So I beat the game on grounded…
This was definitely the hardest gaming achievement I’ve ever done, and honestly I would not recommend it. This is my third play through of my favorite game of all time and it feels like an inferior experience. Sure, AI is more intelligent and the game is more “realistic,” but two things are significantly worse in my opinion: 1. Fun, 2. Immersion.
As for fun, core mechanics of the game that are designed to make it more playable like the cues that you’re being spotted, hud, life-bar, and most importantly listen mode are just gone, which I knew going in but you don’t appreciate how much they matter until they’re gone. And worst of all, resources are so scarce that if you don’t do every encounter damn near perfectly you’re just fucked. You just barely have enough materials to kill everything if you score perfect headshots and almost never get spotted in a mode where people spot you with laser-perfect accuracy if you’re in their line of sight for more than half a second.
The difficulty destroys the pacing of the game where you feel like you’re playing Edge of Tomorrow, resetting over and over again until you get the perfect run. It took me 48 hours to complete the game and that’s for someone that’s already played it twice before. And with the difficulty and pacing issues, I lost immersion in the game since I spent so much of it just resetting instead of getting wrapped up in the story. Furthermore, it makes you just realize that in no reality could Ellie and Abby ever survive this shit in real life, which you could call a bullshit criticism but it just takes me out of it a bit as a narrative-based game.
So yeah, it’s an experience I don’t regret undertaking, but only do it if you’ve already played the game and know the story well because I just don’t view it as the ideal way to play the game. Hard is the right balance between challenge and fun imo. And yes, I still love the game, it’s still my favorite of all time but even if I didn’t enjoy this particular play through as much. I was still crying in that last cutscene, it gets me every time.
This was definitely the hardest gaming achievement I’ve ever done, and honestly I would not recommend it. This is my third play through of my favorite game of all time and it feels like an inferior experience. Sure, AI is more intelligent and the game is more “realistic,” but two things are significantly worse in my opinion: 1. Fun, 2. Immersion.
As for fun, core mechanics of the game that are designed to make it more playable like the cues that you’re being spotted, hud, life-bar, and most importantly listen mode are just gone, which I knew going in but you don’t appreciate how much they matter until they’re gone. And worst of all, resources are so scarce that if you don’t do every encounter damn near perfectly you’re just fucked. You just barely have enough materials to kill everything if you score perfect headshots and almost never get spotted in a mode where people spot you with laser-perfect accuracy if you’re in their line of sight for more than half a second.
The difficulty destroys the pacing of the game where you feel like you’re playing Edge of Tomorrow, resetting over and over again until you get the perfect run. It took me 48 hours to complete the game and that’s for someone that’s already played it twice before. And with the difficulty and pacing issues, I lost immersion in the game since I spent so much of it just resetting instead of getting wrapped up in the story. Furthermore, it makes you just realize that in no reality could Ellie and Abby ever survive this shit in real life, which you could call a bullshit criticism but it just takes me out of it a bit as a narrative-based game.
So yeah, it’s an experience I don’t regret undertaking, but only do it if you’ve already played the game and know the story well because I just don’t view it as the ideal way to play the game. Hard is the right balance between challenge and fun imo. And yes, I still love the game, it’s still my favorite of all time but even if I didn’t enjoy this particular play through as much. I was still crying in that last cutscene, it gets me every time.