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The technological answer seems obvious - being underdeveloped, technology was advancing more rapidly, leading to more cool new shit that feels fresh and exciting.
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 pants873 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 otherADHDshooting 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
a) It'a not so simple
b) people are stupid
c) time, effort, laziness
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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.
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