Giant Bomb Thread The Third: #TeamBrad

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Typographenia said:
Yeah, I was really surprised by how excited he was about the series in general. Jeff never struck me as someone that really felt strongly one way or the other about the GTA games, but he seemed really positive overall on them. Made me want to replay Vice City, but I haven't ever owned it. Only ever played it over at my friend's place, and the whole "I never used cheat codes/did crazy stuff in GTA4 despite doing it in previous games" thing was spot on for me. We used to just do stupid crap all of the time in Vice City, but I never really thought about it in GTA4. Sure, I'd do dumb stuff right before quitting the game, but I just felt okay doing what the game normally presented me in it. Never really thought too much about it until he brought it up.
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I rate the GTAs as 4/DLC (Top 10 game ever) > VC > 3 > SA, so my opinion differs to him, but it was just cool to have him recap the evolution of the series along with his opinion on the changes.

Probably the best Jar Time question/answer yet.
 
I want to listen to the GOTY bombcast but there's way too many games I didn't get around to this year. Not sure if I want to risk full disclosure.
 
Mr. F said:
I want to listen to the GOTY bombcast but there's way too many games I didn't get around to this year. Not sure if I want to risk full disclosure.
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I fast-forwarded through half of it. More often than not, I don't get around to playing games until years after they release, which makes Giant Bomb's stance on spoilers insanely frustrating.
 
pirata said:
I fast-forwarded through half of it. More often than not, I don't get around to playing games until years after they release, which makes Giant Bomb's stance on spoilers insanely frustrating.
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Not really, because when else do they frankly talk about games? Spoilercasts are few and far between. Have we even had one this year?

They have to talk about them sometime, and lumping all the spoiler talk into GOTY is a good way of letting people know to stay the hell away if they don't want to be spoiled.

Play games sooner or don't listen, but don't complain about it! It's great.
 
I tend to side with Jeff in that I generally don't give a shit about spoilers, sometimes even going as far as to spoil myself.

It's all about your experience of the journey, man.
 
This is the first year in a while I haven't played some of the bigger games I'm interested in, so I think I'll probably skip the GOTY podcasts. Should be fine with all the video content though.
 
Antiwhippy said:
Oh I know that I'm in the minority.

Like Jeff though I am largely apathetic to it.
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For GOTY stuff I agree.

I haven't watched any videos yet, only listened to the day 1 podcast. I figured I'd want to hear them deliberate before seeing the videos that just go straight to the winners.

Just clicked on the first video, HOLY SHIT 40 SOMETHING MINUTES? Wow.
 
JackEtc said:
For GOTY stuff I agree.

I haven't watched any videos yet, only listened to the day 1 podcast. I figured I'd want to hear them deliberate before seeing the videos that just go straight to the winners.

Just clicked on the first video, HOLY SHIT 40 SOMETHING MINUTES? Wow.
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The last 25 minutes are of Brad playing ME3
 
pirata said:
I fast-forwarded through half of it. More often than not, I don't get around to playing games until years after they release, which makes Giant Bomb's stance on spoilers insanely frustrating.
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Well for people who play games when they come out listening to people tip toe around spoilers the rest of the year is also frustrating. I like these podcasts because it's the one time they aren't afraid to talk specifics. All the complaining about it is inane.
 
JackEtc said:
Just clicked on the first video, HOLY SHIT 40 SOMETHING MINUTES? Wow.
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Yeah I was surprised to see that too. I wondered how they could sustain their pretty great parody for that long.

Still pretty neat to see the highlights of the Leviathan DLC revelations. Can't believe they left that info-dump hidden in some final DLC.
 
(not really) spoilers for TWD

Brad says it shows the entire industry how meaningful choice in an interactive storyline should be done. I'm sorry but your choices in TWD don't amount to anything inside the game itself. They might shape how you perceive the story but that's the bare minimum an interactive story needs to do in order to justify being interactive. TWD might be a high water mark for writing in games but not for interactive narrative as a whole. Praise it for the right thing.
 
eot said:
(not really) spoilers for TWD

Brad says it shows the entire industry how meaningful choice in an interactive storyline should be done. I'm sorry but your choices in TWD don't amount to anything inside the game itself. They might shape how you perceive the story but that's the bare minimum an interactive story needs to do in order to justify being interactive. TWD might be a high water mark for writing in games but not for interactive narrative as a whole. Praise it for the right thing.
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A story with a well considered beginning, middle, and end -- a single, dramatically sound through line -- will trump a patchwork narrative with a bunch of completely different outcomes every time. Surely you wouldn't consider Choose Your Own Adventure books to be great literature?

The Walking Dead does it right because they know the story they want to tell from the outset. Your choices color your interactions with individual characters and define to an extent your role in the events that play out, but the plot is the plot, as it should be.
 
ya and we've seen examples of devs trying to really make a choose your own adventure type game where your choices really have consequences, games like Heavy Rain. That was a bit of mess plot wise though and even Mass Effect which tries to make it seem like your choices mattered never really hit that promise because no matter what your always going to reach the same one or two conclusions. The only way I can see that type of design and storytelling being viable is to make a game which is maybe an hour and a half to two hours long, but you can replay it over and over again to get drastically different outcomes.
 
Eh, I've already had Spec Ops spoiled to hell and back for me and I just bought it off steam. We'll see. :P Though ironically it was the spoilers that made me want to play it.

I tend to appreciate how the scenario/story is made rather than finding satisfaction from the shock or appreciation of the twists. Plus I have no patience, which is why I sometimes wiki a film's plot as I'm watching it or read the final chapters of a book when I'm only midway through.
 
rudds said:
A story with a well considered beginning, middle, and end -- a single, dramatically sound through line -- will trump a patchwork narrative with a bunch of completely different outcomes every time. Surely you wouldn't consider Choose Your Own Adventure books to be great literature?
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In a game, the story I make is far better than the authorial mandated outcome of the designer.
 
rudds said:
A story with a well considered beginning, middle, and end -- a single, dramatically sound through line -- will trump a patchwork narrative with a bunch of completely different outcomes every time. Surely you wouldn't consider Choose Your Own Adventure books to be great literature?

The Walking Dead does it right because they know the story they want to tell from the outset. Your choices color your interactions with individual characters and define to an extent your role in the events that play out, but the plot is the plot, as it should be.
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So meaningful choice should be essentially cosmetic and mostly just get out of the way of a linear story?

I don't buy it. There's nothing wrong with games relying on non-interactive stuff, but TWD succeeded in spite of its choice, not because of it. It's good because of its story and characters, period. It would suck if other games embraced its anemic choice system.
 
Jake Tower said:
In a game, the story I make is far better than the authorial mandated outcome of the designer.
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I disagree with that as a blanket statement. If I can have a noticeable impact on how things play out, that's cool, but I wont care if the writing is terrible (often due to a lack of "authorial mandate"). Maybe a non-existent version of The Walking Dead with triple the development budget could give me both great writing and significant choice in a satisfactory way...
 
imho illusory perception of meaningful choice, if satisfyingly executed, is superior to actual choice poorly executed

the gold standard is obviously meaningful choices meaningfully executed but I will settle until that occurs
 
Chairman Yang said:
So meaningful choice should be essentially cosmetic and mostly just get out of the way of a linear story?

I don't buy it. There's nothing wrong with games relying on non-interactive stuff, but TWD succeeded in spite of its choice, not because of it. It's good because of its story and characters, period. It would suck if other games embraced its anemic choice system.
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What is meaningful to you might not be to someone else, and vice-versa. TWD succeded at exactly what it set out to do, the choices are there to get you more involved emotionally.
 
rudds said:
A story with a well considered beginning, middle, and end -- a single, dramatically sound through line -- will trump a patchwork narrative with a bunch of completely different outcomes every time. Surely you wouldn't consider Choose Your Own Adventure books to be great literature?

The Walking Dead does it right because they know the story they want to tell from the outset. Your choices color your interactions with individual characters and define to an extent your role in the events that play out, but the plot is the plot, as it should be.
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The tension between authored and interactive narrative is a huge topic and how much interactivity you can have while still telling a good story is something developers will probably be exploring for a long time. However, I think TWD pretends to be something it's not.
It gives you choices like saving Duck or Shawn and then the same person dies regardless of what you choose. Moments like that shatter the illusion of choice and that undermines what's good about interactive narrative in the first place
. The interactivity in Lee's relationship with Clementine, on the other hand, works great because it never pretends to be more than it is. It just shapes your relationship with her which is something they're able to support.

Games like The Witcher 2 go much further exploring how supporting player choices can add to the narrative. TW2 does have a mostly pre-determined plot, but your perspective on the events and characters of the game will differ greatly depending on what you choose to do in a way that's really quite awesome. To me that's meaningful choice done right. Again, I think TWD does lots of things right, like moment to moment character interaction, but I don't think it's a better game for
things like conveniently killing the one character that could've lived / died in ep.1 after they were relegated to off-screen duty during most of ep.2. It feels like a lack of resources rather than an artistic decision.


Also, while on the topic of TWD:
The ending was by far the best moment of the game, but maybe nobody wanted to spoil it for Jeff
 
bobeth said:
What is meaningful to you might not be to someone else, and vice-versa. TWD succeded at exactly what it set out to do, the choices are there to get you more involved emotionally.
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TWD's choices killed a lot of the emotion. It literally might have had more impact with no interactivity rather than the fake interactivity we actually got.

For example, if you could pick one of two characters
to die, you automatically knew both would die, because the game couldn't handle a significantly different story branch.
That immediately dampened the impact of the
second character's death
.

Another example is how you interact with Kenny. No matter how you treated him and how much he liked or disliked you,
you'd be stuck with him for the majority of the game.
It makes all of the interactions with him feel superficial.

Yet another example, from the last episode:
the crazy guy who owned the car with the stuff your group stole. It doesn't matter if you took the stuff or not. If you did loot it, the guy gets justifiably angry and you might feel blameworthy. If you didn't, he gives you some strained reasons to try to convince you you're still guilty, but all of the impact is completely drained.
Telltale could've had more emotional impact by creating some limited consequences here, but instead chose to keep to the same path in an incredibly contrived, artificial-feeling way.

Don't get me wrong. TWD did have some emotional impact for me (heavily concentrated with the Lee/Clem relationship), and I liked the experience overall. But that was in spite of the choices, not because of them. This is not a case where Telltale had to choose between different consequences and a focused, tight, impactful story. It's a case where some consequences would have ENHANCED the story and emotion.
 
pirata said:
I fast-forwarded through half of it. More often than not, I don't get around to playing games until years after they release, which makes Giant Bomb's stance on spoilers insanely frustrating.
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Basically.

It's really too bad I can't listen and enjoy these podcasts. I've played fuck all from this year. I've still played fuck all from last year!

Can we get a 2012's 1998 GOTY podcast? >_>
 
Chairman Yang said:
Yet another example, from the last episode:
the crazy guy who owned the car with the stuff your group stole. It doesn't matter if you took the stuff or not. If you did loot it, the guy gets justifiably angry and you feel blameworthy. If you didn't, he gives you some bullshit reasons and tries to convince you you're still guilty, but all of the impact is completely drained.
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I was absolutely hoping they would
gone the Fallout/Mass Effect/Alpha Protocol route and had one very specific set of circumstances and dialogue choices that would enable him to see the error of his ways, as a reward of doing everything from the past four episodes, coincidentally (because you wouldn't know the ramifications ahead of time) "perfectly". If only they had that, I feel like it would deflect a lot of the criticism.

But as far as choices as a 'character will remember your choices' mechanic goes, they (SUPER spoilers)
used it incredibly well to play with your expectations, as Carley remembers something right before she's suddenly killed. It's effective because having that text on the screen enables you to be just as surprised as Lee. And then at the very end, Lee's final words are all remembered by Clementine, in a thematic way to remind the player that the decisions you that player have made along the way are more for Clementine's sake than your own.

Powerful stuff, man.

BLACK BOXES EVERYWHERE.
 
pirata said:
I fast-forwarded through half of it. More often than not, I don't get around to playing games until years after they release, which makes Giant Bomb's stance on spoilers insanely frustrating.
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They barely ever talk about spoilers and it would be extremely annoying hearing the game of the year podcasts if they talked around certain parts of games.
 
BigJiantRobut said:
This close to pulling the trigger on a Fuck Ryan Davis shirt. But when the hell would I wear it?
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You just need to put a flyer out in your community announcing a big party for everyone named Ryan Davis. Get everyone to show up at a designated location, walk into the room from the back, yell loudly to draw their attention, stroll confidently through the middle of the crowd pointing toward your shirt, stand in the doorway to the exit, flip them all the bird, and then exit, leaving them all to wonder what just happened.
 
rudds said:
A story with a well considered beginning, middle, and end -- a single, dramatically sound through line -- will trump a patchwork narrative with a bunch of completely different outcomes every time. Surely you wouldn't consider Choose Your Own Adventure books to be great literature?
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But those aren't the only choices, surely.

Look, this interactive storytelling thing is brand spanking new when compared to the history of storytelling, at least in "printed" or mass-market media, so people are still trying to figure things out. There's nothing inherent to choice that disqualifies the telling of a good story.

Think about it from a science fiction point of view: there are plenty of good "alternate timeline" stories in science fiction. There's no inherent reason you can't structure those as branches in an interactive story, rather than brief episodes that stray into an alternate timeline or alternate universe.

The reason Choose Your Own Adventure books aren't great literature has less to do with some inherent flaw in the very idea of interactive story, and more to do with the fact that:
1. They attempted to shoehorn narrative choice into a medium that isn't well constructed for it.
2. It was a series of several hundred books (when you include the young readers versions and various spinoffs) churned out as quickly as possible, so the writing wasn't great.
3. They were books for kids, so the emphasis was on shoving a lot of crazy endings into a very small printed space, instead of exploring literally anything about characters or relationships or long-term ramifications of seemingly small decisions, etc.
 
Walking Dead would have worked better as choose your own adventure books because the writer doesn't have to produce assets and wrangle voice actors. It would be a lot more possible to have dramatic changes, and carry those changes into the next book. There aren't any well written choose your own adventure books for the same reason that writing in videogames generally sucks. There's a stigma attached to the genre that's going to keep away the better authors and readers.

Walking Dead couldn't commit to its choices because Telltale would have needed to make a half dozen (or more) episode 5s. It's a lot of expense for very little gain.
 
Aaron said:
Walking Dead would have worked better as choose your own adventure books because the writer doesn't have to produce assets and wrangle voice actors. It would be a lot more possible to have dramatic changes, and carry those changes into the next book. There aren't any well written choose your own adventure books for the same reason that writing in videogames generally sucks. There's a stigma attached to the genre that's going to keep away the better authors and readers.

Walking Dead couldn't commit to its choices because Telltale would have needed to make a half dozen (or more) episode 5s. It's a lot of expense for very little gain.
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I agree with everything in this post.
 
It's true that the time and resources that need to go into making truly impactful choices in a game are huge and may be difficult to justify financially, especially when the possible permutations get ridiculous but I'd still like to think someday some developer will go all in on the ambition and nail it.

The Witcher 2 came a good way, all within a single game, which I'm sure is easier, they were willing to let the player miss out on big chunks of beautifully rendered content based on player decisions. The overarching plot stays on a pretty set course, which makes sense because Geralt is only a small piece to the bigger puzzle but the world can be left in some seriously different states. Maybe it takes the cheaper development costs of a development team in Poland to convince the money people that a game can be made better by not guiding the player through ever little piece of content created. We'll see if they can continue to pull it off as they move farther into the story and more decisions play into it. Maybe they won't even try and will just choose a canon version of the events for the 3rd game.
 
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