Am I the only one burned out on gaming?

[MKSheppard]

I'm kind of burned out on a lot of new games now -- the last game I put serious hours into was Fallout 4.

A lot of A++ games have nothing stunningly new these days.

I may be kind of spoiled because in my gaming lifetime, I've seen us go from:

Civ I (first game, lo res 320px VGA)
Civ II (isometric upgrade, Windows based SVGA that can resize to your screen resolution, easier to play, modding support)
Civ III (16/32 bit graphics)
Civ IV (polygonal graphics introduced)

But with Civ V and then VI....I'm not seeing anything cool other than "lolhexes".

Same thing with Fallout 4. While I like that the game is now literally beyond the pre-rendered talking head quality of Fallout 1/2 and that they've added actual fucking living trees to the Wastes...the basic game scripting has gotten worse or stayed static.

By that, I mean there should be a variety of responses/behaviors according to how you behave in the wastes. I think this is due to the damn requirement for 100% voiced lines. If they made it possible to synthesize realistic voices for not too much effort, they could really cut loose with more dynamic storylines rather than the current railroaded ones.

Meanwhile, over in FPSes...Call of Duty is....Call of Duty. It hasn't changed since the first game, and while the first game was pretty awesome...in 2003; it really has not advanced much since then gameplay wise -- I played Black Ops 1 recently and I was pretty underwhelmed. It was basically nothing but unlimited respawning monster closets until you moved forward and then did a scripted scene, then another unlimited respawning monster closet area.

Or am I just a crotchety old man now?

EDIT: Also, Grand Theft Auto -- is it still pants with no savepoints just before crucial mission points, meaning that if you fuck up, you have to spend 15 minutes retrying the mission again?

[TheFeniX]

But with Civ V and then VI....I'm not seeing anything cool other than "lolhexes".

Civ and other sims games are kind of a lost cause and the only real advances I've seen over the years have been graphics and UI improvements. Yes, there certain other aspects developed, but for the most part where the game really needs improvement, AI, is a zero-sum game as far as publishers are concerned. A new coat of paint can't really fix a stagnated system.

Same thing with Fallout 4. While I like that the game is now literally beyond the pre-rendered talking head quality of Fallout 1/2 and that they've added actual fucking living trees to the Wastes...the basic game scripting has gotten worse or stayed static.

By that, I mean there should be a variety of responses/behaviors according to how you behave in the wastes. I think this is due to the damn requirement for 100% voiced lines. If they made it possible to synthesize realistic voices for not too much effort, they could really cut loose with more dynamic storylines rather than the current railroaded ones.

Beth culled the karma aspects of original Fallout games (of which, if I recall, the only title that pissed everyone off was "childkiller") with the lazy karma system that somehow EVERYONE knew about. But the bigger problem with that was Beth learned that with the FallScrolls games, the more RPG they cut out to add more Action: the more money they made. There's no point is doing more because the people who line their pockets don't even know they could have more. They grew up playing Mass Effect and Beth FallScroll games. These are massively expansive games to them. The idea of doing planets in a different order, which is Bioware SOP across multiple games (KOTOR comes to mind) and wandering around picking up everything not nailed down while, in both instances, they are still on a roller-coaster with a few switches to pull, is the best it can be.

These kids would literally get lost and have no idea what to do in a game like Star Control or Wizardry 7-8, just to name two. The thing is, alternatives to the "you're in the game, do stuff! We aren't holding your hand" existed even back then. Now they are the only ones to exist with rare exception.

Dark Souls is like a hilarious footnote in this. Every kid, every review-site, talks about "X is the Dark Souls of Y" because the game is an outlier in that it relies on patience and skill. Oh and also because they are all fucking hacks buying into a fad.

Or am I just a crotchety old man now?

Maybe. I can't think of any good RPGs I've played in the past few years. Most talking about co-op are boring Diablo clones. Shooters are almost all chasing CoD money. AAA development is in a shittier spot than Hollywood these days because at least those guys can beat on comic book movies for years to come. Gaming is in a weird spot: mechanically, the entire industry of multi-million dollar marketing is like concrete. The emphasis on the console controller has brutally murdered a whole lot of UI and control choices before they've even started. AI and world-building is even deader than it has been due to gimped CPUs combined with balls-out GPUs. Not that they'd dedicate any time to either anyway.

FallScrolls games "get a pass" because there's no one tackling the genre except terribly bad games like Fable 3. GTA is a fucking joke. Rockstar is too busy trying to remake The Godfather than give us any real improvements in the gameplay department. At least Saint's Row is fun. A lot of studios forgot about fun while they chased awards and reviews. Order 1886 was noteworthy in that gameplay and fun were beaten and left for dead in the quest to make a shitty movie. Then the devs threw a shit-fit when people expected gameplay in a video game.

Too much has been distilled down to a formula to see anything really good out of AAA development. Arena shooters are dead. No one wants to run up against Blizz for action-RTS. EA has been chasing CoD with Battlefield. Anything with a decent multi-player idea is jammed into a shitty MMORPG.

There's still fun stuff out there. But you have to dig for it because these smaller groups can't spend $300 million on marketing. I'm not burned out. There's enough to keep me going, but I'm so glad I don't play competitive FPS anymore. I would have quit completely due to the absolute trash that is passing for an FPS these days.

[Thanas]

The Witcher series is a great one with regards to choices having consequences.

[Purple]

Honestly the only way I've been having fun with games these days is by going back to ancient stuff I've missed back in the day or the stuff I liked. So old DOS games (like say X-Com) or Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and SMAC. That's my advice for you as well. Just go look up a list of old classics and see what you newer had a chance to play back when it was new.

[Ace Pace]

I think you have a crazy level of selection bias and crotchy old man. Most games were derivative, you just remember the good ones better because they were literally inventing the genre while today they're iterating. You can check out Witcher 3 as one of the best Open World games lately. Has it done anything new? No, but it's amazingly well executed. By your count it's crap.

The same for FPSes. I'm a die-hard UT2004 fan but it's easy to see how modern CoD and UT versions are better balanced, better paced and overall just more fun.

You can see the same thing happening in movies or books.


If you want to see gameplay innovations, you either have to carefully fish them out of AAA games and buy only the ones that a year later people mention (such as Witcher 3 or DOTA) or play a lot of crap indie games and hope to find something good.

[Zaune]

I also suggest looking at the indie games scene, since they usually have the advantage of being cheap. If you're interested in strategy stuff and non-linear storylines you might give FTL: Faster Than Light a go. Or even the Adventure Mode of Dwarf Fortress if you want a really freeform sandbox RPG with procedural everything.

[MKSheppard]

I think you have a crazy level of selection bias and crotchy old man. Most games were derivative, you just remember the good ones better because they were literally inventing the genre while today they're iterating.

Here's the thing. A derivative game can be fucking balls out awesome and fondly remembered...IF it does atmosphere really well.


(PSX version screenshot, as all the DOS screenshots were of underwater missions at higher depths)

Oh, XCOM: Terror from the Deep, you're nothing but a thinly veiled reskin of UFO Defense, with the same items, but maybe 5% different statistics and the difficulty turned up to pants (research bugs that make it impossible to finish the game, and multi part terror missions).

So why do I love you so much?

ATMOSPHERE.

A big reason why I bought CoD Black Ops was due to Zombie mode (Zombies turned out to be meh), and for the 1960s atmosphere. The first and last missions were pretty fucking memorable, but they were ruined due to the unlimited monsterclosets present in every level.

You can check out Witcher 3 as one of the best Open World games lately. Has it done anything new? No, but it's amazingly well executed. By your count it's crap.

I actually own Witcher 1+2 (got them cheap), but haven't played them yet. I've seen lots of good things being said about Witcher 3; but $$$. Waiting till it drops to a cheaper price (and all the DLC is out and debugged).

Hell, I still haven't played Mass Effect 3; mainly because while I might be willing to put up with EA Origins for a brief time to finish Mass Effect 2 and then play Mass Effect 3....EA don't include lair of shadowbroker for ME2 in any of their online compilations. You have to buy it through a ancient, clunky, fucky DLC download system.

[MKSheppard]

I played Black Ops 1 recently and I was pretty underwhelmed. It was basically nothing but unlimited respawning monster closets until you moved forward and then did a scripted scene, then another unlimited respawning monster closet area.

Here's the thing -- Fallout 4 actually felt more like an old school FPS to me than all the modern stuff. Why? Because you could save scum your way past difficult areas, trying new things, like a puzzle to unlock them, something not really possible with COD's monsterclosets.

For example, I probably spent like 30 minutes once trying to clear a bunch of Super Mutants out of some ruins in FO4, and at the end, I felt a sense of accomplishment (fuck yeah).

[AniThyng]

TBH 8/10 times when I get a old game I loved from gog I find myself irritated by the inferior UI...(with some exceptions - notably MOO, XCOM)

[Starglider]

I have been gaming since the late 80s and have been generally happy with progress in gaming the whole time, but I confess there hasn't been much to excite me in the last two years. The last console generation had a good run of various genres up to 2013 or so, with the Mass Effects, Saints Row 2&3, Just Cause 1&2, Skyrim, assorted fun shooters e.g. Bulletstorm, the Skylanders series up to Trap Team, Fallouts, Forzas, some decent JRPGs e.g. Lost Odyssey. I have approx 100 Xbox360 games, but only 5 PS4 games. The X360 launch lineup had lots of interesting quirky stuff like Kameo, but the current gen not so much. I did buy and complete Just Cause 3, but although the graphics and physics were improved, it took a major hit to the variety of the world and missions, making it inferior to JC2 IMHO. FarCry 4 and Dragon Age Inquisition were good, but the latter was very MMOish. Other than that... well at least there is finally a proper Ace Combat for this year, 9 years after AC6.

If you like slower-paced gaming with fiddly interfaces, as in 1990s PC games, that is what indie games are for now. They have the same kind of budgets that 90s PC games ($100K to $1M) had and cover the same genres. Even graphic adventures have had a bit of a rebirth. The only thing that has been lost is the industry attention and prominence that those kind of games used to get, but they're still being made. Plus there have been the remakes and rereleases of all the Infinity Engine games and other classics. Given the lack of interesting console stuff at the moment, maybe I'll go back to PC gaming and look at VR, once the market has stabilised a bit.

I have to admitt my favourite game in fun per playing hour is still Ace Combat 5 on the PS2 (fortunately runs perfectly on PCSX2 emulator as of 2015, given a reasonable PC). Second to that is still Mercenaries 2, on the X360, from 2008. Don't ask me to explain it, objectively it should only be a mediocre game, but somehow it manages to be more fun than JC2 and SR3.

[TheFeniX]

I think you have a crazy level of selection bias and crotchy old man. Most games were derivative, you just remember the good ones better because they were literally inventing the genre while today they're iterating. You can check out Witcher 3 as one of the best Open World games lately. Has it done anything new? No, but it's amazingly well executed. By your count it's crap.

While it has it's issues, the combat system alone in the Witcher series is fairly unique. But even if it's not, there's nothing wrong with putting together tested mechanics to create a complete package. Epic did this with Gears of War and the gameplay was excellent.

The problem is that we aren't seeing additive games, even across the same series. Stagnation actually isn't the problem, it's regression. I've said this before, but just looking at the FallScroll series since Morrowind. More and more of the RPG elements were cut as the series progressed with very little to replace them. We're basically paying the same amount of money (or more) for less options and less story.

Fable is another good example, likely due to Microsoft meddling and Molyneux being a sell-out and known liar. Chop, Chop, Chop: BUT WE GOT MICHAEL FASSBENDER!

And don't get me started on the MMO genre. Hell, I could rant at length about what Blizz has chopped out of their own MMO over the years and that was already a casual game. WoW actually offers so little RPG, it's no wonder why people love it.

The same for FPSes. I'm a die-hard UT2004 fan but it's easy to see how modern CoD and UT versions are better balanced, better paced and overall just more fun.

Neo-UT exists only because Epic and it being a good way to showcase their engine. I doubt any AAA publisher would touch it. And CoD strangled the FPS genre with the "3-entry" way maps and hitscan weapon selection of "shoots slow, big damage. Shoots fast, low damage. Is akimbo, kills everything."

I had a lot of fun with MW1, WaW, and (to a lesser extent) MW2. But looking at other "competing" (as if anyone could) games in the genre: they're all the same fucking game and play the same. Meanwhile, put three old competing FPS up against each other: UT, Quake, Counter-Strike. Three distinct shooters, two of which are part of the dead Arena Shooter genre, which is also why we won't ever get another Jedi Knight game. At least not anything like the first 3.5.

[MKSheppard]

You will never speak of Jedi Knight again. There is only Dark Forces. Kyle Katarn is not a Jedi. He is a Rebel SpecForces Operative.

[TheFeniX]

"Forget years of dedication and training, I found a lightsaber in a garage and that makes me a Jedi!"

I could poke fun at JKs story all day, but it had some of the most solid gameplay out of any game I've played and also some of the only noteworthy AI in history. And was a Lucasarts proper game at that. Raven only expanded on the combat while, unfortunately, letting the AI slip a bit. They were all around great games. Jedi-Academy even allowing for a semi-RPG SP experience with it's mission selection, even if it was arguably the weakest link (up against Mysteries of the Sith).

I played back through both a year or so ago: still solid to this day.

It's also one of the reasons I laugh at Dark Souls kids.
"Dark Souls is the first game to rely on roll mechanics for melee combat."
"Ignoring Tenchu, Jedi-Outcast called. It wants credit where credit is due."
"No one cares about your shitty* Jedi game." *Actually a slur against homosexuals.

He's not that wrong though. We lost out on more Jedi-Knight games because Lucasarts felt Arena Shooter mechanics were dead and wanted to go another direction. They ditched Raven and gave us EXTREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEME Jedi Action! (AKA: Force Unleashed).

Yea, Katarn's story is kind of a joke, but I'd take him and Luke bro-ing it up over Darth Gary-Stu chasing hot Empire tail, kicking Vaders ass and creating the Rebellion along the way. Also, holy shit that gameplay was on a whole other level of terrible.

[Joun_Lord]

I couldn't even play much of Force Unleashed because of how bad the combat is. Now maybe this is being a crotchety old man myself but the fucking lightbat bullshit was just so goddamn annoying. It wasn't even that you had to hit them multiple times like some heavier enemies in series JK, it was literally like you were wailing on them with a glowy bat. Even stormtroopers and rebel scum took multiple hits from the saber.

Thats not even getting into the completely goddamn pants on head retarded story. Yet another reason to be glad that Disney shit canned the old EU.

The Jedi Knight games were not perfect but they were far, FAR superior to most any trash that came after. They were fun, they made you feel like a fucking Jedi not some guy swinging a bat and not overpowered either (without console commands, setforceall 5 or higher was fun).

Dark Forces was perfect though. Heretical as it might be to say it was superior to Doom.

I'd choke out a koala to get another good Star Wars shooter or Jedi game.

[Ace Pace]

I think you have a crazy level of selection bias and crotchy old man. Most games were derivative, you just remember the good ones better because they were literally inventing the genre while today they're iterating. You can check out Witcher 3 as one of the best Open World games lately. Has it done anything new? No, but it's amazingly well executed. By your count it's crap.

While it has it's issues, the combat system alone in the Witcher series is fairly unique. But even if it's not, there's nothing wrong with putting together tested mechanics to create a complete package. Epic did this with Gears of War and the gameplay was excellent.

The problem is that we aren't seeing additive games, even across the same series. Stagnation actually isn't the problem, it's regression. I've said this before, but just looking at the FallScroll series since Morrowind. More and more of the RPG elements were cut as the series progressed with very little to replace them. We're basically paying the same amount of money (or more) for less options and less story.

Fable is another good example, likely due to Microsoft meddling and Molyneux being a sell-out and known liar. Chop, Chop, Chop: BUT WE GOT MICHAEL FASSBENDER!

And don't get me started on the MMO genre. Hell, I could rant at length about what Blizz has chopped out of their own MMO over the years and that was already a casual game. WoW actually offers so little RPG, it's no wonder why people love it.

The same for FPSes. I'm a die-hard UT2004 fan but it's easy to see how modern CoD and UT versions are better balanced, better paced and overall just more fun.

Neo-UT exists only because Epic and it being a good way to showcase their engine. I doubt any AAA publisher would touch it. And CoD strangled the FPS genre with the "3-entry" way maps and hitscan weapon selection of "shoots slow, big damage. Shoots fast, low damage. Is akimbo, kills everything."

I had a lot of fun with MW1, WaW, and (to a lesser extent) MW2. But looking at other "competing" (as if anyone could) games in the genre: they're all the same fucking game and play the same. Meanwhile, put three old competing FPS up against each other: UT, Quake, Counter-Strike. Three distinct shooters, two of which are part of the dead Arena Shooter genre, which is also why we won't ever get another Jedi Knight game. At least not anything like the first 3.5.

Uh....dude, I perfectly agreed with you.

[TheFeniX]

Sorry, my sarcasm meter batteries must have died.

[Darmalus]

I feel like the gaming industry is in an odd place right now.

Visually we seem to have surpassed the human eye's ability to notice improvement (remember when graphic cards would use the number of colors they could display as a selling point?) which means games have to rely on style, which for a franchise means keeping the same style and thus not feeling like they area changing or improving across generations.

AI wise we seem to be advancing at a snails pace, if at all. Other than pathing to me slightly better through more complicated environments (sometimes), all interactions are still entirely reliant on scripting and the writing team.

A strange place of seeming technological stasis. Just shuffling the same ingredients around hoping for a winning combination.

Don't get me wrong, there are still games that come out that I just dig into and love, but stepping back and looking at them calmly there are no new elements, just old elements tweaked one way or another.

[RogueIce]

EDIT: Also, Grand Theft Auto -- is it still pants with no savepoints just before crucial mission points, meaning that if you fuck up, you have to spend 15 minutes retrying the mission again?

No, it has savepoints now, which is great. I don't know if 4 did or not, but 5 definitely does. And they're pretty generous with them too, from my experiences.

[Mr Bean]

I feel like the gaming industry is in an odd place right now.

Visually we seem to have surpassed the human eye's ability to notice improvement (remember when graphic cards would use the number of colors they could display as a selling point?) which means games have to rely on style, which for a franchise means keeping the same style and thus not feeling like they area changing or improving across generations.

I disagree with you there, we still have years of improvements left to go on graphics, the wall that's been hit is the combination of console's last cycle short-changed the video cards and the heat issue that dogged 28mm which finally is going away again with 16mm on the scene. There was efforts at the end of the cycle by AMD to make watercooling standard on cards to alleviate the heat issues they were having.

Meanwhile Nvidia has dropped the 1080 and the 1070 which literally offer 20%-70% performance increases over the 980 TI's and 980s. One 1080 was comparable in several games to a 980 SLI setup.

Meanwhile on the Console side both the PS4 and Xbone are using cards that are close to a Radeon HD 7870. See a Tom's Hardware - Benchmark chart for a 980 SLI setup on the left vs a Radeon 7870 on the right. And the thinking is based on what we've seen out of Pascal, this time a year from now the successor to the 1080 is going to be another half again as powerful improvement.

The long and the short of all of this is as follows... game graphics are now reliably held up by however powerful the current GPU in the consoles is, but because of the choice of the Radeon 7870 and a lack of GPU ram the console market is stuck at 720p and 900p gaming marks and because of a lack of optimization they are still suffering massive frame rate issues on consoles which at this point in the process we should be at the wringing every drop of performance out part of the lifespan but now they still struggle with the Radeon to hit a reliable 720p 30 FPS.

We will in all likely-hood because of VR see a short console cycle because if this cycle is anything like the last time a big graphics technology upset the apple-cart (3D back in the play-station, n64 days) we are a year or two off from a GPU upgrade which Playstation is signaling they are holding out for the AMD Pascal equivalent so they can say look at our VR console which Microsoft can't match.

[Darmalus]

I'd forgotten about consoles, I don't think I've spent any significant time on one since Halo first came out on my friend's Xbox.

I was thinking less about FPS (and outside twitch shooters I don't really care, I play games at single digit FPS regularly) and more about the art itself. Unless you give me in in-game microscope that lets me see the brushstrokes in the wall paint of a virtual house, I'm going to have an extremely difficult time noticing any difference. Lower resolution art often looks better just by having superior stylistic execution.

So while better tech may allow more dudes on the screen with the same performance, I question if those dudes will look any better.

[Starglider]

We will in all likely-hood because of VR see a short console cycle because if this cycle is anything like the last time a big graphics technology upset the apple-cart (3D back in the play-station, n64 days) we are a year or two off from a GPU upgrade which Playstation is signaling they are holding out for the AMD Pascal equivalent so they can say look at our VR console which Microsoft can't match.

On the countrary, the PS4 NEO looks likely to be out this year. Leaked specs (from dev kits) are a 30% CPU clock boost, double the GPU compute units, 14% GPU clock boost, 24% more GPU bandwidth. No new ISA or HBM, as the former would be too hard for backward compatability and the later is still too expensive for consoles. Enough to do 1080p 60FPS convincingly, 4K support will be strictly for marketing purposes of course.

[Mr Bean]

On the countrary, the PS4 NEO looks likely to be out this year. Leaked specs (from dev kits) are a 30% CPU clock boost, double the GPU compute units, 14% GPU clock boost, 24% more GPU bandwidth. No new ISA or HBM, as the former would be too hard for backward compatability and the later is still too expensive for consoles. Enough to do 1080p 60FPS convincingly, 4K support will be strictly for marketing purposes of course.

So will the playstation VR be a strictly low poly only thing because VR demands 2k-90FPS per eye least you get motion sickness in lots of people or what? I can see a lot of Job Simulator level games able to run on the Playstation thing but when people ask when can I VR the hit new Playstation game and Sony says sorry you can't it's going to create a demand.

[Starglider]

So will the playstation VR be a strictly low poly only thing because VR demands 2k-90FPS per eye least you get motion sickness in lots of people or what?

The spec on the PSVR is 1080p split into 960 x 1080 per eye. Frequency is 60 Hz input, spatially interpolated to 120 Hz at the display (i.e. panning your head around effectively updates at 120 Hz, while everything else is 60Hz). The PS4 Neo is engineered to do 1080p 60FPS at the same detail that current PS4 games have at 900p (upscaled) 30 FPS. Sony actually manded a constant 60 FPS input (120 FPS effective) to certify the games, so anyone connecting the PSVR to a current gen PS4 is definitely going to take a bit of a polycount/shader hit

VR does not 'demand' 2K per eye; Oculus Rift DevKit 2 was the same setup and people seem to be fine with that. In fact the consumer version is only 1.3K per eye and Oculus DevKit1 was just 640×800 per eye, as research&professional HMDs have been for years. Halving the frame rate does seriously increase the risk of nausea, but 1K per eye just makes everything look a little fuzzy.

[Mr Bean]

VR does not 'demand' 2K per eye; Oculus Rift DevKit 2 was the same setup and people seem to be fine with that. In fact the consumer version is only 1.3K per eye and Oculus DevKit1 was just 640×800 per eye, as research&professional HMDs have been for years. Halving the frame rate does seriously increase the risk of nausea, but 1K per eye just makes everything look a little fuzzy.

Not all people were fine with 2k, my own cousin who's lucky enough to work in the industry had an office which now has everything (Dev kit 1/2/Retail and Vive) and they like to do a "this is how far we've come" for some clients and he personally has reported to me that Devkit 2 several people have stated it looks blurry/muddy on both Dev kit 1 and Devkit 2 with the retail as looking "like you finally got my glasses prescription right" so I take back the 2k thing, it was my mistaken impression that Oculus had shot for and gotten 2k and it was that I was basing the Devkit2 VS Retail comparisons so I'll say 1.3k "looks fine".

Note my cousin (He's a graphical artist) sample size is limited to about the sixty odd people they have shuffled through plus the people in the office itself but off that sample size about a third reported DK2 looked blurry. And as they have 1 DK1, 2 DK2s and 2 retails I don't think it's a configuration thing (Note they actually want eight oculus units, they were lucky to get two and that's only because the boss reimbursed 3 different employees to try buying them privately in addition to the company order)

[Starglider]

I was assuming by '2K' and '1.3K' you actually meant '2 MP' and '1.3 MP'. The difference between ~1 MP in DK2 and ~1.3 MP in the consumer unit is actually only a 14% increase in angular resolution, the statistic which correlates most with perceived blurriness. As such Oculus Rift Consumer looking better than DK2 is probably mostly down to the much improved lenses, not the marginal resolution increase. DK2 had a simple single-element optical system (though they tweaked that a few times in different revisions of it). The consumer version has a dual lens system that accomodates eye variation much better.