b e a r d
i'm always like 5 seconds away from never playing another new video game ever again. they're just getting more and more shitty. it's not even nostalgia talking because i can go back and play old games i've never played before and find them way more fun than the new slop that comes out. even if it is extremely refined slop, there's still something missing. even something like baldur's gate 3 which was by all accounts an amazing game did absolutely nothing to hook me beyond the 4 hours i played.
half life, FEAR, and portal are games i have played within the last couple of years i hadn't before. they are absolute gems that are still better than the vast majority of shit that's come out in the past decade.
@beardalaxy
Yes, it is sad, but games are no longer made for people like you. But that's not such a big deal once you get over the initial shock.
The industry is huge, and you have literally decades worth of back log anyway. And you're working now, so you won't be binching games that way anymore anyway.
Although, there is one advice I can give. Learn to play the games for everything they offer. Go on a side quest here and there, and try to not be satisfied with just "good enough". Once you do that, the hours for some games might unironically explode all of a sudden.
@beardalaxy
Fifa/call of duty was the black pill on that topic. While the gamer culture is still a strong driving force behind sales of consoles, there are two paralel economies to ours.
1) Mobile/facebook moms.
2) Sports games + COD
And these paralel economies are just as insular as you could immagine, they are still huge drivers of revenue. But I don't see that as a bad thing of itself, since both do boost the gaming economy in general. The issue is just, that the entire topic of gaming is insanely convoluted to talk about, since you're covering several cultures.
Ironically enough, I kinda had to accept this while going to conventions. They are THE DEFINITION of culture clash, since it's the ONLY FUCKING PLACE to socialize for young people, no matter if they are gamers like me, trooned out weirdos, or even the Artist chicks. Those are 3 COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CULTURES, all forced into the same place. And it works about as well as London right now :D
@LukeAlmighty this sounds weird but i kind of don't give a fuck about the gaming economy if it means we're going to keep getting shittier and shittier games to please the masses. the fact that $10, $15, $20 games can come out and still be wildly successful with not nearly as large of a team, budget, or development time frame means that the "gaming economy" is completely broken and the AAA devs are out of their minds.
@beardalaxy
Again, here I disagree.
Unity and unreal are financed by the gaming economy as a whole. Not just our games.
Same goes for software like Vulcan and hardware graphics cards etc.
I seriously no longer see the issue in this.
@beardalaxy
Enjoy the art you have. Wasting more thought on the slop made for others is not worth your time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iocRbdvUgJ4
@beardalaxy
Although, when I think about it, you might be right........... in the mobile market.
Mobile market had been monopolized by casinos so much, that the entire platform had sufficated all the normal games are impossible to find. And the platform itself was never adapted.
That is why gaming phones were always a dead platform.
@LukeAlmighty i'm not even really thinking about mobile games much. i barely think about them as games at all. i'm talking about how insanely popular games in general have become and how many, for lack of a better term, normies play them.
In the meantime, https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.chadenas.cpudefense/ is neat. As is https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete/ but it's barely a game; at least it's GPS-ish, so it fulfills the "not strictly inferior to PC" criteria.
@Zerglingman @beardalaxy
They literally ported GTA SA and Xcom Enemy unknown to phones.
The power is there, and there was the good will too, but the app store got way too much cash from kids stealing mom's credit card, so they killed the market on purpose.
@Zerglingman @beardalaxy
Therefore, turn strategy like Xcom was ideal.
When I was experimenting with emulation, I found, that Fire emblem was 9/10 of the way there already with the control scheme for example.
I don't consider FE to be a very good game because it has that one fatal flaw common in turn-based strategies.
@Zerglingman @beardalaxy
At this point, I am not sure what you're even trying to argue.
Are you trying to tell me, that it's a good thing, that gaming market is infested with child casinos? Or, that no non-casino AAA games could ever work on a mobile device? That ergonomics of gamepad cannot possibly fit to a phone?
I don't get it.
Everything else runs from "it works well enough that it's not really worse than on a PC" to "why did you even bother".
@Zerglingman @beardalaxy
Mobile gaming isn't about peak performance. It is about being stuck on airplane for 4 hours.
Or going to and from work every single day for 45 minutes.
I need to fix my ereader (or go buy that trashy Amazon one that's been sitting in that opshop for the last 6 months) and set up a pipeline to shove manga onto it automatically.
@Zerglingman @LukeAlmighty i can't remember what the game was called, i got it for free with my first smartphone... but there were points in real life kind of life those poke stops in pokemon go, and i think three different teams that had to visit those spots and try and take them over from each other and build up defenses and stuff. it was a pretty cool idea, i wish i could have explored it more because i never was able to drive and none of my friends had it since i think it wasn't on iphone and none of my friends have androids lol.
>I kinda had to accept this while going to conventions. They are THE DEFINITION of culture clash, since it's the ONLY FUCKING PLACE to socialize for young people
That's probably where the problem starts. Two decades ago gaming as a culture was neither precisely defined, nor as monetized and controlled as it is now.
Nowadays this same type of monetization and control has been applied to every social space as well.
Back then you had young people developing their own culture and the gaming industry functioning as some sort of input and tool to do so. Nowadays every social space is heavily shilled and the participants forced to conform to whatever each corporation wants to push at the time.
Independent and open source gaming clubs are the answer.
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@Re_L @beardalaxy
> Independent and open source gaming clubs are the answer.
I am listening
@LukeAlmighty @Re_L luke you're literally a part of one already xD GAME liberty dot CLUB
Nothing too grand, just people enjoy playing together without the need for these centralized platforms. As mainstream games get sloppified even further, that's all that will remain being fun.
@Zerglingman has the right idea with his open source gaming club. Can't find the link to the chatroom, if he sees this he'll drop it in the thread.
It's on hiatus for now; current focus is general lfg channel. That l4d2 group (mostly) isn't in it yet.
@Nesano @beardalaxy
You mean, that you can create a breathing open world full of characters living their individual lives with their individual problems, and if you add a propper modding tools, this combination makes a perfect platform for individualized experience?
@Nesano @beardalaxy
Yes, Skyrim is mechanically broken, but mods can fix mechanics.
The world of Skyrim though is a deeply intimite dark fantasy. It has a ton of hidden depth, that
a proper game can be build around.
That is why I was insanely disappointed with Fallout 4 and didn't even bother checking out stardield. Because not even Bethesda has the common sense to look, what is it they actually did create.
@LukeAlmighty @Nesano Skyrim is actually really good somewhere deep down, but there are a lot of problems with it for sure, from the mechanics to the story itself. Bethesda's lore is all over the fucking place and that game is no exception. Mods help you get immersed more for sure, and there is a wealth of lore and things like that which are really interesting to explore. The game is still, functionally, not really that great though, and the fact that they have been parading it around for over a decade in the state that it is in really does say something about the common consumer and the general gaming industry.
@beardalaxy @Nesano
> the fact that they have been parading it around for over a decade in the state that it is in really does say something about the common consumer
Counter argument:
@LukeAlmighty @Nesano mods don't mean as much when they update the game to allow for new, subpar, paid mods to be purchased with a shitty monetization scheme and that breaks all current existing mods for everyone. just saying.
none of what mods actually provide is bethesda's doing. if anything, it has made their games worse. i mean, it got to the point where modders don't even want to do shit with starfield and nobody is playing that. i do think skyrim is probably peak bethesda, but it is also what led to their downfall.
@beardalaxy @Nesano
BECAUSE STARFIELD IS A DEAD WORLD!!!
At that point, it's easier to make the game from the base up. Why are you ignoring the point of what bethesda did provide?
@LukeAlmighty @Nesano bro i'm not saying it is a horrid game like starfield is. i'm saying they put out a heavily flawed game that could only be salvaged with mods, barely fixed any of it, and then kept re-releasing it over and over again without really fixing any of the core issues and people just kept buying it more and more, and that led to what qualities they did have as a game studio becoming diminished, which led to something like starfield coming out.
@beardalaxy @Nesano
Of course they couldn't just fix it. Fixing the base game would destroy the game's ecosystem.
@LukeAlmighty @Nesano what do you mean by "the game's ecosystem?" do you mean mods? because if that's the case then every single time they update it, including to add paid mods, it breaks that ecosystem as well and people have to scramble to get it working again.
@beardalaxy @Nesano
Yes, payed mods are retarded... Next question?
@LukeAlmighty @Nesano also, i just want to say that the game being bad or super janky or whatever doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. i really enjoyed a modded playthrough i did that was survival focused where i didn't do any fast travel and wasn't even a dragonborn. stayed away from the main story completely. put 50-60 hours into it for the most time i've ever played one skyrim playthrough. i only stopped because i felt like my character's story arc was completed and i was going hard on the roleplay, i'm sure i could have kept playing for a lot longer if i wanted to. still don't think it's anywhere close to the greatest game of all time or something though, like a lot of people say.
heck, it's #81 on my top 100 games list.
@LukeAlmighty >games are no longer made for people like you
ain't that the damn truth. that's why most of the time i find something i really like it's either in a mod, an indie game with a very specific target audience, or a game that nobody else seems to like.
well, modern day developers even say this out loud. they do not make games for people like me anymore because it isn't profitable. it is far more profitable to give slop to general audiences who will eat it up like livestock.