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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2672 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 20, 2026

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Anybody playing Crimson Desert?

I heard someone refer to it as a "game for content-lovers". That is precisely what it is, a ton of random bullshit to do, with a nonsensical main plot and highly uneven side quests.

I'm not surprised, since it's basically an MMORPG retrofitted into a single player one, by devs who've made MMOs for over a decade. Looks gorgeous, combat doesn't look bad, but is wide as an ocean and shallow as a puddle. Being able to pet cats and climb trees doesn't make up for a near total absence of actual RP.

Absolutely not for me, at the very least.

In general, I have never understood this fixation on "content" and "replayability" in games and this denigration of linearity, which ends up being reflected in every new game trend ranging from roguelikes to open-world games to (most recently) immersive sims. It always just ends up feeling like yes, there's theoretically massive or even unbounded replayability, but in practice almost none of this variation is meaningful; it's the game equivalent of finding variation in a pine forest, ceaseless randomly-generated content featuring all of the same building blocks. Unless you're treating the game just as a tool to occupy your fingers, one's actual interest in it wanes very fast, and the prioritisation of endless "player agency" and endless "replayability" often means that you have to sacrifice any sense of satisfying pacing and progression. Don't even get me started on the de-prioritisation of meaningful narrative as a casualty of this focus. It's an approach that reduces games to absolute brainrot.

I really hate all of these terms that games get judged by now. It's almost as if we were having the whole Games As Art thing a while back where a lot of developers briefly tried to make games indistinguishable from movies with extra interactivity, and then we overcorrected quickly and basically treated games as glorified content farms, which we still haven't come back from after years and years of genericised slop. A lot of players have a serious problem with viewing games like a product, as if the measuring stick for a game's quality is how many hours one could theoretically get out of it, and this really fucks up how games get designed.

The ultimate “replayability” is not to be found in any game where the story and drama are largely driven by the non-player controlled characters and environment, which is most games. Player vs Environment is much more popular as a core game type than Player vs Player, yet its only in the games where the drama is overwhelming driven by player actions creating constantly emerging content where true replayability can be found in my opinion.

The problem with this is that 99% of obligate PvP games are short iteration, high twitch reaction, high skill: 1st person shooters. FPS have a strong filter for a certain player type and have very few opportunities for the players to drive the content. Other games have excellent PvP systems but it’s a sideshow that is entirely avoidable if you aren’t interested in it, like Guild Wars, or never re-iterate, like Eve online. The trick is medium term iteration (a single “match” takes anywhere from a week to a month to finish), slower pacing, still obligate PvP, but much of the competition between the players takes place outside of direct face to face combat in gathering and refining resources and producing weapons and building fortresses that take 20 people multiple days to finish constructing. A thousand people on both sides, or more. Imagine an RTS type game, except all the pawns are players. 0 bots. And the match takes two weeks to a month with the medium term pacing. Only a handful of games have tried this and they’ve all eventually failed. The only game out there right now that gets close is called Foxhole, a war simulator with two factions that are permanent enemies, every weapon and bullet are made by players sans a small amount of starting weapons, almost every defense structure is player built, complex industrial chains are needed for advanced items, massive amounts of resources requiring dozens of people working together for days to make 1 battleship/super tank. A month long RTS with no bots or AI NPCs. 1-3k players online together in a single game world. It’s almost the same map every war, the developers make gradual adjustments over time. It has a level of genuine risk of losing all your efforts and hours invested in any particular war while you’re asleep that few games are comfortable with. For me the extremity of negative experience you can have in Foxhole, thousands of manhours of work lost to an ambush or nighttime raid, is a huge part of the draw. Very few major studios will ever publish something that they know has common content interactions that can drive the players into a berserk rage (souls types excluded, this is their thing too). I get bored very fast with any multiplayer game with training wheels rules to protect the slow and soft. And no loss is ever for very long: the next war is never more than a month away and you get to try again with grand plans and a lot of “this time we’re doing it differently” planning with your friends. Fully 60% of people who try Foxhole hate it immediately, another 30% grow to hate it in one war. The remainder become obsessed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=YE5bPhKpoWU

Content and replayability are not the same.

The joy of replayability is in experiencing something again. In well designed games that teach mastery in the player, a replay is a demonstration of knowledge, skill, and familiarity gained from the first experience. A first run of Dark Souls may take dozens of hours; a replay may take a third or a quarter as long.

Content is a blanket term I hate, because it implies there is no difference between content. But people are poor, and they are seeking More Content for their dollar, so they don't care if it's slop as long as they don't go hungry. The error content producers tend to make is that there are different kinds of poor; as someone time-poor I want higher quality content I can experience in less time.

Also, the way people experience games now is just different. Games in the 8-bit console era were actually very short, but they also often assumed very low completion rates. Games in the WoW era all wanted to be a second lifestyle with a monthly subscription. Now I'm not sure, but something does seem kind of wrong when the latest Resident Evil, a product of a long and tortured development and crucial decisions taken years in advance about the future of the franchise, drops and the community's reaction is where's the rest?

Replayability (or replay value) is not new; it's been used to judge games for decades. It makes a lot of sense if you are time-rich and money-poor, like a student; you buy a new title every few months and hope it keeps you entertained as long as possible. For full-time working adults, it makes a lot less sense.

It's always been a trait that people consider positive, but there are tradeoffs and at least to my recollection, there was a time when a lower relative value was placed on its importance (specifically a certain era when a lot of story-based games came out, indie and triple-A alike). There's inherent tension between many of the goals a game can aspire to, and at the moment more emphasis seems to be placed on conceptual ideas based around "player agency", "nonlinearity", "replayability", and other such concepts that actively interfere with the ability to satisfyingly curate and pace a game. Rare is the game that actually manages to balance these goals.

I do agree that replayability makes a bit more sense for those time-rich and money-poor. But it's also somewhat dependent on whether you're personally receptive to the addiction-adjacent feedback loops that these games actively try to foster. I've been in this situation before, and still would not buy a game like that, my preference ranking tends to prioritise ephemeral but memorable experiences over less impactful experiences that can be stretched for longer. It doesn't take long for my enjoyment level of a game to hit the point where I have better things to look at and read and do, rather than play it for the 116th time. Your mileage may vary though.

Good rant, it has my endorsement. "Content" is a very poor standard for the quality of a game: meaningful, interesting content is far harder to create than churning out procedural junk or trying to fake it with busywork.

I've sometimes been slightly miffed when a very enjoyable game ends too quickly, but I am far more regularly frustrated by games that try and pad things out. Crimson Desert, Starfield, etc, not that I'm going to bother to play either.

On the other hand, games like Arma 3 (4000 hours), Rimworld and Total War Warhammer as a series (1500 hours each) and a few others? They have interesting mechanics, player-driven interactions, a world that is never the same twice, and usually extensive modding support for when the base game gets stale. Those hours were fun, I was engaged instead of just trying to stay busy. That is awfully, unfortunately rare for games these days.

"Content" is a very poor standard for the quality of a game: meaningful, interesting content is far harder to create than churning out procedural junk or trying to fake it with busywork.

Hard agree. I like to point to Chrono Trigger as a great example of this: yeah, the game is only 20 hours long, but it's tight. They trimmed every bit of fat off that game, so that you're never sitting around doing busy work or enduring an area that goes on long past when it's interesting. I'll take that any day over a game which is 100 hours but only 30% of that time is actually interesting.

Still waiting for more base PS5 performance reviews. Too lazy to build a PC and not willing to upgrade to PS5 Pro.

I'm playing on PC and it looks great, but I've heard mixed things about base PS5, a lot of FUD though it seems, waiting for legit reviews seems like a good plan.

Slightly tempted but thinking it would likely be a waste of money and time.

Are you?

Yep, it seems simultaneously better than I could have imagined (yes you really do have that much shit to do and options for things) and worse than hoped (Korean slop writing).

It's been a great "watch low effort video content" while playing game so far, but I can understand if that's enough to justify the price.

What are your favorite games ever? Just to help me gauge where you are coming from when entering this game.

I'm not an open world guy, although my favorite on that front is The Witcher 3. It's also far too early for me to say if it is good or not, but I can say it delivers on the sheer number of things to do.

Got it. Rumor says it was started as an MMO project, which could partly explain its strengths and weaknesses, I guess.

Edit: typo.

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