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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.
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?
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