I think maybe I just don't like Video games that much anymore?

The Game Room
21

I think that’s it for me anyway. When I was younger, I relished the idea of having to spend a lot of time playing a game and getting good at it.

Now that I’m older and have kids, I’m looking for something more… episodic(?) so that I can drop in, play a half-hour or hour, and not come back for a few days without feeling like I either dropped behind the other players or like I never really engaged with the game.

I’ve also found that I like multiplayer games a lot more than I used to; I have a set of friends across the nation, and it’s more fun to play just about anything WITH them, than play anything else by myself.

22

Elite is an interesting one as, especially with the original release, it was clear that David Braben hadn’t learnt anything from the last thirty years of videogame development. Elite: Dangerous was, quite simply, the original Elite with a fancy frontend and he somehow thought this was going to fly.

Elite: Dangerous is probably my biggest ever gaming disappointment.

23

This ^^^^

Back when the best you were going to get graphics wise was super pixelated 8bit color
and the games platform did not have enough memory to live load the world encyclopedia from 12billion BC to present, it HAD to be your gameplay that kept the gamer.

Your graphics were going to look like everyone elses, you were working with a CPU that ran about the speed of a sewing machine, so your gameplay was everything and you code had to be godlike in efficiency.

Now, the trend does seem to be to throw all the flash bang and eye candy you can at the screen in lieu of content and gameplay.
And the coding can get sloppy and inefficient because the hardware will gloss it over, kind of.

I still like games, but these days, i like a lot less of them.
When i do find one i actually like, it tends to stay around a long time.

24

As someone who plays a lot of games, I think the big challenge is innovation. Not in graphics, but in gameplay. We’re reaching the point where we’ve done pretty much everything we can do with First-Person Shooters without getting into VR. Real-time Strategy reached its peak several years ago. Pretty much the only thing that changes in many sports games is the names of the virtual players.

There’s some real gems in Indie gaming - I highly recommend Papers, Please, This War of Mine and Dead State - so there’s still some innovation coming from there, where they have to compensate for 1980s/1990s-era graphics with good stories and interesting mechanics.

Personally, I think the way forward is going to be in better storytelling - but first, major games companies have to stop trying to shoehorn multiplayer into everything.

25

Eh, video games have always been piles of dreck with a few gems. I had over five hundred floppy disks with games on them (many with multiple games) for my Commodore 64 and could maybe list fifty if I really tried and many of those were nothing special. Consoles have always been inundated with shovelware and crappy franchise tie-in titles.

I don’t know if innovative games really came out at a faster rate than before but I do know that today big studios can create immersive worlds unlike in the past and smaller studios have access to development tools that let them do stuff that a couple independent guys couldn’t have managed before.

26

Real Time Strategy - nothing has been released in about 10 years that is as well put together as Supreme Commander : Forged Alliance. There are a handful of new AAA RTS games released, maybe 1 a year, but none of them have the interface or the complexity of the battles or anything.

First Person Shooter - this peaked years ago. Deus Ex Human Revolution or FEAR or Half Life 2 were about when it peaked. There’s nothing new out you haven’t played, since then. (ok, there’s Doom, but it has the old abstract levels instead of real places and has limited gameplay besides run around with a shotgun)

Construct Em Up - Nothing has surpassed Minecraft, and at this point, Minecraft has been static for years.

RPG - Nothing has surpassed Baldur’s Gate 2, though there are more recent titles that are pretty good

That’s what I think. Recent trends have been towards a lot of very crude, unfinished games that do unique things but will never be completed.

There IS one new-ish genre of game. The open world sneak/kill em up. Started with Day Z, there’s DayZ standalone, H1Z1, Player Unknown battlegrounds, and other games. The basic premise is that it’s a a far more realistic shooter that takes place in wide open environments with actual realistic buildings and trees and all that. Weapons are actual weapons available to the military now. And dying is immensely penalized - you generally have to start the game over. This creates a very tense environment where you may be shot dead at any moment, and generally if another player gets the drop on you, you die.

27

You’ve got Open World Survival which is broader than that, getting famous with Rust and then leading to ARK and other titles.

28

Personally I think we’ve had several excellent RPGs which surpass Baldurs Gate 2, including the various Witcher games, Fallout 3/New Vegas, and Oblivion/Skyrim.

29

Well, fair enough, but most people don’t think FO4 or FO3 are very good. I’ll give you Witcher and New Vegas, forgot about those. Fairly “old”.

30

Hoo boy. Talk about a subject I can go on for pages about. Since I realize you all have jobs and whatnot, here is a somewhat condensed history:

First steps (1979ish-1982): Oh, wow! This “Atari” doohickey is way more fun than staring at the walls or listening that fossilized dreck my parents call “music”! And my sister seems to be in it too! Most of these games are kinda pointless, but who cares, I really like this thing! Enthusiasm: Considerable, if childlike

Developing arcade scene (1982-1984): Atari system has stuff break down, eventually give it up. Game rooms are mixed bag; can be fun places, but dark and sometimes scary. Eventually the customer base vanishes for some reason and most struggle to survive. I’m fascinated by the bright colors and crisp sounds but am completely intimidated by the control schemes (do not get me started on Crazy Climber). Do very little actual playing during this time. Enthusiasm: Waning

Dark times (1984-1985): Game rooms all but dead; “casual” arcade cabinets gradually vanishing from supermarkets, drugstores, convenience stores, etc. Still no successor to the Atari systems. Computer games are crude, clunky things about as fun as car repair. Arcades games developing rapidly, but still way too cowardly to actually play them. Enthusiasm: low

8-bit renaissance (1985-1987): Nintendo finally arrives and quickly rises to supremacy, and a whole nation is abuzz. Arcade game starting to show marked quality, and I finally have enough courage and hand-eye coordination to try them out. Enthusiasm: recovering

First golden age (1987-1992): NES becomes monster runaway hit with a jaw-dropping number and variety of titles. Arcade games are beautiful, electrifying, transcendent, and, oh yeah, insanely addictive. Arcade scene is colorful and vibrant (and then Street Fighter 2 came along and everything flat out blew up). And just when it looked liked the NES miiiiiiight be getting a little old, along comes the Game Genie to open up a whole new world of possibilities. A wonderful, wonderful time to be alive. Enthusiasm: overwhelming

Uncomfortable transition period (1992-1995): NES all but run its course. 16-bit era ushered in, along with a mountain range of baggage spurred on by Mortal Kombat, and, oh yeah, this was also the time Nintendo declared itself a “family company” (which took them something like two frickin’ decades to live down); Genesis is an underpowered system with notoriously tinny music. The absolute nadir console-wise. It gets so bad I end up buying both Neo Geo systems, and the less said about those, the better. Arcades dominated by fighting games, which are insanely complex and ridiculously hard to learn and thus not really my thing. Street Fighter 2 getting really, really, really, really, really, REEEEEALLLLY old. Enthusiasm: low, seriously worried about the future of the medium for the first time

Back in the saddle again (1995-1999): The Playstation heralds the 32-bit age. Straddling the line between 2D and 3D, it boasts a library dwarfing even the NES, and eventually its own Gameshark…and thanks to this wonderful invention called the Internet, I no longer have to do a ridiculous mail-order crapshoot to get codes! Arcades making the slow transition to 3D, breathing new life into old genres like auto racing and vertical shooters. Enthusiasm: high, hope restored.

The Endless Obnoxious Broken Record Era (1999-2001): “The Playstation 2 is great! The Playstation 2 is wonderful! The Playstation 2 will cure cancer! The Playstation 2 will be one of the greatest inventions in history! The Playstation 2 will unite the world! Don’t buy a Dreamcast! Don’t give a damn about the Dreamcast! Don’t think the word Dreamcast! The Dreamcast is doomed! The Dreamcast is useless! The Dreamcast is pathetic!” Enthusiasm: high re. Dreamcast games, severely ticked off about everything else

Rise of Sony (2001-2004): Wow, the PS2 really is a great system. And it has this awesome device called a Codebreaker. Whoda thunk? Enthusiasm: very high

Second golden age (2004-2010ish): Initial D Arcade Stage! Pump It Up! Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune! Beatmania IIDX! Pop 'n Music! And then of course I had to get a Playstation 3, which introduced me to the Assassin’s Creed series, Time Crisis 4, Rock Band, Project Diva…I spent more money during this period than any time prior (I could drop $60 on Maximum Tune in a day). To see the kind of games I wanted, I loved…it was simply, simply awesome. Oh, this was also the time Kongregate and similar sites really took off; tons of high-quality, wonderfully creative games I didn’t even have to pay for. Truly the best of times. Enthusiasm: overwhelming

Long, hard, brutal, painful decline (2010ish-2016): Ridiculous Gamergate flap casts a dark shadow on the whole culture. Lack of Codebreaker (or any successor) for PS3 massively hampering any kind of replay value. Wii and XBox 360 fun for a few months, then sit around gathering dust. (My favorite XBox 360 game of all time is still Prizefighter, just to put it in perspective.) Arcades no longer carry wonderful music games. Pump It Up’s difficulty skyrockets before it dies with a whimper. Everything costs too damn much, except for Kongregate, which is slowly becoming overrun with way too difficult, grindy, difficult, badly designed, difficult, repuslive, difficult, difficult, difficult difficult difficult games. Buy my first IPad, which is a cool novelty, but also introduces me to the annoying practices of mobile games, none greater than all the damn commercials I’m forced to watch (more on this in another thread). Still putting in time, but the bloom is off the rose, the ship is sailed, the dream is well and truly dead. Enthusiasm: very, very low

Last gasp (2016-present): One news horror story after another makes the future of the industry look bleaker than ever. Bought a PS4, found Assassin’s Creed Unity to be an absolute travesty (I made a thread about it, read it if you haven’t already! :D), and that’s the extent of any feeling I’ve mustered about this system so far. New Maximum Tune out, but it’s really pricey and they took out 10 Opponent Outrun; can’t get too worked up about that one. Discovered hacked flash game sites; currently enjoying them more than Kongregate. Got a second IPad, and it’s pretty nice, even if the stupid stand is so short that the dang thing keeps falling over. All in all, though, I find more and more that I’d much rather be watching or writing about video games than playing them. Enthusiasm: clinging to life

In a nutshell, I really miss all the freedom I once had. The Codebreaker was what made the PS2 worth having, and losing it really crippled the value of everything that’s come since. What happened to the simple, fun music games that weren’t crammed with 25 layers of pretension (I’m looking at you, Guitar Hero)? Why hasn’t anyone released a board game adaptation where you could enter your own die rolls? I mean, isn’t that the most elementary thing ever? And why is it that I have to watch 15 minutes of commercials to get anywhere in a puzzle game? More and more, I feel constrained by video games. It’s as if the purpose isn’t to have a good time but to follow a rigid series of rules and spend hours learning specialized skills, and if I falter in the slightest I’ll get horribly punished. Everything is either too hard, too restrictive, or too watered-down these days. And no, sorry, Minecraft can’t carry the load all by itself.

31

Not a PC gamer, then?

32

What I’ve learned is that my attention span for single-player games has gone way down. I can still spend a couple of hours happily playing something with voice chat, but I’m much more likely to get bored on my own. A lot of times I decide that I want to play Overwatch or Heroes of the Storm, play a single match, and then turn off the computer because nobody is around and I’m bored already. Sometimes I won’t play at all.

I got FFXV a couple months back, dropped a bunch of hours into it, and then inexplicably stopped. The game is fun! I was enjoying just about every aspect of it, but my desire to sit and play it dropped off a cliff.

It’s especially weird because I want to get into a lot of these games. I want to dive into a crunchy, oldschool RPG with lots of items and character leveling and that sort of thing. But then I got Pillars of Eternity and barely made any progress.

33

I think for me it’s the fact that nothing will replace that rush I got from games like Ultima Online or Dark Age of Camelot. The PvP in those games had a high skill ceiling, but not in the same sense of your modern MOBAs, for example. It was the ruthlessness and unforgiving nature of them. I feel like everything tries to hold your hand now in one way or another.

Die in old UO? You lose all your gear and your assailant can stomp on your corpse. I think I miss that potential to totally ruin someone else’s day in a video game. It was fun because it was rage-inducing when it happened to you, just as it is when you did it to someone else.

34

SuperHOT was new and innovative. It’s not the best game in the world, but it was fun, different and could be played in nice bite-sized pieces. For traditional shooting, the Wolfenstein games were great. Games like Rainbow Siege Six do interesting stuff with the environment to complicate things more than point 'n shoot. Titanfall switches you up between traditional shooting and controlling a big ole battle mech and shooting things that way.

Conversely, while I loved Everquest at the time, these days I don’t have time for that nonsense. Staying up until all hours (or setting an alarm) to camp a quest spawn or guild rushes for raid mobs or six hour long corpse recoveries in Plane of Fear. All “good” memories but I have a family and a mortgage and stuff these days. That’s the same thing that keeps me out of the games like ARK these days – fun concept but I don’t have time to build sandcastles just so people can kick them down and steal my stuff while I’m at work.

But if you’re looking for a chance to ruin someone’s day, the Survival MMO genre is probably your best bet.

I have a feeling though that there’s a number of people who fondly remember games from when they had sixteen hours to blow on trying to get past a level. These days, they don’t, so the 16hrs-per-level games get set aside and the games where you can do a level in an hour are derided as “watered down”.

35

Here’s what turns me off. Minecraft showed that a new kind of game is possible. Yet, the actual codebase of Minecraft is a buggy messy written in java, so Minecraft itself never advanced past a certain point. (also, the developers working on it are nervous to change anything major because they don’t know why it’s so popular)

No one has written a follow up game that isn’t an even buggier mess. Nor has anyone really tried to introduce gameplay to the genre.

ARK - a buggier mess that somehow looks worse graphically even though it uses drastically more advanced rendering techniques. It also has abysmal framerates and the levels do not procgen and the gameplay basis is explicitly grinding.

Space Engineers - the best of the followups, but it is a buggy mess. “Spacecraft” can’t travel more than ~100 meters/second because of a totally inadequate physics solution. Crashes and physic glitches that ruin whatever you built for hours are common and have been common for years.

Fortresscraft - an example of one that is actually a little less of a buggy mess, because it does less, but the gameplay basis is boring grinding.

What I mean by “gameplay” is that all of these games share the open-ended, “pointless build” type goal. When you fire one up, there is little *reason *to actually make any of the things you can build because everything you make (besides something very simplistic) is pointless.

This turns me off, because now that I’m in my 30s, I want a challenge I can immediately get into, I don’t necessarily feel satisfied just sorta putzing around making a virtual castle by hand that doesn’t actual defend from anything.

Minecraft : you don’t need anything but a low wall or a fence to keep the monsters off you and some torches inside, a few crafting related blocks, and storage chests. Everything more elaborate is pointless, you can beat every challenge the game has to offer with just that. You don’t even need a roof because the game doesn’t simulate any negative effects from getting rained on.

Space Engineers is similar in that you do not actually need a large and complex spaceship, just basically a brick with engines on all sides, a source of power, a seat to sit in, and storage. Maybe a gun or 2. It doesn’t reward anything complex because the game doesn’t model many forces and needs that act on real and hypothetical spacecraft.

And so on. I feel like there’s some real potential here for a far more sophisticated game. Essentially a simplified reality engine, basically, that simulates accurately anything that is made of 0.5 meter or larger sub-voxels*, simulating heat flow and electricity and life support and nuclear physics and all that, and in VR.

*basically the game would be runnable on existing computers because it cheats and doesn’t model anything’s pieces smaller than a certain size - it doesn’t go down to individual atoms, but models things as a series of modules of that minimum size.

36

If you don’t insist that the game be 3D, there are roughly seven million 2D games in the survival/building genre.

None of them are as vast and open-ended as Minecraft and its ilk. More like Dwarf Fortress - limited space, limited resources, unlimited external pressure.

Two that I’ve heard of recently are Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included. The latter is by the same folks who made Don’t Starve, which is also a survival game.

Oxygen Not Included is in early access - I don’t know about Rimworld.

37

ARK isn’t anything like Minecraft aside from “you build stuff”. ARK isn’t voxels and isn’t intended to let you build “anything”, you’re supposed to build shelters, then fortresses, to protect you from the environment and from other players. It has a progression system of “dungeons” (caves) and then raids which is the reason to make stuff – so you can defeat the dungeons/raids and get more stuff (or beat up players and take their stuff). In that respect, and in its grindy aspects, it’s more akin to a PVP MMORPG than to Minecraft.

ARK doesn’t “compare” to Minecraft because they’re two completely different styles of game. Only one let me build a kick-ass war platform on a brontosaurus though :smiley:

38

I know about both. Neither attempts to model anything like reality with sub-blocks or has the immersion of actually being there. (the 3d part). Oxygen Not Included doesn’t even bother to model conservation of energy, which bugged me the moment I saw it. Nor can you build your “base” into a mobile vehicle, a critical concept I think these games need to encourage a far more interesting bit of gameplay.

I mean, a 2d version of the game I have in mind, you play on a procgen planet, top down. You must venture about the world and you have a “main base” vehicle (and scout vehicles) that you made from sub-block “squares”. The basic idea is, you are limited in what you can carry on your vehicle (stopping the inventory flood problem of Minecraft) and you need to find unique things about the gameworld that you can use to upgrade your vehicle. Basically, your vehicle ultimately is like a 100x100 meter atomic powered tank or something at the end. Each “square” you add to your vehicle is simulated with all fundamental interactions modeled - there’s structural stresses and heat flow and energy flow and liquid flow and all that.

So the fundamental gameplay loop might be : you start out with a pile of vehicle parts on the ground and your character. You make a buggy or motorcycle. You move across the gameworld to a place where you can use the stuff there to make a bigger, more sophisticated vehicle. You then move to the next places - at any given moment, there are a couple waypoints the game gives you where you might go, and more advanced stuff has something guarding it or required the vehicle be able to traverse some type of obstacle in order to get there. A 3d version of the game, you would need to build an airplane and send one there, or a ship or a submarine or some totally different type of vehicle to obtain what you need. (while your “main base” vehicle waits for you to return)

Eventually you have the biggest, baddest vehicle possible and have gotten every upgrade, and now you must traverse to and then beat down the “boss vehicle” for the “you win” screen.

39

So… kind of an open-world, land-based Kerbal Space Program?

40

With as much as is out there, I’m fine if a game doesn’t give me a huge number of hours of enjoyment–as long as I get it at a price that justifies my level of commitment.

I mean, I never beat Super Mario Bros as a kid, either. I rarely beat games. But that was because there was something else I wanted to play. I’m fine with that now.