I had a thought earlier “that would make a good blog post” and I have a bit of a headache, can’t face doing anything, and so figured why not? If the inspiration was there. I have drafts for half a dozen blog posts unfinished, this might add to the pile, or I might ramble for a bit and call it done. Merlin knows I’m no real blogger. I write ‘conversationally’ but I’m well aware I’m just talking to myself.

Anyway! I’ve been really scattershot with games over this past year, breaking my rule about ‘one game at a time until completion’. There has been a lot of “picking up, dropping for months, then having to restart” which is how I used to be, and what I had hoped I’d trained myself out of in 2023. One thing this has made me consider though is FRICTION.

Reluctant to Criticise
When it comes to games I am much less critical than I am about books/TV/movies. I think that’s partly because games are more interactive in design (as opposed to interactive via fanworks), and thus I do watch videos on YouTube about gaming news, or feature explanations/how to guides etc. in a way I don’t with anything else. With TV if I am exposed to other people’s opinions, then they tend to come from a place of love because it’s some corner of the fandom – I am hearing those people because we share a liking for the thing. Whereas the comments sections on gaming videos tend to be a dumpster fire. My prevailing attitude is always sort of a bewildered (and sometimes a little wounded) “why can’t we just enjoy things?”. As even when something is newly announced, and people should be excited, there’s always such negativity.

I think my brain has sort of whiplashed to being quite generous about games, precisely because people are just so damn mean about them. I utterly despise the term “Ubislop” and how nobody can say anything positive about Assassin’s Creed without a deluge of comments about how garbage it is AND (far more critically) what a loser/idiot/boot-licker etc. anyone must be to still like that crap. Honestly, why is it so hard to accept that people like different things? It’s upsetting honestly.

Anyway! A particular game is what prompted this musing…

Forspoken
I don’t really remember but I’m guessing I must have seen trailer adverts for it pre-release. It looked very cool and I wanted it a lot, but it was expensive (more than the ‘normal’ – and it’s painful to say normal – £60/£70 that new games cost). I think it was like £90 and just absolutely not. I eventually got it a year or something after it came out for my birthday I think? It had dropped to less than half a price and maybe that should have been a clue. I’d seen a lot of bad reviews for it, but they mostly seemed to focus on how the dialogue was too quippy (like Whedon Avengers style), and of course it was ‘woke’ because the main character was a black woman (can you hear my eyeroll?). The latter made me want to play it more out of spite (down with the haters!) but oh man this game is so bad.

I didn’t make notes so I’m only going off vague recollections but PlayStation told me I had about 2 hours played – that was all I had when I first installed it. I think my initial reaction was a bit “this is current gen, the graphics suck” and I fell into playing something else and didn’t examine it anymore closely. The other day I picked it back up, reinstalled it because I had a craving for a game where I threw around magic and I got an image in my mind of the Forspoken combat. Now it does look older than a current PS5 game, but that isn’t the problem.

A micro example which I think encapsulates a lot of the issue is with a Detour (side) quest series where you follow around a cat. Basically you see a cat, click the interact, get locked into an animation of petting and then the cat walks off, you follow and then at the end there’s an item to pick up, sort of like a treasure chest. I’ve done this 4x I think in the main city (I don’t know if it happens anywhere else), but one of the big ‘draws’ of this game is it’s traversal. You can magic sprint and auto run up walls. It’s fast and fun and isn’t allowed at all in the city (you can’t even sprint). I came out of the characters quarters at the inn and turned left instead of right. There is what looks like a walkway, it’s totally flat between that building and the next, nothing stopping you from walking across – apart from an invisible wall. There’s no ‘parkour’ allowed in this traversal game. So literally following the cat is just walking behind it, there is no climbing, it doesn’t even move that quickly so it’s not tricky to keep up with it, it just sort of wanders a bit and then there’s the item.

Sounds bad, right? It gets worse. Everytime you transition between cinematics, quests, animations etc. the game blackscreens and you get a loading circle. So doing these stupid little walkaround quests in the town took like an hour because it was ‘walk for 2 seconds’ ‘load’ ‘repeat’, and yes there is an awful lot of “walk and talk”, or worse just “stand and talk”. No animations, no movement, just standing there and you can’t even move around yourself as the moment you talk to an NPC you lose control of the character.

People blast Ubisoft for having large maps with nothing in them. If I tell you I have never felt that way, and then tell you I think that’s true of Forspoken, maybe that will illustrate how desolate it feels. The combat system should be a strength (and maybe it improves when more schools of magic open up), but the aiming system is so poor, the best way to play is to skate around the enemies with the traversal and then hitting ‘attack’ it will auto-aim for you. It’s like cycle through abilities by choosing them, then click the button to fire them off. It can visually look ok at times, but the fights last way too long for what is essentially pretty much a one button job. There’s no parry/block so far as I can tell, just race round and try and stay out of range.

I don’t like thinking these things ^^ because hey this was a birthday gift, I want to like it! I started with the assumption it would be good, and then kept being disappointed. I don’t entirely know what to do with it to be honest. Should I continue to play when I keep thinking “this is rubbish”, after all maybe it improves? I feel guilty in a way for marking games as “mistakes were made”. I did that with quite a few games I got on Steam (yes Steam sales /cough) but it was easier to write them off because I pretty much quit Steam (too many issues trying to game on PC, I much prefer the simplicity of ‘it just works’ that console offers). I haven’t platinuumed everything I have played on PlayStation, but aside from AC3 (which came free bundled with Odyssey), I haven’t mentally ‘written-off’ any games either.

On the other hand, should I keep throwing good time after bad? Games are supposed to be fun! If it’s not enjoyable, then why play?

I said this made me think about friction
I have picked up and put down games a lot over the last year. In 2023 I got 9 actual platinum trophies and I think I finished 11/12 games. That number steeply nose-dived in 2024 because WoW basically went full FOMO and starting with Mists remix, it just demanded all of my attention and the patches keep coming out ridiculously fast. Mists remix started in May 2024 and I wound up dropping Horizon Forbidden West which I was 16 hours into. By the time remix was over, and I’d got far enough into the new expansion of The War Within to take a breather, it was months and months later and I knew I’d need to start again – literally I don’t think I touched the PS5 for 6 months.

That’s not friction, that’s just a question of what is prioritized. I say that to explain I know the difference. There was no friction with Horizon Forbidden West. I absolutely adore the world of Horizon (I platinuumed HZD remaster in 2025). I don’t think it’s a bad thing I still have HFW to go through given the huge delay there is for Horizon 3 (it might come out 2030), so it’s nice in a way that I still have new Horizon to enjoy. But anyway I digress, I’m talking about why I’m scattershot on games right now.

• Crimson Desert – an incredible game, but also incredibly overwhelming. I love it to pieces but it confuses me and also I’m not very good at it. I’m on a bit of a WoW break at the moment so this has taken WoW’s spot as the game I dip in and out of and make slow progress on. It’s definitely not a game I can think about ‘finishing’, so occupies a bit of a different spot to everything below.
• Rise of the Tomb Raider – not a fan of the icy shivers, it’s bleak I miss the sun, and the weird mix of very tight narrative focus but also sort of open world/crafting stuff just feels weird. Plus I really don’t like how the deers just despawn which makes ‘farming’ impossible, and yet I’m supposed to do that? Please don’t get me wrong I adore Lara Croft and the whole concept of Tomb Raider, I’m just saying there’s a reason I’m not playing this everyday to completion.
• Enshrouded – combat is too hard! I am beyond grateful that the devs took pity on shitty players like me and allowed a toggle so we can turn off losing all our stuff on death. I was having to corpse run so much, and now I still have to corpse run to try again, but it’s not endless corpse runs just to try and get my stuff back. Backpack inventory is too small. Oh and also I got this on PC as I didn’t wait for console (big mistake) and when I booted it for the full release it told me to update my graphics drivers, and then turned into a slideslow (it had worked ok before). I really hate PC gaming for that.
• Forspoken – see previous complaints ^^
• Runescape: Dragonwilds – combat is too hard! I’m thinking this must be a survival genre feature, that it’s perhaps not meant for bad players. Which honestly given that I was drawn to both games because of being able to build stuff (and Enshrouded offers even more scope for building), you’d think that they’d tune the game (or offer difficulty modes) that allow for people to suck and still succeed. I haven’t even got to any bosses yet, I went to some tomb with the main story (still in the first region) and the adds in there just destroy me. My power level is 2, same as the region, and there’s nothing new for me to craft. Oh and inventory management sucks. I’m supposed to pick up everything to craft stuff, but I can’t even fill up my backpack because there’s a secondary weight mechanic.

I could probably summarize my friction points to 1) I suck at games, 2) I want to be able to store infinite stuff so it’s there if I want it. Crimson Desert actually hugely improved on the latter from launch, I don’t have inventory issues in that game any longer thankfully! But what these two things have in common is that they both don’t feel ‘fixable’. If there is a path towards powering up so I can make the combat easier – then I can still play, but if I just feel stuck in a loop unable to progress that’s not a challenge that will feel satisfying to overcome, that’s something that makes me walk away from the game.

I like combat to feel satisfying and I like it to feel achievable. The Spiderman games had great combat, loads of well documented buttons so I knew how to do cool combos. God of War had similarly good documentation so I could look up what to press, and it was an explained part of the gameplay loop about what weapons should be used for what types of mobs etc. to encourage switching it up. The recent AC Black Flag Resynced was also highly enjoyable, with a variety of buttons for cinematic style takedowns. Crimson Desert has the documentation as to what to press, but I don’t think I’ve quite grasped when certain abilities should be used. It’s so huge it’s really hard to remember everything, and most combat is sort of a brawler almost with loads of mobs all at once. It puts it in the ‘in between’ of maybe it will join the awesome list, and maybe it won’t, as it’ll depend on if I feel like I can do it. Right now, I feel like I can’t and I only beat fights because you can infinite heal with enough food/come back to life with enough res pills. which downs the boss, but doesn’t feel satisfying.

So a conclusion?
I don’t know, I just had thoughts. I guess what I’m trying to say is criticizing games feels a little wrong sometimes, because there’s so much negativity and I’d rather focus on the positives. However, games aren’t perfect and I guess it’s ok to acknowledge that too. Also maybe it’s ok that I have been flitting between games, rather than finishing them, because games are supposed to be fun. I haven’t lost my chance to go back and (re)start again, and I can platinuum if I choose, but if I desired a different game in the moment, then maybe that is ok. It’s not wasting anything, in fact maybe I’ll wind up playing more hours if I have to restart.

Also, I think it’s ok to say with criticism that it’s how I feel, and that it’s not a universal truth. When I criticize e.g. the writing on TV, I accept that people might disagree but I also accept that they are wrong /hides. I know, that sounds bad, but if I think something is badly written then it’s badly written. I would never say it as definitive as that because I always leave room in anything I say for people to have their own opinions, but if I’m honest deep down I would think I was right and it was truth. Whereas with games when I am disliking the combat in Enshouded, or Dragonwilds – or AC Shadows as I have mentioned before – that doesn’t actually make the combat ‘bad’. It means it’s not working for me but someone who is better at games, who understands the systems, who knows how to parry time etc. could think the combat was amazing and they would be just as right.

But also I do have to (reluctantly) agree with much of the criticism of Forspoken. That game really does suck.