Fiona Apple once sang, “No, I don’t believe in the wasting of time.”
That’s a nice sentiment. I’m guessing she didn’t play many video games.
Well, I do and this is what my typical day looks like. I wake up, shower and shave, write e-mails, spend about half an hour seasoning my apathy with whatever outrage is trending, eat a boiled egg and maybe, just maybe I turn on the PS4 for a bit. I can usually squeeze an hour in before I have to drag my daughter from her bed to school. Between my stolen hour in the morning and whatever I can broker with my wife in the evening, once my little one has had her fourth goodnight hug, I don’t have a whole lotta time for my favorite hobby. Neither do any of my grownup friends with work responsibilities and familial obligations but that hasn’t stopped modern video games from disrespecting our valuable time nonetheless.
Pointless Hub Worlds, Broken Systems
Now, don’t get me wrong. When I criticize modern game design, I’m not talking about those delightful sandbox moments when you settle into a leisurely pace to take in a prairie sunset from horseback. Nor do I mean when a game’s difficulty adds playtime organically. That’s part of the fun. No, I’m talking about games like WWE 2K18 that have gameplay systems and hub worlds that are so utterly pointless that playing the game to completion becomes a grim prison sentence.
Reader, if you haven’t experienced WWE 2K18’s MyPlayer career mode, hoo boy, consider yourself lucky and stay far away. If you do decide not to heed my warning prepare to be damned to a monotonous, Sisyphean hell in which, instead of pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again to restart the process, you must wander an empty backstage area making vacuous small talk with “superstars” and “management” both before and after every goddamn match. All with the promise of ending your day with an solitary walk to the back to summon your car so you can go home to a nice long loading screen. I don’t know about you but when I was a kid I’d watch my favorite superstars on TV week in and week out, dreaming about what a glamorous, car-summoning, small-talking life they must lead.
Occasionally, a side quest will pop up to derail your momentum in the main storyline and offer little in the way of a reward to balance it out. Also, the game wants you to change your T-shirt design every week to keep fans interested because WWE universe fans are a ridiculous and fickle lot. WWE 2K18 is truly the gold standard of time wasting hub world nonsense.
Janky Online Matchmaking
… But at least it’s not making you perform archaic satanic rituals to get some co-op time in Bloodborne with your buddies. It should be a simple formula. Destiny got it right on the first try. FromSoftware has had, like, 5 games to figure out how to have me and a friend team up to help each other out and fight monsters without breaking the difficulty of their games. Yet here we are still having to dip into the options to get matching passwords, ring a little bell in just right the spot and then do the whole awful dance again for every subsequent level. Fine if you’ve got the time, a drag if you don’t.
Even Nioh couldn’t crack the code. So they just lifted FromSoftware’s jury-rigged online co-op model, as is, and called it a day. Maybe for this type of game with player invasions and pattern based AI, there’s no room for easy, drop-in drop-out co-op? These games are supposed to be mind-breakingly difficult after all. Or maybe the process itself is part of the whole “super hard” that everyone seems to get off on when playing this series and its copycats. It’s not enough that turning a corner leads to me getting flattened by a boulder. Now I have to stand around like a jerk twinkling my dinky bell for twenty minutes (that’s being generous!) before the wizards in my PS4 box open The Bifröst Bridge so my friend can crossover into my game to die within two seconds of entering the boss’ lair. That’s assuming that I still have enough bells or soapstones or Hummel figurines left to do so.
Interminable Length With A Weak Payoff
… But at least it’s not 300 hours long (unless you’re crazy enough to actually play it that long or are being held at knife point.) Now, I don’t regret the 300 plus hours I dumped into the Witcher 3 and its meaty expansions. The main quest was suitably epic and the side quests were varied and robust; stuffed with useful rewards and fun, memorable characters, sex unicorns, and branching narratives guided by player choice. Most games, however, even those that have clearly taken inspiration from The Witcher 3, aren’t worth even half that amount of time.
I spent about 100 hours in Fallout 4 murdering mutants and Max Max rejects (while occasionally looking for my son if the mood took me.) During those 100 hours I spent approximately 60 of them telling Preston Garvey and his pesky Minutemen to go die in a fire. The game bets everything on the player making a choice between one of four dull and completely loathsome factions as it crawls towards its finale. Once I’d run out of bombed out buildings to explore, new things to massacre, and unique side quests that didn’t simply involve murder (helping the zombie captain of a derelict Chinese submarine relaunch and playing vigilante for a silver age radio host being my two favorite,) I begrudgingly chose to align myself with the clinical, bottomline minded faction, The Institute. I did this because liberating outposts for The Minutemen had turned me off of the whole brotherhood of humanity concept.
I mean, this goes back to ugly or broken gameplay systems but it seemed like every time I would liberate an outpost in one part of the world, another would fall to mutants or synths elsewhere and I’d be back to square one. The futile nature of the task brought back nightmares of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic mobile game. That microtransaction filled plague would send wave after wave of invasive bugs called Parasprites to take back the land I’d spent hours clearing of debris and building pastel colored bakeries upon. The game makers should’ve just taken Pinkie Pie out behind the barn and put two slugs in the back of her cotton candy head because they certainly murdered my daughter’s enthusiasm for saving Equestria, the magical land of horse-like beings. #TeamFluttershy
Do the math. It’s nuts. In total I spent 200 hours playing the latest Assassin’s Creed from its October release until mid February. That’s almost 10 hours a week just for one game and I still didn’t Platinum it. Although I might’ve if I’d checked in with Kevin for tips. CHEAP PLUG.
Copy N’ Paste Busy Work
Then there’s the infamous Ubisoft Tower™ those ubiquitous harbingers of medial copy n’ paste collectathons. Each Ubisoft Tower™ stands as a looming tombstone, a memorial to a Saturday afternoon I killed searching for feathers on the top of stunning European architecture or chasing Ben Franklin’s dancing notes as they flit across Boston rooftops. Oh, and who can forget clearing bases, or ships or, yes, towers. Now in one of three layouts! Collect ‘em all!
At the risk of whining, I don’t have time for all this! Much of the content I refer to above may be considered optional but so, technically, is playing the game at all. We always have the option of stopping, going to the park and feeding the ducks for the rest of the afternoon. Everything is optional! Breathing is, technically, optional!
So putting that notion aside, what I’m suggesting is that game developers respect my time by filling it with engaging, unique content even if, perhaps especially if, there’s less of it. People, myself included, heaped mountains, DEATH mountains of praise upon The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but even that game stops switching things up at a certain point and becomes a checklist of semi-identical shrines and tasks that will almost always fall into one of several categories with little variation. It’s built into the DNA of the thing! They give you four powers unlocked from the outset and set you loose to figure out how to make the best use of them.
Before you crucify me for blaspheming against the mighty Zelda, know that my daughter and I were enchanted with Link’s latest adventure from start to finish, but even my six year old got tired of looking at those blue walls and rolling hills.
By the Numbers Questing
I want to point to the early goings of Horizon: Zero Dawn which absolutely trick the player into believing that the world is going to be far more alive, far more mysterious than it actually is. At that point in the game I was still getting my bearings, when suddenly I heard a cry for help from somewhere near the tree line. I followed the sound to an NPC who needed assistance. This is emergent storytelling. A sound within the environment lead to a crisis which the player is tasked, in the moment, to resolve.
After completing my goal, I began to wonder what other moments like that would await Aloy and I? Would I stumble perhaps upon a trail of blood that lead to a wounded animal and a little girl trying to take care of it who stubbornly refused to leave until I provided her with the herbs necessary to heal the critter? Or maybe I’d see a little house in a tree and no way to climb up and no context for why it was there. Yet, that image and that mystery would plant its seed in me so that when I met someone who knew more about it later, I would have that rapturous “eureka!” moment.
Horizon was one of my favorite games of last year but it settled into a very dull groove with regard to how it leads the player to side content (most of which can be found in settlements) after such a promising start. Oddly enough, Fallout 4 had the same problem. Little miniature stories like the part where you happen upon a long tube and follow it to its source to discover what went down are few and far between.
Open World Bloat
Side content. Sometimes these open world games are just stuffed with it like a bloated over-filled Build-a-bear, but just as often the open world itself is superfluous. One of the worst offenders was LA Noire. Here was a game that got almost everything right; evocative, period setting, A-list actors giving strong film-worthy performances, capsule mysteries with fun pixel hunt style investigations. It was basically Phoenix Wright washed of its loopy anime exterior. If it had just been a smattering of unique locales that played like mini movie sets for each investigation it could’ve been brilliant but LA Noire is saddled with the emptiest most non-interactive open world since the satirical one in No More Heroes.
Do you know that one? In No More Heroes you would play as Travis Touchdown and ride your big motorcycle, patterned after the one that Kaneda rides in Akira, around a cityscape almost completely devoid of life except for one guy that continually tries to cross the road every ten feet. It looked like a Mario Kart battle stage and the only thing you could do was keep an eye out for collectibles and, admittedly, look cool doing so. LA Noire may be prettier and more lifelike but it ain’t far from that!
People love to heap praise on the Grand Theft Auto series, but I’ve never found the side activities all that engaging. You seen one awkwardly animated, dead-eyed lap dance, you seen ‘em all. The whole sandbox concept works best when its content is offered buffet style alongside the main course. If you like the tennis minigame in Grand Theft Auto V, you can play to your heart’s content and if you don’t the game will allow you to ignore it.
This was a lesson the series learned the hard way. In Grand Theft Auto IV, main character, Nico’s phone would blow up constantly with requests from his pals to join them for a game of darts, bowling, etc. The worst part was when you turned them down they seemed really dejected. Like, if Rockstar wanted to simulate how it felt to be the popular girl in school before the big dance… mission accomplished. For the player though, it was an annoying mechanic that distracted from the real fun, of fire bombing crowds of people.
Frustrating Setup
…But at least it doesn’t make you rearrange your AV Receiver and tangle you in a mess of wires a la Superman III (the most traumatic Superman movie,) like the PSVR does. I should rephrase that, like the first iteration of the PSVR does. Early adopters of the tech, like me, are being punished by Sony with no hope of salvation because the version of PSVR we bought doesn’t have an HDR passthru and there’s no elegant solution (though a fair few inelegant ones) available to remedy that.
For those that don’t speak AV, what this basically means is that if I played Horizon: Zero Dawn or Assassin’s Creed: Origins with High Dynamic Range color mode enabled the night before, I must now wrestle the cords behind my TV/Receiver into a new configuration if I want to use the PSVR because I would have had to disconnect it. For a technology that takes a fair bit of setup and upkeep to begin with this is in direct opposition to the breezy concept of plug n’ play, set-it-and-forget-it, console fun that attracts PS4 users in the first place. No wonder I still haven’t gotten out of that first village in Skyrim VR. I spend all my magic points dispelling dust bunnies from behind my TV stand.
Signs of Progress
To be fair there are some games that have made great advancements in quality of life allowing the player to get to the fun stuff quicker or making the old standbys more engaging somehow. I criticize Breath of the Wild for using the same motif for every dungeon or shrine, but I found its Ubisoft Towers™ to be a welcome evolution of the formula. Rather than scattering icons across your map automatically, Breath of the Wild puts the onus on the player to spot and mark interesting sights from the top of the tower. Both Mad Max and Shadow of War make spotting the typical checkmarks a mini game of sorts and while not perfect, at least they’re trying. In the latest Assassin’s Creed for instance, sync points don’t actually reveal where to go for busy work, instead offering your eagle more insight to help in finding your targets. I call that progress.
Perhaps one of the games I’ve been most impressed with is Persona 5. Not only do cutscenes have a fast forward button but the developers have given you a dialogue log that you can revisit at any time. Then there’s the many quality of life improvements to turn based combat. Persona 5 is a game of exploiting elemental weaknesses in battle. With a simple press of the right trigger the game will guide the player to the appropriate attack or teammate with the ability to weaken the opponent. That is assuming you have familiarity with the monster’s weakness already. Additionally, it also offers the option to have characters attack with melee one after the other without the need for excessive button pressing. My carpal tunnel thanks Atlus.
There is one aspect of Persona 5 that has the potential to eat up a lot of playing time unnecessarily though — the game has no autosave. I have, at times, lost hours of progress to a lucky demon in a fight because I simply thought I could press on without consequence and honestly…
…I respect that.
In Conclusion
I don’t mind losing hours if the game makes it clear that this could happen to me if I’m careless. Persona 5 respects my time and I, in turn, accept that a consequence of playing is that I’ll be sacrificing mine now and again. I’ve mentioned specific games from my experience but there are countless others in every genre and probably from every age. Perhaps there’s too much distracting busy work in the latest Assassin’s Creed, but at least it doesn’t have cheap hits, unfair gameplay moments meant to artificially pad playtime that required psychic prowess to overcome, like Ninja Gaiden on the NES did. Still, that was just a weekend’s time worth of game and you could move on to the next one by the next weekend. I feel like these days I buy a game and I’m making a commitment to a relationship of at least 3 months and that’s before the game makers decide to NEVER STOP updating and adding content post release. Looking at you, Final Fantasy XV.
If I’m going to get serious in my relationship with a game, if I’m going to plop my daughter in front of YouTube for longer than is healthy so I can eke out an hour, I want that time to be made of irreplaceable moments, each unlike the next. I can get that from a quick shot of indies games, but triple A titles would do well to cook down their content to the best stuff and leave the rest on the cutting room floor. Also, lose any menus or hub worlds that don’t enrich the experience.
I’m a professional editor and, trust me, you don’t want to see the 4 hour cut of my documentary. You don’t want me to add an unskippable 90s style full motion video DVD menu to the front end. You want to see that perfect 90 minutes of killer, no filler. You want to get straight into the fun.
Fiona Apple goes on to sing, “But I don’t think that I’m wasting mine.” And with the further help of game companies and developers, I hope I won’t be either.
(By the way, our editor-in-chief has figured out how to be a gamer with a family and solve a lot of the problems you’re about to read about. Check out his thoughts here! )
