Shrines in BOTW were the worst. The engine was genuinely interesting. Everything being legitimately traversable and designed around stamina was great, and I’d love to see more games utilize the premise that everything you see is accessible. But all that traversal just never got you anywhere interesting. Eventually you’d find a shrine, take longer to load it than beat it, then load back into the world.
TOTK I just never got far enough to feel if it improved.
The world is jam packed full of new and interesting. It quite possibly has more new and interesting than any other game ever made.
Enemies similar to previous enemies you’ve encountered but with different twists and in different situations are part of enemy design. It’s supposed to happen. It’s what real worlds look like.
If you don’t like open world period, fine, but there’s a reason it’s by far the most successful game they’ve ever made, and it’s because nothing matches the feel of open world done right, and they did it right.
I’m not sure why you think every interaction in an open world game is supposed to be completely hand crafted from scratch.
The scale is part of the point, and Elden Ring nailed the sense of exploration of a huge, open world that maybe hasn’t happened since Skyrim. It’s that rare to capture that sense of awe.
Sniper Elite 4/5 are my favorite stealth game. Huge maps with a lot of ways to approach combat, the way they use noise works really well, and who doesn’t like exploding a grenade on someone’s chest into a truck engine to disable that too?
Hitman (I honestly have no clue what they’re calling it now; it was 3 when I bought it) also has a passable rogue-lite mode now. The missions don’t have the same hand crafted polish as the real missions, but you start light and earn your way up to gear, with varied challenges to unlock currency, and potentially alert future targets on future maps if you’re sloppy. If you like stealth, hitman’s brand is a little different, but it’s solid overall.
Combat also varies heavily between weapon types and equipment weight. You have to approach combat completely differently with different gear, so you can play it again with less of a feel of exploration (probably not none; it’s huge), but completely different battles.
The performance (at least on the Pro; I gave my original to my brother) has definitely improved a lot, too. It was a slide show on the original and the pro with and without boost mode enabled for a good while after I bought the PS4 pro, but it’s not bad now. Load times suck though. I basically only made progress once I switched to PS5 and got to take advantage of the SSD. (Note that PS4 games still load way slower than PS5 games on PS5, for the most part.)
But those moves have traditionally come when a game is out and has, by whatever metric, failed. Or, at the other end of the scale, when a game fails to get off the ground earlier in development, and a publisher decides to cut its losses, or as it would probably say, “reallocate resources”. To commit five years of work, to build an entire company around the goal of producing a single game, and then throw it all in the bin just days before it was supposed to come out is a whole new level of ineptitude that’s particularly cruel, even by this industry’s cruel-by-default standards.
Abandoning a project right out of the gate before there’s a real chance to see what it can be is “cruel”.
Recognizing that a product doesn’t deserve to be shipped is a good thing. They gave it a great chance to get to a finished product, evaluated where it was at, and had the decency to not shovel shit out the door and rip people off.
Everyone knows, the absolute best value add to a power hungry mobile device is the ability to use that power to inefficiently mine some random junk cryptocurrency.
So I hope it’s that. (No I didn’t read the article. There’s no version of this that isn’t a scam.)
Do you know how much space I could save (and transfers that could be prevented) if they offered alternate branches that didn’t pack obscenely large textures onto my steam deck for no reason? You already know what textures you load on low, medium, high, ultra texture quality settings. Steam offers branches that are easy for users who care to use. Why not use them?
PS5. Easy. New hardware does shit older hardware can’t. And while there are games older than PS4 I like, there aren’t anywhere near enough to choose them over actually modern shit.
And newer indies often do modernized takes on the stuff older games were limited to.