Push the bloat out
Something that often goes unremarked upon is the unspoken pact between player and game developer. The pact says, ‘If you pay X for this game, you will have fun. It will stimulate the joy receptors in your brain, and release the fun hormones’. But as games sprawl ever wider, I have found myself more and more apprehensive of starting a new game. Not because I don’t enjoy the genre or the developer, but because do I really want to spend 100+ hours in one world, in one game space, cycling through the same rote actions? Starfield is a prime example. Do I want to play a game that forces me into busywork? Do I want to play a game where people tell me that actually it only really gets going in New Game ++? So now I have to complete a game three times to get to the good stuff?
I first experienced this sensation of bloat when I was playing As it began, I genuinely loved it. In the middle, I enjoyed wondering where things were going. But around 80–90 hours in, I hit a wall. I had to grind to be able to survive any boss encounter, I constantly felt like I was making the wrong choices of who to hang out with, and then, when I completed a mission, I thought, ‘Oh, this will be the endgame’, and it continued to expand, and not contract to give me the power fantasy and story resolution I wanted. There was only a finite amount of monsters doing monstrous things I could stomach before I was like, ‘I’m actually bored – why am I forcing myself to try and finish this?’ And so I didn’t. I walked away.
