i love the concept of the forever game i just think that aaa devs are uniquely poorly suited to actually making one. or rather: the aaa conception of a forever game involves players constantly paying for it, one way or another, and that totally hamstrings their ability to actually lay out a game that is appealing and enjoyable in itself, in favor of trying to MIND HACK players with MICRO TRANSACTIONS or w/e
i'm reminded of the tevis thompson thing about desert golf? and my own habit of playing gplanarity. these are extremely simple games (puzzle games, basically) that are just... do you enjoy the experience of this game? if yes, keep playing and coming back to it forever; if no, then don't play it. and that's not really... i mean i play a reasonable amount of fancy big-budget games and it never actually feels like that's a design goal? it's either to deliver a shot of linear content (potentially dragged out forever by endless grind to pad the game) or to try to get players hooked with various dubious pseudo-gambling mechanics
like the reason i come back to minecraft (or sometimes terraria or starbound etc) is because it's open-ended enough that i can just do what i want? and that's... not a thing you can do in games. like everybody's been talking about breath of the wild, big open world, free adventure, etc, except... it's still all hardcrafted and designed for players to complete tasks set out for them by the devs. yr incapable of doing what you want b/c there's no mechanical support for wandering off and doing yr own thing. all you can do is collect things that the game has decided are collectable and kill things the game has decided are killable. and once being puppeted around by the dev's strings gets boring then the game is over.
i'm reminded of the tevis thompson thing about desert golf? and my own habit of playing gplanarity. these are extremely simple games (puzzle games, basically) that are just... do you enjoy the experience of this game? if yes, keep playing and coming back to it forever; if no, then don't play it. and that's not really... i mean i play a reasonable amount of fancy big-budget games and it never actually feels like that's a design goal? it's either to deliver a shot of linear content (potentially dragged out forever by endless grind to pad the game) or to try to get players hooked with various dubious pseudo-gambling mechanics
like the reason i come back to minecraft (or sometimes terraria or starbound etc) is because it's open-ended enough that i can just do what i want? and that's... not a thing you can do in games. like everybody's been talking about breath of the wild, big open world, free adventure, etc, except... it's still all hardcrafted and designed for players to complete tasks set out for them by the devs. yr incapable of doing what you want b/c there's no mechanical support for wandering off and doing yr own thing. all you can do is collect things that the game has decided are collectable and kill things the game has decided are killable. and once being puppeted around by the dev's strings gets boring then the game is over.
