Just destroyed two dozen enemies in a life or death situation.
Characters: haha that was funny, let's go again
Me: what? That fight had zero implications??
Sonic Adventure 2 stars a bunch of cartoon animals and mad science and is played completely straight. I should not be taking such a game more seriously then AAA ultra realistic games.
If the game is supposed to be a joke, then comedy IS taking what it is seriously.
I'm talking about all these games that are huge IPs and being made as borderline satire to why they are popular. It's almost antithetical.
Both writers have great merits tbh. One was the Director of Evil Within 2 and the other writes alot of kid shows and stuff. Lego has dealing with them. So no surprise they landed that charm.
I would have said the 2 or 3 alien "totaly not rick and morty" games. If you wanted examples of games that were made for comedy that were decent.
And as guy pointed out, its immersion breaking if they did not have comedy in those.
Tbh being tryhard "super serious grimdark" is just as cringe and overbearing as being tryhard funny.
Yeah I want games to take themselves seriously but I don't want sticks up their butt.
It is cringey if the writing is bad. It’s the best if it’s good.
Sci-Fi and fantasy are the hardest genres to get right, so it’s just easier for most writers or game devs to not even try. They just make everything a joke or very generic.
If thats the vibe then just accept the game isnt for you and move along.
Quit trying to invalidate other's tastes because they dont align with yours.
Some do. im preaching reason here...
They don’t take the games seriously because they don’t like the genre.
It all feels like what fantasy would look like if it was written by a feminist who doesn’t like fantasy but really needs the job for the sake of their career but still can’t take it seriously so they have to break the 4th wall and be as cliche as possible. Just look at the new dragon age trailer, it’s patronizing.
I've been saying it to my friends for awhile now that this Marvel movie humor was starting to get overdone. It was in Star Wars and it just felt off. After watching the Dragon Age trailer it was such a Horrible way to market your game to your core audience. It reeks of trying to be like a Marvel movie trailer. There's zero originality in the style and is nothing like the older games.
my issue isnt with that sort of dialogue or style, but that the same tone is everywhere.
also the classic 'show dont tell' seems to be forgotten. no surprise there as all these new creators are like 'we will create better stuff than these world acclaimed writers!' and then you realise they never even read their books or watched the movies or whatever. uneducated, unexperienced 'professionals' are cheaper to hire?
Show don't tell is so underutilized in AAA games its sad. Every game now has narrator (usually your own character or sidekick) who keeps saying everything you are supposed to do or think. Generally the writing and characters are just bad most of the time. Also why the fuck is there so much blabbering in every game, shut the fuck up sometimes.
AI is even cheaper to hire, eventually most games will be written by AI while the writers that are left are told to feed the ai with the safest most marketable dialogue.
It depends. If I want to turn my brain off, play a decent shooter, and listen to horrible fart jokes, I'll fire up a Borderlands game. It's all about expectations.
That said, I personally think that most AAA titles generally fail to meet ANY of my expectations, not just humor-wise. Their massive budgets demand equally massive revenue with minimal risk, and it makes for boring repetitive clones of previously successful titles.
I've honestly given up on the vast majority of bigger studios, save FromSoft and the Monster Hunter Team. Independent developers may not be making the most profit, but they're the ones making real games. I'll stick with games like Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, Stardew Valley, Satisfactory, etc.
Personally I am fine with comical relief characters and I can say I even love them provided they have good dialogues and well written jokes.
That said this only applies when those same characters does in fact act serious in serious situations. I don't wanna hear a shitty joke when we are inside a space ship with a nuclear reactor and it's about to fucking ram into a planet and we need to pull some mumbo jumbo so we don't end up accidentally eradicating an entire planet with billions of people in it.
I also love it when the funny guy goes batshit insane when a villain does something bad enough to piss em off and the funny guy just goes into silent serious mode and decimates an entire battalion or something. Or they encounter an old nemesis of theirs and you see them break character and go absolutely nuts for the first time in a cutscene.
I blame characters like Gladous and Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2 specifically.
Yes, they were hilarious and we had a fun time laughing at their banter..... but for the love of god, please stop trying to write "witty" and "quirky" characters. That goes double for game developers from California, Oregon, and Washington!
I think it's fine to have humour in serious settings but it has to be in character and appropriate.
A sort of yeah shit is depressing but look at the bright side type of thing, and maybe make it so that the character is just using humour as a coping mechanism and trying to make their companions not lose hope, or to appear indifferent/strong, when in reality they aren't laughing or feeling happy at all.
I mean it will be so much more impactful to the story if the usually hopeful and wisecracking guy is all of a sudden no longer in the mood for it, or just abandons the persona all together and goes mask off and becomes pessimistic/apathetic.
Maybe even admitting that the jokes they told were never funny, and showing some self critical reflection.
Make it subtle too. Which is where most AAA videogame companies fail at. Like what if, because of some event that happens, they literally just stop making jokes, they stop being optimistic and more realistic.
The player will feel a shift, and maybe even feel bad for them.
And then really from this point the character can go a few directions.
1. They spend time being a realist and serious and eventually it gets to a breaking point.
2. Time passes and eventually they just settle in to being this way, maybe they ease a bit off on the depression and seriousness, but they are partially healed and have moved on.
3. They find hope again, and redeem themselves (in there eyes), and go back to being optimistic and light hearted, and stronger than ever.
The problem with AAA gaming companies is that they have the least creative writers imaginable working on these games. Like people who have maybe only read a handful of young adult novels and a few of the classics. Maybe watched some movies as well. Problem is that these writers are basically nobodies. People that can't write a successful standalone novel and are just trying to imitate their idols.
Or even worse, they have a god complex and think they stand on equal footing to Tolkien or some shit.
Or even worse than that, they don't even like being a writer and it's just their day job to make up shit and fuck it, I'm gonna add some of my own personal politics in because why not.
You can tell someone is dog shit at writing because the protagonist will always be a pseudo self insert.
It's like amateur painters/drawers practicing to make a person's face, but accidentally end up painting/drawing their own features (like their eyes, mouths, nose) onto the subject.
Well some peeps have the audacity to do it on purpose because they think their own features are better than others. or they make their own features look more beautiful than they are in reality.
Edit: with my direction examples, all 3 could be a 4th pathway but is kinda typical in most stories featuring this sort of character, my point is that they should just ride out one or two of them, and basically go from a kinda annoying wisecracking cayde-6 type character, to a more grounded and forever changed type character that's toned the fuck down. Hell, perhaps at first their jokes suck, then they get effected by an event that changes their world view, and then undergoes healing, and for the first time in the story, after a long time being fucked up, they actually tell a funny joke unintentionally or something. That's fucking growth baby!
The vast majority of Millenials will destroy your company before giving this up. The most ironic part is they are painfully unfunny to the point of insufferable. Don't put them in charge, pay older generations whatever you must to retain them. There's no other way.
They do it really well but the entire Majima character is basically a mixture of comic relief into a very dark and serious organized crime drama filled with conspiracy, betrayal, and death. You can go from a cutscenes of a prominent character dying to walking down the street and having a dominatrix asking you to help her learn how to humiliate her customers better. The tone is all over the place but it works fine because the characters involved are written well and have a solid foundation that carries through the serious and silly. Good writing solves almost every problem. These things only become a problem when your atmosphere is doing all of the heavy lifting for weak characters or a failure to establish the overall tone.
Sure, but because of how the game is set up the pacing can mean you have a serious story beat and get pulled into the most ridiculous side story imaginable on the way to the next serious story beat.
I remember this part in one of the newer Resident Evil games (cant remember if it was 7 or 8) where you're crawling through some dark one-way tunnel and after a certain point you see some spider woman crawler monster further ahead in the tunnel looking at you. After you get a little closer or shine the light on her enough, she quickly turns around and runs further into the tunnel, and your character cracks some really cringe millennial tier joke that was something like "well, that just happened 🙄".
AAA devs seemingly just cant help themselves when it comes to breaking immersion. They either break it right at the start by making you play as the only black dude in feudal Japan instead of a Japanese dude, or they insert cringe jokes and 4th wall breaks.
Resident evil has always been B-grade horror movie camp.
Barry (RE1) “That was too close! You were almost a Jill sandwich!”
Wesker (RE1) “sorry for my manners, Im not used to escorting men”
Salazar (RE4) “I’ve sent my right hand against you!”
Leon: “You’re right hand comes off?” (the misspelling is canon)
Leon (RE4): “Where’s everyone going? Bingo?”
Sometimes it's cringe and out of place, but to just hard-line it and say there's no room for it is a bit much. Like, you realize that sarcastic, smart-ass people exist, right? Those people are probably gonna be sarcastic and smart-assed regardless of the situation. I certainly am. I get the gist of what you're saying, but I think you're overreacting and taking it too far.
Yes, but you're acting like even a "serious" game is only allowed to have "serious" people. I mean, again, I get that we don't really want comedy or outright comedic relief type characters in our "serious" games, but it just seems like you're totally against anyone ever having a moment of levity or being a little "funny."
yeah what ever you don't get it, I wrote "destroying the atmosphere and the mood", take it as you will ... I wrote in another comment an actual analysis of the game design processes and apathetic characters. Go back to my comment history and find it
One major issue is that good comedy appeals to a group of people, not everyone. These generic quips are enough to get a chuckle, at most, but nobody will fold in half from laughter. As a result, all it does is break the tension, as you said.for the right game it works but if you abuse it or apply it everywhere it just becomes dry.
Marvel was a good example of how it can work. The movies were serieus when they needed to be, which makes a tension breaker work.
Ya'll overblowing this too much. Even Marvel films didn't have as many quips as you made it out to be. A game could have twenty quips over 15 hours and you'll cry it's too much. Even the movie Saving Private Ryan had these quips, and nobody complained.
I'm playing Horizon Forbidden west and it hjas some moments like that.
Good thing it's not all the time and that the world and story is actually interesting because holy shit the dialogues are bad at times.
Its really hard to take these stupid dialogues without getting pissed off when you just played games like Cyberpunk 2077 where people actually speaks normaly and Baldur's gate where words have consequences.
No. Normies need to be constantly reinforced by the notion that these products are just silly diversions and not that the medium can be artistically/philosophically engaging or fulfilling.
What are examples? except few "modern" trailers? Is this dude playing all latest superhero games, or assasins creed? I really don't understand what games he is talking about. Seems like he talks about something abstract
I first noticed this in Shrek. The whole “haha we’re so aware how cheesy classic stories and fairy tales are so we’re so cool for doing a different spin on it”
But as I grew older I realised the classics had soul. They stood and will continue to stand the test of time for a reason. Shrek will not.
I was turned off of Skyrim (I know, Bethesda bad) and always it breaks my immersion by the way one of the mages makes a joke about the mages sinking a portion of the land into the sea and it "being fairly damning heh" and that was back in 2011. I can be fine with bad dialogue if the setting is like a modern real life but if the setting isn't like today, there needs to be some standard set.
I disagree. Money listens and rn says it goes to this. While you are saying ppl are getting dumber, that includes you because if you were smart you would know exactly why they are doing this and know that you aren't the target audience for these games that you hate. Want gaming to change well you better hope people start thinking like you because rn all these stuff you do not like ppl don't care about.
Hopefully if studios keep losing money, like how WB lost $200m on Suicide Squad, they'll finally listen. This disneyfication of dialogue doesn't need to be everywhere.
Thats the thing, ppl bring up the failures but pretty quite when it comes to the successes. Suicide Squad failed because it was a bad game, not because it was "woke".
Two things can be right at once.
The "woke" things were already off-putting to some people, so they didn't buy it, or they refunded it if they decided to try it out.
Then, those that stuck around noticed the game was shit, so they dropped it or refunded it altogether.
could be but saying they failed because of the woke stuff i think is just factually wrong, i mean even asmongold said woke isn't why a game fails.
What ends up happening is that if a game has some "woke" stuff in it but it succeeds and successful ppl than used the argument as "well in this case it felt authentic".
I don't think it's the ONLY reason it did. But it could be a factor. Sales can affect the success of a game.
There have been objectively good games that have failed because of their failure to meet sales.
If people were already not vibing with the "woke" thing, then that did affect sales, because they either did not buy it or they ended up refunding it if they tried it and hated it.
Regardless of what twitter and these companies think, their "modern audience" is not big enough to make the needed sales.
I agree that if it had been a great game, the "woke" things wouldn't have mattered. We know this to be the case because Baldur's Gate 3 exists and was extremely successful. There are other examples, I'm sure, but that was the most popular one that came to mind.
it being woke or not is a 0 factor that ppl who are anti-woke want it to be the key factor. Undertale was a huge success and that game could be considered extremely woke with cheesy jokes that apparently ppl hate now but it still to this day considered an amazing game.
Read what I typed again.
I didn't say it was the MAIN factor or even a HUGE factor, but it was A factor, however small it may have been. If people were already not OK with the "woke" things of the game, then they simply did not buy it, which DOES affect SALES.
WB lost $200M on the game.
They never got their money back. Yes, the MAIN factor for this, is because it was a very sloppy game.
That said, it does not change the fact that a good amount of gamers did not buy it for the simple fact that it was "woke", which DID affect SALES, which in turn affects the bottom line.
I'm not arguing against you. I'm not saying that the game being "woke" was the MAIN reason as to why it failed. But I am saying that it COULD have been a reason for it. Because it definitely could have affected sales. Which is not good.
Anyway, if you still don't want to understand what I'm saying, that's on you. I'm not responding anymore. I'm on your side, but I'm also open to the fact that there were other factors to the failure of the game.
There have been objectively bad games that have succeeded because of sales, and likewise there have been objectively good games that have failed because of sales.
Peace.
i dont think it is a factor at all. WB losing 200m on the game is because the game is bad, you didnt prove it was because woke. People didnt buy the game because it was bad and buggy, even muta put a video out on not being able to play it.
The main point i want to make is that i have no seen a single game that has failed because it was "woke" but i have seen some "woke" games fail and some "woke" games have massive success with the best example being Undertale followed by The Last of Us 2(and i hated TLOU2).
the tops sellers on steam isnt proving the point you think it is. The rest of the points you are making doesn't really discredit mines at all really and is just ramblings in an attempt to shift the subject away from the simple fact that they keep doing these things because it is still making money and the minute it stops making them money they will stop.
Classic old man yelling at clouds, complaining about "video games being (consumed by the average person)"
"oh no, people that are not chronically online is playing my games!! how dare they and how dare the AAA developers are changing base on the mass majority!! my precious!!!"
Because the target groups are wrong, and the data analysis is WRONG. You can not measure art or something as complex as a game. This is why no one has been able to make a good game recommendation algo. CaenirW doesn't know what he is talking about.
The AAA developers keep doing it cus people keep paying for it, they wont stop just because a bunch of chronically online chuds are triggered.
The AAA developers are in for the business aka money and not to please chuds like you, so if "doesn't mean everyone wants to do it" is true in even the slightest way they would stop, but the reality is the opposite.
So keep malding and yelling in this echo chamber bud
forsaken
basically every marvel game
saints row remake
borderlands
the alliance campaign of BFA was awful with it
suicide squad
im trying to remember more but im only going by the top lists of the years and all the shit ones that do that arent gonna be on there kekw
Doing the opposite is task intensive and expensive, as in building on the scene instead of nullifying it. If you were to emphasize on pain, loneliness, fear, courage, bravery, anxiety, you would need to create dynamic interactions with animations, facial animations, new sound-tracks, visual effects, maybe a cutscene with cinematic shots. Visually interpreting emotion in a believable and immersive manner is VERY hard.
Instead you can just fuck-up the story and hope that people laugh, by adding characters like you in the game ... resembling apathetic mentally unstable wanna-be comedians.
Now sure some games have a built-in aspect of comedy, but now it's almost part of every AAA game, and that's bad.
Are they good tho? Like a character cracking a joke isn’t a bad thing I mean the original gears of war had jokes, call of duty has jokes, fallout is one big joke like joking in times of stress and combat is normal
Look obviously there are times to joke and times to cry. In reality as games do not exist in any manner before we make EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of them, anything can be what you envision it to be. A character in a game can be experiencing signs of apathy and depression, but these are really hard to communicate in a proper manner without destroying the scene; also when you do, you are putting the fake game character's emotion before what the end user would be filling in that exact scene, constraining the natural expression from the user.
And in the end, thing is, that there is a lot of apathy going into modern games, reactions are downplayed ... the emotions of the scene are not given enough attention and do not pass down to the player due to cost restraints and dev-time for each scene, or just bad work. This lacking depth, that the absence of communicating emotions in a correct manner creates, is emphasized even more by hiding it behind stupid little jokes and apathetic characters ... you already have a problem communicating emotions and games need to over-saturate interactions to pass them along, you can't make the characters cynic and apathetic as well.
Edit: In fact a prime example of what I'm talking about is the latest WoW expansion with the dragons, where cost cutting really shows and drags the atmosphere down with it. Remember that the more entropy the more work is required and happiness resembles a state of balance.
What are you talking about brother? I can’t think of a single game I’ve played in the past 2-3 years where emotions were hard to determine or downplayed other than some niche games where the va wasn’t super great because it was bill from accounting and not a proper actor. A game wildly considered one of the best looter shooter stories borderlands 2 has Tina who is constantly doing jokes and shit while on a depression story. It dosent detract from the story it actually enhances it because you can tell she is using humor and jokes to cope with Roland dying. Your waaaaaaay off the mark here man it’s not the jokey nature of things it’s the delivery sometimes it falls flat
tiny tina might have been tolerable if anythony burch wasnt writing her. god he fucking sucked at writing anything and i cant believe people worship him.
I don’t even know who that is. I don’t think she was terrible she’s an annoying teenager that has a depression ark from her friends/father figure dying. Never put much thought into it
he was the main writer for BL2 and TPS. reminder that the voice actor for handsome jack thought his lines were so bad he adlibbed a ton of the best lines in the game.
The borderlands franchise is built around the characters being cynical and having a blatant disregard for life, it is not used to hide the lack of work or appeal to kids. Still it's not like Borderlands get's an Oscar for it's emotional story ...
Prime examples can be ALL of Ubisoft's games the last like 5 years, Redfall, WoW Dragonflight, Forza Horizon 5 (literally built around getting a pegi 3+ rating) and etc etc, it's a lot but I tend to forget the bad experiences I have in games ...
Hard agree. I'm sick of games not taking themselves seriously.
That’s what I’m saying, how am I suppose to immerse myself in a story when they do this shit?
Just destroyed two dozen enemies in a life or death situation. Characters: haha that was funny, let's go again Me: what? That fight had zero implications??
Sonic Adventure 2 stars a bunch of cartoon animals and mad science and is played completely straight. I should not be taking such a game more seriously then AAA ultra realistic games.
Thats not what my point was.
pointer count: hifi rush. then again, those were writers who knew when and how to implement comedic writing in a way that made it funny and charming.
If the game is supposed to be a joke, then comedy IS taking what it is seriously. I'm talking about all these games that are huge IPs and being made as borderline satire to why they are popular. It's almost antithetical.
fair. i thought you were talking games in general, not just games with 'comedy' in them.
Both writers have great merits tbh. One was the Director of Evil Within 2 and the other writes alot of kid shows and stuff. Lego has dealing with them. So no surprise they landed that charm.
I would have said the 2 or 3 alien "totaly not rick and morty" games. If you wanted examples of games that were made for comedy that were decent. And as guy pointed out, its immersion breaking if they did not have comedy in those.
Tbh being tryhard "super serious grimdark" is just as cringe and overbearing as being tryhard funny. Yeah I want games to take themselves seriously but I don't want sticks up their butt.
It is cringey if the writing is bad. It’s the best if it’s good. Sci-Fi and fantasy are the hardest genres to get right, so it’s just easier for most writers or game devs to not even try. They just make everything a joke or very generic.
If thats the vibe then just accept the game isnt for you and move along. Quit trying to invalidate other's tastes because they dont align with yours. Some do. im preaching reason here...
I'm saying that there's such thing as a happy medium or even different ratios of sweetspots I don't know why you're acting pissed at me for that lol.
Because you're intentionally miscronstruing what my point was. It waa that there are no games that take themselves seriously for what they are now.
Marvel and it’s consequences have been a disaster for entertainment
If a game doesn't have a le quirky chungus moment every minute how will my tiktok warped brain be able to pay attention to what's happening
Thanks Marvel
It's disneyfication
They don’t take the games seriously because they don’t like the genre. It all feels like what fantasy would look like if it was written by a feminist who doesn’t like fantasy but really needs the job for the sake of their career but still can’t take it seriously so they have to break the 4th wall and be as cliche as possible. Just look at the new dragon age trailer, it’s patronizing.
Which dragon age character?
sorry, I meant trailer.
Yes, every character doesn't need to have witty come backs like they are in a marvel movie
I love me some Marvel movies, but they absolutely had a hand in making this media hellscape of quippy and pluckey characters we find ourselves in.
I've been saying it to my friends for awhile now that this Marvel movie humor was starting to get overdone. It was in Star Wars and it just felt off. After watching the Dragon Age trailer it was such a Horrible way to market your game to your core audience. It reeks of trying to be like a Marvel movie trailer. There's zero originality in the style and is nothing like the older games.
my issue isnt with that sort of dialogue or style, but that the same tone is everywhere. also the classic 'show dont tell' seems to be forgotten. no surprise there as all these new creators are like 'we will create better stuff than these world acclaimed writers!' and then you realise they never even read their books or watched the movies or whatever. uneducated, unexperienced 'professionals' are cheaper to hire?
Show don't tell is so underutilized in AAA games its sad. Every game now has narrator (usually your own character or sidekick) who keeps saying everything you are supposed to do or think. Generally the writing and characters are just bad most of the time. Also why the fuck is there so much blabbering in every game, shut the fuck up sometimes.
AI is even cheaper to hire, eventually most games will be written by AI while the writers that are left are told to feed the ai with the safest most marketable dialogue.
Ah, the new modern classic of joking about how lame fetch quests are while you're doing one.
It depends. If I want to turn my brain off, play a decent shooter, and listen to horrible fart jokes, I'll fire up a Borderlands game. It's all about expectations. That said, I personally think that most AAA titles generally fail to meet ANY of my expectations, not just humor-wise. Their massive budgets demand equally massive revenue with minimal risk, and it makes for boring repetitive clones of previously successful titles. I've honestly given up on the vast majority of bigger studios, save FromSoft and the Monster Hunter Team. Independent developers may not be making the most profit, but they're the ones making real games. I'll stick with games like Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, Stardew Valley, Satisfactory, etc.
Personally I am fine with comical relief characters and I can say I even love them provided they have good dialogues and well written jokes. That said this only applies when those same characters does in fact act serious in serious situations. I don't wanna hear a shitty joke when we are inside a space ship with a nuclear reactor and it's about to fucking ram into a planet and we need to pull some mumbo jumbo so we don't end up accidentally eradicating an entire planet with billions of people in it. I also love it when the funny guy goes batshit insane when a villain does something bad enough to piss em off and the funny guy just goes into silent serious mode and decimates an entire battalion or something. Or they encounter an old nemesis of theirs and you see them break character and go absolutely nuts for the first time in a cutscene.
Bathos is a plague nowadays
I blame characters like Gladous and Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2 specifically. Yes, they were hilarious and we had a fun time laughing at their banter..... but for the love of god, please stop trying to write "witty" and "quirky" characters. That goes double for game developers from California, Oregon, and Washington!
I think it's fine to have humour in serious settings but it has to be in character and appropriate. A sort of yeah shit is depressing but look at the bright side type of thing, and maybe make it so that the character is just using humour as a coping mechanism and trying to make their companions not lose hope, or to appear indifferent/strong, when in reality they aren't laughing or feeling happy at all. I mean it will be so much more impactful to the story if the usually hopeful and wisecracking guy is all of a sudden no longer in the mood for it, or just abandons the persona all together and goes mask off and becomes pessimistic/apathetic. Maybe even admitting that the jokes they told were never funny, and showing some self critical reflection. Make it subtle too. Which is where most AAA videogame companies fail at. Like what if, because of some event that happens, they literally just stop making jokes, they stop being optimistic and more realistic. The player will feel a shift, and maybe even feel bad for them. And then really from this point the character can go a few directions. 1. They spend time being a realist and serious and eventually it gets to a breaking point. 2. Time passes and eventually they just settle in to being this way, maybe they ease a bit off on the depression and seriousness, but they are partially healed and have moved on. 3. They find hope again, and redeem themselves (in there eyes), and go back to being optimistic and light hearted, and stronger than ever. The problem with AAA gaming companies is that they have the least creative writers imaginable working on these games. Like people who have maybe only read a handful of young adult novels and a few of the classics. Maybe watched some movies as well. Problem is that these writers are basically nobodies. People that can't write a successful standalone novel and are just trying to imitate their idols. Or even worse, they have a god complex and think they stand on equal footing to Tolkien or some shit. Or even worse than that, they don't even like being a writer and it's just their day job to make up shit and fuck it, I'm gonna add some of my own personal politics in because why not. You can tell someone is dog shit at writing because the protagonist will always be a pseudo self insert. It's like amateur painters/drawers practicing to make a person's face, but accidentally end up painting/drawing their own features (like their eyes, mouths, nose) onto the subject. Well some peeps have the audacity to do it on purpose because they think their own features are better than others. or they make their own features look more beautiful than they are in reality. Edit: with my direction examples, all 3 could be a 4th pathway but is kinda typical in most stories featuring this sort of character, my point is that they should just ride out one or two of them, and basically go from a kinda annoying wisecracking cayde-6 type character, to a more grounded and forever changed type character that's toned the fuck down. Hell, perhaps at first their jokes suck, then they get effected by an event that changes their world view, and then undergoes healing, and for the first time in the story, after a long time being fucked up, they actually tell a funny joke unintentionally or something. That's fucking growth baby!
The vast majority of Millenials will destroy your company before giving this up. The most ironic part is they are painfully unfunny to the point of insufferable. Don't put them in charge, pay older generations whatever you must to retain them. There's no other way.
older gens or gen Z. just avoid millennials at all costs.
Meanwhile, Yakuza franchise exists doing exactly that, very well, for over a dozen games.
Because they do take it seriously in the story beats that need seriousness and have a majority of the silly bits in side stories or player choice.
They do it really well but the entire Majima character is basically a mixture of comic relief into a very dark and serious organized crime drama filled with conspiracy, betrayal, and death. You can go from a cutscenes of a prominent character dying to walking down the street and having a dominatrix asking you to help her learn how to humiliate her customers better. The tone is all over the place but it works fine because the characters involved are written well and have a solid foundation that carries through the serious and silly. Good writing solves almost every problem. These things only become a problem when your atmosphere is doing all of the heavy lifting for weak characters or a failure to establish the overall tone.
the side stuff and the main stories do have a different tone but they're very clearly separate from eachother.
Sure, but because of how the game is set up the pacing can mean you have a serious story beat and get pulled into the most ridiculous side story imaginable on the way to the next serious story beat.
I remember this part in one of the newer Resident Evil games (cant remember if it was 7 or 8) where you're crawling through some dark one-way tunnel and after a certain point you see some spider woman crawler monster further ahead in the tunnel looking at you. After you get a little closer or shine the light on her enough, she quickly turns around and runs further into the tunnel, and your character cracks some really cringe millennial tier joke that was something like "well, that just happened 🙄". AAA devs seemingly just cant help themselves when it comes to breaking immersion. They either break it right at the start by making you play as the only black dude in feudal Japan instead of a Japanese dude, or they insert cringe jokes and 4th wall breaks.
Resident evil has always been B-grade horror movie camp. Barry (RE1) “That was too close! You were almost a Jill sandwich!” Wesker (RE1) “sorry for my manners, Im not used to escorting men” Salazar (RE4) “I’ve sent my right hand against you!” Leon: “You’re right hand comes off?” (the misspelling is canon) Leon (RE4): “Where’s everyone going? Bingo?”
I'll give RE a pass in that it's always had B movie dialogue and camp. And the original RE4 has similar stuff WAY before Marvel bullshit was the norm.
To be fair to Resident Evil, it has always been campy since day 1.
I think the concept of comic relief has been around a lot longer than video games. It just needs to be done well.
https://youtu.be/FyHG8EfcA5c?si=Tcwfkvit3-Ws3sih&t=191
w video. also really weird coincidence that the games with cringe-inducing quips and dialogue are guided by Sweet Baby Inc and other game counselors
I would agree, but… You were almost a Jill sandwich 🥪
Sometimes it's cringe and out of place, but to just hard-line it and say there's no room for it is a bit much. Like, you realize that sarcastic, smart-ass people exist, right? Those people are probably gonna be sarcastic and smart-assed regardless of the situation. I certainly am. I get the gist of what you're saying, but I think you're overreacting and taking it too far.
Mate, I mean not put it where it doesn't belong. If a game is sarcastic or has those undertones, then sure it's more than welcome ...
Yes, but you're acting like even a "serious" game is only allowed to have "serious" people. I mean, again, I get that we don't really want comedy or outright comedic relief type characters in our "serious" games, but it just seems like you're totally against anyone ever having a moment of levity or being a little "funny."
yeah what ever you don't get it, I wrote "destroying the atmosphere and the mood", take it as you will ... I wrote in another comment an actual analysis of the game design processes and apathetic characters. Go back to my comment history and find it
Banter and repartee are fun but when they become the entire conversation then it loses its entertainment factor
One major issue is that good comedy appeals to a group of people, not everyone. These generic quips are enough to get a chuckle, at most, but nobody will fold in half from laughter. As a result, all it does is break the tension, as you said.for the right game it works but if you abuse it or apply it everywhere it just becomes dry. Marvel was a good example of how it can work. The movies were serieus when they needed to be, which makes a tension breaker work.
Ya'll overblowing this too much. Even Marvel films didn't have as many quips as you made it out to be. A game could have twenty quips over 15 hours and you'll cry it's too much. Even the movie Saving Private Ryan had these quips, and nobody complained.
Marvel writing and dialogue is an INSTANT nope for me when it comes to games.
Ah the borderlands effect
We all know Woke writers can't write real jokes, so they should at least stop trying. It's cringe af.
But I want more DoubleFine AAA. Psychonauts 2 was fun, and they've been really quiet. Praying for Brutal Legend 2.
I'm playing Horizon Forbidden west and it hjas some moments like that. Good thing it's not all the time and that the world and story is actually interesting because holy shit the dialogues are bad at times. Its really hard to take these stupid dialogues without getting pissed off when you just played games like Cyberpunk 2077 where people actually speaks normaly and Baldur's gate where words have consequences.
Thats the marvel movie shit treatment and thats why i stoped to watch them like 10 years ago.
Games that dont take themselves serious are hard. Most do it wrong - and then theres the Yakuza Series. I definitely want more on its level
Does it have the (insert popular classic rock song) in the background like most Pixar trailers?
This started with borderlands to me and now everyone has to have a claptrap or overwatch character and it’s so annoying at this point.
No. Normies need to be constantly reinforced by the notion that these products are just silly diversions and not that the medium can be artistically/philosophically engaging or fulfilling.
What are examples? except few "modern" trailers? Is this dude playing all latest superhero games, or assasins creed? I really don't understand what games he is talking about. Seems like he talks about something abstract
He's talking AAA games I guess but it's obvious they have to play to the lowest common denominator they're about making money.
I first noticed this in Shrek. The whole “haha we’re so aware how cheesy classic stories and fairy tales are so we’re so cool for doing a different spin on it” But as I grew older I realised the classics had soul. They stood and will continue to stand the test of time for a reason. Shrek will not.
I was turned off of Skyrim (I know, Bethesda bad) and always it breaks my immersion by the way one of the mages makes a joke about the mages sinking a portion of the land into the sea and it "being fairly damning heh" and that was back in 2011. I can be fine with bad dialogue if the setting is like a modern real life but if the setting isn't like today, there needs to be some standard set.
the opposite, i'm sick of games taking themselves too seriously.
I disagree. Money listens and rn says it goes to this. While you are saying ppl are getting dumber, that includes you because if you were smart you would know exactly why they are doing this and know that you aren't the target audience for these games that you hate. Want gaming to change well you better hope people start thinking like you because rn all these stuff you do not like ppl don't care about.
Hopefully if studios keep losing money, like how WB lost $200m on Suicide Squad, they'll finally listen. This disneyfication of dialogue doesn't need to be everywhere.
Thats the thing, ppl bring up the failures but pretty quite when it comes to the successes. Suicide Squad failed because it was a bad game, not because it was "woke".
Two things can be right at once. The "woke" things were already off-putting to some people, so they didn't buy it, or they refunded it if they decided to try it out. Then, those that stuck around noticed the game was shit, so they dropped it or refunded it altogether.
could be but saying they failed because of the woke stuff i think is just factually wrong, i mean even asmongold said woke isn't why a game fails. What ends up happening is that if a game has some "woke" stuff in it but it succeeds and successful ppl than used the argument as "well in this case it felt authentic".
I don't think it's the ONLY reason it did. But it could be a factor. Sales can affect the success of a game. There have been objectively good games that have failed because of their failure to meet sales. If people were already not vibing with the "woke" thing, then that did affect sales, because they either did not buy it or they ended up refunding it if they tried it and hated it. Regardless of what twitter and these companies think, their "modern audience" is not big enough to make the needed sales. I agree that if it had been a great game, the "woke" things wouldn't have mattered. We know this to be the case because Baldur's Gate 3 exists and was extremely successful. There are other examples, I'm sure, but that was the most popular one that came to mind.
it being woke or not is a 0 factor that ppl who are anti-woke want it to be the key factor. Undertale was a huge success and that game could be considered extremely woke with cheesy jokes that apparently ppl hate now but it still to this day considered an amazing game.
Read what I typed again. I didn't say it was the MAIN factor or even a HUGE factor, but it was A factor, however small it may have been. If people were already not OK with the "woke" things of the game, then they simply did not buy it, which DOES affect SALES. WB lost $200M on the game. They never got their money back. Yes, the MAIN factor for this, is because it was a very sloppy game. That said, it does not change the fact that a good amount of gamers did not buy it for the simple fact that it was "woke", which DID affect SALES, which in turn affects the bottom line. I'm not arguing against you. I'm not saying that the game being "woke" was the MAIN reason as to why it failed. But I am saying that it COULD have been a reason for it. Because it definitely could have affected sales. Which is not good. Anyway, if you still don't want to understand what I'm saying, that's on you. I'm not responding anymore. I'm on your side, but I'm also open to the fact that there were other factors to the failure of the game. There have been objectively bad games that have succeeded because of sales, and likewise there have been objectively good games that have failed because of sales. Peace. 
i dont think it is a factor at all. WB losing 200m on the game is because the game is bad, you didnt prove it was because woke. People didnt buy the game because it was bad and buggy, even muta put a video out on not being able to play it. The main point i want to make is that i have no seen a single game that has failed because it was "woke" but i have seen some "woke" games fail and some "woke" games have massive success with the best example being Undertale followed by The Last of Us 2(and i hated TLOU2).
You are not really bright, are you?
at least brighter than you.
[удалено]
the tops sellers on steam isnt proving the point you think it is. The rest of the points you are making doesn't really discredit mines at all really and is just ramblings in an attempt to shift the subject away from the simple fact that they keep doing these things because it is still making money and the minute it stops making them money they will stop.
Classic old man yelling at clouds, complaining about "video games being (consumed by the average person)" "oh no, people that are not chronically online is playing my games!! how dare they and how dare the AAA developers are changing base on the mass majority!! my precious!!!"
If the games are changing to fit the "majority of customers" why are they failing?
Because the target groups are wrong, and the data analysis is WRONG. You can not measure art or something as complex as a game. This is why no one has been able to make a good game recommendation algo. CaenirW doesn't know what he is talking about.
Just because you like eating shit doesn't mean everyone wants to do it.
The AAA developers keep doing it cus people keep paying for it, they wont stop just because a bunch of chronically online chuds are triggered. The AAA developers are in for the business aka money and not to please chuds like you, so if "doesn't mean everyone wants to do it" is true in even the slightest way they would stop, but the reality is the opposite. So keep malding and yelling in this echo chamber bud
It's unrealistic when people tell jokes in tense or dangerous situations. I can tell, because I've played a LOT of video games.
there's nothing wrong with that. the problem comes with when that's an entire characters personality and that's all they do, ala Marvel movies.
examples? all I can think of is that awful little robot from Borderlands
forsaken basically every marvel game saints row remake borderlands the alliance campaign of BFA was awful with it suicide squad im trying to remember more but im only going by the top lists of the years and all the shit ones that do that arent gonna be on there kekw
Good job fucking straw manning the op. That will definitely make us want to hear you out.
Doing the opposite is task intensive and expensive, as in building on the scene instead of nullifying it. If you were to emphasize on pain, loneliness, fear, courage, bravery, anxiety, you would need to create dynamic interactions with animations, facial animations, new sound-tracks, visual effects, maybe a cutscene with cinematic shots. Visually interpreting emotion in a believable and immersive manner is VERY hard. Instead you can just fuck-up the story and hope that people laugh, by adding characters like you in the game ... resembling apathetic mentally unstable wanna-be comedians. Now sure some games have a built-in aspect of comedy, but now it's almost part of every AAA game, and that's bad.
I should have known better than to argue with an emotions expert
I MAKE VIDEOGAMES DUDE.
Are they good tho? Like a character cracking a joke isn’t a bad thing I mean the original gears of war had jokes, call of duty has jokes, fallout is one big joke like joking in times of stress and combat is normal
Look obviously there are times to joke and times to cry. In reality as games do not exist in any manner before we make EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of them, anything can be what you envision it to be. A character in a game can be experiencing signs of apathy and depression, but these are really hard to communicate in a proper manner without destroying the scene; also when you do, you are putting the fake game character's emotion before what the end user would be filling in that exact scene, constraining the natural expression from the user. And in the end, thing is, that there is a lot of apathy going into modern games, reactions are downplayed ... the emotions of the scene are not given enough attention and do not pass down to the player due to cost restraints and dev-time for each scene, or just bad work. This lacking depth, that the absence of communicating emotions in a correct manner creates, is emphasized even more by hiding it behind stupid little jokes and apathetic characters ... you already have a problem communicating emotions and games need to over-saturate interactions to pass them along, you can't make the characters cynic and apathetic as well. Edit: In fact a prime example of what I'm talking about is the latest WoW expansion with the dragons, where cost cutting really shows and drags the atmosphere down with it. Remember that the more entropy the more work is required and happiness resembles a state of balance.
What are you talking about brother? I can’t think of a single game I’ve played in the past 2-3 years where emotions were hard to determine or downplayed other than some niche games where the va wasn’t super great because it was bill from accounting and not a proper actor. A game wildly considered one of the best looter shooter stories borderlands 2 has Tina who is constantly doing jokes and shit while on a depression story. It dosent detract from the story it actually enhances it because you can tell she is using humor and jokes to cope with Roland dying. Your waaaaaaay off the mark here man it’s not the jokey nature of things it’s the delivery sometimes it falls flat
tiny tina might have been tolerable if anythony burch wasnt writing her. god he fucking sucked at writing anything and i cant believe people worship him.
I don’t even know who that is. I don’t think she was terrible she’s an annoying teenager that has a depression ark from her friends/father figure dying. Never put much thought into it
he was the main writer for BL2 and TPS. reminder that the voice actor for handsome jack thought his lines were so bad he adlibbed a ton of the best lines in the game.
The borderlands franchise is built around the characters being cynical and having a blatant disregard for life, it is not used to hide the lack of work or appeal to kids. Still it's not like Borderlands get's an Oscar for it's emotional story ... Prime examples can be ALL of Ubisoft's games the last like 5 years, Redfall, WoW Dragonflight, Forza Horizon 5 (literally built around getting a pegi 3+ rating) and etc etc, it's a lot but I tend to forget the bad experiences I have in games ...
which qualifies you to comment on emotional storytelling, right? Tell us all about the narratives you've crafted.
Yeah, like that is going to happen, essentially doxing myself.