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Notes -
Morning Chestnut Problem
After two delays Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, the latest installment in Ubisoft’s hit and award-winning series, has been released.
Several months ago when the latest installment in Assassin’s Creed video game franchise was announced to have a person named “Yasuke” as a protagonist, it was in the English-speaking discourse to proclaim he is a beloved in Japan and considered an important historical figure by the Japanese and that any negative opinion of this peculiar choice was coming from gaijin. It wasn’t only the English-speaking internet masses who promoted this conjecture, a powerful member of this community and even New York Times (although as this article contained no information that wasn’t known at the time, it may have been written just to launder the Hirayama’s tweet that Yasuke was a samurai, into something citable on wikipedia) did too. Introducing one “Kazuma Hashimoto”, whose knowledge of the Japanese language is unknown, who in his twitter bio used to identify as half-Japanese, as “a Japanese consultant”, despite the fact that he belongs to the California geographical and cultural milieu, thus a very non-central example of a Japanese person! After his deception was discovered he laid low, until surfacing after the release to peddle the same distortions, speaking over a native people.—
I suspect the reason why such a person was cited, is that even gaijin working on matters related to Japan, think that the knowledge of English language is sufficient to obtain all necessary information and as “Kazuma Hashimoto” has chosen a Japanese name, but has the knowledge of English of the American he is, he is the perfect source to lend credibility to conjectures about Japan some journalist might have. If one wants a starting point for researching some topic related to Japanese people, searching for it on X, Google, or YouTube by its Japanese, not English name: “弥助” not “Yasuke”, “アサクリ” or “アサシン クリード” not “Assassin’s Creed”, “問題” not “controversy”. Doing so, one finds some comprehensive overviews of issues some Japanese have with Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Even if you do not know Japanese, using Google Translate and Deepl on a Japanese text written by a Japanese person will get you closer to their perspective, than asking a monolingual American who got his opinion from a monolingual American who got his opinion from a monolingual American who misunderstood a bilingual westernized Japanese.—
But he is just one man. His influence would in the English-speaking be negligible, if he didn’t have fellows (1) working towards the same goal of minimizing Japanese perspectives, and interpreting them to suit their agenda, combined with the general attitude that whatever is created in Japanese, must first pass through a native English speaker in order to gain value or credibility.—
This incident makes it clear that anyone unaffected by Gell-Mann Amnesia should be wary of foreign authors writing about Japan. No matter how minor the topic, many non-Japanese writers seem to consistently prefer English sources over foreign-language ones. For example, the English Wikipedia page on Yasuke uses citations from historical fiction, non-peer-reviewed articles written by tendentious gaijin, and recent news. The reliance on news is especially strange-why should a journalist's opinion, who doesn’t have any specific expertise, be considered more important than anyone else's? One might draw a parallel to the hypothetical situation where mathematical wikipedia articles would be based not on rigorous academic papers but upon the distorted misinterpretations, such as those presented in popular science journalism. The reality is that these English-language texts, simply by virtue of being written in a familiar language, are favored over more authoritative sources. The authentic primary sources and meticulous research conducted by Japanese historians is overlooked in favor of easily accessible, yet not rigorous, English sources.— (2)
EoPs set the null hypothesis about foreign countries. Given the affinity that Americans feel towards Blacks, this naturally leads them to imagine every Black person as much greater and more important than they really were. So they write, picking and choosing among the already scant sources available in English, to craft a narrative. As it is written in English, it is considered the default, and the native experts have to prove a negative. In English, of course, you can’t expect EoP historians of other countries to learn another language.—
Now, you could say this is what people say online; maybe that is a biased sample, and perhaps only the 'antis' are vocal, while the majority loves it. A not absurd objection; one should search for objective sources. Luckily, in the case of Japan and video games, we have that: every week it is published how many physical sales of games and consoles were made there. One would expect that if, in a long-running franchise, an entry would be released this time set in Japan, it would sell better in Japan than previous entries set in foreign locales. People are narcissistic; they like being talked about and are interested in what others think of them. Ghost of Tsushima, an AC game in all but name, which was set in Japan, sold more copies in Japan than any AC game. With the added bonus of featuring the allegedly popular-in-Japan protagonist Yasuke, sales would surely increase compared to previous installments.—
Data:
Opening week physical sales in Japan for AC games and GoT, ordered chronologically:
name [platform of the best selling version] release date, opening week sales on that platform (opening week sales across all platforms)
Shadows [PS5] R7-03-20, 17701
Mirage [PS5] R5-10-06, 20407 (28436)
Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS5] R3-08-20, 13745 (23969)
Valhalla [PS4] R2-11-10, 45055 (49282)
Ghost of Tsushima [PS4] R2-07-17, 212915
Odyssey [PS4] H30-10-05, 50173
Origins [PS4] H29-10-27, 53716
Syndicate [PS4] H27-11-12, 39858
Rogue [PS3] H26-12-11, 19496
Unity [PS4] H26-11-20, 43838
IV: Black Flag [PS3] H25-11-28, 50032 (65910)
III [PS3] H24-11-15, 85918 (97991)
III: Liberation [PSV] H24-11-15, 22110
Revelations [PS3] H23-12-01, 40440 (47602)
Brotherhood [PS3] H22-12-09, 39198 (50964)
Bloodlines [PSP] H21-12-23, 16221
II [PS3] H21-12-03, 55789 (83874)
I [PS3] H20-01-31, 36898 (70952)
Week 2, ordered chronologically:
Shadows [PS5] R7-03-20, 5565
Mirage [PS5] R5-10-05, 3402
Mirage [PS4] R5-10-05, 1890
Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS4] R3-08-20, 4154
Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS5] R3-08-20, 3526
Valhalla [PS4] R2-11-10, 6918
Valhalla [PS5] R2-11-10, <2265
Ghost of Tsushima [PS4] R2-07-17, 53387
Sales totals after two weeks, ordered by sales totals:
Ghost of Tsushima [PS4] R2-07-17, 266302
Valhalla [PS4] R2-11-10, 51973
Mirage [PS5] R5-10-05, 23809
Shadows [PS5] R7-03-20, 23266
Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS5] R3-08-20, 17271
Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS4] R3-08-20, 14378
Mirage [PS4] R5-10-05, 9919
Valhalla [PS5] R2-11-10, >=4227&<=6491
Interpretation: It has been almost a year since details about Assassin’s Creed: Red were announced, and only slightly less since English-language game journalists started lying about the reception the game had in Japan to their English-speaking audience. The latter is blameless, for it is too much to ask the masses to actively research an issue which is at best tangential to their lives. The former is blameworthy, as a journalist which leaves the reader with a worse model of the world than he started with is worse than a monkey with a typewriter. At least chimp’s writings won’t worsen the reader’s perception of the world.—
Shadows had the second worst first week sales out of all non-re-releases of Assassin’s Creed games. Only Bloodlines on the PSP sold worse, and even that only slightly.—
This can be said to be the end of a significant phase of a scandal. Unsurprisingly, gaijin Assassin’s Creed fans who considered it big news that Shadows was for a brief moment in the top 5 games by revenue on Steam in Japan, or in the top 10 best-selling games on Amazon Japan, either ignored these Famitsu numbers from ignorance or embarrassment, or downplayed them saying gaijin games don’t sell in Japan. A statement disproven by the success of Ghost of Tsushima and Shadows‘ sales being even lower than of previous entries.—
In the interest of intellectual honesty I must also be open about evidence I discovered which goes against my thesis. There exists a website which scrapes Steam reviews by language. For Odyssey, .32% of reviews are in Japanese, Valhalla, .53% of reviews are in Japanese, Mirage, .31% of reviews are in Japanese, Shadows, .71% of reviews are in Japanese. This could imply the Assassin’s Creed audience in Japan moved to Steam, thus consumer sales do not tell the whole story.—
(1)Such as one Jeffrey J. Hall.(1.1) Unlike other gaijin who report on Japan, he cannot plead ignorance about. For you see one aspect of the Morning Chestnut Problem which reached even the PM of Japan was ingame destruction of shrines. Politically it started with one member of the prefectural assembly conducting an interview with the head priest of the shrine depicted in the viral video showing the African protagonist marauding through it. I noticed this interview early on, but so did Jeffrey. Ever willing to discredit indigenous people(1.2), the man who holds a position equivalent to a state senator. The next day the local politician uploaded another video, showing he brought the issue to a member of Japan's Upper House, conveniently adding English subtitles. It was the latter man who spoke a day before the games release in Japan’s Diet about this issue and to whom Ishiba, Japan’s PM replied. The attention shrine vandalism was too great to ignore and Ubisoft issued a silent Day 1 patch, which only partially limited it but continues to refence the real shrine by name, but has yet to issue a formal response to protests from the Hyougo Shrine Association.(1.3)—
(1.1)To put it in terms Americans would better understand, Jeffrey (and Kazuma, if he didn’t also pretend to be Japanese) is to Japan what people like Claas Relotius, are to the US. In that both distort the countries they proclaim to be experts about, in order to reinforce the pre-existing perpectives of their audiences.—
(1.2)This wasn’t the first time this game caught the attention of a Japanese politician. Before the events I describe above, a member of the Party to Protect the People from NHK, had asked the National Diet Library for all materials it possessed that pertain to Yasuke. Jeffrey made hay of the fact this party is a minor, non-coalition one. The politicians I describe above belong to the perpetually-in-power Jimin-tou.—
(2)The wikipedia editor most responsible for the current sorry state of the English wikipedia article on Yasuke, ‘Symphony Regalia’, was on R6-11-13 topic-banned from Yasuke for a year on English wikipedia. This sanction follows a permanent suspension of that editor on Japanese wikipedia for sockpuppeting which occured on R6-08-31. The vandalism he inflicted was fixed in the Japanese, but not in the English language article. I think this is because I think wikipedia works by establishing a consensus. Early on, before this happens, one can slant and selectively interpret and pick sources to push a POV, without restrictions. Then one can use this history as evidence that a consensus is clear. And if one is successful, this POV is determined to be the truth, indisputable unless a great number of Reliable Sources, in English of course, disagree plainly.—
Sources: https://sites.google.com/site/gamedatalibrary/, sales for week of R2-07-20 to R2-07-26, sales for week of R2-11-16 to R2-11-22, sales for week of R3-08-23 to R3-08-29, sales for week of R5-10-09 to R5-10-15, sales for week of R7-03-24 to R7-03-30
The state of video games in the year of our lord 2025 continues to astound me. I continue to wonder when the inflection point was, between the ascending art form, and it's degenerate form we see today. Insane stories nobody wants to hear, ugly unlikable worlds, artless current year lampshading, technical issues out the wazoo, "gameplay" that seems to revolve around trying to hook into as many addiction centers as possible and draping casual-tier game mechanics over top of it as a fig leaf. it's a disgrace.
An obvious flashpoint was Gamergate, and that's been beat to death. But before Gamergate, Bioshock Infinite killed the AAA title as it was understood up until that point.
Arguably, Bioshock Infinite was the perfect game. Gamers loved it, reviewers loved it, it was philosophical with something for everyone (except a few wokies who got upset that it depicted both sides as capable of great evil), and most importantly it sold gangbusters. And it still couldn't earn it's money back (allegedly1), the developers basically closed down, reducing in size to a mere skeleton crew that never released another game. I'm struggling to find good sources for it, but I recall this sent shockwaves through the industry. I remember panicked headlines on Gamasutra which I had been reading at the time for some fucking reason. Suddenly everyone was shitting their pants afraid that they'd been shoveling money into a business model (big budget AAA singleplayer games) that would lose them money. And to my memory, this is when the changes began.
Publishers were desperate to do anything but a AAA singleplayer game which would lose money even if it succeeded because it cost so damned much. You saw more games as a service, more DLC, more online requirements, more courting of controversy to make up for obvious lack of quality. Or maybe the woke shit was just a convenient hack to get free publicity and better reviews from a gaming press that Ziff Davis had centralized in San Francisco and then abandoned. Who's to say.
I'm obsessive. I keep a spreadsheet of all the retrogames I aspire to play again, the year they came out, the issue of Computer Gaming World they got reviewed in, which of my stable of retro PCs I should play them on, etc. Around 2015 the list stops. The last game on it is Rebel Galaxy. The last big budget AAA game on it is Borderlands 2 from 2012. I didn't stop at that date because the games weren't retro enough. I stopped because as I was perusing lists of top reviewed or most popular games year by year, that was roughly the time upwards of 80% of them became Games as a Service. Either always online DRM, a multiplayer focus, or even 10 years of perpetual updates chasing "engagement" made them unsuitable for a list oriented towards posterity and nostalgia. Which once again, is more or less right around the time Bioshock Infinite and it's disastrous aftermath was rippling through the industry.
Arguably, Ubisoft has been fighting the good fight. I make fun of Ubislop titles, and their super generic, open world, casual action adventure mechanics. But they are still ostensibly offline big budget single player games. Which really only leaves woke-baiting as a tactic to try to punch above their weight. Alas.
In the 2000's I think it was, Nintendo announced they were no longer going to devalue their games by reducing their prices. It was customary to release $20 versions of games that had sold a bunch. It was easy in the back half of a consoles life to stock up on all the classics pretty cheap, and brand new to boot. Nintendo argued this created a race to the bottom, and quit doing it. People were upset, accused them of being greedy. Gamer entitlement is quite the sight to see. But in the meantime, I think Nintendo was largely vindicated. The first party games that released for the Switch were all 1000% worth the money, especially when compared to the GaaS titles Xbox or Sony were pushing. One again Nintendo is pissing gamers off raising prices. Switch 2 games look to cost $70 or $80, and the console itself is priced at $450. This could be greed. Or like in the early 00's it's Nintendo insisting on being paid what they are worth. Unless you want them to start whoring it up on the corner of Woke & GaaS.
The perfect bioshock infinite was called Prey ... and nobody played it.
The death of the golden age of gaming came with the death of the speed part of moore's law in 2006-sh. I am trying to assemble history of how and why.
But I would say that the first canary in the coal mine was Warcraft 3. It was the game that showed me that something is starting to get wrong in the industry.
Writingwise Warcraft 3 was not great compared to WC2 and Starcraft 1, but gameplaywise it was solid. And yhe writing was definitely better than the garbage we got in Starcraft 2. Warcraft 3's greatest sin was that it was so popular it was able to kickstart World of Warcraft's popularity which in turned sucked all of the oxygen out of the MMO genre and also got a ton of studios to waste mountains of cash trying to imitate it.
Was it really that popular? From my memories people played it like for a month, then went back to brood war. And after one year people were only playing tower defense and dota maps in WCIII
I only played Wings of Liberty and I think the writing was ok there - but now reading the plot of the next two - damn it really had gone downhill and fast.
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If we're gonna be citing RTS games as the warning signs of change, why WC3 and not C&C: Tiberian Sun? That game infamously launched in quite the state, and contra WhiningCoil's above post about auteur studio leads, I doubt that TibSun was supposed to be a magnum opus kind of game. It was an ambitious title, sure, but it was otherwise a bigger-and-better sequel that, as far as the popular narrative goes, was unfairly rushed out the door by EA and never really fixed into what it should have been.
I am not citing RTS, I am saying warcraft 3 - there are bad games and there are wrong games. Tiberium sun was kinda bad, Warcraft 3 for me was wrong. In the way that Diablo 3 was wrong. They kinda fixed the feel of the world to be better in Diablo 4 though.
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Tiberian Sun was broken as hell, but I have to say it was a very fun type of broken. My friends and I played that game so much, just doing stupid shit, that the first thing I thought on reading your post was "We need shooooes!"
I think you're thinking of Generals for that voice line, but yeah.
Lol I am, how embarrassing. And yet it's tiberian sun I remember for sure, because our game loop was we'd all ally with each other then try to betray our ally and suicide bomb them with blue tiberium before they could do it to us. Oh yeah, it was because we were suicide bombing each other and generals was the breadth of our exposure to middle eastern culture at the time. A different kind of embarrassing.
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To me, a big thing that gaming companies got wrong is that they essentially started chasing graphics over gameplay. This wasn’t obvious at the time, because graphics are a very obvious selling point when graphics capacity is growing fast. But it seems a dead end especially once you get to high levels of graphics that are photo realistic. Except this takes the place of doing other things: gameplay itself, storytelling, characters. There were a lot of games in the late 2000s that were beautiful to look at and so boring to play that it just wasn’t fun. This is something that Nintendo has always got right — they focused first and foremost on whether or not the player was having fun.
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Strategy games peaked very early; Achron is about the only RTS I know since the new millennium that can truly be called groundbreaking, and the new millennium's about when UIs stopped being janky as well (though it took a few more years for every franchise to get an entry that was jank-free). I haven't played as many 4Xes (in particular I haven't played any Paradox games), but AIUI SMAC still has little competition for the Civ spot despite being pre-millennium.
On the other hand, VNs peaked quite late, I'd say early 2010s. Most other genres were somewhere in between.
A key point here is that games only require a certain amount of processing to be good, so House's law becomes irrelevant after a point. Yes, their GPU needs have continued to build, making games bigger and more expensive, but this was not really necessary or useful, just something that AAA developers continued doing in Molochian competition for the "ooh, shiny" demographic (even that eventually started to go indie, though much later).
That would explain why you're completely wrong about strategy games. Paradox (and other indie publishers) continue to push the boundaries of what a strategy game can be. Victoria 3, for example, attempts to simulate literally the entirely population of earth over its timespan-- down to their professions, wealth, culture, religion, and political preferences.
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I'd love to hear that thesis about Warcraft 3. I remember from early previews it felt far more RPGish than it turned out and had far more races and campaigns that got cut (they planned 6 didn't they?). But ambitious design documents getting cut back isn't anything new.
The whole feel was wrong. The previous blizzard games were rooted in some dark and gritty and I wouldn't say realistic, but logical graphics and feel - you had ships, oil spilled around them. Starcraft had actually good story in which the characters were acting believable. And they showed their sides. When Raynor was forced to leave Kerrigan to die you felt it - both as a player (the doomed mission) but in the characters and the world.
In Warcraft III the story - the best I can tell about it was that it was manufactured. I don't think that anyone felt any kind of connection to any of the characters. It felt that the story was trying to tell you what to feel about the characters and not make you (btw - problem of the woke movies too) feel it. The graphics were off - they were too cartoonish, the gameplay itself was totally meh, the camera and the field of view that was available was absurdly tiny - so you couldn't S in your RTS.
It also started the trend of Blizzard pushing characters on the players. No one liked arthas - and yet they made him the big bad. His story arc was supposed to be epic, but on every front they only delivered cringe. That also continued in World of Warcraft. The stompeaks story line of Thorim totally overshadowed Icecrown. And once again they showed that they had no idea what actually makes their successes successful. Because they suddenly decided with the Ulduar patch to replace the big blue battered vrykul both with something shiny and polished that no played had connection to - both in the raid and in the outside world. But talking about Icecrown - did anyone actually like the stupid way the storyline ended. It felt so forced, so tryhard.
I think that this is what was Warcraft III problem - it was tryhard all the way, and that is why it felt fake. So for me that was the canary in the coal mine - the try hardiness of the people in the gaming companies that tried to make people that were not the buyers of the games view them as REAL ARTISTS
This is why we got the terrible terrible surreal God Of War 3 ending (kratos is hope he is chasing a little girl to the light), terrible Mass Effect 3 ending( little girl and the light) and the whole gears of war.
After that the tryhardiness conitued to infect more and more. rockstar tryhard with GTA4, the way the brilliant prince of persia games mutated into Assassin's Creed game (although there were problems with two thrones)
Once again - this is not a coherent post because the whole thing is not yet coherent in my head. But the decline proper started with XBOX360 and some signs were visible slightly before that.
I certainly felt attachment to the characters in Warcraft 3, and I liked Arthas. So your experience was not the one everyone had. In fact, I thought that the story in War3 was overall pretty good.
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I remember reading the Warcraft 2 game manual multiple times as a middle schooler. It was dark, gory, and realistic. There were heroes, but they weren't larger than life and sometimes they got died. It read like a chronicle of Aztecs invading England, it was badass. I especially enjoyed how each Orcish clan was essentially a separate tribe with it's own rituals and cultures, lovingly detailed. Shout-out to my homies from the Bonechewer and Laughing Skull. The human kingdoms also had interesting histories, I loved the stories of Lordaeron and Alterac. Even the heroes were cool. Aleria, Turalyon, and Uther were badass.
Warcraft 3 pushed all of this into the background to focus on goofy Arthas. The gameplay was good, but the SOVL was gone.
(Controversial take -- I feel very similarly about Final Fantasy VI and VII.)
Reading game manuals in middle school is such a unique time period. It think it was really only the mid 90's where the manuals had enough heft and fluff to make that an interesting exercise, and also they were still actually printed and shipped with games. I poured over the manuals for Diablo, WarCraft 1 & 2, StarCraft, etc in middleschool. It really built up the anticipation to run home from school off the bus and boot them up again.
I remember the manual for Red Baron was about 1/3 game , 2/3 history, planes, and pilot profiles. And that the BG1&2 manuals were basically the D&D rulebooks, but with some added character commentary.
See also the gigantic wirebound manual for Jane's Fighters Anthology.
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I’d highlight the old Homeworld manual as another great strong point. The game’s mechanics were okay, if a little easily solved, but the universe it drew and the bounds of what it left to the imagination were fantastic.
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I also enjoyed in Warcraft II how you weren't the hero. You were a commander doing his job. And got promotions along the way.
This is a sentiment I've heard a number of people express. Borderlands 1 being preferable to 2 because in 1 you play as a nobody merc while 2 makes you the savior of the world and center of the narrative. Classic WoW being preferable to later expansions because you're a nobody adventurer as opposed to Azeroth's Greatest Champion. Half Life 1 vs 2. Seems there's a kind of gamer that doesn't like the conceit that the player is always the center of attention.
Single player video games almost always require the player character to be the Chosen One, because in a meta sense, they're the only one with free will, and they almost always follow a unique set of rules compared to NPCs. I think, as storytelling in video games took more prominence, too many devs saw this as an opportunity to be clever by making the in-universe story reflect this, leading to it being done so much that many players got bored of it. There's something to be said about the power fantasy of being the Chosen One, but that also can make the player feel like their success in the game is pre-planned rather than earned.
This is why I personally didn't like Commander Shepard filling such a special role in Mass Effect rather than being the right soldier in the right place at the right time to save the universe. Doomguy in 1993's Doom was more that, and I was disappointed in the narrative of the 2016 Doom making Doom Slayer the Chosen One. I think From Soft games tend to do a good job at finding a good balance between the 2, where the player character is usually a member of a class of characters with special abilities including resurrection, but they're not a particularly special one of those, other than that the player controls them to accomplish special things which earns them the status of a
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I forgot about that, but yes, completely agree. I played a recent Fire Emblem game (Engage, I think) and the MC is fanfic-tier overpowered dragon goddess who has a dark alter ego. In older FE games you were some guy who was good with a sword, or at best a noble who had fallen on hard times and had to play politics and win difficult military victories to regain power. I guess normies enjoy power fantasies.
Engage's story was godawful, but let's be real who plays FE:Engage for the story?
(I had a chuckle when the first autocomplete result when I tried to google "fire emblem engage* story" in Japanese was "fire emblem engage* story bad")
edit:aword
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I mean, the cutscene where he commits Regicide/Patricide was pretty awesome. I'll give them that.
I think that's actually a good example of the general Blizzard problem, when it comes to storytelling. Blizzard make amazing cutscenes, but it's very obvious that what they do is create a couple of pre-set 'high points' for their stories, the dramatic moments that will have cutscenes, and then fill in everything between those moments - and the fillings are largely nonsense. Even in Warcraft III, all the cutscenes are amazing, but then you play the missions in between them and get to enjoy awful, wooden dialogue and endless plot contrivance. Very little in Warcraft III's story makes sense, and the dialogue is cringeworthy, and it has only gotten worse from there.
Thus with Starcraft II or Diablo III or World of Warcraft - the usual course is a farrago on nonsense leading up to a dramatic, technically excellent four or five minute film, and then back to nonsense, perhaps on the logic that people will only remember the cutscenes.
Let me take a specific example - Battle for Azeroth is widely considered a terrible expansion, with a nonsensical plot that engaged in rampant character assassination, and where entire factions were derailed. Nonetheless, consider a few cutscenes. The BfA trailer is amazing. You need practically zero context for it, but if you enjoy random high fantasy people fighting each other in spectacular ways, wow, that trailer delivers. Now 'Old Soldiers'. That orc and that troll look fantastic, extremely human and emotional, and it's a powerful, quiet moment as they reflect on the loss and sacrifice of war, and it puts the BfA trailer in a new context. Now 'Warbringers: Jaina'. Obviously lower production values than the others, but a genuinely haunting moment, as a character once known for her empathy and pacifism, to the point of once siding with the orcs over her own father out of a desire for peace, realises she was wrong and embraces a militant mindset. This then led up to an in-game cutscene at the battle in the trailer where she appears with the ghost ship and, again, without context it's genuinely cool.
And look, those four cutscenes without much context all string together in a way that might seem excellent, right? The Horde and the Alliance are at war, we've got some complicated emotional journeys on both sides, real ambivalance around the necessity, even glory, but also the horror of war, and so on.
But trust me, if you have played Battle for Azeroth, you will know that all the connective tissue between those moments is horrible. There are potentially interesting moments here, like Jaina's or Saurfang's development, but the game constantly whiffs on the execution, or changes its mind and goes back on what the cutscenes seemed to imply, or even just forgets about what it was doing; and I haven't even mentioned Sylvanas yet.
Blizzard are very good at making "pretty awesome" cutscenes. But cutscenes alone do not a compelling story make.
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If watched in isolation yes. But the buildup to it was somewhat of a meh, and the very next mission he is level 1 death knight running for his life. So he killed his father just to be edgy, not even for the lulz
I would say that the only really good character blizzard created after SC1 was Varok Saurfang. And they even didn't give him a proper death because of the Anime Waifu (d2 was also light on good characters, but eh no one even pretended it had story)
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Yeah, Blizzard's writing has always been more like a series of events that happen to occur chronologically rather than any kind of story with a plot. Sometimes you get the sense they expect something will have a big emotional payoff and give it a big cutscene, and it's just a character introduced 20 minutes ago randomly doing something for random reasons invented on the spot.
The Warcraft universe kind of feels like if you trained an LLM on Tolkien, D&D, and heavy metal lyrics, and then had it create a fantasy story. Everything is an exaggerated version of the shared consciousness about what a "dwarf" is or what an "elf" is or what medieval fantasy looks like. And sometimes is just an exaggerated version of the real world for some reason, so we get New Jersey gangster goblins and Jamaican Trolls who love the Loa, mon.
A lot of this stuff just feels like the 1990s-early 2010s. Anyone remember early Five Gum ads? Or heck, Bionicle. There was a trend towards hard-edged and tryhard atmospheres, everything had to be edgy and serious even if it didn't warrant it. People praise those Playstation 2 ads, but they seem like surrealist nonsense with no actual connection to video games. It really does feel like the "burgers?" meme.
Exhibit A was The Matrix, there were so many neat elements of it and it's remained in the popular consciousness for that reason, but it had to go eerily spiritual in a film series about technology. Who the heck was that grandma, anyway? What does this chosen one nonesense have to do with robots using humans as batteries?
I wouldn't say I'm into hard science fiction, but I think you need to be careful about inserting vague spiritualist nonsense in a story about technology. The spiritual and humanistic elements of a story about technology have to arise from the impact of technology on people and how it changes their perception of the world, not from spiritual powers imposed from the outside.
I enjoy stories about technology, but the problem with science fiction is that its authors have always been too Big Five Open for their own good and have squirted strange new ideas onto the page alongside the thoughtful reflections about the future of science and tech. I will say, for a cluster of people so committed to materialism and atheism, science fiction authors seem strangely compelled to write about beings of pure spirit and gods.
You can tell a compelling genre story about characters struggling against evil, but you have to think about characters and their motivations and have them act accordingly. I don't understand why game stories leaned so heavily into pseudo-mystical elements to add depth (poorly) instead of character motivations, which is the way in which deep stories actually stick with people. Your game will not be the source of a spiritual awakening, but it might inspire someone to strive for what is just and right, which is an important message that's easily possible.
In mild fairness, I think some of this was an outgrowth of The Matrix starting out as an homage to Ghost in the Shell, which is a rather cerebral and philosophical story which also happens to be bracketed by gorgeously-rendered cyborg carnage.
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I increasingly think Carmack was right. Story in games is like story in porn. You need just enough to get the action going. Most of my memorable moments in games come from overcoming challenges, rarely story beats. I rarely want to replay a game with a good story, because it takes so much work to get through it. If I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie. Increasingly just read a book these days.
The singular exception to this was ICO, who's environmental story telling was so masterful, which tied it's game mechanics into it so subtly, it blew me away with it's story in a way no other game has since. You were buying into it in ways you didn't even realize just playing the game normally. Raw genius.
Outside of that, I think I just want unpretentious serviceable game plots.
I'd rather play a game than watch a movie, personally, even with the same linearity of plot.
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Carmack definitely wasn't right. But he wasn't entirely wrong either. Not all games need a story, let alone an elaborate one. For example, Tetris would not benefit from the blocks having elaborate backstories. But some games do need a good story (gestures at the entire RPG genre). It's all about what you prefer and what kind of game you want to make. Carmack's error was in assuming that the kind of game he wanted to make (gameplay-heavy, story optional at best) was the only kind of game worth making.
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Crying silently for poor "Fallout: New Vegas" and GTA:Vice City
A good game tells its story not in cutscenes, but with its world and interactions. To make psychonauts (and the milkman conspiracy work) you need a good worldbuilding and storytelling.
In classical doom fashion you don't need a story - why are you cutting demons witch chainsaws - because there are demons and I have chainsaw. Same with mortal kombat - why do you want to beat this guy to a pulp - because he is there. When the gameplay is pure enough - all your bases are belong to us is enough of a motivation to play.
But the first time you meet roman soldiers in full atire in mojave desert in postapocalyptic Nevada you are WTF - mind blown ... the fact that they make it work and make sense is even bigger WTF mind blown.
The problem with the story is that games have way to tried to tell you a story so you can clap the writers and not to make your experience better.
A great game that tells simple story for you is Icewind Dale - there the story was minimalistic, but extremely tight. But it did great things to make you care and feel the place - which made the quests more enjoyable.
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I disagree -- not because I think your preferences are invalid, I just have totally different ones. Story in games is hard to do right, but I do believe it can be compelling if the story is actually part of the interactive elements of the game and not just a framework for the gameplay. That's only the case if you're actively making choices that affect the outcomes for particular characters and having to make tradeoffs to accomplish an ending that satisfies your concern for the characters and their world. That's why people were so angry at the Mass Effect 3 endings -- all your choices and progress meant very little in terms of the conclusion, you just had to pick from a fixed set of options based on your progression in the third game rather than having your particular choices throughout the trilogy result in a unique ending.
So game stories only matter if participating in the story is part of the player's set of choices. Linear stories with no branching paths or player choice are to player-driven stories what walking simulators are to gameplay. Branching stories with mutually exclusive options are also deeply replayable, because you can make wildly different choices each time and see different parts of the game. Note how players keep replaying and replaying Fallout New Vegas, Witcher 3, Skyrim, Mass Effect, etc.
I would definitely be curious what your gamer motivation profile looks like. Mine doesn't really match up with any of their archetypes, I like the immersion and creativity motivations almost to the exclusion of the others. So I'll engage in gameplay if it rewards me with positive story outcomes or character immersion or a cosmetic that fits my character's style or something I can use to create a thing in the game world, but I don't find gameplay inherently compelling, except for racing games, for some reason. Games are for me an excuse to exercise imagination in an interactive fictional world, not to demonstrate competence or achievement except insofar as those drive the fantasy. (So I might think of my character's progression in terms of the obstacles they've overcome or the achievements they've made, but it's not all that important that I've overcome them.) I'm a game world enthusiast and I see a player-driven story as part of participating in the game world.
It looks interesting, but I refuse to sign up to another fucking site to take their gamer astrology quiz.
Maybe Carmack takes it a bit far, but I think story in gaming is load bearing. At best it lets a game punch above it's weight. Portal minus the writing and world building is rather bland. But by the same token, think about how sparse the "writing" in Portal really is. Do you think it cracks 15 minutes of spoken dialog? Would the scattered bits of text in the game fit on the front and back of a notecard?
From one perspective, Carmack's dismissiveness towards writing and story is proven wrong by Portal. From another perspective, Carmack is vindicated, as Portal truly does have just enough writing to get the action going.
"Just enough to get the action going" is hardly a scientific measure, and one could argue an RPG takes more to "get the action going" than a puzzle game. But I enjoy the laconic inspiration behind the ethos. Nothing kills me worse in a game, even a game I am ostensibly enjoying, even an exposition dump I am ostensibly invested in (like when Xenoblade 3 almost made me cry), than when I get the feeling like this is nice and all, but I kind of want to play too, so can we wrap up this going on 30 minute cutscene?
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Ich bin ein cashual.
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I got Skirmisher and Slayer, huh.
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I think I pick up what you are putting down. There was a very weird nu-metal, Lincoln Park themed push in video games circa 2001-2003 ish that really fucked up a lot of games. I think the one that got it worst was Jak 2. But Prince of Persia: Two Thrones, WarCraft III and others didn't escape unscathed. It was all very mass market edginess. Like a fisher price razor blade.
Two Thrones? That game was a notable step back in numetal edge from Warrior Within. In WW, the time beast (Dahaka?) action music was literally Godsmack. Song was I Stand Alone. At least it was an instrumental. The gratuitous thonged ass near the start feels relevant to the early 2000s edge as well.
This is all based on memories of games I haven't played in a decade. I'm confident nonetheless.
I think your 20 year old memory is better than my 20 year old memory on this one. I was misremembering Warrior Within as Two Thrones.
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Their great sin was not waiting for the visual fidelity to match up to the scale of epicness they wanted. Who can argue against the epicness of this.
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I love Warcraft 3! Was amazing for me.
It was technically amazing, the custom maps scene was probably where custom maps peaked (the success of DotA inspired at least three spin-off games, and probably put dollar signs in Blizzard's eyes for the SC2 arcade), and I never played the native RTS in serious multiplayer but it seemed good.
But I also think the campaign was pretty... ehhh, and the expansion campaign was similar. Not like Wings of Liberty (which has great mission design and structure, but bad writing) or the SC1 campaigns (which still have "Blizzard writing" but are a lot better, and discussed upthread).
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