It's very easy to forget what being trusted feels like. But once you notice that it’s happened – and it’ll take some of us longer than others – then it becomes a very difficult feeling to ignore.
This past weekend, I had an hour to kill. Glancing at the shelves, I decided to play something that was new to me. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 on the PS2 was the pick. Purchased months ago, because a) it was cheap, b) I hadn’t played it and c) PS2-era Need for Speed was generally entertaining enough.
So, with no nostalgia attached and no expectations, I set about killing that hour.
Within seconds, I was racing.
No tutorial. No onboarding. No systems being drip-fed to me one mechanic at a time. No voice in my ear explaining which button was the accelerator and which was the brake. No 10-minute cutscene to introduce my character, his cohorts, their in-laws, and their next-door neighbours’ pets. Just a simple menu and a choice of whether I wanted to outrun the police or take part in more traditional street racing.
Win the race, unlock the next one. Sometimes, unlock a car for use in other modes. Lose the race, try again. That was it. Somewhere in that hour, something clicked that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I realised that I wasn’t working through the game. I was playing it.
That distinction sounds obvious, right up until it isn’t.
Press Start
I’ve played a lot of modern games of late. They look incredible, and technically, of course, they’re miles ahead of anything from that PS2 era. More detail, more systems, more options, more customisation, more modes…more everything.
But increasingly, when playing current-gen titles, I feel like starting them is an absolute chore. You pay your money, you boot the game, and if you’re lucky, after creating your online account, naming your character, and digitally signing a 40-page licence agreement and agreeing to the terms of service, your first hour might be enough to complete the tutorial.
We’re not being asked to play. We’re being onboarded. Walked through mechanics. Introduced to systems. Gently guided from one concept to the next, with just enough input to keep us engaged, but never enough freedom to actually play.
And that feeling that I get from modern games - that low-level sense that I’m merely completing tasks rather than enjoying them - isn’t new. In fact, it’s all become uncomfortably familiar.
Maybe this is just me getting older. Maybe this is where someone yells out “unc fell off” (whatever that means) or that I’m “washed.”
I don’t think that’s it.
I’ve played games my entire life. I spent two decades writing about them. With more than 1000 reviews under my belt, I’ve seen trends come and go, genres rise and fall, and entire design philosophies shift underneath the industry.
But something big has slowly changed. I just can’t shake the feeling that modern games don’t trust you.
Downshift
They don’t trust you to understand what to do without being told. They don’t trust you to fail and try again. They don’t trust you to work it out. They don’t trust you to enjoy yourself without a system nudging you forward every few seconds. Instead, they teach you. Learning isn’t a bad thing, but every mechanic is introduced in isolation. Every mistake is softened. Every edge is rounded, so it can’t hurt you, and you can’t hurt it.
It's rank distrust, dressed up as “onboarding”, which is a term I’d associate with work rather than play, anyway.
There was a time when games didn’t explain anything at all. You pressed start, and you figured it out. If you got stuck, there was a manual. Something physical that you could read if you wanted to, as opposed to something digital that you had to sit through before you were allowed to begin.
Then things shifted. Games got more complex, mechanics got deeper, and having an in-game tutorial made sense. They showed you what was new. What this game did differently. Just enough to get you going.
Somewhere along the way, that balance tipped. Games now assume that you’ve never so much as held a controller before, and as such, lead you by the hand through minefields of cutscenes and menu pointers until the game (such as it is) is half over.
By the time you’re finally let loose, the moment has passed.
You understand the game, but after an hour and a half, you really haven’t played it yet.
And that shift - from playing immediately to preparing to play - changes how the experience is built in the first place.
There was a time when games stood or fell on the strength of their gameplay. That was the deal. If it wasn’t fun, you stopped playing. There were very few systems to prop up a bad game. An unenjoyable experience was given up as a bad lot, and you’d trade it in to try something else. There was no layered progression designed to keep you moving forward, regardless of whether the moment-to-moment experience actually held up.
You either enjoyed the act of playing, or you didn’t. That’s not to say that older games didn’t have progression – of course they did – but it was a different kind of progression. It was progression with a point. You were working towards the end. Saving the princess, winning the World Cup, defeating the bad guy. You were finishing the thing you’d started.
If your playing time was fun enough, you’d even come back afterwards. Not because you were being nudged to, but because you wanted to. Maybe there were more things to unlock in the postgame, but you sure as heck wouldn’t bother if the gameplay sucked.
Now, progression often feels like the point itself. It isn’t a path to something, but a loop designed solely to keep you in place.
Modern games don’t just want your attention - they’re competing for it constantly. More and more, games are played as background attractions, with players grinding and trudging through dull and unenjoyable gameplay while watching Netflix on their second screen. To increase their chances of winning the attention war, games hit you with a constant barrage of noise. Every few seconds, something happens. A reward, a notification, a progression tick. A couple of extra numbers are added to one of the game’s nine different currencies. Just a little something to keep you engaged, to make sure you don’t drift. Don't forget to check in every week! No, I mean every day! How about every 6 hours? Did you look away? Wait! No! Look at me!
All of this isn’t necessarily because the act of playing the game isn’t enough to keep folks enthralled, but because it’s assumed that it won’t be.
From a fiscal perspective, the shift makes sense. There was a time when you bought a game, and that was it. Whether you played it for an hour or for a decade didn’t really change anything for the people who made it or the bean counters who paid their salaries.
Now, your presence matters. Not how long you play. Not whether you beat the game – if it's even beatable. Not even your engagement. Just your presence. Without you being there, publishers can’t later sell you a new hat, a new player, a new car, or the rest of the game you thought you’d already paid for. It’s not just about making something enjoyable anymore. It’s about making something you won’t leave. Once that becomes the goal, everything else shifts, too.
More Isn't Better
What’s worse is that in a way, we kind of asked for it.
At some point during the 360/PS3 era, an outstanding 8-hour game apparently stopped being worth the asking price. If it didn’t provide 40 hours of playing time, then it was to be tossed into the pit. Vanquish didn’t provide as much value for money as Assassin’s Creed DCCCXXVI Part 6 Deluxe Edition, despite being the more enjoyable game. We started to equate value with time, even if the 40-hour game was 36 hours of drudgery, cutscenes, and checklists, with 4 hours of actual gameplay sprinkled in.
It doesn’t take a mammoth leap to see how companies looked at that and saw the easiest money imaginable being left on the table. Publishers saw that inch that we gave up and dragged it for a mile. Don’t make anything new. Don't try to make anything fun. Just make more of what they've indicated they'll accept, and they'll choke it down and ask for seconds. Seconds, which will be available as DLC for $19.99 just 3 months after launch.
More game time simply doesn’t mean more play. More often than not, it means more work, if anything.
Trust
The more I think of modern gaming, the more my feelings come back to that one word: trust.
I want a game to trust me to enjoy it without being guided through every step. I want it to trust me to fail, to get something wrong, to come back and try again without stepping in to soften the experience. I want it to trust me to stick around. Not because there are three hours of grinding for every 10-minute chunk of actual entertainment. Not because I’m being nudged or rewarded every few seconds, or because I have to come back to do my daily check in, but because I’m actually enjoying what I’m doing.
More than anything, I think I’m just tired of being treated like I won’t.
If you’ve only ever played modern games, I don’t know how this feels from the other side.
If this is all you’ve known - tutorials, systems, and progression bars layered on top of each other - then maybe this just is what games feel like. Maybe there’s nothing missing, because there’s nothing to compare it to. Maybe it’s not that modern games are necessarily worse. But that there was a version of this - simpler, sharper, more immediate - that you could just pick up and play.
I’m not sure you’d know to miss it if you’d never experienced it.
Older games understood something simple: if someone picks up a controller, they probably want to play. So, they let you.
Maybe the natural failure that comes from not having your hand held through half the game is the cornerstone of what makes older games satisfying. Not because games were difficult for the sake of it (though some were!) but because they trusted you to handle the loss. They trusted you to figure it out. To get better. To come back and try again without being coaxed or protected from the experience.
To be clear, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 is a relatively middling game. It has framerates that vary as wildly as the accuracy of the collision detection. It’s not the best PS2 game. It’s not the best racing game. Heck, it isn’t even the best Need for Speed game.
But it trusted me, and it trusted me quietly.
There was no noise. No systems layered on top of systems. No sense that I was being guided toward something just out of reach. Just a simple loop.
Start. Play. Win and move on, or lose and try again.
And for that hour, I wasn’t thinking about progression, or unlock paths, or what I was working toward. I was just there. Playing a game.
For a few years now, I thought I’d fallen out of love with games. To an extent, maybe I had.
But sitting there, playing a bang average PS2 racer I’d never touched before, I realised that it wasn’t the idea of video games that I’d drifted away from. Rather, it was the reality of what they have become.
And for the first time in years, I found clarity. I’m not looking for bigger worlds, better graphics, or more systems. I’m looking for something that trusts me to press start, play, and let the chips fall where they may.
