Then you should play uncharted and the last of us. This is peak AAA
TR2013 doesn't push any boundaries, but it does execute a standard formula more effectively than anything else I've tried. I did not think the two sequels were anywhere near as good!
(I haven't played The Last of Us though. I hear it's incredible, but I can't deal with the subject matter.)
But, 2 and 4 are very different. 2 is a solid 3d action-platformer, while my favorite parts of 4 were when it basically just became a "walking simulator"-type game for long stretches, with most of the action and platforming just feeling tacked-on and superfluous.
> (I haven't played The Last of Us though. I hear it's incredible, but I can't deal with the subject matter.)
I should have loved it, but bounced off hard. The prologue had me, but a little while into the game proper I just wanted all the main characters to die, including the one you're really, really not supposed to want to die. They're all horrible and I didn't like or care about them a single bit, to the point that I wanted them to fail. The protagonist in particular, I had to root for him to fail because clearly this humanity-on-the-brink would be better off with one fewer self-interested mass-murders around making things even worse. That's... not a great way to motivate the player.
Isn't the question of the players morality vs the "enemies" core to the entire concept of the game though? I think the lesson the game is trying to teach is exactly that: by what standard is the protagonist actually any "better" than those he regards as enemies? By the end of the game, I think doubting the main character is hopefully exactly the point - he isn't a good person either. In a completely lawless world such as that inhabited by the characters, I think this makes sense to explore.
Make the central character a likable, non-mass murdering fellow and this huge central theme of the game disappears - The Last of Us is harrowing by design, I'd argue, and its commitment to being harrowing is what sets it apart as a game in a sea of relatively emotionally shallow "AAA" titles of the same era.
I think I quit right after the game had me murder a couple soldiers for bad reasons. I already have several GTA games I can play, which, thanks to tone and expectations, aren't frustrating when they ask me to do that kind of thing. My head-canon is that the soldiers instead shot everyone there and that was the good ending for the story.
OTOH, my friends who praise these games do so exactly because of that. To which their own.
Linear game that's awesome: Pillars of Eternity.
Linear gameplay that's not awesome: Tomb raider games.
Or maybe different games are made for different people. That could also be an option.
I started the game, went to margit, found him too difficult, and then, with no particular alternatives, pretty much explored the entire map aimlessly, wishing for a clear direction on level appropriate content. It was hard to find the next thing to do. I didn’t want to skip through things with ashes or multiplayer. I didn’t want to farm.
By the time I actually found this content there was nothing left to do besides warp to bosses and murder them, or look up the obtuse quest lines and warp around to complete those. A huge floor on character progression is finding the flask upgrades. But since they’re just lying around you just go from having none of them to quickly finding more than you need for 80% of the game.
Like… dark souls would just be a worse game if every door and elevator was open from the beginning. It would just be confusing and frustrating if you started making “wrong” explorations.
I would greatly have preferred elden ring with pretty much the entire open world cut and instead just a tour of the legacy dungeons. The open world just compounded on some of dark soul’s weaknesses. Like finding even more cool weapons that you can’t practically try without farming a ton of upgrades and changing your build.
Playing through Elden Ring made it clear to me how impressive Breath of the Wild was in retrospect. Even without any meaningful awards (or because of?) the exploration in BotW is just so much more memorable and dynamic.
Sure, I'm aware somewhere in the back of my mind that everything has been laid out for me, but in my favorite games, I'm able to suspend my disbelief. However, if I can't figure out where to go, or if the game is too hard and I die too frequently, or if the game is too easy and I don't feel a threat, or if the pacing gets bogged down by optional side quests and bullshit skill trees... it's very easy for any of these things to break the illusion.
I'd actually hold up Portal 2 as the best example of a linear cinematic experience done right. The pacing is perfect, the difficulty is perfect, and there's no distracting side quests or experience points. Combined with the first person perspective and the mute protagonist, I really feel like I am Chell, trapped inside Aperture Science and talking to Wheatley.
About that... Tomb Raider 2013 has probably the most gruesome death animations I ever encountered in video game.
When games don't have a penalty for dying, players will sometimes fall back on a trial-and-error approach, where each individual attempt stops being meaningful. Some experiences, like Celeste, are designed around this type of gameplay loop, but it usually doesn't work well in a cinematic experience.
The most common penalty for dying is lost progress, but this also doesn't work well for cinematic games, because the experience looses its magic once you know what is going to happen.
So Tomb Raider takes a different approach. Checkpoints are frequent, but the death animations make you really, really not want to die!
I'm very squeamish, so I always had to close my eyes when I died. But even the chance that I might see something was a good incentive!
And there’s quite a lot of those.