The Evil Within 2

[Wirdschowerdn]

We wuz antagonist n sheeet.

 

[Multidirectional]

So they start the second game about same way they did the first one but this time with QTE. Enemy you cannot beat chasing you, run away. I guess later into the game you'll be killing these bitches with ease.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Game will be shit. You heard it first from me here.

 

[Average Manatee]

TEW was a cool little game. Most modern games (virtually everything from RE4 on) that are supposedly survival horror are actually just horror shooters, where there is no chance of running out of ammo or health if you just gun things down well. TEW1 actually forced you to stealth a lot, and you could pretty much beat the majority of the game without even being seen or wasting ammo if you were good enough. Reminds me a lot of System Shock 2 with the wrench on impossible now that I think about it. Fuck the plot/setting/grindhouse intro though.

Hopefully they don't fuck up the PC port this time.

 

[Kitchen Utensil]

The first game was utter shit and this will be even worse.

 

[Ivan]

lies

I wish this were true. I'm hoping for more open environments and more choice with regard how to navigate said environments. If it has just the amount of freedom and options as RE4's first village area, I'll be satisfied.

 

[Average Manatee]

lies

I wish this were true. I'm hoping for more open environments and more choice with regard how to navigate said environments. If it has just the amount of freedom and options as RE4's first village area, I'll be satisfied.

Ehh? You can definitely stealth kill or stealth past the majority of shit in the game. There's obviously a few on-rails parts but most areas heavily reward stealth. I wish RE4's first village area had some kind of choice to make other than "what wall do I put my back to while killing everything", which is also about the extent of options for every other area in RE4.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/09/21/evil-within-2-preview-open-world/

How The Evil Within 2 tries to be an open world b-movie

By Alec Meer on September 21st, 2017 at 3:00 pm.

Let me qualify that title statement, for fear it merely conjures images of a game in which you’re supposed to be endlessly surprised to find more zombies lurking behind the next hedgerow. A good (or, indeed, bad) b-movie is not someone sprinting aimlessly around and being constantly jumped by monsters, but rather it’s scene-by-scene situational. What fresh horror awaits in the basement, what tricksy traps and obstacles must be overcome to make it out this house alive, and oh no what just happened to that helpful man in the sensible pullover?

In an hour spent playing Bethesda’s upcoming survival horror sequel The Evil Within 2 [official site], I found a game that was striving to be a cat’s cradle of micro b-movies, spun across a freely-explorable, monster-blighted town. I also found a game that was trying so hard to be scary that my only true fear is that it isn’t scary at all.


Let’s tackle that last point first; get the gripes out the way before moving onto hopefulness. In a lot of ways, The Evil Within 2 (at least what I played of it, all of which you can watch for yourself in this commentary-free footage of my preview session) was exactly what I expected it to be, which is a third-person horror game very much made for the age of grown adults mock-screaming for coins on Twitch streams. Surprise A HORRIBLE THING and now surprise ANOTHER HORRIBLE THING, and so forth.

I skipped over the first Evil Within despite generally being partial to games about conserving ammo and creeping fearfully around each new corner, partly because SO MANY GAMES but mostly because everything I saw of it suggested a game throwing every horror trope at the wall at high velocity and hoping something stuck, or at least slithered down to the floor with suitably blood-curdling menace. I know that computer game graphics can effectively show us anything in extreme detail now – that’s not enough for me anymore, particularly in terms of a horror game. A grotesque distortion of a human body is not a pleasant sight, sure, but without some kind of context – who this is, what do they mean to you, why did the evil Photoshop man do that to poor Lara Croft’s neck – it can wind up not meaning much more than a big pile of hitpoints.

Which is exactly what happened at multiple junctures during my time with EW2 – a wearying barrage of Things To Be Frightened Of and little done to make the situation mean anything more than ‘don’t let your character get killed.’ Contrast this with the recent Resident Evil 7 (the latest instalment of a series created by original Evil Within lead Shinji Mikami), which worked hard to give its major enemies definable personalities, motivations beyond slaughtering you and, ultimately, tragic backstories.

Clearly, it’s only fair to give EW2 a chance to put weight behind its monsters, and not judge this side of it on the opening hour alone. But there’s a big difference between feeling very clearly that I was in a place with actual but corrupted human beings behaving in appropriately unpredictable ways, as I did in RE7, and feeling that I was in a scripted playground full of pop-up things that go bump in the night, as was my initial response to EW2’s assorted nasties. Sacks of hitpoints or pillars of graphics I just had to run from until I passed a certain scripted threshold: a fear more of having to repeat myself if I failed than of their grotesquery.

Even an Evil Within 2 sequence that made Adam deeply uncomfortable, in which a monsterised woman force-feeds sickening viscera to a helpless captive, came across to me like more desperate capering for attention. It’s icky alright, but what does it matter? Who were these people? What were they to me? Well, one of them has to be shot three times and then it’s on to the next house, and the next monster.

Maybe more thoughtful writing and especially acting could have put more meat on those bones – that this has thus far been Generic Videogame Man offering endless gruff, one-note variations on “what the hell was that?” and “where is my daughter?” certainly didn’t help. It’s pretty clear, despite only passing familiarity with EW1’s tale, that All Is Not What It Seems in terms of what the player-character perceives as reality, but he doesn’t sell it. I did not care about the raspy-voiced man or his missing daughter, whose only personality appeared to be Missing Daughter. Of course, one doesn’t exactly look to b-movies for nuance either, but equally I wouldn’t sit through a 12 hour (n.b. I’m guessing entirely at EW2’s length here) b-movie for precisely that reason.

Then I stumbled off the beaten track, and found what could be, if handled with consistent verve, EW2’s redemptive masterstroke. If I’m reading it right from that hour, it’s not one 12 hour b-movie, but rather a confetti-scattering of capsule b-movies, to be discovered and experienced in an order of your choosing. I.e. “Today I’m going to go over there into that part of town or that house or that sinister basement hatch and have a mini, semi-self-contained Resident Evily experience for 45 minutes.” That I am absolutely down for.

For context: I played EW2 at an event attended by around a dozen other assorted media, and, once we’d all emerged from the opening monster-monster-monster sections, whenever I glanced over to someone else’s monitor, they were doing something very different to me, in a very different place to me. They wandered in different directions and explored different houses: as simple as that, and yet an oddly rare proposition in the survival horror pantheon, which tends to push one in specific directions.

Specific directions are available if one wants to stick close to the EW2 core plot, but as well as missing out on its clutch of side missions and hidden dungeons, you’ll miss out on a whole bunch of weaponry and other upgrades. In that, it’s a bit like a Far Cry – combing the environment for goodies before you tool up and tackle the big bads. I didn’t get the sense that EW2’s town was as large as a Far Cry, but a) I could be wrong and b) I’m not sure it needs to be, as each location is, hopefully, a little timesink of its own.

This is a game about poking your nose into the next house you stumble past and finding out what’s in there. Of course, usually it’s a few monsters – most of which are zombies by any other name – and a few boxes of ammo or skill upgrade thingers to find, but even then there is the satisfaction of clearing out/surviving a house, a sense of completionism that finishing a level and sitting through the next cutscene can’t provide.

Sometimes though, as it was for me, a house is not just a house – it’s effectively a portal to another world. I used a PC in one and found myself transported to The Armoury, a clearly faraway (or really real?) place of some military function, a maze of oppressive corridors and industrial doors with weird waveform-hacking security and, yes, not-zombies lurching at me from darkened corners.

On its own, not necessarily novel, but again there was that sense of diving off somewhere I hadn’t expected to find, tussling with the evils within it and then leaving it with a sense of completion. I survived The Armoury! I could have run right on past that house to the next and I’d never have seen it, never have known what The Armoury was. The demo ended a little later with – what else? – a giant pop-up monster accosting me unexpectedly as I crept through the streets, and I was left frustrated.

Not from any urge to know how Gruff McGruff-Face survived that encounter, if he ever found Missing Daughter again or if this was all a twisted fantasy of some kind, but simply because I wanted to know what I’d find in the next house if I sprinted off to the East or West or North or South. Because I wanted to play through another little b-movie of my own.

I will accept the game as whole’s apparent absence of wit and over-reliance on Oh No Yet Another Horrible Thing if it really is the case that I can burn through my own private hell for kicks over a lunchtime. I’m not interested in repeatedly screaming at things made of bones and sundered flesh and teeth and spikes all put together in the wrong order, but I am interested in trotting off to a random compass point and surviving whatever horrors lurk behind the next door I choose to open.

The Evil Within 2 is due for release on Friday, October 13.

 

[Master]

TEW was a cool little game. Most modern games (virtually everything from RE4 on) that are supposedly survival horror are actually just horror shooters, where there is no chance of running out of ammo or health if you just gun things down well. TEW1 actually forced you to stealth a lot, and you could pretty much beat the majority of the game without even being seen or wasting ammo if you were good enough. Reminds me a lot of System Shock 2 with the wrench on impossible now that I think about it. Fuck the plot/setting/grindhouse intro though.

Hopefully they don't fuck up the PC port this time.

RE4 wasnt horror sure, but it was survival. It was basically survival shooter. And more than SS2 with the wrench which doesnt waste ammo and doesnt degrade. But only for that build, otherwise SS2 trumps it.

 

[Average Manatee]

RE4 wasnt horror sure, but it was survival. It was basically survival shooter. And more than SS2 with the wrench which doesnt waste ammo and doesnt degrade. But only for that build, otherwise SS2 trumps it.

Any game with significant enemy drop rates is not survival because if you are incentivized to farm things for their drops you're just playing a more elaborate Diablo (1 in RE4's case, since enemies aren't unlimited). In RE4 when a dozen enemies come at you and you are given the chance to run, you fight them because they drop stuff and you need that stuff for upgrades. In SS2 evading enemies is always superior to any resource expenditure because killing something is almost always a poor ROI. Note that in RE games previous to 4, enemies usually didn't drop resources. Enemies were an obstacle to getting resources that were scattered across various rooms, much like SS2.

SS2's melee wastes health fairly often by the midgame, assuming you aren't either godlike or a savescummer. A melee weapon that requires lots of skill to use with significant risk has precedent all the way back in RE1. RE4 has its own knife and you can pretty much win the game using it alone, it just drowns you in so many resources that you never even need to try it.

TEW was a bit different in that enemies fairly consistently dropped goo, but didn't consistently drop enough ammo to kill them. This meant you were incentivized to kill them but never got into the positive feed back loop of kill enemy->get more ammo than you used to kill them -> kill even more enemies, instead you had to use the environment/stealth/weapon combo tricks to kill as many as possible without spending ammo, and when the game threw you into a situation where dozens of enemies streamed in at you, you had good reason to run away because standing and fighting was just wasteful.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

This game actually manages to be even more lame ass than TEW1.

 

[Master]

Hm. It seems you have a knife the whole time in RE4. Somehow i never figured that out and never used it. Shit, i thought the japanese were being hardcore. I guess theyre as popamole as everyone else.

 

[Ash]

In SS2 evading enemies is always superior to any resource expenditure because killing something is almost always a poor ROI

Not true. You kill dudes so you can loot the area thoroughly unhindered. That + enemy drops = very good ROI. Not to mention you research their guts afterwards to further reduce the invested costs in clearing an area.

 

[Average Manatee]

Not true. You kill dudes so you can loot the area thoroughly unhindered.

Obviously, that's the point. You kill enemies (net negative) when you have to in order to get something of value (net positive). But if you are just randomly walking back and forth to handle the plot and see two rumblers with no reason to fight them, you don't think "great, more loot for me", you avoid them. On the contrary when you come across the same in RE4, you kill them and get thousands of cash. As far as I'm concerned if the game mechanics are designed around the player looking for a fight then it's not a survival game any more than DOOM is.

That + enemy drops = very good ROI. Not to mention you research their guts afterwards to further reduce the invested costs in clearing an area.

Enemy drops are pretty much non-existent on impossible difficulty, which is what I'm referring to. For shotgun hybrids your drop rates are like a 5% chance for 5 nanites, meaning you'd have to kill an average of 40 of them to afford a single medbay heal (which, on impossible, is worth about 2 or 3 hits from an enemy). At least they drop 1 shotgun bullet though, which makes them by far the closest to "farmable" of the enemy types.

Of course, you'll research any organs dropped. I'm not saying you avoid everything, just that if you have the option it's generally a good idea.

 

[Ash]

Yeah, fair point.

 

[Master]

You can also recycle their shotguns for how much was it. Enough to modify your guns a couple of times. Then you can farm some more.

 

[Average Manatee]

You can also recycle their shotguns for how much was it. Enough to modify your guns a couple of times. Then you can farm some more.

Can't recycle weapons in SS2. But you're right about the recycler changing things, if you recycle the shotgun ammo then that's a guaranteed 1 nanite per shotgun hybrid. Only 80 to buy a single psi hypo (assuming replicator discount OS)! But then you have to farm them with the wrench rather than the shotgun.

 

[Master]

Huh? Im fairly sure you can. I did play with some mods though.

 

[Beastro]

6. Explore at your own pace…

8. It’s a race against time

I know this could describe most any game, but to see that in a hype article....

 

[Multidirectional]

Hm. It seems you have a knife the whole time in RE4. Somehow i never figured that out and never used it. Shit, i thought the japanese were being hardcore. I guess theyre as popamole as everyone else.

Yeah that knife is really OP. Particularly against barrels and crates.

 

[Edward The Mediocre]

And setting up context sensitive attacks, which gave even you more time knife them. This was probably the main reason The Evil Within punch attack only stuns and even then not consistently.

 

[Master]

Hm. It seems you have a knife the whole time in RE4. Somehow i never figured that out and never used it. Shit, i thought the japanese were being hardcore. I guess theyre as popamole as everyone else.

Yeah that knife is really OP. Particularly against barrels and crates.

Yes without it you have to shoot the crates. But that wastes ammo, which you dont have, because you dont have the knife, and have to shoot the zombies.

 

[Multidirectional]

Yes without it you have to shoot the crates. But that wastes ammo, which you dont have, because you dont have the knife, and have to shoot the zombies.

If you really think it's such a useful thing in a fight then go ahead and try knife only run. Because to me it never felt any good or any fun to use.

 

[Master]

I dont know how it is but a couple of times i didnt shoot the crates because of low ammo. With the knife there wouldnt be that dilemma should i shoot the crate or the zombie. It did seem stupid how he couldnt smash them but i thought it was so you could have these little dilemmas and how Leon was a simple man who takes a direct approach to things.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yes without it you have to shoot the crates. But that wastes ammo, which you dont have, because you dont have the knife, and have to shoot the zombies.

If you really think it's such a useful thing in a fight then go ahead and try knife only run. Because to me it never felt any good or any fun to use.

It's actually pretty trivial when you figure out the AI patterns. You can bait them into swinging early by running at them and stopping short, then you just smack their knee and start the QTE. But even if you aren't cheesing the knife is great for finishing off grounded enemies.