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The New 'Red Dead Redemption' Reveals the Biggest Problem With Marquee Games Today: They're Boring as Hell. (theoutline.com)
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.
[...] 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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"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.