Worth Reading: 11/08/2013

@patrickklepek I want a game to affect me in some way. It can be humour, drama, anger, etc. As long as it does something for me and doesn't leave me cold or bore me.

A Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst of consoles? COUNT ME IN!!

I still say the worst decision of the series was to kill Saren in the first game. IMO it was like killing Darth Vader, a great charcter who we were just starting to hate, or love. I would love to know if they struggled with that decision, or that was gaming at that time.

@curufinwe: It's way too fucking early to tell, in practical application terms, how the differences in hardware between the two consoles will manifest in actual games. A few launch games really aren't much of an indication of anything, and it's idiotic that people are making such a big deal about it.

The difference in hardware power between the PS4 and Xbone will be relevant for the rest of the decade.

The Neogaff and Deus Ex articles were amazing. The halo 4 stats were depressing because I love halo but also relieving because I never could stand halo 4. This is one of my favorite features of the site, I get so many interesting things out of it and while i don't normally find a new game I want to play, the critical discourse on the industry is hard to beat. I just need to get better at remembering to swing by the site to spend the time going through Worth Reading.

Thank fucking god.

Yes, tell the story using gameplay please. If the majority of the emotional story comes through cutscenes or having it voice acted at you through an NPC you have failed to use the medium effectively. Go make shitty daytime TV.

Tell the story contextually using the environment and the actions the player takes. You can give the player choices and freedom and still tell a linear story. It doesn't have to explode out into an unmanageable tree of possible outcomes.

You don't need to expose all the story elements or choices to the player unless they go looking. Let the player use some imagination and invite them to think about the situation. If all the player is doing is moving to the next glowing dot on a mini-map, why is there any interaction at all?

Don't be afraid to mix real, skill-based gameplay into your story choices. Yes, some choices won't be available to people who aren't good enough at the gameplay. Embrace it! This is what games can bring to the table! Instead of presenting the choices on a dialog wheel or as button prompts make the choices themselves gameplay segments.

I'm ALL for more emotional games. I don't think that means the emotion has to come primarily from the story. You can make an emotional game with a primary theme using a well-realized setting and cast of characters who meaningfully react to gameplay outcomes. The emotion of the situation will naturally come out of the context and the actions the player has to take to move the game forward. Show the results of the player choices. Shitty outcome made your good friend and party member loose a leg? Well now he has a prosthetic in every following scene and his jumping sucks. Nice job (asshole).

Make the player choose to walk down that next hall and deal with the situation beyond the next door knowing full well how they approach the situation and characters is going to matter. How WELL they deal with the next situation is going to matter. They have to do it. Pressing A to continue isn't an option.

It means unclenching and moving some of the story out of traditional, rigid methods such as dialog scripts and into a more dynamic and fuzzy software simulation.

Hyper Light Drifter just looks great. Really great.

I'm one of those people who enjoys both kind of games. The games that are 'just' entertainment and the games that go deep and tell strong and/or sad stories. That's what I like about the state of games right now. There is room for both. If you want wacky over-the-top action, you can find it. If you want to find a game that tugs on your heartstrings, you can find it.

For example, just this year we had Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons and Saints Row IV. They couldn't be more different but I loved them both and they are two of my favorite games this year.

As far as the debate concerning if video games should be 'fun' or 'emotional' goes, I definitely believe it's a good thing for games to try to connect with their audience on a deeper level than simply as a form of raw entertainment, but they should do it on their own terms.

I feel like too many developers trying to make games more emotional try to play to the strengths of a movie rather than of a video game by focusing on events which limit player actions ("Press X to do this very specific, contextual action!") and/or cutscenes which completely rip away control from the player in order to ensure the 'scene' plays out exactly as intended. Unfortunately, a developer may indeed make a nice spectacle this way by getting all the camera angles, shadows, and other aesthetics just right, but direct interaction is the most important advantage video games have over other mediums and this is a mitigation of that strength. When I'm playing something like Uncharted or Metal Gear Solid I rarely feel like I'm playing a game at all, let alone like I have any say in how I 'play the role' of Solid Snake or Nathan Drake - I feel like I'm sitting back and watching a movie which happens to require a minor amount of input on my part from time to time.

I'll end this post with a few examples of games which I feel take full advantage of the medium. Shadow of the Colossus is the (probably) obvious one as it has little in the way of plot for the vast majority of its length and it's not necessarily even all that much 'fun' to play (I often found it more frustrating than enjoyable gameplay-wise), but it manages to make you, the player, feel a sense of wonder, sadness, and deep uncomfortableness simply because it rarelytakes away or limits control so there is a much greater sense of 'responsibility' for causing the events of the story to play out; you feel satisfied when you discover how to defeat a colossus and manage to climb up it because you're the one doing the climbing and you likewise feel uncomfortable and possibly horrified when a colossus dies because you're also the one stabbing it to death. Without giving too much away, Hotline Miami is also a great example as it is a fun game to play, the developers clearly know a player is likely to have fun while playing it, and it can make a player unsettled and uncomfortable simply because they're having fun with it. Dark Souls rarely throws the plot and lore in the player's face, but the inability to 'take back' actions due to the game constantly auto-saving and only allowing for one save slot per character puts in astounding amount of weight on even the most minor of actions and Yes/No responses in a setting so bleak that there is never so much a choice between 'good' and 'evil' as there is a choice between two actions which feel equally terrible or a choice between indulging in self-delusion or seeking increasingly-depressing truths about the state of the world and the characters in it. Finally, cheesy FMV's aside, Myst to this day manages to convey a sense of 'melancholy beauty' with little more than a few puzzles and a navigable slideshow of locations which are all wonderful, interesting, and disturbingly devoid of life.

If the rule for telling a story with a movie is 'show, don't tell', I think a new rule should be made for video games along the lines of 'guide, don't show'; using environmental clues and minimum amounts of dialogue to guide a player in the intended direction will always trump ripping away control to force a scene as the best, most gripping moments in video games are those which the player helps to create through his or her own free will.

Braid and Fez are great because they don't ignore gameplay. Braid is especially great.

But, I find that whenever people tell me what's great about point-and-click games, every single bullet point they bring up is something non-interactive. Things like the character dialogue, humor, story, etc. But all of it is non-interactive and linear. So why should I play a game when its best parts are non-interactive?

So yeah - I don't get how I defied my logic there. I never said all indie / story-based games are bad. I loved Braid, Journey, The Walking Dead. But what's great about these games is that the best parts of the game make use of interactivity.

as lord of winterfell once said "BRACE YOUR SELF NEXT GEN CONSOLE ARE COMING"

That's a very arbitrary statement. And not true, as well. Plenty of "serious games" or "art games" are all about their gameplay. Braid, which arguably kickstarted the genre, is full of meaningful gameplay that acts as a metaphor for the story being told. Meanwhile, fan favourites not usually accused of being snobbish games, from Monkey Island to Day of the Tentacle, are all about a linear story that stops for a puzzle and unlocks when it's complete, making it basically a little animated movie that plays in chunks between the gameplay.

Not that I have a problem with it, but I feel that you defy your own logic when Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis misses your bar for excellence in indie gaming but Fez passes the test.

"One of the more interesting fractures is between those who view games simply as entertainment and those who desire (demand?) the medium to aim higher."

You don't get to say this and then say that it is OK to have both views. The statement in itself is snobby.

The problem with the games that actually try to be serious is the story is not conveyed through the gameplay. While playing games of this type, I'm often left dumbfounded when I ask myself - "why is this a game?". Why force interactivity into a story when it would be far, far better in literally any other medium?

For those claiming that games like these are the future of gaming, I simply don't get it. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for there to be better stories told through games, but not at the cost of gameplay.

Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us, Gone Home, etc. are games that have fantastic stories and memorable characters. But the gameplay is nowhere near as good. Passable / barely there / bad gameplay is not a step in the right direction for the medium, no matter how good the story might be. This is a deviation from the evolution of gaming.

What is really needed (IMO) is more games with good stories, gameplay, and most importantly, their mutual relation. One element should not be feel like it's been tacked on to the other; they should work together and play to the strengths of gaming as a medium. If the best parts of a game are things that I can watch on a YouTube playthrough, then it's not a good game.

Shut the fuck up; she's been writing "something actually intelligent" for years now - one appearance on the Bombcast doesn't negate everything else she's done. Frankly, this is pathetic.

I am not a fan of Schindler's list...if you want depressing: Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light. It is about a pastor who loses his faith in god after a parishioner of his killed himself. It's actually an excellent movie and he is one of the best directors ever

Leigh Alexander writing something actually intelligent? Stop the presses!

@clarkj1981 said:

Also, like half the shit that Alex and Patrick have talked about on the morning show this past month has basically been console flame wars.

On the Bombcast, that stuff gets passing mention, then Jeff basically dismisses all of it because who fucking cares. On the morning show, Alex and Patrick seriously talk about it for like 5+ minutes, as if ANYONE will remember the word "resolutiongate" in 6 months, then say "I'm buying both but if I were only getting one it would be the PS4", then at the end they say "but we're not trying to take sides in a console war or anything".

If you didn't want to involve yourself at all, then barely even mention all of this stupid speculative news on the new consoles. Giant Bomb is pretty clearly not Kotaku, and at least GB isn't posting news articles on it, but every morning show lately they get pretty deep into all this new consoles bullshit speculation based on only having seen a few launch games that are in no way indicative of anything 6-12 months from now.

@wh1terav3n said:

While we're talking about it:

I think that tweet sounds like a fucking terrible idea, because really, have any prequel games that cover the villain before their fall from grace actually been all that good? The only one I can think of is MGS 3, and even then I feel like there's kind of a huge disconnect between Big Boss in MGS3 and villain Big Boss in Metal Gear 1. Maybe Phantom Pain will fill that in.

Most other prequel games of that sort have just never stood out, because they don't really document the gradual fall from grace in the way something like Breaking Bad did. Instead, video game villain prequels are more like the Star Wars prequel trilogy, where Anakin is basically just a whiny brat who disrespects Obi-wan for no reason other than self-entitlement, then the Emperor tells him to go murder a bunch of Jedi children and suddenly he's evil.

I don't know man, it's pretty early on, and... well it looks like Ultima. Not sure what more you want after 6 months. That video seemed to show a ton of stuff.

I increasingly have no clue what the fuck Shroud of the Avatar is about. I backed it thinking, hey, cool, Garriot's gonna try and go back to his roots, but it's been months of nothing but talking about fucking player housing. I know they did a tiny story teaser a little while back, but it just keeps going back to all these fucking houses.

Don't get me wrong, I loved cramming my houses in Skyrim full of junk, but what the fuck, show me something that doesn't make me think I'm getting Second Life: Ultima Edition.

it'd be great if the internet could stop making fun of people with autism

“David Cage's design philosophy ... You don't "choose" between option A or B with reassurance of what will happen. Your decisions speak for themselves. When you don't think of alternate paths, the story feels more like your own, it feels more real, as opposed to just ‘one of the branches.’”

Which woudl be fine if the stories WENT anywhere or were constructed well enough to be satisfying.

With that said, I think Heavy Rain was a superior game. The story of HR had something to say, said it, and had an ending that felt like the players 'choices' & 'ability to play' lead someplace. On my first playthrough at lauch my ending DID NOT reveal the killer. Ol' Scott walks away and I was no one is the wiser. Really that IS an outcome if certain peopel die in certain spots...you can have an outcome where only Scott lives and there are no clues or people linking him to the case. The whole story is Scoot collecting clues, Ethan going mad wondering if he did it while complying with each request of the supposed kidnapper, Norman collecting some small facts that mostly point to Ethan and other killers, and Madison finding that the whole town is full of other killers and other abusers.

Heavy Rain is not perfect and teh dialogue and delivery of the voice actors borders between distracting and abysmal...but the plot is better, the pacing of story elements is better, the connection to real even is real people lives is stronger, and in the end the story links outcomes to choices and player input.

@wh1terav3n: Alright, video game novelizations. That's totally a replacement for actual quality entertainment.

PS Saw that there's a Bioshock Rapture book. Terrified of considering reading it.

Increasingly, more and more games are directed at very specific audiences.

Increasingly after a nasty flirtation with "one-size-fits-all" mentality towards genre and experience during generation 7 once again, actually. Without the fear that a genre or experience one loathes catching fire to become the defacto form that many of your favorite series or genres begins parroting, there's alot less of an impetus to rail against them. It goes back to a more personal or person-to-person situation reguarding this once again and not astroturfing a type of game or rallying against the status quo.

Honestly, I see generation 8 being much broader top to bottom again, along with tastes as availability favors it once again.

Read article but did not understand it, decided to throw shit at the writer instead.

Ryan and Jeff going through all of the Amped 3 cutscenes in that quick look is one of the greatest, and most underrated videos on this site. Goddamn, I wish more games had Amped 3's balls.

Thanks for clarifying. Also irony, hypocrisy etc. tbh

Anyway, most shocking thing from this worth reading is a free rag like the metro having quality editorial. I thought it's main use was for starting fires or as backup loo roll.

I find it a bit ironic that Patrick has spent the past few days lamenting how he has "wrongfully" been injected into the console flame wars, and yet now has posted one excerpt of an interview with COD's Mark Rubin that serves no other purpose than to fan those same flames.

And yes I'm getting both consoles. And PS3's ram is better. And XBOne's UI and online is better. And both systems will have phenomenal looking games. IN. MY. OPINION.

@themasterds: That's not what he's saying at all. He's actually saying quite the opposite and your reasons for why it's good to be an indie now are the very reasons that back up his point.

In its simplest form, an industry bubble grows through an increase in participants. The ease of creation and proliferation of success in the indie game space has increased the number of participants (and therefore competitors). The traditional way to increase a participant's chance of success was to market, mainly through media outlets. The author posits that with the substantial increase of participants, the availability of marketing space is shrinking.

Classically, being of "good" quality in a given industry allowed a participant to leverage its marketing awareness into sales. With a massive increase in participants, "good" participants will be lost in the shuffle and marketing (through media outlets) becomes non-viable.

The author is speaking specifically to indie game developers that are designing business plans based on the volume and magnitude of successful indies and marketing plans that have traditionally worked in the space. He is saying that the space is changing; being "good" and targeting classical marketing won't necessarily work; it's a risk, it takes luck (more so than before due to the increased competition).

He is not sour that his games are not well known, quite the opposite. He has been successful through the four things he recommends for other indies:

1) Keep budgets low enough that the sales of your game, based purely on word-of-mouth, can sustain you

2) Cultivate an audience that goes directly to you for information, not necessarily (or primarily) through a third party (such as an adver/editorial gaming news site)

3) Cultivate an audience that goes directly to you for sales, not necessarily (or primarily) a distributor or third party (as you may be shut out in the future ie- Greenlight)

4) Understand that success requires luck, and the more competitive the industry, the more luck required

I hope that clarifies it for you a bit.

Man, I know Jeff and Ryan used to talk about Amped 3 all the time, but NOW I KNOW WHY!

What I read of that Indie Bubble seemed super pretentious. It was like he was saying "ooh, no ones cares about my shitty overwritten RPG no one's ever heard of, therefore the days of indie games are coming to an end." Its never been easier to get onto a console. It's never been easier to develop games. It's never been easier to fund a game. It's never been easier to get your game to frugal folk. And, frankly, indie games have never been better. He can fuck right off with his self centered pessimism.

Vogel's write-up on the indie bubble is a great read. I can't say that I really disagree with him. There's only so long that the indie market can continue at this pace before reaching some sort of critical mass, with or without the giant glut of retro-art platformers. A shift of some sort will have to come eventually. I wonder how Rami Ismail would feel about it, given the philosophy behind his tweets. Does he believe the market will change, or is he under the impression that there is no bubble and Steam will remain a magical Candy Land for devs of all sizes?

Abbie's face. Lol.

Jesus Christ that machinima video. If someone asked me a "question" like that I'd have to burst out into a "FPHHHHH-WHAT?" about halfway through.

I guess that's why Abbie has that job.

Shoutouts to the Titanfall dev for not laughing out loud in that guy's face. What a goon.

Also, Kill Screen had another good article on Beyond here: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/reviews/beyond-two-souls-wants-be-more-videogame-its-much-less/

Ever, Jane looks awesome! I'm gonna Isabella Thorpe the hell out of some proper Victorian people.

I watched an LP of Beyond Two Souls, I loved it for like the first half, but those numerous typical plot twists and stereotypes near the end were too much. The examples that the article uses seem very small scale, and wouldn't really do much to change my opinion of how the story takes a nose-dives in the last third or so of the game. I still want to buy the game and try playing it for myself, but it's really not worth full price imo. Maybe $40.

Man, everyone's still throwing Ken Kutaragi under the bus in that article about Mark Cerny. I mean, if the dude was as bad as I hear (and apparently he was), that's fine, but uh...yeah.

I don't think many people are really frustrated because of the attention for more emotional games. There are still much more typical games being made that don't incorporate strong emotions. If someone is angry *other* games are *also*¨being made instead of the type of game they like, that's their problem.

But that works the other way around as well. People who like emotional games should not start complaining that many games are being made that do not provoke strong emotional reactions. That goes for all the things some people want to see in games nowadays. (like not every game that doesn't have strong female characters is promoting hatred against women).

Or you do things you both enjoy while you are together, and the others while you are apart. Makes no sense to make someone do something they don't enjoy just because they happen to be married to you. With gaming one person can just go sit behind a PC and play. But if you want to watch a movie in the evening you are kind of blocking the other persons entertainment.

That Mark Rubin interview is really painful to read.

I want a new amped game god damn it.

I sincerely hope whatever Bioware does with Mass Effect going forward is actually going forward with Mass Effect. Prequels are such an easy way out and can be underwhelming. Just bite the bullet and iterate on what already exists in that canon.

And that Wired feature on Cerny and the development of the Ps4 just reaffirms my notion that half of the reason people are so behind Sony right now is just the story of how they came to be where they are. Everyone loves a good story; it's the foundation of all those shitty singing contest reality shows. You can be as good as you want to be, but you have to tell a good story.

With the Wii, it was "Nintendo's on the ropes, and this is their last, crazy bet!" With the Xbox, Microsoft was the plucky know-nothing upstart in video games, doing weird "hip and trendy" features and conferences to seem bro-friendly, being scrappy and fighting for all the attention they got. The reason people adore the Dreamcast is half-because it was the story of Sega stolen from us at arguably the height of their creative output. And now with Sony, it's a "the King is back" sort of story, of a games giant that rocked, lost it's way, and is bringing it back oldschool. People love that narrative. It's almost as important as the game machines themselves.