Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

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There's been plenty of amazing and culturally relevant games recently, you just have rose tinted glasses for the time you grew up in (or you haven't been gaming much). I'll just list a handful of really well known ones.

* Basically everything FromSoft has put out (With Dark Souls 1 and Elden Ring probably being the most important - Dark Souls effectively kicked off an entire genre because of it's popularity (technically Demon's Souls came first, but Dark Souls was the first one to blow up).)

* Breath of the Wild

* Escape from Tarkov also kicked off a new genre in the extraction shooter, although noone else has quite nailed it yet imo.

* The Witcher 3 (heavily influentual towards the design of Breath of the Wild, and a number of other open world rpgs recently)

* As someone else pointed out, Baldurs Gate 3

* Skyrim

* Minecraft

* Dwarf Fortress (not exactly recent, but the Steam release propelled it into being much more well known)

* Path of Exile arguably revolutionized the diablo-style ARPG genre - any ARPG that comes out now is influenced by it - see Last Epoch for probably the biggest example.

Whether a game is "culturally relevant" or not really just hinges off of whether a significantly large portion of the population plays and talks about it for long enough though.

These days we get so many more quality game releases than we ever did in the 90s/2000s so it's much harder for a single game to grab everybody's attention in the same way that the stuff you mentioned did.

We’re also finally getting games that have genuinely good writing in them, not just writing that’s good for the sliding scale that usually applies to interactive media.

- Disco Elysium is a role-playing game largely about self-discovery and identity

- Kentucky Route Zero is a reflection on mortality and the true costs of poverty

- NORCO is a meditation on death and survivorship with meanderings into environmentalism and groupthink/cult thinking

that's not really what Disco Elysium is about ;)

To be fair many of the games on this list would be trivial to preserve as long as windows remains backwards compatible with older software, and not too hard even after that. Breath of the wild and Tarkov stands out as exceptions

linux & proton?

Until recently I would have said Spider-Man and God of War 2016 though both are now released on Windows as well.

I think I've seen Breath of the Wild running well on emulator, at higher resolution than on the switch.

* Basically everything FromSoft has put out - roll, roll, slice, roll, roll, slice

* Breath of the Wild - boring temples, lifeless empty world

* Escape from Tarkov - unplayably buggy, awful servers, generic assets and models

* The Witcher 3 - good, but generic third person adventure/exploration

* As someone else pointed out, Baldurs Gate 3 - incredibly generic fantasy universe and fantasy trope story

* Skyrim - incredibly generic fantasy universe and fantasy trope story

* Minecraft - actually innovative, creative, and unique game. What LEGO bricks were to kids in the 80s and 90s, minecraft is to the 2010s and 2020s

* Dwarf Fortress - cool indie game

* Path of Exile - a decent game in a dead genre. bad story/art style. only noteworthy thing is the gameplay is tight, but so was Diablo

Great take, I agree with all of these

Blade: The Edge of Darkness came first before the Souls saga.

How are we defining recent?

( you're right they're all recent compared to Pong and the OP's point. )

Except BG3, most of what you've listed are around 10 years old.

BoTW: 7

Tarkov: 8 ( Technically, but was slow burning so hard to place exactly when it took off. )

Witcher3: 9

Skyrim: 13

Minecraft: 14? ( 13 if we're counting retail, but it was massively popular before then )

DF: 18?

Path of Exile: 11.

The PoE of 11 years ago isn't the PoE that people rave about today, though. That's more of the past 6-7 years through today.

You skipped over mentioning Elden Ring, with it being from 2022.

Some others from the 2020s:

Hades, 2020

Animal Crossing, 2020

Among Us, 2020

Vampire Survivors, 2022

Half Life Alyx, 2020 (Still probably the only real example of a "true" AAA VR game)

I think it's tough to say what games will be long-term culturally significant when they've only been out a year or two, though. I think it's easier to look back in that 5-15 year range and see what stood up.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great and impactful games from recent years, I was just struck that the list of "recent" games were particularly old from the perspective of actual new games like the ones you mention. I missed the mention of Elden Ring in the original post, it wasn't deliberate on my part to skip it.

And indeed, PoE of 11 years ago isn't comparable, even PoE pre-delirium probably isn't recognisable to current PoE, and anything pre Incursion certainly isn't, but that's the nature of a live-service game. The power creep post-conquerors has been incredible, and there's been essentially no effort to bring that in after they decided that a reset with PoE2 would be preferable than trying to rein in power creep in modern PoE, and that adding upper end aspiration content instead was preferable.

The decision to rein in power with expedition backfired so hard that people still complain they don't have an item editor with harvest. ( Although with Locks it's come pretty close again at the right cost. )

I think they made a good choice, PoE is better than ever, but it's controversial, and every patch post 3.14 has had a lot of detractors claiming that "PoE is ruined".

In terms of cultural impact, it's still interesting that it's such an "old" game that's having an impact on (gaming) culture.

If we're talking about wider culture, you're right that "culturally significant" can take time to materialise. I'm not sure Alyx or even Hades really makes the cut. They're great games of their genre but I don't think they've had the cut through that the others you've listed have had.

Among Us was a cultural phenomenon that was immediately visible outside of gaming, akin to something like Fortnite although perhaps magnified by the pandemic massively boosting streaming audiences and people looking for some kind of social connection through the internet.

Survivors has had a massive impact on gaming, it's created a genre of it's own ("Survivors-like" is a thing) which can be seen with the release of "DeepRockGalactic: Survivors" which is a great improvement on the genre. It's fair to say that while Vampire Survivors itself might not have the cultural cut through, it defined a genre of games that have inspired clones from Brotato to DRG and deserves its place on that list if we're looking at gaming culture, but it's too soon to say if we're looking at culture outside of gaming.

> I think it's tough to say what games will be long-term culturally significant when they've only been out a year or two, though. I think it's easier to look back in that 5-15 year range and see what stood up.

This is exactly what I was thinking when writing this list, along with noting that OP mentioned games from the late 90's at the latest - my timeline for "recent" was pretty wide.

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"Culturally Relevant" to me means one of two things:

* So many people played the damn thing that it entered the public consciousness outside of gaming focused communities, and stayed there for a decent amount of time.

* It had a significant and fairly enduring influence on the design of later titles made by other studios.

You can tell within a few months whether a game is in the former category (Elden Ring, Palworld, Minecraft, Among Us, BG3 etc), but it takes years to know whether a game is in the second category (Dark Souls, also Minecraft to an extent, Path of Exile, Witcher 3, Tarkov etc).

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