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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I’ll give you Rocket League. That’s an entirely new spin on a genre I didn’t see coming. The rest are just RPGs or platformers you like. Good games, but not innovative. Yes, some new franchises have been born and some successful indie titles have been launched but most of the market share in the games industry is held by the top 5.

Yes, I have over 1,000 games in my Steam library going back to 1999. I engage in most games that make the top 500 and have so since I was a teenager making games myself.

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I hope I never become this jaded and cynical about video games.

Keep playing them for 20 years :D

I've been playing games since I could hold a controller basically, so 26-ish years, and I think modern gaming is phenomenal. I feel sad for you, but it is what it is. Just your loss in the end.

Modern gaming is a micro transaction DLC hellscape. Are you serious?

Are they fun? Yes, they are designed to be addictive. So you spend money on pixels.

What’s wrong with paying for entertainment?

Nothing, that’s why I bought the game. Don’t shake me down for more money because you couldn’t forecast.

Microtransactions are part of the forecast of revenue the game will make.

Now they are, they weren’t when they were introduced. Now, it’s the long tail to a crappy launch.

None of the games I mentioned have micro transactions.

Outer Wilds, 1000xResist and What Remains of Edith Finch all moved me to tears. I still can't casually listen to the soundtracks of Outer Wilds or 1000x, as they simply evoke too many emotions.

Stop conflating Call of Duty and the like with "modern gaming".

You're jaded, and I feel sad for you.

Have you played "A Space for the Unbound"? It's quite moving (I teared up multiple times) and I love the unfamiliar, to me, setting of rural Indonesia. It reminds me a lot of To The Moon, which I will assume you're no stranger to.

Ah, no, I've not played it. It's been on my wishlist for quite a while tho :) Been on a bit of a JRPG streak lately.

I didn't know it took place in Indonesia though, that's very intriguing. It will probably be my next game of this ilk then, thank you!

And yeah, no stranger to To The Moon :P

Maybe give it another try? I have been playing lots of games for the past few years, some vigorously. Not a single one of them has a single microtransaction, because that's an immediate turnoff for me.

I've been gaming for twice as long as you. You're picking the wrong games.

Oh? If I’m picking the wrong games, and they’re all on the Steam top 100, what games should I be playing? Give me a 2025 title I haven’t tried.

PEAK

Well, I don't know what you've tried, but apparently it all has microtransactions and DLCs.

Try Blue Prince.

Into the Breach only came out 8 years ago, but I'm still playing it vigorously.

I'm sorry to say, your nostalgia-colored-glasses are so strong, you're actually blinded by them. I grew up in the same gaming era as you (started around early to mid 90s, but the peak was later), and I too have fond memories. But there undeniably has been some magnificent progress in pretty much all aspects of gaming.

Somewhere between 2005 and 2010, I thought I had outgrown gaming, and that no game would have anything to offer to me anymore. But years later I learned that that was just because I was stuck thinking that JRPGs were the pinnacle of gaming, it turned out that I had grown out of those. Obviously your story will be different, but I bet there is some story to you somewhere.

This! Both FTL and Into the Breach are evergreen games imho.

I've been playing them for 35 years and I don't share your opinion at all.

So, is Outer Wilds a RPG or a platformer?

Open world game but also a mystery game as we’re a couple others mentioned above. Those go back to Carmen San Diego and Sherlock homes series. Open World, we’ve seen plenty of those.

Well, nothing new has been invented since checkers, if you really think about it hard enough and reduce everything to a few buckets of games that everything can fit neatly into, then everything is just a mystery game or just open world or just a platformer. Again, I have a feeling like you're just looking at it mechanically and not how these elements work together to produce a game that is larger than just the sum of its parts. Outer Wilds has puzzles and open world and mystery element to it - and all of those have been done before. But has anyone else combined them this way to produce a game with this narrative? No, I don't believe so(happy to be proven wrong, as always).

Like the other commenter said - I hope I don't become jaded like this about video games, it still brings me joy to see how every new game twists the known formula a little bit more and in new and exciting ways, I believe there are several nieches where we haven't seen the game of that genre yet and I can't wait to see it emerge and how and who is going to do it.

Have other games put together open world and mystery? Yes.

I have a feeling you haven’t played those games otherwise you’d see the similarities.

Yes, I am ABSOLUTELY looking at the mechanics of the game. I’m also looking for innovation. Take something someone tried (maybe it was a big part of their design) and make a full blown out version of it. Pushing the genre in either a new direction or opening one up. Outer wilds did neither. Not to say it wasn’t a good game. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m saying outside of those that played it, it will be forgotten. It changed nothing. It came, it endeared, it left.

Have you played Outer Wilds though?

I'd finished a playthrough of RDR2 in 2022 and thought I was done with gaming forever, that nothing would ever be able to touch that level of experience again. I stopped playing for months, completely having lost interest.

Then I discovered Outer Wilds, went in completely blind, played in VR, and had one of the most engaging experiences of my life. It's a true gamer's game.

>”Have you played Outer Wilds though?”

Did my review not tell you that I had?

I somehow completely glossed over those two sentences, sorry!

Comparing Outer Wilds to Sherlock Holmes is way too big of a stretch for me. There are mysteries in both, yes, but it's the mystery of the (game's) universe vs. crimes.

I'm curious if you think this way about movies/TV too. It's very strange to me to just dilute things down to their genre(s) and then expect innovation to come out as new genres.

>>Good games, but not innovative

Calling outer wilds or Clair Obscur "not innovative" just tells me you haven't played these games from start to finish, and I don't mean any offence saying this. Unless you mean just mechanically?

I have played both. I stand by my statement.

What’s innovative about Clair Obscur? Its battle mechanics are clearly heavily inspired by Paper Mario, Shadow Hearts, and Legend of Dragoon, it inherits a bunch of mid-level design stuff from Dark Souls, and its story structure is extremely standard, also borrows a lot of worldbuilding from Dark Souls with a hint of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Kingdom Hearts. It’s competent, somewhat refreshing and not actively consumer-hostile, and it’s a sign of how bad things have gotten that that’s all it takes to be heaped with praise.

Oh don't get me wrong - mechanically I actually think it's boring as hell, which is why I asked OP if he only talks about mechanics. But I will say that in terms of story and world building it's exceptional - so many games nowadays are just some kind of variation on a standard fantasy/scifi trope, CO has a completely "fresh" repertoir of enemies and locations that feel new, and I didn't have any clue where the story was going until act 3 - I think its exploration of grief and the ability to make you bond with characters while not unique, it's definitely up there with the best video games ever made(imho).

>>also borrows a lot of worldbuilding from Dark Souls

I see that comparison a lot and I don't see it, and I've played every From Soft game from start to finish. Maybe the painted world from DS3 is sorta-kinda similar, but not really?

What did you think after you got into room 46 of Blue Prince?

So Dark Souls is just another RPG, and not innovative?

It was the first rpg I played where there was so much attention paid to continuity you could see all the other areas in the skybox.

Innovative? Check Blade/Severance.

That’s not a great example to pick, given that Demons Souls exists.

And that was a successor to Kings Field…

These kids don’t know.

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