Thought for the Day: Lorena

How better to celebrate the long-overdue release of TDU2? If there was a Bennett medal for "Thought for the Day of the Year" (now there's an idea) this would have it sewn up, no doubt about it.

On the Subject of Pre-Rendered Trailers

Lorena B/G

I fucking loath pre-rendered game trailers. While I'm sure some jumped-up marketing whore can produce endless powerpoint presentations to demonstrate the promotional value of these pieces of shit, the fact is that they bear no relation to the game play experience. Trailers for movies and TV shows, while often misleading, do at least tend to be constructed from pieces of the actual thing that they're intended to promote. Rendered game trailers, on the other hand, are just lies. You're expected to watch something which took minutes, hours or more per frame to render rather than the milliseconds available to a game, and somehow convince yourself that "Wow, that was sooo cool! This game will be the best EVAR!!!". And the sad fact is that some people do. For fuck's sake, the trailer was almost certainly not even produced by the same company as the game.

Even successful, quality properties aren't immune to the lure of spunking away cash on worthless teasers, as demonstrated all too ably by the recent Mass Effect 3 promo. But that was nothing compared with the staggeringly worthless Skyrim teaser which made the basic mistake of not only being pre-rendered, but which also managed to be rubbish. Not that it made any difference to the rabid Elder Scrolls fans, of course.

It reminds me of 80s box art (remember when games came in boxes?), when it was routine for games to be swaddled in laughably misleading imagery which bore no relation to the primitive reality of the game itself. More recently Evony has become synonymous with this sort of thing.

Maria Whittaker's classic tits were nowhere to be seen in the actual game.

I'm also reminded of Sony's classic attempts to pass off pre-rendered graphics as real-time in the run up to the PS3 release, specifically for Killzone 2 and Motorstorm. Although now that I think about it I'm not even sure that that's worse than a simple trailer. Trailers don't even pretend to be the real deal, so it makes even less sense for people to mistake them for the game they're promoting.

Of course games aren't necessarily that entertaining as a passive experience. The whole point is interactivity, so even state of the art graphics may not make for thrilling, polished promotional material. But that's no excuse for going to the other extreme of blatant misrepresentation. In any other industry this sort of practice would be condemned as despicable and probably banned.

What's even more depressing is how much these fucking things cost to produce. You could probably buy a couple of man-years (if not more) of developer talent for the same money. That's money which could be spent on improving the game itself, instead being pissed away on pure, meaningless marketing twattery.

If you're going to disregard the fundamental nature of the product you're trying to sell, you may as well go all the way and come up with something like the recent Call of Duty "There's a Solider in All of Us" campaign which didn't even bother with pre-rendered graphics, but rather went completely live action (give or take negligible VFX). Not that celebrity cameos come cheap, of course, but at least it was vaguely memorable and entertaining.

But there's a difference between being entertained by a promo, and being susceptible to the subliminal "fancy trailer = great game" association. Far too many people appear to fall for that trick, usually without even realising. If you want to sell a game to me, show me the game. Or show me some big tits, that works too.

Speaking of tits, here's some more Maria Whittaker especially for anyone who felt short-changed by Barbarian.

On the Subject of Dragon Age: Origins

Lorena

Damn the neverending Steam sales. Somehow the Dragon Age expansion appeared in my game library, as if by magic, and so I decided it was probably about time I completed the original game.

First time around I took what I presumed to be the straightforward route and built a standard issue tank character. This was fine to start with but I soon found the difficulty creeping upwards, despite lots of people posting on forums claiming that the encounters were "easy" (see my Guide to Forum Posting). If you find yourself in a similar position, you'll soon notice that all the people claiming the game is easy a) are playing mage characters, and b) recruited the additional healer party member Wynne. Unfortunately I a) was playing a tank and b) killed Wynne in the mages tower because I thought she was a sanctimonious old bitch. This leaves your party without a healer (unless you spec Morrigan as one, but that would be no fun), and I think you'll find that ups the difficulty considerably. Ultimately I got a bit bored of spamming potions and eventually moved on to other games, after completing perhaps 25% of DA.

So, lesson learned, this time I made a nice mage character, cranked up her healing skills, recruited Wynne (who turns out to be largely unnecessary if you play as a healer yourself) and set out to save the world from the nasty darkspawn.

It certainly was a lot easier this time, no doubt partly due to my familiarity with a large chunk of the game. Unfortunately that also made the early stages quite tedious, despite starting off from a different racial/class starting zone. I doubt I'll play DA again for a while, unlike both Mass Effect games which I've completely 2 or 3 times. I'm not sure why but I don't find the game world of DA quite as compelling, despite the storytelling and voice acting being very similar. Except for the fact that your own character doesn't speak in DA, which has quite an impact on your relationship with him/her. It sounds like that will be one of the big changes in DA2, and it's one I whole-heartedly endorse. Also there's a lot less party micro-management in ME which streamlines the game play a great deal. DA is quite an old-fashioned, almost turn-based game at heart so it doesn't "flow" as smoothly.
Still, once I caught up with myself and reached a point where I was facing new encounters it got a lot better. The story takes a while to find its feet, and of course it takes a while for your character to level to a point where you feel like a double-hard killing machine. Eventually you're felling dragons and laughing at the ragtag ruffians who dare to take you on and you reach that golden stage of really feeling like the hero you're supposed to be. I also turned my mage into a blood mage (at the expense of a poor, defenseless child), which is slightly odd in a game world where blood mages are villified while you're the great white hope for civilisation's future. You do get some cool spells though.

I'm still not keen on all the micro-management. I still want to play as my character and let all the others get on with their jobs. I don't mind gearing them all up, except for the fact that there are quite a lot of them, but forever pausing battles and switching party member to issue instructions or heal or whatever is a bit too RTS (not even "RT", mostly "S") for my liking. I could probably have tweaked the combat tactics a bit more, but in the end I just made them at least try to heal themselves, and to prioritise serious enemies, and protect my character above all else.

I'll admit I did cheat once, but I also maintain that it was forgivable. Essentially I wanted my pretty lady mage to get it on with naughty bard Leliana, but I ran into a bug where you can't trigger Leliana's personal quest if she likes you too much, so I had to make her a little less adoring temporarily.

And bugs are my main complaint. Not necessarily in terms of game play (although I did encounter stuck characters occasionally), but god DAMN the game crashed a lot. For a start if you play for extended periods then it begins to crawl, especially during loading screens. And I had any number of CTDs during battles, often "important" battles. I suspect they were audio-related, as a recent patch does list that as one of the fixes. But there were several sections, especially towards the end of the game, where the fucking thing would crash immediately upon entering a new area, over and over until by luck I could do a quick-save on the other side and restart. Given the relatively modest technical complexity of the engine (at least in PC terms) it was quite disappointing. Especially compared with the surprising reliability I had become used to while playing GTA4 (even if they did manage to fuck up the engine with the LC expansion).

Anyway, I got there in the end. The world was saved, the girl got the girl and various other boring shit probably happened but I couldn't be bothered with reading all the end-game text. I think I'll take a break before diving into Awakenings, though.