Neil Druckmann talks about Nathan Drake mass murderer discussion, calls out NeoGAF

Fairfax said:
I couldn't find a body count for the uncharted games, but this GAF thread says it's 884 in Uncharted 2.

With 12 hours, that's 1,22 kills/minute. In his most violent film, Temple of Doom, Indy killed 21 guys. That's 0,17 kills/minute. 0,95 and 0,10 in Raiders and Last Crusade, respectively.
The comparison is just silly.
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Considering the film is not in the POV of indy constantly goes to show that the comparison cannot be valid. I don't recall killing that many people in uncharted 2 but the question is.....why on earth does it matter? Every single enemy you shoot is out to kill you first.

This is why comments like "in cold blood" or any other statement about "mass murdering" seem silly as hell. When you kill people who want to kill you, that is self defense. Why don't you go through the game and see if you can get drake to talk his way out of every situation. How about a hug-a-thon? A dance off?

No? These pirates/militants/mercs
/zombies/monsters
all want to kill you, you say? Obviously if you kill them first you must be a deplorable human being with a broken sense of morality and survival instincts!

Refreshment.01 said:
Is not just about the killing, is about incongruencies of different elements that forms the game. If Indiana kills, it is that character doing it the person is just a passive witness of the action. But when you give the viewer agency like games do, then it is fair for the creator to provide the player with a set of tools that let them express themselves through gameplay. Im waiting for the day that ND actually is above the curve in that regard, then i' ll start talking about them as redefining the way videogame stories are comunicated.
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Just because you are given agency doesn't mean that the characters they created need to be altered as well. If these crazy gun toting dudes are going to kill you on sight, then it doesn't matter if you want to talk, dance, juggle stones or do a stand up routine. They will still kill you. If you want the option to just die without progressing you are welcome to enter in a given situation and stand still. Then again, if your goal was to sneak around and not harm anyone then why bother getting an action shooter and why not invest in a stealth game that fits your needs?

And as far as storytelling goes, it is a good thing that the enemies and their behavior is clearly defined. Once that is set, how you react to it is still in your hands but the devs are just giving you a logical way to survive the situation.
 
Refreshment.01 said:
i think Drukman (apologize for spelling) answer speaks for itself, and it is kind of ironic that people proclaim Naughty Dog as an studio pushing videogame narrative and story telling in new directions, when he is giving that kind of answer. ND is juts pushing the pretty much standard (by now) method of story telling to new heights. One that encapsulates a sort of divorce between some gameplay and narrative elements.

Is not just about the killing, is about incongruencies of different elements that forms the game. If Indiana kills, it is that character doing it the person is just a passive witness of the action. But when you give the viewer agency like games do, then it is fair for the creator to provide the player with a set of tools that let them express themselves through gameplay. Im waiting for the day that ND actually is above the curve in that regard, then i' ll start talking about them as redefining the way videogame stories are comunicated.
Click to expand...

Great points. I do think TLOU did a far better job at shrinking the dissonance just by changing the tone to something much darker. But yeah, it's an issue with games that we'll hopefully solve some day.
 
NullPointer said:
On my last playthrough I stumbled upon two of them.
The first was in a downtown intersection which was being watched over by some guards on a blasted out second floor. On ground level was a shitton of car husks and a bookstore with those explosive trap-lines set on the doorways near a few roving guards.

I snuck through the bookstore and took out the remaining ground level guards while completely out of sight of the second floor overwatch, made my way around the corner to the fire escape, but couldn't activate it. I wandered around for a while trying to figure out what I missed but had no luck. SO I went back, snuck upstairs and took out the few guards there. Once I turned the corner, Ellie talked about a scene with some dead bodies and I was able to boost her up to the fire escape so she could drop the ladder.

The second time was in Winter, after Ellie loses her horse and has to hoof it on foot. She eventually comes up to a lodge with some guards patrolling outside. I took them down and found a side entrance into the building, which also had some enemies. I took them all out and got stuck looking for where to go next. I eventually found the door out but it wouldn't open. Why? Because there was still one guard sneaking around outside. I had to time a shot to take him down through the slats covering the windows (I didn't know any way to get out to where he was yet), but once I downed him the door unlocked and I was able to continue.

Both of those were situations where I thought I should have been able to just continue, as I was safe and hadn't been detected by the enemies, but the game forced me to go out of my way to kill every last person on the scene before letting me move on.
Click to expand...

I didn't have that issue with your first example, if it's the same place I think you're describing:
[SPOILER?]example

The second example didn't happen to me either, but I can imagine it happening since
that guy outside is apparently supposed to come inside to look for you. I don't think I ever had to kill anyone looking in from outside in that section.
They both may be glitches. I thought you were talking about forced areas like the
mini-mart, Hotel entrance, and power plant
. There are only a handful of those I can think of.

jimi_dini said:
I just added some more data about the trophies of Uncharted 1.

Weapon trophies alone are about killing 550 people in cold blood.

There are 14 trophies about collecting treasure. 30 about killing people and 4 about difficult settings. That's kinda embarassing and also shows where the focus of Uncharted games is.
Click to expand...

LOL

The focus of the game is shooting bad guys. It's a third person shooter man.
 
Ishida said:
Dumbass statements like this is why Neil's statement about ignoring GAF is so right. Even it he was half-joking.
Click to expand...

i am sure he was joking but at the same time, you have to stick to your own ideas when you are making anything creative, if you get stuck on comments from 3rd parties, it will never end well.
 
Superflat said:
One thing I can't believe is how some people are taking Neil's statement seriously.

He's directly referenced GAF multiple times praising its community (the most recent being within the past 24 hours responding to his new meme) and when he gives a joke statement to tag at the end of his real answer, some people are actually offended LOL
Click to expand...

100% this. Listen to the way Neil even said it! It doesn't sound like he's putting down GAF as a whole (on the contrary, there ARE posts that he likes, such as the new meme), but rather offering an answer to the question that when creating a product, listening to the negative voices is never as important as setting out to accomplish what you are trying to accomplish, and he isn't wrong.

We <3 ya, Neil.
 
Jarmel said:
Yea, that's bad writing in that they're treating it as a problem even if they don't feel that it's one. It's so half-hearted that all I can do is roll my eyes.
Click to expand...

A Dead Diehard said:
Kinda falls flat when it's Lezarevic saying it.
Y'know, with the whole war criminal thing. Killer of his own men and unarmed civilians alike.
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Villains often try to psych out the protagonist by pointing out how they're alike, but as is mentioned above, you have to keep in mind that all of the people the protagonist killed are armed and being paid to carry out bad deeds.

I can see taking issue with Drake making quips about the people he kills, but just in terms of the number of people he kills, it's hard to argue that he's any worse than any other video game protagonist.
 
ignore as much as possible...

just remember the squeaky wheel gets the oil Mr Druckmann.

Or in our case: the whiny Gaffers get the aim fix and motion blur added back in to make UC3 a better game. :)
 
Ysiadmihi said:
Can someone bring me up to speed on this? Is there really a significant number of people on GAF who are upset that you kill a lot of people in a shooting game?
Click to expand...

The only Uncharted game I've played is the Vita one and that's kind of its own thing but in that game, I would've preferred (not that I hated it what Drake had to do against that personal army) minimal killing and more stealth since he's climbing all over the place anyway.
 
Lol, seeing Drake kill a bunch of dudes in the Uncharted trailer was the first thing I thought of when watching.

Also, movies as an entertainment medium work differently than games, Neil. Especially when you're watching Indy kill somebody versus hitting the trigger and seeing the guy keel over.
 
Superflat said:
I didn't have that issue with your first example, if it's the same place I think you're describing:
[SPOILER?]example
Click to expand...
Wow. That's exactly the spot and pretty much exactly how I went through it, but the ladder wouldn't activate. Not until I went back and took the others out.

I guess it was just a case of glitches? Weird.
 
I hope Uncharted doesn't try to tonendown the violence and go stealth heavy like TLoU. That game was dull as all hell. I'm six hours in and still have no urge to go back to it. Uncharted made its money on action. Body counts go up in sequels, not down. PEACE.
 
Always a weird critique seeing as 99% of AAA games gameplay is structured around guns and murdering things. Maybe it's because of how endearing ND characters are that this becomes a issue with these games and not others?

Otherwise, how many other games don't do it? Especially games with gunplay? Are there any?

It really seems like there's only two overarching game types; puzzle and gun-play. Sometimes a mix between. If its got gunplay, you're gonna murder a lot of stuff.
 
There's a lot of games I wouldn't level this critism at but when something is trying to tell a serious story, or in uncharted's case a lighthearted one with a happy-go-lucky protagonist I do think it's a pretty significant tonal issue. Like, it doesn't bother me that much but it's a bit annoying to hear him be so dismissive about it.
 
I don't get why the amount of kills is so important.

Like, when you kill more than fifty dudes... YOU'RE A REALLY BAD GUY?

C'mon now. There is no imaginary scale saying 0-50 is bad, 51-100 is really bad, 100+ is ultra bad etc.

Would it be okay if you play through all three games waiting for the enemy to shoot at you first? It's a little silly.
 
I think that Druckmann, Naughty Dog and every other studio that makes shooters games with humans enemies are in a sort of dead end. Games are every day more close to replicate human behaviour and reactions and be obliged to kill people, even ficticious one in that context, doesn't feel right for a part of the audience.

The tone and the "bullet sponge" feature on the Uncharted games only make that more evident.

In that sense I prefer to shoot mechas, zombies, robots...etc. Fortunately I like games like Vanquish and Binary Domain.
 
Thunder Monkey said:
Fair enough.

Part of me hopes an Uncharted Trilogy pack releases on PS4. So I can experience the entire series when I've got one. It definitely won't bother me to the same degree as it does others. At worst I'll think "That was macabre." after a quip.
Click to expand...

Uncharted is pretty light though, definitely not macabre. TloU on the other hand is a lot more serious, and killing something there leaves a lot longer residue than 100 perps in Uncharted. At the end, it is all about context.

You have movies like Indy, where many people die but you think nothing of it, and then you have movies where a single person dies and you cant sleep for a week.
 
Leondexter said:
It was a subset of that, which is basically the opposite problem, which bothered me in Uncharted 2. Yes, I killed approximately 800 guys (IIRC). It's a game, the conflict is fighting/shooting to the death, fine. Sold.

What bothered me is the cutscene near the end. I creep up and peek over an edge at the mastermind bad guy, fully intending to shoot him in the head and end all this...and a cutscene plays where Drake can't bring himself to shoot someone in cold blood.

Now the game's narrative and the cutscenes' narrative are at odds with each other. That's the problem. Not the long killing spree, that's nothing more than a videogame joke, like characters who repeat themselves or enemies dropping food/ammo, or whatever. But the Uncharted games attempt a cinematic narrative, and that narrative shouldn't conflict with the game's narrative.

Indiana Jones kills a bunch of Nazis, sure. He's the good guy. They're the bad guys. He believes it, we believe it, no problem.

But Indiana Jones doesn't balk at killing a bad guy for no reason. The movie contrives something - a hostage, an artifact at stake, she's a beautiful woman he's recently slept with - something.

This isn't a problem specific to Uncharted, of course. Games have this problem all the time.
Click to expand...
Same here. I got a lot of flack for talking about this in a thread a few weeks back. I wish I had written this post to stop people from misreading it as "he's a murderer." It's a pulp action game, so that's fine, but this specific scene is damn stupid. It's Batman not saving Ra's Al Guhl stupid. It's just a lazy attempt to make us care about the conflict. Still not as bad as Tomb Raider's ending.
 
I totally agree with him. The topic has already been discussed here and I was surprised at how many people didin't see the obvious: some games have to deal with this problem, some others don't. Tomb Raider does, TLOU does, Uncharted does not.
Just because a game has good characters, great acting and great storytelling, it doesn't mean it has to deal with every kind of theme.
By the way, great speaking from Ru, I like that he cares about the little things because I look at them all the time.
 
It wouldn't be so bad if Drake's attitude wasn't so jovial and they offered either nonlethal options or ways to avoid killing altogether. Provide an incentive for players to sneak through levels undetected.

At least give those of us who have issues with the mass murdering a tranquilizer gun and a heavy weapon that incapacitates armored enemies without killing them.
 
My problem with Drake is that he's so fully realized, and he goes from these well animated and acted cut-scenes where he's cracking jokes, to immediately killing 40 people, then it's flirt and joke time again.

If I'm controlling an anonymous ninja, or it's a grim war game, then I don't really think about it. But it's just that Drake is so light-hearted all the time it's jarring.

Games are amazing, but the tone switches so fast that it's pretty funny when you have a cuddle with Elena seconds after the two of you kill 50 armed gunmen.
 
Metroidvania said:
Lol, seeing Drake kill a bunch of dudes in the Uncharted trailer was the first thing I thought of when watching.

Also, movies as an entertainment medium work differently than games, Neil. Especially when you're watching Indy kill somebody versus hitting the trigger and seeing the guy keel over.
Click to expand...

well it is fine not to like TPS... nothing wrong with that. Thats why there are so many other different games that you can enjoy.
 
Fairfax said:
I couldn't find a body count for the uncharted games, but this GAF thread says it's 884 in Uncharted 2.

With 12 hours, that's 1,22 kills/minute. In his most violent film, Temple of Doom, Indy killed 21 guys. That's 0,17 kills/minute. 0,95 and 0,10 in Raiders and Last Crusade, respectively.
The comparison is just silly.
Click to expand...
That's kind of irrelevant though. He wasn't saying the number of people Drake kills is equivalent to the number of people Indiana Jones kills in the films, he was equating the nature of the violence between the two. They share the same tone and style of heightened reality. Indy still kills a significant number of bad guys in his films, often times in gruesome ways, but we find it easy to not dwell on it because the nature of the action is so adventurous and over the top, the exact tone that the Uncharted series seeks to emulate.

The number of kills he compares to an exaggeration of "reality," something that isn't literal but is a representation of action in a video game conceit, similar to how night is often portrayed in film. When it's supposed to be pitch black outside, we still see characters perfectly lit, with bright lights casting shadows across the ground. We just buy into the idea it's supposed to be night even though it's not what night looks like in reality, similar to how we might buy into the idea that Nathan Drake shoots 30 guys in an action scene because it's a game representing a scenario. For example, a movie version of Nathan Drake might have him take on 5 guys in one scene in a scenario that would feel equivalent to the scene where he takes on 30 guys in the game.
 
Furyous said:
It wouldn't be so bad if Drake's attitude wasn't so jovial and they offered either nonlethal options or ways to avoid killing altogether. Provide an incentive for players to sneak through levels undetected.

At least give those of us who have issues with the mass murdering a tranquilizer gun and a heavy weapon that incapacitates armored enemies without killing them.
Click to expand...
This is an action game. How many action movies feature tranqs? Maybe just don't play the game. If you have moral issues with killing, it shouldn't be driven by body count. Oone murder should be too many. I don't understand thstnweird sliding scale of morality. I also don't understand what anyone would expect to do in a game with weapons. Killing things is one of the only uses most weapons have. PEACE.
 
Don't forget there are more enemies in Uncharted as well. Indiana Jones doesn't have to fight this way through waves of like 20 enemies at one time.

And, yes, they instantly shoot at Drake the moment they see him.
 
spwolf said:
well it is fine not to like TPS... nothing wrong with that. Thats why there are so many other different games that you can enjoy.
Click to expand...

I'm not trying to single you out with this post it's just that it's probably the most one to respond to on this page.

Name 5 games with the production values of Uncharted that aren't about shooting people?
 
I take back all of the horribly made photoshops I did of you, Neil.

..Nah. He's right. On all counts. I do think with the more appropriate stealth mechanics that appear to have been added in the new Uncharted coming out it will ease some of the people's concerns, though.
 
snoopeasystreet said:
I'm not trying to single you out with this post it's just that it's probably the most one to respond to on this page.

Name 5 games with the production values of Uncharted that aren't about shooting people?
Click to expand...
There probably aren't many. People generally don't buy games that don't feature killing, so companies don't fund them. Look in the mirror before using that as your support. We drive game budgets and development with our purchases. PEACE.
 
Some of you guys should leave shooter games as a whole and play some fairy rainbow colored
nintendo games.

I like shooting people in videogames.. :rock :yeah
 
3328775-grant-morrison.jpg
 
Dr.Acula said:
My problem with Drake is that he's so fully realized, and he goes from these well animated and acted cut-scenes where he's cracking jokes, to immediately killing 40 people, then it's flirt and joke time again.

If I'm controlling an anonymous ninja, or it's a grim war game, then I don't really think about it. But it's just that Drake is so light-hearted all the time it's jarring.

Games are amazing, but the tone switches so fast that it's pretty funny when you have a cuddle with Elena seconds after the two of you kill 50 armed gunmen.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say Drake is "fully realized". Like Indiana Jones, John McClaine, or James Bond, none of them are complex characters, but they're beloved because they're awesome. They are highly idealized killing machines with a sense of humor, tons of charisma and sex appeal. None of those characters carry emotional baggage from previous films with them like a burden, so they don't grow like real human beings. They are legendary awesome characters. This is why Bond can and is replaced time and time again.

Insert another RedLetterMedia clip.
 
I always found the argument pretty silly tbh. It's clear from the tone that it's a light pulp adventure. People that complain about the "ludonarrative dissonence" in Uncharted are probably the same people that get confused and refuse to reconcile the fact that Wolfenstein: TNO is both campy pulp, and serious character drama, complaining it 'can't be both'. Movies do both these things all the time: Indiana jones and James Bond for the uncharted complaint, and stuff like Fargo for the wolfenstein one. It's all a matter of tone.
 
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