I'm honestly happy to be back to just playing one-off, non-service games. It's nice to just play something without timed events that doesn't seem to spend most of its development effort on figuring out ever-more-intricate strategies for increasing FOMO.
I play mostly single player games... but I still play GaaS games religiously (as long as I like them anyway, I've stopped a lot of them too).
For me, it's less about the complete "experience", and more about the games feel.
And I think that's where a lot of single player games fall into exactly the same trappings of GaaS - even if for entirely different reasons.
Sure, God of War does not want you to spend more money to get more runes or whatever. But every sequence is so much longer than it needs to be (and the frequent elevators or similar parts make me think of arcade games from the early 90s weirdly enough), everything is slow, oftentimes animation locked to hell and back (Read Dead Redemption 2 comes to mind here), and of course my main gripe with A LOT of mdoern games...
The completely meaningless progression systems that have spread everywhere.
Did Horizon 2 need those crazy long upgrade chains for everything that you'll never fill?
Do we really need the WoW color schemed in every AAA under the sun?
Why is Labyrinth of Refrain so slow and grindy when the combat is so shallow and progress RNG based?
Sure, the GaaS model is pretty explicit about wanting the players to be engaged - but the now endless hours that every game requires before being approved... is that really any different?
A few days ago, you were talking about Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and it's a good example: the game is quite solid. It's also 15 hours of content stretched over triple that. And you end up with insipid dungeons lasting hours, with meager enemy variety and extremely limited character progression, and all the good parts come at the cost of a lot of drivel.
But that's not even new: even in the original FF7 the cinematics were some sort of "reward" for completing the more common game parts.
That's why I don't think the GaaS model is really at odd with the older solo experiences.
Because, frankly, wasting your time in not-so-fun-content is not new at all.
And I sure hope that we can get more concise, and more interesting all the way experiences... but since the amount of playtime became such an ubiquitous requirement and atrocious 2005 era MMO-lite systems (that have now been abandoned! World of Warcraft went back to its roots with more interesting gear progression, erased most of the daily grind and goes for a much more casual audience now, ironically) are everywhere, I doubt it will happen in the AAA space.
Certainly made me drop of most of the enthusiast crowd when each new big release I play is just more boring systems, rehashed combat, slow movement and Marvel-level of storytelling.
