I see a bit of a dogpile in progress, with the leading charge of "Nostalgia! Rose-tinted glasses! It don't matter because gaming is better now!". Might as well address that first.
Yes, that reasoning is true to a point, because gaming AS A WHOLE can only improve with time,assuming we dismiss all the garbage that comes with every generation of games.
It's improvement on technicality, but it's quite true all the same.
However, the whole (history) of gaming doesn't accurately describe CURRENT trends, which are far more relevant (we can only realistically impact the present and the future...and the latter is kind of a crapshoot at best).
Gaming may be better as a whole, but that doesn't mean EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW is better. In fact, there many things that are just flat out worse than even 10 years ago.
So pardon me if I don't find the tired "nostalgia rebuttal" to be of any real use when comparing trends of now vs then.
Which isn't to say that everything was better on PS2; just that not everything is better today.
RicoADF said:
Adam Jensen said:
I just miss the fact that buying games was easy. You go out, you buy it and you play it. No bullshit. No DLC, no pre-order bonuses, no unfinished products. Just a finished game. Like buying a DVD of your favorite movie. MGS V will be like that. Did you see it? It is glorious. All the pre-order bonuses are so tiny and worthless they only exist because it's become almost mandatory for games to have them. But it's a complete game just like in the old days. No skins, levels, characters, weapons or vehicles to pre-order. Isn't it weird that having no pre-order bonuses worth having is the reason I pre-ordered MGS V? I just want to play it as soon as it is out. I can hardly believe that in this day and age a AAA release of one of the most famous brands in the industry will let me have an entire experience the moment it is released. It excites me. I pre-ordered The Witcher 3 for the exact reason.
On the opposite side we have Hitman, and Square-Enix's latest strategy of releasing a literally unfinished game for $60 with a promise that they'll release the rest of it in the coming months. Guess who's not buying that.
Amen to that mate, you bought a game and it bloody worked. None of these false advertising, releasing literally broken games to the point that I don't bother buying day one anymore as
it's proven that you get a better product if you wait and buy it cheap. That says alot and it's not good.
Hell I'm finding myself looking at other hobbies recently, the gaming industry is becoming depressing.
^So much that. Games are rarely sold as complete-packages anymore.
Part of that has to do with the rising cost of production, but I think more of it still just comes from the fact that gamers have lowered their standards for the sake of expediency. Otherwise, why else would companies feel so bold now as to release games in increasingly buggy, unfinished states?
The bolded part is an especially potent indictment of the industry; gamer and developer/publisher alike.
It's not because I'm some whiny "entitled" (*rolls eyes*) brat that wants everything done exactly as I like it; I feel for game producers because I know production is an unpleasant balancing act of creating player expectations, juggling the workload, and actually MEETING expectations.
Each of those steps has its own critical sub-steps, and the process is only getting harder because the market is moving faster.
With the roaring success of the previous console generation and advent of widespread digital content distribution...I think things have become TOO fast and "convenient". Today, it's a cycle of overhype and rush jobs, and it's feeding back into itself.
There's just so much competition for our attention, that producers are routinely all but outright lying to acquire it; and once they do have it, they're exploiting it for all its worth.
Coming from the other direction, it's why consumers GROSSLY underestimate the collective amount of market pressure they create by buying into crap like microtransactions, pay-to-win, always-online systems, and pre-ordering rushed productions; Producers are pushing the envelope harder than ever, going well past what is reasonable.
The pre-180 Xbone and Steam's Paid-Mod program are two terrifyingly close bullets we dodged, and that's just in the past two years.
And the scary part? In both cases there were still passionate, vocal supporters for those horrible offerings from the consumer side of things. Thankfully, such supporters were such a fringe minority that they weren't viable offerings, but it blows my mind whenever I see someone who would gladly ruin everything for the rest of us just for the sake of a bit convenience or blind faith in business logic.
In that, I really do miss the PS2 era. Yes, gaming had its baggage then as well, but it was more manageable and certainly less political. The biggest producers were still willing to take more risks on average, provide more middling production offerings and not lean so heavily on post-release content that twists the player's arm.
While there's some truly great games made since that time, I'm finding them increasingly rare both by proportion (relative occurrence) and by gross-numbers (absolute occurrence). And that's in SPITE of gaming's greatly increased production base (there are more developers than ever).