>>11879026
>What bothered me most is that there's one long road you can run down in 2, and after a while it's just a dead end and the game makes you go back. That just killed me and made me wonder why they let you do that. I don't know if there was some kind of intention behind it like punishing James for neglecting what he's supposed to be doing but it made playing the game feel pretty bad especially after you already had a similar long run at the start.

Nathan Ave? The bridge is out which is why he has to go to the Historical society which has a boat launch out back.

James doesn't relay a lot of his intentions to the player, who can often think he's just doing random bullshit one after another.

>I need to go the park, so I have to go through these apartments
>I need to go to the motel, but the bridge is out, so I have to go through the historical society to the back entrance

What the player sees:
>I'm going to go into these apartments since its' the only way forward but I have no idea why I'm here
>I'm going to go to the historical society since the madman mentions it in the note but I have no clue why.

>>11847012
it's because budgets increased, and they had to spend much of the Sh2 dev time working on the new engine, new lighting system, new assets, the town, etc. They had to cut somewhere, and cutting the amount of cityscape you explore by half is one area. They also had to trim down the amount of enemies.

I did some quick math and analysis, and SH2's city street segments are about half of Sh1's. The lower budget allowed them to make bigger levels in the end.

Since 2 didn't sell well, they made 3 and 4 at the same time, with 3's team mostly being 2's team and 4 being new people. 3 is a cobbled together mess of a game.