Comment on Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 day agoThat feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Perhaps the only major issue with using environmental storytelling to give City 17’s base exposition is that the game is both a sequel, and intended as an entry point. I remember as a kid playing HL2 (with very little knowledge of HL1) and as soon as I saw the aliens in gas masks corralling everyone, really wondered what sort of story I missed in the first one. Leaving people to figure things out is definitely cool, I’m just offering ways to point out clearly that you, the player, didn’t miss anything key, because in today’s media deluge, often the reason for that feeling is because a story is slapdash and poorly written - as opposed to simply hiding the details in plain sight for the player to find.
Interestingly, there are some notes in an art book where the G-Man originally gave a longer opening speech to explain what’s happened in your absence, but they removed it. Overall it was probably the right move, but I’m curious how it would have felt.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Yeah, the DS1 remake had Isaac talking, and they did it pretty decently because he’s not constantly surrounded by people who have answers to questions that Isaac has. The game is still about finding out what happened, and nobody can answer that, so you can’t talk about it. You’re discovering it with Isaac AND the other survivors. In DS2 you can’t really ask all that many questions about unitology, because people don’t really know the answers either.
But it would ruin all the interesting stuff about HL2’s history discovery. If someone just tells you “Oh yeah, the combine conquered the earth, and now they’re using these hybrid soldiers to suppress humanity after their military conquest, and their citadel is slowly expanding an ever more repressed population in this city” that’s not nearly as interesting as finding it out. But if Gordon asks, anyone would know the info, because they lived through it. By having a silent protagonist, people can just assume Gordon’s been around and knows this stuff, and not magically kidnapped by a supernatural magic guy in a suit who keeps mysteriously following him around. Half the fun in HL2 is figuring out the world, it’s a core concept of the game. Having G-Man spell it out would remove the fun.
Of course, launching it today removes a lot of the fun too, since there will just be 5000 youtubers repeating eachother about the game.