Goboard

@minipato:I mainly have focused primarily on where you said gameplay is irrelevant in my response to you however I do think the continuing trend, regardless of a creators past work, to prioritize the part that is not gameplay is a very regressive continuation of a bad trend in the promotion cycle of games. MGS4 and MGS5 are also poor indications as well because the former had 9 trailers before gameplay that were then just the first few hours of the game, and the latter was, for all intents and purposes announced, via Ground Zeros which lead with a combo of cinematic and gameplay trailers. Even P.T. is poor reference point because it's name is literally Playable Teaser even and is a bespoke game for which the game it is teasing would not have played like. Death Stranding itself being a new game means it starts with a lot more questions about it and the first one I would hope people have is what kind of game is it. Even if it does just end up being a rote implementation of existing genre tropes at least knowing that bears a clearer understanding, and a more useful one, for anyone who does end up watching the trailers. No creator has a perfect streak so I always allow a necessary distance between my expectations and their history of success because I know how much worse it is to end up on the bad side of expectation.

Again, with regards to Nier, Wolfenstein and gameplay married directly to narrative, this was largely in response to your calling gameplay irrelevant in the context of a crazy story. Reading through latest response and the one that prompted me to initially reply to you I'm getting that we do agree that the inflection point of gameplay and narrative when inextricably tied is when games are achieving their greatest potential. It's maybe largely the concreteness of your use of irrelevant that led me to think we weren't on the same page.

@shindig: Yeah, this has often been a really vague thing for games compared to other media. Given the scope to which games can get when it comes to production and what they contain it's often difficult to discern where the voice of the creative lead begins and where the voice of individuals and teams that enact it exists. On the last Waypoint Radio Austin and Patrick talk about this to a degree with regards to the Best Direction and Game of the Year awards from The Game Awards and how the venn diagram for those is very close to just being a single circle.

@liquiddragon: The corporate culture of Japan within the game sphere doesn't seem as tied to how it works throughout the rest of the country. Even before Kojima there have been numerous well regarded people who left the company they made their name at and worked for a large portion of their career to start something new. People also got really caught up in Kojimas move to Sony as a message to Konami, when everything I've heard him say in the few HideoTube videos on the Koji Pro youtube channel suggests he's just the kind of person who always wantss to be making something. This is certainly true if we look back at the last years he was at Konami where he was working on, to varying degrees, MGS Rising, MGS Ground Zeroes, MGSV and PT. A few of those are smaller and one later was passed on entirely to a different studio, but he had his hands in many projects all at once. That's largely why I didn't read too much into the speed to which he returned or his personal feelings towards the end of his tenure at Konami. I highly recommend people go check out the first few HideoTube videos because you get to see a side to Kojima that nothing I'd seen before from him had ever conveyed. It also makes it super clear how star struck he still is to be working with Mads, Norman, Guillermo and to have a personal relationship with Nicholas Winding Refn.

@mattbosten: Yeah, don't restart. My last save is right at the threshold to the final fight in the game and I had to walk just far outside the castles confines to get access to the map so I could teleport to where the new dlc starts. A word of warning, one of the shrines at the beginning of that dlc has an unnecessarily hard/fickle jump. You still need to beat the divine beasts just to get to the dlc so no point in throwing away the progress and time it takes just to get back to the point your already at. I had no issue picking up the controls after a few minutes of playing.

@memu: I'm not able to find any such E3 video, let alone an interview conducted by Jeff with Josef in the Giant Bomb presents section of podcasts where a recorded interview would end up. All I've found is a written interview done by Patrick after the release of Brothers.

@digaumgrunge: As someone who's been on a long flight which left in the morning that ended with being in the airport in another country for 10 hours on a lay over starting at midnight, jet lag can really fuck you up. One of the most surreal and discomforting experiences I've ever had. Somewhere between too much caffeine and the high of working the midnight oil on a huge project when all you want to do is sleep. Or to quote William Gibson "She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”

@elmorales94: I doubt they would cancel the game or not consider working with him again in the future. He didn't disparage EA, in fact it was the opposite, he was thanking them for the great support he and Hazelight have received from EA and acknowledged that EA has done things that have made fans upset with them recently. Feels like a lot of the people who are cheering him on after this tuned out after the "Fuck the Oscars" moment. It's a win-win for EA because if you read any of the comments on his most recent few tweets it's a bunch of people saying they will now buy A Way Out because he said fuck the Oscars.

Out of all this, the last sentence in the personal life section of Josef's Wikipedia page is the part that upsets me. Wikipedia isn't the most accurate source for information, but it represents one of the most honest and successful uses for the internet and to now have it become a target for vandalism so the internet can have another meme is such a fucking stupid thing.

@kevin_cogneto: Only Josef brought up the Oscars, he's directed several movies so maybe he has some past experience with the organization that wasn't great. You should watch the clip, it's only about 4 minutes for the part where Josef is talking and anyone who watched it and characterized what he said about EA as taking them to task needs to watch it again. He was being thankful towards EA and apologetic for their recent public disappointment. More than anything, it appears people latched onto when he said fuck the Oscars and then totally tuned out for the rest of that segment.

@liquiddragon: The short answer is that my default state is cynical/skeptical. I just wish more developers would show their game when they're ready to show the game part of it. To what little or great extent the gameplay is, I'd at least like to know something about what it is.

I've been the same way as you for games in the past, but it's always tempered by the lingering thought in the back of my mind that not everything is as good as it seems. I also tend to not have an overly jubilant response to anything. When it comes to games, every time we see a trailer and then the next trailer is either a slight variation on what was in the previous one or lacks anything that advances other aspects of the game that weren't present in the previous trailer I start to wonder why. Doesn't matter how much I trust or respect the person or persons making something, whatever is presented is also part of what is not within it's silhouette. To be clear, I don't mean that to say that I think companies are being duplicitous, rather that when it comes to games there's a history of illusion because of the haphazard nature of development that dogs expectation. A lot of this has to do with games just being announced or announcing a release date waaaay too soon. Even Shawn Layden expressed doubt at PSX over whether people really wanted to know about a game or it's release date as soon as possible as the crowd enthusiastically yelled their affirmation. Shawn having said this shortly after announcing,via a shirt, that MediEvil is getting a remaster followed by a video that said the exact same thing Shawn had just said without then actually showing anything more than a few second zoom into a mouth and voices of characters followed by details soon. So many times companies announce something so far ahead of when aspects of a game are certain, that by the time the actual game comes out the expectations for it fork in so many ways that they'll have disappointed more people than they would had they started promoting the game half a year before it's out instead of 2. The industry is littered with the corpses of games that fell to this end.

Everyone loves a good train wreck is my best guess. It was hilarious in the moment, then again I was watching the Waypoint stream of it so also getting Austin, Danika and Natalie's reaction to it was part of the insanity of the moment. Jason Schreier wrote an article about leaked EA PR docs for several games including the one the Josef is working on that included a line to the effect that Josef is great as a personality, but watch out for potential controversy. EA might have failed to heed their own advice to avoid what happened. Sucks for Geoff, but that segment was off the rails 30 seconds in and then went on for a further 3 minutes before cutting to the trailer. This was hopefully an important educational moment for Geoff as far as how to handle a guest like that going forward.

As for the quality of The Game Awards, I don't think it's improved all that much with respect to other award events or even other events in the games industry. I mean the first Game Awards had the Schick Hydrobot for crying out loud. This is still an event where at least half of it's nearly 3 hour running time is devoted to ads and game announcements like this is an E3 press conference. Then you have several of the awards noted upon as an aside when one of the winners goes up on stage but not given the same appreciation or time for the winners of those specific awards. Compare this to other industry awards shows like the Game Developers Choice and IGF awards during GDC or the video game BAFTA's and there is a world of difference with regards to how it's run and what it's celebrating. For all intents and purposes, The Game Awards is a media event and not an awards show. The closest it comes to having an honest developer focused moment is the industry icon award and that is quickly subsumed and summarily lost in the torrent of ads and announcements.

@liquiddragon Considering this game is taking a different approach to it's gameplay, per a Kojima interview where he explained why he wants to take a different approach, you'd kinda think they'd want to give people some sense of what that is especially when it's a new IP. Even with his track record, if it diverges enough from the gameplay in his past games or focuses more on one element over another there will likely be a lot of people upset that their expectations were built up for something they may not want to play. The way Kojima has described the reason why he's taking a different approach sounds interesting so I guess I'm just more interested in what that is than the insane stuff we've come to expect from his cinematic and narrative work.

@dt9k The game has been in production for close to 2 years now. They've managed to produce nearly 20 minutes of cinematics in that time, which included finding an engine and staffing up. Unless this game will have a prolonged development cycle, 4 - 5+ years, then we've neared the point where one would expect to start seeing a more concrete display of the gameplay. Kojima is also working with a lot of people he's worked with in the past so there's already a developed working relationship so I doubt there was much of a collaborative warming up period. Also Mark Cerny said at PSX that parts seen in the trailer are playable and that after playing for several hours the parts in the newest trailer start to make sense. So they have enough gameplay available for it to function meaningfully but not enough that they lack the confidence to show it?

@minipatoThey can still sell atmosphere and tone through gameplay. If Death Stranding were to end up being a walking simulator or closer to the opening sequence of The Phantom Pain with regards to gameplay, showing that is gonna sell people on it a lot more concretely than what they've shown and convey their confidence in it as a game. We all know Kojima can do interesting and entertaining cinematics, so after the third time of showing some It's starting to lose momentum. If we get another cinematic trailer at E3 2018 then I might as well forget this game exists. I personally wasn't sold on MGSV until the E3 2015 trailer, which while lacking in UI and consisted of cuts to moments from cutscenes, displayed very clear elements of the gameplay with narrative that established the tone of the game. I really enjoyed playing Ground Zeroes, but it was after that E3 trailer that I was able to say with confidence that what was experienced there would carry over into a larger scale game.

Nier wasn't interesting purely because of it's narrative, it's because of how it also used the games mechanics in different ways at punctuation points throughout the game with the narrative and themes. Same for Wolfenstein II. Had they not created moments where the narrative and gameplay met in unexpected ways then the game as a whole wouldn't be nearly as strong.

At the very least reviews should note at the top when a game is one that will likely change a lot after the review, or go back to the review at the point at which the review no longer reflects the current state of the game and say that it's no longer valid source by which to judge the games state and quality.

@mike: That was my take after this recent trailer as well. It's been several years now since production began on this game and we still have no idea where or what the game part is. We all know Kojima can do insane cinematics and narrative, and when he's doing this with his Hollywood friends and idols that he's super stoked about that, however I'd still like to know what I'll be doing when I ostensibly play this game. Danika said during the Waypoint stream that this is a cg movie that she'd like to watch and so far that's the most damning thing against Death Stranding at this point. I honestly don't know how much of the early MGS games is Kojimas game design ideas vs that of his team and not knowing how many of the same people he's working with and whether what we've seen of Death Stranding is the a sign that not much of his past games' design was by him. I'm optimistic that we'll get there, but it's taking an uncomfortably long time, even by Kojima standards.

I don't know that guns are what the game needs any more of, it already covers the spread very well with what's already out there and with variety in each category. If they gave some existing items actual functionality (Ballistic Mask serving as extra head armor, gas mask allowing you to breath when in a smoke grenade area, smoke grenades causing the players inside them to cough) or new items like tasers, tear gas grenade, traps that make a sound when someone trips them, socks that allow you to walk or run without making a sound but you run slower. Anything that can allow for more player ingenuity during play would open up the play potential way more than any new guns would.