Turns out that people like playing games that respect their time and aren’t a glorified second job. Who knew.
that respect their time
I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.
and aren’t a glorified second job
I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.
The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.
Why would you write this and then not say what your favorite jrpg that is specifically more grindy in America is? Do you write clickbait headlines for a living?
Hah, just edited the comment for you.
The games I play do respect my time but boy are they a second job. From Rimworld to Satisfactory, from Space Engineers to modded Minecraft… My job is a second job.
Tell that to everyone playing games like path of exile (which i admittedly have also played too much of in the past).
PoE, Factorio, etc
I seem to like games that require spreadsheets
I am on a 6 year old computer playing 10 year old games. I don’t see a need to upgrade anytime soon.
deleted by creator
I bet WoW runs like a dream on that machine 😂
deleted by creator
If it makes you feel better, it will never be the same as it was when you first played. Every time there is a xpac that looks interesting I have tried and failed to get that feeling back. It devolves very quickly into feeling like a job again.
deleted by creator
I do hate being in the never ending upgrade cycle but the 10 year old games are limited, at least the ones I like to play.
Built a new killer rig last summer. Have spent 90% of my time with it playing HL1 mods.
Recently upgraded to a 7800x3D, 64GB DDR5, and a 4070… which I’ve been using to get back into modded Minecraft recently.
Same machine… The framerates I’m getting in Rimworld are off the charts.
Tbf, the larger modpacks can be pretty resource intensive.
New games just don’t have a ‘punch’ to it anymore. They are not not game breaking anymore.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with old games either. They are the same as they were, which is why reboots and remakes are so popular.
I want to agree but some games are really well done. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a good example.
However
I feel like many people are so focused on graphics and looks, like raytracing for example, that gameplay/story has become less important? Sucks but it is what it is I guess…
A good story isn’t something groundbreaking that marketing teams can slap on the box in the same way they can with ray tracing dlss or whatever else I guess
deleted by creator
Older games = more than 2 years old? Then the same goes for readers, movie and TV watchers, etc media consumption most isn’t from the current or previous years
I’m playing a new old game, because i’m playing the Suikoden Remaster. There for I have beaten the system by simultaniously playing both an 20+ year old game and a brand new game thats a few weeks old.
I got a steam deck on the way and I’m so stoked to use it for Suikoden. I hope they remaster number three!
Suikoden 3 needs far, far more than just a remaster.
It needs a full blown remake, both of the story, and the game, to get rid of that trinity sight mechanic. cause the constant shifting perspectives absolutely kept me out of the game, cause every time I start to get invested boom rip me out of it and make me control someone else for a long period. I understand what they were trying to do, but it was one of the most fundamentally bad game design choices i’ve ever seen.
Suikoden 4 has a similar problem. They would need to remake that, too… and create a ton of new story and side content… because S4 is like a 7 hour game, that only takes 40 hours to play because of the absolutely ludicrously insane encounter rate… which is very blatantly used to pad game length time.
Suikoden 5, Hell… I dont even need a remaster. Just wrap the PS2 version in an emulator and release it on PC and I’ll be happy as can be.
The Steam Deck is actually wonderful for retro games. EmuDeck makes setting up emulators a breeze, and the roms can easily be
found onlinelegitimately ripped from your own copies of the game and loaded onto a MicroSD card.
It’s the Baldur’s Gate saga for me right now, and I’m still in the BG1 campaign.
It is such a great game to play on the couch with a trackball while chilling with the family.
Either oldish titles or Indies, mainstream game devs are pure malaria
Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was “oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I’ll wait until I get a better PC.” [wait 10 years] “My ADHD has gone worse, I can’t play all this stuff”
I can agree with this: All the hype around KCD:2 led me to buying/playing KCD:1
I play Rocket League and ~30,000 MAME games on a converted Arcade 1up. I’m waiting for my payment to go through for Vintage Story though – that one is fairly new!
Still playing Battlefield 1942 mods.
7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
6.4% were in League of Legends
6.2% were in Roblox
5.8% were in Dota 2
5.4% were in FortniteThat is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
Free is an important reason why. Also, these games run very well on old machines. If you mostly play that and get a new rig, you don’t have to spend a lot. Pc parts have gotten ridiculously expensive.
I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of “how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?”
I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.
But the thing is, if it’s a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I’ve played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money — and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.
You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it’d still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I’ve played, because I’ve spent so many hours in the thing.
If people are playing these like crazy, you’d think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just…doesn’t matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.
Free means you can easily get any friends to dip in and play which is a big factor.
Hmm. That’s a thought. I guess that that’d mesh with them also all being multiplayer.
Also big up for Cataclysm: DDA. One of the greatest games ever made.
It has one of the harshest learning curves out there, but yeah, it’s very replayable and has pretty extensive game mechanics.
That and Dwarf Fortress; learning curve is steep but they’re rogue-likes. Death is an opportunity to have a whole other adventure and learn from your mistakes and see what RNG has in store for you this time. And there’s infinitely repeatable!
Free means a hell of a lot when you are a child with approximately $0 in expendable income.
I’m old enough to have bought TF2. Played a little less than a thousand hours. Even counting a few in-game purchases, the cost per hour is very low.
But free means no barrier, you can join anytime,m and stay if you like it. Your friends can try it out too.
3/5 games from that list also launched as paid games, but gained majority of its players after becoming f2p. Yeah people love free stuff ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Which ones ? Apart from CSGO, the others have always been free (on the technicality that Fortnite BR is different from the original game)
CS was paid, Dota and Fortnite had “early access” packs before being released. Yeah fortnite is the odd one out here with keeping early access stuff to seperate gamemode and still costing money, but was originally planned to transition to f2p.
Dota was always going to be f2p, and maybe you could buy the beta access, but I, like many others, never paid and just got invited. So I would not consider it to be a paid game going f2p
Soo… What I’m getting is that you kinda like a game called Catapult: Streets Ahead?
Love seeing another person with lots of hours in Caves of Qud. It’s rapidly climbing up my hours played list since 1.0 release. Bought it at 17.99, played for 220 hours so far. Math says that’s 9 cents an hour, and I’m still not done playing. Live and drink, friend!
Its the replayability. I mean, look how many people are still playing chess. Stick a human intelligence on the other end of the stick and you’ve pretty much got it figured out.
I’m playing Counter-Strike 2
… exclusively on a modded server hosting a Warcraft mod
… that I found because I was searching for the same thing I played on CS:S over a decade ago
I read every one of those and thought. Well that’s a new game. Apparently I’m old.
Apparently I’m old.
Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Realmz/comments/qoowgl/assorted_realmz_files_codes_realmz_character/
These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.
Nothing like a comment about someone’s grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you’ve played in its original form.
League of legends is two decades old now, so if you’re thinking it’s new, yeah that’s on you 😜
I’m going to be honest I just looked up the game for the first time and had no clue it came out in 2009. I hadn’t ever heard of it until a few years ago so I just figured it was some new game. The whole warcraft/dota thing was crazy to me.
Crazy how?
I just learned that DOTA was a wc3 mod originally like last month, so I’m assuming that’s what they mean?
Edit: and how did I find out? Well, Basshunter’s “DOTA” music video of course. Which coincidentally I also learned was about DOTA the game lol.
@tacofox @AwesomeLowlander wasnt LoL made by some of the original DotA modders? But somehow valve ended up with the rights for the name so they made DotA 2 as a standalone game? It’s been ages since iv’e seen an article about the origins of those games :D
Sounds very valve-ish. But my knowledge ends at Basshunter 😅
There were many people who worked on dota back then. There was no official version to begin with, you could find a dozen variants in bnet on any given day. Slowly it got centralised. Some of the modders ended up at LoL, others ended up at Valve. The name wasn’t copyrighted, nobody really owned it. Valve kinda inherited it by virtue of hiring the guy running the mod team at the end.
Nope. I know about DOTA and how it has a bunch of spin offs. One of my best friends plays some weird betting game that is a mod of DOTA and he tried to explain the whole thing to me a long time ago.
So looking it up my guess is I played AoE over Warcraft, never understood DOTA, don’t really like battle area games, and have only ever watched AoE in e-Sports.
The amount of times I “finally sit down and watch that new Netflix show I’ve been putting off” and it’s 7 years old. My kid is into “newer Disney stories” I don’t know from my day… that are 25 year old films!
25 years so… Tarzan? Lilo and Stitch? The Emperor’s New Groove?
besides the lower bar of entry due to being free, Midias research has shown that the younger generation prefers online multiplayer, and as you grow older, you start to favor single player games more.
My personal hypothesis is that everyone likes online multiplayer initially because it’s pretty cool, then you get bored it when you realise playing with angry randos is no fun. It’s not that a younger generation prefers online multiplayer, it’s that they haven’t got sick of it yet!
I don’t get how people are still into those old games. I like new experiences too much
People don’t get bored of playing/watching the same sports their whole lives
The game may be old but that doesn’t mean a particular person has played it before.
Honestly, most new games just fucking suck. They’re too expensive, often don’t run properly at launch even on excellent hardware, and those that don’t have micro-transactions built-in require you to purchase DLC to get the whole game.
On the other hand, the older titles almost always run well on my machine, have a ton of community DLC, and in general are just designed better because they were built to bring the player as much fun as possible, not to extract as much money as possible.
Plus, the quality content generated from 2005 - 2015 represents some of the best ever, and can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you even get into the 2010s. Why waste money on something that may not work, and that I likely won’t enjoy as much as the games I bought 10 years ago?
It’s why I usually wait at least a year after release to consider whether or not I’m going to buy a title.
New AAA games suck.
I either play indies or old AAA games. It all went to shit around the beginning of the PS4/X1 era, so yeah, my upper bound is about 2013.
I tend to agree with you, I think the downfall started in the ps3 era since that’s when online was in every console. I understand your idea that it was bad in ps4 era since devs had the time to figure out how to makes things worse due to the ability to use the internet to sell things/deliver patches.
I don’t know if I agree about new games. This is a bit of a problem with some AAA games though. The indie game scene is still thriving as far as I can tell, in some genres more than others. (E.g now is a great time to be into FPS games.)
A good old game can occupy you for many hours though, and it’s hard to make good games period. I’m not surprised that a few older games dominate the market.
For sure, and my backlog is huge. I have tons to still play. I’m just now getting around to gta5 on my steam deck. I also just finished re-playing the original ff7 with some mods that made it look way nicer than back when I played it on my ps1 in the 90’s. I could go another 5 years without catching up to 2020 if I wanted to.
What’s your opinion on Dome Keeper?
Amen. I also have a ton of issues with contemporary game design—padding playtime with procedural generation, prioritizing graphics, world size, or narrative over gameplay… etc.
Nowadays, I feel as if every game tries to compete for “most game” while lacking cohesion and polished ideas.
And to top it off: non-optimized game size. I’m sorry—I don’t care if your game is $2.99, I’m not downloading 80GBs just to try a game I may refund an hour later.
Totally. Even with good new games, best to wait until they are cheap and completely stable. The impatience to play something the day it releases hasn’t been a thing for me since like 2010… which I agree with you were just generally better, more exciting times for the medium.
