auto 4 was the game that I forgot about (so totally that I couldn't even remember Niko's most bare basic character motivation until I played it again) Episodes from Liberty City is the game replaced it totally in my mind. I played GTA 4 a lot back in the day, but I played Episodes a simply obscene amount of time, to the point where there were certain beginning cutscenes I could recite by heart like I was playing Skyrim. It was eerie how deeply I ingrained these two campaigns in my heart over years of playing and replaying them, all the while never quite acknowledging the fact that these were, indeed, smaller slices of game than the main chuck. I always thought back in the day that together these games were about the length of GTA 4, but today I can see that was nowhere near the case. These were spin-offs there to supplement and complete the open spaces intentionally built into the GTA 4 campaign, not replace GTA 4 in it's entirety.

After the release of GTA 4, Rockstar had a plan to do something they had never done before and don't seem willing to do again anytime soon (but we'll see what those greedy Sony execs do) they bought an exclusivity deal. Now back in the day we weren't as familiar with how these deals work as we are today, so when news came out that 'Episodes From Liberty City' was going to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, it was like a seismic wave had rocked the world; people couldn't believe the reality of living in a world where half of GTA's fans, or more, would be barred from the franchise. Of course, in hindsight that was obviously going to just be a timed exclusivity, GTA was too grand to be limited to one platform. Keeping it off the PS3 would simply be theft. Honestly, a port might well have been automatically in development. But even with that expectation, the manufacturers went so far to print that ratty 'only on Xbox' tag on the front of the packaging. Can you blame little-me for being fooled?

It felt like my duty to pick up 'the GTA game that went too far for Playstation', and maybe that sense of compunction was what encouraged me to live with the disc as a permanent feature of my console's disk tray for the next few years. I believe that may have been one of the first occasions wherein I allowed myself to be truly swept by the hype train. I watched and rewatched the trailers, memorised the dialogue, counted off the days on my calendar; I devoted myself to the coming GTA game knowing that I was going to love it. And coming back to it after all those years it's inevitable that some of that residual love is going to reside, like leftover mucus in an emptied wind-pipe; clogging up my precious objectivity! But I've held my head as straight as I can and think I can approximate a non-biased judge just long enough to write this blog.

Episodes from Liberty City is a game of two halves, following the story of the other two protagonists who make up the first Trio of  the HD era. (It's going to be weird going to only two protagonists for GTA VI... maybe they'll throw us a solo DLC; give the fans what they crave.) Our criminal tales are told adjacent to the events of GTA 4 proper and feature plenty of cross-over between characters, and mission locations; and even some missions themselves. 'The Lost and Damned' follows Johnny Klebitz, temporary road captain for the Lost Motorcycle gang and 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' features Luis Lopez, business partner and official full-time bodyguard and maid for the 'queen' of the Liberty City club circuit; Tony 'Gay Tony' Prince. Narratively 'The Lost and Damned' should be played first, but for some reason 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' contains all of the basic control tutorials when you first start it up. The biker one doesn't. (Strange little oddity, that.)

The Lost and Damned is, and I mean this without sarcasm, Red Dead Redemption 2 with bikers. Honest to god, if you take the bare basic elements of Red Dead Redemption 2's narrative and squeeze it into as tight a campaign as it can possibly get, replace the horses with horse power and shave Arthur bald; you've got 'The Lost and Damned'. (So there's the solution for folk who say Red Dead Redemption 2 is too long; you get the worst GTA HD game to enjoy. Lucky you!) Okay that's being a little mean, but I don't retract it. Grand Theft Auto has a high enough quality bar for each of it's games that calling this the worst of the HD era is by no means a brutal condemnation of it's quality to total crap tier, but I don't think anyone would disagree that for some reason, this tale of bikers and betrayal just isn't compelling in the slightest. So much so that in GTA V- actually, we'll get to that in my GTA V review, I have a theory about that scenes significance.

The Lost and Damned is no great revolution on the basic elements of your typical GTA experience, you wander the open world of Rockstar's highly detailed New York clone, Liberty City, and accept missions between bouts of, typically chaotic, freeroam fun. But there is a twist. In the Lost and Damned you have the might of the Lost motorcycle gang a mere phone call away and most conflicts in the game are specifically designed to be fought with an entire posse of AI bikers at your side. You can even summon them out of mission to help you fight off the police if you so desire, making them better buddies than the GTA V crew, who don't even bother answer their phones if you call them doing a police assault! So how are these AI companions? Rough. They can't drive those bikes they love more than life itself very well and for some reason they seem to jump in front of live-fire exchanges believing themselves to be bullet proof. (They are, in fact, not.) The game has an in-universe memoriam board that mourns the loss of any gang member you lose in the line of duty. I had that wall filled up before I was mid-way through this campaign; there's no saving these chumps.

But I suppose their impending doom fits alongside the decidedly distinct cinematically appealing thematic choice that fundamentally shifts The Lost and Damned away from GTA 4's realism. Stylistic flourishes and fonts have been baked into the UI with a scratched aesthetic on top to play up the rebel rider concept and the colour saturation has been tweaked in a manner to make the world feel like it's being played on an old tape. An aesthetic completed by one of my least favourite graphical tricks: (one which thankfully has a toggle in the options menu) screen noise to make the visuals look like a literal mess... What it all says is pretty clear, the art is no longer interested in making you feel part of a world that feels real, this story is going to be about the melodramatic tragedy of a biker club doomed to blow itself up in a blaze of glory.

Alongside the general aesthetic there are actually in-game mechanics which lean towards a style I would describe as 'arcade like'. GTA 4 changed pickups to no longer be floating icons but items actually placed into the world with a slight orange glow so you can make them out, probably figuring that the floating item icons break the illusion of the faux physical world. The Lost and Damned (and TBoGT, for that matter) veers away from this with the whole 'ride formation' system when you follow behind the Road Captain and have to line yourself up with a giant emblem that magically appears behind him in order to get an inexplicable boost to your health and/or armour. We also see this shift in the new 'Gang Wars' and 'Bike Races' job system which, rather than requiring the player to call up a potential job giver on the phone and risk them not being there, presents a steady string of dynamically spawned missions all over the map like Ubisoft mission markers that constantly replenish themselves allowing the player to grind them over and over. (For a pretty underwhelming reward, mind you. Weapon spawns in your apartment aren't worth the 50-mission minimum.)

This presentation of quick and constantly accessible action is in line, again, with the more explosive sort of gameplay that these spin-offs play to. Every mission tends to result in heavy gunfights with dozens of participants aided by a couple of new powerful fun weapons like a sawn off shotgun that can be used on bike-back and a grenade launcher which always seems to launch it's payload under and then behind cars you want to blow up. (It does explode on impact but good luck nailing that trajectory.) It all fits closer in line with the bombastic campaigns of GTA past with the added bonus that, since this is supposed to played after GTA 4, you don't have to sit through the relatively tame intro chapters before you get to the chaotically charged 'kill a whole gang' missions. This abundance of action does, however, prove GTA 4's point with it's decidedly more tame presentation. Restrained and relatively rarer bouts of action tend to be more impactful than sustained explosive content that desensitises the user. 

Honestly, there were only a handful of The Lost and Damned fights I enjoyed as much as GTA 4's and think that's a testament to the strength of 4's slower but more enduring structure. The other part of equation is however, the stupidly large battles you'll fight both in missions and gang warfare during which the progression of battle is decided by your swarming and stupid AI companions rather than the pace of the player. Trying to keep up with their mindless wanderings can too easily land you in the middle of a killing floor of gunmen whilst you end up firing wildly everywhere. Exciting perhaps in a very base sense, but lacking in the insightful structure that can benefit from clever escalation and spikes in tension. Everything just sort of stays at the same violent base-line, and that can make the action stale quicker. But we're talking about the higher theories and concepts of game design here, stuff that most games don't ever consider anyway; let's narrow our scope to a much more universal aspect of games; the narrative.

Much as I said before, The Lost and Damned is a Red Dead Redemption 2 predecessor, telling of the downfall of the The Lost's Road Captain, Billy, and how he brings the gang down with him, peppered with an ass-kissing side character who you hate, a man versus mentor split and a 'Wild Bunch' finale at the end. Bikers are often considered the modern day cowboys, so the parallels are fairly strong. Johnny Klebitz is a much more active antagonist than Niko was, with actual compunctions and choices he makes for himself, and moral boundaries he chooses to uphold. Niko's descent into the underworld perhaps necessitated his somewhat inactive observation of the narrative that unfolded around him, wherein he simply grumbled about jobs and then did them anyway; but I prefer the sense that my protagonist has a direction he's going so that even when the thrust of the narrative isn't present in the immediate, I still feel like we're progressing in some fashion. Sure, Johnny is still a belligerent arse in a manner that is meant to reflect the wider Biker culture, but he also posses protective leadership principals and some jaded, but still potent, solution of loyalty and duty that sets him apart from the likes of Billy.

My problem with The Lost and Damned actually comes from its tiny campaign, in which the ideas and characters that Rockstar are explored struggle to fit themselves in. A lot of the side characters don't get so much as a single piece of meaningful development or introduction; we know that Angus is in a wheelchair but unless you call him up between missions you'll have no idea what his importance to the club even is. And Billy is a pale substitute for Dutch Van Der Linde. The man is an dickhead and self absorbed clown of a leader, and we're given absolutely no explanation of why he's like that or who the man must have once been in order to serve as an effective leader of the gang once. We see the characters around him act with shock and confusion as he makes blatantly destructive decisions for hardly any reason whatsoever other than to soothe his bloodlust, but we have no reason why they're surprised. As far as I know, Billy has forever been a terrible leader.

The highlights of the game are really the way it slides in and out of the GTA 4 narrative, and even slightly touches on TBoGT. We get to learn a little bit more about the diamonds and who's hands they changed with, and I like the through line of these valuable cure-all money injectors that everyone swaps hands with and no one benefits from. But The Lost and Damned mostly keeps to it's own undercooked narrative with climaxes that feel rushed and unearned and a cast I never really had a chance to understand and so didn't get attached to. I only really like Johnny in comparison to everyone else he interacted with, and even then there's a shade of narrative/gameplay dissonance that makes it hard to fully immerse myself with him. Such as how the Gang Warfare minigame pits you against any gang in the local area, not just the rival biker gang you start beef with in the narrative. Which is odd given that Johnny is against senseless fighting, but then has no problem picking fights with the Yardie gangs out of nowhere or even the mob... when he's supposed to be working with the mob for most of the story! It's just confused, for the most part, which is probably why most people choose to forget The Lost and Damned altogether.

The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the otherhand, is TLaD's antithesis. A colourful champagne-popping alternate face of the spin-off with popping glitzy glamour all over the UI and a brighter night-time palette tint to highlight the main attraction of this ballad; Nightclub life! Much as I did enjoy the utter desaturation employed by GTA 4; getting to see actual colour in the world even at night is a nice return to normalcy for me, as this is the game in the GTA 4 trilogy which best recalls one of the most important side-elements of older GTA games; a celebration of hedonistic excess! Not to the extent where that's the entire crux of the game like some of it's contemporaries, but enough that you can enjoy yourself in a simulated world where nothing matters without having to reflect on the harsh turmoil of life as an impoverish immigrant who drags himself through the criminal underworld, building a name for himself but isolating himself in the same breath. 

The nightclub life is more than an aesthetic, it's a genuine optional gameplay mode where you 'manage' the club by being a bouncer during the night. It's painfully boring to do so, basically just being a walk and stand simulator until a cutscene happens or some other event drags you away, but at least you get to soak up the very well realised atmosphere of "the hottest straight club in LC". I doubt a ton of concept and thought was pushed into realising this idea beyond figuring it would be fun if players got to soak in the Nightclub outside of missions, which remains just as true for the other minigames that TBoGT adds to the minimap including Drug Wars (which is literally just TLaD's Gang wars), Parachute trials and Dance minigames. I'm going to be a little unfair here, but there is a comparison to be made... GTA's club themed minigames suck next to Yakuza's. Their dancing minigame is rhythm based where you have to jab the joystick in time to the music (which is pretty odd and uncomfortable) and calling the Bouncer job a 'management' mode is ridiculous. Where TBoGT brings it's best, however, is in the narrative.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is, throughout it's playtime, a celebration of all the crazy excess that the Rockstar franchises are capable of, often to the detriment of the cohesiveness of events, but you know what; I don't care if everything that happens makes sense when the writing is this good. The Ballad shares the same rough length of The Lost and Damned but that length shoots past like lightning because the characters are all infinitely more likeable and you'll find yourself greedily vacuuming up every single scene. Pretty much since Vice City the quality of narrative and character writing at Rockstar has been at a higher level of quality where dialogue is clear, characters are popping and the narrative is engaging; but The Ballad of Gay Tony might be the only game, and I'm counting GTA V in this too, where the dialogue, in particular, is a knockout in practically every scene.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that Gay Tony is perhaps my favourite character in the GTA franchise, as the aging neurotic nightclub owner who's too busy snorting half of South America up his nose to deal with his empire crumbling down around him necessitating Luis, a frankly stellar straight man, to patch the holes in his sinking ship. A character like that can so easily be unlikable and annoying but Tony is just that perfect mix of witty, pitiable and manic to worm into that special place where you can't help but love the man. But not just Tony, all the side characters are to some level worthy of their time on screen. From the obligatory man you love to hate; Rocco, to the guy too rich for his own good but honestly more of a socially-illiterate weirdo than an actual scum bag, Yusuf Amir. This game even managed to make me somewhat like a character I couldn't stand in GTA 4, Brucie, by introducing us to his considerably worse brother, Mori, and exploring how his inferiority complex led to his apparent overcompensation.

Luis is sort of a character without any significant compunction of his own, but in his role as Tony's wet nurse he is perfectly placed to be the guy who suffers for every enemy that his boss makes. You never worry about the progress of the narrative feeling sluggish because of the relative shortness of the narrative, and rather cleverly Rockstar found a way to wrap up The Ballad's narrative, the diamond overall subplot and GTA 4's last hanging loose thread all within a neat campaign. And with missions that are simply insane and rememberable, such as when you snipe a tank out of a sky crane, or fight off police helicopters from the roof of a speeding train with your explosive pellet shotgun or turn an experimental military attack helicopter on a yacht full of international gun smugglers you just stole it off. All of these missions are the kind that sound crazy on paper and live up to that fully in the flesh, the best of all worlds!

I consider The Ballad of Gay Tony to be the 'Assassin's Creed Brotherhood' of GTA 4, as in the follow-up experience that shaves off all the chaffe of the long base game without losing what made it effective and fun; and sprinkling excitement all over the package to make it ridiculously fun. The free-time conscious who find playing through an entire GTA intimidating can find themselves perfectly served with this masterfully balanced slice of everything great about GTA; explosive action, memorable characters, varied side activity, (although not always fun) and a satisfying narrative experience. And it's the first Grand Theft Auto game in the franchise's history to realise that it's campaign is so good that it needs a replay mission system. Even The Lost and Damned, which released on the same disk, didn't have a replay system. I don't... that really doesn't make any sense to me. (Red Dead Redemption 1 had a replay; they really should have learned.)

Playing through the GTA 4 trilogy again after all this time has been a delight; and I've loved relearning what it was about this era of Rockstar that made their games industry juggernauts. Finishing off these two side games has been like coming back to old friends and remembering their wrinkles and their wit at the same time; where some have grown long-toothed and rambling, others have matured perfectly with age. I don't think my view on these two games will be any great upset for commonly accepted opinions on the quality of this trilogy amidst the community, but I've enjoyed reaffirming for myself what I always quietly believed to be true. In terms of ranking, The Lost and Damned is going to miss my recommendation just slightly with a B- Grade, being my least favourite of the trilogy. The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the otherhand, demonstrates the potential of leaner, better, experiences and pushes itself to an A- Grade; with my tacit recommendation for open world lovers and even Saints Row fanboys. I think the whole spectrum of open world enjoyers can find a lot to love in the Ballad. This whole era of reviews was supposed to lead me to another Rockstar property, but have instead sent me a little astray to another franchise my subconscious told me was probably a damn decent spiritual successor to what GTA 4 was trying to accomplish. Come see if my subconscious callously lied to me when I review 'Watch_Dogs'.

Scorn is curious

 One might even call it a case study...

Nope! Get out of my head low-effort IGN contributors! I want to talk about something of substance today! Ahem- what I mean to say is: I want to talk about Scorn. But first I need to say for the sake of prosperity that I haven't currently played Scorn and thus cannot judge the feeling of playing the thing, which is fine because this blog isn't explicitly about that. Besides, I've watched the entire game and it seems that's a more valid way of experiencing this game than it really should be- but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, Scorn, in the beginning, was promise incarnate. It bought to life the grossly sexual abstract exoskeleton work of H.R.Geiger and realised it in stunning detail to the point where even the teaser trailers, devoid of gameplay as they were, felt like a tour through a digital art exhibition.

Almost through merit of being visually interesting alone, the game developed an aura of mystery and eccentricity where everyone who learnt of the game couldn't help but buzz about what the game might contain and the direction it may go. Because here's the thing, no game that looked so surreal had ever been realised in high fidelity before. The most you get in these sorts of styles or even more bizarre are the art games like 'Cruelty Squad' and 'LSD: Dream Emulator'. Both visually insane adventures but lacking that subtle touch of visual thematic purpose that a truly high budget 3D modelled world based on very evocative art can bestow. (Actually, with that being said: I do think Cruelty Squad's aesthetic does have some sickly confidant purpose behind it.) When you reach the point that your gameplay-less visual walkthrough teaser trailers are bumping around the heads of onlookers for months and even scratching on lists of 'most anticipated game'; you've either got yourself a solid gold opportunity splayed before you, or a hanging noose over your head.

Of course, some of that fame did come from the fact that this style of art was already made popular and not by the game developers. Famously Geiger's work was realised as the biomechanical design of the Xenomorph for Ridley Scott's seminal monster art-house-adjacent masterpiece, Alien. As well as the cultural design of the mysterious race who created these creatures, up until then known only as 'The Space Jockeys'. Borrowing from this same style of art did not breach any form of copyright with the Alien right's holders, the art exists in of itself regardless the cultural contextualisation that movies have thrust upon it, but it did draw unspoken parallels between the quality of Ridley Scott's near-timeless work and the as-of-yet untested talents of the team behind Scorn. An expectation that no-doubt weighed heavy on the heads of a team that kept pushing back and delaying Scorn as much as they could so they could ensure the final product was exactly what they envisioned. (Or, exactly what they thought the fans wanted.)

Hype didn't die down on this title like it does for some; instead it just seemed to build and fester in a ravenous hunger when the people realised the game they had built up in their heads as a swan song art house master piece was playing 'hard-to-get' with them. All this excitement and hubbub foamed up despite the fact that literally no one knew anything about what this game was and would contain. The only snippets of gameplay we saw featured grotesque firearm implements that didn't look particularly fun or interesting to shoot, unloading on enemies who appeared to have unfinished AI. (Nowhere near as unfinished as the AI in the reveal trailer for S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2; but bad enough to be concerning.) Such was the fever that it almost didn't register with people when the game stopped being pushed back, rolled up to it's release and then, recently, actually came out. I think we were all expecting a 'The Last Guardian' situation with this one and... well, there are parallels to be made...

Scorn's main source of gameplay is through it's various puzzles laid across the game world that bar you from progress until you interpret your way through some grotesque logical equation that typically does something you don't quite understand in an increadibly visually evocative way. The atmosphere of the game, it's greatest asset, is best served during moments when you are encouraged to observe and pull apart the world and environment, so this makes sense as a focus point. But it's also not exactly what the game presented itself as. The trailers demonstrated visually arresting exploration peppered with tiny moment of danger, not prolonged sections of logic quizzes. There's no problem with going that route, but maybe it should have been disclosed in marketing for the sake of clarity else you're setting up players for what appears to be a survival style game, and letting them down with a different experience entirely.

Speaking of those danger sections; one of Scorn's biggest gripes has been the gunplay which is, much as the trailers seemed to imply, pretty bad. In this sense it's very good that Scorn wasn't a survival style game, because if crucial moments of life and death were decided by functionally questionable weapons that require pinpoint depth perception it would be a very frustrating experience. Defenders will say that you're not supposed to fight the monsters and clearly the game wants you to avoid them; but games that don't want you to fight the monsters, like Outlast, Amensia and it's ilk, usually don't give you guns to kill the monsters with. That's... kind of basic concept design 101: give someone a tool, they're going to want to use it. There's no trying to excuse the bad combat by saying it isn't the point, it's a largely unfun system, it probably should have been cut.

And the most head scratching part of this is the way that Scorn, inexplicably, designs it's saving system as though it is a hardcore survival experience instead of a puzzle game through masterfully evocative environments. All saving is done at the beginning of chapters, and none of it is manual. The game tells you when you get a free break and can take long gaps between saves, making the player more and more anxious the longer they go without a save point. Such that when the monsters do appear, dying to them thanks to the poor combat comes with the high price of maybe an hour of lost time. Which is a spirit breaker for a lot of people out there. It's as if the saving in particular was built to accommodate a game that focused on high dangers high risk gameplay, but that game just got replaced with the Scorn we have today.

So is Scorn ultimately a disappointment? I think that, much like the Last Guardian, it really depends what you go in expecting. If you want to explore increadibly rendered environments that feel like the inside of an absurd art piece mixed with the unnerving aura of a world that defies your expectations; then that is what you're going to get. If the enigma that the creators fostered painted a false image of gameplay-driven horror with a Bioshock style survival world you learn to manipulate as you become more familiar with your surroundings... yeah, that's not Scorn at all. I suspect that, like Death Stranding, time is going to be kind to this game as future players enter the experience knowing a bit about what it is and coming to appreciate the game for that; but the mystery angle that all the marketing relied on built an impossible standard to match. This whole unveiling has left me nervously hoping my mysterious indie screen pleaser of choice, Atomic Heart, lives up to everything it promises to be.