Railroads and Vaults

My comments on Miracle of Sound yesterday got me thinking about something. I mentioned how much I liked Open Air by Miracle of Sound, and how I liked how it compared against 'When the World Ended'

What I mentally compared it against also, was Fallout.  I find it bitterly ironic that the Russian post apocalyptic story is more uplifting. What's more ironic is that Metro's uplifting is basically Fallout's 'normal.' 

Metro's core conceit is that the bombs went off, and things were made very, very bad. The surface is coated in toxic gas, humans and mutants swarm through dingy dark tunnels that are the only barely survivable areas. Humanity is reduced to licking moisture off of walls and eating rats and lichens. Filth and misery pile up everywhere and the tunnels are ghost haunted because people fear that the afterlife itself was blown asunder by the apocalyptic exchange of weapons.

Fallout's conceit is that cartoonishly evil governments fired rockets at each other motivated by greed and blew everything up.

In Fallout, in half of the games you're a dweller in a vault, a place meant for survivors to hide out and then come out and restore the world. The vaults are mostly clean, bright, and well maintained. They have food, shelter, pool tables, and other amenities, and when you step outside, its post-apocalyptic crapshack, with people living in ramshackle houses, even three hundred years after the bombs have dropped.

Fallout is shackled to its aesthetic.  Metro conversely has people who were alive when the bombs fell, and who remember the world before. The big differences come from Exodus though. In Exodus the protagonist of Metro discovers that its only Moscow (which was nuked directly) which has air you cannot breathe and a surface blasted clean of all life save for mutant abominations. 

The Metro people find a train, and they ride outside and find that they can breathe the air, find that animals, plants and the like are still growing, they find more humans who are trying to live in the post apocalypse. Coming out of the vaults of the Metro and discovering a damaged but LIVING world is a sea change in tone for the series. They thought that humanity was going to die in the cramped dark, swimming in human excrement, with even their ghosts trapped forever. But it turns out there's hope outside, a chance to start over anew.  The tone becomes one of optimism and looking forward because they're coming from a destroyed world to a merely broken one.

The russians in Metro, despite the bombs dropping about thirty years prior have already started building new buildings, reclaiming old ones, and generally know how to make a roof that keeps the rain out, unlike the folks in Fallout after three HUNDRED years. 

Fallout has you coming from your secure, safe, underground vault into a place that's irradiated, hopeless and destroyed.  You then have to fix whatever the problem of the game is, but the tone is one of loss, it pessimistically looks back. 

The irony for me is that irradiated, mutant infested craphole sums up both surfaces, but the Muscavites are overjoyed whereas the Vault dweller is terrified.  Kind of interesting to me for reasons of tone, but also of how looking forward as opposed to looking back can drastically change your outlook.

Spook’s Review, Far Cry 5: The Good.

 It’s an unfortunate thing that when you review stuff, the worse stuff stands out more than the good. I think its partially because it’s fun to complain. Also, most people can agree when stuff goes awry, when stuff is on track, is a bit harder to connect.

Now, I don’t rate multiplayer experience when I talk about Far Cry games, because I don’t play them multiplayer.

Anyway, the good..

The Combat in Far Cry is extravagantly fun, smoother then 3 and 4, and encompasses a wide variety of weapons and styles.

The fact the game has its quick, forced pacing, means that weapon upgrades and equipment come down the line at reasonable times, and feel like genuine rewards. In general Far Cry 5’s system of having you constantly be chased by the main plot, also contributes to a sense of verisimilitude. No longer do the bosses of a given area not recognize that you’ve been blowing up their monuments, wrecking their stuff, and liberating outposts. In fact, they are very responsive, to the point of occasionally commenting on your actions specifically, or mentioning stuff you’ve done in the past.

Clearing areas, clears them. I kind of dislike this, because it essentially puts a time limit on the game, but when you fight through an area, defeat its boss and burn down their stronghold, the amount of enemies you encounter drops off precipitously, giving the actual genuine impression that you, you know..cleared the area.

In that, Far Cry 5 is superior to 3 and 4, where you essentially liberated areas, but the enemy forces there remained entirely unchanged.

Basically my complaint is I want to keep playing the game past the point where the game lets me play it. It’s got me hungry for more. So I put this in the good column.

The NPC system is also well thought out with the NPCs contributing to you without overshadowing you, and they have skills and personalities that tie them to certain playstyles. They also interact vocally with the plot and environment.

The ‘minigames’ such as fishing and hunting, are really fun. I’ve commented to my friends that after beating the game, it transforms from Far Cry into Montana Simulator 2018, albeit with angry people trying to shoot you.

The story, except for the ending and the monologues, is also well fleshed out, and I found I liked pretty much every character we really spent time. The NPCs give you a genuine reason to like or dislike them, and as you explore you find yourself organically disliking the cult if you pay attention to what’s been happening.

I also really love how America gets portrayed in Far Cry 5. The people fighting against the cult are a diverse bunch, but they’re all Americans. Truckers, scientists, bearded mountain men, conspiracy theorists, businessmen, patriots, perverts, weirdoes, goofballs, nerds, chefs and all sorts of people, forming a genuinely diverse collection of people motivated and united by their desire to be free and to live their lives. Even your followers get into arguments with one another, but seem to respect each other’s differences (Hurk’s dudebroisms, Jess being a mild sociopath, etc).

Don’t let the multiple posts about the bad taint this. It’s a good game. It’s a fun game.

Far Cry 5 has ‘I like it, but..’ like all of its predecessors, but the first thing to take away, is that I like it.

Spook’s Review FAR CRY 5: The Bad. Part 4.

This is the last of the bad. Honestly, it’s a good game, but I wanted to rant about these things, and it’s my blog, so.. Also, I’m not discussing the ending. Enough people are doing that.

Give me some of that old time, non-denominational fanatical religion.

                Our enemy is the cult, the Project at Eden’s Gate, the Peggies.

They’re fanatics, driven by their faith in Joseph Seed, and carrying out the reaping with utmost and driven religious zeal. They’re meant to represent the dangers of blind belief, or so we’re told but..

See, the problem with the cult’s religion is that the cult doesn’t have a religion. Its entire purpose is to be ‘cult’ and to say troubling stuff to you, but I think a core problem the game developers have is that their playerbase is diverse, so what to one person is crazy heresy is to another person what he heard in Sunday service.  

See. To be troubling, they have to actually be troubling. To have beliefs shook, you need to know what someone’s beliefs are and say, do or demonstrate something that shakes them.

You could argue that the PEG are focused on trying to shake up the simple idea that ‘things will be ok’ and you can even argue the endings tie in with that theme. It’s not a bad position to take, the problem is that to truly oppose the guys we need to know what they stand for, and what they stand for is self contradictory.

See, we have three lieutenants under Joseph Seed: Jacob, John and Faith.

Jacob opposes a ‘cull the herd’ ethos where the weak are ‘culled’ to make the strong stronger and strong enough to survive what they have to endure.  

John takes the approach that one must endure enormous pain to cleanse themselves of sin.

Faith’s approach is that one needs to essentially be drugged up immensely and just ‘give in to the bliss.’

These philosophies don’t work together, at least from the perspective of a consistent theology. The followers admittedly seem to admit this when they mention how you should be glad that you got captured by John instead of Faith or Jacob. But, if the cult is positing a theology under their leader of Joseph Seed, they need to be consistent don’t they?

They aren’t, which makes them feel like they’re trying to hit the high end of ‘the evils of belief’ without bothering to think of why anyone would sign up for this particularly whacked out bit of philosophy, but..

We might touch on that when I start discussing what I liked about Far Cry 5.

Spook’s Review FAR CRY 5: The Bad. Part 3.

Torture me, kill me, just please shut up.

Vaas from far Cry 3 was received well. His ‘definition of insanity’ speech was a big deal. People liked being menaced by the guy. The sad part is, in a game like Far Cry it’s difficult to have a conversation with the bad guy, since you’ll want to you know, shoot him. So he has to find you in a situation where you can’t shoot him. And that’s a tricky thing to accomplish.

And so in Far Cry 3, Jason Brody never checked his corners, and kept catching baseball bats to the head so he could be trussed up, and Vaas would throw him into a deathtrap James Bond villain style, after being a crazy dude at him. 

This, in recent years, has metastasized into the stuff from the new Wolfenstein series. Our unstoppable hero seems to be kidnapped, incapacitated, tied down and so forth with the regularity of an adult film star, so that the Nazis can menace him and do terrible things to him.

Meaning that to me Wolfenstein feels like a weird version of a hurt-comfort fanfic, where someone hurts you and you comfort yourself by battering the crap out of faceless drones.

Far Cry 5 buys into the Wolfenstein model. You essentially get kidnapped or incapacitated by the bad guys about 15 times so that they can monologue at you. And oh my God do they monologue. It’s just endless cavalcades of bland, ridiculous, senseless and vapid attempts to make it seem like they have a point.

The devs have said that part of the theme of 5 is the danger of blind belief, and in the case of the People at Eden’s Gate, they’re definitely blind since no real clear philosophy or theology is established for the Peggies besides ‘the collapse is happening,’ ‘souls operate like in dark souls,’ and ‘Joseph Seed is..somebody.’ Despite claims that they’re Christians, they never seem to really reference ‘God,’ or ‘Jesus’ and almost all of their biblical references are out of context stuff from a book it sounds like none of them ever read. So they sound like a cult, which they are. The problem is the game wants us to take them seriously, and be ‘troubled’ by their statements about whether Joe Seed ‘might be right.’

And the game continually tries this. Even up until the endings. Keeps trying to act like we actually are considering, or worried that this maniac might be right. The problem is, he doesn’t give us any reason to think that, and his religion seems to have gained its followers through brainwashing and drugs, which makes me question how the hell it got so large to begin with.

And I think this is a major weakness. The most effective monologuer of the bunch is Jacob, and Jacob is effective because his monologues give us a good vantage into his mindset, and are very clearly designed in a workman’s way to actually brainwash us. I didn’t mind Jacob talking to me because well, he spoke the least, and his means of trying to seduce me to the dark side were better thought out. See. He tortures and attempts to psychologically condition you, Manchurian candidate style. It’s actually pretty damned brilliant.

Faith and John though? Holy shit they’re terrible.

Faith is the typical Far Cry “Drugs are magic” bad girl, and her entire thing revolves around stupid visions and generic commentary about ‘being happy in the bliss,’ and we’re forced to wander around through vistas that resemble a Parks Department Screen Saver while she dispenses more But-Thou-Musts then other mysterious fairy princesses.

John gives us the same talk. The same talk again and again. He’s the Evangelist, with his ‘Say, Yes’ program and his weird torture stuff. John’s actually not a bad villain, but he talks too much, and we’re forced to watch him talk too much. He says the same thing every time, and we get no real glimpse into his character besides ‘he likes hurting people, and uses contrition as an excuse.’ Since I started this rant they seem to have added something so we can skip cut-scenes, it’s made dealing with John a thousand times better.

And see, that’s the problem. I shouldn’t be reaching for the ‘skip cut scene button’ the first time I saw the cut scene. And if I fail a mission, I shouldn’t have to sit through the guy being a jerk to me again and again and again.

The most irksome thing though. We can never just ‘shut up’ the bad guy. Even when we get to fight them, they get death monologues. We’re forced to sit there, listening to the crap coming out of their mouth, without saying anything of our own.  After I killed John, I just wanted to rifle his body with M60 shells and leave him for the cougars, but no, I had to walk over so he could grab my shirt lapel and vomit a ton of borax about his brother being guided by the heavens at me.   

It robs you of your sense of beating the guys, which makes their role as antagonists feel, well, hollow.

Brevity is the soul of wit. Shut up. Or at least let me shut them up.