Is gaming right now what you thought it would be?

Pighardia

Pighardia

Pighardia

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9 Jan 2011
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I have to be honest, things are not progressing as I imagined they would years back. The current trend for me seems to be things looking shinier but games getting less interactive, and in the end I find it hard to get excited about new releases now.

Everyone going on about next gen when new consoles are released but they just have better looking games. When a new trailer is released 99% of comments are talking about how good it looks or if their graphics card will handle it. I'd be more interested in seeing gameplay innovations, a new level of interactivity, improvements in immersion or quest complexity. It is so rare though.

I was playing AC Valhalla earlier(an excellent game imo btw) and there were 2 groups standing next to each other. I know these groups hate each other and are at war but they just walked past each other. I paused the game and just thought to myself "haven't we got to the point yet where they should react to each other?"...I find myself thinking similar in lots of games atm.

As a slight aside, I mainly play and enjoy RPGs, and I have played most recent isometric RGPs from the last 5-6 years. Good games that I like but tbh they are mostly just better looking versions of the same game made 20 years ago. Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 are the only ones that I feel have really tried to push things forward(and they did that imo. Excellent games).

This is not to say that there are not games out there that are innovating or improving these areas, but they are few and far between.

Anyway that's just something I've been thinking recently. What are everyone else's thoughts?

Cheers
 
Not really.

This year in August my wife and I moved into my own place but prior to that during lockdown all I played was the same game I was playing back in March - The Division 2. Prior to that it was Satisfactory. Both games not on Steam - the client just doesn't get a look in anymore as I find it extremely cluttered. I look at the Steam store and I just close the client down, nothing appeals to me. My real life commitments are keeping me from gaming nowadays but I still have time for games after work and during weekends.

I miss RPG's, I miss RTS's (I still play modded Forged Alliance from time to time) but I don't really find anything that appeals to me much. Assassin's Creed is pretty much dead and replaced by a cut & paste affair. I could look at the current version and hell it might as well be Odysssyey/Greece because of assets being re-used. There still are absolutely superb titles out there - I still have yet to play Spiderman on the PS4, and God of War 3 so there are good titles which don't require a million patches and are bugged to hell (you know what I refer to).

Regarding next gen consoles - you will never see true innovation or visual jumps until well into the consoles life when they're more mature.

Edited for drunkens grammer
 
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I have been thinking the same thing for years. I would say since 2010 nothing has progressed like expected. Companies seem to rely on rehashing the same game or creating a cheap easy to make knock off for Battle Royale or whatever the flavour of the year is. Games like WoW haven't innovated at all, they would rather steal good ideas from other MMOs, and also cheapen the experience by dumbing the game down so much that the real fans wanted Vanilla back again (a 15 year old game).

Then you had the early access years where developers would release any old cobbled together rubbish and charge you for beta testing it. There is certain games like Star Citizen which i keep an eye on since they are trying something new and innovative which i respect, i do fear they might drop into the early access group where it will never be finished and disappoint a lot of people.

There are a few gems out there that are worth it but are easily missed due to the amount of rubbish out there.
 
Kainz said:
Assassin's Creed is pretty much dead and replaced by a cut & paste affair. I could look at the current version and hell it might as well be Odysssyey/Greece because of assets being re-used.
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Tbh I think the AC games get a bit of an unfair rep. The overall gameplay does get very samey, and they do resuse assets way too mcuh but they actually try a lot of new things in each game that gets overlooked...I really can't be bothered right now:p:)) but if I made a list of new features in each AC game in order I think most people would be surprised at how much they switch things up. Problem is the main gameplay loop stays exactly the same.

Just the last 2 games off the top of my head-

Odyssey from Origins- added Mercenary system, Assassin targets, battles, ship combat, extensive loot system, choice of protagonist.
Valhalla from Odyssey - Removed ship combat and mercenaries. Added Raiding, social stealth, restructured main story in to arcs(which I like a lot), Reworked loot system, completely changed the way they handle side quests in an interesting way.

Imo Valhalla is excellent, but it is the point where it will get stale if they keep reusing assets(I had to move the exact same crates in anciient Greece, ancient Egypt and medieval England!) and don't fundanentally change the moment-to-moment gameplay for the next game though.
 
I honestly thought we would be more advanced, but then time and money are always finite, and those are the limiting factors. As a whole, I think the industry needs a bit of a shake up, as they've gotten too formulaic.
 
Have enjoyed a couple recent PC games, but most gaming fun I had in recent memory was on the PS4, specifically God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn. Majority of the recent PC games are all flash and no substance.
 
Zernath said:
I honestly thought we would be more advanced, but then time and money are always finite, and those are the limiting factors. As a whole, I think the industry needs a bit of a shake up, as they've gotten too formulaic.
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Greed and laziness are the limiting factors. MVP, cut and paste, shove it out the door, make excuses and give the standard corpo nopology, milk it for every penny...let the dust settle and start the cycle again. Devs/Pubs know there are always plenty of people who will buy anything and defend anything as their self-worth is bound up in gaming. Look at how the internet screams its head off in defence of their hero CDPR, despite lying its ass off about the most over-hyped damp squib of all time, it sure looks pretty though...I haven't played it, but I can't see anything in it that makes me want to play it, nevermind buy it, it looks pretty standard with plenty of issues, half-baked systems, missing features etc.

So i'd agree with what the OP is saying really, if it's pretty, that tends to be enough, and people get excited about how it will run etc the gameplay is an afterthought.
There's too much focus from PC gamers about performance and tinkering with settings, arguing about RT and DLSS etc then benching everything ad infinitum...look at the CP2077 thread...

Oh and this constant nonsense waffle about games being "next gen", there's virtually nothing innovative out there, games are pretty much the same as they were 10 years ago, the thing about "next gen" is it never actually arrives...it's just marketing waffle.

On good thing is you can pick up great games for next to nothing within a year or two of launch, completed and patched, so there's no need to throw money away at launch because 9 times out of 10 you're missing out on nothing anyway, and also avoiding disasters like F76.
 
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Never gave it too much thought tbh, I just look at how it is. I think on the A.I. side it's just a matter of console CPUs being really weak and so there's been stagnation on that front. Not to say devs couldn't do it for PC-only (and streaming now, I guess) but who would buy it? The other part is not just the lack of hardware but also the fact that the market doesn't generally value these types of innovations as much as they do more presentation-related matters. Same as to why games are getting dumbed down ever more, and assume very little knowledge & intelligence on the player's part.

In a way we're lucky we still get games like Divinity OS 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance etc because if you look at the incentives they really should deploy their talents on lootbox games, there's waaaaaay more money there & a lot less risk.
 
Flight Sim 2020 is amazing in 4K at highest settings I find a lot of other games a bit undewhelming though....yet to try Cyberpunk and fingers crossed next Battlefield is a game changer.
 
No where close. Many of the games from 10-15 years ago, while visually inferior, in terms of gameplay were significantly more fun. Hardware is so powerful in comparison today, but I honestly don’t see what much of the benefit is. We get new features like RT that add little, whilst significant gameplay elements are lacking in comparison.

I think of games like Jedi Knight that blew my mind - 20 or so years later we get games like Fallen Order. I don’t see 20 years of innovation there. There are so many examples like this.

I was watching Worth a Buys video of games coming out 10 years ago - there was a huge title almost weekly.

I never saw myself moving to Xbox either, but the whole environment is just more joined up than on PC. PC gaming has fallen a part somewhat over the years - lazy development, hackers worse than ever, multiple annoying launchers, hardware prices just silly, a community that has become like its console counterparts (the Reddit ‘pcmasterrace’ just encapsulates this). Shame really.
 
I am going to write something up later, but it’s worth also pointing out that if you have been playing video games for 10 or 20 years already, then what you found great back in the day can sometimes be put down to the fact that you simply didn’t have enough experience yet.

but anyway, i think I would have liked things to be ‘further on’ but it’s more that the fantastical things you could dream up 10 years ago are much more complicated to put into practice than we hoped.

But there are still great games and gameplay experiences to be had.
 
CaptainRAVE said:
Hardware is so powerful in comparison today, but I honestly don’t see what much of the benefit is. We get new features like RT that add little, whilst significant gameplay elements are lacking in comparison.
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Absolutely. Take a game like Assassin's Creed Valhalla .... Honestly it looks good enough. I'd much rather have a game released on that engine looking exactly the same but with the developers working on improving AI or creating more interesting gameplay mechanics and stories than wait years for a better looking game with the same level of gameplay and no improvements in enemy AI or physics.
 
Pighardia said:
Absolutely. Take a game like Assassin's Creed Valhalla .... Honestly it looks good enough. I'd much rather have a game released on that engine looking exactly the same but with the developers working on improving AI or creating more interesting gameplay mechanics and stories than wait years for a better looking game with the same level of gameplay and no improvements in enemy AI or physics.
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Ubisofts world design is an absolute masterpiece given the scale, but it gets so incredibly repetitive and I don’t think the AI has changed hugely since the first AC game. New features yes, but even those have been introduced very very gradually.

chef-borjan said:
I am going to write something up later, but it’s worth also pointing out that if you have been playing video games for 10 or 20 years already, then what you found great back in the day can sometimes be put down to the fact that you simply didn’t have enough experience yet.

but anyway, i think I would have liked things to be ‘further on’ but it’s more that the fantastical things you could dream up 10 years ago are much more complicated to put into practice than we hoped.

But there are still great games and gameplay experiences to be had.
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True, it can sometimes be a shock going back to play some games, but not all fit into this category. There just doesn’t seem to be much drive to innovate currently.
 
chef-borjan said:
But there are still great games and gameplay experiences to be had.
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Oh definitely I would say that also. There are games that are pushing things forward. Without properly thinking things out I would single out RDR2, honestly not a great game imo but the AI and specifically the animal AI is scarily good. Divinity OS 2 just gives you so many tools and options and reacts brilliantly to your actions. Even something like the Dishonored series(criminally overlooked imo) for having its own aesthetic and excellent level design with many options or how to play. There are certainly still games that impress me a lot in how far they've come
 
Pighardia said:
Oh definitely I would say that also. There are games that are pushing things forward. Without properly thinking things out I would single out RDR2, honestly not a great game imo but the AI and specifically the animal AI is scarily good. Divinity OS 2 just gives you so many tools and options and reacts brilliantly to your actions. Even something like the Dishonored series(criminally overlooked imo) for having its own aesthetic and excellent level design with many options or how to play. There are certainly still games that impress me a lot in how far they've come
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I just wish we had more of them. I mean look at this list and this is just 10 years ago:

https://youtu.be/hfu_uYAWTeM

There are some huge games there within weeks of each other.
 
40 odd years I've been gaming, I was literally there playing the first ever home game and have continued that gaming week in and out ever since. I've played it all, every genre, every format. Is it where I thought it would be by now. No, but mostly for one aspect really, the AI just isnt where I had thought it would be after 40 years. Aside from the AI, I really thought that multiplayer would be further along by now than it is, we're still so limited in terms of the numbers of players in multiplayer, we ought to be at a stage now where the next Battlefield game has a max population in the hundreds (at the very least) but no doubt when it comes it will be 64 players again (or at a push 128)
 
The recent PC renaissance over the past decade or so has surprised me, particularly now with plenty of girls as well as boys getting PC builds or building their own for streaming or Fortnite, etc. PC gaming is now cool and accessible to age groups and demographics that might never have played PC games in the past.

I felt a change in PC gaming between 2000 and 2003 for the worse with the original Xbox being the reason for more simplified games. Just compare Deus Ex to Deux Ex Invisible War, barely 3 years later but a real step backwards in complexity. MS seemed to completely disregard the PC for almost a decade but things seemingly now better than ever again on PC, but still suffering from some simplified games designed for console.

A huge bonus for me was the number of Japanese devs who finally noticed PC, Steam easily now the most diverse library compared to any console. Wasn't that long ago the idea of getting the latest Japanese console games plus many only timed console exclusives on PC simply wasn't possible.
 
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