Watched the Super Best Friends LP of it. Glad I never spent the money on it. Having said that, I'm kind of weirdly tempted to get this during next year's summer games drought or something.
The general western design philosophy has mutated over the years. This is a totally natural process. At this point there's consensus and a certain quality bar and anything "archaic" is often seen seen as lesser and rejected in prettiness that robs the player of genuine agency. I find it interesting that @jec03 called out Max Payne in particular. That series is a really clear microcosm of this change. 1 and 2 were unabashed video games, where you are in full control nearly all of the time. Max Payne 3 constantly wrestles the controller out of your hand to rant and rave about how cool its presentation and story is. Whether that approach is better or worse is totally subjective, but personally? Not my thing at all.
So yeah, I'm pretty much totally with you here. I play a lot of modern games though, and keep up with things. I tend to do a lot of "retro" gaming in the summer months while the release schedule is thin and dry for the modern platforms. September through March I feast on the modern stuff.
2nding Ecco, Journey and Fez. The whole second half of Journey from the Underwater part and onwards is a real emotional shitstorm for me... Every single time. The bit where you have to stealth past the machines... Eurgh.
And Ecco gave me a fear of open water I've never shaken, and probably never will.
Yeah, I'm tired of open world games too. They seem inherently more of a meandering form, made to squeeze hours out of the player. As I get older, my time is increasingly precious. I will play large games if they are dense and packed full of worthy content (Souls, for instance, or Witcher 2 since it was free of the meandering open world bullshit,) but I'm not going to spend 60 hours travelling between side quests. Fuck your plain ass farm fields and woods.
Possibly. The creative minds behind this are some of the people that I think are responsible for my perceived downfall of the FF franchise... So... Eh.. Maybe? Cautious optimism.
Have you played Dark Souls 1 since the time of writing? DS2 is good but the first is a vastly superior game in a meta sense of being more cohesive; all the disparate elements that make up a video game are far more unified and it's generally the fairer game.
I miss Witcher 2's tighter narrative experience. Skyrim influenced all these games to add garbage MMO style side content. Like you activate quick travel, really is this FF14. Im getting nothing out of this open world busywork they added. And yeah Witcher games always had that kind of side stuff but they're mandated more of that into the main quest line. If Im playing nothing but the main questline, there shouldnt be all these "go kill some wolves then I'll give you info" shit happening.
I absolutely agree with this so far. Still a fantastic game, but I think the open world nature of it hurts it overall. But then, I also don't think there are many open world games whose open worlds are truly justified and well done.
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