| KBG29 said: What makes TLOU gameplay great is the variety of choices you have going into each encounter and the strategys you can create. Every time you come across a group of enemies you can look around and determine a battle plan. How many supplies do I have? How many enemies can I see? Which types of enemies will I be facing? What is the patrol route of each enemy? Who do I need to engage, and who can I avoid to save supplies? |
This I think sums up the problem with modern game design. That's the design philosphy of most "dumbed down" games and Naughty Dogs are masters of it, that they always want the player to feel in control.
They design each encounter so the player tends to naturally make the best choice, or they design an encounter so that you can approach it in many different ways and they all work. The player feels good about himself, seldom frustrated.
To me this is deception and I always get a very artificial feeling when playing this kind of game.
Instead, classical masterpiece games like Half-Life 2, Thief, Deus Ex and Dark Souls didn't make the player always feel in complete control. You often made the wrong choice, you felt frustrated, it was challenging. And that's what made them great.
Like the demos they've showed for say the latest Hitman or Splinter Cell games. They show how you can approach each mission in three different ways - pure stealth, lethal stealth or guns blazing - and we're supposed to be sooooo impressed. But if the level is very consciously and cynically designed with all of this in mind, that the player will always feel in complete control, then the end result will feel artifical and not satisfactory.
