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Games

The New 'Red Dead Redemption' Reveals the Biggest Problem With Marquee Games Today: They're Boring as Hell. (theoutline.com) 211

An anonymous reader shares a column: Everything about "Red Dead Redemption 2" is big. The latest open-world western, released in October by Rockstar Games, constantly reminds you of this. It takes roughly 15 minutes for its bland everycowboy star, Arthur Morgan, to gallop across the 29-square-mile map. It has 200 species of animals, including grizzly bears, alligators, and a surprising number of birds. It takes about 45.5 hours to play through the main quest, and 150-plus hours to reach 100 percent completion. There are more than 50 weapons to choose from, such as a double-barreled shotgun and a rusty hatchet. It's big, big, big.

[...] On top of all the bigness, "Red Dead Redemption 2" is also incredibly dull. I've been playing it off and on since it was released, and I'm still waiting for it to get fun. I'm not alone in thinking so -- Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit called it "quite boring" and Mashable said it's a "monumental disappointment." There are a glut of Reddit posts from people complaining about how slow the game feels, usually with a tone of extreme self-consciousness. Unless you're a real a**hole, it's not exactly fun to stray from popular consensus. Perhaps the general hesitancy to criticize the game is due to the fact that it's not technically bad. Its graphics and scale really are impressive. It is designed to please.

And yet "RDR2" seems to exemplify a certain kind of hollowness that's now standard among Triple-A titles. It's very big, with only tedium inside. Call it a Real World Game. The main problem with "RDR2" is that it's comprised almost entirely of tedious, mandatory chores. It always feels like it's stalling for time, trying to juke the number of hours it takes to complete it.

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The New 'Red Dead Redemption' Reveals the Biggest Problem With Marquee Games Today: They're Boring as Hell.

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  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @10:42AM (#58199492)
    even the positive ones said the same thing: It's a great experience but a lousy game.

    This is the problem with "Live Services". Because the game has to go on forever with an endless loop chock full of microtransactions and loot boxes nothing substantial or interesting can happen in the game. Even Destiny 2 with it's instance dungeons fell victim to that.

    The consoles still have 2 or 3 decent single player releases a year so there's that. But they're only there to move consoles. If we ever get the "ever-console" that streams the games then we'll lose that too.

    What I don't get is these kids who pay real money for crap in game. Guess I'm just too old, but it ruins the experience to have a store front in my face non-stop. Even when I was at the arcades as a kid I didn't have that. Once the quarters dropped the game was a game (Double Dragon 3 not withstanding). Pac-man didn't distract me with a power pellets store and I couldn't buy armor for my flying ostrich in Joust.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:01AM (#58199580) Homepage Journal

      "A hundred yards short of your objective, accidentally ride off a cliff and die"

      Once I stopped giggling I started to think about older games. Many didn't have any save or password options at all. You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start. We really are spoiled with modern games that let you save after every mission, or even at waypoints during the mission, and give you infinite lives and continues.

      The bigger problem for me is the amount of grinding in modern games. I don't mind a challenge that I have to work at and where I feel like I'm improving and making progress, but with GTA a lot of it is just fairly easy missions where you fail mostly due to bad luck or the janky game engine, and there is just so much of it. Seems like RDR2 is the same.

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:38AM (#58199810)
        older games needed hard penalties so you didn't blow through them in an afternoon. When I was a kid I could make it through Shinobi on the Master System in an hour flat.

        Good Modern games have a ton of content, so they don't need lives to keep you from blowing through the game. Bad modern games, OTOH, don't have much to do, so they substitute grinding.

        In the old days the goal was to keep the game out of the used bins (and before that to keep your parents from getting made when you asked for a new game in less than a day). Nowadays the goal is "engagement". To keep you playing so they can sell you more crap. That'd be fine if the crap was more gameplay, but these days it's skins and minor stat tweaks.

        What I hate about modern games is how the constant nagging for microtransactions reminds me of the real world. I play games to unwind after a long day. It's an escape. Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I never had a NES but I have heard that Shinobi was quite a difficult game, so when you say you could get through it in an hour I guess you mean after putting in many many hours of practice.

          Modern games have more content, but are more like interactive movies where even poor players get to see it all just by relentless grinding. Open world games are particularly prone to that - if you suck just grind more equipment and weapons until it becomes unbalanced in your favour.

          Remember GoldenEye on the the N64? The

          • ... A few years later and every game had a tutorial, often unskippable....

            Every single GD Match 3 game on this good earth, despite being clones of clones of clones of Bejewelled, insist on teaching you the exact same fraking mechanics.

            • by Calydor ( 739835 )

              It's the rule of the 10,000 new people every day. For a decent number of people, any given Match 3 game WILL be their first Match 3 game.

              Unskippable, though. To hell with that.

          • It's no different than anything else that grows and tries to expand the user base to people who are just starting out and don't have years of previous experience that they can fall back on. Look at the computer industry and early internet where there was little hand-holding and people needed to spend a lot of time figuring things out. Unfortunately if you're a company that wants to increase their customer-base, that naturally requires dumbing-down the product so that more people are able to use it.

            Try an
          • I never had a NES but I have heard that Shinobi was quite a difficult game, so when you say you could get through it in an hour I guess you mean after putting in many many hours of practice.

            NES and SMS versions of Shinobi were different games.

            The big bad super-hard ninja game on the NES was Ninja Gaiden.

          • by pnutjam ( 523990 )
            I don't mind a reminder about what key to press, or what a key does; but I hate unskippable cut scenes.
        • Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.

          I don't like to be reminded too much about virtual assets in the virtual world either. Too much grind required to progress. Oh, grind can be fine if it's sort of optional, in longer games sometimes I do like to do something a bit mindless and get sidetracked, as long as I can get out of it when I want to. But take Battlefield 5. Fine shooter. But then they added all these "seasonal" objectives you have to complete in order to unlock new weapons (and more skins, yay). Kill 4 guys with a headshot in 1 r

          • Oh, grind can be fine if it's sort of optional...

            I totally agree. And it blows my mind that games think it's OK to just hand out grind missions.

            That's bullshit. It's so fucking lazy and disrespectful to the players.

            Stick some barter tradeposts in the game, and price the items in them in terms of grind. 100 bandit bandanas to avenge my father, and I'll give you his old rifle. Medicine man has ED medicine I need. Get me some of that, and I'll give you this pistol. Medicine man needs 25 sequoia seeds to make the ED medicine, along with a live snake. To get s

        • by Tom ( 822 )

          What I hate about modern games is how the constant nagging for microtransactions reminds me of the real world. I play games to unwind after a long day. It's an escape. Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.

          This. I've had times in life when money was a real problem - I mean, who has money to spare after just buying a house? When I've dealt with finances for the whole day and the result wasn't making me too happy, throwing a "buy this DLC" into my face was a certain shortcut to the uninstall button.

          But game designers don't get that, I fear. Or not enough of us do it.

          • Rather on topic here, thanks for Battlemaster. I played that for several years, and had an awesome time every step of the way. Started as a knight, rose to power, started a second knight, founded a kingdom, and then lost it as well.

            Real life got busy, and I realized I just didn't have the time and energy for the game that I felt the other players deserved. I still think about it fondly every time I see you post here. If it's still around when I retire, I may get suckered back in. It was one hell of a ride.

            • by Tom ( 822 )

              Thanks for the compliments.

              I still love the game, but wish it were up-to-date with technology. That's why I made Might & Fealty, but for some reason it didn't catch on quite as much.

              I'd very much love to see the concept of BM in an AAA open-world MMORPG. But I guess the business model just isn't there to pay for that.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Well, personally I stop reading game reviews when I see "microtransactions" and I do buy quite a few games. (No TV and not missing it one bit.) If they want to screw me over, they can screw themselves instead. I will rather give my money to those that may have worse tech or worse size but actually understand that this is about entertaining people, not about squeezing as much money out of the customer as possible.

            Sadly, I think not many people actually do vote with their money this way. They get drawn in by

      • Even back in 1988 we had game with multiple save, case in point ultima 5. In fact at some point consolisation of the game market partially made us go backward by removing multiple save and adding checkpoint late 90ies early 00ies. But yes we are not spoiled with modern game if anything we are going back to where we were on pc market back early 1990. To go back to the state you are speaking of we have to go back late 70ies or early 80ies. If you remove the pink glasses you will realize that actualy the syst
        • I see people talking abou the good old days of games realize that they're talking about 1995 or 2000 and that they've never actually seen a game that's not on a console that wasn't solitaire or minesweeper.

          There are indeed a lot of players who do want a big open world game that isn't over once the short 40 hour main quest is done. A lot of people used to story driven games that don't give you a choice don't get this. A lot of new games are just slightly interactive movies.

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start.

        But that was designed into the game. The early jump & run games, for example, were all made so that any individual part was not crazy impossible, so you always made progress. But to get to the end with enough lives left to conquer it was hard.

        So on your first play, you'd lose one life here and one life there and then be out of lives maybe in the middle of the level. Then by design you start at the beginning again, with full lives, because on your second run you reach the middle with one or two lives lef

      • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

        We really are spoiled with modern games that let you save after every mission, or even at waypoints during the mission, and give you infinite lives and continues.

        No more than you are "spoiled" by being able to vote without being male and owning property.

        • To be honest, I don't even remember that many games that did not let you save anywhere you wanted to, and I've been playing computer games since Adventure and Wizardry 1. When I first saw a game that only let you save at save-points I thought it was crazy.

      • Once I stopped giggling I started to think about older games. Many didn't have any save or password options at all. You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start.

        On the up side that first hour was actually fun. God forbid you plodded along for 15min doing nothing only to die without a save point.

      • Even GTA seems like an improvement though, even though it's older. I haven't played RDR because it's not available for my platform, but I felt the same way with the Mad Max game a few years back. It started out fun but eventually it became clear that it was just a grind across a large map. Kind of the same with the recent LOTR games. I think that what separates those from GTA is that, with all of the games you might have a certain objective to get to across the map. With LOTR or Max Max or (presumably)

    • Pac-man didn't distract me with a power pellets store and I couldn't buy armor for my flying ostrich in Joust.

      But there was in-game weapons stores in Black Tiger and Crossed Sword. Granted, it used in-game currency, but still.

    • by skam240 ( 789197 )

      "This is the problem with "Live Services". Because the game has to go on forever with an endless loop chock full of microtransactions and loot boxes nothing substantial or interesting can happen in the game. Even Destiny 2 with it's instance dungeons fell victim to that. "

      I'm puzzled. The core Red Dead 2 game play is single player (so much so that multiplayer was still in beta on launch) which has no micro transactions.

      "The consoles still have 2 or 3 decent single player releases a year so there's that. But

    • by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:33AM (#58199794)

      "Once the quarters dropped the game was a game"

      Games had a variety of ways to ensure that the average quarter didn't stretch too far. Sure, Pacman can be played for hours (until you die or the game locks up) on a single quarter, but no one knew how back then- it took years to figure out the patterns, and to this day only a few people can execute them flawlessly. For the most part, the monetization was aggressive and subtle. Heck, by the 90s, that 3D Gauntlet game would start buffing enemies and eventually squeeze you out, and they added these patches in waves, each willingly installed by operators to keep good players paying something.

      By contrast, when an arcade game hit your home console, this stuff was mostly taken out, as it was only ever added to fit the actual sales model of the game. And when a home system WAS made available as an arcade- such as the Playchoice 10- the quarters directly paid for time.

      I'd say that games have ALWAYS been created around their sales systems, that this has ALWAYS determined how the game is designed, developed, and implemented, and that even the progressive difficulty you find pleasing in old school games was created by the desire to get you to put more quarters in the game, by honest implementation at first, and by harsher tricks as you went on.

      • e.g. few couldn't be mastered with enough skill. Most games rewarded skill with more play per quarter. This was fine because to get to that skill level you'd invested heavily in the game. As much or more as a console game. But those games understood value.

        To be fair they had a _lot_ more competition too. There are very few AAA publishers left. Activision, EA, Sony, Capcom, Ubisoft, Bethesday and Square are about it (might include Gearbox in that). That's 8 companies. There were dozens back in the arcade
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Because the game has to go on forever with an endless loop chock full of microtransactions and loot boxes nothing substantial or interesting can happen in the game.

      To be honest, I found the entire lack of grandiose world-turning events in RDR2 refreshing. This is not Skyrim where you're the grand savior, you don't have any great hidden powers and you're not a pawn/hero in the great battle between good and evil. You can be a good guy, bad guy, neutral hunter/trapper/fisher guy or whatever but nobody has at any point given the impression that Arthur Morgan would change the world. Sure a few guns are unlocked but you start out a gunslinger, you end a gunslinger. If that

    • Even Destiny 2 with it's instance dungeons fell victim to that.

      Instance dungeons in Destiny 2? After thousands of hours of playing have I missed something?

      Do you mean Lost Sectors? Or the Infinite Forest? I suppose they could be considered "instance dungeons". I agree that Lost Sectors and the Infinite Forest are not terribly exciting. But they are also fortuntely not particularly central to the Destiny 2 gameplay experience.

    • I would like to play it, since I like open world games like Fallout, but it's not on PC. I wonder if console users have become so used to games that are tightly on the rails that they're uncertain how to deal with open world games or games with more RPG than action. Having a store in a game is a bad thing, but I gather that this is pretty common in modern games.

  • ... CEO's realized the way to expand the market and recoup development costs was to make movies and not games. This trend towards making the game a movie pushed aside gameplay beginning around 2000 with the jump of PC devs to console as PC games were getting costly to develop due to 3D cards making dev costs explode and greener pastures on a locked down platform with less technically informed population.

    Now that the market has expanded to the bottom half of the bell curve we get shit games and mind blowing

    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:28AM (#58199754)

      Dude, have you been playing any games lately? Yes, you have to lay off EA, Ubi and Blizzard like they do developers, but there has NEVER in the history of gaming been a larger, more open market for independent game developers that offer great games without any DRM bull.

      Forget about the big studios. They're a lost case and probably won't shit out anything worthwhile anymore. They can't take no risk, they will offer nothing interesting. What they do is to give last year's turd a new shine, slap the current year onto the title so there is actually a noticeable difference to what they sold you last year, sell it to you for 60 bucks, sell you the 0-day DLC for another 30 (that you need to finish the game at all) and milk the rest from you with microtransactions. Forget them, they're a lost case.

      But aside of those studios there is a very large amount of small game makers, usually with only a handful of games to their name (if that) that sell you absolute gems for maybe 20 or 30 bucks. Without DRM, microtransactions or any other bullshit.

      Of course they have less money at their disposal for advertising. Their money is in the game.

      • I agree, there are loads of GOOD games. Cheap ones as well. Darkest Dungeon, This War of Mine, The Awakening of Theam Wasteland 2. All great, all without EA or Ubi behind them ripping you off. You can easily avoid the big guys 90% of the time. The only problem is that the humongous studios tend to buy up any good IP or small studios and destroy them. What I wouldn't give for a decent version of Civilization to come out again.
      • but they aren't AAA games. They can't be, they don't have the money. It's a different experience. Like comparing a big budget Hollywood block buster to a cheap slasher flick. Both are fun, but for different reasons, and I liked it when I had both.

        Also there's not a lot of AA games left. There's Obsidian, but Microsoft just bought them and who knows what'll happen. Most of the AA Japanese devs are gone (even Konami dropped out except for PES).
        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Yes, AAA can give you an incredible amount of nothing, but independent can give you a reasonable amount of actual fun. I know what I prefer.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Couldn't agree more. The most fun I had last year was with Oxygen Not Included by Klei. And they are still not even out of early access.

  • by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @10:45AM (#58199504)

    "It takes roughly 15 minutes for its bland everycowboy star, Arthur Morgan, to gallop across the 29-square-mile map."

    Apparently the author is new to modern RPGS
                A) Relative to other modern RPGs, that's not very much at all
                B) The game has fast travel

    Everything else in the review just makes me think "Well, maybe you need to accept that big open world RPGs are not for you".

    • People want more variety in these games. They all have limited mission types, boring play mechanics for things like, fetch water/chop wood/gather plants/etc.

      • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:03AM (#58199596)

        It's a western-based game that has a western-based environment and western-based tasks to accomplish.

        Maybe the author doesn't like westerns.

        • by cfalcon ( 779563 )

          Yea for a game that has several simulationist pieces and tries to put you in a virtual wild west, I don't exactly know what is expected. You can make a straight full action fps with a cowboy skin, or some kind of vaguely interactive movie with a western plot, but for an open world game, why all the complaints?

          • Agh, I'm not on any rails! What do I do now? Please Mister Developer, give me more cut-scenes and Quick Time Events!

        • This. It's a western game. What was expected?

          • Probably train robberies whenever they want, lots of shootouts, etc. They wanted the best scenes from westerns, not the middle part where they rode across the desert over a month.

      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        "People want more variety in these games."

        Which is why these games sell so well?

        • I think this game sold well based on rep, I know most people stopped playing it by their own metrics before the first 1/3rd of the game is completed. They made it too slow for the audience. I haven't gotten on RD2, but loved RD1 and would play it at a slower pace. Going on lots of diversions, etc.

          • I should add, the low play will effect the next release from Rockstar unless they make online play better/cheaper.

            • by skam240 ( 789197 )

              It will? You just said you loved Red Dead 1's slow pace. That game's slow pace certainly didnt hurt Red Dead 2's sales.

          • by skam240 ( 789197 )

            Of course most big games like this are never finished so your anecdotal evidence matches up with all big games like this https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com] . Shit, in the article's major example just 6.4% of players finished Pillars of Eternity.

            People not finishing big games has been a well known trend in gaming for at least a decade.

            "They made it too slow for the audience. "

            It's fairly certain that if you dont like a game with scores like these https://www.metacritic.com/gam... [metacritic.com] it's not a problem wi

          • Maybe the "audience" that found it dull wasn't the intended audience? Sure, any genre of games that I dislike I tend to end up disliking, that's to be expected. Maybe the fault is with releasing the game for consoles where it's a completely different class of players who are unused to open world, sandbox, or RPGs that don't have a J in front?

    • by JD-1027 ( 726234 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:15AM (#58199684)
      This game is definitely of a slower pace. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I've enjoyed that pace just fine.

      Besides fast travel, you also have "Cinematic Travel"... it is basically auto-steer... set a waypoint, and you can set the controller down and enjoy the (very well done) scenery as it takes you to your destination. I've not seen that in a game before, but I don't play a ton of games, so it has probably been done before.
      • by Calydor ( 739835 )

        I haven't played RDR2, but the description KINDA sounds like flight masters in WoW although that's between hard set travel points. An evolution of an idea, perhaps?

        • Most MMOs have something similar to this. It's "fast" travel though as travel faster than you normally can.

    • My understanding that you have to unlock fast travel which at the minimum requires you to have visited that location before and completed enough of the campaign. If you are playing the game for the first time you’re going to have to slow travel to locations for a while.
      • My understanding that you have to unlock fast travel which at the minimum requires you to have visited that location before and completed enough of the campaign.

        Most games only let you fast travel to places you've visited before, but most games also put new objectives near to old ones. It's much less common to make you unlock fast travel at all, but it's not unheard of.

    • Seems like it should be pretty exciting to travel on a horse at 120mph.

    • "Well, maybe you need to accept that big open world RPGs are not for you".

      Big open world RPGs and big open world yawn fests are not the same thing. RDR2 is pretty, like really pretty. Unfortunately that's about all it has going for it. Once I stopped being fascinated by graphics I found it to be one of the more boring RPGs I've played.

  • And you play the role of a cowboy and everything in the old west just kinda moseyed on. Apparently if you can get into it and move at the game's pace it is a fantastic immersive experience if you can't it is complete shit.

  • Looking at the articles by the author he's not a games 'journalist' (and very few of the people calling themselves game journalists have a clue how to actually be a journalist), so I'm not sure why I should care what he thinks about RDR2 (BTW I have not bought/played the game, so I don't have a dog in the fight myself). If this was an article of cultural or artistic aspects of the game he might be a bit more qualified in his opinion, but to someone who is not specifically interested in this genre of games o

    • The fact he is not a game journalist is exactly what make him credible for me.
      • The Gell-Mann amnesia effect says you shouldn't inherently trust anything any journalist says.

      • Really? We already know that there are millions of people out there who will dislike your favorite game. Why listen to them? You want someone to say "I've never used a computer before so this computer game thing is pretty weird, and frankly silly so I advise you to just go watch a Jim Carey movie instead"? Do you listen to people who say not to play chess because there's not enough explosions? Do you base your decisions based upon a silly metacritic score?

        Essentially you've got someone who doesn't like a

  • by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:06AM (#58199618)

    If you think riding across the map is boring, don't do it. Use fast travel, or use it as an indicator it's not a game you find enjoyable.

    We don't say there's a terrible problem in books today when someone who likes mysteries does not find an autobiography interesting.

    An open-world RPG is going to have certain game elements, no matter what the setting. Like repetitive "chores", and a slow pace. If you don't like those elements in your video game, don't play an open-world RPG.

    It's not like RDR1 was a frantic experience, so you should know this going in to RDR2.

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      The thing is those certain elements can be done better and worse. Bully Scholarship Ed is still the best thing they have ever done IMHO. There is repetition, classes you must attend, even chores but never feels tedious. They found the right balance of "a day in the life" and real action.

    • You are intentionally ignoring the point. Even the people who like particular types of games are finding the latest big name releases awfully boring. No matter what type of game you are a fan of, they latest iterations simply lack substance.
      • Yeah, I went through the same rose-colored-glasses thing when I was younger. Thankfully, things like GoG exist so I could play those titles I remembered as having so much more depth and fun....and figured out that >90% of them lacked substance too now that I was not longer a kid.

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Fast travel takes you out of the game imho.

      In these modern 'open world games' it can, even with fast travel take anywhere from 5-20 minutes before you get to the 'action' part and you're doing repetitive tasks until you meet some internal counter.

      Even old 'open world' games like Duke 3D, you had various avenues to get to your goal. In modern games, they program a single path and place to victory and straying from that path doesn't get you anything until you get back to it.

    • There were neat little nooks and crannies all over the map. Never went 30 minutes without doing anything unless you did it on purpose.

      I think the author's point is that a lot of these open worlds are kind of empty. Saying "Well, the designers meant to invoke the loneliness of the old west" is all well and good, but while that imagery might make for good cinema it makes for dull as paint drying games...
  • I found the gameplay to be ok, what made it feel slow at times was how ponderous and slow the character is. Yes that's how people are in real life, but people in real life aren't trying to serve up entertainment.
  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:18AM (#58199694)

    We started judging games by the hours it takes to play through them, is it any kind of wonder that game studios try to maximize the hours it takes to play through them?

    The problem is that many modern games have zero replay value. After you've seen the game and its story once, there is very little incentive to do it again. You already know how it unfolds. If you're the achiever type you can try to slaughter a billion (insert animal here) or find all hidden masks of Ujawuja in the cave but for the normal, non-OCD player, being done with the story means being done with the game.

  • I once played a game that traced 'hours spent logged in' When I hit 1 year I started thinking...
    What else could I have done, learned, experienced, read with that time in my life. I quite gaming and have been much happier ever since.
    Games are meant to entertain us, so amuse us and to be a way to expend 'free time'.
    But what do you have when you are done. Why not write story, a poem , go explore you city for an hour, read any of the many classic books out there , spend time discussing thing on line or even

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You're going to die either way, people choose what to spend their time on and it doesn't actually matter. Your opinion is that writing a poem is a better use of time, but that is only your opinion.

  • i rather play GTA5 if i want an exciting FPS game, and it has cars and motorcycles, and a train you can hop on, airplanes and helicopters, and a tank if you can get in to the army base and steal it without getting killed
  • I've been baffled by the chores aspect since The Sims was around simulating people washing dishes. Some games I quickly dropped since I was spending time sharpening my weapon or some other tedium. I have enough chores in real life to do, why on earth would I spend my precious free time doing simulated chores?

    I suspect it has to do with the way these games make money nowadays. There was an article linked on /. some time ago about all the games catering to the small percentage of players who were addictive
  • After I beat the game I spent hours working on a ranch as John Marston, building fences, milking cows and shoveling the barn.

    The RDR2 story was great outside the mundane tasks in the game. I didn't agree with the death of Arthor Morgan though, I grew to like his character.

  • by Tom ( 822 )

    I find that a common theme in games release in the last decade or so.

    I'm a gamer. Not addicted but I've clocked in enough gaming hours and enough different games that it's really hard to surprise me anymore. And somehow, games used to be more fun. For a long while I attributed that to the stupid payment models. Pay2Win, DLCs, subscriptions, whatever, they all require game designers to change the gameplay away from maximum fun to maximum profitability. When you bought a game and that was it, the game could f

  • My laughter loves RDR2. The open world tedium immerses her and makes her very happy.

    For her, it's an escape from the day to day. She doesn't need or want constant adrenaline from this game. She wants to be in it. When she does want Adrenaline she plays Overwatch.

    My favorite game is an excruciatingly tedious open world first person shooter, Arma 3. It's not uncommon for a death in a Zeus match to respawn me on the opposite side of the island, a 20 minute boat ride away from my squad. It makes me much m

  • It takes a great story to make a good game. Playing a video game should feel like reading a good book and being a part of the story. It's difficult to come across games which feel like that these days. And it's not because creators are running out of ideas. There are always great literate minds willing to write incredibly engaging content. But guess what? Perfection requires thorough planning, attention to detail and, most importantly time. Something that many companies are entirely not comfortable with. Ju

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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