the sample sounds normal to me, also sounds like US neutral. mind I watch a lot of videos at 1.5-1.75x speed because people speak way too slow
I would agree that there should have been some pauses between sentences for pacing. No drama or emphasis, all infodump
Yeah the Jackal doesnāt have a strange inflection, sounds like pretty normal English, just fast, but I am wondering if the cadence is part of a dialect heās picked up from his time in Africa. Because that cadence is noticeable when any of the African characters speak at you in the game.
My professional opinion is that there is no way that this wasnāt a misguided decision to cut the breathing and gaps out of everything in post. The number one mistake every inexperienced editor makes is eliminating all pauses and air out of every line because ātightening things upā is good, but it isnāt, not to that degree. I have never seen an actor do whatās in the video instinctually, and no director ask for it unless it was a dubbing project and they had to make a line fit.
Also seems like the game engine itself is compounding the issue by just queuing the lines to play instantly right on top of each other (itās much more common now for their to be about a .3 second pause built in by default before the next line plays).
It is just strange enough that it is difficult for me to take it as an aesthetic quality of that character. Like, he talks about Nietzsche and the power of oneās will, so I can almost imagine that he is so sure of his intent, like a stage actor who has rehearsed his lines, that he is just performing, and what he says comes across like a monologue. But like I said I hear this cadence all over the game, so I canāt sustain that fantasy even though Iād kind of like to lol
thereās also a pretty big mismatch between the line delivery and the animations the lines are attached to - the delivery feels like someone told to delivery a gruff monologue while sitting down, and maybe the scene was initially planned so that the character was going to move a lot less, but someone decided that the scene was too āstaticā and they didnāt have time to rerecord the lines so they had the animators try and compensate by having him walk around and wave his arms way more than the line delivery suggests. but with all the breathing and gaps in, they realized that the scene moved way too slowly with the way the character gets up and moves around so they shortened the time of the animations and cut out all the gaps in the performance. also the reading is super close to the mic and it doesnāt really seem like theyāre attenuating the audio to the character in the game, so you get this weird sense of him whispering in your ear even as the character moves closer and further from you. it would make more sense to keep it all 2D if the reading was a little bit more dramatic, but as it stands it feels really weird. itās especially evident in the sequence after the one @vodselbt posted
from my small amount of experience in games, these lines are usually recorded all in one go, pretty often without any real storyboarding of the scenes that theyāre supposed to belong to and only the vaguest of character motivation and affect to base the performance on. then the designers get this big dump of VO lines and have to make things work without the ability to redo the lines unless someone pays a lot of money to get the studio and actor time
edit: just looked at a postmortem of the game and apparently they didnāt have an animation director for almost the entire development
There are a handful of moments that break the monotony in Far Cry 2 but they are rare, and at most tangentially related to the plot. The moment to moment combat gameplay doesnāt get interesting unless you willfully give yourself a disadvantage with bad weapons. It generally becomes more of a nuisance, especially if you get your hands on some of the really powerful weapons.
Iād say stick with it unless you get really bored or frustrated. If so, bail out, it wonāt do anything so amazing that you canāt miss it.
This game is one I like very, very much but I can still see why a lot of folks have no patience for it.
Haha, oh wow, that doesnāt help!
Thereās this part in the intro of Dishonored 2 where Emily and Corvo have a conversation in the intro while walking in the throne room, right before character select. I later learned that there was a bunch of content cut (see here), but not knowing this at the time and working on the voiceover stuff, I remember how I got the entire finished animation back of them walking toward the throne and started looking at the script so I could spot cues for the actors to voice the scene, and realizing how incredibly tight the timing was going to be because of all the exposition and emotional context that had to be crammed in to already finished art. It was very painful at the time and itās all I see when I watch the scene now!
It gives good freedom but nothing to write home about, in my opinion.
Zelda Breath of the Wild gives much more joy of movement, with its freedom of climbing over everything, flying (well, almost) and so on.
I love osman so much, definitely in my top 5. It has one of my favorite game stories. I think I remember reading that the story was meant to parody the kinds of manga that strider was emulating more earnestly. Itās a great example of being as weird as possible in the space of just a few lines of dialogue.
I beat Control, or at least the base game, based on the credits this Foundation mission was DLC and then the Alan Wake stuff definitely is. Iām close enough that Iām vaguely considering platinum-ing it?
My wifeās been working ridiculous hours in the room with the playstation so Iāve mostly been playing it via remote play on my ipad. It works really well? I donāt think I realized how much flexibility I had with this. It hasnāt been perfect, the initial set up was annoyingly flaky, but a lot leas hassle than steam home streaming has been
Anyway right after complaining about sucking I got much better at the game lol. The triple launch basically removes all challenge from the game. At that point it becomes mostly about dealing with how they made the ground dangerous. I did find it obnoxious how often the game has instant death open pits/falls mixed in with bottomless-seeming pits that you had to go down to progress. More than once I wasted a lot of time trying everything but going down holes because I was afraid of being punished.
I really enjoyed the reality-bending setting being used to full effect to make cool levels. Everything felt pretty cohesive except the weird collectables you get. I spent the special limited resources to upgrade all my guns and now I have a billion Fragmented Thoughts or whatever and no idea what to do with them. Iāve never needed to make a mod, and I canāt imagine running out of jukebox tokens (though, Iām not very interested in going back to the higher levels having beat what I needed to clear the quest). Cubaās right, they went overboard on them.
I also wish there was more to the enemies beyond them having more hp or whatever, there werenāt a lot of points where I wasnāt oneshotting normal enemies with Launch. At about mid game they introduce the last enemy type, an invisible one that just screams and explodes next to you. I found them to be obnoxious jump scares rather than a threat I had to manage strategically.
Anyway it was fun and Iām glad I played it
If I keep playing I guess Iāll only go for rusty guns, or purchased guns with low reliability. I saw that there is a mod which adds the flair gun as like a utility item, which sounds really cool. But that mod also adds a huge amount of other stupid stuff so I wonāt bother with it. It made me wish I could play with that flair gun some more tho.
The biggest thing you can do to increase the challenge without making things annoying is avoid using sniper rifles, which tend to make a lot of fights fairly trivial
As someone that went back after a year to do the 2 DLC levels for free it was barely worth it. I kept wanting stranger environs for the game and the DLC didnāt really play that through. I saw it too clearly as reconfiguring base game assets.
Thereās some nice character and greater plot things in the DLC. And one cool out of place part until you die 10 times at it (youāll know it.)
The DLC is more difficult and introduces new enemy designs that push you to explore your powers more. I basically never used the shield until then, and then it became a regular part of my rotation. But narratively I think they really suffer from too much explanation syndrome. So umā¦ basically the opposite of what Rudie just said lol sorry Rudie.
This is the main reason I was disappointed with Control as a whole. Itās a relatively high-budget game but it starts to all look the same. Thereās a little bit of variety with say the mines level, but then I got into the late-game prison sector and it just looked like a remix of the early-game aesthetic rather than anything fresh and exciting.
Compared to, say, Demonās Souls which achieved tremendous variety on basically no budget, or HL1 which broke the monotony of its similar government institution setting with an outdoor mesa level and an alien level, Iām not sure what went wrong exactly for Control to have this problem.
I think itās fair to say the art direction was like 20% too tight, especially for a game that relied on visible postprocessing over world geometry to such an extent. that mines section is very visually striking in hindsight, as are plenty of other memorable geographies ā the ridiculous dark souls optional boss in the infected basement, the big open atrium hub(s), the prison, the ending ā but Iād agree that itās a little too static for its own good. a little.
I think they were a little too slavishly devoted to the mid century office building aesthetic. It afforded a lot of opportunity for cool geometry tricks but it led to a lot of sameness which is disappointing in a game that otherwise has a wider imagination. The otherworldly environments you go to are all right angles just like the offices. The mold is an organic texture over boxy bones. This same structure repeated everywhere makes it feel like youāre stuck inside while game otherwise does everything it can to tell you that the universe is so much bigger than you think
I feel bad for saying this because I know that the reality is that itās a huge amount of effort to make these environments and the game is already packed with some incredible work but the 90th boring-but-quirky conference room felt limited compared the unlimited potential for strangeness
For me it sheds new light on how important those outdoor excursions were to HL1, or the biocapsules and cyberspace to System Shock. The meat of all these games is a megaclaustrophobic built environment and itās why I love them, but it also needs to be balanced by something else to not become suffocating
Playing the DLC did make me appreciate that the floating and the physics fucking work and that is incredible and now no one needs to suffer PsyOps again.
been celebrating the past week of mandatory quarantine after unpacking and fixing up all my stuff by playing probably an hour each of 13 sentinels, star wars squadrons, and teardown every day.
Iād started all of these back in oct/nov/december but just wasnāt in the mood to play anything back then, and Iām having a really good time with each of them!
squadrons multiplayer hasnāt quite taken off but the campaign is a lot of fun; Iāve been semi-arbitrarily playing each of the past few yearsā new flight sims with a new feature every time, and this is the first actual action game Iāve played on my hotas, which I mostly bought for flight simulator after playing ace combat 7 on a controller ā the mission design, the shield power manipulation, the tangible differences in ship loadouts, etc., are all as good as my memories of the old tie fighter, the cockpits are really compellingly rendered, juggling the various throttle features feels better and better (the hardware has a nice high ceiling to it), their star wars fanfic is pretty comparable to 90s EU stuffā¦ itās really a swell time! Iām glad motive managed to actually ship something! definitely the best EA gamefeel since titanfall 2.
Iāve already talked about 13 sentinels in the dedicated thread and I was late to it if anything, but itās a terrifically maximalist use of every imaginable trope, riverdale-style, the first title Iāve really enjoyed which I think could technically be called a visual novel, and itās remarkable that the pacing is as good as it is given that Iām barely halfway after a dozen hours.
teardown is probably my favourite heist game in addition to being my favourite voxel game and high on my list of physics games ā the mission design is a little repetitive early on and it takes a while to settle into its core gameplay loop of, basically, casing the level as you prep for a speedrun, but once you get most of your tools it really shines; they reuse their spaces to an unusually effective degree (at least as well as MGS5) and the game actually becomes less repetitive as it starts to demand more of you. the art design also feels unusually lived-in for an art style thatās typically associated with procedural generation; itās really nicely intentional stuff.