David Cage's games get attacked for "no gameplay" yet LucasArts games are worshipped

Don't want to be rude, but if you can't tell the difference in gameplay between games like Monkey Island 2 or Day of the Tentacle, and Heavy Rain, then you're not paying enough attention when you play.
 
Fbh said:
Lots of lucas arts game have puzzles
"Get X item to interact with this character so he gives you the key to open that door which will give you access to a new item you need to progress the story".

Now I honestly think Heavy Rain managed to give the feeling of playing because of the fact that the characters could die. During action heavy scenes you felt a sort of "pressure" because you knew that if you screwed up too much the character might actually die with no "checkpoint" and no "try again".
That alone was enough to make it really enjoyable to me.


But they didn't do that with beyond: two souls.
All the sense of pressure and urgency was gone when you knew that even if you screwed up the game everything would be fine.

Both game felt like an interactive movie. But at least in Heavy Rain it felt like my actions and input were relevant. In Beyond it just felt like I pressed stuff for the cutscene to continue

PS: Also Lucasarts game had fun dialog and great characters. David Cage feels like a teen was trying to write a "deep and emotional" story while failing at it
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even then in some instances you cna put the cntroller down and our choices would be made for you if you didnt answer them fast enough. its not like palying a movie, its literally watching a movie
 
Smooth Operator said:
It's because Cage is a really bad writer. When you have no gameplay, you must at least have a good story/characters.

LucasArts games are well written, that's why they're worshipped, even if there's no "real" gameplay.

(Edited)
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This is really hyperbolic, cage games are written just fine, they have some quirkiness but they are no where near "bad".
 
velociraptor said:
My point exactly.

So how can anyone suggest David Cage games have no gameplay?

The player has a significant input throughout the entire experience.
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That's an awfully round about way to point out a fallacy considering you actually put forth an (admittedly uneducated) argument for KOTOR not containing gameplay.
 
I think you should have made a Walking Dead vs Heavy Rain thread, but even then you'd have to be open to writing talk, because actually people say The Walking Dead has no gameplay too, the difference is that it gets a lot more praise, so the criticism is not as evident.

I'd say Cage's and Telltale's games are closer to being high budget western visual novels than point n click adventure games, and I don't even say that as a negative thing, I like them.

And the reason some people like Walking Dead while they dislike Heavy Rain is the same reason for anyone to like one visual novel and not the other: They think the story/characters/setting are better.

Katawa Shoujo is better than both though.
 
I've always considered Cage's games to be point n click adventures, thats pretty much what they are and I think that style fits the games he makes just fine.

As mentioned though, the story and characters need to be strong, and at least IP and HR have issues in that department. I haven't played Beyond yet, but I plan on it soon.
 
One of my biggest hopes for Virtual Reality is that it'll help us move beyond this notion that gameplay can only be defined as one in direct physical conflict with another.
 
fvng said:
right right, QTEs are only acceptable when it's coming from GAF cult favorite Shenmue.
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MormaPope said:
The "well opening a door is a quick time event so HAH" posts are out there.

Shenmue was a pioneer in quick time events. Why did Shenmue have quick time events? Because Shenmue 1 has reallllllyyyy sloooooooooooowwwwww paaaaaaaaaaaacing. You spend most of the game running around the environment, talking to strangers, rotating objects, and examining objects. Shenmue 1 is the equivalent to a really dry/info heavy prologue for an action epic.

So to make the game more interesting, I imagine the team behind the game decided to let the player in on what would typically be cutscene action. Instead of Ryo kicking everyone's ass in a predetermined cutscene, the player now has stake in the outcome. Shenmue 1&2 has moments where failing a QTE can influence gameplay and what the player does for the next hour or few hours. Story and gameplay branches that lead to the same result, but how you got there was different.

You know what QTE's amount to now? Gameplay padding. Instead of watching a predetermined outcome, the player has to pay attention and play simon says to progress or to not die. Instead of sitting and watching animations happen in peace, developers want the player to feel involved, because maybe from their point of view, the amount of time of watching would add up and make those predetermined outcomes seem useless (which they probably are).
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Quantic Dream games amount to only QTEs and those affecting outcomes rather than having more realized gameplay along with QTEs affecting the outcome.
 
velociraptor said:
Haven't played it but watching it on YouTube.

There is no 'gameplay'. You click some stuff and the players fight for you.
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That's the gameplay, it can be pretty involving. Spatial awareness, stats awareness and other things affect how successful your clicking decisions are. Not comparable to one-sided button prompts.
I believe there's a dual analog version on Xbox, I assume the gameplay is essentially the same.
 
PhineBuyM3 said:
I've only played Heavy Rain, but judging from the comments this could apply to all his games. Cage tries to focuses more on story,characters, plot, and emotions. He fails at all of those things. People are then stuck with a game that has shit gameplay and a shitty story. A game like Telltale's The Walking Dead has an awesome story, so it's get a pass on having the gameplay it has.
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This is the truth. I've seen some people say stuff like "how come people shit on Heavy Rain and Beyond but then praise TWD: The Game??", as if it's somehow hypocritical, failing to see the huge difference between the series: quality of writing.

I'm not claiming TWD is perfect, but for a videogame, it does have relatively good writing, characters and voice acting. It accomplished the rare feat of making gamers actually care about the fate of digital people. That's why it's received such acclaim, and why a lot of people see it favorably to Quandric Dream's games. Not because The Secret Agenda to keep David Cage down, or whatever. I really liked Heavy Rain, but it was a unintentionally fucking hilarious cheesefest. From what I've played of Beyond, it's even worse. If' you're gonna make a game that's entirely focused on story and characters, you're gonna be held to a higher standard than normal.
 
Hellsing321 said:
Because puzzle solving is far more engaging than playing simon says.

Edit: Also David Cage's writing is bad and he should feel bad.
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I mean, if your game is going to revolve around standard QTEs, it would probably help to have the choices you make hold more significant consequences to the plot. Ultimately, you were usually only given an illusion of choice, and the "branching" was hollow. And if there is no solid writing to back up what is there...
 
CecilRousso said:
Don't want to be rude, but if you can't tell the difference in gameplay between games like Monkey Island 2 or Day of the Tentacle, and Heavy Rain, then you're not paying enough attention when you play.
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You are not reading on which criteria these games are being compared. None of the aforementioned games would appeal to any gamer who is not interested in story-focused games with little to no twitch gameplay.


dream said:
I can almost buy that, but then I start thinking about how obtuse some of the puzzles in LucasArts (and especially Sierra) games were, and I'm not entirely sure that it's a net positive. Puzzles like, say, the the way you retrieve the mood ring in Sam and Max, or the way you make a moustache in Gabriel Knight 3 are "interactive," but they're so convoluted and purposely obtuse that the interactivity seems artificial to me.

But maybe it's just my perspective. I was always one to play adventure games for the stories.
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Agreed 100% even though I loved those games, definitely had to buy a hint book to get past a lot of obtuse puzzles in King's Quest V and other Sierra games

z5RJ2tN.jpg
 
fvng said:
FoA is a better experience overall, but this isn't about which is a better game. I'm baffled why you don't understand why games that suffer from the same lack of traditional 'gameplay' are being compared. Fate of Atlantis is a superior game, by far, that doesn't change the fact that the same complaints could be lodged at both of these games, and I LOVE LucasArts game
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Heavy Rain is basically a bad adventure game. Could you lodge some similar complaints against all adventure games? I suppose, but that's ignoring all of the things adventure games did well. Adventure games are largely about story, exploration and puzzle solving. Just because HR has a story, some basic exploration, and puzzle solving doesn't mean it's automatically as good as any other adventure game.

The story in HR is largely terrible. It's interesting in concept, but outside of a few scenes that work based on shock, it's poorly executed. A good adventure game (like, say, Grim Fandango) often has a good story. You can't just say "we're not considering story", because story was fundamental to adventure games.

The exploration in HR is limited and fairly boring. Part of the joy of something like Grim Fandango was exploring the world of the dead, which was colorful, vibrant, and interesting. HR was dull, grey and boring. Yes, it looked good for the time, but can you honestly say that any of those areas were interesting to explore?

Finally, in terms of puzzle solving, HR was extremely limited and rudimentary. There weren't really too many puzzle, instead QTEs were substituted. I'll address QTEs in a second, but they're not the same as puzzles. "Push the buttons marked on the screen" is very different from "figure out how to solve problem A using items B, C and D", or even more generally "explore this area and find items to figure out how to solves problem A"

Right, but QTEs are being dismissed as decent gameplay mechanic
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Here's why: QTEs boil down your interaction with a game to "monkey see, monkey do". They put a prompt on the screen, you do exactly what they tell you to, or you fail. For some people, this isn't really gameplay, or at least it's not good gameplay. The best gameplay experiences (IMO) come from a game setting up rules and constraints, and then challenging you to solve the game within these rules and constraints. QTEs fundamentally break this because each one has it's own set of rules, and you don't know the rules before the game thrusts the QTE on you. It allows for much more cinematic looking experiences, but at the cost of feeling like you have any agency beyond "win" or "lose". Figuring out the solution to a puzzle in an old Lucas Arts game felt like an accomplishment, because you took what the game gave you and applied it in some clever way. Figuring out a QTE has no sense of accomplishment because you're just hitting the buttons they tell you to.
 
LucasArts made good games that had lots of laughs and you got to use your brain

It sincerely does not matter that they had "no gameplay" because LucasArts' games were a blast to play. David Cage receives deserved flak for his games because they have questionable writing and dull puzzles, tending towards QTE:s.

And if someone insists on calling LA's games bad because of no gameplay, do you also discard other puzzle games with slower, thought-out gameplay like Phoenix Wright, Professor Layton, Picross, Pushmo and their like?
 
This thread....0_0

1) GAF is not one person who loves LucasArts Adventures and hates David Cage

2) You are literally the only person I've ever seen equate these two types of games.
 
solving puzzles is gameplay

David Cage's games are more like these "interactive movies" in the laserdisc days, watch a "full motion video", press a button, the next video, press a button...
 
How bad or good Telltale's recent games and David Cage's games are compared to each other is a separate discussion, and no matter what the result of that discussion, they're both inferior to the best LucasArts games in the gameplay aspect.

Good puzzles with clear objectives, multiple available puzzles at once and great exploration of the enviroments is so much better then "try and guess which object you need to highlight to progress the game".

I really enjoyed The Wolf Among Us, but it doesn't even play in the same league like Monkey Island 2.
 
Gbraga said:
I think you should have made a Walking Dead vs Heavy Rain thread, but even then you'd have to be open to writing talk, because actually people say The Walking Dead has no gameplay too, the difference is that it gets a lot more praise, so the criticism is not as evident.

I'd say Cage's and Telltale's games are closer to being high budget western visual novels than point n click adventure games, and I don't even say that as a negative thing, I like them.

And the reason some people like Walking Dead while they dislike Heavy Rain is the same reason for anyone to like one visual novel and not the other: They think the story/characters/setting are better.

Katawa Shoujo is better than both though.
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What this person said. The old point-and-click is pretty damn different from games like Heavy Rain and the Telltale games. Telltale has fairly good writers, Quantic Dream does not. The story enhances the gameplay, which is why Telltale gets the praise and Quantic gets the backlash. Still, the gameplay is minimal.

Strictly speaking on the topic without talking about story/character quality, the old point-and-click has gameplay that goes beyond the game itself. It takes thought to solve puzzles, to put the pieces together. Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls don't have that. They play more like QTE, involving minimal thought and little puzzle solving.
 
Echoing what others have said: technically puzzles were gameplay, but even factoring those out (an arguable benefit!) the writing, story, and acting are far better in Grim Fandango and The Walking Dead than most of David Cage's games. Whether they themselves truly have great writing is another story, but it's certainly more entertaining and engaging.

I do feel that for all the crap people give David Cage's QTEs though that they're actually some of the better examples: It's easier to forgive when it's not getting in the way of meatier gameplay (see: Bayonetta) but from my memory of the Heavy Rain demo (I quit the main game just as this demo part started) the QTEs actually made the cutscenes dynamic, rather than "press X to not die." When it's like that it actually allows you to have a cinematic fight that's actually interactive, which is kind of nice.
 
Gbraga said:
I think you should have made a Walking Dead vs Heavy Rain thread, but even then you'd have to be open to writing talk, because actually people say The Walking Dead has no gameplay too, the difference is that it gets a lot more praise, so the criticism is not as evident.
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Bingo. Telltale's games have evolved to a point where they are CG cartoon shows. Walking Dead Season Season 2 and The Wolf Among Us have no puzzles of any difficulty. Their only challenging gameplay consists of a brief combat scene per episode, scenes which are no longer possible to fail. Yet they are praised endlessly.

Part of that is because they are actually well written and entertaining. Wolf Among Us is especially excellent.

Yet they have reached a level of "not-game" that deserves heavy criticism, not constant praise.
 
dream said:
I can almost buy that, but then I start thinking about how obtuse some of the puzzles in LucasArts (and especially Sierra) games were, and I'm not entirely sure that it's a net positive. Puzzles like, say, the the way you retrieve the mood ring in Sam and Max, or the way you make a moustache in Gabriel Knight 3 are "interactive," but they're so convoluted and purposely obtuse that the interactivity seems artificial to me.

But maybe it's just my perspective. I was always one to play adventure games for the stories.
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That GK3 puzzle is infamously bad, though. You can't cherry pick one of the worst puzzles in adventure games and use it to dismiss all puzzles. I would say the majority of adventure games had a few bad puzzles in them, but this doesn't mean that puzzle solving = QTEs. It means, I suppose, that bad puzzle design is every bit as non-interactive as QTEs, but that's not exactly a defense of QTEs.
 
fvng said:
ha



I am literally not the only person who had made this comparison, and I never said GAF is one person, I made an observation based on gamers I've communicated with. gaming discourse is not limited to GAF
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Give us the name of the other guy, so we can find him and stop him.
 
p2535748 said:
Here's why: QTEs boil down your interaction with a game to "monkey see, monkey do". They put a prompt on the screen, you do exactly what they tell you to, or you fail. For some people, this isn't really gameplay, or at least it's not good gameplay. The best gameplay experiences (IMO) come from a game setting up rules and constraints, and then challenging you to solve the game within these rules and constraints. QTEs fundamentally break this because each one has it's own set of rules, and you don't know the rules before the game thrusts the QTE on you. It allows for much more cinematic looking experiences, but at the cost of feeling like you have any agency beyond "win" or "lose". Figuring out the solution to a puzzle in an old Lucas Arts game felt like an accomplishment, because you took what the game gave you and applied it in some clever way. Figuring out a QTE has no sense of accomplishment because you're just hitting the buttons they tell you to.
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Different interactions are attempting to pull different strings in the players. Which is to say, a QTE isn't attempting to engage the player in the same way that, say, Tetris is, which isn't attempting to engage the player in the same way Myst is. There are different goals in place.

I'd say QTE gameplay attempts to attain the same feeling of being in the zone that jeff minter games like Tempest 2000 or Space Giraffe do. "The Zone" is a feeling where your senses are so heightened that you can accomplish what looks like the impossible to outside people because you're so highly in-tuned. The force working against the player in QTE interactions is time, in this case. Time is also the force working against players in Tetris (or rather A force, since the other force is the amount of real estate left) but it's less tasked with trying to induce "being in the zone" and more focused on seeing how quickly the player can recognize spatial configuration. Which is all different from myst, where the force against the player is solely the abstract nature of the puzzle.

The degree of which these games accomplish their goal is probably what we should measure when doing reviews. I.E. I think music games are much better QTE games than, say, Dragon's Lair. But I think it's wrong to hold one game's goals up against another game's goals and claim they fail. Football Manager is not a poor game because it's not playing like FIFA, as an extreme example.

I think that was the point the OP was trying to get at... kinda. But, as many pointed out, the answer might simply be that people consider Cage's games, as a whole, to be poor quality.
 
CecilRousso said:
How bad or good Telltale's recent games and David Cage's games are compared to each other is a separate discussion, and no matter what the result of that discussion, they're both inferior to the best LucasArts games in the gameplay aspect.

Good puzzles with clear objectives, multiple available puzzles at once and great exploration of the enviroments is so much better then "try and guess which object you need to highlight to progress the game".

I really enjoyed The Wolf Among Us, but it doesn't even play in the same league like Monkey Island 2.
Click to expand...

To be fair, some of the LA early adventure games boiled down to "guess which random pair of items you need to pick to proceed" and some of them had no rhyme or reason to them.
 
Snuggles said:
This is the truth. I've seen some people say stuff like "how come people shit on Heavy Rain and Beyond but then praise TWD: The Game??", as if it's somehow hypocritical, failing to see the huge difference between the series: quality of writing.

I'm not claiming TWD is perfect, but for a videogame, it does have relatively good writing, characters and voice acting. It accomplished the rare feat of making gamers actually care about the fate of digital people. That's why it's received such acclaim, and why a lot of people see it favorably to Quandric Dream's games. Not because The Secret Agenda to keep David Cage down, or whatever. I really liked Heavy Rain, but it was a unintentionally fucking hilarious cheesefest. From what I've played of Beyond, it's even worse.
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The Walking Dead gave me perspective on being a parent and trying to raise a child when everything in the world is against you.

The themes of TWD:

Fatherhood
Humanity is the biggest threat for humanity
Accepting the consequences of your own life
Destiny (
you start the game in a police car, on your way to be sentenced to live or executed. Lee doesn't escape this fate.)
Family isn't based on blood alone
You can't control people, you can only influence them

Thematically TWD is a full package.
 
Smooth Operator said:
It's because Cage is a really bad writer. When you have no gameplay, you must at least have a good story/characters.

LucasArts games are well written, that's why they're worshipped, even if there's no "real" gameplay.

(Edited)
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border said:
Here's a shocking revelation -- maybe the people criticizing David Cage games are not the same people that love Lucasarts adventure games!
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hey look, we have two winners today!
 
truly101 said:
To be fair, some of the LA early adventure games boiled down to "guess which random pair of items you need to pick to proceed" and some of them had no rhyme or reason to them.
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I can't speak for games like Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion, but Monkey Island 1&2, and Day of the Tentacle are games that aren't like that.
 
truly101 said:
To be fair, some of the LA early adventure games boiled down to "guess which random pair of items you need to pick to proceed" and some of them had no rhyme or reason to them.
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I'd love for you to name specifics here. Lucasarts adventures are in part praised for generally NOT having such puzzles as this. Monkey Island, for example, doesn't have a single puzzle like this.
 
Snuggles said:
This is the truth. I've seen some people say stuff like "how come people shit on Heavy Rain and Beyond but then praise TWD: The Game??", as if it's somehow hypocritical, failing to see the huge difference between the series: quality of writing.

I'm not claiming TWD is perfect, but for a videogame, it does have relatively good writing, characters and voice acting. It accomplished the rare feat of making gamers actually care about the fate of digital people. That's why it's received such acclaim, and why a lot of people see it favorably to Quandric Dream's games. Not because The Secret Agenda to keep David Cage down, or whatever. I really liked Heavy Rain, but it was a unintentionally fucking hilarious cheesefest. From what I've played of Beyond, it's even worse. If' you're gonna make a game that's entirely focused on story and characters, you're gonna be held to a higher standard than normal.
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Beyond is ridiculous. Some people couldn't get over it and hated it, I enjoy all the stupidity. It should be called Jodie's Bizarre Adventures. Or maybe The Jodie Conviction.
 
Fallout-NL said:
I wrote my thesis about metaphor and videogames which compared Grim Fandango to Heavy Rain. The thesis was actually published as an article in a scientific journal last summer.

If anyone's interested in reading it, send me a PM with your email address and I'll send you a PDF of the article.

The abstract can be found here:

http://muldisc.wordpress.com/2011/0...ey-the-source-path-goal-schema-in-videogames/
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This is terrific, thank you. Much more thoughtful than half the posts and predictable gifs in this thread
 
Telltale does suffer from the same problem Cage does.

The difference is that their games have an enjoyable storyline and characters while Cage's don't.

Cage gets doubly crapped on because most people don't consider an endless stream of QTE's real gameplay and they also think the writing in his games is shit.
 
I really enjoy David Cage games, but don't see how such a direct line can be drawn between them and the Lucasarts classics.

Games have not lacked for good storytelling for decades, games just have a problem with good storytelling when they try to tell it like a movie or TV show. Traditional adventure games tell stories like they're interactive literature. Except the flowery detailed descriptions of Tolkien becomes optional and left to the player to discover as they themselves are forced to participate in the world building through the puzzle solving.
It's one thing to read three pages about how a dining room looks, it's entirely another to put it on the player to see the dining room and discover the details themselves.

What David Cage does doesn't allow for this, he's making interactive movies and not in the multimedia CD-Rom sense. David Cage wants to make Indiana Jones interactive, not an 'interactive novel starring Indiana Jones' like Fate of Atlantis.

He wants the pace, drama and tension of a film told in a way that the player is an active participant in.
It's not only a much more expensive prospect, but it's also apparently really fucking hard.

I love that he's trying and I hope he never stops. All that needs to happen is for him or someone he inspires to get it right once.
 
fvng said:
FoA is a better experience overall, but this isn't about which is a better game. I'm baffled why you don't understand why games that suffer from the same lack of traditional 'gameplay' are being compared. Fate of Atlantis is a superior game, by far, that doesn't change the fact that the same complaints could be lodged at both of these games, and I LOVE LucasArts game
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What the hell? Adventure gameplay is part of the foundations of our hobby. You can't get more traditional than that; time to give up on the horse, it's dead, accept your punishment in the form of GAF mocking.
 
fvng said:
ha



I am literally not the only person who had made this comparison, and I never said GAF is one person, I made an observation based on gamers I've communicated with. gaming discourse is not limited to GAF
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You may not be the only person to make the comparison in the grand scheme of things but I don't think the comparison is that well-substantiated. There is plenty to "play" and "interact" with in both David Cage games and LucasArts games. It's the basic degree of the interaction and the overall tone surrounding those interactions that are much different. For example, "Press X to Jason" is an unintentionally funny interaction anyway you slice it. LucasArts games typically commit to a self-aware tone or atmosphere so comedy comes from laughing with the game since it has let you in on the joke, so to speak. In Heavy Rain you're laughing at Scott Shelby or whatever puts a baby to bed with awkward animation. In Indigo Prophecy I'm laughing at the strange basketball mini-game with the twangy funk music.

Basically, David Cage makes B-movies for me to laugh at so there's some value in his stuff but the interactions are more limited. Look no further than the NahmanJayden YT channel to see what I mean.
 
Untalkative_Bunny said:
It's not, but even if it were, does it matter?

The companies in the videogame industry refer to their products as "entertainment software". And imo, the more variety in entertainment software, the better. No need to hate on things.
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No, it does not matter at all, and I have never claimed it did. In fact, I think it is completely okay for a "game" to be very light on gameplay as long as it presents an attractive experience. I very much enjoyed Gone Home for instance, even though many would state that it is hardly a game.

So we agree, I think.

My only point is that stating that either LucasArts games or David Cage's games are without gameplay is silly,
and that it is very unhelpful to make that the basis of a discussion.

The problem with Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy is that they are weak both on the gameplay AND story front. Many people take issue with this.
 
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