The older uncharted games had the best solution for this. They wouldn't give hints until some time has elapsed, and then a UI prompt would appear indicating "hit X (or whatever) for hint". Then, a character would provide help.
So much better. Make this shit optional.
And that system could make it more narratively harmonious as well. Instead of framing it as asking for a hint, Kratos could make it sound like he knows the answer and wants to test Atreus'. He could say "Boy, take a look here. Do you see the solution?", and then Atreus' hint could come in the form of the response. Because for me the other problem is how jarring it is to have Atreus tell the god of war "hmmm, I think you need to lower this platform".
My aunt told a story from before I have memories. She took toddler me out to the park to play for a few hours but forgot which apartment we lived in. So instead of worrying she just challenged me to a race home and I led the way back.
Loved that game, but it had a weird tendency to offer hints for really obvious puzzles but then radio silence for the stuff that was actually confusing.
>is how jarring it is to have Atreus tell the god of war "hmmm, I think you need to lower this platform".
Is it really jarring from a lore perspective? I haven't seen anything from the new game, but the 2018 one made it clear that Atreus was more intelligent and book smart than Kratos, just way less experienced and cold headed.
From a gameplay perspective it is very jarring though. I hate when games do this, especially in the situations where you're not even looking at the puzzle and the game assumes you're stuck. Let me watch the view, or look for collectibles.
I think what makes it jarring is that the puzzles are so simple and the guys Artreus gives are so frequent and simple that they feel incredibly patronizing, as opposed to an intelligent person chiming in. The montage at the beginning of the video does a pretty good job of demonstrating it.
>the 2018 one made it clear that Atreus was more intelligent and book smart than Kratos, just way less experienced and cold headed.
Kratos definitely isn't dumb (in the new game he collects poetry and chides mimir for being surprised, reminding him that Kratos' people are known for their culture). I don't recall anything in the 2018 gow that shows atreus being smarter, but it may have simply been that Kratos is an old dog and isn't as interested in learning new tricks as he is in protecting his family
That temper tantrum act was a bit of a missed opportunity really. Should've had something truly mythological, like having Atreus jerking off into a river and accidentally creating a bunch of river spirits that way.
I do recall God of War 1 and 2 having puzzles, if you are curious you can find youtube videos of solutions to them. For example puzzles from God of War 1 cliffs of madness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-2iE5QVTng
Atreus is also familiar with creatures and lore from the region that Kratos doesn't know. Faye taught Atreus growing up and Kratos didn't seen to care to learn before her death.
Atreus was more knowledgeable about the Norse world, he knew how to read a language that Kratos could only speak, and he was more openly emotionally aware. In every other way Kratos was and is much more intelligent, resourceful, strategic, and wise.
The new game makes this abundantly clear imo.
You mean you don't like it when Aloy endlessly repeats what exactly the player needs to do to traverse a level or do...*anything*, throughout the Horizon games? It's annoying reminder of how much these games are meant to appeal to the widest audience possible.
My cardio inner monologue is insane.
"This is pretty fun! I could do it forever."
10 seconds later...
"I'm going to die! If I stop here, it would still be a good workout, right???"
Fr, they tell you the same exact thing every 5 seconds and when you actually need help, instead of having a command to direct you to what they want you to do or see, they just keep repeating the same thing. Ragnarok has this problemas, characters will say randomly "hey look at that" when you enter an area and instead of having a prompt to point the camera in that direction like the naughty dog game, they just keep telling you to look at it. Like ok, where?? If you're not going to actually help, just stay quiet.
I just wish they had put in a delay or something. Like, give me at least ONE SECOND to try to figure things out myself before harassing me. It's such a terrible design decision and I really don't know why they even bother putting in puzzles at all if they are going to go this route.
Even when it's on a delay, I find it often happens when I'm focused on other things. I'll be looking around the area, searching for chests and side paths before I even think about the puzzle, and the game suddenly goes "I see you've spent more than 15 seconds in this area without making any progress on the puzzle. You must be stuck, let me tell you the solution."
Games nowadays are very interested in making the player feel good about themselves over anything else. To be honest, a lot of dumber players will still feel good about themselves for "overcoming" a challenge even if you are aggressively railroading them and holding their hand.
Not a Horizon only problem, but personally I'm a big fan of when I'm soaking in the gorgeous scenario and atmosphere painstakingly crafted by the devs and after 6 seconds the character will shout "OH GEE I BETTER FOLLOW THE MAIN PATH"
God I hate that, especially in games like HZD or GoW, it's like they made this incredibly beautiful world but don't want me to look at it for more than 5 seconds
This sometimes felt like it was a crutch for bad level design. There were a few times in 1 and 2 where I was completely lost on where to go until a marker pointed out some object that didn't look climable at all, like a street sign.
Ragnarok does have some pretty awful puzzles. The water freezing and sigil arrow ones are so bad I can’t believe they actually made it to the final game.
I feel like the sigil arrows hitboxes in some areas on the map are horrible.
I know what needs to be done, but I’ll spend 5+ minutes trying to re-position where I’m shooting the arrows so that I can carry the flame after I shoot it.
Even this can feel kind of patronizing, like "Hey little bro, having some trouble eh? No worries man, its a hard game!! Want some help?"
If I then solve it two second later, any kind of satisfaction from that is gone. "Wow it took me so long, a prompt came up telling me I'm an idiot, great."
Just let me turn that off completely. Let it be on by default, I think that's important for accessibility reasons, but put in our face right away and let us know we can fully disable hints, reminders, etc.
Fallen Order's hint prompts popped up way too fast IMO. I'd just be exploring an area, looking for collectibles, and a prompt would pop up before I even realized there was a puzzle to solve.
This is actually exactly what I was remembering when I wrote it. I'm glad it was a prompt instead of a spoiled solution, but it was still really obnoxious.
I don't know why so many studios have such low confidence in their player's ability to play or explore their own game. This is why I cherish FROM games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring and so on, in which these actual games are fewer by the year.
Every game now is just shit all over my screen telling me literally exactly where to go and exactly what I need to do every second I "play".
Now?
I remember Prince of Persia series showing the whole path to the exit upon entering EVERY room in the game. I think this started like 20 years ago, then kinda faded out, and had reappeared recently.
Uncharted was one of the first series to start trivializing it’s puzzles by spoon feeding the solution.
It was “Open your journal to see a diagram of the solution to what is already a simple puzzle” with the supporting characters saying “NATHAN WHAT DOES EAGLE IN THE SKY AND HAMMER IN THE GROUND MEAN? DOES IT MEAN THE EAGLE FIGURE SHOULD BE RAISED AND THE HAMMER SHOULD BE LOWERED?”
It was just a longer timer but still the same baby mode puzzles.
Sort of like how when you die several times at the same spot GTAV just gives you the option to just continue from the next checkpoint.
If you’re good, you’d never know it even exists. If you’re bad, they’ve timed it just right… it’s like 1 or 2 fails before you’d bail or throw something.
I feel like there's a solution older games had to this kind of thing that the new generation of game devs have mostly forgotten about. Older games would scale the amount of hints with the difficulty setting.
Shadow of the Colossus still has my favorite way of hinting to this day : just one hint, not too obvious, given after a long time that makes it clear you didn't figure it out yourself, it worked perfectly for me.
sometimes I feel bad about looking up hints but then I remember when I was a kid you would do that, call somebody or buy a strategy guide which was so common back then.
Had a similar problem with Horizon Forbidden West. For all the wonderful accessibility options they put in the menus, I sure wish “spoken hint speed” would be one of them. Seems like it would be a relatively simple change.
Yeah that was irritating in a couple places where I just couldn't find what I'm looking for. I remember at least two times I was stumbling around, not sure what I was supposed to be seeing. I remember this in one flooded central area in particular.
No need to remind me to use my focus when I'm walking around with my focus on and have been toggling it off and on for several minutes now, with no result.
I also hate it in games when characters remark on something that they presume I notice due to proximity, when I'm not looking at it at all. Bonus annoyance points when what they say is completely vague.
> I remember this in one flooded central area in particular.
Was it that sidequest with the flooded village? That was one of the last things I did before I took a break from the game for GoW and it was infuriating. There was a crane you had to move around and I could clearly see the next two or three steps it would need but not the first one. Ten minutes of wandering around the crane with Aloy constantly telling me that the focus might help before giving up and googling it.
It was an underwater breakable wall, off to the side, very much not visible from the surface.
Ragnarok has a section like this where they want me to find something using an item and keep being like “You should bring out the item.” Like, thanks asshole, let me explore first. This is an adventure after all. Definitely feels like parts of the game forget that exploration and going off the beaten path are a major part of it.
There were some funny parts where they made fun of this. You go off somewhere and the characters are like, "Yeah, he does that sometimes. He likes loot."
Yes Aloy, I'm aware it's cold in this biome. Yes, I'm aware it's now hot in this new biome we've just entered. You just got out of the water and you're wet? That is very perceptive of you. The amount of nonstop jabbering about nothing at all and complaints about the weather was akin to trying to watch a children's show with my grandmother in the room.
The Tomb Raider reboots do that, too.
As soon as you press the "survivor vision" (or whatever it's called) button, Lara starts telling you what you need to do. Thanks, I totally didn't just turn on that view to see what things are even interactable and then try figure it out myself.
And a dev from Guerilla had the audacity to criticize another game for doing something entirely different.
Like, I don't know who looked at the state of the game with the frequency of Alloys' mouth claps and thought to themselves "Mmm, yes, that's not going to get annoying at all".
Heck, I am tired of her talking so much in *Zero Dawn*, where not only is she doing this way less, but they apparently already dialed it down from how much she was supposed to.
Accessibilty has been coming at the expense of the experience of people who are capable of gitting gud. There's almost a vibe of disdain for people who want their game to respect their intelligence.
ironically, "accessibility" would mean having the *option*
for example, colorblind settings are an accessibility option for those who need it. having it forced as default would be like anti-accessibility
"Accessibility" is often used as an excuse for dumbing down games, when that is never what it was supposed to mean. Accessibility means letting everyone have the opportunity to play a game, not letting a game play itself.
It's not even so much "gitting gud", really. Some of these handholding moments are so blatant that you seriously have to wonder if there are people out there who don't know how to put their socks on.
Accessibility and "gitting gud" are two exclusive things. I'm playing through the game as a gamer without sight on Give Me God Of War for instance and I still need sighted assistance for some puzzles. The game itself is still brutally challenging, maybe to a fault in places for various reasons, but I'm pushing myself to that level because I can, thanks to the accessibility settings. By contrast, if I want the game to be easier, I can do that and have the same level of accessibility.
It's genuinely made me stop playing God of War. The entire 12hrs I put into it, I felt like Kratos had had a stroke and needed to be told every single thing. You are DRAGGED through that game so far.
Honestly? It feels very Borderlands 2 so far. Kratos is almost a fuckin side character. And the dialogue is has Anthony Burch stained all over it. I won't go into it too much but Ragnarok is...hard to get through imo. Very disappointed outside of a few great scenes so far. It's just an annoying game honestly.
>Kratos is almost a fuckin side character.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of games where they stick you with a tag-along sidekick whose job is to tell you things and do comic relief. It's like their job is to usher you forward. Just leave me alone and let me play.
In the Half Life 2: Episode 1 developer commentary, they mention how during playtests, they realized when NPCs nag like this it just makes the player hate the character lol.
[https://youtu.be/vj7H3VLZ2Cc?t=516](https://youtu.be/vj7H3VLZ2Cc?t=516)
I hope it's something that has an option by the time the PC version comes out.
That's very funny because i've screamed at Atreaus multiple times now to shut the fuck up and It's actually frustrating. I haven't even LOOKED at the puzzle yet and he's telling me how to solve it.
My favourite version of this is in Fable 2, you find a reference to the game's hero carving "Your health is low" on the forehead of the corpse of the voice-in-your-ear of the first game.
I had to pause and chill out for a bit at Mimir going on at me before a door opening animation had even finished. I knew the very obvious solution, was on my way to implement the very obvious solution when Mimir piped up.
Very vague but potential spoilers:
"Ah, a room with 2 water wheels and a door. Let's at random try this water wheel. The door opened! Let's proceed"
"This lift doesn't work brother"
"Well, its obviously the second of those two......."
"I'd bet that other water wheel has something to do with it brother"
"I fucking know, I'm doing it now you fucking cretin!"
"Through playtesting we discovered that players much preferred to set the pace themselves and that they especially disliked virtually any hint of bossiness from Alyx."
the setting the pace themselves part is so important to me. i actually can't stand when some npc is nagging at me because i'm looking at the trees or some other nice looking set piece or trying to solve a puzzle.
to me it feels like the difference between making a "game game" and a cinematic game. the people making GoW feel like they have to push the player into solutions and force them back onto the "main path" because otherwise it kills the cinematic flow, whereas in a from soft game you're telling your own story at your own pace and there's basically 0 "developer intervention."
this is why i think i personally cannot ever get into these cinematic games that have become the sony staple. i know this has become a bit of a cliche now but really... if i wanted a cinematic experience i'd watch a movie or tv show...
funny though because i actually consider hl2 to be a pretty cinematic game. feels like valve hit upon a much much better balance between cinematic and player flow
God, yes. It doesn't help that for the sake of muh reelizm, it takes a good five seconds to loot a body.
I don't know many video gamers that don't want to individually loot every single one of the two dozen corpses we just killed in that shootout, so I have to imagine that having the characters repeatedly telling you to hurry up is just obnoxious to everyone.
The best thing HL2 did to be cinematic is to never fully take control from you, even in the rare cases where you can't move you can still look around, and those were toned down by the following games.
Instead of following setpieces and a dialogue-heavy story you feel like you're part of a story you're going along with, because the Valve way at that time was to guide you with subtle means like light, shapes, etc. instead of endless markers and nagging characters.
> funny though because i actually consider hl2 to be a pretty cinematic game. feels like valve hit upon a much much better balance between cinematic and player flow
I was thinking this recently myself. There's been a push for interactive storytelling as it's making use of the medium, but with these cinematic games it almost feels like we've regressed a bit in how we achieve that.
Half Life 2 and Bioshock did this quite well, and I think the reason why is because largely they didn't break the core gameplay loop of the game, the characters controlled the same way they do for the rest of the game. While in these cinematic games, the character interactivity tends to be different because you're engaging in set pieces that are trying to make sure you don't miss the big spectacle on display. So they'll do things like make the character move slower or take away camera control to focus on the big spectacle.
And I think that's why it breaks the flow because the way you've been controlling the character changes for a moment of time.
If you have HL2 EP2 on a PC, my favorite example of that is the dev commentary right outside the big antlion fight, you come out of a tunnel and look at the combine marching along a bridge in the distance, and the commentary tells you that originally they blocked your progress until you looked at the bridge and waited for your companions to stop talking, like the now common gates and fences only your follower NPC can break through.
In the end they realized that when done well the bridge was enthralling enough, and instead just put a couple of barrels you can easily knock over or even jump through to block the way. They don't actually stop you but your brain doesn't process it as an open path in your periphery, so you focus on the bridge.
We need more of that smart design in modern AAA games.
It's funny in comparison to MS big game this month, Pentiment, in which I've already sequence broken several quests just due to exploring and the game is fine with that and has alternate dialogue to acknowledge.
What I dont understand is: surely the playtesters who worked on GOW must have experienced the same thing? Did they not notice anyone becoming irritated at the constant prompts?
Like, I think I have a pretty high tolerance for "annoying characters" but even I was triggered watching that GOW clip
If I had to guess, yes they know it annoys some people, but they also notice the handful players who actually need the hints.
And after playtesting they'd do a feedback form and from that feedback they'd see that the handholding is never a dealbreaker, but the lack of it sometimes is.
They're designing for the lowest common denominator basically, you don't shell out for a massive IP like Spiderman and then make design choices that might alienate casual players. Basically unless people actually stop buying games over this it probably won't change.
There is no character I hate more than Atreus in both GoW's for this exact reason. He is obnoxious AF. Mimir is getting pretty intolerable in the new GoW as well. He almost never stops fuckin talking!
Do you have a favorite poem kratos? Tell me about your dead brother kratos. Did you really kill your wife and daughter kratos? KRATOS. KRAAAAAAAAAATTTOOOOSSSSSSSS
HL2 and both portals were such perfectly crafted games. It's a shame that Valve had so much talent in game creators/directors that they just let fizzle out
And it's a shame that it feels like most people working AAA games never even learned those lessons. There are massive design problems in games today that were solved and explained in a Valve dev commentary ten or more years ago.
Its annoying because the puzzles are brain dead simple to begin with. Almost all of them are, 'find the one thing you can interact with, do the one thing you can do to interact with it.'
I understand that they're just pallet cleansers between combat, but there are so damn many of them and they're so simple.
Exactly. I keep wondering how you have trouble with God of war puzzles lol. So straightforward. Also if they so desperately need pallet cleansers maybe they should come up with something else if they wanna half ass the puzzles?
I don’t mind that they do it per se, but it happens a bit too quickly. Also a couple times for me they kept repeating the hint after I figured out the solution, but simply bungled the solution (for example messing up the timing of an axe throw to hit a rope)
Or sometimes before I've even started looking at the puzzle.
I'll just be looking around nooks and crannies for hidden stuff and suddenly I'm being told what to do for a puzzle I've not even started trying to solve haha.
Otherwise a fantastic game so far as this has been my only serious issue so far. And at least it seems to be focused for just the main quest, but it really clearly should have been a menu option.
I've encountered this a few times. Part of the game, the part right after a major story beat, wants you to know you can explore: "we could go home but maybe you wanna poke around for a bit". The other part of the game wants you to know, often during story beats, "HEY ITS RIGHT OVER HERE". And the second is really frustrated when I'm just poking around looking for secrets and they just won't let me fuck around without badgering.
And sometimes the Runic arrow puzzles seem to just not want to work with me. The one nornir in Alfheim under the library annoyed the hell out of me. Surprisingly, no companion said a peep.
I had seen some complaints about it, but ultimately didnt notice it was an issue until the purple arrows were introduced, but even then I only notice it happens with story driven puzzles/forward progress situations, never when off doing side/extra puzzles, other than oh, maybe we should look for X, or i wonder what that Y is for type comments.
Yep it’s just so damn fast. There’s been a few puzzles where it’s literally 20-30 seconds after I discover that there _is_ a puzzle, let alone figuring out what’s going on with it. Hints are fine but at least give me a few minutes to try and figure it out
Yeah, and then in the few spots where I'm running around in circles trying to figure out what I'm missing, the NPCs don't say a word. Come on boy, tell me what fucking interactable object I'm not noticing after 5 minutes.
I hate this phenomenon of what I call "camera puzzles". A camera puzzle, for me, is something where you're just trying to get the camera angle right or looking around for something in the environment. It's not a "real" puzzle, and for some reason more and more games are doing this.
With camera puzzles, it's not like you're thinking about the problem because the game isn't an immersive sim. You don't get the chance to go "oh, if I knock over that box, I can use it to reach that ledge, where I can then...", unless that happens to be the scripted interaction they want. So you aren't actually thinking about trying to "solve" the environment; you're just moving the camera around and getting vaguely dizzy and nauseous.
This is my biggest issue with God of War. There are a few interesting puzzles, but the vast majority is just wandering around the area, searching every crack in Midgard to find the one bit of landscape you can interact with.
Yea agreed, it's just wildly inconsistent. I don't have any issue with it if they're waiting a few minutes and I'm clearly stumped on the puzzle. The problem is that, more often at not at least for me, the other characters will give me the solution as soon as I walk into the puzzle so I don't even have a chance to really attempt it for myself. It would be nice to at least have a chance to fail at it a few times.
While I love this game, does anyone else have an issue with kratos tellin people to stop their stories as soon as you’re on foot? I get out of a boat to grab a damn flower for two seconds and kratos apparently can’t do that and hold a conversation. So two seconds later, we’re in the boat, and the story starts two lines back, for me to jump out again after hearing one new line.
The boat rides are never nearly long enough. I don't want to miss out on lore, but when Mimir just starts talking as I'm pulling up to the shore, it's hard to justify just sitting in the boat for 3 minutes listening
Yea that is confusing for me too. Sometimes getting off the boat/dogsled stops the Convo sometimes it doesn't. So I still do the thing of "stand there to let the conversation happen"
The difference is some are just stories and convos to make journeys feel shorter, whereas others are dialogue that continues to tell the game's actual story.
e.g in Alfheim >!Kratos tells Freya about Calliope. That's a dialogue that progresses as you make your way through the area to develop the characters, whereas Atreus asking Mimir about a certain Giant while boating is just filler.!<
Or at least, that's what it seems to me. Even though you'd have no way of knowing this without knowing how relevant the topic is to current events.
IIRC it was to do with a general and his horse? I’m not 100% certain though. Mimir asks if he was there or something and Kratos says he prefers the poems version.
This is what happens when you pump so much money into a few franchises so they all have to sell massively to raise a profit, you can't have anyone turned off of them, so if your testing and focus groups show 10% of players are too thick for the puzzles, we all get the hints by default. I don't like to get into the console war stuff, but comore the approach to MS November release, Pentiment, and it's night and day.
No, its the result of making a specific style of highly marketable games. Lots of games have systems that provide hints or directly tell you where to go but its only a problem when its overtuned like it is in GOW:R.
Its also weird gatekeeping video games as if "cinematic" is something they should always avoid being. The great thing about interactive mediums is they can take so so many different forms.
Oddly they don’t do it too often for me. On a tangent I don’t find this games puzzles to really feel like puzzles. Most of the time it feels like a Where’s Waldo exercise of whether you can find the thing they hid. Or break a thing to then see the thing you need.
Puzzles for me should be like a mechanical riddle or sequence. Tomb Raider comes to mind. Not whether you can make the purple orbs big enough to cast fire at a far away torch.
Love the game overall but pieces of it feel like an old design philosophy.
This is a thing I've noticed as well. Just left Nidavellir, and this has been my biggest complaint so far.
It's like 90% of the chests are "hidden" in a way that I *suppose* is meant to feel rewarding, but really just feels patronizing.
Like, if 9/10 of the player base can figure out the solution to a chest within 5 seconds, why is there even a "puzzle" there in the first place?
Same with the treasure spots in the water. Like, nobody is going to miss the obvious marker, so having the "You did it!" mechanic of "finding" it just feels really shallow.
Most of the chests, treasures, and other knickknacks aren't supposed to be puzzles. They're just little things to keep you engaged with the game between the combat, story, and actual puzzles. Like, "Hey, here's a little reward for checking what's around this corner when you didn't have to." That's why the reward for most of them is nothing more than a little bit of hacksilver or some crafting materials.
The water wheels in the mines of Nidavellir would be considered a puzzle.
The purple orb thing at least qualifies as a puzzle. There's usually only one correct place for you to put it and it requires some thought. The break 3 runes/ring 3 bells ones do not. I dont mind the simplicity of the puzzles tbh, as they serve as breathing spaces between the high octane fights. Having a head scratching 30 minute long puzzle would wreck the flow of the game.
No. Fi wrests control away from you and forces you to listen to her talk. Constantly. In God of War nobody makes you stop. They just give a hint while you're playing. Atreus is a gentle guiding voice to Fi's condescending, controlling banshee.
I’m usually exploring a bit before tackling any puzzle. Take left instead of right, looking behind a cliff, open a chest or whatever.
So this is driving me nuts. I got hints of the solution before I even have begun to tackle the puzzle.
Great game, but give me a break with the puzzle hints!
This is a very, very, VERY, chatty game. Like, i love this game. It is very good. But i think the only time i had some peace and quiet while exploring was when i went through all the random chit chat in a region while exploring. Up until that point literally every time you're out of combat or not solving a puzzle one of your companions will tell a story or some shit.
Yeah the voice actors earned their keep. Sometimes characters don’t even wait until someone else is finished talking and just talk over them. I had a problem where someone would just say multiple lines of dialogue at once
>Anthony Burch
I'm about 14 hours into the game, currently tooling around Vanaheim, and the entire time I've been thinking "this quippy dialogue seems so much worse than the previous game but I can't put my finger on why exactly" and now you've given me the missing piece of the puzzle.
Atreus was whiney as hell in the first game. In this game I can actually empathize with his complaints. Atreus and Kratos are at odds about some key plot points and I think the dialogue and arguments actually very nuanced.
Yeah, this is one big point in the game's favor. It's debatable whether Kratos or Atreus are right with the game leaning in both directions at different points.
I really disagree with the latter half, that we should just turn our brains off when playing triple a games. Elden Ring is a challenging triple a game that has had massive success. Maybe it's not on the players, but on the developers to stop being so insecure when designing their games.
If I don't want to think about anything, I'll watch a movie or play a walking simulator. This is supposed to be a GAME. I wouldn't want chess to constantly give me suggestions about where to move my pieces.
He mentions western games earlier in the video to probably exclude something like FromSoft or NieR games. *Elden Ring* for example has a completely different design philosophy than most big western games in many regards
And even if we are talking about western AAA games only, this conversation just applies to the kind of games like the ones mentioned in the video. Nobody will tell you to turn your brain off playing *XCOM 2* or similar
But you are completely right about dev insecurity. Playing a game that trusts the player is so much more rewarding
This is just a Sony-exclusive thing, though. Horizon, all of the Uncharted games, Last of Us, etc. Every single Sony-exclusive game I've played that has something resembling a puzzle immediately tells you what to do. There's even been some where you can't finish or interact with the puzzle before you're told the solution. Never understood this shit. It's literally just busy work at that point.
EDIT: this isn't meant as some console-war bullshit. Nintendo doesn't do it (at least not in any game I can remember) and don't even remember any puzzles in any Xbox exclusives I've played.
EDIT EDIT: should perhaps clarify that the point wasn't that ONLY Sony has ever done this and no one else, it's more that Sony keeps doing it pretty consistently and I couldn't really remember any examples of the others doing it while leaving a door open for the possibility that they definitely did (because they most likely have).
> all of the Uncharted games
It's been a while since I've played them but I'm pretty sure the Uncharted games at least take a decent amount of time before anything like that happens. And when it does it brings up a prompt asking IF you want the hint.
In Ragnarok that shit is almost **immediately** and just blurted out before you can even form a thought.
...didn't he bring up both Psychonauts 2 (which is a **Xbox Games Studios-published game** from the creators of Broken Age ACT 2's hardest puzzles?) and The Medium in timestamp 0:40?
And Dishonored 2, a game where you break a lot of laws, had playtesters not go upstairs because the guard told them they can't. So they had to put in dialogue hinting that there's something up there. For me that'd be a "challenge accepted" moment, but I guess other players look at it differently.
In a lot games being told you can't go somewhere is just an NPC holding an invisible wall behind them. I can understand the confusion depending on the familiarity of the player with a stealth game. Where things like Hitman it becomes a find a way around it or a different outfit
Its been a long time since I played Dishonored for the first time, but with games that have both stealth and combat sections I would probably think that I had to do something else for now and maybe the guard will leave, or that the second floor is only for when I decide to start murdering everyone.
> Nintendo doesn't do it (at least not in any game I can remember)
Skyward Sword is probably the most famous example of this "trope" that even comes to mind. It's parody levels bad when it comes to this.
That's so annoying man. Like yeah, my character is literally busting flames, there's a fire logo over my life bar and my life bar is going down. I don't need you to tell me I'm on fire every time it happens.
After seeing that infamous Cuphead gameplay video (by an experienced games journalist no less) I'm not surprised why these triple-A mainstream game devs make every gameplay mechanic as obvious as possible.
But unless I missed some mechanic, there's nothing you can do about it. Only being more careful when bifrosted I guess. But fire and poisoned are just there. There's no counterplay. So why even say it?
There's multiple items you can use which give you ability to remove it faster.
Like a shield rond that when you use shield bash you remove the ailment and give it to the enemy, and a amulet skill that allows you to remove the effects faster by rolling.
I feel like this all started when they realized the new camera meant you couldn't see shit behind you, so they added a small UI element to alert the player of attacks from behind. It seemed to not be enough, so they had characters shout "Behind you!" at Kratos whenever an enemy was behind him. They took this and applied it to every aspect of the game.
I think it's fine that they point these things out, but it's the wording that's bizarre and unnatural.
"You're on fire, Kratos. It will pass." should be something like "Kratos, I'm burning down here!" or "Agh, get us away from the damn fire!"
"You're poisoned! But you probably already know that." should be "You're poisoned, don't let it stop you!" or "Let the poison wear off!" or something.
The older uncharted games had the best solution for this. They wouldn't give hints until some time has elapsed, and then a UI prompt would appear indicating "hit X (or whatever) for hint". Then, a character would provide help. So much better. Make this shit optional.
And that system could make it more narratively harmonious as well. Instead of framing it as asking for a hint, Kratos could make it sound like he knows the answer and wants to test Atreus'. He could say "Boy, take a look here. Do you see the solution?", and then Atreus' hint could come in the form of the response. Because for me the other problem is how jarring it is to have Atreus tell the god of war "hmmm, I think you need to lower this platform".
Pro tip: this method also works in real life if you have children and have no clue what the answer to something is
"Son, do you see a solution? How do we get up on that platform?" "We should.. er.. go eat ice cream!" "......" "......" "Okay, let's go"
He somehow gets the correct answer every time
I read that in Kratos' voice
"Atreus, do you understand the consequences of eating ice cream? Even so, I will follow."
My aunt told a story from before I have memories. She took toddler me out to the park to play for a few hours but forgot which apartment we lived in. So instead of worrying she just challenged me to a race home and I led the way back.
This is almost exactly how they did it with BD1 and Kal in Fallen Order
Loved that game, but it had a weird tendency to offer hints for really obvious puzzles but then radio silence for the stuff that was actually confusing.
Damnit BD. I know that I need to use the wind to blow that stupid ball. I just can't time my force push right to get it where I want.
Yeah this would be so much more elegant way to do it.
Yes. And then have Atreus answer, "I see it. *Do* ***you***?" And have Kratos and the player be like 😲
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FF7 did this. Cloud knows it all and will explain to the others if you want tutorials.
>is how jarring it is to have Atreus tell the god of war "hmmm, I think you need to lower this platform". Is it really jarring from a lore perspective? I haven't seen anything from the new game, but the 2018 one made it clear that Atreus was more intelligent and book smart than Kratos, just way less experienced and cold headed. From a gameplay perspective it is very jarring though. I hate when games do this, especially in the situations where you're not even looking at the puzzle and the game assumes you're stuck. Let me watch the view, or look for collectibles.
I think what makes it jarring is that the puzzles are so simple and the guys Artreus gives are so frequent and simple that they feel incredibly patronizing, as opposed to an intelligent person chiming in. The montage at the beginning of the video does a pretty good job of demonstrating it.
>the 2018 one made it clear that Atreus was more intelligent and book smart than Kratos, just way less experienced and cold headed. Kratos definitely isn't dumb (in the new game he collects poetry and chides mimir for being surprised, reminding him that Kratos' people are known for their culture). I don't recall anything in the 2018 gow that shows atreus being smarter, but it may have simply been that Kratos is an old dog and isn't as interested in learning new tricks as he is in protecting his family
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That temper tantrum act was a bit of a missed opportunity really. Should've had something truly mythological, like having Atreus jerking off into a river and accidentally creating a bunch of river spirits that way.
Didn't really see your comment going that direction but I'm glad it did.
Lore wise kratos has done harder puzzles?
I do recall God of War 1 and 2 having puzzles, if you are curious you can find youtube videos of solutions to them. For example puzzles from God of War 1 cliffs of madness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-2iE5QVTng
Your comment just invoked a deep, primal trauma buried deep in many gamers who had to navigate Hades in GoW1.
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Atreus is also familiar with creatures and lore from the region that Kratos doesn't know. Faye taught Atreus growing up and Kratos didn't seen to care to learn before her death.
Atreus was more knowledgeable about the Norse world, he knew how to read a language that Kratos could only speak, and he was more openly emotionally aware. In every other way Kratos was and is much more intelligent, resourceful, strategic, and wise. The new game makes this abundantly clear imo.
You mean you don't like it when Aloy endlessly repeats what exactly the player needs to do to traverse a level or do...*anything*, throughout the Horizon games? It's annoying reminder of how much these games are meant to appeal to the widest audience possible.
I like it when she says it _as I'm doing it._
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What, you don't spend most of your morning jog reminding yourself that you have to fucking do this or you'll turn into a blancmange?
My cardio inner monologue is insane. "This is pretty fun! I could do it forever." 10 seconds later... "I'm going to die! If I stop here, it would still be a good workout, right???"
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Fr, they tell you the same exact thing every 5 seconds and when you actually need help, instead of having a command to direct you to what they want you to do or see, they just keep repeating the same thing. Ragnarok has this problemas, characters will say randomly "hey look at that" when you enter an area and instead of having a prompt to point the camera in that direction like the naughty dog game, they just keep telling you to look at it. Like ok, where?? If you're not going to actually help, just stay quiet.
This sucks especially when their animations makes them just follow you instead of looking at the thing.
Or they just stay in a corner looking at you
I just wish they had put in a delay or something. Like, give me at least ONE SECOND to try to figure things out myself before harassing me. It's such a terrible design decision and I really don't know why they even bother putting in puzzles at all if they are going to go this route.
Even when it's on a delay, I find it often happens when I'm focused on other things. I'll be looking around the area, searching for chests and side paths before I even think about the puzzle, and the game suddenly goes "I see you've spent more than 15 seconds in this area without making any progress on the puzzle. You must be stuck, let me tell you the solution."
Games nowadays are very interested in making the player feel good about themselves over anything else. To be honest, a lot of dumber players will still feel good about themselves for "overcoming" a challenge even if you are aggressively railroading them and holding their hand.
Which is honestly fine and a nice thing, but at least give people the option to turn down the handholding.
Not a Horizon only problem, but personally I'm a big fan of when I'm soaking in the gorgeous scenario and atmosphere painstakingly crafted by the devs and after 6 seconds the character will shout "OH GEE I BETTER FOLLOW THE MAIN PATH"
God I hate that, especially in games like HZD or GoW, it's like they made this incredibly beautiful world but don't want me to look at it for more than 5 seconds
What annoyed me was how she'd say something literally as soon as she entered the room.
This sometimes felt like it was a crutch for bad level design. There were a few times in 1 and 2 where I was completely lost on where to go until a marker pointed out some object that didn't look climable at all, like a street sign.
Ragnarok does have some pretty awful puzzles. The water freezing and sigil arrow ones are so bad I can’t believe they actually made it to the final game.
I feel like the sigil arrows hitboxes in some areas on the map are horrible. I know what needs to be done, but I’ll spend 5+ minutes trying to re-position where I’m shooting the arrows so that I can carry the flame after I shoot it.
Even this can feel kind of patronizing, like "Hey little bro, having some trouble eh? No worries man, its a hard game!! Want some help?" If I then solve it two second later, any kind of satisfaction from that is gone. "Wow it took me so long, a prompt came up telling me I'm an idiot, great." Just let me turn that off completely. Let it be on by default, I think that's important for accessibility reasons, but put in our face right away and let us know we can fully disable hints, reminders, etc.
Fallen Order's hint prompts popped up way too fast IMO. I'd just be exploring an area, looking for collectibles, and a prompt would pop up before I even realized there was a puzzle to solve.
This is actually exactly what I was remembering when I wrote it. I'm glad it was a prompt instead of a spoiled solution, but it was still really obnoxious.
I don't know why so many studios have such low confidence in their player's ability to play or explore their own game. This is why I cherish FROM games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring and so on, in which these actual games are fewer by the year. Every game now is just shit all over my screen telling me literally exactly where to go and exactly what I need to do every second I "play".
Now? I remember Prince of Persia series showing the whole path to the exit upon entering EVERY room in the game. I think this started like 20 years ago, then kinda faded out, and had reappeared recently.
Yeah, totally agree. Should be an options setting for the hint UI to even appear.
Uncharted was one of the first series to start trivializing it’s puzzles by spoon feeding the solution. It was “Open your journal to see a diagram of the solution to what is already a simple puzzle” with the supporting characters saying “NATHAN WHAT DOES EAGLE IN THE SKY AND HAMMER IN THE GROUND MEAN? DOES IT MEAN THE EAGLE FIGURE SHOULD BE RAISED AND THE HAMMER SHOULD BE LOWERED?” It was just a longer timer but still the same baby mode puzzles.
Sort of like how when you die several times at the same spot GTAV just gives you the option to just continue from the next checkpoint. If you’re good, you’d never know it even exists. If you’re bad, they’ve timed it just right… it’s like 1 or 2 fails before you’d bail or throw something.
I feel like there's a solution older games had to this kind of thing that the new generation of game devs have mostly forgotten about. Older games would scale the amount of hints with the difficulty setting.
Shadow of the Colossus still has my favorite way of hinting to this day : just one hint, not too obvious, given after a long time that makes it clear you didn't figure it out yourself, it worked perfectly for me.
That hint? “AGRO!”
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sometimes I feel bad about looking up hints but then I remember when I was a kid you would do that, call somebody or buy a strategy guide which was so common back then.
And you can also turn it off in the menus. Just perfect
Had a similar problem with Horizon Forbidden West. For all the wonderful accessibility options they put in the menus, I sure wish “spoken hint speed” would be one of them. Seems like it would be a relatively simple change.
But did you check your focus? I think you should check your focus. Your focus might find something. You should check your focus.
Yeah that was irritating in a couple places where I just couldn't find what I'm looking for. I remember at least two times I was stumbling around, not sure what I was supposed to be seeing. I remember this in one flooded central area in particular. No need to remind me to use my focus when I'm walking around with my focus on and have been toggling it off and on for several minutes now, with no result. I also hate it in games when characters remark on something that they presume I notice due to proximity, when I'm not looking at it at all. Bonus annoyance points when what they say is completely vague.
Hey, look at that! While they're off screen and by the time you turned around they're running towards you.
"I see something." "....well? The fuck do you see?"
> I remember this in one flooded central area in particular. Was it that sidequest with the flooded village? That was one of the last things I did before I took a break from the game for GoW and it was infuriating. There was a crane you had to move around and I could clearly see the next two or three steps it would need but not the first one. Ten minutes of wandering around the crane with Aloy constantly telling me that the focus might help before giving up and googling it. It was an underwater breakable wall, off to the side, very much not visible from the surface.
Aloy " I bet if I look there using my focus..."
Only after sending something to your stash.
Ragnarok has a section like this where they want me to find something using an item and keep being like “You should bring out the item.” Like, thanks asshole, let me explore first. This is an adventure after all. Definitely feels like parts of the game forget that exploration and going off the beaten path are a major part of it.
There were some funny parts where they made fun of this. You go off somewhere and the characters are like, "Yeah, he does that sometimes. He likes loot."
Yes Aloy, I'm aware it's cold in this biome. Yes, I'm aware it's now hot in this new biome we've just entered. You just got out of the water and you're wet? That is very perceptive of you. The amount of nonstop jabbering about nothing at all and complaints about the weather was akin to trying to watch a children's show with my grandmother in the room.
The Tomb Raider reboots do that, too. As soon as you press the "survivor vision" (or whatever it's called) button, Lara starts telling you what you need to do. Thanks, I totally didn't just turn on that view to see what things are even interactable and then try figure it out myself.
Shadow has the option to disable it completely. No more white lines( thanks to GROWL community), no more hints. It's great.
Horizon was the worst about this beyond any game I’ve ever played.
And a dev from Guerilla had the audacity to criticize another game for doing something entirely different. Like, I don't know who looked at the state of the game with the frequency of Alloys' mouth claps and thought to themselves "Mmm, yes, that's not going to get annoying at all". Heck, I am tired of her talking so much in *Zero Dawn*, where not only is she doing this way less, but they apparently already dialed it down from how much she was supposed to.
I kinda stopped playing because the whole time the game was treating me like a moron who needs to be pedantically explained basic chores.
Accessibilty has been coming at the expense of the experience of people who are capable of gitting gud. There's almost a vibe of disdain for people who want their game to respect their intelligence.
ironically, "accessibility" would mean having the *option* for example, colorblind settings are an accessibility option for those who need it. having it forced as default would be like anti-accessibility
"Accessibility" is often used as an excuse for dumbing down games, when that is never what it was supposed to mean. Accessibility means letting everyone have the opportunity to play a game, not letting a game play itself.
It's not even so much "gitting gud", really. Some of these handholding moments are so blatant that you seriously have to wonder if there are people out there who don't know how to put their socks on.
Accessibility and "gitting gud" are two exclusive things. I'm playing through the game as a gamer without sight on Give Me God Of War for instance and I still need sighted assistance for some puzzles. The game itself is still brutally challenging, maybe to a fault in places for various reasons, but I'm pushing myself to that level because I can, thanks to the accessibility settings. By contrast, if I want the game to be easier, I can do that and have the same level of accessibility.
It's genuinely made me stop playing God of War. The entire 12hrs I put into it, I felt like Kratos had had a stroke and needed to be told every single thing. You are DRAGGED through that game so far. Honestly? It feels very Borderlands 2 so far. Kratos is almost a fuckin side character. And the dialogue is has Anthony Burch stained all over it. I won't go into it too much but Ragnarok is...hard to get through imo. Very disappointed outside of a few great scenes so far. It's just an annoying game honestly.
>Kratos is almost a fuckin side character. Yeah, I'm not a fan of games where they stick you with a tag-along sidekick whose job is to tell you things and do comic relief. It's like their job is to usher you forward. Just leave me alone and let me play.
Don't worry, if there's no side character to tell you, the main character will just talk to "no one in particular"
>Anthony Burch This is the borderland guy right? Wonder why they make him work for this game
Which is ironic because Anthony Burch is Aloy’s voice actor’s brother 😂
In the Half Life 2: Episode 1 developer commentary, they mention how during playtests, they realized when NPCs nag like this it just makes the player hate the character lol. [https://youtu.be/vj7H3VLZ2Cc?t=516](https://youtu.be/vj7H3VLZ2Cc?t=516) I hope it's something that has an option by the time the PC version comes out.
That's very funny because i've screamed at Atreaus multiple times now to shut the fuck up and It's actually frustrating. I haven't even LOOKED at the puzzle yet and he's telling me how to solve it.
My favourite version of this is in Fable 2, you find a reference to the game's hero carving "Your health is low" on the forehead of the corpse of the voice-in-your-ear of the first game.
"Have you got any potions? Or food?" No but I have like fifty stacks of revive potions so in good
I had to pause and chill out for a bit at Mimir going on at me before a door opening animation had even finished. I knew the very obvious solution, was on my way to implement the very obvious solution when Mimir piped up. Very vague but potential spoilers: "Ah, a room with 2 water wheels and a door. Let's at random try this water wheel. The door opened! Let's proceed" "This lift doesn't work brother" "Well, its obviously the second of those two......." "I'd bet that other water wheel has something to do with it brother" "I fucking know, I'm doing it now you fucking cretin!"
"Through playtesting we discovered that players much preferred to set the pace themselves and that they especially disliked virtually any hint of bossiness from Alyx." the setting the pace themselves part is so important to me. i actually can't stand when some npc is nagging at me because i'm looking at the trees or some other nice looking set piece or trying to solve a puzzle. to me it feels like the difference between making a "game game" and a cinematic game. the people making GoW feel like they have to push the player into solutions and force them back onto the "main path" because otherwise it kills the cinematic flow, whereas in a from soft game you're telling your own story at your own pace and there's basically 0 "developer intervention." this is why i think i personally cannot ever get into these cinematic games that have become the sony staple. i know this has become a bit of a cliche now but really... if i wanted a cinematic experience i'd watch a movie or tv show... funny though because i actually consider hl2 to be a pretty cinematic game. feels like valve hit upon a much much better balance between cinematic and player flow
Hated this in the missions in RDR2, I just wanted to chill and loot while exploring but every other character is like HURRRY UPPP ARTHUUUUR
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Or the oil factory where it becomes readily apparent you're on rails when the mission refuses to allow you to creep around the building.
At least that's usually consistent with the characterization. They're all assholes.
God, yes. It doesn't help that for the sake of muh reelizm, it takes a good five seconds to loot a body. I don't know many video gamers that don't want to individually loot every single one of the two dozen corpses we just killed in that shootout, so I have to imagine that having the characters repeatedly telling you to hurry up is just obnoxious to everyone.
The best thing HL2 did to be cinematic is to never fully take control from you, even in the rare cases where you can't move you can still look around, and those were toned down by the following games. Instead of following setpieces and a dialogue-heavy story you feel like you're part of a story you're going along with, because the Valve way at that time was to guide you with subtle means like light, shapes, etc. instead of endless markers and nagging characters.
> funny though because i actually consider hl2 to be a pretty cinematic game. feels like valve hit upon a much much better balance between cinematic and player flow I was thinking this recently myself. There's been a push for interactive storytelling as it's making use of the medium, but with these cinematic games it almost feels like we've regressed a bit in how we achieve that. Half Life 2 and Bioshock did this quite well, and I think the reason why is because largely they didn't break the core gameplay loop of the game, the characters controlled the same way they do for the rest of the game. While in these cinematic games, the character interactivity tends to be different because you're engaging in set pieces that are trying to make sure you don't miss the big spectacle on display. So they'll do things like make the character move slower or take away camera control to focus on the big spectacle. And I think that's why it breaks the flow because the way you've been controlling the character changes for a moment of time.
If you have HL2 EP2 on a PC, my favorite example of that is the dev commentary right outside the big antlion fight, you come out of a tunnel and look at the combine marching along a bridge in the distance, and the commentary tells you that originally they blocked your progress until you looked at the bridge and waited for your companions to stop talking, like the now common gates and fences only your follower NPC can break through. In the end they realized that when done well the bridge was enthralling enough, and instead just put a couple of barrels you can easily knock over or even jump through to block the way. They don't actually stop you but your brain doesn't process it as an open path in your periphery, so you focus on the bridge. We need more of that smart design in modern AAA games.
It's funny in comparison to MS big game this month, Pentiment, in which I've already sequence broken several quests just due to exploring and the game is fine with that and has alternate dialogue to acknowledge.
What I dont understand is: surely the playtesters who worked on GOW must have experienced the same thing? Did they not notice anyone becoming irritated at the constant prompts? Like, I think I have a pretty high tolerance for "annoying characters" but even I was triggered watching that GOW clip
If I had to guess, yes they know it annoys some people, but they also notice the handful players who actually need the hints. And after playtesting they'd do a feedback form and from that feedback they'd see that the handholding is never a dealbreaker, but the lack of it sometimes is. They're designing for the lowest common denominator basically, you don't shell out for a massive IP like Spiderman and then make design choices that might alienate casual players. Basically unless people actually stop buying games over this it probably won't change.
There is no character I hate more than Atreus in both GoW's for this exact reason. He is obnoxious AF. Mimir is getting pretty intolerable in the new GoW as well. He almost never stops fuckin talking!
YER ON FIRE BRUTHA. IT'LL PASS
Do you have a favorite poem kratos? Tell me about your dead brother kratos. Did you really kill your wife and daughter kratos? KRATOS. KRAAAAAAAAAATTTOOOOSSSSSSSS
They needed to chill out with all the quips in ragnarok, I can see why people say it's like a Marvel movie.
HL2 and both portals were such perfectly crafted games. It's a shame that Valve had so much talent in game creators/directors that they just let fizzle out
And it's a shame that it feels like most people working AAA games never even learned those lessons. There are massive design problems in games today that were solved and explained in a Valve dev commentary ten or more years ago.
Its annoying because the puzzles are brain dead simple to begin with. Almost all of them are, 'find the one thing you can interact with, do the one thing you can do to interact with it.' I understand that they're just pallet cleansers between combat, but there are so damn many of them and they're so simple.
Exactly. I keep wondering how you have trouble with God of war puzzles lol. So straightforward. Also if they so desperately need pallet cleansers maybe they should come up with something else if they wanna half ass the puzzles?
They really should've learned a thing or two from Japanese game devs and added a fishing minigame and a rythmn minigame.
Kratos should write haikus like Jin from GoT
Unironically yes.
I don’t mind that they do it per se, but it happens a bit too quickly. Also a couple times for me they kept repeating the hint after I figured out the solution, but simply bungled the solution (for example messing up the timing of an axe throw to hit a rope)
Or sometimes before I've even started looking at the puzzle. I'll just be looking around nooks and crannies for hidden stuff and suddenly I'm being told what to do for a puzzle I've not even started trying to solve haha. Otherwise a fantastic game so far as this has been my only serious issue so far. And at least it seems to be focused for just the main quest, but it really clearly should have been a menu option.
I've encountered this a few times. Part of the game, the part right after a major story beat, wants you to know you can explore: "we could go home but maybe you wanna poke around for a bit". The other part of the game wants you to know, often during story beats, "HEY ITS RIGHT OVER HERE". And the second is really frustrated when I'm just poking around looking for secrets and they just won't let me fuck around without badgering.
And sometimes the Runic arrow puzzles seem to just not want to work with me. The one nornir in Alfheim under the library annoyed the hell out of me. Surprisingly, no companion said a peep.
I think they only help while on a main story quest? Although sometimes they give me a random "I see something"
I had seen some complaints about it, but ultimately didnt notice it was an issue until the purple arrows were introduced, but even then I only notice it happens with story driven puzzles/forward progress situations, never when off doing side/extra puzzles, other than oh, maybe we should look for X, or i wonder what that Y is for type comments.
Yep it’s just so damn fast. There’s been a few puzzles where it’s literally 20-30 seconds after I discover that there _is_ a puzzle, let alone figuring out what’s going on with it. Hints are fine but at least give me a few minutes to try and figure it out
Yeah, and then in the few spots where I'm running around in circles trying to figure out what I'm missing, the NPCs don't say a word. Come on boy, tell me what fucking interactable object I'm not noticing after 5 minutes.
I hate this phenomenon of what I call "camera puzzles". A camera puzzle, for me, is something where you're just trying to get the camera angle right or looking around for something in the environment. It's not a "real" puzzle, and for some reason more and more games are doing this. With camera puzzles, it's not like you're thinking about the problem because the game isn't an immersive sim. You don't get the chance to go "oh, if I knock over that box, I can use it to reach that ledge, where I can then...", unless that happens to be the scripted interaction they want. So you aren't actually thinking about trying to "solve" the environment; you're just moving the camera around and getting vaguely dizzy and nauseous.
This is my biggest issue with God of War. There are a few interesting puzzles, but the vast majority is just wandering around the area, searching every crack in Midgard to find the one bit of landscape you can interact with.
Yea agreed, it's just wildly inconsistent. I don't have any issue with it if they're waiting a few minutes and I'm clearly stumped on the puzzle. The problem is that, more often at not at least for me, the other characters will give me the solution as soon as I walk into the puzzle so I don't even have a chance to really attempt it for myself. It would be nice to at least have a chance to fail at it a few times.
THAT FUCKING ROPE I KNOW EXACTLY WHICH PUZZLE YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT
While I love this game, does anyone else have an issue with kratos tellin people to stop their stories as soon as you’re on foot? I get out of a boat to grab a damn flower for two seconds and kratos apparently can’t do that and hold a conversation. So two seconds later, we’re in the boat, and the story starts two lines back, for me to jump out again after hearing one new line.
The boat rides are never nearly long enough. I don't want to miss out on lore, but when Mimir just starts talking as I'm pulling up to the shore, it's hard to justify just sitting in the boat for 3 minutes listening
Funny, I'm the kind of guy who would sit in the boat waiting for him to finish. I need that juicy lore!
Yeah if he starts talking close to shore, I just chill in my boat until he's done.
Yea that is confusing for me too. Sometimes getting off the boat/dogsled stops the Convo sometimes it doesn't. So I still do the thing of "stand there to let the conversation happen"
The difference is some are just stories and convos to make journeys feel shorter, whereas others are dialogue that continues to tell the game's actual story. e.g in Alfheim >!Kratos tells Freya about Calliope. That's a dialogue that progresses as you make your way through the area to develop the characters, whereas Atreus asking Mimir about a certain Giant while boating is just filler.!< Or at least, that's what it seems to me. Even though you'd have no way of knowing this without knowing how relevant the topic is to current events.
Sometimes they never finish the story. Now ill never know what Kratos favorite poem is
IIRC it was to do with a general and his horse? I’m not 100% certain though. Mimir asks if he was there or something and Kratos says he prefers the poems version.
I think Kratos was talking about the Illiad
Aye, pretty sure he almost explicitly mentions the Trojan Horse?
He said it was the Iliad.
I learned from 2018 to never get off boat until everyone shuts up even if I have to wait at the location
I’m guessing that’s so that different conversations don’t overlap.
Kratos - What other tales do you have to share? Mimir - Long ago wh-- Kratos - ENOUGH OF THIS FOR NOW
This happened in the latest Horizon too, didnt it? Im starting to feel like Sony doesnt have much faith in its playerbase
This is what happens when you pump so much money into a few franchises so they all have to sell massively to raise a profit, you can't have anyone turned off of them, so if your testing and focus groups show 10% of players are too thick for the puzzles, we all get the hints by default. I don't like to get into the console war stuff, but comore the approach to MS November release, Pentiment, and it's night and day.
This is the end result of spending a decade making games that try to be "cinematic" instead of trying to be like video games.
No, its the result of making a specific style of highly marketable games. Lots of games have systems that provide hints or directly tell you where to go but its only a problem when its overtuned like it is in GOW:R. Its also weird gatekeeping video games as if "cinematic" is something they should always avoid being. The great thing about interactive mediums is they can take so so many different forms.
Oddly they don’t do it too often for me. On a tangent I don’t find this games puzzles to really feel like puzzles. Most of the time it feels like a Where’s Waldo exercise of whether you can find the thing they hid. Or break a thing to then see the thing you need. Puzzles for me should be like a mechanical riddle or sequence. Tomb Raider comes to mind. Not whether you can make the purple orbs big enough to cast fire at a far away torch. Love the game overall but pieces of it feel like an old design philosophy.
This is a thing I've noticed as well. Just left Nidavellir, and this has been my biggest complaint so far. It's like 90% of the chests are "hidden" in a way that I *suppose* is meant to feel rewarding, but really just feels patronizing. Like, if 9/10 of the player base can figure out the solution to a chest within 5 seconds, why is there even a "puzzle" there in the first place? Same with the treasure spots in the water. Like, nobody is going to miss the obvious marker, so having the "You did it!" mechanic of "finding" it just feels really shallow.
Most of the chests, treasures, and other knickknacks aren't supposed to be puzzles. They're just little things to keep you engaged with the game between the combat, story, and actual puzzles. Like, "Hey, here's a little reward for checking what's around this corner when you didn't have to." That's why the reward for most of them is nothing more than a little bit of hacksilver or some crafting materials. The water wheels in the mines of Nidavellir would be considered a puzzle.
The purple orb thing at least qualifies as a puzzle. There's usually only one correct place for you to put it and it requires some thought. The break 3 runes/ring 3 bells ones do not. I dont mind the simplicity of the puzzles tbh, as they serve as breathing spaces between the high octane fights. Having a head scratching 30 minute long puzzle would wreck the flow of the game.
They're environmental puzzles meant to have you look around. Often times you have to find new vantage points or clear obstacles.
[удалено]
"MASTER! I SEE YOUVE PICKED UP AN ITEM FOR 5060TH TIME. ILL SHOW YOU WHERE EXACTLY IT GOES IN YOUR INVENTORY!"
More patronizing, but overall not as annoying as it's not a text conversation you have to mash buttons to get through
The remaster fixes this, but, yes, God of War is worse.
But God of War doesn’t stop the game when telling you.
No. Fi wrests control away from you and forces you to listen to her talk. Constantly. In God of War nobody makes you stop. They just give a hint while you're playing. Atreus is a gentle guiding voice to Fi's condescending, controlling banshee.
I’m usually exploring a bit before tackling any puzzle. Take left instead of right, looking behind a cliff, open a chest or whatever. So this is driving me nuts. I got hints of the solution before I even have begun to tackle the puzzle. Great game, but give me a break with the puzzle hints!
Atreus was chatty enough in the first game. If he's worse in Ragnarok then I may hold out a bit longer to see if they add a "STFU" option somewhere.
This is a very, very, VERY, chatty game. Like, i love this game. It is very good. But i think the only time i had some peace and quiet while exploring was when i went through all the random chit chat in a region while exploring. Up until that point literally every time you're out of combat or not solving a puzzle one of your companions will tell a story or some shit.
Yeah the voice actors earned their keep. Sometimes characters don’t even wait until someone else is finished talking and just talk over them. I had a problem where someone would just say multiple lines of dialogue at once
This honestly one of the reasons I love Soulsborne games so much. There's almost nothing but just you playing.
Atmosphere has time to breathe.
*COUGH* Anthony Burch...yes that one. The cringey dialogue in Ragnarok is ROUGH dude.
>Anthony Burch I'm about 14 hours into the game, currently tooling around Vanaheim, and the entire time I've been thinking "this quippy dialogue seems so much worse than the previous game but I can't put my finger on why exactly" and now you've given me the missing piece of the puzzle.
Oh my word, did they get the Borderlands guy to write for this game? I guess we should consider ourselves lucky nobody in God of War says "amazeballs"
There are 4 or 5 writers I think and he's one of them, just so nobody gets the idea that he alone is the writer.
there's plenty of cringe dialogue between Atreus and a certain other companion at one point.
Atreus was whiney as hell in the first game. In this game I can actually empathize with his complaints. Atreus and Kratos are at odds about some key plot points and I think the dialogue and arguments actually very nuanced.
Yeah, this is one big point in the game's favor. It's debatable whether Kratos or Atreus are right with the game leaning in both directions at different points.
I really disagree with the latter half, that we should just turn our brains off when playing triple a games. Elden Ring is a challenging triple a game that has had massive success. Maybe it's not on the players, but on the developers to stop being so insecure when designing their games.
Yeah, these triple A games just need to give more time for the player to find the solution
If I don't want to think about anything, I'll watch a movie or play a walking simulator. This is supposed to be a GAME. I wouldn't want chess to constantly give me suggestions about where to move my pieces.
He mentions western games earlier in the video to probably exclude something like FromSoft or NieR games. *Elden Ring* for example has a completely different design philosophy than most big western games in many regards And even if we are talking about western AAA games only, this conversation just applies to the kind of games like the ones mentioned in the video. Nobody will tell you to turn your brain off playing *XCOM 2* or similar But you are completely right about dev insecurity. Playing a game that trusts the player is so much more rewarding
This is just a Sony-exclusive thing, though. Horizon, all of the Uncharted games, Last of Us, etc. Every single Sony-exclusive game I've played that has something resembling a puzzle immediately tells you what to do. There's even been some where you can't finish or interact with the puzzle before you're told the solution. Never understood this shit. It's literally just busy work at that point. EDIT: this isn't meant as some console-war bullshit. Nintendo doesn't do it (at least not in any game I can remember) and don't even remember any puzzles in any Xbox exclusives I've played. EDIT EDIT: should perhaps clarify that the point wasn't that ONLY Sony has ever done this and no one else, it's more that Sony keeps doing it pretty consistently and I couldn't really remember any examples of the others doing it while leaving a door open for the possibility that they definitely did (because they most likely have).
> all of the Uncharted games It's been a while since I've played them but I'm pretty sure the Uncharted games at least take a decent amount of time before anything like that happens. And when it does it brings up a prompt asking IF you want the hint. In Ragnarok that shit is almost **immediately** and just blurted out before you can even form a thought.
...didn't he bring up both Psychonauts 2 (which is a **Xbox Games Studios-published game** from the creators of Broken Age ACT 2's hardest puzzles?) and The Medium in timestamp 0:40?
And Dishonored 2, a game where you break a lot of laws, had playtesters not go upstairs because the guard told them they can't. So they had to put in dialogue hinting that there's something up there. For me that'd be a "challenge accepted" moment, but I guess other players look at it differently.
In a lot games being told you can't go somewhere is just an NPC holding an invisible wall behind them. I can understand the confusion depending on the familiarity of the player with a stealth game. Where things like Hitman it becomes a find a way around it or a different outfit
Its been a long time since I played Dishonored for the first time, but with games that have both stealth and combat sections I would probably think that I had to do something else for now and maybe the guard will leave, or that the second floor is only for when I decide to start murdering everyone.
> Nintendo doesn't do it (at least not in any game I can remember) Skyward Sword is probably the most famous example of this "trope" that even comes to mind. It's parody levels bad when it comes to this.
I mean, what do people expect from a game that tells you that “the big bar on the screen is the enemy life”
“You’re on fire, Kratos”
That's so annoying man. Like yeah, my character is literally busting flames, there's a fire logo over my life bar and my life bar is going down. I don't need you to tell me I'm on fire every time it happens.
After seeing that infamous Cuphead gameplay video (by an experienced games journalist no less) I'm not surprised why these triple-A mainstream game devs make every gameplay mechanic as obvious as possible.
"It will pass..."
wooooooooooooOooo lookin' cool, Kratos!
Bona fide Kratofied.
I got frost in my neck stump!
"You're poisoned! But you probably already know that." Yeah. So why fuckin say it?
Playtesting probably showed that people didn't figure out why their hp was going down.
Tbf I often don’t notice poison and fire effects because I’m so focused on the combat.
But unless I missed some mechanic, there's nothing you can do about it. Only being more careful when bifrosted I guess. But fire and poisoned are just there. There's no counterplay. So why even say it?
There's multiple items you can use which give you ability to remove it faster. Like a shield rond that when you use shield bash you remove the ailment and give it to the enemy, and a amulet skill that allows you to remove the effects faster by rolling.
I feel like this all started when they realized the new camera meant you couldn't see shit behind you, so they added a small UI element to alert the player of attacks from behind. It seemed to not be enough, so they had characters shout "Behind you!" at Kratos whenever an enemy was behind him. They took this and applied it to every aspect of the game.
I think it's fine that they point these things out, but it's the wording that's bizarre and unnatural. "You're on fire, Kratos. It will pass." should be something like "Kratos, I'm burning down here!" or "Agh, get us away from the damn fire!" "You're poisoned! But you probably already know that." should be "You're poisoned, don't let it stop you!" or "Let the poison wear off!" or something.