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Comment by sgillen | Hacker News Reader

Feels to me like right now/this last decade is a golden era as well. Factorio, rimworld, binding of Isaac, dark souls + sekiro, xcom, civ 6, Divinity, paradox games, Minecraft, subnautica, rocket league. To name a few of my favorites.

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Today is absolutely the golden age. We stand at the point where making and selling a game is easier than it has ever been.

I think over the years, people will continue to move away from PCs as a gaming platform to mobile devices, and shovelware from the casual, pay-to-play game companies will keep the market so saturated that it will be hard to discover great indie titles.

PS. your list is missing Disco!

The term shovelware reminds me of the E.T. incident. A game so bad that Atari literally got out the shovels:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

Really? I feel like any damage mobile could do has already been done at this point. Mobile is no longer novel and has been saturated for many years. I haven't built a new PC in years but recently with the fantastic AMD chips and some great titles that I want to explore, I plan on doing it soon. Plus it would be nice to have a system I could tether a VR headset to if I want.

I tend to agree with him (well, for me 95-2004 is the golden era) for the reason that it's mostly "been there, done that" nowadays. In addition, you have a lot of bad business practices such as microtransactions, lootboxes, terrible DRM (Denuvo, Steam etc), release of unfinished products and you can't even buy the games physically anymore. Apart from some indie games, nothing really seems worth it. As someone who started playing PC games at the beginning of the 00s, I'm mostly playing ones released in the 90s and early 00s. The main issue with older games is typically the UI and controls. Apart from that, they feel a lot more "fresh" due to its content and often times experimentation. In contrast, a lot of games these days stick to the same things and at best combine two genres into one (roguelites for instance). Or they take old ideas and just build on top of it. Very rarely you get something like "Return of the Obra Dinn".

Totally agree. Dark Souls threw every third person action game of the nineties down the trash. Same with the wargame series being the best rts game ever released, in complexity combined with real time and unit balance it's unparalleled.

The only 90 games worth talking about anymore are the rpg games, the space simulators/rpgs and Homeworld. As in that you would actually prefer to play it instead of a modern game for none nostalgic reasons.

And we still have games breaking new ground like Disco Elysium.

Eh, I think there are truly classic games from all genres from the 90s that are still relevant and played today. RTS games like StarCraft and Red Alert still have large followings. On the FPS side there’s the original Counter-Strike (well, “1.6” at least), Doom, Quake, and even stuff like Starsiege: Tribes which I’d say are still relevant and hugely influential. I have played lots of these games in recent years. I enjoy the relative simplicity of them compared to most modern day counterparts.

> Dark Souls threw every third person action game of the nineties down the trash.

I dunno. Ocarina still holds up today, or at least the 3DS remake does. I don't know about the original.

Yeah, the Zelda series is alright. And the Zelda games for all consoles are still worth playing.

Minecraft is the best game I have ever played in 25 years of playing games. Nothing like it. A masterpiece. Once in a generation masterwork. Created an avenue for creativity for a generation. It's for the history books.

Do you know Clonk? Minecraft is basically that, just in 3D and with some added things like a procedurally-generated world and stuff like hunger. But crafting, "blocks", extracting materials, mobs, multiplayer, creating new items, mechanics, scenarios etc for the game and so on were already there, many years before Minecraft.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Clonk-En...

https://cc-archive.lwrl.de/shots/7.jpg (with Stippel pack)

Seems like it's really hard to come by screenshots these days. Things like the Stargate pack with working portals, Goa'uld etc were just great.

Incredible. What a disappointment I did not come across these as a child. There's something to Minecraft, though, and I can't quite describe it.

Clonk is great but not comparable to Minecraft imo.

Some of the added things you mentioned plus the 3d aspect are vital to what minecraft is. The game starts in survival mode and slowly switches to building mode which is a very well executed and satisfying transition. The 3d aspect of it is important and so is the hunger. Hunger is the first bit of horizontal progression, then the rest comes from unlocking building resources and convenience. Vertical progression in comparison is quick and 99% of the mobs soon pose no challenge.

I think Minecraft is the only game I could conceivably nominate as objectively the best game ever. It's not my personal favourite (I'm more a Paradox guy), but it's the only game in this over-saturated market that literally everybody knows. Even out of the box there's already a lot of different ways to play the game, and then there's mods and custom servers with plugins that open up such an endless world of possibilities that nothing else comes close.

For me personally, I would add Hollow Knight to the list.

That is one of the few games I intend to always have installed on at least one machine.

Yeah. I think gaming market and the technology are doing just fine since it produced Hollow Knight. I really think it is one of the best games in history, and one of the greatest storytelling in an interactive, electric media. Such exquisite balance between simplicity and detail, music and visual, story line and game play, characters and background, etc.

Waiting for Silksong...

Then there's also Shovel Knight, Celeste, The Messenger, Stardew Valley, Undertale, and so on. We've never had it better as gamers!

The Last of Us Part II

Not for pc unfortunately!

Yikes, thought we were speaking generally

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