In a nutshell, it's a solid foundation, and I'm hoping a story expansion delivers a lot more now that they have the core game out the door and can focus on the fluff.
If it's an open world game like modern Ubisoft games I'm probably going to have no interest in it. I'd like to see something that has an open-linearity to it. Perhaps something similar to either recent Naughty Dog games, Arkane games, or even From Software games. Any of those developers recent games have level designs that I really enjoy and think would cater well to the Splinter Cell formula. I don't think stealth works as well in open world games as it's too easy to break the systems and cheese the AI whereas linear/contained levels can have enemies dropped in specific spots that make for interesting 'scenario puzzles' if you will.
As for other mechanics, leveraging modern lighting technologies to make dynamic lighting play a role in how and when you can move across a level whilst avoiding detection would be nice. For example. movement of light fixtures to adjust placement of shadows or even realtime day/night cycles so shadows change dynamically across the world. This means some folks would play a level at night whereas another player may only experience it with daytime lighting.
And of course, every good Splinter Cell game has good gadgets.
Probably Psychonauts 2 for me. I had the biggest grin on my face the entire time I was playing it. I loved everything about it and have never been more excited to see what a developer does next. That's a great sign.
Others to note:
Deathloop - I enjoyed this game quite a bit as well, but the ending sort of falls flat and took away a lot of my excitement over that game.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - good game, but I think I overhyped myself too much for it. It just felt like another good Ratchet game to me (which is great, but nothing that really caught me off guard and wowed me either).
Hitman 3 - I liked some of the levels in this one, and loathed others. This one didn't quite do it for me, and I still feel like I'm chasing that 'Helmut Kruger Paris' high after all these years. It's still Hitman at the end of the day though, so it deserves a shout-out.
Guardians of the Galaxy - I'm surprised how much I'm enjoying this, but it's not quite GotY material. Just a good, fun, linear, single-player experience which is something I've been desperately missing. I'm sick of these icon-vomit map-fests that have taken over the industry in the last couple of years.
Metroid Dread - I've never loved a game I hated playing so much. I really like some parts of this game, but also really hate the map-flow and sign-posting (or lack thereof).
Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 look very promising but I'll reserve judgment until they're actually out.
Each time I check in, I notice marked improvements. In fact, I just booted it up yesterday for a bit to play some Darkest Dungeon. Given, that's the perfect game for cloud streaming with its turn-based nature, but I still found the input delay much improved since the last time I tried xCloud. I also noticed that some of the choppy audio issues and visual artifacts that I used to experience have gotten better as well. I don't know if this is random luck, or maybe a new data center was opened in the Northeast/Boston area or what. Either way, I'll be using xCloud more if it continues to work as well as it did for me this past weekend.
There's a juke box in your ship and you can cycle through a ton of different songs and let them play through to your hearts desire. I don't really interact with it much, but it's nice to have the background music playing quietly while exploring the ship, talking to the other guardians and upgrading my perks.
Hooray! I may give this game a shot now. I made it an hour or so in and enjoyed it well-enough, and then lost my progress to the PS5 rest mode issue. After that, I never returned to the game :|
Isn't The Initiative supposed to be MS' big "quadruple A" studio with nothing but the best of the best talent developing the game? Yet they have to bring in a partner studio for help? Don't get me wrong, I actually like a lot of Crystal Dynamics games, but this move is...strange.
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