I’ve recently found that big (mostly open world) games tend to overwhelm or even intimidate me. I’m a big fan of the Rockstar games and absolutely adored Breath of the Wild, but my playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom has been a bit rocky from the get-go.
As soon as the game let me explore all of its content and released me from the tutorial island, I was able to roam the lands of Hyrule freely as I once did in Breath of the Wild, but I’ve come to a sort of paralysis. I feel like there’s such an enormous amount of content to see that I’m constantly anxious to unintentionally skip content or to not make the most of my experience. I did not feel like this back in Breath of the Wild, and I’m not really sure why. I did, however, have this same sense of FOMO when I first played Skyrim. That game also made me feel like I was constantly missing stuff which left me kind of unsatisfied.
This is not a big problem and all of the games I listed are great games. I’m posting this because I unconciously took a two week break from ToTK in order to alleviate that feeling but when I came back to the game today and still felt the same, I thought of posting here and maybe hearing your opinions on this thing.
Have you ever felt the same in big open world games? Do you feel like this in more linear games with multiple endings? (I do) Do you think I’m an overthinker and should just rock on? Looking forward to your comments!
I thought I was alone with that feeling. I’m in exactly the same boat as you.
For me, it’s a tiny bit different, because I played BOTW shortly before my daughther was born in 2017. I still had time for games like that back in the day. Now I don’t only have a daughter, but a son as well.
When I grab the controller and start playing something time intensive like BOTW and now TOTK, I usually feel really guilty really quick, because there are so many other things to do, that in theory should have a higher priority.
Just do what I do. Split your time between family, work, house projects, errands, and play a little of each backlogged game you have. Get absolutely nothing in your life done by trying to do everything 24/7. This way you get the benefit of feeling like you have no free time while also having the benefit of getting burnt out and overstressed. It can’t backfire. 100% sustainable.
Help me.
Don’t forget taking so long a break between games that you completely forget what you’re supposed to be doing, and if the game offers no sort of recap/hand-holding quest system - you have to start from scratch.
At which point the daunting nature of that overwhelms you and you just sit there browsing your catalog for something new to play/continue until you’re 15 minutes past your allotted time - and you’re now even further behind.
Win/win all around.
For me, TotK has been great for forgetting what’s next. The whole game is chunked into small little tasks that string together. It’s rare that I’ve managed to set a goal and gone straight to it. It’s usually “warp to x in order to do y but now, z is on the way and it says to go to b. But b redirects me to do g,h, i, and j before I can fight my way to c. Aaaand whoops I just finished temple and I was just trying to deliver eggs to the shop keep.
That may not be to your taste, but I’m enjoying the happy accident moments of the game. I feel like a diagram of the quest flow would look similar to a technical diagram for the whole us postal system. Just play in the sandbox and have fun. You’ll eventually get where you’re going!
Right?!?
I’m trying to play Elden Ring, Last of Us Part I, Diablo IV, Stray, BOTW, SW: JFO, Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Spider-Man: Remastered, Hogwarts: Legacy, Atomic Heart, It Takes Two, Luigi’s Mansion 3, and more.
I’m not going to beat any of these before Starfield comes out, of which I will surely add to my catalog of “actively” playing games. I’m currently working on D4, but I did go back to BOTW briefly and get the third devine beast done, because my kids got me TOTK for Father’s Day, so I feel compelled to not sleep on it because I want them to play it with them.
I haven’t even finished Skyrim yet. How do people do it?
happened with me and new vegas. I did it in the spring of 2021 and did everything but the dlcs and the final confrontation at hoover damn.
Started Dead Money, hated it, and quit it and started old world blues. After this I was burnt out so I just stopped playing NV, and wanting to come back recently I tried to resume in the DLC.
I have no idea what the hell is going on so I have no idea if I’m going to continue where I left off or start the game over, only to miss the DLC content again when I inevitably get bored after the main game
i remember this overwhelming feeling when first playing Witcher 3. At some point I just said f it, ignored the thoughts and had a blast
The game would be better with 75% less of the random map markers. I find them hard to ignore even though they’re often not worth getting.
I’ve gotten to the point where if somebody tells me that a game is 100+ hours, I consider it a con. I don’t want to dedicate the next 3 months of my gaming to a single game. And in my 20+ years of gaming, I’ve learned that no game truly has 100+ hours of content. Rather, they have 20 - 40 hours of content, stretched over the remainder of the filler in bullshit ways. These days, I’m ecstatic when I find a game like Guardians of the Galaxy. Tight, well written 20 hour experience that know what it is an what it wants to be. One and done. Love that game.
I find that I totally switch off as soon a game starts to feel like a big checklist of “Content” to check off. For open world games, this is usually as soon as there’s a fast travel feature. For me, it’s not that I’m overwhelmed, I just feel that this framework makes for an incredibly samey experience.
I never fast travel in games that allow me the option not to. I find them infinitely more engaging that way. Skyrim got it just right with their well-balanced mounts.
I played through most of Horizon: Zero Dawn before I realised it even had fast travel. It was that moment that I realised I’d been enjoying traversing through the game world even if it meant everything took a lot more time. Since then I’ve used fast travel less in games.
@joelfromaus @Stalinwolf spiderman was the one game where I refused to use fast travel I didnt care how far I had to go web swinging was just that fun
@joelfromaus This reminds me of my first time with Skyrim where I was buying huge quantities of food, potions and other supplies as “preparation” for travelling to other places.
The best example I remember was the first time I had to travel to Riften and I was going through all these supplies on my horse and it was so fun!
I came to this conclusion after asking myself how would I be doing it in the time period set by the game.
TOTAL IMMERSION!!😍
I think I was 16 back then.
I liked the silt striders in Morrowind. You had to pay them to fast travel to a certain destination. That seems realistic to me and doesn’t break immersion.
Morrowind’s fast travel was the best execution ever, yeah. It’s like, paying for a journey as you would in real life, often to new locations entirely, rather than magically teleporting to the middle of a city.
Final Fantasy XI (an MMO) has something that feels spiritually similar to me, in that you can ride airships and ferries to different cities; but it’s real time, and some people use ferry journeys for fishing for example.
I often feel the same about more mainstream open world games; though I’ve been happily surprised by Insomniac’s Spider-Man game so far. Things don’t overstay their welcome, story progress isn’t gated behind a bunch of generic side content, and the side content I’ve experienced so far has – beyond being optional – still had a flair for the unique. Hope more AAA devs who insist on the open world formula learn something from them.
Absolutely. I hear Witcher 3 is good, and I believe that it is… but after playing it for 5 hours and feeling like I got nowhere, the next day I just genuinely didn’t feel like playing it as I’d felt very little character progress, and zero story progression.
Games are continuing to market towards younger people - especially kids - with spare time to burn. They consider their 120+ hour playtime to be a selling point, but at this point that’s the reason I avoid them. If I’m going to play for an hour or so at the end of my day, I want that game to feel like it meant something.
I prefer my games to feel dense, deliberately crafted, minimal sawdust padding. I’ve enjoyed open-world in the past but the every-increasing demand for bigger and bigger maps means that most open-world games are very empty and mostly traversal. Linear worlds aren’t bad - they can be crafted much more deliberately and with far more content because you can predict when the player will see them.
Open worlds that craft everything in it deliberately are very rare, and still rely on constraints to limit the player into somewhat-linear paths. Green Hell needs a grappling hook to leave the first basin, Fallout: New Vegas fills the map north of Tutorial Town with extreme enemies to funnel new players south-east.
And what really gets me is that with microtransactions, the number of games that make themselves so big and so slow that they’re boring on purpose, so that they can charge you to skip them! Imagine making a game so fucking awful that anybody buying a game will then buy the ability to not play it because 80% of the game is sawdust: timers, resource farming, daily rotations, exp grinding. Fucking nightmare, honestly.
