Your video game hot take(s) thread

[Old_Hunter_77]

KC (former Esscapist now SecondWind) has been streaming DMC5 with Marty their as part of their streaming the whole series. While of course they have been positive about the whole thing they do seem a bit disappointed by it after 4 hours in some ways, including the character "V" (Vee?) and that he's just like spamming attack and getting S ranks. They believe a lot of the mechanics is based around rewarding replays but perhaps at the expense of first-time or one-time play-throughs.

I'm just saying this because I listened to it last night and it's coincidental that I see this here. I have no dog in this fight. I did try DMC5 when I had access to Gamepass and I was bored, but I took that to be more because I was kind of burnt out on action games at the time (having recently played the Bayonetta trilogy), couldn't get into the story/style, so I certainly didn't think it was bad I just wasn't vibing to it. And I had barely played any of the others in decades and I don't care about skill/expertise/replay and it was more a "not for me right now" thing.

 

[BrawlMan]

KC (former Esscapist now SecondWind) has been streaming DMC5 with Marty their as part of their streaming the whole series. While of course they have been positive about the whole thing they do seem a bit disappointed by it after 4 hours in some ways, including the character "V" (Vee?) and that he's just like spamming attack and getting S ranks. They believe a lot of the mechanics is based around rewarding replays but perhaps at the expense of first-time or one-time play-throughs.

I had to stop watching the Stream because KC and Marty said V was "boring" and has "no good dodge". When they didn't know how to use him or his dodge properly, and KC was just spamming jump like it's DmC 2013 and expecting to dodge everything and the game hand it to him on a silver platter. I literally said fuck you and stopped watching. I get it's been 3 weeks since they played, but don't blame the game on your lack of skill. I am not wasting 2 hours of my life every Thursday on this. Not worth it, and this the problem I noticed with their DMC streams. They'll make complaints and blame the game's gameplay or story, yet never pay attention or talk over themselves/the cut-scenes/dialouge/important bits almost every single time. Yet with DmC 2013 it's almost nothing, but praise and claiming "stuff happens, unlike the past games". And even then, KC still fucks up on super easy segments or combat sections by not paying attention or over praising that specific game. The Vtubers or gaming streamers new to DMC are all better than KC and Marty. They actually try, or actually decent or good enough, and don't get distracted too much.

 

[Ezekiel]

02 seconds - What could go wrong with the cam so close to Dante?
03 - I moved Dante right a little and one of the enemies is already gone, only his scythe visible.
04 - Only two enemies are seen and Dante is obscured. "Just move the camera," you would say. My thumb is occupied with the attack, style, shoot and jump/dodge buttons. If you can limit the number of thumb movements (in a fast-paced game that places the primary actions on the face of the controller) with a different cam and tailored map design, why wouldn't you?

Mario is supposed to be just to the left of the center of the picture. I edited it, placed him right before the drop. Functional? No. Is Devil May Cry 5's camera functional? Since you can barely see threats, certainly not. Let's make Super Mario players work a stick with their thumb as well.

Actually, the character is too far away. It doesn't look cinematic.

There! Who cares that the player has a fraction of a second to react to falls and enemies and needs to move the cam manually in order to see what they jump towards with that same thumb so long as the camera is up close and personal? It's like a movie!

06 - One of the two visible enemies stepped backwards, out of the frame. Now we only see one.

......................

Bleh. I was going to go over the entire minute of video, but rest speaks for itself. Cam barely keeps them in view. Games like Devil May Cry 3 were far less work.

 

[Ezekiel]

Can practice until you get good at anything, but homeless Dante is still unnecessarily complicated.

Faces boringly real too, the unfortunate side of progress. I know Devil May Cry 3's were scanned, in part why it had fantastic facial animations and lip sync for the time, but the graphics were still simplistic enough that with the developer's few edits they appeared like a part of that stylized world.

Supposedly, this has only a slightly longer cinematic runtime than Devil May Cry 3, but how the cutscenes are paced, how frequently they appear mid-level, is absolutely more tedious. The old games mostly had them at the beginning and end of a chapter and hugging bosses. Here they are sprinkled all over.

Visually bland bosses.

"Get used to them," you say. How about we just separate them into their own shorter campaigns, mostly self-contained stories that sometimes intersect, for better flow and not taking such a gamble in hoping players will love all three?

 

[BrawlMan]

BTW, get used everything being on the RE Engine forever, because it is Capcom's new MT Frame Work engine.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Not a hot take really but if there's any one reason to despise AI creation tools, it's the enormous influx of shovelware on game stores. Dear God, the last month has just been trash after trash after trash on Switch or Steam.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Ok, not so much a ho take, but something I think is a bit odd. The modding community is a big pars of many games, I'm pretty sure the entire point of Skyrim is to see how many weird mods you can run at once.

There's loads of Lollipop Chainsaw mods around. But they all seem to be mods for other games, often featuring Juliet without her trademark outifts, and with very different body proportions.

There doesn't seem to be any mods for Lollipop Chainsaw though. I'd have expected Harley Quinn outfits or Buffy skins, but fans don't seem to be interested in doing that. Sure, there's lots of different outfits you can get anyway, but still seems odd.

 

[BrawlMan]

Silent Hill 2 Remake is going to do well or great, but the usual suspects in the professional sphere or YouTube sphere, are going to throw a biatch fit. They'll call anyone who enjoys the remake: "sheeple", "not real/true fans", or go on about how "pointless" the remake is and that you're a fool for enjoying and not playing the original. Even though most young people or older people who grew up in the 2000s don't have a PS2 or XBOX on hand.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Even though most young people and older people who grew up in the 2000s don't have a PS2 or XBOX on hand.

And even if you do have an Xbox on hand, that doesn't have analog face buttons, so you're stuck using heavy attacks on everything with no way to do light attacks, which required a half-press on the PS2 controller... For the remake, as I said in the other thread, at the moment my stance is 'expect the worst, but hope for the best'.

Anyway, if nothing else it makes a case for the preservation of older games. The original Resident Evil 4 is playable on every modern system and can be bought for about 20 bucks on Steam, but Silent Hill 2 hasn't been re-released since the debacle of a HD collection.

 

[BrawlMan]

Anyway, if nothing else it makes a case for the preservation of older games.

I am always for preservation, and we are seeing more of that thankfully, but not everyone is lucky like RE4. That's because companies like Capcom or Grasshopper care about their IPs. Konami doesn't all. The last time they truly cared for an IP, other than Metal Gear Solid, was Lords of Shadow 2.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

And even if you do have an Xbox on hand, that doesn't have analog face buttons, so you're stuck using heavy attacks on everything with no way to do light attacks, which required a half-press on the PS2 controller... For the remake, as I said in the other thread, at the moment my stance is 'expect the worst, but hope for the best'.

Anyway, if nothing else it makes a case for the preservation of older games. The original Resident Evil 4 is playable on every modern system and can be bought for about 20 bucks on Steam, but Silent Hill 2 hasn't been re-released since the debacle of a HD collection.

Silent Hill is really hard to preserve through "re-releases" because apparently it's very difficult to recreate the fog effects the way they worked on the PS2. That's why the PS3 re-release looked like shit, the PS3 literally wasn't capable of rendering the fog effects the same way that the PS2 did.

I learned about this probably like 5+ years ago, so I may be entirely wrong about the reason, but I believe it has to do with the way the PS2 was able to render 2D objects in 3D space, in comparison to the PS3, because part of the fog is a 2D overlay.

 

[BrawlMan]

Silent Hill is really hard to "re-release" because apparently it's very difficult to recreate the fog effects the way they worked on the PS2. That's why the PS3 re-release looked like shit, the PS3 literally wasn't capable of rendering the fog effects the same way that the PS2 did.

I learned about this probably like 5+ years ago, so I may be entirely wrong about the reason, but I believe it has to do with the way the PS2 was able to render 2D objects in 3D space, in comparison to the PS3, because part of the fog is a 2D overlay.

You are correct. I learned about this around 2013-2014ish about the disaster of porting these games over. Takes a lot of reverse engineering too. You won't believe how crazy shit the developers had to go through to get DMC1-3 to work on then modern consoles during 7th generation. Capcom didn't do it themselves, they outsourced to a Western studio for the first HD collection on 360/PS3. It's amazing they got nearly everything working. The only thing that sucks, is that DMC1 has garbled sound effect issues at certain spots, but nothing that effects cut-scenes nor the overall gameplay. I think the Switch version fixed the sound issues. The HD version of DMC1 does have much better control set up than the US/UK/EU PS2 original. The jump button is the actual bottom face button for now on!

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Silent Hill is really hard to preserve through "re-releases" because apparently it's very difficult to recreate the fog effects the way they worked on the PS2. That's why the PS3 re-release looked like shit, the PS3 literally wasn't capable of rendering the fog effects the same way that the PS2 did.

I learned about this probably like 5+ years ago, so I may be entirely wrong about the reason, but I believe it has to do with the way the PS2 was able to render 2D objects in 3D space, in comparison to the PS3, because part of the fog is a 2D overlay.

Huh. I didn't know that. That's interesting.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Silent Hill 2 Remake is going to do well or great, but the usual suspects in the professional sphere or YouTube sphere, are going to throw a biatch fit. They'll call anyone who enjoys the remake: "sheeple", "not real/true fans", or go on about how "pointless" the remake is and that you're a fool for enjoying and not playing the original. Even though most young people or older people who grew up in the 2000s don't have a PS2 or XBOX on hand.

Yeah I agree with this even though I have no stake in this one. All I have seen is some complaints about faces or something which is weird when you're talking about an old game where no way did faces look good.

The one thing I will say is that it seems a game that works on atmosphere and those kinds of intangible qualities are inseparable from the context of the time, technology, social times, etc. So it may end up being true that "remake is pointless" in the same way that all these movie remakes are usually pointless. But if that ends up being the case then the whole remake game project is doomed to fail, artistically.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Silent Hill is really hard to preserve through "re-releases" because apparently it's very difficult to recreate the fog effects the way they worked on the PS2. That's why the PS3 re-release looked like shit, the PS3 literally wasn't capable of rendering the fog effects the same way that the PS2 did.

I learned about this probably like 5+ years ago, so I may be entirely wrong about the reason, but I believe it has to do with the way the PS2 was able to render 2D objects in 3D space, in comparison to the PS3, because part of the fog is a 2D overlay.

There’s also the fact that Konami (or Team Silent, but probably Konami seeing as they own it) lost a big chunk of the source code which was why the HD Collection was mostly garbage.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Yeah I agree with this even though I have no stake in this one. All I have seen is some complaints about faces or something which is weird when you're talking about an old game where no way did faces look good.

The one thing I will say is that it seems a game that works on atmosphere and those kinds of intangible qualities are inseparable from the context of the time, technology, social times, etc. So it may end up being true that "remake is pointless" in the same way that all these movie remakes are usually pointless. But if that ends up being the case then the whole remake game project is doomed to fail, artistically.

My take on this is simply, nothing can take away from what these devs accomplished back then to have us looking back so fondly on these games.

However, likewise nothing can take away from what the devs accomplished now to take advantage of modern technology. It is already an almost certainty the game will play better than before, and it’s a given it looks and sounds better barring VA preferences. Everything else generally falls under the guise of nostalgia.

If buzz around this game doesn’t start getting that awkward silent (no pun) treatment shortly before release that suggests the final product didn’t hold up to early impressions, then I will be getting a PS5 for it and playing with my already-purchased Pulse 3D headphones and enjoying the hell out of it.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Silent Hill 2 Remake is going to do well or great, but the usual suspects in the professional sphere or YouTube sphere, are going to throw a biatch fit. They'll call anyone who enjoys the remake: "sheeple", "not real/true fans", or go on about how "pointless" the remake is and that you're a fool for enjoying and not playing the original. Even though most young people or older people who grew up in the 2000s don't have a PS2 or XBOX on hand.

That's not too strange considering both Bloober and Konami's pedigree. We are getting too many remakes as is, but even so a lot of remakes get positive responses from fans. With Silent Hill 2 it's really Bloober and Konami that's getting the vast majority of the side eye. I'm sure we all remember that icky period when Capcom shipped off their IPs to second rate Western developers. Well, Konami never left that behind, and they're now sending Silent Hill 2 to that chopping block. I'm not keen on SH2 being remade, but if say Remedy was tasked to remake it I'd be far more open to that.

There’s also the fact that Konami (or Team Silent, but probably Konami seeing as they own it) lost a big chunk of the source code which was why the HD Collection was mostly garbage.

I keep hearing this, but mods for the original exist, and while not perfect, they make the game look far better than the HD collection did. Konami simply can't be trusted to boil an egg.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Yeah I agree with this even though I have no stake in this one. All I have seen is some complaints about faces or something which is weird when you're talking about an old game where no way did faces look good.

That's subjective. Angela's face looks off. Unfinished, lacking in character, I don't know, but the original face looks better. Laura's face in the remake looks fine. James' face... eh.

 

[BrawlMan]

I'm not keen on SH2 being remade, but if say Remedy was tasked to remake it I'd be far more open to that.

I wouldn't mind either, but that's neither here or there. Remedy has got their own thing going on anyway. Konami came to Bloober, not the other way around.

FTR, Bloober intends to be faithful to the remake.

https://automaton-media.com/en/news...e-devs-wanted-more-changes-than-bloober-team/

[h1]Silent Hill 2 remake's producer says the original Japanese devs wanted more changes than Bloober Team[/h1]

Amber VAmber V
2024-06-06 13:35
News
4 Comments

2 mins


HomeNews

Silent Hill 2 remake's producer says the original Japanese devs wanted more changes than Bloober Team





Silent Hill 2 remake visuals



With the reveal of Silent Hill 2's first trailer and release date, fans of the original game are growing both excited and anxious about how the modern remake will interpret the horror classic. In a recent interview with Famitsu, the Silent Hill series' producer Motoi Okamoto made comments about the work-in-progress remake and the team's efforts to stay faithful to the original.

Surprisingly, Okamoto comments that it was Silent Hill 2's original staff members, such as art director/monster designer Masahiro Ito and sound designer Akira Yamaoka, who were more eager to introduce changes to the upcoming remake. On the other hand, members of Poland-based developer Bloober Team would often counter such opinions, vouching for certain elements to remain untouched.



"Game creators don't want to make the same thing twice. I think that as the original creators, they had many parts they wanted to change," Okamoto explains on behalf of the Japanese development staff. On the other hand, it seems these exchanges with Bloober Team were what helped the developers strike a good balance – keeping everything the original Silent Hill 2 did right as-is, while making the game more modern.

"It was thanks to the opinions of Bloober Team, who are huge fans of the original game, that the remake is highly faithful to the original," Okamoto comments. Furthermore, the producer even suggests that had the remake's development team been all Japanese, there may have been a lot more differences between the original and the remake.



As for specific characteristics of Silent Hill 2 that the team wanted to keep in the remake, Okamoto mentions the balance of what is spoken versus what is suggested to the player via visuals and sounds, as well as the focus on the distinct psychological horror the original game embodied. In addition, the team was mindful of avoiding UI screens as much as possible to maximize immersion (for example, by having James physically take out the map instead of having a UI map screen).

While new technology allowed the developers to pack more information and detail into the game's environments, they made sure to do so in a way that does not compromise the setting of Silent Hill 2. For example, while tempted to enrich the city's atmosphere with traffic lights and street lamps, Okamoto decided against doing so as there was no electricity in the original setting.

That's subjective. Angela's face looks off. Unfinished, lacking in character, I don't know, but the original face looks better. Laura's face in the remake looks fine. James' face... eh.

They all look good or great. Don't know what you're looking at.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

That's subjective. Angela's face looks off. Unfinished, lacking in character, I don't know, but the original face looks better. Laura's face in the remake looks fine. James' face... eh.

Maria’s face looks creepier in the original. As in, she might as well be the Joker’s sister or something.

This is the issue with nostalgia. Technical scrutiny wasn’t relevant back then like now because it’s just what they had to work with. Now it’s like, it might as well be something completely original because even perfection will be under all kinds of microscopes and huff-puffing as not living up to *expectations*. Basically why all of the comparison discourse for remakes winds up as hot air babble to me.

I wouldn't mind either, but that's neither here or there. Remedy has got their own thing going on anyway. Konami came to Bloober, not the other way around.

FTR, Bloober intends to be faithful to the remake.

https://automaton-media.com/en/news...e-devs-wanted-more-changes-than-bloober-team/

They all look good or great. Don't know what you're looking at.

Huh, didn’t realize that Team Silent was even in the picture as far as the remake design in concerned. Wonder what they would’ve done differently, and why they didn’t end up taking on the project in the first place. Guessing it’s just a handful of them lending consulting efforts since the full team disbanded for good.