Poll: Are games as "fun" as they used to be?

[L-J-F]

I think they're, on the whole, less fun than they used to be. Whether or not this is due to becoming bored with them in general or a decline in the fun factor, I don't know. If I do know one thing though, it's that they're much better now than they used to be. With most games however, I don't get that "omFG it's so ******* awesome!!!!!!!" anymore ...

...

... except for ArmA2 ... that really is making me catch my breath and get the mad glint of expectation in my eye!

 

[_Janny_]

They're not as lengthy as they used to be, but they're still fun, even more fun I can say.

 

[New Troll]

Like my marriage, the passion is gone. Still beats watching TV for the most part though.

Gaming now is either a time killer or something to do with friends. Course with my fiance so far away at the moment, I find myself playing more than usual. Mainly just don't want to go out and do stuff without her. So I game instead.

 

[Niman]

I have grown dissapointed with today's games. They dont cut it for me anymore. It seems as if all games are based on one idea and the difference between each game is just minor tweaks that each developer installs.

I dont know what has caused the spark to be lost. Is it that I am no longer 15? Is it that after so long of playing games, their language has somehow become second nature to me and I know exactly what to do each time? (I havent opened a manual or gone through a tutorial in ages....). But it does seem to me that the way games are made today is as if they are not games. They feel too corporate if that means anything....

I dont know...I miss the creativity I guess. I havent bought a major release in a few months because I usually get the chance to play them at friends' houses and no game has caught my eye like they used to. That's why I still play the old stuff. Even going back to the Commodore Amiga


(Anyone else got the feeling we are headed for another video game crash with some many uninteresting games flooding the market??? Would make a good Escapist article)

 

[deadmandancin]

The novelty of games has gone but when they do grab your attention they are amazingly fun.

 

[L-J-F]

There are good games out there, it's just that they are obscure and not mainstream (which probably makes up a good percentage of the "corportate" titles that were mentioned earlier). I played 1 game throughout 2002 to 2007 (operation flashpoint) and then the sequal (arma) from then until now and most probably up until the release date of the next installment (arma2). For me just this one series makes it all worth while.

I think one of the best things a game can have is a good community. The ofp/arma series has so many mods you can check up once a week and get another 500mb of playing time. Another thing is editors, with them you can extend the life of a game almost indefinitely, and then finally there is the open-ness of a game. Something like call of duty is limited by the content created by the developers, nobody could create another COD4 campaign, it's too much work, but a game like ofp/or an RTS? It's easy because the game stands on it's own feet, you can create a map and play it.

I think there are some really great titles in the works and there will continue to be fresh and innovative games coming, it's just that you have to fish through the sewage to find them.

 

[Biek]

The moment I asked myself the threads name, I stopped playing WoW.

 

[Julius M]

I don't think so, i still play allot of my old games even today. I still play Worms for the PSX, and i still play Id Software's original Doom (the game is 15 years old) and i still return back to Super Mario 64 now and then even though i could be playing Super Mario galaxy instead. The games may grow old and so do i but i would still take my fav old games over some of the recent remakes/sequels any time of the day.

Worms is arguably one of the best games ever so I won't say anything about that.

But still playing Doom? Not that it wasn't a great game, but I wouldn't say it was better than Half Life for example. There have been plenty of better shooters, though I must admit the latest line has too much look-alikes.



I think the old games were just simple. And what made games great was both our lack of overt criticism and the developers decision to not make their games do too much. Mario 64 was brilliant in it's simplicity, and while galaxy did include lots of old things and new things it didn't have that simplicity. Games try to cram too much into a short period and so they sometimes don't work each thing out in a good way.

I did get older though so I doubt I would ever play old games like I used to. When I was a kid I just didn't have much else to think about. No partying, drinking and going after girls. No internet sites where I could debate about a vast range of topics. Not much music or basically any other distractions.

 

[Same River New Water]

i for one like there Call of Duty series allot, though i must say they are not taking the time they could to work on them anymore, they already have 2 call of duty games using the Call of duty 4 engine and another one is around the corner. The game may be of pretty good quality but they are still on a very good road towards turning the series into more of a product for the masses rather then long good solid game.

The engine used primarily affects the graphics. Gameplay features like AI and character abilities are written on top of that. In your last post you complained about developers being hung up on graphics, so... *shrug*

As a side note: the engine also affects a game's physics. I'd say Call of Duty's physics system is as advanced as it needs to be.

---

Spore is a prime example of EA's new strategy: it's ambitious, innovative and critically praised [http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/spore?q=spore]. I can't remember ever seeing an overall negative review of Spore(not including the DRM/piracy debate which had nothing to do with the game itself)so I don't know where you're getting your "like we all know" arrogance from

"Amazon users slam Spore DRM" - GamesIndustry.biz [http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/amazon-users-slam-spore-drm]

Sample review: "Fantastic game, gets 1 star because of DRM."

I can't remember ever seeing an overall negative review of Spore (not including the DRM/piracy debate which had nothing to do with the game itself)

---

EDIT:

i still play allot of my old games even today. I still play Worms for the PSX, and i still play Id Software's original Doom (the game is 15 years old) and i still return back to Super Mario 64 now and then even though i could be playing Super Mario galaxy instead. The games may grow old and so do i but i would still take my fav old games over some of the recent remakes/sequels any time of the day.

Yeah, but first impressions stay with you. Take the Zelda series, for example. The core Zelda games are all pretty similar: A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess are basically the same game on progressively updated hardware. If you ask anyone what their favourite game of the series is, they'll usually say the first one they played. My favourite is Ocarina of Time, because it was the first I played; my expectations are calibrated to that, so A Link to the Past is dull for me and Twilight Princess is fun but doesn't have the same emotional pull. People who played A Link to the Past first will insist it's the best, because it laid the foundations and the later games were just going over old ground; they can see that OOT and TP are good, but they aren't as "special" as LTTP. Someone who played Twilight Princess first will see OOT as a crappier, smaller version of TP, and won't understand the reverence for LTTP: it's just not as good, like a 2D prototype of the latest game.

They're all good, and if you ignore which one was first and adjust your expectations for the year they were published, you could say they're all equally good. Which one you prefer depends on you.

 

[Cylem]

I haven't gotten totally addicted to anything as of late, but I haven't exactly been looking very hard. Last time I got really psyched up for a game was after seeing the concept art for The World Ends With You last summer.

There are a few games I'd like to play, but I can't say I've been counting down to release dates recently.

 

[Phenakist]

Could the internet have thrown the classic gaming feel out the window?

I know everytime I sit down to play a singleplayer game it seems the internet wants to mock me because most of my friends seem to instantly swap over to halo 3, cod 4, or whatever. It's always some game with fun multiplayer, and by the time I cave in and go to play that game they seem to disappear in the time it takes for me to check my friends list to see they're still there, get to the dashboard take 1st disc out, check they're still there, 2nd disc in, game loads and they've gone.

I think Gaming isn't as fun because everyone is too focused on multiplayer which as much as some people hate to admit, is essentially the same thing over and over again, as in single player there is "culture" and depth to it. I am by no means saying multiplayer is a bad thing but it seems to have taken the "spark" out of true gaming.

See, I would disagree here, multiplayer is one of the few aspects of modern gaming that I still find undeinably fun, although not in all cases. Still, I almost always have fun playing multiplayer on Halo 3 or Left 4 Dead, part of that is because it's genuinely about the gameplay, and part of it is that interacting with people is a lot more fun than being by ones self. Like I said in my earlier post, when I become frustrated with a game it's because I'm not accomplishing the goal, but with multiplayer the goal is to play the game, so it's still fun even when I'm getting owned.

I think there needs to be a balance to multiplayer, it is definitely alot more fun (most of the time)than single player. BUT when a game becomes dominating and everyone plays it and there ends up being that one weapon or one build that is overpowered, that takes the fun and soul out of gaming, turning it into nothing more than a grind. Halo and L4D are part of the minority that have weapon sets that are balanced better than other games, the guns do what they are supposed to and all have their own specific purpose for example, no assault rifle is better than sniping than a sniper rifle is or no sniper rifle is better at close quarters than a shotgun. I hope you see what I am trying to get at.

 

[tsunamibomb]

I would say they are not quite as fun for me as they used to be, not because of nostalgia or anything, but for me as i grow up (slightly) games have less appeal... I think I will always play games, but they're part of my life will shrink as my time is taken up by other things, such as a my education, career, relationships, socialising, etc...
But I don't think they are less 'fun', I just don't have the same level of interest in them as I used too. I'm sure that too people aged what I was when I was playing the N64 and dreamcast, the current gen games are incredibly fun and addictive, but to me it has become just a way to spend free time when I'm bored and have nothing else to do...

 

[Jast]

I would'nt neccessarily say games aren't as fun as they used to be, but that games aren't as creative as they used to be.

 

[Same River New Water]

You don't actually think that everybody hates Spore simply because it has DRM do you?

I don't think that everybody hates Spore, period. Check out the professional reviews it got [http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/spore?q=spore]: an average of 84%. There was a focused and explicit campaign to vote down Spore on Amazon.com because of the restrictive DRM it came packaged with, rather than the game itself. I expect a lot of those negative votes came from multiple sock-puppet accounts people made for themselves just for that purpose. Even on Metacritic the user reviews are relatively low, but almost all of the complaints say the same thing you did: "It's not the game I expected." That doesn't make it a bad game, just not the game you want.

I defended EA earlier, but I'm not a fanboy: I agree they're mainly interested in profits. But they curbed the scope of Spore because they didn't want it to become another Duke Nukem Forever. It was in development for eight years, remember.

Will Wright hasn't said anything about leaving EA because of creative restrictions. After all, they let him spend the better part of a decade developing one game - that doesn't sound like an oppressive regime. In fact, in an interview on the same site [http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/09/07/will-wright-reacts-to-crtical-spore-reviews/], he explains why the focus of Spore changed: not because of pressure from EA, but because they wanted it to be a game for everyone, not just us core gamers.

the one consistent complaint I?ve seen is that the gameplay seems to have been ?dumbed down? for the sake of appealing to a more casual audience. Was it?

?I?d say that?s quite accurate,? Wright told me. ?We were very focused, if anything, on making a game for more casual players. ?Spore? has more depth than, let?s say, ?The Sims? did. But we looked at the Metacritic scores for ?Sims 2″, which was around 90, and something like ?Half-Life?, which was 97, and we decided ? quite a while back ? that we would rather have the Metacritic and sales of ?Sims 2″ than the Metacritic and sales of ?Half-Life.?

If you think he's just saying that because EA made the decision, think about his previous games. He's always made games for everyone, never gone for the core gamer demographic.

 

[Sergeant M. Fudgey]

Yes they are still just as fun.

The only reason an old game seems more fun is because of nostalgia. That's not to say old gamer aren't fun, it's just stupid to think that they are instantly better than all modern games.

Oh by no means are they instantly better than modern games. I suppose it is a lot of nostalgia in play here...

I mean, I think games like Banjo Kazooie back in the day were fantastic, but I almost like the new BK better. Its almost completely unrelated to the old ones, but still manages to deliver a well thought out and creative game. Halo 2 is probably the best shooter I have every played, better than doom obviously even with the insane amounts of time I spent with doom.
From a technical stance, modern games are in every war better than old games. I think the problem is, there aren't any new concepts being introduced (and the ones that are being introduced seem pretty good) I'm thinkin we need a whole new genre of gaming to revolutionize the market.

A new genre? That's not going to happen.

Somebody just needs to make it happen.

 

[massau]

there getting to short and i so it just suck me in but than just after it (one lvl)THE END
but hawq had a good length

 

[Same River New Water]

A new genre? That's not going to happen.

There are a lot of indie games that don't fit into any existing genre. Look at World of Goo, for example. Tower defence wasn't a genre until recently (I think). Audiosurf has created a genre. Rez is in a tiny genre if not a new one. A lot of casual games are in new genres, like Peggle (although I guess you could call it "crazy pinball".