Eurogamer gives Uncharted 3 an Eight, Comments go full retard

[Kantor]

padib said:

Kantor said:

...

The railroading of Uncharted 3 isn't positive or negative by itself, and that's exactly my point. The reviewer clearly doesn't like it, but fails to account for the fact that other people do. This in particular is just absurd:

"Your freedom of choice risks ruining the shot. Indeed, throughout the game, if you jump into an area you are not supposed to visit, Drake will crumple on the floor dead, Naughty Dog switching role from movie director to vindictive god. That is not your predestined path: Game Over."

Your freedom of choice? Since when has Uncharted, or any remotely linear game, had anything resembling freedom of choice? You walk down a narrow corridor and shoot whoever they tell you to shoot, solve the puzzles they tell you to solve and scale the walls they tell you to scale. If any action adventure TPS has deviated from that formula, please tell me about it, because it could potentially be quite brilliant.

It's not that he doesn't like it. It's more that he doesn't like the direction it took for the 3rd iteration. I wrote abt that here with quotes to support my idea: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=4279343.

It is also my understanding that players of a series take two approaches esp. when it comes to the 3rd installment, approaches which I 've already mentioned: 1) Either they want it to break its own mold or 2) they want it to solidify its present nature. Clearly being in category 1, he let that pervade his review. It doesn't mean he doesn't like rail shooters, it just means he wanted to see something new be done with the series and to his displeasure it doesn't happen.

I think that dynamics is normal for the review of the 3rd installment in a trilogy tbh. With that, the "one voice" argument, whether valid or not in terms of the quality of a publication, falls short since we don't know what UC2 reviewer thinks about the breaking the mold idea (typical of 3rd installment critique).

To expect the sequel to a game which has been received brilliantly by critics and has sold well to completely revamp the basic formula of the series is unreasonable. Back when I still wrote editorials, I wrote this: http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/83289/how-to-make-a-good-sequel/

The majority of sequels end up with slightly more negative reviews than their predecessors, but some of the franchises which have innovated the least (such as Assassin's Creed from II to Brotherhood) have actually improved over time. It's actually far more of a problem if you completely overhaul a successful formula. Look at Dragon Age II, or Command and Conquer 4, or Dawn of War: Soulstorm. Revamps can be done well (Look at GTA3) but there's no real point in risking it when people love your formula so much. It's far more likely that everything will go horribly wrong. 

Can you imagine if the linearity and railroading were removed? It would be a mess. You would be falling all over the place and having to restart entire sections, completely destroying the flow. Story events would get horribly out of sync and continuity would go out of the window. It could be done successfully, but that would take far more than two years of development, and the longer your game spends in development hell, the higher people's expectations get.

I would have no problem if he were complaining about a lack of innovation (though in that case no Call of Duty should ever get above a 7) but he isn't. He's complaining about something which has been a feature of the series and the majority of the better games in the genre since the beginning. Arkham Asylum is one of the rare games which permits you some exploration, and handles it very well. Not every game can or should try to manage that.

We don't know what the Uncharted 2 reviewer thought about Uncharted 3, but more importantly, we don't know what the U3 reviewer thought about U2. If the U2 reviewer had made these same comments, they would hold more weight, because we know that he loved Uncharted 2, including the linearity aspect. We have no idea what the U3 reviewer thought of U2. He could well have despised it, so anybody who loved it would most probably find themselves disagreeing with him on U3 as well.