What happened to the purity of games?
When did it become so banal and tiresome?
Note; not specifically referencing nintendo here, just using it as a reference to when I started gaming
What happened to the purity of games?
Aiden Jenkins
Other urls found in this thread:
youtu.be
youtube.com
twitter.com
Isaac Roberts
I dont know, user. All I know is that it happened
Joshua Jackson
The current outrage after outrage thing this decade is really fucking stupid from my perspective
Tyler Moore
We lost the core essence of game design somewhere along the way. It's not even nostalgia either, I've been trying older SNES games for the first time thanks to NSO and there's just something fundamentally missing from modern experiences. Maybe modern development is too bloated, too Hollywood, or too caught up in its own histronic ideals.
Brody Robinson
>too bloated, too Hollywood
This seems an accurate piece of the puzzle.
I don't think there's any one thing specifically that's changed though. There's a lot of greasy optics surrounding games now that's getting harder and harder to avoid, and as a result it rubs off on your gaming experience more and more.
Hunter Howard
Growing up doesn't help.
Kevin Miller
I think it's easy to get this feeling if all you play are big-budget Experiences™. Very few are actually tightly designed games. This isn't an opinion allowed on Yea Forums, but Breath of the Wild was one of the best recent games at making me feel the magic again. Indies are also good at it, since often gameplay is all they've got to make an impression.
Kevin Nguyen
Experimentation is dead, that's what happened. Up until around 2006-2008ish. you'd see games of all stripes trying new things and experimenting. Even AAA could sometimes churn out an inventive experiences. Then at some point in the 7th gen, AA-level studios started dropping like flies, AAA stopped bothering to make anything new or innovative, and the independent scene (though they still try to make novel or innovative gameplay) is too often concerned with appearing deep and meaningful at the expense of fun or engaging gameplay.
Hunter Martinez
The quality you're thinking of is "focus".
They couldn't really create photorealistic or filmic experiences working with pixels or basic polygons, so they gave more attention to ludic elements than some modern games.
They also didn't have modern niceties like near-infinite storage or post-launch patches, so they had to make the best experience possible strictly limited to the development time/budget they had, and limitations inspire creativity.
Older games also respected your time more in general. Smaller worlds, less grinding (except for early RPGs), no DLC or microtransactions, no endless online multiplayer.
Jason Reyes
The main reason for this is the cost of HD development and players' demand for better and better graphics. Making a AAA console exclusive takes a LOT of people and a LOT of time, and therefore a LOT of money. There's not much room to take risks when the studios have so much investment riding on the line. Meanwhile the rising costs to keep up with the big dogs made smaller studios struggle to stay relevant without publisher support — you see it today in how many studios Microsoft and Sony are buying.
So when you see someone calling out an indie studio for making "pixelshit", or complaining that the most recent AAA release is "too different" or "a good game but not a good game", know they're part of the problem
Brandon Rogers
How much impact did expanding gaming community have on general direction of gaming?
Was it a cause, catalyst or a symptom?
Could the "traditional gamer" have propped up the industry through to 2019?
Evan Howard
There is a huge push to make games not gameplay oriented but experiences oriented so movie games.
Large gaming companies are actually profiting more than ever before. The problem actually is like you said risk management. Making a game means investing your money so you want to make something that is of lower risk but higher reward and that is the shit we have now. Like EA is vilified everywhere and yet people are still buying their games en masse because their game appeals to a broad audience.
Large companies buying small companies is not really about the small companies not having money. It's about the money being thrown at them. Example is what epic is doing right now. It's also risk management. Imagine someone wants to buy you out for $1m when you have profited $0 for a few years and will profit $0 for a few more then you don't know if you can recoup the cost and profit.
Even small companies are also taking lower risks by doing gacha shit and people keep buying gacha items even on asset flip gacha games.
however there's still a lot of experimentation going on and it's on the indie game scene. That is really the only hope for gaming.
Eli Lewis
all companies seek growth and when they had the gamer market exhausted they started pandering to non gamers and casual market. turns out these people are much more docile and accept buttfuckery unlike the typical consumer of video games in the past (see horse armor). now theyve gone all the way to the deep end of monetization by engineering gambling systems just so they can milk whales as efficiently as possible.
Robert Collins
It fell into mainstream most likely because of the PS2's widespread success and everything went downhill with the 7th gen.
Benjamin Lopez
I want to say Generation 6 is when the modern day AAA gaming Universe became inevitable. Up until the PlayStation 1 and the Nintendo 64 gaming wasn't looked at in the same light as the movie industry. They weren't exactly just toys for children anymore but they were still allowed to be overall silly and go in whatever Direction they want. But the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube changed things. Because now people started to realize that video games could be just as strong as movies. Yes they were still awkward but games like Final Fantasy 10, Metal Gear Solid, Halo were all such major hits that even casuals who didn't care about video games at all knew what they were. An honor that used to belong to things like Mario and Sonic. And I think this is where game developers decided to really push the Cinematic, broad appeal angle. After all if you're really going to push games to be as good as movies then you're going to want as many people throwing money at it as possible which means broadening the target audience as much as you can.
Enter Generation 7 and a PlayStation 3 an Xbox 360 eras and everybody and their dog is now a first person shooter with a gripping story about characters that don't matter or cinematic experience. And that broad appeal net just continue to extend wider and wider until now we have diversity politics where everyone must be included. And a very concept of a target audience has pretty much gone extinct by the time we get to the current generation.
Eli Harris
The success of Halo and Xbox Live taught American devs that video games should be purely for profit and not passion projects. Gacha games are having the same effect on Japanese devs.
Adam Rodriguez
sjw and movie games happened
Jackson Torres
I agree 100% here. I don't think people realize just how much Xbox Live and improved internet connections change the rules in the gaming sphere. Because suddenly you didn't have to invite people over to your house to share a video game experience. You could do it from home. And online gaming one from something that only nerds did to being so ubiquitous that pretty much any household at any time can connect to the internet. And developers in turn started breaking their backs to make sure online functionality would be mashed into all their projects whether or not it made sense. Why the hell was Fallout 76 necessary?
Hudson James
>There is a huge push to make games not gameplay oriented but experiences oriented so movie games.
In an ideal world I think this is just a step. Gaming is still young as an industry and as an artistic medium. The way forward is storytelling THROUGH gameplay, not in spite of it.
Adam Watson
People stopped caring about good gameplay. Now they were obsessed with trivialities, like waifus and graphics and how deep and cinematic the story is. They're also easily suckered in by loot boxes, er I mean "surprise mechanics". They'd rather buy their way through the game, instead of working hard for it. The idea of a challenge is seen as gatekeeping and toxic, so now every game needs multiple easy modes, and hard mode should let you beat it too because why work for something?
Samuel Miller
these three cover pretty much all of it
Carson Morgan
There is a massive, pulsating hurdle with this though. Stories have good pacing. And video games are player-controlled. Meaning you could put in all of the work you want to make sure your story is a well-paced, well told adventure but there's nothing stopping the player from choosing to fuck off for 10 hours doing side quests. Unless you go the Uncharted route and basically put the player on a roller coaster that he can't break from. Or the Final Fantasy route where the giant meteor is hanging in the sky forever while you make chocobos fuck. I do see that some developers are trying and I do respect that but I can't even imagine what an elegant solution would look like.
Lincoln Garcia
>Like EA is vilified everywhere and yet people are still buying their games en masse because their game appeals to a broad audience.
Something this board loses track of a lot is that we (core gamers) are a minority of the overall gaming audience. Games that appeal specifically to us might have limited appeal to the rest of the demographic, which makes them less profitable, which means they either need to be subsidized by the casual market or have less investment in general.
Nolan Foster
Papers Please came the closest of anything I've played to nailing it
Carter Perry
>They'd rather buy their way through the game, instead of working hard for it.
I think this is an interesting aspect of modern gaming and highlights the impact that online gaming has had.
The concept of "endgame content" was essentially coined when online games became popular, no? It feels like this concept is seeping into even single player games, where the journey to the end is seen as a chore rather than an actual part of the game and the "real game" starts when you're a step away from the end.
I don't doubt this has affected developer approach for gameplay, making them tune it specifically towards the end of their game and using it as a device to complete the game faster, rather than making it something to enjoy throughout.
Isaac Jackson
>The idea of a challenge is seen as gatekeeping and toxic
I at least partially blame games journalism for this. Because they want something where they can see all of the content in like a weekend. And anything that even vaguely trips them up in that needs to be nerfed in anyone who argues against it is just an elitist nerd who wants to keep those filthy casuals out of their hobby. I also blame the absolutely ridiculous amount of AAA games that come out every season. Even the most popular game is only popular for like a month and then everybody has moved on to the next hot shit. So developers have to make sure their game makes a big splash really early and so rather than make players work for the content every game wants to hike up her skirt, take her panties off, and show you everything she has to offer as fast as you can before you move on.
Asher Edwards
Name a single hobby that didn't become 10x worse when it got popular with normalfags
Joseph Reed
The way I see it, games seem to be developing this "it gets good after X amount of hours" mentality, if they haven't already. Now, I'm sure there's nothing wrong with this when done right, but when it's done wrong (which is alot of the time mind you) it leads to the game being a giant chore. it feels almost intentional, like they want you to pay your way through the game, to skip the boring grindy parts to get to the end faster. Same with the idea of challenge. Make bosses that are too hard or too grindy, so you offer special weapons for a premium. Mobile phone games are particularly guilty of this, letting you buy currency to speed your way through the gameplay.
Grayson Miller
When you grew tits from eating microwave burritos and stopped going out in the sun. Bitch somewhere else
Bentley Moore
>What happened to the purity of games?
Money.
>When did it become so banal and tiresome?
E-sports in the early 2000s. Also the same time you grew up.
/thread
Ethan Wood
I'm enjoying underrail and factorio at the moment. xcom 2 and DOS2 were also great last couple of years imo. Some games still have it, but it really depends on the studio and the devs. I dunno whats the link between these 4 studios, why their games still have it and others don't. I wish there was an easy way to tell.
Nicholas Moore
>Because they want something where they can see all of the content in like a weekend.
I mean, they want this because they need to play a lot of games fast. They don't have time to grind something out, they've got a deadline to hit.
Gavin Powell
kingdom come deliverance was also brilliant
Blake Sanders
>I at least partially blame games journalism for this.
Personally I think MODERN games journalism is just a symptom of the mainstreamification of games and the explosion of financial value of the industry.
Remember, we've always had "games journalists" - they just didn't always have a blue checkmark or feel like talking about issues surrounding games. Remember gaming magazines?
John Young
Endgame content was mainly an RPG thing in the past. Chrono Trigger had the seminal New Game+. Now everything is an RPG.
Gavin Cooper
Casuals
Easton Rivera
>Endgame content was mainly an RPG thing in the past
It looked different though. It wasn't a goal - it was just another phase of the game.
Currently it feels like everything before endgame is just in service to the endgame.
Landon Kelly
I don't blame them for this. As a matter of fact on this front I sympathize with them. Where I start to have a problem with it is when they start to use that as a platform to point the finger at players who want a bit more meat on their video game challenge. It's an easy target but the Dark Souls should have an easy option is probably the biggest offender of this. Because the developer has said time and again that the difficulty is intentional to pull you into the game world. If everyone says that the castle is super dangerous and then you go into the castle and it's a cakewalk then that just ruins the idea of the castle. Not everyone might not agree with that mindset and I can understand that but I also respect Miyazaki for sticking to his guns on that. Even if I think he messes it up in places. But the journalist that I'm talking about, even though they understand that, still use that series as a poster child for difficulty needing to go away in video games so that everyone can praise the sun regardless of skill level. Yeah my biggest problem with that is that people listen to them. At some point you as a player need to level up and beat the game. There was one time where beating the game with a badge of honor, not just something for you to get over with.
Juan Morales
Jesus I used to have Stacks and stacks of Gamespot magazine's. I miss them
Jackson Gonzalez
And before someone retorts using an obvious ad hom like "dude stop complaining, it's just videogames lmao", I'd like to follow up his post by asking how we'll ever improve as a society if we continually allow this mindset of giving everyone a participation award? Sure, now it's just video games, but then they start doing it elsewhere. Soon games no longer have a lose condition. Now everyone gets treated like they're special snowflakes. No criticism ever gets said. No feelings are ever hurt. Is this not emotional and physical stagnation? How do you expect to improve when everyone around you is a soulless yes-man?
Carter Scott
I really go back and forth on the easy mode argument. True accessibility modes, yeah, that should be handled — stuff like colorblind modes, adaptive controls, etc, and console manufacturers can help a lot here. But easy mode is thorny. On the one hand, I think people should be able to enjoy experience-focused games without needing a ton of technical skill, but on the other, it's like No Fear Shakespeare, no substitute for the real deal.
Ian Harris
>what happened
People chose the dvd player.
It was downhill ever since.
Angel Watson
I think there's a difference between easy and accessibility. Going back to Dark Souls, again because that's a really easy target for this conversation, you can play that game on a Guitar Hero controller. You can even play it on a DDR pad. Those are different ways you can actually play the game but playing on those controllers doesn't stop the enemies from behaving the way they always do. And the gameplay loop is still the same.
Henry Brooks
You reminded me of this
Christopher Wright
There's a difference between dumbing a game down and making it more accessible. Funfact, did you know that even a disabled quadriplegic can play video games if he puts enough effort into it?
youtube.com
What do these able-bodied game journalists have in comparison? A liberal arts degree? An essay on why games need more messages about diversity and immigration?
Jordan Scott
Hardware limits bred creativity.
Bentley Bailey
This right here. Wasn't there some sort of documentary about how naughty dog were the Geniuses of their time for making Crash Bandicoot work on the PlayStation 1? Something about them inventing new math to make the game work?
Jose Myers
eh, NES era was all about the grind. Games that could be completed in minutes that would take you days, and even weeks to do properly
Kevin Fisher
>At some point you as a player need to level up and beat the game. There was one time where beating the game with a badge of honor, not just something for you to get over with.
Agreed.
The "rush to the end" is too real these days. And it's funny, because people that do this also complain about "lack of content".
Recently went through a few games I've beaten quickly in the past and just took time to admire the art that went into them. It's funny how much work just gets ignored in the pursuit of the finish line.
Also agreed about challenge being something to see as a reward for overcoming rather than an obstacle to progressing.
Julian Parker
From what I remember, they utilized the camera to help implement a progressive loading scheme, where essentially you only saw a small part of the map at any given time, and once something was off the camera it was immediately unloaded. Gonna need a source on it though.
Cooper Clark
Right, easy mode and accessibility settings are different things. I don't like how journalists portray easy mode as an accessibility issue.
I like Celeste's easy mode model. It leaves a permanent mark on your save file that you used it, so nobody who cares about having triumphed over the game is going to use it as a crutch. It's also really customizable so if you do choose to use it, it doesn't have to be baby mode or nothing. But obviously it's going to come down to the developer, some won't see any compromised version of the gameplay experience as in line with their vision.
Jackson Moore
NES inherited that from arcades. The 16-bit era had mostly grown out of it. (And now we've gone back to arcades on mobile with mtx, timers/energy bars, and gacha.)
Brandon Wood
Occlusion culling isn't space-age tech mr. digital foundry
Brody Scott
>because people that do this also complain about "lack of content
I blame DLC for this shit. In concept DLC is fantastic. A way to keep old games alive longer than they normally would be. In practice it's become a lazy crutch because now you get skeletons of games on release only for you to wait for the muscle and tissue to show up later. Even if a technically complete game comes out nowadays it doesn't feel complete because everyone is just waiting for the next 3 DLC Packs.
Christian Foster
Never trust DLC announced before release.
Cooper Baker
It was back then. The smallest, simplest ideas could revolutionize an entire industry. Look at Mario 64 for example. An okay platformer by today's standards, but it was borderline witchcraft on release.
Isaiah Wood
>Preorder a month before release and get "character" and "stage" early
>"Guy" in DLC pack 2 was present in the base game as an NPC with a completed model and everything but was locked behind a paywall until 3 months after release
FUCK
OFF
Wyatt Myers
I wonder if you could do a case study on the history of Electronic Arts and get an answer to these questions? Maybe even Epic Megagames?
Both started out great, but have become generic corporations over time.
Would also be interested when the perception that they "want to make good games" became more of a fanciful, idealistic notion rather than seen as a company line.
Nathan Brooks
Had Sega not fucked up so much leading up the DC it could've lasted a little while longer on the market. Was still a fantastic machine at the time and the arcadefag in me had a blast.
Bentley Ward
I'd like to see that case study too. I'd also like to see that case study on Capcom. Because I've never seen a company Harbor both unflinching love and never ending hate from their own fan base. It's like Capcom does just enough to keep people loving them while still screwing them over under the table. Except for the PlayStation 3 era where everyone just despised them for years
Mason Collins
too many games. when you were little you appreciated the 3-4 titles you had. they were your world and lasted for years. today you constantly stress about buying a new game every month. console exclusives.... and no your free indie 16 bit shit doesnt count. no one wants to play that garbage
Adam Cooper
also people seem to tolerate shit games because of lootboxes since the reward has been made an external component of the gameplay. people grind thousands of hours in csgo and hate 99% of the time spent on it because on the back of their heads they have the idea of the next roulette wheel giving them a cool skin. I'm not a big fan of nintendo but reggie was 100% right. why play it if it's not fun?
Ryan Davis
You gotta find the right "16 bit shit". Some pretentious walking simulator just can't compare to something super addictive and endlessly replayable.
Pic related, behold my wall of autism.
Daniel Stewart
You got old
Alexander Hernandez
When Nolan Bushnell turned his $250 investment into millions of dollars, or when Yamauchi turned his toy company into a goliath video-game company, ‘financial analysis’ wasn’t what framed their decisions.