Back when video game were starting to gain traction, they were made with heart. Of course, at the end of the day, the people making them were still paid workers trying to earn as much as possible. But they also wanted to make GOOD games.

2 decades on, Baldurs Gate 2, Fallout 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, and others still have so much detail that many modern games can't quite compare. And they were made on FAR inferior machines, with less budget.


I will take Baldur's Gate 2 any day over Battlefield or any other crap game


Nowadays, games have gone mainstream. Many casuals want to play. Games are made not as an art, but as a microtransaction hub. All of it is just an elaborate trap to convince a rich kid to spend 1200 dollars on a skin.


That's why i appreciate people like Hideo Kojima. He knows he makes weird games that won't ever go mainstream, but he doesn't care. He likes what he does.


Is gaming doomed? Have casuals destroyed any hope?

No, no it's not, Casuals are what keep most of the industry going funnily enough.

Hideo Kojima isn't perfect and is now as mainstream as any other, don't worry about it,

No, there are simply more products on the market than ever before.

Just pick those who you like and be happy.

there are still good games made

Ages ago, I opened this thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_thread_of_random_questions

It was for legitimate questions that didn't deserve a full thread. I suggest you move yours there rather than relentlessly spamming questions. In most forums (read: all but this) flooding the boards is frowned upon.

2020 was a great year for gaming, IMO. We got Doom Eternal and Cyberpunk. There are plenty others that were released, too.

so much for 2020 is just dandy for him

Mainstream games have been stagnating for years now. The games have become more shallow, because developers are focusing so much more on graphics than anything else. And, unfortunately, a majority of the more casual player base seems to care overwhelmingly about graphics.

I think there is a strong parallel with big budget Hollywood movies, where they put so much focus and development spend on CGI. Also, actors/actresses are chosen primarily for their looks, rather than actual acting ability. If you look at which are typically the most highly rated movies (on Rotten Tomatoes, or wherever), it tends to be older ones where the focus was more on acting, dialogue, writing. A good example are the Star Wars movies - the originals are far and away the highest quality. The newer ones are relatively shallower and focus too much on pretty visuals.

It seems that the mainstream masses tend to have a shallow taste, so once an artistic franchise goes mainstream, it tends to pander to those masses and it loses the depth and subtlety that made it mainstream in the first place. It's quite rare that you see big budget blockbuster movies being nominated for or winning Oscars. It tends to be movies that are made by
smaller studios, which are focusing more on the art and originality than mainstream mass appeal.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you want good games, the golden oldies and smaller, indie developers seem to be mostly where it is at.

Well, i wrote 5 paragraphs? I don't get your point

Gaming is indeed doomed, imo, and shame on y'all for downrating one of OP's higher effort topics (save the jokes there too, please).

Contrary to some, I don't think some of the awful practices we see nowadays such as microtransactions and DRM schemes are the direct reason why gaming is doomed. Rather, I think they are symptoms of what happened once gaming went mainstream (I am aware that DRM existed even in the earlier days but certainly not in the draconian form we see now). It needed to remain underground/open to stay focused on art and the "for gamers by gamers" ideal.

Essentially, all the bad practices we see now are able to remain and perpetuate because the casual users who don't care (and who have been conditioned by media and culture not to care) are so great in number. So there cannot be any meaningful pushback by the "vocal minority" of users who do care. This is exactly what I fear is happening/has happened with GOG's proprietary client which appears to meet the meaningful criteria of being DRM.

And that's where I think it'll never die. On the contrary. It's never been easier to create games with all the frameworks and toolkits available nowadays. Nobody needs to learn Assembler to write a game any more.

The real enthusiasts will always be there, and keep making their games. They won't be "mainstream", they only really were mainstream when gaming itself wasn't mainstream. But they are there, and will be. You just have to know where to look, and don't have to be blinded by the shiny-sparkling-triple-A-big-$$$-shenanigans.

I like to think the same but what concerns me is that at this point "indie gaming" has become an industry-of-sorts on its own. Perhaps it's just a matter of subjective taste, but I am not seeing a lot of the games I want among the indie scene either. Basically I want what I feel is a big, complete experience, without any of the AAA bs. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, this is hard to find. I do agree there will hopefully always be individual instances like developers selling DRM-free games from their own websites, etc.

the main difference is testing: back then it was humans playing the game at every stage of the build and finding bugs before the game shipped.

today this job is farmed out to AI servers that "play" a game 48 hours a day and don't really understand whats going on unless it hits a crash.

back then "riddled with bugs" = today's solid stable build so ship it out

It's true, gaming was more fun when it was a niche hobby, but that is true about everything tech related. Just look at how youtube changed, once upon a time it wasn't tied to google and it didn't have ads all over the place. you could actually find original content there, and content creators didn't have to worry about censorship or their videos getting buried by millions of others. There was an actual community based on real people, that is slowly being lost now due to bots, trolls, etc.