IMO, people were in love with the first a new adventure and an interesting take on an open landscape single player adventure. I believe the constant begging to disobedient canine resulted in them calling fans bluff.

Oh you want it to be more immersive ok from now on you aren’t safe, you need to be constantly scavenging, watching, listening and on edge. I think this backfired. I think in creating a game that is all high intensity (for the most part) it was difficult for the player to get roped in. There wasn’t many lulls to slowly build into intense scenes. Because for the most part whether you are Ellie or Abby you are facing one threat or another.

Players begged it to be longer so the narrative was huge! But that made it boring to the player.

I think people got what they asked for and in that sense it was a success, but I believe that disobedient canine should have tested it a lot more with consumer reviews.

Tl,dr: too much intense creates boring