Real boomer energy. While graphics improvement flattened out, other things (that are more important) have continued improving.
Off the top of my head… Zoomers got: Disco Elysium, The Outer Wilds, Undertale, and a million other indies.
I mean, millennials also got those
Most of these titles don’t have mainstream appeal though. The example is true for the majority of players.
I do love me some indie games (probably 95% of what I play atm are Noita and Balatro) but I’ll admit it was really cool as a child / teenager / young adult to see the improvements over time.
Minecraft for me lol, from age 9 to 20 (zoomer)
this is just a millenial version of a boomer meme. you guys are really shaping up to become what you hated. complaining about kids these days not enjoying the same shit you did when you were a kid. what next, you gonna complain about how gen alpha are destroying the economy because they’re not buying avocados or something?
stop the inter-generational fighting, honestly, it’s cringe and a huge distraction from the fact that the rich fucks in charge are looting us for all we’re worth. let’s fight them, instead of eachother
complaining about kids these days not enjoying the same shit you did when you were a kid
I have 0 idea how you could have read that from the image. It’s about the seemingly exponential improvement in graphics or just how fast things were changing in gaming.
lol chill
stop the inter-generational fighting, honestly, it’s cringe and a huge distraction from the fact that the rich fucks in charge are looting us for all we’re worth
Bro, take a deep breath, that is just a meme. People can be nostalgic sometimes, there is nothing wrong with that.
except its not just nostalgia, is it? over 50% of this meme is dedicated to dumb culture war shit.
I Love resident evil 4. Great game.
Shit like this made me think we would hit singularity around now,
Oh boy, was I naive
VR actually went through this from 2014-2024 or so. the original Oculus DK had such chonky pixels, very rudimentary tracking, game integration sucked, no hand controls. it rapidly got better to the point where playing Riven is like straight up being teleported into the world…
…except for like, being able to run around or touch things. so it’s stayed niche.
Not as widespread as the systems shown above though. Older VR games and even VR in general is pretty niche.
What’s the status of VR right now? Any major advancement? I know oculus got bought by Facebook, so no way in hell I’d ever get that.
Strong rumors of Valve’s new VR launching this year. Quite excited for that. Otherwise, the status (in my opinion) is stagnant. I still have fun occasionally getting into VR though.
regrettably, Meta is the state of the art for VR. the Meta Quest 3 is stunningly crisp for the price point. it’s almost retina-scale with the pixels, the head/spatial tracking is extremely accurate and doesn’t require any base station or wired attachment, and you can fluidly stream VR games from your PC wirelessly at 1080p and like 120fps with nearly no latency or reality sickness.
I played Myst and Riven while I was sick with COVID last year, and it was one of the top five visual experiences of my lifetime (along with seeing the Grand Canyon and taking psychedelics.)
Meta has also recently finally cracked the holy grail of non-chonky AR glasses with full FoV, though the gallium nitride waveguide process is quite expensive and yields are too poor for them to sell it. but they look like slightly nerdy glasses that let you see holograms superimposed on your vision, even outdoors in the light.
unfortunately, VR is still anti-social and there’s not much content there, and the company leading the way is awful. but even just for Riven alone it was worth it to me.
Ah hopefully other companies will advance becuase there is no way I’m giving my money to that shit company
Gen X version:
Year 1: Pong
Year 5: PacMan
Year 10: Super Mario Brothers
We got lied to so hard on cover art, it took decades to believe anything.
This site shows some top lies, and shows that Activision, didn’t lie so much.
Don’t you dare knock Adventure!
Yeah holy shit, we really went through eras playing games, theyve pretty much only ever known fortnite, like modern 18 year olds
Nah, zoomers went through the whole indie horror game gauntlet, Minecraft, terraria, etc.
Edit Addendum: Also, don’t forget about games like Friday Night Funkin and the plethora of mods that it spawned. The Five Nights at Freddy’s fandom was basically a cult at some point and still memed. Cuphead was a big enough phenomenon to get it’s own animated series. Stardew Valley is another game that will doubtless have influence beyond it’s years. Motherfucking Undertale, sans memes, etc. VA-11 HALL-A was pretty popular for a while too. Don’t forget about Among Us. Lethal Company is still getting updates. SCP Secret Laboratory is another one people forget about, but is still a game with a dedicated player base. Kenshi…oh man great game released in 2018. Fucking Persona 5 and Metaphor ReFantaszio, great games. MiSide is a new game, a horror game that doubtless has a small yet dedicated following. No Man’s Sky is great, especially after they fixed it. Many Gen-Z doubtless remember Subnautica. Ultrakill is something that is quite special.
I mean, they’ve decided to stick with fortnite, roblox, minecraft, whatever. But, there have been thousands of great games released that they just chose not to play.
Either only Fortnite, or a mix of that + Minecraft + Roblox.
I did 10 yrs of TF2. Better graphics might have come in that time, but I only noticed the phlogastinator.
Pyro pre nerf had one of the most op build of degreaser (any) flare gun and axtinguisher
It was also very fun, along the lines of scout cleaver sandman pre nerf
Still using dead ringer after they nerfed it several times over lol
Zoomers played Minecraft
Millennials and Alpha play(ed) Fortnite
You could also put 10 years of RuneScape or WoW for millennials and a plethora of games that came out between 2010-2020 for Zoomers
Millennials did not play Fortnite.
My wife’s current fortnite addiction would suggest otherwise
Not true! I installed it and played for 5 minutes once!
Yeah, I played a few times right when it came out, but put it down, didn’t feel like it was for me. I am currently 37, so pretty middle of the pack millennial. I’m sure someone born in '95 played.
My sister was born in 97, my brother in 93, and me in 90 and I always have to remind myself she isn’t, technically, a millennial.
No idea if she’s played Fortnite, though.
Parents playing with their kids
Runescape changed quite a bit in that 10 year span
Yeah but then osrs came along
And now there’s 2009scape!
Lol was gonna reply that, which osrs? XD
Gen X version:
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(Had to cheat and put an arcade game for 1980, because I’m not aware of any notable console games from that year. In reality the console games from then looked much, much worse than Pac-Man)
Home console in 1980:
That’s a good choice! Probably the most popular one of that year. I never had a 2600 and started with a 5200, so my knowledge of it is lacking.
Even as a millennial this is one of the first games I played (and I still love it). I dumped the ROM so I can play it forever.
Maybe graphical advancements have slowed down (especially since it takes half a decade to make a game now) but this feels a little disingenuous. Bottom is supposed to be Fortnite? I can see someone playing WoW or Quake or UT for 10 years since its release too.
Theres more variety in gaming today then there ever was, many more single dev games succeeding because they dont need to impress the likes of EA to publish their game thanks to the internet and free distribution. More platforms to choose from and multiplatform releases are more common.
The successes of one game are not reflective whole medium or the current state of gaming.
That’s the average “modern thing bad” to you. Especially the ones shitting on things around kids
I really hoped we millennials would remember getting shit on constantly and maybe not do it.
It’s also really ignoring how much Fortnite has changed over the years. It’s like saying 10 years of LoL and using the same three pictures from season 1.
Everyone who doesn’t play LoL will think you’re an idiot if you play ranked, that hasn’t changed in 15 years
I mean… sure, but when i was a kid if I wanted a free game I had to pirate it but all you need nowadays is to have an epic game store account and you get a free legal game every week. I would have loved that as a kid.
I mean, they can still play the old games. My kiddo loved Kirby on the NES Classic
The point of the meme is the experience of witnessing the unique rate of progress in game engines, not the variety. There’s definitely more variety now than ever before, if you go looking for it l, and I say that as a 40 year old curmudgeon.
Exactly. Several limits were loosened or removed entirely. The SNES was the first console with actual pixel transparency, the PSX, despite being weaker than the Saturn and the N64, was the king of the 90s. The jump in graphical and sound quality was always night and day from the Atari era all the way to the PS3/360 era (sound probably peaked in the PS2 era, with DVD quality)
Even on the PC, the jump from 3 years’ worth of advances was astonishing. Just compare the original Doom, 1993, with Quake, 1996
And here’s Quake 3, 1999
HL1 vs HL2 shows a similar rate of progress
Graphically, I think the two Half Life are more akin to UT99 and UT2003, similar year of release, too. UT2004 didn’t change graphics, but I remember that, if you set everything on the graphics to maximum, the announcer will exclaim “HOLY SHIT!”
didn’t feel like it to me at the time, but I was glad they finally developed the technology to prevent Gordon’s boots from being slippery as fuck. god hl1 platforming was abysmal.
With the graphics specifically though, IMO half life 2 (2004) is more similar in terms of fidelity to Portal 2 (2011) than to Half Life 1 (1998). Which does make sense as Half Life 2 and Portal 2 were made in the same engine ofc.
Not the most active current popular games for them tho, if you’re around 18 rnow fortnite was prob the main/only mutiplayer title played, my friends and I played a ton of games, jumping every month to what was popular, its consistently been fortnite for kids for a while now, I have 18 year old nephews that have only ever played fortnite, which is honestly a non issue if that works for them, the goal is to get dopamine, move on when you stop getting dopamine
They can play the same game for years and I cant even open one of hundreds I have avilable to me most days, I think they and sports game player win, they seem happier.
the goal is to get dopamine, move on when you stop getting dopamine
Is that the goal? I want more from my games than just poking my brain. I sometimes play games that challenge my reactions, sometimes ones that challenge my thinking. Superhot and Braid provided interesting time-related puzzles. Portal had some good lateral thinking puzzles.
I’m not exactly playing educational games, but when I played Assassin’s Creed games, the historical bits I found interesting were things I could learn more about outside the game. When I played Hearts of Iron 4, it was global politics around the time of WWII. Uboat and other sub games taught me a bit about submarine tactics in WWII. Oxygen not included taught me things I didn’t know about thermodynamics and materials, even if it is extremely simplified. Age of Empires and Total War were gateways to learn about medieval styles of warfare.
Even Sea of Thieves, which involves incredibly simplified sailing was what prompted me to learn about how square-masted sailing ships actually worked.
And, of course, all the flight simulators I’ve played over the years has taught me a lot about how to actually fly planes.
To me, if all you’re getting from a game is a bit of dopamine hits, you’re really missing out. It’s like watching the same movie over and over, or reading the same book over and over.
You think they didn’t do different things? Play different games?
Don’t be an old crusty fucker
This is an critique on the gaming industry, not the players.
I remember moving from the first sims to the second which was a spectacular difference, and then the sims 3 expanding on the tech with an open world. You could smell the future on the book that came in the box with the disc that you read on the way home.
Compare the early and modern versions of wolfenstein. The first game was revolutionary, can you tell apart generic stills from the last 3 games?
Some millennial have been playing WoW for over twenty years at this point.
This is me except it’s RuneScape
It was Mabinogi for me.
Same
Final Fantasy XIV has only been out for… Hmm… Well, yeah, I guess it’s gonna be one of those days.
This is just perceived technological advances in the same span of time, not what games different generations prefer.
While Moore’s Law isn’t dead the slow down is apparent. From game graphics to phones and other areas of life, the perception is stagnation.
For example I’d notice little difference in a flagship android phone from 10 years ago or AAA video game compared to something that came out this year. Hell I might gain some features like a headphone jack or IR blaster.
You couldn’t say the same if you went back 10 years from 2012 to 2002 tech. You’d go from a smartphone to a cellphone that probably didn’t even have a color screen nevermind a camera, web browser, touchscreen etc.
I think you would notice a big difference from a 10 year old phone.
A flagship of 2015, like the Samsung Galaxy S6, is a medium-low specs phone of today (3GB RAM, 32GB storage), but with smaller screen. For most people that only use social media and messaging, it’s perfectly serviceable.
They’re physically bigger, higher resolution and thinner (but you can’t easilly replace the battery when it inevitably dies) and the number of cameras went up from 1 to 3.
The difference between a phone from 10 years ago and one from 20 years ago is the difference between the 6th generation of the Apple iPhone and the Motorola Razr (a non-smart flip-phone) both lauded phones at their time.
The same massive deceleration in the speed of improvement compared to the period from the 80 up to the 2010s seems to have happenned all over Tech: my generation (Gen X) saw the appearance of consumer computing (Spectrum, Amiga, the original Mac back in the 80s) which accelerated to massive adoption amongs consumers and informatization of companies with the PC at the same time as mobile phones became mass market (the 90s), then the Internet and the digitalization of consumer technology with things like Digital Cameras (end of the 90s and the 00s), then mobile networked computing in the form of smart phones and tablets (late 00s and 10s).
What exactly is the great life-changing technological breakthrough of the late 2010s and the 2020s? The only one I can think of is the weaponization of Social Networks for mass manipulation, which is hardly an improvement.
I remember hearing various venture capitalists and the like talking about finding the next iPhone around circa 2012 because at that point phones were already starting to mature
I haven’t seen much improvement to game mechanics or graphics in the last decade, personally. Just little nudges forward, sidegrades, or screaming drops back to the worst, most capitalist parts of the 80s
In my biased opinion, The Finals has a really interesting mechanic that you can’t find anywhere else. The destruction absolutely feels “next gen”, all the rubble is synchronized so everyone sees and actually interacts with the same destruction. It’s different than just blowing up a wall for an entrance, it’s a core part of the gameplay.
Red faction guerilla
Oh look, my favorite game! The devs treat the fans (both casual and competitive) so well!
I would hope it is more of the magic of dreaming of the future of video game graphics. It was so exciting to see the next generation of graphics come out.
I am hoping to see the same with VR. But unless there is some kind of technological breakthrough that they are willing to sell to consumers, I don’t see it jumping forward very fast over the next few decades.
I think Gabe Newell said in an interview, VR is actually moving to fast. There is no point in pushing a product to market and spending all that time and money needed for that, when by the time you make it to the market the research has moved so much, your tech and product is obsolete already.
At some point they will release products again and they will be amazing (hopefully) but we dont get the continuous advances like with grafics back in the day
IDK, the modern high budget VR games are still pretty on-par with Half Life Alyx
Thanks! It is good to have something to look forward to! I guess that explains the massive dev time for the new steam headset!
Personally and as a gamer since the 80s (and nowadays making games myself), I think the last great breakthrough improvement was procedurally generated game spaces, and that stuff dates back to Minecraft in 2009.
The improvements in visuals are well into the diminishing returns part of the curve, the richness and size of custom crafted game spaces has hit a cost ceiling (hence budgets in the $100 million mark for AAA games, even with partial authomatisation of things like model generation and painting via stuff like Houdini and Substance), and the only direction of growth I can see is the gameplay itself, where the improvements from the naturally emergent gameplay of multi-player were a one-off and have been more or less stuck at the same point for a decade.
For a while I had some hope that AI (specifically LLMs) would yield a massive jump in the richness of the game world in story terms (imagine an RPG were all NPCs have genuine complex stories with realistic interactions, all generated on the fly and even influenced by you) but plain LLMs have large hardware requirements merelly to interact with one person (powerful GPUs, at least 12GB of VRAM) on top of the requirements to run the game itself, so that kind of game improvement seems unlikely before the end of the decade.
There’s been a lot of resources invested in improving local LLMs very recently, and Meta of all companies has been investing a ton of researcher time into local LLMs since the start of the AI boom with Llama and the like
Given the timelines for game development I’m still hoping for more emergent storytelling and gameplay at some point via AI, even if that’s just to generate interiors for buildings that can’t be entered and dialogue for silent NPCs
Everything in game design is a meaningful choice. What does the choice of making the game for VR mean, exactly? I started this sentence planning to follow up with a few ideas but I’m honestly coming up short.
I work with zoomers and tbf a lot of them play many different varied games but some of them genuinely still play roblox and fortnite into their late 20s/early 30s. But tbf to them there’s the millennials that have been playing shit like wow, eve, and osrs for 20 years
I’m playing Split Fiction with my wife right now and it’s one of the best coop player games I have played in awhile. Back in my childhood, the best we had was Toe Jam and Earl.
I feel like we had decent co-op games back then.
World of Illusion (the one with Mickey and Donald). The Chaos Engine.
Hell, a lot of arcade games had co-op modes, like Gauntlet.
Not many, I’ll admit, but at least it was more than one company making them.
Outside of shoot em up or hack and slash. Something with a good story that involved real coop to win. Not many.
Let’s be honest, if we wanted a game story in those days it was in the manual.
That’s actually pretty fair.
