Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda' copout excuse. I bet we'd be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel...
Yea but what are executive responsibilities to a company? They generally are not creative and dynamic positions and instead focus on producing results for the corporate body. I could readily see Krafton firing them for trying to make a fun and compelling game as opposed to a profitable game ripe for DLC, for example. Of course they'd couch such money grubbing expectations in to language of the managerial class...
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply 'there' to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited 'main' areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you'd just wander in to while exploring.
The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
The "AI" companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.
Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them ... not greater than the sum of their parts.
I think it could've been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome "over there" largely literally on land. The ice worm would've been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it's been a while) could've been way cooler if it wasn't for one biome "over there", too.
I don't know how much larger it'd need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would've gone a LONG way.
I agree his biggest problem is the writing, because in reality, he'd be the best person to fix the problems (as you say)... outside of his freakish inability to kill irredeemable trash.
Though that's why he sucks so bad when reconciling everything back to reality. He absolves the rich of fixing problems because not even the "cool" insanely rich and very willing philanthropist Batman can fix a single city let alone a country, and heaven forbid killing irredeemable trash!
He's inadvertently a perfect example of how blind capitalism and boundless optimism are absolute braindead garbage perspectives.
The obvious solution to the irredeemable crazies I hint at is to KILL THEM. Then it would become a question of why the fuck isn't he helping Gotham's economy?
I get what you're hinting at, that a lot of it is a lack of perspective by the writers, but the fact remains that Batman is one of the least effectual "heros" there is.
I dunno' man, I gotta' agree with Darth Helmit: "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb"
... or more eloquently, with MLK Jr: "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."
Good people are many, but their silence is tentamount to acceptance of evil. At this point in time, I see no valid reason what so ever for anyone "good" to hide within their own cliques.
I dunno', batman is cool, but he's an ineffectual LARPer that refuses to do the ONE thing that would actually start to fix things in Gotham...
That and he's a billionaire that decides to keep up the playboi image despite his escapades demonstrably having a miniscule effect on crime in Gotham compared to him just using his billions to actually help solve the systemic issues in Gotham's economy that drives so many to crime in the first place.
In short, Batman is everything wrong with the American attitude about capitalism.
At least Superman has the excuse that he is not an economic powrhouse that actually could indirectly improve thousands upon thousands of peoples' lives. ... as weirdly as an all-powerful being not being an economic powerhouse is.
Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda' copout excuse. I bet we'd be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel...