cars posted:probably the best story about the Wachowskis and The Matrix is when they said they wanted to give the agents Desert Eagles, and their hired gun nerd threw a tantrum and whined that deagles were "wanker" pistols, and the Wachowskis laughed at him and said Yeah we're definitely giving them that specific gun then.
in the 1999 film, the character of Switch was originally intended to be male in the real world and female in the matrix, but the idea apparently caused warner bros great anguish and foot-stomping, so the role was cut down to just a cis woman who has like two lines and then dies
all the stuff about that vis-a-vis the wachowskis' personal lives aside, it's interesting to me because by now "person exploring their gender identity by presenting a different way online" has become such a commonplace that if they were to resurface and spotlight that concept in 4, it would be almost trite
cars posted:yeah the trailer for Matrix 4 is like 50% a blatant mega-troll in a way only it could be. like it cuts from someone choosing the red pill right to “Directed by Lana Wachowski” lol
i hope that's the case because it felt more like a "hey everyone, remember pills and streaming binary and wacky stuff?!" cash grab. kind of like with fallout and the vault boy/war never changes bit that gets trotted out every time
招瑤 posted:started doing a nwn playthrough as a druid and i've never felt more useless
original campaign?
at least until i get some levels im just a bad fighter with some cantripes who can helpfully turn into a badger
damoj posted:
I love famous Communist Leader Bernie Sanders
zhaoyao posted:well shit
at least until i get some levels im just a bad fighter with some cantripes who can helpfully turn into a badger
how did it go? did you enjoy collecting 4 items from each of the 4 compass points in every chapter and rolling on loot tables?
tears posted:how did it go? did you enjoy collecting 4 items from each of the 4 compass points in every chapter and rolling on loot tables?
just because its a bad game doesn't mean i don't have nostalgic baggage from 20 years ago tied up in it 
JohnBeige posted:Bought a new computer for the first time in 8 years. Having hella fun playing Total War: Warhammer 2 and Battletech on my time off. Also gonna finally play Celeste and Hollow Knight.
goddam this post was bugging the hell out of me today because this band Celeste came up in my playlist at random and i knew i had just heard about them. or so i thought. anywho, i don't know what celeste the video game is but celeste the french experimental metal band is p good.
Gssh posted:offensive tactics focused on sending 'garbage' to your opponent's screen through relentless tetrises and t-spins, offshoring the waste generated from highscoring moves.
the 'offensive tactics' are not new. they were introduced almost thirty years ago in the arcade version of puyo puyo. after a couple of years of copying and refining, the most popular aracde battle puzzler game appeared as tokimeki memorial spinoff taisen puzzle dama. what is new in the present era is scaling it up from two player to multiplayer battle royale versions like tetris 99, pac man 99 and super mario bros 35
JohnBeige posted:Total War: War
cars posted:
Someone pointed me in the right direction and I learned more about how stories for video games are written in nearly every contemporary case that isn't a solo project. The head of the development team writes the story as a vague outline, maybe just something they ramble off the top of their head on Zoom so their team leads can turn it into a framework for the game. In rare cases this is a known auteur but otherwise, it's written at the usual level of talent that a software development project director has for crafting a compelling narrative, and the goal is to make whatever elements are considered hot right now in AAA games happen in this game, whether or not any of what's decided for this game fits together at all. That is also a moving target, and since it's the most important target for the game to hit according to every current development philosophy, contempt for the story is baked into inventing it.
The various assets, sequences, quests, maps, etc. for the game are then acquired or developed with the outline as a guide, though it's often ignored or rapidly changed during development so different parts of the game no longer fit together. It's considered poor form in today's industry either 1) to develop a AAA game without a melodramatic plot, OR 2) to use the plot to inform what's going into the game. The standard is to switch the plot up as needed to match the assemblage of marketable copies of parts of other recent games that keep getting kludged into the one that's being made.
Then, the "head writer" and/or "writing team" are brought into the project, often at a point when the game is nearly finished, to try their best to translate all the jumbled mess of stuff that happens in the "plot"—the project director's vague and constantly metamorphosing ideas of the narrative paths of characters that have already been inserted into wall-climbing and gunfights and climactic duels with each other—into a story that makes something resembling sense, through writing dialogue-heavy cut scenes, characters saying exactly what they're doing to themselves to inform the player (with the writer maybe trying to sneak in their motivation for it), written or audio logs that interrupt the game to deliver backstory, etc. Contemporary development tools greatly aid the processing of voice lines recorded later into robotic movements of each character's face in the middle of whatever action sequence, as we all know and love.
More or less, no one is tasked with writing the story of a video game anymore, and no wants to be. The writers' jobs are to make semi-coherent the narrative nonsense of the game, a bunch of pieces strung together from an endlessly shifting idea of what the story should be and what the "gameplay" should include, dictated over the phone to the development team daily by their bosses. But a script in imitation of a big-budget action movie is considered mandatory for most such projects, and it has to be elaborate to get people talking about it and arguing over it around release time to build hype, and a huge amount of the game's run time has to be devoted to telling it. It's like making a superhero movie, I suppose. You can't wait around until the script is finished to start animating Superman punching Batman, or it'll never get done.
The net result is that there is just not a standard for a "good" story in a video game project of any size anymore. It's impossible to write one. It's a myth lost to time.
The half that this doesn't answer for me is how the overeducated cultural-critique class writing video game reviews has been trained to ignore how much the "good" stories suck compared to "good" writing in other media. Payola is part of it given the struggling fortunes of all "news" sites nowadays and the full knowledge of writers that their editors have no power anymore, but there's also an existing market for denouncing everything and anything, which doesn't seem to be happening here even though it's deserved. Video game rants are all bourgeois party politics today, pretty much. Republican vs. Democrat, spiced up with buzzwords about this or that feature that "everybody" likes or hates in the current moment.
I don't know. Maybe it comes down to how, for every marketable rage-machine of a "critic" on YouTube ranting about a TV show, the world now contains hundreds of "professional" reviews of the show that are just a breathless or tepid summary at length of the events of each episode, a reciting of the text that makes no sense if you aren't already familiar with the characters and is designed simply to acknowledge and affirm that the reader has watched the show. Imagine trying that for a AAA video game story, chapter by chapter. You'd have to go full lorem ipsum by halfway through the second article. It's a lot smarter to just get some people together, turn on a microphone and say nothing at all for hours and hours and hours.
If there's nothing to summarize in that braindead backpatting written-summary-as-review-series way when it comes to the "best" video game stories today, if there's even less there than there would be for a mediocre TV show by dint of the pseudo-writing process, maybe there's no foundation for talking about them at all in the current economy of "reviews" and "critics", however that breaks down on the back end. Yet video game stories apparently exist almost solely to get people talking about the game, and discussion of the story often fills 50% or more of the text of reviews. I don't know. TBD.