Anyway, your list is biased towards a category of games that have a shitton of text but also aren’t literal visual novels/IF. Whereas I’m leaning towards the claim that a Souls-game density of script is just right, and any game with more text than that is inherently a bit on the flabby side.
I remember when Metroid Fusion came out, everybody complained they didn’t like the personality of the AI character. But really what was wrong there was the having text at all. Of course, Metroid series only offended worse on that front later…
Felix and Broco I think you’re both right. Most games operate best under light and suggestive text, but only recently was that intentional (Souls) as opposed to a closed mouth leaving room to doubt the stupidity (pre-late-90s or so). That period of excessive writing begun in the mid-90s is a trough we only worked out of recently with tighter indie projects and those precepts bleeding into mid-tier.
Personally I’d argue Sony’s house style isn’t good and I still find it over-thick, over-produced, and over-determined in Last of Us. But for as ploddingly set they are to Screenwriting 101 books like Story and Save the Cat (seriously that’s what Bruce Straley told us to do when he visited and we talked about building narrative) it’s better than not that those lessons are being followed in other AAA and we have some understanding of reinforcing themes through quest design.
That’s just empty tone policing. Me and Felix are talking about how we experienced games using the words and context that come naturally to hand (verbs like “is” are concise and “In my opinion,” is empty verbiage). You’re the only one with a commitment here to defend an abstract front of objective vs subjective, elitist vs populist, valuing-by-principle vs valuing-for-its-own-sake, which all in the end boil down to semantics and discussion style.
it’s fun to give opinion using objective language if your audience knows what’s up and you can use that to communicate differences between opinions you feel you can argue strongly and those you’re less committed to defending
I have neither the energy nor the desire to engage with deflection tactics. All I’ll saying is that I feel like conflation of facts and opinions has become a bit of a thing around here lately.
things gettin’ a little too nedgey, 's all I’m sayin
Well, The Last of Us feels “like a movie” more than any other game ever made and that is clearly what they were going for. It’s very natural for a game pushing the limits of mocap, cinematography, lighting, all in the spirit of emulating Oscar-winning prestige dramas, to also follow the conventional screenwriting beats. But this being an effective script strategy is deceptively narrow to the specific thing they’re doing (which is blissfully rare nowadays), and I don’t think they should necessarily be going around recommending it to other studios…
I may not watch enough modern movies or maybe narrative distended of a dozen hours of gameplay gives me time to unpack but movies rarely feel as predictable as Naughty Dog scripts and follow-ons like God of War. And I hate it! I hate seeing the game fall into the ‘strained relationship’ level and knowing why the thunder is booming and knowing I have to wait through twenty minutes of dialogue and level to resolve the beat. I hate having a dozen lines of dialogue for every state and that every line is perfectly polished (read: workshopped to death).
At least God of War could fall back on a surly joke of not talking fairly often.
I’m not willing to say it’s categorically bad but I have a feeling this mode will feel embarrassing in twenty years the way BioWare games feel now.
I finished Wolfenstein: The New Colossus earlier today and… thank god it ended when it did. The final battle was almost exactly the very limit of what I could actually handle, I probably died a few dozen times and that was even with half of those attempts coming after I made a manual save halfway through a good run.
The story was pretty snazzy if undeniably feeling like it was missing a chapter near the end. There is a whole big run up to stealing the massive flying fortress of doom, and then you jump straight to the ending which never even teases it mattering in the least. To be fair the story is often sloppy in this regard you literally detonate a nuke over a likely still somewhat populated city to get your metaphorical tires to no longer be stuck in the mud and probably could have used another pass, but it is forgiven as it has an absolutely amazing… let’s call it cameo in the penultimate level.
to be fair I was thinking that in darker days when Assassin’s Creed II features its hacker’s den and I knew immediately that games were now hiring TV writers, but they were CSI writers at best and oh god we were worse off
I agree that Hallow Knight rocks very direct thematic and mechanical similarities to Dark Souls. But somehow the format and presentation is different enough that it doesn’t feel like Dark Souls to me.
The massive size of the map and the difficulty impresses me. I expected this to play more like a GBA/DS Castlevania that I could methodically and almost passively plough through in ~10 hours, but I’ve been playing Hollow Knight for 12 actively engaged hours, and I’ve only seen a few of its areas so far. I like playing through this game knowing almost nothing about it. The game surprises me a lot. It’s good at evoking a labyrinthine cave for its setting. Exploration and event triggers seem somewhat open ended. The world feels cohesive and lively. The NPCs convincingly inhabit their corners of the cave, or their journeys feel parallel to my own. I’ve come across several difficult boss battles that I’ve disengaged from. They seem to have little bearing on my progress. I’ve made headway in areas I probably shouldn’t be visiting yet.
Actually, I guess I’m describing a Souls. But I think it must be the platforming and the abilities related to platforming that set the tone aside from Souls. That is different enough that I don’t feel like I’m retreading familiar ground. Anyhow, I’m having a great time–this game feels worthwhile.