I liked SR3, and thought a lot of the refinements were good.. and I admit one thing, tying the story together like this DID solve one of the major problems. Remember in SR2 where you could have two of the three gangs kicked out and own 70% of the city, then you go to start the third gang and the response is "Who the fuck are you? You're nobody, you're done with, get out." and naturally your thought is "I OWN this city.. have you not looked at your zone map in the past year?!" It was a downside of having all three playable whenever.. and trying to shift the storyline or at least some of the cutscenes according to your control would've been maddening.
There was something lost though in transition, though.. SR2 is the better game I think. Makes me hope they'll learn for SR4 to pull in what's good of all three games prior. And, moreso, if they don't return Johnny Gat in some interesting twist in the final DLC for 3, a lot of fans will be annoyed at the least (me one of them).
Maybe some day when we figure how to pull apart enough of the formats we could drop SR2's assets into SR3, so we can play all that stuff from SR2 but with the tweaks and enhancements from 3. Make it all one big unified city or something.. hell, SR1 too so we can start, play through, beat one part, have it black for the few years.. then start the NEXT game, then black for a few years.. then the heist then everything moves to steelport. And at the end of such, maybe reconstruct the bridge so we can go back to Stillwater and play stuff across a massive 2 (3?) maps.
And watch the engine break down and sob trying to synchronize that much at once, I know I know