r/Games • u/eldomtom2 • 1d ago
Opinion Piece Get Me Out of this Stupid Void | Semi-Ramblomatic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HHFwMHp1dY179
u/NaltAlt 1d ago
I'm currently playing through Code Vein with a friend, and it uses these void spaces to make you slowly walk through the memories of other characters, revealing the story of the game. You just walk, wait for the voice lines to be over while you stare at a static scene, then slowly walk to the next static scene and listen to more voice lines.
It's the dullest bullshit imaginable. If they were just cutscenes, at least I could put the controller down and focus on the story, and they could cut out the long awkward silences that happen when I have to wait for the game to build a bridge out of floating geometry, then walk to the next scene at a snails pace.
And there's dozens of these slow memory scenes... I think you can skip most, but then you lose out on the backstory...
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u/hyrule5 1d ago
A required interaction section that could have been a cutscene is the video game equivalent of a meeting that could have been an email
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u/Mobile_Bee4745 22h ago
The worst offenders are the cutscenes with completely unnecessary QTEs. Like, who the fuck even expects a QTE to randomly show up in the middle of a cutscene?
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u/richmondody 19h ago
This happened in Assassin's Creed 2 right? The one where Leonardo da Vinci tries to hug you?
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u/CptKnots 19h ago
Yeah I get what Yahtzee means about nobody wanting to sit in cutscenes for too long, but for me, I don't really care as long as the cutscene is doing meaningful storytelling. I'm down for your 2-hour Kojima-nonsense ending cutscene, as long as it's entertaining and well done (and you warn me of the length).
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u/pt-guzzardo 18h ago
"Upon proceeding, several cutscenes will play in sequence. It is recommended that you set aside sufficient time to view these scenes in their entirety."
FFXIV's warning before long cutscene sequences is arguably its biggest innovation.
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u/timpkmn89 17h ago
I remember when BG3 launched with its short endings, and the devs mentioned that they were worried about making them too long. Coming off of FFXIV, I was assuming "what, are they only like a half hour or something?". They were barely five minutes.
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u/Unasinous 10h ago
I agree. There was no warning (although there were a couple places to save and quit if you wanted), but Xenoblade 3 had a series of boss battles and cutscenes that lasts about 2-3 hours and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. If the story warrants a long cutscene, I do not see a problem with it.
Now that I think about it, that sequence actually had a void make a momentary appearance lol.
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u/homer_3 23h ago
I hate how popular this has become. It's because it's such a low budget way to present a story, but it would be so much better if you didn't have to be so active to get through it. Being able to just sit back and watch it instead of having to slowly walk through each scene would be so much better.
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u/Dolomitex 21h ago
I really enjoyed Code Vein (trying to kill things before you killed yourself with Bridge to Glory), but the memory sequences were an absolute slog. I agree with you 100%.
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u/NukeAllTheThings 19h ago
I really wanted to like it, but the anime tropes wore me down until Not-Anor Londo just killed my interest.
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u/Dolomitex 18h ago
Not-Anor Londo was very bizarre. It was like a completely different level designer worked on it, and none of the rest of the game. It was about 6x bigger than any other zone, and also 6x more complicated to get around.
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u/grendus 1h ago
Cathedral is definitely too long. I highly recommend that once you beat the midpoint boss and get access to "[Name]'s Memory" you take a break and clear your backstory before doing the second half.
I haven't seen such an unnecessarily long level since the Caterpillar zone in Alice 2.
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u/Garr_Incorporated 15h ago
My brain goes to Darkest Dungeon 2, where the special location designed to unlock more skills for your characters (in the long run) is 3/5ths of the time a spoken narration with naught but a background image accompanying the soothing voice of Wayne June. And it takes at most a minute.
And 2/5ths of a time it is a single-unit story-driven battle, like your guy escaping prison by beating all the coming guards, or your Jester learning an otherworldly melody from a ghost by successfully repeating it. And those battles can be lost with sufficient effort, which will result in you failing to unlock a skill. It's neat.
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u/Cleverbird 17h ago
Pretty much how I feel about Cyberpunk 2077's Braindance scenes. They were interesting the first time, every time after that it was just a boring slog to get through.
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u/Paratrooper101x 1d ago
I feel you on that monotony. A similar problem I have with most jRPGs is how you need to click through the dialogue or else characters just fucking stare at each other. Drives me crazy
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u/Vox___Rationis 20h ago
I don't feel you at all. I often re-read the spoken lines or just stop to process what is going on and the press-punctuated dialogue of cRPG and JRPG is the most convenient and respectful way of presenting the story.
The cutscenes that just flow and require you to pause manually are a bother (and there are so many games that do not allow to pause cutscenes at all - it is only watch or skip - those are the worst)-3
u/Paratrooper101x 17h ago
What I don’t like is when the spoken dialogue needs to be cycled through. Especially when jrpgs have so much nothing dialogue (daemon x machina is a big offender and this is the reason why I dropped the game.)
I like to sit down and game for long periods of time so I use, or would like to use, these throwaway scenes to passively listen while I get a drink, pee, or check my phone but the needless interactivity ruins that.
Just give us the option to have both! Options are nice!
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u/FuhrerVonZephyr 5h ago
daemon x machina is not a JRPG
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u/Paratrooper101x 5h ago
Still a great example of a click based dialogue system used in most jrpgs I have played.
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u/timpkmn89 17h ago
At least it's much better than the other extreme of being forced to wait for the voiced line to fully play out
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u/KandoTor 1d ago
Persona’s auto feature is really nice for circumventing this, outside of when you have to select an answer for the player character.
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u/Turnbob73 1d ago
Not a JRPG but this is currently irking me so much in Dave The Diver. I’m like 6 hours into the game and I swear every single scene still starts & ends with a shit load of pointless dialogue between characters.
Game is great and I’m having fun, but I’ve already got to the point where I’m not even reading the dialogue anymore because there’s so much of it.
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u/cubitoaequet 23h ago
I had a ton of fun with Dave the Diver but ran into the exact same problem. Eventually just started skipping all the dialog like you. You don't even really need like 90% of it to understand what is going on. It's not that complicated.
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u/ferdzs0 23h ago
At some point I started suspecting that they are doing it for the exact purpose to catch all the players up who skip things. It is obnoxious since they send you for a fetch quest, explain it multiple times, then when Dave arrives to the place, he also explains what needs to be done, just for the quest text also say the exact same thing.
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u/Turnbob73 1d ago
Granted, this game is much older so it kinda gets a pass for that, but this is my main problem with Amnesia: The Dark Descent. So much of that game is spent listening to things instead of seeing anything. Some people like it, but getting lost in dark corridors while a vague monologue of exposition plays out, with a monster encounter sprinkled in every now & then, doesn’t click with me and ends up just feeling so boring and “plain”.
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u/Smart_Ass_Dave 20h ago
I played through Code Vein with a friend and it's failures are deeply educational if you want to know why Dark Souls is good.
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u/hayt88 21h ago
Meanwhile when you have a few cutscenes, you have gamers complain how there are so many cutscenes and that you can basically put the controller away which is a bad thing for then.
But you also have people complain about dialog scenes being back and forth, to then just cut to a scene where you have control for 5s to then continue a dialogue scene, and the next time these people complain about a dialog scene being so long without a break in it to save, which actually was the purpose of the broken up one in the previous instance, ....
I think this is a case where people just complain no matter what. You serve one crowd, the other will complain and sometimes the same people complain over one or the other depending on the current mood they are in.
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u/Ekanselttar 21h ago
It's actually bad in Code Vein though. Imagine you had to do a walking simulator sequence every time you upgraded your weapon in Dark Souls.
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u/pt-guzzardo 18h ago
I don't have to imagine, I've played Asgard's Wrath. It had a (single, unchanging) 30 second unskippable cutscene every time you upgraded your weapon. In virtual reality, so you can't just alt tab and do something else while it plays, either.
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u/EbolaDP 1d ago
Nah those scenes were great. Game has surprisingly good story considering its anime bullshit.
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u/NaltAlt 22h ago
I don't hate them, I just feel like the pacing could be a lot better if you didn't have to walk through them. In fact one of the more recent ones I saw WAS a cutscene instead, and it took like 3x less time to complete, since it didn't break while waiting for yme to walk to the next spot.
Some of the areas themselves are cool, but a lot are just really generic "rubble and spikes with a purple hue" looking. Those ones are the ones that would really benefit from a speedup.
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u/E00000B6FAF25838 23h ago
Yeah, I actually really like the dioramas. Way more memorable than regular cutscenes, which were reserved for present day.
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u/SpaceballsTheReply 21h ago
The only bad thing about them is that there were so many and only one piece of background music that played during every. Single. One.
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u/grendus 1h ago
I didn't mind the scenes themselves.
The problem is that your character has to very slowly walk between them, often in the formless void that assembles itself as you get close so you have to slowly... shamble... towards... a ledge and hope that a bridge starts forming.
They'd be about 99% more tolerable if you moved at your normal running speed and you could skip the actual scenes on later replays.
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u/Indolence 21h ago
I think the first couple times that this trick was done, it was pretty cool. It's a nice little bit of variety and potentially a visual wow moment. It's not subtle, sure, but then most games as a whole are pretty heavy handed. For me the real problem is that it's been done over and over again. It's such a weird specific interpretation of a mental break, it seems odd to keep seeing it pop up.
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u/3holes2tits1fork 20h ago
It keeps popping up because it is comparatively easy. They can throw pre-existing assets around in a half assed manner with a swirly background and it'll work. A lot of the work of building a level can be ignored.
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u/122_Hours_Of_Fear 22h ago
Not exactly the same thing, but the fade section in dragon age origins is such a boring slog. It made me quit the game.
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u/Khalku 21h ago
Lots of people hate it, for what it's worth I didn't mind the first time but there are mods that skip it and give you all the progression (like the stats) from the segment, and highly recommend that mod if you ever get an itch to try the game again. Good game, when you put aside that segment.
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u/JamSa 1d ago
I think Astral Chain's biggest detractor is its fucking Astal Realm. Big featureless voids full of square platforms that you walk across and fight enemies. Has no art direction or level design. Clearly just there to pad content out in the most effortless and cheap way possible, and it stands out like a sore thumb amidst the beautiful neon technofuture city the rest of the game takes place in.
But the worst part is the void levels COMPLETELY disappear past the halfway point, and the second half of the game takes place entirely in real-ass techno city levels. But those boring ass levels already scared away a significant portion of players when they incessantly appeared, accounting for a quarter of playtime of the first four hours.
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u/neildiamondblazeit 20h ago
Yeah it would be better if those worlds were like 50% shorter in Astral Chain.
Control had similar worlds as well. Hell, remnant had them too.
They always seem to suck.
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u/Jaggedmallard26 6h ago
Remnant (at least the first one) mostly limits its floating voids to the area that connects the worlds which for the most part is functionally just a corridor to get from A->B. The actual worlds are all done as weird worlds rather than floating voids.
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u/polski8bit 22h ago
I think the only sequence like that I didn't mind (aside from Batman Arkham Asylum), was in Spiderman 2018. Not because it's fun - it's just... Okay, but because it makes sense. Peter has been injected with Scorpion's toxin, and since this is a world full of weird powers and stuff, I can buy into the whole "void filled with flying chunks of debris" being one of the effects of an unknown toxin.
Plus it's made more bearable due to, well... Peter being Spiderman. You just zip and swing around, instead of slowly walking in a straight line, or slowly jumping from one little piece of rubble to the other like in the vast majority of other games.
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u/LightbringerEvanstar 17h ago
I actually really liked the "void" part of Dragon Age The Veilguard.
Big endgame spoilers ahead for that game.
I liked it because, 1) it's an actual place you are in 2) it's pretty short 3) it serves a purpose in the actual narrative.
It also serves to illustrate the differences between Solas and Rook as characters, Solas is trapped in a prison of his own regrets but is so selfish and prideful he can't possibly escape. He assumes that he's the only actor with any agency and that everything he does is necessary and every sacrifice for the greater good.
When Rook enters the prison and is confronted by the choices they've had to make they actually acknowledge the agency of the people involved Davrin, Harding, Neve and Bellara all made their own choices. Rook didn't sacrifice them for the greater good, Rook chose people for a job that they volunteered for, they all knew the risks going in.
And then lastly you are confronted with the deep seeded regret for what happened with Varric and in order to escape you have acknowledge that you had no agency over him or Solas and accept that he's gone.
It's a really great sequence in a sea of great sequences at the end of the game.
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u/Worldly-Inspector545 22h ago
Spec Ops has some of the more obvious hallucination stuff in it but it does have some good Silent Hill 2 type touches he speaks about. A lot of the imagery caused by the sandstorm is surreal and really makes you feel like you’ve entered hell, yet it all can plausibly exist within the games fiction.
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u/Quitthesht 13h ago
One of my favorite parts of The Line is in Chapter 8 (just before the White Phosphorous if I'm not mistaken) you walk through a small plaza with broken glass, sand and debris littering the room. But in the center is a tree with beautiful green leaves that shine out from the dull sandy tan/khaki environment.
But if you walk past it then turn back to look at it, you'll see what it actually looks like. Dead and withered with brown leaves and a wilted trunk.
It's the first hint that Walker's mind is snapping/hallucinating and it's completely missable.
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u/Jaggedmallard26 6h ago
There are some hints earlier than that. They're just subtle, there is an early showing of Konrads face on a billboard and the "rebel" enemies are deliberately speaking the completely wrong language. They're acknowledged as speaking in Farsi which links to Walker and Konrad serving in Afghanistan but makes zero sense in Dubai. There is a pretty plausible theory that Walker either dies or is gravely injured in the opening in media res helicopter crash and is just stuck looping what he did which also neatly explains why everything after you experience the helicopter crash a second time stops making sense.
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u/Ashviar 1d ago
Surprised he didn't mention the one in OG FF7 and somehow a brand new, different sequence of it in FF7 Rebirth. I don't hate the one in Rebirth, but it felt like it dragged on a bit without having the same impact these types of sequences need. Meanwhile the one in the original FF7 is incredibly memorable for spoilery reasons.
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u/BLACKOUT-MK2 22h ago
Could just be that he didn't remember? He's said before he doesn't really like FF7 so maybe it was less memorable for him in that sense.
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u/HarmlessSnack 4h ago
I just started playing REBIRTH and I can’t fucking believe, after what must have been tons of feedback, they kept in so many slow plodding walking sections.
The Niebelheim Fire scene was excruciating. Mr First Class SOLIDER hurts his leg so he has to slow limp around the burning town at 1Mph, but can still dive- roll when the game wants to be dramatic.
And narrow corridors you slowly have to squeeze through to mask loading areas. I would literally rather have a loading screen than do that shit, it’s super annoying.
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u/Ashviar 4h ago
Definitely alot of painful decisions, like the random climbing wall stuff like we are playing Uncharted 1. It has neither the animation quality, nor the speed, to make those sequences feel atleast worth having. Over the course of my near 70 hour playthrough it really is small drops in a bucket but would hopefully not exist in the third game.
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u/BlindOctopusSausage 21h ago
This ties into one of my most hated tropes in games and movies where the character is clearly hallucinating and it would pretty obvious to someone going through it that they were hallucinating but the character just buys into it completely. As yahtzee says l, it works a lot better when its subtle.
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u/zachtheperson 19h ago
Idk, because dreams are kind of that way. Most people don't question why they have to feed a giraffe in order for their car to start so they can drive their 3rd grade teacher to the Olympics until after they wake up. It's not that unreasonable to believe that a character who's hallucinating has that same level of credulity/acceptance.
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u/Adziboy 21h ago
Can I add all sequences to this - dream sequences, being high sequences, any ‘other world’ sequence that can happen? God its so fucking annoying.
You play a ‘grounded’ game like Far Cry (I say grounded and not realistic for a reason) and then every other level you’re getting high off mushrooms and its the same fucking gameplay but the enemies are purple and there’s annoying effects all over the screen. Same in GTA but I give it a pass because its completely avoidable.
Its a personal thing I guess. Its also the reason I hate the Dr Strange films the most put of the Marvel films.
Just really unfun to play
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u/PeaWordly4381 21h ago
Nah, those were one of the best parts of Far Cry 3. The problem is, Ubisoft doesn't understand why people loved their new ideas and repeats then until they become a parody of themselves. After I've played Far Cry 6 and it tried to rehash literally the same ideas, but worse, it's so glaringly obvious.
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u/donmuerte 12h ago edited 11h ago
It sounds like they haven't done mescaline. LSD changes what you see, sure, but mescaline creates things that don't exist in reality in your mind. I think trying to say that hallucinations are limited by one person's experience just says you don't know the unlimited capacity of human imagination.
even still, on LSD alone, I had an experience where I was walking down an alley and the buildings to my sides started crumbling and falling down on me. Also, a different time I was watching a cartoon and was pulled in and suddenly became a character in that world. I only dabbled in the stuff a small number of times, so I'm only a small sample of the possibilities of this phenomenon.
Curious what the cc thinks of all the Dishonored games.
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u/Gyshal 6h ago
The void in Dishonored is literally called "The Void", and also you literally see how the outsider it just creating this stuff on the fly to get his point across, so it's excusable. This is an actual literal empty void that a god is populating with snippets of past, present and future, not a "inside the mind" kind of thing.
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u/Jaggedmallard26 6h ago
Its weird that Black Ops 6 fell back on this when they've already done levels where you're supposed to be hallucinating that don't do this. Black Ops 1 obviously has its numbers level, 3 has the entire second half of the campaign and two missions explicitly taking place in hallucinatory landscapes and Cold War had the quite creative interrogation level.
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u/PeaWordly4381 21h ago
Never had any problem with those, but that's why it's an opinion piece. We'll now see a lot of people changing their mind on those simply because their favourite youtuber said they're bad.
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u/NewBlueForYou 22h ago
I get his point but does he ever talk about things he DOES like?
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u/StyryderX 14h ago
He did talk about games he followed, but haven't played or only briefly play with. (Fighting games for the former, Team Fortress 2 for the latter).
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u/PotatoKaboose 20h ago edited 37m ago
I can't believe this guy made a whole video on mental breakdowns and the line between reality and delusion in video games, then skipped talking about Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice to talk up Silent Hill 2 again. Like this motherfucker really skipped the best portrayal of psychosis in all of videogames to chat about his fuzzy wuzzy comfort game for the millionth time. Shit isn't even that great a portrayal of those topics either.
Edit: This came off a little confrontational, but Hellblade is chock full of hallucinations (both visual and audio-based) that make it difficult, if not impossible, to tell what is and isn't real.
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u/Jaggedmallard26 6h ago
Because the video isn't about accurate portrayals of mental illness. Its about giant floating voids being used instead of hallucinations. He's not calling for accurate portrayals of mental illness, he's calling for hallucinations that make you not know whats real.
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u/DavidSpadeAMA 10h ago
The game where a viking has some posh british lady whispering trite dialogue in her ear all game? Despite how little sense that makes?
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u/dasbtaewntawneta 21h ago
i actually really like this aesthetic when it's real and not a halucination, like in a fantasy world or sci fi world where some magic has caused the world to be partially blown apart and shit is floating everywhere