[VIDEO] Rockstar's Game Design is Outdated - NakeyJakey - General

I think the main issue is not "Rockstar is railroading me in to a linear story and linear stories are bad" it's "Rockstar is awkwardly trying to have it both ways and constantly switching in between which makes both sides unsatisfying and its fucking, annoying, pick one" I think you can have an open world game that plays linearly, it's called Mafia 2, but its totally wasted potential. Rockstar should be erring on sandbox freedom that asks the player to imagine a solution to a problem rather than giving them one. For instance, let's say I gotta get rid of them McPoyle Brothers, maybe I could shoot them, but maybe make it better to find alternative solutions like lighting their house on fire or stealth killing them or dumping an ungodly pile of shit in their living room.

If everything's well planned out, it is superb for pushing through production. No complications, team manager gets orders from the top, scrum master lays out what needs to be done, the team fulfills them. Questions? Ask the lead, don't waltz into other departments and bother them. It is controlled and contained. The bad side of it is that every department is isolated, so every team has zero clue what is even in the game outside of their tasks, only the producer and select few get the big picture. If something isn't compatible, it will have to wait until the next meeting to get it sorted out. It takes very, very talented individuals to represent and communicate for entire teams of specialists, that's why they get paid well just to monitor people.

I can't imagine putting so much faith in a middle manager. I've encountered very few competent ones and I'm just so used to talking to people I need to directly at my job.

I'd like to put aside the whole "enthralling narrative vs. open world videogames" debate, which, while rather interesting, would take us a very long time and beside, in my personal experience, I encountered open world games with both atrocious storytelling and rather good ones which tied your progression into the game with how you progressed into the plot, which really is the best you can aim for in such genre (see Horizon: Zero Dawn for a recent example). The main crux of Red Dead Redemption II's gameplay is that it's interesting and fullfilling only if you put any kind of value into immersion. If you don't, then it's basically an unbereable slog filled with unnecessary animations and chores. If you do, however, the various mechanics the game offers are mof a mean to an end and become endearing, in a way. To proove my point, let's talk about hair management in Red Dead Redemption II. Basically, as the game's time passes, your hair and facial hair will start to grow exponentially till a certain maxed value (which can be even increased with a consumable item). Also, at several point in the main story your character will experience time skips, with your hair and facial hair growing significantly outside of your control. Hence why the game's world features barber in the main cities and your place at the camp (basically the main hub) is outfitted with a shaving station (which works only on facial hair, of course). So, depending on your personal stance on the matter, having to take care of your hair and mantaining a consistent style for both your hair and facial hair could be either a useless waste of in-game money and in-game time for something most games allow you to keep since character creation or some kind of ritualistic chore of sort, where your hair style becomes such a vital, distinguishing part of your character that you are willing to stop the general flaw of thing to just sit for some seconds in a shop and have it done, maybe going as far as to put pomade on it (which costs some more cash). Note however that, in my experience with Red Dead Redemption II, I found myself loving some mechanics and hating the guts of others. For instance, I loved tasting the camp's stew each time I could, spending currency to make it more nutrient (and therefore more beneficial)and watching the protagonist devouring it with gusto, but I utterly refused to go hunting (a major element of the gameplay, apparently) because I hate the time required and the RNG nature of the results, albeit "realistic"

It keeps leaks from happening because nobody except management knows what anyone else in the company is doing. Your team gets an assignment to code X feature, and you don't know what it's going to be used for.

I think the one thing I can't stand more recently about Rockstar's game design is the shooting mechanics. It's like they take two steps forward with it, but then two steps back. I dislike their over reliance on auto-aim instead of actually building their game to support good third-person shooting without basically just allowing players to snap to a target immediately and kill them in one shot by then just either have all the work done for them, or all they need to do is just move the reticule slightly up for an easy head shot. It's definitely not impossible to play without it, but you can tell their game seems to be built around you using it. I just can't stand it. There was a good move forward in shooting freedom in GTA IV, but it still relied on auto-aim as much as GTA SA. V didn't really add a whole lot besides basically enforcing it as a standard because enemies now lock on to you very easily, and they can even cheat and just obliterate you in seconds with rapid fire, probably as a response to how quickly players can take down enemies with auto-snapping aim doing the work for you. Red Dead Redemption is a different game, but I can just look at it, and it looks like for 2, the shooting is more or less just lifted straight out of GTA V, but has a few new improvements, like being able to switch shoulder, but at its core, conceptually, it still just seems to suffer the same problem, so most of those improvements don't really account for anything. Maybe it's a necessary console thing, I dunno, it just seems like the most outdated part of their games that they haven't grown out of yet.

I think it was highlighted that Rockstar games do little to emphasize and promote the growth of mastery. So they just make the game easy to play and then throw 20 dudes at the player or go through scripted chase sequences with strict solutions. Your issues with it are very legitimate.

You could summarize every fucking story in human history that way. RDR2: A gang tries to outrun the law. Shit gets in the way. Avengers: Infinity War: A bunch of superheroes try to stop Thanos from getting the infinity stones. Shit gets in the way. The Odyssey: A guy tries to go home. Shit gets in the way. The Old Testament: A guy tries to free his people. Shit gets in the way. Is this the first time you're hearing about a thing called 'character motivations'? RDR2 is a great story, for sure, but GoW managed to give [i]actual gods[/i] grounded, human motivations that were actually believable.

I'm struggling with RDR2. I bought it on launch day and there was an initial week or two of ultra hype, and then Hitman 2 came out. I started playing the shit out of that, trying to figure out all the different paths and ways of doing things and it was great. And apart from anything else that game moves fast, it runs at 60 fps and the animations are all pretty brief. Now when I launch up RDR2 I'm just like ah shit, I have to ride all the way over there? I have to slow-walk through camp to my horse, then tap X at just the right speed to not run down my horse stamina, just to arrive at the mission and then stringently follow a series of direct instructions until it says mission complete? I really want to see where the story goes and I really want to enjoy the game more but it just feels like a slog, especially with all the animations. I had the same experience as NakeyJakey with the backroom robbery in the first town, I spent a looooong time trying to organically figure out how you get into the backroom and then eventually had to Google it and find out you just need to look at the door and press a button. The coolest moment I had in the game so far was stumbling upon the serial killer quest, I got the frisson feeling of 'oh fuck I've found an adventure'. I wish there was more stuff like that.

My point was more that there's nothing in-between. All the examples you list have something of substance in between the inevitable goalposts of the story, something that motivates them to push on or something that feels justified in being a problem for the sake of narrative. In God of War you go to the dumb teleporter to get to Jötunheim and oopsie doopsie guess it doesn't work so you need a dumb key to make it work, and it's just just setback after setback and it feels liek you're not getting ANYWHERE in the story for like 8 hours until finally something makes the story move forwards.

did you, like, stop paying attention anytime the characters did something of notice? did you miss all the character development in the game?

Where did I say anything negative about the characters or their developments? The characters had beautiful growth throughout the games and I loved their performances, that was all fine. It's the constant halting of the story for completely inane, bullshit reasons that interrupted the flow of the narrative that ruined a lot of my enjoyment.

This is pretty dumb criticism. RDR2 for as much as I love it could easily be boiled down to be Thisbe dumb and bad. GoW did a good job with motivations and with grounding it’s world. It’s real flaw was that it lacked replay ability.

I dream of a Facepunch forum where people won't be called trolls and/or dumb boxed to oblivion just for speaking against God of War

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