It may not be the work he wanted, but it was a positive direction. I know nothing about his other works, but new-kratos is a much expanded character and successful continuation on the original work. Not a hamfisted cash-in like so many sequelizations do.
Honestly seeing kratos grow up is what makes the new games that much more impactful. The series when taken as a whole just really makes kratos’s character that much better. Imagine 2018 GoW without the original trilogy, it would not be nearly as close to perfect of a game as it was
The original Kratos was basically one big long revenge story. Almost all of it justified and satisfying, but basically wiping out the Greek Pantheon was his ultimate goal.
His actions were reckless and fury driven, but often went over the top, both in violence and in actions.
My favourite example is from GoW: Ragnarok, when certain characters are reflecting on Kratos’ past, and how the one story of him killing the Sisters of Fate must truly be myth, then he corrects them saying it was true and how they deserved it. The third character then shines a present light on the fact that he did that in the past and says, “that’s the most dangerous and irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard.”
I guess it’s mostly old fellows that are way past their teenage years of angst and thus had lots of time to reflect, rather than pretentious gamers. But hey, I’m just an internet rando
There were innumerable opportunities for kratos to develop character beyond raging angry guy of rancorous fury. Every betrayal and every reconciliation was so bland after a while. The originals were one long soap opera.
Worked for the first two games then went steadily downhill. It’s honestly incredible how they managed to ressurect that franchise as GoW was just a boring crappy series of sequels by 2017.
What made them successful was marketing and copying and simplifying devil may cry. GOW’s voice acting and tactility of gameplay were far above the norm, which brought people back for a sequel. Its story was par for ps2, which is to say tolerable.
Meh. Not everything need to be deep. It’s a video games. Nobody is asking what the DOOM character backstory is. He’s there to shoot some hellspawns and that’s fun.
Sure, but when someone whines “Why did they give this character depth? They could have made them shallow and boring!” I’m not going to give that person much credit.
Also, DOOM guy does have some backstory for those that care to look for it in the games. Easily ignored for those that don’t.
Like they don’t need any deep lore dumps or in depth explainations. The simple and casual disregard of Samuel Hayden for the lives of his employees and everyone else on Mars is in direct contrast to how deeply it’s immediately obvious that Doomguy DOES care about those same dead scientists and colonists just from a few simple actions.
No long-winded explanation necessary. Those 10 seconds were a masterpiece of visual storytelling.
Really? I enjoy the lore very much, but it seems more than easy enough to ignore - most is told through collectibles, so you can just breeze through everything without reading pretty much anything.
Not every franchise needs to be deep
I kind of disagree - I like it when a lot of thought has been put into things. I’d rather have it available and be able to ignore it than not have it available at all.
Like they don’t need any deep lore dumps or in depth explainations. The simple and casual disregard of Samuel Hayden for the lives of his employees and everyone else on Mars is in direct contrast to how deeply it’s immediately obvious that Doomguy DOES care about those same dead scientists and colonists just from a few simple actions.
No long-winded explanation necessary. Those 10 seconds were a masterpiece of visual storytelling. It lets us know the stakes, it shows us that Doomguy cares about the lives lost far more than any ostensible greater good or Hayden’s justifications.
100% my biggest issue with modern games right now is there’s too much damn lore. I need to know a hundred different things to understand the game, and I generally don’t know those things.
I’m a huge fan of Doom Eternal, and it’s one of the few single player games I’ve finished in the last few years. Too many games now end up needing to spend half my play session in conversations or cut scenes, and I realized I don’t have fun playing games like that.
A buddy of mine got me to play Dark Tides and I had fun, but he kept telling me I needed to look into the lore of the Warhammer universe.
Looked into it and realized I don’t have the time or interest to get into such a fictional universe that feels like it has more depth than most religions. I feel like there could be a degree track for Warhammer historians…
Not hating on people who are into it. But it’s too overwhelming for someone like me who just wants to play games to clear my mind and distract myself. Also socialize.
I have friends that are deep in the tabletop 40k universe and know all the lore. I couldn’t give two shits about the story and have still enjoyed many sessions, plus the computer games: vermintide, darktide, etc.
Oh yeah, I was doing just that. I wasn’t saying the lore interfered with the gameplay at all. I was just relating to feeling like I can’t be bothered by extended universes.
Modern Kratos wouldn’t be nearly as impactful or enthralling if we didn’t intimately know his past and what he is capable of. Replacing him with another character who acts identical and had a similar background revealed in flashbacks would just undercut how Kratos acts now.
We see him show restraint his younger self was incapable of, and how when hes holding back, its not for his benefit, but for those who are antagonizing him and his friends. HE knows he is a monster, doesn’t view himself as redeemable in the slightest, but has no intention of returing to his old ways while he has the ability to help those he’s come to care for, and also show his son a better a path than the one laid out for him.
So while yes, ps2/ps3 kratos had all the depth and bredth of a puddle, modern Kratos is built entirely off that puddle and wouldn’t hold its own weight without the previous foundations.
Ehh, h’s not wrong. If this David Jaffe guy is a pro-revenge type, of course he has the right to be unhappy: the writers for the new games blatantly said in interviews they completely changed the story around to oppose revenge, completely against the wishes of this Jaffe fellow apparently. Which is ironically a vengeful act.
People don’t have the right to just change stories to suit their personal opinions and the new writers need to learn to respect that.
Lest the writers after that change it back to a pro-revenge story with depth and good writing just to spite them.
Blatant anti-revenge stories are bland, predictable, preachy and uninteresting.
You don’t have the right to do whatever you want simply because you like it.
Yes… Yes you do? Lmao brother have you experienced any story or art in the last, I dunno, ten thousand years? Everyone is just retelling an existing story with their own little tweak or twist.
Look, it seems like you didn’t like the creative direction of the new games, and that’s fine. But getting mad at the writers and claiming they didn’t have “the right” to write the story as they saw fit (in a brand new series of video games btw, not remakes of the existing ones) is weird.
You can certainly write fanfiction and create fanart all you want to. People have done it for thousands of years. But it’ll never be the original story no matter how much you want it to be.
You are not the original creator of the franchise. Grow up and get over it.
Getting mad at me for telling you the truth won’t change that fact, and it won’t make Jaffe any less correct in his complaint that the writers deliberately destroyed his creation and his original intent. Because they did, and they admitted they did it because they didn’t want a pro revenge story in media.
Go look up the interviews with the recent GoW writers. Go actually do some research instead of throwing a temper tantrum here because I won’t let you do what you want.
Objective reality is a thing whether you want it to be or not. You don’t get to decide what the truth is.
Dawg where have I claimed to be an original creator of the franchise? You’re being koo koo for cocoa puffs right now lmao. And the writers didn’t destroy anything. The original games are still there. If Jaffe wanted the new games to be different, if he wanted to preserve his “original intent”, he should have written them himself.
Jaffe writing the original story doesn’t give him the power to dictate how new stories based on his work are written, and that’s objective reality, not whatever fantasyland you’re living in.
When your dumbass looked at me telling you you can’t just do whatever you want, and you responded, “Actually yes, I can”. Like a fucking child.
When you devolve into insults instead of responding with anything substantive because you know I am right and you are wrong.
And when deep down inside you felt the pit in your heart grow like a fucking maw when confronted with the fact that reality exists independently of your whim and whimsy.
Now you don’t get a say in what is canon and what is not. Only original creators can do that. Other people’s works are derivatives at best. That’s the reality you have to learn to accept because reality won’t change simply because you don’t like it.
Now when you grow up and actually become an adult, we can continue this conversation. I am not gonna waste any more time arguing with a child.
I understand Jaffe not being happy that the games are going in a different direction than he imagined, but he’s also the guy who thought Drawn to Death needed to be made.
As someone who has played from the beginning, and seen the entire storyline unfold through the multiple directors, I was so disappointed…in nothing absolutely at all whatsoever about the new games.
I thought it was really cool how they stitched the story back to GoW3 and developed the new character so thoughtfully. Christopher Judge seemed to take the character much further while adding depth, and being thoughtful too.
If Jaffe doesn’t like that Kratos isn’t a mindless rage machine, different strokes I guess. He’s definitely in the minority and I think every subsequent game director did an overall better job than he did in GoW 1. *shrug
Parts of 2018 and Ragnarok and the ending of both actually had me tear up a bit, not many games accomplish that. It was very heartfelt and emotional I enjoyed seeing a proper character arc for Kratos and his kid and watching them develop.
I also really liked the themes of redemption and trying to be better not just for yourself, but for the people around you, I liked that Kratos has to reflect on his actions and actually come to terms with how he was for all intents and purposes, a monster.
I liked that even enemies where made more complex and given good character arcs. 2018 and Ragnarok are so well done and I love them. The old GoW trilogy was also fun and had good writing in it’s own merit and direction, but the new games are something else entirely in a good way and I vastly prefer the character and relationship focused writing in the newer games.
I think a lot of the hating on Gamepass is justified, but I’ve just gotta say as a partially blind gamer it has been a godsend for me.
I used to struggle with whether or not to buy a game every single time because in most cases there is no way from descriptions and reviews for me to know how any given game will work with my vision and fine/gross motor impairment.
With gamepass I can try things and if I can’t play it? I move on and try something else.
Kinda sad that we can’t find some middle ground between making games accessible for disabled folks without bankrupting developers and ultimately hurting consumers.
Tacit Collusion: a type of collusive behavior where firms coordinate their actions without explicitly communicating or reaching an agreement. Instead, firms may signal their intentions through various actions, such as pricing behavior or output levels, in order to coordinate their behavior and achieve higher profits.
If that were the case, companies would go down left right and center. What do you think the gas stations are doing? Landlords? Companies hiring devs? Everything is becoming lockstepped and thats why we are losing.
We need to break up businesses above 999 mil in assets (including other companies) and break up entry barriers for new businesses. Amend the laws to exclude large companies from any securities so it is actually too risky to become this big.
Its not really hard to do but people need to stop working for a day every month to push this. Take to the streets and unionize en masse.
Everyone who is not part of a union is part of the problem at this point.
No recorded direct link of communication. The CEOs and half the board will individually go to company paid lunches with competition, members of the board are straight up members of a competing board. Or even lobbyists and lawyers of competing companies going to events together that happens daily.
“But I pinky promise we don’t talk about our competing business plans while we eat lunch and golf together”
I think most conspiracy theories are bullshit. Especially things that require mass government, academic, and/or inter-industry coordination just cannot happen easily due to the fact that large scale coordination of people is very very difficult.
But in a market with 2-4 long-standing players in an oligopoly with offices right by each other, you bet your ass there is in-person collusion… it has been caught many times and likely the extreme vast majority of cases are not caught. Price adjustment is extremely easy to collude on and has mountains of excuses of plausible deniability and “just following the market” bs. So far, there has yet to be a market that has remained competitive and hasn’t turned into an oligopoly. Monopoly is the steady state of a capitalist system without strict anti-competitive regulations.
Literally every person I know that played it loved it more than the 2018 reboot, which is saying something since the 2018 GoW put the franchise back on the map after its years long downturn.
Why are shilling so hard for a has-been whose most noteable works had to taken away from his creative control to actually develop into something beyond a juvenile revenge fantasy?
The same reason why you guys are shilling for a Dad of War story, that most real, non childish adults don’t care for?
Have you ever thought (it’s rhetorical) that some people just want a basic and funny hack n slash game, and don’t give a shit about the story? There plenty is games that fill that void.
Not every game needs to have a background story or even a story at all!
If thats your take away you’ve clearly never played the games and only read reviews about them second or third hand. No one is saying the og trilogy was bad, but according to Jaffe they were writing epics… Which frankly is a far cry from the truth and they only got better as he had less and less involvement to GoW3 being cslled the best of the trilogy, ironically the game he’s not involved in making.
that most real, non childish adults don’t care for? You are simply making things up. The reboot sold incredibly well, about 5 times more than the originals in fact, and received universal acclaim. People have grown up with the character and were happy to see that evolution. The original creator and you have become out of touch with the reality of this franchise.
Your expectation for things to never evolve and grow says more about you than you seem to want to face. But the same as you think that there are plenty of games that fill the void of deep narrative action games, I can say there are plenty of basic hack and slash games to go around, just go enjoy another one.
Save you all the read, games won’t be discounted or even sold for that matter. They are just being removed from shelves.
" An internal memo has surfaced online stating that all copies will be reduced to 3 cents and sales will be blocked by the store’s system and then removed from the store. As of right now, it appears this is only for Xbox games, but this move was reported last October and it seems to be coming to fruition. It was noted that Microsoft is funding this move for Walmart in the memo, suggesting it may be Microsoft’s decision and not Walmart’s. "
Ubisoft *** said the quiet part out loud and Microsoft decided just to speed run it. I do love all the one piece memes of a great pirate era beginning though.
It could be that Walmart was planning to start winding down physical game sales and made that clear to Microsoft, but Microsoft made a deal to foot the bill for extra inventory to keep supply available during the holidays. Even with packaging and distribution, the actual cost per game to Microsoft isn't really that high.
This might mean it’s true that the upcoming Xbox Series X refresh won’t have a hard drive. Microsoft wouldn’t want Xbox games to be on store shelves when they’re no longer selling consoles that can play them.
Something about the new games that really bothered me was how it handled puzzle rooms. You’d walk into a room and start to look around then your kid would yell out “hey I think we should shoot that target up there which should knock down this bridge for us”. Golly thanks, guess I won’t get to attempt to figure things out myself then. I pretty much fell off about 10 hours into the first one because I found that so frustrating. Does that go away after a while?
I can’t think of any times he did that when I played. Most things I either figured out right away or missed quickly. I went backtracking while he was in his rebellious phase and he was mostly useless as a tutorial prompt. Any scenes out of order that required him to be cheery made him seem mentally unstable too.
Yeah, while I personally really enjoyed both new games, I can understand not liking the way the gameplay went. However, I think Kratos’ story is a perfect evolution for the character, so I cannot really understand his opinion there
Which is something super common in Metroid too.
Hell he probably hasn’t figured out you can shoot up and just tries to jump to fire horizontally at enemies instead.
You can’t even chalk this up to an old man not understanding how modern games are played, either. The OG Metroid on the NES had blocks you could break by shooting upward. He’s just an idiot.
The year before GoW 2018, he released Drawn to Death… PS Plus release that had some cool style but otherwise crap game! He was relevant back in the late 90s and early 2000s… but now his opinion hardly matters and he’s a bit of a drama queen. I don’t really give a shit what he thinks.
I mean, I too would be unhappy with the new games’ stories. They’re not very good stories overall.
But, they’re better than the vast majority of video game plots, because that’s a low bar.
Still, Jaffe seems to imply the old stories in GoW were any better, when they were pure drivel. I might still be very underwhelmed by the story in the two new God of War’s, but I at least like that they’re trying (even if I think the direction of relying heavily on animation and visual flair is the wrong one, as far as telling good stories goes).
Jaffe always struck me as a perpetual adolescent. The two GoW games he worked on were great for the time, but the stories were shallow excuses to showcase as much gore as possible. His other big property, Twisted Metal, was genre-defining gameplay but any narrative was just edgelord violence and/or crass humor.
The last “big” project I remember coming down the pipe from him was Drawn to Death, which took his signature juvenile tastes and combined them with horrible gameplay and eye-blistering art direction. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t worked on a game since.
I’m not saying the new GoW games are perfect, but I wouldn’t say Jaffe has a trusted critical eye.
I fully agree. If you read my first comment, I pretty clearly as much as the new ones are pretty bad (story wise), the two Jaffe worked on are even worse in that regard.
If you already own a decent PC, most of these games have already been released there, although later than on PS5. Only ones missing from that list so far are GoW: Ragnarok and Spider-Man 2.
I thought the story in Horizon was fantastic. I’m a Sci-fi nerd, so that all hit home with me. The second game, not so much though. It was like they didn’t quite get why the story of the first game worked.
I have problems with God of War though. The story feels like an attempt to copy what The Last of Us did with Ellie and Joel, but without really understanding why their dynamic worked.
I have a lot of complaints about the HFW plot but the biggest one is the juvenile way they handled Tilda and Sylens in their capacity as prime movers. Aloy herself is a mature character but the story around her takes place in a moral scape of the world as seen by a fifteen year old.
Sylens goes through the motions of his scheme and keeps the same smug “I’m above it all and don’t owe anyone any explanations” attitude, through setback after setback and reality check after reality check. It seemed like the authors were poised to deliver a harsh discussion about ends vs means, how the world isn’t a magical fairy tale and sometimes something important needs to be done that requires dirty politics and won’t be magically solved by the one pure hero pulling the sword out of the rock; but then they squandered it completely and went back to ‘yeah all glory to the chosen one’. Most frustratingly they had their angle right there, already baked in: Aloy fails the first 7 times she tries to do anything, so if Sylens mocked her “this is the real world, you don’t just go ahead and solve things, Hero”, she could legitimately retort “idk, have you tried”. Instead they just don’t have this discussion and go back and forth “screw you I hate you” “behave, girl” again and again in a flat loop.
Tilda was made in the mold of this cringey moral that’s all the rage now about how everyone’s an abuser and when people say “I love you” they really mean “I own you” (as also seen in Dragon Age: Absolution). It reads like someone’s pent up frustration about their controlling parents, like in his nightmares the person who created this plotline sees his mother taking to the air in that floating exoskeleton and shouting amid a rain of guided missiles “you’re going to college and that’s final, submit or perish”.
I feel like HFW kind of lost the plot when it introduced the Far Zeniths. They just didn’t work for some reason. I kind of wish if they were going that route, they had been the descendants of the people who left for Far Zenith and they had a better reason for wanting Gaia and Earth or something, so they weren’t just cartoonishly evil.
I think the main problem with the world of Horizon is that the most interesting event in their world has already happened.
The story of Zero Dawn worked so well because it is the interwoven tale of a young woman who sets out to discover why she was cast out of her village at birth, and the almost archaeological unraveling of why the world is the way it is. When you finally piece together both the plot is almost already at it’s climax, and you are left with both the understanding of why it must be Aloy who stops the new threat to the world, and the motivation to do so.
But that doesn’t work for a sequel. The format of Zero Dawn relies on exposition about the very nature of the world, that’s why the main quest has a bunch of missions that more or less boil down to walking around an old facility and listening to recordings.
How are you going to translate that into a new sequel? Either you’ve got sequels planned already, which I find unlikely given what Forbidden West amounted to, or you need to try to invent more world building and plot. It seemed quite clear to me that Guerillas writers for Forbidden West didn’t know their own world as well as I had assumed they did. The “how did we get here” plot in Zero Dawn revolved around a small cast characters, who, with the exception of one, were all both very neuanced and strongly invested in their own plot. The Zeniths of Forbidden West come across almost as inverse Deus Ex Machina, characters who fly in from the moon with what seems like no other reason to mess up the plot than “We had to find something”.
It’s the reason why I’ve been holding off on getting a PS5, and recently decided I just won’t. The only thing that has come out recently that tempts me is BG3, but I’m past buying a console for a single game; I’ll just play it on PC.
First, I think its the first game of this type to have any successful control scheme for a controller at all, so I think it deserves accolades for making it happen at all.
Second, while I still mostly play in traditional mouse and keyboard, I am an old man now, having played the original BG as a teen when it came out. Having the controller as an option is huge for me when I am in pain.
Anecdotally, my partner never played these games growing up and she fucking hates trying to play with mouse and keyboard. She says it feels clunky and slow and confusing.
Is it the best? No. Is it an excellent effort? Yes, because it actually works.
The fact that a game with a ruleset as complex as DnD manages to have a couch co-op option and gamepad controls built-in is an achievement, imho.
Eh, it depends more on what you’re used to. I personally hate using a mouse and keyboard and greatly prefer a controller, and it’s not that different from other RPG games that use a controller interface. I’m used to a wheel interface from games like Mass Effect, so it’s more intuitive for me than a mouse and keyboard.
Funny thing is, I realize now there’s multiple franchises I’ve stopped for gameplay reasons, not story.
In God of War, not only was I contending with an offset thumbstick that I didn’t feel like replacing, but I was stuck on a fight that I didn’t seem to be geared for, and was getting pummeled.
Last of Us, I got stuck on some stealth section against enemies that didn’t seem to behave as the tutorial suggested.
Demon’s Souks would just be leagues beyond me anyway, so no chance there.
I like the 2018 GOW and first Spider-Man, but just couldn’t get into the sequels. I guess they’re just so similar I felt like I was done and didn’t want more. Horizon I never liked because I hate the combat. I also liked the first Last of Us, but didn’t want to play as someone I hated in the sequel.
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