New Nav Pages and Other Site Changes

I just wanted to take a moment to point out a few minor tweaks I've made to the blog layout. If you've visited any time in the last few days you may have noticed some of the changes already. 

First up is the new banner image at the top of every page. The original banner was something I made way before realizing that this blog would be entirely video game related; the new banner is a little bigger and more colorful, plus it pops a bit better, and has some video game imagery built right into it to allow newcomers to more quickly realize that the blog centers mostly around video games. I don't play a lot of retro 8-bit games, so that part may be a little misleading, but I liked the contrast that those images provided against the nebulous background.

Next up are the new main pages on the top navigation bar. The "About the Rambler" page is a more thorough biography, of sorts, going into a bit more detail about my history and background as a gamer, with a brief description of what I do when I'm not playing video games, and also explaining my thoughts on the blog itself. The "List of Games Played" page is a full list of virtually every game I've played, in chronological order, since October 30th, 2006. The entire posting history of this blog is contained in that list, but it goes back several years before I started doing reviews here. It's literally just a list, but I thought it would be fun to share, so you could see a little bit more info on what games I've played in the past.

Finally, this change is much less significant, but I changed the "Random Posts" widget in the side bar to show a preview of the article text, and reduced the number of displayed posts in the side bar from five down to four. I also tweaked the overall dimensions of the blog, making each of the side bars 20 pixels wider to allow for a slightly longer line of text before hitting a line break. This, to me, just looks more pleasing to the eye, since it prevents a single long word from dominating an entire line of space and forcing a tag (on the left) or a headline (on the right) from being displayed one word at a time down a long column.

None of these changes are very significant, of course -- I'm sure some people may not have even noticed -- but I wanted to point them out all the same (especially those two pages in the nav bar) since they kind of blend in with the basic layout. There's still one more change I want to make that I haven't done yet; I'll be detailing that in a separate post in a day or two, once it's ready to launch. 

Gothic 3 Sucks -- A Critique From a Longtime Gothic Fan

Gothic and Gothic 2 are two of my favorite games of all time, being two of the games that had the most influence on my young and developing mind when I first played them in the early 2000s. And yet I harbor virtually no love for Gothic 3. I've barely mentioned it in any of my Gothic articles because I don't even like to consider it part of the series; it doesn't connect to Gothic 2 very well, and the whole gameplay formula is a radical departure from what made Gothic and Gothic 2 so great. Even though it was made by the same developer, Piranha Bytes, Gothic 3 feels like a different game by a different group of people who had only a vague understanding of what the Gothic games were, and who were told to make everything "bigger and more epic" in order to compete with the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion. Spoiler alert: they failed miserably.

Gothic 3 is a classic case of a game being ruined by ambition, of a developer trying to reach beyond their own means and biting off more than they could chew. The game, besides being unfinished and under-developed, was a buggy mess upon its release, and it took years of fan-made patches to supposedly "fix" the game and make it functional. The community patch is now 1.5GB of files (the whole "vanilla" version is only 4.6GB, total) and contains numerous bug fixes and stability tweaks, and also attempts to completely redesign and rebalance the combat system. I played the game at launch (late 2006) before the community patch even existed, and again a few years later with it, and while the patch truly does a lot to improve the game's overall playability, it doesn't (and simply cannot) fix the core gameplay design and story problems, which are the real reasons Gothic 3 sucks -- not just the bugs and broken combat that the patch supposedly fixes.

Normally I'd be content to dismiss the issue and move on with life (the game's over a decade old, after all, and I haven't even played it in about eight or nine years), but I find it surprising that, even today, people still speak highly of Gothic 3. With the recent release of Elex, newcomers to Piranha Bytes games frequently ask about their previous games and which ones are worth playing, and people readily leap to defend (or even recommend) Gothic 3, usually with the caveat that you need to play with the community patch. That's sound advice, of course, but I just can't justify recommending Gothic 3 to anyone because of how bad of a Gothic game it is, and how mediocre it is, just as a game in general. So in this article I'll be explaining my opinion on Gothic 3 and why I think it sucks.

THE WORLD IS TOO BIG

Gothic 3 abandoned the tight, compact world design of its predecessors in favor of going for a massive Elder Scrolls-style world with dozens of towns and hundreds of quests. A large world isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is when it isn't filled with interesting content, and Gothic 3's world feels needlessly stretched-out. The central area of Myrtana, which comprises roughly one-third of the map, is at least decently-populated with towns and caves and monsters and so on, but Nordmar and Varant, the two areas to the north and south, are noticeably lacking in content compared to Myrtana. Varant, in particular, is just a sprawling, barren desert with huge stretches of absolutely nothing but sand. This obviously makes exploration incredibly tedious and time-consuming because you have to waste so much time just traversing the map, and in a lot of cases there isn't anything interesting to reward you for your effort or time invested in exploring this over-sized world.

Leaving the first town in Myrtana.

What's even worse is that the world is designed to be done in sequence, going from one town to the next, completing each one as you move across the map with no real need to return to previous areas. Each town is pretty much self-contained (sometimes an orc-controlled town is tied to a nearby rebel-controlled outpost), meaning what you do in one town won't affect anything in another town (except to block quests in the other, opposite town/outpost, if you take too strong of a side in the orc/rebel conflict, say, by liberating a town and killing all of the orcs within it). Once you "complete" an area, it may as well cease to exist, and most of the towns/areas only exist in the first place to pad the game with repetitive stat-grinding as you complete mundane tasks for a minuscule amount of faction reputation. Exploring the world, therefore, feels like you're categorically checking off boxes on a list instead of actually exploring the world, and it makes the world feel incredibly fleeting because you only ever really see a place once, and then move on to the next area once you've completed the previous one.

Varant: The Land of Near-Infinite Nothingness.

Gothic and Gothic 2 were ultimately much smaller, more intimate-feeling games. Their worlds were a mere fraction the size of Gothic 3's, but they were more densely-packed with unique and interesting content. You didn't have to run somewhere for minutes at a time just to find something remotely interesting on the horizon; there was interesting stuff everywhere you looked, often to the point that you might feel overwhelmed with possibilities, just within your immediate surroundings, in terms of where to go and what to do. As a result, they were more fun to explore because you were constantly engaged with interesting terrain and structures (as opposed to wandering across huge empty fields), and the landscapes and their overall layout felt much more memorable, partly because the worlds were smaller but also because they were far more detailed.

MMO-STYLE QUESTS

Virtually every town is filled to the brim with simplistic MMO-style quests, which consist entirely of tedious objectives meant to give you a repetitive bunch of tasks to do so that you can grind experience and faction reputation, and so the back of the box can proudly say that it has "over 500 quests" to complete. Things like "kill 5 wild boars" or "collect 10 healing plants" or "escort so-and-so to such-a-place" -- pointless objectives for random people you've only just met, who serve no purpose in the story or even in the world itself except to hand out busy work to the player, who'll become completely obsolete once the quest is complete. There's no interesting story behind these quests, no narrative or worldly context for them, and no reason to care except to satisfy an obsessive compulsion for completionism. There are no meaningful decisions to make, either -- nearly every quest follows an entirely straightforward, linear progression from beginning to end with completely mindless gameplay amounting to nothing more than cliche errand boy fetch quests.

New Quest: Harek wants some meat.

Quests in Gothic and Gothic 2 were never that ground-breaking, in the grand scheme of RPGs, but they at least gave you a reason to care about them, or a plausible reason within the context of the world for why you would be doing those things. When the farmer in the starting area tasks you with bringing him 10 turnips, it's not just a dumb, pointless fetch quest -- you need a way into the locked-down city, and he's offering to sell you farmer's clothes so you can pass as a farmer, except you don't have any money to pay for the clothes, so he allows you to work for them. It makes sense and doesn't feel like tedious busy work, even though it is just a basic fetch quest, because it serves a greater purpose in the story and gameplay. Likewise, when the farmer's wife gets sick later in the game, he sends you in to town to fetch a healing potion. There's nothing more to the quest than that, but you care about it because you have an established relationship with those characters, they're not just random NPCs you've just met and will never see again. You were also given a lot more choices, compared to Gothic 3, with often multiple ways to solve a quest or multiple sides to choose, in systems that encouraged and required your own problem-solving thought and input.

RANDOMIZED/SCRIPTED LOOT PROGRESSION

The majority of loot in Gothic 3 is randomized inside of chests. A select few items are hand-placed in the environment, but these tend to be useless junk or otherwise so rare that they barely deserve mention. Most of the time, you're opening a chest and rolling the dice to see what you get. Most chests, I imagine, are scaled to a certain value, which means you're just getting generic, interchangeable rewards every time you discover someplace new or kill a tough enemy, which isn't actually very rewarding since the reward comes down to luck whether you actually get something good or not. Every now and then you find special types of chests that are guaranteed to give specific, special rewards, based on the number of special chests you'd opened previously, ascending in value as you open more special chests. In other words, the core loot progression through these special chests is completely scripted, meaning every time you play the game you'll go through the exact same loot progression. Earning better rewards isn't a matter of overcoming more difficult challenges or discovering obscure, hidden areas of the map, but is simply a matter of grinding chests. There are no shortcuts, either -- end-game loot will always be restricted until end-game because you have to go through the entire process, hunting down every single chest in the game to get the best loot.

All the loot from all those skeletons is in those two chests.

Absolutely nothing in Gothic and Gothic 2 was randomized, or followed a scripted scaling system -- every item was individually and uniquely hand-placed by the designers. Getting good loot wasn't a matter of rolling the dice and hoping for something good, or about grinding chests; it was about deliberately pushing yourself into dangerous territory where you could expect to find more valuable loot. The more dangerous the challenge, the greater the likelihood of finding greater rewards. It felt more exciting to get a unique reward for a unique challenge, and also allowed for satisfying meta-gaming on future replays because, if you remembered where the good loot was, you could go out of your way and push yourself to achieve more powerful loot earlier in the game. Plus, there were often fun narrative and lore explanations for why you would find special loot in special places, like the legendary Dragonslayer being found in a knight's crypt, floating in blue light above a certain casket, guarded by two skeleton knights, or a dexterity-boosting amulet being found in the mountains on the decayed corpse of an adventurer who fell and met an untimely demise. You don't get that kind of world-building when all the items are randomly found inside random chests.

BORING, BROKEN COMBAT SYSTEM

Combat in the first two Gothic games was ahead of its time, being one of the first fully three-dimensional, third-person combat systems in an open-world action-RPG. Those games had some issues, like the somewhat cumbersome, idiosyncratic tank-like control scheme, but the combat played at a pretty satisfyingly fast pace with quick animations and response times, while still following a grounded, realistic tempo that had a good back-and-forth rhythm to it. The system demanded precise timing and positioning, with you having to time each and every attack, block, and dodge just right else you'd stutter in your attacks or get hit. You could also string attacks together in different ways, chaining forward-momentum attacks with left and right swipes, and the attack animations changed and improved as you gained better training with your weapons. Doing well in this system required a high degree of skill, both in terms of learning enemy attack patterns so you knew how to exploit their movesets, but also in terms of having good hand-eye coordination and reflexes, with being able to execute the controls just right, at the right time.

The brawl in the first town.

Gothic 3's combat is complete rubbish. Attack animations feel slow and awkward, like the hero is spreading butter on toast with a giant sword, and the recoil from being hit is obnoxiously excessive. You no longer have to time your attacks or blocks, as you can just spam the attack buttons or hold down the block key indefinitely. The stamina meter, meanwhile, does practically nothing as you can still block and perform most attacks even with no stamina. The game adds a distinction between light and heavy attacks, but there's no real reason to use heavy attacks because light attacks will stunlock enemies better, and the special attacks (which consume stamina) tend to be absurdly over-powered, like the 360-spin with polearms. There's no more upgrading movesets, and enemy AI is so painfully miserable, with every fight against humanoid enemies turning into a one-on-one where you spam attacks against the one enemy, who's powerless to interrupt your infinite combo, while everyone else stands around watching. There's no innate skill threshold, whatsoever. The community patch helps the combat, to a certain degree, but it adds whole new problems of its own and ultimately doesn't change the core system enough to make it any more fun or exciting -- just slightly less broken.

NONSENSICAL ENEMY HEIRARCHY

In Gothic and Gothic 2, there's a very clear hierarchy for enemies; as you get stronger and work your way up the ranks, you know what's beatable and what's not. Perhaps more importantly, you feel like there's an intuitive reason why a shadowbeast would be more powerful than a snapper, or why a lurker would be more powerful than a field raider. Gothic 3's enemy hierarchy doesn't make a lot of sense, because different types of enemies are randomly much stronger or weaker than they would seem. Never mind that the same enemy types get recycled with slightly different names and skins, further blurring those lines (ie, is an aggressive wolf more or less strong than a roaming wolf?). Ironically, orcs (who should be the main threat per the story) are some of the weakest enemies in the game, while boars (unpatched) were far more devastating enemies than skeleton warriors or any other tough enemy, just because their attack animations were so ridiculously fast. Every fight is a crapshoot because you rarely know how strong you'll actually be against a certain type of enemy, just because of how inconsistent they are.

A cave full of zombies.

SLOW, STAGNANT CHARACTER PROGRESSION

Getting stronger and progressing as a character doesn't really feel that satisfying. Similar to the game world being stretched too thin, it's like the progression system is stretched so thin that it takes long chunks of time and leveling (ie, grinding) before you make any kind of noticeable progress towards actually getting stronger. With the scripted loot progression you're forced to get stronger in small increments at a time, while end-game gear isn't really that much better than some of the starting gear. The game world is also designed to be conquered in sequence, starting on the east coast of Myrtana and working your way west, so while the game's enemies technically don't scale with your level, they tend to get stronger as you work your way further west; unless you veer really far off the game's intended path, most enemies in an area will likely be within your level range as you reach them. Then, after a certain point much too early in the game's overall length, you become insanely over-powered and leveling up any further then becomes pointless. The community patch addresses this, but "solves" the problem primarily by slowing your progression down even further while limiting your skill points to such a degree that you're forced into picking one specialization and sticking with it for the entire game, which isn't exactly a great solution in my mind.

The skills and stats window.

THE REALLY LOOSE FACTION SYSTEM

One of the coolest features of the original two Gothic games was how both of them forced you to pick from one of three different factions to play as, which would change the way you played the game by unlocking unique skills, equipment, and even quests. This not only gave you a more uniquely personal feeling of playing the game, but also allowed for some good replay value since you could replay it and experience a whole new perspective on the same game. In Gothic 3, you never really join a faction -- you're sort of a freelance hero the entire game, doing whatever quests for whatever faction you want, whenever you want. Even though you might pick a side in the orcs versus rebels conflict, doing quests exclusively for one side, you never actually join them. Although the reputation system can unlock rewards with each faction, as you complete quests for that faction and improve your reputation with them, it feels more like an abstract number -- a stat, if you will -- than actual faction membership. Plus, you can work with multiple factions simultaneously, until a certain point, so your gameplay decisions about how you build your character are much more independent of faction alignment.

Quest log showing faction reputation; one more stat to grind.

NO REGARD FOR LORE AND BACKSTORY

In Gothic and Gothic 2, orcs were a primitive tribal society. They used crude weaponry, wore minimalistic gladiator-style loin cloths, lived in teepees, ate from their bare hands around campfires, believed in arcane gods, practiced spiritual mysticism, and spoke a guttural beast-like language. They were incredibly tough warriors and felt genuinely intimidating. In Gothic 3, they all suddenly speak English, they wear normal human-looking clothes and armor, live in normal human buildings, use human weaponry, eat at dining tables on plates with utensils, and have a full organized societal and military structure. They look and sound kind of like they were made by Dreamworks, and most of them are push-overs in combat (it's easier to kill an entire platoon of heavily-armed battle-trained orcs than a couple wild animals). They're almost completely different, and utterly ruin the fearsome aesthetic of the orcs in the original games by becoming ordinary, mundane humanoid enemies in Gothic 3.

These orcs are much too regimented.

At the end of Gothic 2, the nameless hero set off from Khorinis (and subsequently Irdorath) with a boat full of friends and allies. At the start of Gothic 3, suddenly Lee, Lares, Vatras, Angar, and assorted other NPCs are all inexplicably missing. Your friends like Diego, Milten, Gorn, and Lester all look and sound different than they did before, and they even act differently. In Gothic 2, you're said to be the avatar of Innos and Xardas becomes the avatar of Beliar, and suddenly in Gothic 3 those roles are inexplicably switched to King Rhobar and Some Hashishin Guy, respectively, while the gods themselves (Innos, Beliar, and Adanos) seem to be worshiped completely differently than they were in Khorinis. Throughout Gothic and Gothic 2 you keep hearing about the mainland being a war zone with the orcs on the cusp of winning and enslaving all of humanity, and then you get there in Gothic 3 and it seems like a relatively peaceful stalemate with the orcs are content to let you -- a random human -- wander freely through their occupied cities. Basically, it feels like they started from scratch with Gothic 3 and tried miserably to tie it in with the established lore of the series, since very little in Gothic 3 feels "right" from a Gothic and Gothic 2 standpoint.

THERE'S NO MAIN STORY

Gothic 3 is basically just a fantasy sandbox game with a very limited scope of what you can actually do in its huge open world. Whereas most games of this sort (e.g., The Elder Scrolls) give you a main quest line to follow which is ultimately optional and should by no means be your main focus in the game, Gothic 3 pretty much skips the whole concept of a main quest altogether -- there's no main story and hardly any main quest line to pursue, even if you wanted to. There's an opening premise about finding Xardas (your necromancer friend turned badguy) accompanied with the general suggestion of "pick a side in the orcs versus rebels conflict" and that's basically it. You spend essentially the whole game on a giant side-quest (liberate orc-controlled cities or destroy rebel outposts) for your own reasons (improve your character by gaining experience and better gear through factions) and because it's really the only thing in the game to do besides wandering around killing random enemies. Then you find Xardas and it turns out you have to do that stuff anyway, for some reason, so you finish it if you haven't already, do a few simple quests and then the game abruptly ends. I really must stress that there's no actual story element to this, and hardly any quest line to follow -- it's just a bunch of random, arbitrary tasks until the game eventually ends.

The main story collect-a-thon.

SO WHAT'S ACTUALLY GOOD ABOUT GOTHIC 3?

I would be remiss to not give Gothic 3 credit where it deserves. Gothic 3 isn't all bad, it's just mostly bad. So here are some things for which I feel like it actually deserve some praise.

TRULY OPEN-WORLD, NO LOADING SCREENS

Gothic 3 was released in 2006, and the world is absolutely huge. What's most impressive about that is that it has absolutely zero loading screen, beyond the initial load. Unlike Oblivion, for instance, which came out around the same time and forced you to sit through a loading screen every time you used a door, Gothic 3 lets you go everywhere on the map, from one corner to the next, and even inside buildings, loading everything in the background as you go. It was a major resource hog at the time, of course, but is still an impressive feat considering newer games, even today, still divide their playing areas into smaller loading zones. And it is a truly open world, with completely non-linear exploration and questing and complete freedom to go wherever you want from the very start of the game.

Waterfalls in the distance.

GREAT SOUNDTRACK

Kai Rosenkranz is one of the few video game composers whose name I actually know, and that's entirely because of his work with the original Gothic series. I liked his soundtracks a lot in the first two games, being perfectly atmospheric to set the mood for those games' environments, while having just enough melody and musical structure to keep it interesting, without having too much of that stuff to make it stand out or become repetitive. His soundtrack for Gothic 3 features a full orchestra, and his compositions and the performances by the musicians are all just so powerful and impressive. Gothic 3 received a ton of negative backlack from professional reviewers and gamers alike, but the soundtrack was one thing that everyone unanimously praised. Tracks like Vista Point and Exploring Myrtana have become emblematic of the game itself. I also like Ominous Woods, Trelis Liberate, Castle of Faring, Sad Strings, but seriously everything in the full soundtrack is great.

GOOD VISUALS AND ATMOSPHERE

The level designers and artists at Piranha Bytes have always been great at crafting outstanding-looking environments, and Gothic 3 is no exception. Though hampered by performance issues with having such a large view-able area, parts of the game looked truly beautiful at the time, if you had a rig powerful enough to render everything in high detail and longer distances. Other things, like character models, armor, and animations weren't so good, but the overall look and general aesthetic of the environments (combined with the great soundtrack) make Gothic 3 pretty satisfying just walking around and taking in the sights. The atmosphere of being out in the wild is pretty strong, just from an audiovisual standpoint alone.

A picturesque castle in the mountains.

ARCHERY AND MAGIC

Archery and magic in the first two Gothic games were never that great, and I always recommended against those playstyles for new players because they weren't very fun and were also difficult to make effective. In those games you were heavily restricted by limited ammunition and mana supplies which made it tough to specialize early on, but the actual gameplay for archery and magic amounted to simply locking on to your target and pressing attack to automatically shoot the enemy. There was no aiming and enemies made no effort to dodge. In Gothic 3, you finally have to aim ranged attacks manually, which makes them so much more engaging, especially when you have to lead targets and compensate for gravity's curved trajectory of an arrow, plus magic is a much more accessible and viable option from the beginning of the game than it was in the previous two games.

SOLVING QUESTS BEFORE YOU PICK THEM UP

As boring and tedious as the quests are, it's nice that you can actually complete most of them before being issued the quests from the quest-giver. If you've already gathered the items they need, or killed the enemies they want killing, you gain the experience the moment you finish the objective, and then if you stumble into an NPC who asks you to do something you've already done, you can say so then and there and collect your reward immediately. Not the most exciting thing, but a nice quality-of-life thing nonetheless.

IN CONCLUSION

Gothic 3 isn't really so bad as to warrant the "Gothic 3 Sucks" title, but it's a game that's so thoroughly mediocre and generally underwhelming, while feeling needlessly bloated and excessively long, that I can't recommend it to anyone in good conscience. There's some good stuff to enjoy in Gothic 3, and it still has some of that unique Piranha Bytes charm, but it's all buried under tons of bad design choices and horrible execution, and the good stuff just isn't good enough to justify sifting through all the bad stuff just to find it. And while some people insist that it's a fine, decent, or even good game with the community patch, the patch is simply that -- a patch, a bandage over a huge gaping wound that stops the bleeding but doesn't suture or disinfect the wound. The community patch, while admirable and definitely worth using, only goes so far as to make the game playable by fixing so many of the glaring bugs and tweaking the combat enough to bring it up from "completely broken" to "at least functional." It doesn't (and cannot) change things like the core combat mechanics, or the boring, tedious quest design, or the bland and shallow world design, or the almost complete lack of a main story. It's just not a very good game, and it's a horrible conclusion to what was, until Gothic 3, an utterly brilliant and masterful series.

Resident Evil 7 DLC Review: "Not A Hero" and "End of Zoe"

December 12th saw the release of what might be the final pieces of DLC for Resident Evil 7 -- the free Not A Hero scenario in which you play as Chris Redfield trying to find Lucas in the moments immediately following the base game's conclusion, and the $14.99 End of Zoe (part of the season pass) in which you play as Joe Baker (Jack's brother) trying to find a cure for Zoe after she starts being crystallized by the mold, as seen in the base game. Each scenario lasts roughly two hours and provides closure for some loose end of the main story. This final (?) round of DLC feels like a nice coda for a game that I absolutely loved, the final bit of content to round everything out into a full and complete experience, and yet I also feel somewhat underwhelmed by them, and perhaps in the case of one of them, outright disappointed. See the full review for my thoughts on each one.

Not A Hero

Not A Hero had been teased ever since the base game was first released, back in January 2017, with a giant in-game splash image upon finishing main story, advertising that it would be available "Spring 2017." After the glowing reception Resident Evil 7 received from the general public, Capcom decided the already in-progress work on Not A Hero wasn't good enough, and announced that the free DLC would be delayed while they worked to bring it up to par with the quality fans would expect. It was kind of a weird statement to begin with, almost implying that they felt like Not A Hero was fine until they realized how much people actually enjoyed Resident Evil 7, and then only decided after that realization that they should actually bother to make Not A Hero good instead of just mediocre, as if they were content for it to be mediocre in the first place. But whatever. Nine months later they finally got around to releasing Not A Hero, and I eagerly played through it on launch day. It felt pretty mediocre to me.

Locating one of Chris's teammates in the mines.

Not A Hero takes place immediately following the ending cutscene of the base game, after Ethan defeats Eveline and meets Chris Redfield. You play as Chris, still with the BSAA but now cooperating with a rebranded Umbrella Corporation, who're supposedly trying to clean up for their past mistakes, trying to find info on "The Connections" who're ultimately responsible for the mold-like bioweapons by tracking down Lucas Baker in the mines near the Baker estate. That's the general premise at least -- in this scenario, you're sent into action to rescue three of your teammates who've gone non-responsive in the mines.

There's really not much more to the story than that -- the setup is a quick and simple matter of "rescue these three guys," and then the rest of the scenario is following paths until you find the key items that will let you reach the next guy, and killing (or running away from) a bunch of enemies that get in your way. It is, quite simply, a cursory game plot meant to give you objectives to complete without really telling a story. Any story elements you glean from this DLC are found in research notes and journal entries and things which clear up some of the base game's backstory, but I found most of this information to be somewhat humdrum -- most of it was stuff that everyone had already guessed a long time ago, anyway, and none of it really has any impact on anything except to make you scratch your head wondering why it's supposed to be significant or how this new information is supposed to mesh with the existing information we already had in the base game.

Exploding a molded into smithereens with a Chris Redfield punch.

As for the gameplay itself; Not A Hero is much more action-oriented than the base game, which is fine since I actually really enjoyed the feel of combat in the base game and first few rounds of DLC, but it lacks any form of survival tension because of how empowered Chris is as a character. As Chris you're equipped with a version of the powerful Albert pistol and a semi-automatic shotgun, plus a big-ass combat knife and health sensors that tell you exactly how much health you have left, and you even gain the newfound ability to execute brutal knock-down punches, Chris Redfield-style. Meanwhile, the game loads you up with tons of ammo and healing items. As a result of all that firepower, I never felt scared or vulnerable because I could safely blast (or punch) any threat that came my way. Even when the game traps you in a room the size of a broom closet with constant waves of enemies, you've got so much ammo and healing items that you barely even break a sweat.

The melee punch is a nice addition since that kind of functionality was completely missing in the base game and made certain situations feel clumsy when you couldn't push enemies away who got in close. But like everything else in this DLC its execution feels rough and unpolished. To execute a melee punch you first have to stagger an enemy with a headshot from a firearm, and then get in close enough and press the left mouse button to do the punch. It's pretty much the same system as the melee attacks in Resident Evil 4 except not nearly as varied or versatile, and the melee attack is bound to the same button you use to hip-fire a gun instead of being safely mapped to something different. In practice, executing the melee attacks has this awkward feeling where you stand around waiting for the HUD to tell you that you can do the attack, because it's sometimes hard to tell when an enemy is simply recoiling from the attack versus being staggered, and you don't want to accidentally fire your weapon when you wanted to punch, or miss a shot trying to punch when you thought the enemy was staggered.

A white molded.

For the most part, combat in Not A Hero plays exactly like it did in the base game and all the previous DLC (except with a lot less weapon variety), which combined with the overpowered arsenal and relative ease, made the "intense" action feel generally mild and underwhelming to me. The only twists on what is now a year-old formula that I've thoroughly exhausted across multiple base game and DLC runthroughs are 1) being able to punch enemies Resident Evil 4-style, 2) unkillable "white molded" that you have to avoid until you find a special type of ammo, 3) "Boomer"-style exploding kamikaze fat molded enemies, and 4) spider-crab molded enemies that scuttle on the ground in swarms. The new variety in enemies seems nice, but there are only a couple instances of each new enemy type in the entire DLC, whereas you spend the vast majority of the time fighting the same old boring molded from the base game.

The invincible white molded are an interesting idea, but they're mechanically shallow and under-developed, since all you really do is run away and avoid them (exactly like you do with so many enemies in the base game, just to conserve ammo (not to mention like you do with Jack, another invincible and yet ultimately much more intimidating enemy)), and once you have the special ammo you just shoot them anywhere and they die instantly in a rather unsatisfying anti-climax.

I see a little silhouetto of some mold

The level design suggests a type of Metroidvania-esque system of exploration where you're initially presented with a set of three branching paths, but you need to find the necessary equipment upgrades to actually explore different areas of the map. Much like the enemy variety it seems like an interesting feature at first, until you realize that the progression is entirely linear since you have to explore the paths in a certain, specific order, and that unlocking the new equipment upgrades doesn't actually change the gameplay or offer you any sort of unique abilities, it just enables you to walk down a path you previously couldn't, no different than if you'd just obtained a key and unlocked a door. It's kind of obnoxious, actually, how much you're railroaded into going certain ways in this DLC, like when you follow the mine shafts to get a special item and suddenly the return path has turrets and impenetrable bars forcing you to go a different way than you came in.

That's not even to mention the stupid HUD messages that pop up to blatantly tell you "YOU CAN'T GO THAT WAY YET" and "YOU CAN'T FIGHT THAT THING YET." Like yeah, thanks game, I really needed you to tell me that. Why not just let me figure that out on my own so I can actually feel like I'm playing the game and learning/experiencing things for myself, instead of forcibly dragging me by the arm through the whole thing?

Thanks for the warning, game.

Then you've got all the other stupid crap going on with the premise, like why does random grunt dude have an advanced gas filter on his mask but Chris Mother-F#$%ing Redfield doesn't? Or why doesn't Chris at the very least have a flashlight on him as part of very basic, standard issue equipment? Why does Lucas use instant remote detonations on all the other bomb collars when he wants to kill someone, but then put an unnecessarily slow-moving dipping-mechanism 10-minute timer on Chris's bomb when he wants to kill Chris? Why doesn't he just blow up Chris at the start? Why does Chris insist on running into certain danger with a bomb strapped to his wrist instead of immediately trying to disarm it? Why can I not even try to shoot Lucas through a window when he clearly doesn't realize I'm there? I get that all of these issues are necessary to facilitate gameplay (Chris can't see in complete darkness so he needs to fetch the night vision goggles) or to create drama (can Chris deactivate the bomb in time?) but it just feels like bad, lazy writing and scenario-design to me.

There's plenty more I could talk about with this DLC (like the awkward scene transitions (we just awkwardly cut from outside the Baker house to deep inside the mines? Chris shoots Lucas in the face, then the screen fades to black and suddenly there's a giant molded cocoon all over the ceiling and Lucas has instantly transformed into a giant monster)), but I'm already starting to get into nitpicky territory so I'll start to summarize my opinion here. If it wasn't obvious by the preceding paragraphs, I did not enjoy Not A Hero. It's hard to complain about a free DLC, but I feel like expectations may have been set too high by the absurdly long wait. Being told that the DLC "wasn't good enough" and having to wait almost an entire year for it to come out, to be left with what feels like a cobbled-together mess of poorly-thought-out and poorly-implemented ideas is ultimately pretty disappointing. There was good potential here, but the end product feels too much like a lame rehash of things things we've already seen and done before in the base game and preceding DLC.

End of Zoe

End of Zoe takes place weeks after the base game, following a canonical ending in which Ethan chooses to give the vaccine to Mia instead of Zoe, leaving Zoe to slowly crystalize under the effects of Eveline's powers. You play as Joe Baker -- Jack's estranged brother who lives by himself deep in the swamp and survives by eating bugs (among other things) -- trying to find a cure for Zoe. This involves a relatively long journey through the swamp into nearby Umbrella research stations, where they were studying the effects of the molded in search of their own vaccine, as you dodge lethal alligators and brawl with enemies in hand-to-hand combat.

Carrying Zoe through the swamp. Watch out for the alligator.

Unlike Not A Hero, End of Zoe feels like something a little more unique, since its focus on melee brawling greatly changes the feeling of combat from what you're likely used to, and it injects some more tension into the scenario by limiting your weaponry and healing items much more (you pretty much have to fight stuff with your fists, which puts you in much greater risk of taking damage) and mixing much more lethal enemies into the mix. Joe's a pretty tough dude who can dish out a serious beating (in a manner that almost defies the fairly "grounded in reality" feeling of the entire game, pushing towards comical absurdity), but alligators can kill you in one hit, and the four-legged crawling molded are insanely difficult to fight with your bare hands, plus several bosses and sub-bosses take a lot of precise timing to block their attacks and land successive combos.

The new melee combat system is fine, but isn't as deep as I'd like it to be. You essentially just alternate left and right click to punch with either your left or right hand, and you can pull off stronger hits by combining enough attacks together, but as far as I can tell it mostly amounts to button-mashing until it's time to press the space bar to block. As with Not A Hero you can also do more powerful attacks if you've stunned an enemy, except you can also curb-stomp enemies once you knock them down. There's also a newfound emphasis on stealth, with patrolling enemies that you're encouraged to sneak past or behind, allowing you to kill enemies instantly with stealth-kills if you can get in close enough undetected. This is a fun addition since it adds mechanical variety to encounters (you can choose how to approach each situation) while increasing the tension.

Grappling with a molded in hand-to-teeth combat.

The real issue with the combat has less to do with the melee combat system and more to do with the fact that they basically just took enemies from the base game and dropped them into the scenario without bothering to change their behavior or movesets to better suit melee combat. The four-legged crawlers, for instance, are really tough to hit because they're so low to the ground and move around so quickly, and the bile-spewing fat molded don't stagger and there's no reliable way to avoid their attacks except to constantly run behind cover (where you'll probably still get hit anyway due to glitchy hit-detection). The regular and "Travis" molded are better, but they don't put up much of a fight unless they come in groups, at which point their attacks start clipping through each other and you get hit by attacks that realistically shouldn't be able to hit you, and which you can't even see coming because there's an enemy in your face blocking your entire field of view. And you can't even fight the alligators in hand-to-hand combat (the real shame of this DLC -- not being able to wrestle an alligator). As a result, the only truly good fights are the ones against the recurring boss enemy, the one enemy who was actually designed from the ground up to be fought in melee combat.

Unfortunately, there's an annoying element of trial-and-error at work, here, where you can often and easily die in an instant because you didn't know something was going to happen up ahead. Early on, for instance, the path splits in two directions, one of which cuts through a tent where you have to avoid or kill a patrolling molded, and one of which takes the longer route around the tent. If you take the longer (but seemingly safer) route you come face-to-face with a four-legged crawling molded once you turn the corner, who will almost certainly kill you; if you'd gone through the tent, you'd have had a much easier fight against a much easier enemy, and would've come out behind the crawler where you could safely execute a stealth kill on it. When you first encounter the alligators, you have to use your limited supply of throwing spears to kill them at a distance, because there's no way to sneak past them or fight them head-on, and there's no way to learn this except to die multiple times trying different things. While not a huge deal (I typically like having to experiment to figure things out) it gets kind of annoying being ambushed and dying instantly, just because you didn't have the prescience to know that you were supposed to do something a little differently.

A church cemetery in the swamp? Ok, I guess.

Compared to Not A Hero, I enjoyed the combat much more (it actually felt intense and exciting being in enemies' faces and having to time my attacks more, rather than blasting everything safely from a distance with an overpowered shotgun), I enjoyed the environment more (the swamp felt more aesthetically interesting than the mine tunnels, and it also felt much more sinister), I felt more scared of the alligators than the invincible white molded, I enjoyed the protagonist more (Joe's commentary is actually kind of amusing, whereas Chris felt kind of bland), and I cared more about the people I was saving (we actually know and care about Zoe, as opposed to the nameless grunts in Not A Hero whom we've never seen or interacted with before).

Still, it feels like a missed opportunity to do something more with the characters. Where, for instance, was Joe during all the time that the Baker family was succumbing to Eveline's control, and why is/was he never mentioned by any of the other family members? He's not even seen in any family pictures around the house, as far as I know. There's no backstory for him, and we don't learn anything on his history or motivation, why he has such a deep bond with Zoe (but apparently no one else in the family?), and barely anything about his personality. Zoe, meanwhile, is incapacitated the whole time, so we don't really get to appreciate her, either.

Returning to the Baker estate.

While I enjoyed End of Zoe much more than Not A Hero, I'm not sure I would've been as happy if I hadn't already gotten it through the season pass. Paying $15 for a two hour scenario is kind of a tough pill to swallow, especially since the previous Banned Footage DLC packs give you more content for the same or less money. At the very least, it's good that End of Zoe has some good replay value with "Joe Must Die" mode essentially combining Madhouse Difficulty (from the base game) and "Ethan Must From Die" (from Banned Footage Vol 1), allowing you to replay the scenario with an increased difficulty level, limited save system, rearranged enemy and item placements, and randomized loot crates. I'm not sure I have the patience to do that (I sure as hell didn't want to bother with the knife-only "Professional Mode" in Not A Hero) since I'm kind of over my Resident Evil 7 craze (it's been a whole year, after all), but it is tempting. Either way, End of Zoe, like Not A Hero, serves as a decent coda for the base game, offering some resolution for some of the game's loose ends, but I don't think I could recommend it unless you're getting the season pass and planning to play everything.