If I go with unique experiences as a criteria just to mix it up a bit I have a few
Playing xwing with a f16 flight stick is really fun and one of my first gaming experiences outside of nes and arcades. Just really fun fast paced fighter combat. A close second would be everspace or Chorus on a controller.
Playing one of the big multiplayer arcade cabinets like Simpsons or X-Men was the original couch co-op with whoever was at the arcade not playing pinball or pool.
Beating your first boss in a dark souls or elden ring game feels like a big accomplishment, sometimes even more than the later ones when your character gets more powerful.
Going from small groups with friends to raids in an MMORPG feels like starting a whole new game, EverQuest and wow were big ones for me.
Playing one of the big multiplayer arcade cabinets like Simpsons or X-Men was the original couch co-op with whoever was at the arcade not playing pinball or pool.
I bought the 4-Player co-op X-Men arcade cabinet from Arcade1up and it’s been a blast playing it all the way through with my son.
That sounds like an awesome experience, I have a friend with a mame cab in their basement that I would probably spend too much time on it if I had one. I went with the cheaper option for mame and arcade legacy using a raspberry pi running batocera, but for some games it’s just not the same without the arcade controls.
I’m not sure there can ever even be a “best game ever”, but in any case mine is Grand Theft Auto 3.
Picture the scene. You’ve got your shiny PlayStation 2. You’ve got a bunch of games, but honestly, a lot of it could have been done on the PS1 with worse graphics.
And this bad boy drops, and never stops surprising you with all the absolute chaos you can cause. Not much of a story to go on, but the sheer scale of it was amazing. A whole city of driving, slightly wonky shooting and even flying (a bit). It was a game that just felt like the hardware was designed specifically for that.
We were no longer just playing games. We were living in the future. And we’ve never gone back.
I’m going to contradict myself a little, because Vice City is the better game. It’s got an actual story, a great voice cast, helicopter gunships, and the finest soundtrack of any game ever made.
But it was very much built on GTA3. The mind was already blown. It wasn’t going to happen again.
When it dropped my folks were on a trip and I was staying with my grandma. Rolled into circuit city to get a copy and then dick behind the counter told me I wasn’t old enough (12) to play the game. My grandma had my back though and told him off. Good times.
If you play enough, pure random chance will eventually get you a game that feels like a fair fight.
But quite often, video game matchmaking systems will fail to accurately estimate player skill correctly, creating teams where one will utterly demolish the other.
Or, as a counter-point, perhaps they are nearly evenly matched, and the slight difference in skill between them is disproportionately reflected in the scoreboard. I’ve seen this happen in fighting games, but admittedly, I haven’t really played a matchmade team game in a long, long time, because they kind of stopped making those games for me.
Not so much a counterpoint. It’s actually a factor that I’ve thought about too, and I think it adds to the problem.
In one of my other comments here, I talk about how it’s an impossible problem, and how I’d solve it by not trying to find a bunch of players of the exact same skill level to begin with. You go for roughly even teams, not precisely even players.
If you have 10 people at almost the same skill level, the tiniest difference in ability gets massively magnified, because that’s the only deciding factor that’s left.
But maybe the meme loses its humor by having less of that kernel of truth that a good joke relies on? Like, if you don’t think the matchmaking is bullshit, it’s not going to be funny, you know?
The only kernel of truth required is that most people have experienced completely unfair matches, and attribute that to the shortcomings of modern skill-based matchmaking.
What exactly the mechanics behind those shortcomings are, matters little.
You also have the team synergy as a factor in a team based game. Even if the match is perfectly balanced if people have any grief with each other in the same team(bad previous interaction, bias against certain characters, the good old racism/bigotry against other player or just difference in playstyles) the match is doomed.
The same player isn’t going to perform identically every session, and accounting for every possible weapon or character/class they might play, potential synergies with teammates, or potential advantages/disadvantages in matchups against any given opponents…
It all makes for a literally infinite number of variables, all of which must be accounted for.
The correct way to get interesting matches, imo, is to make it semi-random, and not try to have all the players on both teams be exactly the same skill level. Rather, put players on both teams from a range of estimated skill levels. This way both teams have weaker links for the other team to potentially exploit, and both teams have strong players which will try to stop that.
Instead, the system should just enforce common sense stuff, like not pitting someone who is literally playing for the very first time, against a team with someone who is 2000 hours in, and hence might straight up deny the new guy a chance to play at all.
I should know. I literally wrote THE team balancer for titanfall 2 community servers. For a time it even used the Tone online database of player stats, to know how to balance players that had never played on a given server before.
I was genuinely shocked how good the resulting games were. All I did was take the completely random players that decide to join a server, and simply figured out a slightly smarter way than other balancer scripts at the time, to divide them into two teams that are close enough to equal.
I’ve personally gotten a lot out of all the AI enhanced graphics technologies, and pretty much consider these applications the absolute perfect use case for the AI we have today. Yes, they shouldn’t be a substitute for optimisation, but overcorrecting the other way and attempting to claim that DLSS is garbage that ruins everything and looks like shit is also bad (and untrue).
Even frame generation has its uses, as long as you don’t play something fast paced where there is a lot of camera movement and/or you’ll feel the added input lag too much.
A special shout-out to the redheaded stepchild of the family too: DLDSR is a fantastic technology and once you’ve tried it you’ll never want to go back.
While I really enjoyed Alyx, it’s very much a game built around it’s own limitations. It’s more of a survival horror game in a way, because of the limits on ammo and deliberately mechanical reloading. There’s no melee at all, so once you’re out of bullets you’re done for.
For all the roughness of Half Life 2 VR Mod, I find myself enjoying it more because it has fewer limitations imposed by the move to VR. It doesn’t always work (and the vehicle sections in particular really push it), but as a mod of a 20 year old game, it’s really good.
Most of the games I play are so niche that 'matchmaking' simply consists of whoever's available. Or sometimes it even requires pinging people on Discord.
Yup, either this or the matchmaking is in find-the-most-toxic-people-available mode. I almost stopped playing online to be honest, I’d rather play couch co-op or even a good solo game.
Personally, I think it’s about how impresonal modern matchmaking is.
You’re only ever playing against “enemies” and “enemies” should be “hated with the hot passion of a burning sun”. And if you lose, you’re never at fault, because your teammates sabotaged you!
People don’t have to maintain cordial relationships, because they will never meet their teammates or opponents again.
Compare that to stuff that works using servers, where each team is made up of the same pool of people from one round to the next. People actually make friends with each other, friend or foe, and have more fun as a result.
Yeah, you unlocked many memories of mine. I played CS back in 90s, train with bots and learn map layouts at home, then play team vs team in a club. A bit later with ADSL started to play online and it was still kinda cool. When life fast forwarded me to Quake Arena and R6S it was very fun but I never ever made any online friend. Maybe a couple of people in R6 with whom I played a few times but even then the toxicity outweighed the team play fun.
Yeah, taht is more or less where I come down. “AI” upscaling is spectacular. Frame gen is much more hit or miss
The main problem is that, as with most things, people are stupid. They don’t understand that an outlet like Digital Foundry or even Gamers Nexus are going to be harsh on upscaling/frame gen because it actively makes it hard for them to give you guidance on what performance you can expect. So “This is horrible for benchmarking” becomes “This is horrible”
Upscaling is great for older games that don’t support modern resolutions. I’m not really a fan of using it in modern games because of the blurryness you mentioned.
Regarding frame gen… Optimise your damn games! Game optimisation is becoming a lost art and now people think they should spend thousands on new hardware too keep up :(
Upskaling is a fabolous technology and the split that quality needs to do between hardware upgrades and software support. Overall the existence of the technology is definitly a positive one.
However people are worried about a development that we are already seeing where games are just not efficient with their resources and require way to much computing power. People are afraid studios will decrease the amount of work they put into optimising because they feel like Upskaling will solve all perfomance problems for them. But optimisation needs to happen on both parts. That’s what people are afraid of.
ofc optimization is still needed, I meant that upscaling improves the maximum you could reasonably get out of your hardware. I'd also like to see actual low options come back bc it's really annoying not being able to turn the graphics down anymore.
I think the greatest growth for me is realising how good “high” or “medium” presets are nowadays. There is a lot of FOMO on missing the best (looking) experience, but IMO modern medium settings are stunning. I was watching a graphics comparison of Kingdom Come 2 and the improvements from “ultra” were so miniscule. The jump from “low” to “medium” to as incredible tho.
I’m a game developer and I will 100% confirm that studios have already started and will continue assuming the user has DLSS/FSR/XeSS enabled because it turns out rendering half as many pixels can get you across the finish line.
It was already fairly standard practice to try as hard as you can for performance, and when that fails to bring you good performance at native resolution, just cut some resolution (for example, to 900p from 1080p).
However, I do want to add that DLSS/FSR/XeSS is great technology for the low end of the market who can’t afford insane rigs but do get to have a slightly sharper image than previous upscalers could accomplish.
Look at the release of Rise of the Ronin for PC, the game has a huge CPU bottleneck, poor performance around big cities, looks like the game render stuff that shouldn’t be rendered. The last patch they released? “Graphics mode”…
Yeah I still remember team fortress classic servers I would go back to all the time. It was nice to go into a server where everyone knew your name. It was like being a regular at a restaurant or bar.
Yep i also ran my own server with a the sniper war mod. If you wanted to play that mod my server was only a handful servers setup to play it. We had a good group Randos would come in and the ones that stuck around became mods and any changes to the server. We held a vote with the regulars and the mods and myself. There were times I was even out voted and we implemented stuff I didn’t agree with.
The last time I had something like that was when BF3 was still the most revent entry in the franchise. I knew how the game would go by looking at which side had more names that I recognized lol, good times
I’ve played about 100 games and it has been completely unable to get me interested. Attempted giving it the ol college try, but just found it vastly imbalanced for someone who doesn’t play any mouse and keyboard games outside of league. Oh also, the monetization is even WORSE than modern league, so there’s that too.
Eh, I think that one's mostly on the community / players giving up games as soon as anything bad happens (making the 30-70 and 40-60 games where you still have decent odds of winning more like 5-95 games which become a self-fulfilling prophecy), plus regular players getting better over time (mistakes and misplays are more likely to be punished and leads are more likely to be capitalized on).
The give-up culture wasn't as bad much earlier in the game's life, at least in my NA-centric exposure to solo queue.
The game intentionally gives you a 33 percent chance to have a game you can’t win. That alone is enough to destroy anyone’s mental. The playerbase is so dwindling that most trying to play swiftplay anymore are just trying to eek out a quick win, it incentivizes cheese strats, making fair games even less likely. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say I really want to be done playing league forever – my online mate recently became a fan after arcane season two so it’s been tough.
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