Opinions on how TCR & FG are dealing with AAMFP criticism

[Adny]

Poorly.

[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.

[LuckyBlackCatXIII]

While we clearly have very differing views/feelings towards the Amnesia games it's funny that you mention the notes and feeling divided about it because it reminded me of something. AMFP had a fuck ton of notes and that really took me out of the game.

I can understand how people might not have enjoyed the notes/journal entries but for me I actually really enjoyed reading them in ADD. Mainly because I loved the characters, I liked hearing their voices and getting the story's background information in a scattered, bread crumb sort of way. They were placed evenly enough between the action parts of the game to allow some breathing time, setting up an atmosphere or occasionally giving tips on what to do next.

In AMFP the amount of notes, more so journal entries, is just overwhelming that it really disrupts a lot of the atmosphere that's trying to be formed. I know TCR/Oswald must really love to see their own writing style but good God how many times did that man write to himself? I remember at points a new entry would pop up, I'd read it, take a step forward and damn it, there was a new one! It was just ridiculous.

[Dikiyoba]

Count me in as another person who was seriously unimpressed by the storytelling. The plot was vague and contradictory. Mandus' motivations were hackneyed and random. The pigmen's actions were even more unexplained. The children were just props. The story was told in the least interesting way possible: a linear narrative in a linear game told entirely through notes and cutscenes (minimal, interactive cutscenes, but still cutscenes). The player has no options, no impact on how the story unfolds, no participation. Also, the notes are really intrusive and break immersion. All in all, it's a much worse story than TDD's story, and TDD managed to have gameplay and be really freaking terrifying at the same time it was telling that story.

The failure in storytelling really ticks me off, because there was such potential, so many things that could have been done, and it was all wasted. What if the story really focused on how Mandus was manipulated by the "egg"'s distorted view of the future? What if we participated in Mandus' descent into despair and evil by being forced to kill his children in a flashback like we had to kill the man in TDD? What if the narrative structure was something unusual, like in media res (imagine the London scene as an opening!) or an alternating narrative that jumps between Mandus' attempts to stop the machine and all the events alluded to in the backstory that led up to him going evil? What if the gameplay helped tell the story? Anything like that would have made the story so, so much better.

[Ossie]

While we clearly have very differing views/feelings towards the Amnesia games it's funny that you mention the notes and feeling divided about it because it reminded me of something. AMFP had a fuck ton of notes and that really took me out of the game.

You make a very good point there - while I loved the notes, they seriously broke up the flow of the gameplay. There was of course a lot of writing in Dear Esther, but as that writing was all narrated you could keep listening as you gently moved along. With AMFP every note was a stopping point and they seriously broke up the flow and the atmosphere.

As the notes in TDD were well spaced that wasn't a problem, also with TDD some of the notes were narrated by Daniel which helped add to the immersion.

I do hope that TCR learn from the mistakes that they made with this game - while I loved it, the game still has its flaws. I hope that TCR will allow themselves to not only see their mistakes, but also to acknowledge and learn from them.

[Cuyir]

Interesting:

Some of you were bothered that the notes broke up the ''horror gameplay bits" that had basically nil storytelling and i'm bothered that said gameplay broke up the storytelling.

That's what we call in the business "highly divergent opinions".

To me, AMFP told a better story (and was an OVERALL better experience) than TDD BECAUSE it had more notes/audio logs/monologues/storytelling focused bits, I was bored by TDD BECAUSE the storytelling was so spaced out.

Which just means that I prefer being told a story (even if it's not done as well as it could have been told) to crouching in the dark, sneaking by enemies.

Hopefully Soma is able to tell a story through gameplay...or in the least space out the storytelling better than they did in TDD. They didn't have that problem in Penumbra, one was always learning new things and such.

[Mechavomit]

@Cuyir
I think you're misinterpreting these last few posts. People don't mind "story". Quite the contrary, they love it, but it was the way it was told that people didn't like. Or me, at least, I didn't like it.
Most notes in AMFP were repeating the same thing, but were just worded differently. I got tired of pausing the game constantly to read them, yet at the same time I was afraid to miss an important plot point. Now, looking back at it, I realize that I wouldn't have missed a lot if I had skipped half of them.
I understand they were supposed to be Oswald's personal thoughts on the situation, hence they were so frequent, but making the player stop every 30 seconds to read flavor text? Really? Maybe if they were narrated, maybe then it would have worked better. Like him thinking out loud.

[JohnDoe]

This here was one of the biggest problems of the game. To me there's a pretty simple division: If you pick up a note on the ground, great. Read it right then, put it in your inventory, whatever. It fits into the game and you can read it at your leisure. Have notes magically appear in your inventory detailing your character's current thoughts and emotions? It's pointless and brings you out of the game.

This is one of the most basic storytelling rules. Show, don't tell. Instead of making me afraid, the game told me how afraid Mandus was. Instead of making me worry about his kids, the game told me how much Mandus was worried. It also violates one of frictional's big tenants, something that they harp on about on the dev blog all the time - agency. MFP actually violates that one all over the place, not just in the journal entries.

An example. People complain about the lack of interactive items, then are told that all it's good for is stacking chairs. This misses the point, though. Being able to move objects gives you a sense of agency. It makes you feel that you are the one doing these things. This is critical for horror, though I guess TCR has decided retroactively that they weren't actually making a horror game.

Do you remember the sobbing in the cistern in TDD? THAT told a story, and that was horror. Did you drown somebody? Probably, though you cannot be 100% sure. And you did it, not Daniel.

[WALP]

So being on the subject of storytelling I am curious, Sometimes we hear Mandus being all deep in some rants like fx:

Spoiler below!

Are these rants flashbacks to things he said in the past or things he is saying in the present?

[Paddy™]

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/ga...inese-room

I can't even be bothered anymore.