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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2909 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Piggybacking off of my last comment, are there others who feel that modern games seem not to be as fun as games from late 90s to late 2000s? This may be nostalgia talking, but people around me game less than they did, and most games they play are MMO ones, as opposed to campaign-focused ones like Half-Life.

I have not played a whole lot of modern games, but their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before. In many cases, modern shooters feel quite slow compared to arena shooters like unreal tournament or Quake. I was looking at games to play and very caught my eye beyond the new doom games.

Here's a few of my personal favorite single player experiences of all time. You will notice that almost all of them are post-2010!

Nier: Automata is an all time incredible single player game with an awesome aesthetic/vvibe + soundtrack + plot. The core combat is somewhat hack and slash, with a few cool boss fights, and the story if you're not familiar is non-linear in that you "play through" the game about 3.5 times across alt-timelines and different perspectives. Top 3 game of all time I think. Excellent ending.

The Last of Us and The Last of Us 2 are both awesome story-first zombie games that get you invested in the characters and setting way more than you'd expect for such a common zombie setting. I could write a ton more about especially the second one and its amazing narrative albeit somewhat unpopular narrative choices but others have written about the appeal of these games a lot already.

Horizon Zero Dawn is just plain fun, and also has a super great story. You fight robot dinos with bows and arrows - but it doesn't feel contrived. In fact, the world is semi-tribal post-apocalyptic Earth, but without too many of the typical tropes. In fact, the storyline has you slowly discover why the world is the way it is, and the slow but emotional reveal is executed super well. Combat is very fun too. There's a sequel that's better-looking, has gameplay refinements, but is overall more of the same with much weaker story, but IMO the first is the right entry point. The sequel is more for fans who liked the first.

Rounding out the legitimately incredible PlayStation hits, Ghost of Tsushima is beautiful and has solid gameplay to match.

Baldur's Gate 3 or its cheaper but fun cousin Divinity Original Sin 2 are both fun turn-based party RPGs with tons of flexibility and player choice. If you want an older game, Dragon Age Origins (OK this one is older) is an awesome party RPG that uses a real-time-with-pause kind of party combat that's got some cool tactics, and is a classic game where there are no easy black and white choices, no pleasing everyone, and your party members might even leave if you make them mad enough. Similar vibes for BG3 in that way, though BG3 is newer and more popular (for a reason).

Other RPGs that are engaging and fun worth mentioning are Kingdom Come Deliverance (cool medieval game with some sim elements but without the full boredom some sims have) (allegedly new sequel is even better but not on sale), Cyberpunk 2077 (neat setting, tons of side content, Keanu Reeves).

Special shoutout to Dishonored, a stealth-ish game (still some action and heart-pounding moments) in a very unique setting with a few supernatural powers. As you progress through a set of revenge assassinations, the world reacts to your choices, and gives you a surprising variety of ways to approach things in a genre that sometimes puts you on rails too much. Along that line, the World of Assassination (Hitman) trilogy if you like creative stealth gameplay where getting caught and going into a shootout is also plenty fun.

If you're a turn-based tactics guy, XCOM and XCOM 2 are classics and very fun. There have been a few great Civ entries. Slay the Spire had an insane impact on gaming too!

If we turn to handheld, at the very least I loved the DS Fire Emblems and Three Houses too. There are definitely more handheld solid titles probably since 2010 but that’s not my main jam.

But even if we circle back to shooters, Apex Legends had a decent time in the sun with decent movement and pace. Games like Battlefield 1 or the Battlefront remakes have incredible sound design and aesthetics that truly offer something new and different. If you like hardcore realistic ish shooters? Insurgency and its sequel, and others too have some decent handling and require some patience and skill. Valorant and CSGO are popular for a reason though I personally dislike them.

Want some run and gun, plain insanity madness? Borderlands 2 from 2012 is just plain fun. Tons of guns and mechanics and high intensity. You could also shift genres a little bit: Armored Core 6 is from FromSoft (dark souls people) but way more accessible, and two words: mecha combat! Respects your time and fun in big and small doses alike.

All of this to say that gaming is plenty healthy and some AAA games still break through too. And the indie space has never been more full and vibrant, ever.

The technological answer seems obvious - being underdeveloped, technology was advancing more rapidly, leading to more cool new shit that feels fresh and exciting.

their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before.

Genuine question - how do you tangibly improve on the Doom gameplay formula? Looting levels and shooting shit seems like a fairly complete feature on its own, the only improvements are building some sort of scaffolding on top of that in search of synergy - RPGesque systems, color differentiation of pants 873 gazillion guns of looter shooters, top-down Crimsonland slaughterfests, roguelikes, realistic sims, battle royale, etc. etc. The core conceit remains unchanged. Maybe nu-Doom and other ADHD shooting games like Ultrakill do represent a core improvement but I'll be honest it's not an improvement I want to see everywhere, my geriatric reflexes aren't up to the task.

As for why games aren't as good as in the olden days, the answer is probably that games grew into a proper art form and achieved mass appeal. Before mass appeal, something that was famous worldwide (e.g Doom, Half-Life, XCOM, etc.) was expected to be, and frequently was, famous on its own strength since the scene is mostly populated by fellow enthusiasts who enjoy this niche as you do and have tastes and standards broadly aimilar to yours.

With mass appeal comes an influx of normies, which by themselves aren't actually a problem, their distaste for difficulty is spiritually the same type of complaint that I make above wrt my geriatric reflexes. They aren't gud enough for trve hardcore gaming, and want different things from their games. I do it myself, I'm terrible at shooting games and dislike PVP in general so I don't play e.g Tarkov with the gang. This is okay.

What is not okay is the swarms of Gervais-sociopaths that invariably follow the herds of normies; as we know, real hard-R gamers are infamously culturally sensitive and averse to bullshit, while normies have no such complications and can be duped with impunity. SplitFiction is actually a perfect example of this trend, as discussed downthread; a malevolent will behind the scenes has explicitly designed the game to deceive normies' sensibilities, with full knowledge that co-op can salvage any garbage, Redditors heckin love novel schticks and metanarratives, and a few cleverly-placed identity markers will defang most of the intuitive criticism (I'm not even talking about the quirky not-lesbian female characters fighting an evil white nerd; rather that the fact of the two being literal writers is specifically made to disarm the exact complaint @Fruck makes here, cf. exhibit A - let's see you write better, fucking chud!). This is a perfect metaphor for gaming as a whole. We truly do live in a society.

Still, I disagree that gaming is dying; AAA gaming is, sure, but that's arguably a good thing, and the indie scene is still strong as ever. My consumption of vidya remains as high as ever, maybe except that I too notice I don't have the stomach to get into 100+ hour games anymore, I really want to play BG3 and Metaphor but the time requirement is legitimately daunting. Great games still exist, but the fame of something is no longer an indicator of its quality (arguably it's becoming a point against), and you have to shovel through piles of shit to find diamonds, or even just some decent ore. Y'know, like with any other popular medium nowadays.

Genuine question - how do you tangibly improve on the Doom gameplay formula?

You build the levels yourself and you shoot up and loot levels of other people who aren't that good? That's a very tangible improvement and one of the reasons I sunk.. 7k hours into an PvP MMO FPS that was (also) about that.

I really want to play BG3 and

BG3 is, lore and writing wise kind of underwhelming. May I recommend WH40K: Rogue Trader? It's basically 'what if X-com had brain-meltingly complex builds and had an actual personality that wasn't bland corporate paint-by-the-numbers snoozefest. The graphics, especially the character graphics aren't nearly as nice, but that's not why we play tactical games, right?

You build the levels yourself and you shoot up and loot levels of other people who aren't that good?

Unless you're somehow incentivized to actually make the levels playable and maybe even grant the 'invader' some crumbs of loot, I think that invariably converges on sadistic kaizo shit. You can't count on players not abusing every abusable game mechanic, especially when you give them agency to fuck with other players; game designers are at least paid to do their jobs.

May I recommend WH40K: Rogue Trader?

I considered it, but I'm not big on WH40K and I already own BG3, might as well. I also DM a 5e campaign for some friends so practice/inspiration would come in handy for a relative newfag.

You can't count on players not abusing every abusable game mechanic, especially when you give them agency to fuck with other players; game designers are at least paid to do their jobs.

Hmm... the thing is, at least the game I was talking about, constructing your own 'levels' takes a serious amount of effort. So even though there are people who maximally abused mechanics, generally they didn't because they say picked the suboptimal spot to build their stuff, were too lazy, lacked the imagination, did not do enough research etc.

I considered it, but I'm not big on WH40K

Well, neither am I, but I'd say where BG3's writing quality ends, Rogue Trader starts. BG3 isn't bad, but the writing really, really struggles.

You build the levels yourself and you shoot up and loot levels of other people who aren't that good?

Doom builds the levels so that they're fun to fight in. What you're proposing seems like it would converge towards levels that are maximally unfun to fight in. Unless I'm misunderstanding your definition of "not that good", but if you mean the others are not that good at fun level design, why would you want to play their levels?

If they're really good, then fighting their bases is maximally unfun, kind of like engaging in a butt-kicking contest with a porcupine. Generally avoided unless it's really needed to teach them a lesson.

But if they aren't so good - you actually have fun, and if you're fast enough you can even sometimes steal some useful stuff off them. At the very least, you'll probably collect some nice kit in the process. (in that game, all the in-game items have to be made, so if you're fighting someone and kill them where you can loot their body, you get some neat stuff. When they respawn next time, they have to get more weapons & armor.)

What stops everyone from copying the maximally unfun design from the web? If I wanted invaders to stop taking my stuff I'd just do that rather than build something aesthetically pleasing yet very penetrable.

What stops everyone from copying the maximally unfun design from the web?

a) It'a not so simple

b) people are stupid

c) time, effort, laziness

Genuine question - how do you tangibly improve on the Doom gameplay formula?

Probably the easiest way is in level and enemy design. I’d actually say that boltgun does a good job at feeling like Doom, but with dramatically better level and enemy design.

You could also argue something like Halo was a different type of improvement over the same - the auto recovering health creates a different feel to the game. You can design encounters for someone who is always at full strength, which allows for a different feel.

You can also take the remnant approach, and add in coop multiplayer. An experience where you approach encounters as a team can lead to an entirely different feel.

Even if the core of “you are a person with a gun” doesn’t change, you can create dramatically different feels by iterating on some common variables.

The main issue I’d say that comes up with modern games is that they all feel like they’re trying to saturate the same market. Dark Souls isn’t that innovative of a design - but it was a popular enough series to spawn its own “genre”, simply because it scratched an itch modern games won’t. There aren’t enough games where you can look for secrets, overcome challenges or get lost in the world - instead, games are very focused on making sure you experience it in the exact way the developers intended.

Yes! And my younger cousins seem to agree. You speak of MMOs, but back then, the MMOs were special too. (Ragnarok, WOW)

IMO, media peaks in a certain era and you just have to accept it. New art forms appear to have a sweet spot at the intersection of maturity and novelty. That's when their best versions are created.

For example, take movies. They hit this sweet spot from 75-95. Jurassic Park, Rocky 1-4, Terminator 1-2, Die Hard, Shawshank, Godfather, Schindler's List, Star wars etc. There are equally great movies made after 95, but they don't have the same novelty. There are equally important movies made before 75, but they seem to lack maturity (of exploiting the art form). Afterall there are only so many stories to tell. There are only so many heart-strings to tug at.

For games, that happened between the late 90s - Mid 2000s. Half life 1 - Skyrim marked an era of special video games.

A telling sign of the end of this era is when authenticity takes a back seat to subversion & commentary. This is most stark with architecture. Mid-way through modernism (right after mid-century modern and at the beginning of Brutalism) Architecture ran out of authenticity. Sometime in an earlier era, Architecture had peaked and run out of novel ideas. So everything novel fails to evoke primal emotions and everything evocative is derivative. I see this trend with games. Where everything is about references, callbacks and subversive characters. It doesn't mean it can't be interesting or entertaining. Borderlands 1 & 2 did an amazing job at exactly this. But, it can't ground an era and wears-out-its-welcome quickly. Ofc, there are still great games (Souls-likes, Larian, etc), but ofc, they're derivative. Derivative works will never be as special as the 'the first'.

Over long time horizons, there are paradigm changes. As the core constraints and tools of a field change, it allows for novelty. But it can be decades of centuries between such paradigm shifts. Until then, a mature art form must languish between derivative and subversive.

On the topics of MMOs, nothing ever managed to match GW1 for me. Amazing build variety, deep mechanics with interesting interactions, easy to get into PvP, good, regularly updated balance, minimal grinding except for variety & visuals. Especially in retrospective it was far ahead of its time. GW2 was such a letdown in comparison, despite not even being a bad game in the grand scheme of things.

For comedy films, I don't think you can top the 2000s. The 80s and 90s were pretty funny, but nothing can beat Anchorman for mass market comedic appeal. And then in the 2010s comedies started to get self-aware and subversive in line with your thesis.

I don’t think it’s nostalgia. I’m playing Persona 4 for the first time now, and it’s fantastic. And it can’t be nostalgia, because I never played any Persona games growing up.

People were just less brainwormed back then, and it shows.

My only point of disagreement is with movies. Literature sure peaked a few centuries ago but the oslo trilogy or drive or many other post 2000s movies are just amazing. The Dune and John Wick franchises are better than movies of the past in the same genre because they do benefit from the higher budget and better tech.

As for games, perhaps like hacking, the more people did it, the worse it got even at the top levels. This is a statement my friends who are good hackers make, I am unqualified for now.

Literature as we mean in the common sense only really began in the mid 1800s and you could argue it peaked in that 1890-1920 period, or 1940-1960 period, or that it hasn't peaked yet, or is peaking now. This claim seems very fuzzy to me. Do you mean novels?

Film is the archetypal example of higher budget and better tech ruining an artform. High budgets means you can't afford to take risks, so every theatrical release is now a sequel or a remake of an established IP aimed at the lowest common denominator of American and Chinese teenagers. Better tech allowed the masterful animatronics and practical effects of the past to be replaced with green screens and CGI, with disastrous results.

What was the last truly great American movie? Probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Last Samurai. No Country for Old Men is overrated. And the less said about the MCU and the Star Wars sequels, the better.

Is the lord of the rings American? Most of the cast is British and almost everyone involved in making of the movie is commonwealth.

What is American is the financing.

I agree that the trends you describe are observable (even if I disagree a bit with your dates) but I think an equally important factor is market conditions affecting budgets.

Middle budget is where an art form usually thrives and both for movies and games that category has almost disappeared. To be financially successful you now need to make a truly mass market game (probably with micro transactions) or develop something on a shoestring budget. The former almost always results in slop and the latter seldom has enough resources to truly shine.

I think you make a very good point about subversion and derivation. As I said in a different comment, you just can't make a game like Half-Life 1, because it's been done before. Even if you do it just as well again, it just gets looked at differently. It wasn't there first. The subversion and commentary thing also clearly defines why I think Earthbound is probably far better than Undertale (or maybe even Mother 3).

That being said, I think there's still a lot of room to do new things. You can make genuine stuff while doing some things that you wanted to see done that has never been done before. Undertale did some of that, though it's overridden by all the meta commentary that it did. There's a lot more room for play in video games than there is in movies, since a game can portray a lot more things and be a lot longer. Playing Earthbound is similar to playing LISA: The Painful RPG in mechanics, but there's a hell of a lot of difference in the nuances that I think let it stand on its own, even if it has a lot of flaws.

Yes, games were better back then. Post mobile game design is all based on farming engagement. There is zero reason Doom Eternal needs weekly quests, or a bajillion cosmetic unlockables, or a weird meta progression mechanics. It's just more shit trying to hijack the compulsive part of your brain. Because game devs now are either evil, or stupid. They know the difference between compulsive and fun, and try to get you addicted out of selfish desire, or they don't and they just follow along because it's what is done.

Also, games were more responsive back then. On a console hooked up to a CRT TV, or a computer with interrupt based input (PS/2) and a CRT monitor, input to action was virtually instantaneous in a properly programmed game. These days there is a distinct fuzziness to game input, and many games actually allow you to input commands late and have them still count to compensate for this. I recall watching a video about some rogue like that let you jump a few frames after you had already walked off a ledge because of input lag.

This isn't true. Attention sink traps with microtransactions are not the entire market.

Many game genres that were invented then were only perfected now.

E.g. 'Transport Fever' 1/2 is what Transport Tycoon devs would have made had they had modern tech and 10x the budget. It has (judging by the screens) all the fun, all the systems but even sligthly more complexity and of course, modern graphics.

Same for strategy games, RPGs.

I was shocked by how clunky Far Cry 3 felt since I grew up playing arena shooters a little bit. PS2 saw some of the best games a console has seen. Console shooters, sandbox titles larping as RPGs became worse with each generation.

Quake Live feels like a different world compared to Valorant.

That's called coyote time, and it's a pretty commonplace feature of most platformers these days, not just in one or two games. Judging from the trend, It seems to be the case that consumers prefer the feeling of that timing much better than strict one-pixel-past -the-ledge and you're dead timing.

Its fuzzy in that there is a gap between what is shown to you and what the inputs will do, but it does not have to be fuzzy in the sense that the game will likely still have a strict threshold it adheres for what is 'too late'.

I suspect the reason that almost all games do this now is that it is much more fun to play them. Donkey Kng Country on SNES, for example, had being able to jump out of a mid-air roll as an almost explicit mechanic. It's similar to how the physics of changing Mario's momentum midair never made any sense - but guees what, Mario is much more fun to control than games with no influence over midair movement.

I was a aware of the technical fix (even Doom Eternal does it, and speedrunners combined it with the weapon wheel to turn that physics nudge into an abusable catapult), but I had never seen it called "coyote time" before. That name is perfect.

I just re-opened my Everquest2 account. So...yes?

I don't play many modern video games anymore, probably for all the reasons. I thought Diablo 4 was absolute dog shit, No Man's Sky was boring, Gloomhaven was fun but ridiculously time consuming and pretty much every other game I turn on turns me off in the first 5 minutes. I just figure I'm getting too old for this stuff and now I just want to piddle around for an hour or two harvesting resources and grinding stupid, pointless quests for crap gear.

I think the single thing I hate most about all games in the past 10 years is the pathological need to turn everything into a story. I don't care about the plot, I don't care about the NPCs, I don't care about voice actors or dialog or the poetry of the stars. I want decent mechanics and an interesting gameplay, maybe hidden stuff or puzzles. I think the last game I really liked was Fez, though I played the Conan MMO for untold hours. I was playing Hogwarts Legacy with my kid, which isn't bad, but even that can't seem to hold our attention. All she wants to dink-donk around in Roblox and build little towns in Minecraft.

I mean, you’ve gotta have some sort of aesthetic context. Gaming minus aesthetics is just computer science problems. Like, yes, you could play Pokémon without all the cute animals and sound effects—it’s just a big chart, mechanically—but somehow I doubt anyone finds being handed the Serebii data dump is a comparable experience to "Pikachu, I choose you!"

And don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy computer science. But it’s not the same thing as gaming.

Well, there's story in video games and story in video games. John Carmack once compared the importance of story in video games to the story in porn. It's there, and it helps to set up the context and make things more interesting, but it's not the main point. Games like Doom or Super Mario Brothers had stories that set up the motivations of the player character and the context for why he was going around shooting demons or moving from left to right towards castles, but they largely melted away in the thick of the gameplay. Doom's story was told almost entirely through a few paragraphs in the manual, and then a few paragraphs at the end of each of the 3 episodes, with basically nothing in between. On the other hand, I feel like modern AAA games tilt towards trying to tell stories, with gameplay in between, such that the playing is broken up every hour or less by story beats. This can work when the story is well written and well told, but that's often not the case.

I think the single thing I hate most about all games in the past 10 years is the pathological need to turn everything into a story. I don't care about the plot, I don't care about the NPCs, I don't care about voice actors or dialog or the poetry of the stars. I want decent mechanics and an interesting gameplay, maybe hidden stuff or puzzles.

I'm a story-fag at heart but I share this sentiment 100%; not because I dislike stories but because the writers are so incredibly dogshit. If your writing team is at best mediocre (it is) then please shut up or at least keep the narrative simple and minimalistic. Having narrative choices and reactivity for the player is great but the amount of useless prose and "lore" is getting completely out of control.

Have you played split fiction yet? If llms ever wrote that bad we'd have scrapped them. I can't believe the main characters are supposed to be writers! The fact it's getting tens across the board is just embarrassing for everyone involved.

While I haven't actually played SplitFiction since no friends, only saw some of the gameplay, the game itself seems decent and the schtick feels fairly novel. It's also co-op (couch co-op, granted), and IME co-op can salvage almost any garbage short of something virtually unplayable.

That said I fully agree that the writing (what I've seen of it) is garbage with zero redeeming qualities, and the people(?) who wrote that must be banned from anything resembling a writing implement. I try not to fall to the "everything I don't like is Reddit" mindset but this game really seems to be targeted at r*dditors/normies who run all latest blob updates, love Marvel-style quippy humor and aren't actually into videogames (which is probably why the friend pass is free so your gf/sibling can pester you into playing the cool game s/he heard about). Competently targeted too, if the rave reviews and flamewars in comments to negative reviews on Steam is anything to go by.

The game isn't terrible (hell I'm defending it) but it certainly isn't 10/10, the writing alone should take off like 4 points. I agree this is probably the ur-example of a game which would be substantially better if any attempts at "story" and "characterization" got mercilessly pruned.

After that ringing endorsement I can't say I'm chomping at the bit here...

You need to carefully account for nostalgia tinting your perception.

I remember enjoying many video games immensely as a kid, constrained only by the number of hours my parents would let me play (and by my aging and decrepit pc).

As a teen, and then a young adult, I still enjoyed video games, to the detriment of my education.

These days, I go weeks without booting up my gaming laptop. I'm too tired to bother half the time, but there are also the constraints of not enjoying gaming with such a small screen and crammed keyboard, as well as the fact that the wifi coverage sucks ass.

Steam will helpfully tell me I have >3500 hours in Arma 3, probably over a thousand in Rimworld, several hundred in Total War Warhammer 3. I think I was past 1500 hours in Tarkov before I burned out on the grind and relentless wipes of progression without enough content to justify them.

And now that I'm moving to an apartment I expect to live in for a year or more, I'm rubbing my hands with glee at the idea of buying a gaming pc, all the bells and whistles.

Having a First World salary (even if paltry by US standards) means I can indulge my hobby. Now a high end GPU is only half a month's salary, as opposed to an upper mid range one being double back home.

Most of the games of my childhood were either pirated, or not on Steam, so I'm spared an exact tally on how long and often I played them. I loved Rome Total War on my anemic netbook. I love Total War Warhammer 3 on my (now relinquished) gaming pc and my laptop. I could play RTW, but I don't, because the new games are better by my taste, barring a few features. I'd have been all over Rimworld even as a kid.

So if you think that games aren't as fun as they used to be, it's more likely you're playing bad games, or that you simply don't have the time or energy to devote to them. I know the latter holds true for me, most of the time. Some genres have definitely died off or become relegated to indie titles, but that doesn't mean there aren't good games!

I relate with what you say a lot since you are not much older than me and saw a fairly similar place growing up. Gaming is still unaffordable for most Indians, the same way a normal healthy diet, peace or anything good is. My dad, due to being a young professor at a top engineering uni (he is a humanities prof) caught on to computers, so we always had a slightly underpowered PC at our house where I could play pirated games in.

Today, I have a turbulent life, I cannot bring myself to game since I am unable to do anything but be a vegetable after a productive game and want to git gud, get a job and migrate out before the year ends.

More than just the energy, gaming is not as popular in my circles as it once was. People go out to cafes or unsuccessfully try to woo girls far more than playing video games since sexual liberation, much more of a thing now, even for early teens, phones and Instagram make it much worse. My gaming itch died when my dad refused to update our PC when I was 16 since I wanted to play doom but he realised that I needed to do my exams better so killing the gamer inside me indirectly helped me do better with the JEE.

I could play RTW, but I don't, because the new games are better by my taste, barring a few features.

The way TW games resolve combat is way worse from RTW2 onward. It's so much worse that even with all the other improvements, additional mechanics and content I think there is a good argument for the older games being superior in their own way even today. The new games aren't a straight upgrade beyond visual fidelity and the amount of content.

Similar things are true for many genres/series but not all.

yeah I've played a handful of games past Medieval TWII and decided that it was the best. Now I play Divide and Conquer, the LOTR mod for it

If you like ancient history at all you owe it to yourself to check out the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for MTWII!

I don't think that it's nostalgia, purely because @mrvanillasky is like 15 years younger than me but we agree on the era when games were better than they are now. If it was purely nostalgia, you would expect that we would have different "those were the days" periods based on when we were growing up. Nostalgia might play a role (I don't think it does, but can't prove it), but I think there's evidence to say that there really was something special which isn't there any more.

I'm pretty sure he's a post turn of the millennium kid, so to an extent, when he talks about "90s" games, he's being exposed to cherry picked games from that era. Namely the absolute classics, the ones that stood the test of time, and thus were what were recommended to him when he was older.

At any rate, my most important contention is that it doesn't matter much whether the "average game" has gotten better or worse with time. There are too many games that are good by most metrics coming out for any human with a full-time job to exhaust faster than they release.

Well. Except if you have very niche taste. In which case it is possible you're stuck waiting for someone to release something that appeals to you.

No, I solely mean games like half life, deus ex, the quake and unreal games at the turn of the century and they were much more fun because they were faster. I enjoyed a game like Arkham Asylum the most since it came out in 2009 but quake and unreal tournament were much more fun.

I cannot name a single game in this era as impactful as the ones I have mentioned. I second @SubstantialFrivolity here. I am 24 and mostly pirated games too. My taste is quite mainstream but Far Cry 3, Arkham Asylum, Assassins Creed 2 were way better games than Far Cry god knows what number they are on now, Whatever Beat em up DC game they made and the black samurai assasins creed.

Arkham Asylum was a step forward like how New Vegas was a step forward. Games today actively regressed. Ioper who I would have tagged had I not been blocked has made some good points.

I'm pretty sure he's a post turn of the millennium kid, so to an extent, when he talks about "90s" games, he's being exposed to cherry picked games from that era. Namely the absolute classics, the ones that stood the test of time, and thus were what were recommended to him when he was older.

Honestly I don't buy this. I think some genres have, by all objective measures, gotten increasingly worse with time.

Take 4X for example. Once upon a time, you bought a 4X game for retail price, and that was that. You got a complete game. Now the average 4X game has dozens of expansions where they piecemeal out mechanics or factions that would have been included in the base game. Sometimes we even know this for a fact because the previous iteration of the game did in fact have those exact mechanics or those factions in the base game!

I forget the exact comparison, but some meme went around with Avowed getting compared with Oblivion or Morrowind and not looking the better for it. Some 10+ year old game had more interactivity that some cutting edge AAA game that aspired to it's style of play. There are good odds Avowed could be the highest profile RPG released this year. Top 5 at least. And by most of the talk I've heard, it significantly misses the mark made by games that are old enough to drive.

I think possibly the only genre of game which might be "better" is the highly competitive sweaty kind of game. If your jam is the sort of global competitive network where you can definitively prove you are the top 1% or even 0.1% of players, we had nothing like it in the 90's or 00's. Factorio style games too. There were some economic games, but nothing like the sort of logistics/programming involved in Factorio.

I have mixed feelings about Boomer Shooters. I haven't exhaustively played a ton of them. Dabbled here and there. I think a lot make noble efforts, but many are still afflicted by the desire to include some sort of meta progression systems trying to hook into the compulsive part of your brain, because that's just how you get people "engaged" with your game. Lets call this one a draw.

Well. Except if you have very niche taste. In which case it is possible you're stuck waiting for someone to release something that appeals to you.

TFW still no X-Wing games since X-Wing Alliance. Feels bad man. Not that I'm condemning the broader industry because of that, lol. You just made me think of how there are games I've enjoyed which are pretty much never coming back.

You'd have thought they'd at least try a VR-enabled one, both to sell hardware and as a "like being in the cockpit!" experience.

I think Star Wars Squadrons had VR support, but unfortunately it just wasn't as good as the X-wing games of old. The PvP focus wasn't my cup of tea.

Yes, I think gaming definitely had its golden age from something like 1990-2010. There are a few reasons why I think this was the case. First, as you noted the rate of improvement slowed down dramatically. In the early days of gaming, the capabilities of computers were so limited that the games themselves were limited in what they could do. As computers got faster, it meant that designers had more freedom to do styles of games that previously were either impossible, or not very pleasant to play. You can see the tech progression if you look at graphics (not that graphics make a game fun necessarily, but they are a decent proxy for computing power). If you compare the NES->SNES->PS1->PS2, each console had a massive difference in how good the games looked right out of the gate. When the PS3 came out, the difference was there, but not as stark (though by the time you get to late PS3 games they had advanced enough that they looked clearly better). Then in the PS4 generation, early PS4 games looked the same as PS3 games, and only ever got to the point where they looked modestly better. Now, even years after the PS5 came out, the games still don't look any better than on the PS4. So in the early years there was dramatic improvement in computing power from one generation to the next, then in the 2010s the gains became more modest, and now the gains are barely noticeable. That has meant that designers long since stopped being constrained by the hardware, so the games don't have the rate of improvement they used to. They probably never will again.

Second, the games industry has gotten bigger. In the early days, the AAA games were made pretty much like indie games are now. Doom was made by a handful of guys who were super passionate about making a game that they themselves would love to play. Thus you got incredible games on a regular basis, because they were basically all passion projects. Now, business concerns dominate the AAA game industry. Passionate, talented devs still exist, even at that level, but they are subordinate to the executives who care more about the quarterly profits than how fun the games are. And as the games industry expands, it also gets more devs who aren't particularly talented, but are still making games (look at Bioware these days, or the many indie shovelware projects). Both of these phenomena are due to the industry expanding - you will get more of the good games to some extent, but you also get far more if the bad than you used to.

Finally, the ever-increasing push for graphical prowess has made AAA games expensive to make. Which in turn makes the companies funding them more risk-averse. When you are paying 200 people to make a game for 5 years, that is expensive and you need to sell a lot of copies to not go broke. So you make the games appeal to as many people as possible, in an effort to get as many sales as you can. But as has always been the case, when you make something that is offensive to nobody, it's also interesting to nobody. So AAA games are very bland, because companies need them to be or else they'll lose their shirts because they only sold 1 million copies instead of 5 million.

The good news is that good games are still being made, you just won't find them in the AAA space very often. Look to indie projects, which are still being made as passion projects by small teams just like in the old days. You will have a harder time finding them because there's a lot of crap to sift through in the indie space (due to the low barrier to entry), but the good stuff is really good and worth your time. It's unlikely that we'll ever see another golden age where almost every game coming out is a classic, but there are still good games being made at least.

On point. Games just suck and I am somehwat glad neural networks will at least keep graphic cards useful as I cannot bring myself to enjoy new games. You barely have any changes, id software shipped quake 3 in less than 2 years, a game whose engine was hailed as a marvel and was Carmack's last great hurrah, Carmack who is widely seen as one of the best hackers to ever touch a keyboard.

I am even fine with the lefty woke subversion if the gameplay is good. I just do not want to play the same game with a slightly different re-skin. Half Life, Quake 3/Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex were all first-person mostly shooting heavy games that all played extremely differently. 25 years later, modern games do not have any advances.

This reminds me of something a good hacker I know said which is that the average good hacker today is far worse than a good hacker 25 years ago. We fucked up big time somewhere. How do you take hundreds of millions and 5 years to make the same fucking game Ubisoft. Why is making another Elder Scrolls a two-decade long process when New Vegas was made in percentages of that by a studio you cucked out of payments.

Open worlds like Gothic 2 are much better than anything you get now, bigger just means worse.

To get better at something (hacking) you have to play around with it. That really means you need a challenge which:

  • is approximately on your level
  • motivates you

As a technology develops, the people who were playing with it when it was simple develop with it. And they are motivated to do by the increased number of useful/fun things they can achieve.

At the same time, as the technology improves, the amount you need to understand about it to get what you decreases. And the amount of training you have to do to achieve anything increases. So the hump gets higher and there are fewer reasons to put in the effort.

For example, you can use 99.9% of the functions of an iPad without knowing what a file system is. On Windows 98, you did have to know, and 98 was the simplest publicly available system out there.

This is why nobody mends/mods their own cars anymore. I know they’re designed to be inaccessible now but to my way of thinking the two go together. You can’t ban meddling with the internals unless the internals are pretty reliable for day to day use.

I also think it’s already almost too late to learn how to use LLMs. Two years ago, even some very simple hacking with prompts / jailbreaks would get you results. Now you need to wade through a lot of stuff if you want an experience better than the standard GPT web UI.

Now you need to wade through a lot of stuff if you want an experience better than the standard GPT web UI.

Are you.. high? It takes like 5 minutes and one tutorial to get access to almost completely unfiltered Deepseek through openrouter.ai. You can hook that up to an interface of arbitrary complexity and knock yourself out. The tokens are very generous, took me like 6 hours to exhaust them for 24h.

https://old.reddit.com/r/JanitorAI_Official/comments/1ikn1d7/heres_how_to_use_proxies_deepseek_claude_and/

And you don't have to pay a cent, although the newer deepseek might be rate-limited during high demand times, such as weekend.

This is exactly my point. When GPT3.5 first came out, all you needed was some trivial skill with prompt engineering and imagination to get obviously superior results. No extra software needed.

Now you have to:

  • Understand the difference between AI served via UI and API
  • Know what front ends exist and how to use install + use them
  • Connect the one to the other

Already this is more than the average person can handle, and you’re mostly just replicating the UI but it’s more complicated.

If you actually want more functionality then you need to look into character cards, RAG, function calling etc.

Not only is this now a non-trivial amount of work even for the technical, but you’re not getting any return for it until later. It doesn’t seem that way to you because you already understand how everything works, but already starting LLMs from scratch has become limited to technical people who enjoy making things work for its own sake.

Imagine twenty more years and you see how we got to where we are with video games and cars.

"Fun" is a really tough metric to measure, but I think there's probably something to the theory that microtransactions and live service being such big moneymakers for the industry has pushed high budget developers towards optimizing for keeping players addicted rather than keeping them entertained. There's also the fact that the gaming industry was much smaller and low status in the 90s and 00s compared to now, and so devs tended to be nerds who wanted to make games they wanted to play, rather than people who wanted to make money and/or spread a message.

However, it's not as if such devs have disappeared; if you're comparing like for like, there are more games being released these days of the same technological quality as a Quake from 1996 or even a Half Life 2 from 2004 than were released in those years, made by small unknown teams. But there are so many of them, and the vast majority of them suck, so it's hard to find good ones. AAA games get all the attention for obvious reasons, and those are the ones that often are optimized around things other than just convincing you to pay a one-time fee based on how fun the experience is. Even then, when I think about AAA games I've played recently, like Elden Ring or Final Fantasy 16, they compare pretty favorably in terms of "fun" to equivalent-ish AAA games I played 20+ years ago, like Devil May Cry 3 or Final Fantasy 10/10-2/13.

I've heard that recently there was a revival in the FPS genre of "Boomer Shooters," which are fast-paced shooters inspired by those old games like Doom and Quake whose controls and speed were based around video game logic more than around realism. As a fan of those old games back in the day, I've been meaning to check out some of them, such as Dusk.

You can keep players hooked, not addicted and entertained. And paying. War Thunder knows how to do that.

Also: Doom (2016) is pretty much an almost perfect single-player version of the 'boomer shooter'. I liked it very much, in terms of combat it favorably compares to Unreal Tournament ('99, 2003 and 2004, all of which I completed several times).

They killed off Unreal tournament in pre alpha and I have lost interest since then. I suck at FPS, ability wise I am bottom 99th percentile, I still find these games so much more fun, I have quake live and I would pick that over any console shooter.

I have to question the usefulness of such a broad question. Even talking about 90s games is very broad. In my youth, I played on an iMac G3 and played tons of shareware titles that probably most 90s gamers have never heard of.

These days, my addictive personality becomes apparent even with modern games. Escape From Tarkov, Dark Souls Remastered, Caves of Qud, and Katana Zero all made me noticeably tank my own health in my lust to play them as much as possible. Just yesterday, I was reminiscing that I really liked Max Payne 3. These are all games that aren't exactly new, but they do fall outside of the late 90s to late 2000s parameters. I think there's tons of good stuff out there, it just needs to be found and played to death.

I made various comments about the comparisons for AAA games then vs now. I will say that peak game enjoyment was somewhere between late 2000s and early 2010s, but peak advances were made in late 90s to early 2000s.

Games are better, but by miniscule amounts, the gameplay jumps that you had do not exist and the slight improvements are not as fun for me. Gaming was much better when it was smaller, studios spending the same time and money on a game, the way marvel does on movies, gives you marvel movie like games.

I'd kill for Max Payne 4. I wish someone did another AA or AAA bullet-time shooter with the serial numbers filed off. Quantum Break was actually great as a shooter, but not quite the same.

Escape From Tarkov

It convinced me to pay $150 for a video game, and to put in >1500 hours into it, so I feel you. Can't be arsed to play in recent wipes, especially since they released a new ultra luxury edition and gave the middle finger to EOD owners.

El paso Elsewhere is alright if you want third person bullet time, and trepang2 is a pretty cool fps variant (but it feels more like the FEAR games) but the game you really should check out is Echo Point Nova. It's got bullet time, it's got tribes style skiing and a whole bunch of other cool mechanics, all in a non linear open world map.

Thanks for the suggestions. I like the looks of Echo Point Nova, but it looks very slide-y with non human enemies and cartoony graphics. Part of the appeal of Max Payne 3 was going to a shithole Latin American country drenched in sun and humidity as a fatass sweaty drunk who quips extremely pessimistic lines every 30 seconds whose heft you can feel when doing the classic Max Payne diving technique. Shooting people never felt better than it does in a Rockstar game, too.

Related: I liked the stories of the originals, but I think Max Payne 3's story isn't bad enough to be worth bashing. It's written a lot less flowery, but there are a lot more lines in it that I feel tempted to quote.

Yeah I loved the shit out of Max Payne 3. I loved the first two too, but I was entering middle age when 3 came out and the whole "this is what happens to that sardonic alcoholic when he loses the vigor of youth" hit home hard. And mechanically I felt their reach exceeded their grasp (the graphics quality was too high and while that does give it a long shelf life, those resources would have been better spent on more game imo), but it was still great fun.

I have EPN on my wishlist already, I plan to get it as soon as I've moved into my new place and got a PC set up! Everything I've seen about it makes me think it's an amazing game.

It's awesome, and it's that mix of exploration and action that makes you look up from the game and wonder how so many hours could have passed. If you want to save some money though snap it up now if you can, as it's currently part of the spring sale - and it was also last week's midweek special, so it's probably not going to go on sale again for a while.

To tell the truth, I didn't get that carried away with it. This wipe, I played to level 15 and then lost all motivation to launch the game, mysteriously. That's usually how it goes. I get a desperate urge to play, then I do, then it's over. Next time, I think I will do the single player mod version so that I at least get to keep my progress (and also so that Delivery from the Past isn't impossible), but it does lose something to be fighting bots instead of players. You die a lot more often in live as well, which keeps you on your toes and can make something like a pistol run pretty thrilling. I didn't actually take any EMS kits anywhere this wipe. Got my legs shot out by scavs and crawled veeerrrryyyy slowly to extract a couple times. I think they let EoD players have the same privileges as Unheard, but it's a very time consuming game and you're a busy guy now.

Of course, I liked Max Payne 1 and 2 as well, but 3 really scratched an itch I didn't know I had. There was some free multiplayer game with slomo shooting, but it didn't feel nearly as good.

I could never get into SPT. Maybe if I had friends who would be willing to download the 'unofficial' patch that adds co-op or PVP.

The PVP is the main draw for me in Tarkov. I particularly enjoyed teaming up, there are people all over the globe who still stay in touch because I adopted them and taught them the ropes and helped them through quests, and half of them are now better players than I'll ever be. The team work gave me a rush, the closest I came to that would be modded Arma 3 or Squad, but there's nothing like making SOPs with your buddies and randos and then wrecking house. Raids in Tarkov can be nail biting experiences, and having someone to watch your six is amazing.

(Having friends who can insurance fraud your stuff always helps too).

Eventually, Tarkov just moved away from what I wanted. I had been looking forward to the patch that added realistic armor hitboxes, and played that patch after waiting several out. Then BSG nerfed it to make streamers happy.

Can't have shit in Tarkov.

Oh, yeah, you really need the co-op mod for SPT. I think it's called Project FIKA. That's actually how I learned the maps initially, some other Tarkov junkie leading us. Yes, the PVP is really the selling point, tense stuff. I just think that Tarkov takes the gear progression way too seriously. You should be able to have a decent chance of killing anyone in the game, rather than the game saying "too bad, you brought in level 3 bullets but you needed level 6, also you've got level 5 gear and he's level 60". SPT fixes that a bit.

The maps of Tarkov are one of the biggest selling points for me. So huge, so very detailed, so war-torn. It made me realize one of the reasons I love Left 4 Dead and Duke Nukem 3D were for the maps portraying real places.

If you want something similar, but with a focus on the pvp then I'd recommend Hunt Showdown. Has the same big maps, good gunplay, great sound design.

My issue with it is that instead of being able to go to different locations to loot, and then extract, you basically always focus on getting to the location with the boss, killing it, and then extracting. So it leads to more focused, but also somewhat repetitive encounters.

You should be able to have a decent chance of killing anyone in the game, rather than the game saying "too bad, you brought in level 3 bullets but you needed level 6, also you've got level 5 gear and he's level 60". SPT fixes that a bit.

In case you missed the one wipe where they had the realistic hitboxes, this was the case. Sadly it isn't any more.

If you aimed at places like the armpit or got lucky and had shots land in the gaps between plates, you could easily pierce soft armor with non-AP rounds and kill someone decked out in Class 6.

The maps of Tarkov are one of the biggest selling points for me. So huge, so very detailed, so war-torn. It made me realize one of the reasons I love Left 4 Dead and Duke Nukem 3D were for the maps portraying real places

Seconded. BSG does environmental design like no one else. Streets is a masterpiece, but runs like an asthmatic donkey. Now, it's still not enough to keep me keen after like 8 or 9 wipes of play, but there's no wonder new players get totally lost even with online maps handy.

I would love suggestions. My current to-play list includes

  1. Gothic 2
  2. Fallout New Vegas (played it a bit, loved it)
  3. Unreal Tournament 2004
  4. Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal
  5. Vanquish
  6. Metal Gear Rising

My malaise also stems from the fact that the IPs that I liked from the 2010s are either dead or should be dead. Assassin's Creed stopped being fun post Brotherhood, Far Cry got worse. The popular AAA summer blockbuster sorta games feel quite familiar, I wish we could experience breakthroughs in how the games felt.

The jumps from Wolfenstein to Doom, from Doom to Quake and from Quake to Quake 3 were pretty large. You could polish Arkham Asylum graphically, and a guy who has never played it would not find it old or clunky like you would have found Half Life after having played Vanquish.

Maybe I'll never recreate the rush of pizza, coke and old vide games with my cousin from 18 years ago. Welp

Edit - forgot to add immersive sims and some others I forgot

  1. Deus Ex (original and both the Eidos reboots)
  2. Prey
  3. Dishonored
  4. DmC
  5. Metro Last Light

How familiar are you with consoles? Imo N64/PS1+2/Gameboy/N(3)DS all have a fuckton of amazing games that can be played, easily and for free, on most mediocre modern PCs. Wii & Switch are also great because of their unique controls, but unfortunately need to be played properly.

If you have Metal Gear Rising & DmC on your list, I'm guessing you've already played the actual Devil May Cry games? If not, 3, 4, 1, and 5 are all much better than DmC IMHO. DmC isn't nearly as bad as its reputation and has a pretty solid combat system, but it definitely wasn't as good as those actual DMC games, with a severe lack of boss fights and has atrocious art design and writing. I'd also recommend Bayonetta if you haven't played that one. Ninja Gaiden Sigma from the Master Collection is worth checking out as well, though the style of combat is quite a bit different from DMC. I wish I could recommend Sigma 2 or the recently released Black 2, but both are severely gimped versions of the game that took away the craziness that was so fun about the OG Ninja Gaiden 2.

I have not, I fear that the non-reboot stuff is better, so playing the worse game first would at least let me enjoy that, though a good chance I never get through this list either given that I just don't care about games as much now given my turbulent life is currently. I fired up Quake Live yesterday and an hour went by in a flash. I had fun despite like a 1/25 kd.

Devil May Cry series seemed to be much more fun than the God of War games, will check out others you mentioned too. Bayonetta is highly rated.

If there's a good chance you'll never get to all of them, I'd recommend just skipping DmC altogether. Again, not a terrible game, but it's such a huge step down compared to the actual DMC games that it's not even in the same class. And the gameplay is so different that it'll just feel like going to a whole different game rather than an upgrade.

Otoh, DMC1 and 3 have very similar combat systems, but 3 is clearly superior to 1's, so you might want to play 1 before 3, to feel the improvement. 4 and 5 are also upgrades in gameplay compared to 3, but not by nearly as much as from 1 to 3.

And yes, DMC games are far more fun than God of War games. I will forever have bitterness towards David Jaffe for creating GOW that not only overahadowed DMC and Ninja Gaiden, but also helped to popularize quick-time-events in mainstream AAA games. Having flashing icons of the button you need to press above the enemy's head in order to pull off special moves doesn't make it more fun or immersive, it just reminds me that I'm playing a video game, not beating up minotaurs! DMC4 and Ninja Gaiden 2 both implemented similar systems far better without having to have flashing icons, but rather by integrating them seamlessly into the core gameplay controls.

If you haven't played God of War, you definitely should play them. The original games, I can't speak for the new ones as they don't interest me. The God of War trilogy is a masterclass in keeping things fun the whole way through. Penny Arcade observed (back when GoW 2 came out) that the stuff it gives you in the first level is the sort of fun that most games don't give you until the last level. Just really great games, and everyone should play them.

My favorite was gow2, I just did not like it as much story wise since greek gods are still gods, so I never recomemnd that game lol. I would say that I really liked the combat there which is why devil may cry and Metal gear rising tempt me.

Have you tried indie games? They really feel a lot more like 90s games than the latest AAA entry in a well-known IP. Some recommendations:

The last 3 are on sale right now for $5.28; unless you hate point-and-click horror, it's a steal.

Did you try the assassin's creed rpgs? Origins and Odyssey? They are my favourite games in the series, like if the Witcher 3 was historical fantasy.

Also based on your list there I'd suggest checking out Arkane's games if you haven't already. Dishonored and Prey are phenomenal and a good balance of strategy and pacing.

Dishonored and Prey are great immersive sims, unfortunately the studios behind them have been shut down. Immersive Sims always have their studios shut down. I am not that fond of the other Assasins Creed games. The advancements you saw in those with Ezio as the protagonist in a pre microtransaction, leftier than thou world was quite good. The sequels may be good but they are not that much better, and frankly, they are not even proper RPGs the way actual RPGs are. They are less RPG like than new Fallout games, which are terrible shooters LARPing as RPGs, except for New Vegas, which is awesome.

Yeah it's tough being an imsim fan. There are some good ones coming out in the indie scene though, if you don't mind a bit of jank and ugliness - Shadows of Doubt is great for a wip (and not only is it 40% off in the Steam spring sale, but at fanatical you can get it and total war warhammer (or Cryptmaster if you like puns - if you like puns you'll love Cryptmaster) for $10 usd) and the Intravenous series is outstanding if you like the top down view style imsims. Other good ones include Gloomwood, ctrl alt ego, and Teardown.

Also man what does rpg even mean anymore? Since mass effect 2 it has basically meant 'whatever, as long as there are dialogue options'. Not even loot is a prerequisite these days! I do take your point though, it's silly to compare them to actual rpgs like Pillars of Eternity or Rogue Trader . But I will not allow you to compare Assassin's Creed Odyssey to the Bethesda Fallouts, them's fightin words son! I know the primary appeal of the game is that it's like the arcade version of living in ancient Greece, but it has the thing I want most out of any game - a reactive story that changes based on your actions. Way more reactive than Bethesda fallouts.

Oh, I forgot about Prey. Highly recommended if you liked Half-Life, I think.

Prey is n the list, they fucking mangled arkane. The world cannot have studios that make immense sims.

Eidos, Arkane and Looking glass. It's ludicrous lol

Like you, I liked Unreal Tournament 1999. Arena shooters aren't very common nowadays. I also liked Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Marathon a lot, and on that front, there are a lot of boomer shooter options. New Blood Interactive released a lot of games like that, and I also liked Ion Fury somewhat. But these days, if I want something adrenaline pumping, I actually don't play those games, I play something more concentrated like Hotline Miami 2 or Katana Zero. Those really got an addicting formula of "try something, kill people really fast, die, instantly restart and keep killing people". Alternatively, for something different and not very commonly recommended, Streets of Rogue was pretty arcadey and intense at times due to the roguelite nature of it. Lots of options to play that game, like Deus Ex.

I really liked Gothic 1, but I failed to get very far in Gothic 2. The story wasn't as compelling to me, and the setting was more boring from the outset. "You're stuck in this insane penal colony trapped with other homicidal prisoners and also pockets of orcs and goblins and random deadly wilderness creatures and the sorcerers want you to take this letter to the fire mages" was a much better hook than "Omg, dragons! Off to starter town with you!"

I think there aren't really any games like Half-Life. It was pretty unique, even for the 90s. It had a lot of things going for it: environmental storytelling, sparing amounts of NPC dialogue, no dialogue from you, a general survival horror vibe from everyone, and a fun chaotic romp through a sprawling facility. Despite all that, the scope was not that large. I'd say the indie scene is the most likely to produce something like that, but no one wants to do it, because that's not something new or innovative. Maybe something like Selaco is close?

If I had a single recommendation from the last year, it would probably be Dark Souls. I really didn't picture it as being a game I would like, but it was seriously compelling. The setting, the interconnectedness, the weird NPCs, stats that actually mean things, and finally, combat that is really fluid and feels great. If the difficulty is turning you off, don't let it. There are ways around the difficulty.

Dark Souls is worth checking out, but I have been told it is super hard and frustrating. I have heard that they are making half life 3, I really wish valve never stopped, Half Life 2 was one of my favorite campaigns ever.

I don't want to be mean, but there are far, far harder games than the DS series. DS is normie-hard; It's the maximum amount of hardness that you can afford while keeping most of the casual audience, and as oats says, it has multiple design decisions that allow you to get past content you consider to difficult (online co-op, single-use items, simple rushing, cheese/OP gear, or in the worst case, plain ol' grinding). Especially in co-op it's arguably quite easy.

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