Well. Take Destiny for example. Great gunplay. Amazing gunplay in fact. Some of the gameplay systems are good, others not so much. The story? Literally what story, there wasn't even an attempt to make one. It's just vauge dialogue spread few and far between. And that brought the game down, way down. Any COD story is pretty bad too. Most don't even have interesting characters to me. God of War? Not that cutscene intensive, but HIGHLY linear. Very scripted. Again, not an amazing story, and the gameplay isn't innovative. But it's fun, and the story is interesting. That's all I'm saying.
So because Destiny and Call of Duty both a) exist, and b) have below average stories, Uncharted tells an above average story? I wouldn't say that at all. At best the Uncharted stories are the
definition of average, executed with style (actually that's a pretty consistent theme throughout these games that Novacanoo brings up: absolutely basic necessities for the genre, executed with style). Like I said earlier, all 3 games can virtually be recaped as such: Nathan Drake competes with a vastly more powerful/wealthy/ruthless villain to be the first to find a lost treasure. At the beginning of the third act, Drake discovers that the treasure will grant the villain supernatrual powers which could change the world for the worse, so Drake's motivation becomes stopping the villain rather than claiming the treasure for himself." U3 adds a
little more thankfully but the second game is just as guilty of that.
By far the most interesting aspect of Novacanoo's video is the introduction of the axis of game traits. A chart is divided into four sectors to [loosely] categorise every game ever made: Good Gameplay/Good Story, Good Gameplay/Bad Story, Bad Gameplay/Good Story, Bad Gameplay/Bad Story. It looks something like this:
In the "Good Gameplay/Good Story" sector we have games like The Last of Us, MGS3, etc. For the "Good Gameplay/Bad Story," you have games like MGSV, Bayonetta and BOTW. Pretty self-explanatory, nothing revolutionary here.
If we cross off the "Bad Gameplay/Bad Story" section because who gives a shit about games like The Order 1866 or Sonic '06. . .
. . .all that's left is "Bad Gameplay/Good Story" which he divides further into two categories: "Bad Gameplay/Bad Story - Most of your time is spent on Story" and "Bad Gameplay/Good Story - Most of your time is spent on the gameplay". For visualisation, this is what it looks like:
On the "Most of your time is spent on story" you have games like Telltale's Walking Dead and Danganronpa. In these games the gameplay is so scarecely involved in the experience that you can just sit back and absord the media like you would a book or movie.
And on the other side is where he believes Uncharted falls.
According to
https://howlongtobeat.com/, the average person beats
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune in 8 and a half hours on their first playthrough while
Uncharted 2 takes 10. Being generous, these games both have about 2 hours of cutscenes if you include the walking/talking story sections where you """interact""" with the environment. See the problem here? If you're going to waste about 6 hours of your time playing a game for its story then the story you're telling better be absolutely incredible, and
Uncharted's simply isn't. It's about as "incredible" as the game's inspiration,
Raiders of the Lost Ark. The difference with
Raiders and
Uncharted is that
Raiders just so happens to be only 2 hours long and doesn't require the additional 6 hours of effort that
Uncharted does to experience its story; it can be passively experienced, like all film.
But then you may say something like "The games are worth playing for the character dialogue," which, no, they're not. The games' dialogue often get compared to Joss Whedon's
Firefly and his other works, but if you wanted a lesson in how to write quick dialogue, you could watch every single episode of
Firefly and
Serenity to cap it off and still have
5 hours to spare compared to the 18 hours you would spend playing
Uncharted.
The point he's trying to make here is that the characters and dialogue are
only impressive because they've been plopped into a game, where (for good reason) emphasis hasn't normally been placed on cutscenes and character interaction before. The thing is, though, that dialogue has NOTHING to do with gameplay. Nothing. Games are not "
games" when they're showing a cutscene, and having good writing doesn't push games forward in any meaningful way whatsoever. With
Uncharted, Naughty Dog sacrifices
everything at the altar of presentation, but if you want to push
games forward, you have to push actual
gameplay forward. Mechanics, rules, interaction. Why praise a video game for meeting par with film when it does absolutely
nothing with the inherent strengths of video games as a medium.
What's the difference between filming these actors in front of a green screen and gearing them up in all these mocap suits to animate it? The answer is thousands of man hours, millions of dollars and the claim of "pushing games forward." All you're doing here is creating a CG mocap short film and splicing it throughout a barebones cover shooter. This doesn't elevate video games, it elevates the parts of an interactive product that has
nothing to do with being a video game. These games are lauded for trying to make the game
feel like a movie because movies are somehow considered superior as an art form.
Unfortunately
Uncharted is pretty hard to criticise because unlike other games where you can step back and objectively look at how a game functions, Uncharted is a barebones game executed perfectly. It also bears mentioning that a lot of the people who enjoy the Uncharted games are considered "Busy Gamers" in that they don't have the time or inclination to get invested in a game with more depth than
Uncharted, nor do they have the experience to notice that the game is masterfully controlling every set-piece interaction while trying to convince you that you're being the badass Nathan Drake is
on your own. The
Uncharted games represent everything I dislike about games today, and even with the improvement Naughty Dog makes in TLOU, I really hope after TLOU2 they drop the adventure third-person cover shooting shtick and move on to something a little more risky.
Sorry for the rant but it's quite cathartic to get something like this into words. Considering the praise ND gets for what I consider to be a step backwards from games like Jak and Daxter, the ability to effectively convey why I don't like these games after so many years is a gigantic relief.
Show Posts
