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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this may be me getting older, but in part I also think that the whole computer game segment got much more boring over time.

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I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.

100% agreed. The golden age of gaming is right now, Kickstarter and Steam have opened up the field to smaller studios in a way that has never happened before.

The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games can seem soulless.

But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it and better games coming out right now that there ever has been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed by imitators which grow the niche.

I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs" (and maybe a tiny amount of vague Rogue-like-likeness). If you read much about old games (e.g. [1]) it is obvious that the history of games is full of evolutionary dead-ends and forgotten mainstream games (and entire almost-forgotten mainstream genres).

[1] https://www.cgwmuseum.org/

Yeah, it's hard not to consider the runaway success of games like Stardew Valley as counterexamples to the idea that the creativity is completely gone. But you wouldn't blame someone if they superficially looked at screentshots and thought it was a run of the mill retro pixel game. But it's wild to me that there are people who come from broken homes or rough childhoods who say the game was literally therapy for them and showed them a vision of domestic life or human interaction that they could realistically replicate or at least shoot for in real life.

Stardew Valley is HarvestMoon++

It is a lovely, very enjoyable game but it is _incredibly_ derivative.

I'm currently playing a game that is a blatent rip-off of Stardew Valley to the point where I frequently question why they were so obvious. (Or maybe those elements are rip-offs of Harvest Moon, I haven't played Harvest Moon to know.) Still, it's enjoyable. The design elements and places where it does diverge from Stardew Valley make it more enjoyable in my opinion.

As the saying goes, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."

Harvest Moon defines the "Turning round a dilapidated farm in a small village where you give everyone gifts all the time" genre. It all comes from there.

EDIT: Stardew Valley has so many QoL improvements over harvest moon though. The early HM games are punishing.

> I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs

Huh? That is also an artifact of what kind of games you follow. Just of the top of my head:

  - colony sims
  - strategy games (tactical/operational/grand-, with rt, rt+pause, turnbased options for each)
  - racing games
  - 4x games
  - flight sims
  - spaceflight sims 
  - rpgs
  - survival games
  - shmups/ bullet hell
  - roguelike/roguelite
  - exploration
  - rhytm games
  - horror
  - factory builder / management sim

are all having a great time.

Monkey Island. The difficulty of the first game and the difficulty of the last game. The last game was still a game, but the challenge wasn't there. It just wasn't there. We might as well just be playing Progress Quest.

Monkey Island 1 and 2 have deep memories for me. I'll never forget playing Monkey Island 2 during a cold Christmas when I was a kid. The PC speaker music was great (King's Quest V was my other present and I still remember the opening music). One day I got the Sound Blaster on my 486 SX and it blew my mind.

The Monkey Island that came out a few years ago sadly felt like a puzzle-free story for children and their parents to sit together to play. Elaine lacked humor and cynicism, there was a child's voice in some of the narration, the graphics were strangely cubic and stylistic instead of warm, and the characters seemed caricatures of themselves (like season 5 of a comedy series where the writing devolves into self-referential insider jokes about the past seasons).

I feel terrible saying that.

Will Adventure games come back, or are we lost on the new ADHD world of interruptible short content?

Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense of sameness?

Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.

I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.

Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.

    Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 
    'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense 
    of sameness?

In short, no. There were >19,000 games released on steam this year alone in all possible genres (most of them not FPSs or simulators). Even if 90% are "bad" (because 90% of anything is bad) the top 10% (1,900) still span every possible genre including many that didn't exist in the 80s. I suggest that if you're truly interested in finding some modern gems that you try to search for communities that revolve around your interests (for example on reddit).

How many of those are puzzle-based classical Adventure Games like the recent Lucy dreaming?

Many of the genres are baloney, at least the stuff that comes back in search results as recent - it's all Work Simulator, a slow grind, the ubiquitous first person shooter, horror or everyone's favorite hack and slash genre.

We're drowning in numbers, is all you're really telling me.

It’s not a genre I care about so I don’t know. What I’m saying is that discoverability is bad but the supply is there. You need to work to find it. I find the games I like most via recommendations on genre-specific subreddits and discord servers.

If anything, now there is a discovery problem where the novel, incredible inventive games take longer to surface via word of mouth because there are so many. The quality and choice have never been higher. But that feeling that we’re all playing and enjoying the same things is gone.

Just started KCD2 last night by the way.

I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed interesting at the time because our access was so limited. Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the kinds of games that they actually prefer.

I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.

There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.

There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.

> All games involve some kind of exploration, but I’m talking about something like Myst, the long-ago graphic adventures by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of the game was basically “click on everything everywhere.” Today, those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people who didn’t start playing videogames until they got an iPhone. But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)

- Darren Franich, "Metal Gear Solid: The strangest great videogame franchise"

https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...

It's less mainstream, but there are still a lot of good adventure games released in the indie scene. The Crimson Diamond released last year got a lot of good press and is a text parser + graphical adventure game with an EGA style palette.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Diamond

The Crimson Diamond is unique in that it's deliberately trying to evoke a very specific era and platform: late '80s, Sierra SCI engine. It's particularly inspired by The Colonel's Bequest. That's why it uses EGA-style graphics and parser input.

But adventure gaming never went away, it just became more and more of a niche. There are lots of high-quality amateur games, but there's been a steady tricky of high-quality "indie" commercial games since the '90s. I'd recommend Wadjet Eye Games' entire catalog: https://wadjeteyegames.com/games/

When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be.

I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.

I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or other forms of first-person gaming.

To be sure, all games are not FPS. But you know, what are the so-called "AAA" game companies constantly grinding out…

It might be that they're targeting the 8 - 18 year old boy demographic, and that's always a huge cash cow, whereas older gamers have refined taste but don't spend that much money on games because they don't spend that many hours on gaming

AAA companies might pump out a lot of FPS- though it's arguable that they also grind out all sorts of other reliable and less-than-groundbreaking genres, from flavor of the decade trends (MMORPGs/MOBAs/live service battle royales/extraction shooters) to annual sports titles to Assassin's Creed sequels. The Call of Duty machine aside, I'm not sure if FPS is as much of a cash cow as it used to be.

And if you look at this best-selling video games list, there's only a single FPS in the top ten (PUBG, which is technically also third-person):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here) with the coming of Ultima Underworld.

Wasn't UU an RPG rather than an adventure game?

That’s a fair point. I suppose if I wanted to focus on the first person perspective I could have mentioned Myst coming out the same year as DOOM, though I doubt it was even the first FP adventure game.

It was really a blending of multiple genres. Was really ground breaking by for its time.

UU was an RPG. What adventure games became were either full hybrid 3D mechanics (Tomb Raider) and niche point and click ones.

Tomb Raider isn't an "adventure" game, no matter what the "mainstream gaming press" says. Monkey Island is.

It was a real time action-adventure game with puzzles. TR made point and click adventures obsolete as they drove a puzzle-event bound game with free exploration. OTOH, text adventures would still be featureful and playable as they achieved incredible things very expensive to do with graphical games.

If Tomb Raider is an "adventure game" so is Donkey Kong. Tomb Raider is basically a platformer like Donkey Kong but in 3D. Neither made actual adventure games "obsolete" because taxing your hand-eye reflexes is a different sort of fun than taxing your brain.

TR has more to do than platforming, and more convoluted puzzles than DK.

Also, definitively, what killed the adventure genre would be the PS1 survival horrors. You have everything there: items, combinations, loads of puzzles, action and a shitfed perspective. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite Eve...

Pretty much the definition of an old 'point and click' aventure with action points.

Alone in the Dark predates those by like 4 years though...

It does and there were also plenty of horror adventure games, but Alone of the Dark would also make the jump to RE-style survival horror.

Almost none of the FPS shooters try to to something creative, though. Duke Nukem 3D is still unbeaten for fun in multiplayer (and we still get it out now and then for that) with simple gimmicks like the holo duke, pipe bombs and laser mines.

Even just looking at "game uses 3D engine" we don't really have many great things. There's portal, and while some of the other stuff have promising ideas (like infinifactory), for all of them the controls tend to get in the way of fun.

For ease of use and fun pretty much all simulations - even as far back as the 90s - just using isometric projection are still unbeaten by attempts to go full 3D.

Here’s the highest rated games on PS5, Xbox and switch this year. There is _one_ first person shooter in the top ten of all three of these lists combined

[0] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/ps5/all/current-year/... [1] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/xbox-series-x/all/cur... [2] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/...

If this is your view of modern gaming, I think it’s you that has changed. This year alone my play list has been - blue prince, hollow knight: silksong, Ball X pit, split fiction, clair obscur, monster hunter wilds, arc raiders, helldivers 2 (came to Xbox, so this one is a stretch), nightrein, Indiana jones, dispatch… That’s on top of the “big” hitter that are still very fun experiences.

People play such games today too.

Terraria and Stardew Valley show that it isn't just about graphics.

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