If the switch proves anything it's that you don't have to pay $1600 for a GPU to enjoy amazing games. Or the other way round, if you pay $1600 for a gpu it does not mean that you'll be able to play any good games.
What's a common new game trend since then? I can think of these: randomized microtransaction packs, online multiplayer PvP and co-op.
Are there any established trends that I'm missing out on, or new concepts emerging that old gamers may not have come across?
I think the gaming world just really latches onto tends. A few years it was survival/crafting games, before that RPG's. Good luck figuring out what's next!
After a few weeks of that, the game format grew stale, and I stopped playing HG maps. Then a few years later a whole bunch of BR games hit the scene and all I could think of was how similar they were to the Hunger Games Minecraft maps.
That's just my guess from personal experience.
I think Minecraft can't be overrated as a vehicle for experimentation in multiplayer modes. Not only did the game have a huge modding and multiplayer community and have support for large player counts and maps, but it's unusually easy to create for and the game itself has no built-in structured competitive multiplayer gametypes, which means there's tons of demand for people to make gametypes from scratch and there's no built-in code for how matches work that needs to be worked around for new ideas to be attempted. Many other online games have specific ideas of how matches work built-in that reduce the demand for brand new gametypes and could make implementing a gametype where matches work differently daunting.
- Cosmetics. Tons of games have stuff you can buy (equipment, skins, etc.) to make your character look cool. Extra stuff that can be developed easily by an artist, doesn't affect game balance, and sometimes even costs real money.
- Battle pass. I've never bought one but I think you get stuff on two tracks for progression, a free track and a paid track. Progression resets and there are new tracks like 4 times a year or something. Makes people want to open their wallets for the paid track due to FOMO and "...but I already earned it!"
I think if you switch from free to paid you immediately get all the stuff on the paid track you've already progressed past. Also I think they want to charge you $10 four times a year, every time the new tracks come out.
- itch.io -- Sort of like Steam / Epic / GOG for indie developers too small to be on those sites yet.
If done incorrectly, though, procedurally generated quests or dungeons feel boring and soulless.
I like the Switch, but it definitely chugs, and I suspect had we not had the supply chain meltdown over the pandemic we would‘ve gotten a more significant hardware refresh.
As far as simulators go, I‘m playing Two Point Campus, and it definitely chugs and crashes occasionally.
I think the technical imitations can definitely hamstring their games, even the first party ones. breath of the wild comes to mind, and frequently dips into sub 30 fps which breaks the immersion factor.
Yes you don't need PC hardware to play those but non-console gaming environments are also about no lock-in, customisability etc as well.
You're right though - you don't need a fancy GPU to have a fun game, but what you DO need is permission from Nintendo to publish on their platform.
And the main reason the games are colorful on Switch is that Nintendo still, to this day, has a reputation of kids-only console. And Switch also pushed it towards "casual one-off gaming" which invites bright colors (think Candy Crush).
Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition, but after that the other companies were trying to outperform each other in graphical fidelity while Nintendo released basically another Gamecube but with motion controls. And it was a hit!
Folks can quibble about the Gamecube if they like, but step back one generation and they were definitely trying to push the technology.
Most of those kids didn't know what 64-bit meant, but they knew it must be better than their old 16-bit piece of junk. That's 4x the amount of bits, therefore the console was 4x better!
It gets forgotten about because it didn’t sell all that well and because the tiny little 1.8GB discs kept most of the multi-platform blockbusters off it, but the GameCube was significantly more powerful than the PS2 (though not as powerful as the Xbox).
I wish I knew how to find the text of that post. The G4TV forums seem erased from history.
I think that's when they really started leaning into it again, but Gunpei Yokoi (Gameboy inventor) was a big proponent of the idea, which he called "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology". So it's been a part of Nintendos design process for a while before that.
I suppose you could compare to the Neo Geo which was far superior technically, but it was at such a high price point that it never made much of a dent in the market. That generation was pretty much defined by the SNES and Genesis.
Pretty much every strategy / tactics game (outside a single one: Fire Emblem) runs terribly, below 30 fps, looks very burry and... the killing blow... has crazy long loading times. You can go grab coffee while Civ6 is loading and still won't be done by the time.
Quality control of games from Nintendo is very very poor. There are several games that came out which were unfinishable or unplayable and they just happily certified them.
> actually finish debugging the game and errors abound
Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this. I cannot count how many games have come out in this state and there wasn't an ridiculous backlash, just CP2077.
NOTHING comes out bug free nowadays, because we as an industry have this idiotic policy of shipping things ASAP
I'd be happy to as soon as it's possible for me to complete or discard the "Get a gun" tutorial quest that is stuck in my quest roster. Stuck quests are a category of bug that stick badly in my craw; personal preference.
> Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this
Absolutely true, but there's degrees, and CP2077 was the buggiest game I played in 2021. When it works? It's... Okay, it's fine; I didn't find it as captivating as I hoped.
When it doesn't work, the results range from annoying to comical. I did have a good laugh the time that NPC got her handbag fused to her hand at a right angle, just gesticulating wildly in a conversation waving the thing around like an oven mitt. I did not have a good laugh when I got stuck in the floor crawling through an air vent to get into a locked room with a 'runner jacked into his chair, levitated off horizontally into the void so I couldn't move, and found that restoring from save took me all the way back to before I'd accepted the quest.
I'm old now; that shit eats into my finite time to enjoy games at all, and I have minimal patience for that category of error.
The first is "You misunderstood me. I'm hours into the game; that quest got stuck in the first hour or so, I didn't realize it was stuck, and rolling back to before I acquired it would basically reset all my progress. So it's just stuck there, like a splinter, reminding me how broken the game's mechanics are. Getting to live out twelve-year-old-me's fantasy of fighting Adam Smasher hasn't offset the irritation because that's my flavor of OCD."
But had the situation been as you expected, my response would have been "Because I respect my time more than these developers do and there's a literal sea of other games I could be playing that don't make me replay around script bugs."
As for the respecting time thing... does TurboTax respect my time while showing me a false progress bar when it actually completes its analysis near instantly? Does Microsoft respect my time when Edge constantly pesters me with popups asking to be the default? Does Instagram or Facebook respect my time when they pollute my feed with their business objective bullshit? Does a cop respect my time when he pulls me over and spends 15 minutes running my information? (Like WTF is he even doing... he punches my info into cop google and it spits out an answer! Where is all that time going!) What about if they arrest me? Does the radio respect my time when it airs commercials?
Another answer is: temper your expectations. Take the L and move on. The sunk cost fallacy is real.
I agree. That's why after deciding I wasn't having enough fun-to-bugs ratio in CP2077 about halfway through the game, I gave up and played something else. I've been playing quite a bit of No Man's Sky as of late. It's also buggy, but more fun. Satisfactory is a delightfully tight experience. Kerbal Space Program hides its bugs delightfully behind the overall "Failure is the point" game mechanics. Or I could play basically anything on a Nintendo Switch (main console, not the store) and get a nearly bug-free experience because Nintendo enforces some pretty stringent quality standards.
Everyone's preferences are different. Me, I don't get the buzz from the AAA-ness of a CP2077 to offset the annoyance of the underlying mechanics being kinda boring and kinda buggy.
... I'm not sure what to make of the comparison of playing videogames (an experience I spend double- or triple-digit dollars on for entertainment) to the experience of chores in real life, so I'm setting that aside.
Edit: well, of course, a game bug, even if game-breaking, isn't safety critical. Yo have to plan what to spend time on.
Btw Factorio runs on any kind of PC well before it was on the Switch.