30 year old gamers feeling disenfranchised?
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I'm twenty nine, so damned close to thirty.xDarc said:
I started out on the Atari, NES, and arcades. Added PC to my repertoire of consoles in the early-90s. Have been primarily a PC gamer since the early 2000's. (still like my consoles, though)
Honestly? Were you to ask me this same question a year or two (or three) ago, I'd have agreed. I've purchased very few games in the past few years as many of those being released just did not interest me in the slightest.
However, this year is different. Off the top of my head:
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Dota 2
MechWarrior Online
MechWarrior Tactics
Reign of Thunder
Sins of a Dark Age
Torchlight 2
Starbound
All of those coming this year, and (almost) all of those based on, sequels to, or inspired by games or series of old.
Oh, and six of them are free-to-play.
So, uh...yeah. 2012 is shaping up to be the year that gets me excited about gaming again.
As for your last few questions, I'm actually quite happy with my "current" crop of purchased games. But again, they aren't numerous. Portal 2, Terraria, and Dead Space 2 being chief among them in the most recent set of purchases.
What do I miss? I miss Blizzard being a GOOD GAMES company, instead of a "how can we milk people for cash" company. My ire towards them started with Starcraft 2 and has reached it's limit with Diablo 3.
I also miss classic adventure games. Of both the Myst and Banjo-Kazooie variety. Likewise, I miss space sims like Freespace and classic co-op FPS affairs like Doom or Sven Co-op.
Thankfully, quite a few indie devs are bringing amazing, classic-styled side-scrollers back. So I don't miss them as much.
I also miss expertly paced, narrative driven linear first-person games; the kind that tell epic stories instead of just throwing the player into a big, empty sand-box or that just toss a shit load of big, flashy explosions and/or tits at the screen. (damn it Valve...hurry it up with Half-Life 3)
Thirty years old on the dot, started with an Atari then the NES, Super NES, PS1, N64, PS2, Xbox and now predominantly 360. I do play the occasional RTS or other strategy type game on the PC and I used to play Earthsiege quite a bit when I was fourteen to sixteen.
Having played through the "Golden Age" I just have to wonder how people really think games were somehow better in the nineties. Currently, everything I used to fantasize about as a kid is becoming more and more possible and even prevalent.
Kinect + Gaming helmet (if it comes out) = the VR style gaming I used to imagine would exist in the future where immersion was complete because you were actually there. If you had somehow been able to show me Skyrim or Gears of War 1-3 when I was younger I would have pooped my pants with excitement. Frankly, if the plot/graphics/writing to X-Com, Mega Man 1-4, Super Mario RPG, Tencu: Stealth Assassins or FF7 and such was amazing to me (they were) I don't understand how anyone can complain about the current crop of games and their writing/visuals/entertainment value or whatever.
I guess I'm lucky, games have been improving constantly for me and the outlook says they are only getting better. All I am waiting for now is a real life holodeck.
Having played through the "Golden Age" I just have to wonder how people really think games were somehow better in the nineties. Currently, everything I used to fantasize about as a kid is becoming more and more possible and even prevalent.
Kinect + Gaming helmet (if it comes out) = the VR style gaming I used to imagine would exist in the future where immersion was complete because you were actually there. If you had somehow been able to show me Skyrim or Gears of War 1-3 when I was younger I would have pooped my pants with excitement. Frankly, if the plot/graphics/writing to X-Com, Mega Man 1-4, Super Mario RPG, Tencu: Stealth Assassins or FF7 and such was amazing to me (they were) I don't understand how anyone can complain about the current crop of games and their writing/visuals/entertainment value or whatever.
I guess I'm lucky, games have been improving constantly for me and the outlook says they are only getting better. All I am waiting for now is a real life holodeck.
36 here, and I've got even less games than the OP! Woot! Heck, I was so long away from my Steam account it crashed on me when I logged on last since it had so many updates. (also, wtf is up with Team Fortress 2 Beta? My PC is in the shop right now, but I distinctly remember being unable to play TF2 because I needed to do something about Beta.)
How much attention is being paid to me? A great deal, I think, in certain genres. RPG's, for instance, have really adopted a format which is great for me. In Skyrim, no single quest is going to take me more than 2 hours. Which is just about enough time between my infant daughter going down for a nap and then waking up again with a dirty diaper/empty belly/lost that unicorn she was dreaming about catching and now needs to cry about it. I don't need to set aside an entire night just to play a game - I can do it in small chunks.
Games are also looking to create stories that are fun and intelligent, even in games that you don't expect it. TF2 is a great example of this; the game is hilarious. The in game story is hysterical, and the characters are great. (I'm not a crazed gunman, I'm an assassin! Well, the difference bein' one is a job and the other's mental sickness) It's not just another game where you have weirdly proportioned men running around weirdly laid out places shooting each other in the face. Not only that, you need to actually work with a team; it's not a game where you toss 30 people into a server and the goal is to kill everything else. You need to work with others to fulfill a goal. Much as I loved Unreal Tournament, there wasn't anything more to the game shooting each other in the face. Which was fun when I was 22, but now that I'm 36, it's just boring.
So yeah. I feel like I'm being catered to.
How much attention is being paid to me? A great deal, I think, in certain genres. RPG's, for instance, have really adopted a format which is great for me. In Skyrim, no single quest is going to take me more than 2 hours. Which is just about enough time between my infant daughter going down for a nap and then waking up again with a dirty diaper/empty belly/lost that unicorn she was dreaming about catching and now needs to cry about it. I don't need to set aside an entire night just to play a game - I can do it in small chunks.
Games are also looking to create stories that are fun and intelligent, even in games that you don't expect it. TF2 is a great example of this; the game is hilarious. The in game story is hysterical, and the characters are great. (I'm not a crazed gunman, I'm an assassin! Well, the difference bein' one is a job and the other's mental sickness) It's not just another game where you have weirdly proportioned men running around weirdly laid out places shooting each other in the face. Not only that, you need to actually work with a team; it's not a game where you toss 30 people into a server and the goal is to kill everything else. You need to work with others to fulfill a goal. Much as I loved Unreal Tournament, there wasn't anything more to the game shooting each other in the face. Which was fun when I was 22, but now that I'm 36, it's just boring.
So yeah. I feel like I'm being catered to.
35 and I cut my teeth (literally) on the Atari 2600 and the Commodore 64. Those days I view as magical times as I was discovering gaming and a few of my top 10 games come from that era (The Last Ninja, IK+). That said a lot of my top 10 games come from the current generation (Mass Effect 2, Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption) so I can't say that I long for the olden days.
That said I am growing increasingly concerned with the rise of what I call the mobile phone "popcorn" games, which are all style and very little substance. I think as we become more time-diminished that developers will more focus on these bite-sized time wasters than grander works that demand you time, patience and investment in the character.
That said I am growing increasingly concerned with the rise of what I call the mobile phone "popcorn" games, which are all style and very little substance. I think as we become more time-diminished that developers will more focus on these bite-sized time wasters than grander works that demand you time, patience and investment in the character.
It hasn't always been like this; where the 3 biggest shooter franchises today are almost indistinguishable from one another. The only thing good about modern games is they look pretty. But it's been a 5 year long parade of samey, soul-less garbage games as of late and I'm not playing any more. No thanks.Tanakh said:
So why not play Tribes? Well first of all it just looks ridiculous. I have always been pretty fussy about art style in games. Second people are literally just flying across an outdoor map which also seems quite silly. While it may have the whole projectile thing going for it; it doesn't look anything like the twitchy cooridor shooters that I remember. Lastly, I've played games like Tribes in that it's one of those labels, one of those brands, that never has lively community, but has one that just refuses to die. It's so hard to let go of games like that.
Is it really too much to ask for a game a little less over the top than Tribes, with the oldskool run n' gun, that EVERYONE plays for a year or so before it's put out to pasture?
I stick to FPS mainly because it's what I know. But I can remember a lot of other games that came out within 5 years of one another that were absolute gems; which makes me wonder how anyone can claim it was no different then.
Some of my favorites from way back when that just came to me just now: Doom, Duke, Terminator Future Shock, Quake, Heroes of Might and Magic, Starcraft/Warcraft, Aces Over Europe/Pacific, Sim City. Mechwarrior, Fallout, and those two recent "reboots" Syndicate and X-Com were also mid 90's games. I'm probably forgetting twice as many, but every where you turned there were timeless classics that had never been done before. Dunno how today compares by any stretch when PC games are kept in check to work on Xbox's dinosaur hardware.
PC games of the 90's made consoles look like tiger handhelds. Seriously wtf happened?
Many thanks this is way more than i`ll be ever able to play with the upcomming releases.rhizhim said:
I sure missed a lot of games in my younger age. I played mostly Lucasarts stuff and it would`ve been hard to get some of the named titles (speaking/understanding englisch wasn`t my strength in the early ninties).
I am 29 and feel more franchised than ever. The only concern I have is those gosh darn console gamers dumbing everything down and ruining shooters by getting rid of the need to look up.
Lots of great, beautiful, engrossing games coming out all the time. I am happier than a pig in shit!
Lots of great, beautiful, engrossing games coming out all the time. I am happier than a pig in shit!
Inverse order answers, just to look cool:xDarc said:
WTF happened? Companies got bigger and bigger and most could take less and less riks. They also standarized (somewhat) the architecture and improved the game engines, so it's easy to port between the consoles and PC, thus from a money PoV why the fuck will you just focs in 1 market when for almost the same budget you can target 3 if only you lower the quality of your produc to the current standard. Games like BF 3 or Witcher 2, made for PC thinking about pushing the PC current hardware, are the exeptions.
If you loved SC, get ur ass into SC II NAO! late 2012 - early 2013 will be the most exciting single year in the SC franchise history, why? Well, HotS and this ( visible link so u dont thin i am rickrolling: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=333959 ). Dude, dude, DUDE, Jaedong and Flash with the whole KeSPA coming to SC II! With quality of life improvements like global gameplay, tournament improvements like resume from replay and multiplayer replay, and more micro. I couldn't be more exciting if Jesus Fucking Crhist did a second comming just to play SC with the Holy Ghost as his manager.
Current gems out of the top of my head that are 5 year or less, in my very particular opinion:
- SC II
- Portal 2 and Skyrim (only if you are heavy into modding and making mods urself, thus only the PC version)
- L4D2, DotA2, BF 3, Tribes (only if you are playing with a clan, or at least 1 other and obv Vent; otherwise they might suck)
- VVVVVV, SMB, Machinarium, Frozen Synapse, Braid, Cuthulu saves the world, Jamestown, World of Goo, Limbo, Rock of Ages, Trine and a freking bunch of other indies (unless of course you don't have a soul
)- Minecraft? I dunno, i hate this game, but it is at least relevant. Terraria? Now that is a decent one.
And if you don't agree, well me dont care sir, its a matter of taste. Now, games that took previous ideas and polished to never seen degrees leaps and bounds over the previous ones like Warcraft or plainly invented the wheel like Doom? That sir is not going to happen as often if ever anymore, that is the transition from a totally new art expression to a young one but with established paradigms.
An FPS that has run & gun shit and people play for a long time? I seem to remember hearing this obscure title called TF 2, not sure if it's around anymore.
Tribes looking ridic? That is coming from a Doom/Quake fan?!?! Well... at least i guess you do know it's just your very personal subjective opinion right? And it might be a little goofy in pubs, as said before you do need a clan to play it "like is mean to" or at least a couple of friends to have a reasonable margin of chance not to turn it into a disorganized fuckfest. Indeed is not corridor based, but being a fan of large low grav UT maps i say YAY!
Lastly milking a genere is usual buisness, remember when we were hit by all those plataformers and suddenly we had rayman, that orange cat and a bunch of half assed made others? Or when we were hit by a bunch of crappy JRPGs? Or the shitty invasion of 3d plataformers, with decent ones like Spyro and a bunch of unplayable others? When we had dozens of different contra clones? And BF 3 being indistinguishable from CoD?! Preposterous sir.
Nway, if gaming is not making the cut for you anymore, stop. The industry can't be as fresh as when "everybody was indie" back in the 80's early 90's; but it has been done brilliant things in the last 5 years. Really, go right now and play Neo Scavenger & Frozen Synapse, do it and then tell me they have no soul mate, i do dare u!!!
BTW, sorry if i am silly on the netz, me is a srs buisness guy IRL and i save all my goofiness for here.
I don't see the brilliant things in the last 5 years. I see games that were otherwise ok if they weren't being compared to a mountain of shit. Makes them look much better by comparison. As for the Neo Scavenger and Frozen Synapse, never heard of them. There may be obscure indie titles out there that have something going for them, but if nobody knows about them it doesn't do much to change the generally stagnant landscape.Tanakh said:
Well mate, big company videogames r made for the biggest marked. Back in the 80's-90's on PC that market was the enthusiast looking for complexity or innovation, now it's the masses of casual gamers (for a board definiton of casual).xDarc said:
Unless videogames crash and burn in a way never seen before, the biggest videogames will almost always be bland and lacking innovation from now on, thats why you don't look there for soul, you look at "obscure" indies
Dunno, seeing this thread its like looking for a conservatory music fan complaining that MTV and the big record companies don't support more complex and daring music, well duh, its true, but you dont expect or look for that in those sources
xDarc said:Only now the product is RogaineGeorge_Harvey_Bone said:But you should probably disregard my post - it's coming from someone in his mid-thirties who still puts product in his hair and chases tail...
Not far off - one girl I was chasing around recently asked me if I'd heard of Just For Men...