> for casual gamers - a lot of games are offputting since you have to spend a lot of time trying to learn the mechanics / lore.
Now that I have kids, I have real trouble playing anything that requires you to actually build skill at the specific mechanics/controls of that particular game.
What happens is I get a ways in, have to put it down for a week or two, come back, am at a part of the game that's quite a bit more difficult than the beginning and requires you to know how to play moderately well, but don't even remember the controls, so I'm just fucked and can't make much headway without a ton of frustration and effort.
Same happens for narratives in games. I really appreciate the modern trend of reminding you WTF was going on when you load a game.
Ye learning new controls get emberresingly hard with age. I crush any kid in Mariocart 64 but I can't play new Switch games with the same fidelity and focus.
100% agreed. I enjoy games which are "easy to learn, hard to master". I think Counter-Strike, Left4Dead and TF2 are great examples of that. COD to an extend, but they added a lot of other overhead which I don't like. (Weapon customization, and general microtransactions)
I'd love to play newer Wolfenstein games. However, I picked one up a few years ago and the very first thing you had to do was kill your pet dog as a crying and terrified child in a flashback while your abusive father yelled at you. I put the game down and haven't wanted to touch the series since. Notable because almost nothing in games gets to me like that did.
The new Wolfenstein games are fantastic, but yes they are very harsh and uncomfortable. There's a point to everything, but they're tough. I've never been much of a story-in-games person, skip cutscenes by default, etc. But the narrative of the Wolfenstein games really gripped me like no other game has in 40 years of playing.
just to clarify; you don't have to do it, but I'm not sure the alternative is less intense and charged. There is a related payback moment later in the game though, and it feels pretty good.
The latest Wolfenstein games are great. If you like old school fps, the remasters of quake and quake 2 are excellent. And in the last few years there have been great modern games that either recreate the speed of quake with modern graphics (like "Hellbound") or recreate the creepy, lo-fi atmosphere (like "Dusk").
