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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Jimquisition about movie comparisons, crunch and TLOU2

Angelus said:
AngryLittleAlchemist said:

I think the most important takeaway here is that trying to meet movie-style storytelling with game storytelling rarely plays to the strength of games. There's only a couple of examples I can think of where I really liked and was invested in a game's story and, surprise, even then what I tend to remember most is the gameplay. Games where the story is front and center and the only truly great part of the experience are also titles where I tend to be really into them for a week, then just never think about them again.

Games are great at iconography. Generally speaking, iconography makes a games story just as much if not more than it's writing. Having a game with cool character designs, interesting settings and unique scenarios allow you to be much more immersed and give more credence to stories that are otherwise just decent. The same isn't untrue of movies, they are both visual mediums after all, but I find there's a lot of movies that are strong enough as narrative pieces that they don't really even need to focus on those things - and that's just not true of games to me. These are things that realistic games often lack.

Games are great at skits. Banter is an amazing quality to have when you are releasing a product that will probably be, at minimum, 4x longer than most movies. They often tell you more about a character than the actual plot itself because they have their own unique pace and tend to focus on trivial yet equally fascinating qualities.

Games are great at music. When you have a product that is super long, having pieces which set the tone, but are also diverse and awesome just totally makes the experiences, especially when it's above the quality of most other releases.

Now none of this is exclusive to games as a medium, but I think the distinguishing factor is that most of these elements are much more important to games than just the narrative of the title itself. There can be cutscene heavy games which excel at all these aspects and create a truly interesting narrative out of them, and maybe in such a scenario I'd cling to each and every cutscene like a moth to a flame, but those don't tend to be the games being compared to Schindler's List and Citizen Kane .... in fact, those are probably games self-serious story fans might even scoff at

You forgot the thing games are best at. Choice. Giving the player the ability to actually impact the story in front of them, and the world they inhabit. That player agency is the greatest strength games have over every other medium.

I actually did forget to add that, was going too though. I also forgot to add that, the sooner we stop acting as if games deserve a minimum score for superfluous achievements, the better. Games are not an automatic minimum 6/10 because they are technically competent. If a game bores a reviewer to tears, a 5 or less is really not that out there ... guess my comment was just too long to remember everything I wanted to. 



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AngryLittleAlchemist said:
Angelus said:

You forgot the thing games are best at. Choice. Giving the player the ability to actually impact the story in front of them, and the world they inhabit. That player agency is the greatest strength games have over every other medium.

I actually did forget to add that, was going too though. I also forgot to add that, the sooner we stop acting as if games deserve a minimum score for superfluous achievements, the better. Games are not an automatic minimum 6/10 because they are technically competent. If a game bores a reviewer to tears, a 5 or less is really not that out there ... guess my comment was just too long to remember everything I wanted to. 

Yes, I agree, gaming outlets place too much emphasis on the production values in their coverage. Having spectacular visuals is certainly most welcome, we can all agree on that, but just because something looks like it's best in class, doesn't mean it actually is best in class when taking all elements into account. If we wanna stick with the movie comparison, that would have meant that back in 2009, Avatar would have been called the greatest masterclass of cinema to date. Alas, this was not the case. It was an incredibly successful movie, and it was generally very well received by critics, but pretty much nobody hailed it as one of the best movies ever made, and certainly nobody looks back on it thinking as much.



Good video. It was a laughably stupid comparison and deserved the trolling and mockery it received. Schindler’s List came out almost 30 years ago IIRC and is still talked about and still holds up. LoU2 will be forgotten in a year or so, if not sooner.

The worst part is the way the press gushes over narrative type games because they badly want their medium to be held in the same light as movies or television. When in reality if LoU2 is the cream of the crop when it comes to gaming narratives, it’s not even as good John Wick let alone Shindlers List.



The Fury said:
His video, while on form with his usual stuff raised a question for me.

What is considered a good video game story? Instead of moaning that video game stories are crap compared to some films, what are good stand out stories in games that show what a game can produce, so that story in games can be compared to other games. For every great movie story, there are 50 books that are better. For every pun filled super-hero film, there are 15 graphic novels that outshine them. You can't compare different mediums stories against each other as how they are told and portrayed are so different.

Video game medium is still hung up on the idea it's entertainment media has to be compared to that of films because films are still more popular as an entertainment media even if games make more money.

It depends on the series and genre. 

To quote Jim 'there is no perfect pasta sauce, only perfect pasta sauces'. 

Any series can have good and bad stories. It depends on what they come up with, and some series are not consistent with it (I'm a Pokemon fan who likes the stories of Gen 5 and Sun and Moon, but thinks Gen 6 and 8 have bad stories). Of course there is a reason Nintendo doesn't normally advertise itself on story...



The Democratic Nintendo fan....is that a paradox? I'm fond of one of the more conservative companies in the industry, but I vote Liberally and view myself that way 90% of the time?

LudicrousSpeed said:
Good video. It was a laughably stupid comparison and deserved the trolling and mockery it received. Schindler’s List came out almost 30 years ago IIRC and is still talked about and still holds up. LoU2 will be forgotten in a year or so, if not sooner.

The worst part is the way the press gushes over narrative type games because they badly want their medium to be held in the same light as movies or television. When in reality if LoU2 is the cream of the crop when it comes to gaming narratives, it’s not even as good John Wick let alone Shindlers List.

I would say TLOU2 and similar are very good narrative games (like RDR2), but since they are made to be blockbusters the type and level of story would also be similar to blockbuster in movies (so your John Wick is appropriate comparison), perhaps some indies and A tier or lower could have the narrative level of a deep movie since it wouldn't need the mass sales, but then it would possibly lack on visuals, at least with the newer tools it is possible to be made pretty enough. Future is exciting.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

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Jim has uploaded his impressions on the game. And I have the feeling some people are gonna get mad at him:



Vodacixi said:

Jim has uploaded his impressions on the game. And I have the feeling some people are gonna get mad at him:

I wonder if he's going to be called a bigot by the people calling everyone who has issues with the game a bigot on here. 

But seriously I agree with most of what he's saying here and he brings up a lot of good points. although he still has an arrogant attitude that i find grating in a lot of his videos.  



Ka-pi96 said:
Vodacixi said:

Jim has uploaded his impressions on the game. And I have the feeling some people are gonna get mad at him:

Yeah, that just doesn't sound good to me.

He said the game's at it's best when it's ramping up the horror with the zombie bits. IMO the first game was the same. The zombie sections were the best bits. Doesn't sound like there are too many of them in this one though.

Plus he says the story is a bit of a mess with flashbacks/flashforwards regularly occuring. I absolutely loathe flashbacks. They're just annoying. I think FF games are the only games with flashbacks that I actually like and even then I hate the flashback sections. Like FF7, you get out of Midgar the game's opening up and you're able to buy a load of new materia but then BAM flashback. Wanna find out what happens next? Wanna try out your new stuff? Too bad cuz you can't do any of that. FF8 had it bad too. I actually like the character of Laguna, but it was just a pain in the butt to be cut away from the main story for awhile with pretty much no explanation why.

I am about 10h into the game so almost half and had only one single flashback (that is pretty obvious a flashback) that took like 20 min, and no flash forward so far.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

Decent thoughts and expected of it. You could tell before the game came out and the tone of the first that this was going to be the sequels direction. I'm glad he bought up the comparison to Spec Ops in there too.



Hmm, pie.

The Fury said:
Decent thoughts and expected of it. You could tell before the game came out and the tone of the first that this was going to be the sequels direction. I'm glad he bought up the comparison to Spec Ops in there too.

In order to avoid spoilers, I'm not going to watch Jim's video, but Spec Ops: The Line was one of the games I was thinking of when people were talking about good stories in games. It didn't have the production value of TLOU, but it was able to really leverage the gameplay and the fact that you were murdering scores of people in the story in a way which accounted for ludonarrative dissonance.

I think the actual story of that game was more memorable than just about any story beat in TLOU.