Soundtrack Thursday 20

I've done quite a lot of these now, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only one that enjoys them. I've collected a lot of good soundtrack music through this.

Might as well start with Watch Dogs as it came out a few days ago. Naturally, the soundtrack is already uploaded. My initial impressions of the game are below. The soundtrack is good. Reminds me a lot of  inFamous Second Son elements in some places.

Next up is Mirror's Edge. Never played the game, but after the soundtrack...I kind of want to. Nice background working music.

inFamous 1 and 2 in the same compilation for the next section. Clocking in at two hours, this should get me to the end of my work day.

So Watch Dogs. I have the PS4 version. It does not feel like a PS4 game. I wasn't super hyped about the game to be honest. My brother on the other hand, was excited, especially when he heard that people from Driver San Francisco were going to be working on the project. He's camping right now with his phys ed class. He might be a little disappointed when he gets back. I played some Watch Dogs last night, and while I've never played Driver SF before (it's on the list because Michael keeps nagging me to play), I doubt the cars in there drove like spazzy boats. I am terrible at driving in video games, and it looks like Watch Dogs will be A LOT of that.

Let's talk about my initial impressions. It's...not as good of a game as they were marketing. I played maybe about an hour of it, and while I started warming up to the controls and interface, I found a lot of elements confusing. They throw a lot of different controls and game mechanics in there. First off, I think it's got too much going on. You have: driving (ugh), third-person shooter elements (which I haven't encountered much of), tons of minigames that you can find and try (that I haven't tried), a side-quest element (a lot like AC where you can intervene in crimes and save people or follow people to get info), a perk element (which is actually laid out quite well), a crafting element (which...I'm a little unsure of), MORE MINIGAMES (which are actually essential to the game's missions such as following a trail of cameras and phones to open doors or get codes), freerunning (which results in some very silly glitches), and probably a lot more that I haven't encountered yet. It's like GTA meets Assassin's Creed meets Last of Us.

Now the game has positives. The perk system is neat, the premise and idea behind the game is brilliant, the traffic lights element (though incredibly broken and I'll elaborate on that) is hilarious, the dialogue is passable (neat that people are having actual conversations on benches etc.), the writing is cliché, but passable, the characters are interesting (though sometimes cliché and act...strange) and the voice acting is fine so far. Then the game has more negatives. The driving element is so bad. I don't know if I'm alone on this, I haven't read many reviews yet, but it's awful. The steering is the issue, and the AI is the issue. At some points they'll all be stopped at an intersection, and every direction has a red light, and the lights will never change (or at least I'm not patient enough to wait). Then if you hack the lights and make them all green, every person at that light will go ball to the walls stomping on the gas and careen into each other. No attempts to evade, just chaos. The cars you drive sway at the slightest touch. The only plus is that the acceleration and braking is realistic and responsive. The AI drivers are pretty terrible too, where they'll just run into random objects for no reason (and then the objects will bounce around like rubber). I spent an entire car chase giggling my face off because I hit nearly every single object on my path and things were bouncing all over the place. This was not on purpose. I can't go anywhere without causing millions of dollars of property damage. Then the god damned flower pots are immovable, indestructible objects. Why?

The graphics do not look next gen. One of the very first scenes you see is a shot of the city, and the buildings were low res, flat objects IN THE FOREGROUND. Two of the main buildings at least were blurry messes. Character models and textures were fine so far (despite the random jittering animations, but that's another issue). I just love that while watching the opening cinematic and these shots all I could think of was "wow, this looks like shit." The graphics are okay generally, but they look like PS3 or even PS2 graphics in a lot of cases. There are also seams everywhere. Huge, glaring, white seams. That and the running animations are taken right out of Assassin's Creed. A little bit lazy there guys.

Interface is a mixed bag. I mentioned the perks are interesting. I got the car stealing and driving ones right off the bat. I also anticipate combat will be a pain in the ass, so I got lower recoil initially. There are so many buttons to remember immediately. It crash-courses you through all the controls at the beginning in the first mission, but by the time I got to driving I forgot half of them. I'm at the point where I can't figure out how to put my gun away, so I'm just running around freaking people out. Or not. People are kind of oblivious sometimes. What really got me was that there were wheels inside wheels for selecting different devices, but then I couldn't figure out what was needed for crafting and what I COULD craft. I'm an hour in and super confused, and usually I pick up on game mechanics fairly quick, even if I am bad at implementing them. Not only that, you'll get a mission to do something like chase and take down a car. I couldn't figure out if I was supposed to run the car off the road or hack something or shoot at them, so I just tried ramming into it and steering in front of it hopefully trying to stop them. If there was instruction on that, I either missed it or it wasn't there, and no mission details are repeated once you start them unless there's some way to access that through your phone...

I talked with Oliver this morning and he said other problems like impossible train tracks, inconsistencies with settings (sleazy biker bars with pretty flowers and friendly waving people outside) and reflections were all messed up. There are other bugs present as well. For instance, after a car chase and I FINALLY broke the dude's car, he jumped out and we played a game of hurdle jumping in a tunnel over barriers. I tried to jump one barrier and locked onto the dude for a take down instead. He was about 2-3 metres away from me. So I'm just swinging in the air and he's getting beaten up THROUGH THE POWER OF MY MIND. Then half his body fell into the barrier.

I will continue to play as I am interested in the characters enough and the game functions well enough to get used to. The game has an obvious lack of testing and tons of logic errors. Too many people working on too many elements without communication is my guess for what happened. That and I assume a good chunk of that massive budget got stuck into marketing instead of testing, graphics upgrades and making unique animations and elements rather than ripping them from other games. A lot of people were hyped, a lot of people bought the game, and I can see why people are upset. This is...pretty much par for the course on a lot of games lately.