I agree, The Order could really use a page or two from TLOU's story telling and gameplay during down time, hell if it could use a lot of things from TLOU for that matter. I have high hopes from RAD for their next game or sequel now that the engine is there, men hours could be thoroughly used on fully fleshing out the story, characters, gameplay segments and please do more epic set pieces for memorable moments.Again: nobody is asking for nonstop thrills. There's also a difference between deliberate and glacially boring. The Last of Us is a good example of how to handle downtime well. A year later and still everyone has fond memories of the part with the Giraffes. Or the college campus. Or the small town. Or of course most of the prologue. Nobody's gonna have fond memories of Sir Gallahad slowly making his way down a random building and through an alleyway, because there's absolutely fuck all happening during those parts besides the game going "LOOK AT HOW PRETTY I AM!!!"
Did TLoU also have arbitrary slow moments? Because you cite it as guilty of random speed changes, but now saying it's handling slow moment correctly, and I don't quite get what you're saying about game tempo. I can certainly agree that a game can have pointlessly slow moments - I dare say these are padding.The Last of Us is a good example of how to handle downtime well. A year later and still everyone has fond memories of the part with the Giraffes. Or the college campus. Or the small town. Or of course most of the prologue.
It had moments where enemies weren't an ever present danger but these were opportunities to evade, explore, scavenge and craft.Did TLoU also have arbitrary slow moments?
Did you actually look for them? I thought many of them were filled with information.there's absolutely no extra information to be gleaned from any of the collectibles.
Yeah it's certainly not a new style of game. The more they close in the walls of your ability to feel influence over the character's development and game control, and the more obvious it is that the world is just a fakey static scripted set piece, the more claustrophobic and annoying it becomes. Some people dig highly directed, straightforward games though.I actually think the two games are pretty similar. Both are narrative focused. Neither is particularly revelatory in terms of gameplay. Both are far too chummy with movies and hence a little too happy about reducing my role of an active participant to that of a thumb-twiddling spectator. TLoU is just better at what it does.
While in the order, most of the time the level design looks abruply-hatchetly made for "cover based shooter" and the pacing are forced.
I suspect cut scenes are used to mask loading in the Order. As such I doubt they can patch them to be skipable easily. I think the "walking" sections are primarily intended to insist upon the measured pacing RAD designed.AFAIK in Uncharted, the slow transitions were to hide background loading. Could that be a possibility in TO?
If you guys are interested, a few of my buddies on the environment art team decided to a put an art dump on the polycount forums:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=149706