When I play a video game that promises me a grapple hook, a clock starts ticking in my head, as I begin counting down the moments until that grapple hook—my precious—is mine.
No shade on Patrick’s write-up here, but if you want to read the best game review of the year already then check out Jackson Tyler’s take on Dying Light 2 over on Paste: Dying Light 2: Stay Human Is A Terrible Waste - Paste
I’m honestly still going to play this one sometime this year. Dying Light is an all-timer for me so I can’t just write it off without experiencing it first-hand.
This seems like a game to buy when its on sale and maybe had some balance patches. Especially when you consider that in the next few weeks there’s stuff like Horizon, Elden Ring and Total Warhammer 3 all coming out.
Yeesh, this does bum me out. I think Dying Light, despite its flaws, is one of my favorite games. So much promise, but I shouldn’t really be surprised that it decided to go all Farcry as hinted at in that Paste review. The race to make “The Game of All Time” by publishers is tiring and not at all surprising in this mega-conglomeration world. Also, 500 hours to complete is not a selling point for me in the least.
What’s the purpose of making you play one game for that length of time? Is it so you can justify to yourself shelling out on cosmetics for the game?
I assume the main target audience is people with a lot of free time, but not a lot of money (e.g. teenagers). The Ubisoft open-world games get steeply discounted very soon after launch, which makes me think they expect a lot of their target audience won’t pay full price for the game. I can see these games being appealing from that angle: ~$20 for a new game that looks pretty, has generally good reviews, in a series that you know you like, that you know will last you a long time probably sounds like a better value proposition than paying $10-$15 for an indie game that has positive reviews, but you might only enjoy for 5-10 hours and could instead watch a Let’s Play of.
That’s not me because I don’t have a particularly large amount of free time and already have a huge backlog of games I own that I want to play/replay.
Edit: I bought a lot of used AAA games a year or two after they came out with this same logic when I was in college ~10 years ago.
The thing is, even when I was that broke, I always felt there was a huge distinction between games I could play for 500 hours and games I wanted to play for 500 hours. And if a game’s major selling point is the former, that makes me immediately suspect it’s not the latter.
Or better loot. Or base building materials (this being the Ubisoft playbook I’m describing). You create a game loop that requires some amount of grind and then you offer to sell players a thing that skips the grind.
If you’re going to make a predominantly AAA single-player game then it needs to take a shot at the “Only Game You’ll Ever Need To Play” throne now.
Skyrim ended the general game-playing public’s perception of what reasonable value amounts to in a game, and now every game needs to aspire to that.
Witcher 3, despite being maybe the greatest AAA game I’ve ever played, has to be the worst thing to ever happen to AAA games.
TBH, I think by far the most likely culprit for really cementing the AAA Open World Action Game genre is either Assassin’s Creed II or Far Cry 3, though you could make a pretty compelling case for Grand Theft Auto 3 as well. The Skyrim model, which I believe is also roughly the Witcher 3 model, is a completely different style of open world than this, IMO. Even the radiant quests are still structured as quests, not map-clearing chores.
