I don't care for (western) AAA games in general, but if you were to ask me which one I'd consider the worst, I'd always point to one of those inanely hyped-up pieces of perfect mediocrity that started this whole trend in the first place - games like Heavy Rain (a failed attempt at making "Zodiac meets Mystic River" made by a complete hack and utter creep with a penchant for total contempt for the medium he's working in),
Heavy Rain I always think of like Bioshock Infinite. At the time it was hailed as a turning point for the medium, a wonderful piece of interactive storytelling. But the more you play Heavy Rain, the more you realise it’s just a crap game with a crap story that only passed muster at first glance because it’s disguised by the gameplay, and players are used to games playing fast and loose with the idea of characters having motivations that arent even in the same ballpark as the gameplay mechanics you’re given to play with. If you wrote a piece of genre fiction that just despised the reader in the same way, the reader would just be chucking the book in the bin while mumbling ‘this makes zero sense from the character motivations on up to the scenes themselves, and needed both a rewrite and an editor’.
The progression of the Uncharted series on PS3 I think of as just emblematic of the AAA industry at the time. It starts as a cover shooter after Gears popularised the ‘pop up and shoot targets then pop back’ play, but wants to be more more, it chooses cinematics but pushes any actual gameplay around investigation, puzzles and exploration to the back, making those aspects simplistic because at heart it’s a solid cover shooter, sold to cover shooter fans, it’s just masquerading as a matinee adventure serial as the cinematics and writing are it’s USP but it doesn’t actually want any gameplay to go that way. It knows what shooter fans want. I compare it to Mass Effect 2, when, similarly, everywhere you go, from a factory to an ancient ruin to an alien spaceship all has lots of convenient waist-high cover at geometric angles around as that’s what the combat arenas are about, you can see the combat side of the game is based on current trends but it’s still a BioWare rpg elsewhere, it’s not pretending to be something it’s not. It’s just that Uncharted isn’t really interested in the player doing the ‘elsewhere’ it leans on throughout so it always feels jarring to me. Having said that, the end bit of ME3 always makes me smile with the random turret section added in between you saying your goodbyes before the final section. Because heaven forbid the player hasn’t killed anything in the last 3 minutes.
The tedious ‘dissonance’ arguments just come up more with Uncharted as some players expect more from what are well-put-together games while others are more ‘hey it’s just a cover shooter I don’t care that it masquerades as something else as it’s USP’, which is totally fair enough. They just rarely came up at all for HR that just didn’t care that it made no sense at all, and I suspect that’s down to adventure game players already accepting that the writing of the game is going to paper over the cracks with a straight face even if those cracks become chasms if you ever play it twice.
Anyway, I don’t think either the Uncharted or ME games are bad, this isn’t a dig at either (I love the latter and think Uncharted is well put together for what it was/is). I just think that they, just like actually bad ones like HR and BI, are also full of the trends of the time, they all add up together to remind me of ‘trends in PS360 games’.
