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.

Why all the EA hate?

Since coming late to the gaming party a few years ago, I have come across an ever-widening tide of vitriol that washes up on the shore of a corporation called Electronic Arts. Seriously, I never have to go far to find the hate.

Here's my experience with EA. I purchased Madden 07 about a year after it came out. I'd never played a sports game before, and it was fun and worked well for me. A friend purchased Tiger Woods' Pro Golf 2008. Then I played another game released by them called Dragon Age: Origins (haven't played Dragon Age II yet, though despite the reviews, I expect it to be far from sucky. Origins was hardly a perfect game). Then an entire trilogy under the Mass Effect banner. Then Battlefield 3. And The Saboteur. And the Need For Speed franchise. And Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. All great games in their own genres. Not perfect games (though Mass Effect 2 comes close IMO), but what game doesn't have its faults? On the horizon is the Medal of Honor series, the Dead Space franchise, and some cool-looking game called Syndicate (I have both the old and the new versions).

So why all the hate?

The EA hate seems to boil down to a few categories:

1.   Avaricious DLC policies. I agree with this one. I am still angry about the Mass Effect 3 DLC situation, but the game is great. (I have heard similar stories about Dead Space 3, but I have not played it yet). So if the game is good, I'll grumble and pay anyway. Which of course is what EA is counting on, and is hardly an endearing trait.

2.   Not patching a game after release. I have heard that many users are still waiting for a bug-fix patch for Dragon Age Inquisition. The original Mass Effect still has the black-pixelation problem in a few areas if you are playing on a computer with an AMD Steamroller-based CPU (which I am). It's just stunning that an issue that blatant was just ignored.

3.   Games which used to work are broken in their current form. To be fair, this plagues a number of older games on Steam as well - only a small proportion of them are EA properties. But the game I am thinking of is the original Crysis. It is for sale on Steam, but try installing and running it, and, well, you can't. The version on Origin actually does run - but you have to enter the game files and use the 64-bit executable (which is not included in the Steam version. There are number of work-arounds on Steam, but I don't think the average consumer should have to do that).

4.   Origin. So many people hate it. I'm not sure why. At least I can register my Steam keys on it for free copies of EA games that I already own (most of them, anyway). Then if I want to I can download and install through Origin. This is superior to Ubisoft's Uplay, which HAS to be open and running in order to launch an Ubisoft game that was purchased and installed in Steam. Origin works well enough. Origin has a simple interface, and reliable servers (more reliable than Valve's these days). Is it annoying that Steam can't be the "one-stop shop" for all video games? Sure. But it's time to accept that Origin is competent software. Because competition (for Steam) is a healthy thing.

5.   EA is a corporate juggernaut. Small studios disappear into the bowels of the corporation, sometimes never heard from or seen again. There has been a rash of this hate since EA shut down Maxis about two weeks ago. Never mind that Maxis had not produced much of note for almost ten years, and the last few games they DID create were duds (Sims 4, anyone?). Bioware seems to be safe for now (non-forthcoming patches notwithstanding, Dragon Age Inquisition was a hit), but if Mass Effect 4 crashes and burns, what do you think is going to happen? (Probably not full-scale closure, but some figurative heads will certainly roll). Bitter nostalgia seems to be at play here.

I came across this video on some forums today. It inspired me to write this post. It's a fun satire - I totally get it. My problem is in the description under the video. Here is a quote:

"Q) How is this [EA's] behaviour bad? Companies exist to make money, they're just doing what they're supposed to.
"(A) No, no, no, and A MILLION TIMES NO. Companies exist to trade a valuable product to a consumer in exchange for fair payment. They should only make a profit in order to improve their service efficiency, quality of product, and in order to comfortably support themselves..." [post goes on about what exactly is wrong with EA and why the uploader dislikes them].

No, sir. Companies exist to make money. Non-Profits exist to trade a valuable product to a consumer in exchange for fair payment (or they are supposed to, anyway). Corporations' sole reason for existence is to make a profit to keep the stock value up, so more people will invest in the corporation, so they can pay their executives more money, so working at the corporation is seen as prestigious. It is all about money, not about some kind of idealistic "we live to serve the customer" bullshit. Several companies that tried that approach don't exist any more (remember General Motors' Saturn division?). And even then, in a company that was supposedly all about the customer, Saturn's existence was problematic because their product was crap. And you can only dress up crap in so many ways before people start to notice a smell.

And if a game is actually good? Well, EA can charge as much as they want for DLC; people will buy it anyway (raises hand). Because unfortunately, making money is what any company or corporation is all about.

How about less fanboyism and more realistic comparisons? How about bitching for a damn patch for Mass Effect, instead of clogging EA's inbox about not being able to get the Pinnacle Station DLC on the Steam version? And EA, how about fixing Crysis on Steam, and bug-fixing Dragon Age Inquisition? Oh, and maybe actually making a new Madden game (and bringing it back to PC), instead of re-dressing the same stuff every year with a new roster? Sheesh.

EA's out for the money - as any for-profit corporation should be. Their bottom line could be padded even more if they turned on some PR charm by making Origin and the games on it as rock-solid as Steam used to be. But that would actually cost money. People are "getting by" with the way things are, so why bother?

Side-Quest: Getting Crysis to Run on PC (64-bit)

Despite having poured thousands of hours into my favorite games, I somehow missed out on Crysis (the first one). So, when it was on sale on Steam over Christmas, I picked it up.

Then I tried installing it. Dun dun dun... CRASH! Repeatedly. Turns out this is a common problem.

There are lots of problems getting the game to even launch. Then there are problems using the 64-bit executable. Now I have no trouble executing some complicated "back up x file, then change setting y" type of stuff, but there's some consumer outrage whenever I have to do that. I paid for a working product. It darn well better work. If it doesn't, the question becomes whether I want to go through the trouble. For Crysis, there are some simple steps to follow that result in a working game without having to modify any game files.

You will need an Origin account.

1. Purchase Crysis on Steam or on disc (if you purchase on Origin, go to step 3). The game has been steeply discounted during major holidays, so wait until for a sale if possible.

2. Activate the game's license key with EA, so that it will appear in your Origin library. The tricky part here is that if you try to activate Crysis using the Origin software, you could get an "Invalid Key" error. To activate it, you have to enter the key on EA's support website. Activating here will successfully add Crysis to your Origin library.

3. Download and install Crysis from Origin.

4. You might think you're done, but the minute you try to launch the game, it will crash once again. You might think that the game is simply broken, but that is not the case.

5. Navigate to the folder Crysis is installed to (in my case, F: > Games > Crysis

6. I want to run Crysis using the 64-bit executable, so go into the Bin64 folder.

7. Double-click Crysis.exe to launch the game.

(This solution only works on computers with 64-bit operating systems.)

The game should launch. Exactly why the game launches directly from the executable and not from Origin is a mystery to me.

If you use this method for Steam (install Crysis via Steam, go into the Steam Crysis folder and launch using the executable), the game will still crash. A bait-and-switch move to get more people to use Origin? Who knows. The Origin version of Crysis does use a patched version of EA's infamous Securom DRM; it now uses your Origin credentials to verify ownership. So you DO need to be logged in to Origin to run the game.

Crysis runs smooth and solid now, and still looks amazing for an older title.Unfortunately the multiplayer component is off-line, but hey: what price nostalgia (or, in my case, discovery)?

Quest Completed.

Bonus: EA's support site activation service will also work with Crysis 2 and Crysis Warhead.