General gaming discussion

Retr0gamer

Cordell wrote: »

But I guess having a stereotypical and evil chinese was a-ok, no need to retcon anything. It's a game series where you have the choice to kill little girls, but heaven forbid to make someone uneasy by portraying a black NPC the wrong way.
Subjugated people when freed do carry on abuse on the subjugators, it has happened many times throughout the history, so I don't see any problem and any racism in how Daisy Fitzroy was handled.

Well Ken Levine did as he choose to retcon it.

Anyway, this isn't a new view on it. Plenty of articles written about how problematic the writing in the game was well before now. Vice has a particularly good one:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kwzz43/the-politics-of-bioshock-infinite-are-all-the-worse-when-revisited-in-a-heated-election-year

Cordell

I know it's not a new view, is was even worse a couple of years ago with all that Kingdom Come controversy for example. That does not make it right though.

Infinite's insistence on giving every side of an argument an equal share of the floor makes it feel weightless

So, they should give the floor according to our opinion? I thought you agreed that the artist should be free.

BioShock Infinite wants us to think this place is beautiful ... Of course, the façade is gradually removed

No, actually it's removed quite rapidly and early on in the game, when a mixed race couple is publicly punished for being a mixed race couple.

Retr0gamer

Cordell wrote: »

So, they should give the floor according to our opinion? I thought you agreed that the artist should be free.

They should be free. But equally what they create should be open to discussion and critique.

gizmo

As others have already pointed out, Narwitz currently writes for RT but has previously written for The Daily Caller and RedState, in both cases in a manner befitting the publications in question. If one wanted to rally against the notion of agenda pushing then she's the last person I'd be looking at.

Generally speaking, I find her work to be snarky, confrontational and frequently misleading and this video is no exception. She almost immediately begins to argue in bad faith by invoking the comical boogieman that is Jack Thompson because, as she says, the piece:

...argues that morally grey stories in gaming justify peoples racism and fascist tendencies. And yea, it's a mess. So hey, gaming may not make you a mass shooter but take in one too many morally grey stories and you could become a Nazi. Welcome to discourse 2020.

The problem here is at no point does the article make this argument. It discusses the concept of how black and white versus grey morality found in games can also be found in the real world, yet never attempts to explicitly link the two. Dominique Ferland, the Creative Director at Square Enix Montreal, whom she goes on to quote, sees how one might have led to the other but that is his interpretation, not that of the author of the piece.


As for the piece itself, I found it interesting, not least because I've just played Infamous Second Son in between the DLCs for The Witcher 3, two games which treat morality in an almost diametric manner. For me, however, the interesting discussion isn't necessarily which one is better on paper but how the options within are presented and what effects they have on gameplay.

Infamous, like Mass Effect, offers these options in a completely binary manner with your character visibly changing the further along that path you go. You begin, or are arguably encouraged, to make dialogue choices because of the colour of the text rather than the content of the option itself. This is further reinforced by the powers which become available to the player - go too far down a path and you're locked off from certain powers as the game progresses.

I had a similar problem with the original Dishonored where I found my gameplay options stymied due to manner in which the Chaos system was reinforced in-game. I found myself worrying that doing a particular action in-game would lead to a sign-posted value increasing which in turn limited not only what abilities and weapons I could use but also how the story would play out.

Now, this is a way to do it, sure, I just don't like it. I'd much rather the game not be so up front with how these morality systems worked and instead let the player see the consequences of their actions more naturally. The question then becomes, if the player isn't made aware of how their actions will affect the game/story, does it then become implicitly grey? As I play through The Witcher 3, I'm playing Geralt as a "good" guy but quite often the decisions I make don't have necessary "good" outcomes. So what makes this system morally grey? Is it the neutral manner in which the in-game dialogue options are presented, the unexpected consequences of my seemingly benign choices or the lack of overt reinforcement of these choices via in-game character gameplay?

In any case, it's important the two aren't conflated as was done in this response piece from The Escapist, Infamous Second Son Shows Why We Can’t Go Back to Black-and-White Morality.

Retr0gamer

I think the Witcher 3 works because there's no consequence to player abilities or locking out content. You choose how to interact with the story. You are free to make the choices not because of some gameplay system pushing you in one way but because of actual gods honest role playing.

I really loved Soma as well for kind of similar reasons. You are given a variety of choices to make through out the game when you are put into really ****ty and ethically complex situations and asked to make a choice. And similarly to the Witcher 3 walking away from it is also an option but has consequences. However nothing you do changes the overall player or story progression.

OptimusTractor

I think it's all an ecumenical matter to be honest lads.

Grumpypants

I just thought they liked a black and white morality system and wrote an article about how they liked it.

I'm not sure how you could make a response to that. It's not saying stop making grey ones, it just says they'd like to see a few of the other kind.

The industry sees things come in and out of Vogue. In 2013 your worst crime was releasing a game with a 6 hour campaign. Then over the next 5 or 6 years every game seemed to have tacked on multiplayer and had to be open world & 40+ hours long.

All I wanted was a return of the 6 hour game so I could finish just one game from my backlog.

Potential-Monke

Grumpypants wrote: »

All I wanted was a return of the 6 hour game so I could finish just one game from my backlog.

I actually like what Sony Santa Monica did with God of War. A perfect single player experience with a semi-open world that takes 20-30 hours. A 6 hour campaign nowadays is too little imo. Game depending of course. The first TR reboot did it right too imo.

gimli2112

some games could really do with shortening, Days Gone and TLOU2 in particular. I thought they ended several times before they did, although I quite liked the former. Unchartered 4 was another but I may have had franchise fatigue with that one.

Varik

The entire article is a joke, just a platform to spring off a load of real life social justice pablum.

We don’t currently need more redemption stories about villains or tales about the corruptibility of heroes. The number of games that tell us heroes and villains aren’t that different has become numbing and demoralizing.

There's right and there's wrong and we're right, and there can be no grey.

Retr0gamer

6-12 hours is the perfect action game length for me. Anything beyond that and it begins to draaaaaag. Looking at you TLOU2. It's always been that way. There's very few that break that rule outside of the odd game like Mario Galaxy or Resi 4 where the game is so damn inventive at every turn it really justifies the extended length.

Miyamoto came in for some awful stick with Pikmin and Luigi's Mansion on the Gamecube as he said the 6 hour game was the perfect lenght. But you know what he was right. Those games have no down time and are a joy to play.

At the other end of the spectrum when I was younger I did like my games to last a bit longer as I was strapped for cash but once you get a job I kind of like to sit down with a game and be done with it before the week is out.

Potential-Monke

I'd have no problem with 6 hour games, but not at AAA prices. Half price maybe.

Robert ninja

I don't get the obsession of 'clearing' a game. My goal isn't to get to the end credits fast, I'm no speed runner. Nor am I that into story rich games all the time. The game's story can be long or short, doesn't really matter. As long as the gameplay loop has longevity. Like Devil May Cry, Tekken, Dead Rising, Hitman. Actually I've got 800+ hours in Tekken 7 and I never got past the first chapter or so in story mode. :pac:

one armed dwarf

My personal pref is a 12-15 hour game with lots of gameplay modifiers, that way you can get theoretically infinite mileage out of it as long as the difficulty/gameplay modifers offer enough interesting permutations. eg like DMC as mentioned which I've probably got close > 500 hours in the new one. I wish FFVII Remake had something like that also beyond the 'hard' mode it offers.

Like this is what 100s of hours of playing dmc looks like (not me, someone I'm subscribed to)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIQ4oIUMD5Y

For me tho I prefer to play a small number of games over and over, I just find too many modern games are paced like **** and I get bored and don't finish the story. TLOUII played very well but I ended up just reading the plot on wikipedia, it got too boring after about 10 hours or so with the horrible pacing.

Retr0gamer

I much prefer a handcrafted 6 hour game. Not all games can be like God of War and even with God of War there was a lot of copy and paste elements like the bosses to try keep the run time up.

Potential-Monke

I'd be the opposite. A good story keeps me hooked, and can even get me past bad gameplay at times. But a game with a good story, decent longevity but not overly/unnecessarily long, and excellent gameplay are what top my lists of best games.

And for want of repeating myself, games like God of War 2018, the Legacy of Kain series, H:ZD, Ghost of Tsushima, TLoU 1, Bioshock 1 & 2, the Batman Arkham series, the original God of War trilogy, AC (1, 2, 4, Rogue, Origins, Odyssey), GTA (3, VC, SA and V), InFamous 1 & 2, Far Cry 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, MGS (2 & 3), Ico, SotC, RE4, Skyrim, Okami, Prince of Persia trilogy, Psychonauts, Ratchet and Clank series, SSX Tricky (albeit basically for the gameplay), Timesplitters 1 & 2, Manhunt, Bully, Silent Hill, the original Tomb Raider 1, 2 and 3, Syphon Filter 1 & 2, Kurushi (again, gameplay), Tenchu series, Second Sight.

Everyone one of those games stand out for me, and there are people who will find issues with most, if not all, of them. But they hooked me, got me beyond the technical issues, becuase I was engaged with them. Unlike some modern games with amazing graphics, and sometimes really good gameplay, but the story lacked and I lost interest.

My problem is, I find it hard to replay a game, because I know the story and it won't change. Some games, like InFamous with their black/white morality and different powers due to those choices, they got multiple playthroughs. But Skyrim, I'd love to play that again, but every time I try, the start is always the same, the progression is always the same, just maybe in a slightly different order.

gimli2112

the original Tomb Raider trilogy was wonderful and about the same length as Rise (which I'm playing now) and is a bit of a chore

pixelburp

Time is subjective though; I've enjoyed 6 hour distractions and 60 hour epics, but the one thing I can say I know is when my time is being wasted. Padding and busywork for no discernible reason beyond the suspicion that the development was simply ticking boxes rather than try to create a game polished to a shine, or removed of any extraneous fat.

johnny_ultimate

one armed dwarf wrote: »

For me tho I prefer to play a small number of games over and over.

I'd be the opposite. I like to see as much of what this sprawling medium has to offer as I can, so I most appreciate games that get their ideas across succinctly (although obviously there are long, epic games that deserve to be long and epic). That's why it maddens me that so many modern games - AAA ones in particular - waste our time with hours and hours of filler, and also why I tend to drop out of 'forever' games and multiplayer-centric ones fairly quickly. There are exceptional games I do replay or bump up the difficulty for a bit, but it'd be a rare game indeed that would tempt me to NG+ (Bayonetta, perhaps).

There's no perfect length for every game, only individual games which are the perfect length for what they are. Sayonara Wild Hearts is a one sitting masterpiece; Return of the Obra Dinn hasn't an ounce of fat on its body and you'd get through it in a weekend; Outer Wilds is 20-25 hours of pure magnificence; a Soulsborne game will consume 50-60 hours of my life without me noticing the hours tick by. But modern AAA games in general - whether that's FF7R, TLOUII, or the innumerable open world content-athons - more often than not are far longer than their ideas justify. The exceptions are welcome - Half-Life Alyx was the rare franchise game that filled the hours with worthwhile ideas, and Resident Evil of all series has kept things pretty focused recently.

As I've said before, I feel we're at the point where I'd love to see developers start considering smaller, cheaper projects - such as Uncharted Lost Legacy - rather than the overextended €60-70 epic that has regrettably become the norm for even games that don't need to be that long.

Retr0gamer

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Return of the Obra Dinn hasn't an ounce of fat on its body and you'd get through it in a weekend

I feel really dumb that it took me way more than a weekend.... and I didn't finish it.

Greyfox

I'm so use to games been 30+ hours that a 6-8 hour game that you can complete in the same day just feels very unfamiliar so I automatically say to myself I'll get that when it's on sale. I've been spoiled in the past with the likes of GTA5 and Zelda botw so now I'm always chasing that epic single player experience with lots of secrets and challenges that will take me over a month.. and although finding a very good AAA game is easy, getting an excellent one with no padding issues is very rare.

recyclops

Give me a linear, tight, coherent story at the 10-12 hour mark. Perfect

Open world games can be exceptional, Witcher 3, gta and BOTW. But they are exceptions, the rest are so much filler they become tedious quickly and rarely do I go for 100% for achievements.

Perhaps it's the achievements that are the problem?

Stone Deaf 4evr

recyclops wrote: »

Give me a linear, tight, coherent story at the 10-12 hour mark. Perfect

Open world games can be exceptional, Witcher 3, gta and BOTW. But they are exceptions, the rest are so much filler they become tedious quickly and rarely do I go for 100% for achievements.

Perhaps it's the achievements that are the problem?

there was some game released in the last few years that had loads of those 'collect 100 of x' quests, but all the achievements unlocked when you had 15 to 20 of them. That was a refreshing way of doing it as you kinda stumbled on that many of them by just playing regularly.

larva

I got lured in and bought Desperadoes 3 for full price as I really enjoyed Shadow tactics but have to say i feel I got duped for paying 60 bucks for a game thats pretty much the same game except its in the wild west. I do prefer open world games but the likes of Skyrim are so buggy it takes away from the overall enjoyment. My favorite games at the mo are Warhammer 2 and They are Billions, endless replay ability

Jordan 199

I would like to see a Murder She Wrote type video game.

The Raging Bile Duct

Jordan 199 wrote: »

I would like to see a Murder She Wrote type video game.

Your wish has been granted...

https://www.iplay.com/games/murder-she-wrote

pixelburp

Detective / murder mystery games seem quite a rare breed; wonder why that is, if it's just too niche a genre or if mechanically it's hard to actually develop and codify the shoe leather involved in detecting. Or have I just missed them among the shovelware on online stores; "The Sexy Brutale" was one of the few I've seen that did something beyond visual novel or point n' click style games.

Retr0gamer

Metal Gear Solid VR missions had the murder mystery mission although it was more a set up for an elaborate (and genuinely funny) joke.

johnny_ultimate

pixelburp wrote: »

Detective / murder mystery games seem quite a rare breed; wonder why that is, if it's just too niche a genre or if mechanically it's hard to actually develop and codify the shoe leather involved in detecting. Or have I just missed them among the shovelware on online stores; "The Sexy Brutale" was one of the few I've seen that did something beyond visual novel or point n' click style games.

Return of the Obra Dinn showed up and redefined the genre

The Nal

Goldeneye 64 remake shut down by James Bond licence holders