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Uncharted 4

J_C

One Bit Studio
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People who hate this series don't like fun. :M

Obviously article is bullshit:
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 theUncharted series. But even these games, which supplicate before the altar of Bruckheimer, have expanded to include cooperative side-missions, character customization,
Yeah, well Uncharted 3 also had coop missions, multipalyer, character costumization in multiplayer. Seeing CoD Space, nothing will change. We will still have our blockbuster AAA cinematic games. The writer clearly knows shit about the game industry.

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.
Fucking idiot. The multiplayer in U3 was very well received was liked by many, offering an unusual verticality in fighting which is missing from other games. Just because the MP wasn't played as much as CoD doesn't mean anything. And people like this are allowed to write articles online.
 
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Declinator

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People who hate this series don't like fun. :M
I've played Uncharted 2 and while I wouldn't go as far as to say I hate it, I would say that Uncharted 2 was the most formulaic and soulless game I've ever played. Nothing in it was horrendously bad and nothing in it was good. Everything about the game was mediocre or worse. I guess you could say that it was pretty polished though.

Crash Bandicoot was a much better game.

Perhaps people who like this series want a movie not a game +M

Disclaimer: I borderline despise all cutscenes in games and I have zero interest in spectacle.
 

Sam Ecorners

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That's the crux of it really, if you try to play Uncharted for its gameplay, you'll hate it. If you don't mind kicking back on the couch with a beer and enjoying an interactive summer action flick with hot actors, double crossings, big explosions and tons of one liners, you'll have a lot of fun. Meaningless, dumb fun, which I, at this point in my life, really enjoy from time to time.
 

Tribal Sarah

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I played Uncharted 2 and remember a bit with a train and what felt like a never ending horde of bad guys. This came after something like 20 hordes of the same bad guys and some platforming ( if you can call press x to jump platforming.) Eventually I think the train crashed and then cut scene and then another wave of bad guys appeared. At that point I stopped. It wasn't fun. It wasn't adventurous or captivating. It was mediocre, whackaguy, press triangle bullshit.

I haven't touched the series since then but I read reviews and opinions on the sequels. One thing I noticed is mostly all people talk about are the awesumz naughty godz graphics. They never talk about the actual gameplay. Is it still full of qte's and 1 button no effort platforming? Is the cover system better? Do the maps screech incoming battle ahead? (my number 1 gripe about the last of us, apart from the shit A.I.) Does it still funnel the player so much it often feels like an on rails shooter? Is there meaningful exploration instead of go to far corner, find trinket? Are there any meaningful choices or does nothing the player does actually matter?
 

J_C

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What kind of exploration, what kind of choices? This is not that kind of game and never intended to be.
 

Infinitron

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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
Crooked Bee New development in gaming journalism? The conflation of walking simulators and linear cinematic action games: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-a-walking-simulator-in-action-games-clothing

Combat fatigues: How Uncharted is a walking simulator in action game's clothing

On paper Naughty Dog's Uncharted series is as generic as it gets. It's about a good looking white, heterosexual man going on exciting globe-trotting adventures, killing bad guys and wooing a spunky blonde reporter. On this level, it's functional at best and banal at worst. But dig deeper and it becomes clear that Naughty Dog's bombastic blockbuster series quietly had a profound effect on the medium's development over the past several years.

The first Uncharted wasn't particularly revolutionary, though it did feature some snappy dialogue and stunning visuals for its day. It was really 2009's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves where Naughty Dog really went off the rails (literally in the case of its seminal train sequence) and managed to subtly provide a proof of concept for a type of video game that was still in its embryonic stage. The genre has since come to be labelled somewhat derisively as "walking simulators" - a video game with precious little interactivity and no game-over state.

Of course The Uncharted games do have a failure state and you spend most of their running time engaged in third-person combat. On that level, they're still fairly traditional action games. But Uncharted 2 and its successors only dedicate a little over half of their running time to such mechanics. So what do you do the rest of the time?

Not a lot, interactively. Sometimes you simply watch cutscenes and have zero input whatsoever. The rest of the time you're being funnelled through intentionally frictionless scripted puzzles or button-tapping your way through automated platforming sequences. Technically you're still "playing" the game, but your agency is left out of your hands.

And yet, no one seemed to mind. Part of this is because it looks exciting. Naughty Dog's penchant for slick action choreography is so captivating the player doesn't even notice that they barely have any input on what's happening (if they have any at all). But on a purely mechanical level, leading Drake up through a boxcar dangling off a cliff is no more interactive than selecting Henry's potentially flirtatious dialogue in Firewatch or guiding Kaitlin Greenbriar through her family's new abode in Gone Home.

Yet it's not just the choreography that made such sequences work. In truth, everything needs to work in order for action/adventure junkies - the core audience for the game - to be engaged. The characters need to be charismatic, the dialogue needs to be clever and well acted, the art direction and choreography need to be appealing, and the animations need to be emotive. If anything here fails, the whole enterprise suffers for it.

And, quite frankly, that's usually the case for downtime in action games. I shudder to think of how many times I've encountered a banal narrative-heavy sequence in a game where no one actually gives a toss about that side of the equation. Can you imagine if Halo or Doom spent approximately 40 per cent of their running time trying to tell a story or mixing up their core mechanics with lightweight platforming or puzzle elements? Chances are it wouldn't be good.

Yet Naughty Dog went for it. And what a risk that was! This was before Journey and The Stanley Parable had proved to the world that these sort of mechanics-lite deviations had market value, mind you. If people had found Uncharted 2's non-shooty bits boring it would have destroyed their enthusiasm for the game. Critics and players alike could have hated it. It could have killed the franchise. Maybe even ruined Naughty Dog.

Uncharted 2 designer Richard Lemarchand said at an IndieCade talk in 2011 that many at Naughty Dog were worried about the lengthy non-violent village interlude midway through the title - in which our wounded hero kicks soccer balls, shakes hands, and pets yak butts rather than shoots, runs or sneaks his way through a dangerous situation. But Lemarchand said he'd recently played Tale or Tales' 2008 offering The Graveyard, in which players control and elderly woman slowly walking through a graveyard.

"I thought that in the same way that The Graveyard had created a space for me where I could reflect, so could our village," the designer said at the time. It was a peculiar notion, at the time, to want to merge the ponderous pace of minimally interactive mood piece with the white knuckle bluster of a Hollywood action flick, but there you have it.

Then again, in a weird way it was the Uncharted series' conservative qualities that allowed Naughty Dog to sneak in its more avant-garde experiments. It's a bit like how Mad Max: Fury Road quietly implemented a strong feminist message in what looked like - and otherwise is - a lightweight action flick about a couple of good looking movie stars kicking ass in cool cars. (The film became known for its gender politics after the fact, but it wasn't promoted this way.) By making Uncharted such an old-fashioned matinee throwback with populist shooter elements, Naughty Dog, and publisher Sony, were better equipped to take a few chances.

Of course, what was revolutionary for 2009 isn't so groundbreaking now. Uncharted 4 pulls all the same tricks with even greater craftsmanship. In many ways it's gone even further in this experimental direction with roughly only a third of its opening eight hours dedicated to anything that could even remotely resemble an action game (though its first few minutes are appropriately rousing). And yet it's never boring. The jokes land. The story beats are appropriately moving. The dialogue sings. And it all looks glorious thanks to some of the best art direction and tech wizardry in the business.

In a world that's already seen the likes of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, 30 Flights of Loving and Dear Esther, such bold pacing practices aren't quite as shocking as they were back in 2009. Yet Uncharted 4, for all its bombast, often feels more akin to those games than any of its big budget contemporaries. And maybe the widespread popularity of more sedate games can be in some part attributed to the brilliant Uncharted 2 - a game that proved blockbusters could be played at a very different tempo.
 

Talby

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Codex USB, 2014
Ciif5ZkUYAA4ieL.jpg:large

Disgusting. They're both white, they're both heterosexual, neither of them are visibly trans* and the m*n is in a position of dominance, implying misogyny.
 

Metro

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So is this series an even shittier Far Cry or what? Re: that review -- you could say the same for nearly every modern AAA FPS that's come out in the last few years.

Also:

jpg
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
It's more like a shittier Tomb Raider. With the setting and stories more like Indiana Jones.

The old, real Tomb Raider, not the new ones that are like Far Cry.
 

Metro

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And maybe it's me but the girl looks like the one from Until Derp that whatsherface from heroes played:

latest


Creepy.
 

Ash

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Not a lot, interactively. Sometimes you simply watch cutscenes and have zero input whatsoever. The rest of the time you're being funnelled through intentionally frictionless scripted puzzles or button-tapping your way through automated platforming sequences. Technically you're still "playing" the game, but your agency is left out of your hands.

And yet, no one seemed to mind. Part of this is because it looks exciting.

I did mind. Very much so. This is par for the course in modern games.
Sad thing is, other than the codex and some niche other old schoolers, nobody else probably did mind, and that's a problem.

The games are made up of gameplay. That's at least 60% of what you spend time doing, so make that time worthwhile ffs.

Sam Ecorners said:
That's the crux of it really, if you try to play Uncharted for its gameplay, you'll hate it. If you don't mind kicking back on the couch with a beer and enjoying an interactive summer action flick with hot actors, double crossings, big explosions and tons of one liners, you'll have a lot of fun. Meaningless, dumb fun, which I, at this point in my life, really enjoy from time to time.

Then I'd watch an action movie. An actual good one that doesn't fuck about. Alternatively, I play some meathead shooter that's actually fun, like Duke Nukem 3D or something.
 
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Unwanted

Endlösung

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Because this had so much hype, I watched a Lets Play of Uncharted 1.
HOly shit, its utter garbage. I thought it was something like the original Tomb Raiders. Nope. Its corridor! (there is zero exploration and the puzzle are dumb as fuck) popamole tps with regen health and insane amount of spawning enemies everywhere. Ololol. Its 5 hours long tops. It has functionally 2 types of enemies, shooting ones and melee ones and the melee ones are handled exactly like the shooting ones. The quip dialogue is between cringe and tolerable.
Are people fucking braindead?
 

DramaticPopcorn

Guest
People who hate this series don't like fun. :M
I've played Uncharted 2 and while I wouldn't go as far as to say I hate it, I would say that Uncharted 2 was the most formulaic and soulless game I've ever played. Nothing in it was horrendously bad and nothing in it was good. Everything about the game was mediocre or worse. I guess you could say that it was pretty polished though.
This goes along with my experience with Uncharted as well, also, any Assassin's Creed game comes to mind, although the world design in those games is supreme visually.
 

typical user

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Because this had so much hype, I watched a Lets Play of Uncharted 1.
HOly shit, its utter garbage. I thought it was something like the original Tomb Raiders. Nope. Its corridor! (there is zero exploration and the puzzle are dumb as fuck) popamole tps with regen health and insane amount of spawning enemies everywhere. Ololol. Its 5 hours long tops. It has functionally 2 types of enemies, shooting ones and melee ones and the melee ones are handled exactly like the shooting ones. The quip dialogue is between cringe and tolerable.
Are people fucking braindead?

I watched few hours of The Last of Us and I think the same... Last of Us a ladder-carrying simulator, full of corridor-popamole, sneaking or running like headless chicken with cutscenes. If I wanted a movie I would watch a movie.

But on the other hand you can't criticize Naughty Dogs' games because there are point n' click advanture games, they aren't designed for Hamburgers but.. I don't know. It's more than Call of Duty, probably has a good story but I never even cared to watch Let's Plays. I saw short gameplay clips though and it looked great but from experience with modern games I knew it only looks and it probably would be or is boring to play.
 

Ash

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Adventure games demand that you use your head and figure shit out. The mindlessness, boring banal shit is what separates typical modern games from old. You feel almost as dumb as the design for even bothering to play. I don't mind cinematics, I don't mind varying degrees of linearity, I just can't stand undemanding, semi-automated gameplay, which is what the majority of popular modern games consist of.
 

toro

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Uncharted 4 is not a game. It's a movie in disguise.

But it looks incredible. The attention for details is insane. And from a story telling point of view, this "game" is a beast.
 

Metro

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Because this had so much hype, I watched a Lets Play of Uncharted 1.
HOly shit, its utter garbage. I thought it was something like the original Tomb Raiders. Nope. Its corridor! (there is zero exploration and the puzzle are dumb as fuck) popamole tps with regen health and insane amount of spawning enemies everywhere. Ololol. Its 5 hours long tops. It has functionally 2 types of enemies, shooting ones and melee ones and the melee ones are handled exactly like the shooting ones. The quip dialogue is between cringe and tolerable.
Are people fucking braindead?

you're a fucking idiot and you dont know anything about Uncharted. lol
I'd wear not knowing anything about a shit console exclusive like a badge of honor. Go make another blog post, fatty.
 

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