Let's destroy one last ancient civilization in UNCHARTED 4: A THIEF'S END

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Let's destroy one last ancient civilization in UNCHARTED 4: A THIEF'S END

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

This is the best Uncharted and I'm excited for this LP.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2016 00:27

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 21:10

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Don't play Uncharted 4 on the hardest difficulty. When I played it on Crushing to platinum it there's a fight near the end that took me a full two and a half hours. Of course, there's also the fact that modes harder than ~~Normal~~ Moderate deincentivize the great run-and-gun gameplay of the series.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2016 22:23

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Manatee Cannon posted:

it is nice that you can actually stealth through most of this game tho

Yeah but Crushing makes that near-impossible too. And in the fight I mentioned it's not even an option.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 18:52

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Onmi posted:

I mean thematically yes

then it's a good ending

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 17:02

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

"Achievement" is nothing. It's pointless. If you're trying to tell a story, themes are everything. Stories do not need to be and should not always be about feeling accomplishment or strength. Just because a lot of people complain doesn't mean they're right.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 17:17

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Onmi posted:

Not for a predominantly interactive art form. You want to tell a story free from the greasy manipulations of the consumer, write a book, shoot a movie, make a TV serial, but don't make it a game. By changing the nature of how the media is digested you change the inherent nature of how the story is perceived. Two scenario's framed exactly the same will elicit different feelings depending on what form it's presented in. Hell it goes right back up to the top with the "Make it a cutscene then." That changes how it is fundamentally perceived entirely, the experience is different, the message is different.

You're saying it's the developer's responsibility to make the player feel good, which is bullshit. I've experienced tons of media in other formats that made me feel like total poo poo, and what you're suggesting is that games by nature of their interactivity are incompatible with that. You're essentially saying that games are far more limited in their ability to express complex themes or elicit emotion than other art forms, which is ridiculous.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 17:29

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Cost is completely irrelevant. It may affect how you react to the story but it honestly probably shouldn't. The two have basically nothing to do with each other and those decisions are made entirely separately. I don't get mad I paid money for a game unless I feel like it actively wasted my time or was bad enough to legitimately offend my sensibilities.

What you're saying is that video games can't properly convey emotions like hopelessness or dissatisfaction outside of cutscenes or without later undermining them with triumph. It's a pointless insistence on tying one hand behind your back, for what? To make sure the player doesn't feel bad? That just makes it sound like games are a lovely medium to tell a story. I don't believe that, and I don't think you do either, but that's the logical extension of your argument.

Lots of good endings are "controversial" because they make the audience feel negative. Changing the story to fix that is the wrong move. This is gonna sound kinda harsh but I think in a lot of cases the kinds of people who get upset at these kinds of things don't really understand the purpose of stories.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 17:54

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

kalonZombie posted:

Achievement is everything in a video game, except weird experimental ones.

Every thing in almost every video game is based around a feeling of achievement. Uncharted does this by giving you a platforming challenge or a room full of dudes to shoot / stab / punch to death. Tetris does this by giving you a score to beat. Animal Crossing does this by giving you bigger houses. Minecraft does this with better digging and building materials. There's always some carrot dangling in front of you to keep going until the end, and if there's no end then to just keep playing the game. People who enjoy games tend to put more investment into them, not saying "Kratos got killed" but "I died". To pull this achievement out from a player is basically the game cheating, which tends to put a lot of people off.

This may or may not have a thematic or narrative reason, either. It certainly doesn't in FF9 with Beatrix, who is simply there to go "Haha look these guys lost AGAIN" essentially. But since a player is playing for a sense of achievement, unwinnable boss fights can be very annoying. I don't find them too bad if, like I said, I go back to that boss and get to see my power progression throughout the game, but I understand why people don't think like this. You've invested all this knowledge about a game, all these skills, and the game basically says "They're useless now, you can't win because we're essentially cheating". That isn't fun in a medium that's entirely dedicated to testing these skills and this knowledge you've accumulated over the course of several hours in order to accomplish a goal you're working towards.

What I'm fundamentally asking is, "why do story-driven games need to be fun at all times?" I'm not saying they shouldn't or can't be, I'm saying that it's really strange and probably detrimental that we've been trained to expect that and get angry when it's not true. This isn't some "games shouldn't be fun" bullshit, but I think that constant need is probably holding the medium back.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 17:59

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Gatac posted:

I think it's the developer's responsibility to keep you engaged with the game, and part of that is using the language of interactivity in a way that makes that interactivity matter. An unwinnable boss fight is like an RPG dialogue encounter that makes you choose from several different options, none of which chance the NPC's lines or reaction or anything, and end with the conversation going badly for you. That game is quite literally wasting the player's interaction.

It's not that you need to make the player feel good about things constantly. It's matching effort put into playing the game to a pay-off of some sort. Did it matter what dialogue lines I chose? Did it matter how well I fought this boss battle? No? Then gently caress off and make it a cutscene so I know that things are gonna happen that I don't have any control over, or better yet, rethink why player interaction doesn't matter in your design and how your design can be changed for that interaction to matter. I've already outlined a few ideas for how an "unbeatable" boss fight could give you objectives orthogonal to conventional victory, and I think the designers should have the courtesy to reward my interaction with the game somehow by making the game reactive to that interaction.

Now whether that outcome makes me laugh or cry or think about the fragility of life, man, doesn't really matter to me. But it ought to make me care about the consequences of my interaction.

I think that they should use every tool at their disposal to tell the story in the best possible way, so if interactivity helps them convey what they need to, why not?

But more to the point, having a fight in a loving Uncharted game take place in a cutscene would be absurd.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 18:10

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

CJacobs posted:

The point is that it doesn't help them convey it.

CJacobs posted:

It does have the intended effect of making her look cool, but it also feels a bit cheap.

Then it worked.

And again, this is an Uncharted game, one of the selling points is "we let you do all the cool poo poo in-gameplay," so putting even a relatively rote fight in a cutscene would be jarring.

J.A.B.C. posted:

One of my favorite RPGs also had some unwinnable battles, but they had both sides. One of them, you fight the boss, lose, progress 20 more levels, still lose, then meet him 10 minutes later and win. Then later, you fight three of the final bosses at once and get stomped, but after a bunch of levels and taking them on one by one, you narrowly beat them.

The issue I have with this is the argument that it's necessary to really counteract past failure with triumph.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 18:17

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

CJacobs posted:

It doesn't help them convey it better than a cutscene would, is what I was trying to say.

My argument here is that even if putting it in-gameplay doesn't add much, it's better than what would be lost having the same scene play out in a cutscene, because this is an Uncharted game and putting fights in cutscenes would be weird.

Shoeless posted:

Begging the question, is interactivity the best way to tell the story in this instance?

I should clarify that I was not specifically referring to Uncharted in that instance.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 18:20

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

triangle

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 19:02

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

A really cool thing about this game is the way it compulsively avoids load screens even after simultaneously getting rid of the old games' best way of hiding them, pre-rendered movies. When the game does a scene transition, especially one of those fancy wipes, it has to load both areas at the same time. It's really impressive.

The game looks amazing even without needing to do pre-rendered scenes, too, so it's all win.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2016 21:07

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

This is probably my favorite game this year and this vid has everything I love about it.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2016 07:31

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Zagglezig posted:

So, are the tile-star puzzle answers always the same? What happens if you get the first answer right when Nathan would normally say there are too many permutations? Chip only needed to move one tile one more turn when he came back to it, after all.

I suspect Elena may have gotten a bit suspicious and started checking around when Drake sounded like he didn't know it was monsoon season in Malaysia.

The game actually kicks you out if you get close to solving the tile puzzle without the right answers. That's when it tells you there are too many permutations.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2016 19:52

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

It doesn't really cheapen anything in my opinion, that scene being both from Sam's perspective and in flashback is more than enough to separate it from the rest of the game's narrative.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2016 05:40

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Oh god, we're into the tactical realism poo poo

It really doesn't matter why Nadine is so tough, it's not important in any respect to the overall story.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2016 21:13

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

RareAcumen posted:

Well, let's go over the key points here.

- The player is not allowed to dodge when facing Nadine.

- Nadine doesn't have a get-hit animation, even if by accident the player actually manages to smack her in the face, nothing happens.

- "Mysteriously", Sam fights a million times more slowly clumsily when facing Nadine along with Nathan, than at the Panamanian prison.

With this new knowledge, I'm honestly looking forward to the final boss fight where you shoot her with a rocket and she fights it off for a bit before tossing it away and blowing up a pillar and thus creating the first 'escape the crumbling environment+ final boss fight' of its kind.

Like Rafe said "In case you haven't noticed, we're all ~~thieves~~ Terminators here." Drake had a dinner once like, a week ago, no one's needed to go to the bathroom once and he keeps recovering from bullet wounds from just not getting shot for a bit. Games are weird man.

Whoooooooo cares

e: oh lol is that fake, shoulda known

Arist fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Dec 30, 2016

# ¿ Dec 30, 2016 23:12

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

Sinners Sandwich posted:

To be fair Talbot was really weird in that game

Yeah probably not the best example

# ¿ Dec 30, 2016 23:19

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

The end is admittedly a little dumb but I love how this chapter tells a complete story in the margins in line with the general themes of the game.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 17:08

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

This is easily the best part of the entire game for me.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2017 19:54

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 21:10

Arist: Feb 13, 2012; _{who, me?}

I pretty much only play Cutter in U4 multiplayer, he's the best. He's got enough lines that I doubt it's all recycled, too.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2017 01:07

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Let's destroy one last ancient civilization in UNCHARTED 4: A THIEF'S END