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i make an effort to get through it every 4 or so years. last year (my third attempt) was easily my most successful one. i suspect I got through 40% of the game. in the past, i'd bounce at the first RTS segment. still can't finish it though. I like everything about it conceptually. playing it is a whole other issue.

I’d be curious to know exactly how stripped-down Tim’s original conception was. It sounds like he basically set out to do the RTS battles, but it’s a Double Fine game – it’s hard to believe they didn’t always intend to reserve ample real estate for the lore stuff. Maybe not though! The budget must have been a fraction of what it grew to if at the outset it was just the multiplayer with an accompanying tutorial. When the single-player campaign was greatly expanded at Vivendi’s direction, I can imagine Tim looking at the unplanned evolution as, “Well, now we’ve poured all this extra frosting around the cake – what’s the bad news?” But the way you experience it as a player, the frosting is substantial enough to be taken as the real thing, so when the first RTS battle comes around, you can easily feel as though a rug has been pulled out from under you, especially if you’ve really been digging the God of War stuff. My memory of the first time playing it was that I didn’t object to the swerve in that I enjoyed the stage battles, but I ended up slightly disappointed when the Zelda of it turned out to be somewhat shallower than I thought was being promised in the early going. Retrospectively it’s easier to accept the game as “a little bit of a bunch of things”, but there was a real failure to set expectations. If the entire open-world action/adventure game was ultimately meant to be the most overproduced tutorial ever, they did themselves no favors by leaving the player to find that out along the way.