You know, I respect your commitment to fighting the good fight for Arkham City through incredibly dense clinical dissection of every minute aspect of the game, bulletpoint by bulletpoint, but sometimes it's enough just to glean from a brief statement a person's sentiment, especially if you have a collective of similar sentiments to build upon a fuller picture. Let's be honest here, you're not looking to be converted on your stance, and I doubt the people here who prefer AA over AC have any intention on doing so either.
This thread's mostly reference, and for those few who ardently assert that Asylum is the better game.
I probably see it more than the average user since I read almost every Arkham series thread here, but they are peppered with people stating outright that AA is a completely better game than AC not that they prefer it, not that they value more linear/basic game design over design that's more open. Just that AA is better and AC is somehow worse. Most of the time, very minimal justification is given for their assertion (AA is "more focused, AC is sloppy and directionless"), and I will occasionally see people discouraged from trying out AC, or saying they won't bother with AC after reading these sentiments.
I made this thread in part because I once thought AC was nothing special after playing through it in one go at a friend's house. I genuinely believe a lot of people who tout AA as being better rushed through the game, then never gave AC a decent chance after that (while their first playthrough of AA
seemed better in retrospect) and are missing out on a game they might genuinely love.
The thread won't convince people that they're wrong to feel a certain way about the series because the thread's not meant to do that. It's to show how virtually everything one enjoyed about AA is improved in AC, even the aspects they might have thought were worse at a glance.
This is the problem. You're discussing the quality of a video game. There's no objectively true when it comes to quality outside of technical details like "Does the game crash on this type of hardware?" or "what's the framerate?" A review of a game by its very nature is subjective and it's doubly subjective when you're dealing with two of them. Different people value different things differently as this thread has proven again and again.
As I say above, this thread is, in part, in response to a pretty common sentiment that AA is objectively and entirely better than AC. Look up any Arkham thread here about the games themselves (or even ones that aren't) and you'll see it.
Even without the above in mind: Riddler trophies in AC requiring multi-stage puzzle solving and moving further off of beaten paths, whereas AA's trophies require nothing more than destroying weak walls or hitting single switches is and objective difference. Combat in AC allowing consistent retaining of a combo across more diverse enemy types whereas combos are less likely to be retained when fighting AA's less diverse enemy pool is objective. Everything in that bulleted list from the OP is objective.
Whether someone likes one game, or one aspect of a game over another is subjective. That doesn't mean we get to ignore what people play these games for, what the developers have intended and how those two factors converge in the final product. I don't get to say Tomb Raider 2013 is better than the PS1 games because "there's more action" when I can look at developer documentaries that discuss at length how they wanted to make the game an emotional experience, one driven by survival-based gameplay, then look at the final game that simply does not deliver. I don't get to say Bubsy 3D is better than Super Mario 64 because it's a more "streamlined" experience because time isn't wasted on running from level to level in a huge, sprawling hub that just takes up space.
If you accept that a given game can be better at what it does than another game (or that between two games that are each attempting to do the same thing, one realizes that more fully), then I don't understand why you'd have a problem with this thread. I'm not comparing Shogun II to Katamari Damacy. I'm comparing two games in the same series that are attempting to do very, very similar things and are not as different as many would lead you to believe (as laid out in the OP of this thread).
You can say that different people value different things, and I can say stealth options in AC are more numerous and more intuitively integrated into gameplay than in AA, or any number of other comparisons. "AC is better than AA" is shorthand for all the shared aspects that are simply more fully realized in AC.
