I've been pretty busy so I've only gotten to play this in short spurts. Up to chapter 5 now. Hovering around the space station is the best addition so far (I dug the outerspace sequences in DS2, and an additional exploration element is a good idea), although I wish there was something more interesting to it than resource farming. Fingers crossed something cool will pop up out there.
I'm trying to give the game a chance, but honestly almost all the major changes are for the worse so far. The universal ammo which helps prop up the tedious and unecessary weapon crafting takes away a lot of the resource management aspect. Likewise combat strategy seems more generalized to accommodate the hodge podge of gun combinations people can create. It really doesn't help that enemies uniformly bum rush you, which kills a lot of the strategic nature of using the terrain and balancing ranged attacks vs. close quarter combat. Terrible decisions all around, and a reflection of the inability of the dev team to actually reflect on the criticisms of DS2, which devolved into a similarly obnoxious clusterfuck in the final chapters.
Material collection, which on the surface seems like a good idea in practice ends up feeling like collectathon padding. The main thing is the currency of the system, which leans heavily towards the looting side. They could have cut all the superflous resources and just sprinkled around rare parts in difficult to reach places creating a balanced risk reward system where no part placement was arbitrary, but instead you're left scrounging for the 50th bit of scrap metal or whatever to craft another doohickey. It's pretty unsatisfying. The fact that you can delegate to a robot says it all. And btw, what a poor excuse for halving the number of weapon slots. For a fucking automated resource mining droid. Awful.
Then there's the save system. Oh, the save system. Remember when we were reassured the co-op wouldn't affect the single player experience? Total BS. I don't need to say more about this. A quick glance through the thread shows that pretty much everyone agrees it's ass backwards and a downgrade. It's boggles the mind that this made it all the way through development. It actually keeps me from playing the game when I'm on a tight leash, because I can't just run back to a save station if I have to quit on short notice.
Charater interaction is also super annoying. Throughout the sequels there's been a direct relationship between how much Issac talks and how little I care about his plight. Although I'm a proponent of the silent protagonist in this type of game, I could stomach certain ways of handling the narrative and dialogue. Basically, as a writer don't overstep the boundries of what you're capable of in good taste. But no, in predictable gaming fashion we get Issac, the turdly everyman. I hate how contemporary the dialect is (no regard to theme or sense of place here), and how super-awesome-cool-above-it-all they paint Issac compared to other characters. And yet ultimately every character comes across as an unlikeable douche. If you can't write likable characters simply adding in more of them is a really poor solution. They should have stuck with the audio log shtick and random survivors who fit a limited context from DS1. The more prolonged interpersonal drama, the worse the script fares, and so far DS3 is a real stinker. Echoes of Nicole going from a frightening and symbolically potent spectre to chatty cathy/bitchy ex in DS2, thus proving the less said the better.
The most frustrating thing about all this imo is that it boils down to taste and vision, an inborn sense of what works and what waters down. That was what caught me off guard with DS1, which I only played at a friends insistence after my initial skepticism. You could tell someone with a very astute understanding of all this stuff was at the helm, and it was the product of a clear and comprehensive vision. The game, in spite of a few foibles, came across as a well balanced and complete all around experience, with a surprising knack for knowing when to show restraint and when to go over the top, which it did in equal measure.
The sequels completely lack that sense of circumspection. The series is increasingly about throwing more shit at you, because, you know, more is always better. And the bum out is that it's not a lack of technical skill or artistic talent that's the culprit. DS still oozes cool factor through its environments and some of the more inspired sequences. The suit designs are amazing. DS2 did a wonderful job refining and expanding the combat mechanics. The sci-fi horror aesthetic is better tan what we get out of any modern movie in the same genre imo. What the sequels lack is the coherent vision that carved out the original game's niche as more than just a RE4 clone in space. DS3 is still a respectable shooter with good production values, and I'm curious to see what sequences I run across. It's just a shame that so much of the potential of the series has been flushed down the toilet to make room for every hackneyed feature other shooters thid gen are known for. There's a sort of designed by committee feel to DS3 that's depressing. Not sure I regret jumping on board because of amazon's promo credit, but I have a hard time seeing another day one purchase with this franchise.
