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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27629 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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Am I just overly normy and lame for thinking that Skyrim and GTA5 are both absolutely fantastic games? Whenever this topic of video games comes up, I always feel like I'm missing something.

Both of those games are over a decade old. It could be a symptom of the drop-off that he's talking about that you aren't listing newer ones.

I found Skyrim to be an impressive game in all aspects when it was new, but the charm wore off within a few months and I don't have a very positive perception of it. The music and art design have aged more gracefully than, say, Oblivion, however, and I still appreciate those. GTA V is a flashy game that had even less staying power to me. The graphics are a step up, but the gameplay and story was a huge step down from GTA IV.

Both those games are fine, but they're just fine.

That's pretty much exactly the same feeling I got of Skyrim.

I think Skyrim is a great game, but not for its writing. Try to just play the main quest, not too much of it is actually good, and it's a very short story.

GTA5 is the only game that ever actively convinced me to stop playing it. If the developers had any balls, they'd put the torture mission inside the Steam refund window.

and it's a very short story.

It's a collection of ridiculously short stories. Designing for open-world play maximizing player freedom means having lots of independent quest lines, none of which can be hastened by a training montage or a time skip. The power-fantasy "Chosen One" trope means that many of those arcs are expected to scale from stranger-off-the-street origins at the beginning to change-the-world consequences at the end. Designing for the player to get to experience all those quests means they need to be individually short enough that the game as a whole can be considered "completed" within 40 or 50 hours. And yet this is a game, so even with fast travel the vast majority of those hours are going to be gameplay.

Put that all together, and the next thing you know your axe-wielding barbarian who learned a few spells is getting made the Arch Mage, and your suspension of disbelief is shattered.

It's a collection of ridiculously short stories. Designing for open-world play maximizing player freedom means having lots of independent quest lines

The first doesn't follow from the second. Oblivion had open world play and was somewhat infamous for having better side quests (notably the guild storylines) than the main quest.

They're perfectly fine games. (Paarthurnax and Trevor are my favorite characters from each, for vastly differing reasons.) They're just open world games and are considered inferior to their predecessors by auteurs. To a certain degree, they're right, but they exaggerate it for memes.

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