DerangedHobo said:
How do you know Hatred isn't doing that? I must of missed some key statements from the devs because last time I checked thsi was just a trailer with the game releasing in at least 5+ months.
Because I'm taking the trailer at face-value. It shows the guy saying "My name is not important." I believe it. But then where can you go from there if you were to include a story? It's a non-starter.
Also he's phrasing his rant in a strangely generic style of speech that nobody would ever use in real life. I honestly don't even think the person who wrote the guy's dialogue for this trailer knows what the guy's motivations are.
Again, just because that is all that you can discern from the trailer does that mean that that's all there is to the game? This trailer was obviously meant to drum up talk about that game and it has (clearly) achieved that goal.
Not necessarily. But you generally try to show off a game's selling points in a trailer like this one. Literally the only thing the video chooses to tell you about the game is "it's violent." Since there are tons of violent games already on the market, I don't see the point. I'm still wiaitng for the video to tell me what makes this violent game special amid a sea of violent games, and the video's like "whelp, all done! You want to buy it now, right?"
That's what I would have said before I read McKinsey's last post. He's saying that Hatred actually looks like a surprisingly faithful HD homage to the original Postal, gameplay, lack of story, and all. If that's the case, then there's a hidden band of information in this video that only people who've played the original Postal have access to. I haven't played it, myself. Everything I know about the Postal series comes from Postal 2 and Postal 3. I think a lot of people on this forum might be in that same boat.
Now that doesn't make it a better game in my eye than if it wasn't a remake, but it at least goes a long way towards explaining to me why a vocal minority is so enamored with it. Back in 1997, I'm sure this was very innovative, and we can't help but feel nostalgia for the games we grew up playing. It makes more sense to me now than it did a couple posts ago.
Sorry to do this, but you packed a LOT of separate ideas into the second paragraph. I'm going to need to go through it point by point:
And let's say for a second that just killing random people is all there is to the game, with a grey colour filter and executions.
That was my assumption all along. So granted.
If it laid all of this out bare and has caused this much controversy... surely it is a more or less original idea?
Just because something's controversial doesn't mean it's an original idea. In fact, I think the most controversial thing about this trailer is probably the fact that it's a video game referencing a very old and outdated idea, one the gaming community has consistently struggled to divest itself from: the idea that the only reason people play video games is for the violence.
I don't have a problem with it choosing to do something 180 degrees from other, more popular video games. I have a huge problem with it choosing to do almost nothing, and then rolling the credits like we're supposed to be impressed with that. This isn't contrarian. I can't really call it minimalist, either. It occupies this weird space between trying too hard to present us with an idea that has been largely discredited, and being incredibly lazy about what it's actually trying to do, artistically. I say that despite the fact that it's clearly had a ton of man-hours worth of effort poured into it to get it running on the Unreal Engine. Taken at face value and on its own merits, it feels cheap and manipulative in a way that only the people trying to censor video games would be pulled in by.
call it an homage to the original postal
Yeah, that interpretation of it makes a lot more sense to me. The problem is, if your audience hasn't PLAYED the original postal, they're going to judge the game based on its own merits and their own modern-day sensibilities about how things like crime and insanity work. Basically, what I'm saying is Postal's "message" might be interpreted differently today than it would have been back in the early 90's when Motal Kombat was the new hotness. Everything from the actual Columbine massacre to the ongoing "do video games cause violence" controversy to awareness gleaned from TV shows like CSI and Burn Notice have shaped the expectations of the American gamer. Audiences have gotten smarter, and the premise of Postal has remained the same. That's part of what makes the protagonist's opening speech so insulting to me. It's basically looking me in the eye and telling me I'm an idiot.
but it seems pretty original to me
If it's a spiritual successor to Postal, that's not original. Underrepresented, maybe. But not original. By definition, the less it innovates, the more successfully it's being a spiritual successor. You can't have it both ways.
and if Spec Ops The Line can get a pass
The goal of creating a video game isn't to "get a pass" on the fact that the game has violence in it. The goal of creating a video game is to say something meaningful or at least entertaining that can only be said through an interactive medium. Some games benefit greatly from violence, some games don't need it, and some games get worse (less fun, less interesting, more confused in the statement they're trying to make or the message they're trying to deliver, etc.) the more gritty and realistic you try to make the violence.
Video game violence should always serve the underlying theme of the game. It is not and never has been the *purpose* of the game. Or maybe it was with the original Postal, I don't know. If the theme of the game IS "violence," then it could work. But violence is not the reason we have games in general, and that mentality is destructive to the industry and insulting to everyone here. Stop saying it. It's not true, and it never has been. The reason video games exist is not to drip-feed consumers violence. I don't care how big a fan you are of the original Postal, that attitude isn't helping anyone, not even yourself. I don't think I even put that fine a point on what you were saying until I started typing this paragraph.
If that's your argument, that Postal/Hatred is a good game because the only reason we have video games is to simulate violence, then you are wrong. Plain and simple. Your starting premise is false.
because of it's low rent story,
No, Spec Ops had low-rent graphics. The story was highly polished, and indeed pretty much the only reason to play it if you believe the critics.
repetitive gameplay and "War is hell" statement why can't this?
I'm starting to think you meant "despite" these last two, not "because of."
Nobody here is saying that playing Hatred will cause people to go nuts and start murdering people
Agreed.
I've seen enough people in this thread reference "12 year old psychopaths" and other references to some edgy teenager picking this game up.
I've been mostly reading pages 5-8, and I haven't seen anything like that. If it happened earlier, I apologize. Maybe you could quote some people? I'm mostly seeing people saying it doesn't look interesting, it looks like a cash grab, it looks like it's trying to be controversial for the sake of controversy, and a select few people saying it looks great but not really explaining why, other than to parrot the developer's claims that they're just "giving people what they want." I've already gone into why that attitude is dismissive and insulting to gamers. That's the kind of thing you would say to a reporter to brush off a criticism of your game as being "too" violent. It's not a design philosophy.
The logical conclusion to that statement isn't hard to reach.
You didn't show a statement. You listed some vague references to other people's vague references. Without the actual statement(s), I'm not following your logic through to the conclusion that you perceive as obvious.
Of course no one was saying it would make people go nuts
Oh, okay. That conclusion. So... that's what you thought some of the other comments were trying to hint at? Okay.
For what it's worth, I do not think that playing a video game, even a really horrible one, can make anyone "go nuts" in the sense that the game's protagonist goes nuts. (Partly because the way the protagonist goes nuts in the trailer is unrealistic and stupid, but that's beside the point.) I would honestly be surprised if anyone in this thread intended to suggest that. Mainly because we're all gamers here, and as I've been taking pains to point out, gamers are pretty much uniformly opposed to the fiction that video games cause violence.
Any time you think that's someone's rationale for disliking Hatred, you should probably explore other interrelations of what they've said before jumping to that conclusion. That's just Occam's Razor. I've given dozens of different reasons why this trailer rubs me the wrong way. I've mentioned Columbine more than once, but never in the context you're suggesting. At no point was I saying playing Hatred would make people go nuts. That's just not the way it works.
but I definitely got the vibe that people thought it was aimed at crazy loner assholes.
Not at all. The world's full of perfectly harmless crazy loner assholes. The characters Jay and Silent Bob are crazy loner assholes, for instance. (Never mind the fact that there's two of them.)
It's much worse than that. I think it's aimed at people who believe people like the protagonist actually exist.
Not just serial killers, mind you. Not just violent assholes. But cartoonishly evil sociopaths whose only goal in life is to go out gunning down a bunch of people. The kind of person who would straight up SAY to someone's face "my name is not important. The only thing that is important is what I'm going to do."
Somehow this guy managed to hold down a job, buy a bunch of guns, learn how to use them all effectively? presumably he's been hiding in plain sight all this time. He owns a house in a nice part of town where people feel safe taking a walk at night.
And, I get it. In a weird sense, I get what the suspiciously generic phrasing of the trailer might be stumbling towards. The mystique of the serial killer, exaggerated to the point of urban legend. In better hands, or perhaps given a better treatment by writers who give a damn, this could be the kind of narrative that gives a face and a voice to the dark impulses that cross our minds from time to time.
But that's not what they're doing here, and I don't think it's even what they're going for, not with any real conviction or effort. And I'll tell you the one thing that *really* keeps it from working:
You have to be dumb to buy into it, the way it's presented in the trailer. You have to be really, really dumb. Almost willfully ignorant. You have to be dumb enough to accept the premise that murderers don't have goals or motivations. That there is no story behind a tragedy.
The only people I can think of who are that bone-shatteringly stupid when it comes to thinking about serial killers are the people trying to ban violent video games.
Everyone else has pretty much moved on. Or at least stopped to ask themselves "why" during the 24/7 media coverage after 9-11. (Sorry to drag that elephant into the room, but it's another example of how the public consciousness surrounding violence has shifted since the original Postal was released. We've been through a lot. We've started thinking about it. We've started asking why. That wasn't on our minds in 1997. It hadn't come up yet.)
got a pretty good idea of why he did it, he hated life, the world at large and he chose to go out killing people. I mean say he's a social darwinist, say he's a nihilist, a manic depressive or just a psychopath, do you really need a specific label for his "ideology" or lack there of?
By default, people have reasons for doing things. The more unusual the thing they're doing, the more curious we get about what those reasons might be.
So if you leave the reasons unsaid, you make us curious. In the hands of good writers, this could be the bait that builds buzz right up to launch day, keeps us guessing all throughout the entire game and leads us to post fan theories in online forums long afterward.
But when you flat-out have the protagonist tell us, up-front, "THERE IS NO REASON, I DON'T NEED A REASON, WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT," you do the exact opposite. You create the impression that either the protagonist is an idiot, or else the writer thinks we are.
Again, that's personal preference. I was interested beacuse it dispensed with any pleasentries and just said "Here, this trailer depicts a murder simulator with destructo physics, get hype".
It's gradually dawning on me that, no really, for some people the lack of context *is* the charm. I really don't get it. But I'll take your word for it. You're entitled to that opinion, and I certainly can't prove it false. Just? don't you want more? Don't you feel like you deserve better? A game where you play as Pyramid Head, a game where you start off bringing a gun to school for show-and-tell and then gradually descend into madness? Something. Anything.
That's fine with me, sure you can have your art games, your games that disregard story and go for fun mechanics (i.e. Hotline Miami) and I can have my murder sims which let me kill a bit of time and stress.
Hotline Miami doesn't disregard story. It's a very trippy story more concerned with reenforcing the game's theme and tone than conveying information, but it's definitely there. Everything about the game's design and the way it's presented reenforces it. Also, I thought Hotline Miami *was* one of the murder sims that let you kill a bit of time and stress. Unless by "murder sim" you literally mean a realistic, real-world simulation. But surely Hatred isn't *that.* We've already been into how unrealistic the protagonist is over and over again.
And I can't understand why people are reacting so negatively to it, how people are talking about how this game is sick or a joke of a game. People even defended GTA and Prototype for their mass murder and crime sprees which confused me. Do people want their violence wearing a fucking nice dress and some makeup? When I jack a car and run over 15 "innocent" bystanders do I have to have it in colour and do I have to get a point bonus or listen to a radio station to make it special?
You're conflating a lot of different ideas here. The underlying premise seems to be that the purpose of all video games is to serve as a murder simulation. That's not the case. It wasn't the case in GTA. It wasn't the case in Prototype. Destructive Creations is apparently insisting that it *is* the case with Hatred, but I'm here to tell you that if realism is what they were going for, they missed the mark by a mile.
Now, you could argue that they were actually going for something stylized and evocative. I would actually probably buy that argument, especially if you were able to articulate exactly what the benefit was of choosing that style over another. But for some reason, you're not doing that. Instead, you keep saying things like "What do you want from me? It's violent, just like GTA! That means you have to like it, right?" It makes you sound like you don't play video games or know anything about them. Specifically, it makes you sound like you're drinking the kool-aid of the people who want to ban video games.
That's a big part of the backlash, I think. At least on this particular website.
I'd argue that the lack of a point system or dress up does make it appealing.
Okay. Reasonable argument. You probably should have opened with that. Can you give me any greater insight into how that's a feature? Is this still nostalgia for the original Postal? (It's okay to say yes.) Or is there more to it than that? I'm genuinely curious what you're hoping they will or won't include or add between now and launch.
It's just pure chaos and violence for shits and giggles.
Ehhh kinda. But it's such *constrained* chaos compared to something like Saint's Row or Prototype. And once you've started giggling, how long until it gets old?
To paraphrase Yahtzee "It stimulates that cave man part of your brain that made you kick down your brother's sand castle".
It's honestly doing nothing for mine. And I'm in touch with my caveman brain, believe me. This just isn't doing it for me. It's trying too hard, AND somehow being too lazy, for my caveman brain to care about its antics. I suppose this is just subjective.
I mean, there's a million things they could have done with this premise! There's a billion different directions it could have taken! And instead they chose to explicitly take it Nowhere.
Like... if they'd said nothing at all? Or left the narrative implied but actually *hinted* at something? THEN my imagination would be running wild, imagining some horrible credo for the protagonist, like a monster movie where they never actually let you see the monster. But they didn't leave it unsaid. They came right out and explicitly stated that there is nothing to say. Big difference.
It just falls apart any way I try to look at it. Maybe I'm just not the right audience for this. Oh well. To each their own. If it's any consolation, Unreal Engine licensing is extremely reasonable for indies these days, so I'd imagine they'll probably be able to get by just fine on the support of fans of the original Postal.
