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[Cthulhu]

I used to argue that Breaking Bad was a modern example of the American naturalist literary tradition.  The on-paper definition there was stories that attempt to depict life in a given historical moment as realistically as possible, but often the author had an idea of what that moment entailed which poisoned their realism.  I can't remember my argument now, and I can't remember breaking bad well enough to reconstruct it, but the gist is that naturalist novels usually depicted their characters as being caught in something much bigger than them, and their choices are constrained by it.  The guy from Falling Down is a good example, you can say what you want about him but the movie is pretty clearly placing him as someone who never really had a chance.  Something like Native Son would fall into this as well, and the new Joker (I've said, only half-shitposting, that the joaquin phoenix Joker is a Native Son pastiche)

Anyway, I'm digressing, but, like, yeah V is fucked, but did he actually have a choice of not being fucked?  In two of his stories he's born into poverty and violence with no prospects for escape aside from becoming a solo.  In the other, he is successful but his ouster isn't something hubristic he did, like stealing from his boss or something.  His boss tells him do this extremely dangerous thing or die, and it turns out the target of the plot knew about it and pre-empts him.  He's minor piece in a game other people were playing.  I guess you could argue different things, but I think the game itself is making the argument that V never got to pick a different life path.  It was laid out for him, all he could do was follow it.

[nenjin]

And I think for my personality, I kinda resent that. Drama requires dramatic (self-destructive) choices be made. They made it pretty clear once you got chipped that you were probably fucked. Like, I knew from minute 1 that

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Dexter would be betray you.

Me as the player knowing that is like the audience knowing there's a bomb under the dining room table that the family isn't aware of. Except in this case, you're the one being given non-choices to respond to (literally nothing you can do changes how things go with Dexter, despite the implication that they could), you're the one being asked to walk to the dining table and sit down next to the bomb despite the fact you know it's there.

I just never quite felt this railroaded by the Witcher games. Or if I did, the outcomes weren't so awful that I resented it. (Like, ok, you don't have many good choices regarding the Scoitael in the Witcher games, but at least "not getting involved" was an option and the story adapted to it.)

I think my fee fees about the ending is at least partly tied to the fact the game was rushed. There were many places where it felt like things could have gone differently, you could have had more options.....but the need to release a game and have an ending that ties everything together required a limited set of outcomes (really just different flavors of outcomes as people have said) and in keeping with the theme, they all suck.

Just kinda sucks that as I look back at V as a character, after all this....they come across as a chump.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, I like stories like that which is why I've read a bunch of them, but a medium where interactivity is the core selling point is probably not the right choice to tell a story about social determinism, unless you're trying to do something meta, which has been done a million times anyway.

It's a classic problem, I could enjoy the way the story scenes were directed and written, it leaps straight over the heads of a lot of games where the story is two people with their hands at their sides talking in shot-reverse-shot, but like a lot of games that do that well, the story and gameplay are still heavily bifurcated. 

For fun I ran a timer from the point I hit Start Game in TLOU2 (another game whose story I really enjoyed) to the first point I actually played the game (playing the game meaning making any decision with consequences, even if that's just the decision to shoot Zombie 1 or Zombie 2 first), and it was like 40 minutes.  The first 40 minutes of the game is a giant cutscene where the only thing you can do is walk forward and maybe a few feet from side to side if you're feeling daring.  I find that shit infuriating.

Games still haven't figured out how to mesh storytelling and gameplay.  Even games with great storytelling like TLOU2, Last of Us, and yes, I'll say Cyberpunk, still feel like somebody took a prestige HBO drama and awkwardly glued a video game between the episodes.

[dragdeler]

On this I'm with y'all... Even modern AAA titles are just so gamey it's comically sad, they get better at hiding it behind a wall of animations, but they all coddle up in the proven mechanics comfort zone... You just know you can backtrack all you want, there are never any hidden timers, NPCs who bug you to be faster have no impact... Frankly I can see how it gets difficult to take the story seriously when the sidequests are strewn about lazily like it's a modern far cry title. Fuck imagine if this game had at least a classical reputation system instead of a bunch of POI. After all it is allready most comparable to Fallout - or rather - the outer worlds (which is a cool fallout clone IMO ^^)

[Cthulhu]

I never said any of that though, and I don't agree with any of it.

[Egan_BW]

There are of course lots of games with good... "ludonarrative integration"? Mainly you just need to have a lot more of one of those two things so that the other fits into the naturally forming gaps nicely. ;P
Which is a balance that AAA games aren't good at striking because they NEED to have tons and tons of EVERYTHING in order to justify their expense and marketing.

I suppose it would be a good experiment to try making a decently-high budget game with roughly equal focus on story and gameplay, but without the two being totally separate things.

[nenjin]

and yes, I'll say Cyberpunk

Agreed. Despite the fact I feel maudlin about how it ended, it was well executed. Character interactions felt like they had more life than in W3 (which just used the classic shot/reverse shot dialog method.) Also I felt like characters just emoted a bit better here than in the W3. Granted it's often "drunken jerky lewd fantasy character versus drunken jerky lewd cyberpunk character", but even the dirt bags in CP2077 felt like they had so much more life. (Even to some degree when the lip synching and facial animations just broke.) Probably a big reason why I felt more attached to the story in CP2077 than in the Witcher. I'd be hard pressed to name any W3 NPCs anymore beyond Geralt's crew.

[LoSboccacc]

I genuinely watched a let's play for the plot, skipping the combat sequences for the most part, so I'd say as a narrative piece it was good enough for my taste.

[Damiac]

It's hard to find sympathy or really even appreciation for them. V is basically a hired gun with repeated bouts of bad luck, poor judgment and the scripted inability to walk away at any point. It makes it hard to sympathize or root for them. He's analogous to Walter White from Breaking Bad IMO. You like them as a character but you wish pretty much the complete opposite of the show for them.

You're not supposed to like Walter. He's a horrible person. He'd do equally terrible things to others in any other location. He's a narcisistic garbage human being. You should constantly want Walter caught, tried, and imprisoned before the end of every episode and before he screws up someone elses life. He's unrepentent about all his actions. He lets Jesse's girlfriend die (walt knew exactly how to save her and he just watches her die and later claims zero responsibility) to keep Jesse as a drug making assistant and that's one of the least bad things Walt does.

Did you even watch the show?
Jessie's girlfriend was a recovering heroin addict, Jesse was an addict as well. She got jesse into heroin. Walt said "I refuse to fund your overdose". Jessie's girlfriend called walt's home and blackmailed him for the money, and what'd they do? Shoot a bunch of heroin and she overdosed. Walt didn't save her when he just so happened to be there getting the meth they were trying to sell.


Walt was saving himself and Jessie there.  Jessie's girlfriend was a tragically flawed character whose greed lead to her own downfall. Much like Walt himself.

Walt ended Tucos and Gus frings reins of terror. He indirectly was responsible for the violent cartel being wiped out.

Gus Fring had a child murdered for convenience. Then Jessie, knowing this, kills the dealers, fucks up their relationship with Gus, then after walt saves him, ruining his own business prospects and putting his own life in danger, the little shit joins up with Gus against Walt.

Walt's most consequencial flaw was his love for jessie, abusive as it sometimes was. That dumb junkie caused most of the problems in the series.

[Skynet]

Gus Fring had a child murdered for convenience.

I thought it was Walt who poisoned the child and framed Gus for it? Or was it some other child Gus targeted?

[Damiac]

Gus Fring had a child murdered for convenience.

I thought it was Walt who poisoned the child and framed Gus for it? Or was it some other child Gus targeted?

Two different kids. Same family.

Thomas was the 10 year old or so kid working for the two dealers who worked for gus. He's also the kid who shot combo, jessies friend.
Jessie confronts gus about his guys using kids. Gus tells the dealers no more kids. Thomas turns up dead the next day, and Jessie goes after the dealers. Walt realizes what Jessie is up to, and saves him by running down the two dealers.

This is what gets Gus to decide he wants Walt and Jessie dead.

Jessie later joins up with Gus and Mike, and Walt is persona non grata.

Because walt's brother in law, hank, is looking into his and getting too close, gus wants him dead. Walt knows this, so gus takes him out to the desert, and threatens to kill his whole family if he interferes in the murder of his brother in law.

Walts only hope of getting to gus before people he cares about get murdered is to get jessie back on his side.

So, in a huge plot hole, he somehow feeds the other kid poison berries and convinces jessie that gus gave the kid ricin to frame walt.

The poisoned kid recovers. He's Thomas's nephew.

They never explain how walt could possibly have poisoned the kid, and the kid never says what happened.

[Great Order]

It's hard to find sympathy or really even appreciation for them. V is basically a hired gun with repeated bouts of bad luck, poor judgment and the scripted inability to walk away at any point. It makes it hard to sympathize or root for them. He's analogous to Walter White from Breaking Bad IMO. You like them as a character but you wish pretty much the complete opposite of the show for them.

You're not supposed to like Walter. He's a horrible person. He'd do equally terrible things to others in any other location. He's a narcisistic garbage human being. You should constantly want Walter caught, tried, and imprisoned before the end of every episode and before he screws up someone elses life. He's unrepentent about all his actions. He lets Jesse's girlfriend die (walt knew exactly how to save her and he just watches her die and later claims zero responsibility) to keep Jesse as a drug making assistant and that's one of the least bad things Walt does.

Did you even watch the show?
Jessie's girlfriend was a recovering heroin addict, Jesse was an addict as well. She got jesse into heroin. Walt said "I refuse to fund your overdose". Jessie's girlfriend called walt's home and blackmailed him for the money, and what'd they do? Shoot a bunch of heroin and she overdosed. Walt didn't save her when he just so happened to be there getting the meth they were trying to sell.


Walt was saving himself and Jessie there.  Jessie's girlfriend was a tragically flawed character whose greed lead to her own downfall. Much like Walt himself.

Walt ended Tucos and Gus frings reins of terror. He indirectly was responsible for the violent cartel being wiped out.

Gus Fring had a child murdered for convenience. Then Jessie, knowing this, kills the dealers, fucks up their relationship with Gus, then after walt saves him, ruining his own business prospects and putting his own life in danger, the little shit joins up with Gus against Walt.

Walt's most consequencial flaw was his love for jessie, abusive as it sometimes was. That dumb junkie caused most of the problems in the series.

Pretty sure he mentions at one point that he did it because she was supporting Jessie becoming independent from Walt?

I might be wrong though, I didn't finish it and I've not watched it for years.

[Enemy post]

GOG's newsletter sent me a unique discount code for Cyberpunk 2077. I wasn't planning on buying it, so I thought somebody else might want it. No idea how much it's for, but the code is ZR6Z95992DE70697B1.

[Nordlicht]

Here's mine: ZR6ZCFC721C9145A96

[lastverb]

It's 20%, imo not worth it since the game already dipped below 50% on different promos (at least for steam). Used mine to check.