I’m nearly 40, been playing since the old Commodore 64 days.
I’ve always loved games, but with a wife and kids I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I used to with them, which means I think quite a lot about what I want to play in the 6 hours or so a week that I can actually do it.
I feel like I’m in a minority in that I still love much of the AAA stuff - Cyberpunk and Baldur’s Gate 3 is my jam right now, I might get Spider-Man 2 when it drops in price a bit and I have more time.
I love indie games too but I don’t always have as much time as I want to invest in them, I did get through Bombrush Cyberfunk recently and it scratched a Jet Set Radio itch that I had long forgotten about.
So yea, I still love them but it’s partly because it’s just always been my hobby.
I picked it up at launch and it’s improved quite a lot over the last few years, better combat and skill trees, fewer bugs, better cops, the world is beautiful and the quest design and performance animation makes Starfield feel pretty antiquated.
It’s still not perfect but I’m on my second play through and I’m still having a good time, I’m very excited to see the new stuff in Phantom Liberty too.
I’ve recently completed Metro Exodus, DLCs included. I have most of the achievements, but it don’t feel like getting the remaining ones at the moment. Before that I completed all of the Halo games compatible with the XB360, on coop.
I feel lost. I don’t really know what to play now.
I went back to playing some Insurgency coop, but it wasn’t even too engaging before.
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I think something people haven't mentioned yet is that games are so much a digital media now that where I used to be able to keep infinity games at all times in a CD book, I now have to selectively decide which games get to occupy my limited hard drive space, and installing a new one means uninstalling another, and waiting to redownload it, and between my limited drive space and less than amazing network speed, those can absolutely influence what I'm able and willing to play at any given time.
It's more logical to keep ten games I know I like installed rather than choose one of those to cut off in place of a new unknown quantity.
Also, compared to other major sentiment I see in this thread, I actually quite like tutorial sections of games. I'm often very interested to see what the game itself has in store in terms of exactly what mechanics and systems it contains and how they execute them, and how that stacks up compared to reviews or word of mouth, which are often vague, biased, or missing portions of the experience.
After I fully understand what a game is trying to do, I fall off the wagon often times as it sinks into a routine instead of a novel learning experience, or maybe I actually love it, but standards continue to increase as more and more novel ideas and fusions of genres are created and become existing products. It becomes more difficult to make something that's not something you've already done, but slightly worse or only slightly better.
I still "get into games" plenty, but it doesn't happen quite as often, and it's the "sticking with" them that becomes more desired and elusive.
Pittsburgh has three major parks in the city limits - Point State Park downtown, which is a small area that hosts events, Schenley Park which has plenty of hiking, biking, and fishing, and Frick Park which is massive and allows you to get lost in the forest in the middle of the city. It’s a great way to get out of crowded areas without traveling.
because I have massive, chronic depression. I find no real joy in playing new games with rare exception (Starfield was one, at least, until I got into playing it and realized how bad it was…), for the most part, and prefer to wrap myself in the comfortable known of a select few games, and even those I cant sit and play for a very long time before all drive disappears.
I think there are a lot of reasons for this, but I’m in the same boat.
Most games tutotialize you like you have never played a game before
"Cinematic storytelling" is everywhere. I turned off the dialogue in Need for Speed Unbound, and the game is wayyyy more enjoyable without it. And its…a racing game.
There just are more games. Used to be I’d bring a physical copy of a game hope, and that’d be my game for a bit. Now I have thousands of games accessible at any moment. It’s hard to wait for a game to “get good” when I know that.
I’d also say that I feel no need to complete games or get further into them at this point. Especially seeing how people said Starfield is best in new game plus or whatever, that game barely has legs to stand on in a first playthrough. It’s not worth it for me to play a game for 60 hours for it to maybe get better, and I tend to know when I’m done with a game early now.
Yeah for me it’s the sheer number of games, plus the increasing enshittification of games and just being older and having less free time. I literally have like 200 games I’ve got for free across various platforms, so if I fire one up and it’s clearly not finished, or it’s immediately trying to sell me stuff or even if it’s just a bit boring and annoying I’ll dump it immediately and move onto the next one.
Whereas when I was a kid I had a SNES with about 10 cartridges and that was it, so I played the shit out of those even when they sucked lol
I know right! Every time I come back to a game and they’ve changed every thing about it again I wonder why I bother. I think that’s part of the reason Melee has survived for so long, the community establishes the meta more than someone whose incentive is to keep selling you things.
100% agreed with all of these, but I would add one more factor: Limited spare time.
When I was a kid, it was a lot easier to spend a few hours in front of a console undisturbed, immersed and focused on the game. When you’re an adult and come home from soul-crushing work, hungry and exhausted, then your last bit of energy goes into household, pets, chores, family and the like and then it’s late at night already and if you don’t go to sleep soon then the next day will be worse. Where and how do you cram a couple of consecutive, undisturbend hours of playtime into such a schedule?
If a game isn’t immediatly interesting, fun or otherwise a good reality escape, it is not worth sacrificing time on it when you have to strictly ration your limited amount of spare time already.
Yeah totally. I’ve noticed everyone’s bandwidth dropping as capitalism worsens. It’s even more apparent when every live service game wants you to treat it like a job.
Agreed with your last point. I’m at the point where I can call how much is enough for me for any given title, and it makes me a lot happier than feeling obligated to finish games I don’t enjoy.
Yeah, the bar for should I buy this game is higher when you’ll be giving up sleep and/or rent money if you want to play it.
That being the case, truly excellent games can still clear that bar; ToTK easily siphoned a few cumulative months out of me, despite, well…gestures vaguely at everything.
I still have no desire to do the final boss fight at the end, though.
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