Great games..... I really feel that peak gaming was in 90s/early 2000s.
You had C&C, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Quake 1/2, Half Life, Pro Evo Soccer, and so many more in the PC side, and probably a SNES or a N64 around. Super Mario (all of them), Golden Eye, Mario Kart, Street Fighter 2, Final Fight and more
Online gaming was crude but fun (Age of Empires, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, had a great online implementation). LAN gaming parties were coming in my dorm.
Games had a well defined start, end, and progression that was dependent on your skill.
Now games are just a way for you to spend money in loot boxes, dcls, and cosmetics, or 'upgrades' so you can escape the artificial grind. Tutorials everywhere, handholding to the point that destroy any type of mystery or fun of the game.....
While the gaming industry has turned huge and inevitably is much more about money then when it wasn't really taken that seriously by the broad public, thanks to the indie scene there is still great games being released today in any genre and subgenre you can possibly think of. There has definitely been a game released during the last 12 months that you'd totally like if you only knew about it.
But the "getting old" part definitely plays a role too. When you're a kid or in your teens everything is just more exciting and impressive to you. A teen today might think the latest Wolfenstein installment is the most awesome thing they've ever seen while to you it's just another first person shooter or doom clone, with somewhat better graphics. Now you could say "but doom was new and groundbreaking", but even if there had been a dozen identical games before, if doom were the first one you played, it wouldn't have mattered. Graphics is another thing I stopped caring about. In the late 90s and early 2000s I was blown away by new graphics demos released every year showing off what the next gen of gfx cards were capable of. Nowadays I'm so out of the loop. Graphics from 5 years ago look no different than today. Although I must admit the latest unreal engine tech demos actually did manage to impress me.
I did not get a chance to play most of the late 90s and early 2000 games in my childhood. My second console after an NES clone is a PS4, and I always had run of the mill business computers. My father gifted me Age of Empires: the Rise of Rome and that's pretty much all I played. And Half Life, which my friend gave me. I also played demo versions of Unreal and some shareware ID games, but never full.
I recently bought and played thief, thief 2, deus ex, starcraft, the rise of nations, prince of persia (My dad used to play Jordan Mechner (PC port) one with me, but I was too young then), max payne (1 and 2), half-life 2. I know these are blockbuster games of their time, but I feel they are better than blockbuster games of today. I play RDR2, Spiderman, God of War etc on my modern PS4 but thre is sothing these games are missing.
Some modern games I do like and recommend to everyone: Rimworld, Kerbal Space Program, Prey, ShenzenIO
The two newer Deus Exen are worth a go if you like the first one. Infamously and accurately, you may as well skip 2 and go to 3 & 4.
Also both Dishonored games—best of the more recent descendants of the Thief/Deus Ex games. Improved with the right mindset—you start out more capable than the average person, and are very soon "hella OP", so, whatcha gonna do with all that power? Plus no save scumming and turning off all the modern flashy-arrow-waypoint HUD bullshit. Makes you really feel the weight of things better.
> max payne (1 and 2)
Max Payne 2 on the ultra-hard mode that you have to unlock, where you only get like 2-3 saves per level, is one of my favorite gaming experiences, and I'm not usually the sort to like hardcore "challenge" modes. It totally changes how you play. Highly recommended. Plus you get the real ending :-). Hated 3. Repeated "hold on while we take control for a cutscene then leave you standing in the open for no reason, with guys already shooting at you" got old fast, and the game just never stopped doing that, sometimes seeming only to take control in order to do that. Plus the story failed to make me give a damn about anything that was happening, which is a problem.
Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4) might be up your alley if you've enjoyed the open world "make the icons disappear from the map" games (Red Dead, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry from 3 on) at all. It actually has a plot you might care about, unlike almost all the others, and the world is much cooler than average.
Based on the amount of stealth games in that list, you might like Mark of the Ninja - indie side-scrolling stealth platformer with a great visual style.
That's the thing about getting old, you end up seeing enough examples of everything that you generalise and everything fits in your model of the world. Which also means some of the magic is gone, and possibly also your ability to recognise something genuinely new.
> ...and possibly also your ability to recognise something genuinely new.
I think we can still recognize something new: I found that playing "Vader Immortal" on Oculus Quest to be a genuinely new gaming experience. And I've been gaming on PC since 8/81 (when PCs were first released) and on Apple IIs before that, and IBM 5110s before that.
I'd say what sets the good games from then apart are the ones which were, back then, innovative. Hexen might've been a fun game, as was Heretic, but it is Doom and Quake which were ahead of their time.
EDIT: I disagree games are no longer good. Slay The Spire is a brilliant combination of rogue and card game. Total War: Warhammer II is a good real-time RTS with a non-realtime map component. World of Warcraft was a good MMORPG, and it is from this millennium (2004).
> also your ability to recognise something genuinely new.
Humans are pattern recognition machines and someone who has a much larger training set than a younger person would have a much better sense in spotting what is new or not.
I consider myself also old in this regard, having really enjoyed games like Galaga and Mario Brothers on the NES and with Tiberian Sun as one of my most favorite games of all time.
I'd say the most recent time I've been blown away was using Vive's full room VR setup. Many VR games have some very primitive concepts and graphics but it's a very different way of gaming even in multiplayer. There's a lot of room for improvement in graphics, but even _more_ room for improvement of controller hardware designs.
Now you could say "but doom was new and groundbreaking", but even if there had been a dozen identical games before
I'd love to find out about a dozenb Doom-like games that appeared before Doom. Of course, there was Wolfenstein 3D but its 3D engine was much more limited, there was Ultima Underworld but it was hardly an "identical game"... but other than that? Which fast-paced, first-person 3D action shooter existed before Doom??
> There has definitely been a game released during the last 12 months that you'd totally like if you only knew about it.
I've found this to be especially true. Playing through Witcher 3, Factorio - I'm rediscovering some incredible games that focus a lot of systems design for more emergent gameplay. The architecture of factorio vs the divergent gameplay of Witcher captivates for hours upon hours!
Genre got rehashed / beaten to dead, the hype's at the successor of the genre, MOBA. No more innovation to take from RTS, unless you implement it as part of other genres/games. Which you could argue MOBA is.
I cannot get the game to play correctly. I'm using Debian with AMD open graphics, and about everything works fine, but this game is horribly broken with it. I'd love to play it.
I think it’s a cool tech demo. And that part is honestly impressive. But I find it a pain to play. You are constantly watching your back in 360 degrees on multiple planets at the same time.
Multi-planet battles while cool looking and fun are not balanced and most of the competitive matches are played with no orbital tech on single planet - these are quite similar to competitive matches in TotalA and really well balanced. If you play ladder or with people looking for competitive matches then it feels a lot more like old RTSes although you can still zoom out or send units in not so obvious ways (frontal attacks rarely work) which often makes for interesting surprises and strategies.
It takes a bit to get used to playing on planets instead of classic maps with borders but that’s what makes this game special.
> thanks to the indie scene there is still great games being released today in any genre and subgenre you can possibly think of.
Problem is that the indies production values pale vs what AAA studios did even 20 years ago in terms of how polished the games could be. Like, you won't find any indie game that's as good as Starcraft 1. So in reality you get a lot of half-assed games in many genres (of course sometimes you get lucky and get true gems).
You give me 3 examples. That's cherry picking, and I did mention there are gems, and the games you mentioned can be considered as exceptions. I challenge you to give me a list of 50 polished indie games in their respective genres.
There are games that are focused on being profit-driven to a fault. Pretty much anything from Activision, and most of the stuff produced by EA.
But there's plenty of games that match what you describe. Sony has published a solid lineup for the last few years. The dark souls series is a very solid example of modern skill based progression.
DLC used to exist - we just used to call them expansions.
There's also free to play games that use microtransactions as funding - but they're all either cosmetic or slight quality-of-life boosts that don't have direct gameplay impact (see: warframe and path of exile)
And that's not even talking about indies. There's plenty of indie titles that are pretty much 90s games with modern quality of life upgrades.
Some quality games that meet or exceed the quality of the 90s era from the last few years (in no particular order):
- God of War
- Horizon Zero Dawn
- Dark souls series (including bloodborne)
- Zelda Breath of the Wild
- Hyper light drifter
- Enter the Gungeon
- Spiderman
- Rimworld
- The Witcher Series
There's a ton more.. and there's also a glut of games coming out in the next couple years that also look amazing.
The thing that exists today that didn't in the past, is companies exploiting psychology to produce endorphin rushes tied to microtransactions. Companies tying gambling mechanics to gameplay advantage (FIFA and Madden are egregious examples of this).
People love “the world is burning” type nostalgia for another time. But there’s never been a better time to be a serious gamer looking for excellent story telling and gameplay.
But just like films where you won’t find the auteurs or Criterion Collection at your local theater besides a few exceptions, you have to seek them out and being paying attention (most people who make critiques like this aren’t anywhere near involved in music/films/games/etc like they were when they were kids. But they expect the same ROI.
Every booming cultural market pumps out more crap than good stuff, and I assure you the 90a and early 2000s had plenty of awful games.
RTS is the posterboy of a dead genre, in the same way that Westerns don't exist in film.
StarCraft 2 is probably the most recent major RTS release, and it's not particularly active despite being an excellent game. The issue with the RTS genre is it's been superceded by two other genres. The people who want to play RTS games are playing MOBAs like Lol or Dota, or have moved to city building games which have had an explosion in popularity.
That said, Dawn of War 3 was released last year, the Total War, and Anno series still exist, StarCraft is still receiving updates, albeit infrequently, and there's a handful of indie games that scratch that itch
Hello there.
Full disclaimer : Developer here.
saw this post through a google alert on FPS/RTS.
There's a new RTS-FPS hybrid which is being developed currently on Early Access. It's taking the genre in a way is more similar to Battlezone in a sense that you actually train AI units rather than it being 100% human players on the field. It's a 5v5 , and commander filled the battlefield with trained AI mobs while player are much similar to warcraft3 hero.
Another RTS-FPS hybrid that comes to mind is Battlezone 1&2. It catered to a very niche audience back in the day (1998) which may have doomed it, but I remember playing a demo of it and being blown away by it. I play it every now and and again and I believe still has some active players online.
Wrt BZ2 a remastered version is available on GoG / steam. A few of the original developers have kept the game patched and compatible with todays hardware / software.
I appreciate games like the Anno series in the core niche of city or empire-building. I went looking for city building game lists on YT and there are some promising games coming up, and there are some series with promising sequels.
Age of Empires is being revived with the classic, well-proven look and feel, with upgraded graphics and new campaigns. Settlers is being revived with the classic gameplay (I hope) and not the AoE style gameplay.
There are several other games expected to be released this year or next and look like excellent candidates for being top-of-the-line strategy and city-building games. I hope at least some of them live up to the promos and hype.
> I really feel that peak gaming was in 90s/early 2000s.
IMO we're just old.
If there was any way this was true, then people born after 1999 would be itching to play games from the 90s and early 2000s, instead of the latest thing from EA and crowd. (They aren't. No teenager in 2019 groks Star Control.)
This goes doubly true for "games were easier to learn back then". No, teenagers today are picking up the latest games in 10 minutes just like we used to when we were teens. Games aren't harder now (plenty of 8 bit console games were punishingly hard) we're just OLD. I'm positive if I still had the pliable brain of a 16 year old I'd be hopping on whatever newest, shiniest DRM / DLC goodness was out right now.
> If there was any way this was true, then people born after 1999 would be itching to play games from the 90s and early 2000s, instead of the latest thing from EA and crowd.
Not necessarily. Games at that time targeted a quite very different audience than today's games. So people born earlier do not like these modern games and people born after 1999 are not itching to play games from the 90s.
Yeah back in the 80s and 90s games on PC were made for a niche of folks who were rich enough to purchase a PC and who were typically highly educated, most of them not teenagers. the median gamer today is completely diffferent.
The PC gaming crowd is probably still more like that, compared to console gamers. Most AAA games seem to be made for consoles and ported to PC... Indies often start on PC and are later ported to consoles if they are successful.
Most games on the steam top games by player count list are from the 2000s/early 2010s. For example Dota 2, GTA V, Rust, TF2, GMod, etc... were all released before 2013. It's a bit later than what OP was saying but I think it still demonstrates that older games are typically more enjoyable: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
In addition to a neighbor comment's reference to multiplayer games this also might have to do with some more popular games not being on Steam these days. Fortnite and Overwatch are unbelievably popular and not on Steam.
Multiplayer games probably follow a bell curve, much like the technology adoption lifecycle[1], peaking a few years after release. Except for GTA, the more single-player games in that list (ARK, FM, Rainbox Six Siege) are all younger.
I’ll bite, I’m old and have teenagers. They often still play AoE2 and Half Life. There really hasn’t been a good replacement for AoE2. StarCraft is the closest, but we still like AoE2 better.
That said: Breath of the Wild exceeds everything else I’ve played sing Kings Quest 4.
On the other hand, some of the best games I've ever played only came out in the past ten years (Dark Souls, Soma, Tacoma, Outer Wilds, Subnautica, Factorio). I don't feel gaming is worse off now - we have so much variety to choose from. Whatever special interest you have, there's likely something out there for you to play to accommodate your interests.
I do agree though, that we've lost some things (while gaining others). Blizzard is no longer putting out the same kinds of games that put them on the map. A lot of valuable IP's that forged the gaming industry in its early years are forgotten or killed off or have some weird mobile/mobile transaction-ridden game to carry the flame. We'll probably never see another Starcraft. The next Diablo will likely be a huge disappointment. We've lost studios like Westwood or Maxis. We're never getting another Silent Hill. Or another Metal Gear. The list goes on.
And then you have a company like Nintendo that's pretty much doing exactly what they've always been doing, putting out the same kinds of games that made them so beloved (with many improvements and experiments along the way). Or Sony with its laser focus on great single-player experiences without loot boxes and their crazy large number of first-party and second-party studios.
Maybe it's because I've become older, but I feel that games of the 1990s and early 2000s were easier to pick up. There was no need to invest in world building or complex mechanics. You just picked up the game and started playing.
Like I tried the latest Need for Speed. It's got this whole artifice about you being a racer and you drive around a city to join races.
Back when I played Need for Speed a lot (especially NFS 2, 3 and 4), the games had no such pretention. You just started the game, picked up a mode and started racing. The games never felt compelled to tell you how to feel or think.
Grade School: Doom 2, Quake, Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, Red Alert, HOMM 1-3, Total Annihilation
Jr High - High School: Tribes (started playing it late), Warcraft 3 / DOTA, Diablo 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, World Of Warcraft (beta through WOTLK)
College: Team Fortress 2, Heroes Of Newerth, League of Legends
Post-college: Civilization 5, DOTA 2, Path of Exile
I consider all of these periods equally great/golden. The number of games in each period varies, but I don't consider that a factor.
I could go back and play any of these games and enjoy them today, assuming compatibility issues are dealt with and there are servers with players for the multiplayer-focused titles (sadly not the case for Tribes, and I think HON is dead too).
I played Diablo 1 for the first time in nearly nineteen years last night on diabloweb, and it's aged incredibly well. The atmosphere is just as immersive as it was back in my childhood. I was surprised to not feel nostalgic. Instead, I was reminded of how incredibly disappointing Diablo 3 was.
I'm pretty gamed out now. Lately I only really play MTG Arena. The current Battle Royale era is the first major gaming phase I've opted out of entirely. I haven't played DOTA2 in nearly a year after playing at least one MOBA game near-daily between 2004 and 2018.
I'm tempted to try WoW Classic, but I feel like I'll either be unable to play more than a few hours before losing all interest, or it will completely take over my life again
I might disagree.... if you were a kid in the 90s, you were player at Peak 2D, (NES,SNES, Arcade, Neo Geo), and early 3D, both in PC and consoles where publishers were experimenting.
You had completely new genres of games being invented almost every other year.
Today it is the same type of games, just re-hashing of the same content, maybe with more/better graphics.
The only most recent completely new type of game is Minecraft.... and walking simulators type of games. (although some one can say that they are just like old time RPGs).
Here is a list of new types of games that has come about the last couple of years that might be worth checking out if the only one you are aware if is Minecraft (this might sound snarky but I take you at face value and you might actually not have heard of these types of games before). Some of these have characteristics of old games, but often has stuff that was simply not possible 15+ years ago.
Sandboxed MMOS (EVE, no mans sky, Elite: Dangerous)
MOBA (Dota, HoTs, LoL, Smite)
Real MOBAs (WoW Arena, WC3: Warlock, Battlerite)
Battle royale games (Apex, PUBG, Fortnite, DayZ, ETF, Battlerite Royale)
Simulators (Arma, flight sims, truck driver simulator, which are now SUPER realistic)
Online Trading Card Games (Hearthstone, Magic [1])
Rocket League (I dont know any game like it nor what genre it is "sport"?)
Fast paced RTS (WarCraft, StarCraft, Total Anihilation, Red Alert)
Auto Chess (Autochess, Dota Underlords, Teamfight Tactics)
Competitive FPS (Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Rainbow Six Siege, Overwatch)
Casual social/arena action games (JackBoxTV, Use your words, Mario party, Overcooked, Duck Game, Gang Beasts, Speedrunners, Stick Fight, Hidden in plain sight [2])
If you are feeling old/and/or out of touch of modern gaming and coming from a perspective from the 90s, at least try these genres out. And of course games in the same genre has cross pollination and are similar in some ways, but some games play very differently, so don't dismiss a genre totally because you have tried only one game!
[1] One could argue that these are not a new type of game, but the mechanics in hearthstone is not possible in a physical TCG.
[2] Boardgame-ish types of games.
Edit: Of course I have left out a TON of games and some are actually considered quite old, these were the ones that came to mind.
EVE is from 2003. DotA is too. Magic Online was from 2002. RTS goes well back into the 90s, simulators back to the 70s, etc etc. I'll give you Battle Royale and I don't even know what Rocket League is but most of these are not recent at all.
Yeah, not all are from, but most are from after 2000.
As the person said: the only new "type" of game they know of released the last years was Minecraft, and lists games from "early 3D" era, I assume the person is not aware of all the new genres of games created the last 20 years. The only goal with my post was to list some genres that might be unknown (some of which has been around for a long time). I hope someone reads the list and finds something new that they might like, you should try out Rocket League if you are remotely interested in games. Rocket League is an insanely hard (high skill cieling) physics based football-ish kind of game.
Simulators today are a totally different breed of games, no one that plays them now would consider them even close to what was possible to achieve 20 years ago, thats why I included them.
Edit: I meant to write Planetary Annihilation, not Total Annihilation in my original post. Which is a quite unique RTS.
Rocket League is a football game which you play with cars. Depending on the mode, 1-4 players play against each other to score goals in a specific time limit. It's also not new though, Battle-Cars came before that.
Papers, please, and that dragon, cancer are both types of games that did not exist before.
Probably there's a few more indie games that I am not aware of.
If you want to stick to mainstream games only, even then there is real innovation. E.g. calling Super Mario Odyssee a rehashing of Mario Galaxy does it a misservice (in my view).
However, I'm a counterexample unfortunately. Of all the games that ardit33 talked about, I was between 12 to 18. And for me that period was the golden age of gaming.
A fun side anecdote: I remember when I played GoldenEye I had an English to Dutch dictionary, just to understand the missions! I really got caught up on the term "rendez vous with 006" (this was with the level called Facility), I couldn't find it! And my parents weren't that great in English or any other foreign language, so they didn't know either. It took me 6 months of asking some people from time to time to figure it out.
The golden age of gaming for me was between 12 to 18. I loved Warcraft 3 for example. And I felt it all went slowly downhill after the first installment of World of Warcraft.
Similar time frame for me, but I loved Warcraft 1, 2, and disliked 3. Loved the first Diablo, zero interest in the rest.
The golden age for me was perhaps a little later, LAN parties with friends, primarily FPS games with some RTS mixed in, circa 2000-2003. My biggest mistake was thinking as we got older and had more money we could do this more, but instead it was never.
There are a lot of really good games out there. Game developers (specifically indies) have learned lessons from old games. Some games are updated persistently thanks to disliked business models. The nostalgia factor is hard to overcome, but it is something that is completely invisible unless you were the one playing the game 20+ years ago.
To me it seems the "golden age" of gaming for everyone here has actually nothing to do with the games per se. I have nostalgia as well from when i was 12-18 when we did lan parties every weekend. But I actually think my golden age of gaming is still going. I have been gaming consistently through my college education and now when I am working. I have found new games (and old classics that i continue to play from time to time) and never stopped. I suspect it will end only when/if i move in together with my SO and get kids or something.
I feel in general that people are bad at keeping long friendships, and I seem very good at it (I don't know why). I have ~20 close friends that I speak to regularly that I have known for like 10 years. Many of those are people from the "golden days".
Have people that say they miss the "golden days" just not kept in touch with the friends they had at that time?
Or have they just given up on gaming because everyone else they knew stopped playing?
The age before the internet and monetization where we owned are games and internet penetration hadn't allowed companies to steal videogames functionality with drm.
The 90's AAA game modding scene was heads and shoulders above the modern AAA space because there was no internet, there was no incentive to hold back free level editors, file specs, access to contents inside the game files.
The last 20 years has undermind that hugely in big budget games. How could would have it have been to have level editing and a programming SDK for Need for speed Most wanted 2005? OR mass effect 1 + 2 for instance?
We've definitely lost a lot as game companies are forcing games into the mainframe dumb client model. AKA literally preventing you from owning the game you are buying.
Given that has always been the end goal of these companies since the beginning. Game preservation is going to be a nightmare going forward for all these server locked games.
So to say now is the golden age, means you're basically clueless about game preservation and what the mainframe/cloud model means for your basic rights.
The agenda is to turn PC into a more heavily drm'd locked down platform like mobile and control your software remotely.
Software as a service is literally a scam to invade your privacy, get you locked in and then jack up/extort you.
Look at all the DLC for SF V or Guilty Gear for instance. Huge amounts of cut content, sold back to you at ridiculously inflated prices.
Nothing like that existed in the 90's because there was no internet and analyticis to target stupid spendthrifts. Internet Analytics to target the spendthrift gamers has seriously fucked up gaming.
There are a LOT of modern games released with modding capabilities, just not most of triple A games, one I can actually think of is Skyrim which still has an active modding community. CSGO, Dota 2, StarCraft 2, Arma, is other examples.
When people say "golden age" how i understand it is that they feel like it was "better" experience playing the games then, and for me it means i enjoy playing games just as much now as i did when i was 15.
Sure, game preservation sucks, nothing I have given any thought. But that is not what I am talking about, I thought we were talking about the quality of games and how much people enjoy playing said games, not the state of the industry at large, privacy, DRM, and the future of gaming.
Dude the fact that the industry is stealing games and openly gloats it wants to make all games "services" (aka never give you a local application). Is the end goal.
So yeah, you need to know about the state of the industry to understand where game companies are taking us and it isn't for our benefit.
I do not want every new game to be an app controlled by googles cloud and thats exactly what the game industry wants. They want to move us all to the dumb terminal model of computing.
If you can't see that, you are blind. They openly talk about it on businss sites.
interesting, yet as someone else commented this assumes things only get better over time. which is obviously and throughout history not true. we have had entire civilizations and everything they did dissipated...
we need to strive to preserve the good things. and video games is one of those areas where the best ever will often be a name from a not so distant past... sorry.
You don't have to buy the games with loot boxes. They still make the other kind as well. If anyone is looking for a game with "a well defined start, end, and progression dependent on your skill", I'd recommend checking out Celeste.
Celeste is great. I'd second that recommendation highly and throw in Hollow Knight as well. I've got almost 100 hours in it and watched less than 5 minutes worth of cutscenes or exposition. It's just pure gameplay and the difficulty gets pretty unreal. There's a ton of other great indies out there with the same, turn it on and play. I'd given on gaming for a while. These new ones have gotten me to enjoy it again.
In that same category of pure gameplay, I would also add Enter the Gungeon, it is difficult, and Its curve of skill improvement vs playtime is too shallow, I mean, it takes a lot of playtime to get better at it.
Well, you are old, but I don't think that's the case. Throughout 90s / early 2000s, advancements in computer power and graphics made it possible for game developers to explore beyond simple(r) mechanics of 80's. That's why you see a lot of variety, from back then, in both how games look, behave / mechanics, and even genres than today.
Over the years, certain processes were aligned with what people found to be done well, and of course market dynamics dictated some of the genres to be phased out. That's why, today, you see more or less a bunch of 'the same stuff', yet you also get the best of 'the same stuff'.
Kind of like with computers from 80's through 90's. There was a large variety of equals. Various processors, whole computers, operating systems, everything... and now it's more or less 'the same stuff' (on desktop).
Aging makes us "love" new things less. But I also consider this period peak gaming (emphasis on gaming). These days video games are too sophisticated. Your fathers motorcycle is not your bike to fool around with your friends on saturday.
The videogames industry got overcrowded over time. Videogames became more about money as the big names exploited the growth of the sector. There are good titles coming out, although it seems they become fewer in ratio.
Most big names push away game designers to favour software engineers with elements of game design. That could have worked 15 years ago, but with the increased competition, the need for proper game design has increased.
Finally, the people that made videogames 15 years ago were mostly engineers, but I get the impression they also had a better understanding of game design.
Hence that time was the golden era of videogames because it was when the key people in the industry made their careers. Todd Howard (Bethesda) and Jess Schell (Disney/Schell Games) for example were in the line at that time, but now are in management positions.
Because game designers where having an hard time in the videogames industry, they turned their attention to other areas: board games. Board games are indeed in a great period now, with many independent makers finding success.
So if you want to have again a good time playing games with friends, go for board games.
Yes, and I still play.... not even remotely comparable... we are talking about games you play at home.
In games you give a coin to play in establishment, aka rent a machine for a given time. Pretty clear. Before that you had pinballs, pool halls, and more. Same concept, but everyone was equal and progression was dependent on your skill.
With today loot boxes a you pay "for something random" so you can get some kind of desirable upgrade, or advantage, otherwise you will have to grind your way to the game...
I guess you weren't a Blizzard fan as you're omitting Diablo, Diablo 2, Warcraft, Warcraft 2. You're even not mentioning Dune 2, the godfather of RTS. Warcraft was arguably better than C&C.
I don't see Wolf3D on your list, nor Doom / Doom 2. Single-player wise these were state of the art. You could also play co-op via LPT1. Also, Quake 2 + Lithium mod was my first and most remembering online FPS. Although team-play wise, it is the HL mod Counter-Strike.
Since you're on about games, how about Magic: The Gathering? They practically invented lootboxes. It still exists, but I find with the innovation of Type II / Standard they screwed people into a permanent upgrade cycle.
One friend had a null modem cable, other one a parallel cable. Though they lived together, I was thinking about the latter friend for reasons beyond scope. He made a LAN with two computers. It could've been IEEE 1284, I don't know. Back then, cables were a tad more expensive and difficult to come by. Plus, we had to get it working in MSDOS, IIRC. The advantage of parallel cable was we could pump (other) data over it as well.
I feel the 2000s were slim pickings, and the 2010s have picked up again (Portal 2, Dwarf Fortress, GTA V, Factorio).
Edit: actually I take it back - there were some great games in the 2000s too (Deus Ex, Half Life 2, Fallout 3, Mario Galaxy, GTA IV, The Sims, Bioshock).
I feel there was a ”PC gaming winter” roughly 2005–2012. In that period it seems most commercial PC games were sloppy console ports, lacking the depth and storytelling finesse developed in the previous decade. Games were also severely technically handicapped by the limitations of contemporaneous consoles.
Crowdfunding made possible projects like Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2, starting a renaissance of sorts in game design and a reinvigorated respect for the PC as a gaming platform.
Except you still have all those great options you mention (I played AoE II earlier tonight, in HD!) plus the excellent indie scene, plus you get all the blockbusters 9-12 months after release for a fraction of full retail. You've also got all those discount console games for PS and xbox (if that's your thing) and Zelda on switch is amazing.
Stay away from the pay to play, most sports titles and anything on casual mobile and you've got it better than ever before. And it all runs on a decent windows PC that's less than 7 or 8 years old.
Part of it is the massive expansion to include more people by making the games and mechanics as basic as possible, but the major driver is the rise of streaming and multiplayer becoming the default and most important mode for games, if not the only option.
Strong single-player storytelling and action has been sidelined, and most multiplayer games tend to be the same. Some have unique mechanics and gameplay but they all depend on your team and unless you have a very good group of people to play with, it just ends up feeling bland and repetitive.
Let's not kid ourselves. Tomb Raider was just an attempt to sucker everyone into buying a (super hard, let's be real nobody actually finished those games) game for Lara's tits. Multiplatforms were made to maximize profit, not accessibility. Mods were already being released for money (Counter Strike, among others). Although loot boxes are bad, there's no reason to think that execs of the past wouldn't have done the same thing current execs are now doing if they could have.
> Great games..... I really feel that peak gaming was in 90s/early 2000s.
It's always in the eye of the beholder, but I think a statement that would remain very much true would "the peak of a certain kind of gaming was in the 90s/early 2000s". There is certainly something that changed in the audience and the market as gaming became largely mainstream vs when it was very much still a niche market in the entertainment realm.
This comment does read a lot like when my parents' generation told me about the golden age of music (which differed depending which "golden age" they grew up with). But, oh well, I agree that some of the most fun I had was this games. On the high side, indie games give me some similar fun as when I was a kid, while a lot of AAA games are now disappointing to me.
The first one into a new market gets remembered for it as having defined it. That's all it is. The first ones who got the "pop" sound, or the FPS, etc. right.
the issue is that mainstream titles have to recoup massive cost so they're optimized for monetisation.
the semi-indie scene is producing gases that are comparable in scope, quality, depth and innovation to the titles of old.
sadly it's very hard to discern indie with potential today because the noise is much more and much higher, but titles like factorio, kerbal space program, keeperrl, automation: the car company game, empyrion, stormworks: build and rescue, castle story and many other to list here provide highly polished experiences.
I'm an avid indie supporter[1] so I might help navigating the landscape if anyone is interested, just restrict the genre a little so that the scope is focused enough to be relevant and interesting
I think it's more about age. It's fun to ask people a question like, "What was your golden age for gaming?" That said, I really miss LAN parties and static multiplayer game servers-- we've got the same "golden age" :)
It is absolutely a combination of "the widest audience" and "engagement = money". The part that really jumps out at me is how often I'm trading a real-life grind for a grind in say... Overwatch for loot boxes. It used to be better.
The rise of the internet fucked up gaming because it allowed game companies to control the software and insert
all sorts of abusive monetization inside it.
The internet allowed game theft by EA, activision and Valve. It began with mmo's in the late 90's to take control of software out of the publics hand.
That is why gaming is such a clusterfuck, and why AAA gaming went to shit. High speed internet allowed game companies to take game functionality hostage, dedicated servers and level editors had to be massively scaled back to sell lootboxes and microtransactions.
Go loadup any popular mobile game like Final fantasy brave exvious or Fate grand order.
Single player games under the mainframe dumb client model. AKA they can now force kids to play games as publishers want because they control the values from their servers.
That was their wet dream since the late 90's. The fact that drm, world of warcaft, uo, and Team fortress 2 and League of legends even exist means the average gamer is retarded.
To watch so called "hackers" on hackernews fall all overthemselves to give up software ownership and eat drm in windows 10 was a far cry from the nerds of the 90's. We who remember palladium and wanted to keep control over our PC games because we knew the evil empire was coming to steal our PC games to get rid of dedicated servers, level editors, etc.
But the masses got internet and their stupid consumer behavior fucked up gaming.
All major franchises from the 90's got turned into mainframe - dumb client models.
Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3
Tribes vs Tribes ascend
Mechwarrior 1-4 vs Mech warrior online
The game industry gloats about it's great victory to server lock every new big budget game going forward on businss sites.
So no mass invasion's of privacy, stealing PC games via splitting the local application into two and selling it to the gullible masses as mmo' and "software as a service" / always online drm. Meant that the money men could now control the game from end to end.
Which is why gaming went to shit.
The internet radically altered the power between game buyer and game producer. When game companies can literally steal software by merely holding onto part of the software they produce in an internet enabled society, you know you are no longer in kansas anymore toto.
The shit the nerds of the 90's feared game true as the dumb masses ate up all the corporate PR to take over PC's and turn them into dumb terminals through slowly boiling the frog over decades and raising a new generation of gamers that don't are or don't know about the golden age of the 90's.
It was a golden age for a reason - the incentives were to produce good games, it was a "by gamers, for gamers" era, aka nerds producing games for other nerds.
When gaming went mainstream in the 2000's, everything got dumbed down to chimp level. We went from 8 or so weapons in quake to two in Halo 1 as bungie got bought out by microsoft.
Most PC developers entered the MMO space or jumped ship to make console games and there was a dry decade in PC gaming until it started back up in early 2008-2009 as a new generation of kids got internet and came online, leauge of legends hit and the most exploitive model became the most successful - take control of the game via mainframe-server, and sell flags to display skins to technology illiterate gamers.
To go from something like warcraft 3 to lol and dota is pretty much dystopian. There's no incentive not to make gmaes like the 90's where you got singleplaer campaign+multiplayr + level editors in the AAA space.
The microtransactions in the latest Ubisofts games are abhorrent and the non moddability of games like The Crew or For honor speak volumes about the locked down nature of modern AAA space.
So yeah gaming did go downhill - the internet allowed game companies to take control of the game software which means they can no infect it with all sorts of anti-fun game design.
That was the difference between pre mass internet penetration and after the internet hit the gaming masses.
MkWii has the best physics, some of the best tracks in the entire series, a thriving community despite being 10 years old and having official support dropped 5 years ago, and is just overall the best game really.
I don't know if it is just nostalgia, but I have played them all and like the N64 version the best. It is fast-paced, not as cluttered as some of the new ones, and has a good balance between relying on driving skills and the usage of extras.
Part of why I like Double Dash best. It's simpler, just enough more complicated than N64 for me. The ability to let a second player take the "gunner" role lets me play it with my kids who are too young to drive well—if they suck at gunner and we're playing on a low enough CC we'll still do OK with me driving :-). I don't like or want online play and certainly not DLC. Pop in the disk, a couple seconds of loading, and go. 8's supposed to be awesome but seems too complicated and tuned-to-suit-hardcore-online-players for my taste.
I have to say, apart from nostalgia, the main thing I miss from that period of gaming is the death of RTS.
I think everything peaked with supreme commander forged alliance, and after the strategic zoom, i couldn't go back and play things like StarCraft without feeling like I was watching a genre defined by fighting the interface and hotkey mashing obsessives rather than playing the game or worrying about grand strategy. I know in all these games at the top levels you do have to worry eventually about hotkeys and commands, but after supreme commander on dual monitors, all the rest have been like viewing an art exhibit through a toilet roll.
These days there's barely a handful of games anymore in the RTS genre, and maybe publishers like paradox, will focus on longer running strategy, but nothing that quite meets that old feeling of sitting down for a 30 - 120 minute epic match of actual wits and thought and ability that supreme commander (and the C & C universe before it) contained. We lost something with the death of Westwood and when blizzard moved Warcraft from its roots, and no real successor to the old total annihilation, which is so sad considering how powerful computers have gotten in the meantime and how hard these games were pushing them back in the day.
(PS, if anyone can post me a working tute on getting SC:FA multiplayer working on Linux, I might sell you my firstborn).
RTS exist, they collapsed and were renamed by the new generation "MOBA's"
League of legends, dota 2 and Heroes of newerth were just real time strategy games with the heroes and the lack of complex base management.
They collapsed into hero deathmatch if you will. So RTS didn't really disappear, the dumb masses merely renamed them MOBA's.
So if we're going by popularity, RTS for newbs (LOL, dota 2) are still very popular.
Complex RTS are definitely rarer things but that's because companies couldn't execute. Supreme commander 1 had a lot of good ideas poorly executed, supcom 2 was just a disaster because they were making it cross compatabile with console...
Company of heroes 1 was great but relied too much on hollywood wow and you can tell that the company of heroes 2 team had no idea where to take CoH after the success of the first one.
Often times game developers stumble into success. Then have no idea what to do once they have that success. Like they just hit a brick wall creatively.
Supreme Commander FA, WarHammer 40k Dawn of War 1, Company of Heroes 1, AoE 2, SC1, and, of course, Total Annihilation are the quintessential strategy games imho.
I never understood why people didn’t like AoE:3 as much as AoE:2. With the unit bonuses (ie spears bonus against cavalry, etc), multiple attacks per unit (some units have both ranged and melee attacks with different stats that can be toggled, ie musketeers could be put in melee to deal with horses) and seriously different civs (ie up to 30% of units available might be different) it was a much more strategic play. And the interface was arguably more advanced than SC2, so it was more relaxing to play.
Is it because they picked the wrong era to set it in?
This is one game that always impressed me as a child.
Things I loved about the game:
- Destructible terrain, buildings, and vehicles.
- Ambient lighting.
- Exciting story with known actors.
One thing that always frustrated me was on the back of the box it showed the ability to create light towers but I don’t think that was ever possible in the game without mods.
Yep, Westwood got a lot of flak for that one image on the back of the packaging back in the day. Especially since they basically lied about shipping a 3D engine during development when Tiberian Sun was actually using Voxels.
Having written a voxel renderer for ts models I can confirm that it's definetely a 3d rendering engine. It's not just polygon_based (nor are they hw accelerated)
This is one of the few games I re-bought when they ported it to the Win7+ set of OSes from Microsoft. This game, Dark Reign, Descent 2, all consumed so much of my entertainment time. It wasn't until World of Warcraft dropped that I didn't have a 'lan party' rig that I could pick up and carry to a friends for a great time.
How exactly is pathfinding an NP complete problem?
Surely a simple Dijkstra search across all grid squares would do the job?
Edit: Perhaps it's 'find an optimal strategy for everyone to get to their destination while nobody collides with anyone else'?
I didn't think real time strategy games normally did much collision avoidance between units though... The number of times I've seen an army just walk through another...
The RTS games I know definitely do collision detection. StarCraft 2 disables collision detection in a few cases: workers harvesting resources, adept shading, and the colossus walking over ground units. To see what no collision detection would look like, see how the air units stack and move across each other.
I think collision avoidance might be overkill. It's fine if two units bump into each other while going in the same direction. Collision is bad if some units are moving through a choke point and the units in back turn around to take a different route because there's no open grid squares to walk forward through.
I'm currently playing through the StarCraft 1 campaign and the pathing differences with 2 are huge. Imagine being in line at Disneyland and every ten seconds, the people in front of you decide the entrance is blocked and turn around to try finding another way in. Then they bump into you and turn around again. Or maybe they just keep bumping into you for a bit.
Oh man, this is awesome. I have very fond memories of playing the original C&C. My copy of C&C had a Tiberian Sun ad that I always thought looked amazing, but I never did play it. From the Ars Technica video, it looks like it ought to feel modern enough to play today and have fun. And there are Linux builds. I'm gonna try it. :)
I don't know if it's still available, but a few years ago I bought all 17 games in the C&C series for $5 on Amazon. Downloadable, not CD/DVD, but it works. Some of the games crash occasionally on Windows10, but C&C:Generals runs very well on an Intel NUC with Win10.
I played a ton of RTS games, but I still remember fondly Tiberian Sun for the art style.
It has a very, very distinct feel from anything else back then, and anything that followed.
For me it's a combination of many factors. Voxel units looked great at small scale compared to any polygonal type that came after that. The infantry and landscape is 2D and hand-crafted. It's gorgeous. I think this was the last game in the series where this was the case. Dynamic and scripted lighting, esp nearby tiberium, added a ton to make some of the landscapes really look alien and alive - but did so without changing the vibe of the game. The soundtracks were very fitting as well, although not as memorable as C&C RA.
I'm not nostalgic here. I really did like subsequent games in the series. RA2 was great. I had lots of fun with Generals too (which I always thought looked stunning).
But Tiberian Sun has really a _distinct_ feel to it encompassing everything. RIP Westwood.
> But the biggest thing holding back StarCraft was unit path-finding.
> It wasn’t that the path-finding was totally broken; in most cases it worked quite well. But there were enough edge-cases that the game was un-shippable.
> Game units would get stuck and stop on the battlefield. Often they would go through elaborate efforts to find paths, inching forward or looping around but not making progress, and sometimes getting wedged and unable to move further. Entire task forces would get bogged down in what looked like the afternoon commute.
Ah just seeing C&C getting brought up brings back nostalgic memories. I remember Red Alert 2 being the best game ever.
I revisited this game with a friend of mine during high school years ago, we had to pirate the game and install some 3rd party LAN software to get RA2's online mode working. Once installed, we were surprised to see a good amount of people still playing the game. Good times
I feel blessed that I grew up during the late 80s and 90s. I got to see and play games in arcades, and I owned my first computer in 2001. So I played games mostly at friends houses.
Nobody else will go through what we did, though I suspect my generation might hit the beginnings of good VR tech (hoping so anyway).
Another VIC-20 alum here. At the age of 10, I remember trying to write a version of Donkey Kong in BASIC and was flabbergasted when I ran out of memory before I could even get barrels rolling! Ah, the good ol' days!
Ooooh, the dumpster fire that is Planetary Annihilation.
If they spent a fraction of the effort on the actual bloody game that they spent on making it Twitch and E-sport friendly, the game might not, you know, suck.
Did anyone else here find the rules.ini file and modify it? This controlled power levels and distance of weapons. You could modify a bazooka guy to have a weapon as powerful as a nuke.
I don't understand what is challening about pathfinding specifically. Are there just a huge number of vertices and edges so known algorithms don't perform well? How big are the grids? Is it making the path finding look a certain way to humans that's the hard part?
Consider the scenario of doing "select all; move over there past a bunch of obstacles and choke points" for 300 tanks.
if you're not playing a starcraft , you probably want them to trundle in the right direction and avoid ending up in a huge traffic jam.
if you are playing a starcraft , bad pathfinding is an opportunity for a skilled operator to worsen their RSI while lovingly micromanaging each tank's route
Has anyone been able to get C&C Generals to work on Win10?
My Win10 box doesn't seem to want to read my original discs (I've tried 2 drives, they both appear to hang).
Excepting that, is there anywhere to get working ISOs if you have CD keys? Didn't look available on Gog.
Did they ever publish their path algorithms? I'm building a simulation that will soon need path finding, and something that is good and doesn't appear to be doing obviously stupid things (but not necessarily the best) would be a perfect fit
Starcraft 2 has excellent path finding algorithms, which they did discuss quite a lot prior to release. I don’t think they published the algorithm but maybe you can find it.
I taught myself BASIC programming on a ZX81 to create Star Raiders clone back in the early 1980s. My version was terrible, but it was games that brought me into the world of computers. And it is games that keep me interested today.
> Pathfinding is actually a murderously complex programming challenge—one that, depending on the path, might be NP-complete.
> The "eureka!" moment came when Castle and team realized they didn't have to build perfect—or even really great—pathfinding. Rather, they had to build pathfinding that didn't look stupid to the player.
> The most interesting thing, at least to me, is that pathfinding is still a difficult problem even for modern games, and simply throwing more CPU power at the problem doesn't really help that much—such is the curse of NP-complete problems.
It reminds me of my experience of some pathfinding bugs in OpenRA (free and open source Command & Conquer clone): one day I was playing OpenRA on Linux, and I find the game was running extremely slowly like a snail, the more I played the more slow it was. So I decided to check GitHub, it turned out that AI has built a huge number of soldiers, but unfortunately, due to geography features of the map and the battles, a lot of them have trapped inside "islands" with no available path connected to the rest of the world, or they want to attack targets inside "islands". One example is isolated waterways, another is land with destroyed bridges.
But edge cases like these were still not handled well in the OpenRA engine, the AI would keep ordering those units to move and attack. OpenRA uses a variant of the A* algorithm, and those AI orders will force the engine to run a huge number of A* pathfinding attempts on every second and exhaust most of your CPU time.
The solution should make the AI to detect these endless attempts and "bail out". The developers have already fixed some of those edge cases, but there are still a few to hunt down.
You had C&C, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Quake 1/2, Half Life, Pro Evo Soccer, and so many more in the PC side, and probably a SNES or a N64 around. Super Mario (all of them), Golden Eye, Mario Kart, Street Fighter 2, Final Fight and more
Online gaming was crude but fun (Age of Empires, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, had a great online implementation). LAN gaming parties were coming in my dorm.
Games had a well defined start, end, and progression that was dependent on your skill.
Now games are just a way for you to spend money in loot boxes, dcls, and cosmetics, or 'upgrades' so you can escape the artificial grind. Tutorials everywhere, handholding to the point that destroy any type of mystery or fun of the game.....
Or maybe I am just getting old.....