I quit literally one minute into it. I thought it looked hokey as fuck yet I figured I’d give it a chance but when I heard that voice acting I knew it was exactly the kind of entertainment that makes my stomach churn and immediately uninstalled.
I never wanna play a game starring teenagers again in my fucking life.
yeah Teen Media is weird for me too tbh as someone who had a very uneven adolescence and is not quite there for the themes it’s notionally celebrating, it helps when it’s absolutely surreal like Riverdale, b u t…
I thought they more or less got away with having some of the characters be kind of annoying in this one, it grates like hell in the first ten minutes then you settle in
i appreciated–mechanically, (thematically?)–oxenfree’s execution of the teen horror trope of Conversations No One Wants To Have between Incompatible Personalities during Situations No One Wants To Be In, but when all of the writing read as falling into the categories of:
a.) what if every character was the one you’re supposed to root for dying first,
and / or
b.) sincere sub-sub-Whedon attempt at “normie” wit
and nothing else about the game supports a compelling enough argument against the otherwise constant question of “why would i want to spend any time at all with any of these characters”, i found it difficult to have a generous take on these folks’ creative voice, even after finishing it
for the same reason i’m very confused by how anyone is reading this next thing as any sort of divergence from what oxenfree established, tonally or otherwise
Foxes had a moment a year or two ago and I guess they’re having one again, or it never ended
Noita is out!!!
The perfect song for confronting the festering mistakes of the past
Edit:
as a developer on one of the games mentioned in this article:
sWoRdS hAvE tO bE sOlVeD fOr Vr BeCaUsE pEoPlE wAnT tO dO iT rIgHt???
alternatively: fuck
I assume he’s using it as a stand-in for all the ‘solid objects penetration’ problems in mapping human bodies to virtual spaces (as in, by the rules of the world, your body should stop, but there’s nothing stopping your arm from stopping when it passes through air). It’s a huge constraint! And I don’t think anyone is anywhere close to solving it but it’s a big enough problem that it makes sense for leadership to keep pushing, “work on this nasty problem”.
VR really hammers home how much Star Wars and videogames love each other because lightsabers that cut through anything are the nicest VR/Kinect swords that could be
how is it 2019 and we still havent ‘solved’ killing orcs? its gonna be 2030 and this same person is gonna be like WELL THE FEEDBACK FOR WHEN YOUR CRUSH THROUGH THEIR SKULL ISNT AS SATSIFYING AS SLICING THEM IN HALF VIA THEIR TORSO. skull crushing has to be solved because people want to do it! we brought in consultants from cold steel to make sure that when you kill an orc IT FEELS RIGHT. we know how important the ergonomics or murder are!
the best worldbuilding in lord of the rings was when frodo, samwise, merry and pippin inserted a sword into a new orc every 5 seconds for 6 hours (8 in the director’s cut)
it’s actually fine if you just don’t handle it
at least to me, like I don’t care enough about replicating whatever internal consistency that exists within a game if that requires you to handle those cases
because a game that requires you to handle all that is too big to not also have a bunch of weird abstractions or shortcuts around a hundred other things you’d question about the “”"“immersion”""" of the game world you’re in
that’s like, the number one lesson I’ve learned from this project and AAA in general
it’s a “problem” only if the terms that are laid out for the player require total immersion and not interesting frictions between space and abstractions of such
Yeah, you’ve got to pick your battles carefully and design around what you can’t do. So if I was making a VR game I’d say, heck no, it’s way too risky to take this on. But if I was directing the funnel of Oculus money, I’d be starting up some R&D labs to try to figure this out without expectation that they also, you know, ship a game on time while solving a world-historically-difficult problem that may well be unmanageable with current tech.
First person VR Octodad
I mean if I was directing the funnel of oculus money I’d be more interested in moving the overton window away from like, swords and guns as the only methods of interaction in a medium in which motion controls actually work
(that or spend most of my time reminding people that the company’s founder is now making camera tech to install at the border)
I think you do both. Encourage an ecosystem of small developers to tackle problems through sheer numbers and the magic of crowds, and invest in alternate voices that need financial support (and support them with cheaper, more accessible frameworks like the Quest – really, I think we’re at the stage where the hardware needs to be accessible to allow for more accessible/broader aesthetics first) while internally tackling problems that might need new hardware like the body/environment disconnect.
Talk to traditional games press about solving traditional games problems; talk to tech press about bringing new audiences in (and when you see Oculus inside, say, Facebook presentations, it’s usually presented in the latter light, rather than a traditional games aesthetic light).
that’s just the script to Indie Game: The Movie tho
it didn’t work
I’m not sure what you mean, as in, executives tailoring speak differently to different audiences doesn’t work? Or, companies investing in aesthetically broader output doesn’t work?
all of it
it’s like, hard for me to read that and not see it as just literally the same thing that happened with indie games
ecosystem of small developers + magic of crowds = steam reviews and curation, “the market”
investing in alternate voices that need financial support = GDC’s and PAX’s really shallow “diversity initiatives”, paying for tickets but not travel expenses
hardware needs to be accessible = phones, opening of SDKs to indies, etc.
tackling problems that might need new hardware = VR as a whole
talk to traditional games press about solving traditional games problems = game journalism as a whole staying the same for a decade+
talk to tech press about bringing new audiences in = indie game: the movie et. al
I know this doesn’t really hold up to a high amount of scrutiny and I’m free associating basically but like, it already happened? it was already supposed to change stuff? but it’s pretty similar to how we were 10 years ago
and if there was any time to promote new aesthetic output it would have been directly at the beginning of VR but that didn’t happen
I know I’m being annoying and thick about this whole “it’s still the same” doom and gloom but I did kind of buy into it a decade ago and I’m being burned for it now so I’m bitter sorry
its that whedon-esque best friend/asshole character that really killed Oxenfree for me. Just awful awful meaningless “snark” dialogue the whole way through.
