4 ms·
It's a mixed bag, I think. Good things: * Tons of high quality small indie games that experiment with mood, story, genre. Think Cultist Simulator or Factorio.
by pradn 3y ago
It's a mixed bag, I think.
Good things:
* Tons of high quality small indie games that experiment with mood, story, genre. Think Cultist Simulator or Factorio.
* Remasters and emulation bring the best of the past to the present.
* New experiments in gaming hardware: Nintendo Switch, Playdate.
* Console play is more ergonomic (controllers, voice chat) than ever.
* Gaming is pretty mainstream now, so there's more people to play with, and there's less stigma.
* Twitch, Discord, YouTube all make finding a community for your game easy and fun (if your game is blessed with a positive one at least).
Bad things:
* Certain genres haven't really seen top-quality entries. After Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology, and Warcraft 3, the only top-quality entry in the RTS genre was StarCraft 2. We just don't see folks even trying, certainly not with AAA budgets.
* Game design choices make games too streamlined, and remove fun interactions. For RPG games: quest markers, level scaling, lax loot table probabilities, incentivizing solo play til end game, etc.
* Voice acting means there's just less text and less depth. Compare Morrowind to Skyrim. But I think we're over the hump here. A game like RDR2 is fully voice-acted but had 2000 pages of writing. That's the best of both worlds.
* Bad art design makes things look really bad in low-power hardware. Compare D2 and D4 on a lower-end computer.
- pipes 3y agoMy main gripe is lack of worthy sequels to my favourite games: Deus ex, I really tried hard to like mankind divided but I don't know why I don't. Wave race 64, even the GameCube sequel didn't capture the magic and every other attempt has rubbish water physics. 1080 snowboarding, the sequel was terrible, I left it back to the shop. No other snowboarding game captures the rewarding control scheme (same with wave race). Goldeneye, ok perfect dark is good but why has no other game even attempted to capture what makes goldeneye special? It plays like a roller coaster that you can control. (I think someone on a gaming forum said that, I think they are correct). Quake 3 and unreal tournament 99, no online shooter I've played compares to instagib on these.
- pradn 3y agoFast FPSs generally and instagib specifically have disappeared completely.
- mips_r4300i 3y ago1080 Snowboarding was a gem not matched for a long time. The reason it was so good was because the chief coder, Giles Goddard, was an avid snowboarder and intuitively understood what it should feel like. He modeled the friction of the board relative to the contact patch it makes with the snow. I don't think any other game tried to do this outside of racing sins for quite some time.
- pipes 3y agoYes, it's a pretty amazing story of a westerner working at Nintendo. Bizarrely I worked with a guy who worked with him. I dont work in the games industry but this guy had. Roughly he said he was genius. I didn't realise until after I left that job that he was talking about the same guy who led 1080 development. He was just talking about the mario 64 squishy face that can be pulled and stretched. Saying he knew the guy who programmed that. (Given his background I don't doubt the story)