My biggest problem with newer games in general is they drastically increased the work-to-fun ratio. Over the last ten years they gradually made gaming into work. RPGs and sandbox games especially but it’s invaded games like Mario Odyssey too. Older games were designed to provide a fun challenge that rewarded you on completing a level, or finding treasure. Newer ones replace infrequent, larger rewards with constant smaller rewards. The slow accumulation of minor bonuses attained by either playing longer or paying money instead of getting large bonuses from bigger achievements like beating a boss. If you’re not an eight hours a day gamer with either extreme patience or extreme addictive responses, it makes games into a joyless frustrating slog. Instead of going straight to that next dungeon, first I have to do all these little chores and fetch quests. In some games the fetching is at least optional but more and more they balance the game as if you did all of them or even block the main quest on completing them. In order to get to the next fun, you have to do more work. Don’t want to do more work? Pay more. I’m to the point where I won’t even entertain playing unless the fun to work ratio is at least 2:1.
I think the modern term for this is "grinding' and I fucking hate it. AAA game devs turned fun into a chore and they have no fucking idea what fun actually is
Grinding has been around forever, but it's been a thing you voluntarily do because you want to raise your level and make the game easier. Most games in the last quarter century don't actually require it for gamers who don't want to. This is artificially increasing the length of the game by having you do menial tasks that are usually 'Kill this slightly stronger than usual monster, 'Gather X of these item drops', or 'Walk around to different places talking to people'. At *best* they're boring repetitive filler that make the game longer, at worst they're there to hack addictive players' reward systems to get them to use microtransactions.
The Ubisoft conundrum. Each Assassin's Creed game has become more ambitious than the last, crafting bigger and bigger worlds, which of course they feel the need to fill with tasks and collections., often which don't directly have anything to do with the game itself. Then more and more games have started to do the same. The first Assassin's Creed was so tedious. Checkpoint races and flag gathering?? How boring was that? And as beautiful as Horizon Zero Dawn is, I feel the world is quite empty and devoid of life, one which doesn't feel to have much in the way of significance once the story ends.
I love that game dearly but even HZD is filled with a lot of side quests that don't really add much to the main story. The Frozen Wilds though is fan bloody tastic.
Oh, I loved the sidequests. They're what I'd call lorebuilding quests that add depth to the world beyond the main quest. They're what ended up making me appreciate the story even more. The only thing is, I found there weren't quite nearly enough of them for how big the world is. The playable area is fricken huge, and it ties into my earlier point, that large swatches of it feel empty and devoid of life. If they'd had more and spread them out into areas that are out of the way, it would encourage more exploration. As it is, most of the sidequests were clustered around the Sundom and Meridian when you got there, but there should have really been more along the way, and it is a long way to get there. The ones I felt that didn't add much at all were the trials, which I felt were there to pad the game. There needed to be more exploration incentives beyond the viewpoints and collections.
I never bothered with any of the hunting trials in HZD or the tutorials because some of them just don't work the way they were supposed to and had you leave the area and come back to finish the tutorial which I found quite annoying. For example the tutorial for the improved icerail requires you to kill 4 of a certain machine and when you get to that area only 2 spawn and you have to leave the area, walk a fair way away and return and then if you are lucky you get the remaining 2 as they respawn but not always.
Yeah, I never did the trials either. Once I realized what kind of activity they were, I never returned to them, extras be damned. And I guess it's one reason why I felt confused by the tutorial system. It was too open-ended as a tutorial system, leaving me to wonder what exactly I needed to do in certain situations and often completing them in completely the wrong way they've intended. There were some things I never used much because of this.
Lore building quests I’m totally fine with, but most side quests aren’t lore building so much as glorified grocery runs. They don’t worldbuild or character build, they don’t have unique areas or gameplay mechanics. They’re just chores. And sometimes they gate the main story. This totally ruined Ys IX for me, and the Mario games that gate progress or bonus levels on 100% collection just ruin the flow.
A lot of games these days remind me of that bank commercial with the kid on the bicycle in the rectangular box.... advert if you are unsure.
Ugh, I just found out to open the last level in Super Mario 3D World you don’t just need every star, you need to beat every level with every character. Why Nintendo, why??!!! Why do you gate levels behind tedious repetition? Why do you force players to play levels searching every stupid corner of the map instead of just letting them play to finish levels if they want to without missing out on content?! When did collectibles go from being fun additional optional challenges to being 100% required to 100% collect? Put them back!!!
Yeah, I hate those kinds of unlockables. I think that's why people had an issue with Arkham Knight. I think that at the very least, if someone chooses an easier difficulty level, they shouldn't be gated that way.
I think they said that user data has not been compromised, just source data for some of the software (Last night anyway). Still, better safe than sorry.
Yeah, and FIFA of all things. Guess some fans were pissed off at the latest iteration. They made off with over 700GB of data, including FIFA development data and Frostbyte source.