A new Wednesday, a new topic, a new reason to get (completely logically and in no way exaggerated) worked up. I should warn that not everyone will share my opinion – I was “overcome” quite spontaneously to write about this topic, I probably won’t see it as so wild on another day. So, let’s get started!
Today it catches all those thin display panels that usually lurk at the bottom of the screen and then wait for us to fill them at a snail’s pace before they overflow – and then want to be filled again.
A world full of limited bars – Who’s to blame?
I curse Blizzard. Why Blizzard in particular? Maybe they weren’t the first to introduce daily quests, but they were surely among the pioneers. When they introduced the “Netherwing” faction, it differed from previous reputation factions that you could slowly and laboriously work from “hated” to “revered” in that it was only possible through daily quests. So, not only did progress come slowly, but you were artificially slowed down by setting a value that the player could maximally reach in a day.
Don’t get me wrong, I sometimes really enjoy grinding – it’s meditative, you can switch off and just plow through the masses of enemies. But the form of limitation through daily tasks has two serious disadvantages for me: Due to a daily limit, you feel more or less compelled to complete the corresponding quests day after day, on the other hand, you can never work on a faction for “two hours straight” because the quest design system prevents this.
From reward to torture
I still remember well my first “Final Fantasy” games. Even then, there were XP bars, but they were motivating because they were just a side note. Today’s games often rely solely on such numerical manipulations, which are solely intended to keep the player engaged with the product for as long as possible with as little effort as possible. What was fun and motivating for me back then is today a terrible torture, even driving me away from such video games.
Games that completely forgo such systems, like “DayZ” or “H1Z1”, suddenly become much more interesting, and that, although they have no fixed goal – or perhaps precisely because of that? What once captivated me about games has now been so trimmed and regulated that it drives me away from my favorite medium. Maybe I stand alone with this view, but because I can only achieve a certain amount of progress each day, no matter how much time I want to invest today, it feels like work and no longer like a game.
A world without bars? Unimaginable.
What bothers me even more is that seemingly all games today need a progress bar, no matter how absurd and inappropriate it is. Why does a card game like Hearthstone need something like that? Why does SMITE need a follower count for each individual god, of course represented in a bar?
[intense_progress size=”large” animation=”1″ colors=”success,” values=”60″ texts=”So many followers pray to You, dear God!” /]
It seems to me that there is a fear that the actual game may not provide enough appeal, which is why such “pseudo-progress” is added. People seemingly crave to see some form of directly visible increase constantly – it bores me by now. I ask you, please come up with something creative again – and no, replacing the bar with a slowly filling pie chart is not creative.
