Opinions on how TCR & FG are dealing with AAMFP criticism

[Cuyir]

Funny, I always got that sense of pretentiousness from the Bioshock series. A Machine For Pigs had a climactic ending, didn't railroad you into mindless violence, and actually tries to explore the social ideas it raises rather than forgetting about them halfway through. The way I see it, the failures of the storytelling amount to the limited resources and ageing engine available to the developers, rather than laziness or being a cynical hack.

Some people loved it, some people (quite clearly) hated it.

Personally, i'm somewhere in between moving towards the loving category but with a few things that rubbed me the wrong way.

I thought it was very damn well written and the music and experience were married perfectly(the notes helped a LOOOOOOOOT in the universe too) but there was a disconnect in the writing for me. In the notes, audio logs and monologues, the story was interesting as all fuck, tried to discuss to the best of the platform's ability big themes and generally was a treat for people who immersed themselves and enjoy that sort of storytelling.

But, then the gameplay started over again and that was it. It never felt like a journey to me (neither did TDD for that matter). The ingame hallucinations worked to establish atmosphere and Mandus' personal issues but it was off when you stopped reading and listening to the logs and monologues. I believe in telling a story through gameplay (which is why I highly dislike Quantic Dream's ''games'') and that gameplay, environmental storytelling and such should be working together to tell a story. To me, AMFP felt divided. The gameplay was really atmospheric, tense and such but it stopped actively trying to tell a story for the most part.

Next part is in a spoiler so it looks better and people have the option of avoiding my thoughts on storytelling in games lol.

Spoiler below!

It felt like it was divided. Story bits and horror gameplay bits. This is almost to the point of beating a dead horse, but The Last Of Us told the story through environmental cutscenes, gameplay (combat, walking around, exploring, etc.), notes and more. It felt complete. Hell, to the risk of sounding offensive to a few people, Dan and company included, Dead Space 2 had a nice balance of horror and above average storytelling. It had logs that gave background and context, excellent environmental storytelling and it built Issac's character not only through cutscenes but from his reactions ingame (the same thing happened in Dead Space and Dead Space 3 but I loved Dead Space 2 the most so i'm focusing on it). How does one know that Issac is scared? Not by a meter or blurry vision, but by him gasping, accelerated breathing and the way he got necromorphs off him. When he fought off 'morphs off of him he did it while sounding terrified and angry and his stomps were the stomps of a man that was near his limit. Being a third person game, you were able to read his facial expressions during cutscenes so that also helped a ton. This scene in Dead Space 3 was one of my favorites and it shows how cutscenes can help flesh out a character. Issac's a brilliant man (engineers need to be pretty god damned smart for starters) and it's what kept him relatively sane. Point to this Dead Space tangent is: they built Issac's character through cutscenes, logs, ingame behavior and more.