Days Gone (Sony Bend) [PS4, PC]

[Shifty Geezer]

Yup and I'm going to have a little rant now and it will be a one and done deal. Sorry

The problem with these reviews or opinions is not that they wrong about the way the world and society should change but how they expect everyone to be exactly like them. There's a line from the Eurogamer review where the author says no woman would ever do what Deacons wife does or says in the game and that's bullshit. People do stupid shit all the time. It's becoming a major pain in my ass that people who critique books or games or whatever somehow project themselves on the characters and then proceed to say it's sloppy writing because no person would ever do that. I'll say it again people do and say stupid shit all the time and there shouldn't be outrage when a character in a work of fiction does.

Amen. I come out of every movie and TV programme thinking, "why the hell did they do that?" If people behaved intelligently, drama wouldn't exist as a form of fiction.

Thanos's plan to eradicate half of all life was dumb. All that'd do is set back large populations like Human's 50 years because of exponential growth, whereas other close-to-extinction species would die out. And if Dr. Strange can make portals anywhere, why not make a portal next to Thanos, pull his arm through, close the portal thus cutting off his arm, portal the gauntlet immediately to another place/dimension and deal with it there? And the Flash in The Flash is a complete moron, always stopping to talk to his enemies instead of just dealing with them before they even know he's there, while the cops stand around refusing to shoot at super-villains for some reason even when those villains super-ness only comes from a fancy gun.

So even more than your point about human beings being fallible, fiction has a tendency to make them even dumber so that they can get a story out of situations that could resolved a lot better. If reviewers are going to criticise that, they need to rate everything ever made a 3 or less because of all the morons who populate the Hollywood realm!

 

[Sigfried1977]

I'm somewhat enjoying it, but it is boilerplate as hell nontheless. At least so far. (I'm like 5 or 6 hours in) Thankfully it's not quite as loaded with busywork as your average Ubi world tends to be. I also think it's way too forgiving. As long as I diligently pick up all the crap the game world is littered with, health, ammo and stamina never seem to be an issue. This deflates the whole survival angle considerably. It's less about planning and more about doing chores. In that regard It's as much a survival game as Horizon Zero Dawn was. Visually it's quite pretty, but also quite monotonous. I also think the open world is a bit too small to be believable. Feels more like a playground (admittedly I'm a bit of an outlier in that regard. I think it's a great thing when I can travel for 10 minutes while nothing's going on). And at v1.05 it's still not exactly what I'd call a great performer either. I'm having a fun time with it, but a masterpiece it is not.
The expected feminist bullshit paragraph of the Eurogamer review notwithstanding (all women must be faultless warrior queens because it's the current year y'all!), I can certainly see where the writer's criticisms are coming from. I played this game a million times before, and I've also seen all the individual parts done better.
Still no idea how Dying Light got such a lukewarm reception. Now that game was a friggin' masterpiece and really made me feel like I was in constant peril. I never dared to go out during the night in that game for example.

If this wasn't a Sony exclusive nobody would give a damn is what I'm thinking.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Amen. I come out of every movie and TV programme thinking, "why the hell did they do that?" If people behaved intelligently, drama wouldn't exist as a form of fiction.

There are a few movies and even TV shows, where people act rationally. Acting rationally under no pressure is easy, actioning when emotional or under stress is more difficult. But rational is boring. Have you every watched the Apprentice? It's filled with people with massive egos. They tried a series of more grounded candidates but it was boring as hell.

The Avengers taking on Thanos shouldn't have got as far as it did, Dr Strange can literally go anywhere in time and space. The Avengers didn't even need need all the infinity stones, just some of the easy wins to thwart Thanos's plan but then there would be no reason for a three-hour spectacle that was Endgame. In Dr. Strange's debut film, he locked a planet-eating goliath into a time loop until he surrendered. Dr Strange couldn't win, but he could make it so the bad guy didn't either.

Most fiction collapses pretty quickly when you look too closely but we want to be entertained so we don't.

 

[London Geezer]

Playing devil's advocate here, as this is probably a much broader discussion. And as someone who hasn't played the game, I can understand if someone is critical of bad writing. That has little to do with questioning the rationality of characters in movies or games. There are good ways and bad ways to write a character who happens to be a complete idiot, or situations that are stupid. There is nothing wrong in criticising bad writing.

You only have to look at - generally speaking - MCU movies versus DC movies. They broadly depict the same situations (hero origin, power ups, power downs, big bad, hero wins and sometimes dies, probably comes back next movie, rinse and repeat), however DC just can't get it right half the time because the writing that the movies are based on is just not as good as the writing for a lot of the MCU movies.

Now, is Dead Gone good or bad? I don't know, I haven't played it.

But you can have situations that make you go 'ah that would never happen', however when the writing is good, then we naturally accept it and get on with the movie because it's entertaining. Sometimes you think 'ah that would never happen' and the writing to support that is so bad that it just puts you off the rest of the movie because it's just bloody stupid.

 

[Xbat]

Still no idea how Dying Light got such a lukewarm reception. Now that game was a friggin' masterpiece and really made me feel like I was in constant peril.

That should've been game of the year back then. The movement system and melee combat in a FPS was fantastic and probably still the gold standard in a FPS.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Yeah. I hope they know what they had and don't mess up the sequel. The add-on completely ignored what made DL special ( what DL really needed was the ability to drive around with a dune buggy through loads of empty spaces ... said no one ever) and was a bit rubbish as a result I thought.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But you can have situations that make you go 'ah that would never happen', however when the writing is good, then we naturally accept it and get on with the movie because it's entertaining. Sometimes you think 'ah that would never happen' and the writing to support that is so bad that it just puts you off the rest of the movie because it's just bloody stupid.

The critiques here are characterisations that would actually happen though. The wife says, "promise to ride me as much as you ride your bike," at some point in the game which a tweet rants about. I'm sure some people somewhere in the world think and act like that. Just because that player can't relate, doesn't make it poor writing. In truth, the characterisation critiques in this case (from Tot's link) are just lambasting the game because this character isn't conforming to the current social trend of representing all woman in one way. It's fine to have weak males, like the Hydra scientist guy from MCU, but every female has to be a kick-ass, no-nonsense role-model rather than a depiction of one from the breadth of personalities out there. To the ludicrous extreme of
End Game Spoiler:

Spoiler

The Girl Power shot in the final battle where they all come together to 'help' Captain Marvel, and we see the green antennae alien from Guardians ready to bust heads with zero super powers or combat skills and clearly a personality that wouldn't fit that situation. It was a scene lined up just for a promo shot, and ridiculed by Captain Marvel's complete lack of need for any help from anyone because she's indestructible, super strong, can fly, can shoot energy, and she just rockets unhindered ahead of all her 'support' through all the enemies to take on Thanos.

It's really just another form of sexism. Women have gone from one-dimensional screamers needing saving to one-dimensional heroes who don't need nuffin' from nobody, whereas men have gone from lock-jawed heroes to more rounded and flawed personalities showing affection and tears and whatnot (what used to be stupidly termed their 'feminine' side) alongside strength and courage and blah blah.

If writer's aren't allowed to portray the full range of different people, stories are going to be hampered in what they can say. Red-necks and chavs have their stories too!

 

[London Geezer]

If writer's aren't allowed to portray the full range of different people, stories are going to be hampered in what they can say. Red-necks and chavs have their stories too!

Of course they do. As I said, I haven't played the game (waiting for discounts which I'm sure will come very soon), and actually I haven't even seen the critiques any further than the writing being seen as a bit naff. Everyone can write about anything they want. The fact remains that some writers can write about rednecks and chavs and make it into an Oscar winning movie, while others will just be naff.

Naff is the word here.

The line "promise to ride me as much as you ride your bike" is a bit naff. But it's taken completely out of context, so who knows?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There's also no depth to that critique, and it may be bad writing regards the character who said it. Which is where discussing the twittersphere is rarely a great idea as the person's overall view might be valid but it doesn't come across in a one-line remark that leads to arguments.

 

[London Geezer]

There's also no depth to that critique, and it may be bad writing regards the character who said it. Which is where discussing the twittersphere is rarely a great idea as the person's overall view might be valid but it doesn't come across in a one-line remark that leads to arguments.

Well, Twitter is the rubbish bin of all social media.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I don't know to what extent the freaker populations and movements are manipulated but the world feels really nice. If you go right out of the way there are either very few freakers around or none at all. The world also does that thing that Bethesda games like Elder Scrolls and Fallout nail; that feeling that you're just passing through a populated world with people having their own unscripted troubles.

My bike isn't hugely upgraded and my destination is quite a long way away. I'm maybe a little over halfway there and my worryingly my fuel is around 30% so I'm on the lookout for a gas station or a pickup truck, which typically have gas. So I'm conserving what I have - trundling along at moderate speed and letting gravity get you downhill which saves fuel and keeps noise low.

I hear distant gun fire so coast to a stop and sneak up on a camp of marauders fighting freakers. Wanting to loot everything I crossbow assassinate one of the marauders and let the freakers wipe out the remaining humans then I kill the last of the freakers. I'm merrily looting freaker ears and dead humans for ammo when about 30 freakers just burst into the area - probably attracted by the earlier gunfire and I hightail it out of there.

So good. The game is definitely at it's best when you are not min-maxing the mechanics. If you loot everything you'll probably be okay, but if you relax a bit, you'll feel genuinely more vulnerable which is a thrilling feeling and why I love survival games.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Was there a difficult option at start? For a survival game, I think that's quite imperative to set resources to the challenge level the player wants. It's the kind of thing that can be way too easy or way too hard which should be fairly easily parameterisable in response to a "how do you like your survival games?" response.

 

[Sigfried1977]

The wife says, "promise to ride me as much as you ride your bike," at some point in the game which a tweet rants about. I'm sure some people somewhere in the world think and act like that.

I'd argue most wifes/gfs/bfs do. It's called being playful and kinky. Not to mention the girl is married to a tatted-up biker dude. I'd wager neither of the two are particularly hip to the intricacies of gender studies.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Was there a difficult option at start? For a survival game, I think that's quite imperative to set resources to the challenge level the player wants. It's the kind of thing that can be way too easy or way too hard which should be fairly easily parameterisable in response to a "how do you like your survival games?" response.

There's easy, normal and hard. I picked normal. Think it's too forgiving. Problem is that most of the time, hard mode tends to be more annoying than hard which is why I tend to avoid it.

 

[goonergaz]

Was there a difficult option at start? For a survival game, I think that's quite imperative to set resources to the challenge level the player wants. It's the kind of thing that can be way too easy or way too hard which should be fairly easily parameterisable in response to a "how do you like your survival games?" response.

IIRC, as usual it was 'easy, normal & hard' options at the start.

Only just got to the first save point and not had time to play much...my daughter has been playing it and her only criticism is the bike is hard to control and the story is poor. Regarding the reviews (and stupid people do stupid things comments) , I do get that...but I think the issue here is that (I think anyway) they are trying to come across as a deeper story than it is. So, like LoU it can be really deep and you can get really emotionally involved and when things happen you can justify them, but here (and I'm going into 'spoilers' from the start - things like getting onto the roof, the chopper not just taking off when an injured girl and biker type show up...then saying they had room for 2 only and him not going because whatever wasn't a good enough reason - I mean, this may be all explained but to me is lazy writing and dumb as hell...and from what I've seen there's much of this type of thing.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some lazy writing films and games (Armageddon would be a good example of my sins! lol)...but generally those don't hide themselves behind a mask of a 'deep and thought provoking experience'. This seems to be dressed up like a LoU experience, I might be wrong (early days) but it's looking quite dark so far.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If it were me, I'd separate combat gameplay difficulty from survival difficulty. You may have lousy shooter skills and want that easy, but enjoy the challenges of difficult survival.

 

[Xbat]

If it were me, I'd separate combat gameplay difficulty from survival difficulty. You may have lousy shooter skills and want that easy, but enjoy the challenges of difficult survival.

Good idea. So you can have the survivor aspect like less resources but snap on aiming if you not good at aiming. Choice is never a bad thing.

Being a small team though probably limits how much gameplay testing they can do.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Being a small team though probably limits how much gameplay testing they can do.

I know that feeling!

 

[Sigfried1977]

I'm not really a fan of this "design your own experience" kind of approach. That's what a game designer is for. Besides, if you suck at shooting there are other means to take down foes. You can use grenades, pipe bombs, molotovs, traps, and of course melee weapons. You can already activate snap aim in the menu if you want anyway. It's not part of the difficulty setting (maybe it's disabled on hard)

 

[Sigfried1977]

Btw, here's another thing that really bugs me about the game: loading times everywhere.