Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Uncharted 4

Tehdagah

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
9,236
uncharted-4-downgrade.jpg
:positive:
Not saying that publishers don't like making bullshots, and there were some dumbing down, but the pictures at the buttom are shitty compressed pictures which are not representing the game. Direct screenshot from the game:
jjn7zh7wgwicwkiobi5v.png
Not impressive at all.

That background especially looks straight out of a PS3 game.
 

sexbad?

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 7, 2013
Messages
2,812
Location
sexbad
Codex USB, 2014
The foreground is nice, but the draw distance for those trees is pretty sad when examined more closely. That Africa video was very pretty though.
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
Patron
Joined
Jan 27, 2010
Messages
15,048
Location
In quarantine
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Mini-"drama" over the game getting a review score of 8/10 instead of 10/10 - apparently some people were getting mad at this:

http://www.videogamer.com/ps4/uncharted_4/features/article/uncharted_4_review_an_apology.html

Last week VideoGamer published its review of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, the upcoming mega-hyped PlayStation 4 exclusive. At the time of publishing we were confident that we had produced a good piece of criticism, both in written and video forms. We were confident we had explained the game's appeal, where it succeeded and failed, and how the influence of The Last of Us had helped create a sequel which is really quite different from what went before. Over the past weekend, however, it came to light that we were, in fact, quite wrong about Uncharted 4, and as such some glaring issues with our review began to surface. We'd like to take the time to address these individually.

We'll begin with perhaps the most grievous error possible: having opinions. As one YouTube user rightly points out,"its [sic] clear his personal thoughts are all over this is a stupid review". A basic gaffe, albeit a serious one, and when it was discovered editorial director Tom Orry (@VGTomO) immediately called Steve into his office and demanded an explanation.

We're afraid to say he didn't have one, and looking back on it he realises that having opinions and thoughts on the game he played for tens of hours was wrong, ethically and morally, and just plain stupid. Like true fans of the series he should have instead gone in with the presumption that it would be the best game ever made simply because of who was making it and, armed with the review guide and a PDF of praise for the previous games, not diverged from an already-set opinion fueled mostly by bombast and a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. Even though we have punished Steve by beating him with sticks and making him play Uncharted 3 again, he still found the strength to ask that you please accept his sincere apologies.

Sadly, this was not the first instance of unbridled nonsense in the review: there was also the claim that Naughty Dog's approach to plotting and characterisation in Uncharted 4 was influenced by the studio's work on 2013's The Last of Us, a game which was also directed by Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley. We now accept that this accusation is false, despite Straley himself stating clearly and unequivocally to the Telegraph that the game was influenced by The Last of Us, a game he co-directed, back in 2013. Regardless of the facts, Steve shouldn't have made this statement: instead, he should have done some research and gotten the real story from the people who were there on the ground: YouTube commenters.

We regret the error.

We also regret the fact that Steve exercised his supposed right to give an opinion on the previous three games in the mainline series, and that said opinion was not either glowing nor frankly almost incoherent in its gushing praise. Worryingly, Steve had said that the original games had not aged very well, when in fact they look very lovely in that new HD collection, and regardless of whether or not he was actually talking about the floaty physics or uninspired – and rather shoddy – shooting/shooting mechanics, he still shouldn't have said it. That these mechanics have been the subject of at least two different instances of high-profile patching, as well as sustained public outcry from the very people criticising Steve for bringing it up here, does not matter. Because they do look lovely.

Finally, we'd like to explain our position on Steve's attitude as a whole throughout the review, specifically the claim that he is too negative towards the game, or that he is 'bias' against it. While he does make superficially positive claims that it is bloody good, the best in the series, and that you should buy it, it is obvious that his anti-gaming agenda has gone too far. We should have noticed this sooner, and from now on we will be ensuring that Steve leaves all negativity at the door, no matter how justified by the experience. He has agreed to new, anti-bias review rules, which state that he should be universally positive about the game, regardless of the score, and that any and all criticism should take the form of a some nonsense which follows a breathless 1000 words or so of half-formed 'game is good because it is good/game is good because it's being made by these guys' thinking.

Once again, we regret the errors, and in the future, in order to prevent further bias, Steve will not be allowed to give his opinion on games he has played and you haven't.

Review in question: http://www.videogamer.com/reviews/uncharted_4_review.html
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,651
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Oh now if you don't slurp cock you have an anti-gaming agenda? :lol:
 

Tribal Sarah

Arbiter
Joined
Feb 9, 2014
Messages
316
Location
My dad's bigger than your dad
Watched some guy playing this on YouTube. He was dicking around with a water pistol then had lunch with some chick and then his bro turned up and he'd been in prison for crimes against hair, then they sat on a bench for a very long time. It was all very exciting. Thank fuck I will never have to play it.
 

Hyperpube

Scholar
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
121
Location
a pond
I got it a few hours ago, and just reached the beginning of Chapter 6.. I am kinda torn on it so far, the cutsenes look really good , the acting is good and the story is mostly entertaining but my mood fluctuates from being excited to bored or vice versa ( one example of this when I was just getting bored talking to Nate's wife on the couch, something really cool happened that was unexpected). It also feels like I have been watching more than playing and the cutscens go on too long. Besides the opening that only last a few minutes, I didn't actually start shooting anybody until about 2 hours into the game. Chapter 3 (or maybe it was chapter 4 whatever part has you fucking around in a river) was really boring . Chapter 5 was a lot of fun though, and made it feel like the game is starting to get going after a slow start

edit-It looks like my complaint that the game starts off boring is a common complaint, and it picks up afterwards
 
Last edited:

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Here's a reflection that relates to some of what I was saying in the "Fate of the Middle Class RPG" thread: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/10/11639246/uncharted-4-cinematic-game-review-ps4-playstation

Uncharted 4 is the best (and possibly last) game of its kind

ope_01.0.0.jpg



For decades, big budget video games were designed to look like films.

Why not? Films became, in the 20th century, the most popular form of storytelling. Spread across dozens of genres and forms, films can be funny or sad, artsy or pedestrian, unabashedly childish or confidently mature. They play on towering screens in Times Square theaters just as well as they do on bedsheets strung from tree to tree in a backyard patio. People who sit at sturdy tables made of exotic woods and drink tiny bottles of electrolyte water invest hundreds of millions of dollars into films, so that they can screen at massive temples across the world where countless strangers spend their afternoons and evenings watching quietly, communally, and in the dark. Films retain a power and cultural capital that many people who publish video games envy.

For the most part, the people who have made and criticized films over the past two decades have shared little love for video games — which remains to be perceived, by skeptics, as a half-formed medium for puerile loners swilling Mountain Dew and struggling to bleach Cheetos stains from their sweatpants. Studios have occasionally taken interest in video games in the way coastal businessmen eyed mining towns. A series of middling to terrible game-to-movie adaptations tried to harvest games of their audiences, leaving both filmmakers and game publishers bitter and skeptical. Every now and then a studio returns to adapt a video game, like it’s some trendy form of masochism unique to the bouge neighborhoods of Los Angeles. To this day, film critics use video games as pejorative when describing lesser films that are too frenetic or emotionally vacant. When sought for approval, the most famous and beloved film critic of them all, the late Roger Ebert, lifted his nose in disgust, declaring "video games can never be art."



city_04.0.jpg



Film’s disinterest was, for the games industry, intoxicating. The one-sided romance peaked in the mid-2000s, alongside the release of consoles that could create emotive, lifelike characters in believable three-dimensional worlds. Cinematic games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto flagrantly pastiched action films from the 1950s to the 1990s, homaging filmmakers from David Lean to Michael Mann. Stylized cutscenes looked like adult versions of popular computer-animated film, and made for effective marketing, the latter of which copied the movie trailer formula down to the second.
CINEMATIC GAMES HELPED POPULARIZE THE MEDIUM

Both series, and other cinematic video games, achieved staggering success, accumulating billions of dollars in the decade that followed. Video games began to appear in mainstream outlets, like The New York Times, USA Today, and a hodgepodge of morning and evening news programs.

At this same moment in time, Sony presented its new PlayStation 3 not only as a game console, but also as the heart of the home theater. Along with playing games, it also was the best and most affordable option for the new Blu-ray format. The console, Sony hoped, would entice film lovers to try video games.



mad-preview-still-03.0.jpg



A new adventure game, called Uncharted, would be the gateway. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune — the full title — introduced the world totreasure-hunter Nathan Drake, a likable everyman with gelled hair and a thermal sweater. He looked like he got lost on his way to an Old Navy commercial cattle call, and, by gosh, he landed the role! While other games borrowed from war, crime, and sci-fi cinema, Uncharted cribbed liberally from the action serials produced at Republic Pictures in the 1930s. In Uncharted, there was a pleasant cognitive loop: the young video game medium trying to discover itself by imitating film’s own era of self-discovery.

MORE THAN ITS CONTEMPORARIES, 'UNCHARTED' PLAYS LIKE A MOVIE

While Uncharted wasn’t the most financially successful of the cinematic game franchises, hamstrung playing on Sony hardware, it quickly became a critical darling. More than any of its contemporaries, the series managed to conjure that sensation of a summer blockbuster — not just in the movie’s story, but in the experience of being caught up in an adventure so compelling that you feel, if only for a moment, that you’re there. The series was transportive, and each release felt, perhaps because of its comparative scarcity, like an overdue vacation.

Uncharted 4, released this week, is both the culmination of the franchise, and the pinnacle of the games-as-films craze. To say one plays the introductory hours of Nathan Drake’s latest adventure — which opens with a beautiful, albeit tedious, boat chase in which the player veers a boat left and right into enemy vessels yielding comical overreaction, detonating into columns of fire and debris — would inspire a pedantic debate on the definition of the word play. The adventure doesn’t rush to be more than a series of cutscenes interrupted by spartan controllable sequences where the player learns how to walk on the game’s invisible path of progress.



sco_05.0.jpg



Though as far as a trail of breadcrumbs goes, this one is delicious. The dialogue throughout these guided tours has the flow and concision of good theater. The pithy snark of previous games has been replaced with an acute existential angst that evolves Nathan Drake from a quirky matinee hero to the male protagonist de rigueur; the kind of successful middle-aged man that conceals his reprehensible behavior behind good looks, buckets of charm, and moral gymnastics. This is Nathan Drake as the contemplative man torn between the adventures of his past and the domesticity of his present. This isUncharted in the Netflix age.

THIS IS 'UNCHARTED'IN THE NETFLIX AGE

Uncharted 4 as a work of film is good, great even, and no less modern in tone and structure than what’s playing on television, let alone at a movie theater. And its minimalistic gameplay, early on, is just enough to keep the player engaged without distracting them from dialogue, which does the heavy lifting of playing catch-up on a story roughly 27 hours in. Were it a film, Uncharted 4 could make a handsome sum in royalties for the number of times it will undoubtedly appear at Hollywood conferences and summits, where it will be picked apart for lessons on how to create the future of interactive cinema.

And were it a film still, it would surely get nominated for those Oscars given before the main festivities, the ones that honor technological and artistic craftsmanship. Technical achievement mixes with impeccable art design to give a generic, mid-construction bridge the gravitas and sunny warmth of of a William Turner painting, and that says nothing of the grandeur of larger set pieces, like a snow-packed Scottish hillside. Like its scriptwriters, Uncharted 4 artists have learned a fine touch is often superior to flash and decadence, letting their landscapes be void of business save for a selective inclusion of small details. A dimly lit castle on the horizon. The froth of the ocean lapping against the rocks beneath our hero, who makes a habit of dangling from precarious rocks. The muddy water built up at the bottom of a hill on the savannah. Uncharted 4 doesn’t look like most movies; it looks better.



Uncharted_4__A_Thief_s_End__20160501192631.0.jpg



Uncharted arrives with surprisingly few peers. The linear, one-time adventures of the past are no longer recognized as a practical investment by most video game publishers. In the last decade, publishers saw linear games as foundations on which to build larger, cross-media ambitions. A game like Uncharted could inspire a comic book or a film, and each would feed into the others’ hype. But Uncharted’s film adaptation (in development for half a decade) is stalled yet again. The same can be said for many of Uncharted’s contemporaries.

FOR BIG BUDGET GAMES, BEING CINEMATIC ISN'T ENOUGH

Destiny, The Division, and Grand Theft Auto V— three of the best selling and most popular big budget games from recent years — feature open worlds and cooperative multiplayer modes that encourage players to replay the same stages ad nauseam, first as narrative experiences, and many more times as excuses to spend time online with friends. If games in the past aspired to be like the movies, games in the present aspire as much, if not more, to be like bars.

Earlier this spring, Microsoft released Quantum Break, its own cinematically aspirational franchise, originally pitched as the merger of film and games for the Xbox One, the company’s would-be all-in-one media machine. The project, which rotated gameplay with live-action TV episodes, suffered numerous setbacks and redesigns, and released to tepid reviews and sales.



mad-preview-still-06.0.jpg



Games publishers appear less interested now in adaptations for other mediums. Expanding what can be done with the games themselves is plenty lucrative, and far easier for publishers to control. An expansive, evolving game world — a platform, as publishers call it — can be be used to attract perpetual attention in the worlds of Twitch streams, e-sports, and online adventures that entice players to spend more money on and time with supplemental content long after their initial purchases. In 2011 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of video games as art, granting them cultural cache, along with certain creative and commercial freedoms. Video games no longer need other mediums to leech for relevancy or authority or artistic integrity.

EVEN 'CALL OF DUTY' HAS EVOLVED

Call of Duty, arguably the most successful video game franchise ever, is known for its cinematic single-player campaign, and this year’s entry,Infinite Warfare, boasts senior talent that previously worked on the Uncharted series. But even these games, which supplicate before the altar of Bruckheimer, have expanded to include cooperative side-missions, character customization, and, last year, the choice to play any of the game’s chapters in any order, allowing players to scramble the narrative flow. Each new Call of Duty comes with with a full game’s worth of secondary modes, specifically a multiplayer mode, void of story, that has become a popular e-sport.

If any popular, big budget franchise still aligns with Uncharted 4 it’s Tomb Raider. The adventure series, which has seen the games industry change dramatically in its 20-year run, inspired the original Uncharted, and the two franchises have been learning from one another ever since. Both are about young treasure hunters, both skew toward sci-fi conclusions, both are indebted to Indiana Jones, the films that dug into the tombs of the Hollywood Studio lot and uncovered those long dead adventure serials of the 1930s. But the recent reboot of Tomb Raider, along with last year’s sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, provides a picture of what an Uncharted game built for the current industry climate would look like.



Uncharted_4__A_Thief_s_End__20160428164536.0.jpg



In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the player handpicks the abilities of Lara Croft, along with her weapons, ammunition, supplies, and outfits. While missions follow relatively straight lines, the adventure at large is set in an open world pocketed with a bounty of distractions. And each encounter feels like an opportunity for the player to be expressive, albeit through the medium of violence. Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t match Uncharted in terms of memorability. The story is smart B-movie fare, but plot exists in the periphery, like a doting parent that’s watching her children figure out what they want to do on their own. Because the game’s world is larger, and the player’s path is uncertain, Rise of the Tomb Raiderlacks the detailing of Uncharted 4, where one walk across a rope bridge feels as if dozens of artists sunk weeks into its each splintering plank of wood — because they almost certainly did.

AS IF WEEKS OF DESIGN WENT INTO EACH SPLINTERING BRIDGE

Over its three sequels, the Uncharted series has flirted with design trends. A number of the puzzles in Uncharted 3 partner Drake with a team of allies, and hint at what could have been a co-operative mode. And Uncharted 4’s marketing sells the game as "wide-linear," which is to say there are many moments, particularly in the back half of the game, in which the game loosens the the leash and encourages the player to improvise, rather than reciting the script. But mostly, these moments — which are harrowing and unforgettable — are sleights of hand designed to trick the player into thinking they have control of a movie. An astonishing car chase through a village offers numerous paths, but they don’t branch so much as they funnel, all leading to the same endpoint. The experience is like reading a choose-your-own adventure in which each page has multiple choices, and they all lead to the next page, which offers more choices, and eventually you realize this book is pushing forward in chronological order, and the biggest change you can make would be to quit reading — or in the case of this game, disobey the invisible line of progress, at which point some gun-wielding maniac or loose boulder or unseen booby trap will kill Nathan Drake, and give you a second shot at doing what the game needs you to do. The best way to enjoy Uncharted, like a movie, is to be passive.

The series has, for awhile now, featured multiplayer. It’s a fun sandbox for gunplay, where players are free to create their own action. The mode has yet to approach the level of popularity — and arguably, the creativity — of any of the games mentioned above. Perhaps because Uncharted simply isn’t that sort of game.



city_06.0.jpg



In a 2015 interview, the voice of Nathan Drake, actor Nolan North, was asked about the troubled Uncharted films. "My opinion on this — from what I've heard from fans — is they don't want a movie, no matter who's the star of it," North said. "Maybe it's because [theUncharted series] is such a cinematic experience in and of itself."

"[FANS] DON'T WANT A MOVIE"

North’s comments are, it would seem, in reference to the severe fan backlash from years prior, when the Uncharted film was in development with director David O. Russell and Mark Wahlberg. The two had just come off the Academy Award-nominated film The Fighter, but the Hollywood A-listers were treated as hostile outsiders. To temper the flames, the director shared his thoughts on video games.

"To grow a game into a movie is an interesting proposition because a game is a very different experience than a movie," said Russell in an interview with SlashFilm. "You guys are playing the game, and it’s about playing the game. It’s not about a narrative embracing you emotionally. You know what I’m saying? So, I want to create a world that is worthy of a really great film that people want to watch and re-watch, so that’s what I’m working on right now."

"I’m very respectful as far as the core content and spirit of the game," Russell continued, "but beyond that it’s my job as a filmmaker to make what I think is going to be an amazing movie. People have to trust that and let that go, I think. There’s not a bunch of movies you can point to that are made from games that are amazing movies, that stand up to time as a franchise or as [individual films]."



home_03.0.jpg



Russell's comments didn't win over fans — the director left the project shortly after — though they did, ironically, define the tension on which the series is built. Like Nathaniel Drake living the double life of adventurer and suburbanite, Uncharted is torn between video game and film, interactive and passive, play and plot.

In Uncharted 4, the series’ new directors, Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, have done what David O. Russell originally sought out to do. Their Uncharted is respectful to the core themes of franchise, but rather than design a game that people would want to play and replay, they produced something that will be watched and re-watched. Druckmann and Straley made a fantastic Uncharted movie, and, in some perverse fashion, the first great film adapted from the world of games. That it arrives in an era of Twitch, where watching others play video games online is nearly as common, Uncharted, intentionally or not, has finally, and cosmically, aligned with industry trends.

In the early chapters of Nathan Drake’s purportedly final adventure, he and his wife, Elena, talk about their new, domestic lives as they eat dinner on the couch in front of the TV in their cozy home. The two play a video game to determine who will do the dishes. Elena turns on her original PlayStation — the system that welcomed Sony to the video game industry and gave Uncharted developer Naughty Dog its first success. But to Drake it’s as unfamiliar and foreign as one of the relics he’d find in an ancient tomb, though hardly as interesting. Video games, for him, are playful toys measured in points. Disinterested, Drake sets down the controller, leaves home, and charts his own adventure.
 
Last edited:

sullynathan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Messages
6,473
Location
Not Europe
I despise this series of """""""""""games""""""""""""" and everything it represents, the glorification of un-game and people clapping and being bought by ND's smokes and mirrors. Yeah, I'm never the edgy retard of the threads, let me be it this time ok? Thanks.

They should go back to making those Crash corridor platformers, now that was the shit.
You've clearly never played uncharted
 

Hyperpube

Scholar
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
121
Location
a pond
I despise this series of """""""""""games""""""""""""" and everything it represents, the glorification of un-game and people clapping and being bought by ND's smokes and mirrors. Yeah, I'm never the edgy retard of the threads, let me be it this time ok? Thanks.

They should go back to making those Crash corridor platformers, now that was the shit.

what "smoke and mirrors" are you talking about?
 

sexbad?

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 7, 2013
Messages
2,812
Location
sexbad
Codex USB, 2014
I despise this series of """""""""""games""""""""""""" and everything it represents, the glorification of un-game and people clapping and being bought by ND's smokes and mirrors. Yeah, I'm never the edgy retard of the threads, let me be it this time ok? Thanks.

They should go back to making those Crash corridor platformers, now that was the shit.
You've clearly never played uncharted
I have and it's boring as shit.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom