All entertainment fills a need in your daily life. It only makes sense that the need changes as you grow older.
When I was younger, I was poor and had something to prove. Thus, I loved big games with hundreds of hours of gameplay, grinding for the best bobbles, and competitive multiplayer experiences.
But as I get older, I don’t care about any of that anymore. What I need instead is a way to relax within my short gaming windows, to have unique experiences, and maybe have a sense of control as my life gets more chaotic. As a result, I’ve tended more towards shorter indie titles. But also towards non-gaming things like travel, gardening, and crafting hobbies.
We spent so much of our lives building our identity around a single hobby - gaming. And maybe that was a mistake. So many of us end up sliding away from gaming as we get older and that change is okay and even expected, that shouldn’t give us an existential crisis.
Your identity should reflect the person you are, not the thing you do.
Getting old is strange. I keep trying to go to house or techno shows in the basement of restaurants or other weird places, convinced it’ll be a great time because I used to enjoy it. My knees hurt and I’d rather be home most of the time. It’s okay for things to have a beginning, middle, and end. Also, not to be nitpicky but just because I think it’s a fun word: it’s “baubles”
I’m in my late 20s and have realized two things about video games
I’ve invested hundreds of hours into games and I’ve got absolutely nothing to show for that time investment, and basically nothing to brag about at work or to friends
The last couple of years I’ve been more often playing games to pass time than for the actual love of whatever game I’m playing
So I’ve been trying to spend my time doing other things. If there isn’t a compelling game I want to play at that moment I don’t just play games until I find one that compells me again, I just do something else entirely.
My wife on the other hand has realized she really enjoys video games and sees it as “look at all of this time I could have spent playing video games and experiencing these things!” So I suppose that gives some perspective that it’s not all for nothing
If you can’t justify having something you enjoy by saying “it’s not anything I can physically show some achievement for” are you sure you’re doing it/quitting it for the right reasons?
I read for pleasure sometimes, it’s usually not anything I can talk to anyone about since it’s usually older scifi, but I wouldn’t consider that a “waste of time.”
Also, if you tell anyone in the age bracket of 25-35 that you beat Halo 2: LASO they’ll know youve been in the trenches, it’s not necessarily all for nothing if you have people that share the hobby.
We all die alone. Doesn’t really matter how you get there. If you can amuse yourself while you wait for death that’s usually preferable to the alternative.
Maybe if all you’re looking at is the big AAA releases (even then I don’t agree). But there have been so many cool indie and AA games that have come out in recent years. Last year most of my favorite games were games I’d never heard of before they released. If you can’t find games worth playing then you’re not looking hard enough.
So I know this is a meme but I wanted to say that if anyone out there, particularly younger people, finds this ringing loudly true to their own experiences, you may be experiencing medical depression. Sure you get more responsibilities as you get older and your passions change, but if you notice something feeling off about this sensation and many things you formerly enjoyed you start avoiding because forcing yourself to enjoy them just makes you feel crappy, it isn’t necessarily normal.
I say this because I went through it and I didn’t get help until my late 30s and I regret every day that I didn’t. There is nothing wrong with asking for help, talking about it with others, and not accepting it as a “normal” part of growing up. Without help it will take a toll on your career and relationships and your health.
A lot of modern games just adhere to a basic formula and as such, I tend to get bored of them after a while. First Horizon? Nice. Second Horizon? More of the same. Horizon DLC? Even more of the same. It gradually got a bit more boring with every new entry.
So what I did was…I got an Xbox 360. Loaded it up with 5TB of games. And then I just picked something random to play. It made me discover Catherine, such a weird and awesome game.
I think, getting out of your comfort zone can refresh your enjoyment of gaming.
This happened to me the other day. I’ve had FarCry4 on my Xbox for years. Never played it. Well the other day, started playing it. Died A LOT. But was still having a blast, visuals are a little dated, but the atmosphere and game mechanics are still very fun overall.
Haven’t dived deep yet into the FarCry4 story/lore, but hoping it picks up more. But as I was dying a lot. I wasn’t having any fun. So I stopped playing it for a couple days, and came back to it, fully refreshed and fully restored to tackle the mission. Spoiler: the fun stayed :)
thanks for sharing!really appreciate it,since finishing blood dragon,recently.and now deciding,which to go on with:Riders Republic,uncharted2,fc4,tlou:part2...
does the4,mentioned by you,provide enugh long.term.motivation for staying hooked and going onwith it,over the others?
One of the worst most infuriating games I played the last 2 years is one of the biggest hits of that period : elden ring.
What a total pile of horse shit that is. Nothing is explained, it’s just a pile of numbers called stats. What they do? Fuck you. Where do I have to go? Fuck you. How do I win from this and that boss? Fuck you. Total unplayable garbage.
Untill you give in and open one of the fan made guides. Then it all comes together. Then it makes sense. But the game doesn’t explain shit. From software couldn’t be bothered.
With a guide it’s one of the most fun games. Left on its own, without any sort of explanation it’s garbage.
And don’t get me started on diablo 4, what a load of house crap is that. It’s so very boring. Again nothing is explained because fuck you, blizzivision just wants your money. But here it doesn’t matter because you’re so very overpowered on level 1/2 you can win anything and everything. Want it less easy? Fuck you, first complete the campaign. Then you can do it again and again.
From my pov old school Zoomer shit is where its at. This modern bullshit is just that: bullshit.
I don’t think I can agree with you here. Elden ring, for all of its flaws, is one of the last true honest to God video games you can buy recently. For $60 you get a complete, no microtransaction, no battle pass, no cosmetics, whole, playable game.
There aren’t pieces taken out and sold back to you one item at a time like Sims 4. You don’t have to buy the horse dlc or spend money to get the magic battle pass. It wasn’t a completely buggy mess from the start like no man’s sky or cyberpunk 2077. There’s no integrated battle pass designed to suck your wallet and your soul dry like in Overwatch 2 or COD. There’s no cosmetics to make you look like SpongeBob SquarePants or any other fictional character like in Fortnite and countless other games. This is a game that knows what it is and doesn’t try and bait you into playing it like the others.
Sure it’s difficulty is hard and it doesn’t hand hold you but it certainly doesn’t require you to use the wiki. Don’t get me wrong your experience WILL be better with it but one of the big marketing points was the sites of grace pointing you where to go. The game actually goes through some trouble to make sure you understand what it is when you get to the round table hold. Gameplay mechanics are also explained in the inventory under the info items tab. But by and large you’re supposed to learn through doing here.
Largely I agree that recent games are more slot machines with collectable crap tacked on but Elden Ring is not an example of a zoomer game. Hard? Sure. Garbage? Not on your life.
Not having MTX doesn’t make a game immediately good.
I agree with both you and the person you replied to, but, while the story definitely isn’t barebones, it’s explained like shit. It’s a caveat of souls games, but that doesn’t make it okay, it makes it inaccessible to people who haven’t played a souls game before.
Elden Ring was a lot of people’s first fromsoft game, and from what I understand you’ll get about 80% of the story and world building through watching YouTube videos. Yeah, I’m sure there’s characters in the game that give a little backstory here and there, and I’m sure there’s descriptions of the world through items and such, but there’s “giving the player the freedom to figure it out, and not holding their hand”, and “fuck it this dude you might never meet in the game has an incredibly important piece of information, you’ll only realize after you Google ‘what am I missing about this game’” and Elden Ring falla under the second category.
A story as complex and in depth as Elden Ring’s deserves to be explained better, in game.
Still not a Zoomer game. I think it’s just in a weird spot where it’s catering to a very specific audience so it’s much harder to become a fan of when put up against other games of it’s caliber
I don’t like the sims games or their business model. But saying that they cut content to release as DLC is a bit overboard.
The game is very different to what it was at release. Releasing all that extra content for free wouldn’t make a lot of sense when a lot of people have spent a lot of years creating it.
Now, the amount of DLC Is insane. All the packs are stupid.
It should just be big DLCs and no small shitty clothes or animal packs or whatever.
Paradox games are a bit like that too, but imo they are more reasonable since you don’t need DLC and they release free updates with a few new features as well as paid DLCs.
It makes a lot more sense if you have the context from the Soulsborne games. The series started much simpler, with (mostly) linear progression, fewer weapons/abilities, and shorter “quests.” Part of the appeal of those games was the mystery, and the community that grew around solving the unexplained quests/mechanics/lore. The games were shorter, and the maps smaller, so it was easier to explore on your own.
Then with Elden Ring, it just exploded with content, built around the same game play mechanics. For veteran Soulsborne players, it plays like the next title in the series. The only really novel mechanics are the open world and spirit ashes. The downside is (at least for me), the world is so large that it’s a chore to explore everything. I finished my first play through and lost the will to start a +1 game. In contrast to Dark Souls 3, where I completed at least 6 play throughs.
But if you don’t have that context…yeah i’d imagine Elden Ring is overwhelming in its complexity and scale. Trying to figure out Soulsborne mechanics and navigate this giant world with little direction sounds daunting. Pitting you against the grafted scion to die immediately, and right after putting the tree sentinel in your way, was a confusing way to start the game, even for me.
I mean, the stuff with Elden Ring is on purpose. There are a lot of gamers who like when a game let’s them figure that stuff out. I get why it’s not your style of game, but you’re acting like it’s laziness or bad game design when it’s entirely intentional and absolutely has an audience. Fromsoft made it for that specific audience.
I’ll agree that Diablo is just more of the same 2013+ version of the gaming market, the kind that leaned heavily toward monetization with zero competition to improve game loops or increase depth.
That being said, back in the day you didn’t have a mini map and a compass to point you to every single place on your Ubisoft fetch quest open world “chore list disguised as a videogame” nonsense. You had to figure out the game and read the manual, etc.
Elden Ring is meant to be “Hey, we know you’re sick of playing the 593857th reskin of Assassin’s Division: Ghost Cry, try out something that respects your intelligence.”
Try the Risen or even the old Gothic games. They’re definitely old and janky but there’s a ton of exploration and discovery packed in with the old and the jank. Dark Souls and company are also worth looking in to if you haven’t played them. Get Prepare to Die edition instead of Dark Souls remastered. Read some guides for the first Dark Souls - It has some mechanics that can really fuck you over. But the second and third one, plus Elden Ring, you can mostly just fuck around there’s nothing particularly high stakes.
Honestly I have less and less love for videogames that streamlined the gameplay into a cookie cutter trope.
I noticed having way more fun when playing indie games because you never escape the wierd shit develloped industry free from the general gamplay loops.
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