Gamers love a good game. Big and beautiful blockbusters that you want to discuss with your friends, post screenshots, and take apart. Or vice versa – a small idea indie that, despite a modest budget, won the hearts of players with an innovative idea or a unique style.
But players love to discuss the bad. There have always been controversial games from simple slots from 20betchina.com to world-famous huge releases – even in times we consider golden for the industry: say, E.T., Mass Effect: Andromeda, or the release versions of No Man Sky and Fallout 76.
However, there are “bad” games that evoke complicated feelings from gamers – usually ranked as “controversial.” Some are bad technically, and some don’t follow the formula and rules of their predecessors, which upsets old fans. And yet they have a noticeable fanbase.
Alpha Protocol
Alpha Protocol is a role-playing game about spies in an alternate reality setting. This RPG is from Obsidian Studio, known for Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, Neverwinter Nights 2, and others. The game came out with a lot of technical problems and strange game design decisions.
Trying to combine a realistic Mission Impossible-esque spy-tracking setting with RPG ideas, the developers filled it with questionable mechanics. An agent who can pump up stealth, literally can not hit the enemy with a gun at point-blank range, and a specialist shooter doesn’t know anything about stealth infiltration into enemy bases. There are plenty of minor problems: some of the content is incomplete, and animations and models look strange and very quickly outdated.
So why is Alpha Protocol loved? Because even though a lot of it didn’t work out, it’s still a good RPG. And in a fairly unfamiliar setting: an era close to modernity – instead of the usual fantasy-medieval and technological future. Your decisions affect the course of the story, and your skills – on how to pass the game. Alpha Protocol has no action at all because Obsidian has traditionally made a role-playing game. The RPG mechanics are good.
Gothic 3
The year 2006 was interesting for fantasy RPG fans. Oblivion was released as a new part of The Elder Scrolls franchise, which gained mad popularity with the release of Morrowind. While some players were waiting for the new adventure from Bethesda, others couldn’t wait to see the new part of Gothic – the threequel of the German RPG series about a fugitive from the magical colony in the mines.
Oblivion in the end came out not without problems: strange character faces and dialogues that still go to memes, controversial changes of role elements, and the system of auto leveling, which equates all the enemies with you in strength. However, all this didn’t prevent the game from becoming a hit and a classic of the genre, which is warmly and nostalgically remembered by hundreds of thousands of players. You can’t say the same about Gothic 3.
The German RPG stepped on every possible rake: the development problems, the move to a new engine, the conflict with the publisher, and the lack of funds and time. As a result, we had one of the most scandalous releases in history: Gothic 3 came out incomplete and full of bugs. And if these were its only problems: immersive ness and wagering became worse, the variety of choices and content decreased, the combat system degraded, and the famous world design and attention to detail were replaced by an empty open world.
Still, Gothic 3 isn’t a terrible game. In a flurry of well-deserved criticism and loud fan hatred, the successful findings were drowned out, and the technical problems (as well as some gameplay features) were mostly corrected with the “golden edition” and fan patches.
Gothic 3 is full of good ideas and interesting mechanics. It’s a great game about guerrilla warfare in a fantasy world: you can either help humans reclaim your kingdom from cruel orcs, or become a collaborator and work for the invaders, giving away your own and uncovering rebels underground.
Doing the dirty work for the orcs to gain their trust and at the right moment start an uprising and battle for an entire city – few games can offer such an experience in one place, when as in Gothic you can liberate an entire country, settlement after settlement. Or vice versa, to finally put humanity in chains. Even if it’s just two big storylines instead of three as in the previous installments, they are still impressive and immersive, both in the world of Gothic 3 and in the conflict that pervades it.
Other than that, Gothic 3 has plenty of upside. The world is emptier than in the previous installments, but there’s still plenty to do: exploring dungeons and abandoned fortresses, hunting animals, collecting herbs for potions, and extra quests. Besides the standard “forest middle-European fantasy”, the game has desert and snow regions with their peoples and stories – albeit less well-developed than central Myrtana. And of course the beautiful soundtrack by composer Kai Rosencrantz, who did probably his best work in Gothic 3. Even those who can’t stand the third part can’t help but praise the music of the threequel.
Two Worlds
In the RPG confrontation of 2006, there was another participant – Two Worlds. Its developers and newly minted fans dreamed that it would beat both The Elder Scrolls and Gothic. But in the end, it came out as a very wry, fairly average, and faceless RPG, which is ridiculous to compare it to the Titans of the genre. Critics berated it for everything in the world, and gamers who bought the console and the worst version of Two Worlds for Xbox 360 laughed it up with mud. And yet it sold a good number of copies, got a sequel with a bunch of expansions, and even some sort of fan base. What’s the secret?
The fact that it’s an ultimate “average” RPG. It doesn’t have the most interesting world. It has few gameplay innovations and generally looks like a typical B-grade RPG. However, it’s playable. It’s like The Elder Scrolls at a discount: here too you can get a reputation from factions, perform various tasks, explore a huge world, pump up your character, and develop dozens of different spells and skills.
Two Worlds appeals to the casual, unsophisticated player because it just does the usual RPG stuff well. Swinging here is fun, the quests are generally tolerable, and there are a lot of different treasures and loot. The plot here is primitive and consists of essentially one global goal to collect five MacGuffins, but it doesn’t interfere with the game at all. You want to do it, you want to forget about it and just walk around a huge world full of mystery and adventure. This is the power of Two Worlds – it’s just a normal game where it’s nice to kill time. And most of its technical problems have been fixed with patches and the Epic Edition re-release.
Two Worlds also has its findings. For example, identical pieces of equipment can be combined to get an enhanced version of an item. And this can be done indefinitely, making it possible to assemble a doomsday saber from the guards’ blades if you’re diligent. Notable is the alchemy, which allows you to create your potions with permanent effects and pumped, essentially through magic steroids. Also, after the death of non-human monsters, their ghosts appear at night, and can only be defeated by magic.
Vampires The Masquerade: Bloodlines
Bloodlines is a game of hard fate. Troika Games studio’s latest game hasn’t escaped the same problems as previous works: low budgets, tight deadlines, a conflict with the publisher, and a bad start with a bunch of bugs. The game wasn’t lucky to come out raw and unfinished: at the release, it was physically impossible to pass the game because of the broken scripts, it constantly crashed and suffered from the bugs at every step. All this was overlaid on the episodes as if created for the torture of the player: the famous sewer mazes with mutants or completely incomprehensible escape from the werewolf. In this case, Bloodlines was released on the same day as Half-Life 2 – November 16, 2004. It isn’t hard to guess whose choice the majority of gamers made.
All the troubles that happened with Bloodlines buried the studio, and the game was one step away from oblivion. But through the power of word of mouth, fan patches, and general interest in the vampire theme, Bloodlines survived. For years, enthusiasts have been tweaking it with mods and telling everyone what lies behind the mountains of technical errors, impenetrable quests, and ugly models: a reference role-playing game that everyone still looks up to today.
Bloodlines is a 15-20 hour chamber story, yet monstrously varied. Even after a dozen playthroughs, you can find something new in it, so local wagering is rich in options and details. The course of your story depends on your skills, choices, vampire clan, and backstory. You are the charming, eloquent seducer Toreador, and in another, you are the creepy ghoul Nosferatu, who can’t even walk down the street in public because of his ugly face. And that’s what a real RPG should be. And then there’s the Malkavian clan, where all the vampires suffer from insanity, but can predict the future and even spoil the plot.
On top of that Bloodlines is a stylish and insanely atmospheric game. Thanks to the work of artists and composers it preserves the spirit of dark urban fantasy of the early noughties: nights, aggressive and languid nightclub music, filthy streets, and human cruelty, which is sometimes scarier than any ghoul.
You May Also Like:- How To Choose a Laptop for Work?