I thought I was alone with that feeling. I'm in exactly the same boat as you.

For me, it's a tiny bit different, because I played BOTW shortly before my daughther was born in 2017. I still had time for games like that back in the day. Now I don't only have a daughter, but a son as well.

When I grab the controller and start playing something time intensive like BOTW and now TOTK, I usually feel really guilty really quick, because there are so many other things to do, that in theory should have a higher priority.

i remember this overwhelming feeling when first playing Witcher 3. At some point I just said f it, ignored the thoughts and had a blast

I've gotten to the point where if somebody tells me that a game is 100+ hours, I consider it a con. I don't want to dedicate the next 3 months of my gaming to a single game. And in my 20+ years of gaming, I've learned that no game truly has 100+ hours of content. Rather, they have 20 - 40 hours of content, stretched over the remainder of the filler in bullshit ways. These days, I'm ecstatic when I find a game like Guardians of the Galaxy. Tight, well written 20 hour experience that know what it is an what it wants to be. One and done. Love that game.

I find that I totally switch off as soon a game starts to feel like a big checklist of "Content" to check off. For open world games, this is usually as soon as there's a fast travel feature. For me, it's not that I'm overwhelmed, I just feel that this framework makes for an incredibly samey experience.

Here is my secret: I don’t care if I miss something. It’s not a problem if you miss a side quest or intentionally skip something (especially if you don’t enjoy it, it’s an annoying side quest). Completing a game can be quite enjoyable, but as soon as it becomes a chore or you see it as a todo list, that’s where I personally back off.

For example in TOTK, I really enjoy my time just exploring here and here. I didn’t like the abyss at first so I played 30h+ hours before starting exploring it, and now that I feel more confident, I am passing most of my time there (that’s why I have played 70h+ hours with only one dungeon completed 😅). I knew about a 4th power, but I didn’t find it until very recently. I was enjoying my time with what I got, extrapolating about what it could be, but it was not a problem not to have it.

I really loved Divinity Original Sin II, but I've never finished it. At a certain point I lost momentum and afterwards the idea of trying to pick back up where I left off is just too daunting, and the idea of starting over again is even more daunting.

Yes I have, but I have to remind myself that they have added way more content than they expect one person to engage with, and its on purpose. YOU know best what you are intrigued by and interested in, and for large open worlds can ignore as much as you want, but if you are enjoying yourself chasing the threads you find engaging then they have succeeded at what they set out to build.

Absolutely. I hear Witcher 3 is good, and I believe that it is... but after playing it for 5 hours and feeling like I got nowhere, the next day I just genuinely didn't feel like playing it as I'd felt very little character progress, and zero story progression.

Games are continuing to market towards younger people - especially kids - with spare time to burn. They consider their 120+ hour playtime to be a selling point, but at this point that's the reason I avoid them. If I'm going to play for an hour or so at the end of my day, I want that game to feel like it meant something.

I prefer my games to feel dense, deliberately crafted, minimal sawdust padding. I've enjoyed open-world in the past but the every-increasing demand for bigger and bigger maps means that most open-world games are very empty and mostly traversal. Linear worlds aren't bad - they can be crafted much more deliberately and with far more content because you can predict when the player will see them.

Open worlds that craft everything in it deliberately are very rare, and still rely on constraints to limit the player into somewhat-linear paths. Green Hell needs a grappling hook to leave the first basin, Fallout: New Vegas fills the map north of Tutorial Town with extreme enemies to funnel new players south-east.

And what really gets me is that with microtransactions, the number of games that make themselves so big and so slow that they're boring on purpose, so that they can charge you to skip them! Imagine making a game so fucking awful that anybody buying a game will then buy the ability to not play it because 80% of the game is sawdust: timers, resource farming, daily rotations, exp grinding. Fucking nightmare, honestly.

I felt the same way when I opened the new Hitman reboot, and a bit when I opened TotK. What I like about BotW and TotK is that you basically can't miss content. Some events are one-time-only but you have to experience them actively first. Quests and adventures will wait for you. I feel a lot more paralyzed and FOMO if the game just doesn't wait for me to explore what I want in my own time.

Go ahead and miss stuff. It'll be more fun on subsequent plays-through if you're still discovering new things. It's also more enjoyable to come across stuff organically than if you turn it into a chore.

I used to be a completionist; it made games less enjoyable. If a game is good enough to make missing some content a loss there's a strong chance I'll want to replay it in a year or two anyway so I've learned to let some things go the first time around.

I feel the same way about big games, and just yesterday I was feeling the same anxiety after the tutorial island in TOTK. I usually feel I need to find every secret and every korok sees etc. But this time I'm trying a new strategy - letting the game lead me. Some NPC says "go do this now", OK I do that and try not to get side tracked. Supposed to visit a certain town next? Then I go there! The game (so far) does seem linear or at least it offers that option*, so when I'm overwhelmed, I follow that line.

TotK is a bit of a weird game. I’m still not sure what the "correct" way to play the game is. I did too much of the underground at first because I got a lot of maps. But when I had gotten all the treasures that I found the maps for, I had already explored a lot of the depths. Then I found up I could upgrade my battery more than 30 times, but I still had only five hearts, so I felt like I was playing the game wrong. So up to the surface I went. I thought I will mainly explore the underground after getting the map in that area. But after I learned how to make a aerial vehicle and the fast-building mechanic, I now feel like I skip everything, even places where I feel like I’m supposed to do something clever. But at the same time, I already explored this world by horse in the previous game, so perhaps skipping every obstacle by flying is what I’m supposed to do? Unfortunately, flying from shrine to shrine is pretty boring, and the shrines are ridiculously easy. Not sure where I’m going with this, but I think my point is simply that after probably a hundred hours I’m still confused about how to play this game in a meaningful way, even though I like this game a lot in many ways.

Absolutely! I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 on sale, played for a couple of hours and then I just stopped. Was so many things to do and I couldn't decide on what to do first.. 🙄

It can be a bit overwhelming, yes. I purposely did enough of the main story line in ToTK so that I could get the Hero's Path and the Travel Medallions. And now I'm ignoring the main story and just exploring the world bit-by-bit, like I did with Breath of the Wild. I'm still thoroughly exploring Central Hyrule. I'm racking up side quests and adventures, but only doing them if I want a break from exploring or want to better my gear or something. It takes the pressure off for me to do it this slow, relaxing way. The game feels like it has hundreds of hours in it, which is what I tell myself when I get antsy. I have almost literally all the time in the world.

My problem is I don’t have time and recently faves have tried to get harder and harder or copy the dark souls pattern too much or try to be a rogue like. This has forced me to mainly stick to slower paced simulation games. Even strategy games take too much work to learn their systems and once you stop playing mid game forget about remembering how to play.

I used to have this feeling often with open world games, and it put me off playing them for a long time - it was just too overwhelming, and an activity that was supposed to relax me was having the opposite effect. Now when I play them I don't care so much and just enjoy whatever I come across.

So what changed? I started taking medication for my anxiety, which I never thought was an issue until a few family members gave me a gentle nudge to talk to someone about it.

Not saying you're in the same boat, but thought I'd share my story in case it's helpful.

I call them "man on horse" simulators. I think open worlds have generally gotten a bit bigger than they need to be -- I remember feeling like FFXV was actually very empty, despite being massive, and while Skyrim is beloved, so much of current replay has been slogging through massive amounts of nothing. I tend to wish open world games were somewhat smaller but denser, with more variety instead of huge, empty terrains of sort of bad-feeling, filler quests between the good ones.

I sometimes get overwhelmed just trying to choose a game to play. I've been trying to make myself just enjoy the experience and force myself to just jump in. Sometimes I use the random steam game picker to tell me what to play and then I committ to it for my session

The older I get the more I prefer linear games. I'm playing FFXVI right now and I'm actually quite happy at how linear it is. Couldn't finish XV because the map was too damn big.

When I was younger, no. Now I'm 35, have my own small business, and just generally have way less time to play games, so the more there is to do in a game the more overwhelming it gets. It's really mostly just a time thing for me though. If I had more time to sit down and learn the game it would be different r.

I tried Fallout Las Vegas and I was already overwhelmed by the open world choices from the beginning. Do I loot some of the unpermitted stuff from the guy who saved me? Do I loot every house in view?

I prefer a game to tell me what to do or what to be, like reading a book. Fallout tells me of course but I'm still a bit of a hoarder.

I can certainly understand that! I kind of am the opposite though; I like not knowing the exact extent of the game, or where everything is, because to me it then feels more like a real place that I'm really exploring. I don't need to see everything, and honestly I hope I never do see everything because then the magic is gone. I like feeling like a small fish in a very big ocean.

I guess I'm an anti-completionist in that way.

Absolutely, it feels like so many big budget games made recently command 50+ hours of your time, or have really complicated mechanics that require note taking and maths to really enjoy. Those things are great, but man, just the thought of starting a behemoth like Tears of the Kingdom makes me anxious.

This is a very popular opinion and one that has always confused me. More to do always equals more value even if some of the content is padding or optional.

absolutely! I mostly only play older games for this reason. I absolutely love some of my old N64 and GBA games because I can clear them in a day or two. Even the older RPGs like LoZ:OoT seem a lot smaller than the open-world stuff out there today, and I actually like that I can learn the entire world and know almost everything about them. They're finite and I think that's a plus. Eventually, I'm either gonna get bored and move on, or I'm gonna clear a game. The first feels like defeat, like I did something wrong. The latter feels refreshing and mints the game as a nostalgic memory in my mind; I still look back at the day I finished Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with such bittersweetness; I was sad that it was over, but really proud and happy to have reached the conclusion. And I think you miss that with infinite content, and open worlds. And I also did miss things in my first playthrough of LoZ:OoT but it only took me a couple more (years apart, so nostalgia definitely washed over me every time!) playthroughs to catch them.

I think open-world games can be really fun: games like Minecraft are great examples of that, but the emphasis there isn't on a story being told to you, but on you creating whatever you want. You're not as scared to miss things because you have all the time in the world to explore and not everything is gonna be up your alley (some people don't even "beat" the game, or even go to the Nether or End). But I don't think I'd like a Minecraft where you have a definite Legend of Zelda-style story scattered out across the infinitely-generated landscape. That's just not for me.

Personally I love breath of the wild and adore tears of the kingdom more

There's so much to do and explore and I want the game to keep going forever

With open world games, I don't care where I go or what I do most of the time because it's just a giant sandbox for me. My issue though is when I return to something so vast, like in Pillars of Eternity, after a while I don't know what to do and I'm overwhelmed by all these quests to keep track of. Even with games like Subnautica I need to focus on just beating it in a few weeks. Then theres Factorio... I'll never understand what I was previously up to because suddenly all my previously laid out plans seemed so dumb.

There are too many random side quests in my opinion. I get annoyed seeing Addison and Koroks. They take too long. Every dialog just feels like it takes ages. I remember in an old Dunkey video he called to them AGLs, artificial game lengtheners. A good example of this is the great fairies. Having them have to pop out every time and always tell you about set bonuses and always having to watch the animation and then the star slowly appear in the armor. It's just infuriating. J believe they can capture the feel of it without ruining the experience. Like look at chests in BotW versus TotK. Perfect example.

All that to say, I don't mind the amount of content but when experiencing the content is annoying it makes it worse in massive games because there's so much of it.

I can summon and dismiss sages from my key items. Why the hell can't I do that with the towing saddle??

I get that too, especially with open world games. They tend to focus on quantity rather than quality with too many side quests that are basically just the same thing over and over again.

They can still be nice but I usually prefer a tighter story.

As a casual gamer who only plays once or twice a month I completely agree. I want small and relaxing games that do not need hours of training until you can even start to have fun. Or small and extremely hard games. I really enjoyed "Getting over it with Bennett Foddy" for example.

It's nice to know I'm not alone. I really like Tears of the Kingdom but can barely play it. I thought it perhaps had to do with depression but I'm just overwhelmed. (Though it might still partially be depression.)

Not only that, but I could never get into open world games outside of the Zelda series. I tried Skyrim so many times and put it down every time. There's just something about it that won't click with me even though I recognize it as being a good game.

I do feel overwhelmed and intimidated by certain games, and sometimes it's paralysing (right now I'm a struggling with what job to level in Final Fantasy XI), but whether that's a bad thing depends entirely on the kind of "big" we're talking about.

If it's big in the sense of mechanical depth, I adore that. It's like a drug for me. I adore learning and games that reward that are often great for my mental health. Thinking of things like Project Zomboid, Dwarf Fortress, Loop Hero, Noita, or most of Zachtronics' titles. With those it really isn't about the scale of the world or the number of quests (often those metrics aren't even relevant).

My personal problem when it comes to some games like that, is that I know I'll love them -- like Factorio -- but I simply don't get around to them quickly, if at all; because I also know learning those systems will be a not insignificant time commitment. Ironically, that sensation of being overwhelmed with things to learn is part of why I love them, but I often fail to get around to actually playing many such games out of concern I won't be able to give them the time and attention that 'they deserve'. I'm not sure if that's the same as that FoMO you describe.

When it comes to the more conventional meaning of a "big game", it depends entirely on two things: the originality of the content, and the quality of the storytelling; i.e. the difference between Red Dead Redemption 2, and a modern Far Cry title. I would absolutely worry about missing stuff in RDR2, but would struggle to care much at all about modern Ubisoft titles in the same way.

Better not play Elden ring

With open-world games, I usually end up overwhelmed or lost on where to go next pretty quickly, and inevitably move on to something else after messing around a little.

However, Metroidvanias, a very similar genre, don't overwhelm or confuse me nearly as much, even with some of the larger ones like Hollow Knight. I think something like that is the ideal progression for an open world game - a world that starts out limited and somewhat linear, and eventually grows in scale and nonlinearity as you collect movement options and paths to new areas.

I feel a bit of both ways, on one hand, I love having a familiar universe that I can throws hours into and making it my sort of gaming home base (FFXIV). But when I play something else, I get nervous about them being huge or time demanding. I've been enjoying finding and binging through shorter games that I can knock out in a couple days, experiencing other worlds and stories, but not having to commit substantial life to them.

There's an amazing amount of trying to make games "worth it" by adding tons of side content, and my ADHD ass can't ignore it...So when a game doesn't do that, like Singularity, Remember Me, or even Alan Wake, I love it. A nice, linear, intentional story with none of the "help my farm from the rats" bs.

A little, but I kinda love it. It's a feeling of so many options and I find it kinda exciting.

Hehe I know exactly that feeling! Honestly I found the same with Skyrim, GTA5 and Witcher 3 - I can't imagine spending 100+ hours on a game like that, knowing I'll probably not finish it! I know it's irrational but I'm the same. :)

I loved Disco Elysium and Life is Strange 1 because I truly did feel that I left no stone unturned in my playthroughs - it felt very "complete" and had such a satisfying ending that didn't leave me wandering around a progressively more empty hand world.

I guess that's a type of game preference - I love watching other people play big games like that, but can't do it to myself as I feel it's never "done." :)

And yet... I'll play a wrestling game for probably hundreds of hours, knowing fully beyond unlocking everything, there's a game I can't "finish" - weird really! :)

For me since I quit smoking weed something in my mindset changed and it just seems like too much effort overall to play most games, especially bad with open world with hundreds of quests. The quest log tends to remind me of my ticket backlog at work.

I mainly play some small and quick to pick up and put down games with tight gameplay loops atm.