Resident Evil 7

[JDR13]

Same thing happened in Alien Isolation, where last quarter you just blast through with consumables and flamethrower because you just want to finish the game and be done with it.

I love Alien Isolation, but I agree it's much too long for a survival-horror game. It could have been a little more than half that length and it would have been fine.

 

[gerey]

I love Alien Isolation, but I agree it's much too long for a survival-horror game. It could have been a little more than half that length and it would have been fine.

Problem is that Alien: Isolation is that there's not enough complexity to the gameplay to carry the player through the (very lengthy) campaign. Kudos to CA for actually making an effort and having the game last more than an afternoon, but I think they were too enamored with what they had accomplished with the alien and couldn't bring themselves to dial it down a notch.

The game would certainly have benefited from sections later in the game where the alien wasn't on your ass the whole time, and the game made you face different challenges and opponents, maybe even gave you the chance to fire your weapons occasionally.

The game would certainly have been much better if the leash on the alien was a bit longer so you didn't get the feeling that the alien only existed to stalk the player.

At least in RE7 you are pretty much the sole person around for the family to victimize, so it made sense they were breathing down your neck, and the game itself is short enough that even the slog in the middle isn't too bad. There were also combat sections to break up the monotony of sneaking around the family too.

I had to force myself through parts of A:I, especially once the initial tension of the alien went away and it just became an annoyance that won't fuck off - especially since the game often actively punishes you for being stealthy and not making any undue noise when the alien just drops unannounced and hangs around for 10+ minutes just going around.

 

[JDR13]

The game would certainly have benefited from sections later in the game where the alien wasn't on your ass the whole time, and the game made you face different challenges and opponents, maybe even gave you the chance to fire your weapons occasionally.

There must be some randomization involved there, because, for me, there were plenty of sections, even late in the game, where I didn't see the alien for extended periods of time.

 

[gerey]

There must be some randomization involved there, because, for me, there were plenty of sections, even late in the game, where I didn't see the alien for extended periods of time.

There are actually two AIs at play - the AI of the alien itself that dictates how it will behave and where it will look - the alien is also capable of learning the player behavior and adapting accordingly (if you use the flamethrower too much it stops being afraid of it, if you hide under desks/in lockers/etc. it will eventually start looking there for you) - and the director AI, whose primary job is to tell the alien when it needs to come out to ratchet up tension and when it needs to go away to give the player some breathing room.

My main issue is that I mostly avoided the alien coming out of the airducts, outside of the scripted sequences - but you can always hear the alien near you making noise in the airducts. It is constantly near you, waiting for the player to make noise so it can start hunting.

That was the annoying part - at no point does the alien fuck off and bother someone else, he's always tethered to the player and in the vicinity.

There's actually a mod that extends the "leash" and lets the alien roam much farther away from the player on the map, and I found the experience much more enjoyable than having to hear the alien crawling in the shaft overhead just waiting for me to make a sound.

 

[Quatlo]

There must be some randomization involved there, because, for me, there were plenty of sections, even late in the game, where I didn't see the alien for extended periods of time.

There are actually two AIs at play - the AI of the alien itself that dictates how it will behave and where it will look - the alien is also capable of learning the player behavior and adapting accordingly (if you use the flamethrower too much it stops being afraid of it, if you hide under desks/in lockers/etc. it will eventually start looking there for you) - and the director AI, whose primary job is to tell the alien when it needs to come out to ratchet up tension and when it needs to go away to give the player some breathing room.

My main issue is that I mostly avoided the alien coming out of the airducts, outside of the scripted sequences - but you can always hear the alien near you making noise in the airducts. It is constantly near you, waiting for the player to make noise so it can start hunting.

That was the annoying part - at no point does the alien fuck off and bother someone else, he's always tethered to the player and in the vicinity.

There's actually a mod that extends the "leash" and lets the alien roam much farther away from the player on the map, and I found the experience much more enjoyable than having to hear the alien crawling in the shaft overhead just waiting for me to make a sound.

The "learning" part only works when you die doing something and restart from last save point, thats when it "saves" the AI state. If you don't die and just rush like a moron for the last part because you have so much squeaky toys and flamethrower ammo it won't work.

 

[Roguey]

Zoe dlc is crap.

2 hours of punching molders on an engine not suited for a first-person melee combat. Survival? Horror? nah, you're just punching mold zombies, stabbing gators and spouting silly one-liners. This dlc also turned awesome Jack Baker into another boring mute mold zombie.

I thought it was hilarious. As for Jack being mute, yeah that was likely a cost-saving measure, but also a sign that his mind had devolved into a sentient fungus acting on instinct and vague recollections of past memories after having survived a nigh-fatal poisoning and without having his puppet master there to keep his mind together. His actions still aren't representative of the typical mute zombie (e.g. taking Zoe back to the family dinner table, putting Joe into an underwater coffin instead of just killing him, Joe at the end spelling this out for Zoe/the player saying there was a part of him that still remembered and loved his family)

My only two issues was that Joe makes no sense (he's been living in that swamp all along and not once in three years has he tried talking to anyone from his family? Bullshit. Maybe that's how family works in Japan, but not the southern United States) and at the end when Zoe thanks Ethan for "sending help" but not Joe, the guy who did all the work in helping her except design the actual cure. Umbrella wasn't in any condition to help considering they had been completely overwhelmed.

 

[Wunderbar]

As for Jack being mute, yeah that was likely a cost-saving measure

Joe makes no sense (he's been living in that swamp all along and not once in three years has he tried talking to anyone from his family? Bullshit

at the end when Zoe thanks Ethan for "sending help" but not Joe, the guy who did all the work in helping her except design the actual cure.

that's because this DLC was a cashgrab, and its story wasn't planned or well thought out. The whole thing is basically just a minigame that was put together from pieces of cut content to compensate for a lame choice&consequence scene from the base game.