Chris

Idle Weekend January 7, 2017: Get Your Camera Out of Trico's Butt

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Idle Weekend January 7, 2017:

Idle Weekend January 7, 2017


Get Your Camera Out of Trico's Butt
This weekend, we chatted about the worst—and best—frustrations we've experienced in games, inspired by recent explorations of the great-but-so-unpolished The Last Guardian. Control schemes, systems running beneath the hood, and talk of movies loved and hated round out our weekend projects. So watch where you point that camera, bub.

Discussed: The Last Guardian, Black and White, Resident Evil, Dishonored 2, Thief, Myth, Overwatch, Harry Potter, John Wick, La La Land

 

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RE: Destiny, Overwatch, and transmedia storytelling.

 

I actually want to begin this by talking about the problem that this question actually gets at, which is most evident in Destiny. Destiny is a game with a singleplayer story, told over multiple hours, with the story playing into the other modes, and the story is garbage/nonsense. As pointed out in the email, a lot of it begins to make sense, but ONLY if you dig through the lore that isn't even available in the game itself (which is a bizarre choice). This is a huge problem, and the reason it is a problem is that the story drives the game, and yet it is incomprehensible, leading to a game that feels disconnected and incoherent. The lore is simply a bandaid that attempts to patch that problem. 

 

This is completely and utterly different from Overwatch (caveat: I played the crap out of Destiny, and own it, but only played a half-dozen hours of Overwatch, and I don't even own it). Overwatch is nearly completely disconnected from the tranmedia storytelling. In the outside-the-game story, good guys like the Winston and Tracer, fight against bad guys like Widowmaker and Tracer. In the game, any group of heroes fight against any other group of heroes. They can be all Tracers vs all Tracers. It's a competitive shooter. That's it. There is TONS of personality in the game, shown entirely through in-game barks, animations, and playstyle, and it makes the game fun. This personality is likewise represented in the animated shorts/comics outside of the game, but with, you know, actual narratives. Again, they are separate from the game. The game isn't made more sensible through the transmedia information, but rather, there are other, different things out there that are related to the game. Knowing that Tracer is gay neither adds to nor takes away from how she plays. Knowing her history with Widowmanker doesn't change how they play against each other, etc.

 

There are good parts of transmedia storytelling, and bad ones. Overwatch is a multiplayer shooter. It has oodles of personality, but it's all limited to making for a fun and balanced game. Overwatch media is about telling linear narratives that have the same kind of personality as the game. This is great. Destiny the game is a singleplayer shooter (with multiplayer aspects I'm ignoring for the purposes of this) that leans heavily on its story, but is the worse for that. Destiny the transmedia experience is merely about patching the holes in Destiny the game. This is a problem. 

 

In the end, a game should have everything it needs to have as a self-contained unit. Overwatch has that, Destiny doesn't. If there is additional content outside of that game, it should be along the lines of: Oh, this is nice too! Overwatch has that, Destiny doesn't. Transmedia content should be like a Starwars toy. It should be a neat thing that is related to the movie, something that has connections to it, but you can enjoy on its own (ie: more like Overwatch). It shouldn't be something where you have to go find the toy to understand what even happened in Starwars. 

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I'm in the middle of Last Guardian at the moment and gotta say I really disagree with Danielle on the controls. I think the looseness of the movement is entirely appropriate to the character you're playing. Sometimes it feels like there is this consensus in design that there is only one single correct way for game controls to feel and any imprecision is by definition 'bad', but having the boy move like every other action-adventure ninja/assassin/soldier would not achieve the clearly intended effect and would feel wrong in the context...

 

I'm not really seeing that distinction between walking and climbing that you describe either, one being more skilled than the other. I don't know about you but I remember being pretty good at climbing as a kid [edit: okay maybe not THAT good, but I think video games generally allow for a little more stamina and grip than is strictly speaking realistic for the purposes of gameplay], and there's an endearing awkwardness to how the boy moves around that (in my opinion) fits perfectly. The only area where it feels like they could help you along a bit more is when climbing on Trico and sometimes getting lost behind his legs or tail.

 

And yes, the camera could use some work (perhaps with occasional switches to hand-placed angles), but these are minor flaws that pale in comparison to what this game achieves and I think a lot of people are too busy fussing over camera and controls to notice (though you did touch on this with the bit about "good frustrations"):

 

Trico is a masterpiece of AI, animation and design.

 

The Last Guardian succeeds where Black & White did not because the behaviour of Trico is life-like and, crucially, readable in a way that has just not been done before. THIS is the new bar for interactive creatures that others are going to have to try to reach now.

 

I'm looking forward to playing the rest of it and can't wait to see what Ueda and his team do next and what the rest of the industry do in response...

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For games where you don't have direct control I immediately thought of Majesty.  I have mixed feelings about it... I enjoyed the overall experience but seemed kind of repetitious after a bit.  It was fun seeing your little guys making decisions or going off to buildings you had made for them so they could train up.

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On 1/9/2017 at 0:46 PM, Ninja Dodo said:

I'm in the middle of Last Guardian at the moment and gotta say I really disagree with Danielle on the controls. I think the looseness of the movement is entirely appropriate to the character you're playing. Sometimes it feels like there is this consensus in design that there is only one single correct way for game controls to feel and any imprecision is by definition 'bad', but having the boy move like every other action-adventure ninja/assassin/soldier would not achieve the clearly intended effect and would feel wrong in the context...

 

I'm not really seeing that distinction between walking and climbing that you describe either, one being more skilled than the other. I don't know about you but I remember being pretty good at climbing as a kid [edit: okay maybe not THAT good, but I think video games generally allow for a little more stamina and grip than is strictly speaking realistic for the purposes of gameplay], and there's an endearing awkwardness to how the boy moves around that (in my opinion) fits perfectly. The only area where it feels like they could help you along a bit more is when climbing on Trico and sometimes getting lost behind his legs or tail.

 

And yes, the camera could use some work (perhaps with occasional switches to hand-placed angles), but these are minor flaws that pale in comparison to what this game achieves and I think a lot of people are too busy fussing over camera and controls to notice (though you did touch on this with the bit about "good frustrations"):

 

Trico is a masterpiece of AI, animation and design.

 

The Last Guardian succeeds where Black & White did not because the behaviour of Trico is life-like and, crucially, readable in a way that has just not been done before. THIS is the new bar for interactive creatures that others are going to have to try to reach now.

 

I'm looking forward to playing the rest of it and can't wait to see what Ueda and his team do next and what the rest of the industry do in response...

 

True, the game tries to use non-ninja controls that feel organic with lots of inverse kinematics and are a bit clumsy, I remember Ico and SOTC taking a similar approach. I do like this decision and it fits the game well, but I also feel there actually is a lot of frustrating bugginess in the controls that surely wasn't intended. The camera is sometimes completely insane including just fading to black in narrow spaces, grabbing onto objects can be hit and miss, jumping off ledges and ropes is very cumbersome and requires positioning the camera in the perfect spot. Climbing Trico is pretty rough and it's easy to get stuck on some weird bump on Trico's body or even be ridiculously catapulted away.

 

There's a difference between making the character feel loose and human through acceleration, inertia, jump height, animation etc and making it hard for the player to specify which actions should the character perform. I feel like TLG is trying to do the former, but ends up doing both.

 

I also do agree with Danielle that the boy has superhuman climbing skills, all the completely insane bullet speed free fall ledge/Trico grabs look like his bones are made of titanium. It's required for the gameplay, but I definitely felt it clashes a bit with the intended natural and organic feel of the character.

 

I absolutely loved TLG, but it definitely does have control issues going far beyond just having non-ninja controls that are more that just "minor frustrations".

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Agreed on the camera: that objectively does not work a lot of the time. This could have been fixed with more intelligent nudging out of the way, or switching to backup cameras with a better overview... Maybe it was a stylistic choice to not have multiple angles but in that case the dynamic camera placement defintely needed more work.

 

I personally haven't run into "that was not what I meant to do" issues with the controls except while climbing Trico, like ending up behind his legs or grabbing onto his fur when you're trying to jump off and such. That does feel like something that could have worked better. But basically I really disagree with the assertion that there is anything wrong with the overall feel of the movement of the boy character on his own.

 

As to the climbing, there are definitely things in there that even a skilled human adult could not do in real life in terms of stamina, falls that would kill you or arm strength (eg falling several stories and grabbing a ledge) but no more than any other game. Some handwaving is required to not render these things unplayable.

 

I mean realistically you would be crushed the first time Trico kicks you or accidentally lands where you happen to be standing. But that would not be very fun or interesting. So I'm not sure the "boy should be less clumsy because he is adept at climbing" argument holds up.

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Playing a bit more... Alright, the controls could be improved by adding a slower walking state between sneaking and running, I'll give you that. [edit: also aiming when jumping towards chains could be better - missed a couple of jumps - so OK there are some problems, but I stand by my original point that the style of the movement is not one of them.]

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Regarding The Last Guardian, this is a good video:

 

 

NOTE: contains some mid-game mechanical/story spoilers, also for Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us.

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