Modern gaming isn't fun

[ChopBlock223]

6 hours ago, dmslr said:

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. 

Kind of, but people were doing that even a long time ago. Look at Bram Stoker's Dracula for the SNES, some of the art assets are pretty cool, clearly some effort was put into making the graphics for the bosses of the game, but also the bosses are all inexplicably twice your size (even Renfield), and all most of them actually do is run or pace back and forth.

 

 

Some very pretty graphics, but lord is it a shallow and unsatisfying game.

(Rather, I should say, there's some assets which on their own look very pretty, but their use and limitations in the game don't do them any favors).

[Juza]

Support indie devs instead. Most good shit this day is indie

[Skeletonpatch]

What is this argument? I've never understood it. Plenty of shit gets released on the regular. It does not matter what decade it is. But, plenty of good shit also gets released regularly. While it is stupid that many games are released in a broken, unfinished state, that is an unfortunate reality of modern gaming that I've come to accept. It's by no means a necessary evil, it should never happen at all, but I don't get angry when it happens because of course it's going to keep happening when fuckwits like Bobby Cotic are still calling the shots. If it's a game I'd been excited for I just hope that it will get fixed so that I can get some level of enjoyment out of it.

 

It's like the music industry. People bitch all the time that there's no good music being released anymore, but I'd say they aren't digging deep enough and are only looking at the profitable garbage the big labels are trying to push down their throats.

[alps]

these days, video games are nothing but microtransactions or straight up boring gameplay. games will never be as good as they were back then.

 

hey, remember when doom was modernized with the first release of unity doom? bethesda nor nerve didnt really care until now. when they actually decided to fix it and make it better. and you can see cd projekt red, not being able to release a single game that isnt full of bugs. and cyberpunk 2077 looks like a rushed failure that cant go above 20-25 fps on a rtx 3090 ti (turning on ray tracing actually is faster than when it is off on specific computer builds)

 

and then say a developer was given a short timeframe to make the game (start to release), and some unfinished content had to be cut. they just add them back in again but sell them for some god awful price as dlc.

 

and lastly, ea is the worst company, not only in america, but worldwide, they're kinda the pioneer of these practices. and the only reason would be money.

 

microtransactions, unfinished games, cut content being finished and sold as dlc, terrible customer service, not fixing bugs with patches (after the game is released) or faking a reveal trailer and so on. its why modern gaming is simply dead for the most part.

[ketmar]

4 minutes ago, alps said:

bethesda nor nerve didnt really care until now

Nerve guys DID care. that's why we have it fixed in the first place. but there is only so much they could do in the timeframe given them by bethesda. 'cmon, blame those who are really responsive for that disaster -- bethesda executives, but not Nerve. Nerve did what they could, and then even more.

[alps]

1 hour ago, ketmar said:

Nerve guys DID care. that's why we have it fixed in the first place. but there is only so much they could do in the timeframe given them by bethesda. 'cmon, blame those who are really responsive for that disaster -- bethesda executives, but not Nerve. Nerve did what they could, and then even more.

i said "until now", back when it was released they didnt bother patching it for like 4 months. and tbh given the base, this shouldn't have been hard to fix for them.

 

do you know that i have leaked beta copies that were made with a trial version of unity? im sure you've seen that talk somewhere. i wonder, how can a multi billion dollar company not even pay for a copy of unity? lol.

[alps]

doomworld broke.

[ketmar]

1 minute ago, alps said:

i said "until now", back when it was released they didnt bother patching it for like 4 months. and tbh given the base, this shouldn't have been hard to fix for them.

sadly, that's not how it works in commercial gamedev world. basically, you cannot do anything without approval from the higher managers, even if it is a simple one-line bugfix. you were hired to do the work, and then you cannot do more until you hired to do it. you cannot release patches on your own, even if you have the fix. you only can sit and look at your reputation being trashed.

[alps]

1 hour ago, ketmar said:

sadly, that's not how it works in commercial gamedev world. basically, you cannot do anything without approval from the higher managers, even if it is a simple one-line bugfix. you were hired to do the work, and then you cannot do more until you hired to do it. you cannot release patches on your own, even if you have the fix. you only can sit and look at your reputation being trashed.

well thats actually the case for bethesda. todd is a pioneer of leaving bugs as it is. so you are pretty much right about that.

[Doom-X-Machina]

For me it's not the games themselves that are the issue, it's everything surrounding the games that pisses me off.

All this fucking "sign into your profile to play" wankery... requiring a constant internet connection to play... loot boxes... people PAYING their way to the top instead of PLAYING their way to the top... broken games requiring ridiculously sized day-one patches to fix them because of corporate deadlines and publishers rushing shit out to compete against other games... digital only delivery... dedicated servers that get shutdown after a number of years and you can no longer play them... 15 fucking editions of the same game with exclusives only available in certain editions...

THIS is the shit that has ruined modern gaming. Not the actual games themselves.

If developers and publishers are going to continue to treat gamers with contempt and insist on making it a hurdle to access and use their product, I will simply ignore their product and find something that's less of a pain in the arse to play. When id added Denuvo to Doom Eternal (which is well-known to be tamperware) to prevent online cheating I stopped playing and didn't touch it again until it was removed. I don't play it online (Battlemode is literal garbage) but it was enough to ruin my single-player experience (FPS drops, stuttering, increased load times) and I didn't appreciate that one little bit. They got slammed for that and it was a 100% completely justified slamming too.

[Taw Tu'lki]

I prefer to play indie-games.

[Biodegradable]

I think the boom of gaming technology is both a blessing and a curse. It got too powerful and thus too profitable a little too fast. It has created this incentive to hype games up and then shove them out the door to meet continuously unrealistic profit margins before their even finished and showing a complete lack of respect for consumers.. It's also become very predatory with its borderline gambling practices thanks to microtransactions that literally lock off content. But honestly, I feel like I'm repeating myself here since we've covered this topic before months ago.

 

AAA is pretty trash and broken, but they're making a shit-ton of money and seem to have no incentive to change be it breaking developers through crunch and suckering consumers with predatory practices. And given that it's also become a tax haven, I don't see it changing anytime soon less their greed blow up in their faces-which given how unsustainable this direction is-and we experience a second Video Game Crash like back in the 1983. But who knows if such a thing will happen and I'm certainly not going to claim it will. What they are doing though is definitely going to have long term consequences for the AAA gaming industry at the very least.

 

Once again, I am grateful to the indie gaming scene and the Doom community for sustaining my interest in games these days.

Edited December 19, 2020 by Biodegradable

[ketmar]

most indie games are not better, they just fucked from a different angle: "but we're small team, you can't expect any quality from our product! and no, we won't accept 'beta money' for it!" which is acceptable for free games, but funny enough, free indie games are usually much better than commercial ones.

 

of course, not all indie teams are like that, but...

[Silhouette 03]

The problem with modern games, specifically AAA studios is that they are unwilling to take risks. They are so fearful of not making a profit they end up making the same game with a different skin. Look at assassins creed. For every problem they fix with the original games formula, they create new ones, oversaturated length and cumbersome mechanics. Call of duty is a prime example of a game series that ultimately refuses to evolve, create more interesting scenarios than “America good”,”Russia bad”, becoming borderline propaganda, as these companies are so afraid of losing profits. 

[NoXion]

3 hours ago, Doom-X-Machina said:

For me it's not the games themselves that are the issue, it's everything surrounding the games that pisses me off.

All this fucking "sign into your profile to play" wankery... requiring a constant internet connection to play... loot boxes... people PAYING their way to the top instead of PLAYING their way to the top... broken games requiring ridiculously sized day-one patches to fix them because of corporate deadlines and publishers rushing shit out to compete against other games... digital only delivery... dedicated servers that get shutdown after a number of years and you can no longer play them... 15 fucking editions of the same game with exclusives only available in certain editions...

THIS is the shit that has ruined modern gaming. Not the actual games themselves.

If developers and publishers are going to continue to treat gamers with contempt and insist on making it a hurdle to access and use their product, I will simply ignore their product and find something that's less of a pain in the arse to play. When id added Denuvo to Doom Eternal (which is well-known to be tamperware) to prevent online cheating I stopped playing and didn't touch it again until it was removed. I don't play it online (Battlemode is literal garbage) but it was enough to ruin my single-player experience (FPS drops, stuttering, increased load times) and I didn't appreciate that one little bit. They got slammed for that and it was a 100% completely justified slamming too.

I agree with all of this except for the part about Battlemode being literal garbage. It's a part of Doom Eternal that holds no real interest for me and I haven't touched it once since buying the game, but that's not enough for me to slag it off as shit when it clearly ain't. We could have gotten the full modern triple-AAAeeeh cash-grab experience with microtransactions and pay-to-win bullshit in collaboration with psychologically abusive Skinner box nonsense, aimed at extracting the largest amount of cash from the fattest whales. The fact that we got the Battlemode we have instead - in which players advance through gameplay alone - tells me that at least some people within id/Bethesda were fighting to maintain gameplay as the focus of the design. I think that's praiseworthy.

[Doom-X-Machina]

23 minutes ago, NoXion said:

I agree with all of this except for the part about Battlemode being literal garbage. It's a part of Doom Eternal that holds no real interest for me and I haven't touched it once since buying the game, but that's not enough for me to slag it off as shit when it clearly ain't. We could have gotten the full modern triple-AAAeeeh cash-grab experience with microtransactions and pay-to-win bullshit in collaboration with psychologically abusive Skinner box nonsense aimed at extracting the largest amount of cash from the fattest whales. The fact that we got the Battlemode we have instead - in which players advance through gameplay alone - tells me that at least some people within id/Bethesda were fighting to maintain gameplay as the focus of the design. I think that's praiseworthy.

By "garbage" I mean Battlemode and it's lop-sided gameplay. On it's own as the only single multiplayer mode is a pretty poor effort in my eyes, and it's not even fun when you're winning... BUT, I do agree with you 100% that id/Bethesda avoiding the implementation of microtransactions etc. is deserving of praise. Hugo has said many times he doesn't believe in that kind of thing. To props to them there.

My issue I was raising wasn't about Battlemode itself, but that they introduced Denuvo as an anti-cheat measure to protect people who played multiplayer and it caused various issues for people who really only cared about the campaign and also added a potential security threat to player's PCs. That was a dick move that they didn't think through but thankfully removed after seeing how negative the reaction from the fans was. I give them props for that too.

I don't like having to log into a bethesda.net account to play and having it throw up a message 2 minutes from the end of a map saying it's lost connection with the server and then not having the XP I've earned counted because it can't connect with my account. That is just straight up fucking DUMB.

I miss the days of going to the game store, buying a copy off the shelf, going home and popping in the DVD, entering your disc key, installing and then sitting back and just enjoying it...

[hybridial]

3 minutes ago, Doom-X-Machina said:

I miss the days of going to the game store, buying a copy off the shelf, going home and popping in the DVD, entering your disc key, installing and then sitting back and just enjoying it...

 

 

That's a major part of the reason I don't bother so much with consoles now because these days they have all the negatives of PC gaming without any of the potential positives. 

 

I guess Nintendo are different but they don't make anything I'd want to play so, eh. 

[seed]

Good games still very much exist, it's just harder to find them since the media only knows the big ones, usually, so it takes more effort to discover hidden gems.

 

There also aren't more or less crappy games now than there's ever been, they're just more visible because of how the internet works, but that being said, the industry is a lot bigger now than some 30yrs ago, which played a role in the overall creativity behind the triple-A titles in particular, by becoming safer, more stale, and less daring, as those need to sell on top of everything.

 

tl;dr Good games still exist, they're just harder to find.

[Matias]

Just don't buy new AAA games. Preordering or getting a games on launch day is at this point just idiotic and you can only blame yourself if the game is dissapointing. It should be pretty obvious at this point that most games are completely broken, incomplete or atleast buggy at launch. It's better to wait year or two so you know exactly what you are getting and for cheaper. Not a single game is good enough that you have to play it right now, especially when there are thousands of other games you could play

[NoXion]

I pre-ordered Doom Eternal and haven't regretted it. Although to be fair, it's probably the only game I will ever pre-order. They've teased a new Mass Effect game and while as a fan of the series I'm looking forward to seeing how that one turns out, it's gonna be published by fucking EA so I'm going to be holding off even on launch day. Sad times.

[DimLight]

I don't enjoy modern games as well. Pretty much why i'm here in the first place...

[Cruduxy Pegg]

12 minutes ago, NoXion said:

I pre-ordered Doom Eternal and haven't regretted it. Although to be fair, it's probably the only game I will ever pre-order. They've teased a new Mass Effect game and while as a fan of the series I'm looking forward to seeing how that one turns out, it's gonna be published by fucking EA so I'm going to be holding off even on launch day. Sad times.

The old ones had EA plastered all over them though.

[NoXion]

Just now, Pegg said:

The old ones had EA plastered all over them though.

I know that, the logo intro screens made damn sure to remind me every time, especially the unskippable ones they introduced from the second game onwards. I got into the series after the third game, so they weren't new by the time I bought them.

[Sunnyfruit]

13 hours ago, Noiser said:

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:

 

I agree on that point, it was the one I wanted to make lol. We have to make a difference between Artistic Direction and high-end graphics. Both are good, but the former matters more than the latter. Case in point in 3D games, Dusk.

 

10 hours ago, Gustavo6046 said:

 

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

 

I wanted to put pixel art back on an evolving scale as I feel that as time passed people got a better grasp at it. It's not a technology, but a matter of an evolving artform and it's not something that is stuck in the past, unlike what the horrendous "8-bit style game" qualification implies.

Games from the beginning of the decade, like from the top of my head, Terraria or Party Hard, were absolutely gaudy and I couldn't touch them for that reason.

Now, yeah, of course, I care about VISUALS :p

Edited December 19, 2020 by Sunnyfruit

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

I don't think the problem is that modern games are trash, the problem is that most of us here are older and have become desensitized to a lot of things. The more experience you have as a consumer of any art form, the harder it will become for the art to impress you. Tolerance can make you demystified.

 

This condition is known as "old fart syndrome"

 

Thirty years from now, our children will undoubtedly be on some internet forum complaining that the games coming out in 2050 suck, while reminiscing about the wonderful time they had with the games from 2020 that we are complaining about.

 

 

Edited December 19, 2020 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[holaareola]

Modern gaming is fantastic. I'm glad I had my real gaming phase back in the 90s and 2000s because I was addicted enough when things were so rudimentary that even the little gimmicks Duke3d brought in seemed cool as fuck. Think I'd have never left the house with the level of polish and variety you see at the top-end now.

 

Not to say that much isn't lost in the kind of A/B tested, dopamine-tuned way that modern AAA titles are made, but if you want to feel a stronger, more idiosyncratic vision or more heart or whatever, the indie scene seems to be absolutely booming also.

 

My problem is that modern gaming is too much fun to fit in to the few hours I'll allow myself per week.

[Rampy470]

Sounds to me like you're burnt out or depressed. Or both. 

[Boaby Kenobi]

The good old days weren't always good and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems.

[The_SloVinator]

I think if you look deep enough, you can find something of a high quality.

Most people are fixed on a thought that goes: "all old games perfect, new games sux"

And I think that could be the problem that prevents most folks searching the modern gaming catalog & find something very much as enjoyable as the old era & I'm not only talking about only indies but mainstream & niche stuff as well.

 

I had a similar mentality but decided to drop it & go explore. One of my friends got me into Yakuza series. While the franchise exists for 15 years now, it's doing way better nowadays with a huge fanbase & quality newer titles.

 

Doom Eternal is another one. Among the junkyard of 'generic military clones' that still pop up from time to time, this one took me by surprise. It retains that arcade-ish feeling & it was challenging, even on HMP.

 

But yes, games being released unfinished, unpolished with false advertisement CAN suck hard.

This was in the old days as well, though not as prevalent.

 

=========

My point is, be a bit more positive about gaming in general & just explore, find something you might enjoy, even if it emulates oldschool-ness or not.

[SaladBadger]

some of the games I've played the most this year were published this year (though one is a port of a game originally published a few years ago), so I can't say I agree. Yes, AAA is pretty fucked, when games get this big and involved they become huge financial risks, and CP2077 can show how that investment can backfire... But there's still plenty of good shit, even some from big development studios.