The Evil Within gives us a few choices as to how we'll handle certain sequences, but Bethesda plans to take this to another level in The Evil Within 2.
First of all, the environments will be larger and offer more freedom this time around. Want to sneak past enemies by using the boxes on the left, or by using the shadows from the trees on the right? Maybe you'll want to play Rambo and go nuts with your shotgun? The choice is yours.
You might want to take note of some of the other changes before doing the latter. The customisation system has been tweaked so that you'll only need "Green Gel" when giving Sebastian new abilities, not when modifying weapons. Sebastian's abilities are now broken into five categories:
• Athleticism: Run, Forrest, Ruuun! It's always nice to have some extra stamina to run away, and have the chance to auto-avoid certain types of incoming attacks.
• Combat: Not a fan of sneaking past enemies? The combat tree will help you increase the damage of your melee attacks and decrease the kickback when firing weapons, and more.
• Health: Using some Green Gel in the health tree will obviously give you more health.
• Recovery: The recovery tree is for players who knows that they'll take damage sooner or later. Upgrades here include an increased health recovery speed when regenerating from near-death situations, and the chance to automatically use a medical syringe when taking fatal damage.
• Stealth: In addition to an increased movement speed while crouching, the stealth tree can allow you to perform sneak kills from around a corner while in cover.
Each of these also includes special abilities that will cost a significant amount of Green Gel. One example is the Bullet Cascade in the combat tree. This will temporarily increase shooting damage with each consecutive shot. The active ability will end when either the time is up or you're out of ammo.
The weapon customisation options for gear like handguns and shotguns haven't changed all that much. You'll be able to tweak your firepower, ammo capacity, reload time and fire rate by using weapon parts. This doesn't apply to the Warden Crossbow, as that one has an entirely different set of upgrades. Here we get to increase the crossbow's range and decreasing the time it takes to fully aim the weapon, in addition to changing the parameters for the specific types of bolts.
With that in mind, only one question remains: which aspects will you focus on? The Union isn't exactly filled with resources, so you might have to make some difficult choices. Will you use the resources you have to craft ammunition for your weapons, or healing supplies? Are you going to search for more resources while knowing that you might use more than you get if you stumble upon enemies? It definitely sounds like it's worth doing multiple playthroughs if it's as open as Bethesda claims.
Was the lack of freedom and player choice something you disliked with the original?