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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably in the minority, as I've gotten older, I no longer enjoy single player games. I'd say most gamers have gotten pretty pissed off that we're paying for AAA titles and then still being bombarded on a game-by-game basis for battle passes (basically add-on subscriptions).

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Stop playing AAA.

Subnautica, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Hades, Tunic / Death’s Door… Indie is where it’s at man.

The only AAA I’ve loved in years was Red Dead 2… my horse :(

You don't even have to go full indie. There are plenty of amazing games that are maybe best described as AA instead of AAA. Let me start by recommending most of Nintendo's catalog.

Quicker games that can be easily put down and picked back up and don’t break the bank. Nintendo catered to their audience as the company grew.

This is a my-taste thing more than a their-quality thing, but it's been literal years since I've enjoyed a Nintendo-platform-exclusive title if you exclude any that were from a famous franchise that's old enough to drink good scotch. I don't have that same problem with PlayStation - there are loads of great games in between the Horizon/GOW/etc. prestige releases.

>t's been literal years since I've enjoyed a Nintendo-platform-exclusive title if you exclude any that were from a famous franchise that's old enough to drink good scotch.

Xenoblade and monolith as a whole has been amazing for RPGs post nintendo acquisition. And Splatoon is super popular these days (but is very MP centric).

Thing is Nintendo doesn't really need to make new franchises every other year like Sony. their new, semi-known franchises from the last decade has been Splatoon and ARMS. But they constantly reinvent their old IPs and tend to give it sufficient time to bake. Stuff like Breath of the Wild may as well have been a different franchise for what a departure it was from the Zelda formula.

Also helps they can just dig in their wine closet and bring out some untouched scotch. It can take out F Zero, Kid Icarus, Golden Sun, Warioland, Mother, and a dozen other franchises and they may as well feel new to the next generation. Sony instead abandoned all their talent and moved HQ.

I've tried, but I just don't enjoy the PS-style "prestige" games. I want my games to above all be fun, and I just don't find the gameplay loop of the Horizons/GoWs/etc. to be very engaging. It always seems like there is more emphasis on the production values than in making sure the player is having a good time.

I own a PS5, and the absolute most fun I've had on the system is Astro Bot, followed closely by Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart. Everything else I've enjoyed has either been a PS4 game or an indie game.

A useful shorthand for my taste is that most games that fall into E-for-Everyone on the ESRB ratings scale (or even the 10+ version) are probably not something I'm particularly attracted to. There are outliers, especially since Nintendo does their best to stay family-friendly to a fault because that's their brand/history. TOTK is E10, for example, and I certainly enjoyed it, but that's the "legendary franchise" exemption bucket again.

But stuff like Astro, Splatoon, Ratchet and Clank, whatever latest Mario title, anything Rabbids or Rayman, etc. don't speak to me at all anymore. I never played R&C in any of the Playstation generations, and I never liked Crash Bandicoot when I tried that. I sort of remember liking Spyro when it was contemporary.

Given the selection bias of who publishes what games where, it's hardly a surprise to me that I'm not getting much mileage out of my Switch. Nintendo feels like a brand that's tailored most of all for my kid nephew and any appealing titles for me are largely exceptional.

To some degree I think my tastes are a response to a trend that I hated during my formative years. When the sixth generation of video game consoles came out when I was in high school (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, XBox), there was this sudden near-universal trend to make everything darker and edgier. Grand Theft Auto was making senators faint with concern, Sega gave Shadow the Hedgehog a gun and the ability to say "damn", Naughty Dog took Jak and Daxter from "Banjo-Kazooie on PS2" to "GTA-lite for edgy preteens", etc. etc. Everyone but Nintendo, who were cheerfully putting out Super Mario Sunshine, was doing it.

At the time, I was just starting to think of video games as an art form in addition to a source of entertainment, and the blatant fad-chasing I was seeing across nearly the entire industry turned my stomach. Of course the same thing had happened many times before and has happened many times since, but I wasn't in my formative years for any of those.

As with similar complaints about film, I can only assume folks complaining that there’s nothing good because lots of the big-budget ones are lazy and bad, either didn’t look very hard, or has super-narrow taste (which is ok! Just… not a problem for me)

I can’t even come close to keeping up with the probably-good entries in either category, film or single-player(-friendly) games. They could stop making more and it would be quite a while before that was any kind of problem for me. My backlog gets a ton larger every year.

Everyone keeps talking about the death of film by superhero, but what they really mean is the death of Hollywood. There are brilliant directors working today - Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Johnathan Glazer, Lee Chang-dong, Claire Denis, Park Chan-wook, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and so many more, they just aren’t American.

Hell, plenty of good American movies come out every year, too. There are a shitload of movies released each year, even just the ones big enough to get noticed nationally or internationally, not just art projects that only play once at a local library or something. It doesn’t take a large proportion of those being good before they’re outpacing the rate at which most people watch movies, even if all that watching goes to movies released in the last year or so—me, I’m also still catching up on the thousands of good-to-great movies released in the first century+ of cinema.

Some of the good ones are even Hollywood movies. They just might not be action movies (sometimes they are!) or might not have a super-sized marketing budget, so I guess lots of folks only see the handful that get advertised heavily and figure those are the only movies, but even Wikipedia or IMDB’s list of films released each year are looooong and they don’t capture everything.

Asian media has absolutely exploded. China, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan have all put out a lot of good TV and movies in the past few years. It's definitely given me a refuge from the increasing proportion of American and British media that's crap.

Squid game was the big breakout. I liked Hell Bound.

What else should I look for?

As another child mentioned dont play AAA games. AAA games budgets have gotten so big the entire project becomes about how they are going to make a profit on their $100 million cost instead of making a good game. Even if they wanted to make a good game with projects that size you get corporate management and design by committee that will always result in crap.

well, Single Player games don't really have battle passes nor subscriptiosn. Some skin or expansion DLCs, but most of the popualar games are multiplayer, and most of the complaints are from multiplayer gamers.

SP games are fine for gamers outside of the $70 price increase (which I'm fine with), but apparently it's getting harder and harder to profit from SP these days. Not surprising with longer dev times, larger dev teams, and a stagnation of the console market.

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