I remember a time when I used to get excited upon hearing a game developer boast about how many hours their game would take to finish. Something like “we’ve crammed over 200 hours into this thing” used to sound awesome! And, rarely, it was. I remember being obsessed with the likes of Skyrim or Dragon Age: Inquisition when they were fresh and new. I wonder though: how much of that time was actually spent having fun? Same goes for any and all online mulitplayer games with battle passes and other stuff meant to keep you in the game for as long as possible. Is chipping away at these things actually fun, or are we getting fooled into conflating “fun” with “progress” and rewards? Does time really equal fun when it comes to games?

As much of a meme as it’s become, Skyrim might be one of the few examples of this sort of ethos actually translating into actual fun. There’s just so much to find and see within vanilla Skyrim that it really was fun just getting lost in it for hours at a time. That feeling certainly diminished as the game aged and became less novel, but it was (and still is to an extent) there nonetheless. Although, I don’t think Skyrim was really ever made with the intent of pulling players along as long as possible. Rather, it’s the sort of game where the makers built this incredible little world, filled it with cool stuff, and just put it all in front of player to do with as they wished.

In contrast, we have the likes of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Destiny and now Starfield. All of these games offer different kinds of experiences, but, where playing Skyrim feels fun and natural, these games all feel like they’re trying to force some extra game time in one way or another. With Dragon Age: Inquisition, the issue is its world. If it had just been allowed to be a mostly-linear, story-driven experience like the previous two games were, I don’t think it would have wound up being as much of a black sheep. There are so many occasions in this game where we have to put our story on hold to go out and do time-waster missions in the field that it’s a wonder that most players didn’t get fed-up halfway through.

Seriously! I get that BioWare made this big ‘ol world and needed to do something with it, but what they did with it wasn’t “fun;” it was just frustrating. I’m also certain that they were trying to pad out the mainstory runtime so as to hit some impressive-sounding number for the back of the box. Like yeah, 80-100 hours sounds great and all, but only until you realize that most of that time is just you trying to wade through a bunch of busywork. I really hope that this kind of thing doesn’t define the Dragon Age: Dreadwolf experience too.

Then there’s Destiny and all the other battle pass-pushing multiplayer games out there. Do we serisously need this? Again, this might just be my old gamer brain talking, but I can’t but compare these games to the likes of Halo 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the original one). Instead of having to keep up with seasonal passes (or worry about missing out), all the unlockables were locked behind your lifetime career in the game.

Sure there was stuff based on total time spent, but there were also plenty of specific challenges to go after for the unlockables of your choice. The point is that you could take it all on at your leisure, and the games had to be that much better in order to maintain their player counts rather than pulling people along with constanstly-renewed FOMO. I was actually tempted to separate Destiny from other modern multiplayer games, but it does all the same things now, but requires even more from players by asking them to grind everything in the game rather than just the multiplayer. Even Destiny 1 did this (minus the battle pass at least).

Let’s close out by going back to Bethesda really quick and looking at Starfield. There are two prime complaints with this one: it’s glitchy and it’s boring. In both cases, I feel like its a case of the developer becoming more and more complacent over the years. I mean, it’s no secret that the modding has been key to developing fixes to Bethesda games ever since Skyrim released, and it seems like they just got too comfortable letting them take on that load. As for the boring part, I have the impression that they fell into the same trap that BioWare did with Dragon Age Inquisition: they felt like they had to have more. More worlds. More stuff. More everything.

They’ve sort of had this problem with all their releases after Skyrim, but it’s really come to the fore in Starfield. Bethesda forced scale, relied heavily on procedural generation to achieve it, and the result are potentially hundreds of places to visit that have absolutely nothing on them. Worse than that, it seems that they were banking entirely on being big to be good. There is a noticeable lack of interesting quests, questlines and characters in comparison to their previous works. This might not be chasing grind in the same way that our other examples are, but it is trying to pull players along with scale and the result also seems to be missing the fun factor that Skyrim has.

Outright trying to be big or lengthy just for the sake for it just never seems to work out. Far better to make something fun first and then trying to offer as much of that as possible before it collapses in on itself, don’t you think?

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What do you think of grind? Can it work or does it always take away from the experience for you?

Image from the Destiny 2: Beyond Light gameplay trailer