Games that push the medium in some way today - Truly bigger and better games

[Xarpho's Return]

When it comes to video games, people often talk about the "golden age" of video games, roughly 1995-2005 (generally), and although people often talk about what games were released or the output of high-quality titles was much greater than today or the general zeitgeist, it's also the fact that games were getting better as a whole, to do things no one dreamed of just five years prior.

Too many people try to recapture the "golden age" by creating retro-style games (and there's a lot of them), which isn't and wasn't the point. Doom wasn't the success it was because it was a fast-paced FPS where you could pick up health packs and ammo, it was because it pushed the envelope and set standards for what an FPS game SHOULD be.

I got the idea of this from thinking of how the physics engine from NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup (2004) was so good that you could try stuff from playing around with the game and have it actually work in real life. In the past 10-15 years there have been some great titles among the dark age, but rarely is there something that feels like a real improvement beyond what anyone else had done before.

The closest I can think of something really pushing the envelope and doing something different is Factorio for its autistic abstracted mechanics while performing all the real-time calculations to work properly, but I can't think of any other games like that. There some more "simulation" games like American Truck Simulator and train simulators but those require a ton of DLC to really cook.

I may be rambling, but I'm pretty sure there is a real difference in upcoming games and how every year they felt bigger and better, and in many cases, they were. How many of these games exist today?

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Interesting thread idea, but that NASCAR example is huge overreach in my opinion. Like, the list of racing games allowing for wallrides is very very long. If I am not mistaken, NASCAR Racing 2003 Season has had a much more groundbreaking physics engine. That game's physics engine was refined with input from NASCAR team engineers, and it later became part of the lineage leading toward iRacing.

I reckon most genuine boundary-pushing and innovation in the past 10 years has been made in areas that are not overtly beneficial for the player.
I'm thinking of things like crossplay, social media integration, monetization schemes, player retention techniques, procedural generation...

EDIT: Added sources for my claims re: NASCAR

EDIT:
I just remembered. There are at least two cases within the past 10 years of pushing the envelope.
Half-Life Alyx and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

the "golden age" of video games, roughly 1995-2005 (generally)

I think it's more like the start of 16-bit vidya to just before "social media" when mainstream. So more like 1990 to 2010 then?

 

[Gan Ying]

Half-Life Alyx

It's kind of wild that despite being the first real killer app for VR, we're 6 years out from Half-Life Alyx and there's been no followup and not even any successful clones. Everyone playing VR games at all is still just playing Beat Saber. I just don't think VR is catching on anytime soon.

 

[funwithshemales69]

Nothing push the medium today cause they all perfectly fit into genre and mechanic boxes. Some people can say that "the frontier has been conquered" but I dont think so since its an artistic medium like film and art, growth is outwards, its not a materialistic medium like tech where growth is linear. I really like what Miyamoto and Ed Mcmillen said, game mechanics must be inspired by real life, thats sorta how they evolve and change. Games need mechanical innovation instead of recycling and incest-ising genres together, stuff needs to change. We're currently in the stagnation phase which happened to movies in the late 50s where they stuck to few genres and didnt innovate. So theres probably a revolution around the corner but rn things are shit. The PS2 was probably the best gen cause there was in equal parts formula and innovation. I guess today, Mewgenics comes close to innovation cause Ive genuinely never seen something which nails turn based battles with a breeding simulator so well.

 

[libRT]

It's kind of wild that despite being the first real killer app for VR, we're 6 years out from Half-Life Alyx and there's been no followup and not even any successful clones. Everyone playing VR games at all is still just playing Beat Saber. I just don't think VR is catching on anytime soon.

I don't know what it is about VR, but it just isn't as good playing it. I didn't like Alyx (never finished it), didn't finish metro, or into the radius. I do go back to contractors VR every so often though, theres a new PVE mode that I want to try out

 

[regalterry]

Ignoring the quality of the writing and the politics of the devs, in the realm of cRPGs you arguably have Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3.

The former does the pushing by eschewing most of the genre's conventions and taking a novel approach to character building and how that impacts your playthrough and the later pushes the envelope in terms of sheer scale and reactivity.

Neither game is perfect, it's very easy to point out faults with both, but if we are only looking at them as trendsetters other cRPGs are now attempting to emulate, then they did push gaming forward.

Cyberpunk 2077 is we look at it as a GTA "clone", mostly because it introduces immersive sim map and mission designs, RPG-esque choices and consequences, skill checks and character builds to the urban open world genre. As an RPG, it is a failure in most aspects though.

 

[FPTMIU]

the "golden age" of video games, roughly 1995-2005 (generally),

I recall when people said 80s-90s were the golden age

 

[Hopkinsville Goblin]

The closest I can think of something really pushing the envelope and doing something different is Factorio for its autistic abstracted mechanics while performing all the real-time calculations to work properly, but I can't think of any other games like that. There some more "simulation" games like American Truck Simulator and train simulators but those require a ton of DLC to really cook.

If you like Factorio but would rather have an FPS-style experience, check out Satisfactory. I can't believe how many machines I can have, all building things, practically stretching out as far as the eye can see. The hand-made map is huge but as you make upgrades it gets easier to get around and navigate.

Also I really like the aliens in this game. I wish there was even more diversity. You can tame these derpy little lizard doggos and then they find stuff for you. I think they're based on the Alfa 177 canines from Star Trek.

 

[Hypercop]

I have tons of ideas for how to evolve certain game genres forwards, but nothing mind-blowing like VR or whatever.

For instance, if you're doing a top-down, 2D pixel art game, rather than having everything be the same elevation, you could have player velocity tied to a height map so that it gradually slows down when you're going up the curve of a hill, speeds up when you're approaching the bottom etc.
There are billions of abandoned unique combat systems in RPGs that you could just steal and bust out the pen & paper to fix all their flaws.
You could make a 2D RPG with fighting game combat.
You could make a first-person turn-based game with 'ATB combat' where you attack different limbs, V.A.T.S. style
etc.

Wasn't quite sure what I was expecting with the "Indie Renaissance", but I was kind of shockingly disappointed in the end. Binding of Isaac might have fucked us, because every indie game of the past 15 years just saw Binding of Isaac and said, "You know what, let's just do that exact same thing but in a different artstyle! And we add crafting!"

 

[FPTMIU]

But I will say, I disagree on the topic of the way people making retro-style games being wrong. Because I do not think they are trying to make a game that is actually as revolutionary as DOOM was. There are two sides to this, we are indeed lacking games that were pushing the envelope as hard. But the games you mention are moreso from people who miss this style of gameplay from old FPSes and want to bring it back (Now, sadly the retro-style FPS scene has been completely taken over trannies and faggots and now we only have gay shit like ultrakill and "too many f*cking nazis" and they barely even work like actual retro-fps games anymore).

To clarify, I'm a zoomer who spent a significant portion of his childhood playing games from the 80s and early 90s. The thing I always liked about those games was the simplicity of the core game mechanics, the shorter lengths and the immediacy. I liked when games were more simplistic in controls, less focused on narrative and were more often curated, shorter expierences rather than the 80 hour slogs that make up gaming these days. There isn't really any game I can just pop open, play and beat in the same sitting that is made in the last 2 decades in the same way that you could for the average NES or Genesis game. Handhelds used to be the last place for this, but the switch and steam deck killed that industry. Now all we have is indieslop that doesn't actually replicate any of what I mentioned and are just modern games in a pixellated coat.

That might be the reason I quite enjoy roguelikes, because they tend to be the closest to what I mentioned in the modern gaming scene. But it's still not truly the same IMO.

 

[Autistic Gunspergings]

It's kind of wild that despite being the first real killer app for VR, we're 6 years out from Half-Life Alyx and there's been no followup and not even any successful clones. Everyone playing VR games at all is still just playing Beat Saber. I just don't think VR is catching on anytime soon.

The big problem with VR in general is the added effort it takes to play VR games, IMO. most people play games to relax, and I dont think they want to flail their arms around with a bulky chunk of plastic on their head after a long day, and thats a big obstacle to making VR truly mainstream the way other mediums are.

I also will not rule out Meta's market consolidation of VR and trying way too hard to cater towards anyone but people who use VR to play video games have hurt the industry as well. The Quest's hardware reqs. are way more restrictive than PCVR and the walled-off nature of the quest's ecosystem makes both proliferation and Iteration of games harder than it really should.
If Meta weren't owned by Zuckerberg, I would bet that there probably would've been an Atari-level crash in the VR market by now. I genuinely wonder if they're ever gonna pull the plug on their VR division.
I think the only realistic way you are gonna see VR pivot towards even having a chance at becoming "mainstream" is if someone can make a headset for PCVR that is genuinely affordable AND can compete with the Quest in quality/value, but until meta stops selling their headsets at a major loss I dont think you are gonna see that happen anytime soon.

 

[FPTMIU]

The big problem with VR in general is the added effort it takes to play VR games, IMO. most people play games to relax, and I dont think they want to flail their arms around with a bulky chunk of plastic on their head after a long day, and thats a big obstacle to making VR truly mainstream the way other mediums are.

This has always been my opinion yet for some reason it's only in recent years that people realize this. I called this out when VR was getting pushed hard in the mid-2010s.

There's also just the fact that VR ironically feels more limiting than playing with a controller. Walking, which the most basic and simple mechanic in any game ever made, becomes a herculean task for VR to make natural. Either you limit yourself to the amount of space you have in your room which means that the game needs to be designed around a single confined space, or you have the controller sticks contol where you walk which leads to a horrific, motion sickness inducing effect. When the core gimmick of 90% of VR games is "This is how we make walking not miserable!", it just makes the whole medium look like a joke.

 

[Mark Goldbridge]

Graphics/Graphics Cards and how they shifted from a gaming thing to a valuable commodity within a few years definitely nuked the gaming industry. They've had to pivot between spending years on graphics to try to keep up with the latest games and then to need to scale them back because nobody can afford the best graphics cards.

 

[PrimeRadiant]

Im waiting for LLM technology to be applied systematically to an open world RPG. Imagine being able to have proper conversations with NPCs, and actual dynamically created quests and events.

 

[Sneaky lurker]

Lowkey stealing all your ideas

 

[Dagoth AMOGUS]

One good way to increase the stakes of modern vidya is to introduce real world consequences for losing or winning. So far this only includes gambling. But what if you got some kind of “shock” for failing a parry? Or missing a jump?

 

[regalterry]

The big problem with VR in general is the added effort it takes to play VR games, IMO. most people play games to relax, and I dont think they want to flail their arms around with a bulky chunk of plastic on their head after a long day, and thats a big obstacle to making VR truly mainstream the way other mediums are.

The problems with VR are multiple. The first and biggest one is the entry price, you need a reasonably powerful PC to run the hardware, on top of having to purchase the headset and controllers.

You also need enough room to flail around like a 'tard, which is not a guarantee for many people.

Then there's the issue of motion sickness, for which there really is no solution beyond toughing it out until you get used to it, unless you're unlucky and can't overcome the issue.

Besides Alyx there's also no killer exclusives for it, and most people can't justify the entry price and requirements just to play one game, nor do most people see the point of investing so much to experience games that play fine with a normal controller in VR.

There's also the shame factor, people playing games in VR look goofy and the overall experience looks clunky.

It's an interesting curiosity, but unlike what sci-fi writers predicted, it's not going to be the next big thing in entertainment.

Im waiting for LLM technology to be applied systematically to an open world RPG. Imagine being able to have proper conversations with NPCs, and actual dynamically created quests and events.

I do wish to see how something like that would pan out.

There's already mods for a few games that let you do this, but it's obviously of limited use since the rest of the game wasn't designed or modded to make use of this.

There's also the ongoing challenge of keeping the tone of the writing consistent, the LLM not hallucinating things, memory and context lengths, costs involved - a reasonably "smart" model that can do the task acceptably is not going to be cheap.

It could also be a QA headache, since there's no way for the developers to predict how the AI would disseminate critical quest information.

I'd still love to see someone make a serious attempt to implement it.

 

[Gan Ying]

I recall when people said 80s-90s were the golden age

Nostalgia value is a sliding scale and all, but to be honest there just aren't that many really good 80s video games. The best ones of the era were all much improved in the 90s, such as Zelda, Castlevania, or Final Fight. The simpler games like Pac-Man and Tetris may be the best of the 80s since they were conceptually perfect right away.

There's also a little less variety since the technology and innovation didn't move as fast in the 80s compared to the 90s. It's a pretty big jump from 1980 to 1989, but its an absolutely massive leap from 1990 to 1999.

 

[ringtones]

It's a pretty big jump from 1980 to 1989, but its an absolutely massive leap from 1990 to 1999.

it's not as massive as you think it was. The industry took a giant shit in the shift from 2d to 3d graphics. The psx was chock full of shovelware. The Saturn and Dreamcast had multiple games that were 3d for no reason other than "games have to be 3d now because that's what's popular". Many games on the n64 were far shittier than they should have been because that console sucked ass at sprite-based graphics. Consoles took a huge shit.

You're looking at the difference between the regression to rudimentary 3d and its final form, but you're not seeing the huge step down from 2d it took to get to that starting point.