How Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun punished the computers of the day [video]

But the "getting old" part definitely plays a role too. When you're a kid or in your teens everything is just more exciting and impressive to you. A teen today might think the latest Wolfenstein installment is the most awesome thing they've ever seen while to you it's just another first person shooter or doom clone, with somewhat better graphics. Now you could say "but doom was new and groundbreaking", but even if there had been a dozen identical games before, if doom were the first one you played, it wouldn't have mattered. Graphics is another thing I stopped caring about. In the late 90s and early 2000s I was blown away by new graphics demos released every year showing off what the next gen of gfx cards were capable of. Nowadays I'm so out of the loop. Graphics from 5 years ago look no different than today. Although I must admit the latest unreal engine tech demos actually did manage to impress me.

But there's plenty of games that match what you describe. Sony has published a solid lineup for the last few years. The dark souls series is a very solid example of modern skill based progression.

DLC used to exist - we just used to call them expansions.

There's also free to play games that use microtransactions as funding - but they're all either cosmetic or slight quality-of-life boosts that don't have direct gameplay impact (see: warframe and path of exile)

And that's not even talking about indies. There's plenty of indie titles that are pretty much 90s games with modern quality of life upgrades.

Some quality games that meet or exceed the quality of the 90s era from the last few years (in no particular order):

- God of War

- Horizon Zero Dawn

- Dark souls series (including bloodborne)

- Zelda Breath of the Wild

- Hyper light drifter

- Enter the Gungeon

- Spiderman

- Rimworld

- The Witcher Series

There's a ton more.. and there's also a glut of games coming out in the next couple years that also look amazing.

The thing that exists today that didn't in the past, is companies exploiting psychology to produce endorphin rushes tied to microtransactions. Companies tying gambling mechanics to gameplay advantage (FIFA and Madden are egregious examples of this).

IMO we're just old.

If there was any way this was true, then people born after 1999 would be itching to play games from the 90s and early 2000s, instead of the latest thing from EA and crowd. (They aren't. No teenager in 2019 groks Star Control.)

This goes doubly true for "games were easier to learn back then". No, teenagers today are picking up the latest games in 10 minutes just like we used to when we were teens. Games aren't harder now (plenty of 8 bit console games were punishingly hard) we're just OLD. I'm positive if I still had the pliable brain of a 16 year old I'd be hopping on whatever newest, shiniest DRM / DLC goodness was out right now.

I do agree though, that we've lost some things (while gaining others). Blizzard is no longer putting out the same kinds of games that put them on the map. A lot of valuable IP's that forged the gaming industry in its early years are forgotten or killed off or have some weird mobile/mobile transaction-ridden game to carry the flame. We'll probably never see another Starcraft. The next Diablo will likely be a huge disappointment. We've lost studios like Westwood or Maxis. We're never getting another Silent Hill. Or another Metal Gear. The list goes on.

And then you have a company like Nintendo that's pretty much doing exactly what they've always been doing, putting out the same kinds of games that made them so beloved (with many improvements and experiments along the way). Or Sony with its laser focus on great single-player experiences without loot boxes and their crazy large number of first-party and second-party studios.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Brood_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asheron%27s_Call

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest

Like I tried the latest Need for Speed. It's got this whole artifice about you being a racer and you drive around a city to join races.

Back when I played Need for Speed a lot (especially NFS 2, 3 and 4), the games had no such pretention. You just started the game, picked up a mode and started racing. The games never felt compelled to tell you how to feel or think.

https://totalannihilation.fandom.com/wiki/Boneyards

Over the years, certain processes were aligned with what people found to be done well, and of course market dynamics dictated some of the genres to be phased out. That's why, today, you see more or less a bunch of 'the same stuff', yet you also get the best of 'the same stuff'.

Kind of like with computers from 80's through 90's. There was a large variety of equals. Various processors, whole computers, operating systems, everything... and now it's more or less 'the same stuff' (on desktop).

Aging makes us "love" new things less. But I also consider this period peak gaming (emphasis on gaming). These days video games are too sophisticated. Your fathers motorcycle is not your bike to fool around with your friends on saturday.

Most big names push away game designers to favour software engineers with elements of game design. That could have worked 15 years ago, but with the increased competition, the need for proper game design has increased.

Finally, the people that made videogames 15 years ago were mostly engineers, but I get the impression they also had a better understanding of game design.

Hence that time was the golden era of videogames because it was when the key people in the industry made their careers. Todd Howard (Bethesda) and Jess Schell (Disney/Schell Games) for example were in the line at that time, but now are in management positions.

Because game designers where having an hard time in the videogames industry, they turned their attention to other areas: board games. Board games are indeed in a great period now, with many independent makers finding success.

So if you want to have again a good time playing games with friends, go for board games.

Remember arcades?

I don't see Wolf3D on your list, nor Doom / Doom 2. Single-player wise these were state of the art. You could also play co-op via LPT1. Also, Quake 2 + Lithium mod was my first and most remembering online FPS. Although team-play wise, it is the HL mod Counter-Strike.

Since you're on about games, how about Magic: The Gathering? They practically invented lootboxes. It still exists, but I find with the innovation of Type II / Standard they screwed people into a permanent upgrade cycle.

Edit: actually I take it back - there were some great games in the 2000s too (Deus Ex, Half Life 2, Fallout 3, Mario Galaxy, GTA IV, The Sims, Bioshock).

Also let's not forget the dawn of MMOs, with UO and then the revolutionary EverQuest in '99.

Stay away from the pay to play, most sports titles and anything on casual mobile and you've got it better than ever before. And it all runs on a decent windows PC that's less than 7 or 8 years old.

Strong single-player storytelling and action has been sidelined, and most multiplayer games tend to be the same. Some have unique mechanics and gameplay but they all depend on your team and unless you have a very good group of people to play with, it just ends up feeling bland and repetitive.

- Mass Effect 1–3

- Minecraft

- Surviving Mars

- Offworld Markets

Just a few of my favourites. There are so many bad games out there because there are so many games.

Those last two are about base building, one is an open-ended colony simulator, the other is a commerce based RTS with definitive end conditions.

Whether you want something to meditate to or something to get your competitive juices running there’s plenty out there to choose from.

It's always in the eye of the beholder, but I think a statement that would remain very much true would "the peak of a certain kind of gaming was in the 90s/early 2000s". There is certainly something that changed in the audience and the market as gaming became largely mainstream vs when it was very much still a niche market in the entertainment realm.

the semi-indie scene is producing gases that are comparable in scope, quality, depth and innovation to the titles of old.

sadly it's very hard to discern indie with potential today because the noise is much more and much higher, but titles like factorio, kerbal space program, keeperrl, automation: the car company game, empyrion, stormworks: build and rescue, castle story and many other to list here provide highly polished experiences.

I'm an avid indie supporter[1] so I might help navigating the landscape if anyone is interested, just restrict the genre a little so that the scope is focused enough to be relevant and interesting

1 https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197986674427/games/...

The modern philosophy is that LAN gaming shouldn't be allowed -- all multiplayer must go through the vendor's official central servers.

It's awful.

The rise of the internet fucked up gaming because it allowed game companies to control the software and insert all sorts of abusive monetization inside it.

The internet allowed game theft by EA, activision and Valve. It began with mmo's in the late 90's to take control of software out of the publics hand.

That is why gaming is such a clusterfuck, and why AAA gaming went to shit. High speed internet allowed game companies to take game functionality hostage, dedicated servers and level editors had to be massively scaled back to sell lootboxes and microtransactions.

Go loadup any popular mobile game like Final fantasy brave exvious or Fate grand order.

Single player games under the mainframe dumb client model. AKA they can now force kids to play games as publishers want because they control the values from their servers.

That was their wet dream since the late 90's. The fact that drm, world of warcaft, uo, and Team fortress 2 and League of legends even exist means the average gamer is retarded.

To watch so called "hackers" on hackernews fall all overthemselves to give up software ownership and eat drm in windows 10 was a far cry from the nerds of the 90's. We who remember palladium and wanted to keep control over our PC games because we knew the evil empire was coming to steal our PC games to get rid of dedicated servers, level editors, etc.

But the masses got internet and their stupid consumer behavior fucked up gaming.

All major franchises from the 90's got turned into mainframe - dumb client models.

Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3 Tribes vs Tribes ascend Mechwarrior 1-4 vs Mech warrior online

The game industry gloats about it's great victory to server lock every new big budget game going forward on businss sites.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-making-pir...

So no mass invasion's of privacy, stealing PC games via splitting the local application into two and selling it to the gullible masses as mmo' and "software as a service" / always online drm. Meant that the money men could now control the game from end to end.

Which is why gaming went to shit.

The internet radically altered the power between game buyer and game producer. When game companies can literally steal software by merely holding onto part of the software they produce in an internet enabled society, you know you are no longer in kansas anymore toto.

The shit the nerds of the 90's feared game true as the dumb masses ate up all the corporate PR to take over PC's and turn them into dumb terminals through slowly boiling the frog over decades and raising a new generation of gamers that don't are or don't know about the golden age of the 90's.

It was a golden age for a reason - the incentives were to produce good games, it was a "by gamers, for gamers" era, aka nerds producing games for other nerds.

When gaming went mainstream in the 2000's, everything got dumbed down to chimp level. We went from 8 or so weapons in quake to two in Halo 1 as bungie got bought out by microsoft.

Most PC developers entered the MMO space or jumped ship to make console games and there was a dry decade in PC gaming until it started back up in early 2008-2009 as a new generation of kids got internet and came online, leauge of legends hit and the most exploitive model became the most successful - take control of the game via mainframe-server, and sell flags to display skins to technology illiterate gamers.

To go from something like warcraft 3 to lol and dota is pretty much dystopian. There's no incentive not to make gmaes like the 90's where you got singleplaer campaign+multiplayr + level editors in the AAA space.

The microtransactions in the latest Ubisofts games are abhorrent and the non moddability of games like The Crew or For honor speak volumes about the locked down nature of modern AAA space.

So yeah gaming did go downhill - the internet allowed game companies to take control of the game software which means they can no infect it with all sorts of anti-fun game design.

That was the difference between pre mass internet penetration and after the internet hit the gaming masses.

Night and day.

The best Mario Kart came out in 2008, so.

League of legends, dota 2 and Heroes of newerth were just real time strategy games with the heroes and the lack of complex base management.

They collapsed into hero deathmatch if you will. So RTS didn't really disappear, the dumb masses merely renamed them MOBA's.

So if we're going by popularity, RTS for newbs (LOL, dota 2) are still very popular.

Complex RTS are definitely rarer things but that's because companies couldn't execute. Supreme commander 1 had a lot of good ideas poorly executed, supcom 2 was just a disaster because they were making it cross compatabile with console...

Company of heroes 1 was great but relied too much on hollywood wow and you can tell that the company of heroes 2 team had no idea where to take CoH after the success of the first one.

Often times game developers stumble into success. Then have no idea what to do once they have that success. Like they just hit a brick wall creatively.

I think collision avoidance might be overkill. It's fine if two units bump into each other while going in the same direction. Collision is bad if some units are moving through a choke point and the units in back turn around to take a different route because there's no open grid squares to walk forward through.

I'm currently playing through the StarCraft 1 campaign and the pathing differences with 2 are huge. Imagine being in line at Disneyland and every ten seconds, the people in front of you decide the entrance is blocked and turn around to try finding another way in. Then they bump into you and turn around again. Or maybe they just keep bumping into you for a bit.

https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0007021

https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.1895

I believe the second depends on the first.

if you're not playing a starcraft , you probably want them to trundle in the right direction and avoid ending up in a huge traffic jam.

if you are playing a starcraft , bad pathfinding is an opportunity for a skilled operator to worsen their RSI while lovingly micromanaging each tank's route