It’s Time to Coin A New Term for Cinematic Linear Adventure Games | Extra Punctuation
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- čas přidán 24. 11. 2021
- The sad thing about mainstream video games these days is that it’s no longer a craftsman’s industry, really. While the technology was still developing everything had to be built from the ground up. Developers usually coded their own engine, created all the art assets and sounds - I can’t find a source right now but I remember reading that the underwater explosion sound in Quake was created by wrapping a condom around a microphone and sticking it in a bath. That’s a fun story. They made the explodey head effect in the movie Scanners by filling a fake head with dogfood and blasting it with a shotgun. That’s a fun story, too. A lot more fun than “we downloaded it from a library” or “we just used CG.”
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This series is turning into Yahtzee's best work to date. It's a milder version of "Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee-hee-hee."
It's not really even that much milder he's just talking slowly
@@RustoKomuska He actually wants to be understood on these.
Agreed, I think it’s just a change of pace. I watch Yahtzee religiously but it’s now slower and more predictable and we understand what his likely opinions on games will be. He’s changed the format, shifted it to opinion pieces with less bounds than imposed on a game review and still has the incredibly slick writing to back hin
@@RustoKomuska zero punctuation now with punctuation
The slower pace gives it a slight melancholic bent but also lets the digs really stew in vitriol, feels somehow like a completely different show just with different pacing
Interesting that he didn't mention coining the game genre "spectacle fighter" for games like DMC and Bayonetta. I always loved that phrase and still use it.
Or "pentiumpunk" for games with stylised depictions of tech themed around clunky beige consumer electronics.
“Spectacle fighter” was such a perfect name too. Shame it didn’t catch on.
I still prefer Stylish Action, but either is better than Character Action.
This is perfect. Fits those kind of games perfectly. Glad there’s been some others, like ULTRAKILL
I don't like the term because "fighter" to me implies head to head fighting game of some kind. Smash or Street Fighter and their ilk.
It's nice to have Extra Punctuation back, I like hearing Yahtzee's thoughts on gaming in general. Ghost Train Ride isn't quite as fun or catchy as the others but it is quite accurate.
It's no "spunkgargleweewee" but it's still very evocative!
Its discussable in work emails unlike the other one
Im still absolutely baffled Spectacle Fighter wasnt the adopted term
No doubt. It just doesn't roll of the tongue as well as the others
The others he mentioned were are too intentionally contrived to ever be used for realsies, the're meant to be funny rather than practical. Ghost Train Ride has a chance, although I think the metaphor is too vague and contrived to really work.
I wish the peril in games could only be something I create for myself out of my own recklessness or stupidity. It’s always jarring to go about my business and then be thrown right into a scripted event like falling into a pit, getting a jumpscare, being detected by an enemy I’ve been spending the past hour sneaking around, or being chased by a helicopter that came out of nowhere but the studio’s ass.
these days even sandbox games fall into that category, theres an open world but all the missions are railroaded. might as well watch a lets play video instead of actually playing the game
I can see this falling flat because zero risk often means zero fun, at least for this kind of game.
@@thekoifishcoyote8762 I understand what you mean, but video game difficulty inevitably exists. Paths themselves can be scripted to a certain extent, like in any good sandbox that gives you a high ground, a tunnel, and a normal ground path. The paths themselves should have many obstacles and tradeoffs between them, at varying risks & rewards. The key is still total player autonomy. If I go through the hardest path and avoid getting seen, I should be rewarded with never being forced into a fight I didn't ask for, from enemies that spawn out of nowhere. Only if I fucked up the navigation and got detected previously, should I expect enemies to finally spawn as a result of my actions.
So..
Jimminy Cockthroat = Assassin’s Creed Clones.
Spunkgargle Weewee = CoD Clones.
Ghost Train Ride = Uncharted Clones.
Is that about right?
Jimminy Cockthroat=Ubisoft clones (which is just ubisoft releasing the same game again with diferent skins on the charachters)
i would say, the other ones seem fine by me
@@isodoubIet To be fair i really liked early AC games, AC 3 was the one that kill the franchise for me just in the first 2 hours, and i've never played another AC since then
@@isodoubIet nah 3 was the last for me, i didn't even finish that game but to each their own
I believe yahtzee also coined the term spectacle fighters for games like DMC and Bayonetta.
@@JoseManuelCigoySegura7239 I'd trust them on that AC3 is not one to judge the series on AC4 is just about the best one in the series next to AC2 and Brotherhood.
This is so accurate and it sucks. Playing Ragnarok now, and it often feels like they really just wanted to make a movie instead. The term "open-world" is itself almost enough at this point to chase me off.
It's what pissed me off so much about the award they got. They literally won the narrative award for nothing that only a game could achieve. They made good cutscenes, good uninteractable banter, both nothing that uses the fact it's a game to it's advantage.
I’m so conflicted over Ragnarok. I keep jumping from amazement to boredom and it feel like part of the problem is the on-rails nature of the world and glut of cutscenes which makes the pacing feel uneven. The game gives you its version of freedom but it’s still very locked down. Maybe if I had more time to really get into it it wouldn’t be so noticeable but I feel like it’s losing me.
@bizmonkey007 For me it's the way the game constantly backseats itself. I can't seem to play it for more than an hour before I get pissed off at the other characters telling me what to do next instead of letting me figure it out for myself.
yup, I came back to this video specifically because of ragnarok. Everything about it fits the tedious characteristics spelt out here.
Which is ironic because I tend to expect these series to evolve in the way a movie trilogy with vision does, where you expand on the themes and world and hone your craft. Instead, in pursuing a larger audience (because the corporate model requires constant expansion) the sequels tend to compromise what made the previous entries good, with compromised tone, feature creep, too much handholding, overstuffed narrative, and weird disconnects between some of the highest fidelity stuff you've seen in a game and basic core mechanics and design elements feeling sloppy and underdone.
'RPG -elements' really does send a shiver down my spine, as I feel it extended to RPG's kind of forgetting that RPG's lay more in their narrative and those mechanics were supplemented the idea of your character learning stuff and not just having 'upgrades' if that makes sense.
Well, that's actually not true. This is a response to a very old comment, but as this comes up all the time it never hurts to clarify.
To begin with RPGs had no real story or narrative at all, it actually sprung off of collegiate war gaming which was little more than statistically represented combat with a few random elements. RPGs simply whittled it down to a more personal level. To be honest at one time adding serious story elements to RPGs was a new idea, as it was mostly nerds proving they could simulate a sword fight with dice and numbers, and a bit of obtuse puzzle solving. Indeed many classic adventures basically started with a simple narrative that was simple "you are now in front of a dungeon". The old "Against The Giants" original version pretty much posited that the PCs were minions of some local lord thrown at the local threat (Giants) mostly because they were told if they came back and the giants weren't all gone, they would be executed as cowards, but if they succeeded there might be some reward, not that this was expected. "Desert Of Desolation" simply involved the PCs randomly exiled to die in a desert for alleged crimes they might or might not have actually committed as it had nothing to do with anything that was going to come.
Now yes, things did progress from there, and got better for it. The thing to remember though is that "Role Playing" had to do with the idea that the role you chose and the numbers involved mattered more than you did. While there could be some personal skill involved as far as say puzzle solving, as far as most things it depended entirely on what your character could do, and not you. That was the "role" part. This later got extended into elaborate personalities, backstories, and detailed worlds and narratives, but really... at one point the whole idea that you might say have the PCs meet in a random Inn and decide that knocking off the local dragon was a cool thing to do over the weekend via dialogue was a unique idea as opposed to just having the GM say "you are now in front of a giant cave reputed to be the lair of the local dragon" at the beginning of the game.
This was of course the days when you might have Derf the Dwarf, Derf being the name of the player spelled backwards. Or a gnome named Alasca, because you know... that's a place in Alaska. So take that for what it's worth as well. :)
@@jeremyrichard2722 Very well put.
To add to it, the first video games to use the RPG genre (Dragon Quest and Ultima for example), used stats, skills, experience, and leveling up, as a way to both extend game time and to create an adaptive difficulty curve.
If you're really good at the game, then you'll get through it quickly and enemies will get stronger quicker. But if you're bad at the game, you'll stay and grind until you can win them, meaning you'll go slower and the game will be easier (and longer). In other words, you either spend the time grinding or "git gud". If you throw in a few exceptionally high difficulty spikes, you can also dramatically increase the game's length as well for no extra cost.
This is the main reason why I hate level scaling in RPGs (or reducing exp earned from weak enemies). Most people who don't like level scaling point towards the fact that leveling up is supposed to make you feel stronger, and naturally level scaling prevents that when all of the enemies are always just as strong as you. I on the other hand point to the fact that if you get stuck in a game with level scaling, then grinding will typically just make the game harder, essentially meaning the game is telling you to "git gud or get out". Even Dark Souls isn't that brutal.
But another thing to point out with level scaling is that... well. If you want all of the enemies to be the same strength as the player, then why have a leveling system to begin with?
I can think of plenty of games which don't have leveling systems, but manage to give the player that feeling of progression and getting stronger. Metroid comes to mind, as well as Doom to a certain extent.
But I've clearly digressed into complaining about level scaling, which I apologize for. The point I'm trying to make is that RPG mechanics in both tabletop and video game, were never meant to supplement the idea of the character learning stuff. They were a means to an end. A rather entertaining end if I might add, although I presume a lot of people would disagree with me on that one nowadays.
@@DanVzare Well the concept of leveling up in computer RPGs has always been a touchy one.
In a live RPG the easiest levels are actually the middle ones, which is why so many campaigns artificially start there (or did) and oftentimes find some way to stay there as that represents a point where the PCs are tough enough to do some cool stuff, but not so powerful that challenging them becomes increasingly difficult to justify.
At the low levels you can die to one lucky hit from a rat, and it can be hard to survive without min-maxing and gaming the system. Concept characters can be difficult to get legitimately past level 1, and some people argued it's almost mechanically impossible to get something like an old "Shi'ar" from 2E AD&D past level 1 legitimately unless the rest of the party literally does everything other than dialogue and doesn't mind being a man down for most purposes when it gets dangerous.
At any rate the problem with computer RPGs is people who play video games expect things to start very easy and become more difficult. One reason old cRPGs used to welcome you to the game by introducing your face to the gravel a few dozen times was specifically because that was accurate to the source material and how low level games are.
When an actual RPG character advances they become more powerful, and confront greater enemies, but as they have more options, resources, and higher end abilities and the game only goes so far, it becomes more an exercise in things presenting parity. Such as when your heroic archmage finally confronts the evil dark wizard who terrorizes the entire world on an equal footing, compared to early on when everything was much bigger and more powerful than you were and thus the threat was greater.
This mostly works because a PnP RPG has a live GM, who knows the player, and can tailor challenges. In an CRPG all it can really do is follow the script, even if it branches, and keep adding more numbers.
What's more with something like an MMO where there is no "final big bad" that ends thge campaign, and this huge open world, it does indeed sort of miss the point when your reward to say gaining the power to drop a giant flaming meteor from the sky is to somehow travel to a land where the average rat can survive that attack... and then you wonder why those didn't eat everyone in the starting kingdom when a few snuck on board a merchant ship and went cross continental as the guys fighting the weaker domestic rats with rusty daggers certainly aren't going to handle rats more powerful than the god they likely pray to... and you know this because you killed a couple of gods in the last expansion, and according to the numbers these rats are way stronger than that.
I mean it works somewhat, which is why people keep playing this stuff, but I think they need to start finding ideas besides level scaling myself. I've presented ideas that could work for many years, but in general corporations don't want to do anything but what they know is a proven formula until that totally crashes and it has not done that yet. I mean true, I'd probably be a crap game designer, but at a certain point trying anything is better than maintaining something even the fans realize is pretty stupid and doesn't work beyond satisfying some basic RPG addiction.
The most certain thing they could do though to help mitigate the problem with the next batch of MMOs (I've heard rumors this is happening, and a big part of why Microsoft bought Activision/Blizzard, they want to do WoW 2, and an action based Overwatch MMO to cater to different audiences and take over a neglected market) is pay more attention to central game design and things like character advancement and such.
See one of the biggest problems with MMORPGs to begin with is they forget that the easiest time to control a game is in what you allow players to do. Too often they do this sort of conceptual "rule of cool" thing and toss game balance to the wind, and then wonder why PVP doesn't work and balancing things is difficult because some characters are clearly better than others. The problem is also compounded when there is no real complexity to the game to make it accessible to everyone, so "there is no wrong choice" and optimization is entirely about how ridiculous you get at a high level of play few people see. In the effort to make it that grandma or a small child could win the whole game by randomly picking a character and tapping a couple of buttons again and again to maximize accessibility they make it so it's difficult to balance, and the only ways to make things seem "harder" is to progressively turn everything into giant damage sponges, and/or use things that make the whole idea pointless by just ignoring the mechanics.
I've rambled a lot, but consider the whole reason why MMORPG bosses all now have an "enrage" timer and instant death mechanics is that they realized without that even a monkey could "turtle" their way through this stuff if they followed the actual rules of their own game because those rules were so dumbed down and the characters so powerful that there was no other way to do it. Avoiding such things should be a #1 priority in initial game design. Developers need to get the corporations to stick it and think long term, not just how the initial experience will be, but what it's likely going to be like three expansions down the road and how it will work not just storywise, but mechanically, when everyone is max level, and things need to be designed around that reality and still be convincing.
I just wanted to say I appreciate this conversation very much! Thanks all, for typing it all up!
I'm my "ghetto" we used to call this a "perfect rental". Not that bad to feel like a wasted weekend, neither good enough to justify a purchase.
That’s an incredibly appropriate name, I might just steal that
You're your ghetto?
@@intensellylit4100 He’s also his own grandpa.
I feel pretty much the same way, except I call them "perfect CZcams material." I enjoyed watching 100% no-commentary walkthroughs of the Uncharted games on CZcams because it felt like watching fun action movies, but I would never spend $60 to do it myself.
Listening to Yahtzee Talk in a slower cadence, sounds like he is in a shrink’s office uncomfortably sharing his real feelings about something. The discomfort is palpable in his tone. This dude is the truth. Yahtzee really is the gift that keeps on giving. May Everything you touch continue to turn to gold, Except for when you go to the bathroom. But you know what I mean.
Lol well said m8
You do know that he lied in his CoD: Ghosts ZP? He made up an entire scene that wasn't there.
@@Michon00 what scene?
@@Michon00 omg! Rly!
@@Michon00 which one?
Has anyone else in the comments suggested “Setpiece Safari”?
Ghost Train Ride sounds too cool for cinematic thrills on rails that exist to wow the players
I just call them hodgepodge bangbusters
because they're usually a combination of a bunch of genres, they're designed to make people excited to spend money, and at some point there's an explosion just because
Yeah, people are refarded for spending money on stuff they like, right?
Setpiece Tour?
Why is that bad thing?
I don't know why people insist it needs to be a term that is as puerile (and hard to understand) as possible. If people start using the term (which is significantly more likely to happen if you aren't embarrassed to say it out loud) then others will start knowing what it means. It's also not entirely a bad thing that a game is like a carnival ride, people like to go to Disneyland, don't they?
@@asj3419 It depends on the player. If the game is just kinda guiding you on a track from one big spectacle/firefight/sneaky-stabby-zone to the next, and your only downtime is walking through the now empty level and picking up ammo or materials, that formula could wear thin for some people. I don't mean to insult players for enjoying it, everyone enjoys a trip to the amusement park now and then like you said -- but going to the park every day will make you sick after a little while, and your wallet will be crying for you to take it easy.
@@Just_Matty this doesn't have to be bad tho, there's good games like max Payne 1 to 3, half life or the new wolfenstein games that do the linear set piece tour thingy. They just need one good fun mechanic(bulletime jumping) good writing or in wolfensteins case the most over the top set pieces I've ever seen.
There is one point missing though and this is that between all these things, you usually have long cutscene moments that convey the whole story of the game. It's also everything anyone ever talks about when they want to sell you the game. I am not sure how this would fit into the analogy though, because a ghost train ride is sold on the thrill. But I do think that there are still AAA developers that at least attempt some form of artistic vision. FromSoftware is always coming up with new ideas. Yoko Taro has become more mainstream and he is definitely doing his own stuff. And even though Kojima often makes too long cutscenes for my liking, at least, his games like Death Stranding have some form of vision for the gameplay. I didn't like it and I am not saying it was done the best way, but I can at least respect it.
Perhaps the breaks between the scares?
I'll take a shot at adapting the analogy, I'd probably say it's like taking a ghost train ride in the club car. The queues and thrills are there to moderate between tension and relief, the gift shop gives you the dopamine hit of getting new stuff, but the only thing you will tell anyone about the trip is the fascinating conversation you had with the guy at the bar that may bear no relation at all to the overall trip itself. Or, since it usually manifests on CZcams as videos where people edit all the cut-scenes together and apend, THE MOVIE to the title, you could say it's a ghost plane ride with an in-flight movie...totally agree with you about FromSoft and Kojima as well...
While I don't disagree about the length thing, cutscenes work in Kojima games because his vision as a game director is so heavily influenced by cinema. He cut his teeth on Metal Gear, a franchise constructed from American military and spy movie tropes combined with some futurism, conspiracy, and traditionally Japanese cultural elements. The emphasis is always on the characters and their experiences. However outlandish the events of a Kojima game become, they always connect to the feelings and motivations of the characters, who are typically well -written and performed. And the long cutscenes are broken up with much longer uninterrupted gameplay sequences which allow for tons of gameplay depth so as to not feel "railroaded" when the 30 minute cinematic suddenly happens. The mix is jarring to the uninitiated, but it's distinctly "Kojima" in a way that eventually becomes a strength instead of a weakness, like how every Wes Anderson film is bizarre in the same recognizable way.
However, I wish that the Half-Life model was the default in the games industry: never wrest control of the character or the camera from the player unless it's completely necessary. For every Kojima who uses cinematics for a specific purpose, there's 100 studios who use them because they don't know how to tell a story otherwise.
Im not sure that Kojima games and FromSofts Souls series counts as train rides, at all. One is a directorial auteur who makes strange things but with big budgets and names, like Death Stranding , and the other created a whole new sub genre of games based on rhythm combat and obscure hidden story exploration
Ashamed as I am, "Ghost Train Ride" games are currently my favorite. Its some entertainment with characters I enjoy to unload after a long day of work where I can stop at any moment to help my wife or child. The gameplay isn't so addicting that I can go a week without playing it and pick it right back up when I have time.
You shouldnt be ashamed of linking things because a man with a british accent doesnt.
A game being a "Ghost Train Ride" isn't on it's own a bad thing, it's just a way to categorise certain games that come out that use algorithms, pacing and content to deliver an experience in the way that Yahtzee describes. There can be good ghost train ride games in the same way you can have on the rail shooters which aren't ghost trains. If you enjoy playing these games more power to you, everyone enjoys different experiences afterall.
On a similar note to what the guy above said, ghost train rides aren't necessarily bad. I believe Yahtzee is critiquing more their overuse - to the point where he can come up with a generic term to categorise several games from several studios.
Oh yeah, I'm not ashamed that ghost train rides are my cup of tea. It's like playing a book, and that's what I like. Like, I've literally played all the games he mentioned (except RE remakes) and yeah, those are some of my top games lol.
Ahhhh comforting mediocrity, the only thing we have left
Agree, I think the problem lies in modularization. We build modules that can be easily reused and easy to swap out depending on the need. So we have these nicely built modules, that are tried and true, and swapping them is easy. You made production cheaper with less manpower (mainly engineering manpower, you still have to pay for the artists and writers!), and because it is tried and true, it will sell. But I guess repetitiveness is the price for optimizing production
@@macmcskullface1004 I think it's a case of misinterpreting what the difference between "not an indy" and "triple-A" is on the part of Omar there as opposed to him being outright wrong. If the discussion becomes "indy" versus "non-indy" then he's not wrong - the indy scene is probably less creative due to the simple fact that like not everyone is cut out to be a doctor or a police officer or a fire fighter or w/e, not everyone is cut out to work on gaming.
It's an artform media that nonetheless needs to be completely interactive in the parts where the gameplay is involved, and good games are ones that merge the world-building, story and gameplay together if they are single-player affairs. While Triple-A is very by the numbers and lowest common denominator, thats the world we live in - you simply cannot market something so specialised and make as much money from it. See Napoleonic war gaming versus Warhammer, or 18-rated movies versus ones for the whole family with a mild amount of sex, bad language and violence in them. While the latter in both examples doesn't necessarily hit the demographic who would enjoy both options as hard, the former is a lot harder to market because less people are going to be into it.
This doesn't excuse Triple-A from being cookie-cutter, it just explains it - when you desire to make as much money as possible, appealing to the largest possible audience without being particularly offensive is the ticket to success - see Skyrim versus anything that attempted to wrest the king from its throne in the last decade.
Indy gaming is in theory more open to wonder and splendour because there isn't as much challenge involved to keep a project afloat financially - you don't have to pay four thousand staff members to keep going if its a small title with a team of six or less working on it, and therefore you can potentially be more artistically creative. Potentially.
And yet I've seen so many fucking Doom '93 clones on Steam in the last 18 months because some massive tit keeps churning them out. As in, the same guy has about thirty different Doom '93 clones on the market for less than £1 with various different "skins" applied to them. It's like paying for a cheap mod by the looks of things. Then there's the dozens of cheapo Dark Souls ripoffs, the Mario ripoffs, Sonic ripoffs etc. etc. because as a whole, people like specific things and haven't got enough imagination to come up with something unique, and instead attempt to redo what they like themselves without putting in effort to considering what they like about it and why it works.
Let's look at the most successful and influential indy titles of the last decade (as Yahtzee himself looked at): Undertale, Papers Please and most importantly Binding of Isaac. The last one has spawned so many homages, parodies, attempts at refinding the formula to market and the like that the market is saturated with them. Then there are the thousands of base builder games, X "sims" and whatever that all play the same and feel the same because its the same idea peddled in a different medium of bus, train, hospital, airport, etc. etc.
There are definitely a lot of great indy titles that have been established in the last decade of video-gaming, but you could also argue the same for double and triple A titles - it's just that because the market for indy games is so much larger than that of double-A and triple-A on account of not requiring as high a budget, the gems in the crap pile are more likely to appear simply because there are more games out there that qualify as "indy" than there are that qualify as "triple-A".
If it was driving down the price of production, they wouldn't continually use it as a justification for driving up the cost of brand new games... It's taking us longer and more money than ever to make this game, so you the consumer will have to pay more
7:14 this was actually exactly what I was thinking.
I thought I was gonna feel all clever and call Yahtzee out on his inconsistency and feel like I was in fucking Ace Attorney. But no such luck. Yahtzee is always one step ahead.
Interestingly, I’ve seen Yahtzee’s point in this video express by the general public in criticism of PlayStation exclusive titles but never the industry as a whole. I’d imagine have a console war to fight drives people to be more analytical about games when they otherwise would be content
Interesting point, but surely Sony Studios are the pacesetter/instigator of this particular format and perhaps are more deserving of blame more than any other particular body? But you’re right in the fact that is far more rife than just Sony exclusives and at least the PlayStation versions are generally the best of the bunch.
Well, not so sure about an Xbox, but on PC you have a huge variety of games to play at all times and no concept of an exclusive, so it's hard to feel like a genre dominates.
When you buy a console, you're buying a promise of a diverse 1st party library, and when all the games are the same, plenty of people are going to notice.
This is definitely part of the issue. Making your game with console in mind forces you to use very specific and standardized keys. That strips away much of the freedom in actually designing the system. Some genres are just impossible/too difficult to port to consoles - like RTS games - and evidently, those are basically left out of the "AAA" bandwagon
@@davidmurphy7332 Are they? As far as I can tell, the formula was invented/perfected by Gears of War which is, notably, not a Sony platform title.
@@Demmrir You’re right. It really kicked off with Gears of War, which led to a bunch of cover-based shooters like Vanquish and Uncharted. It’s just that Naughty Dog stuck with it while others moved on. Then that style of game got a resurgence when The Last of Us released. Which is weird because it’s not like Uncharted was only a moderate success and TLoU blew it out of the water to make studios realize how successful they are. I just checked, Uncharted 2 sold as much as TLOU, and U2 is also beloved.
Huh. Now that you mention it, i have been playing less and less AAA games every year in the past 5-6 years. Because almost no AAA games grab attention anymore. Seen one - seen them all.
However, maybe it's not all doom and gloom? We finally have resurgence of AA/III games again, so hopefully we will see some "polished and looking pwetty" creativity from them?
This is why I prefer Eastern European/European AA games these days, they may be full of jank but they have heart and not one they fished out of someone else's bin.
Even the janky games from around 2010's have way more soul than these polished AAA turds.
Not surprising when the gaming industry is taken over by excel spouting MBA's who only care about regular and consistent flow of dollars.
When creating these 4k assets became more and more expensive and marketing budgets went through the roof, it was just a matter of time before AAA games started looking samey.
@@main_stream_media_is_a_joke So few games these days that catch my interest that 2006 psychonauts will probably be the only game I'll buy in the steam sales. It's just a sea of bland out there. Most games these days are just "normal world + extra thing" while you literally could make anything your imagination allows, which is probably the problem.
One of the reasons I follow ZP is to find the hidden indie gems like Obra Dinn.
@@main_stream_media_is_a_joke We'll never see the likes of Pandemic or Radical again, and if we do, it'll be mere months before they're swallowed up by some bigger publisher.
Same. The only AAA titles I've bought and also been thoroughly enjoying have been the FromSoftware games. Elden Ring is the first game I've risked a pre-order on in a very long time. Most of the games I've been playing have been either relatively recent indies, or AAA games from before about 2017 or thereabouts. I'm now extremely selectively with what I buy and I usually won't until I've seen actual gameplay and genuine reviews not done by the big sites that seem obligated not to give any big game anything under a 7. I got Horizon Zero Dawn for free during the Play At Home bit PlayStation did earlier this year, and I've barely made any progress. I got stuck in one bit and then couldn't be bothered to return to it. Bloodborne, Hollow Knight, Dark Souls 3, Sekiro, Demon's Souls, etc have all kept my attention instead.
The whole "Linear sequence of set pieces" thing is why I've always really enjoyed the Souls series. To use this same analogy, its all Gift Shop.
No handholding or direction, you get past the Tutorial (if there is one) and the game takes the leash off and says "Right, now go explore, and don't come back until you've killed all the monsters. Do it in whatever order you want, no were not gonna tell you the optimal order, figure it out, nerd."
I love the idea, but Ghost Train Ride sounds too respectful to take off. Spunkgargleweewee and Jimminycockthroat have become parts of my gaming vocabulary mostly because of their poisonous catchiness.
Kind of the opposite in my case. Ghost Train Ride is actually a meaningful collection of words rather than random attempted-edgelordy noises.
It's because it's significantly less shit than it's fellow game development cliches
@@vincentmuyo Not sure about Jimminycockthroat but "random attempted-edgelordy noises" is really the only thing you can give contemporary unironically pro-war shooter games.
Some of those Ghost Train games are A-Tier for reasons other than the cookie-cutter gameplay structures. Story is S-Tier, gameplay is B-TIer, for instance.
Spunkgargleweewees and Jiminycockthroats are usually wall-to-wall wastes of time. Nothing redeems them.
Yeah, also because he put so much thought into it, it's just to thoughtful.
The others are just elaborate insults and nobody can hear them and be like "Oh, I wonder what that is about" and prompt you to explain it, which most people won't do because that would require to memorize this argument and nobody got time for that, there is a narrow hallway we must crawl through to the next action-setpiece.
I LOVE these essays, this one is my personal fav so far.
Layers Of fear, a true ghost train ride. Wander through a series of spooky rooms with some choreographed scares with no actual threat of danger or player choice having no effect on the outcome whats so ever and asked politely to do as little interacting with the set/pieces as possible
Hit the nail on the head on why I dont bother with AAA, and why it makes me sad to say that. Indie games have their own set of problems, but they dont hit the wallet as hard and are still interesting even as dumpster fires.
6:00 - It's worse than that. They don't refer to that crap as "RPG elements" to _trick_ players. They refer to that crap as "RPG elements" because *that's what they actually think it is.* Many game designers these days grew up thinking the original Diablo was a deep RPG game because it had stats and an inventory (whereas most people who played it at the time saw it as a hack'n'slash game, and thought calling it an "RPG" - or even an "action RPG" - was just harmless marketing wank, because RPGs like Ultima were pretty popular).
And then lots of games (and marketing departments) followed suit, redefining genres to mean the most basic, superficial and easy-to-implement mechanics (sometimes not even real _gameplay_ mechanics, just UI mechanics) they could. If it shows you a list of skills and stats with numbers, then it must be an RPG, right? If there's a big map then it must be an "open world" game, even if the story is still linear, right? And so on.
Douglas Adams wrote about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation that "this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded: their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws". With most modern AAA games, the superficial design elements are there to disguise the *complete lack* of any fundamental design or gameplay elements, or at least to let them classify the game as some genre (ex., "open world RPG") without actually bothering to adapt the gameplay to that (non-linear story, different outcomes, world reactivity to player actions, etc.).
Ironically enough, they're making an actual Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster at Epcot, which certainly drives home Yahtzee's analogy.
I rather like these "ghost train ride" games sometimes, though I do agree that the industry gets a little too samey with them sometimes. The thrill ride analogy is apt because when you describe it this way they really do feel like that, but I don't think it's necessarily a negative. There's no shame in enjoying a roller coaster for easy thrills even if, say, motorsport is more rewarding and complex, that's why we have them. Why shouldn't I enjoy the Tomb Raider reboot in the same way?
Prebuilt assets and algorithm/shareholder-inspired design is an issue worthy of criticism, but it extends to basically every game genre today.
While Yahtzee has his own preferences, I think his issue is more the prominence and frequency of open world or linear cinematic games in the AAA space than that they exist at all.
None of these genres he mentions are inherently bad but their are plenty of bad examples. God of War is a really good version of it and Uncharted was loved for a reason.
There’s an emerging analogue happening in the boardgame industry right now. Different tropes (except for a major reliance on IP) but a similar cookie-cutter approach.
Interesting.
I'm not into the boardgame scene, could you elaborate?
@@hailmuffins6934 There's a school of designers who are really into piling up gameplay mechanisms into a big gumbo with no real rhyme or reason--they just like that kind of mental challenge. Which is fine, but it's not for everyone. Plus a growing trend of publishers blinging up games with minis and expensive components that have a certain amount of immersion but no real effect on gameplay. That's a very brief precis but it's a start. Thanks for asking!
I do quite like ghost train ride games, as long as they have an extra interesting element. Good writing, good charchters, fun combat, fun driving mechanics maybe. They're also often mercifully short. It's alot easier to overlook faults when your play it it one or two sittings
I partially agree with you Until im paying 70$ for a 3 hour game or a "cinematic experience" like the shit david cage puts out then it doesnt become easy to forgive as much as glaring in an already anemic poorly written, poorly placed and underweight game
@@user-el9bm4vr1f I was thinking more along the lines of mafia 2, my favourite game, it lasts about 10-12 hours and has a good clear narrative arc that leaves you satisfied.
@@user-el9bm4vr1f It's the overpaying that gets me. If I'm playing $60+ for a game, I better be playing it a long time or it better have good replay value. If I want a game I usually wait till it's on sale because I don't want to fork over that much money for a relatively short game.
@@SolaScientia I solve that by not paying $60+. It'll be on sale soon, or can always buy physical and resell after beating it.
@@radical_dog My PS5 is the digital edition, so I have to be extremely sure I want a game before I buy it. I just wait for sales and such. I don't mess with PS+ since I don't play multiplayer games or any game that requires it.
When he mentioned how the combat sections will remain in the arena they are programmed in, my brain went to an old PS1 game called Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. In that, you play as a (realistic!) ninja going around performing various missions, usually assassinations as the title would suggest, the player is not only afforded a good deal of choice in how to deal with things (Use rooftops and alleys to avoid detection? Rely on the special items to get you through and around scrapes? Just plain brute-force your way through? Your call, though the game definitely favors stealth and frowns on direct combat when avoidable), but that it is entirely possible, when you finally make it to your target, for something to happen like, say, enemies you didn't take care of hearing you fight and rushing in from outside to join the battle, or the fight spilling out of the room it started in. We really DON'T see that sort of thing that often anymore, and I do think it is a shame; no scripted setpiece will have the adrenaline of being in a one-on-one fight with a boss and having pre-existing (not spontaneously generated for the fight) mooks come rushing in from behind and turn what was a manageable melee into a frantic scramble not to be overwhelmed.
I feel like this type of thing is true of almost ever genre, AAA or not. I would’ve liked if Yahtzee provided even a few throwaway examples of games or companies or methodologies that don’t adhere to these principles so that this video actually has more of a point.
minecraft
Yeah I just get the feeling that he plays way, way more games than most people, burning him out of anything but the most novel experiences.
The modern Deus Ex games are a good example of games which break that mould in the sense that the game is not designed to lead you down a specific path so you can have specific experiences in a specific sequence. Dark Souls, Metroid Prime, MGS, Zelda... Basically, the really good games all deviate from that formula.
@@MA-go7ee so games that are actual rpg games not just wearing the "I'm an rpg" skin
It's definitely the same issue also faced by pop music, action movies, etc, etc. Made to formula with deviation avoided because the formula is supposedly the only sure fire way to profit and with the productions being done by hundreds or thousands of people all needing to be paid the profit has to show up.
As for who falls outside and who doesn't it doesn't matter much in the end. All games share features with some other games, but you don't need a lot of innovation to feel original. Even changing or adding one or two features to a game can be enough to feel fresh and novel, the biggest new example as I am writing being Elden Ring taking the world by storm, not due to actually adding anything not done by other games before, but because it combines features in a way that hasn't been done on the AAA scene since the late 90s and early 00s, thus it feels fresh and different now. That said, actual examples of games bucking the norm isn't that useful because it is not about one right way to do it and one thing studios have to start doing, other than being innovative. You can't give examples worth anything because specific examples at best lead to slight "improvements" to formula, leading to a slightly different type of just as vision-less products as before.
If you want to compare to other things then I would compare it to say an standard pop song, it's going to be competently made, it's going to hit the notes of the zeitgeist and it's going to be absolutely a void if you wanted to study it for real content. It's going to have been designed by committee to fit the zeitgeist and thus there will be nothing there for you to dig your teeth into other than that zeitgeist, it won't even be a comment about the times it will be entirely a product of them, a flat featureless photocopy of whatever is recognized as the truth of X year of production.
In the end lack of vision and character and pure adaption of formula is just a natural outcome of videogames going mainstream and big budget. Very few dare gamble with hundred million plus budgets and even fewer are allowed to. The AAA scene cannot exist without being formulaic, it is videogames answer to pop music, action movies or junk food, it is designed to hit notes of resonance without attaching meaning or thought to the experience.
Explanation:
Developers start out learning that unique means difficult or impossible.
Try to create a website with unique pages, and then try to maintain that website for a year. That website will die relatively quickly, even if it has 3 unique pages. Why? To update something like that, you have to find each unique part and update it.
Arts require creativity within a framework. You pick an archetype for your work, then work within those limits to achieve something interesting. The hero's journey is a famous one, and is the most often used one. The Wushu one is catching on, if not because how lazy it is, but how plentiful it is.* The point is, to make an excellent art work, requires a strong creative vision.
Video games intersect between this pattern driven design and art. For smaller games, with smaller teams, the art piece genre can be held to by everyone, and time spent playing is not as important. For larger games, with larger teams, well, you want to give everyone a chance, and also make more money.
Take God of War 2015. The developers probably created the lake first. The boat activities and other things were added on later, for each team to work on and make their own. Likewise, each specific stop for the boat, outside the main storyline, had a team generate and refine that portion of the game. The larger the team, the more designs necessary, as that allows management to implement their vision, while allowing the smaller teams to implement their vision. Tis why certain side adventures are more beloved than parts of the main story. Shoot, folks still talk about the Valkyrie fights, but not about any of the story events.
To summarize:
Top creates a general story and setting
Middle creates designs and patterns to be reused by smaller teams
Small generates the elements of the story
The more layers in the middle, then the more generic designs and patterns are used.
"Is it too much to ask" yes. It is. I can't think of a single medium of expression that hasn't regressed to the mean.
These types of games all have never really appealed to me. This video helped me realise why.
I really like this series, it feels more like Yahtzee's actual thoughts, and not just saying or doing something for a joke or entertainment, I like this very much, (although ZP is still awesome and I hope you will keep doing it forever and ever and ever)
I'm listening to this through low-quality headphones, and it sounds like it's coming out of an old radio.
Fun
Lol, in the spanish gaming places we've been calling the typical cinematic AAA "trenes de la bruja" (which are ghost train rides) for quite some time too.
Somewhere between the rebooted Tomb Raider games and Marvel's Avengers, I started thinking of having to constantly keep moving straight forward to move to the next plot point or to not die as just glorified cut scenes.
We've always had a term for these types of games: Bad, because these games are fucking bad. The only grace I can give them is that they maybe sometimes act as a stepping stone to actually good games, except way too many people get weirdly attached to them despite being the gaming equivalent of trophic feed.
Thank you for doing this. I now have the conversational equivalent of a loaded shotgun the next time I come across one of these "I wish I was a movie" games.
It's going to save me a lot of time.
That's kinda sad man, just let people enjoy things.
What your not gonna mention your coining of the "spectacle-fighter"?
I still use that one
5:27 You have to queue for so long at the border, for the thrill of a hockey game, before you can go to Canada's gift shop
Had to switch the playback speed to 2x so I could understand Yahtzee.
I'm glad you made the distinction about GoW4 and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. With those games, I could see the familiar gameplay elements, but they use them so well and tie it in with a genuinely distinct story and characters and some tight gameplay and combat mechanics. There were a couple moments in Fallen Order that had overstayed their welcome (sliding down things had a tendency to bug a bit when I played, causing me to fail and have to repeat the sequence several times), but overall, they stood out among other games with similar structures.
Thank you for the explanation. This is why I reduce and narrow down these type of games that I play. Its because I already know what to expect from the formula.
Yes, you actually SHOULD be critiquing how tightly they put the screws in. Maybe one game used the template to make a better story, or maybe they managed to make the random peril not as random as other games, and actually had it organically flow. Look at Halo, for instance. It was a game changer but wasn't even Bungie's first game about an armored marine and his trusty AI companion battling aliens in outer space. It wasn't the first console shooter either. But it still had a massive impact on the industry despite not being groundbreaking. They make these games from these templates because people like these templates. Obviously someone playing them all for a living will be bored by that, but normal people don't play every major game that comes out each year.
man, this is a brilliant take. took the words out of my mouth.
Yeah, sure.
ooo I really liked this one! great term and explanation.
I've been playing through Black Mesa (the Half-Life 1 remake), and its surprising how much of this trope is already present in the structure of such an old game (in design, the remake released somewhat recently). Half-Life 2 especially checks a lot of these boxes, including the npc follower, the loading corridors, the linear sequence and segmented combat areas. But, at the time we all loved it. I suspect this is because 1. Valve had excellent execution. 2. The structure had not become completely formulaic yet.
Having gone through so many of these, I actually struggle to enjoy replaying these games today (ex, Bioshock Infinite has especially not aged well for me). I don't think the ghost train ride is inherently a bad design. But, having been done to death, the ghost train ride just isn't fun anymore.
Well that and Half-Life games let you play around a lot. They aren't games that just constantly try to funnel you along on cinematic events.
Half life 1 is a horrible linear corrifor shooter with shoehorned in terrible first person platforming, that is to be blamed for starting the trend of games like these.
This is pretty much the only genre of game I don't play. The big-budget linear "action-adventure". They're little more than sightseeing tours with no replayability. Years back I picked up tomb raider reboot on a whim (aka steam deep sale). And I remember being amazed at how artificial the world felt.
After the intro sequence of being shipwrecked and stranded, I find myself alone in a forest. It looked convincing enough with distant trees barely visible through the fog. But if I ran 30 yards in any direction I'd be stopped by an unclimbable cliff face or impassable brambles or an invisible wall dressed up to look like a river. Running around the perimeter or the incredibly small area made it abundantly clear that it wasn't a forest, It was a _room_ . Cleverly disguising itself with fog and visual obstructions so you can't see from one side to the other.
The game didn't want me to discover anything or explore or learn anything on my own. This forest "room" only wanted me to perform a specific set of actions (decided by it) so it could pat me on the head and drag me by the nose into the next "room". (A bandit camp or some shit). That's when I remembered why I don't play these games. Are Ghost Train Rides™ really "interactive media" if all the "player" does is respond to prompts?
I see nothing wrong with a good "ghost train ride", if the ride is good and well made.
The contrast with you-can-do-anything-but-nothing-got-impact is a million times worse for gamedesign.
For good games I trust the developers to take me where something interesting is happening, and expose me to it in a profitable manner.
This is what people were complaining about when they said they didn’t want story games back in the early 2010’s huh
Thought this was going somewhere else for a moment- I've been catching up on games like Control and The Evil Within 2 lately and was struck by how similar they were despite their predecessors being quite different structure-wise.
They're not as linear as the Sony-style cinematic action game, instead having a more Bioshock-esque setup where you can return to previous areas to complete side missions. They're still third person shooters with skill upgrade trees and crafting elements though.
I haven't played the later rebooted Tomb Raiders but the 2013 one had a slightly more open structure as well despite the Uncharted elements.
It feels like a compromise between the traditional story-driven linear single-player game and the current trend towards open world games.
Hey Yahtz! I like how you pointed out the inorganic / jarring feel of safety caused by the disconnect in stealth elements, but that lead me to some confusion: how do you balance that sense of complete safety against the opposite problem, like the kind of cock-up cascade that ruins a significant investment of stealth playtime?
I would love to hear your perspective on how to handle that balance.
I don't think you can. In real life if you're sneaking around, someone sees you, and they hit an alarm, that's it. The entire base is now alerted, and won't go back to being unaware until the intruder is found. That's the cock-up cascade at work: you failed at stealth once, and now that avenue through the level is closed off to you.
On the other hand, it's jarring when you alert, hide for a minute, and the guards return to business as normal. "Oh, that person I saw sneaking around must be gone now, because I haven't seen them in a bit". That might work for a lazy street thug high on god knows what, but it's not going to work with law enforcement or military.
So how do you take a middle ground? Gimmicks, I guess; time travel, amnesia grenades, calling in a favor to someone with reality warping powers, etc. I suppose you could have a speech check on a downed guard's radio to get the "false alarm, all clear" thing going, but you could only do that once or twice before they wise up.
@@TheKrossRoads Well, "in real life" you could certainly employ tactics to deescalate the "cock-up cascade". Various diversions, trickery and cover ups could be done. But no game let's me rearrange the guards bodies so it looks like they shot each other or blow up the whole room and then make it look like it blew up on an accident.
Also no, unlike in games, not everyone in a building will suddenly know your precise location, looks and toothbrush hardness preference.
Imho, a good stealth game should be an exercise in controlled chaos, where each fuckup still let's you progress meaningfully. Oops, had to kill that guards and you got caught on camera, well, first booby trap his body so it kills the first guy who comes to check it out and then go blow up the recording room. Instead of just you know, reloading a save to 3s earlier or restarting the whole 5h level.
That just how stealth works, people have seen you once they can't forget. But I think there are better gimmick than "hide for 15 sec and all the guard forget you've ever existed". Have you guys seen that mission impossible movie, where at one scene, Ethan Hunt disguise as a guard he had beaten up, put a mask of his own face over the guard and hand the guard in like Ethan was captured? That was pretty cool, something like that or disguise as guard would work.
@@TheKrossRoads One way to make this kind of work is have both routes present but have actual consequences to failing stealth / going in guns blazing. Failing stealth / going in guns blazing could make the enemies harder and deadlier because they're more alert. Certain passages in the upcoming area can be sealed off forcing the player to either break in or find the key / pass code to access them. Whatever boss is lying within could be harder because they had more time to prepare. And the amount of resources that were set within can either be adjusted based on the path a player took or set before you enter: the former would make both stealth and rampage options equally viable, the latter would make rampaging costly since you may waste all of your resources doing that.
I think most AAA games try to evoke that kind of tension without fully committing because that kind of game can easily be unforgiving and hard to balance.
Tbh, all of the PS first party titles nowadays are Ghost Train Rides.
The issue is that its monetarily dangerous to experiment.
CZcams is a good analogy to this as well. Why try something fresh that may cost you literal millions of dollars when the masses will almost invariably suck down the same format with a different coat of paint?
these video essays are amazing. keep them up. this is the best one so far. excellent, well written and I totally agree with everything you are saying.
I'd been calling games like that as "dark rides," based on the name for such things at theme & amusement parks, but "Ghost Train" has a more interesting ring to it.
It's the same problem with movies and TV. The _general public_ wants unchallenging, predictable entertainment that doesn't ask anything of them. They just drift through the experience, often only half paying attention while messing around with their phone. They're risk-averse and want the only consequence of failure to be starting back at the last autosave checkpoint. That's why these games sell so well.
They don't want narratives that challenge their expectations. They don't want situations with no right answer. They don't want plotlines that require their undivided attention. They don't want barriers that require them to think outside the box. They just want a clear list of objectives to follow and a world of amusements to pass the time.
It's sad to think about. But right now should be a gaming revolution. Mass production should be a good thing. It means the developers don't have to be that big. Big companies can't gatekeep like they use too. One could take advantage and use the opportunity to make all kinds of gameplay loops and experiment. Make up crazy stories. The hard part is mostly done. But triple A gaming only cares about spectacle and catharsis now.
This already has a term. It's called a content muncher. And it was coined back when the first Half-Life game came out. Weird that you don't know that.
I feel like, at this point, a lot of these genres need to just put out creative packages and let the player base edit, create and design their own experience within the mechanics and settings of these worlds.
Not that the games are even bad but I think they show a real lack of replay value for an experience that's usually able to be summed up in a day's time. There just needs to be more for the price tag, AAA used to be single player, co-op and multiplayer.
Awesome video Yahtzee, really enjoyed this one.
"Hey everybody, the *Ghost Train* guy would have used a *Ghost Train.* Remember when Allen wanted to use a *Ghost Train* ?"
Genious concept. Time to write a book about gaming history, trends and then cash in, Yatz.
Some would hear this as "How dare you do them like this?". I at least hear it as "Prove me wrong, I'm *begging* you!"
I wonder if the ghost train ride didn't start out as a relative of the grayish brown first person game.
Both were born of technical limitations running face first into the demand of ever more photorealistic graphics (notable that their popularity IMHO ballooned on the 7th and 8th gen consoles, which didn't quite keep up with the higher tiers of pc gaming specs.
Naughty Dog in particular is famous for squeezing performance out of hardware through careful use of system resources and the limitations of their gameplay.
Crash Bandicoot remixed chunks of 3d terrain to create its lushly detailed environments using the limited ps1 hardware. But pointedly, you could only interact with snatches of these 3d words at once and it only worked because the levels were relatively linear and had fixed viewing angles.
When you think of it that way, the technique of using slight of hand to consolidate graphical resources, you can see how that would be a predecessor to games like Uncharted and the Last of Us. And how what started born of limitation became a design template.
Ghost train ride? I'd a called it a chuzzwuzzle
Triple A games are the McDonalds of videogames, it's the same burger and fries combo they've been selling for decades, it's safe, cheap and easy to make, there's advertisements for it everywhere, it never attempts anything new unless someone else's had massive success with that idea previously, and you always end up feeling a bit guilty and disgusted with yourself once you're done eating it.
I think all games have their merits. I like Yahtzee's vids because they are funny and point out valid critiques in a humorous way. I may disagree with some on my favorites but generally I do enjoy him ripping on them.
When developers ask "what made [insert classic game here] great? Why did people enjoy it?" It comes really down to because it was a labor of love and art.
For example: Diablo 2 is beloved. Despite it's flaws, it's beloved.
Diablo 3 is tolerated. Because it was assembled in a factory by people that didn't care about the lore or the universe or the artesty of a video game.
I, for one, refuse to tolerate D3. I have no hope for immortal, and tbh with all the BS going on, I'm not sure I'll be able to stomach supporting the company even if D4 is a return to form
@@ichijofestival2576 there are beloved games that didn't do all to well just like there are "classic films" that tanked initially, financial success and long term relevance/classic status do not always correlate.
@@ichijofestival2576 This is because game development is a business, like most industries. Not everyone can own their own cafe, but I assure you that the best cafes are the best because they love what they do, not because it makes them money.
The idea that good games come out of love and bad games don't is bonkers. You're confusing your love for the game with production. You really think someone would bother working for Blizzard if they didn't love their games?
I'm curious if you find the stories and characters in the rides to be so similar that they fall under the "fresh coat of paint but same ride" thing. Just because something is within a genre doesn't mean that it can't excel within that genre and have something cool or interesting in it.
Telling how he doesn’t once mention that. Just wants to whine and complain about a particular experience.
I do. I’m playing TLoU 2 and having déjà vu of playing GoW Ragnarok.
Two curated, on-rails experiences. I’m enjoying myself (I think?) but I can’t help but feel these two are cut from the exact same cloth under the surface.
holy crap, i've been trying to figure out a way to put this exact feeling into words, good shit Yahtzee.
I was wondering why God of War 2018 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake made me feel so numb... they're both ghost train rides!
Definitely more of these videos please!
It was an old advertisement in game informer or something. They blew thru a straw into the company toilet and recorded it with a condom wrapped microphone for one of the bosses noises. I can remember the condom in the ad being blue
I worked in a Srtudio at EA and some of the higher-ups there seriously said that Game Designers were not needed to make games anymore and I sort of start to understand why. Sadly.
I know it’s unrealistic and i probably won’t always follow my own advice, but I really think we should stop engaging so much with the AAA industry. I’ve low-key boycotted big budget games for the past decade or so, and that boycott has only become more strict in the last few years.
Sure there’s some Fomo. But I’m much happier and my wallet thanks me. I doubt there are enough hours in the rest of my life to finish every indie game in my backlog.
Finally someone that gets it .
This is literally the feeling I got when I played through guardians of the Galaxy. I was like "this isn't a bad game. But it's not a great one either, I wonder why" and Yahtzee just hit all my gripes about gotg
It drives me crazy that these even get called “adventure games”
There is nothing adventurous about them. They are linear tracks with virtually no agency or self-directed gameplay.
Point and click games may have been linear, but they were all about player agency of scouring the world and trying to figure out how to navigate it.
No, on a basic level, these are part action game, part walking simulator, with mild puzzle platforming elements.
They just have a story themed around adventure. We don’t get to feel adventurous at all, the MC has all the fun.
I was always fond of the term "Spectacle Fighter" that Yahtzee coined for games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry. Calling them "action" games seems far too vague, "Action Adventure" conflates them with games like the Zelda series and "Character Action Game" describes about 80% of all video games.
I like playing the intro on youtube at 2x speed because when Yahtzee asks "was that slow enough nick?!" comes off as hilarious sarcastic and that is exactly how I see him as a person.
I agree yahtz, however, I want to ask a rather personal question: I have never heard you talking about racing games of any kind, be it arcade in the sense of wipEout, realistic simulators ala forza and gran tourismo. I mean, they are often very disconnected from most other kinds of games, but that doesn't make them any more or less of games.
I think he addressed this in the last Slightly Something Else. One reviewer can't review every game in even a couple genres, let alone genres they have no interest in and wouldn't know how to critique.
He has, he calls them niche games specifically targeted for a specific audience and that's it
The ZP of Driver: San Francisco sums it up real nice.
If a genre just flat-out doesn't interest him, he won't review games in that genre.
It's the reason he never covers RTS games, for instance.
Hell, in every Fighting Game review he does he always points out how he is terrible at them and his opinions on the gameplay are, therefore, irrelevant for anyone who plays them for the gameplay.
I've not played God of War, Uncharted, Tomb Raider or The Last of Us but watched them on CZcams, with all the story bits and dialogue cut together and I honestly think that's the best way to experience them.
They'd have been even better as a CGI series on some streaming platform, because they certainly aren't real games, just interactive movies.
Fortunately, these are all easy to spot and avoid.
Why are you so upset that people enjoy these games?
@@isaywhateveriwantandyougot7421 maybe your "real games" should actually be good then because they're getting blown out the water by these games
@@Beyondfreshken What gave you the idea that I'm upset about other people enjoying them?
I'm just saying that I don't.
I am always referred to those games as "Console Games". Since that is what they are to me. They are designed to be played on a TV screen, and if you ever try to play them on a PC, they make it very obvious you are playing them the wrong way.
watching this now and it still holds up though i do wonder why he felt fallen order wasnt a complete ghost train ride, what did it do to not fall in line with the rest?
@@isaywhateveriwantandyougot7421 IKR GOWR omg the first one was bad enough in this department, but Ragnarök takes it to a whole new level.
@@isaywhateveriwantandyougot7421 It's way worse than the original in terms of hand holding. hours of it strung together.
@@isaywhateveriwantandyougot7421 Can't argue with that.
1:08 I don't know about Quake. But the "putting a condom on a microphone while in water" Was done by The Beatles for the Yellow Submarine Album. Thought said underwater recording wasn't used in the final version.
format slaps. hope extra punctuation stays on this time.
Gaming has felt increasingly stale even as innovations happen at a greater pace. I think the reason I feel this way is exactly what you described towards the end: AAA games are the industry ambassadors. Gaming as an industry has gotten big enough that "mainstream" status can effectively be bought. Safety of the investment is considered paramount. All the horrid things capitalism brings have seeped into our shared passion and while the available budget for developing games has exploded, the greater proportions go to the "safe" AAA boring cookie cutter bullshit games.
I'm just one person but I refuse to buy from any AAA publisher these days. If there's something I REALLY want to play I don't feel bad about pirating it. I try to ensure all my gaming money makes it to the people I want it to. Though sometimes it's a struggle to figure out how to bypass a publisher to give to a studio. A couple of times I've pirated an indie game to fuck a publisher I dislike out of my sale and bought merch from the studio instead. I feel like it's too difficult to reward the people actually making quality games, or at least making innovative ones.
i have bought maybe 5 AAA titles since 2007 and most of those were borderlands games. everything else is just versions of games i already played for hundreds of hours with slightly better graphics and way worse gameplay. gearbox is the only AAA studio i could name thats still trying. tes skyrim was enjoyable even though it dumbed down the gameplay compared to morrowind and oblivion. and i like starcraft 2. thats about it.
another imoritant thing is that youare not only the target consumer.
Sounds like the new name is in the designation. It's lumpy, it's muddy it's claggy.
i've no idea why but this video makes me miss playing mass effect games
oh bioware where have you gone
I just played the 2013 tomb raider for the first time. You pretty much perfectly articulated why i didn't get much out of it.
Been loving this series. Also the point about using assets. I mean, the same happened with music or any other field. Back in the day, John Lennon had considered hanging himself upside down from a fan and gently rotating it around the mic to get a particular sound. In the end they ended up using a rotating speaker but nonetheless - tech def cuts down on the "process" of getting something.
But as fun as creative solutions sound, and should exist, I don't think this is a negative thing. If anything, getting the tedium of creating basic sound effects from scratch being removed leaves room for spending that time in more creative experimentation with the gameplay and the narrative itself. Just because the most generic building blocks and assets exist - shouldn't be the reason that the end products are. For eg. It Takes Two is one of the most creative and ambitious any AA/AAA game has gotten with its mechanics while still more or less qualifying for "ghost train ride" aside from some detours. It's all in the execution at the end of the day, isn't it?
If they can't even try creative sound design what makes you think they can do creative gameplay? This is often what ends up happening. Cookie cutter assets end up being paired with cookie cutter gameplay. Dozens of games are exactly the same with different wallpaper pasted over.
On the one hand, I'm not down on the whole "games can just be from pre-made bits and pieces" thing, since making custom generic guff can be a waste of time and effort when the work has already been done in a lot of cases. Why reinvent the wheel when it's already been reinvented enough times? Why waste man-hours on making generic assets when you could be spending that time in the places that need more attention?
However, I do agree that the "Ghost Train Ride" can be a tired model when played straight. And I do agree that triple-A should be doing a lot more interesting stuff than making the same kind of games according to certain algorithms. I'd even go as far as to assert that doing so is a soulless endeavour unless there is serious deviation from the path. Hell, one could even consider it being yet another form of abuse that developers are coerced into enduring under the thumb of publishers that need to be subjected to internal hostile takeovers from the workforce.
Great video, couldn't agree more. I have stopped playing all these big AAA ghost trains, as they all feel the same. Oh collect materials, craft a thing, this upgrades the thing, but at the end of the day what I'm really doing is pressing X at everything. Zzzz
5:02 Wow this is straight up the flash back cinematic from the second disc of Legend of Dragoon.
Following Yahtzee through the years has made me way more introspective about video games and what I actually like about them
In recent years playing video games has sometimes felt like a chore. I've often just fallen into the trap of multiplayer only games like Apex or DBD, killing time and tricking myself into thinking I'm accomplishing something by getting slightly better and unlocking bits of fake currency. Yet I've probably only truly enjoyed a third of those matches and probably could've learned a language or instrument in the time I've spent on them
I can scarcely remember the last time I was truly engaged by a video game. The newest one to really grab me was probably Arkham Knight, but that's mostly because of my attachment to the other entries in the series.
It's pretty jarring to hear yatzee speed run the intro and then meander through his script
You absolutely nailed the reasons I have zero interest in most AAA games. I love indies and they have kept my passion alive in the gaming industry. I dont hate these linear cinematic games but I treat them as weekend rentals I may pick up or wait until very cheap. They can be absolutely phenomenal on a technical level (last of us 2) but I much prefer the show dont tell approach. Let me play. Do NOT take control away from me. Quicktime events/scripted interactive cutscenes/ follow the leader scenes ala gears of war etc I hate. I love Hollow knight, I love dark souls, I love Subnautica, The forest, Resident Evil 2 remake, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity original sin, Pathfinder wrath of the righteous etc. These are games which I am usually in full control. I throw my eyes up to heaven everytime a game holds me by the hand and has glowing icons showing me the way because god forbid I get lost. Older games didnt give a shit if I got lost and I love that. Tomb raiders on ps1 are FAR superior to modern tomb raiders for this reason. You actually felt ALONE in a big frickin tomb and had to figure it out yourself. Modern AAA games design bar a few exceptions has left all this behind in their pursuit of mass appeal they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Great video, very perceptive
It used to be rail shooters, before 3d and computing power were good enough to players control the camera.
Happy Thanksgiving Escapist!