One of my least favourite tropes in modern games is when the story has your character doing interesting dramatic things, and then the gameplay has the player doing tedious busywork. The player does stuff like picking up ladders and putting them down, shooting stuff until it breaks, climbing ropes etc. and this pads out just enough time until the story can get going again. What's supposed to hold the players attention are character beats and narrative tension, but what the player is doing moment to moment isn't exciting and largely doesn't matter.
Reading this great takedown of ladder-centric level design and looking at the experience goals for Uncharted is giving me whiplash!
If 50~60% of what I’m doing in the Uncharted games isn’t hitting their most important goal, it seems like the designers failed to achieve it? At what point in each of these games’ production did environmental puzzle fluff overtake the intended experience? Is this a by-product of prestige games needing to be super long for whatever reason?
