Saltimbanco

God of War (and a little bit about subjectivity in reviews)

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Let me preface this by saying I have not played the recently released God of War soft reboot. I am speaking based on my impressions of the demo released during the game's announcement, my assumptions might very well be wrong about the final release of the game and, if that is the case, I do hope someone corrects me.

 

I'm going to have a bit of an incoherent rant on the game, and the industry, and the difficulty in finding reviews that are useful for us personally. TL;DR The game always looked bad to me. People are going crazy for it. I wanna have fun too, but am reticent on buying the game, and haven't found any review or argument online that swayed me in one direction on another. Please, do share your thoughts on the game, or expectations for it, if you haven't played it yet; and where you're coming from with your opinions. It would be very useful for me to read it.

 

In order to explain where I'm coming from, I must first say that when this new God of War was announced, all I saw was red flags. The sort of flags that make me say "This is emblematic of what's wrong with AAA game development". A contrarian statement, to be sure, considering how well received that first trailer and demo were, but you'll see how truly contrarian it is when I start describing some of those red flags.:lol: Let me recognize that the series needed to be shaken up. I had no interest in playing God of War Ascension and likely wouldn't have played a God of War 5 that did the same thing all over again. I welcome a new direction but was unimpressed with the one they chose.

 

Mainly. the red flags I saw was with respect to the game being more "cinematic". What a word I despise in the context of video games. At first glance, it seemed to have more in common with The Last of Us than older GoW games. That was a red flag for me both in that it made this brand new direction for the series seem less like a bold move, and more like following industry trends by making an older series with name recognition fit into a pre-existing mold. And it was a red flag because I do not care for The Last of Us. Something I often feel alone in saying. TLoU felt to me like an unimpressive Third-Person Shooter glued to an above average CG movie. The mechanics just don't feel tied well enough to story in my eyes, and it does put me off seeing these types of games being held up by some as proof of the artistry in the medium (a tacky thing to do, and even more tacky is me having a bone to pick with them, I know), instead of games that do tell their stories entirely through their gameplay. I know, not every game can be something like Papers, Please, where the playing the game just is the story, but it just bugs me a bit. And let me tell you, that interview where the voice actor said that the script is "not a game script, it's a script", had me.:rolleyes: I know some games do try to bridge the gap by telling their stories not during cutscenes but during gameplay. Unfortunately, often times that ends with long treks where nothing happens except you walk down a path while two characters talk (or, God forbid, it's a forced walking section!), which are just as lacking in gameplay as cutscenes, without the benefit of being able to skip it if you've already seen it, which absolutely kills my interest in replaying games. That's what I saw from the demo. Walk, walk, watch, walk, walk, highly scripted combat sequence.

 

 

The second big red flag is in regards to the camera and the combat system. Unlike previous games in the series, the camera isn't fixed far away from the player, giving you a full view of the action, it's third-person and over-the-shoulder. A person who chooses to see the best in all situations would probably say that this is in order to strengthen the story. The camera puts you right there with Kratos so you can more easily relate to him, and that's necessary with the more emotional story they're trying to tell. A cynical person would say it has a camera like that because games like Uncharted and TLoU do and they are just copying those. I, perhaps even more cynical, would say it's a measure to squeeze better graphics of out of the weak PS4, even if they have to sacrifice gameplay for it. The PS4 isn't that strong, narrowing the field-of-view is a cheap way to limit the number of things it has to render at once, and that's the only way they could get a consistent framerate out of it. They could lower the graphics and zoom-out the camera, but shiny graphics is good for marketing and it sells, so they narrowed it. It's not so different from The Order: 1886 adding black bars in the top and bottom of the screen and excusing it as making the game more "cinematic". I think about what that does to the gameplay. If the fights won't be smaller as a result, if they're not how the game will deal with large groups and enemies that aren't within your cone of vision. If the narrow field of view won't necessitate you fiddle with the camera more, how you'll have to choose between using your thumb to move the camera or hitting enemies with the face buttons. If whether in order to remedy this they'll put your attacks in the shoulder buttons like the Souls games, except that it's fine in those because they aren't fast-paced, combo-heavy games, how will GoW deal with this? Is the game slower? It looks slower. I see the director commenting about the lack of a jump button, which would add a whole new dimension to the combat, as, and I'm paraphrasing it here, "fun but it wouldn't fit the story". I'm half reminded of a combat preview I saw for Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where they kept repeating something along the lines of "Would it be useful if the game let you do X thing? Yes, but it wouldn't be very realistic now, would it?".:lol: Here I see a game that is so caught up in the story it wants to tell and being taken seriously, that the gameplay seems to be much further down in its list of considerations. Willingly throwing it under the bus if they have to.

 

These are all the impressions I took from the promotional material I've seen for the game, whatever I glimpsed from the gameplay, and a couple of reviews. I know, I'm basically passing judgment on the game without having played it, and I've seen people use that to shield a game from criticism many times before and, it's true, opinions aren't all created equal, and a misinformed one is certainly worth much less. However, while I like to speak from a place of knowledge regarding any game, no one is going to pay full price for a game they're afraid they won't like, just to confirm it is indeed bad. So judgments will invariably be passed.

 

Now, what the issue with that? If there is so much information on the game out there, how can I be so uncertain of the game? Why can't I look it up and know if it's good or bad? And why do I care? Now we move on to the second part of this barely structured rant:

 

I don't want to instantly invalidate the popular opinion. Say it's bad because it's popular, and only filthy casuals must like it. The game is undoubtedly very popular. Objectively, it must offer a large number of people something they enjoy very much. If that's the case, I'm left wondering if it could offer me something as well. I'm by nature a very critical person. I think it's an enjoyment I take from taking things apart that leads me to think about their flaws. But I don't think I'm necessarily negative. I recognize that liking something is always more enjoyable than not liking it, and I would certainly enjoy much more playing a game for 30h that surprises me with how good it is, than playing a game I hate for 30h for the smug self-satisfied feeling that my initial judgment was correct.

 

The issue I've found with truly gauging how good or bad it is is one that I'm certain everyone here has felt: a disconnect between your own unique tastes and that of the general audience, coupled with a lack of familiarity of the people behind the opinions being professed and where they're coming from. I've watched some streams and was unimpressed by the gameplay, but I didn't watch it much out of a fear of spoilers (the game does sell itself on story and spectacle after all), so who's to say if what I saw is truly representative? A review, on the other hand, is certainly meant to be representative of the whole thing, but how can you trust the person's opinion will be applicable to your own experience? I swear, I'm usually not this paranoid with reviews. But my opinion has differed wildly when it comes both to hack n' slash games, and this style of "cinematic" game. I even saw one review that said the game's combat is the best he ever played, while saying that in DMC and Bayonetta you can button mash your way to victory, which I'd argue is just untrue outside of the easiest settings, normal setting maybe. There's the aforementioned TLoU. There's DmC: Devil May Cry which got such great reviews, and I found it merely mediocre, although in that case it was usually prefaced with "I never played/got into the previous games", so I did have a baseline for reference. I understand that most websites try to be everything to everyone. They cater mainly to the more casual consumer, and that's okay, but it's in times like these that I miss truly knowing the reviewer's tastes, and whether or not it lines up with mine. There are certain individual critics on Youtube that I do follow, but they are more the type to wait a month to a year to do a deep dive into a game, rather than a consumer's guide style review of a brand new game.

 

The general audience's opinion is also something I have difficulty following. It's bound to be shallower ("This is the game of the generation!"), and the vociferous uncritical praise I see for it gives me such flashbacks to Horizon: Zero Dawn last year. Which got similarly high scores, and so many people ready to call it the GOTY before it even came, which when I played I found it to be a better version of the Ubisoft Game™, entertaining, but nothing special. I must admit though, this feels much worse when the conversation is centered around a game exclusive to any given console.

 

I'm left still unsure of the game. The combat is my big question. I don't like what I've seen of it. So many of the conversations surrounding the game though appear to focus solely on the story. Is the gameplay the afterthought I took it to be? Or is it the sort of thing that's easy to get into but there's more there for you to sink your teeth into if you want to? I can't lie and say I haven't seen praise for it's "deep, nuanced combat", but I have no idea what criteria the person is employing, what they consider to be "deep and nuanced". It looks like a simpler version of the older titles, which were already a fairly simple version of a hack n' slash as it is.

 

This nearly endless rambling, might not serve much of a purpose and thank you to those who reached the end. I just wanted to rant. The game looks bad. But people love it. Part of me really wants to play it, find out it's completely engaging when you actually have it in your hands and fall in love with it despite everything. Part of me is convinced it will never happen, and I'll just boringly walk, watch and occasionally square, square, triangle my way through it. Nothing I read seems to tip me over to either side. Rarely addressing my misgivings with it.

 

I do hope you guys take this opportunity to talk about the game. Good or bad. Answering my questions, or just taking this opportunity to talk about any element of it you felt like sharing. Just knowing it's not a one-way street will make this thread far more informative to me than anything else I might have read on it. If you have your own experience trying to find criticism that applied to you, do share it. If there is anyone whose opinion you trust to steer you in the right direction and in what context. Or maybe you have your own story of playing a game and later wondering why the hell didn't anyone warn you about a certain thing, or perhaps you have your pet peeve that no one talks about in reviews but is really important to you, do tell.

 

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5 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

BOY

Hm?

 

From your signature, is this an "objective reviews" thing? If anything, I want a more subjective review, from a reviewer whose tastes align with my own, that might better reflect my own personal experience, and I'm bemoaning how hard that is to find, particularly when reviewers in attempting to sound more objective and impartial don't elaborate on their own personal tastes much, or put those tastes in a larger context, as a frame of reference.

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I want games journalism to stop groveling and dispensing 10s whenever anyone throws them a bone in the form of games like this. No other preferences on what the form not-groveling takes.

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6 hours ago, Saltimbanco said:

Hm?

 

From your signature, is this an "objective reviews" thing? If anything, I want a more subjective review, from a reviewer whose tastes align with my own, that might better reflect my own personal experience, and I'm bemoaning how hard that is to find, particularly when reviewers in attempting to sound more objective and impartial don't elaborate on their own personal tastes much, or put those tastes in a larger context, as a frame of reference.

No, it's a quote from the game.

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That's a lot of words for a game that clearly isn't to your tastes. You don't have to like every new big game/movie/book/album/whatever. With that said, I have played a few hours of the new God of War so I can respond to some of your points.

 

On 2018-04-28 at 5:06 AM, Saltimbanco said:

Mainly. the red flags I saw was with respect to the game being more "cinematic". What a word I despise in the context of video games. At first glance, it seemed to have more in common with The Last of Us than older GoW games. That was a red flag for me both in that it made this brand new direction for the series seem less like a bold move, and more like following industry trends by making an older series with name recognition fit into a pre-existing mold. And it was a red flag because I do not care for The Last of Us. Something I often feel alone in saying. TLoU felt to me like an unimpressive Third-Person Shooter glued to an above average CG movie. The mechanics just don't feel tied well enough to story in my eyes, and it does put me off seeing these types of games being held up by some as proof of the artistry in the medium (a tacky thing to do, and even more tacky is me having a bone to pick with them, I know), instead of games that do tell their stories entirely through their gameplay. I know, not every game can be something like Papers, Please, where the playing the game just is the story, but it just bugs me a bit. And let me tell you, that interview where the voice actor said that the script is "not a game script, it's a script", had me.:rolleyes: I know some games do try to bridge the gap by telling their stories not during cutscenes but during gameplay. Unfortunately, often times that ends with long treks where nothing happens except you walk down a path while two characters talk (or, God forbid, it's a forced walking section!), which are just as lacking in gameplay as cutscenes, without the benefit of being able to skip it if you've already seen it, which absolutely kills my interest in replaying games. That's what I saw from the demo. Walk, walk, watch, walk, walk, highly scripted combat sequence.

 

Why do you despise the "cinematic" approach? I know a few reasons why that might be the case but I am curious if you could elaborate a bit more. The Naughty Dog Uncharted/The Last of Us presentation has become a bit of a house style for first party Sony games, and they present well to broader audiences. You could show a random person on the street 5 minutes of these games and they would say "oh it's like a movie that you play." With games that rely on systemic interaction that can be a much more difficult thing to do even to a knowledgeable audience. The Last of Us was really a stealth game, and Joel and Ellie had slightly different mechanics/abilities that tied into the story. I do not understand why you feel this way. 

 

There aren't any forced walking sections in the new God of War, at least not so far. There are lots of conversations that spring up between Kratos and his son, and they have provided a lot of context for the world and their relationship. They have referenced various things I did in side quests along the main path, as well as geography that I probably shouldn't haven been in yet. Like, we had to go to a place and Boy said "hey remember that place" even though at the time it wasn't necessary for me to have visited it. I still have a lot of questions, but I'm probably only a third of the way through the game. I don't know what interview with the voice actor you are referring to, but the dialogue is of a decent quality, and it seems fairly naturalistic. There are still a lot of badly written game (and movies), but also you are taking marketing materials still a bit too seriously I think.

 

The "Walk, walk, watch, walk, walk, highly scripted combat sequence." take is very reductive. The combat isn't highly scripted generally. There are a few set piece moments, but the average combat encounter leaves you in full control, which is almost overwhelming at times.

 

On 2018-04-28 at 5:06 AM, Saltimbanco said:

The second big red flag is in regards to the camera and the combat system. Unlike previous games in the series, the camera isn't fixed far away from the player, giving you a full view of the action, it's third-person and over-the-shoulder. A person who chooses to see the best in all situations would probably say that this is in order to strengthen the story. The camera puts you right there with Kratos so you can more easily relate to him, and that's necessary with the more emotional story they're trying to tell. A cynical person would say it has a camera like that because games like Uncharted and TLoU do and they are just copying those. I, perhaps even more cynical, would say it's a measure to squeeze better graphics of out of the weak PS4, even if they have to sacrifice gameplay for it. The PS4 isn't that strong, narrowing the field-of-view is a cheap way to limit the number of things it has to render at once, and that's the only way they could get a consistent framerate out of it.

 

I am rolling my eyes at this. Action games have come a long way since the original God of War games. Tonnes of games have over-the-shoulder perspectives. The PS4 is plenty powerful. I have the stock model, not the Pro, and this game is very pretty both in terms of design and fidelity and it has a consistent framerate. It also has a hub-and-spoke design for its open world, and from the moment you press start the camera never cuts away. I suspect it cheats a few times but that remains to be seen. This game is a technical marvel and I think you are being very cynical.

 

On 2018-04-28 at 5:06 AM, Saltimbanco said:

A review, on the other hand, is certainly meant to be representative of the whole thing, but how can you trust the person's opinion will be applicable to your own experience? I swear, I'm usually not this paranoid with reviews. But my opinion has differed wildly when it comes both to hack n' slash games, and this style of "cinematic" game. I even saw one review that said the game's combat is the best he ever played, while saying that in DMC and Bayonetta you can button mash your way to victory, which I'd argue is just untrue outside of the easiest settings, normal setting maybe. There's the aforementioned TLoU. There's DmC: Devil May Cry which got such great reviews, and I found it merely mediocre, although in that case it was usually prefaced with "I never played/got into the previous games", so I did have a baseline for reference.

 

You can't and probably shouldn't. Reviews, especially those with a numbered score, are not really all that useful anymore. Longer form criticism is probably a better avenue, which you mention. Yeah sure it takes a while for that stuff to come out, but what's the rush? God of War will still be available for purchase a year from now, and you will have the benefit of it probably being on sale or cheaper, or maybe bundled with any DLC they release for it.

 

Bayo 1 + 2 have very good combat systems, Devil May Cry has gotten better over the years. Ninja Theory's DmC went for a very different approach, in that it is much more of a brawler than a technical fighter like Bayo or old DMC. BUT! DmC got people into the Devil May Cry games (probably in part that it came from a Western developer which is a whole other kettle of fish) and it paved the way for Ninja Theory to make Hellblade which repurposed these kinds of mechanics into a story about mental illness. And sure you will probably sneer at Hellblade for also being a "cinematic" game but it was one of my favourite games of last year.

 

On 2018-04-28 at 5:06 AM, Saltimbanco said:

The game looks bad. But people love it.

 

Hey maybe it's not for you. That's fine.

 

Overall, I like the game, but I don't understand the critical acclaim. Maybe when I finish it the praise will make more sense to me.

 

---

 

20 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

BOY

 

BOY

 

I know it's a meme but Kratos really does say it an awful lot. He has a good voice though so I'll allow it.

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10 hours ago, Atlantic said:

 

Why do you despise the "cinematic" approach?

 

 

I don't like its penchant for taking control away from the player, and I include long sections of walking/looking around with little to no mechanical interaction in that, as well as highly scripted events. I don't like how gameplay often feels like an afterthought, both in terms of the depth of its mechanics (platforming in these games is often so linear and automatic that it feels to me less like a gameplay challenge and more like walking down a particularly winding corridor) or how it can be used to tell a story. It may be a petty gripe I have with them, but I do somewhat resent them for being held up as some of the ur-examples of good storytelling in the medium, over games that do tell their stories through an inherently interactive way, regardless of how mechanically complex they may be, like Papers, Please, The Stanley Parable or Her Story.

 

I don't mean to say that cutscenes have no place at all in video games. I can't think of a way that games like Yakuza and Persona could tell their stories outside of cutscenes, and I do still love them, including their stories. They do still have deep gameplay, and I think having cutscenes does afford them a certain level of abstraction that allows them to have the gameplay they want to without feeling at odds with the story. As opposed to cinematic games, which do try often to rely less on cutscenes and always keep the player in a state of interaction, they feel to me like they almost fall into a gameplay/story segregation uncanny valley. With determined story sections and gameplay sections, the transitions can feel like a bright neon sign saying "You are entering the 'game' part of the game". I don't know if you would put Bioshock Infinite in the "cinematic game" category, but I felt that one was so bad in this regard. Combined with how shallow I find their gameplay most of the time, it gives me the impression that they were told they had to put some gameplay bits in it so, here, just stop and kill people for 20min before we can go back to the story.

 

I wasn't always like this. I did use to love some of these games. Now they usually feel so superficial to me. If anything I think I appreciate games with outright cutscenes more since falling out with cinematic games. There must be a reason why despite trying to replay Uncharted 2, I game I absolutely loved, many times since I first beat it, it never once held my attention long enough for me to beat it once again. In the meantime, I finished Nioh 5 times last year. I'm not sure an exciting scripted sequence can remain exciting for more than once, but I still gotta play it. Meanwhile, Nioh's story is all cutscenes, and instead of being forced to watch everything 5 times, I can just skip it.

 

I don't know if God of War is like that, and I will hate it. It's the one series where the protagonist stopping to kill people for 20min would not feel out of place at all. The platforming sections are probably terrible, but those always were in this series. On the other hand, I love Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, despite having big scripted QTE sequences, and even a couple of forced walking sections which are the game's nadir, because outside of that the gameplay delivered. I put an insane amount of hours into Hyrule Warriors, a series most people will call the shallowest a hack n' slash can be; and I would have agreed, until the post-game adventure mode, where it wasn't just about beating a simple level, but it was about doing it as fast as possible, with as few mistakes as possible, while trying to manage the entire battlefield at once. I saw there that despite the game having a very low skill floor, it still had a place for mastery in its mechanics, and that depth and nuance in the gameplay aren't measured solely by how many buttons I press within the span of a single second. I know God of War doesn't have the combat of Devil May Cry, it never did, but that doesn't mean it was, or is, a shallow afterthought. I really hope it isn't, and that the bulk of my time would be spent engaging with the mechanics, and that I find those deep and satisfying throughout. But I really don't know. When most of the conversations around the game I see, like with all cinematic game, all revolve around the story or some scripted boss fight, or it's some hastily written "Narrative 101" interpretation of the story, I really don't know what the gameplay is capable of.

 

Quote

I am rolling my eyes at this. Action games have come a long way since the original God of War games. Tonnes of games have over-the-shoulder perspectives. The PS4 is plenty powerful. I have the stock model, not the Pro, and this game is very pretty both in terms of design and fidelity and it has a consistent framerate. It also has a hub-and-spoke design for its open world, and from the moment you press start the camera never cuts away. I suspect it cheats a few times but that remains to be seen. This game is a technical marvel and I think you are being very cynical.

1

 

It isn't. It really isn't. I'm not sure if there's a big AAA game out there that can maintain a 30fps framerate with a 1080p resolution on the regular PS4. The trick they always go for is dynamic resolution. Where whenever things get too busy the game lowers the resolution from 1080p to 900p, or even 720p, hoping that if you sit far enough away from the TV (I don't, my room isn't that big) you won't notice it. And even then, most games don't manage to stay at 30 at times. Bloodborne and Final Fantasy XV, for as much as I love them, occasionally turn into veritable slideshows. I'll grant you though that most modern exclusives tend to fare better. I don't think Horizon Zero Dawn ever got as bad as that, even if it still had its dips. God of War, from what I read, also stays at 30fps most of the time. It is indeed a technical marvel that it does, and the zoomed-in camera is without a doubt a factor in achieving that. Low FOV has been a trick FPS games have been using on consoles for at least ten years. God of War is using it too. You may disagree with me on whether the over-the-shoulder camera came in because the graphics necessitated it, or whether they cranked up the graphics after seeing the camera allowed them to, but the game would most definitely not maintain its 30fps framerate, at this level of detail, if it had the zoomed-out camera of the older games.

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  MGSV springs to mind as a game that maintains a pretty consistent 60 FPS with a 1080p image on the base PS4. I can't recall if it used dynamic resolution scaling or not.

 

Dynamic scaling is a trick, I suppose, but only in the sense that pretty much every tool of game development is a trick. No matter what level of hardware you're working with, the end result is going to involve a compromise between artistic vision and technical limitations. I think dynamic scaling can be a valuable tool for ensuring a relatively consistent experience across platforms - but of course if this becomes something you notice and it starts bothering you, it stops being a convincing trick.

 

I guess they could have made God of War a game with fixed camera angles throughout. I imagine it would have become an entirely different sort of game. But if we assume for a moment that the close camera angles, cinematic style, and limited FOV of the new game were imposed due to technical reasons - it is quite possible that they could have used those limitations to create something good. Video game history has all kinds of examples of devs coming up with cool, creative solutions to difficult technical problems which actually enhance the experience rather than detract from it.

 

Still, if the result isn't to your taste there's not much you can do about that. Some people seem to like this game a lot. I think the only way to negotiate this kind of uncertainty is to find some critics whose opinions match your own, and follow them. Perhaps the worst thing about games media is the focus on hot takes about new releases, to the extent that it sometimes feels like I'm missing out when I'm not playing the latest, greatest thing. I feel this too (and I've felt it lately about God of War). I guess I try to ignore it. If I feel any uncertainty at all about the quality of a game at release, I just don't buy it.

 

For the most part I prefer to come to games later, once things have settled down a bit. I'm actually playing The Last of Us for the first time at the moment (on the mighty PS3!), and I like it, but it's scarcely recognisable as the heartbreaking work of staggering genius that it was hailed as at the time. Encountered today, its flaws are perhaps more evident, as are its similarities with the Uncharted games. But all of that is okay. I wouldn't even say that it has become a worse game since 2013: I can file these thoughts alongside the original hyperbole in my brain. Everything adds to the picture.

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I haven't played any of the earlier God of War games – they did not appeal to me at all – but I decided to give this one a go because the setting and the way the story was told was intriguing to me.

 

While the continuous cut approach is technically very impressive, the big deal for me is that the developers had to weave all the necessary background in the story and the environment instead of relying on long cutscenes that take you out of sight of the protagonists. So far I have liked the flow of the story a lot, especially in the very beginning where I had practically no idea what had happened or where things were going. While the pacing is much slower, the way in which the world is revealed to the player reminds me of Mad Max: Fury Road. So far, I haven't felt the need to read the journal entries at all, and I hope it won't become "necessary" either.

 

(I should note that the last action game I played was Bayonetta 2 and I absolutely hated how the story was told in that game, which may affect my liking of God of War.)

 

I'm still not a big fan of action games in general, but the combat has been quite fun and intricate so far. Ranged, melee, and unarmed seem to vary in effectiveness drastically depending on what types of enemies you are fighting, which I keep forgetting about in the heat of the combat. There have been several fights where I ate shit almost immediately on my first try, but as I rethought my approach, was able to deal with it without having to bang my head against the wall for too long. I just hope that the game won't become too overwhelming as more mechanics and enemy types are introduced.

 

Also, god damn this game looks beautiful.

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I only got halfway through that giant post, sorry, but I can empathize with where you're coming from. I'm a big fan of good combat, I love all the Devil May Cry games, I loved that DOOM game in 2016, and I played God of War 3~ It was good, but the combat still had room to grow. I wanted to cut to the facts on this mad, raving stampede of 10/10, 5-star reviews as well.

 

I bought Horizon: Zero Dawn thinking I was in for a 5-star time, but the combat was good-enough compared to what I like and the characters were very wooden and boring compared to what I was watching in TV and films. I was so annoyed I'd spent money and time on this thing waiting for it to open up!! Collecting trinkets and crafting nik-naks again? Using ice attacks when they're weak to ice again? These game reviewers have been playing games for just as long as me, how can they be blown away by this stuff!??

When they announced God of War I laughed and said "The potency of this story will be compromised by the beat-em-up boss fights, and the depth of this combat will be compromised by the need to be more cinematic. Nobody reaches their potential with this concept, except marketing".

 

I checked out the game with a friend for a couple hours, until you reach World 2-1, and I think I was basically right. I'm not annoyed, I think the game's exceedingly well-made. It's good. I could probably play the whole thing and be happily invested, the same way I would watch an Avengers movie for a fun afternoon. I don't feel very compelled to though, cos I like playing interesting combat systems more than I like watching summer-blockbuster custscenes.

 

It bugs me that I don't trust a 10/10 from practically anyone these days. I decided to go on twitter and ask my favourite indie combat designers what they thought of God of War to get a review personally written for me. They were critical of the same stuff I would be, and let me know that the game was nicely put together, but nothing new if you've already played X, Y and Z. So that's how I decided to basically skip it.
This comes up commonly for me now. Should I REALLY, ACTUALLY play Nier: Automata, Hitman, Shadow of Mordor? Or are they re-writes of games and mechanics I've already played? Who do I have to ask to get my own personal answer?

It was only when I heard about Into The Breach on 3-Moves-Ahead that I decided it must be something really good. I'm not a big strategy or tactics expert, but it really penetrates the noise for me to hear from someone who is.

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The site I contribute towards got in a lot of shit for their two God of War reviews. Basically people poured out of the new Neo Gaf site to give them crap on the score on Twitter and on the site itself:

https://gamecritics.com/mike-suskie/god-of-war-2018-review/

 

It was obvious that Brad who does a lot of the write-ups knew he was going to get grief so he asked another writer to also write about it. The other reviewer scored higher and they still got grief for it not being a perfect 10, or at least a 9. They vet their comments section, and only printed the most civil ones.

 

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I can't see a number on that page, but the comments do say it's a 7.5/10.

 

It reads like this reviewer is very insulted that the game can soak up so much of your time without doing anything impactful to earn it. This is something I think about with games these days too, so maybe I would agree!

It looks like this site gave Persona 5 a negative review with similar thoughts. I definitely agree that Persona 5 dragged it's heels for miles and miles too long, so I'm actually liking this perspective.

 

Wow, their review on Horizon matches closely enough with what I said as well, I'm gonna listen to their podcast.

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ATHENAAAAAAAAAAAA

 

the games great. Been absolutely addicted to it since release, credits rolled a couple days ago. Haven’t had a game get it’s claws into me like that since... Bloodbourne, Zelda. Easily best game I’ve played since those.

 

feels great, looks great, sounds great. This guy will get a bafta for sure 

 

Baldur.jpg

 

Ya’ll should play it. It gets better and better as you go through it.

 

i hate games that waste my time, quit persona 5 after 10 hours, utter waste of my life. Whereas I found my time here the most enriching gaming hours I’ve had since like uncharted lost legacy... is that what it’s called? Did I just make up a game. The Chloe DLC.

 

The over the shoulder camera is because you do a lot of axe throwing, mostly for puzzle solving which requires you to look around the environment, sometimes needing to line things up

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11 hours ago, I_smell said:

I only got halfway through that giant post, sorry

 

 I'll forgive you as long as you skimmed through the other half ^_^

 

Quote

Should I REALLY, ACTUALLY play Nier: Automata, Hitman, Shadow of Mordor? Or are they re-writes of games and mechanics I've already played? Who do I have to ask to get my own personal answer?

I haven't gotten around to play Nier: Automata yet past the tutorial. I know it's big and depressing and I just haven't been in quite the right mood for it. I've been busy playing the big and depressing dark Souls series instead. :lol:

 

Based on what little I experienced, and everything I read, it's a mix of hack n' slash Platinum-style combat with a bullet hell. So it's not gonna be quite the same as DMC, Bayonetta, etc.

 

Shadow of Mordor I loved, but more as the best example of the Arkham style of combat, as opposed to something brand new. The Nemesis system added the flavor and did occasionally impact combat by changing your enemies' properties. But moment to moment, yeah, it's Arkham on a bigger scale. Shadow of War isn't as good though, they tried to stretch things too much and it got repetitive.

 

Then again Persona is my favorite series of games, with Persona 3 being my favorite game ever, so if you have a problem with those, take my opinion with a grain of salt. Although I do love that they tell really big stories and take their time doing it, and I contrast that against Shadow of War where I feel like it's not slowly ramping up further and further, it's just spinning its wheels.

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I had zero interest in playing the pre-reboot games because they hinged mostly on violence, misogyny and juvenile bullshit.

 

This new game I love to bits. I'm 100% in favour of the dadification of games, and my only complaint would be that I'd also like some more momification. Having a game with Kratos in it actually have an emotional arc is not something I ever expected to happen, but I'm glad it did. Basically, what Mington said.

 

Boy.

 

@twmac That seems like an entirely fair review to me. Personally I'll take any excuse to get more of this game so the filmsy fetching didn't bother me too much, but I can understand it being bothersome and it's hard to justify narratively. There's some amazing plot payoff moments though.

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On 02/05/2018 at 5:34 PM, I_smell said:

I can't see a number on that page, but the comments do say it's a 7.5/10.

 

It reads like this reviewer is very insulted that the game can soak up so much of your time without doing anything impactful to earn it. This is something I think about with games these days too, so maybe I would agree!

It looks like this site gave Persona 5 a negative review with similar thoughts. I definitely agree that Persona 5 dragged it's heels for miles and miles too long, so I'm actually liking this perspective.

 

Wow, their review on Horizon matches closely enough with what I said as well, I'm gonna listen to their podcast.

 

Yeah, they are a site that firmly believes in using the whole scale. 5-6 is average, not below average as most sites treat it. If you want to see a game's score highlight the end of the review as it is there.

 

It is amazing the amount of grief they got for those reviews.

 

@osmosisch Yeah, I think it was a horses for courses scenario - I've not played the game but I trust Brad and Mike (even if I don't agree with them all the time - still hurting over that Jettomero review Brad did). The site is ad-free so most of the 'clickbait' comments are nonsense. My personal favourite part of their site is the constant push for more accessibility details.

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I have by now finished God of War. I haven't really read many of the reviews but I can guess where they failed to point out flaws in the treatment of the women characters.

 

Some loose thoughts and criticisms:

 

- The combat really started to wear thin in the last few hours. I don't think it's deep enough to warrant the amount of combat you have to do just to get to the end. Throwing the axe around is fun and feels good, but your toolset is limited for the majority of the game. You get more options later in the game but they made combat easier and in doing so it became a chore. All of the stats and RPG elements felt a bit superfluous in that I could just chip away at every enemies health by spamming the attack buttons. I didn't need much strategy.

 

- I didn't really like any of the characters. Kratos is pretty dull and hard to care about, Atreus tries to undercut him most of the time but I found BOY to be annoying about 70% of the time. There are two dwarves that help you along the way called Brok and Sindri. Brok is okay, but Sindri's schtick wore thin after probably the third encounter with him.

 

More importantly, I would argue that the treatment of the two named women characters in the game injects a new misogyny into the series. Kratos' wife is dead before the game starts. The other character is treated very poorly by the game. I don't really want to spoil it even though I think that it is very bad. I know this game is trying to be a meditation on toxic masculinity (which it mostly pulls off) but there are shitty things right in the middle there.

 

- The music by Bear McCreary is not very interesting. I haven't seen a single person mention this. Nordic music, especially Scandinavian music, is full of distinctive instruments and musical characteristics. Instead we get this typical big budget score that doesn't take any risks. I watched a video where McCreary said he got to really explore thematic writing for this game, but to my ears the themes didn't develop over the game, they just got repeated during cutscenes. It's a long game, so maybe I'm misremembering the beginning.

 

- I think the one-shot camera idea, where there are no "cuts" throughout the entire game is cool. I think I managed to spot a couple of the places where they cheat. MGSV did a lot of one-shot cutscenes, and I think Hellblade did a one-shot through most of the game as well. There are a few points in GoW where it really pays off though. When there are those moments of grand spectacle, the camera rolling through it makes it seem like even more of a technical marvel than if they cut.

 

Overall, I enjoyed the game. I won't remember anything from it in about six months time.

 

---

 

On 2018-05-02 at 11:03 AM, I_smell said:

It bugs me that I don't trust a 10/10 from practically anyone these days. 

 

[...]

 

This comes up commonly for me now. Should I REALLY, ACTUALLY play Nier: Automata, Hitman, Shadow of Mordor? Or are they re-writes of games and mechanics I've already played? Who do I have to ask to get my own personal answer?

 

I don't think you should ever trust a review completely. There are loads of games that I love that didn't get a wide spread positive critical consensus, and loads of games that were highly praised that didn't connect with me at all. The only way to actually know if you like a game means you need to play it (or maybe watch a Let's Play of it? idk). 

 

Having said that, Nier: Automata is simultaneously a 7/10 game and one of the greatest games that I have ever played.

 

On 2018-05-03 at 4:06 PM, osmosisch said:

I had zero interest in playing the pre-reboot games because they hinged mostly on violence, misogyny and juvenile bullshit.

 

This new game I love to bits. I'm 100% in favour of the dadification of games, and my only complaint would be that I'd also like some more momification. Having a game with Kratos in it actually have an emotional arc is not something I ever expected to happen, but I'm glad it did. Basically, what Mington said.

 

Having gotten to the end of GoW, I'm not entirely convinced it has gotten away from the violence, misogyny, and juvenile bullshit. It's still a big summer blockbuster.

 

I'm going to go pick up Yakuza 6 next, which will almost certainly be a better dadified game. Kiryu is a much more nuanced character than Kratos, even though they are both muscle wizards.

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I actually went ahead and got the game to try it out. I'm about to leave the lake area after doing a couple of side missions. My impressions so far have been as follows:

 

- Story is fine. Hasn't made an impact on me either way so far.

 

- Camera is absolutely atrocious. Like, really, it's awful. The game wants to be a 3rd Person Shooter so bad that Kratos doesn't attack where he is facing, he attacks where the camera is facing, so you have to constantly maneuver the camera around to hit enemies in melee combat of all things. Since the FOV is so tiny you can only see a fraction of the arena and have to constantly be adjusting the camera when you're surrounded, which is always, because every encounter is basically the same so far: 4 or 5 melee guys spawn around you, plus a couple of ranged ones in the back. The game tries to remedy the fact that the camera is clearly not up to the task by having little arrows in the bottom of the screen pointing to offscreen enemies, but they blend into each other and some of the colors are deceptively similar at a glance, it's not a substitute for a proper camera. I think about 90% of the deaths I've suffered were the result of attacks from offscreen and likely wouldn't have happened if it had the same camera system as the older games.

 

- Combat is fine? I guess? Too early to tell. It was definitely very boring at the beginning of the game when I felt like there was little I could do beyond repeating the same button combinations forever. I've since unlocked some other moves and finally feel like I have some choices in battle. We'll see what it builds up to. So far the best part about it is its visceral nature, the sound design and presentation really make every strike feel powerful. I'm already getting bored of the grab attacks though, but I suppose the series always had this problem. I must say that I did begin playing on hard but eventually lowered the difficulty to normal. The enemies were such damage sponges which, especially for a starting character with no skills, made fights a long, tedious slog, plus the feeling of power behind attacks was undercut by their health bars making it seem like I was tickling them. Not to mention that the deficiencies of the camera were exacerbated by making every offscreen hit that much harder, and fights last that much longer. I don't need to beat the game on hard just to say I did it, best to lower it to normal and have a chance to enjoy myself, which so far I have, at least more than before.

 

- Environments are a mixed bag. A couple of areas that were part of very scripted sequences looked gorgeous: the first boss fight and the sequence with the witch, in the case of the boss fight it even tied into gameplay, by having trees get knocked down throughout the fight. However, I feel like most of the meat of the gameplay so far has taken place in bland looking small tunnels and caves. Let's see if it improves when I go to different realms. Might be because I'm also in the middle of my first playthrough of Dark Souls 3, but I miss a sense of place in the environments. A lot of it feels like a random ravine where they can place a combat encounter in, then you go down a trail in the woods to the next nearly identical ravine with the next combat encounter. The lake is the first big environment I found so far, but I feel like there isn't much to talk about it. You just hold forward until you hit a little island with some enemies and a treasure chest. The traveling feels like a waste of time. Maybe if there's another big environment later on with some gameplay elements you can interact with on your way somewhere, could be more interesting.

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The game is definitely not tuned to have a fun start when playing on hard. You have none of the tools or muscle memory yet to deal with the enemies. Some of the hardest encounters in the game are actually early on for this reason, bizarrely.

 

Things definitely open up a lot, it takes some time to get there though.

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