It’s not a controversial take, but survivorship bias is certainly strong with anything like this. People like classic rock because the bad songs from that era have faded into obscurity. The same goes for your favorite retro games; for every Ocarina of Time there was a Superman 64. For every Zelda there were 3 shitty LJN games.
The type of trash is just different. Instead of low-effort cash grab games, now we get high-effort overworked devs making a game that asks you to pay for it over and over again.
You even see this with games that were insanely cash grabby from ten or so years ago. Borderlands 2 made you pay for every level cap increase and tiny piece of updated content as it rolled out. The handsome collection fixed that, but it’s still true that it really tried to toll you at every corner. Game is still highly regarded though.
I dunno. I pulled Septera Core out of a bargain bin shoved together with some forgettable mech game for $10, and it was pretty great.
I don’t think effort is what makes the difference. Games now are designed increasingly in ways that are less ‘risky’ in terms of corporate measures of user satisfaction than they used to be. It’s the kind of measure of satisfaction that sees a quest marker constantly showing your destination as clearly preferable to having to actually look at the world and find your way around.
I’ve run into this with friends of mine who are into modding before. When they see one mechanic that negates another mechanic, or that degrades the output quality of another mechanic, they see it as wasted code. To me, that’s the essence of the tension and release in a game. You create a state the player wants to get to, then you put shit in their way and provide them with various ways of solving your obstacles. That’s basically narrative driven gaming in a nutshell, an interaction between barriers and ways of negating those barriers.
But like, I think that may be part of what’s missing sometimes in pushing these more like real-world convenience-oriented features akin to a GPS app. If you’re making a GPS app, you want it to work perfectly, but in a game it’s kind of more fun if it’s got a little bit of jank in it. Not the actual code, obviously, but the player’s interaction with the mechanic in the game world. A straightforward trip from point A to point B isn’t much of a story.
Honestly, I think it’s just more of the kind of watering down that’s inevitable as you get too much money wrapped up in a project. Corporate infrastructures and IPOs aren’t conducive to art. Or quality in anything else, for that matter. It doesn’t just affect what decisions are made in a game’s development, either. It affects how people are educated, who gets hired, how labor is divided.
There’s definitely something to be said for the effects of nostalgia and survivorship bias on the appearance of retro gaming in a modern context, but there also have been major changes that aren’t just about the decisions of individual companies.
Honestly, my argument that new and old games are both good would be to point straight at the Ratchet & Clank series.
In my opinion, it’s only gotten better with time, and the latest entry in the Series from 2021 is genuinely one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. It’s modern, cutting-edge, requiring a PCIe Gen4 SSD and a DualSense controller for the best experience. It’s just fantastic. New games, even AAA games, can be great so long as the project is being led by people who know how to make good games.
Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn’t inherently malicious, unlike the latter.
I’d, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that’s besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn’t exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.
What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That’s purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.
In the Paradox case, nothing is live, and they aren’t pretending it’s a service. They just put goods out at a rapid clip that you choose to buy or not. That’s why live service games are always online. If Paradox counts, then so do board games, and that’s absurd.
Shovel Knight - Growing up on games like Mega Man and Duck Tales, Shovel Knight feels like it was made specifically for me.
Celeste - One of my favorite gaming experiences. Great story, great gameplay, and hard as fuck. Incredible accessibility options also.
Recettear: An Item Shop - I don’t know anyone else who has played this game but it’s so damn good. I love it.
Stardew Valley - The way ConcernedApe continues to add free content to this game makes this easily one of the best values in gaming, but this game would still be great even if content updates had stopped a long time ago. Have to play on PC though for mods; the default walking speed makes the game unplayable for me.
I also put years into a now-defunct multi-user-dungeon called Arythia, but that’s kind of it’s own whole thing so I don’t think that counts.
edit: I can’t believe I forgot to include Hades, which is literally one of my all-time favorite games.
Yeah I played a few, but arythia was my “main” and the only one I still remember the name and details of. But it was also run by a group of kids just slightly older than me out of a local tech school that I knew about via a connection I made in local theatre, so arythia had a much more concrete “real world” feel to me than any of the other completely random MUDs I played.
I thought all of those were undisputed indies? Also good one for recommending Recettear, the japanese indie scene is almost lost media since they used to sell their games as physical disks at events, very few ended up on steam, it’s a pain in the ass trying to find stuff that’s not on there.
I believe a number of them have publisher/port deals with big studios, so I wasn’t sure if that would disqualify them in some eyes, but yes I consider all of them fully indie-developed games.
I see, yeah it’s complex, but people still think of devolver games as indies since they basically only help with marketing and localization I think? This discussion happened with Bastion too but the devs said Warner only helped them to get on consoles and steam, it was self-funded.
Pony island is a hoot! I knocked it out in a couple hours.
I SAVORED The Hex though. After 50-some hours of Inscryption I thought there’s no way The Hex could compare… I have a lot more play time in Inscryption, but overall I thought The Hex was fucking brilliant. Hard recommend to anyone who likes Mullins’ games.
I have so many Steam Sale games in my library that I haven’t played yet that I don’t know if I could justify buying more. My backlog is just too long. By the time I get around to playing any purchases for this dale, 2 more Steam Sales could have already passed.
I started playing each game in my library for about 10 min and then moving on. Some games catch me playing longer but otherwise I check them off as played. With recent Steam sales I’d buy 5-6 games, immediately install them all, and play each right away. Feels good man.
How the hell do you find fulfillment in that (unless they’re super small games)? I don’t think I could speedrun something like Cave Story in 10 minutes, much less roguelikes - Dead Cells, Darkest Dungeon, Balatro etc, where the gameplay loop takes hours and hours.
It’s only $40 in the US which is what I expected it to be.
If that translates to $61 bucks in CAD: How much is the base game? Because I wouldn’t expect it to be the same $60 base price of a AAA game like it is in USD.
Edit: Just looked on SteamDB, the price of the base game in Canada is $80. Which appears to be typical for anything that’s $60 here in the states.
Whenever I replay OOT I never have a problem with Navi. She rarely hard interrupts, usually just a short tone and flashing C button that goes away after a few seconds. The voice lines only trigger if you press the button to call her, in most cases the hints she gives are genuinely helpful, and stays out of your way for the vast majority of the game.
Fi from skyward sword though… Far worse because she does interrupt gameplay, often repeats what the last dialogue box just fucking told you, and takes several dialogue boxes to tell you what Navi would have taken one to do. I’m glad they significantly overhauled her interactions in the HD release but I’m still going to be hesitant to play that game again
Yeah Navi is much less intrusive than people remember, she was really well done. And yeah Navi is concise and has a little personality whereas Fi is rambling and repetitive and just completely emotionless (yeah I know lacking emotion was intentional but that doesn’t make it enjoyable)
Zelda’s ghost in Spirit Tracks is even worse. She explains logic that a 5 year old could figure out. “Now we should go over there and do the obvious thing! I’m going to explain this over several sentences making you wait and click through them all!”
Ex game dev here who jumped ship and is now doing VR training stuff for a big medical company.
I don’t regret it one bit. You definitely lose some of the spirit and excitement of working with people who are super excited to make the fun games they grew up playing, but on the flip side, if you’ve been in the industry long enough to have 18 years under your belt, you’ve probably had enough of that excitement to see the bad sides of it.
By far the nicest thing about being in an industry that isn’t entertainment is that the success of the “product” you’re making is so much easier to define than “is this fun” or “will this help playing retention”. I can’t describe how nice it is to have actual users instead of players, and UX’ers who to come tell me what people want. Sure, it might not be as fun as games, but to be honest, I’m OK with that. I get vastly better pay, better work life balance, and most importantly, a complete lack of any kind of game director whose vision I must try to make real.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like TotK and BG3 and just replayed Outer Worlds (Fallout in spaaaace) and love me some “mainstream” games. But I think people unfairly exclude many genres when making these sorts of lists. E.g.: The Sims, Civ5, Minecraft, Pokemon, and many others that sold like hotcakes and have been extremely good games.
Personally, I’m always biased towards 4X, RTS, and similar, and find it strange they’re always overlooked. Europa Universalis 4 is ten years old and still getting DLC and updates – how many people must have played that game over ten years for the studio to justify that continued investment?
Strategy games are never featured outside maybe a grudging nod to StarCraft or Warcraft 3. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a list that mentions a 4X, a sim, or a non-Blizzard RTS. The closest you’ll usually see is someone listing Black & White.
Game journalists have to bounce between games as a job, so it sort of makes sense that the majority of them go for linear, shorter RPGs, and thus over-fixate on them.
I think the actual reason is that they only have a limited presence on consoles, which is what the majority of the English-speaking discourse on games is focused on. The genre also fizzled out in the early 2000s, which doesn’t help.
bin.pol.social
Ważne