E3 2018

Yeah, that was all bs. If they wanted to make a statement about violence they wouldn't be so violent.

Best statement about violence would be to make a video game about gay people kissing and not having to do any violence

it has been interesting seeing the debate around this. lots of people going "What, you just want it cartoony to make it easier to handle?" as if changing a visceral physical act of leaping onto a human and jamming an edged blade into their neck into a single button press isn't an abstraction. or the fact that if you fail and get killed, you don't die forever, you get a retry, just like any cartoon. it is cartoony anyways. luxuriating in realistic mutilation is just a cherry on top. it's certainly a discussion worth having, as games become more and more realistic, but i don't think it's as simple as "cartoony = bad, realistic = good". videogames strive to be realistic and have long fetishized "realism". in many ways a realistic death is a reward.

on the other hand apparently the first game was super bloody too and these were always horror games. despite hearing that it's an incredible benchmark in gaming, i haven't played it. seeing the second game, i don't think i ever will.

The preview didn't strike me as being that gratuitously violent, and I generally hate violent games and feel bad when I run over pedestrians in GTA. You know - compared to Sniper Elite, or a Final Destination thing, those things really love to ogle their violence.

It is an interesting debate, sort of, and it's not new. Movies are the best comparison, especially as games continue to approach movies. "Realism" is held in high esteem in movies, both in things like war movies and horror movies, the former more "realistic," the latter more fantasy but both "real" depictions of cause/effect violence (despite, of course, both being fake). You can make a war movie or a horror movie with no violence, but it's probably much harder with a game, not least because games like this are also more or less hybrid-action games (that is, war/horror/action/fantasy all wrapped up). There are plenty of puzzle games and games with cartoonish violence (Mario et al.), just as movies have their equivalent (like the Marvel movies, which are more or less 100% violent yet nearly bloodless). This sort of game is the other end of the spectrum and probably wouldn't work without the hyper realism, which is to say, violence.

Still, I can think of some pretty easy thematic solutions. For example, rewarding, say, mercy killing over sadistic killing, or having killing carry some sort of karmic cost that affects play, so that seeing that sort of hyper violence gore doesn't come as a reward so much as a sign you did something wrong, or could have done things a better way with better results. Or the more violent you are the harder it is to play, or it starts to affect accuracy or something a little bit. Basically the opposite of something like "Doom," where the bigger the violence, the bigger the reward. There are probably games like this already, maybe "Last of Us" (one or two) is one of them, I have no idea. I think the first one involves a lot of strangling? I thought there were zombies involved.

Speaking of which, I watched some of the gruesome gameplay of the Resident Evil 2 remake and yeah, that's pretty realistic and gross, too, but it's straight horror, and you're killing (humanoid) monsters. The little bits I've seen of Resident Evil 7 were a lot more sadistic.

https://www.polygon.com/e3/2018/6/13/17459358/super-smash-bros-ultimate-solid-snake-butt

fallout76 looks like dogmeatshit but the existence of cyberpunk 2077 makes me not mind

on the other hand apparently the first game was super bloody too and these were always horror games. despite hearing that it's an incredible benchmark in gaming, i haven't played it. seeing the second game, i don't think i ever will.

FWIW the violence and brutality of the original game are an integral part of the story, and honestly shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. (It also was NOT particularly graphic.)

That said, this article (IMO) rightly questions if the violence is as critically productive as it was in the first game.

https://www.gamesradar.com/the-last-of-us-part-2-is-struggling-to-stand-out-amid-a-brutal-video-game-landscape-the-original-inspired/

Definitely a good point - I was a bit worried after the first teaser which lacked some needed context for the violence. The E3 trailer took my worries away though.

yeah i hear the story & gameplay is very holistic and cohesive. i have played a little of TLOU but it was mostly killing inhuman monsters so this took me by surprise. i haven't played TLOU all the way through so i don't have full context.

kind of funny that Death Stranding was my favorite and it was mostly just people walking through landscapes lol. it took me a while to realize it wasn't CGI that it was in game footage with the HUD (if there is one) off. very meditative and surreal. i am very curious about this game.

loved Nintendo dropping Fortnight for free. a free game the day of E3! that rules. the game is fun and the art is colorful and nice and a little psychedelic. this is why i go to Nintendo.

can't wait to see the new Bloodstained demo, i know they have something new at the conference that will go out to backers soon. i believe it is a good chunk of the start of the game.

lol Fortnite was already on every other platform including phones but yes it makes sense on Switch

Yeah I pretty much burnt out on Fortnite a while ago but was ready to jump back in on switch. Until this bullshit (which is absolutely Sony's fault btw, not Nintendo's): https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-06-12-fortnite-blocks-users-playing-on-switch-if-youve-already-logged-in-on-ps4

So I've played a little bit. Am I right that I am apparently playing against people who have a much easier time aiming than those playing with controllers?

Well yeah maybe, I think you get to choose whether you're playing against other platforms or just against folks on the same console as you? But even then some sweaty PS4 players are plugging in mouse and keyboard to get an advantage over other PS4 players etc.

In my experience though the more fun way to be good at Fortnite is to play smart and avoid combat until the end game, by which point you're more likely to have picked up some decent enough weapons to have a fighting chance. I've never figured out building but I can still do pretty well about 70% of the time just by adapting my play style to my strengths - the fact that's possible is a big part of what makes it compelling overall.

I wish AAA devs had the guts to make actively non-violent games like e.g., Undertale, but fuck it, that'll never happen. I like shooting, hitting, & exploding stuff as much as the next person, but it feels like there is such a wealth of unexplored ludo-narrative territory that has nothing to do with any of those things. Imagine, like, a Tomb Raider game with no combat. IMO that would kinda rule.

Death Stranding just might be what the doctor ordered here, but it seems to early to tell?

there's always racing games

my big E3 takeaway is the good shit isn't coming out until 2020. =|

Nintendo should release a new console called Coming Soon.

this is the first time i've seen Octopath Traveler in action. wow - the game looks like a dream!

it's like the ultimate take on a pixel-art-in-2.5D Final Fantasy Tactics-style presentation.

Demo out today with the first chapter of each character's story; progress carries over to the full game.

…I think I'm gonna hold off so I don't get mad about having to wait to keep going

yeah same, no reason to tease myself when i've already got it preordered

i tried the first demo that came out (w/ 2 playable characters) and i didn't really get it. it seemed like a totally generic JRPG? what am i missing?

the retro textures in a modern 3d engine presentation is cool and the boost system for combat looks satisfying - i didn't play bravely default but that game is very well regarded and this is an evolution of its system. idk more since i barely touched the first demo but it just seems like a well made game overall in a genre that has a lot of uneven games. and the characters all look fun

the combat felt really unenjoyable -- it wasn't clear to me how to use boost effectively and all the combats felt like a grind and then the [first?] boss beat me and i realized i'd need to grind up to win that fight and it wasn't a strategy issue and that's when i quit.

the combat's designed around you using break/boost well so it's kinda puzzley in that regard - if you don't engage with the system you do like 10% as much damage and fights will take a while. same deal as xenoblade really. i doubt you have to grind, almost no modern jrpg makes you do that.

I felt like had to grind a little bit for the boss in the original demo, and retry a couple times, which was fine; what wasn't fine is they hadn't implemented cutscene skips so I had to wait through like a three minute dialog each retry. But they already said the final version would have cutscene skipping when they did a video specifically responding to the early demo feedback.

And yeah the combat puzzle is basically identify weakness -> break -> do a ton of damage with a boosted special move, which is the sort of thing I really dig.

new demo has cutscene skipping

wish every jrpg used the same retry system as trails of cold steel - you never lose progress, any time you wipe in a fight you get a choice between 'retry' or 'retry but make enemies a bit weaker'. so if you're having trouble with a fight and aren't feeling it you can just make it incrementally easier until you pass

cutscene skipping is nice. feels like a SNES RPG with plenty of QOL improvements.

the presentation is so nice and not generic at all. i love the graphics and world design. the music is really good too, again, like a nice old FF entry. on that tip the writing is nice and classic and relatable. feels closer to FFIX than anything in the past decade.

heh i just said nice a bunch of times. but that 3d modeled world w pixel art textures & HD shading is legit stunning.

Is anyone else sick of 3D games where you shoot people? Half of the games at E3 were like this and I had no interest in them, except maybe the RE2 remake.

one reason Death Stranding stood out to me

The games are all becoming more movie like, and most big movies seem to be about people shooting each other too.

I am not really in the market for realistic gun games so it’s not much of a stance to say I’m boycotting them but I do think maybe they should stop making them.

do you think it matters if you are shooting monsters versus people?

I think the critical/commercial feedback loop is stuck on 3d action-adventure/action-RPG games right now, some of those have guns but I didn't get a sense that there were that many pure shooters at the show

do you think it matters if you are shooting monsters versus people?

That always has mattered to me actually, maybe that's odd. It's not even monsters vs people, it's cartoony people vs people too (or even sci-fi people vs people). So team fortress, fortnight, those angry solider guys in doom, imperial officers in star wars games, all fine. But put me in front of a cod or a battlefront and I just don't feel right about it.

Yeah, I don't like it either when it veers from fantasy to hyper-realism. I mean, I'm ok with hyper-realism applied to fantasy, a la Doom - it's cartoonishly OTT - but something like that Last of Us trailer, it's just suspect and gross.

i forgot where i heard it, Super Bunnyhop or somewhere, where someone explained that triangulating a single point in space is the most efficient thing you can do with 3D computing. lining up crosshairs with a target is the basis of pretty much all 3D gaming. it just happens that shooting a gun is a real world analogy to that simple act of computation (which you can design an entire game around, just ask 19th century carnival workers).

plus society is entirely violence and pro-gun, tv shows and movies glorify guns, the new/old media promotes the most shockingly violent stories. even at its most divided the US govt has never had trouble jointing reaching into the piggy bank for larger and larger budgets to buy bigger and more sophisticated weapons (that actually kill real people in real life). reality is violent therefore media is violent. sometimes people mistakenly think it is the other way around.

Yeah tbh I think I'm a lot more comfortable with shooting for fun as a UK resident than I'd be if anyone here actually had guns for real.

Which isn't justified at all but yeah.

triangulating a single point in space is the most efficient thing you can do with 3D computing

Eh, I think shooting at things is just the laziest way for these designers to craft something with minimal world building and story telling.

¿?

But put me in front of a cod

do you think it matters if you are shooting monsters versus people?

I hardly consider myself a sophisticated or self-aware gamer (I barely consider myself a gamer at all!), yet I'm deeply anti-gun IRL but have little problem playing games where you shoot people.

Anyway, I do think that even if the enemies are monsters, that greases the wheel to

... making shooting people in games more acceptable.