Um, did Jim just knock the game for lacking ambition?
What?
Creating incredibly accurate depictions of what New York would likely look like in terms of a similar crisis even down to the placement of barricades and debris inside buildings along with absolutely seamless PvP, and fantastic visuals and weather effects that completely change the look of the environment including fogging up windows in realtime and snow actually collecting on the ground and objects and melting overtime, along with a procedural destruction in an open world title and even realtime reflections with amazing technical performance simply doesn't count as ambitious. /s Those are some ridiculous expectations if this game doesn't hit whatever metric he has for ambition. And I'm just talking from a technical perspective.
I don't think Jim is wrong. Technically, the game is masterfully done with its beautiful rendition of New York, a city I was in a few months ago and I can go "Cool, I actually walked here!" In that way the game is certainly ambitious.
However, like I've mentioned before the game is very lacking in many other areas. The story is woefully undertold and very sparse, its hard to keep up with what is going, especially if you play in co-op with buddies. Antagonists come and go without so much of a serious impact, I met the Rikers big bad boss, killed her, and only knew that she was the big bad one because of one single ECHO I found in another mission. And the only way I knew we were fighting her was because her name popped up as a tag on one enemy that rushed into the room and was a little harder to kill.
No introduction, no build up, no reason to make me feel like she was an antagonist, she was just there, acted like every other idiot in the room with a class role assigned and that was it. The same has gone for the Rioters and Cleaners, I apparently met their big baddies and completely glossed over the fact, only realizing it after. Last Man Battalion was introduced like I was supposed to know about them, with characters acting like they have been a constant thorn in their side when I
just met them, heck, one of the side characters who arrived with me should even have less of a fucking clue cause she is constantly in the main base and wasn't fighting them and SHE acts like she knows them more than me!
The story told is very bad, I have no investment and it becomes hilarious when one of the characters goes shocked about the potential of Agents going rogue around lvl 16-20, when me and my friends had been around rogueing shit up in the Dark Zone since lvl 10. The bosses are poorly designed in that way that they are regular enemies, slightly scaled up and then given a bigger health pool so they don't stand out at all except for their nametag. And there are the countless of cut and paste side missions, encounters etc. that does nothing for you except say "go here, kill this dude, you saved the world here is some XP". Like fucking hell, every bounty side-mission I've encountered have been -exactly- the same, first a one-sided audio conversation saying that the person I am after is mean, followed by an objective kill that person's Lieutenant #1 followed by another Lieutenant #2 (all of them have 2 Lieutenants, for some fucking reason), usually a exact same looking guy, followed by the bounty who is, once again, another regular enemy but with a nametag, followed by an one-sided audio conversation with the mission giver saying I "did good, here is some XP". And then there is every single encounter which is exactly the same, all the time.
So yeah, calling the game lacking in ambition when actual ambitious studios like CD Project who made a pretty game AND put some effort into the side content is not really that far off when Massive and Ubisoft mostly focused on the graphics.
