Despite being nominated for numerous awards and even winning Game of the Year in 2018, the creator of God of War, David Jaffe, is not a huge fan of the new direction the series has gone in. Jaffe himself hasn’t worked on these new God of War games, but thinks that they’re not staying true to the spirit of the character and the franchise. The creator noted that if developers want to pour their life experiences into their work, they should do it with new IPs and characters.
I like the 2018 GOW and first Spider-Man, but just couldn’t get into the sequels. I guess they’re just so similar I felt like I was done and didn’t want more. Horizon I never liked because I hate the combat. I also liked the first Last of Us, but didn’t want to play as someone I hated in the sequel.
I thought the story in Horizon was fantastic. I’m a Sci-fi nerd, so that all hit home with me. The second game, not so much though. It was like they didn’t quite get why the story of the first game worked.
I have problems with God of War though. The story feels like an attempt to copy what The Last of Us did with Ellie and Joel, but without really understanding why their dynamic worked.
I have a lot of complaints about the HFW plot but the biggest one is the juvenile way they handled Tilda and Sylens in their capacity as prime movers. Aloy herself is a mature character but the story around her takes place in a moral scape of the world as seen by a fifteen year old.
Sylens goes through the motions of his scheme and keeps the same smug “I’m above it all and don’t owe anyone any explanations” attitude, through setback after setback and reality check after reality check. It seemed like the authors were poised to deliver a harsh discussion about ends vs means, how the world isn’t a magical fairy tale and sometimes something important needs to be done that requires dirty politics and won’t be magically solved by the one pure hero pulling the sword out of the rock; but then they squandered it completely and went back to ‘yeah all glory to the chosen one’. Most frustratingly they had their angle right there, already baked in: Aloy fails the first 7 times she tries to do anything, so if Sylens mocked her “this is the real world, you don’t just go ahead and solve things, Hero”, she could legitimately retort “idk, have you tried”. Instead they just don’t have this discussion and go back and forth “screw you I hate you” “behave, girl” again and again in a flat loop.
Tilda was made in the mold of this cringey moral that’s all the rage now about how everyone’s an abuser and when people say “I love you” they really mean “I own you” (as also seen in Dragon Age: Absolution). It reads like someone’s pent up frustration about their controlling parents, like in his nightmares the person who created this plotline sees his mother taking to the air in that floating exoskeleton and shouting amid a rain of guided missiles “you’re going to college and that’s final, submit or perish”.
I feel like HFW kind of lost the plot when it introduced the Far Zeniths. They just didn’t work for some reason. I kind of wish if they were going that route, they had been the descendants of the people who left for Far Zenith and they had a better reason for wanting Gaia and Earth or something, so they weren’t just cartoonishly evil.
I think the main problem with the world of Horizon is that the most interesting event in their world has already happened.
The story of Zero Dawn worked so well because it is the interwoven tale of a young woman who sets out to discover why she was cast out of her village at birth, and the almost archaeological unraveling of why the world is the way it is. When you finally piece together both the plot is almost already at it’s climax, and you are left with both the understanding of why it must be Aloy who stops the new threat to the world, and the motivation to do so.
But that doesn’t work for a sequel. The format of Zero Dawn relies on exposition about the very nature of the world, that’s why the main quest has a bunch of missions that more or less boil down to walking around an old facility and listening to recordings.
How are you going to translate that into a new sequel? Either you’ve got sequels planned already, which I find unlikely given what Forbidden West amounted to, or you need to try to invent more world building and plot. It seemed quite clear to me that Guerillas writers for Forbidden West didn’t know their own world as well as I had assumed they did. The “how did we get here” plot in Zero Dawn revolved around a small cast characters, who, with the exception of one, were all both very neuanced and strongly invested in their own plot. The Zeniths of Forbidden West come across almost as inverse Deus Ex Machina, characters who fly in from the moon with what seems like no other reason to mess up the plot than “We had to find something”.
It’s the reason why I’ve been holding off on getting a PS5, and recently decided I just won’t. The only thing that has come out recently that tempts me is BG3, but I’m past buying a console for a single game; I’ll just play it on PC.
Eh, it depends more on what you’re used to. I personally hate using a mouse and keyboard and greatly prefer a controller, and it’s not that different from other RPG games that use a controller interface. I’m used to a wheel interface from games like Mass Effect, so it’s more intuitive for me than a mouse and keyboard.
First, I think its the first game of this type to have any successful control scheme for a controller at all, so I think it deserves accolades for making it happen at all.
Second, while I still mostly play in traditional mouse and keyboard, I am an old man now, having played the original BG as a teen when it came out. Having the controller as an option is huge for me when I am in pain.
Anecdotally, my partner never played these games growing up and she fucking hates trying to play with mouse and keyboard. She says it feels clunky and slow and confusing.
Is it the best? No. Is it an excellent effort? Yes, because it actually works.
The fact that a game with a ruleset as complex as DnD manages to have a couch co-op option and gamepad controls built-in is an achievement, imho.
Funny thing is, I realize now there’s multiple franchises I’ve stopped for gameplay reasons, not story.
In God of War, not only was I contending with an offset thumbstick that I didn’t feel like replacing, but I was stuck on a fight that I didn’t seem to be geared for, and was getting pummeled.
Last of Us, I got stuck on some stealth section against enemies that didn’t seem to behave as the tutorial suggested.
Demon’s Souks would just be leagues beyond me anyway, so no chance there.
If you already own a decent PC, most of these games have already been released there, although later than on PS5. Only ones missing from that list so far are GoW: Ragnarok and Spider-Man 2.
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I just can’t with this generation of PlayStation games. Couldn’t finish god of war, Horizon or spiderman. They look good but the game and story sucks
I like the 2018 GOW and first Spider-Man, but just couldn’t get into the sequels. I guess they’re just so similar I felt like I was done and didn’t want more. Horizon I never liked because I hate the combat. I also liked the first Last of Us, but didn’t want to play as someone I hated in the sequel.
I thought the story in Horizon was fantastic. I’m a Sci-fi nerd, so that all hit home with me. The second game, not so much though. It was like they didn’t quite get why the story of the first game worked.
I have problems with God of War though. The story feels like an attempt to copy what The Last of Us did with Ellie and Joel, but without really understanding why their dynamic worked.
I have a lot of complaints about the HFW plot but the biggest one is the juvenile way they handled Tilda and Sylens in their capacity as prime movers. Aloy herself is a mature character but the story around her takes place in a moral scape of the world as seen by a fifteen year old.
Sylens goes through the motions of his scheme and keeps the same smug “I’m above it all and don’t owe anyone any explanations” attitude, through setback after setback and reality check after reality check. It seemed like the authors were poised to deliver a harsh discussion about ends vs means, how the world isn’t a magical fairy tale and sometimes something important needs to be done that requires dirty politics and won’t be magically solved by the one pure hero pulling the sword out of the rock; but then they squandered it completely and went back to ‘yeah all glory to the chosen one’. Most frustratingly they had their angle right there, already baked in: Aloy fails the first 7 times she tries to do anything, so if Sylens mocked her “this is the real world, you don’t just go ahead and solve things, Hero”, she could legitimately retort “idk, have you tried”. Instead they just don’t have this discussion and go back and forth “screw you I hate you” “behave, girl” again and again in a flat loop.
Tilda was made in the mold of this cringey moral that’s all the rage now about how everyone’s an abuser and when people say “I love you” they really mean “I own you” (as also seen in Dragon Age: Absolution). It reads like someone’s pent up frustration about their controlling parents, like in his nightmares the person who created this plotline sees his mother taking to the air in that floating exoskeleton and shouting amid a rain of guided missiles “you’re going to college and that’s final, submit or perish”.
I feel like HFW kind of lost the plot when it introduced the Far Zeniths. They just didn’t work for some reason. I kind of wish if they were going that route, they had been the descendants of the people who left for Far Zenith and they had a better reason for wanting Gaia and Earth or something, so they weren’t just cartoonishly evil.
I think the main problem with the world of Horizon is that the most interesting event in their world has already happened.
The story of Zero Dawn worked so well because it is the interwoven tale of a young woman who sets out to discover why she was cast out of her village at birth, and the almost archaeological unraveling of why the world is the way it is. When you finally piece together both the plot is almost already at it’s climax, and you are left with both the understanding of why it must be Aloy who stops the new threat to the world, and the motivation to do so.
But that doesn’t work for a sequel. The format of Zero Dawn relies on exposition about the very nature of the world, that’s why the main quest has a bunch of missions that more or less boil down to walking around an old facility and listening to recordings.
How are you going to translate that into a new sequel? Either you’ve got sequels planned already, which I find unlikely given what Forbidden West amounted to, or you need to try to invent more world building and plot. It seemed quite clear to me that Guerillas writers for Forbidden West didn’t know their own world as well as I had assumed they did. The “how did we get here” plot in Zero Dawn revolved around a small cast characters, who, with the exception of one, were all both very neuanced and strongly invested in their own plot. The Zeniths of Forbidden West come across almost as inverse Deus Ex Machina, characters who fly in from the moon with what seems like no other reason to mess up the plot than “We had to find something”.
It’s the reason why I’ve been holding off on getting a PS5, and recently decided I just won’t. The only thing that has come out recently that tempts me is BG3, but I’m past buying a console for a single game; I’ll just play it on PC.
BG3 really wants to be played with a mouse and keyboard. Using a controller is clunky AF.
Running around the world is better with a controller, but interacting with it is better with M + K.
Eh, it depends more on what you’re used to. I personally hate using a mouse and keyboard and greatly prefer a controller, and it’s not that different from other RPG games that use a controller interface. I’m used to a wheel interface from games like Mass Effect, so it’s more intuitive for me than a mouse and keyboard.
I mildly disagree.
First, I think its the first game of this type to have any successful control scheme for a controller at all, so I think it deserves accolades for making it happen at all.
Second, while I still mostly play in traditional mouse and keyboard, I am an old man now, having played the original BG as a teen when it came out. Having the controller as an option is huge for me when I am in pain.
Anecdotally, my partner never played these games growing up and she fucking hates trying to play with mouse and keyboard. She says it feels clunky and slow and confusing.
Is it the best? No. Is it an excellent effort? Yes, because it actually works.
The fact that a game with a ruleset as complex as DnD manages to have a couch co-op option and gamepad controls built-in is an achievement, imho.
Good tho know, thanks. I wonder how that will work in couch-coop.
Funny thing is, I realize now there’s multiple franchises I’ve stopped for gameplay reasons, not story.
In God of War, not only was I contending with an offset thumbstick that I didn’t feel like replacing, but I was stuck on a fight that I didn’t seem to be geared for, and was getting pummeled.
Last of Us, I got stuck on some stealth section against enemies that didn’t seem to behave as the tutorial suggested.
Demon’s Souks would just be leagues beyond me anyway, so no chance there.
I thought the same thing. All i vould think of is: man, i should really like this, but i don’t
If you already own a decent PC, most of these games have already been released there, although later than on PS5. Only ones missing from that list so far are GoW: Ragnarok and Spider-Man 2.