As someone who has played over two hundred hours of Dark Souls, using it as a benchmark for environmental storytelling as if it deserves the rose tinted glasses treatment is asinine. The voice acting is terrible, and much of the richness of characters are linked to wholly arbitrary decisions. Siegmeyer and Sieglinde's arc is one of Dark Souls most emotionally powerful story arcs; it deals with the subject material a great deal. But pointing out all of Infinite's window dressing flaws when Dark Souls central storytelling is done wholly on you being told things, doesn't compute.
Again, if you manage to get all the way to Ash Lake and play out said arc, Sieglinde's killing her father is shown through us hearing her emotional as a result of her doing the deed, and all we see is her standing in a static position over a dead body. We don't even see her strike the final blow. Hell, we don't even see Siegmeyer turn hollow. All the environmental storytelling is told to you. You don't experience it. And that's the point. You're playing the aftermath of a world's embers. The great adventures are over, crumbled to dust.
Point being, many things can be said about many games, even the top ones, and if you and others wish to peel the thinnest layers of the onion as if they are central, you're missing the point, and making a post that's more about casual versus non-casual. On its own merits, from a subject standpoint, the most central issue games face isn't what new gameplay concepts they employ, or whatever. So many people use this wholly arbitrary measure to make fake salient points. Core to story is engaging characters and conflict resolution. It doesn't matter if Infinite doesn't reinvent the wheel; it's the job it does with what it has. Subjectively, Infinite succeeds at a level other games have not.
Which, again, rides on subjectivity.
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