Because I don't want Kotaku getting traffic.

The genre is the difference. Those games are visual novels, and there are consequences to all your actions, including picking the wrong button in quicktime events. Imagine if in TWD, every choice you made had the same exact outcome, and there was no way to fail quicktime events. You would literally just be reading a 3d comic book instead of playing a game. That's what Ryse is, according to this article.

Because there's no false sense of control in those games.
Also the story does not change with Ryse, there are no decisions just unfailable QTEs.

Don't know about Heavy Rain, but while the Walking Dead was rather weak on the 'game play' side of things, it was still fundamentally an interactive experience: i.e. the experience is shaped at least in part by the player's interaction. The actual events of the plot differ only in minor variations but as a whole the contexts of the narrative and Lee's character arc are very much up to the player.

But Ryse apparently doesn't even have that. It's a 100% directed for the player experience. It's the difference between Deus Ex, Bioshock, or Metro to the likes of Call of Duty, Battlefield or Medal of Honor. Sure the earlier games were essentially giant corridors but within those corridors the player created their own experience. How they fight was their determination, what and where they explore was their prerogative, their accomplishments are very much their own. They didn't have the game forcing them to wait for NPCs to open doors, instant death invisible walls, restrictions and directions on exactly what tools they were allowed to use and when, button prompts to do awesome shit in a cutscene...

Are you realizing your own experience in some way, or are you just given one to consume? That's the difference between interactivity and non-interactivity. That's the difference between TWD and what Ryse looks like it's going to be.

And last I checked, the degree of interaction/interactive feedback and player enjoyment have always been strongly correlated.

Right, I'm the lesser person because I actually bothered to be interested enough to read what I was curious about instead of expecting others to do the work for me, like my personal secretaries. Suuure.

They aren't against LPs as much as the fact that people were making money off of their products. Other companies have done this too (Sega being rather infamous for actually taking down videos in a debacle a few months ago).

The difficulty level only makes the game more boring, but not harder. Enemies have more health and you deal less damage, that's all. It doesn't fix the gameplay, only the fights last longer. Killing a giant with a level 1 character on master difficulty is not hard, but it's super boring since it takes 15 minutes minimum.

Just increasing numbers doesn't make the game more interesting.

I played it on hard. It was hard indeed for the first couple of levels, but once I beat like the 3rd or 4th dragon (that one was an elder dragon) and got myself the dragonbone armor, stuff was easy to faceroll.

No idea how you manage to die all the time in Skyrim. Really. All you have to do is move around a bit to avoid enemies since they always stop while attacking and thus can't hit you as long as you move. There are about one million other ways to defeat enemies easily of course, but this is the most obvious one. Apart from potions of course, which make you invincible as long as you have any left since they heal instantly and you can drink as many as you want while pausing the game. Or crafting godlike equipment, which is super easy since even the best raw materials lay around in random locations and you can simply grab them, the people who own them don't care. Or...well, I could go on and on.

do all the draugr tombs/caves you can find, ALWAYS explore dungeons and outside fortresses to the fullest (to find the hidden chests) and you'll find yourself with named weapons not worth carrying around because enchanted obsidian swords beat everything.