Badass

20 Jan 2006

boojiboy7 wrote:

winkerwanker wrote: _You all seem to be missing one key thing about God Of War. It is a smart game. It is trying to make the player feel something. Mr Mech gets it; GOW wants the player to feel as ridiculous as Kratos, the combat, the dodging and, especially, the QTE and button bashing insta kills are all geared towards making the player feel something akin to “RUUAAAAARRRRGHHHHHHH”. Thats what makes the QTEs work so well. You feel like you’ve worked to rip that guy apart or knock him down and stab him in the throat or, my favourite, ripping his arm off and beating him to death. It’s delibaretly over the top in order to make the player be over the top.

It’s far more about feel as opposed to working within a rigid system ala DMC3.

boojiboy7 i am afraid that you are one of those crashing bores who must insist that every game be a struggle, be it against the odds or the difficulty curve._

See, i don’t insist on a game being a struggle. Shit, I don’t mind a game that is easy at all. What I am saying is that GOW failed at making me feel in the slightest bit a badass because I wasn’t having to do anything badass at all to win. DMC3 made me feel like a badass because I had to master it, and work at how to play it. A game can be easy and make me feel like a badass. Any time I have finally pulled off a huge level spanning combo in a hawk game, for example, I have felt pretty badass. In GOW, though, I didn’t feel like what I did really had much of an effect on Kratos. In DMC3, every move Dante does is my direct input. While techincally this is true in GOW, it just doesn’t feel the same to me. So yes, it is about the feel for me, just not in the way you think.

I do think the difficulty curve in DMC3 has something to do with it, though not in the way you might think either. DMC3 is hard until you learn how to fight, and then it becomes much more easy. The problem most people have is that DMC3 asks you to fight in a way much different from that of even the earlier games in the series. In it, once you start the fight, you don’t stop until every last thing in the room that isn’t you is dead. to make it more interesting, those things actually pose a threat to you. This si something that was lacking in GOW for me. There wasn’t a threat. DMC3 did a really good job for me of balancing just the right amount of threat with my continuing ability to defeat that threat.

Basically, GOW felt like i was watching a movie about a badass (albeit a pretty vapid one with horrible plotting and pointless repetitve gore serving no purpose other than the occasional chuckle). DMC3 made me feel like I was becoming the badass.

I think the fighting game analogy might be the best one out there. GOW is the game to play if you want to watch some stuff that is badass. DMC3, like Street Fighter III, is a game you approach knowing you will bea n idiot to start with, and not look in the slightest bit cool, but once you get good at it, and learn how it plays, you (or at least I) get an amazing rush of power, just the feeling of being unstoppable.

The QTE’s were really indicative of this for me in GOW, just because when they took the action away to me focusing on what button to hit, it took me right out of Kratos’s shoes. I just felt like I was watching the movie again. It didn’t help that the ones that activated with the regular enemies just became routine, so another 10 second of time is wasted on the same death animation. s/Devil May Cry/Ninja Gaiden/