A lot of good stuff in here. I read an editorial someone wrote called “I don’t want to do my video game chores” and I resonated strongly with it.
For a long time it’s felt like a lot of open world games just fill their games with stuff. A lot of it isn’t even good stuff. It’s just padding. Stuffing even.
I think the one that really annoyed me recently was Assassin’s Creed: Origins. Granted it’s not as bad as other AC games (I’m looking at you Unity) but the map is still just stuffed with useless garbage. Things that are not even fun to do, and I only do the thing to get rid of the icon on the map so I can feel like I’m accomplishing something.
But the map is SO BIG there is SO MUCH stuff that it feels fruitless.
And the thing that annoys me the most about this, which really gets under my skin, is that all the really cool looking shiny armor and shit must all be purchased now. The most interesting costume you can get in the game is one that gives you a iron Tiger helmet. The rest are boring, drab costumes.
You’re getting mostly trash tier crafting gear that you can’t use for anything cool or interesting from all these barren and boring wastes.
Meanwhile the game from the start is waving all these shiny magic infused armors and incredible weaponry for a extra $10 on top of what I already paid.
Every once and a while I see AC: Odyssey go on sale, and my interest is piqued, until I remember that slog I felt near the end of my time with Origins. Any time a game goes from feeling like a grand adventure to feeling like you’re wading through a thick bog I get really frustrated at the wasted potential of a restrained, reasonably paced game.
Odyssey is even more stuffed than Origins, if you can believe it. I enjoyed Origins because I happened to have a spot in my gaming calendar where a big ol’ Witcher-style game would fit, but Odyssey is somehow bigger? Like, I’ve picked up Odyssey three times, put six more hours into it, and put it down again without even making much of a dent in it. Some folks are quoting playtimes of >90 hours.
I know folks have some Thoughts about Insomniac’s Spider-Man game, but I have to applaud Insomniac for making a single-player campaign that’s like, 12 hours long or so and 95% of the cruft is optional (although the traversal is SO GOOD that I did a big chunk of it anyway).
So I’ve tried this, and it works for the first half of the fight, until it spawns the invisible enemy whose attack drains 90% of my health if I don’t dodge it fast enough.
Most of these bosses would be manageable if they didn’t spawn more enemies halfway through the fight.
I’m a little torn over Three Houses! I agree with you that conceptually it’s really interesting and personally think that it kind of works. I played along with two other friends & we all were different houses. All of our end states were so radically different that I struggle to see each route as different parts of the same story, and more of different endings to a choose-your-own-adventure book? Every player will have their own canonical ending dictated by the House they chose. I like that but can totally see why some/most people wouldn’t. What REALLY frustrated me was the fact some of my friends learned things about the house I chose in their playthroughs that I never learned in my own!! Yes maybe it makes sense in some way, but ugh then I need to have some sort of cutscene gallery that lets me learn the Deep Lore of people I just fought alongside.
Death Stranding needed more “game” and less story/cutscene. Some of the mechanical changes they do towards the end were interesting but were only used that one time!
Ubisoft are probably the main culprits here for me, but that’s why I’ve tended not to buy into most of their franchises for a while. Of the games I’ve played recently:
The Witcher 3 - I just have a range of gripes about this game because I love the fantasy of planning and preparing for a challenging fight with equipment, oils, potions and bombs. But it seems determined to avoid any structured progression. Every list just keeps growing with stuff that isn’t relevant to where I am now and it makes navigating menus a pain. Quests I’m underlevelled for. Advanced recipes I’m missing the basic version of. I only need the ingredients to craft potions and oils once so I have this huge pile of ingredients and so many different recipes I can’t work out what materials are useful and what’s just trash now. Food is so expensive it’s not worth buying but I don’t want to chug my 3 healing potions then have to rest to get them back. I enjoy it but the more it goes on the more these issues grate on my experience of the game.
Subterrain - A neat indie twin stick survival horror game from years ago. I’ve tried twice with it because it has a whole bunch of systems that seem really neat, but you won’t finish it in under 20 hours and it just doesn’t hold up for that length of time. It’d be great as a 10 hour game but it just feels excessively padded.
I know people love to dump on the modern Bethesda RPGs, but I will still defend them as the only studio that does open worlds right. Yes, their worlds are crammed full of stuff to do, quests have helpful arrows pointing the way, etc., etc., but unlike the Ubi model the point remains that you’re supposed to go out and find the stuff to do by either talking to people or just wandering around with your eyes open, not have it automatically sprinkled around your map after you climb a tower.
76 comes dangerously close to fucking it all up with the events, but even those are pretty reserved compared to the Ubisoft LOOK AT ALL THESE FEATHERS approach. (And besides, it’s an MMO, the events are supposed to funnel people toward encountering one another. I’ll cut them slack on that as long as the mechanic doesn’t pop up in Starfield or TES VI.)
I’d like to chime in here in defence of the recent Assassin’s Creeds. Origins’ quests are as custom as anything in the Witcher 3, it just has a disgusting number of them. The worst thing about it is that they’re all quite good. I ended up playing most of the quests that I had leveled past because they all contribute to a better understanding of the setting and Bayek’s place within it.
I’m currently playing Odyssey, which is impossibly huge. I’m 40 hours in and I feel like I’m about 2/3rds of the way through the game. However, it’s so much more of an ARPG due to expanded focus on loot and leveling.You need to be at the appropriate level for a quest (which are also decently written) otherwise you’ll get stomped. The Skinnerian treadmills of gear, leveling, and new skills all work in concert with the meandering structure of Greek myths. The Odyssey may as well be a series of regional quests strung together.
All this to say that these games are too long for the amount of time most people have to complete them, but I don’t think their length exceeds my interest in their mechanics or stories. For me, the older Ubi model of structuring the AC games around activities rather than scripted side content was much more tedious and bloated than what they’ve arrived at here.
Recent example would be Ori 2. A ton of redundant abilities to the point of having a massive ability wheel for a game where the combat isn’t as deep as it thinks it is (expanding Stomp into a separate weapon set is pointless), the passive trait system they lifted from Hollow Knight is padded out with useless/situational buffs, and all the NPC and vendor interactions never justify themselves.
The biggest offender is the way that they kept almost every movement ability from the Definitive version of Ori 1 and then added more onto it when that version already suffered from a functionality bloat. There were multiple times in Ori 2 where I’d get the controls mixed up because Ori just does too many things. They needed to decide to iterate on the first game’s core mechanics, or alter the core mechanical focus (eg the Shovel Knight DLC campaigns), not both.
One of the worst offenders of this is God of War 2018. One look at the equipment upgrade screen screams “we included every progression system imaginable because we have no confidence that you’ll play through this without an extrinsic motivator”.
Agreed. God of War could 100% use less game in that particular sense. I hated the armor upgrade system. It was a weird, needless hanger on in a game series that was otherwise pretty straightforward when it came to upgrades (you kill something/meet a god/kill a god, get an upgrade, pour blood into it until you can’t anymore). It was incredibly annoying to constantly have to go back and mess with my clothes in order to make sure I was best equipped for a fight. It’s the only game I can think of that was actually not improved by the addition of a dress-up mini-game. The only thing I liked about it was the story bonus of interacting with Brok and Sindri.
Also, oddly enough? Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It feels more game-y than New Leaf and is definitely more game-y than Happy Home Academy, and that sits wrong with me? There’s a lot more progression by virtue of them turning this island into a place that is Capital-Y Yours, and I’m not sure how to feel about it. I don’t hate it, but if it wasn’t there, it wouldn’t bother me.
Agreed on Witcher 3 in here, and also on Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Actually, speaking of upgrade systems that subtract more than they add, I’ll mention Control again. The random mod pick-ups are the worst part of that game, by far, especially since doing anything but stacking Launch Efficiency upgrades is almost objectively wrong. The skill tree isn’t as offensive, but it doesn’t add anything either. I also never felt the need to do a single “alert” or “board countermeasure” because that kind of GaaS stuff was never why I was there to begin with.
Great game, but if there’s a sequel it needs to chuck all that crap out the window and focus on unlocking things via the quests (including the crafted side-quests) instead of having enemies drop upgrades and crafting materials.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It’s like they wanted to make an MMO but…didn’t.
(Writing this post prompted me to read up on that game’s development history and…I was making a joke but this is literally what happened. Okay. Now those thirty returning fetch quests make more sense.)
While I’m totally in agreement that a lot of games, past and present, have too much filler, I would say that my bar for “too much game” varies based on circumstances. Like, when I’m busy juggling professional and personal responsibilities, I definitely gravitate toward the <10 hour experiences or repeatable multiplayer. But now that I’m stuck at home, the 40+ hour experiences are becoming more appealing to me. Sometimes combing through an Assassin’s Creed map like I’m popping bubble wrap is what I need.
Also gonna say Doom 2016. Too many collectables, weapon upgrades, runes, just let me shoot demons. Giving Eternal a wide berth, as it sounds like they’ve doubled down on gameyness.
I’m going to disagree with everyone on the Witcher 3. That game needs less story. I loved being distracted with all the side activities but the main quest drags on and on.
I’m gonna go with Receiver II. I had lots of thoughts about that game but hated how it seemed insistent on punishing me for not being able to drop everything and give it several hours of my life. You’ve got to find five widgets in order to proceed… but it’s very easy to die! And if you die, you get demoted back to the last level. If you want to go do something else to center yourself so you’ll be better at playing the game that demands focus… you get demoted back to the last level. If you holster your gun without holding the holster button for the exact right amount of time, you’ll shoot yourself in the leg… demotion! Hey, we introduced a hacking minigame, so sneak up to the enemies and… oh, the enemies rotate 360 degrees constantly, including while you’re hacking them, and you have to put your gun away to hack them, so, ding, yes, that’s a demotion…
I have other complaints but it’s really just stuff like that which seems intent on wasting my time and, crucially, my ability to make meaningful progress. I’ve seen people contend that demotion is meant to make the game last longer… but what’s the point in it lasting longer if it’s off the back of an actively adversarial system that does not in any capacity reward the player? Demotion actively removes enemies–content–from the player’s experience! Playing worse gives you less to do!
I finally dropped No Man’s Sky because I just stopped having fun with some of the core loop of collecting materials, upgrade, collect more materials… Man, don’t make me have to mine so much copper! I think I would have had a lot more fun with it if the whole resource collecting piece was streamlined and less time consuming. Especially since exploring and base building was very fun.
Going in the opposite direction, I’ve been replaying the Ys games in order of release and I just completed Ys Oath in Felghana not long ago, and one of the things that really impressed me is how tight and lacking in filler those games are for a jrpg. Even grinding out a few levels is no big deal when you find yourself under-leveled, and the stories in those games also feel small and contained in a way that actually makes the world of Ys far grander and more interesting than other world-spanning rpg stories.
First things first, it always bugs me to a very minor extent when people say that Naughty Dog or Kojima should make a movie. They would be awful film makers. There’s a reason there’s not TloU movie, and it’s because it would be dismissed almost immediately as a painfully generic zombie film. Making interesting bits to watch between action segments does not mean you could make an interesting film at all.
Also, and I am prepared to be roasted into oblivion for this, but Animal Crossing. As much as I am enjoying vegging out and creating my idyllic island paradise in the midst of a world gone mad, holy hell I wish there was a slightly more direct way to get the things I want. Randomness is nice and all, and I at least appreciate they’re not asking me for money to speed things along, but I wish there was at least a more direct upgrade path to “I like things in this style so please give me more of that.”
Around the time that Uncharted 4 came out and was getting tons of praise for its story, there was an email that got read on the Giant Bombcast pointing out that said story is almost beat for beat identical to National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. This is now the only thing I can think about any time someone talks about how great Naughty Dog’s stories are.
I’ve always thought if there was anything that would get me into modding, it would be to make versions of games that trim the fat and offer a streamlined, lean cut of the game. Think an actual ~90 minute cut of a film instead of the three hour director’s cut games usually are.
Fire Emblem: Fates is the game that really got me thinking about this. There is a great 30 hour Fire Emblem game in there, but it’s marred by needing to play through three different versions of the game that have been padded to hell and back to justify it’s $100 price tag (between all three playthroughs). There is a ton of fat to trim that would not be missed.
Once you’ve cut each campaign down to a third or a half of the length, you start chopping at the unncessary bits on the edges:
Take out kids entirely. The in-universe pocket dimension bullshit does not make sense and they were only included because the developers didn’t know why Awakening was popular so they threw in every system from it.
Throw most of the “My Castle” stuff into the woodchipper. It wasn’t engaging, was only there in a half-hearted attempt to make people like the online mode and maybe buy some DLC.
The food cooking can go too. It was never Monster Hunter levels of strategic buffs.
For god’s sake make it fucking gay. Just include all of the gay support conversations from the community made mod. Yes, this is technically adding content instead of subtracting it, but it’s only choices of shipping, not length of game. Also, it’s fucking necessary that your Sakura and Hana can get married.
I’m sure there’s other systems in the game to chop down and other games I’d do similar with, but a lot of it is escaping me right now. I’ll post again if anything else comes to mind.
EDIT: Oh god Persona 5… Oh god Persona 5… Oh GOD Persona 5…
Unfortunately, it’s major problems is not its length, despite it being a Fucking Problem™
Control could definitely do with less upgrades. Especially the whole system of crafting mods seems superfluous. Personally I am mainly sticking with it because it feels fun to play, and the side bosses keep me on my toes.
My ultimate “too much game” is still Darksiders 2. After having played the relatively restrained precursor a week before, I sat down, hoping for something similar. Instead I was facing loot drops, upgrades, inventory, open world quests and hubs. I never got very far in that game after having picked up my fiftieth redundant piece of loot in the first hour.
Also, it cannot be said too many times how AC: Odyssey is too much game. Good on 'em for making almost all of it curated content but still, coulda cut out every sidequest in the game and still have a meaty amount of content.
