Have you ever played a game that just didn’t have any respect for your time? Whether it’s terribly long quests with little payoff, endless grinding, or another annoying gameplay trait, we’ve all been there.
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Long games can sometimes be the perpetrator here, but it’s often how a game is made long rather than the length itself. Here are some games that do not respect your time.
10Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
Level Gating Is Pain
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Assassin’s Creed Odysseyis arguably the best of the new age Assassin’s Creed games, but it has a serious issue with time-wasting.
At certain points in the game, the main story becomes inexplicably stonewalled by level gating, and the only way to proceed is to finish a host of side quests so that you can continue with the main plot.
It happens several times, and it took a while before Ubisoft registered this issue and added a decent fix for it.
Still, it was an insult to the players who bought the game at launch, and it felt even worse because of the gross use of microtransactions to speed up the leveling process.
It’s a great game, but the side quests never end, and while that can be fun for a while, eventually, the quality wanes, and you’re left with a bloated game that doesn’t know when to quit.
9Death Stranding
Definitely Not ‘30 Minutes Or Less’
Death Stranding
Death Strandingcan be agreat game at times, but when it’s not, it is one of the biggest disrespects to your time imaginable.
It’s a fascinating visual experience, but the slightest slip-ups result in large amounts of time being wasted.
Since you’ll be carrying packages so often, you’ll have to maintain your balance.
If you manage to do this, you’ll still have to watch out for the terrifying BTs who, if they catch you, you’ll be washed away, with your packages flying all over the place.
This will result in a battle with the BT, but even if you win, all those packages must be retrieved.
This situation happens way more often than it should, and can result in so much lost time that all the other great things thatDeath Strandingdoes matter little.
It’s hard to appreciate the unique experience that is provided when the game you are playing is actively wasting your time.
Horse Back Riding Takes a While
Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2is one of thegreatest games of all timeby most metrics. One metric it doesn’t succeed in though, is respecting your time.
The lack of easily accessible fast travel is a mind-numbing choice that forces literal hours of exploration where fast travel would normally be in play.
There are times when the world will surprise you with a random event, but it’s nowhere near frequent enough to offset this issue.
Generally speaking, everything is immersive, realistic, and detailed to a fault, with everything feeling like real-life chores that are long-winded and often pretty tedious.
Realism is great, and it can really help place you in the world presented, but I’d much rather be robbing trains and shooting bandits.
You’ll be slowly walking around, fixing fences, picking up alcohol, riding an achingly slow carriage to town to do menial tasks, and doing a whole host of other painfully slow and unenjoyable activities.
When Red Dead Redemption 2 is cooking, it’s great, but there are moments when it feels like it has no respect for your time.
7Persona 5 Royal
Hours Before the Good Stuff
Persona 5 Royal
Persona 5 Royalis the definition of the game version of a TV show that gets good after the first season.
That is to say; you are going to beplaying for around 10 hoursbefore the momentum of this game really picks up. Which is basically an ATLUS game staple by this point.
Once it gets going, it’s one of the best JRPGs of this generation, but before that, its pacing is woeful.
There are the chores you must do, the endless days that you have to fill doing menial social tasks, the extremely repetitive dungeons, and the complete lack of dungeons in the opening 4 hours of the game.
It’s all about setup and payoff here, but the setup is some of the most time-sucking gameplay imaginable.
A lot of players don’t have time for a game to kick its tires for 10 hours before taking off into the stratosphere. But if you do, we will admit, it’s well worth enduring the plodding opening.
6Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Tutorials for Days
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Xenoblade Chronicles 2is a massive, epic JRPG thatcan be a ton of funonce you get your head around the myriad of systems that the game throws at you.
To get to that point, though, you’re going to be sitting through literal hours of tutorials.
From the game’s opening minutes to the closing hours, you will be constantly sitting through new tutorials as new systems get thrown at you non-stop throughout the game.
The gameplay can be fun, but it’s so overly complex that you’ll struggle to remember half of the things the game teaches you.
It gets even more frustrating that you can’t skip the tutorials, and often, they’re for systems you’ll be using very little of.
This is just a slog to sit through, and you will be looking at your watch to find out how much of your time is being wasted by this game.
5Dragon’s Dogma 2
You Were The Chosen One
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Dragon’s Dogma 2had everything set up to be a massive success. The return of a beloved franchise, a long development cycle, industry veterans on staff, it was all there.
The game ended up being okay at best, and one of themost insane time-wasters imaginableat worst.
Dragon’s Dogma 2doesn’t care about your time. It’s that blatant, and it shows you this very fact throughout the gameplay.
First off, the fast travel system is embarrassing. Having fixed this for the most part withDragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, they somehow went backward here to make it as difficult to get around this world as possible.
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On foot, your sprinting constantly drains your stamina meter, so you’ll be watching the out-of-breath animation constantly if you decide to hoof it.
If you take a carriage, it’s going to get attacked by monsters and destroyed 80% of the time, so you’ll be walking anyway, and you’ll need to find the carriage in the first place which is an equally irritating task.
Capcom was going for immersive exploration here, but missed the mark and instead wastes your time so often that it’s not a shock the game’s secret timed main story triggers for just about everyone who plays.
Aliens on Loop
Returnalis an amazing gameonce you get into the meat of it, but until then, it is a painful disrespect to your time.
Of course, that’s by design, as you’re meant to be stuck in this loop of life and death and each time, you’re a bit more equipped to handle the situation at hand.
That doesn’t do much for the early game hours though, where you are clearly not able to contend with most of the creatures you have to fight.
Having to repeat the opening area over and over again is a very poor impression that the developers even added in an additional feature to stop players from quitting the game out of frustration.
It’s a hardcore experience for sure, but that doesn’t excuse the amount of times you’ll be replaying the same levels over and over just hoping things tilt your way the next run through.
3No Man’s Sky
Resource Gathering isn’t Fun
No Man’s Sky
No Man’s Skyis aone of a kind experience these days, but it can’t be denied that its one of the biggest time-wasters around.
In the current iteration of the game, you have the option to turn off the need for resources for most things, but without that option, you’re stuck in a constant loop of gathering and spending and gathering and spending.
The gathering part is just not fun at all, and it can take hours to gather the resources you need to fund the various systems at play in the game.
The universe is an amazing place to explore in this game, but sadly, most of the time you’ll be staring at a poorly detailed rock as you zap it with your mining laser for the thousandth time.
You’ll need to be doing this constantly though, because it’s how you build everything in the game and how you fuel your trips around the galaxy.
Realistic? Sure, but it’s also a massive disrespect to your time and that is part of the reason so many people fell off the game when it was initially released.
2Dragon Age: Inquisition
The Hinterlands Problem
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Dragon Age: Inquisitionisone of the best in the series, but it faces a massive problem that has never been fixed until this day.
It’s called the Hinterlands problem. The first big area of the game you get to explore is called the Hinterlands, and it is full of so many menial tasks that its mind-boggling.
The problem comes in the power currency you acquire when completing these tasks and, to unlock other areas of the war table, you must acquire this power.
This leads to hours upon hours in the opening area, completing every side quest, clearing every set of enemies to claim territories and generally doing busy work until you can escape the prison that is the Hinterlands.
Other areas are thankfully better than the Hinterlands, but this time-wasting feeling never leaves. You still must gather power to progress through the story.
Thankfully, the story is good, so that pushing through the areas gets more tolerable as the game goes on.
Getting rid of this bloat was a massive priority for Bioware, and it shows with how much more compact things are inDragon Age: The Veilguard.
1Starfield
The Great Unknown Is Boring
Starfieldis definitely one of the more polarizing games to come out in some time. You either love the endless space exploration, straightforward story and middling combat, or you don’t.
One thing is for sure though, and that is that Starfield has no regard for your time.
Case in point, exploration. The thing that made all of Bethesda’s hits the names they are today. In Starfield, when you land on a planet, you’re going to walk. And you’re going to walk some more.
In fact, that’s all you’re going to do. No vehicles available at launch or without mods, no QOL functions to make your sprinting meter not cause you to become exhausted, just no care in the world.
The developers know this and said it’s supposed to be boring sometimes. A novel statement, but not an excuse for wasting hours and hours of players' time.
There is also the copy and paste dungeons, like the Cryo Lab, that literally appears multiple times, with the same item layouts and same notepad locations.
It’s so easy to fall for these too, because one second you think you’ve found a new location, you’re exploring and fighting, and then you realize “I’ve done this before.” and by that time, another 45 minutes has been wasted.
It’s painful how muchStarfielddoes this and while it has some good times to be had, nothing will ever make up for the way it disrespects your time.
