Welcome to the final part of Interactive Friction plays A Way Out. This is the final part of our playthrough of the game, and one of the better parts of the game. Or at least, one of the most interesting parts of it.

If you want to watch content like this as it is recorded live, be sure to follow my Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

At the time of recording, we had yet to start our run of Detroit: Become Human, which is why we talk about it as if it’s not out yet. (It wasn’t.)

It seems also silly to have this really personal story about two guys escaping jail and taking revenge on someone who wronged them both end in a third-person shooter co-op campaign. It’s lower-budget, but the idea is the same.

While I really like the scene where we confront Harvey, it’s one of the most cliche scenes in a game full of them. That’s the main problem with A Way Out. All of these scenes are well made, but I’ve seen most, if not all of this before in other movies and/or games.

And if it was more than just “another movie-like game”, then the ending might have more impact if I had some attachment to either Vincent or Leo. The twist is executed well, but it hinges on drumming up emotions that I just didn’t have towards the protagonists. I wish I had more to say than that, but there’s just nothing to work with.

Good game, but I wish there was more meat to sink my teeth into.

And so we being the second of Dishonored’s story-based DLCs: The Brigmore Witches.

Unlike the previous DLC, we weren’t able to finish the whole thing in a single session. The plan will be to finish the last mission and then transition into Dishonored 2 if there is time remaining.

If you wish to see content like this, be sure to follow me on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

What I find most interesting about the Brigmore Witches is the way it experimented with new gameplay concepts in Dishonored, and remixed a few old ones together.

The return to Coolridge is a intriguing from both a lore standpoint and a gameplay one. It’s always fun to see how a game designer can reuse old assets in new ways, and this was no exception. Further, it’s a complete inverse on the first mission in the base game. Where Corvo had to break out of prison, Daud needs to break in to rescue somebody. And as the stream audience pointed out, Dishonored is clever in the way it uses randomization to make sure that players still need to go through the motions, even on repeat runs. They can’t have magical foreknowledge of safe combinations or objective locations.

On top of that, we even see an (optional) return of the social stealth mechanic from Lady Boyle’s Last Party. It’s limited, and there are a lot of ways to break cover, but it feels good to hide in plain sight as I did in this mission.

As for the next mission, the most obvious mechanic being toyed with is conflict between multiple warring factions. We’ll see another twist on this core mechanic in Dishonored 2, but here it feels very much like they were testing the waters. They start with both factions hostile to Daud, but also each other. The player can use the tension between them to take care of guards without actually staining their own hands in blood. Then, once the Dead Eels become neutral to Daud, they feel the freedom of being able to navigate a space without being accosted by guards.

In terms of upgrades to the toolkit, this is where Corrupted Charms, that offer a positive and a negative effect, were first introduced. I have mixed feelings on them. While I like to make interesting trade-offs, Dishonored is a stealth game at its core. Therefore, it seems strange to take on effects that hinder the player’s ability to sneak around. Meanwhile, since combat is to be avoided, most players will ignore any adverse conditions that effect fighting prowess. It’s doesn’t matter if I take more health damage per hit, I shouldn’t even be getting hit in the first place.

The stun mines also start to finally give non-lethal players some utility in what they can do. They didn’t go far enough in The Brigmore Witches, but just starting to experiment with more non-lethal options opened the door for Dishonored 2 to refine a lot of what was introduced in both Brigmore Witches and Knife of Dunwall. It’ll be excited to speak more on that once we get to it.

Interactive Friction returns with the second part of our three part series on A Way Out.

We successfully found A Way Out of jail. And now, we’re in another predicament. With Harvey and the police after us, we need to evade our pursuers and get revenge. Will we find A Way Out of this? Or will the Oscars defeat us once and for all?

If you wish to see content like this recorded live, be sure to tune in to my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud.

First off, I did not realize how offensive the “Reeeeeee” meme is when I recorded this stream. Now that I know, you won’t be seeing me doing it again.

Second, you can find the Far Cry 5 article I mentioned here.

Whether this is good or bad is hard to say, but the most striking part of this game is how much fun I’m having when I ignore the story and wander about looking for things to interact with. We didn’t do absolutely everything we could in these scenes, but we definitely had our fair share of fun.

It’s a shame that whenever the main story becomes the focus, the game gets noticeably weaker. It’s not to say that they’re telling a bad story by any means. The problem is that it does nothing to stand out from the other jailbreak stories that exist elsewhere. Neither does it stand out much as a co-op game. While there are strong elements in both the beginning and ending of the game that leverage the split-screen co-op gameplay, the whole middle part we play here is… okay.

Sam and I have the problem where almost as soon as we see the setup we know instantly how its going to go beat-for-beat. It happens more than a few times in this video alone. Despite the cries of “Fuck the Oscars”, it’s clear that Josef Fares still has a love for cinema, and the tropes common of this genre of film.

It’s disappointing in a way, but what’s here is still really good.

Now that we’ve finished vanilla Dishonored, it’s time to keep going with the DLC. Starting with The Knife of Dunwall, the developers at Arkane started making a ton of improvements to the core game that had a huge impact of the end-user experience.

Remember, if you wish to watch these get recorded live, you should subscribe to my Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

The most immediate change was to Blink. Unlike Corvo, Daud has the ability to stop time and precisely aim where he lands. This might sound minor, but it makes it a lot easier to perform some of the trickiest maneuvers. Where Corvo has to carefully time his blinks while in the air, Daud can simply hold still, cease gravity’s pull, and accurately jump to his destination. This change was so welcome that it became part of Corvo’s arsenal in Dishonored 2.

And though the performances often fall flat, the addition of voice acting did much to solve the problem where the player character’s silence felt uncanny. In also helps to have Billy Lurk serve both as an assistance and a soundboard for Daud to play off of.

This is also where Dishonored starts to experiment with more non-lethal tools. The staff at Arkane seemed nervous about making non-lethal tools function similarly to lethal tools, but it was a start. Even in this run, we found more than a few uses of Chokedust both defensively, to retreat, and offensively, as cover to safely knock out enemies mid-combat. If memory serves, Brigmore Witches would further expand on the potential for non-lethal play.

Which is why we’ll continue with that next time.

It’s been really fun to play Dishonored on stream, for all the people who joined in. In this last session, we were able to finish the Campaign in Low Chaos.

Remember, if you want to see this content as it’s being recorded live, be sure to follow my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud. The next time I have a variety stream slot open, I’ll continue with the Dishonored DLC (Knife of Dunwall/Brigmore Riches).

Credit to both IGN and AARONMACKENZIE for their videos on the High Chaos run of the game. It made it easier to talk about them with a visual handy.

While I adore the original Dishonored game, and believe it serves as an excellent start to the franchise. This is where the core gameplay was established, going back to the sandbox 0451 games of old.

That said, there was a ton of room for improvement. While the idea of non-lethal gameplay helped add to the idea of players choosing their own path, the implementation left a lot to be desired. There weren’t many options for non-lethal players in terms on interesting gameplay since most of the equipment and power set was designed for lethality. Devouring Swarm, Windblast, Springrazors, Grenades, and Pistols were all practically useless for a non-lethal run. And the non-lethal takedowns for assassination targets, while appreciated, felt like a last minute addition most of the time (because they were).

I wrote some words about the chaos system way back when, and while my old writing leaves a lot to be desired, I stand by the sentiments expressed in that article.

As we delve further into the franchise, I look forward to exploring the many changes and additions made during each game, and how they addressed some of these problems.

Welcome to a new chapter in Interactive Friction. Sam and I are glad to get back to playing games, but the sad fact is neither one of us has enough time to produce the highly edited content you guys are used to from us. For that reason, we’ve decided to transition to the more accessible territory of streaming, much like my Dishonored LP.

To that end, here is the first of our VODs from our 3 sessions on A Way Out. If you want to see more content like this live, as it happens, by sure to subscribe to my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud.

Apologies for Sam’s audio early on. After about 10 minutes, he eventually recognizes and fixes the problem.

The Detroit VOD I was talking about early can be found here.

I think Sam made an interesting point in comparing this camera work to the “single shot” camera in the new God of War. That said, I hesitate when he makes the claim that it will/should be the “future” of gaming. Not only is that a lot of work to get that working right, but there are benefits to having those discreet stopping point that the single shot composition lacked in God of War. The camera is a large part of why that game’s story just keeps “going on”.

As a student of film himself, I’m also intrigued by Sam’s jealously of the video game camera. It’s easy to understand that since the camera isn’t a physical object, but rather a point of origin for where to draw the scene, that you can “get away” with shots are completely impossible in real world space. However, I’ve never really thought too much about it until Sam pointed it out here. That’s not to say that game directors have it any easier or harder than film directors, but that a different set of considerations and skills are required.

Lastly, at the time of this recording, Detroit: Become Human had not been released. Considering how well it sold, I doubt any of the comments we made about David Cage and his games will matter at all. (Not like they would have if the game sold poorly, but y’know what I mean.)

We’ll work to get the remaining 2 sessions on YouTube whenever we can. Given Sam’s schedule and E3 going on now, that’s unlikely to happen soon.

Those of you who have been following my streams know that I’ve been busy recording A Way Out with Sam.

With that out of the way, I returned, at least briefly, to my run of Dishonored.

One of the big topics that came up in the middle of the recording was the really strange, casual sexism that does exist within the game. Some of it is less overt, like the fact that all the female characters are in some subservient role. Most of background ladies are either brothel workers or maids in some capacity. Stuff like this is hard to notice unless you’re aware of the issue and are actively looking for it.

The first obvious example is the one where Piero spies on Callista taking a bath. This is my fifth run through Dishonored 1. As much as I love this game, I still have no idea what the underlying purpose of this scene is. It never comes up again and the player doesn’t really get a chance to call him on how disgusting that behavior is. To top it off, if they want to be nice to Sokolov, then he demands money from them immediately after being caught peeping through a lock.

Then there’s Lady Boyle’s low-chaos, non-lethal takedown. Rather than kill her, you can knock her out and hand her to her creepy stalker, who promises that she will be neither seen nor heard from ever again. While it’s not outright stated, the game heavily implies that she’ll become his sex slave.

None of the non-lethal takedowns, aside from Daud later on, are particularly forgiving. Most of them involve some sense of karmic justice. The High Overseer, who abused his authority over Dunwall’s central religion, gets forever ostracized from said institution. The Pendleton brothers, who abuse the lower class and treat their workers as expendable fodder, are punished by being forced to work their own silver mines with their heads shaved and their tongues cut out. It’s brutal, but you see the logic behind these punishments.

With Lady Boyle, her crime was funding the Lord Regent’s forces. Some of the ambient conversation in the middle of the mission implies she may not necessarily agree with him. but is funding him out of a genuine sense of affection. Obviously, her funding is allowing him to destroy the underclass, but the punishment from the non-lethal option doesn’t fit the karmic justice angle that the other targets face. It’s sadistic in a different way, one that even in my less aware, younger days, I saw as problematic.

What’s really strange about all of this is that it seems quite likely that all of this casual sexism is just the result of a massive oversight. Once critics called Arcane on it, every other Dishonored game took steps to address these problems, putting female characters in positions of authority in the world on Dunwall. Harvey Smith even apologized for these mistakes.

Hopefully I’m able to get to those other games, because I do want to talk more about how successful Arcane was in fixing this.

I’ve been wanting to play Dishonored for an LP ever since I completed the Hitman Let’s Play series, but I was struggling to find time to do it.

Then in walked streaming into my life, and suddenly what would’ve been a huge commitment is now much easier on my time.

The idea for this run to be more “improvisational” than I usually am when playing Dishonored or any immersive sim. When I play for myself, I tend to save scum. If something goes wrong, I’ll glad boot up an old save and do it again. And since I’m constantly on the Quick Save key, I’m rarely thrown back too far.

Since so many of the great stories from this genre are born from screwing up and adapting in the face of adversity, I want to force myself to roll with the punches. Since nobody enjoys watching someone else save scum, doing this on stream will force me to break the habit.

It’s also nice to have a presence to bounce ideas off of while playing the game. Knowing someone is watching makes it easier to roll with my train of thought and communicate my ideas.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. If you want to watch this live whenever I next record, be sure to follow my Twitch channel.

Okay, video content is simply hard to produce on a consistent basis. Editing videos takes time, and doesn’t allow for much interaction.

Streaming is comparatively easy, allows for audience participation, and automatically saves a video of the event. This makes it a lot easier both for me to make content for you, and for you to have your voice heard.
My friends David Phillips and Andre Doucet joined me to play the demo for Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human. Here is the result:

Because of the games he produces and his presentation, it is easy to focus on and make fun of David Cage, especially in light of recent events. In the stream, even we fall victim to this trap. However, it is important to note that script aside, there is clearly a level of talent at Quantic Dream that shows in the environment, modeling, and detail that goes into the production of Detroit. These are high-quality assets in play, and the motion capture/actor performance is top notch.

And despite Andre’s (legitimate) gripe that Cage’s script doesn’t make effective use of the setting, the scene is executed well. I’ve seen people on Twitter talk about how playing this demo sold them on the game, largely on the strength of this scene. To be fair to those people, who don’t have prior experience with Quantic Dream, this is a very powerful scene. Sure, it’s cliche. But in that cliche, David Cage offers more than enough to hook his audience in.

The reason my friend David, Andre, and I approach this demo with such cynicism is because we all have experience with David Cage games. The thing Cage excels at is writing individual scenes. Barring some of the questionable positions he’s written his female characters into over the years, individual scenes are always strong on their own. In particular, the opening of Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy stands out as some of his best work.

But once he’s asked to tie them together into something coherent, or to cash in on all the hooks and lingering plot threads he’s established over the course of a story, they almost always come crashing down in a fantastic display. I won’t speak for Andre or David, but a scene like this, as impressive as it is, only puts me on guard. Whatever potential that exists here is likely to be squandered later.

This has only become more clear as other studios enter the space of “narrative-heavy adventure” games, like Telltale and Hazelight (the makers of A Way Out), often with lower budgets, they show a mastery of the medium that Cage seems to lack. They understand how interactivity impacts the end-user experience, often producing content of a better narrative-quality (even if it lacks the visual polish of Cage’s recent work).

Maybe this will be Cage’s best work to date. Maybe this will be the one that finally breaks the curse, but I doubt it.

I make no secret of the fact that Ubisoft and I have an on-again, off-again relationship. Every now and then they create a game like Assassin’s Creed: Origins, that I can easily sink 50+ hours into without thinking — sure, it may have its flaws, but there’s clearly a level of love and care imbued into the final product. Other times, they are liable to produce content like Watch_Dogs, which paints itself as a typical, by-the-numbers open-world revenge story that left me sour and disappointed. From my previous experiences with 3, 4, and Primal, I was expecting the fifth entry in the Far Cry franchise to be dumb but otherwise milquetoast: A decent open-world shooter with a story that brought up some interesting ideas that ultimately go nowhere.
Instead, what I received was one of the worst stories I had ever seen in an Ubisoft game. Even more than the villainous Aiden Pearce in Watch_Dogs, Far Cry 5 left me contemptuous and ultimately resentful of the direction the developers chose to go. There are some very dangerous implications behind the story, particularly the ending, and they need to be discussed. (Though it goes without saying, there are spoilers abound, so read at your own risk.)

For those of you who haven’t finished the game, Far Cry 5 takes place in the fictional county of Hope, Montana, where a cult of doomsday-preppers has set up the mysterious ‘Project at Eden’s Gate’, led by Joseph “The Father” Seed. After a video documenting recent abductions and a string of violent incidents involving cult members goes viral, , a warrant is served for Joseph Seed’s arrest. The player assumes the role of ‘Rook’, a nameless, faceless deputy in Hope County, assisting the local sheriff and a US Marshall in executing the warrant.
Unfortunately for the player and their fellows in law enforcement, this event was exactly what the cultists were waiting for. Preaching that “God will not let you take me!”, Seed raves that attempting to arrest him is the “breaking of the First Seal” that sets in motion the end of the world as we know it. After the arrest attempt inevitably goes south, the deputy is rescued by a man named Dutch. Dutch claims that if the player wants to confront The Father, they will first need build up a resistance force by causing enough havoc to draw out and kill his three lieutenants, referred to as “The Family”.
Three dead commanders later, Joseph Seed invites Deputy No-Name to join him at the church where they first tried to haul him in. There, he reveals that he has used a previously-established magical substance known as “Bliss” to brainwash the resistance forces the player has gathered throughout the campaign, compelling them to hold the other three law enforcement officers who came with the player at gunpoint. He offers to let them and the player go if they promise to leave immediately and cease their efforts to imprison him, which the player can choose to do. If they instead make the only logical choice to fight on, the deputy rains a hail of bullets on their former allies so that they can revive them, turning them good again in one of the dumbest final boss segments I have ever played in a first-person shooter. Then, and only then, can The Father finally be defeated…
…or not. After the fight, Seed laments that “The Final Seal has been broken” — and then a nuclear bomb goes off in the background. Yes, really. To which the whole cast hops into a truck and evacuates to Dutch’s bomb shelter from the beginning of the game. Once again, things go poorly, and the player wakes up inside the aforementioned shelter to find themselves cuffed to a bedpost. Lying dead in a pool of his own blood is Dutch himself, with Seed watching over him, cleaning the knife that delivered the fatal blow. As the player awakens, they are confronted at knife-point. Blaming them for “breaking the seals and unleashing hell on earth,” the former Father says that were it not for the fact that no one else is left, he would gladly kill the player for what they’ve done. Then, credits roll. If you return to the main menu afterwards, the previously idyllic intro screen has been transformed into a nuclear hellscape.
At the time I finished the game, I had assumed that The Father was the one that called down the bomb that devastated Hope County. I believed that he detonated them out of spite, blaming me for the consequences of his own actions. While this annoyed me, it’s par for the course when it comes to video games pretentiously spouting fatalistic pseudo-philosophy in the hopes of sounding intellectual. However, a friend of mine mentioned that if one were to listen to radio broadcasts while driving in-game, there are talks of escalating global tensions leading to potential nuclear war. As it turns out, a foreign country had opened hostilities against the US at the exact time that the player defeated Joseph Seed.
This might be dismissed as coincidence, if it weren’t for the rest of Far Cry 5 itself. According to the rantings of both Joseph Seed and his Heralds, after smothering his just-born daughter (whose birth killed the mother), Joseph had a vision from god. He saw that once he was apprehended, bound against his will, the world as we know it would come an end, drenched in fire. Several events would precede this moment. The ones who would eventually bind him would fail their first attempt. They would then proceed to assassinate those closest to Seed, reject his charity, and only then would they finally emerge victorious, triggering the great calamity. Believing this to be inevitable, he created the Project at Eden’s Gate to safeguard enough people that the human race could live on.
His insane, absurdly specific prophecy about the end of the world, unlike the rantings of every doomsayer before him, is one-hundred percent unequivocally correct. And considering just how accurate every single detail of this account is, it would be absolutely mad to blame sheer happenstance. That, more than anything else in this entire story, is a problem.
Similar beliefs exist in modern America to a much greater scale than you might initially think. Even outside of relatively modern doomsday cultsthroughout the world, the idea that the end times are upon us is more accepted than it should be. Roughly 50 million people in Americabelieve that they will be “raptured” away any moment now: That Christ will descend upon Israel and take the true believers with him to the gates of Heaven, leading to the literal End of Days. Some of the people in that group are very prominent politicians, many of them still in office today. Much of US foreign policy (particularly revolving around Israel), climate change policy, and other policies, are subtly or not-so-subtly influenced by the idea that we are living in the end times. Why bother tackling global warming when we know we humans aren’t going to be around to feel its effects? Why should we attempt to bring peace to a region of strife when we fundamentally believe that very conflict is itself a sign that heaven is not too far away? Actual people who hold power over these crucial decisions go in with these thoughts.
I can’t claim to know the minds and hearts of Far Cry 5’s creative team. I wasn’t in the writing’s cubicle, where these decisions were being made. I can only speak to the content of the game they created. That said, to present Father Joseph Seed as “correct” in his prophecy is to give credence to these voices. Ubisoft and the dev team have chosen to validate those who abdicate responsibility to work towards a better world in faith that there will soon no longer be a world to improve. As Waypoint’s Cameron Kunzelman pointed out in an editorial, there is no counterpoint to the cult’s ravings: The protagonist is silent, and the resistance forces are too focused on removing the cult’s power base to talk about what they’ve done to the people of Hope County. The doomsayers are given even more power to spread their message in this game than they have in real life.
Even more aggravating is how the game treats the player for daring to oppose the rabid, murderous cult. Throughout the game, the Heralds all admonish Deputy No-Name for their violence. In my run, I had dismissed this as just another one of the franchises laughable attempts to address the nature of violent video games, much like Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 before now. I distinctly remember shouting at my television “I wouldn’t keep killing you if you didn’t insist on shooting me on sight” during one of these speeches. It’s annoying, but vanilla.
But it’s tough to think of it in the same way given the full context of the game. After all, in this specific story, the cult is confirmed to be one-hundred percent correct about the coming of the end times. It makes sense for them to take hold of all the resources of this area, since they know that they’ll need them to survive once the bombs fall. Of course they’d try to recruit everyone they can, even if it has to be through torture, drugs, and brainwashing. They’re just ‘mercifully’ trying to save them from their impending fate. Since the end is coming, and not everyone can be saved, they simply don’t have time to take less drastic measures. If only this player could understand how their selfish heroism is damning people who were otherwise going to survive.
Proving that the cult’s prophecy was true, and that the world does end once those conditions are met, Far Cry 5 retroactively justifies every sadistic action performed by the Project at Eden’s Gate. Conversely, it criticizes not just the player, but anyone who would condemn such actions, even in the real world. If you reading this are someone who actively works to protect people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and/or women from the many threats to their well-being, Far Cry 5 wants you to know that you might be wrong for doing so. After all, the crazies might be right. Your gay friends might actually be going to hell for loving another person of the same gender. Who are you to get in the way of their salvation?
These aren’t questions that deserve to be asked. This is not a political platform that should be up for debate. These beliefs genuinely harm people of all stripes across the world, and very a tacit acceptance of them is not something I can take lightly. I felt uncomfortable just writing the above two paragraphs because I’m genuinely afraid someone might take that as praise for the game, excited that it’s worldview aligns with their own. As a cisgender white male, I can’t speak to the level of damage these ideas can cause, but I know that harm has been, is being, and will be done, and this game might further that.
As previously stated, I found it hard to believe Ubisoft intended this to be the underlying moral of Far Cry 5, given my long and storied history with them. That said, there was a whole team of writers who worked on this game. They should be able to think through the logical implications behind their own script. The creative leads for this project presented a statement in support of doomsday cults and against people who were earnestly fight to safeguard their fellows from those who would openly oppress them, whether or not they intended to. (And I honestly don’t care which.) I expected Far Cry 5 to have nothing of substance to say. What I did not expect was to be left quaking in anger and disbelief at the choices made in creating this game. Taken holistically, Far Cry 5 is one of the most damnable games to be released in recent history.
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