lockii said:
I don't get the ED hate, I thought it was a great game. Better then any RE anyway.
I don't "hate" Eternal Darkness. Hate is too strong of a word. I was extremely disappointed with it. My reasons are pretty simple, and they don't even take into consideration the rather weak combat system.
Eternal Darkness has this sanity system. The thing about this sanity system is that the more you let your sanity drop, the more crazy things that start happening. You know about this already, of course. In theory, it sounds like it's an awesome feature that hasn't really been tried in any game before. But the problem arises when the "insanity" effects fail to surprise or even alarm, and then it becomes an excersize in sitting around
just for the sake of seeing what crazy shit the developers threw at you.
The reason this is possible, of course, is because there is very little punishment for losing all of your sanity. There are a few arbitrary ways they tried to inhibit the dipping of sanity, but the penalites are so minor that they become almost irrelevant. You quickly gain a spell that can eliminate your sanity problems, and even if you don't have that the penalty for losing almost all of your sanity is close to nothing.
In the end, I felt that this direction was fairly ruinous for Eternal Darkness. It had a perfectly decent idea in concept, but it failed to have a large enough impact on the gameplay in execution. If you at all knew that the game was going to throw crazy things at you (which you would if you read the manual or the back or any review), then it would be pretty impossible for anything to really surprise you. Now I understand that there are
certain people who would claim that aspects of the game genuinely surprised them, and for that I can do nothing but shrug my shoulders. It's all anecdotal for my part, and I admit that in that aspect alone it was personal.
But the lack of major penalties for losing your sanity is a harsh misstep for the game and it really disappoints me. How about creating a game that intelligently increases the difficulty the more you lose your sanity. Imagine creatures which
fed off your increasingly disconnection with reality, and grew stronger with every crack of your mentality. This would make the whole sanity system much more potent and would not create situations where the user is simply sitting around trying to lose their sanity so they can see the game create fake scenarios that attempt to 'trick' the gamer.
Anyway, that's my take.
Overall, Eternal Darkness is still a decent game... but this was the problem for me, anyway.