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Comment by default-kramer | Hacker News Reader

Not so much with video games. The industry is so young that most of those "classics" are actually much less fun than I remember them. (Super Mario World does hold up very well though.) But since you mention Persona, consider how much better Persona 3 Portable is than Persona 3 FES. Game design has come a long way, and I believe it still has a long way to go. Not to mention the technical improvements that allow a game like Uncharted to exist, which cannot be compared to any 16-bit or earlier game.

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Video games are stagnating hard. I've basically quit gaming for like the past 5 years, playing maybe two graphically undemanding games to completion per year, and what I'm seeing is that it's the same old games that have remained popular. From my perspective as someone coming back, it's as if time had stood still. In fact, one of the games I played was initially released 10 years ago in early access.

Bethesda even decided to just remake Oblivion rather than show off more of TES 6.

That might be true about the time period from the SNES to the present but it's not clear to me that we're really getting better games post the PS3.

I have Persona 5 Royal on my mind because I am playing through it now maybe a decade after I played Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita. I love the story, I love the art, but the music isn't up there with P4G (how can you beat Reach out or Make history?) and I think it's a disappointment as a game.

Hypothetically it matters if you develop relationships with the characters and raise your social stats but practically you're not required to make hard choices because you have enough time to do everything -- and since the game is so long you feel compelled to do it all in one playthrough which stretches out the game even longer.

It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.

My son and I have been thinking a lot about a "visual novel + something else" game which is maybe 30 minutes - 6 hours per playthrough but requires multiple playthroughs. I'd be happy to have NG+, but he thinks that's cheap.

Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction" since the beginning, maybe LLMs will change that. Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games. For now we get Meta's absurd model that you can make a storefront in Horizon Worlds but you need to have a real person to staff it which makes sense to exactly one person.

We aren't getting good games past 2015 or so because the industry has become incredibly risk-averse and realized there's more profit to be made releasing sequels and remakes than producing something innovative. That being said, that's not a sustainable strategy and we are seeing the limits of that.

>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.

I think that's more a function of the games you are playing, in Kiseki or Xenoblade or (some) Final Fantasy there is alot more strategy involved than in Persona, whose primairly appeal I believe is more of a social life simulator than a deep rpg experience. Even with music, it's just a different style where P4 is pop while P5 is jazz, but other games draw from instrumentals or ecelectic mixes like Ar Tonelico. To say one is better/worse isn't a good term because they aren't easily comparable.

>Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games.

Well that's just a MMORPG or a RPG or ImSim. And the MMORPG is probably closer to needing a fresh start than being anywhere close to a solved genre. But as the riskiest and most expensive genre, nobody is going to funding something that really pushes the line due to the sheer risk involved.

I got stuck 1/3 of the way through Xenoblade on my New 3DS, I oughta figure out how and finish it!

>We aren't getting good games past 2015 or so because the industry has become incredibly risk-averse

Slay the Spire was released in 2017. Are you accounting for indie games?

They mostly seem interested in JRPG anime slop, and even then Expedition 33 was released just this year and is probably the best example of that genre from the last 20 years? That's also by a relatively small studio though..

I would agree that big AAA studios are basically entirely creatively bankrupt at this point, but that's not exclusive to games, the same trend is apparent with movies (remakes of Disney movies, Star Wars sequels, etc.).

Another end-of-ZIRP casualty?

There will always be exceptions to any trends, but I wouldn't say the deluge of generic roguelike platformers with 16 bit art has been paticularly flattering to the indie industry. Have things really progressed in 2024 since 2012 in the same way that 2012 was abjectly different from 2002? Not really, you could release Slay the Spire in 2012 or 2024 and it wouldn't look out of place.

My favourite game of all time, Outer Wilds, was released in 2019.

I agree that AAA dev is too risk-averse and that there's a dearth of mid-budget games, but the indie sphere is still very rich.

You can try Etrian Odyssey series by Atlus. It's all about status ailments, binds, buffs and debuffs.

I got that on my New 3DS, gotta try it some day!

To be fair, Persona 5 is my least favorite out of 3/4/5. Most fans of the series agree it's embarrassingly easy. Persona 3 (Portable is best, or FES if you're a masochist, but not Reloaded) offers a perfect challenge on the hardest difficulty, and Persona 4 was pretty well-tuned also. It wouldn't surprise me if P6 was closer to P4 or P3 than P5.

There are mods for Skyrim that hook into LLMs for dialogue and voice, some people seem to like it but from the videos I've seen I'd call it more of a curiosity or an experience than an engaging system.

> Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction" since the beginning

Hard disagree. Dialogue is a strength of interactive fiction. Dialogue trees are unique to the medium. Titles like Firewatch, Night in the Woods, and Disco Elysium are all-time great examples of dialogue writing. I'd love to see interactive fiction that put more emphasis on internality instead; in that dimension, Disco Elysium really stands alone.

> maybe LLMs will change that

LLM-generated dialogue is only ever going to waste your time. Good dialogue is expressive and clever and characteristic and dense, none of which describe anything I've seen from an LLM. You'd be better-off just reading the prompt.

I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people rating older games very highly, more than many new releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy’s, arguably Oblivion Remastered).

While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.

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