Also finished Arkham Knight and am generally disgruntled. Maybe I'll do a longer post later.
Do share! Always interested to hear people complain about things that I also complain about.
Okay!
Arkham Knight: So, a lot of the problems I have with this are problems I have with general AAA game design. Here there are sidemissions all over the place and while they're not as annoying to deal with as objective vomit from something like a Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, several of the missions don't seem very well considered or designed. Like, oh okay there are bombs all over the city, let's upload a virus and then fight 40 tanks for no reason. Or let's take out a random outpost. That's not quite fair because some of the missions have at least some character interaction between villains that can be okay, but all of the villains outside of the Knight and Scarecrow are just doing random assorted things around the city and are relegated to side missions. As with Dragon Age Inquisition and some other games, there is a difficulty in maintaining a proper amount of tension in the main story for large open world games with a ton of sidequests. The main story ends up taking a backseat when you can just fly around beating the shit out of random people on the street for no particular reason or cruising around in your causing millions and millions of dollars of property damage. "Scarecrow must be stopped," but nah I'll just disarm some bombs and solve every crime that's going on in the city before I handle that.
Because most of the villains are left for side missions, the confrontations don't tend to be very memorable, and you have an explicit sense of where you are in a quest because you are shown a little timeline of rewards every time you do something, which wasn't a good way of incentivizing things for me. The main problem is that the threats posed by each side mission was very abstracted or gamey in a way that eliminated all sense of a threat. Two-Face is going around robbing banks! (don't care). We need to destroy Penguin's gun caches or else something bad will happen! (doesn't matter). Some dude is setting fires all over the city! (if you fail to catch him it's all good). There are bombs around the city that need to be destroyed (will never go off if you leave them alone). There's a serial killer leaving bodies behind (you won't ever find him until you get far enough in the quest). There's some dude who wants to be your heir! (who cares). There are military APCs all over town! (god damn it I don't wanna drive). Rioters are confronting members of the fire department! (this is getting there but again, they will wait around to be saved forever). The Riddler quest has a bit of a hook because Catwoman is captured (the game's damselization of women is mildly problematic but that's another issue), but again, you can just sit on your hands forever and the Riddler won't do shit.
I feel like nowadays, there are enough other gameplay ideas out there that would alleviate some of these issues. For example, this isn't quite a Nemesis system (Shadow of Mordor) idea, but if they had it so if you had encounters with really heavily armed Penguin folks out in the world, that would greatly incentivize you to deal with that sidequest and directly show that what you are doing has consequences in the world. You destroy his cache of guns, his goons are crippled and can easily be dealt with. You stop Two Face from robbing a bank, he gets fewer resources for future raids or something. If you don't deal with a bomb, it goes off and greatly hinders your ability to travel around in your stupid tank. I think a game like this that had time sensitive side missions actually could work, although it would be a little stressful, but god damn it, it would be stressful to solve every crime in an entire city, and that should be reflected somehow. The Nemesis system had it so if left alone, factions would get stronger. If implemented in this type of game, I think there could be something really special. I guess what was missing for me was a sense that anything I was doing in this open world meant anything. Your reward for doing stuff tends to be upgrade points but I think a better reward would be for your actions to have some tangible effect on the power structures that are in place, but maybe that's not the game they were trying to make.
The core of the gameplay is largely fine. Predator missions are still really gratifying still and I still hardly ever used the shiny new stuff available to you if I didn't feel I needed to. They have some twists like having dudes drones, dudes who can detect your detective mode, and dudes who can't be seen during detective mode but those are kind of rare. The one confrontation with the Knight that is all Predator mode is a fairly good encounter, albeit a little easy (dude do you never look directly below you?). Combat is still good, but when you need a special gadget against a specific type of enemy, the game tends to be good at targeting the one you need to use the gadget on, although the same isn't true of special combo takedowns (ALWAYS TAKE OUT BRUTES DAMN IT). The dual takedown situations are fun but tend to be over really fast. Medics could have been annoying but they're really easy to take down.
But the car. The fucking car. It doesn't control well enough to allow for precision driving but that is what you need for some of the things the game asks you to do. None of the Riddler driving missions were that bad, but whenever I failed, I never felt like it was my fault but that the car is weirdly floaty and goes too fast but sometimes too slow? I don't know how to describe it but it's annoying, and the game comes up with the most contrived situations in which you need the car. It's never for anything particularly creative, you either need to blow shit up or use the winch or power something up. I like the concept of having a remote control the car, but I didn't like any of what the car was used for. Tank combat is kind of stupid, and it gets ridiculous with some of the later parts where you need to beat up like 50 tanks on your own. Those segments aren't that hard, they're just annoying because there's a cacophany of lines and red shit and noises which are slightly overwhelming to the senses. Stealth tank combat is really stupid though.
I think the reckless abandon that the car is used for is one of the reasons I felt a little weird about the game. I think a lot of my thoughts can be summed up with this piece by Austin Walker (great writer, btw):
http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/superheroes-cities-and-empty-streets/1100-5241/I played Arkham Asylum and still love its smaller but tightly designed areas. I think one thing is that Knight is missing is a sense of place, and that's a criticism shared with a lot of big open world games. The huge locations are just places I have to drive through between different objectives. I never end up like I know what a place is like, excepting LA Noire, and that's because that was really meticulous and I recognized a lot of the landmarks in the game. But in Arkham Knight, Gotham is this destructible playground for Batman. You run your car into structures and it has no import, which brings up the question of whether I as Batman really give a shit about this place I'm supposed to be defending, since I have absolutely no problem just tearing through everything in it. A Gotham that Walker describes, where you get a sense of why people are there and why it is great and a sense that the city is a city and not just a large combat arena, that is what is missing. Superhero movies and games are just kinda boring if they're only power fantasies, but if there is a sense of loss or that you need to restrict yourself, that greatly increases the intrigue in a game like this. Everyone in Gotham after the evacuation is a criminal so you can just drive around like a fucking lunatic and run everyone down if you so choose (how does this not kill, by the way?). The possibility of collateral damage and having situations where you need to skillfully maneuver to avoid hurting citizens would be so much more appealing to me, but that's not there.
I don't read any of the Batman comics so I can't speak for very much on that front, but the story was kind of fine. The inclusion of Joker is interesting thematically but it highlights how weak the remaining villain cast is to have him having the biggest presence and him in your ear at all times. Scarecrow got a bit of an upgrade and he does seem like more of a threat. The plot is weirdly uneven and the Knight is sort of one note and then just kind of fades away. Not a fan of the ending but I haven't seen the 100% one. I'll have to youtube that since I'm not doing all this riddler shit.
Anyway yeah, it's the worst Arkham game I've played. It's still, like, okay, and I did a lot of the side missions in spite of the problems I outlined above, mostly as a thing to do rather than me actually wanting to do them. I don't regret playing it, but this could have been so much better.
