Information originally from MinnMax’s Ben Hanson. There is an existing game used to describe this new game to Hanson as a point of reference, and all we know is that that game is not Hitman.
Considering the fact that when I think of naughty dog I think of great story-driven games this is just sad.
They’re not opposites. Baldur’s Gate 3 is both of those things, for instance.
Did you mean to reply to someone else?
No, I meant to reply to you. “A lot of player freedom” is not at odds with a great story-driven game, and I gave an example of a game that fits both criteria, so I think it’s unfortunate that the perception is that you can only have one or the other.
“Let’s give them lots of player freedom this time!”
Play testers continually don’t look at a set piece vista the developers and artists spent 400 hours creating.
“Well, that’s enough of that. Back to the rails.”
I’m reminded of the techniques Valve used for this type of thing in the Half-Life episodes.
Say, for instance, they have a bit of destruction physics that they think looks memorable and they want people to see. They’ll have a Combine soldier shoot at you from that direction, to force your attention that way. They may also set the event on a “Look Trigger” so that it will only happen while the player is looking at it.
Yeah. Valve invented most of the attention direction techniques for Half-life (light, motion, etc, etc.) Trailblazers.
Every WoW developer ever.
Ironically I looked at shit far more when I (finally) got a flying mount in each expansion than I ever did while stuck on the ground.
Alright, can’t really get hyped without anything else to go on.
I was pretty fine with the way Last of Us 1 and 2 were handled, did a pretty good job at telling a story, without making it feeling like a linear corridor game. More freedom in a similar type of game would be nice, but generally it just seems to mean more downtime traveling between objectives occasionally interrupted by random encounters. If that is what they mean with more freedom, and not something else like character creation or branching storylines or whatever.
Reading the article, he refers to Elden Ring. I personally hate that kind of story telling though. I know a lot of people are absolutely lyrical about the game, but that’s probably more thanks to the gameplay. The story in that game is just being dripfed without much context and they are being intentionally vague about so many things. It’s more like a passive way of revealing little bits of the world without ever fully explaining anything.
Last of Us 1: “You have the freedom to kill this doctor, or you can just shoot him in the leg or something.”
*Player shoots him in the leg*
Last of Us 2:
News news news, it may also be using a game controller to translate user input into character actions.
The freedom to make a PNS account maybe?
Players: Can we have more co-op with a sturdy storyline, and maybe offline play?
Game Developers: lol fam 💀
Truthfully, all sorts of players are asking for all sorts of things, and you’ve got co-op story-driven games still coming out from other sources. Systems-driven games are way up my alley, and I’ll happily take one of those even without co-op. Besides, if a PlayStation game came out with co-op, it wouldn’t be offline co-op.
