Have you ever played so many games, but never really made progress in any of them? That pretty much describes the past few months for me. Aside from grinding away in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (and never really feeling like I get anywhere) I have been playing a wide, wide variety of titles. Since last month saw the inclusion of EA Play into Game Pass Ultimate, I’ve played through Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and tinkered around with the likes of Battlefield V and Need for Speed Heat. I’ve also played bits and pieces of games like Dragon Quest XI, Little Nightmares, The Touryst, Dirt 5, Tales of Vesperia, and so on and so forth till the end of time.
Granted, I never really seem to finish any of these games. They’re barely more than distractions that hold my attention for a few minutes before I quit out and either boot up something else or look blankly around the room for something else to do. Gaming has lost a bit of its appeal recently.
There could be many factors, but I’m leaning heavily into the “end of the generation” blues. When you’re as heavy of a gamer as I am, there’s a point at the end of a gaming generation when I just can’t be bothered with anything. All of the great games for that generation have released, and the chances are pretty good that if it was something I was interested in, then I’ve played it. Same with sales. The game sales even start to suck, because again, if I was even remotely interested in a particular game, by this point in the generation, I either own it already or have played it by some other means.
New generations used to be exciting. In the past, it meant that games that rarely saw a price drop at retail (like a Gamestop) would finally dip to that magic price point. It used to $20. Twenty bucks was impulse purchase territory. But that was before Microsoft and Sony started having insane discounts on their digital stores. Now you can regularly get games in that price range, sometimes less than a year after they release. They’ve taken away that wonderful experience of walking into a store with forty or fifty bucks and walking out with five or six games that you’ve been waiting to play.
Microsoft’s approach to the cross-gen was going to lack excitement, due to the fact that most of the next gen games would have previous generation counterparts (or more accurately, most of the current gen games would have next gen upgrades). Add to this the fact that even finding a new console, whether it’s a PS5 or an Xbox Series X/S is practically impossible, and it’s leaving gamers like me in a bit of a limbo, bored by existing games and unable to play new ones.
As such, my interest in gaming has waned quite a bit lately. I can’t seem to stick with anything long enough to finish it, and the idea of having so many unfinished games just kinda kills the mood.
The interesting thing is, I was able to stick with Jedi Fallen Order long enough to see it through to its conclusion, and can’t help but wonder if it’s not so much that I’m bored with gaming, but that gaming hasn’t really offered me anything that I can really get invested in. I’ve put about 65 hours into Assassin’s Creed Valhalla so far, because I think it scratches a certain itch. I’ve also put a hefty amount of races into Dirt 5. I’m finding that the games that I can play a few minutes at a time are the ones that are keeping my attention. Games like the Yakuza series, which I have been trying desperately to remain interested in, can have cutscenes that stretch on far longer than I have the attention span for. Since I’m talking about Yakuza, I’ll also chip in that Yakuza 0 has probably one of the most boring fucking stories I have ever seen in a video game. Seriously. There’s going to be a rant-astic about that one, I can feel it.
It’s clear I need some kind of motivation to complete some of these games so I can get them off of my hard drive, so there may be another Backlog Bingo or something in the works. I apparently need to make a game out of playing games.
As we’re heading into the thickest part of winter, it might not be a bad idea. We’ll see what happens.
