juv3nal

Journey (thatgamecompany's next thing)

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handful of screens over at NeoGAF

It doesn't really give an impression of what it would play like, but it's pretty at any rate.

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Instantly more interesting then anything I saw today.

Neat, hope it's fun.

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My first impressions were "damn, that looks like Love". Then I read the bit about it. Damn, that sounds like Love.

In typical internet jumping to conclusions manner, SUE THEM ESKIL.

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I like the look and feel of this one better than that of Love. Uniformly applying a crazy fuzzy paint daubs filter to everything in your pastel world is a stupid way to add visual interest to a bland, Quake-like art direction. I want to like the way Love looks, but I don't. :fart: Journey looks a lot more considered.

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What's love got to do, got to do with it?

I don't really get it. What's the goal/quest?

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Oh man, there's some straight up crazy in the comments here courtesy of one Adam Coate

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Oh man, there's some straight up crazy in the comments here courtesy of one Adam Coate

Adam Coate is the gift that keeps on giving

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Like some other commenters there, I'm not sure that's the real Adam Coate and not someone trolling with his name. Not entirely implausible though; he does bring some quality crazy to comment threads.

The idea of TGC sitting down and deciding on Flytrap as excellent inspirational material is pretty hilarious :tup:

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I never actually saw his game, before the previous post, but I did witness his total meltdown. No way that the Adam Coate in that thread is for real. Funny though. :grin:

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That comments thread is great. He played it well, but I'm still surprised the troll was as successful as he was. "Adam Coate" is for the moment a meme (and a good one at that), even if Adam Coate isn't. He still seems to post on Gamasutra, which at least means he's got balls. Had I so embarrassed myself I'd have never gone near the internet again, or at least changed my name to something less tainted, like Josef Goebbels.

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What exactly did the dude do to make himself the butt of the internet?

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They should rename themselves to ThatScreenSaverCompany. I feel like I'm having a flashback to the days of multimedia in the 90s. Flower was like a tech demo for some grass middleware, and Journey looks like it has no point beyond exploration.

Multiplayer is going to totally break the illusion, and from that interview it looks like they're not very familiar with how people behave. You're going to be enjoying your hike through the barrens, only to stumble upon a Chris Remo trying to climb an incline that's just a little too steep, but can be strafed walked. Will you sing out to this individual, or just continue your magical journey through the sands?

Personally I feel like these guys don't play games at all. They create experiences that other people have explored exhaustively. I get the feeling that he doesn't want to talk about the game for the opposite reason that he claims. If it truly was an experience that couldn't be summed up by words, he could talk endlessly. The truth is their games are just as vulnerable as others to reduction, if not more. They just don't want you to spoil the experience by being told what it is.

A lot of people that were big on Flower, did a lot of speculating that it would be great for a non-gamer. The theory being that the simple mechanics and absence of common game concepts would translate better to people who didn't grow up playing video games. The problem is that doesn't seem to happen. Non-gamers seem to be more comfortable with goals and mechanics than openess. A video game to them is like a puzzler from the newspaper, give them the basic rules and goals and they're happy, but ask them to immerse themselves in a world with no direction and they're confused. John Davison had a great segment on What They Play, with his wife about Flower, and I had a similar experience with my family. It's just anecdotal evidence, but I haven't heard of anybody but a hard core gamer gush over Flower.

They should just come out and say what this game is. It's a boiled down experience of the sense of exploration and wonderment of being immersed in an MMO-style world.

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I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. On the one hand you seem to be saying "They don't make proper games", and on the other you seem to be saying their only audience are people who play "proper games".

Various members of TGC have said said in public, several times, that they're not going for the same kind of hard fun you get from a well designed traditional Video game. Personally, I think it's great that a commercial company can find the freedom to explore game design like that, rather than doing this.

I've only met Jenova really briefly, but I did spend an hour or so once discussing game design with Robin Hunicke and she's super smart. What they do is far more than a reinvention of 90s multimedia projects. I've also sat people who don't play games down with Flower; they immediately found it accessible, loved it, and were perfectly fine with figuring out what to do next at any point.

I don't mean to come over all fanboyish. I like Flower, but it's not the kind of thing I'd sink 80 hours into, whereas things like Fallout 3 are. I just think you're really catastrophically selling TGC short.

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Forbin laying down the smack! I'm guessing you didn't enjoy Flower then? :grin:

I thought that Flower was a very effective piece, which I enjoyed greatly. In terms of mechanics, it's Video game logic (shoot the red barrel to make it explode), I think. Which is in part, I'm guessing, why non-gamers can't seem to make sense of it.

In any case, those are a lot of assumptions based on a couple of screenshots and some interviews with Jenova Chen. I'm also not entirely sure what the point you're trying to make is.

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My issue with TGC is that people (and the designers themselves) seem to think they're doing something profound. But I honestly don't believe they're doing anything new, or even more polished than other developers. They act like keeping their scope small is art. But the problem is they're a small company, so it's not like they have the throughput to make that focus pay off in a way that's earth shattering. What they make is good for what it is, good for how many people made it, good for how much it costs, but not really good.

It's like comparing scene in a Pixar film, with a selected frame from that scene, and then claiming that because you have the time to focus on that one frame and see it's depth that it's more beautiful than the full scene.

I don't object to what they create, but I do object to people acting like it's the greatest thing ever created. I wish more people would see the craftsmanship that goes into every day games. If you didn't have people shooting you from every angle in the Favella in Modern Warfare 2, you might be impressed by the architecture that went into that map.

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If you know of other games that play anything like Flower, then please point me in their direction!

I'm not suggesting Flower is the most amazing thing ever made, but it is fairly unique in my experience and very relaxing while still remaining fun.

I wasn't that interested in flOw though.

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It's just anecdotal evidence, but I haven't heard of anybody but a hard core gamer gush over Flower.

That's understandable. Flower is neat because what it does is something so few games do. But you need to be something of a hard core gamer to even understand that it's something that few games do (and to consequently find that appealing).

They should just come out and say what this game is. It's a boiled down experience of the sense of exploration and wonderment of being immersed in an MMO-style world.

I think they have said exactly that if you look at the various articles online. Only minus the MMO part. From what I gather, it's a kind of filtered multiplayer experience so that while there may be massively many people online at once, you're only ever going to encounter at most 1 other person at a time.

But I honestly don't believe they're doing anything new, or even more polished than other developers.

Flow was kind of wonky, but in Flower, I can't think of a better implementation of motion control on the PS3. Obviously this is going eventually be done better with Move and whatnot, but it still counts as being "more polished than other developers" in my book.

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Huh?

Forbin, sounds like you're responding to hyperbole from one end of the spectrum, with hyperbole of the other end.

I mean, really?

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