Max Payne 3 Delayed

Contrary to vox populi I actually think both the character's "even more fall from grace" and the ditching of New York may be a good way to continue the story. By itself, the fact Max is bald and older or it's not set in the US doesn't actually say anything inherently bad or good about the premise, it's just a ground rule for the actual game concept.

What I'm worried about is Rockstar's ability to fashion a gripping third person game without the abstractions/game "features" that invariably affect a game's verisimilitude. It's hard to explain without examples, but a recent example would be (though completely unrelated to where MP3 could do wrong) is Borderlands. Now, a game like Diablo 2 does things that are semi to totally incomprehensible in terms of the gameworld, because of its hack and slash, multiplayer-friendly nature. Rats that drop mauls, ludicrous travel between continents, pathetic creatures that by virtue of being coloured differently are a thousand times stronger, etc. Borderlands, however, crosses some personal invisible boundary of mine with its "renaming stations", free vehicle spawners, enemies that are stronger just because they have a bigger number, continuous and almost absurd respawning, micro-quests solved by walking 5 meters, out of the blue achievements, and many, many more deal-breakers. All these things don't tell me "Here's Pandora, a harsh world, go find the Vault", it just screams of "Here's a game, level up".

So, what I'm worried about is Rockstar fucking up Max Paynes' pitch (at least in my mind) "Here's the distillation of what constitutes a good noir graphic novel about Max Payne in the game medium" to something more mundane like "Here's a third person action game, caipirinha stands works as checkpoints, cover system!!! ".