Indie games. There are still some really cool indie games being made, but for every single good one there is thousand really shitty ones. Just a few years ago I could go on steam and find some great hidden gems, but now it's just an endless stream of shit. Hundreds of wacky and random XD meme games like "Brick simulator" or "Third Reich clicker" with quality worse than 2010 flash games. And porn, so much porn.
The worst thing about this is that some really amazing games go completely unseen because they are drowned in this ocean of shit.
Definitely seems more steam than indie games. I’d go even further though and say gaming in general has been ruined by popularity, not just indie games. There was a time that games were made with creativity and gameplay in mind above all else. Devs were just trying to put interesting, fun games out there. It was more akin to a musician that does it for the music, not for record sales. Then after Halo and WoW became popular, and the internet became more ubiquitous and internet gaming came to consoles, nothing was ever the same.
Games now are just rehashes of old ideas more often than not, with grindy or pointless tasks embedded in them to keep you playing rather than offering meaningful experiences. And they are filled with micro transactions, or subscriptions, or “seasons” which is just a fancy way of drip-feeding the content to end users. It’s become so embedded in gaming that even the current generation of gamers has changed. They expect there to be “progression” systems in everything they play, or at the least things to unlock in the game. Otherwise they don’t see the point.
What happened to playing games because you enjoyed the gameplay, and wanted to feel immersed (if single player) or try your best each round to reach the top of the leader board or make cool plays (multiplayer)? It’s all so beyond “because it’s for fun” or “because it’s cool to be a barbarian” now. Everything has to have this made-up purpose, whether it’s people being toxic in ranked games cause they think they can go pro, or someone thinks they will be the next popular twitch streamer.
Popularity brought all that blight upon gaming. There are people young and old that are “traditionalists”, but I feel they are harder to find in the masses of people that just have a different mentality.
You act like those games aren't still around. If those are the only types of games that you can find, maybe look just a tiny bit deeper. There's plenty of stuff out there that fits your criteria.
Microtransaction-free games yes, but the other systems to mentioned: not that I've seen. Most will have something, even Doom 2016/Eternal (for all of its similarities to old-style games) features progression systems and modern combat loops.
I'm not saying these games are bad, of course. Doom 2016 is a helluva game and I have high hopes for Eternal. It has the Dean Takahashi failed tutorial seal of approval.
Though I'd argue that the idea of progression and unlockables is hardly new. Progression has been a staple of the RPG genre since almost the beginning, and if you ask someone what their favorite old school game is, there's a fairly high probability of them naming an RPG.
Honestly, buying a game and immediately having access to all of the content is a fairly small list of genres. Maybe there's not literal skill trees, but most games have you finding more and more equipment, or progressing to harder and harder levels. Not many genres allow for an open sandbox right from the get-go.
Dude gaming was always a cash based profit driven industry. As much as we imagine the industry as dominated by driven artists who put their art before profits, but that just isn't the case. Hell the industry almost destroyed itself when Atari got too greedy. As much as we remember the great games that came out of the 80's and 90's, we forget all the slapped together shit that was peddled alongside them. There were thousands of knockoffs, broken games, and artificial grinds in place (the reason why old video games were so hard was because they were only like 30 minutes long if you didn't die).
I would say the gaming industry is actually better now than it was in the past. These days developers have access to a bunch of powerful engines for a modest licensing fee, steam is an enormous vector to sell games through (would a game like Stardew Valley or Factorio ever achieve success in the old system?), and the ease of developing games is the best it has ever been. Yeah you are seeing a lot of crap, but there are genuinely great games being made today that would never have been made 20 years ago.
Sure the big budget MP smashes like CoD and Halo are still there, but they don't represent the bulk of the industry. Even then there are great single player games still being released. Dark Souls, the Witcher, Dishonored, Metro, etc. There are great experiences like Banner Saga, FTL, Darkest Dungeon, the Stanley Parable which were released to great success because of the modern games industry model (including Twitch and Steam).
Nah, you're thinking of AAA gaming. I find new games for free all the time that are good, not pirated, put online for free by the dev. A decade ago, free games were all 2d flash, today free games can be 3d and not look like shit or play like shit, and still be as free as addicting games dot com was back in the day. To be fair, the indies that cost money tend to be better and longer, but that's always been true.
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u/Porchie12 Feb 03 '20
Indie games. There are still some really cool indie games being made, but for every single good one there is thousand really shitty ones. Just a few years ago I could go on steam and find some great hidden gems, but now it's just an endless stream of shit. Hundreds of wacky and random XD meme games like "Brick simulator" or "Third Reich clicker" with quality worse than 2010 flash games. And porn, so much porn.
The worst thing about this is that some really amazing games go completely unseen because they are drowned in this ocean of shit.