Baud Attitude

I finished up Batman: Arkham Origins over the weekend, and finally figuring out what I was doing wrong with the combat made it a much more enjoyable experience than Arkham City.

I was pretty skeptical that we needed a prequel game at all, but I’m open to admitting that I was wrong there – in fact, I think that being set in Batman’s early career actually made for a pretty interesting story. He’s still fighting gangsters and corrupt cops, with the weirder high-tech and super-powered members of his rogue’s gallery mostly ignored or relegated to side stories and DLC. Gotham is, well, a rather oppressive place, but at least it’s not a battleground just yet.

It particularly scores points with me for the Deathstroke boss fight, which wasn’t terribly difficult but which served as something of a “have you been paying attention?” test of combat mechanics and had some great mid-fight banter, and for the Mad Hatter sequence, which I would have completely missed if I’d been holding to my plan of sticking to the main story quest.

The complaints I DO have about it are all structure-based, and here is where you should probably stop reading if you don’t want to read a bit of ranting.

I am still getting used to open-world game design, so I’m probably not the best person to critique an open-world game, but one of the things I enjoy the most is having a huge quest log and the freedom to work on almost any of the things on it. “Skyrim” is my go-to reference here, and I frequently found myself thinking of AO as “The Elder Scrolls: Batman” while I was playing.

In a lot of ways, it IS very free-form. You find out very early on that there are ten broadcast towers around Gotham, one per neighborhood, and you need to visit each of those. Then you find out that there are also 10 network relays per neighborhood that need to be disabled, and two guys per neighborhood that specifically need to be sought out in order to get the location of twenty collectibles scattered across each neighborhood, and – barring occasionally needing to get new gadgets – you are welcome to tackle these 330 small objectives at any point in the storyline.

There are also case files, typically revolving around stumbling across a recent murder and tracking down the killer through a detective crime scene reconstruction sequence, and “Gotham’s Most Wanted”, a set of side bosses including the previously-mentioned Mad Hatter.

If that wasn’t enough, you have training challenges to do back at the Batcave, and three separate tracks, of 15 challenges each, to tackle in the field. The training challenges are a good way to pump up your experience bar, and the field challenges unlock new gadgets.

Basically, if you like putting check marks on checklists, there are SO MANY CHECKLISTS to check off.

Where it breaks down in spectacular fashion, though, is having many of these checklists only doable in rigid order. A couple of examples are, I believe, needed here.

Apart from a couple of story-related case files, most of the investigation sequences trigger randomly as you swing and glide around Gotham. You’ll overhear some police radio chatter, there will be a new indicator on your map, you go to it and find a dead body and then investigate.

Unfortunately, you can only have one active case file at a time – once you stumble across a trigger, you will not get a new case file trigger until you have followed that case file to its bitter end. I had one instance where I DID close a case file, but the case file closure didn’t “stick” and it was a long time before I looked in my quest log, noticed that it was still at the “Apprehend Suspect” step, and went back to find the guy a second time. As a result, I was stuck on that one case file until nearly the end of the story campaign, and finishing the case file track would have meant ignoring the story campaign and simply running around Gotham waiting for random quest triggers to fire.

As a side effect, since some of the “Gotham’s Most Wanted” quests are tied to completing the case files, I missed out on a ton of those.

Likewise, the field challenges suffered from needing to be completed in a specific order. There are three lists of field challenges, each with 15 objectives, and you can see every one of these objectives from the very start of the game. For example, there’s an objective for “Stop a crime in progress in each neighborhood”, and this SHOULD be terribly straightforward – if only it weren’t the last objective in a list of 15. You can stop all the crimes you want, but the game only rewards you for the ones done once you’re on that 15th step. If you put it off, you are going to be going back to each neighborhood LONG after you’re done with other objectives and hoping that a crime-in-progress event actually triggers in a timely fashion.

For an extra bit of “Really, guys?”, one of the challenge tracks revolves around performing very specific actions during the game’s “Predator Room” sequences. There are only a few Predator rooms, and they do not respawn, so missing a couple of these challenges early on means that you can’t complete this challenge track in one play-through, even after finishing the campaign and going into Free Roam mode. Playing the story again in the “New Game Plus” mode is the only way to get the Predator Rooms to re-populate with enemies, and that also saddles you with a big boost to difficulty.

So, short version – a great Batman game, with a TON to do, but with some design decisions that will haunt you if you have a completionist mindset and aren’t the sort of person who obsessively refers to a guide during play.

Also, it had the side effect of getting me to load up Skyrim again. This may be similar to the effect playing MMOs has on me, where playing almost any MMO for longer than a couple of weeks inevitably ends up with me re-installing Everquest and losing another few months of my life to chasing the nostalgia dragon. At least Skyrim is theoretically finite.

TWO games off the backlog this weekend.

First, “Lord of the Rings: War in the North”, or “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Other Guys”, in which you fight a ton of goblins, orcs, those bigger orc goblin guys, and trolls in a variety of funny hats.

Seriously, you’ve got cave trolls, frost trolls, armored trolls, trolls with big flaming axes… The LOTR movies were kind of lacking in enemy variety, is what I’m trying to get at here.

There are also giant spiders and if you are bothered by EXTREME CLOSE-UPS of giant spiders it is probably a good idea to give it a miss.

On the other hand, if you have enjoyed other action RPGs from Snowblind (Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, Justice League Heroes), or if you are the sort of person who knows the names of Elrond’s sons, you should probably check it out.

I called them Herp and Derp because, seriously, elf names.

Second, “Enslaved: Odyssey to the West”, a post apocalyptic story based loosely on Dragonball, in which you are a surprisingly limber guy with a staff and a mad on for robots.

As luck would have it, post apocalyptic New York has lots of robots to kill.

OK, I know it’s ACTUALLY based loosely on a book, but I’ve never read the book and I’ve watched two episodes of Dragonball so that’s what I’m going with.

You’re protecting a woman who goes by “Trip” and who helps you solve puzzles and can fit through tight spaces and is in every way a somewhat hotter version of the girl from Ico, with the exception that the girl in Ico didn’t wire your head to explode if she dies.

Your name is “Monkey”, by the way, and I mention both of these character names only to contrast from the Lord of the Rings game, whose characters included “the dorf”, “the ranger”, “the elf”, and the aforementioned Herp and Derp.

Post-apocalyptic New York, and here I deliberately hyphenate it to emphasize the fact that I did not previously do so, is extraordinarily pretty.  It’s like the designers looked at every work set in the After The Vaguely Defined World War period and said, nah, that’s too much brown, let’s green this puppy up a notch.  It’s worth the play solely to look at some very nice vistas.

Note a lack of screenshots of Trip’s butt here. I am proving that occasionally I can write a post without channeling my inner 7th grade boy.

They are both also refreshingly short.  LOTR: The Other Guys clocked in at a shade over 14 hours, and Enslaved took 10.5 by Steam’s timer, which includes the times when I paused the game and went and cooked breakfast and did dishes and a few other chores.

I’ll go ahead and give it my unqualified recommendation here, because I loved the action bits and the dynamic between the main characters and there are no spiders to worry about.

One of my few complaints about the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot was that the shotgun seemed pretty terrible. It’s a silly thing to get worked up about, but I like it when video game shotguns pack some OOOOMPH, and that one just didn’t have enough oooomph.

The shotgun in Rise of the Tomb Raider brings ALL the oooomph, and you can eventually take a perk that lets you shoot incendiary rounds. I’m not sure if real-world shotguns have the option to load ammo that lets you set things on fire, but Mossberg should get right on that if they haven’t already.

There’s obviously a ton more to the game – lots of clambering around on vertical surfaces, a very Tomb Raider plot of the sort that starts off in the realm of the plausible and takes a hard turn into the supernatural near the end, nine “challenge tombs” that serve the narrative that you are actually an archaeologist and not just a mass murderer, a wonderful array of gadgets designed to encourage revisiting earlier story areas as your traversal abilities expand, a regrettable tendency towards writing run-on sentences… but trust me on the shotgun part.

According to Steam, I’ve played ROTTR for 42 hours, starting last Thursday evening, so that’s 42 hours over five days. I finished the main story, went back for all of the collectibles, bought the “Baba Yaga” DLC, finished the DLC story, hunted down all of the DLC collectibles, and even mucked around some in the game’s “Expeditions” mode, where you replay levels for score. I don’t usually buy games day one – I typically wait for the inevitable $20 price point on Steam – but getting that much out of a game makes me not regret it too badly. I lucked into a 25% off deal on the preorder, anyway, so even with the DLC I’m still under MSRP.

Considering that, in December, I was standing in a Best Buy holding an Xbone bundle and desperately trying to justify it to myself, I think I did pretty well to hold off for the PC release.

Sadly for PS4 owners, this one is still stuck in exclusivity deal hell until the end of 2016, at which point it probably will get lost in the holiday release barrage. I do hope that Squeeenix made enough money off Microsoft to justify further sequels, because I doubt the overall sales are going to do the trick.

I did need to resort to a guide once I started working on hunting down the dozen or so documents and relics that I’d missed, and for help with the challenges in a couple of zones.  I couldn’t find a decent Lost City guide, however, so I wound up spending a good few hours on the challenges and collectibles there.

I guess there’s a DLC campaign?  Oh dear.

I had the following error message pop-up on me this evening:

And I thought, huh, I guess I have been playing for a while, so that sort of error isn’t that weird, how long HAVE I been playing anyway?

It turned out that I’d been playing for twelve straight hours without even really noticing, hunting deer and looking for challenge tombs and doing optional missions and occasionally advancing the story.

I don’t think I’ve gotten this sucked into a single player game since, maybe, Skyrim?  It’s so dang good.

Also, benefit of playing on launch weekend while most people are still focusing on the story mode, I got to cheese my way to the top of a leaderboard.  I will almost certainly be dethroned as of tomorrow, but for now this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

A second benefit:

My only achievement ever with a 0% global completion rate, so it’s something that less than 0.1% of players have, um, bothered to do.

That sounded a lot cooler in my head.

Anyway, good times all around. 🙂