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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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