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Detroit: Become Human

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Nikkolas said:
Why are you comparing those to a murder mystery like Heavy Rain?
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Because they're adventure games, which is the overarching category the game is in. Its right there in his post and just saying its a Mystery isn't really a response to his criticisms. He is in fact replying to your comment.

Nikkolas said:
Which is why I made sure to point this out in my post. I do not defend Cage's political incorrectness or the plot holes but I think it's completely fair to say the anger online against him transcends "he makes bad video games." He makes highly successful video games in a format people don't like and every criticism of Cage will come packaged with "he doesn't even make real video games."
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He makes video games that are insecure about their status as videogames and try to become more videogamey, while failing at being the "cinematic" media busting shining cities on the hill he proclaims he is making. He didn't figure out the basics of cameras until Beyond Two Souls and even then he didn't know how to use them effectively.

The fact that he has a savior complex and talks down to the entire industry could be forgiven if he was able to cross the Kanye Threshold where we forgive a lot due to talent. Hideo Kojima could take an upper decker in our apartment and we would be even.
 
Fell said:
"I have all these emotions, but they have no place to GO!"
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The best exemple of this is in Beyond 2 soul where he decied to go in anachronistic order for the story, you effectively have a scene where one character forcefully draft the protagonist and the very scene after is there lovely dovey date where she explicitly state she's falling for him

The bit where they grew closer is in training montage and the mission at the start of the game
 
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Redem said:
The best exemple of this is in Beyond 2 soul where he decied to go in anachronistic order for the story, you effectively have a scene where one character forcefully draft the protagonist and the very scene after is there lovely dovey date where she explicitly state

The bit where they grew closer is in training montage and the mission at the start of the game
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Or the bit where she goes into the initial spooky ghost base as a teen, and has that scene where she is all worried that she lost Aiden.... Only, because of the anachronistic order, we already know he is okay.
 
Has anyone figured out what the thematic purpose of Two Souls' jangled layout was, if one even exists?
 
Athene said:
Because they're adventure games, which is the overarching category the game is in. Its right there in his post and just saying its a Mystery isn't really a response to his criticisms. He is in fact replying to your comment.
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I can't very well argue quality of writing for games i never played. But I think it's perfectly fair to point out the obvious flaw in the argument "Cage's games are unnecessary now we have these other games" is that these other games have different appeal. A survival horror game about some cabin and psychopath is not comparable to a game about a girl and her ghost friend's shitty life. For all I know, Until Dawn could be the best thing ever written in human history but the premise doesn't interest me whatsoever. On the flipside, I first played Heavy Rain because I loved the premise. You don't go into the two games looking for the same thing.

He makes video games that are insecure about their status as videogames and try to become more videogamey, while failing at being the "cinematic" media busting shining cities on the hill he proclaims he is making. He didn't figure out the basics of cameras until Beyond Two Souls and even then he didn't know how to use them effectively.

The fact that he has a savior complex and talks down to the entire industry could be forgiven if he was able to cross the Kanye Threshold where we forgive a lot due to talent. Hideo Kojima could take an upper decker in our apartment and we would be even.
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How exactly is Cage talking down to "the entire industry" or you?

Orion Scimatarii said:
Sounds like this guy has an ego that surpasses most celestial bodies in size.
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David Cage is a cool dude. I refuse to believe the guy who has live chickens in his game thinks he's some auteur genius. All I've ever heard from him personally is that he doesn't like Call of Duty or AAA shooters. Such criticism would go completely unchallenged if he was anyone else.
 
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Nikkolas said:
How exactly is Cage talking down to "the entire industry" or you?
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"Game overs are a failure of the game designer" Cage says as he coats Beyond Two Souls in grease so people can literally slip and slide through the entire thing.

He also talks a lot of shit about "innovation" for someone who uses the same goddamn story beats in every goddamn game. See Cage Bingo further up the thread.
 
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ZerbanDaGreat said:
SO ARTÉ
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Don't you dare drag ARTE into this

It's the best Franco-German documentary channel out there

(Admittedly a very limited sample size)

...So yeah, uh, for real now? I'm not going to play this game. The "gameplay" looks QTE-laden, the dialogue writing and delivery is wooden, the direction looks kinda eh so far, and I have accreted more than enough circumstancial evidence that David Cage cannot write police procedurals, romantic relationships, and mystery well.

I have precisely zero trust in his ability to write a story about robot discrimination based on faux-race issues, admittedly also because dude's a Frenchman born in Mulhouse whose studio headquarters is currently located on the Boulevard Davout in the 20ème Arrondissement, i.e. as close as you can be while still being able to say you're headquartered in Paris, enjoy cheap living costs, but without saying you're in the actual poor banlieues.

Sounds like just the right type of guy to handle a story heavily touching on the thematic conflicts inherent in American race issues, no?

EDIT: Corrected a factual mistake. Still stand by my assessment.
 
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Redem said:
I've been sorta wondering about the presensation of the robot sentience, because if there wasn't the Kara short, you could question the sentience of the robot considering that they all go join the revolution once they are turn by Markus, you could almost make a point that he infecting with virus of robot rebllion, though I could believe that in the game the robot are always sentient, but their programming bar them from certain though and action are barred from them.
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The thing is, you could make a really interesting plot purely out of a servant class of machines gaining sapience and moral questions that arise. But, while I haven't played Mister Cages games, my understanding is that they have a tendency to shrow a Shamalan into the plot rather than moving forward with exploring their initial premise.
 
David Cage wants you to believe his games have no meaning

The idea that you can rise above the piece of art you're creating and "just ask questions" is hard to take seriously. You're setting up a world, and the way you create that world says something. The questions you choose to ask say something, and the answers you provide the player definitely say something. Your word choices say something and the way you design the characters says.
You can't claim you're just asking questions, when you're also limiting the possible answers. You can't say you're just trying to see what the player does while also being responsible for how the game's world reacts to those decisions. The game has a point of view, even though Cage — who used to argue strongly for adult stories — is trying so hard to distance himself from what that point of view might be.
The result of all these E3 interviews is the perception that this is a game so scared of saying anything that it says nothing. That David Cage was too skittish to inject any meaning that would help the game rise above the choose your own adventure books we read as kids. It's frustrating to see games try to borrow unearned weight and meaning from pop culture and social movements while the people who create those games are seen furiously stating over and over that there is no message behind any of it. What if a writer actually had the courage of their convictions and was willing to say what a game was actually about?
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Anyone willing to spend millions of dollars on a piece of media that they intend to put out into the world, and then claims that said media has "nothing to say" and no message is either an idiot or a liar. The characters you focus on, the conversations they have, the mechanics you introduce and focus on, the feel of the controls,movement, and gameplay all send a message about the world you have created and what you think is important. Even if you didn't think you were sending that message, it was still being written.

Triggerhappy said:
The thing is, you could make a really interesting plot purely out of a servant class of machines gaining sapience and moral questions that arise. But, while I haven't played Mister Cages games, my understanding is that they have a tendency to shrow a Shamalan into the plot rather than moving forward with exploring their initial premise.
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M. Night's twists at least make sense within the story up to that point. Cage is really in a class almost of his own, with only Perfect Lionheart reaching the same level of "out of nowhere" plot elements.
 
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The problem with David Cage's "gameplay" is that it's whole bunch of bullshit shoved in your face made to look as important as possible. Waggle the stick to brush your teeth! Now waggle the stick to play with your kids! Hit these buttons to have a less funny chase scene. Okay, now you have to do something and don't have a lot of time to do it! So walk around! You found something! Waggle the stick! No you fucked it up, now think! Hit the buttons flying around your characters head to think! Nope. Sorry, you're dead.

Games like this should be simple as possible so the player knows what options they have in any given moment. In Walking Dead and Until Dawn you either do the thing with the thing, or make the binary choice. In Asuras Wrath you hit the button to do cool shit. In Night in the Woods you either talk, interact, jump or don't. And if an interaction is just flavour and isn't really important these games let you know.

David Cage games remind me of older adventure games like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream that give you atleast six interaction options most of which don't seem to do anything half the time. Except there you had the luxury of knowing exactly which options you had at any given time. Heavy Rain just throws a bunch of shit in your face while waving it's arms and expects you to deal with it.

Also, the waggle the stick to do mundane shit options can really hurt the flow and pacing of the scenes if you fuck them up.

 
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Jace911 said:
"Game overs are a failure of the game designer" Cage says as he coats Beyond Two Souls in grease so people can literally slip and slide through the entire thing.

He also talks a lot of shit about "innovation" for someone who uses the same goddamn story beats in every goddamn game. See Cage Bingo further up the thread.
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I literally already addressed this.

Cage's point is that, in a game where skill is irrelevant, game overs are dumb. If you die in an RPG, manage your equipment better or use different attacks. If you die in Beyond...well, there's not really anything different to do. You haven't failed at anything.

If you're bad at the game, then you get a bad ending. It's that simple. If you constantly fail tor refuse to do the trials in Heavy Rain, the game doesn't just end. You instead get a thoroughly depressing ending.

I don't see why it's that complicated.

And while Cage has some tropes and ideas he loves to reuse (although "shower scene" doesn't mean anything to me because he's equal opportunity there), Beyond is absolutely nothing like Heavy Rain and Detroit looks like it will be quite different as well.

serra2 said:
David Cage wants you to believe his games have no meaning


Anyone willing to spend millions of dollars on a piece of media that they intend to put out into the world, and then claims that said media has "nothing to say" and no message is either an idiot or a liar. The characters you focus on, the conversations they have, the mechanics you introduce and focus on, the feel of the controls,movement, and gameplay all send a message about the world you have created and what you think is important. Even if you didn't think you were sending that message, it was still being written.
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https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/posts/8759803/
There's a lot of turmoil in the world right now, for example with the recent attacks in London and, before that, Paris. Has that changed your thoughts and your attitude about this game, given the scene you've shown off at E3 is, essentially, an attack?


Yeah, absolutely. The events in Paris happened while I was writing the script and it happened very close to the studio. We are very close to the Bataclan, very close to the supermarket that was attacked, and my kids, they were at school, very near the supermarket where this thing took place and they were locked in school, so I was at home, watching TV about what was going on, calling my kids, no answer, and you can imagine what goes through your mind when that happens.
I have one guy in my team who was in the Bataclan when it happened, so I was writing scenes and I'm very clear and very honest and very sincere and ... I was totally comfortable with the story I wanted to tell, because I think it's a very positive story in telling something very important and meaningful, but at the same time, I didn't want any ambiguity in my story.

There are a couple of scenes that I cut, because I felt [they] could be misinterpreted and could be understood in a way that wouldn't be right. I cut them away and it made me think about the story I was telling and how I was telling it and, at first, I was really scared, because I thought, "Wait a second, we're dealing with very sensitive issues here. This is so important and so serious for real people in the real world, how can we create a game that would even resonate with this kind of thing?"


Your first reaction is to step back and way, "Whoah, what am I doing?" But then, the second reaction is to say, "Wait a second, that's important. That's meaningful." It's definitely sensitive and sensible. I'm going to need to be careful, but at the same time it's very interesting to be able to talk about such important things in the game. As long as you feel respectful and careful about what you're saying and how you say it, why wouldn't games be qualified to talk about real-world issues? Do we always have to talk about zombies and aliens and stuff, or can we talk also about the real things?


My take was this is a creative opportunity to see if a game can talk about these things or not, so don't see [the scene shown off on-stage] as, "Oh, this is the [entire] game." Each scene is different and the meaning is absolutely not binary. Don't take away from this scene that it's going to be, "[Do] you want to be violent or pacifist?" because that's not what the game is about. The game is much more complex than that and you show all the complexity and the repercussions of your choices, on opinion, on media, on your people, and being violent is not the wrong thing or the right thing. It's not about being right or wrong, it's really questioning what would you do if you had to fight for your rights and it's one of many questions in the game.
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Nikkolas said:
Cage's point is that, in a game where skill is irrelevant, game overs are dumb. If you die in an RPG, manage your equipment better or use different attacks. If you die in Beyond...well, there's not really anything different to do. You haven't failed at anything.
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Yes you have. You failed at the QTE. That thing that Dahveed Kahje puts in the videogame to make it a videogame and not a pure movie/extremely elaborate visual novel. Being good at QTEs, especially the ones in his games with all sorts of esoteric inputs, is a skill. It's not a particularly deep or complex skill but it is a skill that you train by progressing through the game. If you fail the QTE then git gud at reacting.

But as it is, Beyond lets you fail through literally every single input. Sometimes the game will just hang forever in what are supposed to be do-or-die time-sensitive tense moments, sometimes it'll pause just long enough for it to be impossibly awkward before it just teleports Jodie where she was supposed to be going anyway. They even gave Aidan a healing power for basically no reason other than to justify why Jodie will never be impeded by failure ever because even if you deliberately fuck up and get her shot by the cops sixty times some healing green ghost-farts will get her spick and span in under ten seconds or your money back.

Or that one time in Africa where she hurts her leg then you get a prompt as Aidan to fix it but if you do she just gets shot in the same leg literally like thirty seconds later so she can still use the same limping animations for the escape lol choice.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
Yes you have. You failed at the QTE. That thing that Dahveed Kahje puts in the videogame to make it a videogame and not a pure movie/extremely elaborate visual novel. Being good at QTEs, especially the ones in his games with all sorts of esoteric inputs, is a skill. It's not a particularly deep or complex skill but it is a skill that you train by progressing through the game. If you fail the QTE then git gud at reacting.
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You can pause during cutscenes in both HR and Beyond. That's the only way I beat them. I can't keep up with all the QTE's.
 
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