"I ignore the critics!" (Necrotect quote TW Warhammer II)
Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12
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Saved me the trouble of typing all that in...
I'm thinking of your old gnarled arthritic hands I am guvner.
Hey, you take Werner out of there! He's the right kind of lunatic
If anyone wants an absurd indie-docu-drama invocation of an alien world using the arctic depths, then I can pretty much recommend The Wild Blue Yonder:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pksyIwiP2Cs
It's not perfect, or his best, and I seem to remember the NASA talking heads during the 'flight out' are poorly handled. But the other-wordly-ness of the underwater realm is good overall I'd say. (It's more one for alien vibe than space facts
Brad Dourif?! Sold!
On the topic of the various Dunes I'm glad Jorodowski never got to make his version. A lot of people say how great it would have been, but my feeling is it would have been abysmal. Lynch's movie, and i know he disowned it, but for me is a masterpiece. Yeah, it deviated a lot from the book in many areas, but the casting was fantastic and it has so many quotable lines. Even the idiotic ending has the "And how can this be? For he is the Kwizatz Haderach!" line. Not to mention the music and sets.
Agreed. And imho, a lot of the aesthetic is spot on. Not all of it (ornithopters not being ornithopters, harkonnens weird heart valves, gas-filled NBC suits Sardaukar...), but the antique tech, the architecture, the stillsuits, the Bene Gesserit, the Guild misfits, the oppressive sandstorms, the dust clouds around harvesters...
By comparison, the TV miniseries follows the books almost to the letter, but the costumes/settings just make me want to cry (the diagonal Harkonnen camera, the fairy Bene Gesserit who flap their hands to try and get the robes to flow like in the Lynch movie...).
Looking forward to the new one, possibly a best of both worlds.
That is all just Kinski's fault!
Had someone mentioned sandwurmies? I'm asking for a friend!
Done by the dude that did Bladerunner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve) so should be good.
I could bang on for ages about movies vs games as mediums, and whether they can be meaningfully blended.
In fact I will
The two formats are essentially diametrically opposed. In a game you are the agent. In a movie someone else travels to a pre-determined end. If a game's story is equally set in stone, how do you give your player meaningful agency? If the player can alter the story, even if only in timbre, how the hell do you provide the assets and code to convincingly lay out all the alternate branchings?
This is the hard problem of game narrative. Yes you can make players care about characters. You can deploy narrative reveals, reversals and jump-scares, and other tricks of the trade to emotionally involve the player. But these moments are rarely enmeshed in or influenced by the actual gameplay. They can happen around you, they can happen in cut-scenes. But they're mainly something that happens when you're not playing the game.
Only skilled and dedicated game devs have even approximated an 'artful' solution to this conundrum. Not just entertaining you with a story, but giving you the impression of being personally involved and influential within its twists and turns. I'd tip my hat to RDR in particular in this regard. Because R* used a fundamentally sneaky trick there. They gave in completely to the problem of a railroaded narrative, and just embraced it. You had no choice in the story, but it made sense.
They took the big brash tropes of the Western genre, and co-opted the 'bad guy outnumbered by the badder guys' motif. It made sense that you couldn't change the key junctures of your life, because they were dictated by bigger forces. They brought it all to a head with the final unwinnable 'Cassidy & Sundance' style shoot out. You didn't have a choice in that, even if your character appeared to. You came to realise that the scenario was unwinnable, even with all the top abilities at your disposal. That's crap for the character, and it's crap for the player (if striking and cinematic to realise in the moment). And then you came to understand why he chose to walk into that trap. And you forgave being railroaded into a dead end. (And with your standard computer game rebirth from this death came the extra twist. Not just the revenge of the son, but your own revenge. For the death of a character that you'd come to identify with. Yourself. I'd liked playing as John Marston dammit! When the time for retribution came, I went from my usual 'shoot the gun hand and let them go' quick draw routine, to putting 6 shots into that 'bad guy' heart without a beat, despite the greyscale morality painted all around. And that also wasn't a choice. The game was going to make me do it one way or the other. But I did it that particular way, and it sure as hell felt like one )
This is the hard problem of game narrative. Yes you can make players care about characters. You can deploy narrative reveals, reversals and jump-scares, and other tricks of the trade to emotionally involve the player. But these moments are rarely enmeshed in or influenced by the actual gameplay. They can happen around you, they can happen in cut-scenes. But they're mainly something that happens when you're not playing the game.
Only skilled and dedicated game devs have even approximated an 'artful' solution to this conundrum. Not just entertaining you with a story, but giving you the impression of being personally involved and influential within its twists and turns. I'd tip my hat to RDR in particular in this regard. Because R* used a fundamentally sneaky trick there. They gave in completely to the problem of a railroaded narrative, and just embraced it. You had no choice in the story, but it made sense.
They took the big brash tropes of the Western genre, and co-opted the 'bad guy outnumbered by the badder guys' motif. It made sense that you couldn't change the key junctures of your life, because they were dictated by bigger forces. They brought it all to a head with the final unwinnable 'Cassidy & Sundance' style shoot out. You didn't have a choice in that, even if your character appeared to. You came to realise that the scenario was unwinnable, even with all the top abilities at your disposal. That's crap for the character, and it's crap for the player (if striking and cinematic to realise in the moment). And then you came to understand why he chose to walk into that trap. And you forgave being railroaded into a dead end. (And with your standard computer game rebirth from this death came the extra twist. Not just the revenge of the son, but your own revenge. For the death of a character that you'd come to identify with. Yourself
. I'd liked playing as John Marston dammit! When the time for retribution came, I went from my usual 'shoot the gun hand and let them go' quick draw routine, to putting 6 shots into that 'bad guy' heart without a beat, despite the greyscale morality painted all around. And that also wasn't a choice. The game was going to make me do it one way or the other. But I did it that particular way, and it sure as hell felt like one )Chris just doesn't seem to be engaged with any of the hard problems there. His conception of why games are a good fit for the movie treatment does sound dated. He's excited by the idea that you can recreate the appearance of a movie with modern technology. And he's up for plenty of world-building in the sense of lore and backdrop assets. Which is all fine. But the excitement seems to dissipate completely when it comes to the hard problems. How do you deliver a narrative in an interactive environment? How do you make cut-scenes an adjunct to the game world rather than an impediment to them? How do you allow agency to affect plot? Or at least have the illusion of it? How do you get the player to care about their role and the broader arc of the story simultaneously?
There's not a peep. No apparent perception that those are challenges at all. No discussion of technical or conceptual approaches. (And no, the ability to walk away from a conversation doesn't count
).Instead, all you'll see is lots of this type of thing from him:
As a snarky bonus, here is a quiet moment from Outlander
I think when you take stuff like the above (of which there is loads), Chris's movie output to date (where he had creative input), and that accursed script all together... The odds of them pulling off a Rockstar are... low. Let's put it that way
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A particularly good pick since…As a snarky bonus, here is a quiet moment from Outlander
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUZY9SsbpF4
Kotaku UK said:
Source.
A 500 or 5000 dollar investment will do the trick
In this regard CR doesnt have to worry. He already has those fishes on the hook, regardless what he does or how the game turns out to be. Even if people will ultimately judge the game as "bad" or "inferior" whoever has any money sitting on it will play it in order to get the most out of the money already spentYeah same GOG source ultimately
I genuinely enjoyed Outlander, as so-bad-it’s-good fare. I wondered at the time who the hell had made this film. How had they managed to lavish so much physical production, with such tone-deaf deployment, on such a cavalcade of bad ideas?
And now I know
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For the quote itself, yes. It's the extended context and analysis that brings the point home though: for all his bluster, he's just objectively bad at the job, and he's prone to exaggerating his own contribution to any project he touches.Yeah same GOG source ultimately
Yeah fair play. I just assumed everyone knew it had bombed horribly for some reason
. And that his production roles were mainly hands off creatively. (Outlander did seem to be one where he burrowed into active production as much as he could though).
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Yeah I’m basing it more on the way he talks up his input with Outlander compared to the big hitter titles. Haven’t heard him try it on with them so much, other than name-dropping. (Plus as a bonus this press release for Outlander was full of similar nudges...)
Very Chris
Haven’t stumbled on similar for Lord of War etc
So why does SC look so utterly derivative and artless? Every interior looks like "generic grimdark sci-fi interior #23", every ship is "generic form-over-function, rule-of-cool space ship #17", every armour set, every weapon etc. There are zero iconic designs in the game, outside of unintentional classics like nipple jets or spaghetti monsters.
When Roberts says "classic", he means "a third-rate imitation of someone else's genre-defining movie from 40 years ago."