About Riddick: escape from Butcher Bay

[Serious_Business]

p. cool game

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I've been playing this for the first time (just reached the mines) and I... really don't get the hype.
It's not bad, but oh my lord is it bland, and I say that as someone who semi-shame-facedly enjoys the movies.

The Good:

+Environments look very nice. Seriously, they're pretty on par with modern shooters.
+Atmosphere is well done; you feel like you are in a shithole sci-fi prison.
+Vin Diesel. He's the right kind of camp for this sort of thing.

The Meh:
)Level Design is not complete garbage. There are secrets and there are multiple paths through levels; there just aren't very many of them.
)Weapons feel good, but so far there are very few of them, and it makes the shooty-shooty bits pretty monotonous.
)The writing is fairly cringe, but to be fair, it's nowhere near as bad as The Chronicles of Riddick movie.

The Bad:
- Enemy variety is severely lacking. So far I've met a couple varieties of generic soldiers, 1 beefy soldier with a propane tank strapped to his back, and some nosferatuish things. So that's 3 enemy types in ~3 hours of playtime. That is completely unacceptable to me in an FPS.
-There are tons of things in the game that systemically make no sense. It feels like they were making an immersive sim, and then 9/10ths of the way through development someone came in and stripped out every single one of those immsim elements. For example, the game has a currency system, but, despite finding money littered around everywhere, so far I have found exactly one place where I was able to use it, and it was in the game's tutorial. What.
-Character models look fucking awful. Riddick looks more like Clayface than Vin Diesel.
-Not enough Michael Rooker. He's prominently advertised in the game's credits, and so far I've heard... like 3 recorded barks from him. You can never have enough Michael Rooker.

From what I've seen, the general consensus is that the game gets worse as it progresses so honest question:

What is it that people like about this game so much?

 

[Wunderbar]

It was very cinematic, had great graphics (for its time), and was regularly putting you into different situations.

At one moment you're in some hub area doing sidequests, then you're participating in fistfights for a pack of cigs, then the game turns into survival horror where you're trapped with flesh-eating mutants in a dark tunnel while your flashlight slowly runs out of energy, then the game turns into splinter cell, then you control a mech and gun down dozens of guards, etc.

 

[cretin]

like a lot of games, it starts out really well, but can't maintain its momentum. It is very fortunate that the game is short, because it would be a lot worse if they tried to make it into some kind of deus ex like some people wanted.

also it has the distinction of being one of the few film IP games that don't suck balls. Largely helped, i suppose, by the fact it does its own thing rather than trying to ape a feature film, and without the time restriction of needing to be released at or around the same time as the film.

 

[DalekFlay]

I remember liking it a lot, but I'm a total slut for stealthy first-person. I haven't played it since the remaster came out, but I keep eyeing a return. Hopefully with the nostalgia goggles off it doesn't let me down as much as you <3sRichardSimmons.

I remember liking the pseudo sequel too. Again though, total slut...

 

[Kainan]

I played EFBB a hundred times, it never gets old. Its linear but very free flowing in a way.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Yeah, my last playthrough was couple years back (playing the remaster) and I thought the game held up pretty well. In terms of gameplay the main charm came from switching the styles frequently on the fly (ie the more social/side quest parts, stealth, fights, shootouts and suit/robot piloting were all nicely blended, so I never had a feeling any of them got old). The setting, atmosphere and characters were top notch as well. EFBB is a pretty unique game in this regard and I wish something like this would come out again at some point - personally I would love a new Riddick game focussing on Necromongers (fairly cool antagonists from a later Riddick movie) though I guess that is never going to happen.

As for Assault on Dark Athena (the DLC/semi-sequel), it starts off great when you are on the Dark Athena itself and does the same things as the main game, though the tone is much darker (you are up against pirates/slavers who raid small colonies and turn their prisoners into servitor-like cyber zombies and then sell them as weapons). Unfortunately, once you get out of the Dark Athena and on the planet surface (where there is an ongoing slaver raid) the game throws its unique formula out of the window and turns into a fairly average shooter. Still it is worth a playthrough if only for the first part.

 

[Multidirectional]

Fuck remaster, it actually looks worse and there's no quicksave. And Dark Athena sucks.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Lyric Suite]

So i got the original 2004 version running and everything, but setting any resolution that isn't 4:3 makes the POV completely messed up. Any way to fix it?

 

[Baron Dupek]

So i got the original 2004 version running and everything, but setting any resolution that isn't 4:3 makes the POV completely messed up. Any way to fix it?

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/T..._Assault_on_Dark_Athena#Widescreen_resolution

 

[Lyric Suite]

So i got the original 2004 version running and everything, but setting any resolution that isn't 4:3 makes the POV completely messed up. Any way to fix it?

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/T..._Assault_on_Dark_Athena#Widescreen_resolution

That's for Dark Athena i'm asking for the original 2004 version.

I guess i can settle for 4:3 i just assumed since the menu scales at widescreen resolutions i was having a bug or something but apparently the game doesn't actually support widescreen so i guess that's that.

 

[Multidirectional]

It's been many years ago since I played it last time but I don't remember ever having any problems with widescreen. It should support it natively, except for stretched HUD.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It's the other way around for me. HUD doesn't stretch but FOV is messed up.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

I can't find this game neither on Steam or GOG (though I remember it being on the latter platform a few years ago)
What happned?

 

[Fargus]

I can't find this game neither on Steam or GOG (though I remember it being on the latter platform a few years ago)
What happned?

https://af.gog.com/forum/chronicles_of_riddick_the/no_longer_for_sale/post4?as=1649904300

The license to use the Riddick IP expired. It probably was not feasible to renew it as the income from sales of the Riddick games must have dwindled to not much more than pennies. Or maybe it was the music in the games or something; I already forgot the exact details

 

[udm]

You can download Escape From Butcher Bay for free on MyAbandonware though: the original, not the (pardon the pun) butchered remastered version which has a whole bunch of glitches and unnecessary changes. EFBB is superior to Dark Athena, even in the Butcher Bay campaign itself lol.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Of course you can always pirate it
But I wouldn't minded purchasing a GOG copy
A shame it because abandonware because of such legal drudgery - I guess Vin must hold the rights and doesn't care about renovating the IP or something

 

[SharkClub]

Well this is sort of odd. I put Pitch Black on Netflix the other day and it was fun enough schlock (I have seen it before but not for a while), ended up watching the hilariously messy second film (The Chronicles of Riddick) for the first time shortly afterwards, the whole time I was thinking that it kinda wished it was some grand space opera epic like Dune or something but it's even more convoluted and far cheesier. After that I decided I'd play Butcher Bay for the first time since I'd heard good things about it for years and finished it in one afternoon. All of this was completely independently of this thread being necro'd recently and I didn't notice this thread until just now.

Anyway, I played the "remastered" version that is included in the totally legitimate gog.com copy of Assault on Dark Athena that I definitely paid for. It was ok. I was kinda surprised how just "okay" the game was overall compared to the showers of praise I'd seen it receive online. It didn't really impress me overly much, it made me think that maybe if I was a starved consolefag owner of the original Xbox that I would have seen it for more than what it is at the time (similar to the people who unironically think BioShock is good). The lighting is pretty good, which is kinda the only thing I can really give it a point for and as I understand it a lot of people prefer the lighting of the original version of the game over the remaster, so maybe I missed out on slightly better visuals by playing the "remaster" instead (seems to be the case with a lot of remasters). I think I'd much rather play Thief Deadly Shadows again than Escape from Butcher Bay if I had to play an original Xbox stealth game, and believe me I really do not like Deadly Shadows at all (always thought it was overrated clunky console garbage compared to its predecessors). Everything about Butcher Bay was pretty standard and okay for the time the game was released but never graduating to actually being good, the way I see it. It did have a lot of variety crammed into a short campaign but none of it was really all that innovative, kinda reminded me of a worse version of the original Red Faction game, which is actually what I'd be more ready to compare it to than a Deus Ex, Thief or some other first-person genre hybrid gaming experience.

I'm probably going to play Assault on Dark Athena to finish off my Riddick experience, I've heard it's even shorter than Butcher Bay so I'm not expecting much. Can anyone tell me aside from the art style/lighting/whatever/etc. supposedly getting worse/being a sidegrade in the "remaster", did it change anything gameplay wise that I definitely would have noticed? Someone mentioned the original has quick saving and the remaster didn't but it mostly barely mattered for me while playing even if I prefer manual quicksaving.

 

[Kainan]

Pitch Black is not shlock. Something like Avengers would be that. Yes the remaster has no quicksaving but it makes the healing stations into save checkpoints. Its harder in some ways and easier in others. You can fool around with the bodies in remaster more and make Riddick stand/crouch in awkward positions during conversations.

 

[SharkClub]

Pitch Black is already a cheese extravaganza and then the second film brings a load of ham to the plate, it is absolutely jam-packed full of cliches. Just because I described it as schlock doesn't mean it's valueless garbage though, it is a pretty entertaining and endearing film. Avengers is just mindless capeshit made for the consoomer mass market by a bunch of suits in a boardroom.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It's been many years ago since I played it last time but I don't remember ever having any problems with widescreen. It should support it natively, except for stretched HUD.

So i figured this out. Game only works in widescreen up to 1080p. Was cleaning up my game drive today and on a whim i launched this thing again and after tinkering with it i finally found this out.

Also, the original game (Escape from Butcher Bay) is on the Abandonware site. Boots in Windows 11 just fine, didn't even have to set any compatibiliy or anything.

 

[Semiurge]

I have the original DVD-ROM, but of course it probably has some draconian DRM scheme. Never finished it, it just felt too restrictive to play a character like Riddick with how the game starts, like an RPG. The way the game encourages you to play in the prison didn't seem like Riddick at all, unfortunately. More like some sissy errand boy. Riddick is a loner, not a talker.