Cecilthedarkknight_234 said:
Sack of Cheese said:
Linearity.
A linear game is not necessary bad, it just means your experience is manually crafted by the developers. A well-crafted adventure can be just as fun as an open-world sandbox one.
I truly don't care if a game is linear or not due in part that I'm a huge retro gamer. Most nes, snes, sega master system, sega genesis and turbo grafx 16 where very linear but still fun to play aside from a few expectations. What Upsets me is when they take a series like metroid which is known for it's exploration, back tracking and weapon upgrades and dumb it down. Such an example would be the heaping disaster we all know as Other M, which took away everything we grew to love about the series and squashed it.
I find it a little funny that you say that you don't care if a game is linear, and yet Metroid fans seem to be the most vocal when anything dares to make a Metroid game a little more linear.
I hate to use you as an example, because I don't want to make it seems like I'm picking on you in particular, but I am tired of the criticism that when a certain series that tries to be particularly different with its gameplay and story in a new game is always a bad thing, and I find Metroid fans to be particularly guilty of this. Their complaints about linearity are second in my book of "Complaints about a particular game that I am sick of hearing" right behind the Mass Effect 3 ending.
There are multiple ways to look at it, though. First off, I was never a big Metroid fan. I didn't grow up with Super Metroid, and I wasn't very good at Metroid Prime, and it took me a lot of use from walkthroughs to make it through it. I get that its fans love it for particular reasons, and that Other M took a different route, similar to Metroid Fusion, with more focus on a plot, which tends to make games more linear. I also see that Fusion gets a lot of flak for that reason. I watch SpeedDemosArchives' videos of speedruns, and in one of their recent charity Twitch events, Metroid Fusion was one of the games that was being played, and some people in the room with them would
just NOT SHUT UP about Adam, and when it reached one point late-game where you aren't being guided because of plot reasons, someone actually said "This is point where it actually becomes, you know, a Metroid game!"
I just hate that, when they say that X game is "not an X game" because it tries to be different. It all just reeks of "I don't like change!! Never change anything!!" to me. Personally, I'm fine if a series tries to mix things up. I'm never too attached to one gameplay style that I can't bear to see it altered in any way. In that sense, I was fine with the gameplay style of Other M, a little less exploration, and a larger focus on story, because I thought it was an interesting change. All I ask is that the changes hold up the game well. I thought Other M's gameplay could use some tweaking, but I thought its style was fine. (I really would have preferred to use the nunchuck's control stick rather than the Wiimote D-pad, that would be the first tweak for me)
As a Zelda fan, I frequently see this a new game is released. Fans always seem to hate it compared to the previous major release when it comes out, but a few years later, they like it enough to hate the new one for being different than it. It's very frustrating cycle.
-You will notice that I haven't brought up Other M's story and characterization yet. Mostly because I didn't like them either for pretty much all the same reasons as the fans, but it takes a lot for a game to make me truly mad, and Other M didn't make me mad. I just think the game is 'okay'.-