Today I tried the Quake Champions beta. I’m pretty sure I had to check a box saying I can’t talk about it in order to play it. We should get a group of SBers together to do some brutal frags (check the thread in Multikombat).
All the T:ToN praise I keep reading here makes me want to give it another chance, but honestly, my first six hours with it were just a miserable experience. I haven’t beaten Planescape yet, but I like how it instantly welcomes you with a web of mysteries you have to untangle – all the dramatic flashbacks in the intro you wanna learn about, the reason you can’t die, Pharod. Avellone quickly builds some friction between your character and the mysterious world you wake up in, so you’re given a reason to explore the story. As a person who demands his fantasy to quickly give him a reason to care, this was important for me.
Meanwhile, T:ToN… just assumes I’m into exploring all the weirdness of Numenera, never bothers to build any personal stakes (you’re a castoff, look for other castoffs), quickly kills the mystery of main plot by having two random companions drowning me in useful infodumps. There’s no friction that I liked so much in Planescape, and its setting desperately needs it – it’s just a constant stream of odd, wildly different, almost incoherent ideas. During your first five minutes in Sagus Cliffs, you get to see slave traders, giant alien monster, a time-travelling child and a criminal who is slowly strangled with a physical manifestation of his own thoughts (the last one, I can somehow save through cunningly inciting social outrage even though I was just told I’m practically like a newborn baby). The natural first response to all of this is to feel alienated, doubt if it all makes a sense as a whole. Five hours later, I realized nothing I’ve seen suggested that hunch was incorrect, and I had no drive to explore Numenera the way I wanted to learn about Planescape. After umpth dialogue full of useless information regarding abstract sci-fantasy concepts from bygone ages, I became completely numb.
Also, none of the companions I’ve met were remotely as interesting as Morte (who instantly proves to be a charismatic, memorable character). I’ve recently seen some screenshots that implied Erritis has some hidden depth to him, but as a dumbass who didn’t pick a mind reading skill I never learned he has an audience following his every move.
the thing with until dawn is that pretty much every part of it works and is competently done, which is not something you can say of any other game in that mold I don’t think
it’s maybe less interesting in some respects than earlier attempts at fully-voiced-and-rendered adventure games, but: the writing and acting works, the auto-saving works, the QTEs work, the mystery works, etc. it’s campy and effective, we should all be so lucky.
plus it delivers pretty much the same standard of storyteling as uncharted without making you traverse a bunch of very linear ledges
Still playing Hyper Light Drifter. Got down the North and East bosses. North was hard until I got the shotgun. The shotgun is bonkers in this game. I am trying to locate West boss (or at least more shards) now, but East is by far the most confusing of the three areas. I still don’t know where is the path I am missing.
Most objects in these games just don’t have 9-15 modes of interaction. The Humongous Entertainment games I had as a kid (Pajama Sam, Putt Putt, Spy Fox) had one mode of interaction per object, so going back to verbs is ordinarily tedious. In Full Throttle you get 2/4 valid modes for every interactive object.
I should also mention the update lets you highlight the interactive objects by holding shift. The audio touchups are very nice.
I definitely agree with you that it’s mechanically competent and put together with some thought, but for me the writing and acting completely failed, even at being camp. But I’m also a cranky bastard who generally doesn’t enjoy shlocky genre B-horror (I’m also too cranky to enjoy Uncharted games, despite my respect for aspects of their craft). My feeling is that one’s appreciation of Until Dawn is directly related to whether its packaging is appealing to the player; effective QTEs can’t carry an experience on their own. In an alternate universe, there’s an Until Dawn that is informed by High Tension* that I am defending on SB.
I’m not pretending that High Tension is any better than Until Dawn, just that it appeals to me better.
I want a dozen different stories draped on Until Dawn’s structure. I would much rather Uncharted be a six hour playable movie than an interminable cover shooter.
With Sony Money I think they could eventually rope in better writers and directors from film/TV than Larry Fessenden.
What makes Until Dawn work is that it’s trying to be every single different cliche horror movie all one after another. It’s hilarious. The second half of the game is just one ludicrous twist after another.
Like, who was it that pointed out in a youtube video that the most interesting part of Until Dawn was that, with slashers, tropes are adhered to traditionally and you as the viewer are like “oh look there they go, they’re gonna check the shower curtain just like always”, but with Until Dawn, you’re put into a position of control, and therefore are responsible for whether or not you adhere to the tropes or not. And then the game responds to your reactions and changes routes in turn. That might have been a Push to Smart video. Or maybe it was Mark Brown? Or Super Bunnyhop? Fuck, we live in a wonderful youtube gametalk renaissance.