/games/ - Video Games

It's pure nostalgia, and nostalgiafags are one of the worst cancers in the videogame industry. Hell, if they didn't exist nintendo would've went bankrupt years ago.

Videogames were always cash grab shit

>>41191
what about free games?

>>41200
Narcissistic supply.

>>41191
>>41201
>>41208

The ego these people must have…

I would sooner believe it's just nostalgia. Gamers go on about it all the time, especially Nintendo fans. With the OP picture, I expected an explanation but the fact that there isn't one bothers me. Why should I believe what the person who made the picture says when they don't even bother to present their reasoning? It kind of comes off as a bit… I don't know… conceited? That could be the word I'm looking for. The person making the picture could be right but I'm certainly not as inclined to believe that if an argument isn't provided to sway me.

I think either way works.

Soulless (It's just a job)

-programmers
-animators
-technical work

Soul

Design
stetting
story
etc.

The designers can put in things you can find by looking hard as well as make sure good mechanics are present that go along with a good story. On the other hand, if they don't put much effort into this in the first place, the product could suffer and they could get fired. The company needs to sell as many products as possible, so making it mediocre or bad is not a good idea.

This doesn't factor in the possibility of the employees being overworked and understaffed with a deadline being way too close for any good work to be done. So, in this case, it's the company being soulless and releasing their product earlier than needed, getting patched, and maybe losing sales and credibility for that.

There are many different ways a game could go wrong, and both parties, the employees and executives, being responsible for a game being bad.

FF7 was an example of soul

soulless will be its remake

I don't think it is nostalgia, just that it was easier to put more effort into the feel of the game in the past because video games did not take that many resources. Today games take hundreds of people to make so the game really loses that personal touch.

>>41187
>Created by somebody with a pure heart. Solebody dreamed to make this.
Wtf are you on it's n ape in a mine cart ffs

>How accurate is this?
ignoring the picture(because i haven't play DK) i think the concept of "soul" has some basis in reality, it mainly depends on a game being a passion project of developers, you can have super refined gameplay, but if there is no passion it will be soulless.
>or is it just nostalgia?
it's often easy to mistake nostalgia for soul, which is why you see all those franchise reboots and sequels, some of them do have soul, but most just exploit nostalgia.

Older games very often were mod-friendly. I'm always surprised how you can just drag and drop assets into Assetto Corsa, and bang - you have a new track, a new experience, and you've got it for absolutely free.

CS:Soul vs. CaSh: GrabO, for example.

As for console games, it all went to shit when they started re-using assets. I mean, I like Kirby, but most of the games after Return to Dreamland feel and play exactly the same, they don't experiment like with Mass Attack anymore.

>>41649
As games get more and more complex it's getting increasingly harder to offer any real mod support unless the game and the engine were made from the ground-up with modding in mind. It's no longer 1995 where most of the game's logic is in a few txt files and textures are loose bmp files.

>>41649
modding is still just as easy as in old cs, but you have to play offline or on custom servers.
>>41650
it could be an excuse for some games, but certainly not cs:go, source is one of the most mod friendly engines out there. valve just wants to sell community content, but at least the game remains actively developed and content creators get their cut.

/pol/chads are coming for gamers: https://www.rt.com/news/430112-gaming-addiction-who-disorder/

Absolutely. And it is what characterizes modernity. And it is a principle applicable to absolutely all areas of life and every other kinds of products.

>>41654
In online games there's always the excuse of "with mods only you could see the changes, with integrated paid content everybody else does too!". Seeing how all multiplayer gaming is just a pissing contest and skins are just an extension of that it's not hard to see why there was barely any pushback against it.

>>41655
They can all go fuck themselves.

>>41655
>/pol/chads are coming for gamers
Can you translate that from retard? What does /pol/ have to do with this?

The sixth generation was the last generation of games with soul and made with passion.

>>41679
in 6-8 years wizkids will be saying it was seventh gen

>>41187
Not accurate at all. It's just you losing interest in something over time. It happens with everything so I'm always surprised people having such difficulty understanding it happens with gaming as well. Oh well

>>41681
i mostly agree, however the concept of "soul" in games in real, it just has nothing do with when the game was released, back in the early days of gaming there was so much trash the market crashed, but even that was not enough to stop trash games from being made, more than half of NES(and especially Famicom) library is either unremarkable or straight up shit.

>>41191
pathetic opinion, considering it wasnt a big industry until suckers like you started supplying souless corps like EA

I think the reason why many modern games feel bland and unimpressive is because they lack originality, most of the games that are being released are just remakes of older games, or are part of a series that has abandoned its original plot long ago.

The people who work on these games for the most part probably couldn't give a shit, they're just there to complete a product and to get paid so they can go back to living their ordinary and uneventful lives.

Art is dead, just turn on the radio or the television for example it's all the same shit. The people who release new media are uninspired STD ridden simpletons.

>>42744
creation by consensus and flowchart

"successful games of the last 1.5 years have included these things, how can we jam these things into our game?"

Nostalgia is the biggest fucking plague on video games, second only to people who eat up DLC and microtransactions.

The groidbreeders are obsessed with the open world meme and shiny graphics that captivate their stinkly little groidlet brains so studios instead of being tight streamlined and dynamic making neat games like billy hatcher, have become bloated and commanded by giant international conglomerates. RIP sonic

There were shitty, soulless games then and there are shitty, soulless games now. The only difference is that back then, the great games became the "mainstream" of that period's gaming culture, so we remember them as representative of that period. Whereas our modern gaming culture worships shit (due to huge influx of normalfags who don't understand games), and so our mainstream is polluted by shit. We still have great games now like there were back then. It's only the mainstream that's been lost.

>>41680
That's clever and all but no. Now days you can buy the new outfit rather than earn it among other faggy things.

>>41655
>The World Health Organization (WHO) said victims of the disorder devote so much of their time to virtual worlds that it “takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities,” playing for increasingly long periods of time despite the obvious negative consequences on their real life.

By that logic, working a full time job is a mental disorder because it also takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities, and also causes negative consequences over time (sleep deprivation, stress, poor eating habits, etc)

>>42763
That's called overworking, and it too is frowned upon.

>>41187
At some point in your life you have played a game of every genre and every crossover genre and things will start to look the same. Sure, there are differences, but once you hit that mark the magic of the games seem to disappear and you get enjoyment from the people you play games with.

>>42744
>The people who work on these games for the most part probably couldn't give a shit, they're just there to complete a product and to get paid so they can go back to living their ordinary and uneventful lives.

Pretty much this, but I think this is due to the fact that video games are much harder to make these days. Creativity is stifled with large teams.

There are some good games out there still, maybe the general trend is that games aren't what they used to be but that doesn't mean you can't find some gems.

>>41187
There is alot of crappy games now, just like there was back then.

People just need to learn to dig better to find the gems.

>>41187
>losing soul
My experience with Bethesda suggests: yes.

it's all relative. the further back you go the more you find 'soul' in games. when do you stop? 'soul' is just a term for some experience you feel resulting from a small amount of developers working on the game, there is a coherence and consistency, often things are simple as a result. you can feel the original vision for the game. with more people added onto the game, things are less coherent, you have people working on various sections. the 'great vision' for the game becomes weaker and blurry. you have random mechanics and gameplay elements added that are pointless detractions from the original vision. things become complicated and messy

games can still have soul, and my belief is that the number of developers is the primary influence. look at 'Spiderweb Software' if you want to see 'modern' games that still have soul. for 25 years it's just been this guy and his wife. they do lose some points for using freelancers to create all the art which can seem unorganized but since their games have never really bothered too much with the graphics it's weirdly consistent. because they've never hired anyone else all the games have a strong 'soul' i would argue

the cost of having more soul, resulting from fewer developers, is that you have less gameplay mechanics. the extreme example of this can be seen in many indie titles, they are often games with only a single gameplay mechanic. games with soul are simpler and can be rough, but they have more character

TLDR- the fewer the developers, the more soul

Video games have always been designed to waste your time and money by over-activating your brain's reward system. They never had a soul, you were just a kid and so you were too dumb to realize it at the time when you played those old games. Plenty of kids enjoy new games today and I'm certain they will be saying the same stuff about games they played as a kid. Truth is is that it's not the game you want to go back to but the childish innocence you once had, but you can never get that back.

SCI was gritty, dark, and had character.
SCII was a polished, more PC, sanitized version that lacked a lot of what made SCI a classic

>>46655
for me what ruined sc2 was how much game-ification they did for every single fucking thing. games don't need achievements and all these menus and store things and exp and shit. okay i cant really even remember what sc2 was like at this point but i remember the ladder things and not even playing it after buying

but games without all this feel so much better. instead of buying some hacked together passive-cash generating botched software called a "game", you can get actual games and all you can do is play that game

there is a similar saying for software bloat that goes:
>Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
which i think can be understood similarly for many modern games

>>46652
>probably not related
Definitely related. As someone on 4chad's /tg/ Elder Scrolls thread put it, "Morrowind was TES's experimental college phase. TES now has a mortgage and 2 kids." It's become normal, and you can't un-normie the normal. Exact same shit's happened to Bioware.

>>41442
Please no ! I love FF7 dearly , and i am still hoping for the best.
(eventhough i am affraid you might be correct)

The problem with modern gaming is it's being made by people who like games. That's going to sound weird but when you're a fan of something you can never truly input something new or interesting to it, your core idea will at it's base be something already done. Like adding some fruit to the top of an established cake.

I'll use the Souls series for this as it's a good example of the decline.

Demon's souls is based off of a lot of personal experiences turned into game mechanics. Kings field was based on other ideas and as such Demon's souls has a few of those two (don't try to reinvent the joypad, not all old things are bad). But it also has ideas that technology couldn't do previously that come now be implemented, like the messages being left, the random no voice chat co op and invasions. The new technology and the teams real world experiences could come together to make new ideas. It's easy to understand why Demon's souls has many rough edges but also became an iconic game series where you took impossible ideas previously and made them possible and a core focus of the game. What new experiences could fans of the genre add to the new technology? It's like starcraft but with better menus, it's like Castlevania but with more colours. Fans aren't good innovators.

Now Demon's souls worked Dark souls has the larger budget to push those refinements and a better experience base to make those refinements. The rough edges get polished, the ideas they didn't have time to finish get implemented and you get a good solid sequel. Dark souls is the game Demon souls would be with a few extra years of work. Good game, good series.

Dark Souls 2 tries to fix issues with Dark souls but has few left to really push. They want to do something new but they're stuck in the old mold because that's how franchises work. Some of the stuff they add works, some of it doesn't. But now they have fan demands to cave into. It has to have PvP arenas and a whole bunch of other junk. You can still see some real gems in the game and some good ideas brought forward from previous games that couldn't do them as well (Majula is the refinement of the 2 hubs). The fan backlash to some of the new ideas and how this game STILL has unrefined edges demands changes to the formula. The want a faster action game with cooler bosses because that's what people remember, but no one appreciates the adventure aspect of the previous 3 games so they get dropped. But the entire series game philosphy has previously been an adventure not a boss rush. The bosses are the cap on the end of the exploration aspect of the game.

We then end up with Dark Souls 3, which suffers from countless issues where a game series has outgrown it's niche and is trying to be something it's unfit for. And at the same time it has to be the meme not the game it is. People aren't playing the gloomy adventure series any more, they're playing the streamer screaming at how hard it is game. But people are also burned out on grinding bosses so the bosses aren't even very hard any more. There's a bonfire every few feet because game devs now have to compete with smart phones for people's attention and 10 minutes of gameplay without a place to check facebook is unacceptable. Like how Pokemon now has EXP share for all pokemon in the party instead of just 1 because it means people don't need to grind ever. And designers know roughly how powerful every pokemon on a team will be so can design "safe" challenges for what will be the average run.

>>47099
We then have random indie hits like Amnesia being picked up several years later by the big devs. Design cycles mean it will take 3-5 years for a game to be finished. When Amnesia hit big as an indie title RE7 and Alien Isolation went into pre-production. By the time they were finished the genre had stagnated hard and feature creep would destroy the project. By the nature of the industry the big companies can't keep up with the indie flexibility, so even when new innovative titles can appear they're very hard to make. Either you're too small to develop the idea to it's fullest or you're too big and you have to predict a new genre's changing landscape. RE7 got lucky in this because VR exists. Silent Hills got fucked because Konami wanted to make a walking sim, made a prototype then found out the dev team had no idea what to do with the game after the prototype. It wasn't a project they cared for, just the way the genre went.

Then you have experimental Triple A games like Death Stranding. Kojima's a known quantity so I won't bother getting into that here. He's making a glorified walking sim with PS3 third person combat and went visual appeal. People scream how it's the next big innovative thing yet everyone can see the core gameplay is generic Sony game from the last ten years with a weird visual style to it. It's not innovative, it's not new, it's shuffling some chairs around in the kiddy pool of safe ideas. But a lot of game devs are failed movie directors and now they have the budget to hire big name hollywood stars and to make their own movies. That's a big reason why game budgets are so huge now, they're trying to be movies.

Games are no longer made, they're bought as a service to sell other services. When Ubisoft make a new far cry game they don't make every tree they need, they go to the unity store and buy a tree pack. Pay 1 artist to modify a few of them over an hour and now 20 hours of tree modeling has been cut down to 1 hour of an artists time. Alternatively they just go and scan it. Take 100 photos of a tree, put it in the software and it makes it into a 3D model for you. This is how RE7's graphics were done. It's how motion captures now done. Way less things you can do with a game when you have to base it all on reality and use real animations. Check out DMC 5's live action cut scenes if you want a laugh. That's how modern game design works. (embedded a video with it).

The games as a service thing is how companies make money now. EA can't profit from selling games, they will lose money on every release. They now have to sell "merchandise" the same way hollywood movies do. DLC, loot boxes, all that jazz are how they make money on each game sold. Smash bros is now just a DLC platform. Fighting games basically the same thing. With these models you don't need to convince 10 people to buy your game. You can convince 1 whale to buy your game and all the DLC and make up that same figure plus any extra sales you get. Most mobile games are supported by whales and everyone else plays more or less for free. Triple A games are moving towards that model.

Are modern games soulless? Yes.
Were old games soulless? Many of them yes

>>41191
t.o blizzard fan

>>47099
>The problem with modern gaming is it's being made by people who like games.
Nobody who likes games would think of putting microtransactions and DLC and shit in.

https://youtu.be/JalWT8oNxhk


OP picture is almost prophetic

>>47099
shut the hell up. modern games are not made by people who enjoy games. it's made by corporations looking for the best way to make money in their given corner of the market. case and point, no franchise can survive a 3+ continuation without being turned into a corpse filled of shit that would never make sense in a game design but perfectly reasonable by the shallow turds in marketing research. if these people liked games they have to be the most perverted maso in existence to release content that only shows neglect for the medium. pretty much every large scale game in existence that was even half good was developed by coping artists accepting a lower station in life. games suck so much major ass today because there's basically no artists involved in the process, and the ones that are are hired for politics.

Lmao, old geezers whining about how everything sucks nowadays
Naive idealists just dont get that there can be no "soul" what a stupid term in anything, everything is just made to manipulate you, amirigt guys?
Games are just so more complex nowadays, you can bond with your horse, you can dodge and roll in witcher and many much more mindblowing stuff, you just dont get it geezers, and so what if immersive sims are dead? Just get with the times geezers
We have many great games, like witcher, deus ex, mass effect, new vegas, wonderful games, classics, everyone loves them, only you geezers whine that something was lost in the process, some mythical "soul", there is no such silly thing, we all rational human beans, were all here to make money, nothing to be ashamed of
this past decade was such a wonderful time for games, just take off your nostalgia goggles, the future looks bright, i cant wait for that cyberpunk-totally-not-deus-ex-ripoff game, already preordered it, no shame in supporting based devs
Oh this is gonna be such a good decade for games..

>>48182
I can't tell what point you're trying to make one way or the other

Indie studios still got it…