This post contains some light spoilers, so if you're entirely new to the games, you may want to skip this.
Huge disclaimer: this post is just my personal opinion and I don't intend to offend anyone in any way. If Jak 2 is your favorite Jak game and you love it as it is, I respect that and I'm happy for you, no hard feelings!
I've been playing the trilogy for a couple of months now. I finished TPL about a month ago and Renegade a week ago. I started Jak 3 only two days ago and the difference in checkpoints, health refills and missions difficulty is astonishing.
I've reached 40% of progress in Jak 3 in a couple of days, while it took me weeks to do the same in Jak 2. I've not finished Jak 3 yet, but I can tell this so far:
- at least for now, Jak 3 seems like a cake walk compared to the previous title. In Jak 2 I had to repeat some specific missions dozens of times before completing them, while for Jak 3 it has been only a couple of times.
- Jak 3 checkpoints are way more lenient. It's so refreshing to know that I don't have to repeat the entire mission from the very beginning if I screw up at the end. Jak 2 genuinely almost made rage quit because of this.
- I appreciate the fact that there is a good amount of health refills during the missions. Again, Jak 2 lacked those in some and I don't know whether it was made on purpose or not, but adding this to the checkpoints issue made playing them literal hell.
It's my first time playing both titles, so I had no way to "develop" some skills to be better in one of the two. It's true though that in Jak 3 you get some moves, weapons and items from Jak 2, so maybe having to use them before makes it easier later. While between TPL and Renegade there's a radical change, Jak 3 offers some continuity in terms of gameplay.
Now for some completely personal opinions:
- I prefer way better Spargus City than Haven City. It's amazing being able to move fast from one place to another without having to crash into NPCs or guards every single time.
- I like way more the driving missions in Spargus City than in Haven City simply because in the former you get to do them in the desert, far from the actual city, so again you don't end up getting stuck because of NPCs in the way. The enemies in the desert are easily avoidable but still challenging enough to damage you.
I'm already at a point where I know that I'll have to come back to Haven City, so I don't know whether this temporary review will still be valid or not lol. So far I'm liking Jak 3 more than 2 and I'm judging only on the gameplay side, not on the storyline. I can't offer a POV on that yet since I've still not finished Jak 3.
After this long opinion, I will now talk about the QoL mod point. Despite the few times where I was questioning my life choices, I enjoyed the shift of atmosphere from TPL and I think the storyline was great. I even appreciated the addition of weapons and actually liked the races in the stadium (I can't say the same for the driving missions in the city, I despised those). Overall the game was good and I wouldn't change it in terms of content, but more so of gameplay experience: a QoL (quality of life) mod does that.
These changes would include health refills in the mission that lack them, adding checkpoints where relevant and removing a certain number of the NPCs so that the city isn't that crowded.
I don't even think you could make this kind of mod unfortunately, but I personally believe the changes above would make the game way more tolerable.
