Quote Originally Posted by monkeychemist View Post
Thanks to everyone for your input, I really appreciate it. Particularly YoshiM, thank you for going into such detail... and Gameguy I think we're in complete agreement with today's games. It's funny because I was playing Fallout 4 (which is more of a PS4 game but in the vein of modern games) I spent hours customizing and looking for parts. My daughters watched me and said "why do you like this game, you don't do anything in it." It took me a couple more days until that made sense to me. When I realized that, I stopped playing and I had been looking forward to this one for YEARS.
I'm glad I'm not alone with my thinking, I was starting to think my negative attitude towards modern games was mostly just me.


Quote Originally Posted by kupomogli View Post
Yeah, right here. You watch 10-20 minutes of a video and you literally see nothing, if you want to do research to see if you're interested in a game now days you've got to sit there for hours so it's either actually doing WORK to see if you'll like a game or you just go out and buy it. It's ridiculous. The largest fanbase in gaming are people who are happy to just play anything regardless of quality and most publishers want the biggest potential userbase they can get so we just end up getting these games that developers know people will play for no other reason than they exist as games rather than games that are actually good.

I don't really get where you're coming from about the current Xbox is better than the current PS5 because it's really not. Playstation still has better first party titles than the current Xbox and the mixture of AAA from both western and Japanese third party developers still keeps Playstation ahead of even the Switch which has mostly indie games and Japanese third party games at half the framerate with the one caveat that Nintendo games are atleast better than Sony first party studios and Nintendo seems to go after a lot more of the exclusives that people actually want from third parties, something I can't say for Sony or Microsoft except for Final Fantasy 7.

*edit*

Xenoverse 2 doesn't even have an open world but the game has fetch quests in this hub world out the ass. It's hard to even want to continue because I do like the storyline they've added but it takes forever to get anywhere because they want you running all around this damn hub world. I've been saying this for a long time but I think developers have started purposefully developing games that waste your time.

Persona 5 is a good example of one that receives a massive amount of praise. Now if you've played Persona 4, the dialogue between characters each day is often different, but Persona 5 day in and day out has so much text that is constantly the same thing every single day based on what's happening at the time, the fact that every character needs to get a response in after each character says something this shit drags on and on and on. I don't even like Persona 5 because of how much bloat it has in text, it's like a game that is potentially amazing but the amount of time it wastes is unbelievable(same with each new The Legend of Heroes game.) People apparently love the idea of spending more time than the idea of that time being just filler content and developers that have no respect for the time you're spending.
First I'd like to thank you for addressing those points separately, I should have separated them when I wrote that but just didn't which was a mistake.

These days 20 minutes for a youtube gameplay video will barely get past the tutorial sections. It's actually another reason I dislike modern games, it takes ages just to learn the basic controls for a game compared to the NES or SNES era. Now that I think it over it's also a reason why I dislike Ocarina of Time as I hated that opening village section which I found incredibly boring, I would usually shut off the game before leaving this section and just play something else. With people buying games regardless of quality, I really believe a big part of this is people buying games to review on youtube or make let's play videos, or general twitch streaming. It's not for enjoyment, it's for content creation. The more bugs and crap to complain about, the more entertaining it is for the intended audience.

As for which current console is better, I don't have personal experience with using any of them so I'm probably not fully informed correctly, I've just seen a lot of people preferring the current Xbox exclusives over the PS5 exclusives. Like with the latest Spider-Man game for PS5 which has tons of severe bugs. Also the Xbox online services are apparently cheaper priced than the PS5 online services, which apparently had a recent price increase as well. I never use online services so I wouldn't know, it just seems like there's a lot of complaints towards Sony these days except from the fanboys. Plus Sony tried and failed to prevent the Microsoft merger with Activision Blizzard, it just seems like Sony is in a worse position compared to Microsoft.

As for the Switch, it still has a library that looks more appealing to me compared to the other consoles. Maybe eventually I'll get one, but I'm reluctant as it doesn't seem super reliable for the long term compared to earlier consoles. You're right about there being more indie games on it, many of those are what appeals to me, and modern releases of classic franchises such as Wild Guns, Pocky and Rocky, and several others.

You are right about games being designed to waste the player's time, it's to market the game as having more hours of gameplay so it can be sold for a higher price. You've already pointed out something I was going to mention as well, game maps are made bigger than ever, but there's not really any additional content so it just takes longer to travel between the actual gameplay. To be fair, plenty of older games in the past were also made like this, such as all the adventure games that included arcade sequences. It's just way more common with modern games, like games that need to be played multiple times to experience multiple paths or endings, or skill trees in games that aren't RPGs like FPS or action games. Multiple paths and endings can be well designed depending on the game, but I'm thinking more like Telltale's King's Quest game which has three paths to play through(really just three ways to solve each puzzle which affects the ending), this just feels like artificially lengthening the game. Plus forced online gameplay or other questionable design decisions, mostly added so watching a youtube playthrough won't be "good enough" compared to most one-player narrative based games.



With how enjoyable modern games seem to be, I think back to the arcade days when you had to wait in line, or with early consoles when visiting a friend's house.

Arcade/early consoles: "This game looks fun, I want to play it!"

360/PS3 era: "This game and story looks interesting, but the controls look complicated and annoying. I want to watch a playthrough on Youtube."

Current era: "This game just looks tedious. I'd rather watch a movie or random youtube videos."

Obviously there are some exceptions but I mostly don't care about modern games at all, the characters and stories just don't interest me with most current games. I suppose I could think of specific reasons why that is, but it would take me awhile. It's mostly either terrible gameplay, or terrible writing when a game focuses heavily on the narrative or character development.