I don’t think we have many more interesting critiques to write about it, but it’s definitely a major weakness of this game; most beats and elements are so best-practices aligned that there’s very little surprise or human feel behind it.
This game is extremely well-made and I certainly like it more than the Naughty Dog games whose values it emulates but I find it aesthetically very boring and feel kind of gross after playing it too long.
also the combat is good but not great, it’s just the feedback that’s world-class (and that’s, sure, 40% of a good combat system but not it entire)
I have a lot of words waiting to get out about this game but its uncritical acceptance as the best thing ever by everyone at my job is causing me to feel very artistically isolated right now so I kind of hate this game even though I have a decent time while playing it
OK yeah actually that’s a very good clarification to what I meant: I wasn’t trying to say that something being judged too well-produced is exclusively left to the realm of personal fussiness and snobbishness, but that this is actually sturdier ground to make that criticism on than is extrapolating to all big-budget productions everywhere. if this one didn’t get away with it (for you) where others did, break that down beat by beat, don’t get carried away with the aboutness.
in other words I’m filing a separate opinion to alterity’s last big post above while agreeing in principle with the criticism of the linked critique
In that you’re reacting to the sloppy name-tossing in the linked article, I agree with you. It reminds me of my little brother taking every aesthetic pose just a step too far.
Everyone has a familial killing adventure waiting to take them for miles of smiles. This one might not be yours, but we will get around to realizing them all, I promise you. We’re getting so good at the killing bits, and we’re working on the family bits.
i don’t know how to approach this and honestly i don’t think anyone does. what has great combat? what is the space successfully met between 5000 concurrently running systems, personal taste and patience, aesthetic disposition, difficulty levels attempting to consider for all of these factors, etc.? or is the failure defined immediately at the point at which it attempts to meet the needs of multiple audiences necessarily muddying the waters? i know that this is definitely a question you have spent a lot of time on, but,
from a character action perspective: the needle hadn’t moved in beat em ups in a decade at least, so while i kind of get the argument about where and when this might frustrate or flounder from more of a gdc lecture argument angle about very specific player feedback, i don’t think it’s entirely appreciated yet the ways in which this recognizes what works about this particular subgenre that was previously almost entirely dead the realm of japanese game development and not only somehow integrated it into several tiers of accessibility but executed it at about as high a level as any of its competition while also wrangling a bunch of AAA bullshit concessions mostly seamlessly
If you’ve been paying attention, you might start to see this would be a problem when dealing with an over-the-shoulder camera. Other games might pull back to give a better overview of the situation, but God of War refuses in order to keep intact its gimmick of taking place in one take, which itself fails to pay off.
like we all internalized re4 and god hand by now and are not still having this same ign conversation about “but what if enemy behind you” “whyit tank conrtols”“” in 2018 (especially since this in particular has been addressed in several ways directly)? and a lot of the rest is dependent on the specificity of the players’ execution of and relationship with the mechanics functioning at any given moment that how do you have a singular conception of what god of war’s combat is and don’t click send
By the way, if going straight-up no HUD is too much for you, I’ve heard you can set specific elements to be hidden but appear for a few seconds with a swipe of the touchpad, to quickly assess health or cooldown bars or whatever without having them on all the time, and that’s pretty cool.
I also thought that was a particularly silly thing to critique given some of the above mentions of how being aware of a situation is a key part of the conbat system.
It makes a majority of the extended moveset useless. Moves like trip attacks become inconsistent, and at times straight up don’t work on enemies.The inability to stagger enemies means trying the stance switches or longer combos is a good way to make yourself vulnerable. It’s possible to integrate these moves into combat, but the best strategy quickly becomes to do the basic combo while watching for the indicators that tell you when to block or dodge.
Dang, this was me one month ago when I was only a few hours into the game! Except I relied only on the charge R2 button attack. (As I posted later on I completely turned around on the combat system shortly after.)
Yeah, I used this to turn off everything but the notifications on what items I picked up. Horizon: Zero Dawn had the same options. It lets you clear the screen of all the crud you don’t want but you can quickly take a peek at them when want to.
I think this is the real value of the linked article: it identifies the God of War games as aesthetic vacuums, sponges soaking up the most popular AAA gameforms of their time and executing them passionlessly, which contributes to this rote and inhuman feel. If God of New is better than God of Old that’s because popular AAA gameforms are on average better now than they were in 2006, which I think is true probably.
I agree with that. The back half of the '00s were especially dire; I think things picked up right around when everyone decided no, every game can’t be Uncharted.
I mean they are certainly passionate about incandescent rage and then what if bad but still.
It is still a game filled with watermelon smashing gleeful pornographic murder. I don’t want to play that. A game about the cost of one death in which you murder hundreds. The whole series has me asking the question “I’m supposed to be on this guy’s side?”
It’s probably a good game. I never intend to play it.
@felix how many other games tried to be uncharted? The ones I can think of are less than two hands.
my personal take on violence on videogames is it doesn’t make me sick enough yet. close is noob saibot puking when his spleen is ruptured in mk9
but otherwise i assume videogames still underutilize fluids horror movies have capitalized on for years
my biggest pet peeve is when a game is violent and people go oh it’s gotta be parody. nah.
kratos murders fantastic creatures to prove to his boy the only rule is if it bleeds it dies and that includes yourself, all life is truly precious but some of that life wants to murder you
