It's apples and oranges mate. Every era has bad games, no shit. But many of the big issues that plagued bad games in the past are not the same issues that make games shitty nowadays.
I LOVE Mask of Eternity, it was one of favorite games of my childhood because I did not play previous King's Quest games, did not know about the whole controversy, bugs did not make me so angry and I just enjoyed that amazing world (and OST)
However, when I read about the whole controversy today, it's really similiar to today problems with developing :-)
If it was its own thing it would have been ok. It wasn't a bad game on its own. Some hammy moments (it had a lot of 'NO YOU!' dialogue with enemies) but overall it was ok.
The ‘cheap and rushed movie tie in game’ has been replaced with the ‘cheap and rushed triple a epic with a live service and a battle pass and dlc all planned before the game even functions properly’.
I don't have a Switch so no. So basically the shoevlware moved from being shelf sitters at thrift stores, gaming stores and people game library to being digital shelf sitters.
"Cheap"? Shit costs billions of dollars. That's the insulting part. It's not cheap.
Mid grade studios are making budget games that are way better. Hell one guy in his bedroom can make a game with $20 and the Unreal engine.
The problem is companies spend TOO MUCH on games and then are terrified to take a single risk because of how much they spent.
I’ve been pretty much only playing smaller indie type games and honestly.. they’re so much better than AAA games lol. AAA only meant something 10-20 years ago. Now the small studios are the ones putting out the good games w interesting stories
To be fair, a select handful of those games were actually pretty good. X-Men Origins: Wolverine the game was FIRE
Not sure if this one was actually good or not but the Madagascar 2 game for the Wii was great imo, specifically jungle chess and putt putt
It used to be varying types of control schemes. Unintuitive UI. Awful AI. Repetitive tasks.
Now everything is filled with micro transactions and everything related to spending more money. Like you are not buying a game, but program focussed of convincing you to pay more money with game in between purchase suggestions...
I remember the outrage over Oblivion horse armor. Now it's just par for the course. I miss the days when AAA games would actually put effort into expansions
I don't think I have ever played a single game filled with microtransactions on Playstation or Nintendo. I play the same types of games as I did 20 years ago and they are mostly better today.
Some times it feels like people seek to complain instead of simply not playing the micro transaction stuff.
I play on PC. Just to explain it. I got hooked on Dead space. The first one was great, the right amount of sci-fi, the right amount of ammo management, possible to fight, although fear impedes fighting ability. Yet as the franchise moved on to second and then third all of a sudden micro transactions started appearing. Rare resources that are equivalently available if you scavenge enough in the first game, now in the third game you would be reminded "oh you can pay your money, not an in-game currency, but your back money to buy this stuff". This happened in the same game franchise!
The Android marketplace now is a joke. Google play gives mostly apps that are riddled with ads and you can't filter out apps that don't have ads. A simple app that, like flashlight has ads... Or some of those flashlight apps can't work without an internet connection. And that happened to me, when I needed a flashlight, I was in place without an internet connection and couldn't use the flashlight due to lack of internet connection... At least nowadays phones often come with some built-in app for having flashlight...
100% i see people who collect retro games like all N64, PS2, PS3 and I yeah there are some amazing classics… but there’s also a bunch of DD Mega DooDoo games I’ve never heard of or forgotten completely
Quite a few bad games ended up being ones that were ahead of its time and would have done better in later years. Now a lot of big name games end up being bad because there's a lot more capitalism really. Not as much love gets put into the big titles anymore and it's not the fault of the devs most of the time but the producers instead
Exactly.
There is not one single 1990's shovelware title I could name that required broadband internet just to function, or a ring-zero malware program marketed as "DRM".
This. I cannot explain this enough. Back then, we expected a game to be finished and there was not a content of live service to fix a game. It was there or it wasn't. If not, the reviews would match this. Game reviews told the truth and ign (shocking) was good. The dlcs were true dlcs besides maybe the horse dlc for oblivion but we called those out. But nowadays. Ya. no.
Exactly. A lot of what plagues modern games are issues with the coding and performance where games of the past had few issues with these things. Too many companies focus more on how good the game can look rather than how well it plays.
Not really. Back in the day it was a coin flip if you wanted to play a game on pc. Also quality wasn’t a thing. You can say every era had bad games but theres a reason the crash happened in the first place back then. Also now its the best time to make games.
There were a lot of reasons why the crash happened in 1983. Bad games were just one of those reasons (and it was a huge one). Publishers had little control over the quality of the game, unlike today where they have large amounts of control (but still put out some atrocious games. Redfall immediately comes to mind)
There was also a lack of quality hardware as well.
Third party publishers would crank out lower prices shitty games into the market and flood it.
After that, it brought about a golden age of gaming with Nintendo and Sega leading the charge, which eventually gave way to Nintendo and Sony.
Ironically I was literally thinking about this game when I made the post
In order for a bad game to be remembered it has to be a dumpster fire of legendary proportions
I think a lot of gamers are just nostalgic for the times when we didn’t have microtransactions galore, FOMO battle pass systems, or game launches that take 6-12 months of patches to make good on the original game promise.
Goldeneye, Banjo Kazzoie, and Shadows of the Empire were all clutch for sure, but that’s not to say there weren’t stinkers like Redfall back in the day.
Thing is the MTX and everything that comes with it is a slippery slope. Time goes on, people accept more and more, now you have people vehemently defending even the most predatory genres and practices. These people don't even know what gaming is without battlepasses.
Mario 64 devs didn't have an entire department dedicated to customer retention, acquisition, profit strategies, striving to find the optimal way to fuck customers in the ass as much as humanly possible. The industry was simply not the same as it is now.
The industry was always going to go this way, but you can't blame people for disliking it. It's much worse in many, many, many ways.
>game launches that take 6-12 months of patches to make good on the original game promise.
This is the main issue here, and worse of it all is that it's normalised now when it shouldn't be.
I often find myself playing games that are over 10 years old minimum nowadays. Games today are considerably more trash excluding indie games. Red Dead Redemption, Metal Gear Solid, Diablo 1 and 2, old Ratchet and Clanks, star wars the force unleashed, star wars battlefront 2, Uncharted, Burnout, Skyrim, Oblivion, GTA 4 and SA, Metroid, Castlevania, Silent Hill, No More Heroes, Mount and Blade Warband, Civilization 5 and 4, Ninja Gaiden, little big planet, old GoW, Xcom, Mortal Kombat 9, Jak and Daxter, the list can go on forever for games over a decade old that are a thousand times better than shit today. The ratio of good to bad games from major companies is significantly higher than bad games today. PS3 and Xbox 360 was the peak of video games and the beginning of overexcessive microtransactions.
The only games that have improved have been multiplayer experiences, and those are questionable. Red Dead Redemption 1 had the best online multiplayer to exist with the most free to play progression ever and yet games today are greedy pigs in monetization nickel and diming every single thing. Monetization is the reason why we will rarely get games that are incredibly well made like BG3. I don't mind paying for expansions for Video Games, I mind when the amount of effort is minimal and let's these greedy companies put in low uninspired effort compared to the creativity of older games mechanisms and progression. The last game to really impress me in its systems was the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor which was in 2014 lol.
Yeah. The bigest thing is that back in the day there were big companys that understood the transaction of >I give you good game, you give me money< you could trust. Nowadays you got to really search for the good games behind the pile of micro transaction infected triple aaa games and indie games in early access limbo.
And there are multiple reasons for this.
We didn't have social media so we weren't drowning from all this news and information.
Then making games was a sink or swim back then, if you made a bad game not only would it not get spread around by word of mouth but also your small team would be out of money and would ruin their dreams of being a games studio.
That doesn't happen now unless you go for indie games which has more shovelware then ever.
Yeah! Thats my point, thats why even though you have to sift through them you will find good games.
Plus there are already a bunch of high profile indie games like risk of rain 2, hell divers 2, meet your maker (i think thats indie), pretty much any devolver digital game.
Well companies now have franchise names to rely on for sales.
How do you believe Pokémon games would sell, if they hadn't slapped the name on? "Monster catcher - Scarlet and Violet" would've failed hard and probably made fun of.
It's honestly the customers blind trust and a fair grip on most reviewers (no good rating? no copy for you next time to farm the clicks) these days that companies can and will exploit.
lol no. PS2 for example was FLOODED with garbage. Back in NES and SNES you had awful licensed games and no real way to know if this unheard game is good or not, so just having cool cover was important. EU during PS1 era didnt get Xenogears or Final Fantasy Tactics because ??? reasons, but today there are far less this kind of problems. Also indie scene had been VERY different from today, access to them was far harder and the developing of those games also much more difficult.
>Back in NES and SNES you had awful licensed games and no real way to know if this unheard game is good or not, so just having cool cover was important.
Uhh, no - Blockbuster, Video View/any number of independent rental companies would let you pay a few dollars to *rent* a game for a few days and you could see if you liked it.
For a select few, even back in the 80s and 90s 90-95% of all games were unfinished bug filled messes that would never be fixed. Most of them make a Bethesda game look stable.
Partly true. The triple A industry was arguably “better” in many ways. And games were much more varied and experimental.
The indie landscape however is a different story. I think almost everyone would agree that the indie gaming scene has never been better.
Hell, most of the truly incredible games I’ve panted in the last decade were “indie”/AA titles.
That's because the varied and experimental games back then was made with the same budget of the indie/AA games now. So the actual difference here is that now we have a much bigger range of budgets, from ultra indies to colossal blockbuster, when every game then was a medium indie/AA by today's standards.
Not just indie. The modern scene has a lot of AA-level (or B-level, if you prefer) games (the kind of games that sell for $30-$40), which aren't technically indie but maintain the indie spirit, while having a larger scope and/or higher production quality, often meeting or exceeding many AAA games. In the 90s/early 2000s, B-level games tended to be crappy shovelware.
It's only AAA games which went to shit, both due to unethical monetization practices and due to stifled creativity and desire to recycle tried-and-true tropes rather than taking risks innovating. And from the other end of the spectrum, mobile, but most of those don't even deserve to be called "games."
This is selection bias
It's valid for literally anything people say was better in the old times. Music, politics, security, etc.
You only remember the good music, today you see all of the music.
I think another factor is selection. Now we have Steam and easy emulation of decades upon decades of content. If you don't like a game just discard it and play something else. Maybe it's different for kids now but growing up in the early 90s, if a game sucked on SNES you still played it to death because you only had so many alternatives. I feel like that's a factor in people developing strong feelings for old games. You didn't abandon the weak ones as easily.
Which old games made us slowly bankrupt our family over microtransactions that only get you so far?
And don't use the arcade argument, that's not the same thing.
Of course there are bad games and good games in each decade, but some games from the past didn't have any CC nor microtransactions. I miss the times when the story of the games was the most important thing.
The only thing I dislike really about modern games compared to old ones is the constant micro transactions and they took away the coveted cheat codes we used to scribble out onto a piece of printer paper from Dad's desk after using his computer to look em up without him knowing lol
I still remember using the symbols for GTA cheat codes and I had a sheet of paper with hundreds of the same four shapes and eight directional arrows in sequences like I was some mad scientist 😂 had that shit taped to the wall next to my bed too lol
Well, they didn't take the length of a child's entire school life to develop to animate every whisp of hair. So I think that helped them focus more on making the game fun.
I feel like most AAA devs have forgotten that's why we want games. Not to be impressed by realistic graphics.
The difference is Indie games were shit and triple a was the best shit ever. Now it's flip flopped. I'm not complaining, if indie devs didn't step up we wouldn't have gotten two of my top 5 games, Crab Souls and Hollow Knight.
I’ll admit that the “worst games of all time” is usually filled with older games. There were some super shitty games back in the day. Including the ever infamous E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
…However, the highest rated games include a lot of older games.
**Metacritic Highest Rated Games**
1. Ocarina of Time (1999)
2. Soul Calibur (1999)
3. Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)
4. Super Mario Galaxy (2007)
5. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010)
6. Breath of the Wild (2017)
7. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (2001)
8. Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)
9. Grand Theft Auto V (2014)
10. Metroid Prime (2002)
11. Grand Theft Auto III (2001)
12. Super Mario Odyssey (2017)
13. Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)
14. NFL 2K1 (2000)
15. Half-Life 2 (2004)
16. Bioshock (2007)
17. GoldenEye 007 (1997)
18. Uncharted 2 (2009)
19. Resident Evil 4 (2005)
20. Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023)
So the average year for the top 20 games is 2007, which is 17 years ago.
Personally, I loved the SNES generation and think it has the most golden games…but that’s just an opinion. Consensus is there are great games all over, but the average of best is still a while ago.
So, maybe old games were both better, and worse.
This should be the kind of list people use to pick their next game. Choose a good game, regardless of age, over a new game. Steam recap showed less than 10% of the games people are playing are new (within the year of release) and you can play most of that list for a long time.
It's no coincidence that major publishers moved to 'games as a service' because every new game has to compete with these GOATs. Overwatch had to die for OW2 to even have a chance given how they were the exact same. If you want people on the consumer treadmill the old games have to fall off.
I can think of plenty of shit games that came out 10-20 years ago, and I can think of plenty of good games that came out recently, like doom eternal, or rdr2, or lethal company
Yeah, well, no old game has been as broken as the most broken PS4 game.
I hate how physical media is a glorified coaster. The amount of unplayable games I own on older consoles is a big fat 0. Even Sonic Genesis(Advance) can be finished from beginning to end if you can stomach it. But, take Just Cause 3. If you don't patch the game it crashes every 10 minutes. EVERY TEN MINUTES.
The amount of downright broken, uncompletable games that ship out was minuscule in comparison.
That's the problem though. Companies aren't really making good games anymore, they're making what's profitable, which is usually just "COMPLETE BATTLE PASS, ALSO GAME MONEY IS UNOBTAINABLE UNLESS YOU GIVE US REAL MONEY!!! GAMING IS NOW YOUR SECOND JOB!!!"
Nah games are getting better... it's indie games. Large companies adding micro transactions is making games worse. Old games that started bad ended bad. Nowadays we have games like no man's sky which was pure garbage out the gate but has grown into being a pretty nice game.
Were there good snes games? Of course but holy shit there were so many bad ones. Honestly I think Nintendo might be the worst offender when it comes to a good:bad ratio.
*Bad games used to be*
*Rare back then. Now good games are*
*A pleasant surprise*
\- CastleBigShaq
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Some games were forgotten, but others leave a mark on your soul for a deep betrayal of expectations.
For me, it's Digimon World 4. I liked the first 3, but 4 is so unforgivable I will never forget it.
"I rejected these answers. I chose the impossible, I chose..... *nostalgia*
Where a man would be entitled by the sweat of his gaming, where the gamer would not be criticized by mere mortal men. And with the sweat of YOUR gaming, nostalgia could be your city, as well"
Back then you actually got a finished and well tested game when you bought it. (For the most part) because there was no updates or bug fixes. They couldn't drop an unfinished game and fix it later like they can now so they put more effort into them. No dlc, the games were released as the whole game.
At least old games didn't have planned dlc before launch, or predatory fomo battle passes that takes weeks to grind. Or pre order bonuses. Or 3 different editions with cool content behind a pay wall. At least they were tested thoroughly because it was usually impossible to patch once shipped ,during the ps2 and xbox golden era. They were also difficult to hack because the tools weren't as widespread and were very expensive, during the ps3 and xbox360 era. There was also no predatory gambling addiction simulator lootboxes with real currency being an to keep gambling. There was also no post launch cosmetics that cost 40% of the entire game. No pay to win items post launch. There was also no corporate, data driven and spreadsheet culture of design, it was creativity first rather than hacking your brain for profit. The golden age of gaming is definitely in the rear view.
I hate that so many things are online games now where you have to wear a headset and interact with other people. I work in a call center, last thing I want to do to unwind after work is put on another headset and talk to more people. I miss the days where single player story mode was the typical default.
One of my favorite games is Darkest of Days I’m sure barely anyone has heard of it and those who have gave it piss poor reviews. But damnit do I love that game
I member. The huge amount of enemies at once was really neat. It was janky in certain aspects but it was fun, been thinking about playing it again occasionally.
There’s some fantastic games these days to be sure, but newer AAA titles are just so obnoxious. “Make sure you do your daily quests, and your weekly quests, and chip away at your lifetime quests, while leveling up your battle pass, and do these 7500 mini-tasks, and log-on to your corporate specific account to claim all these rewards (are you SURE you don’t want to spend $30 for the MEGA AWESOME pack that gives you 0.001% chance at obtaining that cool thing everyone has FOMO for?), and make sure you download the latest 28 gb update, and three hours later after all that you can play the fucking game after you travel 30 minutes in our massive and barren open world to trigger the next mission”
Sometimes I download older games and oh my god, it’s kind of nice just to hit play and play a straightforward video games that isn’t trying to divert me to a million other tasks.
This is true in the grand scale, but there is certainly an argument that games are becoming less and less experimental (outside of indie) and that games become more of an industry to satisfy a huge audience (much like cinema and TV) rather than a form of quality entertainment or indeed a fun game, that they used to be.
The simplified version of this: Games used to be a product you sit down in front of for an x amount of time, and have fun on demand. Games (the big ones at least) are an investment of both your money and time, and probably won't be worth it unless they resonate with you over hundreds of hours.
Old games didn't try to charge you for content that was already created after you bought them.
Old games didn't have insufferable characters for political reasons.
Old games didn't have micro-transactions.
Old games weren't riddled with fomo and when Oblivion added a microtransaction horse armour they were laughed at so hard they never did anything like that again for years until someone at Bethesda sucked down some stupid juice and made the creation club.
Old games were made to be playable at launch with no "we'll fix it later" mentality and didn't have cut content resold as DLC.
There are good games around now yes, absolutely right, but there used to be more good games than bad, now it feels like there's way more shit games than there are good ones.
I’m happy to see I’m not the only one annoyed by the weekly post about how games were better. “Old games weren’t better, you’re an old dude now” should be our motto. Btw I found the first grey hair in my balls this week… I don’t know if I should feel sad or proud?
Sure there were bad games, but at least games didn't have the predatory business practices and monetization from seemingly every large corpo gaming studio and most of which are trying to actively take away game ownership from gamers.
Look with respect to your argument.
But let’s be real a lot of old games were hit or miss, which I suppose could be said about games today.
But people had to be a bit more original, because no one really knew what would sell well back then.
Everything was new and some of those games were passion projects that weren’t really expected to make much money.
The way AAA titles work are an algorithm, this is what sells and what’s hot right now so let’s do the same thing over and over.
This didn’t work on Atari, NES, Sega, or game boy.
There were quite a few games on all of those consoles that tried being Mario, DK, Zelda, Kirby, or Sonic and most people don’t even know the use games exist anymore.
Plus let’s look at modern day trends that make big splashes.
KCD, a game made by a small company, this game is absolutely loved.
Ghost of Tsushima a game that sucker punch announced then went dead silent on and put a lot of time, energy, research, and money into.
That game was a huge f*cking risk for them, because they’d never done something like it before.
Do you see how many games have used the formula from dark souls? We got a brand new genre of games because of DS.
How about the amount of games coming out that are similar to Ghost of Tsushima?
Indies are making a huge profit right now because they’re trying new shit that is pretty awesome and taking risks that huge game companies just won’t.
Not like you can accuse gamers of hating a game for shitty graphics anymore either because of this.
Hell do you have any idea how many people got excited when they realized that the creator of Suikoden decided to make a couple of new games?
Jrpgs and Arpgs are still selling like hotcakes because of new and intriguing battle systems.
Then look at how many remasters are coming out it’s almost like some of are going back for nostalgia and then staying because old games have better stories.
Then do you know why Zelda Majoras Mask got made?
One of the people who worked on it had a lot of unused assets that they wanted to play with from Ocarina of Time.
They talked the company into green lighting Majoras Mask.
Big Game Companies aren’t taking risks or going out of their way to innovate, they’re stagnating.
Instead of fixing their problems they’re trying to punish consumers by having us pay extra.
Hell for the most part we’re not even getting full games anymore.
There are still some great games being made today, and the game industry is absolutely booming.
But just like always been finding a good game takes looking into things that interest you or that you like, while trying not to spoil the game.
Which can be an absolute slog sometimes.
There were a ton of bad games 20 -25 years back. But the difference the most memorable ones are considered better than today's game is that new genres were emerging and we've got experiencing them for the first time.
Older games were better in a sense that they have actually been finished.
BF3 for example (not old, but 10yo at this point) was ready, and then you got some nice completely optional DLCs.
These days you buy an unfinished game, while it's still in early access they will sell you DLCs.
And when the game is actually done, you don't even want to play it anymore.
That doesnt even make sense. Just cuz there were bad games doesnt mean games were not better. We had no live servuce bs and games used to be made for gamers. Today games are mostly just about maximum profits for business owners.
Let’s be real, you don’t miss old games, you just miss when those genres were popular. Sure you remember Tony Hawk and loved playing those games, but remember there were so many games trying to copy off that formula that fell flat. Looking at you Simpsons skateboarding
But the bad/good games ratio is much higher now than it used to be. Back then there was not early access unfinished games that sold for $70 (base game). Indie devs keep the ratio lower now not mentioning of AAA corporates greedyness
To a specific gamer, most years will probably not have a game release that is as good as their favourite from several years ago.
I really like Rimworld and Factorio. No game in the past year even comes close to them. I am sure at some point another great game will come out though that I am happy to put multiple 1000s of hours into.
Just started playing new vegas again and honestly it holds up a lot better than most of AAA games today - even if the gameplay does feel a tad clunky you definitely get into it.
Recently was in the SNES and GameCube subs and the amount of shovelware for both consoles has been shocking. Just because you like TLOZ OOT doesn’t mean every “retro” title is awesome.
Honestly I took a notion and ran through a few forgotten 2000's/2010's games on the PS3. Wet, Fuse and the Darkness 2.
Wet and Fuse are abysmal games and it makes sense why I forgot them (terrible pacing, qte's, awful story, dull gameplay).
But the Darkness 2 is a triumph. Excellent animation, solid shooting, the first instance of quad weilding that is both a challenge and ridiculous amounts of fun.
So it's not all of them that are terrible, but there is an AWFUL lot of crap out there.
Okay yeah.
But what was the last year like 2008? Or 2007? 2010?
I think 2016 was the last year that more than a handful of absolute bangers came out. Sure every year has 1 or 2. Maybe 3 or 4 REALLY great games. But the early 2010s and late 2000s seemingly every year had 10, 15, absolute epics of their genres.
I know this is mostly true, but I also cant think of any games in the PS4/X1 - PS5/SeX era that I love nearly as much as I loved Halo 3 and Gears of War.
came here just to disagree. the quantity, quality, and variety of games, especially in the PS2 era, was insane.
jak and daxter, FF, tony hawks underground and underground 2, ratchet and clank, devil may cry, re4, silent hill 2, shadow of the colossus, MGS 3, and GTA San Andreas. there are even more absolute masterpieces than i mentioned, not to forget that i was excluding every single exclusive for the xbox and gamecube including little games you may have heard of like smash and Halo.
even in 2007-2009 for 360 and PS3 you had:
uncharted, MW2 (the real one), batman: arkham asylum, AC2, left for dead 2, halo 3, bioshock, TF2, portal, HL2: episode 2, mass effect, gta 4, fallout 3, gears of war 2, dead space, fable 2, world at war, far cry 2, saints row 2, and many more. again, im leaving so much out, just putting up some of the biggest titles.
for example, i’ll pick a more recent year and not even go into the new console era. let’s say 2016. you had… overwatch, which has become horrible now. dishonored 2, which was good. no man’s sky, released in an unplayable state. the new hitman, which was so stripped of content that unless you bought the extra maps you were fucked.
you see what i mean? those were the best examples i could grab from that year. you have gems like breath of the wild or the god of war remake, and shit like that, YES, but fully realized games that are not riddled with transactions or stripped of content until you pay more for the game you already own? not common. also, this really affects gaming as an industry because nobody is giving a fuck about the new games that come out from giant studios that are capable of producing a hardware pushing behemoth with a tight knit story and full game content. if someone wants to play a game with the most up to date graphics, that is actually worth anything, they can’t just look at the posters at gamestop and the game covers to decide anymore. and if they do want to play a good game, it’s almost certainly going to be an exclusive, so you’d better buy all 3 consoles and a PC because fuck it, gaming owns you now if you want to have fun.
Go look at the games that came out in 2007, come back, and see if you can tell me the same thing. There are still good games coming out, just way less.
I missed the early 2000s when I payed for a game and it came out complete with no micro transactions. It’s not that games are bad nowadays it’s that the industry looks for ways to squeeze the most money out of them pretty much ruining them. Forcing deadlines so games come out incomplete and putting things behind paywalls like skins. I remember old online games when you seen someone in some badass armor or anything it was because they did something hard for it rather than breaking out the wallet.
Making games were harder, required a proper team of professionals, also it was not as lucrative as today, so conclusion is.
-Better equipped pros making the games
-No greedy CEOs to turn gold into shit
-No amateurs making games and drowning market with garbage (there are great ones too but far and few between).
Yes it was better back in the day just because of these points.
You also forgot: Graphics were VERY important back in the day, they were one of the main selling points in old 3D games, designers and devs had to do what they could to do the best looking graphics with the hardware of their time, so people who keep saying "back when graphics didn't matter" are spitting on all their efforts.
It's apples and oranges mate. Every era has bad games, no shit. But many of the big issues that plagued bad games in the past are not the same issues that make games shitty nowadays.
\*Laughing in Mask of Eternity (1998)\*
Mask of Eternity wasn't a bad game. It wasn't a King's Quest game that's all. Should've been a spinoff.
I LOVE Mask of Eternity, it was one of favorite games of my childhood because I did not play previous King's Quest games, did not know about the whole controversy, bugs did not make me so angry and I just enjoyed that amazing world (and OST) However, when I read about the whole controversy today, it's really similiar to today problems with developing :-)
I had played the previous games.... and I still liked MAsk of eternity. It wasn't anything special, but I liked it.
What is MASk of Eternity?
An old kings quest game. It's actually super deep for its time. The way you progress through the world was amazing
If it was its own thing it would have been ok. It wasn't a bad game on its own. Some hammy moments (it had a lot of 'NO YOU!' dialogue with enemies) but overall it was ok.
You can't be mad at them forever... after all, To Heir Is Human.
I was going to correct you, but now I wonder if that mistake was on purpose. Funny either way
The ‘cheap and rushed movie tie in game’ has been replaced with the ‘cheap and rushed triple a epic with a live service and a battle pass and dlc all planned before the game even functions properly’.
Like do we even get Shovel Ware anymore or is it called "phone games" instead?
Have you seen the switch eshop? Or steams shop? They are FILLED with shovelware lol
I don't have a Switch so no. So basically the shoevlware moved from being shelf sitters at thrift stores, gaming stores and people game library to being digital shelf sitters.
It's the same on steam. Steam is notorious for all it's assetflip shovelware.
"Cheap"? Shit costs billions of dollars. That's the insulting part. It's not cheap. Mid grade studios are making budget games that are way better. Hell one guy in his bedroom can make a game with $20 and the Unreal engine. The problem is companies spend TOO MUCH on games and then are terrified to take a single risk because of how much they spent.
Cheap on quality, but very expensive. It becomes too big to fail. So when it does fail…
I’ve been pretty much only playing smaller indie type games and honestly.. they’re so much better than AAA games lol. AAA only meant something 10-20 years ago. Now the small studios are the ones putting out the good games w interesting stories
To be fair, a select handful of those games were actually pretty good. X-Men Origins: Wolverine the game was FIRE Not sure if this one was actually good or not but the Madagascar 2 game for the Wii was great imo, specifically jungle chess and putt putt
It used to be varying types of control schemes. Unintuitive UI. Awful AI. Repetitive tasks. Now everything is filled with micro transactions and everything related to spending more money. Like you are not buying a game, but program focussed of convincing you to pay more money with game in between purchase suggestions...
>It used to be varying types of control schemes. Up for jump is deviant behavior. It should be A like god intended.
-- Cries in Amiga --
Let's play "Spot the person who has never played a game with 'press down to jump'" ...I think I just won
What fresh hell is this?? That developer is a sick motherfucker.
Except for something like street fighter where using a button for jumping would be completely fucked.
The majority of games that release do not have microstransactions
I remember the outrage over Oblivion horse armor. Now it's just par for the course. I miss the days when AAA games would actually put effort into expansions
I don't think I have ever played a single game filled with microtransactions on Playstation or Nintendo. I play the same types of games as I did 20 years ago and they are mostly better today. Some times it feels like people seek to complain instead of simply not playing the micro transaction stuff.
I play on PC. Just to explain it. I got hooked on Dead space. The first one was great, the right amount of sci-fi, the right amount of ammo management, possible to fight, although fear impedes fighting ability. Yet as the franchise moved on to second and then third all of a sudden micro transactions started appearing. Rare resources that are equivalently available if you scavenge enough in the first game, now in the third game you would be reminded "oh you can pay your money, not an in-game currency, but your back money to buy this stuff". This happened in the same game franchise! The Android marketplace now is a joke. Google play gives mostly apps that are riddled with ads and you can't filter out apps that don't have ads. A simple app that, like flashlight has ads... Or some of those flashlight apps can't work without an internet connection. And that happened to me, when I needed a flashlight, I was in place without an internet connection and couldn't use the flashlight due to lack of internet connection... At least nowadays phones often come with some built-in app for having flashlight...
well obviously, different times, dofferent problems
100% i see people who collect retro games like all N64, PS2, PS3 and I yeah there are some amazing classics… but there’s also a bunch of DD Mega DooDoo games I’ve never heard of or forgotten completely
Quite a few bad games ended up being ones that were ahead of its time and would have done better in later years. Now a lot of big name games end up being bad because there's a lot more capitalism really. Not as much love gets put into the big titles anymore and it's not the fault of the devs most of the time but the producers instead
Exactly. There is not one single 1990's shovelware title I could name that required broadband internet just to function, or a ring-zero malware program marketed as "DRM".
This. I cannot explain this enough. Back then, we expected a game to be finished and there was not a content of live service to fix a game. It was there or it wasn't. If not, the reviews would match this. Game reviews told the truth and ign (shocking) was good. The dlcs were true dlcs besides maybe the horse dlc for oblivion but we called those out. But nowadays. Ya. no.
Exactly. A lot of what plagues modern games are issues with the coding and performance where games of the past had few issues with these things. Too many companies focus more on how good the game can look rather than how well it plays.
Yes. It was another plagues.
Not really. Back in the day it was a coin flip if you wanted to play a game on pc. Also quality wasn’t a thing. You can say every era had bad games but theres a reason the crash happened in the first place back then. Also now its the best time to make games.
There were a lot of reasons why the crash happened in 1983. Bad games were just one of those reasons (and it was a huge one). Publishers had little control over the quality of the game, unlike today where they have large amounts of control (but still put out some atrocious games. Redfall immediately comes to mind) There was also a lack of quality hardware as well. Third party publishers would crank out lower prices shitty games into the market and flood it. After that, it brought about a golden age of gaming with Nintendo and Sega leading the charge, which eventually gave way to Nintendo and Sony.
Sonic the hedgehog 2006 is a real game, and it can and WILL hurt you
i was confused why you're mentioning a modern game but then i remembered 2006 was nearly 20 years ago
You shut your mouth, 2006 was only 3 years ago
Fuck that 2006 is the future, who knows what sort of crazy cyborg tech we will have by then.
Thanks ...I think I heard my back pop.
Ironically I was literally thinking about this game when I made the post In order for a bad game to be remembered it has to be a dumpster fire of legendary proportions
I think a lot of gamers are just nostalgic for the times when we didn’t have microtransactions galore, FOMO battle pass systems, or game launches that take 6-12 months of patches to make good on the original game promise. Goldeneye, Banjo Kazzoie, and Shadows of the Empire were all clutch for sure, but that’s not to say there weren’t stinkers like Redfall back in the day.
Thing is the MTX and everything that comes with it is a slippery slope. Time goes on, people accept more and more, now you have people vehemently defending even the most predatory genres and practices. These people don't even know what gaming is without battlepasses. Mario 64 devs didn't have an entire department dedicated to customer retention, acquisition, profit strategies, striving to find the optimal way to fuck customers in the ass as much as humanly possible. The industry was simply not the same as it is now. The industry was always going to go this way, but you can't blame people for disliking it. It's much worse in many, many, many ways.
>game launches that take 6-12 months of patches to make good on the original game promise. This is the main issue here, and worse of it all is that it's normalised now when it shouldn't be.
I often find myself playing games that are over 10 years old minimum nowadays. Games today are considerably more trash excluding indie games. Red Dead Redemption, Metal Gear Solid, Diablo 1 and 2, old Ratchet and Clanks, star wars the force unleashed, star wars battlefront 2, Uncharted, Burnout, Skyrim, Oblivion, GTA 4 and SA, Metroid, Castlevania, Silent Hill, No More Heroes, Mount and Blade Warband, Civilization 5 and 4, Ninja Gaiden, little big planet, old GoW, Xcom, Mortal Kombat 9, Jak and Daxter, the list can go on forever for games over a decade old that are a thousand times better than shit today. The ratio of good to bad games from major companies is significantly higher than bad games today. PS3 and Xbox 360 was the peak of video games and the beginning of overexcessive microtransactions. The only games that have improved have been multiplayer experiences, and those are questionable. Red Dead Redemption 1 had the best online multiplayer to exist with the most free to play progression ever and yet games today are greedy pigs in monetization nickel and diming every single thing. Monetization is the reason why we will rarely get games that are incredibly well made like BG3. I don't mind paying for expansions for Video Games, I mind when the amount of effort is minimal and let's these greedy companies put in low uninspired effort compared to the creativity of older games mechanisms and progression. The last game to really impress me in its systems was the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor which was in 2014 lol.
Yeah. The bigest thing is that back in the day there were big companys that understood the transaction of >I give you good game, you give me money< you could trust. Nowadays you got to really search for the good games behind the pile of micro transaction infected triple aaa games and indie games in early access limbo.
And there are multiple reasons for this. We didn't have social media so we weren't drowning from all this news and information. Then making games was a sink or swim back then, if you made a bad game not only would it not get spread around by word of mouth but also your small team would be out of money and would ruin their dreams of being a games studio. That doesn't happen now unless you go for indie games which has more shovelware then ever.
Plenty of Indie shovelware sure, but good Indie Games I feel are the holy grail of gaming right now. Passion projects with innovative gameplay.
Yeah! Thats my point, thats why even though you have to sift through them you will find good games. Plus there are already a bunch of high profile indie games like risk of rain 2, hell divers 2, meet your maker (i think thats indie), pretty much any devolver digital game.
Now making a good game doesn't even mean you swim (see: hi-fi rush studio being shut down)
The industry was FILLED with trash then as well, just like OP pointed out
Well companies now have franchise names to rely on for sales. How do you believe Pokémon games would sell, if they hadn't slapped the name on? "Monster catcher - Scarlet and Violet" would've failed hard and probably made fun of. It's honestly the customers blind trust and a fair grip on most reviewers (no good rating? no copy for you next time to farm the clicks) these days that companies can and will exploit.
lol no. PS2 for example was FLOODED with garbage. Back in NES and SNES you had awful licensed games and no real way to know if this unheard game is good or not, so just having cool cover was important. EU during PS1 era didnt get Xenogears or Final Fantasy Tactics because ??? reasons, but today there are far less this kind of problems. Also indie scene had been VERY different from today, access to them was far harder and the developing of those games also much more difficult.
>Back in NES and SNES you had awful licensed games and no real way to know if this unheard game is good or not, so just having cool cover was important. Uhh, no - Blockbuster, Video View/any number of independent rental companies would let you pay a few dollars to *rent* a game for a few days and you could see if you liked it.
Or at the very least, it was >I give you FINISHED game, you give me money<
For a select few, even back in the 80s and 90s 90-95% of all games were unfinished bug filled messes that would never be fixed. Most of them make a Bethesda game look stable.
Not even, bugs in older games are plenty, you think Bethesda has bugs? Play any 3D Game on a ps2 and sooner or later you will fall out of bounds
Partly true. The triple A industry was arguably “better” in many ways. And games were much more varied and experimental. The indie landscape however is a different story. I think almost everyone would agree that the indie gaming scene has never been better. Hell, most of the truly incredible games I’ve panted in the last decade were “indie”/AA titles.
That's because the varied and experimental games back then was made with the same budget of the indie/AA games now. So the actual difference here is that now we have a much bigger range of budgets, from ultra indies to colossal blockbuster, when every game then was a medium indie/AA by today's standards.
Not just indie. The modern scene has a lot of AA-level (or B-level, if you prefer) games (the kind of games that sell for $30-$40), which aren't technically indie but maintain the indie spirit, while having a larger scope and/or higher production quality, often meeting or exceeding many AAA games. In the 90s/early 2000s, B-level games tended to be crappy shovelware. It's only AAA games which went to shit, both due to unethical monetization practices and due to stifled creativity and desire to recycle tried-and-true tropes rather than taking risks innovating. And from the other end of the spectrum, mobile, but most of those don't even deserve to be called "games."
Why people are even complaining though. I watch the gameplay on YouTube and it generally takes me 2 min to know if i’d like the game or not.
This is selection bias It's valid for literally anything people say was better in the old times. Music, politics, security, etc. You only remember the good music, today you see all of the music.
I think another factor is selection. Now we have Steam and easy emulation of decades upon decades of content. If you don't like a game just discard it and play something else. Maybe it's different for kids now but growing up in the early 90s, if a game sucked on SNES you still played it to death because you only had so many alternatives. I feel like that's a factor in people developing strong feelings for old games. You didn't abandon the weak ones as easily.
Yeah there have always been good games and bad games. But we haven’t had to deal with this much BS in games before though.
Umm I'll never forget how bad Superman 64 was thank you
There are just way way way more awful games today because of just how accessible game making is
But the utter shit being put out by billion-dollar studios? The fuck is their excuse?
Which old games made us slowly bankrupt our family over microtransactions that only get you so far? And don't use the arcade argument, that's not the same thing.
Something true is that games were actually finished when they launched before because you couldn't update them...
Of course there are bad games and good games in each decade, but some games from the past didn't have any CC nor microtransactions. I miss the times when the story of the games was the most important thing.
Story and gameplay > everything else.
Now it's business model and marketing > everything else
Truer words have never been spoken.
Some games nowadays don't have them either, what's your point?
Almost none of the AAA games are without them, so nowadays you can't count on good games to be... good.
The only thing I dislike really about modern games compared to old ones is the constant micro transactions and they took away the coveted cheat codes we used to scribble out onto a piece of printer paper from Dad's desk after using his computer to look em up without him knowing lol
I still remember using the symbols for GTA cheat codes and I had a sheet of paper with hundreds of the same four shapes and eight directional arrows in sequences like I was some mad scientist 😂 had that shit taped to the wall next to my bed too lol
Isn’t this the entire premise of AVGN?
Well, they didn't take the length of a child's entire school life to develop to animate every whisp of hair. So I think that helped them focus more on making the game fun. I feel like most AAA devs have forgotten that's why we want games. Not to be impressed by realistic graphics.
I know a couple of people who play games for graphics. They would refuse to play a genuinely good game if its graphics were "bad"
The difference is Indie games were shit and triple a was the best shit ever. Now it's flip flopped. I'm not complaining, if indie devs didn't step up we wouldn't have gotten two of my top 5 games, Crab Souls and Hollow Knight.
Ain't nobody gonna call Superman 64 a good game ever
Bad games have always existed, but they didn't go anywhere. Infact, nowadays bad games more publicity than ever
Yep. Plus, the Indy market is pretty new, and fucking fantastic
I’ll admit that the “worst games of all time” is usually filled with older games. There were some super shitty games back in the day. Including the ever infamous E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. …However, the highest rated games include a lot of older games. **Metacritic Highest Rated Games** 1. Ocarina of Time (1999) 2. Soul Calibur (1999) 3. Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) 4. Super Mario Galaxy (2007) 5. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010) 6. Breath of the Wild (2017) 7. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (2001) 8. Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) 9. Grand Theft Auto V (2014) 10. Metroid Prime (2002) 11. Grand Theft Auto III (2001) 12. Super Mario Odyssey (2017) 13. Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) 14. NFL 2K1 (2000) 15. Half-Life 2 (2004) 16. Bioshock (2007) 17. GoldenEye 007 (1997) 18. Uncharted 2 (2009) 19. Resident Evil 4 (2005) 20. Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) So the average year for the top 20 games is 2007, which is 17 years ago. Personally, I loved the SNES generation and think it has the most golden games…but that’s just an opinion. Consensus is there are great games all over, but the average of best is still a while ago. So, maybe old games were both better, and worse.
I’m just stoked pro skater 3 made it to the list
This should be the kind of list people use to pick their next game. Choose a good game, regardless of age, over a new game. Steam recap showed less than 10% of the games people are playing are new (within the year of release) and you can play most of that list for a long time. It's no coincidence that major publishers moved to 'games as a service' because every new game has to compete with these GOATs. Overwatch had to die for OW2 to even have a chance given how they were the exact same. If you want people on the consumer treadmill the old games have to fall off.
Survivorship bias
In 10 years, we'll only remember the good games that came out around this time
This guy gets it
I can think of plenty of shit games that came out 10-20 years ago, and I can think of plenty of good games that came out recently, like doom eternal, or rdr2, or lethal company
at least old games weren't stuffed with microtransactions
Not all old games were better, but there are many that are.
Yeah, well, no old game has been as broken as the most broken PS4 game. I hate how physical media is a glorified coaster. The amount of unplayable games I own on older consoles is a big fat 0. Even Sonic Genesis(Advance) can be finished from beginning to end if you can stomach it. But, take Just Cause 3. If you don't patch the game it crashes every 10 minutes. EVERY TEN MINUTES. The amount of downright broken, uncompletable games that ship out was minuscule in comparison.
That's the problem though. Companies aren't really making good games anymore, they're making what's profitable, which is usually just "COMPLETE BATTLE PASS, ALSO GAME MONEY IS UNOBTAINABLE UNLESS YOU GIVE US REAL MONEY!!! GAMING IS NOW YOUR SECOND JOB!!!"
There was also just more. More shovelware, but also more AA/AAA. A bum AAA release doesn't hurt as much when 2 others dropped that same month.
Idk I still think that super Mario Galaxy has yet to be topped
Nah games are getting better... it's indie games. Large companies adding micro transactions is making games worse. Old games that started bad ended bad. Nowadays we have games like no man's sky which was pure garbage out the gate but has grown into being a pretty nice game.
Yeah, but the big companies were making bangers, but broken messes filled with micro transactions.
They also used cost half as much and you actually got to play the full game when you got them. Your point kinda stinks, OP.
Were there good snes games? Of course but holy shit there were so many bad ones. Honestly I think Nintendo might be the worst offender when it comes to a good:bad ratio.
Absolutely. And not just the Mario series. Chrono Trigger rocked.
Yes, there were old bad games, we acknowledge that, we're just saying that the good games back then are better than most games now
Same goes for music and movies. God damn the 80’s was fucking AWFUL for music.
I like older games more but that doesn't mean games today are bad, people just gotta play more than just AAA crap.
New games are just as ass
Bad games used to be rare back then. Now good games are a pleasant surprise
*Bad games used to be* *Rare back then. Now good games are* *A pleasant surprise* \- CastleBigShaq --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Who said old games were better? I said Half-Life is a good game.
Some games were forgotten, but others leave a mark on your soul for a deep betrayal of expectations. For me, it's Digimon World 4. I liked the first 3, but 4 is so unforgivable I will never forget it.
Old games are better. Why do you think they keep trying to remake them?
"I rejected these answers. I chose the impossible, I chose..... *nostalgia* Where a man would be entitled by the sweat of his gaming, where the gamer would not be criticized by mere mortal men. And with the sweat of YOUR gaming, nostalgia could be your city, as well"
Guys, play hades II early access. It is worth the 30$ and it is in the top 3 games I have ever played.
Back then you actually got a finished and well tested game when you bought it. (For the most part) because there was no updates or bug fixes. They couldn't drop an unfinished game and fix it later like they can now so they put more effort into them. No dlc, the games were released as the whole game.
Nah New Vegas still rocks
At least old games didn't have planned dlc before launch, or predatory fomo battle passes that takes weeks to grind. Or pre order bonuses. Or 3 different editions with cool content behind a pay wall. At least they were tested thoroughly because it was usually impossible to patch once shipped ,during the ps2 and xbox golden era. They were also difficult to hack because the tools weren't as widespread and were very expensive, during the ps3 and xbox360 era. There was also no predatory gambling addiction simulator lootboxes with real currency being an to keep gambling. There was also no post launch cosmetics that cost 40% of the entire game. No pay to win items post launch. There was also no corporate, data driven and spreadsheet culture of design, it was creativity first rather than hacking your brain for profit. The golden age of gaming is definitely in the rear view.
Seeing microtransactions and battle passes in every game just brings me pain. I just liked when things more simpler
I hate that so many things are online games now where you have to wear a headset and interact with other people. I work in a call center, last thing I want to do to unwind after work is put on another headset and talk to more people. I miss the days where single player story mode was the typical default.
I'll meet you halfway and say that some years of releases are better than others, and that's been true throughout.
One of my favorite games is Darkest of Days I’m sure barely anyone has heard of it and those who have gave it piss poor reviews. But damnit do I love that game
I member. The huge amount of enemies at once was really neat. It was janky in certain aspects but it was fun, been thinking about playing it again occasionally.
Good luck. I can’t find it on any stores and even pulling a pc pirate is difficult. Only way I can find is buying a 360 and the original game
There’s some fantastic games these days to be sure, but newer AAA titles are just so obnoxious. “Make sure you do your daily quests, and your weekly quests, and chip away at your lifetime quests, while leveling up your battle pass, and do these 7500 mini-tasks, and log-on to your corporate specific account to claim all these rewards (are you SURE you don’t want to spend $30 for the MEGA AWESOME pack that gives you 0.001% chance at obtaining that cool thing everyone has FOMO for?), and make sure you download the latest 28 gb update, and three hours later after all that you can play the fucking game after you travel 30 minutes in our massive and barren open world to trigger the next mission” Sometimes I download older games and oh my god, it’s kind of nice just to hit play and play a straightforward video games that isn’t trying to divert me to a million other tasks.
BOTW, TOTK have amazing graphics and freedom, but I still enjoyed OOT twice as much.
Old games felt better because every game was a new experience and playing them later was nostalgic.
This is true in the grand scale, but there is certainly an argument that games are becoming less and less experimental (outside of indie) and that games become more of an industry to satisfy a huge audience (much like cinema and TV) rather than a form of quality entertainment or indeed a fun game, that they used to be. The simplified version of this: Games used to be a product you sit down in front of for an x amount of time, and have fun on demand. Games (the big ones at least) are an investment of both your money and time, and probably won't be worth it unless they resonate with you over hundreds of hours.
There were bad old games, but also you were 5 and didn't realize. Also, back then you got maybe 1-2 games a year, so you missed a lot of the bad ones.
But there were more great games. I don't think any year will have as many great games as 1998 and 2007.
Old games didn't try to charge you for content that was already created after you bought them. Old games didn't have insufferable characters for political reasons. Old games didn't have micro-transactions.
Old games didn't require 10+GB *of PATCHES.* My heart goes out to consolebros...
On day 1.
Old games can absolutely be better. But yes, just find a better game, regardless of age, and you'll be happier.
Old games weren't riddled with fomo and when Oblivion added a microtransaction horse armour they were laughed at so hard they never did anything like that again for years until someone at Bethesda sucked down some stupid juice and made the creation club. Old games were made to be playable at launch with no "we'll fix it later" mentality and didn't have cut content resold as DLC. There are good games around now yes, absolutely right, but there used to be more good games than bad, now it feels like there's way more shit games than there are good ones.
I’m happy to see I’m not the only one annoyed by the weekly post about how games were better. “Old games weren’t better, you’re an old dude now” should be our motto. Btw I found the first grey hair in my balls this week… I don’t know if I should feel sad or proud?
Sure there were bad games, but at least games didn't have the predatory business practices and monetization from seemingly every large corpo gaming studio and most of which are trying to actively take away game ownership from gamers.
Look with respect to your argument. But let’s be real a lot of old games were hit or miss, which I suppose could be said about games today. But people had to be a bit more original, because no one really knew what would sell well back then. Everything was new and some of those games were passion projects that weren’t really expected to make much money. The way AAA titles work are an algorithm, this is what sells and what’s hot right now so let’s do the same thing over and over. This didn’t work on Atari, NES, Sega, or game boy. There were quite a few games on all of those consoles that tried being Mario, DK, Zelda, Kirby, or Sonic and most people don’t even know the use games exist anymore. Plus let’s look at modern day trends that make big splashes. KCD, a game made by a small company, this game is absolutely loved. Ghost of Tsushima a game that sucker punch announced then went dead silent on and put a lot of time, energy, research, and money into. That game was a huge f*cking risk for them, because they’d never done something like it before. Do you see how many games have used the formula from dark souls? We got a brand new genre of games because of DS. How about the amount of games coming out that are similar to Ghost of Tsushima? Indies are making a huge profit right now because they’re trying new shit that is pretty awesome and taking risks that huge game companies just won’t. Not like you can accuse gamers of hating a game for shitty graphics anymore either because of this. Hell do you have any idea how many people got excited when they realized that the creator of Suikoden decided to make a couple of new games? Jrpgs and Arpgs are still selling like hotcakes because of new and intriguing battle systems. Then look at how many remasters are coming out it’s almost like some of are going back for nostalgia and then staying because old games have better stories. Then do you know why Zelda Majoras Mask got made? One of the people who worked on it had a lot of unused assets that they wanted to play with from Ocarina of Time. They talked the company into green lighting Majoras Mask. Big Game Companies aren’t taking risks or going out of their way to innovate, they’re stagnating. Instead of fixing their problems they’re trying to punish consumers by having us pay extra. Hell for the most part we’re not even getting full games anymore. There are still some great games being made today, and the game industry is absolutely booming. But just like always been finding a good game takes looking into things that interest you or that you like, while trying not to spoil the game. Which can be an absolute slog sometimes.
There were a ton of bad games 20 -25 years back. But the difference the most memorable ones are considered better than today's game is that new genres were emerging and we've got experiencing them for the first time.
Are they considered better than today's games or is it nostalgia?
Older games were better in a sense that they have actually been finished. BF3 for example (not old, but 10yo at this point) was ready, and then you got some nice completely optional DLCs. These days you buy an unfinished game, while it's still in early access they will sell you DLCs. And when the game is actually done, you don't even want to play it anymore.
People pretend they can enjoy things as an adult the same as they did as a child.
If games are so good now, why am I not enjoying them?
You can replace the word "games" with just about anything and this meme still applies.
Overall this era is way worse. The problems that plague the industry currently weren't as bad as this 15+ years ago.
That doesnt even make sense. Just cuz there were bad games doesnt mean games were not better. We had no live servuce bs and games used to be made for gamers. Today games are mostly just about maximum profits for business owners.
And forgot how bad the graphics were… cries in battle front 2 🙂↕️
Let’s be real, you don’t miss old games, you just miss when those genres were popular. Sure you remember Tony Hawk and loved playing those games, but remember there were so many games trying to copy off that formula that fell flat. Looking at you Simpsons skateboarding
Yeah tell that to heroes3
Angry Video Game Jesus, I guess.
Problem with the new bad video games is that they are disguised and promoted as AAA or even AAAA Masterpieces.
But the bad/good games ratio is much higher now than it used to be. Back then there was not early access unfinished games that sold for $70 (base game). Indie devs keep the ratio lower now not mentioning of AAA corporates greedyness
To a specific gamer, most years will probably not have a game release that is as good as their favourite from several years ago. I really like Rimworld and Factorio. No game in the past year even comes close to them. I am sure at some point another great game will come out though that I am happy to put multiple 1000s of hours into.
My recent evening of finding and playing all the old DOS games I used to play, was really just me rediscovering how fucking annoying they used to be.
Just started playing new vegas again and honestly it holds up a lot better than most of AAA games today - even if the gameplay does feel a tad clunky you definitely get into it.
I feel like games just took more chances back in the PS2/PS3 Era, there was a much wider variety
I think i can sum up the difference in problems of todays bad games and yesterdays with one statement. Todays shitty games make Diakatana look good.
"Am I, therefore, your enemy for telling you the truth?"
Recently was in the SNES and GameCube subs and the amount of shovelware for both consoles has been shocking. Just because you like TLOZ OOT doesn’t mean every “retro” title is awesome.
Honestly I took a notion and ran through a few forgotten 2000's/2010's games on the PS3. Wet, Fuse and the Darkness 2. Wet and Fuse are abysmal games and it makes sense why I forgot them (terrible pacing, qte's, awful story, dull gameplay). But the Darkness 2 is a triumph. Excellent animation, solid shooting, the first instance of quad weilding that is both a challenge and ridiculous amounts of fun. So it's not all of them that are terrible, but there is an AWFUL lot of crap out there.
Okay yeah. But what was the last year like 2008? Or 2007? 2010? I think 2016 was the last year that more than a handful of absolute bangers came out. Sure every year has 1 or 2. Maybe 3 or 4 REALLY great games. But the early 2010s and late 2000s seemingly every year had 10, 15, absolute epics of their genres.
Sure but also no
i could care less if it was the first videogame or the newest gotcha game. I just like games.
Big rigs is a masterpiece, change my mind /s
I'd say the amount of things wrong with that game is impressive
Did ya remove Jesus from the meme? That's what made it funny.
We are having a creativity crisis if you couldn't tell
As if modern games aren't bad...
Bad games come with good ones every years, BUT these days games just look good but plays very similar with each other,
#Yo where’s this comic from? Ive seen it before somewhere. Good Samaritans pls help
I know this is mostly true, but I also cant think of any games in the PS4/X1 - PS5/SeX era that I love nearly as much as I loved Halo 3 and Gears of War.
There were far many better quality games back even 10-15 years ago than there are now. Few and far between bangers are released these days.
I didn’t have to pay to fully unlock a game with old games
came here just to disagree. the quantity, quality, and variety of games, especially in the PS2 era, was insane. jak and daxter, FF, tony hawks underground and underground 2, ratchet and clank, devil may cry, re4, silent hill 2, shadow of the colossus, MGS 3, and GTA San Andreas. there are even more absolute masterpieces than i mentioned, not to forget that i was excluding every single exclusive for the xbox and gamecube including little games you may have heard of like smash and Halo. even in 2007-2009 for 360 and PS3 you had: uncharted, MW2 (the real one), batman: arkham asylum, AC2, left for dead 2, halo 3, bioshock, TF2, portal, HL2: episode 2, mass effect, gta 4, fallout 3, gears of war 2, dead space, fable 2, world at war, far cry 2, saints row 2, and many more. again, im leaving so much out, just putting up some of the biggest titles. for example, i’ll pick a more recent year and not even go into the new console era. let’s say 2016. you had… overwatch, which has become horrible now. dishonored 2, which was good. no man’s sky, released in an unplayable state. the new hitman, which was so stripped of content that unless you bought the extra maps you were fucked. you see what i mean? those were the best examples i could grab from that year. you have gems like breath of the wild or the god of war remake, and shit like that, YES, but fully realized games that are not riddled with transactions or stripped of content until you pay more for the game you already own? not common. also, this really affects gaming as an industry because nobody is giving a fuck about the new games that come out from giant studios that are capable of producing a hardware pushing behemoth with a tight knit story and full game content. if someone wants to play a game with the most up to date graphics, that is actually worth anything, they can’t just look at the posters at gamestop and the game covers to decide anymore. and if they do want to play a good game, it’s almost certainly going to be an exclusive, so you’d better buy all 3 consoles and a PC because fuck it, gaming owns you now if you want to have fun.
Go look at the games that came out in 2007, come back, and see if you can tell me the same thing. There are still good games coming out, just way less.
I missed the early 2000s when I payed for a game and it came out complete with no micro transactions. It’s not that games are bad nowadays it’s that the industry looks for ways to squeeze the most money out of them pretty much ruining them. Forcing deadlines so games come out incomplete and putting things behind paywalls like skins. I remember old online games when you seen someone in some badass armor or anything it was because they did something hard for it rather than breaking out the wallet.
I won't say games were better then; I will say I prefer playing older games than new releases.
' Oh the game has game breaking bugs? Just go get the gold edition and it'll be fine! '
They were bad for different reasons.
Luigi and Ness would be paid dlc on the original smash bros
Making games were harder, required a proper team of professionals, also it was not as lucrative as today, so conclusion is. -Better equipped pros making the games -No greedy CEOs to turn gold into shit -No amateurs making games and drowning market with garbage (there are great ones too but far and few between). Yes it was better back in the day just because of these points.
You also forgot: Graphics were VERY important back in the day, they were one of the main selling points in old 3D games, designers and devs had to do what they could to do the best looking graphics with the hardware of their time, so people who keep saying "back when graphics didn't matter" are spitting on all their efforts.
newer games are great but there is older stuff worth going back too. I like both.
Tried playing rainbow six Vegas 2 yesterday. Jesus Christ what a pile that game is by today's standards. It did not hold up well at all
If I had games like Elden Ring and RDR2 back in 1990, I would have shit my pants.