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.

Comments

Re:The problem is...

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw

[cfalcon]

"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.

Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw

[fazig]

But how long did the average player have to practice the game before they could beat it without virtual deaths? I'd wager that most players of these old games have never reached the ending on their own before saving features were introduced.
I would say that this practice made the games still repetitive. So that's not a good argument here.


Disclaimer: Now I'm talking about myself here in a more subjective manner. Your mileage may differ.
I used to play games. I'd still do if most of them weren't just so terrible. What do I mean by terrible?
When I was first confronted with video games, this new form of media thrived on innovation. Practically all games had their unique angles that required the player to either learn new motor skills or new ways of thinking to solve the problems the game posed. You had to learn to master these new skills in order to beat the game, which then was a reward on its own.
Today however, most of the games have to play pretty much exactly the same, because apparently you can't ask from your consumers to learn and train a new skill, which can lead to frustrating experiences if it doesn't work right away. Therefore pretty much every big first person shooter has to play exactly like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Every 3rd person shooter has to play like Uncharted. Every 3rd person action RPG has to play like Dark Souls. And so forth. Then there's also this competitive-multiplayer craze, which I won't touch here because it'll take too long.
From my perspective the few things that make these games different are their graphics and the stories they try to tell. The one thing that distinguishes games from other forms of media -- interactivity -- appears to become less and less important.
So I came to the realization that I do not need to spend $60 every time a big studio craps out one of these games, just in order to get essentially the same experience that I can get on platforms like youtube or twitch (played by a trusted streamer) for almost no additional costs. There's no more need for an expensive gaming computer or maybe a console as I can watch these things on my phone, while I'm on the go. If I want good stories there are even simpler ways like picking up plain simple book or even audio book if I'm lazy.

Now and then I still pick up some simulation games like ArmA or DCS. The odd low budget indy game can be interesting to me. But all in all I've shifted my focus on other, factually healthier activities for my spare time.
Maybe I'm just getting old and bitter.