Can anyone else watch the videos embeded in this article? On windows 7, in both Firefox and chrome, I press play on the videos and they just spin a loading icon.
Came here to say the exact same thing. Lost Legacy was really, really good about it with Chloe and Nadine chatting while in the Jeep and then saying “Hold that thought” when you got out. I also loved how they would then follow up with the previous statement.
I can’t think of another game doing this before U4 and Lost Legacy, and I was really happy to see that God of War did the same thing.
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This sounds incredible. Far Cry 5 has a similar solution, which stops the speaker mid-sentence and, upon re-initiating the conversation, they say “as I was saying,” and pick up on the sentence at which they stopped. The problem with Far Cry 5, though, is the dialogue sucks fucking ASS so you can’t abuse the dialogue system by punching them mid-sentence as a means to a welcome end
@smoonHooch nah, I’m on Firefox on macOS and they don’t display in this thread.
This was such a great touch in Uncharted 4 when you would get in and out of the jeep.
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The first time I noticed it in Lost Legacy I was so impressed. Compared to the janky way it ends up in a lot of other games, it was a really nice touch. When playing a game and characters awkwardly interrupt for a clearly completely different conversation, or even start talking over each other with different conversations, it completely takes you out of it.
This kind of thing keeps you totally immersed.
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Yup. Unlike Far Cry 5 where your helpers would talk over each other with repeated dialogue and/or get stuck in a loop of the same phrase.
It’s indeed rather rare occasion. Almost anywhere it was always abruptly cut-off, leaving ‘important’ dialogue for cutscenes. You never know when next abrupt cut might happen, so either you continue with you flow of movement and forfeit the dialogue, or stand in some nice spot and wait until it ends. Sometimes it goes for a long time (and there’s also special occasions when long dialogues turn on right before ‘abrupt’). And there might be conflicting thoughts – should I spend my time for this speech, or should I move on, never knowing where it will cut off – are there important bits in it⸮
Hi smoon, they worked okay for me, but I would talk a look through some other Waypoint videos and, if it’s a common issue, maybe make a topic about it in #site-feedback? Comments on threads aren’t always picked up by the technical folks, whereas I know #site-feedback does get checked!
Videos in the thread embeds don’t work (we are looking into it, but getting the RSS feed to work with the forums is quite difficult), so we’d always recommend clicking on the original article and checking there instead.
I feel like a dummy now, because I’ve put probably 20 hours in this game so far and spent SO MUCH TIME waiting right next to a boat dock for a conversation to finish. It just never occurred to me that a video game could actually fix this.
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honestly i want to discuss this. the way AAA game design works is you have so many people putting so much Stuff into a game that there’s guaranteed to be 1000 articles even from thoughtful outfits about them. the amount of free promotion these games get - which they absolutely do not need - is absurd.
i mean, what this article really is - with all the love in the world - is “someone put a lot of time into audio scripting”. rad. what’s their name? who’s a part of that team? who figured out that system? how did they get it to work? have they been appropriately recognised - and compensated - for their work?
im glad y’all excited about this game, but if you’re going to run free promotion for them, please take it somewhere. or, yknow. try promoting something which can’t afford to run ads on the side of buses.
sorry to be a sour puss online.
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People don’t like talking about God of War, huh?
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This is probably gonna harsh some buzz, but one of the first popular games to do this was GTA V. Ubisoft’s tried implementing into some games too, FC5’s already been mentioned, but (IIRC) Watch Dogs 2 also started and stopped its in-car dialogue when something dramatic interrupted the conversation.
The signalling is different in GoW and Uncharted, as these more directly say “hey this’ll pick up when the drama’s over/the player’s back in position”, and it’s definitely a good way to make your mix of scripted-and-unscripted narratives work, but it’s not a super new fix and maybe even got its start in a… less than admirable game.
It can be pretty exhausting when an environment that prides itself on platforming diverse and unheard voices is dominated for more than a week with articles from a (by author admission) straight white dad praising a straight white dad action game.
I’ve got no major beef with Patrick or the meat of his coverage, it just feels like it could be patiently sat on and condensed so that it doesn’t feel like the front page is dominated by it, again, for more than a week.
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yeah, as someone who’s been interested in the gow coverage the same way i’m interested in people talking about any game i’ll never really play – kind of a “huh, neat to hear different perspectives on twitter” feeling – i took a quick glance at the front page right now, and 4 of the 12 articles/podcast posts under the “Latest” section are about the new god of war.
that’s a solid third of coverage, which is more than the game itself has had here in the past month; i only counted about three other articles/podcast posts since the start of april. among the rest of waypoint’s output in that same front-page “Latest” section, there’s articles about controversial athletes, a painfully watchable tv show, unionization and exploitation in indie games, using your sd card on the switch, and pronoun usage in battletech.
seeing kratos’s face over and over again among these unique articles does stand out, so i think it’s understandable for someone who doesn’t care about gow – or who cares about indie game coverage/spotlights on individual workers way more, for example – to be exhausted by it. i know there’s plenty of visual novel coverage i’d like to see more of and i’ve avidly kept an eye out for basically all of the articles waypoint’s hosted on the topic!
on the subject of this article: i’m always interested in hearing about dialogue systems in games, this is generally a neat topic! i watched a streamer fumble to understand npcs with overlapping dialogue and sudden yells in far cry 5, which was already mentioned upthread, but was just such a mess that it really undermined its own ambient storytelling.
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Then maybe don’t read them? Games like Zelda and PUBG have entire features based around them, not seeing how a few articles suddenly break the bank.
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Honestly I’m getting more annoyed by the people who come into a topic about God of War to complain that people are talking about God of War, especially when every thread and story I see popping up has something interesting to examine.
I mean, we can still talk about games we don’t like for things they do right or interesting things we can read into that tell about their ambitions and thematic core.
That said, I would like more pieces getting at the heart of the game’s inherent issues with misogyny and violence and how it tried to use the messy legacy of the old games for good and bad. But just coming into a thread to loudly proclaim “I DON’T CARE ABOUT THIS TOPIC, LOOK AT ME” is getting obnoxious.
As for the dialog stuff, I hope we see more games use similar tactics GoW is using so maybe we can cut down on cutscene overuse in games that rely mainly on mechanical impact. It would be cool to see something like the volume in the surrounding world turned down while listening to an audiolog, or taking a page from Gone Home and space the environment a certain way so players don’t get too far ahead as the dialog is being made.
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One of the cool stories of the last 2 years is Guerrilla and Sony SantaMonica rising up to naughty dog’s level. I’ve loved it as someone who adores ND’s narratives and production quality, but finds a lot of their gameplay kinda mehh.
Horizon and GoW have basically given me ND games with the gameplay I want.
Even after I knew I kept doing the same thing out of habit haha
The “why are people still talking about this” or the “stop writing about this” comments show up on every and any comment section/forum that’s out there and it’s always universally boring. This site has covered a lot of stuff I could care less about but the thought would never occurred to me to complain about it, there no shortage of takes out there. I think this also has combined with certain segments of WP’s community having a really virulent reaction to idea of the game, irrespective of its contents.
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Hoo boy if y’all want to see a lot of free advertising for games that don’t need it you should look up PUBG or Nier on here
But yeah I think it’s extra important that a game incorporating a lot of dense mythology that most people aren’t super well versed in has some sort of system so that characters aren’t interrupted while offering up potentially crucial exposition. The introduction of Mimir as a companion of sorts leads to a lot of conversations you really don’t want to miss, and I think they did a great job of allowing you to play how you’d like instead of cowering in a corner waiting for conversations to wrap up. They also give you conversations to listen to during “fast travel” scenes so it doesn’t just feel like a dull loading screen.
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I can’t think of a way to put this in a way that doesn’t sound confrontational and condescending, so sorry in advance for this, but I feel that saying even just segments of WP’s community has virulent reactions to the idea of the game irrespective of content is a little weird.
There’s been a lot of discourse on the forums already about why a lot of people here find the widespread largely-uncritical appraisal of GoW (and who gets to talk about it on a platform) to be offputting, and the nuances of its place in the medium & wider culture, how it fits into a pretty homogeneous lineage of games and so on. Even if what we’re left with at this point is largely snark, there might be a reason for that snark now being so common.
And yes, there is no shortage of takes out there, but there is a shortage of platformed takes from non-cis non-straight non-white non-dudes, and a shortage of coverage of games outside of the very narrow subset that GoW represents. WP’s curated community consists of a lot of people far outside the demographic for that subset and who already get a gluttony of it on most other sites, coming here mostly for a break from that norm. This doesn’t mean it has no place here, but right now it’s taken more of a place than any game made by/for minorities has for a very long time, the pace of publication makes it dominate the front page and, arguably, the conversation space, and some folks here believe that’s a point of critique, even if that now comes out more as jokey jokes than anything.
I think this was just as true for stuff like BotW, Nier, and PUBG, but this isn’t the Beef Zone, so we’re particularly whinging about GoW coverage here.
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