marurun wrote:2. Complexity in games is not a new thing at all. Some early PC games were often needlessly complex (sometimes for all the wrong reasons). If you are talking about shoe-horning systems into games that don’t “need” then, that’s not an issue of complexity but rather a mismatch of game styles and expectations.
3. Game developers have wanted to do that forever, but only could when storage got cheaper. You see early signs of it in some SNES and it takes off in PS1-era and GBA games. Basically, it was inevitable.
Yeah, as for #2, you're totally right. Early PC RPGs were often bafflingly complex in ways that no modern game I've encountered has managed to rival, with all kinds of statistics and systems that had no indication of how they functioned in the game or how they interacted with any other stat or system. That being said, I do agree that unnecessary systems are pretty annoying. A personal pet peeve of mine is when a game implements an unnecessary crafting system. And for the record, I actually like crafting systems in games when they're built into the core of the game play. It can be a fun way to trickle out rewards to a player in a way that makes them feel like they're accomplishing more than they really are. However, when they're implemented poorly all they do is serve as an irritating bottleneck that just slows everything down, and there do seem to be a lot of games nowadays that just slap them in there because, well, you gotta have a crafting system!
In regards to #3, I actually think the issue is kind of similar. I think it doesn't really matter how long the script of a game is if it's well written. Something like a visual novel or one of the Ace Attorney games are essentially all text, but when it all serves the function of organically advancing the plot, it ends up feeling relatively breezy. I think the problems start when one of two things (or often both) happen: 1) the script is poorly written and just wastes time with unnecessary chatter, or what I feel is typically the more likely culprit, 2) the game doesn't respect the player's intelligence and has constant cut scenes where they reiterate the beats of the plot over and over again or they explain in intricate detail logical conclusions a reasonable person would have already reached. Either of those things can turn an otherwise fun game into a real slog. As much as I really like Persona 5, that game could have easily cut down its length by probably close to a third if they just took out all the dialog where everyone reexplains the entire plot during a cut scene at every significant plot beat. While I do agree that games have actually been pretty chatty for at least the last twenty years, I do think really disrespecting the player's intelligence is a relatively new phenomenon, although one that's definitely not unique to videogames. A lot of modern movies are pretty bad about this too, with lots of scenes where characters explain the plot over and over again because the writer and/or director assume the audience is too stupid and/or doesn't have enough of an attention span to follow along. And, hey, maybe they're right, but I'm not sure this is a behavior they should be validating in their viewers/players.