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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.
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.
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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.
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