The same reason the literal entirety of society exists. After we completely figured out food, water, and shelter, we got bored. We stopped being at risk of famine 10k years ago, we pretty quickly figured out fermentation and distillation makes water not kill us, and we figured out how to house everyone.
Then we kept just making that faster and easier to accomplish.
Well what do we do with all that free time? Fuck play games, do some entertainment, kill other people over petty nonsense, create pointless class based societies that generate artificial scarcity simply because a few people are greedy and most are too trusting of those greedy people, enrich out lives through momentary joy.
So in the dark ages of computing this tradition was continued and a very smart, highly paid scientist in charge of tens of millions of dollars of equipment made some of that equipment play table tennis.
A few decades and massive corporate funding of naive over enthusiastic nerds with much cheaper but more powerful equipment later and we have video games instead of going to the pub to play dice or doing a war…
I’m shocked that BoTW was considered the top game of the 2010s. I felt BoTW was mediocre over all on top of not feeling like a Zelda game at all. As far as open world games, I felt that Horizon: Zero Dawn was more compelling in both gameplay and story and I’m still not sure I’d rank it as a top game of the decade.
Botw was good, but I wouldn’t put it anywhere near game of the decade. Divinity 2, Subnautica, Skyrim and its DLC, Hollow Knight, Death Stranding, Doom 2016, HLA, Ori and the Blind Forest, as well as a number of smaller games and ones I’m probably forgetting.
Your list of games would definitely rank higher for me as well (assuming Divinity 2 means Divinity: Original Sin 2). I’m sure there are a ton of games in there I’ve forgotten that would also quality.
BotW completely changed the open world landscape. Yes it was a bad Zelda game, it was by no means a mediocre game. That first experience is fucking magical, and has been recreated to great effect in Elden Ring and Genshin Impact (I shouldn’t need to point out how popular both of those games are).
You can dislike that it was a bad Zelda game. Calling it mediocre is just patently false. Granted, yes - I’ve called the game ‘Horizon: Zero Awards’ because it definitely should have won at least something. It was not more impactful than BotW.
Fine, let’s go with BotW was a bad Zelda game and I strongly disliked it. I tried to like it and played all the way through because I was stubborn, but in the end I think it sucked as did my friends (they all quit long before I did). I wish I hadn’t bought it or spent time in it.
Also, I disagree that it changed the open world landscape. H:ZD released before BoTW did, did the open world stuff better (IMO), and still doesn’t seem like it was radically novel at the time other than the story/setting. The only truly novel thing about BotW was that it was open world in a Zelda game.
All I have to say is that I sincerely doubt that From Software and MiHoYo were looking at H:ZD when they made their very successful games. That’s my only point, you are allowed to have your opinions about H:ZD - I’m not saying that you’re wrong.
Central Hyrule on horseback in BotW was such an amazing feeling. TotK didn’t ever catch that level of action, but everything else was more fun. Plus it has a lot of QoL changes that helped. Opening chests with full inventory comes to mind. I was upset BG3 beat it for game of the year but the competition was really tough.
If you are interested in the historical vote split for past awards, just go to the article linked in my post and look under the "Awards and ceremonies" section. Then look for the awarded games between 2014 (the year that The Game Awards launched) and now.
I think it’s just because it was the dominant monetization scheme when they were introduced, people got used to spending nothing up front on their mobile games. Then there are other barriers. Like why would I pay $15 for Stardew Valley when it probably won’t work with a controller or output comfortably to a TV. You can do some of that stuff sometimes in mobile, but there’s no enforcement of it, so that means you’re getting a lesser version of the game, which drives the price down. I wanted to revisit Planescape: Torment on mobile, but they ported it to Android too long ago, and now it just doesn’t work with modern Android OSes. They’re really teaching me to not treat mobile as a place where people like me should expect to find stuff to play.
An excellent philosophical question, that we all ask ourselves at some point - why do we play?
I’ll answer your question with one of my own: what is productive labour for after all? To allow for more productive labour?
I could cite some evolutionary hypotheses about how we came to enjoy play and beauty for their own sake, but that doesn’t tell you what we ought to value.
For my own part I think thoughtfully maximising life’s pleasures is a good goal (though I would rank diminishing pain as higher priority).
True but they didn’t say 2 in the above comment and with 2 years off, it’s easy to not realise the first wasn’t released in the 2020s without checking.
fedia.io
Ważne