The Errant Signal Thread

[Destroid]

Or Star Wars: Rebellion. If he was born in 85 he's slightly young for those titles. That said, my Star Wars experience was pretty much exactly as he described, and I found his analysis of game making from existing settings interesting, it's not an angle I'd really thought about before, despite having made a game from an existing setting.

 

[Gurkog]

I never really played any Star Wars games until recently even though I was born in the early 80's. I am one of those who identify with the movies more... and I wish I played some of those awesome games back in the day.

 

[tuluse]

I have two dissagreements with his whole premise.

1) I don't get his concept of ownership. Pretty much every generation of Americans watches The Wizard of Oz. Parents share it with their children and gets passed on. So what is the value of this ownership idea?

2) The idea that the entire Star Wars universe has been mechanically solved is laughable. Here are some game ideas I had just since this morning.

Play as Han Solo before he signed up with the Rebels. Run blockades, make shady deals, dump your cargo and have Jaba put a price on your head.
Play as law enforcement on Tatoonine. You have to navigate the super powerful criminal organizations and your own corrupt government to bring criminals to justice.
Play as a Hutt running his syndicate.
Play as Lando Calrissian. Basically Tropico in space except instead of siding with the US or USSR, you have to appease the Empire or you die.

 

[felipepepe]

1) I don't get his concept of ownership. Pretty much every generation of Americans watches The Wizard of Oz. Parents share it with their children and gets passed on. So what is the value of this ownership idea?

Just think of the equivalent in gaming; if a popamole modern kid that doesn't even know what the URSS was tried to get into old stuff like Wizardry or even Fallout, there is a "noise" in the process. It isn't the state-of-the-art, it isn't new, it isn't something everyone else is talking about, the hype is dead, you know you're going back to something that isn't current.

Remenber when Skyrim was released, it was everywhere, people talking about it, reviews, funny videos, arrow in the knee jokes, all that... like it or not, it is part of the "experience" of playing Skyrim at the right time, and something that you won't get by playing it 5 years from now. Just try going into everyday life saying that you watched StarWars today. Even being a classic movie, the reaction will be totaly different from saying you watched Iron Man 3 or the new Star Trek.

2) The idea that the entire Star Wars universe has been mechanically solved is laughable. Here are some game ideas I had just since this morning.

Play as Han Solo before he signed up with the Rebels. Run blockades, make shady deals, dump your cargo and have Jaba put a price on your head.
Play as law enforcement on Tatoonine. You have to navigate the super powerful criminal organizations and your own corrupt government to bring criminals to justice.
Play as a Hutt running his syndicate.
Play as Lando Calrissian. Basically Tropico in space except instead of siding with the US or USSR, you have to appease the Empire or you die.

As your "Tropico in space" comment shows, you're doing nothing but taking existing games/genres and pasting them in the StarWars universe... that's very different from unique stuff that only the setting offers, like reflecting shots with your lightsaber.

 

[shihonage]

I can still make a game where you get to kill George Lucas though right

 

[tuluse]

Just think of the equivalent in gaming; if a popamole modern kid that doesn't even know what the URSS was tried to get into old stuff like Wizardry or even Fallout, there is a "noise" in the process. It isn't the state-of-the-art, it isn't new, it isn't something everyone else is talking about, the hype is dead, you know you're going back to something that isn't current.

Remenber when Skyrim was released, it was everywhere, people talking about it, reviews, funny videos, arrow in the knee jokes, all that... like it or not, it is part of the "experience" of playing Skyrim at the right time, and something that you won't get by playing it 5 years from now. Just try going into everyday life saying that you watched StarWars today. Even being a classic movie, the reaction will be totaly different from saying you watched Iron Man 3 or the new Star Trek.

No one is going to care about any of those things in 5 years, much less 30 years or 80 years. So I'm still not seeing the value in it. Obviously it is a different experience watching Star Wars now than it was in 1977, but I'm not sure it is that much of a lesser experience. It's certainly a better one than playing any Star Wars game since 2004 or watching and of the prequels, I know that.

As your "Tropico in space" comment shows, you're doing nothing but taking existing games/genres and pasting them in the StarWars universe... that's very different from unique stuff that only the setting offers, like reflecting shots with your lightsaber.

I didn't mean an exact clone. I was just doing one of these, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch

 

[Gurkog]

They need to somehow combine a Dungeon Keeper type theme with the Empire. You could be an evil sith overlord taking out pesky republics and jedi while making sure to stifle any rebels that result.... That would be neat.

 

[felipepepe]

No one is going to care about any of those things in 5 years, much less 30 years or 80 years. So I'm still not seeing the value in it. Obviously it is a different experience watching Star Wars now than it was in 1977, but I'm not sure it is that much of a lesser experience. It's certainly a better one than playing any Star Wars game since 2004 or watching and of the prequels, I know that.

Is not worse, is just not "yours". Take Wizard of Oz, as you said... everything there's to be said about it was already said. You may enjoy it a lot, but you can't really influence it anymore... not even have the illusion of influce, history already passed judgment on it and the public image of it was set decades ago. You're nothing more than a visitor to a museum... probably even requiring the guide's help to understand parts of it.

 

[tuluse]

That's a good explanation.

I never really felt any ownership over anything Star Wars then. Despite loving the movies and a good amount of the games.

 

[Infinitron]

Sleeping Dogs: http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=511&utm_source=feedly

Spoiler

Sleeping Dogs was released late last year, but I only got around to playing it recently. And what I found surprised me. I had expected a B-tier GTA knockoff (well, okay, it *is* that) but it actually had a fairly clear thematic angle and a really subtle way of delivering it.
Oh, and I screwed up the credits. The song isn’t “Peking Paris New York,” but “From Xikou With Love.” Same album of (I think?) contract music produced by a third party but expressly for the game. ‘s available on iTunes.
Transcript below the cut.
In my previous videos I’ve gone over how Grand Theft Auto has become a franchise that’s got a rather disjoint tone. It wants to be a goofy, parodic chaos generator and it wants to be a self-serious gritty crime drama loaded with social commentary and doesn’t really seem to recognize how jarring it is for players to switch violently and randomly between those two extremes.

When other games have tried to take on this genre and attempt to avoid making Grand Theft Auto’s mistakes they typically end up doubling down on the chaos. Saint’s Row tosses out pretty much any semblance of maudlin introspection and ramps up the insanity by encouraging just about every act of violence and debauchery possible. And Just Cause treats its story the way John Carmack has always suggested games should – like the story of a porn movie, there as flimsy justification for the explosions and the revelry. And both solutions work really well for what their respective games are trying to accomplish – Saint’s Row’s transgressive excess and Just Cause 2’s pulpy nonsense avoid the problems Grand Theft Auto had while still setting up and conveying the tone they’re after.

But Sleeping Dogs is different It actually tries to ramp the chaos down – at least compared to the more absurd elements of its open world contemporaries. You’re not hijacking an airplane from another airplane while in mid-flight or getting into dildo fights with sports drink mascots like in Saint’s Row. Where Grand Theft Auto stories spiral out of control with an ensemble cast from all over the city, Sleeping Dogs is in comparison an intimate story with a small cast of characters. And while there are still shootouts with ridiculous body counts and insane chase sequences they’re normally framed with a clear narrative purpose. What makes Sleeping Dogs work, at its core, is that it plays with the very dissonance and tension between serious story and over the top gameplay that Grand Theft Auto tries so hard to pretend isn’t there. It’s a game that sees the duality presented in Grand Theft Auto and uses it as a rhetorical device to explore being torn between identities; not so much in a “split personalities” sense but more in a “We all wear masks, metaphorically speaking” sense.

The game takes major influence from the Departed (and Internal Affairs before it), where the line between friend and foe gets blurred and characters loyalties and motives are questioned. The protagonist, Wei Shen, is an undercover cop in Hong Kong sworn to uphold the law and bring criminals to justice. But by virtue of being undercover Wei Shen is also a gangster committing very real acts of crime. He’s got a personal vendetta against drug-pushing Triads for what they did to his sister and has sworn to take them down. But his best friends, support network, and power all come from his position within the Triad. He’s got a strong moral compass that leads him to resolutely conclude what’s right, but is perfectly comfortable doing horrible things to assure those right things come to pass. This sense of split identity defines not only the entirety of Wei Shen’s character, but all of Sleeping Dogs as a whole. It’s a game about dealing with conflicting aspects of self, but what’s so interesting – and perhaps even shocking – is that it isn’t a game about choosing between those aspects. It’s a game about living with and reconciling the fact that you have these identities. There’s no “Are you Bruce Wayne or are you Batman” moment here, there’s just the ongoing stress of simultaneously trying to be a cop who solves crime and a gangster who creates it. The two are always in conflict for your time and attention but Sleeping Dogs never asks you choose one or the other. And the game creates and exploits the same sort of tensions that drag Grand Theft Auto down in order bring up those broader topics regarding identity.

The most straightforward example of this is in the experience systems when on missions. Every mission is graded on two scales – one gives you police experience and one gives you triad experience. The two are earned in fundamentally different ways and try to enforce fundamentally different playstyles – but it’s important to note they aren’t mutually exclusive playstyles.

The Triad meter fills up like a traditional experience bar. It’s filled by skillful combat, environmental take downs, headshots in, completing triad objectives – that sort of thing. In the triad and on the streets reputation has to be earned. There’s a whole world of wealth and power out there and you just need to actively reach out and grab it. The more creative and violent and skillful you can be with headshots and vehicle takedowns and fist fights, the more your clout with the Triad grows. So go out there! Prove yourself to be worthy of respect by being a force of action.

The police meter, on the other hand, depletes with failures – hurting innocent people or causing property damage cases you to lose experience. The assumption is that you’re a good cop until you prove you’re not. But it’s deeper than that – you get judged not just for killing pedestrians or causing massive car accidents, but running into railings on the highway and even slipping up when trying to do parkour. If there’s a fence in the way and you don’t hit the parkour button on time you’ll stumble, lose police experience, and be told you’re clumsy. The anal retentive attention to detail is annoying, and I feel like that’s intentional – like Wei’s handler in the police force, Raymond, is silently judging your ability to perform your job because you couldn’t gracefully vault a small fence. It underscores the idea that there’s someone second-guessing your moves and holding a magnifying glass up to your actions ready to review your performance.

The result is that you feel pressure to simultaneously be as brash and bold as possible but also as conservative in your approach as you can be. The Triad mechanics ask you to lash out with aggression and the police mechanics ask that you restrain yourself, but skilled players can do both! You’re not choosing to be a cop or choosing to be a criminal, you’re balancing two different aspects of your identity with these two different needs. And sometimes you might let one win out over the other! Sometimes you throw caution to the wind to complete the mission even if it hurts your police experience. Sometimes you’d rather get it done clean because you want the next police upgrade. But the conflict itself never goes away, and the very next mission these two conflicting systems will again be vying for your attention. And this system is, I think, where the Grand Theft Auto tension is most clearly felt, and felt intentionally – where the debate between mechanical indulgence of asking you to break laws and cause havoc is diametrically opposed to a demand that you yield to caution.

And this duality is reinforced by other elements of the game. Its fight sequences are broken up into gunplay and melee combat, and the two rarely if ever intersect. You’re either shooting or you’re punching, but the mechanics are modal and not designed to have much interplay. One is Gears of War and the other is Arkham Asylum and they don’t form a cohesive whole. This game isn’t really a beat ‘em up and it isn’t really a cover shooter, but it just as Wei has to juggle the responsibilities of cop and criminal this game has to juggle the responsibilities of both of those genres. The game also fluctuates between vehicle sections and on foot missions – some missions feel like you’re playing a racing or car combat game, and other missions feel like you’re playing a platformer or beat ‘em up. There are even two story tracks that compete for your time – one involves being a cop and solving crimes while the main story missions are tied to your undercover work as a gangster. At all times you’re juggling these disparate mechanic sets, these different priorities, these different sides of what it means to exist in this game world. Sleeping Dogs uses them to explore this idea of having different identities in different contexts; the idea that a person or a character or even a game aren’t one thing but a multitude of things all struggling to co-exist. And that struggle, that inner conflict about coming to terms with the fact that identities are multifaceted, contextual, and impermanent is really what the game’s about.

To that end I think it’s telling that the biggest villains in the game aren’t part of external organizaitons. The Sun On Yee skirmish with the 18K and both of those Triads have run-ins with the police, but the major conflicts aren’t really between any of these forces. Instead we get characters like Pendrew. He’s your handler’s boss and a member of the police force who has become so corrupt he’s willing to blow your cover and get you killed for personal gain. Meanwhile on the streets your biggest threat is from Big Smile Lee, who is in your own Triad but wants to put himself in line as the next chairman. In both situations you’re fighting elements of organizations you’re already a part of – this isn’t a cops versus criminals game or a triad versus triad game; it’s a game where cops hurt other cops and Traid members turn on each other. Even the organizations that make up this world are full of inner conflict and are unsure of what they represent as a whole. Uncle Po talks about the values of the triad fading at length.

And to the game’s credit it rarely brings these concepts into the forefront; it doesn’t smack you over the head with them. Grand Theft Auto burdens its missions with the pretension of being some sort of grandiose statement about American culture, and inserts gravitas and symbolism into everything it does. When Niko goes bowling with his girlfriend it isn’t just a nice date scene where we get some character growth; it’s also invoking a mechanic set that alters your date’s reaction based on what you’re wearing, what you’re driving, and where you take her. So it becomes another hamfisted swipe at American materialism in a game that considers this clever potty humor. In Sleeping Dogs when Wei Shen goes on a date it’s more character driven – we find out a little about Wei and the girl and watch how they interact. It’s less about heavy handed symbolism and more about getting to know our protagonist from various angles while we try and search for who the ‘real’ Wei Shen is. And what we find out is that we’re not sure there is one. He can’t stay with a girl for more than a few dates, and we begin to question if Wei even knows what he wants.

Now, obviously, using female characters as props to explore male characters sucks, and it’s one of the game’s biggest missteps. The game seems to believe there are only two classes of women – young, sexy, attractive ladies defined by the men they’re with, or strong, independent, and wholly asexual women who wield power over you like Broken Nose Jiang, Inspector Teng, or Mrs. Chu. There aren’t really any female gangsters to fight beside you or to fight against; which is all the more weird considering that there are women falling over themselves to sleep with Wei and women higher in command to give him orders. There just aren’t any women on Wei’s level doing gangster work in the streets. It’s another game that has some absolutely wonderful elements that gets dragged down by awkwardly framing all women exclusively by their relationship to our male protagonist. Women are either used to frame Wei Shen’s character like his dead sister or his various girlfriends or the fact that he didn’t sleep with Victoria – or they exist to give him something to do. None of them are characters in their own right.

But while that’s kinda gross it’s hard to complain too much about that – after all, the only character (male or female) who really gets an arc other than Wei Shen is Jackie. And… oh, Jackie. I had hoped that they were going to do something interesting with him, but as the game draws towards its conclusion it becomes clear they’re going in perhaps the laziest direction they could. Which is a waste of a character they managed to get me to empathize with despite the heavy handedness of the melodrama. Still, I guess it resonates thematically – Jackie couldn’t deal with juggling these alternate identities. When he was in the triad he was 100% Gangster and refused to consider the ramifications of his actions or his responsibilities to anyone else – or even himself. This holistic identity led to him getting arrested, beat up, and buried alive. Then when he decided it was time to get out he ended up dead because of his desire to get away and be alone. It was as if he thought he could just abandon the past and wholly inhabit a new identity away from his old life style. And all of that ties in with the conversation Wei has with his martial arts teacher regarding his own past and his need to accept it as part of himself. Jackie’s story, as manipulative as it is, does pose as an allegory for anyone who refuses to acknowledge the need to recognize and balance the different parts of themselves.

There may be times where the game’s reach exceeds its grasp – open world GTA games are notoriously difficult to pull off, and there are times where the seams and shortcuts start to show. But overall Square Enix and United Front did a fantastic job of making a game that explores this concept. It reinforces the ideas it wants to present at every level of its mechanics and story, but it also never feels like it’s being heavy handed or preachy. In fact, I love the end of the game that leaves Wei Shen’s story on a note of ambiguity. When Wei meets Teng at the end of the game, he tells her that Hong Kong finally feels like home. In reply she wonders which Hong Kong he’s found himself ready to settle in. And we never find out! And it’s just so refreshing to end on a note of thematically resonant ambiguity that isn’t just sequel bait.

The obsession video games have over choice is dangerous because it so often gets framed in the most hamfisted ways possible – exemplified most horrifically by those abominable Moral Choice Systems. Do you do the horrifically repugnant thing or the selflessly good thing? But life isn’t like that. Not just with regard to moral quandaries, but in everything else too. Wei struggles with questions that don’t result in pop-ups where you hit ‘A’ to choose one option and ‘X’ to choose another. Is his home America or Hong Kong? Is he a gangster or a cop? Is he using people like Jackie, or are they really his friends? The answers to these aren’t clear cut; they’re shades of grey that depend on when we ask them. And in a medium so obsessed with consequential choice there’s something refreshing about a AAA game that doesn’t ask us to choose the answers to these questions but deal with the fact that there are none.

 

[Gozma]

I liked how they made Hong Kong into an anarchic crimehole when it has like 20 murders per year IRL in a city of 7 million

 

[Gurkog]

I liked how they made Hong Kong into an anarchic crimehole when it has like 20 murders per year IRL in a city of 7 million

20 officially documented murders.*

 

[Gozma]

I'll take HK's murders, unreported murders, covered up murders, and murders imagined by disaffected teenagers to be lower than Chicago's murders that get cleared within 48 hours.

 

[Jarpie]

Errant Hipster overanalyzes everything way too fucking much, he's like those one of those people who tries to find anykind of symbolism from every frame of the film. He's done some good stuff in the past but this and couple other videos lately haven't been that good.

 

[SCO]

Remenber when Skyrim was released, it was everywhere, people talking about it, reviews, funny videos, arrow in the knee jokes, all that... like it or not, it is part of the "experience" of playing Skyrim at the right time, and something that you won't get by playing it 5 years from now. Just try going into everyday life saying that you watched StarWars today. Even being a classic movie, the reaction will be totaly different from saying you watched Iron Man 3 or the new Star Trek.

Humans are fucking monkeys

Destroy all TV.

 

[PlanHex]

Humans are fucking monkeys

Destroy all humans.

fixed

 

[Infinitron]

PREPARE FOR EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=525

Spoiler

The Last of Us represents something of a capstone for the current generation of game hardware. Not just because it’s among the last major original titles that will be released for this set of consoles, but also because it sort of seems informed by almost every AAA blockbuster that has preceded it. The Last of Us is, in a lot of ways, a Greatest Hits tour through the last decade of AAA action adventure game design by major studios. You can see this even at a really high level: it’s a zombie game set after the apocalypse featuring chest-high wall cover shooting and a mix of action and stealth. If that doesn’t scream “recent trends in games” I don’t know what does. It’s got the latest detective vision gimmicks, it’s got escort missions that seem to draw influence from every one of those from Ico to Bioshock Infinite. It has industry standard obnoxious button mashing quick time events, and the minimally impactful carrot-on-a-stick doesn’t-really-matter-if-you-get-them-or-not weapon upgrades. Resident Evil 4’s influence is felt throughout the singleplayer game, and it’s got a multiplayer component with all of the persistent always-on grinding you’d expect in a post-Call of Duty world. It really does seem acutely aware of modern trends and wears those influences almost as a badge of honor.

But for all of its modern influences, The Last of Us is (at a higher, structural level) an oddly retro game – and not just because it’s got Move The Block And Avoid The Water puzzles that wouldn’t feel out of place in Soul Reaver. It’s very driven by the traditional “complete a gameplay section and be rewarded with story chunks” mentality that games have been trying to move away from for years. And, you know, maybe that’s appropriate. I mean, an uncomfortable juxtaposition of narrative and gameplay has been arguably the defining trait of AAA games for the past 10 years, so if you’re gonna do a best-of tour I guess it’s important to get that right too. Where smaller titles are comfortable combining mechanics and metaphor to produce a cohesive whole, or even focusing on wholly emergent stories generated by the game itself, AAA studios have typically treated the two like oil and water. “Story” in a AAA video game doesn’t mean a framing mechanism to give mechanics meaning, or an emergent series of events that happen because of gameplay – it means a Hollywood style movie baked right into videogame. The Last of Us not only continues this grand tradition, it ultimately pushes this oil and water formula to its breaking point, taking it perhaps as far as you possibly can but in the process showing its fundamental limitations. And as a result it serves to be both the game’s biggest strength and its greatest weakness.

The title of The Last of Us sort of begs a question, but you don’t really recognize it immediately thanks to the assumptions Zombie games generally bring up. Specifically, the game wants us to task who the “Us” is in the Last of Us. How do we define “us;” how do we sculpt and cultivate social groups and loyalties? Do you mean you and yours or do you mean your greater community or do you mean humanity as a whole? And whatever your answer, how much are you willing to lose, to hurt, to sacrifice, and to harm others for that “us?” It’s a title that frames the “us” as under threat, and how you define “us” and how you react to that threat is the core idea the game toys with throughout.

The game is broken out into a series of vignettes, each of which involve looking at different characters’ interpretations of those social borders and the threats those borders face. The first vignette starts by forcing us to watch Joel’s young family be ripped apart with the loss of Sarah. Immediately – even before seeing any of the fully mutated clickers – we’re presented with a world where lines are being drawn about who we should include in groups we want to protect and who we try to exclude and push out and other. Tommy is willing to kill a soldier to save his family, and the soldier is willing to kill a family for the greater good of society. In the first ten minutes the game has begun asking us which social orders and groups are worth protecting over others. And from there we follow Joel as he bounces between various characters who have their own take on who their version of “us” is and just who it is that needs saving.
Twenty years after Sarah’s death we find Joel clearly cares about only one person besides himself – Tess. The two are smugglers, and it quickly becomes apparent that they’re not all that interested in saving any lives other than their own. This, as far as Joel’s concerned, is his us, the two of them against the world. Both Tess and Joel are willing to kill in cold blood and are quick to dismiss Marlene’s requests for help, having turned their back on humanity itself a long time ago. But when Tess confesses to getting bit, she reveals she cared more about humanity than she let on – that she wants this last trip outside the city before she dies to be more than a cheap score for the two of them. Joel still doesn’t give a shit about other people at large, but he cares a great deal about those close to him. When Tess asks him to take Ellie he does so not for out of the goodness of his heart- he isn’t doing this to save humanity. But for Tess, for his “us”, he makes her a promise and starts his journey across the country with Ellie.

The next several chapters are arguably a little filler-y, but each tries to explore the overall concept in its own way. Bill and Frank’s failed relationship looks at what happens when social groups fall apart; the consequences of deciding that there is no “us” any more. Frank ends up dead and Bill ends up heartbroken and alone in a city of the dead. Tommy juggles his commitments as a brother to Joel with his commitment to his new wife and the community he’s building at the dam, torn between the “us” that was his family and the “us” that is his growing village. Henry and Sam form a tenuous bond with Joel and Ellie in a chapter that plays each group’s empathy for one another off of their inherent distrust of strangers. The David chapter examines what happens when you are the other; when you are not the one deciding whether inclusion can or should happen but when you are rejected by an already extant group. They all explore this idea of how social groups define themselves, how they include or exclude people and how they respond to outside stresses. Every chapter feels like it reframes the title – the last of our family after the apocalypse, the last good people in a city gone mad with raiders, the last of a cult hungering for revenge.

In the final vignette, Joel is forced to choose between the two forces we saw at play in the opening of the game; he’s forced to decide whether to protect humanity and help the Fireflies get their cure or protect a loved one despite the dangers that might pose to the greater population. And in the end he kills for Ellie and he lies to Ellie. Not to protect her, but to protect himself. He’s a selfish bastard who has experienced tremendous loss and never wants to do so again. And by making him the one responsible for keeping humanity endangered the game critiques traditional hero tropes, suggesting that a save-the-damsel-you-love narrative is a horrifically selfish construct in the face of genuine systemic change; that when you definition of us is too narrow you become more monster than hero. It frames strong, intimate bonds as selfish if it means removing a sense of empathy for all.

But I get why people don’t like the ending. Joel never takes responsibility for his actions nor pays any price for damning humanity, so the whole sense that the game is critiquing his actions feels a bit undercut. There’s no debate about whether humanity or Ellie deserves to be saved, and if anything it makes a bigger deal about lying to Ellie than killing Marlene. Worse, the final chapters reveal that Joel’s real arc as a character took place in the moments between Sarah’s death and “20 years later” – he’s a selfish bastard afraid of being hurt when the game opens and he stays a selfish bastard as the game closes. The zombies are there when the game opens, and they’re still there when the game ends. The only thing that changes is that a lot of people are dead. There’s a sense of nihilism and hopelessness about the ending, and while it fits the setting and the themes it’s hard to walk away from this game feeling satisfied. You mostly walk away from it feeling empty and sad.
Still, when the game’s in story mode and presenting you with cutscenes or exposition you’re actually getting something with substantive subtext, and whether it succeeds or not that’s more than you can say for most games. It’s also done with an eye for restraint and subtlety not often seen in major titles, and I have to applaud that. This is a game that knows its most powerful moments aren’t explosions or gunshots but quiet moments where a camera lingers too long or a painful truth is begrudgingly confronted.

Unfortunately those powerful moments only really exist in the cutscenes. Mechanically the game is just perfunctory. The majority of it is spent getting from A to B using a combination of stealth and combat mechanics. Both modes of play are viable and functional, but neither really stand out as something worth playing on their own. The gunplay is a stock third cover-based schtick that feels more or less lifted directly from Uncharted. Perhaps the most interesting bit of that system is the real time inventory management, which has to be invoked even to switch out what pistol or rifle you have out. This can force a quick melee kill or mad scramble away into hiding, but hardly elevates the combat into something more transcendent than a slightly more tense version of Uncharted by way of ZombiU.
More can be said about the stealth play, if only because it’s not so much boring as notably shallow. In most stealth games you’re supposed to either manipulate your environment to sneak around, like Thief or Mark of the Ninja, or you’re supposed to use movement to your advantage like in Dishonored or Mark of the Ninja. Either way there’s usually a fairly complex series of systems that let you avoid detection – and when you finally are detected, a variety of ways to escape from the situation. The Last of Us doesn’t really do this – it’s basically that scene in Jurassic Park where Lex and Tim hid from the raptors made into a AAA zombie game. Hide behind a shelf, throw a thing to make some noise elsewhere, move to another shelf, rinse and repeat until you’ve reached the next cutscene trigger or you get spotted. Getting spotted means a forced transition into action mode as most of the bad guys around you will hear the commotion. So play oscillates between the resource restricted combat that wants you to make your bullets count and fearful sneaking in shadow in hopes of avoiding combat and saving ammo and health packs for the forced combat bits.

Ultimately the gameplay is more about giving the universe texture and tone than it is about, well, how it plays. Resources are scarce, punishments are swift and harsh, you feel a little underpowered, and the gun sway and clunky animation driven nature of melee combat all intentionally convey a sense of tension and of desperation. It’s actually a really cool use of mechanics to build texture in the narrative, but unfortunately that’s really all they do for the narrative.
It’s not that the mechanics are bad, but they’re functional and utterly disconnected from the journey Joel and Ellie take as characters. Through them we learn how Joel or Ellie move from Point A to Point B, but we don’t learn who Joel or Ellie are. In fact, when the narrative does eke its way into the gameplay it’s usually awkward. Conversations between Joel and Ellie in the cutscenes feel vital, filled with a spark and energy that comes not just from the voice acting but the mocap work and the facial animations and the cinematography. In-game, though, Joel often feels like he’s having a conversation with a disembodied voice. I mean, say what you will about Bioshock Infinite (and I have) but at least Elizabeth felt like she was there with you.

The relationship Joel has with Ellie is what drives the entire game. She is his “us;” with Tess gone all she’s all he has to cling to, and he’s a guy that clings tight to what few friends he makes. But we don’t engage with that relationship mechanically or through play. We never get to be Ellie trying to coax a smile out of Joel with a dirty joke or inquiring into his dark past or proving ourselves capable to him. And as Joel we never get to interact directly with Ellie, educating her or training her or protecting her – she’s more or less invulnerable, autonomous, and static. In fact, it’s worth noting that until the last 30 seconds of the game whenever we’re in control of Sarah or Ellie Joel isn’t even there to interact with. This is a game that trusts us with a shotgun and a molotov cocktail, but is horrified of letting us create those quiet heartfelt moments of our own volition.

And it’s not just the relationships that suffer in the player’s hands. The themes themselves dissipate the moment gameplay starts. It’s not like there aren’t games that have explored the topics discussed in the cutscenes with their mechanics, even in the past few months! State of Decay forces you to make interesting decisions about who to welcome into your group and who to exclude, framing the decision in a utilitarian ethics perspective. It asks you to define your “us”, your group, based on resource management, tactical advantages, and available space every time you meet new survivors. And Shel’s story in The Walking Dead’s 400 Days is very much about choosing who we want to protect and what the borders of our social groups are through branching story choices. You can do these things with game mechanics, and there are games out on the market right now that try. But the game stubbornly insists, like so many games before it, that story and gameplay are oil and water, that they’re two asset pipelines that have nothing to do with one another, that gunshots make for more interesting play than the characters it spends so much money trying to bring to life in cutscenes.

Ultimately the game feels like perhaps the best possible version of a fundamentally flawed design ideology; a perfect implementation of an imperfect idea. It takes the Half-Life content muncher mentality as far as you can possibly take it. But in doing so it yo-yos back and forth between two mediums; clearly more interested in the one it isn’t than the one it is. And I’m not sure a truly great work can come about that way. Can a well acted, well written game be good if its gameplay remains wholly disjoint from everything that makes it good? If a film is just boring, flatly lit talking heads in shot reverse shot but the dialog is deep and its characters believable can that be a good film? Is it okay for a song to have a boring, monotonous, noodly composition as long as its lyrics are poetic and true? If a card game played just like Magic the Gathering but had unbelievable art and flavor text that moved you, could it transcend being just a Magic ripoff? It becomes a sort of aesthetic values question, and that’s really subjective and impossible to answer meaningfully for anyone but myself.
Do I think story in The Last of Us is worthwhile; do I think it in some capacity edifying to experience and ponder? Yeah, warts and all, I do. Do I think that story is crammed into the loading sequences for a game that has a passable but otherwise boring set of mechanics? Yeah, I also think that’s the case. And I think maybe that’s the reason this sort of game style has survived as long as it has; because there’s enough people out there that legitimately don’t care whether their play is meaningful. And as long the story bits are entertaining story bits and as long as the gameplay bits are fun gameplay bits, the game is a “good game.”

But you can feel the need; the desire for change and cohesion underneath the skin of this game. You can feel that pull for something *more* than hitting dudes with clubs and shivs and bullets when you play as Sarah during the opening sequence and you’re as scared and confused as she is without having to kill or hide from anyone. You can feel it when the game’s cinematography lingers on an unsaid sentence and it wants *so hard* to actually be a game about that feeling before letting you go back to shooting dudes. You feel it in the game’s climax, which sucks all of the immediacy and tension out of the situation by doing the standard video game last level thing of escalating the difficulty to let you know: Hey, this is the *big boss fight.* And after 10 or 20 deaths and restarts your emotional investment in the moment is deadened, and that sense of familial concern for Ellie’s life and the future of humanity turns to frustration with the mechanics and level design. And you can feel it in the last moments of the game, where Joel needs to commit to his lie and Ellie needs to commit to trusting him about it once and for all. We sit by the side, helpless to do anything but watch as there are no monsters nearby to hurt. We are the game’s pistol; we are the game’s lead pipe; we are the game’s smoke bombs and its bow and arrows. But no matter how much it might want to pretend otherwise, we are not its characters. They exist immutably in their own movie universe, a universe without… well, a universe without us.

 

[buzz]

How the fuck can you talk about a video game for 16 minutes and mention (also deride) the gameplay for less than 2? What the fuck is his problem with the narrative? I slowly feel like everyone is going insane.

I haven't played Last of Us, but I actually prefer that form of storyfaggotry that he criticizes. At least cutscenes can be skipped or I can go to the toilet while they play. But the newer games don't let me do that, they are "interactive" so now I have to make my characters walk slowly as fuck while they're talking to some people. Oh, and I can look around while scripted sequences happen, ain't that immersive and emergent?
It pisses me off so much that nowadays when I replay Half Life I just load to the point when I first get a pistol. I loved the entire introduction sequence when I first played it but now it just gets on my nerves, especially when I remember what it lead to.

It's a fucking action game, why would you be so cranky about the story?

 

[felipepepe]

Because this CITIZEN CANE OF VIDYA GAMES it's a goddamn action/adventure game just like all the countless one before it, the only real difference is the story painted over it. Gameplay is cover-based shooting, QTE smashing and shitty stealth, what more you need to hear?

Besides, Errant Signal isn't a "8/10 review" kind of guy, he's more into the game as a media and all that...

 

[Jarpie]

Errant Signal is like film critic who desperately tries to analyze story and characters from films by Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich. There are actually very few games what would be worth of it. I do wonder if he has ever played anything like PST, Fallout 1+2, Arcanum, old P&C adventure games etc. given his critique in The Last of Us about games what tries to tell stories.

 

[buzz]

Then say it's a shitty and boring game and call it a day. All this trouble over the "ludo-narrative" dissonance is just a half-assed job at actually writing critiques about video games. He makes the valid criticisms but for all the wrong reasons. His problem is not that the QTEs are boring, but more that there's not QTE where you hug the girl or something like that.

Take a comment of his about GTA

In my previous videos I’ve gone over how Grand Theft Auto has become a franchise that’s got a rather disjoint tone. It wants to be a goofy, parodic chaos generator and it wants to be a self-serious gritty crime drama loaded with social commentary and doesn’t really seem to recognize how jarring it is for players to switch violently and randomly between those two extremes.

Why is THIS a subject of criticism in a video game? The story in GTA serves as present for the player while the missions and the mechanics serve as the meat, the gross of the game. The "chaos generator" is almost completely optional and left for the players who want to do it. Should the game be more reactive to the chaos some people generate? Maybe, but then again we have RPGs where our actions and choices receive better in-game consequences. GTA IV was not mediocre because Niko was presented as such a tragic character and that was jarring because the Niko I played as killed hookers. GTA IV was mediocre because the missions were bland and had no variety, neither the world wasn't packed with as much fun things like the previous ones.

 

[Infinitron]

buzz Well, you might find this shocking, but not all reviewers think their purpose in life is to list all the reasons why a particular game is shit. Sometimes they just want to talk about stuff.

 

[buzz]

Yet he still spent 16 minutes telling us how "jarring" the game is because the gameplay mechanics and the cutscenes don't fit and (to quote you) we don't get "emotionally engaged" while shooting zombies or killing dudes from behind. He still technically told us that the game is bad, but not because the crafting system is useless or the shooting is not challenging, aside from the two minutes or so when he complained about the boring stealth section and mentioned the QTEs. I find this need to involve the narrative more and more into the mechanics pretty disturbing, especially when it's about action games like this one.

 

[Gozma]

Eh, I feel like "the problem of the moviegame" concept is already obvious to the point he shouldn't even have done a TLoU video. The interesting stuff left to talk about for them is how mainstream game faff criticism reacts to stuff and about the economics of AAA. But he just did a straight review of the big new middlebrow megamarketed hit game out of habit/pageviews.

 

[Cholo]

The title of The Last of Us sort of begs a question, but you don’t really recognize it immediately thanks to the assumptions Zombie games generally bring up. Specifically, the game wants us to task who the “Us” is in the Last of Us. How do we define “us;” how do we sculpt and cultivate social groups and loyalties?

This whole bit was pretty cringe-worthy. Reminded me of: