Vanquish

Rocket sliding into cover and vaulting over in slow-mo to gun down foes never looked or felt as good as it did in Vanquish. But even at roughly six hours for the main campaign, it just simply ended following the battle with Bogey Alpha and Bravo. No final battle with Victor Zaitsev, who subsequently escapes and destroys Providence. Even US president Elizabeth Winters, who sought to destroy Moscow with Providence’s microwave transmitter, simply kills herself. At least Sam and Elena survived so that’s nice.

DLC Required

Remember how Frank West valiantly sacrificed himself at the end of Dead Rising 4 so that Vicky and Brad could escape? Yeah, that’s not the “true” ending. Purchasing the Frank Rising DLC reveals that West actually became a zombie, got better and then maybe escaped (or not, depending on your choices). Unfortunately this wouldn’t be the first time that a game’s “true” ending would be gated behind DLC – see Asura’s Wrath, also conveniently published by Capcom.

Today, we got the very long awaited next entry in the shooter franchise, Half-Life: Alyx. It wasn’t the return many thought they’d see (and to be fair, most people had probably long given up hope of seeing any type of return), but it’s a solid affair all the same. But what exactly happened to the franchise to put it on ice for so long, and not just that, but leave us with a massive cliffhanger in Half-Life 2: Episode 2? Well, a part of that mystery was unveiled today.

In an interview with IGN, Level Designer Dario Casali explained what happened. The simple crux of things is that it all became bigger than they expected. Part of the reason of doing the episode format was to create smaller, bite-sized continuations of the narrative. But the ambition of the episodes got out of hand, as they added more and more, and in the end they decided the overall project was going farther than originally intended, especially as more crew had to be brought in to finish things.

“After working on Half-Life 2 for six years we decided we didn’t want to go dark for so long. That’s why we started doing the episodes where we thought, ‘well, we have the stable technology now. We understand the characters, we understand the story, we have most of the mechanics. Let’s just bite off little chunks and then release more often. We think players are going to prefer that from waiting six years and going through however many delays we went through.”

“We found ourselves creeping ever forward towards, ‘Well, let’s just keeping putting more and more, and more, and more stuff in this game because we want to make it as good as we can,’” he continued, “and then we realized these episodes are turning more into sequels.”

While many people assumed that the biggest reason the games were put on ice was Valve’s continued building of the Steam storefront, it seems that was only part of the reason, and that the whole thing grew well above what it was intended to be. It makes sense, considering Half-Life has always been an ambitious series that has utilized new tech, such as Half-Life: Alyx does with VR. So will we ever see a Half-Life 3 keeping this in mind? Well, only time will tell.

RAGE 2

For all intents and purposes, RAGE 2’s story is stupidly simple. You meet the members of Project Dagger, fight General Cross and corrupt him with a virus that prevents more of his clones being made. The virus happens to be lethal to Walker, the protagonist, as well. But lo and behold, his friend Lily saves him, there’s a rendezvous with the Project Dagger members again and…that’s it. It’s not a terrible cliffhanger like RAGE 1 but that’s not saying much.

It goes without saying, but owing to this feature’s nature, there will be major spoilers ahead for every game we speak about. So if you see us beginning to talk about a game you’d rather not have spoiled for you, go ahead and skip to the next entry.

PERSONA 3

Persona 3’s ending is an unpleasant one in a slightly different way- while we do end up managing to beat the larger threat and save the world and all that, it ends up extracting a heavy toll. The main protagonist ends up sacrificing himself to keep Nyx sealed away. It’s a much more personal loss, and sure, in the grand scheme of things the good outweighs the bad- but it still hits you like a ton of bricks.

Back to the Drawing Board

Even with its legendary status, it took a long while for Half Life to reach that point. In 1997, as per the Valve Timeline in the Valve Employee Handbook, internal reviews on the game said that Half Life wasn’t good enough to ship. Which isn’t out of the ordinary for games but it also said that the Half Life team went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. Talk about an urge for perfection.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Oracle “Dies” – Batman: Arkham City

So technically Barbara Gordon aka Oracle didn’t die – it was actually Scarecrow’s Fear Toxin fooling Batman into thinking such. However, the Dark Knight didn’t know this at the time. To him, Barbara inhaled a ton of Fear Toxin and shot herself to avoid whatever monstrosity she saw Batman as. To Rocksteady’s credit, even if we didn’t notice the gas present on Batman’s side, we would’ve sworn that this was the end of Oracle.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Rikiya’s Sacrifice – Yakuza 3

The very premise of Yakuza 3 – where Kiryu Kazuma is trying to prevent his orphanage from being destroyed – is sad enough. However, when Rikiya sacrifices himself to save Kiryu from a bullet, so many major emotional developments come to a head. Rikiya considered Kiryu to be his brother and his death caused the latter to cry for the very first time. Knowing Kiryu and the nonsense he’s been through, that’s saying something.