My favorite genre of video game is the open world video game.¹ No type of video game has a greater obstacle to overcome than the open world video game. There is a type a storytelling that no artistic medium accomplishes as well as the open world video game. All three of these statements are true and they lie at the heart of my continued love/hate relationship with video games.

It is no surprise, given my love of open world games, that Infamous and Infamous 2 were my favorite Playstation 3 exclusive games. The seemingly made for video games idea² of being a super powered person set free in a city was so purely fun and well executed that I got a Playstation 4 early in its life primarily in anticipation of Infamous: Second Son. Upon completion of the game I can firmly tell you that the game is fun, the story is not.

I had no problem with the narrative woven through Infamous 1 & 2. Cole McGrath was a decent character as far as video game characters go, and his reluctance at suddenly becoming more than human was an interesting take on the super powered hero. The story had all the makings of a good comic book/bad movie³, and was even an above average vessel for presenting me with an explanation for the games progression. Infamous: Second Son shares few of these characteristics.

Delsin is a Native American living on a reservation⁴ who is a delinquent acting out under the shadow of his cop older brother because that’s what younger brothers with traditionally successful older brothers in bad stories do. Early in the game a military transport carrying convicted bio-terrorists⁵ crashes. Through a series of events revolving around Delsin trying to save his non mother maternal figure⁶ Betty he finds he has the ability to absorb other conduits⁷ powers. Our villain, Augustine, implants concrete shrapnel into the legs of people in Delsin’s tribe and the only way to save them is to absorb her powers. So off Delsin goes to save day, and the story proceeds without twist or turn to its conclusion, ending unsurprisingly with Delsin removing the shrapnel from the legs of the various tribal people, including Betty.

That is one way the story can progress. The alternate way sees Delsin slowly graduate from delinquent to power hungry evil terrorist who kills anyone who gets in his way. For you see Infamous: Second Son is a game about choice. Or rather it is a game about 5 choices that do not affect the game until the very end, and then only in a very small way. The whole choose one of two options morality system is as universally dumb as it is ubiquitous in modern video games. Which is a shame for Second Son particularly considering Infamous 2 ended with one of the greatest implementations of this dual choice concept ever presented.

(MAJOR SPOILERS: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED) At the end of the Infamous 2 you are given two options. Option 1: set off a device that will kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people the world over including yourself and the woman you have come to love but will likely, though with no absolute guarantee, save billions. Or option 2: become the ultimate version of yourself, and in the process kill billions of people, but definitively save those same millions of people, including yourself and the woman you love. Now that is a moral conundrum. The options in Infamous Second Son: kill the villain, thus ending her tyranny but making you not a great guy, or spare and expose the villain, thus ending her tyranny and leaving you as an alright guy. Morality doesn’t get much harder.⁸

The one area of storytelling that is not laughable and/or confusing is the interactions between Delsin and his older brother. Their relationship follows a stereotypical path of older mature brother waiting on younger rebellious brother to grow up to brothers find mutual respect and understanding, but the growth is handled well, the acting is good and the progression of their relationship is entirely believable. It is of course relegated to an under utilized side plot that ends all to early and predictably.

All of these sins would be perfectly forgivable,and actually would be perfectly in line with the current state of video game narrative, if only the game excelled at the one area video games, especially open world video games, should excel at: world building. If you haven’t guessed, it does not. Infamous: Second Son is set in an utterly beautiful and utterly lifeless recreation of Seattle, complete with the Space Needle and coffee shops and a lot of pedestrians in blazers and jeans. The city is under martial law after the escape of the conduits, and thus is a police state with armed guards and checkpoints and cameras and other evil symbols of oppression which are actually the entire point of martial law. You can destroy these symbols of oppression, but that is the extent of your ability to affect the city. It and its citizens are the background to your adventure, they are not participants in the play.

This is I feel the most disappointing aspect of the game. The best video games, the Skyrims and Bioshocks and Red Dead Redemptions, do not need their narratives. Their environments are oozing with more detail and story and history than the greatest films, with the visual element that likely led Egon Spengler to declare print dead. This is the single element of storytelling that video games do better than all other media, and it is an element Second Son lacks. Second Son’s Seattle is a cardboard cutout of a city with cameras attached and extras hired to portray pedestrians. Their awareness of your presence is either non existent, as when I suddenly turn invisible and run into them with no reaction, or nonsensical, as when I rescue a civilian they were just beating to death in the street causing them to…cheer.⁹ At least Arkham City had the good sense to say “we know that civilians make our gameplay complicated and we don’t have the technology to make them act realistically, so we’re going to take them out and explain it away through bad plot.” I assure you, that was a better solution.

What makes all of this so disappointing is that Second Son is a beautiful game that is also an absolute joy to play. Your superpowers are inventive and well executed, starting with the traditional feeling smoke powers and moving onto the fast paced and visually stunning neon powers and the inventive if illogical video powers. Combat is varied and always fun thanks to the powers, and the simple act of traversing the city is enjoyable enough to justify a game on its own. You’ll dart around the city at the speed of light (or neon, which is a state of electrified gas, or plasma, I don’t know chemistry was a long time ago) turn invisible, fly, teleport with a puff of smoke, shoot lasers, and summon demons to fight at your side¹⁰ The only two complaints I have with the gameplay are that there are not enough activities for you to utilize your powers doing, and that the final equally fun power is not acquired until the last fight of the game. Add to this the fact that Second Son is probably the most gorgeous, graphically impressive game I’ve ever played on a console, and the mess of a plot becomes even more damming.

The great writer Tom Bissell once said of Batman: Arkham City “am I alone in wanting to play a game this good about something other than a dude in a batsuit?”¹¹ Having finished Infamous Second Son I can confidently say, please let me go back to the Batman.

The sin of Titanfall’s narrative is both more understandable and more unforgivable. Made by Respawn, a company founded by the people behind the Call of Duty shooter revolution, it seemed a rational move to announce a first person shooter that wouldn’t bother with a traditional single player campaign and would be focused only on its competitive multiplayer. While the video game world’s ire is oft focused on the crime of the tacked on multiplayer, a company finally taking the logical step in removing the just as irrelevant tacked on single player makes perfect sense.

Then Respawn announced a move that seemed a minor revolution from the game genre most accused of spurning innovation: they would be including a multiplayer campaign based around the title’s competitive gameplay. The idea seemed so inventive and unique that I should have known better than to be excited.

Imagine a campaign wherein the story adjusts and changes based on how you and your team perform in the competitive multiplayer matches. The game mode and map that came next would be entirely dependent upon which team won. Cutscenes would be radically different based on your outcome. Win the match as the militia, and you next strike at the IMC¹² military base in a game of Attrition (team deathmatch, with NPCs to kill as well). Lose, and you retreat to your refueling outpost and try to hold out in a game of Hardpoint (domination mode, capture and hold three points). You could win a hard fought back and forth war as the Militia, or totally dominate the rebels as the IMC, or anything in between. The possibilities were tantalizing. I have played the game extensively, hours upon hours in the few weeks it has been out, and I can tell you two things; the game is insanely fun, the campaign is far from tantalizing.

What the game is is the absolute best combination of refined gameplay built upon an excellent existing foundation with the right amount tweaking and innovation to make the game feel both familiar and wholly new since Halo 2. It is Call of Duty¹³ with jetpacks and giant robots, and that is a very cool thing. The CoD mechanics are all there, but the changes make the game feel completely different. You run along walls, double jump onto roofs, run in out of buildings and up and down levels at a pace that makes CoD feel slow and one dimensional in a way I never realized before the game came out. And all of this comes without mentioning the titular Titans, four story mechs that give you a tremendous sense of power, while making you vulnerable in all new ways. While only one team is called the Militia, everyone feels like a guerrilla warrior the moment an enemy titan comes stomping down the road and you make for the closest cover to fire your missiles out of a window and hope that he can’t catch you in his sights. This game is adrenaline, and it is a game I will gladly be spending whole weekends ignoring my girlfriend while playing.

What this game is not, however, is anything more than a broken promise with regards to its campaign. To say the game has a bad story would be unfair and untrue, this game has no story. Why are the Militia fighting the IMC? You are not told. Who is the IMC? Also unexplained. Why are there giant dinosaurs wandering in the background? Your guess is a good as mine. When you join a campaign you will placed on either the Militia or the IMC, and you will stay on that team until the end. What happens at the end? Well the Militia wins. Always. Doesn’t matter if they win every match, or if they do not win any matches. The Militia wins. The maps you play, the game modes; the same regardless of the outcome of the previous match. Even the cutscenes, which are remarkable only for their ability to tell you absolutely nothing about what is going on in this world and this war, remain unchanged. This is not a revolution in story telling, it is the penultimate unnecessary game mode.

If you’re asking me whether or not you should play Titanfall, my answer is yes, immediately. It is the most fun I’ve had with a competitive shooter since LAN parties were still a thing.¹⁴ And truth be told you will probably never even care about the lack of innovation in storytelling. You get to shoot your friends, and you get to have fun doing it. But for those of us who wanted more, who saw the potential for something great, forgive us our disappointment. Titanfall did do something I had never seen before. It created the most unnecessary and irrelevant game mode I have ever seen in a game. Here’s to useless revolutions. Here’s to missed opportunities.