Yoda
Member
(I'm only referencing the original)
To the subject question no. It's a great game for its genre, but not I'd argue it's genre is what limits it from being considered for any kind of "greatest of all time" award or anything similar.
The "movie/story heavy" style game by its very nature removes agency from the player. What makes games different (an imo better) than movies is your ability to impact the game world. If I were to break down the games high level components:
* gunplay/third person shooter - It's certainly above average, but not the best
* exploration/world building - Great, but when I turned the game off, I never pondered about the game world's secrets, lore, etc... The type of mystery games like for example the original pokemon managed to illicit was absent for me.
* systems/immersion - it had a crafting system that played into the limited resources survival mechanic. This also encouraged you to limit your use of resources for taking down enemies. It was not overdone which was welcome... I suspect being limited was to not distract from other aspects of the game.
* story - It was pretty solid, the father <-> daughter dynamic was executed amazingly and played well in the game. This was it's strongest aspect by far. I wouldn't say it's comparable to the best movies (I haven't watched the HBO show), but a proper adaptation could easily get a 8/10 from me and I'm a very harsh critic for movies.
If they dialed down the story, they could increase the amount of effort put into the other aspects. This would probably make it a worse experience for me, so I'm happy they didn't. But it goes back to my original point, the genre limits how much of a "game" it is.
To the subject question no. It's a great game for its genre, but not I'd argue it's genre is what limits it from being considered for any kind of "greatest of all time" award or anything similar.
The "movie/story heavy" style game by its very nature removes agency from the player. What makes games different (an imo better) than movies is your ability to impact the game world. If I were to break down the games high level components:
* gunplay/third person shooter - It's certainly above average, but not the best
* exploration/world building - Great, but when I turned the game off, I never pondered about the game world's secrets, lore, etc... The type of mystery games like for example the original pokemon managed to illicit was absent for me.
* systems/immersion - it had a crafting system that played into the limited resources survival mechanic. This also encouraged you to limit your use of resources for taking down enemies. It was not overdone which was welcome... I suspect being limited was to not distract from other aspects of the game.
* story - It was pretty solid, the father <-> daughter dynamic was executed amazingly and played well in the game. This was it's strongest aspect by far. I wouldn't say it's comparable to the best movies (I haven't watched the HBO show), but a proper adaptation could easily get a 8/10 from me and I'm a very harsh critic for movies.
If they dialed down the story, they could increase the amount of effort put into the other aspects. This would probably make it a worse experience for me, so I'm happy they didn't. But it goes back to my original point, the genre limits how much of a "game" it is.
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