Oblivion, Serious Sam – review addiction

Let’s go for gaming memories in March 2016, 2011, 2006 and 2001.

You are reading What We Played, a monthly column where we remember which games came out exactly five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago. In the March issue, we do ten headshots to defeat a single enemy on the streets of winter New York, get out of rags to riches amid Kirkwall’s political intrigues, scamper all over Cyrodiil, scattering monsters from Oblivion, and crushing headless jocks in the scenery Ancient Egypt.

5 years ago – Tom Clancy’s The Division

What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam
The first anniversary this March is celebrating The division – MMO shooter from Ubisoft about the consequences of a deadly epidemic that decimated a significant proportion of the US population and turned former megacities like New York into half-abandoned concrete catacombs, where marauders operate. Actually, the aesthetic desolation of winter Manhattan has become one of the main selling points of The Division. The announcement of the game at E3 2013 caused a real sensation: the snow-covered exteriors of the Big Apple and the destructible details of the environment looked so realistic.
But, of course, Ubisoft wouldn’t be Ubisoft if it stumbled on Watch dogs only once – “Division” repeated the case of its predecessor almost unchanged. First, loud promises and mind-blowing graphics in gameplay demos, and then a big downgrade and excuses from developers: they say, we honestly wanted to make beauty, but somehow we didn’t think that most of the players’ video cards are not as powerful as ours, so we had to cut picture so that everyone could play.
However, this somewhat predictable disappointment had little effect on release sales: with or without a downgrade, The Division sold so well that it broke the world record among new game franchises in the entire history of the industry and bypassed Destiny… It was not the lack of correct reflections in the puddles that brought her to her grave, but something much more unforgivable: lack of content. And if the simple plot of the online sandbox could still be forgiven, then the monotonous missions and an almost empty endgame are a death sentence for any MMO. Following the tremendous sales in The Division, there was an equally tremendous outflow of players: after completing the main story, admiring snowy New York and running around the PvP “dark zone”, users could not find anything else to occupy themselves, and stopped entering the game. a couple of weeks after release.
In defense of Ubisoft, I must say that they quickly admitted their own mistakes: the developers did not limit themselves to patches alone and thoroughly reworked the mission system, rolling out so much new material that by the end of 2016 the daily online almost returned to release indicators. And then the belated, but still the success of the new franchise, as expected, made the studio think about the continuation – and The division 2 was not long in coming.
What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam

The Division has a great world and mechanics well tuned: shootouts are fun and require you to work as a team at least a little. Another thing is that the structure of the open world is not very sensible – you will forget about typical tasks and some coercion with side assignments in the endgame, and the maximum that you can do in the game, besides high-level tasks and PvP, is to walk around insanely beautiful New York and turn your head.

10 Years Ago – Dragon Age II

What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam
Ten in early March equaled the second part Dragon age… After a resounding success OriginsWhere all fans of classic RPGs got plenty of plot, nonlinearity, and gray morality, and boring gameplay mechanics, and just a deep and entertaining lore that really wanted to explore to the last line of any dialogue, the audience’s expectations from Dragon Age II were very high. And, alas, in its quest to quickly satisfy the audience’s request for a continuation Bioware sacrificed both quality and quantity.

In the expanded and epic first part, you could go around the whole country and visit dozens of dissimilar places and situations. But DA2 after it caused genuine claustrophobia: the plot, albeit stretched for a whole decade, was enclosed in a single city, the protagonist from the chosen savior of the world was downgraded to an ordinary mercenary, and locations from detailed spacious maps were compressed to a dozen stuffy corridors, according to who had to run back and forth throughout the game.

Everyone who hoped to get from the second part the same as from the first, but in doubled volumes, were furious: Dragon Age II did not disappoint much technically, so it also took about thirty hours, while Origins had sixty – a chance to fall into deep the prescribed magical world had to wait for several weeks right before the release Skyrim in the fall of the same year. But you can’t call the sequel an unambiguous failure either: the intimacy of the second part, which caused such violent anger among many fans, at the same time became its key advantage.

The twisted scenario and the atypically mundane fantasy drama, for which Origins was so fond, in the conditions of the condensed narrative of DA2 only became richer. Instead of galloping across Europe and presenting the player with a bunch of new characters in every next episode of the adventure, Bioware’s writers were able to focus on developing the characters and problems of a dozen key characters – and thus taking the narrative to the next level. Unlike the dwarves of Orzammar or the elves of the Brecilian forest, who fled into the background immediately after completing their quest chains in the original, the main characters of Dragon Age II remained in focus throughout the game, and Varric, Isabela, Fenris and the rest of Hawk’s companions received much more. screen time and storytelling significance than the Origins companions. In terms of charisma and level of elaboration, they completely bypassed most of their predecessors from the first part – and this is largely due to the laconic plot, which focused on the personal problems of several people (and non-people) instead of again spreading the key conflict to the whole world and hundreds of destinies affected by him at the same time.

What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam

There is no need to look for the reasons for the depressing technical state of the game for a long time: Dragon Age 2 was made for only a year and a half, so all forces were clearly thrown into the plot and characters. Actually, this is what helps the game out: heartbreaking stories and battles are played out in nondescript repetitive scenery, the consequences of which you will have to disentangle until the very end.

15 Years Ago – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam
The next birthday girl this March shares much the same fate as Dragon Age 2: with her The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion not only the genre is related, but also great fan expectations, which were not fully justified. And they took a similar place in history: exactly between the legendary predecessor, who set the bar so high that it was not so easy to jump to it a second time (Origins and Morrowind), and an ambitious follower, in which the developers finally turned to their fullest (Skyrim and a little less successful “Inquisition” respectively).

What’s funny is that even in terms of plot, Oblivion and DA2 have approximately the same significance: despite their intermediate position, both became a springboard for key plot events that radically turned the course of the history of their universes. But if some fans turn up their noses from the second Dragon Age to this day, then Oblivion over the years, on the contrary, only increased its importance, moving from the category of “not bad, but it could have been better” to the status of an unambiguous legend.

At the release, it really had a lot to find fault with: apart from the general unoptimization and shameful bugs with launching and crashing from the game (the then Igromania had to set out ways to solve the most popular errors right in the review), Oblivion also “pleased” the traditional AAA – titles by the gap between the two sides of the “expectation – reality” tandem. Bethesda’s PR specialists promised players with three boxes – and, admittedly, they implemented most of the announced features, but many of them worked very badly. The graphics provided by the new engine, for example, really looked luxurious for those times – especially against the background of the dullness of the previous Morrowind. But the Radiant AI vaunted by the developers, which was supposed to provide “unprecedented live” behavior of the NPC, worked not so much for realism as for circus absurdity: the NPCs who gained independence did the devil that, for no reason, attacked the player or, on the contrary, pursued the nag of the main the hero instead of himself, not falling into the hands. Moreover, the annoying unpredictability in battle concerned not only enemies, but also partners: they also behaved like blind kittens and did not always provide at least some significant assistance in battles. And the additional frustration from the combat system was also caused by the controversial auto-scaling: opponents automatically grew up in the level with the protagonist, and therefore it took an equally long time to cut simple guards with a sword at the beginning of the game, and at the very end of it – the motivation to pump weapons and skills is not added.

Oblivion rehabilitated all these shortcomings, of course, its plot. Apart from the already mentioned global events that influenced the entire TES universe, it lingered in history as the most lore-rich part of the series. And the usual quests did not hit the face in the mud: not only could new adventures be found on every corner, but they still did not slip into the classic “go-fetch-kill”, which is often sinned by voluminous role-playing. On the contrary: even the most banal, seemingly, tasks could turn into unpredictable chains of events that stretched across the entire map and made you forget about the main plot for a long time.

And yet another merit of Oblivion, which can be difficult to discern from a distance of a decade and a half, is how much more accessible to beginners it made the CRPG genre. If the previous parts of TES relied much more heavily on conventional D&D table mechanics, Oblivion made the action faster, simpler and more understandable (although this, of course, had its own critics). In addition, for the first time in the history of the series, elements appeared there, without which it is now difficult to imagine any role-playing game in the open world: for example, quest markers and quick teleportation points.

What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam

Well, the most beautiful thing about Oblivion is the settlements. Imperial City, like most capitals, is overwhelming with its size, scope, statism. The provincial towns scattered all over the map, on the contrary, attract. Each of them has its own layout, its own unique architectural style and its own cozy places. Yes, this will probably sound pretentious and funny, but any settlement in Oblivion has a unique soul, there are secrets and legends. And, traveling the world, sometimes you start to feel like a real tourist who, once in a new city, opens his mouth, wanders its streets for a long time and takes screenshots and photographs.

20 Years Ago – Serious Sam: The First Encounter

What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam
What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam

And twenty years this month hit the Serious (or, as some guardians of the correct locations insist, Cool) Sam – the shameless, but therefore no less bloodthirsty clone of Duke Nukem. In 2001, an unknown Croatian studio Croteam, which until then only made football simulators, introduced to the world not only him, but also a whole subgenre of arcade FPS: shooters where at least a somewhat coherent plot, any puzzles and even doors between levels disappear to give way to non-stop and maximum dynamic carnage.

While the rest of the industry, having seen enough of the first Half-life, already tried to build a serious narrative and cinematic production around the shooting (following Serious Sam, Return to castle wolfenstein, Aliens versus Predator 2 and Max payne), Croteam decided to make its own Doom… And, despite the fact that the Croatians chose a rather sunny setting for their project – palm trees, sand and the tombs of the pharaohs – the scale of bloodshed there was absolutely hellish. And the monsters did not disappoint! Whoever had to cut along the way: from literally headless kamikazes to combat robots, arm toads, scorpions with machine guns and skeletons with cow horns.

There was no question of any deep tactics: mobs were released on the hero in such numbers that there was no need to think – just run back from the bullets and water the big man with lead or rocket salvos in response, until you mow down everyone to the last. And then – half a minute’s respite, while you run to the next room, and all over again.

In addition to driving and unprecedented meat fights, an additional guarantee of Sam’s success around the world was the price: while the major developers of that time were asking for $ 40-50 for their 3D action games, Croteam set their brainchild a modest price tag of $ 20 – and the game paid off handsomely for this amount. The only thing that frustrated users was that the first part came out too short: it could be run in five to six hours, and the gameplay did not imply much variability. But even then the guys from Croteam were prepared: the second part of Sam’s delusional adventures, The Second Encounter, they rolled out in less than a year.
And, unlike many other series that became famous at the turn of the millennium, Serious Sam is still alive today. The latest numbered part of the franchise, Serious sam 4, was released last September – and pleased us not only with the typical hurricane action for the series, but also with an unexpectedly decent humorous script that Sam could only dream of twenty years ago.
What we played 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago: The Division, Dragon Age II, TES IV: Oblivion, Serious Sam

The fact that Serious Sam is the bloodiest game of all times and peoples does not require proof. Absolutely crazy gameplay, tons of meat and multi-barrel grinders for any choice. When the developers from Croteam announced to the whole world that they were doing 3D Action, no one took them seriously. But after the release, no one recalled their previous doubts – everyone was chained to monitors and chopped one portion of meat after another into cabbage. The word “meat” before “Sam” meant nothing at all what it means now, after “Sam.” No one has ever brought the gameplay to SUCH meat, and the gamer to such a sincere, childish, meaty delight from monster carcasses scattering to bloody shreds. What else do you need to be happy? Yes, except that there are more cartridges …

What did you play in March five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago? Be sure to let us know in the comments.

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