Available on: PC, Xbox 360
Played it on: PC
Played it for: 40 hours
RATING: 7/10
Metro 2033 succeeds where The Witcher 2 fails. But that doesn't make this game bad.
I'm no stranger to Eastern European video games. I've been a fan of the Metro games since they first released. I love their vision of an underground ecosystem barely hanging on, trying to forget the weight of the nuclear winter raging above and trying to survive the mutant menace crawling up from below, all while dealing with the ever-present tribalistic nightmare that is inter-station politics. Games made in this region of the world tend to hit different. From Metro 2033 to This War of Mine to S.T.A.L.K.E.R., these games tell the story of a region of the world whose psyche has been irreparably affected by grim folk tales, harsh mythologies, revolving wars, and of course most recently by the devastating presence of the Soviet Union. And it shows in the art produced in this region. If you've played more than one of these titles, the similarities in tone and feel are incredibly apparent. So too does The Witcher fall into this category.
Eastern European games also tend to feature their fair share of mechanical jank, which is sometimes referred to as "Eurojank" because it's so common. The older the game is, the more evident this becomes, with the original Witcher game being one of the most prime examples. Thankfully The Witcher 2 escapes the nightmarish confusion of the first game, but this legacy is still obvious. The PC controls aren't unintuitive, and never get in the way of combat, but they can still be imperfect. Left click is how you interact with the world, but it's also how you attack, so it's better to put your sword away if you're looking for items on the ground lest you attack instead of searching a pouch. If you begin to draw your sword, you cannot move until the animation is finished, which sometimes gives enemies a free hit at the start of combat. If you want to use your medallion to highlight items, you have to wait for Geralt's walking animation to come to a full and complete stop before the game will read that input. While these don't break the experience, they also don't help.
The biggest problem the game has, however, is in the communication department, and this is why I said in my opening statement that Metro succeeds where this game falls flat. And it's for a very simple reason - Metro 2033 understands its constraints, and absolutely flourishes within them while The Witcher 2 tries extremely hard to break those chains and wastes effort doing so, diminishing the game. Let me provide an explanation.
In Metro 2033 the theme of the entire game is that Artyom is constantly walking a razor's edge against death, and that comes through in the design. There's really only 2 things you're supposed to care about as you progress, and that's maintaining stealth and being frugal with your good ammunition. These two elements are constantly complimenting one another. If you can maintain stealth, you can use throwing knives to kill enemies or just sneak past them entirely. By doing this, you save regular ammo and don't have a chance to get shot. In turn, you then don't have to spend your good ammo to trade for health kits, or more simply to kill enemies faster. The design of the levels, too, employs general simplicity so that effort can be spent elsewhere. When Artyom is above ground, Moscow feels quite immense despite the playable area being small, by using distant assets correctly and providing enough small side paths to allow the imagination to do the rest. The game is still imperfect, but by revolving entirely around simple goals, the developers were able to spend their effort in exactly the right ways.
In contrast, The Witcher 2 feels completely confused in its goals and generally fails to communicate the right things to the player. The game pretty desperately wants you to think that the areas are bigger than they are. But instead of employing simple tools like rendering large structures in the background of towns or guarded doors where you're told "only merchants allowed beyond here" or some such, it instead opts to just make towns absolutely labyrinthine with a map that doesn't reflect an accurate layout so it's even more difficult to navigate. The forest near the first town is completely littered with bodies, I guess to make you feel like the elven Scoia'tael freedom fighters are a much larger threat than they are shown to be in-game, but the number of dead bodies is about a fourth the number of the NPC's you see walking around town, which is just excessive. This would be fine if the town seemed bigger, but you can explore the whole thing in about 2 minutes, it's barely as big as the street I grew up on, it's just laid out poorly to make you think it's bigger.
The saddest part is that CDPR already pulled off the feel of making a town feel larger than it actually is in the previous game. Both the starting town and Vizima do it. So CDPR actually regressed their design for this game.
The economy is the worst aspect of this, as the game to communicates that you'll need to maintain a balance of money and crafting materials as you progress. You can spend your money to buy diagrams and formulas from vendors for a large up front cost, and then kill monsters for their parts. Then crafting items yourself is dirt cheap, and you can still buy missing monster materials from vendors that will add up to less than the cost of buying the finished item, so it sends the message that you should invest in formulas and diagrams to make later chapters easier, even if you need to buy parts somtimes. Simple, right?
Except you can still find those same diagrams and formulas out in the world. Not just unique ones, the basic generic ones you can find at vendors. So you might end up blowing 500 orens on something only to immediately find it in a random box, and you can't even buy most monster parts in the final act of the game. So if you didn't blow your time farming out dozens of monsters in Chapters 1 and 2 then congratulations, you have to buy those items whole anyway!
On top of this, I found zero use for most monster parts in the game despite leveling up almost entirely in the Alchemy tree and relying heavily on potions and oils, the kind of playstyle you'd think would make the most use of these ingredients. I had a massive surplus of hundreds of Endrega fangs and Harpy feathers and Nekker claws, while I completely ran out of Nekker hearts at the beginning of Chapter 3 because crafting one Ysgith sword rune takes 8 of them and finding better swords is relatively common, so I made them often. And then I suddenly found out that not a single vendor sells them in Chapter 3 and there are no Nekkers to kill, so for three quarters of the game I was informed that I could kill Nekkers for their hearts, or buy the hearts if I was in a hurry, and suddenly I can do neither and I have to spend 512 orens per Ysgith rune because I didn't stock up on 40 hearts before I progressed the story. So I didn't even upgrade any swords I found in Chapter 3 until I was sure I had the final ones, so I could just spend 1,024 orens on 2 Ysgith runes and call it good. This is a horrible way to treat your players, and it honestly doesn't even make sense from a design perspective. You should not communicate something for the vast majority of the game and then punish players for doing that thing.
Sigh.
It might sound at this point like I hated playing this game. And yes, there were parts I found highly aggravating. Quests only sometimes have markers. Hub towns are poorly laid out and nightmarish to navigate. Only two of the magic signs are any help, and the code for the Yrden trap only fires about half the time. The loot system is average. The graphics are dated, even for a 360-era game. Only some of the voice actors are good. There are at least two quests in the game where you are guaranteed to lose money - "The Harpy Contract" and "A Sackful of Fluff", the latter of which has its own stupid design where you can try to pass a persuasion check to get 1.5x more money or an even harder persuasion check to get 2x the money, but if you don't do any check the NPC will automatically give you 2.2x the reward money... which will still make you lose money compared to just selling the Harpy feathers he asks for at a vendor. Suffice to say, the game is extremely imperfect.
Yet, I didn't give this game a 5, so there has to be a reason I think it's above average. And there is. It's the writing.
The writing, both in the characterization of NPC's and in the dialogue between characters, is extremely high quality. In fact, it carried my entire experience and was the only reason I finished the game rather than abandoning it halfway in. The game maintains a careful balance when it addresses the larger world conflicts that don't motivate Geralt. It was actually nice to play an RPG where I'm not playing the destined hero, but rather a neutral party who gets involved with in a continental war by accident, just doing as much as he has to in order to get closer to his own personal goal of saving his friends and making coin.
The side characters, too, all have personal motivation for doing the things they do, and it's clear that their actions are the fuel for the events of the game rather than some predestined path laid out before them. Even the villains are not the world ending variety, rather they are characterized as people with their own distinct pasts, biases, and personalities, and it is their conflicts of ideals with the protagonists that lead to something much larger by the end of the story. The war between Nilfgaard and the Northern Kingdoms in The Witcher 3 has its seeds masterfully laid in this game, making it clear that the conflict originates with... people. Flawed kings. An ambitious emperor. A cabal of conniving sorceresses. And two Witchers who are both victims of circumstance - Geralt of Rivia and the Kingslayer, Letho of Gullet.
So ultimately, what do we have here?
I think that's a tough question. The game is old, obviously. It comes from a different era of RPG's, and has older style conventions. The combat is janky, and doesn't always work correctly. The controls are a bit stiff, though not unserviceable. The game crashed on me twice, so it's not perfectly stable even in its current state. The graphics are dated to say the least, hair tends to look quite terrible most of the time and facial animations are stiffer than concrete. Quest design leaves something to be desired. And I was frustrated by many of the core design decisions in the game.
And yet, it is unquestionably carried by its magnificent writing. Though it got to be too expository at times, and it left a few gaps knowledge gaps here and there, it is overall a very airtight experience. Believable characters are motivated by realistic goals that clash and end up igniting flames that have very far reaching effects. Ultimately, that is what you should probably play this game for. If you can tolerate average mechanics and slightly frustrating quest design long enough to get invested in this world, then I don't think you'll have an issue reaching the credits. That certainly happened with me.
Would I play it again? I don't know. Not right now, I can say that. But I'm glad I played it once. And if you're a fan of narrative RPG's, I think it's worthwhile for you to give it a try as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment