Zombeaver

Vib Ribbon is the one that didn't come out in the US. Pretty good (and difficult) game.

I’m sorry, but I found this to be overly rambling and frequently incoherent. I was ten paragraphs in and had little to no idea what was trying to be conveyed. I wanted to scream the Monty Python “Get on with it!”

In little more than a breath it moves from text-adventure cave systems to NPC conversations to Varric being an interesting character from a storytelling perspective but less than ideal as a strategic element of your party makeup… what? It’s kindof a disjointed mess to be honest with you; and the whole time almost no actual commentary is being made on any of these disparate elements, they’re mostly just thrown out there – nothing to explain how any of these things are related to each other or even to your primary point. “This game has this one thing and there’s this other game that has this other thing. Corpses. The Witness sucks. I hate audio logs.”

You also do absolutely nothing to illustrate how Dark Souls’ implementation of desiccated corpses is in any way superior to Fallout or The Witness’. The fact that they somewhat ironically contain the soul of a “proud knight” despite being cowered in a corner makes them superior to a skeleton hugging a mannequin in Fallout… how exactly? The fact that they serve as little more than a “Hey look, an item!” is somehow, in your mind, beneficial to the storytelling? Now, I will grant you that “information dumps” with a note or journal entry next to a dead corpse are often lame, but it’s not as though that’s always present in Fallout – there are plenty of cases where you’re simply presented with an environment (that may or may not contain corpses) and have only your imagination to form the rest of the story. I actually think that’s something Fallout frequently excels at. I can’t speak for The Witness as I haven’t played it. I feel like you just make the claim that “Dark Souls does it better” and then let that fall completely flat without anything really illustrative of such a statement.

“In games, palaces are cheap and kings are expensive. But if you implement the palace, not the king, the resources you save from not implementing the king can be put to work implementing a whole other palace. Environmental storytelling is the trick that lets us have the palace as a narrative proxy for the king.”

Now this… I like this quite a bit – succinct, illustrative, and actually relevant to the topic.

“Look at the Oculus and other VR headsets; a device designed for looking out rather than looking at; a device designed to immerse in an environment rather than focusing on another subject. Place rather than character.”

Aaaaand you’ve lost me again. That is, at least, if this is supposed to be some sort of criticism, which is how it comes across to me (especially considering your very next sentence). Because, if it is, by this logic we never should have moved to “talkies” or indeed film in the first place – they’re not needed to tell a compelling story right? Guess you’ll need to return that HD TV you’ve got there. Technology is predominantly iterative rather than revelatory, and those iterations have always allowed us to do what we’ve already been doing but “better”. Now, if you feel like what’s being improved upon is something that shouldn’t be appreciated in the first place then say so and tell us why. The article never seems to take that step though. And if you’re not saying that, I’m not sure where the beef is. Now you can reach out and touch those corpses! Neat!

“…the player character “dies” each time, and cat-like, has a limited number of lives. This easy narrative solution, 30 years later, is a fetish: Steam reminds me every time I open it that I have the "Prepare to Die Edition" of Dark Souls installed, and that game is itself all about the weird relationship games have to death.”

This just comes across as a lot of faux-intellectual hipster bullshit; more rambling that has little to do with anything but I’m sure you thought it sounded great.

The rest of the article basically reads as “I really don’t like Jonathan Blow” and “I really like Firewatch” while then doing very little to illustrate the basis for either sentiment. I’ve played neither so I have no opinion on either of them, but I can tell you that this article does literally nothing to convince me that I should play one over the other because almost nothing is illustrated or convincingly conveyed in any significant way.

“Games developed their fascination with death through a process that is valid and important…”

…why? Why is it valid and important? To whom and for what reason is it important? I feel like the whole article is on the brink of something interesting. I feel like you want to say that it doesn’t need to be this way. I can’t say for certain if it does or it doesn’t. I think that’s a pretty interesting question that this article repeatedly almost asks.

“I'm not writing this to condemn the tradition of storytelling skeletons, or the history of how environmental storytelling has been used…”

“…except for that game The Witness cause it doesn’t do anything interesting and new with its dead bodies. What a piece of shit it is. I’ll take my ironically-named item drops in dead-body-treasure-chests thank you very much.”

You’ve got an interesting topic here with very little substantive to actually say about it based on this article. There’s a single paragraph out of the whole mess that has anything particularly interesting and poignant to say.

Sorry to sound overly harsh/critical but this was an incredibly frustrating read for me.

Agreed. Again, I'm not opposed to the concept at all, and if something were to come along that surprised me and went above and beyond my expectations, that'd be great; and at the same time it's not going to harm my love for the genre as a whole. My point is just that a somewhat insubstantial story in this type of game isn't quite as detrimental as it is in games like The Witcher or Mass Effect, where a strong narrative is basically the entire intent.

I know what you mean. It's a great feeling when you encounter that sort of thing; things that shake your preconceptions of what a game can be or do. It's great when a game can flip your expectations on its head.

This is going to be a really weird example, because I know a lot of people hate this game, but for some reason this conjures to mind some parts of Two Worlds for me. Again, I know it's not a well regarded game but bear with me. There's a quest...well it's really not even a quest... there's a completely optional event that takes place where you go to a village and when you talk to the townspeople they say that there's a nearby cave that's full of giants that have them all terrified. They beg you to just leave it alone though because they don't want to make matters worse. But...I'm the hero...so I gotta go take care of them and save the day right? Except that, if you do go to the cave and kill the giants, when you go back to the village all of the townspeople are dead and a bunch of giants are walking around in town. I...didn't expect that. I'm "the hero" and I can always resolve things with force and save the day - at least that's what games have trained me to believe. So when there are dramatic and actually negative ramifications for that it's something special.

I feel like this sort of thing could fit right into The Division, given the setting and plot. And if they were to do something like this, it certainly wouldn't hurt matters, but the truth is its going to be lost on most people, myself included, if I'm just focused on the loot grind. To a degree these games are kindof mindless - there's a reason people talk about listening to podcasts or music while playing them. So again, it's not that this sort of thing would be detrimental, it's just something the vast majority of the player base for this type of game simply isn't going to care about and most of us are probably of a mind that there's plenty of room for improvement in what we deem to be more pressing (mechanical) issues.

Yes, that's essentially the issue I take with it as well. There's nothing wrong with wanting the kind of hypothetical experience that's being described in the article - I like those sorts of things too! The problem is, the specific game that the commentary is being directed towards was never intended or advertised to be any of those things. I think its misguided because it's either comparing it to things that really aren't comparable or expecting things from it that aren't present in any other title that actually is comparable. I feel like it's expecting it to be something that it's not and then criticizing it for that. Given the enormously wide spectrum of games at our disposal these days, that just seems kindof odd to me.

@graf1k: Yep, we're definitely on the same page. I also think the grounded in reality vs fantasy point is a good one - there are myriad examples of similar games that haven't had any such criticism levied against them, and I'm inclined to think this is the primary reason. Even a lot of the reviews I've read have admitted the perceptual difference this makes - usually in reference to the bullet-sponginess of the enemies; within the realm of fantasy or science fiction this sort of thing can be explained away by magic or technology but here it's just dudes in hoodies. The requirement for suspension of disbelief is even greater than it normally is, and people are getting hung up on it. When you back up for a moment and think about it from a gameplay perspective though, it kindof falls apart. If the damage model was more akin to say (ironically) Rainbow Six, the game would be an absolute nightmare. Again, I stand by the statement that these kinds of games are some of the "gamiest" out there. Jeff even said in his review that there's plenty of stuff that you'll just have to shrug off as "typical video game shit".

@theht: I certainly think it's possible, yes; though the fundamental questions are:

Why are you playing the game?

What are you expecting to get out of it?

What aspects of the game do you enjoy most and compel you to continue playing?

As someone who enjoys these types of games, I'll approach these from my perspective, as they pertain to this genre. I enjoy having that constant goal of improving efficacy through small incremental improvements - the never-ending path to perfection (which is basically unobtainable, in reality). I like to set goals for myself and see how close I'm able to come to meeting them. I like math and testing and theorycrafting. I like having an "end-game" that challenges me and puts the planning, experience, skill, and time that I've invested to the test; something that allows me to push myself. These are the things I expect in a loot-driven game for me to be able to enjoy them. If it has a good story on top, great, but those fundamentals need to be met first and foremost.

I don't think it's impossible to incorporate a more meaningful narrative to drive the looter experience along, but at the end of the day the things that I'm actually looking for and want out of this type of game are not narrative-related. A good story certainly isn't going to hurt matters, but it's not what got me in the door in the first place and, in all likelihood, isn't what's going to keep me coming back months later; and unfortunately the gameplay hook of this genre isn't exactly conducive to having a deep, meaningful, narrative-driven interaction with the game world.

What if those nameless looter thugs were all unique NPCs that had backstories and, once killed, never returned? That could be interesting...except "How do I grind now?" How do you have meaningful choice and consequence in a setting specifically designed to have you repeat tasks (murdering enemies primarily) to get better gear; something which, by its very nature, makes killing inconsequential?

I'm a huge fan of Bioware games, The Witcher series, etc. I think I should state that because I don't want to downplay the importance of storytelling in games. While I don't think good storytelling is diametrically opposed to the looter genre, I don't think it necessarily has the same significance as it has in those games. I played through the story in D3 (and paid attention) once. After that, it became literally nothing but a nuisance - something that got in the way of improving my effectiveness as efficiently as possible. After those first 10 hours or so, the other thousand were driven purely by the gameplay (loot hunt) hook. From that perspective, it doesn’t matter how good or compelling the story is, it’s no longer the driving force of the game (it really never was to begin with) and the more it gets in the way of the gameplay hook the more annoying it’s going to be (regardless of how compelling the actual narrative is in and of itself).

I found this to be a well-written article that’s ultimately a bit misguided. I don’t necessarily disagree with some or even most of the sentiment espoused here, just the target thereof. It’s not that The Division is beyond reproach – far from it – but I find these to be rather odd criticisms of this particular game, given its nature, which is, for better or worse, a grindy looter.

I’ve logged literally thousands of hours into D3 and probably about a thousand between the various Borderlands titles, hundreds in Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Sacred, Titan Quest, and even played a fair share of Hellgate London (probably the closest analog of the bunch). I dig these types of games (obviously). I have issues with all of them, but none of those issues involve storytelling, morality (or lack thereof), or any underlying message (intentional or otherwise) – they’re all mechanical. That’s because these are exceedingly mechanical games – some of the “gamiest” games in existence. I could give two shits about D3’s story or characters and that game has a better crafted tale to tell than The Division (though that’s not saying much). I never have a moment where I have to stop and think “I wonder if that treasure goblin is just trying to provide for his family” – I’m thinking “I sure hope he drops [X] ancient legendary that has the stats I need”. The former would illustrate a fundamental lack of understanding of what game I was actually playing and what its intentions are (which are, most assuredly, not to tell a thought-provoking and introspection-inducing tale).

I feel like there are plenty of games out there that this sort of criticism could be legitimately levied against, but The Division is an exceedingly odd choice. I wouldn’t criticize Doom because it doesn’t let me hug it out with a Cacodemon. I wouldn’t criticize the next Madden game because I can’t shoot the other team with lasers. I feel like this article is incorrectly comparing The Division to games like The Witcher, a deeply narrative-driven experience, when it’s much more akin to Diablo. Those are two vastly different experiences that should espouse vastly different expectations.

I love bad movies. I’m kindof a bad movie aficionado. If it involves a UFO with visible wires and papier mache monsters, I’ve probably seen it. I appreciate bad movies for completely different reasons than normal movies and I judge and examine them accordingly. They’re objectively terrible, but you see…that’s the whole point. Reveling in their utterly insane degree of ineptitude is what makes them entertaining. I don’t fault them for a lack of narrative coherence or production values because that’s not why I’m watching them in the first place; indeed, that incoherence is precisely what I signed up for. I would fault them if they were boring though, because that’s not what I signed up for and isn’t intrinsic to the genre (if you want to call “good” bad movies a genre). If I want a magnum opus of cinema that’s thought-provoking and challenging, they’re at my disposal. Starcrash and Samurai Cop don’t detract from those in any way, and I don't judge them by the same metric that I would with Citizen Kane.

If you feel like The Division is mechanically broken or that it’s boring or that the gameplay loop isn’t compelling, those are completely understandable and legitimate concerns, but focusing on narrative dissonance or complaining that a game entirely about shooting bad guys and getting treasure only lets you…shoot bad guys and get treasure…is pretty far off the mark in my estimation. At the same time, if this was intended to be a fundamentally narrative and story-focused game where you make impactful choices that drive and change the story, where the entire point of the game is choice and consequence, and then the game strips you of compelling options…that’s also a legitimate concern. That isn’t what The Division is though. It’s a loot shooter, not Mass Effect or The Witcher.