I recently played Doom on my Switch and that was a fine bit of nonsense, reasonably diverting and entertaining with a combat system slick enough to pass the time. Having finished it I decided to get the new Wolfenstein.
This was an error. I should have researched it a little more thoroughly.
Christ, when exactly did people decide that the cut-scenes and “acting” need to take up most of the bloody game? I don’t want to know anything about the character’s back-story. It interests me not one jot. I want to shoot nazi’s in the face with as few interruptions as possible.
I couldn’t even get *started *for 15 minutes while it spooled it’s way through some ham-fisted bollocks or other about an abusive father, a jewish mother, a dog, a black friend. (seriously…why do I get the sinking feeling they are going to drag all that bullshit up again later in the “game”) To cap it all you end up playing the first level in a sodding wheelchair with frustrating restrictions on free movement and no way of knowing who is shooting at you or from where.
Terrible. I’ve played 30 minutes of actual game and I’ve had enough. It has annoyed me every step of the way and life is too short for that. I’m selling it on.
I like FPS, loved the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Half life 1 and 2, Portal 1 and 2, the original Dooms and Quakes and Halos. None of these felt the need to shoehorn in bullshit story padding to this extent. Spending 30 seconds or a minute tops to introduce a scene *once *and once only is tolerable but no more. Spare me the life stories, you are a game not a movie so stop doing both things badly.
On a brighter note, I was up and running with “yoshi’s crafted world” in about 45 seconds flat and that’s a delight to play.
You’re behind the curve, Novelty Bobble. Games have been emulating movies and TV shows (and in some rare cases, surpassing them) for some time now, and people are perfectly happy with it. I am, too. Maybe it’s the old D&D player in me, but while I like shooting bad guys in the face, I like it even more when I pretend I’m an actual character who’s doing it for a good (or at least interesting) reason.
Now, I haven’t played the game in question, so maybe the plot wasn’t implemented that well. But if you’re complaining about RPG elements in shooters, I’m sorry to say that you’ve lost the battle years ago.
that and you missed the 2 other Wolfenstein games see they rebooted the series where the hero gets captured after getting shot but doesn’t wake up until 5 years after the axis won ww2 and helps reignites the resistance
this game takes place 30 tears after that the series does have a smidge of social commentary here and there
I don’t mind there being a backstory or elements of a wider world being revealed and context provided but there are ways of doing so that are far less intrusive then forcing you to sit through long periods of badly acted CGI with risible dialogue and massive, clunky PLOT POINTS signposted in advance.
Also, the (massive) intro cut-scene had absolutely no relevance to the first stage that you play, A first stage in which the mechanics are unforgivable clumsy. It is a very poor way to grab someones attention.
I played and loved Zelda BOTW. There is a case to be made for that being the greatest game ever. It has backstory, it has cut-scenes, there is a story revealed but but it never really intrudes on the next bout of exploration, discovery, slash and puzzle. It was intrinsic and organic. It existed as part of the game whereas the Wolfenstein nonsense felt like bolted-on bollocks that served no purpose. There may have been other games in the series prior to this but there should be no expectation that I’ve played them to enjoy this one (and indeed they are not available on the console I own). Each should stand on it’s own merits. My son knew nothing about Zelda before BOTW but enjoyed it no less.
OK, but you’ve just told me all I need to know in a single sentence. Add a little bit of fancy video and stretch it out to 60 seconds of exposition and I’m perfectly happy with that. Drop in a few flashbacks here and there and you can tell the story and build the world without smashing the player over the head with it, all the while they are mashing the non-existent “skip” button thinking “get on with it, get on with it, get on with it”
I’m happy with a great game that is held together with elements of a wider story, Wolfenstein feels like (the clunky) gameplay is there purely to advance the the story and that is absolutely not what I look for in a game.
Gameplay first and foremost. How does it feel to play should be the first consideration. It is an aesthetic and tactile joy to fight guardians, skate on shields and fly on gliders in Zelda, drifting and boosting in Mario Kart is one of life’s great pleasures.
Maybe I’m old (but aren’t we all, now?), but unskipable cinematics kills a game for me. I abandoned The Witcher 3 pretty early on because of all the cut-scenes. My aversion is not widely shared.
At least not generally. But I will admit that the unavoidable repetitive Dandelion narration snippets they use instead of blank load screens are a genuine annoyance. It’s the repetition that kills me. Unless you avoid re-loads by never dying and playing for very long stretches at a time, hearing the same dialogue over and over again in certain long areas of the story quickly becomes a pain in the ass.
But it is completely worth it as it is otherwise an awesome game.
The problem is not unskippable cutscenes. Sorry, you’re just wrong.
The problem is BAD cutscenes that don’t go a good job of conveying information or character and therefore make you WANT to skip them.
The problem is that while lots of games want to sell themselves with “story”, writing and actual story-creation remains a low priority for most developers. Oftentimes a writer won’t even be brought in until a game is well underway, so the writer is stuck with a bunch of stuff and has to make the best of it.
Game writing is hard, and few developers give it the staffing or importance it deserves, even as they try to make games with a compelling narrative. Of course, some developers are better than others, but nonetheless…
I thought that TNC was weaker than TNO but the previous game was such a breath of air in the genre that I’m not surprised they didn’t capture lightning twice. On the other hand, checking my post-game stats, I killed 2,045 Nazis, Nazi robots, Nazi dogs, Nazi robot dogs and one alligator who probably wasn’t affiliated with National Socialism in any way. So despite more cut scenes, there was still plenty of shooting to be had and I enjoyed the game overall.
Even TNO I’ve described as a game where you need to just tolerate the first half hour (the castle tutorial and plot building) before it starts to get any good so I guess it’s just a mark of the new Wolfenstein franchise.
I loved the ever livin’ fuck out of New Colossus, and the cut-scenes were a big part of why. BJ was an amazingly realized character, both in visual design and in writing. And that extended beyond just the protagonist - the bit where you meet the leader of the resistance in Manhattan, and she describes the experience of living through the Germans dropping an atom bomb on the city, was one of the most affecting things I’ve ever seen in a video game.
I thought the initial intro was boring, cartoonish and hammy. I was very quickly wishing for his dad to punch his mother and for him to shoot his dog just to get the awful acting over with and get on with the actual game.
Novelty, if what you want in life is [del]to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women[/del] lots of shooty-blam-blam without any pesky story getting in the way, check out the Serious Sam franchise. It should be right up your alley.
Oh, also, while I haven’t played the latest one, I found the new *Shadow Warrior *game to be pretty neat. There’s a story, of sorts, but it’s mostly a pretext for the voice actors to ham it up and enjoy themselves trading barbs ; and for the gameplay to have token context.
But it doesn’t take itself seriously in the least, doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is, nobody expects you to press F to pay respects and it’s pretty good shooty-blam-blam ; with decent swoosh-swoosh-sblurtch tacked on too ! Usually melee combat really doesn’t mesh with FPS, but here it’s well done and you can have great fun blending seemlessly between, well, blending your enemies and then shooting them in the face.
Thanks Kobal2, I’ll have a look at the Serious Sam games. Not available on Switch I see but I have a Steam account and can run some less-demanding games on low-powered laptops at home so the earlier incarnations should be fun.
And pondering on your words, I suspect that a game taking itself too seriously is part of the thing that bugs me.
I don’t remember if the first scene was longer or worse than the rest of the game. It was too many games ago to remember. But I don’t remember being annoyed with the cutscenes. There was plenty of Nazi killing in the game. I don’t like player versus player so this is the type of first person shooter I like with a decent storyline. If all I cared about was shooting guns I would stick with PvP.
