I was thinking about the Mad Max game earlier (since apparently I'm turning into the Joseph Anderson of Mad Max) and I kind of came to a realization as why I thought the game felt it too safe, and it has to do with the cars (specifically Max's car, the Magnum Opus). See, in the movies it's made pretty clear that cars = life in the Mad Max universe and shiny new F-150s aren't exactly growing on trees. This is pretty obvious to anyone who's seen any of these films (especially Fury Road) but I think it's worth pointing out that cars are put on a seriously high pedestal in this franchise, and not just in the The Fast and The Furious kind of "these cars are real fast and look cool" way -- they're really more like horses, with names and personalities that haven been customized to the owner's tastes over the years, but far more valuable since you can't just wander out into the outback and lasso a car to replace the one that just got wrecked. Max's Interceptor in The Road Warrior is equipped with a bomb that will go off if anyone tries to siphon his petrol and we're shown several times in Fury Road that all of the vehicles in Immortan Joe's fleet have detachable steering wheels, unconventional fuel modifications, and in the case of the War Rig, a dead man's switch preventing ignition without a special sequence of switch flips. It's shown quite clearly to us how valuable and irreplaceable many of these vehicles are, so I think it's a real shame that Mad Max the game doesn't really continue with this theme and instead kind of goes in the opposite direction.
For starters, Max is able to steal any enemy vehicle with just a single button press - evidently they thoughtfully drive around with their doors unlocked all the time. This is pretty silly just in the least immersion-breaking case of you being able to theoretically sneak up on a guy and steal his car leaving him stranded in the desert (this never happens). It gets hilarious in practice however as, if you can get the timing right, you can pull enemies right out of their own cars while they are still moving. Often these car doors are festooned with rusty spikes and jagged tips probably intended to prevent this exact scenario from occurring, but whatever, they probably originally built the game to not let you perform these carjack stunts but in testing people hated getting run over repeatedly without any recourse so... there you go. This still would've kind of silly and dumb if the enemies were allowed to do this to Max's car as well, but no, instead of trying to give Max a taste of his own medicine enemies will just hop onto your car and try to kick you / punch you / stab you to death. This is a real bummer as you're frequently forced to get out of the car and leave your sidekick / mechanic buddy Chumbucket all alone and defenseless, but since none of the enemies can actually hurt him there's really no danger at all, even though Chum has lots of incidental dialogue about how scared he is, how dangerous the area you're in is, etc. It feels like a pretty obvious idea so I'm guessing Avalanche Studios at least thought about this but it's a shame nothing made it into the final game as that added tension of needing to protect Chum and the car would've added a lot of white-knuckle moments as you race back from whatever you were doing to save him before some scavengers run off with your Magnum Opus and erase about 15 hours of progress. What would've been really cool, is if at that point you have would've had to repeat some of the introduction missions of the game and gone back to the Boneyard, grab another of the 5 car bodies, and try again with a stock Opus. Maybe too punishing since you're asked to get out of your car a lot, but still probably would'be felt more in line with a post-apocalyptic hellhole than what we got.
The other aspect that the game slides backwards from in relation to the films is enemy variety. I don't mean the variety of the enemy factions as those are actually fine even if they are all kind of same-y - I mean the cars. For a Mad Max game there is a dishearteningly small pool of included car designs that you will encounter way, way too often by the end of the game, and it's so fundamentally at odds with the universe this game takes place in and the generally accepted ground rules of post-apocalyptic media that I honestly believe that this was just a result of Avalanche's inexperience with making a Mad Max game, as this is an issue that the developers must have been reminded of time and time again as they were putting this game together.
This isn't every vehicle in the game, but these are definitely the most common ones you will see in your time in the Wasteland. Notice the repeats? Yes, every vehicle has totally separate entries in this menu for its "no armor", "some armor", and "tons of armor" versions (as you progress through the areas of the environment and get closer and closer to Gastown, the enemies get tougher. In this case "tougher" just means "has more health" but whatever, you will see 13 of the vehicles on this page so often that they are honestly the only enemies that exist. What's worse, there is a lot of overlap between enemy factions here: 3 factions have a heavily armored car with shredder tires (top left, far right middle row). 3 factions have a "rammer" car with a huge cowcatcher and distinctive exhaust (2nd from left, top row and 2nd from right, middle row). 3 factions have a similar looking coupe-type vehicle with a flamethrower mounted in the back (far left, middle row, 2nd from right bottom row). 2 factions have pickup trucks filled with dudes who try to board your car (2nd from left, middle row). And then all 4 factions have their own front-line "infantry grunt" vehicle that makes up the bulk of convoys and a significant portion of patrols (right 3 top row, left 3 bottom row). The excessive repetition stings even more considering that many of the vehicles are modeled after the cars featured in Fury Road, a film where you couldn't find a repeated car model with a gun to your head.
Like the issue with Max's carjacking and Chumbucket's invulnerability, I'm sure the obvious solution to this was already thought of by the developers (obvious to me, at least): take the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor, and reshape to generate random procedural enemy vehicles instead of Orcs. This is almost certainly an insane amount of work however, so I can understand why they weren't able to do something like this as I'm sure they recognized the potential of semi-random convoy or camp leaders for Max to take on. What is interesting to me is that there hints of a more modular car customization system a la Mafia II that exists, as a there are certain late-game vehicles that belong to a smaller faction which are like twisted, even more souped up versions of the "regular" enemy vehicles seen in the image above. These vehicles strangely are the only ones in the game that you cannot capture for yourself and feature some very cool and unique parts and chassis, so it's a bit of a bummer that they weren't able to do more with that - maybe since each "region" of the map is under the control of a leader who specializes in certain aspects of car combat (one is all about armor and tires, another is all about engines and exhausts, etc."), the enemies in that region maybe could've had distinct, unique customizations in order to survive against the leader's people. Which brings me to another strange piece of this game: the people.
Throughout Mad Max, you do most of what you do in order to help the people of the Wasteland. Whether that's taking over outpost camps, wrecking convoys, or clearning minefields and etc., it's all ostensibly to further Max's own personal goals while helping the "normal" people of this world get out from under the thumb of the game's antagonist, Scabrous Scrotus (yes, that is really his name). And to some extent, your progress is tracked and reflected in the game world - the "threat level" of each area goes down, reducing the frequency of enemy patrols, and whenever you take an enemy camp it's repopulated with friendly NPCs who are for some reason shown dismantling everything. Yes, even in the post-apocalypse where water is more valuable than gold you can stand and watch these people for hours hack, saw, and grind away at the metal structures that can only have been put together with countless man-hours and resources. It doesn't make any sense and the game only gives this lame "we have to make it so there's no reason for them to come back" excuse as a hand-wave, but that makes even less sense. No one has guns in this world (except snipers. Snipers with fully-functioning rifles are littered all over the place but Max possess literally the only other firearm you will see in the game) so what are they going to do? Ram their cars into the outpost? It would've made way more sense if, every time you captured a camp, you had to defend against an inevitable counter-attack - kind of like the 2nd stage in a boss battle. And depending on the amount of perimeter defenses that you destroyed on your way in (stuff like flamethrowers, snipers, and bizarre automated turrets) the fight would be easier or harder since the people you liberated it for might not have enough tools to push back the enemies. That could've fed into a larger system of territory control for each region's leader in a similar way to the gang fight mechanics from GTA. As it is now you just kind of clear out camps and the enemy factions just kind of accept their losses and leave you and the camps alone in a very un-Fury Road manner. Just having something really small like the outpost retaliation mechanic in Fac Cry 4 would've gone a long way towards making this seem like more of a constant struggle that Max and the player are helping out with instead of the one man army conquest that it is now.
This is getting long and kind of ranty so I'm going to end it here, but I might write something about the car combat as well since it's mostly good but way too easy and has some strange quirks about it. We'll see.
