Twenty Hours

There are some books in which the sample chapters are just so engaging you immediately buy the book...then find out the rest of the book does something different and not as interesting.

I've never encountered this in a game. Generally, you know in less than five minutes. (Of course, you rarely get a sample chapter, so you've bought the game already...)

Mostly. It can take a while to get into the core gameplay loop. In Horizon Zero Dawn you are introduced to most of the core concepts within twenty minutes of the (long!) opening cutscene. An important element is the "focus," however, and if you are really, enjoying exploration and listening to all the audio diaries it might take you forty minutes get to Aloy actually using the thing in-game.

Similarly, you don't get the bow and you certainly don't get the trick arrows until an hour into Tomb Raider 2013. But the thing is; whether it is the mostly-passive opening sequence of Bioshock or the extremely long cutscene that begins Horizon Zero Dawn or the big build-up -- you do character creation before you even start playing -- before you actually stride the corridors of the Normandy as Commander Shepard, you still know what kind of ride you are in for.

These games all have a style. There's a strong artistic vision that infuses all the design elements, from as big as skyboxes to as intimate as inventory screens. The music, the sound effects -- and when any element of play begins, the fluidity and intuitiveness of the controls.

I had trouble right out of the gate with Dragon Age, as I did not like the control system. It almost reminded me of the "tank" controls of original Tomb Raider.  Far Cry 3 also felt awkward. I just did not really feel in control of Jason Brody. But that's a me thing; that's a reaction some players will have, and some will not.

Just as the very strong design choices in some games just don't mesh with all players. When you give a whole game a distinct stamp, color, flavor, then some will like it and some will not.

What doesn't work is being bland. I can't think of any game I have really liked that had a bland approach. My favorite games have all had, over and above the game play, puzzles, dialogue, choices, voice acting, and of course graphics, an extremely distinctive style. You can't confuse Portal with anything else out there.

***

So every now and then a game comes along that the advise is not to judge it immediately but play for twenty hours. As I mentioned in my previous "review" (short take?) Starfield takes obscenely long to open up the rest of the game to you. 

Well, okay, the crafting, base building, and ship building are a bit of an appendage. They are to some one of the more attractive parts of the game, though, and they are behind a grindwall that's a good 10-20 hours thick.

Same goes for the main campaign. Considered skippable -- but one of the side quests that is well spoken of (Crucible) requires multiple hours of play just to clear the first barrier. You have to have a specific package of upgraded ship and upgraded skills (and some toughness, too) in order to even get the quest. 

It took me well over twenty hours to get to where I could start building my first outpost. I could have done ship building earlier, but really, not that much earlier. Plus, it took that long to get both the main campaign into an interesting place, and to be able to start pursuing the big side quests (like Mantis).

So, yes. As far as the play opportunities, as far as exploring that "core gameplay loop," I really did need to put twenty hours in.

Which pains me. It means there are some upper-level managers who are congratulating themselves on making a game good enough that most players do a good twenty hours, and none of them quality for a refund. The reality is that they've done such a bad job of staging this game, it really does require that kind of time.

The crafting system is ridiculously grindy, and it is linked in various ways to outpost building (and less so to ship construction but there are similar things going on there). The player just can't experience the game as written without exceeding the refund time.

But...and here's the big but...the five minute rule was still true.

It looks awful. It looks like shit and it runs like shit. The two are connected only in the dreams of the marketers; turn down the graphics and it still bugs out all over the place. Turn up the graphics to full settings -- and it still looks like a game from fifteen years ago.

Almost every part of this game is a regression. The NPCs are less alive, less animated, less realistic. The scenery is less interesting. There's less interactivity overall, really. This still has the Creation Engine stupid of playing long, long animations of your character sitting down, then awkwardly cutting to a different POV of them seated. Same for crafting. This still has the stuck-in-place, dead-eyed NPCs chanting the same stock lines at you without any sense that your input even matters. It is like being trapped in the animatronic Hall of Presidents for twenty hours.

And all the usual stuck on scenery, vanishing heads, and people mysteriously floating into the sky...that's all still there.

But even that doesn't matter. Because when all is said and done, it doesn't have the "it." The design is merely adequate. There's no strong flavor to it. No strong choices. Just...stuff. Generic music, generic assets, generic UI..

I take that back. The UI is regrettably ugly and dysfunctional. It looks and feels and works like the low bid for a mega-chain POS register. Endless unfriendly menus with poor text, poor tactile response, no clear and consistent UI system...

It feels absolutely random, for instance, whether you can click on a quest location and make the jump from there, or if you have to go to your ship, or if your ship pops into space over the planet and you have to navigate down to the surface with another click-and-loading screen. After dodging bigger enemies for hours by having one finger on the hyperdrive controls -- as the game itself, and the NPCs in the cockpit with me, all recommend -- I got killed while staring at a screen labeled "You can not fast travel in combat!"

There's no strong spirit to it. People don't love Portal because of the cutting-edge ambient lighting engine (although Portal 2 does look very, very nice). Or Bioshock because the environments are filled with intricately modeled clutter. They love that these games have a distinctive look and feel that draws you emotionally and aesthetically into their world.

And you can figure this out in five minutes. Seriously -- don't do the twenty hours. It doesn't really get any better. The same poor gameplay loop, the same broken balance, the same crashes, the same ugly graphics and lack of a great style; what you see in a tutorial in a mineshaft really is the game you are going to get.