CLAYTON, ANDRE, PRINNY, ILLUSIVE MAN, NICHOLAS, AND MATHIAS BEGIN THE LONG WINDING FALLS INTO MADNESS AS SQUARE ANNOUNCES EVEN MORE 30 DOLLARS APPS, WHILE NINTENDO DOES MORE DUMB THINGS IN THE CORNER....
DISCUSSION POINTS:
LIVERPOOL NO MOH! :(
ONLIVE B.S.
TWEWY IOS PORT!
SWOTOR SILLINESS!
GUILD WARS 2 IS GREAT!
THE COSMIC DUMPING GROUND!
(FOR THOSE THAT WANT TO PLAY GW2 WITH HULK, HULKS SERVER IS "SORROWS FURNACE", SEARCH FOR HULK'S NAME)
Sword Art Online and Accel World are attempts to forsee and explain possible futures for videogames. Much in the vein of dot hack we have elements of love, rage, anger, revenge, perseverance and limit pushing mixed together with the endless mind set of being forced to grind day in and day out for two solid years due to the obsessions of an unclear curious madmen.... in short....
It's fucking awesome
I really don't get to give praise very often for videogames, but with guys like this writing books, that were later transformed into manga, anime, and apparantly videogames... its needless to say I found a new source of inspiration.
Why exactly am I loving this guys work so much? Because each adaptation I have seen so far is bringing something more and more to the vision of the world's he has created. Normally with mediums we see a source material, and then we see all other mediums just copying the source material. Dpending on the source material this system could really damn well work. Full Metal Alchemist kinda proved the point, but sword arts approach is really really REALLLY weird... what they did with the anime and manga can only be described as skipping or dancing.
Alright look, this might be alittle long but here's a run down. On the first day of joining SAO, everyone loses the ability to leave the game. Their logout command is gone, and due to the tech involved they cant just shut the device down and walk away. So the story is about 10,000 people being trapped in an mmo for over 2 years. The punch line? If you die in the game or someone tries to get you out of the game back in the real world... then you die in the real world.
The main character Kirito takes on the role of a soloist before the catastrophy starts, they never properly explain it, but he dislikes groups and prefers to do rpg's purely alone. The moment he finds out that this is a game of life or death, he immediately takes the cowardly route of running away from the noobs in order to protect himself and only himself. At this point in the story some things do get a bit hazy. Your never given much of an idea of how much grinding has occured, and all the main plot points that we see occur after krito is over lvl 70. So all time between those two very distinct very far points were turned into side stories ( they used the term side quests). The end results is that we see a human who was just told he could die, someone fearing death yet continuosly doing very difficult things in an RPG all alone, someone that realizes sometimes you need friends in order to survive, someone that fails to protect those friends, someone that falls into extreme depression, and someone that was saved by friends he once thought weren't worth the time. Alright, this sounds like alot ( and i left alot out), but this is all stuff that we see in the books. All the while the writer has explored what is happening to the other 10,000 people. Some randomly died, others slaughtered, some went on a PK frenzy, some became thieves, and a vast majority felt safety in numbers is key. We also see people going through all 7 stages of grief, accepting their situation, and accepting that sword art is now as real as the real world. It had become their home. The anime and manga would only show small snippets of the side arcs and cover a few points of what I just described above.
Normally this would be the part where hulk just starts smashing..... everything... but sword art is getting a free pass for being so enthralling. They did something no game company has ever done correctly. Content that can be viewed more then once, on more then one medium. Each time you read the manga or watch an episode of the anime, you'll find yourself wondering about the book. I really can't think of any examples of games to even experiment with something like this... or even use it effectively.
Every year we're trampled with Mass Effect , Gears of War, and other such knock off junk that very rarely does anything special except prove the point that the original team that made each story should also write the freaking books, while things like star wars just makes us all incredibly sad inside when we think about just how many eras, characters, powers, and worlds that have never been explored in almost 30 years of media and film production.
Every once in a while we may get a sick music album, a children's book, or a lonecomic exploring one of the more silly gags from a free to play mercenary based shooter, but when it comes to fore thought in making a ground break piece of source material that could very well be taken anywhere... we just don't get to see it much guys... and its really sad...
Maybe we need some kind of contest... excel saga and sword art were originally just entrances for a competition... and one of them was too long for the competition so it was just placed online for people to drool over. Perhaps people coming together, working hard on ideas, and then letting people to decide which idea should become a game, show, or book is the actual path we should all be considering.
( If you guys want to have a competition, then I'm totally game. I'll even find a prize for ya)
Narrative has always been a focus for myself and many of the minions. It's a credential to receive a perfect score in a hulk review, has been a firm backbone behind every game that has ever inspired us to become something more then we are right now, and most essentially... it helps bridge the gap and immerse the audience with whatever you are trying to say.
Modern game companies however, are really giving up on narrative in games either because they know they don't have the right talent to get things right, or for more absurd reasons like, "graphics sell the game , not story" which in the end feels more like excuses. I was once asked how can a modern game use light story narrative, while also creating a "AAA" experience without fear of producing something terrible from a narrative perspective.... in other words....how do I make a narrative work right when I don't have a phd in story telling...
The first thing I told the guy is that PHD's are not necessary for a good story.... the second thing I said is that it takes a world, a few points in that world, maybe some unbreakable laws, and something for people to focus on in that world.
Bastion by all means is not a perfect game, but narratively it used those imperfections to enhance the sense of mystery behind that world. We're never given a full explanation of every land inside that game and we certainly never learn enough about all the character to make decisions on what we believe was right or wrong in the present situation. We're just given personal accounts and hard facts like we'd see in a good history book, and in the face of modern videogames it broke all the rules. We had a silent protagonist that wasn't silent in nature, an enigmatic narrator breathing life into this world we're visiting as if this were some kind of children's story meant to teach moral lessons, and a couple complicated cultural love stories meant to teach us all a lesson about never waiting until the last moment, or missing your moment because you fell asleep.
In alot of of ways the narrative of Bastion is also considered character design... why not say we try mixing the two together?
Actually... you know what? Deus Ex already did this.
We never learned a great deal about Adam Jensen, we saw instances of his inflamed past, other instances of where he try and died doing what he saw was right, and then a second life that we ourselves was able to manipulate and control. We decided how Adam preferred to deal with situations and it also spoke volumes to how he was deciding to be in his second life. Did you kill people randomly? Decided to only do what was just? Serve the corporate interest? It all psychologically became a line on the face of what we call Adam Jensen. It's also an excellent way to sell the sequel... your decisions and philosophical beliefs changing how Adam Jensen later becomes.....I Pray they can pull it off.....
This type of narrative is not difficult... hell you could write up the basics for any videogame with one sheet of paper. What "AAA" publishers ultimately need to work on is where we go in the next few pages afterwords. Does our main character have a past? any family? yes we just stated that he's traumatized, but are we going to talk about how? why? do we explain to the audience what this is? any ways to cure it? do we leave it undiagnosed? A few very simple questions on what you want to happen in the story, what has happened to the main character, and executing these points is all the difference between a Call of Duty storyline and Deus Ex., and almost no one bothers doing this.
Part of this is our own fault for just continually buying games and hoping the studio will do better next time. The final blame I think lies more with publishers. Our own Lemon hatchet feels that Bioware may have envisioned a different game then what ea ultimately told them to make, and I'm slowly beginning to see what he means. Instances of the Jedi storyline sound for lack of a better word, "epic" whereas other storylines like storm trooper kept you entertained up till about 3/4ths of the way in. The game at this point begins to feel like something is missing, and this is something that seems to happen alot with games in the 3 out of 5 fists category with hulk. Somewhere it just stops feeling like the same game you were playing earlier. The game is here, the main character is here, the missions haven't changed, but the soul of the game begins to fade or rather "wane"... maybe its the Zynga Icarus effect again? Did our publishers get so close to the sun that they just burned themselves with their own mistakes?
I'm going to keep thinking on this. I think we have a little while left before the "calamity" strikes again....
CLAYTON, ANDRE, PRINNY, AND MODSQUAD RANT ABOUT THE JAFFE ILLNESS! AND IT'S LATEST VICTIM ALEX HUTCHINSON!
DISCUSSION POINTS:
JAFFE PULLS A GAFFE!
GO TO YOUR KENNEL!
TF2 FAILS!
ONLIVE JUST DIED!
GIRLFRIEND MODE!
EVERY JOURNALIST IS A RACIST...
EVERYBODY IS BEING SUED!
HANDHELD TALK...
♫ SAILING ALOOOOOOOONG THE **** RIVER WITH OUR FAVORITE DEVS AND PUBLISHERS♪
YOU WERE FIRED!
YOUR FRIENDS WERE FIRED!
SOME WERE GIVEN STOCK OPTIONS!
WILL LATER BE FIRED!
KICKEYE IS ROCKING THE PLACE!
ZYNGA IS PROBABLY GOING TO BE FIRED!
PRINNY SCARES US FOR HALF A SECOND...
IMPOSSIBLE STUDIOS AND THEIR BADASS MASCOT!
ANDRE JOINS THE PARTY!
WE ALL CATCH UP!
LONG BATMAN DISCUSSION!
GUILDWARS 2!
DIABLO3!
SWOTOR! DOWNLOAD
A LOOOONG TIME AGO HULK AND CLAYTON HAD A SERIES ABOUT BETTER GAMES AND WHAT NOT. ..
THIS IS SOMETHING LIKE A SEQUEL OR THE DLC EXCEPT ITS FREE.
BASICALLY, CLAYTON HAS BEEN RESEARCHING VARIOUS THINGS FOR A GAME HE'S MAKING IN THE DISTANT FUTURE, AND ANYTHING OF PARTICULAR INTEREST HE'S GOING TO TALK ABOUT IN THIS SERIES..
For those that haven't been paying attention to anime lately, we recently had the news that Bleach for all intensive purposes has been cancelled until further notice.While no official reason has been stated, we do have opinions (backed by very very sexy science) out their like our very own modsquad who believe that general interest tapered off after the Aizen saga. I didn't tell modsquad much about it at the time, but I had done a little research on the topic a while ago to improve a game idea.
I could go on forever about how bad the dubbing in English was, how 500+ episodes is just stupid, how the plot doesn't make sense, how the plot had unexplained elements, the lack of true death, and the ever so rigorous amount of plot holes, but none of that was what I really focused on during my studies.
A long time ago when I first saw this series, I remember seeing Ichigo powering up for the first time, it had a sort of eerie blueish glow outline that gave the impression that Ichigo had in some way changed. The music would also cut in to kind of fill the moment, and if done right make you feel energized or excited that you are about to see something crazy. I'd like to show an example, but it seems copyright has blocked most of the good ones online...TIME FOR HULK DOODLES!
Alright, Now here's the interesting bit, depending on how big the glow was and how the moment was set we start seeing different reactions. If the glow took up the whole page and it didn't have a specific reason, I was seeing stress, annoyment, dissapointment, and exhaustion from myself and others involved with the research.
Bleach has this tendency to focus more on the talking and the fighting, so doing a large DBZ inspired power up ( Bleach would take 3- 10 seconds) for the fight was all too common... here's a DBZ clip for reference ( DBZ can take 6- 30 minutes) .
Alright, so why this sudden change in opinion? Milking the franchise
certainly had an effect, and no purpose to some of the fights would also
be another, but we weren't looking at the series. We were only looking
at some silly special effect and how it was being used.
Our conclusion was the intensity, hue, and style being the deciding factors. We never realized it in the beginning, but each of the little power ups were very very different, and the ones used during side arcs were generally less fancy then in the main arc. I'm not going to bore you with numbers, but lets say out of the hundreds of times Ichigo has done the little power up only 50 or so looked genuinely the same, or at least shared common elements. Why? because to the anime these were the moments that mattered.
Retention in games is the idea that you need key moments all throughout the game meant to revitalize the viewer. In truth this is something first created in books, later movies, music, anime, ect, and you're supposed to build, build, and build for one of these critical moments, then some kind of emotional release after ( the before mentioned excitement) . In anime and games if you never see a build and never see a moment of excitement occur, then your project is going to lose retention within the viewers and players. Eventually they'll stop playing / viewing all together. In the case of Bleach, their was a kind of final-ness with the Aizen arc, and much like World Of Warcraft the developers tried to keep it going afterwords with very mixed results.
In Bleaches case we saw the builds taking longer and longer as the side arcs continued to grow in intolerable sizes. These side arc increases were necessary because at one point the anime was a week behind the anime, and unlike south park they can't make an entire episode within a week. So with lower quality, the need to fill time, and a serious stretching of everything involved means that less care and attention was made in that power up build, hence why certain moments made people feel excitement while in other moments disgust..
In terms of games I learned that if you ever use a power up like this, then we need two things, consistency and eventual change. At first it should be something small, whether it be a small glow or some form of attack ...it needs to have a beginning. As the game continues and we see the player change we should also see changes occurring within these basics. It could be anything from a chain of attacks like we see in kingdom hearts, a grow in the hue to envelope the player and his weapons, perhaps something that represents his current paragon status, maybe even something that is supposed to be a direct symbol of his soul, but that change needs to occur, and in between each of these changes the current form must always remain the same.
ITS ONLY IN THE STILLNESS THAT HULK LATER FEELS THE CHANGE!
SAD AND LONELY EDITION!
CLOP!
QWOP!
10 YEARS OF DLC!
CAPCOM SAYS SOME STUFF!
WEREWOLF BULLETS!
MORE BORDERLANDS STORIES!
MASS EFFECT 3!
ZYNGA IS SUED BITCHES!
EA IS DOING SOMETHING HULK APPROVES OF? *HULK GASP*
BATMAN TALK FOR SOME CRAZY REASON..
