People keep buying Triple AAAAYYYYYY~ games with the expectation that they will be good. Well? :lenin-sure:
The one right before this one was good, why isn't this one good :angery:
Kid named capital spotting an opportunity for further exploitation of customer expectations and goodwill built from the last product:
:capitalist-laugh: :waltuh:
if this game isn't good its not because of any kind of cost saving measures or increased monetization
Yes of course. But what I think happened is that, 1. The first game did really well, then 2. The publisher did the classic thing where they do focus group research, which in the end results in the product becoming normalized, non unique, slop. It got zeroed in on and rewritten to appeal to the broadest spectrum, so we get "marvel" dialogue. Add in potential budget cuts, firings, crunch etc, and you end up with a worse sequel. :sterling:
That definitely could be it. But since it has the same creative team with Cory Balrog directing it once again the issue could also be with a decision Santa Monica Studios made.
I don't think Sony messes around with its development studios that much for narrative or writing. Like Last of Us 2 seems like what Neil Druckman wanted to make
People like to meme From Soft dialogue as kinda weird but it is 1000% better than erm that happened dialogue
my problem is more that 90% of dark souls dialogue is like
"heheheh.... i hear you want to............. seek the forbidden stain??? (YES/NO) heheheheh..........." and then when you hit the A button again they say "heheheheeee.........." and then they reappear two levels later as an invasion and then when they die they say "zanzibart... forgive me....."
the actual dialogue when it happens is usually pretty solid but it's like 10% of the game's script and usually hidden behind the most obtuse side-quest design this side of neptune
like don't get me wrong i love the games but holy shit the way it presents its plot is so bad and inaccessible that it's no wonder fan-fiction youtubers is how most people engage with their writing
While a bit bazinga, i did laugh when kratos dodged Thor's hammer and got bonked in the head on the rebound, in which Thor called him a dumbass.
Yeah, I thought that was good. I feel there's an overreaction to anything even remotely resembling marvel, which this only does superficially. Hell, most of the humor and banter feels more like stargate SG-1 (probably due to Christopher Judge voicing kratos) than marvel. Kind of reminds me of when there was a joke in the Dune trailer and all of film twitter said it was marvel soy banter, when it was literally a joke with a setup and a punchline.
Noticing marvel banter is a good tip-off, what I think is distasteful is when media is too insecure to leave serious or emotional moments sit,
First American children's media stopped grappling with difficult emotions and concepts like old age, exploitation or death and now that insecurity is bleeding into media aimed at grown adults
I think you'd need to have a very rosy look of the past (and there's a lot of survivorship bias there) to think that stuff like popular American cinema only now refuses to deal with difficult topics or emotions. It's kind of the status quo that gets broken every few decades when either a popular movement takes over (e.g. noir cinema), or someone manages to break through studio control (e.g. Orson Welles, Chaplin).
And the writing perhaps isn't as good as the first game, but I don't think the game shies away from dealing with difficult topics in any way
spoiler
The entire Niðavellir arc deals with Mimir acting on Oldin's behalf to exploit dwarves and extract resources from the realm. It explicitly mentions that they were realistically not given a choice, and that they weren't threatened directly but would have starved if they the system weren't set up.
Like there was a lot of banter involved (honestly I don't know how you fill the thousands of pages needed to fill game dialogue otherwise) but that was about as close as you'd get to criticizing capitalism and imperialism in a product with a budget north of $100 million.
while spouting soy marvel banter
ummmm probably because thor is from marvel duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
:biden-forgor:
I am heartbroken comrades :deeper-sadness:
The first 5 minutes were very good and then all tension and stakes were ripped apart piece by piece
It feels like I'm playing bad fanfiction and the game has been written by the marketing team and Critical Role™
The decline of literacy and it's consequences, 2018 was so good :sadness-abysmal:
Critical Role did the marketing for God of War Ragnarok directly without diverging from the Critical Role style guide or altering it to suit the material better, it was really bad
https://youtu.be/ZjucT-UZzgg
probably a rush job lol
My favorite CR is Vin Diesel playing as a Witcher - I think?
Yeah I hated that moment, it broke my immersion. Everything feels so different from the previous game. The story is moving too fast and they're really dropping the ball with making Odin and co. seem even remotely intimidating, especially when they built them up so much. Everything the first game was leading up to feels very cheapened. Also the combat feels weak compared to how weighted it was in God of War 4.
Still gonna play but I'm honestly disappointed with the direction they took. God of War 4 is one of my favorite games.
they’re really dropping the ball with making Odin and co. seem even remotely intimidating
That sounds bad. I liked 2018 fine, but found the story kinda meh. The one thing I really digged was the Odin crow surveillance state going on.
Though maybe that should be expected since one of the god boss battles in the first one was just two large adult sons.
Odin was played like he's the head of a crime family in the one scene he was in so far, I thought it worked reasonably well.
I'm still at the beginning but I thought Odin was introduced in a good way. He more similar to a mob boss getting someone to drop an investigation so no one has anything unfortunate happen to them. With Thor being the muscle
I wanted something more like the Northman where the Norse gods and their followers are socially aliens, I feel like universalizing the modern man (helpful for Kratos/Atreus) is a missed opportunity with the death cult elder gods
I played just the very beginning and I think Odin seemed neat, in that first scene at least. Certainly not what I was expecting
G*mers freaking out over incredibly minor quibbles?
No, that's never happened at all
Literary crit is good and media homogenization under the Disney's neoliberal style guide is bad. I can not rewrite my comment again because Hexbear deleted my comment twice after trying to go in depth (please implement comment drafts)
GoW 2018 was a win for progressive media and gives young consumers a much better role model and genuine literary depth compared to GoW3.
Media literacy is good, the sanding away of well executed themes around parenthood, childhood, parental anxiety, emotional vulnerability, masculinity and healthy fraternal relationships for soy banter and selling Thor pop figures is genuinely bad especially because westerners are incapable of analyzing the world without comparing it to their slop
God of War 4 was more comfortable with exploring literary themes and complicated emotions in depth and at length than God of War 5
4 was a good example of more progressive media and all of that seems to be being sanded away in favor of making it more similar to other big budget media slop
I watched a play through of the beginning and I didnt think it was particularly bad. I'm pretty easily entertained though.
Why the fuck is Odin an old Jewish man from Brooklyn? He sounds like Larry David.
Hopefully he dies like he did in that one Jurassic Park movie
Being ripped apart by two T-Rexes
Ok so I got to this part. I don't see what the issue is at all.
Fakeout deaths in the beginning have been a thing in JRPGs for a long time.
Is this similar to Marvel things? I'm not really seeing that association. The last thing I saw with a fake ending was the anime Bocchi The Rock when the main lead insisted she wasn't good enough to stay in the band
The fight was also pretty cool, more engaging that was I expected from the first boss
Breaking the fourth wall like that was really out of place especially paralleling a genuinely well executed scene from the previous game with Kratos protecting his kid from who can basically be described as an incel psycho that foreshadowed what his kid could become without a healthy village to raise him
A very bad portend for what's coming imo, esp because I consider GOW2018 to be a landmark achievement for progressive media and literary media
Also it was a genuine game over screen with loading-screen combat tips
I don't think that was breaking the fourth wall, that was just a way of communicating that Kratos genuinely died in the scene to the player. Like I didn't detect any irony or humour in that scene, it wasn't trying to be "meta" or anything. I think it tried to communicate that Kratos died and was resurrected and a game over screen is an effective use of the medium to do that.
I don't think it was exactly a fourth wall break, Thor didn't know that you were at the respawn page. But Kratos was dead/defeated and Thor knew that.
I had died before in the fight so I was genuinely ready to press the button to respawn at checkpoint. To me at least it didn't read as unserious and it did not distract from the scene
Now if Thor said that the combat tips wouldn't be enough to beat him! That would be pretty weird!
What is disappointing is the son shouting out every single combat tips. I'm pretty sure Kratos knows he should use the fire blades on the ice dudes!
I think that hit me as a joke more because Thor and Odin were already speaking and behaving like modern-day mobsters without the fantasy overtones that Freya and Baldur used when talking.
Especially because using Mjolnir as a defibrillator was genuinely funny but also implies that these Norse gods have defibrillators.
Someone suggested to me that Kratos would be forcibly healed just like how he taught Atreus to do in the previous scene and I think that would have worked better
You make a good point that the characters don't break the fourth wall, that helps
Fakeout deaths in the beginning have been a thing in JRPGs for a long time.
It happened in the original God of War too
