In this note I wanted to capture my thoughts on video games and how I approach this hobby while living a busy adult life.
The Framework
Over the years - I’ve been playing video games since the year 2000 - I developed a set of basic criteria that I use to filter potential games.
They all revolve around one simple concept - A game must respect my time.
I have a lot to deal with, as all of us do. Family, work, modelling - it’s not easy to find time for video games. So when I do have time to play a game, I want it to be spent wisely.
What exactly does it entail?
- Game must support being put on pause. This automatically rules out all the multiplayer games, and to some extent typical souls-likes, which still inexplicably don’t allow the player to pause them. Real life comes first, and I need to be able to stop the game at any moment without being punished for this.
- Frequent/free saving. I may need to quit at any moment based on the real life needs, so the amount of progress lost should be minimal. Nowadays with suspend mode supported by all modern consoles this requirement is somewhat relaxed, but still stands.
- Skippable dialogues and cutscenes. I may never use this if writing is good, but I want to be able to skip useless wordy dialogues at will.
- Minimal amount of grind. I value my time and simply have no desire to repeat the same basic actions to grind more levels.
This doesn’t mean that I ignore action games - top games from last year for me include Lunistice and Yoku’s Island Express which are very fast-paced. But it is undeniable that I really enjoy turn-based games, since they allow me to approach them at my pace.
Of course, those rules are just a framework that I use when weighing potential purchases. With GamePass I can play many games for the price of subscription, and I often use this option to try some unusual/unexplored for me genres, potentially ignoring this evaluation framework since the risk is minimal.
Still, I found that for the majority of games I end up playing those rules apply.
Bonus points go to games that have a “Last time I played the game months ago and don’t remember the plot and/or controls” mode. Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed are typically very good at this, with clever unobtrusive reminders and self-contained missions/activities.
I often take long breaks between playing a particular game, lasting from days to months (and even years in rare cases), so having a good way to get back into the game is much appreciated.
Cutscenes are a plague
I’m a weird person who doesn’t particularly like to watch movies or TV series. And this means I dislike games that have excessive amount of cutscenes.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Basically, nowadays, I feel like many AAA games sacrifice gameplay for cinematics, and I don’t like it very much. Especially Sony is guilty of this, at least from my experience with PS4 exclusives.
In fact, I can scarcely remember a blockbuster AAA game from the last 5 years with massive cutscenes which I liked, not even loved.
Just checked my reviews and the only cinematic-heavy games I loved were new God of War, Jedi: Fallen Order, and Batman Arkham Trilogy. All three had great story lines and great gameplay, so can’t complain.
The rest of the AAA games I liked were much more gameplay-oriented, like most of the fantastic Nintendo first-party games, or Assassin’s Creed, or AAA RPGs like Outer Worlds and Wasteland 3.
Everything else from AAA output - meh or worse.
From my recent experience, I can name a couple of games which were absolutely ruined by incessant cinematics interruptions for me:
- Guardians of the Galaxy (with cutscenes after cutscenes putting me to sleep)
- Psychonauts 2 (where the game takes control from you every 30 seconds for some stupid short cutscene, which absolutely kills the flow of the game)
Both seemed fun at first, but I had to drop them because of this cutscene disease.
And on the other end of the spectrum we have gems like Snowrunner or Tinykin or Lunistice which are all about pure undiluted gameplay.
Can you have a great game which has plenty of cutscenes? Sure, and I gave examples of such games.
But regardless of how great cinematics are, they will never save mediocre gameplay for me, and the more a game focuses on them, the more it detracts from the overall experience for me.
And of course it’s pretty clear how my dislike for cutscenes maps clearly into the rules of the Framework. For a person who doesn’t like watching movies, cutscenes simply take away the time that could be spent actually playing the game.
Do you dislike the game, or are you simply tired and depressed
I often ask myself this question, and learned to evaluate my own mental condition to see if it’s a good time to try a new game or play a demo.
Far too often I’ve discarded games based on my time with a demo, or dropped a playthrough just to come back to it in a few months and realize that I actually like the game, and was simply too tired or sad to enjoy anything new last time.
Now I allocate dedicated time to try new games mainly over the weekend, and only after I had some rest.
Conclusion
As you can see, it all revolves around time. All the points I tried to make in the note show one thing - time is limited, highly valued, and must be carefully managed.
Thus, it must be respected, and in particular, by video games creators.