We're just as long away from OG Bioshock as Goldeneye 64 was from Contra

uncleslappy

uncleslappy

nethack is my favorite dark souls clone
Bioshock released ten years ago this year. This is the same amount of time between Goldeneye 64 (1997) and Contra (1987) on the NES.

Ten years between them, yet it seems so different. The advances in gaming between 1987 and 1997 feel monumental. But 2007 to 2017 doesn't feel that different. Bioshock 1 could release tomorrow with updated textures and probably get the same review scores it got ten years ago.

Not sure what my point is. But time sure is a son of a bitch isn't it?
 
Past two gens of consoles were stagnated due to the poor economy right? I'd imagine tech would've advanced faster and new consoles would be here much sooner if the economy didn't collapse right after ps3 and Xbox 360 were released.

If that never would have happened we'd be halfway into the PS5 gen right now. Or I could know nothing.
 
Scrawnton said:
Past two gens of consoles were stagnated due to the poor economy right? I'd imagine tech would've advanced faster and new consoles would be here much sooner if the economy didn't collapse right after ps3 and Xbox 360 were released.

If that never happened we'd be halfway into the PS5 gen right now. Or I could know nothing
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i don't think it has anything to do with the economy, and i wouldn't even call it "stagnation"... ps3 and 360 were overpowered behemoths for their time.

though i guess you could argue economy is a factor in that nobody wanted to spend $500 on a powerhouse console when gen 8 started. but i'd say most were still content with gen 7 so the demand just wasn't there
 
It's not surprising that super primitive tech in the 2D era feels a lot different than 3D games.

tbh, going from Mario 1 to Mario World, despite the latter being a better game, didn't feel like a monumental jump because they were both 2D platformers with the same basic concepts and some of the same enemies. But the jump to another dimension is obviously going to feel different.

Fundamentally, BioShock didn't feel like a different kind of game than Goldeneye, 10 years prior. Atmospherically, yes, but they're 3D FPS games, and BioShock was not known for having amazing gameplay or a big jump in gameplay either.
 
Scrawnton said:
Past two gens of consoles were stagnated due to the poor economy right? I'd imagine tech would've advanced faster and new consoles would be here much sooner if the economy didn't collapse right after ps3 and Xbox 360 were released.

If that never would have happened we'd be halfway into the PS5 gen right now. Or I could know nothing.
Click to expand...

Not really, no. It's just diminishing returns.
No matter how strong the economy is, you wouldn't end up with a technological leap as great as the one from 87 to 97, or from 77 to 87 before it.

It takes exponentially greater power to produce results that feel like tangible improvements as tech matures.
 
No switch from 2D to 3D game like before + Diminishing Returns + Mostly bankrupt creatively AAA games = getting the same games over and over for a decade now.

It's an hyperbole statement I know but I'd say that there is maybe some thruth in what I'm saying. And yes I know there is indie games but let's be real, It's the AAA games that shapes the generations.

There is also VR games but it's not there yet.
 
Manmademan said:
Not really, no. It's just diminishing returns.
No matter how strong the economy is, you wouldn't end up with a technological leap as great as the one from 87 to 97.
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Yep. Just diminishing returns as graphics get better and silicon based CPU technology has started to stagnate. We probably won't get those kind of huge jumps until there's new computer chip technology that improves the speed of advancement in processing power at a faster rate again.
 
Serrato said:
No switch from 2D to 3D game like before + Diminishing Returns + Mostly bankrupt creatively AAA games = getting the same games over and over for a decade now.

It's an hyperbole statement I know but I'd say that there is maybe some thruth in what I'm saying.
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There's not. Some of you just have short memories and forget the "creatively bankrupt" and straight-up bad games of the 90s and 2000s.
 
Yeah, I always get depressed thinking about how I wasn't into NES collection while working at Game Crazy during college. I mean, we actually had them in the store like nothing. Like it was no big deal. Of course, the prime time to collect was probably 5 years sooner than that.

I miss the era of games where you bought a system, bought the game release, and that as the end of the story. People like to pick this sentiment apart, call it nostalgia, but new systems have too many low quality parts, too complicated computers in them, or something, along with functioning as early access machines. Really hope someone makes a successful new retro style enthusiast console that plays today's best indie games in a definitive physical form.

The way famicom or SNES games just work, even today decades later, is something I'll always respect and idealize. The Gameboy Advance may be the end console from that era, in that it's hardy, you pop the games in and they just work. Very collectible in that regard. I want a new console like that, with games like CRAWL, Duck Game, Speed Runners, Spelunky, etc
 
Polioliolio said:
Yeah, I always get depressed thinking about how I wasn't into NES collection while working at Game Crazy during college. I mean, we actually had them in the store like nothing. Like it was no big deal. Of course, the prime time to collect was probably 5 years sooner than that.

I miss the era of games where you bought a system, bought the game release, and that as the end of the story. People like to pick this sentiment apart, call it nostalgia, but new systems have too many low quality parts, too complicated computers in them, or something, along with functioning as early access machines. Really hope someone makes a successful new retro style enthusiast console that plays today's best indie games in a definitive physical form.

The way famicom or SNES games just work, even today decades later, is something I'll always respect and idealize. The Gameboy Advance may be the end console from that era, in that it's hardy, you pop the games in and they just work. Very collectible in that regard. I want a new console like that, with games like CRAWL, Duck Game, Speed Runners, Spelunky, etc
Click to expand...

I think you're letting nostalgia get to you more than just a bit.

NES carts were notorious for not working due to the design of the system. Even taking perfect care of your games and NES, you'd inevitably end up with NES blowjobs and blinking blue screens trying to get your game to work.

Game testing and localization also didn't have a fraction of the care put into it. Janky localizations and game busting bugs were just something you had to put up with if nobody caught them...which is how we got the bizarrely high difficulty of 7th Saga and the sketch bug in FF3 that could corrupt your entire game without warning.

D grade shovelware was EVERYWHERE despite games being drastically more expensive, and in the absence of the internet publishers would put up flat out lies on the game boxes because they knew they'd never get called out. Karate Champ NES had screenshots of Karate Champ ARCADE on the box.

The modern era isn't perfect, but I don't think going back to the tech and practices of the 8 and 16 bit eras would be an improvement.
 
Aeana said:
There's a thread calling the DS and Wii retro, too.

I can't handle this.
Click to expand...

Wanna feel really old?

https://www.xkcd.com/1686/
feel_old.png
Click to expand...


This one's worse since it's from six years ago.
https://www.xkcd.com/891/
movie_ages.png
Click to expand...
 
Manmademan said:
I think you're letting nostalgia get to you more than just a bit.

NES carts were notorious for not working due to the design of the system. Even taking perfect care of your games and NES, you'd inevitably end up with NES blowjobs and blinking blue screens trying to get your game to work.

Game testing and localization also didn't have a fraction of the care put into it. Janky localizations and game busting bugs were just something you had to put up with if nobody caught them...which is how we got the bizarrely high difficulty of 7th Saga and the sketch bug in FF3 that could corrupt your entire game without warning.

D grade shovelware was EVERYWHERE despite games being drastically more expensive, and in the absence of the internet publishers would put up flat out lies on the game boxes because they knew they'd never get called out. Karate Champ NES had screenshots of Karate Champ ARCADE on the box.

The modern era isn't perfect, but I don't think going back to the tech and practices of the 8 and 16 bit eras would be an improvement.
Click to expand...

Hell, let's look at stuff "just working" from the past:

nPIzaDq.gif


oCAeewl.jpg


TRP4B3Z.png


This is coming from someone who has great memories from then, but people forget a lot of the bad. I had more trouble with the Disc Read Error in the PS2 days than I ever have from a console now.

The NES days were filled with people having their own "techniques" for inserting cartridges.


SScorpio said:
Wanna feel really old?




This one's worse since it's from six years ago.
Click to expand...

timeghost.png
 
Diminishing returns. I think games, mechanically, reached the peak last gen, and now we're just getting more of the same, and I think it'll be like this for a very, very long time.
 
I'm hoping the next big jump comes in the form of things like ultra realistic fluid dynamics and destructibility. I'd be more than happy with what we currently have graphically if the new power in future consoles allowed for more realistic interaction.
 
here's a pretty sad fact that is reality now:

the time between the first and last F-Zero games is now less than the time between the last F-Zero game and the present.

(in the west. in japan this becomes reality next year since the original F-Zero released one year eariler there)
 
120v said:
i don't think it has anything to do with the economy, and i wouldn't even call it "stagnation"... ps3 and 360 were overpowered behemoths for their time.

though i guess you could argue economy is a factor in that nobody wanted to spend $500 on a powerhouse console when gen 8 started. but i'd say most were still content with gen 7 so the demand just wasn't there
Click to expand...
PS3/360 were overpowered behemoths. But the other side of the coin is that PS4/X1/Wii U are some of the most conservative consoles ever released, relative to the hardware that was available at the time.

360 and PS3 were both, in some respects, more advanced than anything you could get on PC at the time. 360's GPU was the first unified shader architecture ever released. And of course Cell CPU was ridiculously powerful.

If 360/PS3 had been designed with the same budget as PS4/X1, it would've probably been something like a dual-core Atom CPU + GeForce 7600 GS.
 
Theslammer said:
Hell, let's look at stuff "just working" from the past:

nPIzaDq.gif


oCAeewl.jpg


TRP4B3Z.png


This is coming from someone who has great memories from then, but people forget a lot of the bad. I had more trouble with the Disc Read Error in the PS2 days than I ever have from a console now.

The NES days were filled with people having their own "techniques" for inserting cartridges.
Click to expand...

exactly. whenever I hear this complaint I wonder if these people ever actually owned a NES and all of the headaches that came with it, or if every NES game they ever played was via emulators using walkthroughs.
 
Manmademan said:
exactly. whenever I hear this complaint I wonder if these people ever actually owned a NES and all of the headaches that came with it, or if every NES game they ever played was via emulators using walkthroughs.
Click to expand...

It's either that or people simply remember the high points and forget the low points, which is a normal thing to happen. Because I remember clear as day all the problems I had during those times, and then down the line with the long load times of the PS1 era, the disc read error in the PS2 days, the game-breaking bugs in Enter the Matrix, the red ring of death, etc. etc.
 
shark sandwich said:
PS3/360 were overpowered behemoths. But the other side of the coin is that PS4/X1/Wii U are some of the most conservative consoles ever released, relative to the hardware that was available at the time.

360 and PS3 were both, in some respects, more advanced than anything you could get on PC at the time. 360's GPU was the first unified shader architecture ever released. And of course Cell CPU was ridiculously powerful.

If 360/PS3 had been designed with the same budget as PS4/X1, it would've probably been something like a dual-core Atom CPU + GeForce 7600 GS.
Click to expand...

they are also the reason Nintendo pulled something like the Wii. the insane prices of those HD consoles were impossible to reach for Nintendo.

i bet Nintendo would have tried to match them graphically if they used a PS4/XB1 budget and design style since that would have been within their budget (well at least partially. it seems like motion controls would have happened anyway)

also, the insanity of the budget for 360/PS3 in a way resulted in the conservative current gen. maybe if they didn't go all in as hard as they did, that gen would have lasted shorter since there wouldn't have been a reason to extend it for so long to recoup losses and the tech would have been oudated a lot sooner, necessitating a new gen in the usual 5 year schedule. with that we'd be on the gen after PS4/XB1 at this point in time most likely too.
 
Madao said:
here's a pretty sad fact that is reality now:

the time between the first and last F-Zero games is now less than the time between the last F-Zero game and the present.

(in the west. in japan this becomes reality next year since the original F-Zero released one year eariler there)
Click to expand...
youmakemesad.gif :(
 
Wow I remember downloading the demo and loving it. Can't believe it's been 10 years. Game didn't really keep the quality of the demo up sadly but I still enjoyed it.
 
IdreamofHIME said:
Did you even read the OP?
It's not about 'time', it's about how the industry has slowed to a snails pace over the last two gens.

You kids and your +1s.
Click to expand...
I wish GAF would ban these lazy drive-by responses. It's so rude when OP tries to spark a thoughtful discussion, then some douche comes along and tries to reduce it to some black-and-white issue that can be answered in 1-2 words.

Anyway to stay on topic, I think some of it is due to the fact that budget is becoming the limiting factor.

If you have, say, a $5 million budget, what you can build for a 7th gen system vs an 8th gen system won't be all that dramatically different. It takes an insane amount of time and effort to really push modern hardware to its limits.

And is it really worth it? Look at Mass Effect Andromeda. It's getting endlessly mocked and ridiculed for some awkward animations and glitches. Whereas Persona 5 has production values that are orders of magnitude less, it looks like a mid-tier PS3 game at best, and yet critics went nuts for it.
 
The one that always gets me is there was more time between twilight princess and twilight princess hd than there was between ocarina and TP.
 
The reality is we're getting quite old. We've seen some of gaming's most iconic changes in our lifetimes.
 
In a way I suppose it's nice not having games date as quickly, it means you don't need a pair of rose tinted goggles to revisit a lot of 360 games. Games really figured out their shit in 2007, it's been small refinements /improvements since
 
This is a picture that I often look at to make me feel better about myself...

qrfjw5R.jpg
.


I don't know if OP's right that if Bioshock was re-released it'd probably get near the scores it got from reviewers as when it was first released. I mean, Bioshock on 360 got huge scores and the collection wasn't too high up there, although it did get some pretty good scores. That might be due to the "package value" of the collection though.

I mean, I guess innovation and drastic changes have slowed down dramatically, but I think they're getting "better" at making games. Like... I don't think Machine Games' Wolfenstein: The New Order does anything drastically "new" compared to Bioshock, but I think it's a much, much better game. I think TitanFall 2 and Doom are much much better than Bioshock, too, but... I guess I don't know what my point is either. This is your fault!

I suppose until something comes along that catches on and is a really big innovation, we're going to have to get used to games further splintering off into more and more sub-genres. (Man, I just rambled on about... I don't even know. I feel real dumb now, I need a beer...)

All I know is: There is now less time for my burrito to be done in the microwave than when I left the kitchen to get on the compooter.
 
The technology has reached the stage that far more is now achievable. Up til the second or third gen of 3D consoles developers were forced into using certain visual styles and game design styles. Now the limit is sort of the imagination, although I await GTAX with intelligent AI creating the story for you on the fly and a city or world filled with possibilities.... that's the only big change to come is the super advancement of systems like that, probably relying on cloud computing. Graphics will inch ever closer to photorealism, should you want that, but virtually anything is possible now visually whereas in 97 it definitely wasn't and you had limits to what could be done.
 
shark sandwich said:
I wish GAF would ban these lazy drive-by responses. It's so rude when OP tries to spark a thoughtful discussion, then some douche comes along and tries to reduce it to some black-and-white issue that can be answered in 1-2 words.

Anyway to stay on topic, I think some of it is due to the fact that budget is becoming the limiting factor.

If you have, say, a $5 million budget, what you can build for a 7th gen system vs an 8th gen system won't be all that dramatically different. It takes an insane amount of time and effort to really push modern hardware to its limits.

And is it really worth it? Look at Mass Effect Andromeda. It's getting endlessly mocked and ridiculed for some awkward animations and glitches. Whereas Persona 5 has production values that are orders of magnitude less, it looks like a mid-tier PS3 game at best, and yet critics went nuts for it.
Click to expand...

Indeed.

Time, budgeting and manpower are becoming more limiting factors for games than the actual technology at this point. Which is ironic for me personally, as my main fear was that the current gen consoles would be too weak to offer a major leap in visuals or performance compared to last gen due to lack of interest in expensive/loss leading boxes.

I would love to get industry insight into what devs would do with, say, a PS5/Xbox 2 that matches today's high end PCs (i7 or Ryzen 7 paired with a 1080ti, for instance). And more specifically, whether they think they WOULD get a chance to do it. Doubt we'd ever hear about it, though.
 
RPGamer92 said:
They're 2 gens old now so...
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It's interesting to think about. We're 3 1/2ish years into this generation. So going to 2003, we were the same amount of time into the PS2 generation (or 2002 if you include the Dreamcast and go back to 1999, which is probably more accurate), and at that point, the Genesis/SNES were retro and I don't think many people debated that or felt it was weird to say that. I was posting on a ton of boards at that point, and I remember a lot of debates/conversations, but not people shocked that the SNES/Genesis were considered retro.

Part of it is just time going faster. It felt like it took a lot longer for me to go from 1994 (Genesis being around) to 2003 than, hell, 2003 to now.

I guess it's partly because a lot of us have grown up with video games since the average age of a gamer has increased the past couple decades, so when things were retro in 2003 (NES/Genesis/SNES), it just felt right, I think (again, because time just moves faster as you get older, and a lot of us were in high school/college at that time and I'd assume many here were in elementary/middle school when the SNES/Genesis were the big things). Whereas now, someone like who you quoted hears Wii is retro and thinks "WTF?!" because time has passed him/her by so much quicker.
 
All I can think of as a counter-point to the "it just worked" people was that gran tursimo 2 has three different disk revisions one of which ended a save destroying bug, or ps2 vice city having a bugged save point at the ice cream factory in launch copies.

The next major jumps to enhance gaming experiences have either massive space costs (roomspace VR), require expensive custom work (3D positional audio, drop in-out coop, seamless loading), or hasn't reached mass market (dedicated AR platforms)
 
Theslammer said:
It's interesting to think about. We're 3 1/2ish years into this generation. So going to 2003, we were the same amount of time into the PS2 generation (or 2002 if you include the Dreamcast and go back to 1999, which is probably more accurate), and at that point, the Genesis/SNES were retro and I don't think many people debated that or felt it was weird to say that. I was posting on a ton of boards at that point, and I remember a lot of debates/conversations, but not people shocked that the SNES/Genesis were considered retro.

Part of it is just time going faster. It felt like it took a lot longer for me to go from 1994 (Genesis being around) to 2003 than, hell, 2003 to now.

I guess it's partly because a lot of us have grown up with video games since the average age of a gamer has increased the past couple decades, so when things were retro in 2003 (NES/Genesis/SNES), it just felt right, I think (again, because time just moves faster as you get older, and a lot of us were in high school/college at that time and I'd assume many here were in elementary/middle school when the SNES/Genesis were the big things). Whereas now, someone like who you quoted hears Wii is retro and thinks "WTF?!" because time has passed him/her by so much quicker.
Click to expand...


Also generational age gaps get much shorter as time goes by. Previously a generation gap was 30 years, now it has been reduced to half, if not less.
 
Manmademan said:
I think you're letting nostalgia get to you more than just a bit.

NES carts were notorious for not working due to the design of the system. Even taking perfect care of your games and NES, you'd inevitably end up with NES blowjobs and blinking blue screens trying to get your game to work.

Game testing and localization also didn't have a fraction of the care put into it. Janky localizations and game busting bugs were just something you had to put up with if nobody caught them...which is how we got the bizarrely high difficulty of 7th Saga and the sketch bug in FF3 that could corrupt your entire game without warning.

D grade shovelware was EVERYWHERE despite games being drastically more expensive, and in the absence of the internet publishers would put up flat out lies on the game boxes because they knew they'd never get called out. Karate Champ NES had screenshots of Karate Champ ARCADE on the box.

The modern era isn't perfect, but I don't think going back to the tech and practices of the 8 and 16 bit eras would be an improvement.
Click to expand...

Oh I'm not saying it was all perfect.
But something I like about some video games is that you can pop a game in, and it's on the moment you hit the power. Famicom is like that. NES had hardware issues, but still works if you keep it clean. SNES and Genesis simply work if the games and cartridge bay are clean. No problems. The games play.

Even PSone and PS2 are like that, though PS2 especially was more likely to fail. Put a game in, turn them on, play the game.

I'm not saying all video games should be like that. There are many kinds of new experiences that rely on constant updates, whatever. But most of the little indie gems I love often have more in common with those older games than today's beasty games. Like I said, these local multiplayer games are perfect to just boot up and play.


edit: One of my main points, I'd say, is that if I bust out the NES and the game doesn't boot immediately, I give it a quick and easy cleaning with a cotton swab and isopropyl alcohol. If you bother to clean these old games at all, you'll find they don't have problems like they did when you were spitting into them as a kid. However, I can't clean my PS3 games to make them work. The system broke because it just decided to take a shit. The Slim died too. The NES? That still works. I can still play that right now, and in fact, I do.
 
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