Quick Look: Valiant Hearts: The Great War

@stevesonaplane: Why? What he/she said is totally understandable.

That's not how chlorine gas worked/works.

The chlorine gas that was deployed during World War I was actually more effective against low-lying targets, men who sat or laid down in trenches suffered far more than those who were able to get above ground level. This is due to the fact that chlorine gas is denser than air.

The same goes for the far more deadly phosgene gas that replaced chlorine shortly after it's initial use during World War I.

However...

I do appreciate a video game trying to at least attempt to set it's stage in a more...difficult...period of human history.

None of which are video games.

Although I disagree with MBR and Keichan's point of view, there's nothing they wrote that warranted your off-the-cuff insult.

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Maybe it's BECAUSE Ubisoft went to great lengths to depict the horrors of the Great War, but if I were going to nitpick it would be the fact that they gloss over the fact that the British and French also used mustard gas attacks on the German/Prussian soldiers. All sides did some pretty universally horrible things in WWI -- that's one reason the Geneva Conventions were drafted and the League of Nations was created in the aftermath.

@mbr2 Wow, you are really grasping at straws trying to find something to be offended by. WW2 is fine, Modern warfare is fine, future warfare is fine, ancient warfare is fine, medieval warfare is fine, but for some inexplicable reason WW1 is off limits. Maybe you forgot where you were, but irrational indignation and trying to find things to be incensed about doesn't work well outside of Tumblr

This doesn't actually feel anything like WW1 to me.

Really excited to see that Ubisoft is using some of their gigantic ass team they have and pumping out some new smaller IP's

Three games have used the UbiArt engine and they all couldn't be any different from one another

This quick look just made me sleepy.

@beatnik11: I'm not offended and I never said I was OK with how video games in the past have depicted other wars. The first time I saw footage of Valiant Hearts I was immediately skeptical and a bit put off, so no I'm not digging in to find things that might tick me off. I don't have a blog (at all let alone on tumblr) nor do I frequent others.

The feelz.

Jeez, I have to post again because I feel so disappointed. WW1 as a jaunty adventure with civvies and your own side is shown as victims trying to avoid the enemy, instead of being the other side of the giant meatgrinder that destroyed a generation.

I sincerely hope this was just a super bad portion of the game, because as shown it doesn't really tell anyone anything about WW1. Except maybe for the text blurbs in the menu, but that's not a game, that's just text.

edit: hell, even a shitty comic book fps like The Darkness was better at conveying the horror of WW1.

I love Drew and Jeff quick looks.

Jeff: "huh"- 2014

@drewbert thank you ever so much for mentioning the lion king comparison, i had said it to my friend about 30 seconds before you brought it up, it made my day.

@drewbert What's with the low in-game audio in some of these videos, Drew? =(

Well I think this looks completely fantastic. Looking forward to trying it out after Shovel Knight.

Isn't a bit shortsighted to condemn a game's depiction of something after watching a 20 minute QL?

There sure were a lot of levers in the trenches of WW1.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's gross or offensive, but I do agree that there's an uncomfortable tension between the gaminess/goofiness and the self-seriousness/edutainmentness of the game. When this was first unveiled, I understood it to be a pretty serious treatment of the civilian faces of war, which might be more the fault of the marketing and/or coverage of the game than the game itself. I don't really have a problem with it, but it does turn me off the game.

For whatever reason, I feel like I'm a lot less sensitive to stuff about WWII. Maybe just because WWII has been the setting of a wide swath of popular media, while WWI has mostly been relegated to history books and documentaries.

@gaff: at the very least the collectibles follow the theme of the rest of the game in that they have "fun" little factoids attached to them, like a urine soaked face mask thing, or like shell casings.

I kind of like the edutainment aspect of the game.

Hopefully he's seeing these messages from folks. My guess is they might have filmed all these over the course of a day or two and released all of them at once. So these current videos were already in the pipes and couldn't be changed.

This game looks really cool and interesting. I might have to check this game out now.

jeff's comment at the very end about wwi vs wwii cracked me up. anyways, this looks great. will pick up at some point hopeffully soon-ish. both because it looks great and because i want even more ubi-art.

It's a great little production. I hope they keep making these kind of games, I'll keep bying them for sure.

@mbr2: I understand your trepidation, however I think it is unfounded. This game is fantastic and much like Grave of the Fireflies, or Maus, or Waltz With Bashir, it uses it's animated art style to draw you in and make the horror of the material digestible and - in a way - more effectively relatable. The collectables are factoids and items from history and there is a real sense of groundedness to the game, despite its (on the surface) whimsical art style. This quick look is not the best part of the game to show what it has to offer, as the characters and scenarios are actually very thoughtful. And though you might find it out of place, once you wrap characters you love into the equation, the puzzle solving actually becomes a much more interesting and meaningful means of interacting with the world than running around shooting people.

@keichan

I think it's worth nothing that this game is based on letters from real people. They didn't randomly decide to tell a story set in WW1, it is where and when it happened. The game is about how four people's lives played out after being sucked into the whirlwind of WW1, because that's the story their letters told.

I personally don't think a game's genre, art style or "game-a-fication" of a subject makes it inherently "gross" or disrespectful, but that's just me. Everyone is different :)

War... War never changes...

I wish they hadn't made it a puzzle-adventure game, or at least left out all the wacky bits. The tone's all over the place.

@ethanielrain: I feel like I picked a side in some huge argument, because I keep getting email notifications of being mentioned, when all I wanted to say is that I find it a little gross, too.

To clarify, now that I've had my coffee, I find the odd History channel treatment applied to the very grim collectibles (which are an increasingly distasteful trope in video games), juxtaposed with "SHARE ON TWITTER/FACEBOOK" gives this game a canned/manufactured sort of quality.

Then there's the rapid transition from men choking and dying on chlorine gas followed by an awkward, unintuitive wheel-turning puzzle to disable a giant goofy chlorine gas machine that might as well have been designed by Cobra Commander. Maybe "offended" is too strong of a word. It just seems distasteful and strange. It'd be incredibly naive of me to judge this entire game based on what I saw of it in this QL, so I can't speak to the whole thing, but gosh, those just seemed like some hard tonal swings.

I was agreeing with mbr2 in that it seemed gross, I don't know what everyone's arguing about WW2 being alright for shooters but WW1 being off-limits or whatever, I just found the implementation of social networking buttons and bizarre design choices to be off-putting, especially when put in the context of some of the darker subject matter.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

"March 10th, 1915 - Saved by an American soldier!"

Um, America didn't enter the war till 1917...

At least get the history right guys. That's pretty poor.

Does anybody know if the dog gets hurt or killed? I would love to play this game, but if any harm comes to the mutt, I'm out. Every screen writer knows not to put animals to death in movies, but game writers are clueless.

1:40 seconds in, I don't need to see anymore. Instant purchase.

@biggest_loser: America didn't, americans did join the French Foreign Legion though.

You might want to brush up on your history, that assumption was pretty poor.

@keichan Sorry if it seemed like I was piling onto an argument. I can certainly see your point; I've compared this game to a Wes Anderson film, because it does have that odd tone of seriousness and wackiness intermingled together. The game mechanics & social hooks don't bother me, but I can see why it might you or others.

I won't bring up this topic again, or if I do I won't tag you :)

@biggest_loser: America didn't join the war until 1917 but there were a number of Americans fighting in the war before that time - something the game addresses directly. Do you really think that the developers are so dumb as to spend years making a WWI game, inspired by letters from the war, full of historical text, events, and items, and not know the basic facts the war?

@cyrano: The trailer implies that the dog lives but everyone else gets fucked

Fantastic looking game and Drew referencing Lion King on the SNES. This QL has it all.

Agreed. I wasn't expecting it to be a puzzle/adventure game, but that was a pleasant surprise.

Great looking game.

@mbr2 said:

So you want every puzzle game to have some abstract theme that references nothing other than the elements involved in solving the puzzles? Cube plus cube equals cuboid type stuff?

Had a huge grin on my face when I realized the music was timed with the bombs and machine gun fire. Looks neat.

I'm really loving these Ubi art engine games.

@keichan: I wasn't sure but now that I've seen 20 mins of it, I'm kinda siding with you guys, and others who said similar things. And that scene with the gas machine, that stood out to me as well, it was, I don't know, kinda silly I guess.

I'm surprised they had never heard of the urine thing, I am pretty sure we learned that stuff in elementary or definitely by secondary school. I think of that as being almost common knowledge, around here anyway, maybe Canadian schools taught a lot more about WW1?

On another note, there's actually a WW1 multiplayer shooter in early access on Steam, Verdun. I played a few matches awhile back, and it was kinda cool because it's one of those games where a single shot will easily kill you, two at most. It's very slow and careful so definitely wouldn't hit with most shooter fans today. The WW1 setting also kinda fails because it's hard to feel like you're in a battle from that era when there's like 8 players total in the match. I don't know many it supports but as you'd expect there are very few people playing it. I also don't know if there's any singleplayer campaign planned, which is probably the only way they could take up the more emotional and story telling side of the WW1 setting.