Next year I actually want more games willing to waste my time
One of the best things I did in a game this year was spend ten minutes riding an oxcart from one city to another in Dragon’s Dogma 2 because its fast travel system is so limited (intentionally) as to functionally not exist. The second best thing was turning off the wayfinding settings, quest log, and minimap in Dragon Age: The Veilguard so I could spend a little time getting lost in its cities.
Those experiences aren’t the norm when most games want to make sure I can fast travel, complete quests, and manage my inventory nearly without conscious thought. I love when games waste my time, just a little bit, and I hope that 2025 brings me more games that are slightly inconvenient.
I’m not here to say that accessibility settings are bad (they aren’t) or that easy modes are ruining games (they also aren’t), but I am one of those curmudgeons who thinks we’re better off on the whole without minimaps and I have a special fondness for the mundanity of manually organizing items in my array of storage chests in every crafting survival game.
The popular demand is that games should “respect the player’s time,” but anything can be taken too far: A game that’s 100% optimized for time respecting would automatically quit to desktop instead of letting me spend an hour doing menial daily quests. When games get so frictionless that clicking buttons solves all the problems for me, I check out. My live service game brain fog has conditioned me to click on those “new item” red dots in any interface without experiencing any satisfaction and now all my real joy comes from every little nod towards realism that breaks through that optimization malaise.
The best example in recent memory is the fantastic world map in Outward. There’s no player marker on it at all, so you have to navigate entirely by recognizing landmarks and learning your surroundings. Years later I still know the route from the starter city Cierzo to Berg through the Enmerkar Forest. Walking those roads by memory is one of the best feelings I may have ever had in a game. Sea of Thieves has a similar concept with its treasure maps that will give you a diagram of an island and an X to mark the spot but leave you to identify your surroundings.
I’m always thrilled when a game doesn’t give me a hand quest log entry for the loose ends of every single one of its mysteries and instead hands me a set of custom map markers and a place to jot down notes of my own. Procedurally generated murder mystery game Shadows of Doubt was particularly great at that. Sometimes clues and evidence are immediately obvious like fingerprints at a murder scene but other times I have to make a custom note on my conspiracy board noting down a name or address until I can find out where it fits into the big picture. The moment when I can finally draw a real piece of red string between my disparate jotted notes is more thrilling than a shootout with a perp.
NPC schedules in life sims are another favourite of mine. Knowing just where to intercept a character to deliver them a gift gives me a warm fuzzy feeling harkening back to the first time I ever kept a game journal tracking the residents of Clock Town in Majora’s Mask.
Much as I loved ’90s anime-themed Fields of Mistria this year I’ll admit I was a little bummed when I realized that I could walk into a store and buy supplies from the register even if the owner was out walking around town. I’m sure many other Stardew Valley players who’ve been spurned by ranch owner Marnie’s inattentiveness to her own store heaved a sigh of relief at the convenience that Mistria offered but I felt just a little let down that it was willing to suspend disbelief just so I wouldn’t have to come back later to buy a treat for my chickens.
Aside from the toggle-able wayfinding settings in The Veilguard, I was disappointed by some of its other systems that were hellbent on not letting me mess up or get even slightly confused. It often used popups on screen during cutscenes to explain to me how characters were feeling in the middle of a conversation where a character was telling me in dialogue how they were feeling. Really wish I could have toggled that off too.
Less egregious but also disappointing was its gifting system. In past Dragon Age games there were all sorts of gift items to give your companions—some with obvious recipients and others less so—but in The Veilguard there’s only one gift per team member to give and a quest log entry that won’t allow you to give it to the wrong person. I sort of missed having to look up a gift guide.
At the risk of getting really existential right at the end of the year, this may in part be a sort of emotional rebellion against the way AI is getting shoved into so many parts of our lives. I really don’t want Siri or Copilot or even my games to do all of the thinking and problem solving for me. I like walking around smelling the flowers without fast travel. I like that I never know where the hell Elliot enjoys hanging out in Pelican Town. I like a little well-tuned inconvenience in my hobby.
I hope next year, even as some studios continue shaving the rough edges off their action-RPG mush and AI further invades, that some games will still be willing to waste my time.
