>disco elysium >maybe
it can't compete with any crpg that has combat, the only one it's comparable too is planescape and planescape blows it the frick out of the water. >b-but I don't care about combat
then don't compare it to a crpg you fricking simpleton, go play VNs instead.
before you start shitting on me as a DE hater know that I played it twice, consider it a very good game and would recommend it to anyone. It's an amazing game. But trying sell it as the best crpg to actual crpg fans who care about combat, builds, party synergy, is delusional. And if you only care about dialogue, again, compare it to VNs then.
>biased by nostalgia
NTA but most old games I play that I never played before mog the shit out of new games. No one makes games like Dungeon Keeper, Evil Genius, Jagged Alliance, Stronghold or Patrician 3.
At least once a year I play through Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Freelancer, and Homeworld & HW:Cataclysm. There are some new games that I enjoy but it is hard to beat the classics.
How can I be nostalgic for games that released before I was born and didn't engage with seriously until I was already an adult? If I want a nostalgia driven experience I'll go play Halo 3.
>Too many managers. Games from back then would have been indie today.
This anon pointed out a very overlooked fact. Proliferation of non-creative/non-productive positions, especially in leadership, is a universal problem (American healthcare is arguably the worst offender in the world today), but very few people seem to notice this happens in the vidya industry. Brainlets will instead look at the success cases of yesterday, see mostly white men in AAA teams which were the size of current day indie studios and go full chinlet, ignoring all the absolute garbage both back then and now also being made by white men.
I made a list of iconic good games from the 90s 00s, 10s and the current 20s
during the 90s and 00s there were usually 25 to 30 iconic games per year
now we are getting 3 to 4 good games per year
no matter how much literally who indie garbage we had back then, we had 35 classics per year
now we have the same indie garbage AND AAA goyslop
That's not mutually exclusive with what I said. Few classics are produced nowadays because production at every level is bloated with non-productive/non-creative positions.
the “classics” of today (this is impossible to determine today, we need to wait at least a decade to see if they are still relevant or remembered fondly) cant hold a candle to the classics back then in terms on innovation, structure, level design, just graphics, and who the frick cares about that?
4 weeks ago
Anonymous
Yes, and if production wasn't so bloated, more games could be made with the same amount of resources. Stochastically, more good games and more innovation would be available.
You might be thinking that, even if this is true, it would still produce a lower proportion of good games now than before, and you would have a point. Crucially, higher investment creates a higher pressure for returns and thus less tolerance for taking risks and innovating. So e.g. a publisher financing 20 games with 10m budget each would likely produce a higher amount AND a higher proportion of good games than, say, 5 games with 40m budget each.
4 weeks ago
Anonymous
This is fallacious thinking. A lot of the great games that come out every year go under the radar and won't largely be remembered by the mainstream in ten years. Doesn't mean they aren't getting made, doesn't mean they won't continue to be made. Everyone just focuses on the insanely inflated modern AAA market when there are a ton of games being produced for smaller/cheaper markets.
the gameplay is the worst part of bg3 and this is almost universally understood moron, larian aren't good at designing fun encounters and added a bunch of pointless larian-isms to 5e that made it even less engaging
This is the part of the argument where you list better cRPGs. But you're free to screech and shit your pants instead, if you want to demonstrate how mature you are.
I'll give you Fallout 1 and 2, they're on par. BG1-2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter, those aren't as good.
This is the part of the argument where you list better cRPGs. But you're free to screech and shit your pants instead, if you want to demonstrate how mature you are.
I'll give you Fallout 1 and 2, they're on par. BG1-2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter, those aren't as good.
I'm 36 and grew up playing shitty RPG, you're not going to gaslight me into thinking they're not shit. KOTOR is shit, if you were thinking of naming that one.
PST
BG2
Arcanum
NWN if i feel like shitting all over you with player-made modules, smth which you'll never see in this day and age
4 weeks ago
Anonymous
Shadowrun Returns/Hong Kong/Dragonfall were supposed to be great for players making their own scenarios and campaigns, except 0 campaigns came out of it.
smaller and smarter teams that had a shared culture, also they were almost exclusively nerds and developing in an era where smaller budgets allowed for more risky / creative decisions, plus game design wasn't as codified as it is now so new genres were being whipped up left right and center
Budgets were low enough that a small team could make something cutting edge while being unique and original. There's plenty of bad games from that era too which have been mostly forgotten (pic very much related,) but even they have some spark of originality or some unique ideas that you can't find anywhere else
>There's plenty of bad games from that era too
There's unholy frickloads of shovelware and licensed garbage pushed out for a quick buck from the last 40 years. We only bother to remember the good stuff because it was just so fricking good by comparison. That said, the old and good shit should not be ignored. It's the basis for everything we have today.
It took a lot of trial and error experimentation to narrow down what makes games good or bad, if we're not careful we can wind up back in that shitty phase again.
At least back then, publisher name used to mean something. You played one game by Hi-Tech or LJN and you knew to avoid the fricking rest like the plague.
EA & Activision used to be fricking kings of the PC landscape during the DOS/Win95 era because they were consistently making or publishing great games.
Gaming was not a mainstream or inherently money-printing industry, meaning if you wanted to be a game developer to had to have a real passion for it. In general, games had small teams of a dozen or less people working on them, resulting in more focused games with more coherent mechanics & narratives. Likewise, the game experience is not intruded upon by microtransactions stores, social media plugs, or other 3rd-party content, meaning your attention is allowed to be fully on the game itself.
Primitive graphics forced artists to employ creative solutions to difficult limitations.
Dame devs were almost all unilaterally giant nerds, and they loved putting things in their games inspired or all but copied from the kind of movies, music, and other games they enjoyed.
The gaming industry has been massively industrialized, so you have to look harder to find games with that kind of quality. Tight games with that classic focus still come out from time to time and they're not always retro throwbacks, Hi-Fi Rush is an example.
Look to the indie game scene if you want anti-slop, as indie devs are working with almost the same limitations and conditions as those old dev teams and they're not interested in making "minimum viable product" games.
The Myst remake was super bland though, they couldn't even be bothered to add the Rime age again or dynamic lighting. From a technical perspective realMyst was much more impressive for its time.
Cyan got worse and worse as the years went by, I hope no hope left for them.
That's just like your opinion man, I thought it was good.
4 weeks ago
Anonymous
That's not my opinion, they actually removed content and all lighting and weather effects. All ages are now either cloudy or sunny and the night/day cycle is gone from Myst. How is that not bland?
More than that - or else in addition to - they weren't self referential. Games as a medium was so new that the ideas weren't simply "Game A but B". There was no game A. They were making game A. They had to draw from other sources of inspiration.
Contrary to Ganker's opinion this is one reason Nintendo is still making good games. They intentionally draw from people outside of video games to help design much of their systems. They don't want someone with experience playing games with rock climbing. They want rock climbers with experience rock climbing.
Modern game devs by comparison have a tunnel vision. Hence the sequel-itis. Game A but B(etter). It's all derivative shit.
>"Game A but B". There was no game A. They were making game A
Metroidvania's were some of my favorite games. But indie devs just keep shitting out thousands of them every damn year. Even if they're well made I'm just over them.
>look at the indie game scene
lmao no, I dont need another quircky rpg about depression inspired by earthbound or another metroidvania with the smallest change to the formula yet, or even worse, ps1 looking games that are just nostalgia bait
indiegays are as uninspired as aaa slop
Level design.
It is missing from every mayor release.
When the last time anyone complimented a Call of Duty level?
This too but that was double edge sword, you could also have games that require actual autism to be enjoyed because the author was trying too hard to be immersive.
guess what? you dont have to buy every single game available
let the autistic crowd enjoy their autistic games, you are doing a normalgay >waa please dumb down the game just for me!!!
>be regular shooter >character wheezing and breathing heavily any time he runs >can only run for 15 seconds before being exhausted >can only jump 1 foot off the ground >takes fall damage if he runs off a 4 foot ledge >get shot one time - die
Soldier of Fortune is such a fricking good game
It's so disappointing that it has such a detailed damage model where enemies react to which part of their body they got shot into and die in realistic ways + you actually see the bullet holes on their bodies and there's really well made gore where you can see the guts hanging out after blasting someone in the stomach with a shotgun, shoot off limbs or turn their faces into a gory mess
Meanwhile in modern shooters there's just a small splatter of ketchup and enemies ragdoll to the ground
Nostalgiagay opinion, but there is a general truth to it.
Video games will always be a passion industry, and even if games aren't art, they sure take the work and skill of art.
We have bigger costs, more 3rd party tools and commonly used tech, a bigger audience and bigger expectations, more developers and a wider skill level of those devs. Yet even if the best of the best come together the game may be boring, bland or SOVLLESS as the audience sees it.
Back in the day you could make projects at the fraction of a cost because life in general was cheaper, but it had to be made by highly skilled programmers from the ground up or with some other dudes jank ass engine as a starting point. Expectations were lower so every company that gives a bit more is an instant classic.
Compare the switch from isometric RPGs like BG2 to Dragon Age Origins - a lot of content quantity is lost, but you need to make it tighter since 3D is a cost and time multiplier.
Even Biowares own games have the same issue, Morrowind and Skyrim are fundamentally the same game, but Skyrim is worse because it doesn't do enough new things it's competitors were doing (Gothic for Morrowind, but I digress).
New games aren't 1 to 1 worse than old ones, but it's a bit of a complicated situation.
I think a big thing is just visual clarity. They don't really use real time lighting/fog/etc like modern games do, and a lot of it was even hand painted onto backgrounds/characters instead of just pure real time render.
all thanks to modern autistic pixel upscaling technologies that Consoles depend on, or else most games would run on 1080p ~30fps
>TAA with big splash of Filmic blur effect >shit ton of PostFX effects that smudge the image >upscaling tech that upscale image from half res of TV/Monitor
This holy shit target recognition in modern shooters is the real generational skill gap. I'm not even talking about brown shootyman camo in brown shootyman environment. EVERYTHING is too visually fricking noisy, overdetailed, overcrowded, full of just random decals, junks, pipes, misc shreds of fricking whatever. Then you slap a bullshit color filter on top of everything to blob the entire palette together even more
>S4 >Using a Dagger
If I was playing this still, I would have the most contempt rage right now. But thank you for reminding me of good gameplay in general.
>modern slop
You can thank all your big name companies like Microsoft. Just take a look at their past and present CEOs. They've got some bizarro pick from a NFL team owner. The C-Suite couldn't be more disassociated with the market there selling to even if they tried.
none of those look or play good unless poisoned by nostalgia
Doom is the bottom tier for normies who get into gaming but actual gaymers know Wolfenstein 3D mogs it in every way.
There are a frickton of games made for nerds by smaller teams that share a cohesive vision that improve on literally every aspect of the headline games of the 90s. Stop hate-gooning over Gamespot features and go find some good games.
I can't tell if this is serious or not with that first line, but I'll take it straight seeing that tired second. Reality is that we've experienced a CRPG Renaissance recently, so take your pick. BG3 for the entry-level fluff, D:OS2 for the midcore, WotR for build autism and UnderRail for exploration freeform.
These threads are annoying to read because everyone goes too far in one direction or the other. Great games still release all the time if you're willing to put a little bit of effort into looking for things that appeal to you (everyone talks about 2022 as if it were a wasteland for vidya whereas from my perspective it was drowning in good stuff), but owing to game design being far less standardised and budgets considerably lower at the time (which the likes of Shinji Mikami and Keiichiro Toyama have talked about in interviews before), the 90s and 00s are so obviously more interesting and full of options for anyone who values unique experiences above all else. The nostalgia strawman doesn't work either and I'm not convinced anyone wheeling it out genuinely believes it, because A) in the grand scheme of things games fundamentally haven't changed that much and B) nothing is stopping someone from enjoying a game from these eras if played blind today.
This is almost 100% agreeable and then something obviously untrue like >improve on literally every aspect of the headline games of the 90s
slips in and sullies it. I'm grateful for indie games and have become increasingly reliant on them from the 8th generation onwards and I'm still not aware of any that are going to give me the exact 1:1 same appeal as Homeworld, Jumping Flash, F-Zero X or whatever else while also being an "improvement in literally every aspect."
There are a frickton of games made for nerds by smaller teams that share a cohesive vision that improve on literally every aspect of the headline games of the 90s. Stop hate-gooning over Gamespot features and go find some good games.
(You)
Holy shit this thread is still alive. Anyway, I didn't say explicitly indie games. There are non-indie teams that get small projects, "indie-ish" studios that have a larger (A or AA) budget to work with under a publisher, etc. As for referencing those other games, I don't mean to take away from them, but a lot of their specific appeal boils down to flavour, which can come from a vague mix of a couple of elements that aren't necessarily better-done just because they haven't been emulated exactly.
Not being able to perfectly emulate a piece of work doesn't mean it's largely better than its rough spiritual successors.
The main reason is that modern games chase money rather than their own passions. There was a time we had greatness like Ultima and Wizardry, even Myst and Monkey Island. These people did not chase money, but made something they were passionate about and what they liked and put it out there and became cult classics. If modern games in the West just did the same thing again they would easily come out on top. No AAA company innovates, so it's time for the bottom to rise up to AA status and take on the AAA Industry to show how boring they are by comparison.
AA devs who do that then become AAA devs studios as soon as they find success. look at what happened to Fromsoft. And with Dark Souls 1's success fromsoft's soul and caring about making cool games died and they just wanted to appeal to the hype and money.
Yeah, pretty much, gaming peaked in 2004, it was all downhill from there considering the next year brought us the Xbox 360 and with it the cancer of paid online and DLC
this is the same as people who whine about muh old 80s anime
there were shit and good shows back then just as there are shit and good shows now
same with games, the only difference in past and present is that the volume went up and you are exposed to more trash which sticks to you more than the good ones
Muh 80s anime usually had better animation because japs had infinity money to throw at them but they had usually very shitty stories for the same reason. Wings of Honneamise is the perfect example.
Post 6 games since 2013 that are just good and don't suffer the bad industry memes of the modern era. >What bad industry memes?
Desaturated art direction
Bad visual clarity with dogshit like permanent chromatic aberration and vignette screen effects
Always online
Overly self-indulgent and self-referential story, usually coming from a long-running franchise
T H E M E T A
And those are just the issues I have with what are generally seen as the best these days, like nu-Hitman, Fromslop since Bloodborne, and whatever Capcom releases.
Play absolutely anything from before the late 2000s and you don't have to contend with any of that shit.
I sometimes forget that fromsoft games are kinda always online >playing against a boss >conection lost >your conection had a hiccup?, how can you see le epic “finger but hole xdd” messages now?! better send you to the start screen!
why no one complains about this shit more often?
because you forget about the thousand of other boomer games that were generally slop and just only remember a handful which makes you think boomer games were better in general
because they are made by small white teams with a lot of passion who wanted their dream game to come true and not by large corporations that hire a diverse cast who care about nothing but the best paycheck
In the west, games used to be made by guys who liked games and wanted to make good games for other people who liked games. Now games are made by purple haired activists who hate games and people who play games and just want to make shitty soap boxes and skinner boxes.
People made games because that was their passion. Now there is a mill that just churns out people who can make games. You wont see soul again until the whole system crashes and burns.
Old games were made by people who lived life and read books
new games are made by people who played lots of video games and live on the internet
There is a quality that is lost but it's hard to define
because they were made with soul and heart in mind by gen X and some boomers, not with homosexualry/modern politics, corporatism, greed etc, millennials lived and played during the golden age of gaming, but if you look what millennials made you will throw up, cinematic experiences with homosexualry (Last of us, Uncharted), games with homosexualry/ modern politics (BG3, Disco elysium, Saints Row, Wolfenstein etc), ruined old series (Wolfensteinm, Thief, Command & Conquer, Simcity etc)
For some reasons millennials still blame boomers for the state of the industry, even if the industry is 60-70% millennials who make your games aka people between 28 and 44, gen X move to something else or barely a few left while boomers died or stop giving a frick
This happened because zoomers are dogshit consoomers and the majority of them use their phones to play because they are either poor or moronic while buying battlepasses, premium currency, not asking for full products, etc.
Gen-Z is a failure of a generation. Dont blame us for delivering what the ""people"" want
Zelda was created by a guy who spent his childhood exploring the woods as a boy. Pokemon was created by a guy who spent his childhood capturing bugs. They both took the magic that they felt as children in the real world and were able to capture a small piece of that magic in a video game.
Millennials spent their childhood playing these games and felt the echo of magic that their creators instilled in them. As an adult, the games they made were attempts to capture the magic they felt, not in reality, but inside of a video game. The result is like a copy of a copy, each time getting worse and further from the truth.
We're the most shit on generation, he's just following the script. We ruined literally everything despite being too poor to afford anything, too overworked to do anything and too young to really decide anything.
Good gameplay requires a lot of thinking and try and error done by lead designers, it's hard to speed up this work with manpower. So it's not more money = better results. While with graphics money = quality, so it's safe to invest in it. Also, graphics are much easier to market. I mean, you can give out a demo, but games with demos consistently sell worse.
Then we got cutscene cancer, where games were also boasting looks and length, even if the story&direction was beyond dumb. Then publishers saw Skyrim and thought it was a neat trick to make bigger games with less man-hours. Enter shoddy bloated openworlds. Game size is also easy to market. How this all plays is hard to assess before you buy, sometimes even before it's too late for a refund.
tl;dr Good gameplay is a gamble, publishers don't like gambles.
PCs are unironically getting worse thanks to microsoft forcing garbage bloat, a million notifications and constant updates on the user. It no longer stays out of the user's way. >just install a linux distro!
And then the average normie gets even more frustrated because some stuff might not work out of the box. Not to mention the idea of installing a new OS is already too big a task for most of them.
He looks like a soigay but in a way he's right.
Do you think I would be able to find more righties or lefties incapable of operating a pc and preferring console? If this guy said modding I'd even agree with him sometimes.
Remember old good new bad only works if you actively ignore all of the bad old games and if you are doing so you are inherently arguing in bad faith. Pic actually related.
I made a list of iconic good games from the 90s 00s, 10s and the current 20s
during the 90s and 00s there were usually 25 to 30 iconic games per year
now we are getting 3 to 4 good games per year
this, but also the games were more distinct from each other, and were spawning new franchises and genres. now even when we get a good game, it's probably a remake/reboot or something like BG3 which manages to be a sequel to two different series at the same time.
It's hard to even blame the studios at this point since any game that doesn't lean heavily on existing IP fails spectacularly. Of course they will make nothing but remakes. Even sequels are risky.
If you're ok with a slideshow, Myst Masterpiece edition will do. If you want fully 3D, either Realmyst Masterpiece edition or Myst 2021. Neither remake "fricks up" anything but they both have somewhat questionable changes. Realmyst adds a kind of day night cycle which is unnecessary, and 2021 Myst changes the lighting in a lot of areas, sometimes it works really well, other times I end up preferring older versions. There's no reason not to play all of them once you finished one of them though, once you know the solutions, Myst is an extremely short game.
Here's the undeniable reality: almost all of the talent has left the industry now., especially in the western game industry. Game companies now would rather hire cheap divershitty hires, and colleges give out CS degrees easier and easier every year to anyone who isn't white. This has all combined to result in a massive dearth in competency. What's worse is that these new age "developers" aren't passionate about the games, they got these degrees because they were told that's where the money is, and the game industry is scrapingnthe bottom of the barrel, so that's where they end up.
I mean, look and Microsofts staff in the 90s and today. Its night and day. What once was a company of white americans is now filled to the brim with pajeets hiring other pajeets.
Software in general is in a really bad state in the United States outside a rare select few companies.
people always say this >the talented people are gone now!
where homie?! why dont they just create their own games? modern tools are way more easy than before, if a hipster gay can create his own quirky rpg that talks about depression, why cant the more talented programmer from those times can create something cool? are they just fricking dead now? what happened?
They got real jobs in real software because why MAYBE make millions from sweaty gamer Black folk when you could actually make a significant economic software contribution and make 10s of millions.
Made by people who WANTED to make a game and they wanted it to be enjoyable.
These days being a dev is just a job.
Crunch and meet quotas to make shekelstein more money each year.
Older games took risks and focused on the game by a group of people that viewed making games as a hobby. Modern gaming doesn't take risks and are made by people who don't care about gaming instead only care about ideology and personal beliefs, on top of gaming being viewed as a product. This goes doubly for shitendo.
I don't give a shit about that game, but I looked it up.
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows® 10 64-bit
Processor: 2GHz or faster
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce® or Radeon™
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 128 MB available space
Sound Card: OpenAL compatible
Honestly the sound card is the biggest barrier lmao.
Before video games were a corporate product, developer could just make a game that they wanted to make instead of having to make sure it appeals to every demographic because instead of costing $100,000 to make a game now it's like $80 million
games were made by tighter teams who knew what they were doing. sometimes. just as much crap came out back in the day as it does now but the gems are still better back then
>whites made the cool shit in the 90s/2000s due to easeir access to programming & technology >Pajeets & Blacks get access to it later >Either produce pure garbage or walking simulator VNs instead of cool stuff
Meanwhile furries are the only indies of late making cool shit.
Nta, but it's kinda true.
I hate furshit, but Lethal Company is ingenious and deserves its success.
As far as I know there's also no furry stuff in the game, the dev just happens to be a weirdo.
The delay between button presses and actions/animations, even when emulated it's pretty fricked, ambitious for sure and I'm glad it inspired the creation of resident evil, but that plus a limited inventory system where you need to constantly drop and pickup shit for progression and the combat is so hard to get into, makes it more archaic than charming for its time.
There isn't any delay in AotD1's controls other than every attack has a wind-up on it. Only thing I found jank about the game replaying it last year is determining what's actually an interaction point for using an inventory item on.
The worst part of the game is you need to play it at a lower framerate if you want any consistency on inputs, especially with regards to getting him to fricking run instead of walk.
Not him but having to go into different "modes" was really annoying. Not anything new, point and clicks have stuff like that, but point and clicks tended to put at the bottom of the screen for you to click on. In AitD you have to go into a separate menu. Not too bad once you get used to it though, really enjoyed AitD and I've also been enjoying the new game, still need to get around to finishing it though.
It's literally because they were made to be enjoyed, as in the developers actually tried to make cool stuff that people would like and buy BECAUSE it was good and they liked it. That was the business model. There is no such thing in modern AAA, they do not make games to be enjoyed. They try to make as much money as possible, enjoyment doesn't matter and is not a goal, if they can get somebody paying and addicted to some utter garbage they made then it doesn't matter if that person hates every single minute of playing but is caught in the trap of some addicting mechanic.
Devs just liked what they were making and they were making stuff with the hopes of other people liking it as well. That's just not the case in modern big-budget games, but there are still devs and studios around who try to make cool stuff.
Because the people who made those games were actual humans who lived real lives and that experience was reflected in the games that they made.
The people who make games today spent their lives staring at a screen, consuming media, parroting quirky one liners and meme references, etc. They never actually lived even one moment of their life so the art that they create reflects the slop that is their soul and inner landscape.
You can see it when you play a game like BG3. They don't actually understand how humans speak to each other. It's like their whole perception of reality was built around playing games like Mass Effect and watching Marvel movies, so when their characters interact with each other it's like a very distilled version of that. And BG3 is one of the better games that these people create. The rest is pure garbage
>depth
I'm not talking about depth. I'm talking about the way that the characters communicate on a more basic level than that. When you talk to a character in BG3 they immediately start dumping exposition at you, they all have that same quirky sense of humor where everything is a joke and they can't take anything seriously, they're sarcastic and smug. They're completely insufferable people. I've never met a real human outside of the internet that talks like this. I actually killed all of my companions in that game because I hated dealing with them.
Characters in old games weren't so fricking annoying. They sounded more like regular people and less like chronically online redditors
It's just a different writing style that was popular at the time. People in 90s sitcoms don't talk like people in marvel movies but I wouldn't call either realistic. Just different styles
>they all have that same quirky sense of humor where everything is a joke and they can't take anything seriously, they're sarcastic and smug. They're completely insufferable people. I've never met a real human outside of the internet that talks like this.
This reminds me of British writers came to write the vast majority of good American comics for a couple of decades starting in the mid-80s or so. The explanation for it is simply that they had a far better "cultural diet" than their American counterparts. British education in their time had been much better, and the cultural product which they consumed had been infinitely superior than the slop Americans had always known: TV channels were few and far better in in quality, theater and literature were much more popular among them, pop music took much longer to become overcommodified dreck etc. You would look at these British writers and their influences were classics like Milton and science geeks like Asimov, they were familiar with various interesting figures like Ram Dass or George Gurdjieff and they themselves were involved in the original Punk or Mod scenes; American writers at the time came from already-starved schools and whose cultural consumption consisted of little more than daytime TV pap. Ironically, the American counterculture of the previous decades had already been forgotten by American writers themselves, but were a major influence on the British ones. So while the latter were writing gems like Watchmen, Sandman and The Invisibles, their yank colleagues were making shit like Wildsiderz, a copy, of a copy of a copy and so on. Of course, in the decades since then, this British superiority in comics has been completely eliminated, reflecting the UK's decay into the same cultural desert as the US. Now here we are, when these artists raised on daytime TV pap seem like cultural colossii compared to modern artists who were raised on the postmodern hellscape of Youtube and social media.
Basically, like with everything, products are created to get your attention rather than make you happy. It's been proven to be the most effective way to make money out of consumers. It really is terrifying, in a world where productivity seems to reign, entertainment milking out your capacity without giving much in return can't be a good thing.
generally speaking, there's just so much more mechanical depth and interesting design choices in older games
and the slower pace and lack of a few QoL features will probably scare off the zoom zooms
You had people who were passionate and had fun making games for others rather than making something to meet a quota for a big publisher to get as much money back from wasting it on marketing and moronic shareholders and upper management.
tl;dr gaming became too popular and business oriented
What are some older games, like PS2-era and back, that have really amazing stories?
I'm looking primarily for political or character based dramas, idc about the gameplay it could be total dogshit as long as the story and characters are good
Past games are better because there is more past than present.
What delusional nostalgia gays can't wrap their heads around is that bullshit gets released in any and all ages. It gets used and discarded, like so many top of the pops hits from the 80s. Only the good stuff sticks around.
Now, the "good" stuff generally comes from indie or niche studios who aren't beholden to shareholders. Modern AAA games look and play Like That because they chase GAS bag. You just gotta look at what gametime is being spent on to see why.
Video games were younger and relatively lower risk so people were able to make things they were passionate about.
Now the bigger games are sequel slop factories cuz there's too much money in the industry to take a chance on anything new.
Different devs and different market. Old games were much smaller and reasonable products for a niche audience that enjoyed them. New games costs hundreds of millions of dollars and are "entertainment events" for mass markets of people that are slightly more than apathetic on a good day. Really hard to put that kind of shift into perspective without the raw numbers infront of me but everquest was the big breakout MMO of the late 90s/early 2000s and it peaked at like 200k people. It wasn't considered a failure - to the contrary, it was an industry-steering super success and would remain so until WoW showed up. On the dev side, it's different people as well. Instead of being fans of 'nerd culture' e.g. star trek, DnD, and metal album covers, new devs are fans of games and gaming as a stand alone (if even that much). The well of their inspiration is a lot more shallow and a lot less niche.
Speaking of niches, when did the general consumer population become anti-niche? I read people saying things like "more players is better!" or remarking positively about "growing a/the hobby" and I've never once read an argument for how this benefits anybody but the guys selling the game. Why would anyone want to share resources with MORE people voluntarily? To have MORE dissenting opinions and preferences to contend with? Feels like it goes in the face of common sense and human nature.
Because most of them were made by people who had a passion to make a good game and a vision for what it should be. Today we have activists, and their friends, more activists.
I miss the music the most. There's too much ambient music nowadays, where are the theme songs? You used to recognize games and tv shows instantly from another room because they had a unique sound. Take a semi-modern example of Game of Thrones, everybody knows that song.
Creativity was a thing back then. As a game designer I can tell you the problem nowadays is the industry has a very specific structure of how video game are designed.
If you try to step outside that comfort zone even a little programmer, developers etc... Throw up their arms like big babies because they can't cope because they've only been taught to make games one way. Levels are made, enemies are spawned, loot is dropped and maybe an upgrade system is given if they're feeling really adventurous, but that's about it...
They generally require you to think.
You're just biased by nostalgia, Disco Elysium or BG3 absolutely shit on 99.9% of older cRPGs in every way. The Outer Wilds shits on Myst. Etc...
>Disco Elysium
maybe
>BG3
frick no, though BG was always trash.
>disco elysium
>maybe
it can't compete with any crpg that has combat, the only one it's comparable too is planescape and planescape blows it the frick out of the water.
>b-but I don't care about combat
then don't compare it to a crpg you fricking simpleton, go play VNs instead.
before you start shitting on me as a DE hater know that I played it twice, consider it a very good game and would recommend it to anyone. It's an amazing game. But trying sell it as the best crpg to actual crpg fans who care about combat, builds, party synergy, is delusional. And if you only care about dialogue, again, compare it to VNs then.
>biased by nostalgia
NTA but most old games I play that I never played before mog the shit out of new games. No one makes games like Dungeon Keeper, Evil Genius, Jagged Alliance, Stronghold or Patrician 3.
At least once a year I play through Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Freelancer, and Homeworld & HW:Cataclysm. There are some new games that I enjoy but it is hard to beat the classics.
Freelancer and classic homeworld still hold up extremely well and I say it as a kid who played them recently without any nostalgia
Such good games
Literally patrician taste
0/10 bait
How can I be nostalgic for games that released before I was born and didn't engage with seriously until I was already an adult? If I want a nostalgia driven experience I'll go play Halo 3.
Too many managers. Games from back then would have been indie today.
Is this a fricking joke? Anything Sirtech did is unsurpassed to this day - both JA2 and Wizardry series.
>Too many managers. Games from back then would have been indie today.
This anon pointed out a very overlooked fact. Proliferation of non-creative/non-productive positions, especially in leadership, is a universal problem (American healthcare is arguably the worst offender in the world today), but very few people seem to notice this happens in the vidya industry. Brainlets will instead look at the success cases of yesterday, see mostly white men in AAA teams which were the size of current day indie studios and go full chinlet, ignoring all the absolute garbage both back then and now also being made by white men.
see
no matter how much literally who indie garbage we had back then, we had 35 classics per year
now we have the same indie garbage AND AAA goyslop
That's not mutually exclusive with what I said. Few classics are produced nowadays because production at every level is bloated with non-productive/non-creative positions.
the “classics” of today (this is impossible to determine today, we need to wait at least a decade to see if they are still relevant or remembered fondly) cant hold a candle to the classics back then in terms on innovation, structure, level design, just graphics, and who the frick cares about that?
Yes, and if production wasn't so bloated, more games could be made with the same amount of resources. Stochastically, more good games and more innovation would be available.
You might be thinking that, even if this is true, it would still produce a lower proportion of good games now than before, and you would have a point. Crucially, higher investment creates a higher pressure for returns and thus less tolerance for taking risks and innovating. So e.g. a publisher financing 20 games with 10m budget each would likely produce a higher amount AND a higher proportion of good games than, say, 5 games with 40m budget each.
This is fallacious thinking. A lot of the great games that come out every year go under the radar and won't largely be remembered by the mainstream in ten years. Doesn't mean they aren't getting made, doesn't mean they won't continue to be made. Everyone just focuses on the insanely inflated modern AAA market when there are a ton of games being produced for smaller/cheaper markets.
goyslop gulper posts are so fricking cringe
>BG3
C'mon, bro. BG3 is good game in its own right, but the only way it "shits" on any classics is graphics.
The gameplay absolutely shits on Infinity Engine cRPG trash. You're a nostalgiagay of magnificent proportions if you can't admit that.
the gameplay is the worst part of bg3 and this is almost universally understood moron, larian aren't good at designing fun encounters and added a bunch of pointless larian-isms to 5e that made it even less engaging
2 words:
S O U L
Disco elysoy is Marxist garbage and they deserves no money.
>yeah dude, those games you have never played before until recently and find more enjoyable
are not that great, its just nostalgia
???
>its just nostalgia old games b clunkey frfr
Go back homosexual
Every zoomer needs to be stoned with sharp rocks
>commie propaganda
>homosexual propaganda
>walking sim but in a floating tincan
You will never be old
nta but I'm old and I think you're a homosexual. Disco, BG3 and Wrath are some of the best cRPGs ever.
so you're old AND a massive homosexual as well
This is the part of the argument where you list better cRPGs. But you're free to screech and shit your pants instead, if you want to demonstrate how mature you are.
I'll give you Fallout 1 and 2, they're on par. BG1-2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter, those aren't as good.
Horrendous fricking taste, please stop pretending being old
see
I'm 36 and grew up playing shitty RPG, you're not going to gaslight me into thinking they're not shit. KOTOR is shit, if you were thinking of naming that one.
PST
BG2
Arcanum
NWN if i feel like shitting all over you with player-made modules, smth which you'll never see in this day and age
Shadowrun Returns/Hong Kong/Dragonfall were supposed to be great for players making their own scenarios and campaigns, except 0 campaigns came out of it.
based and true, but people here don't even play games, what's the point of arguing with them
>a couple of good examples means that older games aren't actually better than most modern trash released today
SPBP
You are based, although i would say some old games are still the peak of their genre, like Deus Ex and Starcraft
not to mention that most boomer games were absolute garbage, they just remember the best ones
Do you also have one like this that's better than the classic point and click adventures?
Baldur shit isn't even the best game released on its own month
Everything is normalized now to the point that almost every game looks and feels the same.
smaller and smarter teams that had a shared culture, also they were almost exclusively nerds and developing in an era where smaller budgets allowed for more risky / creative decisions, plus game design wasn't as codified as it is now so new genres were being whipped up left right and center
It's a good day to post Magic and Mayhem on Ganker
Budgets were low enough that a small team could make something cutting edge while being unique and original. There's plenty of bad games from that era too which have been mostly forgotten (pic very much related,) but even they have some spark of originality or some unique ideas that you can't find anywhere else
>There's plenty of bad games from that era too
There's unholy frickloads of shovelware and licensed garbage pushed out for a quick buck from the last 40 years. We only bother to remember the good stuff because it was just so fricking good by comparison. That said, the old and good shit should not be ignored. It's the basis for everything we have today.
It took a lot of trial and error experimentation to narrow down what makes games good or bad, if we're not careful we can wind up back in that shitty phase again.
> It's the basis for everything we have today.
quite literally, all we have now are fricking remakes and remasters
At least back then, publisher name used to mean something. You played one game by Hi-Tech or LJN and you knew to avoid the fricking rest like the plague.
EA & Activision used to be fricking kings of the PC landscape during the DOS/Win95 era because they were consistently making or publishing great games.
because you're a stupid little b***h that parrots every moronic buzzword you see on Gankereddit.
Gaming was not a mainstream or inherently money-printing industry, meaning if you wanted to be a game developer to had to have a real passion for it. In general, games had small teams of a dozen or less people working on them, resulting in more focused games with more coherent mechanics & narratives. Likewise, the game experience is not intruded upon by microtransactions stores, social media plugs, or other 3rd-party content, meaning your attention is allowed to be fully on the game itself.
Primitive graphics forced artists to employ creative solutions to difficult limitations.
Dame devs were almost all unilaterally giant nerds, and they loved putting things in their games inspired or all but copied from the kind of movies, music, and other games they enjoyed.
The gaming industry has been massively industrialized, so you have to look harder to find games with that kind of quality. Tight games with that classic focus still come out from time to time and they're not always retro throwbacks, Hi-Fi Rush is an example.
Look to the indie game scene if you want anti-slop, as indie devs are working with almost the same limitations and conditions as those old dev teams and they're not interested in making "minimum viable product" games.
this
Man I love the stories in MYST and Riven, one of these days Ill actually getting around to solving Riven.
>one of these days Ill actually getting around to solving Riven.
The remake would be a good opportunity to do that.
Is that from the remake? Frick that looks good. The myst remake was surprisingly good so I'm looking forward to this.
Yes. They've been posting a bunch of screenshots on twitter.
oops forgot picture
The Myst remake was super bland though, they couldn't even be bothered to add the Rime age again or dynamic lighting. From a technical perspective realMyst was much more impressive for its time.
Cyan got worse and worse as the years went by, I hope no hope left for them.
so which version of myst is the best one to play nowadays?
Original one or RealMyst
OG
That's just like your opinion man, I thought it was good.
That's not my opinion, they actually removed content and all lighting and weather effects. All ages are now either cloudy or sunny and the night/day cycle is gone from Myst. How is that not bland?
Cool but I don't remember asking.
More than that - or else in addition to - they weren't self referential. Games as a medium was so new that the ideas weren't simply "Game A but B". There was no game A. They were making game A. They had to draw from other sources of inspiration.
Contrary to Ganker's opinion this is one reason Nintendo is still making good games. They intentionally draw from people outside of video games to help design much of their systems. They don't want someone with experience playing games with rock climbing. They want rock climbers with experience rock climbing.
Modern game devs by comparison have a tunnel vision. Hence the sequel-itis. Game A but B(etter). It's all derivative shit.
>Games as a medium was so new that the ideas weren't simply "Game A but B". There was no game A. They were making game A.
Kek nice way to put it
>"Game A but B". There was no game A. They were making game A
Metroidvania's were some of my favorite games. But indie devs just keep shitting out thousands of them every damn year. Even if they're well made I'm just over them.
>look at the indie game scene
lmao no, I dont need another quircky rpg about depression inspired by earthbound or another metroidvania with the smallest change to the formula yet, or even worse, ps1 looking games that are just nostalgia bait
indiegays are as uninspired as aaa slop
They were made by nerds for nerds. Not gate keeping video games was a mistake.
Stop buying AAA slop.
Level design.
It is missing from every mayor release.
When the last time anyone complimented a Call of Duty level?
This too but that was double edge sword, you could also have games that require actual autism to be enjoyed because the author was trying too hard to be immersive.
guess what? you dont have to buy every single game available
let the autistic crowd enjoy their autistic games, you are doing a normalgay
>waa please dumb down the game just for me!!!
Didn't this chick literally stopped being a Tumblrina SJW after a single good dicking from some thuggish half-Black streamer chud?
shooter gameplay going back to boomer shooters was so good. i hated how "realistic" it was getting
>be regular shooter
>character wheezing and breathing heavily any time he runs
>can only run for 15 seconds before being exhausted
>can only jump 1 foot off the ground
>takes fall damage if he runs off a 4 foot ledge
>get shot one time - die
Soldier of Fortune is such a fricking good game
It's so disappointing that it has such a detailed damage model where enemies react to which part of their body they got shot into and die in realistic ways + you actually see the bullet holes on their bodies and there's really well made gore where you can see the guts hanging out after blasting someone in the stomach with a shotgun, shoot off limbs or turn their faces into a gory mess
Meanwhile in modern shooters there's just a small splatter of ketchup and enemies ragdoll to the ground
>Soldier of fortune
I loved that shit
you kinda goofed up your paragraph and made it sound like all the good shit is disappointing
Warframe is the spiritual successor of Unreal; that's why nobody is making good shooters; they've been on this one for years.
Because you watched people play them instead of playing them yourself
Nostalgiagay opinion, but there is a general truth to it.
Video games will always be a passion industry, and even if games aren't art, they sure take the work and skill of art.
We have bigger costs, more 3rd party tools and commonly used tech, a bigger audience and bigger expectations, more developers and a wider skill level of those devs. Yet even if the best of the best come together the game may be boring, bland or SOVLLESS as the audience sees it.
Back in the day you could make projects at the fraction of a cost because life in general was cheaper, but it had to be made by highly skilled programmers from the ground up or with some other dudes jank ass engine as a starting point. Expectations were lower so every company that gives a bit more is an instant classic.
Compare the switch from isometric RPGs like BG2 to Dragon Age Origins - a lot of content quantity is lost, but you need to make it tighter since 3D is a cost and time multiplier.
Even Biowares own games have the same issue, Morrowind and Skyrim are fundamentally the same game, but Skyrim is worse because it doesn't do enough new things it's competitors were doing (Gothic for Morrowind, but I digress).
New games aren't 1 to 1 worse than old ones, but it's a bit of a complicated situation.
unironically soul
I think a big thing is just visual clarity. They don't really use real time lighting/fog/etc like modern games do, and a lot of it was even hand painted onto backgrounds/characters instead of just pure real time render.
Same with anime, movies, and TV shows. Everything is dark, desaturated, or has some ugly effect now.
based noticer. been pissed off at this for a while now, visual clarity is down the toilet
i hate RE engine
i love RE engine
Can't it be modded?
>All made for the ps4
Makes you think
SOUL (left)
SOULLESS (right)
Everyone's adding fog now and it looks moronic
These. I love DMC5, but hate its art direction, for the areas that seemingly have direction in the first place.
yooo fart gas gaming
Gotta love that low-contrast fog of gen 9. It occurs to me that I never hear anybody talk about how good AAA games look.
all thanks to modern autistic pixel upscaling technologies that Consoles depend on, or else most games would run on 1080p ~30fps
>TAA with big splash of Filmic blur effect
>shit ton of PostFX effects that smudge the image
>upscaling tech that upscale image from half res of TV/Monitor
This holy shit target recognition in modern shooters is the real generational skill gap. I'm not even talking about brown shootyman camo in brown shootyman environment. EVERYTHING is too visually fricking noisy, overdetailed, overcrowded, full of just random decals, junks, pipes, misc shreds of fricking whatever. Then you slap a bullshit color filter on top of everything to blob the entire palette together even more
Tone that shit down my man.
>S4
>Using a Dagger
If I was playing this still, I would have the most contempt rage right now. But thank you for reminding me of good gameplay in general.
At least its not countersword turtling 🙂
They called me crazy when I told them this fact.
I love megaman legends art style.
Why has no other game company tried to copy it
Cause using color is hard q_q
>modern slop
You can thank all your big name companies like Microsoft. Just take a look at their past and present CEOs. They've got some bizarro pick from a NFL team owner. The C-Suite couldn't be more disassociated with the market there selling to even if they tried.
none of those look or play good unless poisoned by nostalgia
Doom is the bottom tier for normies who get into gaming but actual gaymers know Wolfenstein 3D mogs it in every way.
>Doom
Without Doom you would not have your precious COD.
but COD is slop for zoomer cattle
>They don't know about Hexxen
gays.
>doom
zoomie homosexual tourist
There are a frickton of games made for nerds by smaller teams that share a cohesive vision that improve on literally every aspect of the headline games of the 90s. Stop hate-gooning over Gamespot features and go find some good games.
name a better cinematic platformer than Abe's Oddysee
name a better CRPG than Planescape, and don't say Disco Elysium either
I can't tell if this is serious or not with that first line, but I'll take it straight seeing that tired second. Reality is that we've experienced a CRPG Renaissance recently, so take your pick. BG3 for the entry-level fluff, D:OS2 for the midcore, WotR for build autism and UnderRail for exploration freeform.
>a bunch of pozzed nonsense being better
No.
>name a better CRPG than Planescape
Underrail.
I said better
>name a better CRPG than an adventure with stats and bad combat, and don't say adventure with stats and no combat either
These threads are annoying to read because everyone goes too far in one direction or the other. Great games still release all the time if you're willing to put a little bit of effort into looking for things that appeal to you (everyone talks about 2022 as if it were a wasteland for vidya whereas from my perspective it was drowning in good stuff), but owing to game design being far less standardised and budgets considerably lower at the time (which the likes of Shinji Mikami and Keiichiro Toyama have talked about in interviews before), the 90s and 00s are so obviously more interesting and full of options for anyone who values unique experiences above all else. The nostalgia strawman doesn't work either and I'm not convinced anyone wheeling it out genuinely believes it, because A) in the grand scheme of things games fundamentally haven't changed that much and B) nothing is stopping someone from enjoying a game from these eras if played blind today.
This is almost 100% agreeable and then something obviously untrue like
>improve on literally every aspect of the headline games of the 90s
slips in and sullies it. I'm grateful for indie games and have become increasingly reliant on them from the 8th generation onwards and I'm still not aware of any that are going to give me the exact 1:1 same appeal as Homeworld, Jumping Flash, F-Zero X or whatever else while also being an "improvement in literally every aspect."
(You)
Holy shit this thread is still alive. Anyway, I didn't say explicitly indie games. There are non-indie teams that get small projects, "indie-ish" studios that have a larger (A or AA) budget to work with under a publisher, etc. As for referencing those other games, I don't mean to take away from them, but a lot of their specific appeal boils down to flavour, which can come from a vague mix of a couple of elements that aren't necessarily better-done just because they haven't been emulated exactly.
Not being able to perfectly emulate a piece of work doesn't mean it's largely better than its rough spiritual successors.
is there any way to get Fallout 1 2 on NINTENDY SWITCH? cuz that would actually be epic
The main reason is that modern games chase money rather than their own passions. There was a time we had greatness like Ultima and Wizardry, even Myst and Monkey Island. These people did not chase money, but made something they were passionate about and what they liked and put it out there and became cult classics. If modern games in the West just did the same thing again they would easily come out on top. No AAA company innovates, so it's time for the bottom to rise up to AA status and take on the AAA Industry to show how boring they are by comparison.
AA devs who do that then become AAA devs studios as soon as they find success. look at what happened to Fromsoft. And with Dark Souls 1's success fromsoft's soul and caring about making cool games died and they just wanted to appeal to the hype and money.
>still no indie game where characters have this style of painted shadows on character
suffering
Pseudoregalia
Yeah that’s one, and a big hit.
>IT'S LOW POLY SO THEY ALL ROOK SAME
Go ingest detergent
go crawl back under a rock coomer
Boomer games were made by whites with a passion.
because they didn't cater to a target audicence comprised of only mentally ill, autistic incels such as yourself
Fact: games are no better than they were in 2004.
Yeah, pretty much, gaming peaked in 2004, it was all downhill from there considering the next year brought us the Xbox 360 and with it the cancer of paid online and DLC
It's called 'talent' and 'passion'
this is the same as people who whine about muh old 80s anime
there were shit and good shows back then just as there are shit and good shows now
same with games, the only difference in past and present is that the volume went up and you are exposed to more trash which sticks to you more than the good ones
Hilarious zoom cope
Muh 80s anime usually had better animation because japs had infinity money to throw at them but they had usually very shitty stories for the same reason. Wings of Honneamise is the perfect example.
that's a film though, not a shitty weekly show
>how come when i cherry pick 6 games released across 10 years they are better than 6 games that were released this month?!??!?
They're better than any 6 games released since 2007, almost 20 years ago
Post 6 games since 2013 that are just good and don't suffer the bad industry memes of the modern era.
>What bad industry memes?
Desaturated art direction
Bad visual clarity with dogshit like permanent chromatic aberration and vignette screen effects
Always online
Overly self-indulgent and self-referential story, usually coming from a long-running franchise
T H E M E T A
And those are just the issues I have with what are generally seen as the best these days, like nu-Hitman, Fromslop since Bloodborne, and whatever Capcom releases.
Play absolutely anything from before the late 2000s and you don't have to contend with any of that shit.
I sometimes forget that fromsoft games are kinda always online
>playing against a boss
>conection lost
>your conection had a hiccup?, how can you see le epic “finger but hole xdd” messages now?! better send you to the start screen!
why no one complains about this shit more often?
because you go offline from the starting screen you fricking idiot
Oxygen Not Included
UnSighted
Hades
Stellaris
Cities: Skylines
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Apologies for the PC
Most modern gamer are an equivalent of 10 minute youtube videos that should've been 6 minutes long but needed 10 for monetization purposes.
You are not playing REAL boomer games.
I'm learning game dev and this shit is so insanely cool dude. I wanna know how they did it. Seriously impressive.
written in assembly
My dad loves this shit.
I don't even know how you are supposed to play.
For me, it's Another World
because you forget about the thousand of other boomer games that were generally slop and just only remember a handful which makes you think boomer games were better in general
developers had passion and talent and actual competence
no remake remaster bullshit
because they are made by small white teams with a lot of passion who wanted their dream game to come true and not by large corporations that hire a diverse cast who care about nothing but the best paycheck
fear not, everything will return to normal with GTA6
In the west, games used to be made by guys who liked games and wanted to make good games for other people who liked games. Now games are made by purple haired activists who hate games and people who play games and just want to make shitty soap boxes and skinner boxes.
Games used to be made by bored engineers trying to make something fun and cool. Modern games are made by Sanjeet and Harminder.
Is there any game out there that does literally everything better than UFO Defence? Asking for research purposes.
Check out all the wildly different settings and color schemes.
Which are the two in the bottom row?
Made by different people
wat gaem
nvm I read the filename
>gen alphas are playing retro shit
I kneel, hail the zoomerslayers
People made games because that was their passion. Now there is a mill that just churns out people who can make games. You wont see soul again until the whole system crashes and burns.
Talented amateurs > Diversity hire "professionals"
Simple as
Because they respect your intelligence except maybe Fallout 2
By nerds, for nerds. Simple as.
>Current indietrash comparing themselves to nerds of old
Hilarious
Old games were made by people who lived life and read books
new games are made by people who played lots of video games and live on the internet
There is a quality that is lost but it's hard to define
>says that when Hedon is a new classic and Ashes 2063 is a modern masterpiece
Learn to find good games.
They didn't give fricks about coddling sensibilities of either side of some socmedia conflict
>Dont like it, dont play it b***h
A really unique boomer game I played recently is Alien Legacy. Never heard anyone talk about it.
because they were made with soul and heart in mind by gen X and some boomers, not with homosexualry/modern politics, corporatism, greed etc, millennials lived and played during the golden age of gaming, but if you look what millennials made you will throw up, cinematic experiences with homosexualry (Last of us, Uncharted), games with homosexualry/ modern politics (BG3, Disco elysium, Saints Row, Wolfenstein etc), ruined old series (Wolfensteinm, Thief, Command & Conquer, Simcity etc)
For some reasons millennials still blame boomers for the state of the industry, even if the industry is 60-70% millennials who make your games aka people between 28 and 44, gen X move to something else or barely a few left while boomers died or stop giving a frick
This happened because zoomers are dogshit consoomers and the majority of them use their phones to play because they are either poor or moronic while buying battlepasses, premium currency, not asking for full products, etc.
Gen-Z is a failure of a generation. Dont blame us for delivering what the ""people"" want
>planescape torment is somehow a happy game
homie people age 50+ directed those games.
Zelda was created by a guy who spent his childhood exploring the woods as a boy. Pokemon was created by a guy who spent his childhood capturing bugs. They both took the magic that they felt as children in the real world and were able to capture a small piece of that magic in a video game.
Millennials spent their childhood playing these games and felt the echo of magic that their creators instilled in them. As an adult, the games they made were attempts to capture the magic they felt, not in reality, but inside of a video game. The result is like a copy of a copy, each time getting worse and further from the truth.
You really think millennials didn't play outside or something?
We're the most shit on generation, he's just following the script. We ruined literally everything despite being too poor to afford anything, too overworked to do anything and too young to really decide anything.
>The result is like a copy of a copy, each time getting worse and further from the truth.
The more you look, the more you'll see it.
yep, simulation and simulacra
Good gameplay requires a lot of thinking and try and error done by lead designers, it's hard to speed up this work with manpower. So it's not more money = better results. While with graphics money = quality, so it's safe to invest in it. Also, graphics are much easier to market. I mean, you can give out a demo, but games with demos consistently sell worse.
Then we got cutscene cancer, where games were also boasting looks and length, even if the story&direction was beyond dumb. Then publishers saw Skyrim and thought it was a neat trick to make bigger games with less man-hours. Enter shoddy bloated openworlds. Game size is also easy to market. How this all plays is hard to assess before you buy, sometimes even before it's too late for a refund.
tl;dr Good gameplay is a gamble, publishers don't like gambles.
hes right tho
sometimes the pc just doesn’t work because frick you
Skill issue, biden voted ;/
Don't download driver or windows updates.
>leftoids can't even understand how computers work
Not surprising to be honest
PCs are unironically getting worse thanks to microsoft forcing garbage bloat, a million notifications and constant updates on the user. It no longer stays out of the user's way.
>just install a linux distro!
And then the average normie gets even more frustrated because some stuff might not work out of the box. Not to mention the idea of installing a new OS is already too big a task for most of them.
He looks like a soigay but in a way he's right.
Do you think I would be able to find more righties or lefties incapable of operating a pc and preferring console? If this guy said modding I'd even agree with him sometimes.
they were made by high iq people on tight budgets and hardware limits
>Missed out on the golden age
>YEA GAYZ NEW GAMES ARE STILL GOOD
lol
Remember old good new bad only works if you actively ignore all of the bad old games and if you are doing so you are inherently arguing in bad faith. Pic actually related.
I made a list of iconic good games from the 90s 00s, 10s and the current 20s
during the 90s and 00s there were usually 25 to 30 iconic games per year
now we are getting 3 to 4 good games per year
this, but also the games were more distinct from each other, and were spawning new franchises and genres. now even when we get a good game, it's probably a remake/reboot or something like BG3 which manages to be a sequel to two different series at the same time.
It's hard to even blame the studios at this point since any game that doesn't lean heavily on existing IP fails spectacularly. Of course they will make nothing but remakes. Even sequels are risky.
>thief
>tenchu
>metal gear solid
stealth genre started out so strong, but it was all downhill from there
The only good Stealth franchise still running is Hitman
what game?
Found it, game is Excalibur 2555 A.D. from PSX
What version of MYST should I play if I've never tried it before? Do modern versions of it frick something up?
If you're ok with a slideshow, Myst Masterpiece edition will do. If you want fully 3D, either Realmyst Masterpiece edition or Myst 2021. Neither remake "fricks up" anything but they both have somewhat questionable changes. Realmyst adds a kind of day night cycle which is unnecessary, and 2021 Myst changes the lighting in a lot of areas, sometimes it works really well, other times I end up preferring older versions. There's no reason not to play all of them once you finished one of them though, once you know the solutions, Myst is an extremely short game.
Games were shorter and easier but without hand holding.
They were also a novelty back then and now you have nostalgia factor.
Here's the undeniable reality: almost all of the talent has left the industry now., especially in the western game industry. Game companies now would rather hire cheap divershitty hires, and colleges give out CS degrees easier and easier every year to anyone who isn't white. This has all combined to result in a massive dearth in competency. What's worse is that these new age "developers" aren't passionate about the games, they got these degrees because they were told that's where the money is, and the game industry is scrapingnthe bottom of the barrel, so that's where they end up.
I mean, look and Microsofts staff in the 90s and today. Its night and day. What once was a company of white americans is now filled to the brim with pajeets hiring other pajeets.
Software in general is in a really bad state in the United States outside a rare select few companies.
people always say this
>the talented people are gone now!
where homie?! why dont they just create their own games? modern tools are way more easy than before, if a hipster gay can create his own quirky rpg that talks about depression, why cant the more talented programmer from those times can create something cool? are they just fricking dead now? what happened?
They got real jobs in real software because why MAYBE make millions from sweaty gamer Black folk when you could actually make a significant economic software contribution and make 10s of millions.
>where homie?!
Big tech corpo
Made by people who WANTED to make a game and they wanted it to be enjoyable.
These days being a dev is just a job.
Crunch and meet quotas to make shekelstein more money each year.
Original Myst is dated as frick. Riven is eternal.
They were white
Older games took risks and focused on the game by a group of people that viewed making games as a hobby. Modern gaming doesn't take risks and are made by people who don't care about gaming instead only care about ideology and personal beliefs, on top of gaming being viewed as a product. This goes doubly for shitendo.
What now?
>requires a quad core CPU, 4gb of ram, w/ 1030GTX to run
I don't give a shit about that game, but I looked it up.
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows® 10 64-bit
Processor: 2GHz or faster
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce® or Radeon™
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 128 MB available space
Sound Card: OpenAL compatible
Honestly the sound card is the biggest barrier lmao.
Before video games were a corporate product, developer could just make a game that they wanted to make instead of having to make sure it appeals to every demographic because instead of costing $100,000 to make a game now it's like $80 million
games were made by tighter teams who knew what they were doing. sometimes. just as much crap came out back in the day as it does now but the gems are still better back then
All of those were made by mostly Caucasian teams.
>whites made the cool shit in the 90s/2000s due to easeir access to programming & technology
>Pajeets & Blacks get access to it later
>Either produce pure garbage or walking simulator VNs instead of cool stuff
Meanwhile furries are the only indies of late making cool shit.
kys furgay
Nta, but it's kinda true.
I hate furshit, but Lethal Company is ingenious and deserves its success.
As far as I know there's also no furry stuff in the game, the dev just happens to be a weirdo.
>
What game?
Alone in the Dark is the jankiest of janks, makes RE 1 look like Dead Space. Blood, Monkey Island and System Shock are cool.
What's so janky about it?
The delay between button presses and actions/animations, even when emulated it's pretty fricked, ambitious for sure and I'm glad it inspired the creation of resident evil, but that plus a limited inventory system where you need to constantly drop and pickup shit for progression and the combat is so hard to get into, makes it more archaic than charming for its time.
There isn't any delay in AotD1's controls other than every attack has a wind-up on it. Only thing I found jank about the game replaying it last year is determining what's actually an interaction point for using an inventory item on.
*the animations and Edward are fricking slow then.
The worst part of the game is you need to play it at a lower framerate if you want any consistency on inputs, especially with regards to getting him to fricking run instead of walk.
Not him but having to go into different "modes" was really annoying. Not anything new, point and clicks have stuff like that, but point and clicks tended to put at the bottom of the screen for you to click on. In AitD you have to go into a separate menu. Not too bad once you get used to it though, really enjoyed AitD and I've also been enjoying the new game, still need to get around to finishing it though.
It's literally because they were made to be enjoyed, as in the developers actually tried to make cool stuff that people would like and buy BECAUSE it was good and they liked it. That was the business model. There is no such thing in modern AAA, they do not make games to be enjoyed. They try to make as much money as possible, enjoyment doesn't matter and is not a goal, if they can get somebody paying and addicted to some utter garbage they made then it doesn't matter if that person hates every single minute of playing but is caught in the trap of some addicting mechanic.
Devs just liked what they were making and they were making stuff with the hopes of other people liking it as well. That's just not the case in modern big-budget games, but there are still devs and studios around who try to make cool stuff.
this
technopriest is really a good series, along with other works set in the same universe from the same author, i recommend everyone to read it
Because the people who made those games were actual humans who lived real lives and that experience was reflected in the games that they made.
The people who make games today spent their lives staring at a screen, consuming media, parroting quirky one liners and meme references, etc. They never actually lived even one moment of their life so the art that they create reflects the slop that is their soul and inner landscape.
You can see it when you play a game like BG3. They don't actually understand how humans speak to each other. It's like their whole perception of reality was built around playing games like Mass Effect and watching Marvel movies, so when their characters interact with each other it's like a very distilled version of that. And BG3 is one of the better games that these people create. The rest is pure garbage
None of those old games have any characters with depth so I dont know what youre babbling about
>depth
I'm not talking about depth. I'm talking about the way that the characters communicate on a more basic level than that. When you talk to a character in BG3 they immediately start dumping exposition at you, they all have that same quirky sense of humor where everything is a joke and they can't take anything seriously, they're sarcastic and smug. They're completely insufferable people. I've never met a real human outside of the internet that talks like this. I actually killed all of my companions in that game because I hated dealing with them.
Characters in old games weren't so fricking annoying. They sounded more like regular people and less like chronically online redditors
It's just a different writing style that was popular at the time. People in 90s sitcoms don't talk like people in marvel movies but I wouldn't call either realistic. Just different styles
>they all have that same quirky sense of humor where everything is a joke and they can't take anything seriously, they're sarcastic and smug. They're completely insufferable people. I've never met a real human outside of the internet that talks like this.
Generation X. Your parents.
This anon gets it.
This reminds me of British writers came to write the vast majority of good American comics for a couple of decades starting in the mid-80s or so. The explanation for it is simply that they had a far better "cultural diet" than their American counterparts. British education in their time had been much better, and the cultural product which they consumed had been infinitely superior than the slop Americans had always known: TV channels were few and far better in in quality, theater and literature were much more popular among them, pop music took much longer to become overcommodified dreck etc. You would look at these British writers and their influences were classics like Milton and science geeks like Asimov, they were familiar with various interesting figures like Ram Dass or George Gurdjieff and they themselves were involved in the original Punk or Mod scenes; American writers at the time came from already-starved schools and whose cultural consumption consisted of little more than daytime TV pap. Ironically, the American counterculture of the previous decades had already been forgotten by American writers themselves, but were a major influence on the British ones. So while the latter were writing gems like Watchmen, Sandman and The Invisibles, their yank colleagues were making shit like Wildsiderz, a copy, of a copy of a copy and so on. Of course, in the decades since then, this British superiority in comics has been completely eliminated, reflecting the UK's decay into the same cultural desert as the US. Now here we are, when these artists raised on daytime TV pap seem like cultural colossii compared to modern artists who were raised on the postmodern hellscape of Youtube and social media.
What game?
Dune
It's like Flash Gordon on crack.
They're not but they're still good for variety because some genres and mechanics went out of fashion over the years
engagement and fun are two different philosophies when creating content
>Zoom trash defending nu ""writing""
lol you literally have nothing
Basically, like with everything, products are created to get your attention rather than make you happy. It's been proven to be the most effective way to make money out of consumers. It really is terrifying, in a world where productivity seems to reign, entertainment milking out your capacity without giving much in return can't be a good thing.
What's middle right?
AitD
None of those games are fun though
generally speaking, there's just so much more mechanical depth and interesting design choices in older games
and the slower pace and lack of a few QoL features will probably scare off the zoom zooms
Another "old geezers can't stop fricking whining" thread.
not buying, sorry
You had people who were passionate and had fun making games for others rather than making something to meet a quota for a big publisher to get as much money back from wasting it on marketing and moronic shareholders and upper management.
tl;dr gaming became too popular and business oriented
>tl;dr gaming became too popular and business oriented
This. The only hope are indie games and some niche studios.
They were made by people with imagination that actually cared about the end product
Twinsen's Odyssey were the epitome of SOVL.
My first PC game ever, I loved it from start to finish.
What are some older games, like PS2-era and back, that have really amazing stories?
I'm looking primarily for political or character based dramas, idc about the gameplay it could be total dogshit as long as the story and characters are good
Harvester
Darkseed
I have no mouth and i must scream
Grim Fandango
Gabriel Knight
Most Lucasfilm games
Because they were made with an iota of passion and not just corporate churned out projects purely to extract money.
I fricking hate doom eternal
Smaller budgets, smaller teams, more focused on creating games they want to play.
Past games are better because there is more past than present.
What delusional nostalgia gays can't wrap their heads around is that bullshit gets released in any and all ages. It gets used and discarded, like so many top of the pops hits from the 80s. Only the good stuff sticks around.
Now, the "good" stuff generally comes from indie or niche studios who aren't beholden to shareholders. Modern AAA games look and play Like That because they chase GAS bag. You just gotta look at what gametime is being spent on to see why.
Video games were younger and relatively lower risk so people were able to make things they were passionate about.
Now the bigger games are sequel slop factories cuz there's too much money in the industry to take a chance on anything new.
Different devs and different market. Old games were much smaller and reasonable products for a niche audience that enjoyed them. New games costs hundreds of millions of dollars and are "entertainment events" for mass markets of people that are slightly more than apathetic on a good day. Really hard to put that kind of shift into perspective without the raw numbers infront of me but everquest was the big breakout MMO of the late 90s/early 2000s and it peaked at like 200k people. It wasn't considered a failure - to the contrary, it was an industry-steering super success and would remain so until WoW showed up. On the dev side, it's different people as well. Instead of being fans of 'nerd culture' e.g. star trek, DnD, and metal album covers, new devs are fans of games and gaming as a stand alone (if even that much). The well of their inspiration is a lot more shallow and a lot less niche.
Speaking of niches, when did the general consumer population become anti-niche? I read people saying things like "more players is better!" or remarking positively about "growing a/the hobby" and I've never once read an argument for how this benefits anybody but the guys selling the game. Why would anyone want to share resources with MORE people voluntarily? To have MORE dissenting opinions and preferences to contend with? Feels like it goes in the face of common sense and human nature.
Because most of them were made by people who had a passion to make a good game and a vision for what it should be. Today we have activists, and their friends, more activists.
Those are Gen X and millennial games
what now?
I miss the music the most. There's too much ambient music nowadays, where are the theme songs? You used to recognize games and tv shows instantly from another room because they had a unique sound. Take a semi-modern example of Game of Thrones, everybody knows that song.
That's racist and sexist.
Creativity was a thing back then. As a game designer I can tell you the problem nowadays is the industry has a very specific structure of how video game are designed.
If you try to step outside that comfort zone even a little programmer, developers etc... Throw up their arms like big babies because they can't cope because they've only been taught to make games one way. Levels are made, enemies are spawned, loot is dropped and maybe an upgrade system is given if they're feeling really adventurous, but that's about it...
Boomers dont play video games. This meme needs to die.
old gay devs knew that they HAD to make it fun or at least follow the lead dev(s)'s vision or else it wouldn't sell
Because you're old.
I know it sounds crazy but back then the people who worked on video games actually liked video games.