I remember booting up Skyrim for the first time, and being let loose in the world. I had recreated my wood elf archer character from the previous game Oblivion and ended up on a quest that had me investigating a ruined tower in the middle of a blizzard. Dark shapes moved behind the snow curtains, agitated shouts sounded through the howling wind, and I lay crouched behind a rock, bow drawstring tight and ready to launch an arrow into the face of the first well-wisher that came my way.
It was an immersive experience, one that allowed you to hunker down and wrap yourself in its world. The mountains and valleys had a language of their own, the people felt like they belonged to their environments, and the institutions felt as old as the land itself. All elements in harmony. That is, until you come along. The bumbling Dragonborn robbing people blind under their noses, unleashing dragon shouts on unsuspecting townsfolk when the guards’ backs are turned and making a general nuisance. Sure, it’s great that the game allows you to do all of the above, and that kind of freedom is why Skyrim has proven such a popular game with the modding scene. But it lacks any sense of consequence for the exalted Dragonborn. You can curry favour with just about anybody important in the land with barely any effort, you can rise through the ranks of various guilds and schools, and pretty much take over them entirely, all through doing some mildly dangerous fetch quests. At some point of time, it starts feeling like everyone in the game is playing dumb just to play down to your level, and when that realisation kicks in, it may be time to consider that this relationship is largely based around sycophancy.
The same goes for Assassin’s Creed. I had love for the first two games. But by the time I got around to Brotherhood – considered by many to be a high point in the series – I’d already grown weary of the formula, and the gameplay itself was barely something that you felt you had to master, because of how simplistic the systems were. Maybe you could spend a little extra time and add some extra panache to how you took down enemies, but that was it.
Not that there’s anything wrong with flattery in itself. A lot of people get bombarded with negativity in their daily lives, and it’s a welcome change to come to a world where many worship the ground you walk on. The problem is, when you make the difficulty curve so gradual as to be almost nonexistent, you have to figure out other ways to gate your players' experience. And to that purpose, many developers turn to grind.
Now, grind isn’t something I can handle any more as a player. With free time continually dwindling as one grows older, I don’t want the game time I have to be spent farming for items or experience because the game doesn’t have enough handcrafted content for me. It’s one thing when the modularity is the game itself, like in Minecraft, but another when it’s a tacked-on system to artificially stretch the game length.
This puts a big wedge between me and the whole emergent gaming experience. It was a blast to explore the systems in big games like GTA and see how just how far you could work the systems against each other, and how much further you had to push till you broke them in some way. But I just don’t have the time for that anymore. How then, to get by as someone who’s not quite ready to close the curtains on gaming?
Turns out that the answer is to bring back skill-based systems into the spotlight. When I’m learning how to parry and riposte in Dark Souls, my effectiveness isn’t determined by my player character level or how good my weapon is. It’s just basic pattern recognition and hand-eye coordination. My time spent dicing trash mobs and getting better at swordplay isn’t reflected by a bump in a stat sheet, I feel myself improving as a player. Today, it’s quite the refreshing change when a game doesn’t act all condescending, and provides you a fair but firm challenge. So maybe it’s better to find a few games that do this and stick with them, rather than dipping my toes into a bunch of similarly shallow pools, no matter how pretty the reflections are.