The GTA3 games were all about the 'bloat'.

A typical GTA mission is: drive for five minutes to get to the NPC who starts the mission. Watch a cut-scene. Get told to drive for five minutes to the real mission start. Watch a cut-scene. Play the game for thirty seconds until you fail the mission. Drive for five minutes back to the start. Repeat.

It's boring. I can hardly remember the details of a single GTA mission because they're all so simplistic and dull, and many of them seem designed so you have to play them multiple times to find the trick to complete them. If you could just jump straight into the missions without all the pointless driving and repetition you'd complete the game in about two hours.

GTA4 removed much of the side-game, which meant you were pretty much left with the boring missions. It also added NPCs calling you every five minutes wanting you to do the intensely boring bowling mini-game. I switched from GTA to the Saints Row games, which have some of the same faults mission-wise, but seem to understand that games are meant to be fun. And it's hard to forget the details of a mission where you have to jump out of a helicopter in a panda suit and chop up people in hot-dog costumes with a chainsaw.

So far, I've not been too bothered by the bloat, simply because it's given me a few chances to try out the whole tree jumping thing (currently on sequence 6, just got my suit). However I suspect that's because I very early on gave up on the appalling level design and said f**k it to the optional extra bits and just played for fun.

Given how they've screwed around with the controls, and generally claimed to improve the free-running though actually just changing its irritations, I'm happy with the bloat as training for later.

Now you're just being silly.

I haven't played FEAR, but I imagine it's the same thing as Duke3D, Wolf3D, Quake and such, they added variety to those games by having varied level design, if it really were as simple as just shooting bad guys, there would be a much, much longer list of classics in the genre.

Just look at Painkiller, the original is great, but you hear a lot of people hating on the later games where they lost focus on the level design and variety of bad guys.

But, AC was a game where they had a really great stealth system and to not make full use of it made no sense at all. Having stealth missions and ones where you had to sneak into various places in order to make the hit added much needed variety to the game.

Being able to run in and around is fun, but a game that has the capacity for more, should make fuller use of it. Which is why the later games are so much better. I haven't had a chance to play AC:R or AC3 yet so I"m going to leave my judgment until I go home and play them. But, seriously, you're completely mis-characterizing the complaints for no particular reason.

I personally loved the addition of the missions to AC:B and the other assassins, which was IMHO sorely lacking from the earlier games.
That's been my feeling earlier. It's nice sometimes to get to knock your head against a different wall for a while. I loved the Assassin's tombs for that very reason.

FEAR had an interesting story, some freaky moments, some of the best graphics of its era, was one of the first FPS games where you could actually look down and see yourself rather than being a disembodied arm, and one of the first FPS games (possibly the first) with 'bullet time' which allowed you to legitimately go up against lots of bad guys without dying. All of those things allowed you to ignore the fact that it was basically just 'go into a room, kill bad guys, to into the next room, kill bad guys, repeat until done'.

Oddly enough, I was playing FEAR 3 this morning and it's apparently become a completely consolised 'go into a room and kill bad guys' game now.

Well I don't think AC used the same rooms or whatever. The hits could be different, the cities were wildly different. I just don't see the complaint.

And even if I did, adding a ton of side busy work that is not based around the core gameplay is not how I would fix it.

Even in different cities, it's still the same mission over and over again.

The informant missions and the stealth recon missions were never busy work, you'd have to do a certain number to get the info you needed and if you did more the mission would be easier. Fail to do it with the minimum and you have the option of trying until you get it, or doing more side quests.

The whole idea that AC was supposed to be constantly bouncing all over the place is sort of short sighted, it lacks depth and subtlety.

So different mario levels is important, entirely different cities is irrelevant?

Anyway this whole this is sort of beside the point. In no way was AC a perfect game. The point is I don't want a ton of superflous bullshit in my action games. When I play Dishonored I am in the thick of it in 10 minutes and I am stealthy-explore-kill dude the whole game. It plays like a game with focus.

Increasing the AC games play like "HEY WHAT THE FUCK ELSE CAN WE TOSS IN HERE?" AC2 I felt it a little, AC:B I felt it more. I skipped AC:R but I know it has tower defense of all fucking things. Now with AC3 I am completely overwhelmed and irritated by it. I feel like the main game is lost entirely within a sea of side shit in the first 8 hours or so.

I played a little more tonight and it does seem like I am in normal AC territory now. I took over a fort and climbed up all the viewpoints in Boston. That was fun, I am happy. The first 9 hours though? Fuck that shit. Ruins the game almost. Ruins replaying it for sure.

Mario was like 30 years ago, and they had different constraints at the time. Now, had the developers had more options, I would agree. But, you're going way out of your way to praise the developers of AC for avoiding all the potential for depth in the original game.

In a few weeks I'll be home and will be able to evaluate for myself how they did with AC:R and AC:B, but you seem to be complaining for the sake of complaining here. AC should have been a much deeper game than it was. They focused way too heavily on the running around killing everybody bit and as a result the game play, as well as the plot, suffered for it.

With the later games they realized their mistake and addressed it. I'll have to make up my mind later about the last couple games, but the unmotivated hating on people that found the original to be the dull and uninteresting game that it was, is really not helpful in making your case.

I'm complaining because those 9 hours sucked and ruined what was my most looked forward to game. I am complaining because I can never replay San Andreas due to endless tutorials. I am complaining because maybe, just maybe, I have different priorities and tastes than you.

Chaser had bullet time before FEAR. But of course, the bullet time effect in FEAR looks much cooler.

Oh yes, unskippable tutorials - the real plague of today.

I don't get why game designers now feel it's ok to completely break the immersion and the flow to make some stupid tutorial 20+ hours in the gameplay. Mid game tutorials always irritate me. Especially when they are not skipabble.

This was the first videogame I played since, well, the early 2000 stuff. I literally couldn't care less about the repetitiveness. I was just glued to the TV screen (it was also the first time I played a game on one of those freakingly huge HD screens).

I don't think I could replay it, but the first time experience was just awesome.
I don't know if it either gets better or I'm better adjusted, but it feels better in later sequences.

How does "make a more varied environment" translate to "give me a bunch of minigames" to you?
I've specifically explained that it wasn't about adding more side missions, yet you keep pretending like that's exactly what I've asked for.

What I have said is that I would have liked to see the core gameplay (assassinating people) be more varied. Hitman did it - why couldn't AC1?


Yeah, a lot of people liked it, and that's totally fine.
I'm not trying to say that people were wrong in liking the game. I'm just objecting to StingingVelvet's claim that those of us who thought the game was repetitive thought so because it didn't have enough bloat.

I don't have a problem with a lot of entirely optional stuff in the game. But even, for instance, the bloat in GTA IV crossed the line in creating a sense of obligation in playing those mini games as and when the game wanted you to. This put a very real crimp on the kind of way I play those games.

If you could at least put it off for a bit, or arrange a time that would be something. Or better yet, have the game intelligently work out that when things are exploding left and right it's not a good time to be receiving a call about casual shit.

Or course, life's not like that. But it's a game.