Gamers have grown up. They're in their late 30's now. They have more disposable income, but less time. I know that occasionally I don't finish a game unless I get really invested in it. It becomes difficult to revisit a game after you've put it down for a length of time.
Plenty of recent games like that. Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause and Saints Row to name just a few, all on console and/or PC. All open world and all allow you to mess around endlessly in the game world.
Posted
by
timothy
from the excuse-me-were-you-using-that-app-and-logo dept.
Haedrian writes "Apple is famous for going to absurd lengths to enforce its patents and trademarks. It recently sued Amazon for calling its app store Appstore. And it has publicly lectured competitors to 'create their own original technology, not steal ours.' Last year, UK developer Greg Hughes submitted an app for wirelessly syncing iPhones with iTunes libraries, which was rejected from the official App Store. Fast forward to Monday, when Apple unveiled a set of new features for the upcoming iOS 5, including the same wireless-syncing functionality. Cupertino wasn't even subtle about the appropriation, using the precise name and a near-identical logo to market the technology."
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the low-emissions-and-low-carb dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Game designer and all-around interesting person Jane McGonigal just published a book arguing that playing games will help solve the urgent problems of the real world. To mark the publication, Discover Magazine has a Q&A with McGonigal on several topics, such as: exactly how much gaming is too much? 'There was a really significant study that tracked 1,100 soldiers for a year, and looked at how they were spending their free time with things they considered coping mechanisms—using Facebook, listening to music, reading, working out, or playing video games. They correlated this with incidences of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, suicide attempts, and domestic violence. The found that by a very wide margin, the most psychologically protected individuals—who had the lowest rates of any of these negative experiences—were people who were playing video games 3 to 4 hours a day. ... That was fascinating—it was more beneficial than anything but working out 7 hours a day.' She also talks about how relationships forged in games can change the world, and which world problems exactly is she trying to solve via games. (Hint: think big.)"
It can be a 40 hour playthrough, at least, depending on whether you go after every little side mission (and... organise your weapons / armour). 'Easy' depends on the difficulty you set and how you play your games usually. The story's pretty entertaining and the depth of the lore in the game could make it seem deep, I suppose.
Sounds sort of like the open quests from Warhammer online. Show up in area, help out, get loot bag. True, there's a ranking system which means if your efforts weren't good enough you won't get anything immediate, but you still earn points which raise your rank in the chapter and (eventually) enable you to pick up useful, class-specific equipment.