As many others here, I have accumulated a bit of a “backlog” over the years, consisting of games that were cheap to pick up on sale, games that I have/had general interest in, or new game releases. Whenever a new game came out, I felt kind of urged to play the new game, drop everything else, and quite often end up not picking up the “abandoned” games again.
Sometime last year, when money was a bit tight, I just started playing games I already had instead of worrying about keeping up with new game releases, and it’s been really liberating. I finished Mass Effect 1-3 over a combined ~100h, I platinumed Sekiro, Bloodborne, and started Dark Souls and Elden Ring, I found my love for Frostpunk and have been blasting that for the past months. I’m just having a great time overall.
I think a good help in that regard was a comment I read on the rexxit equivalent of this community where they proposed to see games as countries and giving them a shot is like coming there to visit: visiting a country is cool, but you don’t have stay there indefinitely to have a good time; it’s always fine to leave the country and go visit another, and not seeing everything the country has to offer does not worsen your experience there.
I don’t stress about picking something back up again after having a good time with it and looking for something else to play. I don’t stress about new releases (too much - Diablo 4 is currently pretty difficult to stay away from for me lol) because the game won’t vanish magically if I check it out a week later, several months later, a year later. I just play whatever I feel like playing and whenever I feel like playing it. If I end up deleting something off the console - that’s fine. There’s always something else to play.
Not really sure what my point is, really, but felt inclined to get the ball rolling in this community. I like the idea of being a patient gamer a lot, and it’s helped me enjoy games a lot more than I used to, so I wanted to contribute too and be a more active part of the “movement”.
Thanks to everyone who’s part of the community and who’s been promoting good vibes!
I totally agree with you. The striving to complete every game often wrecks my desire to actually want to play them.
I am working on being better about dropping in trying it out and then dipping when it stops being fun, but I’ve got a lot of training in doing the opposite. It’s a really hard thing.
I’d be more interested in reading about the games you played and what you thought of them.
Okay, so just a heads-up: this came out to be a lot longer and thorough than I had initially expected lol. Feel free to not read it all.
Well, let’s take the couple games I mention in my post, if you’re interested:
ME1-3: The first time I had played the game was back on the 360 when I was just a little kid trying out random games. I was too spooked by the beginning of the Eden Prime mission where the Husks jump off those spikes and chase you around lol. On a whim, I gave the first game another try a couple months ago and didn’t expect too much. The beginning was a little rough to get into, but ultimately, the lore drew me in a lot. Sure, even with the Legendary Edition and its additions the game is a little clunky at times and shows its age, but it was perfectly serviceable and a lot of fun to to play through. I enjoyed the dialogues and voice acting, the choices felt meaningful and had quite a bit of an impact on ME2-3, and the banter with your crewmates was amazing. There were bits and pieces that were just ok-ish, like driving around the Mako, and the rather repetitive sidequests, but the main story kept me interested.
ME2 is the real deal. Everything good about the first game has been expanded upon and made even better. The interactions with your crewmates have been made even better and are the best in the series through their loyalty missions, the story was - albeit sometimes a little “willy-nilly” - even better and felt meaningful, and the combat was superb. Enjoyed my time there a lot, and the final mission was just chef’s kiss.
By the time I hit ME3, I was slowly starting to get a little worn out by the games, but I kept going. The story was amazing again, the combat was still good but didn’t blow me away as much as it did in the second game, the interactions with the crewmates felt nice, and it was cool to see so many familiar faces again. The ending was… not as bad as everyone makes it out to be imho. It was a little abrupt, I’ll give it that, but it was nowhere near catastrophic as people claimed it to be. It was serviceable and the ending I chose felt like a good canon ending to Shepard’s story.
That’s all I can think of right now - it’s a couple months ago that I played the games, so I don’t have it really fresh in my mind.
Bloodborne: Like many others, I put off this games for the longest time and came back to it years later. First tried it sometime around 2018 when it was a free PS Plus game and tried it again last year. The initial difficulty scared me off especially considering that it’s been the first soulslike I’ve played up until that point.
It was really difficult to get a hang of things, and a couple of times I was about to drop the game altogether due to frustration and impatience. Ultimately, the mechanics, overall theme and atmosphere, and its open-ended story and lore are what pulled me back in constantly. I had a couple of months where I was obsessed with the game and couldn’t think about anything else: listened to the Paleblood Hunt probably 3-4 times (it’s on Spotify and is amazing), I platinumed it, started several other characters, and had a blast.
Sekiro: After finishing Bloodborne, I felt confident and gave Sekiro another shot which I had also put away for a couple of years lol. The learning curve was brutal and getting used to the rhythm of the fights was quite difficult. I ended up platinuming the game in the end via 3 separate playthroughs and, once again, enjoyed the game a lot. I feel like the parrying mechanic actually made me dislike other games for some time because they didn’t feel as weighty and meaningful as Sekiro: Sekiro has a certain rhythm, a dance even, to its combat and is really rewarding when you get a hang of it. The final boss might be the best I ever had the pleasure of experiencing - they still kicked my ass a bunch of times lol.
Overall, Sekiro just might be my favourite game of all time. I enjoy the story a lot, the combat feels really good, the score is superb as is the case with most FromSoft games… I could go on an on. :)
Frostpunk: It was actually pretty random that I gave it a try. I saw footage of a couple years ago in videos and didn’t pay too much attention to it because I’m usually not some who’s interested in city builders. Boy, was I wrong about Frostpunk. I found it on PS Plus Extra, gave it a go and couldn’t stop playing for a couple hours straight.
The loop of identifying a problem and thinking of a short-term and long-term solution is key here. The game presents problems naturally and introduces them over time instead of off-loading them immediately. Even though the game is quite stressful at times, it is very much manageable and is ultimately what I enjoy about RTS, which I cannot play because they’re too stressful and present too many problems and unknown variables all at once. I finished all the main scenarios in normal difficulty and am currently playing The Last Autumn DLC, which puts a nice spin of things with its different mechanics and challenges. Really good game overall.
Completely agree with your comments.
Gamer are a form of entertainment, we don’t have to force them. Enjoy them when you can and leave them when you can’t. You can always come back to a game you stopped playing, and even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, just move on to the next one.
I guess it is kind of implied that you have to finish a game once you start playing it. At least this was the case for me because I felt like I didn’t get my money’s worth out of it if I didn’t finish it. But you’re completely right.
With age, I am realizing that time is just as important a commodity as money, if not much more.
So, if I am not enjoying a 50 hours games, dropping it at 10 hours is much better than spending 40 more hours of non-enjoyment. Previously, I would try to finish it, no matter how much I didn’t like it, but now it feels like sunk-cost fallacy. Throwing away good money after bad (except time, instead of money)
The only games I tend to buy on release day are Nintendo games, because they hardly ever drop in price, but it often enough takes a year+ for me to get to them anyway.
I even have a beefy PC, but the recent shitstorm of horrible PC ports really does not give me any confidence or reason to play most of those games day one. I started playing RDR2 a couple of months ago for the first time, and I’m having a blast, most of the bugs fixed, besides some occasional stutter that happens on every PC, and most importantly, the game only cost me third of its original price.
Not caring about most GaaS games, the current FOTM game and FOMO in general has been really liberating, I can choose whatever I want to play, whenever I want to, instead of twitch dictating me what I’m supposed to be enjoying. I also recently bought a PSP to play all of the cool spinoff games because I never had one as a kid, and most of the games are super cheap to get, unlike the DS, so I’m reliving my childhood a bit as well.
I have zero stress about new releases, all the hype is lost on me.
I find that I keep returning to games because they are fun, engaging, or simply because they allow me to abstract the reality away. That is why I keep returning to Torchlight, Portal, Half-Life, Doom, Soma, Valley and so many others. They are old, the graphics are dated, but they feel like home.
I’ve bought Skyrim 10 years after the original release. I guess it will be a while until I buy Diablo 4 :-)
Do you watch any gaming-related media, like YouTube or Twitch? It’s quite an accomplishment to not get sucked into the hype of a new release - it used to be for me, anyway. Recent bad game releases have made me a little more sceptical.
Comfort games are the best. You just always know you’ll enjoy them - no matter what. And again, it doesn’t feel bad at all to drop them on a whim if you’ve had your fill.
I was glued to the screen for the whole “E3 but not-E3” week we just had. Watched all the events and some analysis videos of all the trailers we saw. Still have no desire to ever spend more than $15 on a video game.
