I love The King of Shreds and Patches; it's a really well-crafted version of the sort of expansive, traditional parser game.
I also remembered now to bring up Adam Cadre's Shrapnel, which does a lot of the metafictional/fourth-wall-breaking things that SU is doing with its parser sections, but in a way that was more tortuous and unnerving.
@psyael: This is an inherent problem with class-based shooters; some characters will invariably work better or worse across skill levels, and thus be hard to balance. Widowmaker's problem isn't even the long range, but rather the fact that she had the ability to get one-hit kills in a game where players get a very strong expectation that this isn't supposed to happen. Popping your head out of cover and immediately getting clipped by some guy across the entire map is the core experience of Counter-Strike, but it feels very out of place and seemingly "unfair" in Overwatch. Snipers also have the problem that you sometimes only encounter them when they're killing you, creating a perceptual bias towards thinking they're too powerful.
@r3dt1d3:In quick play, I often find that the maps seem to have side passages that have poor wayfinding, causing them to become underused. There's a decent number of weirdly large alcoves and cul-de-sacs in some maps, too, which seem to serve little purpose. I'm not enough of an expert on level design to comment on how it should be different, but it's clear to me that map complexity doesn't equate to gameplay longevity. People played de_dust without getting sick of it for a decade, and that map is so simple I can hold it in my memory and walk through it in my head even now.
Related to that, but more in the realm of environmental design rather than strictly level design, is stuff like badly placed props with collision boxes in this game. There's a camera mounted on a tripod in Hollywood that looks to all the world as though it's a physics prop, but it's actually map geometry and it creates a blind corner you can get stuck on it while moving close to the wall. There's stuff like the banners on the opening approach in Numbani which I cannot, still, tell whether they are a mistake or exist specifically because Pharah players had too easy a time overlooking that approach, but they seem like a clumsy solution to that problem if it's the latter. And there's stuff like the fact that the only way to know whether you can wallgrind a wall as Lúcio is to know it from having tried it; there's no consistent visual indication. I don't even disagree that the level design feels a little simple and repetitive in at times, but to me it also often feels clunky in a way that calls for streamlining.
Part of the repetition problem is that that the maps are very small and tend to funnel players (particularly uncoordinated QP players) into the same combat zones over and over again.
@palebluedot89: Right, and I think we both agree it's not really fair to expect people to examine a game like The Witness entirely out of the context of where it comes from, whether that means Jonathan Blow or the industry at large or Western civilization at large.
For my part, it's really difficult to separate things out and make claims of objectivity. I might say I have design or storytelling issues with The WItness, but anyone could accuse me of letting ideological issues (or merely the fact that the game made me really nauseous when I played it on release, pre-"nausea hotfix") bleed into a discussion of design issues.
Which is why I think it's much more interesting to talk about a game like that in the context of intertextual analysis of one issue as it relates to a bunch of different titles, rather than writing the One True Witness Slam Piece to End Them All. My hope here is that even if you loved The Witness (and there's nothing wrong with you if you did, obviously) there is something of interest in this article for you anyway.
@palebluedot89:I mean, I would probably be more diplomatic than Lulu is in that article. And to reiterate, I don't agree with it 100% but I appreciate where it's coming from; the New Inquiry article I linked upthread is a more measured summation of the issues with The Witness. But then again, Lulu has more vectors of personal anger towards what Blow represents than I do, which is valid afaic, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I will say, though, that I came out of the Witness with a very bad impression of Jonathan Blow (the authorial figure) even though I didn't have a negative opinion of Jonathan Blow (the flesh and blood person) going in. I was excited for The Witness; Braid is one of my favorite games ever.
In fact, I became aware of some tone-deaf things he has said after playing the game, at which point I went "weeeelll that checks out." So I don't necessarily agree that the persona is overshadowing people's reading of the game; but not everyone is primed to the same degree to pay attention to the same things, so I don't expect others to feel the same way.
@decaped:Like I said, my problems with The Witness are multifarious and largely outside the scope of this article. But when it comes to the use of environmental storytelling, I address this directly in the article: The Witness uses audio logs and corpses automatically without containing any critical or reflexive content about them. The content of the narrative presents itself as challenging and cutting, but the presentation of that narrative is most of the time very conservative and not very self-aware.
On this, like most things, the Witness portrays itself as a few steps more clever than it actually is, and I found that very unpleasant. To me, at least, it comes off as condescending. But it's impossible to separate that sensation from a lot of context that surrounds the game, other games, and the games industry as a whole - so if you didn't feel condescended to by The Witness, I'm not saying that you are wrong or foolish or didn't get it
@unsupervised: I can understand feeling the lack of a more clearly-articulated critique of the Witness, but then again I also just remembered Liz Ryerson also wrote a much more coherent criticism of it on the New Inquiry that might interest folks.
@unsupervised:I mean, I can only speak for myself, but the reality of it is that I had a really, really unpleasant experience playing the Witness. And that means I don't particularly think it's productive to knock out 1500 to 2000 words addressing each thing that I disliked about it. Delving into a specific pointed issue (like environmental storytelling, and here I'm only using the Witness as a jumping off point as you can tell) is more interesting. But writing a piece of criticism dedicated entirely to slamming something is not necessarily very productive for the conversation. I might think all my arguments about how bad the Witness is are sound and valid, but someone who played the game and had a good experience with it will never agree with me because what I'm saying is outright denying their lived experience. I have to think readers who really loved the Witness but would enjoy reading a detailed takedown of it are the exception, not the rule (I mean, if I'm wrong and you really want to see that takedown even though you enjoyed the witness, say so I guess). And the people who also had a bad experience aren't really going to learn much from having someone like me spell out an elevated explanation of why the game is bad.
There's also the fact that, if you're someone like me who thinks the Witness fails on multiple counts, it's kind of odd to try and spell all of that out because it feels more like reading a list of charges in court than writing a coherent essay about something. The arguments involved come from different places that can't necessarily be squared together; if I wanted to say "the Witness has a narrative that I disagree with on ideological grounds", that's not the same kind of argument as "the Witness makes poor use of storytelling techniques [which is what I touch on in this article]".
Drastically negative reviews can be entertaining and even illuminating, but I don't think I have something so special or important to say with regards to the Witness that it merits a full article. Maybe someone else does, though, and I do want to read that article too.
EDIT: And I should point out, I don't know Jonathan Blow or have anything against him personally (and I rather enjoyed Braid - I bought the Witness on release day with moderately high hopes for it). But I think the self-portrayal of Blow that comes across from the Witness isn't a person I would want to grab a beer with, if that makes sense.
@buzz_clik: I don't really want to get into my issues with the Witness' narrative content specifically - that would take a whole other column to unpack; I don't begrudge anyone having a different reading or taking something else away from that; and the blog post I linked pretty much goes over my major areas of displeasure at it (please don't take this as a statement-by-statement endorsement of every last word in that article).
I mostly use it as an example to point to an use of storytelling techniques that I thought wasn't very adept and (very importantly) didn't seem very conscious of what it was doing. The audiologs and statues felt very perfunctory, like they're there because the Witness is a video game and not so much because the world it's presenting necessitates them. I'm not sure it would be a loss to that game is they were cut completely. But, sure: the reason the storytelling in the Witness made me actively unhappy about it was also that the actual narrative it was pushing is one I personally find disagreeable (and of course, you and I may disagree about what that narrative is, especially in a work as ambiguous as The Witness). I make no claims to a privileged level of objectivity where I can totally separate what the thing is saying from how it's saying it.
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