A lot of games like to frontload their best content. It's an echo of the arcade era of games, where a game would introduce the premise, get you eased in, then cut you off so you'd slam more quarters in hopes of having that game return to that nice medium fairness.

Here's a long example:
Starbound: If you play the introductory mission of Starbound as it is today, you'll be given a bright colorful tutorial to get used to the controls and "quirks" of the game's engine. Just as the mystery gets going, you get dumped onto a planet and have to grind your ship back to functionality.

Back in the Beta, this used to be an organic process. You'd build a distress beacon, and summon the first boss. Kill the boss, and you get the thing you need to repair the engines. Mazeltov. Nice and organic.

In the Release, you have to commit to finding 20 of something deep within the planet so you can activate a gate that's on the planet's surface, so you can have your ears talked off by lady exposition dump. Then you have to scan things around the outpost before you finally get the instanced mission added to your computer.

The mining facility arguably isn't a bad dungeon, but having to do it and the others every time you spin up a new universe (and having to do the mine for every character) wears out the charm quickly. There are hints of interesting lore, but those are just the skeleton of a form the game once was.

After your ship is brought to function, in the beta the gloves are off. Universe is your oyster. Progression is gated though needing materials for advanced crafting tables. In the Release, you need to...commit yet another scanning mission on one of the species of the universe who only sometimes have a chance of appearing on planets you visit because the developers forgot to implement a planetside scanner.

Repeat 5x times, with each dungeon being worse than the previous.



At the end of it, it just leaves you wanting the story over even though there's no urgency.

Steam had a free weekend for the latest Age of Empires game (is it IV?), so I decided to try it. I think this was a month or two ago, maybe.

The tutorial mission seemed quite nice, the AoE gameplay I know and like. Build a small town, start gathering resources, build an army and set up defenses, upgrade your town etc. Nice.

Then the first actual single-player campaign mission starts. Uh, nothing like the tutorial mission. No town to protect, no resource gathering, no upgrading of your facilities and troops.

Instead, you just had two armies in a battlefield, and was just trying to beat the other army so that it loses all its men before you do. And it was done in a very rigid and controlled way, ie. the game pretty much told you what you are supposed to do, like now send your archers forward, now you are supposed to send your horsemen to attack the enemy archers, etc. etc. etc.

At that point I decided I don't like the game, and stopped playing it. That trial convinced me I don't need to play the latest installment of Age of Empires.

I recall AoE3 and even AoE2 did have a bit of the same problem, too many missions WITHOUT the base building and resource gathering. That is probably why I actually think the first AoE game is the best in the series, even if it feels quite archaic with its user interface and parts of the gameplay. But at least it didn't constantly change its playstyle to something completely different, and didn't have such "story missions" that later AoE games constantly had.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance. In the first couple of hours, you have to escape from a huge army of thousands of men who are trying to massacre you, which is very epic.

Then after that, you spend the rest of the time doing mundane boring things like looting containers and riding around on a horse, and then nothing interesting ever happens again...and almost nothing at all happens, other than you get ambushed by a bandit or two sometimes (which is not exciting in the least bit, especially not after the first time when it happens).

I abandoned the game before finishing it, so maybe it gets good again at some point; I wouldn't know.

Definitely it quickly turns from epic fun at the very start into a quite unepic & boring slog, though.

I've seen this happen with some incremental games. The game starts out quite fun, but then you hit a clickwall or a timewall, and then it's not that fun for a while.

(Clickwall: To progress, you need to do a lot of clicking. Timewall: To progress, you need to wait a while, which can be on the scale of hours or even days.)

While enjoying the combat promoted by WB in Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor, I noticed that if I'd try to complete everything you can in the game it would get way too repetitive.

The repetition of gore for gore and violence for violence really gets annoying by the 10hr mark, after noticing that the story is not that deep. So you're just running around killing for killing, and, if you can perfect the combat (which is not that hard in this game In my humble opinion) there's not much else to do.

A fun game with good mechanics in combat - nonetheless - but long breaks might be a necessity in this case for 'mental safety'.

--edit:

To clarify: I finished the game already, and it does have a good 'end game' content, specially with what I think it's the game dlcs where you play as other characters, or challenges. It's fun - but more of the same. A good way to have fun with the combat. :)

Mafia III. The first act is absolutely incredible (especially once you apply a reshade filter to get rid of that unforgivable messy blur they made of the graphics); bank job, escape, betrayal, fires, the CIA... Then, the middle third becomes a load of repetitive missions - almost like they thought that side-quests would make a game. The final few missions (and the add-on packs) are better, but they really dropped the ball in the middle.

It's not that the mechanics aren't fun - it's just there's too much grind, like you get in a bad RPG.

Side quests *can* make a game. In fact, Romancing SaGa is pretty much just side quests, except for a short intro and the endgame quests, and it actually does work (unless you do every quest available early, but haven't fought enough battles to advance time enough for later quests to open up).

The Order: 1886. Wow look at those graphics, that it? ...frig.

I had a strong impression of front-loading with Zelda, Windwaker. The first island you start on is much larger and more interesting than any of others. As soon as you leave it, it becomes apparent very quickly that most of the overworld map is featureless ocean, with a small handful of tiny islands to visit. Probably one of the weakest Zelda games, imo.

Cyberpunk - It looks great, but it's like the game has ADHD and constantly prodding you in the chest to go do stuff


Horizon Zero Dawn - Once the visuals become used to, it just begins to melt into a ubisoft-like experience of box ticking and 2d character writing. Turned me right off

I didn't get that far, as the game has an insta-fail stealth section right away, and such a section is a game ruiner for me.

(I've actually only played the demo, which at least allows you to experience some actual Zelda-style action without having to go through the stealth segment first.)

It all depends on how much one enjoys robo-dino safaris. I had a blast with it. The story ain't that bad, especially as one uncovers how their world came to be. My most memorable moment of the game was when I was ambushed at night by 2 Stalkers (hunters with cloaking ability) while merely traversing the jungle from point A to B. Survived the intense fight by the skin of my teeth. It also was a superb visual spectacle of a light show.

To each their own I guess. *shrug*

Play through Mafia III (it's a LONG game) without skipping any missions and see if you still think that!

I've never understood what it is about HZDs graphics that are supposed to be so impressive. And I agree about the flat characters - the world is cool but otherwise the story is pretty crappy.

I think Far Cry 2 was beyond incredible the first 1-2 hours, then as you starts to get how basic and mundane the world is, it kinda looses a lot of charm.

I also think Tomb Raider (2013) goes downhill after climbing the radio tower.

But neither game turns to crap, they just can't keep the momentum up.