Dialogue
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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 Persona 5. 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.
Some might say that is sacrilegious: how dare you not finish! But why should I? I wasn’t having fun. And I think I was right to. Games that mitigate this idea of boredom are those like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Tears Of The Kingdom. You don’t spend your time hoovering up markers or doing errands.
You spend time because the scope and possibilities for play are near endless. I think a lot of big game developers have lost sight of this. I think back to something I read once, maybe even in Edge, from Miyamoto, which stated that even the act of traversal should be enjoyable. When so much of the current triple-A output is a joyless trudge through misery-inducing landscapes, is it any wonder people look for more small-scale gaming?
I believe this is why indie games have had such a renaissance. Smaller teams equals smaller scope, but also focus. If you focus on the original pact and bring people joy, you can find that. But when you approach games as a box-ticking exercise, bloat is inevitable.
We’re with you. A good amount of triple-A games could benefit from the ludic equivalent of a high-fibre diet.
State of the artform
Baldur’s Gate 3 has folks compl
