Hot Takes 2016

Hey all,

It's July so that means the year is more than half over. What has 2016 brought to the table for video games? In this post I'm going to shotgun a bunch of hot takes on two of the supposedly hottest games of this year.

Get Psyched!
First up is Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. My hot take is that this is probably the best Uncharted game of the series even if it does kind of drag on a bit longer than it should in the latter half.

Visually the game is splendid, as though someone made a moving oil painting right on your eyeballs. The adventuring and puzzling are still top notch and Nathan Drake is still a mass murderer who chews through an entire private army before breakfast.

Cheekily the developers included a trophy called "Ludonarrative Dissonance" which pops up after you rack up 1000 kills. The term comes from what critics referred to as dissonance between the part of the game you play (the "ludo") in which you gun down bad dudes indiscriminately by the hundreds versus the narrative part of the game (presented as a rollicking, pulpy Indiana Jones type adventure).

In a recent interview one of the game's directors, Neil Druckmann, said he doesn't buy into that criticism because Indiana Jones kills people too. Well, Mr. Druckmann, it's true that Indiana Jones kills like 12 people across all those movies. But that discrepancy between the numbers mentioned here (12 versus 1000+) is kind of the whole point.

Each time Indiana Jones kills someone it means something in that moment. He's not just gunning people down to get from point A to point B. If you can make a game like Uncharted where you only kill 12 people in the whole game and make each kill matter in the context of that moment then you might actually start to approach the kind of story-driven game you've been trying to do for decades now instead of just making another (albeit really well-made) third person cover shooter interspersed with non-interactive movies every so often.

The Real Uncharted 4 starts, of course, after you finish it the first time and are able to unlock the in-game cheat modes. I'm playing it again with infinite ammo and time slows whenever I aim a weapon making exploding heads really easy. Also everyone sounds like they're in a room filled with helium instead of air and the graphics regularly switch from being rendered with ASCII characters to having rainbow colors flowing over everything.

Next up is the new Doom game or as it's called by the marketing, "DOOM". So for the first Doom game in twelve years and id Software's first game since 2011's Rage (or "RAGE", as it was marketed.  id should really get a new marketing team.) it's really not that bad. I was expecting it to be worse, to be honest with you, since all of the original founding talent of id Software is gone and the company isn't so much focused anymore on innovating either in game design or rendering technology. So it was a pleasant surprise to have id come out and prove they were still capable of making a decent action game.

Doom, or Nu-DOOM as I prefer to call it, is narratively neither a direct sequel to the previous Doom games nor a complete remake. It's kind of somewhere in the middle between the two. You're the Doom Guy again but this time the game has a whole mythology built around him. Just like in the real world in the game Doom Guy is literally broken out of cold storage to beat back the demon hordes before they can overrun a Martian base. This is referred to as a thing that happens time and again throughout the ages, as though the folks at id were acknowledging that no one plays a Doom game for the great story.

Anyway the game is slick and fast-paced and unpretentious in its irreverence so it's kind of a critical darling at the moment. The game starts out strong with big open levels packed with secret areas and lots of monsters. The fundamental gameplay loop involves sliding all over the place at 90 miles an hour killing monsters and executing a context-sensitive kill action to execute enemies in the most gory ways imaginable. Executing such a "glory kill" makes the monsters drop health and ammo pickups which you'll need because you'll be taking consistent damage from all the enemies they throw at you.

It's basically the same kind of risk-reward mechanic that was in Relic Entertainment's 2009 game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. A great game that not enough people played. That's probably the only mechanic Nu-DOOM takes from the game but it's a good one. While Nu-DOOM starts strong it begins to falter about halfway through and by the end the level design devolves into a series of hallways connected by some larger rooms where a few combat encounters take place. And while the game is fast paced it's still not really as fast as Quake, id's first fully 3D rendered game from 1996. This is obviously because it's primarily a console game. It has a good PC version (there's a video of it running at 200 frames per second and it's really sweet and looks buttery smooth) but the primary audience for a big budget game in 2016 is on console so it can be faster than Halo but not that much faster.

Another complaint I had with it was that while you fight lots of enemies at once for a modern game you never fight enemies in the same numbers as you fought them  in the older games. It's tempting to explain this away as computers not being to render that many enemies at once but we have games for a decade ago like Dynasty Warriors or Earth Defense Force that have no problem throwing a hundred monsters at you at once so I'll just have blame it on id making a poor design choice. Hey id, maybe instead of cramming a dumb character upgrade system that nobody asked for into the game you could have taken those few huge monsters you reserved for boss battles (that nobody asked for either now that I think about it) and instead gradually introduced them into the mix of regular monsters you fought and made the levels bigger as the game went on instead of smaller.

I don't know that's just what I would have done.

Tune in next time when I'll be talking about... more games or game-related stuffs. Stay cool!

Thanks for reading.