The points being brought up by this game are very similar to other titles. Little nightmares was supposed to be 8 hours according to the dev team and it wasnt. (Still a great game though). But people said it was too simple, so the first dlc has puzzles which arent hard but are frustrating (possibly a bug, couldnt lift item on second playthrough at all)

Also broken age act 1 was easy so they made the second act harder and less fun

I agree with aaa games wasting time (assassins creed - treasure hunts)

This game apparently has permadeath (something to do with dying for taking too long?) cant say im pleased with such a decision. I dont really judge games by their gaming tier (e.g. Triple a) but i do use other games as examples and i judge the game on its own merits :)

The one defining factor for triple A productions is generally the giant budget -- how they spend that budget varies, obviously. It's not uncommon that a large chunk ( 50+% ) of the budget is simply spent on marketing. Not a fan of Call of Duty or similar games either, but they actually do have very high production values and a lot of content... that's crammed into a linear, heavily scripted 5 hour campaign.

What puzzles me, is why Indie devs strive to reach that "AAA" label for their game, when it's debatable whether "AAA" is even a good thing...

Looks interesting. But this 'independent AAA' contradiction makes me skeptical. That is either a meaningless PR drivel or it means, as others have pointed out, HQ graphics with hardly any game behind it. So I'll wait for it to drop to much, much lower prices before buying it.

This Dark Souls fan would like to mention that the save system in the Souls series never worked like that. While you only have one save game per character, you can never save yourself "into a corner", making it impossible to progress.

I normally like having multiple save slots, quicksaves etc. too, but I guess some games ( including Dark Souls ) wouldn't quite work if they allowed save scumming. ( I like to keep manual back-ups of my save files, so I guess in theory it's still possible to revert to an older save state, but I never needed to do that. )

One would hope so. That's also why people aren't considering that a Hellblade's feature, but a bug. A bug that got nastier by only having the autosave slot. And a bug they should fix.

I finished Blade Of Darkness twice back in the day and I still think it's a great game even with multiple savegames, so I don't understand why that wouln't work in DS. In fact, I always thought the one savegame mechanic to be an artificial way to increase Dark Souls difficulty. And I still don't like it. But then I don't care for true hardcore gamer badges or anything like that.
(Edit: And I don't mean that as if you do. I mean that as in that's for me the only purpose of the one savegame slot)

I'd argue that the one defining factor of modern AAA games is that 95%+ of them are derivative garbage that are not worth buying and probably not worth playing either.

Call of Duty and similar games do not have a lot of content...if they did, then they'd take at least 30 hours to complete. 30 hours used to be standard for the normal length of a video game. Anything less than 30 hours at full price was considered to be a rip off, and rightly so.

That many gamers now think 5-10 hours is "long" is shocking. 10 hours or less is way too short. A game that lasts no more than 10 hours should cost no more than $10 USD.

As for the "independent AAA" label of Hellblade, they should have just went with "independent." AAA on any game (although there are a few good AAA games) is a warning sign to stay away, not an enticement to come buy.

Having said all that, I don't mean for the content of this post to be picking on the Hellblade game in particular. The stuff I've mentioned are industry-wide problems that require industry-wide solutions. Most of all they require gamers to start raising their standards back to where they used to be, starting from the dawn of video games up until ~2005.

The game has a quite hardcore permadeath.

They probably mean a Triple A Experience on an indie budget, or III (Triple I)

The footage in that review constantly shows the game pausing when a blade hits; it looks like the kind of stuttering that happens when V-Sync is on.

But the commentary doesn't mention those glaring problems in the footage. Therefore I'm confused about why the game is stuttering in the footage. Is the reviewer using weak hardware? Or does the game always stutter regardless of how strong the user's hardware is?

Well, Graphics are definitly on AAA-level, but assets do look a little bit stocky some times. My overall impression is that it´s a cool game for folks who liked AlanWake, the 2008 PrinceOfPersia, WalkingSims like MIND or so...
...which I did. Oh yes, I liked the first hours.

One part of my job is taking a look at social networks, and today I noticed "Hellblade" is a global trending topic on Twitter. Most of the tweets right now are talking about this feature (it seems the game will delete your savefiles if you are killed too many times). And... they are praising it as an awesome idea. Perhaps there are more hardcore gamers out there than I thought.

It's not likely to die often enough for that to happen, unless you're playing on hard I guess, there's not that much combat.
Also, if you're worried about it and not a fan of the permadeath, you can just copy the savefile.
However this forum, like so many others on the internet, seems to mostly attract people who just love to complain, even though they haven't even played the game. :(

https://www.gamekult.com/jeux/hellblade-3050387569/test.html

Gamekult: 6/10

FYI.

Seems like an interesting game a bit too repetitive in its systems and a wrting a bit over the top.

But TotalBiscuit told us the game is bad and Jim Sterling found a game-breaking bug, so that *must* mean the game is truly awful and everyone will come across the same bug, right? /sarcasm

Yeah, the GOG Forum has always been a place full of people who mostly complain about everything in the announcement/release threads of games, this has happened since the "good old days" of the Forum, it's kind of a staple. Even if it's a game in a genre they don't like or they haven't bought -- and never will -- something urges them to come in these threads and "warn" potential buyers that a game is bad because they don't like it.

Fortunately, most GOG customers couldn't care less about the forums and just vote with their wallets by buying or not buying the games. Senua's Sacrifice is the second most popular game on GOG, right now, following Tacoma, according to the "Popular" list on the front page, so I guess all the crap we talk about in here doesn't really matter much.

Very well put.

Oy, now THAT's nastiness!

Multiple saves but also a ranking determined by your number of saves per level. That's a decent balance. Made even me save infrequently, consider saving as a resource to carefully allocate, and finished with... I think hero rank? The one for an average of less than 5 saves / level, whatever it is. Still allowed me to save both before and after nasty boss fights, keep some potential saves in reserve for later levels, that sort of thing, while, uh, saving on the saves in more regular parts.