Welcome to VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast: Episode 34 – the best game that suffers from bloating
Bloat was clearly on all our minds in the afterglow of the christmas season, so we did an entire podcast about the concept. But we’re not talking about being full of mince pies, here: we’re on about video game bloat. The scourge of modern times, that has turned what used to be a fun escapist hobby into the full time job of icon janitoring. Games are so rammed with the dreaded “content” now that dev cycles are starting to be measured in decades instead of years. It’s an industry-wide problem, and we’re all tired of it.
But which game is the worst offender, according to our esteemed panel of turkey-stuffed commentators?
Here’s a photo of Chris Bratt looking fed up with Assassin’s Creed (Support friends of VG247, People Make Games, on Patreon).
Cast: Tom Orry, Alex Donaldson, Connor Makar, and Jim Trinca.
Our picks this week (SPOILERS AHEAD):
Tom – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Nintendo’s most Ubisofty game, but one with a reputation for having fixed open-world design problems, actually. This will be a hard one to pitch.
Alex – Persona 4: Golden
Persona games are fairly meaty when they first come out, but ATLAS has a habit of re-issuing them with a load of extra stuff glued on, crammed in, and smeared over, to the point where the games actually become worse: more unwieldy, more of a chore, and less fun. But these updates are usually bundled with a suite of QoL updates that make the initial releases very hard to go back to. It’s a very special form of torture, as Alex explains.
Connor – Final Fantasy XV
Final Fantasy games have absolutely ballooned in recent years to the point where the cost and time it takes to make one has spiraled out of control in an alarming way. And according to Connor, XV’s boring side-content is one of the most miserable side effects of this.
“What is VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast?” you ask? Well, it is essentially a 30-minute panel show where people (Jim Trinca and associates) decide on the best game in a specific category. That’s it. It’s good. Listen to it.
Come back in a week for another exciting instalment of VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast.
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