A full-featured open-world RPG that can be casually played in 2-3 hour sessions once or twice a week.
I love this game format (Skyrim, BotW, WoW) etc but they're all best played very consistently for many hours at a time. I simply don't have that time anymore.
Something that will remind you where you left off (what you were doing, where you were going), controls/mechanisms that aren't overly complicated (nothing worse than booting up a game and realizing you forget how to attack), etc.
>they're all best played very consistently for many hours at a time
Why do you think that? BotW I found was very amenable to consuming in short hour or two sessions, although it was incredibly easy to get sucked in for longer.
BOTW has the controls issue too, absolutely— its scheme is a bit of an oddball compared to other modern over-the-shoulder action adventure games, and that's made it hard for me to jump back in after a period of playing more conventional games like AC, Spider-Man, God of War, etc.
The story though? Lol, BOTW has none. You just show up and chase whatever catches your fancy while the princess hangs out at the castle doing all the work keeping the monster at bay.
I so wanted to like the Witcher, but the controls were absolutely nuts. Actually maybe not that bad (ahem, Outer Wilds). But for a casual gamer they were not intuitive and were extremely forgettable. Plus you couldn't easily go back to the little training dojo.
Good controls and quick review/tutorial seem to be overlooked opportunities for improvement that would dramatically lower the bar for casual gamers who want to play more games but quickly get frustrated by any kind of friction.
("Previously on" or self-evident state is increasingly dead even in TV/series so I guess it's not surprising it's disappearing from games too.)
Are you talking about The Witcher 1? That game had whack controls for sure, and all in all I'd say isn't worth playing.
TW2 and TW3 are some of my favourite games though and IMO had fairly straightforward controls. I do think I switched between playing with controller and keyboard + mouse though, so it may be worth trying controller in the 2nd/3rd games if you hadn't done that.
I played W1 and W3 several times and had no problems with the controls, but I was never able to accommodate with W2 controls, so I never played more than 15 minutes at a time, with many attempts. It was kb + mouse.
It feels like as gamers have been getting older and having kids, there's a huge market for games like this designed for limited play time. I want to be more into shooters too, but I just don't have time to get good enough to enjoy them.
I do really appreciate Halo for finally going back to "everyone, regardless of level, starts with the exact same equipment and skills". That levels the playing field and I can still have fun (even if I'm not good) without playing a lot.
I think this is part of the appeal of rogue like games such as Hades. Exploring large 3d environments isn't as rewarding when I can only play a half hour at once (while simultaneously attempting to get the baby to sleep). I'd much rather get straight to the core gameplay before I crawl into bed, exhausted.
I play Xonotic, a free software FPS that uses the Darkplaces engine.
If you're up for twitch shooting, play instagib.
If you want action, hop onto a Clan arena match (team Deathmatch but 1 life per round, and you start the map with everything).
OTOH if you're too tired to frag, hop on a Xonotic Defrag Server, where your only goal is to practice movements to finish a track on time. Xonotic has some very cool quake like movements, and there are almost always people on the Relaxed Running server (but they also have >1 hr puzzle/trick jump tracks).
It's so much fun, even just for the 20 minutes I can usually get before going to bed ;)
In the same logic, a RPG where no one can play more than X hours per week (e.g. 3). Or instead of a nominal amount of time, a chapter of the story per week. We all progress together at a slow pace. Something akin to a tv show.
Something that will remind you where you left off (what you were doing, where you were going)
So... Skyrim’s quest log? A huge list of every quest you’ve encountered in the game so far, with the ability to pick one to be highlighted on the map and radar. Boot it up for the first time in a while and you can immediately see what Past You was officially working on. Pretty much every big sprawling open-world game has one of these, with a zillion text snippets to describe every possible stage of what’s happened so far in every quest, and what you need to do next.
Add a handful of generalized user-defined quests like “I am gathering (list of resources/items) so I can (make this thing/exploit this bug/do this quest a particular way)”, or maybe just an in-game notepad with some text completion assistance, and that probably covers any possible “where did I leave off”.
I'm currently building a game like this and it's pretty close to finish.
The game is a Space Survival MMORPG that takes place far into the future, where human civilization is stranded in an O'Neill Cylinder in space. No one in the cylinder knows anymore how they got there and why they are there in the first place since so much time has passed. Technology has also been lost due to the very long time periods, so life and survival is tough in the cylinder.
However, the longer someone survives, the stronger and the more rare their character becomes. We expect only a few percent of players to survive for longer than a couple of weeks and only 1% for longer than a month. However, those that have survived for longer than a month are very strong characters that can usually lead and provide protection to a village of 50 to several hundred people.
The biggest danger to the player are other players, since the entire game is PvP. This means, you need to quickly band up with others to protect against other players. There are no guns in the game, since there is no technology in the cylinder, so it takes several minutes of beating someone up to to actually get their health to zero. There is also voice chat, so it's quite brutal.
From my experience a boss battle or a dungeon run in Valheim takes all afternoon, and that's if you have a group supporting each other to make things quicker.
Because of this I find myself gravitate towards sports games like Fifa. Easy to get right back-in on offline career mode. I just stay away from FUT (Fifa Ultimate Team)
I love this game format (Skyrim, BotW, WoW) etc but they're all best played very consistently for many hours at a time. I simply don't have that time anymore.
Something that will remind you where you left off (what you were doing, where you were going), controls/mechanisms that aren't overly complicated (nothing worse than booting up a game and realizing you forget how to attack), etc.