I stared at a wall. It’s an early mission in Ubisoft’s latest behemoth role-playing game, Star Wars Desperadosin which I was charged with infiltrating an Imperial base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention.
This is a perfect wall. It definitely captures the late 70s sci-fi aesthetic, with dark gray cladding broken up by utilitarian gray panels covered in dim twinkling lights, I stopped to think how much work must have gone into that wall. Looking elsewhere on the screen, I was overwhelmed. The wall is the most uninspiring thing in a giant pylon, TIE fighters hang from the ceiling, hordes of Stormtroopers prowl below, and even that little white sign with a yellow arrow looks like it has Ten years in the making, crafted to fit the wall. I am very surprised by this achievement. Ubisoft, through multiple studios around the world, and the work of thousands of talented people, built this incredibly perfect area for a one-moment scene that I was going to run right past.
I ran through it three times though because the AI kept screwing up and I started over at the checkpoint before that gray wall over and over again.
I’m trying to capture the dissonance of this moment. There’s this sense of absolute awe, almost unbelievable admiration that a game of this scale and detail could even be built on, and the baffling bad decisions that happen in it all, a slap in the face.
If you’re excited about a beautifully crafted wall, you’ll be primed for Aneurysm the moment you start noticing the tiny, anamorphic details on a character’s face, or the meticulous idle animation of a bored guard. Then when I tried to imagine the same level of care taking place in thousands of locations across multiple cities on a handful of planets, my real thought was, “We’re labeling these games by the same standards as other games, and this It’s ridiculous. How could anyone watch it? thisthis majestyand said, “Well, seven out of ten?” Then a guard saw me walking across a solid hillside, ruining fifteen minutes of grueling stealth, and I wondered how it could possibly be for sale.
In 2024, we’ve reached that strangest of places, where AAA games once considered true wonders of humanity suffer from the same annoying problems and tedious repetition they did in the ’90s. This contrast, this dissonance, is absolutely mesmerizing.
In my opinion, Ubisoft is the leader in this bizarre field. For years I’ve been delighted and baffled by what this company has been able to create, although usually not in a positive way. this Assassin’s Creed The series often builds entire cities, even countries, in such authentic detail that we almost take it for granted. I always thought this was the most horrific waste in a game like this Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Ancient Greece could be recreated in such wonderful detail and then discarded, the entire digital space never being used for anything else. It could be dedicated to the world, serve as the backdrop for a thousand standalone games, and be reused and recycled like such an achievement deserves. Instead, it only applies to a single game, where we legitimately complain about the frustrating details of failed missions, or how swarm artificial intelligence goes awry at crucial moments.
This is just about art and architecture. We haven’t even mentioned the brilliant writing, exquisite voice acting, sound effects, musical score, lighting, concept art, and the direction and leadership that put all these different parts together that made this kind of design possible. All this is against the backdrop of me repeatedly running through the gantry because a distant artificial intelligence decided to trigger on a nix it couldn’t possibly see, or because when I pressed Square it decided to punch instead of triggering a knockdown.
I’m old enough to remember a time when we would lament that beautifully drawn point-and-click adventure games were no fun to play, and be utterly disappointed that such lovely artistic techniques became the backdrop for illogical puzzles and poor writing. Imagine a shot pulled from an adventure game that shows the room it’s in, the house that contains that room, the town that the house is in, the city that the town is in, and the country that city is in – and this gets us to the same question 40 years later It’s getting close to the point that bothers us.
In that open city oxygen“Utlaws”, Mirogana’s gaming abilities are far beyond what they were 10 years ago, let alone 40 years ago. This is just a small taste in the astonishing breadth of this game. I can’t overstate the scale of what’s on offer here, and how incongruous it feels that all of it can be dismissed so easily given such basic errors. The bug means the game will attract people like “Star Wars Desperados Oversimplification to the detriment of its own good”. I see! I know what this article means! True, its stealth is mediocre and poorly executed, but it’s a core element of the game. But damn why can we reasonably call this creation “simplify”?
I don’t know what the solution might be, but I feel like it lies somewhere in the new order of priorities. An ambitious plan that involves scaling back everything big developers know able implementation, and refocus resources on solving absolutely fundamental problems that are often unsolvable. Because the tragedy of a work of art is like outlaw– or the many other architectural masterpieces we see in this industry every month – to be sniffed at with a (well-deserved) 7/10 is terrible.
Read more: Star Wars Desperados: this my city review
At Gamescom this year I saw a talk (currently banned) about how wind will cause game worlds to behave differently, and it was incredible stuff and a technological marvel in a way . But on the other hand, it will definitely provide there is nothing If the game’s basic loop was dull, or if the enemy’s artificial intelligence were endlessly ramming into beautifully rendered walls. It could end up being a technically stunning 7/10 game.
So I went back to the wall. I’m grateful to everyone involved in making it so special, to the artists who spent so long making sure it felt real, to the level designers who placed it, and to the people responsible for the collision detection that made sure I couldn’t walk through it, and to those who wrote to the code for the Snowdrop engine so that it could exist; to the producers who encouraged developers to implement it; and to everyone who was in some way responsible for the wall I was momentarily staring at. I wish I didn’t have to sneak over quite So many times.
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