Absolutely. I hear Witcher 3 is good, and I believe that it is… but after playing it for 5 hours and feeling like I got nowhere, the next day I just genuinely didn’t feel like playing it as I’d felt very little character progress, and zero story progression.

Games are continuing to market towards younger people - especially kids - with spare time to burn. They consider their 120+ hour playtime to be a selling point, but at this point that’s the reason I avoid them. If I’m going to play for an hour or so at the end of my day, I want that game to feel like it meant something.

I prefer my games to feel dense, deliberately crafted, minimal sawdust padding. I’ve enjoyed open-world in the past but the every-increasing demand for bigger and bigger maps means that most open-world games are very empty and mostly traversal. Linear worlds aren’t bad - they can be crafted much more deliberately and with far more content because you can predict when the player will see them.

Open worlds that craft everything in it deliberately are very rare, and still rely on constraints to limit the player into somewhat-linear paths. Green Hell needs a grappling hook to leave the first basin, Fallout: New Vegas fills the map north of Tutorial Town with extreme enemies to funnel new players south-east.

And what really gets me is that with microtransactions, the number of games that make themselves so big and so slow that they’re boring on purpose, so that they can charge you to skip them! Imagine making a game so fucking awful that anybody buying a game will then buy the ability to not play it because 80% of the game is sawdust: timers, resource farming, daily rotations, exp grinding. Fucking nightmare, honestly.

I reflected on that as well yesterday. I started Botw on Cemu after hearing so much good about the newest instalment and wanted to see what all that fuzz is about. I really really like it, I always thought it would feel empty from the vibe I got from gameplay videos and screenshots but it doesn’t. I played for 40 hours and now I’m on a tipping point.

So after thinking about it yesterday I found a good comparison for me. I thought about ice cream. Bare with me. Imagine buying a really big pot of a new kind chocolate ice cream. It fills all the space of your freezer. You try it and it’s awesome, you don’t want anything else to eat right now. So you eat it every day for every meal. It still is awesome but at some point it’s nothing special anymore and also last time you went shopping you saw that awesome looking strawberry ice cream for which you don’t really have space right now in your freezer. So what is your next move. Jugging down the chocolate ice cream until you reach the bottom but hate it or throw it away and buy something new? So here is what I try: I want to get over my FOMO for the strawberry ice cream and try eating just a bit of the chocolate ice cream every other day. I mean, it couldn’t be healthy to eat ice cream for every meal and every day right? And if it isn’t going to be special anymore I don’t need to eat it until I finish it, I won’t get any more enjoyment out of it if I’d do.

I hope this makes as much sense to you as it does to me

i remember this overwhelming feeling when first playing Witcher 3. At some point I just said f it, ignored the thoughts and had a blast

I thought I was alone with that feeling. I’m in exactly the same boat as you.

For me, it’s a tiny bit different, because I played BOTW shortly before my daughther was born in 2017. I still had time for games like that back in the day. Now I don’t only have a daughter, but a son as well.

When I grab the controller and start playing something time intensive like BOTW and now TOTK, I usually feel really guilty really quick, because there are so many other things to do, that in theory should have a higher priority.

The older I get the more I prefer linear games. I’m playing FFXVI right now and I’m actually quite happy at how linear it is. Couldn’t finish XV because the map was too damn big.

I greatly prefer games that wrap up in thirty minutes or less… you know, fighting games, old-school arcade games, puzzle games, that sort of thing. Sometimes it’s fun to just wander around in an open world, but big video games are big time sinks that require a big commitment, especially at the start when you have to learn the ropes. Sometimes these big games aren’t well explained and you have to fumble your way through their complicated play mechanics, an issue I had with Biomutant. Struggling and confusion are not a part of the gaming experience I particularly enjoy.

absolutely! I mostly only play older games for this reason. I absolutely love some of my old N64 and GBA games because I can clear them in a day or two. Even the older RPGs like LoZ:OoT seem a lot smaller than the open-world stuff out there today, and I actually like that I can learn the entire world and know almost everything about them. They’re finite and I think that’s a plus. Eventually, I’m either gonna get bored and move on, or I’m gonna clear a game. The first feels like defeat, like I did something wrong. The latter feels refreshing and mints the game as a nostalgic memory in my mind; I still look back at the day I finished Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with such bittersweetness; I was sad that it was over, but really proud and happy to have reached the conclusion. And I think you miss that with infinite content, and open worlds. And I also did miss things in my first playthrough of LoZ:OoT but it only took me a couple more (years apart, so nostalgia definitely washed over me every time!) playthroughs to catch them.

I think open-world games can be really fun: games like Minecraft are great examples of that, but the emphasis there isn’t on a story being told to you, but on you creating whatever you want. You’re not as scared to miss things because you have all the time in the world to explore and not everything is gonna be up your alley (some people don’t even “beat” the game, or even go to the Nether or End). But I don’t think I’d like a Minecraft where you have a definite Legend of Zelda-style story scattered out across the infinitely-generated landscape. That’s just not for me.

This is a very popular opinion and one that has always confused me. More to do always equals more value even if some of the content is padding or optional.

I’ve gotten to the point where if somebody tells me that a game is 100+ hours, I consider it a con. I don’t want to dedicate the next 3 months of my gaming to a single game. And in my 20+ years of gaming, I’ve learned that no game truly has 100+ hours of content. Rather, they have 20 - 40 hours of content, stretched over the remainder of the filler in bullshit ways. These days, I’m ecstatic when I find a game like Guardians of the Galaxy. Tight, well written 20 hour experience that know what it is an what it wants to be. One and done. Love that game.

I felt the same way when I opened the new Hitman reboot, and a bit when I opened TotK. What I like about BotW and TotK is that you basically can’t miss content. Some events are one-time-only but you have to experience them actively first. Quests and adventures will wait for you. I feel a lot more paralyzed and FOMO if the game just doesn’t wait for me to explore what I want in my own time.

Man this post made me think about why some games that seem right up my alley (fallout, cyberpunk, etc) I just can’t seem to finish. I have a perfectionist issue where I feel I need to do all the available side quests before moving onto the next mission/level/boss. I might try to pick up cyberpunk again after I complete my fallen order replay and just stick to the larger missions.

I am really looking forward to starfield but I really don’t know if I’m prepared for it.

I sometimes get overwhelmed just trying to choose a game to play. I’ve been trying to make myself just enjoy the experience and force myself to just jump in. Sometimes I use the random steam game picker to tell me what to play and then I committ to it for my session

Absolutely, it feels like so many big budget games made recently command 50+ hours of your time, or have really complicated mechanics that require note taking and maths to really enjoy. Those things are great, but man, just the thought of starting a behemoth like Tears of the Kingdom makes me anxious.

I hate the current trend of open worlds everywhere.

It makes sense for some games (e.g., Skyrim, GTA), but most games would be much better with a more linear world. The open worldness just makes most games boring after 10-15 hours of gameplay, in particular when game devs like to include collectible quests everywhere.

I do feel overwhelmed and intimidated by certain games, and sometimes it’s paralysing (right now I’m a struggling with what job to level in Final Fantasy XI), but whether that’s a bad thing depends entirely on the kind of “big” we’re talking about.

If it’s big in the sense of mechanical depth, I adore that. It’s like a drug for me. I adore learning and games that reward that are often great for my mental health. Thinking of things like Project Zomboid, Dwarf Fortress, Loop Hero, Noita, or most of Zachtronics’ titles. With those it really isn’t about the scale of the world or the number of quests (often those metrics aren’t even relevant).

My personal problem when it comes to some games like that, is that I know I’ll love them – like Factorio – but I simply don’t get around to them quickly, if at all; because I also know learning those systems will be a not insignificant time commitment. Ironically, that sensation of being overwhelmed with things to learn is part of why I love them, but I often fail to get around to actually playing many such games out of concern I won’t be able to give them the time and attention that ‘they deserve’. I’m not sure if that’s the same as that FoMO you describe.

When it comes to the more conventional meaning of a “big game”, it depends entirely on two things: the originality of the content, and the quality of the storytelling; i.e. the difference between Red Dead Redemption 2, and a modern Far Cry title. I would absolutely worry about missing stuff in RDR2, but would struggle to care much at all about modern Ubisoft titles in the same way.