Martin said that it doesn't matter if your audience figured out the twist, you wrote the story with the twist in mind so don't change it just because the audience anticipate it.
Right, because the twist isn't necessarily what a story should hinge on. If your story can't survive without the fricking surprise, then was it good to begin with? Psycho is one of the most spoiled movies of all fricking time and yet most folks enjoy it because of the fact its a good fricking movie.
Martin said that it doesn't matter if your audience figured out the twist, you wrote the story with the twist in mind so don't change it just because the audience anticipate it.
what was martin's big twist discovered in the 90s? Jon Snow being related to the blonde chick?
It's a bad sign when you're getting topped by George RR Martin here who despite fans figuring out his big twist in the 90's has not thrown it out.
I'll be honest, how does or how can Jon Snow being Lyanna and Rhaegar's son matter in any satisfying way whatsoever? We're basically bludgeoned with the fact that royal bloodlines are merely a game that the society they're all in plays on itself and that magic and magical powers in this universe come with a tragic loss.
I would not be surprised if the reason why GRRM has yet to write an ending is there being no non-cynical way for a guy who's been in repeated depressive spells over everyone he used to know irl dying to end this story.
Fans clamor all the time, "when's The Winds of Winter? When's A Dream of Spring?" but could we even get those books and be satisfied? Could George write those books and have them be any good?
This entire story was a mistake.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I assume its gonna be similar to the show, in the sense that they'll be allies/lovers and it will be leaked somehow that hes the true aire
3 months ago
Anonymous
>how can Jon Snow being Lyanna and Rhaegar's son matter in any satisfying way whatsoever
It could matter if he'd suddenly managed to tame a dragon and thus got a chance to fight against Daenerys air force.
3 months ago
Anonymous
The fact that people have high expectations of a thing is not a reason to leave it undone. Holy fricking shit what is wrong with you?
I anticipated Martin’s big twist to be The Mad King knew about the Night King. He saw the white walkers coming. Hence the caches of Dragonfire. Hence “burn them all”. The Mad King was trying to prepare Westeros but it turns out I was wrong which is a shame because my idea is better than what we got
I just reread Game of Thrones (the actual book) and it could not have been more fricking obvious who Jon's real mom is. The amount of goddamn times Ned thinks about his sister and what he promised her, usually directly in relation to Jon, is comical.
fpbp
Foreshadowing is a critical narrative device because it's technically incorrect to actually have a twist that nobody could have seen coming.
So many tepid, insecure writers treat the craft like a competition between them and the audience. They try to outsmart the audience but can't, so they're forced to disguise plot points and draw on mystery and surprise to increase the work involved in calling them hacks.
It's actually a good sign when an invested audience member "just knows" what's coming.
And yeah, we react to big twists in the moment, but then if 3 minutes go by and everyone's thought is "...wait a minute, what?" and realize it was bullshit. And then the audience loses a lot of investment, because they won't try to predict things and they'll accept that anything can happen at anytime for any reason so just shut up and watch
"Subverting expectations" was a weird time in media, gave us shit like Star Wars Episode 8 and GoT Season 8.
Damn right I didn't predict Brann being made the King, Bron being master of coin, Samwell being made the best Maester and Danaerys being driven insane by a bell. Guess they pulled one over on me
Subverting expectations only works if it serves a purpose or aids the story. A twist for the sake of a twist is just bad/lazy writing only put in because the writers are either a) pretentious hacks that need to fall back on spectacle in order to make up for lack of creativity or b) just straight up incompetence.
I don't understand how hard it is for modern writers to recreate something that was perfected in 1980. It's not difficult. You need to care about the plot twist and not in a way that makes you angry.
It’s because they’re not good writers, they think of narrative devices and themes less as things that help enhance a story and more like the very foundation of it. It’s the equivalent of taking out the engine to a car in order to cover it in flames and other flashy shit. In the end it just looks like ass and it can’t serve it main function.
>Guess they pulled one over on me
The funny thing is — the discourse around GoT prior to the last several seasons was SO full of wild theories and predictions, that they were covering pretty all possible outcomes. It was pretty much impossible to make a twist that wouldn't have been anticipated to at least some degree.
In fact the overall "Daenerys goes full Mad King and Jon leads the army to free people from her oppression" was pretty popular theory. And I believe it would've worked if the israelite duo would've taken time to show Daenarys' slow fall to the dark side.
>Danaerys being driven insane by a bell
Danaerys being a tyrant was the number one foreshadowed and obvious thing since the start and the one thing they actually stuck with.
If you there was any point at all to ASOIAF/Game of Throne's story, it would be how the human mind can justify tyranny if it's not directed at them, not realising how quickly it can turn.
Danerys was always a psycho b***h who threatened fire and brimstone the second she didn't get what she wanted.
People unironically fell for her hype because she just directed her brutality to people the audience didn't like.
Reminder she crucified not just the slavers but their families, guilty or not, in Meereen as some sort of abstract warning but did nothing to actually fix the issues her abolishment of slavery brought about.
>Danaerys being a tyrant was the number one foreshadowed and obvious thing since the start
This, the problem was how they did it, she snaps and starts mass murdering right when she won the decisive victory, instead of writing it so that something bad and nasty was what set her off.
Doesn't help that D&D rushed the christ out of Seasons 7 and 8 to get their sweet sweet Star Wars money ASAP. >characters written as reductive Abridged series tier flanderizations >comical levels of fast travel >"Daenerys kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet" >pretty much everything about the Battle of Winterfell >coffee cups, water bottles, and watches frequently visible in used takes
Imagine being such brand poisoning hacks that even nuDisney saw fit to say "actually maybe it's a terrible idea to hire these morons" and cancel their movies. I bet if it GoT season 8 aired just a couple years later, Disney would still hire their goofy asses and start a press cycle about fans being stupid mean bullyjerks for appreciating writing in GoT that didn't go their way. They started to get ridiculously invested in discourse wars ever since COVID.
Doesn't help that D&D rushed the christ out of Seasons 7 and 8 to get their sweet sweet Star Wars money ASAP. >characters written as reductive Abridged series tier flanderizations >comical levels of fast travel >"Daenerys kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet" >pretty much everything about the Battle of Winterfell >coffee cups, water bottles, and watches frequently visible in used takes
Imagine being such brand poisoning hacks that even nuDisney saw fit to say "actually maybe it's a terrible idea to hire these morons" and cancel their movies. I bet if it GoT season 8 aired just a couple years later, Disney would still hire their goofy asses and start a press cycle about fans being stupid mean bullyjerks for appreciating writing in GoT that didn't go their way. They started to get ridiculously invested in discourse wars ever since COVID.
An actual twist would have been Joel alive or never revealing what happened to Joel until the end. A happy or neutral ending would have been more of a twist given the nature of TLOU being a misery porn franchise.
>A happy or neutral ending would have been more of a twist
it was a neutral ending moron. and it was basically half of what you said. It revealed why Joel was particularly vulnerable that day and showed their last conversation together
>post credits scene >joel's body is floating unconsious in a green tank of liquid in a lab, his head stitched back together, with a mutated strain of cordeceps him alive. >close up on his face >bubbles form rapidly in the liquid and it drains away >his eyes snap open >he exits the now empty tank >"You thought you were the last of us? We are just getting started" >pan out to hundreds of tanks all draining their water with clones of joel in them
>Joel looks at his second clone >"Who are you?" >"We are a part of you too..." >Faces Camera >"You thought you´ve seen the Last of Us?" >Turns to look at a third Joel emerging from a tank >"Part three is on the way..."
First game already did that, and a part of why his death was such bullshit, >you subverted his death in the first one just to kill him off at the start of the next one? >frick you.
Yeah I immediately think of something that maybe GRR Martin said about plot twist, something about creating a twist just because you're worried the viewers can guess it will ruin the story.
See also Westworld, people on Ganker predicted from the start that we were seeing a flashback of the Man in black, but we still greatly enjoyed the season. Then S2 it was like they were improvising.
>Ruins The Last of Us, Uncharted, etc >Wants to create movies instead of games >Has a massive ego that he references himself in his work >Gets completely ignored by Hollywood
I can't ask for a better fate for a narcissist.
He's the western Kojima.
The only difference is that at least Kojima and his people can actually put out a video game people love and talk about for years. Even if he's a pretentious Hollywood worshiping gay about it.
Now, Kojimbo is competent in his craft and seemingly charismatic/humble enough in person to not repulse his own employees and celebrity contacts. He might be a giant quack in his writing but he's funny about it and doesn't take himself too seriously, a lot of the shit in his games is tongue-in-cheek Japanese humour. You wouldn't call Kojimbob's self-inserts vain or narcissistic really, just silly and weird. It's not the same thing as Druckmann putting in a collectable item in TLOU2 which literally describes himself as a genius who is trying to fight for "his people"(eternal israelite persecution complex).Also even Kojima's most unhinged vanity projects like Death Stranding are actually decent games in their own right.
how? I think kojima's writing has been startlingly on point throughout his lifetime
death stranding was amazing, he basically made a game about the importance of not losing human connections right before we saw that in action. and society has not been the same since covid just becuase of us losing a little bit of closeness with each other
I suppose the sentiment that he's a hack comes from the kind of grandiose, overly philosophical nature of his writing. It's not bad, but becomes preachy and obnoxious because he never shuts the frick up about whatever existential point he's trying to make. It lacks subtlety and once Kojima fixates on an idea he never stops with it. Death Stranding's philosophy of human connections is nice if not particularly groundbreaking, but the way it's framed is so silly and weird that it's hard to take seriously. All the extinction entities and BT bullshit could have been removed and you could simply have had Sam Porter being a lonely schizoid (wow, he's literally me) in the wild slowly pulling himself back to humanity and making friends again with the help of his old colleagues and it would have been far more effective than the absolute drivel that is 99% of DS's plot. People remember DS's opening scene with the timefall rain and Sam being really cold and hostile to Fragile, nobody gives a shit about the 6 million codec calls you get from Deadman talking about some bullshit for 15 minutes straight. Kojima has no idea how to just let the story breathe. Everything needs to be explained.
>Death Stranding's philosophy of human connections is nice if not particularly groundbreaking, but the way it's framed is so silly and weird that it's hard to take seriously.
? not whatsoever. there is japaneseness, but the setting itself was awesome, and looks fully realized in 2.
yeah he's overly expository sometimes, but it's not really meaningful; i can't say any other game director made an impact on my personal philosophy in life like metal gear influenced me toward anti-war thoughts as a young man.
I stupidly bought and played death stranding because people who's opinions i trusted were talking about its themes about connections, social media, feeling noticed and appreciated through engagement, etc.
Then i played it and realized all of that is spelled out for you with no subtlety through text documents.
3 months ago
Anonymous
you bought death stranding because you heard it had themes about social media and feeling noticed?
sounds like a really disingenuous post and you just didnt like the game and now are struggling to find some weird way to shit on it
be honest with yourself, other people can tell when the shit you say sounds weird
>how? I think kojima's writing has been startlingly on point throughout his lifetime
If you acknowledge that MGS4 was bad on purpose to spite the fans that threatened his wife and son's life then yes.
doesn't work because >Gets completely ignored by Hollywood
Kojima has a gazillion Hollywood friends he keeps in his basement and pulls out for his newest moviegames
I honestly would've been perfectly fine with Abby if TLOU2 wasn't about revenge and it was just her game about trying to survive and find meaning in her life. Its already mostly there, its just bogged down by the fact that they had to force a connection to the first game which was basically an open and shut story.
they just simply couldn't drop joel and ellie's story, or only paint joel and ellie as the bad guys. problem of tlou1 was that it felt like a hug and tlou felt like a punch. I mean I remember he warned years prior saying that tlou1 was about love and tlou2 about hate
Of all the things you can do for your story, don't try to surprise the player but faking that shit out without a clear purpose. I.e. Metal Gear Solid 2.
If they figured it out, they figured it out, just let it roll.
this. your narrative choices should never be in service of a gotcha or a twisty. it's shortsighted, a cheap and brief orgasm, but a worthless one you'll forget about hours later.
Why do modern writers not understand the value of twists is recontextualizing past actions and character relationships, and how characters will move forward with that development and not just >lol we lied to the audience again xdd >omg I was told one thing but now I'm told new thing :^0
Modern writers are fricking shit and think that the audience being able to determine what's next in the story is a flaw. The point of a murder mystery is that some people are smart enough to know the answer before you get to it and they get to feel good for figuring it out. They're so stupid that they're taken totally by surprise so they think that everyone should be that instead makes their stories nonsense.
what an absolute cuck.
he is the kind of cuck that gets cucked and tries to convince everyone that he is the one cucking everyone.cuckman is a hack, and the real reason behind the success of The last of us was Bruce Starley, then this homosexual stole the project, and shown everyone he can't do good videogames. he could be given Mario Bros to work with, and he would still frick it up.
This is literally the same logic that killed the West World show (for which Hailey Gross was also a writer.
Some people on Reddit were able to figure the twist before it was revealed in Season 1. In response, Season 2 was made so incomprehensible to avoid people figuring out the twists that it killed the show.
George RR Martin only looked for people that figured out the Jon Snow twists by themselves when looking for showrunners. Also the Hodor twist wasn’t figured out by anyone. George just was confident in his own writing. So no it doesn’t necessarily need to be figured out
Are writers unaware that if a twist is actually good and foreshadowed properly it SHOULD be able to be figured out?
he's saying stories endure the test of time because they so universally resonate with people, irregardless of culture or time. stop following hack writers
Get this: Humans only have one lifespan, most of us lucky to hit 80. Just because stories are sacred and long-known in a greater society does not mean they lose their worth to individuals living out their short lives enjoying the same stories their ancestors did in a core way.
>Pre-school tier
Let's run through the list then >Ass pulls galore so plot events can occur without any real thought behind them >McGuffins to push the plot forward >Characters acting out of character so the plot can happen >Attempts to show two perspectives but fails at making the viewer care about the other party since it's poorly written trash
Huh, that's TLOU2 to a Tee.
Now let's look at a game that ISN'T that pathetically childish >Plot makes logical sense and doesn't ass pull random things to make the plot happen >Logic also applies to the gameplay >Characters don't act out of character so the plot can happen >Shows both the hero and villain side but has 6 perspectives total >Uses death as a meaningful character defining moment and doesn't just spam it to feel mature because BLOOD AND GORE IZ MACHURR >Despite having McGuffins as a key item they aren't used to magically push the plot forward and only come into play for the final boss fight
This is Sonic Adventure 2
Why does a game about talking hedgehogs have a more logical and focused narrative than an M rated game for mature people that are totally beyond childish notions(except for when they have to excuse the writer's laziness since plot writing is hard)
Imagine a game where you fight a giant space lizard attached to a satellite being more logical and mature than the game where humans die like b***hes in the post-apocalypse with totally not-zombies.
>why do people like stories where the bad guy loses and the good guy lives happily ever after? >it MUST be because they're being contrarians against this random game dev!
Last of Us is filled to the brim with clichès.
The rough around the edges old guy who doesn't want to open up again, after being hurt, that learns to love again thanks to a son/daughter figure, on the backdrop of a literal journey across zombieland? Filled with faceless goons, pedo cannibals, cartoonish religious zealots, and every other zombie apocalypse trope you can think of.
How the frick is Last of Us NOT a constant clichè?
subverting expectations is a neutral thing. It can be good or bad depending on what the subversion is. If you subvert expectations in a way that makes the story better than cool. But going "you thought the story was going to be good? well i subverted your expectations and made a bad one instead!" is shit.
Subverting expectations is only bad when it's done poorly and handled by incompetent writers (which is 95% of people attempting to subvert expectations nowadays). Subverting expectations could be so much better if the people doing it actually knew what they were doing.
Stories that subvert expectations (handled by good writers) > Cliche stories > Stories that subvert expectations (handled by bad writers)
The issue is that the element of surprise is interesting when it's either actually surprising, or is used in a manner which can take you down a road that's otherwise rewarding for that surprise. TLOU2 achieves neither, because the story of "Cycles of Violence/Violence Begetting more Violence" is a tale as old as the first man who hit another man with a rock, and Joel's death spurring on a completely flavorless story of revenge in a post-apocalyptic setting where 99.9% of characters are just marauding murderous shitheads or tyrannical murderous shitheads leaves you with no sense of gain from this subversion. It's all a matter of knowing what tools are in your hand and actually using them, not just showing off that you have those tools.
The only expectations that matter are the in universe characters's expectations. If you are approaching what happens from the perspective of audience interaction you aren't writing and you aren't a writer.
I'd argue that it's different for games but that's mainly due to mechanics affecting the portrayal of the story and mechanics being partly handled by the player.
As an example, one common criticism I heard of Ghost of Tsushima was that the game would dump a scene emphasizing Jin using poison, assassination, and other 'non-honorable' techniques to create a rift between him and his adopted father.
The issue was that some players had tried to play the game while minimising the use of such techniques (and it wasn't unwarranted either as Jin initially despises being driven to the point of using them).
So Jin's spiral down into accepting these techniques felt unnatural to them as from their perspective Jin had barely used them to reach that acceptance.
>As an example, one common criticism I heard of Ghost of Tsushima was that the game would dump a scene emphasizing Jin using poison, assassination, and other 'non-honorable' techniques to create a rift between him and his adopted father.
The bigger criticism is that Jin's father is somehow bothered by this. Throughout history the Japanese are known to be war crime enthusiasts.
>Throughout history the Japanese are known to be war crime enthusiasts.
So? It's his character. He's so obsessed with honour and his strict code that he is willing to sacrifice himself and everyone else to uphold it. >Muh history
Were the Mongols repelled by one man named Jin Sakai in history? No? Then shut the frick up.
So long as either someone else was doing it on their behalf or no one found out about it that could do anything about it.
That way their honour is squeaky clean
My understanding for that scene was that at some point the game had a choice system like Infamous between acting like a Samurai knowing the fights would be harder but getting more resolve and better sword skills, or a Ronin with poison, stealth kills, and the like. The devs decided to only keep the ronin path but that meant some of the big story beats had to be a bit shoehorned. It'd be like if Infamous 1 had Cole activate the big metal ball no matter what your alignment had been previously.
The thing is they could have adapted it to a single path by making the ghost tools essential to eliminate some enemies consistently.
Jin's development is meant to be driven by his realization that he is not strong enough to keep sticking to his code and win.
All it would have taken to parallel in gameplay is either >Make some elite enemies that need to have a ghost tool used on them >Make it so you can't defend from many weak enemies without using ghost tools
I didn't personally experience the criticism because I first played the game on Lethal and I wasn't good enough at the combat to consistently take a stronghold head-on once the stronger enemy variants kicked in (being surrounded by many weak enemies made me make more mistakes).
So I ended up undergoing the same development mechanically, as I began to use stealth and ghost tools, that the character experienced and the scene felt fitting to me.
Ever since I've wondered how different the game's reception would be if Lethal was the standard/only option to play the game in.
I forget which difficulty I picked, it was the one a notch above normal. I agree it was tonally quite strange that Jin would mutter apologies to his uncle about slashing a mongol's throat but have no comment about sprinting into a camp like meet the demoman and turning them all into hamburger. I imagine on Normal if you're able to just blindly dive in with your sword and chop everyone to pieces it loses a lot of the sense of challenge and having to choose.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>kill 400000 dudes in the game >have to poison some dudes later >NOOOOOOOO THIS IS SO DISHONOROBU I ROST MY HONOR
3 months ago
Anonymous
I forget which difficulty I picked, it was the one a notch above normal. I agree it was tonally quite strange that Jin would mutter apologies to his uncle about slashing a mongol's throat but have no comment about sprinting into a camp like meet the demoman and turning them all into hamburger. I imagine on Normal if you're able to just blindly dive in with your sword and chop everyone to pieces it loses a lot of the sense of challenge and having to choose.
There's a difference between meeting a man face to face in honorable combat and being a coward ass pussy and poisoning his water
Yep, inserting shame-based moralhomosexualry systems into games is almost always lumpy and awkward and punishes the player for playing how the quack developer thinks is a "morally bad" way to play the game. Nobody wants some pretentious peace and love homosexual morals shoved down their throat when they play a game wherein they assume the role of a hardened samurai, creeping ninja or ruthless outlaw. It feels unnatural, neurotic and contrived like the decadent imbecile author inserting their personal misanthropy and childish morality into something where it does not fit. This is why the Samuel boat scene in Dishonored caught so many people by surprise, it's so out of nowhere and only small hints are dropped throughout before the scene in high chaos, not to mention the ridiculousness of Samuel mouthing off to a dangerous supernatural killer about how le bad he is for killing the disgusting, brutish men who tortured him and kidnapped his daughter, despite Samuel being portrayed as a sagely kind of ambivalent figure up to that point in the story, who never passes judgement on much and just gives Corvo advice. TLOU2's moralhomosexualry is so heavy-handed that the player isn't even really given a choice in the matter and is expected to suffer pointless shame over things they don't have a choice to do, even if they try to spare as many characters as possible. I'm glad that this kind of obnoxious "DO BETTER CHUD" moral systems in games is largely gone and a relic of the 2010s. It's stupid as frick and boring, like a nerd lecturing you on how you should enjoy media.
What is it about game writers that you see this so often? I could chalk it up to leftism, but it's so consistent that you can't help but notice. The suicidal pacifism of this kind of writing is very weird, it's like how a childish, sheltered person perceives morality, as all conflict always being bad and shameful and we should all hold hands and frolic. Maybe it's some kind of bullied child thing? Narcissism? It's just bizarre.
Samuel considering you to be the reason things turned from bad to worse in very high chaos would have been fine on its own.
But him willingly bringing you over to the island.
Telling you to your face that you're the worst person around and threatening you then shooting to alert the guards.
Is just bizarre, is he trying to kill himself? Kill you? Neither really makes sense.
The more natural way to have basically the same 'message' is to have Samuel disappear prior to the mission.
You don't even need to have him blame Corvo he can die from the plague getting out of hand or run away due to the situation falling apart.
So you end up manning the boat yourself for the first time in the game in complete silence.
Dishonored also does this thing where it overestimates the importance that the player's actions have on Dunwall. Corvo killing at most a few dozen people should not cause this much of a difference in an already dying city. It makes him out to be this huge moral agent in a situation where his actions would make very little difference. Even if he does spare or kill political figures, so what? The plague is still there and that is outside of his control. It's needed for the gameplay mechanics sure but it's too heavy-handed to be realistic morally and it does want to be taken seriously. As you said Samuel being absent would have been far more haunting and probably sold it better. Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider handled this better by toning it down somewhat.
3 months ago
Anonymous
it's narcissistic morality, you hit the nail on the head
>IN THIS SITUATION, I'D BE JUST LIKE JESUS, BUT YOU THE PLAYER ARE WRETCHED! >"Oh, what charitable act have you done lately?" >THAT'S BESIDES THE POINT
It's like leftist "morality". They care about hyper aggressions but helping a person? doing charity? working for free? are you insane? oh, i'm sorry, i shouldn't say insane, that's dehumanizing to people with mental health struggles. etc etc
You can see this on a large scale, and it was fascinating: Swedes were so convinced that they and their civilization were better than everyone else's, that they intentionally imported arab and african rapists, to "fix" them and prove the point. Now they have the most rapes in the EU and grenade attacks. Country had basically 0 violent crime before when it was all Swedes. They lived in a literal fantasy land.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Exactly, it's this preachy condemnation morality and how prevalent it is in white western Judeo-Christian societies, it's a Catholic guilt complex thing? But it's also universal among hypereducated, neurotic upper-class people who live in a bubble and are very prone to sneering at people they consider to be morally inferior to them while being unaware of the irony of that. These are the kinds of people who write games. Dishonored's moral system is still a lot better than Spec Ops or TLOU2 simply by giving the player the option to play like a "chud" in the eyes of the leftist writer even if they do sneak some barbs and quips at you about how guilty you're "supposed" to feel.
DOTO did a better job by doing away with it entirely, with Lurk's actions having very little effect in the grand scheme of Karnaca; has Ivan Jabcobi been arrested? He gets killed by the Eyeless anyway. Kill him yourself? His house is sacked and it's covered up. Do nothing? He kills himself. It's subtle and helps the existential themes. Lurk is also powerless to stop the Abbey's actions in the Observatory, the game shows the cruelty of their actions but doesn't overstate it and you understand that they are ruled by fear in their actions. It's better than Neil calling you a chud for killing the poor cannibal rapists who were just trying to feed you to their families.
3 months ago
Anonymous
i have no idea what youre talking about with all those names in the second part
3 months ago
Anonymous
>Judeo-Christian anything
???
This isn’t a thing. One group doesn’t accept Christ, the other does. The two are incompatible.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>They care about hyper aggressions but helping a person? doing charity? working for free? are you insane?
This is a big part of woke culture, it’s not concerned with actually helping people in a material way but rather hyper fixating on ideas. They derive their power from the immaterial be it words, writing, or ideas. This is because most of them inhabit roles like journalist or writer, so it all boils down to how people talk and think and if they can control that then they basically have a way to gain a massive amounts of power. Their concern is not in what is actually bad or harmful to someone or society as a whole but what feeling certain action cause to arise in them and others.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>Their concern is not in what is actually bad or harmful to someone or society as a whole but what feeling certain action cause to arise in them and others.
So leftism is performance art
3 months ago
Anonymous
That’s a pretty good way to describe it actually. And yeah pretty much, people using socio-political shit in order to gain leverage and try to claim the moral high ground. Virtue signaling has become wide spread for a reason, it’s not about caring or doing anything but projecting the idea that you do and giving others the idea that they’re helping so they feel good about themselves. When in reality they’re not doing much aside from crying and screaming.
3 months ago
Anonymous
The weirdest example to me is Overseer Campbell.
The non-lethal option has him be forced out of his position with the same spontaneity as him dying and just leads to him being left in the flooded district where he gets infected and dies.
It's hard to see how one would lead to more chaos than what's honestly the more humane route of assassinating him.
3 months ago
Anonymous
A lot of the low chaos eliminations are really sadistic which just makes it weird that everyone praises Corvo for how hecking better he is for doing them. The Pendleton twins have their tongues ripped out and sent to the mines to work until they die in low chaos. You'd think Samuel would be MORE disgusted by this than Corvo killing a bunch of buttholes in a very fast way. You can send a noblewoman to a man's rape dungeon, which is apparently morally superior to just killing her. Dishonored 2 had similarly cruel methods like robbing Brianna of her powers and making her suicidal, or lobotomising Jindosh.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>suicidal pacifism >spec ops the line
? you don't even know the scene if you think this
3 months ago
Anonymous
>What is it about game writers that you see this so often?
I dont think it always bad, but this usually comes from devs that work on games where you have to kill often and think its a trope of games and not of reality. Theres thousands of games where you dont have to fight or kill monsters but some of these writers probably have only played fps
Samuel considering you to be the reason things turned from bad to worse in very high chaos would have been fine on its own.
But him willingly bringing you over to the island.
Telling you to your face that you're the worst person around and threatening you then shooting to alert the guards.
Is just bizarre, is he trying to kill himself? Kill you? Neither really makes sense.
The more natural way to have basically the same 'message' is to have Samuel disappear prior to the mission.
You don't even need to have him blame Corvo he can die from the plague getting out of hand or run away due to the situation falling apart.
So you end up manning the boat yourself for the first time in the game in complete silence.
He's based
Okay, keeping your audience in mind isn't all bad but media is too fricking meta these days, it panders, second guesses the audience and tries to elicit seal claps much more than it just tells a good story
I hate how "subverting expectations" is always something the turns story in some "negative" direction. Something that makes it sadder, more depressive, etc. Why there are no "positive" subversions?
That at least does have a reasonable explanation
Stories are built on conflict, when your subversion removes conflict it just innately feels bad. Reaching resolution by subverting expectations just leaves people going "well that was fricking boring"
There's probably a good way to do it though, sure, exception to every rule and all that
>It doesn't
It does and I just told you what it was. Conflict leads to resolution, pain leads to catharsis. When you take way the first thing in those pairs from the reader, you inherently take away the other as well.
Note that I'm not excusing shitty twists or shitty expectation subversions. I'm just telling you why you tend not to see subversions where everything just goes right - it's boring and makes it feel like the characters involved cheated to win
People call that kind of expectation subversion 'deus ex machina', by the way
>pain leads to catharsis
It doesn't lead to it. It can be directed to it, but you have to consciously include the catharsis. Otherwise your writing just stops at pain. There's no big surprise many of these kinds of works are just miseryporn where everyone gets fricked over and over no matter what they do and then it just ends.
Ganker before TLoU2 >LMAO who the frick cares about this trash game
Ganker after TLoU2 >NEIL DISRESPECTED US FANS OF THE FIRST GAME BY KILLING JOELINO AND NOW OUR COLLECTIVE HEART IS BROKERINO
I never cared for the franchise, I always considered it an imitation of The Road, but I know some anon's love the first TLOU and I support them in their justifying hatred.
You can't spit in the face of the people who are giving you their time and money to hear what you have to say just because you are a pretentious idiot who thinks is breaking new ground making cheap shock value and empty subversion while mistreating its own workers.
>just because you hate a series with a passion for being standard Sony third-person survival cinematic action slop doesn't mean you don't care about its future!
???????????????????
I never cared for the franchise, I always considered it an imitation of The Road, but I know some anon's love the first TLOU and I support them in their justifying hatred.
You can't spit in the face of the people who are giving you their time and money to hear what you have to say just because you are a pretentious idiot who thinks is breaking new ground making cheap shock value and empty subversion while mistreating its own workers.
Because if you're some israelite who was raised by rich parents, your desires as a writer are to be lauded by the masses as some paragon of virtue and some genius who can have his work cited for decades to come. You're not trying to make quality, you're trying to be recognized by your work. Literature isn't the social giant it used to be, they can't actually paint or create any art (which also precludes them from making music), and Video Games are the present emergent multimedia market with more eyes on it than film. Cuckmann thinks he can just take film tropes and make them into a 10/10 video game while under the (incorrect) opinion that these tropes are just superior to standard video game writing, but as time proves him wrong again and again, it's just us that suffer.
I'm not sure Cuckmann even believes in traditional movie tropes, either. He thinks it's enough to "surprise" when good movies build towards a reveal. You know, payoff for something that happens, not grabbing the wheel and careening down some less-traveled alleyway to keep you guessing.
3 months ago
Anonymous
There are so many games with big twist reveals that I've played, but it's always garbage games that feel the need to break narratives for the sake of twist reveals without the intelligence to rebuild the narratives later. I distinctly remember how surprising it was to see that painful big twist in Nier Automata that humanity was already long extinct, and Yorha was effectively just following pointless subroutines eternally because they can't break their programming, but the story didn't just ride off of that. The fallout of all of the events that were raised thanks to that revelation explain all of the cataclysmic events that follow it, and it still held true to the numerous philosophies the story was playing with leading up to that point AND following it.
Meanwhile Cuckmann feels bad that people easily predicted Joel dying in 2, and then when he killed him anyways, he was scrambling for another big twist (It was revenge for the fireflies!) to cover up how bland and boring the first one was.
3 months ago
Anonymous
not believing in traditional movie tropes is like a writer not believing in grammar
I actually don't see why it's that big of a deal. Killing off the hero of the last game, to set the younger hero off on a journey of revenge, seems like a perfectly valid story premise.
Now, the fact a butch woman who looks like a troony was involved IS funny. I'll give you that. That's where they went too far by trying to be clever.
It's all well and good but the downside to the approach is you need to be solid on the old hero's characterisation.
Much in the same way Prototype 2 ended up receiving criticism for how they handled Alex Mercer.
The problem is the obscene amount of retconning he had to do to make Part 2 make sense. He had to remake Part 1 in order to change Jerry Anderson from a more than suspicious surgeon to practically a saint. TLOU1 is perfect as a self-contained story, it was clearly intended as such.
TLOU2 existence was forced by Druckmann, that's why people think is not canon.
funny how writing can be so bad that a game I wasn't going to buy still made me retroactively upset i spent time playing the first game
all they had to do was make joel go down fighting. that's it. And if they wanted to keep improving things, make it so you play as Abby first and learn about her life before she guns down joel at the beginning of the ellie portion
>all they had to do was make joel go down fighting
Pretty much why no drama happened over the death of certain characters in Red Dead Redemption, they get proper sendoffs
>all they had to do was make joel go down fighting. that's it. And if they wanted to keep improving things, make it so you play as Abby first and learn about her life before she guns down joel at the beginning of the ellie portion
Honestly this is such an obvious subversion im surprised they didn't go for it
Revealing the character you got attached to wants to kill another character you're attached to would've gone far better with people
>all they had to do was make joel go down fighting. that's it. And if they wanted to keep improving things, make it so you play as Abby first and learn about her life before she guns down joel at the beginning of the ellie portion
Honestly this is such an obvious subversion im surprised they didn't go for it
Revealing the character you got attached to wants to kill another character you're attached to would've gone far better with people
Am I the only one that wanted this: >Tommy overhears Abby’s group dropping Joel’s name, but the group is friendly at first and lets them freshen up because they faced the horde and saved Abby. >Then they go to the main room again and introduce themselves but Tommy says his name is Joel. >They then torture and kill Tommy but still are interested in Joel because they know Tommy as well (he had a falling out with the Fireflies in part 1). This way they could explore a lot of the interesting backstory Tommy and Joel had in 1 (being hinted at as being ruthless murderers). >The plot would be that they take ‘Tommy’ (Joel) with them for some sort of revenge or to leftover groups of Fireflies, but >Maybe they pretend to kill him so Ellie and her group won’t come look for him. They could leave an infected body next to Tommy’s body and behead them both, maybe set the house or them on fire, Ellie would then still have her mourning scenes.
Well it’s easier when there’s already a semi-working story to improve upon. They should actually hire people specializing in this ‘improving’ to consider hundreds of other variations without plotholes and stupid shit like Tommy literally saying ‘I’m Tommy, that’s Joel’. But I guess the ego of writers stand in the way of that, their own version is sacred.
joseph anderson video man say make witcher 3 video but no video where is video anderson joe where is. video joe wh. video joe anderson witcher 3 whefd jou andeson witcfw 3
3 months ago
Anonymous
I would have believed this was real if you didn’t sage
>They should actually hire people specializing in this ‘improving’
Yeah
Sometimes I know exactly how to fix something that already exists, but I know I couldn't have come up with the concept or framework in a million years. They're different sets of skills, it's why some creatives flounder on their own but flourish with a good editor.
Simply changing the order of scenes so that the player doesn't know that Abby killed Joel until the very end would have worked well.
Also make Abby hot. You would have countless people saying that they could fix her. It really is that easy, hot b***hes can do anything and be forgiven.
>Also make Abby hot. You would have countless people saying that they could fix her. It really is that easy, hot b***hes can do anything and be forgiven.
THis.
Stop making character ulgy (or even average) and unlikeable
Ganker before TLoU2 >LMAO, TLOU is a shit moviegame
Ganker after TLoU2 >LMAO, TLOU2 managed to be even worse and killed the entire studio and any chances of getting back old IPs
I was here for the leaks actually. Was hilarious seeing the whole board shit all over the game and make edits. Straight up drove all the Sonygays from the board for a solid month because they didn't want their incredibly game and lame game spoiled
I was there for those threads.
It was 50% snoys absolutely flabbergasted at the story and 50% people who had no idea about TLOU at all but were laughing at the pozz. To be fair, I can understand the disappointment and upset of the snoys, because I played TLOU1 and was a little shocked at the direction it was taking.
>Ellie's mom
Ah those were the better times where we thought TLOU2 was going to have some playable dual-timeline with the past and present. Much better than the trash we actually got.
Uncharted and TLOU1 had good writing and dialogue, but TLOU2 is just awful, so much of the game was dependent on him and he failed so badly the game flopped
he does everything better, just the end credits of Nier Automata alone is better video game, gameplay writing/story integration than anything Neil has ever done.
[would you like to delete your save to help someone else?]
>That buildup to Weight of the World >Entire cast are targets to both shoot at and be shot at by >Story is still being concluded in the form of the pods desperately trying to fish out information for and from the Androids in their conclusion >Musical swell met by massive power increases >Data Lost
Nobody does it like Yoko Taro, and nobody ever will.
Why do modern writers not understand the value of twists is recontextualizing past actions and character relationships, and how characters will move forward with that development and not just >lol we lied to the audience again xdd >omg I was told one thing but now I'm told new thing :^0
At some point subverting expectations starts to mean that I get a straightforward story with no rug pull. Actually I already experienced that with Wasteland 3 siding with the Patriarch and actually getting a good ending from if. Japan is the only place that can subvert my expectations because they still consistently do big feel good endings so I am surprised if it doesn’t turn out that way but with western games I have to come to fully expect some big gotcha tweeest.
We went from >Doctor's suicidal matchup was a hidden assassination attempt >Blind man feigns his helplessness to heart grab the wrestler and finishes him off with a wrestling hold out of admiration >"The Dragon's Shot Misfires"
to >"By Purgatory Rules..." >You were Awesome, [participant] >THE WORM
How did this happen?
Kojima at least directed 3 good games, Neil just sat in the cuckchair in the writing room and and watched others do the work for one decent "game" and thought he was hot shit immediately after
I remember him coming on kinda funny saying "Motherfrickers, I love Joel and Ellie more than anyone, I fricking made them they are my children" blah blah blah, and then he writes shit like this.
Imagine wanting to be a great artist, imagine creating a character and story that truly resonates with the audience (I know, I know, he wasn't solely responsible for that) and then mocking them for being invested. Imagine pissing away all the goodwill from your first game because you wanted to punish the protagonist for being liked and the players for liking him. Imagine being such a smug, mean spirited c**t.
I mean yeah some people take it too far, but no aspiring artist should actively discourage their audience from being invested in their work.
If you're resentful that you made something good by accident, like Alan Moore with Rorschach, you're doing it wrong. If you want to be an artist you should be grateful and humble over the fact that people have connected with your work.
being a great artist is not about making people happy holy frick LMAO. It’s hilarious reading people on this board trying to talk about art especially with ai shit. Their knowledge of art extends only to Bob Ross. And this moviegame cuck is not making art or making people happy.
I didn't say anything about art making people happy? I said you as the artist should be grateful that people have connected with your work, instead of mocking them for it. Just don't be a spiteful butthole, that's all it takes
>creating a character and story that truly resonates with the audience (I know, I know, he wasn't solely responsible for that) and then mocking them for being invested
blah blah blah
misery por is just another fetish product, no different from porn.
TLOU was always shit and it becoming a meme game with normies made gaming even worse
Oh boy, it makes me think of Ron Gilbert, I dread finishing Return to Monke, because I know it ends, and how Ron basically makes fun of you for caring, but I gotta do it, and then I'll see the Noclip documentary, hoping is not too dick sucking.
>tlou2 comes out and is trashed by everyone with the exception of the le media literacy melvins on twitter who only like it to pwn le gamuhchuds >neil spells out the plot being an allegory for palestine and israel around the time shit starts to go down in gaza >melvins realize they were defending unironic israeli propaganda the entire time >half of tlou2's fanbase then disappears
This game is the gift that will never stop giving isn't it?
What do you have examples of fans leaving the fanbase because they realize this? I think they’re not changing their mind because the ending of TLOU2 is basically means peace and no revenge
>makes a twitter post supporting israel >backfires horribly >he does damage control making a public donation to Palestine and Israeli rescuing efforts >next instagram post is him playing spider man 2
>This game is the gift that will never stop giving isn't it?
That's the best part, anon. The game's entertaining pretty much every single way you can imagine except playing it. Watching people trash it is equally as entertaining as watching the melvins fail and try to defend it. Even when the dumb motherfricker in charge of this dumpster fire gets what he wants it blows up in his face with spectacle.
>allegory for palestine israeli conflict >specifically disallowed from shooting objects in the synagogue, despite being expected to cause mayhem and death wherever you go
what did he mean by this?
Here’s some Israeli wisdom from Cuckmann. >The formulation for Ellie’s turn toward darkness can be traced back to the year 2000. Then in his early 20s, Druckmann witnessed news footage of a crowd lynching two Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. >“And then they cheered afterward,” Druckmann, who grew up in Israel, recalls. “It was the cheering that was really chilling to me. >In my mind, I thought, ‘Oh, man, if I could just push a button and kill all these people that committed this horrible act, I would make them feel the same pain that they inflicted on these people.’" >The feeling faded, though. Eventually, he looked back and felt “gross and guilty” for his intense feelings. >With “The Last of Us Part II,” he wanted to explore that emotional tumult on a didactic level. >“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” >“This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
I think his ideas were good, but his execution needs support from wiser people to truly make them shine, ala Bruce being the guiding force that helped TLOU's first story succeed. No one of that caliber or equitable power was around for 2. It was funny watching the recent documentary and seeing how many developers clearly hated Neil's story but lacked the power to do anything about it. 100% the leak came from an in-house dev.
I didn't see the documentary, did they really hate it or is that just wishful thinking? Because if true then Neil Druckmann must be really oblivious if it's in the fricking documentary.
I don’t know but Neil said he thought Joel’s voice actor would be like ‘I told you so’ after the leak outrage. The actor actually supported him, probably because of all the hate they were getting, but it shows that before the leaks he didn’t agree with Neil’s plot
That sounds good but how can it be both inevitable and surprising? Maybe just when parts of it are surprising. The only thing I can think of that can be both are things in real life like pandemics or tsunamis. You know they’re coming but you don’t know when.
It is a bit paradoxical when written out, but in practice, you usually get a sense of the protagonists values pretty early on and, by the end of their arc, will be triumphant over their struggles or tragically struck down by them.
A literary example might be a bit obscure, so I’ll use Breaking Bad since that’s reasonably popular. It’s obvious Walt will die by the end of the show, and while at first you might think it is the cancer that is established in the very first episode, you’re quick to realize that it will most likely be the result of his increasingly careless behavior. While his death is a given, the death being the result of him gunning down neo-Nazis with a homemade autoturret isn’t something most people would predict right up until the moment it actually happens.
It doesn't take sophistication to pull shit from out of your ass. Treating your audience like your enemy is already mistake number one, if your only ideal for your plot is "I want to trick them!" then it makes sense as to why it was so goddamn hollow. Druckmann is a failure who will never achieve his dreams and will always be looked down upon by those he seeks the approval of.
Jews love subversion more than any other race.
The most subversive race that has ever existed are the israelites.
Why do the israelites love subverting everything?
>Why do the israelites love subverting everything?
It serves both as their means of survival and raison d'être, it would be weirder if they didn’t love it
if your story only works under the assumption that the audience thinks and expects things in a certain way then you don't have a story at all, you just have meta level reactionary nonsense, you might as well just go out and have random people fill in surveys and it feed to an AI
I hate these people that convinced themselves they are writers by profession when all they did was climb the corporate ladder over the shoulders of marketing studies data
>how can we trick players even MORE?" then something's very wrong with how you approach the writing process.
Wrong.
https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_the_mystery_box
Low IQ individuals hate it because they need their disney childrens' film storybook approach, where everything is simplistic and so obvious only a 5 year old who spends the movie playing on a tablet won't get it.
There's nothing to get. Mystery box storytelling is just literally just trying to trick and confuse the audience instead of coming up with an authentic conflict or idea in the story. Your contrarian shit won't work amigo.
>it's not authentic if I have to think and digest information instead of being spoonfed baby stories
3 months ago
Anonymous
A core of mystery box storytelling is that you cannot reach the conclusion with any kind of certainty, it’s a bunch of question marks followed by an arbitrary reveal. A supercomputer couldn’t predict it reliably, it’s just a packet of nonsense vomited at the viewer in the hopes that the duped viewer will do all the work himself.
3 months ago
Anonymous
The mystery box by design is incomplete
It alludes to plotlines but that's it the story can still be pretty much anything.
That's not to mention the approach in trying to create potential questions to later follow up on tends to make too many questions for any particular story progression to answer.
So you end up with a lot of plot points being either ignored, closed off unsatisfyingly, or completely reversed.
Oh wow never mind, after this post I've come to realize that the sequel trilogy is the peak of writing because they took the mystery box approach
Man, JJ Abrams really is a genius and not a hack who just sets up mysteries and has someone else do they payoff for him because he didn't have any idea of what the payoff was either
This is the surest way to know if a writer is 1) a hack and/or 2) an butthole
Subverting my expectations is 99% of the time not interesting, enjoyable, or deep its just feels like you are wasting my time by doing stupid shit and more over that you have no ability to write something good so are just doing off the wall things.
>people care about the thing you made so much that they try to guess at what's happening next >get upset because one of their guesses was right
this proves Druckmann is a hackfraud and a homosexual far more completely than anything else.
you needed 2 brain cells to predict that Joel dies in TLOU2
like even before the game was announced or anything you just know thats gonna happen because these homies lack creativity
why do i need to be surprised? why do i need my expectations subverted?
if i read a romance novel and theres no romance, am i supposed to enjoy it?
i'm so tired of post modernism
Amateur writer faux pas. Look at that second abysmal Disney Wars movie. Did nothing but subvert expectations from start to finish. Except the expectation that Disney would not ruin Star Wars.
For real though, what the frick is up with “subverting expectations”? Are these people so soulless they don’t know how to tell a straight (no pun intended) story?
jj abrams fricked over every single project by his mystery box bullshit, why do these people still get jobs? twists are supposed to be able to figure out, and when the twist comes for those that don't, it has to be logically coherent and been foreshadowed and followed events properly in the story
this, Twists should be the dreaded thing you think could happen, but hope won't and then they do.
that is how they work the best, when its a good twist, its the opposite, its the thing you wish so much that would happen, the heroic turnabout, and it seems so impossible, or fricked, and then they do, they turn the tide.
the problem is that by putting a shock jock scene in your story, no one will actually give a shit about the actual point you're trying to make beyond the shock
I liked TLOU1 and 2. If you really care that much about Joel dying, you unironically need to go outside and touch grass. It's just a video game character.
I disliked TLOU2. If you really care that much about us calling Neil a fraud, you unironically need to go outside and touch grass. It's just an exposure of a slimy hack.
What I find so fascinating about TLOU2 is that it could have worked. There's an idea here that works. The whole thing makes sense.
Joel gets killed off over something he did and his daughter looks for the person whod did it, but we also learn about that person and why she did it. It works, right?
It's fine as a broad outline.
Neil just couldn't make it fit. It's not that the concept is bad, it's fine, it's great even. Travel Zombieland to get revenge on someone who has more pressing issues. I'd sell it.
But if you can't write for shit, even something so obvious won't work.
>but we also learn about that person and why she did it. It works, right?
Any moron should have known why Joel was killed right away. It baffles me how Neil approached it as some huge twist halfway through the game, I hope that was just for people who didn’t play Part 1 (I know it wasn’t though and some actually didn’t see it coming)
Everytime I watch this cutscene, I see more dumb shit. >grabs her bicep which apparently immobilizes Ellie >Ellie is rotated enough to keep her dazed, but not enough to have her fall over her own feet >bothering to even rotate Ellie as opposed to just following up with a punch after the head butt >not disarming Ellie or taking the knife who thankfully for the plot has Ellie drop it and not stab herself as she falls down
Don't care what you think, tlou2 made me feel things no video games ever did before. I surely don't plan to replay it but I'm grateful to have experienced this rough journey. Thanks Neil.
>Watch a cutscene from the game where Ellie is threatening two people >"Tell me where she is and you can go" >Predictably they fight back and she kills both of them >Ellie randomly decides to remove the girl's coat and have an upset meltdown that the girl is pregnant >The girl had a knife to her throat not 10 seconds earlier
The frick stupid bullshit is this? Why'd she even do that? Why does she even feel bad? Why is there still this huge gameplay/story disconnect in these games where your character will just mow down people emotionlessly in droves with guns/bows/traps but OH NO NOT THE HECKIN PREGNANTGIRLARINO
Also nobody posted it yet so obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NClSfK_bpQw
anon, only what happens during cutscenes is canon, you'll notice during gameplay that all the encounters start in stealth, you can basically not kill anybody other than during self defense sequences ( except that car thing with the asian guy, not sure maybe you can not be the agressor)
basically ellie only kills scarface guy to save dina, that asian girl playing with a vita after she fights back, kills that black girl by infecting her with spores to get away, kills in self defense a dog, kills mel and owen in self defence, kills in self defence by having that dude beaten by a clicker, she only kills in cold blood that fat dude.
Wrong, Neil says in this doc that the (cinematic) trailers are part of the story, in the announcement trailer Ellie says ‘I’m going to find and I’m going to kill every last one of them’
>anon, only what happens during cutscenes is canon
Lol, talk about pathetic. Can't even write a narratively consistent game where the story and gameplay interact and relate to each other.
Only a total loser would praise that kind of dogshit writing.
Okay, fine, but what is the point of that cutscene, still? Why am I, or Ellie, supposed to feel bad that she gave these two people an out to not die and they go full moron? There is no motivation whatsoever for Ellie to randomly remove the girl's coat after she justifiably killed them, and there's even less reason for her to feel bad that this pregnant woman basically killed herself. It could have been a moment where we question Ellie's morality if they played along and she killed them anyway, or a moment where only the dude fought back and you could organically realize that maybe that was the unborn child's father by the girl's crying because she could more reasonably not want to kill herself and her child. This reads more like a storyboard sessions of "Okay, how do we make the player feel bad?" It completely falls flat, I do not feel an ounce of sympathy and neither should Ellie
But then again I guess the entire point of the game is "I want to do a revenge quest until I'm 2 inches from the finish line to make the entire story pointless, glad all the bodies between me and abby all were people who died for nothing"
>This reads more like a storyboard sessions of "Okay, how do we make the player feel bad?" It completely falls flat
They were definitely going for that, they did it with the dogs too. You know, the dogs that viciously attack you
Guilt trips, one of my least favorite things in video games
>anon, only what happens during cutscenes is canon
What's the point of the gameplay then?
I can understand dismissing stuff like npc's code-breaking or glitches not being canon.
But why have an entire dedicated set of mechanics to combat that the developers knew full well the players would use if you're just going to pretend those never happened?
There isn't even any indication of this in the game beyond it making the cutscenes look ridiculous.
That just sounds like the developers fricked up by completely ignoring how the player experience interacts with the narrative.
>anon, only what happens during cutscenes is canon
not in a good game
if you make a game about killing a bunch of people in gameplay (it's the expected path even if it's not strictly mandatory) and act like killing a bunch of people in gameplay didn't happen, you're a bad writer
Saints Row 2, one of the great things about it, is how consistent it is between story and gameplay, this is a game made to appeal to people that found GTA 4 too mild, they are the crowd that would waste time in the GTA overworld causing mayhem, and this is the kind of protagonist you see
Look at this, flirting with the barista one moment and then to help himself doesn't hesitate to use her as a shield, the character is a psycho just like the kind of character the average player will enact.
I can understand having a "what the frick am I doing, did I really just do that, is all this really worth it?" moment after killing a pregant woman, but it acts too much like she was actually in the wrong, when she wasn't
did he think he was being clever when he did a MGS2 tier subversion? only a master ruse man like kojimbo can pull something like that off, you could say Kojima invented subversion (and lenses, and eyes)
>more focused on tricking people then telling a good story
Jarvis, pull up the Neill Druckmann Wikipedia page, and could you please read me the "Early Life" section?
people were predicting Joel would die since before the first game even came out.
it's literally the most obvious fricking trope you can do when you have a story about an old teacher and young learner.
if anything the original TLOU was subversive by not having Joel die.
how fricking dumb do you have to be to get surprised that people predicted this?
oh wow the wise old mentor dies when his student grows into a capable adult who could have seen this coming this has literally never been done before...
they could have so easily fixed this by giving ellie actual ptsd and schizophrenia type visuals, Jesse and Joel do carry themselves very similarly (clearly designed on purpose) so it could have easily been excued as her seeing shit. They even do this after she murders Owen and Mel, she hears Joel's voice, not Tommy's.
they think that's how you get to be clever. because they never read anything like "East of Eden" where you aren't subverted but have the point instead jammed in your face repeatedly, even if you don't get it until the end.
I played something recently that had an in your face twist from the start of the game where the older version of the protagonist was guiding the younger version of herself. It was incredibly obvious but the way the writer got to the explanation of how it was done was so out of right field that it was an immensely gratifying twist.
when you are inundated with "content" you look for filters to figure out a way to ignore stuff. money made is an easy way to gauge group consensus for midwits.
same thing with people using boxoffice to signify how good a movie is.
>Chastises older female video game characters for their designs of being attractive >Regresses character writing by equating female's designs as more important than their actual character
Frick this guy and may he be constantly mocked as the idiot he is for all eternity.
He subverted mine. I didn't expect the writer of a cliche zombie survival story to think he was writing the Iliad.
*ruckmann was already a decade and a half late to the zombie scene, and it was just like 90% of modern zombie media where the undead are just an excuse for people to be shitty because there is no law enforcement. I was expecting a "maybe the real monsters are people" type of line played straight.
>purchase video game >game starts with a video of the game director spreading their ass to the camera and farting >credits roll
Really subverted my expectations
What the frick does that mean? What, Zombie/Punished Joel steps out of the shadows to reveal himself before Ellie as she's going through a warpath in California for Abby?
I like TLOU2. Story does nothing for me and the new characters are uninteresting pieces of plywood but the world is beautiful and the combat/enemies are great. I just wish Neil hadn't killed the entire studio to make it.
he isn't saying he has to get more sophisticated than you guys, he's saying they have to get more sophisticated in general, lol. the drunkmann seethe is crazy!
Substantially worse since the 90's were full of narcissists.
The difference was those dudes felt they had to prove it and maintain their egos while this new wave feel entitled to greatness immediately.
Want to be absolutely subversive today?
Just be absolutely candid and honest without a shred of irony to your story
Be cringy and edgy without a shred of shame and be as over the top as possible without some underlying 2deep4u motive
>Our audience is more intelligent now. >So we have to outsmart them!
He's insecure as frick. He perceives himself as the vanguard in storytelling, he HAD to subvert, he HAD to be one step ahead. Any successful prediction by the audience is a threat to his ego and invalidates him as the pioneer he believes he is.
That explains why such subversions are empty and shallow, they are not about telling a great story, they exist only to be unpredictable events using cheap shock value as a way to pose as "adult" and "mature"
>what the frick people can predict twists?
>better make the twists twistier
hackedy hack. also remade an already HD game twice.
fpbp. Writing story events just for the sake of twists is the trait of a hack.
It's a bad sign when you're getting topped by George RR Martin here who despite fans figuring out his big twist in the 90's has not thrown it out.
what was martin's big twist discovered in the 90s? Jon Snow being related to the blonde chick?
Martin said that it doesn't matter if your audience figured out the twist, you wrote the story with the twist in mind so don't change it just because the audience anticipate it.
Right, because the twist isn't necessarily what a story should hinge on. If your story can't survive without the fricking surprise, then was it good to begin with? Psycho is one of the most spoiled movies of all fricking time and yet most folks enjoy it because of the fact its a good fricking movie.
I'll be honest, how does or how can Jon Snow being Lyanna and Rhaegar's son matter in any satisfying way whatsoever? We're basically bludgeoned with the fact that royal bloodlines are merely a game that the society they're all in plays on itself and that magic and magical powers in this universe come with a tragic loss.
I would not be surprised if the reason why GRRM has yet to write an ending is there being no non-cynical way for a guy who's been in repeated depressive spells over everyone he used to know irl dying to end this story.
Fans clamor all the time, "when's The Winds of Winter? When's A Dream of Spring?" but could we even get those books and be satisfied? Could George write those books and have them be any good?
This entire story was a mistake.
I assume its gonna be similar to the show, in the sense that they'll be allies/lovers and it will be leaked somehow that hes the true aire
>how can Jon Snow being Lyanna and Rhaegar's son matter in any satisfying way whatsoever
It could matter if he'd suddenly managed to tame a dragon and thus got a chance to fight against Daenerys air force.
The fact that people have high expectations of a thing is not a reason to leave it undone. Holy fricking shit what is wrong with you?
I anticipated Martin’s big twist to be The Mad King knew about the Night King. He saw the white walkers coming. Hence the caches of Dragonfire. Hence “burn them all”. The Mad King was trying to prepare Westeros but it turns out I was wrong which is a shame because my idea is better than what we got
I had a similar theory, but with his only saying "burn them all!" in his last few hours being the result of him getting Hodor'd.
Dude that would have been fricking awesome and would have made Bran seem much more powerful
I just reread Game of Thrones (the actual book) and it could not have been more fricking obvious who Jon's real mom is. The amount of goddamn times Ned thinks about his sister and what he promised her, usually directly in relation to Jon, is comical.
fpbp
Foreshadowing is a critical narrative device because it's technically incorrect to actually have a twist that nobody could have seen coming.
So many tepid, insecure writers treat the craft like a competition between them and the audience. They try to outsmart the audience but can't, so they're forced to disguise plot points and draw on mystery and surprise to increase the work involved in calling them hacks.
It's actually a good sign when an invested audience member "just knows" what's coming.
And yeah, we react to big twists in the moment, but then if 3 minutes go by and everyone's thought is "...wait a minute, what?" and realize it was bullshit. And then the audience loses a lot of investment, because they won't try to predict things and they'll accept that anything can happen at anytime for any reason so just shut up and watch
"Subverting expectations" was a weird time in media, gave us shit like Star Wars Episode 8 and GoT Season 8.
Damn right I didn't predict Brann being made the King, Bron being master of coin, Samwell being made the best Maester and Danaerys being driven insane by a bell. Guess they pulled one over on me
Subverting expectations only works if it serves a purpose or aids the story. A twist for the sake of a twist is just bad/lazy writing only put in because the writers are either a) pretentious hacks that need to fall back on spectacle in order to make up for lack of creativity or b) just straight up incompetence.
I don't understand how hard it is for modern writers to recreate something that was perfected in 1980. It's not difficult. You need to care about the plot twist and not in a way that makes you angry.
It’s because they’re not good writers, they think of narrative devices and themes less as things that help enhance a story and more like the very foundation of it. It’s the equivalent of taking out the engine to a car in order to cover it in flames and other flashy shit. In the end it just looks like ass and it can’t serve it main function.
I think the nu the Batman movie was Infamous bad about it too. The movie pulls multiple red herring to push some twists that made 0 senses
What do you mean "was"?
It's still happening.
>Guess they pulled one over on me
The funny thing is — the discourse around GoT prior to the last several seasons was SO full of wild theories and predictions, that they were covering pretty all possible outcomes. It was pretty much impossible to make a twist that wouldn't have been anticipated to at least some degree.
In fact the overall "Daenerys goes full Mad King and Jon leads the army to free people from her oppression" was pretty popular theory. And I believe it would've worked if the israelite duo would've taken time to show Daenarys' slow fall to the dark side.
>Danaerys being driven insane by a bell
Danaerys being a tyrant was the number one foreshadowed and obvious thing since the start and the one thing they actually stuck with.
If you there was any point at all to ASOIAF/Game of Throne's story, it would be how the human mind can justify tyranny if it's not directed at them, not realising how quickly it can turn.
Danerys was always a psycho b***h who threatened fire and brimstone the second she didn't get what she wanted.
People unironically fell for her hype because she just directed her brutality to people the audience didn't like.
Reminder she crucified not just the slavers but their families, guilty or not, in Meereen as some sort of abstract warning but did nothing to actually fix the issues her abolishment of slavery brought about.
>Danerys was always a psycho b***h who threatened fire and brimstone the second she didn't get what she wanted.
Yes, both literal and metaphorical scorched earth. It was not subtle in the slightest.
>Danaerys being a tyrant was the number one foreshadowed and obvious thing since the start
This, the problem was how they did it, she snaps and starts mass murdering right when she won the decisive victory, instead of writing it so that something bad and nasty was what set her off.
>instead of writing it so that something bad and nasty was what set her off.
But that would be good storytelling instead of nihilist subversion
Doesn't help that D&D rushed the christ out of Seasons 7 and 8 to get their sweet sweet Star Wars money ASAP.
>characters written as reductive Abridged series tier flanderizations
>comical levels of fast travel
>"Daenerys kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet"
>pretty much everything about the Battle of Winterfell
>coffee cups, water bottles, and watches frequently visible in used takes
Imagine being such brand poisoning hacks that even nuDisney saw fit to say "actually maybe it's a terrible idea to hire these morons" and cancel their movies. I bet if it GoT season 8 aired just a couple years later, Disney would still hire their goofy asses and start a press cycle about fans being stupid mean bullyjerks for appreciating writing in GoT that didn't go their way. They started to get ridiculously invested in discourse wars ever since COVID.
I got what I wanted from season 8
TWO MEN ENTER
NO ONE LEAVES
CLEGANEBOWL
God that was shit.
8 years for this
what a twist!
An actual twist would have been Joel alive or never revealing what happened to Joel until the end. A happy or neutral ending would have been more of a twist given the nature of TLOU being a misery porn franchise.
>A happy or neutral ending would have been more of a twist
it was a neutral ending moron. and it was basically half of what you said. It revealed why Joel was particularly vulnerable that day and showed their last conversation together
>post credits scene
>joel's body is floating unconsious in a green tank of liquid in a lab, his head stitched back together, with a mutated strain of cordeceps him alive.
>close up on his face
>bubbles form rapidly in the liquid and it drains away
>his eyes snap open
>he exits the now empty tank
>"You thought you were the last of us? We are just getting started"
>pan out to hundreds of tanks all draining their water with clones of joel in them
>Joel looks at his second clone
>"Who are you?"
>"We are a part of you too..."
>Faces Camera
>"You thought you´ve seen the Last of Us?"
>Turns to look at a third Joel emerging from a tank
>"Part three is on the way..."
KINO
First game already did that, and a part of why his death was such bullshit,
>you subverted his death in the first one just to kill him off at the start of the next one?
>frick you.
It's what shitty writers do because they're insecure and feel the need to "outsmart" their audience instead of letting them figure things
Yeah I immediately think of something that maybe GRR Martin said about plot twist, something about creating a twist just because you're worried the viewers can guess it will ruin the story.
See also Westworld, people on Ganker predicted from the start that we were seeing a flashback of the Man in black, but we still greatly enjoyed the season. Then S2 it was like they were improvising.
NEXT GUY NEXT GUY
> subvert expectations
He’ll actually make a game and not just a sequence of interactive cutscenes?
4chuds jealous as hellous
>Ruins The Last of Us, Uncharted, etc
>Wants to create movies instead of games
>Has a massive ego that he references himself in his work
>Gets completely ignored by Hollywood
I can't ask for a better fate for a narcissist.
He's the western Kojima.
The only difference is that at least Kojima and his people can actually put out a video game people love and talk about for years. Even if he's a pretentious Hollywood worshiping gay about it.
Now, Kojimbo is competent in his craft and seemingly charismatic/humble enough in person to not repulse his own employees and celebrity contacts. He might be a giant quack in his writing but he's funny about it and doesn't take himself too seriously, a lot of the shit in his games is tongue-in-cheek Japanese humour. You wouldn't call Kojimbob's self-inserts vain or narcissistic really, just silly and weird. It's not the same thing as Druckmann putting in a collectable item in TLOU2 which literally describes himself as a genius who is trying to fight for "his people"(eternal israelite persecution complex).Also even Kojima's most unhinged vanity projects like Death Stranding are actually decent games in their own right.
>He might be a giant quack in his writing
how? I think kojima's writing has been startlingly on point throughout his lifetime
death stranding was amazing, he basically made a game about the importance of not losing human connections right before we saw that in action. and society has not been the same since covid just becuase of us losing a little bit of closeness with each other
I suppose the sentiment that he's a hack comes from the kind of grandiose, overly philosophical nature of his writing. It's not bad, but becomes preachy and obnoxious because he never shuts the frick up about whatever existential point he's trying to make. It lacks subtlety and once Kojima fixates on an idea he never stops with it. Death Stranding's philosophy of human connections is nice if not particularly groundbreaking, but the way it's framed is so silly and weird that it's hard to take seriously. All the extinction entities and BT bullshit could have been removed and you could simply have had Sam Porter being a lonely schizoid (wow, he's literally me) in the wild slowly pulling himself back to humanity and making friends again with the help of his old colleagues and it would have been far more effective than the absolute drivel that is 99% of DS's plot. People remember DS's opening scene with the timefall rain and Sam being really cold and hostile to Fragile, nobody gives a shit about the 6 million codec calls you get from Deadman talking about some bullshit for 15 minutes straight. Kojima has no idea how to just let the story breathe. Everything needs to be explained.
>Death Stranding's philosophy of human connections is nice if not particularly groundbreaking, but the way it's framed is so silly and weird that it's hard to take seriously.
? not whatsoever. there is japaneseness, but the setting itself was awesome, and looks fully realized in 2.
yeah he's overly expository sometimes, but it's not really meaningful; i can't say any other game director made an impact on my personal philosophy in life like metal gear influenced me toward anti-war thoughts as a young man.
I stupidly bought and played death stranding because people who's opinions i trusted were talking about its themes about connections, social media, feeling noticed and appreciated through engagement, etc.
Then i played it and realized all of that is spelled out for you with no subtlety through text documents.
you bought death stranding because you heard it had themes about social media and feeling noticed?
sounds like a really disingenuous post and you just didnt like the game and now are struggling to find some weird way to shit on it
be honest with yourself, other people can tell when the shit you say sounds weird
The codec calls are kino taken by themselves but I still can't refute anything you said
Death Stranding is not about a loner pulling himself back to society, it's a Cain and Abel story where Abel wins.
>how? I think kojima's writing has been startlingly on point throughout his lifetime
If you acknowledge that MGS4 was bad on purpose to spite the fans that threatened his wife and son's life then yes.
But enough about Kojima. Lets talk about Cuckman
doesn't work because
>Gets completely ignored by Hollywood
Kojima has a gazillion Hollywood friends he keeps in his basement and pulls out for his newest moviegames
>These two ruined some games from entirely different companies.
Damn.
Sam Lake?
Sam Lake doesn't give a frick about Hollywood and doesn't want to make movies, he just lampoons them like the GTA guys used to.
israelite
It should have been about new characters. TLOU 2 sucked and it ruined the original and now they're stuck with 3
Don’t sage pls
Yeah it could have been an anthology series. Different survivors at different places in America dealing with different apocalyptic scenarios.
I honestly would've been perfectly fine with Abby if TLOU2 wasn't about revenge and it was just her game about trying to survive and find meaning in her life. Its already mostly there, its just bogged down by the fact that they had to force a connection to the first game which was basically an open and shut story.
they just simply couldn't drop joel and ellie's story, or only paint joel and ellie as the bad guys. problem of tlou1 was that it felt like a hug and tlou felt like a punch. I mean I remember he warned years prior saying that tlou1 was about love and tlou2 about hate
>perfectly fine with Abby
Lmao not as long as she looks like that
Of all the things you can do for your story, don't try to surprise the player but faking that shit out without a clear purpose. I.e. Metal Gear Solid 2.
If they figured it out, they figured it out, just let it roll.
this. your narrative choices should never be in service of a gotcha or a twisty. it's shortsighted, a cheap and brief orgasm, but a worthless one you'll forget about hours later.
Neil sure likes subversion, really makes you think
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
Next guy! Black person
NEXT GUY, NEXT GUY! MOVE KEK
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
Next guy!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
Modern writers are fricking shit and think that the audience being able to determine what's next in the story is a flaw. The point of a murder mystery is that some people are smart enough to know the answer before you get to it and they get to feel good for figuring it out. They're so stupid that they're taken totally by surprise so they think that everyone should be that instead makes their stories nonsense.
NEXT GUY!
LE NEXT GUY!!! XD
Do I fit yet?
>el Black
>defends a nobody
You must have never gotten daddy's attention huh?
>el Black alternativa
>that last photo obviously taken in different lighting and daytime
lel
What does the "Next Guy" mean?
NEXT
GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY
what an absolute cuck.
he is the kind of cuck that gets cucked and tries to convince everyone that he is the one cucking everyone.cuckman is a hack, and the real reason behind the success of The last of us was Bruce Starley, then this homosexual stole the project, and shown everyone he can't do good videogames. he could be given Mario Bros to work with, and he would still frick it up.
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY
next gay
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!!!!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY
Keeeek.
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
>PACKMASTER SAYS MANTHINGS HAVE FOUND WARREN HOLES!
>SCAMPER SCURRY TO ISRAELBLIGHT, TELL SQUEEK GREAT WARLORD
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY !
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY! "NEXT GUY!"
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY! NEXT GUY!
Ahh if only this worked
anyhow, let us hope
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY, NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUYYYYY
NEXT GUY!
Next guy
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY
NEXTU GAIYO
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!!!!
NEXT GUY!
Next guy
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
NEXT GUY!
This is literally the same logic that killed the West World show (for which Hailey Gross was also a writer.
Some people on Reddit were able to figure the twist before it was revealed in Season 1. In response, Season 2 was made so incomprehensible to avoid people figuring out the twists that it killed the show.
Are writers unaware that if a twist is actually good and foreshadowed properly it SHOULD be able to be figured out?
The stupid ones are.
George RR Martin only looked for people that figured out the Jon Snow twists by themselves when looking for showrunners. Also the Hodor twist wasn’t figured out by anyone. George just was confident in his own writing. So no it doesn’t necessarily need to be figured out
>So no it doesn’t necessarily need to be figured out
But it has to make sense once you have all of the puzzle pieces and put them together
The hodor twist was almost figured out by a guy sharing an elevator with Martin kek
What even was the twist of season 1? Bernard being a robot?
This right here. When you can enjoy clichés, so much fun can be had. Webnovels in particular are great for the latter crowd.
>Gankereddit will unironically cheer for preschool-tier villain vs hero stories just because it's contrarian to haber and druckman's philosophy
Go away cuckmann
Wouldn't Cuckman be the contrarian?
Because people have been enjoying those stories since when we started telling stories for a reason.
>Because people have been enjoying those stories since when we started telling stories for a reason.
What are you talking about?
he's saying stories endure the test of time because they so universally resonate with people, irregardless of culture or time. stop following hack writers
>preschool tier villain vs hero stories
Get this: Humans only have one lifespan, most of us lucky to hit 80. Just because stories are sacred and long-known in a greater society does not mean they lose their worth to individuals living out their short lives enjoying the same stories their ancestors did in a core way.
Writing "THE STORY WAS GOING THAT WAY, SO INSTEAD I'M CHANGING IT THIS WAY" is the real contrarian thing to do.
>Pre-school tier
Let's run through the list then
>Ass pulls galore so plot events can occur without any real thought behind them
>McGuffins to push the plot forward
>Characters acting out of character so the plot can happen
>Attempts to show two perspectives but fails at making the viewer care about the other party since it's poorly written trash
Huh, that's TLOU2 to a Tee.
Now let's look at a game that ISN'T that pathetically childish
>Plot makes logical sense and doesn't ass pull random things to make the plot happen
>Logic also applies to the gameplay
>Characters don't act out of character so the plot can happen
>Shows both the hero and villain side but has 6 perspectives total
>Uses death as a meaningful character defining moment and doesn't just spam it to feel mature because BLOOD AND GORE IZ MACHURR
>Despite having McGuffins as a key item they aren't used to magically push the plot forward and only come into play for the final boss fight
This is Sonic Adventure 2
Why does a game about talking hedgehogs have a more logical and focused narrative than an M rated game for mature people that are totally beyond childish notions(except for when they have to excuse the writer's laziness since plot writing is hard)
Imagine a game where you fight a giant space lizard attached to a satellite being more logical and mature than the game where humans die like b***hes in the post-apocalypse with totally not-zombies.
>why do people like stories where the bad guy loses and the good guy lives happily ever after?
>it MUST be because they're being contrarians against this random game dev!
Cliches become cliches for a reason. Most of the time, it's because they're good.
Last of Us is filled to the brim with clichès.
The rough around the edges old guy who doesn't want to open up again, after being hurt, that learns to love again thanks to a son/daughter figure, on the backdrop of a literal journey across zombieland? Filled with faceless goons, pedo cannibals, cartoonish religious zealots, and every other zombie apocalypse trope you can think of.
How the frick is Last of Us NOT a constant clichè?
>How the frick is Last of Us NOT a constant clichè?
Mainstream cattle were told it's original and innovative, therefore that's what they repeat
Worked for literal millenia
Trying to be different and subversive for the sake of it is just juvenile
subverting expectations is a neutral thing. It can be good or bad depending on what the subversion is. If you subvert expectations in a way that makes the story better than cool. But going "you thought the story was going to be good? well i subverted your expectations and made a bad one instead!" is shit.
Tropes, well executed, make for the best story.
I fricking love power of friendship.
Subverting expectations is only bad when it's done poorly and handled by incompetent writers (which is 95% of people attempting to subvert expectations nowadays). Subverting expectations could be so much better if the people doing it actually knew what they were doing.
Stories that subvert expectations (handled by good writers) > Cliche stories > Stories that subvert expectations (handled by bad writers)
Big brain
The issue is that the element of surprise is interesting when it's either actually surprising, or is used in a manner which can take you down a road that's otherwise rewarding for that surprise. TLOU2 achieves neither, because the story of "Cycles of Violence/Violence Begetting more Violence" is a tale as old as the first man who hit another man with a rock, and Joel's death spurring on a completely flavorless story of revenge in a post-apocalyptic setting where 99.9% of characters are just marauding murderous shitheads or tyrannical murderous shitheads leaves you with no sense of gain from this subversion. It's all a matter of knowing what tools are in your hand and actually using them, not just showing off that you have those tools.
The only expectations that matter are the in universe characters's expectations. If you are approaching what happens from the perspective of audience interaction you aren't writing and you aren't a writer.
I'd argue that it's different for games but that's mainly due to mechanics affecting the portrayal of the story and mechanics being partly handled by the player.
As an example, one common criticism I heard of Ghost of Tsushima was that the game would dump a scene emphasizing Jin using poison, assassination, and other 'non-honorable' techniques to create a rift between him and his adopted father.
The issue was that some players had tried to play the game while minimising the use of such techniques (and it wasn't unwarranted either as Jin initially despises being driven to the point of using them).
So Jin's spiral down into accepting these techniques felt unnatural to them as from their perspective Jin had barely used them to reach that acceptance.
>As an example, one common criticism I heard of Ghost of Tsushima was that the game would dump a scene emphasizing Jin using poison, assassination, and other 'non-honorable' techniques to create a rift between him and his adopted father.
The bigger criticism is that Jin's father is somehow bothered by this. Throughout history the Japanese are known to be war crime enthusiasts.
Absolutely but in my eyes that bears less weight as it's clear from the beginning of the game they're romanticizing the whole honor thing.
It wasn't very common but some people did genuinely, truly believe in stuff like codes of honour or chivalry.
>Throughout history the Japanese are known to be war crime enthusiasts.
So? It's his character. He's so obsessed with honour and his strict code that he is willing to sacrifice himself and everyone else to uphold it.
>Muh history
Were the Mongols repelled by one man named Jin Sakai in history? No? Then shut the frick up.
So long as either someone else was doing it on their behalf or no one found out about it that could do anything about it.
That way their honour is squeaky clean
My understanding for that scene was that at some point the game had a choice system like Infamous between acting like a Samurai knowing the fights would be harder but getting more resolve and better sword skills, or a Ronin with poison, stealth kills, and the like. The devs decided to only keep the ronin path but that meant some of the big story beats had to be a bit shoehorned. It'd be like if Infamous 1 had Cole activate the big metal ball no matter what your alignment had been previously.
The thing is they could have adapted it to a single path by making the ghost tools essential to eliminate some enemies consistently.
Jin's development is meant to be driven by his realization that he is not strong enough to keep sticking to his code and win.
All it would have taken to parallel in gameplay is either
>Make some elite enemies that need to have a ghost tool used on them
>Make it so you can't defend from many weak enemies without using ghost tools
I didn't personally experience the criticism because I first played the game on Lethal and I wasn't good enough at the combat to consistently take a stronghold head-on once the stronger enemy variants kicked in (being surrounded by many weak enemies made me make more mistakes).
So I ended up undergoing the same development mechanically, as I began to use stealth and ghost tools, that the character experienced and the scene felt fitting to me.
Ever since I've wondered how different the game's reception would be if Lethal was the standard/only option to play the game in.
>>Make some elite enemies that need to have a ghost tool used on them
not allowed in modern AAA game design.
I forget which difficulty I picked, it was the one a notch above normal. I agree it was tonally quite strange that Jin would mutter apologies to his uncle about slashing a mongol's throat but have no comment about sprinting into a camp like meet the demoman and turning them all into hamburger. I imagine on Normal if you're able to just blindly dive in with your sword and chop everyone to pieces it loses a lot of the sense of challenge and having to choose.
>kill 400000 dudes in the game
>have to poison some dudes later
>NOOOOOOOO THIS IS SO DISHONOROBU I ROST MY HONOR
There's a difference between meeting a man face to face in honorable combat and being a coward ass pussy and poisoning his water
Yep, inserting shame-based moralhomosexualry systems into games is almost always lumpy and awkward and punishes the player for playing how the quack developer thinks is a "morally bad" way to play the game. Nobody wants some pretentious peace and love homosexual morals shoved down their throat when they play a game wherein they assume the role of a hardened samurai, creeping ninja or ruthless outlaw. It feels unnatural, neurotic and contrived like the decadent imbecile author inserting their personal misanthropy and childish morality into something where it does not fit. This is why the Samuel boat scene in Dishonored caught so many people by surprise, it's so out of nowhere and only small hints are dropped throughout before the scene in high chaos, not to mention the ridiculousness of Samuel mouthing off to a dangerous supernatural killer about how le bad he is for killing the disgusting, brutish men who tortured him and kidnapped his daughter, despite Samuel being portrayed as a sagely kind of ambivalent figure up to that point in the story, who never passes judgement on much and just gives Corvo advice. TLOU2's moralhomosexualry is so heavy-handed that the player isn't even really given a choice in the matter and is expected to suffer pointless shame over things they don't have a choice to do, even if they try to spare as many characters as possible. I'm glad that this kind of obnoxious "DO BETTER CHUD" moral systems in games is largely gone and a relic of the 2010s. It's stupid as frick and boring, like a nerd lecturing you on how you should enjoy media.
lmao my favorite was spec ops the line
WHY DID YOU KILL THEM?? YOU COULD HAVE JUST NOT BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT AND THEN YOU WOULDNT HAVE TO KILL ANYONE
*developer shuts down*
What is it about game writers that you see this so often? I could chalk it up to leftism, but it's so consistent that you can't help but notice. The suicidal pacifism of this kind of writing is very weird, it's like how a childish, sheltered person perceives morality, as all conflict always being bad and shameful and we should all hold hands and frolic. Maybe it's some kind of bullied child thing? Narcissism? It's just bizarre.
Dishonored also does this thing where it overestimates the importance that the player's actions have on Dunwall. Corvo killing at most a few dozen people should not cause this much of a difference in an already dying city. It makes him out to be this huge moral agent in a situation where his actions would make very little difference. Even if he does spare or kill political figures, so what? The plague is still there and that is outside of his control. It's needed for the gameplay mechanics sure but it's too heavy-handed to be realistic morally and it does want to be taken seriously. As you said Samuel being absent would have been far more haunting and probably sold it better. Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider handled this better by toning it down somewhat.
it's narcissistic morality, you hit the nail on the head
>IN THIS SITUATION, I'D BE JUST LIKE JESUS, BUT YOU THE PLAYER ARE WRETCHED!
>"Oh, what charitable act have you done lately?"
>THAT'S BESIDES THE POINT
It's like leftist "morality". They care about hyper aggressions but helping a person? doing charity? working for free? are you insane? oh, i'm sorry, i shouldn't say insane, that's dehumanizing to people with mental health struggles. etc etc
You can see this on a large scale, and it was fascinating: Swedes were so convinced that they and their civilization were better than everyone else's, that they intentionally imported arab and african rapists, to "fix" them and prove the point. Now they have the most rapes in the EU and grenade attacks. Country had basically 0 violent crime before when it was all Swedes. They lived in a literal fantasy land.
Exactly, it's this preachy condemnation morality and how prevalent it is in white western Judeo-Christian societies, it's a Catholic guilt complex thing? But it's also universal among hypereducated, neurotic upper-class people who live in a bubble and are very prone to sneering at people they consider to be morally inferior to them while being unaware of the irony of that. These are the kinds of people who write games. Dishonored's moral system is still a lot better than Spec Ops or TLOU2 simply by giving the player the option to play like a "chud" in the eyes of the leftist writer even if they do sneak some barbs and quips at you about how guilty you're "supposed" to feel.
DOTO did a better job by doing away with it entirely, with Lurk's actions having very little effect in the grand scheme of Karnaca; has Ivan Jabcobi been arrested? He gets killed by the Eyeless anyway. Kill him yourself? His house is sacked and it's covered up. Do nothing? He kills himself. It's subtle and helps the existential themes. Lurk is also powerless to stop the Abbey's actions in the Observatory, the game shows the cruelty of their actions but doesn't overstate it and you understand that they are ruled by fear in their actions. It's better than Neil calling you a chud for killing the poor cannibal rapists who were just trying to feed you to their families.
i have no idea what youre talking about with all those names in the second part
>Judeo-Christian anything
???
This isn’t a thing. One group doesn’t accept Christ, the other does. The two are incompatible.
>They care about hyper aggressions but helping a person? doing charity? working for free? are you insane?
This is a big part of woke culture, it’s not concerned with actually helping people in a material way but rather hyper fixating on ideas. They derive their power from the immaterial be it words, writing, or ideas. This is because most of them inhabit roles like journalist or writer, so it all boils down to how people talk and think and if they can control that then they basically have a way to gain a massive amounts of power. Their concern is not in what is actually bad or harmful to someone or society as a whole but what feeling certain action cause to arise in them and others.
>Their concern is not in what is actually bad or harmful to someone or society as a whole but what feeling certain action cause to arise in them and others.
So leftism is performance art
That’s a pretty good way to describe it actually. And yeah pretty much, people using socio-political shit in order to gain leverage and try to claim the moral high ground. Virtue signaling has become wide spread for a reason, it’s not about caring or doing anything but projecting the idea that you do and giving others the idea that they’re helping so they feel good about themselves. When in reality they’re not doing much aside from crying and screaming.
The weirdest example to me is Overseer Campbell.
The non-lethal option has him be forced out of his position with the same spontaneity as him dying and just leads to him being left in the flooded district where he gets infected and dies.
It's hard to see how one would lead to more chaos than what's honestly the more humane route of assassinating him.
A lot of the low chaos eliminations are really sadistic which just makes it weird that everyone praises Corvo for how hecking better he is for doing them. The Pendleton twins have their tongues ripped out and sent to the mines to work until they die in low chaos. You'd think Samuel would be MORE disgusted by this than Corvo killing a bunch of buttholes in a very fast way. You can send a noblewoman to a man's rape dungeon, which is apparently morally superior to just killing her. Dishonored 2 had similarly cruel methods like robbing Brianna of her powers and making her suicidal, or lobotomising Jindosh.
>suicidal pacifism
>spec ops the line
? you don't even know the scene if you think this
>What is it about game writers that you see this so often?
I dont think it always bad, but this usually comes from devs that work on games where you have to kill often and think its a trope of games and not of reality. Theres thousands of games where you dont have to fight or kill monsters but some of these writers probably have only played fps
Samuel considering you to be the reason things turned from bad to worse in very high chaos would have been fine on its own.
But him willingly bringing you over to the island.
Telling you to your face that you're the worst person around and threatening you then shooting to alert the guards.
Is just bizarre, is he trying to kill himself? Kill you? Neither really makes sense.
The more natural way to have basically the same 'message' is to have Samuel disappear prior to the mission.
You don't even need to have him blame Corvo he can die from the plague getting out of hand or run away due to the situation falling apart.
So you end up manning the boat yourself for the first time in the game in complete silence.
Shits fricked anyway what does he have to lose aside from his life which if not taken by Corvo is just going to be claimed by the plague.
You're moronic.
He's based
Okay, keeping your audience in mind isn't all bad but media is too fricking meta these days, it panders, second guesses the audience and tries to elicit seal claps much more than it just tells a good story
Final Fantasy Strangers in Paradise had a twist everyone predicted, and it didn't matter, the story was great, it subverted expectations anyway.
I hate how "subverting expectations" is always something the turns story in some "negative" direction. Something that makes it sadder, more depressive, etc. Why there are no "positive" subversions?
That at least does have a reasonable explanation
Stories are built on conflict, when your subversion removes conflict it just innately feels bad. Reaching resolution by subverting expectations just leaves people going "well that was fricking boring"
There's probably a good way to do it though, sure, exception to every rule and all that
>That at least does have a reasonable explanation
It doesn't. It just feels like authors want me to feel miserable.
>It doesn't
It does and I just told you what it was. Conflict leads to resolution, pain leads to catharsis. When you take way the first thing in those pairs from the reader, you inherently take away the other as well.
Note that I'm not excusing shitty twists or shitty expectation subversions. I'm just telling you why you tend not to see subversions where everything just goes right - it's boring and makes it feel like the characters involved cheated to win
People call that kind of expectation subversion 'deus ex machina', by the way
>pain leads to catharsis
It doesn't lead to it. It can be directed to it, but you have to consciously include the catharsis. Otherwise your writing just stops at pain. There's no big surprise many of these kinds of works are just miseryporn where everyone gets fricked over and over no matter what they do and then it just ends.
Where is Factions 2?
They subverted expectations by not releasing it.
Neil gave this explanation at the shareholder's meeting (it didn't go down well)
The documentary was a fun watch, I can't wait for TLOU2 to come to Steam so I can play it
>Let's surprise them by gratuitously torturing and SMASHING HIS BRAINS by a STRONG, INDEPENDENT WOMAN (emphasis on MAN)!
Ganker before TLoU2
>LMAO who the frick cares about this trash game
Ganker after TLoU2
>NEIL DISRESPECTED US FANS OF THE FIRST GAME BY KILLING JOELINO AND NOW OUR COLLECTIVE HEART IS BROKERINO
You can think a game series is trash and also be upset about the story
This isn't a contradiction.
>just because you hate a series with a passion for being standard Sony third-person survival cinematic action slop doesn't mean you don't care about its future!
???????????????????
>NEIL DISRESPECTED US FANS OF THE FIRST GAME BY
I never cared for the franchise, I always considered it an imitation of The Road, but I know some anon's love the first TLOU and I support them in their justifying hatred.
You can't spit in the face of the people who are giving you their time and money to hear what you have to say just because you are a pretentious idiot who thinks is breaking new ground making cheap shock value and empty subversion while mistreating its own workers.
Poor little wannabe movie maker. He hated his own industry, but movies didn't want him.
Why do Neil and several other game developers desperately want to get into a slowly withering and increasingly irrelevant industry?
Because if you're some israelite who was raised by rich parents, your desires as a writer are to be lauded by the masses as some paragon of virtue and some genius who can have his work cited for decades to come. You're not trying to make quality, you're trying to be recognized by your work. Literature isn't the social giant it used to be, they can't actually paint or create any art (which also precludes them from making music), and Video Games are the present emergent multimedia market with more eyes on it than film. Cuckmann thinks he can just take film tropes and make them into a 10/10 video game while under the (incorrect) opinion that these tropes are just superior to standard video game writing, but as time proves him wrong again and again, it's just us that suffer.
I'm not sure Cuckmann even believes in traditional movie tropes, either. He thinks it's enough to "surprise" when good movies build towards a reveal. You know, payoff for something that happens, not grabbing the wheel and careening down some less-traveled alleyway to keep you guessing.
There are so many games with big twist reveals that I've played, but it's always garbage games that feel the need to break narratives for the sake of twist reveals without the intelligence to rebuild the narratives later. I distinctly remember how surprising it was to see that painful big twist in Nier Automata that humanity was already long extinct, and Yorha was effectively just following pointless subroutines eternally because they can't break their programming, but the story didn't just ride off of that. The fallout of all of the events that were raised thanks to that revelation explain all of the cataclysmic events that follow it, and it still held true to the numerous philosophies the story was playing with leading up to that point AND following it.
Meanwhile Cuckmann feels bad that people easily predicted Joel dying in 2, and then when he killed him anyways, he was scrambling for another big twist (It was revenge for the fireflies!) to cover up how bland and boring the first one was.
not believing in traditional movie tropes is like a writer not believing in grammar
I actually don't see why it's that big of a deal. Killing off the hero of the last game, to set the younger hero off on a journey of revenge, seems like a perfectly valid story premise.
Now, the fact a butch woman who looks like a troony was involved IS funny. I'll give you that. That's where they went too far by trying to be clever.
It's less about what they did, and more about how they did it
Kind of similar to the recent controversy over Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
It's all well and good but the downside to the approach is you need to be solid on the old hero's characterisation.
Much in the same way Prototype 2 ended up receiving criticism for how they handled Alex Mercer.
The problem is the obscene amount of retconning he had to do to make Part 2 make sense. He had to remake Part 1 in order to change Jerry Anderson from a more than suspicious surgeon to practically a saint. TLOU1 is perfect as a self-contained story, it was clearly intended as such.
TLOU2 existence was forced by Druckmann, that's why people think is not canon.
funny how writing can be so bad that a game I wasn't going to buy still made me retroactively upset i spent time playing the first game
all they had to do was make joel go down fighting. that's it. And if they wanted to keep improving things, make it so you play as Abby first and learn about her life before she guns down joel at the beginning of the ellie portion
>all they had to do was make joel go down fighting
Pretty much why no drama happened over the death of certain characters in Red Dead Redemption, they get proper sendoffs
>all they had to do was make joel go down fighting. that's it. And if they wanted to keep improving things, make it so you play as Abby first and learn about her life before she guns down joel at the beginning of the ellie portion
Honestly this is such an obvious subversion im surprised they didn't go for it
Revealing the character you got attached to wants to kill another character you're attached to would've gone far better with people
Am I the only one that wanted this:
>Tommy overhears Abby’s group dropping Joel’s name, but the group is friendly at first and lets them freshen up because they faced the horde and saved Abby.
>Then they go to the main room again and introduce themselves but Tommy says his name is Joel.
>They then torture and kill Tommy but still are interested in Joel because they know Tommy as well (he had a falling out with the Fireflies in part 1). This way they could explore a lot of the interesting backstory Tommy and Joel had in 1 (being hinted at as being ruthless murderers).
>The plot would be that they take ‘Tommy’ (Joel) with them for some sort of revenge or to leftover groups of Fireflies, but
>Maybe they pretend to kill him so Ellie and her group won’t come look for him. They could leave an infected body next to Tommy’s body and behead them both, maybe set the house or them on fire, Ellie would then still have her mourning scenes.
You put more thought into this story than the writers did
Well it’s easier when there’s already a semi-working story to improve upon. They should actually hire people specializing in this ‘improving’ to consider hundreds of other variations without plotholes and stupid shit like Tommy literally saying ‘I’m Tommy, that’s Joel’. But I guess the ego of writers stand in the way of that, their own version is sacred.
joe can you finish the witcher 3 already
What does this mean?
joseph anderson video man say make witcher 3 video but no video where is video anderson joe where is. video joe wh. video joe anderson witcher 3 whefd jou andeson witcfw 3
I would have believed this was real if you didn’t sage
>They should actually hire people specializing in this ‘improving’
Yeah
Sometimes I know exactly how to fix something that already exists, but I know I couldn't have come up with the concept or framework in a million years. They're different sets of skills, it's why some creatives flounder on their own but flourish with a good editor.
Simply changing the order of scenes so that the player doesn't know that Abby killed Joel until the very end would have worked well.
Also make Abby hot. You would have countless people saying that they could fix her. It really is that easy, hot b***hes can do anything and be forgiven.
>Also make Abby hot. You would have countless people saying that they could fix her. It really is that easy, hot b***hes can do anything and be forgiven.
THis.
Stop making character ulgy (or even average) and unlikeable
Ganker before TLoU2
>LMAO, TLOU is a shit moviegame
Ganker after TLoU2
>LMAO, TLOU2 managed to be even worse and killed the entire studio and any chances of getting back old IPs
>newbie wasn't here to witness all the straight-faced, unironic tears when Joelino got golferino
lmao
>doesn't say anon was wrong
I implied it
I was here to remember all the edits because everyone thought it was hilarious that Neil would shit on the first game so hard
I was here for the leaks actually. Was hilarious seeing the whole board shit all over the game and make edits. Straight up drove all the Sonygays from the board for a solid month because they didn't want their incredibly game and lame game spoiled
gay and lame*
I was there for those threads.
It was 50% snoys absolutely flabbergasted at the story and 50% people who had no idea about TLOU at all but were laughing at the pozz. To be fair, I can understand the disappointment and upset of the snoys, because I played TLOU1 and was a little shocked at the direction it was taking.
Idk but that blond woman(?) in the trailer was so fricking unhinged.
>Ellie's mom
Ah those were the better times where we thought TLOU2 was going to have some playable dual-timeline with the past and present. Much better than the trash we actually got.
Uncharted and TLOU1 had good writing and dialogue, but TLOU2 is just awful, so much of the game was dependent on him and he failed so badly the game flopped
Yoko Taro did it far more effectively with route C of Automata and 2B's death
he does everything better, just the end credits of Nier Automata alone is better video game, gameplay writing/story integration than anything Neil has ever done.
[would you like to delete your save to help someone else?]
>That buildup to Weight of the World
>Entire cast are targets to both shoot at and be shot at by
>Story is still being concluded in the form of the pods desperately trying to fish out information for and from the Androids in their conclusion
>Musical swell met by massive power increases
>Data Lost
Nobody does it like Yoko Taro, and nobody ever will.
It was good, but I still liked the original Nier and Route B more
Why do modern writers not understand the value of twists is recontextualizing past actions and character relationships, and how characters will move forward with that development and not just
>lol we lied to the audience again xdd
>omg I was told one thing but now I'm told new thing :^0
modern writers aren't very intelligent
World Trigger is great at this.
It's not even twists at that point it's just a nonstop ongoing thing
World Trigger also requires you to enjoy meta autism and making excel spreadsheets because a huge chunk of the series is spent on talking heads
At some point subverting expectations starts to mean that I get a straightforward story with no rug pull. Actually I already experienced that with Wasteland 3 siding with the Patriarch and actually getting a good ending from if. Japan is the only place that can subvert my expectations because they still consistently do big feel good endings so I am surprised if it doesn’t turn out that way but with western games I have to come to fully expect some big gotcha tweeest.
I'm so happy a developer leaked THE TWIST
Based working class hero dabbing on israelites.
what was the twist???
who is Ellie's mom?
>Read subvert
>Immediately think about Keng/a/n
Sandro…
We went from
>Doctor's suicidal matchup was a hidden assassination attempt
>Blind man feigns his helplessness to heart grab the wrestler and finishes him off with a wrestling hold out of admiration
>"The Dragon's Shot Misfires"
to
>"By Purgatory Rules..."
>You were Awesome, [participant]
>THE WORM
How did this happen?
You forgot
>Principles
A israelite being subversive doesn't subvert expectations at all moron.
This mfer is actually moronic
He's got that Kojima brainrot where he thinks he's done something nobody else has before.
Kojima at least directed 3 good games, Neil just sat in the cuckchair in the writing room and and watched others do the work for one decent "game" and thought he was hot shit immediately after
Kojima DID do things no one else did before in video gaming, lol.
did you think there was alot of twist and turn spy thrillers before him?
Things such as "camera"
NEXT GUY
NEXT GUY
He should make a good game, nobody expects that.
Well, v?
There is this very funny and cute argument that would instantly change his mind about characters not being real.
What?
Meet my tulpa, sonic.
No one thinks drawings are real
Everyone thinks e-girlcons are pedophiles
Everyone moronic, that is.
I remember him coming on kinda funny saying "Motherfrickers, I love Joel and Ellie more than anyone, I fricking made them they are my children" blah blah blah, and then he writes shit like this.
It’s not real but he still attacked a journalist on twitter several times because who was angry a reviewer said it’s as good as Schindler’s List.
*because he
iconic cuck
Don’t you have webms to record schizo?
rights anime?
if he pulls up his sleeve you can see the TR
>Rights
>left arm
>GANORFE
Where’s the sickle?
>Present tense tattooed on his arm.
Good lord.
>iconic hammer
kek these are the same people who are arguing that AI celebrity porn is sexual assault.
>just go to THERAPY
could there be a more tone deaf israelite thing to say
Imagine wanting to be a great artist, imagine creating a character and story that truly resonates with the audience (I know, I know, he wasn't solely responsible for that) and then mocking them for being invested. Imagine pissing away all the goodwill from your first game because you wanted to punish the protagonist for being liked and the players for liking him. Imagine being such a smug, mean spirited c**t.
I mean yeah some people take it too far, but no aspiring artist should actively discourage their audience from being invested in their work.
If you're resentful that you made something good by accident, like Alan Moore with Rorschach, you're doing it wrong. If you want to be an artist you should be grateful and humble over the fact that people have connected with your work.
he wants people to dissociate from it because he knows he won't be part of anything like it again
being a great artist is not about making people happy holy frick LMAO. It’s hilarious reading people on this board trying to talk about art especially with ai shit. Their knowledge of art extends only to Bob Ross. And this moviegame cuck is not making art or making people happy.
I didn't say anything about art making people happy? I said you as the artist should be grateful that people have connected with your work, instead of mocking them for it. Just don't be a spiteful butthole, that's all it takes
>Just don't be a spiteful butthole, that's all it takes
No Anon DON'T!! I'ts too hard for them!
>creating a character and story that truly resonates with the audience (I know, I know, he wasn't solely responsible for that) and then mocking them for being invested
blah blah blah
misery por is just another fetish product, no different from porn.
TLOU was always shit and it becoming a meme game with normies made gaming even worse
Oh boy, it makes me think of Ron Gilbert, I dread finishing Return to Monke, because I know it ends, and how Ron basically makes fun of you for caring, but I gotta do it, and then I'll see the Noclip documentary, hoping is not too dick sucking.
It's not AS bad in a comedy game but it's still bad form
I elected to skip that one, mostly due to the art style. Good luck with it, anon
Wow I can't believe Neil liked a e-girl post on twitter and went to its defense
Kinda based to be honest
>Watching shit is now being sophisticated
I really feel sorry for snoys.
The whole western industry is rotten.
>tlou2 comes out and is trashed by everyone with the exception of the le media literacy melvins on twitter who only like it to pwn le gamuhchuds
>neil spells out the plot being an allegory for palestine and israel around the time shit starts to go down in gaza
>melvins realize they were defending unironic israeli propaganda the entire time
>half of tlou2's fanbase then disappears
This game is the gift that will never stop giving isn't it?
What do you have examples of fans leaving the fanbase because they realize this? I think they’re not changing their mind because the ending of TLOU2 is basically means peace and no revenge
>makes a twitter post supporting israel
>backfires horribly
>he does damage control making a public donation to Palestine and Israeli rescuing efforts
>next instagram post is him playing spider man 2
> makes a twitter post supporting israel
I gotta see this, lol
>playing Spider-man 2
I thought we were talking about Druckman, not Dunkey
Did Dunkey support Israel?
>This game is the gift that will never stop giving isn't it?
That's the best part, anon. The game's entertaining pretty much every single way you can imagine except playing it. Watching people trash it is equally as entertaining as watching the melvins fail and try to defend it. Even when the dumb motherfricker in charge of this dumpster fire gets what he wants it blows up in his face with spectacle.
>allegory for palestine israeli conflict
>specifically disallowed from shooting objects in the synagogue, despite being expected to cause mayhem and death wherever you go
what did he mean by this?
Here’s some Israeli wisdom from Cuckmann.
>The formulation for Ellie’s turn toward darkness can be traced back to the year 2000. Then in his early 20s, Druckmann witnessed news footage of a crowd lynching two Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.
>“And then they cheered afterward,” Druckmann, who grew up in Israel, recalls. “It was the cheering that was really chilling to me.
>In my mind, I thought, ‘Oh, man, if I could just push a button and kill all these people that committed this horrible act, I would make them feel the same pain that they inflicted on these people.’"
>The feeling faded, though. Eventually, he looked back and felt “gross and guilty” for his intense feelings.
>With “The Last of Us Part II,” he wanted to explore that emotional tumult on a didactic level.
>“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?”
>“This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
I think his ideas were good, but his execution needs support from wiser people to truly make them shine, ala Bruce being the guiding force that helped TLOU's first story succeed. No one of that caliber or equitable power was around for 2. It was funny watching the recent documentary and seeing how many developers clearly hated Neil's story but lacked the power to do anything about it. 100% the leak came from an in-house dev.
I didn't see the documentary, did they really hate it or is that just wishful thinking? Because if true then Neil Druckmann must be really oblivious if it's in the fricking documentary.
I don’t know but Neil said he thought Joel’s voice actor would be like ‘I told you so’ after the leak outrage. The actor actually supported him, probably because of all the hate they were getting, but it shows that before the leaks he didn’t agree with Neil’s plot
Baker is a very good actor, but is not someone to whom I would actually ever listen for opinions on anything, also he shills NFTs.
>neil spells out the plot being an allegory for palestine and israel around the time shit starts to go down in gaza
wait what
A year before at least.
Literal manbun on his head. What a gay.
I think it was Aristotle who said that a story's conclusion should be both surprising and inevitable.
That sounds good but how can it be both inevitable and surprising? Maybe just when parts of it are surprising. The only thing I can think of that can be both are things in real life like pandemics or tsunamis. You know they’re coming but you don’t know when.
It is a bit paradoxical when written out, but in practice, you usually get a sense of the protagonists values pretty early on and, by the end of their arc, will be triumphant over their struggles or tragically struck down by them.
A literary example might be a bit obscure, so I’ll use Breaking Bad since that’s reasonably popular. It’s obvious Walt will die by the end of the show, and while at first you might think it is the cancer that is established in the very first episode, you’re quick to realize that it will most likely be the result of his increasingly careless behavior. While his death is a given, the death being the result of him gunning down neo-Nazis with a homemade autoturret isn’t something most people would predict right up until the moment it actually happens.
I'm not the anon who asked but this is a great way of explaining it, thank you
TLOU 2 characters are repulsive inside and out
I'd rather play games that appeal to my aesthetic sensibilities
You think it's a hospital full of civilians, but it turns out to actually be a terrorist base. Bravo cuckman
>kicks Amy
>ruins Uncharted
Don't care what he says, I'll hate him for that alone.
It doesn't take sophistication to pull shit from out of your ass. Treating your audience like your enemy is already mistake number one, if your only ideal for your plot is "I want to trick them!" then it makes sense as to why it was so goddamn hollow. Druckmann is a failure who will never achieve his dreams and will always be looked down upon by those he seeks the approval of.
People only want subversion in their media because they're using it to replace real life experiences without realising it.
He is a leftist and a israelite [/spoilers] therefore everything he creates is garbage
Well yes
His kind wor
ships uglyness and hates beauty. That's why TLOU 2 is so repulsive
I'd rather play jrpgs
Jews love subversion more than any other race.
The most subversive race that has ever existed are the israelites.
Why do the israelites love subverting everything?
>Why do the israelites love subverting everything?
It serves both as their means of survival and raison d'être, it would be weirder if they didn’t love it
>writes a "revenge le bad" story
>goes to write schizo ramblings on why israelites must commit genocide
kek
>goes to write schizo ramblings on why israelites must commit genocide
did he actually or just that pro israel message after the hostage situation?
shalom rabbi
It's funny taht feminist Niel HACK-men pushed a far superior writer that was a woman out of Naughty Dog
if your story only works under the assumption that the audience thinks and expects things in a certain way then you don't have a story at all, you just have meta level reactionary nonsense, you might as well just go out and have random people fill in surveys and it feed to an AI
I hate these people that convinced themselves they are writers by profession when all they did was climb the corporate ladder over the shoulders of marketing studies data
When your mindset in writing a story if "how can we trick players even MORE?" then something's very wrong with how you approach the writing process.
>how can we trick players even MORE?" then something's very wrong with how you approach the writing process.
Wrong.
https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_the_mystery_box
Lol what planet are you from? everyone loathes the mystery box approach and jj abrams is commonly known as a hack for using it
Low IQ individuals hate it because they need their disney childrens' film storybook approach, where everything is simplistic and so obvious only a 5 year old who spends the movie playing on a tablet won't get it.
There's nothing to get. Mystery box storytelling is just literally just trying to trick and confuse the audience instead of coming up with an authentic conflict or idea in the story. Your contrarian shit won't work amigo.
>it's not authentic if I have to think and digest information instead of being spoonfed baby stories
A core of mystery box storytelling is that you cannot reach the conclusion with any kind of certainty, it’s a bunch of question marks followed by an arbitrary reveal. A supercomputer couldn’t predict it reliably, it’s just a packet of nonsense vomited at the viewer in the hopes that the duped viewer will do all the work himself.
The mystery box by design is incomplete
It alludes to plotlines but that's it the story can still be pretty much anything.
That's not to mention the approach in trying to create potential questions to later follow up on tends to make too many questions for any particular story progression to answer.
So you end up with a lot of plot points being either ignored, closed off unsatisfyingly, or completely reversed.
Oh wow never mind, after this post I've come to realize that the sequel trilogy is the peak of writing because they took the mystery box approach
Man, JJ Abrams really is a genius and not a hack who just sets up mysteries and has someone else do they payoff for him because he didn't have any idea of what the payoff was either
>Subvert expectation
This is the surest way to know if a writer is 1) a hack and/or 2) an butthole
Subverting my expectations is 99% of the time not interesting, enjoyable, or deep its just feels like you are wasting my time by doing stupid shit and more over that you have no ability to write something good so are just doing off the wall things.
>people care about the thing you made so much that they try to guess at what's happening next
>get upset because one of their guesses was right
this proves Druckmann is a hackfraud and a homosexual far more completely than anything else.
you needed 2 brain cells to predict that Joel dies in TLOU2
like even before the game was announced or anything you just know thats gonna happen because these homies lack creativity
If even half the rumors about this guy are true then he is a piece of shit, and a good example of the cancer in the vidya industry.
why do i need to be surprised? why do i need my expectations subverted?
if i read a romance novel and theres no romance, am i supposed to enjoy it?
i'm so tired of post modernism
Amateur writer faux pas. Look at that second abysmal Disney Wars movie. Did nothing but subvert expectations from start to finish. Except the expectation that Disney would not ruin Star Wars.
He said the line! Just like our friends Rian, Dan and Dave
What the frick, why is he so scrawny?
For real though, what the frick is up with “subverting expectations”? Are these people so soulless they don’t know how to tell a straight (no pun intended) story?
jj abrams fricked over every single project by his mystery box bullshit, why do these people still get jobs? twists are supposed to be able to figure out, and when the twist comes for those that don't, it has to be logically coherent and been foreshadowed and followed events properly in the story
this, Twists should be the dreaded thing you think could happen, but hope won't and then they do.
that is how they work the best, when its a good twist, its the opposite, its the thing you wish so much that would happen, the heroic turnabout, and it seems so impossible, or fricked, and then they do, they turn the tide.
FFXIV really subverted my expectations in that I was told it was a good game but it was actually shit
the problem is that by putting a shock jock scene in your story, no one will actually give a shit about the actual point you're trying to make beyond the shock
>Viewers
Ohnonononononono
I liked TLOU1 and 2. If you really care that much about Joel dying, you unironically need to go outside and touch grass. It's just a video game character.
I disliked TLOU2. If you really care that much about us calling Neil a fraud, you unironically need to go outside and touch grass. It's just an exposure of a slimy hack.
You are here defending a game character, schizo.
Go outside and touch grass
Shit bait
MYSTERY BOX
What I find so fascinating about TLOU2 is that it could have worked. There's an idea here that works. The whole thing makes sense.
Joel gets killed off over something he did and his daughter looks for the person whod did it, but we also learn about that person and why she did it. It works, right?
It's fine as a broad outline.
Neil just couldn't make it fit. It's not that the concept is bad, it's fine, it's great even. Travel Zombieland to get revenge on someone who has more pressing issues. I'd sell it.
But if you can't write for shit, even something so obvious won't work.
>but we also learn about that person and why she did it. It works, right?
Any moron should have known why Joel was killed right away. It baffles me how Neil approached it as some huge twist halfway through the game, I hope that was just for people who didn’t play Part 1 (I know it wasn’t though and some actually didn’t see it coming)
Abby did nothing wrong
no one ever said she did, she's completely justified murdering Joel.
the problem is everything else in the story, and the narrative as a whole, Abby is jsut dumb because she got her friends killed.
Everytime I watch this cutscene, I see more dumb shit.
>grabs her bicep which apparently immobilizes Ellie
>Ellie is rotated enough to keep her dazed, but not enough to have her fall over her own feet
>bothering to even rotate Ellie as opposed to just following up with a punch after the head butt
>not disarming Ellie or taking the knife who thankfully for the plot has Ellie drop it and not stab herself as she falls down
>people can stand having this shit on their screen
Gross
This is comical to me. I'm baffled by people who take it seriously.
Last Jedi throne room tier
>Too many people right off the bat said Joel is dead
Well, director who should we blame that on?
I have no idea why you'd go for a convoluted "cycles of revenge setup" when you have a "heart of darkness" story ready to ship.
Don't care what you think, tlou2 made me feel things no video games ever did before. I surely don't plan to replay it but I'm grateful to have experienced this rough journey. Thanks Neil.
Yeah that's great. NEXT GUY.
you aren't gay anon, abby is still technically female
even with the clit enters your butthole for the first time you remember that
Neil didn’t make you feel that, Gustavo Santaolalla is who you should thank. He completely carried the game and saved face for Neil
>tlou2 made me feel things no video games ever did before
You could have just gone to a gay bar for the same experience
NEXT GUY NEXT GUY
>Watch a cutscene from the game where Ellie is threatening two people
>"Tell me where she is and you can go"
>Predictably they fight back and she kills both of them
>Ellie randomly decides to remove the girl's coat and have an upset meltdown that the girl is pregnant
>The girl had a knife to her throat not 10 seconds earlier
The frick stupid bullshit is this? Why'd she even do that? Why does she even feel bad? Why is there still this huge gameplay/story disconnect in these games where your character will just mow down people emotionlessly in droves with guns/bows/traps but OH NO NOT THE HECKIN PREGNANTGIRLARINO
Also nobody posted it yet so obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NClSfK_bpQw
anon, only what happens during cutscenes is canon, you'll notice during gameplay that all the encounters start in stealth, you can basically not kill anybody other than during self defense sequences ( except that car thing with the asian guy, not sure maybe you can not be the agressor)
basically ellie only kills scarface guy to save dina, that asian girl playing with a vita after she fights back, kills that black girl by infecting her with spores to get away, kills in self defense a dog, kills mel and owen in self defence, kills in self defence by having that dude beaten by a clicker, she only kills in cold blood that fat dude.
lmao why even have the game at all at that point?
neil only cares about cutscenes bro
I just realized I answered my own question seconds after making that post.
Wrong, Neil says in this doc that the (cinematic) trailers are part of the story, in the announcement trailer Ellie says ‘I’m going to find and I’m going to kill every last one of them’
then I guess joel is still alive 🙂
Yes he must be there’s no other way! Just like Ellie was just seeing Joel sitting on his chair right there on the beach when killing Abby!
>anon, only what happens during cutscenes is canon
Lol, talk about pathetic. Can't even write a narratively consistent game where the story and gameplay interact and relate to each other.
Only a total loser would praise that kind of dogshit writing.
Okay, fine, but what is the point of that cutscene, still? Why am I, or Ellie, supposed to feel bad that she gave these two people an out to not die and they go full moron? There is no motivation whatsoever for Ellie to randomly remove the girl's coat after she justifiably killed them, and there's even less reason for her to feel bad that this pregnant woman basically killed herself. It could have been a moment where we question Ellie's morality if they played along and she killed them anyway, or a moment where only the dude fought back and you could organically realize that maybe that was the unborn child's father by the girl's crying because she could more reasonably not want to kill herself and her child. This reads more like a storyboard sessions of "Okay, how do we make the player feel bad?" It completely falls flat, I do not feel an ounce of sympathy and neither should Ellie
But then again I guess the entire point of the game is "I want to do a revenge quest until I'm 2 inches from the finish line to make the entire story pointless, glad all the bodies between me and abby all were people who died for nothing"
owen says "she's pregnant"
Ah, shit. That's my bad, I guess. So it was more of a confirmation to see if he was lying? Why didn't anyone say that the first time
>This reads more like a storyboard sessions of "Okay, how do we make the player feel bad?" It completely falls flat
They were definitely going for that, they did it with the dogs too. You know, the dogs that viciously attack you
Guilt trips, one of my least favorite things in video games
>anon, only what happens during cutscenes is canon
What's the point of the gameplay then?
I can understand dismissing stuff like npc's code-breaking or glitches not being canon.
But why have an entire dedicated set of mechanics to combat that the developers knew full well the players would use if you're just going to pretend those never happened?
There isn't even any indication of this in the game beyond it making the cutscenes look ridiculous.
That just sounds like the developers fricked up by completely ignoring how the player experience interacts with the narrative.
Beyond parody
>anon, only what happens during cutscenes is canon
not in a good game
if you make a game about killing a bunch of people in gameplay (it's the expected path even if it's not strictly mandatory) and act like killing a bunch of people in gameplay didn't happen, you're a bad writer
Saints Row 2, one of the great things about it, is how consistent it is between story and gameplay, this is a game made to appeal to people that found GTA 4 too mild, they are the crowd that would waste time in the GTA overworld causing mayhem, and this is the kind of protagonist you see
Look at this, flirting with the barista one moment and then to help himself doesn't hesitate to use her as a shield, the character is a psycho just like the kind of character the average player will enact.
I can understand having a "what the frick am I doing, did I really just do that, is all this really worth it?" moment after killing a pregant woman, but it acts too much like she was actually in the wrong, when she wasn't
did he think he was being clever when he did a MGS2 tier subversion? only a master ruse man like kojimbo can pull something like that off, you could say Kojima invented subversion (and lenses, and eyes)
>more focused on tricking people then telling a good story
Jarvis, pull up the Neill Druckmann Wikipedia page, and could you please read me the "Early Life" section?
people were predicting Joel would die since before the first game even came out.
it's literally the most obvious fricking trope you can do when you have a story about an old teacher and young learner.
if anything the original TLOU was subversive by not having Joel die.
how fricking dumb do you have to be to get surprised that people predicted this?
oh wow the wise old mentor dies when his student grows into a capable adult who could have seen this coming this has literally never been done before...
MORE EXPECTATIONS SUBVERTED
>hmmm the fans are way too clever for me...
>I guess I have no choice but to lie to them!
imagine admitting this in your own doc
>Maybe... maybe misleading people was the WRONG move here. Maybe if people predicted Joel was dead, it wasn't the "great subversion" we thought.
>Joel grabs her from behind and puts his hand over her mouth
>She instantly knows its him
l-lewd
they could have so easily fixed this by giving ellie actual ptsd and schizophrenia type visuals, Jesse and Joel do carry themselves very similarly (clearly designed on purpose) so it could have easily been excued as her seeing shit. They even do this after she murders Owen and Mel, she hears Joel's voice, not Tommy's.
This is raw evidence that Neil Druckmann is an incredibly insecure person.
literally everything druckmann does indicates he's deeply insecure.
You have not subverted expectations. We thought you were a homosexual, and you were a homosexual.
they realised that no one would buy the game once they realised noel was dead
la sophistidad
Last of us 3 will reveal Joel is actually alive and is now mentally challenged? So now Ellie has to raise Joel. That's a great subversion!
>TLOU 3 will be about Ellie chasing down and killing Tommy before he can kill Abby
Bravo Neil
There's no way this wasn't just made to frick with Ganker.
Not sure what movie this is from but I think a big guy stabs him to death with a knofe in next scene.
>How am I still gonna surprise players and viewers?
>I will just lie to them in trailers
Genius subversion master, you did it again!
>mass reply.
>calls other people NPC.
>while posting a trending meme image
you deserve to feel upset, as you looked at a mirror image of yourself.
He reached the ultimate goal of all AAA game devs - to be noticed by HBO and invited to TV industry events.
Those shitty Star Wars movies really mindbroken people's perception on media criticism huh.
Why are modern day writers obsessed with "subverting expectations?" Can't they just write a story without trying to be "clever?"
they think that's how you get to be clever. because they never read anything like "East of Eden" where you aren't subverted but have the point instead jammed in your face repeatedly, even if you don't get it until the end.
I played something recently that had an in your face twist from the start of the game where the older version of the protagonist was guiding the younger version of herself. It was incredibly obvious but the way the writer got to the explanation of how it was done was so out of right field that it was an immensely gratifying twist.
back in the day when gamers were gamers nobody cared how much what sold
when you are inundated with "content" you look for filters to figure out a way to ignore stuff. money made is an easy way to gauge group consensus for midwits.
same thing with people using boxoffice to signify how good a movie is.
ive looked at gore shit for 20 years on the internet but i played the last of us 2 for a few hours and it was like sickeningly gorey a few times
and then the girl started walking me through a synagogue and talking about hannukah or something
it felt very pointed. WE ARE israeliteS, HERE IS GORE
Neil Druckmann is a moron hack, but the funniest part of this thread are the anons posing as pillars of virtue.
You can be a fricking piece of shit of human being and be able to write great stories.
Doubt. And this is clearly not the case
Agreed.
>Chastises older female video game characters for their designs of being attractive
>Regresses character writing by equating female's designs as more important than their actual character
Frick this guy and may he be constantly mocked as the idiot he is for all eternity.
He's gonna need to make a game that sells first. Then perhaps he can dick around like last time.
Apologies for e-celeb posting, but if anyone is interested Yahtzee actually made a video about this recently
?t=379
Neat, I had forgotten to finish watching it, a lot of things here apply to Last of Us writing.
Mass repliers get the rope.
# Filter posts with 10 or more quote links:
/(?:>>d(?:(?!>>d)[^])*){10}/ ;stub:no;
I expect his games to be shit.
He has so far not subverted my expectations.
He subverted mine. I didn't expect the writer of a cliche zombie survival story to think he was writing the Iliad.
*ruckmann was already a decade and a half late to the zombie scene, and it was just like 90% of modern zombie media where the undead are just an excuse for people to be shitty because there is no law enforcement. I was expecting a "maybe the real monsters are people" type of line played straight.
>purchase video game
>game starts with a video of the game director spreading their ass to the camera and farting
>credits roll
Really subverted my expectations
Is that the whole quote? Who fails basic grammar here, Joss Whedon or the person who quoted him?
I never saw it coming
DiksuckMan looks goofier than ever
>Abby was Ellie's long lost sister all along
Neilchads, how does he do it?
What the frick does that mean? What, Zombie/Punished Joel steps out of the shadows to reveal himself before Ellie as she's going through a warpath in California for Abby?
Resident Evil 7, 8, and remakes of 2,3 and 4 have all come and gone.
The advertising for this masterpiece, this game among games, however, will continue even after the end of eternity. It's just that good.
They made a show and remastered 1 and 2 like 4 times each, its not the game itself thats keeping it in the conversation
Maybe some people just don't like israeli misery porn.
I like TLOU2. Story does nothing for me and the new characters are uninteresting pieces of plywood but the world is beautiful and the combat/enemies are great. I just wish Neil hadn't killed the entire studio to make it.
he isn't saying he has to get more sophisticated than you guys, he's saying they have to get more sophisticated in general, lol. the drunkmann seethe is crazy!
>Our audience likes our work and considers it worth the time to dissect and investigate the breadcrumbs we put down
>lmao frick those nerds
what breeds this mindset?
Subverting exceptions is a cop out by shits who cannot even meet let alone exceed those expectations.
God it all just comes across and pretentious self-absorption. I can't stand the way this guy communicates. Fricking insufferable.
If there was a button that deleted every narcissist from existence, how much of the western entertainment industry would be left after you pressed it?
Substantially worse since the 90's were full of narcissists.
The difference was those dudes felt they had to prove it and maintain their egos while this new wave feel entitled to greatness immediately.
>how much of the western entertainment industry would be left
>substantially worse
?
I had a moron moment and read it as "would be better".
Please forgive, it's been a long day.
Not the guy you're replying to, but you are forgiven. God bless.
He did subvert the expectations of people at the golden globes.
Nothing wrong with that. Now a story about queer and transgender teenagers during the apocalypse, that's boring.
Want to be absolutely subversive today?
Just be absolutely candid and honest without a shred of irony to your story
Be cringy and edgy without a shred of shame and be as over the top as possible without some underlying 2deep4u motive
Western authors haven't reached such level of enlightenment yet. And it's not clear if it's even attainable for them.
>Our audience is more intelligent now.
>So we have to outsmart them!
Plot twist, Ellie has 2 dicks instead of one.
They could just make intelligent stories but nah, moral of the story, just shit on a plate and drones will gobble it up.
>Plot twist, Ellie has 2 dicks instead of one.
They call her Hemi Ellie
>Our audience is more intelligent now.
>So we have to outsmart them!
He's insecure as frick. He perceives himself as the vanguard in storytelling, he HAD to subvert, he HAD to be one step ahead. Any successful prediction by the audience is a threat to his ego and invalidates him as the pioneer he believes he is.
That explains why such subversions are empty and shallow, they are not about telling a great story, they exist only to be unpredictable events using cheap shock value as a way to pose as "adult" and "mature"
sorry bro but the title of western kojima is already taken
subvert the west with trannies and gays