fuckle85

Supposedly there's a 2 hour cinematic in Death Stranding lol. It almost feels like Kojima went all in to make up of for a lack of them in MGSV. And THAT game almost felt like a reaction to the critics who said he relied too much on cinematics to make his work entertaining haha.  Nobody trolls their fans and critics like Kojima does.

On 11/10/2019 at 9:38 AM, skillzdadirecta said:

 

The fact that I've only played ONE of these games (Silent Hill 2) and had little to no interest to try the others despite their fans says something about me I guess... Unlike a lot of gamers, I DON'T play games for "story" because I personally feel that videogames still haven't mastered the art of clear, nuanced storytelling just yet. Have there been games with good, if not great stories that I've loved? Yes but those games were almost always complimented by gameplay mechanics that were just as good if not better than the story they were telling. At the very least the worlds that the games took place in immersed me so much that the story becomes secondary to just spending time in the world doing stuff. What those games REALLY succeeded at for me was making me FELL like I was the character in the game and was actually PART of the story and not a disembodied observer.

 

Gaming for me has always been about DOING not watching or observing. That's what books, movies and TV shows are for and all are inherently better storytelling vehicles than games are. It's also why most of the most popular games today have little to no story at all because that's not what games priority should be. It's also why both Koijma and David Gage should just go ahead and make the crappy movies they are dying to make and get it out of their system so they can focus on making games.  I know there's a generation of gamers who do value story in their games... so much that they would suffer through bland or dull gameplay to experience what ultimately ends up being a mediocre story. I'm not one of those gamers 

Would you say this is because you feel video games are moving towards more emergent narrative design to increase emotional engagement during gameplay instead of disrupting the flow of it with exposition and cinematics, and you enjoy that more? Showing story and evoking emotion vs telling/explaining it, etc.  But also that interactive media, arguably more than any visual medium, is still highly versatile and allows for good art to be made hundreds of ways, be it emergent gameplay and narrative, use of long cut scenes and lots of writing, games where you control the movements of a character and interact with the world, games that are live action choose your own adventure movies, use text and still pictures instead of moving visuals, heavy story or even no story, single player, competitive, sidescrolling, 3d, 8-bit, photorealistic, abstracted, etc?

Death Stranding, Super Monkey Ball, dreams

Didn't Vincent Gallo also try to take responsibility for hexing Ebert's prostate cancer into existence, or he clarified his aim was off because he was initially trying to hex him with colon cancer?  Dude might be playing a fool sometimes, just sayin'. 

19 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Except they haven't really created any type of compelling story for their characters. All they can do now is ruin it

 

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/11/02/overwatch-2-focuses-on-the-story-but-doesnt-seem-to-correct-any-of-its-issues/

Welp, not gonna defend that lol. I knew of some fuckery going on at Blizzard but not to what extent it was happening in their games (haven't played Overwatch in a few years). 

18 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

But nearly everything else was very specifically accurate. And from what I can see all Blizzard employees are disgruntled. Also when did we take disgruntled to have anything to do with whether facts are true or not? I feel like we just toss that word around to discredit people despite evidence to the contrary being presented. Seems silly.

After spending 20 minutes googling news on Blizzard it seems there's much more going down there than I knew about, so won't say much else until I know more.  That said, regardless of how truthful or not that anon leak was, its still never a bad thing to take any info regarding 4chan and/or disgruntled employees with a massive grain of salt.  Don't get grifted, xbob.

On 11/1/2019 at 7:22 PM, Brick said:

I was always slightly disappointed that there was no story mode in the first to get to know these characters better. 

THIS.   Blizzard has to know there's demand for it and how perfect it is for the world and characters they've made. There should be some backlash if they don't, even if it's only like 5 hours or something.  

On 11/1/2019 at 10:28 PM, Xbob42 said:

This leak from a while back is proved true bit by bit...

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Dexterryu said:

I'm not sure what to make of all of this. On one hand, the announcements give it a lot of credence. On the other, if the games they ultimately release are good then we're kind of in a tough spot as consumers. If the games are good, and we want to play them and we buy them we're just encouraging this. Obviously this sounds like it's not a good place to work, but no one is making people stay at their current employers (While not a game dev specifically, I'm close enough to it to know there are TONS of opportunities).

 

It's also interesting how much this parallels with EA and Bioware after ME:A and Anthem. Even Ubi to a certain extent. Suits are trying to push for annual cookie cutter "living game" releases and gamers are (finally) stopping from buying them. That'll get the investors to (hopefully) realize that they need to listen to the developers (who are much more close to the actual customers).

Not that anyone should be caping too much for Blizzard, but disgruntled employee sounds disgruntled.  They were wrong completely about Diablo 4 being a destiny clone.  Shockingly, a 4chan post should be taken with a massive grain of salt.

6 minutes ago, Moa said:

 

Allow me to amend my post, any Starcraft game designed to be playable on a controller would be a huge slap in the face to Starcraft fans. I'm sure its possible to have fun in the campaign with a controller scheme, but having a full console release would likely necessitate the kinds of gameplay concessions that would ruin the game for core players.

The same was said of Diablo 3 before it was ported, but it turned out well. If content was removed or scaled back, sure, but how would it ruin the gameplay if everything's intact but remixed to be more comfortable playing w/ a controller?   A console port could still allow compatibility with keyboards too.  I'm not seeing a downside to having the game playable on more platforms.

29 minutes ago, Moa said:

Any Starcraft game playable on a controller would be a huge slap in the face to Starcraft fans.

I've played Starcraft 2 on a controller. Mapped out a control scheme that works pretty well so far.  Also wasn't Starcraft already released on consoles once before?  The main challenge in porting it would be designing an intuitive UI, no? 

I've had some bad experiences where someone gave me the wrong keycode and wouldn't contact me until after the full refund deadline expired, but nothing quite as bad as that!  Airbnb needs to revise their damn rules ASAP.

Hopefully this means there's a console version of the next Starcraft game coming at some point.

36 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

 

I mean...listen, all I have is my take here, maybe I'm wrong and the reviewers who played all of it are more on point than me, sure.  I still think there's lots of info left out of those reviews, but I'll concede it doesn't mean they aren't comprehensive enough to be informative on whether DS will be appealing or not based on what someone finds engaging.  If anyone sees the footage and reads the reviews and is like "yeah that just doesn't seem fun to me", I get it and respect it, though I think it's too soon to have in depth discussion on the merits of the game beyond that.

I 100% respect the "eh it just doesn't look like something I'd want to play" reason for skipping DS btw. It's just that given how much info about story and gameplay still hasn't been released it's kinda wut to me why anyone at all interested would reach a conclusion yet. It could definitely end up being a pretentious mound of garbage, but even after playing a decent chunk of it it was difficult to know for sure.  It does seem fair enough imo to say it won't have as much appeal to audiences, including me potentially, as most well-made AAA games, sure.  I think a lot of passionate MGS fans will be more at home exploring that world than they might expect though.

8 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

I like how you’re defending this game but it looks exactly the type of game you would hate. I’m sure you’ll play it and say you loved it no matter what at this point.

Jumping onto @gfxtwin’s “unique” view isn’t going to make this game somehow amazing.

lol why is it I keep getting confused with gfxtwin!?  I am not them, though I did post on another account here several years ago.

Question for anyone making the "not gonna play Death Stranding because the gameplay doesn't look fun" argument : What's your take on PT, Silent Hill 2, Grim Fandango, Killer 7, The Last Guardian and anything else loved for the story and creativity despite (arguably) bad and/or unfun gameplay?  Assuming DS at least meets expectations with its story and presentation and the gameplay, gran turismo of walking sims it may be, is crafted well enough to do it justice, does it still mean the experience as a whole can't be engaging enough to be worth playing?

Fight Club only the narrator escapes life via 4chan and meets Tyler there instead of while traveling.  Marla, assuming she was a real person, probably wouldn't have encountered him.

The characters in Office Space smashing wifi routers with a baseball bat instead of fax machines, and Milton would probably be working remotely.

Josh Brolin's character could've called an Uber in NCFOM and also bought tons of inexpensive security cameras to put everywhere to help make the film less suspenseful.

Eh, I'm still thinking comparisons of DS to MGS are like comparing Pacific Rim to Pan's Labyrinth. From second one MGS was always an intentionally over-the-top bonkers anime parody/homage of James Bond and 80's action movies.  And even though DS looks more modern and serious, almost like an Alex Garland or Denis Villeneuve film sometimes, there's still zany moments throughout that remind you of those games.  

So if you enjoy MGS there will probably still be a lot to savor, but also at the end of the day Kojima and team might have different creative goals with the experience they're curating and what's expected of the audience for DS, which imho is probably worth keeping in mind before reaching conclusions about how amazing or shit it will be before playing it, or assessing the value of his entire career even though glimpses (all we have right now) of his recent work implies he's got more range than what we saw in the 80's-2010's.  Will it be hot garbage?  Maybe!  Will some fanboys like it no matter what, while others are shocked at how much they don't like it?  Possibly!  Difficult to know to what extent until the entire thing is playable though. 

5 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

 You didn't watch Skill-ups review of Death Stranding I see

 

 

 

he compares Death Stranding to everything from The Sopranos, to To Kill A mockingbird to the mother fucking Odyssey... Kojima fans, Like Skill-up think the guy is a genius and are not shy about telling you.

Is he someone who's usually credible or is there a history in his writing of early-mid 2000's game writer bro hyperbole?  

quick reminder that I only played a chunk of it in one sitting and also reviewers are instructed by Sony(?) to not go into any spoilers or details.  There's so much unprecedented and weird stuff from moment to moment in DS that it's a feat of writing imo to do a comprehensive enough review of it or even show 20 minutes of interesting gameplay without spoiling anything. So, with that in mind, if you're waiting for impressions before deciding whether or not to bonk down the 60 or more bucks, might be better to rent it or wait for reactions, playthroughs and write-ups after the official release, y'know

Gonna say Titanfall since its the only online shooter I've played that a) never stops feeling fun to me and b) i'm actually somewhat competent at.  

18 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

Let me just first say that I am interested in the game, will not hold any significant opinion on the work itself until I play it myself, and I go in pretty open minded. That said...

 

Listen, I love kojima. 

 

He’s not as dense as his critics would have you think, but by the same token the man is hailed as an absolute genius by some, and that’s also going too far. As an avid critic of centrist takes, I am actually a kojima centrist. 

 

It was always a bit hard to tell how seriously he took himself since he couched a lot of metal gear in goofy humor. It seems DS is lacking in that department, so his story telling has to be taken a lot more at face value, and holy shit does it sound like it does not deliver in that department. It also sounds like he has a lot of fascinating gameplay ideas that do not come together in a great way.

 

People are going to have different tolerances to that, and it seems like for some the game really clicks in a zen-like way, but for even those people they seem to couch their praise with a hundred caveats and awareness that hey, this shit is very flawed. 

 

I dont really know where I was going with this, but there is certainly a certain sect of people online starting to spin a narrative that if you don’t like the game you don’t get it, and I think that gives kojima way too much credit when it’s not necessarily deserved. 

Well agree to disagree about there being no humor in the game.  There's definitely quite a bit from what I noticed in my time playing it, so I'm not sure it's quite as serious as a lot of the marketing makes it seem.  There could be some truth to how you think reactions online are/will be, be it from reviewers or audiences in general maybe.  I think we will know for sure starting in about a week!

2 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

From the impressions I have heard and read, this is absolutely not true. 

 

One of the biggest Kojima fans on the planet, Dan Ryckert, called it his least favorite AAA video game of all time. 

Well a lot of DS by design seems like an intentional reaction to and subversion of most AAA open world design tropes. 

Look, there's a saying that at heart there are two film direction styles: Give audiences what they want (James Cameron, MCU films, Brad Bird, etc) and give the audience what they need (Kubrick, Lynch, Peele, Herzog) and of course there are also directors interested in doing both (Tarantino, Del Toro, Nolan).  

It's possible the main distinction between Kojima's creative output now vs then is that he was more interested in doing the former, and now he's more interested in doing the latter.  And the reactions being all over the place make sense because not everyone wants what they need or needs what they want.  Reactions to movies like 2001, Taxi Driver and Eraserhead were similarly divisive for their time. 

But it bears repeating that reviewers have been instructed to avoid going into much detail about the game so we won't know for sure what's on our hands until after playing through the whole 50 hour experience. 

19 hours ago, Bloodporne said:

Right now it's a RDBX contender for me.

 

Sounds disappointing as fuck overall and and I find it even weirder and more irritating that somehow half the impressions seem to have wildly differing takes on the quality of its gameplay.

 

I've read a lot of reviews and I haven't once seen anyone mention MGS in any other way than 'this is the total opposite'. What makes it exciting for MGS fans in your experience, can you elaborate?

What is RDBX?

So I only played the ending moments of the first act, then several hours after the gameplay opens up.  It’s tough to mention any details without spoilers since so much of the fun is figuring out how to react to all the surprising and weird moments while wondering what the story is about, but I’ll say this: at some point fairly early on it becomes much less of a sloggy hiking and delivery guy simulator and plays more like the action games Kojima is known for (if you want to play it that way or not, it’s up to you) and there’s a reason why reviewers are not talking about it very much. It could ruin your experience if I say much else. Just go in with an open mind, prepare to be in think mode and go through some emotional labor, expect engaging mechanics and an evolution of the MGS storytelling and cut scene direction and it will probably click.  MGS's fanbase might be confused at first, but there will be many who praise DS no matter what, some will not get what it’s going for, etc. I think it will be worth playing at least once though and it's gonna be fun and interesting to see everyone's reactions.

So my roommate from college is in town this week with a review copy and we just breezed through a seven hour chunk of it. All I'll say right now is Death Stranding is pretty fucking bonkers, but not nearly as bonky as a lot of reviews made it seem.  It'll take a minute to grind through that slog of an opening act, but then you start getting the weapons, gadgets, upgrades, vehicles, etc.  The reviews are kinda misleading, honestly: pretty certain MGS fans are gonna adore this game to death so if you're huge into that series definitely pre-order it soon or buy it on release week, then sit back and relax while letting the gorgeous imagery, brilliant cinematics and engaging gameplay wash over you for 40 hours.  This will easily be a GOTG contender.

wat 

That trailer almost feels kinda spoilery oddly enough but still plenty of questions.  What is this game about?  Why is it so weird?  How much gameplay will there be?  The reactions right now are kinda all over the place, what will the reaction to the finished product be? And so on. One week left!

Pretty bonkers if true.  But kinda understandable since most fans seemed to have a sour aftertaste from the ending of the main series.   Besides, the Wheel of Time, The Witcher and even that upcoming LOTR show have more potential to be the next GOT than any of the prequel concepts.  Since Martin's still literally in the process of figuring out all the lore and backstory of Westeros while writing the upcoming books, it makes sense from a creative standpoint for the shows to be put on hiatus, giving him time to bring more of ASOIAF's world to life before more of it's adapted to screen.