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Rant - All Your Time Are Belong To Us
7 years ago
There's been a trend over the last 5-10 years where corperations get so greedy as to defy all logic. Where a game/film making lots of money isn't good enough. It has to make all the money ever and be the highest grossing game/film in history or else be considered a failure. This trend is fairly well know, and if you're reading this you've either noticed it yourself, or at least heard of it.
But one thing I never see mentioned a similar obsession with time. Be it YouTube bombarding you with recommendations, Netflix asking if you want to watch some other film the instant the credits start rolling, to games including all kinds of grind, time limited events, and other grimmicks to keep people playing. They might hide it with corperate buzzwords like "engagement", but much like the greed, they seem to have an irrational desire for peoples time.
I'm a grown up, and not a particularly busy one, but even I rarely find the time to clear my backlog of games. I have chores I have to do, and non-game stuff I want to do. Yet it seems more and more games are padded to the eyeballs with tedious grind to extend playtime, and most big name games these days aren't things you can lightly dip into.
I remember back when there was a push by the games press, as well as young family's, that games were too long. That hundreds, if not thousands of hours of questing in Skyrim meant that someone with a job, a wife, and a kid that only had an hour or 2 per week to play would be need almost a year to finish the main quest, and 3 times that if they did the side stuff. I dismissed that argument, and still do. Wanting long games to go away so you can easily write reviews, or because you can't fit all these popular games into your current scheduled? Tough.
However, I also remember a time where I'd replay quality games. eg. Resident Evil 2 can be finished in 3 hours if you know what you're doing, and there was modes you could unlock by beating the game a lot. And while I still replay older games, I rarely do that with new stuff. Let me put it this way. When have you ever heard someone say "I have a weekend free. Maybe I'll replay Destiny 1." I doubt it's beatable in a weekend. And even if it is, the amount of grinding and recycled content means that you're likely sick of it by the time you reach the end.
Making matters worse is that some gamers and YouTubers also contribute to this. I know games are expencive, but it's weird how people demand to know what kind of "endgame" is in a given game. Hell, people seem to STILL buy into the myth that a tacked on team deathmatch mode will make a game last forever, as if it won't be completely abandoned within a week or 2. Why is someone going to play, say, Anthem PvP when Fortnite, CS:GO, and Team Fortress 2 are available?
Finally, I sometimes wonder if there are people out there who are game design genius' born at the wrong time? Like, would Billy Noname and his pixel art platformers have been a Mario level hit had he been making games for the NES and SNES, instead of them being burried in the bowels of Steam or the App Store? I ask this because I also wonder if games like Resident Evil or Super Metroid would be considered good games if they were first released today? After all, they don't have online PvP, 80 hour story quests, or 6 man end game raid content.
After writing this post, I came across this screenshot about HBO that is the exact thing I'm talking about.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhuiVdK.....IibE.jpg:large
But one thing I never see mentioned a similar obsession with time. Be it YouTube bombarding you with recommendations, Netflix asking if you want to watch some other film the instant the credits start rolling, to games including all kinds of grind, time limited events, and other grimmicks to keep people playing. They might hide it with corperate buzzwords like "engagement", but much like the greed, they seem to have an irrational desire for peoples time.
I'm a grown up, and not a particularly busy one, but even I rarely find the time to clear my backlog of games. I have chores I have to do, and non-game stuff I want to do. Yet it seems more and more games are padded to the eyeballs with tedious grind to extend playtime, and most big name games these days aren't things you can lightly dip into.
I remember back when there was a push by the games press, as well as young family's, that games were too long. That hundreds, if not thousands of hours of questing in Skyrim meant that someone with a job, a wife, and a kid that only had an hour or 2 per week to play would be need almost a year to finish the main quest, and 3 times that if they did the side stuff. I dismissed that argument, and still do. Wanting long games to go away so you can easily write reviews, or because you can't fit all these popular games into your current scheduled? Tough.
However, I also remember a time where I'd replay quality games. eg. Resident Evil 2 can be finished in 3 hours if you know what you're doing, and there was modes you could unlock by beating the game a lot. And while I still replay older games, I rarely do that with new stuff. Let me put it this way. When have you ever heard someone say "I have a weekend free. Maybe I'll replay Destiny 1." I doubt it's beatable in a weekend. And even if it is, the amount of grinding and recycled content means that you're likely sick of it by the time you reach the end.
Making matters worse is that some gamers and YouTubers also contribute to this. I know games are expencive, but it's weird how people demand to know what kind of "endgame" is in a given game. Hell, people seem to STILL buy into the myth that a tacked on team deathmatch mode will make a game last forever, as if it won't be completely abandoned within a week or 2. Why is someone going to play, say, Anthem PvP when Fortnite, CS:GO, and Team Fortress 2 are available?
Finally, I sometimes wonder if there are people out there who are game design genius' born at the wrong time? Like, would Billy Noname and his pixel art platformers have been a Mario level hit had he been making games for the NES and SNES, instead of them being burried in the bowels of Steam or the App Store? I ask this because I also wonder if games like Resident Evil or Super Metroid would be considered good games if they were first released today? After all, they don't have online PvP, 80 hour story quests, or 6 man end game raid content.
After writing this post, I came across this screenshot about HBO that is the exact thing I'm talking about.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhuiVdK.....IibE.jpg:large
