Or it compliments the player's interactions with the gameplay and characters simultaneously. Imagine if you really love playing as a Royal Guard, but you really hate the character who has that Style. By fighting alongside that character and gradually discovering their hidden depths just as you unlock powers for Dante to use, you could grow to have a greater appreciation for the character, or at least come to anticipate where the next plot twist will push your relationship with them. By design, the game can incentivise behaviour from the player they wouldn't normally consider, and coax more replay value out of the same gameplay to provide greater longevity.
Any design concept is a double edged sword, but you have to be willing to consider that the benefits can outweigh the risks in the end.
I can only speak for myself, but I really wouldn't want that in a Devil May Cry game :/ That way - unless I misunderstood you somewhere in which case I am sorry - there would have to be different ways in which the story can play out, depending on your relatioship with each character. I'm not a fan of that 'multiple-choice' type of story telling, it's ok in RPGs where you've got a character that is basically a representation of yourself, but in games like DMC/DmC where you're playing a character that already has defined characteristics and behaviour patterns, it would always leave me with the question "So, what did now
really happen?".
And what if I just
can't appreciate that character? What if I simply can't stand them? It'd annoy me greately that I'd have to spend time with them despite disliking them so much.
But I do agree that they could do something with a hub world, however, it should be additional.
A little like the old games, where you could walk around the castle in DMC1, for example, and interact with some objects like book shelves, to give you additional information about the story, just that they could do it more extensive. For example, instead of simply having and Mission Select screen and a cutscene triggering automatically, they could allow you to walk around freely in some smaller, closed off sections to interact with the environment and maybe trigger some adtional, but not nessesary to follow the story as a whole, cutsecenes, or find objects that may tell you some more detail or something like that, until you've finished exporing.
That playground scene coul have worked like that, you'd be allowed to explore the environment for a bit and discover what Dante thinks or remembers on his own, and when you're done exploring, approach Vergil to trigger the cutscene where he tells their story.
It would have also been possible to do something with the Order that way, like, before planning to take out Virility and RNN, Vergil could have told Dante to 'make himself at home until he's ready to plan the next step' or something like that, allowing you to walk around the headquaters, talk to some other members and view some of the information the Order had accumulated, without it taking away anything from what will happen next or making the story un-understandable without having discovered everything.
The problem with DmC's more inconsistent pacing was the fact that they felt the need to continue the twenty mission tradition in every Devil May Cry in the past.
It wasn't necessary to fit this dynamic. The game would have benefited with a longer run time.
I think it's not only that, because some missions, like the Bob Barbas and Mundus Spawn ones, could have either been part of another mission or extended upon.
Looking at how much dialogue - dialogue that has even been already recorded - has been left out, I'd assume that they either wanted to or had to shorten the game, because it might have become a little
too story heavy for a DMC title. Or they didn't have the money. Either way, it's deeply regrettable :ermm:
