2 and 3 feel like saints row knock-offs for 12-year-olds.
The first game was… Genuinely different in a lot of ways.
The mod is called Living City and adds so much, it might almost be the real Watch Dogs 2 we never got. What the series could have been had it not gone off the rails.
Was confused for a second there, the title doesn’t specify that the article is about Infinite, so for a minute I thought we were discussing the first game, or the franchise in general.
The first game obviously has a lot to say where rampant freedom is concerned. You might consider it anti-capitalist, but really it’s anti-anarchy, if anything.
I always found the games to be more potent as a starting point for tackling the bad shit a lot of humans will try to pull given power, but Rapture was twice the setting that Colombia was in that regard.
Rapture pulled me into Bioshock.
But Colombia didn’t pull me into Infinite. Booker and Elizabeth did.
As a cleverly written and somewhat complex personal story, Infinite shines. It’s got compelling characters that make you care, and then it puts those characters through the wringer in their search for contentment.
I cared a whole lot about where Elizabeth and Booker would end up, but I can’t say I ever spared Colombia at large a second thought.
So far research suggests the guardrail and hallucination problems are unsolvable, and we are seeing diminishing returns from increasing the complexity of these systems.
Hence devs will never have the necessary control required to author an actual narrative. NPCs will end up talking about mechanics that don’t exist, or saying things that contradict an overrall narrative.
Even with actual people, if you just throw them in a room and have the improv a world into existence, it never ends up quite as good as a properly authored narrative.
And LLMs are nowhere near achieving the level of internal consistency required for something like the worlds of Elden Ring or Mass Effect.
Baldur’s Gate 3 contains truly staggering amounts of writing, multiple times that of classical literary works. The hallucination problem means that if all that were AI generated, small parts of it might pass inspection, but trying to immerse yourself in it as a fictional world would have you noticing immersion breaking continuity errors left and right.
I’m not sure whether you’re kidding, but I wouldn’t complain either.
Five and six are not good games, but played in co-op, slightly drunk, they are a riot of cringe, ridiculousness and camp.
We laughed our asses off in the Ada story sections where the second player constantly pops into existence as a faceless “agent” because Ada doesn’t normally have a companion, but they had to make her sections somehow playable in co-op.