Has gaming had its "Golden Age"?

[arknor]

I think most games don't want to try anything new because they have to stick to a formula like hollywood movies

as soon as one game becomes popular we end up with like a dozen clones trying to copy the success, even the big studios do it.
so many genres are all but dead even though they would have been one of the most popular not too long ago.

 

[unwashed potato!]

For me yes. Fun coop games that can be played with a friend are almost gone. My brother left the country a year ago, and I thought I'd have a few new games lined up to play when he eventually comes back. So far I have zero

 

[Zenduri]

For me yes. Fun coop games that can be played with a friend are almost gone. My brother left the country a year ago, and I thought I'd have a few new games lined up to play when he eventually comes back. So far I have zero

I think games have become a bit cookie cutter-esque and they have a much shorter life span now days and less original content. I have to agree that coop games have fell the hardest though. Its either single player or MMO now days and the MMO games seem to be average at best and the single player ones are very hit and miss but mainly a miss.

A group of 4 of us have been playing civ 5 for about 18 months now every sunday evening as we wanted something we could all play that isnt a fps and now we are looking for a change in game for sundays we are struggling to find a 4 man game to play. I think we have settled to all getting divinity original sin 2 but its taking weeks of looking and discussion.

Aside from me jumping in and out of world of warships and Tarkov regularly plus odd stints of Squad i can safely say my gaming is pretty ropey and there isnt really anything im looking forward to except Cyberpunk (which ill be upgrading for).

 

[unwashed potato!]

I think for).

Give sea of thieves a go if you're a 4 man group. Game is perfect for team play. Some great content on there now after all these constant updates you dont even need to hassle other players as the AI ships are good fun, especially the skeleton ship events when you have to defeat like 5/6 ships

 

[The_Arbiter]

when did the first crappy dlc come along?

Crappy one, COD... COD5 held back zombie maps annoyingly. Though i bought them. So guess they weren't that crappy xD

One of the first was the Halo 2 maps I believe. For context it was like 2 pounds for 4 maps . Certainly don't get that value anymore!!

Was like £5/8? That long ago though...
I remember they had the physical disk map pack also. And steel case release. Oh boy.

Amiga as a child (Dizzy, Shadow of the beast, Cannon fodder, Sensible soccer, Gunship 2000, there are too many to list).

Friend had that on his Dad's Spectrum, 45mins to load, 2mins to die. Impossibly hard, but we were young.



Game expansion packs were a nice touch for gaming. Even consoles had re-releases that gave slightly more content. But i guess modders fill that role now.

 

[Guest2]

Friend had that on his Dad's Spectrum, 45mins to load, 2mins to die. Impossibly hard, but we were young.

I had this one
https://images.app.goo.gl/4ShNHQ4z83bNZixB8
and yes! Ages to load, then you accidentally roll into the fire place at the start and get turned into a fried egg

 

[Besty]

This is not a "Pepperidge Farm Remembers" deal but genuinely, has gaming peaked?

Thing is with the 80s, 90s is that people remember the best bits and tend to forget the dross and there was much dross to be had, including load times and disc/tape swapping.

Youtube tends to paint over this bits and just present the high-points, not the fact that you just hit the last level of Last Ninja 2 at 1am on a Tuesday morning and your tape loader has just packed itself in or when the PSU on your C64 overheated and killed itself on Boxing day morning.

I think the past 5-6 years in gaming has seen too many big production failures for what should have been home-run AAA titles with multi-million budgets and that is the key problem. For every AC: Odyssey which hit the ball out of the park there are five big failures, I can't see the industry being able to bear all these failures over the long haul.

On the whole, no, i don't think the 80s and 90s were 'better' for gaming with the exception of a 20 or so of what you would call milestone influential games as Super Mario World, Zelda: A Link To The Past, Quakeworld, Monkey Island, Sensible Soccer , Turrican 2, Bards Tale, SF2 Turbo, Last Ninja etc....the list goes on.

I think the 2020s will demonstrate that we are just getting started with gaming and the new hardware is going to allow for all the high bars to be reset and redefined.

 

[jasonsony735]

Not at all , if anything Gaming is bigger than its ever been ! With the likes of Twitch every young kids wants to be a streamer or a gamer so if anything PC gaming is the biggest its ever been.
Ok for us older guys it may feel that way but thats because we have been doing it so long,
Im now 37 and I still game and don't plan to stop any time soon , Still enjoy PC games more than TV or Movies.

 

[TeeEmDee]

I know what you mean, with pretty fancy graphics that look very realistic it will probably be quite hard to get a new 'generation' of games.

 

[danlightbulb]

nostalgic reply here but i have been trying to think what it was about 90s gaming that gave me such a buzz. I was 13 in 1993 when i got a megadrive for christmas then i moved on to snes, amiga and finally pc in early 2000s. the amiga was the real productive time for me when i was not only discovering sim type games (rollercoaster tycoon blew it away, civilisation, colonisation, settlers) but also learning to be creative with programming (AMOS, blitz bazic) and art/animation/music (deluxe paint, octamed).

then real life got in the way.

i think the if the pace of technological improvement coincides with your own major growth periods (teenage years) and it hits your buttons / personality type too, then it really embeds itself.

im trying to get back into gaming over the last few years but it lacks the depth it had back then. modding sees great on paper but requires a whole programming degree to understand it all.

 

[chaparral]

I hate to see how much it costs and how long it takes to make an AAA game these days
Back in the 80's the games were far more simple. Just youtube something like a ZX spectrum or C64 game

I still remember when the top games were space invaders & PAC-Man which I used to play all the time on arcade machines in the very early 80's

 

[Nasher]

Mid 00s was the best era.

Graphics got a lot better but it was still before salesmen took over the industry.

 

[mid_gen]

This week's rose-tinted specs thread, not a bad one...

The quality and variety of games available just keeps getting better. Started God Of War recently, and it really is better than anything I played back in the 80s and 90s in pretty much every way.

Sure I don't have the time or inclination to stay up until 4am every day playing it like I did with games back then, but that's me changing, not the industry going backwards or some kind of passing golden age nonsense.

 

[Usher]

The golden age for PC gamers was in the 1990's when everything was new and massive a step up from the spectrum & Amiga systems, computers had just 1 meg of ram and graphic cards had none as it used the system ram, the hard drive was the size of a hardback book, windows 95 regularly crashed and compared to today's standards the graphix were laughable. But we thought it was the amazing back then. I remember playing the original Quake and the graphics were extremely blocky but the gameplay was thrilling.

So will young newcomers to gaming be similarly amazed by the technology involved to produce amazing games such as RD2 and AC Odyssey? absolutely no chance, they will enjoy the gameplay but the graphix will not be considered at all, just like the TV now with CGI special effects.

 

[unwashed potato!]

So will young newcomers to gaming be similarly amazed by the technology involved to produce amazing games such as RD2 and AC Odyssey? absolutely no chance, they will enjoy the gameplay but the graphix will not be considered at all, just like the TV now with CGI special effects.

i disagree. I think RDR2 was a good example of a game that made you aware of what they had created and how great it was. There will be a difference between a 30 year old compared to a 13 year old playing that game, but i know that game did a much better job than others showing what they've put into the game. The snow for instance they make sure you notice it and appreciate it. Zelda is another example of a game that makes you realise it's mechanics and use them to their potential. Mafia 1 is another good example with things like shooting out tyres, speed limits, the police ticketing system.

Games I feel often don't do enough to make you appreciate what's gone into them.

 

[Darujhistan]

I've been thru every era, and gaming now is better than its ever been, everybody has nostalgia for their gaming youth, but you're only kdding yourself if you think it was better in the past. There are just as many good/great games as there ever were, it's changed as a business for the worse, but the convenience and freedom to mod games very easily to your liking outweighs that. While its true that everyone is blown away by the top graphics of their time and that time doesn't erode that pleasure you felt back then, I can remember being wowed on the Atari, C64 and the Amiga, but graphics are demonstrably better now than they've ever been, meaning those wows are in better graphical fidelity.

 

[Usher]

i disagree. I think RDR2 was a good example of a game that made you aware of what they had created and how great it was. There will be a difference between a 30 year old compared to a 13 year old playing that game, but i know that game did a much better job than others showing what they've put into the game. The snow for instance they make sure you notice it and appreciate it. Zelda is another example of a game that makes you realise it's mechanics and use them to their potential. Mafia 1 is another good example with things like shooting out tyres, speed limits, the police ticketing system.

Games I feel often don't do enough to make you appreciate what's gone into them.

My son has 2 boys aged 10 & 12 who play on my PC when they come, for them it's just like a TV programme that they can join in & play.
I've asked them what they think of RD2 and they love the game but they have no real idea of how gaming used to be and think it's always been like this, when I showed them videos of 1990 graphix in games they fell about laughing and wanted to know why they didn't do better job.

re comments others have made, I think people are missing the point when comparing older players to youngsters, back in the 90's information technology was not everywhere like it is now, there were no mobile phones,no internet, no bluetooth, no satnavs etc. It was the dawning of the computer 3D gaming age, it's now gone, it can & will continue to advance to amazing heights but the golden dawn cannot ever return.

 

[suenstar]

I feel like we're probably in gaming's golden age at the moment, there's more people playing video games than ever and it's even reached a point where it's become a fairly viable job path to play games for a living. The quality of games at the moment is pretty high with there almost never being a month without a new game being released that looks great and plays amazing... sure there are lots of old games from the 80's and 90's that I absolutely adore but the way the technology behind the games has advanced has made it possible for games to become something beyond what we ever expected.

I think my only complaint with the current state of gaming is how few local split-screen games we get now... since it's assumed that every adult, child and dog has their own console/pc these days, it feels like the market for local split-screen titles has nearly reached its end.

 

[PC777]

If you're going by the use of Golden and Silver age in comics that denotes a time period rather than a period of exceptional quality, then yes, the Golden Age of gaming is well and truly over.

You could make a case for it being from 1970 -1990, with 1990-2010 being the Silver age. Though that would put the Megadrive and Snes in different eras, so likely 1972-1992 is a better time frame for the Golden age of gaming. From Pong to the release of the 16 bit consoles.

In terms of quality, I'd argue gaming has never been better in the present day after over 35 of gaming for me, if you know where to look and mostly avoid microtransactions, there's still great gaming to be had.

I'm currently switching between Dragon Quest Builders 2 - the best Minecraft type game I've ever played and my retroactive game of 2019 as I only got it this year, even beating RE2 Remake for me, along with Monster Hunter Iceborne, Capcom Street Fighter Classics on Steam and various games on my Snes mini.

It's telling that the 2D offerings on the Snes mini have aged a LOT better than most early 3D games did, it's testament to just how good Mario 64 was that it can still be speedrun today, but many other games from that genre aged horribly.

Even some games from the just a few years back can look very dated, whereas Super Mario World will still be playable as it is, as a high end example of 2D gaming in 1000 years time. Some of those muddy old 3D PS1 and N64 games are going to look like absolute rubbish in terms of looks and janky 3D gameplay, as many do even today.

So I'm still loving gaming, I've still got access to all my old games as well as many great new games that will continue to be released.

In terms of 3D gaming, the best is still yet to come as graphics approach photo realism, innovating graphics standards can level off like they did at the end of the 2D era and focus can go back on game play and AI rather than chasing graphics all the time.