I really loved Divinity Original Sin II, but I've never finished it. At a certain point I lost momentum and afterwards the idea of trying to pick back up where I left off is just too daunting, and the idea of starting over again is even more daunting.
I find Elden Ring a bit frustrating because of the complete lack of any way to keep track of quests. I've resorted to using a notes app. Even then, I'm sure I've missed off finishing some of the earlier stuff from before I started taking notes.
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.
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.
This is my biggest issue with open world games I always forget what I’m doing
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