you know what sucks? new coke
Long-ass fuckin’ time ago, the Coca Cola Company made a change. I don’t know why they made it, but they decided that the formula their entire company was built on wasn’t good enough, suddenly, and they decided to kill regular-old Coca Cola and replace it with “new coke.” People didn’t like that at all. They liked Coke! New Coke sucks, they said!
But that wasn’t entirely true — as you probably know, they reissued New Coke eventually, because New Coke didn’t exactly suck, it was just change for the sake of change, and people didn’t want that.
So, if you’ve read my essays for a while, you know that I’ve got some basic rules when it comes to talking about games. First, we take into consideration resilience — it’s alright to be more frank about our criticism of a game like Hogwarts Legacy because we know it’s going to make a billion dollars. No criticism we ever make could move the needle on it, so we’re allowed a not insignificant amount of leeway in our dealings.
Of course, if you’ve been reading my essays for a while, you also know that we must refrain if our criticism is either honest or useless. If you follow me on twitter, you know that sometimes I talk at length about problems I see in games that I leave entirely anonymous. That’s when I’m using a mistake a game has made (one of the things that sucks about Adios is that our cooking system didn’t have the budget, so it kinda detracts from the drama we were attempting to build in the scene), but I’m not interested in calling out the game. That’s because it’s an indie game.
But if I go tell you about an AAA game, I’m a lot more likely to say “hey, I think Bioshock Infinite really fucks up some of its commentary because of the way the story juxtaposes an accurate representation of post-revolutionary political climates with reconstruction era race issues. It ends up saying that slaves were just as bad as their former masters, which is clearly not the intended message. Any student of revolutionary history (I studied east-Asian revolutionary cinema myself) knows that the intended point was likely “revolutionary leaders rarely make for good peace time leaders.” But the story’s muddled execution results in an audience believing that Bioshock Infinite is simply shitting on the victims of American racism. It screws the fuckin’ pooch and hurt a whole lot of people that didn’t deserve it.”
Look at Redfall — people are being downright cruel. I think there’s a fear there, a fear that Arkane is one specific kind of developer, and an attempt to try something new makes these panicky bastards go “oh no, we have to shit on Arkane until they stop and go back to making Dishonored!”
As someone who literally asked Harvey Smith, the series director, to let me make “Dishonored Tactics” for his studio the last time we hung out, trust me, I’d love more Dishonored, but I also know that the studio gets to make what they want to make, and I think we need to let people try things that you’d never expect. I mean, look at me: I did a horror game, an anti-walking-sim, and now I’m making something nobody in games has ever seen before. Once it clicks for people, they go “holy shit, this is awesome,” but like… I wouldn’t want to be stuck with people telling me “keep making ps1 horror games” or something.
It sucks to watch a bandwagon like that — remember when a bunch of content creators saw that Bethesda wasn’t giving out review keys and went out of their way to lie about Doom 2016 and Dishonored 2? Remember how their fans then started posting “the reason Bethesda didn’t give my favorite YouTuber a key was because of performance issues they were trying to hide” and it was nothing more than fairly standard AAA game release. Some people had problems, some didn’t, but it wasn’t an epidemic. It was gamers trying to push a thing as part of a parasocial relationship with people who were just mad they couldn’t get games early! That sucks!
So, we do our best to be honest — because we want to be productive — and we don’t do the “i call it like it is (i’m an asshole)” thing either… because it’s not productive. You gotta run it past that check.
I did not do that the other night.
Instead, I posted this while playing God of War: Chains of Olympus, which is one of my favorite games. It was, alongside Peace Walker, one of the games I played the most on the PlayStation Portable, which, until the Vita, was my favorite handheld of all time.
Now, at a glance, this is a VERY silly tweet. This screencap does no justice selling the game’s sense of scale at all. It’s a muddy mess (because this was a PSP game running on PlayStation 3 through my capture card software, and not even the good one. And then I hit “print screen”).
If I wanted to make a worse argument, I’m not sure I could have. Which is why I used the picture, because it was very funny. Now, do I believe the remark I made? Absolutely, and I can argue my point sufficiently enough that anyone who hears it will at least understand my viewpoint and appreciate why I have it. They won’t necessarily agree — but that’s okay; even though I write these pieces as a persuasive writer, I cannot and must not expect deference.
I also did not expect the game’s director, who walked up on the same stage shortly after I stepped off it myself to accept an award of his own for God of War 2018, to see my tweet.
I mean, sure, I’ve made some cool games, and I’ve been brought in as a fixer on plenty of games you’ve heard of, but I’m a relative nobody. Like, I’m lucky enough to keep regular correspondence with some absolute icons, but I really am a relative nobody; Cory Barlog has no reason to be aware of my existence.
So when I made a flippant joke — one I was not intending to write about (which is when I do my best to be fair) — I undoubtedly did not offer the man a pleasant experience. It was not meant for him and it was not expected to reach his ears. To me, it’s like joking about Superman’s tights — I’m not expecting him to show up on my doorstep and be like “dude why’d you make fun of my tights?” If I was gonna offer actual critique on Superman’s uniform, it’d be an essay that is fair enough that he could step back and go “ah, I get where he’s coming from,” but that’s about it.
Know your audience, basically. My message was intended for people who follow me and know I’m being very silly. For someone who doesn’t know me, my statement might not be immediately silly.
So, to Mr. Barlog, hey, sorry about that!
Maybe I should introduce myself?
this tweet might help
a bit about me
I speak coarsely for humorous effect, and I’ve found that people engage better with it when I do. I’ve noted the disarming effect it has, and I want to lean into that because we’re all here to have a good time. Now, sometimes, when people read my writing, whether it’s me talking about how Dark Souls and disability don’t get along or why NFTs are bad for game developers, will go “wow, he swears a lot, but he makes a great point.” Some people just don’t like the colorful language. Fair enough. It’s not your thing.
But I think, if anyone reads me at any amount of length, they get a sense that I’m being playful, and my coarse language is part of that playfulness, much the same way I’ll name a character “brodie” in a very intimately sad game about dealing with my post-traumatic stress disorder because… well, the character, “he a bro and he die,” is how I said it to someone. I’m not here to write like an academic or a replaceable journalist.
I’m here to make a connection with you as a human being, and I enjoy cutting the tension by being funny, flippant, and weird.
Someone outside of my circle may not immediately understand what I’m doing or why.
As an example, I’ve often bemoaned, theatrically, that no human alive has suffered worse than I have… when I can’t find my headphones or my beanie. It is entirely possible that a stranger could see that and think I am speaking seriously. I think it’s so absurd as to be deeply funny. And I will be funny because, like I said, we want everyone to have a good time.
Clearly my remark, once it got outside my circle, did not land.
a bit about god of war
God of War was one of two series that helped me move beyond my early fixation with first person shooters. I struggle to appreciate fixed cameras because of how I interact and engage with three dimensional space, while I am at my absolute best when I am working in first person. For a long, long time, it was actually strange to me to hear people say they hated first person platforming. My response to critics of the mechanics were “why don’t you just feel out where you are? why do you have to look at your feet?”
I was a teen. I was not smart.
But then I played the God of War games, and things started to make sense. They were they games that helped awaken me to the idea that you can do things with the camera that result in an interesting way to play with the space you occupy. Rather than being disorientating, the cameras were often implemented in ways that helped create scale while keeping combat extremely legible. The imitators rarely managed to pull that off (like how Call of Duty’s imitators didn’t realize that All Ghillied Up wants you to go loud, which is why it gives you stinger missiles — Mohammad Alavi, the level designer, confirmed this to me).
God of War games were an escalating series of increasingly huge confrontations that dealt with the sublime — that sense of awe and sometimes even fear in the face of the impossible.
And, hey, I’m the guy who thinks Blame! is one of the best stories ever drawn. My header image on twitter is concept art for a co-op game (we once had a session with 11 people; it was a blast we played for hours) where the sky fades to blue… before you realize the stars are lights in the ceiling. I love it when games establish sublime spaces. I love inhabiting cavernous cathedrals. I like the hushed awe of the vast.
So of course I loved God of War. I didn’t love the entirety of the third one, mind you, though I loved the gameplay. I felt that the characterization of Kratos rendered him almost unredeemable as a person. He is not a protagonist I wanted to embody as I play the games (we embody all protagonists in all games we play, because we act through them). That Kratos was not who I wanted to act as. “Man too angry to die,” sure. “Genuinely awful piece of shit?” not so much. But, hey, who can forget this?
This shit’s good as hell, my dudes.
a bit about the sad dad games
I don’t like what God of War 2018 is about (in a “that’s what I’m all about” sense, and not a thematic sense), but I’ve never really felt it was worth any significant criticism, so I never really wrote about the game. There’s no needle to move, there’s no I’ve talked a bit about the things I think it does wrong, but honestly, aside from people straight up telling me I have to accept it as the best game ever made…? that kind of bothers me.
Look, what I like in games is chasing after fantasies that interest me. I am disabled thanks to significant chronic pain and chronic fatigue. I’ve lived in poverty most of my adult life as a result of it. To be glib, shit sucks! And games provide me a meaningful way to escape that pain for a while, so I’ve enjoyed their power to transport me to interesting space.
Where I start to drift from a game is when the experience fails in some way to grab me, to provide a place I find interesting enough to visit. While I’ve talked about my issues with the actual fucked-up worldview of The Last of Us, I don’t really see that kind of wasteful, self-centered misanthropy here. The writing in 2018 is quite good — which doesn’t surprise me, since, as I recall, some of the writing team wrote on one of my favorite games, a very weird little hidden gem called Lost Planet 3.
There’s this bit in Lost Planet 3 where you walk past an NPC, and he says something, and you forget about him. Then, later, when you walk past him after leaving and returning to base, he says something like “hey, I left while you were gone. Don’t think I didn’t go anywhere.” After you return a third time, he’s gone entirely, and then, as I recall, he returns on your fourth visit with something like “see? I don’t just stay in one place. I have a life,” or something to that effect. This is like a ten year old memory, so sorry if I get the precise dialogue wrong. I’m not even sure anyone but me noticed it.
It was cute. It was playful, and it — combined with my love of the previous God of War games — had me thinking that oh, oh buddy, if people who made things like Lost Planet 3’s shockingly well-written story are on board, then as a game, I bet God of War 2018 might very well be one of the best. I was absolutely primed for this thing to blow me away. I mean, look, I’m a bigger-than-average Sony fan. I stanned Days Gone when even the die-hards didn’t. I own more PlayStation Vitas than anybody else on the planet. I count among my favorite developers the legendary Japan Studio at Sony.
Sure, yes, I am actively working on a piece that calls one of Sony’s games racist, but that’s because I’m not a thoughtless fanboy. When I think I can trust people to make good shit, I cheer them on. I want every game to be good.
And, hey, Santa Monica Studio never made a game I can recall disliking. I mean, hell, I literally think God of War: Ascension is an underrated game (and the reason people disliked it was because it takes place largely in two separate biomes, which reduces the apparent scope of the game — think about how Breath of the Wild has a world that’s not particularly huge, but one that is visually diverse, which makes it feel much larger; Ascension doesn’t do that) and absolutely adore the combat mechanics in it.
I generally like Sony games more than most Sony fans — you’re not likely to see an Ellie or Kratos avatar user tell you about how much they love Wild Arms or Siren, y’know? So of course I was sitting there showing you “God of War can only get better” on a chart like Disco Stu saying disco records would keep accelerating.
And… then I played God of War 2018.
After a few hours, I sat down and went “you know, I stopped playing Company of Heroes back in 2011. I should finish that.” I proceeded to. Loved almost every second of it. And then, eventually, in like… 2021, I went “oh, right, God of War.” I picked it up. I got to the point where it gets good (BLADES OF CHAOS). I found it well-written, extremely expensive, and… well, not exactly a game I had any desire to play again (in part because the BLADES OF CHAOS aren’t accessible immediately upon replay).
a short explanation of the problems
This is not meant to be a lengthy, new, huge article. We’re only about three thousand words at this point (I will probably delete things so the count will be inaccurate). This is mostly just an explanation for any reasonably-minded person who might’ve found me because a man with half a million twitter followers from the most rabid fanbase in games (seriously, I’ve gotten death threats and hack attempts before, for minor things like “I’m more of an Insomniac guy than a Naughty Dog guy” and “I miss Amy Hennig” and “I think Jack Tretton throwing that mic was immature lol” and “I don’t like how they removed back compat and started reselling those games on disc”) decided to make what I took as a silly, wry reply. It was a funny reply! I figure, hey, my joke might not have been seen as such, best I offer an explanation.
But if you’re a reader of mine, don’t come into this expecting another 15,000 words on I’ve been writing for maybe 45 minutes? I’m not expecting this piece to be huge. I’m actually going to do my best to be brief because I’m writing that article about how to defeat impostor syndrome and that’s this month’s “real” article.
“Alright, Doc, hit me with it. Give me your worst.” Man, if I was gonna give you my worst I’d be a weird, dishonest asshole about this, because I’d be doing my best to be the worst. I’d rather give you my best, but also I have another article to write this month and a game to direct, so my plate’s full. But I will be uncharacteristically frank here:
God of War 2018 is a game designed-by-averages.
I do not mean it is designed to be average, nor can I actually tell you precisely how it was designed. But if you said “we took the most popular mechanics in video games and put them all together in a game,” I would imagine a game that turned out a lot like God of War 2018, and that is what I mean by “designed-by-averages.”
With a really, really well-designed game that I admire, there’s always something that feels, to me, like a thing the developers did because they had a problem to solve, they had something new to try. There was some level of exciting inventiveness to it all. Like, I love the motorcyle and the way it encourages you to learn the world design in Days Gone. It takes a couple hours to really pick up, but once you do, it puts you into an almost STALKER-esque fugue, where you’re absolutely in the zone (in both senses, STALKER fans), processing the world in a beautifully coherent way. I love the “to get to the objective,” Ghost of Tsushima tells you, “summon the wind.” That’s such a great way to go places. I actually summon the wind rhythmically just for the sense-pleasure of it.
Obviously, the low risk of indie games often means you can find really cool things there. Hell, I try to do interesting experiments in all my games. Take my most recent game, Adios.
With Adios, I expressed my desire to design a game that was about interacting with a person, conversations that felt natural, something that was more than the dry, they-tell-you-not-to-shoot-like-this-in-film-school shot-reverse-shot things most third person game dialogue ends up doing. I wanted to go “how can we embody a person in a space? How can we fidget with our food while we talk about what we don’t want to?”
With Waifu Death Squad, we’re trying to [redacted] and [redacted] and, since no one’s even thought of this before, we’re definitely going to [redacted]. Plus we’re setting up a specific kind of magic trick with the execution of the game.
So to me, a game I love is a game that stretches itself in some way, that solves some interesting problem, presents some paradigm I’ve never seen before. If I know what to expect, I’m not particularly interested in the rest of the experience.
When we get to God of War 2018, what we see is a game that’s a ‘most used mechanics out there right now’ type thing. The controls? Dark Souls. The camera? Similar to most of the other Sony first party games out there. In fact, I saw a guy make a montage of Sony games a while ago, and he was able to motion match the shots to seamlessly cut between several Sony first party games… because they all have the same camera! That’s not great! I want to see the Sony I loved — the one that blew us away with tons of innovative things! And God of War? It’s sure feels like Sony’s least innovative title since The Last of Us. This game is devoid of the reasons I play God of War.
That doesn’t feel great to experience? You look forward to a series that always does the wildest shit, shit only it COULD… and… 2018? It doesn’t feel like it’s offering something only God of War could. It’s a game with a significant budget, but there’s nothing that that makes me go “wow, only this team, these people, in this specific context, could create this kind of magic.” Instead… this is probably the most difficult thing to say… 2018 feels like a game that any reasonably experienced game director I know could make with the same budget. It does not feel like a Santa Monica Studio game.
That’s all thanks to its components.
I’ve mentioned the camera already (before getting to the one take thing — I’ll get there in a bit), but… hey, Sony! Diversify your portfolio!!! Don’t Activision yourself, Sony! Don’t hit that saturation point where you only make one kind of thing and your consumers find they want more variety in their diets! It’s not good for you!
The loot system goes from discrete, specific tools with clearly articulated move sets to “Destiny’s system,” which I have previously argued is the big thing that hurt Destiny. If you don’t know me, you may be unaware that, at several points in Destiny’s history, I’ve written about the game and the thoughts I have on the subject. There was a point where I addressed the loot system, one of the biggest YouTubers dumped his fans on me because “this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” but at the end of the day, he was going “maybe I was wrong” and Bungie made some of the changes I suggested (likely not because I suggested them, to be clear, but because they were necessary changes that any competent designer could see needed to happen. I’m not here to take credit, only to illustrate an example that I’ve maaaaybe been right about the issues with this system).
There was an article I wrote some time ago about cause and effect in regards to tangibles, where people go “oh, we released a pirate game and a ninja game. The pirate game sold better. Therefore, people like pirate games, so we’re only going to make pirate games after this.”
Hollywood actually works like this — there are scam artists who go to execs and promise them a way to remove risk from movie making (by shifting blame to software, which cannot be held accountable) — by selling software that they allege can predict popular trends by looking at old ones. Of course, if you had software like this, you’d still have these companies thinking the pole-sitting fad because nothing can move forward. The algorithm can only tell you what was popular. People, over time, burn out and move on. We’re seeing this as Marvel movie sales start to give way to things-that-aren’t-marvel. The software will tell you “people like Marvel movies” because it couldn’t predict Top Gun and Avatar. They’re still up there… but you can see the taper coming.
That software relies on tangibles — the things we can see — and it goes “pirate game good sales, make pirate games forever” because it’s not complicated enough to realize that a hugely successful pirate movie came out at the same time and made people want to live out the pirate fantasy. It’s exactly the kind of chaos people don’t like to hear about. It’s much easier to go “here is a thing. The thing is successful. The simplest possible explanation is because of various tangible elements about it.”
Destiny is big, so a lot of people have implemented Destiny’s loot system. In nearly every single case of a non-Destiny game, however, the loot system is cited as a low point of the game. At best, it goes unremarked on, or people ask “why is this here?” Assassin’s Creed, Division 2, a Warhammer game I forget the name of, and dozens of smaller games. People actually do not like it — they put up with it in Destiny because they like the other parts of Destiny. But… it’s the most copied thing, because it’s a very distinct thing about the game.
Much harder to articulate the way in which 70s sci-fi vibes blended with the light fantasy touch brought people to Destiny in the first place, or the fact that Bungie made Halo before that so there was a lot of brand loyalty. There’s the fact that the shooter gameplay is immaculate as well. That’s much harder for a publisher or an executive to direct the team to achieve; it’s something that comes from the institutional knowledge a studio builds up over time. That’s difficult to articulate as a goal; as much as the bean counters want us to make every decision based on hard data, that’s just not how people work, and since we’re making games for people, we have to think about how people work.
So, for whatever reason, God of War has a copy of the Big Game’s loot system. I think it harms the game — it pushes players to put mental bandwidth on loot that doesn’t really matter, and we’re seeing, over time, people beginning to say oh, wait, hold on, maybe this isn’t good. Games like Far Cry 6 (from my experience) and God of War Ragnarok (from the experience of designers and critics I’ve spoken with) have pushed loot situationality too far, increasing the granularity and using up the player’s mental bandwidth… without really contributing to the game in a meaningful way. It’s like how the Halo: Combat Evolved remaster introduced so much greebling (excessive, nonfunctional visual detail) that it actively hampered the player’s ability to read the combat experience.
For a series that a good design friend of mine once described as “so mechanically pure you can determine what actions to take in the game based on a single screenshot,” the greebling really hurt Halo’s remaster.
The loot system in God of War not only fails to add anything to the game, it also works against the experience — which should be centered on the journey of a father and his son. It’s vestigial; I know this because I ended up experimenting with playing the game while avoiding loot as much as possible, and it ended up making the game more fun. Trying to think about the loot actively hampered my ability to focus on what mattered: the characters.
For years, gamers have pointed out that games with vestigial crafting systems or experience systems don’t really light their proverbial fires. It seems as though these systems keep getting pushed in because they’re there. For a while, everyone was copying that same dull “we have three separate types of gameplay and you’ve got to put skill points in all of them” stuff. Yeah… nobody was coming to games for that, you know? The three-tier systems often limited a game’s replayability too — once you’re used to having all the cool shit, it sucks to have to go back and restart the game and find you’ve lost it all.
Older games got around this with fewer, more meaningful upgrades (Metroid Prime gives you a lot of new tools but the game is still fun before you get them), while more granular games often feel really bad to play because they rarely feel designed around a deliberate pacing of unlocks over time. Days Gone doesn’t make sense until that crossbow damage upgrade (and it’s a big reason why people were so lukewarm on it early on — the combat encounters are built around killing zombies without getting noticed, and the crossbow is your only “don’t get noticed” weapon and it literally guarantees enemies will notice you, opening you up to danger when you are not equipped to handle it, until the crossbow is capable of one hit kills) and Sunset Overdrive feels like they designed the entire game around the air dash, then decided to remove it for the first few hours, so the player feels like they’re flailing.
God of War 2018 feels reminiscent of that, not just because the entire progression system feels kinda meaningless… but because you get the BLADES OF CHAOS part way through the game.
Now, this is an unenviable design problem: the axe is okay. It’s a cool idea — hell, it’s a reason why I had a spike gun that did the same thing in my old co-op shooter, so obviously I’m on board for that — but when you get the BLADES OF CHAOS, everything clicks. The game suddenly feels so much more fun.
Narratively, it’s a big ‘God forgive me, I have to go back to tha old me’ moment, and it cannot be achieved unless you don’t have the BLADES OF CHAOS. They’re also translated well to the new camera system; they feel so fucking good to use. God. I love ‘em.
But it does kinda… make it hard to get back to playing the original game, because, like the air dash in Sunset Overdrive, you’re without your best-feeling tool.
The solution, I imagine, would be to have them unlocked in a new game plus run. I don’t believe God of War does that, however? I could very much be wrong. It’s like 2 AM, dudes.
The problem, consistently, is that God of War 2018, just mish-mashes a bunch of mechanics you’ve seen elsewhere without really doing anything with it. You remove the loot system, and the game becomes more focused. Remove the crafting/upgrade system, same thing. I can’t really see a scenario where the game gets worse for removing its least-original components. I see a more refined, precise, and interesting game buried underneath there.
and then there’s that fuckin’ camera
God of War’s key identity was its camera. You can say it was Kratos, but that’d be the tangibles talking. The camera was the thing that made it a game unlike anything else — save for its imitators, which always stripped something out of the mix, losing something in the process — because it served a distinct purpose: to create desire and emotion within the player.
When the camera is pulled out, it’s often showing you something not only interesting, but a place you will get to go to. The limitations placed on that camera often encouraged you to look for treasure without actually informing you where it was; the camera and the level design work together to create a distinct, emotional experience.
Take the bit with Cronos in God of War 3.
During the Cronos fight, the camera pulls back, back, back, back, out, and away from Kratos, showing just how small he is between Cronos’ fingers. It makes the fight feel epic.
This isn’t like The Last of Us II, where you get some stupid marketing beat— i literally cannot believe this actually happened, but it did — where Neil Druckmann appears on camera and says you can get more emotional with the characters because they can jump, as if the studio’s previous games were all jump-free (Uncharted 4 to Crash Bandicoot, my dudes!). It’s insulting to hear, and it’s not even true. Jumping doesn’t really connect you to the characters in any meaningful way — and whoever wrote that marketing beat, I’ll bet, knew it. It was just a thing to say because it was a thing the previous game didn’t have.
(speaking of ‘design-by-averages,’ if you look up a checklist of all the game design things people complained about in video games of the 2011s, from forced instant fail stealth sections to not having jumping to pointless crafting, the last of us checks every box except ‘brown and grey’ and ‘regenerating health’ — again, none of those things are what made that game popular. what made it popular was that it looked great, sold the idea that people would take games seriously as art, and came out at a time when the walking dead was wildly popular, so people wanted a big AAA zombie action adventure game to play that felt like The Walking Dead. i would put money on it that if we went back in time and released the last of us without most of the 2013 era tropes like obvious and unnatural waist-high-cover, people would like it even more.)
So along comes God of War 2018, and the official marketing beat is that it is a one-take game.
It releases, and a lot of people praise the one-take thing as being the reason the game is so good. Now, having done the gaming journalism thing for the biggest sites in gaming, I’ve had to work with quite a lot of people, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that some journos come from a deep understanding of games and how they work, and other journos are people who, like your average gaming YouTuber or Streamer, just repeats whatever they’re told.
So when they hear “it has a one take,” a bunch of these unserious motherfuckers (and I’ll explain the derision here in a second), now given a tangible (remember the “you thought people prefer pirates to ninjas, but actually a pirate movie inspired people for a brief period to want to live out a pirate experience in a game” example?) talking point, all went “that’s the thing that made the game good.”
But was it really?
See, if you’ve read my stuff, you know I do my best to prove my point, and usually it’s the ADHD that makes me forget to go back to one I intend to get to later. But if you remind me, I’ll usually go “oh shit I forgot to finish that thought.” The thought itself? Completely intact. Just sometimes forget to drop it in the piece.
You know that if we make a claim that an element of a game has a specific effect, we must invariably prove it. I cannot tell you how many God of War 2018 reviews I read where people would praise the camera (because they heard about it), say nothing about what it does beyond maybe like “oh it’s unbroken and that’s really impressive cause of some of the shots.” No one, though, not a one, could tell you why it could do what the originals could not.
And the reason they’re unserious motherfuckers is because Dead Space and Dead Space 2 both did the same thing. As did Half-Life and Half-Life 2. And they’re far from the only games. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare had a marketing beat about how they avoided loading screens as much as possible. One of my favorite bits of game writing on games is Zach Wilson’s remarks about Virginia, a game that is all about cuts.
When I was working on Homefront, we brought in John Milius (filmmaker of Conan the Barbarian fame) and we showed him our single player prototype, a standard walk-and-talk through a post-apocalyptic community. It was meant to show what the player’s experience might be and that we could handle cinematic storytelling seamlessly intermingled with gameplay. He kept suggesting that we cut between moments — that we shouldn’t be spending time walking down stairs where nothing happens, that it had to be way trimmed down; but we insisted that he didn’t understand. “That’s not how games work, especially First Person Games — they’re contiguous experiences. This is what players expect, and it’ll break the immersion if you do it any other way. I mean maybe in film, but..”
Turns out we were wrong.
Yes, making a game entirely one take is an impressive feat. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 have hitching. You black out in both Half-Life and Dead Space to mask one transition. The lights go out in one moment in Dead Space 2, and on and on I could go. Doing things unbroken, or as close as you can, is a significant part of making video games, and it might not be the right one. But that’s why I’m someone who loves the hard cuts and motion/portal matching that I do in all my games. We have several deliberate hard cuts in Waifu Death Squad that we can’t wait to show you, because they allow us to maximize emotional impact in a way an unbroken take just cannot do.
In God of War, the caveat is that to fast travel, you load into a temporary buffer zone while your destination is loaded in. There’s always some way developers attempt to keep things unbroken, and I find the tedium of the loading zone to be similar to Mass Effect’s loading elevators. Remember those? Exact same thing: they were masking loading to keep the experience feeling contiguous.
God of War might be the most recent, the closest-to-perfect “there is no take” of any game in the world, but… plenty of people have done it, and it hasn’t really meant much for the games in question.
Worse still, the fixed camera limits the game’s ability to play with the camera as much as the previous God of War games did, because being able to do what God of War games did while also being an over-the-shoulder game means way way way way way more work. Once the player has control over the camera, a lot more work has to go into making sure that the camera doesn’t break entirely. Same reason why we have to be extra careful that players are looking where we want when we want specific things to happen in our games.
This is why I suspect we see Trolls as bosses in the game so many times.
There isn’t a lot of deviation here. You can say “oh, no, these aren’t technically boss fights because they show up multiple times,” but I mean, the game frames trolls as boss fights. It does. Plus, Elden Ring has a shitload of recycled boss fights, so that argument shits the bed the second you think it. The Trolls are usually the ‘event guys’ in the game when you encounter them, like the one on the ice bridge to hell, or the first one you meet that has a whole-ass cutscene introducing him, and so on. It’s not a miniboss that gets added to a mix — it’s presented as a boss.
I suspect that, given more budget/time, Santa Monica studio could’ve given us the kind of boss/encounter variety up to the standards of previous God of War games, which are literally sold on the idea of impressive boss fights. But I’ll bet if you actually talk to people on the team, a fair few of them will tell you that getting the camera to do the one take thing took a ton of work, so much that, if they were real honest with you, I’d hazard a guess that they’d tell you that yeah, there could’ve been more variety in the game if the one-take thing hadn’t been implemented.
It’s a gimmick, but it doesn’t make the game better. Russian Ark, all of Inarritu’s one-take films… and, hell, my own work have suffered from one-takes.
Look, the purpose of a one take is to either get you in the groove (which is how Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tar deploy them) or to make you impressed at the cleverness of the filmmaker. Most one-take projects are the latter. It’s an interesting technical exercise, but rarely, if ever, something with genuine artistic purpose. It cannot be said to do anything — it’s simply a gimmick that sounds really really cool when you hear about it, which is why most students in film school try it at least once.
I know this because I’ve helped shoot ’em. Sometimes the problem is the set, sometimes it’s that the director really had no idea what they wanted to shoot (and then when the crew goes on strike he films it himself, refuses to let anyone else work on the film, and edits it all himself — and it gets no votes at the film festival it was sent to because it was godawful. what? personal experience? hahahahahaha why would you think that). It’s a very interesting exercise, but not all of us are Robert Altman, a playful filmmaker doing an insanely creative and complex take that required massive amounts of coordination to pull off.
And… that shit still calls attention to itself while rarely being the kind of good direction that actually sells the fuckin’ story, you know? I can tell you how specific shots achieve distinct narrative effect. I can tell you how and why I stage things when I shoot ’em.
When we were working on Adios, I was working with some super experienced actors, right? And sometimes, they’d ask me why they were doing things. After one of my explanations, one of ’em, either D.C. or Rick, I forget which, said “Doc, one thing I appreciate about you being here is that you know why every line is here, and you can give us exactly what we need when we need it.”
I don’t think that makes me particularly exceptional, I’m sure that the writers of God of War 2018 were able to do the exact same thing with Christopher Judge and the rest of them. But I do think it’s important to do this in all aspects of your storytelling, and I think that because the game is entirely uninterrupted, there are times where the camera is where it is because it’s compromised for the sake of functionality. It is, throughout the game, without purpose.
Seriously, what is God of War’s purpose for the one-take? Well, I can’t say it achieves any specific, discrete effect, and I’ve never heard anyone make a meaningful argument for what it might achieve other than being impressive, which makes me think it’s a gimmick that someone committed to. We can all see how it prevents the game from pulling things off the way previous games had, but I am not sure we ever see when it accomplishes something those earlier games could not. While keeping the camera close to Kratos makes sense in a game about an intimate relationship between a father and son, I’m not sure that “kratos going through a random void because we don’t want a moment of loading” achieves anything, you know? There are too many compromises. There are times when cuts would have made a much stronger, more emotional piece of storytelling than refusing to have any cuts.
It’s impressive, but how does it strengthen the drama?
Narratively, we know “double beats” are bad. As an example, one of my screenwriting teachers, the oscar-winning Kevin Willmott — I say this not to brag, but so you don’t doubt that he knows his stuff — showed us how the movie Red Tails sabotaged its own drama with a sequence where someone goes:
- “please give us the planes!” “alright”
- “did you get the planes?” “yes”
- “did we get the planes?” *planes flying overhead* “looks like we got the planes!”
It’s badly written, inelegant, and like a punch with no force behind it. Willmott’s suggestion was that you have “please give us the planes,” have the character responsible for saying yes or no make a frown, then cut to the soldiers on the airfield, one worriedly asking the other “do you think we’ll get the planes?” and then the triumphant roar of the P-51s as they fly overhead, our characters excitedly celebrating their new equipment. It heightens the emotional power of the scene, establishing that uncertainty.
When you see the trolls, you know what you’re getting, because you keep getting them. It’s a double beat, emotionally. Fine for cannon fodder, not so fine for a series literally built around eye-poppingly impressive boss fights.
With God of War 3 (sadly the only other one you can play on modern consoles), you know that going up against Zeus is very different than Hades who is nothing at all like Cronos, you know? Every one is scaled differently, feels different, vibes different. They achieve specific, discrete effects, and they empower you by promising uncertain outcomes. Drama is all about uncertain outcomes — as Mamet says “who wants what? what happens if her [sic] don’t get it? why now?” It is the resolution of the uncertainty that makes a scene compelling.
So, yes, I’ll bet you that the reason the troll gets reused after he’s clearly meant to be an early boss… is because the game’s non-Troll bosses are obscenely expensive compared to the rest. So when I saw lots of people calling Trolls the low point but calling the camera the high point, I found myself wondering — and it’s seriously something I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at Santa Monica studio for — if the team had to rely on the trolls so heavily because it was far too prohibitive to make bosses that worked with the one-take camera system.
The troll’s frequency ultimately hinders… yup, once again, the game’s dramatic potential.
g’night, sleep tight, new coke sucks
The game feels like someone, somewhere along the lines, said “we need to have all these things in the game because other big games have them.” It’s an assortment of mechanics that don’t fit, don’t contribute, and often detract from the brilliance hiding underneath the game.
Sure, I got dozens of people replying that it’s wildly popular and got lots of awards, so I must be wrong. Sure, man. You do you. I’m not trying to tell you that you mustn’t like the game. I’m not telling you that, if you worked on the game, your work was in vain.
But… something like half a billion people have played games I’ve advised on at this point; I’m more than familiar with scale, so popularity does not impress me, only quality. Lots of people like God of War 2018, but so what? Popularity never mattered before. Big Bang Theory was one of the biggest shows on television, and Twilight, a story that literally has an adult deciding to marry an infant child, was a wildly popular book series. Popularity isn’t a guarantee of quality. It’s heavily marketed, extremely polished, visually delightful — and so, yes, it’s wildly popular.
As you all know, no gamer has ever posted their opinions on League of Legends, the biggest video game in the world. It is objectively one the most balanced, most perfect video game that has ever been made, because as you know, it’s one of the most played games in the world.
See how fucking moronic you’d have to be to think success is a marker of quality? League is a game that everyone disagrees on.
But I think the great stuff — the stuff that sticks with us, the stuff we’ve got to learn from so we ourselves can make the best things we can — lasts. I’m not sure that God of War 2018’s legacy will, because, like The Last of Us, it’s propped up heavily by a company that benefits from continuing to push it as being important. Will it continue resonating with audiences? The story should, but, like The Last of Us, it’s buried in all the biggest, most complained-about problems of the generation. I think people are looking past that to find the gold, and me… well, I can’t.
I came to the series for something specific, and Santa Monica Studio offered me New Coke instead. The flavor’s changed, the formula’s off. If you like it, you do you. I can tell you why I liked the old coke. It’s okay for people to try new things — I applaud Arkane for making an action game with co-op (though I did lodge my protest about there being a lack of campaign co-op progression) — but even though it was an obvious joke (tiny kratos against a roughly monotone background that doesn’t sell the argument at all). Yeah. I guess it does kinda suck to see the thing you loved go for derivative mechanics that plenty of other people have done.
It feels as though there’s a massive disconnect between the game’s design, a grab bag of “shit everyone complains about all the time in other games,” and the narrative it’s trying to tell. I think the grab bag, if anything, actively sabotages the story that deserves to be told.
But what I really fuckin’ hate is this insistence that I have to pretend this game is anywhere near the peak of what we can do. I’ll make a bet with you: give me an equivalent budget and time scale, and I’ll direct a game that blows people away too. Not because I’m exceptional, but because any game at this kind of budget will get this kind of acclaim. You’ll still have journos out there hearing marketing bullet points and ignoring that Dead Space 2 did it earlier just because of the scale, because it’s a beloved IP, or whatever else. People are willing to overlook this game’s flaws because of how it’s positioned — I think if you look at what it is, you start to see how it could’ve been so much better, and the changes made are often detrimental to the game.
Can’t fault the Coca Cola company for introducing New Coke, but hey. I don’t think it works. Demand for the reissue of New Coke was high, and reviews for it were awesome.
Can’t say I was a fan.
You do you. Always.
I wrestled with whether or not to post the tip jar thing because, like, this is a response to someone whose feelings I may have inadvertently hurt, and I ain’t about that. However, I also have to pay like $200 for physical therapy on Monday, and this is labor that I did, so I settled on a compromise:
If you want to support the other work I do on this blog, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, or my upcoming article on how to beat impostor syndrome, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
Being disabled sucks and medical care costs a lot. I put out all my work for free and hope people value it enough to send some cash my way, because there are people like me who can’t afford access if I were to paywall all this stuff. When you send me a tip, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite
ko-fi.com/stompsite
@forgetamnesia on venmo
$docseuss on cashapp
