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Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't much of a gamer but oh boy, did I love all the quest games, they totally appealed to my tastes. I loved the 2D-ness of the games, the attention to details, the scripts, the colors, the music. You could tell there was a talented team behind those games. Games have now gotten so complex graphics-wise but it seems to me that they lost something it's very hard to pinpoint, maybe the limitations of that age was what made the games more creative? Or maybe it's pure subjectivity on my part.

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Games are richer in terms of both content (“things to do”) and visual imagery, but the stories and gameplay are much more uniform now than 20 years ago (which is long after my childhood video game playing period ended). There is some subjectivity here of course, but I occasionally replay games from when I was in college or even elementary school (hello Apple II, Atari and Nintendo). The graphics and limitations are clear, but within those constraints it’s hard to say games have improved that much.

For all the advances in the tech we’ve had I don’t believe we’ve seen equivalent gains in actual gaming experience.

See IggleSniggle's comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24944816

I would recommend Outer Wilds (2019) for a game that displays a real advance in gameplay mechanics. There is alot of exciting stuff happening in the indie game scene.

Game mechanics is definitely one area that seems to have been lacking.

Aside from that, there's a certain homogeneity to games these days. I think that's attributable to the fact that there are more of them and that to reach a broader audience there has to be some generalization that occurs.

Going 3D is a huge limitation on what kind of mechanics you can do. Decent was reasonably popular, but showed how much difficulty many people have given full freedom in 3D space. Sonic style fast scrolling or precise platforming games really don’t translate well.

VR is even worse in that respect as people get seriously disoriented much more easily.

Going 3D (and HD) also consumes far more budget for art and level design, so companies are less willing to take risks in other areas.

Outer Wilds does some amazing stuff. Utterly brilliant in how it constrains your path through it’s small, polished world, and makes it feel incredibly dense.

Hades is also utterly amazing, with similar attention to repeated play.

These games still exist today, but come from small passion studies (much like early-mid Sierra)...and today, the number of games published is much, much greater than it ever was then. That is to say, generally only indie- or genre- enthusiasts know where to find the "good stuff" for any given category good, because the small studios don't have the marketing dollars to compete with the larger players or to cut through from "sleeper genre hit" to "genre hit," let alone from "genre hit" to "mainstream hit."

The genre games that do make it to mainstream are typically backed by distasteful in-app purchase schemes.

Many people have heard about "Dwarf Fortress" at this point since it's been around so long, but mostly only the "traditional roguelike" fanbase is even aware of games like "Cogmind" (an ascii game with incredible attention to detail that extends beyond being just a great game to things like thoughtfully implemented accessibility features and lovely crafted ascii graphics using its own open sourced ascii engine, RexPaint). Within that enthusiast crowd, though, it's one of those obvious 'oh yeah I know that game' games.

(Okay so my reply started out in good faith but then I couldn't help but use it as an excuse to gush about Cogmind[0] and the work of its author.)

But anyway, as a genre- enthusiast I don't really know what the best forums are for finding other hits in other genres. But occasionally I watch YouTube videos reviewing games similar execution to, say, King's Quest 6, and I really do think there's a rich library of high quality new games coming out in that genre.

Steam's recommendation engine has gotten better at helping you find what you're looking for, fwiw, but you still have to go looking.

A bookstore is probably a good analogy for the experience today. If you only looked at the books in the front of a bookstore, or only read the "popular" books, you might come to the conclusion that most books being written are crap. It helps to go into a bookstore armed with knowledge of what genres you like and which authors are respected for quality before you even get to the browsing stage.

[0] - https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

This is mainly a mirrored effect from movies. AAA games / blockbusters are so much safer than they used to be, but there is so much more that is so much better (by any metric) than there used to be, as well. You just have to dig beyond sales.

I don't really know what the best forums are for finding other hits in other genres.

Find a reviewer who loves some of the same games you love, see what else they like. Personally I like Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

I'm not a gamer, either, but I might say that Space Quest was my one dip into games, and I played that a lot. That was a long time ago.

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