I hope it's not overly influenced by CoD and such. I'm fine with perks and such in a game with militaristic overtones, but part of what makes GTA IV still so fun is that success is more simple and honest.
Your ability to win is governed by skill with the weaponry & vehicles and map knowledge only, not what cheap combination of perks you figure out or a machine/plane that automatically gets kills for you as a reward for already being really good.
The Sparan Ops thing adds nothing for me; it's boring and repetitive. All that was really different in each episode was they increased the number of times you thought you were done and then they said "drop ship, clear them out so we can come get you!" And having it set up so an 80GS achievement was impossible to get until four weeks after purchase is just lame.
Its big advantage was coming out before Halo 4 and CoD:BO2; now that it's coming out after, its multiplayer community will never be as large and robust as it could have been. Now I have to rethink buying a game I was very much looking forward to.
No you're not always connected. Because there's pesky things like morons driving into utility poles and bringing down wires, or your ISP simply having an outage, or your router needs a reset. All things that a) are out of your control and have no warning, b) prevent you from playing single player, and c) kill you in hardcore, permanently. The most frightening part of playing a videogame shouldn't be praying your Internet and power stay up and runnin.
Sorry, but that's nonsense. It's not just Internet stability, it's simple electricty staying on, too, or not having a router need a reset.
Twice in one weekend I lost three hours of a non-savable item world dungeon in PS2 Disgaea, once from someone a mile away hitting a utility pole while I was saving after getting out, and again the next day when a freak thunderstorm popped up and knocked out power as I was about two minutes away from redoing all I'd lost the previous day.
And that was just about six hours of lost time that I still had the luxury of being able to restart from where I'd been. I can't imagine even being able to have fun in a mode like Hardcore, knowing that at any second something beyond my control could wipe out 100s of hours of progress with no recourse for disaster recovery. If the most tense part of a game is praying that everything stays on, then the game hasn't been made very well.
Sorry, but a mode that kills you permanently if a sudden thunderstorm knocks out power, some moron crashes into a utility pole, or my Internet just gets wonky doesn't seem very fair or fun. The most white-knuckle part of gaming shouldn't be praying something out of your control doesn't happen.
If you have infinite time/money, yeah play a 6.0 game. But the reality is I'll be lucky to play a third of the games I put on my wish list here as it is, and I restrict that to 7.5 and above. When a game I follow here gets a 7.0 or under I delete it from my list and never look back. Unless it's from a franchise I play everything for and they make a huge goof that I overlook for completion's sake (Silent Hill: Homecoming, I'm looking your way), a 6.0 may as well be a 0.0
jekyll's comments