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Anyone else feels like this?
That gaming has been dead for a few years?

I find myself stuck in the past.
During breaks at my work, i usually click my cellphone on a moga controller and play n64, snes or playstation games (like command & conquer.. always makes people go WOW THATS SO COOL TO DO IT ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE!)

At home, i have been playing league of legends for 4 years now and ocassionaly i play a racing game with my colleagues just to socialize a bit. However, i keep going back to older games like rollercoaster tycoon, doom (online too, i still have great times with zombie horde), dukenukem 3d, blood, even older dos games like comanche, dominus and simon the sorcerer are still good. Sometimes i still play quake 3 which i have been playing when i was 12 to 17 years old. Heroes of might and magic 3 is still great too

I find the new games 'lacking' something...
I dont bind emotionally with it like i used to do.
You buy a game for 60~70 dollars and you it costs you more than 10/20gb these days and what do you get?

A game that has
- some fancy graphics
-You spend minutes walking and walking (NO FAST STRAFEJUMP ACTION )
-You die or kill within 1 sec whoever aims first.
-You do the same maps over and over again...
-No movement skill involved anymore, just whoever aims and shoots first wins
-Day 1 downloadable content that is already on the disc you just bought, only it is locked away with a key that you need to purchase. Think this is not so bad? Well, things just got absolutely disgusting with the release of skylanders : trap team that i bought for my best friend's kid.. I thought i would make her and him happy, but after 30 minutes of arrival i got a crying kid calling me. Why? All the content is already available on the 70 dollar disc you just bought, except.. the levels in the game needs to be unlocked with trap master characters that you need to purchase in the local shop, effectively costing you more than 200 dollars to unlock all the content that is already on the 70 dollar disc you just bought!
-No exploration ( diablo 3..), no more hours walking into absolutely nothing and just see what eastereggs and hidden areas you could find (like in dungeon siege 1)
-Master servers go offline after 3 years, community forced to move on to the latest sequal. Feeling emotionally attached to your game and dont like the feel of the new sequal? Too bad, resistance is futile

HOW DID WE SINK SO LOW?!

It seems that companies only want to make sequals now and are just too chickenshit to try something new. The last 'new era' game i bought was assetto corsa. Starcraft and diablo i bought before that were absolutely horrible for the above reasons and i only played them for 2 days after release.

My other aspie brother still buys 1 new game every 3 weeks or so, i think he is desperatly trying to find a new game that feels 'old' because he feels the same i guess

Every new game feels like plastic, it feels dead..
Look at the hyped destiny : It is just a generic 2014 era shooter with a different sauce thrown over it (items, yay!)

World of warcraf that i used to play? Just kill 10 boars, a raidboss or some jelly fish and get a better sword that deals 10 more damage than your previous one... only for 15 euros a month, yay!

I am getting increasingly angry at how companies think they can release a new sequal every 10 months 'because there is enough demand' and put as little new innovation in there as possible.

Anyone else feel like this?

I wish I didn't know what you're talking about, but I feel pretty much the same. What really dusts my doilies about modern action games is having to listen to the protagonist talking to off-screen people while I'm desperately trying to survive. I really don't want a bunch of plot, one-liners, character development etc when I'm backpedaling and repeatedly pressing the "fire" button.

Yep, I know exactly how you feel.

Try looking towards indie games, instead of the "big guys". The big guys kinda HAVE to stick to the same things over and over, as well as keeping their games overly easy, because the costs of making them are ABSURD.... they've let it balloon out of control. So all those cool, creative, challenging games we used to get in previous eras? Yeah, that's a HUGE part of why we dont get them anymore.

Like you, I loved games like Doom. Still do. I used to really love the FPS genre in general, back then. But now? "Dodge lots of stuff flying everywhere from many enemy types that have unique patterns and attacks" got replaced with "get behind cover. Pop out, shoot, get back behind cover, repeat." I'd so much rather be out in the midst, charging at enemies while zooming around fireballs and flying skulls or whatever, but since that's too hard and not "realistic", we get.... cover systems. Instead of, you know, MOVEMENT.

Have a look at this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz-qBRxruv0[/youtube]


Yes, I know the name of the game makes no sense whatsoever. But my point is the gameplay itself.... this game is an FPS that's all about dodging stuff while running through absurd platformer-ish environments while fighting giant robot bosses with a zillion different destructible parts and transformations. If there's such a thing as a bullet-hell FPS, that's what this is. Projectiles and lasers and fireballs and whatever EVERYWHERE. No amount of "cover" can stop the giant bosses the game is filled with. That just wont work, it'll just get you stomped. And if you watch that for at least 5 minutes or so, you see just how loopy the game gets. It's fun, it's frantic, it allows me to decide on my own approach (as opposed to "cover is the only thing that works ever"), and there's lots of stuff to dodge. It's satisfying. And screw realism. This has an Orbital Friendship Cannon instead.

ANd that's the sort of game you cant find among the big guys. Indie devs are able to make this kind of thing BECAUSE they're not under major publishers. They can make whatever in the hell they want. I've ended up pretty much dropping the idea of worrying about playing "major" games in the last couple years, and switched entirely to this sort, because I was feeling exactly like you do. That things were just so.... "blah". New games were boring, they were uncreative, and worst of all (for me) they had no CHALLENGE. And some genres were nearly gone entirely. And I cant STAND an overload of story elements... it's like, just let me shoot things or jump on stuff or knock cars around or whatever the gameplay is supposed to be! Gaming as a whole seemed to be losing something... Or so I thought, until I looked further. Now? I buy games so frequently that it's a little silly, because I just keep finding more and more that are so INTERESTING.

So that'd be my suggestion.... dont look in the usual places. Because honestly, you'll not find what you want there. Not anymore. Might be time to look elsewhere. A game like the one I showed there is just one in a zillion, really....

This is exactly the type of games that i miss :

Hundreds of enemies shooting thousands of different stuff at you while you try to dodge everything and shoot back.

I mean, c'mon.. even command & conquer is dead nowadays... I still hope for a total war / risk / command & conquer hybrid campaign mode someday..

Where is the innovation?!

The big publishers make hundreds of millions and year and all they develop is plastic sequals

I think i might try that indy game. Looks fun and it remind me in some way of quake and rise of the triad.

PS : I forgot about one of the last gamse i bought a few years ago.. portal 2. Remember how every review site gave it 10's and praised it? There were people out there like me who hated it, but we got scuffled away with comments like "Nah, the community will develop HUNDREDS of maps".. and we all know how that turned out.. right.. Comments like this has become pretty much standard on review sites so i try to avoid them like the plague now.

For many of the reasons stated above, I avoid buying new games at all. I even sold my Xbox because it was all becoming very tedious.

Though it's not an FPS, I will staunchly defend any Elder Scrolls games, because I've yet to be disappointed by them, and even if I were, there are thousands upon thousands of mods out there made by devoted fans.

There's even a community called Tamriel Rebuilt that's trying to map out and fill in the rest of the world from Morrowind. It's a pretty impressive, massive effort.

And yet, I'd love to go to GameStop, but an FPS, and really enjoy it again. ::sigh::

Yep, that's how I'd been feeling for quite awhile years back. At the time it was all console games for me. But those started to get all stupid, and I found myself buying fewer than before, and going back to older games instead much of the time. Granted, as a fan of retro games I"d do that ANYWAY, but I was playing those way more than I otherwise would.

Ended up switching almost entirely to PC gaming. Best damn idea I'd had in a long time. ANYONE can make games for PC... you dont need some large publisher and distributor to make things work. If you have an idea, and the means to make it? Wether it's by yourself, or with a team, you can go ahead and make and sell that game. So people do. I could list countless examples of great things I've found and downloaded/bought (depends on the game... some are free, actually). The game in the video is just one of hundreds at this point. The one and only problem for me was the fact of games needing a mouse and keyboard.... but I fixed that after very quickly finding an easy way to force absolutely any game to work with a controller. Even something like the PC version of Minecraft. PS3 controller, is what I'm currently using.

As it is, I havent been into a Gamestop in some damn silly amount of time now... been a couple of years, come to think of it... and honestly, I dont miss it. They dont have the sorts of games I want. Or at least, not many of them. Sometimes they will... but then that very same game might turn out to also be on PC as well. That's not to say I dont play console games and such... heck, I got a Wii U and 3DS lately. But the PC is definitely the main thing for me now. I can get the challenge and complexity I want, without all of the stupid bits and obsession with graphics that console games tend to have now. And I can get the GENRES I want. I love roguelikes, for instance. Consoles barely EVER have those. I know there were like, 2 of them on the Wii, but hardly anyone had a damn clue that they existed and most didnt know what a "roguelike" was. Or the shmup genre. I *love* that genre. Absolutely love it. But on MODERN consoles? All there is, is hyper-expensive Japanese import games on the 360. Which also involved buying a very pricey JP 360 unit. I did that, and bought all of those, and that would have been the end of it, but even just on Steam alone, I can find TONS of those.

Also I could probably make some recommendations here, if anyone is looking for something specific. Chances are it exists in some form, and there's a good chance that I know about it. Unless it's a sports game or that type of thing.

Lmao, sports games.

I never could understand the concept behind this. Let's play a simulation, of a game! Lol. I remember everyone getting mad at me during thanksgiving for begging someone to play football (or really anything, at all) with me, instead of WATCHING other people play football. I just can't understand it. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons/explanations that many can come up with, I just highly doubt I'll ever feel the same way personally.

Oh man. Rogue. Rogue was the very first computer game I EVER played. My grandpa got me hooked on it, along with Piers Anthony books, Weird Tales, and plenty of other strange, niche stuff, but I'll always fondly remember Rogue, as I've never beaten, tried multiple times recreating it with QBasic back in the day, and as of right now, this moment, have just found someone who knew what it was.

(granted, I could probably find a bunch of people that knew, but I've never sought any out)

I went and googled Shmup, only to find that it's Shoot 'em Up. Heh. Best stress relievers ever.

Currently, I only play one MUD, and don't play any other games. Having been homeless a few times in the very recent past, I've lost almost everything, and instead of buying anything frivolous (like extra food, or clothes, lol) I'm saving up for a car, so I can't really get any game time unless it's the MUD, or I'm over at a friends house or something.


I feel like eventually, we'll move into the era where there are no more game publishers, only designers, after everyone and their brother makes tons of game designing games.

what you all like I hate and what you hate I love. I wouldnt ever want to go back to old games like sonic or similar games . so boring and too hard.

I love all the battlefield games since bad company. I love skyrim/fallout games. I love metal gear solid.
something to consider. game companies market to the masses so if the masses enjoy these games like I do then thats who they market to. you all just don't seeem to enjoy the same stuff which isn't bad it just means you won't see many games made the way you like. I don't love call of duty anymore but millions and millions of people do. they buy it even though its the same game as mw3 just remade with different back stories and such. still it sells like crazy every year cause pople love it with a passion. so yeah I tell people I don't like it but I don't really complain that they make it cause I understand why they do it.

only games I like from back in the old days are :syptyon filter, theme park, risk. and the first two are just cause of good old memories, I tried playing themepark again but it bores me. risk is fun cause its more open to my imaginiation I do wish we had more games like that, but i've also only met one other game who plays that way, so I realize i'm in the minority on that style of gaming. take iphone games, use to be there were tons of single player or pass and play strat games, now they are gone and all there is is massive online player ones where I just get raped for points.

my main issue with games now is that the ones I want aren't out and are not coming out for years it seems

I never got into sonic, or really any SEGA game that I can think of. Sonic wasn't that hard for me, between me and my brother it got beat in weeks, but it wasn't enjoyable. It was more an excuse to hang out with him since it was one of our few shared interests. During it's heyday, I really enjoyed Super Mario Bros. 1-3, and I binged on FF7 with no memory card. I played it for four straight weeks trying to beat it without dying, and eventually had a 72-hour, caffeine fueled, delirious streak of awesome in which it happened. If I remember correctly, I failed everything that semester because school was were I ended up getting my sleep.

Now, as for Skyrim/Fallout, I adore both of them. Fallout has a setting, style of play, and interesting features that I love, and Skyrim is just amazing in so many different ways, I'm certain I don't need to elaborate on that one.

I don't complain about game companies putting out what's profitable, it makes perfect sense in a capitalistic society, but I am often upset by people who complain about the quality of something, then endorse it with their money by purchasing it, repeatedly. I'm not too bothered by it, though. It will pass. To be completely honest, if the people around me are having fun, I'll play anything even if I am horrible at it. I just like being included and helping to create shared, positive experiences. That's why I've spent hundreds of hours playing Battlefield, simply because my roommate enjoyed it.

I've never heard of Syptyon Filter, or Theme Park, never played metal gear solid, and I'm assuming Risk isn't the board game, which I really did like.


What are these games that you want that aren't coming out for years? I'm curious.

risk is the board game but on play station. I enjoy it cause the option i play under takes away rolling dice and makes it more fun to me. its probably the only game from the original playstation I still play to today.

metal gear solid 5, fallout 4, the division, the next non stupid elderscrolls. gta5(finally coming next month after making us new console people wait a year). i wanted to make sure i didn't miss out on the next fallout and wanted the better version of battfleild5, but little did i know fallout is still 4-5 years out if ever going be made. I wish they would mandate it come out every 2 years. say what you want about call of duty but atleast those who play it get a new game every year instead of being stuck waiting 5 years for each new game.

so I have battlefield and watch dogs(ok, but not as good as gta and saints row, the cops are too tough) I spent $400 and for a year i've only had battlefield and then watch dogs a month or two ago. both play station and xbox promised tons of games and never delivered. which is the usually i guess, but this was the first time I've had a console in the first year. to be fair i'd had to buy a new xbox360 to play bf4 so its not a total waste I guess.

Oh man, i still have risk on steam but it is not as much fun as risk 2 from like 10 years ago. I spent hundreds of hours in risk 2.. it had a new-age board where you could attack australia from south america. You could also attack a country from multiple sides at the same time and do a surge attack after you captured it. Good times.. its a shame it no longer works on windows 7

Yeah, other way around here. It aint that I dont play modern games at all... because I do have plenty of modern ones... but typically those marketed towards the masses absolutely bore me to death for 2 reasons: 1, they're probably filled with cutscenes and story and blah blah blah. I dont watch TV, or movies, *ever*, because I find them mind-numbingly boring.... so I'm not interested in all these games that, more and more, are trying to BE movies. Cannot stand cutscenes, ever, with not even a single exception, so I actively avoid games focused on story. But also 2, they're WAY too easy. I get nothing out of an easy game. There's little satisfaction in beating a game where the enemy just sorta falls over and dies in my general direction, which pretty much sums up my experience with playing most "major" modern titles (okay, pretty much ALL of them actually).


.....there was other stuff I was gonna say in this post but suddenly I cannot remember just what it was.

As it has already been said, it takes a lot of money and a large team to develop a game with modern graphics and gameplay. So with it costing so much to make, they have to make darn sure the game will sell, which is why they follow trends with what sells to the masses. It only seems to take one or two badly received games to take a fairly well known game design label off store shelves unless they get bought out by a undeservingly big name like EA.

With the large team aspect, in the past, it only took a small group of people/friends to design a game, and they could really contribute cool new ideas, and they'd probably get implemented in the game... Where as now, those lower down on the developing team food chain pretty much just have to do their job and shut up when something the director in control of the project wants seems stupid, bland, generic or daft.

I'm more of fluid preference when it comes to modern and retro gaming. I love retro gaming because there are so many great challenges and there is just something magical about playing them that I just cannot put my finger upon, but sometimes I'm tired and just want to relax when I play a game and like wandering about in a JRPG like "Star Ocean The Last Hope" or something western made like "Fallout New Vegas", where I can just take in the scenery and loose story, and most of the challenge comes from just thinking and saving before I accidentally do something... unfortunate, like seeing how many punches a deathclaw can take with my ninja character build.

Before my PS3 broke in June, I was mostly just playing PSN games like... "Castle Crashers", "Dead Nation", "House of the Dead III & IV", "Metal Slug", and "Super Stardust HD". Mostly, those are the games I miss along with wanting to go back and re-face my nemesis "Ninja Gaiden Σ 2", and to try my hand at the first "Lost Planet" again, so I've figured I'll just wait until my birthday for a replacement. Though, yeah, when I want that racing breakneck speed along a tightrope over an active volcano feeling on modern consoles, it can often be found in the Japanese market of action games.

Like sly279 said, the games I like are just further in between... but conveniently, I've got my retro consoles to keep me entertained too and they're very easy to maintain upkeep when something in the hardware stops working. The PS3 died after 8 years, and it's just like... well, it's broken. Stupid disposable technology.

Actually, the "Disposable Technology" part is what I find most disheartening about modern gaming, and why I'm not so interested in keeping up with it. I certainly got my money's worth over the years on my PS3, but I have a fair few games I really like that I have no other console to play them on, and Sony made it pretty clear they're doing away with backwards compatibility so they can resell you your old favorites on their new consoles. It just really bothers me because they're very slow to re-release the games they cut off from being backwards compatible, and they seem very selective on what they rerelease as well. I'm definitely the sort to want to go back and play something twenty plus years later, so I've not invested much interest in following where modern greed is taking modern gaming. If I had the know how with making and maintaining a gaming PC, I'd probably just save up to go with PC gaming since most of my favorites are available for rather cheap on PC. Though I imagine the tradeoff is paying a lot more for the upkeep of the PC, and less to upkeep the library of games over the years, rather than re-buying the games over and over on cheaper consoles that come out every eight or so years... so maybe I wouldn't.

And unless you work somewhere really cool, that "director in control" is some guy in a suit in a different building who knows little, if anything, about videogames...let alone how to design one. They just have to know what the current market trends are, and hope they end up with a real "winner" with sequel potential (which will be almost the same thing as the first game).

And if that doesn't work, shovelware isn't a dirty word. If you keep throwing spaghetti at the wall, eventually some of it will stick.



Not really. If you don't go for the cheapest hardware available, you can put off upgrades for quite a few years...maybe even longer than a console cycle. And even consoles are starting to get pretty expensive.

You can go back a few years and get new or used hardware for decent prices, though video cards are stupid pricey right now. PCs are getting killed off by Microsoft switching to tablets, and id Software isn't around anymore to push hardware further, so I'm not even sure how many upgrades will be required in the future.

i like the movies and don't find them too long, what games have you played that had super long cut scenes?
besides most people today buy games for the multiplayer parts that will keep them playing for months not the story they play once and move on. I buy games like skyrim/fallout for stores and compain. I buy battlefield just for the fun multiplayer. gta is for stress releif, though they do tend to have ok stories.

games like last of us, uncharted, tombraider, etc. don't interest me. It's not that I might not enjoy the games. I played uncharted on the vita and loved it. its that I only play it once and paying $60 for one play is out of my budget.(got the vita uncharted free) I'll pick up last of us when its $20 or less. I'm kinda interested in far cry 4 but have already seen some things that i don't like so i'll wait for it to go down in price too. I get most my games later when they are cheaper.

what you find easy I find hard. I never have beat a tombraider game or games like them.

For cutscenes, it's not that they're super long... it's that they exist at all. And typically, many games that use any, probably use alot. The days of stories being told via text boxes.... which I could read at my own speedy pace, rather than having to wait for some voice actor to say it very slowly... are unfortunately over, and with it my giving a damn about story stuff is also over. And some games really do have LONG ones (RPGs of any sort at all). Or just loooooooong talky bits. Just... ugh.


As for the one playthrough thing.... yep, that's another reason why I dumped the mainstream games, and switched to the sorts of things I play these days. Alot of the games I'm into have absurd replay value. I can think of more than a few games where many players have put 500+ hours into them.... and they're NOT multiplayer games. I've known some players to hit 1000 hours at times. None of this $60 for 9 hours of one playthrough crap. Instead it can be $10 for hundreds; the low price being because devs on PC often arent under any major developers, and dont have to have a budget of 20 zillion dollars to make ONE game, as they dont have to have anything resembling an extreme focus on graphics. And that replay value happens particularly when you're dealing with games that have procedural generation, which is becoming more and more popular on PC, wheras it simply just does not happen on consoles in most cases. In those games, every single playthrough is different, as the game generates everything differently every time. You'll not see the same level twice. And these games can have lots of complexity to them.... something frowned upon in mainstream games, because heaven forbid the player actually have a chance of LOSING, they might not buy the next bloody boring game that developer makes. Despite that complexity does not automatically equal difficult, at all.

As for difficulty, you might want to just try other genres. I find lots of games easy that many find to be insanely hard, but for example, I'm bloody HORRIBLE at FPS games. Absolutely freaking terrible. If there's a team of players that REALLY just loves losing, adding me to the team will help them accomplish that goal, over and over and over again. Something like Tomb Raider, I wouldnt even bother with. Looks dull, probably has stealth (nothing more boring than stealth as far as I'm concerned).