While I agree with the title, this particular analysis is kind of shallow. It’s one thing to analyze predatory game design, but here it’s mostly “I don’t like this so it’s bad”. It’s also very narrowly focusing on AAA open world. Old AAA open worlds were much worse. Remember how empty and soulless the first Far Cry and AssCreed were?
I laughed when the author makes a bunch of examples where he calls cutscenes a waste of time. I don’t like action games for example and I can’t find any enjoyment in Dark Souls, but I’m not going to argue that it’s a waste of time or ignore the fact that people genuinely like it.
And then he goes on to say that modern games are made by random people in tech that aren’t into gaming. I mean, bro, have you tried applying for a fucking job as a game developer?? Participated in a lunch break at a gaming company where 90% of people only talk about videogames?
And then he goes on to say that modern games are made by random people in tech that aren’t into gaming. I mean, bro, have you tried applying for a fucking job as a game developer?? Participated in a lunch break at a gaming company where 90% of people only talk about videogames?
Yeah. I guarantee there’s nobody in game develop that isn’t into gaming. Not only is game development much harder than regular web development you also get paid less and are usually treated worse. I love gaming but I wouldn’t go into game development because it’s just not worth the effort for me. I’ll much rather do my cushy regular tech work and have more time playing games.
It depends. There are some people here and there. But also, you don’t need to be a hardcore gamer to do a LOT of the technical work in gaming. Mostly you just need to be really good at coding and somehow prefer decent snacks and a lax dress code to money and job stability.
Technically you don’t need to be a gamer at all to work in gaming if you’re a good developer, but the question is why? Because my experience has been that you get decent snacks and lax dress code in addition to money and job stability. From my experience the only reason to go into game dev is because you want to work on games. If that’s not the reason you’re just better off doing tech work elsewhere.
Yeah, no, we’re not disagreeing here. Absolutely go spend a decade sorting out a single form in a banking software thing. It is objectively the better choice.
All I’m saying is the few people who get into it non-vocationally are mostly there for the vibes.
Bro, banks are one of the worst places to work. I would rather work as a game dev than go into banking. There are infinitely better places to work at but if your experience is only between banking and game dev then I can see how game dev could look much more appealing.
There was another video post to this community last night at around the same time (although was later deleted) saying “Why aren’t games fun anymore?”
This entire thing feels shallow as hell and just one angry dude who’s pissed about things not being like they used to be so he’s whining about it to other people who are angry.
There is literally nothing objective about this. It’s all using heavy skewed data to try and prove its point. He has absolutely no clue what he’s talking about. He’s just angry and saying things that he thinks are intelligent to try and back up his point.
Only thing I’ve discovered from this post is another “analyzer” to avoid at all possible costs.
This type of nostalgia porn is pretty popular on Youtube, but usually they at least make some valid point. Not in this case though.
It’s also funny how Skyrim is presented as one of the ‘cool’ games, glossing over the fact that it has a massive, slow exposition dump at the beginning, which was criticized ever since it launched.
I really don’t understand where this sentiment of games feeling like a “chore” is now suddenly applicable to ONLY modern gaming. Let’s not sit around and pretend that a sizable chunk of older games weren’t insane clusterfuck monotonous slogfests either. This is NOT a “modern gaming” trope, insanely grindy and tedious games have been around since video games were a thing.
Perhaps, but the seasonal events “complete this grind now or get locked out forever” FOMO bs is very much a new thing, at least in how widespread it is.
In, idk, classic Final Fantasy games you could quit whenever and resume exactly where you left off months down the line. Today games demand your attention like they never really did before.
Pretty much yeah, there is a reason why Madden and FIFA (formerly) were top sellers every year with extremely minimal changes. It’s a safe game that sold like crazy. Same with Call of Duty. If we want something fresh, indie games for the most part try not to fall into the saturated market and stand out above their peers
Dude is spot on with Starfield. I’ve played the shit out of so many Bethesda games. I was SO excited for Starfield. But I just didn’t have the time. I didn’t even get to that planet where he does the quests, I just quit and I’m afraid that if I pick it up I’ll accomplish nothing in the little time I have.
I always considered myself a dedicated gamer, like gaming was my sole hobby. Lately the last game I really could get fully into was stardew valley because I could fit in a single “day” or two in my schedule and finish on a hype every time.
Last RPG I played I had to make note of what was happening because by the time I picked up the game again I forgot what was happening.
Sure, if you don’t have time to binge play anymore it’s harder to get into genres that depend on following a narrative for tens of hours. Have you tried going back to Daggerfall or Morrowind? Because those weren’t bite-sized then, either, you just had five hours after school to sit down and play.
Which is fine. It’s perfectly acceptable to say that you no longer have time or energy to get into long-winded stuff and prefer faster paced games. I agree. But that’s not because modern games are poorly designed.
Hell, these days I can boot up a PS5 and be right where I left off in 20 seconds. When I was a kid loading up a game was a 15 minute proposition before the damn thing even rendered anything on-screen.
(Preface - I’ve not yet picked up Starfield, though I have hundreds [far too many] hours in other Bethesda games; Cyberpunk 2.0, though, has thoroughly captured my attention.)
I hear what you’re saying, but the YouTube commenter apparently loves Elden Ring, which I found to be an awful game and painful to play. Man, I love complex, deeply explorable games, but I played Elden Ring for 8 hours and never felt like I was making an inch of pleasurable progress. The commenter complains about games being a chore, but what about games like Elden Ring that aren’t chores, but are literal punishment?
I guess I had trouble accepting the commenter’s point of view after he rah-rah’d for Elden Ring…
Elden Ring really scratches that exploratory game itch for me. Every meter felt worth visiting. You never really know what awaits in the next corner. If you’re lucky it might be the entrance to a completely unique area, all with its own set of enemies and bosses. It’s a game that dares to put an optional secret area behind a secret area behind another secret area.
Even on second play through I was caught off guard by some new surprises.
Compare it to Tears of the Kingdom for example. Wherever you go, you will find the same sets of enemies and often even the same environmental assets. After you’ve visited a few of the sky archipelago islands there’s few other surprises to see there. Encountering the first Flux Construct is a fun challenge, but after the 20th one it has turned into a mindless chore.
The point of elden ring and its siblings is the feeling of earned progress through effort and skill. You learn how to kill a boss slowly, and you fight and grapple for every level to build that strength. You do a similar thing with the environment.
The complaint of chores is one of tedium, not challenge. You dont learn to complete the chore list, you just fill time with it.
If you dont enjoy the challenge souls games offer you, its not your type of fun. But I feel the same way about car games, doesnt mean theres fault in the racing genre.
You’ve just described a chore you enjoy vs a chore you don’t. If you enjoy it, great, it’s not a chore for you! If you don’t enjoy it, it’s a boring tedious chore.
I found Elden Ring to be aggressively, intentionally designed to waste my time. At no point did I feel any sense of enjoyment. I found Starfield to be a bit lacking in depth and variety but otherwise OK-ish.
I rrally dont have much time for it but I love gaming. But over the past years, I started to play less and less because most of the games requires so much time and patience. Sometimes, you litteraly have ti spend hours learning stuff before you can actually start playing and enjoy. Or you need to spend half of the games managing inventory. I cant invest dozens and dozens of hours in games anymore, and I feel like simple, easy to play for short session games are disappearing… So even if I’m often tempted by AAA games, I usually now go for snall indie title, and it’s a good thing in the end. I’m still gonna play the shit of Baldurs Gate 3 next Summer tho.
Or you need to spend half of the games managing inventory.
On the other hand, I enjoy this (to a certain degree, mind you). Going through all the random crap I’ve picked up off the ground in Skyrim to maximize selling potential, moving things around in Diablo II for the same reason, picking through my vault in Destiny 2 to figure out which guns to keep and which to dismantle, organizing my various bits and bobs in FFXIV:ARR across my retainers so that everything is where it should be… I kind of dig that kind of stuff because its a bit of a management game within the regular game and a nice break from mindlessly murdering everything (and a bit of a “ooh presents on Christmas” kind of feel when you dig through all the stuff you’ve acquired).
On the gripping (third) hand, sometimes it does become more of a second job almost… Destiny 2, as an example again, feels like a chore sometimes keeping on top of all the various currencies and whether this random gun/armor that dropped is an upgrade over one of the multitude of other options I’ve had collecting dust for the past couple of years. “But maybe I’ll use it if they buff [gun type/perk/build]!” I think as I toss it into the pile, only to forever become an icon I ignore in DIM.
As someone who played/plays a lot of MMOs and stuff like Destiny/The Division: You’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t get to step two of that simple statement.
People who are just downright angry at a game but still actively playing… “Man, I can’t believe they’re forcing me to go into PvP to get [some arbitrary weapon or cosmetic item]!” they grumble, not realizing that they don’t need to tick that little check box in their collection.
People who say things like “I grinded out this holiday season and bought the event pass and I didn’t even like the stuff it offered!” is perhaps not technically ‘common’, but that kind of situation happens often enough that I’m a bit worried for gamers as a whole.
Its some kind of weird combination of a hoarder’s mentality, a sunk cost fallacy, and probably some FOMO sprinkled on top… all mixed together by some psychologist on a company’s payroll to maximize profits.
So much on point. Gaming is about content these days, so stretch it out.
How many got annoyed with Diablo IV nerfs which Activision adopt on every game they release. Suck people in then nerf it to make you spend more time doing the same thing over again. I didn’t invest time or money into this, and I have to admit I felt very smug when I read about them doing this.
Gaming should be about entertainment, today’s triple A efforts just aren’t.
Somebody hasn’t gone back to play mainstream games on the PS2 era recently, when large developers had a fraction of the money and any game below 30 hours was ruthlessly slammed online for being “too short” and “not good value”.
I swear, people use the term “triple-A” just to refer to bits of gaming they don’t like, regardless of who made them or for how much money. The term is meaningless by now.
I have never played any PS2 games. Maybe that is the problem. What was acceptable for a console has become the norm now on a PC. But, if you are happy with the bloatware that games have become then good for you. I will not be supporting them with my cash.
No one’s saying you have to pay for games you don’t like. They’re saying you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about because grindy games have been a popular mainstay of the medium since its inception.
There have always been grindy games. BUT there has always been other options for the more popular non grindy games. Now we see a prevalence of the grindy games, 4and a lack of content in the other area. This is due to cost. It is cheaper to hype up a game with advertising than it is to add content. You clearly don’t even realise you are being conned, clearly.
You’re openly saying you didn’t play older games. You don’t get to say what something has become when you’re not familiar with the originating form. Games ALWAYS had “bloatware”. Console and PC. They were always designed to be padded and stretched out.
Then you either expressed it confusingly or you aren’t understanding my reply. Because it sure sounded like you were saying modern PC game design tropes were console-specific back in the early 2000s and that’s why you don’t remember grindy games existing back then.
I feel like the word content itself is completely wrongheaded. How much “content” does Tetris have? What would more content in a game like that even be?
I like games to be a chore on my terms. Will I grind for a mirror in path of exile, yes. Will I complete a battle pass, do my daily quests and get my log in bonus? Fuck off.
Yeah this is me. Tell me “Find 10/25 Bloblins in the area to continue” and I get upset, but instead tell me “There are 25 Bloblins on this map”, and if there’s an cool optional prize with it then you bet I’ll spend time scouring the map for Bloblins.
I enjoy things the most when I can set the goals with just some hinting from the game. If it’s just something trying to manufacture attention to the game it’s a big turn-off.
It’s not just the playing, even the buying can be a chore, as you’ll have to dig through dozens of different versions, DLC, and season passes to figure out what you are even buying, most of the time the actual online shop doesn’t even tell you, you have to search around forums to figure out what you get. Starting one of those Ultimate Edition that includes everything also means spending 5min clicking though dozens of “You just bought DLC” notifications.
Getting late into a game series is also always “fun”, as you can’t even tell what is a prequel, sequel, spin-off or whatever, as most content no longer puts a number in the title. That’s another trip to Wikipedia, as I have yet to see any online shop providing that information.
Needless to say, I stick mostly with older or indie games. I can’t stand how every modern game needs to have skill trees, collectives, level ups and hundred different weapons that all look and feel the same.
That said, chores can also be quite subjective. The Riddler trophies in the Batman Arkham games can certainly be seen as chore when you just want to reach the end fast, collecting them takes around three times as long as the main game. I however found them to be the best part of those games, as they are very old school and based in exploration and puzzles, as opposed to just running from cutscene to cutscene. They give the player a lot of agency and freedom that is missing in the main plot.
Modern gaming? I’m playing war thunder since 2016 (with interruptions) and it feels like a chore since 7 years. Now as I think of it, the chores began for me back in the 90s in a point and click adventure on a 286 PC.
If a game even remotely looks like a chore, I’m passing. I don’t have time to just mosey around limitless planets, mining for resources to build a gun or some shit.
Unless you let me swing around like fuckin Spider-man. Nothing’s a chore when you get to swing from chore to chore like fuckin Spider-man. Fuckin cool ass bitch with the pendulums and zipping and swinging and shit. Fuckin love Spider-man.
Did you remember to collect all the backpacks around New York and take pictures of all the landmarks though? Plus, you gotta beat all those Screwball challenges if you want all the suits.
If you want to be a completionist, you can’t blame the game. Spider-man is perfectly playable without finding every single collectible and completing every challenge.
In a game where running is fun, running all over the place won’t feel like a chore. Well, only if you don’t use the metro. Once you start fast travelling it begins losing appeal.
Spider-man games are one of my favourite. I really liked the recent one and the 1.5 featuring miles. I’ve lost count of how many I have blown days on. Prototype, hulk, etc., were decent but I generally prefer the spider-man games with spider man in them. That said my favourite spider-man game is gravity rush. I included the ‘-’ in spider-man because he told me to in at least one of the games.
Shit I’m so so so sorry when I wrote that I thought it was obvious I was making a joke about Spider-man being an entitled millennial but now, looking back that obviously was not clear. That’s 100% my bad!!!
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While I agree with the title, this particular analysis is kind of shallow. It’s one thing to analyze predatory game design, but here it’s mostly “I don’t like this so it’s bad”. It’s also very narrowly focusing on AAA open world. Old AAA open worlds were much worse. Remember how empty and soulless the first Far Cry and AssCreed were?
I laughed when the author makes a bunch of examples where he calls cutscenes a waste of time. I don’t like action games for example and I can’t find any enjoyment in Dark Souls, but I’m not going to argue that it’s a waste of time or ignore the fact that people genuinely like it.
And then he goes on to say that modern games are made by random people in tech that aren’t into gaming. I mean, bro, have you tried applying for a fucking job as a game developer?? Participated in a lunch break at a gaming company where 90% of people only talk about videogames?
Yeah. I guarantee there’s nobody in game develop that isn’t into gaming. Not only is game development much harder than regular web development you also get paid less and are usually treated worse. I love gaming but I wouldn’t go into game development because it’s just not worth the effort for me. I’ll much rather do my cushy regular tech work and have more time playing games.
It depends. There are some people here and there. But also, you don’t need to be a hardcore gamer to do a LOT of the technical work in gaming. Mostly you just need to be really good at coding and somehow prefer decent snacks and a lax dress code to money and job stability.
Technically you don’t need to be a gamer at all to work in gaming if you’re a good developer, but the question is why? Because my experience has been that you get decent snacks and lax dress code in addition to money and job stability. From my experience the only reason to go into game dev is because you want to work on games. If that’s not the reason you’re just better off doing tech work elsewhere.
Yeah, no, we’re not disagreeing here. Absolutely go spend a decade sorting out a single form in a banking software thing. It is objectively the better choice.
All I’m saying is the few people who get into it non-vocationally are mostly there for the vibes.
Bro, banks are one of the worst places to work. I would rather work as a game dev than go into banking. There are infinitely better places to work at but if your experience is only between banking and game dev then I can see how game dev could look much more appealing.
There was another video post to this community last night at around the same time (although was later deleted) saying “Why aren’t games fun anymore?”
This entire thing feels shallow as hell and just one angry dude who’s pissed about things not being like they used to be so he’s whining about it to other people who are angry.
There is literally nothing objective about this. It’s all using heavy skewed data to try and prove its point. He has absolutely no clue what he’s talking about. He’s just angry and saying things that he thinks are intelligent to try and back up his point.
Only thing I’ve discovered from this post is another “analyzer” to avoid at all possible costs.
This type of nostalgia porn is pretty popular on Youtube, but usually they at least make some valid point. Not in this case though.
It’s also funny how Skyrim is presented as one of the ‘cool’ games, glossing over the fact that it has a massive, slow exposition dump at the beginning, which was criticized ever since it launched.
I really don’t understand where this sentiment of games feeling like a “chore” is now suddenly applicable to ONLY modern gaming. Let’s not sit around and pretend that a sizable chunk of older games weren’t insane clusterfuck monotonous slogfests either. This is NOT a “modern gaming” trope, insanely grindy and tedious games have been around since video games were a thing.
Perhaps, but the seasonal events “complete this grind now or get locked out forever” FOMO bs is very much a new thing, at least in how widespread it is.
In, idk, classic Final Fantasy games you could quit whenever and resume exactly where you left off months down the line. Today games demand your attention like they never really did before.
Stop buying exclusively AAA games then. They rarely try anything new and their primary design goals are to get you hooked so you buy more crap.
Pretty much yeah, there is a reason why Madden and FIFA (formerly) were top sellers every year with extremely minimal changes. It’s a safe game that sold like crazy. Same with Call of Duty. If we want something fresh, indie games for the most part try not to fall into the saturated market and stand out above their peers
Dude is spot on with Starfield. I’ve played the shit out of so many Bethesda games. I was SO excited for Starfield. But I just didn’t have the time. I didn’t even get to that planet where he does the quests, I just quit and I’m afraid that if I pick it up I’ll accomplish nothing in the little time I have.
I always considered myself a dedicated gamer, like gaming was my sole hobby. Lately the last game I really could get fully into was stardew valley because I could fit in a single “day” or two in my schedule and finish on a hype every time.
Last RPG I played I had to make note of what was happening because by the time I picked up the game again I forgot what was happening.
That’s a you problem, not a game problem, though.
Sure, if you don’t have time to binge play anymore it’s harder to get into genres that depend on following a narrative for tens of hours. Have you tried going back to Daggerfall or Morrowind? Because those weren’t bite-sized then, either, you just had five hours after school to sit down and play.
Which is fine. It’s perfectly acceptable to say that you no longer have time or energy to get into long-winded stuff and prefer faster paced games. I agree. But that’s not because modern games are poorly designed.
Hell, these days I can boot up a PS5 and be right where I left off in 20 seconds. When I was a kid loading up a game was a 15 minute proposition before the damn thing even rendered anything on-screen.
(Preface - I’ve not yet picked up Starfield, though I have hundreds [far too many] hours in other Bethesda games; Cyberpunk 2.0, though, has thoroughly captured my attention.)
I hear what you’re saying, but the YouTube commenter apparently loves Elden Ring, which I found to be an awful game and painful to play. Man, I love complex, deeply explorable games, but I played Elden Ring for 8 hours and never felt like I was making an inch of pleasurable progress. The commenter complains about games being a chore, but what about games like Elden Ring that aren’t chores, but are literal punishment?
I guess I had trouble accepting the commenter’s point of view after he rah-rah’d for Elden Ring…
I tried Elden Ring because the kids were loving it. I gave it about 3 hours and I still didn’t really know what was going on.
Elden Ring gave me the most buyers remorse I’ve ever felt
Elden Ring really scratches that exploratory game itch for me. Every meter felt worth visiting. You never really know what awaits in the next corner. If you’re lucky it might be the entrance to a completely unique area, all with its own set of enemies and bosses. It’s a game that dares to put an optional secret area behind a secret area behind another secret area.
Even on second play through I was caught off guard by some new surprises.
Compare it to Tears of the Kingdom for example. Wherever you go, you will find the same sets of enemies and often even the same environmental assets. After you’ve visited a few of the sky archipelago islands there’s few other surprises to see there. Encountering the first Flux Construct is a fun challenge, but after the 20th one it has turned into a mindless chore.
Elden ring was such a great game for me, I’m really sick of these movies with extra steps kind of game. To each their own I guess.
The point of elden ring and its siblings is the feeling of earned progress through effort and skill. You learn how to kill a boss slowly, and you fight and grapple for every level to build that strength. You do a similar thing with the environment.
The complaint of chores is one of tedium, not challenge. You dont learn to complete the chore list, you just fill time with it.
If you dont enjoy the challenge souls games offer you, its not your type of fun. But I feel the same way about car games, doesnt mean theres fault in the racing genre.
You’ve just described a chore you enjoy vs a chore you don’t. If you enjoy it, great, it’s not a chore for you! If you don’t enjoy it, it’s a boring tedious chore.
I found Elden Ring to be aggressively, intentionally designed to waste my time. At no point did I feel any sense of enjoyment. I found Starfield to be a bit lacking in depth and variety but otherwise OK-ish.
I rrally dont have much time for it but I love gaming. But over the past years, I started to play less and less because most of the games requires so much time and patience. Sometimes, you litteraly have ti spend hours learning stuff before you can actually start playing and enjoy. Or you need to spend half of the games managing inventory. I cant invest dozens and dozens of hours in games anymore, and I feel like simple, easy to play for short session games are disappearing… So even if I’m often tempted by AAA games, I usually now go for snall indie title, and it’s a good thing in the end. I’m still gonna play the shit of Baldurs Gate 3 next Summer tho.
deleted by creator
On the other hand, I enjoy this (to a certain degree, mind you). Going through all the random crap I’ve picked up off the ground in Skyrim to maximize selling potential, moving things around in Diablo II for the same reason, picking through my vault in Destiny 2 to figure out which guns to keep and which to dismantle, organizing my various bits and bobs in FFXIV:ARR across my retainers so that everything is where it should be… I kind of dig that kind of stuff because its a bit of a management game within the regular game and a nice break from mindlessly murdering everything (and a bit of a “ooh presents on Christmas” kind of feel when you dig through all the stuff you’ve acquired).
On the gripping (third) hand, sometimes it does become more of a second job almost… Destiny 2, as an example again, feels like a chore sometimes keeping on top of all the various currencies and whether this random gun/armor that dropped is an upgrade over one of the multitude of other options I’ve had collecting dust for the past couple of years. “But maybe I’ll use it if they buff [gun type/perk/build]!” I think as I toss it into the pile, only to forever become an icon I ignore in DIM.
I’ve boycotted all GaS and live service games. I’ve never been happier and now I play the games I want to play not because I have to
Very complicated way of saying “I didn’t like this, so I stopped doing it.”
Well, duh.
As someone who played/plays a lot of MMOs and stuff like Destiny/The Division: You’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t get to step two of that simple statement.
People who are just downright angry at a game but still actively playing… “Man, I can’t believe they’re forcing me to go into PvP to get [some arbitrary weapon or cosmetic item]!” they grumble, not realizing that they don’t need to tick that little check box in their collection.
People who say things like “I grinded out this holiday season and bought the event pass and I didn’t even like the stuff it offered!” is perhaps not technically ‘common’, but that kind of situation happens often enough that I’m a bit worried for gamers as a whole.
Its some kind of weird combination of a hoarder’s mentality, a sunk cost fallacy, and probably some FOMO sprinkled on top… all mixed together by some psychologist on a company’s payroll to maximize profits.
Gaming is dead and so is the term gamers. Been like that for decades.
So much on point. Gaming is about content these days, so stretch it out.
How many got annoyed with Diablo IV nerfs which Activision adopt on every game they release. Suck people in then nerf it to make you spend more time doing the same thing over again. I didn’t invest time or money into this, and I have to admit I felt very smug when I read about them doing this.
Gaming should be about entertainment, today’s triple A efforts just aren’t.
Yeeeeah. No padding in old games. None at all.
Somebody hasn’t gone back to play mainstream games on the PS2 era recently, when large developers had a fraction of the money and any game below 30 hours was ruthlessly slammed online for being “too short” and “not good value”.
I swear, people use the term “triple-A” just to refer to bits of gaming they don’t like, regardless of who made them or for how much money. The term is meaningless by now.
I have never played any PS2 games. Maybe that is the problem. What was acceptable for a console has become the norm now on a PC. But, if you are happy with the bloatware that games have become then good for you. I will not be supporting them with my cash.
No one’s saying you have to pay for games you don’t like. They’re saying you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about because grindy games have been a popular mainstay of the medium since its inception.
Did you even bother to read what I said?
There have always been grindy games. BUT there has always been other options for the more popular non grindy games. Now we see a prevalence of the grindy games, 4and a lack of content in the other area. This is due to cost. It is cheaper to hype up a game with advertising than it is to add content. You clearly don’t even realise you are being conned, clearly.
You’re openly saying you didn’t play older games. You don’t get to say what something has become when you’re not familiar with the originating form. Games ALWAYS had “bloatware”. Console and PC. They were always designed to be padded and stretched out.
You are talking to someone who enduring the tape decks during the commodore era. The grind then was just getting the game to run.
Oh, like PC games in 2001 weren’t just like that as well. This isn’t a platform thing, this is a development cost vs budget vs technology interplay.
So yeah, PC games were just like that, too, except back then the console ports were much, much worse than they are now, so that part also sucked.
You have just reiterated what I have just said.
Then you either expressed it confusingly or you aren’t understanding my reply. Because it sure sounded like you were saying modern PC game design tropes were console-specific back in the early 2000s and that’s why you don’t remember grindy games existing back then.
And then sell a pass to speed up your progress. It’s a terrible gaming model. It’s apparently a great business model though.
I feel like the word content itself is completely wrongheaded. How much “content” does Tetris have? What would more content in a game like that even be?
I like games to be a chore on my terms. Will I grind for a mirror in path of exile, yes. Will I complete a battle pass, do my daily quests and get my log in bonus? Fuck off.
Yeah this is me. Tell me “Find 10/25 Bloblins in the area to continue” and I get upset, but instead tell me “There are 25 Bloblins on this map”, and if there’s an cool optional prize with it then you bet I’ll spend time scouring the map for Bloblins.
I enjoy things the most when I can set the goals with just some hinting from the game. If it’s just something trying to manufacture attention to the game it’s a big turn-off.
It’s not just the playing, even the buying can be a chore, as you’ll have to dig through dozens of different versions, DLC, and season passes to figure out what you are even buying, most of the time the actual online shop doesn’t even tell you, you have to search around forums to figure out what you get. Starting one of those Ultimate Edition that includes everything also means spending 5min clicking though dozens of “You just bought DLC” notifications.
Getting late into a game series is also always “fun”, as you can’t even tell what is a prequel, sequel, spin-off or whatever, as most content no longer puts a number in the title. That’s another trip to Wikipedia, as I have yet to see any online shop providing that information.
Needless to say, I stick mostly with older or indie games. I can’t stand how every modern game needs to have skill trees, collectives, level ups and hundred different weapons that all look and feel the same.
That said, chores can also be quite subjective. The Riddler trophies in the Batman Arkham games can certainly be seen as chore when you just want to reach the end fast, collecting them takes around three times as long as the main game. I however found them to be the best part of those games, as they are very old school and based in exploration and puzzles, as opposed to just running from cutscene to cutscene. They give the player a lot of agency and freedom that is missing in the main plot.
I feel this way too, I’m currently doing all the riddles in Batman Arkham Knight, and although some are fun, most of them are boring.
I think most current games don’t even consider the fun factor anymore 😆
Remember when we could wreck the game with cheats like in GTA San Andreas or alike?
I used to just mess around with a buddy in the city doing whatever we wanted in the most uncomfortable form of local multiplayer that the PS2 offered.
I clicked it and the ad (Before my ad blocker kicked on) was for Eve online.
So slightly less modern games are chores as well!
Modern gaming? I’m playing war thunder since 2016 (with interruptions) and it feels like a chore since 7 years. Now as I think of it, the chores began for me back in the 90s in a point and click adventure on a 286 PC.
Starfield has too many loading screens to be fun. I have the game on an SSD, but it’s still way too much.
If a game even remotely looks like a chore, I’m passing. I don’t have time to just mosey around limitless planets, mining for resources to build a gun or some shit.
Unless you let me swing around like fuckin Spider-man. Nothing’s a chore when you get to swing from chore to chore like fuckin Spider-man. Fuckin cool ass bitch with the pendulums and zipping and swinging and shit. Fuckin love Spider-man.
Edit: Spider-man
Did you remember to collect all the backpacks around New York and take pictures of all the landmarks though? Plus, you gotta beat all those Screwball challenges if you want all the suits.
If you want to be a completionist, you can’t blame the game. Spider-man is perfectly playable without finding every single collectible and completing every challenge.
In a game where running is fun, running all over the place won’t feel like a chore. Well, only if you don’t use the metro. Once you start fast travelling it begins losing appeal.
Yup, and I loved every minute of it. Traversal and combat in that game were so much fun that none of it felt like a chore
Did you just say you love spiderman. That part wasn’t clear…
No, he wants to swing around while fucking Spider-Man. And who doesn’t?
Spider-man games are one of my favourite. I really liked the recent one and the 1.5 featuring miles. I’ve lost count of how many I have blown days on. Prototype, hulk, etc., were decent but I generally prefer the spider-man games with spider man in them. That said my favourite spider-man game is gravity rush. I included the ‘-’ in spider-man because he told me to in at least one of the games.
That’s because that’s how you spell Spider-Man.
I dunno. If anyone knows how to spell Spider-man correctly, it’s probably not some entitled self-righteous millennial
Edit: OH NO I’M SO SORRY I was making a joke, saying that Spider-man is an entitled millennial, not the commenter above
I only know because at least the Peter Parker spider-man frequently tells people how to spell it.
Shit I’m so so so sorry when I wrote that I thought it was obvious I was making a joke about Spider-man being an entitled millennial but now, looking back that obviously was not clear. That’s 100% my bad!!!