Games that you wish had less game?

Games
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Though I think I’m less susceptible to this than a lot of people, I agree with a few that have already been mentioned in this thread. God of War 2018 and its overabundance of skill trees and upgrade systems definitely was the first thing that came to mind for me. In hindsight, I wish that game had been more Soulslike in embracing its Metroidvania-ness and having a combat system that was less vertical and more horizontal. I never stopped loving that damn axe but I definitely got tired of the samey fights and power creep halfway through.

But to go all the way back to the start, Nier: Automata was definitely the most egregious case of this for me as well, to the point where it really did impact my experience with that game. I loved the first route with 2B, enjoyed it a lot, especially the spectacle and glitz and beginnings of certain narrative threads, but Route B and that unavoidable hacking minigame got really old really fast. It was a neat game in the end, and Ending E truly was… unique? But I skipped out on a lot of sidequests and missed a lot of stuff that I think would have given me a deeper experience because, after 40 hours, I just couldn’t stand another 5 hours of that combat system. It just felt so pointless and boring, and I truly wish that game had just been a walking sim.

Or even—it feels weirdly sacrilegious to say this—I wish it had just been Death Stranding. In the way that Death Stranding had a few big spectacle bosses but was mostly just about traversing a world. I don’t feel like Nier would have lost much that way, because those bosses were really the only times I felt engaged in any way by the game’s combat.

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42

It took me about 2-3 months to complete route A on Nier and about 2 years to complete B. Then another week to get through to E. Good lord I don’t care for playing as 9S.

1 Like
43

I’ve been doing a bit of a survey of 4X games recently and those often have what I think are too many systems stapled onto them. I don’t think they benefit from fine grained control over ship/unit design or a tactical layer to combat.

The lineage going back to Master of Orion means it’s the worst in space 4X like Stellaris and Endless Space, but I just don’t find it interesting to be fiddling in yet another spaceship designer and upgrading a corvette from “lasers III” to “photon torpedoes IV”. At least some games let you kind of ignore it, but that always feels a little fishy to me, either it’s a core part of the experience and those decisions actually matter, or they are just fluff.

Endless Legend and Age of Wonders (I’ve only played Planetfall) include entire tactical combat layers which really feel superfluous. Again, you can auto resolve combat but that always feels a little suboptimal, and the main issue I think is that if they didn’t include a tactical combat layer at all you could imagine the design/development effort being spent to make the strategic layer a richer experience. At least in the Total War games, epic sweeping battles in the tactical layer is kind of the point.

I would go so far as to argue that extraneous systems like this can actually turn into an accessibility issue, because for a player who is using non traditional inputs (I’m using a head mouse & voice control) every. single. click. feels like a chore sometimes

I want the 4X equivalent of Into the Breach – strategic level decisions but ruthlessly pared down gameplay mechanics.

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44

Confusing as all heck when people say “Nier” but mean “Nier Automata”.

Especially when Nier is getting remastered in a bit.

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45

i think la-mulana 2 is the only game i like enough to contemplate what if i didn’t have to push through these bits here and there that i don’t like at all to get back to everything else.
stuff like bravely default or new vegas or knights in the nightmare i just move on when i’m done and never return, even if that’s not even halfway into the game, as happened with knights.
and dark souls (1), almost all of the good stuff happens before you’ve overcome biggie smalls. consequently, i stopped a lot of playthroughs without passing that point.

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47

So, this is a really tough issue for me.

What I’ve found is that, when there’s a game that has “less game”, like a visual novel, I struggle to get myself to play it. A big part of me desires some mechanical pull. I find that visual novels are really intimidating for me. The idea of clicking through all that text sounds… tiring? And it’s not even that I don’t enjoy these games, either, it’s just this apprehension I experience.

At the same time, playing some of these games will exhaust me. I will find myself wishing very quickly I could just teleport to the next story location or what have you. A good example is many JRPGs. I find myself really desiring to just fast forward through the combat. Sometimes it feels like the gameplay is completely contrived just to provide some broader incentive.

There’s an interesting middle-ground for me where I don’t wish it was “less game”, but I do wish it was “less of what it is”. I’m thinking specifically of Pathologic. The game is on survival, and the story is paced well in between this, but I do wish it was less punishing and allowed me to access its story with more ease.

I do think, for what it’s worth, there is a very real element of “Why can’t this be a movie or a book?” Which is not a diss, per se? But I do think that having to work to get to the story is a really frustrating feeling, especially when there are plenty of stories out there that do not require that kind of input.

So I think at the core here is the tension between mechanics and narrative. To put it in unnecessarily obtuse terms, the ergodic and the semiotic. (Yes, you are allowed to hate me now.)

Games are a kind of work, and usually, the reward for said work is the work itself. The work is fun to do in the first place. But I think what happens in these games is that it becomes work for the reward of more story. And when the dynamic becomes one of compensation, it instantly sours any enjoyment that you could get out of that work.

10 Likes
48

I think it’s also different for egodic versus semiotic for video games; there is, of course, ergodic literature, but nothing stops you skipping ahead a chapter in Gravity’s Rainbow [or even, if we lower ourselves to consider long rambling digressions as “ergodic”, skipping ahead in anything Hugo wrote]. You can complete a difficult novel without fully internalising it; or whilst focusing only on the parts that you were interested in.

Ergodic games can provide hard progression limits that stop you from from ever partaking of more of the semiotic component.

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50

Have games always been this long? I wonder if part of it is the AAAification of everything. When hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars are being spent on development the scope of a game is increased apace with its budget, regardless of the actual nature of the project. I imagine the parts that are most costly to produce are hi-res art assets, animations, combat systems etc. What is not expensive is reusing those same systems or adding a 15th variety of +1 to left sock stamina bonus. So a million dollar game has to feel a million dollars big, even if the idea really only warrants 10 hours of content. And this sets a cultural precedent for what a good game looks like so even devs without the enormous budgets feel like they have to keep up.

1 Like
51

The first 4 .hack games pop to my mind. If I ever think about playing them again, I just have to remind myself about virus cores to immediately stop.

52

Im replaying all the Dragon Age games currently and Dragon Age II needs so much less game.

Its narrative is better than I gave it credit for in 2011 and it has some of the best character writing BioWare has done, imo, and I love every companion to bits. But I genuinely think it’s a mechanically terrible CRPG and if I wasn’t stuck in my house with nothing else but time I would have stopped playing it. Less encounters where dudes literally fall from no where as if the DM made the encounter too easy and needs to throw more bandits at the party, more navigating Kirkwall and getting to know the people that live there, please.

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53

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was like a single player MMO with a load of mobile games bolted on to it. I loved it but I was stuck on the couch with a broken leg at the time!

54

Oh, that reminds me of an extremely similar example: Planescape Torment! It’s the first game where I full-on cheated to make myself invincible in combat and had a better time for it.

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55

Using the past couple of games as any indication, if you are reading this post after “Holidays 2020”, please @ me so I can complain about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

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56

I’m playing Odyssey right now and it’s incredible just how many systems there are in this game.

The menu has 7 tabs that are all constantly needing attention. There’s also a gladiator system that 20 hours in I haven’t even seen.

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57

I’ve said it before, but I will say it again: Planescape:Torment would be a much better game if they had stuck to their original idea and just removed random mobs entirely from the game. [I believe there’s at least one interview retrospective where one of the developers admits that they didn’t think people would buy a D&D game without combat, so they put it in despite their inclination.] As it is, I’ve never gotten out of Sigil because the combat is so irritating, and the real-time nature means that you have to always be aware of when people are trying to mug you so you can at least move out of the way.

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58

Honestly, as excited as I am for Valhalla, I still haven’t finished Odyssey yet and I don’t know if I ever will. It’s too big.

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59

I’ve started over on Xbox after playing it at release and have gotten to the exact same spot and have started to fall off again searching 3 places for the mom. It’s just so big and the story moves so slowly because of how much content there is. I’ve also had trouble with the leveling. I don’t know how you could mainline the story because you would be completely under leveled for every encounter.

60

I think you’re supposed to branch out and explore everything so you can be on-level for stuff. And it’s just so much.

61

Yeah, but you level fast enough that if you’re trying to do everything (as I always do) you’re also constantly outleveling most of that stuff. Frustrating.