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.