I haven’t felt the urge to play anything since finishing Elden Ring on my Xbox. 

Hmmmm.

Maybe I’m bored of games. 

Naaaaah. 

I’m going to start a PS5 playthrough.

I think a lot of us play (or semi-play) out of habit more than anything else. The odd game sparks my interest but luckily I've managed to reign in the compulsive purchasing of times gone by. I'd say about 2 games a year grab me so that's enough to continue being a 'gamer'. 107 hours into Elden Ring so there's still something there.

davyK wrote:

I never got the obsession with the recreation of realistic looking places in a video game.

Same, but unreal worlds work for me. That’s part of the reason I still love Halo, I just love these vast, sci-fi environments they build. Doom Eternal has been good for that too, as it happens.

Yossarian wrote:

I never got the obsession with the recreation of realistic looking places in a video game.

Same, but unreal worlds work for me. That’s part of the reason I still love Halo, I just love these vast, sci-fi environments they build. Doom Eternal has been good for that too, as it happens.

Building impossible environments is part of the charm of videogames so I get that.  I'm very much a linear person and the bigger and free-er the environment is , the less I like it.

I'm just not interested in stories in videogames I suppose.  I can see why lots of people like that though.

No doubt. If a level is small and focussed then I'm happy. What I don't like is the padding - wandering around and sent pillar to post to get a maguffin in order to progress.

There may well be tighter focussed games I'd like out there but I've given up on the whole scene to be honest. I play smaller games now. shmups, puzzlers and arcade racers. Not much time for anything else.

I find much of the big name games just too big and bloated as packages to fully enjoy. Halo 5 was great fun but definite padded out. Same with Gears. Batman Arkham Knight. Many more I cant think of at the moment. Even some of the indie games make this mistake - I dont need hundreds of the same thing, just give me a good portion that is refined and perfected as much as possible. 

Still enjoy games but I dont have huge amounts of time anymore to play them so I need them to be concise. SF4 Ultra - perfect, play through as a character in about 15 minutes. Quick Resume has helped but there is still way too much padding.

A lot of new multiplayer games ask too much of us duffers, aimed squarely at those who can enjoy poring over their stats and strats for months into years.

I was still in my 20s when I got into online gaming, playing most of the PS3 stuff Rock hosted, but they were much simpler games. Tekken 7 has way more systems and interactions to learn than the version I started with, and for all of that I find it less rewarding.

Games that are arcane from the outset lead to a small group of elites, and in the case of fightmen, that tends to leave them starved of support as everyone tires of waiting in lobbies. Much as I moaned about Street Fighter IV, it nailed this.

Same with Uncharted 2, which even in its day felt like a PC throwback to unadorned teambased modes. Twice updated with increased complexity, a smaller playerbase each time.

So I only play familiar series now, recognising certain improvements here and there with other genres, but not considering the payoffs of learning their bloat worth their mastery commitments any more.

Almost everything seems engineered for longhaul streaming, stretched beyond intrinsic entertainment mileage. A couple of gens ago we'd get through a variety in that timeframe. I feel like satisfying gamehopping'd take every hour, far removed from the PS1 days of slinging a few golds over a weekend.

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Having said that the main reason I loved The Last of Us II so much was due to the visuals and cut scenes/dialogue exchanges.  The gameplay was fine but I could take it or leave it tbh; it wouldn't hold my interest for a straight action game.

Is why I wouldn't play it for nowt. It's a ramrod storyline with no respect for what you might've hoped to achieve through interaction in the original. ‘Pacifist, were ya? Yeah, well not on my watch, buddy!’

A glaring example of games-can-do-what-noninteractives-can't being noninteractive with gametier writing still.

But that's exactly what I mean: you can get a feel for Rocket League in an evening because it has a learner layer.

Tekken 7's less stratified to invite new players, making it a higher first jump at the same time as lowering the ceiling for pros. The worst part is new players losing to systems added to help them in ways they can't understand and thus learn from.

TLou2 is a much about what you don't want as what you want, and it's better for it. Calling the writing 'gametier' is pretty generous to most other games. I mainly play games for the interactive elements but I'd probably replay TLou2 just to ride the ramrod again.

Gametier writing's improved to match a lot of TV, so that's not a dig in isolation, but you can't say it benefits from belonging to a game when it's immutable. Not for me, Clive. Though I suppose you can feel like you're injecting your presence into it through play.

The better gamewriting becomes, the more we'll notice and potentially question our lack of agency in one of its best platforms. Obviously I'm already there.

I’m very much unconvinced that great storytelling and branching narratives can happily coexist. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong.

Yossarian wrote:

I’m very much unconvinced that great storytelling and branching narratives can happily coexist. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong.

Divinity Original Sin 2, Alpha Protocol, Emily is Away 3 and a whole bunch others all say hello.

Not played any of them. First I’ve heard of any of them being considered great writing too, as it happens, but maybe I’ve missed something, can’t say I’ve paid too much attention to any of them.

b0r1s wrote:

TLoU2 is a great story made better by the quality of the animation and virtual acting. Really a step apart from most games.

Death Stranding has similar quality of animation but the story and chat is just mad bollocks so it doesn’t count. But it is a better game overall due to its systems being satisfying to just play.

I think if I play TLoU2 again I’d just stick it on easy and switch on auto-hoover-up-stuff mode.

Gotta agree with Boris and Moot there.

I'll replay TLOU 2 with unlimited crafting because the game plays so beautifully. The game play is some what overlooked at times because of how stellar all the other elements of the game are.

The story choices are made by the devs and I find the criticism of them amusing especially the whole they killed my favourite character nonsense.
It isn't a choose your own adventure book.

I just figure that truly great storytelling is really hard to achieve in a linear narrative medium, the vast majority of stories aren’t great. Adding in the complexity of branching paths must make that close to impossible.