By Pentadact

After playing about four hours a day for a week, I completed this yesterday.

Short review: fightin’s better, writin’s worse.

It’s a magnificent game, though, in so many ways. While playing, the things that nagged nagged so badly I had to write them out just for catharsis – it’s rather satisfying, it lets you stop analysing those problems and get on with enjoying the game. I’ve included those here in case it’s also cathartic to read them, but skip em if you’re just having fun.

I’ve also hidden anything that could be construed as a spoiler, with a link to reveal it that says what section of the game it’s a spoiler for.

First, one thing I wish I’d known before I started: You’re repeatedly warned that when you do the next main mission, there’s no turning back. This is a lie. Until you go to a thing called the Omega Relay and click ‘Enter’, you can still go back and do anything you like. Even after that point, some of the side-missions and personal quests willl still be available after you finish the game.

I think she’s now my favourite game character of all time. In ME1 it was a combination of a smart, take-charge protagonist role, Jennifer Hale’s naturalistic, commanding performance of it, and dialogue options that let me walk the line between ’stern’ and ‘asshole’ with gratifying precision. In ME2, it’s all those things with the added pleasure that this is now my character. It turns out there’s a world of difference between sequels where you play ‘the’ character from the first game, and ones where you play your character from the first game. The face is my own creation and the voice is BioWare’s choice, but the two are now so powerfully linked that I’d squirm to watch someone else play as their Shepard.

A bad idea handled wrong: the premise of the game has you working for someone you don’t like or trust, for no real reason. Last thing you knew, you were a full-time Council and Alliance employee – causes you have a personal and character-based investment in respectively. When you come to, you’re not a prisoner and you haven’t lost your old job, you’re just not given the option to return to it.

Your personal friend and former Alliance captain (in my game) claims to be powerless to even look into the genocide of his own colonies, despite being leader of the galactic council. Humans weren’t even a member of the council in the last game and they had enough sway with them to request an investigation, and submit evidence for consideration. Apparently now that we’re in charge of them, we don’t have the authority to do that.

You don’t even have the option to talk to the Alliance. You’re still called Commander Shepard, yet the idea that you might want to get in touch with the Navy in which you hold that rank is so inconceivable that it’s not even explained why it’s not an option.

Instead: replace ‘Cerberus’ with ‘Alliance’ throughout. The only difference between them is that Cerberus has this terrible reputation, but the game never does anything with that: Cerberus members just feebly disassociate themselves from their evil experiments without ever explaining what’s changed or why.

Totally redoing the classes was a smart move: each now has a unique defining power that you use in virtually every fight, and it really made me excited to try them all. Biotic powers were always physical, but now they take effect instantly, making them practical and impactful to play with. And Tech has been beefed up to feel tactile too: freezing someone with Cryo ammo and shattering them with a punch is wonderfully satisfying.

I played Vanguard, whose special ability is a hilariously unwise ramming move that zaps you across the field to slam your opponent flying. I had some incredible moments where I’d smash someone out of the window with that, then shotgun their friend and punch their robot dog. If you go a similar route, make sure you do Grunt’s personal mission. Later you can learn one of your squadmate’s unlocked abilities, and Fortification works brilliantly with Charge.

Everything in the game revolves around the urgency of tracking down the Collectors and the Reaper presumably behind them, but that threat is entirely hypothetical for hours and hours. When you finally do meet them, they’re just buzzy monster dudes who pause people. It’s not horrible or frightening or interesting, I didn’t hate them or fear them or want them to die. And then two or three encounters with them later, the game just ends. You haven’t even fought their boss, you just shoot some weak points on a big stupid skeleton that wasn’t a threat anyway. It’s bizarre.

One of the reasons Mass Effect 1 worked so much better than any other BioWare game I’ve played was that the main plot affected you immediately. The first thing you do is that mission where you see Saren betray the Spectres, and from then on it’s personal. It’s genuinely maddening to see him walking around and sweet-talking the council after you witnessed his trechery. It was a textbook example of show, don’t tell. ME2 is tell, in a really conjectural and unconvining way, with no given evidence, from the mouth of someone you have every reason to hate. Then tell, tell, tell, glimpse briefly, end.

It’s not that the game’s short – it’s huge, it took me 26 hours. But 90% of it is recruiting a ridiculously long roster of squad members, including many I didn’t want and many you never need, and then running personal errands for them to keep them happy. It’s good that that stuff is in there – I loved chasing down Garrus’s personal hang-up in the first game – but making it the replacement for a substantial main plot just doesn’t work. The game feels like a parade of disjointed compulsory sidequests.

Wow. I think it helps to play the last game immediately before this to get the full effect: I literally completed one and fired up the other. Even just the aiming is so much smoother, faster and more precise, and then when you fire: pow! It actually sounds like a physical object was launched from this weapon by an explosion! I didn’t dislike the weapons in the first game, but a combination of the excellent sound design, more forceful animation response, and robot dismemberment make this so much more tactile and fun. It feels like a few guys spent the whole of ME2’s development working on /feel/, and I think that’s something every sequel team should have.

The cover system is horrible. By making it the same button as Sprint, Use and Jump, you have to hide behind things before you can climb over them, you’ll stick to things you wanted to run past, and you’ll jump over things you wanted to hide behind. They still haven’t fixed the only real problem with ME1’s system: that when in cover, you’re not allowed to shoot anything to your sides or in front of you: you actually have situations where you have to take a few seconds to unstick yourself from cover, then walk back to where you were to be able to aim at someone directly in front of you. Two years they had, one fix to make, failed unaccountably they gone did.

Instead: they should have just had a sprint button. While holding it, you run as fast as possible and vault over anything in your way. When you’re not holding it, you’ll take cover behind anything you’re touching if you’re in combat. If you aim at anyone you can’t shoot because the game doesn’t have animations for it, you automatically come out of cover to turn to face them properly.

Refreshingly vicious scientist, logical rather than mad. And it’s nice to have a character with a speech quirk that makes him easier to listen to, not harder. BioWare do ramble, bless them, so a guy who cuts out half their words is most welcome to me.

More than that, though, Mordin’s one of those rare characters I found myself genuinely interested in. I’d ask all the follow-up questions, for once, not to squeeze every last drop of content out of his questline, but because I really wanted to know. And instead of wearing thin, the answers made him even more intriguing and sympathetic.

He’s a man who destroyed the Krogan’s only hope of recovering from their horrible curse and becoming a healthy species, and one who saved the galaxy by correcting an anomaly that threatened to destabilise it. The interesting part is that his darkest and finest hours were the same action.

ME2’s substitute for ammo: all guns have infinite ammo, but they all need cooling, and the cooling tube thingy needs replacing every few shots. Luckily they all take the same cooling clips, so any you find restock your ammo for all weapons.

Firstly, this sounds like nonsense. Secondly, it actually is. It’s okay for the player to not really buy into the cooling concept, if it at least explains the ammo mechanic. But this concept is both unconvincing and an outright lie. That’s not how it works. You can run out of cooling clips for your pistol and still have 245 for your sub machinegun. There’s no way to use the pistol until you find more cooling clips for it: so weapons do have mututally exclusive clip types. Guys, that’s just ammo. Just call the pickup an ‘ammo box’ and we’ll get that it contains some ammo for each of your weapons. Don’t invent a bizarre new concept and then lie about the way it works.

And after all that, the system truly sucks. I’m constantly out of ammo for the one gun I like because I’m only allowed to hold 16 shots for it, and switching between that and the shitty pistol is a massive hassle. If I find some cooling tubes, I have to pick up one, then switch to the gun I like, then load it, then pick up the next one. Otherwise, it’ll fill the reserve ammo without filling the magazine, leaving me with even less ammo for the only weapon I like.

Instead: each weapon should have its own ammo, and that ammo reserve should be replenished automatically when you’re out of combat. Still encourages weapon variety, but you don’t have to search the whole goddamn room for clips, making sure you have the right weapon out, after every fight.

Where Mordin is a scientist who’s surprisingly nasty, Thane’s an assassin who’s surprisingly nice. It’s much easier to write a cool assassin character, but I also really like the subtleties of the way Thane is depicted: that slight croak to his voice, the blank tar eyes, the lizardly ridges of his face-chitin. It’s all the cooler that he’s a close-range specialist: I like that my hitman is a gunslinger and my cop is a sniper.

Actually the best thing about Thane is not the character but the missions: the twin-towers job to recruit him is my favourite bit in the game. It just felt like what I want to be doing in a sci-fi fantasy: breaking into an office block after hours, blowing robots heads off, smashing people out of windows, throwing explosive barrels into dogs, rescuing scared workers, and getting to an assassination: not to do it, or to stop it, but just to get the guy behind it on my side.

And his personal mission, of course, includes one of my favourite scenes – but I’ll get to that.

Shuuut uuuup! I get it! I see that you can control and embiggen one of your minions for a while. You don’t have to tell me every damn thing you do, in the worst ‘I am a nasty monster’ voice I’ve heard outside of a kid’s cartoon!

Instead: shut up.

I’ve always loved the plastic creak of the Geth vocal modules, and the curved neck. There’s not much too Legion, but when the ethics of synthetics comes up, I was surprised to find he could make a reasonable point about brainwashing and the nature of data.

Fails the first test of a name for any fictional character: use it in a sentence. “The Illusive Man is very impressed with your- heheh, no, I’m sorry, I can’t go on. The ILLUSIVE MAN? That’s what we’re calling him? In actual conversation?”

Instead: anything. I was vegetating in front of an episode of Friends the other day; Paul Rudd tried to come up with the worst name for himself imaginable, and settled on ‘Crapbag’. I would honest-to-God rather he was called that.

It’s Garrus!

Even if I hadn’t spent them dead, that’d be a long time. No-one except Tali and Wrex seems to have any reaction to seeing me again. Even my captain, the man I saved the world with, just says “Hello Shepard” and shakes my hand. It’s like they all saw me yesterday. My girlfriend gives me a quick kiss and says “I’m busy.” What she’s busy with isn’t even urgent, she’s just lost all her character.

Instead: this has such potential for great scenes – the Wrex one hints at it. I want to be called a son of a bitch, I want to be slapped on the back, I want my girlfriend to burst into tears, and don’t take that out of context.

This is the system whereby you’re occasionally prompted to click to do something good or bad in the middle of a cinematic. I particularly love these in hostile situations ones, when you can get the jump on a tense scene by just shooting someone in the face. My favourite moment of all, during Thane’s good cop/bad cop scene, was being asked to stop punching someone. The prompt still comes up, and Shepard’s fist physically curls with anticipation, but since the mission was at risk I resisted. Such a perfect synch between player restraint and character restraint: I was as itching to beat him again as she was.

Shepard has a drinking problem.

Some actions now give you points for both. BioWare, let me explain the genius of your system to you so you can go back to using it correctly. ‘Paragon’ means doing something kind when it is not necessary. ‘Renegade’ means doing what may be necessary, even if it’s unkind. A person can be both: I punch and threaten people to make sure I get what I need quickly, but I’ll save lives if it doesn’t risk the mission. A single action can’t be, they’re defined as the complement of each other.

Worse, there’s now a skill that dramatically amplifies your Paragon and Renegade scores, completely defeating the point of the system. The game’s perception of your badassness and heroism is now based almost entirely on how many points you’ve pumped into a skill, and worse, it’s the same skill for both. If I wipe out a species because I don’t trust them (to take an example from the first game), that’s not more Renegade if I have +4 in Assault Training when I do it.

I did like landing on strange new worlds in the Mako and drivin’ around a bit, but inevitably they couldn’t make good on the promise of that Star Trek fantasy in ME1. ME2’s just a realisation of what they can do: concentrate on the worlds there’s a good reason to visit, and make them awesome. There’s nowhere as drab or awkward as Noveria in this game, and some of the main planets are downright exciting. Illium, in particular, is made real by the way the missions there take you in hovercars to cool places.

In theory I like the change: I hit the 150 item limit in Mass Effect 1, and sorting through the shit was made needlessly hard by a rubbish interface. Here there’s only one or two new weapons to find for each slot, and everyone gets them. They’re even meaningfully different: the second Heavy Pistol you get has less ammo but more damage per shot.

The trouble is, the new weapons are also so much better than the old ones that there’s no decision to make. The second Sniper Rifle fires around 3,000% faster than the original one, so if there is any difference in the damage per shot, it’s irrelevant. In the end the only decision you get to make is which Heavy Weapon to take, and they’re so cumbersome and ammo-starved that you end up avoiding them for most of the game.

It’s also a pain in the arse to switch between the good ones. It’s nice that they no longer make you carry all four weapon types, but as a Vanguard, I’m stuck with some useless toy called a Shuriken Pistol between my proper pistol and my shotgun, meaning I can’t weapon switch effectively without having to pause the game.

Instead: all that needs to change is for the newer weapons you find, which are a bit different functionally, to be similar in overall power to the old ones. If they just want to upgrade my Heavy Pistol damage, give me a Heavy Pistol damage upgrade – there’s a whole system for that.

There’s no way to level up your squad or even see exactly what skills they have without leaving your ship with one of them and examining them planetside. And yet there’s a dedicated Squad screen on your personal terminal that would be perfect for it – instead, it’s functionless and missing most of the very information it’s there to provide.

To add weird problem to injury, every time you change area you have to re-select your squad and their equipment: even during the parts of the game when you have no choice of either.

Instead: assume I want to keep the squad members I selected when I left the Normandy, unless I turn back and try to leave the mission area: then, give me the option of aborting or switching squad.

The mini-game they’ve replaced the emptier exploration missions with really worked for me: the quivering line graphs gave a little thrill of excitement when they shook into a mountainous peak as I passed over a rich seam of Platinum. God damn you need a lot of Platinum in this game.

It does get old, but only shortly before you’ve got every upgrade you need. I think perhaps some late missions should give you a generous income of the main minerals so you can snap up anything you don’t already have.

The differences are small, so she’s still great, but there’s a definite loss of authority. The best thing about Mass Effect was being in charge, and ME2 starts you out like every other game protagonist: lost, amnesiac, having to ask everyone else what’s happening. Even once you get up to speed, using any AI terminal on your ship makes you ask “What’s this area of the ship?” IT’S THE LAB SHEPARD IT’S THE LAB IT SAYS IT ON THE DOOR AND IT’S FULL OF SCIENCE SHIT AND A SCIENTIST DOING SCIENCE.

In another annoying compromise of Shepard’s command, to check in with a squad member you have to ask if they have time to talk. In ME1 it didn’t come up that often, but in ME2 you have to do this constantly to develop relationships, unlock missions and abilities. And if they don’t have anything new to say, they pretend to be too busy to talk to you. So you’re forever begging your own employees for a quick chat and getting turned down, making Shepard a pathetic, needy, unpopular loser. Jesus, BioWare, this isn’t hard: give me the option to say “How’re things?”, so they can just say “Good, good.” if they don’t have anything important to talk to me about.

I’m also less in control. One of my favourite bits in the first game was when you land on Noveria, and security asks you to hand over your weapons. You can consent or refuse, and refusing makes the situation electrically tense. There’s a similar bit in ME2, and your only options are “No” and “Hell no”. I want to say that, I think we all do, but if there’s no option to say “Yes,” No becomes meaningless. There’s no risk, no tension, no sense of it being my decision, or of potential consequences. Throughout, you’re given more identical options, or objections that get over-ruled if you try them. More often than the first, it feels like you’re playing a script. Mass Effect’s at its best when it feels like you’re writing one.

The last post was figuring out what we all like in open world games; this one’s about how to make that stuff work together. Can you include it all in one game, and still avoid theme-park silliness and repetitive grinding? No, probably not, but the ideas that crop up when you try are interesting.

I had to pick a specific open world to talk about to prevent this from becoming hopelessly vague, so these are all ideas for how a game like Just Cause 2 could work. I chose that not because of any qualms with it, but because the first one was a classic example of a wonderful open world, gorgeous and fun to move around in, without much going on in it. The sequel’s even more inviting and even more fun to traverse, so it’s a great chassis to plug some cool ideas into.

This got long, so first I’ll summarise:

Give the player the option to set up camp in his favourite place, upgrade it with the features he wants, and liberate other areas he likes through a simple but high-level strategy game played out on the world map.

Split the main story into separate series of missions with a common theme – Sabotage, Assassination and Heroics. They have the appeal of categorised side-missions because you get to choose what kind of challenge you feel like taking on, but they’re unique and story-driven so they don’t wear thin.

Litter the world with obvious opportunities: a network of drug dealers with hugely varying prices that invite you to embark on your own travel missions, convoys carrying precious cargo that invite you to attack them, and rare assassination targets whose deaths will help you on the strategy map.

Thoughtfully place sets of collectibles that tell the story of long-dead agents like you as you collect them, encouraging you to explore, making the world feel like it has a history, and improving your character with the upgrades and unique weapons they left behind.

The first thing you do, after base-jumping into the island, meeting your handler and a short introductory mission, is choose where to set up camp. You pinpoint the precise location in-game – a secluded bay, a mountain top, a waterfall, the roof of a skyscraper – and a package is airdropped that unfolds itself into a tent. You can fast-travel there, lose your alert level, make a permanent save, or rest until a set time.

For every twenty or so locations you find – towns, islands, bases, villas, mountains, etc – you’re given the option of calling in another base of operations somewhere else.

When you get your first Revolutionary (explained next), you have to pick somewhere within a certain radius of a camp to place a comm antenna and laptop. You have to use this to issue orders on the strategic map.

You can also add other bits of equipment to any of your bases by stealing them from military bases and government facilities. These are marked with a special logo, and you can just tether one to a vehicle and drive off to rip it out. If you make it out of the area with the item intact and in tow, the agency airlifts it out and you can choose where to put it near one of your camps.

Camp bits:

Tent – pass time, save game (earned by exploring)
Laptop – strategise (unlocked by campaign)
Weapons locker – restock (stealable)
Camo net – store vehicle (stealable)
Anti-air - defense against pursuers (stealable)
Workbench – for upgrading kit (stealable)

The idea is to encourage the player to have a favourite place, and give him a way of making it significant. There aren’t many practical considerations: it doesn’t have to be near anything or easy to get to, since you can fast travel to it. So it gets you looking at the world aesthetically, something a world like Just Cause’s definitely warrants.

The extra features give an ongoing way to improve and customise your camps as you start to engage with more of the world, keeping them relevant, personal and distinct as you progress through the game.

After about five missions, you’ve stuck it to the man enough to inspire some of the locals to rebel – including a Revolutionary leader. On the map, you can send this guy to any region and he’ll Liberate it: he and his band of rebels battle any present military forces and will keep them out indefinitely, making the area a bustling and vibrant safe zone.

A few missions later, the country’s President sends an Officer to lock down the region next to his residence, putting it under Martial Law. Constant military presence, very low tolerance for misbehavior, shops, services and base camp fast-travel disabled. Each time you send out a Revolutionary, he’ll lock down more of the island in response.

If you’ve Liberated a region next to one under Martial Law, you can use your next Revolutionary to attack it. Your guy and his rebels invade, and the resident Officer emerges with his own troops. Chances of success are even, but you can join in the fight to make the odds much better. If you win and your Revolutionary survives, the region is Liberated. If both the Revolutionary and the Officer die, the region reverts to normal.

Each time you make a move on the strategic map – and the government makes one in response – you both get one new leader for every two neighbouring regions you control. So you want to keep your territories joined, and break up the enemy’s. You can pile more Revolutionaries into an already Liberated region and send them all to attack a neighbouring government territory at once, to ensure victory without having to show up in person.

The idea is to let you fight for areas you like with visible effect, to give regions strategic significance, to create a world that changes in response to your actions, and to give you something to think about while messing around. It gives a visual sense of what you’ve achieved, what you’re up against, and how each mission is getting you closer to your objective. And by linking in with Convoy and Target Opportunities, it gives those context and significance beyond fun things to do.

The actual rules of the game, particularly the reinforcement mechanic, work magnificently in the super-simple Flash game Dice Wars.

Your mission is to overthrow the President of this island state, which you go about in three different ways. These mission threads are separate, so you can alternate between them or just burn through one type that suits you.

Sabotage: A series of missions offered by your handler to cripple the local military by destroying their hardware and facilities, either strategically or with brute force. Missions typically have you taking on a large but not limitless force and culminate in the destruction of one vital asset. Eg. Fighting your way through fighter jets and boats to scuttle a battleship at sea.

Assassination: A series of missions given through dead drops by an Agency operative you never meet, to eliminate well-protected key personnel in the local military. Missions usually pit you against a vastly superior force but with a suggested way to avoid them. Eg. Hopping on top of a civilian passenger jet to fly over an island base with heavy anti-air, to drop in on a target there from above.

Heroics: A series of missions given by coded messages broadcast on the local radio, by an operative pretending to be a rebel to convince the locals there’s already an insurgency for them to join. Missions are about using carefully setting up then pulling off spectacular victories, and always have some optional bonus objective that’ll make your actions all the more inspiring to the populace. Eg. Stealing a government Death Squad’s ammo reserves the night before an attack, with the option to sneak in convincing blanks so they don’t realise until they open fire.

The idea is to give the player a clear choice of what kind of challenge he wants to take on, but without resorting to boilerplate template missions or fairground challenges. These are still story-driven campaigns of unique missions, you just get to pick what type you’re in the mood for – and even avoid some of your least favourites entirely.

Each mission series ties its jobs together into an overarching story about the atrocities the regime has committed, the corruption of its officials, and the few local heroes trying to undermine or expose it. You know your Agency wants to overthrow him partly to get their own preferred candidate in power, but since that entails overthrowing a true despot, you’re happy to oblige.

Near the end of each series, though, your work gets harder to rationalise. Destruction missions start to include facilities with hundreds of people inside, Assassinations shift from military to political targets, and the new leader your Heroics missions are promoting starts to show a darker side. The last mission in each firmly crosses the line, and you can both voice your concerns and refuse to do them without necessarily giving up the cause.

You’re after the President, and he’ll only leave the bunker beneath his mansion when he’s lost control of the island – when there are no regions left under Martial Law. That’s extremely hard to achieve: halfway through your missions the government starts locking down regions much faster than you can earn Revolutionaries. But completing any of the three mission threads gives you a major advantage.

Finishing the Sabotage missions deprives all Martial Law regions of hardware, meaning they can no longer invade your territories.

Completing all Assassinations means the government runs out of Officers, so the ones already on the map are all they’ll ever get.

And doing all the Heroics missions inspires the populace so much that you gain double the number of Revolutionaries each time you move.

With a good strategy and skillful fighting on the ground, it’s possible to win the game without completing any of the mission threads – though you’ll have to come close in at least two of them to earn enough Revolutionaries.

Finishing the game this way means you’ve avoided compromising yourself with any of the dubious final missions, so it unlocks a special Epilogue mission in which you can expose the new leader for the asshole he is, and instate one the local heroes you’ve encountered in the course of the missions – against your Agency’s orders.

Once you have freed the island of government control, the President uses every asset he has left to make a mad dash for the airport on the other side of the island. Three convoys of tanks and APCs, a squadron of attack helicopters and a fleet of gunboats all leave the palace area, and there’s no way of knowing which he’s in.

You have half an hour to do at least one of three options. You can destroy all convoys before they reach the airport, to make sure he’s dead. You can try to take back the runways: the government has their last aircraft carrier stationed off the coast there, shooting down rebel air support, scrambling fighter jets and sending in boats of troops. Or you can fight for the terminal building itself, taking control of the government’s anti-air and gun emplacements, and laying mines on the approaching roads to ensure the convoys will be destroyed on arrival.

The first is a very tough fight against vehicles, the second requires evasion and tactics, and the third mostly involves fighting a lot of infantry. None actually take half an hour, and failing doesn’t mean you have to restart, you just get a slightly different ending. But of course the player isn’t told that going in.

Dealers lurk in backalleys of major cities, huts in remote villages, villas in the middle of nowhere, boats in the middle of the ocean. Their prices for each of four or five narcotics vary by region: nearby dealers have similar values, distant ones massively different.

You can see how much dealers you’ve met are offering for what you have at a glance, on the map. But their prices fluctuate over time, so you have to move soon to get there while the price is high. They also change in response to your deals: sell a lot of cocaine and the price crashes in that area.

The legal status of your cargo and questionable ethics of trading it make a good excuse for why you can’t fast-travel while carrying any drugs: if you try, you’re offered the option of instantly dumping your stash with the nearest dealer for whatever their current price is. If you’re feeling ethical, you can buy up drugs just to destroy them at your camp. And if you’re feeling zealous, you can just kill the dealers: they’ll stay dead.

The idea is that this inspires the player to come up with his own travel missions, generated as a result of a changing system that will make different routes profitable at different times. Since the market evens out when he makes a big run, it’s not going to be lucrative to ‘grind’ trading for more than a few good deals every half hour or so, giving a natural motive to vary his activities. Embarking on a mission that was your own idea, for a reward that you’ve calculated, is much more satisfying than doing what you’re told.

You’ll sometimes see processions of vehicles of various types crossing the country – they’re always guarding something important, and you can always steal it.

Military motorcade: truck carrying weapons. Take out its escorts without destroying it and you can grab a rare weapon from it: a high-tech assault rifle, sniper rifle, missile or grenade launcher, or a powerful demolitions charge.

Police motorcade: well-guarded prisoner van. Free the prisoner safely for a free Revolutionary.

Boatorcade: (I don’t know the proper term, okay?) Well-guarded boats are carrying drugs. Nab them, and you’re free to sell them to any dealer.

Private Jet: if you spy one of these with the government flag on it, it’ll be a corrupt official fleeing the country with his cash. If you can board the plane in flight, you can choose to rob him instead of hijacking it. While you do so, though, the pilot panics and flies erratically, so you have to be ready to abort and take the controls if you’re in danger.

When a region’s under Martial Law, the Officer who locked it down is usually safe inside a building until it’s invaded by a Revolutionary. But rarely, they’ll leave and patrol the area with a team of elite soldiers. They’re tough and well protected, but if you can take one out before he gets back inside, Martial Law is ended.

The idea is to provide a rare chance to make a real difference with a relatively quick and fun type of challenge. Once a large number of regions have fallen under Martial Law, you could even patrol them with a sniper rifle, hunting Officers but staying within the law until you spy one.

I hate that term, because it encapsulates how tacky and incongruous these little scavenger hunts often feel in open worlds. But there’s definitely a large contingent of gamers who love them, and I think I’d be one of them if anyone ever did them well.

They need to fit with the fiction to feel appropriate (like Assassin’s Creed 2’s feathers), they need to improve your character to be truly worth hunting for (like Crackdown’s Agility Orbs), they need to include scraps of story to make the world feel rich (like Fallout 3’s characters), they need to include unique items to feel special (like Fallout 3’s items), and they need to be common enough that you feel there could be one just over the next ridge, nook, clearing or summit (like Fallout 3’s quests).

Here’s my idea:

Some foreign, some from your own agency, all rotting away in the most secluded and obscure parts of the islands. They’d be tough to find, except that you’ll occasionally see a coloured light flash. You’ll find it’s a Beacon, the device agents like you use to call in air support or mark targets, and this agent’s other kit will be scattered in the area. The various bits you might find are:

Beacon: its occasionally blinking light tips you off that there’s other stuff nearby
Tracker: usually close to the beacon, this small screen reveals all his other kit on your map.
Pistol: if he’s Agency, he’ll have a gun with some upgrades you can take – whether or not you’ve unlocked them.
Main weapon: These are often unique and powerful, and some even have one or two slots that can take the same upgrades your pistol can.
PDA: states his objective and any notes he took.
Phone: some agents record their conversations; you can play back his last.
Memory card: most agents keep some sensitive images with them: photos of a target, compromising pictures, facility blueprints, scans of incriminating documents.
Cash: some agents need to carry large quantities of it for their work. Others are just corrupt.
Drugs: ditto.
Corpse: dangling from a tree, crushed under a rock, half-buried in the desert, frozen in the foetal position in the snow, impaled on a branch, twisted at the bottom of a cliff – it usually gives you some idea how he died. If he’s Agency, his suit might have some upgrades you can use.

Types of agent:

Native: beacon light is green, they’ll have a main weapon but no Agency pistol or equipment. They’ll always have a PDA with some info on what they were up to, but usually no phone or memory card with full details.
Agency: red beacon, they’ll have an Agency pistol and there’ll always be at least some decent info on what their assignment was.
Foreign: beacon light is yellow, these are rare, unknown agents with little comprehensible info on them but exotic and powerful custom weapons.
Special: blue beacon, these could be any of the above three agent types, but they always have some major info on their PDA, Phone or Memory Card relating to the assassination of the last president.

The idea is that finding this stuff is a little adventure that tells a story, in the order you discover it. Most will be fairly simple stories: guy was chasing some drug dealers, drove his speedboat off a waterfall and buried it into the side of a mountain.

But some, the ones with phones, tell the stories of people who shaped the history of the place. Finding all of these pieces together a subplot about your Agency putting the current president in power in the first place, by ruthless means.

Finding this enables a special Epilogue mission after the main game is complete, to undermine the new regime before it gets started and put a local hero in power.

I mentioned both upgrades and finding special weapons above. The two don’t often work well together: if you can keep upgrading your favourite weapon, loot becomes irrelevant, and if you ever find loot better than your most upgraded thing, upgrades feel like a waste of time.

My idea is to unlock and then buy upgrades for your Agency-issued equipment, including your infinite-ammo pistol, but larger weapons are things you find or buy. You unlock one equipment upgrade after every mission, then pay to have it installed if you actually want it. Or you can find upgrades, sometimes ones you wouldn’t have earned for hours, on dead agents.

To save fussy ferrying, every larger weapon you find is automatically added to the weapons locker at your base, and you can take a freshly loaded one from there any time. You can carry two and your pistol.

You’ll unlock more upgrades for your kit than it can take at one time, but you can switch them around freely.

Specifically:

Each bit of equipment has a number of slots, and higher-level upgrades take up more of them: you can have level 2 Calibre and Accuracy upgrades in your pistol, for example, but if you want the level 3 of one, you’ll only have room for the level 1 of the other.

(+) Full List

The idea is that you customise your core kit to suit your style, but you can be free and easy with what main weapons you pick up and try. Eventually you’ll settle on one or even two you always want, and you can then reconfigure your pistol and equipment to complement it. With the above loadout, you’d probably want something with a decent rate of fire and mag size for mid-range fighting.

Earning a steady stream of upgrades – without enough slots to fit them all – is a system that works brilliantly in Dawn of War 2’s Last Stand mode. You’re always excited about what you’re going to get next, and you try it out eagrely, but the unlocks don’t have to keep getting better to sustain this. It’s just nice to get more options, play with them, then settle on the combination you like.

It felt like last year open world games took over, and stopped being high-budget exceptions to the norm. It’s now pretty commonplace for a game’s linear story to be just the main attraction in a fairground of challenges, collectibles and distractions. ‘Go anywhere, do anything’ games have been around since the eighties, but it’s only in recent years developers have figured out the hooks, tricks and bribes to get a wider audience playing them.

Most of them kinda suck though, don’t they? Not the games themselves, necessarily, but their approaches to filling these sprawling open spaces with stuff to entertain you. They know how to make a traditional game, and they know how to make an open world, but their attempts to fit the two together amount to mashing a square peg into a round hole until it splinters.

I’m interested in whether there’s a way to take the most successful of these systems and make them work with the world, and each other. To fit with the fiction rather than jar with it, and to draw attention to the world rather than distract from it.

So ignoring how much we like them as games for a moment, what do some of the better open worlds fill their lands with, and how well does it work?

Assassin’s Creed 2:

• Series of story missions that lead you through each new city
• Scattered mini-missions that conform to one of a few templates (contracts, courier, etc)
• Informal missions like chasing any thieves you see
• Isolated unique puzzle/platform levels
• Collectibles, some of which assemble to shed light on the plot

The broad variety means there’s always something you feel like doing, and most of it is integrated into the fiction – albeit by clumsily grafting two different fictions together. The informal missions feel like fun because no-one tells you to do them, and failing is no big deal. The puzzle/platform levels are usually welcome because you know what you’re getting into when you take one on.

World of Warcraft:

• Miscellaneous quests
• Large scale co-op dungeons
• Resource nodes
• PvP arenas

It’s nice that there’s stuff to do wherever you go, but the lack of a main quest and presence of other players doing the same ones makes it hard to feel like what you’re doing matters.

Fallout 3:

• Series of story quests
• Character-driven sidequests without obvious rewards
• Occasional unique locations, people and loot (Oasis, Dogmeat, Alien Blaster)

The density of hand-scripted missions to find is enough that exploring is always appealing, and the unique stuff is rare enough to feel special, but common enough that everyone finds some of it. The main story has its moments, but your motivation for it is disastrously weak.

Far Cry 2:

• Two main story mission threads that sometimes merge
• Optional extra objectives to those missions with little reward
• Template mini-missions: convoys, assassinations
• A set of FedEx missions you have to keep doing to stay alive
• Trickily placed collectibles with a material reward

The main missions feel annoyingly disconnected from your objective, and the choice between them is illusory. The template missions are excellent because the templates themselves are compelling, but they never feel like more than that. The thoughtful placement of collectibles makes them much more fun to hunt, even if you don’t need the money.

Prototype:

• Series of story missions that change the city from peaceful to wartorn
• Fairground-style challenges
• Collectibles and destroyables that grant XP

The story missions are mostly bad, and the challenges are ridiculously divorced from the fiction. The changing city would be cool if you could make any of it yours, but instead the only influence you have is deciding which of two factions that hate you control certain bits.

Red Faction Guerilla:

• Series of story missions that conquer each area, making it safe and unlocking new one
• Template mini-missions: hostage rescues, defenses
• Fairground style challenges

The mini-missions do a good job of providing a choice of fun stuff to do without breaking fiction. The fact that the story moves on from each area, though, makes it feel less like a world and more like levels.

Just Cause:

• Series of story missions
• Scattered identical mini-missions to take over settlements
• Template mini-missions
• Collectibles

Since the mini-missions keep you in a small area and are very similar to play, they don’t offer much of a break. Neither do they or the collectibles carry an appealing reward.

It seems like the things that work best, or are most needed, are:

• Informal missions – opportunities you spot rather than jobs you’re ordered to do
• Collectibles that improve you, in places it’s fun to visit
• Categorised missions, so you can choose what kind of job you want to take on next
• Scraps of story scattered about to make your adventure feel meaningful
• Unique things you can find, take and use
• The ability to change or add to some part of the world
• Variety – at every stage you should have more than two meaningfully different options for fun things to do next

Any additions? Anything you really like in open world games in general, or a specific one? The next post will be figuring out how to cram all the good stuff into one specific open world.

Last one of these – I won’t do a music one because I didn’t really get into much last year, and everyone’s heard Florence and the Machine. The Music Downloads tag has everything I liked enough to share.

Is this list in order? If you care, no. If you don’t, yes.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Dollhouse

Man-doll Victor’s been the other treat of this season – previously stuck in some pretty dull roles, he’s since been given three or four chances to mimic other characters when ‘imprinted’ with their personality. Each time, the performance has been creepily good. When trying to tot up how many times it had happened just now, it took me a while to remember that he’d ever impersonated Topher – I just filed that whole sequence as ‘the bit with two Tophers’.

Update: just saw the latest. Whaaaaaat.

Castle

It couldn’t pick a more worn-smooth formula if it consciously tried: a police procedural starring a non-cop ‘consultant’ who helps the department solve crimes by a) having some special insight into the criminal mind and b) projecting an aura that prevents ordinary cops from grasping rudimentary logic until it’s phrased to them in allegorical form. The flavour this time is that he’s a best-selling crime writer. And that it’s brilliant.

The twists are small but effective: Lady Cop’s disapproving relationship with him is complicated by the fact that she’s always been a fan of his trashy work, and there’s something almost cute about her determination to give him a harder time to compensate. Castle himself is a rockstar in the literary world, but a powerless underling in law enforcement – Fillion manages to be charming, funny and pathetic as both. And his profession gives him a boyish excitement for working with the police rather than the sneering smugness the genius character usually has.

His daughter, whose inclusion initially triggers a Pavlovian sense that this is where it’s about to jump the shark, isn’t used as a source of whiny teenage tension. Instead she’s just a bedrock for the character, convincing, likable and sweet. It’s so rare to see a father/daughter relationship on screen where they just seem to be friends, and neither of them is being an asshole – the highest compliment I can pay is that it reminds me of Veronica and Keith Mars. It’s only because all this stuff works that she serves the purpose most irritating daughter characters are trying to: she humanises a man who seems otherwise ghoulish in his enthusiasm for murder.

Dexter

Funnily enough, despite an exciting escalation from the worst Thanksgiving ever to an extraordinarily grim finale, the episode that stuck with me was an early one-off. A sleep-deprived Dexter completely loses track of where he’s stashed a body, and consistently one-ups himself by avoiding all the places even he would think to look. I think the core appeal of Dexter is that, whether or not we’ve killed anyone, we all remember how it feels to have done something bad. Even if it was as a kid, the consuming fear of getting caught is scarier than any monster or murderer, because no-one’s going to be on your side.

Jen said she’d never ever see me again
When I saw her again, she said it again
Jan met another man
Leeza got amnesia just forgot who I am

Felicity, said there was no electricity
Emily, no chemistry
Fran ran, Bruce turned out to be a man
Flo had to go; I couldn’t go with the flow

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

(He doesn’t cook or clean; he’s not good boyfriend material)
Ooh we can eat cereal!
(You’ll lose interest fast, his relationships never last)
Shut up girlfriends from the past
(He says he’ll do one thing and then he goes and does another thing)
Ooh, who organised all my ex girlfriends into a choir and got them to sing?
Who? Who? Mmm, shut up
Shut up girlfriends from the past

Mimi will no longer see me
Britney, Britney hit me
Paula, Persephone, Stella and Stephanie
There must be 50 ways that lovers have left me

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town

Love is a delicate thing it could just float away on the breeze
(He said the same thing to me)
How can we ever know we’ve found the right person in this world
(He means he looks at other girls)
Love is a mystery, it does not follow a rule
(This guy is a fool)
(He will always be a boy; he’s a man who never grew up)
I thought I told you to shut u-u-up?

Mona, you told me you were in a coma
Tiffany, you said that you had an epiphany
Mmm, would you like a little cereal?
Who organised this choir of my ex girlfriends?
Was it you, Carol Brown? Was it you, Carol Brown?

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

Special Mention: State of Play

It’s the story of two murders, a mysterious death, an MP and the journalists investigating their connection. S. It gets complicated at a rate of knots, but never arbitrarily, and making sense of those complications becomes a compulsion. It’s a single six episode series, and if you can make them last more than a week you’re a stronger person than I.

I tried to watch the more recent film adaptation on a plane, but in trying to cram six hours of fast-paced developments into two, they’ve somehow managed to make it slower, less exciting and insufferably preachy. If you can watch the whole thing after seeing the series, you’re a more patient person than I.

Note: Glee