Mini-Fights

So I’ve Finally Played… God of War (2018).
And you won’t see a video titled this, because I stopped playing it. At the point where Kratos walks down a mountain with a head on his hip back to the main-hub, and I realized “there’s twenty more hours left isn’t there?”

Perhaps I’ll look up the cutscenes later, I did rather enjoy the game’s presentation. I understand why it’s often quoted, and was genuinely impressed by it’s fidelity that still looks absolutely gorgeous a generation later.

This isn’t a review of my time with God of War though, but instead, it’s about the main-reason it ultimately lost me. A reason that by no means is exclusive to God of War, in-fact, it’s been quite prevalent in video-games for decades…

You know how Youtubers like Mr. Beast will insert random explosions in their videos? Clearly for no reason other than viewer retention? There’s a similar thing that video-games do. Where during a pace breaker from combat like puzzle, exploration, platforming, 1-3 enemies appear to force you into combat… for about thirty seconds.

It’s like the opposite of MGS3’s ladder.

You're not trusted to so much as walk for three minutes without cutting someone in half. There’s so many cliche statements about players being blood thirsty psychopaths who’ll shut the game off a nano-second after their monkey brains have hinted at even a modicum of boredom - IE, not shooting, stabbing, or smothering someone - and it is a little bit true…

Because that’s what games have conditioned them to expect!

This is not merely a thing in mainstream action games. I adore Dragon Age: Origins but holy shit, even as a mage it was pissing me off how often caves and castles had some gremlin every five fucking feet. Doubly so as a Knight reading “Missed” as my sword swung past a basic thug.

That could maybe why this problem effects some games more than others? In Spec Ops, when it spams a rusher you can mow-down from a football field away, that’s exactly what happens. You point and click on an enemy for a second or two, where as that doesn’t happen nearly as much in a game like God of War or Dragon Age.

Killing a Revenant isn’t hard but it does require more effort and coordination than centering one’s screen for half a second, so when the game places one between puzzles after we’ve already killed them in full-encounters with 10+ enemies multiple times, the developer’s hand is about as subtle as a clown’s shoe. It’s not teaching the player new mechanics, designing a unique challenge, or adding immersion to the world, it’s jingling keys.

Is it God of War’s biggest problem? Not individually. But just like mini-games, it’s a small problem that occurs 1000x times more often than any boring bossfight or rock-climbing talk therapy session.

It’s such a simple line from an ancient Examined Life of Gaming video, but I always remember it. “The worst thing you can do is take your gameplay, and make the player tired of it.”