In all fairness, HOW could anyone improve on Arkham City? Rocksteady was smart, leaving at their highest point. Arkham City was freaking perfection and they'd be doomed to be overshadowed by their previous success.
They wouldn't have done better than this studio, just given they've already taken the franchise as high as it can go.
It's like Zelda now. An action adventure game that is basically unchanged- you just get new gadgets to play around with every new iteration, and it's awesome enough.
if gamespot were consistent in how much they dropped a score, or didn't drop a score due to those things, you could factor in the difference for yourself by just ignoring that measure and looking at the rest.
The issue is, given Gamespot's past reviews, we don't know if they'll subtract 1 point, 4 points, or even INCREASE points if a game is a derivative sequel (cough cough Nintendo).
The result is, if we disagree on that one facet of the review, it's really hard to look at the score, or read the rest of the review, not being sure how much is affected by that reviewer's perspective.
Gamespot staff needs to have a meeting, and determine once and for all if they are going to say its 'ok' for a good game to keep being good by not changing the sequel much, or if they will score low for a game not changing or innovating.
You're going to have opinion, but the inconsistency is just way too much. People are deciding whether or not to spend 60$ on a game, and looking at any two reviews on this site isn't just viewing two people's opinions, it's more like a bi-polar person arguing with each side of themselves:
Over time, more advanced hardware architecture improves at an exponential rate.
However, being able to keep up with those architectural improvements becomes more difficult at an even faster rate. It takes more and more effort to get a noticeable difference in improvement as time goes on.
It's going to be easier to make games in general- because the amount of power means you don't have to worry so much about optimization. However, it will be MUCH more difficult to make something that completely uses all that power there with maximum efficiency.
You are assuming he's only graphics require you to program in a way that interfaces best with the hardware.
You assume wrong. Gameplay elements such as physics, artificial intelligence, and the ability to give the player options on how to play, ALL of these require raw horsepower from the console, and to get the most out of it, you have to deal with how the architecture works.
Carolyn Petit wrote an article that was critical of the last of us for it's gender representations.
Here's a quote from it
"But these stories about men--usually white men, usually violent men, often angry or emotionally distant men, whose lives are impacted by the violent deaths of women--are so prevalent in games today, and you can't tell such a story while simultaneously subverting the framework these stories follow, at least not if you adhere to that framework as closely as The Last of Us does."
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