The most excited I have ever been for a trailer was when I saw an ad for Secret of Mana on TV; and it’s entirely because it was the first time I ever saw a video game advertised on TV and not just in magazines.
There used to be a couple… Back when the default skin for Steam was just that ugly green shit? There was a couple different 3rd party clients that offered customizing the look before they added that function officially.
The only one I think might still be relevant is the one centered around filtering shovelware from the store. And I don’t know if you download that, or if it’s just a web client, since it is focused on the store and not much else (I also never used it personally).
Elden Ring is still a stuttery mess on PC and barely hits 60 fps on consoles, even the $700 one, yet it’s beloved.
I have an old ass PC and a PS5 with the game on both and they run smooth as shit unless you’re using raytracing, which literally doesn’t even change the visuals in the game; it just makes it slower.
Stalker 2 is a busted mess. The performance issues have been fixed mostly after 3 patches, but the game itself shits itself once you get to a certain story mission. Literally nothing works beyond that point. The A-Life system does not work, scripted events are all jacked up, IDK if anyone else is getting this but every now and then I have my secondary weapon replaced with a random other weapon that I didn’t even have in my inventory, sound effects don’t play properly, the hud completely disappears, and so many more things that make me glad I’m only playing through GamePass and didn’t actually buy the game. There’s a good game under the mess, somewhere. But they should have just bit the bullet and delayed it another month or two instead of releasing what they did for the holidays.
The reason they sold so many copies though, is because pre-ordering. People bought them before they ever saw the game in action. And games like Stalker 2 are the reason why you shouldn’t pre-order. Because the chances of getting burned by busted-ass shit like this is increasingly more common. Again, because people pre-order the fuck out of games.
I definitely don’t see a fixation of performance lol
The reliance on AI upscaling and frame generation, while the entire game takes up half or your entire SSD shows that optimization is an after thought. These solutions make everything look pretty and smooth, at the cost of how it actually feels to play (input lag up the fucking ass that makes the game feel way worse). Couple that with the myriad of performance issues the majority of AAA games have at launch.
The focus is entirely on making something visually good looking that will sell millions in pre-orders alone.
Personally, I find it frustrating to see the buzz Baldur’s Gate 3 gets because I remember a time when games like BG3 weren’t a rare sight. I mean, shit, BG3 is just a logical evolution from BG1 and 2. It’s got modern graphics, modern UI, modern controls… Same basic gameplay, same kind of choice that can lead to many replays because there are so many ways to do any given quest, etc.
It isn’t that BG3 isn’t deserving of praise; it definitely is. But the fact it is like a breath of fresh air shows just how awful the industry itself is. They didn’t do anything that hadn’t been done before, and instead went back to old-school roots and fucking dominated the scene by simply not making their game watered down garbage with a lack of agency.
I miss that game… And real arcades. All the “arcades” around here have nothing bullshit mobile games you can literally download and play for free on your phone, and they want like $1-2 per play at the cabinet now. I ain’t paying any money to play Angry Birds or Flappy Bird.
At least they still have skeeball and the basketball things…
As for light gun games on PC, the only things I’ve ever seen are emulated. Either arcade games like that Terminator one with the machine guns that actually have kick to them, or NES/SNES games using the zapper/super scope 6. The emulators do support the actual hardware if you have it and a way to connect it, and there used to be light guns made for PC, but I don’t know if they would be USB or serial port (they were from the 80’s and 90’s).
The lack of static servers and prevalence of random matchmaking has made multiplayer gaming so bad. At best nobody talks. At worst, the people talking are toxic as fuck. Who cares, right? Never gonna see these players ever again. Nobody accepts friend requests either anymore because 9 times out of 10, they only wanted to add you to talk shit.
There isn’t a game that exists that isn’t better going in knowing very little, if anything at all, about it. I don’t even understand reading an entire guide or wiki about a game before you ever even load it up and play.
I completely agree with that. Even the games that made the big companies big back in the day started off being like 3-5 people, tops. Now they have hundreds of people, tons of ideas, along with limited time and tons of bureaucracy. Even if there’s just one person making the decisions, it can’t be easy frequently hearing good suggestions from other people working on the thing under you and not wanting to try and incorporate them.