/vr/ - Retro Games

>>6290456
I hope you'll forgive my ranting, but among the games made after the original IW is better-written but HR is more fun to play. Invisible War brings up more worthy philosophical subjects than HR. HR is too obsessed with cyborgs and making it a parallel to things happening RIGHT NOW even though the point of the original DX is "these are problems we'll have down the line if current trends continue" because it was forward-thinking. IW isn't a fun game. It's no longer an RPG, universal ammo was just a bad idea considering it's not like ammo took up inventory space in DX anyway, and an absolutely terrible inventory system. It existed to show off their new ragdoll physics which are amazing.

IW was a smarter game than HR. IW dealt with the ideas of how democracy evolves in a society increasingly more focused on utopian visions, human intolerance towards the other, capitalism going out of control, DX's themes on transhumanism and the centralization of power, the technological singularity, and the role of religion in an society that becomes more and more technology-focused. What was HR about? Cyborgs. Cyborgs, cyborgs, cyborgs. Also gun control and abortion, through the lens of cyborgs. Yeah the themes of corporate influence and media control of the conversation are there but they're a backseat to cyborgs. To quote Ross Scott on this, if you removed any one of the themes from the first 2 games, you'll still have a story. If you remove cyborgs from HR, there is no story. Without that all you have is a guy flying around on your company jet and shooting up security guards. And again to quote Ross Scott, having a single central theme is not a bad thing as long as you know what you're doing, but the problem with HR is it never brings up a convincing argument as to why augmentation is a bad thing. They use sweeping generalities all the time, like how it's "the next stage of human evolution" and "naturals don't stand a chance" but don't give you much of a reason WHY.

>tfw I wanted to make the "it's ok, he still has 29 more lives" joke but someone on /v/ already did

>>6208729
In terms of moddability? Yes. In terms of the campaign? Dear god no. To quote a man who after 7 years doesn't know how to edit videos, in terms of writing NWN1's plot is one of the most truly boring, halfassed ones they've ever done. ME:A, for all of its failings and rehashes of ME1's plot, is a much deeper and better-presented script than this. NWN1 is the single most mediocre story in Bioware's catalog. But by the time you're done with it, you're left with two important pieces of knowledge

The first being you know how a campaign is structured, how the maps are bound together, how quest triggers work, and what the overall limitations of the engine are. You learn all of this because these things that are usually hidden are left completely transparent in NWN. The environments are angular, bigger, it's a game of hallways and doors. All the ways things hinge together, all the thresholds you cross to trigger conversations or traps, all of them are plain against the largely undecorated background. Conversation is even relegated to a small corner of the screen where once the words were given half the visual field, now they're simply another menu mode aside your inventory and character sheet. Dialouge is 'a' feature of 3rd Edition D&D but it's not the primary one. Quests as a result are primarily transactional, it's not who you know but what newly triggers that counts. BW for whatever reason decided to take half a decade of writing experience for the Forgotten realms and focus purely on the mechanical, far moreso than even Icewind Dale had ever bothered to do.

And then the second piece of important knowledge trickled down: the muted nonsense that there's got to be a way to do this better.

No but I found a CD wallet the other day and it has a handful of PS2 dics from my EX.

I hope you miss that greatest hits version of kingdom hearts 1

>>2790858
>tfw go out of my way to avoid anything that isn't cart only because it makes cart collections look like shit