playing a big name video game for a change. nine hours in so far. i tried writing a longer thing about it but it just kinda feels like there's been a lot of effective action sequences but also i'm pretty sure i'm barely at the beginning of the Story Proper and that's a long ass time to set the stakes for "the actual game". then again, i guess i'm expected to do like 50 hours of side quests in addition to the another 15-20 of main story i have?
it just feels like there's too much video game in this video game. it's an open world ish game, so i guess it's on purpose that it's not a super tight experience... but like, for that to work it requires me to get something from just wandering the world, and it so far doesn't feel like the type of open world game that does that for me.
it's very difficult to put into words how i feel about this but maybe something like: i think the game wants to tell a cinematic 20-30 hour story through action setpieces, which is fine. but it also wants me to spend 70 hours exploring and doing side quests that may or may not have something to do with that cinematic action setpiece main story. and i think these two aspects just don't work super well together, at least not when implemented like this?
there's just something about this particular implementation that makes me feel like a different kind of abstraction might work better. maybe not a first-person game at all? a lot of what you need to interact with in this game could just be inert set-dressing in a different type of game. a lot of the game's interactions are ultimately there specifically because they decided that this is a game where you're behind the eyes of a character in the world, and where one of your main interaction verbs is clicking to shoot