I’m pretty sure the grind is about making games take longer to beat, be more addicting, and of course give more opportunities for micro transaction sales.
I wish that the product management teams at some of these publishers would pick a smaller list of features to include in these titles, and try to be the best at them. Instead, as usual, they cram in a huge list of features, and be mediocre (at worst) at them. I second this call to scale shit back.
Whenever I see a new game from a franchise I like adopt open-world mechanics, I sigh. I'm sure there will be people who love it, but not me. I like the Metroidvania approach, where the world is "open" but compact (the original Arkham Asylum was perfect in this regard). Once the game starts touting giant worlds with hundreds of hours of side quests irrelevant to the main story, my eyes glaze over. There is a type of person who likes it, but it's not for me.
Fuck it. I enjoy open world stuff with RPG elements. Yes, even in Batman. I enjoy the slow building up of your character into a badass, where you have a choice as to which route through the skill tree you want to take to get there.
Microtransactions can fuck off though. No buying your way to better stuff, which not every gamer has the resources and disposable income to do. I'm all for that going away forever.
I'm mostly an RPG player, but I can still relate. So many games are focused now on throwing "content" at you to the detriment of story.
Like, I recently replayed the whole Dragon Age series for the first time in awhile. Dragon Age: Inquisition is such a frustrating game, because if the developers would have been content to make a tight 40-hour game, it could have gone down as one of the best games in history. But they wanted to make a game you could grind 100-200 hours of play out of, so they added a clear B-tier of MMO-style questing and a ludicrously complicated crafting system. I don't know why they decided that the old Bioware formula (tight, narratively-focused games) no longer worked and they should really make a Bethesda game.
It doesn't even make sense within the narrative of the game, as your character is supposed to be essentially a general leading an army, but your advisors get to do cool missions offscreen depicted through a fucking card game while you're collecting elfroot to upgrade your potions or somesuch. The whole purpose of an organization is delegation, and as the big boss, you should be delegating this stuff to someone much less important than you. If they absolutely thought it was needed to include this crap, the game should have had you send a squad out that didn't include your created character, who is too important for MMO-style fetch quests by the time the midgame starts.
I really think though a lot of this comes down to how AAA games are designed. The teams are large enough that I don't think there's much coordination between the writing team and the game design team. Probably in a lot of cases "features" are added to the game well before the writers even have any knowledge of them. So the games are not designed from the ground up so that the gameplay matches the themes and the characters, but the story is basically pasted on top of a generic framework.
I agree that a lot of upgrade and crafting mechanics are cheap ways to create filler content. You've made a huge empty open world, but it's not that fun to traverse? Make the player collect 9 badger pelts or whatever. I wouldn't play a badger hunting game, but if I know I've got to shoot those badgers to unlock the anti-badger shotgun or whatever, I'll probably do it.
The sad thing is that a simple number going up is enough to motivate a lot of people to go through all kinds of tedious grinds.
There are good upgrade systems though. If you have to make trade-offs, or pick which upgrade you want to unlock first, that can create interesting choices rather than a grind. The best example recently is Nobody Saves The World, which is a bit like Diablo except you can switch between lots of different forms which are effectively separate characters with their own separate (small) upgrade paths. You can be a horse or a mermaid or a slug as well as the classic ranger and necromancer types.
The best bit is that you can swap some of the abilities between forms.
There are challenges and 'quests' which involve getting X of something or hitting Y enemies at once with a certain ability, but because of the swapping mechanic, a lot of these go beyond a grind and force you to explore the possibility space of all the different combinations available. You need to hit a lot of barrels quickly in a limited time - it seems impossible, but if you're a ghost with an area attack power AND you have the horse's gallop ability, it becomes possible, and that is a fun challenge.
I will never get the appeal of crafting, though. If I'm an adventurer in a fantasy world, it seems like I should be delving into an ancient dungeon to find a legendary suit of armour, not gathering 99 iron ingots and then holding down a button to turn them into steel ingots. But some people love that kind of thing. There are various taxonomies of player types, and for some people wandering around a river gathering nurn roots to make a really good potion is what they want out of a game. I guess when you're making a triple A game that will take 5 years to come out, you want to appeal to the widest possible player base. As long as I can ignore the crafting if I want, I'm OK with that.
My games tend to fall into two camps. I like engrossing, open world stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2 for when I have a load of time to play something. Then, if I just want to dick about for an hour, I'll play something like Untitled Goose Game.
What I like about RDR2 (and Cyberpunk 2077 tbh) is that there are crafting elements, but you can completely ignore them if you choose. If you want to just go straight ahead with the story, fine. If you want to spend hours hunting wildlife, that's cool too. It doesn't feel forced or tacked on. Whereas the latest Assassin's Creed games feel baffling to me. There are skill trees, but then I can also level up individual weapons and add runes and special abilities etc. It feels like work, not play. Just let me be a viking and twat things with my axe.
I feel sorry for game devs these days. I guess they have to show that they listen to fans, but the problem is, most fans are clueless when it comes to game or narrative design (myself included).
Which is why a lot of modern AAA titles end up being like that car Homer Simpson designed that ruined his brother's career.
I also hate these types of games, but I know people who are really into them. The audience for these games are people who generally only buy a couple games per year, but game multiple evenings per week. I'm the opposite of that: I have a massive collection of unplayed games and realistically play a game maybe once a month (if that). So I favor games that are highly focused on their core ideas and I can beat in a handful of sittings. Other folks though just want to boot up whichever game they've been grinding through, turn off their brain, and feel like they achieved something. The various Assassin's Creeds, Witchers, Cyberpunks, Far Crys, and Arkham's all hit this spot pretty well, I think.
mmorpgs where it's a useful way to make money by selling to other players, help out a lower level friend, gear up an alt class that hasn't gotten any dungeon drops yet, etc.
fallout new vegas where for the part of the game where it's relevant helps to fit in with the "scavenging stuff from the wasteland" feel
the central problem that crafting has in almost every other game is that the sw33t l00t "should" be coming from sources like quests, bosses, exploring, etc. which means that crafting is either a) devaluing these kinds of gameplay or b) trying to fill a gap in gear that doesn't actually exist.
the REAL terrible culprits here though are the shitty mobile games. i coulda sworn i read an article years ago about how they pioneered the "zillion different stats and shit that make your eyes glaze over" setup in order to basically confuse the player into never being able to figure out how important anything is, what builds work best, etc. so that they'd just give up and start spending money on stat boosts.
I cannot think of many games that fully justify having an open world at all. The GTA games, despite being the progenitor of the fad do next to nothing with the open world itself. The mission design is extremely restrictive and must be completed the exact way the developers want you to, lest you upset all the carefully crafted set pieces and cut scenes they crafted. The most egregious example of this is the poker game you can rob in Red Dead 2, where you must follow the exact sequence of actions Rockstar wants; the players doesn't even spawn in until you do exactly what Rockstar demands! GTA V and Red Dead could easily be a linear games in the style of Uncharted and lose very little of the core gameplay and I dare say the much vaunted atmosphere. Cyberpunk 2077 does a much better job of justifying the open world, for they (mostly) present a location, give you a task, and leave you to achieve it as you see fit. Easily the best justified open world is Breath of the Wild, so far the only game that lives up to the promise of go anywhere, do anything.
Yeah this is spot on. That’s why I was so charmed by Stray recently. Obviously cat was lovely, but there was also a wonderful simplicity to it. Same with Portal. Come up with a concept and do it well. If you’re gonna be RPG then be RPG, like Disco Elysium.
You can blame The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s critical/commercial success for making it the game that everyone in the industry is trying to ape from.
I just want games to stop making me feed my character. It's annoying enough to have to feed myself.
I’m pretty sure the grind is about making games take longer to beat, be more addicting, and of course give more opportunities for micro transaction sales.
I wish that the product management teams at some of these publishers would pick a smaller list of features to include in these titles, and try to be the best at them. Instead, as usual, they cram in a huge list of features, and be mediocre (at worst) at them. I second this call to scale shit back.
I am so, so sick of crafting in games. It's tedious. Just let me sell old weapons or equipment for in-game currency so I can buy new stuff.
Whenever I see a new game from a franchise I like adopt open-world mechanics, I sigh. I'm sure there will be people who love it, but not me. I like the Metroidvania approach, where the world is "open" but compact (the original Arkham Asylum was perfect in this regard). Once the game starts touting giant worlds with hundreds of hours of side quests irrelevant to the main story, my eyes glaze over. There is a type of person who likes it, but it's not for me.
Fuck it. I enjoy open world stuff with RPG elements. Yes, even in Batman. I enjoy the slow building up of your character into a badass, where you have a choice as to which route through the skill tree you want to take to get there.
Microtransactions can fuck off though. No buying your way to better stuff, which not every gamer has the resources and disposable income to do. I'm all for that going away forever.
I'm mostly an RPG player, but I can still relate. So many games are focused now on throwing "content" at you to the detriment of story.
Like, I recently replayed the whole Dragon Age series for the first time in awhile. Dragon Age: Inquisition is such a frustrating game, because if the developers would have been content to make a tight 40-hour game, it could have gone down as one of the best games in history. But they wanted to make a game you could grind 100-200 hours of play out of, so they added a clear B-tier of MMO-style questing and a ludicrously complicated crafting system. I don't know why they decided that the old Bioware formula (tight, narratively-focused games) no longer worked and they should really make a Bethesda game.
It doesn't even make sense within the narrative of the game, as your character is supposed to be essentially a general leading an army, but your advisors get to do cool missions offscreen depicted through a fucking card game while you're collecting elfroot to upgrade your potions or somesuch. The whole purpose of an organization is delegation, and as the big boss, you should be delegating this stuff to someone much less important than you. If they absolutely thought it was needed to include this crap, the game should have had you send a squad out that didn't include your created character, who is too important for MMO-style fetch quests by the time the midgame starts.
I really think though a lot of this comes down to how AAA games are designed. The teams are large enough that I don't think there's much coordination between the writing team and the game design team. Probably in a lot of cases "features" are added to the game well before the writers even have any knowledge of them. So the games are not designed from the ground up so that the gameplay matches the themes and the characters, but the story is basically pasted on top of a generic framework.
I agree that a lot of upgrade and crafting mechanics are cheap ways to create filler content. You've made a huge empty open world, but it's not that fun to traverse? Make the player collect 9 badger pelts or whatever. I wouldn't play a badger hunting game, but if I know I've got to shoot those badgers to unlock the anti-badger shotgun or whatever, I'll probably do it.
The sad thing is that a simple number going up is enough to motivate a lot of people to go through all kinds of tedious grinds.
There are good upgrade systems though. If you have to make trade-offs, or pick which upgrade you want to unlock first, that can create interesting choices rather than a grind. The best example recently is Nobody Saves The World, which is a bit like Diablo except you can switch between lots of different forms which are effectively separate characters with their own separate (small) upgrade paths. You can be a horse or a mermaid or a slug as well as the classic ranger and necromancer types.
The best bit is that you can swap some of the abilities between forms.
There are challenges and 'quests' which involve getting X of something or hitting Y enemies at once with a certain ability, but because of the swapping mechanic, a lot of these go beyond a grind and force you to explore the possibility space of all the different combinations available. You need to hit a lot of barrels quickly in a limited time - it seems impossible, but if you're a ghost with an area attack power AND you have the horse's gallop ability, it becomes possible, and that is a fun challenge.
I will never get the appeal of crafting, though. If I'm an adventurer in a fantasy world, it seems like I should be delving into an ancient dungeon to find a legendary suit of armour, not gathering 99 iron ingots and then holding down a button to turn them into steel ingots. But some people love that kind of thing. There are various taxonomies of player types, and for some people wandering around a river gathering nurn roots to make a really good potion is what they want out of a game. I guess when you're making a triple A game that will take 5 years to come out, you want to appeal to the widest possible player base. As long as I can ignore the crafting if I want, I'm OK with that.
My games tend to fall into two camps. I like engrossing, open world stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2 for when I have a load of time to play something. Then, if I just want to dick about for an hour, I'll play something like Untitled Goose Game.
What I like about RDR2 (and Cyberpunk 2077 tbh) is that there are crafting elements, but you can completely ignore them if you choose. If you want to just go straight ahead with the story, fine. If you want to spend hours hunting wildlife, that's cool too. It doesn't feel forced or tacked on. Whereas the latest Assassin's Creed games feel baffling to me. There are skill trees, but then I can also level up individual weapons and add runes and special abilities etc. It feels like work, not play. Just let me be a viking and twat things with my axe.
I feel sorry for game devs these days. I guess they have to show that they listen to fans, but the problem is, most fans are clueless when it comes to game or narrative design (myself included).
Which is why a lot of modern AAA titles end up being like that car Homer Simpson designed that ruined his brother's career.
I also hate these types of games, but I know people who are really into them. The audience for these games are people who generally only buy a couple games per year, but game multiple evenings per week. I'm the opposite of that: I have a massive collection of unplayed games and realistically play a game maybe once a month (if that). So I favor games that are highly focused on their core ideas and I can beat in a handful of sittings. Other folks though just want to boot up whichever game they've been grinding through, turn off their brain, and feel like they achieved something. The various Assassin's Creeds, Witchers, Cyberpunks, Far Crys, and Arkham's all hit this spot pretty well, I think.
games where i have liked crafting:
mmorpgs where it's a useful way to make money by selling to other players, help out a lower level friend, gear up an alt class that hasn't gotten any dungeon drops yet, etc.
fallout new vegas where for the part of the game where it's relevant helps to fit in with the "scavenging stuff from the wasteland" feel
the central problem that crafting has in almost every other game is that the sw33t l00t "should" be coming from sources like quests, bosses, exploring, etc. which means that crafting is either a) devaluing these kinds of gameplay or b) trying to fill a gap in gear that doesn't actually exist.
the REAL terrible culprits here though are the shitty mobile games. i coulda sworn i read an article years ago about how they pioneered the "zillion different stats and shit that make your eyes glaze over" setup in order to basically confuse the player into never being able to figure out how important anything is, what builds work best, etc. so that they'd just give up and start spending money on stat boosts.
I cannot think of many games that fully justify having an open world at all. The GTA games, despite being the progenitor of the fad do next to nothing with the open world itself. The mission design is extremely restrictive and must be completed the exact way the developers want you to, lest you upset all the carefully crafted set pieces and cut scenes they crafted. The most egregious example of this is the poker game you can rob in Red Dead 2, where you must follow the exact sequence of actions Rockstar wants; the players doesn't even spawn in until you do exactly what Rockstar demands! GTA V and Red Dead could easily be a linear games in the style of Uncharted and lose very little of the core gameplay and I dare say the much vaunted atmosphere. Cyberpunk 2077 does a much better job of justifying the open world, for they (mostly) present a location, give you a task, and leave you to achieve it as you see fit. Easily the best justified open world is Breath of the Wild, so far the only game that lives up to the promise of go anywhere, do anything.
Yeah this is spot on. That’s why I was so charmed by Stray recently. Obviously cat was lovely, but there was also a wonderful simplicity to it. Same with Portal. Come up with a concept and do it well. If you’re gonna be RPG then be RPG, like Disco Elysium.
You can blame The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s critical/commercial success for making it the game that everyone in the industry is trying to ape from.