Why don't games stimulate wonder anymore despite having hardware that is about a thousand times more capable than they had during the "golden age"
>>730691509the more tech has advanced the lazier people got
>games made by passionate, smart, white/asian nerdy men working 80 hour weeks vs. anything made in the modern eraYou will NEVER get another golden age of gaming. It's done and gone forever, those people are gone, and you can never recreate the circumstances.
"wonder" is surprisingly not a function of triangles per second
Because they waste all that processing power on muh realism and end up recreating outside.
>>730691509Mostly because the focus on graphical fidelity has taken time and hardware power away from other things. We're kind of used to every game looking like a movie but we're less used to games with like, simulated cities with odd characteristics or bizarre traversal methods or powerful AI or whatever but nobody really wants to spend time on that because most people judge books by their covers first.
You're just looking in the wrong places.
>>730691509Because you're a cynical balding man now.You're no longer a young naive person without any responsibilities in life.Sorry if the truth hurt.
>>730691770i'm not balding. Sounds like projection.
Budgets are too high, they can't take risks anymore
>>730691509I will never ever forget the first time mounting Flammie and flying all over the world map in Secret of Mana as a tiny little youngun. A blissful moment burned into my brain forever.https://youtu.be/rMkgyjpmqF4
Answer you want: hyperrealism leaves less room for imagination.Real answer: you're just playing bad games lol
>>730691770zoomertranny cope.
>>730691770>baldingOuted yourself zoomie
>>730691509>Why don't games stimulate wonder anymore despite having hardware that is about a thousand times more capable?There's been many discussions about this very same topic in the past, and most people have gotten to a similar conclusion:Because the work-force, ethnics and target audience started swiftly changing in the late-00s.The most notable thing is the fact that the game-dev teams we loved turned into big houses. Instead of a group of dozen or so buddies working on their cool idea, putting everything they love into their product, we now have hundreds of people doing their "job".It's no longer form of expression. It has become about over-analyzing the situation, the needs, and then trying to appeal to them.Then there's the subject of art and immersion:Essentially, I believe that there's a heavier atmosphere and more "magic" to older video games, because the primitive visuals make your imagination run wild, "filling the gaps".Silent Hill 1, Tomb Raider 2... etcm are perfect examples:even today, I can play these games and still dream about what's beyond the hills outside the mansion gates (which is a 2D wall, but whatever), but when I play some Uncharted / TLOU type of game... I don't ever think about that!I can clearly see what things are supposed to represent, and even where the explorable game world ends.Immersion is all about getting the player feel like he's "in the game", instead of observing a pixel-character moving on his screen.Perfect immersion is achieved by making the player's imagination do the heavy lifting, creating more content and context around the game's world than there's actually present. This is how the books captivate readers as well.This is why "good graphix =/= "better atmosphere and enjoyment".Showing EVERYTHING < < < showing little, but teasing the possibilities.There's some gameplay aspects to all this as well, namely how much handholding modern shit always has, killing challenge and feel of adventure.
>>730691823Have a slightly bigger tree
>>730692012thanks. had a huge one ready but it was too huge to plant on the ‘chan
Demographic changes. I remember loving early 00s gamer culture and then I got a job at gamestop in 2009 and everything I saw was cancer. The overweight feminists had taken over and the simps had let them.
>>730691753buy an ad
>>730692136Let me make a corny live-action commercial first.
>>730691509I would say that's your own brain being burned out. Plenty of games stimulate wonder in people. You're simply jaded.
Imagine how wondrous video games would have been if vidya was invented half a century earlier
>>730691509I love Final Fantasy's overdesigned magitech nonsense.
Harada talks a lot about how things have changed on his Twitter, interesting to read
>>730691509Everything needs to be explained. There's no wonder anymore cause wonder was taken away. It doesn't seem like much now, but finding the undergroumd ruins in final fantasy 6 was one of the coolest things ever
>>730691753That looks like shit.
>>730691997>>The most notable thing is the fact that the game-dev teams we loved turned into big houses. Instead of a group of dozen or so buddies working on their cool idea, putting everything they love into their product, we now have hundreds of people doing their "job".>It's no longer form of expression. It has become about over-analyzing the situation, the needs, and then trying to appeal to them.I would emphasize these points. What you need is a leader who is uncompromising on its vision. You need a guy like that who knows what kind of game he wants to make, and it's probably based on something that's not rooted in reality but more likely inspired by some movie or other thing he did in real life. It's not about recreating reality, but giving enough that's familiar from reality while creating a separate world that leaves the player with a lasting impression. They were making experiences as games, not simply working through the motions. Nowadays it's all focus tested slop. Oh this hero shooter is the most profitable and popular model and we can sustain a live service model and yadda yadda. With guys at the top who don't like games, don't play games, and are only interested in extracting as much money out of the situation as possible. It's not about fun, it's not about experience. It's about dangling a carrot in front of people and hoping they run on the treadmill long enough to generate some $$$. Games have always had a financial incentive to keep people playing, look at coin-operated arcade machines. But when it came to home consoles, games had to differentiate themselves. The ones that leaned into being an experience, that polished their gameplay and story and atmosphere and all that other good stuff, the ones that last an impression wound up being the ones that would shape the future of gaming. All it takes is for a game like say, Resident Evil 4, to complete flip the game industry on its head. People have been chasing that experience for a while.
>>730691509FNAF, Undertale and FromSoft seemed to stimulate wonder in people judging by all the YouTubers who've made a career out of speculating over their worlds.
>>730692271>overdesignedI’ve seen many posters for different games use this word to describe character designs, using it as a criticism. That is to say, there are people out there now consciously demanding LESS imaginativeness and creativity.I don’t know what the the fuck happened and where it all went so terribly wrong man.
>>730692410>it stirs wonder because YouTube sloppersZoomers were a mistake.
For me personally it was growing up and learning the constraints of the systems and their development. Being a kid I was fairly dumb and my expectations weren't burdened by things like "is this thing actually possible on the hardware of the time" or "is a developer really going to include this in their game", so I could believe stupid shit like "if I can find a way to get the arwing off this track I can see even more of the planet" or "the world of this game is more complex than the little snippet I can see".Hell, even when I was a teenager I was still like this. I remember playing around in the Doom 3 level editor and trying to make a rudimentary projector, only to be confused that whatever I put on the transparent thing in front of the light source wasn't automatically projected.Nowadays I've seen and played enough games to know roughly what to expect, so there's not really that much wonder any more.
>>730691770Why is there always a post like this, it doesn't matter how the discussion goes, they will come back and post this exact same thing every time.>but I'm rightYou're not very good at defending your position then because I've never seen good arguments for this.
>>730692340Finding random recipies in witcher 3 in fullly mapped out, quest marker driven areas is NOT the same as finding things in uncharted, unknown lands just isnt the same
>>730692450I have a character designer friend talking about designs from the 90s and early 2000s being "outdated" and how we've evolved and improved since then, and I really don't understand what he means by that.
>>730692517>Why is there always a post like thisBecause GenZ has never created anything truly new and sincere.They can only leech off old products of old masters, and now leave the creative work to literal artificial intelligence.They cannot fathom there being people who are passionate and skilled in their craft. They have also not witnessed the complete devolution and decline of the gaming industry happen the past 25 years, having grown during the casual slop era.
>>730692560>and I really don't understand what he means by that.He doesn't either.
>>730691509Because the culture that creates games like that has been extinguished.
>>730692517Because you're a cynical balding man now.You're no longer a young naive person without any responsibilities in life.Sorry if the truth hurt.>>730692517
>>730691613You people are so negative lmfao. I completely disagree, and it’s increasingly obvious to me that the great age of gaming WILL come back evidenced by all of the amazing indie games being made right now. I’m sure you’ll make fun of this post but it’s true. AA games are coming back in a big way.
>>730691632Precisely why modern games are failing.
>>730692851which games are failing?
>>730692769Yeah, I share your optimism. AAA games may be a lost cause, but overall tons of good games are still coming out. And all the old games are still around and easily playable. It's a great time to love games.There is some sadness seeing a lack of evolution compared to the past, where a decade was a massive leap and the biggest studios were way more free to be creative. But overall games will be fine.
>>730691770>Because you're a cynical balding man now.Xth post best postWhen you're a kid, you get taken in by the novelty and wonderAs an adult, you've seen it all before and don't give a shit
>>730692284I mean yeah, corporate game dev has been fucked for a good while now. It's why I've been very happy to see the most notable names still in the business drop off and start their own small studios and copycat series. I'm hoping that's what Harada's unspoken plans are. He deserves to make games the way he enjoys. All devs do.
>>730692769Indie games are mostly pretty small in scope, sticking to 2D platformers or more archaic RPG design that's been around since the 80s. Not that that type of game design is bad. Some of the best games ever made are 2d platformers and turn based RPGs. But beyond that, they are often extremely derivative of the games they're borrowing from, often labeling themselves as spiritual successors. Now I know games in general tend to borrow from each other, that's nothing new. But as far as indie visionaries that completely reshape how we think of gaming...we've yet to really see anything like that. Everyone was wanking off Clair Obscur but I don't really think that's the one to bring forward the revolution. There are tons of cool indie games don't get me wrong, but so far it doesn't feel like they've even hit the highs of old school pixel art even when they DO keep it simple. Most of the indie games now are imitating PS1 era but not a single one has come close to Ps1/n64/dreamcast level classic games. They lack the experience, they lack the teams, they lack the resources to make games of that scale. A lot of them can make pretty good games, but I'm not seeing "the revolution". I do think they are some of the few people making decent games though. Just a lot of room for improvement as well. I have more hope for indies than I do the AAA industry getting their act together, that's for sure. But then they might just try and rebrand themselves as indies and focus on smaller scale projects. Which once again I don't see THAT bringing forward the revolution. The late 90s/early 2000s had a lot of momentum behind them, and a lot of experienced developers that had worked on huge games, who would then go on to pioneer their own huge games. We need that kind of momentum again for indie games, they need to build on that experience and keep aiming larger while keeping the vision in tact.
You've simply outgrown Neverland, anons.
>>730693229nahhttps://youtu.be/YCPDVVLUw-4
I graduated high school 18 years ago. Things just get progressively worse.
>>730692886"AAA" trash games.
>>730692284Is this the more mature medium American journalists wanted?
Nu-game devs dont have any natural life experience to pull from anymore so they just copy other video games. There's no wonder in making another Soulslike or Metroidvania
>>730693375I graduated a year before you. Some things do suck compared to the past, but it's not all worse, and it's still possible to find joy in this world.
>>730692485>the Doom 3 level editor and trying to make a rudimentary projector, only to be confused that whatever I put on the transparent thing in front of the light source wasn't automatically projected.Anon are you serious? Even as a kid I would be like "nah there's no way they did this" in every game, my mind was blown when I saw that if you fire an arrow in Ocarina of Time through the flames it becomes a flame arrow, like the game showed me very early that it wasn't realistic at all and very limited, this had no business being there.
>>730692759>Because you're a cynical balding man now.This is what happens every single time, there's no argument so you just accuse everyone disagreeing with the insult you started with.Your beliefs are just a gut feeling, every time someone says>I never played this old game before and I think it's amazing now>I'm a zoomer and playing this old game I have no nostalgia for and I think it's way better than what comes out todayThere's no response, because what you believe is based on emotions only.The only thing you can reply to this is something about seething balding man or just stay quiet I guess, then continue to post the same thing in another thread.
>>730692930>AAA games may be a lost causeAAA games were never good, there were no AAA games before the 7th gen.
>>730693616Besides popularity, I think the reason indie devs make so many Metroidvanias is that it actually used to be a fairly uncommon genre in the 90s and early 2000s. Metroidvanias felt special, especially since the most well known ones were great games like Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. So every kid growing up with those wanted to make their own.I still want to make a Tomba-like someday, that's a Metroidvania variation that never got built on much (and Oney's Bowlbo probably is never coming out). Though there is at least one: DoubleShakehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZbZspPH-gU
>>730693780And the same anecdotes can be found in reverse.. >I thought all modern games sucked then I played this cool gameTry harder.
>>730693963>I thought all modern games sucked then I played this cool gameLiterally made up because it never happened, which also doesn't dispute the claim that older games were better.Even if we're on equal terms, saying that old games were bad and you're just nostalgic is incorrect.>I'm not saying they were bad, just not better than current gamesFactually incorrect when you label liking old games as nostalgia.You seem to believe your opinion is based on statistics or facts, since you're dismissing counter examples as "anecdotes", but keep in mind, what you're saying is a gut feeling based in absolutely nothing.
>>730693865Eh, you can debate terminology if you want, but just substitute "high budget games for the time" if you prefer. If you want to sit here and tell me that every high budget game in the past sucked, you can do that and be a contrarian jackass, but most people will agree there were a lot of great high budget games back in the 90s and 2000s.
>>730694175>If you want to sit here and tell me that every high budget game in the past suckedAbsolutely not, I'm with you on this one, I'm just saying that since AAA was born it has never been good with notable exceptions.I guess you have a point since AAA displaced AA from the industry. As there's no point for big companies to make small games with smaller budgets when they could hit it big.
>>730694259Yeah then I agree with you 100%. I've barely played AAA games for over a decade now.
>People saying it's because we're old and jaded.Then how come I can still get the sense of wonder from old games then?Checkmate nerds.
>>730694490>People saying it's because we're old and jaded.It's just zoomer cope because they can't comprehend older games with worse graphics feeling better than modern games, it literally mindbreaks them. Then when they can't give old games a chance they dismiss them as slop.
>>730691509FFVII is a very gullible game. It openly talks about "spirit energy" and "the planet's will" etc.I love science but I dislike how institutional everything has become and how we've brainfucked ourselves with rigid schooling and facts-oriented knowledge and secularism.I'll never believe in christianity, let alone a deity, but I have to admit there was something great about people still being able to openly say "I believe there is something between heaven and earth" and you don't hear people say that much now that kids that were raised with science are parents raising their own kids with facts and science.
>>730691509Because your wonder glands are short-circuited by pornography and entitlement. And also most developers don't go for a sense of wonder anymore, they go for what research has determined will get the most sales.
>>730694795The scientific method was never meant to be a religion. It was invented by the religious in order to have a means to observe, quantify, and interrogate the natural world.
>>730691613Something similar will happen again but it will take another World War and parenting 2-3 generations afterwards. A lot of what we see, even in Zelda games like Majora's Mask and Wind Waker are passed down reflections and lessons on the peaceful world order. At the start of Wind Waker there's a pretty evocative line where your old teacher says "In times of old our people fought great wars. But we don't do that anymore. Now we live in times of peace."The problem is that Gen X and Millenials don't really remember a time with real fear and conflict that wasn't kind of isolated or not happening where we live, but Sakaguchi is still close enough to a post WW2 society that he could look at his country, and have conversations with all his peers and go "Yup, these are precious times, BUT WE MUST NOT FORGET..."I think a lot of the "wonder" comes from that. New fiction is too jaded and self-absorbed, because we base it off of things we didn't understand, and we haven't been punched in the face enough to take our own stories seriously.
>>730694795Sure man, go buy you some magic crystals too.
>>730695001Yes, but science has replaced faith because faith was how we explained the world once, and people actually believed in it. The more people knew that it's all spiriual bullshit the more they found a maturity in not indulging too much in it.But I think especially lately people, even outside of the MAGA right, do recognize like "I kinda miss believing in something." A huge part of why childhood is magical is because you don't know much yet, and everything feels huge and exploratory. A big loss for us humans is that all landmasses have been charted. That's why we love talking about space, and why people want to be "progressive". It's the need for there to be something left we're heading towards, but now it's an issue like Climate Change where we're just unfucking stuff we did ourselves. That makes it feel kind of purposeless to a lot of people I think, especially because we're not expanding outward, but telling ourselves to stop and limit ourselves.
>>730691509Because you grew up, you fucking retard.
>>730695398I like those quotes"Faith in god... Do not look for it on the outside... It comes from theinside...""Anyway, we have things we have to do too, now. And, while we do them,let's prey thateveryone comes back safely.To god?No... to your own innermost feelings that everyone believed in... What'swrong?"
>>730691509>OP posts marketing lies Here's what the actual game looks like.
>>730691770Gottem!
>>730695824
>>730694490Because you're nostalgic for the time when you still felt wonder and there are abstract aesthetic triggers that evoke those feelings. For gen X it was ugly pixel shit, for Millenials it was low poly PS1/PS2 games and for zoomers it'll be ugly shit like Minecraft and Fortnite.I can play ace combat 3 and it'll evoke the same turn of the millennium tech optimism because I link those themes and that production ig animation with ghost in the shell and the golden age of anime, a younger zoomer isn't going to feel any of that.
>>730691509My theory is it's because of the over-reliance on concept art. The 3D guys now just replicate the concept art that is designed using industry standard visual shorthands so everything feels safe and standardized.
>>730692886ConcordNigger Creed
>>730695824Nostalgiafags will tell you R ruined the setting.
>>730696490cant imagine an appledamn
>>730696141Did you think they weren't using concept art for PS1 games? If anything the reliance on concept art was much higher in older games and has given way to a new generation of concept artists who just photobash generic shit or kitbash some lazy 3d environment and render it in blender.
>>730691509Corporate control, meddling, commodification, etc. of any modern game with a halfway reasonable budget.Too many suits and non-programmers/non-artists making calls that homogenize games into generic slop instead of art.
>>730696834I can imagine 6,000,000 apples being gassed in Germany and then imagine it was actually only 270,000 apples mostly due to disease and starvation.
>>730692517>what's 2+2>4>Why is there always a post like this, it doesn't matter how the discussion goes, they will come back and post this exact same thing every time.Are you retarded?
>>730696490That is correct.
>my hecking setting is le ruined!
>>730695824the marketing(and cgi cutscenes) informs your subconscious so when you play it, you accept the 12 polygons as the airship. and in 30 years, your memory of the whole game is the marketing images.
>>7306969244chan ate my post but new games just have that concept art look. Like they come off an assembly line. Or maybe that's just UEAnyway I'm reminded of this video from 13 years ago where Feng Zhu talks about how they have to dumb down environment design to guide the player. It just seems more relevant than everwww.youtube.com/watch?v=mmff8bBCYW4
>>730691509Because you're 35 years old now
>>730691509Games are no longer largely made by creative and wordly people from various backgrounds, they're made by people who grew up with them who can only (poorly) copy the games from the past.
monkeys saw this and said "ack i would prefer colourful elevators instead"
>>730693223Outer Wilds is one of the best games ever made, and is like nothing that came before.
>>730691509Ever since 7th generation consoles focused on graphics, processing power, and realisim creativity went out the window.You know all those AA Japanese games that were everywhere during the SNES/Playstation/Playstation 2 era? Those died the moment the Xbox 360 focused on Call of Duty and realistic brown games. For a period handhelds like the Vita and 3DS held their ground but they were doomed the moment smartphones had real hardware and data plans were accessible.The biggest meme from Square at that time is "doing towns in high definition is way too hard, so we're going to make our games be hallway simulators with cutscenes" Even Final Fantasy XV with its suppose open world had one fucking major down with Insomina being cut from the final product because it's too hard. You can't explore 99% of buildings in GTA because it's too hard. Putting dense meaningful content in open world games is too hard. I think the last games I felt the sense of adventure were Witcher 3 and Dragon Quest XI.
>>730692450If you were making a killer robot you wouldn't cover every single part of the surface with decorations and shit. Nothing in FF games post 7 or so just looks functional. Look at lightning's swotd. I'm not complaining, I like it, but it's how they are.
>>730698343Feng Zhu himself is a bit of a joke among concept artists because his design process became pretty lazy and nondescript, then he started a school that pumped out a billion Feng Zhu clones who all made generic artwork. Modern concept art in general is efficiency and fidelity before fresh ideas or actual content, it's hard to make new or interesting shit so they rely on easily replicable tricks to impress. The change you saw wasn't a new reliance on concept art it was a shift in the type of concept art that was favoured, less stylistic and wholly original and more a hyper realistic kitbash of photos and 3d models.
They did ruin the setting for 85% of the game thoughever.
>>730691613>white/asiankill yourself
