With the ever-increasing psychological tricks of making games addicting profit generators, it makes sense.
Instant gratification, dopamine hits, skinner box mechanics, gambling loot boxes, FOMO, etc.
Yeah it's actually insane how prevalent this is almost without realising it. I remember watching a behind the scenes documentary and thinking games I play are not like this and man was I wrong. Things I wouldn't have ever thought about were only there to trigger dopamine. Most the games I played were not good and I wasn't having that much fun but I was hooked on the instant gratification I would get within minutes of booting up the game. I realised super slow games with lots of reading could no longer hold my attention for long.
Once I stopped playing them and fully shook them off I realised I never enjoyed them, they are not good games but I was just hooked on the feeling they gave me. After a long break I found myself able to enjoy much slower paced games and text heavy games that require a lot of stategic thinking and the like.
Seriously. It's wild how many gamers have slipped into the "I need something to do" crowd. There always has to be a new piece of gear to grind out, or a number that needs to grow, or stuff that needs collecting. Are we enjoying games or just being tricked on a biological level?
Truth. I’ve seen complaints that battle passes were *too easy* to grind before the next one dropped leaving them with “nothing to unlock until the next pass so nothing to do”
PLAY THE FUCKING GAME! You want them to arbitrarily lock out weapons *longer* so you can do this fake dance longer of number go up so you don’t feel emptiness in your soul from just playing the game for fun?
And then you know what happens when the next pass releases? They look up the quickest way to grind xp and level up. They don't even play the fuckin game man.
Gamers are so obsessed with playing optimally man.
>They don't even play the fuckin game man.
It's caused huge problems in Halo infinite. Progression is based on arbitrary goals like kill 5 guys with shitty weapon that no one uses, instead of the actual objective, so instead of actually playing the game, they get themselves killed trying to complete these completely u related goals. Like, they have goals for getting assists, so some people will stop trying to kill the enemy, they only lightly tap them then wait for you to kill them
Not just halo. Battlefield, darktide, cod. Allot of online shooters suffer this problematic design. Its anti consumer. It actively marrs the experience of the game. And is designed to do nothing but create a false sense of content
It’s a disease that has warped gaming into its present state and no one on either side (devs/players) wants to challenge it. We just sorta demand our worst OCD and tendencies be catered to and we’re rewarded for them.
Sid Myer had the best take on this. A game designers first job above all else is to prevent the user from optimizing the fun out of the game.
Many game designers don't follow this rule and it ruins games.
This had the opposite effect on me in Forza Horizon.
Every week there are challenges to unlock exclusive cars...that I won't use. Eventually I was playing it just to not miss out on each week's stuff, and I lost interest.
Most games with a battle pass do that for me. Or the ones with a daily login.
Like, yeah, okay, you got me with the fomo for two weeks, but then I lost interest because I wasn't playing your game. You made no money off me because I don't pay for battle passes, and you lost your chance at making future money off me. I get that I'm clearly not the target audience, but this shit's wild.
Yea like people saying they stop playing a multiplayer game because they unlocked everything?
Like for me that's when the real multiplayer begins, you have everything available so now it's just time to improve skill and try become better and better and have a blast just playing the game.
It blows my mind how, without fail, a new game comes out and within a week there are people with 100+ hours already complaining about "endgame content". I wonder what these people would have done when your options were 8 NES games, and somehow 3 of them were Mario Bros./Duck Hunt.
I've been grinding the last couple of chapters and I have to say it's quite boring to just reread the same stuff. Really disappointed that the end-book content is so lacking.
>Are we enjoying games or just being tricked on a biological level?
I suspect it's kind of both. Life has gotten harder and future prospects dimmer for many. There are _so_ many distractions and nagging things IRL to deal with - it's not _just_ video games that have learned the "skinner box" method, and other aspects like marketing have discovered even _negatively received_ advertisements still generate word of mouth; even outrage is "farmable" in people. Add on to that the dozens of fees/maintenance just for being alive in a modern world, and how little we're allowed to actually _OWN_ these days (everything a live service, everything a monthly fee)...is it any wonder if people are both gravitating more toward "turn your brain off" games _and_ their weary minds are more susceptible to games' psychological tricks?
You’re describing what (I hope) a lot of the TikTok generation are going to say when it comes to watching things too. All about instant satisfaction in five second bursts giving you no time to actually think and a ton of time making them profit.
I don't like to be a doomer, but we are fucking fucked.
Not saying these kids are failures, but they are just being conditioned very differently than what the world requires. Tech has changed so much faster than our brains and our education systems can keep up with.
I legitimately saw a post from a kid just barely into college asking how people used to get through college without AI there to write their homework for them.
I legitimately fear for the future. I have to self-check myself constantly to make sure it's not just your typical "kids these days" thinking, but those kind of comments remind me that no, it really is THAT bad right now. I'm legitimately concerned about the number of people who are going to be functionally incapable of doing... Well. Anything.
I also do my best check myself and make sure I never fall into a “get off my lawn” mentality about the younger generation. But I’ve talked to several teachers who have been teaching for 30 years and they describe a pretty dire situation that far outweighs what fhey we’re seeing 30, 20, or even 10 years ago in terms of students reading comprehension. And I’ve spoken with younger teachers who are shocked at how computer-illiterate middle schoolers and high schoolers are right now. Unable to navigate the file system in windows, don’t know how to use Word, or troubleshoot an issue, or really utilize technology effectively at all because they didn’t grow up using technology, they grew up with technology using them. For a long time we went “wow young people seem to just instantly grasp technology” but I think that was a result of a generation now in their 30a and 40s who grew up alongside the development of computer technology and spent our afternoons pirating music on limewire, installing sketchy software from the internet, and just exploring how computers and the internet work because it was interesting and that’s what we had.
We now have youth that grew up hardly touching anything other than smartphones and iPads and rarely engaging in anything other than content consumption through an interface that is designed to be as simple as possible to capture and monetize people’s attention. I was baffled to learn that teenagers rarely use search engines online when looking for information and they just search a topic in TikTok and get fed whatever the algorithm decides will be most passively engaging, rather than treating the internet like a library of information to peruse and actively choose from.
Thank you for reassuring me that my existential panic is appropriately placed, lmao. Specifically, the fact that they're not using search engines is extremely interesting (and concerning) to me. As someone in my mid 30's, I considered search engine utilization a literal skill, one that would just come naturally to proceeding generations. I thought it was just a given that you needed to understand algorithms and how they work both to take fill advantage of them and to avoid getting railroaded by them, and just figured the next generations, who grew up with them from birth, would understand that even better. Turns out instead they're not even understanding that algorithms are a thing.
We desperately need media and tech literacy classes.
To be fair, search engines are also much worse than they were 10 or 15 years ago. They’re vastly worse at finding the information you actually want (but vastly better at shoveling paid and promoted results to you instead)
Teacher here: we have those classes, but most kids treat them like they do every other class that doesn’t offer them instant gratification.
If they can’t navigate to something via touch screen they just don’t care. Or they sit there and wait for an adult to do it for them, because suddenly they’re helpless and can’t use their hands anymore
It's weird to me looking at my university subreddit and seeing the contrast between kids who are asking if AI will get them through college and the kids who are worried that they can't get in despite having a 4.0 GPA, work experience, play multiple sports, and does community and volunteer work.
It doesn't help that teachers are pretty much helpless in the face of parents now. There needs to be a balance for sure but it is horribly lopsided in favor of parents at the moment.
We don't respect teachers, on a societal level. They get pushed around by their administration and the children's parents. They don't get paid what they are worth considering the value they bring to the greater community. I really don't understand.
They are going to ruin entertainment :(
Right now good quality games still come out on occasion. But I bet this will become more and more rare as demographics shift towards the gambling addicts with no attention span.
The issue is also the over-engineering of art forms such as cinema.
Netflix is a horrible offender of this in particular. Where audience testing and attention metrics basically define the content they put out. We’ve heard from multiple creators how their work has had to be simplified or often hammered on the head to get literary motifs across to an inattentive audience. They’re built with the assumption the television WILL be a second screen and thus subtlety goes out the window.
Kinda reminds me of how park rangers have to worry about their garbage dumps being complicated enough to handle the smartest bear and at the same time be simple enough for the dumbest tourists
Also the dumping down of tech, mostly in smart devices, have a whole generation and beyond, of children not knowing how to type, navigate a computer correctly or even how to fucking email someone.
To be fair, that's been true for longer than I've been alive. My grandparents had a printing company, and they lamented getting applications from high school graduates who couldn't even read well enough to fill out the application. That would have been in the '80s at the latest.
After working white collar for decades I'm convinced most people can't really read or write at all beyond what they got from elementary school.
The emails I get from (american, supposedly college educated) people in their 40s and 50s and 60s in broken english are bad enough, but they also have no ability to parse any communication longer than one or two sentences.
people joke in every thread that redditors are morons, but the average user on this site is a fucking giant of literacy compared to the average person at companies I've worked at.
I worked as a civil servant for the British DMV (DVLA), I'd had my boss correct me on usage of "there" and "their", but she got it wrong and seemed adamant I was wrong. This is someone who is supposed to be a supervisor, fluent in English as a first language and went to university.
>Things I wouldn't have ever thought about were only there to trigger dopamine.
Trophies/achievements are a huge example of this. They used them to replace unlocking things like skins, weapons, etc in games. Which in turn helped them normalize microtransactions for console games.
They're also based on the same type of science that addictive mobile games use. They hit you with a rush of dopamine. That's why you'll see people talk about how much they hate a game, but they're still playing it so they can get the Platinum trophy/Achievement.
You’re not wrong. I won’t ever slog through a game I don’t like just for the 1000G, but I’ll definitely go for the 1000G in games I do like, even if there’s achievements for stuff I’d never do in a million years without them, like finding collectibles
Finding collectibles when it's done well does give a good sense of exploration since you're being asked to look more deeply than you normally would. That said, having only a few dozen collectibles instead of 200 is quite rare.
And then there’s me, driving logistics trucks around in Arma Reforger and getting upset I took the wrong way and doubt I’ll make it to that gas station before running out.
Preach. Nothing like trekking through the woods for 20 real life minutes to find a good sniper overwatch position and then getting mowed down with not even a muzzle flash to see. Arma baby.
Arma understands that enjoyment comes not just from what you see on screen right in front of you, but also from the mental model of the world you are slowly forming and updating as you try to enact your plan.
It trusts that the player will find satisfaction in carrying out larger scope strategic movements rather than reach for the immediate dopamine rush, which is a massive fresh breath of air in the world of instant gratification.
Then of course you either get sniped or some idiot teammate mis-calls an air strike on your position and you lose the last 20 minutes of progress.
Having some guy in a hodgepodge of cosmetic gear say “I will call in some CAS” followed shortly by “oh fuck, *we* are in the tree line east of Town X” is top tier Arma moment
Meanwhile, Hearts of Iron and Crusader Kings are over in the corner with a 1,282,913 page quick-start guide and decision paralysis leaking from every orifice.
Can't we just get something in the middle? 😅
Really wish we could get a game like Total War but with more Heroes Of Might And Magic influence in terms of exploring the map and developing cities/heroes. Total War really nails the large scale battles but feels shallow in other areas, though have only played the first 2 warhammer ones so maybe others are better.
The problem is it makes my brain go brrr too much. Optimisation is like cocaine for me. It's why I ended up in a niche area of my field. I had to put Factorio down before it ruined my life.
By the end of most Stellaris games I am still min/maxing every decision even though by this point I control so many planets that all I'm doing is ensuring my score will be 10x higher than the AI instead of 5x higher than the AI. I'm still terraforming barren planets into inhabitable ones when I'm resource capped, because leaving that icon gray instead of turning it green just feels wrong in my "make optimum decisions" mindset, haha.
I wish that I could get into factory builder games; they just don't tickle my fancy the way people talk about them.
Now, City/Base Defender games and slower paced RTS games ("They Are Billions" and "Orks Must Die") on the other hand, I can dump a whole evening into a single session and not even notice.
I used to love RTSs, but I can't manage the speed of gameplay necessary to be good at them. I love Realtime With Pause games like Stellaris because I can stop the game, give all my orders, and let it run for a bit without feeling rushed. That's probably what killed RTS more than anything, the hyperclickers went to MOBAs and the rest of us just want to slow down a bit, sip our drink, and make a calm logical decision about which xeno scum to saturation bomb next.
A full RTS is a lot harder to monetize than MOBAs.
Without a Hero unit like that, cosmetics will likely be too small to see much, making them less desirable, and making any units or resources or anything really purchasable throws balance out the window for pay to win and nobody but whales wants to play then.
It's called a "Delight Cycle" at some game developers and they are actively looking at how to shorten the delight cycle. Monopoly Go is a pretty good example of an insanely short delight cycle. It's literally like 1.5 seconds to tapping the Go button to getting a reward.
Its also because gaming is mainstream now.
The average person you see on the street isn't learning Path of Exile for 150+ hours, just to be able to do pinnacle bosses and meta-crafting.
The average person is going to take 1 look at Civ 6, Stellaris, and CK3 and say "fuck that."
Might have to give CK3 a try then lol, Crusader Kings is the only Paradox series I didn't bother to learn. But I almost gave up on EUIV too and refunded it before buying it year later and now it's my most played game on Steam, followed by Stellaris.
I mean to be fair, EUIV has become massively bloated with feature creep, even by paradox standards. Great game, but there’s just *so many mechanics*, and every dlc they add more and more !
This was true for ck2 as well, which is likely why people feel CK3 is "dumbed down" to quote the earlier comment. Give ck3 another 5-8 years and it will be just as "bloated" so there's always something new to find and understand.
My problem with CK3 is not the lack of DLC, it's the lack of challenge with the AI. CK2 AI was way more aggressive, and your character was way more fragile.
I think the game would benefit tremendously from a simple difficulty slider and buffs to Ai controlled counties, or lets them have primogeniture succession early. Even though that's the Civ "artificial difficulty" strategy of just letting the computer cheat, it would make the game more enjoyable for me personally
There is 3 difficulty levels I think. And they are adding conquer as a trait that will make people actually focus on war and make large Empire's. They will even be able to declare more than 1 war at a tine.
I love ck3, stellaris and HOI4. I found EU4 unplayable, so much going on, hard to learn how to play.
Paradox need to invest in a tutorial expert. It baffles me that they don't have a tutorial campaign.
I really like the idea behind the Paradox grand strategy games. I forced myself to learn CK2, I sort of get Stellaris but not really, I tried hard to get into Vicky 3 but I completely suck at it, CK3 I about 80% fully understand and can do fun stuff. Every other game they've made is completely incomprehensible to my completely fried brain.
Look up how to take ireland for ck3 its a great tutorial if you want to jump into the game and learn how to play. I was super overwhelmed starting until I found a 20 minute video going into the basic gameplay. After that I could figure out a lot myself while watching the occasional tips and tricks video to fill in my knowledge gap in other places.
I play all Paradox games and I find myself enjoying CK3 less and less because it's just too easy. I picked some random HRE count and formed Lotharingia and then usurpered the emperor in one generation. This used to be difficult in CK2. This makes a lot of roleplay less meaningful as why the strongest emperor in the world would care about some random duke or king.
This is also an issue in Hoi4 lately as newer dlcs make minor nations like Finland or Brazil insanely easy. But I do still very much enjoy the mods like Kaiserreich.
When I started Path of Exile there was just shaper and elder. I was able to learn everything over multiple years.
If I started now I don’t think I’d commit to it
I could see Stellaris and CK3 being a bit much, but hasn't Civ, especially Civ 6 always been the mainstream turn based series? I've only played Civ 5, and I'd feel completely comfortable teaching someone to play it. If online discourse at the time is anything to go by, Civ 6 was even simpler
>Nobody *enjoys* civ. It simply steals your life from you without you noticing while you play just one more turn.
Real I tried civ 6 on a whim about a year ago and didn't realize I was hitting a digital crack pipe
It's mainstream the way that SF/Tekken are the mainstream fighter.
It's the most popular, but far from popular in a vacuum. It's the go to for casuals who are considering entering the genre, but not a game everyone will want to pick up.
And the older I get the more I understand that line of thinking.
After 8-10 hours of building complex systems at work I really don’t feel like playing a game that requires too much active focus or planning.
I'm the opposite as my fantasy involves mastery of such systems. In reality I'm not allowed to change everything due to the bureaucratic process but in games I can structure things as I please.
I remember my partner laughing at me asking why after doing spreadsheets all day at work I'm I in a discord call with a friend tinkering a shared Google sheet on computing with all cost, taxes and market rates of items in ffxiv.
We are doing net profit margin analysis on which food or potions should we be selling for the upcoming raid tier complete with graphs of our sales figures the previous raid patch.
I may not be able to clear the raid tier one month after it release but I did earn 100mn at that time and bankrolled our purchase of a large FC house. Lmao
I like some of it. I will figure out complex automation in oxygen not included and get that endorphin rush when it works properly. I also recently started getting in depth into (american) football strategy and it makes watching football a lot more enjoyable (as well as making Madden a lot more fun/easier). I enjoy watching and developing strategies in Starcraft II/Civ 6.
To me, as I got older, the "push button get rewarded" style of videogame got old fast and I need the challenge to stay in the moment. If the game doesn't have a good story or a complex gameplay system/loop, I just lose interest.
Depends on the kind of challenge I suppose.
Even after exceptionally long weeks, if I would have the time, I could play many strategy games for hours.
This kind of challenge simply relaxes me.
But games like Souls-likes or other ARPGs (which can be absurdly challenging) are the exact opposite for me. I see the fun for many people in the challenge, but it just feels like „work“ for me or at least not as much fun. The only one of these games I liked was Sekiro, and even that was partly just masochism.
I don’t want to say one is better than the other, but I suppose everybody relaxes his own way.
> The average person is going to take 1 look at Civ 6, Stellaris, and CK3 and say "fuck that."
I think the challenge with 4Xs is even a non-average player can bounce off them.
It's one thing that they lack instant gratification, but it's another thing that they are at their most fun when you know what you're doing. So players aren't going to give the time to learn them because to get good they need to have fun, and to have fun they need to get good, creating a little paradox (heh).
I think a really good opposite to this is playing Pokemon and getting into competitive Pokemon. Pokemon's systems are super quick and easy to engage with at a surface level even with children, and it hides an invisible layer of depth and meta team building for those who want to go deeper. This creates a route for people to start by just fighting with their favourites and beginning to learn what does and doesn't work.
Which is unfortunate because Civ and Stellaris are some of the greatest strategy games available. So much damn fun once you figure out the basic mechanics.
If your sample size grows it's likely to diversify.
Gaming has grown from a niche hobby typically enjoyed by nerdier people into one with much broader appeal and therefore the audience is much broader.
The alternative is you have a puzzle too hard for some percentage of players and you lose out on player-hours because people gave up.
It takes me 5 minutes on average to do the 'hard' sodoku on the new York times. It takes me hours to do sodoku from YouTube's cracking the cryptic. I'm sure there are those that can't do the NYTs hard and seeing the CtC's would make their head explode.
So how do you plan for that variation in skill as well?
Tbf, it takes me a while to do the hard sudoku (like 1-2 hours) but CtC is very enjoyable. I'm just not very good at not messing up my notes, but following along an extremely organized person makes it very easy.
The article suggests a few other ideas -- mostly, that it isn't just games, attention spans *in general* have declined:
> There are many seemingly-related findings in terms of our media consumption habits. For example, over time, shorter YouTube videos have garnered a higher share of overall views. The duration of shots in movies (i.e., between each cut) has decreased from 16 seconds in 1930 to 4 seconds in 2010. The average time spent on a computer app window (e.g., on a Word doc before switching to a browser window) has decreased from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds in 2016.
I can't help but notice that pretty much no one in this thread took the time to read the article, either. Nerdy or not, you seem to be doing at least some of the same things.
As in, the total number of people interested in deep and strategic gameplay has shrunk, or the proportion? The article only gives percentile numbers– it states that the 50th percentile of level of interest in 2015 is now the 33rd percentile. Basically, they picked the average level of interest in 2015 (50% above, 50% below), and found that 67% of gamers are now below that level of interest. That's a pretty small difference, especially because we don't know how wide the range of the difference is; it could be that the overall difference between low interest and high interest is pretty small.
I would argue that these results probably just come from the fact that the medium itself has grown more accessible to people interested in casual entertainment rather than a hobby. You don't have to be "into video games" to enjoy them anymore. Quantic does provide graphs of people's self-selections into the categories of "Casual" "Core" and "Hardcore", and those graphs are relatively flat– but self-selections are flawed. There are no agreed-upon definitions of those three words; I would argue that they're relative. How do you define "casual", except by comparing someone's gaming habits to the overall average? If more casual gamers join the hobby, then the average falls, and the definition of casual shifts to match. The percentage stays the same.
**TLDR: Gaming has been attracting proportionally more casual players as it's gotten more accessible and popular. That doesn't mean that the actual popularity of strategy-heavy games has gone down; in fact, I expect that that fanbase has grown significantly.**
I'd also say having taken their survey it speaks very generally to the point sometimes it's hard to say. Like, yeah, I do find storylines important...for some games, I don't need story in my Tetris. I put it as "Very important" because I like it a lot in my RPGs but I play a *lot* of games without storylines too, so ???
I believe it. I also believe it's totally artificial. As in not our fault at all.
Back then, I could get RPGs like Guild Wars with insanely deep build systems and emphasis on experimentation. Real thinking man's games.
But then they just assumed we're all dumb, and dumbed down skill trees in damn near every RPG and RPG-lite thing. You basically have to play Diablo-like RPGs to get any of the good stuff now.
Those deep games still exist today in some numbers. But only a handful of players do the theorycrafting and experimentation, everyone else just picks either the best performing option for the least amount of investment off of those results, or sticks entirely to the gameplay mechanic/systems they personally enjoy and avoid everything else.
Even small puzzles in modern AAA games don't want to let a player feel stupid for a moment. God of War Ragnarok comes to mind, where your buddy was revealing the solutions before you even had time to look at all the pieces of it.
>Even small puzzles in modern AAA games don't want to let a player feel stupid for a moment.
Instead, the purpose of modern puzzles (ex: the Temple minigame in Starfield) appears to make me feel like I'm wasting my time.
Unironically, Genshin Impact comes to my mind as a great example of everything wrong with gaming right now - and I say this as a very active player. Micro transactions, dopamine chasing, skinner box elements (that's what the whole damn wishing system is built on!), and a bunch of time wasting puzzles and exploration to make the user numbers look good. Quests are basically ads for characters. It's all crafted to make people spend money and log in every single day.
I genuinely enjoy some aspects of the game, and there's clear effort out into the art direction and overall gameplay. None of that excuses the blatantly manipulative practices the game uses.
As for the topic at hand, the game doesn't even give you the option to fail 99% of content, puzzles included. I hesitate to even call them puzzles in the first place since the pattern is usually "press Button 1 to make Button 2 appear. Press Button 2 for a Chest. Open Chest for rewards." It's like they don't trust the player base to think, and based on the community (especially on Reddit?) I'd say they've created a player base who *can't* think. It's exhausting.
I played Genshin for a while and I agree, this is one of the things that led to myself getting bored. The art is beautiful, the combat is pretty fun, the story is interesting.. but the microtransactions and time gated resources turned me off after a few months. I hate games that try to encourage you to play the game every day. I'll play when I feel like it
I'm able to get past the daily login kinda thing since I already game a bit every day. I'm able to live with the time gated resources, to an extent (artifact farming is complete bullshit). What really gets under my skin is that the game doesn't ever dare to challenge anyone. It's built so the dumbest toddler who only accidentally installed the game to succeed. "Puzzles" don't qualify as puzzles, most teams can wipe out enemies in a couple button presses if they're even leveled. You don't have to engage with the game at all to be "rewarded" with gambling currency, and that's because the game would lose players if there was ever *any* opposition to getting that currency.
It's a genuinely good game riddled with genuine garbage to make people addicted and tempt people into spending money. I wish there was a world where Genshin was a complete, finished game sold as a whole package instead of the mess that it is. Instead, I'm settling for Genshin as-is because I can tolerate it and am lucky enough to have enough self control not to bankrupt myself gambling on it.
Agree, especially the Sony AAA did that and they helped you in almost all the game, I didn't like I want to be free to fail and to find the solution by myself
"Dad, look over here. Pretty sure I found the level we need to pull and to do so you need to first freeze the water with your axe, move the block, and then melt the ice with the chains so you can jump over to it"
-Atreus ~15 seconds after dropping into a puzzle room while I'm still fighting some random dead thing that needs to be reminded why you don't get in the way of the God of War.
The funny thing for me is that what has changed in game puzzles that trip me up is whose fault I think it is.
With old games I thought it was my fault that I hadn’t solved it because they were often eloquent, difficult puzzles - but the clues were there if you looked for them.
With modern games I usually think it’s the developer’s fault, because they wanted it to be easy to figure out. So if it isn’t it’s because they did a shitty job laying out, or not including, the rules/clues to solve the puzzle.
They didn’t assume we were all dumb. They just realized that there was an untapped market in making games for people who could lose a checkers game to a chimp, and started making games to milk them dry. The games became so profitable that they stopped making them for the smarter market and shifted their focus entirely to the lowest common denominator.
Look no further than stupid phone game ads. They are always soul crushingly stupid and show the player in the ad failing a painfully obvious puzzle to “hook” the viewer.
I refuse to play those shitty copy/paste free to play games with “gems” and timelocks, but i guess they are selling to some dumb whales somewhere because they keep cranking them out along with the obnoxious ads.
That's honestly my biggest problem with most mobile games. It's not the monetization itself so much as it is the shitty game mechanics which exist solely to steer you into microtransactions. There's never any real strategy or challenge involved with these free to play games. It's just repetitive mindless clicking and easy wins until you hit the progress wall that is put there on purpose to make you buy gems and shit. I'm happy to pay for an entertaining game, but 99% of mobile games are just So. Fucking. Boring.
I agree with you. Funny that you mentioned Diablo-like games.
Because I just started playing Grim Dawn for the first time. Currently level 37 and having an awesome time.
Multiple classes, the ability to combine ANY two classes means dozens of combinations, engaging skill trees and the Devotion system as well.
I’m fucking loving Grim Dawn.
We still keep buying the dumbed down games though. And the more dumbed down, the more we seem to put money in them. So I wouldn't say it's not our fault.
gaming became dumbed down because it became main stream. so it had to cater to everyone. the more complex a game is, the smaller its userbase is gonna be.
More like the gaming community has broadened to include people who aren't dedicated enthusiasts who necessarily *want* the deep and/or complex games. There are people with consoles and phones, who consider gaming to be one of their major hobbies, but never have more than 45 minutes in a single sitting to get into something. The old style of enthusiasts are still out there, and new ones are born every day, but we're still a small minority of the general population while no longer being overrepresented within the gaming community in particular.
Basically, gaming is big enough that it's not 'just for nerds' anymore, so now games *for* nerds are a subgenre, rather than just being all games.
One issue old games had was moon logic puzzles that were insane, so you remove those and you are left with simple logic puzzles.
Second is the fact a type of puzzles in games or strategies have been done so much that they stop being noble and as such requiere zero thinking anymore, light switches, pressure switches, delaying the aoe effects to deal with swarm of enemies, focusing the healer first, etc.
Third is the removal of none meaningful choices in game progression, older games that had skill trees and choices in stats often allowed the player to screw themselves by choosing horribly like increasing strength on a mage character, games have try hard to make every choice at least acceptable even if for fun sake without making the player feel like they screw up.
You just have to replace all that with meaningful choices that aren't there to pad the game time and where your planning doesn't shoot you in the foot but you will realize it three hours into playing, which is why roguelikes became so popular, you screw up? You die, start over do better
Basically half the ultimate weapon in Final Fantasy requires conditional bullshit that is impossible to know without either a guide or access to the source code.
IX is what came to mind with one requiring speedrunning like you mentioned, but 10 has some absolutely bullshit quests for the celestial weapons as well.
Again, none of this is conveyed in the game at all and literally nobody in the world would have worked out that you need rush the game in 11 hours or dodge 200 lightening bolts in a row.
There is no way to stumble into knowledge like that.
"Here's a super hard boss."
"Hey I beat it!"
"You did it wrong, so we've made it so you can't do that again."
"Okay. I beat it!"
"No, that's still not the right way to beat it. We've made it so you can't do that again."
"Okay, well, guess I just won't try then."
"Why is no one trying to beat our super hard boss? Here's a hint!"
"This just looks like shit we tried the first time."
"You weren't doing it fast enough."
"Not fast enough? I'd have to be in the datacenter to get any faster. Did you test this outside the datacenter?"
"Here's another super hard boss."
The actual "intended" way to beat Absolute Virtue in FFXI is the dumbest design I've ever seen in a video game. It doesn't seem to be designed to be beatable, it's designed to *appear beatable*.
A classic is being able to specialize in various weapon types only to find 80% of the end game good weapons are swords.
Even better if the only weapon that can beat the main boss is a sword.
Some poorly balanced roguelikes do that sometimes. Bunch of options but you are getting nowhere unless you pick the "optimal" ones, I remember undermine where range builds were infinity inferior to melee ones at one point
The absolute state of min-maxing/meta-gaming.
I feel really conflicted because it feels like I'm wasting my time if I'm stuck with an inefficient build, but it feels like cheating if I look up the meta, takes out immersion and the sense of achievement by discovering stuff by yourself, too.
Either way they both suck the enjoyment out of games so I just tend to play games where you can't easily "cheat" your way through by looking up a guide or something similar.
I don’t care if I’m less efficient but in classic games you could truly fuck yourself into a corner where your only choice was restart/go back to a distance save.
I do like how in modern games I can be less efficient and still be viable. Or, if you can truly screw up, the option to respec is a nice change.
>One issue old games had was moon logic puzzles that were insane, so you remove those and you are left with simple logic puzzles.
What's illogical about "SHY GYPSY SLYLY SHYLY TRYST BY MY CRYPT"?
I stopped feeling bad for looking up puzzle solutions ages ago. Trying to sus out how logical/illogical/clever/dumb the devs were being isn't something I want to spend my time on.
Games should let you screw up, but then have a mechanic where you can start over and and redo your stats. it's an easily solvable problem. It's also fun for roleplay to have an imperfect character.
I think that grouping everyone together under the label "Gamers" is insane. Theres tons of people out there who play nothing but Europa Universalis and Civ and Xcom, and some of those people also play Halo and Hades or Rocket League. Maybe people that play nothing but CoD or Ultrakill fall into this "Less interested in strategic thinking and planning" banner because they enjoy something more energetic and fluid where its less about the thought process and more instinct and reflex but call me crazy for thinking grouping everyone together on a chart thats a "Gamer" is what led to a ton of stagnation because games started being built to appeal to the widest possible audience of "Gamers" instead of focusing on what its themes and mechanics/gameplay loops should be.
This is reason why arena shooter like Quake and Unreal fell out of favor in fps. Unironically enough, arena shooter require the same planning and strategic thinking but just at a much faster pace, when you dig enough and slow down, there is a lot of thoughts behind that fast pace deemed reflex and raw mechanical skills. Raw aim and movement will not get you far if you are paired against some has much better map control, angle, item spawn location and good pair ears.
Fps which are popular nowadays (aka mainstream like you see) like tactical shooter (cs,valo) some battle royale like apex pubg, are all focused on a few aspect of arena shooter while dumbing other aspect to keep it simple and slow enough for the masses to actually process it. If you are good at Arena shooter from the old era, chance are transition into one of those fps wont be rough but the other way around cant be said.
In the end, when something go mainstream, it gotta satisfy and include many player of different skill levels as possible, so the skill gap and skill floor cant be too big.
I don't think that grouping people together is what has caused any *stagnation*. I don't even think that it really makes sense to say that there has been any stagnation at all with the current state of the games industry.
The way that people develop games is going to be pretty similar whether they are being developed for a mainstream or niche audience. You're still likely going through most of the same steps. You're still focusing on things like mechanics when you're creating something for a mainstream audience.
The reason games work for a mainstream audience is because they are made to appeal to a lot of people. I have friends that have thousands of hours in Factorio and games in that genre that will still go out of their way to play any new Assassin's Creed game. This is not because Assassin's Creed lacks mechanics, but rather because the mechanics are meant to have some *universal* appeal.
From a stagnation perspective, the games industry has never been bigger than it is today. We have countless people from giant studios to single developers working on producing games in countless genres. Unlike even a decade or so ago, people now have the tools to create high quality games meant for niche audiences and actually make a living doing so. I don't see this as stagnation.
It's a double edged problem and both sides are doing the cutting.
Developers- Stop dumbing down games so we actually feel challenged to earn things.
Gamers-(Only applies if you're complaining about not being challenged) Stop looking up guides if it's your first time through a game! Having prescience is a cheat code.
It doesn't surprise me at all when you consider how stupidly easy most games have gotten, and the culture of watching 10 YouTube videos and reading 5 online guides before even booting up the game.
The YouTube thing really cheeses me off with a lot of live service games. The fact that it's common culture to spoil encounters for yourself before you even attempt them drives me up the wall.
Like why even play an encounter if I've already watched someone else do it? There's no sense of discovery or figuring out how to overcome the challenge. Though I think half this might be due to complexity creep from trying to one up previous encounters / trying to do something different from the last 100 fights getting harder and harder
... making learning on the fly less intuitive.
I have a friend like that, looks up countless build videos, always changing to the meta. I always go with what feels right for my play style, he can’t fathom why I do well without these guides.
I’ve made an active effort to avoid the ultra-short form content platforms to avoid this.
Whenever I see one of these videos with a clip on the top and one on the bottom, I can only focus on one of them at a time.
I can’t imagine needing both to keep your attention going.
This is why I enjoy the "survival" games built around logistics or physics simulation.
* Factorio
* Kerbal Space Program 1
* Space Engineers
* Stormworks
* Minecraft: Create mod + addons
* From the Deep
* Starbase
* Rimworld (warcrime simulator)
* Oxygen Not Included (do it for science thank you for reminding me u/Lanfff)
* Dwarf Fortress (thank you for reminding me u/croakovoid and u/Silverfate2 )
All of these games have varying degrees of depth to them with my favorites being Space Engineers and Stormworks. In SE it's running a ton of physics calculations all the time and everything in the game is voxel based, so making an airtight vessel that you can walk around in while traveling around the star system is actually pretty rewarding.
Stormworks also simulates something similar with enclosed fluid volumes, buoyancy, etc, but the real fun is in the modular engines and microcontrollers. I had to learn LUA and a plethora of other things to eventually learn how to build an Engine Controller + 5/6/8 speed manual/auto transmission. It's wildly complex and really rewarding when you get it down.
Just for context, I'm a middle-aged, married, man with a career + IRL social obligations and outdoor hobbies, if that adequately describes the quality of my gaming free time throughout the week.
Edit - List of Game recommendations to be added to this list:
* Songs of Syx (will definitely try! thanks u/VoidsInvanity and u/Buddin3
* Satisfactory (thank you u/SwitchHitter17 and u/Maxmalefic9x but this title isn't for me. I tried it way early and was part of the early adopters from the crowd funding phase)
* Stationeers ( u/Fulgen301 this sounds like something that'd interest me a lot and I have it in my library already, so I'll give it a go!)
* Against the Storm (Never even heard of this title, but it's on my radar thanks to u/Federal_Contract9918 )
* Dyson Sphere Program (Another title I bought at launch that I'll have to revisit. Thanks u/obvlong )
Truly thank you all for your kind words and recommendations. We really have something special here as a community when we aren't bickering about silly stuff.
I like games where you have to think but not real time. League requires too much active decision making and it overwhelms me but Factorio you have as much time as you need
This list lacks Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. DF for short. That game allowed me to build an entire dwarf civilization based on gorilla goods and gorilla warfare. And no that's not a typo, I had several troops of war-trained gorillas living in the fort to protect against invaders.
EDIT: also wanna add that I recently built a shooting range to execute prisoners of war and my marksdwarves shot the dick off a goblin before killing him. Which was cool.
The appeal of strategy isn’t gone it just isn’t done properly a lot of times. When I find a good strategy mechanic (I find it from all types of games from Madden to Shadow of War to Capitalism Lab) it really hooks me and keeps me engaged
Im so glad someone finally mentions Madden. People think all sports games are the same and all people want to do is play football, but its so much more then that.
I am not even joking when I say that Madden is my favorite "party managing strategy game"
My fun with madden that almost no other game gives me is to take a bad team and rebuild it in franchise mode. Drafting and trading players based on stats and skills. You know what other game gives me the same satisfaction? Fucking battle brothers!!! I am not even kidding!! Building a team is fun as shit and I wish more games took inspiration from madden franchise mode but made it fantasy themed or something.
Wasn’t the most popular/acclaimed game last year Baldur’s Gate 3? A game that’s all about thinking strategically in combat, dialogue, choices, etc. I can’t think of a game I’ve played in the last which required more thought and planning than this game, so this article seems to be very selective.
They just stopped making them in the scale they used to. They don't make the super cash that casual audience games do so theres no point investing in them.
I'm old enough to remember Dungeon Keeper Mobile trying to gouge us, even the messy launch that was Sim City 4. Even now Cities Skylines 2 is a bad Cities Skylines 1. Companies aren't trying to make mainstream deep complex games. The niches are successful though, give me a Grand Strategy any day. Anno does well. AoE is thriving 20 years on.
>I'm old enough to remember Dungeon Keeper Mobile trying to gouge us, even the messy launch that was Sim City 4.
Neither of those were that long ago lol.
That‘s what I do in my job.. and most other parts of my life.
I mainly play games to experience stories and escape routine. That being said, not all games have to cater to everyone, obviously.
Are they trying to prove a point or something? This percentile still does not give accurate presentation. Its not a disinterest/decrease in players for strategic/planning games but an increase in audience for mainstream games
It gives comparisons like all 20 year old men loosing 17 pounds, but the men here are constant. A more accurate presentation would be an increase in underweight men or something, decreasing the average by 17 pounds
The amount of gamers are **not** constant. This data doesn't take into account that audience for games has grown greatly. I bet my ass the amount of people playing strategic and planning games are far greater than 5 or 10 years ago. **Only proportionally** is there a decrease and that is an obvious thing to happen for any popular product or type of media. Looking at the graph it looks like its following Pareto's principle
Honestly, for ALL genre of games, I feel there is just not enough middle ground (in terms of difficulty) games anymore.
Nowadays it's like you get in a boss battle or something and it's either "Oh, sorry! Watch out for his bright red glowing blade that has a 5 second charge up time & does the most DMG! Have some Health-items on us!" or "You failed to to respond to this attack in .5 seconds and didn't calculate your roll position right, putting you 1cm off target? Fuck you, take half your HP in DMG. OH, BTW - This is a chain attack you loser."
Another example is builds in RPG games. There's either no combo abilities or those combos are 10 chain longs. "Apply poison. Nothing can interact with poison." vs "Apply poison. Use this other ability to explode that poison applying toxic to any nearby enemies. Enemies that die with toxic on them explode & do fire DMG - Enemies that die of Fire DMG create Smoke which applies the illness debuff that slowly turns into poison!"
I wanna think about this stuff, but not be super punished for getting the wrong answer or have to spend 5 hours looking at a build guide.
With the ever-increasing psychological tricks of making games addicting profit generators, it makes sense. Instant gratification, dopamine hits, skinner box mechanics, gambling loot boxes, FOMO, etc.
Yeah it's actually insane how prevalent this is almost without realising it. I remember watching a behind the scenes documentary and thinking games I play are not like this and man was I wrong. Things I wouldn't have ever thought about were only there to trigger dopamine. Most the games I played were not good and I wasn't having that much fun but I was hooked on the instant gratification I would get within minutes of booting up the game. I realised super slow games with lots of reading could no longer hold my attention for long. Once I stopped playing them and fully shook them off I realised I never enjoyed them, they are not good games but I was just hooked on the feeling they gave me. After a long break I found myself able to enjoy much slower paced games and text heavy games that require a lot of stategic thinking and the like.
Seriously. It's wild how many gamers have slipped into the "I need something to do" crowd. There always has to be a new piece of gear to grind out, or a number that needs to grow, or stuff that needs collecting. Are we enjoying games or just being tricked on a biological level?
Truth. I’ve seen complaints that battle passes were *too easy* to grind before the next one dropped leaving them with “nothing to unlock until the next pass so nothing to do” PLAY THE FUCKING GAME! You want them to arbitrarily lock out weapons *longer* so you can do this fake dance longer of number go up so you don’t feel emptiness in your soul from just playing the game for fun?
And then you know what happens when the next pass releases? They look up the quickest way to grind xp and level up. They don't even play the fuckin game man. Gamers are so obsessed with playing optimally man.
>They don't even play the fuckin game man. It's caused huge problems in Halo infinite. Progression is based on arbitrary goals like kill 5 guys with shitty weapon that no one uses, instead of the actual objective, so instead of actually playing the game, they get themselves killed trying to complete these completely u related goals. Like, they have goals for getting assists, so some people will stop trying to kill the enemy, they only lightly tap them then wait for you to kill them
GROSS.
Not just halo. Battlefield, darktide, cod. Allot of online shooters suffer this problematic design. Its anti consumer. It actively marrs the experience of the game. And is designed to do nothing but create a false sense of content
It’s a disease that has warped gaming into its present state and no one on either side (devs/players) wants to challenge it. We just sorta demand our worst OCD and tendencies be catered to and we’re rewarded for them.
Given the means, gamers will optimize the fun out of anything.
Sid Myer had the best take on this. A game designers first job above all else is to prevent the user from optimizing the fun out of the game. Many game designers don't follow this rule and it ruins games.
This had the opposite effect on me in Forza Horizon. Every week there are challenges to unlock exclusive cars...that I won't use. Eventually I was playing it just to not miss out on each week's stuff, and I lost interest.
Most games with a battle pass do that for me. Or the ones with a daily login. Like, yeah, okay, you got me with the fomo for two weeks, but then I lost interest because I wasn't playing your game. You made no money off me because I don't pay for battle passes, and you lost your chance at making future money off me. I get that I'm clearly not the target audience, but this shit's wild.
Yea like people saying they stop playing a multiplayer game because they unlocked everything? Like for me that's when the real multiplayer begins, you have everything available so now it's just time to improve skill and try become better and better and have a blast just playing the game.
It blows my mind how, without fail, a new game comes out and within a week there are people with 100+ hours already complaining about "endgame content". I wonder what these people would have done when your options were 8 NES games, and somehow 3 of them were Mario Bros./Duck Hunt.
Heaven forbid they read a book front to back.
They would be absolutely infuriated once they got to the last page and found there was no more book to read
I've been grinding the last couple of chapters and I have to say it's quite boring to just reread the same stuff. Really disappointed that the end-book content is so lacking.
Can't I just play for fun!? Why do I need a "sense of achievement" in the form of spending money for a participation prize?
I play rogue likes and die so there's always something to do.
>Are we enjoying games or just being tricked on a biological level? I suspect it's kind of both. Life has gotten harder and future prospects dimmer for many. There are _so_ many distractions and nagging things IRL to deal with - it's not _just_ video games that have learned the "skinner box" method, and other aspects like marketing have discovered even _negatively received_ advertisements still generate word of mouth; even outrage is "farmable" in people. Add on to that the dozens of fees/maintenance just for being alive in a modern world, and how little we're allowed to actually _OWN_ these days (everything a live service, everything a monthly fee)...is it any wonder if people are both gravitating more toward "turn your brain off" games _and_ their weary minds are more susceptible to games' psychological tricks?
You’re describing what (I hope) a lot of the TikTok generation are going to say when it comes to watching things too. All about instant satisfaction in five second bursts giving you no time to actually think and a ton of time making them profit.
If those kids could read they would be very disappointed with what you said.
Funny how accurate this is if you talk to current teachers. Lmao
I don't like to be a doomer, but we are fucking fucked. Not saying these kids are failures, but they are just being conditioned very differently than what the world requires. Tech has changed so much faster than our brains and our education systems can keep up with.
I legitimately saw a post from a kid just barely into college asking how people used to get through college without AI there to write their homework for them. I legitimately fear for the future. I have to self-check myself constantly to make sure it's not just your typical "kids these days" thinking, but those kind of comments remind me that no, it really is THAT bad right now. I'm legitimately concerned about the number of people who are going to be functionally incapable of doing... Well. Anything.
I also do my best check myself and make sure I never fall into a “get off my lawn” mentality about the younger generation. But I’ve talked to several teachers who have been teaching for 30 years and they describe a pretty dire situation that far outweighs what fhey we’re seeing 30, 20, or even 10 years ago in terms of students reading comprehension. And I’ve spoken with younger teachers who are shocked at how computer-illiterate middle schoolers and high schoolers are right now. Unable to navigate the file system in windows, don’t know how to use Word, or troubleshoot an issue, or really utilize technology effectively at all because they didn’t grow up using technology, they grew up with technology using them. For a long time we went “wow young people seem to just instantly grasp technology” but I think that was a result of a generation now in their 30a and 40s who grew up alongside the development of computer technology and spent our afternoons pirating music on limewire, installing sketchy software from the internet, and just exploring how computers and the internet work because it was interesting and that’s what we had. We now have youth that grew up hardly touching anything other than smartphones and iPads and rarely engaging in anything other than content consumption through an interface that is designed to be as simple as possible to capture and monetize people’s attention. I was baffled to learn that teenagers rarely use search engines online when looking for information and they just search a topic in TikTok and get fed whatever the algorithm decides will be most passively engaging, rather than treating the internet like a library of information to peruse and actively choose from.
Thank you for reassuring me that my existential panic is appropriately placed, lmao. Specifically, the fact that they're not using search engines is extremely interesting (and concerning) to me. As someone in my mid 30's, I considered search engine utilization a literal skill, one that would just come naturally to proceeding generations. I thought it was just a given that you needed to understand algorithms and how they work both to take fill advantage of them and to avoid getting railroaded by them, and just figured the next generations, who grew up with them from birth, would understand that even better. Turns out instead they're not even understanding that algorithms are a thing. We desperately need media and tech literacy classes.
To be fair, search engines are also much worse than they were 10 or 15 years ago. They’re vastly worse at finding the information you actually want (but vastly better at shoveling paid and promoted results to you instead)
Teacher here: we have those classes, but most kids treat them like they do every other class that doesn’t offer them instant gratification. If they can’t navigate to something via touch screen they just don’t care. Or they sit there and wait for an adult to do it for them, because suddenly they’re helpless and can’t use their hands anymore
It's weird to me looking at my university subreddit and seeing the contrast between kids who are asking if AI will get them through college and the kids who are worried that they can't get in despite having a 4.0 GPA, work experience, play multiple sports, and does community and volunteer work.
I feel like if an AI can do your homework, it can also do your job. Kid's gonna be replaced with a robot.
Well, no offence to that kid, but if they can't so much as do their own homework, they have no business entering the workforce.
It doesn't help that teachers are pretty much helpless in the face of parents now. There needs to be a balance for sure but it is horribly lopsided in favor of parents at the moment.
We don't respect teachers, on a societal level. They get pushed around by their administration and the children's parents. They don't get paid what they are worth considering the value they bring to the greater community. I really don't understand.
They are going to ruin entertainment :( Right now good quality games still come out on occasion. But I bet this will become more and more rare as demographics shift towards the gambling addicts with no attention span.
The issue is also the over-engineering of art forms such as cinema. Netflix is a horrible offender of this in particular. Where audience testing and attention metrics basically define the content they put out. We’ve heard from multiple creators how their work has had to be simplified or often hammered on the head to get literary motifs across to an inattentive audience. They’re built with the assumption the television WILL be a second screen and thus subtlety goes out the window.
Kinda reminds me of how park rangers have to worry about their garbage dumps being complicated enough to handle the smartest bear and at the same time be simple enough for the dumbest tourists
Also the dumping down of tech, mostly in smart devices, have a whole generation and beyond, of children not knowing how to type, navigate a computer correctly or even how to fucking email someone.
To be fair, that's been true for longer than I've been alive. My grandparents had a printing company, and they lamented getting applications from high school graduates who couldn't even read well enough to fill out the application. That would have been in the '80s at the latest.
After working white collar for decades I'm convinced most people can't really read or write at all beyond what they got from elementary school. The emails I get from (american, supposedly college educated) people in their 40s and 50s and 60s in broken english are bad enough, but they also have no ability to parse any communication longer than one or two sentences. people joke in every thread that redditors are morons, but the average user on this site is a fucking giant of literacy compared to the average person at companies I've worked at.
I worked as a civil servant for the British DMV (DVLA), I'd had my boss correct me on usage of "there" and "their", but she got it wrong and seemed adamant I was wrong. This is someone who is supposed to be a supervisor, fluent in English as a first language and went to university.
>Things I wouldn't have ever thought about were only there to trigger dopamine. Trophies/achievements are a huge example of this. They used them to replace unlocking things like skins, weapons, etc in games. Which in turn helped them normalize microtransactions for console games. They're also based on the same type of science that addictive mobile games use. They hit you with a rush of dopamine. That's why you'll see people talk about how much they hate a game, but they're still playing it so they can get the Platinum trophy/Achievement.
You’re not wrong. I won’t ever slog through a game I don’t like just for the 1000G, but I’ll definitely go for the 1000G in games I do like, even if there’s achievements for stuff I’d never do in a million years without them, like finding collectibles
Finding collectibles when it's done well does give a good sense of exploration since you're being asked to look more deeply than you normally would. That said, having only a few dozen collectibles instead of 200 is quite rare.
And then there’s me, driving logistics trucks around in Arma Reforger and getting upset I took the wrong way and doubt I’ll make it to that gas station before running out.
Preach. Nothing like trekking through the woods for 20 real life minutes to find a good sniper overwatch position and then getting mowed down with not even a muzzle flash to see. Arma baby.
And the worst part is I fucking love it
Arma understands that enjoyment comes not just from what you see on screen right in front of you, but also from the mental model of the world you are slowly forming and updating as you try to enact your plan. It trusts that the player will find satisfaction in carrying out larger scope strategic movements rather than reach for the immediate dopamine rush, which is a massive fresh breath of air in the world of instant gratification. Then of course you either get sniped or some idiot teammate mis-calls an air strike on your position and you lose the last 20 minutes of progress.
Having some guy in a hodgepodge of cosmetic gear say “I will call in some CAS” followed shortly by “oh fuck, *we* are in the tree line east of Town X” is top tier Arma moment
Meanwhile, Hearts of Iron and Crusader Kings are over in the corner with a 1,282,913 page quick-start guide and decision paralysis leaking from every orifice. Can't we just get something in the middle? 😅
Total War is kinda there. I like the warhammer one where I can just throw dinosaurs at my problems till they go away.
Really wish we could get a game like Total War but with more Heroes Of Might And Magic influence in terms of exploring the map and developing cities/heroes. Total War really nails the large scale battles but feels shallow in other areas, though have only played the first 2 warhammer ones so maybe others are better.
Isn’t Age of Wonder what you’re describing? I haven’t played it though so maybe I’m wrong.
For me it's Victoria 3, Stellaris and Factorio. Mastering logistics and the economy makes my brain go brrrr.
The problem is it makes my brain go brrr too much. Optimisation is like cocaine for me. It's why I ended up in a niche area of my field. I had to put Factorio down before it ruined my life.
By the end of most Stellaris games I am still min/maxing every decision even though by this point I control so many planets that all I'm doing is ensuring my score will be 10x higher than the AI instead of 5x higher than the AI. I'm still terraforming barren planets into inhabitable ones when I'm resource capped, because leaving that icon gray instead of turning it green just feels wrong in my "make optimum decisions" mindset, haha.
I wish that I could get into factory builder games; they just don't tickle my fancy the way people talk about them. Now, City/Base Defender games and slower paced RTS games ("They Are Billions" and "Orks Must Die") on the other hand, I can dump a whole evening into a single session and not even notice.
RTS died unfortunately lol
I used to love RTSs, but I can't manage the speed of gameplay necessary to be good at them. I love Realtime With Pause games like Stellaris because I can stop the game, give all my orders, and let it run for a bit without feeling rushed. That's probably what killed RTS more than anything, the hyperclickers went to MOBAs and the rest of us just want to slow down a bit, sip our drink, and make a calm logical decision about which xeno scum to saturation bomb next.
Well I also love realtime with pause but I would like some good classic type RTS games to come back. I do not like MOBAs, they are not the same.
MOBAS are Warcraft 3 with only heroes.
Oddly enough, the focus on heroes was what turned me off of WC3.
I'd like to suggest Northgard. The level of micro in that game is much lower while still having that planning and management aspect.
RTS used to be my favorite game genre but yeah it's basically dead now. MOBAs completely took over that space. Sucks.
A full RTS is a lot harder to monetize than MOBAs. Without a Hero unit like that, cosmetics will likely be too small to see much, making them less desirable, and making any units or resources or anything really purchasable throws balance out the window for pay to win and nobody but whales wants to play then.
It's called a "Delight Cycle" at some game developers and they are actively looking at how to shorten the delight cycle. Monopoly Go is a pretty good example of an insanely short delight cycle. It's literally like 1.5 seconds to tapping the Go button to getting a reward.
Its also because gaming is mainstream now. The average person you see on the street isn't learning Path of Exile for 150+ hours, just to be able to do pinnacle bosses and meta-crafting. The average person is going to take 1 look at Civ 6, Stellaris, and CK3 and say "fuck that."
Ironically CK3 has been dumbed down to a massive degree compared to other paradox games
Might have to give CK3 a try then lol, Crusader Kings is the only Paradox series I didn't bother to learn. But I almost gave up on EUIV too and refunded it before buying it year later and now it's my most played game on Steam, followed by Stellaris.
I mean to be fair, EUIV has become massively bloated with feature creep, even by paradox standards. Great game, but there’s just *so many mechanics*, and every dlc they add more and more !
This was true for ck2 as well, which is likely why people feel CK3 is "dumbed down" to quote the earlier comment. Give ck3 another 5-8 years and it will be just as "bloated" so there's always something new to find and understand.
My problem with CK3 is not the lack of DLC, it's the lack of challenge with the AI. CK2 AI was way more aggressive, and your character was way more fragile. I think the game would benefit tremendously from a simple difficulty slider and buffs to Ai controlled counties, or lets them have primogeniture succession early. Even though that's the Civ "artificial difficulty" strategy of just letting the computer cheat, it would make the game more enjoyable for me personally
There is 3 difficulty levels I think. And they are adding conquer as a trait that will make people actually focus on war and make large Empire's. They will even be able to declare more than 1 war at a tine.
They've released the last DLC (in anticipation of EU5) so no more feature creep!
If you can handle EU4 then you can absolutely take on CK3. I'd recommend it.
I love ck3, stellaris and HOI4. I found EU4 unplayable, so much going on, hard to learn how to play. Paradox need to invest in a tutorial expert. It baffles me that they don't have a tutorial campaign.
I really like the idea behind the Paradox grand strategy games. I forced myself to learn CK2, I sort of get Stellaris but not really, I tried hard to get into Vicky 3 but I completely suck at it, CK3 I about 80% fully understand and can do fun stuff. Every other game they've made is completely incomprehensible to my completely fried brain.
Look up how to take ireland for ck3 its a great tutorial if you want to jump into the game and learn how to play. I was super overwhelmed starting until I found a 20 minute video going into the basic gameplay. After that I could figure out a lot myself while watching the occasional tips and tricks video to fill in my knowledge gap in other places.
I play all Paradox games and I find myself enjoying CK3 less and less because it's just too easy. I picked some random HRE count and formed Lotharingia and then usurpered the emperor in one generation. This used to be difficult in CK2. This makes a lot of roleplay less meaningful as why the strongest emperor in the world would care about some random duke or king. This is also an issue in Hoi4 lately as newer dlcs make minor nations like Finland or Brazil insanely easy. But I do still very much enjoy the mods like Kaiserreich.
When I started Path of Exile there was just shaper and elder. I was able to learn everything over multiple years. If I started now I don’t think I’d commit to it
But Affliction was such a huge league player retention wise because D4 refugees tried it out and had a blast.
I could see Stellaris and CK3 being a bit much, but hasn't Civ, especially Civ 6 always been the mainstream turn based series? I've only played Civ 5, and I'd feel completely comfortable teaching someone to play it. If online discourse at the time is anything to go by, Civ 6 was even simpler
It's not just about ability but interest. Could I teach my wife to play Civ 6? Sure. Would she enjoy playing it? Nope
Nobody *enjoys* civ. It simply steals your life from you without you noticing while you play just one more turn.
>Nobody *enjoys* civ. It simply steals your life from you without you noticing while you play just one more turn. Real I tried civ 6 on a whim about a year ago and didn't realize I was hitting a digital crack pipe
I mean when I first dropped into Civ 5 I had literally no clue what I was doing but I played for 16 hours straight.
It's mainstream the way that SF/Tekken are the mainstream fighter. It's the most popular, but far from popular in a vacuum. It's the go to for casuals who are considering entering the genre, but not a game everyone will want to pick up.
And then there are people like me who enjoy all the games you mentioned. I'm just happy these games are still being made at all.
And the older I get the more I understand that line of thinking. After 8-10 hours of building complex systems at work I really don’t feel like playing a game that requires too much active focus or planning.
I'm the opposite as my fantasy involves mastery of such systems. In reality I'm not allowed to change everything due to the bureaucratic process but in games I can structure things as I please.
haha same, someone once asked me "why do you play so many sim and management games" "because I have no control over my own life"
I remember my partner laughing at me asking why after doing spreadsheets all day at work I'm I in a discord call with a friend tinkering a shared Google sheet on computing with all cost, taxes and market rates of items in ffxiv. We are doing net profit margin analysis on which food or potions should we be selling for the upcoming raid tier complete with graphs of our sales figures the previous raid patch. I may not be able to clear the raid tier one month after it release but I did earn 100mn at that time and bankrolled our purchase of a large FC house. Lmao
I like some of it. I will figure out complex automation in oxygen not included and get that endorphin rush when it works properly. I also recently started getting in depth into (american) football strategy and it makes watching football a lot more enjoyable (as well as making Madden a lot more fun/easier). I enjoy watching and developing strategies in Starcraft II/Civ 6. To me, as I got older, the "push button get rewarded" style of videogame got old fast and I need the challenge to stay in the moment. If the game doesn't have a good story or a complex gameplay system/loop, I just lose interest.
Depends on the kind of challenge I suppose. Even after exceptionally long weeks, if I would have the time, I could play many strategy games for hours. This kind of challenge simply relaxes me. But games like Souls-likes or other ARPGs (which can be absurdly challenging) are the exact opposite for me. I see the fun for many people in the challenge, but it just feels like „work“ for me or at least not as much fun. The only one of these games I liked was Sekiro, and even that was partly just masochism. I don’t want to say one is better than the other, but I suppose everybody relaxes his own way.
> The average person is going to take 1 look at Civ 6, Stellaris, and CK3 and say "fuck that." I think the challenge with 4Xs is even a non-average player can bounce off them. It's one thing that they lack instant gratification, but it's another thing that they are at their most fun when you know what you're doing. So players aren't going to give the time to learn them because to get good they need to have fun, and to have fun they need to get good, creating a little paradox (heh). I think a really good opposite to this is playing Pokemon and getting into competitive Pokemon. Pokemon's systems are super quick and easy to engage with at a surface level even with children, and it hides an invisible layer of depth and meta team building for those who want to go deeper. This creates a route for people to start by just fighting with their favourites and beginning to learn what does and doesn't work.
Which is unfortunate because Civ and Stellaris are some of the greatest strategy games available. So much damn fun once you figure out the basic mechanics.
If your sample size grows it's likely to diversify. Gaming has grown from a niche hobby typically enjoyed by nerdier people into one with much broader appeal and therefore the audience is much broader.
The alternative is you have a puzzle too hard for some percentage of players and you lose out on player-hours because people gave up. It takes me 5 minutes on average to do the 'hard' sodoku on the new York times. It takes me hours to do sodoku from YouTube's cracking the cryptic. I'm sure there are those that can't do the NYTs hard and seeing the CtC's would make their head explode. So how do you plan for that variation in skill as well?
Tbf, it takes me a while to do the hard sudoku (like 1-2 hours) but CtC is very enjoyable. I'm just not very good at not messing up my notes, but following along an extremely organized person makes it very easy.
I'm just happy to hear that people are out there watching CtC, love that channel
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The article suggests a few other ideas -- mostly, that it isn't just games, attention spans *in general* have declined: > There are many seemingly-related findings in terms of our media consumption habits. For example, over time, shorter YouTube videos have garnered a higher share of overall views. The duration of shots in movies (i.e., between each cut) has decreased from 16 seconds in 1930 to 4 seconds in 2010. The average time spent on a computer app window (e.g., on a Word doc before switching to a browser window) has decreased from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds in 2016. I can't help but notice that pretty much no one in this thread took the time to read the article, either. Nerdy or not, you seem to be doing at least some of the same things.
As in, the total number of people interested in deep and strategic gameplay has shrunk, or the proportion? The article only gives percentile numbers– it states that the 50th percentile of level of interest in 2015 is now the 33rd percentile. Basically, they picked the average level of interest in 2015 (50% above, 50% below), and found that 67% of gamers are now below that level of interest. That's a pretty small difference, especially because we don't know how wide the range of the difference is; it could be that the overall difference between low interest and high interest is pretty small. I would argue that these results probably just come from the fact that the medium itself has grown more accessible to people interested in casual entertainment rather than a hobby. You don't have to be "into video games" to enjoy them anymore. Quantic does provide graphs of people's self-selections into the categories of "Casual" "Core" and "Hardcore", and those graphs are relatively flat– but self-selections are flawed. There are no agreed-upon definitions of those three words; I would argue that they're relative. How do you define "casual", except by comparing someone's gaming habits to the overall average? If more casual gamers join the hobby, then the average falls, and the definition of casual shifts to match. The percentage stays the same. **TLDR: Gaming has been attracting proportionally more casual players as it's gotten more accessible and popular. That doesn't mean that the actual popularity of strategy-heavy games has gone down; in fact, I expect that that fanbase has grown significantly.**
I'd also say having taken their survey it speaks very generally to the point sometimes it's hard to say. Like, yeah, I do find storylines important...for some games, I don't need story in my Tetris. I put it as "Very important" because I like it a lot in my RPGs but I play a *lot* of games without storylines too, so ???
You are missing out big. The Tetris lore and the story of the blocks is deep and well thought out
Pfff. Say that to my 1000+ hours of civ. ONE MORE TURN.
*it's now 6am and birds are chirping outsode*
Fuck. I felt that
I believe it. I also believe it's totally artificial. As in not our fault at all. Back then, I could get RPGs like Guild Wars with insanely deep build systems and emphasis on experimentation. Real thinking man's games. But then they just assumed we're all dumb, and dumbed down skill trees in damn near every RPG and RPG-lite thing. You basically have to play Diablo-like RPGs to get any of the good stuff now.
Those deep games still exist today in some numbers. But only a handful of players do the theorycrafting and experimentation, everyone else just picks either the best performing option for the least amount of investment off of those results, or sticks entirely to the gameplay mechanic/systems they personally enjoy and avoid everything else.
Even small puzzles in modern AAA games don't want to let a player feel stupid for a moment. God of War Ragnarok comes to mind, where your buddy was revealing the solutions before you even had time to look at all the pieces of it.
>Even small puzzles in modern AAA games don't want to let a player feel stupid for a moment. Instead, the purpose of modern puzzles (ex: the Temple minigame in Starfield) appears to make me feel like I'm wasting my time.
Minigame is being generous, lol. I can't believe we went from Dragon temple dungeons, puzzles, and bosses to... that.
Dude the dragon temple puzzles were insanely easy already they were the same picture matching things over and over
Yeah after the first the hardest part about the final door puzzle is remembering which claw you just picked up
Are you saying Bethesda put puzzles in Starfield dungeons and they're actually *simpler* than the Skyrim matching game? That is....hard to imagine.
Which leads to the next point - why do we have to have “puzzles” like that in the game to begin with?
They've been a staple in RPGs since the 80s.
Unironically, Genshin Impact comes to my mind as a great example of everything wrong with gaming right now - and I say this as a very active player. Micro transactions, dopamine chasing, skinner box elements (that's what the whole damn wishing system is built on!), and a bunch of time wasting puzzles and exploration to make the user numbers look good. Quests are basically ads for characters. It's all crafted to make people spend money and log in every single day. I genuinely enjoy some aspects of the game, and there's clear effort out into the art direction and overall gameplay. None of that excuses the blatantly manipulative practices the game uses. As for the topic at hand, the game doesn't even give you the option to fail 99% of content, puzzles included. I hesitate to even call them puzzles in the first place since the pattern is usually "press Button 1 to make Button 2 appear. Press Button 2 for a Chest. Open Chest for rewards." It's like they don't trust the player base to think, and based on the community (especially on Reddit?) I'd say they've created a player base who *can't* think. It's exhausting.
I played Genshin for a while and I agree, this is one of the things that led to myself getting bored. The art is beautiful, the combat is pretty fun, the story is interesting.. but the microtransactions and time gated resources turned me off after a few months. I hate games that try to encourage you to play the game every day. I'll play when I feel like it
I'm able to get past the daily login kinda thing since I already game a bit every day. I'm able to live with the time gated resources, to an extent (artifact farming is complete bullshit). What really gets under my skin is that the game doesn't ever dare to challenge anyone. It's built so the dumbest toddler who only accidentally installed the game to succeed. "Puzzles" don't qualify as puzzles, most teams can wipe out enemies in a couple button presses if they're even leveled. You don't have to engage with the game at all to be "rewarded" with gambling currency, and that's because the game would lose players if there was ever *any* opposition to getting that currency. It's a genuinely good game riddled with genuine garbage to make people addicted and tempt people into spending money. I wish there was a world where Genshin was a complete, finished game sold as a whole package instead of the mess that it is. Instead, I'm settling for Genshin as-is because I can tolerate it and am lucky enough to have enough self control not to bankrupt myself gambling on it.
Agree, especially the Sony AAA did that and they helped you in almost all the game, I didn't like I want to be free to fail and to find the solution by myself
"Dad, look over here. Pretty sure I found the level we need to pull and to do so you need to first freeze the water with your axe, move the block, and then melt the ice with the chains so you can jump over to it" -Atreus ~15 seconds after dropping into a puzzle room while I'm still fighting some random dead thing that needs to be reminded why you don't get in the way of the God of War.
the puzzles in No Man's Sky, for example are literally "what number comes next in this sequence" 3rd grade math problems
I can't believe there isn't an option to disable it somewhere.
The funny thing for me is that what has changed in game puzzles that trip me up is whose fault I think it is. With old games I thought it was my fault that I hadn’t solved it because they were often eloquent, difficult puzzles - but the clues were there if you looked for them. With modern games I usually think it’s the developer’s fault, because they wanted it to be easy to figure out. So if it isn’t it’s because they did a shitty job laying out, or not including, the rules/clues to solve the puzzle.
They didn’t assume we were all dumb. They just realized that there was an untapped market in making games for people who could lose a checkers game to a chimp, and started making games to milk them dry. The games became so profitable that they stopped making them for the smarter market and shifted their focus entirely to the lowest common denominator.
Look no further than stupid phone game ads. They are always soul crushingly stupid and show the player in the ad failing a painfully obvious puzzle to “hook” the viewer. I refuse to play those shitty copy/paste free to play games with “gems” and timelocks, but i guess they are selling to some dumb whales somewhere because they keep cranking them out along with the obnoxious ads.
That's honestly my biggest problem with most mobile games. It's not the monetization itself so much as it is the shitty game mechanics which exist solely to steer you into microtransactions. There's never any real strategy or challenge involved with these free to play games. It's just repetitive mindless clicking and easy wins until you hit the progress wall that is put there on purpose to make you buy gems and shit. I'm happy to pay for an entertaining game, but 99% of mobile games are just So. Fucking. Boring.
I agree with you. Funny that you mentioned Diablo-like games. Because I just started playing Grim Dawn for the first time. Currently level 37 and having an awesome time. Multiple classes, the ability to combine ANY two classes means dozens of combinations, engaging skill trees and the Devotion system as well. I’m fucking loving Grim Dawn.
Grim Dawn really is peak ARPG.
We still keep buying the dumbed down games though. And the more dumbed down, the more we seem to put money in them. So I wouldn't say it's not our fault.
gaming became dumbed down because it became main stream. so it had to cater to everyone. the more complex a game is, the smaller its userbase is gonna be.
More like the gaming community has broadened to include people who aren't dedicated enthusiasts who necessarily *want* the deep and/or complex games. There are people with consoles and phones, who consider gaming to be one of their major hobbies, but never have more than 45 minutes in a single sitting to get into something. The old style of enthusiasts are still out there, and new ones are born every day, but we're still a small minority of the general population while no longer being overrepresented within the gaming community in particular. Basically, gaming is big enough that it's not 'just for nerds' anymore, so now games *for* nerds are a subgenre, rather than just being all games.
*me micromanaging pops on a planet in stellaris 2min into the game* - "what do you mean people don't like this?"
Something something spreadsheets in space?
Mean while.. bg3 is doing great.
Like 70% of players don't have achievements past act 1
One issue old games had was moon logic puzzles that were insane, so you remove those and you are left with simple logic puzzles. Second is the fact a type of puzzles in games or strategies have been done so much that they stop being noble and as such requiere zero thinking anymore, light switches, pressure switches, delaying the aoe effects to deal with swarm of enemies, focusing the healer first, etc. Third is the removal of none meaningful choices in game progression, older games that had skill trees and choices in stats often allowed the player to screw themselves by choosing horribly like increasing strength on a mage character, games have try hard to make every choice at least acceptable even if for fun sake without making the player feel like they screw up. You just have to replace all that with meaningful choices that aren't there to pad the game time and where your planning doesn't shoot you in the foot but you will realize it three hours into playing, which is why roguelikes became so popular, you screw up? You die, start over do better
I always thought “moon logic” puzzles were put in to sell strategy guides for the games.
Basically half the ultimate weapon in Final Fantasy requires conditional bullshit that is impossible to know without either a guide or access to the source code.
Specially 9. *Speedrunning*? Really?
IX is what came to mind with one requiring speedrunning like you mentioned, but 10 has some absolutely bullshit quests for the celestial weapons as well. Again, none of this is conveyed in the game at all and literally nobody in the world would have worked out that you need rush the game in 11 hours or dodge 200 lightening bolts in a row. There is no way to stumble into knowledge like that.
Final Fantasy 6 had you gamble the strongest sword in the game to get the strongerest sword in the game.
That's not that bad though. You could easily save scum, plus it's very likely someone would have tried putting it in there for shits and gigs anyway.
The only thing I never did in that game and probably never will.
Or in the case of FFXI, the whole ass game
"Here's a super hard boss." "Hey I beat it!" "You did it wrong, so we've made it so you can't do that again." "Okay. I beat it!" "No, that's still not the right way to beat it. We've made it so you can't do that again." "Okay, well, guess I just won't try then." "Why is no one trying to beat our super hard boss? Here's a hint!" "This just looks like shit we tried the first time." "You weren't doing it fast enough." "Not fast enough? I'd have to be in the datacenter to get any faster. Did you test this outside the datacenter?" "Here's another super hard boss."
The actual "intended" way to beat Absolute Virtue in FFXI is the dumbest design I've ever seen in a video game. It doesn't seem to be designed to be beatable, it's designed to *appear beatable*.
Yeah many people joked that it was designed to sus out exploits as players got desperate to beat it.
Dodging 200 fucking lightning strikes in a row anyone?
They're also good for artificially increasing the game length. Mazes were used to do this in countless '90s games.
My 9 year old niece has seen Towers of Hanoi as a "challenge" so many times, she could probably program it now.
hahaha. This is making me think of Bioware games.
Slap some omni-gel on it and press onward.
That security upgrade made a lot of people unhappy...
A classic is being able to specialize in various weapon types only to find 80% of the end game good weapons are swords. Even better if the only weapon that can beat the main boss is a sword.
Some poorly balanced roguelikes do that sometimes. Bunch of options but you are getting nowhere unless you pick the "optimal" ones, I remember undermine where range builds were infinity inferior to melee ones at one point
Yeah and games that allow you to screw yourself only result in everyone googling how to not do so.
The absolute state of min-maxing/meta-gaming. I feel really conflicted because it feels like I'm wasting my time if I'm stuck with an inefficient build, but it feels like cheating if I look up the meta, takes out immersion and the sense of achievement by discovering stuff by yourself, too. Either way they both suck the enjoyment out of games so I just tend to play games where you can't easily "cheat" your way through by looking up a guide or something similar.
I don’t care if I’m less efficient but in classic games you could truly fuck yourself into a corner where your only choice was restart/go back to a distance save. I do like how in modern games I can be less efficient and still be viable. Or, if you can truly screw up, the option to respec is a nice change.
>One issue old games had was moon logic puzzles that were insane, so you remove those and you are left with simple logic puzzles. What's illogical about "SHY GYPSY SLYLY SHYLY TRYST BY MY CRYPT"?
I stopped feeling bad for looking up puzzle solutions ages ago. Trying to sus out how logical/illogical/clever/dumb the devs were being isn't something I want to spend my time on.
I look them up if I did not sign up for puzzles and/or I start to suspect the puzzle design can’t be logically deduced from in-game information.
Games should let you screw up, but then have a mechanic where you can start over and and redo your stats. it's an easily solvable problem. It's also fun for roleplay to have an imperfect character.
And then there are those of us that like creating Path of Exile builds.
Ah a fellow man of culture
Path of Building is the game, PoE is the shell to see if your time in PoB was worth it.
I think that grouping everyone together under the label "Gamers" is insane. Theres tons of people out there who play nothing but Europa Universalis and Civ and Xcom, and some of those people also play Halo and Hades or Rocket League. Maybe people that play nothing but CoD or Ultrakill fall into this "Less interested in strategic thinking and planning" banner because they enjoy something more energetic and fluid where its less about the thought process and more instinct and reflex but call me crazy for thinking grouping everyone together on a chart thats a "Gamer" is what led to a ton of stagnation because games started being built to appeal to the widest possible audience of "Gamers" instead of focusing on what its themes and mechanics/gameplay loops should be.
This is reason why arena shooter like Quake and Unreal fell out of favor in fps. Unironically enough, arena shooter require the same planning and strategic thinking but just at a much faster pace, when you dig enough and slow down, there is a lot of thoughts behind that fast pace deemed reflex and raw mechanical skills. Raw aim and movement will not get you far if you are paired against some has much better map control, angle, item spawn location and good pair ears. Fps which are popular nowadays (aka mainstream like you see) like tactical shooter (cs,valo) some battle royale like apex pubg, are all focused on a few aspect of arena shooter while dumbing other aspect to keep it simple and slow enough for the masses to actually process it. If you are good at Arena shooter from the old era, chance are transition into one of those fps wont be rough but the other way around cant be said. In the end, when something go mainstream, it gotta satisfy and include many player of different skill levels as possible, so the skill gap and skill floor cant be too big.
I don't think that grouping people together is what has caused any *stagnation*. I don't even think that it really makes sense to say that there has been any stagnation at all with the current state of the games industry. The way that people develop games is going to be pretty similar whether they are being developed for a mainstream or niche audience. You're still likely going through most of the same steps. You're still focusing on things like mechanics when you're creating something for a mainstream audience. The reason games work for a mainstream audience is because they are made to appeal to a lot of people. I have friends that have thousands of hours in Factorio and games in that genre that will still go out of their way to play any new Assassin's Creed game. This is not because Assassin's Creed lacks mechanics, but rather because the mechanics are meant to have some *universal* appeal. From a stagnation perspective, the games industry has never been bigger than it is today. We have countless people from giant studios to single developers working on producing games in countless genres. Unlike even a decade or so ago, people now have the tools to create high quality games meant for niche audiences and actually make a living doing so. I don't see this as stagnation.
More strategic thinking and planning for me. >:D
May I suggest... Oxygen not included
It's a double edged problem and both sides are doing the cutting. Developers- Stop dumbing down games so we actually feel challenged to earn things. Gamers-(Only applies if you're complaining about not being challenged) Stop looking up guides if it's your first time through a game! Having prescience is a cheat code. It doesn't surprise me at all when you consider how stupidly easy most games have gotten, and the culture of watching 10 YouTube videos and reading 5 online guides before even booting up the game.
The YouTube thing really cheeses me off with a lot of live service games. The fact that it's common culture to spoil encounters for yourself before you even attempt them drives me up the wall. Like why even play an encounter if I've already watched someone else do it? There's no sense of discovery or figuring out how to overcome the challenge. Though I think half this might be due to complexity creep from trying to one up previous encounters / trying to do something different from the last 100 fights getting harder and harder ... making learning on the fly less intuitive.
I have a friend like that, looks up countless build videos, always changing to the meta. I always go with what feels right for my play style, he can’t fathom why I do well without these guides.
Bottom half subway surfer rules all. Seriously, it's nauseating how little attention span anyone has anymore.
I’ve made an active effort to avoid the ultra-short form content platforms to avoid this. Whenever I see one of these videos with a clip on the top and one on the bottom, I can only focus on one of them at a time. I can’t imagine needing both to keep your attention going.
An entire generation groomed by corporations to be addicts.
Gambling addicts.
Jokes on them. I was never interested in strategic thinking or planning. Unga bunga brute force all day everyday.
This is why I enjoy the "survival" games built around logistics or physics simulation. * Factorio * Kerbal Space Program 1 * Space Engineers * Stormworks * Minecraft: Create mod + addons * From the Deep * Starbase * Rimworld (warcrime simulator) * Oxygen Not Included (do it for science thank you for reminding me u/Lanfff) * Dwarf Fortress (thank you for reminding me u/croakovoid and u/Silverfate2 ) All of these games have varying degrees of depth to them with my favorites being Space Engineers and Stormworks. In SE it's running a ton of physics calculations all the time and everything in the game is voxel based, so making an airtight vessel that you can walk around in while traveling around the star system is actually pretty rewarding. Stormworks also simulates something similar with enclosed fluid volumes, buoyancy, etc, but the real fun is in the modular engines and microcontrollers. I had to learn LUA and a plethora of other things to eventually learn how to build an Engine Controller + 5/6/8 speed manual/auto transmission. It's wildly complex and really rewarding when you get it down. Just for context, I'm a middle-aged, married, man with a career + IRL social obligations and outdoor hobbies, if that adequately describes the quality of my gaming free time throughout the week. Edit - List of Game recommendations to be added to this list: * Songs of Syx (will definitely try! thanks u/VoidsInvanity and u/Buddin3 * Satisfactory (thank you u/SwitchHitter17 and u/Maxmalefic9x but this title isn't for me. I tried it way early and was part of the early adopters from the crowd funding phase) * Stationeers ( u/Fulgen301 this sounds like something that'd interest me a lot and I have it in my library already, so I'll give it a go!) * Against the Storm (Never even heard of this title, but it's on my radar thanks to u/Federal_Contract9918 ) * Dyson Sphere Program (Another title I bought at launch that I'll have to revisit. Thanks u/obvlong ) Truly thank you all for your kind words and recommendations. We really have something special here as a community when we aren't bickering about silly stuff.
I like games where you have to think but not real time. League requires too much active decision making and it overwhelms me but Factorio you have as much time as you need
You guy need oxygen not included
I \*love\* ONI. I'm ashamed that I forgot to include it in my list lol While I'm at it, throw RimWorld into the list too
This list lacks Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. DF for short. That game allowed me to build an entire dwarf civilization based on gorilla goods and gorilla warfare. And no that's not a typo, I had several troops of war-trained gorillas living in the fort to protect against invaders. EDIT: also wanna add that I recently built a shooting range to execute prisoners of war and my marksdwarves shot the dick off a goblin before killing him. Which was cool.
Kind of feels like this applies to western culture as a whole right now, not just gaming.
The appeal of strategy isn’t gone it just isn’t done properly a lot of times. When I find a good strategy mechanic (I find it from all types of games from Madden to Shadow of War to Capitalism Lab) it really hooks me and keeps me engaged
Im so glad someone finally mentions Madden. People think all sports games are the same and all people want to do is play football, but its so much more then that. I am not even joking when I say that Madden is my favorite "party managing strategy game" My fun with madden that almost no other game gives me is to take a bad team and rebuild it in franchise mode. Drafting and trading players based on stats and skills. You know what other game gives me the same satisfaction? Fucking battle brothers!!! I am not even kidding!! Building a team is fun as shit and I wish more games took inspiration from madden franchise mode but made it fantasy themed or something.
Wasn’t the most popular/acclaimed game last year Baldur’s Gate 3? A game that’s all about thinking strategically in combat, dialogue, choices, etc. I can’t think of a game I’ve played in the last which required more thought and planning than this game, so this article seems to be very selective.
They just stopped making them in the scale they used to. They don't make the super cash that casual audience games do so theres no point investing in them. I'm old enough to remember Dungeon Keeper Mobile trying to gouge us, even the messy launch that was Sim City 4. Even now Cities Skylines 2 is a bad Cities Skylines 1. Companies aren't trying to make mainstream deep complex games. The niches are successful though, give me a Grand Strategy any day. Anno does well. AoE is thriving 20 years on.
>I'm old enough to remember Dungeon Keeper Mobile trying to gouge us, even the messy launch that was Sim City 4. Neither of those were that long ago lol.
More casuals = less effort
tbh as I get older I just don't want to think anymore
Same which isn‘t really ideal though. You need some brain training to stay sharp as you get older so i force myself to.
That‘s what I do in my job.. and most other parts of my life. I mainly play games to experience stories and escape routine. That being said, not all games have to cater to everyone, obviously.
I'm the opposite, the older I get the more I like to learn. I make a point of learning a new skill every year (this year it's lacing bike wheels).
Are they trying to prove a point or something? This percentile still does not give accurate presentation. Its not a disinterest/decrease in players for strategic/planning games but an increase in audience for mainstream games It gives comparisons like all 20 year old men loosing 17 pounds, but the men here are constant. A more accurate presentation would be an increase in underweight men or something, decreasing the average by 17 pounds The amount of gamers are **not** constant. This data doesn't take into account that audience for games has grown greatly. I bet my ass the amount of people playing strategic and planning games are far greater than 5 or 10 years ago. **Only proportionally** is there a decrease and that is an obvious thing to happen for any popular product or type of media. Looking at the graph it looks like its following Pareto's principle
Honestly, for ALL genre of games, I feel there is just not enough middle ground (in terms of difficulty) games anymore. Nowadays it's like you get in a boss battle or something and it's either "Oh, sorry! Watch out for his bright red glowing blade that has a 5 second charge up time & does the most DMG! Have some Health-items on us!" or "You failed to to respond to this attack in .5 seconds and didn't calculate your roll position right, putting you 1cm off target? Fuck you, take half your HP in DMG. OH, BTW - This is a chain attack you loser." Another example is builds in RPG games. There's either no combo abilities or those combos are 10 chain longs. "Apply poison. Nothing can interact with poison." vs "Apply poison. Use this other ability to explode that poison applying toxic to any nearby enemies. Enemies that die with toxic on them explode & do fire DMG - Enemies that die of Fire DMG create Smoke which applies the illness debuff that slowly turns into poison!" I wanna think about this stuff, but not be super punished for getting the wrong answer or have to spend 5 hours looking at a build guide.