WRT brutal mode why shouldn't they include it? The only real question is whether people want a harder mode, it isn't for me - i usually play on normal, but options are cool.
Playing uncharted 2 and it looks ridiculous in places.
On another note, which motion blur option is best for you guys? I genuinely have no idea.
It's just not fun. When Naughty Dog added Grounded to The Last of Us it actually felt intense because it took away your situational awareness in both your listen mode and your hud. It made it so you had to rely on watching Joel's posture to know how much health you had left, it requires patience and skill in resource management, stealth, and ammo preservation. It felt like it required you to be firing on all cylinders in regards to combat.
Brutal, on the other hand, requires you to have some incredibly quick reflexes. Unless you're taking advantage of the unlimited ammo from having the Golden 92FS and Golden AK from preorder, you have to be able to line up head shots with little to no prep time because all it takes is one or two half assed shots from any one enemy to take you out. Rather than requiring you to employ everything you know about each combat area and the weapons available to you, it feels like the only real way to get through this is by standing back as far as you can and picking off enemies... Or in some cases, as I've found, skipping combat altogether by rolling, and hoping luck is on your side to skip past the enemies and trigger he next cutscene, as I did in the fight just before
you find Sully prattling off to some of the henchmen in the library.
At least on Crushing, even with Drake's Fortune's much more limited toolset at your disposal, it feels like a fun and satisfying challenge that allows you to take advantage of everything you've learned. It feels like it takes skill and comprehension, as opposed to luck and a love for punishment.
I guess really the problem is this doesn't feel balanced at all, it's hard for the sake of difficulty and not for the sake of fun and challenge. It sounds like they took the fact that only one QA member could best it as a point of pride, and I guess that's cool for them, but even before trying this for myself the idea of that kind of raised a red flag. I remember working at Gearbox we tried that same method for one of the raid bosses in Borderlands 2, and it didn't go over well, and took a ton of back and forth between programmers and QA to find a happy medium for something that felt good without feeling laced with contempt for the player.
I don't mean to say that Brutal feels like it was made with contempt for the player, far from it, but it does feel like it could have used balancing and thought beyond pushing the damage numbers to the limit and making ammo more scarce. IF Naughty Dog decides to use this idea and employ it in Uncharted 4, I would hope that it would benefit from being designed from the ground up rather than having been implemented into an already finished game.
I'm pretty satisfied with how Crushing feels, but if Brutal in Uncharted 4 means Crushing's damage numbers with maybe more enemies, more advanced behavior, or different spawn patterns, something that forces the player to keep moving, think vertically, and mix stealth, melee, and gunplay without punishing them for leaving cover... something designed to test the player's skill beyond having the spawns memorized and being able to pull off consistent head shots, I'd be much happier and more likely to replay the game on Brutal like I already do the previous games on Crushing. I'd also be perfectly happy with just keeping Crushing as is and leaving it at that, since multiplayer in 4 will likely have my attention.
Maybe I'm just one fan of this series, with an opinion way off base and out of touch with the rest of the players, I don't know, I'm not sure how Brutal's being received or if others are considering it fun and satisfying, but as someone who's put a little over a thousand hours into just the single player of these games, that's my two... More like thirty-nine cents on the matter... Sorry for the wall of text.
And to anyone from Bluepoint lurking in this thread. That all may sound really negative, but on the whole, I love everything you've done with this collection, and I'm so glad these games were put in the right hands. Thank you for giving others the opportunity to experience these games for the first time, or the umpteenth as in my case.