The Post-Game - The Saboteur (2009)

Platform: PC (disc & Origin), Xbox 360, Playstation 3.

I picked up The Saboteur during an Origin sale. I had never heard of it, but the premise looked cool: playing as a member of the French Resistance, fighting Nazis, exploring open-world Paris. Incredible potential, and a great idea on paper.

Well, The Saboteur gameplay is a ton of fun. It plays as a hybrid of Just Cause 2 with Assassin's Creed. If you loved either of those games, you'll probably like The Saboteur. And there are not a lot of open-world WW2 games on the market, so The Saboteur occupies a unique niche. The open world of Paris, the black & white vs. color mechanic, fast cars, destroying Nazi installations, and a passable story make The Saboteur a great experience.

Gameplay
+ The map is huge, covering Paris and the outlying countryside.
+ Parts of Paris are hidden behind Nazi checkpoints. Instead of making these other parts of Paris unlock with story progression, you can actually enter them at any time. Enemies are tougher and more numerous, and instead of presenting identity papers to pass through checkpoints you just have to barrel through the gates, raising an instant Level 1 alarm.
+ Occupation colors. On-screen colors are black & white (with red being the only other color allowed) until a sector is liberated from Nazi control, when the display is changed to full color.
+ A lot to do. There are sniper nests, fuel depots, radio installations, radar systems, propaganda towers, armored vehicles, zeppelins, railroad bridges and more to find and destroy.

+ A lot of time is spent driving. The car models have good detail for a game from 2009, and are easy to power-slide.
+ Stealth is fun. The detection meter is there of course, but the disguise mechanic adds a fun element. Knock out a Nazi guard and put on his uniform to disguise yourself. Be sure to use the non-lethal take-down, though; blood on the uniform will make it unusable. With the disguise on, you can go wherever you want - even into restricted areas. Get too close to other guards, though, and you risk detection. If detected, it is pretty easy to shoot your way out of these situations early in the game. Later on in the game, getting detected can result in near-instant death because the enemies' firepower becomes almost overwhelming.
+Stealth weapons allow for aggressive stealth without needing to be a ninja. The silenced pistol and silenced SMG allow for quiet kills. These need to happen out of sight of other guards, OR you need to quickly kill all guards who might witness an assassination.
+Rambo-ing is also possible, if stealth is not your style. It is easy to get head-shots with the right weapon. Watch out for Gestapo death squads, though. Those suckers are very hard to kill.

+ / - The platforming / parkour works well. It just feels clunky. It's awesome swinging around Paris on the roof-tops, zip-lining and climbing everywhere. And don't get spotted by German guards, or you'll trigger an alarm (this is good). But there have been a number of times I reached for a ledge to climb it, and for some reason Devlin wouldn't grab it, or leaped for a zipline but the key-combo did not make Devlin grab it (making him plunge to his death) (these are not good). In many ways the platforming / parkour functions in a similar manner to the Assassin's Creed games with Ezio (II, Brotherhood, and Revelations). Unfortunately, a lot of similar frustrations are here as well.
+ / - The contraband system. It makes sense within the context of the game, i.e., get contraband to trade with black market dealers. And finding a Resistance cache tells you what contraband you're getting, like jewelry, paintings, chocolate etc. But from destroying a sniper nest, you get - 200 contraband. Of what? Scrap metal? Contraband is necessary to upgrade weapons and gear, not criticizing having contraband at all, there is just some video game logic at work here. Not worth taking points off, but logicians will be annoyed.

- Destroying all that Nazi stuff (sniper towers, tanks, propaganda etc.) has nothing to do with the level of Nazi control over an area; "destroy" actions yield immediately-generated "contraband," and nothing else. I was hoping for something like in Red Faction: Guerrilla, where destroying enemy assets reduces enemy control and morale; when the morale reaches zero, the mission to retake the sector is triggered. There is nothing like that here. Destroying stuff just devolves into "doing random stuff" with no major implications. Yes, if you destroyed the sniper towers by the Gestapo headquarters, it will make some missions easier, but that is about it.
- Grinding. Without much additional reason to destroy stuff, accumulating statistics becomes an epic grind which has no real relation to the story.
- No fast travel.
- Dying and reloading a save-game does not give your character weapons. What? Yes. You have to re-equip weapons from the nearest black market dealer after re-spawning. That is not a problem, though, because
- All save points and re-spawns return you to the nearest Resistance safe house. Of course, that could be quite far away from where you were, leading to frustration and re-traversing countryside that has already been explored.


Characters
+ Sean Devlin is fun, determined, and loyal. A great character to empathize with. An Irish Catholic (he crosses himself once or twice, otherwise religion plays no role in the game aside from a few missions for a priest), he has an instinctive dislike of the English. He has solid if conventional motivations, and is rarely conflicted. Basically a straight-up action hero. Veteran voice actor Robin Atkin Downes is extremely solid.

+ / - The rest slot into prescribed narrative arch-types. The evil Nazi engineer / scientist who killed Devlin's friend (Kurt Dierker), the beautiful British spy (Skylar Saint Claire), the beautiful British spy's asshole boss (Bishop), the dutiful best friend's sister (Veronique), the leader of the Resistance that the best-friend's sister is in love with (Luc Gaudin), and the shady black-market dealer who can get rare and high-powered weapons (Santos).

Narrative
+ / - In the prologue, a close friend of Devlin's is killed by the Nazis. This provides the jump-off point for "let's get back at the Nazis for killing my best friend" mayhem. While the setting is serious, things feel almost light-hearted for a while. Help people out on the street, annoy the Nazis to no end, defend some hotspots in a "fight back" mission (which is basically a timed horde mode). Then return to the Belle (a burlesque club) to chill with some scantily clad women. All that determined-yet-warm-and-fuzzy feeling goes out the window as events turn unexpectedly dark in the third act. Thanks to a traitor in the midst of the Resistance, people around Devlin start dying. There is no choice available, these events are hard-scripted into the story. The climatic finale is impressive, but there is not much fighting in the final story level (where it takes place is really unique, so I won't spoil it). There is good forward motion, and the drama goes from being mundane to intense in the third act. A well-done story that takes full advantage of the locale.

- The game ends with Sean Devlin saying, "I'm just getting started." Sounds like the game is tailor-made for a sequel. In six years, there has not been even a hint of one. Too bad.

Graphics etc.
+ The black & white aesthetic that changes to color is an awesome technique that really gives The Saboteur a unique look.
+ Voice acting is good, and the French accents are generally correct.

B & W is cool, low-res textures are not.

+ The music is awesome and really sets the tone. A lot of classic jazz (Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone,and others), and some new songs that perfectly fit the mood (like Koop Island Blues). Really gives the game "that 40s feel." Menu themes and a few action cues were composed by Christopher Young, and work well.
+ The Saboteur runs easy on system resources. Maxed out with post-processing disabled, the game used between 400-600MB of video memory (Radeon R7 260X 2GB). My A10 6800k was at 50% CPU capacity (two cores) while playing the game.

+ / - For a 2009 game, character models are decent, but Mass Effect's were better, and Mass Effect came out two years before the Saboteur.
+ / - Leave the Post-Processing option off in the graphics menu. This game runs via DirectX 9 and looks just awful with Post-processing on.
+ / - There is a lot of nudity in The Saboteur. It is usually contextual, but sometimes it seems like the designers took the setting (one of the Resistance safe houses is in a burlesque theater) as a chance to binge on CG breasts. The female body is awesome, don't get me wrong, but in this case it seems like this part of the game was exploited to appeal more directly to twelve- and fourteen-year-old boys who might not have a standard of comparison.

- Some crashing. Not too bad - three times in 30 hours.
- graphics are generally sub-par, with low-resolution textures everywhere and some of the worst texture pop-in that I've seen so far.
- Finding a "scenic viewpoint" results in the camera pulling back and panning (like Assassin's Creed Viewpoint synchronization). It's an achievement-based action, no new information is learned from the scenic viewpoint. I guess it is supposed to show the gamer how awesome Paris looks, but there are major problems with the mid-distance rendering. Near distance and far distance render fine (if blurry and low-res), but in between the two would be flickering textures or just black blotches. Not sure if bugged, or just a faulty installation.

The Post-Game - The Witcher II (spoilers)

So with The Witcher 3 getting ready for release, I though it was a good time to play The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings. I played the first Witcher game a while ago, and played the game all the way through multiple times. I never really had a computer that I felt could play The Witcher 2 with any degree of competence. Yes, I could have floundered through it at 20 fps, but that wasn't how I wanted to experience the game (or any game, really).

So The Witcher 2 sat in my Steam library for two years. I occasionally tried loading it up and playing it, but the game would stick and stagger so badly in the tutorial mission that I just couldn't bear to continue. Well, one (modest) hardware upgrade a few months ago, and I felt ready to tackle it. Now that I've finished it, it is a great game that everyone who loves medieval-style fantasy games and choice-laden narratives should have in their library. Go out and get this one. With sale prices for The Witcher 2 dropping as low as $3, there is very little reason not to purchase it at some point.

What follows was after one playthrough of The Witcher 2, played without importing a save-game from The Witcher.

THIS LIST CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS.

Gameplay
+ High replayability (always the first thing I look for), thanks to a branching narrative and choice-laden side-quests.
+ Four skill trees, but lots of skills to choose from.
+ Lots of equipment, and the ability to craft and upgrade new new armor and swords
+ Lots of customizations for the equipment.
+ Lots to do and explore.
+ Big maps that, while maybe not "open world" in the same sense as Skyrim, are nevertheless sprawling and provide a good sense of size
+ Choice-centered dialog, some of which is on a timer (only a few seconds to respond). This prevented me from pausing the game and looking up ramifications on the internet.


+ / - Combat may be more realistic, but (as a hack 'n slash fan) I found the combat in the first Witcher game, with three on-the-fly styles to choose from, much more engaging.

- The "click to climb" and "click to jump" mechanics may have been easier for the developers than programming jump and climb abilities, but they break immersion at best and are annoying as heck at worst. For instance: descending the path to Kayran's lair.
- Map size can be an illusion generated by the time it takes to travel. There is no fast-travel (also as in the first game)
- The in-game map has points of interest marked on it, but nothing else
- The inventory system is a cluttered mess. I finally quit trying to monitor it, and just watched the weight meter to make sure the weight of what I was carrying didn't slow me down.
- Bad combat scaling, i.e. combat is too hard in the beginning, and too easy by the end.
- Alchemy and brewing potions is less intuitive than in the first Witcher game, and while potions are helpful (the Cat potion is easily the most creepy), it was extremely frustrating to ready up for a fight, have a cutscene, then find that for some reason the cutscene cancelled ALL the potions I had painstakingly brewed and consumed.
- Some quests provide no indication of how to proceed. So I can wander around the game-map for hours looking for the right NPC to further the quest, or I can just look up a let's play. Completionists will probably discover where to go since they'll explore every nook and cranny of the map, but more casual gamers will be frustrated by some incomplete quests in their journal.
- - Geralt has to meditate to drink potions. Who thought this was a good idea? Again, more realistic, perhaps. Forget about dodging away from a fight, quickly drinking a potion, and diving back in again. Can't do it. If you try, Geralt's animation going into and out of meditation will take so long that he will absorb extra damage in the process. That's if the game allows you to meditate in combat in the first place; sometimes I could, while other times I got a "Meditation Cannot be Performed at this Time" message. Horrible design decision.


Characters
+ Lots of old friends are back. Dandelion narrates the game, and Zoltan Chivay fights along side Geralt in several missions.
+ Geralt himself is a little less restrained, depending on the situation. One possible scenario sends him on a path of righteous slaughter to rescue someone. We have seen numerous times that NPCs are afraid of witchers, even though Geralt is usually torn between two sides. This was a chance to see what happens when a witcher is motivated by cold fury, and the carnage was devastating. Geralt just seems more human in general, with some wry sarcasm appearing occasionally.
+ Some great new characters (to those who have only played the games). Ves, Roche, Saskia, Sila, Letho, Philippa, and my man Iorveth - all well drawn and superbly voiced.

- Triss Merigold returns as well. Now don't get me wrong. Playing as Geralt, Triss was the woman for me in the first game. I never really bought into the whole Shani romance. It was always Triss. Well, in The Witcher 2 they changed her character design, making her less willowy and more compact, though more voluptuous as well. That's fine. Most of The Witcher 2 is spent on the road, not in court advising kings. But Triss' voice actress is flat, wooden, and simply boring, as well as sounding more girlish. The Triss of the first game was someone I would have hesitated to cross. In The Witcher 2, Triss is a damsel in distress for about half of the game, and the voice acting makes her sound young and naive. I was still motivated to save her, but am ultimately disappointed that she has so little to do when she is there.

Narrative
+ There are two different paths to the game, and lots of tangential choices to be made along the way.
+ A simple motivation - finding the kingslayer - gives the story good forward impetus.
+ You can't please everybody. You'll have regrets about many decisions in this one. In true Witcher fashion, though, the alternatives are not always better options.

+ / - Only two romance options (though there are plenty of opportunities for more base gratifications).
+ / - Lots of nudity in this one. Some of it is gratuitous. For instance (SPOILER): Triss is captured, wearing her usual outfit. She gets shrunk into a statue; the statue, when we see it, displays her still wearing her outfit. When the statue is decompressed and she is "reborn," she is reborn naked. Though the next time we see her in the dungeon, she is wearing the same outfit from prior to her capture. So logically, she should have had clothes on when being "reborn."
+ / - Lots of violence, too. Though torture is not shown on screen, the immediately before and the immediately after is shown, and might be disturbing the first time you play through the game.

- Some of the politics and background are insufficiently explained at the beginning - like the full implications of Foltest's war. It is mentioned once (maybe twice), then never mentioned again. This was one of the first times I kept referring back to journal entries for completed missions (ghost-written by Dandelion), because that is where large parts of context lay hidden. I don't doubt that multiple play-throughs will bring additional understanding.
- The story starts with a lurch. Excluding the tutorial level, the beginning is told in a series of flashbacks. It's a burdensome method in this case that slows down the story-telling. I was bored by the end of the Prologue, and itching for the game world to open up. Maybe that was the intention of the developers, but that method can backfire for those players who judge a game based upon first impressions.

Graphics etc.
+ The graphics are fantastic. Water, light shafts, bloom, foliage detail, wood detail. The mud even looks as real as the water - not an easy feat.
+ The music score by Adam Skorupa and Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz is superb. More folksy in a renaissance way, then it goes all Hans Zimmer when the action heats up.

+ / - Character models are good, but the faces do not have much expression.

- You'll need a half-way decent graphics card to run the game. I'm using an A10 6800k APU (basically an over-clocked Athlon 760k), and CPU usage never went over 60%. All four CPU cores were utilized, though, so the more cores the better. My graphics card, a 2GB Radeon R7 260X, was the bottleneck, running at 100% for the entire time I was playing the game. I averaged around 50 frames-per-second on low-to-medium settings with v-sync turned off.
- Some overlapping sound. Don't advance too quickly while an accompanying NPC is providing exposition via speech; if you get attacked by monsters, the speech will be overwhelmed by the sound of the battle.
- Some crashing. The Witcher 2 locked up and crashed on me five times over 35 hours. This was usually preceded by a memory usage spike (the game would jump from 900MB-1.2GB of system ram to using almost 2 GB), so there is probably a memory leak somewhere. How or what triggers the leak I have no idea.

The Post-Game - Dragon Age II (spoilers)

Being relatively late to gaming, I only just now finished my first play-through of Dragon Age II, after passing on it so many times. I have heard so many negative stories about how bad a game it is, and how especially bad it is for a Dragon Age game. It is smaller in size than Dragon Age Origins (MUCH smaller), but is still an engaging game that provides a lot of fun.

This isn't a review; just some likes and dislikes after completing the game.


Gameplay
+ High replayability. Not so much for the narrative choices (though there are plenty of those), but for the desire to explore the different classes. Hawke died in combat one time and I had to survive with just Merrill - and it was incredibly fun.
+ More abilities. Incredibly easy to feel like a bad-ass in combat. There is an implied encouragement to get more abilities, though, instead of maxing out a single skill tree, so cast the upgrade net quite wide.
+ More tactics slots. There are plenty. Battle plans can have great depth.
+ Streamlined loot. Some things will obviously be useful - like armor and weapons - but other things like cracked figurines, gemstones, etc., when looted, go directly to the Junk section of the Inventory. Then when selling to a merchant, simply click, "Sell All Junk." Much easier than hunting through the entire inventory for random bits and pieces.
+ Customizing companion armor is gone. I have to say I am grateful for this. Managing loot and armor upgrades for all companions in Origins was simply a chore and took away from the fun of playing the game. Plenty have disagreed with me on this, but I appreciated the streamlining. My inventory was a LOT less full in this game. Who would want to replace Merrill's post-romance costume anyway? It's one of the most attractive I have ever seen in a game (and while like Merrill, she's actually pretty scary).

- / + Smaller game world. I loved and hated this one. The smaller game world helped prevent tangents and helped keep the story focused. No real places to wander around. On the other hand, the open wandering and variety of locations kept Dragon Age Origins interesting for much longer than I played Dragon Age II.

- Re-use of levels. How many times could the game-designers re-use the same cave level? Did you really think I wouldn't notice it's the same level, even if I'm progressing through it from the opposite direction?
- Some bugs. Not game-killers, but aside from the Act II boss bug (see my other blog post about how to fix it), there were numerous minor glitches, hitches, frame-rate drops that really can't be explained. Disabling Auto-save might help. Transitioning to the credits after the final cut-scene crashed the game, which means I didn't get two achievements. Now I have to go back and re-play the final boss. And even though I romanced Merrill, Isabela got her own special outfit as well as if I had romanced her. And so did Anders, but I never chose any of his romance dialogue.
- Corridor adventure is back, unfortunately, and makes up a larger part of quests than before.
- The character roster is not balanced. For a rogue-class or warrior-class Hawke, three rogues, two warriors, three mages. If playing as a mage Hawke, three rogues, three warriors, and two mages. You'll find yourself depending on one party member for a specific role, like Aveline being the default “tank” for a rogue Hawke. In Dragon Age Origins, there were four options for a warrior: Oghren, Shale, Sten, and Alistair (excluding the Warden). In Dragon II, there are only two. Depending on choices, only one party member is a healer: Anders. And I didn't take Bethany to the Deep Roads, so she was taken away to join the Chantry at the end of Act 1 making Anders the only option. Stock enough health potions and do the tactics correctly and a healer is not necessary for all missions, but this felt like Anders was being forced on me, which I didn't appreciate.


Characters
+ The characters are sharply drawn, if a little narrower in scope.
+ Memorable characters. Isabela has some great dialogue; and if you ever wanted to (fictionally) reform a rogue, her story is perfect. Varric is everyone's favorite dwarf uncle: friendly, loyal, prone to exaggeration. Merrill may be too sweet and naive to be completely convincing, but her story is really good, if not entirely fleshed out. Aveline may seem a little strange at first (one reviewer referred to her as a “she-man”), but I found myself really appreciating her soldiery and her loyalty. She would have been my first romance choice, but alas, it cannot be.

- Annoying characters. Anders is snippy and arrogant. Sebastian is “pure” (and nothing is more annoying than purity). Fenris should be sympathetic, but he wears his burdens a little too obviously on his sleeve. Isabela's constant flirting with everything wears thin after a while.


Narrative
+ The story works well. If you do a number of side-quests, the focus throughout the entire game is the mage / templar conflict, but that conflict does not come out into the open until the third act. Act I = Find a new home. Act II = Is Hawke capable of defending that home? Act III = Can Hawke defend Kirkwall against a new threat, or is he the threat? There is not the forward impetus of Dragon Age Origins, but for a story focused on a single character it invested me in events and kept me playing.
+ Plenty of narrative choices. As in Dragon Age Origins, those choices have profound effects on the journey to the final boss fight, but doesn't change the where or when of the final boss fight.
+ Character cameos from Dragon Age Origins. Loved seeing some old friends again, even briefly. The encounter with Zevran just made me wish he was in the game instead of that kill-joy, Fenris.

- / + Party betrayal. It WILL happen, at some point in the game. You're going to trust somebody who is going to use their position in Hawke's party as a means to their own ends - and the sense of betrayal will feel very real. I was pissed off, anyway.

- Fewer origin stories. You're playing as Hawke, a human, whether you like it or not.
- Fewer romance options. Playing as a male interested in females? Isabela or Merrill, and that's it. Male interested in males? Anders or Fenris. Female interested in females? Isabela or Merrill. Female interested in males? Anders, Fenris, or Sebastian (who is DLC). Wanted to romance Aveline or Varric? Too bad.


Graphics etc.
+ Compared to Dragon Age Origins, the textures are generally at a much higher resolution.
+ Character models have more detail.
+ Water has a nice reflection to it now.
+ Lots of cracks and dust in the city streets - very realistic, even within a now-older game
+ Great soundtrack. Inon Zur did a great job once again.

- The countryside, such as the Wounded Coast, may have nice water, but it feels very empty. And with the narrow corridor play returning from DA Origins, it also feels very empty. Aside from the narrative-related NPCs, very little ambient life.
- Some absolutely awful rock textures.
- Buying the soundtrack from Amazon can only be done in three transactions, as the soundtrack was split into three "albums" of about 12 tracks apiece. That's greedy.
- Too much DLC. This is a common issue with EA games, and unfortunately the pattern holds true here.

Side-quest: Freeze / Crash in Dragon Age II "Faith" Quest

I'm currently working my way through Dragon Age II for the first time (about seven years late, but whatever). I encountered a bug that causes the game to freeze and makes progression impossible. The fix is easy but cumbersome.

This particular bug happens in Act III, with the Companion quest entitled, "Faith." One part requires going to the Viscount's chambers at night. Hawke + party shows up, kills some blood mages, and - the game froze. I was able to unstick the game by hitting the Escape key; while that did not cancel the following dialogue, it did cancel cut-scene following the combat and preceding the dialogue. At the end of the dialogue, however, the screen froze again, for good this time.

The problem is discussed in this forum. Apparently the Exiled Prince dlc has some compatibility issues with Game Patch 1.04.

The fix:
1.  Progress to immediately before the fight with the blood mages. Save and exit Dragon Age II.
2.  Find the folder the Exiled Prince dlc is installed to. In my case, that was F: > Origin Game Library > Dragon Age II > addins > da2_prc_drk.
3.  Within da2_prc_drk there should be a folder called "patch". Cut and paste this folder to some place outside of the game folder. It doesn't matter where you put it - the desktop is fine - but don't delete it because we'll need it again later.
4.  Start Dragon Age II and play through the fight with the blood mages and the subsequent conversation with "Sister Nightingale" (lol at the name. Seriously, it was good to see her). After that conversation is concluded, save and exit Dragon Age II.
5.  Paste the "patch" folder back into the da2_prc_drk folder.
6.  Start Dragon Age II back up and continue playing.

That should do it. Cumbersome, but hopefully not hard to do.