Why Having Too Much Content Can Ruin a Good Game | Design Delve

I thought Donkey Kong 64 taught us this lesson years ago. Yet here we are still complaining about bloated games lol. Speaking of... you should do a design delve on that game JM8.

Dave the Diver was a good choice to examine since it’s objectively a great game and illustrates your argument (though I’d say the flaws are fairly minor). It would be easy to point out games that are artificially stretched out by corporate mandate (Ubisoft collect a thons) or tradition (Yakuza games -I enjoyed the content overload of Yakuza 0 but damn there were 500 more iterations on karaoke, fighting, and empire building?)

Personally I don’t have a lot of time for games, so I really enjoy games that are short but well made, or have content I can approach at my own pace. Stardew Valley is my favorite game ever, I’ve played over a thousand hours in it, but that’s over ten years or so (I can’t remember when I was released). Games that make it a chore to come back to don’t keep my interest. I don’t want to sit and figure out mechanics that are not core to the game because I won’t remember them and it just feels like a slog to relearn the controls, mechanics, and story beats. I’m sure some people love games that jam tons of content in, but it would have to be a game people want to be in for a long time. But I work 96 hours a week, have a family, and other things that need my attention and a game like Dave the Diver makes me not want to return to its world because I don’t know how to play it anymore.

I love the Nioh games because of the ridiculous amount of content and systems, but I think they are also what turn a lot of people off. Gotta strike the right balance.

Its not a game per se, but the Sim Settlements 2 mod for Fallout 4 is just too damn much. You do the first couple of chapters of the mod and everything is fine, but it has a third one which drops a whole new game into the existing game and it's just too much. Too much for a player, too much for a lot of gaming systems to handle, just excessive. It has a fair amount of options that allow for automization, thank the devs pointy little heads, but you still have quite a bit to do, which would be fine by itself, but there's this whole other game (the original one, remember?) you're playing and things start piling up. It's quite impressive work, really. And if you are a person who enjoys micro, hoo boy are YOU in for a treat. But I think I'll give it a pass if I dip back into F4 again in the future.

I gave up on Rogue Galaxy (an old PS2 JRPG) when they introduced a factory design mechanic to generate consumables. While you didn't go into it, the "too much content" issue also crops up with games with huge swathes of similar content. AC Odyssey does this somewhat, and it's a general issue with Open World games in general; Daggerfall also comes to mind. Sometimes you just want to finish the damn gzme.

A Crazy Frog reference, nice❤

Was that an Indeimaus reference?