[ALL CAPS GAME] review

[chronovore]

I'm stunned that I'm not having more fun in [PROTOTYPE], but somewhere between the overly complex control scheme, difficult to utilize combat abilities and powers, and the [UTTER RUBBISH] they are passing off as a storyline, it feels as though I'm struggling through completion because I know I will never pick it up again if I set it aside for even a moment.

It's strange, because it's still a much better version of Sega's HULK game. There are so many things done much better than HULK, and yet the dissonance between Alex's "must find a cure" motive and his "destroy anything which moves" tactics. I don't know that Mother Theresa gameplay to deal with the hordes of Infected people running rampant in Manhattan would be compelling, but at least it would make sense.

I know holding the player's hand and mollycoddling them is not considered "hardcore" -- but in a game with two or three dozen melee moves spread out over five or six distinct power groupings, plus their variants locked to and combined with various forms of locomotion, there should be more prevalent [TUTORIAL] missions to bring the player up to speed on what they just purchased with their Evolution Points. 

When this and inFamous came out at the same time, and so many people were noting the similarities, I was really excited. But inFamous is more internally consistent within its fiction, and the control scheme makes more sense. 

Comments

[sdemory.livejournal.com]

Hm. Might have been the fact that I sort of immersed myself in [PROTOTYPE] back in the day, but the control system seemed sort of intuitive. The fact that you could actually look up the moves was nice, and it did click after a while. I also took advantage of the little side-missions to provide some degree of {TUTORIAL}.

The storyline is ridiculous, and the fact that the designers basically gave up and said "Yeah. Give them ultimate power in a sandbox and they'll just take a big, biomass-y dump in the middle of it. Let's make it a high-fiber meal" seems a little counterproductive... but, for some reason, I kept finding my gameplay shifting as the game progressed. I actually shot for a bit of finesse in occupied areas, only consuming the obviously infected or potential threats, and only really cut loose in Red Zones.

I almost wish that they'd eliminated the overarching "story" part of things and just let you learn what was happening through the Web of Intrigue, bumping up the conflict and the major NPCs when you chow down on enough high-profile targets. It would feel much more organic and a bit less [SHITTY].

For an utterly compromised power-fantasy, though, it really can't be beat.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

See, for me, the overall Web of Intrigue is a fascinating idea with mediocre execution, and miserably poor content. The gung-ho military dialog is every bit as repetitive as it is clichéd. The scientist and civilian targets are more tolerable, but also more rare.

The prerendered mission-start and mission-end movies are quite poor, and there is no visual continuity between them and the in-game graphics’ lighting tone, saturation, contrast… The poor lip-sync quality in the prerendered videos is surprising, because it would not have required much more finesse to drop in a more detailed head model, and certainly some more care in phoneme matching should have been demanded of the outsource company. Or maybe they’re so noticeably poorly matched because there were late re-records of dialog, and new audio had to be overlaid on existing movies.

Anyway, visual quality bar aside, the actual content is still bad in both the movies, and the Web of Intrigue, and it is further hampered by inconsistent form.

If I’d been designing the storytelling experience, I’d have kept the movies to an absolute minimum, and go with your idea of maximizing the Web of Intrigue/consumption-driven storytelling, which is sharp.

I’d have removed the 1:1 relationship of target/snippet which gave such disjointed and repetitive content, and instead have a cell of connected nodes. Each node would represent a target to be consumed, and only when the cell had each target consumed would the content play, and I’d have made it a longer contiguous story. Players could select a node, which would lead them to the target, encouraging them to actively seek out targets to fill out the storyline on their own impetus. The asynchronous story development could be controlled by only allowing sequential nodes to open up on completion of the node preceding it.

Then, to unify the storytelling with the Web mechanic, I’d have placed target humans/creatures around the map which would show up even without being intentionally, actively selected in the Web of Intrigue interface. Potentially, those “story targets” could also open up new Web nodes as well.

So, yeah, I think your idea has merit, and that’s how I’d implement it.

I’ll be curious to see how they change things up for [PROTOTYPE 2], since that’s just about to drop, but I’m not curious enough to spend US$60 on it out of the gate.