WHAT PLAY YOU!? Version 3.0

[Merzbow]

4 minutes ago, Loki said:

When I was teaching music and engineering a few years ago I’d set the students a task to write a piece of music entirely with samples and a maximum memory of 1.2 Mb (a floppy disk worth). That blew their minds.

Did anyone ever use an Amiga Tracker?

[Sphinx]

The Hacienda club track Voodoo Ray was supposed to be Voodoo Rage but the sampler didn't have enough memory to catch it all, so it chopped the end off.

[Keith Houchen]

4 minutes ago, Sphinx said:

The Hacienda club track Voodoo Ray was supposed to be Voodoo Rage but the sampler didn't have enough memory to catch it all, so it chopped the end off.

Show A Guy Called Gerald some respect!

[Your Fight Site]

29 minutes ago, Tommy! said:

Where do you stand on the occasionally heard view that lack of limitations hinders creativity by not presenting problems to try and solve? I tend to hear it talking about things like Silent Hill or Soul Reaver where limitations drove great creativity choices or ensured everything was relevant in driving the game forward.

I genuinely think not shipping on finite-space, physical media has had a negative effect. Studios think nothing of digitally peddling 100-plus GB unfinished titles, knowing fine well they can just put out at a zero day patch that it probably going to be dozens of GBs again, and probably not fix all the issues that players are going to encounter any way.

When you were releasing games on disc, there was none of that. What you shipped was the finished product, so you better make sure it fits on disc, and you better make sure it’s not a steaming, buggy pile of shit.

[Loki]

2 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

Did anyone ever use an Amiga Tracker?

No!  Using Octamed would have been a good idea.  That’s the first thing we ever wrote music on.

 

[Sphinx]

8 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Show A Guy Called Gerald some respect!

[Tommy!]

24 minutes ago, Your Fight Site said:

I genuinely think not shipping on finite-space, physical media has had a negative effect. Studios think nothing of digitally peddling 100-plus GB unfinished titles, knowing fine well they can just put out at a zero day patch that it probably going to be dozens of GBs again, and probably not fix all the issues that players are going to encounter any way.

When you were releasing games on disc, there was none of that. What you shipped was the finished product, so you better make sure it fits on disc, and you better make sure it’s not a steaming, buggy pile of shit.

I've said before on here that I'm slightly sad that some games will inevitably be lost to time in years to come because even if a physical copy of a game is out there to buy second hand it won't be much use without all the patches to make it playable.

Hell, that's even true now for some games of the PS3 era and it's only become more prevalent.

[FLips]

Gaming as a whole right now is incredibly flawed for several reasons.
One is as Tommy said, the Live Service and Always Online models are short term annoyances but long term killers. Even as a jumping off point if your internet is cack, that model is a non-starter, but outside of that you're basically only allowed to play the game as long as the developers intend, which if the game doesn't become a huge hit is not very long at all. Me and a mate were playing Redfall earlier (which has it's own problems to begin with) when in the middle of a dungeon the servers went down so they could patch the game and kicked us both off. We waited 20 minutes, couldn't get back on, so just stopped playing.
More popular games like Dead By Daylight will be around until the DLC mine dries up and in a few years all that money spent will just vanish into thin air. Which brings me to the second problem.

DLC, Season Passes, Roadmaps, whatever way you cleverly word it. They're shit, and even ignoring the fact the licences will run out and you won't be able to use them eventually, they're making creators and publishers lazier and greedier. You can ship a game now with fuck all on it but a promise of future additional content, whether that be free or paid. Street Fighter V is my go-to example of this because that thing launched bare-bones and took years to get a respectable place by which time 6 had been announced. Doesn't matter though because the name value got them their money so who cares.
If you're doing something like a season pass, the actual best way to do it is like Fortnite. You buy a season pass on that for a tenner and play it enough and you earn the credits back to get the next one free. If you like the game and don't care about buying extra cosmetics you can have everything it has to offer over years for a tenner. 90% of other games don't do that though. You buy the season passes and before you know it you've spent £60 on a game that won't work in a year.

The last one, and one I'm probably not going to get so many agreeing with, is that the current genres are stagnant. I know games go through trends, but the current one we're in now is horrendous. Open World especially is killing off original games in favour of just having a big world to doss about in. The issue with that is to stand out your open world has to truly be impressive, which a lot of the time it's not. It's why Elden Ring was so lauded, because everything in that world had something to do or somewhere to explore.
Often, the story is bare bones, and the gameplay is just fetch quests over longer distances. I recently downloaded Ghostwire Tokyo which started with a unique story, interesting setting and decent atmosphere and then an hour into the game I'm just walking around empty streets collecting things and lighting shrines to open more map. Shit and unoriginal and I almost immediately lost interest.
There's nothing wrong with linear if the story is good or the gameplay is fun. Not every game has to be Assassin's Creed or Far Cry.
If you don't like open world then your other options are 3rd Person Action games, Crafting Games, or Battle Royales. Usually Indie Games would be the go-to when the mainstream got stagnant, but even they're all stuck in Pixelated Metroidvania, Pixelated Platformers or Farming Sims at the minute. Very rarely is there anything unique now.

I've never been so bored with gaming as a whole as over the last few years. I can count on one hand the amount of games I've truly loved and that I could actually go back and play in the future because the servers aren't dead.

[SuperBacon]

Thought some of you might enjoy this article about GTA IV and immigration. 

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230505-grand-theft-auto-iv-blockbuster-game-dared-political

[Merzbow]

This is a cool find and it's all thanks to Jonathan Ross who bought one on eBay ages ago.

 

 

[The Gaffer]

I'd never thought about modern gaming's quality control and creativity being hindered by no restriction on data but that's a great argument and I'm all over it. It sort of relates to how weird I find it when so many people my age and up now - and even plenty of people who put out video game related content for a living - talk about how they don't have the time to sink into big budget games anymore. 

What's weird about it to me is that for the time sinks that they are, very few of these games actually feel big to me because they're just not engrossing enough to have grown in my imagination, which is where the best ones really ply their trade on you. 

Games like Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time are considered tiny, accessible games you can have a quick nostalgia hit of on the bus now but really at the time there was nothing bigger and there sort of still isn't for a lot of us. But realistically in terms of how games are designed now? Yeah you hit the ground running immediately with them. No installation, minimal menu diving, no updates, no lengthy cinematics or tutorial sequences. You can get to the end credits of Final Fantasy VII in thirty hours, which is about the amount of time a lot of service games ask of you now just to get used to all the base content. 

It's always shocking playing some of those games back and seeing how they've shrunk, but usually by the time I'm done with them my heart is bursting and I've loved the run more than any other in the past. 

I don't think it's an age thing either, more a consequence of how we've all grown up with video games evolving. There was plenty of video game mags on the shelves in the nineties written by men in their middle years who were moved to tears by some of this stuff at the time. 

In addition to the data argument, I think another massive part of it was that you needing to fill in some of those graphical blanks was an important part of the interactive experience. The more realistic games get, the more literal the term 'interactive experience' becomes. Now you're just playing in worlds, but before you were sort of tasked with helping to build them. PS1 - PS2 for me represented this perfect plateau where games looked 'cartoony realistic'. Metal Gear Solid, GTA III...those games finally found the form and general look of real life but it was still just a bunch of textures and colours. Your brain had to drink in this weird art style borne from technological limitation, consider it a world, and then build a feedback loop on how that world related to your own. There was a genuine magic in there. 

 

[Loki]

@FelatioLips I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said there.  But it’s consumers driving this, you sadistic bastards.   These bloated content farms are the result of the enormous amounts of money made by say Fortnite, where pay-to-play season content has produced an endless cash waterfall.

 Telling Lies is possibly one of the most creative games I ever worked on, but how many people bought it?  There is a market for really great games but it’s niche.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve abandoned the major consoles and now play on the Switch.  Yes, I just paid 35 quid for Metroid Prime, a 15 year old game, but I get 30 hours of gameplay on a card that will always work as long as I own it.  Zelda is out next week, that’s me sorted for 12 months.

@Gay as FOOK also agree.  I’m a believer in letting the player’s imagination fill the blanks.

 

Edited May 8, 2023 by Loki

[Mr_Danger]

I think for everything you lose due to developers not having to think outside the box as much and releasing rush job unfinished games we’ve gained so much more in games like Elden Ring, BotW, Red Dead and AC by having basically unlimited possibilities. It still blows my mind that you can see some massive landmark way off in the distance that you can go to and interact with even if it takes you the best part of an evening to get there.

Wipe the nostalgia out of your eyes and you’ll see that no old arse game can hold a candle to the modern classics of today.*
 

 

*Unless Peggle Nights is classed as an old arse game.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Mr_Danger

[Tommy!]

2 hours ago, Mr_Danger said:

I think for everything you lose due to developers not having to think outside the box as much and releasing rush job unfinished games we’ve gained so much more in games like Elden Ring, BotW, Red Dead and AC by having basically unlimited possibilities. It still blows my mind that you can see some massive landmark way off in the distance that you can go to and interact with even if it takes you the best part of an evening to get there.

Wipe the nostalgia out of your eyes and you’ll see that no old arse game can hold a candle to the modern classics of today.*
 

 

*Unless Peggle Nights is classed as an old arse game.

I'd say it's not black and white, and a great game like Red Dead or Elden Ring aren't great just because of the scale but because they are well crafted within it. The best thing in red dead imo was the story, same for spiderman. Having half the American west or New York to tell that story is astounding but it's not what makes it and without that backbone of character and story I'd not really care.

With something like FromSoftware they clearly take care over their products, and pushed by limitations or not always seem to strive to think creatively or ensured a deeper playing experience within a formula built and established over years.

I'd also say it's not a case of old games standing up against today's, because a lot don't and some are downright awful due to control choices or early 3D visuals as just two example reasons. It's more that, as far as I see it, the market and the technology drives away from forced innovation which made groundbreaking moves or creative choices which resulted in occasionally astounding results from teams who embraced them in days gone by and so relies on people or devs with sway and initiative to push against a business drive for easy money.

And for me while I can go back and play those old classics that do stand up now I'm expecting to be less able to do that in another 20 or 30 years with today's games.

 

 

Edited May 8, 2023 by Tommy!

[DavidB6937]

For me it's probably not a change in gaming but a change in my life. Ironically the bigger and more open gaming has become, the less time I've had to put into it. Growing up and having a family and responsibilities means I'd love to have time to put into these games but i simply dont. I'm sure younger me with hours to kill would've absolutely loved the exploration.

So I find myself dipping into the smaller games these days. Perhaps why I even play a lot of retro stuff. They're exactly what I have time for now.

But yeah definitely agree on the quality aspect. For all the wow look at this scope aspect of gaming there needs to be something decent at the core or it's just a nice tech demo.