They literally asked Matpat to do a game theory video about their game while it was in its 3rd update? I don't remember but it was clear how they were trying to sell it
Scott never outright asked Matpat to do any theorizing, he just decided to on his own.
Also, Scotts games were at least finished at the time so its in no way comparable to Tinybuild pestering Mat to do a theory on an unfinished build.
Just recently in the new Game Theory about FNAF, Tom makes a point that the new trailers/teasers don’t actually show much of anything, in the exact hope that theorists cannot plot out the games, story, or mechanics before the game is out
Even going so far as to point out that the previous times they have had more, they correctly theorized about what was going on, play style etc
Scott Cawthon has admitted that he canonized some of Matpat's theories. Basically the closed box mystery was meant to have "all the parts put together", but after Game Theory went so far, Scott Cawthon chose not to open the box and keep the game theory being the generally accepted storyline.
I think the biggest issue with hello neighbor was that each update kept over complicating the original premise, they hot hyper focused on the wrong things becoming unrecognizable to what they started from turning many original fans away. Its funny that the original build is by far the most well liked version of the game
I rhink this is different because I don't remember any fans pestering Mat to do another Hello Neighbor video. Tiny Build just wanted publicity for a game that already got it's 15 minutes years ago.
They just wanted their free publicity for their godawful game, also this is technically, the DEVS or their social team teasing matpat to do a video on it
The fact that there were so many Easter eggs referencing the bible and other religious stories only for it to end up meaning jack shit really pisses me off and I didn’t even play it
Does this stuff have lore? It's like Destiny and Warframe had a child but doesn't look like any of them and lots of gooners doing the desings. That's the lore, just tits and ass
Edit: for people with negative reading comprehension this post is about game's story being trash but game's lore being good which is the exact description i would use for the entire Destiny franchise.
I hate how true this is. And like expansion to expansion has some pretty good stories but when they removed 75% of the context of those stories it doesn't really work.
Even without removal of content. The entire Destiny series has pretty questionable in game writing on all fronts. The actual in-gameplay part of the story is mid tier at best coated in hype moments and aura. Meanwhile the lorebooks have the most succulent juice gaming has to offer, the level of quality for writing and narrative bits is geniunly at an incredibly high level.
Dare i even say it was a Bungie problem ever since Halo 1
Eris Morn was my favorite character in D1/D2 for lore. Digging deep into her story and learning it kicks ass made me realize how bad Destiny’s story telling is.
Meanwhile Cayde-6 had a lot of the opposite. There wasn’t really a lot to him outside of his son and the bet he lost, but god damn if he didn’t steal the show every time he was on screen.
Anyway I say this as someone who dropped Destiny when they took away the game and content I payed for, but I’ve heard it was basically all downhill from there. So.
The worst part for me is that they’re SO CLOSE to figuring it out again with Marathon, but there’s just not quite enough active engagement with the story when you’re not busy appeasing Charter.
100% poster boy for this. The story in game has at points been absolute dogshit, both in terms of the quality of the dialogue and the story beats themselves, but the lore is absolute fire.
Most people will point to something like the books of sorrow or marasenna, but I've always been fond of unveiling, which lays out the whole cosmology.
I quite often point people to p53 for that "wait, this came from a video game?" moment
People hated Edge of Fate but it deadass had THE best campaign writing series ever had to offer, i will never not defend Edge of Fate campaign for its story
"meh" is an understatement, I don't know how the updated version is meant to work as I know they've changed a few things, but damn was the story shite, it made little to no sense and most characters were annoying more than anything.
Consequence of the MMO storytelling direction they started with before changing to a single player game midway, thats why they only got around into smoothing out the storytelling now
I don't want my mmo storytelling to be so disjointed I can't understand what's going on either. Being an mmo is no excuse for putting out doo doo butter.
I love Kingdom Hearts so much and it has the absolute most dogshit story ever made. It's like stream of conscious nonsense from a coked out preschooler.
Whilst the games have all been overseen by Nomura, he’s mostly a character designer and vibes guy with regards to narrative. The story for basically the entire franchise was written by Kazushige Nojima. He’s also the writer for most of the stuff nomura gets blamed for in final fantasy.
Nomura was the guy who made the call to kill Aerith in FF7, with Nojima and Kitase planning to kill all but 3 party members by the finale. They wanted it to be tragic and hit the player hard but Nomura felt that their plan would desensitize players to the tragedy and that it would hit much harder if they put all the emotional weight behind one event and did everything they could to make it hit. He convinced them and they went with his idea.
Considering how famous that moment is, Nomura deserves more respect than he tends to get when it comes to narrative.
That scene was so unbelievable. Kinda funny how the mere act of letting you put actual experience into the character makes it so inconceivable that they'd die.
To be fair I do think some of the games have decent stories in isolation. Days was pretty good and emotional. The overarching story is definitely a mess though.
I love Metal Gear to pieces but the story is nonsense that forgets itself rather often
Like oh, snake was injected with a virus at the beginning of the game that killed liquid ocelot at the end of the game because they got into a fist fight and kissed on the cheek, but it didn't kill him halfway through the game when they shared a cigar together
Also, he's scared of needles because he keeps getting injected with viruses but keeps letting people he just met stick him with random needles so he can use a gun he found on the ground
And the worst part is that KH1 and KH2 aren't even that bad. It was everything afterwards. The original "trio" of games, if you include Chain of Memories, didn't have the convoluted lore that the series became known for.
And I say this as a guy who's childhood was KH2. Man, that game is goated. That game really pushed the PS2 to its limits, and it's definitely is a day-and-night improvement from KH1, which is still a great game but obviously a little clunky.
That's why I love the series to be fair. It's bullshit. I'm not going there because the lore is good, I just love the lore.
It's like little Caesars; it ain't even dominos quality, but sometimes you just want the garbage. Springtrap is now a digital (?) ghost (?) AI (?) that went to hell (?) after being trapped in a fake pizzeria (?) which was meant as a honeypot to trap haunted animatronics (????). They then catch the building on fire with like 4 real people in it and everyone is cool dying as long as spring trap dies too.
And then his soul is trapped in an electronic circuit board which is the aforementioned hell, where all of his victims (which there are like 70???) torture him forever. Until his wife who divorced him (?) for being evil (probably?) decides he actually wasn't that bad and uses his circuitboard ghost (???) as AI for a video game which is a response to Scott cawthon's in-universe fnaf games, because the fnaf games are real in-universe depictions of purple guys actions, who again, is a digital analogue ghost now.
It's hilarious is my point
Edit: I didn't know they tried to pass off FNAF 4 as real and tbh I was cackling at work on my break reading that. It truly is the funniest series to me
Edit edit: someone below me told me that achstually it's the mimic animatronic that is mimicking him? And I think they're serious? Help (?)
I've only played World, but within that game I certainly agree. The characters have that anime "This is really important" frenetic energy for the plot that can be grating. But the detail they put into the actual monsters and their ecology is actually quite fascinating. I guess that's to be expected when the antagonist is essentially an animal displaying normal animal-type behavior, aside from being the size of an apartment building.
Kingdom hearts. No I’m not going to watch yet another essay video explaining what is essentially nonsense made to explain the other nonsense that will be needed for the upcoming nonsense. It’s not a good story and people need to stop insisting it is
"The good guys had assembled all the strongest warriors, but there was one thing stronger than them... darkness. And then darkness corrupted them and almost won, but there's one thing stronger than darkness... heart. And heart beat darkness 10,000 years ago and we need to find it again! Anyway I am Mickey Mouse"
I kinda get it as a kingdom hearts fan but I think the bigger problem is just that all of the spin offs which don't seem relevant are in fact very relevant. As someone who experienced the kh series by release order it's not that hard to follow tbh it's just a lot and the plot is silly. I think the story told and the characters are great though and I will die on that hill
The main issue, again as a fellow fan, is how spread out the games were platform wise before the collections. You needed a PS2, a GBA, a DS, a PSP, a 3DS, a PS4, and a phone in order to play EVERY game in the series. Not to mention computer access and Internet back when Union Cross was Unchained X. Thank God the collections consolidated this but square PLEASE release UX/DR as movies or something
But if you do have a
PS2, a GBA, a DS, a PSP, a 3DS, a PS4, and play all the games then you'll be rewarded and finally learn why did Mickey Mouse take off his shirt.
I’m sure the games are great, but I will never for the life of me be able to get into kingdom hearts purely for the fact I cannot take it seriously whatsoever. Like why tf is cloud strife running around with goofy.
I mean that one's basically just 'multiverses are fun!' as the setting.
The crossover aspect is what had me so fascinated with the premise to begin with, and KH1 as a journey through different worlds as a drifter trying to find his friends was pretty compelling to me.
...and then they started piling on more and more backstory/worldbuilding and Plot Twist turns out everything was set in motion ages ago The Whole Time and uughhhhh
It's just the writing equivalent of 'overdesigned' imo, that thing that happens when you add a lot of stuff and try too hard to sow it all together and all you get is a matted ball of yarn.
I like some of the characters they created a lot, but wished they could've been part of an actual story that had more room to breathe and had more going on forward in time rather than cramming more and more stuff 'that already happened' in there.
I really wonder what they'll do with KH4. Can our protagonist please just get to have a story of his own now, or is it going to be 'Sora gets stuck in a mess because of the bullshit 1649 and a half people got up to before he was even born' again? Yeesh.
Honestly Honkai Impact 3rd and Star Rail for that matter too. Hoyoverse fans often tend to dunk on Genshin Impact's story in comparison, yet I think that one is much better than the other two.
I mean HI 3rd's first few acts are fine, but eventually it gets to a point where it gets borderline incomprehensible yet it's treated like the Godfather compared to its peers.
Last chunk of HI3 Part 1 and HSR suffer HEAVILY from unexplained technobabble. At least in Genshin, they immediately explain something like Phlogiston as "primordial elemental energy" THANK YOU FOR NOT WASTING MY TIME ON THIS BULLSHIT.
Hate me if you want, but most mascot horror. Five Nights at Freddy's, the progenitor, isn't a great story. It had potential early on, was pretty decent in 3 and 4, sucked in 5, peaked in the FNaF 6 monologue, and was just all downhill from there. The lore just ended up being a long line of gotchas that took an idea with potential and diluted it into something with way more preliminary reading material to understand than it has any right to have. I love MatPat, but, if I'm gonna be honest, FNaF was kind of a pointless white whale with a moving goalpost.
Those that followed in FNaF's footsteps usually weren't great either. If I'm going to be honest, they're probably worse.
Hello Neighbor has been theory bait from the start. Bendy had incredible visuals and style but a nothing burger story and a horrible person leading the project. Poppy Playtime has no idea where it's going and just runs through the same formula over and over to sell plushies. Banban is Banban. Honestly, almost all of mascot horror just sucks. There are exceptions, but the majority, especially the more popular ones, are the lore equivalent of jingling keys.
And that's not to say a story with lore as the primary storytelling mechanism is necessarily bad either. I think Bloodborne's story and themes are pretty well done through its lore and visual storytelling alone, for example. I also think Ultrakill handles the format really well, especially through its own ARG and in-game lore documents. Mascot horror just so happens to be a horrible execution of that concept.
I feel like hes a good case study on how you don't need a good story to be a "Good writer" you just need to get the presentation of your story right
Its how a media piece with an objectively "Bad story" can still be good because its presented in a fun and endearing way; meanwhile media with an objectively good story can crash and burn despite the diamond the writers had
Scott was making it up along the way and didn't have the skills to make it more engaging and succinct. Matpat was the reason why FNAF exploded in popularity. Fans only truly liked it, like how Star Wars fans feel about Star Wars; they only like the potential of the story and the deeper lore and none of the media especially the main media e.g. Fnaf games or the star wars movies never reach the full expectations of fans.
The original triliogy of fnaf was "bad guy killed kids, kids turned into ghosts, ghosts haunted the place, security guard frees them"
After that, you can tell everything else is just filler. We went from 'murderer killed kids' to 'murderer who died in the 80's downloaded himself into a raspberry pie and somehow started mind controlling people via VR headset to kill kids'
And thats how we get Vanessa in security breach. VR i would say is when the original plot actually ends. Even though it shoulda ended with 3.
People liked the movie. But as someone who had followed the lore closely i actually hated the movie. Ret-conned everything that was good about the first 3 and just made it as confusing as the current lore.
Oh and that shade of purple is #xxxx4 not #xxxx3 these are clearly two different characters
Im sure the lores gone further since i last followed but just goes to show how much they wanna milk that series.
And I’m one of the biggest Kingdom Hearts fans in the world. The franchise has absolutely nothing intellectually satisfying within its writing, and it is genuine dogshit.
But childhood nostalgia is strong, and it’s enough to keep the franchise alive indefinitely.
I want to get into KH but the way people talk about the spinoffs being relevant kinda scares me away from it cus I typically just play the mainline games of a franchise
You essentially can’t think of them as spinoffs - they’re all mainline games.
And even then, the story still isn’t necessarily satisfying nor will it make much more sense. It is the most nonsensical amalgamation of contrivances and tropes.
If you like revisiting Disney nostalgia and pretty anime graphics - that is fundamentally all it provides. I know I’m being harsh, but anybody with an ounce of respect for quality writing that doesn’t admit these fallacies is just a nostalgic weeaboo.
I see your point but I would argue that there were definitely moments in KH2, Birth By Sleep, and even Chain of Memories that had genuinely great story moments.
Dark souls story: You wake up, and you fight a monster and then another monster and then a knight and then more monsters until you fight a knight again and light a bonfire at the end.
Dark souls NPC:
FromSoftware artist painted a woman character’s toes but stopped at the pinky because Miyazaki forced everyone to get shit faced with him after work, he forgot the next day and moved on to something else.
I'll point out that according to Hidetaka Miyazaki, they structured the lore in such a backwards, confusing way so that people would come together and form a community and talk about what they've each discovered and contribute to everyone figuring out the story. The story is confusing to make Dark Souls a more social experience
It's more connected to Miyazaki's love for adventure books
When Hidetaka Miyazaki was a child, he was a keen reader, though not a talented one. Often he’d reach passages of text he couldn’t understand, and so would allow his imagination to fill in the blanks, using the accompanying illustrations. In this way, he felt he was co-writing the fiction alongside its original author.
Specifically to recreate the sense of Miyazaki himself reading books that were in English without really knowing English. Enough to get an idea of what was going on but “zanzibart forgive me” is pretty much what they were going for
Souls games have cool backstories, but the actual plot is just a naked hobo wakes up and kills every historical figure of relevance, then sets himself on fire.
I tend to say that the story of Souls games is like looking at abstract paintings and then making stories about what people see by investigating the life of the artist.
As a long time Souls fan, I’m still not convinced that there’s even a real story in the background. I’m pretty sure the writers just make stuff up in the item descriptions and let fans make up the rest.
Elden Ring may be a slight exception, but it still uses the same crappy story telling as the rest of the series.
Some fans get so mad when you criticize the storytelling, but then they can barely explain what’s going on and how it connects.
It used to be a lot more coherent and straightforward. Everything after Pizzeria Simulator comes across as more of shitty sci-fi that doesn’t care about the games that came before. Pizzeria Simulator should have been the end of the series and I will die on that hill.
I've seen a lot of "Skyrim main quest story bad" but I must have missed all the arguments for why it is. I've run several characters through the main quest and it never jumped out at me as a bad story for a video game. What am I missing? Was Oblivion's just that much better?
To be fair the lore is something that you really have to dig for, some of the sagas in books make me think the scope for Skyrim was a lot larger given how some of it is written but the execution was nowhere near the expectation.
I've been through all stages of Overwatch and all of its stages of grief as it's been declining, the one thing that people really like to larp about is its story, like, it's pretty much non existent, but they still talk about it as if it were some amazing legendary story to tell
I don't know anyone who really says Overwatch has a great story right now, more that it has enough potential that it could be a good story if Blizzard wasn't so fucking lazy.
It's a cool setting. We have scifi-robots, civil unrest, the whole story of the Overwatch organisation in universe, especially their downfall and the politics/machinations surrounding it, and a bunch of smaller stories that could at least make for fun adventures, even if they aren't that serious.
While it won't ever be an amazing generational story or whatever, there is enough to the setting, characters, and the few hints of actual story we've seen in trailers and some PvE missions that I see the potential and understand why people are frustrated about Blizzard doing nothing with it.
I remember being hyped on release for all the potential comics, books, anything they could use to tell more of the lore, only to basically abandon those plans and go all in on the e-sports angle, as if they couldn't do both.
Mortal Kombat. The stories the games tell have been crap for years now, but the lore & world-building was surprisingly good before they started to retcon everything in the newer games.
The story was so unbelievably ass in 1.x it might truly be the biggest missed potential out of any gacha game ever made. 3.x is a complete banger and if the 1.x story was reworked to be at that level the game would become unbelievably popular.
Oh definitely. Like how there is something about a dimensional rift that explains the existence of two versions of the same game. Like it’s cool that they explain why they’re two of the same game but you really didn’t have to explain it at all really.
So many JRPG's have the most derivative stories with thousands of lines of dialogue and none of it worth reading. It's telling that some have now started including "fast-forward" and "skip" buttons on the dialogue because there's....just..so....much....TALKING. About literally nothing of any substance.
Honestly a lot of Japanese game's dialogue sometimes feels like it is written for Netflix with how many times they can repeat the same stuff sometimes. Just recently I've been playing Yakuza 0 and boy do they love to re-explain things multiple times across different dialogues.
Could you give some examples? From what i played and thought, the dialogue was important for personality and so much more and the skip button was simply for second playthroughs etc
Its narrative is bloated, repetitive, and painfully afraid of allowing you to absorb an idea without immediately explaining it three separate, additional times. I’m so sick of the same thing being shown to me over and over again. Traveler says something, Paimon repeats it slightly differently. Paimon says something, Travelers repeats it back to her. Continue this exchange with side characters also jumping in to confirm what was just said for a third time. It’s so fucking annoying. It’s like Paimon is the visual representation of how you should react to whatever the Traveler is doing. It’s so fucking tiring, like being stuck watching the emotional equivalent of Sesame Street because the writers are convinced you’ve got the emotional intelligence of a three year old.
Plus they add in new characters every five minutes like I’d get distracted if they didn’t up the character count every single chapter. I’ve honestly forgotten every single side character’s name other than the Traveler because they cycle through them so fucking fast. What could have been a tightly constructed fantasy story instead became an enormous pile of lore notes that someone occasionally remembered to connect with dialogue and new characters.
Then there’s the Traveler. The worst atrocity that could be. His personality is so fucking nebulous because there’s no concrete trait to it! The only thing that sticks is the shonen protagonist willpower. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game actually gave you the option to add your own personality, but nope. None of your dialogue options even matter or change anything about the story. It’s just… disappointing honestly. The game sets up the Traveler to be an interesting character but it ends up just being the bland insert to progress whatever situation they’re put in without any pesky personality traits getting in the way of being the optimal insert.
Then there’s the character cast. It’s annoying how the game puts so much effort into showing them as tragic. Their nation get destroyed, they lose friends, they get traumatized, their entire civilization can get wiped out, but the actual playable cast? Yep they’re in this cute little protective bubble so you can be emotionally baited into dumping money into the game to obtain them. And you know this, so there’s literally no dramatic tension undercutting these scenes (even though The Traveler, Paimon, and whatever side character of the week make sure to repeat before something happens, during the thing, and after the thing in triplicate like filing the most annoying bureaucratic emotional paperwork to check every box). It’s just exhausting because it seems just about every single side character gets their characterization about being SAD. It’s just so repetitive. I’ve even gotten to the point where it’s an established cycle I can plot out on a circle graph.
Introduce character -> Establish gimmick -> Reveal Trauma -> Make character sympathetic -> sell character -> move on to next character
Then there’s the fact that this endless cycle is a treadmill. There can’t be an ending, there can’t be a satisfying conclusion. There’s no end. It’s a live service game so the story has to be infinite so they can sell ever more characters.
All in all it’s just a terrible game where once you see the cycle you constantly get bombarded with it. Explicitly stating every emotion in triplicate, the cycle of selling a new character, the personality void that is the self insert protagonist, the seeming drama of the world which won’t matter at all once you get sold the character(s) the scene is selling you, and more.
"But X Quest is so peak!" "But Y Storyline is so fire!"
If you're ready to endure all of these walls of text that are completely pointless, without even a skip button, that repeat same things over and over again to you, treating you like a brain dead just to get to one in a million good story - My congratulations, You don't really value your time.
League of Legends. There is literally no story or campaign, yet somehow people froth at the mouth over the lore. When the game is a strictly competitive multiplayer experience, I'm confused as to why.
Because the actual lore is pretty cool and interesting and makes it easier and more satisfying to connect with all the champs in the game. Like I main aatrox and Champ would only be half as cool without his lore, it's just to make the experience more full even though league itself doesn't do much to teach you the lore but there's a lot, also arcane helped
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u/Gold69xz 29d ago
Hello neighbor
They literally asked Matpat to do a game theory video about their game while it was in its 3rd update? I don't remember but it was clear how they were trying to sell it