Five Times the Hub World Got Dangerous

September 26, 2016
The Bulgogi
CoOp Teachings
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We finished up Deus Ex: Mankind Divided last week and we had some mixed emotions. The game is fun to play but seems to be struggling to balance the need to provide you a powerful hero with the need to provide a believable world. Regardless of our feelings about it, Prague is beautifully rendered with loads of hidden passages and secret areas to discover. You can easily spend hours searching out hidden passages and finding loot caches around the city. Towards the end of the game [SPOILERS], Prague turns into a police state, forcing you to keep to the shadows or engage with cops as you travel between areas. In the game, this feels like a natural escalation of the plot; terrorists’ activities have forced severe restrictions of freedoms. In practice, though, turning the safe and familiar hub world into a hostile environment is something we’d experienced quite a few times before. Here are five other times in which the hub world got dangerous.

Mass Effect: The Citadel

Mass Effect’s awesome story but awkward gameplay makes the game a great game to beat but a tough game to play (and particularly hard to replay). Mass Effect 2 and 3 buffed up the gameplay to be on par with the awesome storytelling and I’ve beaten each of those titles several times, but Mass Effect 1 was a singular experience for me. The plot is really good; you spend the game trying to track down a doomsday device before some bad guys get it. You base your operations out of the Citadel, a truly beautiful hubworld; it’s a spacestation that looks like eden and is filled with fantastic technology. As you race around the universe, you discover that the device you’re looking for has been in the Citadel the entire time and the villains beat you to it. When you finally arrive, you find the Citadel ravaged and loaded with enemy troops. The transition from beautiful paradise to war torn outpost is jarring and wouldn’t be so successful if the designers didn’t do such an incredible job making The Citadel such a beautiful place to begin with. It’s a great example of a beautiful hub world gone bad.

Nice place you have here. Shame if something happened to it.

Ni No Kuni: Everybody Turns Zombie

Ni No Kuni is a game in which a young boy ventures into a supernatural alternate universe to attempt to revive his deceased mom. He completes this quest and – sadly – discovers that he cannot bring his mom back after all. You return to your world and the game seems to be wrapping up but you soon discover there’s a much worse villain behind all the evil. She then turns all of you colorful friends into bloodthirsty zombies. Many of the vibrant towns you’ve visited up to this point are now fairly dangerous and, worse yet, the magistrates of each of the towns has mutated into a powerful monster. You have to fight your way through these towns and defeat these bosses to return things to normal. It’s a crazy last act for the game. Much like Mass Effect, it works by transforming beautiful, colorful characters into dangerous monsters and zombies. The entire thing makes for some real nightmare fuel, particularly Queen Lowlah, pictured below.

A long time ago, we used to be friends.

The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine: Vampire Party

Given the proximity of humans and monsters in Geralt’s world, it’s kind of weird that monsters attacking cities doesn’t happen more often. Sure, sometimes a monster you’re battling might wander into a city but the citizens will usually repel it without too much trouble. In Blood and Wine, though, the whole city goes to hell. In the game, Geralt’s tracking a killer who’s tied to some local vampire activity. Things go awry and the vampires eventually attack the capital city, leading to mass killings and utter chaos. As Geralt, you have to battle your way through the onslaught and attempt to but things back in order (but, believe me, things get a lot weirder before they get better). It’s a great twist that that lets you see the danger folks in The Witcher’s world live with and it finally explains why every city you encounter has so dang many guards.

That’s Geralt for you. Always running to where people are fleeing from.

Dishonored: Bad Guys in the Bar

Dishonored is one of our favorite games and we’re extremely excited about the sequel. The open world steampunk stealth adventure provides a vibrant environment and some really interesting levels to explore. You spend the game taking vengeance against the members of a traitorous group who assassinated the empress in your protection. As you dwindle their numbers through assassination, they eventually turn the tables on you and invade the bar where you’ve been hiding. You manage to escape and take your revenge on those invaders (and it helps that you know the layout better than they do) before going on to free the Empress. It really is a great game with strong levels and terrific powers. You take a lot of revenge in Dishonored, but nothing’s more satisfying than taking back your bar.

I keep my work life and my weekend life separate. With violence.

Deadly Premonition: The City is as Crazy as You

Deadly Premonition is a weird game about investigating a series of grizzly murders in a small rural city full of eccentric characters. Your oddball detective seems to be tuned to the presence of supernatural forces and frequently encounters creatures and artifacts from another world. These encounters are limited and frequently your detective will find himself in an enclosed location as monsters from another world invade in large numbers. These sequences are fun and scary, but I was never quite sure whether they were happening in “real life” or just in Agent York’s imagination. This mystery is solved definitively later on as the fabric between the worlds starts to rip. Towards the end of the game, the monsters start invading the main world as well, leading to some hallucinogenic sequences in which you speed through the town chased by enormous terror dogs. It’s a completely bonkers twist late in the game as safe areas become dangerous and it creates a great sense of urgency to move quickly to return things back to normal. Well, not normal, exactly.