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I'm so sick of bloated games

You're exaggerating; dialogue is never actually repeated. The characters do continue to talk about the same topic if you're for example, heading towards a deadline, but it's never the same dialogue. You get a sense that characters like Ryuji and Ann are incredibly anxious, others less so.

I would argue against the "public opinion" screens if anything, if only for the fact that you can't progress through them with a button press.
Yes it's technically not the same dialogue but I don't see any difference between "we have to get to the safe room first", "let's go to the safe room" and "I agree we should go to safe room for now".

It's the same with all of the "Oh man, do you think their hearts gonna change?" or "We should go to the palace" or "Let's hang out today", etc.
 
Do you feel the same?

No. Not when it's interesting and I'm into the game.

But it happens, sometimes you can't handle long dialogues, etc, I felt that too sometimes, it comes it goes. Play games that don't have a lot of dialogues for now, and see if in a few months you feel like coming back.
 
Honestly, if you just move from main mission to main mission in Zelda, the traversal time isn't especially dissimilar from other games in the series. There are literal paths connecting every single one of the major story locations.

True. And to be honest I probably wouldn't have much fun with a regular Zelda right now/anytime soon. I'm just done with open worlds, over worlds etc. and focused on games that just put your right in gameplay (combat etc) and keep you there. I just have no interest in traversal or exploration anymore for now.

And, since you're talking about grinding in Xenoblade, the only time I ever had to grind in Xenoblade Chronicles during my no-sidequest playthrough was at the very end of the game, and that was only because the jump in level from the penultimate boss to the final one was big enough that I was too weak to hit the final boss.

To be fair, that game just had way to many systems with the leveling, affinity between characters, gear, combat etc. which is another thing I hate in games. So my issue was more just never bothering to learn that shit than being underleveled. If I play WRPGish type games I typically just play on easy to make the combat brain-dead simple and that wasn't an option in Xenoblade.
 
Don't touch Nier Automata then, I heard you have to play through it 5 times to fully experience the game

Underrated post.

Tbh I don't think many people in this thread got the joke.


I wouldn't call big games bloated op, but it's clear you hit genre burnout. Maybe try a simple action ad venture like Sonic 3 and K?
 
How the hell is BotW not bloated? 900 Korok seeds, 50 blessing and combat shrines, 3 minibosses that are repeated 20-30 times each, dozens of enemy camps filled with the same 3 enemy types, etc. Don't tell me that it's not bloated because these things are "optional", there is more to a game then just beating the final boss. Besides, there is no way to know what content to skip unless you have already played the game, on your first playthrough you'll have no idea if you are going to discover something good or not.
 
So I finished Tales of Berseria some time ago and it took me 50 hours. While liking it, the time it took me to finish it was absolutely not justified.

Then I bought Persona 5 and wasn't able to finish it. I just couldn't take the bloated dialogue any longer. Now I'm looking at some unfinished games: Mass Effect, Witcher, Zelda. I'm not saying that these games are bad by any means but the fact that most of them will consist of a lot of running back and forth combined with tedious quests just makes me not want to touch them. I feel that this trend has persisted over the last few years: more content, more hours = better game. To me these games just tend to become a second job. I don't want to feel exhausted while playing games.

I also think that Horizon looks amazing but hearing that it's open world makes me not want to touch it with a ten foot pole. Even though this might sound like a stealth 'open world sux' thread, note that persona and Berseria are no proper open world games. I would also consider Uncharted 4 to be bloated.

Do you feel the same?
Yes yes YES.

Though not with BotW because you can kind of finish anytime you want. It's very transparent in what it asks of you, so it doesn't feel like you're getting strung along. All of those other examples though ughh.
 
Zelda and The Witcher 3 aren't bloated. Some of the side activities will probably grate on most people, but they can be totally ignored without losing much.
The Witcher 3 is terribly bloated. It takes you more than 30 hours to "find Ciri". Then 20 hours to collect allies. Only then do you get some actual main story progression. I liked the game for the first 20 hours, then got increasingly annoyed as I wanted to power through the main story and it wouldn't let me because it was constantly throwing up hurdles to advancing the main plotline.
 
Actually getting 441 for all slots is too much, imo it shouldn't be harder than getting empty bottles in past Zeldas. How does getting inventory slots harder than 100%ing Mario Sunshine or something. I'm just saying that if they put all that content they could have put more meaningful tasks to do rather than having that approach so "any player can get enough" when even 441 is too much. Having much fewer seeds but in larger environmental puzzles would have been a better approach imo, less repetition and more distinct, unique actitivies

I wouldn't disagree in having more puzzle types, but I don't think few seeds / larger puzzles would work. Half of the any given Korok puzzle is traversing the world and finding them in the first place. Take away the quantity and all of a sudden you aren't rewarded for climbing that mountain or taking that side path and the world is a lot less fun to traverse.

I never came close to maxing my slots anyways, finished around 250 seeds or something. It feels like complaining about how long it takes to grind to Lv99 in an RPG where you're only expected to get to 60 by the end.
 
I once loved open world games due to the sheer amount of hours I can put into them. But that was back when I had a part time job with no other major responsibilities. Now that I'm older and more busy, I just can't get into those games anymore. I want to enjoy The Witcher 3, but I just can't bring myself to continue because I know that I could easily spend 20 hours or more on the game.

Adulting sucks. 😔
 
The Witcher 3 is terribly bloated. It takes you more than 30 hours to "find Ciri". Then 20 hours to collect allies. Only then do you get some actual main story progression. I liked the game for the first 20 hours, then got increasingly annoyed as I wanted to power through the main story and it wouldn't let me because it was constantly throwing up hurdles to advancing the main plotline.

Hurdles like what...the story? What weird thinking, it's like opening a book and only saying the first 10 pages and last 10 pages are the only ones worth reading.
 
Get Horizon, the only game (i played) that gets open world design right. I only played the main story - there is no road block, stat check, grinding or pick up five dead rabbits to continue bullshit. Its almost a Uncharted kind of focused game that lets you explore the world if you feel like it at any given time with a story thats very straight forward.

Hurdles like what...the story? What weird thinking, it's like opening a book and only saying the first 10 pages and last 10 pages are the only ones worth reading.

I stopped that game once it told me to pony up 10000 gold coins to get on a ship to progress my game. That was/is a shit move.
 
Too many open-world games or really AAA games in general are trying to do and be too much to check all the boxes, ending up with hours of needless filler. The worst part is it's gotten a lot of people to think open-world games are inherently bad, when it's just that we're getting too many bad ones.

What's amazing about Witcher 3 is that as much as that game has in it, almost none of it felt like bloat to me. Every little quest and activity felt like the writers and designers cared about it at least a little bit. Every little bit of content felt like it had some amount of individual care and attention paid to it. Zelda BOTW feels roughly similar -- it feels like a Nintendo thought up a few hundred good challenges and puzzles and spread them out over a systemic open-world. The difference from say, a Ubisoft game, is that in Zelda they all feel somewhat challenging and engaging beyond just being a checklist.

The problem with open-world games right now is designers forgot why games are open-world. Usually it's either to create a systemic playground (Skyrim, GTA, Elite, Minecraft) or provide cool places to discover and explore (Zelda, many RPGs). Instead a lot of modern ones think open-world games exist to give players lots of crap to do.
 
Bro fist, OP.

I would do a post about this but my English is not good enough. I absolutely agree with everything you said.

I got sick of Persona 5 because of the talk and later when the tutorials of combining Personas and a lot of confusing things came around.

I'm really trying to like Zelda but each time I play I feel I'm doing zero progress in the game.

Somebody said here that it may be because of age ... I'm 33 years old and games that respect my time are a priority for me.

I'm really loving short games currently ... but ... a game like Yakuza 0 showed me that I can still enjoy a 80-hour game. This game was perfection to me... even being so long it was always FOCUSED and fun. (The business and cabaret thing almost ruined it for me)
 
Hurdles like what...the story? What weird thinking, it's like opening a book and only saying the first 10 pages and last 10 pages are the only ones worth reading.
No hurdles that don't progress the main plot. The main plot is as barebones as it gets, only in the last ten hours does it get interesting and then it suddenly ends. I get that you like being diverted by side quests, but try playing the game if you're not interested in diversions, it's pretty dire. I still had a pretty good time with it, which shows the quality of the game, but it's loaded with padding bullshit.
 
No hurdles that don't progress the main plot. The main plot is as barebones as it gets, only in the last ten hours does it get interesting and then it suddenly ends. I get that you like being diverted by side quests, but try playing the game if you're not interested in diversions, it's pretty dire. I still had a pretty good time with it, which shows the quality of the game, but it's loaded with padding bullshit.

The main goal is finding Ciri, everything you do to get to that point IS the story. Getting to a goal isn't a straight line, and everything you do to get to that point shouldn't be hand waved as padding just because you're not interested in it.
 
I'm managing Persona 5 by taking breaks to play something else. Spent a week playing Hitman instead of it, and another Tales from the Borderlands. It's helping to keep my interest this way, as I was pretty eager to get back to it once I cleared each of those.

Made the mistake of picking up Nioh now, though, which I imagine I'll be wanting to take breaks from too :p
 
No hurdles that don't progress the main plot. The main plot is as barebones as it gets, only in the last ten hours does it get interesting and then it suddenly ends. I get that you like being diverted by side quests, but try playing the game if you're not interested in diversions, it's pretty dire. I still had a pretty good time with it, which shows the quality of the game, but it's loaded with padding bullshit.

That is not padding, that is content. If the 'diversions' were bad or had no value, then you would have a point.

The problem here is a misunderstanding of the grounds the game is trying to engage you in. If you are just there to power through the main story, then you may be playing the wrong game.

Funny enough, the game actually does a good job shunting content that could seamlessly fit into the main story as side content.

You an actually beat the game in about 30 Hours if you simply play the main quest. The quality of said content is usually high enough that I think some people play it not realizing it is not required.
 
The Witcher 3 is terribly bloated. It takes you more than 30 hours to "find Ciri". Then 20 hours to collect allies. Only then do you get some actual main story progression. I liked the game for the first 20 hours, then got increasingly annoyed as I wanted to power through the main story and it wouldn't let me because it was constantly throwing up hurdles to advancing the main plotline.

Yeah, the main quest in The Witcher 3 is horrible, outside of a handful of standout moments. It's a 10 hour story dragged out to 50.

The nice thing about BotW's main quest is that it's around 20 hours long. And you didn't even have to partake in most of it if you don't want to.
 
Ubisoft games especially grind my gears. Assassin's Creed usually has about 10 hours of solid, enjoyable content with 10 - 15 hours of filler trash added on for no reason, so by the time you finish it you're sick of it and glad it's over instead of being left positive thoughts about the game. This definitely isn't exclusive to Ubisoft, quantity over quality is a big problem in general IMO.
 
The main goal is finding Ciri, everything you do to get to that point IS the story. Getting to a goal isn't a straight line, and everything you do to get to that point shouldn't be hand waved as padding just because you're not interested in it.
If you have twenty hours of story that doesn't advance the main plot and doesn't come back later in any meaningful form, it's filler. It's fine if you enjoy filler. It's still filler. Not everyone enjoys getting strung along. It's almost a medieval Rockstar game at times. Anyway, enough of that.
 
If you have twenty hours of story that doesn't advance the main plot and doesn't come back later in any meaningful form, it's filler. It's fine if you enjoy filler. It's still filler. Not everyone enjoys getting strung along. It's almost a medieval Rockstar game at times. Anyway, enough of that.

Exactly which 20 Hours of story are you referring to?

The Novigrad quest where you are hunting down Dandelion is the only egregious example I can think of. Even then, it as not bad, just not entirely necessary.
 
recognizing genre-fatigue is the first step.

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If you have twenty hours of story that doesn't advance the main plot and doesn't come back later in any meaningful form, it's filler. It's fine if you enjoy filler. It's still filler. Not everyone enjoys getting strung along. It's almost a medieval Rockstar game at times. Anyway, enough of that.

Man, thats such a reductive viewpoint. If a story only is defined by a starting point and an ending point, with everything in between amounting to "useless" filler, then everything that isnt exactly the end goal becomes filler. This rather extreme viewpoint is basically the only way one could take a game like Witcher 3, which is best in class in almost all these categories, and make it seem like its heavily padded. I mean, what then do you think about other games, like Mass Effect 2 for example? You didnt actually destroy the collectors until the end of the game, so clearly everything in between was clearly filler!
 
If you think the game is going on too long just stop playing it. You're acting like video games are a standardized test or something.
 
True. And to be honest I probably wouldn't have much fun with a regular Zelda right now/anytime soon. I'm just done with open worlds, over worlds etc. and focused on games that just put your right in gameplay (combat etc) and keep you there. I just have no interest in traversal or exploration anymore for now.

To be fair, that game just had way to many systems with the leveling, affinity between characters, gear, combat etc. which is another thing I hate in games. So my issue was more just never bothering to learn that shit than being underleveled. If I play WRPGish type games I typically just play on easy to make the combat brain-dead simple and that wasn't an option in Xenoblade.

So what you're saying is that your tastes are leaning more toward cinematic games, arcade-like games, and raw action games?
 
yeah i adore Persona 5 but it's wearing out its welcome

i put 100 hours into Zelda and didn't notice/mind, just about the same with Yakuza 0 (GOTY) but the latter can be done in far, far less time, OP!
 
Exactly which 20 Hours of story are you referring to?

The Novigrad quest where you are hunting down Dandelion is the only egregious example I can think of. Even then, it as not bad, just not entirely necessary.
Both the 20 hours in finding ciri and the 20 hours in retracing your steps to collect the allies were filled with padding. Even the much lauded (and I agree, except for all of the bullshit to and fro traversal) bloody baron quest is ultimately filler-ish. You come in looking for Ciri, you leave looking for Ciri. Eight hours later the baron tells you yeah okay I don't know where she is either. Could have told me that straight away baron. There was little added depth to the main characters and no progress in the story. Now bloody baron does get referenced near the end of the story (not incredibly meaningfully but still) so it has that over the majority of the other quests. But really, as OrbitalBeard says, the main plot is ten hours stretched over fifty. Actually, the average Netflix season has three times as much plot development in ten hours as The Witcher has in 50. So do quite a few games too.
 
Man, thats such a reductive viewpoint. If a story only is defined by a starting point and an ending point, with everything in between amounting to "useless" filler, then everything that isnt exactly the end goal becomes filler. This rather extreme viewpoint is basically the only way one could take a game like Witcher 3, which is best in class in almost all these categories, and make it seem like its heavily padded. I mean, what then do you think about other games, like Mass Effect 2 for example? You didnt actually destroy the collectors until the end of the game, so clearly everything in between was clearly filler!
I loved, loved Mass Effect 2, but yeah I ain't stanning for the plot and neither should you lol.
That said the stories in the game were meaningful because they all advanced the personalities of the main characters. Whereas in the Witcher Ciri is pretty much a nonentity for half of the game and Geralt also has very little character development.
 
So what you're saying is that your tastes are leaning more toward cinematic games, arcade-like games, and raw action games?

Yep. And that's what I'm focused on playing going forward.

Though I wouldn't say raw action as much as pure gameplay as I hate shit like DMC, God of War, Bayonetta etc.
 
I'd love finding caves in the Elder Scrolls if each one had a puzzle or two inside.

Sometimes they do have puzzles (Dwemer ruins) but they're not all the same

Sometimes you find a pile of bodies and gold from a previous battle

Sometimes you find creepy journals that you can read an learn about terrible events that unfolded in the cave

Sometimes it has epic loot that you can use for the rest of the game


(Even though they re-use assets sometimes) the variety of what's inside the caves is what makes them cool, not whether or not they have a puzzle.
 
OP I think you need to stop thinking and worry about other games you want to finish , just play and enjoy the game at hand after you finish it take a week off don't play anything , in this week start think about the game you played and the moments you enjoyed talk to your friends about it hope this help
 
When grand theft auto 3 came out, I thought the way the main adventure could be progressed in the large realistic environment while surrounded with optional filler was a simple and effective way of appealing to those who wanted to play alot and those who wanted to play a little. And it's still viable.

In the case of persona; it's a dungeon dive. That's the game.
 
If you have twenty hours of story that doesn't advance the main plot and doesn't come back later in any meaningful form, it's filler. It's fine if you enjoy filler. It's still filler. Not everyone enjoys getting strung along. It's almost a medieval Rockstar game at times. Anyway, enough of that.

Lord of the Rings is just a bloated slog about hobbits taking a ring to a mountain, everthing else is just filler. /s
 
Describing Zelda as bloated is weird.

Tedious? I could buy that, but it isn't bloated at all.
It depends what you mean by bloated. Nothing In Zelda feels unnecessary, but equally the game being as big as it is DOES feel unnecessary. I think I'd enjoy it twice as much if it was half as big.
 
buy fewer games. It's difficult but doable. I have bought 5-6 games up to this point and have finished all of them. Currently, i'm finishing up Blood & Wine DLC, then i will be done with Witcher 3 for good.

So far this year, i have played Yakuza 0, RE7, GR: Wildlands, Horizon Zero Dawn, Witcher 3 + Hearts of Stone. Persona 5 is next on the list
 
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