You do realize that prior to RE4's release Capcom was playing it up to be the scariest RE ever right? And then it, well, wasn't anything like that. And I will fully admit that the earlier RE titles are not scary, but they still had great horror atmosphere. Lot's of exploration, long stretches of nothing really happening, great music. Sure they fell more into the Texas Chainsaw massacre slasher type jump scares horror than something like Silent Hill or Amnesia does, but there's certainly a place for that in the market. But RE4 wasn't even trying to be horror on the same level as the older RE games anymore, and that's some low hanging fruit to fail to live up to. And all because they really wanted to try and be an action game. As it is, the only horrific thing about RE4 is playing it for five times as long as it takes to beat RE2 and realizing you're only half way through.Originally Posted by Aulayna
Just because you weren't running into walls quite as often doesn't mean that the tank controls worked. Turning and evading enemies was still a pain in the ass. Actually, probably a bigger pain in the ass since the games entire focus was now on combat rather than on exploration and puzzle solving like the earlier games. In fact, I have to say that the older games (at least after the addition of auto-aim in 2) actually control better because the controls at least made some sense with how everything else in the game had to be designed, and they didn't dramatically hinder your ability to move in the tight spaces of earlier titles. But controls that cumbersome have absolutely no place in an action title.2) Because said tank controls actually worked better on an environment you could move around freely for the most part rather than pre-rendered back drops where most of the tank control issues came from the forever switching camera angles when the backdrop changed?
Bad AI is one thing. An action game designed with the intention of the player just standing still and shooting everything as it slowly walks towards them is another. Let's be honest here, a game based around standing in one place and just shooting enemies as they slowly walk towards you is about as boring a design as I can imagine for something that's trying to be an action game. There is no action there, there is certainly no real challenge (aside from fighting the controls when you do have to move and aim), and it's just not fun. Granted, combat in the earlier RE titles wasn't that fun either, but at least they didn't base their entire games on it.3) You mean just like the vast majority of other games at the time which often involved simply hiding around a corner and taking pot shots as the AI predictably came toward you?
Other games do QTE's as bad or worse so I should give RE4 a pass? No offense, but that's the silliest argument I've seen in days. RE4 had terrible QTE's, end of story. I don't care if others did it worse or if modern games still do it poorly. It doesn't make them suck any less in RE4.4) This isn't something specific to RE4 really. You either like QTEs or you don't. RE4 didn't really have them in abundance either and I think more modern games are far more guilty of doing botch jobs of them than RE4 ever was.
When did I say hard? Sure, aiming was easy once you managed to find the red dot, but finding it was the problem. That was the only tricky part about aiming. But there was no reason that problem needed to exist in the first place, so any time I was waving the screen around trying to find it instead of quickly centering on my target and shooting didn't have to happen at all. It's a stupid mistake on Capcom's part and it absolutely detracts from the experience for me. Not because it makes the game harder, but because it's cumbersome and it wastes time making most fights take longer than they need to. And given how long most fights are and how often they come up throughout the game, it's an unforgivable mistake as far as I'm concerned. And that they repeated the exact same mistake in RE5 tells me that it was probably the result of developer stupidity than simple oversight.5) I don't really recall anything being particularly hard - let alone due to potentially cumbersome aiming and I found the controls responsive enough that aiming was never really a major issue. Infact, if anything, I recall the laser making aiming such a non-issue that it was actually hard to actually miss a target.
"This complaint could apply to all kinds of other games so it must be silly." Yeah, sorry, no. I've already stated exactly why I feel the games combat is boring and repetitive. In fact, it changes very little over the course of the game. Now that's not such a big issue for a game that you can beat in a few hours. Hell, even if RE4 was 10 hours long, it wouldn't be as much of a problem. But we're talking about a game which is 90% combat, and where 90% of that combat never really changes or gets more difficult. More tedious as enemies get harder to kill thanks to armour and shields? Absolutely. But never does it get harder because you actually need to learn any new skills. In fact, that thing I said about most fights being a case of stand in one place, shoot enemies as they advance, run away and start it over again in another part of the room? That pretty much never changes from the beginning of the game until the end. Every battle plays out the same exact way, the only difference is they just get longer as they throw tougher versions of the exact same enemies at you. That's not something that holds up over the length of a decent RPG. That is not something that stays interesting 20 hours in. That is something that simply is not good game design.6) This is such a generic complaint that is more a matter of personal taste than bad game design. This criticism could be leveled at a whole host of games that have you doing the same trout from start to finish and RE itself always got a bit of rap for being too short - so heaven forbid they tried to tackle that one.
And yet when I got to that part I had to go back to an earlier save in order to have enough money to buy it because I'd spent everything at the last point the weapon seller showed up and didn't have enough for the rifle and the scope. As for why I wouldn't buy it, why would I buy a weapon I had no use for rather than buying better versions of the ones I was using as well as ammo and everything else? None of the battles before that happen at a range necessitating a scope and I'm not the sort of person who is going to spend half the game staring at a zoomed in circle in the center of my screen if I don't have to. Arguing that it's somehow my fault for buying a weapon I neither needed until then, nor even wanted is laughable. Not surprisingly, I also spent the rest of the game with said rifle in my inventory only to never really need it again. Again, that's just bad game design. Either make it doable without or make it so there's no way I can screw myself. I literally tried that portion several times with a pistol and shotgun just so I wouldn't have to go back to an earlier save and redo a sizable chunk of the game.As for the sniper rifle thing, really that game threw so much money and ammo at you that space or weaponry was never really a massive concern and in a game about killing things why wouldn't you make sure you have various tools of killing things at your disposal.
Since I've technically already proven you wrong about this part I'm really not under any obligation to prove you more wrong, but what the hell, I'll play along. Here's a list of third person games that included such wonderful things as moving while aiming, strafing, and used two analogue sticks instead of one. I'll even include the years they were released so you can see just how far behind the 8 ball RE4 was already in 2005.SOCOM, cool, find me 5 other third person shooters that handled well and didn't switch to first person view when aiming. I legitimately can't recall there being that many of these types of games on the market at the time.
Max Payne - 2001
SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs - 2002
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - 2002
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne - 2003
SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs - 2003
Kill Switch - 2003 (also invented the cover system used by Gears of War interestingly enough)
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow - 2004
Red Dead Revolver - 2004
Star Wars: Battlefront - 2005 (this one's more contemporary to RE4 since it was released a few weeks before I suppose)
Anyway, not all of those are what I'd consider the best implementations of dual stick movement and aiming in a third person game (Kill Switch and Red Dead Revolver I don't remember being very amazing. Not bad, but not great), nor are these the only ones by any stretch (just the ones I'm most familiar with). But the point is, games had this stuff largely sorted out as far back as 2001. And I would gladly go on record as saying that when it comes to controls, I would rather play any one of these than RE4. RE4's control scheme is slow and cumbersome compared to any of these. And the worst part is that they can't even say they were just too far along in development to do anything else considering they scrapped the version of RE4 they showed at E3 as late as 2003 and started over from there.
Anyway, I think I'm going to need a break from debating this further. I'm not sure we're going to convince each other of anything really and these long posts are exhausting.
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