Gaming update: MW3 and ME3

On 03/08/2012 at 05:11 PM by Michael117

MW3:

Ever since I got my new 360 I've been gaming as much as I can. I recieved Modern Warfare 3 as a gift and I hopped straight into the campaign when I set up the new console. MW2 was the first CoD I've played and I liked playing it on Hardened, so I did my first MW3 playthrough on that difficulty. The first run took me 10 hours and 45 minutes. It took me nearly the same amount of time to get through MW2's campaign. A lot of people rag on CoD campaigns for being short and I've heard people cite them as "4 hour games". I don't have a clue what those people are talking about, becauses it's taken me over 10 hours in both titles I've played. That's around the same time it took me to get through Halo Reach, Crysis 2, Half Life 2, and other amazing shooters that I love. Portal 1 was consistently a 4 hour experience, Modern Warfare, not so much. The Modern Warfare games I've played have been no longer, or shorter, than they need to be. The answers as to why lie in the design.

These are meant to be straight-forward, action packed, and the gameplay is designed to occur at a fast pace. It's a horribly unrealistic, arcade-like, and dramatized version of warfare, but it is incredibly fun and that's all that matters in the end. There don't need to be any puzzles, exploration, or long cutscenes in the design of this particular series because in this case they would amount to filler. If the game was any longer it would be obnoxious. The design of the game requires players to process information quickly, use twitch reflexes, and kill quickly or die quickly. That taxes the brain and too much would be over-kill. CoD is fun and addicting, but I don't want a 15+ hour campaign. Not all games have to be so long, and people need to realize length doesn't equal quality.

I think MW3 is a step forward compared to its predecessor. Not a big step, but it does take the designs MW2 established and polishes them. MW2 had some great level designs, encounters, and set pieces, but there were definitely levels I didn't like. Such as No Russian, Just Like Old Times, and Endgame. I thought those levels were mostly for cinematic effect and not gameplay. In the series' newest, MW3, each level is a self contained action movie in itself. I need to clarify, I don't care about the narrative and characters, just the level design, encounters, and the gameplay that results from all the combining factors. MW3 is more fun to play and experience. Each level is full of exciting encounters, short yet epic cinematic moments, and gloriously silly drama that only CoD can provide. At the end of each level whether I was watching cruise missles launch from a submarine next to me, seeing a goliath sandstorm overtake my position, or seeing the Eiffle Tower collapse, I always found my jaw dropping and myself consistently saying, "This is fucking ridiculous" each and every time.

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I don't love them as much as Hunters in Halo, or Big Daddies in Bioshock, but CoD Juggernauts are badass and it's brutal fighting a group of these guys

The campaign was a lot of fun, but the thing I love most about this game is Survival Mode (aka Horde Mode). I've been addicted to it for the past couple weeks and I find it hard to get away from. The level designs are excellent. My favorite has been Resistance because the two-story house in the middle of the map is the perfect place to dig in and defend. It's just way too much fun fighting there, and so far I've made it to wave 29 by myself. The process of killing enemies, making money, buying and upgrading equipment, setting up defenses, and surviving through waves of increasingly difficult foes is engaging and demanding. If you want to survive you can't just find some gun lying around and sit behind cover shooting enemies. You will instantly be overrun by soliders who may or may not be armored or have C4 strapped to them. Dogs will chase you down and rip your throat out. Bomb squads will set traps for you, Juggernauts will drop out of the sky and chase you to no end, or a helicopter will unleash its mini-gun on you from above. The deeper you get into the waves, you'll find all those things happening at once. Choosing and upgrading my guns on the fly satisfies my need to customize. Finding a defensible area, setting up sentry guns, claymores, and AI Delta Squads satisfies my tower defense and strategy habits. And finally, leveling my weapon and pulling the trigger satisfies my need to shoot people in the face, and all of that doesn't even explain how much fun it is to remote control a predator missle straight out of the sky and down your enemy's throat, or see one of your friendly AI Riotshield Squad thugs beat somebody to death in a scrum. MW3 has been a lot of fun, but I've been dancing with some other games and demos as well.

ME3:

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Time to finish the fight and save Earth, again! I already did this in Halo 3, but what can I say, Earth knows how to get itself in trouble

Unlike the legions of people out there balls (or ovaries) deep in ME3, I don't have the game yet. I don't have the money at the moment, but eventually I will get the game. Another reason I'm waiting is because I'm in the process of building a new Shepard. Once I was finished with ME1 and ME2 I realized I wasn't happy with my old FemShep Aurora. So I'm going through the first two games again with a new FemShep named Hope and I'm halfway through ME1 at the moment. I'm a giant fan of the series, it's one of my favorite of all time, but I'll be able to put ME3 on the backburner and wait for it. Similar to how I'm waiting for the GOTY edition of Skyrim. I'm excited for the game, but just remember that no matter how big the hype is, it's just a game. In a few weeks you won't see adverts for ME3 anymore, people won't be talking about it as much, and it'll be easy to forget it, or at least put it on the backburner. Same thing happened with Skyrim. I'm patiently waiting for the GOTY edition, and if it comes out later this year I'd be happy to pick it up.

Anyways, I played the ME3 demo and it was...okay. I might go as far as saying "Meh" but I'll stick with "okay". Even though I usually just care about gameplay and see a good story as a bonus, I have historically always loved the ME series simply for its cinematics, characters, and story. When it comes to those three elements, Mass Effect is among the best in the industry. On the other hand, the gameplay for the series has always been mediocre at best. It's a sub-par Gears of War clone and has never had it's own identity. Fanboys will likely despise me for saying that, but the truth is the truth, kids. Just because I adore the series doesn't mean the gameplay is great, and it certainly doesn't mean I'm going to brown-nose Casey Hudson and tell him his games are perfect.

When I played the demo I still didn't feel it had an identity. I feel like they made Shep a bit faster, enabled her to roll around, have a neat melee attack, expanded the cover system, and gave your squadmates back some cool powers that were missing in ME2, however the gameplay still just has a classic "Mass Effect wonkiness" to it. The frame rate studders, the animations look a bit rigid, and the cover system is sometimes serviceable, and sometimes it isn't. I died a couple times in an encounter space because Shepard was scrambling between cover surfaces when I didn't want her to. It was awkward trying to get out of cover at times, or get the system to understand the cover I wanted. I was in cover at one point and wanted to slide out and charge forward like I would in Gears, but Shep ran straight sideways to some obscure cover across the hallway. Coincidentally one of my squadmates was taking cover there too and when Shep arrived, the two of them started awkwardly dancing around eachother slowly to make room for them both I would assume.

Another thing I wasn't impressed by, and honestly thought I would fall in love with, was the heavy melee attack. Holding B will get Shep to use the Omni-blade and impale whoever is in front of her. The Shep animation and sound design of the blade charging is sweet, but the hit-reacts of the enemies are weak. There wasn't any gore, not much in the way of sound, and the actual react animation of the enemies were just bland. The process of using the heavy melee attack is basically 50% cool, and the other half is just the enemy possibly going "Doh!" and perhaps ragdolling to the floor. I'm going to have to play it again to make sure, but I'm not even positive that the Omni-blade attack locks onto the enemy. I remember charging the attack up and sometimes it would miss, so I'd just get as close as I could up in the enemy's face and hope it worked. Even if I missed, the animation would continue to finish and eat away a few precious seconds while I got shot by everybody.

In Gears of War the lancer chainsaw locks on to enemies and its activation is dependent on the subject's distance to you, as well as the attacker's orientation. It's fairly polished, consistent, the sound design is good, and the animations for both the parties are brutal. You can rev it up, but it's never going to misfire, and as a result you'll never find yourself in the middle of a tactical no-man's land swiping at thin air while you get shot to death. If you and a buddy chainsaw somebody at the same time you might swipe at thin-air, but that's the exception.

The upsides to the demo were the dialogue choices and the cinematics. When I came across the child in the air duct, tried to get him to come with me, he refused and disappeared, and eventually you see him be vaporized by a Reaper, that was intense. I can tell the story will be very dark, and very powerful. After playing the demo I didn't feel excited and hyped at all. I wasn't hungry for it like I thought I would be. It was okay, not great. Even after all the fair criticism, I still will be super happy to be able to see my Shepard's story come to a close when I finally get my hands on the game some day.

That's all for this half of my update. I had to cut it in half because I realized it was getting pretty long. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing a little bit, and so I usually just put out obnoxiously long and efforted blogs, but I think these updates will be much better if they are in more bite size pieces. I'll finish the second half and put it up within the next day or two.

Julian Titus Senior Editor

03/10/2012 at 11:19 AM

We've been over this, but you consider the gameplay of ME to be mediocre because you've always approached it as a shooter. I've always approached it as an RPG and have highly enjoyed the tactical options available to me. But it's far from perfect. Starting with ME 2 and going into ME 3, BioWare just doesn't have great level design for the shooting they want to implement. ME 2 was just like the first Gears game in the sense that you could always tell when a fight was going to start because of all the convenient waist-high cover points that would show up. ME 2 also was basically a game of "run forward, shoot, run forward, shoot, cutscene", and ME 3 seems to be the same thing.

My problems with ME 3 so far have been narrative related, but you're spot on about the framerate. Even the cutscenes have jarring, janky animation and surprisingly poor lip syncing. But I'll give the game props for giving me a little more RPG mechanic. So far, the powers seem weak, but I'm hoping as I level they reach the fabled craziness of the first game. Still bummed about the lack of inventory and the way its managed. The idea of only being able to switch out weapons at very certain points is just absurd to me.

Michael117

03/10/2012 at 04:58 PM

I've definitely approached it as a shooter since shooting is such a huge part of the design, but I agree with you completely. The level design doesn't really service the type of shooting and power using they have in mind. I also feel ME2 was like the first Gears in the sense of all the obvious cover and predictable encounters. Gears was really predictable, but it was fine because the gameplay was the best on the market for 3rd person shooters. Even with a terrible cast of characters and a narrative as hard to make sense of as Halo, Gears still managed to transcend in the areas that mattered the most to it. In ME I feel like the areas it transcends are in the characters, story, and cinematics. It has a lot of ambition in the combat side but it doens't work out very well, not unlike an Elder Scrolls title, at least in a broad sense.

Even though I ripped up the gameplay in my blog quite a bit, I do think that what I played was better than both previous games. I think the biggest problem with the demo (and the beginning of the game, if the demo is representative of it) is all in the level design. The guns sound pretty good, if you successfully pop into cover and sprout up to take shots, it works really well. The level design was pretty poor though. There was a lot of downtime spent running around, plenty of wasted space, and the encounter spaces were just walkways with chest high cover littered around. I've heard from some people over at 1UP that the games gets better as you go on. I heard a friend say that he was highly disappointed by the beginning, but the game gets increasingly better as you keep playing, and I don't doubt that one bit. In the second half of the SP ME3 demo they let you play out a section on the Salarian homeworld where you're with Wrex rescuing a Krogan princess. I thought that was much more interesting. Julian if they let us go to the Turian homeworld in ME3 and do some missions I'm gonna freak out. That might be even better than going to Tuchanka in ME2 (my favorite mission).

I thought it was really cool they gave you back some powers (emphasis on some) that you had in the previous games. You remember how you were saying you liked how the guns started off very weak and innacurate in ME1, but as you upgraded (as you should in any RPG) the guns became more and more badass? Is that the same case with ME3? I like seeing the guns get stronger and more accurate because it keeps me thinking, "Just around the corner I'm going to get some kind of upgrade and be able to make this thing X% more stable, etc". I like the heat sinks still, I like the upgrading guns and loot, and I think if those elements come together in the game it'll be the best weapon system in the series.

Another upside to ME3 and the demo was that I honestly chose to use the powers at times and they truly helped me in battle. In Dragon Age II I constantly manage my party and make them use powers because the powers are really cool and usefull. In ME1 and ME2 I never got that same feeling of usefulness. I honestly just played it like a shooter, upgraded my incendiary ammo till I was a god, and burned down entire rooms of enemies. In the ME3 demo I actually thought more about how I would upgrade Garrus and Liara. I upgraded my own fire ammo so I could provide the whole group with it when I activate it. Then I upgraded Garrus' overload so he could take down shields, and I focused on making Liara's warp strong. At the end of the demo in the final space you have a boss battle with a Cerberus mech, and I died a few times. I had to roll around, find cover, use overload to bring its shields down, use Garrus' armor piercing ammo to weaken the armor, I had use med kits to save my ass a few times, and I had to go revive both squadmates at different times. That was basically a long winded way of saying that I finally started using the power wheel.

Finally about the frame rate and animations, I was actually surprised by how janky things would get. Last year during some press thing, one of the people on the team (not sure if it was Casey Hudson or not) was talking about animation and said that ME3 would be the first game in the series to show a legitimate handshake. In the ME games during dialogue sequences or cinematics the tricky animations are always implied and they never show anything. In the ME3 demo right at the beginning when Shepard sees Captain Anderson they quickly have a handshake in the hallway. It looked okay I guess but it was just really fast and wasn't really what I was expecting lol. One of the things I didn't like about the animation was the way Shepard moved around in the cutscenes. Her arms were way out to her sides as if she was pretending to be inflated, hyper masculine, and ridiculous. The way it was done was really janky and the framerate studders didn't help much either.

03/11/2012 at 04:22 PM

The weapons have mods now. Not as in depth as the first game, but they seem to actually make a difference. You can find and buy newer models of guns you already have, again more like the first game. But really, the things that matter are clip size (again, I hate that Mass Effect 2 and 3 seem to ignore the way the guns work in the lore) and accuracy. I got a sniper rifle for my infiltrator that can hold over a hundred rounds, with 15 in the clip. It fires fast, and since getting it, firefights have been a breeze. I don't feel like it's more powerful, but it's more useful as I don't have to reload as often.

The game does get better as it goes. I'm 15 hours in, but the first 5 were pretty meh for me. ME 3 is very much like FF XIII: small, super linear areas followed by long cutscenes. Normally I wouldn't mind that, but since I've come to expect more input in conversations it was a bit jarring to sit there for 10 minutes just watching my Shepard talk. So far, my issues are with the story and the missions. Many of the missions feel like multiplayer missions, i.e. "defend X against waves of enemies". That's not very fun to me, and I find myself pining for the exploration of the first game. Oh well. It's still good, but so far the first game is still my number one.

PixlBit