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Oxxidation posted:i do not remotely care that ellie or joel died because everyone in that setting is basically a walking corpse anyway (lol aren't we all), but "evil christian cult crusading for heteronormativity" is bush-league bullshit for an apocalypse story When the earliest gameplay trailers showed off a murderous cult using Biblical phrases I was like "lol are they seriously doing this?"
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Apr 27, 2020 13:52
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fadam posted:I don’t think people are mad because they think it’s not realistic, they’re mad because it’s super low hanging fruit. This is why Death Stranding is good. Some of its writing is just as dumb and hamfisted as Naughty Dog's but it still manages to be really impactful because it's not relentlessly one-note. "Before you I was like any other Cliff" is both dumb as hell and genuinely a great moment, and you didn't have to plod through hours of brutality to get there.
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Apr 27, 2020 18:50
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DLC Inc posted:this all sounds like extreme misery porn. God Of War addressed themes of revenge and redemption so much better and what's more it was actually fun to loving play. The sequel in general is a poo poo idea though because it really lessens the impact of the first game's ending and if these spoilers are true, it makes that even worse Sekiro doesn't get enough credit for this either imo
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Apr 27, 2020 19:42
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If nothing else every single AAA studio needs union drives yesterday. How many stories have we heard about awful crunch practices from Naughty Dog, CDPR, Rockstar, etc.?
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Apr 27, 2020 23:44
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Everything about this makes it seem like the studio bought into a lot of the undeserved praise the first game got as this quantum leap for storytelling in games. The first game has excellent presentation - great visuals, believable characters, strong performances, etc. but it also has lots of the same dumb contrivances from the Uncharted series. It's easier to overlook in Uncharted because that series is trying to be a playable pulpy action movie with quips and a happy-go-lucky attitude. It's harder to overlook in The Last of Us since the game takes itself so seriously. With this new game, on paper it would work to have the player character be someone who has a blood feud with Joel, but they would have to be a playable character from the start and the blood feud would have to be revealed very gradually after we've already grown to care about her. If they really do the character swap after she kills Joel then it smacks of overconfidence. Like they think the audience is so in love with this property they can be strung along for anything
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Apr 28, 2020 14:11
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Stux posted:i mean tlous writing isnt that amazing no, its like, just solidly fine to good. but its shocking to me genuinely so many people seem to have misread like, basic story elements so hard and im not longer shocked if tlou2 is extremely upfront about it to the point of excess. Subtlety is generally overrated imo. Look at Death Stranding. Incredibly blunt with the added benefit of all its gameplay systems reinforcing its themes at every possible opportunity. A character literally says "here, I brought you a metaphor" and it rules.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:48
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doingitwrong posted:Video game narratives are graded on a curve and Naughty Dog has made its bones by telling cinematic stories that at times strain the interactive nature of an interactive medium. This is an important point. I guess a lot of it comes down to your personal criteria for what makes a game good. Last of Us has basically all the same pros and cons as the Uncharted series - excellent presentation, good characterization, great performances from the voice actors, great visuals on the one hand; boilerplate gameplay and a fairly weak plot that relies on contrivances on the other hand. Usually for me to think a game has a good or great narrative, a requirement is that the game's systems, mechanics, interfaces, etc. have to reinforce that narrative. Silent Hill 2, Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, Death Stranding, etc. All the components unique to games as a medium need to reinforce a story and its themes for a game to really be top tier for me. With Naughty Dog games essentially what you have is presentation that is good or even great by the standards of an action movie or prestige TV series but in such a way that the story didn't need to be told through a game. It could be told just as well (or maybe better) as a movie or TV series. Even though the writing quality in Last of Us is far better than something like Heavy Rain, I'd put both games in the same general category of "excellent presentation for a video game but could have just as easily been a movie or TV series." That's not to say Last of Us is bad, it just doesn't meet my criteria for a very good or great game. Last of Us 2, from what I've seen of gameplay footage, seems like it'll be more of the same but further straining credulity. Like, these games stress a self-serious tone and a sense of realism (i.e., people are meant to behave and react as close as possible to our own reality if mushroom zombies happened). But a lot of this falls flat for me when the gameplay doesn't mesh with that tone. Violence is meant to have a cost, but even in gameplay trailers for the new game Ellie gets hit with a giant sledgehammer or thrown through plate glass and just shrugs it off. That disconnect can work in something like Uncharted where the tone is meant to match a summer action movie where the hero is basically invincible, but it makes all the realistic depictions of brutal violence in Last of Us seem gratuitous and shallow.
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Apr 30, 2020 13:56
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ImpAtom posted:Linked last page. This is dumb because the performances are good enough in the first game that it's obvious at the end of the game that Ellie knows Joel is lying to her about the Fireflies but accepts it anyway. I only played it once but that's still clear enough in my memory. Somebody fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 15:17
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Tonally TLOU2 feels closer to, like, Jeremy Saulnier movies (Blue Ruin, Green Room) than Eli Roth. Characters and the violence they find themselves in is meant to be very grounded, which means people make mistakes or dumb choices in how they react to avoiding violence, committing violence, or having it committed on them. Last of Us characters - especially Joel and Ellie - are presented as more experienced/competent than Saulnier's characters but it more or less feels like they're trying to use violence to express similar ideas. I think a lot of this falls apart with Last of Us though, and it's probably mostly to do with the medium. A AAA game is at least 10 hours long, and there's a built-in expectation for combat as a core mechanic during that "runtime." As a consequence, the game's grounded depiction of violence either a) becomes routine and therefore trivialized or b) the player becomes fatigued by it. The latter option is probably the "intended" effect, but for me it was the former. You can say that the game successfully put me in the mindset of a brutal killer/survivor like Joel so, hey, mission accomplished - gameplay reinforced the player character. I can grant the game that, but its use of violence still falls apart when you have scenes like Joel falling onto some rusty rebar from a height of 20 feet, and he's back to being the Terminator after some convalescence and a tiny bit of medicine. When stuff like this happens, it makes it seem like the writers/developers are more interested in violence for its shock value than anything deeper. Last of Us 2 seems even worse in this respect. Just going off of pre-release trailers we have someone getting their arms broken with a hammer, someone being disemboweled, etc. They're far more graphic depictions of violence than anything I can remember from the first game, and yet when it's time for gameplay Ellie can shrug off gunshots or getting hit with a giant sledgehammer. I think graphic and realistic depictions of violence could be used to good narrative effect in a game, but probably not a AAA one. You would probably need a much shorter "runtime," a much stronger commitment to a realistic portrayal of the effects of violence on the player character, and an understanding from your audience that the controls, mechanics, etc. won't cater to their need to feel empowered or competent. This is why I think TLOU2 will fail just based on pre-release footage and not even bringing the leaks into it. Obviously, it might still be a huge critical and commercial success, but I think its intended use of graphic violence as a narrative tool is fundamentally at odds with a AAA game as we understand it. Druckmann is either trying to fool himself or us when he says stuff like "The Last of Us 2 isn't meant to be fun." If that were true then controls, animations, and mechanics would be vastly different than what we've seen so far or what we can expect given the first game's gameplay. You wouldn't have pinpoint accuracy with aiming, animations and controls would be more cumbersome and less empowering, there wouldn't be tall grass to hide in or stealth takedowns, Ellie wouldn't be able to shrug off otherwise fatal attacks during combat encounters, etc. The player is clearly meant to feel empowered. Death Stranding was so successful for me because the game was committed at the start to disempowering the player. Movement is realistically cumbersome and difficult given the terrain, the extra weight you have to carry, etc. And over the course of dozens of hours you're slowly drip-fed little bits of empowerment - motorbikes, exoskeletons, ziplines, etc. But any one of these empowering mechanics can still be nullified at any time. But even so Death Stranding still fell into the same trap when it came to combat. Did the game need third-person shooter/combat mechanics? No, but it has to have them because it's a AAA game. In combat you're immediately proficient and empowered. You always shoot straight, your stealth takedowns are guaranteed to work, etc. If the game had to include combat mechanics to placate a AAA audience, it would have been more impactful and more consistent with the story and setting for combat to be just as disempowering as movement was. MeatwadIsGod fucked around with this message at 03:01 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 02:29
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Zeta Acosta posted:just watched the entire leak, abbys background as the child of that firefly doc that you kill is loving idiotic and hamfisted. is "mgsv airplane pilot" but worse And not for nothing, the first game already had a group of people whom Joel had decimated who had a vendetta against him. Doing it again? Eh.
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May 3, 2020 02:46
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Bonaventure posted:https://kotaku.com/the-last-of-us-part-ii-s-violence-is-designed-to-be-rep-1826781044 This is exactly why I think the game's depictions of violence are going to be gratuitous as hell. NPCs and enemies getting brutalized isn't sanitized, but whenever the player character is attacked it is sanitized. Watch the E3 trailer that has Ellie stealthing around for 10 minutes. She gets shot with a rifle, stabbed (I think), thrown through plate glass, and hit at full force with a gigantic hammer. At most you get a brief animation of her reacting to these injuries and some wincing from the voice actor, then she's right back to running full speed, hopping over cover, firing arrows, etc. The game isn't committed to having violence even semi-realistically impact the player character so the whole thing comes across as a gross power fantasy.
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May 3, 2020 17:24
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You can tell that the leaks messed up the misdirection they were going for with the trailers so far. The trailers heavily imply that Ellie's girlfriend is murdered by another group so Ellie sets out for revenge and Joel teams up with her later so she doesn't have to do it alone. But now we know Ellie is actually setting out to avenge Joel and her girlfriend survives.
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May 5, 2020 00:33
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We have now surpassed Alien vs. Predator 2 levels of spite.
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May 7, 2020 13:27
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Stux posted:maybe the game wants you to avoid killing things by making it bad when you do If this is what they're going for then the mechanics should reinforce it. Getting attacked/injured in this game should be just as detrimental to the player character as it is for enemies if they really want to make the player squeamish of taking the violent option. It's not perfect but even Death Stranding had mechanics to dissuade players from being lethal - dead bodies create BTs that, if they interact with other human NPCs, create a voidout which creates more BTs, etc. It fit with the themes, setting, and tone even if it didn't "cost" enough mechanically imo. Ellie is basically the Predator/new Laura Croft so relishing in this kind of violence falls pretty flat even though I'll commend them on trying to make enemy NPCs more believable.
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May 9, 2020 18:57
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grieving for Gandalf posted:I didn't want to kill the MULEs not just because of the in-game consequences but also because they were established as mostly being guys who'd gone goofy for packages because of the state of the world. they didn't deserve death even if they were in my way I never used a lethal weapon against humans in the entire game because I was too invested in it, but I appreciated that the game gave you the option of lethality but it came with an admittedly weak disadvantage beyond the bog-standard one of "now you have less ammunition." I don't really have a problem with the game shooting for realistically graphic depictions of violence. The problem is that it's only applicable to enemies (and maybe the player character in a cutscene or two). Everyone harped on Uncharted having a ludonarrative dissonance problem but it doesn't. Last of Us does because mechanically it basically is Uncharted.
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May 9, 2020 19:12
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grieving for Gandalf posted:I loved DS but the boss fights against the Veteran and the giant monsters and the weapons they necessitate are really antithetical to the theme. it felt like they weren't confident enough in the gameplay without having these more comfortable actions segments. if it had been limited to using tricks and tools to avoid capture by MULES and terrorists and then you have to use what you learned against Troy Baker in the end, that'd be perfect I know it's anathema to a AAA publisher or AAA audience but I would have preferred DS had little or no combat or boss fights and instead let you use your tools to evade capture or deal with enemies. Like, let Sam unload a collapsible ladder from above to conk an enemy on the head or use a climbing anchor as a handheld version of the bola gun but with less range. The war beach setpieces are incredible but they feel like they belong in another game. The difficulty curve in DS should have been more laser focused on new inhospitable biomes and terrain. The mountains are a great example. You have blizzards and avalanches and slower movement because you're waist-deep in snow. That's great! It's a natural difficulty spike for the core gameplay loop. They considered lava and volcanic biomes because Shinkawa drew some concept art of it, but we really needed stuff like that. More areas where the oxygen mask was necessary, flowing lava or volcanic eruptions, etc. And even if deserts don't make a ton of sense I would have liked to see them too. It's the same kind of trap TLOU falls into. With a AAA game you need to reach the widest possible audience to recoup the expense so the player character has to be a commando who is always proficient at combat. I appreciate that DS veered away from this with traversal, just wish they could have gone all the way with combat too if the game absolutely had to have combat mechanics. Panzeh posted:Past 1 that is not true in the slightest- pretty much any time you use a lethal weapon you actually then have to consider the body at the very least. Lethal weapons are more advantaged as MGS goes on and their action controls get better, but it's still almost always better to use non lethal means because they're much more effective in stealth situations. The good thing about Peace Walker and MGSV is you have a new mechanical disadvantage to using lethal weapons - you need to fill out the roster for your clubhouse. MeatwadIsGod fucked around with this message at 19:49 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 19:44
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If I remember correctly the descent into madness in Spec Ops was also reflected in the mechanics, where your squadmates would listen to your commands less and less until eventually they refused to follow your orders. Even if I thought some parts of Spec Ops were hamfisted, that's good poo poo.
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May 10, 2020 05:10
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ThisIsACoolGuy posted:Quick question but I see a lot of posts saying that the combat is bad on purpose in TLOU1 because of the aiming, but isn't one of the very first upgrades you get 'murder people better' where the sway gets taken away and it just turns into uncharted shooting wise? I faintly remember that. I never felt that aiming was bad in TLOU, except maybe the bow when compared to Tomb Raider. For handguns it's a small circular reticle that quickly gets tighter/more accurate the longer you aim at something. Combat is just as responsive as Uncharted if not moreso, the only difference in practice is in takedown animations and things like that.
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May 10, 2020 12:46
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So we have enemies choking to death on their own blood, spasming in their death throes after getting shivved, a dog getting incinerated complete with realistic sound effects and no doubt a lovingly rendered burnt dog carcass. Then we have the player character who can get shot twice in 10 seconds by rifles and other than a light wince you'd never know it happened. lol
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May 27, 2020 23:34
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CharlestonJew posted:you forgot the worst travesty of all This was good for how weird and jarringly shoehorned in it was, like Monster Energy in Death Stranding.
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May 28, 2020 00:25
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CharlestonJew posted:he was talking about the gameplay footage, which was recorded on easy mode, but meatwadisgod was not playing the game in the footage, meaning your response of "stop playing on easy" makes no sense whatsoever. unless meatwadisgod was in fact the person playing in the footage, in which case what the gently caress are you doing posting get back to work bitch Neil Druckmann found out about my posts and abducted my dog please call the police
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May 28, 2020 00:27
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ImpAtom posted:Eh. There's a real argument to be made for something like Death Stranding which is not 'fun' in a remotely traditional sense but still is undeniably an AAA title and good at what it is trying to do. This War Of Mine is an Ubisoft-published game that is absolutely not fun in any normal sense of the word but still is very effective at what it does. Pathologic is a perfect example of a great game that's not designed to be fun imo. Death Stranding's traversal isn't designed to be fun for the most part (except ziplines and maybe the motorbike on a paved road) but I'd say its combat segments are. Obviously the Pathologic games have leeway as indie titles that AAA ones don't. I think Death Stranding probably pushed it as far as a AAA game can, considering how much grief it got at launch. I hope it was profitable but I doubt it. I figure Druckmann was just trying to be provocative when he said that TLOU2 isn't supposed to be fun because if that were true gameplay would look radically different from what it is. I've already talked this to death though. MeatwadIsGod fucked around with this message at 01:39 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 01:32
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A Sometimes Food posted:But this argument is kind of dumb cause TLOU puts enough effort into trying to make combat fun even with a sprinkling of gratuitous puppy snuff that they're obviously trying to have their cake and eat it too rather than commit to even the degree Death Stranding did.
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May 28, 2020 15:41
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Man, timing for this game's release couldn't have been more inauspicious. I'd be surprised if many people have an appetite for "grounded" depictions of violence after everything they've seen over the past week.
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Jun 8, 2020 03:09
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Codependent Poster posted:We got a winner here, folks lol
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Jun 12, 2020 12:29
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Panzeh posted:Yeah, I think that's by far the weakest part of the story. ND drew these societies and these people who have absolutely no problem killing the poo poo out of whoever they percieve to be their enemies but this is a discussion that happens in that room. It's weird because the first game already kinda dealt with this during the Winter section. The Nolan North Cannibal Crew are the remnants of a group that Joel and Ellie decimated. Somehow they get the basic description of "older man and young girl" as being responsible for all the bloodshed even though they left no witnesses iirc. I haven't played it since release so I'm hazy on the details. But either way the lesson is "dead men tell no tales" and not "anyone seeking revenge should dig two graves."
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Jun 22, 2020 14:35
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