What are some bad or truly awful plots in otherwise good/AAA/critically acclaimed games? Obviously this is about games where the plot is a significant element, not Pong or Bejewelled.
Spoilers, obviously.
My first nomination: Mass Effect 2. Excellent characters. Excellent gameplay. Story makes no damn sense. They kill of the protagonist for no reason only to resurrect them right away. Why? To force you to work for Cerberus, an organisation whose evil is only surpassed by their total incompetence. Why do you have to work for Cerberus? Well, beats me, since you could just nick their ship and leave, but plot-wise it’s because whoever is left on a galactic council doesn’t believe in Reapers, despite having been almost/actually killed by one in the climax of the previous game. When you find a derelict Reaper later on in the game, the galaxy still isn’t convinced, because nobody bothered to bring a camera.
Again, individual storylines (for each planet, each character, etc.) in ME2 are good to excellent – but the overall plot is crap and makes less sense the more you think about it. That and EA Origin means I haven’t bothered to pick up ME3.
Second up: Assassin’s Creed 2. Good gameplay, beautiful game, nice touches of history. I’m not going to bash the Desmond/future storyline – I dislike it, but it doesn’t really get much in the way. No, I’m talking about the plot of Ezio going from being an ordinary schmuck to his assassination attempt against Rodrigo Borgia. So – Ezio goes through a few decades of Italian renaissance history killing more people than the plague, until finally having the obligatory boss fight against the villain of the piece, Borgia. After a cliché fight to the death, Ezio spares him, spouting some line about how he’s gone past needing revenge. Well, Ezio buddy, then why the hell did you travel all the way to Rome and kill a bunch of guards to tell the pope? Why not just relax at home a while and try to go a few weeks without a homicide? It’s not even an attack of conscience, since apparently in other sequels (haven’t played them) Ezio continues his murdering sprees. Not to mention that Borgia was responsible for countless murders and will continue ordering more when left alive, so innocents will continue dying from Ezio’s nonsensical decision.
Borderlands. I love the game, but the plot was just a cobbled together set of steps on the way to a MacGuffin to explain the setting and set up zones for advancement. It’s really a tribute to the old race-to-the-buried-treasure books/movies/serials, an excuse for adventure.
But by Borderlands2 they retrofitted a background story to explain what had been going on, it’s surprisingly coherent all in all , as long as you avoid the “But why didn’t they just … instead” state of mind.
This isn’t so much of a “plot”, but it did tick me off and it is a human/social interaction flaw rather than a strategy flaw per se, so here goes:
In the original Civilization, your computer opponents encroach on your borders all the damn time. But you do it once to them, and you are forever known as “O most untrustworthy leader of the infidels.” This, even when they not only start multiple wars against you when you are trying to be peaceful, but they still keep up with the human-bashing when you are kicking their ass and are about to set their country to ruin. You’re still the most untrustworthy leader of the infidels. I think some brown nosing would be appropriate at that point.
I could say about the same for Dragon Age (a game which I love and have over 200 hours in). Great characters, greater interaction but the overarching plot is so stock standard that everything else shines despite the terrible story, not because of it.
Maybe it’s too early, but Bioshock Infinite. Without excessively spoilering it, the plot combines all of the worst parts of “it was all a dream” with the worst multi-universe/time travel clichés, and ends with “the only way to prevent a single person from being mildly bad and killing a few people is to genocide millions of populated universes – yay! let’s do that! Now we’re the good guys for sure!”
Good call on Borderlands, wolfman. The game was entertaining, but a total mess plot-wise.
Jophiel, isn’t that being a little hard on Dragon Age? The overarching story is bland and totally unoriginal, but it’s both coherent and gets the job done. It even really works as a justification for the individual missions (gathering allies) - I have to give them credit for actually doing a great final battle that feels suitably epic and where your allies actually appear to make a difference. (as opposed to, for one example, the elven city in the end of Baldur’s Gate 2, where the player is essentially taking care of everything alone).
Thanks for the warning about Bioshock Infinite, TimeWinder.
Thought of another example, although I’m not sure if it fully counts as critically acclaimed or AAA - Fahrenheit AKA Indigo Prophecy. The first two-thirds of the game were excellent in their way, but then the story takes the bullet train to Crazytown. Boy, that sucked.
I feel that TimeWinder is incorrect in his analysis of Bioshock Infinite’s plot but I also feel that his post is already WAY too spoilery and would rather discuss it in some other thread. Suffice it to say, I disagree completely.
Plus they actually give you the option of totally fucking over a particular area by letting you leave - but warning you about it before you do, and letting you opt to change your mind - during the middle of a big quest objective. No blocking the zone “exits” until you’re done and then back on the railroad to the next station, nope.
Indeed. Compare that to the story from the original Baldur’s Gate which is unnecessarily indirect to the point of absurdity; Sarevok’s plan has about 23 separate steps for no particular reason, each of which involves sending incrementally more powerful assassins after your character.
High praise, indeed. Far better than me calling it “stock standard” Like I said, I like the game a lot but if you tried to sell someone on the game just by the plot alone you’d probably struggle with it.
“So there’s this kingdom and it’s being attacked by an evil army but the king’s general betrayed him so he could be king and now the main character has to get an army of elves and dwarves and men together to fight the evil army and… hey, where are you going? What do you mean you’ve heard this before?”
The game is great. The plot is pretty incredibly lame.
Interesting. It’s been a while since my last run through BG1 (only played twice) - what do you mean? I recall the plot being the following:
Sarevok ends up running the guilds responsible for ore mining and weapon production
Sarevok ensures metals mined won’t function as weapons, so he can earn a fortune supplying/smuggling functional weapons
He tries to trigger a war to further increase his profits while causing wholesale slaughter
He’s hunting down and killing other Bhaalspawn to gather their power.
For a chaotic evil character, it makes a fair bit of sense, even the “incrementally more powerful assassins”, as no matter who wins in each separate fight someone is getting murdered, helping him “gather the portfolio”, so to speak, of the God of Murder. Ultimately he figures he’ll be so powerful he can take on any contenders anyway, even if the protagonist has been picking up experience taking out his assassins. I’d agree that’s more convoluted than necessary, but it makes sense under the assumption that Sarevok is mentally unstable without being totally flat-out insane. (Although I can see the argument that depending on a villain’s insanity to justify plot convolution is sloppy storytelling) Then again I’ve forgotten a bunch of details.
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The game is great. The plot is pretty incredibly lame.
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Yeah, I’m with you there. It was doubly disappointing since the whole marketing campaign up to release was about how different DA would be compared to other Bioware RPGs, more mature, no clichés, etc. It put me off buying it until a year or so later when it hit bargain prices on Steam.
Also a duke gets poisoned (in a world where magical healing and resurrection is readily available) and the PC gets framed for murder (rather than just being flat-out killed).
At any rate, considering that he has an army of doppelgangers at his disposal, it seemed to me like a very convoluted way to kill a bunch of people. Not to mention that Elminster and the Harpers seem to know what’s going on and yet they don’t particularly seem to do very much about it!
I’d actually bring up the original Bioshock. Yeah, it was probably heralded as a great story back in the day, but it falls apart if you think about it. And, yes, I’m going to spoil it, though I’ll try to leave out obvious words you would catch by skimming. Skip on past if you don’t want a spoiler (like I wish I did for Infinite above. I’m almost certain you spoiled the ending everybody is talking about while saying you weren’t going to spoil.)
Why the hell does the main bad guy destroy the sub or otherwise try to make you think the fake main bad guy is so bad? He has the ability to completely control you. You obviously can’t resist this control, or you would’ve had the option to stand up to Ryan. Obviously knowing about the secret password was not enough to break the control.
Despite this thread saying (SPOILERS) in all caps in the title bar, and my being fairly vague about details, I’ve reported my post to get some spoiler tags added to it.
Because the control he has is shown to require a fair amount of micromanaging or planning ahead, so by keeping you generally on course he can keep only giving you nudges while he’s doing his own end of the scheme, rather than having to yammer “Would you kindly” in your ear every fifteen seconds to keep you on task.
Regarding the Bioshock Infinite spoiler, it’s not really much of one. I’m serious–what he said doesn’t tell you anything about what the actual narrative point of the ending is, and actually strikes me as being similar to thinking the first choice you’re really given in the game being construed as “You can be the KKK or Lincoln! MORALITY!” (which it’s not, at all.)
It was the bad trope of the “white savior,” taken to it’s extreme.
White Rich Kid comes to tropical island, has to fight pirates and mercenaries to rescue his friends, and to help him, he is “trained” by the warrior tribe on the island.
So of course, he gets better than any of them in the span of the game. Throw in the hot priestess who says you’re destined to lead them to glory, or whatever, who also has to bone you because why not, and it just becomes really, really absurd.
The head writer/developer of the game says it was supposed to be satire/taking the piss out of the “white savior” trope, but I think that was back pedaling after the fact, because it’s all played very straight.
So if it is satire, it’s the words dullest, most straight-played satire ever.
I don’t know that it was “acclaimed,” but Star Ocean: The Second Story for the Playstation was a very fun game that had some horrible translation. Some of it was little stuff, like when your character tries to get a shopkeeper’s attention and he says, “Sorry!” instead of “Excuse me!” Some of it, though, just didn’t make any sense. Early in the game, one of the main characters runs into the mayor’s house to tell him about a stranger who appeared out of nowhere and saved her life with futuristic weaponry. The mayor says, “Hey, what’s up?” and your character responds, “Mayor, don’t be so nonchalant!” That always bothered me. Poor word choice, but also…he’s relaxing at home in the evening. Why shouldn’t he be nonchalant?
And awkward sentences, so many of them. I tried to find some examples, and although TV Tropes agree with me that SO2 was an example of “Blind Idiot Translation,” they don’t provide any examples. You’ll just have to trust me…even as a high schooler I cringed at how bad some of it was.
I understand, it’s just that I feel (perhaps wrongly) that the bar for open spoilers is a little higher for a game that came out less than a month ago.
Speaking of Star Ocean 2, it had something I consider a personal pet peeve trope of mine: unnecessarily long chronology. Its been like 15 years since I played that game but it still bugs me when events are references that happened millions or billions of years ago. SO2 had that in spades. It seems like theirs was a universe that didn’t change because some of the locations you visit had been there for literally millions of years. Yet they’re still stuck in some kind of pseudo mix of medieval and futuristic technology. Its like they all decided at some point that to stop inventing new things, stop changing, and just freeze everything as it is. That trope has bugged me ever since that game illustrated it so blatantly.
I always compare it to real life, not a great comparison when it comes to fictional universes, but it gives me a point of reference for how much disbelief I must suspend. In the real world, us humans went from pretty much hunter gatherer nomads 7000-10000 years ago to a modern space-age civilization. So any universe, even ones I love, that remains unchanged over the course of thousands of years bothers me. Not to mention millions.
The plot falls apart for me only because at the end John dies - but there’s still shit to do. Those beavers aren’t going to shoot themselves, and I never did find all the feathers that coot with the wings needed. But alas, the game is not over, you get to round out all the side missions with John’s son Jack … who was like 10 years old when John died but now he’s a young man.
So basically, yeeeeears have past since you last left off. Which I suppose you could rationalize if you only had a few little things left to do. But that poor fucker on the cliff waiting for John to show up with some feathers and wolverine shit or whatever it was, had to wait a decade for some kid he’s never seen before to show up with his gunk.
Like I said, I like the game a lot but if you tried to sell someone on the game just by the plot alone you’d probably struggle with it.