When was the end of the golden age for you, personally?
I always think it’s when Pokémon came out. 3d was becoming a thing around this time which was the beginning of the end. Pokémon marked a direction in gaming to me, where profits mattered more then content (they released the same game 3 times, 3 times in a decade and made millions) of course their are plenty of good games after this and many terrible ones before it, but this was the beginning of the end for me.
Pic unrelated
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Eh, Capcom did the same with all the Street Fighter II iterations.
And I don't even consider Pokemon or Street Fighter to be bad games.
I personally think the golden age ended with the introduction of CD-based systems on the 5th gen. 3rd and 4th gen were the golden age of home video games, much like how the early 80s were the golden age of arcades.
Early 3D was mindblowing as a kid witnessing the jump.
Especially for me as a kid, we went straight from a NES to a PSX. Going from Super Mario Bros to Crash Bandicoot was freakin AWESOME dude
97-98 were the best years.
>ff7
>mgs
>ocarina of time
>goldeneye
And personally I still had the snes and all the movie stores were selling their games for pennies on the dollar
would you risk extending that to 1999?
PS3/360 gen marked the true final end to it for me.
everything after has just been a cut/paste continuation since. the ps4, the xbox 1, same games, same franchises, same exclusive titles that carry to steam, nothing world shattering about the graphics update, the online systems are the same... nothing has changed. we're in a loop
Zoomers all of you. 7th gen was ass. All of it. HD was a fricking lie from both Microshit and Snoy, and Nintendo chased casuals and would abandon actual fricking gamers.
>I'll never forget the mass hype for Xbox 360 era graphics.
Yes, the hype for 360 games that were holdovers from the 6th gen and just had normal mapping and lens flare slapped onto them (and a res boost if you were lucky), and PS3 games like Genji 2 with its stiff PS2 era animated giant crabs and Snoy posting straight bullshit CG trailers as what the system could do.
I was there. Many were let down by the initial launch games and it wasn't until you saw stuff like Gear of War and MGS4 (the latter getting a huge visual downgrade by release) that people were sold on 360/PS3 as being "next gen". Other than that Microshit and Snoy both lied about the HD capabilities of their systems.
Shut the frick up
Man he's not being contrarian though. Even for my normies friends 7th gen was the start of big disappointments and deriving more joy from seeing games fail than succeed. I remember my buddies face when he finally got his hands on oblivion. It was sad.
I still think there were some decent games during the 7th gen, but I definitely agree. That was the start of the decline. The development costs and challenges were outgrowing the teams passions.
The comparison that comes to mind is a faucet. The 1st through 6th gen great games were flowing out full blast, 7th gen was turning the handle to about half, and 8th gen truly great games were just barely dripping out. 9th gen the water in the well has all but dried up. You get a passion project from an indie dev ever now and then, but even those are few and far between.
I’d say the best thing now is how good emulation related hardware and software have gotten, but on the flipside the internet is becoming a very small place so those various rom sites have a very finite lifetime.
And finding those passion projects that actually hold up is impossible you just have to blindly trust curators of some kind. Everything uses some godawful digital storefront where finding quality indie games is like digging through shit.
Sad thing is that the GDC quickly squishes out most of the last good small developers by surrounding them with political ideologies and horrible advice on development and monetization. Really, if the indie game isn’t made by a 1 or 2 man team, or some small Asian team, it runs the risk of being as bad as any other or at the very least the sequel will be.
About the only games I’ve actually bought the last 2 years were made by no name Koreans, or the various teams under Inti Creates. Of course, I’m not too choked up about this either. I’m perfectly happy playing the endless backlog of old games and plan on buying a couple more of those mini-consoles just because I enjoy them so much even outside of emulation, but you do tend to get a bit melancholy when you see what our hobby eventually became and how all the passion and potential circled down the drain, but even then, the rom hacking scene remains relatively untouched and just as good so that passion and potential still lives on in some form.
Take your meds dude
He's right though
>post zoomer opinion
>get called zoomer
>reply with zoomer meme
This is why you get called a zoomer, zoomer.
This. There was still some new franchises but they started to do remakes, they didn't have the lootbox/season pass shit games have today but the DLCs began at that moment.
The final years of the PS2 was the end for videogames.
Pretty much what said.
It started to die when people not interested in gaming started getting interested in gaming, like when they started appealing to normies for lack of a better term.
PS1 still had some charm but started this, PS2 started appealing to this more but still had some decent titles. PS3/Xbox 360 is when shit really started hitting the fan and it's been in a rapid decline since. Still some decent stuff emerges but I can count on 1 hand how many interesting games come out a year since the late 2000s. Of fricking course some of it is just personal preference.
Everyone and his dad played consoles. The real patrician/pleb divide had always been PCs. The decline of the console probably had something to do with e3 hype generating demos with muh graphics.
2011 was the last good year
Peak ended in 2007
2007 was an insanely good year for video games. I'll never forget the mass hype for Xbox 360 era graphics.
Gaming died as soon as the horse armor DLC for Oblivion was released. That opened pandora’s box for microtransactions.
For me, the PS1 was the beginning of the end. It brought so many normies to the market. The industry had already begun trying to sell "experiences" over games with stuff like FMV games, and the PS1 found a new market that wanted a relaxed experience rather than a challenge.
Was the nail in the coffin.
Frick, I was in high school when this happened, I remember this being a thing
>I remember this being a thing
What a useless statement. I hate this "a thing" bullshit.
Imagine making a post on Gankerdotcom to b***h about people using expressions people have been using for at least 30 years
What a useless statement.
Not him but that's a very recent expression
Yeah, and the acceptance of games being released that require friggin updates on day 1. Shits stupid, if I don't want to be connected then I shouldn't have to be, I bought a game and I expect it to run.
Horse armor was the biggest test gaming ever had and we failed. We were not vicious enough to shame anyone from trying that shit ever again, and so it became the standard that just got worse and worse as time went on.
Don't get me wrong, people were against it in a big way but it just wasn't enough. We truly thought this was a mistake Bethesda made that would never be repeated.
>pick up biowares new game dao
>literally a character that sits in your camp(an area you constantly return to) that advertises dlc adventure packs with a giant glowing quest marker over him
Personally, I’d say the sixth gen. Mind you I am by no means a Snoy fanboy, but the PS2 and how many games were published on it was fantastic. Watching Game Center CX episodes from that era was a real treat too as you got to see just how close the teams working on those games were and how much fun they themselves had with making them. Game development was cheap enough that you could take risks, or you could sink some money in to produce some visually impressive titles, but the production hasn’t outgrown these companies pocket books yet so there was a good balance.
I’d say 2012 was the absolute end of vidya though. Games were starting to devolve into the same things, DLC was becoming more and more accepted and would only get worse, and politics were starting to become more apparent in games. It’s sad to have seen the hobby more or less die outside of a couple new games here and there, and the successful monetization of mobile games will probably deliver the death blow to legacy game development, but considering we have found the enjoyment that comes from older games none of us will be affected so the loss isn’t truly that tragic.
Complaining about Pokemon is the boomeriest thing anyone can do. Pokemon at its height eschewed making a big budget console game to make a cheap, affordable classic style RPG as their flagship title. You were never meant to buy both Red and Blue or Gold and Silver, the choice was the same as choosing a color for your console. Yes there were a few different Pokemon, but the idea was to play with other people for the full experience. No different to how a fighting game is fully experienced with other players.
Its been about profits since the arcade days. No ones in the business to lose money.
2007ish, though I still love games past that point. Even now I find plenty of new games to enjoy each year, so it's not all bad. But AAA games rarely appeal to me anymore.
Software wise, it died when they realized they could sell an incomplete game for full price and then sell the other parts later. Now they offer a shell of a game for free, and sell the basic parts to play it. Or sell the idea of a game for full price before the actual game is released, and make all their money on day one, so it doesn't matter how good or bad the actual game is.
Hardware wise, it died with the PS3, the last console with a unique architecture. Now everything is just a PC.
Checked. You are totally spot on about consoles architecture ! Why buying a console while you have a PC with better specs?
I am also surprised nobody mentioned Early Access as a big reason why vidya quality decreased drastically in the recent year, albeit not the "end of the golden age" but more like an additional blow that is
Golden age was arguably all of the 90s and a good chunk of the late 80s and couple years of the 2000s. I wouldn't be able to give a hard cutoff, more just a drying up.hm8ax
Literally the reason why you have problems with post-1996 games is because gaming started getting mainstreamed around that time and companies changed their design and marketing philosophies to better compete in the capitalisms
Every single problem you have is traced back to that.
Meaning gaming went to style over substance shit games they could crank out without any fricking decent gameplay in them.
Honestly, if you think gaming didn't start going to shit after the mid-90s and wasn't complete garbage by the early 2000s, you belong in Ganker, not here.
I'm not saying they aren't valid issues. I'm just saying to consider why things changed.
For me the "good era" was 3rd gen to early 8th gen, with the "golden era" within that span to be 4th gen to early 7th gen.
Halo OG DLC. I remember Doritos being really pumped up about it on a Canadian gamer show and thinking "wow thats dumb"
PS3 era "game design" bros really brought the point home.
I hate to say this buy indygame culture, as cringe as it was, seemed like a glimmer of hope during that era.
Golden age ended with the PS2/GCN
3D was mindblowing, especially shit like playing Pokemon Stadium and seeing your 2D sprites come to life.
Then came PS2/GCN, 3D got a whole lot better and a huge step up visually. PS3 era was the start of chasing minimal gains, near constant remakes of old games and such.
PS2 was the best gen
and it went right off a cliff with the ps3 gen, i thought games were dead forever it was so bad
Hard to decide, there were a few big events
- DLC was invented
- Pokemon hugely popularized not selling a full game by calling it 2 games instead (incredible mind frick)
- Somebody at some point realized you can have the consumer beta test your games for free by just shipped them incomplete
- N64 chose cartridges instead of CDs / created their own greatest rival (Sony was right for once) and Nintendo ignores them to this day
-Wagglin'
-The launch of the Xbox
-The proliferation of smartphones
-9/11
And that's just a few, take your pick
Pokemon is better than your favorite game.
when the 360 came out and the biggest and most technically impressive game was not Kameo but instead Call of Duty 2.
To back up the comments of PS3/360 being the downfall, this is also when we saw the the great developers up to that point start to stumble. Long time greats like Konami, Capcom and Sega all lost their way, games started to become more like Hollywood movies that were focus tested for the widest audience and the authentic feel was beginning to fade.
last years of ps2 as said in this thread, that was about it, the soul died with ps3 generation.
1995
1994 was the absolute height of the 16-bit era, when Nintendo and Sega were blasting on all cylinders to outdo each other and gave everybody on every side some of the most legendary games ever. Then came 1995. Nintendo gets so overconfident in their success that they simply stop trying to compete and make multiple stupid decisions that ultimately stunt their growth, while Sega shoots themselves in the foot with the Saturn and bleeds out fast, allowing Sony to jump in and push style-over-substance in theit games.
Speaking of overpriced games, I have a pretty messed up copy of Rule of Rose that I’m thinking about selling, but I don’t know if it works or not. Has anyone had experience with selling broken games on ebay? Even in poor condition this game seems to be selling for around 400 bucks, and there’s a couple /vr/ related things I was wanting to get with that money so I don’t know if it would be worth throwing it on there or not.
Forgot the pic
It died with the end of the ps2 era.
>majority of my favorite games are 4th and 5th gen
>a very small number from 6th gen, fully admitting it might just be nostalgia that makes me like them
>am a zoomer so the nostalgia excuse for the older games doesn't work
I grew up in the 8th gen era and I had zero desire to play those frickin games.
When Japanese companies stopped to be the main developers.
2006 for me. Really society started to go to shit around them
It seemed like video games were always new, fresh, and wondrous with gradual improvements in all areas from when I was a kid in the 90s until about 2006-07