So when I was a kid in the 80s, I would always get SUPER excited for getting a new game.
We’d get in the car, drive to Toys R Us, and in the video game section was basically an homage to Nintendo. So much so that the descriptors at the end of the isles didn’t say “video games”, it said “Nintendo”. Sure, they sold Sega and Atari too…but it was the Nintendo isle.
So you’d pick your game, and on the drive home you would flip through your new game manual. Remember game manuals??? You’d learn all about this new world. Who was this “Zelda” if the main character was a boy??? What kind of world was this??? It looks HUGE!!! DO YOU SEE ALL THESE DIFFERENT ENEMIES???
Finally (after like 10 minutes), you’d get home. You’d race to the door, only for you to realize that you need dad to unlock the door. Now, dad was probably walking at a normal pace, but to a hyper 6 year old excited to play with his new toy, he may as well have been a dried out turtle. Or a sloth.
FINALLY he opens the front door, and you go rushing to the TV. You put the cartridge in, and you’re ready to play. You turn the power on, and you’re already at the name screen. After you put in the name “Dork”, because you’re an edgy 80s kid, you’re already in front of a cave. Oh god…what’s in there??? How do I fight monsters??? THE BUTTONS DO NOTHING!!! Oh god, oh god, here we go, we’re going in the cave…
And you all know how it plays out from there.
These days, it’s a bit different. These days a game gets announced and you wait for release day. Then you turn on your console, and you buy the game. Now you gotta wait for an hour for it to download. Thats assuming your console doesn’t need an update. So now you’re waiting…and waiting…and waiting…
Eventually it’s all done, and you boot the game up, but theres a day 1 update. So more waiting. FINALLY after an hour and a half it’s done.
So you boot it up, and you don’t get that same sense of wonderment. It’s because todays games have been done to death. Every game is a post appocolytic shooter where the emphisis is on online play. So now you already know what you’re getting, and you gotta wait again for online lobbies to start.
And when Nintendo released the Super Nintendo it was a radical jump in performance in every sense on a platform that was revolutionary to start with. It was must have technology.
Now, 50% of PS4 users haven’t upgraded to a newer system. And why? Because the PS5 looks like a slight visual upgrade in apperance, and zero upgrade in performance. Games look and feel mostly the same as they would on PS4. And the games are all the same. Microtransactions, unimaginative plots, forgetable characters, sequals reboots prequals. We’re seeing the same franchises, with the same characters doing the same things for 30 years. Mario is still saving the princess for Bowser. At this point, Peach is just LETTING herself get kidnapped. Zelda is going to save Link now in the new game…which would be a new concept, playing as Zelda, except Shiek was Zelda the whole time. Oops, spoilers on a 26 year old game.
Breath of the Wild had that samr sense of childhood wonder. But only if you actively avoided online discussions, youtube videos, social media. It was a barrage of avoiding spoilers, but I did it, and March 3rd 2017 was GLORIOUS. It’s also the last time I felt that need to get a new console.
I regretted buying a PS4, but for some stupid reason I bought a PS5 this year. I regret it. I see no system seller.
And thats another thing. Why can’t the games give you the option to play from disc, rather than install everything? Most games are like 50-100gb. It eats up storage REAL quick. Now you gotta decide "ok, which games do I want to delete, and which am I going to use soon?
Theres NO reason for me to justify 45gb on my hard drive for the PS4 version of Madden 19, when all I do is play exhibition. But I also don’t want to delete it, and reinstall it every few months on the off chance I want yo play 20 minutes of 1 game.
Sure, maybe Madden diehards get use out of that 45gb. I do not. I don’t play season. I do give a shit about those madden cards. I only play exhibition, 1 game, maybe once every 4 months. Same with NHL. Same with MLB.
Why must I take up like 200gb for games I play casually and sparingly, and almost ALWAYS have to sit through an update before I throw the ball? I don’t even care about roster updates. Unless they’re on Cleveland’s team, I don’t know any of these players. I don’t give a shit that Joe Whatshisname used to play for Chicago, but now he plays in New York.
I just want to pop in the disc, and play. No bullshit.
I wish Madden 95 worked on the SNES classic. It’s the last SNES version that Cleveland had a team.
But instead now, every single game comes with forced bullshit
TLDR: Agree on many points but also you are wrong in some things. Certain parts of AAA gaming make modern games feel like a chore or feel bad compared to how AAA games used to feel. But also the market of games is flooded and making more money than ever before.
Regarding some of your points:
I get what you’re saying, but you’re also wrong. There are so many games out there these days that vary widely in art, style, design, gameplay, etc. There have literally never been so many different kinds of game on the market at once. Now, I agree that AAA studios are mostly only making “safe” games they know will sell, and I too am upset that companies these days are so risk adverse that they will refuse to make a new game as experimental as something like Illbleed, but thats what happens when a hobby goes mainstream and investors that are greedy get invovled.
Because load times would be astronomical. Disk read speeds are still slow, way slower than solid state drive read speeds. Your 10 second loading screens would be longer than 45 seconds, even the PS1 would probably load games faster. In this case, some data may not be loaded completely by the time the game decides to let you in, as some assets in games now are streamed from the drive as needed instead of being loaded directly into RAM at the start of a scene. Relying on a slow mechanical disk laser to stream that data in a manner that wouldn’t cause crashing or missing assets would not be feasible. They could try solid storage but that comes with its own caveats and increased manufacture price.
I agree, but also games have big textures and better quality audio these days compared to the old days. Sure, not all games need that, but if storage space is a complaint then play any one of the ten trillion indie card battlers. The bigger files also increase load times, more data in general needs more time to search and load.
I agree, predatory monetization sucks. The only times I am okay with inclusion of MTX/Lootbox/Gachapon etc is if the game is free. The developers have to make money somehow. I play occasional gacha games, usually developed for mobile devices but I like to play on PC. I really enjoyed Super Mecha Champions, but they will probably be ending support sometime soon as they have gone into maintenance mode. But I have been very surprised with Zenless Zone Zero. I kinda hate how much I like the game, honestly.
Point is, while I agree that MTX suck, in a free game its acceptable IMO because the developers have to make money. Gacha is really big in Asian culture, and I am not one to police someone else’s culture or say what they do is bad, its just different. MTX on any paid game is just sad though.
---------BotW Rant-----------
IMO Breath of the Wild was a terrible Zelda game. Like, Zelda II Adventure of Link bad, not Wand of Gamelan bad though. It isn’t a bad game in general, I would give it maybe a 5 or 6 out of 10 (unlike many people today I actually like to use all 10 numbers), it just felt average because it was. I laughed like a maniac when Tears of the Kingdom cane out and made Breath of the Wild look like a sad tech demo, and every reviewer that gave BotW a high score now suddenly looked like the biggest idiot on the planet because they were scoring TotK the same despite it being the clearly better game.
Zelda, ever since the 3rd game in its series, followed a clear formula. When people bought a Zelda game after Link to the Past, they had an idea of what to expect. Its like people going to a burger joint because they know they sell burgers. BotW though, deleted all of that in an attempt to go back and repeat what only ONE game in the entire Zelda franchise up to that point had done. A game that the franchise had largely moved on from, it had built upon that concept in its later iterations. BotW was a downgrade, because a lot of people going to that same burger joint were now suddenly getting served ground beef, without any of the other ingredients in a burger.
TotK was much better in being an actual Zelda game, but it still was missing a lot of what people expect from a Zelda game. No real, large and elaborate dungeons, just a pitiful attempt (albeit still a better attempt than BotW) at a 4 room “dungeon.” No pieces of heart, no hookshot or magic instrument, no bottles to collect, etc. It felt like I was playing an Ubisoft open world game cosplaying as a Zelda game.
-----------BotW Rant Over------------