What went wrong with gaming?

friffri

The answer depends on what issue you have with games nowadays.

I completely skipped last gen (PS4/XONE) because every hyped game looked boring as fuck. They all seem rehashes of well known gameplay formulas in different settings with a mediocre story attached.
When I was a teen that was enough for me, I hadn't played that stuff to death so it was still fun, but now the idea of playing 30+ hours of Generic-FPS/TPS just to experience a B-tier movie is dreadful.

Nowadays I only play League of Legends (I know...) but that's more out of addiction and because it's a way to connect with some friends. Competitive online videogames also have a whole lot of issues, I've seen so many people completely lose their mind playing those games.
That's a whole other discussion though

Jon the slayer

The same thing that went wrong with the internet. It got too big. Games used to be made by small companies that actually wanted to make great games. Then they got bought up by companies that just saw gaming as another source of capital for their investors. It's these arrangements that lead to companies making decisions at the expense of their products just to make easy short term gains, which is how we now have bullshit like gamepasses and lootboxes, even for full priced games. The game developers don't want to actually put these things into their games, they're decisions from high up.

Basile

Jon the slayer A lot of people makes this exact argument with cinema. But, the good movies are still there. It's not because Marvel is the most advertised company that good movies don't exist anymore. There will always be people striving for original and good content (even in big companies).

Lumeinshin

Basile
I remember an interesting thing regarding the film industry, I think it was Matt Damon, but he pushed the idea that whilst there are still ultra high budget films being made, and ultra cheap indie flicks, there arent much in the way of AA films, where the budget is high enough to be experimental and have lots of effects (practical or otherwise), whereas the huge films HAVE to make profit so they cant experiment as much.

I think the likes of say A24 are bigger than the other indie films but maybe not quite at the AA level Matt Damon is after, theyre not far off tho
slight tangent from games but it may apply somewhat

Anonicus

The biggest problem boils down to Greed and trying to make everyone get a rush of dopamine for a while before they have an incentive to buy microtransactions in their 60$/70$ vidya rather than wanting to make a really fun game. Typically, Games that does this is generally Mediocre at best. But to me, I think the Indie scene is a lot better and is practically games that I tend to buy anymore since they're made to be fun.

Basile

Lumeinshin Interesting, I never thought of it this way. But it definitely makes sense. I wonder how it affects what kind of movie is produced and the overall quality.

Woland

Lumeinshin
This is exactly what I think it is. It's not that there are no good games anymore; the indie scene is full of great new games. It's that great new games have all but been relegated to the indie scene exclusively. Not only are big studios not making very interesting games, but there are no more AA studios left to do interesting ideas with a substantive budget.

Well, I say that, but that's not entirely true. There are some smaller studios making games right now, and they've made some of the best games of the past 5 years. Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Pathologic 2, all developed by AA studios. But we could certainly use more. And all the listed games, while great, are somewhat niche in their appeal and tend towards the more narrative-heavy. A resurgence of goofy, fun, and unique arcade style games like Katamari or Monkey Ball would also be great. Maybe more AA studios would also lead to more of them, but it feels like a stretch.

Sandro

I think it partly has to do with necessitation for success in the high end of the games industry. If your game bombs and you've no safety net to recoup to, then your studio is more or less out of work unless you're given another chance by your publisher. And that in turn makes it look more appealing to take the safer approach. One in the hand worth more than Two in the bush and all that. I don't think that mentality is inherently bad, and thankfully there's still good games with big budgets being made.

It doesn't worry me too much in the long run since, as people above me have already pointed out, theres plenty of decent indie titles getting recognition too.

damas

Lack of optimizations. Games consume too many resources.

LunaticHigh

Gigachad really? I hated sword and shield, but I’m really enjoying legends and violet. And, no, I don’t like let’s go or go.

Gigachad

LunaticHigh Performance wise it is terrible. And this is a more personal knock but it's open world didn't do it for me. Arceus was fun. I'll show my age but I want 2d pokemon. Pokemon does not translate well to 3d without alot of effort put into it. I wish they would accept not everything has to be top of the line 3d graphics. The switch can barely handle it.

LunaticHigh

Gigachad as a shiny hunter myself, I tend to agree. Not just because the bad translation to 3d but, the lack of challenge. Shiny hunting used to be a very tedious meta, now it’s just a joke. I spent a lot of time shiny hunting, thinking I had extremely rare Pokémon (which they still kind of are, depending on generation) now everybody and there mom can raid shinies on Pokémon go or whatever. and the shiny rate is so fucking stupid these days. I didn’t want it to be easier to catch shinies. It just bums me out

rolf

Gigachad Pokemon Stadium and its sequels look wonderful. SMT 3 and 5 which are the same genre of monster collecting look amazing. Though I find SMT's mythology-based demons far more appealing than Pokemon's simpler designs anyhow. They just need to inject personality

LunaticHigh I relate to this so bad. Shiny hunting is so hollow with the odds, and when Game Freak dared to add some difficulty to it by removing the obvious sparkle in the overworld for SV the new "hunters" couldn't stand having to actually focus on the game to acheive something. And don't get me started on the washed out colours

Gigachad

LunaticHigh When the "rival" started choosing the element you were strong against is when difficulty just stopped.

MeathShot

Hopping onto this thread with something that may or may not be on topic, but why do people still continue to buy yearly releases like COD and Madden? They decrease in quality and detail with every new release, yet millions of people still lap them up. It's not like they change up the gameplay significantly either, there is a few changes and additions at most and then it's shipped out to the masses.

LunaticHigh

MeathShot well, these are the same people who watch sports religiously and now many of them grew up with madden. I did too and my friend’s still play and buy the yearly release. It’s like a ritual.

d100

You guys ever see this movie, eXistenZ? It really made me think more about my gaming habit, and whether I want to continue. I'm basically ready to sell my xbox.

Gigachad

++
I struggle to find good stuff anymore too. The market is saturated with all kinds of games on demand and I believe we have all become much more choosy. But not for no reason. Alot of stuff sucks, alot of stuff is X game but done again, alot of stuff unfinished, "live services". There's good stuff out there but we've gone from digging in a sandbox to digging on the beach. It's harder to find the gems. It's not just you. The quality has gone down overall and the quantity has increased by orders of magnitude.

Not to mention skinner boxes, predatory practices, piecemeal dlc, invasive drm, child gambling, yearly releases, etc...

MO

Gigachad When you learn how much money those shitty mobile games make, you lose all hope in humanity. It's even scarier when you learn that a tiny fraction of their audience is the source of a lot of their money. There must be so many people who are 20,000 under in credit card debt, due to a gambling addiction involving a mobile game.

MO

Gigachad I dunno, I straight up own every single good game on the OG XBOX and almost every single good game on the OG 360.

I remember when I barely had any games and I just put almost whole years into STALKER Clear Sky, Civ 3,4,5, Arma 2, and my dad's old copy of Farcry 2.

And I find some good free games on Itch.io too.

The newest game I have is like that remaster of Rome Total War or that remaster of Age of Empires 3.

Vast

Gigachad Good games still release in the indie space, but you have to shift through the formulaic metroidvania/roguelike/etc games. Now AAA is pretty much fucked

PTaylor

Jamesbaker1
The same thing that is happening to sport: identity politics are taking over and ruining the essence of what made it great to begin with.

Basically, any time there's an area that men go to get away from political correctness, it gets invaded by social justice and used as an opportunity to brainwash them in the name of a "safer" or "more equal" world.

Gigachad

Vast
I gave up on triple A. I am not the targeted market nor do I care for remakes very much. That said i did get the command and conquer remake.

MO
Mobile games are a scourge and should be banned. I understand the appeal but phone gaming fuckin sucks. And as stated, they are now just glorified gambling apps. Been in a modern arcade recently? It jas more in common with a casino than the arcades I grew up in.

Rez
If you like space station 13 I recommend barotrauma. It's a fuckin blast.

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