The Nature of Being Overrated: Portal 2 and TES V: Skyrim
I read an article recently and one of the first sentences really irked me.
“Places like GamesRadar and the Associated Press have said Portal 2 is their top pick for 2011. I too, would place Portal 2 above Skyrim on my list, with my ultimate Game of the Year being Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a selection I might be alone in choosing.”
I don’t know about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but what the fuck? Portal 2?
First of all, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was kind of a disappointment. Some of the big names to the voice acting list end up having rather secondary/tertiary roles, unlike Sean Bean’s performance in Oblivion where he was at the forefront. The game ends unceremoniously compared to the previous installment and the world just continues like nothing was accomplished. As the article even notes, once you kill the end boss in the game, the dragons still keep terrorizing you wherever you go. The other thing that Paul Tassi correctly points out was an element of gameplay that similarly plagued Oblivion; the quest lines, whether for the main line or for the guilds, have no sense of pace or scale. You run around doing dumb little errands until all of a sudden you’re the guild master / savior of the world, etc.
The thing is, Bethesda successfully avoided having the same ten voice actors over and over, the setting and atmosphere were all top notch, and they fixed the whole potato-face thing, but the game left a lot of things to be desired.
There was a surprising lack of role-playing to be had in the game. I played as an Orc, so I expected some kind of influence on my gameplay. It barely ever came up on any of the quests, and even the Orc strongholds in the game barely noted a difference. It’s not that Skyrim is a land that has transcended racism; it’s almost completely the opposite since everybody is racist prick to somebody else in the game, just not you.
The number of traps in the game are farcically high. I understand why you, as a game designer, wouldn’t craft a dungeon that had no environmental hazards, but some things are just ridiculous when you consider the sheer number of traps, but also the relative ease of figuring the shit out. It doesn’t even make sense to have so many puzzles if they take 5 seconds to figure out.
The follower AI is a joke. I lost count of how many times my follower just stood in the doorway and wouldn’t move out of my way. It’s like they’ve regressed to before Half-Life 2. The only option is to move further into the room and hope they follow you and move out of the way. There was actually a scenario where I walked into a tiny nook and was forced to blow away my follower with a Dragon shout to get out. They walk onto every pressure plate and every trap possible and ruin your stealthy adventures.
As beautiful as Skyrim seems outwardly, the game is very, very ugly when looked in detail. Polygonal shores, blurry ground textures, poorly integrated snow and dirt sections, etc. all comes up and make the game very hard to appreciate from an up-close aesthetic level.
That’s really irrelevant to this post, though, and I think I may end up writing less about the actual subject of this post than about Skyrim.
I know everybody really likes to lick the boots of Valve, but I was legitimately disappointed with Portal 2. The original game is one of the best that I have ever played; short and sweet, innovative, and with a charming antagonist as well as a great musical ending.
The Portal series is a lot like a puppy that starts out really cute, but then grows up and still tries to be cute, and is instead, ugly as hell and overstays its welcome. I really love puppies and dogs just like I love Valve, but I really didn’t like what they ended up doing with the second game, which was dragging out the innovative style of gameplay to the point where I got sick of seeing the next level and reducing the puzzles to finding what white paint spot would allow you place your fucking portals.
The addition of all the little gadgets like the gels and the multi-laser puzzles didn’t really add of anything of substance to me. It’s actually reminiscent of how the later stages of Minecraft added all these things like food, crafting, and dragons that I really wasn’t all that interested in because the original core of the gameplay was satisfactorily simple enough.
Sure, Wheatley and GlaDOS were still plenty of fun, but Portal 2 was a legit full-length game that required more than their humor to stay afloat. The ending was wonderful, sure, but everything [SPOILER COMIN’ UP] after you fall down 2394852730582 miles until you reach the original complexes again was just drawn out and annoying to play through. Valve had more features in the game, but they didn’t really add anything.
I feel like there’s a really pervasive attitude throughout the gaming community where Valve is the only company that can do wrong, and that’s just completely incorrect:
1. Where the fuck is Half-Life 3?
2. The hats. Man, the fucking hats in Team Fortress 2 started out as a fun joke, but between them all the customization, drops, crates, etc., the game became more about micro-transactions and less about the game-play.
3. The innovative idea behind Portal wasn’t even an in-house thing. All they did was hire out the development team behind Narbacular Drop.
4. Did we really need Left 4 Dead 2? Before any other game or even a new franchise?
5. As much as people whine about DRM, they always forget that Steam used to be a giant hunk of shit that forced people to be online and served as a giant DRM-based deterrent before it became the delivery service we all know and love today.
6. Where the fuck is Half-Life 3?
It’s a bit of a shame that I can’t even address Deus Ex: Human Revolution because I never played the game (it’s currently on sale though…).
