Oh man, this is such an apt comparison for me. I've gone on record before as saying that Just Cause 2 was literally one of the worst games I played last gen. Not just because it was fundamentally flawed in some aspects of how it played, like the abysmal handling of cars/airplanes and having to execute that same fucking QTE every time when hijacking an aircraft for instance, but in particular for its whole design philosophy. It was a game that believed that 'more is more' is unreservedly a good thing, even if that "more" amounted to nothing more than a copy and paste of the same locations over and over again. It offered this huge, expansive world that the player could treat like a gigantic playground... and then inserted nothing of any interest in that playground beyond the first hour of play. It was ugly, it was workmanlike, and worst of all, it was mind-numbingly repetitive. It was a game that potentially offered over 100 hours of gameplay sure, but when you find yourself overthrowing the same military base for the umpteenth time, and the environment layout is exactly the same and the enemies keep spawning the same patterns they've done countless times before, what's the point?
So for all this controversy surrounding The Order's longevity, I get what Rapier is saying. I can see the virtue in what RaD is trying to achieve, and I will happily take a 7-10 hour campaign that's tightly-woven and expertly-paced over potentially 100+ hours of flab-filled inertia any day of the week. Honestly, based on the impressions given so far, The Order strikes me as the next Silent Hill: Shattered Memories more than anything, and that game ranks as one of my favourites. Short in length and simplistic in its gameplay yes, but with everything honed to such a tee that it got better and better the further I progressed. If The Order is even half as good as that game then I'll consider it a success.
