MusicallyInspired, on 17 June 2018 - 10:31 AM, said:
Half-assed means they didn't put any effort into it. That's obviously not the case.
Sure but that's not the case in 99% of AAA titles, there is a ton work put into every single game like that yet you can call stuff like Assassin's Creed Unity half-assed because something went wrong during production and the end result was not the experience that was intended by the devs and the publisher.
So half-assed does not equal lazy on the AAA market, we agree on that... but still you can't help but notice that Remedy failed to flesh out the intended concept with Quantum Break. They may have fucked up pre-production, they may have not prototyped the experience correctly, maybe the game's features were locked too early during development so they spent a year polishing a turd, frak knows, the point is that the game did not feel like the game Remedy intended to make. Compared to that Alan Wake had some mechanical shortcomings and some of it was uninspired too but on the whole it was a fantastic game.
Honestly I think that Quantum Break's fucked up state may have something to do with Alan Wake's failure. Remedy was clearly prepared to make a sequel to that game but the sales sucked so they made American Nightmare in order to at least do something with what they had for AW2 and then they instantly jumped on QB... without much thought I guess. For example Sam Lake's writing was amazing in Alan Wake (AW is hands down better written than Max Payne and that's quite the accomplishment) but even his work sucked ass in QB.