Hacker Cinema
Destiny
Der müde Tod
1921 · Film · 98 min
Directed by Fritz Lang
As a young couple stops and rests in a small village inn, the man is abducted by Death and sequestered behind a huge doorless, windowless wall. The woman poisons herself in order to join him and is met by Death, who gives her three opportunities to prove that love is stronger than death, thereby freeing her beloved from his fate.
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1 comment on Hacker News
You sound like you think you're disagreeing, but you're not. The point is precisely that games can span a huge array of things, but AAA games are (almost) all trying to jam themselves into the same small "cinematic" bit of the space, basically literally at all costs. AAA games are absolutely staggeringly absurdly expensive for what gets ever closer and closer to a movie.
I do not have a current-gen console so I'll concede that I don't have direct experience, but the reviewers I trust to tell me whether a AAA game sucks or not (i.e., neither giving automatic 8/10+s because they're big advertisers nor automatically slagging things simply because they're "sellouts" or something) have all been telling the same story lately on things like Destiny and The Order: 1886, which is that the gameplay is often OK to good-ish but it's increasingly obvious that the games are so gosh-darned ambitious and expensive now that they're getting brutally cut down to even be able to ship anything, where simultaneously the story is obviously supposed to be very important because vast, vast resources are dedicated to the cut scenes, set pieces, and the "set" (another frequent complaint being "incredibly beautiful skyboxes behind a linear corridor with chest-high walls"), yet at the same time it's obvious that huge holes have been blown in the stories by cuts and once you factor out the cut scenes, the games are almost insubstantial. In the case of Destiny, perhaps still quite fun, but not very substantial.
The "previous gen" showed the trend pretty strongly and many of us thought the gaming companies would be forced to pull out of the current trends, but so far into the current gen it really does seem that AAA will literally sacrifice everything to be "cinematic". Absolutely everything, including even good cinematic storytelling, because many of these games have been so shredded in editing that if they really were a movie they'd seriously make Uwe Boll movies look coherent by comparison. Everything must be sacrificed to good-looking cut scenes. It's getting quite absurd.
"even GTA belongs in this end, since the most fun is to be had just playing with the game mechanics, rather than in completing the story."
And this is a great example of what I mean, albeit in the previous gen... here's an interesting video where someone explores the incredible tension between the fun little mechanics in GTA IV that it goes to great efforts to create, and then how much of them it sacrificed on the altar of a "cinematic story": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E32j9ufrpoE