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Shenmue


hogso

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Shenmue - is this what Lerner was on about in his statement?

 

Naw, it was Shimasani he mentioned

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myWvAdOWcH0

Edited by hogso
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dont get me wrong i love the last of us, but i thought it was the games weak point personally, the graphics, the characters, the story, the setting, the set pieces (giraffes!) the world (although it needed to actually be open rather than just the illusion of being open, naughty dog do that IMO) were all superb, the gameplay was good but not perfect

 

shenmue was the same IMO

 

obviously heavy rain is the better comparison, but i loved heavy rain too 

 

The open vs. linear debate is an interesting one. Personally I like both types of game. I enjoy open world games like GTA where you have lots of things you can do or you can just go around creating havoc, but it has its drawbacks and sacrifices on story.

 

I don't think linearity in a game is necessarily a bad thing. A designer comes up with a problem and its your task to overcome it by either finding the solution in your head or by having the skill to deal with whatever is thrown at you. Some really good developers will give you a linear problem, but design the game so well that you actually have multiple ways of dealing with the problem, but it's really difficult to do this because the more variation in getting through the task you offer a player, the less control over the story you have.

 

Naughty Dog are kings of the set piece and story in games. Set pieces are linear, but if they're done well then they take your breath away. They're very much a one time experience and don't lend themselves particularly well to replayability immediately, but the trade off is that they are memorable and amazing in that first moment. There is a lot to be said about having a lot of choice and overcoming the obstacles in your own way, but I find the more choice the player has in a game, the less strict the rules are concerning what you have to do in order to complete a task and therefore, in many cases but not all, the easier the task is.

 

With a more linear story scattered with grand set pieces, you get a different sense of achievement. Yes, you don't have as much choice, but it's a case of skill. It's like a riddle. There's only one right answer, but you get that enormous sense of achievement for being smart enough to figure it out.

 

I'm a big fan of story. I write them, I've studied writing novels and screenplays though I'm no expert by any means, but the craft that goes into telling a story is insane. A good story is tightly written and full of peaks and troughs along the way. Naughty Dog know this and that's why everyone raves about how good their stories and characters are. If they gave the player more freedom and an open world game then their storytelling would suffer for it, in my opinion. It's a balance and I just don't see how you could make a truly open world game full of choice while telling a really tight story. Naughty Dog definitely come the closest to it, but if they were to go any further toward giving the player more choices, they'd sacrifice story.

 

A good example of this is Arkham Asylum compared to Arkham City. Asylum was a lot more linear but gave the impression of an open world. You could go back to different areas for side quests whenever you wanted, but in order to propel the story forward you had to go to areas in a certain order. The reason it's such a good game is because the world was just small enough that going back to do side quests didn't have to take that long. That or you could go back after completing the story and perform all the side quest stuff.

 

City expanded the map and gave you more freedom of choice concerning the order of things, but you still had to do the main story quests in an order. In my opinion, the story wasn't quite as well told as Asylum because I was too distracted with all the other things to do. I enjoyed doing the side quests, don't get me wrong, but it sacrificed on the main story experience for me. Both are fantastic. I guess it just depends what you value most when you play games.

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Ha, no I most definitely do not. I have an aversion to games purely based on luck. Hell, I have an aversion to most games where luck is any kind of element.

 

**** you RNG ;)

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