Modern gaming sucks.

[kupomogli]

Now I'm talking about modern gaming as a whole, the overarching gaming space of modern gaming is kind of shit now, even though games now days could and should be better than every other instance of every other generation. And yes, there are still great games that release... rarely, they're like a needle in a very piss poor haystack.

Open worlds, procedural bullshit, and whatever the next microtransaction game is the most common game that we see released, games that are designed to waste as much of the player time as possible, and in the case of procedural horseshit they're might be a great game underneath, but after that one run you've seen 99.9% of what the game has on offer.

It's not just the quality of games though but the companies themselves, and right now I want to discuss Steam and how Steam is also ruining video games. So instead of paying anyone to review the garbage that gets uploaded onto their servers, Steam likely has less than a dozen employees. Gabe is up there are the top paying these people slave wages while he's raking in billions a year for basically no quality control. So in order to fight back against all the garbage released to their servers, Steam has implemented THE TWO HOUR REFUND.

Because of this bullshit two hour refund, developers are now required to pad the fuck out of their game. So either the game is now padded as fuck to not even really start before this two hours, or let's say you have a game that's kind of good, now let's make that kind of good game an open ended 2D exploration game to make you run back and forth and turn what's a two to three hour experience in total to 10-15 hours.

I say this because I bought Wallachia when it released and despite spending ~$50 as an import in total and the game being less than an hour to completion, I don't regret my purchase in the slighest. Enjoyed the game enough to not only finish the game no deaths on both normal and hard. Great game despite these runs taking less than 30 minutes each.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihXVmzfjuik

But on Chronicles of the Wolf, their very next gem, they decide they're going to make it a 2D exploration game and it's padded out as fuck, requiring you to walk back and forth through this long strength of map with probably only the third teleporter in an actually good position. The game itself I wouldn't doubt has a couple hours of content at most if it didn't force all this backtracking. Some of the "puzzles" which are just talk to this person or interact with something at the right time are mostly good, but there are some of these that are done really poorly, infact I've been stuck the last 30 minutes to an hour.

So what does this have to do with Steam? Everything. Steam doesn't want to lose money, and as they know that everyone will go through them and for nearly 20 years had to go through them if they wanted to play anything, then they don't hire any QA to curate any of the games that appear on their service. They instead offer this two hour refund. Now this two hour refund "should be" used to get refunds through the amount of asset flips and just complete garbage that releases on Steam on a regular basis, but people are real pieces of shit and if a game is less than two hours, they're just going to play the game to completion and get their refund. So now developers can't release good short games, they make extra long tutorials or openings so that you don't really get to start playing the real game until the two hours is almost gone, etc. Anything to disincentivize players from refunding the game within that first two hours but the damage is already done, the developer is required to make some bullshit changes to their games and in doing so sets the pace of the whole game and ruining a lot of games.

Chronicles of the Wolf is kind of a good game, has some mechanics and some progression that is great, until it's not, and when it's not it's really not good. Thanks, Gabe. alongside all of the other corporate pieces of shit I'm glad you're here to ruin gaming for all of us.

[SparTonberry]

Two hour refund isn't really that much different to the developers than the rental market for console games is/was (I don't know, does GameFly or such still operate?). People were still finishing games without paying the developer. (pretty sure I've read at least one game dev personally feel worse about rentals than piracy. I guess because at least then a third-party isn't making more money than the dev did off that player?)
Does the developer see how many times their game was refunded? I suppose that would make it only a small step more insulting to the developers. But then so was directly pirating the game, and I have heard some devs do have estimates to how activity happens on that front.

[kupomogli]

Two hour refund isn't really that much different to the developers than the rental market for console games is/was (I don't know, does GameFly or such still operate?). People were still finishing games without paying the developer. (pretty sure I've read at least one game dev personally feel worse about rentals than piracy. I guess because at least then a third-party isn't making more money than the dev did off that player?)
Does the developer see how many times their game was refunded? I suppose that would make it only a small step more insulting to the developers. But then so was directly pirating the game, and I have heard some devs do have estimates to how activity happens on that front.

Actually it is, in Gamefly's case the developer would never receive any of the income regardless and Gamefly is a console only service. PC is a pretty large part of the market and effects both console and PC. These are games that are being purcchased, the developers are actually making a potential profit.

Developers aren't dragging the first two hours of the game out because of Gamefly, where it's a 100% loss. They're doing so because if they can pad the game out then the game won't feel like such a short experience, or the opening is dragged out so long that the player doesn't even really get to the actual game until that two hours.

But take Wallachia for example, if you finish the game in an hour, then you just get a refund. If you were to play a game for two hours and it says you're 50% of the way through, maybe you refund it and get the $30 you spent back, some gamers may feel like they've played enough of the game.

Chronicles of the Wolf for example requires you to go from one side of the games map, to the other side of the map, then once you get past this one side of the map then you go back to the other side and make your way all the way to the next town, then you have to go all the way back to the town on the left side, then back to the same area on the right side. Now, this doesn't sound that bad, but if you're having trouble finding what you need in each of these areas because you don't exactly know where you need to go. I know where you need to go in these instances, now, but the amount of time I was wasting in each instance was just infuriating. And apparently, the game is around 10-15 hours long. I've so far played six hours and I'm 60% of the way through according to the game and I think that where I'm located at right now I might actually complete it sooner than 10 hours. I mean honestly, it's been more than 10 hours if you consider deaths or exiting the game so I didn't keep any experience points that I didn't have to because that's another issue entirely, the unintentional level grinding caused by the games padding. So there's not only a lot of padding on my save data and a lot of padding(where I've exited not my deaths) that I just didn't want to go keep the playtime, experience points, etc as I didn't make any progress.

I think on a replay this game would be a much better game when you know exactly where to go in order to progress, an altogether great game, but the first playthrough, the amount of padding that each one part in each instance that allows you to make any progress, it's an absolute shit show of an experience.

Here's a video from Reggie and he's already been to the second town based on his commentary. I didn't watch the entire thing he finally gets to the games second boss in an hour and 30 minutes. Something that off the top of my head, I could do in 15-20 minutes FROM THE START OF THE GAME now that I know where to go. That's how bad the games padding is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueVBy-aNM6I

Now would I recommend Chronicles of the Wolf? Yeah, especially if you plan to replay it like any Castlevania game as future playthroughs will remove all that trial and error on where do I go or what do I do in order to progress. At that point the things the game does well will really shine while the main issue won't be as much of a standout disappointment.

*edit*

And let me also make an edit here about Gamefly. Not only does the game have to release physically, but they would be purchasing the game like anyone else to rent the items out. They don't just have an infinite amount of stock, making the determination of how many copies of each game will they need. They don't want too few copies, they don't want too many copies, as they might lose customers or they might just have games they can't get people to rent and essentially lose money that way. And you also have to think, this is a monthly service. Are people even going to be willing to use their monthly subscription for delivery of a game that's only $20 to order digitally and $30 to order physically? If you use the cheapest option of $13.50 the delivery time back and forth the time you spend to play the game before you get the next game, even if you immediately dislike the game. I would have to assume the turn around is more than a week.

And I doubt Gamefly is used by many people, because if it was, Blockbuster would have never went under as they started to do the whole Netflix delivery plan where you order the movies online, but unlike Netflix where you have to mail them back you could actually drop them off at your local blockbuster store for check in and they were instantly recognized as you could potentially receive games or movies play or watch them that night, return them before the store closes and your next delivery would already be on its way. Netflix had already moved towards the combination of delivery and streaming at that time, the streaming being much more populaar.

The Netflix delivery service is so popular that Netflix has ended the service, so yeah, Gamefly rentals aren't effecting sales.

But that two hour Steam refund is changing how games are developed when people cna just play a game for a few seconds and return it. And that's screwing everyone, not just owners of the games on Steam. And according to Google 50% of the non mobile gaming market is PC, so of course developers are going to make sure that they can capture what will keep their games from not getting refunded on PC and then consoles where you can't refund games unless they're just absolutely broken.

[kupomogli]

So I've finished the true ending on Chronicles of the Wolf and I decided to restart, see how much better it is if I know where to go. The amount of time it's taking, even on data that I keep saved, at 85% of the way through the game is less than 1/4 of my initial run. And yes, it's because I know where to go, but even though there's still backtracking and even though I've still wasted some time on the second run, it just goes to show just how padded the game was in the first place.

I think I'll complete the games true ending in six hours or less. Considering that the game shows your percentage, if someone was to play two hours and see they have 30% of the game done(if it wasn't padded AF) they could just refund the game, enjoy the initial experience and not even worrying about finishing the game. I mean what's that new metric? That most gamers don't even beat 1/10th of their games?

[JSoup]

So what is the actual discussion point here? What's the intended hook? You started with a clickbait-ish thread title and then make it clear you're big mad at the current methodology behind modern gaming, not modern gaming itself. This all seems like it would be better suited for a blog.

[kupomogli]

So what is the actual discussion point here? What's the intended hook? You started with a clickbait-ish thread title and then make it clear you're big mad at the current methodology behind modern gaming, not modern gaming itself. This all seems like it would be better suited for a blog.

That there's a classic game that is padded out because of another modern mechanic that hurts potential sales. Whether you want to take it as Steam two hour refund causing it, many games now days are padded out to be longer just because and there was no reason for it.

Let's go and point out other games that are padded out and worse because of this. Again, this is games that are "worse" because of it, not bad games(FF16 is riding that fine line of mediocre but decent.)

Final Fantasy 16. If you play the first two hours of the game, apparently that's the demo, it's absolutely amazing. After I played the introduction chapter I was telling everyone how amazing this game was, then it fell off the cliff as even main quests throughout the game felt like side quests. Just very long sections of padding to make FF16 a 50 hour game when it would have been a much better experiene at 15-20.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is worse than Remake. People complained that Remake was a four hour section padded out to be a 30 hour game, but while it may have been a longer game for what was initially four hours, it's not really padded. The slow walking complaint is stupid as you're getting the dialogue for the storyline while getting to the location instead of every other game that has you standing there listening to the storyline and then getting to where you're going, and let's not forget about all walking and talking on games like God of War, etc, that get glowing reviews.

However, what about Rebirth, why are people not talking about how Rebirth is also four hours of Final Fantasy 7 expanded to 60 hours? More than 120 hours if you do everything. FF7 Rebirth is padded AF. Now, FF7 Rebirth has one of the better open worlds imo but still very padded and it's got a great but worse and more padded storyline than what we experienced with Remake. Combat is amazing, but the additions they've made with Cloud and Tifa being able to do aerial attacks consistently removes the entire dynamic between Aerith and Barret being more useful against aerial enemies.

Elden Ring is Dark Souls 3 but open world. Aside from the jump button, the amount and variation of spells and the ability to swap out your weapon arts, it's identical to the completely grounded Dark Souls 3 oh yeah, except that it's open world, a large very open aimless world that structurely has all sorts of massive elevation differences. The content within this mostly empty aimless open world is great, but this content requires hours of exploration without a guide. I'm actually replaying Elden Ring right now and went to my previous save data in which I have every single site of grace, opened up the map and took multiple screenshots so I have a general idea of where all these are located at, but it's content that I found mostly on my own, there's some content that I didn't find when playing on my own or playing with a friend that my friend led me to. But anyways, this games open world is padded as fuck and to just discover everything and complete a majority of it took me 300 hours. My friend wanted to platinum the game so there was a point that I did the content on his profile with him, but I didn't want to go through it again so we skipped going through it on my profile. We had to do certain content though like getting to Milenia required going through several areas so of course we had to also go through that content on mine but just regular dungeons after unlocking them on mine we didn't complete them on mine, so technically I did do everything just no record of it. I even helped defeat the last boss yet didn't bother doing it on my own character. This was pretty much out of spite, the amount of padding the game had I wasn't going to bother.

Going through the game knowing exactly where everything is, or atleast having a general idea of where everything is and then being able to experience the dungeons, the games good content at a more reasonable pace is much more enjoyable. It's still disappointing that I have to ride all of over to unlock and get to those points, but at the very least I now have a guide to do so.

Now you might end up saying, well if that's all you need to make the game better, why not just use a strategy guide? I don't want to use strategy guides. I shouldn't have to use a strategy guide in order to make your shitty game better. I don't want to have to be sitting in front of an open laptop or in front of a computer monitor or with some map sprawled out across a desk. It's bad enough that I have to do so by going back to my images every single time on my PS5, but atleast doing so is with all of my own in game information.

Ghost of Tsushima, Immortals Fenyx Rising, Ghostwire Tokyo, etc. Whether they're highly praised or semi highly praised, each of these games were just padded AF. GoT was like a poor man's Nioh, mixed with poor man's Arkham, mixed with Assassin's Creed. After about six hours just couldn't take playing anymore as all I was doing was running or riding my horse for 20 minutes to each encampment to clear out the encampment and then go to the next one. I spent just as much time wasting my way getting to the area than it took me to even complete the area. The same for Ghostwire Tokyo, worse for Immortals Fenyx Rising.

But what about Persona 5 and the Falcom games, these games also pad game time to stupidly high levels Persona 5 or Ys10 are about 80% text dumps compared to anything else and the dialogue and storyline aren't even there, often times it's fluff, or repeating the same text repeatedly over and over again but the people who are traversing with you have to get a word in, so when one character talks everyone else has to talk before they'll move on. Persona 5 doesn't even try to hide how obnoxious the dialogue where you'll have a meeting with the group about when they'll have another meeting, or they'll just repeat the same dialogue for days over and over and over again just in different ways. It's like when someone asks you the same question 37 different ways, that's the way the dialogue is written in Persona 5.

Two favorites of the indie space are basically the open world of indie games. Procedural bullshit or 2D exploration games, games that often times have you replaying the game over and over and over until you complete a run or indie versions of padded out open world games that's not done as well as games that did the same thing 20-30 years ago. The procedural bullshit is anywhere from 40 minute to two hour long runs where you don't get a good build because randomization and progression seems more luck based than anything, oh congratulations, you've got to redo this same shit for 30-40 hours or until you get lucky enough to pull some magical bullshit build.

So whether it's open world or it's this padded AF dialogue that's shoved down your throat, this shit's ruining gaming. The modern day gamer is also part of the problem though, let's spend thousands of dollars on Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty, Candy Crush, etc, because we don't give a shit about good content, we're just happy that we're playing content period. We've got gaming journalists or Youtube mouthpieces telling us that we should like this garbage like some 2025 version of They Live.

[kupomogli]

So I'd also like to go over something about Elden Ring, and I can add images and video proof if you'd like. On my brand new replay, I used my past save data to screenshot images to know all the grace point locations. Now, you still have to find them and I didn't zoom all the way in which would have been a lot easier to find them. I still had it zoomed out by one so I could see a relatively large portion of the map, basically each individual area.

So this new character I'm about 50% of the way through with all of the games content about 28 hours and I've actually completed the content. I didn't just touch the grace point and move on. Now I'm not the greatest Souls player ever, I'm not some narcissistant douche that begs people to give him money to play Souls games until I can beat the game without getting hit with only my fists as a weapon. But as someone who likes these games melee more than magic, and I don't beeline straight towards broken overpowered equipment like a lot of people do, I've completed 50% of all the games content at 28 hours and at the time I have a broadsword +7(a weapon that can go up to +20, so I'm quite a bit underpowered where I'm at, and should probably be around +13-+15 on this weapon I just haven't been leveling my weapon lately.

So why does this matter? Well, if you consider my deaths, the mostly AI generated open world which is then world, probably around 80% of the games time isn't really content. So that leaves around 5-6 hours of actually real content at most. These small dungeons, even a lot of the bigger ones are quite small compared to anything from Bloodborne and all the Souls other Souls games. There are "some" big areas, and I mean Leyendell, or the entirety of Volcano Manor, the one area of the open world where it actually feels like a more classic Souls game, where that area itself feels like a really linear and explorable region rather than open aimless wandering bullshit. The one area that you fight Milenia at the end, and there are some actual decent sized aread but not many.

So you've got this huge open world that's there just to waste time and pad everything out. My first time playing, did you die in the open world? Well, now try to regain where you were exploring from so you make sure you don't miss any dungeons, the only way to actually get new equipment, ONE new piece of equipment per dungeon. Every single death in the open world is ten fold more time t han it is in any other Dark Souls because a lot of time spend is reexploring bits that you've already explored just to make sure you don't miss anything. Padded as fuck.

Because of jumping everything is a bit more vertical, which would be nice, if the dungeons weren't designed in a way that you think you found a new secret only to jump back to an area you've already been and can't get back the other direction. Instead of actual content it's more of a waste of fu--ing time.

Now the different arts and such are nice as you couldn't swap those in Dark Souls 3, but if you were to take 30 hours worth of equipment in Dark Souls 3 and compare it to 30 hours of equipment in Elden Ring, the amount of equipment you've found during this point is a fu--ing joke. Yes, you'll have more in Elden Ring, eventually, and this is a freaking replay using screenshots for maps and I doubt I'll hit a comparable amount until around 50 hours.

Because that's what modern gaming is now days, everything has to be padded as fuck. You have to do absolutely nothing and wander aimlessly because the develpers need to cast the widest net possible to make sure every game is great for everyone because that's where all the money is at. Wasting 20 fucking minutes running to x checkpoint before you actually get to do shit, or waste 45 minutes playing through the game only to lose and restart the entire thing all over again, or indie devs thinking they're clever by making you want to small your head into Deborah's Cliff to make a hole in order to progress, except these indie devs thinking they're clever make their dumb bullshit even more obscure than Castlevania 2 ever did because oftne times there's no way to get past these 2D exploration games except one path if you're missing the one item or you haven't found the one specific path you can now gain access to, you're going to spend absurd amounts of time just looking everywhere. Modern gaming is less about playing games and more about how much of a padded experience can I make to make it feel like the gamer is getting value.