In general, I’d agree that games are getting better, if for no other reason that there are so many made these days that eventually you’ll find something great.
If nothing else, the total volume of great games that are available to play keeps increasing because of massive improvements in backwards compatibility through steam and other online game distributors.
Are they getting worse overall or are we just comparing all of the current AAA games to the best AAA of the past few decades? Or comparing the current versions of series to the high points, which might just be the first game in the series?
We definitely have a number of high quality AAA games that come out each year. Most prior years had a few high quality AAA games and a lot of mediocre or terrible ones too. It’s kind of like music where the average quality over time is actually pretty consistent, but in any given year there are a lot of turds and there are certain trends that are common to those turds.
90% of every entertainment medium tends to be terrible, but when we look back we mostly remember the 10% that were good and only a few of the absolute worst to laugh at.
In the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s AAA games were becoming increasingly hollowed out husks, with dumbed down paint-by-numbers gameplay and tons of QTEs. And its not like their narratives or art direction were any good either (it being the blurry brown piss filter era). In the same time period we saw the rise of predatory practices like day one DLCs and preorder bonuses.
In more recent times I think we’ve actually seen a reversal of the gameplay hollowing out trend, and an improvement in art direction. However with the rise of lootboxes, trading, and gatcha, monetization schemes are more predatory than they’ve ever been (though these are mostly concentrated in multiplayer games). Its also really common now for games to release in an completely broken and unplayable state.
I feel like a huge number of franchises were started back in the day, but everything now is just sequels and remasters of old games.
How many of the current biggest AAA titles got their start in the 2005-2015 era vs the number of new franchises in 2015-2025?
Creativity seems to be mostly dead and games all have to be mega hits or they’re considered a failure. There’s also a distinct lack of AA games (the successful of which often later became AAA titles).
Currently 100% of my time is spent on games that are “six or more years old”, and a lot of that is spent on games that are more than 30 years old. But! I’m playing newly-made community content for 30 y/o games. This kind of retrogaming is something that evades Steam statistics entirely because it usually means playing custom sourceports of old games which rarely are on Steam. One old game I play on Steam to contribute to this statistics is Skyrim.
For me, definitely older and indie (old and new). I don’t get a lot of time these days to sit at my PC. Using my steam deck primarily these days is part of the reason I’m playing older games, but seriously I have a problem with steam/gog/name a storefront/ backlogs. I have so many games already, great time to review what I bought because of hype but never played.
Yeah that whole conundrum, if you have the money to buy new games you don’t have the time to play them, if you had the time, you wouldn’t have the money to buy them.
Update: I assembled the stack, went in, fragged out. It’s got some stupid OP modifiers and there’s probably a meta to counter them, but it didn’t matter- the short rounds and short games meant even if you’re getting stomped it doesn’t hurt too much (looking at you, counterstrike).
Bring back greenlite and this story could have been avoided completely. No one wants an F2P shooter anymore. They suck. They’re never good. Season passes sick. Buying skins is bullshit. I hope we can get to the point where games like call of duty get cancelled before releasing.
Greenlight was almost universally hated by devs. It could be easily gamed by abusing your popularity or by simply using bots. It prevented actual indie devs from ever releasing finished games while a lot of greenlit games didn’t even release.
I‘ve played 20 odd hours of the initial release version on my Deck and hadn’t hit its content cap. It ran smooth, I didn‘t encounter any bugs or crashes.
Gameplay-wise, it‘s more shallow in the farming aspect but cozier in its atmosphere compared to SDV. Personally, I had a lot of fun, probably the most in a farming sim after SDV. I loved the cast.
I‘ve read criticism that it‘s just a clone which even if true (IMO it‘s not), I don‘t think is a problem: I‘ve played so much SDV, I really needed a different flavor of farming sim (but without any extra BS) to get over the fatigue.
The initial release was already a good and competent game by its own merits, IMO. However, it’s not the second coming of farming sim Christ. This is just my 20 hours impression of the release version, it had two major updates since IIRC.
I agree with the other reply. But as a fair warning, I’m not someone who really got sucked into Stardew. That being said, I think Mistria is much better. The characters are all fantastic and fun, the magic system is nice, and I love the museum / collections like Animal Crossing.
I haven’t played this update yet, but I’ve really enjoyed the time that I have sunk into the game.
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