I've never really liked those franchises, even though they do have AAA production value behind them. Uncharted and God of War in particular just feel like button-pressing simulators to me; they feel like 8 hour long cutscenes with a few QTEs and points where you can wiggle your joystick. Maybe I'm just spoiled by gameplay-heavy titles as of late, but a lot of Sony franchises feel like they'd be better as movies instead. That being said, the new Uncharted movie bombed at the box office so I don't know who's at fault here...
I've never played Uncharted, but I had a much different God of War experience from what you described. There's really quite a lot of gameplay there, and some of the optional combat encounters were ridiculously tough -- certainly not QTE-ridden cutscenes. Some of the puzzles were repetitive and there was certainly quite a lot of dialog, but I never felt like I was in a button-pressing simulator.
Maybe OP is considering the earlier games in the series? I agree with you that certainly compared to Uncharted and Tomb Raider the latest God of War has far more engaging world design and combat.
The latest God of War just needed more actual bosses.
Feels like the queen bitch valkyrie was the only encounter where they actually decided to push the combat. Imagine if Sekiro or Souls games only had a couple of bosses that felt like real bosses.
We must have been playing different games, or I’m just terrible at them. I found the non-queen Valkyries immensely difficult, certainly boss level, and some of the other boss-like encounters took me a few tries.
Ah, I think there's an important distinction here my original comment didn't properly touch on: it doesn't mean the bosses weren't punishing.
Consider fighting a normal high level draugr with an under leveled/geared Kratos. Assume we are on the highest difficulty.
You'll basically have to dodge a lot (or spam ranged attacks), your attacks won't reliably stagger them, you'll tickle their health bar and getting hit once or twice will kill you. That is punishing and hard if there's more than one of them.
However, if your levels are similar you'll be able to count on staggers, there will be certain attacks that cannot be blocked, certain attacks that will stagger you if the block wasn't perfect, you can freeze one of the enemies.
The hard case is far simpler and less involved than the normal combat.
I consider the normal valkyries hard, but individually they don't really have lots of tricks that require hyper focusing both on reading them and executing the appropriate counter. They are fairly simple to understand for the most part.
You need to have cached a butt load of movements and their appropriate counters to fight the queen valkyrie. You might even find some non obvious openings for poking.
Most valkyries are straightforward when you get their 1-3 special attacks. That's not much more than regular enemies.
This Uncharted film seems like it really succeeded at the box office. $120M budget. Even if that gets bumped to $200M with marketing and say a bit more for more rev sharing, Sony will still come out with a profit. It’s at almost $150M in the US and might hit $400M worldwide with almost none of it coming from China or similar regions where their cut of ticket sales are much less.
I’m not an expert, but my rough understanding is that you have to take the nominal budget, double it for marketing and other incidental stuff, then halve the nominal revenue to account for the cuts taken by distributors and theaters and whatever. So to break even that means you need about 4x gross revenue over the nominal budget. In this case, just taking the numbers you gave, they are about $80m short of breaking even.
Uncharted the game series is as far as I know, an Indiana Jones movie except they made it into a video game by having Nathan Drake kill 100000 mooks constantly.
Are the movies the same? Just like an earlier movie but weirdly way more violent?
uncharted, horizon, god of war, last of us etc