Urgh, just finished this nonsense. My impression didn't change. The design of this thing was in a sense entirely predictable, but also probably something like a herculean affair. These open world games just take a shit ton of resources to make. This whole genre has its roots in GTA and such, you can see it merge with rpgs now, even though originally it was rpgs that produced the idea of sandbox gameplay. But without something like faction dynamics and mutually exclusive quest design you're left with the purely inconsequential sandbox design and the "emotional" storytelling. I can't fucking stand this sentimentalism in any kind of media or art. Sure, the writing was alright, some of the characters were funny enough, although some were purely boring ; in the end the game wants to create an "attachment", and when its finished you're supposed to feel some kind of melancholic loss, either because the characters die or simply because the relationship with the game ends (which is the same thing). And you do feel loss, but that doesn't mean anything about the quality of the narrative or its themes, it's just sentimental character based bullshit. Fuck it. Fuck "playing for the story". Fuck playing games to have imaginary relationships. I don't even want relationships in real life, why the fuck would I want it in games? How is this not playing to some pathetic sense of loneliness in people? Disgusting.
The rest of the writing didn't exactly exploit ideas in a very thorough manner. The narrative was very self-centered for the protagonist, which I assume was a way to make the player "care", but it backfired in a big way. In rpgs it's usually too much about the world (and saving it) and not enough about characters, relationships and such ; but now we have the opposite problem, really. The thing is, this is a "modern" world, a world that is potentially very complex in nature, that's very political, very technical, etc ; in a modern world, individuals don't matter, but rpgs are all about making the individual matter. I don't actually know how they were supposed to work around this, but surely making the story about the protagonist's survival in an uncaring world wasn't a very engaging affair. I think making it more about politics might have worked. There's exactly one quest that revolves around politics, and its entirely over the top and ridiculous, but it's pretty engaging. Having the protagonist be involved in faction dynamics would have worked wonders I think not only for the rpg elements, but for the narrative as well. We needed some kind of New Vegas shit here. Work for Arasaka, Militech or the punks in the alleys, etc.
I do think the game had some good gameplay elements, though, at least for its genre (good for what it is). I also think it was disturbingly immersive, for a first person rpg (say it's a rpg or not, I don't care). I don't usually play a lot of AAA games, maybe it's just me that's not used to the graphical orgy, all these details, but fuck if it wasn't beautiful. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to even look at something like DX's urban setting now and think it's any bearable to look at. Sad, I know.
