I mean, it’s cool and all, but…
Do you think anyone at Bioware said anything? “That girl looks weird.” “That’s not my favorite.” Anything? Everything else looks great, but, man, those people (including Shepard) are all messed up looking.
Also, I like the idea of playing a whole game as a bunch of futuristic resistance fighters on an alien occupied planet earth like sniper guy. I think that would be really cool. You’re not the heroes that save the day. You’re just a bunch of guys trying to kill as many aliens as possible before you piss off the aliens so much they decide to crush you, which you, the player, know they can do whenever they choose. Is that the plot of Resistance: Fall of Man? I don’t think it is. More like Half Life without any hope of actually doing anything major, you’re just waiting around for Gordan Freeman to save the day, you’re the cannon fodder clearing the way for him to do something totally awesome. Like, I really would enjoy playing a whole game as that sniper guy. No hope of actually winning the whole war, but you can kill a lot of aliens. I hate aliens (Liz knows this). Maybe the goal is to get as far as possible without causing too much damage to the aliens, a balancing act between killing aliens and over exerting yourself.
Update 1: I’ve been thinking about the resistance game and I’ve decided it might not be a bad idea. I thought of a few additions, too. First, since you’re not the heroes, but you’re helping the heroes, you get more points the more you’re able to help the hero accomplish whatever task it us they have to do.
Deux, you’re in charge of several different squads and each day each squad can only do one mission. Deploying a squad costs money and you regain that money on success (and lose it all on failure). However, your avatar can only go out with one of the squads, so with the other groups you don’t actually see how things went, you don’t get to tell them exactly what to do or control them in any way. Ultimately, you just get a report at the end detailing how things went. Success or failure is based of the teams various statistics, the player must determine the best suited squad for the mission, blah blah.
To me the cool part is the report. The more detailed the reports, the better. The only thing I can remember about My Life as a King was how you could read super detailed reports about how the heroes exploration in the dungeon went. As the king, you obviously don’t go into the dangerous dungeons, so you send some poor sap to do your dirty work, some would be hero. You just get to read how things went, which is what I would do if I were the king. The level of detail was fantastic, it showed a turn-by-turn breakdown of all the action. Sometimes, the hero would take a break and eat lunch, and they’d record that, too!
I liked it so much because (probably out of laziness, maybe by design) they decided to cut out what most games would consider the actual game play (this isn’t necessarily the case as My Life as a King was a city builder, so I say “most games”) and replaced it with a text-based report. The player was forced to imagine the dungeon, imagine the enemies and weapons and chests and exploration and basically everything that would happen in a traditional RPG. It’s basically reverting the game play to old school text based RPG. I think it’s a really unique, interesting thing to do and I liked the game a lot.
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