> After all, could you really, badly, critic a 30’s movie because it is not shoot in HD?
1930s films did "shoot in HD". Most films were either 16mm or 35mm, both of which have more than enough fidelity to represent video at 1080p or higher without loss of quality. Here's a copy of Wizard of Oz on 4K UHD: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Limited-Anniversary-Collect...
A more realistic take is could you criticize 1920s films for not shooting with sound, and the answer is yes, absolutely. Films went from almost entirely silent to almost entirely talkies in roughly 3 years because of massive, unprecedented, and immediate commercial pressure to do so. Audiences ate up even mediocre talkies and shunned silent works now considered classics. The only reason colour film adoption wasn't similarly fast was because of Technicolor's monopoly.
Flash forward to the 1990s, where cinema as a medium was very sophisticated. Now look at blockbusters beginning to use CG rather than animatronics. The airplane in Air Force One. Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace. Hell, take the 1997 re-releases of the Star Wars trilogy which inexplicably added garbage like CG Jabba the Hutt. The purple stuff in The Langoliers. Even going back to Lord of the Rings, even going back to the Hobbit, even going back to "early" Marvel films there are tons of moments where CG is jarring. The Polar Express -- an excellent and heartwarming Zemeckis film -- is mostly known because no one likes the dead-eye CG. Yes, absolutely, technical barriers have affected peoples enjoyment of film and still do!
In video games the most obvious period of time that is conspicuously a donut hole is the Playstation 1 / early 3D era. The PS1s 3d games featured really quite nauseating affine texture warping due to a lack of hardware correction support. Here's one video of many talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI Early 3d controls are atrocious -- the "tank controls" of Resident Evil are famous for this -- because controllers initially didn't have analogue sticks and when they did, they didn't yet have basic paradigms around how to best use them. The Nintendo 64 was built around analogue control, which is why Mario 64 works so well, and yet it has a completely rotten camera system because there's only a single analogue stick and the c-buttons aren't a good substitute. And that's the PS1/N64. If you go back to the earlier era of 3D, especially on the Super Nintendo, you find low framerate, awkward controlling messes with flat polygon shading. Try playing an unmodified copy of StarFox or Stunt Race FX, I dare you.
No one is saying to throw Casablanca out with the bathwater, just as no one is going to throw Super Mario Bros, out with the bathwater. I'm not saying that technical issues mean we should never play old games or watch old movies. I'm saying that it shouldn't be surprising that people do count technical issues as part of the reason why they prefer newer stuff.
I also think the article misses widely when it pretends that "old ways" of making games don't exist today. Games are made in now-dead genres, with now-dead mechanics, all the time. They have commercial budgets at least as large as they ever did and large, warm communities. In many cases, the original teams working on games in the 1980s and 1990s still make games. I can't find an example in the article where you can't find similar games to play today.
The article mentions that isometric games would be anathema today. Disco Elysium is one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Wasteland has two recent sequels, both well liked. Hades is also one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Age of Empires IV retains a basically isometric perspective for an RTS. Diablo Immortal just launched and Diablo 4 is coming. Huh?
The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it. Majora's Mask (1999) is considered an excellent Zelda because of its time mechanics. Dead Rising (2006) was one of the first major hits of the HD era of video games and it's on a fixed timer. Final Fantasy XIII-3 (2013) uses a similar mechanic, and while the game is often criticized for being terribly written nonsense, it's not because of the mechanic.
Or if not the time mechanic, then needing to take notes? Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open, to say nothing of From Software (Dark Souls, Elden Ring) suddenly becoming the apex of prestige developer. Point and click adventures are still quite popular: The Return of the Obra Dinn is widely considered among the best games of the 2010s.
The article claims unnamed gamers today are reacting negatively to the visual choices of the new Monkey Island. This just seems entirely untrue. The reaction across the internet, including on gaming forums, reddit, and here, was overwhelmingly positive. A few people said "okay, this style reminds me a bit of the not-great LucasArts Singapore modernizations of the first few Monkey Islands". This does not presage a great backlash against the game, it's just people shooting from the hip, the vast majority of anyone who cares to comment is excited even if they have concerns about the visuals. And anyway, 99% of the people commenting are greybeards like the rest of us, not young people.
Overall I can't find much here that resonates with me.
That's the thing I like about HN: you can find comments that are much better and more insightful then the article itself.
As an old time gamer I can't agree more. We are in the golden age of old-style games (hollow knight, disco elysium, stardew valley, etc). People are making this old style games with all the hindsight of modernized mechanics, better control schemes, more accessibility, stylized graphics, PC releases.
I've watched a decent amount of AVGN. Most of his criticisms are either the game is buggy, the controls are hard to use, or it's too hard. Too hard usually breaks down to either not having enough information to finish the game or places you have to grind excessively. We've learned a lot over 20+ years, and making sure you nail these things in an old-style game makes the game much more approachable and enjoyable.
> Or if not the time mechanic, then needing to take notes? Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open
As the other poster said, plenty of people play Hallow Knight without taking notes. For people who do want notes or use a wiki, it's often for fairly simple things, like trying to remember exactly where a closed door was.
This is quite different from a game like Myst, where most agree note taking is a necessity (I believe the box came with a notebook). For people who haven't played it, imagine 5 or 6 escape rooms linked together, with clues spread throughout, so the first thing you look at in the first room might be something you need to solve a puzzle in the last.
Likewise, the impact of the two games is different. Hollow Knight is a popular indie game, but it's still sold a fraction of the copies that AAA games do. Myst, on the other hand was the top selling computer game for _years_. Often people who never bought any other computer game bought a copy of the game.
Cyan still makes games, but they're niche games that don't have anything like the cultural impact that Myst had.
Likewise, I don't think Majora's Mask should really be compared to games with forward moving time mechanics. It has a time mechanic, but it's basically on a repeating hour schedule. If you miss something, you can just come back to the cycle again.
This is the opposite of games with real time mechanics (time measured in actions - "real action time"?) like The Colonel's Bequest or The Last Express, because the latter games decidedly _don't_ repeat. If you miss an event in the game, it's gone (granted, Titanic isn't quite at that level). Though I suppose such games have always been a bit rare.
Hollow Knight is likely around 10-12 million copies sold by now (one typical rule of thumb: Steam reviews * 30-40 = Steam sales, 201k reviews, and the game also did gangbusters on consoles). This is half my point. The perceived decline in relevance discussed in the article is not real. It may be real if you measure sales as a percentage of the highest selling game in the extant universe, but that's a foolish measure.
I don't really understand most of the other stuff; yes, some games have slightly more punishing implementations of mechanics than others (Dead Rising uses the real-time forward-only approach). I named some high profile examples which are in the approximate orbit of what was discussed. It can't possibly be the article's thesis that minor variation between two games implementing a quasi real-time progression gate constitutes a major arc in the history of narrative gaming.
> The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it
But none of your examples are particularly recent, except arguably Final Fantasy XIII-3. Recent games with a strict timer are rare, and when they exist -- like the recent indie metroidvania Unsighted -- they get a lot of criticism for it. As for difficult puzzles, well, are there any non-indie games with difficult puzzles in recent history? Sure, such games continue to get made, but they're fairly niche.
> Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open
I don't know how many people play Hollow Knight while constantly consulting a guide, but if they do, it doesn't imply an appetite for taking notes while playing games. If I'd had to take notes while playing Hollow Knight (and I did not, though I did consult a guide a couple times) I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. I don't know anyone who takes notes playing games. Heck, I don't remember who it was off the top of my head, but recently a journalist caught a bunch of flack when he suggested taking notes while playing Elden Ring.
> Point and click adventures are still quite popular
The graphical point-and-click adventure is nowhere near as popular, in relative terms, as it used to be. They do get made, but mostly by indies with small budgets and small audiences. I also don't think Return of the Obra Dinn is a great example, but maybe I'm too rigid in what I think a point-and-click adventure is.
All that is to say ... it's no surprise that difficult or otherwise challenging games survive to this day; the sheer size of the market means that niche audiences can have their needs met. But a game like Monkey Island couldn't be made today and expect to be the kind of juggernaut it once was.
I mean, real time mechanics were uncommon when T:AOOT was released and they're uncommon now. But there are examples of them sprinkled throughout the history of gaming -- which was the purpose of showing examples that are spaced out from then until now), including well after the purported decline in youngster competence described in the article. Want more recent examples? Outer Wilds, Twelve Minutes, Forgotten City, Deathloop are all in the last 5 years and all feature the loop version of the time gating mechanic. The Longing is a game that takes place in real time over a one year period and that's been picking up a bit of notice. Consortium is adventure-ish and uses real time.
I'm not saying that these mechanics don't have detractors now, just as they had detractors then. I'm saying there isn't really a generational gap that would make me believe that kids these days wouldn't have a similar reaction to it as people did back then, and the evidence for this is that lots of minor variations of this kind of mechanic exist and mostly it's been in games that do pretty well.
In Hollow Knight, the use of a fan wiki is less about notes in the adventure game sense and more about optimizing builds, reading about lore, checking quest solutions, and looking up boss strategies. It's possible that some unspecified journalist made some unspecified remark about taking notes while playing Elden Ring and some unspecified Twitter demons gave him some unspecified grief about it. And yet, a huge number of people who play Elden Ring do it with a wiki open. Fandom has raised something like $100,000,000 in VC and its primary business model is being a wiki for video games; it's almost entirely supplanted traditional FAQs.
There are of course games that require more traditional "stuff I learned" notes these days, a prime example is The Outer Wilds (> 1 million sales on Steam despite a one year late release, Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, probably my favourite game of the 21st century, Adventure Gamers Game of the Year 2019 so let's sidestep whether you think it's an adventure game please). You might also think about Stardew Valley (20 million+ copies sold, is played almost entirely with Wiki lookups) or Minecraft (300 million copies, has a thriving ecosystem of secondary information and content, including videos, wikis, etc.) What would convince you that there is still a demand for games that require or encourage the use of supplementary information and thinking?
As to team size, point and click adventures don't require the budget of an open world game like Red Dead Redemption 2. About 15 people are credited on Myst. About 20-25 on Secret of Monkey Island. Tons of PnCs today have much larger budgets and larger team sizes than they ever did. The fact that the market also sustains an Asssassin's Creed game made by 2500 people over 3 years doesn't take away from the space for creative adventure games. The relative terms framing is just bonkers. James Cameron has half-billion dollar budget films, but Parasite still exists.
Monkey Island was never a juggernaut. The US sales in the first two years were about 100,000 copies. You don't think Monkey Island could be made today and sell 100,000 copies in the US? Thimbleweed Park (2017, Ron Gilbert) is well over 100,000 copies in the US across platforms. Broken Age is around 100,000 copies on Steam. The Witness over 500k on Steam. Inscryption is over a million on Steam, and that just launched 9 months ago. Papers Please around 2 million on Steam. Agent A, which is I think 3 people in a flash-style animation, is coming up on 100k on Steam. The Grim Fandango re-release is coming on the game's entire original sales run. Phoenix Wright in the 500k range. Gorogoa in the 500k range. The Room around a million units. Granted you can play with the numbers -- lifetime versus first few years sales, discounting, countries of availability, upfront MSRP, availability of console ports versus just PC, whatever. My point isn't to prove all these games outsold Monkey Island, it's to suggest I don't see the apparently cavernous collapsed alleged in demand for PnCs.
It's true that nothing is Myst anymore, but nothing was Myst back then either. PnCs are alive and well.
To add a little bit to this, to be fair to N64 and PS1, we didn’t have a standard texture offset correction using transformation matrices until right around the time they launched. This was considerably noticeable in 007 Goldeneye on N64.
Nintendo had mostly gotten away with not needing it up until then because of the flat shading of their 3D cartoon look for most games. Goldeneye and later Turok suffered from this especially in the level design mapping.
Overall though, you nailed it.
Also, one of the best point and click puzzle games of all time, Myst, was kinda a UX disaster. Kids would spend hours just staring at some 3D rendered scene without knowing what was going on. People figured it out. Puzzles with difficulty have been a part of gaming ever since.
Even the original Toy Story suffers from this - they downplay it because they know it's bad, but the humans in it are low-quality animations that are jarring today (YouTube kids shows animate humans better than that now).
And it's almost completely attributed to direction, screenplay, cinematography, and editing. Even if the langoliers were people in purple jumpsuits it could still be made eery and creepy.
Uncanny CG kinda fits the mood of Steven King anyway. I feel the technical limitations played to the advantage of the movie. Could you make an even creepier langolier today? Sure, but I feel like this train criticizes art because of the tools available.
(I work at a major publishing and developing company)
The biggest change have to be us, the players. Almost every game let it be an indie or a triple-A blockbuster have been researched and min-maxed by most players. Not just the "sweats" but the casuals too. Of course official guides and playthrough books have been a thing back in the 90s too, almost every PS1 game had one. But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play. I see this everywhere. It's not even about the game being hand-holdy or not it's the fact that players can datamine and simulate every aspect of the game. Elden Ring is a perfect example recently where builds are min maxed to edge as possible. And that's a mainly single player title, there is not even anything on the line. MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality, especially WoW everyone expected to have the best build doing the best possible dps or else. Even in very casual games like Animal Crossing you have this mentality of having the best villagers in the game, people asking insane amount of money to visit their islands ot get that best item you need etc. So yeah, I'd say this is the biggest change.
> But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play.
meta gaming kills strategy for me. From back when I first started playing AoE3 I was absolutely infatuated with the game and genre, but found myself incapable of winning MP matches. Some guys from the old pre-DE competitive scene helped train me a bit, and I could win MP matches now, but the game is no fun, instead of being a fun 4X/RTS, it was “follow this foundation, time everything perfectly, micro perfectly, min/max everything and it lost most of the appeal.
Even more recently CK3, which can be a pretty immersive game, often loses that immersion when the game becomes less about what I do as a king, and more about min/maxing mechanics.
A lot of strategy games start to feel less “strategy” and more “who can exploit mechanics and follow predefined path”. Ironically one AoE3 legend rose from nowhere a couple years back with strategies different from the meta and winning. People called him toxic for it.
I don't agree with your take - I've always loved RTS games (played age of empires 2, StarCraft, Warcraft 3, deviated into lol/dota and back to StarCraft 2 and now age of empires 4) - basic strategies in terms of build orders are table stakes for these games and have been since as long as I can remember. You need to be able to react to changing situations in these games. Nobody executes build orders perfectly, and there's RNG in map spawns and layouts that can give you a subtle edge over your opponent. The game is won and lost on being able to react to your opponents moves and follow through on counters to it, the same way chess plays.
Interestingly this is something heavily discussed in many game communities. People feel a tension between looking things up while possibly ruining their experience and experimenting, learning themselves but spending much more time.
I think this has to do with a prevalence of frankly stupefying reward structure of many games. I call it spreadsheet progression. Instead of opening up new gameplay options, you often get a huge list of entirely arbitrary choices that only differ in the most superficial ways.
This is why I love games like Zelda more than the usual RPGs because even tough the game only offers a few dozen items to find, most of them are unique and introduce new gameplay mechanics.
And IMO this is great. My favorite games (Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous) have a very broad difficulty span, story mode essentially plays itself, unfair requires very tight minmaxing of builds. I only play on core (which already comes with a warning popup as it’s 2 above normal), because I don’t like minmaxing and instead want fun builds (but still have a challenge).
But what I hate are puzzles. Parts of the game would have been completely inaccessible to me, because I’d have either avoided them, or stopped playing because of frustration.
Instead, I can simply look up the solutions online, and the unfair player who doesn’t want to spend hours thinking about the perfect build can go to neoseeker and check their list of unfair viable builds.
I’m soon finishing my 3rd time through WotR (with a total play time of over 1400 hours), and for my next run, part of my build was decided by datamined deity reactivity in the game.
Especially in single player games, the options and additional enjoyment coming from datamining, minmaxing, and sharing of secrets are amazing.
Agreed. I realized if I go back and play an old PS1 game, I can’t allow myself to do any internet search about it or it fundamentally changes how I play the game.
On the other side, this change in player behavior has reflected back in the game industry. I often see a “softening” in permanent build-based character gameplay, such as choosing your skills and stats in Diablo 2 has gone away in modern Diablo games - because why add this feature when you know your player base will all just google the best build?
> MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality, especially WoW everyone expected to have the best build doing the best possible dps or else.
I can't speak for WoW, but I hope this is true for ESO. Despite watching many videos explaining the light-attack/power weaving technique, practicing for many hours, watching build videos, optimizing my build, farming/buying (mostly) BIS gear, and maxing it out, I can still only pull about half the DPS demanded by the hardest trials. Despite paying just as much as everyone else, there's a whole bunch of content I'm effectively gated from playing. So I don't, anymore. And I'm bitter about it.
It became a competitive game and you are not willing to be in the top tier of players. It is a holy grail for game companies: "How to mix having uncompetitive fun in a game while allowing competition".
> people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play
There is a very fine line between "providing resources" and ruining a game for me. WoW isn't a lot of fun for me anymore (I haven't played even many years now) because of exactly the reason you list. It felt like the only "right way" to play the game or the only way to be competitive was to find and learn a specific build/play style. That sucks all the fun out of the game for me.
I've run into this with Factorio as well. When I first played it I didn't look up much info at all and I had a blast. On later play-throughs I got deep into online blueprints or "best practices" and in very little time the game lost it's appeal for me. I'm not talking about belt balancer books but malls, research factories, and the like. When I realized why I wasn't having fun I vowed to only use the most basic online blueprints and that has helped a lot.
It's a hard path to walk between "This game is inscrutable and I need help!" and "Well now I'm just a glorified computer following a detailed walkthrough, not playing a game". I have to stop myself from meta-gaming too much or it ruins the game for me (though it's a useful tool to use to quit a game that I'm too deep into).
Maybe the old school ones but there are many examples of games now that have season passes that cost $10-20 for a few months, have cosmetic items you can earn/purchase.
The "meta" in a game is what the min-maxed gear is. Or what I like to call the spreadsheet gear load-out. There are lots of discussions, play testing damage numbers, trying different modifiers/gear combos, etc. done to figure out the max damage-per-second (DPS) and then players gravitate to that gear, grinding for that gear, etc. Some people actually publish spreadsheets of data on the gear.
Then the game devs change the "meta" by tweaking the stats on the gear to make XYZ weapon/armor better, or introduce a new weapon that has better DPS. This sometimes aligns with season passes or map changes. Its endless and probably hugely profitable for them. If you compare the money people spend on these types of games, I bet the average player on season passes spends more than a monthly subscription based MMO (for those that actually spend money).
Its the same "keeping up with the jonses" concept IRL, or in business world, earnings have to always be better than the last time.
Information goes from one player to other, it used to be that the circles for this were small (relatives, classmates etc) but now it's the whole world.
Besides of what you are talking about, it also affects developers, it is not that strange for games today to be developed assuming you are going to google things out or that you are going to be assisted by a wiki site, I'm frankly worried about this.
I recently played Subnautica, one of the features is that after making a vehicle you can craft upgrades for it, you also have to replace the energy cells they use, yet the game gives no indication on how to do either thing, a quick google search will point out that there are specific areas of the vehicle that can be interacted with, but it really feels like there is a missing prompt or tutorial somewhere.
What will become of these experience in some 20-30 years I don't know.
I remember playing World of Tanks during early beta. It was fun. Player was mostly mens in around 30s with interest in WW2 technology. Game has unbalanced matchmaking, different tanks that has really different stats and specific cons and pros... Then it become publicly more known with lot of ads everywhere. A lot of kids joined to the game. Developers tweaked and balanced everything. And it slowly became game without fun. Everything was so perfectly balanced, that it was almost irrelevant what tank you had. And with casualty of players regular games lacks any strategy. No cooperation, just insulting, grinding, no fun... I quit playing WoT after developers puts more and more imaginary/ridiculous tanks with every patch and balanced specific unique abilities of tanks.
It's a relic of the advent of broadband, when playing with tons of other players in a graphical game became possible for the first time. That was novel and amazing, even if it meant deep compromises in gameplay and graphics. Now, though, that's no longer novel, and those compromises don't make sense. And the incentives are awful to boot; a company has to run beefy servers, which means it's pressured to find ways to extract ever more money from the players, leading to stuff like pay-to-win.
Although some people think they can be saved, particularly if they're sandboxes instead of theme parks: https://youtu.be/nvK8fua6O64
> And the incentives are awful to boot; a company has to run beefy servers, which means it's pressured to find ways to extract ever more money from the players, leading to stuff like pay-to-win.
They have to run servers that would have been beefy decades ago. These days I could go rent a server for $5/core/month, and as a lowball handle 100 concurrent users per core. And based on some searches, if 10% of players can log in simultaneously that's much more than enough. So that comes out to $60 a year per 1000 subscribers.
I don't see how server costs could be a problem for a game that has any income. You could ask for $5 a year to play and server costs would completely disappear. No need to do any harsh money extraction at all for server costs.
What, exactly, were you going to min-max in Mario 64? Strategy guides have literally been a thing since the 1980s.
The biggest change is not the players. The biggest change is the monetization of games that you have already played for and the sad hamster wheel that companies have put players on. While Elden Ring is mostly about exploration, most AAA games being developed nowadays consist of a set of mundane tasks that don't even make sense when putting them into a real world context.
Kill 10 X. Collect 20 Y. Walk to Z and stand there while you "survey the area." It's all bullshit, but instead of just being able to enjoy the game by exploring to progress through the story, you have to do all this dumb crap.
> What, exactly, were you going to min-max in Mario 64?
Time to finish the game, aka speedrun. Not necessarily a bad thing though (I love watching all the performance during AGDQ/SGDQ), but that's an example of "optimizing the fun out of the game".
> But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play
I'm kind of OK with the metagame of every player vs. the developers.
I even like the idea of developers vs. players in an MMO. There's sort of a cooperative aspect to it.
But I also usually enjoy figuring things out on my own rather than consulting an internet walkthrough, and an MMO doesn't seem as fun if it is reduced to an exercise in efficiency maximization or trying to increase the value of some number.
Ketroc in the Starcraft 2 AI Arena tournament mentions the same pattern. Starcraft 1 came out before the internet and web had crushed the meta. People would figure out how to play with their friends and then meet up at local tournaments to find out who knew how to play. It was an awesome period of discovery. The guys behind aiarena.net are having a blast running the AI bot tournament because they are making the meta up as they code better bots.
I think this is something that might be starting to reverse a bit. Just going off of conversations I see online, I would imagine a decent number of players made a conscious effort not to consult guides in order to "spoil" the experience for themselves. Outer Wilds is an example of a fairly popular indie where people are very careful not to spoil or give away too much.
I think you're right. Anecdotally I, as well as most of my friends that still game, have become increasingly conscious of avoiding "help" when playing a new game. I'd never played a FromSoft game and beating Elden Ring with zero spoilers or advice was just about the greatest gaming experience I've ever had.
I suspect it's partially an age thing. Now that we're older and becoming nostalgic for the wonder that games held for us as children this is a great way to capture some of that magic again.
As mentioned elsewhere, gaming guides aren't a new thing, but for a certain segment of the population they were pretty uncommon for a large chunk of our childhood. So, instead, knowledge was shared around the lunch table or at recess.
It's maybe not quite as exciting in my 30's as it was back then, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to discover things with my friends than it is to watch a 20 minute video about optimal strategy.
One of the counters to this is to have various ways to play - Stellaris for example has well known "best builds" where you pick the proper civics, traits, government, and origin and follow a pretty basic tech rush, and win.
But then after you've done that a huge amount of fun is trying to win with non-optimal builds, often "for the lols".
In this way it's more of a roguelike (or similar to Dwarf Fortress, et al) where the goal isn't to "beat the game" but to beat it on your terms.
And if you pull off non-meta strategies, you’re not good, you’re just “cheesing” or something.
Funny enough, a recent turn based 4X that was supposed to be a Civ killer released and is now looking pretty rough review wise. The biggest complaint is that some of the civs are just straight up better inherently.
Which is probably why I love Crusader Kings, it’s the only paradox game I’ve played where playing as minor nobody nations isn’t the most boring grind imaginable.
Game devs would never do this. Its all free marketing for their game and if major streamers play the game, even for a short time, it will boost sales/downloads, etc.
I don’t think it’s likely to happen but sometimes I think it would be fun (maybe not the right word) for a really story-driven exploratory game like RDR2 to come with an NDA for the first month or so. Not anything that the company would seriously enforce but just as a way to give players a bit of time to explore the game without any spoilers.
I think the biggest change is content. Games just have a lot more of it now. The ratio of content to mechanics has stretched out hugely. Older zelda games were pretty clear you get one item per dungeon and that's the gimmick and then the item won't be too important going forward. Mario games tend to hit a design theme for a few levels then move on and be done with it.
Now a lot of games just want to be big, even if the variety of gameplay doesn't change. People get validation and a sense of achievement from their numbers going up. People like exploring a big place and running through long scripted social encounters even if there's no autonomy. It's now a long lasting source of social and personal progression that we don't get in real life nearly as easily.
Which is fine honestly. But when a designer fucks up the balance it becomes work because there is no choice but trudging through trivial, reused content to reach the next goal.
A somewhat Zelda related, modern indie game that comes to mind is Hyper Light Drifter. It’s one of the best games I ever played, and I have played a ton until about 5y ago.
The features/content are orthogonal, minimal and extremely well balanced. There is almost no unnecessary fluff and stuff that distracts from the core, everything is designed holistically. The gameplay is challenging and varied, while building on a few well thought out primitives.
Still you feel like you’re stepping into a world of wonder. The game has a distinct personality and encourages experimentation and exploration.
It rewards you with actual gameplay and not with ego soothing tricks.
Mainstream games that have this kind of polish and holistic design are very rare, even though they have access to humongous resources.
This is totally off-topic, but I also own this game and really enjoyed it, but I played it through once and then I was done. Was there some kind of replayability in it that I missed?
There are several games in my library that I have yet to finish, because it just gets so repetitive to do it all. Spider-Man. Borderlands 3. I love AC:O, but how many bandit camps can you clear before you go mad? When you add in all the DLC, you're talking about many hundreds of hours of gameplay, if you do everything, but 75% of it is the just same fight, over and over again. Going back to Borderlands, Wonderlands is WAAAY shorter than 3, and I, for one, really appreciate it. (They'll probably blow that up with DLC tho.)
One of the things that made console games need to get longer is the rise of a retail resale market. That's subsiding a bit with online delivery and online content.
Oh my gosh I couldn’t disagree more! I have a friend who often plays games muted (on Switch, handheld) and it’s like a completely different experience without the dramatic music. The “decorative” aspects definitely make a game more immersive and add to the emotion of whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.
Amusing. I felt the same way in tomb raider. But then I don't find any video game to be particularly immersive (and to pre-empt the inevitable responses, no VR is not immersive at all either). That's not universally true. Many people freak out when something like this happens to their avatar. But tomb raider was the epitome of the cinematic but braindead AAA gameplay genre. In terms of content its actually pretty lean. The game has a linear story and every moment is handcrafted faux-cinematics. Probably a problem, but certainly a different problem than the bloated content issue.
I think the lack of autonomy is largely due to the move away from written social encounters to voice acting. When good synthetic voicing arrives we may see the options open back up. I have an easier time with written rather than spoken communication, so I miss the walls of text in games like daggerfall or baldurs gate. In daggerfall a lot of the texts was generated, we could do that so much better now. Quest markers, fast travel, and automapping also made the smaller hand sculpted (rather than generated) worlds seem even smaller.
Microsoft’s remaster of AoE3 has been suprisingly decent.
The game at its core, is still the same, but they’ve been adding tons of new content, that’s breathed new life into the game to the point where it was even outperforming AoE4 for a bit.
But the new content is a mix of stuff. A lot of it adds new mechanics and diversity that make the game much more enjoyable. Only problem is I never properly learned how to play non-2005 vanilla civs.
I think you are thinking about cartridge games vs today's BluRay / Downloadable. CD-ROM Games circa 1997 had a ton of content. Look at games of that era such as Blade Runner, Zork Nemesis, Wing Commander IV various Sierra Games all had tons of art, music and live acting that would make them very expensive games to develop.
Graphics are not the most important thing for sure but they still _matter_ at least to some extent.
For example yesterday Nintendo revealed the new trailer of the next mainline Pokemon game... and it has some insane texture shimmering and apparently zero anti-aliasing in the whole game. And that's how they promote the game in the trailer. It's not even a low budget title, it's the flagship AAA game of the company sold for $60. And the Switch is not a bad hardware so at this point they most likely just don't care which is the strange part. It's like watching a movie in 360p. Sure the story, the characters, the music matter but a low resolution can damage the whole experience, same as the intentionally low quality graphics in an otherwise good game
For me personally, art direction is more important than technical limitations/issues with graphics. A game with beautiful stylized art will stand the test of time much longer than a highly polished game lacking any kind of style. That polished game might look "real" today, but not tomorrow when compared to whatever is the latest and greatest tech.
And a game with strong unique art will always look good for what it is. You can have both, but it's usually a rarity.
Most people would agree art direction is far more important, which is where cartoon styles generally shine and age extremely well compared to their more hyper-realistic siblings.
In GP's case however, it's been pretty consistent how low effort Game Freak has gone with their in-house Pokemon games. The series practically prints money and the hardware has shown us what is possible. Even the new Kirby game looks stunning, and Kirby is one of the less big budget series.
Yes Pokémon Legends: Arceus was a tipping point for me. The game does not look good at all to me, and across 3 different switches I tested, it felt like it was hitching and not loading correctly even with the low detail and resolution in docked mode. I’m handheld it’s a bit better, but that’s not really how I want to play the game.
On the other hand, my most played game is by far Old School RuneScape, which is a restore of a backup of RuneScape from 2007. The game has certainly evolved in style and content since the re-release, and I use a 3rd party client with an “HD” plug-in which adds more render distance, shadows, lighting and anti-aliasing.
I think the best way to put it is that graphics should not distract from enjoyment.
It is possible to create a visually appealing graphics with limited resolution and colour depth, just as it is possible to create glitchy and ugly graphics with the latest technology. Of course, the opposite is also true. Either way, you need people who know what they are doing in order to achieve the desired affect.
Pokemon games don't just have poor graphics, they essentially release them completely unfinished. It feels like they need two years of development each, but only get one, and don't care about designing the world above the level of detail expected by a 6 year old.
They do tend to finish the game and release it as another version of it later.
> What the gaming experience has become
Today the gaming experience could be summed-up as follow.
• You go on steam.
• You buy and download a 4GB game.
• You play at it.
I don't know on which planet the author lives but my experience is a bit different:
• you go to the store and buy the game. Allmost all games have the same price.
• Come home, insert DVD, install it.
• after instalation the game wants an online account for which it needs to install a windows service.
• account created, try to start the game, it needs an update (couple of GB, it needs one hour)
• after update you can finaly start the game (entusiasm is gone) and you play for some time. Graphics is a bit better than 20 years but nothing "wow".
• you don't touch the game for a couple of days
• you want to play again, try to start the game, it needs another multi GB update, another hour lost.
• you decide next time to avoid this company (EA) when buying games.
Probably just using a console instead of a PC for gaming; AFAIK, Steam doesn't exist on consoles (other than the Steam Deck), and you still have to buy physical media (which for some reason seems to act more like a license dongle, since as the parent comment mentions, you still have to download the whole game).
> Graphics is a bit better than 20 years but nothing "wow"
Maybe 10 years — in which case the answer is: graphics nowadays is mostly bound to the current console generation. GTA 5 was released almost 10 years ago for PS 4. Uncharted 4 was released 8 years ago. The Last of Us 2 was released 2 years ago.
Now we're entering the next generation — ray tracing, nicer global illumination, AI upscaling, and much more. The Unreal Engine 5 enables indie developers to produce an image almost as good as AAA titles of the previous generation.
I’m still trying to figure out how the CK3 console port is going to work. A lot of people compared that the games looks simple/boring because of the fact that they wanted it to run on consoles, but I have no clue how you’re going to navigate that UI without a mouse, I would probably have an Aneurysm.
Yah, I guess i'm the only one that hard power cycles an xbox? Because its a miserable experience turning it back on when its not been on for a month or so.
It seems ever single one of the 20-30 games it has installed need 20+GB updates, and the download speeds are often a fraction of my home internet connection. Has no one heard of incremental/differential package upgrade? MS should charge companies a bandwidth recovery fee by the size of their updates.
Plus, I hate typing passwords on the controller, and it seems to always want people to sign in/etc.
The Nintendo emulator thing I have blows it away in usability. Turn it on, pick a game, play. Takes less than 20 seconds. The xbox takes that long just to show its logo sometimes. I want to play games not play system admin for a game machine, of schedule my game playing 4 hours in advance.
Yeah, it's like saying "we'll fetch your beer... in 15 minutes" to patron at the pub. Entertainment and leisure is about instant gratification and companies don't seem to get that. The people who absolutely get that though are gambling equipment manufacturers - the UX is extremely smooth and polished, so that people don't fall off the hook.
The article laments the death of manuals, but that's because every game has an in-game tutorial-ish start that slowly teaches the mechanics. And given that every AAA game now has completely overloaded controls, you almost have to. I think you can add this to your list.
It's also because the manual needs to be finished so it can go to the printers, but the game is going to get a day one patch that often makes major changes.
A lot of 80s and 90s games in boxes would have the main manual, and then a small pamphlet (printed later) describing last minute changes, because the manuals had to be finalized before the disks, and you wouldn't reprint the manuals unless hell froze over, anyway.
Then there's the expense of localizing that. And the budget, and that nobody will read the manual anyway.
I miss the days of manuals thick with lore and tidbits and things not directly related to gameplay. You're right, the tutorial can cover bits related to actually playing the game, the controls, etc. Manuals are likely to be overrun by development between the time they're finalized and sent for printing anyway (e.g. I distinctly recall the WoW manual saying that Priests could wear leather armor) but please feed me a bunch of backstory.
I can't count the number of times I read through the manuals for Starsiege, Arcanum, various Jane's simulators, and so on.
Unfortunately that means if you need a quick refresher (say you put it down for a few months and pick it back up) you're stuck, since you'll need to replay a large chunk to get at the tutorials.
As a PS4 gamer, I don't understand why I can't predownload and install a game's assets. Let me download and install what I need to ahead of time so when I do get the disc and pop it in, it just launches.
The idea that early games prized fun ahead of graphics is ahistoric.
Video game magazines usually rated games on multipoint scales, with usually ‘graphics’ being a specific category. Games would get high scores just on the basis of their graphics. The main difference between platforms was defined by their graphical capabilities, far more than their performance. Arcade game ports to home computers were almost entirely measured on the fidelity of their recreation of the arcade graphics. A thousand tired movie license tie-ins were released which were just graphical glosses over the same underlying beat-‘em-up gameplay.
> I was very excited because I liked so much Simcity 2000. So, I played to the 3000, not as much, but enough to get the following opinion: it was a very good game, with the same spirit as its predecessors, but a little bit less fun than the 2000.
I spent thousands of hours playing SimCity 2000. I can't speak for 3000 (never played any), but I got 4 soon after it came out. I spent a few hundred hours trying to figure it out, but ended up liking 2000 better. The complicated mechanics in 4 destroyed much of the fun.
It was awkward when my dad needed an example of civil engineering when talking to someone, and asked if they ever heard of SimCity. It happened more than once.
Is there a way to play SC2K on hi res? I went looking a few weeks ago and only found lengthy patch processes. I figured GOG would have it but they're still shipping the DOS version
The original Windows release runs in windowed mode, so you should be able to make it as large as you want.
I'm not sure if running it on a modern machine is a good idea, since it has issues with color depths over 256 colors, and the fastest simulation speed doesn't account for Moore's law. I last played SC2k on a retro PC (Win 98, Pentium 3).
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1930s films did "shoot in HD". Most films were either 16mm or 35mm, both of which have more than enough fidelity to represent video at 1080p or higher without loss of quality. Here's a copy of Wizard of Oz on 4K UHD: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Limited-Anniversary-Collect...
A more realistic take is could you criticize 1920s films for not shooting with sound, and the answer is yes, absolutely. Films went from almost entirely silent to almost entirely talkies in roughly 3 years because of massive, unprecedented, and immediate commercial pressure to do so. Audiences ate up even mediocre talkies and shunned silent works now considered classics. The only reason colour film adoption wasn't similarly fast was because of Technicolor's monopoly.
Flash forward to the 1990s, where cinema as a medium was very sophisticated. Now look at blockbusters beginning to use CG rather than animatronics. The airplane in Air Force One. Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace. Hell, take the 1997 re-releases of the Star Wars trilogy which inexplicably added garbage like CG Jabba the Hutt. The purple stuff in The Langoliers. Even going back to Lord of the Rings, even going back to the Hobbit, even going back to "early" Marvel films there are tons of moments where CG is jarring. The Polar Express -- an excellent and heartwarming Zemeckis film -- is mostly known because no one likes the dead-eye CG. Yes, absolutely, technical barriers have affected peoples enjoyment of film and still do!
In video games the most obvious period of time that is conspicuously a donut hole is the Playstation 1 / early 3D era. The PS1s 3d games featured really quite nauseating affine texture warping due to a lack of hardware correction support. Here's one video of many talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI Early 3d controls are atrocious -- the "tank controls" of Resident Evil are famous for this -- because controllers initially didn't have analogue sticks and when they did, they didn't yet have basic paradigms around how to best use them. The Nintendo 64 was built around analogue control, which is why Mario 64 works so well, and yet it has a completely rotten camera system because there's only a single analogue stick and the c-buttons aren't a good substitute. And that's the PS1/N64. If you go back to the earlier era of 3D, especially on the Super Nintendo, you find low framerate, awkward controlling messes with flat polygon shading. Try playing an unmodified copy of StarFox or Stunt Race FX, I dare you.
No one is saying to throw Casablanca out with the bathwater, just as no one is going to throw Super Mario Bros, out with the bathwater. I'm not saying that technical issues mean we should never play old games or watch old movies. I'm saying that it shouldn't be surprising that people do count technical issues as part of the reason why they prefer newer stuff.
I also think the article misses widely when it pretends that "old ways" of making games don't exist today. Games are made in now-dead genres, with now-dead mechanics, all the time. They have commercial budgets at least as large as they ever did and large, warm communities. In many cases, the original teams working on games in the 1980s and 1990s still make games. I can't find an example in the article where you can't find similar games to play today.
The article mentions that isometric games would be anathema today. Disco Elysium is one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Wasteland has two recent sequels, both well liked. Hades is also one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Age of Empires IV retains a basically isometric perspective for an RTS. Diablo Immortal just launched and Diablo 4 is coming. Huh?
The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it. Majora's Mask (1999) is considered an excellent Zelda because of its time mechanics. Dead Rising (2006) was one of the first major hits of the HD era of video games and it's on a fixed timer. Final Fantasy XIII-3 (2013) uses a similar mechanic, and while the game is often criticized for being terribly written nonsense, it's not because of the mechanic.
Or if not the time mechanic, then needing to take notes? Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open, to say nothing of From Software (Dark Souls, Elden Ring) suddenly becoming the apex of prestige developer. Point and click adventures are still quite popular: The Return of the Obra Dinn is widely considered among the best games of the 2010s.
The article claims unnamed gamers today are reacting negatively to the visual choices of the new Monkey Island. This just seems entirely untrue. The reaction across the internet, including on gaming forums, reddit, and here, was overwhelmingly positive. A few people said "okay, this style reminds me a bit of the not-great LucasArts Singapore modernizations of the first few Monkey Islands". This does not presage a great backlash against the game, it's just people shooting from the hip, the vast majority of anyone who cares to comment is excited even if they have concerns about the visuals. And anyway, 99% of the people commenting are greybeards like the rest of us, not young people.
Overall I can't find much here that resonates with me.
As an old time gamer I can't agree more. We are in the golden age of old-style games (hollow knight, disco elysium, stardew valley, etc). People are making this old style games with all the hindsight of modernized mechanics, better control schemes, more accessibility, stylized graphics, PC releases.
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As the other poster said, plenty of people play Hallow Knight without taking notes. For people who do want notes or use a wiki, it's often for fairly simple things, like trying to remember exactly where a closed door was.
This is quite different from a game like Myst, where most agree note taking is a necessity (I believe the box came with a notebook). For people who haven't played it, imagine 5 or 6 escape rooms linked together, with clues spread throughout, so the first thing you look at in the first room might be something you need to solve a puzzle in the last.
Likewise, the impact of the two games is different. Hollow Knight is a popular indie game, but it's still sold a fraction of the copies that AAA games do. Myst, on the other hand was the top selling computer game for _years_. Often people who never bought any other computer game bought a copy of the game.
Cyan still makes games, but they're niche games that don't have anything like the cultural impact that Myst had.
Likewise, I don't think Majora's Mask should really be compared to games with forward moving time mechanics. It has a time mechanic, but it's basically on a repeating hour schedule. If you miss something, you can just come back to the cycle again.
This is the opposite of games with real time mechanics (time measured in actions - "real action time"?) like The Colonel's Bequest or The Last Express, because the latter games decidedly _don't_ repeat. If you miss an event in the game, it's gone (granted, Titanic isn't quite at that level). Though I suppose such games have always been a bit rare.
I don't really understand most of the other stuff; yes, some games have slightly more punishing implementations of mechanics than others (Dead Rising uses the real-time forward-only approach). I named some high profile examples which are in the approximate orbit of what was discussed. It can't possibly be the article's thesis that minor variation between two games implementing a quasi real-time progression gate constitutes a major arc in the history of narrative gaming.
> The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it
But none of your examples are particularly recent, except arguably Final Fantasy XIII-3. Recent games with a strict timer are rare, and when they exist -- like the recent indie metroidvania Unsighted -- they get a lot of criticism for it. As for difficult puzzles, well, are there any non-indie games with difficult puzzles in recent history? Sure, such games continue to get made, but they're fairly niche.
> Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open
I don't know how many people play Hollow Knight while constantly consulting a guide, but if they do, it doesn't imply an appetite for taking notes while playing games. If I'd had to take notes while playing Hollow Knight (and I did not, though I did consult a guide a couple times) I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. I don't know anyone who takes notes playing games. Heck, I don't remember who it was off the top of my head, but recently a journalist caught a bunch of flack when he suggested taking notes while playing Elden Ring.
> Point and click adventures are still quite popular
The graphical point-and-click adventure is nowhere near as popular, in relative terms, as it used to be. They do get made, but mostly by indies with small budgets and small audiences. I also don't think Return of the Obra Dinn is a great example, but maybe I'm too rigid in what I think a point-and-click adventure is.
All that is to say ... it's no surprise that difficult or otherwise challenging games survive to this day; the sheer size of the market means that niche audiences can have their needs met. But a game like Monkey Island couldn't be made today and expect to be the kind of juggernaut it once was.
I'm not saying that these mechanics don't have detractors now, just as they had detractors then. I'm saying there isn't really a generational gap that would make me believe that kids these days wouldn't have a similar reaction to it as people did back then, and the evidence for this is that lots of minor variations of this kind of mechanic exist and mostly it's been in games that do pretty well.
In Hollow Knight, the use of a fan wiki is less about notes in the adventure game sense and more about optimizing builds, reading about lore, checking quest solutions, and looking up boss strategies. It's possible that some unspecified journalist made some unspecified remark about taking notes while playing Elden Ring and some unspecified Twitter demons gave him some unspecified grief about it. And yet, a huge number of people who play Elden Ring do it with a wiki open. Fandom has raised something like $100,000,000 in VC and its primary business model is being a wiki for video games; it's almost entirely supplanted traditional FAQs.
There are of course games that require more traditional "stuff I learned" notes these days, a prime example is The Outer Wilds (> 1 million sales on Steam despite a one year late release, Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, probably my favourite game of the 21st century, Adventure Gamers Game of the Year 2019 so let's sidestep whether you think it's an adventure game please). You might also think about Stardew Valley (20 million+ copies sold, is played almost entirely with Wiki lookups) or Minecraft (300 million copies, has a thriving ecosystem of secondary information and content, including videos, wikis, etc.) What would convince you that there is still a demand for games that require or encourage the use of supplementary information and thinking?
As to team size, point and click adventures don't require the budget of an open world game like Red Dead Redemption 2. About 15 people are credited on Myst. About 20-25 on Secret of Monkey Island. Tons of PnCs today have much larger budgets and larger team sizes than they ever did. The fact that the market also sustains an Asssassin's Creed game made by 2500 people over 3 years doesn't take away from the space for creative adventure games. The relative terms framing is just bonkers. James Cameron has half-billion dollar budget films, but Parasite still exists.
Monkey Island was never a juggernaut. The US sales in the first two years were about 100,000 copies. You don't think Monkey Island could be made today and sell 100,000 copies in the US? Thimbleweed Park (2017, Ron Gilbert) is well over 100,000 copies in the US across platforms. Broken Age is around 100,000 copies on Steam. The Witness over 500k on Steam. Inscryption is over a million on Steam, and that just launched 9 months ago. Papers Please around 2 million on Steam. Agent A, which is I think 3 people in a flash-style animation, is coming up on 100k on Steam. The Grim Fandango re-release is coming on the game's entire original sales run. Phoenix Wright in the 500k range. Gorogoa in the 500k range. The Room around a million units. Granted you can play with the numbers -- lifetime versus first few years sales, discounting, countries of availability, upfront MSRP, availability of console ports versus just PC, whatever. My point isn't to prove all these games outsold Monkey Island, it's to suggest I don't see the apparently cavernous collapsed alleged in demand for PnCs.
It's true that nothing is Myst anymore, but nothing was Myst back then either. PnCs are alive and well.
Nintendo had mostly gotten away with not needing it up until then because of the flat shading of their 3D cartoon look for most games. Goldeneye and later Turok suffered from this especially in the level design mapping.
Overall though, you nailed it.
Also, one of the best point and click puzzle games of all time, Myst, was kinda a UX disaster. Kids would spend hours just staring at some 3D rendered scene without knowing what was going on. People figured it out. Puzzles with difficulty have been a part of gaming ever since.
I dunno, I think the Langoliers are still creepy. Yeah, a little low poly—but they got it where it counts.
Uncanny CG kinda fits the mood of Steven King anyway. I feel the technical limitations played to the advantage of the movie. Could you make an even creepier langolier today? Sure, but I feel like this train criticizes art because of the tools available.
The biggest change have to be us, the players. Almost every game let it be an indie or a triple-A blockbuster have been researched and min-maxed by most players. Not just the "sweats" but the casuals too. Of course official guides and playthrough books have been a thing back in the 90s too, almost every PS1 game had one. But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play. I see this everywhere. It's not even about the game being hand-holdy or not it's the fact that players can datamine and simulate every aspect of the game. Elden Ring is a perfect example recently where builds are min maxed to edge as possible. And that's a mainly single player title, there is not even anything on the line. MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality, especially WoW everyone expected to have the best build doing the best possible dps or else. Even in very casual games like Animal Crossing you have this mentality of having the best villagers in the game, people asking insane amount of money to visit their islands ot get that best item you need etc. So yeah, I'd say this is the biggest change.
meta gaming kills strategy for me. From back when I first started playing AoE3 I was absolutely infatuated with the game and genre, but found myself incapable of winning MP matches. Some guys from the old pre-DE competitive scene helped train me a bit, and I could win MP matches now, but the game is no fun, instead of being a fun 4X/RTS, it was “follow this foundation, time everything perfectly, micro perfectly, min/max everything and it lost most of the appeal.
Even more recently CK3, which can be a pretty immersive game, often loses that immersion when the game becomes less about what I do as a king, and more about min/maxing mechanics.
A lot of strategy games start to feel less “strategy” and more “who can exploit mechanics and follow predefined path”. Ironically one AoE3 legend rose from nowhere a couple years back with strategies different from the meta and winning. People called him toxic for it.
I think this has to do with a prevalence of frankly stupefying reward structure of many games. I call it spreadsheet progression. Instead of opening up new gameplay options, you often get a huge list of entirely arbitrary choices that only differ in the most superficial ways.
But what I hate are puzzles. Parts of the game would have been completely inaccessible to me, because I’d have either avoided them, or stopped playing because of frustration.
Instead, I can simply look up the solutions online, and the unfair player who doesn’t want to spend hours thinking about the perfect build can go to neoseeker and check their list of unfair viable builds.
I’m soon finishing my 3rd time through WotR (with a total play time of over 1400 hours), and for my next run, part of my build was decided by datamined deity reactivity in the game.
Especially in single player games, the options and additional enjoyment coming from datamining, minmaxing, and sharing of secrets are amazing.
On the other side, this change in player behavior has reflected back in the game industry. I often see a “softening” in permanent build-based character gameplay, such as choosing your skills and stats in Diablo 2 has gone away in modern Diablo games - because why add this feature when you know your player base will all just google the best build?
On the upside it can keep the game fresh trying out new things, but if you find one that's fun, it will likely be nerfed in the next league.
I can't speak for WoW, but I hope this is true for ESO. Despite watching many videos explaining the light-attack/power weaving technique, practicing for many hours, watching build videos, optimizing my build, farming/buying (mostly) BIS gear, and maxing it out, I can still only pull about half the DPS demanded by the hardest trials. Despite paying just as much as everyone else, there's a whole bunch of content I'm effectively gated from playing. So I don't, anymore. And I'm bitter about it.
There is a very fine line between "providing resources" and ruining a game for me. WoW isn't a lot of fun for me anymore (I haven't played even many years now) because of exactly the reason you list. It felt like the only "right way" to play the game or the only way to be competitive was to find and learn a specific build/play style. That sucks all the fun out of the game for me.
I've run into this with Factorio as well. When I first played it I didn't look up much info at all and I had a blast. On later play-throughs I got deep into online blueprints or "best practices" and in very little time the game lost it's appeal for me. I'm not talking about belt balancer books but malls, research factories, and the like. When I realized why I wasn't having fun I vowed to only use the most basic online blueprints and that has helped a lot.
It's a hard path to walk between "This game is inscrutable and I need help!" and "Well now I'm just a glorified computer following a detailed walkthrough, not playing a game". I have to stop myself from meta-gaming too much or it ruins the game for me (though it's a useful tool to use to quit a game that I'm too deep into).
Maybe the old school ones but there are many examples of games now that have season passes that cost $10-20 for a few months, have cosmetic items you can earn/purchase.
The "meta" in a game is what the min-maxed gear is. Or what I like to call the spreadsheet gear load-out. There are lots of discussions, play testing damage numbers, trying different modifiers/gear combos, etc. done to figure out the max damage-per-second (DPS) and then players gravitate to that gear, grinding for that gear, etc. Some people actually publish spreadsheets of data on the gear.
Then the game devs change the "meta" by tweaking the stats on the gear to make XYZ weapon/armor better, or introduce a new weapon that has better DPS. This sometimes aligns with season passes or map changes. Its endless and probably hugely profitable for them. If you compare the money people spend on these types of games, I bet the average player on season passes spends more than a monthly subscription based MMO (for those that actually spend money).
Its the same "keeping up with the jonses" concept IRL, or in business world, earnings have to always be better than the last time.
Besides of what you are talking about, it also affects developers, it is not that strange for games today to be developed assuming you are going to google things out or that you are going to be assisted by a wiki site, I'm frankly worried about this.
I recently played Subnautica, one of the features is that after making a vehicle you can craft upgrades for it, you also have to replace the energy cells they use, yet the game gives no indication on how to do either thing, a quick google search will point out that there are specific areas of the vehicle that can be interacted with, but it really feels like there is a missing prompt or tutorial somewhere.
What will become of these experience in some 20-30 years I don't know.
They should. MMO is an expired genre.
It's a relic of the advent of broadband, when playing with tons of other players in a graphical game became possible for the first time. That was novel and amazing, even if it meant deep compromises in gameplay and graphics. Now, though, that's no longer novel, and those compromises don't make sense. And the incentives are awful to boot; a company has to run beefy servers, which means it's pressured to find ways to extract ever more money from the players, leading to stuff like pay-to-win.
Although some people think they can be saved, particularly if they're sandboxes instead of theme parks: https://youtu.be/nvK8fua6O64
They have to run servers that would have been beefy decades ago. These days I could go rent a server for $5/core/month, and as a lowball handle 100 concurrent users per core. And based on some searches, if 10% of players can log in simultaneously that's much more than enough. So that comes out to $60 a year per 1000 subscribers.
I don't see how server costs could be a problem for a game that has any income. You could ask for $5 a year to play and server costs would completely disappear. No need to do any harsh money extraction at all for server costs.
The biggest change is not the players. The biggest change is the monetization of games that you have already played for and the sad hamster wheel that companies have put players on. While Elden Ring is mostly about exploration, most AAA games being developed nowadays consist of a set of mundane tasks that don't even make sense when putting them into a real world context.
Kill 10 X. Collect 20 Y. Walk to Z and stand there while you "survey the area." It's all bullshit, but instead of just being able to enjoy the game by exploring to progress through the story, you have to do all this dumb crap.
Time to finish the game, aka speedrun. Not necessarily a bad thing though (I love watching all the performance during AGDQ/SGDQ), but that's an example of "optimizing the fun out of the game".
I'm kind of OK with the metagame of every player vs. the developers.
I even like the idea of developers vs. players in an MMO. There's sort of a cooperative aspect to it.
But I also usually enjoy figuring things out on my own rather than consulting an internet walkthrough, and an MMO doesn't seem as fun if it is reduced to an exercise in efficiency maximization or trying to increase the value of some number.
I suspect it's partially an age thing. Now that we're older and becoming nostalgic for the wonder that games held for us as children this is a great way to capture some of that magic again.
As mentioned elsewhere, gaming guides aren't a new thing, but for a certain segment of the population they were pretty uncommon for a large chunk of our childhood. So, instead, knowledge was shared around the lunch table or at recess.
It's maybe not quite as exciting in my 30's as it was back then, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to discover things with my friends than it is to watch a 20 minute video about optimal strategy.
But then after you've done that a huge amount of fun is trying to win with non-optimal builds, often "for the lols".
In this way it's more of a roguelike (or similar to Dwarf Fortress, et al) where the goal isn't to "beat the game" but to beat it on your terms.
Funny enough, a recent turn based 4X that was supposed to be a Civ killer released and is now looking pretty rough review wise. The biggest complaint is that some of the civs are just straight up better inherently.
Which is probably why I love Crusader Kings, it’s the only paradox game I’ve played where playing as minor nobody nations isn’t the most boring grind imaginable.
Now a lot of games just want to be big, even if the variety of gameplay doesn't change. People get validation and a sense of achievement from their numbers going up. People like exploring a big place and running through long scripted social encounters even if there's no autonomy. It's now a long lasting source of social and personal progression that we don't get in real life nearly as easily.
Which is fine honestly. But when a designer fucks up the balance it becomes work because there is no choice but trudging through trivial, reused content to reach the next goal.
A somewhat Zelda related, modern indie game that comes to mind is Hyper Light Drifter. It’s one of the best games I ever played, and I have played a ton until about 5y ago.
The features/content are orthogonal, minimal and extremely well balanced. There is almost no unnecessary fluff and stuff that distracts from the core, everything is designed holistically. The gameplay is challenging and varied, while building on a few well thought out primitives.
Still you feel like you’re stepping into a world of wonder. The game has a distinct personality and encourages experimentation and exploration.
It rewards you with actual gameplay and not with ego soothing tricks.
Mainstream games that have this kind of polish and holistic design are very rare, even though they have access to humongous resources.
There are several games in my library that I have yet to finish, because it just gets so repetitive to do it all. Spider-Man. Borderlands 3. I love AC:O, but how many bandit camps can you clear before you go mad? When you add in all the DLC, you're talking about many hundreds of hours of gameplay, if you do everything, but 75% of it is the just same fight, over and over again. Going back to Borderlands, Wonderlands is WAAAY shorter than 3, and I, for one, really appreciate it. (They'll probably blow that up with DLC tho.)
The game at its core, is still the same, but they’ve been adding tons of new content, that’s breathed new life into the game to the point where it was even outperforming AoE4 for a bit.
But the new content is a mix of stuff. A lot of it adds new mechanics and diversity that make the game much more enjoyable. Only problem is I never properly learned how to play non-2005 vanilla civs.
For example yesterday Nintendo revealed the new trailer of the next mainline Pokemon game... and it has some insane texture shimmering and apparently zero anti-aliasing in the whole game. And that's how they promote the game in the trailer. It's not even a low budget title, it's the flagship AAA game of the company sold for $60. And the Switch is not a bad hardware so at this point they most likely just don't care which is the strange part. It's like watching a movie in 360p. Sure the story, the characters, the music matter but a low resolution can damage the whole experience, same as the intentionally low quality graphics in an otherwise good game
In GP's case however, it's been pretty consistent how low effort Game Freak has gone with their in-house Pokemon games. The series practically prints money and the hardware has shown us what is possible. Even the new Kirby game looks stunning, and Kirby is one of the less big budget series.
Money doesn't buy happiness but not enough money causes unhappiness.
Graphics doesn't make a game great... but bad graphics causes unhappiness. Just like bad controls, no tutorial, flakey network connections, etc.
On the other hand, my most played game is by far Old School RuneScape, which is a restore of a backup of RuneScape from 2007. The game has certainly evolved in style and content since the re-release, and I use a 3rd party client with an “HD” plug-in which adds more render distance, shadows, lighting and anti-aliasing.
It is possible to create a visually appealing graphics with limited resolution and colour depth, just as it is possible to create glitchy and ugly graphics with the latest technology. Of course, the opposite is also true. Either way, you need people who know what they are doing in order to achieve the desired affect.
They do tend to finish the game and release it as another version of it later.
It's a bit long in the tooth. It's a 5+ year old Tegra chip.
I don't know on which planet the author lives but my experience is a bit different: • you go to the store and buy the game. Allmost all games have the same price. • Come home, insert DVD, install it. • after instalation the game wants an online account for which it needs to install a windows service. • account created, try to start the game, it needs an update (couple of GB, it needs one hour) • after update you can finaly start the game (entusiasm is gone) and you play for some time. Graphics is a bit better than 20 years but nothing "wow". • you don't touch the game for a couple of days • you want to play again, try to start the game, it needs another multi GB update, another hour lost. • you decide next time to avoid this company (EA) when buying games.
Different country or socioeconomic situation perhaps? Don't think I've bought a physical game from a store in the last 10+ years.
Maybe 10 years — in which case the answer is: graphics nowadays is mostly bound to the current console generation. GTA 5 was released almost 10 years ago for PS 4. Uncharted 4 was released 8 years ago. The Last of Us 2 was released 2 years ago.
Now we're entering the next generation — ray tracing, nicer global illumination, AI upscaling, and much more. The Unreal Engine 5 enables indie developers to produce an image almost as good as AAA titles of the previous generation.
It seems ever single one of the 20-30 games it has installed need 20+GB updates, and the download speeds are often a fraction of my home internet connection. Has no one heard of incremental/differential package upgrade? MS should charge companies a bandwidth recovery fee by the size of their updates.
Plus, I hate typing passwords on the controller, and it seems to always want people to sign in/etc.
The Nintendo emulator thing I have blows it away in usability. Turn it on, pick a game, play. Takes less than 20 seconds. The xbox takes that long just to show its logo sometimes. I want to play games not play system admin for a game machine, of schedule my game playing 4 hours in advance.
EA is not worth the time for a multitude of reasons, multi gigabyte updates being the least of it.
But yes, where do you live that you still buy PC games physically?
A lot of 80s and 90s games in boxes would have the main manual, and then a small pamphlet (printed later) describing last minute changes, because the manuals had to be finalized before the disks, and you wouldn't reprint the manuals unless hell froze over, anyway.
Then there's the expense of localizing that. And the budget, and that nobody will read the manual anyway.
I can't count the number of times I read through the manuals for Starsiege, Arcanum, various Jane's simulators, and so on.
• Go to the Epic Store
• Collect the weekly free game
• See that it needs a *40 GB* download
• Go away for now, because I do not have so much free space
• A few weeks later, after cleaning the disk, start the download
• Let the download run for a few days, like 10 GB / day, because my internet connection is slow (either that, or download it at the university)
Video game magazines usually rated games on multipoint scales, with usually ‘graphics’ being a specific category. Games would get high scores just on the basis of their graphics. The main difference between platforms was defined by their graphical capabilities, far more than their performance. Arcade game ports to home computers were almost entirely measured on the fidelity of their recreation of the arcade graphics. A thousand tired movie license tie-ins were released which were just graphical glosses over the same underlying beat-‘em-up gameplay.
I spent thousands of hours playing SimCity 2000. I can't speak for 3000 (never played any), but I got 4 soon after it came out. I spent a few hundred hours trying to figure it out, but ended up liking 2000 better. The complicated mechanics in 4 destroyed much of the fun.
It was awkward when my dad needed an example of civil engineering when talking to someone, and asked if they ever heard of SimCity. It happened more than once.
I'm not sure if running it on a modern machine is a good idea, since it has issues with color depths over 256 colors, and the fastest simulation speed doesn't account for Moore's law. I last played SC2k on a retro PC (Win 98, Pentium 3).
https://theandrewbailey.com/article/122/SimCity-2000
A few hundred hours is an insane amount of time to spend on a game where much of the fun was "destroyed".