Friday, September 6, 2013

Dark Souls: the Alternate Reality Simulator

Warning: full spoilers follow!

Dark Souls is not easy.

Not only is it difficult to play, it's also difficult to understand. If you were like me, you probably went on the wiki to learn some valuable information that you could not have continued without. "Humanity isn't the same as being human? Resistance is useless? I need an orange soapstone to create warnings?" These are statements that would have taken me forever to create, but the multiple wikis make the game's concepts so easy to understand that they are difficult to resist after the initial exposure.

What does this even mean?

Yes, I succumbed to the temptations of the all-powerful wikis; I continued to depend on the wiki for almost anything that I didn't immediately and fully understand. Eventually, I accidentally spoiled various key storylines for myself, almost completely destroying any sense of wonder that the story should have bestowed upon me. I knew that Gwynevere was behind that door, I knew that Lautrec was evil, and I knew Solaire would fall, all before I even set foot in Quelaag's Domain.

We meet again, old friend

In other words, I messed up.

If you played Dark Souls, you probably spoiled some plotlines or enemy encounters for yourself as well. Imagine though, that you hadn't done this. Imagine that a wiki didn't exist (no, this isn't the alternate reality in the title). You would have to play the game completely blind. Concepts unknown to you would remain so for a significant amount of time, and plotline arcs would be completely unknown.

Oh boy, what a different game Dark Souls would make.

Not because its various surprises would actually be surprising, but because of how utterly helpless you would feel. You would know that you lack a fundamental understanding of what you're playing, and you would watch slowly as your friends die around you. The Firelink Shrine fire keeper, Solaire of Astora, even the annoying Crestfallen Warrior that you've grown fond of, would all begin dying without your say or preparedness. You would be barely alive by the time you reach Gwyn with your substandard armor, weapons, and spells, and you would slay him.

You know that a boss means serious business when he's a humanoid and is slightly taller than you.

And then you would play again, because you know that you missed something.

Something is an understatement. Everything would be available to you this time. Better equipment, better spells, and, most importantly, your friends. This time, you would do everything in your power to keep your friends alive. You would say no to Laurentius of the Great Swamp, as he requests the whereabouts of your new flame. You would end Petrus before he lays a hand on the damsel Reah. You would save your favorite bro, Solaire. This time, you would save them all.

The coolest dude you'll know in Lordran

Or would you? The crestfallen merchant is once again dead, your newfound wizard duo cannot be saved, and Siegmeyer is destined to be slain by his own daughter.

You thought you had the power, didn't you? Like everything else that the game does, Dark Souls mocks its players with the illusion of power, then quickly takes it away from them as it ambushes them with hordes of enemies to withstand.

Dark Souls is, or at least was meant to be, a lesson to its players: they are not always going to be in control of every situation presented to them. From life, to death, to bloody videogames, people are never in full control of what comes upon them.

Hopefully, Dark Souls 2 will explain its mechanics properly so that I can be taught this lesson again without having to resort to spoilers.

League of Legends: Why Zac is an Issue

If you don't understand this title, turn around now; this is pure game talk.

League of Legends holds itself highly as a game that expertly weaves addicting progression with fun and engaging gameplay (for more of what makes League of Legends, see my previous post). This gameplay remains exciting because of the amount of choices that a player can make to best their opponents, and vice versa.

Once his all powerful dash is out of the way, Shen is one of the most easily kited enemies in the game.

Throughout their creation process, champions are designed to have a balance of both power and counterplay; a chosen champion may seem powerful in one aspect, but actions can still be made to defeat him/her. Lux, for example, has long ranged and CC abilities that she can use to harass her opponents to their deaths, but she has no dashes/movement abilities which means that if she ever gets caught up close, she's in for a big beating. Likewise, Talon is a burst assassin that can eliminate mages with ease. However, once he starts facing enemies who build armor, he becomes less of a threat. Champions have never crossed a line that disallows their opponents from fighting back.

Zac has crossed that line.

This fool right here.

Now I know you're thinking that I'm saying he's overpowered. He has a strong early game and weak late game, so he isn't quite OP. However, his early game ganking power is simply unparalleled because of one move: elastic slingshot. Its range is so great that it can completely divert careful ward placement. How is it fair that someone should have to pay for a ward and place it intelligently, if the enemy jungler can make it completely irrelevant?

Elastic slingshot can also be used as a quick getaway. If Zac ever gets caught, all he needs to do is fly away. If he uses it preemptively, he can even leap over two walls.

Look at that bloody range!

Finally, elastic slingshot has the cancerous perk of knocking up anyone it hits. No, it doesn't snare, stun, or slow, it displaces enemies, as if that's some sort of tool to be used liberally. The problem with displacement is that it cannot be countered: No amount of tenacity can save you from Zac's full combo. All he needs is to hit his easily-aimed leap at you, and you are forced at Zac's mercy. His ultimate also gives him three additional chances to knock up his enemies yet again, meaning that if you are in his sights, you are going to get displaced. Of course Zac himself deals minimal damage, but that's the job of the lane that he's ganking.

We can see this problem recurring ever more frequently on the Fields of Justice: new champions like Vi, Aatrox, and the reworked Sejuani can freely disregard their opposing team's front line. They have abilities that both allow them to leap, and deal considerable damage or displace foes. The problem with champions like these is that they break the delicate balance of the game formed from years past. Rather than each team having a front line, mid line, and back line, champions with damaging/displacing leaps completely destroy the existence of any lines. This mobility should be limited to assassins, such as Akali and Kha'zix, who actually need the leap to reach high profile targets. Instead, this privilege is being handed out willy nilly to champions of all kinds. Old champions are also completely without this versatile tool, making them less than optimal choices as compared to their newer counterparts.

Oh, these guys? They're not important, just jump over them.

Zac, the most annoying of these examples, is simply the greatest exaggerator of this meta.

So what do you think? Is this argument all hogwash, or is there some truth to these abilities being cancerous?

Riot itself calls Zac powerful on all levels of play. Gee, I wonder why... (no, it's not the chunk drops.)

The Success Behind the League of Legends System

If you're a PC gamer, chances are that you've heard of League of Legends. It's currently the most popular online game available. If you, by some slim chance, aren't aware of what League of Legends is, I invite you to read up on these ludicrous statistics to show you the magnitude of what you're missing.

Oh. My. God.

Having played for three years now, I am among those avid Summoners. Eager to increase my ranking, I play on, ready to show the world how awesome I am at videogames. At least, that's what I want to show the world. Undoubtedly, the majority of players are as equally unskilled as me, and will never achieve any sort of success in the gaming world. They know it, I know it, and yet we come back for more victories, more failures, and by the end of the day, we don't improve at all.
                
So what brings back 32 million, 12 million, and 3 million poor souls back every month, day, and moment respectively to League of Legends? How could anyone hope to replicate this success? Join me as I attempt to understand the success behind League of Legends.

1.       The game has a large amounts of content

LoL currently contains 115 champions, who each have their own spells, playstyles, itemizations, and counter champions to consider. It can be seen that there's a lot of information to absorb for just one of these units, let alone 115. So deep is this necessary understanding that, in all of my three years of playing this game and understanding everything that has to do with its metagame, I have only been able to master about 24 champions. Every champion is his/her own adventure, filled with the struggles necessary to fundamentally understand each and the satisfactions of using their mechanics to the maximum. There are also multiple maps that each demand changes in the playstyles of every champion.

But let's assume that a player isn't quite as interested in mastering every character as he is in actually obtaining them all. The cost of every champion in the game is about 450,000 influence points, LoL's in-game currency. The average game reaps someone about 65 IP, and the average daily bonus reaps the player 225 IP. So if someone were to complete 5 games a day, they would get an average of 485 IP a day. So someone who plays 5 games a day would have to continue for… 2.54 years in order to collect every champion so far. This is excluding the constant stream of new champions that each cost 6300 additional IP.

This is also excluding the game's rune system that allows players to boost their champion's stats from outside of the actual game. Runes require IP, and a full page of high-tier runes can easily cost someone 9,000 IP.

That is a lot of content right there. The sheer amount of things someone can strive to purchase and the never-ending quest to find someone's perfect champion ensures that the average Summoner will never run out of things to do in League of Legends.

It can take new players more than a couple of weeks to even identify each champion.


2.       The game features infinite replayability

I just discussed the sheer massiveness of what LoL has to offer, but let's do some more math.

The most popular game mode of LoL is competitive 5v5 in a map called Summoner's Rift. In the draft version of this game mode, no champions can be picked twice. As a result, there is a total of 2.705 x 1020 different matchups that can be played. This excludes Summoner's Rift's normal mode, which allows teams to use the champions that their opponents have already chosen, and the three other available maps, and we can safely conclude that every possible matchup will never be played. Of course, every possible matchup includes unviable teams that no one in their right mind would want to be part of, but the point still stands: no game will ever be the same for any player. Essentially, no one can truly be prepared for any game that they begin. This uncertainty adds to a sense of apprehension before every game that is simply adrenaline-pumping.

This system makes sure that not only will the average player never run out of champions to purchase and master, but possible games to play either.

3.       Content is easy to add

Last bit of math, I promise: once the 116th champion is added, a total of 2.44 x 1018 new possible matchups will be added to the game.

Let's compare this to, say, Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition, which has 39 characters. If a 40th character were to be added there would be, well, 39 new matchups to consider. Why hasn't SSFIV picked up its slack? The answer is simple, SSFIV is a fighting game.

Every fighter requires modeling and painstakingly created animations. In addition, each fighter requires movement speeds and dashes, a dozen basic moves, special movies, and ultimate moves that require extremely careful balancing and tuning in order to make no fighter either too underpowered or too overpowered in any aspect. Every champion in LoL, by contrast, has only a couple of basic animations, a couple of base and scaling statistics, and only 4 moves, one of which is an ultimate. These statistics usually require simple number changes in order to balance.

Champions don't require creation as careful as that of fighters in SSFIV, and are thus far easier to produce and maintain. With the depth of every champion discussed in the beginning of point one, we can see that Riot has found a system by which it can introduce maximum depth through minimal effort.

I'm not necessarily a god, but boy do I feel like I'm on a roll!

4.       Play is always rewarded, and progress is constantly tracked

LoL provides two methods of tracking one's progress: IP (the game's currency used to buy champions and runes), and League Points. Although IP is not an indicator of one's skill, it rewards people for actually playing the game. This produces the mentality that the more games one participates in, the more he will get. Although basic, this is one of the most ingenious ideas behind League of Legends; that even if you lose a game in Summoner's Rift (definitely one of the most demoralizing feelings in all of gaming), you still have something to show for it. IP softens the blow when you lose, and amplifies the awesomeness of winning.

IP may add to the fun of LoL, but in comparison LP is crack. This is the most accurate representation of one's skill in the game, and is thus the object of every competitive player's ire. It's the means by which a Summoner can brag about their skill within a community of entitled jerks, and by which players can mock each other for their inferiority. As such every player wants a high ranking, but this is impossible since every time someone gains LP, another person loses it. Summoners, such as myself, become addicted to gaining LP and climbing through the game's ranks to earn the glory that comes with completing such a difficult task. Although few are truly skilled enough to do this, almost everyone feels as if though they belong in higher leagues. It is this misconception that keeps LoL's monstrous competitive scene alive and well; the league system is designed to keep players coming back in order to prove to the world that they are as good as they say they are.

Team Fortress 2, DotA 2, Black Ops 2; massively popular competitive games such as these provide ways for players to show how much time they have put into mastering the game, through hats, costumes, and levels. None of them, however, provide ways to show how skilled each competitor is at playing the game. The chance for people to prove their skill quantitatively is part of the reason why LoL is so much more popular than anything else on the market.

5.       The developers take their game seriously

I have put in a solid month of playtime into Team Fortress 2. It's fun, faced paced, rewards methodical thinking, and has an awesome community.

The only problem is that the game is broken.

By this I mean that the balance of the game is far from perfect: the existence of the Engineer nullifies that of the Scout in any aggression-based objective mode (such as Payload). Snipers, as fun as they are to play, lack the necessary damage output to make them truly viable. The Medic's healing output is simply too extreme; the list goes on. Of all professional TF2 games I've ever seen, I've only ever witnessed use of the Medic, Soldier, Scout, Demoman, and the Heavy and Spy on occasion. The game's many unlockable weapons (which expertly utilize point 3 of this post) are hardly ever balanced; they are usually underpowered (ex. the Medic's Quick-Fix), overpowered (ex. the Soldier's Equalizer), or too gimmicky to see in viable play (ex. the Spy's Dead Ringer).

What I witnessed as time went on was that Valve was slowly turning its popular game into a purely fun affair through its ridiculous balancing. While the game being fun is certainly a good thing, I did not appreciate the fact that only a few loadouts and classes provided optimal play.

It's for this reason that I eventually stopped playing TF2 at the height of the almighty hat craze; when Valve officially focused on providing accessories for its players, rather than making the game fair.

The opposite is true for LoL and Riot Games. Sure, Riot does present its players with the option of changing their characters' appearances, but it is far from the company's main investment. With polished balance has come a remarkable competitive scene and players whose lives are dedicated to dominating the Summoner's Rift. LoL, and not TF2, is blessed with this kind of community because Riot is shooting its game for the stars. In order to make the game fun for everyone playing, Riot has paid heavy attention into balancing every champion. Everyone, therefore, has a fair chance of winning each match, which shifts one's focus from simply having fun, to besting his opponents with the fair chance that he's been given. The fact that one can lose out on winning additional IP, and lose LP entirely, as discussed in point 4, only makes winning a greater concern. 

Sure, TF2 is fun, but LoL is serious.

They may be funny, but hats such as these destroy the theme of Team Fortress 2


6.       The game is easy to watch
                
Twitch.tv, the main video platform for videogames, has been graced with a boost of popularity recently. It's not hard to guess why: right now, 58,470 people are watching LoL. So many people aren't just watching LoL because it's fun to play, but because it's also easy to watch. Everything that a viewer could wish to see is presented on the screen. In fact, a simple screenshot is often enough to determine which team is winning and which is losing. The game's UI also takes up minimal space on the screen, allowing for casters to utilize colorful UI overlays and live video feeds of themselves playing.
               
With this game's competitive nature, Summoners will want whatever advice and tips that they can bring with them to win matches. This is one main reason for why players watch LoL on Twitch: they want to win games as soon as they get back home from work.
                
The casters themselves are also entertaining characters. People who understand the game also like to watch it played because they want to get a laugh out of funny players. SivHD is one such famous personality that comes to mind.
                
LoL's insane e-sports scene is a testament to just how easy and fun the game is to watch.

SivHD up to his no-good antics


7.       The game features tons of customization and choices

As stated earlier, there are 115 playable champions currently. Each of these champions ingeniously fulfills certain niches, both thematic and qualitative. Ziggs, for example, is an insane demolitionist that primarily deals AoE damage. Xerath is an ethereal being of infinite power that specializes in long-range harass. Ezreal is a cocky adventurer who uses ranged spells and autoattacks in tandem. Most recently, Lucien is a vengeful evil-slayer that excels in gunning down his opponents with Max Payne-esque corridor shooting. The list goes on, and every player is bound to have a champion that fits just their bill.
                
In addition, runes and masteries let Summoners slightly alter the numbers of their chosen champions to further fit the Summoner's chosen playstyle.
                
LoL has choices for everyone, allowing for maximum player accessibility and retention.

Rengar is a hunter who used his ferocity, weapons, and stealth to quickly burst down foes.

    8.       The game is free

LoL is the very epitome of free-to-play: nothing that could affect gameplay is ever limited to customers that pay. Instead, Riot Points, bought with real cash, can be used to purchase skins for champions. Free players can still level up to level 30, purchase every champion and rune, and vie for power in the game's ranked mode. Since LoL is free, customer accessibility and retention are once again maximized.

    9.       The game is fun 

What would everything else be if the game were boring? The satisfaction of killing an enemy for first blood, winning a game, or ascending a league in ranked mode, is almost unrivaled by any other game.
                
I have never spent such an extended period of time playing one game. Usually, games get stale and boring by three years' time, but not LoL. I never, to my detriment, feel as if though I'm wasting my time while playing. Hopefully, the success of this incredible game can one day be replicated to take the world by storm.

League of Legends used to be just this small.

What Went Wrong with: Max Payne 3

Antiheroes are damned entertaining.

They lack the morality, the kindness, and the generosity that plagues many characters with objective blandness. Videogames of generations past were riddled with such principal characters that were completely devoid of personality. The videogame industry was in need of an interesting character; one that was relatable, had no super powers, and wasn't entirely sure of what he was doing.

Max Payne, with his snarky pessimism, took the gaming world by storm, and made him an instant fan favorite.

Max Payne and its sequel both received hefty critical acclaim, but only the first installment was welcomed with financial success. In fact, the financial failure of Max Payne 2 was so extreme that it forced Rockstar Games to heavily reconsider its next investments. It seemed that the franchise had come to a decisive end.

It came to the gaming world's shock, then, that Max Payne 3 was ever announced. Fans rejoiced, skeptics were intrigued, and the world started dreaming about shooting up bad guys in bullet time.

You will never feel as cool as this in Max Payne 3.

In the end, Max Payne 3 was not what the audience expected. Devoid of cheesy comic book cutscenes, New York City, and a head of hair, the videogame took a decisively cinematic turn away from its predecessors. Although it received identical critical acclaim to that of Max Payne 2, this new installment left a bitter taste in the mouths of fans (including myself). Of course, many considered this a welcome change of pace for the franchise, but no one could deny that this game has problems. Simply put, Max Payne 3 was unbearably close to true greatness, but it was boggled down by confusing conceptual design choices. This game has fundamental flaws in three aspects of its being: its mechanics, story, and multiplayer.

Mechanics


Max Payne is synonymous with slow-mo, matrix shooting. We saw it first in Max Payne where he could mow down foes with style. Max Payne 2 further developed this intense experience by actively rewarding players for running headfirst into a crowd of gun-wielding goons. So, what's the best way of wasting bad guys in the newest installment? No, it's not by running through their ranks, using bullet time to narrowly dodge bullets so that you can fill them with a couple of your own; this isn't Max Payne 2. One of the biggest crimes of Max Payne 3 is that it ignores the perfect bullet time of its immediate predecessor, which rewarded the player for taking risks by increasing the power of Max's bullet time as he killed enemies while using it. Instead, Max's bullet time has a fixed potency. Max also gains an insignificant amount of bullet time for each kill that he acquires, and his maximum capacity is stifling.

In general, the bullet time's decreased power discourages the player from taking the same ultimate risks that made the combat in Max Payne 2 so satisfying. Encouraging Max to take advantage of the newly-implemented cover system isn't itself a problem. Taking away means to reward the player for taking risks is indeed an issue, because mitigating the risks a player can take, or mitigating the reasons for which a player would want to take a risk, makes for gameplay that can quickly become unsatisfying. By making Max more realistic, Rockstar Games made Max Payne 3 a more linear, repetitive game.

Other abilities provided to the player also add to this repetitiveness. While Max is underpowered in terms of basic damage-trading, he has a few incredibly powerful abilities that certainly don't exist for the better. One of them is Max's "last stand" mode, where, upon taking lethal damage, Max has the opportunity to take an instant-kill shot at the inflictor, or die. If he kills his target, he restores the same amount of health as a painkiller normally would. The catch is that he requires one bottle of painkillers to do it. Understandably, this feature is meant deal with constant death in the first two games, and it almost works. However, the gimmick gets boring fast, it stops the pace of combat, and it negates the use of painkillers since saving them for "last stand" ensures that Max can never instantly die. It doesn't add to Max's ability to dive into combat, since if he takes lethal damage and kills the inflictor, he becomes prone; if he gets caught in a crowd of enemies, he might as well be dead. Let's not forget the fact that a bottle of painkillers cannot save someone from a lethal bullet; the realism that MP3 boasts vanishes instantly. The result of this "solution to death" slows down combat, and once again encourages Max to stay behind cover.

Bullet dodge, unfortunately, has been changed for the worse. Bullet Dodge is Max's literal leap of faith.

Perhaps the most badass move ever. It's bound to break a few ribs though.

This incarnation is a mixture of those seen in the previous two games. During bullet time, Max is invincible (seen in MP1), and he can shoot while prone (MP2). However, the former perk of this move is what cheapens the whole ordeal. In a game that boasts cinematic realism, the main character is able to take a face-load of bullets while in mid-air without taking an inkling of damage. This is literally what happened in one of my playthroughs: while using bullet dodge, someone stuffed my head with enough bullets to kill a village. Although humorous, the fact that I was laughing at such a silly thing meant I was taken out of the experience. In MP2, one of my favorite videogames of all time, Max was vulnerable even during bullet time. With the power that he was given in his bullet time, his bullet dodge became less of a viable option to survive, and more of a "look at me, I'm a badass!" ticket. The opposite is true in MP3, where the bullet dodge is so powerful that bullet time is downgraded in order to compensate. Bullet dodge shouldn't have to be spammed or gimmicky, as is encouraged by MP3, it should be savored for the perfect moment.

Max should be given tools to achieve ultimate awesomeness. Unfortunately, what is provided is a bunch of limiting mechanics that don't make much cohesive sense. They exist as a means to take full advantage of the cover system, thus limiting what the player can or wants to do. There's less inherent risk in the system that made its predecessor so intense, and thus the game feels more restricting. It feels like all of the game's encounters were more calculated, less organic. "Get behind this cover to kill these guys," the game dictates. By being more cinematic, MP3 ends up being less engaging, and more repetitive.

Story

POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOLLOW


After everyone he loves dies, and after he eliminates New York City's crime moguls, Max becomes an alcoholic. After angering NYC's kingpin of crime, Max is forced to flee his home with an old friend, Passos. He and Passos, a boring character, then find work as personal guards. Despite having nothing, Max lives on. Essentially, the only thing keeping him alive at this point is his tolerance to the various drugs that he consumes. He says that he is alive in order to see the man that kills him, but that's an utter cop out.

Eventually, the family he has been contracted to protect finds itself in danger, and it's up to Max to save the day! The first half of the game can be summarized as "people get kidnapped, Max tries to negotiate/take them back." If you know this guy's luck by now, you know that things go wrong preposterously quickly.

The second half of the game sees a bald Max (a decision I still find appalling) undergoing extremes to save this family, and taking revenge on its aggressors (who are exceedingly dull). Max goes on a rampage, killing an amount of people tantamount to the Nagasaki Bombing. The story ends our hero on a beach, looking like he's in retirement.

Why Max why?!

As you might have guessed, nothing is particularly grabbing about the story in MP3. The whole thing seems like it should be completely out of one human's hands. (I cannot express enough how many people Max kills. He kills everyone. Seriously, everyone dies.) Where in the first two games, Max Payne has a personal, understandable involvement in what's going on, MP3 provides no way for the audience to connect to Max. He is, for all intents and purposes, just an outlet for genocide.

He eventually overcomes his alcoholism through the game's run. In the context of this being Max Payne, the man who has lost everyone he loves, this should prove some sort of significant feat. However, the player has no way to -- case in point -- connect with Max overcoming this burden; there is no direct change in the way MP3 plays that would suggest that he is currently experiencing overbearing stress. In fact, if the game were to contain no cutscenes, there would be absolutely no way for the audience to tell that Max was ever an alcoholic. His withdrawal could have been enough excuse to get a dream sequence in the game, famous in the Max Payne series. That right there is missed potential.

It must be pointed out, by the way, that close to half of the campaign's run time consists of cutscenes. For that much time, the player should be given something interesting.

In summary, MP3 takes far too much time in telling a story that doesn't matter, while providing no way to connect to the game's titular character.

Who is this guy, you ask? It doesn't matter, he's boring.

Multiplayer


For me, this is the greatest disappointment of the game. Not because it's bad, but because it's too good. Shooting up real people in bullet time, making nemeses, and taking advantage of the intricate customization system proved an absolute blast. Yet, regardless of how shockingly well-thought the system was, the online community dissolved almost instantly.

What on earth happened? I believe I have the answer: Call of Duty.

MP3's multiplayer features loadouts, extremely low health, and killstreaks. It's easy to point out these similarities to CoD, but why did Rockstar Games even attempt reusing such popular material? Now, I'm not a fan of the hate that borders on barbaric on the massively successful CoD series. Yet there is one truth, whether one hates the games or not, that can't be denied: everyone wants the kind of success that envelopes this franchise. And so, Rockstar Games tried its hand at creating an equally popular game to no avail. The very existence of half a dozen active CoD games and communities doomed the multiplayer of MP3. This is synonymous with the unfortunate demise of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Despite a triple A budget, it simply couldn't stand up to the guns of the already massive World of Warcraft. Add to the fact that low health almost completely closes the gates to unskilled players, and that leveling up is punishingly slow, and we can see just why the promising MP3 multiplayer was left with no community in a matter of months. MP3's multiplayer becomes less a matter of skill as the first person to shoot tends to win.


You'd hope that you could get out of an encounter like this alive. Unfortunately, all you need to die is a half dozen bullets, so that's unlikely to happen.

Commendably, MP3, through eight years of development, has diminutive issues. These problems, however, begin to stack upon each other until they produce a glaring vision of what is fundamentally amiss with the game. Despite vicious polish and the masterful attention to detail that this game boasts, there really is no way to dress up fundamental conceptual mistakes. An unfulfilling combat system, an uninteresting story, and a multiplayer that lacks its own staple of originality all add up to a sense that something went wrong with Max Payne 3

To finally conclude, why am I talking today about a year old game that is currently being talked about by approximately nobody? This game is, unfortunately, seen as a failure by Rockstar Games on a financial level. The game turned out to be an unfit use of resources, and we may never see a game of its like for another console generation. Max Payne 3 is the perfect example of a perfectly capable game, forgotten because of a thousand tiny conceptual faults that could have been diverted through a little more focus on the part of the developers.