4 ms·

I will even go farther and say that I feel like I have now been playing the same game for 25 years. The FPS genre gets some new tricks, but it's still the same

I will even go farther and say that I feel like I have now been playing the same game for 25 years. The FPS genre gets some new tricks, but it's still the same basic game with a few new mechanics and tricks- I can pick up a game I have never played before and generally be reasonably competent at it within a few minutes- a stark contrast to when I picked up tribes for the first time and was completely useless in online play for at least a week. Graphics increases have been both incremental and with diminishing returns in recent generations.

kbenson 6y ago
I think part of that is that the UI and control system has standardized on a mostly similar set of features with somewhat standardized mechanics. They've iterated over the last twenty years towards what is likely the peak (or at least a local maxima) of what you can do with a mouse/keyboard or controller (and controllers are generally normalizing as well, except for small differentiators). I.e. there's only so much control over your physical space you can have with a mouse and keyboard while still allowing good character movement, so there are limitations on what can easily be done. On the other hand, VR based games are wildly experimenting and iterating because the control interface is so different (while at the same time fairly intuitive in that it maps to our reality better). Superhot in VR (which I have on the Quest) definitely doesn't feel like the same game from the last 25 years. Half-Life Alyx is supposed to be an amazing experience (I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I won't for a long time likely), but that's not supposed to be because it looks so much better, but because it offers a wildly different and new experience. So, if you're tired of feeling like you're playing the same old games, try VR. The Quest is probably the cheapest way into this space, but it's not actually cheap at $400, and it will gate you from a lot of the premier experiences available if you have a powerful PC with a good graphics card and VR headset that can interact with it (which the Quest can also do with a cable, so you aren't locked to Quest games, although maybe not at quite the visual quality of some other headsets).
- kevstev 6y ago
  I guess I just feel there is a real lack of creativity in gaming these days- There used to be a rich variety of games- puzzle/adventure games, RTSes, Simulation games, Flight/Space games of all kinds, and now its just kind of condensed down to FPSes, repeated sports franchises, and a few outliers- KSP, Minecraft, to name a few. Interestingly, I won an Occulus Go at a meetup about 9 months ago. I almost gave it away, I didn't really know what I had won, I thought it was going to be an upgraded google cardboard. But man I was surprised at how cool it was. And yeah- everything feels really raw and unpolished and experimental, kind of like the early days of the internet. My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore, but still its all quite interesting and has me interested in buying a "proper" VR setup.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    > My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore Some titles on the Quest are a bit better in that respect, but you still have to research the game to know. I think that's also a factor of how new the space is. It's much harder to allow users to roam where they want and still have the polish allowing them to interact how they want with the environment, it took quite a few years for that to happen in the traditional game space, both because of the effort required to craft that world, and because the engines were still working on abstractions that made it easy to fill those worlds with things that could be interacted with without too much programmer/artist work. A good example of this is all the ways people have found for break Half-Life Alyx by working around the game expectations. People have found a way to hoard items, which would normally be hard to do because you have to actually hold them, but throwing them in buckets and bringing the bucket with you (for example, hauling around a bucket with 20 grenades in it, when normally you don't have a way to carry them all). If you put too many items in a bucket and pick it up, the physics system slows to a crawl and can crash the came. They designed the game so there weren't too many interactable objects in any one scene (because that makes sense), but the wholly new paradigm means that people were able to easily do crazy stuff to break it. I've been meaning to pick up Arizona Sunshine for Quest, and that might be along the lines of what you're looking for (but not for Go). The Walking dead game is supposed to come to Quest eventually to (but again, the Go is unlikely), and the reviews of that looks pretty open for movement and exploration.

kbenson 6y ago

I think part of that is that the UI and control system has standardized on a mostly similar set of features with somewhat standardized mechanics. They've iterated over the last twenty years towards what is likely the peak (or at least a local maxima) of what you can do with a mouse/keyboard or controller (and controllers are generally normalizing as well, except for small differentiators). I.e. there's only so much control over your physical space you can have with a mouse and keyboard while still allowing good character movement, so there are limitations on what can easily be done. On the other hand, VR based games are wildly experimenting and iterating because the control interface is so different (while at the same time fairly intuitive in that it maps to our reality better). Superhot in VR (which I have on the Quest) definitely doesn't feel like the same game from the last 25 years. Half-Life Alyx is supposed to be an amazing experience (I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I won't for a long time likely), but that's not supposed to be because it looks so much better, but because it offers a wildly different and new experience. So, if you're tired of feeling like you're playing the same old games, try VR. The Quest is probably the cheapest way into this space, but it's not actually cheap at $400, and it will gate you from a lot of the premier experiences available if you have a powerful PC with a good graphics card and VR headset that can interact with it (which the Quest can also do with a cable, so you aren't locked to Quest games, although maybe not at quite the visual quality of some other headsets).

kevstev 6y ago
I guess I just feel there is a real lack of creativity in gaming these days- There used to be a rich variety of games- puzzle/adventure games, RTSes, Simulation games, Flight/Space games of all kinds, and now its just kind of condensed down to FPSes, repeated sports franchises, and a few outliers- KSP, Minecraft, to name a few. Interestingly, I won an Occulus Go at a meetup about 9 months ago. I almost gave it away, I didn't really know what I had won, I thought it was going to be an upgraded google cardboard. But man I was surprised at how cool it was. And yeah- everything feels really raw and unpolished and experimental, kind of like the early days of the internet. My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore, but still its all quite interesting and has me interested in buying a "proper" VR setup.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore Some titles on the Quest are a bit better in that respect, but you still have to research the game to know. I think that's also a factor of how new the space is. It's much harder to allow users to roam where they want and still have the polish allowing them to interact how they want with the environment, it took quite a few years for that to happen in the traditional game space, both because of the effort required to craft that world, and because the engines were still working on abstractions that made it easy to fill those worlds with things that could be interacted with without too much programmer/artist work. A good example of this is all the ways people have found for break Half-Life Alyx by working around the game expectations. People have found a way to hoard items, which would normally be hard to do because you have to actually hold them, but throwing them in buckets and bringing the bucket with you (for example, hauling around a bucket with 20 grenades in it, when normally you don't have a way to carry them all). If you put too many items in a bucket and pick it up, the physics system slows to a crawl and can crash the came. They designed the game so there weren't too many interactable objects in any one scene (because that makes sense), but the wholly new paradigm means that people were able to easily do crazy stuff to break it. I've been meaning to pick up Arizona Sunshine for Quest, and that might be along the lines of what you're looking for (but not for Go). The Walking dead game is supposed to come to Quest eventually to (but again, the Go is unlikely), and the reviews of that looks pretty open for movement and exploration.