9 ms·

I miss when games were for fun. Now, games are filled with pay-items which I guess some people enjoy, but it leads to not a lot of fun in some cases. For examp

I miss when games were for fun. Now, games are filled with pay-items which I guess some people enjoy, but it leads to not a lot of fun in some cases. For example, some games sell tokens that you can convert to in-game money. That essentially translates into a boring grind for 100 hours or pay X amount to skip that by getting enough money to buy the items you need to skip that content. I haven't bought a new game since 2016, and I'll never support the *AAA gaming industry ever again :)

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
The indie world is full of great games with no paid content and if there are expansions, they are worth the money. I'm a gamer and I play on average one AAA every few years, rest of the time is indie only. I agree AAA is not sustainable, especially because the stuff delivered on average has a way worse gameplay than good indie games. And by the way, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind forest (and the will of the wisps) is a slap in the faces of AAA games. Beautiful, amazing to play and in the case of hollow knight, really intriguing story.
bitcurious 5y ago
If you’re open to a recommendation from someone who holds a similar outlook towards today’s games, Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch was one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. I recommend coop with a less gaming-inclined partner.
- throwaway675309 5y ago
  I'd argue to manage your expectations. If you're coming into odyssey with the idea that this is a traditional Mario game, you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's more like a open sandbox scavenger hunt using Mario IP.
- james-skemp 5y ago
  Who played the hat? Asking because my son is pretty good at games, and we're about to start this one in the next week.
scrollaway 5y ago
Remember how grindy world of Warcraft used to be? I mean it’s still grindy but remember how much worse it was? Well let me tell you a secret: when it came out in 2004 people were talking about how it was turning MMOs into very casual play because of how little grind there is compared to EQ and others. Games were always work. Not all of them, of course, but this isn’t a new thing. It’s just that there are genres of games that are better suited to the grind; they come and go.
- input_sh 5y ago
  What's EQ in this context?
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    EverQuest, sorry for the undefined acronym.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    Everquest.
  - powersurge360 5y ago
    Likely to be EverQuest
- mattmanser 5y ago
  You're talking about MMOs, who have always been a very different beast. People spend orders of magnitude more time playing them, mainly socializing. Which means they need a lot of grindy content to keep people occupied while they chat.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  Your example leaves out a ton of aspects and how the MMO landscape has changed since then. First of all MMOs are not strictly comparable to regular single and multiplayer games. Back then MMOs were very grindy, that much is correct. However you have to take a moment to think about the reasons for that. One of the main reasons is that in old school MMOs socializing was a very major part of the appeal and made up large portions of your gametime, you were required to cooperate and coordinate with people manually (form groups, guilds, trading etc.). WoW is a good example, because it was very similar back in 2004, but made many aspects, especially playing alone much easier than e.g. EQ. So what does it mean when people say that modern day WoW feels more like work than oldschool WoW? The reason is that many many social components are gone from modern day WoW, it now has automatic systems in place for pretty much every aspect of the game, most content is soloable, and the parts where a group is required offer systems to automatically search and find players etc.. In short: basically no manual communication is required in WoW nowadays to see and complete almost basically everything the game has to offer. There is one exception: there are versions of parts of the content that is just harder versions. What makes modern WoW feel more like work than oldschool MMOs? The reason is that the game design intentionally keeps you locked in a very tight loop, many parts are designed in a way to keep them from being completed too quickly, many parts build on "daily quests" that can be completed exactly once per day/week, but no more than that. There is much more nuance to this, but in short it can easily create the feeling that you have to show up to play certain content you don't enjoy and if you don't you lose progress/time you can't catch up on. Think "oh no I still have to login today to get my daily quests done...", players typically complete missions/quests like that not because they are fun, but because they are working towards a reward. But since ingame mechanics have killed the need for social cooperations and interactions (this is not strictly a negative thing, and a hard problem to balance) it creates an atmosphere that is a very different flavour of grind than back in the day, which is closer to some kind of work obligation as opposed to a virtual world you go to to adventure and meet with other people.
pjmlp 5y ago
I basically buy mobile stuff that have a retro gaming feeling and don't take GB of space.
thedevelopnik 5y ago
But there are so many good games that have none of this bullshit. Check out Hades. It is so fun. And it is self-contained. The dev doesn’t even have interest in making an expansion despite demand because they made a fun, complete game and they’re done. There are lots of games outside the pay-to-play arena, even AAA ones. The Playstation Spider-Man games are another great example. Unless those get support, they may actually disappear.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  I'm dreading the day that one of the big AAA publishers acquires Supergiant Games. Hoping that it doesn't happen, but I can't imagine the founders are going to wave off multi-million (or even billion?) dollar offers forever.
  - riveducha 5y ago
    The total games market is expanding at a rate where you will have more quality indie games from new game makers than you could possibly play. If Supergiant gets bought and turned into a cash grab, there will be plenty of others out there to take their place.
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      Yes, but game developers are not fungible. There's still a PopCap shaped hole in indie games since their acquisition by EA. I'm sure there will be other indie games, but Supergiant's combination of excellent music, art style, and unique, well polished gameplay is not something you see a lot of.
    - iratewizard 5y ago
      I like a lot of indie games, but I cut them slack for their budget. Indie devs will never accomplish what massive budget, ambition, experience and talent can make. The best I've seen from indie in my opinion is hollow knight. Objectively compared to LoZ:OoT, THPS, GTA IV, etc makes it clear they are in different leagues. Objectively compared to modern AAA like halo infinite's campaign, fallout 76, or cyberpunk, it looks like AAA is dead. Maybe it was the HR departments that killed them. Maybe it was, in shifting from art to product, they unlearned the basics of how to make fun. Either way, nothing interesting will come from it for a long time.
meheleventyone 5y ago
Games aren’t a monolith in this respect. There are loads that don’t do this sort of thing at all.
JaimeThompson 5y ago
What sort of games do you enjoy playing?
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bfors 5y ago
> Now, games are filled with pay-items which I guess some people enjoy, but it leads to not a lot of fun in some cases. For example, some games sell tokens that you can convert to in-game money. That essentially translates into a boring grind for 100 hours or pay X amount to skip that by getting enough money to buy the items you need to skip that content. You are not looking in the right places, there are more great games coming out now than ever. Try Inscryption or Outer Wilds.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Outer Wilds is so much more interesting than No Man's Sky
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Jaxkr 5y ago
> I haven't bought a new game since 2016, and I'll never support the gaming industry ever again :) Oh, come on… While there may be a lot of games trying strange monetization strategies, the majority of the industry is still great. So many amazing and innovative games have come out in the last 5 years. Breath of the Wild, Half Life Alyx, Valheim, and countless others. Gaming is the largest entertainment industry. Larger than movies and TV. You can’t just write it off because of a few bad eggs, there’s too much to miss.
- dogleash 5y ago
  >Oh, come on… While there may be a lot of games trying strange monetization strategies, the majority of the industry is still great. While it's possible to separate wheat from chaff, it's also OK for someone to move on from an entire category of things because of the chaff.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  I absolutely agree that the regressions in gaming are avoidable if you filter a bit more aggressively and that there have been many great releases still. However pretending that monetization-first game design, predatory micro transactions are "a few bad eggs" is just false, they have infested most of AAA space and have creeped into parts of the AA and indie sphere too. Given the amount of games that release, you got it the wrong way around, it's not "a few bad eggs", it's "a few good eggs" in a basket full of bad eggs. I mean that in a proportional way, and gladly the egg basket is very big, so the few good eggs are enough to have a good time without bothering with the bad and predatory ones.
  - Goronmon 5y ago
    Given the amount of games that release, you got it the wrong way around, it's not "a few bad eggs", it's "a few good eggs" in a basket full of bad eggs. I would really enjoy to something even close to evidence that shows this to be true, because this sounds...far from correct, to put it nicely.
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brightball 5y ago
Prior to Covid we had a strict “no free games” rule in my house because the free games were the ones with advertising schemes or paid items in them. During Covid it became impossible to avoid the likes of Fortnite and Roblox so that my kids could still play with their friends. Not sure how to put the genie back in the bottle at this point.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > Not sure how to put the genie back in the bottle at this point. This sentence sums up my entire parenting experience for age 5+.
- CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
  If you squint a bit you can view the buying a battlepass as actually buying a game, due to the added challenges. In that way its not actually violating the policy.
  - brightball 5y ago
    This is actually what happened. :)
- greggman3 5y ago
  I'm not sure I get the problem. My friend's 7yr old son calls to play Brawl Stars with me. You run around in an arena, multiplayer, and try to shoot each other. The game is polished and AFAIK he's never spent a dime on it but he loves the game.
  - brightball 5y ago
    In addition to ads and upsells, many of the free games come with timed rewards (hourly, daily, etc) that you have to hop on to claim. Creates addictive behavior. I want to say Brawl Stars falls in that category. I’m sure there are some good free games out there, but for the most part the dangerous patterns I’ve seen in game design happen in free games.
klodolph 5y ago
Would love to hear someone narrow down the era "when games were fun". It wasn't the 1970s and 1980s. Arcade games were designed to extract quarters from consumers. They were brutal. They heavily influenced game design for home systems, for years, so you'd expect games for the Nintendo Entertainment System to act like they're trying to extract quarters from you. In the 1990s this should have been gone, but there are games like The Lion King (1994, SNES / Genesis) which... > Disney actually told the developers to make the game so difficult that people wouldn't be able to beat it during a rental period.
- Talanes 5y ago
  Rental period? I owned that game as a kid and NEVER beat the second level.
- KeepFlying 5y ago
  Those examples are "pay money to spend more time with the game" but OPs example is "pay money to spend less time playing the game". Both extract money from you, but in different ways.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Not really hard to nail this period down. 1992-2009 (the release of Call of Duty Modern Warfare ushered in the age of progression and weapon unlocks in multiplayer games).
  - kcb 5y ago
    Agreed. Watch a documentary on game dev during the period. It was very often just a bunch of gamers creating the game they wanted to play.
  - grumbel 5y ago
    What makes this a bit hard to pin down is that around 2009 was also the (re)start of indie gaming. Xbox Summer of Arcade started in 2008, Humble Bundle and Steam Greenlight followed in the next few years and ever since we had an enormous mass of high quality indie games available. So even with AAA gaming starting to go downhill around 2009, gaming as a whole did actually quite well.
Fezzik 5y ago
After years of not playing a single game I picked up a Nintendo Switch a few months back and every title I have played is great. I’ve been playing Mario Odyssey for more than a month and it’s still a fantastic game to pickup and run around in for 15-30 minutes. Loved Link’s Awakening as well.
gspr 5y ago
But at the same time, the non-AAA part of the industry is thriving. The amount of creative, original(!), quality games out there by 1-10 people teams is absolutely amazing. I'd go so far as to say that we're actually in the golden age of gaming. I for one blame nothing except my lack of time and energy.
foo_barrio 5y ago
For what it's worth, I lost 2 weeks of my life to Metroid Dread on the Nintendo Switch. It's a 2D side scrolling action/adventure/platforming game that I enjoyed and not once did I have to deal with pay mechanics. Two years ago I played Breath of Wild (Zelda game) and again did not deal with pay mechanics. There are plenty brand new AAA games and were of great fun to me!
- disambiguation 5y ago
  Absolutely. Nintendo in particular has been experiencing somewhat of a golden age with the Switch. It goes to show you don't need high performance to make fun games. Really excited to see if the Steam Deck results in a similar boon to PC gaming.
  - foo_barrio 5y ago
    I used to be a huge gamer in the mid-90's but now I only really play 1-2 games a year. No matter if PC/console, AAA/indie, there are just so many insanely good games to choose from because I get to pull from the last couple of years! Prior to Zelda I played Stardew Valley on PC and absolutely loved it. I really enjoy old-school shoot'em'ups (little spaceships that shoot at fast moving enemies with fast scrolling) and have been able to play both old classics via emulators and a couple on iOS that were really enjoyable. To a now casual gamer like me, all of gaming is as good as it has ever been! That Steam Deck does look tempting but I have a tendency to dump hours into games. I'm planning to talk it up to friends so one can get it and I can maybe borrow it once in a while.
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
Plenty of games without pay-to-play. Here are my favorites: Indies: Celeste, Hob, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Factorio, Tesla vs Lovecraft AAA: Returnal, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, Civilization, Nier: Automata Just don't play anything from Ubisoft.
deergomoo 5y ago
These days I only usually play old games and indie games. I heavily favour short single-player games, and find myself quickly irritated by repetition and filler content. I know there's a lot of people–particularly younger folks and those with less disposable income–that demand sprawling worlds and play times in the triple digit hours, and all this micro-transaction shit is ultimately in service of supporting the huge budgets those games demand. I'm so far past that now though; when I look at the Battle Pass screens for Warzone or Halo Infinite, I imagine it's how my grandparents felt when they tried to use a computer. Just utter bewilderment. Part of it is having less time to play due to general adult life things, the rest is just having other stuff I want to do, be it other games or different hobbies entirely, but I would much rather spend my money on a polished 2-6 hour experience, especially if that means the teams working on it actually get to go home and see their families instead of crunching half to death.
stelonix 5y ago
I'm on the same boat: haven't bought AAA in years but am happy to spend thousands of dollars on indies. It's not just that AAA companies are awful, but the games they've been making are the same old stuff from 15 years ago. Sometimes lacking even the most basic polish.
eatsyourtacos 5y ago
wutbrodo 5y ago
This comment encapsulates what confuses me about commentary on the way videogames have evolved. I fully understand and support the idea that monetization has had a negative affect on many games. But the idea that "games aren't fun" to the point that you haven't bought a new game is beyond lunacy. I've continued to buy videogames over the last half decade, and haven't spent a single dime it had my experience compromised even remotely by any of these trends. They're insanely easy to avoid and still have access to a wide variety of high-quality games. The level of moaning about how the very concept of gaming is ruined due to what some games are doing just reads as people who enjoy being miserable manufacturing something to complain about.
Madmallard 5y ago
Nintendo still hits home runs in game design so don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
odessacubbage 5y ago
this is why i've grown to like fighting games, shmups and other arcade style genres so much. there is little to no padding between you and the core of the game and by extension, the most exciting elements.
alickz 5y ago
There are so many games that are still fun, even for people who don't define fun as grinding away at a Battle Pass (which some people do indeed enjoy) In the single player narrative space you have any Sony first party exclusive, along with games like RDR2 / Prey / Outer Wilds / Witcher 3 / Yakuza 0 / Disco Elysium / MGS: V. For less narrative heavy single player games you have any Nintendo first party exclusive, along with games like Factorio / Hades / Rimworld / Carrion / Hollow Knight / Ori 1 and 2 / Stardew Valley. And these are just the games I personally enjoy off the top of my head since 2016. I'm sure there's many I'm forgetting, along with many which aren't for me but might be for others. The top level of games like CoD, Battlefield, Apex, and pretty much any Ubisoft game are MTX riddled Skinner boxes alright, but there are so many great single player MTX free games out there right now.
me_me_me 5y ago
> I miss when games were for fun. Recently I completed Outer Wilds (note not Outer Worlds), and also Incsription. Both amazing games I will always recommend playing to anyone. Indie games are not corrupted as mass production AAA production run like a late stage capitalism corporations, who quite literally add cocaine to their game if they could. Companies run by people who never played games, dont like them, don't understand them have very low chance of creating something good. There are good AAA games out there that are not exploitative, Marvels Guardians of Galaxy - everyone thought it will be awful ended up being great, God of War games, Ghost of Tsushima. That said there are a LOT of exploitative games that child or teen should not play if they have any tendencies that can be exploited.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago

The indie world is full of great games with no paid content and if there are expansions, they are worth the money. I'm a gamer and I play on average one AAA every few years, rest of the time is indie only. I agree AAA is not sustainable, especially because the stuff delivered on average has a way worse gameplay than good indie games. And by the way, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind forest (and the will of the wisps) is a slap in the faces of AAA games. Beautiful, amazing to play and in the case of hollow knight, really intriguing story.

bitcurious 5y ago

If you’re open to a recommendation from someone who holds a similar outlook towards today’s games, Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch was one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. I recommend coop with a less gaming-inclined partner.

throwaway675309 5y ago
I'd argue to manage your expectations. If you're coming into odyssey with the idea that this is a traditional Mario game, you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's more like a open sandbox scavenger hunt using Mario IP.
james-skemp 5y ago
Who played the hat? Asking because my son is pretty good at games, and we're about to start this one in the next week.

scrollaway 5y ago

Remember how grindy world of Warcraft used to be? I mean it’s still grindy but remember how much worse it was? Well let me tell you a secret: when it came out in 2004 people were talking about how it was turning MMOs into very casual play because of how little grind there is compared to EQ and others. Games were always work. Not all of them, of course, but this isn’t a new thing. It’s just that there are genres of games that are better suited to the grind; they come and go.

input_sh 5y ago
What's EQ in this context?
- scrollaway 5y ago
  EverQuest, sorry for the undefined acronym.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  Everquest.
- powersurge360 5y ago
  Likely to be EverQuest
mattmanser 5y ago
You're talking about MMOs, who have always been a very different beast. People spend orders of magnitude more time playing them, mainly socializing. Which means they need a lot of grindy content to keep people occupied while they chat.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
Your example leaves out a ton of aspects and how the MMO landscape has changed since then. First of all MMOs are not strictly comparable to regular single and multiplayer games. Back then MMOs were very grindy, that much is correct. However you have to take a moment to think about the reasons for that. One of the main reasons is that in old school MMOs socializing was a very major part of the appeal and made up large portions of your gametime, you were required to cooperate and coordinate with people manually (form groups, guilds, trading etc.). WoW is a good example, because it was very similar back in 2004, but made many aspects, especially playing alone much easier than e.g. EQ. So what does it mean when people say that modern day WoW feels more like work than oldschool WoW? The reason is that many many social components are gone from modern day WoW, it now has automatic systems in place for pretty much every aspect of the game, most content is soloable, and the parts where a group is required offer systems to automatically search and find players etc.. In short: basically no manual communication is required in WoW nowadays to see and complete almost basically everything the game has to offer. There is one exception: there are versions of parts of the content that is just harder versions. What makes modern WoW feel more like work than oldschool MMOs? The reason is that the game design intentionally keeps you locked in a very tight loop, many parts are designed in a way to keep them from being completed too quickly, many parts build on "daily quests" that can be completed exactly once per day/week, but no more than that. There is much more nuance to this, but in short it can easily create the feeling that you have to show up to play certain content you don't enjoy and if you don't you lose progress/time you can't catch up on. Think "oh no I still have to login today to get my daily quests done...", players typically complete missions/quests like that not because they are fun, but because they are working towards a reward. But since ingame mechanics have killed the need for social cooperations and interactions (this is not strictly a negative thing, and a hard problem to balance) it creates an atmosphere that is a very different flavour of grind than back in the day, which is closer to some kind of work obligation as opposed to a virtual world you go to to adventure and meet with other people.

pjmlp 5y ago

I basically buy mobile stuff that have a retro gaming feeling and don't take GB of space.

thedevelopnik 5y ago

But there are so many good games that have none of this bullshit. Check out Hades. It is so fun. And it is self-contained. The dev doesn’t even have interest in making an expansion despite demand because they made a fun, complete game and they’re done. There are lots of games outside the pay-to-play arena, even AAA ones. The Playstation Spider-Man games are another great example. Unless those get support, they may actually disappear.

AlexandrB 5y ago
I'm dreading the day that one of the big AAA publishers acquires Supergiant Games. Hoping that it doesn't happen, but I can't imagine the founders are going to wave off multi-million (or even billion?) dollar offers forever.
- riveducha 5y ago
  The total games market is expanding at a rate where you will have more quality indie games from new game makers than you could possibly play. If Supergiant gets bought and turned into a cash grab, there will be plenty of others out there to take their place.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    Yes, but game developers are not fungible. There's still a PopCap shaped hole in indie games since their acquisition by EA. I'm sure there will be other indie games, but Supergiant's combination of excellent music, art style, and unique, well polished gameplay is not something you see a lot of.
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    I like a lot of indie games, but I cut them slack for their budget. Indie devs will never accomplish what massive budget, ambition, experience and talent can make. The best I've seen from indie in my opinion is hollow knight. Objectively compared to LoZ:OoT, THPS, GTA IV, etc makes it clear they are in different leagues. Objectively compared to modern AAA like halo infinite's campaign, fallout 76, or cyberpunk, it looks like AAA is dead. Maybe it was the HR departments that killed them. Maybe it was, in shifting from art to product, they unlearned the basics of how to make fun. Either way, nothing interesting will come from it for a long time.

meheleventyone 5y ago

Games aren’t a monolith in this respect. There are loads that don’t do this sort of thing at all.

JaimeThompson 5y ago

What sort of games do you enjoy playing?

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bfors 5y ago

> Now, games are filled with pay-items which I guess some people enjoy, but it leads to not a lot of fun in some cases. For example, some games sell tokens that you can convert to in-game money. That essentially translates into a boring grind for 100 hours or pay X amount to skip that by getting enough money to buy the items you need to skip that content. You are not looking in the right places, there are more great games coming out now than ever. Try Inscryption or Outer Wilds.

imbnwa 5y ago
Outer Wilds is so much more interesting than No Man's Sky

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Jaxkr 5y ago

> I haven't bought a new game since 2016, and I'll never support the gaming industry ever again :) Oh, come on… While there may be a lot of games trying strange monetization strategies, the majority of the industry is still great. So many amazing and innovative games have come out in the last 5 years. Breath of the Wild, Half Life Alyx, Valheim, and countless others. Gaming is the largest entertainment industry. Larger than movies and TV. You can’t just write it off because of a few bad eggs, there’s too much to miss.

dogleash 5y ago
>Oh, come on… While there may be a lot of games trying strange monetization strategies, the majority of the industry is still great. While it's possible to separate wheat from chaff, it's also OK for someone to move on from an entire category of things because of the chaff.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
I absolutely agree that the regressions in gaming are avoidable if you filter a bit more aggressively and that there have been many great releases still. However pretending that monetization-first game design, predatory micro transactions are "a few bad eggs" is just false, they have infested most of AAA space and have creeped into parts of the AA and indie sphere too. Given the amount of games that release, you got it the wrong way around, it's not "a few bad eggs", it's "a few good eggs" in a basket full of bad eggs. I mean that in a proportional way, and gladly the egg basket is very big, so the few good eggs are enough to have a good time without bothering with the bad and predatory ones.
- Goronmon 5y ago
  Given the amount of games that release, you got it the wrong way around, it's not "a few bad eggs", it's "a few good eggs" in a basket full of bad eggs. I would really enjoy to something even close to evidence that shows this to be true, because this sounds...far from correct, to put it nicely.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

brightball 5y ago

Prior to Covid we had a strict “no free games” rule in my house because the free games were the ones with advertising schemes or paid items in them. During Covid it became impossible to avoid the likes of Fortnite and Roblox so that my kids could still play with their friends. Not sure how to put the genie back in the bottle at this point.

jkhdigital 5y ago
> Not sure how to put the genie back in the bottle at this point. This sentence sums up my entire parenting experience for age 5+.
CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
If you squint a bit you can view the buying a battlepass as actually buying a game, due to the added challenges. In that way its not actually violating the policy.
- brightball 5y ago
  This is actually what happened. :)
greggman3 5y ago
I'm not sure I get the problem. My friend's 7yr old son calls to play Brawl Stars with me. You run around in an arena, multiplayer, and try to shoot each other. The game is polished and AFAIK he's never spent a dime on it but he loves the game.
- brightball 5y ago
  In addition to ads and upsells, many of the free games come with timed rewards (hourly, daily, etc) that you have to hop on to claim. Creates addictive behavior. I want to say Brawl Stars falls in that category. I’m sure there are some good free games out there, but for the most part the dangerous patterns I’ve seen in game design happen in free games.

klodolph 5y ago

Would love to hear someone narrow down the era "when games were fun". It wasn't the 1970s and 1980s. Arcade games were designed to extract quarters from consumers. They were brutal. They heavily influenced game design for home systems, for years, so you'd expect games for the Nintendo Entertainment System to act like they're trying to extract quarters from you. In the 1990s this should have been gone, but there are games like The Lion King (1994, SNES / Genesis) which... > Disney actually told the developers to make the game so difficult that people wouldn't be able to beat it during a rental period.

Talanes 5y ago
Rental period? I owned that game as a kid and NEVER beat the second level.
KeepFlying 5y ago
Those examples are "pay money to spend more time with the game" but OPs example is "pay money to spend less time playing the game". Both extract money from you, but in different ways.
mdoms 5y ago
Not really hard to nail this period down. 1992-2009 (the release of Call of Duty Modern Warfare ushered in the age of progression and weapon unlocks in multiplayer games).
- kcb 5y ago
  Agreed. Watch a documentary on game dev during the period. It was very often just a bunch of gamers creating the game they wanted to play.
- grumbel 5y ago
  What makes this a bit hard to pin down is that around 2009 was also the (re)start of indie gaming. Xbox Summer of Arcade started in 2008, Humble Bundle and Steam Greenlight followed in the next few years and ever since we had an enormous mass of high quality indie games available. So even with AAA gaming starting to go downhill around 2009, gaming as a whole did actually quite well.

Fezzik 5y ago

After years of not playing a single game I picked up a Nintendo Switch a few months back and every title I have played is great. I’ve been playing Mario Odyssey for more than a month and it’s still a fantastic game to pickup and run around in for 15-30 minutes. Loved Link’s Awakening as well.

gspr 5y ago

But at the same time, the non-AAA part of the industry is thriving. The amount of creative, original(!), quality games out there by 1-10 people teams is absolutely amazing. I'd go so far as to say that we're actually in the golden age of gaming. I for one blame nothing except my lack of time and energy.

foo_barrio 5y ago

For what it's worth, I lost 2 weeks of my life to Metroid Dread on the Nintendo Switch. It's a 2D side scrolling action/adventure/platforming game that I enjoyed and not once did I have to deal with pay mechanics. Two years ago I played Breath of Wild (Zelda game) and again did not deal with pay mechanics. There are plenty brand new AAA games and were of great fun to me!

disambiguation 5y ago
Absolutely. Nintendo in particular has been experiencing somewhat of a golden age with the Switch. It goes to show you don't need high performance to make fun games. Really excited to see if the Steam Deck results in a similar boon to PC gaming.
- foo_barrio 5y ago
  I used to be a huge gamer in the mid-90's but now I only really play 1-2 games a year. No matter if PC/console, AAA/indie, there are just so many insanely good games to choose from because I get to pull from the last couple of years! Prior to Zelda I played Stardew Valley on PC and absolutely loved it. I really enjoy old-school shoot'em'ups (little spaceships that shoot at fast moving enemies with fast scrolling) and have been able to play both old classics via emulators and a couple on iOS that were really enjoyable. To a now casual gamer like me, all of gaming is as good as it has ever been! That Steam Deck does look tempting but I have a tendency to dump hours into games. I'm planning to talk it up to friends so one can get it and I can maybe borrow it once in a while.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

Plenty of games without pay-to-play. Here are my favorites: Indies: Celeste, Hob, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Factorio, Tesla vs Lovecraft AAA: Returnal, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, Civilization, Nier: Automata Just don't play anything from Ubisoft.

deergomoo 5y ago

These days I only usually play old games and indie games. I heavily favour short single-player games, and find myself quickly irritated by repetition and filler content. I know there's a lot of people–particularly younger folks and those with less disposable income–that demand sprawling worlds and play times in the triple digit hours, and all this micro-transaction shit is ultimately in service of supporting the huge budgets those games demand. I'm so far past that now though; when I look at the Battle Pass screens for Warzone or Halo Infinite, I imagine it's how my grandparents felt when they tried to use a computer. Just utter bewilderment. Part of it is having less time to play due to general adult life things, the rest is just having other stuff I want to do, be it other games or different hobbies entirely, but I would much rather spend my money on a polished 2-6 hour experience, especially if that means the teams working on it actually get to go home and see their families instead of crunching half to death.

stelonix 5y ago

I'm on the same boat: haven't bought AAA in years but am happy to spend thousands of dollars on indies. It's not just that AAA companies are awful, but the games they've been making are the same old stuff from 15 years ago. Sometimes lacking even the most basic polish.

eatsyourtacos 5y ago

wutbrodo 5y ago

This comment encapsulates what confuses me about commentary on the way videogames have evolved. I fully understand and support the idea that monetization has had a negative affect on many games. But the idea that "games aren't fun" to the point that you haven't bought a new game is beyond lunacy. I've continued to buy videogames over the last half decade, and haven't spent a single dime it had my experience compromised even remotely by any of these trends. They're insanely easy to avoid and still have access to a wide variety of high-quality games. The level of moaning about how the very concept of gaming is ruined due to what some games are doing just reads as people who enjoy being miserable manufacturing something to complain about.

Madmallard 5y ago

Nintendo still hits home runs in game design so don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

odessacubbage 5y ago

this is why i've grown to like fighting games, shmups and other arcade style genres so much. there is little to no padding between you and the core of the game and by extension, the most exciting elements.

alickz 5y ago

There are so many games that are still fun, even for people who don't define fun as grinding away at a Battle Pass (which some people do indeed enjoy) In the single player narrative space you have any Sony first party exclusive, along with games like RDR2 / Prey / Outer Wilds / Witcher 3 / Yakuza 0 / Disco Elysium / MGS: V. For less narrative heavy single player games you have any Nintendo first party exclusive, along with games like Factorio / Hades / Rimworld / Carrion / Hollow Knight / Ori 1 and 2 / Stardew Valley. And these are just the games I personally enjoy off the top of my head since 2016. I'm sure there's many I'm forgetting, along with many which aren't for me but might be for others. The top level of games like CoD, Battlefield, Apex, and pretty much any Ubisoft game are MTX riddled Skinner boxes alright, but there are so many great single player MTX free games out there right now.

me_me_me 5y ago

> I miss when games were for fun. Recently I completed Outer Wilds (note not Outer Worlds), and also Incsription. Both amazing games I will always recommend playing to anyone. Indie games are not corrupted as mass production AAA production run like a late stage capitalism corporations, who quite literally add cocaine to their game if they could. Companies run by people who never played games, dont like them, don't understand them have very low chance of creating something good. There are good AAA games out there that are not exploitative, Marvels Guardians of Galaxy - everyone thought it will be awful ended up being great, God of War games, Ghost of Tsushima. That said there are a LOT of exploitative games that child or teen should not play if they have any tendencies that can be exploited.