I quit gaming because there’s the idea that time spent = successful game design.
I don’t have hundreds or even dozens of hours to play around. Sometimes I have maybe 15 minutes once or twice a week.
It’s too late for me now, but I would’ve liked a game that’s a quick blast of fun. It can even be a long game, as long as I can make one step of progress in 15 minutes, it would work.
You're not alone, and there are many genres that focus on that play style. They're mostly indie or small-studio titles, though, as AAA studios can't practically scale down their operations to suit that kind of thing.
By convention, they often adopt the "roguelite" tag in some way or another, to represent a that there's a divide between play session and some kind of long-term metaprogression that accumulates as you keep playing sessions.
Developers keep crossing that "roguelite" design model with every other type of genre you can imagine: dungeon crawlers, platformers, deck-builders, city builders, rpgs, pachinko, solitaire, tower defense, 4X strategy, poker, etc
This is one of the things that absolutely kills my interest in playing games. I have time to play a game right now. I may only have a half hour of uninterrupted time. If I have to spend any amount of time waiting on an update I've already lost momentum. If I then need to sit through long load times or unskippable cutscenes my interest and available time are gone.
> This has been challenging to sit around the PS5 to update the system, then the firmware of the controller (!), and then the game itself. Annoying.
if you properly configure your PS5 setup; the system auto updates when you're not using it, the games are updated automatically. The only thing is the controller firmware update which happens maybe twice a year if at all.
I've bought a PS5 and got myself the PS+ subscriptions, and have been having a blast with pickup and play games, all different genres, and the instant resume from sleep also lends to quick gaming sessions.
May I recommend a Steam Deck? It's terrific for gaming in short, interrupted bursts. Gotta go? Hit the power button, it immediately suspends the game. Hit the power button again later, it immediately resumes right where you left off. Plug it in between bouts. It's great at helping you opportunistically squeeze more gaming into short, randomly found moments in life.
This is me. I prefer turn-based games where a single game will take me 4-6 months to complete. But I'm hardly spending every waking moment playing them.
I've been on a Master of Orion game for a few months now. I'm also a big fan of Stardew Valley. It's not turn-based, but close enough. Same with Surviving Mars, which has become one of my favorite games.
Honestly you don't even have to be old. There are so many high quality activities nowadays competing for my attention that the idea of spending 60 hours on a game to have mediocre fun just doesn't fly with me.
Too many games that call themselves "roguelike" these days are nothing at all like Rogue, though. I'm not exactly sure what the term really means anymore.
Yes, it doesn't have much to do with the rogue anymore (except a few games). These days, the meaning is along the lines of "the game consists of many repeating runs, each one being reasonably short like 0.5-1h, failure is normal, you will progress in many different ways both within each run and globally even if you fail, there will be a predominant effect of randomness, there may be some exploration effect".
Right?! Cataclysm DDA is the first thing I think of when I think roguelike. And then someone says Slay the Spire is roguelike because, I dunno, you progress in ability. I suppose I'm just too old.
I don’t have hundreds or even dozens of hours to play around. Sometimes I have maybe 15 minutes once or twice a week.
It’s too late for me now, but I would’ve liked a game that’s a quick blast of fun. It can even be a long game, as long as I can make one step of progress in 15 minutes, it would work.