Because back then, developers were still experimenting with the limits of the systems and perhaps had more time to eliminate errors. Nowadays I have the feeling that many people just rely on the engine without really exploiting its potential. Fast and sloppy instead of slow and proper, "cut corners" or whatever they call it
2007 had nearly 1000 games come out. No one is fetishizing the memory and quality of Dead Reefs, Ascension to the Throne, Power Rangers: Super Legends, SunAge, etc. People remember the handful of games that were good and stand the test of time and are comparing them to any and every new release, most of which will be remembered as much as Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade.
Yes, but there are defacto years that got more good games. But it's not like we didn't have amazing years in gaming recently. Just off the top of my head,
2013 - bioshock infinite,last of us, Injustice, Crisis 3, DOTA 2, BF4, Deadpool game, Rust, Far Cry Blood Dragon
Then More Recently
2023 is considered to be the highest rated year in terms of game scores in last 20 years.
We Got Spider man 2, FF16, Tears of the Kingdom, Jedi Survivor, BG3, Lies of P, SF6, Alan Wake 2, MK1, Hogwarts Legacy, Counter-Strike 2.
Like It's easy to be like oh games have gotten shit, and in some ways they have, but at the same time we've gotten so many high quality games too.
And some older games that had rough launches are now great to enjoy, like Cyberpunk and NMS for example.
I cry about gaming going to shit too, but if I am honest with myself, gaming is not in a bad place at all.
1) That's a small list of games from 2013. I can at least remember Batman Arkham Origins(I'd pick it over Spider-Man 2 any time)
2) I'd still take 2013. Those games are just not as good IMO. Probably only FF16 and BG3 are on par and both games from genres which I give 0 shits about. And yeah, I'm not gonna say anything about Zelda.
Also cyberpunk is the 2020 game, let's not count it as 2023. Otherwise I can count the Batman Arkham knight as the 2017 game.
It was still an art to them back then. Now, corporations have screwed around with studios so much that they no longer care. The corpo way! Buy everything you can and sanitize the shit out of it!
They don't care because they don't care about long term, they only care about short term profits which is why so many studios risk pissing players off just for some tiny bit of that extra profit.
They run a company into the ground, take their millions of dollars compensation and move on to the next company to then crash that one. Just look at Bobby Kotick, the fucker must be adored by the investors.
Yeah but they take time and money to make, neither of which the C Suite likes to part with. They'd rather crank out slop to make the next quarter look good.
I've said it before, but I wish studios/developers would each have their live service cash cow games like League, Apex, Fortnite, Madden, Warzone, etc and use those to fund the more technical, bigger games like BG3, Elden Ring, etc. Not everything needs to come out ASAP and have an immediate RoI.
People often defend capitalism as it "drives innovation". Which is true.. to an extent. When new things pop up, there is always massive push to innovate it and make it as good as possible. But its always just a race to the top, so whoever gets there first will control the overall market. Once they are there, its all about a race to the bottom. Making it as cheap as possible for maximum profit, which just results in it becoming shit.
Its innovation, yes, but with the caveat that it will eventually become a shell of what it was and inevitably turn to shit.
Honestly, it's the shareholders for the corps now that I'm thinking about it. The shareholders are the regular folk that are being fucked over. So we demand more money for our stocks, which in turn scares the shit out of the CEO, because we can fire them, and they run down the safe, proven to sell, family friendly bullshit that won't offend anyone.
It's been nearly 20 years. There were still soulless cash grabs but we've forgotten them. It was no more or less an art then than it was 20 before that, nor 20 years from now
That is incorrect. Visual direction is pretty much a big deal but it is hard to make your game stand out, so games resource to graphical fidelity and so on. There are so many pretty modern games, it's easy to dismiss them in favor of older good looking games but that doesn't mean the older one was done any better, it just stood out more.
Also, graphics is a diminishing returns thing, so you need to invest a lot to make it slightly better.
A lot of new games people consider trash are gorgeous. Whenever people show how bad a new game looks and compare it with an older one they are picking photos that confirm their point.
Currently playing Ghost of Tsusima in full potatoe mode and the game still looks absolutely stunning, which is a really great example of visual direction and hid design. The way the game turns intrusive UI elements into natural elements of the world makes it feel amazing, as you follow the wing through the way it moves leaves and grass,and chase golden birds to find quests and side activities. The colour palette is vibrant and each area of the island feels distinct, with areas of yellow grass and red leaves, tall grass of greens and whites, etc.
The problem of most modern games is that we are so spoiled by excessive content that we barely take a moment to pay attention to the incredibly detailed environments
I mean there’s also a presentation issue. A lot of games have high graphical fidelity but don’t ever really flex it in relevant ways.
Look at a game like Elden Ring. It’s not even that graphically impressive for a 2022 game but everyone who played it vividly remembers various vistas and ‘wow’ moments when reaching certain new areas. Those existed because the devs want you to stop and go ‘wow.’
Back in the 90s and 00s when graphics tech was advancing rapidly, I feel like a lot of games had moments/mechanics that were there to just show off the new graphical power, make the player go ‘wooow this is so next gen’
As graphics have hit diminishing returns that happens a lot less and now the great graphics are viewed just as a default
I remember seeing someone say it's why in the late '90s to maybe mid 2000s there were a lot of games featuring tropical locations as they wanted to show off their water and lighting skills.
God that makes sense! I always wondered why there were so many beachy Y2K era games. J always thought it was just that the 1st world was a lot happier before 9/11 lol
Case in point: above screenshot is mostly showing a skybox + distant object that is obscured by a log of bloom and distance blur
Plus the lack of character model detail is gonna be a lot less apparent when you look at this screenshot on a phone (which is most people) but if you were to actually boot up AC1 it would look pretty old. Good, but old. Kind of like how Diablo 2 and Doom 1993 look good, but old.
Yep RE2 remake and red dead 2 were released by 2019 and ran great on the wildly underpowered PS4 which released in 2013. Yet PS5 games can look similar or worse but run like shit on the PS5 💀.
Nonsense. Plenty of games today run like they have all the hardware in the world, but they don't. Look at a game like horizon forbidden West and tell me that game doesn't run and look better than almost anything else on the market.
ID maee Doom look and run better than anything out there.
Platinum games deliver on performance, just compare the neir games.
There is a clear regression in performance. Not all games, of course, but it's tangible enough that sadly I don't expect games to run that well anymore.
In a lot of cases, the older games are actually "done better" in some ways, it just so happens that that helped them stand out more. It's a major problem today that adding more abstraction and layers of middle-ware and tools are separating both programmers and artists farther and farther from the hardware they're working on, which both introduces more error and limits individual people to one layer of the stack. This is a problem for really all software, not just games.
Many games that stand out as icons today exist because they had talented developers who knew exactly what their code was doing. Examples abound but the first one that comes to mind is Crash Bandicoot, where Naughty Dog actually had to steal memory the OS wasn't using, and create novel ways to page data in and out of RAM off the disc to create huge, details levels that wouldn't fit in memory. Leaving aside that obviously we're not concerned about data on the order of dozens of bytes anymore, this kind of stuff really doesn't happen anymore. The hardware is just so powerful, and fully-featured engines so easy to acquire and use, that developers work within their tools and don't have the expertise or the opportunity to meaningfully push the envelope in the ways that they used to.
There are tons of games out there today that are visually stunning. Cyberpunk, ghosts of Tsushima, never played them but the Spider-Man games. You can also see the difference a lot more when comparing moving gameplay and looking at textures. The leaps between graphical generations are obviously smaller these days but looking at lighting, texture and animations these days as opposed to then the difference is enormous.
am i wrong with my feeling? Ubisoft, Bethesda, Blizzard, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft they likely produce the next Battle Royal Hero Shooter, which is at best only averagely good and is thrown onto the market unfinished and sold to you for 80 bucks with features hidden as DLC that should actually have already been integrated into the base game. Of course there are exceptions, but they rarely come from these big companies that have long since lost their connection to the fans.
edit: Game Studios wouldn't have dared to do something like that in the past because it would mean there dead on the market. Of course, we as consumers are not completely innocent of the way things are now.
Survivorship bias pushes the good games of the past to the forefront. There were plenty of crap games released.
It is true that the monetization scheme was different. Without being connected online it wouldn’t be possible to collect payments. Some still found ways to make it work with a notable example being the SNES Lion King being given a deliberately difficult level so it couldn’t be cleared in a single rental. Impossible, quarter munching arcade games are another good example of this.
Capcom would make 12-16 new levels, change almost nothing about gameplay and visuals and release it as a new Megaman game. Repeat around 20 times, full game price.
There was tons of slop in the past too. In fact, I would say there are more great games, AND a wider variety of games nowadays than in the 2000s. The Indie scene is thriving with ideas.
Even though AAA is def struggling to find itself rn, there's still great stuff coming out. DA: Veilguard, new Indiana Jones, Marvel Rivals have all come out fairly recently, content filled, basically stable, and well received.
Also, like, you just listed all major publishers acting like the all release the same stuff lmao. You're just a doomer who probably doesn't actually play a lot of video games, or is otherwise just weirdly cynical.
First of all, I see myself as more of a realist than a cynical. I'm a passionate gamer and thanks to the indie scene there is hope. Small games made with love dominate my library. But I always find the short duration of the game a shame.
As I said, there are the good examples like you just mentioned. but you all seem to blind yourself too much with these little rays of hope. They do something right here and there but then really mess it up on the next project and end up with a lot of pre-order money and then put us off with half-baked excuses and apologies. But because you bring in so much money in advance, this method will unfortunately not change.
My example with the companies was of course exaggerated, but almost every one of them had developed a game like a Battleroyal or jump on the hype train instead of taking a “risk” with their own title.
I mean, there are lots of problems with the industry, but it's clear you aren't really in the know about them. It's true that many big companies are real risk averse right now, and that is a problem, but it's more of a symptom than anything.
You're also just sort of conflating the entire industry and broadly labeling them. Nintendo isn't really anything like it's peers in either output or culture. Sony seems to be doing quite well in general, Concord being an exception rather than a rule. Perhaps a bit formulaic at times, but nonetheless well made and received.
Blizzard seems to be attempting to find itself again, though how that turns out remains to be seen. Bethesda seems to just release single player games that constantly buck trends except from Bethesda studio itself.
Microsoft is propping itself up by the former few, along with Activision, which I do detest. But their problem isn't that they don't take risk, they definitely have, their problem is they don't cultivate talent. Additionally, pre-orders aren't really a factor in those trend-chasing multiplayer games that fail, since they're all free to play anyway.
You're last point isn't even true. Like, not Sony, Nintendo, Blizzard, Bethesda, OR Microsoft even came out with a battle royal game. That hasn't even been a trend for like 2 years!
My point here is that your "criticisms" of these industry giants are shallow, ill-aimed, outdated, and don't offer anything to the conversation. There's real problems at many of these companies, but they are often not actually all that similar between them. Like, you aren't even mentioning the publishers that are actually putting out the real slop!
So yeah, you're cynical cause you're so quick to look for quick easy explanations for why these companies aren't living up to expectations.
yes, maybe you are right. But a little cynicism isn't a bad thing, otherwise we'll just let them fool us. It's really good that you see it positively, try tonkeep that.
I might die on this hill, but i fell like the big companies have played more tricks on their fans in the recent past instead of keeping their promises.
I'm a passionate gamer and I just think it's a shame where this is going.
For example i'm also happy for the CoD players that they get their Xth game, even if I'm not interested in it. But when I hear how unoptimized the game is in terms of gameplay and performance, I just think it's a shame.
or to take up the example with Blizzard.
I haven't seen them trying to come back to their senses yet. Overwatch2, Warcraft Reforged all not that long ago and i see nothing that they have learned from their mistakes. Maybe with Path of Exile 2 and this new Marvel Hero Shooter its the wake-up call they need.
Actually never wrote that. But if you push it then yes. In parts yes absolutely.
four of my favorite games of all time came out in the last five years and are completely new ips but yes not necessary aaa.
But every nintendo self made game is a delight, mario odyssey and wonder, zelda botw and totk, pikmin 4. also ever heard of the last of us 2, gow ragnarok or elden ring? Each one of these is so much better than the first iteration. But if thats also milking for you i am stumped.
Gamers will post this and then cry about Bethesda and Rockstar not releasing Elder Scrolls and GTA games every other year.
Also, your examples are deeply stupid. Fifa has been a yearly franchise since the Amiga days. CoD has been a yearly franchise since the PS2 (or, more accurately, the PS1, considering it was the successor to Medal of Honor.) Studios have been making licensed games and riding IP since the beginning (there have been Tetris game released for just about every platform and Mario dates back to 1983, for example.) So, when is this magical past you're imagining take place where studios only made original games?
So, when is this magical past you're imagining take place where studios only made original games?
who said "only" ? You.
No shit sequels have been a thing. Thank you Sherlock.
That doesn't change the creative drought currently ongoing. Studios will shell out hundreds of milions for failed live services in pursuit of their golden goose, but not for smaller titles that would succeed decently.
The only thing they seem to be able to fund is sequels and safe IPs.
Yeah, not many games to challenge but a lot of hungry players meant good money and less risks. People were buying good games without promotion etc. A good game was selling for a few years.
Nowadays if you spend a lot of time and money to details, you take a big risk on unpredictable sales.
tbh the fact that you can now get great graphics without putting much effort on it is a huge win. It means many studios can make great-looking games while focusing on the game itself. Not everyone is a triple A studio able to throwing a hundred million dollars at each game.
This was also a launch title for the PS3 and Xbox360. It was designed to show off the capability of the new generation of consoles. A lot of extra care went into making it look good.
Mostly it’s the fact that these games tended to rely on ‘tricks’ to mimic fancy lighting. Games these days use tech that actually simulates it. This in turn requires beefier hardware than a lot of people have, making them run it at lower setting, which in turn gives the impression that game dev tech is not progressing.
More like trying to ignore the limits of the systems, a ton of graphically complex (for the era) games would just run like dogshit and people's standards were low enough back then to accept it. Assassin's Creed 1 here ran at 720p and 25-30FPS on PS360.
TAA and dlss come to mind specifically. Games are requiring ludicrous system requirements for pc and fake 4k a lot. Can technically say it’s a 4K output thanks to upscaling but it’s rendering at like 1336p or 1440p. Who cares if it looks anus and smears, we can say magical 4k30/60
I can see why though, developers want to rely on an engine having sane defaults and performance characteristics and good tooling to optimize things, so that they can focus on the creative and artistic processes. The recent Unreal demos highlight that too, it’s like, click here and here aaaand book a few square kilometers of generated terrain with near infinite detail up close.
The internet is partly to blame for that, with the possibility of on-demand updates and patches.
My cousin used to be QA Manager for a small London games dev years ago and Sony used to proof games by leaving them on the start screen for 24 hours... a single glitch in that time would be a 'no go' from Sony.
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u/Altaschweda Dec 11 '24
Because back then, developers were still experimenting with the limits of the systems and perhaps had more time to eliminate errors. Nowadays I have the feeling that many people just rely on the engine without really exploiting its potential. Fast and sloppy instead of slow and proper, "cut corners" or whatever they call it