Snap you should know better. I play as a male 90 percent of the time. He is often named Toront or Max, but I do break it up from time to time.
But I DIDN'T know better... or at least, I didn't recall any details that would say otherwise.
Bloodborne was the only game (in recent memory) where I went out of my way to make and play female characters..... except I purposefully did it split 50/50 between male and female. My first character was physically modeled after me, male (of course), then the second was female, then the next male, then female, then male, and so on. All told, I made 8 different characters (though I had to recreate them all at least once, so I MADE upwards of 20-30 characters), each playing differently, each looking differently, each fulfilling completely different purposes, and I had a blast playing them all while my PS+ lasted (it finally expired a few days ago). I DID NOT like the grind of repeatedly venturing into the dungeons and unlocking each successive dungeon just so I could unlock the next dungeon just so I could unlock dungeons that, 10 hours into the dungeon roaming, were FINALLY all about their loot! Spending a couple days, per characters, grinding, just so I would never have to do that again really sucked a lot of the joy out of their creation.
But stepping into my deliberately-unfinished Nightmare of Mensis so I could invade and be invaded to PVP with other players doing the same was a WONDERFUL treat. All the characters I designed to end up in the same level range so they could all PVP in the same place but play differently from one another made for really fun times. There were also a couple fights that were several-minute affair engagements that went back and forth and ended with some words shared between myself and my opponent (good words, not insults) and moved me on to the next encounter in chipper spirits. In the end, I finished playing
Bloodborne until my PS+ expired, PVPing until the very end. It was wondrous fun! =D
Oh yeah, I had a BLAST during the designing phase for every characters, particularly naming them all with cleverly disguised puns. See if you can decipher the joke behind the name Lucas Himia. =)
I replayed Arkham City today, I think you are wrong whne you said they didn't improve anything in Origins, the combat between the two games feels really different. Is weird, from the surface it looks the same but I felt that the counters and the Enemyto enemy flowing movement was much smoother in Origins than in City. I actually kind of felt like City's combat was a little clunky in comparison, I can pull off rather large combos in Origins but in City they drop constantly (enemies tend to wait in place too often so timing sometimes gets weird and inconsistent, yet it doesn't make it harder) and there is a bigger variety in enemies from the beginning. Predator was left pretty much untouched. Also the Joker looks like a muppet in the game over screens.
All the commentary about the combat system is easily dismissed as "to each his own".
I PERSONALLY had the easiest time (excluding AK, as I have not yet played it) pulling off unending, smooth combos in AC. AA was the toughest, but that should be expected, because they just INVENTED the freeflow combat system. AO... was just fluff. AC really changed up a lot of things, some for good, some not. I liked that they made the combat challenges much less oppressively daunting, although the ease of the combat system made them end up as breezes, and not all that challenging. Meanwhile the effort they went to in order to make the predator challenges less of a breeze turned THEM into tedious and headache-inducing tests of patience. They tried to make a hard thing less hard and make an appallingly easy thing less easy, and they went too far in both attempts. At least they were still fun.
But what AO did that was unforgivable for me was turning the entire game formula into a railroaded experience. My INTRODUCTION to the game was an argument with a friend who had never played the Arkham games, but played AO, and came away disgusted and displeased, and I had to argue my case for why AA and AC deserved to be played. He was so unhappy with AO (and at the time I didn't understand why) that it tainted his entire expectations of the whole series! Of the complaints that stick out in my memory the most, he complaints the most about it being "too linear" and lacking any open world. Having just come off of playing AC, I was astounded that ANY complaint of "no open world" could come out of someone playing an Arkham game! But it's true! The game REALLY drives you down a corridor, one after the other. You have to do this, then this, then this, then this, then this, so on and so on.
The progressive nature of a story was cleverly disguised in the first 2 games (partially masked because of all the side content), but AO's structure did NOTHING to hide its rigidity. Worst was that it was SO HEAVY on exposition and cutscenes! I forgot just HOW MUCH Origins Batman would keep muttering to "himself" (the player) how he needs to do this or look for this or find that on and on and on, and it was painfully obvious that the game was telling the player "do this to proceed". While the freeform nature of AC did somewhat invite elements of ludonarrative dissonance in the form of a mortally poisoned Batman deciding to practicing his diving an gliding instead of... y'know... FINDING A CURE SO HE DOESN'T DIE, the freeform nature of the game itself was still very pleasing. Instead of reminding "himself' over and over what he needed to do, the game just periodically gave you a reminder of your upcoming objective. No rush, just a heads up. But in Origins? "I need to find the point of entry." "I need to find blah." "I need to stop blah." "I need to get to blah." "I should really stop talking to myself!!!!!" ARGH!!! It was so fucking frustrating.
And the cinematic cutscenes just made it all the worse... In AA and AC, there was no cutscene showcasing what Batman could not see. You saw the game from his point of view. You saw some things Joker did because he was addressing you on the other side of a screen. But ultimately, all cutscenes were limited to what Batman was seeing or doing, and there wasn't that many of them. AO? TONS of fucking cutscenes! And almost all of them were from the perspective of someone else! Granted, it's always pretty cool to see things from Joker's perverted mental image of the world, but that REALLY kills the immersion of the game being played by BATMAN!!! It's not a bad style of storytelling... it just didn't fit with the series. The big reveal at the end of AC was a direct result of the player being equally as in the dark as Batman (pun intended, I guess?) because they did NOT see what the Joker was up to. Meanwhile in AO, you know EVERYTHING that's going down. There was that first hour where you had this feeling Black Mask wasn't really Black Mask, but that was about it. As soon as Joker revealed himself, now begins the cutscenes where you watch the Joker convening with his hired killers, the Joker planning his machinations, the Joker recounting his (supposed to STAY a mystery) past in a revision of the story that AA already established, again and again and again. SO MUCH Joker cinematics! I love the character, but it's NOT a Joker game! This is a BATMAN game, damnit!
Like I've been saying, I REALLY love AO Bane, because they GOT Bane, unlike Rocksteady's hulking brute. AO Bane was imposingly tall, clearly a daunting physical opponent to go up against, yet clever and calculating and perceptive. Bane was THE best part of AO, and I cannot say enough how much I love watching THOSE cutscenes over and over again. Bane was really a treat. If the game was BANE pulling the strings all along in order to test Batman and push Batman to his limits in order for Bane to have a final showdown in the end (reminiscent of the character's
Knighfall introduction) then I probably would've loved it, JUST because of that direction and taking such an underappreciated character and making a really awesome story out of it all. It already had elements of
The Long Halloween in the game's Calendar Man introduction, and taking control of Blackgate (TWICE) and subsequently releasing all the dangerous inmates was very reminiscent of
Knightfall. AO had a lot of potential to be something great. It certainly had great aspects. But the sum total of its package was just very disappointing.
