Originally in The Last of Us, everything was made and shot as if you were seeing everything from the character's perspective. There were a lot of tracking shots, the camera during cutscenes moved as if it was being controlled by a outside force holding a camera: it's meant to be intimate, to show you the characters as up close as possible, to really get into these character's heads. The only times it doesn't do that is during gameplay, but even then it's still not completely motionless. It's done with smaller movements as you're walking, driving, doing whatever, with these being much more noticeable when it transitions from gameplay directly into footage. Here: everything feels so sterile and bland: Joel entering the room loses that intimacy by having it zoomed into the doctor and past his fuckin' face, only to then cut back to Joel standing there, stone-faced. And then bam, long shot of the door. Then a room full of dead soldiers, lying there, really making you feel like shit cuz you caused this, how dare Joel, he's a monster:
I'd expect this from a Kojima game, not Naughty Dog's The Walking Dead. The scene's basically conveying to you: "OooOOOooOOOOooh, look at all the peeeEEople Joel kIlled. WhOOOaaAAAaa look at the bOdIeS!!!!". I can fucking hear the doom sound effect in my head, like the game's trying to shove the weight of Joel's actions down my throat, like I'm a baby that's got a bib on and the plot is shoveling its way into my mouth.
"Whooooa, you did that? Why would you do tha-""Because the game told me to!".
It's like it's trying so hard to be an artsy Walking Dead, but you can't really do that when you have this constant jumping back and forth: from the disconnect caused from the smooth camera pans and static shot position, only to have it transition right back into shaky cam. It's like it's confused as to what it wants to make the audience feel about this scene.
This was already an issue I noticed way back when the newer trailers and images for the game out closer to release, where they kept showcasing this sweeping vista shots of Ellie riding on horseback, putting focus on the buildings and environmental detail, and making it seem like something out of Breath of the Wild, and nary a zombie had basically been seen up to that point. Hell, the trailer where we got the cabin reveal did this too with the Firefly insignia on a tree branch with the slow zoom-in, but I thought they'd just done it to build up hype, but if it's like this throughout the whole game, and only in the gameplay will we get mere glimpses back to that shaky cam madness: then hoo boy this game's tone is in trouble. Nobody wants auteur shots in their zombie games, Druckmann: even The Walking Dead video game knew how to use placement correctly, and those characters and camera could be as stiff as wood.
It seems so small but these things have a purpose! There's a reason you don't see people using dutch angles for every scene in a movie (looking at you Battlefield Earth), or shot-reverse-shot overusage being a problem in most animated shows, and why people discuss bad composition: this stuff matters to the presentation and style of your game.