lol
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But yeah, I can see that for D2…
chores n chats is def the best part of this game bc the progressively revealed islands actually have some level design and you can often just instakill enemies by punching them into the water
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This is very important when you are fighting things 3-4 levels above you and are doing little damage and no hitstun.
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Re: the single cut stuff, I think most people don’t even notice it. Most games are mostly one cut anyway since most games’ cameras don’t constantly cut to new angles while you’re playing it. That’s like old school survival horror stuff. And you’ve still got menus, flashes of light during some scenes, and other stuff that take you out of the sense of place. Maybe the effect could have been stronger if they went all the way and portrayed the menus in world somehow. Like Kratos has to pull out a map and point his finger at where you’re looking and he has to manually take his axe off his back and put new upgrades in it.
One thing the decision might have influenced, and there’s no reason this still couldn’t have been done with cuts, is how the point of view is always centered around the perspective of Kratos and co. rather than ever pulling out. GoW games always feature grandiose environments and the camera would pull out to show it like when you’re just an ant-sized guy walking along a Titan or when you enter some big courtyard or whatever. But this entry has to sell those same feelings to you from eye level and it provides nice moments that might have been typically portrayed from afar, such as when you’re falling off a crumbling structure and you’re following Kratos has he hurtles among the debris, or when you’re walking alongside the body of a dead giant and you can see the individual strands of its beard and its nose hairs, or just anything involving the World Serpent.
It also forced them to portray what fast travel looks like and it looks extremely rad.
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Oh jeeze, I didn’t realize it was weak ‘sometimes the screen goes all one color to hide the cuts’ style one cut. The heck
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I want this so much
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Everyone play alone in the dark inferno.
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i don’t want to be too snarky or fashionable in dunking on this game, but now that i’ve finished it i am comfortable saying that they could’ve just watched beyonce’s daddy lessons and spared themselves the trouble
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Game of the generation is a phenomenal writeup of this game I’m never going to play, and also has some sick fucking burns
It’s the combat of Resident Evil 4 and the narrative design of The Last of Us shot out of opposite ends of the Large Hadron Collider, upon which the word “Skyrim” has been haphazardly painted.
oh shit
Video games are for grown ups. They are serious, concerned with small gestures and big ideas; they are the reanimated corpse of a fallen giant crashing through fifty layers of ice and they are a tender conversation with your son. Video games are not one dragon tragically chained by the gods, they are three dragons in a questlog, each of whom drop unique epic loot when they are freed.
fuuuck
God of War perfectly threads the impossible needle, balancing the aesthetics of quote unquote “serious art” with player empowerment, making its audience feel like they’ve confronted something within themselves while never for a single moment making them feel truly threatened. It hits this sweet spot with greater precision than any game before, never committing too much to its themes that it loses the audience, nor so little that it completely collapses into empty nihlism. It is the landing Ken Levine could never stick.
just read the dang thing if you haven’t already
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cringe
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So if you took this critique and countered with, “but the combat is, actually, extremely good” - what would that be a counter to, exactly?
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It is not even critique. It is nothing more than posturing about one’s broad, facile hatred of videogames altogether.
Calling the combat “Resident Evil 4” in a world where God Hand and every other 3D beat-em-up exists is simply baffling illiteracy, let alone his namechecking of Skyrim because I guess the games both have mountains and forests and gear. Oh, and of course, randomly namechecking Skyrim is a cool burn, because it’s cool to hate Skyrim in 20-fucking-18, right? “The narrative design of The Last of Us” as if that’s an inherently bad thing, or as if it is no longer permissible for a parent and child to go on a killing adventure together.
There is no criticism in that first quote; it is vapid namechecking and nothing more.
Onto the second quote, yes, obligatory questlogs/rewards and redundant objectives are a shame. Guess we’ll have to throw it out along with every other game featuring them such as… every CRPG ever made, including Morrowind and Deus Ex and probably even Pathologic for that matter.
His jibing of the presumed pretentiousness of the game is itself far more pretentious (and cloying) than the game actually is, same with every idiot coming into this thread to grandstand about how they’re never going to play this because they are simply too cool for it. Thank you! We are impressed! Your input is valuable!
I haven’t finished the game so I can’t comment on how it ultimately furnishes its themes, but I doubt there’s any way it can outdo the sheer dread I felt waking up the night after starting it on Give Me God of War and the ordeal I’d have ahead of me. Of course you’d miss that if you picked Give Me A Bloated Movie without caring about beat-em-ups or videogames altogether, in which all you stand to accomplish by playing the game begrudgingly is to scrape out “sick burns” to impress other sick idiots with no genuine interest in beat-em-ups or videogames altogether.
Nevermind the fact that every other beat-em-up to this point has not even tried to have anything in the way of “writing” or “themes” or “presentation” worth mentioning, aside from perhaps Metal Gear Rising, but I guess all the rest get a pass because they are Japanese and not as mainstream and really we never wanted videogames to try to be serious anyway, actually. Or just fuck videogames, right? Whatever.
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i am grossed out by the glory kills and mushy cantalope smashing gib noises but otherwise this game looks like it could be cool to play
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Sorry, I just thought they were funny, there’s no way I will play this game simply because I don’t have a PS4, so I can’t offer any meaningful critique. I was definitely being rude, and I apologize
i mean like every vid i watch is like dubbed with audio from the night a very rowdy argument broke out down at the all you can eat watermelon buffet
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To be fair, I’m sure the reviews calling it “Game of the Generation” or gushing about its themes say similarly silly things, but I’m not bothering to read them, nor the snarky anti-reviews, and it feels that nobody is coming at this game (positive or negative, and myself included) with the earnest, holistic approach that any good criticism should have.
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finally someone on the same page
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I feel like we really have to move past the thing where you criticize something for being focus tested and well executed because it’s, like, an early aughts vestige of critics suddenly deciding by consensus that Pixar was the pinnacle of human achievement, it started out as a way of saying “actually these mass market kids’ entertainment products are really technically accomplished” but now it’s always invoked in service of a “it’s too perfectly refined to give its audience exactly what they want to be interesting” critique, which is always so obvious and people try to extrapolate so so much out of it
It’s still totally fine to be an aesthetic snob to the point where you’re turned off by the seriousness of the production (hi) but let’s keep those separate
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God, I wish.