I had been planning to avoid Far Cry New Dawn entirely. However, I am interested in the opinions of Yahtzee Croshaw, and he claimed that the main villains are only dangerous because otherwise reasonable people get "brain farts" and obey orders to disarm themselves and handcuff themselves instead of "going in guns blazing."
Oh, yeah, spoilers below, mostly for New Dawn but also perhaps for Fallout games.
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So I decided to see whether Yahtzee's opinion matched mine. I started it up and the cutscenes were too damn long. The opening is even more tedious than Skyrim's opening, and that was too damn long also. I don't care about the characters that the writing team cares about, I want to interact with a game world. The villains were annoying and my character was powerless as they taunted him, which reminded me of crappy D&D DMs who felt the need to take over a game session with overpowered NPCs gloating at powerless PCs. A game play session should be a sequence of interesting choices; getting gloated at by NPCs while you are held frozen and unable to interact is the opposite of that.
Okay, so the endless cutscenes dropped me into a game world and it reminded me slightly of Just Cause 3, because there was a pretty landscape with very little traffic and driving around was fun, because little skill was required. (I hate racing games where avoiding other cars is necessary to avoid dying. However, Saints Row IV inspired me to get slightly better at driving because it rewarded me for near misses, which made the challenge fun.) Falling damage was not fun.
I really enjoyed capturing outposts, and New Dawn has only a few outposts to capture. (Surrendering an outpost to the enemy, letting them re-take it, and then taking it back from them is very implausible and absolutely wrecked what little immersion I had.) However, after I had taken and re-taken a few outposts, I found myself reflecting that Fallout 4 had done something similar but better. Post-apocalyptic Hope County seems a lot smaller than post-apocalyptic Boston. Upgrading the outposts in New Dawn was just as un-immersive as upgrading the guns. It did not rise to the level of base-building gameplay.
After I had built up the base, the villains showed up for another boring cutscene, in which they had some children held hostage. Once again the villains showed up to gloat and it was a cutscene so I could not shoot them even though my character and a bunch of friendly characters had guns. This kind of parley was just barely plausible IF we assume the main character HAS to be a goody-goody who always negotiates with terrorists. However, it means that you're not free to roleplay as a Dirty-Harry-type cop or as a Conan-type antihero or as an Elric-type villain protagonist.
So a few missions were okay and one of the story missions actually managed to hold my interest with tactics I normally hate. The NPCs took my guns away and forced me to compete with crappy weapons as a prisoner/gladiator. It was not very fun, but it was absorbing enough that I didn't immediately think that Nuka-World had done a similar thing. Unlike many games, New Dawn didn't feel the need to put an exploding slave collar on my character before the gladiator stuff. I hate slave collars and handcuffs, and I hate game designers who need them to tell their crappy stories.
And the story mission given by the cultists had good music and art direction even though it was boring. But as soon as you finish that, you are told that your best buddy is being held hostage and you have to drop everything and go rescue him. I showed up at the mission and noted the ticking clock timer and stopped trying. It was obvious from the dialogue what was going to happen. This was the mission where you first had to do an annoying puzzle, and then you had to put your guns in a bag and handcuff yourself so that the villain NPCs could gloat at you. This was not a "brain fart" as Yahtzee had said. This was just plain stupid DM powertripping, justified by the fact that this is not an RPG where you are free to choose your character's morality. You have to roleplay as a goody-two-shoes who will take any stupid action if someone has hostages. And the villains have to so sadistic that they are stupid. (A smart villain wouldn't let the game finish; a smart villain would kill the hero as soon as he had handcuffed himself.)
So I didn't bother solving the stupid mission on the timer, of course, but I learned something valuable about RPGs. If the player has the freedom to make a meaningful choice between being Dirty Harry and being Officer Friendly, then it deserves to be called an RPG. If the player gets railroaded into being Officer Friendly, it's not an RPG.
However, I don't insist on RPG freedom. Saints Row IV doesn't give me freedom to be sexually repressed. In that game, my character can be a freewheeling hedonist, or a slightly MORE freewheeling hedonist who has sex with some of his allies. Saints Row IV is still a lot of fun because it is a fun open world simulator much like Just Cause 3 but with more neon and more freedom to enter the interiors of buildings. Skyrim puts a lot of effort into enabling the player to customize the build and to choose between sinister necromancy-using antihero or benevolent restoration-using hero, but Skyrim doesn't have a parachute or a jetpack.
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[–] videocodec 1 point 0 points 1 point (+1|-1) ago
Saints row 3 had a remake and looks great