General Gaming Do you ever find some games don’t respect your time?

[gamer.tv]

If you’ve been posting in the ‘what are you playing?’ thread, you may (or may not) know I’m playing

Persona 4: Golden. I’ve been enjoying my time with the game: the story is engaging, the gameplay loop

has become fun, the look and sound is  fine for what is essentially as PS2 game…I didn’t even mind grinding but then…

 

…I had the same feelings that I had with Persona 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher 3, Pokemon Violet - and I’m sure many other games.

 

I’ve really enjoyed every part of the above games, except for the fact they don’t respect my time as the person playing. A lot of the time is filled up

with things that don’t progress any aspect of the game, except it’s length. This usually leads me to think about whether it’s worth investing in the game when a significant time is spent walking/riding/arbitrarily fighting, instead of pushing things along.

 

I think for me, at least in my life now, I need in a game to feel a full

sense of enjoyment (maybe fulfilment) from it. Take the Last of Us: Part 2. It wasn’t a short game but it generally

progressed at a good pace, keeping me along for its depressing ride. Similar for something like Super Mario Odyssey, Dark Souls (and to lesser extents due to their length things like the modern RE games, Bayonetta etc) - no

part of the experience feels as though it’s trying to elongate itself in any other way than through story progression and pace of gameplay.

 

This may not be as applicable for others as it is specifically for me, but I do wish developers would release games with the charm, story and fun of something like Persona or Final Fantasy, without the forced bloat to justify its price. If you know any, do let me know! 

 

[SimpleG]

Its become some fucked up badge of honor for Devs run a game into the ground for some shitty bullet point on completion time. " New and improved with over 9000 hours of gameplay" . Only 20 of that is any good with other 8,980  being the most milquetoast generic ass fetch , deliver, flip a switch , climb a tower side quests. If you can skip them and just get to the good part I am fine with it but when I got run to the bottom of some barren cave and punch a fairy in his balls because the game gatekeeps the story behind levels and you cant level up unless you collect 20 sets fairy testicles , then I have a problem.

 

 

[Kal-El814]

I've thought about this a bunch, and my thoughts on it are kinda squishy.

 

I generally don't mind if some things take a a very long time, but if certain other things take too long it drives me absolutely insane.

 

Some stuff in God of War Ragnarok is like this... not having instant fast travel is fine since the downtime in the boat or sled lets the characters gab and that's some of the more fun stuff to experience in the game. But spending a bunch of time on foot to get to a gizmo to change the day / night cycle to move a puzzle incrementally forward? Or having a plant shoot spitballs at me that will never kill me but will slow me down? Relentlessly annoying even if spent less than 5 minutes being slowed down by that shit over a 24 hour game.

 

I Red Dead 2 was like this as well. I held onto an enormous amount of treasure before I brought it back to the camp; I wanted everyone to love me and think I was cool for showing up with the equivalent of a jewelry store while other people are donating half smoked cigars. I spent hours and hours and hours of IRL time before making the deposit. I do it, and Dutch walks by and wants to talk... then he chews me out for not donating cash, telling me how much everyone looks up to me and I was letting them down. I stopped playing for a couple days after that, I hated it so fucking much.

 

Long winded way of saying it really comes down to execution and vibes.

 

[Paperclyp]

It is perhaps my number one pet peeve in games. 

[skillzdadirecta]

As much as I loved it, God of War Ragnorok definitely felt like this in parts. Ultimately I enjoyed the game and the time I spent with it, but it dragged in certain parts. Most of the time I enjoy games if the gameplay is tight and the world is interesting and immersive.

[thedarkstark]

This is why I've never really liked GTA games, 2/3rds of the quests are fetching some random thing. It's a monotonous slog.

 

My adhd is also way too strong to sit through a  game with 45 minute cutscenes. If you're going to subject me to that it had be one hell of a story and 99% of the time it's just not anywhere near compelling enough to justify that.

[Remarkableriots]

55 minutes ago, thedarkstark said:

This is why I've never really liked GTA games, 2/3rds of the quests are fetching some random thing. It's a monotonous slog.

 

My adhd is also way too strong to sit through a  game with 45 minute cutscenes. If you're going to subject me to that it had be one hell of a story and 99% of the time it's just not anywhere near compelling enough to justify that.

I loved playing GTA series games so much that it's one of the few games I've replayed a few times. My roommate lost his save file, and he didn't want to replay to where he was at, so I replayed for him to where he was at.

[TwinIon]

I wish there was a way to search through my own posts on this site (if there is, please let me know), because this is a real pet peeve of mine and I complain about it often. That said, I think we are all defining the term differently. When I think of a game not respecting my time, I think of choices the developers made that force you to waste time in order to play the game as intended.

 

Filler content is a separate issue as long as it's optional. If I open the map in a new Far Cry game and see it littered with icons that all represent some repetitive task I can complete, that might be boring, but it's fine. I can ignore those icons and just play the game however I want. I consider nearly every implementation of collectibles harmless filler. Often filler content doesn't progress anything, but while they might be time wasters, I don't consider it a problem as long as it's optional, like most fishing mini-games.

 

I also don't consider content that is repetitive to necessarily fall into the "lack of respect for my time" category. Most of games are repetitive by nature, some clearly more-so than others, but the nature of the repetition is important. Few would complain about racing games sending you around the same track for multiple laps a waste of time, but it's definitely repetitive.

 

However, there absolutely is a line to be crossed were repetition becomes a burden. The best example I can think of is NieR Replicant. Replicant is already a game where relatively little content is stretched out in an attempt to make the game longer, but the real icing on the cake here is that it wants you to beat the game multiple times in order to get the whole story. Each successive play through hardly adds any real story, with significant events playing out largely the same each time. This is on top of a game design that already lacks fast travel or the ability to save anywhere, both of which are common issues with games I'd argue lack respect for players time.

 

 

[XxEvil AshxX]

I find myself having less and less patience for pointless conversations in games nowadays.... which is why I've fallen off JRPGs when I used to love them.

 

I haven't even beaten Tales of Arise yet, and I generally love the Tales series. But omg the amount of pointless conversations in that game....

[Brian]

1 hour ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

I find myself having less and less patience for pointless conversations in games nowadays.... which is why I've fallen off JRPGs when I used to love them.

 

I haven't even beaten Tales of Arise yet, and I generally love the Tales series. But omg the amount of pointless conversations in that game....

I thought Tales of Arise is actually a decent paced game for a JRPG. You constantly moving forward with only a few side quests with no need to grind levels. It unfortunately falls apart in the last act.  It feels like the devs noticed the game length is too short and really dragged things out. I do agree that JPRGs are the worst offenders when it comes to respecting one’s time. 
 

If the devs build a world and setting that I want to spend time in, I don’t mind. Assassin Creed is the series that I always get sucked into even though the games continue to grow way too large. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Yeah. The problem with games that do that too is it can cause you to burn out. If you’re the type that likes to 100% a game you could max out your enjoyment hours before the game’s story completion. 
 

I think this also makes games less replayable. 
 

Say what we will about the buggy nature of Bethesda games, but one thing they did well was fill the games with lots of original quests with their own stories that made you want to keep playing. You weren’t just trying to find 12 statues, 25 flowers, photograph 30 landmarks, stop 100 random and generic crimes, clear 15 generic enemy camps, kill 25 of each of the 40 enemies in with critical damage using the weakest weapon in the game, etc. 

 

Even Halo Infinite couldn’t escape this. I think they may have wound up with these pointless map markers and collect-a-thon stuff to make the open world more justifiable. 

 

[gamer.tv]

28 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

Yeah. The problem with games that do that too is it can cause you to burn out. If you’re the type that likes to 100% a game you could max out your enjoyment hours before the game’s story completion. 
 

I think this also makes games less replayable. 
 

Say what we will about the buggy nature of Bethesda games, but one thing they did well was fill the games with lots of original quests with their own stories that made you want to keep playing. You weren’t just trying to find 12 statues, 25 flowers, photograph 30 landmarks, stop 100 random and generic crimes, clear 15 generic enemy camps, kill 25 of each of the 40 enemies in with critical damage using the weakest weapon in the game, etc. 

 

Even Halo Infinite couldn’t escape this. I think they may have wound up with these pointless map markers and collect-a-thon stuff to make the open world more justifiable. 

 

That last point is very interesting and really why so many people view Breath of the Wild’s open world as fantastic - because it relied on its core gameplay mechanics to make the world engaging, rather than fill it with unnecessary ‘game’.