what’s a good smithy joke, I have to wonder? Lay some on us! Ain’t like I know a lot of people who could do that
they don’t exist
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all of this
I remember playing the first God of War, then never wanting to play a God of War again both because of the level of grrrrrrrrrrrrrargh self-seriousness in its hypermanmurderness and because the hypermurder was just TAPATAPA. This one has this really confident combat system then BAM the tapa is backa.
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Also when you’re in Hel and your kid is sick and far away the codex is still actively being updated in his voice : |
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This must be a hard mode thing but honestly the Blades of Chaos felt more like a hindrance because hard mode is all about constant movement, as it was difficult to cause hitstun, and the blades just required way too much commitment to their animations. You do a swing or two and someone is already about to smack you in the back of the head and take off half your health. They hit a lot of enemies at once but it was not until much later in the game did I feel it was worth using, after it got a lot of upgrades and I leveled Kratos himself up for the endgame stuff, and even then I mainly used it for its special moves. Narratively that segment is Kratos reluctantly having to dig up and face his past, game design-wise it’s probably supposed to be “this is awesome, here are a bunch of grunts to kill outside your house”, but in my game it was just a continuation of the dire circumstances surrounding Hel. Axe for life.
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At least we can all agree that Kratos’ wife had much better taste in weapons than he.
Questionable taste in men, tho 
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Things (presence of mortal men and their undead leavings) imply this is defo happening in the actual Viking Age and not just some Mythic Whatevertime but [redacted] doesn’t even exist as himself yet implying VERY EARLY medieval Scandinavia or maybe even Migration Period and meanwhile
MEANWHILE
the cosmetic swords that litter the environment have guards that are CLEARLY from like the 10th-11th century
I KNOW
I’M FLABBERGASTED AS WELL
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Look, pretty much anything can be explained away at this point with time travel. New-GoW3 will take place in 2348, where Kratos has learned that the planets literally are the gods they’re named after and he rips the Eye off Jupiter..
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cued to the appropriate moment
smith’s touchmarks don’t work like cattle brands I don’t care if they’re magic dwarves I’m so mad right now
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I beat this a while ago. Finished the story, anyway.
I guess it wants to function as a sorta critique of Kratos but it’s too invested in reifying the necessity of his violence for that to work? Also the violence is Too Awesome All The Time. Like Nicholas Winding Refn made a AAA Dad Game?
What if Unforgiven but the Schofield Kid needs to learn a tiny bit of restraint when The Murdering is upon him rather than being made sick by it and exiting the story. Also he’s Munney’s son.
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I mean, it tries a little at the beginning to be a critique but then you never kill another human again the whole game
Unless the wolf people are humans idk how wolf people work
Maybe the sequel will be about the rich culture of the misunderstood Wolf People.
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The wolf person finishing move was so absurdly violent it was like playing a real God of War game for a second.
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The game doesn’t ever commit to exploring any single feeling or event as they occur, settling the micro-conflicts before they can be fleshed out so they can move on to the next area.
I remember when you hit the climax of Alfheim and Kratos has to abandon his son momentarily to enter some dimensional rift. You’ve got a moment where Kratos is tempted to abandon his son to pursue a vision of his wife, and when he’s forcefully pulled back by Atreus to reality Kratos discovers what felt like a minute or two had actually been hours, and his son, drenched in blood, had been defending himself against countless enemies with Kratos’ own axe.
Okay, they’ve brought the emotional distance between Kratos and Atreus to the fore in dramatic fashion. Atreus is resentful towards his father for abandoning him at a moment when his life was on the line, and is emblematic of how his father has treated him and seeming his mother his entire life. All Kratos left him was a weapon with which to kill. Kratos seems somewhat resentful himself and we get a peak at how even Kratos is longing for someone, even seemingly at the expense of his child.
So how does the game explore this? They trade some minor jeers about each other’s competency at puzzle solving as you backtrack through the area. Then you got on your boat and Atreus bluntly says something to to the effect of “You didn’t care about us (he and his mother), you didn’t even cry when she died!”. Kratos replies “Just because I didn’t cry doesn’t mean I was not mourning in my on way.” Atreus goes “Oh.” And that’s that. Conflict resolved! Back to the regular boat stories.
I thought the game was finally going to start doing something and then it pulled away, and I feel like the game does that a lot.
Maybe it’s a metaphor for how they treat their work. In the next game they’ll reconcile with the spirits within their weapons and Kratos can start unleashing their bankai.
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I’m watching this right now and I don’t think it has been linked in this thread
It’s by josepth anderson, the king of longform
The video is about as long as the game but I figure there are other unemployed videogomez-likers here so whatever
I picked this up since I got a PS4 recently and it was very cheap due to Black Friday sales.
One thing that strikes me as I play and read this thread is that certain story telling devices that would work in movies don’t work at all in games. It’s okay for a movie to have set ups that last most of the runtime, because the payoff will still happen at most 2.5 hours later. But 2.5 hours in a AAA video game is barely enough time to set a story up, since the act of learning and playing the game takes a good chunk of the player’s focus.
If for 20 hours Kratos’ relationship with his son is toxic, then the game itself becomes toxic whether the last bit admonishes him or not (I’ve not yet completed this game, so idk how it actually shakes out). The time is proportionally skewed and it puts a spotlight on what’s happening most frequently. Additionally, while most people will watch a movie to completion, a fewer number of people will play a 30 hour game to completion. By structuring the game this way, you’re teaching people the wrong lessons from your story.
Story telling in (long) games likely works much better in cycles. There can be an overarching theme, but each area should be a microcosm of that theme that reinforces it, with a mini set up, conflict, and resolution. I think this kind of structure jives a lot better with how most games are mechanically set up, too. God of War half pretends it’s an open-world game, but really it’s just a series of discrete areas with discrete tasks, built around a basic hub.
A lot of interacting with media relies on faith in the author; I’m willing to let certain things in movies slide when I have faith that the director will handle it correctly by the end of the movie. The bar is higher (lower? are we jumping over the bar or limboing?) for video games; if something disgusting happens in the first hour, I’m going to bail well before some payoff tens of hours in.
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I agree and this is why I think games are suited to telling stories about places through space and time rather than people, about myths rather than plots, about moods rather that arguments.
I also haven’t completed the game but I took this the other way – I felt that it was setting up to chastise Kratos as a toxic father (having experience with that myself, there were authors involved who understood), but if it, as I understand, backs away from an honest consequence at the end then I feel it’s doing a great disservice to the damage this type of relationship causes; that it’s more honest to leave it broken and unpatched than fixed through a few days of travel.
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there are worse dads than Kratos
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For what it’s worth their relationship actually does evolve over the course of the game. They get to a good spot by the end but the issues between them aren’t totally resolved. There are a few ways it can deteriorate in future games if that’s how they want to write it. However, like Gates says, by nature it’s a long story so you have to really stick with it to see it through if you’re not feeling it up front which is a big ask from a storytelling perspective.