This game is going to be good. How good? I don’t know. Apparrently 10/10 good. That’s right, this game will be better than Shaq-fu. Better than the live-action Street Fighter movie. I haven’t played it but I am almost not looking forward to it. I will admit, I tend to get very jaded with the volume of hype put into games. The amount of 10’s coming out with such a small amount of experience is pretty insane. I have never really found GTA to pass the lastability test, so after the inital shock of being able to do “everything”, I am expecting the novelty to wear off. I don’t think I know anyone that has actually played one through, start to finish. Actually, I can think of only 1 person that might have, but I’m not sure. I’m sure he will comment soon to let me know.

It makes me happy to know I’m not alone in my skepticism. Mitch over at Insult Swordfighting wrote a great post on game hype. It does raise the point, with so many 10’s within the first few days of release, could any game ever live up to that kind of score? Also keeping in mind the exclusive review issues. With everyone jumping blindly on the bandwagon with nothing but hearsay and a couple of clips, I am quite happy to watch it roll away.

I do have a few problems with the game already, mostly due to my sandbox hate, but Tycho at Penny Arcade sums things up unbelievably well. I tend to get tired of roaming around pointlessly. The fact that you “can” interact with anything and anyone, doesn’t really mean I will want to find everything out. The whole idea of extending this interactivity to everything in the city makes the task all the more daunting, and near impossible(logistically). In straight story games there are things to unlock, secret areas and it’s fun to find them, there is always an end in sight. Not having that there just takes away that drive to find things. Things to do, new weapons, and eventually I can see people getting tired of finding missions. Rumour has it there is around 30 hours of solid gameplay if you do the missions and only the missions, but it’s the in between time that is the killer.

People drop World of Warcraft because they get sick of running around. People in general don’t like to drive around aimlessly. Travel time is a big part of a lot of online and rpg games, but there is always the added bonus of having company. Sure, theres the novelty of going really fast, shooting things on the way, but how long can that really last? I guess we will find out in a few months.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under PS3, Rant, XBox360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.