Uncharted 4 - A Thief's End

Games
101

I saw this post on the Doom thread:

It seems like a common sentiment about the combat in Uncharted here but it makes me wonder if we’re playing the same game?

I made a brief non spoiler video of a combat section in Uncharted4. I wasn’t playing super l33t or anything but it does demonstrate the variety of options that the player has available in combat. You don’t see me hiding in cover, with no control walking down a straight corridor. There was a ton of different options available, from full stealth, hand to hand, a variety of weapons (pistols/grenades/automatic rifles/grenade launchers/sniper rifles), terrain opportunities (ledges/cliffs/ropes/barrels). You can mix and match all those on the fly at your discretion. Granted there are some areas that are more direct but most of the encounters are bigger than the one in the video. I dunno, it just seems odd that people don’t see the combat that I see.

(auto-aim = off, difficulty = hard)

102

Good video. Yeah, it is pretty strange the way some people seem motivated to diminish what this game offers. I can understand the mix of gameplay not appealing to people, or just generally preferring other types of games over 3rd person perspective shooters, but a number of commentators seem to have either invested little effort into understanding the game and yet feel equipped to authoritatively berate it as if they had, or are just pissed off at this game or developer or its business practices.

103

My problem with that video and similar videos which I always see when I complain about combat in Uncharted games is that Drake is getting shot to hell and back.

I hate that. Or at least the way it’s presented in the game. When I’m getting hit constantly and my vision is turning black and white, the game is signalling failure to me. It means I’m doing something wrong. So I stop doing it.

If the game really and truly expects me to jump and swing around like a madman, then it should do a better job of not telling me I’m constantly on the edge of failure when doing so.

104

I’m not sure I understand the problem. The screen turns red/dark because you’re getting hit. You’re in a bad spot and need to move NOW. It does it quickly on my game because I’m playing on hard and I can’t take much damage before I die. On normal or easy it shouldn’t happen as much. I don’t know if those modes just give you more health or make AI’s aim worse but it shouldn’t be “constantly” affecting your vision.

I feel the combat is fun, approachable and encourages experimentation. The loading is so fast and frequent I have no problem just busting out and trying different things and laughing it off when I die. The video wasn’t my first attempt. I went through a few different approaches and tried various paths until I got to that one. No madman random guesses, only premeditated trial and error.

From your earlier posts it sounds like you have a problem accepting the dissonance of a 3rd person shooter set in a real world situation.

If Drake was a space marine or hulking paladin then you’d be OK with unbelievable situations taking tons of damage with piles of bodies at your wake.

I hear this a lot and I understand people’s difficulty in suspending their beliefs. What irks me is the notion that the game shouldn’t exist. Like we’re only supposed to get future or fantasy settings with non-realistic shooters. I just want fun shooter experiences and I’ll take the novel one featuring a guy with wife problems over space marine #92387 fighting alien hoard #93823.

105

I wasn’t super clear.

First, yes, the dissonance gets to me. Especially when showing the game to non-gamers when they ask me what all the hubub is about - it’s just disappointing.

But once I get past that and simply try to enjoy Uncharted as a shooter, the game is fighting against me on every attempt. When I hide behind cover and gradually pop off rounds to take people out, I’m pretty safe - until they start bombarding me with grenades. So when that happens, I just move to adjacent cover and continue. In the end, that strategy is really boring to play with, but since the game shows me I’m not getting hit, that initially seems like the “right” way to play the game, so I do.

When I’m out in the open swinging around and moving like crazy with Drake’s mobility, it’s impossible not to get hit. I’m constantly getting hit. I’m constantly seeing damage indicators on the screen and I’m almost always in more of a “gray” tone of screen than undamaged. It’s unnerving, I don’t like it, so I avoid it. It doesn’t matter that I can take a ton of damage before dying, I care that the game is shoving it in my face that I’m getting hit in the first place.

If all that mobility is how the game is supposed to be played, then the game does a shit job displaying that in everything about how often Drake gets hit, how the game indicates that I’ve been hit, etc. etc.

I can imagine a better implementation of this game being simply that Drake gets hit a lot less frequently, yet each hit does a little more damage. Or improved indications to make it super clear when you’re actually in danger vs. the “expected” amount of damage being taken as a result of swinging around everywhere.

I don’t know, I’m no game designer and don’t pretend to be, but what I do know is that all of the Uncharted games always feel terrible to me in how they always seem to punish me for trying to play the game in the way they intend for me to play it.

106

The game has an actual fail state in combat. It’s death. Hit indicators are just signaling, not punishment.

In any case, Jazar’s original point remains valid, that quote was an absurd misrepresentation of not just Uncharted 4, but combat design for the whole series.

107

It probably shows off better with non-gamers than any game I’ve ever owned. Don’t think you were stating otherwise, but it is really good for that sort of thing.

108

On the previous generation, I was definitely on the ‘I want to like Uncharted, if it just would let me’ side. But after playing Uncharted 2 from the Uncharted Collection, the PS4 controller completely changed the game for me.

Yes, it still throws a million enemies at you, but being able to get headshots on them completely changes the gameplay. On PS3, it took me 10 hours to get about half way through the game until I just gave up in frustration. On PS4 I finished the whole campaign in under 6 hours, and it was excellent. There was an article somewhere online about how they made changes in the autoaim and senstivity and other systems to make it a more modern game, and it really shows. On PS3 I was always running out of ammo, because all the enemies are bullet sponges that take forever to kill. Then you have to risk getting killed by running into the area where you are killing enemies so that you can pick up their ammo before the next wave arrives, and while I was doing that I usually got killed. On PS4, I can just headshot most enemies, so there’s no ammo problems, and each encounter is short and sweet and more befitting an action adventure.

On PS3, it was 5 minutes of story followed by an hour of frustrating action and constant dying. On the same difficulty on PS4, it’s five minutes of story, followed by 10 minutes of action, followed by 5 minutes of climbing around, etc. At least on Normal difficulty on both consoles, I suddenly found out what they were aiming for, and I really enjoyed myself.

On the other hand, I haven’t played Uncharted 4 yet. And I am really hoping that it’s as good as The Last of Us. I thought that TLOU was on a completely different level compared to previous Uncharted games. So it’s dismaying to read the same old complaints about Uncharted 4 as in previous entries.

109

There’s definitely some design aspects of The Last of Us that made it into Uncharted 4. That said, I think TLOU is probably the better game, particularly for the combat, but also for the setting and storyline. I’m only on chapter 8 of U4 - while I doubt it’ll displace TLOU as Naughty Dog’s best, it may be the best in the Uncharted series.

110

Up to Chapter 10. After marathoning the entire NDC, it took a few hours to get accustomed to the targeting in Uncharted 4. It’s… more floaty? Less precise? Not sure. I’m getting better but I don’t feel like I’m making headshots nearly as often. And thank goodness they ditched the melee combat mechanics from Uncharted 3. Those were genuinely awful.

111

I finally got around to starting Uncharted 4 on Sunday. It was supposed to be just until the game I really wanted to play finished downloading, but ended being until the start of chapter 10 instead. Then I came home at 9pm on Monday, and thought I’d play for a couple of hours before going to bed. Stopped playing at 6am in the middle of what I suspect is the final chapter, when the controller ran out of battery. Oops.

So yeah, Uncharted 4 is pretty damn good. The shooting isn’t great, but the stealth is. (And any encounter that doesn’t start out as a firefight seems to be doable using stealth). I expected to like the story on the small scale of character interactions and backstory, and indeed do. But somewhat shockingly I’m fully engaged with the treasure hunt plot too. The environments are just amazing, and I can’t think of a game with better looking animations.

112

And finished, such a great ending. I think UC4 is definitely in my top 3 for video game storytelling.

What I don’t understand is how people who clearly obsess over the tiniest details of everything else can end up accepting such lame puzzle design.

113

We all find our hills to die on.

114

Christ on a stick this game is beautiful. The added downsampling from 1440p is glorious, not a single jaggy anywhere, flawlessly pristine image. I just arrived to Scotland and wow, beauty.

Only two flaws I detected so far, 30fps sucks donkey balls (anytime I move camera fast I can see the judder of missing frames on every refresh) and I still hate how many people I am forced to kill. Why can’t I knock them out instead of breaking their necks? Why can’t I have tranq guns ? It feels so wrong that I catch myself shooting them in the legs.

Obviously this is a long ass and thousand times addressed topic. And for some reason it did not bother me as much in previous games, they felt more “arcadey”, plus you are killing evil warlord’s mercenaries and some shadowy evil order goons there. But here, first big shootout and it is against guards in a prison and at an auction who are just doing their jobs.

115

I did not like that scene as well.

Unrelated, the DLC is available August 22. I look forward to one last spin in the world.

116

So I played through all four games this month. They are good (except the first, which is really dull lot of the time) for what they are - cinematic popcorn blockbuster without any big ambition. Characters are fun, setpieces are awesome, locations are beautiful. Gameplay is good to mediocre, though never boring.

But again and again one issue kept coming to my mind, and it is nothing revelatory, I am sure thousands of people have already complained about this. But it still surprised me again and again that with each game, this flaw was never addressed when it would have been so easy to do.

I am of course talking about the almost complete separation of narrative (characters, cutscenes) and gameplay (murdering hundreds of people). I love Nate, Sully, Elena, Chloe…but for the life of me I cannot understand, why didn’t Naughty Dog provide players with the option (only an option!) of dispatching enemies nonlethaly ? All it would take is:

  • make default takedown animation into knock out/chokehold instead of neck snap
  • make Nate have a tranq/stun gun by default
  • lower the amount of enemies in certain sections (wave after wave is more boring than fun anyway)

These do not seem like difficult things to do, hell the series even attempted it in Uncharted 2 at the museum. Why not extend that for the whole game (and sequels)?
In U4 it really took me away from the experience when you have these gorgeous, beautiful human characters in cutscenes, and then in gameplay I am killing dozens (hundreds…) of guards who are just doing their job.
Note that I am not saying get rid of the combat and killing people. Keep that in, but as an option. Give also the option to get over stuff without killing, so those of us who care about consistency of narrative with gameplay can enjoy it (I still enjoyed the series a ton, mind, but I would have even more if nonlethal was an option).

Obviously this is all water under the bridge now, but maybe for the future games (probably not Lost Legacy, releases too soon) ND could address this (but they probably won’t, judging by Neil Druckman’s opinion about it). For me this was the greatest (and pretty much only) flaw of this great series.

Fourth game was particularly bad with this, since it actually played some human drama and characters looked more real than ever. Graphics is just stunningly™ beautiful, ND have fantastic artists and programmers:

I am definitely gonna replay this one someday.

117

Uncharted 4 has an achievement for killing 1000 dudes called “Ludonarrative dissonance” as a lampshade for how often that discussion has come up.

https://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/uncharted-4/trophy/140663-Ludonarrative-Dissonance.html

118

The Uncharted exists in a pulpy world filled with villains and heroes, where life is cheap and pirating is still considered a viable career path.

119

Yeah I know, but making a joke about a bad thing does not make the bad thing go away. (I understand that many people do not consider it bad and it does not harm their enjoyment. All I am asking for is an extra option for those who do consider it bad).

120

Was it the second one where the bad guy says something along the lines of: How many people have you killed to get to this point, and you call me a monster?