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Shinjobi posted:If I never see the phrase ludonarrative dissonance again I will have lived a fantastic life. What else would you call it from now on
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Feb 11, 2017 20:42
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it is Extremely Problematic that Nathan Drake never endorses the ethically superior vegan lifestyle moreover, the deaths caused by their gun battles will pale in comparison to the deaths caused by Sam and Sully's thoughtless promotion of smoking Hwurmp fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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Feb 11, 2017 20:44
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Really Pants posted:it is Extremely Problematic that Nathan Drake never endorses the ethically superior vegan lifestyle This sort of "it's just a video game dude lol don't take it so seriously" argument only worked when the game wasn't taking itself too seriously. I'd be one of the first people to say "who cares about drake murdering people" in regard to previous games because they were just action movies you play, uncharted 4 is a Character Story where even the characters don't actually care about any of the exciting adventure stuff half the time and would rather just go home. Mario doesn't have princess peach mundane kingdom management sim for an hour after you collect all the power stars and rescue her because nobody cares about the lives of video game characters when they aren't doing exciting things unless you're a self absorbed middle aged game designer who wants to make something that Matters and Has Something To Say instead of Just Entertainment. Not to say that there is no place for media/games that have the sort of themes and tone UC4 is clearly going for, but shoehorning it into mass murder adventure power fantasy 2016 that you're being asked to make by your corporate overlords to sell product is not it. The crash bandicoot throwback shows just how little mainstream games have come in two decades when it comes to storytelling because despite all the amazing advances in motion capture and dog jowel animations the story matters exactly as little to the gameplay as the story in crash did, give or take some QTE cutscenes.
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Feb 11, 2017 21:02
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Now imagine if the entire series is Drake and Elena telling those adventures to their daughter, and she's embellishing them, or Drake is saying the fights were bigger than they were.
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Feb 11, 2017 21:11
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or maybe they will explain to their child that life isn't black and white and they did, in fact, kill some dudes, because dudes tried to kill them.  there is, so far as I can remember, literally no point in which Nate or Elena outright murders someone who wasn't already trying to kill them. especially in this game, you frequently have the option to just sneak/run by enemies. you could, I suppose, argue that they could just go home and not hunt treasures, but then there's no point to the series in the first place.
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Feb 11, 2017 21:11
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Secret ending: Go home and be a family man. Which reminds me, I love Spec Ops: The Line in spite of the contempt the developers have for their own playerbase. I seem to recall that their official position was that you should buy their game, and upon seeing that the character is making choices you disagree with, you should then turn it off and not play it again, or else you're a bad person and directly responsible for everything bad that happens (in the fictional story [to fictional characters {that they wrote [and then sold to you (for money)]}]). With the amount of effort put into these setpieces, I doubt Naughty Dog is of the same opinion, and the somewhat garbled dissonance that results is just a best-effort attempt at reconciling gameplay and story. Looking forward to your future projects, folks.
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Feb 11, 2017 21:27
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morallyobjected posted:that they could just go home and not hunt treasures, but then there's no point to the series in the first place. Which is exactly why rubbing your nose in the fact that drake and elena have normal perfectly well adjusted lives & drake had a childhood that feels like an 80's version of the outsiders in spite of their combined bodycount being somewhere between jack the ripper and the rwandan genocide is a terrible idea. When you introduce realism and actual pathos to the story of adventure shooting man and his merry band of quipping rogues you also invite questions like "hey, why doesn't drake have PTSD when he's personally killed more people in gunfights and had more grenades explode in his face than entire units did in ww2?"
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Feb 11, 2017 21:29
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Psychological therapy in the Uncharted world is a hundred years more advanced than our own. In fact, several fields of study are leaps and bounds beyond our real-world progress. See also pirate engineering, or the biomedical science of several ancient civilizations. It's a shame bridge-building never caught up; I mean, even the dive salvage intro to the game involved an accident with a bridge, I imagine the entire field is just some huge knowledge gap in that world.
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Feb 11, 2017 21:34
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Nate's death count doesn't even touch most JRPGs and I don't see anyone talking about Zidane's PTSD
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Feb 11, 2017 21:42
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morallyobjected posted:Nate's death count doesn't even touch most JRPGs and I don't see anyone talking about Zidane's PTSD Well those are monsters and very rarely ever just dogs or whatever counts for pets in said fantasy universe. Now, if you're playing a JRPG and 95% of the enemies are people then that could work. But the only place that counts for a high human body count I can think of is Fire Emblem or, something that isn't even a JRPG, Dynasty Warriors. Uncharted is unique in featuring something of an everyman just gunning down enemies like Serious Sam.
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Feb 11, 2017 21:47
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Secret ending: Go home and be a family man.  ?????
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Feb 11, 2017 21:49
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morallyobjected posted:Nate's death count doesn't even touch most JRPGs and I don't see anyone talking about Zidane's PTSD change all "shoot" or "kill" references in UC to "defeat" and/or "power of friendship," add damage numbers above pirate & merc heads, problem solved
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Feb 11, 2017 21:52
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morallyobjected posted:Nate's death count doesn't even touch most JRPGs and I don't see anyone talking about Zidane's PTSD Zidane is a combined monkey king/shakespeare reference who lives in a world where people can look like this without anyone raising an eyebrow  She actually looks even more ridiculous in game. You're less likely to poke holes in a cartoony world like this than you are in a photo realistic ultra HD one like uncharted 4. If you don't understand this I can't help you. Even then this is still a bad argument because large parts of FF9 ARE spent on characters like zidane or vivi (who is essentially a goth muppet) angsting about literally being killing machines & trying to have a normal life in spite of it. Meanwhile drake just kills lots of people and never stops to think about it when he goes on to live what by all means is set in the human world where he does normal human things with his normal human family like play crash bandicoot without ever reflecting on it once. Which once again was totally fine before because drake wasn't a character that reflected on anything, but in this game large parts of the story are about him, where he came from what he's doing now and why as well as his relationship with his family so it feels weird to conveniently skip over this large part of what drake does when he has a magnifying glass on everything else. darealkooky fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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Feb 11, 2017 22:03
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You're taking the gunfights very literally for a game in which being shot in-game means literally almost nothing. I thought we cleared this up back in UC2 - gameplay mechanics are what Naughty Dog uses to get the public to pay for their Indiana Jones games, those mechanics are not 100% correlated with the story they're actually trying to tell. Yes, it would be nice if they had realised from the start that they should give Drake Luck instead of Health (i.e. you get closer and closer to actually being shot, not shot and healed and shot and healed and shot and healed like a regenerator), and if most enemies you 'killed' sort of rolled on the floor moaning in pain instead of being Super Dead With Orphans You Monster, but they didn't think of that at the time or couldn't figure out how to make it work. Give them a break - they got literally almost every other detail in the game perfect, and it's okay for a game to not be a papal edict.
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Feb 11, 2017 22:21
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so many words spilled because a character acknowledged the existence of a gun holster in the final cutscene
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Feb 11, 2017 22:23
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I wonder what the total would be if some enterprising soul (ie not me) went back through all of C&Is Uncharted LPs and totaled up the number of people killed by Nate and company would look like.
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Feb 11, 2017 22:29
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Thanks for showing us this game. The ending was really satisfying; it's nice to see a series that actually gives some thought into its epilogue. Really good work, and I'm looking forwards to your next LP, whatever it is.
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Feb 11, 2017 22:31
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I thought it was obvious from the start that Drake has been shooting rubber bullets and throwing fake grenades since no one bleeds when they get shot and grenades just make enemies fly up in the air.
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Feb 11, 2017 22:31
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Red Minjo posted:
Given the context and the picture there, I'm pretty sure that's meant in a sarcastic way of "Oh, it's okay, it's just a GAME, right?? It's not YOU being a bad person!"  There's another one more towards a strictly, blatantly negative sentiment:  And another saying "Do you feel like a hero yet?"
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Feb 11, 2017 22:32
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AriadneThread posted:so many words spilled because a character acknowledged the existence of a gun holster in the final cutscene 
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Feb 11, 2017 22:37
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Which reminds me, I love Spec Ops: The Line in spite of the contempt the developers have for their own playerbase. I seem to recall that their official position was that you should buy their game, and upon seeing that the character is making choices you disagree with, you should then turn it off and not play it again, or else you're a bad person and directly responsible for everything bad that happens (in the fictional story [to fictional characters {that they wrote [and then sold to you (for money)]}]). With the amount of effort put into these setpieces, I doubt Naughty Dog is of the same opinion, and the somewhat garbled dissonance that results is just a best-effort attempt at reconciling gameplay and story. This is stupid. If anything, Spec Ops: The Line's creators have more contempt for the genre, how it has trained / influenced players psychically, and how it stands in the overall culture. Of course, some gamers didn't like how the game made them feel and obviously that means that the developers hate them and want to make them feel bad. Most players who play shooters don't give a crap about the choices they make to either agree or disagree. The assumption is that you're fighting for a good cause against bad people, and know enough about the overall situation to comfortably shoot, kill, and move on without question. No matter what gamers believe, games are culture, and culture influences how we think and how we act in the real world. You don't think that CoD's masturbatory celebration of the military-industrial complex and military adventurism, plus the vilification of foreign states and cultures (Russia, Arabs, Iran, China etc.), works to undermine discourse on the real harm that American militarism and the "us vs. them" mentality has wrought on real people? The "it's just a game lol" excuse falls flat because of the high degree of fidelity military shooters have to real life. Spec Ops made gamers realise that they disagreed with the choices Walker made (under their control) and it deflated the badass operator power fantasy that shooters are built on. That should've made them think about the times they took the same approach in every other shooter with the narrative sucking them off, which would've destroyed the lame "but the game made me do it" excuse. War and combat are nothing glorious, and I don't know, maybe the fact that many games presenting the battlefield as a fun playhouse in which to carry out one's power fantasy might be harmful? Red Minjo posted:
This makes the point better than my rant. You are not a bad person, you should just think more about the media you consume. Shinjobi posted:If I never see the phrase ludonarrative dissonance again I will have lived a fantastic life. It's a good and useful word that makes me feel smart when i'm spergin over video games. darealkooky posted:This sort of "it's just a video game dude lol don't take it so seriously" argument only worked when the game wasn't taking itself too seriously. I'd be one of the first people to say "who cares about drake murdering people" in regard to previous games because they were just action movies you play, uncharted 4 is a Character Story where even the characters don't actually care about any of the exciting adventure stuff half the time and would rather just go home. Mario doesn't have princess peach mundane kingdom management sim for an hour after you collect all the power stars and rescue her because nobody cares about the lives of video game characters when they aren't doing exciting things unless you're a self absorbed middle aged game designer who wants to make something that Matters and Has Something To Say instead of Just Entertainment. I think it was more the writers wanted realistic characters that gamers would connect with and cared enough about the characters to jerk them off with a saccharine ending. Which is where they hosed up, I think, by placing their characters in a split-reality of gameplay and narrative with little verisimilitude between the two they showed that didn't care about the players as they did about their characters. And that sucks because if you want the players to give a poo poo about what the character story, perhaps distancing the player from it isn't that great for that?
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Feb 11, 2017 22:44
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AriadneThread posted:so many words spilled because a character acknowledged the existence of a gun holster in the final cutscene How many millions of dollars were spent on this game's development of ultra HD jowels and marketing that could've gone towards helping the vulnerable peoples of the world? (like say, south africans that have to turn to being mercenaries that get thrown off cliffs by drake because they have no other way to make ends met) to say that you shouldn't be able to hold them to some sort of standard is foolish, as is shaming others for doing so even if you personally don't.
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Feb 11, 2017 22:55
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Elena: No, Nate, the relentless mercenary death trucks were in Madagascar, not Tibet.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:08
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Spec Ops: the Line is good, but this isn't really the place to talk about it.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:08
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I post about video games because I am Extremely Woke
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Feb 11, 2017 23:16
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Drake should have used rubber bullets and attached hot-air balloons to every enemy so Sully could pick them up later.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:18
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ZiegeDame posted:Drake should have used rubber bullets and attached hot-air balloons to every enemy so Sully could pick them up later. Sully: You're extracting him? Goddamn, Nate, his highest rank is D in Medicine!
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Feb 11, 2017 23:20
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darealkooky posted:it's cool to care about things, especially media. jesus christ, you're really going to use the 'starving children in africa' cudgel over this? get some perspective friend to act like it all comes apart in the very last cutscene in the game because the kid says "is that a gun holster" is an absurd blindness to something that's been a recurring structural tension that people have been gnashing teeth over since the first game came out and like, it's not some last minute breaking of the ~gameplay/cutscene divide~ for a character to acknowledge the existence of guns, that is not equivalent to acknowledging drake murdering hundreds of people is uncharted 4 some work of fine art beyond reproach? hell no. it's a middling to above-average third person shorter whose developer has clearly become more interested in character based story-telling as the series has progressed. but they've remained entrapped by or otherwise beholden to it's mechanical roots and gameplay expectations this was never something that series was going to resolve in the final act of the final game, it's fundamentally not an issue solvable within the confines of the uncharted series while remaining uncharted imo. if you're either unable or unwilling to handle that cognitive dissonance, then these games were never going to leave you with a satisfactory feeling but god help you if it took four times around to figure that out
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Feb 11, 2017 23:32
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Is it ever possible that Naughty Dog can make a game with decent plot and characterization, and not make it a shooting game? Or are the pressures of the video game industry such that they would never be able to make a game with the budget they're now accustomed to without the shootyman element?
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Feb 11, 2017 23:41
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Miz Kriss posted:I thought it was from the first game It's the image from the first game.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:49
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quote:There's obviously a lot of death and mayhem in the games that you design and in the game world generally. Do you feel that it's important that in that world where there's a lot of shooting and a lot of death that the story have some sort of moral compass? quote:why do you think even when you're challenging conventions we're still running around shooting guns? Neil Druckmann doesn't give a drat and neither should you.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:53
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If you don't make it full of setpieces and shooting that can be put in trailers, you're not going to sell games. Uncharted has a very high budget that would generally never be used on something unless it's a very safe bet that it's going to be profitable. Making new AAA IPs is super risky even when they are genres that are currently trendy. So basically shooters and open world games. Good luck making and selling an Uncharted game where you only kill 3 people the whole game.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:53
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Funky Valentine posted:Sully: You're extracting him? Goddamn, Nate, his highest rank is D in Medicine! Spoilers! At least wait until the next thread. 
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Feb 11, 2017 23:54
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Tippis posted:Spoilers! If anyone hasn't watched the Peace Walker LP by now, you should definitely fix that. I'd like to link the final glorious Co-op R&D weapon video, but I feel like that should be earned and the entire LP is still great.
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Feb 12, 2017 00:08
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AriadneThread posted:to act like it all comes apart in the very last cutscene in the game because the kid says "is that a gun holster" is an absurd blindness to something that's been a recurring structural tension that people have been gnashing teeth over since the first game came out When did I say this? Them actually talking about drake shooting people doesn't break the tone any more than it did in UC2 when generic badman mentioned it. I can only say the same thing so many times, so let me try one last time to word this. Either be a power fantasy action movie but playable lots of people die and nobody cares because it's a wacky world where you can regenerate bullets and instant kill people with a stone fist and nobody cares because wow holy poo poo this entire ancient city just collapsed we have to platform on these conveniently placed handholds OR Be a serious look at the characters that fully goes into the psychology of why they behave the way they do, starting with them as children and having lots of people to contrast them with as they realize what's really important to them isn't this silly adventure stuff they've done before but their potential new life with their family But don't half rear end it. By trying to be a character story about adventure shootyman but just quietly ignoring the inconvenient details to do so at best makes your writing feel really sloppy and at worst makes the characters you want your audience to relate to look like psychopaths (elena "missing the adventuring" after killing dozens of people has an awkward feel to it when you see that she has a regular home life like everyone else instead of just being sassy adventure lady). Making the characters more relatable by showing that they suck at crash bandicoot and are fed up with their somewhat unfulfilling jobs just like you the player you make the parts of them that are NOT relatable very heavily stand out. It's "why don't they just use phoenix downs on aeris" except even more annoying because instead of magic that can have whatever arbitrary rules the writers want it's people that naughty dog wants really really hard to portray as real people in the models, writing and mocapped animations that suddenly start behaving in very unreal ways that nobody questions 5 minutes later, a sort of uncanny valley effect.
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Feb 12, 2017 00:18
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They don't use Phoenix Downs on Aeris because Phoenix Downs cure being knocked out, not being dead.
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Feb 12, 2017 00:20
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https://youtu.be/xb2rwMag0Ro?t=5m57s
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Feb 12, 2017 00:22
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CJacobs posted:Neil Druckmann doesn't give a drat and neither should you. Neil Druckmann is making an unfair comparison because none of the indy movies have a scene where he decides to become an archeologist because of his emotionally traumatic childhood and pressure from others. He just does it because he's a cool guy. The only indy movie that takes an actual look at the character of indiana jones outside of "he's a cool guy that punches people, shoots nazis and travels around the world" in any real way is kingdom of the crystal skull, the movie everyone hated. He's also making an unfair comparison because despite what him and many other people writing for western AAA games really want, he is not writing for film but for videogames which naturally tell stories in different ways and thus have things that can work for one medium and not another, the same way translating from book to film is not 1-1. darealkooky fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 00:25
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There is nothing wrong with ignoring realism when it's convenient for the story (especially if the story is the emphasis) because, as you say, the medium straight up would not be able to function without doing so very regularly.
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Feb 12, 2017 00:30
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CJacobs posted:There is nothing wrong with ignoring realism when it's convenient for the story (especially if the story is the emphasis) because, as you say, the medium straight up would not be able to function without doing so very regularly. if the devs want to emphasise the story as the underpinning of the experience, why have the players play a game that has nothing to do with that experience? they want a character story where their emotions and experience define the game, but the player is kept walled away from actually having anything to do with that lest they mess up the developers' precious story. instead we get to jump and shoot people to keep us satisfied and wait for the game to feed us more story. we are jumpy shooty man, but we are not Nathan Drake. the game gives no fucks about the story we get to make through actual play, neither does it care to actually give us a part in the story it wants us to experience. why should we care about this character that we never really connected with, and it's not like the medium can't facilitate that sort of interaction by it's very nature.
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Feb 12, 2017 00:46
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