u/GwyddnoGaranhir

Where Tsushima felt cohesive, huge and mysterious, with terrain and weather often obscuring what lay ahead, Yōtei can't wait to serve everything on a silver platter and expose just how restrictive the map is. Half of every sprawling vista is occupied by forests you'll never visit, a mountain you can't climb, and invisible walls that don't even have the decency to masquerade as rock faces.

The visual splendor is mostly gone, with Tsushima's bold contrasting colours being replaced with one green map, one orange map, one red map, and possibly one more (I don't know if I'm gonna reach it, tbh). These have the tiniest pockets of colour sprinkled throughout them, and where Tsushima was able to make the biomes nicely flow into one another, in Yōtei the visual presentation gives the impression of an awkward lip-service to the first game.

I don't really understand why this was the direction the studio chose for the sequel and I'm equally unsure how people generally feel about Yōtei's world desing on this sub; regardless, I'm gonna go as far as to say that people were misled regarding the map SIZE as compared to Tsushima. When you google this, you'll find that Yōtei's map is roughly similar in size to Tsushima. I'm gonna call big fat bullshit on that, and my source is that I'm currently into my third playthrough of the first game after spending more than 60 hours with Yōtei and being unable to ignore the differences that I personally see as flaws and regressions. It might technically be true that when you stand at one end of the map and put a pin on other, the distance shown might be similar. The difference is that while in Yōtei I'd be riding through smooth swaths of land full of nothing for two minutes, the equal distance in Tsushima will be segmented by a much more complex terrain, a lot more secrets, and a lot higher amount of combat encounters.

I'm having such a blast with Tsushima yet again, the feeling of discovery and not knowing what awaits behind every hill remained unchanged for me. I wouldn't mind not seeing Yōtei's barren plains (with flower paths giving me a speed boost, so I don't have to waste time on them I guess) ever again.

I had my reservations about Dan Romer, but he composed one mighty theme. It works wonders when combined with Ramin's original masterpiece.

When the topic comes to Grand Theft Auto 6's hype, one can often encounter people pouring cold water on others' expectations. Fair enough, too much hype has been a bane for many games at this point. However, if there's ever been an entertainment product that is bound to exceed even the wildest of people's wishes, I think it's GTA 6.

The reason I believe so is that not only there hasn't been a game from a studio other than Rockstar that would surpass RDR2 in terms of sheer open world detail and simulation - there actually hasn't been a game that would surpass GTA 5 either. This 13 year old game still absolutely demolishes everything that came after. YEARS after the release of both of these games, people are still finding new details, surprising interactions, hidden mechanics and dialogue. The only other game that reached somewhat close to the sheer insanity of RDR2's complexity was Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and even that fantastic game can't hold a candle to Rockstar.

The common argument against the hype is the studio's somewhat outdated mission design. To that I say this - even if GTA 6 retained the mission structure of the previous games, it ultimately won't matter much. The rest of the game is gonna be an immersive tapestry with such a potential to get lost in that the time spent on the main story will make up only a small fraction of people's total play time.