Wolfenstein

Did anyone try out Cyberpilot? The Wolfenstein VR thing I mean

A dissenting opinion on Wolf 2: I played the two first hours of this last year on Switch and I didn’t see in that time any of the kick-ass stuff like that courthouse intro that is the sort of thing that justifies it. Instead I found that the game seems to be dominated by dated, not-that-crunchy FPS shooting; a shitload of plotting that only has value if I cared about the trajectory of specific characters instead of purely about the politics and world drama; and generic FPS settings like a nuked city.

I’m not saying I think the game is objectively bad especially since a lot of that is me just being burned out on FPSes in general and only wanting to play one of them if it’s really really fresh. But personally I didn’t want enough to see the good parts (what became clear is a few minutes of play per hour) to keep playing, and I sort of organically stopped playing and never got back to it.

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The wheelchair part at the very beginning is funny in theory but quickly grows tedious in execution; the early cutscenes though, like all the cutscenes, have such POP and VERVE that once you get on your feet I was completely juiced.

As for

I still don’t think any modern FPS has done this stealth-until-it-breaks style of gameplay… uh, at all, really, and it is really good. Also custom dual wield combos are amazing. My protip is never have one weapon and ADS, that’s a waste of damn time

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I registered most of the cutscenes I saw as heavy-handed in a way that’s even a little bit sentimental. They’re trying to have it both ways with badass Nazi murder in the Id Software spirit and also a human story with characters you care about. The latter did not work at all for me: the script and acting lacked the precision and insight of, for example, The Last Of Us, so I could only think of these characters as archetypes. And dialogue lines in service of human stories constitute ~80% of the cutscenes.

I honestly thought so many of the interpersonal scenes, particularly the scenes with BJ and his father, were exceptionally well done while still fitting in the game’s campy tone. idk. different strokes I guess. it’s definitely not high art or anything but I loved it and found many moments of it to be moving.

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The New Order’s portrayal of PTSD is perhaps the most realistic and emotionally nuanced I’ve seen in a mainstream videogame.

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Agreed. New Colossus shades a little more into high camp, but the melodrama is so arch that it’s legitimately affecting, almost like a telenovela. BJ’s big, soft, sensitive heart is the warm core of the story that makes it move and breathe. Comparing it to a complex character prestige drama like Last of Us is a big exercise in point-missing. It’s like trying to argue that The Artist is a better film-about-films than Cecil B Demented.

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Just as a heads-up, the Switch version of Youngblood sucks. At its base, it’s a much worse port than Wolf 2 (in terms of fidelity, framerate, etc). On top of that, it’s super glitchy, and my game repeatedly crashed or kicked me offline.

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Yeah this game owned. It didn’t really need to be a co-op game though?! It was WOLF3D but with Arkane disho levels! I think the complaints about bullet sponge enemies is valid buuut also you get to unload 2 full uzi clips into a Nazi’s face so it’s a net win imho. Well, I think I liked it more than TNC. Also, Sophie and Jessica Blastkowicz are my new video game girlfriends AND every 20 lines of dialogue or so you get something that is very Online!!

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Well if they’re using words like bodacious I gotta get it. That’s one of my favorite words!

All the big Youtube reviewers ripped this game a new one and proudly declared that It Sucks. So it must be good and you’re further cementing that belief

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is this a reference to the precision with which The Last of Us lifts every character/emotional beat and significant cut scene framing choice from an already extant movie or… ?

:twisted:

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I have an absolutely hard time working through Naughty Dog games because they are distressingly follow the textbook Script Writing 101

no humanity allowed except the humanity scientifically measured to be appropriate

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OK, I won’t go to bat on the TLOU comparison, I concede it’s out of place. TLOU mostly came to mind as the only example of a game with long, chatty cutscenes that I felt were worth my time. If it didn’t exist as proof that videogame character drama is able to rise to the level of second-tier HBO, I would might be saying that no game should spend this much time on character cutscenes, period.

Anyway, rather I’d like to emphasize – and this is more about the conversation about the game than the game itself – that the Wolf2 plot largely doesn’t consist of what most people said the game was about, before my post forced a reorientation.

I think top-1%-of-experience-highlighting discourse about 50-hour-long games can amount to accidental misrepresentation after a certain point. Fans ought to construct at least an explanation for why the elements constituting the majority of the game are good and in synergy with the elements they prefer to talk about. For instance, for a game like Zelda 2, because from the beginning most players had different expectations and skeptical takes, its fans (like me) end up mounting thoroughgoing defenses for what the game is and why its ā€œflawsā€ are good from another perspective.

You’re not wrong to say I’m missing the point, but I wonder if healthy critical discourse actually needs some point-missing parties to create the negative space to outline what the fans are really appreciating.

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The New Order is still the best one storywise and even with that one I have issues with how it paces itself once you meet up with the Resistance.

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Funnily enough, I have the opposite reaction to TLOU cutscenes. Only the intro really resonated with me; the later scenes felt like a really boring character drama I both do not have a stake in and do not particularly care about any of the characters.

The HBO comparison is good though, because it highlights just how empty a lot of ā€œprestigeā€ television is. For all their flaws, a lot of HBO shows are bombastic, goofy, and wild. TLOU never really rose to that level for me (granted, I did not finish it because I was SO bored). Instead, it felt like the dour drama your friend tells you to watch because ā€œholy shit it’s so subtle and darkā€ and it’s mostly really tedious character studies that go nowhere, and it’s canceled after two seasons because there’s no joy in it, just some male writer jacking off to nihilism.

There are plenty of people out there willing to miss the point of what pieces of media are trying to do, I don’t think we need more of them. If anything, I wish more people would suspend their preconceptions and instead try to engage with media ~on the media’s terms~ rather than their own.

Really, this comes across as ā€œmaybe I should purposefully not seek to understand, so other people can educate meā€, which seems like an unfair imposition on fans.

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not sure ā€œfansā€ is the word you meant to use here but I think at best your position is more suitable for twitter where you’re constantly beset by exhausting levels of wrong than in a community where most people trust and respect each other?

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I used ā€œfansā€ because it’s the terminology used in the quoted post. See:

As for trusting and respecting each other, that’s fine! I’m not taking posts in bad faith or anything. But also I still think it’s unreasonable to put the burden of understanding on others, instead of trying to come to an understanding yourself. Socratic dialogue on videogames is exhausting no matter the venue.

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I mean, I’m the first one to admit fatigue when we retread old arguments, but I know a lot of heavily discursive thinkers who I like and respect, so I don’t think that’s a fair blanket statement (or something to get after someone for when they’ve gone to the trouble of framing it as explicitly discursive because they know what they’re doing).

Then read my post as being discursive about discourse, rather than snarking about Twitter or whatever. I’m just commenting about what was said, I’m not ā€œgetting after someoneā€.

This game sucks I keep dying because of my shitty ai partner who doesn’t do jack shit and having to start the entire level over because you can’t save and kleptomaniacly collecting little coins to upgrade weapons is dumb and dual wielding only works for the two pistols you have press 1 to switch between the two pistols and press z twice quickly to dual wield them

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