Modern Games Vs. Old Games, A.K.A how games have regressed

Focus on physics and AI improvement definitely seems to have become more absent in modern gaming and taken a backseat. I recall once when those aspects used to be pushed hard in tech demos as key features to sell a game.

MidGenRefresh said:
Stuff like this requires skilled coders, and what we have working in these Western companies right now is the complete opposite of skilled coders.
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The brain drain in the west has never been more apparent in western AAA than now tbh. Those senior long time devs with institutional knowledge are slowly being replaced by people who don't possess the same creative impulse, drive or skillset. Instead, they settle on some weird guys who'll screech about awkward societal/identity issues, because they don't have a well developed imagination or interesting life experience of their own to share.

Asian and some Euro developers are running in circles around those guys atm.
 
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Red Faction Guerilla came out in fucking 2009 (OG was 2001 iirc)

Even older Battlefield games had great destruction, someone camping in a building just blow it to smitherines 😂
 
Games are worse because more people play them (mainstream). So they have to cater to more at he same time, make sure they all understand them, make sure they can all beat them, etc.

They are also worse because not everyone involved in their making are nerd gamers like back in the day. Now you have political activists, feminists and DEI hires that an only do harm and add more obstacles for the actual developers.
 
analog_future said:
I just find purposeful misinformation built around dishonest cherrypicked results to be tiresome and a microcosm of the outrage driven gaming community at large nowadays.


Waste of time and is only built to pile on to the victimhood perception that's so popular today around so many fandoms.
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Victimhood, wtf... Nothing about that, its called noticing patterns instead of mindlessly consuming the "current shiny". Nothing wrong with being critical and noticing trends.

Also not all games are worse, there are tons of amazing modern games, but they come by way less often in AAA space. If looking at AA and indies, pc strategy and roguelikes, great games are flourishing.
 
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Shadowstar39 said:
I know people dispute this, but I truly believe windows vista killing sound blaster and EAX really killed devs motivation to do good sound design.
Before that Soundblaster bundled games with their hardware and had deals with publishers to use their tech. The devs had to work environmental audio into games, make it impressive and showcase it.

All that stopped or seemed to stop after vista removed almost all sound card support except for el cheapo realtek /mb solutions or expensive xfi cards.
My work horse sound blaster live from 2000, had to be put to pasture.

People say realtek mb software sound is just as good as eax, and dedicated hardware, I don't believe it.
The on board chips may have some parity now, but the desire to leverage 3d audio and environmental effects isn't there.
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EAX was great, and your right Vista did kill it.
 
The video might have made a valid point, specially regarding physics and interactivity taking a backseat in AAA gaming, if they actually took the effort to compare games from the same franchises or at least the same developers, instead of just doing a bunch of cherry picked comparisons from completely different games by completely different devs.
 
I 100% believe today's games would be much better if the industry had kept building on the small, cumulative effects of this attention to detail.

It's not hard to imagine the board meetings:

"Doesn't add to core gameplay. Distractive. Disrupts the pacing. Pareto principle. Etc"

The result:

Streamlined cookie cutter experiences without depth. Getting more shallow with every new generation.

Today's developers are the worst in the history of gaming. Period.
 
Shadowstar39 said:
I know people dispute this, but I truly believe windows vista killing sound blaster and EAX really killed devs motivation to do good sound design.
Before that Soundblaster bundled games with their hardware and had deals with publishers to use their tech. The devs had to work environmental audio into games, make it impressive and showcase it.

All that stopped or seemed to stop after vista removed almost all sound card support except for el cheapo realtek /mb solutions or expensive xfi cards.
My work horse sound blaster live from 2000, had to be put to pasture.

People say realtek mb software sound is just as good as eax, and dedicated hardware, I don't believe it.
The on board chips may have some parity now, but the desire to leverage 3d audio and environmental effects isn't there.
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Creative already dumbed down sound with EAX from the best PC audio sound design of the late 90s. Games that had accelerated 3d audio were forced to use inferior reverb as Creative killed off competition. But now I don't imagine that audio is being held back by dedicated hardware, just people not caring enough to code software solutions to things like 3d or raytraced audio.
 
This is the biggest difference.

AqWjMb5GXQ2Pdzt6.jpg
 
Hypereides said:
The brain drain in the west has never been more apparent in western AAA than now tbh. Those senior long time devs with instutional knowledge are slowly being replaced by people who don't possess the same creative impulse, drive or skillset. Instead, they settle on some weird guys who'll screech about awkward societal/identity issues, because they don't have a well developed imagination or interesting life experience of their own to share.

Asian and some Euro developers are running in circles around those guys atm.
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Firaxis fired a ton of long time employees to save money, were replaced with "modern devs" and Civ7 was the result.

But you're right the real talent left western AAA in droves in the last couple years, either by choice and better pay or driven out by these new age agenda pushing corporates.
 
Most old games were either totally custom engines or they rewrote huge parts of the engines they had. Devs would add custom tech just because it would benefit their game. Nowadays, if the stock engine can't do it, then the game's not doing it.
 
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Fess said:
show Starfield, or rather The Elder Scrolls VI when it's out. Same developer, same IP. Have things regressed?
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Well, yes, Bethesda are in this very video on how their games have regressed :unsure:

I think their games have regressed. I've played all of their games, including Starfield 🤷‍♂️

I don't get your point.

It's apperent to most that studios have had a severe drop off in quality as of late. Its not even in contention.
 
I feel that in the search for bigger and prettier games have gotten dumber and less reactive i.e NPC AI and physics. If the new Splinter Cell ever comes out we all know it will be open world and have crap NPC AI. But we all know it will at least look nice. Yay.
 
Signalis said:


Very interesting video. Not just nostalgia goggles when we say older games were better. Developers(not all) really have gone backwards.
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The problem of this video is that not every game is designed around destruction.

Also, using Skyrim as an example of good AI is pure lulz.
 
when they moved from sprites as used in Duke Nukem 3d to polygons then they had to go backwards in interactivity and cool details for awhile until the hardware/developers caught back up.

Or in the case of rts games...they kind of disappeared in the transition to polygons from sprites. AoE and Starcraft died out during that transition. Coincidence?

Similar with open world games vs 'hallway' games.
 
I've always wondered why certain things cannot be easily copied from past games, like enemy AI and physics. Do they literally need to reinvent the wheel every time? We should not be regressing on these things. Yet AI now is so awful in most games. I am starting to think that talent has simply left the industry and the people who have replaced them quite literally are not able to do it. But they have pronouns at least.
 
Saw a recent video highlighting how NBA 2K14 looks and plays better than 2K25.
I agree. 25 simply looks cleaner in 4K.
 
djjinx2 said:


Red Faction Guerilla came out in fucking 2009 (OG was 2001 iirc)

Even older Battlefield games had great destruction, someone camping in a building just blow it to smitherines 😂
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I've yet to see a more beautiful destruction design than Age of Empires II Definitive Edition. And it's 2D.

 
Dr.Morris79 said:
Well, yes, Bethesda are in this very video on how their games have regressed :unsure:

I think their games have regressed. I've played all of their games, including Starfield 🤷‍♂️

I don't get your point.

It's apperent to most that studios have had a severe drop off in quality as of late. Its not even in contention.
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Only skimmed through it but it looked like they compared Avowed to Skyrim on npc reactions and interactivity. No?
That makes no sense imo. Compare Skyrim to TESVI instead, once it's out. Or compare BOTW to TOTK. Zero Dawn to Forbidden West. KCD1 to KCD2. The Outer Worlds 1 to The Outer Worlds 2. Etc. Same devs, same IP, actual sequels. Otherwise you'll compare what one developer is focused on for one project to what another developer is focusing on for another project, which can differ a lot.
 
Signalis said:


Very interesting video. Not just nostalgia goggles when we say older games were better. Developers(not all) really have gone backwards.
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100% and it's kinda shocking how many people 1) don't see it and 2) defend it and cape for it. And, of course, the nostalgia argument inevitably shows up like it's on call.
 
I stopped watching this after a few minutes because it's just cherry picked stupidity to fit a narrative of "modern game bad".

There's a part about how old game AI has better self-preservation. It contrasts clips of FEAR's bad guys taking cover behind walls while nu-Far Cry enemies just stand around catching lead. But then later in that AI bit, it makes a point of showing how Perfect Dark's AI won't shoot at you if there's a friendly in their way - yeah, cute feature... except the footage is showing just as dogshit self-preservation as any modern game!

This revelation may seem shocking to some: developers only have limited time and budgets and need to prioritize certain features and details. It's now taking 5+ years and often hundreds of millions of dollars to release a game as it is, they don't have the means to do everything.

Red Faction for example would've been an utterly forgettable series if the developers hadn't prioritized destruction as its main selling point. They purposefully went above and beyond on that specific feature - so much so that it still holds up today. Few other developers actually need destruction of that level to realize their vision, though. No shit Helldivers II won't have the same level as destruction as Guerrilla, or the stealth of Splinter Cell, because it's a game about shooting aliens and does that very well already without it.

Would it be nice? Sure. Is it critical to make the game at all good like in Guerrilla? No.

I also don't understand why it omitted some really obvious like-for-like examples. Why compare Red Faction to Helldivers and not Donkey Kong Bananza, which has an eerily similar destruction system in 2025? Why use COD as the modern example of bullet impacts while neglecting to mention Doom: The Dark Ages' spectacular bullet impact system using SSDO and POM:



The video also doesn't mention The Dark Ages' fantastic destruction for that matter, or Assassin's Creed Shadows' cutting physics:



Oh right, because all those don't fit the narrative of "modern game bad".

JayK47 said:
I've always wondered why certain things cannot be easily copied from past games, like enemy AI and physics. Do they literally need to reinvent the wheel every time? We should not be regressing on these things. Yet AI now is so awful in most games. I am starting to think that talent has simply left the industry and the people who have replaced them quite literally are not able to do it. But they have pronouns at least.
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AI is all just tricks to give the illusion of intelligence. FEAR's AI combatants are not even aware each other exist and so don't truly work as a team. It just seemed that way because the levels were so small.

There's a good Youtube channel about AI in games that goes into it:






Some of the best AI I have ever seen is Sophy in Gran Turismo 7:

www.gran-turismo.com

Gran Turismo Sophy

Gran Turismo Sophy's website. GT Sophy is a revolutionary superhuman racing AI agent that has been featured on the cover of the world's leading science journal, Nature. Project overview, innovative AI technologies, race movies.
www.gran-turismo.com www.gran-turismo.com
 
Killer8 said:
AI is all just tricks to give the illusion of intelligence. FEAR's AI combatants are not even aware each other exist and so don't truly work as a team. It just seemed that way because the levels were so small.
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Yeah I remember being gob-smacked by the 'AI' in half-life, but in reality it was mainly just solid scripting faking actual AI.
 
Lots of cherry-picked examples but I think it's true that modern games took a big hit when it comes to AI, physics, and fun details in environments. They're cutting a ton of corners nowadays.
 
Knightime_X said:
At 1/8th the graphical quality...
They could barely run minecraft
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Is there a PS3/X360 game like Fortnite? Open-world, 100 players, building system, nearly everything can be destroyed, vehicles (on water, land and air), NPC enemies roaming the map and real-time events.
 
Generic said:
Is there a PS3/X360 game like Fortnite? Open-world, 100 players, building system, nearly everything can be destroyed, vehicles (on water, land and air), NPC enemies roaming the map and real-time events.
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They are games with some of these features and next to none with all of these going on at once.
And absolutely nowhere close to the image quality we have today.
 
Rush2112 said:
Games are worse because standards are worse. Take all the idiots on this board who buy every new game because of FOMO. You think they give a shit about the quality of their games?
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FOMO guy: Blindly pre-orders a shitty full priced game a year out so he play brag about leaderboards and achievements > Chilling to see if it's worth supporting a quality game

Why do you guys think game devs are so amped up online connections? So people can track and compare their leaderboard progress vs other gamers and friends lists. And that leads to many jumping to the online store to buy skins or P2W gear to look better or beat them.

It's a cycle of stupidity. But it works on many gamers.

It's like mtx/dlc. The last time I bought any extra content was a COD map pack for 360. Pretty sure it was for MW3 in 2011. I even remember it. It was the map pack where you run through a crash plane. So in the past 14 years, I've spent $0 on extra content. But there will be some people jacked up spending $100s, 1000s or whales at $10000s.
 
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nkarafo said:
They are also worse because not everyone involved in their making are nerd gamers like back in the day. Now you have political activists, feminists and DEI hires that an only do harm and add more obstacles for the actual developers.
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Back in the day, my bro used to buy pretty much all the M&M RPGs. Even the early ones on Apple.

There was a time, there would be a new M&M game almost every year. They took a bunch of years off to make 3D-ish ones, but then made 3 more in 3 years.

It doesn't even sound possible to make so many RPGs in such little time even if the template could be cookie cutter sometimes. But there were big jumps in graphics, game engine and productions values over time and the teams figured it out.
 
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poppabk said:
Some of this is due to modern games being more complex not less. Instead of scripted actions and reactions there is a game logic that can fail.
Someone above posted a comparison video between Mafia and the remake. In one part you can see people jumping out of the way of the car in the same scripted manner in the original whereas in the remake they sometimes jump out the way sometimes kind of just stand there or try and walk around. The latter is more complex but there are parts where it looks dumb.
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There is a great presentation about FEAR AI where the developer explained the AI and how it was only possible because of the maps were basically huge squared rooms with more square boxes as cover.
So a game like Control should have a great Fear like AI.

Anyway... imho the main problem with modern games is the combo of PBR with bad implemented TAA. It murder the IQ on anything lower than 4k.
 
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The only thing I don't like is games taking much longer to come. Back then they came out faster so we got to experience good games at a faster rate plus the humor were better pre 2010.

There were Halo 1 and 2, WoW. CS, Half Life 1 and 2, Oblivion, Fallout, NV, tons of Ratchet and Clank games and countless great games on the PS2 and to a lesser extend in the PS3 era.

There's still great games like with GTA VI, Tides of Annination, Space Marine 2 and 3, Stellar Blade 1 and 2,, Elder Scrolls VI, Fallout 5. Witcher 4, ILL, and Resident Evil games but they are too few with most being upcoming.
 
Different games have different priorities and design goals, so comparing different games to each other 1:1 is not really fair;

That said, there is a baseline of physical interaction and world+AI reactivity that should really be part of every game being made (that has AAA budget and takes place in world of physical laws). And many modern games do skimp on these aspects, to their detriment.

I am playing Trepang2, which is a lowbudget FEAR-like shooter, and AI reacts to player's flashlight in it. If this small team can do it, surely so can MachineGames.
 
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One of the things games regressed even compared to 7th gen games is details in realistic texture, nowadays everything looks so flat, Arkham Knight vs Gotham Knights summarizes it but this is far from being the only case
 
Killer8 said:
I stopped watching this after a few minutes because it's just cherry picked stupidity to fit a narrative of "modern game bad".
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His video style is a derivative of Crowbcat, and you can tell because Crowbcat, in a smarter fashion, will use games from the same franchises to make his case crystal clear.

This youtuber, on the other hand, will compare different franchises across different development teams with different gameplay priorities.

It would be like asking why Street Fighter 5 didn't have assists because Marvel vs Capcom 3 had them prior.

It comes across sloppier than Crowbcat's work due to this.
 
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I think the creator has a point but its poorly made using such different games, franchises. You could do this with two games in the same era. Like compare GTA IV car destruction to Saints Row 2.

I think ultimately you have developers who arent allowed to spend time on 'cool' things, just the requirement to ship as early as possible.

I also think a lot of those 'types' of developers no longer exist. The industry seems to be over saturated with devs who are more concerned with 'their story' or the narrative elements rather than things which are just superfluous but interesting. Take a look how something small like closing car doors in Division 1 became a 'wow' moment and something cool you could do in game. It's small but impactful to the experience and I think thats what we're losing. And as a result games are seemingly more homogeneous. But we went through this at the end of the 369s life where everything felt like a reskin too.
 
Dr.Morris79 said:
Just watch it :messenger_tears_of_joy:

Even the Far Crys got worse.
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It's a 20 minute video, you have to give me the times for Far Cry if that was a proper comparison.

What I saw was comparisons for different IPs from different developers on games with different focus.
Apples and oranges.

And the video creator was conveniently avoiding showing any modern game where things haven't regressed. Like why?

Could've shown fire spreading in BOTW/TOTK, interactivity and physics in Starfield, cars getting wrecked in Wreckfest, etc.

🤷‍♂️
 
Aces High said:
Greed is the biggest issue.

Example: the coroorations controlling this industry keep raising prices on digital games that are over a decade old.

Someone explain this to me.
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The way they're going on, do they think gaming is the only hobby/interest in existence? It's massive but there's so much out there, so many options competing for our time.
 
The importance of A.I. of NPC's went downhill. In some games NPC's are just static and do not respond to anything/you can't hurt them. In older games, sometimes even from the same studio, they do respond/you can kill them.
And no, it might not be important for the overall plot of the game, but it sure as shit adds to the total immersion that a lot of people are still looking for in games. Same with basic physics.

But then still it's quite specific to what games this applies does or does not apply to. Can't really say that every modern game suffers from this.
 
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