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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.
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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