I wish devs were allowed to just make the games they want and take as much time they want making them.
There is no better feeling then enjoying a piece of media that you can feel the creators passion from. There is something perverse about the way capitalism strips out the soul from art.
Cookie Clicker embodies this. The creator/main dev (out of a two-person team) says
and will go years between updates.
Capitalism incentivizes to make every bideogame into the same thing, but different dressing and once you realize that you can’t unsee it. It’s just going through the same thing over and over again and the only thing that tends to change is the fidelity. Exceptions where it doesn’t happen, really makes it visible even more.
The modern game development model is just to make a game people never stop playing and keep spending money on; a landlord model of sorts sold with the pr branding of “live service game”. Playing diablo 4 (which is total dogshit) really made me appreciate single player campaign based games, which I think are the pinnacle of gaming and it’s not even close.
Right now I’m really enjoying octopath traveler 2. And before that I went super retro and played digital devil saga 1&2. Graphics are not the biggest draw for me anymore. Gameplay, music and plot (including characters) are what I want in a game. For me good graphics only really help when the other bases are covered.
Every single game releases undercooked now and the expectation is it’ll be finished in a few more years after a dozen patches and 3 DLCs. literally every game
KCDII was a very pleasant surprise in that regard. A smooth launch with minimal bugs, a bunch of features and a great plot.
Yup that’s another terrible sales model. I actually forgot about that one lol. I don’t know what’s more annoying tbh. Because I know what live service games are about so I avoid them. When I go into a single player game and I need to buy dlcs that’s like absolute worst. also I find it’s hard to get back into a game for a dlc. Like elden ring. Never played the dlc (although fromsoft does handle dlc better from what I’ve heard).
I’m going through Final Fantasy 1-6. I’m on 2 at the moment.
While I don’t think it’s for everyone, to be able to just put on an old game, and enjoy the simpicity of it really works for me.
There is definitely a bit of a barrier to playing old games. But I think if you enjoy a specific game series then it’s not too hard to go back to older games in that series. That’s what got me to play retro games
I like games with interesting plots, but then I can only play it once. I like roguelikes that change every time I play them. Some roguelikes (less traditional ones) have stories such as Hades. And Dwarf Fortress generates a whole mythology and history with every new world.
I might check out dwarf fortress. Hades 1 & 2 were both amazing. I tried dead cells but holy crap that game is hard.
Especially the “worse” graphics part. If you can’t make your game look good while running at 144hz on my 3080TI, you’re just bad at art. They were making amazing looking games in the 90s that I can run on my fucking phone. No amount of “technological advancement” is going to make up for being artistically incompetent.
The pursuit of realistic graphics is the root of all of modern gaming’s ills.
Stylized graphics age significantly better than “realism”. Jet Set Radio looks amazing today. Katamari Damacy another great example.
I don’t have time to look it up right now, but I’ll edit this comment later today with a few videos that go into the specific graphical techniques Nintendo used to make Wind Waker and Super Mario Galaxy look so good
edit: idk if editing and tagging in a reply works, but @regul@hexbear.net, here are the links I mentioned:
How The Wind Waker Redefined Cel Shading
How scrolling textures gave Super Mario Galaxy 2 its charm
If you enjoy those videos, definitely check out the longer videos as well as the shorts on that channel.
Fully agreed. I will once again admit to appreciating videogamedunkey, whose Bad Graphics video’s prescience lives on.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I always used to say that Microsoft and Sony spent all of their time measuring each other’s dicks, vis-a-vis graphics. But Nintendo was in the corner, pushing out underpowered devices, that focused on the fun.
Real, I had more fun with Deltarune this year than any long ass AAA game, and some of the graphics are (on purpose admittedly) crusty as hell
Nothing really needs to look better than Gothic 1, maybe some more physics in there. Half Life 2 still looks really good and that’s two decades old at this point.
I constantly use Half-Life 2 as an example! Especially regarding faces and facial animation. “Why the fuck is this running at 25fps when Half-Life 2 looks better and ran on my 9500GT”
There’s a like a period of visual improvement for about 15 years after Half Life 2, basically none of it really worth it, before it turned into using AI to do some bullshit and now every modern game looks like you’re having a migraine
Unreal Engine 5 is ruining everything, just as UE4 did when it first came out. All these first gen games using it run so horribly. Someday I’ll get to play Clair Obscur without constant microsutters.
They’ll eventually hit actual photorealism, and then they’ll be forced to start focusing on the art.
I dunno what you’re talking about, we need to make the animators work overtime so that each of Joel’s pubic hairs have accurate physics in The Last of Us: Remastered Remake Remastered Edition
its so bad that i know someone who i show cute, amazing little indy games to and they are almost always like “eh, i dont like the graphics” and never give it a try these people fucking exist
You know whats funny ? A buddy of mine has a similar reaction these kind of games but still ends up playing them . Which props to him I guess
The trend for a good game is this: more gameplay for less money. The more bloated the game, the cheaper the $s per hour of gameplay.
Using this I can prove that Nethack is the best game of all time because it’s free and varied enough to have fun playing it frequently for over a decade.
This is correct, and I would add Dwarf Fortress to this category too.
No we should stop all games being made. We have enough games all the games already exist there will be no more games.
Except light no fire I will allow hello games to continue indefinitely
I’m so excited for Light No Fire.
Im holding off too much excitement incase Sean is pulling another Peter Molyneux.
A game the size of earth or larger is actually an absurd concept and if it turns out to be real ill eat my keyboard
Iirc they are using the same tech as NMS and we all know that even the smaller planets and moons are huge when on the surface. I expect a ton of bugs early on and throughout but that’s just the nature of Hello Games. NMS was a herculean task after all.
I do wanna wait for the game to get smoothed out a bit after launch but I’m also morbidly curious to see it from the very beginning. It might be a day one purchase but not sure yet. I started NMS 9 years after release but that was on purpose. I kept up on it throughout it’s painful launch and updates until I felt it was “finished” and also functional on Linux.
I mean its possible that Hello Games faceplants with Light No Fire but based on their track record they will probably keep updating and supporting that game till 2040
I keep posting this whenever people ask for recommendations: Iji is a freeware, 17-year-old solo-dev passion project with low res pixel art graphics that still knocks the socks off games being released today. It has a banger soundtrack, well developed characters, and a plot that engages with and pushes the medium.
I’ve been told gaming “has never been better.” Well, suit yourself, I’ve got a thousand-game PS2 library to go through.
Someone saying this could either mean:
a) There are so many indie games being made by passionate devs with interesting ideas that you could play a new one every day and never run out
or
b) graphics have never been better (thanks to record levels of dev crunch)
there’s also sickos out there who genuinely enjoy live service battlepass slop
No… that’s not true… that’s impossible!
RPG fans have been eating good the past few years too. BG3, KCDII, Elden Ring SotE and Nightreign, Claire:Obscur Re:Fantazio, and a dozen more excellent titles.
Where can someone acquire said PS2 library? Asking for a friend
Vimm’s Lair is my go-to
🙏
I’d personally say Myrient is the best ROM and ISO site out there.
Big
to Vimm’s Lair for being around so long, though, I remember downloading NES ROMs from there around 1998 
I know a major reason for it is nostalgia, but I just keep going back to my PS2 games over and over. It’s unbelievable how good some of those games look on 25 year old hardware limitations. And they still managed to develop games in like a maximum of 2 years.
Final Fantasy X and XII are favorites
Hell I even like X-2 and no I won’t apologize
Girls rock.rpg is a fun one
Damn right, you get it
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Nooo, you can’t just play a sequel to a 36 year old arcade game over all the 7080 dollar TrIpLe A games!!Me playing Night Striker Gear:
VVVVVV is sick
Slightly shorter games would be so welcome! I like the open maps and all, but it becomes a little overwhelming at some point if you want to experience a few of them.
Minecraft makes a shit ton of money but they make in a year what a passonate mod dev makes in two weeks
