Quality-of-Life improvements as Videogame Goals

Engaging annoyance

Some computer games are just annoying. On purpose. In the beginning, at least. And one method of keeping you engaged in the game is to offer solutions for all the annoyances that the game imposed on you. A common example is a very slow movement speed of the player character, with the promise of faster movement speed if you just keep playing a little longer.

What a terrible reason to play a game! Can't game designers come up with better ways of keeping the player engaged than making it IRRITATING to play?

Other examples of annoying things are a very small inventory size that forces you into constant micromanagement, with a method of increasing the inventory space if you just keep playing, or the requirement to perform mindless, annoying, repetitive tasks in order to advance in the game, with the promise of efficiency or automation just around the corner.

Stardew Valley is a big offender in this regard. You can barely store any items and have to go back and forth between storages/vendors and micromanage tightly in order to get by, but if you just collect enough money, you can afford a bigger backpack. Moreover, you walk very slowly, your tools are inefficient, the activities are repetitive, and so on.

I can theoretically imagine that someone might get therapeutic value in mindless labor on a huge Stardew Valley farm, but this value is lost on me, and perhaps it's just not the right game for me.

Factorio is an interesting example because at least it's plain honest about this: Increasing efficiency is one of the main goals of the game. While (like in Stardew Valley) your tools (mines, inserters, assemblers) are horribly inefficient in the beginning and improve as you progress in the game, the main point is how you use and combine those tools, and the emergent beauty that arises from the interplay of the tools. Not that you use the tools again and again and again and again mindlessly (like in Stardew Valley). Even the slow player movement speed is fine, because you can overcome this problem by building infrastructure, and building railroads is actually one of the most fun things in the game, in my opinion.

Non-engaging annoyance

There's a variation of this theme where the game is just annoying, on purpose, but you are not even aware that a quality-of-life improvement exists in the game. So on the first playthrough, you just deal with it and accept the annoyance. Once you progress far enough in the game and the solution appears, your eyes are opened, and there is just no way you want to go back to playing this game without this solution. But then you might start a second playthrough, and now that you are aware that a solution exists, the annoyance is so unbearable that you might feel pressured to rush through the game progression as fast as possible to get to the quality-of-life improvement, without really being able to enjoy the game much until you arrive there.

Baldur's Gate, for example, is in my opinion DREADFULLY SLOW until you get the boots of speed somewhere around halfway through the game. Of course these only speed up ONE of your (up to) six characters, and it's so bad that I usually limit my group size to the number of boots of speed available at the time, so that no slow character is left behind, and you don't need to wait ages to "gather your party before venturing forth."

Fallout 4 has a "Survival Mode" where the "fast travel" option is disabled and you have to walk every place in the huge world by foot. The point is of course that this is immersive and more realistic. And there are some solutions to speed things up (which I won't spoil), but what's particularily awful is that the solutions don't only require you to progress to specific points of the storyline, but also make very specific choices in the game that you might even find unethical. But maybe there's a deeper meaning here: Sometimes improving one's quality of life actually requires making unethical choices.

But it's entirely possible to build games that offer improvements to movement speed, inventory size, tool quality, and so on, without making the game a pain, or excessively wasting the player's time. In Prey (2017) or Deus Ex 3, the inventory size and running speed is good enough from the start that the player is not suffering, and improvements can be obtained any time for a small cost, without doing quests or making choices that one doesn't really want to make.

So, please, game designers, have some respect for the time and the well-being of the player, and don't ruin the experience by making us rush through the game just to get some critical quality-of-life improvement.