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RatHat posted:I don't think you guys understand what ludonarrative dissonance means. It doesn't matter if the main character is morally justified or not. Nobody's arguing that either; if anything people are kinda arguing the opposite - Nathan Drake isn't Superman or Batman where it's supposed to be a big deal that nobody dies. It's not that sort of story, and it's weird that it's only Uncharted where people expect it to be.
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Dec 11, 2014 07:39
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Choco1980 posted:Reminds me of a conversation I had years ago when a friend was telling me about the end of City of Villains, which he played like crazy and I didn't. He was telling me how the final mission has you apparently go forward in time to fight an older version of the big bad and then take proof of your win back to him in the present to prove his inevitable loss? and I part way through his story ended up coming up with a much cooler ending he was mad at me over--I thought it'd be cool if the big bad was revealed to be future-you, as your power creep continues and you ARE a villain too. The time travel elements of CoV did paint sort of implied futures for your character. (I'm not spoilering these, because the game's dead anyway) Early-ish in the game there's a story arc that deals with a time traveler from a future that you blew to smithereens; he's come back in time to team up with his present-self to kill you. He turns up again in the arc that you're talking about, and you do get to see what that future is. It varies depending on the contact you took to get that mission, but 'power creep' is right: you either shook up enough that everyone went to war and killed each other, detonated a doomsday weapon in a gambit to take over the world, or had one final fight against the big main villain that resulted in mutual destruction and a world of ghosts. Since nobody wanted any of those futures to come to pass, they instead opt for the plan you were told about. Far later in the game's lifespan, another mission introduced a different version of your future. In this one you grow more powerful than God, kill literally every major boss of the endgame without breaking a sweat, and then send someone back in time to help you secure that power.
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Dec 11, 2014 08:23
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My favorite case of this was in the original Fallout 3. Super mutants were completely immune to radiation, and you could have a super mutant companion, Fawkes, with you. At the end of the game you have to go into an irradiated chamber and save the world. But the radiation will kill you, and you are offered the choice to let your companion go in and die for you. But if you have Fawkes with you, the game just outright refuses, with Fawkes saying IT IS YOUR DESTINY They patched this out in New Vegas IIRC.
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Dec 11, 2014 11:33
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Hate Fibration posted:My favorite case of this was in the original Fallout 3. Super mutants were completely immune to radiation, and you could have a super mutant companion, Fawkes, with you. At the end of the game you have to go into an irradiated chamber and save the world. But the radiation will kill you, and you are offered the choice to let your companion go in and die for you. But if you have Fawkes with you, the game just outright refuses, with Fawkes saying IT IS YOUR DESTINY You mean broken steel or whatever? You could also have the robotic companion who also refused.
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Dec 11, 2014 11:37
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Full Battle Rattle posted:You mean broken steel or whatever? You could also have the robotic companion who also refused. The Ghoul, too! Broken Steel lets you send in any of them to do the job, but that DLC itself declares the radiation to be a non-lethal amount anyway. EDIT: Game still calls you a coward for sending in a radiation-immune companion, though.
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Dec 11, 2014 11:43
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Wandle Cax posted:How about he kills more people than Rambo, before lunchtime and without breaking a sweat, all the while acting like it ain't no thing and casually quipping away. And nobody ever mentions it apart from one cursory mention from one of the bad guys at the end of 2. The character himself (likable treasure hunter) not meshing with the player as the character (being a hardened mass-killer) is indeed what ludonarrative dissonance means. So I think the argument can be definitely be made for Nathan Drake being a case of this. Pretty much. Uncharted is one of the few games where this has ever bothered me. There's just such a massive disconnect between the way Drake acts in the cutscenes and the way the player MUST act if they want to complete the game. They never sell the treasure hunter aspect through the playable sections at all, apart from some 3rd grade level puzzles, the player is pretty much just a killer. Indiana Jones is a bad comparison because his body count is way the gently caress lower and his enemies are literally Nazis.
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Dec 11, 2014 11:44
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Hate Fibration posted:My favorite case of this was in the original Fallout 3. Super mutants were completely immune to radiation, and you could have a super mutant companion, Fawkes, with you. At the end of the game you have to go into an irradiated chamber and save the world. But the radiation will kill you, and you are offered the choice to let your companion go in and die for you. But if you have Fawkes with you, the game just outright refuses, with Fawkes saying IT IS YOUR DESTINY More recent Bethesda RPGs are always pretty bad about the illusion of choice thing. I know in Skyrim there are several instances where it seems like you might have the option to make a choice but the game railroads you into the "right" one at the last second with some dumb excuse.
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Dec 11, 2014 11:50
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Cleretic posted:The Ghoul, too! Broken Steel lets you send in any of them to do the job, but that DLC itself declares the radiation to be a non-lethal amount anyway. It's amazing that the game considers you a coward for giving the job to someone for whom the task poses zero risk at all. If you made someone who was just as vulnerable to radiation as you are do it, yeah, then you could justifiably be called a coward. There's making a sacrifice for the greater good, and then there's what the game seemed to expect of you which is just killing yourself for no good reason. That's called suicide. The game advocated pointless, meaningless suicide.
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Dec 11, 2014 13:10
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Slime posted:It's amazing that the game considers you a coward for giving the job to someone for whom the task poses zero risk at all. If you made someone who was just as vulnerable to radiation as you are do it, yeah, then you could justifiably be called a coward. There's making a sacrifice for the greater good, and then there's what the game seemed to expect of you which is just killing yourself for no good reason. That's called suicide. The game advocated pointless, meaningless suicide. It's especially weird and dumb considering that not long before that, you send Fawkes in to get the GECK from a super-irradiated area. It's even more survivable than the ending, with a ton of chems and a good radiation suit.
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Dec 11, 2014 13:13
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The Moon Monster posted:Indiana Jones is a bad comparison because his body count is way the gently caress lower and his enemies are literally Nazis. Not for lack of trying.
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Dec 11, 2014 15:27
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If action movie conventions required a 10 minute shootout with 25 dudes to make the movie exciting and fun to watch, Spielberg would have had Indiana Jones slaughtering dozens of Nazis. They don't, they can be more concise, but action games do require longer encounters with more obstacles to achieve the same level of challenge and excitement. It's not a literal body count, it's a stylized, distorted reality.
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Dec 11, 2014 16:10
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The thematic elements in Drake's Uncharted are very problematic
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Dec 11, 2014 17:14
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Hate Fibration posted:My favorite case of this was in the original Fallout 3. Super mutants were completely immune to radiation, and you could have a super mutant companion, Fawkes, with you. At the end of the game you have to go into an irradiated chamber and save the world. But the radiation will kill you, and you are offered the choice to let your companion go in and die for you. But if you have Fawkes with you, the game just outright refuses, with Fawkes saying IT IS YOUR DESTINY Isn't the last room like, hilariously pathetic in terms of radiation, but as soon as you press magic game win button, you instantly keel over dead?
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Dec 11, 2014 18:37
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Alabaster White posted:Isn't the last room like, hilariously pathetic in terms of radiation, but as soon as you press magic game win button, you instantly keel over dead? It's some pretty serious radiation once you get up to the button, depending on your rad resistance. They may have changed it after Broken Steel, though. Think I only played through that once.
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Dec 11, 2014 18:46
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cp91886 posted:If action movie conventions required a 10 minute shootout with 25 dudes to make the movie exciting and fun to watch, Spielberg would have had Indiana Jones slaughtering dozens of Nazis. They don't, they can be more concise, but action games do require longer encounters with more obstacles to achieve the same level of challenge and excitement. It's not a literal body count, it's a stylized, distorted reality. Absolutely, but all the brutal killing still clangs against the dude's characterization. It's something you accept because you get the conventions of video games, not because it isn't weird or uncomfortable as a narrative The Moon Monster posted:Some Naughty Dog bigwig recently addressed this by pretty much saying "what were you expecting, non-poo poo writing in a videogame?" Inzombiac posted:Which is a bad argument to begin with. Just because it is a game doesn't mean that it must be poorly written. You're starting to figure out why it's not that simple, right? In a game where you shoot 1000 men to death the story either has to be explicitly about shooting 1000 men to death, or totally removed from what you do as the player. There's a small contingent of japanese action games like Revengeance where the stories are about dehumanizing yourself and facing to bloodshed, but even then they quickly run out of things to say without having to reference some real-world context that distances the story's treatment of violence from what the player really does.
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Dec 11, 2014 18:54
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all this violence in video games has to come to an end some time i tell you, we've got all these fakemen not taking the murder of hundreds if not thousands of other fakemen very seriously at all and i for one find that oh so very troubling to me. if nathaniel drake can't even take him blowing apart 3 dudes with a well tossed grenade and then punching a dude so hard in the balls he drops extra ammo for the magnum he was carrying with the kind of weight and gravitas it has in the REAL WORLD i just can't see myself enjoying this video game where you shoot men while doing parkour
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Dec 11, 2014 20:08
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Okay, why don't we move on from Uncharted and just agree to disagree? Mass Effect When you compare the responses characters can give to what Shepard does or say, a few characters come off as schizophrenic. Sometimes this can be excused as someone just being antagonistic towards Shepard (such as Mr.  ) but at one point if you play around with dialogue choices you can get Captain Anderson to firmly state that Humanity needs the Citadel Council, and then 30 seconds later argue that Humanity needs to look after itself with the same conviction.EDIT: Speaking of Mass Effect, has there ever been a game that had a moral choice system that reveals the writer has a really warped view of reality? Given how risk-adverse publishers are and how they rarely do anything that's actually controversial (as opposed to fake controversy: whoopee, you showed us the back of a naked woman  ) I might actually respect a game that let you go all Richard Rahl on a crowd of peaceful protesters and then laud you as a champion of good for doing so.
SirPhoebos has a new favorite as of 21:17 on Dec 11, 2014 |
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Dec 11, 2014 21:01
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Alabaster White posted:Isn't the last room like, hilariously pathetic in terms of radiation, but as soon as you press magic game win button, you instantly keel over dead? It's at least around 30 rads a second, which isn't exactly instantly fatal, but will kill you quickly if you just stand in it. Which you probably will because the prompts on the tiny buttons are super finicky.
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Dec 11, 2014 21:30
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SirPhoebos posted:Speaking of Mass Effect, has there ever been a game that had a moral choice system that reveals the writer has a really warped view of reality? Given how risk-adverse publishers are and how they rarely do anything that's actually controversial (as opposed to fake controversy: whoopee, you showed us the back of a naked woman I think there was some of this in Fallout 3. There's a town where two people are dressing up as a superhero and supervillain from an old comic book and battling each other, and at the end of it you can convince the survivor to either hang up their costume and be a normal person again (good) or keep up the good work and go out into the wasteland with their cool toys (bad). I never understood why I got evil Karma for telling the heavily armed "superhero" who clearly loved being a good guy and could more than take care of himself to keep it up and go fight real bad guys, you know, exactly like I was doing.
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Dec 11, 2014 21:34
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There was a thing in one of the KOTOR games where releasing poison gas gave you dark side points, but releasing more of it to kill faster was light side. Not a video game, but the Mage the Awakening RPG had raising zombies be a severe sin, despite this being the shtick of one of the character types. And despite said zombies explicitly having no soul that's being tortured or whatever, they're literally a walking corpse, like a flesh robot. In a further source book the writer for that piece doubled down saying "that corpse was someone's grandma, that's just wrong and icky" without explaining why at all. Luckily the upcoming second edition looks like it's done away with this.
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Dec 11, 2014 22:16
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bewilderment posted:There was a thing in one of the KOTOR games where releasing poison gas gave you dark side points, but releasing more of it to kill faster was light side. And the cadaver that some med students are poking at was a person once. The difference, I suppose, is consent. If you got someone to sign over the rights to their corpse after they died it might not be considered to be so bad. It's pretty silly that zombies are considered automatically evil no matter what, though. Like you said, no souls are being eternally tormented. It's just a sack of meat. Though honestly, using human corpses seems kinda silly. If we're talking mindless meatsacks, animals would probably do whatever you're trying to get done with human zombies better, and people are going to ask way less questions about where you got the body from.
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Dec 11, 2014 22:21
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Slime posted:And the cadaver that some med students are poking at was a person once. The difference, I suppose, is consent. If you got someone to sign over the rights to their corpse after they died it might not be considered to be so bad. There's an early quest in Planescape: Torment about a guy who does exactly that.
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Dec 11, 2014 22:42
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Kellsterik posted:I never understood why I got evil Karma for telling the heavily armed "superhero" who clearly loved being a good guy and could more than take care of himself to keep it up and go fight real bad guys, you know, exactly like I was doing. Wasn't this because they were kind of incompetent and delusional and you were more or less knowingly handing them a death sentence? iirc if you do the solution you're describing, their corpses appear somewhere and you can loot them.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:01
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I just remembered a better example from Mass Effect: When you get to the part where you decide what to do with the Rachni queen, one of you squad members says that you should free it while the other says you have to destroy it. But only two potential squad-mates are consistent in their view points (Liara will always want to free it, and Wrex always wants to kill it). The other four? Oh, they don't seem married to the one side of the genocide debate or the other. Much better that both sides have equal advocacy. 
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Dec 11, 2014 23:48
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:I hate when people level this at Uncharted like Indiana Jones never just loving killed dudes in cold blood. Drake's got the higher kill count probably, but feeding a dude into a rock crusher never stopped anyone from accepting Jones as a force for good. Check out that scene again, the guy gets caught in the rock crusher and starts screaming so Jones tries to pull him out. He fails obviously. I dispute that comparison. It doesn't really work. Drake kills thousands, and he does so often in an attempt to line his own wallet, sure the ending of the games feature him realizing the global implications of some dangerous artefact and vowing to save the world, but it doesn't negate the sheer amount of massacres he's committed. The dissonance occurs in a number of cutscenes. In the first Uncharted game, some guy who's name I forget but is leader of the pirates complains that his men are being "massacred", now, when I first played this I just assumed he was referring to Drake but it soon became clear he was referring to something else even though Drake is clearly killing way more people than anyone else Also, both Uncharted 1 and 3 feature a villain being imperilled in a cutscene and Drake bravely trying to save them, this stands at odds with the gameplay in which Drake just murders everyone he sees.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:18
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Alouicious posted:all this violence in video games has to come to an end some time i tell you, we've got all these fakemen not taking the murder of hundreds if not thousands of other fakemen very seriously at all and i for one find that oh so very troubling to me. if nathaniel drake can't even take him blowing apart 3 dudes with a well tossed grenade and then punching a dude so hard in the balls he drops extra ammo for the magnum he was carrying with the kind of weight and gravitas it has in the REAL WORLD i just can't see myself enjoying this video game where you shoot men while doing parkour No one here is complaining that there is too much violence in videogames, they're complaining that the amount of violence clashes with the narrative leading to ~*ludonarrative dissonance*~
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Dec 12, 2014 00:40
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The Moon Monster posted:No one here is complaining that there is too much violence in videogames, they're complaining that the amount of violence clashes with the narrative leading to ~*ludonarrative dissonance*~ ludonarrative dissonance is a rock stupid concept because if you the player doesn't give a poo poo about the millions of fake pixel men you're gunning down why should the character you are controlling.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:31
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Anyone who is getting upset at the killing in Uncharted is incredibly loving dense and managed to entirely miss the point of the Uncharted series, which is honestly kind of astounding considering it's supremely baldfaced about what it is from the get-go. Uncharted is a campy action film. It's a Clive Cussler novel. It's a deliberately pulpy idiot massacre-fest where hundreds upon hundreds of nameless goons eat painful and unnecessary deaths simply because they're in the way. If Naughty Dog got their way there would probably be more scenes where people fall into helicopter blades, or get kicked off ledges and impaled on poo poo. What kind of weird loving bizarro would do you need to live in to think that killing loads of people in Uncharted doesn't gel completely with the rest of the game? It's exactly what they were going for.
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Dec 12, 2014 09:01
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Alouicious posted:ludonarrative dissonance is a rock stupid concept because if you the player doesn't give a poo poo about the millions of fake pixel men you're gunning down why should the character you are controlling. You don't seem to understand this "rock stupid concept" at all, though. A game where you kill millions of people and the characters don't care (or even relish it) doesn't have ~*dissonance*~, the narrative and gameplay mesh with each other (Saints Row 3, for example). A game where you kill millions of cops, yet the cutscenes and narration completely ignore said killing and try to make drama about the shooting of a single one (GTA SA, for example) doesn't mesh and has dissonance. Hope this helps!
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Dec 12, 2014 09:07
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Can anyone think of good examples that aren't about the narrative being less wantonly violent than the gameplay? I find the concept of this dissonance interesting, but all the examples that come to mind of its presence or noteworthy absence have to do with the sort of extreme violence video games can contain.Brain In A Jar posted:Uncharted is a campy action film. It's a Clive Cussler novel. It's a deliberately pulpy idiot massacre-fest where hundreds upon hundreds of nameless goons eat painful and unnecessary deaths simply because they're in the way.
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Dec 12, 2014 09:33
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Dropbear posted:You don't seem to understand this "rock stupid concept" at all, though. A game where you kill millions of people and the characters don't care (or even relish it) doesn't have ~*dissonance*~, the narrative and gameplay mesh with each other (Saints Row 3, for example). A game where you kill millions of cops, yet the cutscenes and narration completely ignore said killing and try to make drama about the shooting of a single one (GTA SA, for example) doesn't mesh and has dissonance. Hope this helps! considering the hot topic has been about uncharted and how nate drake doesn't give a poo poo about all the people he's murdering my comment is actually more on topic than yours. Vavrek posted:Can anyone think of good examples that aren't about the narrative being less wantonly violent than the gameplay? I find the concept of this dissonance interesting, but all the examples that come to mind of its presence or noteworthy absence have to do with the sort of extreme violence video games can contain. no because it's pretty much the only thing the kind of pendants who care about ludonarrative dissonance can go on video games are stupid things that reward the player doing stupid things within them and when nerds run into something that makes them realize this they get mad, like getting mad at the ewoks in star wars 3. Alaois has a new favorite as of 09:57 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 09:55
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Vavrek posted:Can anyone think of good examples that aren't about the narrative being less wantonly violent than the gameplay? I find the concept of this dissonance interesting, but all the examples that come to mind of its presence or noteworthy absence have to do with the sort of extreme violence video games can contain. There was the talk earlier on about Fallout 3's ending. You've also got the perceived 'money woes' of GTA San Andreas and GTAIV, where the story keeps declaring you in need of money despite the fact that you're never not loaded. Probably the oldest one in the book is the classic RPG trope of 'you're the destined hero of fate, but gently caress if our kingdom's actually going to help you at all'. That one's so old that developers have actually started responding to it, be it by actually giving you that help or explaining why you aren't getting it. I've been playing Shin Megami Tensei IV recently, which does have this, but tries to justify it; the world's so full of egocentric demon hunters and cynical, downtrodden people that barely anybody even gives a poo poo if you're 'chosen by the gods' or whatever you claim to be. Still doesn't explain why the people that do care don't help much, though. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 10:04 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 10:00
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Alouicious posted:no because it's pretty much the only thing the kind of pendants who care about ludonarrative dissonance can go on weren't you the dude who lost his poo poo over Syndicate having you play as a bad guy
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Dec 12, 2014 10:22
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Vavrek posted:Can anyone think of good examples that aren't about the narrative being less wantonly violent than the gameplay? I find the concept of this dissonance interesting, but all the examples that come to mind of its presence or noteworthy absence have to do with the sort of extreme violence video games can contain. I'd count these "It's critical that you get to place B fast, but there's a bamboo fence on the way and you have to waste time jumping through 86 hoops to find the key for it instead of hacking it to pieces or climbing over it"-type comments as ludonarrative dissonance; the narrative doesn't make any sense with the "bamboo fence blocks you and is indestructible"-mechanics. Another annoying one was in Freespace 2 - basically, there's this huge bigass ship coming to ruin the protagonist's side of the conflict, and you have to destroy it's cannons so it won't wreck your flagship. It's pretty easy to destroy ALL of it's weapons, in fact, so that it can't even do anything except sit there and be pummeled to dust. After shooting this sitting duck, you get a debriefing going over how your flagship needs months of repairs because of the damage it sustained (it was at 100% health). Alouicious posted:considering the hot topic has been about uncharted and how nate drake doesn't give a poo poo about all the people he's murdering my comment is actually more on topic than yours. Not really, since the comment I quoted had nothing to do with Uncharted (I've never even played it). You seem p. mad about something "only pedants care about", tho. Dropbear has a new favorite as of 11:54 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 10:32
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I like bringing up ludonarrative dissonance in Uncharted because people really love Naughty Dog for some reason so someone is guaranteed to flip their poo poo when you mention it. To use a game I just finished as an example, Dragon Age Inquisition does a good job of giving your character a reason to kill hundreds of people. You're basically a superhero leading an army of justice to save the world from an army of death eaters. It's hokey as gently caress but the scale of the conflict makes your body count feel not out of place. The game does have plenty of ludonarrative dissonance, though; why is the leader of the Inquisition wasting his or her time picking herbs, mining iron or delivering ten units of goat meat to some hunter?
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Dec 12, 2014 11:47
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The early Assassin's Creed games were the last console games I played, and they reconciled heroism with sandbox mayhem pretty well: you're not playing as the assassins, you're playing as their simulations. So you can randomly kill innocent civilians and otherwise screw up, but that's just you not playing along with the simulation. Justifying the whole HUD with the frame story isn't that necessary, but that particular part is good.
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Dec 12, 2014 11:56
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:The early Assassin's Creed games were the last console games I played, and they reconciled heroism with sandbox mayhem pretty well: you're not playing as the assassins, you're playing as their simulations. So you can randomly kill innocent civilians and otherwise screw up, but that's just you not playing along with the simulation. Justifying the whole HUD with the frame story isn't that necessary, but that particular part is good. As much as people hate the modern day portions of the rear end Creed games, it really does help hand wave a lot of that little poo poo.
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Dec 12, 2014 17:48
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Bioshock Infinite has Ludonarrative Dissonace because you kill shittons of people, and this has nothing to do with the story, which is about Booker feeling bad for killing shittons of people. Wait a minute...
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Dec 12, 2014 18:06
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To bring back Deus Ex: Revolution, one thing that really bothered me was the boss fights. I tried to go 100% non-lethal for my first playthrough, and I was doing great until the first boss fight. I'm trying everything I can think of to take this guy down without killing him, to the point where I get so frustrated I look up a FAQ online. Turns out that boss, and indeed all the other bosses, are immune to any of the non-lethal weapons/moves. You have to kill them, and there's no way around it.
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Dec 12, 2014 18:25
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poptart_fairy posted:weren't you the dude who lost his poo poo over Syndicate having you play as a bad guy no? i made fun of people who thought you should have been a bad guy in syndicate because that's real dumb
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Dec 12, 2014 18:32
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