All yhese takes are blowing mind how the differ from reality and I do not have the ti-
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vr! switch! these are rich people games! 
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yeah it is true that you get a weirdly incomplete picture of whatâs out there right now if you just have, like, a PS4 and a laptop, which wasnât true at all prior to about 2017
the baseline investment to engage with a lot of mechanically novel stuff has like⌠tripled? considering GPUs and whatever else, especially if you donât have access to the US aftermarket.
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yeah, i agree with this. this is why everyone was making platformers a decade ago - a lot easier barrier to entry! but now stuff has moved to the cutesy flat shaded 3d because of Unity and that 3d is seen as more desirable (i secretly think many people are also unconsciously reliving the 2d - 3d industry path of the 90âs because game world tends to lack the collective imagination to see outside of that framework). plus the whole landscape of free games got really sidelined/forgotten, and new developers without much experience are pressured by a bunch of different forces (academic game programs, publishers, social media, etc) to make a Commercial Product to feel Valid right from the get go.
itâs part of the general path weâve taken where younger and younger kids are expected to be successful entrepreneur. the space has become more âprofessionalâ but the kind of growth period that modding communities/free game/just generally âhobbyistâ spaces could provide are sidelined and youâre expected to run instead of walk straight from the getgo. so you get a lot of indie games that are basically one-dimensional publisher fodder that are engineered to look respectable in the moment and potentially Go Viral due to looking stylish on social media but be forgotten about in the long run. and you have an increasing amount of the language of Youâre Valid Because You Shipped A Game going around, because i guess thatâs whatâs important? so much stuff has this real air of disposbility around it, and it really bums me out.
thatâs kind of why i think so many walking sim or short lo-fi horror games work a lot better in amateur spaces, in the way that a lot of lo-fi platformers used to. itâs because they are a lot more honest about what they are and arenât! i honestly feel much more comfortable diving into the deep end with those kinds of genres than i do with anything that looks like vaguely polished but without any clear sense of identity underneath. and that idea of focusing on something cool that you can achieve instead of making some polished product seems to have been really forgotten by a lot of people ever since the early 2010âs.
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the only thing thatâs improved I guess is a moderate increase of diversity in themes/stories told by games, and AAA studios seemingly discovering the concept of âart directionâ, and I guess also a mainstream acceptance of âactual game designâ thanks to dark souls, et al, even if that disproportionately landed in the indie space in ways that continue to annoy to this day.
meanwhile budgets and asset complexity have only swollen out further, edging out mid sized teams and projects that might have had a chance of doing something remotely interesting, to the point where even something like resident evil viii feels like a miracle for being a AAA game with personality, writing, and mechanics that arenât just another open world variant or dull, self-serious prestige piece.
doesnât feel like weâve headed in a great direction, though at least there are AAA games that occasionally seem interesting to me from time to time. and we finally hit the first time in the HD era where games are consistently not ugly 
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tv games are good, regardless of their era. terrible shit from big studios has and will always exist, and the indie scene of that era was dominated by every jackoff blowhard who either turned out to be a sex pest or a racist with his head far up his own ass. like yeah, shitâs gonna look bleak when you see article after article crediting eaâs vice president as leading some indie game revolution because he made a game where two squares bumped into each other or whatever, while the âea wivesâ thing was playing out simultaneously.
or every hack writer who wouldnât shut the fuck up about crying over the beauty of absolute dogshit like fallout 3, while avoiding halo like the plague, in case they accidentally selected the multiplayer option and found themselves on a team with a poor person. or that other, extremely shitty period where some dudes played something like vampire rain and came to the conclusion, âhuh, japanese people are not as good at making games as the white man.â
if you were able to avoid all of that bull shit, there was absolutely some great stuff that came out. it was hard as shit to find, as a lot of these games had a marketing budget of like five bucks, and got lost in the shuffle of assassinâs creed and some other trend chasers that have been long forgotten. and thatâs only the mainstream stuff. i would mention some smaller stuff of that era, but trying to double check my dates for independent stuff released in 2008 only brings up fucking braid, and fuck braid.
and in 2021, you could apply this same argument that itâs all a bunch of ugly prestige disasters for assholes this year (or giving way too much undue grief towards balan wonderworld), while ignoring something like cruelty squad, or guilty gear, or any of micky albertâs upcoming work. itâs all about avoiding the (sometimes literal) white noise, and find the good stuff. itâs a pain that you have to sift through so much garbage to get there, but itâs possible.
i think i had a point to make here, and i lost it. something about games being good? video games, you ever hear about these things?
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Iâm put off in general by just how many games seem totally circumscribed by genre & a very limited sense of possibility. Itâs disheartening knowing exactly what experience Iâll have with something just by knowing itâs marketing terms.
I mean, I donât think thereâs anything wrong with playing like, Castlevania, and thinking, Iâm going to make my own version of this. But itâs a very narrow dialogue to be focused on, and when thatâs the majority of games, and theyâre asking for at least 6+ hours of my time, thatâs a hard bargain being put forward.
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Iâm not directly targetting you when I say this (see me and any Search Action game) but I think this is just growing up. When you go to watch a horror movie or read a detective novel or a prodedual television. The time commitment is so much more in games but a genre piece being a genre piece isnât something to rail against.
Okay donât have time baby-
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I mean I donât know if I agree. I would say that in general what a horror film can be is significantly broader in possibility and scope than the equivalent in games. A ânew platformerâ 95% of the time is going to have a very clear lineage of popular console platformers that you can very quickly identify, even if youâre not someone who dedicates that much time to thinking about games.
Whereas, say, like, a horror film from Magnet versus one from A24 versus one from Toetag are coming in with wildly different aims, pulling from multiple, very different histories, and are in much broader conversations with the world outside of their form.
Yes, there are a lot of generic horror films that are based on some abstract understanding of âslasherâ as a set of rules they are riffing on or whatever. But I personally think games are harmed at a much larger scale by a very unambitious and ignorant sense of canon and history than other mediums.
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Psychonauts, Sonic 2, Super Mario Bros, and Super Meat boy are all games described as platformers.
Doom, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Dusk, and Deus Ex are all first person shooters.
Gran Turismo, Mario Kart, DIRT, and Outrun are all racing games.
Thereâs a lot of copycats, sure, but itâs hard to say thatâs wildly different than trends in movies either, like the creature features of the 50s or slasher films of the 80s?
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You know I never even stopped to consider that one would consider the PS4/XBONE era of games to be better than the PS360 one yet thatâs what the timeframes listed seem to suggest many people think. On first blush I donât even know how to process that.
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More playable minute to minute. Better control schemes. Most often going back to PS360 you find something that goes âoh we hadnât worked that out yet.â
Also those OSes became so bloated over the changes in that generation that it is difficult to go back. At the start of 4one was a sigh of relief at how easy it was to do everything you wanted in the OS. This generation the OSes got bloated by forced obsolescence to make you upgrade by making it slower for no reason features no one asked for. Communities, tracking friends achievements as you play, a splash page that never fucking works. Reorganizing your icons, just for you! Versus like background downloads, voice chat, open the store mid game, report racists.
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itâs weird just how palpable this is these days? maybe itâs me growing up and getting cynical but I donât remember being able to so transparently see the attempted âprofessionalismâ endemic to most games released on any platform especially when itâs so easy to take a look at a trailer for a game and see precisely which touchpoints are being hit
I still have a weird fondness for the 360 era if only because the budgets hadnât gotten quite so enormous so it still felt like there was a liminal space between what devs wanted to do vs. what devs could actually achieve where they had to fill in the gaps, and filling in those gaps more often than not leads to the fun experimental stuff, even if it was just a step between âps2 golden agesâ and âevery game is a metaverse now made by one of 3 companiesâ
games only seem to be able to reference other games these days, so as more games are made the canon only seems to get smaller instead of bigger
it feels to me like it has something to do with dev tools being incredibly proprietary, ever-changing and only increasing in complexity, but I havenât formalized how the two are connected yet
the 360 era felt to me like the last time âthe industryâ was at least on the surface invested in making games easier to develop, I just donât see that being the case now unless youâre doing it like, roblox, and there are some problems there
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From my perspective, tools like Unity have been huge enabling factors. My student games were suddenly competing against much, much better stuff from many more school because they didnât need esoteric programming cadres. Small studios were capable of shipping to three, four, five platforms without needing a huge investment in very-specifically-skilled engineers to do the ports. And after a few years we got licenses for Unreal and Unity that allow students and small teams to develop without initial investment, which has been pretty huge.
Of course, more access means more stuff and more competition and they can no longer survive for an exclusive skill, like âgame C++ programmingâ.
Of course, that runs up against that ever-separated world of Flash development and webgame portals which really has died and that question as to whether people are building and learning in safe, low-stakes communities before they try and survive on it.
I think Minecraft and the media ecosystem around it really did change the player culture towards something that can be learned and iterated on, an approachable step towards game making in a way the constrained gardens of user-generated-content games like Little Big Planet and Spore could never be, and accessible in a way the PC modding communities of Doom and Quake never were.
But I agree, it feels like thereâs a missing step between the more participatory game culture and the more accessible professional tools, and itâs the small communities making and sharing simple cheap stuff. Game jams and itch.io donât seem to have the scale to replace what Kongregate was doing but at least they can be made to work for communities that organize themselves. They really lack the communication built-in. A forum can be a distribution network and a feedback and community builder in one but a place like itch needs to be paired with a presence on twitter and thatâs so disconnected from a reliable community of mentorship and shared values and itâs a knifeâs-edge struggle between being seen and avoiding being seen.
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there are still too many games imo
stop them
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I mean, the suspend function might be my favorite console addition ever, but I donât think the OSes make any of the games actually better or worse. Iâd say that those were definitely better on the PS4/BONE though, no argument there.
Just man⌠if I were to list my five favorite games from those two combined generations I think all five might be from the PS360 one? I donât even hate that gen and have a some games I still have to get to, but just looking at my list of âPS4 games I own and beatâ the best is like⌠God of War or Dark Souls III (I love the Last Guardian more than either but admit its flaws)?
Maybe I am just skewered as Iâm not including all the PC/indie games I played in those eras as I have no clue where Iâd draw the line.
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Iâd read that list in an axe thread.
Iâm not sure if people are talking about the general quality of games, the quality of discourse about games, or the way platforms and media has changed we talk about games since 2006. Every console âeonâ has been a very mixed bag which has grown in size YOY. All of them have great shit, most of their output sucks. This is true going back to the 70s.
One thing I do worry about is that the age at which you now have the opportunity to become a developer is decreasing on average and the skillset curriculum is becoming more and more mercantile balancing design experimentation against pitching, funding, and incubation. This is also sullied by an increasingly narrow media diet and people emulating other developers emulating their favourite game - in some cases completely remaking it.
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my hatred for what 2008 in videogames represents is such that armored core for answer is one of my top 5 games of all time but mgs4 and persona 4 are such cynical malicious curdled garbage that they cancel it out
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I think Iâve exclusively heard this perspective from people on the inside so to speak and it took me a really long time to grasp what they meant because itâs very counterintuitive to me but I think I understand