What do you LIKE about the current state of gaming?

[Singularly Datarific]

Steam. I like steam.

 

[jcfrommars9]

1. Services like GOG allow me to buy games with relative ease at a very cheap price.
2. Thanks to kickstarter I now have plenty of cRPGs to look forward to.

That's it really.

And bigger and experiences at that, as much a stink as people made about Mass effect 3 it's still remains an incredibly ambiotious project tieing together two other games and a bunch of interesting characaters.

That's not ambitious. That's just what sequels are meant to do.

There's a big difference between normal sequels and what Mass Effect did. Since each playthrough could be imported into the next game, your decisions carried into other sequels. That's a very big deal, especially in RPGs.

An entirely different point to what MrHide was making. All he spoke of was tying multiple games together through the use of repeat characters.

But sure even IF he was referring to the choices carrying over (which evidently he was not) they spectacularly failed in that department. In each individual game there was minimal C&C and across the span of the entire trilogy there was minimal C&C. Yes there was an occasional dialogue change but that's simply not good enough.

Other games had already done this before and they did a much better job at it (e.g. the Wizardry series). Bioware deserves no praise for their failed promises.

Only if you perceived it as a failed promise. In spite of the ending, I did not see as a failure let alone a spectacular one but as a huge success in regards to choices, cause and consequence, dialogue, story and so forth. In other words, I'm in agreement with Karoshi and MrHide-Patten.

Change of subject and topic wise, gaming is so much versatile than even seven years ago. Just this month's titles alone to me is like a summer blockbuster of great movies. Tomb Raider, God of War: Ascension, Gears of War Judgment and Bioshock Infinite, etc.

 

[bojackx]

There's really not a whole lot to hate in gaming nowadays. Although 2012 felt kind of lacklustre to me in terms of what was released, visuals are getting better and stories are getting deeper.

I'm also very interested in all the new consoles coming out, I love to see how these kind of things advance. It's unfortunate the PS Vita hasn't delivered in my eyes so far, but that's one of very few gripes I have with gaming as it is now.

 

[hazabaza1]

There's a nice amount of focus on story in a lot of games without having to trudge through a billion buttons of shitty interface.
Stuff also looks nice, and if I want to get old stuff it's really easy to do so.

 

[Squidbulb]

I love how I can easily find a play pretty much any game I want. If I can't download it, it should be pretty easy to order off Amazon or something.
That, and I like how indie games are easily accessible, and how they can be succesful too despite the lower production qualities.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I'm really loving indie games these days. I haven't bought a AAA game while it was still relevant since... the PS2[footnote]I still buy them, but not anywhere near release. I wait for price drops and sales.[/footnote]?, but I'm pretty well up on my indie hits. A big part of why I'm /rooting/ for an industry crash is because killing off the AAA industry won't kill off the indie devs, it'll just clear out the old baggage and give some room for a bunch of devs who value creativity and and know how to treat their customers right a chance to take over. The modern indie scene really reminds me of the shareware days of the early 90's, and I don't know anyone who remembers those games and the companies who made them but doesn't remember them fondly.

The point of this rambling post is, clear out the monsters at the top and give the indie devs a chance to fill in the gap, and the business practices of this industry will get a lot better for a few years. Then the whole cycle will start again, because money corrupts, but that's inevitable.

 

[Darren716]

I love the amount of amazing sandbox games we get now a days such as Sleeping Dogs, Arkham City, the new Fallouts, Oblivion & Skyrim, Just Cause 2, and my all time favorite in the genre Saints Row 2.

 

[TheHmm]

Because they dont consider long-term sales anymore it kinda sucks...

Polish doesnt pay off in the short run and going for becoming a classic is too risky...

Boo Hoo

 

[Razentsu]

Improved graphics are always awesome. Also, the higher budgets usually provide with storytelling experiences that constantly trup whatever bullshit Hollywood is trying to pass off as entertainment these days.

But for me, personally, the revival of the Fighting Game genre. Hands down. As a wee lad growing up, one of my favorite games was Capcom vs SNK for the PS1. At first my young mind was baffled at the sheer complexity of the game's controls and mechanics, but as time went by, my fear grew into a longing for worthy opponents. And then, Street Fighter IV happened. At first, I hated the new graphics and art style, but my friend got me hooked on it. After that the floodgates opened, with BlazBlue, MvC3, new KoF and Tekken titles, you name it.

Granted, companies quickly got smart and started milking the new generation's traditions of DLC mongering (looking at you there, Capcom), while still releasing glorified balance patches in form of new games with a couple new character introduced to the roster like they did back in the 80s.

All in all, though, I'm happy with the whole fighting game boom.

This, I can agree with. Mortal Kombat's revival was just awesome. The series been stagnant since the last gen, and we got a proper, competitive yet accessible, fun MK.
Can't wait to see what they do next!

Hell yeah, I'm also very happy for the resurgence of the fighting game genre. You gotta love the variety of fighting games to choose from these days.

 

[fezgod]

As much as we like to ***** and moan about how "gaming is ruined because DRM/COD/EA, etc" the video game industry is improving year by year. Steam and XBLA are allowing smaller, independent games to receive more attention and some triple-A games are pushing the boundaries of what can be done with video games.

Saying that the industry is ruined because of certain games/companies is like saying the music or movie industry is ruined because of a few bad apples. If you're gonna hate an entire industry, you're clearly not examining every part of said industry.

 

[Saika Renegade]

I'm enjoying the greater characterization, where it appears. For instance, the human companions from Fallout New Vegas are all incredibly nuanced, deep characters with personalities, and feel less like collections of electrons and more like people. I'm sure I'm not the only one who empathized with a socially awkward but competent fellow like Boone who had happiness and saw it snatched from him, hiding his very human pain behind a mask of cold lethality.

For contrast, Mario hasn't really evolved much of a personality past 'saves worlds and/or princesses,' which we see even in the present. The Mario of today could and does neatly be slotted into previous games and vice versa.

 

[Christopher Fisher]

te]

There's an awful lot of negativity in the gaming community right now. Some of it is justified, sure, but gaming is something we do to for entertainment. There's gotta be a reason you're still here, right?

There are a lot of things that I think are great about the industry right now. Things seem brighter now than when they did back when I was a wee one, to be honest.

Retro gaming!

Services like GoG and the Virtual Console let me buy some really fantastic games that I missed the first time around, without needing to hold on to ancient hardware/piss around with DOSBOX or whathaveyou. There's a good couple of decades worth of classics waiting to be played. Some titles are even easier to get now than they were at release! Phantasy Star IV, for example.

Cheapness!

OK, so new AAA games can be pretty expensive and then there's DLC if you're into that (I've only ever bought one DLC, m'self and that was for Magicka) so you're probably wondering what I'm talking about.

Well, as a PC Gamer, shit's never been cheaper for me. Relatively low end hardware can run the majority of games at an acceptable level (for now) and there's always a massive sale or two somewhere on the internet. Between the Humble Bundles, Steam Sales, Green Man Gaming, GoG sales and even deep retail discounts you can build a massive library entirely by accident.

I've bought over 200 games in this past year which... was really quite stupid on my part, but still! 200! 10 years ago someone with my kinda money wouldn't have been able to buy 200 games in a year without filing for bankruptcy at the end of it. Plus, I should have more than enough of a backlog to tide me over until I can afford to get some next-gen hardware, so yay future savings!

Indies!

A few people here aren't fans of indie games, but there have been a lot of indies this generation that I've really loved. Games like Gemini Rue and Lone Survivor have become some of my favourites of all time, and others such as Amnesia or Minecraft have almost become modern classics. Commercial indie games have always existed but it seems like they're given much more of a chance now. It's like the early '80s, where anybody could make a game, except with less unplayable shit.

Even the AAA industry doesn't suck, really!

There have been more fantastic games than I can even count this generation. A lot of people like to complain that all we get are CoD clones but I don't think that's true at all. We've gotten wonderfully unique puzzlers like Portal, open-ended stealth 'em ups like Human Revolution, Batman revolutionized the brawler and Darksiders may well be one of the best games in the whole Zelda franchise.

I think it's easy enough to ignore the bits that you don't like. I haven't played a single CoD-clone except Homefront (it came in a bundle so I thought "why not?") and Battlefield 3's single player, which I promptly ignored in favour of it's incredibly fun multi-player.

I'm not saying that there aren't problems and that they aren't worth discussing, but let's try to lighten up and talk about why we still care enough about gaming to yell at each other on the internet.

Yeah, I have to agree with you. People just like to ***** and be all doom-and-gloom, but imo the gaming industry has never been better...unless that is you only play AAA console games (which aren't that bad; they're just becoming less diverse). You should also add kickstarter as a plus--games like Shadowrun Returns, FTL, and Project Eternity, yes please!

 

[Candidus]

Kickstarters
Reviving genres I thought were basically dead or relegated to the hands of Bioware inepts. Examples: Infinity and Torment.

T & A in HD
You may have noticed graphics getting better. Fanservice has been getting better right along with it. This is quite splendid.

E-sports
The various e-sports saw record growth and attendance at events this year. Record viewership on Twitch and ever-higher sponsor spending. Prejudice against it, from gamers who misunderstand the meaning of the word sport and are incredulous over its use, to non-gamers who think the whole hobby is frivolous... That's just people being people. They'll get past it. Some of them, anyway.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

1. Services like GOG allow me to buy games with relative ease at a very cheap price.
2. Thanks to kickstarter I now have plenty of cRPGs to look forward to.

That's it really.

And bigger and experiences at that, as much a stink as people made about Mass effect 3 it's still remains an incredibly ambiotious project tieing together two other games and a bunch of interesting characaters.

That's not ambitious. That's just what sequels are meant to do.

Ambitious in how it tied togteher the multiple choices, if you didn't put any effort into saving characters and the like, ME3 came across a lot more varidly. Didn't really think I needed to sum that up.

 

[OpticalJunction]

I love being able to play old games as well as new games these days without having to buy a retro console or something like that. Modern gaming has become so simple, installation is easy, modding is easy(er), gameplay is more intuitive than ever. Ontop of that the graphics are better and the prices aren't much higher than before (and in some cases are extremely low). It's as easy to get into gaming these days as it is to get into reading, or watching movies.

 

[King Aragorn]

Improved graphics are always awesome. Also, the higher budgets usually provide with storytelling experiences that constantly trup whatever bullshit Hollywood is trying to pass off as entertainment these days.

But for me, personally, the revival of the Fighting Game genre. Hands down. As a wee lad growing up, one of my favorite games was Capcom vs SNK for the PS1. At first my young mind was baffled at the sheer complexity of the game's controls and mechanics, but as time went by, my fear grew into a longing for worthy opponents. And then, Street Fighter IV happened. At first, I hated the new graphics and art style, but my friend got me hooked on it. After that the floodgates opened, with BlazBlue, MvC3, new KoF and Tekken titles, you name it.

Granted, companies quickly got smart and started milking the new generation's traditions of DLC mongering (looking at you there, Capcom), while still releasing glorified balance patches in form of new games with a couple new character introduced to the roster like they did back in the 80s.

All in all, though, I'm happy with the whole fighting game boom.

This, I can agree with. Mortal Kombat's revival was just awesome. The series been stagnant since the last gen, and we got a proper, competitive yet accessible, fun MK.
Can't wait to see what they do next!

Hell yeah, I'm also very happy for the resurgence of the fighting game genre. You gotta love the variety of fighting games to choose from these days.

Yep. New IP's in the shape of fighting games are out all the time. Skullgirls, Injustice, etc. Back then, it was honestly just fighting game sequel over fighting game sequel over fighting game sequel...

 

[CloudAtlas]

I like that, now, it is possible to animate characters well enough so that their faces and gestures are able to convey even subtle emotions, and so that their movements look fluid and natural - virtual characters never looked so real.

 

[Tom_green_day]

I'm fine with the current gen. Four of my 5 favourite games are on my PS3, and I think it's as slick and easy to use as I like. I really don't care about graphics so it serves me well. The one thing I don't like is the hostility between consoles. From my experience it's usually PC gamers acting as though consoles are inferior, but there are also console fanboys too. These people just really annoy me.

 

[Mrkillhappy]

For me it is the growth of the indie seen and also the fact that console games are now capable of being patched so now their are less games that are unplayable due to glitches. Also this generation of games have amazing graphics, better writing, and better voice acting. Also the occasional good reboot (i.e. Mortal Kombat and Tomb Raider).