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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
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