Been having a go at this. Anyone else picked it up? It's bloody beautiful, possibly the nicest looking game I've ever seen, and generally it plays really smoothly. It's not without its issues, though, in fact little bits of the design are starting to grate. I've put in about ten hours or so now, and it is definitely on the road to that overwhelming Elder-Scrolls-esque objectives overload thing that I can't really be bothered with these days. There's also a lot of scavenging/crafting fetch quest shit that I'm expecting I'll get bored of at some point (but haven't yet, to be fair, they've not made it essential beyond the absolute basics like health and ammo). The facial animations are also ME-Andromeda bad at times, and whoever directed the narrative has obviously never heard of the maxim "show, don't tell", as it dictates the central story thread to you through NPC mouthpieces like an infant at times.
That, er, sounds a lot more negative than I meant it to. It's actually been really good fun so far for the most part. I'm guessing it was developed by a British team as there are little hints here and there, I just found a "remnant of the old world" data drive or whatever (a little bit of text, world-building and all that), which took a pot shot at the privatisation of the NHS, which was unexpected.
>>22132 It's a snippet from a news article, from "our time" rather than the game's time (set in the future). It's about a war veteran who can't make ends meet.
I couldn't get into it. Other than the setting which is pretty novel, everything about it felt like it had been done before. Felt like a mishmash of bits of Far Cry 3/4, bits of the Witcher 3, bits of The Elder Scrolls, and dozens of other open world action games.
Probably didn't help that I started playing it immediately after beating Breath Of The Wild, so I was already burned out on open worlds and had grown used to being able to climb any surface.
One of those games I might go back to when there's a lull in new game releases.
>>22135 >everything about it felt like it had been done before
In a very real way, everything has been done before.
I've reached the age where people are praising the orginality of stories, because they are ripped off from stories old enough that the collective consciousness doesn't remember them, but I do. The point where I observe history repeating itself only with different players.
Realistically how many stories or ideas that wow'd you at first did it because you didn't know better? because you were young enough to have not seen what it was copying before.
>>22136 There is a limited number of situations with which to build a plot - 36 or 37 depending on who you believe. It has also been suggested that there are only a handful of core plot structures, which is why so many things seem derivative.
>>22138 I don't know where he's getting 36-37 from but the idea that plots can be reduced to a few basic arcs is something that George Frazer, Joseph Campbell and Jung addressed or developed. Vladimir Propp did a specific analysis of Russian folk tales, breaking them down and creating a sort of algorithm for them; the Aarne & Thompson index applies a similar theory to all folk tales.
There have been countless self-help tier novel-writing books in the past 30 years trying to cash in on the idea by pushing their own version of 'X archetypal plots' then selling tickets to their creative writing lecture tours. I'm guessing that's where all the strange numbers the previous poster has got that from.
I'd contend you could probably say there's only two or three if you really get to the foundation. A lot of books I read you could describe as "object X is powerful, group A must keep it away from Group B"
Doesn't mean Lord of the Rings and The Expanse feel that much alike, though.
>>22140 I don't think that's a contention to anything in my post, I agree that it's all just degrees of reductionism and not particularly useful in most situations.
In most meaningful dramas, plot is secondary to character development. The tedious sixth-form example would be Waiting for Godot, a play in which nothing happens, twice. The problem for video games is that character development is often at odds with play. The more developed the protagonist is, the less able we are to inhabit them as an avatar. Expository scenes tend to be tedious cinematics that players either skip through or wish that they could. A lot of game writers just write a movie that is interspersed within a game. "Scripted" is often a pejorative term when applied to games - there's a very fine balance between telling a story and removing agency from the player.
I think that games will eventually develop their own unique grammar, with very little resemblance to traditional media. Portal manages to tell a really compelling story in a manner that is completely unique to gaming. Fallout 3 has a traditional narrative arc, but with lots of little side-arcs and bits of mise-en-scene that are entirely optional. They have starkly different approaches to the problem of agency. Portal gives the player an illusion of choice, while ultimately pushing them towards a bleak and futile conclusion; Fallout 3 gives the player real and meaningful choices that have lasting repercussions. See also Papers, Please, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide.
I would, but I have to not play the game for another two years.
I've always maintained that there is a sliding scale in story telling between tempo and tone at one end; and detail, and coherence under analysis at the other.
and depending on your medium that bar moves, the more interactive your story is the more plot holes you can have but the 'feel' has to be right. so games and films (games more so than films) can have plot lines that are a complete twaddle and riddled with holes but it doesn't matter as long as they have the right feeling to them you will accept what is happening because keeping that pace going is the most important thing.
Where as a book the devil is in the detail, you can spend 20 pages discussing the subtle and particular nuances of a short conversation, but good pace regularly falls by the wayside.