Comment on To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days agoI actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.
This gave me conniptions when playing Control. I couldn’t just stop and look at the environments, which clearly had a lot of work put into them, or listen to the ambient sounds, for more than minute without the getting a loud “BRRRR” alarm in my ear and having a full screen text popup that says “BOARD ALERT: HISS COMMANDOS IN WASTE PROCESSING”.
This was compounded by the whole ‘randomly spawn in some random group of enemies at a random point every time you enter a room’ design of the game. That’s bad enough for other reasons, but those two things together gave the impression that the game designers were terrified of the player having 10 seconds to sit there and have a thought enter their brain.
Ashen44@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
It’s hilarious that you say that because I literally just finished 100%ing Control the other day haha! I found it to be the perfect game for stopping and staring because of all the thought put into everything, and how many cool little details and experiences you can have by taking things slowly! I do 100% agree with you though, I wish they were way less aggressive with the enemies spawning. Thankfully when you get tired of it you can just turn on god mode and blast through them, but it’s certainly not an ideal solution.
Unfortunately, it’s an intentional design choice. You can see it in many, many other games too. Fact of the matter is, most players need constant stimulation or they drop off quick, so game designers specifically design their games so you never go without a new event for more than 5 minutes. You can see it especially well in games like Tears of the Kingdom, another game I love that has a godawful encounter system where you can’t go five steps without another enemy ambushing you!
It’s sadly something you aren’t going to escape from as long as you’re playing big budget games, which is doubly sad because big budget game worlds are usually extra fun to explore because they can afford to really flesh out their worlds! That’s why I appreciate games like Monster Hunter (specifically World and Wilds) which solve the issue by giving you those constanr encounters (back to back quests, running into monsters constantly out in the maps) but make it incredibly easy to just not engage and completely ignore them (most monsters not being instantly aggressive, ghillie mantle and skills that make monsters ignore you completely). This at least gives me hope that we can compromise between the stimulation bombardment and the tranquil admiration.