That was such a delightfully pretty game. I remember loving playing that. Might give that another play through next week. Thanks for reminding me. <3 :)
Sir Terry Pratchett was an avid gamer himself and contributed to a few mods for Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim.
Lovely guy, really. So shame his works doesn’t click in non-english languages.
Which is such a cool story.
Like Emma had been writing some awesome Morrowind mods for ages - she was involved with a massive project that brought children to the game, wrote some of the pioneering companion mods for that game - and then she got to collaborate with Terry fucking Pratchett on one of the best Oblivion mods ever made.
Wait… WHAT?!
Honestly, what an amazing person.
Well at least regardings books, Patrick Couton did such an amazing work at translating them in French, he even received awards for it
Cool article, thanks
She also wrote some of the tomb raider reboots and was an additional writer on BioShock infinite.
Specifically, she wrote the 2013 game and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Studio and publisher interference on Rise was so pervasive that she permanently quit writing for AAA games and someone else took over for Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
That explains why Shadow felt different.
And why Rise was so incredibly by-the-numbers after 2013 shook things up.
Yea, the second one started feeling very resident evil 4ish. Which is fine, if you’re playing resident evil.
Some of the Overlord series too 🙂
I liked the look of the city in catalyst, much more easier on the eyes
I think the city feels/looks more natural in the original. In Catalyst the city looks like it was build FOR the runners, like it’s a playground not a real city.
Beautiful game.
Banger of a theme song too.
The first song in English I loved, I was 11
I was just about to post a link to it haha
I played it and enjoyed it, but I don’t recall it having much in the way of writing! The plot felt like an excuse to tie the set piece parkour areas together. I mean, moreso than in other games.
Sadly that’s often the way of things in games - writers brought in far too late, when the bulk of the design and development is already done, and being told to ‘just write something that connects these levels together’.
I’m fine with that for most games. I don’t need a strong story if the gameplay is great, it’s more of an added bonus.
And that’s never true in reverse. I REALLY wanted to play The Witcher 3 for the story but I hated the combat too much
I’m 100% the opposite, don’t have time for beautiful games without a heart.
To each their own, the only time I really care about it is when my in-game decisions affect the story.
I play games for the interactivity of it so if the story is told “passively,” I don’t really care how good it is as long as it’s not obtrusively bad
Sure, just love a good LA noire or bioshock.
Popping people in the head repeatedly over the internet just seems like a waste of time to me.
No judgement if you like that, just wanted to counter that “the reverse is never true” part in your earlier comment.
I have a few friends who used to go to game jams, events where you get a bunch of people together, split them up into groups, and give them a set amount of time (usually a day or a weekend) to make a video game.
Most of the people who went to these were programmers of course, and there were a couple in my friend group who were techy people as well, but mostly they were writers, artists, and musicians.
And the groups they ended up in usually handed up doing pretty well. Having the whole team there and involved from the get-go helped them make a pretty polished game, where a lot of the groups that didn’t have that ended up with music, writing, or visuals that felt kind of tacked-on as an afterthought.
Yup. It was a parkour game. I don’t remember much of a story either.
There’s more story and lore in the comic books. I really enjoy its world.
Thanks for the heads up, did you read both series (WildStorm and Exordium) or just one? If both, both good? Exordium seems to have different writers.
“They’re teaching the cops parkour… we can’t have that in this surveillance state distopia.”
I still haven’t played the sequel as I heard it was disappointing. What a bummer, there was so much potential there.
Fwiw, the second one had some frustrating moments but I still really enjoyed it. Running around the open world is really fun and the moveset is slick as hell.
I’d genuinely love a next gen sequel.
Yeah, but writing was pretty meh.
She basically ghost wrote his last novel and it wasn’t good.
I just recently played through Catalyst and I know it was divisive, but I’m firmly in the “I wish it had another 6 months to cook and it would have been a banger” crowd. The only major issues I had were with unreliable parkour, which I bet they could have resolved. It was so close to being a winner if it weren’t for that.
The reason I quit Catalyst early was the insane loading times. The game just doesn’t play right when you’re too afraid of making mistakes.
Story-wise the original is perfectly adequate, I’d say even good. You can’t put too much story in that kind of game, it’s much more about the vibes and unlike say Doom you can’t hide lore in the environment either, investigating that would destroy the overall gameplay flow. It’s a well-paced game, but the quiet parts aren’t still the quiet parts is when the running is easy and straight-forward. Ideally, you never stop, and the points where you have to stop (elevators) are orchestrated to make you feel restless.
It was a seriously underrated game, my main complaints were too much clunky combat and not nearly enough indoor areas. It felt like I had to run the same outdoor loops dozens of times for what should be serious missions.
Edit: I really think the combat could’ve been awesome with some Ratchet & Clank style gadgets. Not the guns, but the things like the bundle of mini-robots that chase and attack enemies, or the sentry device you throw that slows down/freezes enemies. Feels like a good way to keep the asymmetric fighting where they have actual weapons but you need to be strategic.
As flawed as the original is, it’s one of my all time favourites. To me there’s a perfect harmony between gameplay, graphics (art direction), music and atmosphere. The soundtrack is easily one of the best game OSTs of all time. The story isn’t deep but the characters are interesting and the world has so much potential. On the other hand I love its “cult” status, on the other there was a lot of lost potential for a truly exceptional game franchise.
Catalyst is… not terrible. For me it’s just average and it never reaches that real Mirror’s Edge atmosphere of the original. It’s even worse today because it never got an update for PS4 Pro or PS5, so it looks kinda awful tbh, and I’m usually not too picky with graphics and fps stuff. Finished it once back then and tried replaying it a couple of years ago but dropped after a few hours.
The soundtrack is by Solar Fields. Amazing ambient electronic artist, great for chilling or even sleeping.
Along that genre I also recommend Carbon Based Life forms, Joey Fehrenbach, Trentemoller, Hol Bauman, and Marconi Union
Thanks, lord’s work.
Great recommendations. I’d add Planet Boelex, also ambient electronic artist. Most of his albums are available for free in bandcamp (Suunta and Misplaced Ep are excellent).
Huh, no shit. Such a good fucking game, I never played Catalyst though.
Let’s see what my favorite 2000’s game critic had to say about it :D https://youtu.be/MqTreOK5YUQ
Nepo baby?
Yeah, because writers have so much power in this world!
Hollywood is staffed by nepo babies like finance, medicinr, law etc …
That’s how this shit works.
You want to know a fun fact… USSR worked the same way lol
I was born in USSR, so I know a fact or two. But I also know that there’s a long line of shitty people who have power before you get to the ones who sit at home and type something.
Nobody suggested that the subject is a shiti person…
You did, because nepotism is shitty, which means that from your point of view, Terry Pratchett used his power (?) to put his relative on multiple projects, where otherwise someone else would work.
Some serious mental gymnastics on Herr lol
Bootlickers gonna bootlick
I know what you mean but it seems like she earned her credits. She’s been constantly putting out great works.
So we got a competent nepo baby… I guess it could worse like our dear leader so I should be grateful.
At least she is no a lebron James son who can’t dribble worth of shit
What on earth are you on about?
Nepo baby implies someone who’s there only because of who they’re the child of. This is more old fashioned having connections and knowing the right people because your family moves in those circles.
Having Pratchett as a surname surely gets your foot into the door but it doesn’t get you short-listed. Her track record does that.
True nepotism would be her getting hired by someone because the hiring company wants to get into good graces with her father so he’ll bestow them some boon. That won’t work for reasons ranging from Terry not having that kind of power over him not being that kind of asshole to him being dead.
Exactly
Not in this case. She’s… very talented. 😊
You are getting downvoted for your wording I think but I believe it’s worth pointing this stuff out especially now that people are trying to “restore” the “meritocracy”.
This one writer’s competency isn’t the question. The question is how many others won’t get a chance because this person already had a foot in the door.
Even without a single “nepo baby writer”, many others wouldn’t get a chance for whatever reasons. Writing in general is such a competetive field that you’d be a fool to not use your connections and every possible chance in order to support yourself as a writer. And video game writers might even be first to lose their jobs to AI in the near future, who knows.
you’d be a fool to not use your connections
And this folks what a class war looks like in nuts and bolts type example
Remember next time they preach to you about this “meritocracy”
The question is how many others won’t get a chance because this person already had a foot in the door.
A bootlicker doesn’t have the mental capacity to comprehend this concept…
They have been conditioned since child hood to worship other people’s “success” without realizing the people they worship were put into these positions . they don’t understand that conceptually that’s how a class system works and their simping enables it.
A nepo baby is peak class war… These people are the enemies no matter how “nice” or “good” they are.
At the end of the day, a good job is a super limited resource that goes to nepo babies first then remainder is dolled out on “meritocracy” basis.
Nobody is worshipping their success, she just did a good job on multiple projects. I never knew of her existence before, but I see some great titles and I see a pattern of a “job well done”.
