air_show
elementary my dear baxter
I'm playing Elden Ring right now, which is a Soulsborne game, basically, but with a truly gigantic, enormous map. Like, so big, that the first castle in the game, Baby's First Castle, is more huge and sprawling than any endgame castle from any previous game in the series.
It's impressive, certainly. It also paralyzes me, for some reason. I've reached a point where I'm getting a little stuck in the game, having a hard time motivating myself to play simply because of the overwhelming size of the map and sheer amount of stuff to do within it.
And this isn't the first time this has happened to me. It happened before in Dragon Age Inquisition. At one point, I'm wandering a huge map, seeing the hundreds of icons for sidequests and content to collect, and I just felt prematurely exhausted. I also bounced off Outer Worlds after reaching the third planet or so and picking up so many sidequests every 20 feet I traveled that I became overwhelmed. I just couldn't decide where to start and where to stop. Even as far back as the Batman Arkham games I had a distinct preference for the tight, smartly designed map of Arkham Asylum over the more sprawling open design of Arkham City.
Is this a thing for anyone else? Is it an age thing?
One "exception" I can make note of is Red Dead Redemption 2, with the caveat that I haven't actually completed that game either. But something about the atmosphere of that game inspires in me an extremely leisurely pace that makes the slow, ponderous exploration more of a feature than a bug for my mind goblins. Even still I tend to put it down for months at a time after making only modest progress.
It's impressive, certainly. It also paralyzes me, for some reason. I've reached a point where I'm getting a little stuck in the game, having a hard time motivating myself to play simply because of the overwhelming size of the map and sheer amount of stuff to do within it.
And this isn't the first time this has happened to me. It happened before in Dragon Age Inquisition. At one point, I'm wandering a huge map, seeing the hundreds of icons for sidequests and content to collect, and I just felt prematurely exhausted. I also bounced off Outer Worlds after reaching the third planet or so and picking up so many sidequests every 20 feet I traveled that I became overwhelmed. I just couldn't decide where to start and where to stop. Even as far back as the Batman Arkham games I had a distinct preference for the tight, smartly designed map of Arkham Asylum over the more sprawling open design of Arkham City.
Is this a thing for anyone else? Is it an age thing?
One "exception" I can make note of is Red Dead Redemption 2, with the caveat that I haven't actually completed that game either. But something about the atmosphere of that game inspires in me an extremely leisurely pace that makes the slow, ponderous exploration more of a feature than a bug for my mind goblins. Even still I tend to put it down for months at a time after making only modest progress.