I'm gonna get flak for this but the incessant need to have "choices" for everything and forcing open world structures. Having choices are great in games but when developers have a vision and stick it only for people to moan about not being able to do x or y is a big pet peeve of mine in current games these days. It's why God Of War felt so refreshing to play.
Last edited by HaruKazuhira on Wed Nov 28, 2018 8:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The sheer, unashamed greed of publishers who sell shell games for £50+ with the "full" version costing £100+. The same publishers pay their executives tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars and avoid as much tax as possible, then plead poverty about how games are so expensive to make and shut down studios if they don't sell the tens of millions of copies they somehow think they deserve or have promised to their shareholders (who are the only people who really matter to them, after all) through aggressive preorder promotions and locking in your cash before critical reviews or un-doctored gameplay footage comes out.
Lootboxes are disgusting, anti-consumer frameworks designed to take money from anyone and everyone and they would love it if you spent as much as possible on them for as long as possible. Battlepasses are worse in a way - a continual "keep up with your friends" tax based on aggressive artificial scarcity to get you to play as long as possible and keep you psychologically hooked.
Companies like Activision Blizzard patenting a multiplayer matchmaking system focused entirely on weaponising (and monetising) envy of expensive shiny pay2win DLC in an infinite loop of trouncing the have-nots to motivate them into spending more money.
Empty, treadmill "live service" games which are more about filling up meters long-term than what you're actually doing moment to moment and exist as frameworks for more monetisation, are getting blander and less fulfilling while trying to get away with charging more. Forza Horizon 4 is emblematic of this for me - visually stunning and technically sound but full of superfluous and not individually-interesting 'stuff' to do.
People have talked about "gamer culture" and I think it comes from two directions which are both as bad - one is the aggressive promotion of almost tribal consumerist attitudes towards platforms, consoles, manufacturers and franchises. These spaces of infantilisation facilitate the kind of narcissistic in/outgroup mentalities which bring out the absolute worst in normal people who get sucked in or legitimise the horrendous attitudes of the emotionally bankrupt who thrive in the anonymised environments online games provide, especially when the makers of said environments seem so hesitant to actually police them if the outrage from that affects their bottom line. This goes further with the increasingly worrying trend of developers/publishers throwing their staff under the bus if they dare to rock the boat and say even the mildest thing against their ravenous 'fans' - clearly showing that placating these terrible people (and ensuring their preorders in the future) is more important than supporting their own staff.
Youtuber demagogues like the two guys who lied about owning CSGO skin betting sites and promoting them to their fanbases in order to make a load of money and getting away with it. YouTube has created a set of near-invincible charlatans who can get away with racist, homophobic or plain reprehensible stuff while laughing all the way to the bank.
Valve and Steam. A typical example of technology companies promoting a naive utopian vision of their platforms and completely eschewing all responsibility for the fountain of raw sewage they have by their own inaction created and coming out with limp statements and apologies, often only when they get caught out.
In short, I am fed up of the vast majority of games, the games industry and the culture around them. Apart from a handful of series/genres I'm culling my physical collection and uninstalling/hiding stuff in my digital libraries as I want to distance myself from all of the above and take up something physically creative like making/painting miniatures/model kits - something where hours of effort and creativity are rewarded with tangible and unique results rather than some higher numbers/gamerscore and mild RSI and which you can enjoy with others in real social interaction.
It's funny to see so much dislike of modern gaming when, while there are obviously problematic areas of the industry, gaming has never been so diverse as it is now (in both games coming out the people playing them), and we've probably had some of the best games ever made released in the last couple of years. The quality and quantity of games available is just going up.
OrangeRKN wrote:It's funny to see so much dislike of modern gaming when, while there are obviously problematic areas of the industry, gaming has never been so diverse as it is now (in both games coming out the people playing them), and we've probably had some of the best games ever made released in the last couple of years. The quality and quantity of games available is just going up.
Honestly, this. If today's games had been around 10 years ago back when I was spending way more time gaming, I'd have been on cloud 9.
My biggest frustration with modern gaming is just that I don't enjoy it as much any more. It's nothing to do with the quality of the games, but my own personal tastes and desires have changed, and gaming doesn't really fit into how I want to spend my leisure time anymore, at least not the way it used to. There are still gaming experiences I really enjoy, and my PC library is always going to be there, but I don't have the desire to spend as much time on it. It's a combination of having less free time, but also wanting to achieve other things with that free time.
OrangeRKN wrote:It's funny to see so much dislike of modern gaming when, while there are obviously problematic areas of the industry, gaming has never been so diverse as it is now (in both games coming out the people playing them), and we've probably had some of the best games ever made released in the last couple of years. The quality and quantity of games available is just going up.
I think for me there's just so much more bullshit than there used to be.
I would agree that games have probably never been better, but they also tend to come with an additional layer of scum in the form of Microtransactions, Pre-Order bonuses lootboxes and other crap.
So much of games these day is just transparently trying to milk even more money from us and it's tiring.
I'm not sure how to put it into words but everything that's wrong with modern games for me can be summed up by comparing the original Battlefront II to EA's new Battlefront series.
Luboluke wrote:I'm not sure how to put it into words but everything that's wrong with modern games for me can be summed up by comparing the original Battlefront II to EA's new Battlefront series.
HaruKazuhira wrote:I'm gonna get flak for this but the incessant need to have "choices" for everything and forcing open world structures. Having choices are great in games but when developers have a vision and stick it only for people to moan about not being able to do x or y is a big pet peeve of mine in current games these days. It's why God Of War felt so refreshing to play.
I thought for a contemporary AAA first party game, God of War felt restrictive and old fashioned.
I still liked it though. I've nothing against a good, linear, story driven game, but just plonking a few rocks down and expecting me to accept that Kratos can't climb over them feels like lazy level design in 2018.
It's not really about the gaming itself, but I don't really like that there are hardly any gaming magazines any more.
They really built up my excitement about a game, and the reviews used to be out before you could buy a game so you had a chance to pore over them first before buying them (and if they didn't release review code to them first, you'd definitely smell a rat).
I don't think there is the same tactile pleasure in scrolling through a gaming website.
So essentially, what I seem to be saying is that it is actually the modern world that annoys me.
Oh, and also, choices in games. I cannot stand that mobile phone always going off in GTA. It stresses me right out with the thought of all the stuff I should be doing / might be missing out on.
In contrast, I absolutely loved Uncharted 4 - the last game I actually finished and also the first in about 5 years - because it basically told me exactly what to do every step of the way.
What a relief to have all that stupid choice taken away and to just be able to concentrate on jumping to the next ledge.
It felt like the comforting embrace of an old folks home, I imagine, but with more ledge jumping.
Abacus wrote:Oh, and also, choices in games. I cannot stand that mobile phone always going off in GTA. It stresses me right out with the thought of all the stuff I should be doing / might be missing out on.
In contrast, I absolutely loved Uncharted 4 - the last game I actually finished and also the first in about 5 years - because it basically told me exactly what to do every step of the way.
What a relief to have all that stupid choice taken away and to just be able to concentrate on jumping to the next ledge.
It felt like the comforting embrace of an old folks home, I imagine, but with more ledge jumping.
I agree that linearity in games can be a good thing. If a game is good and the story decent then being told where to go doesn't have to be a bad thing. I also completed Uncharted 4 and that's something I rarely do. The game didn't need to be open world and would have been poorer if they had made it so.
Metro is another example of a linear game that's bloody amazing to play and is replayable despite being linear.
I don't think it's gaming culture that has a specific problem. I think it's internet culture that has an issue. From YouTube comments to social media bullying.
People are dicks, and the internet just allows people to show that more.
Premium price tag OR microtransactions is fine, but when both turn up then strawberry float that noise.
Like, I get that games have been getting steadily cheaper in real terms for years now, so I'm not entirely opposed to increased monetisation of games, but the way the audience gets nickel and dimed so aggressively now does get my back up. Like, I'm guilty of dropping a few bob here or there on some Free to Play games, but they're free and if I play them enough I don't mind throwing a bit of cash their way. But microtransactions in full price games can do one.
Same for 'Premium' editions; fine in theory and Lord knows I've bought a few in the past. But when it gets to the point that you'd have to buy multiple copies of a game across different retailers to get all the content it gets ridiculous.
