The games I play do respect my time but boy are they a second job. From Rimworld to Satisfactory, from Space Engineers to modded Minecraft… My job is a second job.
I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.
and aren’t a glorified second job
I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.
The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.
Why would you write this and then not say what your favorite jrpg that is specifically more grindy in America is? Do you write clickbait headlines for a living?
Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was “oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I’ll wait until I get a better PC.” [wait 10 years] “My ADHD has gone worse, I can’t play all this stuff”
Older games = more than 2 years old? Then the same goes for readers, movie and TV watchers, etc media consumption most isn’t from the current or previous years
I’m playing a new old game, because i’m playing the Suikoden Remaster. There for I have beaten the system by simultaniously playing both an 20+ year old game and a brand new game thats a few weeks old.
The Steam Deck is actually wonderful for retro games. EmuDeck makes setting up emulators a breeze, and the roms can easily be found online legitimately ripped from your own copies of the game and loaded onto a MicroSD card.
Suikoden 3 needs far, far more than just a remaster.
It needs a full blown remake, both of the story, and the game, to get rid of that trinity sight mechanic. cause the constant shifting perspectives absolutely kept me out of the game, cause every time I start to get invested boom rip me out of it and make me control someone else for a long period. I understand what they were trying to do, but it was one of the most fundamentally bad game design choices i’ve ever seen.
Suikoden 4 has a similar problem. They would need to remake that, too… and create a ton of new story and side content… because S4 is like a 7 hour game, that only takes 40 hours to play because of the absolutely ludicrously insane encounter rate… which is very blatantly used to pad game length time.
Suikoden 5, Hell… I dont even need a remaster. Just wrap the PS2 version in an emulator and release it on PC and I’ll be happy as can be.
If it makes you feel better, it will never be the same as it was when you first played. Every time there is a xpac that looks interesting I have tried and failed to get that feeling back. It devolves very quickly into feeling like a job again.
I want to agree but some games are really well done. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a good example.
However
I feel like many people are so focused on graphics and looks, like raytracing for example, that gameplay/story has become less important? Sucks but it is what it is I guess…
A good story isn’t something groundbreaking that marketing teams can slap on the box in the same way they can with ray tracing dlss or whatever else I guess
I play Rocket League and ~30,000 MAME games on a converted Arcade 1up. I’m waiting for my payment to go through for Vintage Story though – that one is fairly new!
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