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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 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
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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Happy with the bloatware that games have become
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.
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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.
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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.
Suck people in then nerf it to make you spend more time doing the same thing over again
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?
So many of the responses to this (and the original video) boil down to “me like good games that I like, no like bad games I don’t like”.
I promise there were boring, repetitive, grindy games all through gaming history. This isn’t a “modern gaming” thing.
MMO games have been doing this shit since WOW became a thing
I mean I remember grinding for loot and levels in FF1.
If you think the WOW grind is bad, you should’ve seen Everquest or Ultima Online.
Pretty much from the dawn of gaming. There was another video posted just the other day about ADOM and how it’s pretty much unplayable unless you’re willing to put endless hours in to learn and memorize all the inscrutable details it makes use of, mostly by dying constantly.
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’m having just as much or even more fun than I had 30 years ago.
I do however refrain from buying any overhyped AAA game when it comes out and wait maybe a year or two until people’s reviews on it are out.
Then under those conditions I can avoid heavilly monetised games like the plague: not just microtransaction crap but also things with Season Passes and even games with lots of DLCs as lots of those are usually a bad sign.
In the last few years I also just avoid MMORPGs because I don’t really want to have responsability towards other people (such as guild members to go on scheduled raids) and prefer setups were I can do things when I feel like it and can do it.
Basically give yourself time to find out from others how the game really is, then avoid anything with even the slightest wiff of having a business model that gains from people spending a significant proportion of their life in the game as those tend to have lots of grindy stuff, scheduled events that you “cannot miss” and lots and lots of disguised (and not so disguised) sales push - for the whole work for a living whilst being constantly under pressure from sales pushes trying to sell you useless shit, there’s already Real Life.
Funnily enough, I end up mainly playing Indie games and older AAA games and I do mean it when I say I have as much or even more fun as I ever did gaming - it probably helps that I’ve long transcended being dazzled by whatever passes for hyper-realistic graphics at the tech level of that time (I’m from the days of Pacman) and care way more about gameplay since that’s were the fun is and I play games for fun, not for artistic appreciation.
First off the idea that “other people share this opinion” is some form of validation of said opinion is…less than persuasive. “The earth is flat and you can find lots of people online saying the same thing” is an example of why you can’t just rest on other people agreeing with you as being the primary support of your positions. And it’s one of the first things brought up in the video so clearly this person feels it’s important to bring up.
Secondly the idea that older games respected your time or weren’t grindy is ridiculous. From core MMO designs, to JRPGs there are plenty of examples of old games that waste your time in some way or another.
It also sounds like he is saying that all games need to be simple games like Tetris. No story/cutscenes and no complicated game design that someone had to spend time learning. That’s certainly an opinion, but I don’t agree that game developers should only make games that target one specific person’s taste.
Opinion arguments, like “gaming feels like a chore” require different support from fact arguments like, “the world is flat.” You absolutely can not prove the world is flat, gravity works, or birds are real with an opinion poll, but a poll will support whether newer games are less fun or Coke is better than Pepsi.
IMO, the best argument against the video is that he’s focused on old games that he still plays - he’s comparing the best of old games with whatever has just come out. I’d argue that there’s something special and unique about a game you can still play a decade later - it’s not the story, which is definitely going to get tiring after 10-20 playthroughs; it’s not the quests for the same reason. Game mechanics, decent pacing for that one-more-turn feel, and maybe just aesthetic appeal. Where would he put games like Minecraft or Valheim, both of which rely heavily on resource farming and repetitive building?
I think that many of the new, big titles have tried to capture all possible niches - part FPS, part RPG, part basebuilder - and it’s hard to make all of those seem important to the game without forcing FPS players to do basebuilding and basebuilders to do RPG. That takes away from each person’s enjoyment of their preferred mechanic and imposes tedium.
Opinion arguments, like “gaming feels like a chore” require different support from fact arguments like, “the world is flat.”
Sure, but “other people say this” isn’t going to hold much sway in pretty much any context. It’s not really worth bringing up at all.
I think that many of the new, big titles have tried to capture all possible niches - part FPS, part RPG, part basebuilder - and it’s hard to make all of those seem important to the game without forcing FPS players to do basebuilding and basebuilders to do RPG.
Some do, but plenty don’t. Just like there are plenty of indie games not worth playing, there are plenty of AAA games you can avoid if you don’t think you’ll enjoy it. And the reverse is true for both cases as well.
You can get a lot of mileage out of what other people say by paying attention to the ones who give reasons for those opinions and focusing on the one whose reasons correspond to what you value in a game.
Overall I think a good review of a piece of media doesn’t even need to say if it’s good or not; what it needs to do is describe that aspects someone might find compelling or annoying so they can make an informed decision about whether it’s a good fit for their taste.
theres always been games that feel like a chore
donkey kong on n64 had you what go collect bananas or something? is that fun? some werent even found until a few years ago
ghostbusters on nes is an entire chore made into a “game”
Hey, I liked NES ghostbusters. You got to design your own car, bust ghosts, and worry about your business’ finances. Of course I haven played it in over 30 years so I imagine the rose-colored glasses might be a problem.
donkey kong on n64 had you what go collect bananas or something? is that fun?
I don’t know what caused people to all of a sudden complain about this game (maybe a dunkey video?). This game is still fun by modern standards regrdless of whether you 100% it or not
There are definitely games that are designed to pull as much money from the player as possible, just avoid them. Don’t buy them, don’t play them.
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.
(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…
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 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.
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.
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.
Yes, because 22 years ago nobody thought Animal Crossing felt like a chore.
Hey, don’t mess up with the game that saved the sanity of uncountable people in the pandemic!
Both new Zeldas and Baldur’s Gate 3 don’t feel like a chore to me. They’re awesome games. Same with Red Dead Redemption 2.
Oh boy, the new zeldas’ have tons of collectibles and they don’t feel special at all. The fact that you have a menu telling you how many you got makes it worse.
Woodland critter counter
Poe counter
Shrine counter
Stable points
Fall challenges
And so on. It began as fun and as I progressed I started getting sidetracked and by the end it just wasn’t as fun anymore. The new zelda lack focus. And it’s intentional too, I just hate that.
Don’t forget how much you had to grind for armor upgrades.
Armor what? xD
I beat the game with a shiny 12 in amor.
The “new zeldas”? Where were you when they hid a bunch of quality of life upgrades behind an actual hundred skulltulas?
I think sometimes people mistake a game surfacing a list of content for practical reasons with forcing you to touch every little thing inside the game. In any case, Zelda games have always had a progress screen like that. They practicaly pioneered the concept.
I don’t feel the need to get all of those things. If I see poe, I pick it up, but I don’t go actively hunting for it.
Just this year we got Spider-Man 2, Pikmin 4, Cities Skylines II, Super Mario Wonder, Hi-Fi Rush… The guy even praises Baldur’s Gate in this.
It’s just people being weird and conservative and nostalgic. “Game that doesn’t make me feel like a child” = “modern game”.
It’s just people being weird and conservative and nostalgic. “Game that doesn’t make me feel like a child” = “modern game”.
Old. They’re being old. This is EXACTLY the same energy as a boomer saying “Music these days don’t get it” or “No one pays attention to this anymore” or “Nothing’s as good as it used to be”.
The take hyper focuses on negativity and would rather whine and complain about everything bad NOW, while nostalgia is living in their head rent free, because things are passing them by.
A friend of mine started saying BG3 was garbage recently. When I asked why he couldn’t adequately get out a reason. They were all weird and dismissive. We ended up in a heated discussion because I felt he wasn’t being fair at all to the game. Turns out I was right. He eventually ended up saying “Listen I just think the game fucking sucks because there is too much in it. I don’t have the time for all this. I miss when games were good and didn’t sprawl on forever, forcing you to get confused and lost.” When I pointed out that his complaint was based entirely in what he likes and not what’s good, he changed subject.
Nine times out of ten these “IT’S NOT GOOD ANYMORE” are based purely in nostalgia that ignores everything negative because they’re not looking to criticize. They’re looking to vent their frustrations but don’t know how to do it in a healthy or fair manner.
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.
Nah, I enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Tears of the Kingdom, and yes even Starfield enough to give them up just because rage-bait Youtubers told me to.
Just like I’ll eventually probably pickup Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Spiderman 1 and 2 at some point along with many other AAA games that I think I’ll have fun playing in the near future.
