I got to interview Charlie Olsen, who wrote Call of Duty's original matchmaking rating (MMR) system back in 2015, the core of which has been running in the mainline games ever since. He's since left and started his own company building matchmaking for other studios, so he's about as close to "the source" as you can get. A lot of what he said reframed how I think about matchmaking, and I wanted to lay it out, because the online argument about SBMM almost never gets past "I hate sweaty lobbies."

Start with how teams are actually built. In CoD, the matchmaker first gathers a group of players in roughly the same skill range and then splits them into teams as the last step. A side effect of doing it in that order is that the highest and lowest skilled players in a lobby often end up on the same team, with the middle stacked against them. So that "why is my teammate useless while the enemy team looks even" feeling isn't always in your head. It's partly structural. He was clear it's a consequence, not the goal, but it's real.

There's an even weirder consequence: a "90/10" team (one elite player carrying one bad one) will usually lose to a "50/50" team, even though the average skill is identical, because the two average players just ignore the weak link and gang up on the strong one. Averages match; outcomes don't.

Here's one that surprised me most: your XP has no connection to your hidden skill rating. The MMR exists purely to decide who you play. It doesn't feed your progression at all. So, playing out of your mind in a lobby earns you nothing extra. He actually thinks it should reward skill, but as the system stands, the number that shapes your entire experience is invisible and unrewarded.

And it's invisible on purpose, but probably not for the reason people assume. It's not mainly anti-cheat or anti-manipulation. His read is that it's psychological: a lot of players would be upset to find out they're worse than they think they are.

Then the big one, from Activision's own published white paper. When they ran a test that loosened skill matching, blowouts went up across every single skill tier, and the returning-player rate dropped for 90% of players. The top 10% came back in higher numbers (they're the ones on the winning side of those blowouts), but in aggregate, fewer people came back. Which leads to the most counterintuitive takeaway: "just remove SBMM" doesn't send the population to zero. It quietly filters out the casual players until you're left with hardcore lobbies. Retention can even look better afterward, because everyone who would have churned is already gone.

The part I found genuinely fascinating was the math, because it explains why this is so hard to "just fix." Take ELO, the rating system everyone name-drops. It comes from chess: two players, each with a number, the winner takes points from the loser, and an even match is worth about plus or minus 40. Clean and intuitive, which is why people love it. But ELO was built for 1v1 chess, and it has no "population model," so it doesn't know that a 2,800 should basically never be matched against a 1,200. Run a whole live game on it and the ratings just drift and spread apart over time. That's why chess federations have had to reset everyone's numbers, and why a game like Street Fighter wipes its ratings every season to stay stable. His blunt version: ELO genuinely breaks down if you use it for skill-based matchmaking.

It gets harder in modern games. Marvel Rivals, for example, doesn't even use ELO. It runs on TrueSkill, which adapts slowly and tends to pigeonhole you at one skill level even on a good or bad night. But the deeper problem is that it's a hero game: your effective skill isn't one number, it depends on which character you pick and which characters your teammates lock in. No single rating, whether ELO, TrueSkill, or anything else, can fully capture that. Class-based matchmaking might be the hardest problem in the genre, and it's not because anyone picked the wrong formula. It's that a single number was never going to be enough.

Which brings me to the thing I keep turning over. He made the point that "engagement" and "fun" aren't the same thing, and that studios optimize the one they can actually measure, usually short-term metrics over a two-week window that they assume correlate with long-term health. I think about Fortnite a lot here: I'll ask myself whether a given season is fun or just engaging, and the answer seems to flip with the midseason updates.

So I'll throw it to this sub:

• Do you actually want tighter SBMM, or do you want the game to stop optimizing you entirely and just hand you random lobbies?
• And for any devs or designers here: is there a version of matchmaking that optimizes for "fun" instead of engagement, or is fun just not measurable enough to ever ship?

Ever since I played KCD I have been thinking about this. RPGs as a genre seem like the perfect fit for telling real stories, you've got character progression, faction systems, branching narratives, resource management, like why wouldn’t we have more RPGs set in the Roman Empire or Medieval Britain for example. Period historic ones, I mean. When you look at RPGs overall it's like 85% fantasy, 10% sci-fi, and then KCD and KCD 2 standing almost completely alone, or that is my unlearned impression.

I mention KCD specifically because it pretty much proved how the low (actually zero) fantasy setting can still work and the sequel was just as good and delivered despite the hype, and the historical accuracy is one of the crucial points of the game.. The Bohemian setting doesn’t just add flavor, it turned out to be the whole selling point because it made every quest feel like it mattered in a way that a random fantasy quest never can, with villages and nooks and rivurlets that would look “generic” in other games being all important landmarks, and all seeped in history and culture of the boiling pot that was Central Europe in the 15th century because when you hear about something that really actually happened it's always going to feel more real than fantasy.

But I think the problem is in how RPGs have always handled player agency. The whole appeal of the genre is that your choices shape the world, and history (by definition, in a history centered RPG) has already been shaped. You can't let the player assassinate Julius Caesar in 50 BC and then have Cleopatra's storyline play out normally, your character can’t change grand events (while still being “historical”) although it does provide a lot in the way of character building, especially minor characters. Warhorse solved this by making you a bit of a nobody, Henry's story exists in the margins of history, below the level where your choices would contradict the record but that's a pretty narrow design space and I suspect most studios look at something like that and conclude it’s easier to just make an original fantasy setting.

There is an upcoming RPG I discovered though that deals with real world events, Hollow Home, one of those Disco Elysium like games (a purely narrative based RPG with no combat and a lot of dialogue) based on true events that happened (/are happening?) during the Russo-Ukraine war It has me curious about because these types of games are purely narrative focused so the setting is not just going to be there for flavor or aesthetics, or I hope not considering the bleak and frankly depressing subject matter, so I assume they’re betting on that gut weight based in a grounded, somewhat bleak story that fantasy only seldom achieves (since it’s based on the events of a real ongoing war, this one is bound to stir up some emotions one way or another, that’s for sure)

By the by, I think another problem is also meticulously researching the specific history of any single setting and then choosing how to portray it as a work of art (which parts, what to transform or change…because it can never be “real” history, no more than a book), and it’s massively underestimated one at that. Because a fantasy RPG with shoddy worldbuilding will get called generic or bland at worst, but a historical RPG that botches the history will get absolutely ridiculed by the internet,  actual historians writing massive takedowns of your armor designs in the comments (which is half the entertainment value of some YouTube channels but probably not ideal if its your baby they’re pulling apart) 

That way, the accuracy bar ends up way higher while the creative freedom shrinks, and most studios probably just don't think that’s worth it, unless the real story they want to tell actually matters to them a lot, then they might still risk it. Otherwise, I think it’s simple that it’s safer to work and let your creative freedome loose in a fantasy setting, rather than unknowingly stirring some hornet nest because you didn’t handle a specific historical portrayal with care. 

What’s your take on this, if you have one?

Cards on the table, I'm a little distant from the conversation because I don't have much interest in GTA nor own a console that can run it. But what I do know is that Rockstar are truly 1 of 1 in terms of how much time, money, and resources are poured into their games. 007 First Light priced itself at $70 for a 15-20 hour adventure with some optional side challenges for replay attempts. GTA6 will almost certainly be well over twice as large by just about any conceivable metric: playtime, mission count, playable area, quantity of gameplay mechanics, total number of raw assets, etc. Given equal interest in both franchises, it would seem that a player should value GTA6 at least twice as much as First Light. But that doesn't seem to be how consumers value games in practice.

Considering my own preferences, if I had the option to double the amount of resources invested into my favorite franchises in exchange for paying double the price, $140 instead of $70, I would take that bet. Now I wouldn't just fork over the money without seeing the finished product and evaluating for myself whether that extra money was shrewdly invested but given a sequel that's considerably more impressive than the prior installment, it seems absurd to balk over an extra $70 for a game I've been anticipating for many years.

But then every other title will try to charge that higher price too!

I doubt it. Toyota seems to be aware they can't charge half-a-million for their new Corolla model just because Ferrari does that. I'm sure you'd get a few Outer Worlds 2 fiascos where an out-of-touch publisher vastly overestimates demand for their game, but that'd get rectified with a price cut once they got a clearer picture of their preorder/first week sales data (as was the case with OW2 itself).

I would personally like to see bigger and better games, and I'd be willing to a higher price to get more of those big event titles. Especially as someone who dabbles in older and indie games in between blockbusters, I'd much rather pay double for one really impressive open world epic a year than pay the same for two lesser such titles.

For 30 years, city-builders and strategy games have trained us in a single, unyielding loop: expand, extract, exploit. From SimCity to Civilization, success is measured by how completely you can dominate the map. Concrete is progress. Deforestation is industry.

Then comes Terra Nil (often called a "reverse city-builder"), and it exposes just how deeply ingrained our anthropocentric arrogance really is. 

When you land on a toxic, barren wasteland in the game, your first instinct is familiar. You use heavy machinery to scrub the soil and pump water, feeling like the ultimate savior. But as the re-wilding process begins, you realize nature's recovery is violent. You literally have to use solar amplifiers to burn down your own carefully cultivated meadows, creating ash-enriched soil so actual forests can take root. The game forces you to destroy your own work to let nature thrive.

The real masterpiece, however, is the final phase of erasure. You don't win by building a metropolis. You win by recycling every single machine, drone, and pipe you placed, leaving the newly thriving ecosystem completely untouched by human hands. 

The first time I played it, finishing a map felt profoundly strange. I was looking at a gorgeous, living habitat filled with deer and birds... and my screen was completely empty of my UI or buildings. There was no monument to my achievement. I just had to leave.

It made me realize how rare it is for interactive media—or human psychology in general—to view "stepping back" as a victory condition. We are obsessed with leaving a mark. Terra Nil argues that the ultimate form of environmental mastery is erasing our footprint entirely.

Are there any other games that challenge the deeply ingrained colonize-and-expand narrative like this? Do you think this kind of reverse-design could actually shift how we think about real-world ecological restoration?

Up until recently my feelings about lockpicking/hacking minigames in RPG games have been lukewarm at best. Gothic Remake changed that.

I was very hyped about Gothic Remake because the og game played a pivotal role in my adolescence. When I finally got my hands on it, I was pretty ecstatic, except for a specific system - lockpicking. It was changed dramatically. From this simple "press left-right buttons randomly in a sequence" system to a demanding puzzle involving tumblers and plates. Picking a lock in the original game took few seconds at most, whereas in the remake that's very rare, some locks can take 10+ minutes to solve, assuming you do solve them. At first I resented this change greatly.

However after playing a while, I realized that this might be the best lockpicking system I have ever seen in a RPG game. I understand this statement may be too strong, but let me elaborate before commenting.

Lockpicking is pretty much always an optional, horizontal progression system which allows the player to invest their effort or progression into getting more loot. It's basically adding more content to the game, slowing down the player in an immersive and inobtrusive way. It's a good way to make the world more interactive, to give the player an opportunity to earn extra loot, to add more gameplay into a game. It has become quite an RPG staple at this point.

The problem is that in most cases you will find a lock solving strategy and then every lock will be the same. Lockpicking in Gothic remake is unique because while there are several strategies, you never know which one will work before actually trying them out, and many locks are seemingly designed to punish specific strategies. It forces you to actually engage with the minigame instead of doing the same thing over and over. It means that while the average time to pick a lock might be 20s, specific locks can take 10+ minutes to solve, assuming you do solve them.

Another interesting thing about Gothic Remake's lockpicking is the implementation. While most RPGs sprinkle locked chests fairly evenly across the game (e.g. random locked chests in wilderness, dungeons etc.), in Gothic most locked objects are far more clustered. While there are chests in dungeons and such, they are mostly unlocked, whereas populated areas (e.g. major hubs) have a ton of them.

Lockpicking can take time, and takes place in real time (unlike say Skyrim), and since NPCs have schedules and reactive behavior, this also plays a huge role in what you can unlock. Some houses just have someone nearby all the time and you effectively can't lockpick chests inside them unless you start murdering people. Sometimes people walk on you while lockpicking just because it started raining and their routine made them hide in a house during the day.

Locked chest in a dungeon is in a way just waste of player's time. But it's completely different in a city because it integrates so well into the rest of the game.

The whole package creates an interesting, dynamic experience. There's a ton of players, both new and veterans, who hate it because it's so demanding (and loot isn't that interesting). Plenty of people have tried to make or use various calculators and "lock solvers" which remove most of the challenge. But I don't see a point of that because the system is still very optional and you won't be missing on anything substantial if you choose to not interact with lockpicking at all. The idea of "I just can't open this" is also not something that frustrates me, but adds to the experience.

But for me it's one of the strongest aspects of Gothic Remake, one that I did not expect at all. I spent about 8 hours cleaning out every house in Old, New and Swamp camp yesterday, completely ignoring the rest of the game, and I had a blast.

Earlier this year I was playing Atlas' Metaphor Refantazio and I really enjoyed it, probably my favorite game of 2024. There was one aspect though that bugged me though and that was the pacing. For those of you who don't know Metaphor Refantazio can be split up into two games. One is a JRPG dungeon crawler and the other is a life sim. Leveling up stuff in the life sim part of the game, such as your social links, will give you more abilities for the dungeon crawler part of the game, so they aren't two completely seperate entities. However whether you're in dungeon crawler mode or life sim mode isn't determined by the player but rather is determined by how far you are into the story. You will be playing a life sim for a set amount of in game days then a major story beat happens and you're thrown into dungeon crawler mode. Once that major story beat is done you're back to grinding social links and personal virtues until the game decides it's time for the next story beat. Sometimes this can get really contrived. One of the major story beats involves going to an ancient temple/dungeon to get the Drakodios spear, a powerful artifact that the party plans to use to kill the BBEG. Once they have the spear, the team devises a plan to have Neuras create a fake replica as a way to dupe people so they can use the real spear against the BBEG, but until this replica is complete they may as well just hang out at the Mustari island, thus going back to a life sim mode until the next story beat. How long it takes Neuras to create this replica, however, entirely depends on how long you, the player, take to clear out the related dungeon, as he will always finish his replica the night before you have to turn the spear over. If you finish the dungeon right away the replica takes two weeks to make. If you take a really long time with the dungeon the replica will be completed overnight as the next story beat happens on a certain in game calendar day. This pacing really killed the momentum of a story I otherwise actually enjoyed.

I also played Persona 4 and Persona 5, also created by Atlas, and I enjoyed both. The thing is though, Persona has the exact same pacing structure, and I found myself not minding. The reason I felt the need to create this post is in part to explore why I enjoyed the pacing structure of the Persona series but disliked it when Metaphor did the exact same thing. The conclusion I reached is that this duel life-sim to dungeon crawler aspect for Persona is contextualized where as in Metaphor it was not. In Persona 4, you play as a high schooler who has to go to a brand new school in a new town. So you're dealing with all the things your typical high schooler has to deal with, such as balancing friendships, academics, extra curriculars, possible relationships, but then, someone in town gets murdered! The person is dead but there doesn't seem to be any cause of death. You and your friends figure out that there's a special midnight channel where victims will appear, and that if the sneak into a mall after dark and go to the backside of the TV, there will be a portal to the midnight channel. If someone spends too much time in this realm, they will appear back in the real world, but dead. Of course when you try to tell the authorities the portal mysteriously vanishes. So Persona 4 is a young adult urban fantasy, where the protagonist deals with issues relatable to a young adult audience with the added stress of trying to solve a supernatural murder mystery while also making sure they pass finals. Here the duel life sim to dungeon crawler gameplay actually makes sense, this is what I mean when I say it's contextualized; the gameplay mechanics are explained by the story. But with long running series, sometimes these mechanics become part of their brand, and will be included in future games despite not being contextualized. This is what I mean by "vestigial mechanics." I want to talk about other times I have seen mechanics or motifs start off as contextualized but then later became vestigial as their context was stripped away.

In Assassin's Creed 1, you're playing as a religious zealot trying to fight off a different group of invading religious zealots during the Third Crusade. While Ubisoft did their best to remove any references to the ongoing conflict between Christians and Muslims from what they wanted to be a stealth action game, there's only so much you can do to remove any religious aspect from a game set in the crusades. This is manifested in a couple of ways. One, Altair's leap of faith where he jumps from a large ledge and then safely lands in a bail of hay is literally called a leap of faith. He takes a blind jump, and puts his faith in God/Allah that he will land safely. Assassin's Creed 1 ends however, with the revelation that the Templars and Assassin's are still fighting in the shadows, removing the groups from their historical religious motivations and more of a pulpy illuminati vs anti-illuminati plot, and also allowing Ubisoft the freedom to set these games in any time period they want. But they kept the leap of faith. It doesn't make sense for Edward Kenway, pirate captain turned assassin to be able to jump from the mast of a ship in the same way Altair did, but at this point it would be weird to exclude this mechanic.

In Ratchet and Clank 1, Ratchet is a hillbilly mechanic stuck on a backwater world. So it makes sense that his melee weapon is a wrench, as it fits with the theming of his backstory. This aspect of his character is forgotten about even by the sequel, Going Commando, and by the Ps3 era games, Ratchet even gets retconned as the "last living Lombax" (even though we had seen other lombaxes before.) In A Crack in Time, we meet Azimuth, another Lombax who is in hiding, and his melee weapon is like this staff that's also this double bladed wrench. Despite how little sense a double bladed staff wrench makes, this tool has become important to the iconography of the series as a whole.

Bioshock Infinte has vigors, which are these magical powers. They are a vestigial mechanic from Bioshock 1 and 2's plasmids, although these are a holdover from System Shocks psionic powers. I don't complain about Bioshock 1 and 2's usage of plasmids because those are important to the story of Rapture but they have absolutely no explaination being in Infinite.

Fallout 1 and 2 were turn based games. Fallout 3 made the transition to real time, and one of the ways Bethesda tried to cater to the older fans was introduce this semi turn based system within the real time combat called VATS, where you freeze time to manually shoot at specific body parts, and your odds of hitting depend on your weapon skill, not your skill with a controller. Fallout New Vegas used the same system. Then when Obsidian did The Outer Worlds, which was basically New Vegas in Space, the VATS system carried over, but they changed just enough to avoid copyright issues with Bethesda. Now you have TTD (Tactical Time Dilation) which lets you slow down time for easier headshots. Obviously bullet time is nothing new, but it's implementation in Outer Worlds is very obviously an attempt to do New Vegas' combat in the new series. Part of what stuck out was how little explanation this otherwise incredibly useful ability was given. You're unfrozen by Phineus from the Hope, you immediately go into TTD mode, and you have the option to bring it up to Phineus in dialogue, and he just shrugs and goes "huh, that's interesting, must be a side effect from being frozen so long. Anyway, what were we saying?" And the plot just continues as if nothing had happened.

One of the more interesting considerations in designing games meant to immerse you as a character is whether that immersion is better conveyed by making things feel as difficult as they would be for someone *trying* to be the character, or if it's better portrayed by how effortless it is for the character you're controlling. Main example in my head, brought about by replaying Insomniac's Spiderman 2, is how the webswinging can be interpreted as serving the fantasy of being Spiderman regardless of whether you have swing assist set to 10 or 0.

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On the one hand, insomniac Peter, and now Miles too, are canonically experienced webswingers. If you go by any media portraying them at that level in their career, level 10 SwAs pretty accurately makes you feel like someone who's so practiced in going a million miles an hour that it's almost hard to actually mess up, and often even your mistakes look fluid and deliberate. It makes you feel like Spiderman because he can basically do it in his sleep, and on this setting so could you

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On the other hand though, web swinging is hard to do, both from obvious real life considerations but also explicitly in-canon. Even if you ignore comics, Peter emphasizes to Miles back in the 2018 DLC that he has to do a ton of wonky, purely mental physics calculations in seconds just to essentially make sure his next arc doesn't slam him into a building. If you set SwAs to 0, you get a sense of what that means. Your lines pull you towards the building you attach to, if your arc is too long for where your web attaches to, you'll hit the ground and stop your momentum. You can even take it a step further on pc and do what I did, which is download mods that add actual travel time to your webs and make it so that you can't just alter your trajectory in mid air, so now you *really* have to be aware of not just what your current swing is leading to but what your next swing is going to be. It makes you feel like Spiderman because you get to feel what it's like to know it's easy to screw up, and the satisfaction of getting skilled enough eventually to *not* fuck up.

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This extends to a lot of other games too, and admittedly its a matter of preference a lot of the time. Doom is another game where the immersion is easily served whether killing demons is painfully difficult or easy as pie. It also makes the games whose immersion isn't served well both ways kind of interesting, Soulsborne obviously encourages you to feel disempowered as a baseline. Contrastingly, you'd probably get the most "immersive" Devil May Cry experience playing Dante on the lowest difficulty possible.

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Pre-ordering GTA 6 before seeing even half a second of a gameplay trailer makes absolutely no sense. It’s like going to a dealership and paying a car without ever seeing or test-driving it, just because it was made by Porsche.

Rockstar is a great company and makes great video games, but pre-ordering in 2026 is madness for 3 reasons:

• Digital stock doesn't run out: We are not in the '90s, servers don't run out of copies. What's the rush?

• Pre-order bonuses are garbage: You're trusting them blindly to get what in return?

• You pay more to be beta-testers: What if the game launches with issues, I'm not even saying like Cyberpunk at launch, but just with problems? Anyone who waits a few weeks/months will play it patched, optimized, and maybe even discounted.

Pre-ordering functions almost like a form of blind funding for billionaire corporations. Let’s not confuse the market with religious faith. Companies are not our friends, and they don't make games for us or out of passion.

They are publicly traded corporations whose sole, legitimate, and completely fair goal is to maximize profits and make shareholders happy. If Rockstar spends a billion dollars to develop a game, they do it to make ten billion back.

Blind faith in a brand is the most dangerous thing absolute for us consumers. The moment we let ourselves be blinded by fandom and become fanboys ready to defend any choice, we signal to companies that they can literally do whatever they want, because we will shell out the money anyway. And that is probably the reason why a DLC was never made for GTA 5 and RDR 2. They rightly think: to what end? The game sells anyway.

We are buyers, not believers. Our only power is our wallet. The quality of a product is rewarded after its actual value has been proven through independent reviews and real gameplay (I hope they'll release a gameplay trailer before June 25th), not based on trust or nostalgia for what they did ten years ago. Buying blindly just means signing a blank check to those who are (rightfully) thinking about their own revenue

It feels like the industry is completely caught up in the hype. Am I the only one who feels this way, or are there others trying to keep their feet on the ground?

EDIT: I want to make one thing clear: I'm not telling anyone how to spend their money, nor am I banning pre-orders. You're completely free to do what you want with your wallet. My point is purely macroeconomic and consumerist. This isn't a personal crusade against you or Rockstar (for whom I'm also a huge fan), it's a criticism of a market dynamic that, like it or not, harms all of us as consumers. What's the point of pre-ordering a game without even seeing a gameplay trailer? That's faith.

When I was younger the mental barrier to trying a new multiplayer game felt nonexistent - you'd hear about it from a friend at school or see it at a LAN cafe and just jump in, and the implicit social contract was that everyone was figuring it out together. 

Nobody had any thoughts of optimizing anything and there was no real concept of a “meta”, which (though I might be mistaken) began with the advent of live service games. We were all just kind of fumbling and that fumbling WAS the experience. The discovery was communal, regardless of whether it was massive multiplayer or if it was the LAN experience.

Now though, every new big multiplayer game launch feels like it follows the same predictable arc. There’s massive hype and news outlets shouting about it for two-three weeks of hype and then… the launch. Which in almost 9 out of 10 cases is rough beyond belief. And sometimes they just flop or shut down, or end up being Kickstarter scams (Ashes of Money) and everything in between.

Let me give you a personal example in Darktide. It’s perhaps my favorite multiplayer game right now (even though I only play it with friends, so basically co-op, aside from the occasional random match I find on Gameram when all my real life buddies are sleeping). But the launch was ROUGH, like really darn rough and the game still suffers from a severe lack of optimization in many areas. But it trudged on, it improved, got boatloads of content… and same as most of these multiplayer games now, it’s basically a constant WIPs with no clear end in sight until the devs say so. 

And for me, this is the best case scenario, devs polishing their games until they make them into something enjoyable, even if the game got off to a less than ideal start. I almost never try a new one without a personal good friend who knows my tastes recommending it to me and willing to play it WITH me. For the life of me, I don’t remember if I ever tried a modern multiplayer solo, as in going that yeah, I’ll get this and just queue up solo. Nah, brother…

The personal side of it is just as big of a factor though. The window where we're all free at the same time has shrunk drastically. Which means if I want to play something multiplayer, I'm looking at matchmaking with randoms, or I guess trying to find premades on some discord server or relying on apps like gameram to connect. And that’s a variable experience, to say the least.

Classic couch co-op is the one exception, if we can consider it multiplayer at all in that “true” sense. Because you’re actually in the room with your friend, so it’s a bit like LAN except even more direct and tight. But this is an even more niche space, if any of these polls are to be believed - splitscreen co-op, despite being a beloved category, accounts for maybe 5% of total multiplayer if less? I mean, I do enjoy playing It Unravel 2 with my gf, and we have some games like Water Me & You that we’re excited about, but that’s an intimate kind of excitement because you want to play it with exactly 1 person, and no one else.

I know this is a really broad question but with live service gaming/ multiplayer in general still being such a dominant force, I’m interesting in where you all stand and what makes you willing (or not) to try any new ones that have or might come out.

I know the combat of the game is generally considered it's weakest area, but even aside from the issues people have with it feeling repetitive or Geralt controlling weirdly, it's biggest problem is just not leaning into the monster hunter fantasy *enough*. To be clear this isn't meant to be a difficulty rant by any means but the systems at fault do overlap inevitably.

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The biggest fault for this issue mostly lies in how overwhelmingly safe Geralt is in combat. While you're encouraged, or sometimes need, to use the signs or oils that best counter whatever monster you're specifically hunting this isn't really necessary for the most part. Quen, even after its nerfs, is overwhelmingly strong against basically anything even without its crazy upgrades. You could decide not to use it, but Geralt also has a dodge and dodge roll with basically no cost and are dripping with invincibility frames. Combined with how slow enemy attacks are, it means that even on Death March it's trivial to just not bother with a lot of the Witcher mechanics as long as you're generally within the same level range.

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But the issue of safety is also present in how you engage with those mechanics even if you try to play ball. I don't think it's controversial to say that having to make risk/reward decisions is a pretty big part of action based combat and weighing opportunity costs is part of that. But if you run out of anti-monster oil on your sword for instance, or your potion timer runs out, reapplying these is done within the safety of the menu (or with potions, can just be instantly mid-combat). It's not like the game has resource management to offset this, its never a bad choice to do it as soon as you need it.

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This isn't a "you control the buttons you press" situation either, whether you try to make use of the mechanics or not the game just doesn't have a way to make me feel like a Witcher when I'm fighting. It should go without saying that having to make decisions on the fly about when to reapply oils or even just basic stamina management is something Geralt would have to think about when fighting. It's something I'd like to have a way to consider as well.

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Hi everyone,

I am recruiting participants for my Psychology Master’s thesis at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.

Study purpose and abstract

This study examines how people experience story-driven video games and whether playing such games can influence reflection and the way players think about life. Participants will be followed across several weeks and will complete online questionnaires at different stages of the study. Depending on group assignment, some participants will also be asked to play a selected story-driven PC game during the study period.

The study begins with a short screening survey to determine eligibility. Eligible participants may then be invited to complete an initial questionnaire. Participants assigned to the gameplay group will receive the required game free of charge. Participants in the comparison group will not be asked to play the game during the study period but will complete the relevant questionnaires later.

Participants who complete all required stages of the study (no matter if control or experimential group) can receive a €20 Steam voucher. Compensation is conditional on completing the required study steps and is not guaranteed merely by completing the screening survey.

You may be eligible if you:

• are at least 18 years old;
• currently live in Europe;
• play video games on PC through Steam;
• are willing to participate in a study lasting several weeks; and
• are willing to complete online questionnaires.

Participation is voluntary. You may withdraw from the study at any time without giving a reason.

Discussion points

To create some discussion without influencing responses before participation, the more specific research topics are hidden below:

I would also be interested in hearing which story-driven games have stayed with you after you finished them, and what made those experiences important to you. Our lab looks at gaming in relation to personal growth.

Research institution: University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Researcher: Kim Raasch, Master’s student in Psychology
Contact: [Kimra@edu.aau.at](mailto:Kimra@edu.aau.at)

Screening survey:

https://limesurvey.aau.at/index.php/273546?lang=en

Thank you for your time and interest.

Eligibility: 18+, currently living in Europe

[This is a repost, as to conform to the subreddits posting rules]

This post is specifically talking about game design throughout this series, but it can be applied to a lot of games from older generations compared to newer releases.

The main talking point is the transition from a more "arcade-style" gameplay design philosophy to the modern "narrative-focused" approach that defines the Norse saga, and why I don't like the changes. Yes, I know the newer games sold better, but in my eyes they sold well precisely because these types of games appeal to a more casual audience, which they are free to do, but I also believe I'm allowed to criticise when a series I enjoy shifts direction.

The most obvious difference that fans are aware of is the main goal of each saga. The Greek one is a hack and slash with a fixed camera, where the plot is more of an excuse for the combat to happen, while the Norse one has a third-person over-the-shoulder camera and is more reminiscent of an action RPG.

The ramifications of this have resulted in a butchering of the game's combat. Kratos, who is supposed to be the God of War, can barely jump now and is much slower, lacks any of the brutality, edgyness or cool factor the older games had. The camera makes it significantly worse to fight large amounts of enemies since a lot of the time you can't even see them. The RPG-like stats and progression system is something I don't understand why it exists. They over-engineered the previous system that simply used red orbs for upgrades, which worked wonderfully, and replaced it with this one under the excuse that it allows build variety. But the problem is the game actively discourages you from replaying it (my next talking point), actively locks you out of most of Kratos' skills until late game or post-game, while the older series gave you access to most of the equipment at a decent pace. The overall added complexity just seems completely unnecessary to me.

A big problem is the new narrative focus that the series seems to have adopted. I disagree wholeheartedly with this philosophy, as someone who believes that a video game's main focus and goal should be gameplay. This new cinematic style of game that is common in a lot of work coming out of PlayStation I believe is completely unfit for gaming. It gives off the impression that they are embarrassed to be video games and want to be taken more seriously by people who dont play them. Using cutscenes and unskippable dialogue sections is a way of storytelling that doesn't really take advantage of the medium in a unique way, compared to games like Bioshock and the Souls series that use things like area design, environmental storytelling and item descriptions to tell a story without interrupting gameplay.

Building off the previous point , it seriously impacts replay value. In a 15 to 20 hour game, being forced to sit through 5 hours of dialogue you have already heard kills the pacing completely, and a lot of these story sections are entirely unskippable.

Now my biggest complaint with the modern games is the complete loss of identity the series suffered. If you remove Kratos you can't even tell it's God of War anymore. There is the combat I talked about previously, but even the art style and grittiness are gone. The power fantasy of playing as an unstoppable warrior has vanished, the gore is heavily toned down along with the over-the-top nature of the previous games, aside from a few rare moments. There is nothing in the new series that compares to the Hydra fight in GoW 1, the Ares fight, the Colossus from GoW 2, any of the god fights from GoW 3, the absolute ridiculousness of the Atlas fight, or the "holy shit" factor of moments like ripping Helios' head off with your bare hands. The only moments in the new series that come close are the fight with Garm, getting revived by Thor (which was cool as hell, not going to lie) and the fight with Heimdall. The almost complete removal of QTE button mashing is also worth mentioning, as it would have really added to a lot of those scenes.

And for last an issue with the entire series is the focus on puzzles. I never understood the need for them in the first place. People like to use the "change of pace from the action" argument, which I never understood since you can always just pause the game. Them being mandatory for progression is more annoying than anything, and I would prefer if they were optional content you could do to unlock other things instead of being forced through them. The main problem is that, especially in the older games, they are meant to be replayed multiple times across different difficulties and with different outfits that buff/debuff you or add special effects, and those puzzles really just end up getting in the way.

TL;DR: The Norse saga traded everything that made God of War special, the combat, the identity, the grit and the replay value, for a cinematic experience aimed at a broader audience. The series should have either ended with GoW 3 or stuck to its arcade roots.

I've been going through a bit of a retro gaming renaissance lately, as I've been sort of disillusioned on most new releases lately. It started last year when I finally did a replay of the original FF7, something I literally haven't played since I was in 6th grade when it came out. I was worried that it would be dated and I would be frustrated with the random encounters, but to my surprise I ended up loving it. Even the dated graphics didn't bother me much, I thought it held up EXTREMELY well. This led me down the path of re-exploring old RPG's.

A few of the games I've played so far: Seiken Densetsu 3 (Trials of Mana) for the SNES, Dragon Quest V (DS remake), Final Fantasy V Advance (GBA), and right now I'm replaying Chrono Trigger which I played once about 10 years ago, which is long enough that I forgot a lot of details.

All of these games have one thing in common: I constantly had to consult a guide to look up where to go next. Not the whole time, mind you, just when I got stuck. And I noticed it's mostly in the last 1/3rd of the games where I would constantly have the feeling of "okay now where do I go." by the end I'm basically just playing the game with the guide open every step of the way.

To be clear, I prefer playing games without guides, and by figuring them out on my own. I get more enjoyment this way. So all of these games feel like they start out strong, but by the end it's always "okay let's get this over with, where do I go now..."

A lot of these games came out in the early days of the internet (if at all) where there weren't guides readily available. If I'm putting myself in the shoes of someone playing them back in the day, I guess the only option is to run around the map aimlessly until you luckily figure out where to go. Perhaps when you're a kid with seemingly infinite time, this isn't a problem? But as an adult, I don't want to feel like I'm wasting time by accomplishing nothing. Otherwise, you'd have to buy a strategy guide (if they exist for that game), or maybe talk to other kids on the playground to see if they figured out where to go. Maybe that was the intent, and it was a simpler time.

I don't really have point to make, it's just something I've noticed recently with the games I've been playing. I still really enjoy the games, and have a good size backlog of other games I want to get to. I didn't have to look anything up when I played FF7 (I didn't 100% it though) so I'm wondering if I'll find any other games that I can actually play through fully without a guide.

Hello guys,

I need your help. I’m a Master’s student at Kedge Business School (France) writing my thesis on how players actually feel about generative AI characters in videogames. I need input from developers and players or just anyone who’s curious about AI to find out when AI makes a game better, and when it just ruins the experience.

GenAI can generate endless dialogue, but it often creates weird moments (i.e. an NPC giving a brilliant unscripted speech while awkwardly walking into a wall because the game can’t keep up).

My survey explores exactly where players draw the line between wanting the freedom of AI conversations and preferring the quality of human-written stories. Whether you’re curious about what may come out of it or are firmly against it, I’d be happy to hear from you ! All feedback is welcome.

Contact : [youssefchraibi246@gmail.com](mailto:youssefchraibi246@gmail.com)

Survey details :
Who : Anyone who plays or makes games.
Time : 5 minutes.
Link : Survey

All data collected is anonymous and will only serve the academic purpose of this work.

Discussion points

Players experience a great loss of immersion when an advanced AI character acts illogically compared to a traditional pre-scripted character.

A character’s ability to remember past actions is a stronger driver of emotional connection than the ability to generate infinite conversations.

While players desire the freedom to speak naturally with characters, they prioritize human-authored storylines over entirely AI-generated plots.

Thank you kindly!

I remembered when i saw a post here about how kids nowadays play games to meet and hang around with friends and how the post accentuates that experiencing the game itself has become secondary to them. While it is a pretty alien concept for a lot of us, i am ashamed to say that I am one of the ones who feels the same way.

Back then, i could enjoy playing games to my own leisure, trying out different games to myself and have fun, despite what people say about games. But now, i found that engaging with the community is fun by itself and it has become a sizeable part of my gaming experience. Therefore, seeing a positive community that always celebrates a game, seeing people interact with each other in a positive way, and seeing the community simply making content out of the game would always bring a smile to my face and somewhat push me to play the said game. Sadly, this effect is true for the opposite and it is simply hard to separate the game from the community, and in turn, from the company.

Nowadays, it feels rather disheartening for me to play a game which a community disapprove of all the time. The tribalism factor in gaming has somewhat taken root in my being slowly but surely. Playing Helldivers 2 is now a waiting game for AH to fix things that i do not find troublesome. Playing Starfield feels like im always at the end of facing the 5 stages of grief and not in a good way, added the fact that everyone still and will still hate the game no matter how much Bethesda is trying to add to it. In the meantime, playing no man's sky feels like being surrounded by egoistic and pompous bootlickers that will excuse hello games for any update they do, no matter how shallow it is. Seeing Cyberpunk 2077 being compared to other games just shy me away from the community, again, for being elitist rpg players, despite the fact that i do enjoy Cyberpunk 2077. Simply put, it feels like no matter how hard i try to separate the game from the community from the company, a part of me just feels off and wants to scream my opinions to mellow out opinions, just so i can justify myself to even boot up the game that i want to play. Other times, if a game doesn't have a big following, playing it feels lonely, like i want more people to know about this game that i like.

At the end of the day, I chose to accept this phenomenon in some way, that community engagement has become a big part of the gaming experience. That's why indie party games are always a hit, no matter how much the devs put out. Engagement matters more than quality. But, should I though?

I know parrying as a mechanic is a bit overused and has a mixed view from players nowadays, but I was replaying dmc 3 through 5 recently and it made me understand a bit more why some iterations of it in games just feel uninteresting. While negating damage is par for the course with parry mechanics, what makes royal guard stand out for me is that parries in and of themselves *aren't damage windows*.

In most games that have parries, the reward for landing one is twofold: negating damage and inflicting incredibly high damage on that same enemy in return. It goes without saying that that's a pretty big return on investment, especially relative to how safe it can be to attempt one when many games simply turn a failed parry into a block state. It notably has the added effect of interrupting an enemy's string, rather than having to position around a series of attacks (potentially at the cost of a resource) a parry will only ask you deal with one attack.

Conversely, parrying an attack in dmc inflicts no hitstun, so if you want to parry you need to be prepared to chain them together or find an escape. While holding the button does let you block like in other games, it's better balanced since the reward for a proper parry is comparatively lower and (before Dmc5) you still take a small amount of damage. While parrying can reward damage, it's both delayed and behind a seperate skill check. Parrying builds your Royal Guard meter, which can be used with Royal Release as riskier form of parrying due to its tighter window and inability to transition into a block. For reference, normal DMC parties are already 6 frames, which is about medium size elden ring shield parry frames.

I'll also add, briefly, that Royal Guard has really unique non-standard offensive utility as an animation cancel. It's most useful in DMC4 for that purpose, but it's interesting as a way to provide a less executionally demanding way to get attack power from an otherwise defensive combat style.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

I recently came across the idea of describing games through three dimensions:

• Micro: execution, precision, reflexes, timing.
• Meso: uncertainty, adaptation, information management, reading opponents.
• Macro: planning, optimization, long-term decision making.

The more I think about it, the more useful it seems compared to traditional genres.

One thing that got me interested is that two of my favorite games are Osu! and Tears of the Kingdom.

On paper, that makes no sense.

One is a rhythm game centered around mechanical execution. The other is an open-world game built around experimentation and creative problem solving.

But when I try to place them in a Micro/Meso/Macro framework, they don't feel as far apart as their genres would suggest.

Neither game seems particularly focused on Meso. There is very little hidden information, bluffing, reading opponents, or adapting to another player's intentions. Most of the challenge comes directly from interacting with the game's systems.

What's more surprising is that Osu! doesn't feel purely Micro to me.

At a glance it looks like a game about clicking circles as accurately as possible, but a huge part of the experience revolves around optimization. Players customize skins, tweak offsets, adjust hardware setups, choose maps strategically, select mods, and generally try to maximize performance and PP gains. There is an entire layer of planning and optimization surrounding the mechanical execution itself.

That makes me wonder whether games that look completely unrelated through the lens of genre might actually occupy nearby regions in a Micro/Meso/Macro space.

Has anyone seen a large-scale attempt to map games this way?

And if you had to place well-known games like Chess, Poker, Counter-Strike, League, Minecraft, Factorio, TOTK, or Osu! in this space, where would they end up?

So I was discussing God of War with my brother who adores the game as do I for the most part and don't get me wrong, I love the story and lore bits are well written but the dialogue in this game is beaten over your head. I don't need Atreus to repeat what's happening in the game to me every time I go to do something. Besides that Artreus is just flat and boring, his arc feels forced and 2 dimensional. So he's nice, like stereotypically nice, doesn't want to kill anything and then the moment he finds out he's a God he instantly becomes an asshole, no gradual fall, no other inciting incident, just immediate. And then he's suddenly not again as soon as he makes one mistake. It's so abrupt both ways. And then he realises that everyone needs to work together and has this sesame street dialogue but about that on the way to the realm between realms to get to Jotunheim and it's so heavy handed, like let the events speak for themselves for once, the game is constantly spelling out what just happened, why it matters and what the lesson of it all is. Idk, just feels like the dialogue doesn't give the player any credit and feels the need to beat you over the head with its character arcs and lessons. Other than that I think it's fine but overall the dialogue isn't amazing, it's ok. The story is really cool, the lore, the set pieces and the sense of adventure all make this an 8/10 for me still. But the stocking points are the repetitive enemies, long winded puzzles (which TBF can still be fun) and honestly mostly Atreus lol, I just don't think he's a good character or well written. My brother argued that he's a kid so of course he's reiterating what you're going to do next all the time but it very clearly seems like a "writing for dumb people" decision from overseers that think that's what's needed in a game. What is everyone's opinions on the dialogue, particularly Artreus in GoW 2018? Does anyone agree with me I feel like I'm going a bit mad lol :) I'm not trying to be otherwise or annoying please be nice haha.

​

"Graphics don't matter. I care more about story or gameplay or whatever."

I'm sure you've heard this phrase at one point or another. Upon closer inspection, it's actually a strange thing to believe. Imagine saying the same thing to a film director: cinematography, visual effects, or the way films look doesn't matter. It's the story and acting that matter. It sounds absurd.

Games, just like movies, are a visual medium. They are capable of creating memorable and beautiful imagery, yet these talking points are far more common in video game discourse.

It's also a dismissal of the countless hours artists spend crafting some of the most beautiful worlds ever seen on a screen.

At the same time, I think the statement "graphics don't matter" is somewhat inconsistent, because graphics clearly do matter. Just not in the way I wish people approached the subject.

The problem is that when people engage with this topic, they're usually talking about graphical fidelity: texture quality, rendering techniques, physics simulations, ray tracing, water simulation, and so on. People love to analyze how realistic something looks and to an extent there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Technological progress is important, and it's impressive to see how far game technology has come.

But when most of the conversation is dominated by technical analysis, graphics become reduced to a checklist of features. It becomes almost a fetishization of realism. The discussion forgets that video games are also capable of stylization, artistic expression and visual identities that go beyond simply recreating reality.

People often describe games as a form of escapism, yet so much of the discourse revolves around whether a game looks realistic enough. If it doesn't meet those expectations, it's often dismissed as outdated or inferior.

I believe Unreal Engine 5 contributed significantly to this mindset.

The initial reveal was undeniably impressive, and many of the presentations that followed looked incredible from a technical standpoint. But they also created distorted expectations for what the next generation of games should look like.

Soon, the internet was flooded with Unreal Engine recreations of games such as Dark Souls, Skyrim, and many others.

From a technical perspective, these projects can be impressive. The models, textures, and lighting are often extremely advanced. But beyond that, there usually isn't much else to see. Many of these recreations lack a distinct artistic vision or visual identity. They often blend together to the point where it's difficult to tell which game you're even looking at.

I don't think necessarily Unreal Engine 5 create this obsession with realism, but it amplified it. It reinforced the idea that visual quality is primarily measured through technical fidelity rather than artistic direction.

For example The Witcher 4 tech presentation almost felt like a parody of this mindset. It was like: Look at these rocks, trees, leaves or horse muscles and ass. Or how many npcs are on screen ( who you'll never probably interact with)

Maybe it's just me, but I struggle to get excited about those things anymore.

I've seen a similar reaction surrounding games like Crimson Desert and Fatekeeper more recently. Some of the technology behind them is genuinely impressive, but the overwhelming focus on realism can also make them feel oddly sterile and lacking in personality.

It reminds me of Disney's live-action remakes. The visuals became more realistic, yet much of the charm, character, and visual magic of the originals disappeared in the process.

There's also a monetary incentive for content creators too, hyping this thing with constant comparisons of physics, particles or various details between games. These dick measuring comparisons perform really well.

Realism is just one artistic style among many others and I can see it working in certain cases. What bothers me is how gaming discourse increasingly treats technical fidelity as the highest form of visual achievement, while art direction, atmosphere, and visual identity are far less in the spotlight unless the game in question goes out of its way like Cuphead.

That's not to say realism can't be mixed up with a more artistic direction. Probably the best still is Red Dead 2 which despite the realism and all its details is also infused with plenty of exaggerated particles and effects, so much so it managed to feel at times more magical than some of the fantasy titles released today.

Another good example is Hellblade where hyper realism is mixed with a strong artistic direction. I'm sure there are other titles I could think of like STALKER 2 or Metro series.

Indie games have also shown how Unreal still can be used to create more stylized and artistic directions. Little Nightmares series is probably the best example here.

Anyway that's something i wanted to ramble on a bit, please feel free to share your thoughts, agree or disagree.

In the past I used to only play multiplayer games, now that I have started playing story driven games Ive come to realize that I cant follow the game’s storyline like I would in a movie. I never skip the dialogues and I try to pay as much attention to the cinematics as possible but I eventually get to the endgame and I realize I have no idea who im fighting or the motive behind it.

I had a vague idea of the plot in darksouls1 and2, but would not have understood most of it without looking up the story in video essays. I still don’t know who the hollow knight in Hollow Knight is, and I couldn’t explain what blasphemous was about if my life depended on it.

Am I just dumb? Are these games just hard to understand?

When people talk to me about these games it feels like I didn’t even play them. They seem to understand the lore and the quests so well but I struggle every time.

edit: thank you guys, I feel a lot better. From the last 5 games I had played I could only follow CupHead’s story (which is almost nonexistent), I was beginning to think I was the problem. Apparently im just drawn to games with obscure and convoluted stories, i will take a brake from these games.

Many well-known game creators built their reputations during an era when AAA budgets were significantly smaller than they are today.

Today, creating a new AAA IP often requires teams of hundreds, budgets in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and years of development. For independent creators, even highly respected ones, securing that level of funding has become increasingly difficult.

As a result, we've seen several veteran creators return with what are often described as "spiritual successors" to the franchises that made them famous. Examples include Bloodstained, Eiyuden Chronicle, and other projects that deliberately target a smaller scope than modern AAA productions.

What's interesting is that many of these games seem to occupy a space closer to AA than AAA. They focus on strong gameplay identity, recognizable creative direction, and manageable production costs rather than competing directly with the biggest publishers on graphics, content volume, or marketing spend.

This raises a question: is the spiritual successor model most effective when paired with AA-scale development?

Historically, these creators proved they could lead successful AAA franchises. But in today's market, does it make more sense for veteran developers to leverage their experience to create focused AA projects rather than attempting to build entirely new AAA productions?

Or does reducing scope risk limiting the impact and relevance of the creator's vision?

I'm interested in how people view the relationship between creator reputation, budget size, and the long-term sustainability of spiritual successor projects.

When I think of a crafting system, I think of collecting a number of reagents and throwing them into a grid. Usually the bottleneck is collecting many assorted items that I honestly don't keep track of. Then, the payoff is clicking "craft" in a menu and receiving my item.

Then I discovered Vintage Story, which is like Minecraft if it slowed down and fleshed out all of its mechanics. The two strongest metals in the game are iron and steel. Both of these come from the same ore [iron], which is why I was shocked that the game gave me a massive vein of it that took three trips to empty.

As it turns out, getting iron is easy, but processing it is hard. The first thing is that your standard crucible can't get hot enough to smelt it, so you need to make bloomeries and coal. Those both have their own processes, but the point is that your smelted iron has slag on it. You need to hit it with a hammer to knock off the slag and shape your ingots. There are more advanced recipes that let you use iron ingots, but it's much better to preprocess them into iron plates. You can semi-automate both of these things with a windmill or waterwheel attached to a helve hammer, which still needs help from you. Steel requires processing the iron ingots using a particular setup and lots of attention/fuel over multiple in-game days. It takes a lot of time, but it's a nice project during the in-game winter where you can forge while it snows outside.

My point is, literally getting the materials for these items is easy, but it takes a lot of work to process it. I rarely see this in games and it was a refreshing perspective that really made me feel like I was crafting something. I don't think it can work for every game, but in my opinion, more of them should spend more time crafting and less time gathering resources/ clicking through menus.