Look, man... some of us (most of us, actually) grew up with our own time's standards:
Baldur's Gate 1/2
Planescape Torment
Fallout 1/2
Star Trek TNG
Absolutely amazing writing about humanity, about what it means to exist, evolve, understand oneself, evolve beyond our limits and reach for the stars in all the ways possible...
And one would think that from that point things could only improve and reach insane values of quality...
But here we are:
Baldur's Gayte 3
Star Wars Obi Wank
Star Trek Woke New Worlds
Some average and often below mediocre writing, setting UBER "quality" standards for these... new, young generations of poor young fuckers (my son included) and gamers that never knew more than the shit they are fed with.
Sad times, fellow clan members. It's our duty to not let those values and examples get lost in time and make sure we keep this shit away from our sons and daughters!
Disco Elysium came out recently too.
There's plenty of quality games around, I don't find the ratio between shit/good games has shifted all that much since the 80's-90's, which were filled to the brim with shitty ass games.
R5 5600X - 3070FE - 16GB DDR4 3600 - Asus B550 TUF Gaming Plus - BeQuiet Straight Power 11 750W - Pure Base 500DX
@TheZor
Same. there was TONS of shitty high title games over the last 2-3 decades.
I feel this overall sentiment is the same one that drives all the "They dont make it like they use to" stances for music, TV, Movies, etc.
That the filter of time makes you only remember the good ones (and forget the shit forgettable ones) and try to contrast it with fresh in the memory recent ones. And think the ratio of good to bad is way different.
Like people saying how good music was in the 80's. How every song seemed a major hit of perfection and passion. When it's you only hear/remember the good ones from then. Forgetting the other 100 shit ones to the 1 good one ratio it really was.
So in your head it SEEMS "man like 1 out of every 4 back then was a classic. Now it's like 1 out of 100" when it was 1 out of 100 then, you just forgot the other 95 even existed.
I distinctly remember that's WHY I got into pirating in the 90's. I was young, broke, and tired of buying a game to go "Man...this game sucks". So I went with the "Free trial" yar option to decide what was worth money.
That mixed with lower expectations back then for us, of less 'refined palate' of honed and incrementally more experienced expectations of games than back then. I remember games I thought was top notch amazing, to go back and play it and go "Hmm...this game kinda is lame". If I didn't retry it, I would still argue it was the best damn example of [x] type game ever made. When its not. (I just didn't know then when I formed that opinion, it wasn't).
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
its the usual delusion we give ourselves in that everything was better in the past... heck even socrates was bitching about this 400BC
imo it's just the indication of how we're becoming grumpy old farts
there's a plethora of quality productions nowadays and there was a whole lot of shitty media back in the good old days... so just deal with it or find another hobby
yeah but the kids eat that shit up so we're clearly no longer the target group
i remember my older brother who brought me up on apple 2 / C64 games and later PC gems like ZackMcCracken , DOOM , et al bitching about what a dumb fucking game Diablo(1) was when i excitedly showed it to him
We are all grumpy old farts here but it's really not as simple as nostalgia glasses in my opinion.
Games were objectively braver in creativity and experiment. It resulted in a lot of jank bullshit that got forgotten but also in games you couldn't dream of seeing today: Deus ex as a tiny morsel of an example.
And also since games were final when shipped, devs tried their best to deliver a game in the best shape possible. Live-service cancer wasn't a thing, games weren't cut up to sell parts of it later. DLC was the size of entire new games as expansion packs etc.
This is all shit that is super rare to see today. As someone who always enjoyed this hobby I don't care as much about what goes on behind the scenes. I care that I get a game that I vibe with and hits the spot and these days it's a very rare occurance every 4-5 years. When it used to be every year back in the day.
Now it's devs always complaining that money men made them do this and that and releasing hot garbage. I say maybe tone back on the expensive graphics bullshit and focus on what makes a game a good experience for the player first.
But if it's suffocated by INDUSTRIAL amounts of Spider Man, TikTok, Fortnite and Avengers, it's almost useless.
Welcome to getting old, and less relevant as the target audience. And the frustration in fighting to deny that fact.
We are in that goldilocks age group of where we have lived long enough to feel the 'most important' bracket of people (our own) should still gall the shot [we did for some long we are use to it], yet JUST slipping out of the social current climate as having impact on that.
35-50+ year old gamers are not the main demographic. Hell they usually are not even on the list of demographics to aim for. As we get into that group, we struggle to let go of the reins we must pass on, because we enjoyed holding them so much for so long.
Getting older and feeling your ''earned time" on the planet is worth more value than those with less, conflicting with the reality that's the opposite of how it works. Is hard to come to terms with.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
Last edited by DXWarlock on Thu, 9th Nov 2023 20:13; edited 1 time in total
I often ask myself: am I now old and nostalgic and blind because of that, or have things really gone worse?
I try and answer this in two parts:
Is it theoretically possible for things to decline for real, or is it always progressing and older people simply don't feel comfortable?
A: all datapoints indicate, things can in fact decline. Progress is not linear. Progress can lead to dead-ends.
OK then. ARE things declining?
This is harder to answer, but western pop culture most definitely is (in my very strong opinion).
The costlier the industry, the worse off it is. So for example literature and music is fine, and I have many new artists I like. But movies and games cost a lot money, and as such corps are aa lot more risk averse and go with the cultural trends, which are bonkers right now.
- everything is overpoliticized. I can hardly watch a movie, that doesn't try to educate me. These are atrociously poor pieces of art. Woke culture truly did fuck up most blockbuster movies. And I am not alone in this opinion. Check out the new Top Gun movie. No politics. People loved it.
- everything is simplified. Case in point: Marvel movies. Thesre are comic books for kids ffs. Kids. They are so very stupid, and they used to be all the rage, and the reasons why everything had to be part of a universe now. This did a lot of damage. Scorsese (who makes stellar movies to this day and is a legend) was completely right: Marvel is not cinema, it is a rollercoaster ride (for manchildren).
- journalists are pushing agendas. back in the day gaming sites were written by gamers. Now they are written by journalists, who have no idea what a good game looks like, but got their LGBTQIAXYZHDSAKFD degrees and agendas, and they score games based on that.
---
So yes. For me, in certain cultural fields things have gotten a lot worse.
Last edited by Radicalus on Thu, 9th Nov 2023 20:14; edited 1 time in total
We are all grumpy old farts here but it's really not as simple as nostalgia glasses in my opinion.
Games were objectively braver in creativity and experiment. It resulted in a lot of jank bullshit that got forgotten but also in games you couldn't dream of seeing today: Deus ex as a tiny morsel of an example..
agreed but again i'd say we have to differentiate between AAA productions with big fucking companies and shareholders' interests in the background and smaller indie productions more akin to what you coudl find in the old days.
what i mean is that there is still "brave game design" just not in the money making district of the gaming industry
Games are just not thought and made towards our age groups, mayyyyyyneeeee.
Some are pretty good and work for all ages, but most of the AAA today is just shit.
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
@blackeyedboy
I can 100% guarantee, at least for me. if I was give Baldur's Gate 3 in 2001. I would have said it was the best made, most visually stunning, and nearly limitless direction of choice games I had ever seen. That it is years ahead of its time. And label it the king of all RPG games ever made full stop.
Now, I dont even want to play it. I got it as a gift on steam, I have 16 minutes in it...
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
Last edited by DXWarlock on Thu, 9th Nov 2023 20:17; edited 2 times in total
Planescape Torment
or
The Measure of a Man (Star Trek TNG)
And compare them with ANYTHING from:
Baldur's Gate 3
Star Trek Strange New Shit (Season 2)
disco elysium disco elysium disco elysium
You consider New Vegas ancient too ? Plenty of newer games with high-quality writing.
Completely agreed with @pho08, it's really not rocket science.
The AAA industry wasn't even really a thing back then even tho EA/Interplay and such existed, it was all glorified indie stuff that they decided to publish.. might be a leading cause for your perception.
You're not going to sell the idea that 80's-90's games were better on average than current day to me, that was absolutely not the case either.
For each Baldur's Gate there were a metric ton of bad games, which nobody even remembers now because our collective memory just erased them for good reason.
Some of them were more ambitious, technically-wise the 80-00's were incredible in terms of exponential progression ; but gameplay-wise ? Ehhh.. Yeah, some were creative, but the ratio feels the same to me.
I'd argue that's one big chunk of it all. Of course, the Internet and further globalization might have made things less surprising or original.. that's a caveat with having access to basically everything from the tip of one's finger.
What did you consume back then ? Only what you had limited access to and really desired.
Maybe we can try drawing conclusions from this all in some more time, but as it stands, I see no actual difference - or not any that'd be easily explained.
The major thing is publishers got very big, propped themselves on the stock market, invited shareholders and a variety of suits in.. that's the one key difference to me. Our hobby became an industry, there are growing pains that come along with it.
It's just a very human kind of thing. As pho wrote, Socrates bitching about it back then is a very good example of that.
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Last edited by TheZor on Thu, 9th Nov 2023 20:28; edited 3 times in total
Yea, man Disco Elysium is a rare bird. An exception out of... space and time.
I'd say New Vegas is perhaps some sort of "the last of it's kind" bird. Strong RPG with a broken engine, dated visuals hiding a burrowed coffin full of old (skool) brilliant stuff that you need to dig to discover.
also take games like Death Stranding... while i never got into (so correct me if i am wrong) but to me it basically seemed like the antithesis to the ADD tiktok generation
A lot more media these days is soulless, that is the main problem, then comes the shit writing and whatever agenda pushing there might be to make it even worse.
Art is supposed to hit you places, make you feel things. The way corpos run things is complete opposite of this in fear to offend any potential buyers.
Starfield is a Star example of this, lotta written lines, constant babbling while saying absolutely nothing. These games were made to appeal to executives and not gamer men.
That's only regarding story telling. As for gameplay these games are padded to hell and back for stats it might as well be a boring second full time job.
Lately it is true that I've been finding more respect for my time by the very few independent titles that aren't asset flip garbage.
Matter of perspective I think. I think Death Stranding IS an example of a shit game. A total soulless low effort attempt at pompous vision over content. I didn't even play it despite friends offering to let me.
So it really comes down to WHICH current games, in 20 years we will forget was the other 90 that sucked compared to the 4-5 we remember as "nearly everything I remember from then was classics".
(And a good example, until you said that title name. I already forgot it existed.)
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
While I can respect Death stranding's attempt at originality, I think it went way off in the opposite direction of what's fun.
I can take a hike for free and get some exercise, I don't need to do that in a video game.
if i had a kid, i wouldnt know what to let him play after halflife (if he wasnt yet call of duty brainwashed), that would be a level up for a single player shooter, battlefield visually perhaps but gameplay/immersion wize, it just seemed to stop there
HL2 got close but had to many boundaries n trickery n slow bits
Last edited by PickupArtist on Thu, 9th Nov 2023 20:44; edited 2 times in total
Really? That isnt youth nostalgia talking?
WoW Vanilla had some of the most shallow and vapid storylines you can think of. The most generic 'MMO main quest line' dialog you can imagine.
The excitement of playing as a greenhorn a big genre, I really think leaned into thinking the story was good when it came out. And that the game itself was good
It was total 'fisher prices my first MMO' for people that was deep into MMO's before it. I dont know a hardcore MMO player at that time, that thought it was groundbreaking. They thought it was 'meh' and mechanics of character choices super simplistic (Compared to the depth older MMOs gave you)
Again a reflection of the entire sentiment: Those that have had time to get picky about a genre, think new stuff sucks. Those just going into it think it is amazing as it's the first exposure to it they had. Eventually they get picky and think the new things after IT suck. (While those already in it, think IT sucks compared to their previous first experince).
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
Last edited by DXWarlock on Thu, 9th Nov 2023 20:46; edited 1 time in total
@Radicalus
You know..they had a 60 Minutes episode about that exact thing in the 80's and a 'Dateline' episode just like that in the 90s...
Not a new concept that "shit now sucks more than before" in 2030 we will have a youtube video (or whatever is the new one) about how movies THEN suck compared to 2010's and 20's.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
@Radicalus
You know..they had a 60 Minutes episode about that exact thing in the 80's and a 'Dateline' episode just like that in the 90s...
Not a new concept that "shit now sucks more than before" in 2030 we will have a youtube video (or whatever is the new one) about how movies THEN suck compared to 2010's and 20's.
What you say is factually true. They did have this.
But is it not possible for both statements to be true?
- all generations have the "everything was better in the past" moment or opinion
- some things actually were better in the past
Because I think both statements are true, when thinking about western pop culture.
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