The Critical Flaws of BioShock Infinite

"If you're used to insipid boomfests like Halo then BioShock will seem like the shit, but if you're a long-time PC gamer spoiled by more complex FPS-RPGs then you're in for a kick in the balls." -- Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw.

Yahtzee's review of BioShock basically sums up my thoughts on the original game. Like everyone else at the time, I bought into the hype and bought BioShock for $50 on launch day -- a decision I quickly regretted once I discovered it came boxed with crippling DRM. The actual gameplay did little to assuage my disappointment at the technical problems as I grew increasingly frustrated with its excessively contrived sidetracking, unrewarding exploration, and binary morality system. Looking back, the first BioShock may in fact have been the catalyst that led to my current state of jaded cynicism whenever it comes to massively hyped mainstream games.

Going into BioShock Infinite, I was hopeful that the gameplay would at least be an improvement over the original, but I was still fully prepared for it not to live up to its hype. I had the distinct feeling in my gut that it would be another case of "all flair, no substance," and I probably never would have bothered playing it if not for PlayStation Plus putting it into their lineup of free games. Fortunately, many of the things that actively bothered me in the original have been improved or removed. Unfortunately, what we're left with in Infinite is a game that's been so streamlined as to cut out any form of meaningful interaction, while the game stubbornly insists on being something it probably shouldn't have been in the first place.

The world in BioShock Infinite tries so hard to bill itself as plausibly real and immersive, even despite its fantastical steampunk/science-fiction setting and alternate history premise. Great effort was put into the intro sequence to establish the lore and backstory of the world, to wow you with a sense of awe at all the sights, to let you simply soak in the details of the environment, and to make you wonder about its cryptic hooks. As the game goes on, it even tries to make you think about the deeper implications of American history -- most notably the roles that religion, manifest destiny, and racism played in the foundation of "the greatest country in the world." It's a game that really draws you into the experience, suggesting you've just stumbled into a truly special place in a truly special type of game.

All of the game's deft subtlety and nuance go out the window, however, when it becomes clear that this is just another farcical action shooter in which you murder hundreds of cops and civil rights activists by shredding their faces apart with handheld saw blades, summoning crows to pick the living flesh off their bones, and splattering their brains against the wall with a shotgun. It's gratuitously violent, which would be fine if this were Painkiller, Gears of War, or even Call of Duty, but for a game that seemingly wants itself to be considered Something More than just Another Typical Shooter, it comes off feeling completely unnecessary and even ruins the game's alluring mystique.

This is a story about a protagonist coming to terms with and washing his hands of the sins he's committed in war; it's the story of a mercenary-for-hire's developing relationship with a young woman he was sent to rescue; it's the story of a young woman coming to realize her own identity and rebelling against her father's wishes for her; it's the story of a high-flying society built on the principles of bigotry and exceptionalism that must ultimately come crashing down. Combat isn't necessary to tell that story, but it can most certainly be used to supplement aspects of that story, to add dramatic flair to certain scenes or to create small moments of tension.

When the gameplay revolves entirely around combat, however, and when the player has no other agency within the game's world except to shoot people in the face, it doesn't mesh with the purpose or narrative flow of the story and instead creates a very disjointed experience. Too much constant action makes it feel stale, and it doesn't even make consistent sense within the context of the world they're trying to create. If the point of the story (or at least part of it) is to have a protagonist who feels guilty about the slaughter of native Americans in the battle of Wounded Knee, the solution to his guilt is not to have him spend the entire game slaughtering white American cops and African American civil rights activists.

If you're putting a scene into the game in which your main character is confronted by the ghost of her deceased mother, it should not merely be a setup for a lame boss fight, and it should serve a greater purpose in the story than to reiterate things we've already been told through audio logs. This is a moment that should be full of emotion, character development, and meaningful interaction as Elizabeth comes to terms with her past and confronts her demons, but instead it's solved by shooting bullets at ghosts in a boss battle that gets repeated three different times. Eventually, Elizabeth delivers a 30-second monologue about forgiving her mother, but that's about the only plot development in this sequence, and the protracted battles had nothing to do with her cathartic revelation.

In cinema, smart directors and writers don't just throw action scenes into the script because it's been a while since the last explosion -- each action scene is there to serve a specific purpose, whether that's to show something about the characters or to create dramatic tension as the stakes rise. The idea, known as Chekhov's gun, is that one should only include relevant details that advance the plot, and anything superfluous should be left out. In the case of BioShock Infinite, the vast majority of combat scenarios don't serve any purpose in the story, and so it often feels forced and meaningless. I don't even know what my motivation is supposed to be for killing all these people, I just do it because it's a video game and that's what you do.

Imagine if, instead of being forced to shoot everyone all the time, the game offered you some different options. Maybe there'd be a stealth system that would let you sneak past enemies instead of killing them. Maybe there'd be an elaborate social role-playing system that could let you talk your way out of situations or blend in with the crowds. Maybe you could solve problems and conflicts by solving puzzles in the environment. You don't have to make every situation a combat situation for it to be tense and exciting, and there are a plethora of other ways to make the player feel like they're using some sort of skill in the game besides FPS gameplay. Playing BioShock Infinite is kind of like playing a lamer version of Dishonored, Fallout 3/NV, or Deus Ex/DX:HR, since those games at least give you different options, even while revolving heavily around FPS gameplay.

In one of the game's loading screen tips, it says "consider not shooting; not every situation needs to be a fight." This is a blatant lie; every situation is solved by shooting at it. The game persistently forces combat on me when I don't want to fight and leaves me no other choice but to kill everyone in sight. At one point you discover a valuable upgrade sitting on a counter behind a vendor and his guard, but the game presents you with no apparent options to obtain that upgrade without "aggroing" the merchant and everyone else in the area. There's no subquest or clever way to get it, nor is there even any interaction -- you either kill them, or keep on walking.

In another scenario, I'm walking through "Shantytown," a poverty-stricken ghetto, when two armed guys confront me in an alley asking me to hand over my money. In a situation where I wanted to say "I don't want to fight you guys; you're obviously in a horrible situation down here and I have more wealth than I know what to do with, so fine, take some money and let's not make a brawl out of this," I was once again left with no option but to violently murder them.

Rather than feeling like the cohesive artistic vision of the game director, Infinite feels instead like a game by committee. It's as if Irrational and/or 2K realized that in order for the game to earn back and profit off its massive budget, it would have to have elements that would appeal to the widest demographic of gamers, and thus it would have to be designed around FPS gameplay. It's then as if two different teams were assigned to work on the story and the combat separately, and then only met to mash the two together in the final stages of production. The game so blatantly jumps back and forth between dumb action sequences and melodramatic story sequences, which creates such widely jarring tonal shifts that pull me out of the immersion.

The HUD is an obvious cue in this regard, coming onto the screen whenever you're likely to experience combat, and going away whenever you're simply meant to take in the story. "This is Combat Sequence A, this is Story Sequence A, this is Combat Sequence B," and so on. If the HUD is onscreen, you've just watched a few minutes of cutscenes, and it's been a while since you've shot someone in the face, you're probably going to be fighting someone soon. At other times you fight your way to an objective to watch a cutscene and just know that once you turn around to backtrack out towards the entrance, more stuff will have spawned just for the sake of having you fight more stuff. It's just so enervating.

After a while, the combat gets to feel incredibly rote, formulaic, and predictable. You frequently walk into areas that look obviously designed like giant arenas, with supply caches and cover sources symmetrically scattered about. The game specifically telegraphs "you are entering a combat zone," which makes them feel so artificial. Ideally, it should feel like you're in a real space that serves the logic of the game's world, which should then break out into combat. It should feel like the battles are taking place right in the streets of Columbia, but these arenas feel so obviously detached from the rest of the game world. It's almost as if I can see the stitch marks from the way they've assembled this world, which only goes to pull me out of the experience.

The sad fact of the matter is that for as much emphasis as Irrational put into the combat, it's not even that good. Movement, aiming, and firing weapons all feel kind of clunky and straightforward since you lack the ability to shoot from behind cover or while sprinting, which prevents the game from achieving the fun of either tactical precision or fast-paced mayhem. It's the lukewarm middle-ground of mediocrity. The game's incredibly low FOV combined with the excessive bloom and glaring light sources makes it difficult to see enemies in the environment, so it often feels like a confusing, chaotic mess with you being hit from all directions not knowing who or what is actually hitting you. It doesn't help the fact that enemies frequently seem to enter the arenas from odd areas offscreen, either.

There are over a dozen different weapons to use, but for the most part these are all standard shooter fare -- a typical assortment of pistols, machine guns, rifles, shotguns, and rocket launchers. You can only carry two weapons at time, though, which would ordinarily be fine since limiting the player's arsenal makes him have to weigh the benefits of different combinations and come up with his own desired build, but there are no real consequences of using one weapon instead of another. Besides their innate properties (shotguns being good at close range but useless at a distance), the weapons all seem equally effective at dealing with any enemy you might encounter in the game. Since it doesn't really matter what you pick, I played practically the entire game using the same two weapons and never once felt like I needed to switch things up, or regretted not upgrading another type of weapon.

It makes you wonder why Irrational even felt the need to switch to a two-gun system, considering the original BioShock let you carry all of your weapons. I guess the idea was for more realism, but if that's the case it would've been more appropriate (and more desirable) to let the player carry three weapons. If the idea was indeed to force the player to make choices about what weapons he'll carry into battle, then what's the point if you're going to strategically place all the weapon types in the combat arenas for me to pick up and use? The effect is I can still use any weapon I want in virtually any situation, but now there's a tedious middle step to do so.

There aren't very many enemy varieties to face; most of the time you'll be fighting the same assortment of machine-gun wielding, unarmored footsoldiers whose only purpose in the gameplay is to rack your kill count up into the hundreds. Melee enemies run straight at you while you mow them down with a gun, and ranged enemies stand around blatantly stepping in and out of cover essentially just waiting to die while laying down suppressing fire. Every so often you're faced with a sub-boss, stronger variants that use vigors, but these guys don't require any special strategy to take down and only serve as bullet sponges to artificially inflate the difficulty of a given encounter.

Plasmids make a return in the form of "vigors," but like the weapons, these all serve basically the same purpose as one another and it doesn't really matter what you use. Most of them do some combination of direct damage, damage over time, or temporary incapacitation, and most of them can be set up as traps. It rarely feels like there's any clever use for vigors since you can no longer use them on the environment -- puddles of water and oil spills are entirely absent except in a handful of scenarios that require way too much effort to lure an enemy into, and you don't use them to solve environmental puzzles or to reach new areas.

The new additions this time are skylines and tears. Skylines are rail systems that you can ride through the sky, dangling by one arm and shooting with the other. This is an interesting concept, but they only appear in a handful of battle arenas and enemies don't seem to use them except as a way to enter the level. While riding the skyline you basically just press left trigger to auto-lock onto a target and press right trigger to shoot, which isn't very involved gameplay, so they feel underwhelming and don't contribute much to the combat. In fact, the skyline exists as a literal demonstration that this is quite sincerely an "on rails" shooter. Tears allow Elizabeth to summon things from other dimensions to aid you, like supplies, cover, decoys, and mechanized allies. This can be useful at times, but it's just about the only way Elizabeth serves any role in the actual gameplay.

When you first meet up with Elizabeth, a tutorial message pops on screen telling you not to worry about her in combat, essentially informing you that she's invulnerable. At first I thought "thank goodness," because it's often very frustrating having to babysit a helpless, useless person in typical FPS escort missions. The more I played, however, the more I started to realize this was a truly missed potential. As much as everyone hated Ashley Graham in Resident Evil 4 (her annoying, whiny personality certainly didn't help), she added an extra layer of depth to the gameplay that I find lacking in BioShock Infinite.

In Resident Evil 4, Ashley was completely vulnerable and you therefore had to protect and take care of her. This added extra tension to action scenes because you had to be mindful of other things than just your own immediate surroundings. She could take too much damage and be killed, or she could be carried off the level, requiring you to chase after and eliminate the guy carrying her without harming her. You could instruct her to hide in giant bins, or tell her to wait somewhere or follow you closely. When she took damage, you had to split your own limited healing supplies, weighing the costs and benefits between healing her and yourself. When presented with an item that can upgrade your maximum health, do you use it on yourself since you'll be the one in direct danger the majority of the time, or do you use it on Ashley since she's the more vulnerable one?

The effect of Resident Evil 4 is that I had more things to consider in and out of combat than just shooting every enemy in the face. There was a feeling of genuine interaction between myself and Ashley, as purely mechanical in nature as it was, a mutual dependence that made her feel much more tangible and present within the game. In BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth is this transient figure who basically only shows up whenever it's time for a cutscene. She can pick locks for you, but that's the same gameplay mechanic as me pressing the action button to open any other door, and she can find health or ammo when you need it in a fight, but this is the same gameplay mechanic as regenerating health/ammo. There's no player interaction with Elizabeth since it only happens in cutscenes. Even when she's crying after a traumatic event and you press the action button to "comfort" her, you don't actually do anything since it just sets up another cutscene.

Ellie from The Last of Us serves as a pretty good example of how the middle ground between Ashley and Elizabeth can be pulled off. In The Last of Us, Ellie was designed so that she wouldn't be an unnecessary nuisance in combat -- when sneaking around, enemies would never react to her presence, even if she scurried right in front of them. She did not take damage, but it was possible for her to become incapacitated, thus requiring your timely assistance to prevent her from dying. She was used in occasional environmental puzzle-solving, wherein you had to help her across an area, and as the game progressed she'd come to help you in combat by throwing objects at enemies or even shooting an unsuspecting enemy from their flank while they focused fire on you. Conversations with her often happened in ordinary gameplay and came off feeling natural and unscripted.

I came to feel a much closer bond with Ellie than I ever did with Elizabeth, and she served at least some basic function in the actual gameplay. I hated Ashley's guts, but the mechanics got her involved in the gameplay to such a degree that, in retrospect, I appreciated her presence. As great of a character as Elizabeth is, as well-acted and (generally) well-written as she is, as well-animated as she is, and as much effort went into setting up emotional setpieces for her, she never feels like an actual person in this game to me. Instead of finding some worthwhile use that incorporated her in the gameplay (tears being the only exception, albeit functionally shallow), we're stuck with combat mechanics like any other basic shooter and which forget about Elizabeth, the central figure in the story, almost entirely.

The running theme in BioShock Infinite is of a game that begs to be treated like a more sophisticated role-playing experience, but which only ever offers you the illusion of choice. After receiving an objective prompt to "find a way into the city," a minister extends his hand offering a baptism and your only option is to accept the baptism, else simply not advance the game. Two characters hand you a coin and ask you to predict if it's heads or tails, but all you get to do is press a button to advance the cutscene while your character says "heads." Someone hands you a basket of baseballs and asks you to take one, and your only option is to press a button to advance the cutscene while you take the one you were explicitly told not to take. At the raffle you win the privilege of throwing the first "stone" at the interracial couple; you're given the option to throw it at the couple or at the announcer, but the scene has the same outcome no matter what choice you make.

The game has so much pretense about telling its story in its own precise way that it never gives you any opportunity to veer off the rails to have any input of your own. In some of the game's more dramatic narrative moments you're literally stuck on rails, forced to just sit there and watch as the sights go by. There's a sequence when you're trying to escape from a giant mechanized bird, but the tension falls apart when you realize you can just stand there twiddling your thumbs and nothing will ever happen until you cross the next threshold, and when you do, you end up in a cutscene where your character flies around on the skyline. Any excitement in this scene is merely shown to the player; you never get to feel any of it through actual game mechanics.

There's no sense of urgency to any objective in the game, save for one, at the very end. The narrative pacing is therefore either so tightly controlled by the game that you have no control of your own, or your own control only goes to ruin the pacing of obviously emotional sequences. In one instance, Elizabeth runs away from you and an objective pops up to catch up to her, but then she patiently waits for you to get just close enough to see her before moving on, like a puppy playing keep away, while you scrounge through trashcans looking for hotdogs and full cups of coffee to ingest. Except for the combat sections, you are entirely passive in this game, and the game's ending even explains that everything is predetermined, specifically saying you have no control and none of your choices actually matter.

Even the game's own narrative logic starts to fall apart when certain game mechanics are introduced. Why, for instance, is there so much money to be found in trashcans, and why does my character go around scarfing down pineapples and cotton candy that he digs out of trashcans? Why am I finding machine gun bullets in a box of chocolates on a peaceful, happy beach? Why does no one care when I steal money from their bags right in front of their eyes, and why do other people suddenly care when I start stealing money from cash registers? Why does this deeply religious society sell demonic vigors out of vending machines that let me possess other people, burn them alive, or summon crows to devour their flesh? Why is the fair giving out free samples of the possession vigor right next to a machine I can possess to grant me access to a restricted area? Why am I the only person who thinks to use this vigor to get into the raffle without a ticket?

In one area of the game I was faced with a restricted zone guarded by police officers. I approached the area for the first time from an unintended angle and therefore couldn't see the barricades set up on the other side of the ledge. The only prompt I had suggesting this was a restricted zone was the presence of one police officer, who said nothing and made no gestures as I approached, and one line from Booker saying "doesn't look like we can enter now." "Why," I asked at the screen and walked forward, barely crossing the invisible "do not cross" line, only to have every officer in a square-mile radius open fire attempting to murder me.

Which then led me to wonder "why are police officers sent into a murderous rampage over such trivial, insignificant transgressions?" Surely getting too close to a restricted zone only warrants an officer to raise his hand and tell me "sorry, no access" and at worse push me away with the butt of his weapon, like the guards do in the introductory area of Half-Life 2. These guards literally just stand there and make no reaction to your presence until it's time to call the SWAT team on you for putting one toe over the line. "Fine," I say, "I won't go to this area I'm obviously supposed to come back to later." So I went into a building next door, spent less than two minutes talking to one character, then stepped right back outside only to find that the police barricade had been lowered and I could proceed, which then led me to wonder "why do they suddenly not care if I go this way?"

Linearity is to be expected in such a heavily-scripted, story-driven game, but Irrational rarely ever pulls its linearity off in a convincing fashion, always making it feel obviously contrived. You're in this fantastical floating city in the sky but you're always stuck in linear corridors with only one way forward, because the only other branching path is conveniently blocked by something that will conveniently disappear once the game is ready to let you go that way. One of the worst offenders is a group taking a photograph in front of the gondola station, not letting anyone pass for as long as it takes you to scrounge through trashcans before talking to the necessary NPC. You also have barred gates inexplicably showing up over doors you've used previously, preventing you from backtracking away from the story, which then disappear once it's necessary to go that way again.

Exploration is hindered severely by the contrived linearity -- there are no large, open hubs to experience and the only branching paths are locked siderooms that you quickly back out of once you're finished looting them. Even within the cramped corridors, exploration feels like a tedious waste of time because you're often just rummaging through trashcans looking for small, incidental amounts of ammo and restorative items. But since you have an automatically regenerating shield, and Elizabeth automatically refills your health, mana, and ammunition in battles, and you're usually bound to find entire caches of health/mana kits in tears, there's barely any incentive to explore every nook and cranny except to find the occasional upgrade (which are usually behind obvious, locked doors anyway) and audio logs.

For as much emphasis as was put into the story, too much of it is told through audio logs and disembodied voices spouting monologues at you over the PA. I hate audio logs in almost any game because they feel so detached and out of place -- they can be useful to add atmosphere and supplement the details in a story, but it's incredibly lazy to have virtually the entire story told through audio logs. It's especially illogical how and when these audio logs turn up -- why is this audio log from this person in an area he would never conceivably be? Why did this audio log suddenly show up in the elevator I was just in five minutes ago? Why am I almost never interacting with any of the game's more prominent characters, instead listening to them talk to me through a PA system just long enough for me get a chance to shoot them in face?

There's no feeling of antagonism throughout BioShock Infinite, either, no overt villain to provide conflict and drive your efforts forward. Father Comstock is largely passive, a ghostly icon lurking in the background never actually doing anything. There are a couple of major sub-bosses leading up to the encounter with him that take place over major arcs within the story, but even these characters come and go without much development or resolution. You hear a few things about them in audio logs, they say some things to you over the PA, and then you kill them and move on to the next one. Interesting characters like Jeremiah Fink and Lady Comstock are just excuses for boss battles and are about as memorable as any of the mercenary boss battles from Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

What's perhaps most egregious about BioShock Infinite is that everything feels so phony and artificial. Despite the fantastical setting and the great attention to detail in the atmosphere, it always feels like I'm watching an animatronic show like the Chuck E Cheese band or like I'm on the Splash Mountain ride at Disney World. The comparison is easy to make because so much of the game's imagery uses actual animatronics, but even the living, breathing inhabitants of this world feel like dead, lifeless robots. They all stand around idly doing nothing, and then come to life as you approach, just long enough to exchange a few lines of dialogue before returning to their inanimate idle state. Characters never actually acknowledge you, and there's not even a way to use the action button to get them to say "hello." They're just scenery in a theme park ride -- you watch their little show and then you move on.

At one point I arrived at an industrial manufacturing district that had dozens of characters out working on stuff. They're scrubbing the floors, polishing new vending machines, hammering nails into shipping crates, and so on, and every one of them is using the exact same animation sequence. As I walked throughout the district I thought to myself "surely there's no way a developer would be so lazy as to leave this unrealistic crap in their game, this has to be intentional, there's gotta be some story reveal coming up that explains they're all mind-controlled drones or something," but there was no big reveal and I was left to conclude that Irrational were just being lazy hacks. Once again it felt like I was seeing phony animatronic theme park characters instead of the actual, harsh working conditions of desperate workers in the midst of an industrial revolution.

The game's story -- the other main emphasis besides the combat -- is interesting, I guess, but it's the kind of story that's built entirely around a twist reveal at the end, meant to make you reconsider everything previous in the story, the type of thing that encourages and even almost demands a replay to understand fully. Unfortunately, as interesting as some of the ramifications for the game's "twist" ending are, I have no desire whatsoever to go back and play the game again because I'll just be stuck in the same dumb combat scenarios and the same filler elements of the story when you're sidetracked catching up to Elizabeth any of the numerous times she's separated from you, or being sent out of your way to murder hundreds of dudes because you don't have the "blue key" to use on the "blue door."

Since the action and role-playing elements are so streamlined, there's not even any incentive to try new builds in combat because, as mentioned earlier, everything is designed to be equally effective and the gameplay won't change dramatically by using different guns or vigors. Odds are you already played around with all of the different weapons and vigors in the first playthrough, anyway, since there are no restrictions on what you can use at any time.

The story also wants to shock you with its depiction of racism and the abused power of religion, to make you reflect more deeply on aspects of American history, but the game never gets going with any of these ideas. Throughout most of the game, it feels merely like it's yelling "look, bigotry is bad" at you, and it even undermines the empathetic struggle of the civil rights movement when its leader is portrayed as a psychopathic child-killer. Midway through, the themes of racism and religious extremism are dropped almost entirely in favor of pursuing Elizabeth's story, which is welcome enough, but stands out as another instance of missed opportunity and wasted potential to be Something More.

The effort and intentions are worth applauding, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, leaving it feeling ultimately worse than many similar types of games. The combat is serviceable at best but feels almost entirely superfluous in the context of the story and the world. Everything in this world is so artificial and lifeless, making it feel like you're just walking through a theme park attraction, and there's zero sense of meaningful choice or interaction allowed for the player -- everything is streamlined so precisely that there's no satisfaction to be had from the gameplay, unless you really like the mindless action. Otherwise, BioShock Infinite is possibly even shallower than the original BioShock and therefore not worth recommending except as a demonstration of how a game can have such great ideas but still fall so brilliantly short of achieving its own goals.

Impressions of Warframe

I spent most of my weekend playing Warframe, a free-to-play online cooperative shooter. It had been on my radar for quite some time, ever since it showed up on Steam almost a year ago, but as usual I never got around to playing it. Ever since Killing Floor jumped the shark in mid-to-late 2012, I've been looking for a new coop shooter with the same kind of depth, intensity, and longevity to replace it, and it seems like Warframe might have the potential to be that game.

Warframe is a futuristic sci-fi shooter in which players take the role of an ancient civilization of warriors known as the Tenno, battling a variety of humanoid armies throughout the solar system. As the Tenno, players have the ability to move like ninjas, running and jumping along walls and sliding across the floor, while their warframes (the suit of armor they wear) give them a variety of unique active skills. The action is fun and exciting, the controls are tight and responsive, and the visual style and atmosphere are very immersive.

The only problem I have with Warframe is that it's fundamentally designed like a free-to-play game: "free to grind, pay to have fun." In a way, that works in the game's favor because it offers a psychological satisfaction to be had from earning your improvements while giving you long-term goals to work towards. On the other hand, the grind can force you to spend dozens of hours slogging through repetitive missions with boring starting equipment you may not even like before you can even get to the fun part of unlocking new warframes.

Starting the game for the first time bypasses the main menu and brings you right into the tutorial, a subtle little trick that helps immerse you in the game's world and gets you right into the action. It's a necessary trick, because once you're out of the tutorial and into the game proper, you're presented with an overwhelming amount of indecipherable windows and menus that would probably turn impatient, less dedicated gamers away if not for having already gotten a sample of the actual gameplay from the tutorial.

It took me several hours of gameplay and some careful navigation of the game menus, followed by research on the game's wiki to figure out what everything does. I'm sure there are tons of unexplained attributes and mechanics I still don't understand. In matches, for instance, enemies sometimes drop items. The most important of these are mods that you apply to weapons and warframes to upgrade their stats and abilities. For a new player, it's first a question of "how do I equip this," followed by "why won't the game let me equip this," followed by "what do these symbols, numbers, and meters mean" followed by "what are these buttons for fusing and transmuting, and why would I use them?" It's all very convoluted and mystical with no tooltips or descriptions to warn you of what you're getting into.

As I quickly learned, you have to be very careful with what you click because like an MMORPG, every action in Warframe is permanent and you don't want to risk wasting valuable items or money on something you don't want or don't understand. When I finished the tutorial I was given the choice of three starting warframes, but all I got was a one or two sentence description of their playstyles and the names of their four skills. One of them was clearly marked as being the best suited for novice players while the other two were more advanced. The other two sounded more interesting to me but I figured I'd try the basic one and then switch if I didn't like it.

After a few matches I realized I didn't care much for his active skills and went to change warframes, only to discover that all of the other warframes, including the two other choices from the tutorial, were locked and required me to spend real money buying them or craft them from materials dropped by enemies in missions. Researching the recipes I discovered that they all require items that only drop from Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, higher level planets that are restricted until you complete the requisite missions to advance through the solar system, starting on Mercury and working your way outward. I plowed through the missions and hit a brick wall on Earth, realizing I was vastly underleveled and would have to spend hours and hours grinding out experience on Mercury and Venus.

It's a steep grinding barrier for me to reach those planets, but even once I get there it's going to be a grind farming rare materials from bosses, and even once I get everything the craft itself takes three-and-a-half days. Even then, the new warframe will be at level zero, unable to use any of the higher level mods I've acquired thus making it useless except on low-level planets, until I've spent more time grinding it up to match my current warframe. After 15 hours of actual play time in missions, I've only just reached Mars, and I'm going to have to grind some more to get through those missions, and then it'll be a grind to get through Jupiter and Saturn.

At this rate it'll take me another two weeks playing a warframe I don't particularly enjoy just for the chance to try something new. That's an awful lot of commitment to ask of new players, but it's all because of the evil F2P model -- make the player feel like he's wasting his time so that he'll spend real money to bypass the grind and get to the fun part of the game. The F2P model has proven it can be successful for developers; Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of how a F2P game can be enjoyable for gamers without spending a dime, while still being profitable for the developer. With Warframe, the microtransactions feel devious and manipulative.

I'm not generally against the F2P model and am perfectly willing to spend money supporting a developer if I like their product. I bought Killing Floor for $5 in a sale and was happy to spend $20 more buying cosmetic DLC, just so that Tripwire could continue releasing new game content. In Warframe, cosmetic stuff is relatively cheap, but if I want to skip the dozens of hours grinding and farming, it's going to cost me a little less than $20 per warframe and per weapon that I want to unlock. Those prices are awfully expensive, but even if one were to acquire everything the free way, you're limited to one extra warframe and five extra weapons; if you want any more than that you'll have to spend real money buying extra slots -- you can't earn more slots through free gameplay.

With those kinds of price points and the fact that you basically have to spend money if you really get into the game, I think I'd prefer to spend $20-30 up front and have access to all of the game content, and then have the option to spend an extra $2-3 on hats or other such cosmetic goodies. It feels like the game is twisting my arm trying to get me to buy things, and you could ultimately spend more than the usual $60 cost of any other game. Suffice it to say I'm not pleased with the way Warframe handles its F2P execution since it mires your ability to enjoy the game without spending money, but makes it difficult to justify the overpriced cost of buying things from the in-game store. It's a shame because the game is pretty good otherwise.

Warframe features a loose campaign of missions strung together in a sequential order. You start in the center of the solar system, on Mercury, and work your way outward, fighting an army of cloned human soldiers, a megacorporation's crewmen and robots, and a species of infested creatures. There's kind of a story going on, conveyed to you between missions in the form of emails and voiced narration, but it's really just a flimsy pretense to get you into combat situations.

Missions take on various forms -- there's the usual "exterminate" objective to kill every enemy in the level, as well as the "assassinate" objective to kill a powerful boss, but others are a little more creative. "Survival" missions require you to activate life support systems while fending off an infinite number of increasingly stronger enemies, all while fighting the timer of available air supply; in "capture" missions you chase down a powerful target that flees through the level; in "rescue" missions you have to free a target and escort him to the extraction point; in "defense" missions you defend an object from waves of enemies; in "sabotage" levels you infiltrate a location and destroy a piece of equipment; and "intercept" missions are basically like king of the hill matches.

With the main exception of "defense" and "intercept" missions, gameplay doesn't change that dramatically from mission to mission since they all basically amount to working your way through a level shooting everything in sight, but there's just enough variety in the objectives to keep things from getting too boring. Adding to the variety is the fact that each level is randomized from different combinations of rooms and hallways, meaning you can do the same mission multiple times in a row and have a slightly different layout each time.

Combat is fast-paced, pitting you against sometimes hundreds of enemies in a single level, frantically running around rooms mowing down waves of enemies. Your mobility is a key component in making the firefights so fun engaging as you slide around and bound off walls, moving from cover to cover and evasively dodging attacks. The controls feel tight and responsive whether you're shooting from the hip or zooming in for the more precise over-the-shoulder perspective, and the guns have a satisfying feedback every time you fire them. Melee combat is pretty satisfying, too, for a shooter, with each character starting with a katana-esque blade that he can use to slice enemies apart.

There's also a ton of equipment to unlock, including 18 different warframes, each with unique skills and stats, and over a hundred different primary, secondary, and melee weapons. Weapons and warframes are all leveled-up with combat experience, which increases the number and strength of mods you can apply to each one. Mods can be applied and removed from equipment freely, allowing you to experiment with different combinations to find your own desired build. There are so many options available, and despite (or perhaps because of) the tedious grind there's a great psychological satisfaction to be had from finding a rare mod, upgrading your equipment, making progress towards crafting a new warframe or weapon, and getting strong enough to survive a tough new area.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much need for genuine teamwork, at least in the starting areas. Mercury and Venus are easy enough that players can run around irrespective of one another and still beat the levels. There's rarely any need for communication and zero need for strategy; in a lot of cases, players just race through the level attempting to see who can get the most kills. It wasn't until I reached some "defense" and "intercept" missions where I could see the potential for necessary teamwork, so I'm hoping that later in the game the whole "cooperative" aspect of the gameplay comes through.

While the grind and microtransactions kind of insult me, the action is exciting, the atmosphere is fun, and there are plenty of long-term goals to work towards, meaning every match feels like I'm making progress in something. I intend to continue playing at least long enough to try out some of the other warframes (the healer warframe, Trinity, is the one I really want, since I usually like to play support roles in online games) before I decide to give up on it, but I have a feeling Warframe will hold my attention for a decently long while.

On Video Game Difficulties

I don't consider myself a "hardcore" gamer -- I'm not the type of person who has to play every game on the hardest difficulty or hunt down every single achievement or trophy to get satisfaction from the games I play. When it comes to playing video games, it's not about proving how good I am to the rest of the world; it's just about having fun. For the longest time my philosophy was that whenever a game presented me with difficulty options, I would play the default, normal difficulty unless I knew in advance that the normal setting would be far too easy and therefore unsatisfying. And yet lately I've noticed myself consistently playing games on the "hard" setting, because it seems like in most mainstream games these days, "normal" has actually come to mean "easy."

It's no secret that games have been getting easier over time. Classic NES games were so difficult they even inspired their own trope. The idea at the time was to make less total content last longer and to cause arcade players to spend more money on the machines buying continues after reaching a game over. Those games were so hard that only the most dedicated players mastered the skills and know-how to reach the end. Nowadays, with advents like regenerating health and frequent checkpoints, the idea seems less about challenging the player and instead about ensuring that evern the lowest common denominator will be able to reach the end of the game.

I find myself playing on "hard" more often lately because I want to feel some sense of challenge, and most "normal" modes don't provide much real sense of accomplishment. I like that feeling of satisfaction that comes from developing my own mastery of the game, the realization that it was my own skill, wit, and determination that got me through to the end. That's what makes the experience unique and personal, because otherwise I'm having the exact same gameplay experience as everyone else, and I don't always get that feeling from playing games on the default, "normal" difficulty.

When I started playing BioShock Infinite, I was immediately intrigued by its so-called "1999 mode," a tough difficulty meant to replicate the feeling of challenge found in games from the late 90s like its spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2. As I played, however, I found myself bored and annoyed with its "cheap" difficulty; it felt more like a tedious waste of time than a genuine challenge to me. As much as the developers may have hyped its 1999 mode, the fact remains that the game was fundamentally designed around its "normal" mode, and all 1999 mode does is artificially inflate the difficulty by playing with damage values and monetary costs.

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are both considered hard, challenging games, and indeed they are -- unlike most modern games, they're not afraid to punish you hard for your mistakes. Both of those games require you to think and play intelligently in order to succeed, and really aren't that difficult if you're observant, take your time, and play diligently. When you die, it's usually because you made some kind of mistake; you learn from the experience and improve. The Souls games are what I consider ideal in terms of difficulty, because everything in the game is fundamentally designed around providing a certain level of challenge, and because they empower the player to succeed or fail based on their own skill and technique.

This makes me realize there's a difference in perceived difficulty making some games feel like worthwhile challenges to beat, while others feel like a waste of time and effort to overcome. The Souls games offer a wholesome challenge because even in the face of failure there's the distinct perception that "I can do better" and "my fate is in my own hands." BioShock Infinite is the case of a game that's almost too easy on normal mode, but then doesn't improve the feeling of gameplay in higher difficulties, since it's the exact same gameplay but with the odds unfairly stacked against you. It's as if the game reacts to your complaints that it's too easy by tying your hands behind your back instead of stepping its own game up for the challenge.

BioShock's 1999 mode is the type of difficulty designed for hardcore enthusiasts who have already beaten the game and already know where to expect enemy spawns and strategies for surviving certain encounters. But since it's the exact same gameplay experience (same level progression, same enemies, same everything -- just harder) I have zero interest in replaying the game just to experience the extra challenge. It feels like a tedious waste of time the first time through because I'm having to resort to trial-and-error as I learn what to expect up ahead, and it would be a particular waste of time doing a replay because I'd have already seen and experienced all of the game content.

With most games that only artificially inflate the difficulty by stacking the statistical sliders against your favor, they only succeed in making the player take longer to accomplish goals while doing the same basic thing he would've been doing otherwise. In a typical run-n-gun FPS, for instance, the gameplay doesn't change much except that it demands more efficiency on the part of the player, and enemies take twice as many bullets to kill. Borderlands 2 is a good example of this, where replaying the game in True Vault Hunter Mode has you literally playing the same game the same way, but causing you to pump hundreds of bullets into enemies to kill them, while making you hide behind cover more often/longer regenerating shields.

Games like The Witcher, by contrast, change their difficulty with the usual tweaks to the sliders but also by requiring the player to use more game skills. Alchemy and potions aren't really necessary in the normal mode of The Witcher, but playing hard mode practically necessitates the frequent use of potions to offset some of the statistical deficiencies you suffer thanks to the difficulty. This kind of difficulty, while being harder and increasing the amount of time it takes to kill enemies, encourages the player to play more intelligently, using the alchemy system to his advantage and planning in advance for situations he might encounter. In The Witcher 2, you even get access to unique armor sets and weapons, offering you some new game content to experience in the process as a reward for taking the challenge.

About a year ago I wrote an article reminiscing about the way Rareware used to implement difficulty modes in their games. Their games in the 90s were known for being easy to beat but difficult to complete. GoldenEye and Perfect Dark are particularly iconic of this; both games offered three difficulty levels to accommodate novice, intermediate, and expert players, but the gameplay experience radically changed and evolved from one difficulty to the next because they added objectives, opened new areas of the game, and changed enemy placements in addition to simply making enemies do more damage, be more accurate, and have more health.

With GoldenEye and Perfect Dark I found their hardest difficulties almost impossible at first, and thus stuck with the easier game modes until I'd developed a familiarity with the levels, gotten used to the controls, and improved my skills at the game. I then felt empowered to go back and try the hardest difficulties, for more than just bragging rights -- I felt encouraged to see and experience all the game had to offer. While the artificial difficulty inflation of going from "normal" to "hard" (in terms of enemies being impossibly accurate and lethal) was indeed tedious and frustrating, it felt entirely worth it because it provided a genuinely dynamic gameplay experience.

I can't think of any games that have handled higher difficulties the way Rareware did with those games in the 90s. Most developers, it seems, design their games around what eventually becomes the "normal" difficulty -- a mode designed not to provide a challenge, but to ensure that players will be able to safely see their way to the game's end -- and then scale damage values and resources after the fact, which is a really cheap and lazy way to do things. I've never been drawn to hard difficulties until recently, because it seems like normal difficulties have gotten too easy of late, but it's tough knowing ahead of time if a game's hard mode will be a fun challenge or a shallow exercise in tedium.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Why Must You Suck?

Open-world RPGs have been dominated the past decade by the likes of Bethesda, a developer whose games I regard with utter contempt. When smaller studios try to compete with Bethesda, their ambition usually outstretches their own abilities or resources, and they wind up with a janky mess of a game that falls way short of its potential (I'm looking at you, Gothic 3). With Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, I hoped that it might be the game that would finally offer some contention for Bethesda's stranglehold of the genre.

In an industry that relies so heavily on sequels and established franchises, it's always nice to see a fresh new product from a fresh new company, so I really wanted KoA:R to succeed just for that reason alone. On paper, KoA:R has all the requisite parts to be a good game and shares many similarities to some of my all-time favorite games, but what made it seem all the more promising was the blend of headlining talent working on the game combined with its enormous budget. It was to be a big game from big names, and there was an awful lot of hype surrounding its pre-release anticipation. 

I really wanted to like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, but the game itself is a sad, mediocre disappoint punctuated by the developer, 38 Studios, going out of business shortly after its release and company owners (and Rhode Island taxpayers) losing tens of millions of dollars on the financial flop. My experience with the demo almost exactly two years ago made it seem like a good game that just wasn't worth the full $60 asking price, but even after numerous price drops and sales putting it in a more comfortable budget range, I feel like KoA:R just isn't worth anyone's time.

Kingdoms of Amalur, you see, falls victim to the same problem as virtually every other would-be Elder Scrolls competitor -- in its attempt to rival the sheer sense of scale in a TES game, KoA:R only succeeded in stretching itself out way too thin. The TES games themselves fall victim to this, but it's almost worse in KoA:R because of its own misguided vision and lack of overall cohesion. There's an awful lot of content to experience in this game, well over 100 hours if you're a completionist, but after the first dozen or so hours very little of that content is actually worth exploring because of how shallow and repetitive everything truly is.

My character staring on dead-eyed and expressionless in conversation.

There are over 200 quests to complete, for instance, but the overwhelming majority of them are simple item fetching and monster killing, given to you by random, instantly forgettable characters that serve no other purpose but to give you one quest and promptly become useless wastes of space. The tasks themselves are boring as hell and there's never any reason to care about the actual quest givers. Even main characters lack any form of distinguishing personality, but the side-quest givers are especially shallow, one-dimensional one-offs you'll never see again, anyway, which makes their simple tasks that much more trivial.

This is not an RPG like Fallout, Planescape, Gothic, The Witcher, Arcanum, or Vampire Bloodlines where player choice is emphasized and reflected heavily in its quests. None of the quests overlap or conflict with one another requiring you to make tough decisions about whom to support. None of the quests require you to think or use any sort of problem-solving to reach the solution; you just shut your brain off, follow the waypoint, and kill or click on whatever has the quest arrow over it. Very few quests give you any sort of meaningful options for role-playing or alternate solutions. This is as straightforward as you'd expect for a typical action-RPG. 

Faction quests are a little better in the sense that they actually tell an over-arching story with some sort of central conflict, along with recurring characters, which helps flesh out some of the game's lore in the process. But the actual objectives prove just as shallow and boring, so the gameplay doesn't improve very much with these quests, either.

The explorable space of the world map (click to enlarge).

There are over 150 locations to discover on the world map, a large portion of those being self-contained caves, fortresses, and dungeons, but they all share the same basic structure and gameplay. You progress through a completely linear series of rooms and hallways killing enemies and looting chests before reaching the end, then spend two minutes backtracking to the entrance. I found this structure tedious in Skyrim, but at least Bethesda were gracious enough to give you an easy exit out the backdoor instead of making you backtrack through long, boring, empty hallways after every single dungeon. After a little while you discover a new location but realize you're not going to encounter anything new or interesting inside, and that the dungeons are just another opportunity to fight stuff and collect loot.

Collecting loot would be worth it if not for the fact that 95% of loot only exists to serve as vendor trash. Early on you have the potential to find cool new gear with better stats or better random effects, but it's incredibly rare that you'll ever find anything better than the gear you received from quests or that you crafted on your own (even then, quest rewards tend to fall way behind your own crafted items). With the game's arbitrary restrictions on inventory space, this means you spend the bulk of the game fast-traveling back and forth between shops and your last location just to sell all of your worthless items for worthless gold that you'll never spend in shops because all of your quest items and crafted gear is better than the shop items, too.

Throughout the entire game, the only things I bought from merchants were lockpicks and repair kits. Early on I bought a few health potions not realizing how completely unnecessary they would become -- I ended the game with hundreds of restorative, defensive, and offensive potions cluttering my inventory for which I had literally no use because of the game's easy difficulty. I bought an amulet once that gave a +1 bonus to sorcery abilities, an effect I hadn't seen on any other pieces of equipment, and I bought one or two dirt cheap greatswords just so I could break them down and use components to craft my own sword, because I didn't want to wait for random enemy drops. I had zero points in the mercantile skill and still ended up with over two million gold, having nothing worthwhile on which to spend it.

Big, open space without much interesting structure.

Exploring the overworld map proves dull and boring, too. The explorable space is technically pretty large, but the entire world is divided into a series of enclosed, open areas connected by long, winding valleys, giving the feeling of simultaneous claustrophobia and agoraphobia. You're constantly surrounded by borders, but the areas within those borders are often vast, barren wastelands with nothing but random mobs and treasure chests strewn about. Even the confines of major cities are massively spread-out, so the effect of exploration is to make you spend a majority of your time just running across its landscape getting from point A to point B with nothing to see or do except fight random enemies, which feel entirely obligatory.

Even just wandering around the game's overworld and repetitive dungeons would be bearable if not for the almost complete lack of music. The visual design is somewhat cartoonish, full of brilliant colors and fantastical, evocative scenery that you don't see in other games, so it's pretty to look at and has a lot of personality, but a game such as this relies on its music to establish its whimsical atmosphere and to help with your immersion. The music itself isn't outstanding, but it does the job sufficiently, except that each track in any area seems to play for only a minute or two before fading out, leaving you to wander around in complete silence, making the long treks running across the map especially boring and uneventful. It got to a point where I started watching TV on the side just to keep myself occupied.

What makes the feeling of shallow repetitiveness stand out is that KoA:R is essentially an MMORPG masquerading as a single-player RPG, without any of the benefits of the "MMO." The way the world is designed feels like it's meant to accommodate dozens of players running around the same spaces at the same time, in terms of how large and spread out everything is and the way clusters of mobs are spread around the map. The quests are all dumb waypoint-following "item fetching" and "monster killing" tasks that all too prominently feature in MMOs, and the quest-givers all stand around with giant yellow exclamation points above their heads. Towns exist basically to serve as quest hubs as you follow the hub-to-hub sequence of exploration across the map while grinding to higher level areas.

Random scenery sure looks pretty.

Kingdoms of Amalur feels a lot like Guild Wars to me, except with a more robust combat system. The feeling of exploring the world map feels just the same as being in an instanced zone of GW, trying to get to the next mission hub, and the NPCs exhibit the same lifelessness as any MMO NPC whose job it is to sit around all day delivering the same bits of dialogue and quest rewards to hundreds of players over and over again. Every MMO I've ever played ultimately felt lifeless; it was the other players that brought the world to life. In KoA:R it's just you and its population of soulless mannequins. We might argue that at least KoA:R has a main storyline with fully voiced dialogue and cutscenes -- Guild Wars does that just as well, but playing through the campaign alone is not exactly fun in GW, and it's not much better here.

In much the same fashion as MMOs, KoA:R even seems to require level grinding to reach new thresholds. Playing as a mage, for instance, there are only 10 magic spells in the game to unlock, so in order to balance the pacing at which you earn skill points and unlock new skills so that it all lasts throughout the entire game, acquiring those 10 spells gets spread out over the course of 40-50 hours. The result was for me to spend an awful lot of time having essentially the exact same fight spamming the same two or three offensive spells over and over again for dozens of hours until I unlocked another active skill to mix things up.

Yet while KoA:R seems to necessitate grinding to unlock the best parts of its skill trees, the sad fact is that being a thorough completionist -- completing all quests and exploring everywhere to maximize experience points, or simply to experience all of the game's content -- just goes to break the game's difficulty balancing as you become vastly over-leveled. I started out on normal mode and before long was one-shotting every enemy in sight with my basic tier 1 fire spell. After a while of this I got bored and bumped the difficulty up to hard, which helped for a little while, but before long I was back to one-shotting everything with no difficulty. After the 45 hour mark I was so bored with the unrewarding quests and exploration and so over-leveled that I stopped exploring dungeons and doing side-quests altogether so I could concentrate exclusively on the main questline and reach the end of the game.

Shooting jets of flame to propel away from enemies.

The game's only saving grace is its combat, which feels much more akin to God of War, Devil May Cry, and Vindictus than what's typical in fantasy RPGs. Combat is real-time and has you attacking in combos, blocking attacks, roll-dodging, and executing special skills, often against multiple enemies at once. You really feel the weight and impact of each attack, with enemies flinching and recoiling to attacks (and you likewise flinching to damage) and the more elaborate skills have a dramatic, over-the-top kind of flair that makes them fun to pull off.

What's especially fun about the combat system is the open class system that allows you to make hybridized classes, picking skills from all three skill trees. Skill trees are divided into basic mage, warrior, and rogue categories, and you're always free to dump points into any tree, becoming a battlemage wielding greatswords and casting devastating magic spells, or a stealthy assassin who's not afraid to whip out a giant hammer when the going gets rough. With the game's nine different weapon types and three skill trees, there are a fair amount of options to play around with; the system even encourages experimentation, allowing you to redistribute your skill points freely at any time by visiting a fateweaver.

The only real reason to play KoA:R is because it's an open-world RPG that actually has an engaging combat system. It's unfortunate, therefore, that the game's insultingly easy difficulty undermines any sense of challenge to be had from combat. As novel as combat is, it gets to feel pointless and boring after a while when you realize you're just having the same fights over and over again, and when you're constantly one-shotting entire groups of enemies with the same spell. There are a fair number of enemies to fight, but the game also commits the cardinal sin of repeating many of the same enemies later in the game at a higher level -- I was fighting level 2 wolves in the starting area, and 30 hours later I was fighting level 20 wolves in a different area.

Combining gem shards to sagecraft an epic gem.

The other worthwhile aspect of KoA:R is its elaborate crafting system. Any piece of equipment can be broken down into component parts (which give the item its unique stats and effects) and then you can create your own gear from dozens of components. A mastercrafted sword would be constructed from five different parts, for instance, and you might have a dozen options to choose from with each component type. It's a pretty open system that, like the class system, gives you a lot of freedom to customize your character. There's also sagecrafting and alchemy skills, crafting systems that let you make gems to socket into equipment and brew potions from harvested ingredients, which also let you experiment to find new combinations.

These skills, unfortunately, are part of the very reason the game is so easy. The game is already easy enough, but these skills are what allow you to maintain a status of "indestructible killing machine" throughout the entire game, even on hard mode. These skills also ensure that you'll have no use for hardly any of the loot you find in shops or from defeated enemies, except maybe to salvage a component for later crafting, and no use for any of the money earned from selling looted items.

Among the headlining talent working on Kingdoms of Amalur is R.A. Salvatore, brought on board to help with world building. I assume this means creating the world's lore and backstory. Having read some of his books, I can vouch that Salvatore's fairly good at depicting fantasy worlds and telling interesting stories within them, and it seems he's done a good job in KoA:R of making a world that's at once familiar and also unique. At first glance it would seem like a typical fantasy world with lush forests populated by light elves and dark elves and with gnomes living in mountainous caverns, but when you start to look a little deeper you realize there are some unique aspects to this world.

One of the small villages in the game.

When you meet with human villagers in the starting town you learn about the fae -- magical creatures that seem like a cross between faries and elves, known to the humans for their immortality. If you pursue the faction questline for the House of Ballads, you end up working closely with the fae and learn that they're not really immortal but in fact live their lives as (essentially) actors in their traditional ballads that get repeated through the seasons. When one fae dies, another assumes the spirit of the ballad and becomes the new embodiment of that character. The questline deals heavily with a saboteur acting against the threads of fate to alter the outcomes of ballads, and with you trying to put everything back together again.

Fate itself plays a prominent role in this world, with every person and every action pre-ordained by fate. Professions exist called "fateweavers" whose job it is to examine the threads of fate and predict the future. When at the start of the game your character is brought back to life by the Well of Souls, a gnomish experiment on reincarnation, you break the strands of fate and become known to fateweavers as "the fateless one." You were fated to die, but your unexpected resurrection allows you to exist outside of fate as the only person capable of altering people's destinies and changing the outcome of events.

These are all very interesting concepts suggesting you've just become part of a very rich, deep world, but unfortunately the game struggles to convey its lore to the player through actual experience; rather than showing you its world and letting you experience the lore for yourself, it's more apt merely to tell you about it through rigid dialogue screens delivered by flat characters. There are a ton of Morrowind-style dialogue options that let you prompt characters for more details on various subjects as they bring them up in conversation, but this tends to lead to information overload as you get bombarded with walls of text talking about unfamiliar terms and concepts for which you'll never get any sort of actual context.

More random scenery.

For that matter, the game doesn't do a very good job of rooting you in its world. The game introduces you to so many characters, concepts, and locations right from the start and quickly prompts you to move on to new locations to meet new characters who'll talk to you about new concepts. I was never able to develop any sense of the game's society or become familiar with its world because the game never takes the time to develop any of its characters or locations; they're all so fleeting that I can't remember the names of hardly any characters or towns, and no parts of the landscape stand out as distinct or memorable to me. The whole game felt like a transient blur of same-looking, generic sights and nameless, faceless characters.

There are a lot of little things, too, that make the game feel a little amateur. When you interact with an NPC, they have to finish whatever animation they were in before the dialogue screen pops up, and then spoken dialogue becomes noticeably quieter once the dialogue screen is actually up. Only one line of dialogue can be playing at any one time, so if you talk to a second character while someone else was talking, the first one will suddenly be cut off. Once in dialogue, there's almost a complete lack of facial or bodily animations, with characters just staring at each other. The interface is extremely clunky (long list of inventory items buried in sub-menus) and the excessive amounts of solid black in things like dialogue and mini-game screens is just ugly to look at. Inability jump and rigid collision meshes cause you to get stuck on small bits of terrain too easily.

Causing an earthquake in combat.

Other things suggest consolization ranging from weird to extreme. While looking at the map, you have to press "3" to toggle between the world map and the local map, and you have to press "2" in the inventory screen to assign an item to the joystick-oriented quick-access hotwheel. The game's default, unchangeable field of view (at least, not without a third-party mod) is extremely narrow, preventing you from having any peripheral vision whatsoever and having the camera pressed really close to your back. When in combat, there's an intense auto-aim feature making it difficult to use ranged attacks on the targets you want, since the system is apt to pick a different target for you.

In general, KoA:R feels like a Bethesda-esque open-world, exploration-heavy sandbox game crossed with a more restrained BioWare-esque story-driven RPG, dressed up in the skin of an MMORPG, but without any of the good aspects of any of those types of games. The game feels stretched too thin and with a complete lack of focus, as if the developers took elements from different popular games and mashed them together, making the entire game feel bland and generic despite the talent and effort at work. Kingdoms of Amalur feels like it would've worked much better as a smaller 20-30 hour game that focused on being a more straightforward action-RPG, instead of an open-world RPG. As it is, KoA:R deliberately wastes your time with shallow, repetitive content padding and unfocused, poor game balancing, all in an effort to make it seem bigger and more epic than it truly is.