(no subject)
No matter what the developers try to say about the morality system, renegade options still make you seem like a gigantic douchebag.
I started Mass Effect over today. Male Shepard, Earthborn, Ruthless, soldier class. (My god, why have I not played a soldier until now. This class rocks.) I wanted to try my hand at a different play style since I've seen a lot of people say they enjoy the renegade options a lot more than the paragon ones. My original character concept was that of a man who got the job done no matter what the cost, going so far as to sacrifice most of his team in order to ensure that the batarians knew humanity was not a race they could push around, but was someone who was still pretty chill to people who weren't terrorists/slavers/other gigantic douchebags.
It's not working out. Since this is an entirely new playthrough, not a new game plus, I don't have the luxury of a bunch of charm and intimidate points carrying over. I'm going to have to be a gigantic douche and earn a ton of renegade points over a few game cycles in order to actually play the character I want. Good job, self.
I wouldn't mind so much if the renegade options weren't like playing an immature thirteen year old boy who's trying to hard to be badass. Maybe it's my own inclination to be (at least outwardly) polite, or the fact that dialog options are only given a small summary on the wheel and what Shepard does never quite exactly matches up to what we the players want to do, but every time I pick the choice down in the bottom right-hand corner I just cringe. It is genuinely embarrassing to play a straight-up renegade character.
I actually didn't mind the options that much in ME2. They're still kinda jackass-tastic, but not retardedly so. Not as much shoving guns into peoples' faces for no apparent reason at all and more of the actual getting the job done at any cost. Of course, there's still a lot of silliness, but it's not absolutely terrible. Still, though, Garrus is a much better representation of what that morality is like.
Also: it is actually fairly difficult to get back in the swing of the old controls. I know I derided ME2's battle controls in my first post about the game, but they're actually fairly good. Very focused and streamlined. ME feels a little bogged down by its stat-dependent combat abilities. You tend not to notice it when you hit the endgame because you've already invested a lot of points into your skills, but it's very apparent when you start over with an entirely new character. Remind me again why I missed a guy at point blank range with a weapon I've been trained with? On the other hand, I kinda wish ME2 had retained the ability to crouch whenever you want. Yes, I know exactly how stupid that sounds, but still. There were several areas where I could have survived if I could have just ducked.
I'm still up in the air about the Mako. On one hand: why the fuck am I driving this thing. It is such a time sink. You spend a good fifteen to thirty minutes driving around a landscape that's been copy and pasted about fifty billion times, with mountains that take forever to scale because you were too lazy to check your map and look for an alternate route. On the other hand: driving it around those empty, alien worlds really hammered home just how vast the universe is. Reading those little descriptions on each of the planets I come across, about how some planets are being considered for terraforming for human colonization, or how others might develop life millions of years from now so scientists are keeping their eyes on it, or just -- all these things people are doing that will never see results within their lifetimes. The thought that you are probably the first and last living thing that will ever walk across a planet's surface. Stuff like that.
Also: holy fuck why have I not played a soldier until now, my god. I can get used to this shit. I always feel something like a tool when I play classes that are pure combat (I usually go for some sort of magic or stealth based class, which is why my first Shepard was a vanguard and my Tabris a rogue), but this is kinda awesome. High health, great armor, access to every weapon in the game -- oh hell yeah.
On a completely unrelated note: I finally managed to get my ass in gear and finally beat Bioshock. It was... eh. I'm not sure how to describe it. The horror aspects were spectacular, and the FPS was solid, but combined it just didn't seem to work. Then again, playing on casual might have had something to do with it, but I was plenty freaked out during my first shot at the game, so I don't know. A Splicer jumping out of the shadows at you every once in a while is terrifying. A Splicer jumping out of the shadows at you every few minutes is just dumb. Maybe it's scarier when the difficulty is higher because you're in danger of having your ass handed to you more often, but I doubt it. However, the atmosphere really made up for it when I wasn't busy tripping alarms and fighting off hordes of manhacks security bots. I know Bioshock was a spiritual successor to the System Shock games, but goddammit did they really need to carry the stupid fucking cameras I mean seriously.
The first two-thirds of the game were great. Everything after the reveal just sorta... fell apart. It just didn't feel as tightly handled as before. It was just one fetch quest after another. Granted, the earlier parts of the game were basically fetch quests, too, but I just didn't feel as invested after that, oddly enough. I mean, that was the part of the game where you should be frothing at the mouth to go after the end boss more than ever since it got so personal, but I ended up losing interest instead. Maybe it was because I was starting to feel burned out by then, though. I think the worst part was becoming a Big Daddy. Two item hunts with no hints at all? Yeah, no. I had already saved a majority of the Little Sisters in Rapture. They adored me at Tenenbaum's safe house. Why in the world did I need to go through that? Couldn't she have just asked the girl who led me to the sewers to just open the door? Those vents connect all throughout Rapture; it wouldn't have been hard! Gaaah.
You know what I did love, though? That Fucking Reveal. Very much a SS2-esque deal. The Atlas form might not have been dead, insect, but you were most definitely taking orders from someone you really shouldn't have. But it's not like you ever had a choice in the matter. Very effective use of taking control away from the player in the middle of a cutscene. What's so great is that Bioshock generally took Half-Life's cue when it came to cutscenes -- namely, don't use any. I think the only other times they were used were the first time you inject yourself with a plasmid and it basically kicks you in the teeth, causing you to pass out and become weak, and at the end when Frank hits you so hard you go flying and can't get up afterward. Both are instances where it makes sense for you to not be able to move around. The rest of the game is played out in real time and (seemingly) mostly under your control, making the use of Jack's trigger words that much more shocking.
What's so great about that scene, too, is that it completely takes your expectations about what an encounter with Andrew Ryan would be like and punches it in the face. It leads you to believe it's going to be a boss fight: there's a Gene Bank, a U-Invent, and a Circus of Values in the area before you enter his office. There's even a deactivated Vita-Chamber, although that's more of Ryan's benefit than to impose on you the seriousness of this encounter. The game has even been trying its damnedest to make you hate him even without Atlas telling you to kill him.
And then at the end of it you don't even want to murder him anymore.
BIOSHOCK: making sure you never trust your mission control ever again.
Random thought: The more I play KOTOR 2, the more I get the feeling that when Kreia talks about killing the Force, she's really talking about killing George Lucas/the writers of KOTOR2/You the Player. I mean, she hates the Force because she sees it as a cold, cosmic chessmaster toying people's fates in order to maintain some sort of insane universal balance and/or further its own goals? Nope, this doesn't sound like anyone who has contributed to Star Wars canon from the point of a character at all.