Thyroid

The Last Guardian

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I never posted anything in this thread but it topped my game of the year list and I wrote something about the game there:

 

Quote

What’s the Difference between an AI and a cat? The Last Guardian is a game about the frustration of loving a thing you can never really be sure loves you back, but knowing that to do anything else would be against your nature. You’ll ask if this giant creature cares about you or just the food you bring it and like all trick questions you already know the answer. You never really cared.

 

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On 3/10/2017 at 11:10 PM, miffy495 said:

I have a copy sitting and staring at me that I hoped to start before Zelda came out. I did not accomplish this. Perhaps once Zelda is done. I do really want to play it.

 

 

...and a few weeks later I did! I am about halfway through, from what I can tell (I have just discovered swimming, for those who are in the know). I am absolutely in love with the game that this game wants to be, and incredibly frustrated with the game that it is. The concepts keep on writing cheques that the frame rate and controls can't cash. I still have every intention of finishing the game, but the number of times I have thought "this moment would have been so amazing if <broken thing wasn't broken>" is kind of staggering.

 

A few puzzles before stopping tonight, I did a section where

I ran through a corridor as it was collapsing around me, before being snagged out of mid-air by Trico as the last jump just would not happen

. If it had worked the way the game intended, it may have been one of the most triumphant moments I've experienced in games in a while. As it is, the first time I tried it the camera wouldn't show me what was coming and I jumped in a hole, dying. Then it loaded a checkpoint that was back JUST before the cutscene that kicks off the section, rather than after, which is frustrating in itself. I started going through the section again, but the frame rate hitched up and was erratic to an extent that I felt like I couldn't predict the timing of anything. I jumped in a hole and died. Then it reloaded to that cutscene again, at which point the camera got stuck in a wall and I jumped in a hole and died. It took me 6 tries to run through this scripted thing that was the most Uncharted that this game has tried to be so far. That's just one example (don't even get me started on how unpredictable and infuriating it is to find the points where the game will let you jump off of a chain that you're hanging from).

 

Don't get me wrong, I think I actually love this game. I just don't love playing it. There's so much good here. Being broken didn't ruin Shadow of the Colossus, and I don't feel like it will ruin this for me. It also doesn't hurt that I'm playing it while my cat is going through some pretty intense health problems, so a lot of my feelings regarding animals are pretty heightened right now. Good game, recommend it highly, but god DAMN be ready for some bullshit.

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Yeah I finally finished this today and I'm pretty much right where you expect to be, miffy. I think it's broken as hell but it didn't quite manage to ruin the game for me. The pithy one-liner I use when people ask me about the game is that "I love everything about it, except playing it". A certain amount of the control issues can be explained away with intention, as mentioned earlier in this thread, but there are still parts of it that just feel bad, even if you understand what they're going for. When it comes to the camera and the performance, even that amount of cover doesn't exist - the camera is just garbage.

 

The problem that really hurts it, though, is the AI interacting with scripting. The reason this is the most egregious issue is because this is also the core of the game's beauty. Trico is a fucking amazing feat of creation, breathed to life by I don't even know how many people working across disciplines. So when you realise in a moment that the reason he's not going along with what you want him to do isn't because he's a wild animal with whom you have imperfect communication and understanding, it's because he's glitched the fuck out, it completely breaks the spell. This happened to me more than once during the game and I had to turn to guides to see whether I was just doing completely the wrong thing - nope, in a few cases I was doing exactly what was expected of me but Trico just couldn't get into the right script.

 

Neither the bugs nor the atrocious performance and camera nor the (arguably) leaden and confused controls completely outweigh the wonder of this game, though. I haven't had an experience like this for a long time, and I'm glad I did. I wish more games had ambitions like this, both in terms of scope and direction - making a convincing, interesting and emotionally affecting companion is not something many projects even strive for, let alone achieve.

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I've been thinking a lot about this game (still) and some of the ways in which it is difficult. I hope this doesn't read too much like a senseless apologia but it I do think it's worth thinking about the some of the (very) rough edges of this game and how/why they cause so much friction.


One reason that the cutscenes become a stress point for the game is that as far as I could tell, they aren't 'cutscenes' in the conventional sense. It's not a case of the game taking control away from you to show you a series of previously rendered, locked-down sequences. Here, the camera is moving in a pre-determined way, and perhaps Trico is too; but the actual outcome of what happens is determined according to a ridiculously complex set of interacting physics and animation systems. Quite often the player is still technically in full control of the boy during all these action sequences - so even if you're just holding on to Trico's back as he leaps through the world, it's still possible to fall off if you're in a tenuous place on his body, or if he clips the scenery in just the right way. So I guess it's kind of inevitable that some of the trickiest moments will be those where (a) you're supposed to perform a very particular series of actions, very quickly and (b) there's a plethora of physics-based variables that can (and almost certainly will) mess you up. Whether any of this feels worthwhile to a player is ultimately down to them, I guess. For my own part I rarely enjoy the 'collapsing bridge' sections in the Uncharted games, and those aren't made much easier here. 


The camera is difficult in its own way. Unlike most third-person action games, it isn't locked to a fixed position behind the player-character's body. To me it felt like the camera is attached to one end of a long, invisible pole, with the boy as a balanced pivot in the middle of the pole - when you move the right stick, it pokes the camera on the tip of the pole left and right accordingly, but it still seems to 'float' a little of its own accord. And it does feel strange, and somehow old-fashioned: like a throwback to the PS1 era of 3D graphics atop pre-rendered backgrounds, except now everything is actually 3D and you're just nudging the camera around from time to time to re-frame the background while the action takes place in front of it. 


But I think all of this is entirely deliberate. I think they're trying to frame the world in such a way as that the player-character is not always the centre (literal or otherwise) of the experience. It is the opposite of the approach taken in, say, the GTA games, where the camera is locked so close that the player-character might as well be flailing forever in the middle of the screen while the rest of the world pans and slides around them. You don't often see an approach like TLG's today, but it does give you a very different sense of traversal. It's often pretty but not always helpful.

 

And because the camera works in this way, it also facilitates something I've seen very few reviews mention - that when you press and hold the L1 button, it locks the view on Trico. The camera is still floating at the end of that pole - an object in the world, linked to the boy - but the lens swivels subtly to focus on your friend. It's a neat mechanical callback to ICO, where you had to hold down a shoulder button on the controller to hold hands with the girl. But it's also its own thing. You, the boy; in the world; looking at this creature - all those elements are there, in the moment of the holding of the button.

 

I guess what all of this amounts to in my mind is the sense of being alone in a world which is indifferent to my presence; of having a limited amount of control over a life ultimately subject to the indifferent rules of the universe; of developing a relationship with the animal spirits that carry me through life, even though they sometimes bug out in unpredictable ways...
(Oh, and I guess there's a video game, too.)

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I think I understand what you're saying, but I also think both of the things you mention (cutscenes not being pre-rendered, camera not being locked behind character) are distinctions without difference to many games.

 

What I mean by this is that a lot of games have "cutscenes" that are rendered in real-time - actually, at this point, most of them do. You mention that control isn't taken away, that you can still move the boy around on Trico's back, which is true, and that the outcome is therefore subject to complex physics calculations, which is... adjacent to true. The boy is still controlled by physics, and you can indeed fall off during a scripted Trico jump (though I would hesitate to call that a positive, since the only consequence is a restart and seeing the exact same sequence again), but that's it. Everything else during a scripted jump/run sequence is canned animation, because of course it is. It'd be outrageous to try to just set up some kind of collapsible bridge physics object that would hopefully collapse in the right way at the right time and an AI routine that would hopefully escape it in the right way at the right time. So with the minor (and arguably problematic) of the boy's limited movement, everything during those sequences is the same as any other in-engine sequence in any other game. You namechecked Uncharted, and that's a great touchstone - Uncharted has tons of these sequences, and many of them have more continuing player interaction, without the whole framerate going to shit. You might say "ok, but Naughty Dog is known for their especially excellent technical skills", which is fair, but I could also call up other examples like the recent Square Enix Tomb Raider games that do the same thing (more on those games later).  The bigger issue with the performance is that it regularly tanks when you're not in big action scenes. In fact in my experience of playing the game, this happens more often out of big scripted moments - presumably because those moments had more individual attention during development and therefore some of these issues were smoothed out during them.

 

The other big point you made is about the camera and how it's not like other modern games and not locked behind the character. The latter part is true, but again the former is not so much. Again the fastest examples to point at are Uncharted and Tomb Raider, but I could also point to basically any other third person game that isn't a shooter (and many that are), and the camera works the exact same way - it can rotate all the way around the character to look in any direction. Dark Souls, MGS, the Witcher, Splinter Cell, Hitman, Horizon, Final Fantasy... honestly I'm having more trouble thinking of games that don't use this camera convention. It's possible you're talking about what happens if you just don't touch the right stick at all in this game, in which case the camera zooms out a bit and takes a more static approach out in the corner of a scene (though still very much focused on the character), which definitely is kind of a retro touch from when games didn't really have camera control (it's very reminiscent of earlier Devil May Cry games to me, in which it mostly served to make platforming more difficult). I can't speak much to how that camera behaves because it regularly annoyed me and caused me problems if I let it go into that mode, so I almost never did.

 

Regarding pressing L1 to look at Trico - that's true, and is useful. It doesn't, however, require the different camera system of the Last Guardian (which as I mention above isn't really a different camera system in any way I can see) to work. Games have had a "press this button to look at something else" function at least since the original Gears of War, but there are probably earlier examples.

 

I'm not trying to be unremittingly harsh towards the game, actually as I said in my last post I'm glad the game was made and I'm glad I played it, but I am trying to be honestly critical of its technical failings. There is often a dichotomy when a game comes out between people who appraise it for its "artistic merit" and people who appraise it for its "technical execution", and the twain does not always meet. I think the Last Guardian is one of the strongest examples of a game that deserves to be appraised differently on both scales - I think it's a wonderful artistic achievement, and in some ways an impressive technical achievement (see my thoughts on animation and AI of Trico previously), but it's in other ways a frustrating disappointment in technical execution. I think both of these things can be true, and both should be recognised in order that we can try to follow one and improve on the other.

 

There is, obviously, also the fact of individual experience. Some people just didn't experience the same amount of technical problems as others, or happened not to be so bothered by them. Which is fine - in fact, I'm envious of those people because I'd have loved for my enjoyment of this game to be smoother and more pure. But I'm very hesitant about letting that lead me to waving off the problems as ones of taste, as it seems many people in the broader conversation about this game are wont to do, because it bypasses the very real issues of control, performance and interface that exist in it. I'm not trying to draw a moral comparison here, only one of perspective, but it's not entirely dissimilar to the way certain issues of gender and race are "dog whistles", and much of the population doesn't notice them. It doesn't mean they're not there.

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I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of how games are put together is very limited, so when I'm writing about cutscenes and physics simulations and so on I'm mostly just grasping towards some understanding of how a game made me feel, in the moment. And given that most of my formative gaming was on an underpowered PC, I have a fairly high tolerance for games that don't always run well. In this case I worry I might have explained myself quite badly? I'm sorry if that's the case - and thank you, @gwardinen, for your very thoughtful response. I think you're entirely correct about the difference between technical ambition and technical execution, and this certainly deserves to be recognised.


For me, I think that for all the problems with The Last Guardian it does succeed in doing some very special things. I feel like for this game in particular, it's worthwhile to look at those problems (and they are often real, significant problems) as the by-product of deliberate creative choices. They were trying to do some very particular things with this game and maybe they weren't entirely successful but the result is interesting regardless. Maybe that's true of games in general, though? And maybe my approach overlooks the myriad ways in which any game is necessarily compromised, unfinished - maybe I'm just affording the developers too much benefit of the doubt...


I'm not sure the game would have felt quite the same to me with a camera from Uncharted, or the recent Tomb Raiders. And I like those games a good deal. (That's an obvious point, in a way - 'if the game was different it would have felt different!' - but I keep coming back to it in my mind.) I'm thinking of some of my favourite moments from TLG, and how different they felt to anything from Uncharted - the moments when camera perspective and location and AI and simulation all cohere into something bigger. 

 

This bit I recorded, for example. I pretty much knew what was going to happen here (because it was widely trailed) but there's a moment near the end of the video where I turn my back on Trico, and he does something to get my attention - it just about destroyed me. All of that could probably have happened in an Uncharted, with Sully instead of Trico. But I don't think it would have had that terrible sense of immediacy - that feeling that 'this is all actually happening right now, and it's happening to me' - even though I know that's what Uncharted is trying to do a lot of the time. Perhaps I just felt more for my dogbird friend than I will ever feel for a grouchy man in a Hawaiian shirt.

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...and done.

 

That was a beautiful experience. I came to grips with a lot of the shitty things about it while playing, but that doesn't make them less shitty. That said, I absolutely loved the game. I just don't think I can ever recommend it to anyone without MASSIVE caveats. My girlfriend was watching some of it and was pretty enthralled, but I can't tell her to give it a try because she's not a person who plays many games and I don't think she'd be able to (for example) recognize when the reason that progress is happening is that the AI is caught in a loop or the physics are hitching up rather than her doing something wrong. It's a game that I would love to show to non-gamers, but can't because so much of the bullshit that you need to get around is something that you need to have been playing games for a long time to recognize. Infuriating, in a way.

 

That said, the sequence where

the armoured Trico and my own were wrestling and I was trying to find ways to help it

was probably one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've had in a while, and the fact that the game forces you to stick around and actually deal with the aftermath is powerful in its own right as well. Such a beautiful, powerful, poignant, fucking busted-ass game.

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Put me in the camp that didn't see many bugs (or any that I can strongly remember really). Frame rate problems sure and obviously camera problems but I've played way too many video games to have an experience significantly ruined by a camera. I think I'm very forgiving of a lot of technical things generally, especially when I'm on board with what the art is trying to achieve. I don't think Guardian is a complete success but it is nevertheless an incredible experience. The moment-to-moment gameplay might have been the weakest of Team Ico's games but the art direction, story, and overall aesthetic is the strongest for me. There are a number of scenes in that game that will stick with me for sure, especially the ending.

 

For those that have finished, here's a bit of story analysis I thought was really interesting:

Spoiler

 

 

Also how incredibly sick were the scenes that took place outside the valley? Makes me dream of what Team Ico could do with a better technical framework and bagfuls of money. Platinum collabo anyone?

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I thought that story hypothesis was interesting, but by comparison to other story analysis videos for other games it wasn't particularly well supported. The example that comes to mind is VaatiVidya on YouTube who makes similar videos about the Souls games - his videos are full of references illustrating how and why he came up with his theories. By contrast there are only a couple of brief spots in that video where the author mentions anything in the game that gave him the impression he's talking about, and much of it (like the people being split into two souls) doesn't appear to originate from anywhere in particular. Also I find it very hard to buy into the idea that the Trico are constructs, partly because of how strongly the robotic armour suits are contrasted with the organic, vulnerable and emotional Trico, but also partly because the entire intro video to the game is of a taxonomy document that seems to imply the Trico is another natural species.

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Thought this was probably the best place to post the Digital Foundry tech analysis of the new Shadow of the Colossus remake.

 

I didn't realise it was a ground-up remake. It seems they've taken some delicate liberties with world geometry (moving trees, adding bumps and outcrops and detail) to modernise the game, but otherwise it looks very faithful. There's something about the foggy, bloom-esque light in the original which I personally think they could have captured more authentically - the 'fog' in the forest, for example, is scaled back dramatically and it really alters the atmosphere. It's not 'bad' - the foliage and the clarity are beautiful, but the tone is different and this game is all about tone.

 

Regardless, the video shows the top-class job they've done, and it makes me want a PS4 Pro just to play ICO and this and Last Guardian.

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On 1/30/2018 at 9:41 AM, dartmonkey said:

Regardless, the video shows the top-class job they've done, and it makes me want a PS4 Pro just to play ICO and this and Last Guardian.

 

Same here - I already have a PS4, I'd just really like to see how good it looks in 4K/HDR. Unfortunately I don't have a 4K TV either so this will probably be postponed indefinitely until my current TV breaks. (This is a weird thing which is stopping me buying a lot of new PS4 games right now; I decide it'll look much better on the Pro, but I don't want to get a Pro, so I say to the game: no.)

 

It's interesting to me that there's no option in this remaster to swap between old/new grafix, as they've done with the new versions of Halo, Grim Fandango, etc. Perhaps that would have been an overwhelming technical challenge. Still, I think it's this, combined with the lack of backwards compatibility* for the older versions of the game, which makes it feel like Sony saying 'this is the definitive edition of the game now'. I have mixed feelings about that. I would like to have the option to feel what that game felt like on the PS2. But it's clear that Bluepoint have once again done a smashing job on this remaster.

 

* - Apart from playing the PS3 HD edition through Playstation Now, but...

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Yep, I've got a 4K TV on the list this year, but I just got a new laptop so it's going to be a while.

 

It's tough because the original game was incredibly ambitious to the point where the PS2 couldn't handle it. I guess some people might argue that dropped frames actually helped convey the vastness of the world - 'wow it's so epic, the console can't take it, man!' - like how slowdown caused by explosions sometimes felt cool, in a Hollywood way. I don't think I agree with that but the original game worked with its limitations cleverly.

 

At least multiple options exist: if you're a stickler, there's always the original; PS3 cleans up the fuzziness somewhat; PS4 reimagines it in 4K. Interestingly, USGamer have since published an article criticising the changes and the loss of atmosphere - they highlight the fog and lighting but go further. It's definitely different.

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On 2/1/2018 at 3:20 AM, marginalgloss said:

It's interesting to me that there's no option in this remaster to swap between old/new grafix, as they've done with the new versions of Halo, Grim Fandango, etc. Perhaps that would have been an overwhelming technical challenge. Still, I think it's this, combined with the lack of backwards compatibility* for the older versions of the game, which makes it feel like Sony saying 'this is the definitive edition of the game now'. I have mixed feelings about that. I would like to have the option to feel what that game felt like on the PS2. But it's clear that Bluepoint have once again done a smashing job on this remaster.

 

The reason that it was possible in those other games that you mentioned was that the old game was still running underneath and it really was just a graphical pass being done. With Shadow, they rebuilt the entire game, so there is no PS2 original behind the scenes that they can switch to.

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Some people are complaining that Shadow doesn't have the same ethereal graphical quality as the original release. And after seeing some side by side screenshots I agree, it is really stepping back from the original vision and giving it an 'Uncharted'-like feeling instead. 

 

 

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I saw this video

 

 

but honestly people, why the hell do we need to post about shadow of the colossus in a thread called "The Last Guardian"??

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