@believer258: In Black Ops 2, you feel like you really have control over things in a way that makes sense. You influence things, you don't just pick between A and B, you do a thing and that is what causes things to change, instead of you making a decision.
And honestly, if you haven't finished (or played much at all) of Black Ops 2, you have absolutely no reason to even discuss it. The end of Black Ops 2 is where it all pays off.
The brilliant part about Black Ops 2 is that it doesn't make any of the choices feel like choices. You have no idea that your agency in the situation even exists beyond what you'd normally have most of the time. I never felt like I was making a choice in a video game, I was just trying to do things and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I treated everything like it was a choice, and tried to do what I thought was the best thing. And sometimes, the results were unexpected. There are still parts of the game that I wonder if they are in fact influenced by me or not. For example, there's one sequence that ended, at least for me, with a character being pretty badly maimed, and for the rest of the game, you can see the results of that injury. I genuinely felt guilty, because it felt like it happened because I hadn't been driving as well as I should have been. I don't honestly know if that was a moment of player agency, or just a thing that always happened, and that's where Black Ops 2 really excels at giving the player a sense of control that most games don't give.
Also, aren't you pretty down on all military shooters? I'm not sure you're the person I'd ask to compare the two.
How much of each of them have you actually played?
@Nodima said:
Costs in all manner of animation, A.I. and graphics programming need to go down so that more budgetary concerns can be focused on quality acting, writing and design. For the longest time, most games didn't really have to focus on complex animations or A.I., at least not my favorites. Fights were random and then based on dice roles in RPGs, platformers were essentially side-scrolling pattern puzzles. Sports games were entirely based on dice rolls and rubberbands, and shooters were essentially "the monster is on the screen, it will not stop moving until you stop it's movement." And you certainly couldn't have voice acting; even the PS1 struggled with that for a while. As a result the writing always came off as clever because it didn't have to be interpreted by anyone but yourself, and the design of the game was what kept you coming back.
All of this is sort of why I struggle with Jeff's decrying of Turtles in Time on older podcasts...in my opinion the original game is very well planned out and challenging enough for what it set out to be. But it's obvious you can't make that exact game today, due in part to Re-Shelled and in part to the fact it's just TOO simple in subtle ways. At this point it's really hard to accept simple games; even if they appear simple on the surface, oftentimes they avoid novelty by surprisingly deep internal systems. But the bigger the game gets the more imperative it is that the animations work, the scripts work, the screen doesn't tear, the polygons don't clip, the lighting feels right. This is why sports games have seen such a downfall as graphics standards this generation (as someone like Brad I think asked on a recent pod). All of those issues seem like something that needs [i]so[/i] much polish to look right that it's hard to focus as much of your game on the actual presenting of the game (missions, characters, etc.). Red Dead Redemption told a great story, but I still think it's sad that it can be held up as some classic of game storytelling to this point.
To take games forward, the technology and tools required to handle the immediate visual presentation has to become easy enough and cheap enough to use that more emphasis can be put into the actual art of the game, from design to expression.
As someone looking to get into the part of the industry that you just said should be budgeted down as much as possible, I disagree. Shitty animation means shitty characters, shitty AI means shitty gameplay, and shitty graphics means shitty atmosphere.
Regardless of what we want, you're never getting a return to the stone age. If you want that, go play a Zelda game, otherwise, games are going to keep moving forward with the new technologies, not backwards.
Or, really, it sounds like you just want to play text adventures, because you don't want a good story, you want a good written tale, and maybe some old school gameplay to push it along.
Also, fuck anyone who says that the code running those games is any less of an art than the shitty writing that no matter how much "effort" he puts into it, Joe Game Writer is going to push out. On top of that, that isn't why a lot of crappy writing exists in games today, that has ALWAYS been the case. And just like 20 years ago, there are still plenty of examples of fantastic storytelling and writing. That is just silly. People work very hard and care very much about those things, and ignoring them as being some sub-par aspect of the game creation process is so frustrating. One of the coolest things about Rage was how fantastic the animation was. It wasn't spit out by a computer, it wasn't mocapped, it was all hand animated, and it looked fucking stellar.
And look at games like ArmA 2, which is freakin' awesome with the right people and a good mission. That game has awful to no writing and acting, and the design isn't all that great. In fact, just about all that is great about it is the cold hard technology of it enabling an experience that is awesome and unlike almost anything else.
I'm not saying you have no right to like the things you do, not at all, but A) you aren't going to get what you want except out of the indie darling part of the industry, and B) it's dumb to say that things like AI and game engines should be simplified and made easy and quick to do because we need more writing. Games are awesome because they are interactive, and it's the engine and the AI and things like that which make them interactive to the level they are, not some guy writing a story, regardless of the quality of that story.
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