deskpro2k3 said:
Darc Requiem said:
Naughty Dog's writing used to be really good but their best writer is no longer at the studio and it shows. That's a big issue because Naugthy Dog, at least recently, makes games that live and die by their story telling. TLOU didn't get acclaim for it's gameplay, it got praise because of it's story telling. Insomniac games have story and gameplay to live on. Like Uncharted did in the past for ND. Insomniac has basically put the PS5 on it's back and released mulltiple quality titles. In the same time frame, Naughty has been re-heating and re-serving TLOU and TLOU2 to Playstation audience for what seven years (?) at this point. Games, for me, at the end of the day are about an enjoyable experience. Slugging through a title with passable gameplay and bad story telling isn't going to cut it for me. This gets compounded if the games story telling and gameplay have a disconnect that dulls the effect of the message you are trying to get across. What makes great story telling isn't just what happens in a story but how the events of the story are conveyed. That latter aspect seems to have gone by the wayside at ND. Although it's not just them, it's become prevalent in entertainment as a whole. Edit: This situation with Aloy's face bugs me for a different reason than most. At least I belive so. I'm tired of western developers expressing that women should not have to be beautiful while hiring beautiful women to model their characters. If you want more "average" looking women, then how about you employ them and pay them for their likeness. Paying someone to use their likeness and then altering it to the point that it looks nothing like them seems like a waste of development time and money. |
This is exactly what I’ve been trying to say, but you've articulate it masterfully. If the goal is to show more "average" or "realistic" women, then why not hire models who naturally fit that vision? Paying a beautiful model for her likeness only to change her face so much feels wasteful. The original model already had so many qualities that worked for Aloy. Strong, grounded, and real. Why spend all that time and money just to alter it? If the industry wants to break beauty standards, then fully commit to it and hire people who reflect that vision naturally. You nailed it perfectly. |
I feel like we're really starting to overstate the differences between the model and the eventual character. It's pretty obvious that the model was used to make Aloy. I would imagine it's pretty standard practice from an artistic standpoint to have some kind of reference that you start from and to adjust from there depending on your vision of the character. Are we really saying that the only legitimate use of a model is if you change nothing about their appearance and port them into the game, one to one? Seems like a huge waste of time to spend that long in casting looking for the absolute perfect person that you have no need to change anything about.
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