[HN Gopher] What has changed with video games over the last 25 y...
___________________________________________________________________
What has changed with video games over the last 25 years, and what
has not
Author : canuck69
Score : 84 points
Date : 2022-05-31 06:31 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dynamic-mess.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dynamic-mess.com)
| _han wrote:
| The link gives a bad gateway error, here's an archive:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220531063207/https://www.dynam...
| [deleted]
| sylens wrote:
| The biggest change from me is the shift away from dedicated,
| organic game communities to ones that are cultivated by
| "community managers" and fed a drip feed of live service seasons
| and battle passes.
|
| Counter-Strike and Battlefield 1942 are two examples I'll call
| back to as they were two important games of my youth. At the
| time, most servers for these games were hosted and/or run by
| people that weren't affiliated with the developers or publishers
| of those games; it was just something you did so that your local
| group of friends or community could have a virtual home to get
| together and play.
|
| My friends and I would have maybe a dozen servers we would keep
| favorited and a handful that we played on heavily. Over time, you
| got to know the other people on the server just by playing
| against them consistently; for example, when BigCheeseburger
| logged on and was on the opposing team in CS, you knew you had
| your work cut out for you. There were rivalries and camaraderies
| that just formed naturally as a result of this. Some of these
| servers also had web presences with a site that had their roster,
| dates and times for regular game nights, etc.
|
| Games would also get occasional patches (patching before Steam is
| something I don't think was better back then) that would bring a
| new map or two, but that was generally it until a big expansion
| dropped, like Battlefield's Secret Weapons of WWII pack. If
| people wanted new content, they made it themselves - I spent so
| many hours on custom CS maps like Iceworld or even ones that
| shoehorned in Half Life's terrible vehicle controls to make
| facsimiles of Tatooine with landspeeders.
|
| In most multiplayer games nowadays, the developer has one or more
| employees assigned to "manage" the subreddit or Discord for their
| game. Custom servers are often not even supported anymore, as
| matchmaking is used to funnel players into full games and keep
| them playing even if their friends log off for the night. You can
| forget about creating your own maps unless it's a special case
| like Halo's Forge mode; the developer/publisher has a great
| seasonal rollout plan that might never get realized if enough
| people don't keep playing the game (Say hi to Battlefield 2042!).
| Players need to see numbers go up so every game has an experience
| and leveling system first seen in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
| so that people don't realize how banal and limited the available
| content is. Cosmetics and boosts sprinkled over a battle pass
| system layer on top of this as another form of retention.
|
| What has changed in the last 25 years? Games, like everything
| else, became extremely monetized at all levels, and in the
| process, conditioned a lot of players to feel that they NEED that
| monetization or else it's "boring". Look at the reaction to Halo
| Infinite, a game that plays fantastic but has had limited
| map/content drops since last fall. Instead of praising the fact
| that you can ignore its battle pass entirely and just have fun
| playing a few games with friends every few nights, people are
| demanding to see their game time rewarded with more progression,
| more unlocks, etc.
| TheFreim wrote:
| > Custom servers are often not even supported anymore, as
| matchmaking is used to funnel players into full games and keep
| them playing even if their friends log off for the night.
|
| This is one of the primary reasons I still mainly play older
| games. I like being able to host servers with exactly the modes
| I like, or find servers that have them. Some of the best
| experiences I've had in online games has been on servers I've
| hosted for Halo (Trail AND Custom Edition). Nothing matches the
| feeling of logging on to your own or favorite server and
| playing with a mix of regulars and randoms, without servers
| it's impossible to build communities in the same way.
| sylens wrote:
| Is there a list of modern games that still support this?
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| see here https://nodecraft.com/games
| bombcar wrote:
| Factorio and Minecraft are two big ones I know of.
| vlan0 wrote:
| Lack of player generated content also killed it for me. My
| friends and I spent 1000s of hours playing custom CS and
| Warcraft III maps. And then 100s of hours playing custom Portal
| maps. Feels like there is nothing comparable to this today.
|
| Feels bad.
| the_only_law wrote:
| The one thing I was disappointed in with the AoE3 remaster
| was the old multiplayer, player created scenarios were not
| compatible and frankly you just don't see many custom
| scenario games anymore. Some were quite fun.
| imaginaryNumb3r wrote:
| The problem is that content-creation has become prohibitively
| laborious and expensive. Don't even think about creating a
| Battlefield level (or similar levels) without having a team of
| people working on it.
|
| 3D models aren't much better. You can easily re-texturing and
| create new content this way, but adding new models, animations
| and AI requires huge amount of polish to be somewhere near AAA
| quality.
|
| Of course I completely agree on the community aspect. Forums
| have been dying for a long time and left a vast graveyard of
| former communities. But this is mostly due to social media and
| how newer generations are using the internet. We have a
| continuing trend of centralization which has affected the
| gaming sector big time.
| Arrath wrote:
| Half-Life 1/Goldsrc was the golden age of modding, and I miss
| it dearly.
|
| Don't get me wrong, plenty of modern games have vibrant
| modding scenes (Minecraft, Starsector, Rimworld, Elder
| Scrolls, Fallout) but we don't see massive total conversions
| like we used to.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > but adding new models, animations and AI requires huge
| amount of polish to be somewhere near AAA qualities
|
| On too, I remember wanting to get into the modding scene for
| an game I loved to play.
|
| I did some research on the format used for 3D models and at
| the time the format was completely proprietary and supported
| only by software that costs tens of thousands of dollars most
| kidders probably don't have sitting around.
|
| The situation may be better nowadays, as I faintly recall the
| format being reverse engineered and supported on blender
| through plugins, but I may be created a hopeful fantasy.
| dudul wrote:
| One thing that wasn't mentioned: games were much harder before,
| by design to support the rental business. Devs had deals with
| game renters to make them hard enough that players would need
| more than 3hours to finish a game.
| matt_s wrote:
| I think a huge thing that is missed in the article is how players
| have influenced gaming. I like to think players brought cross-
| play to major games, maybe it was also studios but they wouldn't
| have pushed for it without players requesting it.
|
| For multiplayer games on the internet that is a huge thing that
| has shifted in 25 years. Its not every game or every platform but
| major online games allow cross-play whereas before you were
| basically locked into playing with only people on the same
| platform.
|
| Maybe there will be other things players want and studios will
| listen and implement in the next decade-ish?
| hulitu wrote:
| > 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Arrath wrote:
| 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.
| mook wrote:
| 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.
| Havoc wrote:
| >I don't know on which planet the author lives but my
| experience is a bit different
|
| Different country or socioeconomic situation perhaps? Don't
| think I've bought a physical game from a store in the last 10+
| years.
| cesarb wrote:
| 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).
| the_only_law wrote:
| Don't most of the consoles have their own store though?
| Like I thought you didn't have to purse the disk, you could
| go to the Xbox/PS/etc. store and just download the digital
| copy there.
| filoleg wrote:
| You are 100% correct. It made me essentially switch from
| all physical on consoles to "all digital, but physical
| for games I ended up liking a lot and would want to
| preserve/have it on my shelf". Mostly out of sheer
| convenience of not having to swap disks or look for them
| or having to dedicate space for them in my apt.
| StillBored wrote:
| 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.
| ajconway wrote:
| > 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| > you decide next time to avoid this company (EA) when buying
| games.
|
| 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?
| benibela wrote:
| My experience is like this:
|
| * 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)
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Graphics are extremely important for me for buying a game, yet
| the least important for actually playing a game. Sadly, it's been
| a long time since I've had time and interest to finish a game,
| most of them I rather just try out and never touch again after an
| hour of playing. For example, I bought Cyberpunk 2077 and Red
| Dead Redemption 2 when they came out and never played them - it
| was too much of a hassle, and even getting into a game like that
| takes too much time for me nowadays. I basically just tinker
| around with the graphics settings and enjoy the scenery.
|
| From time to time I fire up games like these again just to
| realize that I don't have the time to even get through the
| tutorial.
|
| To cut a long story short, there is unfortunately nowadays a huge
| divide between making a game that people buy and making a game
| that people play, and the bias is obviously towards the former.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I've seen posts like yours enough that I think there might be a
| market for Graphics Settings Simulator, where the entire game
| is just having a ludicrous number of settings to tweak and a
| small area to wander around and take screenshots of for posting
| on Reddit.
| becquerel wrote:
| That sounds a lot like AAA fatigue more than fatigue with games
| (if I can say that without sounding condescending). There's a
| wealth of good indie games out there with lovely graphics that
| respect your time.
|
| One that stands out in recent memory was A Short Hike. You can
| beat it in about an hour, and the scenery is very pleasing to
| look at. I also think of Journey, which might be one of the
| most beautiful games ever made, and is probably less than three
| hours long.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I've never been interested in indie games because their
| graphics is not appealing to me. I don't like stylized
| graphics, comic shaders, pixel art games, etc. The more
| realistic the graphics, the more likely I will buy it.
|
| I also don't think it's a fatigue, as if it were some kind of
| disease; it's just lack of time when you get older. ;-)
| nottorp wrote:
| > The more realistic the graphics, the more likely I will
| buy it.
|
| May I recommend some text adventures to cure you of that?
| :)
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Most of the games with great graphics are AAA, so you're
| stuck playing open world collect-a-thons, card drops
| sports, or looter shooters.
| bennysomething wrote:
| I bought Deus ex mankind divided a year or two ago (I don't
| play games much anymore) the number of mechanics to learn is
| just annoying and they don't add much. Everything feels so much
| clunkier and slower than the orginal.
|
| I recently installed the orginal , what a breath of fresh air.
| Just left to figure out levels yourself instead interruptions
| every step.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2
|
| Both of these are good examples of control schemes that are so
| complicated that it basically precludes me from playing
| anything else until I'm done with them. Otherwise, muscle
| memory will screw me to the point of frustration. I hate this
| part of modern games.
| psyc wrote:
| I couldn't discern a control scheme in RDR2. It was like
| Dragon's Lair. "Press J to execute this half-action/half-cut-
| scene. Now press P to execute this next one and advance this
| half-action/half-cut-scene. Now press comma. Now learn these
| arbitrary mechanics that only exist for this one
| mission....."
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > Both of these are good examples of control schemes that are
| so complicated
|
| Agreed on RDR2, but I didn't have a problem with Cyberpunk.
| In comparison to RDR2 it may as well have been the original
| NES Mario Bros.
| Arrath wrote:
| This is why I was very glad RDR2 always had on-screen prompts
| for the various controls since it was so often context
| sensitive and you were always riding a hair-thin line of
| waving at a townsperson and saying howdy, or drawing down and
| getting everyone really, really mad.
| nurbl wrote:
| It's weird to me that even games that seem focused on story,
| atmosphere and graphics with pretty simple gameplay - like
| "Control" or "Death Stranding" - can manage to over-complicate
| it with confusing menus, lots of micromanagement of upgrades,
| pointless subsystems, etc. I like both these games well enough
| but I don't think I will ever get through them simply because I
| don't play often enough to learn all the fiddling.
| Ruthalas wrote:
| My approach with control was to max out two skills (floating,
| throwing stuff) and ignore the rest of the systems almost
| entirely. I upgraded the single gun I used.
|
| Fortunately this was viable and the game doesn't punish you
| for not engaging with every facet of the varied
| upgrade/crafting/salvaging systems.
|
| So that may be an option if you'd like to complete it!
| louissan wrote:
| *eyes his daggerfall dosbox folder*
| unpopularopp wrote:
| (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.
| Levitz wrote:
| 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.
| kipchak wrote:
| 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.
| zbtaylor1 wrote:
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| 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.
| jlawson wrote:
| What game was it?
| the_only_law wrote:
| Humankind.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > 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).
| matt_s wrote:
| > MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality
|
| 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.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| > _MMOs are kinda dying_
|
| 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
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
| dgb23 wrote:
| 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.
| amlib wrote:
| 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.
| RektBoy wrote:
| Just an idea, let's add into EULA something like, you can't
| post guides and walkthroughs on the internet, or DMCA/lawsuit.
| matt_s wrote:
| 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.
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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.
| hhmc wrote:
| It's pretty straightforward to avoid spoilers if you don't
| want to be spoiled. Although I guess this depends on your
| social circles behaving to some extent.
| 0des wrote:
| Let's not
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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?
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| So you get Path of Exile instead, where the mechanics keep
| changing each "league" and you need to run a new "build" each
| time.
|
| 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.
| StillBored wrote:
| <i> but if you find one that's fun, it will likely be
| nerfed in the next league. </i>
|
| That is what I find infuriating about the game. They are
| constantly messing with the skills tree and even if it
| doesn't destroy my characters I don't want to go back and
| rebuild them everytime I log in. So, when I initially
| played it, I gave them money and logged in pretty regularly
| for 6 months or so, then I didn't log in for a couple
| months and they literally destroyed my character by
| removing the linkage to opposite sides of the skills tree I
| was using (yah granted that character felt way
| overpowered).
|
| If they were smart, they would version the skills tree at
| the point of character creation, so people in the general
| global world don't get messed up every time they want to
| change the league play strategy.
| jpadkins wrote:
| the game is designed around the assumption you don't play
| a character for more than 3 months (< 5% of the
| playerbase plays in standard). I agree they could do a
| better job setting expectations with new players to not
| get attached to their characters.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I've sunk more than 2000 hours into PoE, and spent a few
| hundred dollars to support the devs. I had gotten into a
| groove where I'd play the "fun" leagues and skip the
| stinkers (because they tend to alternate: great-broken-
| great-broken).
|
| I have almost no time for gaming these days, between work
| and family. I backed the new System Shock on Kickstarter
| years ago, and I probably won't get to play it.
| barrysteve wrote:
| 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.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > 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.
| maccard wrote:
| 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.
| ericdykstra wrote:
| RTS has always been my preferred competitive genre. Yes,
| basic build orders are pretty well mapped out. In Starcraft
| 2, for example, the first 1:30 or so for beginners, the
| first 3-4 minutes for intermediate players, and the first
| 8-9 minutes for pros have "standard" build orders.
|
| But once you get past this, there's so many things to worry
| about - balancing tech versus units versus upgrades versus
| economy, micro, scouting, unit composition, harassing and
| defending harass... And then the meta layer, which is
| allocating your limited time and APM to those decisions and
| actions! Really challenging and rewarding to improve at,
| and the only "e-sport" I find interesting to watch.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Ok fair enough, though to me personally, I'm not very
| excited by or immersed in chess games either. I've trended
| more towards grand strategy in recent years, which on the
| surface seem to be closer to what I'm looking for, but in
| practice often end up being me just trying to min/max
| modifiers for RNG rolls.
| maccard wrote:
| Totally fair - it's a pity that how RTS games are
| presented Vs how they play is very different. I was going
| to say grand strategy games are probably more what you're
| looking for. I'm a fan of stellaris and the total war
| games, and they do lend themselves to min maxing but
| fatless so than many other games!
| wincy wrote:
| Yeah I mean I totally get it. I've been playing a lot of
| Stellaris lately and want an emergent fun story of being
| a space empire. Once it feels like I'm playing a
| simulation I get bored and look for something new.
|
| I've started playing tabletop role playing games and
| being interested in those lately because of this. Really
| I want to tell interesting stories.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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.
| PetitPrince wrote:
| > 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".
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > 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.
| yetihehe wrote:
| 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".
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I thought that detailing my efforts was a clear
| illustration of my willingness, but ok.
| yurishimo wrote:
| As a more charitable take, I think they mean that the
| devs at ESO know that only an upper echelon of players
| are willing to maximize their builds and they're okay
| with some players falling off the edges.
|
| I agree that it's shitty.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Exactly this. Not everyone can be in upper echelons. I'm
| pretty bad at any competitive game I've tried, even one
| I've created myself 5 minutes ago (I've lost to a
| colleague on a tiktactoe game on a graph I've invented
| when I was learning about graphs in university).
|
| What I meant with my comment: some players play for fun.
| Some players play to win and make a competition out of
| any game. Being the best requires some degree of rule-
| breaking which makes a game less fun. Not every player
| actually wants to compete in ways that are not fun but
| required to win a game.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > Now a lot of games just want to be big
|
| 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.)
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Another settlement needs our help!
| georgeecollins wrote:
| 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.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| 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.
| dgb23 wrote:
| That's mainstream games.
|
| 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.
| tinco wrote:
| 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?
| dgb23 wrote:
| Aside from having secret corners and areas it definitely
| has replay value, because it is just so damn good. Like you
| would replay some of the Mario games, just to enjoy it one
| more time, do things differently, better, and maybe find
| some new tricks and so on.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| 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.
| the8472 wrote:
| Here's a nice illustration of mechanics vs. graphics.
| https://twitter.com/robotduck/status/759529875992698880
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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.
| aconbere wrote:
| Hmmm, the author of the tweet goes into more detail later
| in the thread. In this case their point wasn't so much
| about adding decoration but about lying to the player about
| the danger.
|
| The game is presenting one thing "this is very dangerous
| you could slip and fall and die at any minute!" while the
| mechanics are saying another thing "There is no danger just
| a linear path".
|
| It's not that the author thinks we should remove decoration
| but that the decoration should be authentic to the
| situation the player is is in.
|
| If the game is presenting danger, BE DANGEROUS! If the game
| is presenting anxiety, BE STRESSFUL! But this in between of
| presenting danger without the play mirroring the experience
| is disengenuous.
| eterevsky wrote:
| > The previous generation stares at the current one with disgust
|
| Is this really happening to video games? I suppose I can think of
| some old-school gamers disapproving of Fortnight, but I believe
| anyone would be disgusted with ALL the modern video games. They
| are simply too diverse. There are modern games created for every
| possible taste. Whatever your favorite video game from the 90s
| did well, there are modern video games that do it better.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > Graphics do not really matter. Do they?
|
| > The quality of the graphics seems to be the most important
| point in a game.
|
| > However, let's not be assertive: there are still a lot of
| players, usually not the casual ones, who also consider
| playability, the scenario, and how much time you need to finish
| it, the presence of a multiplayer mode... to evaluate a game
| completely and fairly.
|
| I have a gap of around 10 years in my videogame playing history.
| After resuming, the difference that struck me the most is how
| immersive videogames are nowadays (of course, there are many
| factors, e.g. the genre), which is partly due to graphics
| advancements.
|
| Graphics don't live in the void though. They're part of the art
| design and they're a mean of expression; overall, they help
| providing an immersive experience for the player.
|
| Beautiful graphics also are not relegated to AAA 3D games (which
| are a narrow segment of the market) like one would think (since
| AAA games have the most exposure to casual readers/gamers); many
| indie games have beautiful (in different ways) graphics.
|
| > "Oh, it is so ugly", "They did not age well" for the more
| diplomats.
|
| I think I've never read this, referring to graphics. In general
| the aging refers to game mechanics which that considered annoying
| and obsolete today, e.g. permadeath (where not intended), lack of
| convenient checkpoints etc.
| rhdunn wrote:
| Early 3D graphics clearly fit the "haven't aged well" category.
| Most of that is due to the low polygon count making the models
| look angular.
| tpxl wrote:
| >> "Oh, it is so ugly", "They did not age well" for the more
| diplomats. > I think I've never read this, referring to
| graphics
|
| The games that tried to have realistic graphics with the best
| the tech had to offer 15 years ago have definitely aged badly
| (Crysis 1, Fallout 3). Compare that to highly stylized graphics
| that didn't push the envelope, and still look good today (Team
| fortress 2).
|
| That being said, I'm of the opinion that modern AAA titles
| spend _waaaaaay_ too much effort (money) on graphics.
| 0des wrote:
| I went through this recently when I played some early Saturn
| games and its crazy how much either time or the primitive
| nature of the time allowed your brain to fill in the gaps
| where graphics fell short.
|
| On the bright side maybe my next computer can run crysis.
| [deleted]
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > 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.
| atomicUpdate wrote:
| > 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.
|
| A few hundred hours is an insane amount of time to spend on a
| game where much of the fun was "destroyed".
| 0des wrote:
| 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
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| PC Gaming Wiki on the subject: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/w
| iki/SimCity_2000#Installing_on...
| 0des wrote:
| Ah great, you found the lengthy patch process I spoke
| about. In Wine it is more complex and in the end did not
| work.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| My bad, when you said "lengthy" I assumed you meant
| something more complicated than "install this game
| normally and then run this single patch executable". And
| you never mentioned Wine.
| 0des wrote:
| What can I say, I am my mother's father.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://theandrewbailey.com/article/122/SimCity-2000
| jameshart wrote:
| 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.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| do you play.. or are just played with? choose.
|
| anyway, my favorite.. after maaaaany attempts, the recent true-
| to-original remake:
|
| http://loderunnerwebgame.com/game/
| wazoox wrote:
| Wow, thank you, that's a hell of a blast from the past.
| gsatic wrote:
| Not sure where I heard this but games apparently, on a total
| revenue basis, rake in more than all other categories of software
| combined.
|
| That was no were close to true back in the day.
| bluescrn wrote:
| But it's incredibly hit-driven and while the biggest hits rake
| in billions, the majority of games make a loss, especially
| indie games.
|
| The market is becoming incredibly tough with so much high-
| quality entertainment available for very little money via Game
| Pass, PS Plus, Steam sales, indie bundles, etc. And that's
| ignoring the F2P side of things.
| maccard wrote:
| To be fair, the vast majority of games on steam, iOS and
| Android are shovelware and asset flips. The barrier to entry
| to publishing on these platforms is $99, so it's not
| surprising that the majority are not profitable. There's only
| so many times I will play a passion project 2 person
| metroidvania with roguelike mechanics before I start to look
| for something else.
| ido wrote:
| Also more than music, movies and books.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Not a perfect comparison, but Microsoft has higher revenue that
| entire video games industry across the globe (not perfect,
| because MS also has some game dev revenue, and is also selling
| hardware and consulting, so not all of its money come fron non-
| games software).
| majani wrote:
| He probably meant that games dwarf the rest of the
| entertainment industry now.
| sQEjOG4eEBcsVwU wrote:
| The biggest change that I personally mourn is the death of cheat
| codes in games. They're all but nonexistent these days, and if
| you want even the most reasonable gameplay tweaks you have to
| hope it's both on PC, and mod friendly enough.
| ki_ wrote:
| personally i find game DESIGN utterly bad these days. It's all so
| dumbed down also. Mainly talking about online games, because
| that's the only ones i play. I also find myself keep going back
| to old games and not new ones. I just find them better.
| notafraudster wrote:
| > 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.
| mcphage wrote:
| > The purple stuff in The Langoliers.
|
| I dunno, I think the Langoliers are still creepy. Yeah, a
| little low poly--but they got it where it counts.
| willis936 wrote:
| 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.
| amlib wrote:
| I was deathly scared of these things when I watched this
| movie as a kid, couldn't sleep well that night. So it was
| definitionally effective.
| bnralt wrote:
| > 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.
| notafraudster wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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).
| islon wrote:
| 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.
| DaveSapien wrote:
| Here here.
| christophilus wrote:
| Pedantry: "Hear, hear!" is the phrase, unless you're
| pointing to a specific location. :)
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I'll quibble a bit ...
|
| > 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.
| notafraudster wrote:
| 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.
| gabereiser wrote:
| 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.
| bennysomething wrote:
| Genuine question what is offset mapping and what would I see
| in Goldeneye showing this?
| Thlom wrote:
| Wow. Turok, that's a game I played to death back in the N64
| days. Haven't really thought about it since. This brought
| back a ton of nostalgia!
| amlib wrote:
| Are you talking about affine transformation vs perspective
| correct texture mapping? Because the n64 for sure had the
| later, and ps1 the former.
| midnightclubbed wrote:
| I was confused by this too. N64 texture mapping hardware
| has the same capabilities of current generation GPUs -
| perspective correction, automatic mip-level selection,
| bilinear/trilinear interpolation.
|
| The blurriness on the N64 was down to the hardware
| requiring each texture fit into a 4KB cache (and games
| using low resolution video output to control pixel fill-
| rate).
|
| The texture unit on the N64 is really powerful but the 4KB
| size limit and additional usage restrictions leads to its
| signature look:
|
| - If you want texture repeats/wraps/clamps the texture
| dimensions must be power of 2.
|
| - If you want mip-maps then you halve the size of the most
| detailed texture mip.
|
| - If you want detail textures then you halve again (I
| think, bit fuzzy on that mode).
|
| - If you want to use a color lookup (from 4 or 8bit pixel
| values) then the LUT takes 2 of your 4KB, even for 4bit
| pixels.
|
| Most of the pixel formats have options for 1 or 4 bits of
| transparency, but transparent pixels render at half speed
| (and the alpha bits further eat into your 4KB limit).
|
| For something like Goldeneye you are likely going to use as
| many 4 or 8bit mip-mapped, repeating, greyscale textures as
| possible (64x64 or 64x32) and use vertex tinting to add
| color. Everything will look a little monochromatic but you
| will be controlling blurriness as best you can!
|
| On early 3d games the art team would spend enormous amounts
| of time hand tweaking individual pixels and carefully
| specifying texture formats per texture in order to get the
| most detail out of the available resolution. It wasn't all
| bad though, they had a couple orders of magnitude fewer
| textures to produce (than a current generation game) and
| their polygon counts were 2-3 orders of magnitude lower
| too!
| amlib wrote:
| Such a shame the SGI engineers didn't try allocating more
| silicon to that tiny texture memory, this is perhaps (not
| an expert so don't quote me) the biggest bottleneck and
| annoying constraint in the system. It gets even crazier
| when you compare how much space the VI filter/blur takes
| on the silicon, removing it could easily allow for double
| the cache memory.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Thank you for spending the time to write this fantastic
| comment.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Budgets. $500k was enough for dev and marketing of a licensed
| Nintendo GBA title circa 2004. But the return was higher
| probability, if the game was high quality, popular IP. Now, you
| could produce an indie VR title for approx $100k. And expect a
| return in $1M gross sales. But it probably requires more luck.
| Marketing to a niche, or popular IP. It's just kinda the
| fragmentation of the channels. How folks divide attention now.
| And skyrocketing costs of specialized industry talent:
| environment art, gpu shader programming, metahumans etc ;)
| bombcar wrote:
| Super Mario 3 cost something like 800k (in those dollars) to
| make - and had a 25 million dollar marketing campaign
| associated with it.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Holy guacamole, even I didn't expect these numbers! I'd say
| $25M well spent, and those old nintendo reveals still hold up
| ;)
|
| In the United States alone, the game had generated
| $595,000,000 (equivalent to $1,230,000,000 in 2021) in
| revenue for Nintendo by early 1992,[20] exceeding the gross
| revenue of the films E.T. (1982), Batman (1989) and Jurassic
| Park (1993)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._3#Sales
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Same-screen multiplayer is nearly gone. This dramatically changed
| how video games are experienced and enjoyed.
| Arrath wrote:
| Halo: Infinite not having splitscreen co-op is a crime, imo.
| christkv wrote:
| The massive amount of time you have to invest in any new game
| haunter wrote:
| That's debatable. People bring this all the time up but older
| games were massive too especially if you played any
| RPG/cRPG/JRPG. Baldur's Gate took me a summer vacation time to
| beat back then, easily 100 hours or more. But that's just one
| example.
|
| It's more like a generation grew up and they have less time
| now.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| Agreed and to extend this further I wonder how the current
| summer vacation eligible demo spends their time compared to
| how "we" did?
|
| I don't have the statistics handy (maybe someone does and can
| link them) so won't speculate but...do "kids" today spend the
| same relative amount of time playing games "we" did?
|
| Seems fairly safe to assume they have alternative ways to
| spend their time (tiktok/current social media flavor of the
| day etc.) but not sure if that's the case or not.
| sylens wrote:
| I would hazard a guess that they do, but it is on games
| like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite
| imtringued wrote:
| I've played GBA games with ROM sizes of 16MB to 32MB that
| took 40 hours to finish.
| becquerel wrote:
| Really depends on the game. There's plenty of smallscale indies
| out there you can knock out in an evening and have a satisfying
| time with.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think I read the same comment differently, and now I'm not
| sure what the original intent was.
|
| I read it as:
|
| 25 years ago I had lots of time to invest in games.
|
| But, the other, more likely, interpretation is that you need
| to invest large amounts of time I to games these days.
|
| Like you, I disagree with the latter. I find the former
| interpretation resonates strongly though.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Only true for certain genres, which has pretty much always been
| true. There does seem to be an obsession around "content"/$
| with a lot of today's gamers though, that leads to a bunch of
| relatively vapid 100hr+ open-world games that frankly all kinda
| feel like the same game, but again even that is same-as-it-
| ever-was if you recall when everything was a DOOM clone.
|
| I'm quite pleased that today's game market has allowed for a
| wide variety of small, often fairly short, games with lots of
| experimentation.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Before everything was a DOOM clone, everything was a
| platformer. Before that, everything was a shmup or
| Galaxian/Space Invaders clone. Before that, everything was a
| copy of Pong. Before that, everything was pinball.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > that leads to a bunch of relatively vapid 100hr+ open-world
| games that frankly all kinda feel like the same game
|
| And the on occasion you get something that looks like it can
| shake up the genre, but turns out to be an over promised
| scam.
|
| But yeah, the whole open world, survival genre has exploded.
| Notable, Valheim was fun, but I felt like it could use a bit
| more variety on content.
| 0des wrote:
| Also stop preventing me from skipping cut scenes and dialogue!
| arriu wrote:
| With all the advances in AI, I'd expect to be able to walk up to
| an NPC and just talk to it. No pre scripted options, just traits,
| background story, and inventories... let the AI figure it out
| from there.
|
| For example, mass effect without the 4 pre-canned options during
| each dialogue.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Don't expect that to soon. Language models are still really bad
| at having any kind of purpose to the text they generate. It
| just meanders around a theme with no ultimate point, which is
| to be expected given that they don't have any purpose other
| than producing plausible sounding text (unlike writers who
| typically are seeking to convey something in their texts, even
| if it's a banal message like "the game continues only if you go
| to the left").
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Can't be long now with the recent advances in LLMs.
| Havoc wrote:
| >"Creativity has gone". Black and White (2001) and Spores (2008)
| are perfect counterexamples.
|
| Bit strange having to reach back 20+ years in a 25 year review to
| prove "recent" examples of creativity.
|
| Game devs do seem to stick to tried & tested formulas especially
| with AAA titles which are major financial bets.
|
| e.g. If you compare overwatch and say DotA. The one is a 1st
| person shooter the other a RTS engine. Yet conceptually they're
| identical. ~5 a side lane push mechanics with two tanks, two dps
| and a healer with each having unique but complementary abilities
| to emphasize teamwork and coordination. CSGO, TF2, League
| etc...same thing over and over
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| Hm. Lol and dota are the same, overwatch is TF2 meets lol+dota,
| and tf2 is CS with classes. There's a spectrum connecting
| everything you've mentioned, but dota and cs are definitely
| different enough.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Tf2 is casual quake and has little relation to CS.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >Game devs do seem to stick to tried & tested formulas
| especially with AAA titles which are major financial bets
|
| Because that's what makes the most consistent, safest money.
| That's really all there is to it. When a marginal improvement
| on an existing series prints you more money than investing in a
| risky new IP, of course innovation takes a backseat.
|
| By comparison, aside from personal interest, indies don't have
| any existing series to draw from, and competing with an
| existing series on aspects they will most definitely beat you
| is a bad idea to begin with. At the same time, most popular
| indies suffer from staying in their lane too, continuing to
| pump out similar style games, as they notice the same issues.
| People making RPGs continue to make RPGs, people making
| platformers continue making platformers, etc.
|
| And in a twist of irony, this is what developers _should_ be
| doing anyway. Experiment with spin-off games, iterate on your
| main line games. The only problem with this pattern is the
| humongous number of games this would create, in a market which
| is already very cutthroat.
| stryan wrote:
| > If you compare overwatch and say DotA. The one is a 1st
| person shooter the other a RTS engine. Yet conceptually they're
| identical. ~5 a side lane push mechanics with two tanks, two
| dps and a healer with each having unique but complementary
| abilities to emphasize teamwork and coordination.
|
| Conceptually identical is a pretty strong claim there.
| Overwatch has no concept or equivalent to the various RPG-style
| mechanics in MOBAs (e.g farming, items, XP, shops) while DOTA2
| only has a single match type (i.e. no Assault vs Push vs etc)
| and significantly less mechanically demanding gameplay (barring
| a few micro-intensive characters like Meepo or Brood). Hell,
| I'm not sure if I'd claim OW even has lanes instead of flank
| routes (compare an Overwatch lane to a CS lane) and the
| majority of DOTA supports aren't even healers (maybe 5ish?)
|
| I feel like we often do this with video games, comparing
| aspects that are very low level to the game and are often just
| a part of being interactive pieces of media. Would chess to
| checkers and be conceptually identical? They're both board
| games and involve the same base mechanics (move pieces across
| the board, capture enemy pieces). And if they are, would that
| make one of them a worse game? Should we have not made checkers
| since we already had chess?
| haunter wrote:
| 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
| aceazzameen wrote:
| 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.
| pradn wrote:
| Absolutely, with oft-cited examples being the incredible
| pixel art of Chrono Trigger and the cel-shaded style of
| Okami.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| 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.
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| wernercd wrote:
| To me, graphics are like money.
|
| 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.
| 0x202020 wrote:
| Yes Pokemon 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.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >And the Switch is not a bad hardware
|
| It's a bit long in the tooth. It's a 5+ year old Tegra chip.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Switch is more powerful than PS3.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I love the inconclusive conclusion!
|
| >Conclusion: There is not conclusion. I will let the reader to
| its own because everything, in art, is subjective.
| Udo wrote:
| Bad gateway error
| unwind wrote:
| Yeah, me too. Here [1] is the Google cache result, that might
| help.
|
| [1]:
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Rz5tzz...
| mikerg87 wrote:
| The nature of bug fixes, overall quality and DLC have changed
| dramatically.
|
| In the old days discovery of fixes was often who you knew and the
| means by which a game studio provided fixes. sometimes it was a
| BBS, sometimes it was AOL or Compuserve. You might not be able to
| win or get to the next level because of a bug and not even know
| it.
|
| Now the games has built in system that grabs fixes/updates right
| off the internet. Often automatically. Which has lead to games
| being in some ways poorly constructed and with the idea "we can
| ship another version later"
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