Someone get me an editor.
Edit(or): I will say that towards the beginning there’s this bit where you’re constantly switching control between multiple characters and it was a nice touch to let you jump around a scene to see it developing from multiple angles rather than strictly from the perspective of a single one.
This is a good summary of it to be fair. There is one exception which has so far been the most surprising bit of gameplay which is The Seraphites seem to hunt using echolocation like the clickers which means you can’t ‘guns blaze’ the encounter if it goes south. It was a neat way of meshing clicker and human sections and was genuinely confusing (in a good way) the first time it happened. Player and character experience were aligned well. Felt very MGS3.
On the other hand every decent thing in the game is counterpointed by other gripes. Stalkers are a dumb enemy as are the huge melee guys. It might be because the game is so long but enemy variety felt very forced and I’m only 12 hours in (which is apparently half the game?).
The reason I (and I assume many people) approached the game as if it was going for that was Druckmann et al explicitly saying that they were going for that (“It makes players feel dirty, and that’s part of the point.” etc.) in the reams of pr that supported the launch.
I haven’t played to a Human Killing Point, yet! I turned it off after the first few hours and just haven’t felt the need to return?
I don’t get all the talk about feeling bad when ‘doing the violence’ in these games. Your character is a child or child-adjacent Toughdad being hunted by teams of armed twats or the literal undead. I’ve never enjoyed being magnificently violent more than in these games.
I think there’s a difference between mocking the player for playing your game and violence feeling bad because violence feels bad. The characters in the game are set on the paths they’re on and the game doesn’t seem to be lecturing you, it’s just not dressing up the actions in the game to be more palatable. another entry in the Violence: A Hell of a Thing genre, along the lines of classic christian bale/wes studi banger Hostiles
have you played tlou2 though? the whole point of the game is that it also makes you play as someone who is hunting ellie down for killing her friends. and dog or something. friend killers on both sides.
I’m playing it now, I think I’m about halfway through.
What does this mean in practice? I had forgotten the whole clicker echo location thing so when the game told me I could sneak up them just being by very slow I was confused how they’d always notice me when I got close up their face until I googled what was going on. But from reading a plot summary the Seraphites are just people, right? Can’t they just see you anyway? Where does echo location come into this? Or are you saying they can tell when you’re behind them? I don’t think I ever noticed clickers doing that.
Here’s my explanation/headcanon
The echolocation thing is mostly abstract simulation-wise but I think the general idea is what they’re going for. For clickers, since they’re constantly clicking and sensitive to sound you can assume some echolocation is happening, although functionally this means they only react to physics-based sounds caused by the player or movement that uses the full tilt of the analog stick. They don’t really react to every sound that is represented by the game.
I noticed when facing off against the Seraphites that while they’re whistling they seem to be able to pick up on roughly where you are. So it’s implied they’re actually echolocating you (although you probably wouldn’t do this with whistling in real life, clicking is more effective because the echo is more clipped). This seems to happen more in the first encounter with them but that’s the impression I got. They could also be coding information like ‘David she’s over there’ or ‘I love dogs’ but they’re also kinda giving away their position.
Even if they can see, echolocation can still help to give information about the environment e.g. your target is on the move but hard to see because of camouflage or low light. It’s not very realistic but seemed neat. Echolocation has been used by humans in real life but usually in cases where their sight is gone/impaired.
I may be wrong about whether this was intended but I still think it’d be cool.
What this ultimately means is that they’re a basic difficulty modifier they seem to just be better at tracking the player than the WLF.
mmmm i kind of think maybe they’re just communicating through whistles
asking that all voice actors post a teddy roosevelt speech on tuesday in solidarity with all those affected by video game length
This probably is all that was intended but my headcanon has grown too strong in the absence of interesting enemy types.
This only adds to the “look at Naughty Dog’s staggering tech achievement/worker abuse” but there are a few moments of characters holding back tears that were really convincingly mocapped, like you could see mouths realistically contorting. I guess that uncanny valley-realism kind of helped me feel even more detached from what they were going for.
I need to finish my longpost on this but I really would like to change how we talk about companies that have received Jason Schreier reports vs those that haven’t. The mistreatment in the games industry is much more systemic and widespread than those companies highlighted, which really reflects which companies the top-of-the-pyramid workers are least happy with. While those workers also deserve to be well-treated, they’re written about because they already have the power to speak out; they’re comparatively highly-paid and have many more options to find other work than the more pressing issues of QA workers, drastically underpaid and with fewer opportunities to advance, outsourced work subcontracted to companies the work owner doesn’t care to look into, the continued hostile environment for non-white cis-men, and the growing class of highly-skilled contract workers looking to make it full-time.
If you’ve worked a holiday season at retail (I’ve done five), you’ve experienced far worse working conditions than a professional working game dev crunch. Those workers need to organize and these exposes are useful and important but I think it’s silly to single these specific studios out as inhuman work, unlike other studios whose games we like.
how will resetera ever deal with this?
I’d like to know more about the companies to which work is outsourced en masse. I know a part of the unionisation debate is a fear that companies will try to shift toward cheaper, non-unionised, overseas labour but I don’t know how viable or likely that would be given that some AAA studios already partially do this for really large projects.
I think having more ‘Schreiers’ talking to people at the lower level would help as well.
I just had a look at the Schreier tweet about games being too long and find it funny how quickly he reveals the subjectivity of such a statement by saying Hollow Knight is the perfect length. I agree that TLOU2 is probably much longer than it needs to be but there are plenty of shorter well-paced games to point to for good exemplars.
i’d be pretty happy to see more pushback on these things but at this point i don’t think that’s what these pieces are really “for”, especially when none of the publications that write them can afford to actually divest from covering this kind of game. they can say whatever they want about these things as long as they don’t say nothing, but sometimes saying nothing is the only meaningful critical decision you can make. and as long as that remains off the table these things are destined to fall into an eternal return: “labour abuse” is just another lens that lets you keep these megagames on the frontpage for a other cycle, along with “examining the politics of x” “look at this beautiful environmental detail in x” “can you pet the dog in x”, etc. it’s extremely funny to see how these critiques end up being both acknowledged and just folded seamlessly into the traditional PR speak of the game review - “although the stories of the company’s internal development culture are concerning, there’s no denying a deep beauty in the sheer amount of craft that goes into these individually rendered fern textures…”
in the same vein i think the discussion about the morality of violence et cetera in these games is more or less a smokescreen to obscure how boring they are. it’s convenient for both developers and critics to be able to act as though the sheer scale of these things gives them some kind of special window into “the culture” since it means their size and proximity to capital alone is the only justification they’ll ever need, rather than any particular, you know, qualities. check out my new waypoint column where I dissect and examine one of jeff bezos’s turds each morning in order to determine the health of the polity.
this post is a good example of QA labour reporting which also mentions the ways these companies get subsidized by tax credits from cities each trying to become the big new tech capital- - geez, and people say there’s been a decline in public funding for art !!!
for the record i have the same affection for goofy commercial schlock as everyone else who grows up in this culture but it’s just aggravating to me when the sheer scale of these things further inflates whatever baleful qualities they already have. a game is produced by a bunch of compsci guys whose real passion in life is fern rendering techniques, but for the sake of convenience (personal, ideological, financial) they tell themselves and other people they’re making a “statement on violence”. the company representatives call 100 press guys to tell them about the “statement on violence” they’re making, the press guys write it all up and then maybe - sometimes - try to engage earnestly with the real content of this “statement on violence”, in ways that might draw others into it as well. this is not to say that the “statement on violence” is worth anything - that it’s anything close to being a useful starting point even if you really did want to have this kind of conversation in good faith, that any further elaboration on it can ever really get past the essential stupidity of the starting position. but it was convenient somewhere to call this thing a “statement on violence” and so that’s the byproduct that gets pushed into the wider culture for everyone else to deal with. air pollution, noise pollution, semantic pollution - wasting a lot of people’s time and energy, pushing them to grab hold of the tar rabbit, pushing buttons that might actually mean a lot to them personally, just for the sake of this commercial enterprise’s right to sail on a little easier. it’s pissing in the swimming pool of public life - you’ll get the quick pleasing hit of warm relief, everyone else gets the taste of piss. i liked resident evil 7, i don’t even necessarily have a kneejerk dislike of ‘polish’ or big complicated projects, but it’s hard to extend any kind of courtesy to these things the harder they commit to becoming Hedorah-esque smog monsters.
there was a twitter thread the other day, that i now can’t find, that basically was along the lines of ‘tlou2, death stranding and rdr2 have paid their way into artistic credibility’.
i get the general idea behind this, but i think at least tlou2 and ds both make some very intentional creative choices, and do something ~new~ with videogames that is more than the surface level appearance of depth through big themes and productions values. this gets messy, because the choices that work for more are things that only exist because of the cost of labour involved in production. like, death stranding as this walking sim that is solely focused on the actual means of traversal is not something that an indie dev could make in the same way.
ultimately we need to spend the time sifting through to the very specific points that are successful in these games and then critiquing from there.
‘good graphics but bad labour practice’ just doesn’t go anywhere other than like you said, feed back into the press cycle.
im p sure i already made this exact post in this thread