I sure hope so, I got quite burned on the last big budget game I’ve played years after the hype. God of War 2018 felt like a culmination of every wrong with gaming at that time (outside of mtx) and AAA games only got worse from there.
I went into detail here. In short, nothing was actually engaging. Combat, puzzles and traversal all felt shallow.
Does it also include those cutscenes where you have to press a button that pops up on the screen or you have to start the cutscene over again?
I hate those because:
- Every console has a different layout for basically the same buttons.
- I like cut scenes being little breaks where you just watch and soak it in. At least assuming the character doesn’t make choices I hate or suddenly surrenders because a few enemies point weapons at them (after probably having fought more of those enemies actually using their weapons instead of just threatening it).
- If I’ve seen a cutscene already, I’d rather skip it and get back to the good gameplay. Maybe the interaction was intended to reduce that “go away cutscene, you’re boring, I want to get back to the fun stuff” but I don’t find it accomplishes that at all.
- It’s not good gameplay. Even if I don’t end up panicking and hitting a wrong button or missing it because I’m not ready to think about where the X button is on this particular controller, it’s not rewarding at all to succeed, other than the “yay, I don’t have to repeat this stupid shit anymore”.
- And I especially hate ones that prompt mashing buttons as fast as you can or rotating a stick as fast as you can (and this applies outside of cutscenes, too). I don’t find anything interesting about testing the physical limits of my thumbs and wearing down the buttons or sticks involved faster in the process.