[QUOTE=spekter;50683041]This argument would stand if there weren't many, many other games with story as a focus that still have a wealth of gameplay in them.
The issue with Cage's games and with stuff like Gone Home is they would be much better suited to a novel or a movie.[/QUOTE]
I disagree with that notion, that those games should be novels or movies, these games fill a niche that other games can't nor are trying to fill in.
Simply put, the demographics for games with good stories like The Last of Us are very different from games like Life Is Strange, even thought you can argue that they both are story-focused.
Making this type of games with more gameplay depth completely removes their purpose for the niche/demographic they are targeting.
[QUOTE=bunguer;50683163]I disagree with that notion, that those games should be novels or movies, these games fill a niche that other games can't nor are trying to fill in.
Simply put, the demographics for games with good stories like The Last of Us are very different from games like Life Is Strange, even thought you can argue that they both are story-focused.
Making this type of games with more gameplay depth completely removes their purpose for the niche/demographic they are targeting.[/QUOTE]
Do you just blank out the existence of classic adventure games? Grim Fandango has a wonderful story, memorable characters at every turn, witty dialogue and plenty of engaging gameplay to boot.
I hate to become a broken record but Metal Gear Solid is arguably the pinnacle of evening out storytelling and gameplay. Taken to the extreme in MGS2 where nearly everything even gameplay elements and scenarios have a symbolic or thematic relevance that increases the depth of the story.
Looking to Cage's games like they're actually doing anything necessary makes no sense when there are games working towards similar goals and doing them in a much, much better fashion.
I'd be a lot more forgiving if he could actually write but he can neither design engaging gameplay nor write believable characters and consistent/interesting narratives. The money he's blowing on just doing the same shit every few years would be better put towards another developer.
He isn't progressive, he isn't doing anything new or interesting he's just trying to reiterate previous ideas in a different way and it's about as stagnant as what happened with COD.
[QUOTE=Blazedol;50682193]people keep saying he has a fetish but tbh i always thought he was just shit at writing suspense.[/QUOTE]
They are way too recurrent for them to just be the result of bad writing.
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;50684598]They are way too recurrent for them to just be the result of bad writing.[/QUOTE]
well, i say that because it seems a common tactic amateur writers use to build suspense/"character" for female characters is to put them in a situation where they're helpless (which mostly translates to being raped) so you can get on their side and sympathize with them more easily, and also to give you a shock, and sometimes this works but with dave it doesn't have a place in the story, but it still makes more sense to me that it's cage being cage, as his writing tends to have generally gratuitous scenes and be really, [I]really[/I] fucking repetitive, and that applies to pretty much every aspect of his stories.
[QUOTE=spekter;50683231]Do you just blank out the existence of classic adventure games? Grim Fandango has a wonderful story, memorable characters at every turn, witty dialogue and plenty of engaging gameplay to boot.
I hate to become a broken record but Metal Gear Solid is arguably the pinnacle of evening out storytelling and gameplay. Taken to the extreme in MGS2 where nearly everything even gameplay elements and scenarios have a symbolic or thematic relevance that increases the depth of the story.
Looking to Cage's games like they're actually doing anything necessary makes no sense when there are games working towards similar goals and doing them in a much, much better fashion.
I'd be a lot more forgiving if he could actually write but he can neither design engaging gameplay nor write believable characters and consistent/interesting narratives. The money he's blowing on just doing the same shit every few years would be better put towards another developer.
He isn't progressive, he isn't doing anything new or interesting he's just trying to reiterate previous ideas in a different way and it's about as stagnant as what happened with COD.[/QUOTE]
Regardless of his writing ability, which I fully agree that is pretty bad, I can't see how you can compare the likes of MGS to this, they are very different genres.
Grim Fandango and other adventure games have very simple gameplay mechanics, so it's a actually a good example of what I'm saying. The reason Grim Fandango is good is because of its dialogue, characters, puzzles and setting - not because of the way you interact with the game.
I separate the quality of these games with their gameplay genre, I like to see these types of games on the market because they fill a niche that other games don't. The likes of adventure games such as Grim Fandango no longer exist, these and Telltale games do somewhat fill that niche.
The way you interact with these games is fine, I like the minimalist relaxed gameplay approach to it, I just want better writing and better characters.
[QUOTE=spekter;50682210]Except he's transitioning elements of film in the worst possible way by making it more of a movie than a game. He's a fucking horrible writer who's probably surrounded by yes men given the consistency of the negative qualities in his work and he just plain fails to actually be more designer than director.
Kojima stands out as a guy who has actually used elements of films in games whilst remaining critically and commercially successful. He understands that the game part actually needs to be palpable and stand on its own as well as with all the other elements.
Frankly Cage should just go to Hollywood they'd eat his work up. I'm not saying movies he could make would do well critically but they would greenlight almost anything he could come up with.[/QUOTE]
I would honestly argue that its meant to be that way. A game like Cage's can be still an enjoyable one. Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain, despite it's flaws, are very enjoyable games and I had a lot of fun with them despite "gameplay" not being really much of a thing. Hell, I make it a regular thing every year to at least replay Indigo Prophecy. I never tried Beyond: Two Souls so I can't argue for it's fun but I think the only reason Cage is getting a lot of hate is because he sounds like a rapist. I remember how uncomfortable Ellen Paige was during an interview with him. And all this shit about an unfinished rape scene floating around doesn't help his case any. I'm going to reserve judgement until I play Detroit: Become Human. And i think everyone should tbh.
[editline]sadkasd[/editline]
I just learned the International release of Indigo Prophecy had an interactive sex scene pfft maybe it's not too late to judge the dude. :v:
I enjoyed the first half or quarter of Indigo Prophecy primarily because it was very new to me and I didn't know shit about adventure games or visual novels at the time. If you're somehow able to ignore the entire last half of that game you've got a serious blindfold on.
The rape isn't even the biggest issue though and I'm failing to understand how people can accept Cage's "standard" of writing as anything but contrived and plain bad.
The rape stuff is the icing on the shit-cake but even without it you've got messy characters, inhuman dialogue and plots that just fly off the handle with no cohesion.
Also this whole notion about his games filling a niche? They're Adventure games. They have more in common with Telltale's work than anything on the market yet people seem to be falling under Cage's spell and accepting his notion that his games can't be defined by a genre or any label. It's just another attempt to make his projects seem bigger than they actually are.
When it comes down to it, they're multiple choice adventure games with bad writing and really aren't doing anything special or new. We've had Indigo Prophecy-but-different 3 times in a row now. I don't have a single hope for Detroit since the guy has literally never gotten any better or learned anything.
All of this is made even more baffling by the fact that his first game actually had some interesting mechanics and generally was a really ballsy attempt at combining many different mechanics from different genres into one. Obviously, the story was bogstandard sci-fi schlock but by some reason of insanity Cage decides "yep the valiant attempt at innovative gameplay was bad but my story was spot-on."
[QUOTE=bunguer;50682994]The games get a lot of hate but they aren't that bad imo. I was expecting some sort of interactive movie and that's exactly what I got, the hate seems highly exaggerated.
I don't understand the lack of gameplay critic at all. You wouldn't criticize a platformer for lacking the gameplay depth of an RPG, so why would you criticize a story-focused game for lacking gameplay? The focus is the story, not the gameplay. The gameplay that exists is enough to tell the story without getting in the way, more gameplay means less narrative.
I do agree with the writing though, it's very cheesy and cliche at times and hopefully they will improve in the future.[/QUOTE]
That would be valid if they had good stories. But they don't, not even in the slightest. There are thousands of games out there that have really good and deep gameplay and have story that is light years ahead of any story David Cage has written. They're horrible trash stories that make absolutely no sense if you actually pay any attention to them with terrible characters and awful dialogue that would be fine if they were in a game that also had super deep good gameplay on top of it, but since the story is all there is to it, it all completely falls apart.
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