In your opinion, what is different in this present gaming age?

Too much budget spent on graphics instead of promoting game design ideas.

Creativity and storytelling are often being weakened by politic agendas or a clear lack of invention.

Please give us back thought provocking games. Most of great productions are so bland now.
 
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The lack of physical games in stores. Your local Target, Best Buy, Walmart might have depressing and tiny game selections to pick from depending on your location. Not to mention most of the games are years old and not even the latest releases.
 
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Today, a AAA game costs between USD$150m and USD$350m. For the next generation, that price range is expected to double. Virtually all issues with "mOdErN gAmInG" can be brought back to a derivative of this fact in my opinion.
 
Kacho said:
Been gaming since 1987. Something has changed but I can't quite put my finger on it

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So-called intellectuals: "What should we do about the rise of populism?"
Me: "We should push the conversation back towards policy, economics, and statecraft."
So-called intellectuals: "Maybe... or we could put all the focus on the personalities of the people in charge!"
Me: "That's populism."
So-called intellectuals: "You need to be a better ally, people are dying out here."
 
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Similarly to movies, very few big games these days are pitched as new ideas. Almost everything is a sequel, prequel or remake because the boardroom sees innovation as risk.

Also the talent in the studios has diluted as gaming has become more mainstream. If you have too many talentless programmers with no imagination and strong political views, the game will end up like Avowed.
 
Work-games have replaced Video-games.

Bloat. Infinite lists of things to do. Absence of player choice and thought process. Fun has been banished from this time-period, for the most part.

People have been lobotomized into thinking that more value = longer games. They buy a game, they need to hear that it will last 100+ hours. After a day of work, and completing the chores of the housework, after the kids being to put to bed etc... When they finally have some free-time, they are going to boot a work-game, with an infinite checklist of repetitive, tedious shit to do by following the marker pointing in the direction. And spend the final hours of their day doing more busywork.
 
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The issues with the current landscape is well-trotted ground at this point, but speaking personally I enjoyed gaming alot more when I wasn't tapped into the news cycle 24/7. Case in point, back in 2001 I had no clue about Sega's troubles and the Dreamcast being shut down came out of nowhere. From my ignorance is bliss POV back then, I was just taking the system at face value and enjoying it for what it was. If that system were coming along today, I'd be getting beat upside the head with articles and forum chatter about how poorly Sega was doing and would have gotten a 6 months 'leak' heads up that they were pulling the plug and going third party. Or to take a modern example and go back 20 years, I wouldn't have had a clue about how poorly the Xbox Series was selling. I would have just had it and played whatever was interesting to me without all the other meta bullshit getting in the way. There are times when I just want to totally disconnect but we're all plugged into this shit now.
 
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Unique trends for this gen

- collapse of Xbox as a console
- Microsoft becoming a third party publisher
- Japan coming back to dominance in terms of quality (
- America nosediving in terms of quality
- Wokism in western games
- Live service flops industry wide
 
Gamerfan81 said:
I would say development time and the cost of it in this era, especially for AAA titles. That's more a threat to gaming than the woke stuff. Don't get me wrong the woke stuff is maddeningly annoying, but if development time wasn't so long and the cost so costly, a few woke games wouldn't be so bothersome, because there would be a lot more quality games to balance it out. We just notice the woke stuff more because of the costs and development time.
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What would you suggest to shorten dev-time?
 
Ainem Enamas said:
Comparing to all gaming's history. What do you notice? What are the biggest differences in your opinion? How far do you remember gaming? Do these dark times in the world impact games?

I personally have noticed that popularity of video games have reached the point where gameplay is more accessible to more people.
Indie games are more accessible.
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For me it's seeing the blatant dishonesty from people in the gaming sphere, even on these message boards; These are some of the people working in this industry now and the results show, they're absolutely terrible at what they do. This is why a lot of us oldies stopped engaging with gaming. A lot of these people are now over here on PC just destroying it, crazy.
 
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Lumpyoatmeal said:
For me it's seeing the blatant dishonesty from people in the gaming sphere, even on these message boards; These are some of the people working in this industry now and the results show, they're absolutely terrible at what they do. This is why a lot of us oldies stopped engaging with gaming. A lot of these people are now over here on PC just destroying it, crazy.
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Dishonesty now is just "trolling" nowadays.

For me, its trend chasing. Not every game needs to be GAAS and Sony is learning that the hard way right now.

That, and the requirement of massive open worlds/bloat. I'm burnt out from them and find games like Doom Eternal with different levels far more enjoyable and pointed.
 
normies and social warriors have had an effect, but i think its mostly budget.

big ass budget = more financial risk = less risk taken / games generalized for a larger market for more sales to recoup dev costs

industry's a victim of its own success
 
We have never had so many games, yet we have never owned so few.

We have never wanted and asked for so many old games, and publishers have never been more willing to give them to us… with all the caveats.
 
Games have become gross and obese, demanding more time and money and it feels more like work than fun, mostly void of personality and every aspect needs to be a complex system. Just for the sake of it.
Thank f*ck I kept my collection, I have hundreds of great games I still play, but if I was introduced to gaming today this would never have become my hobby.
Greed and morons turned it all to shit, like music, movies and TV.
 


GIF by Tokkingheads


Music was better in the past, and graphics is better now but otherwise most core mechanics and game ideas are the same.
Oh and women in western AAA games now look like men with a head swap. In the past they looked like women.
There were more unique games in the past too. And devs now make 1 game per generation.
 
I don't recall any free games 20 years ago.

The modern dawn of indie-games is great!

I did love game magazines, it was so exciting to buy a new issue with game news, previews, reviews, letters from readers.
 
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1. The characters act like children in adult bodies.

2. The level design and mission structure are the most linear they've ever been. The games feel like pre-defined input of pre-defined actions rather than an actual game.

3. The graphics are often not even that good, but the games require sahader compilation and have terrible performance most of the time.

4. You can't just turn on your PC and play. I recently wanted to play GTA, clicked the shortcut, waited for Steam to load, Steam started updating, then the game itself updated, then the damn Rockstar launcher started loading, it started updating too. So it took about 3 minutes from the time I clicked the shortcut for the game to actually start loading. That is not the worst case. The worst case is when i wanted to play Stalker 2 and the game forced me to down;oad a 110 gb updated before i can play. You don't feel like own games nowadays, you feel like you rent the ability to gain the game's acess.

qRLJ5e5.png
 
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Gamers mistakenly bought into the narrative of "imagine how much better games will be if they don't have to support split screen/local multiplayer" that was born around the time that all games had both local and online multiplayer.

What resulted is that gaming is now a lonely, solitary hobby and (IMO) actively makes peoples lives worse while giving back very little, when it used to foster social connections and improve peoples lives significantly
 
PeteBull said:
If bottom row devs/programmers are gamers but whole top is woke infested feminists ofc game gonna turn to garbage or well below what it could be under such a terrible direction, devs who have a say on how game gonna look/play/its story etc cant be infected by woke virus, those are ppl who make decisions, game's quality and sales gonna be directly impacted by their stupid choices if no1 gonna check on them, we have examples left and right with AAA games budgeted for hundreds of milions of usd bombing hard coz of that.
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Fucking demonic world!
Imagine if we could game for centuries, on and on, under the Holy Trinity's cleansed world. Such wonderful created reality this is. When this fucking darkness will end...
Imagine gaming industry that goes for hundreds of years and it's nonstop awesomeness, every year with soulful games like HL2, Doom, Gears, GoW, Ori, DQ...
I know God just wants to finish this all up, and organize everything
All my life gaming was very dear to me
 
Sony becoming absolute shit-tier when it comes to games and generally causing the industry as a whole to suffer by ushering an era of remakes and GaaS

I've found myself generally moving away from new releases and playing lots of classics
 
Too much mtx grifting, employees jamming in personal politics into games, and gaming journalism being terrible (and dead). Streamers took over as being more entertaining, detailed and honest.
 
All big games are now made by committee. Individual brilliance and vision in game direction and design have all but been eradicated. Games are made to syphon as much money out of the userbase as possible.

Games are more accessible, but now cater to the lowest common denominator. Nearly anyone can beat any modern game. Tutorials are long and exhausting.

Graphical advancements are stalled. Games made 8+ years ago stand toe-to-toe with modern releases. Sense of wonder as game worlds opened up during the 7th generation is a distant memory. Ray tracing is a joke as a technological advancement.

Games are released in an unfinished, or even broken state now more than ever. It's become pointless to buy a game on release, with even Day 1 patches failing to fix issues or smooth out rough edges.

Hype is at an all time low, with big events like E3 either dead or a shell of their former selves. The pressurized hype and competition built up at these annual events has been replaced with infrequent video events that often fail to impress and feel as if they were produced in a vacuum.

In many western games, political agendas are built into games at a fundamental level. The simple idea of a masculine man of action rescuing a feminine woman is now considered taboo, flying in the face of simple human biology and thousands of years of human existence.

Etc...

Etc...

Etc...
 
Obviously more of an online/multiplayer focus, generally speaking. There are more niche games or versions/iterations on game types which focus on pretty specific kinds ofcompetitive or multiplayer gaming. And the GAAS push is a big part of all this, which never really existed 20 years ago (except maybe the first MMOs).

There's honestly a lot more variety overall... mostly because there's a lot more product in general. Result of the larger (more casual) market is you can see devs riffing on NES/SNES era gaming and releasing on all of PC, Switch, PS5, and sometimes even your smartphone... and that spectrum of "what is a game" goes all the way up to AAA "modern" gaming. The breadth of that spectrum never existed in that way, with that level of accessibility, until quite recently.

And (perhaps most importantly) there's more of a focus on maintaining a gaming "ecosystem" than ever before... consider not just the likes of Sony and Xbox, but also Apple, Netflix, Steam, and even Nintendo. Rather than focusing on their specific platform which is seen to "compete" with the competitor's platform, they are focusing on the diverse gaming offerings on THEIR platform and what that offers the customer in the aggregate.

Gaming "platforms" are doing much different things these days, despite the fact that they obviously all still develop, publish, and distribute "games".
 
Few PS exclusives. It is already very few PS exclusives, but still it is being ported to PC. And worse about this generation is push and forcing woke agenda especially twisted gender ideology.
 
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Games are in greater number and variety than back in the day. AAA as we know it today (massive mobilization regardless of talent or vision) did not exist back before PS3.

Graphics are at a plateau which is kinda neat. That's a change from the best looking games looking like shit 2 years later.

The price of entry is so low now. If you took away all my stuff and told me I had to game on an office laptop, I would be okay. I'd have more great games available on there than I could ever play.

Things are great. Who fucking cares if bad games bomb or there are a few waves of layoffs. Whenever I see people on here crying about how bad games are, I figure they are either just repeating what they hear everyone else say or maybe have trouble picking games and let marketing budgets do it for them.
 
Too much online bullshit

Buy a console? Sign in
Put a game? Update
Are you offline? Well, fuck you

Only Nintendo worked as a regular console this gen, and that has even some exceptions
 
reinking said:
The biggest difference IMO is access to information both good and bad. I have mentioned previously that gaming is hyper scrutinized now. You have sites like DF zooming in counting pixels and pointing out any drop in frames. You have social media making sure nothing else slips by. We have always had reviews, debates and platform wars but never at the levels we have now. Games are no longer about how much fun they are but about agendas and narratives driven from all sides.

I agree with you about accessibility too. I can pick up my phone and play games anytime and anywhere. Even online games. Crazy how spoiled we have become yet whine a lot (myself included).
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I couldn't agree more. In the past few years it's only gotten worse and worse and you can see it in full force on a variety of different platforms that involve communication. I feel like people care more about the people involved in projects more so than the game(s) they're creating. I just really miss the simpler times when everyone just talked about games, if they're fun or not, etc. Social media has taken over way too much, and I feel like it's doing much more harm than good. It's just created a series of echo chambers on all "sides" where essentially all everyone is doing is bitching, lol. It's not helping anything, or anyone, it's just incessant bitching.
 
Mobile and MTX make a lot more money than the actual games now,
Cost of hardware and games are a lot higher than they use to be,
The quality of Triple A has gone too far down,
Too much online control by the game industry companies to either tell us we don't own our games or take them away.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
Unique trends for this gen

- collapse of Xbox as a console
- Microsoft becoming a third party publisher
- Japan coming back to dominance in terms of quality (
- America nosediving in terms of quality
- Wokism in western games
- Live service flops industry wide
Click to expand...
Live service games are the things keeping the industry alive.
 
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