Also, I can tell that Uncharted 4 is banking on a pre-existing emotional investment in the characters. Removing that from the evaluation of the game seems like cutting the heart out of it.

I played and loved both of the new Tomb Raider games. Rise of the Tomb Raider is especially good.

I feel like Tomb Raider is a better "game" than Uncharted, in that the gun play, stealth mechanics, crafting mechanics, and large explorable hub areas all work really well together to create an engaging gameplay loop. The story doesn't really factor into it at a certain point. I loved Rise of the Tomb Raider, yet I've already forgotten large parts of that story. The characters aren't all that interesting, and I certainly don't care about them like I do the characters from Uncharted.

Uncharted 4 seems like it's structured largely like the rest of the Uncharted games. It's much more linear than Rise of the Tomb Raider, which each Chapter just being another linear level to traverse. The gunplay and stealth are good, but not really in the same league as Tomb Raider's. Uncharted definitely relies heavily on you actually caring about the story and characters to pull you along, and lets you experience cool set pieces, but doesn't actually throw you into the world in the way that Rise of the Tomb Raider did.

Ultimately, as much as people want to compare them, I don't think it's all that warranted. They're completely different styles of games, even if they look very similar on the surface. I'm not sure I can say one is better than the other--I love them both for very different reasons.

Part of me was hoping that Uncharted 4 would mimic and have an answer for Rise of the Tomb Raider's semi-open world design. Part of me is a bit disappointed we didn't get that. The other part of me is happy we didn't--I feared that Naughty Dog making something like that might dilute the good qualities of Uncharted.

Tomb Raider's collectibles are definitely much better, because at least they give a little bit of context. Uncharted's collectibles are literally finding the items with absolutely no indication of what they are. Which, I guess is fine--it makes me feel alright just completely ignoring them.

Perhaps it's because of all the time I spend in Destiny, but these days I seriously crave being immersed in a well-crafted, linear story. I know that in gaming linear is a bad word now, and it's considered regressive if you can't affect the outcome, but games that do a good job of having multiple endings are rare (Dishonored is one), and even then having one logical, inevitable ending is always more satisfying, to me anyway.

I've listened to a few video game podcasts last week that obvious brought up Uncharted 4. Every single one of them held up Uncharted 2 as the standard for Uncharted games. Why?

I didn't play the games as they were released--I played through all three for the first time over the last two months. Uncharted 3 is clearly the best of them by a long shot. The pacing is better, the story is the best (and without the supernatural bullshit), the set pieces are the best. Is it just nostalgia and Uncharted 2 being such a huge leap over Uncharted 1 and being sort of unprecedented at the time in which it was released, or do people genuinely believe 2 is the better game? I mean, I think it's pretty close, but playing them all back to back for the first time, 3 is clearly the stand out for me.

I think a lot of it has to do with people thinking the gameplay was the best in Uncharted 2.

And I definitely don't understand that at all. I think the controls and movement feel much better in 3, and the combat encounters are more interesting (if only just). I realize that's just a matter of opinion, but I strongly suspect it's not insignificant that I didn't experience Uncharted 2 when it was new. I think people remember it more fondly because it was the sort of the first great Uncharted game that really defined what those games are, and Uncharted 3, while technically better, just couldn't live up to the expectations that people had after Uncharted 2.

I've even seen a lot of folks say that Uncharted 4 isn't quite as good as Uncharted 2, and that just blows my mind, because that race ain't even close as far as I'm concerned. Uncharted 4 is so far above the rest of the Uncharted games that it's in another solar system. I guess I can't really proclaim that until I finish it, but it has literally been pitch perfect for the 8 hours and 11 chapters I've done.

I guess it's just sort of like how I can recognize that Reach is the best Halo game, but Halo 2 is still just maybe a notch above it for me, just because it was the game that defined what Halo was and what online console shooters were, and it hit while I was in high school and was able to play absurd amounts of it. Nostalgia means that nothing else can ever really match it.

Playing through them all for the first time, and while I'm 44% done with Uncharted 3, I'd say that it's been very small-scale compared to U2 (both the game and band), whereas Uncharted 2 started big (train wreck survival) and continued to have "big" moments throughout (including the fantastic train ride that led to the game's opening).

Halfway through Uncharted 3, and while the character interactions and gameplay are even better than in 2, the only real "big" sequence has been the castle fire. I guess those podcast folks that you listen to are really big on Hollywood sequences rather than on characters and story.

Oh, just wait. My favorite set piece from the first trilogy of games is in the last half of Uncharted 3. It's fantastic. It might have just been surpassed by the two great set piece moments in Chapter 11 of Uncharted 4, though. I don't know, it's close.

Halfway through Uncharted 3, and while the character interactions and gameplay are even better than in 2, the only real "big" sequence has been the castle fire. I guess those podcast folks that you listen to are really big on Hollywood sequences rather than on characters and story.

3 had the coolest moment with the ship sinking. Here you have cover based combat, where your cover is now sliding around the deck and hold of the ship because it's sinking. So not only do you have to avoid getting crushed by the crates, but you have to constantly move around as they slide around the ship. Then, it starts sinking and flips sideways. Suddenly the climbing aspect of the game is turned upside down (literally). It was really cool looking at everything upside down and figuring out how to make my way out. It was the most balls out awesome level I'd ever played at the time. This was 'big'.

And I will say I agree with them about the gunplay, even 4 feels about the same. It's kind of a shame because it feels good in Last of Us, but that's I suppose mostly because it's intended to feel more difficult to shoot in that game. In an action game series it's disappointing the shooting mechanics aren't tighter.

The general opinion that I heard repeated many times was that Uncharted 3 was great "in a bubble", but being the 3rd in the series harmed many people's perception of it because it did too little to improve on the previous games and repeated too many of the same mistakes. I remember hearing lots of "the gunplay still sucks... how can they continue to fill the game with so much shooting without making the combat any fun?" and that sort of thing. I specifically remember hearing several people complain about some of the "chase" sequences

I played these games much later, but from what I hear the aiming was bad, and later they released a patch to fix it.

I can understand why 3 would disappoint after 2, because it is really just a bigger better version of it. You are kind of doing the same things, only with a different story. There are standout moments like the ship, but it is overall very similar.

With regards to chases, even in 4, we have yet another vehicle chase sequence. Granted this time in 4 it's taken way up a notch, but you are still just shooting guys and jumping from car to car (after of course being dragged around on a rope which is really sweet). I am surprised we don't have yet, for example, a James Bond style ski chase or something similar to mix it up. I can totally see Drake skiing down a mountain outrunning an avalanche, shooting all the bad guys while doing it, then base jumping off a cliff to safety. That would in fact be MORe realistic than some of his stunts :-p

But yeah. 3 was just a better version of 2, whereas 2 really was a huge leap forward, both in terms of graphics and in terms of mechanics.

Also I get the sense that the shooting is supposed to 'suck'. You're not supposed to be able to mow people down like you can in Destiny. That actually makes thinks a bit more tense.

I looked at the multiplayer mode after finishing the campaign, and I see now there are microtransactions and an in game currency.

I'm now never touching multiplayer ever. So sad that a great game is tainted this way.

I'll always get a chuckle out of that.

By the way, you do know that all of the microtransactions are cosmetic, right?
And the in-game currency lets you choose an unlock path, as opposed to arbitrary milestones.

I don't care.

After finishing Uncharted 4, the thing that stood out to me was how ALIVE the environments felt. More specifically, they felt like they used to be alive. Walking through Libertalia I absolutely got the sense that actual people lived there, and that it thrived in its day. You could see and feel the history.

Can you nail down what exactly is missing from Destiny's environments? What specifically could be changed to make them more ... formerly alive? (this is a completely honest question here. How does one make their environments feel more lived in?)

I had the same feeling in Destiny. Large buildings with pointless and big empty rooms, random spacing between buildings, no sign of logical roads, infrastructure, businesses, houses, offices, life...

The environments feel fake.

After finishing Uncharted 4, the thing that stood out to me was how ALIVE the environments felt. More specifically, they felt like they used to be alive. Walking through Libertalia I absolutely got the sense that actual people lived there, and that it thrived in its day. You could see and feel the history.

Can you nail down what exactly is missing from Destiny's environments? What specifically could be changed to make them more ... formerly alive? (this is a completely honest question here. How does one make their environments feel more lived in?)

I haven't played Uncharted 4, but one of the many things that jumped out at me about The Last of Us is what an incredible job Naughty Dog did in creating environments that felt like they had "real history" to them. Almost everywhere you look, you see little details that tell a story. There's the base-level stuff like "I'm walking through an abandoned city". Then the more specific details like "this used to be a library, this was a cafe, this was a school". And then it gets into the much deeper, more subtle stuff like "There's a bunch of furniture arranged in this hallway in a way that makes me feel like someone tried to hole-up here for safety", or "this ballroom is all decorated for a highschool prom... the plates are still on the tables... this place must have been filled with kids when everything went down".

And then, on top of all that, you have the finer, specific storytelling that happens through a combination of everything I mentioned above, combined with little notes or journals you find along the way, combined with dialog between the player characters as they uncover a specific series of events. You literally discover the stories of specific groups or individuals as you move through the game by piecing together clues from all of these little details.

It really is a masterpiece in terms of environmental storytelling. Much as I adore Destiny's environments from an art-design point of view, they really do pale in comparison to Naughty Dog's work when it comes to communicating the living history of each location. Bungie didn't go much deeper than "here are some buildings" or "here is a cave". There really isn't much to tell the player that "this used to be an academy" aside from your Ghost telling you as much. The cosmodrome has a bit more detail in this regard, but not as much as I'd like to see in the future.

STAHP IT! you guys are really making me want to play Uncharted 4 ;)