I definitely feel like my tastes have narrowed with age. Or maybe it's just that I've found a few games to really really fall in love with, and not much else pulls my attention away from grinding those top favorites.
When I was a kid, I could only get a new game every few months or so, so I kind of had to make the most of each one. Now I've got several hundred games in my Steam library, and more than half of are unplayed, because they don't grab me enough to boot them up over playing another ranked online set of riichi mahjong today.
This is me with current books and music. For books, common styles of prose or an abundance of certain tropes used now simply don’t hit with me, and I’ve even gone back to mid-to-late 20th century books recently to try to avoid all that.
I’d say the best way to try to broaden your taste is to make sure you’re touching on the hits in different genres, and–if you can handle dated gameplay and visuals–to go back and try games from previous generations as well.
I don’t think you’re alone in this. I’m kind of becoming the same way, and I figure it’s because as you become older you become wiser, specifically wiser to the way that so many modern games are bullshit now.
Nowadays it seems like almost everything is just a cynical cash grab. And with a lifetime of experience, you know how to spot that bullshit. Oh look, it has always online components. And an in game store. And season content. And gatcha mechanics. And grind. Not only just regular old grind, you know, where you need to level up and be at least be this tall to beat the beef gate (which always has the tantalizing possibility of being able circumvent it by cheesing it or being very clever). No, it’s just grind with no mechanical justification. You must fill the bar before you’re allowed to access this content. Would you like to make a microtransaction to fill the bar faster?
Fuck that, and count me out.
The current fascination is on delivering games as a “service,” and that just rubs me the wrong way. Everything is transient, nothing is permanent, and everyone is making a desperate grab for recurring revenue over creating a compelling experience or indeed anything anyone would ever want to go back to and play again. It’s all just crap designed to feed into people’s sunk cost brains, and it feels like damn near every major title wants to be your full time job.
I have even started eschewing Nintendo titles and some modern indie stuff specifically because they display a complete and utter disrespect for not only the player’s intelligence, but also their time.
The Xbox 360 uses a processor with a different instruction set which means the executable on the disc simply isn’t compatible with the Xbox One and Series X|S. For those, Microsoft have worked with game vendors to convert the executable (from binary, not source) to the other platform: “static recompilation”. The new executable must be downloaded to play the game.
For the Xbox One, the architecture is very similar to the Series X|S so it can mostly just run it like you can run Windows 7 games on Windows 11 with compatibility tweaks applied by the operating system.
To add another point to the discussion: a lot (the majority?) of “fake” collision detection isn’t there because of hardware limitations. It’s there by design.
Take a look at 2d platformers. They’re about as computationally simple as you can get. Yet they’re still full of “unrealistic” physics. Coyote time, double jumping, air control, collision boxes that don’t match the sprite, gravity isn’t consistent, you don’t stagger if you slam into the wall or floor, etc, etc. This is on purpose, because realistic does not mean fun. “Realism” is not a magical word that makes games better.
There have been games where, to use your example, your character’s sword bounces off anything it hits, rather than clipping through. The reason most games choose not to do this is because it’s usually pretty annoying. The game’s intended experience is most often to let you play as a badass experienced warrior. The kind of person who doesn’t fumble their blows.
Realism is just another tool in the designer’s toolbox. An example of more “realistic” physics being used deliberately is Shadow of the Colossus. If you swing your sword at a wall, it bounces off, and your character staggers back clumsily. This is because the game is specifically about playing a character who is not a badass, but an inexperienced nobody.
I’m in the last tier, nuclear power, but I am extremely choked on computers right now. I’m a spaghetti mess and considering a restart to be more organized.
Exanima, it’s mostly a testing ground for a game the devs want to make around this concept. It’s a good time, and also exactly what I think you’re looking for.
Not to bury the lede, it is a fairly full featured action game, but there’s not really a story element at this stage. store.steampowered.com/app/362490/Exanima/
I also had Exanima in mind.
The story is actually already there, it’s just easy to miss :)
Although I’m guessing once they finish up work on the AI, roles and dialogue system soon, there’ll be more of it.
True, somewhat of a “look for the story and you’ll find it” dark souls vibe. I got the impression from dev logs that the end goal is a more traditional RPG story
I believe that’s more of a goal for Sui Generis. Which is the game they initially begun working on (and still are).
They do have some dialogue with Derrin that gives us some lore, so I’m guessing we’ll get more of that.
There are high-polish VR shooters, like Half-Life Alyx, Boneworks, and Vertigo 2, which obviously care about where your hands and other body parts are. Boneworks attempts melee combat, but it’s pretty janky. In Half-Life Alyx, you use your hands to rummage around junk to find resources. In Vertigo 2, if you get hit by arrows or thrown spears, you have to pull them out of your body, and there’s a section where you steer a boat.
I think BeamNG.drive fits your request. I’m not sure how accurate the model is, but it tries to model car crashes and damage based on a bunch of factors.
Kerbal Space Program. But that's not "action", more like simulation, and, the entire game revolves around accurate, realistic physics, since it models actual space travel. So accurate to the point where you can build and test crazy real world concepts like the machine from that company that wants to put stuff into orbit by spinning it and then flinging it up through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
There’s a guy who was working on a fan build for alternative to Tribes Ascend that had some really elegant collision stuff going on to address what we called “dead stops”
bin.pol.social
Aktywne