This video is sponsored in part by Skillshare. Around the turn of the Millennium there
came out an inconspicuous little Sci-fi Horror thriller named Pitch Black, in which a spaceship
transporting passengers in cryostasis crashlands on a deserted planet infested by a
vicious species of nightstalking, carnivorous Aliens. The survivors, including the famous criminal
Richard B. Riddick, have to, in good old Alien-fashion, stand their ground against a
primeval threat and find a way off this barren rock if they
want to live to tell the tale. The film's plot and execution itself was
considered mostly derivative at the time – although I honestly unironically enjoyed it,
myself, from the first viewing – but within its innocuous setting slumbered a
soon-to-be-tapped, greater narrative universe. Pitch Black quickly garnered a cult-following,
mostly flocking around the deep-dark-grey antihero character of Riddick, as well as the insinuations
of a much grander, intricate and fascinating space-opera universe that felt different – faceted,
gritty, textured and,... socio-politically interesting. But hey, a decent box-office return,
as well as a sleeper-success in DVD sales eventually convinced Universal Pictures that
it’s worth expanding this cinematic universe into a much bigger grand and epic
sequel "The Chronicles of Riddick," which is kind of a lovable
mess, in a way... and ... hoo boy ...
a video game adaptation. (gunshot) Movie-IP videogamizations are a
dodgy topic, ain’t they? 49 times out of 50 The resulting titles end up as mediocre-at-best
cash-grabs and horrible-as-the-norm abominations that will still sell because of the name printed
on the box, which... keeps signalling to - [Guillermo del Toro] The Bastards with the money... - [Ragnar] that this is good business
practice and the hamster wheel of disappointing license adaptations should
be kept spinning eternally. (cringy Star Wars dance version of YMCA) Riddick is #50 in this case study. One of those exceedingly rare cases where
the key creative people behind its production, lead writer and director David Twohy
and lead actor and writer Vin Diesel both cared a lot for
the narrative universe. - [Vin Diesel] I can, you know,
use all this pool of knowledge about the world and incorporate it into the video game and keep the video game
consistent with the movie - [Cos Lazouras] Vin? Y'know, reeeaaally know games.
Which I was really surprised about. Plays obsessively. - [Ragnar] They also understood, appreciated and
respected video games as an artistic medium enough that 2004's The Chronicles of Riddick:
Escape from Butcher Bay - and its 2009 sequel Assault on Dark Athena became exhibit A for
how movie-license tie-ins are done the right way. Vin Diesel worked with and actively supported
the Swedish developer studio Starbreeze in their ambitions to not just retell the film in
video game form, but fully realize canon parts of Richard B. Riddick's backstory
exclusively in video game form, because they all agreed that these
story-beats were... best told interactively. - [Vin Diesel] In this huge epic,
if you don't have the room, really, to explain some backstory... - [Shirah] You cannot escape your destiny. - [Riddick] I can escape anything. - [Shirah] Like Butcher Bay? - [Vin Diesel] You can then take ideas
that you don't have time for in the movie and now incoroporate them
into the video game in a cool way. - [Ragnar] In an era of gaming where every major
release had to have a hastily-produced video game tie-in to generate extra revenue, and the average
movie cast voiced their lines reluctantly and only for contractual obligation because gaming
was still regarded as an inferior storytelling medium not to be taken fully seriously
– Diesel went the extra mile for Butcher Bay and actively contributed to the writing
and game design, himself. And at the same time, he respected
their expertise and ensured that Starbreeze got the creative space they needed to develop a
killer video game chapter of the Riddick-universe. So, I am seriously excited to rediscover this
somewhat neglected, highly-ambitious first person shooter, stealth, immersive sim
genre-hybrid together with you: - [Revas] Kill him! - [Ragnar] a piece of video game history that still
stands proud as one of the prime examples for how great movie-license
video games can be, if the producers see more in
them than just return-on-investment. (punch) - [Riddick] In the end, everybody bleeds the same. (♫ Monsters of the Week Intro Music ♫) Alright, before we go on, I'd like to express my thanks
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I hope you enjoy the rest of the video! (epic space opera music sting) (space ship engines roaring) - [Ragnar] Butcher Bay – or to call it by its full
title The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was released in probably one of the most
fiercely contested years in gaming history. Metal Gear Solid 3, Halo 2,
GTA: San Andreas, the first Fable We got Knights of the Old Republic 2 as
well as Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines and even World of Warcraft
was unleashed on us. Oh and... Katamari,
how could I forget? God... and if all of that wasn't enough,
2004 was also the seminal year in which Doom 3 went head-to-head with
Half-Life 2 and the first Far Cry; - [Dr. Betruger] Excellent! - [Ragnar] three incredibly
important first person shooter releases and showcases of
cutting edge game engines of the time, that shifted the technological
gears towards a new era of video game history. It was a tough year to release
a game and make it stand out, especially if you tried to compete in the
heavily fought over first person shooter segment. And yet, Starbreeze, a fairly unknown studio
from Sweden, came pretty much out of nowhere with their adaptation of Riddick and...
was absolutely and totally able to go toe to toe with the
juggernauts from Valve and id. - [Jimbo] My advice?
Do like all the other fish. Among all these recent
galaxy brain think pieces alla "Half-Life 2 Has Actually Always Been Bad"
and "Doom 3 Was the True Masterpiece of 2004 All Along"
and "Oh Waitaminute - what if Doom 3's shotgun
is ACTUALLY Genius??" I’ll slink into the shadows and
let The Chronicles of Riddick live rent-free in my head as my
personal ego shooter pinnacle of 2004. (And before you get all anal, I do
not count Bloodlines as an FPS in this) Like, I distinctly remember the
discourse at the time about the fundamentally, revolutionarily, game-changingly new 3d technology that Doom 3 and Half-Life 2
brought to the table, which was Normal Mapping. It was the Hot Topic in the gaming press in
the months preceding these games’ releases. Normal mapping, which is still common
practice in realtime 3D rendering to this day, is essentially done by creating 2 versions of a 3D
object; one with very few polygons that primarily create the silhouette of the object and
another modeled with virtually unlimited detail and whose height information then gets "baked" into
a texture that’s projected onto the low-poly model. This is used to calculate light and shadows
and create the illusion of height without using actual 3D geometry and saving
a lot of cycles in the process. The result is that objects consisting of very
little geometry appear like they contain the detail of millions of triangles without
actually having to render them. It was groundbreaking in video games and perceived
with collective jaws on the floor at the time. I... hang on... I specifically remember there was this comic
that kind of put Doom as a little mons... wait let me (frantic keyboard typing sounds) Ah yeah here it is, yeah the
pretentious blowhard blob of Doom 3 boasting about its enormous technical
achievements while the stoic giant Half-Life 2 is like, "yeah I'm so good I don't really need to shoot the
bull cuz I get everyone's attention just because of how big and strong I am” And like.... See, I’m usually not a big sucker
for “graphics” and tend to focus far more on aesthetics in games, because technical
specifications deprecate pretty damn fast, but it *is* noteworthy that during the big
arm-wrestling match of Doom 3 and HL2, Starbreeze just Toastieee’d in in with its own impressive-looking
in-house engine that featured Normal Mapping, dynamic lighting with per-pixel
stencil and self-shadowing among many other things, and all of it without making any big fuss,
just quietly creeping there in the shadows. Very true to the game’s protagonist. I distinctly remember, at the time, being
quite perplexed how the hell this game, which came seemingly out of nowhere,
could just nonchalantly look so much better than the technological wunderkind the press
couldn't shut about for years before its release? It looked technically almost more
impressive and at the same time had this unique look and feel to it, like a prettier, more sprawling and lavish
version of Doom 3 in a vast, original setting that’s aesthetically kinda new and
exciting to discover in a video game. (punching and groaning) I love this game. I had played Butcher Bay start to finish twice in
the past, the last time being over 10 years ago and when I just mentioned it in passing in
my video on Cryostasis, not too long ago, it created this irresistible compulsion to
dig out, boot up and revisit this classic again. So this is going to be the journal of my personal
rediscovery of both of these excellent genre hybrids, Escape from Butcher Bay, as
well as Assault on Dark Athena. They both work perfectly as individual
titles on their own but at the same time, both narratively AND mechanically make
up two inseparable pieces of a greater puzzle that are ideally enjoyed
in direct succession. If you want to follow Riddick's story
in canon chronological order, Butcher Bay is where the journey starts,
followed by Dark Athena and THEN you're ready to embark on the movies
and the other supplementary material. And you know what, this is
exactly what we’re gonna do today. Let's transfer to the Maximum Security Prison
that no one has managed to escape to this day. And change that fact. (♫ Riddick Theme Music ♫) The game starts as typical for a Riddick
story as it can get- on a prison transport. The bounty hunter Johns- yep, the
same bastard cop as in Pitch Black, has Riddick in chains and is delivering
him to the notoriously inescapable maximum security prison, Butcher Bay. - [Johns] ... and I'll bank your bounty plus fifty.
- [Riddick] PLUS FIFTY?! Now come on Johns... Greed is an ugly thing... - [Ragnar] The ship arrives at the landing platform,
engulfed in heavy sandstorm clouds and because of that there doesn’t seem to be the
expected welcoming committee of highly armed prison security present and after a brief
interactive, multiple choice conversation with Johns - [Riddick] Today, Johns, you get *fucked* - [Johns] You don't move until I say so. - [Ragnar] one of the other prisoners distracts
him, draws his attention away and since we seem to be somewhat shielded by the
bad weather conditions, we take the initiative and- (cracking and choking sounds) Now that's kinda unexpected- I thought he was supposed to be...
alive in Pitch Black? Anyway, we also learn that the guns here,
that he just dropped, are apparently DNA coded and any inmate who touches them
gets electrocuted on the spot. - [Inmate] We should get moving! I guess it’s bare knuckles for now. We quickly slip away into the ventilation
system, before anyone notices us, on the way, overwhelm a
technician in hand-to-hand-combat, sneak through the shadows and learn
how the game’s fullscreen-version of Thief’s hidden-in-shadows-indicator works. It desaturates and tints the whole screen with a
cold-blu-ish shader whenever you’re fully hidden away. So we can use this to sneak
up on unsuspecting guards and crush their larynx
swiftly and mercilessly... and then hide the lifeless body
in a dark corner like a good taffer. The game employs an interesting hybrid
of first and third person. Most of the time we see straight through the
eyes, or later the welding goggles, of Riddick but, at times, the camera cuts to the outside and
shows him doing smoothly animated Riddick things. It was one of the first titles where I noticed
this approach working surprisingly smoothly. Best of both worlds. All of this is tutorialized with on-screen prompts
and this first segment turns out to be a pretty solid vertical cut through many of the mechanics we're
going to regularly encounter throughout the game. It really shoots one new mechanic after the
other at you, almost like on a conveyor belt- Climb up ledges,
dangle along ceiling railings. Refill and use health stations, (mechanical noises) outsmart more enemies with stealth, steal a shotgun and eventually
engage in open firefights -and all of this really within
the first 10-15 minutes at max. And then, after fighting through some heavily armed
esistance and shooting our way through the tunnels we eventually sprint towards freedom and... - [Johns] Rise and shine... Riddick! It turns out that Riddick was actually still
snoozing on the prison transport the whole time and this entire segment was just
a little dream he's been having. - [Stormcloak prisoner] Hey, you...
you're finally awake! You were trying to cross the border, right? - [Johns] Rise and shine, jackass. - [Ragnar] I always found this little twist at the
beginning a pretty cool tongue-in-cheek introduction, because it literally does the very thing that
Skyrim's opening -which I just memed here-
is always criticized for not doing: It makes use of every moment to full efficiency
to give you as much of an appetizer of the pretty extensive difference in kind we're
going to engage in across the length of the game. Usually though not in
that steep of a frequency. Now, the second time around, when landing,
it's pretty clear that this time, security ain’t gonna be as lax and it's gonna take Riddick a bit longer
than ten-fifteen minutes to get off this desolate rock. - [Riddick] It's already over, Johns. - [Hoxie] Secure your weapon, Johns. (Johns chuckles sardonically) - [Riddick] When we're being escorted into the
facility by chief prison guard Xzibit, here, the game really takes its
time in good Half-Life railway opening style to establish the
air of a cinematic introduction credits rolling along, the orchestral music
swelling up and the vista giving you just the tiniest glimpse of the true scope
that’s awaiting you in this place. - [Abbott] So check those desires right now! Because you will not get out!
No one has. No one ever will. - [Ragnar] And you know, the way real actors are
integrated into this game, which starts shining through here, was definitely
something really impressive at the time -I mean people are still stunned when
a game like Death Stranding or some David Cage stuff enlists a Hollywood
actor or two these days, but back then this was one
of the paragon examples of employing a star ensemble in a
video game and making it feel truly epic. Like you were actually playing a Hollywood
movie and not just some cash grab license adaptation where the movie’s actors listlessly read
a few contractually obligated extra lines so the IP owner could make an extra
buck with a half-baked shovelware game. - [Abbott] Well let's see...
Am I still mad about before? (shouts angrily, smashing) - [XZibit] I play Abbott, I'm in charge of the slam - [Abbott] Prisoner walking! - [Ragnar] It was mind blowing to be regularly watching
stuff like Pimp my Ride on MTV and listen to Weapons of Mass Destruction on your Discman
when cycling to school and then suddenly having X to the Z himself be in
the game, felt kinda surreal. - [Xzibit] Nice! - [Ragnar] Like, Half-Life 2 might have had more
advanced facial animations but Riddick had CAST. Besides Vin and Xzibit, there’s
Ron Perlman.. - [Koulikov] Bam! Bam, bam!! - [Ragnar] Cole Hauser and yo- Dwight Schultz -that’s
Murdock from The A-Team. (Murdock gasps in pain) - [B.A.] (laughs) Sucker! - [Ragnar] Now, one thing that definitely helps despite
not having the level of facial expressiveness a Source Engine can provide is that the narrative
universe is just made for stoic characters that barely have to move their
facial muscles to convey the tone, - [Abbott] Name's Riddick; thinks his shit don't stink. - [Inmate] THE Riddick?! - [Ragnar] But aside from that, it’s also just damn fine
modeling, texturing and animation work at play here that makes those characters come to life in Butcher
Bay and even more so later in Dark Athena. - [Abbott] This... is your home! - [Ragnar] After being deloused, we're dropped off
in our very own... prison cell. Our new home. Now this, you could say is when the actual game starts,
and it gets rolling at a much slower pace than before. Riddick, finding the
accommodations exceedingly quaint, doesn’t want to stay here one
minute longer than he has to. So we start walking around and...
explore, get a bit of a feel for our new home. It's almost peaceful. Nobody charges at us with
knives and guns (yet) so we just... talk with the other
inmates and get acquainted. - [Jack] You should see Haley! - [Ragnar] This is genuinely one
of my favorite parts of this game; you regularly get into hubs
that are more or less nonviolent -more like in an RPG alla,
say, Gothic than an all out Stealth-Shooter where
everything that moves is automatically an adversary; you engage in multiple choice
conversations with people, find things to do for them and trade with them
and, damn, we even keep an actual quest-log. According to the developers, this game
was initially planned to place an even higher emphasis on these RPG lite
segments, but it's also one of the parts where Vin Diesel himself vetoed, at some
point, and objected to how Riddick was just *talking too much* in earlier
drafts to do the character justice. So the team, together with Vin went and rewrote
everything to make his interactions with people feel far more in line with his interpretation
of the Famous Criminal, Richard B. Riddick. And although I’d have personally loved to see
more “social” questing in the game, I think it was ultimately a great decision because
it gives Butcher Bay this incomparable, iconic feel. Diesel, start to finish, delivers Riddick with
the signature stone-cold, deadpan stoicism you’d expect from the
movies, truly a man of few words, and it makes his one-liners one of the genuinely most
enjoyable and memorable elements of these games. - [Red] Tell me, Riddick: How did it
feel when you killed your first one? - [Riddick] That's between me and him. - [Ragnar] I also really enjoy how Butcher Bay
feels like a real place? Like, there's a lot of thought
put into the layout and structure, into the facilities necessary to run a prison,
the way they're connected through infrastructure and the means by which the guards exert
iron-fisted control over the prison population. When we step into the courtyard,
for the first time, we get yet another glimpse just of how
vast this facility really is. This central hub here connects to multiple
wings that are under the control of different gangs. Most of these areas
are still off-limits for now. So after talking with a few people
here and there, immediately getting multiple requests to assassinate
other inmates as a courtesy, we come to the conclusion that we might really
benefit from having a concealed weapon in here –and luckily Matteson here is aware of our
reputation and offers to provide us with a shiv; purely for
self-defense of course- So, we make our way to meet him
in his cell for our little deal and- - [Inmate] Riddick! Rust bids you
welcome to Butcher Bay! (smack, shout) Yeah, that was kinda
to be expected wasn't it? Of course nothing is free in Guantan-
uh Butcher Bay, and since an intimidating sigma male like us is a clear and present
threat to the established pecking order, the head honcho of the ruling Aquilas clan tries
to snuff us out before we can even become a problem. But the thing they don’t seem to get is, you don't fuck with Riddick. These goons are barely a warm-up exercise
and after knocking their lights out, we confront the guy who tricked us into the ambush
and well, it looks like he was coerced into it himself. - [Riddick] Matteson set up the ambush. But he'll turn when I tighten the screws... - [Matteson] It was Rust, he forced me to! But... but I knew those
goons were no match for you. I'll get you a shiv. To set
things right. You have my word. - [Riddick] Cross me again, and I'll have your life. - [Ragnar] ...looks like he
was coerced into it himself. Kinda feel bad for the guy. He now wants to make it up to us by
actually delivering the shiv this time. When we meet him in his cell, finally, well,
we do get our shiv this time, but damn, the game really doesn’t want us
to keep it for long because Rust, the Aquila’s chief himself steps in and
tries to T-pose to assert dominance. - [Riddick] I said: You're in my cell. - [Rust] What?! Wrong! Now you ain't paid me for that shank,
so it ain't yours. - [Riddick] Come take it. - [Ragnar] Without great success. (Rust groaning)
- [Riddick] See this? It belongs to me. But it turns out that Abbott, the guard
captain, played by Xhibit, has his grimy fingers in the pie and profits from the
internal inmate power structures. So, he steps in to protect his prime
rooster before we can seriously hurt him. It looks like Rust is becoming
a serious thorn in our side, so we decide to take matters into our own
hands and wreak some havoc in the Aquila wing. I really love this first prison wing
segment of the game because the actions that takes place
always have narrative context. When the gameplay switches from RPG
socializing and talking over to brawling it always feels like a smooth
transition that makes sense, story wise, and it’s not just filler fights thrown at the player
because the developers are afraid people get bored too easily, without having
some fights here and there. The game does that with a lot of different segments
that play fundamentally different from one moment to the next over the course of its playtime, and
there is often no clean-cut segregation between social, melee combat, stealth
elements, firefights and more. A lot of the time it flows into each other seamlessly
within the dynamic mechanical ecosystem of the game. And for some reason, I still think the
brawling might actually be one of my secret favorite
gameplay elements. It's not super complex, you can
swing and jab in four different directions, block, and parry and riposte your enemy's
attack if you strike in the right moment. It takes a bit getting used to and feels pretty
frenetic and hectic, with a lot of head-bob, but something about it feels satisfyingly
nasty like actual real-life fisticuffs: It's fast, kinetic and kind of janky, but
everything can be over in the blink of an eye when you get the drop on your
opponent and you snag the shiv from his hands and slit his
throat in one fell swoop. It's gnarly in a way that fits the
gritty and ruthless setting perfectly. So, after punching our way through the Aquila
Wing, we eventually confront Rust himself and- He's sort of the first
boss fight of the game. It’s the test if we’ve really grasped the ins
and outs of hand-to-hand fighting by now, because he is far more aggressive and dangerous
than the regular goons we encountered so far. (slicing and stabbing) But once we do, we
take him out for good. That is when Abbott again steps in and offers Riddick
a promotion to become the new leader of the gang, - [Abbott] Looks like I need
a new rooster. Yer Interested? - [Ragnar] But Riddick ain't
no tool for anyone's agenda. - [Abbott] I take that as a no. Sayin' no to me is not the
kinda mistake you wanna make. - [Ragnar] This is very often how the game plays out,
it’s far more story-and-narrative heavy than you’d expect for the first person
shooter that Riddick really is at its core. You talk with people, get the right ideas
and find a way to execute them, -the ideas, I mean
-or sometimes also the people, if that’s necessary. We, for instance, trade some favors
to buy our way into the infirmary, where we then wait for and exploit
the briefest moment of inattention to overpower the guards and quickly
slip away through the vent shafts. This is also where we get our
first level up if you want. The game is not really all that
heavy on the RPG mechanics, but over time we encounter Butcher Bay’s
version of your typical post Half-Life shooter’s wall-mounted med-stations. I absolutely love the game's
NanoMed health stations. They’re really easy to read, game mechanically,
each station has a maximum contingency of four squares that refill a corresponding
amount of health and it’s just so... (metallic stab, Riddick groaning) violently unpleasant and invasive. Throughout these two games it’s sort of
like a morbid little running gag how violently nano-med medical devices invade
your body to heal your organs... however they achieve that. - [Riddick] A med-station.
Takes away the hurt. Leaves the pain. - [Ragnar] So you have the regular med stations that
heal you, and at certain key-moments in the game these huge level-up stations that
give you an extra health bar, and they amp up the invasive medical
practices even another notch more. (machine sounds) (long beep) - [Nanomed voice] Resilience strengthened.
Only Nanomed makes you stronger than you were. - [Ragnar] Now, the reason we broke into the infirmary
to slip away like an eel in the first place is to find a covert way into the prison’s
data center where the DNA imprints for the guards' firearms are
being registered and stored -you remember from earlier,
we as an inmate get normally electrocuted when we try to use
the guards armaments against them. This all happens, as I
said, smoothly flowing from open into restricted areas, from
stealth to combat, which is impressive, buuut sometimes
can be a bit confusing when at times it feels somewhat unclear
what the game really wants from you. I’ll get into that in more
detail a little bit later. Because in this first segment, it’s still
rather clear-cut and easily readable. We sneak our way through the shadows and vents
until we eventually get access to the data center, get the jump on the technician there and imprint our
DNA into the guard database and finally take up arms -which then immediately triggers a prison-wide alarm
and a squad of armed guards breaches the room; so lock and load, we
got some new tools. Similar to how it went in the tutorial,
the gameplay switches straight over to open firefights with very little
opportunity for neck-stabbing from now on and demonstrates how fun of a purebred,
fun FPS game Butcher Bay can be. It is not as hyper-fast paced as a Doom or a Quake,
but more on the semi-realistic combat side, with cover and leaning around it, as well as
highly responsive one-hit-headshot-kills as central mechanical components, and only
having two custom assigned weapon slots from your pretty sizeable arsenal
available in quick selections. All of this makes the gunplay
feel far closer to something like counter-strike than a Quake,
Doom or even Half-Life. So, we combat our way through multiple
corridors of armed resistance and eventually encounter a near invincible guard in
a mecha exoskeleton in a miniboss-showdown. This guy, we have to outsmart
to get the drop on him and then eventually get back into GenPop
before our disappearance is noticed. Because we're trying to make use of the confusion
that our little breach of security created as it degenerated into a semi-large
prison riot that’s currently going on. It’s one recurring theme
that I really adore about this game that’s strongly in line with
the Riddick we know from the movies. Multiple times we find ourselves as a lone wolf without
allegiance in a conflict between two opposing parties; in this case guards against inmates, while we exploit the
situation to our advantage. Because Riddick has a plan. He wants to get into the pit
-the giant hole in the courtyard, the one that was covered by a steel grate before,
but that has now been opened by the guards temporarily during the prison raid to dispose
of dead inmates that got killed during the raid. So... we have to hurry to make our
way back there before the raid is over. And normally this
seems like a bad plan. Because this would be a fall
way too deep for anyone to survive, but you know what they say... - [Inmate] It ain't the fall that gets 'ya...
(loud smack) (spine cracking) - [Riddick] It's the
sudden stop at the bottom. - [Ragnar] Riddick is not a perfect game,
and it’s astounding how much of a just barely not perfect game
it is in almost every regard. This might sound like a
bad thing, but it really isn’t. Because when I say “not perfect”, I don’t mean
the things it does are executed poorly, but rather that nearly every element is just that little bit rough
around the edge, the odd hint of jank here and there. (fighting sounds) Never enough to break the
game but enough to be noticeable. But this is yet another case where
this imperfection in many different areas draws the spotlight towards the
sheer abundance of notably good things. These imperfections also
make it apparent just how central experimentation and
versatility was to the devs, which is always a common denominator
for the games that stick to my mind like glue. Consider the decision to make the player
character, despite being controlled from a first person perspective, an actual physical
body colliding with the world geometry and adhering to a set of animations
that you rarely even see. It becomes apparent when
you look down for instance: you can see Riddick’s feet and you’ll
notice that when turning while standing still, the model first rotates the
upper body on its own and only when passing a certain threshold starts
an adaptation animation to reposition the feet. You mostly never notice this during
movement, but from time to time, especially when you’re trying to
smoothly move around corners, it can get in the way because sooometimes it
doesn’t perform as smoothly as in a regular FPS, for example, where the player
is basically just a floating camera. This at times, especially in hand-to-hand combat
and during more social sequences adds a subtle level of weight and substance to the
character you’re playing, making it feel more like being in control of a
highly detailed 3rd person character, but from a first person POV. This can feel really impressive like when
Riddick automatically tilts the gun around obstacles right in front of him to add a
level of believability to the shooting, but it also creates these funny jank
moments and comes at the cost of sacrificing a sliver of the controllability
that you get in other FPS games of that era. It is fine though, since it makes the game feel
unique enough that it’s more than worth the trade-off. These little imperfections across pretty
much every facet of the game turn it into an impressive array of surprisingly
well-executed individual elements that form a whole that’s far greater
than the sum of its parts. Take the upcoming area of
the game for example, the pit. The moment we get up from the fall, we can hear
the people on the surface already write us off... - [John DiMaggio voiced guard]
Holy cow! I think he survived the fall! - [Guard] Don't worry,
the dwellers will take care of what gravity missed. - [Ragnar] We were just made aware that the
pit is apparently everything but safe (and yeah, you heard right, one of the
voice actors there was actually John DiMaggio, aka Jake the Dog and Smiling Jack from
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines) - [Smiling Jack] Aaahahaha!
What a scene, man, whoowee, aaahaha! - [Ragnar] And to add insult
to injury the mounted flashlight on the shotgun we snagged
from the cushion-guard got damaged during the fall
so that it now graciously warns us how it’s only gonna
remain operable for the next... - [Flashlight voice] Six Minutes! - [Ragnar] So we soldier on
double-time into the sewers and- (shotgun blast, bestial groaning) -get promptly rushed by mutated,
zombie-like humanoid creatures that mindlessly charge at us with a
carnal ferocity, for reasons unknown. (shotgun blasts, groaning, gurgling) This is what I mean when I say that
the game constantly switches gears, shifting pacing, rhythm and core
gameplay often from one instant to the next. We suddenly find ourselves in a horde-like
hunter-prey shooter segment that feels similar to playing as a Marine in Monolith’s
amazing Aliens versus Predator 2, which came out a good three
years before Butcher Bay. It makes complete sense for the Riddick
narrative universe considering how many obvious inspirations Pitch Black
took from the Alien universe. And yeah, AvP2 was amazing and especially being
a Marine was a pulse-pounding, adrenaline-ride, because your gun and motion sensor were the only things
you had to keep those swarms of Xenomorphs at bay. It’s similar here: the deeper we get the darker it gets
and once our flashlight’s battery inexorably dies, we have to exclusively rely on pyrotechnic flares
to illuminate our surroundings step by step while the pit-dwellers keep
attacking us from the gloom. If only we had things like night vision
available, like in the Predator Campaign. Now, that would certainly give us
an edge in the darkness wouldn’t it? Well, luckily, down here in the sewers, we
meet possibly the most significant character that makes Butcher Bay a central
piece for the Riddick canon. We meet Pope Joe, a convict who lives
in the facility’s underbelly as a hermit and who surgically patches a
grave wound on Riddicks’s arm. And this is the moment in which
Riddick acquires his signature Eyeshine. (stabbing, bestial snarling) Like, I always believed- –and this is also what Riddick believes
himself for a long time in the movies– -that it was Pope Joe who surgically implanted
his Eyeshine for a couple of menthol cigarettes. But in actuality, it was more like an awakening
of Furyan Destiny that later on led to the- –well, if you’ve seen The Chronicles of Riddick then
you know what his ultimate fate was going to be. So, I'm not going
to spoil it here. - [Riddick] These? These are
a curtesy of a slam preacher. Got 'em a long time ago.
Cost me 20 menthols. - [Shirah] Interesting how one
chooses to remember the past. You cannot change the truth, Riddick! You cannot escape your destiny. - [Riddick] I can escape anything. - [Shirah] Like Butcher Bay? - [Ragnar] No matter what, the result of this fateful
encounter is that from now on we CAN see in the dark. Riddick’s eyesight is now extremely
light-sensitive which forces him to wear his signature welding goggles whenever he’s in
normal lighting conditions, but once we take them off, even the darkest corners are fully illuminated to
our eyes while our enemies are tapping in the dark. - [Pope Joe] What do you see? - [Riddick] Everything. - [Ragnar] This is technically when
things get really good for us. This new iconic ability gives us, THEORETICALLY, a
massive advantage over unexpecting guards in our way, but it turns out that it’s an advantage
we really really need in the next section. See, this next segment- –you just got your new toy and are ready to
become the ultimate clandestine shadow stalker– -is another one of those examples
where the game shows its imperfections. We seek out an exit that gets us
conveniently into the guard quarters- -Seriously, Butcher Bay
has really a lot of very convenient design flaws for a supposedly
inescapable prison, I gotta say. Anyway, this is the section where
I’d expect the game to give the player at least a bit more of a
power fantasy than usual. And you can tell that the
developers definitely had this in mind, introducing light switches that turn the
dressing and shower rooms pitch dark and make the blinded
guards clumsily tap their way to the light switch
to turn it back on. This is where you’re supposed to get the
drop on them and easily dispose of them, in the first moments, with your
newly acquired superhuman ability. If it weren’t for the AI and level
structure fiercely working against it. This first part here, with the eye shine, I’ve had
to replay over ten times until the guards were in a constellation that made it possible to get
the drop on one without alerting the other and, especially coming straight from
playing Splinter Cell at the time, the constant illogical detections I encountered
felt surprisingly frustrating rather than empowering? A thing I’ve noticed is that
Butcher Bay feels far more like a purebred stealth game, alla
Splinter Cell, than it is in actuality. The developers stated in interviews
that they made it a priority to ensure that every non-scripted segment of the game is
completely solvable by stealth exclusively, but I find it rather impractical
to achieve that in many areas. One of the reasons is
that the guards have an extreeeemely sensitive detection AI
without any “buffer-time” at all. You can sometimes be super far away,
only half-illuminated and they still only have to peripherally spot a single pixel
of you and will snap straight into full-on aggro mode in a split-second,
which can feel cheap at times. What I want to say
with that is basically- -hm - well - okay- a little tip I want to give that might help you
avoid some confusion and frustration, if you play it. The moments where it feels like the game is
clearly signposting that it wants you to play stealthy, while being sometimes
ridiculously difficult to pull off, while going in guns blazing
works surprisingly fine, while often not feeling
contextually right. Like in this part of the game here, we traverse
the guard quarters to get the drop on Abbot- –right after we got our
eyeshine ability to see in the dark– -it 100% feels like “going loud”
shouldn’t even be an option in the guard quarters of one of
the most secure prisons in the galaxy. But, turns out that large parts of the
level design and enemy placement in this area simply don’t allow for a
stealthy solution without deliberately, constantly cheesing the
game’s AI and engine. And that’s really not
conducive for immersive play. (choking, neck cracking) Maybe it was just me,
but what I’m saying is: Don’t insist too hard on Butcher Bay always
pedantically having to be 100% stealth game when it seems to imply it and embrace
it sometimes being a straight-up shooter when that’s the far less frustrating
solution to a situation and... just... just sometimes don’t look too
much at ludonarrative coherence and it’ll make the experience a lot more
fluid and enjoyable in the long run! (gunshot)
That's all. Because, funnily, even if you end up blastin
your way loudly through the guard quarters, Abbot himself will still be completely unsuspecting
when you get to his apartment’s intercom so that it leads to what, at the time, feels
like the final battle of the game. - [Riddick] I got a package. - [Abbott] Finally!
Must be my new rifle. Enter! - [Ragnar] But... Is this plan really going to work? Overpower and capture the guard captain to force
access to a transport ship off this stinking planet? (moaning) (gun charging) Of course not – Fucking Johns here has the third eye and
pops up to be the fly in the ointment again. And Prison Warden Hoxie is everything but amused
at our breakout attempt not even a day after our arrival and decides that he should have put
Riddick in a higher security section of the facility. Why not do it straight up, huh? - [Riddick] Just working my way to the top. - [Hoxie] Even more reason
for me to bury you deep. I'm sending you to the mines, Riddick! I expect things could get ugly. - [Riddick] I'll be disappointed if they don't. - [Ragnar] A bit earlier I talked about
how the tutorial section- –the little slumber Riddick had
before actually landing on the planet– -served as a near perfect vertical cut
for the different types of gameplay you engage in across the length of
the game and you know what? I think I want to revise my statement because
Riddick has a very interesting ludonarrative structure. Namely, that its progression is
arranged in concentric circles, of what the tutorial segment is
the first, smallest, innermost ring: Take the opening segment, which begins with
an introductory cinematic, then puts you in control of a small
area where you move around somewhat freely and, very briefly,
engage in conversation- -until you find a loophole
to slip through the security- -and use the prison’s
infrastructure to your advantage. From there, the game flows into a
stealth/low profile combat passage which then seamlessly transitions into all-out
gunplay until we make our escape attempt. It, gets intercepted in one way or another, and we
end up in a larger, more secure part of Butcher Bay- -the next, bigger concentric
circle of the narrative loop. Structurally, the entire
segment from the moment we arrive in our cell until the boss
fight against Abbot is extremely similar. We start out in a non-combat area,
engaging with people socially, until we find a way to slip through
the security and into the shadows, manipulate the facilities to our
advantage and eventually end up in all-out firefights with whatever
the game throws at you. The biggest difference here
really is that you’re facing the horror movie like segment of
The Pit against the dwellers; but technically it’s really just a different flavor of
“Stealth-is-not-an-option all out firefights”. And it equally ends with an
unsuccessful escape attempt, followed by Hoxie throwing us into
the next level: The Mines, in this case. This new overarching chapter I probably
my favorite part of the entire game- –this even more hopeless
underground layer of Butcher Bay– -if we look at it under the
game design microscope- –once again follows exactly the
same pattern as the two previous acts, only on an even grander and
much more interesting scale. It begins, as always, with an introductory cinematic
in which we get our first glimpse of the area: a sheer neverending vertical shaft consisting of
endlessly stacked modular cube-shaped prison cells. It’s such a surreal, breathtaking
construction in which people are being processed like crates
in an Amazon warehouse- –forced to unpaid, hazardous de facto
slave labor for some faceless government or corporation and anyone who steps
out of line gets discarded without trial- - [Robotic voice] You're in violation.
- [Inmate] Oh man, no! No, nononono no! (machine gun staccato) - [Ragnar] ...also like an Amazon warehouse. (inmates cheering) Yeah, the name-nod to Guantanamo
Bay is not just a passing reference. This is the kind of hyperbolic dystopian
science fiction version of a supermax prison that the real US Prison Industry would
take admiring inspiration from in a heartbeat if the technology
existed in our day and age. - [Riddick] Commerce needs transportation. So do I. - [Riddick] After arriving and getting our
first feel for the new area, we ride the elevator down into the
new GenPop area of this prison wing, which is a far larger open-ended
area than the first one, containing multiple courtyards,
an infirmary, mess-hall and even a designated pit-fight arena, which
is not just silently tolerated by the guard staff. They actively profit off inmates
beating the shit out of each other. Just like before, this is the “social hub”
from where everything in this chapter unfolds, but with more areas, more people,
and way more quests to engage in. Many of which are even entirely optional. But ultimately we’re still
pursuing the exact same goal: find a way out of here, which in this case
means, a way into the mines. - [Riddick] The mines.
I need to get to them. - [Ragnar] The social quests in this part of the prison
take a lot longer to finish, and overall, through the scope and variety in different
characters among the inmates and prison guards, the place feels even more fleshed out, organic
and like a real place than in the previous act. And we also get even more of a glimpse of the
surrounding narrative universe of Riddick than before. For instance, one of my favorite
aspects about it has always been how central a part
islamic faith plays in this setting. Several of the characters in Pitch Black, for
instance were on their pilgrimage to New Mecca, which plays a more weighted role in the sequel,
and here in Butcher Bay, too, there are multiple inmates of muslim faith who we can observe
in their routines of daily prayer in the courtyard, but because they’re not allowed prayer carpets,
there are just marks on the floor as a substitute. It is details like these that make
this universe feel like it has so much more potential than its pulp space
opera character reveals at first glance. And this particular aspect has
always struck me, because honestly, there aren’t all that many benevolent
portrayals of Islam to find in western media at all, so its prominent place in the Riddick
universe without any negative islamophobic or scaremongering connotations
whatsoever definitely deserve an honorable mention. And because there is so much more
going on, in this chapter of the game, we also engage far more in things like
playing different factions against each other, social subterfuge and
lateral thinking than before. And your choices also branch out more. The main goal we set after a while
is to somehow get into the infirmary, after you find that this is a surveillance
-free area so the guards can, umm, perform advanced information
extraction techniques and extracurricular punitive
measures on inmates. - [Guard] You motherfucker!
(punch, grunt) - [Ragnar] How you get in there is up to you. You can either defeat all the
challengers one by one in the arena until the guard in charge of the
pit-fights himself challenges you- –and take him as well– -or alternatively you can get
your hands on illegal narcotics and let the guards catch
you carrying it on purpose. Both of these paths will draw the
attention of our good old friend XZibit who’ll want a little
word with us in private. I’ve been meaning to take the drug
route every time I played the game. People who’ve been following me for
a while know I’m usually a big sucker for any kind of social/non-violent
solutions to game problems; but I’ve always had this weird obsession
for arena/gladiator fights in video games, especially when they’re embedded in
something like a meta-story campaign. I don’t know why, but when I play
any kind of open world game and I find out there’s an arena questline somewhere,
I will drop everything and won’t get back to the main story or anything else until I’ve
become the champion of the Arena. (loud punch, painful screaming) Don’t judge me. Anyway, once we make our way into
the infirmary and get Abbott to show up, - [Riddick] You aren't still mad about before, are you? - [Abbott] Well let's see.
Am I still mad about before? (abbot shouts, loud smack) - [Riddick] You done, Abbott?
Or you need more? - [Abbott] You're a hard-ass, Riddick.
But we're about to soften you up. - [Riddick] You don't know
what you're fucking with. - [Shirah] That is right, Riddick.
They don't know. There is a fury within you, Riddick. Set it free! (deep, bestial snarling) - [Ragnar] Riddick unleashes some
untapped primordial Power in him, which is another part of the greater Riddick mythology
setting up central story events in the later movies. We take out the guards
and, once more time, fight Abbott in a final face-to-face confrontation
before we finally put his lights out for good. Riddick's goal was to steal his high-level security
card, and that marks the milestone where we finally break out of the social hub and slip away into
restricted areas on our path towards the mines. So from talking, scheming, and questing,
we seamlessly, once again, move over to heavily interspersed
sneaking and combat sections, worming our way through ventilation
shafts and heavily guarded corridors. In this part we also find the
amazingly useful stun gun that quietly shoots charged electricity bolts
and stuns opponents for several seconds, which gives us a window to rush up
to them and take them out for good. It is pretty satisfying but also feels a little bit OP for stealth gameplay because it gives
you range without making a sound, and this pretty much completely overtakes how
you play sneaky passages from that point on. It is even capable of
shooting light sources out which gives you a huge advantage
that you didn’t have available before, at least not without making a noise, because so
far every gun that we could have done that with was so loud that it would
alert all the guards immediately. But the tranquilizer gun is quiet
enough that, if you’re like me, you’ll end up one by one turning
every room and corridor pitch black. Pun intended. Down in the mines, our goal
is to seek out Jagger Valance, who’s played by none other than
Hellboy himself, Ron Perlman, - [Jagger] If you take me with ya... - [Riddick] No.
Nothing slows me down. - [Ragnar] Jagger is the man every inmate
agreed we should talk to if we get out or here; he’s sort of a legend among
the prison population and the only one who gets into the
mines without a mine-pass. And he’s also been
anticipating our arrival. When we find him, it turns out he sees working together
with us as his own ticket out of Butcher Bay as well. His plan is to blow a hole into
the outer walls of the mines- -for which we have to backtrack all the way to the
courtyards again to produce an explosive device– -and once we achieve that,
our explosion breaches into the deepest, most dangerous
depths of the mines where... something ancient and deadly is
slumbering that we’re about to unleash. (snarling) (snarling, bestial screaming) (head snapping off, gargling) (bestial squealing) (long, deep snarling) - [Riddick] (whispering) Beautiful. - [Ragnar] So, pretty much identical to the
previous narrative ring, after starting out in a social
hub we discover and make use of a means to slip outside
of the surveillance network, from where the gameplay divulges into
a hybrid of stealth and combat if necessary. And once we get through
that, we escape into a deeper, forgotten part of the prison that nobody dares to
venture into because of the dangers it harbors. And that’s again where the game turns into hunter-prey
mode unleashing a primal, feral entity on us; this time around, the monsters we face are even closer to the creatures Riddick and the
other survivors face in Pitch Black. But ultimately the segment once
again plays extremely horde-mode like. A “Hectically find a way out as
fast as possible while blasting away swarms of incoming minions
with your shotgun”-kinda situation. And just like the pit dwellers before,
these Xenos also slightly comically explode into giblets just a little
too easily to not look a bit silly. (squealing, shotgun blast) We fight our way through the dark tunnels
below the mines and after a pulse-pounding chase we emerge in a different prison wing
where we find that our intervention, unleashing the Xenos into Butcher Bay, has turned
the prison once again into a state of high alert; xeno invaders swarm in and the
security staff is completely occupied with fighting back the invading force, a situation
that we shamelessly exploit to our advantage. I have compared this game to Aliens versus
Predator 2 before, and when I think about it, this part of the game now, feels even more
like it, but, now that we’re actually equipped with night vision, we’re finally taking
the role of the dominating Predator preying on the conflict between the
marines and xenomorphs for sport. (slashing, Predator howling) It’s a really cool turn of events again, observing the
desperate fights between men and creatures from the distance and then regularly charging in
as the third, independent party nobody expects. (chaotic fighting sounds) And, since we’re talking about the concentric
parallelism of the different acts of the game, after gradually upping the ante even
more, leading into tight and engaging purebred first person shooter
gameplay for a good while, the chapter eventually culminates
in yet another escape attempt. At this point, after a massive confrontation
with a boss-enemy in a chain-gun fight, It feels *very* climactic. It feels like the end of a long and arduous
journey and it certainly had me fooled not just the first time around that this
might actually be the end of the game. But... (punch) - [Johns] (punch) You're always trying
to ruin my paydays, Riddick. (fighting) (gunshot) - [Ragnar] It’s definitely a bit
comical at this point and the game, and even Riddick himself is well aware
of the irony of the situation. We once again stand in front of Hoxie and he
inspects the re-captured Prestige-Inamte being like “hmm well looks like the mines weren’t
secure enough for Riddick after all. hmm guess we’ll have to put him in an even more secure
facility, which I just so happen to have at the ready.” Like, after destroying half the
facility, killing dozens of employees, including the goddamn guard
captain and also multiple inmates, hijacking prison armament and a spaceship,
multiple escape attempts, and also indirectly causing the death of dozens of Butcher Bay’s
personnel in just the short time we arrived- -and considering how it’s regularly
shown how any other inmate gets executed on the spot without trial if
they just sneeze half a decibel too loud– -you’d expect that
Hoxie would just be like, “nah I’ve had it with you
Riddick. Guards, shoot him!” but no, for some reason, Richard B.
here always gets the special treatment. I assume there’s probably some kind of massive
monetary reward in accommodating one of the galaxy’s top ten most wanted in your
facility, but it... does get a bit riddicul... oh... ohhhh Anyway, I’m glad that we’re not
being liquidated on the spot, because the final section genuinely
puts another dollop of cream on top in terms of how incredibly inhumanely
commodified the prisoners are in here. In this final cyberpunk wing of Butcher
Bay, we’re being put in eternal cryosleep and are only allowed 2 minutes of daily
defrosting for guild-mandated exercise time. - [Speaker] This is your right as a guild-prisoner,
and your ownly right. - [Ragnar] And yes, this final chapter of the game is
again structured very similarly to the previous acts- -albeit for the first time in a much smaller
scope than the grand third chapter. It’s more of a shot and
explosive final culmination. During our 2 minutes of daily
exercise, we have to observe the regular patterns and
eventually discover our loophole: By hiding away in the coffins of another
inmates without being sedated ourselves, we eventually manage to arrive in the huge storage
hall while awake and slip away into the facility. It’s basically Riddick’s absolute Kryptonite,
because everything here is brightly illuminated into the last corner, and guarded by extremely
sensitive, highly armored automated sentry bots. The high tech space station technology here always
reminded me kinda of the Death Star in Star Wars. But yeah, we punch our way through droves of
little police-bots and do what Riddick does best: escape through the ventilation shafts and
sneak up on security personnel from behind until we eventually get our hands on Our own Exoskeleton... I mean I’ve been speaking
about Aliens a lot haven’t I? (pneumatic whirring) The final Stealth/Combat section of the game
culminates in this all out mechanized mayhem and we waltz through a pretty lavishly decorated
section of the prison that we haven't been in before. This piloting-a-mech section
is probably one of the best and final microcosms of how the kickass quality
and enjoyability of Escape From Butcher Bay peacefully coexists with its
trademark brand of eurojank. (♫ Manuel - Déjà Vu ♫) The moment we step into this thing really
makes you go “hell yeah bring it ooooon”: you expect to go peak badass when waltzing
through almost completely defenseless waves of guards- -and yeah, you do, but
man does it feel janky. I get that they were trying to recreate a
sort of believable feeling of how it is to really be inside the cockpit
of a bipedal robotic mech, but the aggressive camera shake and wobble with every
turn and step makes controlling it so cumbersome. But hell, whatever, it’s still fun even
though it almost makes me vomit. I do genuinely love the Mech’s AI, getting
passive aggressive when we keep ignoring the neverending onslaught of
advice it keeps droning in our ears. - [Mech AI] Battle Analysis suggestion: Pilot should turn off auto-battle analysis,
as pilot seems not to care (cut off by gunfire) - [Ragnar] This final eruption of Riddick’s nobody-can
keep-me-locked-up crusade results in his... What now? his now 3rd? 4th? Escape attempt. But thiiis time... our old fly-in-the-ointment nemesis has finally
had enough of Butcher Bay and Hoxie disrespecting him and is for once, actually temporarily on
our side and helps us escape together with him. With the intention of flying our ass to another well
paying maximum security penitentiary of course. Hoxie too has one more ace up his sleeve and...
shoots our ship down with an anti-air missile. This, on the other hand, knocks Johns out cold,
which Riddick exploits by taking over control and purposefully crash-landing the ship
straight into the warden’s office. - [Riddick] I guess you wanted Johns dead, not alive. - [Hoxie] Riddick! - [Ragnar] Where Riddick, for the first time, confronts
him without any shackles or guards between him and us. Hoxie tries to haggle his sorry
ass out of this quagmire and cravenly presses the panic
button which unleashes... two self-camouflaging
mini-gundams, sort of- -who doesn’t have a mini-gundam
security system installed in their office right?- -and in this final fight of the game, we’re only
equipped with Riddick’s signature tank-top and a minigun that’s
conveniently laying in front of us. (electrical whirring) (heavy gunfire) This feels like a much more interesting
fight at first to be honest, and it really is, but it turns out to be more like a battle of
attrition, patience, and just constantly seeking cover while keeping the Mechs under fire before
they de-camo and unleash their gunfire on us. (short minigun burst) But after everything we’ve been
through, even Hoxie’s personal guard can’t keep us from finally
exacting our vengeance on him. Riddick... decides that since he's been
so obsessed with him all this time, he might as well put him a
Riddick-cosplay as a parting gift. (loud explosion) (muffled screaming) - [Guard] (shouting) It's Riddick!
(machine gun fire) (engine whirring) - [Riddick] You know Johns, statistically,
take-offs are the most dangerous. - [Johns] No shit,
I thought you said landings were. - [Riddick] Yeah. I guess it depends
on who you have at the control. (ship engines boosting) - [Ragnar] If you look at the length of this video;
we’re way past the half-point already, and that means I’ve dedicated far more time to Butcher
Bay than to its sequel Assault on Dark Athena, which... kind of reinforces the general
impression I’ve always had in the past that Athena is often
regarded as more of a continuation- -almost like a full-game size Story DLC
expansion of the first Riddick game, and this is exactly how it felt to me when
playing these games back to back. Especially since Dark Athena
is delivered with Butcher Bay in one joint executable and it strongly
insinuates you should start with the first game. So even Starbreeze seems to,
at least in part, see it that way And this is certainly not a bad thing. When comparing these two titles directly, what
struck me was that Dark Athena feels overall far more polished and less janky in its moment-to-moment
gameplay, especially when it comes to stealth sections. Most of the intended covert segments achieve
that far more comfortably than in Butcher Bay, due to, for instance, better balance and overall
smarter level design that ensures that each playstyle, covert or guns blazing, makes sense and feels no
more or less rewarding or challenging than the other, as well as
massive improvements in enemy AI. Enemies’ reaction time feels far more reasonable: I’ve encountered far less of the cheap “a bored
guard on their 6th hour of patrol duty switches to hyper-aggressive rambo mode in
0.01 seconds after seeing only the tip of your elbow poking out 100 yards away” problems I
kept being haunted by in the first game. All of this and a lot more quality
of life improvements make playing Dark Athena the far
smoother, more polished experience. It is still made from pretty much exactly
the same building blocks as the predecessor- -albeit in a slightly
different distribution. The developers toned down the social-
hub RPG lite elements, for instance, and focused far more on adaptive
immersive sim style gameplay that again seamlessly flows from quiet stealthy
passages into all-out action shooter segments; and the story campaign is overall
even a tad more linearly structured. The single player campaign picks up pretty
much immediately after the end of Butcher Bay: Riddick and Johns are still adrift in cryosleep
aboard the ship they escaped the Prison Colony with, when somewhere in the outer, unpoliced rim of
the galaxy, they get intercepted by the Dark Athena, a colossal space hulk operated by a band
of mercenaries-turned-pirates that captures and outright devours space traveler vessels
whole, taking their passengers captive and... Lobotomizes them to turn them into
man-machine hybrid drone soldiers. The entire setting exerts a strong Giger-esque
horror vibe with a touch of existential dread: The borg-like drone-soldiers used to
be innocent, unassuming people who’ve been violently transformed into automated
or on-demand-remote-controlled cyborgs. It’s a really terrifying notion; these mindless humanoid automatons robotically
patrol and stalk the dimly lit corridors of the Dark
Athena following a simple algorithm, but when they spot you, a human
operator in a remote surveillance room responds and manually
assumes direct control of the drone, its headlights turning bright white and its
movements shifting to being visibly more animate. - [Lynn] (panting) It's easier to hide
from the ones with the red light on the face. Because the ones with the white
light can see you with their flashlights. And they can talk, too. - [Ragnar] Switching to this high-alert-state immediately
makes them far more dangerous and intimidating too. In Hunter mode, they’re suddenly able to
see into the darkest corners and crevices and exit the common patrol patterns to
actively stalk and hound the invader. This strooongly incentivizes players to avoid getting
noticed at all costs, far more than in Butcher Bay. One of the multiple ways
in which Dark Athena, much better than the predecessor,
encourages players to fully - [Riddick] Embrace the darkness. - [Ragnar] Assault on Dark Athena consists of a good
number of stunning and highly memorable set-pieces; like the vertical cargo shaft composed of
a maze of wall-cubes we have to scale with sentry guard search lights on the
opposite side scanning for intruders. It is just one of many incredibly
cool segments of the game that boast stark visuals and
inventive gameplay ideas and are usually over in a heartbeat before the
game moves on to the next impressive scene. This is one of the big strengths
of especially Dark Athena: I’ve talked about the difference in kind
quite a bit in the previous chapters, and it’s really striking just how often
Starbreeze switches up not just the pacing but literally the core engagement from scene
to scene in order to make things never get boring. This first half - eh - maybe even
two thirds of Assault on Dark Athena, where Riddick plays hide and seek with the ship’s
company across the ventilation shafts (as always) and stalks the shadows of the vessel
to find a way out of this predicament- -the scenario, especially with the game being a
first person shooter, gave me heavy flashbacks to the wonderful classic FPS masterpiece
Star Trek: Elite Force by Raven Software, in which you face an invasion of
none other than the infamous Borg. (explosion) When it comes to its place within
the Riddick canon, I’d say that this chapter is somewhat less
mandatory(?) than Escape From Butcher Bay. Like, the first game features the seminal moment
when Riddick acquires his signature eyeshine and when his prophetic spiritual
connection to his ancestral Furyan lineage awaken for the first time,
and it also portrays how he achieved the reputation of one of the most
notorious prison breakers in the galaxy. (gunshot) Whereas the events in Dark Athena feel
more low profile and personal in comparison. You don’t need them as vitally as a
cornerstone of the canon mythology, but they add some genuinely
nice bits of character progression. There’s this interesting duality about the character
of Riddick in both movies and the games. Within the eyes of The Law, the powers that be, and of anyone
who’s heard of him through hearsay, he’s clearly established
as “The Bad Person”. He’s a Criminal (bad),
he’s killed people (bad) and especially in Pitch Black he’s deliberately framed
very close to black on the moral greyscale meter. But yet, his actions never really
confirm him being a truly bad person. He’s opportunistic and clearly
driven by a personal agenda, acting remorseless towards anyone
who crosses him and his goals- -and those who directly act against
him pretty much always turn out to be representatives of oppressive,
imperialist forces in one way or another. So Riddick is pretty much an
embodiment of an ACAB mentality, individualist, and clearly adhering to
his own, surprisingly strict moral code for such a textbook
“Chaotic Neutral” character. He never directly threatens nor
harms, and even oftentimes protects those that are helpless if
it won’t put him at a disadvantage. And this is where Dark
Athena comes into play. He willingly joins forces with anyone who shows the
will to fight in the face of overwhelming adversity. Especially when they’re at a
disadvantage and innocent - i.e. kids. Similar to how he becomes a mentor
figure to Jack in the movies, he meets Lynn, the escaped daughter of one of
the prisoners on the Dark Athena, who has been successfully slipping away
from the pirates long enough to become a ship known stowaway, and learned
to successfully evade the drones- -monsters as she calls them. And Riddick, without hesitation,
forms an unlikely alliance with her, working together and protecting
her whenever she needs his help. - [Lynn] The monster... - [Riddick] That monster is gonna
be with you until the day you die. Don't be afraid of it. In time you'll
understand how to use it. Control it. Harness it. Unleash it. - [Lynn] I can be a monster, too. - [Ragnar] Which she rarely ever
even needs actually it turns out. And damn, at a later point, she even manages
to be a rare video game case of a non-annoying companion in an escort mission, because you
can clearly tell how she fights tooth and nail and helps us out with guidance and getting
things done that we’re physically incapable of. - [Lynn] I can open it from inside. Watch out! - [Ragnar] They share a symbiotic bond. - [Lynn] There's so many of them!
(heavy gunfire) - [Ragnar] It also helps that just like
most sections of the game, the escort missions are equally short and
snappy enough to never outstay their welcome. Just a few minutes of carrying her around
on the back of a mech we’re piloting until the point gets across and then the game moves
on to the next change in gameplay challenge. - [Guard intercom] Riot control requires
extra power for the prisoner cleanup. - [Ragnar] The first and biggest chunk of the game takes
place aboard the Dark Athena, itself, and, as I said, the game heavily tones down on the
social elements in comparison to Butcher Bay. The only part that plays somewhat similar to
the courtyard social hubs of the previous game is when we get access to the prison cells
and talk with the inmates in their cells to collect information and trade favors to gradually,
Metroidvania style, unlock access to more and more areas of the ship where there’s always
something we need to find or get done. - [Riddick] This place reeks
of sweat and desparation. Getting info from the prisoners...
not a problem. - [Ragnar] Compared to even the first, rather small
chapter in the first prison wing in Butcher Bay, this is way more compact, basically just a handful
of conversations with people locked in place that kick your next goals and
objectives into gear from time to time. Overall, this entire huge chapter aboard the ship
feels, as I said, far more like an immersive sim, with the true focus being that each new
compartment of the ship we gain access to adds new and interesting alterations in
challenge, scenery and gameplay to the mix. In one part we hunt down a notoriously sadistic
crew member to enact revenge for one of the inmates, which makes us stalk after him
straight through the crew quarters, taking on anyone who challenges us
in straight up hand to hand combat- -well hand-to-ulaks combat, more like. (slicing, splattering, screaming) I guess that's one of the most important additions
that Dark Athena brings to the Riddick canon, is that this is where Riddick discovers
his signature dual-ulaks melee weapons. Another really fun stage has you engage in
firefights within the gravity core of the ship; so it’s exceedingly hard to hold
onto the floor for yourself and even tougher for your opponents, which you
can and totally should use to your advantage. (shotgun reloading) And of course, you guessed it, eventually
Riddick will gain access to the Control Room from where the drones can be manually controlled
and uses the pirate's own medicine against them. It puts such an interesting twist
on how you carry yourself because now literally don’t have to
care for your life energy anymore because the drones are disposable and once you
get shot down, you just switch over to the next one. It’s really energizing and satisfying to
see how, after staying in the shadows for the lion’s part of the game,
once you hijack the drone control, the central nervous system of the
Dark Athena’s security, if you will, everyone on the ship completely
panics when they’re being overrun by their own army of
lobotomized automatons. And in stark parallelism to the
first game, we also, of course, eventually hijack a robo-warrior
exosuit again in this game, and even leave the airlock to engage in
stunning fights outside of the ship’s hull. And just like with a lot of the gameplay
aspects that have been drastically improved from the first game to this one, controlling the Mechs
here finally feels really good, smooth, intuitive, fun- -no more over-exaggerated head-bobbing that
makes movement and aiming borderline unplayable. It’s just really enjoyable and engaging, a
massive improvement over the first game. (machine gun fire) But yeah, after fighting our way through the
Dark Athena’s corridors for a good while, we eventually we face its Captain,
Rivas, in a face to face duel, which is another one of those moments
that heavily feel like the final fight- -the toughest melee encounter so far
against the very leader of your adversaries. (slashing) (metallic slash, painful choked scream) Ughh... yeah that
should take care of her. After disposing of our nemesis, in this
game, Riddick snags the last escape pod, flees away towards the planet
the ship is currently orbiting and- -oh... shoot... realized that he fucked up big time.
(the price is right horn) - [Rivas] (croaking) So you think you can escape ME?!
- [Riddick] I know it. - [Computer voice] Warning. Three. Two. One.
(computer beeping frantically) (rocket explosion) - [Ragnar] The latter third of the game takes place
after our pod crashlands on the shores of the Colony planet of Aguerra Prime,
a fall that we luckily survive, but then again the fact that all of these
stories precede the movies doesn’t really make it very likely that Riddick would
actually die from this, now does it? The old prequel conundrum. Now I’ve pointed out in multiple
instances before how Riddick takes often heavy and unabashed artistic
inspirations from the Aliens franchise, and this next setting here is another
strong case in point for that to me. The atmosphere and aesthetic of Aguerra
Prime have always strongly reminded me of the desaturated desolation and
despair ambiance of Fury 161, the prison and mining
colony planet in Alien 3. The planet has been forcefully invaded and its
inhabitants are in the process of being “harvested” by the Dark Athena's crew, and we find
it in the final throes of its resistance against the assimilating
Drone-Pirate Mercenary force. So we use the opportunity and the
fact that we’re assumed KIA from our crash landing, to once again
slip into the shadows after the all-out fights of the previous
final act aboard the space hulk. The streets of Aguerra Prime are probably one
of my favorite sections in the game when it comes to Immersive-Sim style
stealth/action hybrid gameplay because it feels the most refined and
honed in the entire series, by now. The drone-soldiers here combing the alleys of the
settlement for survivors can be keenly observed, outmaneuvered and overpowered from many angles
from the shadows without feeling linear or forced. This is probably the part where stealth felt to me
the most like an open-ended dynamic puzzle, the way it's supposed to be, incredibly rewarding
when you see it through completely undetected. It gives you that good old Splinter
Cell like feeling of empowerment from the shadows that are often sometimes
missing in Butcher Bay. But at the same time it equally leaves it up to
you to engage the occupation troops guns-blazing, or if you get caught sneaking, it lets
you adapt and change strategy on the fly. And it also makes contextually more
sense than the prison Butcher Bay. The encounters in the streets of Aguerra Prime
reminded me just how good of a systemic first person shooter this game really
is at its core, easily going toe to toe with the sheer spectacle of the resistance battles
in the urban canyons of City 17 in Half-Life 2. And equally Dark Athena really doesn’t stop throwing
new things at the player even late into the game. You know how especially first person shooters
in the post-Half-Life 2 era had this tendency to build a huge part of their gameplay about a
physics based gimmick gun, like the Gravity Gun? I talked about this recently
in my Cryostasis video. Well, Dark Athena features its own
gimmick-weapon, the SCAR gun: a multipurpose tool primarily developed
for mining operations which fires energy projectiles that stick
to any surface or adversary, that are then remotely detonated to
create a kinetic pressure explosion. You can dispense up to 5 projectiles
at the same time and then detonate them all at once, multiplying
their explosive efficiency. This gun manages to turn the gameplay
quite on its head and slightly dominates the final stretch of the campaign,
because it is strong, efficient, comes with unlimited ammo and
plays like a less goofy version of Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun, where you
repurpose a device primarily intended to be used as a tool in creative ways to
fling your opponents across the map. It is a ton of fun, and I find
it so indicative for the highly diverse and experimental nature of
these games that a feature like this, which most developers would have probably
given you in the early parts and built nearly their
entire game around– -Starbreeze chose to drop this weapon as what it is: a gimmick and hands it to you in maybe
the last 8th or so of the story campaign. (frantic slashing, deep groaning) Like most things, it doesn’t overstay its welcome,
and the segments featuring the SCAR gun are equally versatile enough that it never
forces you to use it all the time. It’s just the suggested approach in many
corners here, because it’s ultimately up to you how you fight your
way back to take over the docked Dark Athena, which turns out to be your
only way off this rock now, and brace yourself
for the final showdown. I really like this game for what it is. There was not a single part
about it that I found disappointing, padded too much or stretched to
long or boring, which is astounding considering how many different types
of engagement within the framework of a first person immersive shooter Dark
Athena throws at you beat after beat. To quote lead
producer Peter Wanat: “Most teams and groups just try to do one
thing well, and we did four things really well." "That's more than most
teams can hope for.“ And I totally agree with that. It is all good, some
of it even stellar. The sceneries and vistas
are striking and memorable, both stealth and gunplay is
engaging start to finish and often leaves you seamless freedom
to solve problems however you want. Characters are once again extremely
well cast, acted, and motion captured, and the story it tells feels
like a road movie chapter. A self-contained bump in
the road on Riddick’s journey but ultimately nothing that you
have to play for story reasons. Which is why I remain steadfast in my
assessment that Assault on Dark Athena, despite being the more refined, better
balanced and polished game of the duology, it still feels like a
“feature-length” story expansion to one of my favorite First
Person Shooters of the 2000s. Escape from Butcher Bay, for any lover of Dark
SciFi, First Person Shooters and Immersive Sims, is in many ways the more interesting
game, mechanically and historically. The must-play of the duology. But if you’ve beaten this charismatic,
imperfect masterpiece, and still feel like more, Assault on Dark Athena is the
perfect chow to assuage that hunger. - [Riddick] Now the monsters have something to fear. - [Ragnar] The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from
Butcher Bay received rave reviews from the gaming press at the time and is often considered
one of the best games of the Xbox generation. It sold well enough that it warranted an
equally excellent sequel that rounded up the duology into one complete, technically
optimized package for the seventh console generation. Yet despite the critical acclaim, in recent years
these games have become adrift in copyright limbo. The only straight-up way to buy the
Riddick games digitally these days is getting Assault on Dark Athena, which includes the HD
Remaster of Butcher Bay, in the Xbox 360 marketplace. The PC version has been removed from
digital storefronts in 2017 indefinitely. And if you happen to still own it on Steam from
before or acquire a physical copy of the PC version, you’re gonna have to deal with the atrocious
Tagès (I don't know how it's pronounced) copyright protection system which was designed to
allow users to register their game’s serial number to three different PCs and then
put their license in a 30-day time-out until the three
registrations are refreshed. Problem is that this disgusting piece
of DRM garbage requires online servers to run a proto-Orwellian
kraken-algorithm, and guess what, it has been discontinued
for a good many years by now. Which means that the moment you install your
legally acquired copy of the game a third time, you will be locked out of installing it again
from that point on and are forced to use technically illegal means to crack it if
you want to still play your own game. Another case in point for why Digital
Rights Management is, and always has been rubbish that invariably ends up
hurting paying customers who, like, support games by actually buying them, 100
times more than those it’s meant to counteract because who doesn’t
have to deal with this crap? Yo ho ho, those who
pirate it from the get-go. And well, those who bought the DRM-free GOG version,
but that one’s equally been discontinued since 2017. So despite admirable efforts in
making a great movie-license adaptation, the distribution side of this
is sadly yet another case of profit-first corporations not caring
for the preservation of the art one bit, which let it sadly become a notably difficult
game to attain these days, especially for PC. It is generally considered abandonware,
and at the time of release of this video it’s listed on various
abandonware sites out there, so if you’re eager to sail the grey seas, mateys,
then you’d be doing so under the honorable flag of video game preservation; to keep the memory of a one-of-a-kind immersive sim,
first person action adventure genre mix alive. Well, two actually, two-of-a... two-of-two-kinds...
two-of-one-uh... one kin- - [Gintoki] Just do it.
("do it" reverberating infinitely) - [Ragnar] which demonstrated admirably to
future video game generations just how fffucking good adaptations of movie
licenses can be and how much they’re capable of adding to a fascinating narrative
universe bursting with potential – if only the powers that be care about
more than making their shareholders happy. The Riddick games, as I’ve said, have been removed from digital shelves
for quite a good while now and even if you get your hands on them, you might still
run into trouble with the deprecated DRM system. So at this point the simplest way to acquire both
of these games on PC is through abandonware. I am going to list some sources that
host abandonware versions of the game, which you can grab and play
but at your own risk of course. In case you’re wondering
about the legal ramifications, I’ve also linked a document in the description
with a little overview on the current situation and why game publishers are
actually shit-their-pants scared to ever act on client, meaning player-side,
use of abandonware use on a legal basis. In the end, it’s 100% up to you to
decide how chaotic good your alignment is. For those who've discovered
me with this video, hey, I'm Ragnar and on this channel I mostly
cover old games, horror games, indie games or combinations thereof and I try to
bring attention to videogames that have fallen into obscurity and indie games
that I think deserve your attention. In today's credit segment, I’m showcasing
footage of me playing Golden Light, a procedural, dark comedy horror first person
shooter which is an absolute phenomenon, one of the weirdest and most surreal
mind-benders I’ve ever played. A game in which you constantly question your sanity
and delve into an absolutely unique kind of anxiety, because down in the bizarre meat-zone, it’s a
prop-hunt where the props actually hunt you. And where all your weapons are edible. Golden Light is a horror
roguelike that feels like a David Lynch meets vaporwave fever
dream, while you’re OD’ing on acid. It’s available on Steam
and you can find the link (and a couple of free Steam codes as
long as they’re hot) in the description. The work on these videos and the
financial support of everyone who partakes in making them
is in big parts crowdfunded. If you’d like to help us shed light on more
forgotten and overlooked titles in the future, then why not consider dropping
a buck or two over on my Patreon. It gets you access to High Quality Vimeo
versions of my videos one to several days early, as well as the chance to immortalize
your name in the credits here. Your help really does make all the
difference. So thank you for considering. Today, my special credit-shoutout goes out
to these (soon to be) immortalized Patrons: www.patreon.com/ragnarroxshow/ Until next time... ta ta!
Even today I'm honestly shocked how good that game was. While I don't think it appealed to everyone it was certainly a blast for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing. I never did play Assault on Dark Athena though. I seem to recall that by the time I went to play it something screwy was happening with the PC version and I couldn't get it running.
2004 was a monumental year for FPS games ,graphics engines and gaming as a whole
We really went from games looking like this to this,almost overnight.
Static lighting ,no weapon bob,blobs as shadows,limited use of colors,flat textures with no dept... was a thing of the past.
It seems the first game has been classified abandonware so it can be distributed like No One Lives Forever. This was one of the best and most impressive FPS games of its era and doesn't deserve to be forgotten to unsold box copies hiding under Walmart warehouse racks.
Now to wait for Dark Athena I suppose.
Wasn't it done right largely because Vin Diesel was a massive nerd who personally helped fund the games and vetted the studio who made them?
Butcher Bay was an amazing game. So much better than it had any right to be. I played through that game so many times when it came out.
I purchased a used copy of Dark Athena recently for the Xbox 360 on Amazon. Can’t wait to play it when it arrives!
This title is one that I never completed because I couldn't progress past a certain point. That was the Xbox version. I should replay it with mouse and keyboard.
Dark Athena was a fantastic little game, I remember being in awe at how fluid and varied the kill animations were. Would love a re-release.
One of the very few cases where the time-in game is definitively better than the movie. I absolutely loves that game when it came out.