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Final Fantasy XV Trailer

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06.16.2013 10:32pm

Atma Weapon
I Am Pure Energy

Let's not forget that Shiggy Miyamoto wanted Ocarina of Time to be a Western at one point, with the Master Sword being a mythical six-shooter.

That game needs to be made. Now.

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06.16.2013 10:40pm

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

SuperSquall said:

Free Spirit I respect you greatly, but I think you are operating on a false pretense that the artistic goals set out by movies and books and music are achieved. Video Games are maturing as a medium and some truly great games have been made. Meanwhile Michael Bay is making movies and Bill O'Reilly is writing books, so don't shit on video games just because they aren't living up to Citizen Kane. The movie industry isn't. Most books aren't To Kill a Mocking Bird either, and not every album is The Suburbs, and meanwhile your generalization that a good band will listen to lots of music doesn't include the fact that they probably watch movies and read books, and if they don't they ought to. Consuming good art is almost universally good regardless of medium.

I wish Nomura played games more too but he's not the reason FF sucks, and his offering looks good right now. Seriously, ideas like this get bounced around all the time. Let's not forget that Shiggy Miyamoto wanted Ocarina of Time to be a Western at one point, with the Master Sword being a mythical six-shooter.

Eh, I'm not making any sort of claims on anything really, just trying to figure out what is missing from games today. Because I definitely feel something is missing. I feel like they aren't reaching the potential they could be and should be at this point in the evolution of the medium, and I'm just trying to figure out what it might be that's causing this. Yes there are great games out there, but they're just great entertainment experiences, not great works that truly move me in some trancendental way. You know, that goose-bumpy "triumph of the human spirit" feeling you get when you experience something special, something that feels like it will stand the test of time and be remembered hundreds of years from now. I've experienced "that feeling" when listening to truly inspired music, watching truly inspired movies, reading truly inspired books, etc. But I haven't felt that way about games in a long time, and I refuse to believe it's just because I grew up. That would mean video games are only truly deep, profound, moving, meaningful works of creative force when applied to kids experiencing them who don't know any better. I refuse to believe that. Games still entertain me greatly, but they don't really move me like a good book (I just read the Hyperion cantos for example, and that moved me) or a good movie (just watched Cloud Atlas, and that moved me). Sure there's shit out there in every artistic medium - soulless, insipid by-the-numbers stuff that is meant for nothing beyond entertainment, but video games seem to have more of it than normal, and nothing that really hits that sweet spot for me like other mediums. I dunno. I'm just trying to figure out why this is. Heck, it might just be me, and if so, that is sad indeed.

I think part of it might be the fact that video games take so much time, effort, money, and varied talent to make that you just can't do anything else but the safest, most uninspired things with them, or force yourself to do a low-key indie type game (which does see some truly inspired work, now that I think about it. Journey is pretty damn moving). Not to mention it takes more time, effort, and money just for the audience to enjoy the work so that the audience themselves can't even afford to experiment with the medium as much as they might with other forms of expression. The financial realities of the video game world really stifle the creative potential.

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06.17.2013 1:07am

Seelas
I want to go back.

I actually agree with your view Free Spirit, just not the explanation for it.

I think the biggest part of it is that, like, modern game design has no emotional capacity. You make these gameplay systems and then use them to create repetitive gameplay - you have this many firefights, this many fetch quests, this many "go here" quests. But what the modern school of game design has converged upon is this thing that is fun, but also emotionally numb. How the hell are you supposed to actually tell a story within that framework? How do you write strong characters that spend most of their time shooting people, or solving block puzzles, or whacking trolls? So you so often see games sandwiching their story in between the gameplay as a breather, because we just don't have any gameplay systems that can move people or communicate something meaningful. And you see stories that get twisted to support the demands of gamey level design.

Game developers, imo, need to stop being bound by the word "game." Great works of other media, like Apocalypse Now, they fall under this category of "entertainment." But are they primarily trying to be "fun" or "entertaining?" No, that's not their primary goal; they're trying to communicate something and move people. If games are going to achieve the same thing, it means they need to throw a lot of their game design conventions out the window, because our idea of "fun" doesn't really have a language for being emotive or thought-provoking most of the time.

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06.17.2013 2:31am

(Edited on 06.17.2013 at 7:03am)

Fincher
Deep Water Horizon

I don't dwell on whether or not games/movies/etc. are "art" as opposed to "entertainment", but to the extent that developers aim for that, I don't think they should try to make video games into movies. Each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and games are defined by their interactivity. A large part of the investment in the stories of games like Final Fantasy VII is that you're playing them. You're putting yourself in the shoes of the characters in a way that you don't with a movie. If you subvert the interactivity in order to better produce a singular vision, in order to then make games into art, you're defeating the point. You're not advancing gaming. It's like a chef who wants to prove that food can be art, so he slathers food across a canvas like Jackson Pollack. Okay, that is art, but it's not effectively food anymore. If you wanted to raise food to a higher level, you would have to approach food on its own terms, find a way to heighten the experience of eating it.

Interactivity doesn't have to mean gaming. It can mean choice, and I'd be all for "games" that focus on the choice element of Western RPGs and drop or at least severely reduce the combat and other forms of gameplay. However, the catch is that for choice based gaming to evolve, the developers have to embrace the idea that the player's choices really matter. That's part of why Mass Effect 3's ending was a big issue. Sure, there was a lot of criticism surrounding Bioware's vision of the ending, but there was also the question of how much we were there to experience their ending and how much we were there to craft our own. Games will equal movies and books in this regard not by reflecting the developers' vision alone, but by holding up a mirror for players to see themselves in. In other words, games advance art by making the player into an artist.

Currently playing: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, Picross DS
Last played: Time Hollow (good)
Last watched: Agent Carter (very good)
Me on Favslist

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06.18.2013 5:27am

SuperSquall
Shortening His Posts

Free Spirit said:

Eh, I'm not making any sort of claims on anything really, just trying to figure out what is missing from games today. Because I definitely feel something is missing. I feel like they aren't reaching the potential they could be and should be at this point in the evolution of the medium, and I'm just trying to figure out what it might be that's causing this. Yes there are great games out there, but they're just great entertainment experiences, not great works that truly move me in some trancendental way. You know, that goose-bumpy "triumph of the human spirit" feeling you get when you experience something special, something that feels like it will stand the test of time and be remembered hundreds of years from now. I've experienced "that feeling" when listening to truly inspired music, watching truly inspired movies, reading truly inspired books, etc. But I haven't felt that way about games in a long time, and I refuse to believe it's just because I grew up. That would mean video games are only truly deep, profound, moving, meaningful works of creative force when applied to kids experiencing them who don't know any better. I refuse to believe that. Games still entertain me greatly, but they don't really move me like a good book (I just read the Hyperion cantos for example, and that moved me) or a good movie (just watched Cloud Atlas, and that moved me).

Re: Cloud Atlas: Tom Tykwer's directing will do that. If you haven't watched The Princess and the Warrior yet I whole heartedly suggest you do it.

I think part of it might be the fact that video games take so much time, effort, money, and varied talent to make that you just can't do anything else but the safest, most uninspired things with them, or force yourself to do a low-key indie type game (which does see some truly inspired work, now that I think about it. Journey is pretty damn moving). Not to mention it takes more time, effort, and money just for the audience to enjoy the work so that the audience themselves can't even afford to experiment with the medium as much as they might with other forms of expression. The financial realities of the video game world really stifle the creative potential.

Well... what you're describing is what I think of as a "religious experience" or feeling that you've found a genuine truth through an authentic artistic experience. For me these events are rare enough, and although I have sometimes found that in gaming I do see your point to a certain extent. Have you played To The Moon? Or Journey?

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06.18.2013 2:45pm

(Edited on 06.18.2013 at 3:21pm)

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

Well, I would'nt go so far as to say a religious experience, more like a "spiritual buzz". Not quite numinous, but still gives you that afterglow of experiencing something with an attempt at a real message, something that was trying to say just a little more than "BOOM POW!". There are games that have moments of this, sure, but they are just brief, single scenes, almost like they were inspiring by accident. I'm not asking for Citizen Kane, just something...more than what we've been given, in terms of the entertainment-to-expression ratio. Heck we might not even be at a Citizen Kane level of expertise in the video game medium. We might not even be at Birth of a Nation, or Metropolis, or Sunrise. Video games might just not be ready for that paradigm shifting "artistic singularity" that moves a cultural curiosity into a culturally recognized form of expression. Due to the rather staggering logistics required to make a video game and experience a video game, it might just take a lot longer for them to grow out of being toys and into being something greater. Maybe it really will take a hundred years before they evolve to where movies were after only 50 years. I just don't know, but I know that I want to still be alive the day the thing which used to be called a "game" is called something else.

As for games like To the Moon and Journey, I see them as the right path to this unknown thing I'm looking for, yes. But I see them as too small, too independent, too separated from the general flow of mainstream gaming evolution. They are experiments in expression pushing us in what I feel is the right direction, but are they the golden children of a new era? I think not. When a blockbuster game attempts to do what they attempt to do, and succeeds, that is when things will start changing.

To use another analogy, I think I may be looking for the "novel" of the video game world. How many centuries, millenia even, did it take for the novel to evolve and become accepted as a legitimate literary form? It wasn't until what, the 1700's that the novel began to be seen as anything more than a diversionary waste of time and taken seriously. And it wasn't until the 1800's that it really exploded as a serious literary movement. And most of this was a cultural thing, not an inevitable evolution. The time was right for the novel, and it appeared.

Things like Journey are more like poems or early plays. They're a start, but the ultimate thing I'm looking for will probably be very different, I think. I'm looking for something meatier, something akin to the Robinson Crusoe of video games. Not yet War and Peace, no, that's a million miles away, but at least something that, a few hundred years from now we can look back and say "That. That was the start of this thing." And we'd be wrong, just as Crusoe isn't undeniably the first novel with nothing resembling it coming before. No "thing" has a single, identifiable start, but if we're even asking such a question, that must mean the thing now exists and is recognized. And that's what matters.

I'll probably be dead by then, but then again maybe not! Maybe that good old technological singularity will come along and we'll all be immortal Terminators in a hundred years, reading our holo-novels and playing our full stimsim virtual reality games and dreaming of electric sheep.

EDIT: Of course, getting back on track, I don't expect FFXV to be this messiah of video games. My highest hopes for it are at least a partial revitalizing of the Final Fantasy name and spirit, nothing more. My expectations are that it will be better the FFXIII, possibly better that FFX, but never as good as the older games. They were a moment in time, and that moment has passed.

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06.18.2013 8:56pm

Fincher
Deep Water Horizon

Personally, I'm not as concerned with art as some people are. I think it's all well and good when a filmmaker has something to say, but it's by no means mandatory and in no way a substitute for them making an entertaining movie. Where I didn't agree with Roger Ebert was not just that he claimed video games aren't art, but also the implication that they have to be art to be worthy, as if there's nothing else a medium could aspire to.

I have two big futuristic dreams for video games. The first is virtual reality, and while the Oculus certainly looks cool and is a step in the right direction, I'm talking full on VR here. The second is to apply advanced artificial intelligence to the medium. Imagine a game along the lines of Western RPGs where you can make your character say anything you want and do anything that's possible within the game's universe, and the AI will understand and make the world and the characters in it react accordingly. There's no particular plotline you're being pushed down. It has all the freedom of open world gaming with all the depth of scripted scenarios. You can discuss philosophy with any characters who would be willing to do that, or you could spin around in circles shouting non sequiturs and make everyone think you're crazy, and whatever you do can potentially affect the fate of the world and those in it. Is that art? I really don't care if it is or not. It's awesome.

Or imagine you're in the mood for a new TV show, so you say, "Futuristic Game System, I want to watch a cop drama set in the 1980s, but not a police procedural. And I want one of the main cop characters to secretly be a werewolf. And there should be a hot redhead and a senile old bag lady who utters strange prophecies." The AI creates the show from scratch, and being a learning computer, it's come to know your tastes enough to make it in a way that you would love. Or it can invent shows you never even knew you wanted to see. Certainly a step up from Netflix: "You watched a horror movie, so here are five other movies you might want to see because they also are horror".

This is obviously theoretical and not something we can expect around the corner, but the point is that there's so much potential to what "video games" might end up doing, and it can't be defined in terms of the accomplishments of media that have been around for a hundred years or more.

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06.19.2013 3:20am

Thread Creator

Scribe
The Taru

Walls of text! I'm not gonna read all that... Can anyone give me the short version of the above discussion?

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06.19.2013 3:34am

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

Blah blah blah art blah blah blah entertainment blah blah blah video games blah blah blah nothing to do with FFXV in particular.

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06.19.2013 5:02am

Thread Creator

Scribe
The Taru

I think we've all been waiting for that video game that spiritually matures us after the expereience. It's been missing in FF for some time now. FF15 is not likely to be that game, even if it is fun. The heart of the series left with it's creator.

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06.19.2013 6:01am

Dr Squirrel
medicine woman

SuperSquall said:

and Bill O'Reilly is writing books,

actually he's just paying people to write subtle white nationalist novels and putting his name on it

trust me, i'm a doctor

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07.07.2013 1:38pm

Zubis
Registered Member

https://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=616011

Time for the cliff notes...

- They have the actual clothes of each character in the office that was designed by Roen so they can faithfully recreate the clothes design in the game and CG cutscenes.
- Nomura admits he's not very good at managing his time so that's why they have "more intelligent" people on the team making sure the games are on schedule.
- No motorbike for Noctis and crew. More vehicles to be announced later. Car and Magitek armor still in.
- Nomura says Stella's design has changed a little to make her look "prettier" not younger.
- Red eyes Noct still a thing.
- Dual audio? Ask Square Enix. But probably not because of disk capacity and two of the same CG scene would be put on the disk because of Japanese and Engish lip syncing in both scenes.
- Game over if Noctis dies but that can still change.

Ugh.

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07.07.2013 2:29pm

Rhaegar
World Warrior 21007

Haha, oh, wow, I think the last RPG I've ever played where it's game over if the main character dies is ... um, Baldur's Gate II?

Oh, Square Enix, even when you take inspiration from good games, you only use the shitty parts of those.

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07.07.2013 4:33pm

SuperSquall
Shortening His Posts

^
Kingdom Hearts I and II, every Mass Effect game, and The Last Story (once live are exhausted of course). I don't get what's to moan about. Don't get me wrong, I've been shitting on Squeenix for the better part of a decade, but getting upset over a detail like this is petty. It's been in plenty of games, and good ones at that.

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07.07.2013 4:57pm

Zubis
Registered Member

Because it was a complete pain in the ass in FF13 when your leader died that it was game over - even if the other two characters were at full health.

A quick google of "FF13 leader dies" shows I'm not the only one annoyed by it.

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