kella

WHAT would be your reaction if Bethesda took VATS out of Fallout and replaced it with a turn-based point and click system? How would you feel if The Sims no longer needed to eat, drink or sleep? What if someone released a DLC for Grand Theft Auto that made impossible to steal a car? This atrocity of a DLC crushed my spirit and wounded my soul. It is impossible for me to understand how a long-established, formerly likeable independent game studio like Paradox would take the core gameplay mechanic of one of its best games and shoot it dead, like a horse in the street. Somebody took an axe to the warfare mechanics and irretrievably broke it. Why, why, why would anyone in the entire country of Sweden permit this act of aggression? Sweden prides itself on its neutrality and non-involvement in foreign wars. Yet the release of this violent, insulting, belligerent piece of content is a declaration of war against its own fans. I would like to think someone got demoted or lost their job over this. It’s not that I wish ill on other people, but at some point you have to have accountability. You have to have the courage to say: Look, you’re just not cut out to be a game designer, or a producer, or a brand manager, or whatever. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re terrible at what you do and you are hurting our company and angering our fans. You ****. You are an embarrassment and you shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever it is that you’re doing. Because whoever created and approved this fiasco doesn’t even play their own game, doesn’t like their own game, doesn’t like their fans, doesn’t understand what the appeal of their own game is, and in essence destroyed the game and irreparably harmed the brand. This vile, ill-conceived atrocity saddens me to this day and has irrevocably destroyed the goodwill I used to feel towards Paradox. Yes, of course I can roll it back and I have and I still play the game pre-Conclave, but what this thing did to me was damage my trust in the company.

This game is an undiluted delight, lovingly crafted and intricately detailed. And the depth! Dear God, the depth is overwhelming. Once I realized you could actually go into your magic item with your party to explore a randomly generated dungeon just to power up that magic item, I had an out-of-body experience. This is the kind of creativity and unexpected pleasure that the best of JRPGs . The character design, the story, the finesse—everything about this game is stellar. People who work at Electronic Arts and are responsible for inflicting Dragon Age: Inquisition upon the world should be locked in a prison with nothing but a PlayStation 4 and this game and if at the end of their sentence they still want to talk about market research and 3D action adventure then you need to take those people and shackle them together and make them pick up trash on the side of the highway for the rest of their natural lives because they will never, ever, ever understand what it means to make a game. I am so bloody tired of corporate crap-fests puked up by committees of soul-less hipster robots. This game is the absolute antithesis of Electronic Arts. This game is a refutation of focus groups, branding, iPhones, touch screen, and Facebook integration. This is a game. This is a novel. This is art.

I hope a lot of people got fired for this piece of unplayable piece of garbage. I don’t know if the fault lies with the designers, some arrogant, egocentric producer or executive, or if this was a design-by-committee that just checked off the boxes—dwarves without beards, check; glowing green goo; check—on the the way to launching undiluted trash. It doesn’t matter to me, the buyer of your products—although I use that term loosely, because I will never buy one of your so-called products again. This is not an open world game and I have contacted the Federal Trade Commission to alert them of the fact that Electronic Arts is engaging in false advertising regarding this product. The character creator is adequate and the classes available are feasible, but as soon as you begin the game and are put on a bloody unilineal rail it becomes obvious that this not an open world game, this is not something you can explore and enjoy at your leisure, going your own way and doing your own thing, creating your own story with your own character. The essence of open world games is freedom to go where you want and do as you please. This is a crappy, bog standard 3D action-adventure game with some RPG elements that some soulless corporate executive decided to call an Open World game after Grand Theft Auto made a billion dollars. But you can’t just call a hamburger a steak and demand reviewers and gamers and players eat it like a steak. This is not a steak. This is a disgusting, rotten hamburger made up of entrails and snouts and filth vacuumed up off of the slaughterhouse floor. It’s a disgusting fast food hot dog made by an absolutely ill-managed and persistently incompetent game company, Electronic Arts. This is also brainless, mindless trash written and designed by people who hate fantasy, do not understand swords & sorcery, do not apparently even like or play open world games, and if you met them in person are probably overgrown hipster man-children without a clue. This conception is a bowel movement, the byproduct of a lifeless, corporate nine-to-fiver hack who thinks beard-less dwarves and glowing green goo is somehow innovating the fantasy genre. It’s not. Anyone involved in designing, producing and approving this farce should never be given a multi-million budget to make a creative product ever again. That is not an indictment of the programmers, artists, sound designers, voice actors or anyone else. But the creative, production and management team must be held accountable for their blathering incompetence. At the end of the day, I’m glad I only spent $10 to buy this game used at Wal-Mart, a serious lapse in judgment I will never make again. This so-called game is a crime against humanity and the perpetrators of this malfeasance and fraud belong in prison.

Fallout 4 is not perfection but I've played games for a long time and this is the best game I’ve ever played. So it’s not surprising I’ve played it for hundreds upon hundreds of hours, close to a thousand. The new Survival Mode is an improvement over even that mode in Fallout: New Vegas, a sleeper classic. If that’s too hard for you, sorry, maybe you should go back to poking an iPad while drooling on yourself because you’re not a gamer, you’re a consumer: a blind, slobbering idiot that wears Nikes and makes monkey noises at the TV screen. Of all the open world games I’ve played—and I’ve played all of Bethesda’s and most of Rockstar’s and a number of other disasters put out by garbage dump developers who haven’t the skill, staff, or finances to create genuine open world experiences—this is by far the deepest, most challenging, most fully realized and most enduring. It is another world, plain and simple. It is the ultimate escapism, a pure gaming drug. At this point, playing anything else feels like a waste of time, a restrictive box that stifles my freedom and my will. I despise game designers and their rigid, uncreative thinking and inability to liberate gamers and let gamers play any game the way they want to. Open world games are among the few that free gamers from the shackles of corporate idiots and of all the open world games this is by far the masterpiece, the crème de la crème, the best of the best.

This used to be my favorite game. Used to be. Back during Rajas of India or somewhere along there I would have rated it 9 out of 10. Then they broke it. Inexplicably ruined it, trashed it, let some junior designer or idiot know-it-all producer or a committee of dunces--I have no idea what happened there, in Sweden, behind closed doors--utterly trash the game with the broken, worthless, unplayable steaming POS that is the Conclave DLC. I hope someone got fired for that, but now that I have Stellaris, I don't think that person got fired. I think they got promoted. Seriouisly, WTF happened to Paradox? Did their best game designers quit or something? Because this once-great strategy company has gone to the dogs.