The Year is 2005

simpatico

simpatico

Member
The year is 2005

Half Life 2 Episode 1 just released. Doom 3 is still blowing minds and working over GPUs. We got F.E.A.R. release hype. Final Fantasy XII releases next year and the PlayStation 3 is packed to the gills with exotic silicon you can't get anywhere else and a cutting edge optical disc format 10x-ing its predecessor. Far Cry just gave us a glimpse of what the future of FPS games could look like and Crysis trailers are being called out as CGI "there's no way it's possible". KOTOR was making us all wish for an addition to the Star Wars trilogy. Imaging how great that would be.

It seemed the talent dispenser was bursting at the seams in every tech company's HR office. You could point to a dozen studios with visionary men at the helm and the money to make it happen. The hardware side of things was also in a state of rambunctious growth. DirectX 9 was in full stride and 10 was on the horizon with golden bloom spilling all over. PC gaming was about to undergo a period of great simplification and price reduction with cards like the HD4750 and the 260 GTX and Intel and AMD were trading blows with the Core 2 and Phenom II showdown. Nintendo was crafting the GameBoy Advance and the avalanche of content and childhoods behind it was immense.

Today I look around and there are plenty of things you can point at, but I think the one that chills me the most is the people. Where are the people? We're dusting off the semi-retired veterans from the era I mentioned above and trying to wring more classics out of them, but where is the next generation? In that snapshot we had iD, Valve, Crytek, UbiPrime, BioWare, Epic, Remedy, Capcom, good EA and dozens more. Sadly this creator drought doesn't seem limited to video games, the movie and TV industry is in a very similar quality desert of disappointing sequels, painful reboots and C-tier super hero moonshots. Even cars are going down a very uncertain path as all these huge companies seem to be crumbling at the same time, and not for lack of customers. The exciting products and value propositions just aren't there.

What is happening to society that is preventing these savants from getting their ideas to the masses? Are they out there but unable to reach us? Or has something happened to prevent them from developing?
 
Last edited:
simpatico said:
What is happening to society that is preventing these savants from getting their ideas to the masses? Are they out there but unable us? Or has something happened to prevent them from developing?
Click to expand...
Not "society", per se, but corporations have become seemingly extremely risk-averse. Nobody wants to put together a team in the AAA space that makes a game that may or may not have a good return on their investment. For every Expedition 33, there are probably 10+ Concords that will never see the light of day because they've been scrapped after failing market testing or failed focus groups.

As for young talent (even in the TV / Movies / Car spaces), companies again want to put well known and well established creators in charge because there is far less risk involved. Would people still buy a game called Death Stranding where you deliver packages if Kojima didn't have is name all over the box? (hint: probably not). These companies want as close to a guarantee of success as they're able to get, and putting the "up and coming" talent front and center won't do that.

Twenty years ago, like you described, it wasn't like this.
 
1995-2005 was a special time, and I don't want to diminish the people that were at the helm (political shit didn't matter to cause noise/distraction)...but it was also a time when there was so much fundamental innovation inevitably happening because 3d graphics started with big hardware improvements each gen.

Anyone with some vision and persistence, could do something new because no conventions existed yet. New genres could form, older genres could be reinterpreted using 3d space to blow your mind again, and graphics had a goal in the distance of what to be. Nowadays, hardware has hit bottlenecks where we're seeing smaller improvements, physical limits are hitting transistor counts on the same boards with heat dissipation as an issue, AI is still in its infancy as tech that could maybe help, and graphics last gen at the AAA level already looked pretty damn realistic.

Older talent had BASIC things they could think up or interpret from other media to just throw in a game. Many of those basic ideas have been done to death, so it gets harder to impress people. People also put up with shittier controls, worse camera systems, worse voice acting, etc back then....while newer games people expect all of that to be better + innovate something. New talent does have its own unique challenges, in addition to limitations that come with higher budgets + political bs.
 
Last edited:
iphone-4S-big.jpg
2005-ford-mustang-gt
Plus Cars and phones looked better
 
Those savant, pioneering, entrepreneurs are still out there. Many of them are making indie games.

Others have their influence being snuffed out by corporate committee decision making.

Some still sneak through. Like whatever was in the water at the offices of Clair Obscur's devs.

And Warhorse Studios made a (mostly) uncompromised vision of their AAA Western RPG with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
 
Last edited:
simpatico said:
The year is 2005

Half Life Episode 1 just released. Doom 3 is still blowing minds and working over GPUs. We got F.E.A.R. release hype. Final Fantasy XII releases next year and the PlayStation 3 is packed to the gills with exotic silicon you can't get anywhere else and a cutting edge optical disc format 10x-ing its predecessor. Far Cry just gave us a glimpse of what the future of FPS games could look like and Crysis trailers are being called out as CGI "there's no way it's possible". KOTOR was making us all wish for an addition to the Star Wars trilogy. Imaging how great that would be.

It seemed the talent dispenser was bursting at the seams in every tech company's HR office. You could point to a dozen studios with visionary men at the helm and the money to make it happen. The hardware side of things was also in a state of rambunctious growth. DirectX 9 was in full stride and 10 was on the horizon with golden bloom spilling all over. PC gaming was about to undergo a period of great simplification and price reduction with cards like the HD4750 and the 260 GTX and Intel and AMD were trading blows with the Core 2 and Phenom II showdown. Nintendo was crafting the GameBoy Advance and the avalanche of content and childhoods behind it was immense.
Click to expand...
And the 360 hype. The UE3 demos. Omg.

cebd26a0615786bc24fe661900824eea.jpg
 
If there was a time where things were better in any way, it was specifically computer games on the 90's and 2000's. There were a lot more complex games that at the same time were less turorialized.

Otherwise, things have changed and there are now games designed to sell tens of millions. That level of production did not exist back in the day. In 2005 it was already starting to change. The AAA games of today are not for hardcore enthusiasts and they need to stop feeling so entitled to think those games should be catered to them.

Your games are still coming out and they are successful selling 1-5 million. Sorry, they don't have the best graphics like they used to. Your 1200 dollar computer will go to waste. Big cry. Suck it up and go play some real games. There's just as many coming out and they're cheaper, even.

I just built a reasonable deal on a PC on the better side and I'm not thrilled with results only because I play so few games that even benefit much over my PS5. I've played a fuckton of games in my life and you can miss me with the vast majority of AAA games that ran any meaningfully better that my previous, 800 dollar machine. A first world problem who's impact depends on your means.

If you have a problem with the AAA's and mtx, just... find something else. There's plenty.
 
Last edited:
Durin said:
1995-2005 was a special time, and I don't want to diminish the people that were at the helm (political shit didn't matter to cause noise/distraction)...but it was also a time when there was so much fundamental innovation inevitably happening because 3d graphics started with big hardware improvements each gen.

Anyone with some vision and persistence, could do something new because no conventions existed yet. New genres could form, older genres could be reinterpreted using 3d space to blow your mind again, and graphics had a goal in the distance of what to be. Nowadays, hardware has hit bottlenecks where we're seeing smaller improvements, physical limits are hitting transistor counts on the same boards with heat dissipation as an issue, AI is still in its infancy as tech that could maybe help, and graphics last gen at the AAA level already looked pretty damn realistic.

Older talent had BASIC things they could think up or interpret from other media to just throw in a game. Many of those basic ideas have been done to death, so it gets harder to impress people. People also put up with shittier controls, worse camera systems, worse voice acting, etc back then....while newer games people expect all of that to be better + innovate something. New talent does have its own unique challenges, in addition to limitations that come with higher budgets + political bs.
Click to expand...
Indie space is a definite outpost for creatives. I wonder if Dave Syzmanski or the Selaco guy would have been scooped up and been given eye watering budgets in another era. Road to Vostok is made by one guy and the v2 demo is in the running for most hours spent on a game this summer for me. If those guys can make a living doing what they do it's understandable they don't want to run the obstacle course of HR and office culture. As we've seen it has cost some more than their job. I'm just surprised a company hasn't been spry enough to shift gears and build a culture that will incubate the right kind of people. Now it's not an exaggeration to say most big game companies spend millions to incubate the culture that is costing them solvency.
 
simpatico said:
Indie space is a definite outpost for creatives. I wonder if Dave Syzmanski or the Selaco guy would have been scooped up and been given eye watering budgets in another era. Road to Vostok is made by one guy and the v2 demo is in the running for most hours spent on a game this summer for me. If those guys can make a living doing what they do it's understandable they don't want to run the obstacle course of HR and office culture. As we've seen it has cost some more than their job. I'm just surprised a company hasn't been spry enough to shift gears and build a culture that will incubate the right kind of people. Now it's not an exaggeration to say most big game companies spend millions to incubate the culture that is costing them solvency.
Click to expand...
Yeah, you kind brought up two other issues for me. The first is that while indies are definitely the outposts of creativity, they're often not attached to larger publishers that would give them attention the way other studios got back in the 90s and 2000s when less games were being made. They have to somehow market well on social media to build awareness, which not every great creative is going to be good at marketing too.

Then you have the issue of larger publishers that have increasingly not cared about fostering talent, much less retaining it as we see studios go through a churn cycle where at the end of production they let a good amount of people go, and then ramp up again when they enter full production for the next game. Throw in that larger budgets have publishers pressure devs to include more monetization strategies that have to be baked into the design, or waste their resources to build (networked cash shops suck up programmer time).

Some creators also don't scale well with big budgets. I don't think having a larger budget helped Glen Schofield (Dead Space creator) be more successful with The Callisto Protocol.
 
2005 might be my least fav year gaming year of the 2000s never thought that year was good

I remember hating most of the popular games that year (which was a first)

F.E.A.R, Burnout Revenge and Battlefront II were the only exceptions

Matrix and 50 cent games were like real life memes they were fun to laugh at

My friend rushing to my place after buying Shadow the Hedgehog for $60 in tears was pretty fucking funny tho
 
There are new creators out there but they are not making the kind of games we usually like.

We are not the most desirable market segment anymore.
 
Because, in 2006, HD era begins, which started graphic focuse cinematic era begins. In which started to push devs to chase broader market. The industry seen growth, but at what cost?

In 2006 up to 2014 we still got some of good games.

Anyway, thats on the mainstream games. As in the back stages, still filled with unique games. Some video still thrived, but people tends to overlooked them.
 
simpatico said:
Today I look around and there are plenty of things you can point at, but I think the one that chills me the most is the people. Where are the people?
Click to expand...
Many people don't want to hear it but...

gbo-addicted-to-smartphones.jpg


The smartphone did irreparable damage in many regards. Boredom was... good. It forced people to gather and come up with shit. Many of the folks that created legendary entertainment would be basement dwellers post 2025.
 
ShirAhava said:
2005 might be my least fav year gaming year of the 2000s never thought that year was good

I remember hating most of the popular games that year (which was a first)

F.E.A.R, Burnout Revenge and Battlefront II were the only exceptions

Matrix and 50 cent games were like real life memes they were fun to laugh at

My friend rushing to my place after buying Shadow the Hedgehog for $60 in tears was pretty fucking funny tho
Click to expand...
I picked 2005 not for its releases in a vacuum, but rather the proximity to mega releases and a year when legendary developers were all working full time in the industry.
 
As budgets got higher and higher, risk taking went down and companies had to find ways to get more revenue per user.

Having said that I'm still enjoying gaming today.
 
In a year when we just got Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur, and Death Stranding 2 I'm not sure asking where the savants are really works. We still get amazing games on a yearly basis (perhaps not exclusively from the AAA space anymore), focusing on the negatives does us no favours. 2005 had plenty of negatives as well, we just don't focus on them because nostalgia doesn't help remembering the bad stuff.
 
"First Im gonna take your ride, then Im gonna take your girl" Quote from a Prophet

iNgI2WfdaL6gXhut.jpg


I recently watched a vid from a small time YTer and he made a great point (which is obvious). We went from gaming being games for fun and escape from daytime grind to games pushing photorealistic look and putting real life politics, gender equalities, sexual orientation and political correctness at the forefront of any marketing before the game even comes out. I just want to game, theres a reason why I try to avoid reading or watching day to day news because its just depressing.
 
Last edited:
What's happened to western AAA, has been like watching a slow brain-drain trainwreck in motion till it reached its climax in the 2020s. My personal belief and observation is that it was set in motion and seeded some time during the early 7th gen. Moneybags/suits who descended upon the western AAA sector and studios during its prime, somewhere between the 6th ~7th gen, share a big fault in why those dev cultures have become irrecognizable and completely gutted. They failed to understand the importance of the culture that was established within those studios and why they produced creatively renowned works, then opted on the idea that their studio name alone would serve as their brand and be more than enough to propel them forward. Which screwed over the talent and visionaries who made those studios what they were.

We're now seeing the magnitude of that short-sighted thinking where many/most AAA studios' current output struggle to measure up to their prior works. Non-gaming suits will refuse to admit, or recognze, any accountability and responsibility for this current predicament though. Even if some of these mindboggling creative decisions can be traced back to their direction and supervision. Half the time, they think they're better knowing than their own creatives in their disciplines and processes which has resulted in "classics" such as the recent Suicide squad game.

Back in the early 7th gen, those same studios managed to somewhat deal with the beginning of the brain-drain industry exodus stream, since their studio names still bared some prestige, association with "fun" and had/have a consistent conveyorbelt of "factory fresh" candidates (read: warm bodies) who were/are more than willing to throw themselves into the AAA development pipeline furnace these studios had internally turned into. Getting some renowned studio name on their CV meant something. Imo many big name studios these days aren't really worth having on your resume. They've largely become ships of Theseus, devoid of the original talent who spearheaded them coupled and replaced with leadership and management that coasts entirely on their old rep which they cling onto like it means something today.

That said, gaming is still largely fine today though. AA and indies is where some "magic" still happens from time to time. You won't find much of that in western AAA now though. The talent that used to flock to AAA has largely been repelled and scattered elsewhere to follow their own ambitions and dreams.
 
Last edited:
simpatico said:
The year is 2005

Half Life Episode 1 just released. Doom 3 is still blowing minds and working over GPUs. We got F.E.A.R. release hype. Final Fantasy XII releases next year and the PlayStation 3 is packed to the gills with exotic silicon you can't get anywhere else and a cutting edge optical disc format 10x-ing its predecessor. Far Cry just gave us a glimpse of what the future of FPS games could look like and Crysis trailers are being called out as CGI "there's no way it's possible". KOTOR was making us all wish for an addition to the Star Wars trilogy. Imaging how great that would be.
Click to expand...
Sad Michael J Fox GIF
 
Last edited:
I was still playing Half Life 2 at the beginning of the year, then GTA San Andreas on PC in the summer, then FEAR 1 in the autumn which i had to buy my first powered GPU for, great games, i was watching some TV at the time, not loads and i can't remember what!, not like now where i don't watch any anymore lol, especially the BBC, a good year and i was still looking forward to new games back then like Oblivion releasing in March 06 which is very different from now.
 
Just last night was thinking about how different this era was in the PC gaming space. It was a WILD time. Felt like we were always on the cusp of innovation; always six months away from the next gaming revolution. And it usually came to pass.

There was something "perfect storm" about these factors:
  • The economy & the culture pre-'07/'08 great recession
  • The generation of developers who honed their craft in the crucible of the 1990's 3D revolution and all the gameplay advancements that came with it
  • The dev teams could still be small back then - lean and mean - and make absolute banger AAA games with clearer focus, communication & direction compared to today's weird, distributed, contracted-out, drag-ass projects that are least common denominator by financial necessity
  • The tech advancement in this era came FAST and relatively cheap. Remember the Nvidia 8800GT hit the market at $200 and was considered basically high end in its space. Inflation has done a number since then, but NOT the $2500 amounts we're seeing for today's high end gaming hardware
All of that, and more, made this a once in a lifetime situation IMO. I don't see any kind of correction bringing ALL of these conditions back, probably ever again.
 
Last edited:
simpatico said:
The year is 2005

Half Life Episode 1 just released. Doom 3 is still blowing minds and working over GPUs. We got F.E.A.R. release hype. Final Fantasy XII releases next year and the PlayStation 3 is packed to the gills with exotic silicon you can't get anywhere else and a cutting edge optical disc format 10x-ing its predecessor. Far Cry just gave us a glimpse of what the future of FPS games could look like and Crysis trailers are being called out as CGI "there's no way it's possible". KOTOR was making us all wish for an addition to the Star Wars trilogy. Imaging how great that would be.

It seemed the talent dispenser was bursting at the seams in every tech company's HR office. You could point to a dozen studios with visionary men at the helm and the money to make it happen. The hardware side of things was also in a state of rambunctious growth. DirectX 9 was in full stride and 10 was on the horizon with golden bloom spilling all over. PC gaming was about to undergo a period of great simplification and price reduction with cards like the HD4750 and the 260 GTX and Intel and AMD were trading blows with the Core 2 and Phenom II showdown. Nintendo was crafting the GameBoy Advance and the avalanche of content and childhoods behind it was immense.

Today I look around and there are plenty of things you can point at, but I think the one that chills me the most is the people. Where are the people? We're dusting off the semi-retired veterans from the era I mentioned above and trying to wring more classics out of them, but where is the next generation? In that snapshot we had iD, Valve, Crytek, UbiPrime, BioWare, Epic, Remedy, Capcom, good EA and dozens more. Sadly this creator drought doesn't seem limited to video games, the movie and TV industry is in a very similar quality desert of disappointing sequels, painful reboots and C-tier super hero moonshots. Even cars are going down a very uncertain path as all these huge companies seem to be crumbling at the same time, and not for lack of customers. The exciting products and value propositions just aren't there.

What is happening to society that is preventing these savants from getting their ideas to the masses? Are they out there but unable us? Or has something happened to prevent them from developing?
Click to expand...
You mean the legendary devs, they just don't buy the whole console business idea. Great devs are seriously cautious on when and where they thrive in the industry, they think independently.
 
2005... I think it was pretty good, and fairly important for console gaming as it ushered a new console era of HD, online connectivity and communities.

In januari I bought a used GC with RE4 for like 100 bucks total. Good times. I still had a PS2 as well. The most important release was GT4, which I played to bits. I remember playing Radiata Stories, SoTC and AC Zero back to back later that year. And the PS2 version of RE4 with the extra chapter.

The 360 launched, and with it the push to HD televisions and online gaming on consoles. This is why it was kind of an important shift. I gradually lost interest in the PS2 after this 2005 wave of games. My friend persuaded me to buy a 360 but I didn't want it yet. But I think after playing Dragon Quest VIII somewhere early 2006 I jumped in a and bought a 360 as well. FFXII was on the horizon, but I didn't enjoy the demo. I sold my PS2 and games.

This era was just before Facebook and Youtube made their mark on society, and candybar phones were still the norm. In hindsight a better time.

I think the main problem nowadays is the stress of choice. There is a sea of content available, everyone wants to sub you and FOMO is sparked by socials. No wonder the new generation often can't cope.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

2004 - 2005 Is The BEST TWO-YEAR Span for First Person Shooters, EVER
2 3 4
154
2K
darrylgorn replied
THIS IS THE YEAR!!!!
2
56
1K
Maiden Voyage replied
  • Poll
Remembering 2005 - an incredible year in gaming
Opinion Poll Retro 
37
3K
DaciaJC replied
Is 2026 Going to be the Greatest Year in Gaming?
2
96
1K
Beretta replied
The Schmup of the year has landed!- Earthion!
News Review Retro  2 3 4
150
2K
B_Boss replied
Top Bottom