2020s - The Decade of Bloated Masterpieces - Article
by Mark Nielsen , posted on 17 March 2025 / 4,623 Views
Halfway into the decade and the 2020s has been an interesting one for gaming in both good ways and bad, with the restructuring of the industry, a mix of innovation and the same old, and of course many, many long waits. But there have also been many quality titles, to be sure; the last three years in particular have seen a number of critical darlings. Something the most acclaimed ones have had in common (with the obvious exception of Astro Bot) has been an absolutely massive scope, easily boasting 100+ hours of content. In my own experience that massive amount of content hasn’t always been a positive; in fact I would go so far as to call their slightly overeager strive for quantity a shared flaw of these games. I’ll be looking at four titles in particular here and going over the different ways in which these otherwise solid experiences became victims of having just a bit too much fluff.
Elden Ring - Repeat Bosses
There's no doubt that Elden Ring has been one of the decade's highlights in terms of pure atmosphere and style, taking us to the Lands Between to explore an epic world and face down increasingly deadly foes, so it’s a shame that the second half of the experience is regularly interspaced with exclamations of “You again!”. Seeing a couple of bosses a few times might not sound like the biggest of deals, but with around 70 boss types in the base game and 165 boss encounters (+73 mini bosses), you’re looking at more than a fair amount of repetition. And with FromSoft's Soulslikes already being games where you tend to stick to the same weapon for long periods of time, and you eventually reach a point where most drops beyond the souls themselves are unimportant, it’s hard not to feel a bit of that sense of discovery got lost somewhere along the long journey to the Erdtree.
Tears of the Kingdom - Here a Shrine, There a Shrine, Everywhere a Shiny Shrine
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is about as massive as they come, with the already-expansive world of Hyrule from Breath of the Wild being turned into a triple-layered sandwich, with sky islands floating above a dark underground below, not to mention the many caves being added on the surface throughout the land. Considering its size, Nintendo did a pretty impressive job of filling Hyrule with stuff worth doing, but on top of the downside of most players having already explored the surface once before, there’s another area where it falls short of its predecessor: there are too many shrines.
With a larger overall game space one would think having more shrines than Breath of the Wild is only logical, but the issue is that despite the increased space they're actually much easier to find this time around, thanks to your increased mobility and newfound aerial capabilities. These two things combined have an unfortunate effect: finding a shrine doesn’t feel quite as much like an interesting discovery in Tears of the Kingdom as another bullet on the to-do-list. That doesn’t change the fact that most shrines are in fact very compelling once you venture inside them, but there are outliers, like some very questionably-placed tutorial shrines or there being too many escort-a-shrine quests in the sky, making it all the more clear that cutting a few of them would have been for the better.
Baldur's Gate III - The Act 3 Slouch
For both better and worse, having an overabundance of content is one of the core elements of Baldur’s Gate III; it wants to provide you with an experience where you can keep discovering new things on subsequent playthroughs, and at that it no doubt succeeds. However, as highly regarded as the game is, it's not uncommon to hear complaints about its third and actually biggest act. In a game that both burrows from and differs from its predecessors, it seems one thing they all have in common is a titular city that's too big and not interesting enough. I will be quick to say that there are most certainly some great quests and story moments in Act 3, but frankly nearly all of them began in previous acts, while the new things the city has to offer on its own fall a bit flat by comparison. It doesn’t help that while a big sprawling city sounds cool on paper, it's frankly the least interesting area to traverse in the game when compared to a wilderness interspaced with enemies and areas of interest.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - A Mini-Game collection with RPG Elements
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was a big departure from both the original game and Remake in several ways. For one thing it switches to a more open-world format, and for another its switches genre. Rebirth has enough mini-games to fill a game all on its own, ranging from the well-executed & compelling Queen’s Blood and Chocobo Racing, to the ones that make you want to press the skip button or choke a Moogle. While some of them are legitimately great parts of the experience, all in all there are definitely more mini-games than there should be. They’re also a symptom of a larger issue, as Rebirth has a few too many filler side quests, and the open-world exploration elements, while fun at times, can become quite repetitive. As much as Rebirth also brought great things to the table and overall provided an excellent experience, it’s hard not to feel it’s dragged down a tad by Square trying its damndest to justify the decision to split the remake into three titles.
Conclusion
While I enjoyed every game listed here, and I even consider some of them among my favorites, I strongly believe all of them would have stood to gain something from the developers trimming a bit more of the fat. Most of the issues mentioned above of course relate to optional elements of each title, which makes them less problematic to be sure, but the best massive games are the ones that manage to make the full experience compelling and where you never get moments of fatigue or start to ask “why is this here?” on a regular non-completionist playthrough. That’s certainly a feat easier said than done, but one that I hope developers will at least strive for, because at the end of the day neither player nor developer stand to gain anything from spending time developing elements that feel like filler. While these four games are certainly far from being the worst sinners in this category (*cough cough* Ubisoft) and all of them have other - and perhaps bigger - flaws to speak of as well, it’s still worth pointing out that even highly lauded GotY winners are not immune to this trend, particularly as of late.
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What's ironic is studios bloat their games to make them longer and more "attractive" to a dollar conscious consumer... With every game being bigger and longer we inevitably end up playing fewer and fewer of these massive games
I'm at the point where I only have time for 1 massive game per year... This year it'll be Oblivion Remake, last was FF7, then TotK.
Other than that I only play short games now that are tight sub 20 hour games.
This’d only be a problem if studios were pumping out several games per year. Rockstar, for instance, would def prefer consumers be sucked into their games for hundreds/thousands of hours.
I think I have more time than that, but I definitely have to be conscious of the games I play, just so I can best focus my time on what interests me the most at any given time. I think since about Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, I've been increasingly conscious about the length of each game I start, and I've also paid increasingly much attention to pacing: I tend to pick shorter games between the longer ones so the longer ones don't start feeling like work.
I blame especially Valhalla, which to me felt about twice as long as it should've been. I was starting to feel a bit tired when I was about halfway through - often not a terrible feeling when you're actually nearing the end of a game - but I really wanted to finish it since I had already invested so much time in it.
This seems like it ties in with my (largely unvoiced) complaints about developers not respecting our time. I feel like many, if not all, of these could've been avoided had the devs been thinking whether their particular design choices respect players' time or not.
(Just to be clear, I'm not opposed to games taking time, I'm opposed to them taking time when it's filler content or otherwise clearly inconsiderate of our time.)
I agree with the point about Elden Ring - it's one of the reasons I prefer From's Souls games; I'll take a tighter, more linear experience with little repetition over a huge open world with a huge number of repeat bosses, even if there are slight variations on them. I don't mind a couple of cool bosses being repeated with variations, or earlier bosses reappearing as common enemies later on, but... yeah.
I know they're optional, but for me one of the main challenges in a Souslike is to kill all the bosses, much more so than just reaching the end, and that loses its appeal a little bit if too many are copy/pastes.
Have to disagree on the Baldur's Gate 3 criticism, I thought the third act was amazing and just as good as the first two, if not even better. It does sadly lack some polish at times, some questlines can get glitchy or just not have enough options for how to tackle them when compared to quests earlier in the game, but for the most part, I thought exploring the city and getting to know the people and culture within it was awesome.
I personally do have an issue with Act 3, I've completed the game once but have like 5 or 6 characters now and have got at least 4 of them to Act 3 but stopped before the final battle(s), if not before. If anything it's not that Act 3 has an issue, it's that by the time you finish all your companion quests, get the special items, it can drag, good though the missions might be. I struggle to do that final step because all I can think is "Urgh, gotta go though that big battle and the next one and the next one again." And I just can't do it.
Plus I start getting ideas of a new character build. :P
Last time it was annouced Larian were updating the game and adding about 15 endings or something I joked about how I'll never see them due to how I lack the time/patience to just finish that final bit.
The finale and Astarion quest defintely drag it up as a whole (as well as a certain spoilery cameo) but aside from that there’s not a ton left that didn’t feel a bit like fluff or a tad underwhelming to me. But to each their own, wish I could have enjoyed it as much.
It's one of the reason i tend not to play these modern games anymore.
To huge
To bloated
To little actually stuff to do
For Tears of the Kingdom, that’s a considerable upgrade from the pre-Breath of the Wild games which bloated their content with all sorts of “find the key/switch” objectives which are designed for nothing more than to waste time. Shrines are good content - and therefore, whether or not they’re easier to find is irrelevant. Despite a lot of similarities, Tears of the Kingdom isn’t the same game as Breath of the Wild.
Not sure about the other games. But I will mention that “repeat bosses” is hardly a new thing in videogames. This has been commonplace in every generation since at least Atari 2600. It’s not a valid criticism.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Minigames is in line with the original game. I haven’t played FF7 Remake, but I absolutely expect a lot of minigames in it for when I do finally play it (Assuming it’s coming to Switch 2).
No idea about Baldur’s Gate 3, but I see others have already addressed this.
Elden ring is too bloated for its own good,
If they didn't bloody copy paste caves and catacombs would've been easily 10/10
"...or choke a Moogle"
Is this one of the mingames?
FF is usually heavy on them, the odd thing about FF7 Rebirth many of the minigames in FF7 were for the most part, not really important or very small in overall need. Bike and Snowboard were just fun 3 min things, tower defence Fort Condor short but I think if you lose you still get the item you need, then the others in Golden Saucer were just fun to mess around. Thing is, with time, technology increased and it seems they updated them to actual minigames and added like 5 completely new ones, plus an entire card minigame that while is apparently great, seems to me just another time sink in the overall game.
I guess, while FF7's vs FF7Rebirth's mini games are comparable, what is the difference is FF7 was 1 single game and spending hours on minigames on FF7, when it's also open world, when there are also mini-minigames when exploring (hoovering up mako? Can't it just be a fight?) just seems overkill. The average complete time for story only is like 47hours. Is the rest just fluff at that point?
Here's an example of boated for you, I recently played God of War Ragnorak, great game, loads to do... then near the end they go "Here's another entirely new area." I thought at the time I had to go there but there was no mission, it was completely optional. The game could have cut all of that and I'd think no less of it, I do wonder why they added it outside of just adding content to an already complete game.
Are you talking about the Valhalla/rougelite mode for Ragnarök? Because that was added as free DLC and wasn't in the base game, otherwise I have trouble remembering what you could be referring to. But yeah while I might not call Ragnarök bloated it is a bit weirdly structured.
The Moogle thing is a reference to the forced moogle catching game which is imo the worst one in the game.
No, in main GoWR, in Vanaheim the extra area you get to by flying boat. Just looked it up, The Crater. Here's the thing, it's decently fun, extends the game but at the same time, utterly pointless. It could have been saved as some DLC or something and to me, if anything, distracts from the main gamea plot and it's urgency, now admittingly so does the rogue like area or lava worlds from the first game but when the thing to come is "Ragnarok" vs "finding a way to get the portal open". It feels different, you get me?
Also, if that is the case, that's just modern SquEnix for you in their big budget games. KH3 had like 10 mini games. The entire of Hundred Acre Wood was just a puzzle match game you can get several thousand on my phone, why am I playing it in KH3? You know what was missing? colosseum/arena stuff like in KH1 and 2.
Articles based on negative narratives are utterly unneeded and uninteresting.
Negativity already plagues social media as it is. And the premise screams click bait to begin with.
Keep your negative comments away
You do the same and go away.
Not sure why the downvotes, I’m with Hynad on this. This seems like negativity for negativity’s sake. None of the criticisms are actually pointing to anything bloated in these games. Otherwise, it’s a criticism of nearly all gaming, since more content, repeat enemies, are things that exist in almost all games of these genres.
Bloated experiences are like empty calorie gaming intended to artificially expand the experience. Bravely Default is an actual example of a game with a lot of bloat, A. The mechanics require more input than is necessary - making each character select attack 4 times instead of just once doesn’t really add to the experience; and B. Making the player needlessly repeat the entire story three (or is it four or five) times without improving the game, is bloat. But having similar enemy types, more quality content, more options - that’s not bloat, that’s content - it’s like saying that because you saw a goomba twice in Super Mario Bros that SMB is bloated. And “these games are too big for me” doesn’t mean there’s any problem with the game; if a player only likes games to be 3 hours or less, all that means is the player likes smaller games, that’s not an argument that games over 3 hours are bloated.
he got -5 from a gold badge user. I saw it in livetime.
