felipepepe
Codex's Heretic
Over the past few years writing & editing reviews on several games, one aspect has always been controversial: repetition.
Personally, I hate grind & filler content. I'd rather play an amazing 10h RPG than a bloated 100hs one. Very few games - such as Baldur's Gate II - have enough quality content to last that long. Yet a lot of people defend these saying they offer a lot of content for the price - or that they are simple, "tune-out" experiences.
A good example is SpellForce. With all the expansions for SF1 you get like 200hs of basically the same gameplay: enter map, build base, create an army and slowly clean the map. There's very few curve-balls or gameplay changes, but a lot of people love these games.
The Agarest games and a few niche JRPGs also do this A LOT, with hours upon hours of grinding & filler battles, then asking you to replay it 2 or 3 times for the "true ending". We're talking over 200 hs, mostly spend in random battles!
Others examples could be Bethesda's "Radiant AI quests", Borderland & its endless DLCs, Eador: Genesis, Neptunia, Dragon Age: Inquisition, BloodLust Shadowhunter, etc...
The question is, how can one fairly criticize a game like this? Where to draw the line between "repetitive" and "long-lasting" ?
Personally, I hate grind & filler content. I'd rather play an amazing 10h RPG than a bloated 100hs one. Very few games - such as Baldur's Gate II - have enough quality content to last that long. Yet a lot of people defend these saying they offer a lot of content for the price - or that they are simple, "tune-out" experiences.
A good example is SpellForce. With all the expansions for SF1 you get like 200hs of basically the same gameplay: enter map, build base, create an army and slowly clean the map. There's very few curve-balls or gameplay changes, but a lot of people love these games.
The Agarest games and a few niche JRPGs also do this A LOT, with hours upon hours of grinding & filler battles, then asking you to replay it 2 or 3 times for the "true ending". We're talking over 200 hs, mostly spend in random battles!
Others examples could be Bethesda's "Radiant AI quests", Borderland & its endless DLCs, Eador: Genesis, Neptunia, Dragon Age: Inquisition, BloodLust Shadowhunter, etc...
The question is, how can one fairly criticize a game like this? Where to draw the line between "repetitive" and "long-lasting" ?