You’re not crazy, you just need to get away from 40 hour long open world chore games
Arcade style games that give you a quick hit are what I miss. Things that drop you straight in the action and don’t let up.
I think some are making a bit of a come back on the Indy scene though.
Pretty sure I’m in the same boat. Literally nothing is enjoyable anymore and I have 0 motivation to do anything “productive” after work since it’s all just more work…
My friends must think im nuts when they see me bounce from game to game to game within 1-2 hours because nothing keeps my attention lol
This has been me the majority of the time since about 2020, which I chalk up to depression and more recently suspecting that I have ADHD (I know self-diagnosing isn’t cool, I intend to explore this more formally eventually, but I have many reasons for suspecting it in general). Sometimes it’s bad enough that if something doesn’t grab me in 5-15 minutes, I’ll bounce off to something else and probably repeat the cycle a few more times before giving up and doing something else instead.
I find that I can’t really play modern games at all anymore. They just feel like work and are more concerned with monetization rather than being enjoyable to play. Modern experiences feel so hollow to me now. I miss when the main draw of a multiplayer game was feeling your skills improve rather than spending 100+ hours to get some skin from grinding out a battlepass. It feels like a chore. I fell off of TOTK in May and apparently haven’t been too eager to return to it. I’ve been doing a decent job sticking with Mass Effect lately though. Helps that it runs perfectly on Steam Deck so I don’t always have to be on my PC. It’s my first time playing ME1, which helps. We’ll see if I can stick with it through 2 and 3, which I played many years ago.
This has also led to me drifting apart from many of the people who I previously considered to be my friends. Most of them barely leave the house anymore and only hang out and communicate on Discord, which I am barely on anymore due to my general lack of interest in games lately, my general disinterest in modern games specifically (which is all they play), and my disinterest in participating in more voice calls after being in Teams calls during the workday beforehand. They also have significantly more free time than I do due to almost all of them being single, so the rare times I have tried to play anything progress-based with them has been a bust because I inevitably fall behind. It’s unfortunate to drift apart like that, but it took longer than it should have for me to realize that we probably weren’t actually that close if me losing interest in games is all it took for them to cut me out. Oh well.
I know, self diagnosing isn’t cool
It’s cool and useful as a starting point. The main thing is to be authentic and say it the way you said it: That you suspect it.
I know a few people on the suspectrum, and it’s fine as long as you don’t try and claim that you most definitely have the thing and that your self diagnosis is valid/means you should have access to healthcare/etc.
When I hear this, I wonder if people are playing the wrong types of games for them. Most AAA games have great graphics and cutscenes, but the core gameplay loop is just tedious and feels like you’re following a GPS from chore to chore. I don’t fault anyone for feeling bored with 10hr interactive movies.
I still love games that challenge me and offer a real risk of failure, for example. If there’s no chance of losing, then beating the game just feels like “finishing” it, like how you would describe a movie or TV show. I’d get tired of that too.
To be honest with you, I think a lot of it is just a factor of adulthood.
Between work and life, I don’t have the energy to start a new game, even though I daydream about playing video games all the time.
Yeah that‘s my point as well. I play games on the lowest difficulty possible because after a day of work I do not want to be grinding during my free time. And even on easy mode it‘s sometimes just too tiresome.
I think games with grind are just annoying.
Like I love Minecraft but I will explicitly play to have fun and build things, my building resources come from what I gather around my area, you’d never catch me using concrete as a primary component in my builds for example.
But MMO level grind? Never. I just want games that respect my time
Yeah having the time and energy to log on every night and play games is something I constantly daydream & fantasize about, but when I rarely get an opportunity to do it, it’s extremely hard to enjoy it because I know I’m not gonna get another chance again for who knows how long. My enjoyment is directly related to looking forward to the next time I’d be able to continue what I was doing in game.
This is why I bought a steam deck and have accepted joy in Stardew Valley.
All entertainment fills a need in your daily life. It only makes sense that the need changes as you grow older.
When I was younger, I was poor and had something to prove. Thus, I loved big games with hundreds of hours of gameplay, grinding for the best bobbles, and competitive multiplayer experiences.
But as I get older, I don’t care about any of that anymore. What I need instead is a way to relax within my short gaming windows, to have unique experiences, and maybe have a sense of control as my life gets more chaotic. As a result, I’ve tended more towards shorter indie titles. But also towards non-gaming things like travel, gardening, and crafting hobbies.
We spent so much of our lives building our identity around a single hobby - gaming. And maybe that was a mistake. So many of us end up sliding away from gaming as we get older and that change is okay and even expected, that shouldn’t give us an existential crisis.
Your identity should reflect the person you are, not the thing you do.
Getting old is strange. I keep trying to go to house or techno shows in the basement of restaurants or other weird places, convinced it’ll be a great time because I used to enjoy it. My knees hurt and I’d rather be home most of the time. It’s okay for things to have a beginning, middle, and end. Also, not to be nitpicky but just because I think it’s a fun word: it’s “baubles”
Play a good game, stop playing the same zoomer-bait crap
What is zoomer bait crap?
One of the worst most infuriating games I played the last 2 years is one of the biggest hits of that period : elden ring.
What a total pile of horse shit that is. Nothing is explained, it’s just a pile of numbers called stats. What they do? Fuck you. Where do I have to go? Fuck you. How do I win from this and that boss? Fuck you. Total unplayable garbage.
Untill you give in and open one of the fan made guides. Then it all comes together. Then it makes sense. But the game doesn’t explain shit. From software couldn’t be bothered.
With a guide it’s one of the most fun games. Left on its own, without any sort of explanation it’s garbage.
And don’t get me started on diablo 4, what a load of house crap is that. It’s so very boring. Again nothing is explained because fuck you, blizzivision just wants your money. But here it doesn’t matter because you’re so very overpowered on level 1/2 you can win anything and everything. Want it less easy? Fuck you, first complete the campaign. Then you can do it again and again.
From my pov old school Zoomer shit is where its at. This modern bullshit is just that: bullshit.
I mean, the stuff with Elden Ring is on purpose. There are a lot of gamers who like when a game let’s them figure that stuff out. I get why it’s not your style of game, but you’re acting like it’s laziness or bad game design when it’s entirely intentional and absolutely has an audience. Fromsoft made it for that specific audience.
I don’t think I can agree with you here. Elden ring, for all of its flaws, is one of the last true honest to God video games you can buy recently. For $60 you get a complete, no microtransaction, no battle pass, no cosmetics, whole, playable game.
There aren’t pieces taken out and sold back to you one item at a time like Sims 4. You don’t have to buy the horse dlc or spend money to get the magic battle pass. It wasn’t a completely buggy mess from the start like no man’s sky or cyberpunk 2077. There’s no integrated battle pass designed to suck your wallet and your soul dry like in Overwatch 2 or COD. There’s no cosmetics to make you look like SpongeBob SquarePants or any other fictional character like in Fortnite and countless other games. This is a game that knows what it is and doesn’t try and bait you into playing it like the others.
Sure it’s difficulty is hard and it doesn’t hand hold you but it certainly doesn’t require you to use the wiki. Don’t get me wrong your experience WILL be better with it but one of the big marketing points was the sites of grace pointing you where to go. The game actually goes through some trouble to make sure you understand what it is when you get to the round table hold. Gameplay mechanics are also explained in the inventory under the info items tab. But by and large you’re supposed to learn through doing here.
Largely I agree that recent games are more slot machines with collectable crap tacked on but Elden Ring is not an example of a zoomer game. Hard? Sure. Garbage? Not on your life.
Not having MTX doesn’t make a game immediately good.
I agree with both you and the person you replied to, but, while the story definitely isn’t barebones, it’s explained like shit. It’s a caveat of souls games, but that doesn’t make it okay, it makes it inaccessible to people who haven’t played a souls game before.
Elden Ring was a lot of people’s first fromsoft game, and from what I understand you’ll get about 80% of the story and world building through watching YouTube videos. Yeah, I’m sure there’s characters in the game that give a little backstory here and there, and I’m sure there’s descriptions of the world through items and such, but there’s “giving the player the freedom to figure it out, and not holding their hand”, and “fuck it this dude you might never meet in the game has an incredibly important piece of information, you’ll only realize after you Google ‘what am I missing about this game’” and Elden Ring falla under the second category.
A story as complex and in depth as Elden Ring’s deserves to be explained better, in game.
Still not a Zoomer game. I think it’s just in a weird spot where it’s catering to a very specific audience so it’s much harder to become a fan of when put up against other games of it’s caliber
I don’t like the sims games or their business model. But saying that they cut content to release as DLC is a bit overboard.
The game is very different to what it was at release. Releasing all that extra content for free wouldn’t make a lot of sense when a lot of people have spent a lot of years creating it.
Now, the amount of DLC Is insane. All the packs are stupid.
It should just be big DLCs and no small shitty clothes or animal packs or whatever.
Paradox games are a bit like that too, but imo they are more reasonable since you don’t need DLC and they release free updates with a few new features as well as paid DLCs.
I’ll agree that Diablo is just more of the same 2013+ version of the gaming market, the kind that leaned heavily toward monetization with zero competition to improve game loops or increase depth.
That being said, back in the day you didn’t have a mini map and a compass to point you to every single place on your Ubisoft fetch quest open world “chore list disguised as a videogame” nonsense. You had to figure out the game and read the manual, etc.
Elden Ring is meant to be “Hey, we know you’re sick of playing the 593857th reskin of Assassin’s Division: Ghost Cry, try out something that respects your intelligence.”
Nothing is explained
It makes a lot more sense if you have the context from the Soulsborne games. The series started much simpler, with (mostly) linear progression, fewer weapons/abilities, and shorter “quests.” Part of the appeal of those games was the mystery, and the community that grew around solving the unexplained quests/mechanics/lore. The games were shorter, and the maps smaller, so it was easier to explore on your own.
Then with Elden Ring, it just exploded with content, built around the same game play mechanics. For veteran Soulsborne players, it plays like the next title in the series. The only really novel mechanics are the open world and spirit ashes. The downside is (at least for me), the world is so large that it’s a chore to explore everything. I finished my first play through and lost the will to start a +1 game. In contrast to Dark Souls 3, where I completed at least 6 play throughs.
But if you don’t have that context…yeah i’d imagine Elden Ring is overwhelming in its complexity and scale. Trying to figure out Soulsborne mechanics and navigate this giant world with little direction sounds daunting. Pitting you against the grafted scion to die immediately, and right after putting the tree sentinel in your way, was a confusing way to start the game, even for me.
