95 thoughts on “What was the exact point in time when video games lost their magic?”
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Introduction of PBR texture workflow which killed distinct look from every studio and homogenized creation of textures to match the realistic rendering. This is also main culprit behind the plastic look of every poorly made asset
Being a wagecuck. I always have this feeling that if I spend my free time doing something I enjoy instead of making money to escape wagecuckery, I am wasting my life.
Genre homogenization. Growing up, so many games thoroughly embraced their genre and you’d get so many different playstyles. Nowadays most of the big budget games are bloated composites made up of:
this is right on the money. so many execs looking at charts and going "well our game needs a bit of this, and a bit of that, and a bit of this, this game did well so let’s copy that"
also obvious shit like mtx, intentional scarcity of beloved classics (Nintendo), using flashy visuals to compensate for shallow/hollow mechanics, etc
IMO its basically what happened to anime, people who grew up watching anime and playing games get make the game/anime and the whole field enters into a rehash spiral due to lack of original concepts(which come from IRL experience in stuff other than vidya or anime)
Indie games tend to vary in quality obviously but due to their inherently unfiltered nature there’s still some soul / ‘magic’ intact. There tends to be an imbalance with different facets of their production (art / gameplay / story / music) as they can’t cover all the bases as well, but I’d still recommend those games over the AAA shit and overpriced Nintendo rehashes.
Also, time consuming games such as RPGs are bound to lose their magic as you get older. They’re full of management / checklist aspects that aren’t fun to engage with after a day of work.
I feel games coming out of Japan have not really changed besides looking "prettier"
It’s the Western industry that’s lost it’s soul by appealing to the lowest common denominator who wants to watch a movie rather than play a game
If the "magic" is marketing as truthful as that image, then video games never lost it. "Project Reality" my ass. Fuck Nintendo, Fuck SGI, and fuck NURBS
It wasn’t an instant loss, but a draining over time and from multiple factors. A lot of issues are rooted in gen 7. >the Wii and explosion of DS edutainment (and then the Move/Kinect leeches) were what got companies to want absolutely everyone possible to be their audience, meaning gameplay depth had to start being noticeably gutted and introduce handholding mechanics to coddle their new audience >360 popularizing turn and burn yearly dudebro dutyshooties/sportsballs >PS3 cultivating and validating oscarbait-wannabe games with heavily cinematic design/flow and tryhard stories >the cheap smartphoning revolution that began in the early 2010s gave rise to disgusting new/deeper avenues of monetization >the Mannconomy update for TF2
Point I’m getting at, all the major players’ hands were fucking dirty in terms of who ruined the industry in gen 7.
>far cry, call of duty, battlefield, fallout, etc. >series which were still niche >their individual 2010s entries comes out >all suddenly mainstream
was it social media and garden gnometube that gave them the push?
Sometime between 2011-2013. The 7th gen, despite its frequent generic-ness, still produced plenty of SOULFUL games pretty reliably for most of tis run, but around the tail end of the generation you started having a falling off of varied games from different genres and the collapse of the middleware AA game, everything being overbudgeted copycats. And right before the new console generation, you had a number of stupendously disappointing hype-bomb releases like Bioshock Infinite, Aliens Colonial Marines, and others. It was the point at which game developers as a class stopped caring.
These days we’re lucky to find one good AAA or AA game a year. I don’t mean to say that the SOVL has been completely eradicated from the industry, but it’s extraordinarily rare. In the PS1/n64 and PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generations, you could pick out practically any game from the shelf and be entertained, even if the game was crap. In the PS3/360/Wii gen, you still had a better than even chance at doing the same thing. By the time the PS4/XBO gen, I’ve played maybe 10 different console games worth keeping, and scarcely more PC games of the same class (by which I mean games that are not mods or retro indie stuff like Black Mesa or Undertale)
For me it happened gradually as the realization dawned on me that video games were no longer improving from year to year.
Now it seems that a game developed 10 years ago could easily be released today and we would be none the wiser.
I think when you play enough of them. Every new game I played as a child was a great experience because it was usually something new and interesting. Then I play more and more things, and they’re offering me experiences I’ve seen and done before, as games borrow and take from each other in terms of gameplay and mechanics a lot.
>I think when you play enough of them. Every new game I played as a child was a great experience because it was usually something new and interesting.
I think this is true too. Because then it’s always well X did it better, Y copied this wtf it’s the same thing or some other inane criticism. > as games borrow and take from each other
And this, it makes games feel so similar and not like they’re unique and trying to be/do their own thing. Certain elements prevail because they’re good and fun but it sucks when it’s in all of them.
I wouldn’t say "lost their magic" because there are still plenty of good games that get things right. But the worst thing to happen to games was the paid online services. Original Halo for Xbox played over the internet just fine. You could connect your Xbox to a hub and select a lan game then using a PC with gamespy you could select and connect to anyone. Microsoft later created XBL to simplify this process. Then they started adding in paid DLC. And companies figured out that paid DLC is a great way to combat the sale of used games. You can sell the base game for $60 and $20 in DLC that they need for the full experience. And every time the used game is sold at half price the new buyer needs to buy the DLC at full price. The value you added to your physical purchase is non-transferrable. And slowly what used to be free services became paid services. Console gaming is a race to find innovative ways to fuck the customer. I avoid it whenever I can.
I love how every NEET assumes people with jobs just work at McDonald’s lol
I own a house anon. What do you have? An unstable sleep schedule? Is sacrificing your opportunity to own things really worth that?
>this is what neets actually believe
Anon mr shekelstein has convinced you that being dirt poor is great and having success sucks. I have more than enough time to play video games and i make a bunch of money. Hell my company gives me so much vacation time i basically get paid to play vidya.
It was the point where hardware and graphics were sufficiently strong that you could sell a game only on looks and detail. PS2 era was the last gen where devs kind of had to have somewhat interesting gameplay still. Because you couldn’t "hide" the gameplay mechanics with visuals. With the PS3 era and games like Uncharted it had been officially established that the gameplay mechanics didn’t need to be interesting if the visuals and spectacle was of a certain level.
I’d also fault the DS/touchscreen era. Personally for me, having to hold onto the stylus and be super precise with some of the games, it ruined the immersion. Or having to pay attention to huge colorful buttons and shit. Don’t get me wrong, there were some good games, but it felt too "streamlined" and "planned" to let the player experience a magic feeling. Same with the wiimote. if the waggle sucked, the game just became a game instead of an experience. On the other hand I think it could have worked better if the technology was there, I remember buying Hyrule Warriors because I wanted to play swords like a kid, but then the game was kind of shitty. That’s on me for buying a Musou game though.
>old good new bad
It is kind of true the past couple of years.
But there have been dozens and dozens of fantastic games that have come out the past decade. I feel like a lot of you are clinging so hard to your childhood that you can’t accept that vidya isn’t the same for you now.
>>old good new bad >It is kind of true the past couple of years.
This just confirm that people spewing this meme are zoomers that are not old enough to appreciate games that aren’t current gen.
When you became the one paying for them. I still love video games, and based on what I read around here I’m pretty sure it’s because I have a job where I can comfortably afford them
Paying for them isn’t the problem for me, it’s just I don’t have the time anymore. There is a steady stream of games coming out that I’m interested in, but I don’t even buy half of them because I will not have the time to play them, so why bother?
With this piece of shit. It killed all mobile games that had soul by popularizing the act of monetizing games past a single purchase, and then video games followed suit.
Yep, couldn’t be because assholish toxic retards are in the loud minority, it must be the Jooz!
Always excuses and "reasons" why ‘get woke go broke’ has zero successes, yet none ever touch the reality: Get woke go broke is bullshit, because most people don’t flip their shit like retarded monkeys over delusional conspiracies.
Just FYI, it’s a well known fact that the majority of posters on Ganker are doing so from Israeli IPs.
You can’t hide here, Laim.
If that’s true, then that means you’re the minority and that you have no power here.
most people just quietly hate being morally condescended to and choose not to participate
Picture me, a person that doesn’t know what’s going on. And I have 2 sources of information to explain a phenomenon. One is that image, which is well documented and explaining its sources. The other one is you, an emotional response just saying everything is bullshit because uuuh whatever.
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this but unironically
I remember a few weeks ago before they raised the debt ceiling again the government met with a bunch of banks and other companies like raytheon.
It was the point where hardware and graphics were sufficiently strong that you could sell a game only on looks and detail. PS2 era was the last gen where devs kind of had to have somewhat interesting gameplay still. Because you couldn’t "hide" the gameplay mechanics with visuals. With the PS3 era and games like Uncharted it had been officially established that the gameplay mechanics didn’t need to be interesting if the visuals and spectacle was of a certain level.
moron, Silent Hill 2 barely has gameplay mechanics and is one of the best games ever made
ps360 era give us guitar hero 3, halo 3, bioshock, call of duty and so many more, the problem started to exhaust at ONE/PS4 era.
>Games that were mostly considered good because they brought things to arcade and pc standards.
Guitar Hero was straight up normie DDR, ignoring Guitar Freaks since you’d only see that in high end arcades.
guitar hero 3 was based because they get a lot of great licensed music and the campaign was excellent, the moment all went to shit was with Rock Band, a overglorified karaoke.
>It was the point where hardware and graphics were sufficiently strong that you could sell a game only on looks and detail.
Recidivist cope. Games have always used graphics as a major selling point.
>Recidivist cope. Games have always used graphics as a major selling point.
The difference is that it wasn’t until the PS360 era that games truly started blending cinematic elements into gameplay. Its when you got stuff like cinematic takedowns and other mid-gameplay cutscenes. This was present to a smaller extent on the PS2 in games like God of War QTEs, but they were still mostly gameplay focused. PS3 generation is when games became "interactive experiences" where they were supposed to feel like being inside a movie.
Atta boy. Completely agree. Also the 360/PS3 could BARELY play some of those games. Outdated graphics with bad gameplay, and on top of it, you get a smooth, consistent, cinematic 7-19 frames per second.
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Introduction of PBR texture workflow which killed distinct look from every studio and homogenized creation of textures to match the realistic rendering. This is also main culprit behind the plastic look of every poorly made asset
Being a wagecuck. I always have this feeling that if I spend my free time doing something I enjoy instead of making money to escape wagecuckery, I am wasting my life.
2011
Genre homogenization. Growing up, so many games thoroughly embraced their genre and you’d get so many different playstyles. Nowadays most of the big budget games are bloated composites made up of:
>RPG
>Hack & Slash (dodge roll, parry etc)
>Shooter
>Adventure
>Platformer
>Stealth
But it never feels like they particularly excel. I’ll pick on Horizon Zero Dawn as an example. It’s a decent game but it’s just trying to do too much.
this is right on the money. so many execs looking at charts and going "well our game needs a bit of this, and a bit of that, and a bit of this, this game did well so let’s copy that"
also obvious shit like mtx, intentional scarcity of beloved classics (Nintendo), using flashy visuals to compensate for shallow/hollow mechanics, etc
With craftingvania and roguebound elements.
IMO its basically what happened to anime, people who grew up watching anime and playing games get make the game/anime and the whole field enters into a rehash spiral due to lack of original concepts(which come from IRL experience in stuff other than vidya or anime)
Indie games tend to vary in quality obviously but due to their inherently unfiltered nature there’s still some soul / ‘magic’ intact. There tends to be an imbalance with different facets of their production (art / gameplay / story / music) as they can’t cover all the bases as well, but I’d still recommend those games over the AAA shit and overpriced Nintendo rehashes.
Also, time consuming games such as RPGs are bound to lose their magic as you get older. They’re full of management / checklist aspects that aren’t fun to engage with after a day of work.
Jan 16, 2007
When, instead of becoming a retreat from everyday life, they became your everyday life.
I feel games coming out of Japan have not really changed besides looking "prettier"
It’s the Western industry that’s lost it’s soul by appealing to the lowest common denominator who wants to watch a movie rather than play a game
If the "magic" is marketing as truthful as that image, then video games never lost it. "Project Reality" my ass. Fuck Nintendo, Fuck SGI, and fuck NURBS
Japs are still pretty good at making vidya for the most part.
Western developers mostly went to shit in the PS3/360 era.
Outside of some pretty cool indie stuff, I genuinelly have no idea what’s produced in the West that gets people hyped nowadays
It wasn’t an instant loss, but a draining over time and from multiple factors. A lot of issues are rooted in gen 7.
>the Wii and explosion of DS edutainment (and then the Move/Kinect leeches) were what got companies to want absolutely everyone possible to be their audience, meaning gameplay depth had to start being noticeably gutted and introduce handholding mechanics to coddle their new audience
>360 popularizing turn and burn yearly dudebro dutyshooties/sportsballs
>PS3 cultivating and validating oscarbait-wannabe games with heavily cinematic design/flow and tryhard stories
>the cheap smartphoning revolution that began in the early 2010s gave rise to disgusting new/deeper avenues of monetization
>the Mannconomy update for TF2
Point I’m getting at, all the major players’ hands were fucking dirty in terms of who ruined the industry in gen 7.
2007-2010
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>far cry, call of duty, battlefield, fallout, etc.
>series which were still niche
>their individual 2010s entries comes out
>all suddenly mainstream
was it social media and garden gnometube that gave them the push?
CoD was mainstream long before 2010.
Sometime between 2011-2013. The 7th gen, despite its frequent generic-ness, still produced plenty of SOULFUL games pretty reliably for most of tis run, but around the tail end of the generation you started having a falling off of varied games from different genres and the collapse of the middleware AA game, everything being overbudgeted copycats. And right before the new console generation, you had a number of stupendously disappointing hype-bomb releases like Bioshock Infinite, Aliens Colonial Marines, and others. It was the point at which game developers as a class stopped caring.
These days we’re lucky to find one good AAA or AA game a year. I don’t mean to say that the SOVL has been completely eradicated from the industry, but it’s extraordinarily rare. In the PS1/n64 and PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generations, you could pick out practically any game from the shelf and be entertained, even if the game was crap. In the PS3/360/Wii gen, you still had a better than even chance at doing the same thing. By the time the PS4/XBO gen, I’ve played maybe 10 different console games worth keeping, and scarcely more PC games of the same class (by which I mean games that are not mods or retro indie stuff like Black Mesa or Undertale)
For me it happened gradually as the realization dawned on me that video games were no longer improving from year to year.
Now it seems that a game developed 10 years ago could easily be released today and we would be none the wiser.
I will say between 2013-2017 ish
hazy maze cave was the hardest level for me, all my last stars were there
They haven’t
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After Portal 2. I miss Valve. I miss being excited for games.
Wii and Kinect defanged all games out of greed to serve the most retarded customers
When you turned 16 and real responsibilities started becoming apart of your norm obviously
Nah, I had more fun gaming at 16 than at any other age. Then again, games were still good when I was that age.
I think when you play enough of them. Every new game I played as a child was a great experience because it was usually something new and interesting. Then I play more and more things, and they’re offering me experiences I’ve seen and done before, as games borrow and take from each other in terms of gameplay and mechanics a lot.
>I think when you play enough of them. Every new game I played as a child was a great experience because it was usually something new and interesting.
I think this is true too. Because then it’s always well X did it better, Y copied this wtf it’s the same thing or some other inane criticism.
> as games borrow and take from each other
And this, it makes games feel so similar and not like they’re unique and trying to be/do their own thing. Certain elements prevail because they’re good and fun but it sucks when it’s in all of them.
I wouldn’t say "lost their magic" because there are still plenty of good games that get things right. But the worst thing to happen to games was the paid online services. Original Halo for Xbox played over the internet just fine. You could connect your Xbox to a hub and select a lan game then using a PC with gamespy you could select and connect to anyone. Microsoft later created XBL to simplify this process. Then they started adding in paid DLC. And companies figured out that paid DLC is a great way to combat the sale of used games. You can sell the base game for $60 and $20 in DLC that they need for the full experience. And every time the used game is sold at half price the new buyer needs to buy the DLC at full price. The value you added to your physical purchase is non-transferrable. And slowly what used to be free services became paid services. Console gaming is a race to find innovative ways to fuck the customer. I avoid it whenever I can.
2006
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When you left highschool and the burdens of financial and adult responsibilities began taking their toll. Take the NEETpill and enjoy vidya again.
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I love how every NEET assumes people with jobs just work at McDonald’s lol
I own a house anon. What do you have? An unstable sleep schedule? Is sacrificing your opportunity to own things really worth that?
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Cope, wagie. You should be preparing for work tomorrow so mr shekelstein can manipulate more stocks at your expense.
Let me guess, you have no applicable skills so can’t crack $40,000 a year and assume that everyone who works is as useless as you?
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>and assume that everyone who works is as useless as you?
No, they’re worse.
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>Post another mcdonalds tier job
Other guy is right, not everyone is making minimum wage with shit benefits.
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Finally
>this is what neets actually believe
Anon mr shekelstein has convinced you that being dirt poor is great and having success sucks. I have more than enough time to play video games and i make a bunch of money. Hell my company gives me so much vacation time i basically get paid to play vidya.
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To each their own. I hope you enjoy the neet life. I couldnt deal with it. Thankfully my current job pays well and I enjoy what I do.
You can still enjoy video games. But that has nothing to do with the games "losing the magic".
I’d also fault the DS/touchscreen era. Personally for me, having to hold onto the stylus and be super precise with some of the games, it ruined the immersion. Or having to pay attention to huge colorful buttons and shit. Don’t get me wrong, there were some good games, but it felt too "streamlined" and "planned" to let the player experience a magic feeling. Same with the wiimote. if the waggle sucked, the game just became a game instead of an experience. On the other hand I think it could have worked better if the technology was there, I remember buying Hyrule Warriors because I wanted to play swords like a kid, but then the game was kind of shitty. That’s on me for buying a Musou game though.
Because I put effort in high school and college I don’t have to worry about anything as an adult.
Gone Home
>captcha: SJWHD
>old good new bad
It is kind of true the past couple of years.
But there have been dozens and dozens of fantastic games that have come out the past decade. I feel like a lot of you are clinging so hard to your childhood that you can’t accept that vidya isn’t the same for you now.
>>old good new bad
>It is kind of true the past couple of years.
This just confirm that people spewing this meme are zoomers that are not old enough to appreciate games that aren’t current gen.
Whenever the first iPhone came out. Society as a whole started it’s decline.
2007.
Somewhere around 2005
The HD era
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When you became the one paying for them. I still love video games, and based on what I read around here I’m pretty sure it’s because I have a job where I can comfortably afford them
Paying for them isn’t the problem for me, it’s just I don’t have the time anymore. There is a steady stream of games coming out that I’m interested in, but I don’t even buy half of them because I will not have the time to play them, so why bother?
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With this piece of shit. It killed all mobile games that had soul by popularizing the act of monetizing games past a single purchase, and then video games followed suit.
Around 2007-2008, when the recession hit.
garden gnomes decided that good games were bad.
what garden gnomes have to tho with that?
First day on Ganker?
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>he doesn’t know
Yep, couldn’t be because assholish toxic retards are in the loud minority, it must be the Jooz!
Always excuses and "reasons" why ‘get woke go broke’ has zero successes, yet none ever touch the reality: Get woke go broke is bullshit, because most people don’t flip their shit like retarded monkeys over delusional conspiracies.
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>it must be the Jooz!
Post nose
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Take yours first
Post fingernails
Just FYI, it’s a well known fact that the majority of posters on Ganker are doing so from Israeli IPs.
You can’t hide here, Laim.
If that’s true, then that means you’re the minority and that you have no power here.
most people just quietly hate being morally condescended to and choose not to participate
Picture me, a person that doesn’t know what’s going on. And I have 2 sources of information to explain a phenomenon. One is that image, which is well documented and explaining its sources. The other one is you, an emotional response just saying everything is bullshit because uuuh whatever.
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this but unironically
I remember a few weeks ago before they raised the debt ceiling again the government met with a bunch of banks and other companies like raytheon.
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PS360 era.
It was the point where hardware and graphics were sufficiently strong that you could sell a game only on looks and detail. PS2 era was the last gen where devs kind of had to have somewhat interesting gameplay still. Because you couldn’t "hide" the gameplay mechanics with visuals. With the PS3 era and games like Uncharted it had been officially established that the gameplay mechanics didn’t need to be interesting if the visuals and spectacle was of a certain level.
what the monkey says
agreed
I agree with this.
moron, Silent Hill 2 barely has gameplay mechanics and is one of the best games ever made
ps360 era give us guitar hero 3, halo 3, bioshock, call of duty and so many more, the problem started to exhaust at ONE/PS4 era.
>Games that were mostly considered good because they brought things to arcade and pc standards.
Guitar Hero was straight up normie DDR, ignoring Guitar Freaks since you’d only see that in high end arcades.
guitar hero 3 was based because they get a lot of great licensed music and the campaign was excellent, the moment all went to shit was with Rock Band, a overglorified karaoke.
>ps360 era give us guitar hero 3, halo 3, bioshock, call of duty and so many more
Yes, that’s the problem
Yea that actually makes alot of simple sense. When games started being sold almost exclusively on their looks and nothing else, gaming was doomed.
Now we have garbage "games" sold exclusively on their stories too when movies and books exist as a better form to tell a story.
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I’m personally a fan of Dreamcast graphics.
>It was the point where hardware and graphics were sufficiently strong that you could sell a game only on looks and detail.
Recidivist cope. Games have always used graphics as a major selling point.
>Games have always used graphics as a major selling point.
Yes, but at a certain point they began to use graphics as their only selling point.
>Recidivist cope. Games have always used graphics as a major selling point.
The difference is that it wasn’t until the PS360 era that games truly started blending cinematic elements into gameplay. Its when you got stuff like cinematic takedowns and other mid-gameplay cutscenes. This was present to a smaller extent on the PS2 in games like God of War QTEs, but they were still mostly gameplay focused. PS3 generation is when games became "interactive experiences" where they were supposed to feel like being inside a movie.
Atta boy. Completely agree. Also the 360/PS3 could BARELY play some of those games. Outdated graphics with bad gameplay, and on top of it, you get a smooth, consistent, cinematic 7-19 frames per second.
i was about to say this. the jump to "HD" is what killed games for me
It’s also ironic that despite basically creating this type of game RE4 still had great mechanics and an unique feel.
Wisdom
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SPBP
/thread
When your childhood ended.
fpbp
fpbp
Fpbp
The cope answer.
The real answer.
The two coincide for most people.
fpbp
good thing that i’m a 30 year old manchild
2009
Incorrect take loved by midwits. Games objectively got worse.
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Wish me luck in the ardous journey that is reading this left-wing meme, Gankerros!