RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS

[Katphood]

Pfft. Neither 2001 nor 2007 stands a chance against 1998...

 

I think you're mistaking 1998 for 1997. Yeah, that's the famous one. I was talking about 'the second one', you know...like when you talk about the 7 wonders of the ancient world and then you proceed to talk about the 7 wonders of the modern world. 

[Bartimaeus]

 

I have completely missed this video from January, buuut it is one of the best, I've seen about the current state of gaming.

 

They did some research and they are not talking out of their asses, based on marketing hype, nor nostalgia...

 

This video sums up pretty much everything, what gamers in their 30s and 40s around me thinks what's bad today, and what was better yesterday :-/

 

 

8 minutes in total...

 

Ahhhhhhh...Metacritic! The place where 13 year old kids gather around from time to time to p*ss on the single good game that they don't happen to own. What better source to use for a research when it comes to video games, eh?! It's funny because I usually end up reading the reviews that are rated 6 when I check out Metacritic, those tend to be the neutral ones, at least they let you know how the game plays...

 

Also 2001? Seriously!!! What the hell happened to 2007 then?!

 

Just check out ACG,  EasyAllies or  GiantBomb. Most of these guys have been in the video games industry since forever and based on what they say, I really don't think there will be a video games industry crash...unless Steam and its collection of games become vaporware or something. 

 

 

I am pretty sure they're using the actual critic reviews (aka the metascore), not the user score.

[Fenixp]

Regardless, starting with a premise of "Review aggregate scores are objective and don't follow any trends and therefore quality of a game with a lower score is objectively lower than that with a higher score" is a rather flawed way of approaching the subject.
 

Oh man, the first one was serious gamer crack for me. Full of bugs, but such a great and funny title, perfect 60s Bond feel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFw_48vv5NQ

Edited July 7, 2017 by Fenixp

[Blodhemn]

Yeah, they pretty much just described their own video as clickbait.

 

Agree about saturation and micro transaction, but not so much about other things as bugs and marketing have been part of the industry for years and there's also no detail as to why there's a storm of mediocrity, i.e. developers playing it safe for fear of backlash, making games with fan service as priority.

[Mamoulian War]

 

I have completely missed this video from January, buuut it is one of the best, I've seen about the current state of gaming.They did some research and they are not talking out of their asses, based on marketing hype, nor nostalgia...This video sums up pretty much everything, what gamers in their 30s and 40s around me thinks what's bad today, and what was better yesterday :-/https://youtu.be/Zlc8piKQccU8 minutes in total...

 Ahhhhhhh...Metacritic! The place where 13 year old kids gather around from time to time to p*ss on the single good game that they don't happen to own. What better source to use for a research when it comes to video games, eh?! It's funny because I usually end up reading the reviews that are rated 6 when I check out Metacritic, those tend to be the neutral ones, at least they let you know how the game plays... Also 2001? Seriously!!! What the hell happened to 2007 then?! Just check out ACG,  EasyAllies or  GiantBomb. Most of these guys have been in the video games industry since forever and based on what they say, I really don't think there will be a video games industry crash...unless Steam and its collection of games become vaporware or something. 

 

The article is not about the crash, it's about quality. The game industry is making more money than ever before, at the expense of quality. That's the idea behind the video.

 

The more **** they introduce into gaming (DLCs, Microtransactions, "openworldesness", fetch quests, always online for single player, preorders, day 0 patches) the lower quality the games are... the industry will be making more money as a whole, and the game will became more and more bland... We have for a few years almost all games with copy/paste formula, innovation is nowhere to be found, only once in a while a company is willing to risk. We get all the tame the same ****, be it CoD or AC rehash few times every year...

 

I have spent in 2016/17 more time with games, than last 5 years, despite having same time. But with the exception of Dishonored GOTY, and project Cars GOTY, all games, I've purchased were Japanese or Indies... And the all of them, with very few exceptions are old few years. I even prefer to watch Let's plays and streams of older games compared to new games...

 

2016 has brought us more than 5000 games, and only 5 or so of them got high review scores... with games released in such a ****ty state as ME andromeda, BF4, Mafia III, Dishonored 2 for PC, Arkham Knight for PC, people are buying less and less new games, and are buying more and more older games and GOTY editions, for cheap. The new cost ****loads of money. Because of that The Distrubutors are getting revenue as never before, but that lowers their profit, and that's why we get more and more **** incorporated in games. Because they are making most money out of microtransactions...

 

I have also bought more games in 2016/17 than in 2010-2015 together, but I have spent less money in total on them. I am happy, because I love Japanese games, and we are experiencing their Renaissance now.

 

Look what we got this year from Japan: Tales of Berseria, Yakuza Zero, Final Fantasy XV, Nioh, Nier: Automata, Atelier: Firis, new Zelda, Persona 5, Resident Evil 7, etc. and we'll be getting few more A-Bombs this year as well, all polished games, wih no need for day zero patch, and no microtransactions... although FFXV should not count, because SE is going games as a service road as well, to stay competitive with west, and it is already being seen on FFXV season pass startegy...

 

And look what we got here in the west in the AAA department: Mass Effect Andromeda (the second worst game I remember if we look purely on technical status of the game, right behind Arkham Knight), For Honor (good game, but no one is playing it anymore, because of ****ty microtransactions), Watchdogs 2 (also not worst game, but it has so many preorder editions, that you needed an excel sheet for it), and what will be having more this year? Another Battlefield, another Call of Duty, another edition of Skyrim... The only really good western game, which I remember released this year, which was polished, did not copy paste all the checklist formulaes from focus testing, and which was not infested with microtransactions, which have brought new formula, and was not affraid to give us female protagonist was Horizon: Zero Dawn... The western games have become sterile checklists to appease as big audience as possible, which completely destroyed any innovation here...

 

/end of rant

[Fenixp]

Yes, let's just ignore Prey altogether :-P Also yes, Sturgeon's law applies pretty much every time.

[Mamoulian War]

I haven't forgotten Prey. Unfortunatelly it was also bugged release at least for PC *shrugs*

 

We can say, it was typical Bethesda release :-P

Edited July 7, 2017 by Mamoulian War

[Fenixp]

I haven't forgotten Prey. Unfortunatelly it was also bugged release at least for PC *shrugs*

Unlike Nier: Automata which didn't even properly support HD in fullscreen and had terrible performance issues, not to mention crashing? Or Resident Evil 7 that also had crashing and I believe performance issues? Prey worked properly at least and amount of bugs was relatively minuscule (altho they were certainly there, some even progress halting, majority of players reported the game working splendidly)

Edited July 7, 2017 by Fenixp

[Mamoulian War]

Well, thanks for correcting me then

 

I must have missed the issues of the two beforementioned games, because at least in this case, I have not heard any complaints anywhere in the parts of the internet, which I am frequently visiting, and I have info about Prey only from Obsidian forums, becuase despite it being pretty praised game, it's not my cup of tea. And I have noticed few complaints here, including the progress halting bugs, but for some reason I haven't noticed any complaints about Nier and RE7

Edited July 7, 2017 by Mamoulian War

[Katphood]

 

 

I have completely missed this video from January, buuut it is one of the best, I've seen about the current state of gaming.They did some research and they are not talking out of their asses, based on marketing hype, nor nostalgia...This video sums up pretty much everything, what gamers in their 30s and 40s around me thinks what's bad today, and what was better yesterday :-/https://youtu.be/Zlc8piKQccU8 minutes in total...

 Ahhhhhhh...Metacritic! The place where 13 year old kids gather around from time to time to p*ss on the single good game that they don't happen to own. What better source to use for a research when it comes to video games, eh?! It's funny because I usually end up reading the reviews that are rated 6 when I check out Metacritic, those tend to be the neutral ones, at least they let you know how the game plays... Also 2001? Seriously!!! What the hell happened to 2007 then?! Just check out ACG,  EasyAllies or  GiantBomb. Most of these guys have been in the video games industry since forever and based on what they say, I really don't think there will be a video games industry crash...unless Steam and its collection of games become vaporware or something. 

 

 

Look what we got this year from Japan: Tales of Berseria, Yakuza Zero, Final Fantasy XV, Nioh, Nier: Automata, Atelier: Firis, new Zelda, Persona 5, Resident Evil 7, etc. and we'll be getting few more A-Bombs this year as well, all polished games, wih no need for day zero patch, and no microtransactions... although FFXV should not count, because SE is going games as a service road as well, to stay competitive with west, and it is already being seen on FFXV season pass startegy...

 

 

 

Maybe that's because they spend the money on Story and design instead of 4K textures and purdy graphics. Not that Japanese games look bad or something, but if you compare Nier: Automata to Horizon: Zero Dawn for instance you can clearly see the different approach the devs have taken.

 

Western games rely waaaaaay to much on graphics, gimmicks and the so called "innovation", Japanese on the other hand simply tell a good story.

 

Example: I finished Silent Hill 2 a few days ago and noticed that it had very awkward combat, same as Silent Hill 1. What I do with these games is that I set combat difficulty(or simply the difficulty settings)  on Easy so it won't bother me. I enjoy the games regardless of the combat every time. Then I remembered what Swery 65 had to say about Deadly Premonition(Red Seeds Profile in Japan): "This game wasn't meant to have combat, we added it at the very final stages of development."

 

As you can guess, the combat in the game sucked but why did they absolutely have to add it to the game? The western audience likes guns in their games and it might not sell if we don't include it in our game. 

[Mamoulian War]

And that is why I am happy, that SONY annomced just before E3, they are planning to bring more Japanese games to the west. And I really hope, they will help them out little bit with the marketing. Because even the best Japanese games which are >>>>> than their western counterparts are selling low numbers. The guys, which video I have linked before, did not even knew what Persona 5 is before it was few weeks out, and their subscribers told them about it, and they right after that made some comparison video and praised all J games they learned about in few days, and were surprised how good they were..

[Fenixp]

Western games rely waaaaaay to much on graphics, gimmicks and the so called "innovation", Japanese on the other hand simply tell a good story.

More importantly, western games rely on mechanics-driven gameplay, which is what I have always considered the main strength of the medium (mechanics interacting with each other leading to emergent gameplay) whereas Japanese games do focus on their stories (for the most part obviously, there are also Japanese games that do not do that - Dark Souls, character action games etc.) Which is why Japanese games rarely ever end up among my favorite games.

 

...

Well, be it Western or Japanese, buggy games are not really a new thing regardless, so I have kinda learned to ignore such issues. In fact I tend to have a lot less technical issues with games nowadays than I did back when DOS was the main OS on my computer. Edited July 7, 2017 by Fenixp

[Mamoulian War]

Unfortunatelly, lot of our games are lately not very good with mechanics as well. (

 

I really hope some executives would finally learn, why were iD soft, Epic and Raven shooters always the best of the best FPS games ever created... I really don't understand, how corridor shooters with cinematics, where you have to grind XP to get new gear could ever be prefered to concentration of pure gameplay, like was the last Doom or Wolfenstein *shakes head*

[Katphood]

On topic:

 

 

[Keyrock]

 

Tekken Bowl is back!

[Azdeus]

 

Pfft. Neither 2001 nor 2007 stands a chance against 1998...

 

I think you're mistaking 1998 for 1997. Yeah, that's the famous one. I was talking about 'the second one', you know...like when you talk about the 7 wonders of the ancient world and then you proceed to talk about the 7 wonders of the modern world. 

 

 

No, I mean 1998, not '97. I do mean the year of Battlezone, Thief, Fallout 2, NFS; Hot Pursuit, Half Life, Grim Fandango, Decent: FreeSpace The Great War, Star Craft & Brood War, Rainbow Six, Baldurs Gate, Warhammer Dark Omen, Commandos; Behind Enemy Lines, Unreal, Delta Force and SiN.

[Katphood]

I apologize, sir. I thought you meant the year of Final Fantasy VII, Mario Kart 64, Blast Corps, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Need for Speed II, Dungeon Keeper, Shadow Warrior, Blood, MDK, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy Tactics (Japan), Star Fox 64, Carmageddon, GoldenEye 007(GoldenEye 64), Hexen II, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Ultima Online, Fallout, Total Annihilation, Grand Theft Auto, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Age of Empires, Riven, Blade Runner, The Curse of Monkey Island, Tomb Raider II, Quake II and Gran Turismo.  

[Mamoulian War]

Can anybody remind me what was 2016 year of? Oh yeah. Battlefield 1... How could I forget that pinnacle of gamesness!!!

[Katphood]

Yup, DICE could have made the Battlefield: Bad Company 3 everybody wanted but they didn't and probably never will.

[Azdeus]

I apologize, sir. I thought you meant the year of Final Fantasy VII, Mario Kart 64, Blast Corps, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Need for Speed II, Dungeon Keeper, Shadow Warrior, Blood, MDK, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy Tactics (Japan), Star Fox 64, Carmageddon, GoldenEye 007(GoldenEye 64), Hexen II, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Ultima Online, Fallout, Total Annihilation, Grand Theft Auto, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Age of Empires, Riven, Blade Runner, The Curse of Monkey Island, Tomb Raider II, Quake II and Gran Turismo.  

 

Good sir, while there were great games in '97 the ones that were released in '98 had more iconic games in it, and I only count games for The One Platform to Rule them All, or I could pad out my list some more. But I would need an encyclopaedia, I never bothered with the... lesser... platforms.

[Fenixp]

Can anybody remind me what was 2016 year of?

DOOM and Titanfall 2, featuring some of the best FPS campaigns I've ever played, both for entirely different reasons. For MP fans there's Overwatch that I'm not too fond of because it's MP, but.. Y'know. Hitman coming back to form with episodic releases of the Hitman games.

 

When it comes to sequels, it wouldn't be me if I forgot to mention Dishonored 2 with generally stellar level design, but especially two levels come to mind that I'm rather unlikely to forget. XCOM 2 also seem to have been accepted rather well with some great improvements to the formula (and, arguably, some things being for worse.)

 

As for indies, Firewatch showed us how to do walking sims right, Starbound showed No Man's Sky how to do No Man's Sky right and Darkest Dungeon was one of the best Lovecraftian games I have ever played, often to detriment of its own gameplay (for which it has my respect). Inside was also rather acclaimed and Oxenfree was ... Well, Oxenfree I guess?

 

Incidentally, speaking of BF1, it actually featured a pretty damn good SP campaign as well.

Edited July 7, 2017 by Fenixp

[Katphood]

Titanfall 2's single-player campaign was one of the best I have played in years.

 

 

That part towards the end where you're eliminating enemies like a ninja with the overpowered pistol...it was just awesome!

 

[Mamoulian War]

 

Can anybody remind me what was 2016 year of?

DOOM and Titanfall 2, featuring some of the best FPS campaigns I've ever played, both for entirely different reasons. For MP fans there's Overwatch that I'm not too fond of because it's MP, but.. Y'know. Hitman coming back to form with episodic releases of the Hitman games.

 

When it comes to sequels, it wouldn't be me if I forgot to mention Dishonored 2 with generally stellar level design, but especially two levels come to mind that I'm rather unlikely to forget. XCOM 2 also seem to have been accepted rather well with some great improvements to the formula (and, arguably, some things being for worse.)

 

As for indies, Firewatch showed us how to do walking sims right, Starbound showed No Man's Sky how to do No Man's Sky right and Darkest Dungeon was one of the best Lovecraftian games I have ever played, often to detriment of its own gameplay (for which it has my respect). Inside was also rather acclaimed and Oxenfree was ... Well, Oxenfree I guess?

 

Incidentally, speaking of BF1, it actually featured a pretty damn good SP campaign as well.

Hmm I thought Doom 4 was older my bad :-D and even though Titanfall 2 is good, I don't believe anyone will remember it soon. Not many people playing online nowadays.

 

Hitman and it's episodic release is now praised as almost everything what is wrong in current industry trends.

 

Overwatch. Ok I give you Mamou's approval of quality on that . It's crazy popular, but still, it is infested with worst kind of Microtransactions.

 

I come back to your list shortly, my flight is just taking off

[Belle Sorciere]

Can anybody remind me what was 2016 year of? Oh yeah. Battlefield 1... How could I forget that pinnacle of gamesness!!!

 

Dark Souls III, XCOM 2, Overwatch, Doom, and Total War: Warhammer come to mind.

[the_dog_days]

 

Can anybody remind me what was 2016 year of? Oh yeah. Battlefield 1... How could I forget that pinnacle of gamesness!!!

Dark Souls III, XCOM 2, Overwatch, Doom, and Total War: Warhammer come to mind.

The long anticipated Last Guardian and Final Fantasy 15 came out in 2016 too. Personally, I really enjoyed Stellaris, Tyranny, Grim Dawn, Dex, Oxenfree, and the Technomancer.