It’s as if two completely different studios made these games, and the one behind Syndicate had no idea what made Unity great.
Funny you say that. Unity was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, the primary Ubisoft studio who are responsible for much of the good work they’ve done (think Splinter Cell, Far Cry and AC: Black Flag). Syndicate was developed by Ubisoft Quebec, and it was also that developer’s first AC game.
Man I bought F.E.A.R. recently for like a dollar on GOG and I really want to play it, but I don’t want SecuROM malware all over my system.
I’m sorry. The attention span comment wasn’t directed at you personally, it was reflecting on your point that people would find it too slow and boring with fewer kills. It wasn’t meant as a jab at all.
I think it sounds like we’re mostly in agreement. And yeah, the O’Driscolls spawning in and popping up like whack-a-moles is another great example!
I don’t really disagree with you about the nature of the story, and I don’t have anything against the overall narrative. I just personally think the story could have been told with fewer bloodbaths and outright massacres and still be compelling. In fact, for me every innocent you kill would feel more impactful morally and narratively if there were fewer of them.
But maybe I’m out of touch with the attention span of the modern mind.
It might well be a me-problem. I had the same issue with Sleeping Dogs that I just finished last week. So I might just have a fundamental problem with the type of gameplay design these kinds of games go for and the fundamental ludonarrative dissonance you have to be able to look past to enjoy them. I just have a hard time squaring off war crime levels of mass murder as “getting into a little too much trouble”. Killing a lawman or two as things get out of hand in Valentine? That’s getting into a bit too much trouble. But Arthur Morgan literally kills hundreds upon hundreds of people and that just breaks my immersion.
I’ll get through the RDR2 story one day. I played it for two stints last year but I just space out and lose immersion every time the main story forces you to kill one hundred lawmen in the middle of a town. For a game that put so much effort into making the open world vibrant, alive and dynamic you face very little consequences for committing what can only be classified as genocide in the main story.
Even that thread is full of mixed messages but I guess I’ll just risk it.