Indie game manages to fully use the strengths of the medium to tell a more compelling narrative than every AAA game I...

>indie game manages to fully use the strengths of the medium to tell a more compelling narrative than every AAA game I ever played
If I was a AAA developer I would be ashamed

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If you were a AAA developer you'll only care abut making money with your "products".

I agree. Even if I wasn’t enamored with the gameplay, they did more with a little than most big studios do with a million dollars. Little things like waiting on the edge of the galaxy, while the sun goes supernova, listening to the convergence of all your friend’s instruments is just some top tier shit. I think it’s just proof the industry is just too bloated and profit focused to really focus on what’s important

there are too many people developing any AAA game for them to make a cohesive & interesting narrative, too many cooks etc. it's probably not even a slight at the competency of these developers either, given the right atmosphere and drive they are probably talented enough to make something truly remarkable also, but when they get trapped in the AAA machine there's rarely any opportunity to see something through as originally intended

>Don't have a single cutscene
>Create a better history and character development than any AAA with HOURS of cutscenes

to bee honesty the game would be 1000 times better with cute anime girls

the plot and everything could remain the same

kys coomer

AAA devs don't want to use the strengths of the medium. They dream themselves auteurs, they're all just Hollywood rejects who'd jump ship in a heartbeat had they had the opportunity. They're just using video games as a cope, which is why they're so desperate to turn video games into something "mature" and "respected", because deep down, no one looks down on video games more than they do. There's a reason all these pretentious hacks keep name dropping great films and literature as "parallels" to their by the number, cliche, badly executed, on rails story that fails to take advantage of the medium, and doesn't even scratch the surface of being on par with film or literature.

Ehh. I think you're overselling it. Outer Wilds was very simple and predictable, and it has the big crutch of lots and lots of text logs which only kind of make sense in context. There were other big games, some with more complex stories, that pushed environmental storytelling much harder.

Bought the game today aftee pirating it a year ago. Just chilling outside the star system waiting for the sun to explode. Shouldn't be more than five minutes now.

Yeah this, it did nice things with time related aspects. But other than that it average.

You DID land on Sun Station manually, right?

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>very simple
What other game simulates an handcrafted solar system in which events are triggered by the passing of time?
>There were other big games, some with more complex stories, that pushed environmental storytelling much harder.
Such as?

I think it was a great game, but I don't think the story is particularly special.

I'm talking about the story and the storytelling, not the gameplay. It's a great premise, but you can absolutely see the very clear influences. If you're familiar with The Last Question, you're going to know exactly what's going on and what's going to happen.

Anyway, the first game that immediately came to mind was Riven.

God I'm inside a jellyfish in Giant Deep's core. I don't want to get out. I know there's nothing there but still. It's like Subnautica's depths but a million time worse.

Oh fuck and I'm retarded, all I wanted was to get to the secret doppelganger ending, I could've done that without this shitty place

But the gameplay IS also the story, that's what it make it great. The game is about the awe and satisfaction of discovering the mysteries of that dynamic world, your make your own storytelling.
Something like Riven might have a good story, but it feels really static in comparison. I don't think it's a good comparison.

To pointlessly elaborate on this a bit more, one of the things that sticks out to me about Outer Wilds is that there wasn't really any commitment to "realism" or actually portraying the single snapshot in time from when the Nomai all died. The text logs are scattered all over the place in sometimes nonsensical locations. There's an escape pod with a closed explosive latch that leads to a pathway that the Nomai clearly had to have taken, so that latch should have been open. The Sunless City doesn't seem to have an actual main entrance, and it can't be buried in the sand because the Ash Twin is full at the start of the loop. It doesn't make sense that the entire history of the Nomai and their conversations is captured in scribbling all over the place. They must have been around for years, long enough to create a solar system spanning civilization from two starting points with generations of Nomai children, yet nobody bothered to erase their early panicked scribbles or move their escape pods or develop over anything that would obscure this bizarrely pristine timeline of their entire history from the moment they landed in our solar system. This is why I don't think it pushed environmental storytelling very hard. Instead of creating an authentic portrait of this universe they've created, it allows for sometimes severe contrivances for player convenience.

This is the kind of concession that a game like Riven doesn't make to the player. I actually disagree that Riven has a particularly good story because the actual plot is kind of hokey. But the history of the place and the environmental clues that lead you to understand exactly what had happened there are extremely sophisticated.

>nonsensical locations
?
They were exploring the solar system just like you. How is it nonsesical that their stuff is scattered all over the place?

Because there is no mechanism that explains why their stuff is scattered the way that it is. There is never anything that justifies why the Nomai are constantly leaving transcripts of their entire conversations in random, often public places. Why would there be whiteboards in what is essentially a park in the Hanging City, and why would people leave their conversations on said whiteboards? Why would a panicking Nomai whisked away to some completely enclosed cave after getting entangled with a piece of quantum rock start writing his verbatim musings on the wall? Why would the Nomai looking for him write conversations about how he's been missing in the cave instead of putting up fliers or something in a reasonable place? Not to mention none of this stuff ever gets erased in a realistic way. That Nomai I mentioned should have been found later and yet all of the people looking for him left their conversations up. It's way too much of a coincidence to have their entire history laid out like this.

Compare that again to those Cyan World games. Notebooks weren't scattered all over the places, they were found in the places that they were reasonably found. Catherine keeps a diary and there's an explicit reason given as to why she has kept this diary.

Why not? I just assumed it's one the forms how their culture communicates. Wouldn't an ancient alien civilization communicating in exactly the same way as humans be less believable?

i get what you mean, but i feel like it just wouldnt be as fun if you weren't reading little nomai bits and pieces all the time

Even if we make that concession, it still doesn't make any sense. The Nomai were around for a long time, if transcribing everything and leaving them all around the place were just what they did, there'd be millions of random frivolous conversations everywhere. The text logs that we read range from critical to totally banal, so there's no particular weight on importance. Instead of getting logical snapshots of stories, we'd be flooded with every kind of complete nonsense. In particular there'd be no coherent sense of time - you wouldn't get the contemporary conversations about the early settlers of Ember Twin out of the escape pod on the trek to what would end up being the city, you'd just get garbled nonsense from what seemed like generations of Nomai. It would make even less sense that all text logs from a particular area seem to all be contemporaneous, but not a snapshot of what was happening concurrently to the ghost matter being released.

No, it probably wouldn't be. But it might be more atmospheric. I'm not saying that text is a bad thing, I'm just saying that it shows very clearly a compromise to the player in the environmental storytelling. Were it more realistic, instead of coherent stories, we'd get something like the graffiti at Pompeii. Don't know if the game would be better or worse if the text logs instead read
>Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men's behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!
but I think the stronger commitment to being believable in Cyan World games (and others) mean that they had better environmental storytelling. Both because it increased the immersion, and because that kind of uncompromising attitude creates a lot of challenges for the developer to overcome which is impressive.

You do realize the Nomai aren't native to the Hearthian system right?
They only traveled there after receiving the signal from the eye, so it makes sense that most of what the player finds pertains to the events of the game.

>Muh narrative
>Muh story
Read a book instead, tranny

Yeah, I mentioned that here: But the Nomai have been around long enough to create two cities, a solar system spanning project, and lots of children, some of which I presume were born in our solar system.

The thing is that lots of text doesn't pertain to the events of the game. We see their entire history laid out from the moment they crash landed to when they all died. In that time span, it never bothered you that you somehow had a perfect record of exactly what happened and the only the relevant transcripts to understand how it all went down?

Although let's not get too distracted. I think the nature of the text logs can be immersion breaking, but that's one point I brought up to support my overall argument which is that the game doesn't really have much of a focus on environmental storytelling.

It's an abstraction meant to condense the world. Just like the planet isn't actually 500m across, the conversations you find aren't actually scribbles on a whiteboard. It's a stylistic choice.

mfw I skipped this game when it game out for the Epic Store because I read someone in Zig Forums saying the was shit and short then I saw Vinny streaming it and by that time I got so spoiled that i just watched his stream.

Would have really liked to play it myself

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It's not unreasonable for an advanced civilization to have records of everything, and they seemed to only communicate non verbally.

>listening to Zig Forums
Got what you deserved retard

Is there any other way?

Looks like you didn't explore the Ash Twin thoroughly enough.

The proper way is warping inside. Landing there with your ship is an alternative for masochists.

The best part is Outer Wilds came out months before Outer World and completely shit on Obsidian.

actually , yes.

Fuck Zig Forums and their retarded opinions, never listen to them.

There's so much shit on the Twins that I thoroughly believe that statement.

I tried getting into this game but it seems kinda pointless, I went to the moon and was kinda bored. Does it get better?

Kinda pointless? At it's heart, it's a puzzle game. You're playing it to solve the puzzle. If that's pointless to you, then don't play it? I am curious what games you think have more of a 'point' though.

ok cumskull