David Cage is one of the worst writers in the industry

KennardKId5

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He is a hack, but when he fails, not only is it in the most endearing way, it's hilarious shlock.

He's like a small child that can't do anything right. As long as you don't have to take care of them, it's hilarious to watch them hit their head over and over again.
 

Grimbold

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Fahrenheit/Indigo prophecy? In my book one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.
The story might be partially garbage especially the second half. But it's entertaining and emotive garbage. Also I have so far played no game with a story to take fully seriously.
Fast paced story, stunning action, powerful imagery, infinetely better than all the games where you you shoot at enemies for half an hour without purpose, like a rat in a labyrinth, only to get to the next two-minute-piece of story.
If I remember correctly.
Are there more games like this?
 

Rutabaga_swe

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Grimbold said:
Fahrenheit/Indigo prophecy? In my book one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.
The story might be partially garbage especially the second half. But it's entertaining and emotive garbage. Also I have so far played no game with a story to take fully seriously.
Fast paced story, stunning action, powerful imagery, infinetely better than all the games where you you shoot at enemies for half an hour without purpose, like a rat in a labyrinth, only to get to the next two-minute-piece of story.
If I remember correctly.
Are there more games like this?
Perhaps not in the sense that they are as cinematic or trying as hard to be movies as Cage's games, but i think a lot of old school adventures and RPGs do a FAR better job of telling a great story, whilst still having some gameplay left in them. Planescape: Torment. GG Cage.
 

Grimbold

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Rutabaga_swe said:
Perhaps not in the sense that they are as cinematic or trying as hard to be movies as Cage's games, but i think a lot of old school adventures and RPGs do a FAR better job of telling a great story, whilst still having some gameplay left in them. Planescape: Torment. GG Cage.
Planescape is nice but if Fahrenheit is comparable to a movie then Planescape is like reading an illustrated book. Entertaining as well but a totally different experience.
 

WenisPagon

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DrunkenMonkey said:
dunam said:
DrunkenMonkey said:
dunam said:
DrunkenMonkey said:
Two indigo prophecy came out a while ago, it was one of the first games to do the whole cinematic angle. Not counting Shenmue, etc. So it deserves a pass on that, and cannot be compare to the likes of the walking dead. Overall it was a good attempt, and doesn't deserve the hate that some people give it. Strangely IP is very comparable with Suda 51, killer 7, but yet people don't praise it for its incoherency. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it wasn't intentional..
I think kareteka and defender of the realm were much earlier better examples of pioneering cinamatic angle.
I was referring to the blending of cinematic narrative with QTEs
Were QTE's ever used for a non-cinematic moment?
I'm not sure I understand, let me reiterate my statement.

I was pointing out that Indigo Prophecy should get some breathing room from scrutiny because it was the one of the first games to be a collection of cinematics. With QTEs as the main method of controlling the action on screen. i.e. along with games like shenmue and dragon's lair. This does not mean QTE's are one of the features of the game, i.e. RE4, uncharted, etc.

Alex Dimmock said:
Well to be fair Indigo Prophecy did have a dark and disturbing story (matrix shenanigans aside). It's not Cage's fault that his audience has seen so much of "dark and disturbing" that they had become desensitized to the concept in video games.

Additionally, why do people go for extremes. Can a person defend Cage, and not love every single thing that he does fanatically?

edit: had a misadventure in quoting, apologies.
That's uh, extremely far from the truth. Dragon's Lair came out in the 80's and there was a huge boom in shitty FMV games in the early 90s. Indigo Prophecy is more complex than those, sure, but it's not really innovating the field in any significant way.

If you want to see a game that succeeded in innovating the cinematic experience, I suggest trying out The Last Express.
 

Someone Depressing

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There's saying the same thing twice. There's beating a dead horse. there's criticising Justin Bieber. There's playing World of Warcraft. Then there's playing Final Fantasy 13. Then there's saying that David Cage can't write.

Still, Farenheit (Still a better title than Indigo Prophecy) has a pretty good soundtrack. Not sure if it's original, but Wikipedia says he's a musician, so he might have composed it himself. So that's always a plus. (Among the horrible story, the lackluster choices, the stupid action sequences, and.. voice acting...)

And really, he's not unique. He's just dumb. Would you say an idiot running into the room with a traffic cone on his/her head screaming things in Arabic is unique? Well, it's probably not happened many times, but would you call it unique? No. You'd hit them and tell them to leave.

As for the Maddison Page issue, well, she's a doormat. That's her character. Carla's character is that she is a woman. Maddison's problem, entire personality, role in the story, and gameplay quirk, is that she is a woman. Besides, that woman comes into contact with too many sharp things, so I just got her killed instantly so I wouldn't have to deal with her hammy, annoying voice acting.
 

Rutabaga_swe

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Grimbold said:
Rutabaga_swe said:
Perhaps not in the sense that they are as cinematic or trying as hard to be movies as Cage's games, but i think a lot of old school adventures and RPGs do a FAR better job of telling a great story, whilst still having some gameplay left in them. Planescape: Torment. GG Cage.
Planescape is nice but if Fahrenheit is comparable to a movie then Planescape is like reading an illustrated book. Entertaining as well but a totally different experience.
Agreed, but what exactly is it that you find so endearing about these games? The storytelling is rather poor from a narrative sense, the story itself is beyond mediocre and the cinematics are just...kinda lame compared to real cinema. I fully understand that Cage wants to take the best from both world and slam it in to one glorious experience, the problem is that it ends up being the absolute WORST of both worlds instead. Is it unique? In a sense i suppose, but personally i'd rather play a game with good gameplay or watch a movie that has a competent director and screenwriter and so forth. Cage, and Quantic dream in general, just seemingly lack the talent to pull this off.

Obviously people are free to like these game, i just for the life of me can't see the appeal. Especially not when i can log on to netflix and have an experience a thousand times more engaging.
 

WenisPagon

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The quality of Indigo Prophecy increases significantly when you realize that it is a victim of poor marketing. In reality, it is the industry's leading wheelchair-twirling simulator.
 

BarkBarker

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I would like to see the mess that is his will, and trust me, a man as irritating as him will DEFINITELY have a will, there are people who have killed for less, trust me on that.
 

Xelien

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His writing is so bad... He's a combination of Steven Moffat and Shyamalan, but for gaming. He some interesting ideas, the have an overall effective atmosphere. But the dialog in his games are shoddy and predictable. Woman characters are always iffy.

But I still watch Doctor Who and I still bought and is currently playing Two Souls. Why? Because I support the idea of variety in gaming. And I hope that success from Cage's games allows better developers to create something similar with better execution.

I like my shooters and RPG games but I do think theres a place where theres interactive movies in the gaming platform.
 

Mr C

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Dirty Hipsters said:
So, since Beyond Two Souls is coming out people have been talking a lot about David Cage's other two games, Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain.
He also made The Nomad Soul released on PC and Dreamcast.
 

KungFuJazzHands

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Looks like the mediocre reviews are already coming in for Beyond Two Souls:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/10/beyond-two-souls-review-beyond-awful/

Ouch. Merciless, but not surprising IMO. I've always been less than impressed with Cage's schizophrenic storytelling ability.
 

Roxas1359

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I just got done with watching a Stream of Beyond 2 Souls and I rather liked it...>.>
 

StriderShinryu

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KungFuJazzHands said:
Looks like the mediocre reviews are already coming in for Beyond Two Souls:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/10/beyond-two-souls-review-beyond-awful/

Ouch. Merciless, but not surprising IMO. I've always been less than impressed with Cage's schizophrenic storytelling ability.
I haven't played the game at all (and, honestly, don't plan to) but it does seem that the negativity found in the critical response to the game is certainly largely focused on what Cage does and doesn't bring to the table. The tech can be impressive and the QTE filled gameplay is not necessarily terrible if that's what you're into, but the writing is largely poor and the overall direction of the game is it's biggest failure.
 

DrunkenMonkey

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WenisPagon said:
DrunkenMonkey said:
dunam said:
DrunkenMonkey said:
dunam said:
DrunkenMonkey said:
Two indigo prophecy came out a while ago, it was one of the first games to do the whole cinematic angle. Not counting Shenmue, etc. So it deserves a pass on that, and cannot be compare to the likes of the walking dead. Overall it was a good attempt, and doesn't deserve the hate that some people give it. Strangely IP is very comparable with Suda 51, killer 7, but yet people don't praise it for its incoherency. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it wasn't intentional..
I think kareteka and defender of the realm were much earlier better examples of pioneering cinamatic angle.
I was referring to the blending of cinematic narrative with QTEs
Were QTE's ever used for a non-cinematic moment?
I'm not sure I understand, let me reiterate my statement.

I was pointing out that Indigo Prophecy should get some breathing room from scrutiny because it was the one of the first games to be a collection of cinematics. With QTEs as the main method of controlling the action on screen. i.e. along with games like shenmue and dragon's lair. This does not mean QTE's are one of the features of the game, i.e. RE4, uncharted, etc.

Alex Dimmock said:
Well to be fair Indigo Prophecy did have a dark and disturbing story (matrix shenanigans aside). It's not Cage's fault that his audience has seen so much of "dark and disturbing" that they had become desensitized to the concept in video games.

Additionally, why do people go for extremes. Can a person defend Cage, and not love every single thing that he does fanatically?

edit: had a misadventure in quoting, apologies.
That's uh, extremely far from the truth. Dragon's Lair came out in the 80's and there was a huge boom in shitty FMV games in the early 90s. Indigo Prophecy is more complex than those, sure, but it's not really innovating the field in any significant way.

If you want to see a game that succeeded in innovating the cinematic experience, I suggest trying out The Last Express.
Huh, when did I ever say that Indigo Prophecy was being innovative, or something of the nature? All I meant by it was that Indigo Prophecy was one of the few games to foray into the cinematic movie angle. As in it was formally advertised as an interactive movie experience in the early 2000's, that is all I'm saying. You didn't see a mass exodus of game genres shifting from shooter(action driven) to adventure (story driven), but the opposite. The context in which I wrote that statement was that people give Indigo Prophecy a lot of crap for just about everything that it does. My argument is that it didn't have a pool of games to perfect its formula, because of the fact that story driven games, with QTE segments weren't around in great quantity.

I'm not trying to elevate the game into some higher status, all I'm trying to do is cut it some slack.
 

Lucem712

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ShinyCharizard said:
Well I certainly don't like his games. Crappy movies masquerading as games is what they are. Why bother when you can just watch a good movie instead.
There aren't a whole lot of movies where you have to walk around a grimy room trying to select which would be the least painful way to amputate your finger or ones where you murder a man without choice and have to go about cleaning the crime scene only to then switch to the detectives and try to find all the clues you just buried.


Its all good and well not to like something and think it is shoddy and over praised. But, they do have their moments like everything else.

OT: I'm not sure there are a-lot of people that have actually played all the games that think they are fantastic for the writing. I think it'd mostly have to do with the mechanics. Which has pretty much only been utilized by a few developers. At least in a productive not a 'God I wish I could skip this. I looked away for a second and now I'm dead' cutscene.

And say what you will about Indigo Prophecy but the thing goes straight batshit in a pretty funny way.
 

Longing

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I will say that Indigo Prophecy was truly mediocre, Heavy Rain was average at best, but I just finished B2S and I actually quite liked it. The plot is less batshit insane than IP and way more coherent than HR. So the story was enjoyable, but as always, the thing that hinders his games the most is the complete lack of replay value.
 

FieryTrainwreck

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captainballsack said:
I don't like Cage because he thinks the "art" of games lies in its story telling ability, then uses Ueda to back him up on it.

Shadow of the Colossus is an artistic masterpiece because it perfectly blends story, art style and game mechanics thematically. Themes of isolation, patience, loss and utilitarianism all occur simultaneously through minimalistic story/art/game design; everything in that game flows and complements itself to leave you with a literary experience that can only be accomplished through the interactive medium. Same goes for Ico; the game mechanics reflect the story and the story reflects the game mechanics equally to create something wholesome and beautiful. When you wrap that up in an art style that ALSO reflects what themes the gameplay and narrative are trying to convey, you're left with a masterpiece.

Heavy Rain throws gameplay out the window. What is artistic about Heavy Rain is what is artistic about a Visual Novel, not a game. The minimal amounts of "game" is what dilutes and distracts the Heavy Rain experience from being what it should be: an interactive, choose your own adventure book.

He envisions the future of games being one without actual gameplay, when if he truly hoped to master the art in the way Ueda and Team Ico have, he would be looking at how well he can blend everything fundamental in game design, game art and game narrative to produce something that communicates his literary themes wholesomely.

Games ARE art, but games aren't VNs. What is artistic about a game isn't what Cage envisions it is, and that is why I don't think he can produce great games.
Couldn't have said it better myself. People like Cage (and there are obviously more than a few such individuals pounding away on scripts at Bioware) think they're taking video games in a brave new direction when, in reality, they're essentially misunderstanding the medium's ultimate potential. People who praise him for trying something "new" are welcome to their opinions, but I think such folks are more or less applauding a car with square wheels.

Then again, if it were easy, we'd probably have hundreds of games like SotC instead of maybe five.
 

WenisPagon

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Lucem712 said:
Huh, when did I ever say that Indigo Prophecy was being innovative, or something of the nature? All I meant by it was that Indigo Prophecy was one of the few games to foray into the cinematic movie angle. As in it was formally advertised as an interactive movie experience in the early 2000's, that is all I'm saying. You didn't see a mass exodus of game genres shifting from shooter(action driven) to adventure (story driven), but the opposite. The context in which I wrote that statement was that people give Indigo Prophecy a lot of crap for just about everything that it does. My argument is that it didn't have a pool of games to perfect its formula, because of the fact that story driven games, with QTE segments weren't around in great quantity.

I'm not trying to elevate the game into some higher status, all I'm trying to do is cut it some slack.
What I'm trying to say is that there was a point where the industry was saturated and bloated with these sorts of "cinematic experiences", and there's a reason why that market collapsed.

 

Mzuark

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You know, it's one thing to say that you yourself don't like Cage, but you have no right to declare that anyone that does like him is just plain wrong TO like him.

Personally, I think his stories are....okay. Not great, but not these abominations everyone plays them up to be.