Modern gaming isn't fun

[ReeseJamPiece]

It's just game after game of buggy and soulless overpriced bullshit. What happened the care and quality standards that went into video games? I don't want to sound like a nostalgia goggled grandpa but I really miss the pre-2010 era of gaming. I'm not saying that good modern games don't exist but they certainly aren't in high stock nowadays. What're your thoughts? 

[Bucket]

I started gaming on the Atari 2600. The ratio of well-crafted and worthwhile games to shovelware crap is about the same as it's always been.

[dmslr]

I think the main problem with modern games is the pursuit of photorealistic graphics. Developers spend a lot of time and energy on this, other aspects of the game are relegated to second place. 

[Sunnyfruit]

Modern indie gaming is fun (unlike 2013 when nobody knew what actual pixel art meant). I don't care about grafixx

[HLRaven]

Are you playing mostly triple AAA games? if so just go with the indie scene of games, trust me if you try some of the amazing indie games out there you will change your mind

[AtticTelephone]

Destiny (the first one) was a bunch of fun for me, personally. I love that game, but it's not on PC sadly and I don't have my PS4 copy.

[Nekr0s1s]

i've been extremely disapponted with both AAA and indie games. on one side you have greedy developers making games that will die in about 20 years once the servers go down. on the other side, people are still living the past making imitations of famous games from the 80's and 90's. it's like the whole gaming scene is split between these two groups.

[wallabra]

1 hour ago, Sunnyfruit said:

Modern indie gaming is fun [unlike] when nobody knew what actual pixel art meant.

 

and

 

1 hour ago, Sunnyfruit said:

I don't care about grafixx

 

That is a pretty blatant contradiction and I'm going to have to nitpick you for it. Mwahahaha.

 

[VanaheimRanger]

1 hour ago, Bucket said:

I started gaming on the Atari 2600. The ratio of well-crafted and worthwhile games to shovelware crap is about the same as it's always been.

I'm gonna fully agree with this statement as someone who also started gaming on Atari 2600.

[Antkibo]

You can always

Spoiler

play DOOM.

 

[Sunnyfruit]

24 minutes ago, Gustavo6046 said:

 

and

 

 

That is a pretty blatant contradiction and I'm going to have to nitpick you for it. Mwahahaha.

 

 

Okay, I don't care about ray tracing in my pixel art games :(

[HLRaven]

Yeah I won't like the amount of 90s style games that are coming out got out of hand but I like them! and I love the ones that try to do something unique with that style

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Most of my top 10 games are now games from the past decade. Very games from the 1990s are even still in the top 50 :P. 

[hybridial]

Eh, there's enough good indy games coming out.

 

It's just very clear that the industry has catapulted really in record time and probably because of the ridiculous amount of money games started making which is really unheard of, the corruption and the greed has fully formed at the top which took far longer to happen to say the film industry.

 

It's fairly clear of those who worked in the industry in the past if their hearts are really in making games or just making money. The latter became suits, the former left the big companies to pursue their own interests. 

[TenenteZashu]

Luckily we're getting a revival of Boomer Shooters otherwise the indie market would be full of visual novels and 8bit platformers/rougelikes

[[McD] James]

Awesome games get released all the time on the indie market. You're not looking hard enough. 

[almostmatt1]

It's like music. Most of the public spotlight is on shit, but that isn't where to look. 

[Noiser]

One thing I don't like about modern AAA games is how much you have to wait to actually play the game... cutscenes, tutorials, dialogs, more cutscenes... and while there's nothing wrong with a more narrative-oriented type of game, I miss the arcade plug-and-play mentality that older games have. I think Doom 2016\Eternal is doing a big step in that direction though and that's awesome imo.

I also agree with Sunnyfruit btw. The indie scene is great and still allows games with this mentality to grow. We have so many great titles: DUSK, Amid Evil, Cuphead, Freedom Planet, Blazing Chrome, Shovel Knight, Butcher... they have everything I want on a videogame tbh.
 

On 12/18/2020 at 6:11 PM, Sunnyfruit said:

I don't care about grafixx

Here's an interesting point about this topic. The gaming community tend to measure "good graphics" by how technologically advanced or realistic something is, while I think it's more a matter of how pleasing the aesthetics are - something I can also find on pixel-art games of any time period. For me even Atari 2600 games have potentially good graphics in a sense of how unique they are and how much I like to look at them:

Edited December 20, 2020 by Noiser

[boris]

3 hours ago, Bucket said:

I started gaming on the Atari 2600. The ratio of well-crafted and worthwhile games to shovelware crap is about the same as it's always been.

 

I rather have the feeling the quality went up quite considerably. There don't seem to be many terrible games nowadays, especially AAA titles. You might not like them, but that doesn't make them bad objectively. Yes, the n-th installment of Call of Duty or Battlefield will not win a innovation award, but that doesn't make each game bad on its own.

 

I think a big part is that developers can't really get away with low quality as easily as they could in the pre-internet days. In the days of old developers could prey on hapless users, but today you can read about those games on every corner of the internet, so just delivering a pile of crap doesn't work anymore.

[hybridial]

8 minutes ago, boris said:

I think a big part is that developers can't really get away with low quality as easily as they could in the pre-internet days. In the days of old developers could prey on hapless users, but today you can read about those games on every corner of the internet, so just delivering a pile of crap doesn't work anymore.

 

 

There's several thousand games Valve let on Steam that suggest you're not correct :P

[0o0[ULTIM4TE]L1FE[F0RM]0o0]

I'm not exactly an OG but I'm 15 now, and people would think I play all this modern games-as-a-service crap but actually no, not at all, even though I have a modern PC that is capable of running those "modern" games. I only play First Person Shooters since a little while and I don't feel any nostalgia towards Doom or Quake games at all, not even Half-Life, Duke Nukem 3D or Blood, and before that I played only things like Minecraft or old Sonic games in some random emulator and I noticed how much I prefer games that were made before I was born over that awful garbage that is successful today, like Fortnite, or Call of Duty. Even thought the very very first call of duty is a decent game, I still prefer something like Doom. Or even Star Wars battlefront 2 from 2006, LOL. And I, as a person who never really considered himself as a gamer, can confirm that most modern games, except a few exceptions, is mostly crap. At least the most of what Bethesda and EA and like, Ubisoft is putting out today. I used to play GTA 5, it's boring and apparently, Rockstar seems to make players encourage buying their weird blue cards(I forgot the name) which makes you have cooler items ingame, appeal more to honest players because they don't seem to ban hackers. Well, you could just leave the lobby and choose another server, right? Guess what, their netcode seems to be the very original one from Netquake since the loading times while playing online are actually insanely long. And that made me think about buying a blue card more than once so I can show those hackers how much "better" I am so I won't have to change the lobby once again, which even if you take that 5 minutes of waiting, can fail which means you're gonna have to wait ANOTHER 5 minutes(can still fail too). And so many modern games are full of this crap. They just make the game more annoying to play but give you more things to buy which make your experience worth a full-priced AAA title you already payed 60 Dollars for which, ultimately, make your price hundres of dollars if you really wanna have an enjoyable experience. And for The Ultimate Doom and the other Arena FPS titles, I payed 1€ per game in sale AND because the game is open-source, I have 1000 of custom Maps and mods which are either nearly or exactly(maybe even better) than the original game itself which is already a great experience in itself because developers who were dedicated to creating an awesome game were behind it because crap like games-as-a-service didn't exist back then so they actually had to create a really good game in order to be successful. We don't have that stuff a lot anymore, but if we do, it's coming from someone like id Software who were creating games like that since the 90s who have created gems like Doom, Wolfenstein or Quake. Or Heretic, or maybe even Hexen. They still have all that success from back then and they aren't pressures as much from Bethesda probably because if you play Doom Eternal or maybe even 2016, you can see they had ideas, they tried something, and then, in Eternal they refined their take from 2016 more, balanced everything better and have created a nearly perfect game with the creation of Eternal. They invented the FPS genre and revolutionized it with The Ultimate Doom and a second time with Eternal. And devs like that aren't able to do that any more. People today are used to that standard-AAA crap filled with lootboxes, they don't have time to do something good anymore because the higher people in the industry want to see money and so they're forced to stick to the formular unless they're id Software or someone else who already were successful who have the trust of the bigger industries.

[Doomkid]

I think a lot of games/developers tend to bite off more than they can chew in an effort to shoehorn a little bit of everything into their high-budget titles, it seems to be more prevalent now than in past decades. It strikes me as being a result of caring more about marketability than providing a focused, consistent game that just does what it does well rather than trying to do everything.

 

Some argue that too many disparate elements made their way into the modern Dooms even, but compared to their peers the new Dooms are a bastion of refinement and focus on what’s important to the game’s core formula.

 

23 minutes ago, boris said:

I rather have the feeling the quality went up quite considerably. There don't seem to be many terrible games nowadays, especially AAA titles. You might not like them, but that doesn't make them bad objectively. Yes, the n-th installment of Call of Duty or Battlefield will not win a innovation award, but that doesn't make each game bad on its own.

 

I think a big part is that developers can't really get away with low quality as easily as they could in the pre-internet days. In the days of old developers could prey on hapless users, but today you can read about those games on every corner of the internet, so just delivering a pile of crap doesn't work anymore.

There’s no such thing as an “objectively bad” game though. I agree with Bucket’s take that the ratio of good to bad hasn’t changed all that much. A lot of bug-infested, unfocused games get pushed out in the market these days to the tune of huge sales figures. Although the numbers were lower in the past decades, where gaming was much more seen as a “just for nerds and children” sort of thing, the same thing was happening.

 

Hype culture has generated a giant push towards preorders, that’s where I place most of the blame. No idea why anyone buys into the moronic hype stuff, but by the time most people realise a game is pretty crappy, it’s already in millions of homes - often in a non-refundable digital format. Of course, a game being crappy will still affect it’s sales negatively, I just disagree with the assertion that games are better overall on average or that the overall quality standard is all that much higher. The number of people developing the game has gone up 100 fold, there’s much larger worlds and much more content - but there being more of everything doesn’t mean it’s all better.

 

This is just how I see it, but a well-focused game made by 5 people that takes an hour to beat can still be superior to a game made by 100 people that takes 100 hours to beat, if I had more fun in that one hour than I ever had with the longer, higher-budget game.

[ketmar]

8 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

This is just how I see it, but a well-focused game made by 5 people that takes an hour to beat can still be superior to a game made by 100 people that takes 100 hours to beat, if I had more fun in that one hour than I ever had with the longer, higher-budget game.

Axiom Verge vs Mighty No. 9: FIGHT!

 

oops, that fight was short. ;-)

[Hypnotik]

[Gokuma]

Fun is almost illegal.

[Snark]

To me the main difference is that good games are made by people who try to make games because they have an idea, bad games by people who try to have an idea because they had to make a game.

[Antkibo]

13 minutes ago, Snark said:

To me the main difference is that good games are made by people who try to make games because they have an idea, bad games by people who try to have an idea because they had to make a game.

Problem is, making games is a job. An a job is a discipline; it's a craft. And a craft is something you do everyday even if you don't want to. People need to eat.

 

This fact is all around us nowadays, and it's an institutional problem. Look at the news industry. Is the COVID killing all chances of something interesting happening in the world? Well, I need to bring food to my table, so I'll just make random facts and cover the bare minimal detail to reach my quota.

 

Maybe because I live outside USA I see the forest from a better vantage point, but you guys buy and trash a lot more clothes than most of the world. And phones, and cars... And this all comes to the fact that your industries need to be perpetual motion machines. They can't stop. Even if there aren't news to be reported, something must be published. Even if new iPhone versions are barely better, there must be a new iPhone version.

 

Game studios must work and not think to survive. Or think quickly at least. Nowadays if you don't finish a game in three years you face a generational jump (see Cyberpunk 2077 and what happened to id Software during the 00's).

[DNSKILL5]

Oh come on now. 
 

Edit: guess I should add a bit more. I think you shouldn’t worry too much. People that cried, moaned, groaned, and anything in between with Doom 3 are now filled with glee with Doom 2016 and DE, but there’s yet another batch of folks that are sulking about because they’re upset with the current games. What I’m getting at here is maybe there’s not much out right now that makes you truly feel wowed, and it is your RIGHT to not like a game for any reason, just as it is for others to like the game for the same reasons you do not.
 

If you can be patient, I’m sure something will come out in the next 5 years that will give you some reassurance on the state of the industry, but like you said, there is still good games out there being made now. There’s still shitty games being made now, too. It will always be like this, but what one finds to be a piece of shit another finds it to be a piece of delight. In the end, we are all taste testers. 

Edited December 19, 2020 by Gerolf

[Snark]

26 minutes ago, Antkibo said:

Problem is, making games is a job. An a job is a discipline; it's a craft. And a craft is something you do everyday even if you don't want to. People need to eat.

 

This fact is all around us nowadays, and it's an institutional problem. Look at the news industry. Is the COVID killing all chances of something interesting happening in the world? Well, I need to bring food to my table, so I'll just make random facts and cover the bare minimal detail to reach my quota.

 

Maybe because I live outside USA I see the forest from a better vantage point, but you guys buy and trash a lot more clothes than most of the world. And phones, and cars... And this all comes to the fact that your industries need to be perpetual motion machines. They can't stop. Even if there aren't news to be reported, something must be published. Even if new iPhone versions are barely better, there must be a new iPhone version.

 

Game studios must work and not think to survive. Or think quickly at least. Nowadays if you don't finish a game in three years you face a generational jump (see Cyberpunk 2077 and what happened to id Software during the 00's).

True, for the big studios. Which is probably why most of the above topics mention indie gaming as the main catalyst for quality productions. Most of my favorite recent games sort of started off as a hobby, with no coercive release dates or financial pressure. Amateur doesn't necessarily mean worse than professionnal, just a different frame of mind. Kinda like doom mappers...

 

And I'm not American.

[wallabra]

4 hours ago, Sunnyfruit said:

Okay, I don't care about ray tracing in my pixel art games :(

 

But you said indie games of today are more fun because they "know what pixel art is". Did the indie games of the 00's not know? Either way, if that does matter to you, that means you do care about graphics, just in a different manner lol

 

I'm just confused, would be nice if you clarified. Don't bother too much with it :P