rob25X wrote: ↑May 27th, 2018, 3:17 pm
chase210 wrote: ↑May 27th, 2018, 1:31 pm
As much as I am enjoying Detroit, its still incredibly... quantic dream esque. That is to say, incredibly clumsy and heavy handed. But at least its not quite as awful as Heavy Rain.
Can anyone actually think of a game since Heavy Rain that has done what it did and improved on it? I can't.
The only game that comes to my mind is Telltale's Walking Dead: Season 1. Why is it people think Cage's games are clumsy and heavy handed yet a little girl smashing heads in with screwdrivers, firing guns eating human flesh and hearing the F-word every 5 minutes isn't?! And that medic guy in Fallout 3 "You better have cancer". Why don't other games get the same criticism.
Heavy Rain may have been a little clumsy in parts but no more so than any other video game.
It's more than just being clumsy and heavy handed, there a lot of games I love that are little clumsy and definitely heavy handed. So I have a couple of points.
First, what separates David Cage's games from Telltale's output, is the quality of the writing and the tone. YES, The Walking Dead has moments that are over the top, however those moments are par for the course within the zombie sub-genre. It's playing into well established tropes that fit the tone they're going for. But more importantly, Telltale's writers build a world with a consistent internal logic that (the first season anyway) never breaks, and no story thread is introduced that isn't paid off. Character's dialogue feels theatrical, sure, but it flows without any moments of awkward exposition and knows when to hold back and let a character's silence convey information. The big thing for me though, is that character's actions always feel like they are informed by the character's internal world and not by the needs of the plot.
Everything I just praised there in The Walking Dead (I'd extend this to the Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands too), I could not personally say was true of any of the David Cage games I've played.
Heavy Rain spoilers to follow:
- Spoiler: show
- Heavy Rain is a crime drama like Seven or Usual Suspects and it clearly aspires to be of a similar calibur. This is a genre that tends to go for more theatrical visuals but more organic and "realistic" dialogue. So when characters continually go off on exposition screeds that have no benefit to anyone around them, only the viewer, not only is this clumsy it actively works against the tone the game is clearly going for. Heavy Rain continually fails to create a consistent internal logic and character's actions are often informed by the needs of the plot, rather than being something that character would actually do. Example of a failure to create a consistent world logic: If Ethan threw himself in front of his son before the car hit him, which the game leaves no room to believe otherwise, why is Ethan alive or not in a wheel chair or anything, while his son is dead? He took the full force of that car and yet walked away with his health, while his son was shielded and died. There are more examples, but this post will be the length of a book if I indulge. Example of a character acting in service of the plot instead of acting as the character would: Literally everything Shelby does before and after he is revealed to be the killer. Once you know this information, a lot of his actions cease to make sense and even actions after the reveal don't make sense either. (Why does he still want to kill Ethan at the end? Surely that goes against his established motive?) Only a small portion of it can be explained by "well, he wanted to collect evidence, so people couldn't find out it was him" (Some of which the game just doesn't show you during his playable sections, which isn't a twist, it's just retconning), the rest is just Shelby doing stuff for the audience and for no other purpose. Then there are the multiple red herrings that have no resolution and simply serve as a distraction. As soon as they are no longer useful, the plot discards them with no attempt to feed them into the larger narrative. Why does Ethan keep blacking out and making paper cranes? Oh wait! no longer serves as a distraction any more, so let's forget that ever happened.
My second, and much smaller point, is that not every game so clearly puts narrative at the forefront of what they are trying to achieve. Fallout 3 has a few rough lines, but people are more willing to forgive it, because narrative isn't all it has to offer as an experience. (That said, increasingly people are more critical of that aspect when compared to New Vegas.) Heavy Rain is a choice driven narrative game. It lives or dies based on your enjoyment of the story and that's why people are so much harsher. Though not the popular consensus, I feel the same way about Life is Strange. The dialogue wasn't meeting my standards, thus the experience wasn't working for me. But Resident Evil 3 has equally bad dialogue and I love that game. What a game focuses on, feeds into our perception of how successful the experience is.
So yeah, that's why I and I'm sure others are very critical of Heavy Rain and Cage's other games.