Thursday, July 21, 2011

Crysis 2 and Game of Thrones

I've been watching Game of Thrones first season lately and played through Crysis 2 as Post Human Warrior, which is the hardest difficulty. I am not through yet, but my guess is that I am 99% through. A bug made my enemies disappear. Normally that would be a good thing. But since the endgame is scripted, this blocks me from entering the final spike.
My utter despise for heavily scripted content in combination with the bug, made me stop playing somehow.

Anyway, after reading Wolfshead's latest blog post, I decided to spend a few words on the same topic (again): Game of thrones as well as Crysis 2 have a very heavy focus on credibility. Actually, Crysis 2 at this difficulty is quite spectacular. I die as fast as I would expect to and so do my enemies. It's not like Fallout where moving the difficulty slider up means that every enemy survives a complete magazine of headshots.

The only thing you must not do in Crysis 2 is cloak and stealth through every mission. While that is the obvious thing to do, it is clearly not what the designers had in mind. Since this is one clear break with immersion I can live with it.
Within the scripted limits, I found Crysis 2 to be quite fun.

Game of Thrones is good. At least compared to other fantasy TV series. While the beginning is a bit swallow it gets better over time. The nudity and violence make sense, I feel. I do think that 10 episodes is not enough for the content, though. It would have been better for the series to display the same content in 15 or 20 episodes of the same length, I think.

Just like Crysis 2, Game of Thrones has a heavy focus on credibility. There are no extra powerful weapon effects, the shoulder items make sense. The 'heroes' die every now and then and even those who are spectacularly good at what they do (e.g. combat), fail at something else (e.g. illness).

If a fantasy MMORPG allowed me to play a character in the Game of Thrones world (including the graphical style), I'd be more than happy. I don't need the narrative for that. Let me and my fellow players create the story. Just add some external threats and reasons to fight among each other and see the human mind at work.

One thing I find fascinating is the role of distance. In real life I can reach the other end of the world within half a day of boredom. Frankfurt - Shanghai takes no more than 11 hours. How boring our little planet had become once we could fly!

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