this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
138 points (85.9% liked)
Games
16742 readers
703 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
2 hours doesn't let you experience even 10% of what a game like this usually offer, less alone giving you time to tinker with the systems and see if they actually work, and furthermore if they are actually fun once you're good at them.
Of course I agree. But it's still not that great game design, if you are bored for hours. It's like people telling me about tv show that gets good after first season. What should I do until then... :)
How else do you explain to someone what dwarf fortress is, for example? You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game. Same goes for many bigger games, for example mount and blade (bannerlord) starts off strong with a promise of you establishing and leading a kingdom but once you actually reach that part through tedious grind, you realize it was all for nothing and the game's a badly designed, shallow, unfinished sandbox with absolutely no vision or execution in that regard. Good luck getting to that conclusion without already investing at least 50 mediocre hours in it though.
The problem with this thinking is that you split the game in 2 parts: first a tedious learning process of dozens of hours, and then an enjoyable experience once you know how to play, and imply that you need to get over the first part before being able (or allowed) to rate the game. But the learning part is the game, even more so if you need to invest dozens of hours.
Many players will simply enjoy the grind of Mount and Blade, because they don't care about the endgame. Many players (maybe the same) will uninstall Dwarf Fortress after half an hour, because they will estimate that the learning curve isn't worth their time, even if it was the greatest game ever.
You can and should enjoy those dozens of hours of learning. If you don't you aren't going to enjoy DF.
I understand your point. But, if I take your example of mount and blade. If it's starts off strong with 50 hours of fun, that's a win in my book. But yes, in this regard steam ratings fail, because of binary recommend or not recommend voting. On the other hand, you can see how many hours did the user that posted a review played, so you can kinda make your own decision.
Also, I would like to add that games like dwarf fortress, rimworld, factorio and similar, all start of fun, if you're into this genre….at least for me, they did. Thinking back, I think I never experienced playing a game for X hours having a horrible time, and somewhere in the middle changing my mind. At least from the gameplay standpoint. Maybe sometimes story had some unexpected bump in quality (thank god), but not really core gameplay.
Overall, I agree with you, 2 hours is too little for a complete review of a video game. But these are user reviews that can be helpful as well. For an example, for someone who hasn't that much time to invest in a game to get to the good part. Professional reviewers (or people who have themselves as professional) should play the game for a suitable amount of time, before making an informed review.
If I game can't keep you engaged while doing that for the first 2 hours it's not a good game, at least for that person. You don't need to know everything the game has to offer if it's bored you for 2 hours.