I tried to play borderlands 2 and I was moving happily through the main story when I realized I was way, way under-levelled for the next part. I then realized I needed to go do half a dozen of the 30 or so fetch quests I had ignored up to that point. I did not continue playing Borderlands 2
You were more patient than me. I lasted about an hour of it. I just don’t think FPS gameplay and RPG stats gel at all well. Can’t stand Destiny for the exact same reason.
Call me a traditionalist, but I expect enemies that take bullets to the face to do the decent thing and drop down dead, rather than just take very slightly more damage.
Borderlands is great because you can just break the math. Like these skills and this perk and this gun synergize in such a way that any enemy explodes if you look at them sideways.
That’s why Shadow Warrior 2 was so disappointing after the first reboot. Reboot was an updated fps thay even managed to make the sword melee relevant through the whole game. 2nd one was a bullet spongy mess
lol, replays of any Halo game past Reach? You’re funny. I could barely get through Infinite the first time. At least it was better than 5, but so is a turd sandwich.
My scalding hot take is that 5 is a more fun game than Infinite. 5 looked like shit and had an awful story, but at least the big cinematic moments still felt like Halo. Infinite just bored me and felt hollow.
The gameplay in 5 is actually really good. The set piece battles are very replayable. The biggest issue for me the the creeping Live Service shit, the “Cortana bad” story and the flat out false advertisement. The game only fans seem to think you need to read the books for it to make sense, but I’ve read the books and it wasn’t any better. Wish they made a spinoff game of Sangheili “Blooding Wars”. Those were the peak levels.
Halo 4 has a solid story and the campaign played fine, but the multi player at launch was bad. The MCC version actually fixed a lot of the issues I had though.
By Halo Infinite, including Halo Wars 2, we’ve had three games in a row that ditched the Big Bad from the previous game because the devs had a knee jerk response to loud fans and that AAA studios have a revolving door for upper staff. I’ve bailed on the franchise because I don’t think I’ll ever get a satisfying conclusion to The Endless story. Or any conclusion even.
We share the same opinion exactly. I completely agree with your point about the books. I’ve read every book, comic, etc and that game still made no sense.
I also agree about the gameplay. Warzone was probably some of the most fun I’ve had in a Halo. I never got good enough for regular slayer ranked though so I can’t comment there.
4 is my second favorite campaign for story, but I am a book fan so I may be biased.
Infinite lacking the set pieces is what really killed it for me. Where’s boarding a scarab? Where’s giving the covenant back their bomb? Where’s tank beats everything? Where’s the death star trench run while the best song ever blasts in your ears and the Earth hangs over you to show you what happens if you fail? Where’s jumping down an unfolding Guardian?
The open world is why we couldn’t have those set pieces in Infinite because approaching from any angle makes them basically impossible to choreograph well.
Chasing photorealism has been unsustainable since before MW2 came out. You could see where that line was headed. The answer has always been procedural artwork - not randomized, just rule-based. Even if an entire desert gets away with four textures for sand, those shouldn’t be hand-drawn and manually-approved bitmaps. They should not be fixed-resolution. Let the machine generate them at whatever level of detail you need. Define what it’s supposed to look like.
This is how that “Doom 3 on a floppy disk” game, .kkreiger, worked. It weighs 96 KB. It doesn’t look like Descent. It has oodles of textures and smooth models. Blowing a few megabytes on that kind of content is a lot easier than cramming things down and a lot cheaper than mastering five hundred compressed six-channel bitmaps. Even if every rivet on a metal panel was drawn by hand with a circle tool, ship that tool, so that no matter how closely the player looks, those rivets stay circular.
You can draw rust and have it be less shiny because that’s how rust is defined - and have that same smear of rust look a little bit different every time it appears, tiled across a whole battleship. Every bullet ding and cement crack can become utterly unremarkable by being completely unique and razor-sharp at macro-lens distances. You don’t hire a thousand artists to manage one tree each, you hire a handful of maniacs who can define: wood. Sapling, tree, log, plank, chair, wood. Hand that to a dozen artists and watch them crank out a whole bespoke forest in an afternoon.
You propose an interesting approach. I just wonder how the individual streaks of different rust interact with typical graphics pipelines. You can certainly ship a generator, but then for rasterizing the image the texture still has to be generated and shipped off to GPU memory to be used in shaders, won’t you blow through VRAM limits or shader cache limits by having no texture reuse anywhere?
Any game with texture pop-in is already handling more data than you have space. “Rage” famously had unique textures across the entire world… and infamously streamed them from DVD, with the dumbest logic for loading and unloading. You could wait for everything to load, turn around, and it would all be blurry again.
Anyway if you’re rendering ten zillion copies of something way out in the distance, those can all be the same. It will not matter whether they’re high-res or unique when they’re eight pixels across. As Nvidia said: if you’re not cheating, you’re just not trying.
These tools have been grudgingly adopted, but only to make ‘let’s hire ten thousand artists for a decade!’ accomplish some ridiculous goal, as measured in archaic compressed textures and static models. The closest we came was “tessellation” as a buzzword for cranking polycount in post. And it somehow fucked up both visuals and performance. Nowadays Unreal 5 brags about its ability to render zillion-polygon Mudbox meshes at sensible framerates, rather than letting artists do pseudo-NURBS shit on models that don’t have a polycount. And no bespoke game seems ready to scale to 32K, or zoom in on a square inch of carpet without seeing texels, even though we’ve had this tech for umpteen years and a texture atlas is not novel.
Budgets keep going up and dev cycles keep getting longer and it’s never because making A Game is getting any harder.
Basically Gray Zone. Great game, but even on my i9-12900K, 3080Ti, 128GB DDR5 I have to play it on low settings. Like I’d be happy if they just ratcheted down the graphics quality because the gameplay is great.
Quality of life has improved pretty significantly, the formula has stayed the same, and now there are more Pokemon with more unique properties. It was linear in just about every direction until the latest switch games.
I think everything after Gen 1 holds up pretty well, even if it’s a little rough. And once they figured out the physical/special split in Gen 4 they basically just published the same game over and over again with slightly different gimmicks and stories.
Yup, most of the games I play are either indies or older games. I don’t care much about graphics, I care about gameplay and story, and modern AAA games often lack in both.
White letters on light brown wood texture (trailer on steam at 0:07). Also, the big “Press E to talk” looks heinous. Plus you don’t have full control over where it appears, at one point in the trailer (0:42), it’s on white background. Going by the trailer, you’re trying to make the game look like the product of a inexperienced amateur, while the game itself is actually a subversive masterpiece, similar to the doom mod “MyHouse.wad”. Hats off to you if you manage to pull it off, but if not, you’ll have fallen flat on your face. Metaphorically, of course.
As inflation continues to outpace wages, surely more people will start preferring this. $1000 for a gpu is a joke. If I ever develop an indie game my target system is going to be like, a 1.6ghz core i3 and garden variety basic opengl capable graphics card.
idk, maybe we need to figure out how to get by with basic laptop opengl graphics. An Intel HD 4000 would have been a groundbreaking graphics card in 2005 but today you can barely run a unity project with one. More serious effort needs to go into optimization and efficiency I think and if that means everything has to have 2005 era graphics (which aren’t even that bad) then that’s what has to be done.
Making your own game engine an using open source 3d engine then filling in the rest is too much work for most indie devs but as enshitification continues this will eventually stop being the case. Tux kart was made this way and it can run on a potato.
No one wants to play potato games. And this is evident by the shortage of high end GPUs. People want better graphics and people have the money for GPUs. If you check Steam stats, then the top 15 cards are all 3060, 4060, 3070, 4070, and 3080. Steam has 132m active monthly users and 2% of their users have 3080 cards. That’s over 2.6m people with a high end card.
There are only 0.2% of Intel HD 4000 users. When you combine all the mid and high end GPU users it becomes obvious that there’s absolutely no point making games for Intel HD 4000.
I don’t even understand what Star Field is supposed to be. And I don’t think Bethesda know either. It’s basically what No Man’s Sky used to be before they fixed it, yet somehow worse.
Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5. Which would have worked better with the limitations of the engine as well.
After that they could have taken their time to reskill their staff on either a new engine of their own or just a off the shelf option.
I won’t lie, they pulled the wool over my eyes with Starfield. I kept waiting for that moment where they brought it all together and suddenly it would be a great game. I was shook when the credits rolled and I hadn’t yet found the fun part.
2 years to go from pre-production to complete release, and with extensive special effects requirements as well. Na, It may have begun prep work in 2022 but it’s been known about longer than that. Pre-production takes a very long time, you have to scout locations, you have to hold auditions, you have to work out schedules, you have to work out your set design and your costume, you have to get the script written. There’s a lot before anyone shouts action.
Also that would have been a fair amount of time before that where the studio and Bethesda were negotiating the IP license.
Also I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid got in a way of all of that as well. So we really could be looking at 2019 or even 2018 is a start date so it’s entirely believable that they weren’t that far through production and giving the problems that they would have found by then, they really should have switched gears.
If you’re going to reach back into the time period before they hired the writers/showrunners to actually develop a script in early 2022, or selling the rights to Amazon in 2020, then you’re talking about a project that was far from certain it would actually get made. Hard to say that they “knew” a tv show was coming before 2022.
Personally I’d prefer if games used more stylized graphics like pixel art or hand drawn stuff. That’s not worse in graphical quality but better imho while not needing a supercomputer to run. Spiritfarer is still one of the prettiest games I have played and it runs on the switch.
Going with stylized graphics instead of trying to do photorealism also makes the game age way more gracefully. Bastion for example still looks amazing while there’s a reason Oblivion npcs are a meme.
After watching the Fallout series, I had the itch again so I fired up Fallout 3. I immediately fell in love with that older Bethesda-style dialogue, with so much to discuss and so many skill checks throughout… But the more I played, the more I realized how absurdly easy and jam-packed the game was with weapons, chems, and ammunition. I installed a couple of mods to improve the difficulty and scarcity of items, but it wasn’t enough. Something was missing. I realized that after having played through Fallout 1 a few years ago, my beloved Fallout 3 no longer quite scratched the itch. So I fired up Fallout 2, and I’ve fallen in love with that little game again. I love the slower pace of it all. I love inspecting every little detail of the environment, and the assortment of skills available at my fingertips to apply to my surroundings like a Swiss army knife, if I have the aptitude, of course… (Perhapsh I should join the mage’s college in Winterhold)
Now, I have no hate here for Fallout 3, because the flaws I pointed out above are not why I enjoyed the game in the past. It’s the atmosphere of the DC ruins, the satisfaction of taking shots and exploding heads in VATS, and the haunting melodies of Galaxy News Radio echoing softly from my wrist. I just have to figure out how to make it play a bit more like the classic entries. I want to leave the Super Duper Mart without combat armor, 40 stimpaks, and damn near every weapon in the game.
If you liked Fallout 1 and 2 you’ll probably like NV too. It has a far slower pace than 3, and has a much bigger emphasis on writing and player choice than 3 and 4.
I could never get into 3 or 4 personally, but have always loved 1, 2, and NV.
I liked New Vegas quite a lot. I remember not liking it as much as 3 at the time, but looking back years later with a different perspective (and after playing Fallout 1), I appreciate and vibe with it a lot more and can’t wait to play it again… Heavily modded… With Survival Mode on.
The problem with that is the back catalogue of games that developers have to compete with. There already are better games with worse graphics, the big studios aren’t going to risk competing in that crowded market that already has its crowned victors.
I’ve got pretty similar thoughts. I wasn’t into gaming all that much up until relatively recently when I built my first gaming PC at the beginning of pandemic. Thanks to that, I’m not only on market for bleeding edge AAA titles, but also discovering 3 dacades worth of PC games. My observation is that games got worse over time. They’re also a lot more expensive to make because it all must be visually impressive, which usually ends up with poor performance and bugs, requiring high-end hardware for the game to run somehow. Quite often games are broken and unoptimized on launch, they have that generic formula, watch cinematic, hold a button, watch some more, here’s your little tutorial fight, now more cutscene and a crappy puzzle. It really makes me feel, if game developers were more limited by hardware constraint and unable to feed legions of normie players to flashy graphics, they wouldn’t have other way to makes games attractive other than with better mechanics and level design.
Meanwhile Nintendo continues to release bangers for their ancient potato console.
Game development got more expensive because people want more complex games. No one wants to play a shooter with loading screens, everyone wants to play an open world game. Even if you tone down the graphics, such development will still be a lot more expensive.
Hey man, I like playing ASCII graphics indies on my 2k gaming tower with its wireless rgb keyboard. I can be gaudy and tasteless abd still mostly avoid graphically intense games
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Northern Journey and Crystal Project are the games you want then.
Dusk runs buttery smooth on any modern, low end hardware. I’ll take that over textures or models popping in when ever they feel like.
I want shorter games, on average. 10-20 hour completion times would be right up my alley.
I blame Far Cry 3 for this proliferation of open world bobbins. So much shit to do and almost none of it is worth doing.
I tried to play borderlands 2 and I was moving happily through the main story when I realized I was way, way under-levelled for the next part. I then realized I needed to go do half a dozen of the 30 or so fetch quests I had ignored up to that point. I did not continue playing Borderlands 2
You were more patient than me. I lasted about an hour of it. I just don’t think FPS gameplay and RPG stats gel at all well. Can’t stand Destiny for the exact same reason.
Call me a traditionalist, but I expect enemies that take bullets to the face to do the decent thing and drop down dead, rather than just take very slightly more damage.
for my own gaming purposes i would agree, but i have seen my son do some very interesting stuff with borderlands 2 and payday 2 builds.
Borderlands is great because you can just break the math. Like these skills and this perk and this gun synergize in such a way that any enemy explodes if you look at them sideways.
I enjoyed Fallout 3. But I agree with the general point. RPG/FPS’ rarely gel.
Fallout 3 isn’t a FPS. It’s got turn-based combat because of VATS, and that’s what makes it good.
So true. Although I didn’t always use VATS, sometimes I enjoyed the options.
That’s why Shadow Warrior 2 was so disappointing after the first reboot. Reboot was an updated fps thay even managed to make the sword melee relevant through the whole game. 2nd one was a bullet spongy mess
Steam says I played that game for 2.5 hours. Conversely, I’ve put over 150 hours into Nightmare Reaper.
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Halo: Infinite was fun the first time around, but on replays, I just want to get to the story events.
I also can’t play the open world parts on my PC. Somehow looks worst any of the retro or retro revival titles I play with single digit frame rates.
Halo infinite is the first Halo that I only played once.
lol, replays of any Halo game past Reach? You’re funny. I could barely get through Infinite the first time. At least it was better than 5, but so is a turd sandwich.
My scalding hot take is that 5 is a more fun game than Infinite. 5 looked like shit and had an awful story, but at least the big cinematic moments still felt like Halo. Infinite just bored me and felt hollow.
The gameplay in 5 is actually really good. The set piece battles are very replayable. The biggest issue for me the the creeping Live Service shit, the “Cortana bad” story and the flat out false advertisement. The game only fans seem to think you need to read the books for it to make sense, but I’ve read the books and it wasn’t any better. Wish they made a spinoff game of Sangheili “Blooding Wars”. Those were the peak levels.
Halo 4 has a solid story and the campaign played fine, but the multi player at launch was bad. The MCC version actually fixed a lot of the issues I had though.
By Halo Infinite, including Halo Wars 2, we’ve had three games in a row that ditched the Big Bad from the previous game because the devs had a knee jerk response to loud fans and that AAA studios have a revolving door for upper staff. I’ve bailed on the franchise because I don’t think I’ll ever get a satisfying conclusion to The Endless story. Or any conclusion even.
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We share the same opinion exactly. I completely agree with your point about the books. I’ve read every book, comic, etc and that game still made no sense.
I also agree about the gameplay. Warzone was probably some of the most fun I’ve had in a Halo. I never got good enough for regular slayer ranked though so I can’t comment there.
4 is my second favorite campaign for story, but I am a book fan so I may be biased.
Infinite lacking the set pieces is what really killed it for me. Where’s boarding a scarab? Where’s giving the covenant back their bomb? Where’s tank beats everything? Where’s the death star trench run while the best song ever blasts in your ears and the Earth hangs over you to show you what happens if you fail? Where’s jumping down an unfolding Guardian?
The open world is why we couldn’t have those set pieces in Infinite because approaching from any angle makes them basically impossible to choreograph well.
Chasing photorealism has been unsustainable since before MW2 came out. You could see where that line was headed. The answer has always been procedural artwork - not randomized, just rule-based. Even if an entire desert gets away with four textures for sand, those shouldn’t be hand-drawn and manually-approved bitmaps. They should not be fixed-resolution. Let the machine generate them at whatever level of detail you need. Define what it’s supposed to look like.
This is how that “Doom 3 on a floppy disk” game, .kkreiger, worked. It weighs 96 KB. It doesn’t look like Descent. It has oodles of textures and smooth models. Blowing a few megabytes on that kind of content is a lot easier than cramming things down and a lot cheaper than mastering five hundred compressed six-channel bitmaps. Even if every rivet on a metal panel was drawn by hand with a circle tool, ship that tool, so that no matter how closely the player looks, those rivets stay circular.
You can draw rust and have it be less shiny because that’s how rust is defined - and have that same smear of rust look a little bit different every time it appears, tiled across a whole battleship. Every bullet ding and cement crack can become utterly unremarkable by being completely unique and razor-sharp at macro-lens distances. You don’t hire a thousand artists to manage one tree each, you hire a handful of maniacs who can define: wood. Sapling, tree, log, plank, chair, wood. Hand that to a dozen artists and watch them crank out a whole bespoke forest in an afternoon.
You propose an interesting approach. I just wonder how the individual streaks of different rust interact with typical graphics pipelines. You can certainly ship a generator, but then for rasterizing the image the texture still has to be generated and shipped off to GPU memory to be used in shaders, won’t you blow through VRAM limits or shader cache limits by having no texture reuse anywhere?
Any game with texture pop-in is already handling more data than you have space. “Rage” famously had unique textures across the entire world… and infamously streamed them from DVD, with the dumbest logic for loading and unloading. You could wait for everything to load, turn around, and it would all be blurry again.
Anyway if you’re rendering ten zillion copies of something way out in the distance, those can all be the same. It will not matter whether they’re high-res or unique when they’re eight pixels across. As Nvidia said: if you’re not cheating, you’re just not trying.
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How do you think modern games are made? Procedural generation is used all over the place to create materials and entire landscapes.
But never ships clientside.
These tools have been grudgingly adopted, but only to make ‘let’s hire ten thousand artists for a decade!’ accomplish some ridiculous goal, as measured in archaic compressed textures and static models. The closest we came was “tessellation” as a buzzword for cranking polycount in post. And it somehow fucked up both visuals and performance. Nowadays Unreal 5 brags about its ability to render zillion-polygon Mudbox meshes at sensible framerates, rather than letting artists do pseudo-NURBS shit on models that don’t have a polycount. And no bespoke game seems ready to scale to 32K, or zoom in on a square inch of carpet without seeing texels, even though we’ve had this tech for umpteen years and a texture atlas is not novel.
Budgets keep going up and dev cycles keep getting longer and it’s never because making A Game is getting any harder.
Games were better when graphics were secondary
Basically Gray Zone. Great game, but even on my i9-12900K, 3080Ti, 128GB DDR5 I have to play it on low settings. Like I’d be happy if they just ratcheted down the graphics quality because the gameplay is great.
That’s probably due to optimization rather than graphics alone.
Oh yeah it def is. I’d be happy if it were shittier graphics is what I mean because the gameplay is really good.
I thought this right before I tried to play the really old pokemons again. And very quickly went back to new pokemons.
To be fair those had worse gameplay too
Quality of life has improved pretty significantly, the formula has stayed the same, and now there are more Pokemon with more unique properties. It was linear in just about every direction until the latest switch games.
I think everything after Gen 1 holds up pretty well, even if it’s a little rough. And once they figured out the physical/special split in Gen 4 they basically just published the same game over and over again with slightly different gimmicks and stories.
!patientgamers would agree and so do I
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Yup, most of the games I play are either indies or older games. I don’t care much about graphics, I care about gameplay and story, and modern AAA games often lack in both.
As a game dev who’s making a better game with worse graphics - i think people who say this are in the minority, unfortunately.
I mean this with the greatest respect, I’m not making a judgement on the gameplay.
But there’s a whole spectrum between Roblox and the latest Quadruple A™ that all consist of “worse graphics”
White letters on light brown wood texture (trailer on steam at 0:07). Also, the big “Press E to talk” looks heinous. Plus you don’t have full control over where it appears, at one point in the trailer (0:42), it’s on white background. Going by the trailer, you’re trying to make the game look like the product of a inexperienced amateur, while the game itself is actually a subversive masterpiece, similar to the doom mod “MyHouse.wad”. Hats off to you if you manage to pull it off, but if not, you’ll have fallen flat on your face. Metaphorically, of course.
As inflation continues to outpace wages, surely more people will start preferring this. $1000 for a gpu is a joke. If I ever develop an indie game my target system is going to be like, a 1.6ghz core i3 and garden variety basic opengl capable graphics card.
There are constant high end GPU shortages, $1,000 is too cheap.
idk, maybe we need to figure out how to get by with basic laptop opengl graphics. An Intel HD 4000 would have been a groundbreaking graphics card in 2005 but today you can barely run a unity project with one. More serious effort needs to go into optimization and efficiency I think and if that means everything has to have 2005 era graphics (which aren’t even that bad) then that’s what has to be done.
Making your own game engine an using open source 3d engine then filling in the rest is too much work for most indie devs but as enshitification continues this will eventually stop being the case. Tux kart was made this way and it can run on a potato.
No one wants to play potato games. And this is evident by the shortage of high end GPUs. People want better graphics and people have the money for GPUs. If you check Steam stats, then the top 15 cards are all 3060, 4060, 3070, 4070, and 3080. Steam has 132m active monthly users and 2% of their users have 3080 cards. That’s over 2.6m people with a high end card.
There are only 0.2% of Intel HD 4000 users. When you combine all the mid and high end GPU users it becomes obvious that there’s absolutely no point making games for Intel HD 4000.
certain games need the ultra 8k graphics while others are fine with 1080p especially 2d games
this is such a
messamazing collection of ideas!I advertised it in a group of kids I know that love this kind of shit, hope it helps :)
.!
I don’t even understand what Star Field is supposed to be. And I don’t think Bethesda know either. It’s basically what No Man’s Sky used to be before they fixed it, yet somehow worse.
Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5. Which would have worked better with the limitations of the engine as well.
After that they could have taken their time to reskill their staff on either a new engine of their own or just a off the shelf option.
I won’t lie, they pulled the wool over my eyes with Starfield. I kept waiting for that moment where they brought it all together and suddenly it would be a great game. I was shook when the credits rolled and I hadn’t yet found the fun part.
Kudos for even making it til the end. I just noticed half way in, I might as well watch paint dry instead or play something else.
I’m pretty sure the TV show began development in 2022, four years after Starfield was announced in 2018.
2 years to go from pre-production to complete release, and with extensive special effects requirements as well. Na, It may have begun prep work in 2022 but it’s been known about longer than that. Pre-production takes a very long time, you have to scout locations, you have to hold auditions, you have to work out schedules, you have to work out your set design and your costume, you have to get the script written. There’s a lot before anyone shouts action.
Also that would have been a fair amount of time before that where the studio and Bethesda were negotiating the IP license.
Also I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid got in a way of all of that as well. So we really could be looking at 2019 or even 2018 is a start date so it’s entirely believable that they weren’t that far through production and giving the problems that they would have found by then, they really should have switched gears.
If you’re going to reach back into the time period before they hired the writers/showrunners to actually develop a script in early 2022, or selling the rights to Amazon in 2020, then you’re talking about a project that was far from certain it would actually get made. Hard to say that they “knew” a tv show was coming before 2022.
Personally I’d prefer if games used more stylized graphics like pixel art or hand drawn stuff. That’s not worse in graphical quality but better imho while not needing a supercomputer to run. Spiritfarer is still one of the prettiest games I have played and it runs on the switch.
Going with stylized graphics instead of trying to do photorealism also makes the game age way more gracefully. Bastion for example still looks amazing while there’s a reason Oblivion npcs are a meme.
After watching the Fallout series, I had the itch again so I fired up Fallout 3. I immediately fell in love with that older Bethesda-style dialogue, with so much to discuss and so many skill checks throughout… But the more I played, the more I realized how absurdly easy and jam-packed the game was with weapons, chems, and ammunition. I installed a couple of mods to improve the difficulty and scarcity of items, but it wasn’t enough. Something was missing. I realized that after having played through Fallout 1 a few years ago, my beloved Fallout 3 no longer quite scratched the itch. So I fired up Fallout 2, and I’ve fallen in love with that little game again. I love the slower pace of it all. I love inspecting every little detail of the environment, and the assortment of skills available at my fingertips to apply to my surroundings like a Swiss army knife, if I have the aptitude, of course… (Perhapsh I should join the mage’s college in Winterhold)
Now, I have no hate here for Fallout 3, because the flaws I pointed out above are not why I enjoyed the game in the past. It’s the atmosphere of the DC ruins, the satisfaction of taking shots and exploding heads in VATS, and the haunting melodies of Galaxy News Radio echoing softly from my wrist. I just have to figure out how to make it play a bit more like the classic entries. I want to leave the Super Duper Mart without combat armor, 40 stimpaks, and damn near every weapon in the game.
funny how the first time i played fo3 i struggled to kill fire ants because i ran out of ammo for every weapon amd only had melee weapons
now when i fire it up i know so much of what to do that i am practically unstoppable
the survival mode in fo4 is actually quite a challenge though, thats fun to play (unless i die after not finding a bed for hours, then it sucks😂)
If you liked Fallout 1 and 2 you’ll probably like NV too. It has a far slower pace than 3, and has a much bigger emphasis on writing and player choice than 3 and 4.
I could never get into 3 or 4 personally, but have always loved 1, 2, and NV.
I liked New Vegas quite a lot. I remember not liking it as much as 3 at the time, but looking back years later with a different perspective (and after playing Fallout 1), I appreciate and vibe with it a lot more and can’t wait to play it again… Heavily modded… With Survival Mode on.
Fallout 2 really is the best game not just in the West-coast saga but the entire series.
I’ve only ever made it roughly 8 hours in, so I have the entire game ahead of me now that I’m starting anew. I’m super stoked.
The problem with that is the back catalogue of games that developers have to compete with. There already are better games with worse graphics, the big studios aren’t going to risk competing in that crowded market that already has its crowned victors.
I’ve got pretty similar thoughts. I wasn’t into gaming all that much up until relatively recently when I built my first gaming PC at the beginning of pandemic. Thanks to that, I’m not only on market for bleeding edge AAA titles, but also discovering 3 dacades worth of PC games. My observation is that games got worse over time. They’re also a lot more expensive to make because it all must be visually impressive, which usually ends up with poor performance and bugs, requiring high-end hardware for the game to run somehow. Quite often games are broken and unoptimized on launch, they have that generic formula, watch cinematic, hold a button, watch some more, here’s your little tutorial fight, now more cutscene and a crappy puzzle. It really makes me feel, if game developers were more limited by hardware constraint and unable to feed legions of normie players to flashy graphics, they wouldn’t have other way to makes games attractive other than with better mechanics and level design.
Meanwhile Nintendo continues to release bangers for their ancient potato console.
Game development got more expensive because people want more complex games. No one wants to play a shooter with loading screens, everyone wants to play an open world game. Even if you tone down the graphics, such development will still be a lot more expensive.
Super flashy modern graphics are the RGB keyboard of gaming.
Hey man, I like playing ASCII graphics indies on my 2k gaming tower with its wireless rgb keyboard. I can be gaudy and tasteless abd still mostly avoid graphically intense games