Uncharted 4: A Thief's End Review Thread - MC: 93 / GR: 92.70%

[Boutros]

Veknoid_Outcast said:

Boutros said:

Well you said "If Naughty Dog spent the same energy crafting interesting and involving gameplay, the game would be unstoppable".

And what I'm saying is that they've done that at least within the realm of possibilities. What you seem more troubled by are pacing issues. The balance between gameplay sections and cutscenes/walking sections. That's another issue. What I responded to was what you quoted from his review ("If Uncharted 4 played even half as good as it looked, it would be a masterpiece…"). He's strictly talking about gameplay here. And I don't think it's true that the game plays less than half as good as it looked for the reasons I gave.

Well, I don't know about percentages. Remember, I said the author was unduly harsh. I agree with the overall message though, which is that Uncharted 4 is as much concerned with telling a story and looking good as it is with playing well.

I think we're still caught up on mechanics vs. gameplay. Because, for me, any section where we have control is a gameplay section. So any chapter where we're just walking forward and looking at stuff or any level where we're autoplatforming is technically gameplay. And those end up being boring. When all I need to do as a player is press forward or hit a button to trigger a quick-time event, I start to tune out - no matter the gorgeous graphics on display. 

The biggest problem here, again, is the marriage of cinema and video games. Video games are special because we as players are given control. We can interact with and change the game. In a way there are two narrators, the developer and the player. Gameplay emerges out of the dialogue between those two narrators. With movies, conversely, there is a single narrator. The movie is always the same, no matter how many times you watch it. So, by making concessions to movies, Naughty Dog paints itself into a gameplay corner. If you want players to experience events in a certain way, you need to guide them and manipulate them. You need to funnel them. And that's where gameplay suffers.

They scaled down a lot on cutscenes in favor of those walking moments with dialogues. So I don't really see them as gameplay sections. I see them as cutscenes with added interaction lol