Companies are trying to take shortcuts to making money rather than making quality products and having the money follow.

The sad reality is that some shitty mobile game with microtransactions will probably earn more net income than a AAA single player game.

Sad to see beloved franchises hire these mobile game studios to work for them lowering the quality of the product

I don’t know, dude, I think there are plenty decent modern games.

At 10/26/23 11:56 PM, BCSADER wrote:

They're not .

You have anhedonia, a symptom of depression.

While most AAA games are getting worse and worse, I think it might also have something to do with you getting older and having played quite a few games already.

I remember playing a really mind-numbing super-grinding f2p Chinese "MMO" game at around 2003-2007 where there were no quests, no raids, no instances, no real class progression, and the only way to get good loot was to either buy them on a user run market or grind enemies till they drop said loot or good enough loot that you can then trade away (there was also a pay2win thing but almost none I knew then used it because you could fully play the game as a free player).

Looking back at it, it was such a shit game and I have no idea how I played it for 3 or more years religiously. But it was the first game of that kind that I had experienced. Because all other games I knew back then were either NFS:Underground, CS 1.6, GTA2 and Vice City, and while my brother did play Lineage 2 on private servers, it was too confusing of a game for me back then and I couldn't get past level 20 (or was it 30?).

And I was so into it that I even played what basically were reskins of the same game from the same developer with slight game play changes

My 1st game was Conquer Online, followed by Eudemons online, and then my favourite last game was Zero Online on the Sci-fi aesthetics alone.

Idk games nowadays seem like heart less cash grabs

I'm not depressed tbh it just seems there's less effort being put into games nowadays

Counter: Resident Evil 4 on PS4/5, Xbox Series X/S, and Steam.

I could list them, like Back 4 Blood, Dead Rising 4, Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: Definitive Edition, Mass Effect Andomera, but I'm sure someone's gonna do it.

Obvious answer: corporations don't give a shit about quality. Them corporations need MONEY and artistic value don't mean shit.

industry corner cutting

You gotta elaborate more man. Are you talking about a specific game or just games as a whole?

At 10/26/23 11:56 PM, BCSADER wrote:

Because some dumbass corpo's been outsourcing everything to shady chatGPT-running companies to make shitty knockoffs of the games you loved to save money for their third bugatti, then whine online about how exponzive it is to make games.

Stick to newgrounds.com games. They're way better anyway.

Games as a whole

I'm just sayin, you should try hi-fi rush

I want to agree with you, but I've also played plenty of recent AAA games for hundreds of hours, so maybe I'm part of the problem.

As long as the gameplay is competent and/or the story is decent enough, I can overlook whatever.

This sounds more like a you problem. Since you're insinuating that all games from this point forward are shit despite the fact that everyone has different taste. Or you could just not play them. And if you think popular games such as Elden ring, smash ultimate, FF14, and the pokemon games have no effort being put into them, then the internet would just laugh at you.

Now entering this thread: the great text-wall, of old nerd-rage.

This all mostly applies generaly to AAA games over the years, and only juuuust a little bit of me becoming a big ol grumpy depressed Millenioomer over time, who's starting to think everything is either sucking, or on a slow descent of suck (just a teeny tiny micro-bit of that) and that the simple things that JUST WORKED simple and cleanly are becomming a thing of the past, because the new mentality has become: 'If it aint broke: update the living crap out of it'.

I do believe things have started to take a turn for the suck, ever since gaming became HD.

You could finally see so much more! So much more details, so much more things on the screen, so much more SUCK! Because so much attention went to all that, things being HD, being detailed. The composition of things HEAVILY went to shit.

You're getting more rich, realistic looking open enviroments, sure, that looks nice at first glance. But that does not mean the readability is any good, or that such an enviroment is even any fun at all, to navigate through.

Got this mostly with games such as first person shooters, but also any kind of game, where you move your playable character through a 3D space.

When games didn't have the computing power, for grand open, detailed areas. All the focus simply HAD to be put into designing small areas, wich are fun to move around in. Enemies had to be placed in clever ways, to be challengeing, yet not feeling unfair.

So if you take a first person shooter: in the old low-res days, the fun, or the challenge, in shooting up a dude, was having some fast reflexes, combined with your movement and aim, simple and effective and fun.

Since the graphics have been pumped up, the challange has transitioned into a challenge of Where is Waldo, where you have to look among all of the visual clutter, to find the seemingly randomly placed guys you gotta shoot before they get you.

Not that I have anything against taking the time to look amongst all of the details to find what I'm looking for, but it completely destroys the tempo and pacing you want out of an action packed game. Combine that with needlessly convoluted crafting systems, or shitloads of loot you have to read all of the stats of, doing a bunch of maths excersises to calculate if the new loot you got is ever so slightly better than the crap you are carrying at the moment.

Its like instead of opening up a game, having yourself a blast, escaping the complicated bullshit live throws at you. You now first have to study, read up on what your going to play, and how you are going to build your character in the right way, what stats you are going to assign, blady blady blah.

It's like video-games are becoming like school! Like I gotta do buttloads of homework beforehand, or I'm gonna fail and have a bad time! And I used to play video-games to get away from all of that complicated bullshittery!

And don't even get me started on all of the chores you now have to do before you can even begin start up and begin playing a game!

Back in the old days of the long lost past. A person walked into a store, picked up a game, gave the shopkeeper some money, took that game home. Put the game into the gaming machine. Turn the screen, turn on the console, and well under one minute, you were in your little digital playground, having a good ol time, playing a fun game.

Now you have to turn on your grand next-gen gizmo device. Set up your whole system and account settings, fill in your email-adress and personal info, send a verification back on your email, get everything updated, get into the digital store on that thing (as soon as the store is done doing all of it's bullshit updates too) navigate through the digital shitshow of a shop, wait for big expensive gaming experience to finally finish downloading (better find yourself a long game to play in the meantime, if you're not blessed by the gods of fast internet). When the download is finally complete, I can start gaming and having fun now, right? Riiiiiiight?

WRONG!!!

Now the game now has to download several buttloads of gigabytes of updates and install those. Then you open up your game, wait for half an hour to look at a bunch of unskippable logo-screens and other modern day faggotry. And now you better make a new account for this game specifically, before you can have your promissed fun.

Alright, now I'm finally into the game and I can start playing and have myself some.FUN!!

Oh wait.... Its way past midnight now and I have to get up early to get to work tomorrow....

...OH F*CK!!..

Thanks you for making this thread, for me to dump this on, OP!

Felt gud getting all that stupid old-man rage outta my system.

';3

Video games aren't getting suckier (if thats even a word) they just become an easier target because of the constant moving of the goalposts and unrealistic expectations that fans put on them, only to complain when it's not the 100% exactly what they think they want. Video games aren't the problem, there is enough for all of us, but maybe we should adjust out expectations and thinking.

Yes, certain AAA companies have a record of bad business practices and piss off gamers as a whole, and rightly so. That said, much of the complaints just seem to ring hollow, because the majority of gamers are either going to play the game anyway, rendering the criticism hypocritical, or simply just ignore it but end up wasting their time bashing something they didn't like if they do so.

At 10/26/23 11:56 PM, BCSADER wrote:

Video games are in a solid spot right now. You just have to look past AAA incompetence and find games in a genre you like. My personal rules are that I will not buy a game with microtransations, I will only buy games on sale, and will never pre-order. I have ended up saving hundreds of dollars and many hours of frustration by following them. There are over 30 years of great video games you can play, you just have to find them.

Because suits are more interested of profit and in some cases 3/4 of budget does not go to game making, but marketing.

In short games industry just became too popular and mainstream.

We should expect better from people using millions of dollars to put out games.

I would let mediocre games slide from indie game studios but triple A garbage doesn't deserve respect tbh.

Why are you buying a RPG game exactly? I mean, how is it necessarily the game's fault that you just buy the game on the pulse of "I wanna have fun, let me have it already!"? Sure, RPGs are popular, but why shit on the thing that RPGs do and that's letting you build your characters? Sure, there are RPGs that are way simpler, like the Paper Mario series (Albeit more on the original SNES/N64 and TTYD.) where stats aren't that big and complex, but this is more or less an issue you made if you pick builds that leads to much more difficulty, like for example, Low Level runs, and they're frustrating for people who aren't experienced to the game. How about Magic in SMT 1, 2, and 3 for the protagonist because magic isn't accessible in SMT 1 and 2, not even in IF, and in SMT 3's case, a much worse example, as magic skills get worse the more you level up?

That's because back then, technology was VERY limited during the days of sixth generation consoles compared to now. Sure, these games boot faster compared to games nowadays, but that's because of the data storage. Less data means it's likely to take up less time to set it up compared to games that need more space. Not to mention that bad discs could fuck up the experience, no digital releases or ways to play your games without the disc, DLCs or bug fixes, and do I even need to mention multi-disc games like Resident Evil 2 or Killer7? Missing a disc was basically losing a PART of the game. Sure, games nowadays aren't immune to issues, but I wouldn't exactly say past consoles were better.

TL;DR version: okay boomer

The money aspect is the issue. Especially for games that have had sequel after boring sequel of the same franchise. There is no passion as there was anymore-- and the only thing I have found to have a shred of love in it in recent times was Death Stranding, Oxygen Not Included, more recently Dome Keeper.

I don't even want to go into MMOs, having moderated some communities for a long time before I decided to call it quits, it seems to me that some of those games communities and companies have turned for the worse and are kept alive by pure math, hatred of each other, and monetization.

Money is the root of all evil.

I thought to add, where I took my value in last post from. Deus Ex: Mankind divided was such game, where developers directly went to act against publisher. Publisher wanted X, Y, Z (micro-transactions etc) to be in game, and they (publisher) was in developers rear constantly and then devs spoke out because they felt quilt front of fans of the franchise. They even added all micro-transaction stuff to the game to make sure no one would use that feature.

In case of one of Fallout games the marketing budget was a bit more than half from game budge (this you were able to detect via openly stated game cost and advertising cost of certain marketing things).

I have more and more examples and there we have this disconnect between creator and the suit. People, who claim that "it is just because we have got older" - then no. Creators (as in singular people, not studio) of Dishonored (one of the authors is also one of the creators of original Deus Ex) said that problem is that making immersive sims (best of the best genre in my eyes) is incredibly resource costly to make and only dedicated fans would be the ones, who find all the different nuances from the game (replay). So from one end as creator you want to make good games, but in modern world where entertainment teaches you to get instant gratification (buy this red dot, anyone?) it is no more lucrative - especially for publishers.

It really is NOT about "us getting older" - the scene has changed according to people, who work on it and have worked on it longer than most of us here have age.

How to counter this all ? Seek out indies - especially "passion project" indies. Passion project means that authors care about their characters, story, their fans. Sure game may not be tech marvel, but it would be done with love.

I prefer playing indie games more than AAA games now. You can probably guess why.

Because most AAA game companies are hiring people that barely know how to code or wtf optimization even is. Along with how No Man's Sky set the precedent for those same companies to release buggy unfinished broken mess on release and "just fix it later". It's no wonder that a good chunk of AAA games are shitty. And this not even going into the can of worms that is payed off reviews and consulting companies like Sweet Baby (Yes that's a name for a consulting company that puts their input on video games during development...).

This shit is why I prefer indie games. Yeah there's an ocean of shitty indie games. But the ones that stand out, are far better than most AAA games these days.

Fuck le money. libre fun!

At 10/26/23 11:56 PM, BCSADER wrote: there are some decent ones but videogame companies just want money so yeah, micro transaction

sorry 4 bad english, its my second lenguage

Not enough creative freedom or enough time for that matter