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Comment by ilyt | Hacker News Reader

Also just sheer choice of "good" games.

I look at my wishlist on Steam and think "If didn't had a job and could play games for next 20 years I would still not have to settle for average one ever again". Like, compared to 20 years ago I don't ever play anything that by 20 years ago standards would be considered "just okay" or below. We're definitely spoiled

And between indies and sales they are cheap too.

Frankly picking good ones becomes harder, you no longer can count on next <AAA developer> being great as usual and game journalists are incompetent more often than they are useful.

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> Also just sheer choice of "good" games.

It is obviously a matter of personal taste and a matter of being lucky or unlucky choosing games, but my experience is very much the opposite. There are (nearly) no good games anymore.

You can easily play a very big chunk of the good/great games from the past 40 years and plenty of new good and great games get released every year so you are probably being unlucky or do not know how to find the games that will appeal to your taste.

There are no good games that reflect your taste, or good games that reflect your taste are hard to find?

On my end, there are so many options that I tend to look at qualities that I would not even consider twenty years ago, like tone and setting. (Why would I want to play a grim game? Do I really want to play another game set in space?) Quite often, nothing will get past my personal taste filters, even when they are good games.

There's a pretty huge dichotomy between consoles and PC right now. I find those who bemoan that lack of games tend to refer to the former. It's become much better due to arcade/PSN titles, but consoles still tend to suffer from the 'we have all types of games - first person shooty/stabbers and third person shooty/stabbers' syndrome.

Go to Steam, search for any genre whatsoever that you're interested in, look at player reviews, and find out why some people think there are no games and why others think we're currently in an unprecedented golden age of gaming. Alternatively, which genres do you like?

I find modern games are often superior to the old ones, so I would disagree with the "anymore" part of "no good games anymore".

But I disagree with the sibling comments in that I'm quite sure it's a fact for a lot of players that there are hardly any good games left in the sense that they have grown and their tastes have reached levels where pretty rehashes of old mechanics and ideas will no longer cut it. AAA games don't innovate much these days, and the indie game with one cool new idea is rarely fun to play because the execution as a whole is so lacking.

To be honest, I think the average HN user does not play games that much. Or watch films, listen to music, read fiction, etc. Which is probably a good thing, but means they have less taste, both in the subjective and objective sense. But go to different internet forums, say 4chan, and you'll find people definitely have huge problems with quality creative content being so rare.

It's a mixed bag, I think.

Good things: * Tons of high quality small indie games that experiment with mood, story, genre. Think Cultist Simulator or Factorio.

* Remasters and emulation bring the best of the past to the present.

* New experiments in gaming hardware: Nintendo Switch, Playdate.

* Console play is more ergonomic (controllers, voice chat) than ever.

* Gaming is pretty mainstream now, so there's more people to play with, and there's less stigma.

* Twitch, Discord, YouTube all make finding a community for your game easy and fun (if your game is blessed with a positive one at least).

Bad things:

* Certain genres haven't really seen top-quality entries. After Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology, and Warcraft 3, the only top-quality entry in the RTS genre was StarCraft 2. We just don't see folks even trying, certainly not with AAA budgets.

* Game design choices make games too streamlined, and remove fun interactions. For RPG games: quest markers, level scaling, lax loot table probabilities, incentivizing solo play til end game, etc.

* Voice acting means there's just less text and less depth. Compare Morrowind to Skyrim. But I think we're over the hump here. A game like RDR2 is fully voice-acted but had 2000 pages of writing. That's the best of both worlds.

* Bad art design makes things look really bad in low-power hardware. Compare D2 and D4 on a lower-end computer.

My main gripe is lack of worthy sequels to my favourite games:

Deus ex, I really tried hard to like mankind divided but I don't know why I don't.

Wave race 64, even the GameCube sequel didn't capture the magic and every other attempt has rubbish water physics.

1080 snowboarding, the sequel was terrible, I left it back to the shop. No other snowboarding game captures the rewarding control scheme (same with wave race).

Goldeneye, ok perfect dark is good but why has no other game even attempted to capture what makes goldeneye special? It plays like a roller coaster that you can control. (I think someone on a gaming forum said that, I think they are correct).

Quake 3 and unreal tournament 99, no online shooter I've played compares to instagib on these.

1080 Snowboarding was a gem not matched for a long time. The reason it was so good was because the chief coder, Giles Goddard, was an avid snowboarder and intuitively understood what it should feel like. He modeled the friction of the board relative to the contact patch it makes with the snow. I don't think any other game tried to do this outside of racing sins for quite some time.

Yes, it's a pretty amazing story of a westerner working at Nintendo. Bizarrely I worked with a guy who worked with him. I dont work in the games industry but this guy had. Roughly he said he was genius. I didn't realise until after I left that job that he was talking about the same guy who led 1080 development. He was just talking about the mario 64 squishy face that can be pulled and stretched. Saying he knew the guy who programmed that. (Given his background I don't doubt the story)

Fast FPSs generally and instagib specifically have disappeared completely.

Funny that gameplay-wise, AAA games are the least interesting IMO.

I play AAA games for the narrative now.

As the current AAA games are as playable as mediocre movies, and the movies themselves are nothing but soulless remakes, I'd prefer to get some public domain comic books from https://comicbookplus.com and get some stories from Ditko, the non-superhero based ones, but the ones from mistery/scifi themes, kinda like a comic version of The Twilight Zone.

On proper gaming, most AAA games are lacking against Slashem, IF, csokoban and casual and libre games like Trigger Rally where the playability it's just there, even if the graphics are two decades behind.

Yes, I do agree that books are superior.

But sometimes at the end of the day when I am tired, I just want to play something mindless and not that challenging.

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