Anyone read stalking shadows? I enjoyed it. I like the addition to the lore (also my favorite thing about the game). Pred is actuality scary in the book. Imagine that 🤨
The book is so much better than the game
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Does it follow the same story that’s tied into Predator Hunting Grounds?
Still have it on my audible backlog. Good to hear it is scary though. Might fire it up this month for some atmosphere.
Yep. It chronicles events leading up to the game
I think they’re equally poor
You have to get through 2/3rds of the book and then some timeskips before it even starts and fights are like 1 chapter then its back to this no-name’s inner monologue.
I think your poor you dont see me bashing anything you like. But then again your probably the guy who goes out to eat at a Fancy Restaurant and asks for Chicken Nuggets and Mac and cheese
you’re free to do so btw
not sure what the tantrums about
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Cause im bored at work and I know your hard scales can take it duhhhh
kk as I was saying time skips are GARBAGE storytelling and you can basically skip to the last fight
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Bought it here way early into the games life.
Amazing book.
I will admit it did read like a tom Clancy book but I’m not going to say that’s a bad thing
Yes because Bethesda’s way of just allowing recruits to blast through the ranks is way better.
Remedied by not starting at recruit.
Imagine if we had to follow The Predator sniperman on his sniper adventures and flashback segments talking to his commanding officer, no one cares. Its literally filler.
You mean predators talking to each other…
YES!!!
I’D LOVE TO SEE HOW PREDATORS INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER
at least in conversation.
Not to mention conversation are an important (albiet not the only) way to establish character
I mean
Mass effect’s entire thing is literally conversation
TLOU1 is literally infamous, for guess what, the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Which guess what, is built apon heavily with conversation.
You probably already know this but I’m going to hammer it in anyways.
What about stories that’s literally about a recruits rise through the ranks?
And how are time skips bad writing?
Things take time. We don’t need every detail of how some one got promoted one small rank. And if we did have all the details it would ruin the pacing.
And do you have a problem with flashbacks as well?
Time skips. Dont even get me started on time skips.
Time skips have ruined so many anime over the years.
Even the Witcher was ruined with time skips. Like they could have hd three seasons with just the first season if they didn’t time skip every 39 seconds
no its people. like cheesiest possible military hoo-rah dialogue for over half the book
Thats not what Predator is.
Flashbacks and time skips are literally filler unless you’re writing a thriller/mystery.
Then the problem would be dialogue not flashbacks
Every story is different. And it still defeats your point about time jumps in general
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Time skips literally skip over filler to the main it that happens in future events.
Flashbacks can help add context to a story like a characters backstory.
A. Zero stakes? What about a situation where a group of characters doesn’t know what happened to X, a survivor/generic tells them what happened in a flashback. Maybe X died. Maybe they escaped. In fact
Lord of the rings did this literally. When Merry and Pippin went missing. We don’t know whether they died and so it used a flashback to show us what happened.
And filler?
What about a characters backstory that’s plot reviliant or like the previous example of a “what happened”
It sounds like your using generalizations rather than inherents.
No it doesn’t. Flashbacks helps pacing when done well. Imagine having a characters backstory shown until they show up say, halfway through a season, or book, or game, all for a side characters side story.
No properly used flashbacks are used to add to the current story at hand.
And time jumps are literally there to jump to the main story. Oh god we didn’t learn how this character got promoted 5 times in 10 years which has little to no bearing on the plot.
Zero stake filler.
Jumping around time periods destroys pacing to begin with. Even excessively disjointed mysteries become annoying to follow.
Its giving up on natural plot progression to begin with and just jumping ahead or backwards.
If you have to cut to black and interrupt the whole storyline to give some 10 minute explaination of a characters backstory to characterize them its because you’re a hack and couldnt present it to the audience in any other way besides explaining it directly to their face.
Its braindead and lazy.
Yep, mystery as I said above. Or some kind of anthology like v/h/s where its just cutting between stories and time periods with 0 investment which is what this book is & executed poorly.
Plots dependent on time skipping as a vehicle for storytelling are redundant garbage. Anthologies are also a meme just to throw a bunch of short stories together because there’s not enough substance there.
Your entire point here is “flashback bad”
And why does it have to take 10 minutes?
Flashbacks can be short too. Like the one in lord of the rings.
A. You wrote about genres not moments but I’ll say that was an error on one of us and just move past it.
B. Basically it needs to be plot relevant and you can’t know what happens/needs to have a reason for it to exist.
That’s literally any scene. Any scene can be not plot revelant. Any scene can retread old information.
Your problem seems to be common problems rather than inherents.
You even admitted that the Lord of the rings flashback was good so clearly there isn’t an inherent problem with them.
No it’s not each story builds on each other.
It’s either building Dutch’s and Zues’s trust of each other, Dutch’s first appearance which establish’s his role in the world, establishing character connections, or building up Zues’s knowledge of predators which is what gets Dutch’s trust in the first place. (So basically my first point)
Regardless let’s go back to time jumps and say the book is bad.
If you removed the time jumps would that solve anything?
Congratulations now your jumping from base to base doing the same things as before except now Zues is a rookie the entire time.
“Time skip bad”
What’s wrong with short stories?
Length doesn’t determine quality.
(With exceptions like Mag size for guns if you want to be technical and go outside of stories)
Imagine the Predators intro but after they’re parachuted in they give you a black and white flashback of each character. What do you call that? Filler. They ask Isabelle what happened before she got abducted and it transitions into 'nam tier flashbacks…
no one cares.
Its autistic filler & could have been covered in a couple lines of dialogue. Just panning time and reducing screentime for things that could actually be relevant. Red flag sign of sparse content.
No one cares how they rose through the ranks, we know they are spec ops, we don’t need to see their medals. None of this is a mystery. What they were doing before the movie began doesn’t matter.
Predator movies drop you right into the action.
Trying to develop a character within 2 paragraphs.
Which is essentially what these flashbacks are.
The good short stories don’t and just let people infer details because there’s content they have to actually get to. The only thing more filler than constant character flashbacks are sex scenes.
If your story doesnt need to take place over the span of YEARS then tighten it up simple as.
The audience is capable of infering details without cutting-to-black infodropping someones history in detail. Exposition dumping is reserved for worldbuilding and things later relevant to the story, character flashbacks are just bad. Show not tell. Why start the story at the point you did if you’re going to jump around? Not including prologues ofc.
Half the book would skip worthless details and he’d have to write things relevant to the plot so yes.