<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > is a preface</h1>
That year was really a hardware killer
As a PC and PS4 amphibious player, I haven't played a game with a campaign in a long time, and recently I've either been brushing up on the Call of Duty Modern Warfare pass or wrestling with DICE in Battlefield 5, until Subway: Gone once again appeared with me.
For so many years, it was a series that I loved and hated: love was fascinated by the Moscow subway under the nuclear winter depicted in the story, and I was full of thoughts that if I were to write a novel, I would have to put my worldview in a world that was not too different from "Metro", and see how human nature and morality were distorted under the whip of nature. I bought a novel for Subway 2033 and studied it all night, hoping to learn the essence of what I created, but in the end I didn't find anything beyond ordinary people — perhaps because the author was only 18 years old when he wrote it.
Hate, this is much simpler. Some of the level designs of Metro 2033 seem to be sparse today, with no guidance system and no useful hints, all up to you with a bullet lighter and a map. For a person who was born in a single-player campaign and was "poisoned" by the linear main line of Call of Duty, which has little freedom, this is simply fatal. I was lost, stuck, inexplicably killed by monsters, and I probably died more than a dozen times in the acid pool at the beginning of "Metro 2033".
Secondly, the optimization and configuration of this game was also catastrophic in that year, with the home computer can smoothly play "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" proud of the first time I encountered the monster "Subway", into the game that caton became PPT, I still remember the beginning of the fierce battle under the Moscow TV Tower almost put our computer from XP card back to Windows 95.
None of the above nonsense is the subject I want to talk about today, nothing more than to trace my feelings about the cheapness of "Metro", I will talk about the "Subway: Departed" "Sam's Story" DLC that was released a few days ago. I hope that after watching my stupid small talk, you can go to Steam to support the recently launched "Subway: Departing"
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > digression: an easter egg and a touch</h1>
A touch
The body of "Subway: Gone" is called the tear gas artifact of the game industry, at first glance it is just a very moderate nuclear winter mode theme shooting game, which integrates disaster, shooting, adventure, love and many other elements, and is a more common sub-category in commercial games now.
I really wanted to play Stalker: Clear Sky
But I always want to use another title to classify "Metro: Departed" made by 4A games, which is actually different from "2033" and "The Last Dawn", the first two parts focus on the depiction of the ecology of the Moscow Metro, making it a complete social picture, which is excellent for many players who like overhead or history.
"Subway: Departing" is not the case, it withdraws some of its energy from the presentation of the ecology of the end times, and chooses to focus on the previously neglected character modeling.
Show me crying
So we can see that in the main line, although Artyom is still the tool who does not say a word, her wife Anna, her father-in-law, Colonel Miller, and even the entire members of the Aurora have personalities, and their words and deeds contain their own behavioral logic and value judgments.
In particular, the wedding of "Big Man" Stepan and Katia on the Aurora, the player sees a scene that has never been seen in the game before through Artyom's perspective. A first-person shooter game, Len is a train wedding that only dares to appear in road movies. The warriors who fought alongside you in the previous chapters removed their armor and sat laughingly around the organization of Colonel Miller, playing the guitar and humming a minor tune, singing and dancing to celebrate the union of a pair of hopeful newcomers in such a broken apocalypse. It is like a meteor shining with humanity in the dark night sky, temporarily illuminating the "evil land" of Russia swallowed up by nuclear radiation.
The most touching part of the performance is that when the cheerful melody accompanies the deep voices of the tough guys, Anna, who is suffering from lung disease, looks at her husband Artyom. But when Anna looked back at her old father, Miller, who lowered his head slightly, was silent. The veteran soldier, who had not been weak in the face of both nuclear radiation and the D6 campaign, now had a hint of sadness on his face, and under the rough, aging skin was surging with the indissoluble love for his daughter———— From Russia with Love.
An Easter egg
Space Oddity – David Bowie
In fact, from the wedding of Stepan, I probably experienced the strong humanistic atmosphere of 4A GAMES Studios, and the games they made were not cold commercial products, but the characteristics of the Slavic nation that contained emotions in their hearts. In the game, it is actually the character of Colonel Miller, and it can also be projected into the captain of the "Sam's Story" DLC, because the temperament of the cold climate is finally burst out under the fire of a cup of vodka, full of inner strength.
I'm off topic. 4A GAMES paid tribute to a gorgeous rock singer I like very much in the "Sam's Story" DLC, who is also a good actor who starred in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. This gentleman is naturally David Bowie. The American businessman Tom in the game is completely modeled by David Bowie in his old age, and can be reborn in a game made by Ukrainians, and Bowie in heaven does not know how to feel.
The reason I was really sure the 4A was paying homage was when Sam and Tom were just getting out of the submarine to the docks, and a soldier said in front of the radio, "Ground control to major tom."
Elderly Bowie
In fact, "Sam's Story" is not "Space Oddity", the song presents the audience with the helplessness and loneliness of Tom drifting in space, and the lyrics also repeat "Ground control to Major Tom", this continuous cry to get in touch with others, desperately trying to get a little comfort, despair and hope coexist.
The protagonist of the DLC, Sam, is a former U.S. Marine who has lived in Moscow, where language and customs are not understood, for more than a decade, and even joined the Spartan troops in the subway to defend his former enemies. But Sam never forgot his identity, and his American identity drew countless suspicions from outsiders, even if they weren't sure if Russia was still at war with the United States. Sam did hesitate, feeling far more lonely than the Gerren ray that made the detectors whisper, but that didn't mean he would fall into the negative side. He has always been the astronaut who drifted on the russian land, using his bravery and perseverance to survive in this land of radiation, looking forward to re-setting foot on the land of his hometown.
Major Tom
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > the breaking and standing of narrative and space</h1>
I've touched on narrative science mostly in the field of film, stemming from the similarity between movies and games, and I think it's easier to use "Sam's Story" as a martial arts scene than to analyze a movie, after all, the narrative of the whole story can't jump out of the logic of genre films.
Rather than thinking of it as an action shooter, I think the name of an adventure-themed semi-interactive movie would be a better fit for it.
Narrative structure
When it comes to narratology, friends who study Chinese language and literature will surely think of Vladimir Propp and Levy Strauss, who are both masters of structuralism, and most of the theories generally used in the analysis of film narratives are from their hands.
Propp wrote one of his most famous books, Studies on Russian Folk tales, through the study of the star-studded sea of Russian folktales, in which he discovered that there are common elements in all these very different stories. These elements are first shown in roughly the same seven types of characters:
villain
Benefactors
helper
Princesses, or people and things to look for
Dispatcher or sender
Hero or victim
Fake heroes
At the same time, Propp summarized six narrative units: preparation, dispute, transfer, confrontation, return, and acceptance.
With the development of structuralism, Propp's theory was able to spread throughout the world through the Moscow-Prague-Paris route, and new kinematic models were born under the revision and deepening of the structuralist Gremas. In addition, he changed Propp's six narrative units to four: Contract, Test, Transposition, and Communication.
According to "Sam's Story", sam himself initially integrated the sender, the receiver and the subject, and his object purpose was to return to the United States. But when Sam arrives in Vladivostok, he becomes acquainted with the captain and Tom, as well as the settlement guarded by Tom and Kerim. His mission is still to return to the United States, but he must ride on Tom's nuclear submarine to fulfill his wish, and find the fuel rod as the object of his operation. At this time he had assistants: Tom and the captain, and also had a clear opponent, the bandits scattered along the coast of Vladivostok. Here, the messenger and receiver become the tom/captain representative settlement, and Sam becomes an honest and good man (tool man) who draws his sword to help each other.
Tom wanted to go back to The United States
Obviously, when we have established two sets of kinematic models about Sam, we can find that "Sam's Story" is supported by two sets of narrative units and functional sequences, which is a common narrative structure in genre films, that is, the complementarity and superposition of two stories and two meaning structures.
Let's briefly establish two feature families.
Sequence 1: Sam misses his homeland and his father, and must overcome all difficulties to complete the road back home.
It's a story about Tom's personal dimension, and in the first functional sequence, our Sam bids farewell to dawn and buries Colonel Miller, who loves him dearly. Ready to survive in the wasteland destroyed by the nuclear bomb, he will do whatever it takes to return to his home in Santiago and reunite with his old father. The most important thing is to regain the value of your own life. (Hinting that he doesn't want to be Akebono's tool XD like Artyom)
The second sequence: Tom and the captain's struggle for the leadership of the Vladivostok settlement, the core of which is to use Tom as a tool man to find fuel for nuclear submarines and stop the dispute.
This is a sequence of societies in which Tom stepped forward at a time when the settlement in Vladivostok was deeply divided, determined to use his extraordinary combat qualities to regain the fuel rod for the submarine. In this way, Tom's submarines to the United States can set sail, and the captain can restore the settlement he and the sailors have built and implement peaceful rule.
In the game, these two functional sequences are not parallel and isolated, but are repeatedly converted, and the main functional sequences are constantly reduced to secondary in exchange. Here, the fuel rods and the submarine are the objects of the second sequence, and the objects of the first sequence, the only hope of Tom's return to the United States.
When the story ends with the captain pleading with Sam to blow up the fuel rods to stop Tom from driving the nuclear-armed submarine out of the harbor, the two sequences of functions superimpose, and Tom must control his options in such a contradictory operation.
I didn't blow up the ship anyway
At this point, we can modify the kinematic model:
Subject – morality
Object - Blow up the fuel rod
The recipient, the captain, and he represents the remnants of humanity
If the player chooses to blow up the fuel rod, the world's last nuclear-armed submarine will be burned, and humanity can greatly reduce the probability of another nuclear war, but Sam's dream of returning to his hometown will be shattered; on the other hand, if the player chooses to throw away the detonator, the captain will be captured alive, and Sam will eventually return to the United States as he wishes, and whether to use the nuclear bomb depends on Major Tom's conscience.
"Metro" is not the first time to tell a story alternately with two functional sequences, but it is still much smarter for players to choose between good and bad endings than before relying on moral points and special collections. Throughout the DLC I don't think there is a clear contradiction between good and evil between Tom and the Captain, Tom is a shrewd businessman, but because he has always appeared as the sender, we don't have much chance to get to know him.
On the contrary, the captain who deals the most with the player, who misses the old days of peace and has a deep vision of morality and the fate of mankind, which makes him one of the best in the world of Metro.
I've always felt that it's harder to make their own choices than morals, and this time the 4A production team did a good job. Although Sam's main motivation is to return home, this is also Sam's most urgent and important purpose.
However, the production team has drawn a large picture on the bond between Tom and the captain, and some players in the middle of the game play Sam and the captain will drink together and get drunk, and the two people will roll like children, pee wild upstairs, and play drunk. This drunken performance is comparable to stepan's wedding banquet in the main plot, and the player forgets the existence of the monitor at this moment and devotes himself to the innocent and kind friendship between Sam and the captain.
It's so funny to play drunk
This is one of my favorite things about Sam's Story, which has an elaborate narrative structure and a high level of performance in first-person shooter games. Especially reflected in the "Two Colonels" DLC, the 4A production team used parallel montage techniques to show the fearlessness of the two colonels defending their families.
Awkward fusion midpoint
The games on the market are generally divided into interactive games dominated by "images" and game mechanics. For example, the popular "Detroit: Becoming Human" in the previous period, and the "Rainstorm" and "Extraordinary Twins" launched by their production team before are standard interactive games, which use more realistic images and richer sound environments to immerse players in them.
This type of game adopts a realistic image style, and uses extremely restrained interaction methods and limited interaction point design to make the game experience infinitely close to the movie.
The "Call of Duty" series, "Battlefield" series, "StarCraft" series, "Death Stranding" and so on that we are familiar with are all classified as game mechanics, although "Death Stranding" has a great tendency to integrate the two, but it is essentially a delivery simulator.
In these games, the film became an adjunct to the game's narrative, polishing the progress of the story, reducing the player's fatigue after going through the core game mechanics, and sometimes as a reward. This type of film is called "drama" or "cutscene". Everyone is familiar with the pre-mission animation of the "Call of Duty" series, and the "Death Stranding" plot animation of more than ten minutes at every turn belong to its category.
Then it's time to critique Subway: Gone.
What does it mean that there is hardly a single "scene event" in the "Sam's Story" DLC except at the beginning and end? The player's entire game experience process is completed by a point of view, which is the "self-aware point of view" in the language of the movie, in addition to which there should be a secondary knowledge point of view, a bystander point of view.
In film, a narrowly defined self-aware perspective is difficult to achieve. This technique was tried in 1946's "Corpse on the Lake", and the camera of this film completely acts as the protagonist's eyes, just like people play first-person games decades later, but the film and the game have different requirements for the viewpoint, and the film suffers a tragic failure. When I think about it, I also remember that "Escape" has not been broadcast much since the beginning.
When the game changes scenes, you can only sit silly and listen to them unilaterally instilling with you
What importance does the significance of the broadcast have for Subway: Gone, and we take the ending sam and Kerim showdown as an example.
The definition of this duel should be the climax of the entire game, usually shown in a third-person perspective, supplemented by a complete live-action capture of the action. But I never expected that when I entered the tower full of expectations, I was waiting for a set of cats and cats with no physical skills to speak of. Because it is first-person, the entire game shot is shaking in a mess, and Sam's arms are also shaking and shaking, which looks very strange. What was supposed to be the climax of the passage was made into a grass work by the poor performance of 4A GAMES, and I can only express my mood in silence.
The most terrifying thing is that in this whole three-minute period, the player can't do anything, and 4A has not set up QTE at all. In the end, Kerim was killed and Sam himself had little to do with it, it was the submarine that smashed the glass of the tower and Sam picked up the glass, completing the "last minute rescue".
Originally wanted to give "Sam's Story" 8.5 points, my heart suddenly cooled, this is the old problem of 4A GAMES, they have not thought of changing it until now. It's a shame.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > people under the rubble</h1>
Sam
Sam is positioned as a silent tough guy like Artyom, and in this DLC that should show his true temperament, he himself does not have much opportunity to show. He was a little more talkative than Artyom, and was limited to speaking untranslatable Russian or American swearing when killing and interacting with enemies. In fact, if we look deeply into him, we will find that he was a U.S. Marine who served at the Embassy in Moscow before the war, and hid in the subway after the nuclear war broke out. When his life was on the line, Colonel Miller became his Bole, and he naturally became the Colonel's most heartfelt guard.
The DLC gave Miller two very important incentive points, the first time when Sam met Tom, two strangers connected to each other because of their American identity. Tom didn't know his details and only listened to him confess that "I'm from Moscow." Sam didn't have time to speculate on Tom's true intentions, and just because everyone was American, he decided he trusted Tom. Although Tom lives in such a crisis-filled wasteland, he remains sincere and willing to trust strangers, even if they are only siblings.
On another occasion, the captain invited Tom to his house to sponsor him, and the two soldiers chatted and began to drink. Originally, the wine was not a good thing, but it was a Molotov cocktail, but the more Tom drank, the happier he became. This is a scene I have never seen in so many games, a shooter game, which actually spends so much space to show two middle-aged people drinking (still no QTE). Alcohol can paralyze everything, and perhaps make Tom forget about his unattainable hometown for a while.
One thing to say is that 4A GAMES did not hold on to Sam's American identity too much, which was originally an interesting contradiction, but it was ignored in the DLC. Players often encounter other NPCs before they hear, "Are you that American!?" "Other than that, I don't think There's anything different about Sam's portrayal.
Tom
Tom was a great businessman, and I thought he would go back to the water at the last minute and murder the captain and Sam who had come to negotiate, but I thought about it too much.
Tom controlled the settlement with his superior powers, with careful trade-offs, and everyone admitted that his governance was better than that of the captain and his sailors. When we listen more attentively to the NPC conversations in the game, they will complain that Tom is too shrewd, which always makes people feel less humane. This was probably one of the reasons why some soldiers chose to defect when Kerim mutinied.
By and large, Tom was an honest, reputable businessman, at least in his fellow Sam's place.
captain
Captain, standard veteran character. Colonel Miller's most perfect successor, a frank and straightforward man, ended up in rebellion. The captain is still alive in Russia and a whole era, and he will always love his submarines and sailors, which I cannot understand and cannot prevent the world from falling into the abyss. He despises Tom's power, even though he admits that Tom's settlement-building plan is superior to him.
The captain, who wants to stop Tom from holding a weapon with the power to destroy humanity once again, chooses to wear a naval gown and hang a sword that can only be taken out of festivals and celebrations. If Colonel Miller is a sentinel of the Russian Army, then the captain is the last conscience of the Pacific Fleet, and he is the third "colonel." It's a pity that the hero is dying.
That pair of brothers
During the middle of the game, the player encounters a pair of brothers who are yelling at each other for taking over their own car dealership. For a moment, Tom was embarrassed, because the words of the two of them slandering each other were almost the same.
Players can manipulate Tom to help them find the contract book, after which they will get back together and blame the woman who broke up the family.
There is nothing to mention in this story, but the thought of the brothers who have been struggling with the rotten sesame seeds of Chen Guzi before the nuclear bomb explosion for more than twenty years always makes people feel a very cold humor.
Humanity has never changed.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > gameplay</h1>
Weapon & shooting feel
The DLC updated two weapons, one is the M1911 pistol, which fires a hard currency of .45 caliber pistol cartridges. The second is the assault rifle that combines AK12 and Galil ACE, the overall feel is a little better than AKM, and it can be equipped with a hundred rounds of large drums and wooden butts and handguards that resemble Thomson. But overall it's boring, and the shooting feel of Subway: Gone hasn't really improved in this DLC.
There are also very few weapons available for the entire DLC, the submachine gun will not appear until the second half of the plot, the shotgun has only two barrels, and the sniper rifle is the heirloom. Compared with the "two colonels", you know that 4A 80% is lazy in the weapon system again, and it is also okay to restore the weapon variety of "Metro: The Last Dawn".
< h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > epilogue</h1>
The current AAA games all expect to develop towards Hollywood, and it seems that they are going to squeeze their heads to seize the beachhead of genre games, and large companies are gradually unwilling to do those cumbersome and niche themes. Over the years, we've joked about Ubisoft's clone sandbox model, mocked DICE for making Battlefield 5 a semi-finished product, Blizzard for cutting Warcraft 3 leeks, and even IW for making call of Duty Modern Warfare's multiplayers look like it.
Game theory is far from being as well-established as the film system, but our exploration of the artistry of games has never stopped. Dai Jinhua once asked Lucas and Spielberg: "Is the movie dead?" One was the pioneer of the Star Wars universe and movie special effects, and the other was the old naughty boy who proved that commercial movies can also be artistic, and they replied in unison: "Yes, the movie is dead." ”
But the game is not dead, its bottleneck has not yet arrived, it can also integrate more media and culture, we still have expectations, because creators like Hideo Kojima still insist, and production teams like 4A GAMES are still carefully perfecting the works they have released. Overall, the "Tom's Story" DLC is still worth buying, and it is a good help to complete the main plot of "Metro: Gone". The quality is also reasonable, at least the map is redone, and the volume is similar to a chapter in the main line. If you like apocalyptic games like Fallout, Stalker, etc., then this game is definitely for you.
Friends who have not tried it can also wait for Steam to be purchased after it is on the shelves, and it is recommended to play DLC after playing the main line.