this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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[–] Wild_Mastic 97 points 11 months ago

That's a neat strategy for uploading an unedited film on YouTube

[–] Wilzax 67 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The title text in papyrus was pretty impactful

None of the rest of the film was though

[–] [email protected] 44 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I can still remember the overall plot, which puts it ahead of rise of Skywalker

[–] superduperenigma 17 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I can still remember the overall plot

I could remember the overall plot the first time I watched Disney's Pocahontus 14 years before Avatar came out.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

i could remember the overall plot the first time I watched dances with wolves 5 years before pocahontus came out

this is a lie, i wasnt alive yet when wither of these were released. my point is that its an old story and repackaging those is normal and fine, unless i wanna shit on a movie

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Dude, this joke is both old and inaccurate.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

Damning with faint praise, there.

The Rise of Skywalker made me retroactively hate Star Wars for a while. I still can't bring myself to watch any of the sequel trilogy again.

[–] cuchilloc 4 points 11 months ago

It’s just because you remember Pocahontas re-enacted by the blue man group.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Why didn't this movie develop the nerd following of other properties?

It seems to check all the boxes. Why isn't there a huge Avatar fandom running amuck on the internet?

[–] samus12345 39 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It was very pretty, but not all that memorable. I remember thinking it would make a good video game, which...didn't one just come out? [checks] Yes! Let's see..."Alien Far Cry." Not a fan of that series, unfortunately.

[–] HoloPengin 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Supposedly it's actually pretty decent if you just turn off all of the quest markers and whatnot in the settings. Turns it into more of an immersive story driven exploration game instead of an Ubisoft clear the map checkbox game.

[–] samus12345 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm kinda interested because I really liked the three "Witcher 3 ripoff" AC games, but I tried Far Cry 3 and 4 and just couldn't get into them. I don't know if it's the using guns rather than melee or first person perspective or what.

[–] TotallynotJessica 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Shooters work best when there's plenty of cover or when projectiles move slow enough to dodge. Open world melee games often have wide open spaces with little cover, but shooters can't work in those environments. Open world shooters need dense urban settings, areas with plenty of trees and shrubbery, or only have fights take place in those locations. When there's too much wide open space, it becomes a game of waiting for enemies to peak and hiding to prevent getting shot. That's not as interesting as fighting in close quarters where you can move around more and can choose when to engage enemies instead of waiting for the NPCs to peak.

Unfortunately, dense environments are also more demanding on computers, especially in open world games where you can go almost anywhere. In a linear games, areas can be blocked off and never need to be modeled, but open world games need to simulate a large area around the player, requiring even more resources. Heaven forbid the game needs to simulate the interior of a building 4 blocks away holding an NPC that needs to be able interact with the player at a moments notice. It's why most open world games have loading screens when entering interiors or mostly inaccessible buildings.

Melee based games don't need dense environments to have interesting combat, but shooters do, with denser and more dynamic being better. Open world shooters with dense environments need more beefy hardware to run, so they haven't been possible until recently.

[–] samus12345 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's a good point I hadn't really thought about. I'm trying to think of other open world games that primarily use ranged that I liked and the main one that comes up is GTA. Firefights are usually done in areas with a lot of cover (and the times it isn't are noticeable for how irritating they are) whereas, as you say, Far Cry has a lot of wide open bases when you're shooting, which I just don't enjoy.

[–] TotallynotJessica 2 points 11 months ago

Far Cry often has foliage to hide in, and the main places where you encounter enemies have buildings, hills, or other cover. Animals sneak up on you using flora, otherwise you'd be able to kill then before they got to you. Far Cry actually designs around these problems, but it's less repayable because hitscan gunplay is only fun the first time around. Once you lean the strategy, implementing it successfully requires little skill.

What actually made the Doom reboot and Doom Eternal have better gunplay than Call of Duty style games was making damage avoidable through movement alone. In COD style shooters, bullets travel instantly or move too fast to dodge. In multi-player hitscan can work because positioning and aiming takes skill, but in single player games, this isn't the case. It becomes a game of hiding behind cover, shooting until you take damage, hiding until you heal, shooting until you take damage, and so on. It's less repayable and not very deep.

Doom simply made almost every enemy ranged attack into a slow moving projectile. You have few long range hitscan weapons yourself, and your most powerful weapons have disadvantages that prevent long range fighting. However, if you stay close to enemies for too long, they all have fast and powerful melee attacks. This forces you to constantly move and dodge projectiles, attacking enemies with your shotgun before moving far enough away to dodge projectiles again.

What really makes wide open spaces bad in single player shooters is your inability to avoid damage. The best melee based games also make avoiding damage essential to survival. Hitscan shooters just can't do it as easily, instead giving you enough health to get out of the open and behind cover. It's less interesting.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Compare to Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings. I'm pretty sure you know what those were about, and usually they had multiple layers of meaning.

I cannot for the life of me tell you what specifically the Avatar team thinks about deforestation, genocide, etc. It feels like they just put objectivelt bad things in the movie for the bad guys to do.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think the difference is world building. In the stories you listed there's a sense that you're only seeing a tiny fragment of everything notable going on. History is being made by everyone concurrently.

In Avatar, you see everything notable. We don't care what's going on on Earth (they never hint anything), we don't care what's going on outside this one tribe, the only thing happening right now is the conflict on screen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I actually really don't get the sense of a deep world from Harry Potter as an adult. I know as a kid I did, but the more I thought about the logic involved in the plot the less I felt it held up. I started getting really annoyed with the setting around 10th grade.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

First one was a generic story with some interesting ideas and world, just isn't much to discuss once you get past the visuals. I think with the sequels coming and the expanded lore there will be an uptick in fandom size, but Cameron needs to take bigger risks in the story telling. Avatar hasn't really had a Vader/Luke reveal or "avengers assemble" moment

[–] Stamets 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Because it's just Pocahontas but blue.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Star Wars is just Treasure Island in space, being derivative shouldn't have prevented it from being popular

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Huh. My take from Avatar was that the mighty whitey trope was less about distaste of non-whites, but insecurity of European colonial imperialists.

[–] spacesweedkid27 10 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Remember: Imperialism is ok, unless you are European or caucasian.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't think that's the case. It's just that Europe was able get the upper hand. The ill behavior that comes with that power is an indictment of the human species. China, Japan and Russia were happy to crush and exploit Korea without a European in sight, leading to the current fractured state. (It's practically the setting of an RTS game.)

But maybe we'll figure out a sociological trick that allows us to maintain an egalitarian society, but that's for the survivors of the next few centuries to figure out. (And they may not be human.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

19th century Russia is literally a European colonial nation through every its aspect

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

In the 19th century, when it comes to Korea, Japan was doing the heavy lifting. Queen Min (who couldn't be pinned down by Korea's intensely patriarchal society) developed a spy network in Imperial Nippon to track the modernization of its military as Japanese ambassadors practiced the same gunship diplomacy they learned from Europe.

She became such a problem, Japan sent a literal platoon of ninjas to kill her. Which they did, brutally.

The Joseon dynasty fell to disarray and collapsed in short time, though the assassination of Queen Min wasn't causal so much as Japan was ready to put its war fleet to use, and Korea, with its sweet harbors and strategic significance was a choice target for a test run.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Where'd you come up with that shitty-ass straw man?

[–] spacesweedkid27 -1 points 11 months ago

U mean that one in my urethra?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

yeah so many people lining up to praise the japanese empire....

[–] CombatWombat1212 4 points 11 months ago

Good movie either way

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

An alternative to the (awful) word "impactful" is "significant".