I feel like a time wizard because I’m like 40, date several people, have a full time job, and still play games and read books. Where is everyone else’s time going??
It’s the kids. Kids take a lot of time. Most folks our age with kids don’t have any time to themselves until it’s 9/10 at night, then still have chores & work the next day.
Plus pets, home/vehicle ownership, commute times, etc… Lots of things that some people have/choose to commit a significant amount of time. Sometimes it’s also not about the total time commitment, but the windows of time available. Things like kids/pets can make it difficult for games that assume you’re actually going to be continuously attentive over 20+ minutes at a time when you can be interrupted by breaking up a fight with the pets, having to let the new puppy outside regularly, hearing the cat about to hack up a hairball, cleaning up the ice cream the kid just dropped, etc…
As a 40yr old developer of a FOSS RTS game (not released yet), I generally aim at games taking from 20 - 30 minutes. This is because I usually have only about 1 or 2 hours to play games with the bois after work. Additionally, I am usually extremely tired, so I try to implement a lot of QOL features that make the game less arduous to play.
Recently a popular RTS game that uses the same engine as mine has had a lot of sweats complaining about widgets (Long story, but they are unsynced bits of lua code that can extend things. They have limited access to the synced state, but are still pretty powerful). Basically people complaining about a specific widget that will make your units try to stay at max range when in a fight. While this sounds pretty useful, in the case of players who are relatively decent with rts gameplay, it’s more of an irritation to deal with than anything else.
But as a developer of this type of game, I have a vested interest in making players who aren’t as good be able to compete with players like myself who are really good. If that means some (very) rudimentary AI will try to make your units behave somewhat intelligently when you aren’t paying attention, I’m totally down for that. I find that as I get older, even though I am extremely experienced and good in rts games, I appreciate such tools existing for the players who simply aren’t that great. I don’t get my dopamine hits from steamrolling another player, I get my hits from good fights and satisfying battles. A lot of people I talk to make me feel like an outlier, but I know good and goddamn well that there are a lot of lesser skilled players that just wouldn’t bother with speaking up.
I have a very large problem with games that don’t respect my time. Elite Dangerous is a perfect example. I avoided it for a very long time because people went on and on about how hard it was to fly. Turns out, anyone who played descent 1 and descent 2 (And now Overload on steam (seriously, buy this shit, it’s modern descent built by the original devs and it’s amazing)) can fly the crafts with ease. The space combat is pretty shit tier. However, it’s gorgeous, and super cool, BUT, the developers refuse to implement any sort of fast travel. The sheer amount of time that it takes to get anywhere is mind boggling. I would spent 6 hours flying on a day off, and still not manage to really get anything done. This is the perfect example of a game that does not respect my time. I HATE games like this. I try to understand that time literally is money. That isn’t only a cliche. As you get older, you realize that time is a resource, and as you get older, you find that you have so little free time, that any time lost can be a really heavy blow.
So I spent some time thinking about this. Imma send you a like to a vod of me playing against one of the other devs (he does all of the balance design) instead of linking it directly. It isn’t done yet. It is fully playable, and on our discord there are some download codes for people to use if they want to play test with us.
We have a lot of good discussion on our discord and generally our dev chat stays open for all to read. A modicum of googling will find the GitHub and horrendously out of date wiki + discord and probably even our itch.io listing
This is sea of thieves for me. I had a friend who was obsessed with it, but you’re basically required to dump multiple hours in to complete anything and even then … You could get your ship sunk and lose it all. It’s incredibly frustrating.
really like the implementation. I remember playing the Witcher 3 on easy mode just to be able to go through the story and enjoy the fantastic scenery. One of the best gaming experiences of my life. especially on an ultra wide monitor
yep, I just started playing the DLCs on story mode again. I beat the main game on regular some time back but now I just want to bask in the lushness of Toussaint without having to think too much about which buttons to press
This isn’t a new game only issue tho. Plenty of games waste your time wether it came out this year, 10, 20, 30 years ago. It can be moreso worse in the past due to limits in game design such as only saving at set checkpoints (or even saving at all if you go back far enough)
I’ve heard it since the mid 2000s when EGM (Electronic Gaming Magazine) couldn’t keep up with what was coming out for reviews with Xbox push for indy’s (which lead to more tools and more flooding) plus AAA games. That was before phone games were even a thing. So everyone started to move to podcasts like real early circa 2005 and video reviews like gamespot would do. Same time Steam was slowly roasting in the background. Few years go by Epic also starts do some moves. 2011 Twitch basically becomes the place to review a game by watching someone play it. That feeling almost felt like you didn’t even to play the game because you watched it. 2012 Steam gets early access. The Market has been flooded for a decade not to mention so many games became templates of each other. What’s my point? There’s a ton of great things to play in many different genres that go back to the inception of games. Find what you like and enjoy it. There’s so much media today, one of the reasons save states changed over time. I will not watch every show or every movie nor all the books, comicbooks and manga or put in time with all my other hobbies ie drawing, painting, sculpting. Hard trying to keep up with your friends, some might be better off than you or have more time than you. You get older shit changes, people schedules change, you are more tired and sleepy and probably have more responsibilities. This is life, go for a walk outside come back in and do something you enjoy. That being said I do enjoy quality of life changes in some games but in others it might lose the soul of the game. TLDR There’s too much of everything and it’s overwhelming.
I don’t think it’s the difficulty of games that makes them take so long for me. Just that everything is so bloated now. There’s so much to do, but so little of it actually adds to the experience.
I appreciate that a lot of games have realised this and let you differentiate between “go this way to see the end of the game” and “here is some bullshit if you’re not getting another game until Christmas”.
Like sure, I could deliver every parcel in Death Stranding, and really get into the class fantasy of being a post apocalyptic Deliveroo driver, but I’m just mainlining the story quests at this point. Which is taking long enough on its own.
There’s only a handful of games that made me turn down from normal, but when I do it’s out of pure frustration and just wanting it to be over so I can play something else.
The end of the Control Foundation DLC comes to mind. There was a fight that was a red room, with red enemies, red health bars, and bullshit instadeath mechanics. Man, fuck that.
I am also 55. And every time I get spanked in Destiny 2 pvp I am reminded that my reflexes are now shit, and my days of pvp glory in UT and CS are decades behind me. I’m officially a pve player now.
Yeah just started it solo, guess it’s more fun with friends. However I don’t have friends who play online in my timezone. I’ll try on the Discord channel.
Just completed my first solo mission. Took me 38 mins on easiest, and not completed secondary objectives, but got out there alive! Think it can be a lot of fun in groups, and read many good things about how friendly everyone is.
It’s literally fine though because hard mode doesn’t mean anything more than you do less damage and the enemies do more in 99% of the games out there. You’re not missing extra gameplay or narrative. You just slide two real basic siders up and down.
hard-drive.net
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