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Wednesday 19 June 2013

Downfall of AAA games

10/10.

Masterpiece.

Citizen Kane of videogames.

Best survival game ever made.



Those are some of the statements and opinions you can find around the newly released Naughty Dog game; The Last Of Us.

This, as a gamer, stresses me. The reason why is simple, it lowers the bar for what makes games games in the first place and in some instances makes them completely disappear.


Lowers the bar for games?
This is not a game. Now that might sound like an extreme statement but only one thing is keeping that from being true. And that's the open battles.

Outside the open battles the player has zero input into this game. No world navigation, no character interaction, no dialogues, no morality choices, no ally control, no side missions to pick from, no nothing. Everything in this game is in there and you can't do anything about any of it. That is not interactive.

You clear an area, and the game presses 'play' and you watch.

There are further things in this piece that demonstrate the compromise of game design.


Survival?....Where?
This is where it gets really bad. For a survival game, you have to make big cuts to player luxury so they can get that sense of desperation. This is something unfortunately Naughty Dog, and AAA games in general do not do. They hand you all the tips, tricks, checkpoint systems, HUD prompts, whatever you need and then some to get through this "cruel" world.

Not good enough. If you want to make a game in this setting, do not water it down so much where your game design is in direct contradiction with the setting.
When I die in a survival game, the biggest consequences should not be me losing 40 seconds of progress. This defeats the whole desperation aspect the very core of the genre relies upon.

This is a shooter with limited ammo at best.


Ellie...The companion that never was.
This is a companion we are supposed to care for. But again, in no way interact with so how exactly are we supposed to care for her. This is a game, if you want us to invest in something, build a game play mechanic around it.

There are dialogues littered through the game once or twice (where you press Triangle and listen) but that's about it. We don't look after her in the game, how about sharing food and what-not with her (if there were such mechanics anyway). No 'stop' and 'follow' commands, which would have made us care for her as we looked after her in battle (even if only early on). And to make matters worse, she is not believable in the game world...

...She is invisible to the enemy, sometimes walks right into the enemy....And I can't remember how many times I walked into a bathroom for scavenging and when I turned around to exit, Ellie was right up my ass blocking the way.

Again, another example where something in the game adds nothing of value to game play and even detracts from it.


Why are you picking on this game!
I am not. I am giving examples on how AAA games devolved into mainstream mess where a game can't do what it wants to do because all the players are treated like 12 year old retards. That's what truly gets to me and I can't stand it.

I don't want my hand held in every game. I don't want to be "along for the ride". These are things that go completely against why this medium is great and for game developers to sacrifice interactivity for the sake of ease of use or automation is just mind bogglingly anti-games and even a word I hate to use; lazy.

I have used The Last Of Us as it has been praised as the king of games and I really really really don't want AAA games to continue on this path.