What has changed with video games over the last 25 years, and what has not
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1930s films did "shoot in HD". Most films were either 16mm or 35mm, both of which have more than enough fidelity to represent video at 1080p or higher without loss of quality. Here's a copy of Wizard of Oz on 4K UHD: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Limited-Anniversary-Collect...
A more realistic take is could you criticize 1920s films for not shooting with sound, and the answer is yes, absolutely. Films went from almost entirely silent to almost entirely talkies in roughly 3 years because of massive, unprecedented, and immediate commercial pressure to do so. Audiences ate up even mediocre talkies and shunned silent works now considered classics. The only reason colour film adoption wasn't similarly fast was because of Technicolor's monopoly.
Flash forward to the 1990s, where cinema as a medium was very sophisticated. Now look at blockbusters beginning to use CG rather than animatronics. The airplane in Air Force One. Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace. Hell, take the 1997 re-releases of the Star Wars trilogy which inexplicably added garbage like CG Jabba the Hutt. The purple stuff in The Langoliers. Even going back to Lord of the Rings, even going back to the Hobbit, even going back to "early" Marvel films there are tons of moments where CG is jarring. The Polar Express -- an excellent and heartwarming Zemeckis film -- is mostly known because no one likes the dead-eye CG. Yes, absolutely, technical barriers have affected peoples enjoyment of film and still do!
In video games the most obvious period of time that is conspicuously a donut hole is the Playstation 1 / early 3D era. The PS1s 3d games featured really quite nauseating affine texture warping due to a lack of hardware correction support. Here's one video of many talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI Early 3d controls are atrocious -- the "tank controls" of Resident Evil are famous for this -- because controllers initially didn't have analogue sticks and when they did, they didn't yet have basic paradigms around how to best use them. The Nintendo 64 was built around analogue control, which is why Mario 64 works so well, and yet it has a completely rotten camera system because there's only a single analogue stick and the c-buttons aren't a good substitute. And that's the PS1/N64. If you go back to the earlier era of 3D, especially on the Super Nintendo, you find low framerate, awkward controlling messes with flat polygon shading. Try playing an unmodified copy of StarFox or Stunt Race FX, I dare you.
No one is saying to throw Casablanca out with the bathwater, just as no one is going to throw Super Mario Bros, out with the bathwater. I'm not saying that technical issues mean we should never play old games or watch old movies. I'm saying that it shouldn't be surprising that people do count technical issues as part of the reason why they prefer newer stuff.
I also think the article misses widely when it pretends that "old ways" of making games don't exist today. Games are made in now-dead genres, with now-dead mechanics, all the time. They have commercial budgets at least as large as they ever did and large, warm communities. In many cases, the original teams working on games in the 1980s and 1990s still make games. I can't find an example in the article where you can't find similar games to play today.
The article mentions that isometric games would be anathema today. Disco Elysium is one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Wasteland has two recent sequels, both well liked. Hades is also one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Age of Empires IV retains a basically isometric perspective for an RTS. Diablo Immortal just launched and Diablo 4 is coming. Huh?
The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it. Majora's Mask (1999) is considered an excellent Zelda because of its time mechanics. Dead Rising (2006) was one of the first major hits of the HD era of video games and it's on a fixed timer. Final Fantasy XIII-3 (2013) uses a similar mechanic, and while the game is often criticized for being terribly written nonsense, it's not because of the mechanic.
Or if not the time mechanic, then needing to take notes? Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open, to say nothing of From Software (Dark Souls, Elden Ring) suddenly becoming the apex of prestige developer. Point and click adventures are still quite popular: The Return of the Obra Dinn is widely considered among the best games of the 2010s.
The article claims unnamed gamers today are reacting negatively to the visual choices of the new Monkey Island. This just seems entirely untrue. The reaction across the internet, including on gaming forums, reddit, and here, was overwhelmingly positive. A few people said "okay, this style reminds me a bit of the not-great LucasArts Singapore modernizations of the first few Monkey Islands". This does not presage a great backlash against the game, it's just people shooting from the hip, the vast majority of anyone who cares to comment is excited even if they have concerns about the visuals. And anyway, 99% of the people commenting are greybeards like the rest of us, not young people.
Overall I can't find much here that resonates with me.
As an old time gamer I can't agree more. We are in the golden age of old-style games (hollow knight, disco elysium, stardew valley, etc). People are making this old style games with all the hindsight of modernized mechanics, better control schemes, more accessibility, stylized graphics, PC releases.
Nintendo had mostly gotten away with not needing it up until then because of the flat shading of their 3D cartoon look for most games. Goldeneye and later Turok suffered from this especially in the level design mapping.
Overall though, you nailed it.
Also, one of the best point and click puzzle games of all time, Myst, was kinda a UX disaster. Kids would spend hours just staring at some 3D rendered scene without knowing what was going on. People figured it out. Puzzles with difficulty have been a part of gaming ever since.
The blurriness on the N64 was down to the hardware requiring each texture fit into a 4KB cache (and games using low resolution video output to control pixel fill-rate).
The texture unit on the N64 is really powerful but the 4KB size limit and additional usage restrictions leads to its signature look:
- If you want texture repeats/wraps/clamps the texture dimensions must be power of 2.
- If you want mip-maps then you halve the size of the most detailed texture mip.
- If you want detail textures then you halve again (I think, bit fuzzy on that mode).
- If you want to use a color lookup (from 4 or 8bit pixel values) then the LUT takes 2 of your 4KB, even for 4bit pixels.
Most of the pixel formats have options for 1 or 4 bits of transparency, but transparent pixels render at half speed (and the alpha bits further eat into your 4KB limit).
For something like Goldeneye you are likely going to use as many 4 or 8bit mip-mapped, repeating, greyscale textures as possible (64x64 or 64x32) and use vertex tinting to add color. Everything will look a little monochromatic but you will be controlling blurriness as best you can!
On early 3d games the art team would spend enormous amounts of time hand tweaking individual pixels and carefully specifying texture formats per texture in order to get the most detail out of the available resolution. It wasn't all bad though, they had a couple orders of magnitude fewer textures to produce (than a current generation game) and their polygon counts were 2-3 orders of magnitude lower too!
I dunno, I think the Langoliers are still creepy. Yeah, a little low poly—but they got it where it counts.
Uncanny CG kinda fits the mood of Steven King anyway. I feel the technical limitations played to the advantage of the movie. Could you make an even creepier langolier today? Sure, but I feel like this train criticizes art because of the tools available.
> The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it
But none of your examples are particularly recent, except arguably Final Fantasy XIII-3. Recent games with a strict timer are rare, and when they exist -- like the recent indie metroidvania Unsighted -- they get a lot of criticism for it. As for difficult puzzles, well, are there any non-indie games with difficult puzzles in recent history? Sure, such games continue to get made, but they're fairly niche.
> Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open
I don't know how many people play Hollow Knight while constantly consulting a guide, but if they do, it doesn't imply an appetite for taking notes while playing games. If I'd had to take notes while playing Hollow Knight (and I did not, though I did consult a guide a couple times) I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. I don't know anyone who takes notes playing games. Heck, I don't remember who it was off the top of my head, but recently a journalist caught a bunch of flack when he suggested taking notes while playing Elden Ring.
> Point and click adventures are still quite popular
The graphical point-and-click adventure is nowhere near as popular, in relative terms, as it used to be. They do get made, but mostly by indies with small budgets and small audiences. I also don't think Return of the Obra Dinn is a great example, but maybe I'm too rigid in what I think a point-and-click adventure is.
All that is to say ... it's no surprise that difficult or otherwise challenging games survive to this day; the sheer size of the market means that niche audiences can have their needs met. But a game like Monkey Island couldn't be made today and expect to be the kind of juggernaut it once was.
I'm not saying that these mechanics don't have detractors now, just as they had detractors then. I'm saying there isn't really a generational gap that would make me believe that kids these days wouldn't have a similar reaction to it as people did back then, and the evidence for this is that lots of minor variations of this kind of mechanic exist and mostly it's been in games that do pretty well.
In Hollow Knight, the use of a fan wiki is less about notes in the adventure game sense and more about optimizing builds, reading about lore, checking quest solutions, and looking up boss strategies. It's possible that some unspecified journalist made some unspecified remark about taking notes while playing Elden Ring and some unspecified Twitter demons gave him some unspecified grief about it. And yet, a huge number of people who play Elden Ring do it with a wiki open. Fandom has raised something like $100,000,000 in VC and its primary business model is being a wiki for video games; it's almost entirely supplanted traditional FAQs.
There are of course games that require more traditional "stuff I learned" notes these days, a prime example is The Outer Wilds (> 1 million sales on Steam despite a one year late release, Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, probably my favourite game of the 21st century, Adventure Gamers Game of the Year 2019 so let's sidestep whether you think it's an adventure game please). You might also think about Stardew Valley (20 million+ copies sold, is played almost entirely with Wiki lookups) or Minecraft (300 million copies, has a thriving ecosystem of secondary information and content, including videos, wikis, etc.) What would convince you that there is still a demand for games that require or encourage the use of supplementary information and thinking?
As to team size, point and click adventures don't require the budget of an open world game like Red Dead Redemption 2. About 15 people are credited on Myst. About 20-25 on Secret of Monkey Island. Tons of PnCs today have much larger budgets and larger team sizes than they ever did. The fact that the market also sustains an Asssassin's Creed game made by 2500 people over 3 years doesn't take away from the space for creative adventure games. The relative terms framing is just bonkers. James Cameron has half-billion dollar budget films, but Parasite still exists.
Monkey Island was never a juggernaut. The US sales in the first two years were about 100,000 copies. You don't think Monkey Island could be made today and sell 100,000 copies in the US? Thimbleweed Park (2017, Ron Gilbert) is well over 100,000 copies in the US across platforms. Broken Age is around 100,000 copies on Steam. The Witness over 500k on Steam. Inscryption is over a million on Steam, and that just launched 9 months ago. Papers Please around 2 million on Steam. Agent A, which is I think 3 people in a flash-style animation, is coming up on 100k on Steam. The Grim Fandango re-release is coming on the game's entire original sales run. Phoenix Wright in the 500k range. Gorogoa in the 500k range. The Room around a million units. Granted you can play with the numbers -- lifetime versus first few years sales, discounting, countries of availability, upfront MSRP, availability of console ports versus just PC, whatever. My point isn't to prove all these games outsold Monkey Island, it's to suggest I don't see the apparently cavernous collapsed alleged in demand for PnCs.
It's true that nothing is Myst anymore, but nothing was Myst back then either. PnCs are alive and well.
The loop version of the time mechanic, where you're intended to loop back around and not expected to win the game in a certain amount of time, is much more forgiving than a strict timer mechanic. I guess I don't see the existence of looping games as an indication that younger gamers have an appetite for difficult or obtuse mechanics that used to be more common.
Further, all of those games except Deathloop are not particularly mainstream. Yes, they may have sold a million copies, but it's important to keep in mind that the size of the prize is much greater than it was thirty years ago. There are 160M total gamers in the US alone right now; whereas when I was a kid in the 80s basically no adults played video games, and not every kid did, either. It's not surprising to me that a million people enjoyed a weird mechanic when the number of gamers in the world might number in the billions.
> You don't think Monkey Island could be made today and sell 100,000 copies in the US?
You're selling 100,000 copies short -- that's a fairly large number that many indies would be more than happy with. Regardless, I'm not sure Monkey Island could sell as well, if it were a new property and not backed by an established company. Can you give me examples of point-and-clicks released recently that sold so well? And I mean true point-and-clicks -- Lucas Arts or Sierra style inventory puzzle games. Double Fine released one in 2014 (Broken Age), which I think barely broke even sales-wise. That's the closest I can think of off the top of my head. All the others I've played in the past few years haven't been mainstream games.
> PnCs are alive and well.
I never said they weren't. They're just not mainstream in any way. Most younger people aren't going to be playing them. My nieces and nephews wouldn't know what to do with one, frankly.
> In Hollow Knight, the use of a fan wiki is less about notes in the adventure game sense and more about optimizing builds, reading about lore, checking quest solutions, and looking up boss strategies.
I'm not sure how important this is. It doesn't necessarily comport with my experience with Hollow Knight in particular, but regardless, the fact that people are willing to look things up doesn't seem to say anything important about how likely younger people are to engage with difficult or unforgiving mechanics. When things are difficult people might have to look something up, sure, but that doesn't mean they want to have to look things up. When I did look something up for Hollow Knight it was because I was stuck; I would've hated having to alt-tab out to a fan wiki every ninety seconds to look up tips and tricks and walkthroughs.
As the other poster said, plenty of people play Hallow Knight without taking notes. For people who do want notes or use a wiki, it's often for fairly simple things, like trying to remember exactly where a closed door was.
This is quite different from a game like Myst, where most agree note taking is a necessity (I believe the box came with a notebook). For people who haven't played it, imagine 5 or 6 escape rooms linked together, with clues spread throughout, so the first thing you look at in the first room might be something you need to solve a puzzle in the last.
Likewise, the impact of the two games is different. Hollow Knight is a popular indie game, but it's still sold a fraction of the copies that AAA games do. Myst, on the other hand was the top selling computer game for _years_. Often people who never bought any other computer game bought a copy of the game.
Cyan still makes games, but they're niche games that don't have anything like the cultural impact that Myst had.
Likewise, I don't think Majora's Mask should really be compared to games with forward moving time mechanics. It has a time mechanic, but it's basically on a repeating hour schedule. If you miss something, you can just come back to the cycle again.
This is the opposite of games with real time mechanics (time measured in actions - "real action time"?) like The Colonel's Bequest or The Last Express, because the latter games decidedly _don't_ repeat. If you miss an event in the game, it's gone (granted, Titanic isn't quite at that level). Though I suppose such games have always been a bit rare.
I don't really understand most of the other stuff; yes, some games have slightly more punishing implementations of mechanics than others (Dead Rising uses the real-time forward-only approach). I named some high profile examples which are in the approximate orbit of what was discussed. It can't possibly be the article's thesis that minor variation between two games implementing a quasi real-time progression gate constitutes a major arc in the history of narrative gaming.
The biggest change have to be us, the players. Almost every game let it be an indie or a triple-A blockbuster have been researched and min-maxed by most players. Not just the "sweats" but the casuals too. Of course official guides and playthrough books have been a thing back in the 90s too, almost every PS1 game had one. But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play. I see this everywhere. It's not even about the game being hand-holdy or not it's the fact that players can datamine and simulate every aspect of the game. Elden Ring is a perfect example recently where builds are min maxed to edge as possible. And that's a mainly single player title, there is not even anything on the line. MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality, especially WoW everyone expected to have the best build doing the best possible dps or else. Even in very casual games like Animal Crossing you have this mentality of having the best villagers in the game, people asking insane amount of money to visit their islands ot get that best item you need etc. So yeah, I'd say this is the biggest change.
I think this has to do with a prevalence of frankly stupefying reward structure of many games. I call it spreadsheet progression. Instead of opening up new gameplay options, you often get a huge list of entirely arbitrary choices that only differ in the most superficial ways.
Other regions don't seem to care.
On the other side, this change in player behavior has reflected back in the game industry. I often see a “softening” in permanent build-based character gameplay, such as choosing your skills and stats in Diablo 2 has gone away in modern Diablo games - because why add this feature when you know your player base will all just google the best build?
On the upside it can keep the game fresh trying out new things, but if you find one that's fun, it will likely be nerfed in the next league.
That is what I find infuriating about the game. They are constantly messing with the skills tree and even if it doesn't destroy my characters I don't want to go back and rebuild them everytime I log in. So, when I initially played it, I gave them money and logged in pretty regularly for 6 months or so, then I didn't log in for a couple months and they literally destroyed my character by removing the linkage to opposite sides of the skills tree I was using (yah granted that character felt way overpowered).
If they were smart, they would version the skills tree at the point of character creation, so people in the general global world don't get messed up every time they want to change the league play strategy.
I have almost no time for gaming these days, between work and family. I backed the new System Shock on Kickstarter years ago, and I probably won't get to play it.
I can't speak for WoW, but I hope this is true for ESO. Despite watching many videos explaining the light-attack/power weaving technique, practicing for many hours, watching build videos, optimizing my build, farming/buying (mostly) BIS gear, and maxing it out, I can still only pull about half the DPS demanded by the hardest trials. Despite paying just as much as everyone else, there's a whole bunch of content I'm effectively gated from playing. So I don't, anymore. And I'm bitter about it.
I agree that it's shitty.
What I meant with my comment: some players play for fun. Some players play to win and make a competition out of any game. Being the best requires some degree of rule-breaking which makes a game less fun. Not every player actually wants to compete in ways that are not fun but required to win a game.
This reminds me of some players who say "git gud" (by training for months or however long it takes) or go home. (Aka "begone, filthy casual!")
I guess this sort of overly punishing and steep learning (and eventually backward-turning effort vs. reward/fun) curve is another reason why some games can seem more like working at a time-consuming and very tedious job rather than "playing" something that is enjoyable.
Maybe the old school ones but there are many examples of games now that have season passes that cost $10-20 for a few months, have cosmetic items you can earn/purchase.
The "meta" in a game is what the min-maxed gear is. Or what I like to call the spreadsheet gear load-out. There are lots of discussions, play testing damage numbers, trying different modifiers/gear combos, etc. done to figure out the max damage-per-second (DPS) and then players gravitate to that gear, grinding for that gear, etc. Some people actually publish spreadsheets of data on the gear.
Then the game devs change the "meta" by tweaking the stats on the gear to make XYZ weapon/armor better, or introduce a new weapon that has better DPS. This sometimes aligns with season passes or map changes. Its endless and probably hugely profitable for them. If you compare the money people spend on these types of games, I bet the average player on season passes spends more than a monthly subscription based MMO (for those that actually spend money).
Its the same "keeping up with the jonses" concept IRL, or in business world, earnings have to always be better than the last time.
But what I hate are puzzles. Parts of the game would have been completely inaccessible to me, because I’d have either avoided them, or stopped playing because of frustration.
Instead, I can simply look up the solutions online, and the unfair player who doesn’t want to spend hours thinking about the perfect build can go to neoseeker and check their list of unfair viable builds.
I’m soon finishing my 3rd time through WotR (with a total play time of over 1400 hours), and for my next run, part of my build was decided by datamined deity reactivity in the game.
Especially in single player games, the options and additional enjoyment coming from datamining, minmaxing, and sharing of secrets are amazing.
But then after you've done that a huge amount of fun is trying to win with non-optimal builds, often "for the lols".
In this way it's more of a roguelike (or similar to Dwarf Fortress, et al) where the goal isn't to "beat the game" but to beat it on your terms.
Funny enough, a recent turn based 4X that was supposed to be a Civ killer released and is now looking pretty rough review wise. The biggest complaint is that some of the civs are just straight up better inherently.
Which is probably why I love Crusader Kings, it’s the only paradox game I’ve played where playing as minor nobody nations isn’t the most boring grind imaginable.
meta gaming kills strategy for me. From back when I first started playing AoE3 I was absolutely infatuated with the game and genre, but found myself incapable of winning MP matches. Some guys from the old pre-DE competitive scene helped train me a bit, and I could win MP matches now, but the game is no fun, instead of being a fun 4X/RTS, it was “follow this foundation, time everything perfectly, micro perfectly, min/max everything and it lost most of the appeal.
Even more recently CK3, which can be a pretty immersive game, often loses that immersion when the game becomes less about what I do as a king, and more about min/maxing mechanics.
A lot of strategy games start to feel less “strategy” and more “who can exploit mechanics and follow predefined path”. Ironically one AoE3 legend rose from nowhere a couple years back with strategies different from the meta and winning. People called him toxic for it.
Ok fair enough, though to me personally, I’m not very excited by or immersed in chess games either. I’ve trended more towards grand strategy in recent years, which on the surface seem to be closer to what I’m looking for, but in practice often end up being me just trying to min/max modifiers for RNG rolls.
I’ve started playing tabletop role playing games and being interested in those lately because of this. Really I want to tell interesting stories.
But once you get past this, there's so many things to worry about - balancing tech versus units versus upgrades versus economy, micro, scouting, unit composition, harassing and defending harass... And then the meta layer, which is allocating your limited time and APM to those decisions and actions! Really challenging and rewarding to improve at, and the only "e-sport" I find interesting to watch.
Besides of what you are talking about, it also affects developers, it is not that strange for games today to be developed assuming you are going to google things out or that you are going to be assisted by a wiki site, I'm frankly worried about this.
I recently played Subnautica, one of the features is that after making a vehicle you can craft upgrades for it, you also have to replace the energy cells they use, yet the game gives no indication on how to do either thing, a quick google search will point out that there are specific areas of the vehicle that can be interacted with, but it really feels like there is a missing prompt or tutorial somewhere.
What will become of these experience in some 20-30 years I don't know.
They should. MMO is an expired genre.
It's a relic of the advent of broadband, when playing with tons of other players in a graphical game became possible for the first time. That was novel and amazing, even if it meant deep compromises in gameplay and graphics. Now, though, that's no longer novel, and those compromises don't make sense. And the incentives are awful to boot; a company has to run beefy servers, which means it's pressured to find ways to extract ever more money from the players, leading to stuff like pay-to-win.
Although some people think they can be saved, particularly if they're sandboxes instead of theme parks: https://youtu.be/nvK8fua6O64
They have to run servers that would have been beefy decades ago. These days I could go rent a server for $5/core/month, and as a lowball handle 100 concurrent users per core. And based on some searches, if 10% of players can log in simultaneously that's much more than enough. So that comes out to $60 a year per 1000 subscribers.
I don't see how server costs could be a problem for a game that has any income. You could ask for $5 a year to play and server costs would completely disappear. No need to do any harsh money extraction at all for server costs.
Please, explain the reasoning. What kind of MMO needs that much server infrastructure?
I suspect it's partially an age thing. Now that we're older and becoming nostalgic for the wonder that games held for us as children this is a great way to capture some of that magic again.
As mentioned elsewhere, gaming guides aren't a new thing, but for a certain segment of the population they were pretty uncommon for a large chunk of our childhood. So, instead, knowledge was shared around the lunch table or at recess.
It's maybe not quite as exciting in my 30's as it was back then, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to discover things with my friends than it is to watch a 20 minute video about optimal strategy.
There is a very fine line between "providing resources" and ruining a game for me. WoW isn't a lot of fun for me anymore (I haven't played even many years now) because of exactly the reason you list. It felt like the only "right way" to play the game or the only way to be competitive was to find and learn a specific build/play style. That sucks all the fun out of the game for me.
I've run into this with Factorio as well. When I first played it I didn't look up much info at all and I had a blast. On later play-throughs I got deep into online blueprints or "best practices" and in very little time the game lost it's appeal for me. I'm not talking about belt balancer books but malls, research factories, and the like. When I realized why I wasn't having fun I vowed to only use the most basic online blueprints and that has helped a lot.
It's a hard path to walk between "This game is inscrutable and I need help!" and "Well now I'm just a glorified computer following a detailed walkthrough, not playing a game". I have to stop myself from meta-gaming too much or it ruins the game for me (though it's a useful tool to use to quit a game that I'm too deep into).
The biggest change is not the players. The biggest change is the monetization of games that you have already played for and the sad hamster wheel that companies have put players on. While Elden Ring is mostly about exploration, most AAA games being developed nowadays consist of a set of mundane tasks that don't even make sense when putting them into a real world context.
Kill 10 X. Collect 20 Y. Walk to Z and stand there while you "survey the area." It's all bullshit, but instead of just being able to enjoy the game by exploring to progress through the story, you have to do all this dumb crap.
Time to finish the game, aka speedrun. Not necessarily a bad thing though (I love watching all the performance during AGDQ/SGDQ), but that's an example of "optimizing the fun out of the game".
I'm kind of OK with the metagame of every player vs. the developers.
I even like the idea of developers vs. players in an MMO. There's sort of a cooperative aspect to it.
But I also usually enjoy figuring things out on my own rather than consulting an internet walkthrough, and an MMO doesn't seem as fun if it is reduced to an exercise in efficiency maximization or trying to increase the value of some number.
Now a lot of games just want to be big, even if the variety of gameplay doesn't change. People get validation and a sense of achievement from their numbers going up. People like exploring a big place and running through long scripted social encounters even if there's no autonomy. It's now a long lasting source of social and personal progression that we don't get in real life nearly as easily.
Which is fine honestly. But when a designer fucks up the balance it becomes work because there is no choice but trudging through trivial, reused content to reach the next goal.
A somewhat Zelda related, modern indie game that comes to mind is Hyper Light Drifter. It’s one of the best games I ever played, and I have played a ton until about 5y ago.
The features/content are orthogonal, minimal and extremely well balanced. There is almost no unnecessary fluff and stuff that distracts from the core, everything is designed holistically. The gameplay is challenging and varied, while building on a few well thought out primitives.
Still you feel like you’re stepping into a world of wonder. The game has a distinct personality and encourages experimentation and exploration.
It rewards you with actual gameplay and not with ego soothing tricks.
Mainstream games that have this kind of polish and holistic design are very rare, even though they have access to humongous resources.
The game is presenting one thing “this is very dangerous you could slip and fall and die at any minute!” while the mechanics are saying another thing “There is no danger just a linear path”.
It’s not that the author thinks we should remove decoration but that the decoration should be authentic to the situation the player is is in.
If the game is presenting danger, BE DANGEROUS! If the game is presenting anxiety, BE STRESSFUL! But this in between of presenting danger without the play mirroring the experience is disengenuous.
There are several games in my library that I have yet to finish, because it just gets so repetitive to do it all. Spider-Man. Borderlands 3. I love AC:O, but how many bandit camps can you clear before you go mad? When you add in all the DLC, you're talking about many hundreds of hours of gameplay, if you do everything, but 75% of it is the just same fight, over and over again. Going back to Borderlands, Wonderlands is WAAAY shorter than 3, and I, for one, really appreciate it. (They'll probably blow that up with DLC tho.)
The game at its core, is still the same, but they’ve been adding tons of new content, that’s breathed new life into the game to the point where it was even outperforming AoE4 for a bit.
But the new content is a mix of stuff. A lot of it adds new mechanics and diversity that make the game much more enjoyable. Only problem is I never properly learned how to play non-2005 vanilla civs.
For example yesterday Nintendo revealed the new trailer of the next mainline Pokemon game... and it has some insane texture shimmering and apparently zero anti-aliasing in the whole game. And that's how they promote the game in the trailer. It's not even a low budget title, it's the flagship AAA game of the company sold for $60. And the Switch is not a bad hardware so at this point they most likely just don't care which is the strange part. It's like watching a movie in 360p. Sure the story, the characters, the music matter but a low resolution can damage the whole experience, same as the intentionally low quality graphics in an otherwise good game
Money doesn't buy happiness but not enough money causes unhappiness.
Graphics doesn't make a game great... but bad graphics causes unhappiness. Just like bad controls, no tutorial, flakey network connections, etc.
In GP's case however, it's been pretty consistent how low effort Game Freak has gone with their in-house Pokemon games. The series practically prints money and the hardware has shown us what is possible. Even the new Kirby game looks stunning, and Kirby is one of the less big budget series.
On the other hand, my most played game is by far Old School RuneScape, which is a restore of a backup of RuneScape from 2007. The game has certainly evolved in style and content since the re-release, and I use a 3rd party client with an “HD” plug-in which adds more render distance, shadows, lighting and anti-aliasing.
It is possible to create a visually appealing graphics with limited resolution and colour depth, just as it is possible to create glitchy and ugly graphics with the latest technology. Of course, the opposite is also true. Either way, you need people who know what they are doing in order to achieve the desired affect.
It's a bit long in the tooth. It's a 5+ year old Tegra chip.
They do tend to finish the game and release it as another version of it later.
I don't know on which planet the author lives but my experience is a bit different: • you go to the store and buy the game. Allmost all games have the same price. • Come home, insert DVD, install it. • after instalation the game wants an online account for which it needs to install a windows service. • account created, try to start the game, it needs an update (couple of GB, it needs one hour) • after update you can finaly start the game (entusiasm is gone) and you play for some time. Graphics is a bit better than 20 years but nothing "wow". • you don't touch the game for a couple of days • you want to play again, try to start the game, it needs another multi GB update, another hour lost. • you decide next time to avoid this company (EA) when buying games.
A lot of 80s and 90s games in boxes would have the main manual, and then a small pamphlet (printed later) describing last minute changes, because the manuals had to be finalized before the disks, and you wouldn't reprint the manuals unless hell froze over, anyway.
Then there's the expense of localizing that. And the budget, and that nobody will read the manual anyway.
I can't count the number of times I read through the manuals for Starsiege, Arcanum, various Jane's simulators, and so on.
Different country or socioeconomic situation perhaps? Don't think I've bought a physical game from a store in the last 10+ years.
Maybe 10 years — in which case the answer is: graphics nowadays is mostly bound to the current console generation. GTA 5 was released almost 10 years ago for PS 4. Uncharted 4 was released 8 years ago. The Last of Us 2 was released 2 years ago.
Now we're entering the next generation — ray tracing, nicer global illumination, AI upscaling, and much more. The Unreal Engine 5 enables indie developers to produce an image almost as good as AAA titles of the previous generation.
EA is not worth the time for a multitude of reasons, multi gigabyte updates being the least of it.
But yes, where do you live that you still buy PC games physically?
It seems ever single one of the 20-30 games it has installed need 20+GB updates, and the download speeds are often a fraction of my home internet connection. Has no one heard of incremental/differential package upgrade? MS should charge companies a bandwidth recovery fee by the size of their updates.
Plus, I hate typing passwords on the controller, and it seems to always want people to sign in/etc.
The Nintendo emulator thing I have blows it away in usability. Turn it on, pick a game, play. Takes less than 20 seconds. The xbox takes that long just to show its logo sometimes. I want to play games not play system admin for a game machine, of schedule my game playing 4 hours in advance.
• Go to the Epic Store
• Collect the weekly free game
• See that it needs a *40 GB* download
• Go away for now, because I do not have so much free space
• A few weeks later, after cleaning the disk, start the download
• Let the download run for a few days, like 10 GB / day, because my internet connection is slow (either that, or download it at the university)
Video game magazines usually rated games on multipoint scales, with usually ‘graphics’ being a specific category. Games would get high scores just on the basis of their graphics. The main difference between platforms was defined by their graphical capabilities, far more than their performance. Arcade game ports to home computers were almost entirely measured on the fidelity of their recreation of the arcade graphics. A thousand tired movie license tie-ins were released which were just graphical glosses over the same underlying beat-‘em-up gameplay.
I spent thousands of hours playing SimCity 2000. I can't speak for 3000 (never played any), but I got 4 soon after it came out. I spent a few hundred hours trying to figure it out, but ended up liking 2000 better. The complicated mechanics in 4 destroyed much of the fun.
It was awkward when my dad needed an example of civil engineering when talking to someone, and asked if they ever heard of SimCity. It happened more than once.
I'm not sure if running it on a modern machine is a good idea, since it has issues with color depths over 256 colors, and the fastest simulation speed doesn't account for Moore's law. I last played SC2k on a retro PC (Win 98, Pentium 3).
A few hundred hours is an insane amount of time to spend on a game where much of the fun was "destroyed".
Is this really happening to video games? I suppose I can think of some old-school gamers disapproving of Fortnight, but I believe anyone would be disgusted with ALL the modern video games. They are simply too diverse. There are modern games created for every possible taste. Whatever your favorite video game from the 90s did well, there are modern video games that do it better.
> The quality of the graphics seems to be the most important point in a game.
> However, let’s not be assertive: there are still a lot of players, usually not the casual ones, who also consider playability, the scenario, and how much time you need to finish it, the presence of a multiplayer mode… to evaluate a game completely and fairly.
I have a gap of around 10 years in my videogame playing history. After resuming, the difference that struck me the most is how immersive videogames are nowadays (of course, there are many factors, e.g. the genre), which is partly due to graphics advancements.
Graphics don't live in the void though. They're part of the art design and they're a mean of expression; overall, they help providing an immersive experience for the player.
Beautiful graphics also are not relegated to AAA 3D games (which are a narrow segment of the market) like one would think (since AAA games have the most exposure to casual readers/gamers); many indie games have beautiful (in different ways) graphics.
> “Oh, it is so ugly”, “They did not age well” for the more diplomats.
I think I've never read this, referring to graphics. In general the aging refers to game mechanics which that considered annoying and obsolete today, e.g. permadeath (where not intended), lack of convenient checkpoints etc.
The games that tried to have realistic graphics with the best the tech had to offer 15 years ago have definitely aged badly (Crysis 1, Fallout 3). Compare that to highly stylized graphics that didn't push the envelope, and still look good today (Team fortress 2).
That being said, I'm of the opinion that modern AAA titles spend _waaaaaay_ too much effort (money) on graphics.
On the bright side maybe my next computer can run crysis.
From time to time I fire up games like these again just to realize that I don't have the time to even get through the tutorial.
To cut a long story short, there is unfortunately nowadays a huge divide between making a game that people buy and making a game that people play, and the bias is obviously towards the former.
One that stands out in recent memory was A Short Hike. You can beat it in about an hour, and the scenery is very pleasing to look at. I also think of Journey, which might be one of the most beautiful games ever made, and is probably less than three hours long.
I also don't think it's a fatigue, as if it were some kind of disease; it's just lack of time when you get older. ;-)
May I recommend some text adventures to cure you of that? :)
Both of these are good examples of control schemes that are so complicated that it basically precludes me from playing anything else until I'm done with them. Otherwise, muscle memory will screw me to the point of frustration. I hate this part of modern games.
Agreed on RDR2, but I didn't have a problem with Cyberpunk. In comparison to RDR2 it may as well have been the original NES Mario Bros.
I recently installed the orginal , what a breath of fresh air. Just left to figure out levels yourself instead interruptions every step.
Fortunately this was viable and the game doesn't punish you for not engaging with every facet of the varied upgrade/crafting/salvaging systems.
So that may be an option if you'd like to complete it!
Predatory pricing and marketing, with the sole aim of encouraging and monetizing addiction.
The amount of multi-phase psychological manipulation in many mobile games, and now those in "AAA" games, is on an accelerating curve. For the console/AAA, a game was a one-time-purchase, and perhaps an expansion. Then came monthly fees with MMOs, then came microtransactions.
Then came Machine Zone games with PlayToWin. Addict, then extract. Use social engineering, sunk cost fallacy, constant devaluation treadmills, employee superpowered players to cause conflict, strife, stress, bully, and extract money to survive, false communities. Slot machine mechanics and payoff ratios. Timers with no regard for sleep cycles.
Sure some games were always pushing the envelope, but what is appalling is that the App Stores from Google and Apple feature and promote these "games", and establish no boundaries for the conduct within. This outrageous behavior is officially condoned.
Children's games are loaded with inappropriate ads, inexcusable amounts of addictive elements to get the parents to shell out money for the paid version.
I contrast this with old standards for children's TV programming, and physical toys, games, and products.
This is a sick, sad, manipulative, dangerous, morally depraved business.
And I want to emphasize: I've played video games since the Apple II.
I don't see how things can continue without regulation like TV standards and toy safety standards.
This is not an isolated phenomenon to bad actors like MZ. There are thousands of reprehensible games on the app stores and AAA games are all moving to "revenue models" like this.
Edit: I got a cached version. These are comments from what I guess will be the "golden generation": when revenue wasn't good enough to employ an army of MBAs to direct games into revenue model hell, when the limited budget had to be spent on artist and programmer to even have a chance of success.
And that's what I fear: all games aren't games anymore, for the sake of entertainment. Now they are ongoing revenue models to be refined, enhanced, protected, A/B tested, and focus grouped.
Bit strange having to reach back 20+ years in a 25 year review to prove "recent" examples of creativity.
Game devs do seem to stick to tried & tested formulas especially with AAA titles which are major financial bets.
e.g. If you compare overwatch and say DotA. The one is a 1st person shooter the other a RTS engine. Yet conceptually they're identical. ~5 a side lane push mechanics with two tanks, two dps and a healer with each having unique but complementary abilities to emphasize teamwork and coordination. CSGO, TF2, League etc...same thing over and over
Conceptually identical is a pretty strong claim there. Overwatch has no concept or equivalent to the various RPG-style mechanics in MOBAs (e.g farming, items, XP, shops) while DOTA2 only has a single match type (i.e. no Assault vs Push vs etc) and significantly less mechanically demanding gameplay (barring a few micro-intensive characters like Meepo or Brood). Hell, I'm not sure if I'd claim OW even has lanes instead of flank routes (compare an Overwatch lane to a CS lane) and the majority of DOTA supports aren't even healers (maybe 5ish?)
I feel like we often do this with video games, comparing aspects that are very low level to the game and are often just a part of being interactive pieces of media. Would chess to checkers and be conceptually identical? They're both board games and involve the same base mechanics (move pieces across the board, capture enemy pieces). And if they are, would that make one of them a worse game? Should we have not made checkers since we already had chess?
Because that's what makes the most consistent, safest money. That's really all there is to it. When a marginal improvement on an existing series prints you more money than investing in a risky new IP, of course innovation takes a backseat.
By comparison, aside from personal interest, indies don't have any existing series to draw from, and competing with an existing series on aspects they will most definitely beat you is a bad idea to begin with. At the same time, most popular indies suffer from staying in their lane too, continuing to pump out similar style games, as they notice the same issues. People making RPGs continue to make RPGs, people making platformers continue making platformers, etc.
And in a twist of irony, this is what developers should be doing anyway. Experiment with spin-off games, iterate on your main line games. The only problem with this pattern is the humongous number of games this would create, in a market which is already very cutthroat.
For multiplayer games on the internet that is a huge thing that has shifted in 25 years. Its not every game or every platform but major online games allow cross-play whereas before you were basically locked into playing with only people on the same platform.
Maybe there will be other things players want and studios will listen and implement in the next decade-ish?
In the United States alone, the game had generated $595,000,000 (equivalent to $1,230,000,000 in 2021) in revenue for Nintendo by early 1992,[20] exceeding the gross revenue of the films E.T. (1982), Batman (1989) and Jurassic Park (1993)
In the old days discovery of fixes was often who you knew and the means by which a game studio provided fixes. sometimes it was a BBS, sometimes it was AOL or Compuserve. You might not be able to win or get to the next level because of a bug and not even know it.
Now the games has built in system that grabs fixes/updates right off the internet. Often automatically. Which has lead to games being in some ways poorly constructed and with the idea "we can ship another version later"
That was no were close to true back in the day.
The market is becoming incredibly tough with so much high-quality entertainment available for very little money via Game Pass, PS Plus, Steam sales, indie bundles, etc. And that's ignoring the F2P side of things.
It's more like a generation grew up and they have less time now.
I don't have the statistics handy (maybe someone does and can link them) so won't speculate but...do "kids" today spend the same relative amount of time playing games "we" did?
Seems fairly safe to assume they have alternative ways to spend their time (tiktok/current social media flavor of the day etc.) but not sure if that's the case or not.
I read it as:
25 years ago I had lots of time to invest in games.
But, the other, more likely, interpretation is that you need to invest large amounts of time I to games these days.
Like you, I disagree with the latter. I find the former interpretation resonates strongly though.
I'm quite pleased that today's game market has allowed for a wide variety of small, often fairly short, games with lots of experimentation.
And the on occasion you get something that looks like it can shake up the genre, but turns out to be an over promised scam.
But yeah, the whole open world, survival genre has exploded. Notable, Valheim was fun, but I felt like it could use a bit more variety on content.
[1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Rz5tzz...
Counter-Strike and Battlefield 1942 are two examples I'll call back to as they were two important games of my youth. At the time, most servers for these games were hosted and/or run by people that weren't affiliated with the developers or publishers of those games; it was just something you did so that your local group of friends or community could have a virtual home to get together and play.
My friends and I would have maybe a dozen servers we would keep favorited and a handful that we played on heavily. Over time, you got to know the other people on the server just by playing against them consistently; for example, when BigCheeseburger logged on and was on the opposing team in CS, you knew you had your work cut out for you. There were rivalries and camaraderies that just formed naturally as a result of this. Some of these servers also had web presences with a site that had their roster, dates and times for regular game nights, etc.
Games would also get occasional patches (patching before Steam is something I don't think was better back then) that would bring a new map or two, but that was generally it until a big expansion dropped, like Battlefield's Secret Weapons of WWII pack. If people wanted new content, they made it themselves - I spent so many hours on custom CS maps like Iceworld or even ones that shoehorned in Half Life's terrible vehicle controls to make facsimiles of Tatooine with landspeeders.
In most multiplayer games nowadays, the developer has one or more employees assigned to "manage" the subreddit or Discord for their game. Custom servers are often not even supported anymore, as matchmaking is used to funnel players into full games and keep them playing even if their friends log off for the night. You can forget about creating your own maps unless it's a special case like Halo's Forge mode; the developer/publisher has a great seasonal rollout plan that might never get realized if enough people don't keep playing the game (Say hi to Battlefield 2042!). Players need to see numbers go up so every game has an experience and leveling system first seen in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare so that people don't realize how banal and limited the available content is. Cosmetics and boosts sprinkled over a battle pass system layer on top of this as another form of retention.
What has changed in the last 25 years? Games, like everything else, became extremely monetized at all levels, and in the process, conditioned a lot of players to feel that they NEED that monetization or else it's "boring". Look at the reaction to Halo Infinite, a game that plays fantastic but has had limited map/content drops since last fall. Instead of praising the fact that you can ignore its battle pass entirely and just have fun playing a few games with friends every few nights, people are demanding to see their game time rewarded with more progression, more unlocks, etc.
This is one of the primary reasons I still mainly play older games. I like being able to host servers with exactly the modes I like, or find servers that have them. Some of the best experiences I've had in online games has been on servers I've hosted for Halo (Trail AND Custom Edition). Nothing matches the feeling of logging on to your own or favorite server and playing with a mix of regulars and randoms, without servers it's impossible to build communities in the same way.
3D models aren't much better. You can easily re-texturing and create new content this way, but adding new models, animations and AI requires huge amount of polish to be somewhere near AAA quality.
Of course I completely agree on the community aspect. Forums have been dying for a long time and left a vast graveyard of former communities. But this is mostly due to social media and how newer generations are using the internet. We have a continuing trend of centralization which has affected the gaming sector big time.
On too, I remember wanting to get into the modding scene for an game I loved to play.
I did some research on the format used for 3D models and at the time the format was completely proprietary and supported only by software that costs tens of thousands of dollars most kidders probably don’t have sitting around.
The situation may be better nowadays, as I faintly recall the format being reverse engineered and supported on blender through plugins, but I may be created a hopeful fantasy.
Don't get me wrong, plenty of modern games have vibrant modding scenes (Minecraft, Starsector, Rimworld, Elder Scrolls, Fallout) but we don't see massive total conversions like we used to.
Feels bad.
>Conclusion: There is not conclusion. I will let the reader to its own because everything, in art, is subjective.
anyway, my favorite.. after maaaaany attempts, the recent true-to-original remake:
For example, mass effect without the 4 pre-canned options during each dialogue.