Veterans .Who thinks pc gaming have really evolved in the last few years ..

[Boycey0211]

Playing games since 95 onwards, however looking at games specifically 98-2003 ish, well games really aren't the same anymore. I don't remember being able to complete an AAA single player fps in six hours like you can these days.

Its not becuase of ability either, its lack of content. If you skip the cutscenes in BioShock infinite it ends up being about eight hours long at most.

There's games I still own from back in the day that I still haven't completed, even half life 1 took me a couple of weeks playing almost non stop. I miss games that had a puzzle you had to work out rather than a glowing icon and constant hints as to what to do.

 

[Vern1961]

There's games I still own from back in the day that I still haven't completed, even half life 1 took me a couple of weeks playing almost non stop. I miss games that had a puzzle you had to work out rather than a glowing icon and constant hints as to what to do.

Original Doom. It took me ages on the second from end level to work out the correct sequence of teleporters to reach the closed room with the exit switch. OTOH, there was nothing more frustrating than having killed all the enemies on a level to spend ages wandering and back tracking to find a switch or key you had missed.

Also back then, there was no Gamefaqs, wikis or even OCUK forum which you could Alt-Tab to and find the solution after a couple of minutes trying. If you were lucky, PC Gamer or PC Zone might eventually print some level guides or put something on a cover disc, but no instant help.

 

[Rezident]

Same as. The improvements in every area (except perhaps AI) is a joy.

Playing Hitman now and the sheers scope of possibilities is amazing. The game world is so big and beautiful and the myriad different ways you can complete missions is wonderful. And with VR in the post, this really does feel like a golden age for gaming.

 

[Nevakonaza]

I personally dont like the way PC gaming is going,Too many "Early access" games in Alpha state that once they have made their money dont fix the game up or anything like what they said.

Plus,DLC DLC DLC...When i buy a game i want the whole thing,Not half of it at £35 then expensive DLC packs..for things that should have been in the game to start with.

Additional maps etc is an exception as long as its not silly money.

Other than that,there really has not been a game since Bad Company 2 i have really enjoyed,Maybe its just me getting older. :?

 

[silversurfer]

Main difference in recent games is multiplayer. AI might have improved some but less then I hoped I guess.
Until everyone and everywhere is linked by fibre optic we wont see a giant shift forward in game dynamics because multiplayer is now the limiter by common denomination. Valve frequently sites 60hz and many machines still on dx9 as reasoning for not advancing further and its true generally.

BC1 was the best or most advanced if we talking that but also BC2 was very good and yep dire after that. This latest BF game will look amazing probably, I dont call that an advancement in a game personally not anymore then the original battlechess was

https://fat.gfycat.com/MixedImpishEskimodog.webm

 

[Gimpymoo]

Same as. The improvements in every area (except perhaps AI) is a joy.

Playing Hitman now and the sheers scope of possibilities is amazing. The game world is so big and beautiful and the myriad different ways you can complete missions is wonderful. And with VR in the post, this really does feel like a golden age for gaming.

VR is not the answer.

VR is to gaming what 3d was to movies, the outcome will be the same.

The golden age will come when we get rid of the x86/x64 architecture.

Sure, it will hurt many but then and only then can development move forward.

 

[SkeeterUK]

Not really. Less and less developers due to the big publishers buying and closing studios most of the time so we have to rely more on their games than say a small dev studio knocking out good games.

More rehashes of things each year and sequel after sequel. Very slow for new IPs to come that are any good.

Most things are too cinematic as in long running cut scenes which while pretty can be boring for someone who just wants to play instead of a cut scene every 5 mins. Also too much emphasis on graphics these days from the big titles.

I miss the 1999 era of gaming. Lots of IPs around, more dev houses not just big publishers around, gfx were good for their time and had lots of content at the same time.

 

[Haggisman]

Far too many games these days follow the same formulaic collectathon, crafting system, open world model with a side of cover shooter for good measure that it's become incredibly stale and ends up feeling like a product for market, rather than something someone has put thousands of hours into to make an experience worth having.

Also Big boxes. Big boxes will always win .

This is what I've started noticing as well (and IMO Ubisoft are very much at the centre of this!)

For example Assassin's Creed - the first one was great, it was new, exciting and the majority of gameplay mechanics had never been done before. It had it's flaws, but they were pretty much ironed out with AC2.

Now half the AAA games on the market use many of the same mechanics; AC, Far Cry, Watch_Dogs, Shadow of Mordor, even Tomb Raider to an extent with the collectables, "crafting" and parkour (although to be fair, TR did have this from the start).

Much like zombies, it seems the big devs find a formula which works, and churn out game after game which are almost just re-skins, until we, the game buying public are so fed up with it that the sales drop off.

I guess I can't really blame them; why wouldn't you want to make as much money as possible for little innovation? The problem is we all have different tolerances for "sameness" and where one person might be perfectly happy to buy iteration after iteration of basically the same game (COD anyone?), other people get bored after the 3rd time doing the same thing!

 

[Seanspeed]

Anybody who says that gaming right now is 'terrible' or lacking creativity or whatever is either just a cynical whiner, has ultra narrow tastes or just isn't looking in the right places.

I'd say we're in a golden age of gaming. I dont know how the quality of releases can keep up for much longer before we hit something of a lull, where we'll look back at 2015 and 2016 as some of the best years in gaming for a long time.

Easy enough to look purely at the AAA scene and point out the sequels and boring franchise exploitation and 'cinematic gaming', but that's such a small picture of gaming as a whole. And it ignores that there are still lots of good AAA titles that were made or are getting made, sequels or not. They're not ALL like that by any means. We've gotten GTA V, Souls games/Bloodborne, Dying Light, Alien Isolation, The Evil Within, Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Witcher 3, etc while coming up we have Dishonored 2, the new Deux Ex, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Dark Souls 3, Mass Effect Andromeda, Doom and on and on.

And all the great AA games, including the resurgence of the CRPG. Thinking about games like Xcom 2, Divinity Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Legend of Grimrock 2, The Talos Principle, Grim Dawn, Dirt Rally, Project Cars, Elite Dangerous, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, etc etc.

I shouldn't have the list the insane amount of great indie games that have been coming out recently. It's absolute saturation right now and I honestly have a hard time just keeping up with the rate of releases(Hyper Light Drifter comes out tomorrow by the way!).

Gaming is fantastic right now. And PC gaming is better than ever, with more options and games coming out than ever before. Unless you're just burnt out on gaming, I'd say something is wrong with you if you cant appreciate what we have going right now.

 

[Darkans]

I don't know about anyone else but I really struggle to play single player games after playing MMOs on the PC, very little manages to grab my attention. I've tasted the elitism of the 'skill cap' and its hard to go back.

Don't get me wrong, some games I've really enjoyed. I loved the last Devil May Cry, probably more nostalgia but the multi weapon combat system was a lot of fun. I enjoy COD but again that's primarily for the multi player competition. It actually irritates me to no end that I don't get the same enjoyment I used to, that sense of awe and amazement as I finally defeat a boss or gain a new ability, desensitized I guess.

 

[One Vision]

Most games today are generic rehashes, most stuff is not even worth Pirating let alone buying. Most games today are "Guru Meditation".

 

[bfar]

I've been gaming on all kinds of platforms since 1984. Been a PC gamer since around 1994/5.

I think generally things have worked out pretty well. I doubt anyone believed the platform would still be around today and going from strength to strength.

Online distribution has had a major impact. There is certainly still some great quality content out there, but there is so much garbage its become a lot harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. That said I've enjoyed a couple of gems over the last couple of years, some surprising ones too like Alien Isolation for example.

I have a couple of gripes -

One is the advent of fads. By that I mean aping of original games, themes or features to create genres that become saturated and very tedious. Modern military shooters. Zombies. Roguelikes. Pixel art. Permadeath. MMOs. Meh. Unoriginality has sadly become accepted and even celebrated.

My other peeve is the frankly abysmal quality of big publisher releases. The Arkham Knight experience is becoming the rule rather than the exception. It seems the bigger the budget, the worse the quality. And lack of support for PC features that we used to take for granted is unforgivable. Vsync, disabling mouse acceleration, fov control, online match browsers, to name but a few.

My final beef is the state of video drivers. Optimisation at driver level was an unfortunate direction for the industry to go in. I get why it happened, but I hate the way we have to rely on new drivers every time a new title comes out. It's a lottery if your video card will play a new release in any way well, and in my opinion the GPU vendors have an unhealthy amount of influence on the industry. Hopefully DX12 and Vulcan solve some of this in the future.

Otherwise I'm enjoying myself

 

[Haggisman]

One is the advent of fads. By that I mean aping of original games, themes or features to create genres that become saturated and very tedious. Modern military shooters. Zombies. Roguelikes. Pixel art. Permadeath. MMOs. Meh. Unoriginality has sadly become accepted and even celebrated.

This what I was trying to get at in my post, if something works well in one game, suddenly there are a thousand clones, or the same feature is shoehorned into completely different games where it just doesn't work!

Which sort of leads on to...

My other peeve is the frankly abysmal quality of big publisher releases. The Arkham Knight experience is becoming the rule rather than the exception. It seems the bigger the budget, the worse the quality. And lack of support for PC features that we used to take for granted is unforgivable. Vsync, disabling mouse acceleration, fov control, online match browsers, to name but a few.

So many "faddy" features are tried to be crammed in (many of which don't even add anything to the game) that half of them don't work properly, and the core mechanics/storyline etc are neglected

 

[Dogoid]

the good old days of the spectrum and amiga . the best gaming days of my life and still are.
I love gaming to day on my pc, but theres just something about the games on the spectrum and amiga that kept my attention more

you were younger and had more dopamine.

 

[Telecaster]

Pity we'll not get a PC version of The Last Of Us, that was great I thought.

I too struggle to find things that draw me in, as an older gamer. But let's not confuse a so called 'golden age of gaming' with that old chestnut of 'rose tinted spectacles'- when you're young and haven't experienced much of the world then some games can just catch your imagination in such a way that is unlikely to happen again when you're older, wiser and more importantly much more cynical than a younger you.

I am very finicky these days, I absolutely loved FO New Vegas, I picked it up cheap having never played any of the FO games before, so after exhausting myself with that I picked up FO:3 and just hated it, in fact I've barely played it and have just reinstalled New Vegas for yet another play through hopefully soon. Still not sure I'll enjoy FO:4 from what I've seen of it so haven't taken the plunge with that.

Just started Deus Ex: HR and getting into it nicely, still a decent amount of it that I'm not keen on if I'm honest but it's the best of a bad bunch I have in my steam library that I can't even bring myself to open.

 

[davewhite04]

Since developers made games primarily for console then PC, the PC has obviously been held back. Just look at the mod community, they can make Skyrim look like a PS4 game.

 

[MINUS12]

you were younger and had more dopamine.

Anybody who says that gaming right now is 'terrible' or lacking creativity or whatever is either just a cynical whiner, has ultra narrow tastes or just isn't looking in the right places.

I'd say we're in a golden age of gaming. I dont know how the quality of releases can keep up for much longer before we hit something of a lull, where we'll look back at 2015 and 2016 as some of the best years in gaming for a long time.

Easy enough to look purely at the AAA scene and point out the sequels and boring franchise exploitation and 'cinematic gaming', but that's such a small picture of gaming as a whole. And it ignores that there are still lots of good AAA titles that were made or are getting made, sequels or not. They're not ALL like that by any means. We've gotten GTA V, Souls games/Bloodborne, Dying Light, Alien Isolation, The Evil Within, Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Witcher 3, etc while coming up we have Dishonored 2, the new Deux Ex, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Dark Souls 3, Mass Effect Andromeda, Doom and on and on.
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And all the great AA games, including the resurgence of the CRPG. Thinking about games like Xcom 2, Divinity Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Legend of Grimrock 2, The Talos Principle, Grim Dawn, Dirt Rally, Project Cars, Elite Dangerous, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, etc etc.

I shouldn't have the list the insane amount of great indie games that have been coming out recently. It's absolute saturation right now and I honestly have a hard time just keeping up with the rate of releases(Hyper Light Drifter comes out tomorrow by the way!).

Gaming is fantastic right now. And PC gaming is better than ever, with more options and games coming out than ever before. Unless you're just burnt out on gaming, I'd say something is wrong with you if you cant appreciate what we have going right now.

Personally I really like a lot of new games like "rise of tombraider" or " the division" even though its an old formula Im really enjoying them and so wowed by the graphics compared to the days of jet set willy

 

[Howling]

Since developers made games primarily for console then PC, the PC has obviously been held back. Just look at the mod community, they can make Skyrim look like a PS4 game.

You've not modded your skyrim right then, 'cause PS4 can't even hope to run that

 

[One Vision]

Personally I really like a lot of new games like "rise of tombraider" or " the division" even though its an old formula Im really enjoying them and so wowed by the graphics compared to the days of jet set willy

The fact that everyone refers to JSW is because of how good it actually was for its time, especially the freedom aspect. Graphics are better today obviously but the innovation and originality is terrible today. I have 2xTitan X's and i hardly ever use my PC for games because its a borefest tbh. Played FO4 a lot but that was it, bored of that after good few hours mind you.

 

[MINUS12]

The fact that everyone refers to JSW is because of how good it actually was for its time, especially the freedom aspect. Graphics are better today obviously but the innovation and originality is terrible today. I have 2xTitan X's and i hardly ever use my PC for games because its a borefest tbh. Played FO4 a lot but that was it, bored of that after good few hours mind you.

2 Unused Titans ! Free to a good home

I guess back the days nothing like jsw had ever happened before so we were naturally wowed , but as you say most games now do lack true innovation , it mostly gimmicks like fine tuned game mechanics , better graphics etc . But to be honest I do still enjoy a few sandbox titles today as few yrs back I hardly gamed. Ill admit i am a eyecandy whore though ..