Stop playing repetitive, competitive, multiplayer games. Especially the battle royale style ones.
Oh you just played another 20 minute match where you died to someone out of nowhere at the end, possibly a cheater, shouted bullshit at the screen, didn’t win and didn’t achieve anything? Better re queue to do it again! Hey while you’re in the menus, do you want a new £15 skin? Do you want the battlepass QUICK BEFORE ITS GONE! THE SKINS WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY IF THE CONSTANT LOSSES DONT. I wonder why you’re bored and depressed with gaming.
The most popular steam games? Constant repetitive, competitive, multiplayer games. “I do the same thing with the same guns on the same map every day and I’m bored. Gaming is boring.”
competitive, multiplayer games. “I do the same thing with the same guns on the same map every day and I’m bored. Gaming is boring.”
Sounds a lot like football, except for the guns. Opposing team has new skins for every game, but the game loop is exactly same for every game, all the game. And the map, oh gods, the map! Notice the singular? Yeah, there’s actually just one map. Some background textures change, but functionally it’s always the same green rectangle with some lines drawn over.
My point, if I had one, would be that “boring, repetitive multiplayer games” are so much fun, for so many, that calling people to stop playing them is an exercise in futility.
That said, I find them un-fun, too. Mostly because I constantly get my ass kicked, but also because I enjoy slower, 4x and plot driven games more. To each their own.
tbh I’d rather play a game like this where every round is a new experience or a different strategy than play a half baked “RPG” that holds no roleplay, no stakes, no difficulties or no strategies.
I mean that’s more of an issue with the horrific monetization of those games, their abuse of FOMO, and shit matchmaking (and/or the player’s shit skill). There’s nothing wrong with the genre itself, some people just genuinely enjoy it. There’s a reason it’s popular.
See I tend to gravitate toward creative games. Minecraft is a little too open for me, but something like Satisfactory where “Here’s a few square miles. Build a factory in it.” can keep me going for months.
I’m enjoying this game so much that I keep getting distracted with other things going on in the world to the point where the main story is taking all of eternity.
Anyone saying gaming is dead either doesn’t play indie games, Baldur’s Gate, or doesn’t consider Nintendo to be “gaming.” In either case, it’s their loss. I’ve played so many amazing games this year.
I mean fair but at the same time if I only played fps games then that’s all gaming is to me.
So saying “gaming is dead” would apply since those are the only games I play.
This is a hypothetical btw I play more than fps and agree some companies are still producing quality content but you also can’t deny that most companies have definitely lowered their quality.
Newsflash: your experience is not universal. Just because you exclusively like one genre doesn’t make it accurate to say that that genre is gaming itself.
I didn’t say that the Premier League was dead during the first third or fourth of last season just because my favourite team played like crap and frequently got unlucky in the few games they didn’t. Because that would have been equally ridiculous.
You actually didn’t. You clarified that you yourself play more than one genre without backing down from your claim that a hypothetical someone only playing fps would be justified in saying that gaming is dead just because their own favorite genre is.
I think people who claim “gaming is dead” are just burnt out of games. Doing anything for long enough requires you to take a new perspective eventually, otherwise it feels so samey.
Whenever someone talks about how “games aren’t fun anymore” and such I always think they either need to take a break and do something else or completely change the way they look at/play games, maybe with a different genre, franchise, era, challenge runs such as speedruns or fan mods, and so on.
I find open world games quite tiring in general, but unfortunately a lot of my favourite games are also open world.
I tend to split them up with other games. Like I finished Death Stranding, then played Death’s Door before moving onto Horizon Forbidden West. Like little palate cleansers between main courses.
I think the pacing is the main issue. With open world it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of clearing pointless icons or side quests off a map, figuring you’ll have to do them eventually anyway, but before you get access to a better toolkit of fun, or get invested in a story. Should I do those tasks now with a handful of bland abilities, or later with better toys (but now it’s too easy because it was designed for beginners)?
Complaining about shit on youtube brings clicks. It’s harder to make “hey, here’s a good game” video that will bring you attention, but shitting on stuff works every time.
I think it’s because there’s another brand of mfers out there that see good games and go “it’s not for me, therefore nothing is”.
Yes, you dislike Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate, hypothetical chucklefuck, here’s your award. Can you tell us what you DO like besides that instead? I finished (eh) Noita and Sonic Roboblast 2 last week, and have started Triangle Strategy and Prey. All good shit. Good games exist in everywhere.
Well, if the game is shit, there is no point in spending time on it, even if you acquired it by means other than buying. I mean, your time is the most important commodity.
I almost never buy games on release anymore. Only for games I really want to support, like Final Fantasy 16 or Baldurs gate 3. Other than that, I always wait for sales. Save more money, games are “finished” and patched.
I’m loving Baldur’s Gate, Final Fantasy I was enjoying the story a lot. But the gameplay for 16 has been the most boring of all the Final Fantasy games I’ve played. Cinematically phenomenal yes, but actual combat has felt like a slog. When I fight enemies it’s the exact same thing over and over, I’ll already know who to attack first how many staggers and pulls I can perform on each enemy. It’s made it hard to go back to the game.
I’m thinking I might just watch a YouTuber go through the game without the combats, mostly cause I was really enjoying the story. I’m still in Act 1 in Baldur’s Gate 3, but loving everything so far. Also planning on getting some mods for BG3, saw some awesome mods already out and looking forward to playing my favorite class, Artificer.
Games aren’t objectively better or worse than they used to be. AAA devs can release unfinished trash and patch it later, which I think is super annoying, but we enable this behavior when we pre-order games simply because it’s the next iteration of our favorite series instead of just waiting to hear the impressions of other gamers.
Also, as an adult I lack the time and patience to play the same kinds of games I used to play, so I’ve had to adjust my play style to suit my schedule better. That means I enjoy casual singleplayer games more than what I used to play growing up. It also means you have to avoid the temptation to buy games you like, but you know damn well you won’t ever actually play.
Ah yes the jingoistic shooter, minecraft. No, wait, Portal 2. No… Skyrim? Nope. Batman Arkham Asylum? Still not it. Dark Souls? Wait, that’s not a shooter. Bioshock? Not jingoistic. Fez? Journey? Braid? Starcraft 2? Assassin’s creed? Right, you meant GTA 4 and red dead redemption, right?
The point I’m making is that I know there was certain style of gaming popularized by COD, but it wasn’t the entire generation. The X1/PS4 generation is also filled with bloated formulaic open world games (popularized by AC2, FC3 and Skyrim, all 360 era games BTW) but it doesn’t mean the entire last gen sucked. Just because you played “shit” games during the 360/PS3 era doesn’t mean the entire era is trash. It’s your own poor decisions that made it trash, for you.
I’m turning 40 this year and what’s been refreshing after not gaming for the last 5 years or so has been playing older games from the 2000s that I’ve missed. Great prices on these older titles and I’ve been having a blast playing them.
Similar situation here and I recommend playing roguelites (Hades, Vampire Survivors, FTL, Slay the Spire, etc). There’s an appreciable power curve in each play through sitting. Each experience and play through is self contained and satisfying. There’s good use of time rather than lots of “dead” time or loading/matchmaking time.
If I’m having fun escaping the stressors of living life as an adult with two young kids, it serves a purpose, and therefore it by definition isn’t a waste of my time. Just because someone thinks something is a waste of time, doesn’t mean it objectively is a waste of time.
Flip that around. Just because you like to waste time and even feel like you need to waste time, doesn’t objectively mean you’re not wasting time.
Even if people objectively need to waste time, it doesn’t matter how they waste it. The average time-waster such as gaming barely serves any purpose in itself. Someone becoming disillusioned with games isn’t a problem, it’s an opportunity for them to do something better.
When I was responding to you yesterday, I was trying to come up with an example of something we do that would be objectively a waste of time, but it was hard to think of something that almost everyone would agree 1) consumed your time, 2) you would do voluntarily, and 3) provided absolutely no benefit to you or anyone else.
Thankfully you replied and I have a perfect example: this conversation.
When I have a chance to play a game, I’d like to play a game. Not have 2-4 hours of tutorials, 30 minutes of a cool story and then 5-30 hours of pointless side quests.
I think there is a problem with over-tutorializing in AAA games. I don’t think they are going away, or the hobby will collapse. I just think of the opening experience of Elden Ring versus Jedi Survivor. One puts you in the action and has a 30 minute optional tutorial dungeon, the other has tutorials pop up four hours in the game.
I don’t play for long stretches, maybe two hours at a time. It’s not satisfying for me to play a game three or four times and still be in tutorials. For me AAA games are the absolute worst at this.
I said free, fullstop. Meaning gratis. No microtransactions or even ads (if I can help it... kinda hard to find on Android, though I can ignore mobile/just use fdroid), so that's not the issue either. Also I typically don't play multiplayer games.
I often skip over of anything that calls itself a demo or shouts "Check out my new Steam game/crowdf-" etc before I know much else about it.
I’m glad due to lack of money and just change in my tastes in games/content in general has lead me to enjoy some pretty great indie titles that are at least not getting constant updates that try to fix millions of bugs.
I thought his, but it seems that I’m just not playing the right games. Couldn’t get into anything. Randomly started playing Cassette Beasts because it looked cute. Devoured it and it’s one of my favorite games now.
I think it’s a combination of tastes changing as you get older and a lot of games being shit.
A lot of games have always been shit, that’s not new. It’s easy to look back at the games of old with nostalgia and think “wow, games were better back then”, but really you just don’t remember the mountains of trash games that came out.
Also, you have to reckon with the fact that you may still want to play the same types of titles, but you don’t have the time anymore to dedicate to actually enjoying it. So you have to adapt your game choices. For example, I really love turn based strategy games like Civ, but I’ve bought a few recently that I haven’t played for more than 10 minutes. I realized that I just can’t spend the hours it would take to learn the strategies and controls like I used to when I was a kid.
This is why I keep turning to old games like Alpha Centauri or the original Fallout games: I already know the rules, I know what to do, and I can just jump right in for an hour and not have to spend the first 55 minutes figuring out how that shit works.
Yeah growing up from playing bad games to watching bad TV shows. It’s evolving, just backwards. (The type of media you entertain yourself with has nothing to do with age)
Everybody plays video games now. I saw a 70+ old lady playing a Peppa Pig themed platformer on a tablet in public. “Video games are for kids” was a boomer take 30 years ago, and now it doesn’t even make sense.