For me, traditional singleplayer or multiplayer games feels less and less intriguing. Here's a couple of games that has failed to capture my attention:
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I've played about 5 hours of this game, and I really don't feel like continuing.
Crysis. I think I've completed about half the game, and I will probably not complete. The stealth was fun, but grew old after a while, and the vehicle sections really killed the joy for me.
Final Fantasy XII and X. I played around 40h of FFXII before giving up. It was fun, but the time it took me to get to the level I needed to be able to keep going was just tooo long.
Just for reference, when FFVII came out I beat it twice, played it for about 180h total. I have played a fair number of hours of Counter-strike, played through Half-Life, and used to beat every Nes and SNES game I could lay my hands on.
It's not just that the games are too long. The interesting part of them is disappearing. This makes me worried, and is what lead to the question in the topic.
Thank god there are a few exceptions to this rule. The Guitar Hero games have totally captured me, but they are not games in the traditional sense. The only traditional game that has made me giddy as a school boy these last couple of years is Portal. I love Portal so much I made a list of the eight reasons it's the game of the century.
Why I love Portal:
1. It introduced a completely unique concept. I know you can argue that Narbacular drop was first, but that's beside the point really. The last time the FPS genre saw an innovation was the Gravity-Gun in HL2, and that was more of an improvement of already existing idées. True innovations are far between in this genre. Portal makes your head spin, in a good way. It makes you think things that you never thought before,
2. It is incredibly funny. It's not often a game makes me laugh out loud repeatedly. Portals voiceover, the main reason the game is so funny, is great for a number of reasons. First we have the script, filled with absurd comments and standing jokes (cake, anyone?) that makes for memorable quotes, second there's the very talented voice-actress and thirdly, GlaDOS is believable partly because we never get to see or talk to her. The secondary reason that Portal made me laugh is ofc the ending.
3. It's short. This has been presented as a flaw from most reviewers, but I think it's a complete stroke of genius. I seldom complete games nowadays (played FFXII for 40h then gave up...), so Portals length means it's one of the few games I completed last year. It also means that it is possible to play again by lowering the time-barriers of a regular-length game. I have finished Portal from start to end five times to date, and I'm probably going to play through it again.
4. It uses your imagination to build the story. The story in Portal is never told in words. It uses cues in the enviroment and the players actions alone to weave a story that is simple and powerful. The story is not built by narrative, but by the players imagination. This is very uncommon in games. In fact, in my gaming experience there is no game that have come even close to using the players imagnation with the same success.
5. A new genre (or genre-mix). I don't know about this, but it was the first time I ever played a first person puzzler (FPP). The best parts of FPS (Guns, graphics, story) and Puzzle games combined.
6. The narrow focus. Portal is a game that does one thing, and one thing only. This focus allows it to do this very, very well. Keeping down the number of characters (I count 4, GlaDOS, Chell, Companion Cube and Turrets) also makes the drive in the narrative (or lack thereof) more forceful, and the characters more memorable. If a game makes an inanimate object into a loved and memorable character, it must have done something right.
7. Playtesting. Few other developers reach the same level of clarity in game-design as Valve. This is, I understand, due to the fact that Valve-games always undergo intense playtesting. Portal simply feels intuitive, you don't get stuck anywhere and you seldom miss important facts or events.
8. Symbios of gameplay, design and story. In Portal, design and story are inseperable. And these both follow rules set by the gameplay. Example: The clean enviroments are a direct result of cluttered enviroments drawing the players attention away from the portal mechanic. This coupled with the need for introducing the player to the new idées leads to the Test-Chambers, clean, devoid of life, automated and with helpful (or not so helpful) hints here and there.
Come to think of it, these are all qualities that I miss in most games nowadays. Most traditional games are built on the 'Bigger, faster, better' formula. If every new game had at least some of those qualities I think I would be a lot more excited, but I cannot be sure of that.
I know a lot of you out there have similar experiences, finding games harder and harder to have really fun with. Maybe it's just a part of growing up. Maybe it's inevitable. I just know that I don't like it.
Share your thoughts with me, please.
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