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Toptube
Anti-cabbage Party Candidate
Joined: 23 Apr 2007
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 Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:49 pm |
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this game has screenshot support? full 720p res?
*oh wait, Adi has a capture card or something. duh. |
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Felix
unofficial repository
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: vancouver
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| Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:58 pm |
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| Broco wrote: |
| remote wrote: |
| i mean, it kinda just works for me as a thing to enjoy. moving around in its very gorgeous, detailed environments is something i don't know if i've ever enjoyed so fully in a videogame. i'm looking for supplies, of course, but i want to explore each and every place anyway. i feel like if i move on without soaking it all in, i'm missing out on something. |
Dunno, I'm starting to dislike the scavenging part of the game. For me I tend to focus on spotting little white circles or highlights and it actually distracts me from paying attention to the environment. And the available character/weapon upgrades are one the weakest, most pointless upgrade tech trees I've ever seen (faster crafting speed? seriously?) so it clearly exists purely to justify the scavenging.
Scavenging in an area where you sneak around clickers is also very time-consuming and you lose what you picked up if you die and go back to checkpoint -- potentially about 5 minutes of gameplay. I've started to give up on picking up everything in those areas.
Ultimately it boils down to a big timesink that slows the game's pacing down considerably -- by intent I'm sure. But it's one of the things that gives rise to Shrug's comments about "this is a LONG game". |
this is a major pet peeve of mine -- one of the reasons I thought Mass Effect 3 worked much better as an AAA than its forerunners/Bioshock is because the game doesn't constantly fuck its pacing by pretending it's not a shooter and hiding baubles (or worse, hacking minigames) in the environment. games are getting the tiniest bit better at actually balancing the decision to forego these things (as in Broco's example), but it's still a basically empty solution to the typical kleptomania.
it's really good to hear that the stealth is actually fun/consequential and hard mode is well-balanced, though. |
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remote
Joined: 11 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:09 pm |
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a couple of the skill upgrades are silly and mostly useless, but it doesn't matter much since it takes so long to scrounge up the pills for one upgrade anyway
6 or 7 hours, now, and i only have "shiv master"
the baubles aren't that big of a deal, seriously. you see things glinting in the light and you walk by and tap triangle a few times to grab everything. you scrap together your crappy shivs and molotovs and whatever else and keep moving. it doesn't fuck up the pacing since it's not a shooter, really. i'm enjoying just walking around and looking at things more than i'm enjoying the actual combat. that's where this game's real strength is: just a really powerful sense of being in a real with place dust motes floating in the light.
you could say the skill upgrades and some of the weapon upgrade stuff is cruft, but it really doesn't get in the way or pad the game out all that much. i mean, unless you're just trying to blast through the game without actually taking your time the way i am, maybe...
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:28 pm |
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| Yeah, I don't think it's that big a deal either. And I do like how thematically appropriate it is that I'm just picking up bits of garbage and fashioning useful things out it. |
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parker
a wolf adventuring
Joined: 31 May 2007
Location: suplex city
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| Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:34 pm |
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| remote wrote: |
| dust motes floating in the light |
Is to this game what neon on wet pavement was to sleeping dogs
To me the 30 guys showing up for you to murder at the end of every area is the more tedious filler and padding thing than any of the collecting and crafting stuff. And it seems to be getting worse as the game goes on. It's wearing thin, thinking "what interesting things are going to happen in these nice looking environments" and then oh, just kill a bunch of guys. Though that's about every game now. I think even regular videogame reviewer people are getting sick of it too though, I've seen it brought up in tomb raider and bioshock reviews. I'd take just walking through an area doing absolutely nothing but passing through. I was having a great time going through the university, just taking in the environment, wondering what exactly happened, even dealing with the few infected in the area was fun, those small encounters are like puzzles, but then you get to the end and an army of guys show up that you have to fight back through, and for no reason that I could tell but busywork. Maybe some plot twist will reveal the hobo bandits were tracking us via the last functioning gps tracker or some shit though, I don't know.
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remote
Joined: 11 Dec 2006
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:58 pm |
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| remote wrote: |
| a couple of the skill upgrades are silly and mostly useless, but it doesn't matter much since it takes so long to scrounge up the pills for one upgrade anyway |
It'll take several more hours to play through Survival to tell, but those skills seem like they're ideal for some of the default attributes on the hardest difficulty. At the very least, I sure don't remember the targeting circle rocking back and forth as much as it does in Survival.
You die in two gunshots at the start. Getting choked will kill you in a matter of seconds.
Pretty much all of my biggest problems with the game seem like they're remedied with the increase in difficulty.
I did like how, even on normal mode, when Joel is getting shot, you can't just charge at your attacker to melee them. Each gunshot staggers Joel, and you can get staggered a half second after you recover. Meanwhile, you still take damage from physical attacks.
I appreciate that getting shot at does seem to mean something in terms of bullheadedly charging into enemies like in most FPSes. Joel is a bullet sponge in Normal, but he's a bullet sponge that plays differently. On Survival, he's more of an already damp cloth.
I also like that Joel cannot attack when he's surrounded by enemies who are wailing on him. He crouches and gets into a defensive position, and the only way out is to run.
These seem like smart obstacles. They discourage abusing a generous health bar.
| Quote: |
| you scrap together your crappy shivs and molotovs and whatever else and keep moving. it doesn't fuck up the pacing since it's not a shooter, really. i'm enjoying just walking around and looking at things more than i'm enjoying the actual combat. that's where this game's real strength is: just a really powerful sense of being in a real with place dust motes floating in the light. |
The placeness of it is exquisite. I just love that it looks like someone actually took stock of how the non-human world overwhelms abandoned urban environments, right down to varied patterns of the foliage dominant in different geographical regions of the US.
You can also craft stuff straight from your HUD. If you see a wrench in the lower right corner of the un-expanded HUD, you can tap the d-pad to see what you can craft. That way, you don't need to go all the way into your backpack. As small of an obstacle as that is, it feels considerate.
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:12 am |
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I'm surprised nobody ever imitated Shadow of the Colossus in terms of its pure unrewarded exploration. That being said, this game is too linear for that anyway...
| remote wrote: |
| 6 or 7 hours, now, and i only have "shiv master" |
Ha, you really do hate clicker one-shots. I went for health and listening distance instead. I actually like the clicker one-shots, the rules are clear and fair and it forces you to maintain spatial awareness. After the first clicker/runner group (which is admittedly unfair), you have enough options to avoid untimely clicker death, whether it's shivving them before the runners spot you, murdersneaking enough runners that the clicker is almost alone when you have to fight him, or staying/running away and killing it at a distance. |
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Felix
unofficial repository
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: vancouver
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:55 am |
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now that this thread has calmed down a bit, if nothing else, I think I can cement my opinion that Polygon generally writes non-reviews in order to make a point (not that I, erm, don't think that's okay in some contexts). I remember Bennett tweeting about how they confirmed everything he expected not to like about the game, and, well ... I have a really high opinion of Bennett, but just goes to show. I think I had the same confirmatory response to shrug saying that the game took itself too seriously given is lineage.
I'll look forward to playing it sometime. I'll have my PS3 hooked up until EDF, at least. |
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 4:32 am |
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Bought this.
I like it, but zombies are bullshit. I'm sick and fucking tired of zombies. Why couldn't they make this same game except the bad guys are just guys? Everyone says this game rips off The Road, but The Road didn't have fucking zombies. I don't need another "WE'RE the REAL monsters" lecture, McCarthy just goes ahead saying yeah, obviously, we're monsters. Did you ever think otherwise?
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 5:07 am |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
Bought this.
I like it, but zombies are bullshit. I'm sick and fucking tired of zombies. Why couldn't they make this same game except the bad guys are just guys? Everyone says this game rips off The Road, but The Road didn't have fucking zombies. I don't need another "WE'RE the REAL monsters" lecture, McCarthy just goes ahead saying yeah, obviously, we're monsters. Did you ever think otherwise? |
Good news! They're not all zombies.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 5:46 am |
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That is correct. And the parts where you're killing the not-zombies are way better than the parts where you're killing the zombies. Hence my desire for a non-zombie Last of Us.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:06 am |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
| That is correct. And the parts where you're killing the not-zombies are way better than the parts where you're killing the zombies. Hence my desire for a non-zombie Last of Us. |
Oh OK, I follow now.
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remote
Joined: 11 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:23 am |
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i kinda like the fungus zombie thing i guess
so far there has been no obnoxious WE ARE THE REAL MONSTERS nonsense — it is as straight as the road about "well yeah we're awful, no shit" even though zombies are around, too
right from the beginning, even!
i mean, there's never any ambiguity when you encounter other groups of humans — no chance that they'll be friendly. you're either gonna sneak past 'em or you're gonna kill 'em
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shrugtheironteacup
man of tomorrow
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Location: a meat
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:25 am |
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Ambiguity starts to happen at least once.
Then it turns into more homicide.
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Rud31
forum ruler of Iraq
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: SanAnTex
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Toptube
Anti-cabbage Party Candidate
Joined: 23 Apr 2007
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:20 pm |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| remote wrote: |
| a couple of the skill upgrades are silly and mostly useless, but it doesn't matter much since it takes so long to scrounge up the pills for one upgrade anyway |
It'll take several more hours to play through Survival to tell, but those skills seem like they're ideal for some of the default attributes on the hardest difficulty. At the very least, I sure don't remember the targeting circle rocking back and forth as much as it does in Survival.
You die in two gunshots at the start. Getting choked will kill you in a matter of seconds.
Pretty much all of my biggest problems with the game seem like they're remedied with the increase in difficulty.
I did like how, even on normal mode, when Joel is getting shot, you can't just charge at your attacker to melee them. Each gunshot staggers Joel, and you can get staggered a half second after you recover. Meanwhile, you still take damage from physical attacks.
I appreciate that getting shot at does seem to mean something in terms of bullheadedly charging into enemies like in most FPSes. Joel is a bullet sponge in Normal, but he's a bullet sponge that plays differently. On Survival, he's more of an already damp cloth.
I also like that Joel cannot attack when he's surrounded by enemies who are wailing on him. He crouches and gets into a defensive position, and the only way out is to run.
These seem like smart obstacles. They discourage abusing a generous health bar.
| Quote: |
| you scrap together your crappy shivs and molotovs and whatever else and keep moving. it doesn't fuck up the pacing since it's not a shooter, really. i'm enjoying just walking around and looking at things more than i'm enjoying the actual combat. that's where this game's real strength is: just a really powerful sense of being in a real with place dust motes floating in the light. |
The placeness of it is exquisite. I just love that it looks like someone actually took stock of how the non-human world overwhelms abandoned urban environments, right down to varied patterns of the foliage dominant in different geographical regions of the US.
You can also craft stuff straight from your HUD. If you see a wrench in the lower right corner of the un-expanded HUD, you can tap the d-pad to see what you can craft. That way, you don't need to go all the way into your backpack. As small of an obstacle as that is, it feels considerate. |
are the difficulties above normal available from the start?
Uncharted 1 does a good job of punishing players that want to just run around a kill everything without regard to their own mortality. Uncharted 2 does a pretty good job of it, as well. Just not quite as good a job as Uncharted 1. |
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diplo
Joined: 18 Dec 2006
Location: Brandy Brendo's bungalow
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 3:13 pm |
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| RIP troops post |
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Brooks
Joined: 08 Apr 2007
Location: peak caucasity
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 3:15 pm |
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| Dammit, caught sleeping |
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spinach
hardline radical martian
Joined: 04 Mar 2008
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA!
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 3:34 pm |
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if the fungus could get to the point of infecting mammals, i doubt it'd drive them to violence. more likely they'd just develop some nervous tick and find strange climes and positions comfortable, curl up and die there. this game's fungal zombie is just a regular zombie with a hat.
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| mauve wrote: |
| thieves are more boons to other classes than anything else. |
http://pleasestopthese.tumblr.com |
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Felix
unofficial repository
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: vancouver
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 4:01 pm |
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| I saved the massive troops post if anyone wants it, would have to check with him first though |
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 4:14 pm |
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| remote wrote: |
i kinda like the fungus zombie thing i guess
so far there has been no obnoxious WE ARE THE REAL MONSTERS nonsense — it is as straight as the road about "well yeah we're awful, no shit" even though zombies are around, too
right from the beginning, even!
i mean, there's never any ambiguity when you encounter other groups of humans — no chance that they'll be friendly. you're either gonna sneak past 'em or you're gonna kill 'em |
Exactly. Soooo... what are the zombies for again? There's only two explanations: one is an excuse for a post-apocalypse story, which is silly because anyone can write a non-zombie post-apocalypse story. So the only other explanation is that it "mixes up the gameplay," and the clicker shit really bores me while stealthing/fighting humans is thrilling, which is why I just want humans.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 4:29 pm |
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| spinach wrote: |
| if the fungus could get to the point of infecting mammals, i doubt it'd drive them to violence. more likely they'd just develop some nervous tick and find strange climes and positions comfortable, curl up and die there. this game's fungal zombie is just a regular zombie with a hat. |
I think the implication in the introduction is that it's engineered to target humans specifically, and then it's put onto food that's exported from South America to the rest of the world. It's the rationale for the pandemic, and it also gives the general principle of contagion a visceral presence that I'm not sure could be conveyed as effectively otherwise. It also creates a cataclysm that is (1) human made and therefore an arena for inter-tribal strife and (2) non-nuclear and therefore a way to depopulate the world of people without eradicating the non-human world (as in The Road).
The zombies / clickers provide a needed variation in gameplay that's connected to narrative context. Otherwise it would wind up feeling like another shoot dudes + get paid style game like Uncharted. That seems like a tired focus, and it doesn't interest me very much.
Having that variety requires developing different strategies of stealth and combat, which becomes especially challenging on Survival. Throw a molotov at a group of runners/clickers, and you have a good chance of taking a few out with a single attack, whereas humans are going to run away from the fire. On the same principle of self-preservation, humans will also hide when you're firing at them, whereas infected will mob you.
I think that having the zombie-likes in there is pretty effective at creating the game's atmosphere and particular post- to mid-cataclysmic world. Outside of just not liking zombies -- and that's fine if that's what it is -- I don't understand the complaint.
| Cuba wrote: |
| Exactly. Soooo... what are the zombies for again? There's only two explanations: one is an excuse for a post-apocalypse story, which is silly because anyone can write a non-zombie post-apocalypse story. So the only other explanation is that it "mixes up the gameplay," and the clicker shit really bores me while stealthing/fighting humans is thrilling, which is why I just want humans. |
Putting it down to just humans while also pushing the same behavioral distinction between groups would probably strain the cohesion between narrative world and gameplay more than has already been discussed here.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 4:47 pm |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| It also creates a cataclysm that is (1) human made and therefore an arena for inter-tribal strife and (2) non-nuclear and therefore a way to depopulate the world of people without eradicating the non-human world (as in The Road). |
But the catacylsm is fictional, you can always make some pseudoscience justification that eliminates all the social and environmental factors you want to eliminate, leaving only the ones you want to laser-focus on - arguably the point of all post-apocalyptic fiction. As for The Road, I think it's pretty clear its cataclysm isn't nuclear, rather it's some kind of man-made environmental disaster that eradicates all plant life. Otherwise there'd be radiation concerns which there aren't. It's also what makes the book so utterly bleak, because survival is literally impossible in the long term.
| Adilegian wrote: |
The zombies / clickers provide a needed variation in gameplay that's connected to narrative context. Otherwise it would wind up feeling like another shoot dudes + get paid style game like Uncharted. That seems like a tired focus, and it doesn't interest me very much.
Having that variety requires developing different strategies of stealth and combat, which becomes especially challenging on Survival. Throw a molotov at a group of runners/clickers, and you have a good chance of taking a few out with a single attack, whereas humans are going to run away from the fire. On the same principle of self-preservation, humans will also hide when you're firing at them, whereas infected will mob you. |
I don't think transitioning from "intelligent enemies who flank, coordinate, and evade hazards" to "enemies that charge directly at you en masse" is a "needed" gameplay variation. In fact I'd call it a boring gameplay variation, which is where my frustration comes from. I already played a whole lot of Left 4 Dead, and it did that idea better. As for "shoot dudes + get paid," this game seems built to finally narratively justify that idea in light of all the criticism about Uncharted, which is the whole exciting thing about it! Play a half-terrible dude in a really terrible place. Can he be redeemed? Etc. How is that more tired than a focus on "you get to shoot people without feeling bad about it" which, ultimately, is why zombies became so popular in videogames in the first place?
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Brooks
Joined: 08 Apr 2007
Location: peak caucasity
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 5:05 pm |
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| Felix wrote: |
| I saved the massive troops post if anyone wants it, would have to check with him first though |
Please
Also the clicker noise is taken from Ju-On? |
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spinach
hardline radical martian
Joined: 04 Mar 2008
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA!
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 5:15 pm |
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the complaint is -- here's a fungus that actually exists, is real, makes ants and bees behave in ways they would not otherwise. it's sensationalized over the course of 2011-12. some guys go "zombie fungus? let's make zombie people from it!" and the actual thing it does goes out the window even though what it actually does (manipulates animals to form its ideal growing environment) is a scenario entirely worth exploring in its own right, so that some guys can make another zombie thing with some new contrivance so they can say but these aren't regular zombies.
also
representations such as these apocalypse porn scenarios in light of real events in race- and class-divided regions (events already encouraged by media representations) always (always) engender in me an immediate and strong apprehension towards what, at best, i can say is moral irresponsibility.
"it's not because they're [x], it's because of the fungus"
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| mauve wrote: |
| thieves are more boons to other classes than anything else. |
http://pleasestopthese.tumblr.com |
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The Troops
Joined: 20 Feb 2007
Location: Providence
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:14 pm |
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dont ban plz
Naughty Dog bequeaths to us its grittiest, triplest A yet. But does it live up to the hype? Theodore Troops investigates.
Troy Baker reaches deep into his Dallas heritage to deliver his best drawling "baby girl," Ashley Johnson is presumably compensated for a sterling impersonation of Ellen Page saying the word fuck, and Merle Dandridge offers us a glimpse into one of the 20 failed Half-Life 3 scripts in which a hardened Alyx Vance inherits the rebel cause from her father, but turns all villainish in a 10/10 twist, all in one of the summer's hottest releases, best played to completion on YouTube in convenient six-hour condensed format.
Even though this game's ending made me go for a two-hour head-clearing walk, and handily earns The Least Embarrassing Writing and Acting in a Videogame Award, this is definitely the confirmer of worst fears re: Games About Humans.
Really, why isn't this a movie? I know that's a standard-issue low blow when talking about games like this, but I'm actually serious. Why isn't this a Beowolf-style CG performance-captured three-hour film? It would preserve all of the game's strengths, look a hell of a lot better, be better paced after cutting out all the filler, might actually be profitable at the box office (instead it will just be "watched" for free via Twitch streams), and, most importantly, it would be accessible to normal human beings. But lo, it would then be open to criticism by those same normal human beings, which would mean that instead of just emulating everything about The Movies but making the gunfights playable, you would actually have to run with the big dogs, which Naughty Dog really could, if it wanted to, with Amy Hennig and all; Sony also owns movie studios, so the transition should be painless.
The last time I remember hearing people getting all ironic about calling a game a "really good movie" was Valve's (in collaboration with KnowYourMeme.com) Portal 2, and maybe 2011 was just a more innocent year, but I seem to remember that it was an Actual Videogame, constructed entirely out of formalized game elements, such as numbered test chambers, giant buttons, and laser beams. Characters (disembodied voices and talking eyeball robots) spoke only at the start and end of a room (codifying punchlines to jokes as gamey rewards), because the player had to focus on the puzzle, which was solved with very repeatable, orthogonal game mechanics, and very clean, clear rulesets.
The Last of Us, on the other hand, is the worst of both worlds, casting most of its non-cutscene, non-combat interaction into stilted-feeling rooms with infuriatingly lavish production values in which the player performs extremely occasional but still formalized and repetitive game actions such as ladder leaning and buddy boosting, all so ai_ellenpage can cross from one end of the game environment to the other while her audio emitter spouts lines of disbelief at, say, ice cream trucks. It's dehumanizing. It's a rube goldberg device for character development, a braindead, triangle-hammering "solution" to a "problem" that only exists because all potential bright-eyed and bushy-tailed game designers have been raised on podcasts that have burned terms like "block puzzle" into the gaming lexicon.
Orthogonal game design is directly at odds with humans doing things, a lesson Valve learned in 2004 when they got all the AAA out of their system with Half-Life 2 (and I'm not just constantly bringing up Valve because they established The Official List of Appropriate Post-Apocalyptic Visibility Blockers, which includes turbines, shattered concrete foundation with exposed rebar, and other staple art assets, which is adhered to with great respect here).
Human interaction is an extremely complex thing, and choosing which of the myriad subtle elements to cast into an intentional piece of programming / animation / voicework with the proper probability of execution can be a nightmarish balancing act. For example, I think Ellie expresses excitement a little too often when I take someone's head off with a nailbat, which makes her kind of unlikable, though wise-cracking too little might make her seem too withdrawn, which isn't exactly in-character, according to the cutscenes; maybe she is more likely to cuss with fervor when I kill a zombie as opposed to a human; maybe she draws from different pools of responses for each type of kill, i.e. brutal melee vs arrow to the head vs nail bomb; maybe the pools of responses are changed according to what her mood is supposed to be at this very moment in the story. Many factors go into determining just this single element, and it alone can change how I feel about this character, let alone placing it into a matrix.
But whatever work they've put into managing the flourishes of the game's Highly Repeatable Loops are destroyed when we enter one of the game's Formal Puzzles, also known in executive producer speak as "palette cleansers" and "downtime," in which our progress is barred, and we explore a room until colliding with an invisible trigger volume and/or run down an invisible timer that makes [Insert Female NPC] notice something odd about this wheeled tray table with lots of heavy shit on it -- almost as if it can be moved!! (She too must have noticed the triangle icon on it.) The puzzles are not even interesting in a tight-knit spatial-mechanical way; there's no interesting IK animation at work, such as the pull-and-tug elasticity between Ico and Yorda; there's no interesting reuse of existing game elements such as holding the flashlight and lighting flares for Alyx. These are made all the more bothersome by their frequency and reappearance. The fifth time you float Ellie on a plank, even she can't believe how rote it is.
It's worth remembering that these puzzles don't just "happen." Multidisciplinary roundtable brainstorming sessions, in which designers drink coffee from custom disposable cups with the company logo on it, must be held to confer how to build and where to place such events.
I imagine the formalized act of "Ellie Riding a Plank" (the game contains six) is valued by all parties, because a) it allows the script-writers to remind the player that a thing they have probably done, swimming in a pool, is a recreational activity and has no place in a post-apocalypse, and thus Ellie wouldn't have experienced it, and ties into a story beat at the end; b) it allows all the concept and environment artists to actually utilize settings that have no combat relevance, but which they are attached to, such as the exterior of a hydroelectric plant or flooded subway tunnel, and can point to a thin justification of triangle-pushing "gameplay" as a reason to keep them; c) the animators see their hard work given multiple encores; d) particle artists can make custom water splashes; e) shader artists can make custom water-on-the-lens shaders when the screen catches a glimpse of that sweet FP_40 HDR, and finally; f) the creative director can fulfill his dream of making the "Game Pacing" graph (the result of hundreds of playtest analytics) look as close as possible to a sine wave.
So far I've only talked about the parts where the game is trying to pretend it's a movie, by being a an authored conversation simulator about ladders and planks. There are also riveting moments of the rawest, hottest examples of the e3demofication of the industry, such as Joel hanging upside down from a rope trap with infinite pistol ammo, and a literally unbelievable stealth section in which four people graze spotlights but are unseen because Something Something Escort Mission.
Throughout the entirety of the "game" portion of this game, by the way, the camera is pinned by invisible staple to protagonist Joel's back, offset to the right, and when it rotates, it looks like the uncanniest, weirdest thing -- something no real-life camera has ever done, but it must be adhered to because Resident Evil 4 did it in 2005, and progress is progress. Of course this means we can never see Joel's face when he talks during gameplay (this is possibly a budgetary concession), and at least half of the story is dispensed while we watch Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talks with the same walk animation from the same angle for seven hours, occasionally being guzzied up with custom gestures.
For a game that prides itself on being Cinematic As Fuck, it sure has some of the worst cinematography in the world while actually playing it. Thousands of manhours were spent photographing and measuring and building such visitable places as the Boston Capitol, though what consideration was given to how it would be presented? Every time a cutscene ended, I sighed. "Shit, it's a game again."
The sole benefit of this camera: it keeps the z-axis in perfect alignment, which makes it easy to land a headshot. That's it. By choosing this camera system (which even Uncharted didn't use all the time), Naughty Dog subconsciously confesses that shooting a gun is the most important thing in this game.
Nothing about the gunplay humanizes Joel, or conveys the fact that he's just a man. Leon S. Kennedy is more humanized by his gameplay system than Joel, and needs to really stop and take (shaky, nervous) aim. If Joel moves while aiming, his crosshair expands, one of many examples of the game's expressing ideas through icons instead of its fifty-million-dollar art. Of course, RE4 had actual game design by an actual game designer, while Naughty Dog and every other developer on earth is working from the same (apparently open-source) Gears of War codebase. The stealth is similarly derivative and aesthetically compromised.
In 1998, Metal Gear Solid let the player pin himself against the edge of a wall, and the camera would look down the hall, while the main character triumphantly took up half the television screen, facing us. When it wasn't, it was giving us a top-down view through parrallaxed transparent flourescent ceiling lights, and a radar that was at least an in-universe abstraction of the big picture.
In 2013, The Last of Us achieves stealth gameplay by Yet Another Use of Batman Vision that abstracts out all interaction into a color-corrected black-and-white icon fest, and the use of a scary droning noise when we are close to an enemy's vision cone / hearing radius, which is required because flattening the z-axis (basically the only axis that any interaction takes place on) makes it impossible to gauge depth with any accuracy.
(Related: Joel's flashlight is uncannily locked to the invisible crosshair and not the player model, and does not bob around even when he's running. Unrelated: exactly one millisecond after a corpse initiates its death animation, it no longer has a ragdoll or even produces blood particles when shot. Perplexing: when Joel hides behind Waist-High Cover[tm], he faces the cover, so we can't even see the trademark wincing at bullets that Nathan Drake exhibited; this again may be because they didn't want to animate the thousands of lines of dialog spouted during gameplay. Revolutionary: when landing a headshot, this game takes Call of Duty's hit markers To The Next Level by showing eight little sunshine-like lines around the crosshair, instead of the standard four -- 10/10.)
WARNING: TOO HUMAN TALK
I'll take this opportunity to remind that in the last eight years, the only human beings that have even considered thinking about the design implications of the behind-the-back camera are Silicon Knights with the release of Too Human. Pro MLG Mortal Kombat 3 players / game designers Denis Dyack and Henry Sterchi (first seen showing secrets in the Donkey Kong Country promo tape) were so used to counting the pixels between their uppercuts that they said, if we are going to compress the visual space, we might as well compress the game space, too: the result was basically the Divekick of its genre.
The player wouldn't have to perform a melee that missed the enemy by inches of z-depth or be given button-prompt assists (as in TLOU / Uncharted / Ryse / every AAA game in the last and next half-decade). Instead, if he was in range, noted by the glowing circles beneath enemies (which also indicated their level and hit points), the player would auto-slide over and the attack would connect. Firearms, similarly, automated the execution of interaction to focus on spatial awareness and crowd control (you didn't move a crosshair so much as pointed in the general direction, enabling, for example, dual pistols with independent targets), and it all made contextual sense because the player was a god. This was all assisted by a camera that did things like tilt upward to show the slow, arching trajectories of incoming missile projectiles; offset on the most powerful enemies or those that were shielding all the others; or blurred out enemies that could not hit you in depth of field while the player was in his melee stance. This was an unprecedented level of design and engineering spent attempting to accomodate the deficiencies in 2-D-projected 3-D space, to say nothing of the vast constellation of editable values, such as attack speed, slide range, rate of fire, size of hammer-slam enemy-launch radius; years before the rest of the industry became obsessed with unlocks, "persistence," and the general RPGification of action, Too Human was letting players plunk points into Game Genie: The Game, to make something, that, if they wanted, almost played faster than the frame could render, or was host to the weirdest, gamiest quirks, such an ice shield that would freeze any enemy that hit you, even in mid-air.
END OF TOO HUMAN TALK
That there is any metagame at all ("crafting") in The Last of Us has been taken as a stunning reversal of Naughty Dog's previous work Uncharted 3 (released in fall 2011, alongside Gears of War 3 and Modern Warfare 3, a time when people were camping outside the stock exchange after having a sudden societal epiphany that maybe QTE's weren't in the public's best interest). In this era where the term "roguelike" must be spoken at an E3 press conference because the videogame industry's vocabulary is so limited that they can't possibly use language that implies long-term consequence without saying "Dark Soulsish," yes, picking up scarce items and turning them into other scarce items does, I suppose, result in slightly more complex gamestate than the screen turning red and taking your hands off the controls for three seconds.
And while Joel reads books about how to not break his shivs when he uses them, and can expand the radius of Stealth Vision, nothing in the game mechanically implies character growth. The combat difficulty level reaches a plateau in about three hours, and doesn't really change outside of the end, when Joel actually does become Nathan Drake.
The [strikethrough]Year[/strikethrough] Decade of the Bow continues, as Naughty Dog is the latest developer to remember that videogames are capable of simulating projectiles with spatial simulation and variable speed and trajectories; as in Every Other Game, the arrow lets you not break stealth, and if you miss an enemy, he will simply enter a caution state.
The Last of Us also inexplicably continues the videogame enemy naming convention pioneered by Gears of War for the sake of co-op callout convenience and/or action figure production. Names like "Clickers," "Bloaters," "Runners," and "Hunters" are given to enemies, and are rigidly adhered to by the characters.
But enough of the bad stuff.
That was a hell of an ending, wasn't it? |
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Brooks
Joined: 08 Apr 2007
Location: peak caucasity
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:30 pm |
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| Really, why isn't this a movie? I know that's a standard-issue low blow when talking about games like this, but I'm actually serious. Why isn't this a Beowolf-style CG performance-captured three-hour film? It would preserve all of the game's strengths, look a hell of a lot better, be better paced after cutting out all the filler, might actually be profitable at the box office (instead it will just be "watched" for free via Twitch streams), and, most importantly, it would be accessible to normal human beings. But lo, it would then be open to criticism by those same normal human beings, which would mean that instead of just emulating everything about The Movies but making the gunfights playable, you would actually have to run with the big dogs, which Naughty Dog really could, if it wanted to, with Amy Hennig and all; Sony also owns movie studios, so the transition should be painless. |
A field of small fists in the air swaying in unison for this para |
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 7:56 pm |
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Really if these games were shortened to the 3-4 hour movies they want to be anyway, they would probably be a lot better. These games feel painfully interrupted by Letting You Do Things - which probably means it was only a shell of a game to begin with.
Still, you know any game with QTE prompts is probably not going to be all that great. Simon Says isn't really a game most people will play for sixteen hours.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:14 pm |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
| But the catacylsm is fictional, you can always make some pseudoscience justification that eliminates all the social and environmental factors you want to eliminate, leaving only the ones you want to laser-focus on - arguably the point of all post-apocalyptic fiction. As for The Road, I think it's pretty clear its cataclysm isn't nuclear, rather it's some kind of man-made environmental disaster that eradicates all plant life. Otherwise there'd be radiation concerns which there aren't. It's also what makes the book so utterly bleak, because survival is literally impossible in the long term. |
This is where I feel like there's some element of preference that's not satisfied. I'm a bit burned out on zombies myself
| CubaLibre wrote: |
| I don't think transitioning from "intelligent enemies who flank, coordinate, and evade hazards" to "enemies that charge directly at you en masse" is a "needed" gameplay variation. In fact I'd call it a boring gameplay variation, which is where my frustration comes from. |
Well the "enemies that flank" VS "enemies that charge" dichotemy is a bit reductive because, as I wrote before, you actually have to use different strategies against them. There are different restrictions, different payoffs.
This falls in the arena of preference, but one of the reasons why the Uncharted games kind of wear on me after about 3/4ths the way through, actually, is precisely because each encounter is about getting to the same final point ("Guess I'm going to murder everyone"). This simply is not a possibility during the zombie portions of the game -- on the harder difficulties in particular, which is where the contrast between the enemy types becomes much starker.
As for the boring charge -- well OK? It's not about shooting dudes but about sneaking and using traps. Those non-shooting sections are pretty good at being sneaking/trapping non-shooting game segments. Without that, it is just Uncharted with heavier gravity and a crafting system, which limits the kinds of violence depicted in the game. As someone who either plays games specifically designed for this approach or plays open-ended games with a preference for stealth and traps, it hits the right tone for that foray into the genre, so it's not like what it's doing there is bad or done badly.
The zombie element matters because of how the zombie element supports the larger themes. Looking back over what I wrote before, I'd retract the assertion that the element is man-made bioterror. The fungus seems like something that just got into the food supplies of South and Central America and infected the world.
The fungus reduces people to zombie-like state, forming a kind of symbiosis that retracts human ambition from the level of civilization-building to environmental animals. You see this everywhere in the game: the overwhelming of human endeavor by the natural environment. The zombie aspect is integrated into this theme.
Just having dudes to shoot on their own would not convey this re-absorption back into an uncivilized natural state as strongly. The zombie genre reinforces the larger theme, much in the ways that it's used to reinforce larger themes of consumerism, mob mentality, disease and infection, etcetera, in other good examples of the genre.
So, again, if you just don't like zombies, OK, but you can't really extract that aspect of the cataclysm and its fallout from the game without changing how it explores its themes. It uses the contrast between the zombies and the humans to narrate what's happening to this world, and I think it's executed really well for that. Do you just want a restriction on usage of the zombie genre period?
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:20 pm |
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Also real quicklike:
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| Really, why isn't this a movie? |
I think this is a way outmoded framework for looking at the kind of story that this tells and the way that it tells it. The game format creates a pacing different from what a movie can create. TLoU's pacing is probably better compared with a television series, but even that overlooks how integral the elements of exploration, environmental habitation, and scavenging are to the creation of the atmosphere.
Exploration gets you character interaction, lets you piece together stories that are not directly narrated without looking around and actually assuming that this is an actual place that you actually inhabit. That's why this is a videogame and not a movie or a television series.
If you're in a hurry to speedrun, you're definitely going to enjoy the game less and probably even miss what's valuable about it.
That the answer to this question seems immediate and obvious to me. It's embedded in the game that I played. I am pretty stunned at the gulf of difference between experiences here, and I'm curious to know what accounts for it.
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another god
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:27 pm |
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Nobody gives a fuck that there are no princesses?
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:35 pm |
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I don't understand why speedrunning should be considered a problematic or inappropriate way to play.
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shrugtheironteacup
man of tomorrow
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Location: a meat
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:37 pm |
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| The Troops wrote: |
That was a hell of an ending, wasn't it? |
If only every piece of narrative media would lift the final shot/line from The Road for its own.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:39 pm |
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| Dracko wrote: |
| I don't understand why speedrunning should be considered a problematic or inappropriate way to play. |
Because you're then willfully missing 75% of what the game is and then drawing a conclusion about 100% of the game based on 25% of the game.
It's basically drawing a conclusion about something you don't know enough about. Which I think is something we don't respect?
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:50 pm |
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It seems pretty unfair to me to claim that people who are interested in optimising a game's mechanics and design quirks as much as possible in order to complete it are missing out on most of its contents.
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evnvnv
hapax legomenon
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: the los angeles
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 9:03 pm |
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The Last of Us will almost definitely make more money than World War Z, right? I don't really buy the idea that video games are still so much of a niche that will never appeal to "normal human beings." Making it look like a movie would require the budget of a movie. I don't actually have any idea how much AAA games cost to produce, but I would imagine it is still cheaper than anything with Brad Pitt in it.
Anyway, at a time when two supposed cinema visionaries are literally predicting the end of the theatre-going experience as we know it, I don't really think trying to make movies instead of video games is a very smart decision.
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The text will not live forever. The cup are small |
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remote
Joined: 11 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 9:20 pm |
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some things I said in facebook comments to an acquaintance contemplating whether this could be as good or better as a movie:
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I guess the appeal is that, unlike with a movie, you have control over the MC and the camera movement, to some extent — enough that you can look around and really drink in these lavishly detailed environments. The animations, too, like when Joel puts his hands up against the side of a car while you're hiding, all feel very fluid and natural and that's pleasing to see when you're the one pulling his strings. Dissonance arises with some of the weird combat problems and the silly skill upgrades, AI companion behavior, etc. but I'd still rather be playing this than watching it. And no, it's not as successful at holistic design as some of my favorite videogames, but the sense of being there is so strong in this one that I'm overlooking a lot of crufty design bullshit that might irk me more otherwise. Been a long while since a AAA game has impressed me so much.
(and the story it tells is, imo, secondary to its setting, which is the way I feel it should be in videogames. So I see no need to consider what it would be like as a film.) |
So yeah, perhaps to simplify what Adi said, it's a setting I want to inhabit, not as much a narrative I care to watch.
| Dracko wrote: |
| I don't understand why speedrunning should be considered a problematic or inappropriate way to play. |
I think it's a cool secondary way to approach the game (or almost any game that isn't built in a way that particularly lends itself to speedrunning), but I'm with Adi on encouraging folks to take their sweet time with it at least once. Your first time, ideally.
| Dracko wrote: |
| It seems pretty unfair to me to claim that people who are interested in optimising a game's mechanics and design quirks as much as possible in order to complete it are missing out on most of its contents. |
I mean, uh... okay?
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parker
a wolf adventuring
Joined: 31 May 2007
Location: suplex city
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 9:31 pm |
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| Dracko wrote: |
| It seems pretty unfair to me to claim that people who are interested in optimising a game's mechanics and design quirks as much as possible in order to complete it are missing out on most of its contents. |
They're trying to bypass as much of the game as possible as fast as possible, how is that not missing out on most of the game. They've made a their own game out of the thing, and maybe it's even a better game, but you wouldn't play checkers with a chess set and still call it chess.
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 9:34 pm |
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They're still playing the same game. Speedrunning isn't about rushing. It's about figuring out the most optimal way to complete a game. Discovering what's optimal doesn't come about by not paying attention to what the game is offering.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 9:41 pm |
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| remote wrote: |
| So yeah, perhaps to simplify what Adi said, it's a setting I want to inhabit, not as much a narrative I care to watch. |
Day Z seems like a much better way to go about getting this experience then. What is the setting you're inhabiting in The Last of Us? Male protector meets copious walls?
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