In my experience, it’s a threefold problem for large-scale games like RPGs or AAA titles.
Playing the game in short bursts isn’t meaningful enough to be enjoyable. While you could do it, it would either be under pressure, or you would have so little time to do anything that it feels like you’ve accomplished nothing.
To get around that, you have to schedule playing the game into your day or carve time around it. It’s often difficult to do so, and games are usually the lowest priority activity for working adults.
When you can’t schedule the game in, you take a break to play a different game with less commitment requirements. Then, after a couple of months have passed, you realize that you have forgotten where you were in the story and what goals you were trying to achieve. That’s super demotivating, and it’s usually just easier to play a new game than try to figure out where you left off.
When you consider that, it kind of makes sense why small games like Vampire Survivors or handheld gaming (where quick suspend is a thing) have taken off in recent years.
And to add on to #3, you might not even remember how the game works. Like obviously movement is easy but you might forget some other important mechanics.
Though sometimes this can be a good thing because you might learn the game better the second time. Like I got stuck on one encounter in Doom Eternal and dropped the game for a while. I came back and loaded my old save but had no idea what I was doing because the gameplay loop is more complicated than “shoot everything and pick up drops”. So I started a new save to relearn it and didn’t even notice when I passed the point I was stuck on because it wasn’t hard at all the second time through.
I might end up doing this with persona 5 royal, too, though I put a lot more hours in to get where I’m stuck at.
In my experience, it’s a threefold problem for large-scale games like RPGs or AAA titles.
Playing the game in short bursts isn’t meaningful enough to be enjoyable. While you could do it, it would either be under pressure, or you would have so little time to do anything that it feels like you’ve accomplished nothing.
To get around that, you have to schedule playing the game into your day or carve time around it. It’s often difficult to do so, and games are usually the lowest priority activity for working adults.
When you can’t schedule the game in, you take a break to play a different game with less commitment requirements. Then, after a couple of months have passed, you realize that you have forgotten where you were in the story and what goals you were trying to achieve. That’s super demotivating, and it’s usually just easier to play a new game than try to figure out where you left off.
When you consider that, it kind of makes sense why small games like Vampire Survivors or handheld gaming (where quick suspend is a thing) have taken off in recent years.
Exactly right. And yet I love that there are deep and long immersive games even if I can’t always play them.
I do like how some games summarize the gist of what you’re doing.
And to add on to #3, you might not even remember how the game works. Like obviously movement is easy but you might forget some other important mechanics.
Though sometimes this can be a good thing because you might learn the game better the second time. Like I got stuck on one encounter in Doom Eternal and dropped the game for a while. I came back and loaded my old save but had no idea what I was doing because the gameplay loop is more complicated than “shoot everything and pick up drops”. So I started a new save to relearn it and didn’t even notice when I passed the point I was stuck on because it wasn’t hard at all the second time through.
I might end up doing this with persona 5 royal, too, though I put a lot more hours in to get where I’m stuck at.