What's your #1 issue with modern gaming?

Like, biggest complaint. Modern being anything this gen, I guess. Or last gen, at the most. I don't like woke stuff, but that's dying, so cool. Other than that, bunch of complaints, but a big one is "blockbuster" mentality over gameplay, with Sony being an obvious culprit.

What about yoos guyz

Without a doubt, micro-transactions. Particularly when they are merely unlocks of what's already on the disc itself. It's a case where they deliberately lock some of the content on the disc and only make it available after you pay a certain amount of money. Nintendo did this with Fire Emblem: Engage.

Furthermore, I hate micro-transactions that merely unlock things that would be attainable if you actually played the game. The developers of Gran Turismo 7 did this. What was even more disgusting is that, whenever you wanted to buy a car, you were asked if you wanted to unlock the car using in-game credits or real life money. When micro-transactions are that aggressive and blatant, it takes away from the experience.

Overly padded games

I would say, in general, the overall business strategies of AAA gaming publishers.

• Installment after installment of the same franchise. Why we on BLOPS 6? AssCreed 30? BF 2040-whatever?
• Neglecting established, but underused franchises. Where is Splinter Cell? Where is Legacy of Kain? Where is No One Lives Forever?
• Overblown marketing budgets.
• Overworked developers.
• Piss-poor quality of the product at release. These are games with huge budgets and years of work and thousands of people investing tens of thousands of hours into the games, there is no excuse for such pure shit quality.
• Overly large budgets in general.
• The whole "eggs in one basket" approach to many AAA games, where they invest $150 million and hope to get a couple billion out of it.
  • Why not make, oh I don't know, five or six $20-million and get a few billion out of them. You don't need much to make a good game!
• The "buy the developer so our competitor doesn't buy them" approach of consolidation.
• Focus on shareholder happiness, exclusion of customer happiness.
• The extreme protection they put on their IP's, often to the point of damaging the very communities that keep that IP alive.
• Microtransactions.
• Trend- and gimmick-chasing. "Oh, BR is popular! MAKE BR! MAKE BR! EVERYONE MAKE A BR! Our BR failed?! MAKE ANOTHER ONE CLEARLY IT WAS OUR CUSTOMER'S FAULT!
• Culture of failing upwards at higher leadership levels.
• Never learning from their mistake.
• Building games based on what the market wants, not what the developer (the people with actual vision) want.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

And look, I'm not [that] ignorant, I know this is a multi-billion dollar industry that dwarfs cinema, television, and streaming combined in terms of revenue. But you don't have to sacrifice artistic integrity and respect for the end consumer for the all-mighty dollar; you can do both, you can make a great product and make money.

Movie game mocap slop.

As someone who likes buying games on physical format it’s probably day one patches. Outside of Nintendo games most seem to be coming out with fairly large and substantial day one patches.

Gamers who are snowflakes.🤭

Being afraid to take risks.

My number 1 concern about modern day gaming is the gamers.

No Bloodborne remake or sequel so far.

Not enough games pushing physics further. TotK did a good job here but a lot more can be done. Even 2D games could be doing this. VR games have some focus on this but it can go so much further.

That's actually a new one, lol

Problem with most VR games is devs are afraid to push the envelope because of some fear of mass pukage. Pukocalypse, if you will.

That's why you gotta go with mods for VR. Just jump in and get your head twisted.

Broken, unoptimized, and unfinished games. Publishers want you to buy games at launch, but the quality of the games are telling you to stay the fuk away. They need to focus on releasing polished products.

Games designed around monetization and live service milkage suck too.

The forced woke nonsense also has to go. It is diluting the quality of the development teams and games.

Cowardly design.

Walking sections, too many cut scenes, non gaming related portions ballooning budgets which tend to curve creativity.

Not enough pixelation, too realistic.

Modern games usually aren't ambitious enough. Everything is iterative or regressive now, and you typically have to look at indie titles to find anything that helps push genres forward.

Oh, this too. There's this trend of toxic stupidity running rampant in the last few years, trying to browbeat and boycott developers who don't conform to their super conservative worldview.

In the last 20 years of shitposting, System Wars has never felt dumber than it has lately - and I'm worried that people outside of here are actually serious about this stuff. If so, the gaming community has a lot of growing up to do.

Overspending on these AAA games makes no sense! When I think of AAA games, I'm thinking 100 million - 50 million in total cost of the game itself. Developers shouldn't have to spend that much money on a single game half the budget than it needs to. Overspending can lead to years of years development. Ubisoft is guilty of spending crazy amounts of money.

At least AA & Indie games use their money development wisely because I can tell you now that Indie and AA studios are getting better at making good fun games.

Microtransactions, nickel and diming and unoptimized releases.

The same for me.

I think @mrbojangles25: summed up EVERYTHING quite well, but if we're picking one, I say bloat. So many games have about 15 hours of good ideas stretched into a 50 hour run time.

@Planeforger: You've got the wrong idea when I said gamers, has nothing to do if one has conservative views or not, it's not about "wokism" or whatever people call it these days.

Mine is more about gamers just eating up every shady practice that devs/pubs come up with and normalising it.

Just about every fucking game these days feels like their selling you half a broken game and sell the the rest of it later through dlc, and stuff you used to unlock back in the golden days of gaming the 90's devs would reward you with unlockables, now the sell you an outfit for $5 a piece.

I wish there were more RTSs. I miss the time of StarCraft, age of empires 2, dune battle for arrakis, command and conquer.

As for the rest, I am quite happy with modern gaming. I think in both quality,. access and pricing it's substantially better than before if you are Smart and patient.

The constant pandering to a vocal minority of gen Z who are to busy playing Fortnite and making tiktok videos..

And

Trying to make everything into a live service.

It's hard to pick one since modern gaming is a dumpster fire.... but probably number 1 would be the ballooning dev times/ cost. This is probably the worst gen since the 90s b/c of it.

Cinematic walking would probably be a close 2nd.

• Micro transactions on PAID games and pay to win micro transactions. I don't mind Fortnite selling skins, since they're a free to play and they don't affect the game play. I have a problem with paying $60 for a game, then having to pay like $20 for additional content. It's especially trash when some of the micro transactions are pay to win.
• Overblown budgets: the push for ultra realistic 4k gaming is regressive. I'd rather have less resolution and a unique art style, as opposed to forcing companies to have to sell 10 million to break even. As opposed to firing and overworking employees.
• Release of broken games: they do this because they can release a patch. However, I'd prefer they just delay the game.

Cinematic expirence being more important than actual gameplay… looks great in trailers but once you played a few of those games it gets old really fast!

Also chasing trends, let the artist create the game instead of trying to make every game an open world game, a BR or whatever is the hot thing around! And yeah accept that games like fortnight etc isn’t something you set out to create it just happens when a bunch of talented developers gets free reigns!

Lack of creativity in AAA space, lack of new interesting gameplay mechanics. Small indie teams are doing more innovating than the guys with 100s millions of dollars. Movie/heavy cinematic games. They aren't even video games, just bad interactive movies.

I want more focus on

• Gameplay sections
• good pacing (between action, puzzles, downtime)
• Trusting the player he's actually able to do something/see something or solve a problem without explicitely telling him what to do

I want less focus on

• CGI
• in game cutscenes
• Big name hollywood actors

The concept of microtransactions is crazy to me. We let the companies come up with bullshit prices for something that isn't real. Want some bullshit ingame currency? Can be yours for the bullshit price of 12 dollars, cause that's.. what it's worth? or something? And now we made another tier of bullshit currency that can be yours for 30 dollars. That's a great price! Or something.

And gamers are like "...ok!".

I don't want to pay more for games because developers like to sell them in a million parts after you've bought the game for full price. I'm simply not ok with that, and that means I have to refrain from getting a lot of games.

I get that others mention bugs and technical issues, but that's not even close to the same problem for me. One is an unstable game that is being fixed for free later. The other is a bullshit milking machine feeding off the dumbest of gamers, actively making gaming as a whole way worse for everyone.

An overwhelmingly minority.

1% of players spends on microtransactions and less than 0.01% are considered whales.

It's just that these people make up for such a big amount in terms of profit, and the profit/cost ratio for these small purchases is so big that it makes a big difference in the end.

@R4gn4r0k: I've no idea what the percentages are, but enough people are buying these things for devs to have them in basically all games now. Would there not be a lot of gamers paying for this bullshit, they wouldn't do this. I have no one else to blame but gamers. There are obviously more gamers out there being ok with this shit, than there are gamers who aren't. Gamers who aren't ok with this would do like me, and not get the games. I'm the minority here.

And to think they're done? Soon we will pay full price for 20% of the game. Want the full game, shell out 2000 bucks. Some games are actually already there.

AAA Publishers have flat out stopped reporting game sale numbers and only go deeper into profits from microtransactions.

Valve's Steam platform is driven in large parts by the marketplace, stuff like opening crates in Team Fortress and CS 2 which both have weapon skins.

Have you spent any money in Helldivers? Bought the deluxe edition? spent any money on super credits?

I'm not sure if I agree with "gamers are to blame" when stuff is made this easy to spend on. When games constantly scream to visit the marketplace. When fun is locked behind paying. And when everything is made harder for if you want to spend nothing on top of a full game price and easier if you do.

It's a psychological thing. Twists a few bits and bops, tweak a few tiny numbers and presto, your game is instantly made to be more alluring towards spenders. And instantly less fun if you just bought the game like a filthy peasant.

I want to buy this game but its still too expensive. I mean the complete edition should be $10 by now during sales, come on ubisoft dont u want my money.

This. Quantity over quality.

@R4gn4r0k: I haven't spent anything in HD2 apart from the initial game, and I didn't get the deluxe edition as it just included bullshit that should be free. I'm extremely against microtransactions in that game too, but the initial game is too fun to not get.

No dev needs microtransactions, but they like saying that they do to continue to milk people of extra cash. It's disgusting and I don't want to be part of it.

A few years ago I noticed how review copies didn't have in game stores. Then the game was out, it got its scores (its 8s and its 9s) and the devs release a patch to make everything way grindier, to slow down gameplay and reward mechanics and suddenly you got this game that is not very fun to play and you need to grind for hours. Well, you don't need to grind, you can just pay ;)

How shady is that?

On the other hand if some indie game cost me 10 bucks and I find myself truly having fun and I want to send some more money their way, of course I'll do that. As long as there is nothing shady about it, and they are upfront with everything.

Fact is though, the first example I listed? Those games are thriving.

The indie games I listed? They are all but gone.

The more you do in the shadows, the more you keep hidden from people and try to be shady and force people into something psycholigically, the more prosperous you become.

Saw this video last week and it haunts me because his issues are my issues.... Games, especially AAA games feel more than ever to be less original, worse writing, worse characters... Everything geared towards money farming.

I'm not saying you've gotta watch this video, but if you are mid 40s, gaming your whole life you'll be amazed how close this guy nails the dilemma.

He also touches on our own self imposed problems with the gaming industry... Namely that we follow it so close it also ruins the experiences for us. Really interesting.

@R4gn4r0k: That is extremely shady, and I try to not enable that crap as much as I possibly can while trying to maintain a toe dipped in modern gaming while dodging all the fieces flung at me from all directions.

@TheEroica: Member when AAA game design was run by passionate game designers trying to make fun shit instead of multi billion dollar businesses made to farm max amount of gold? That was a pretty cool time.

I remember it well... I often wonder what the next generation of game designers will call upon as their inspiration when making future games. Will they be further and further from the exquisite games or our past? Will they continue chasing the highly produced, dumbed down gameplay, movie approaches? Will we have a Renaissance of sorts?

I just think of the kid who's interested in the hobby having all these schmucks making concord and fortnite and wondering how the hell a kid is gonna make a good stealth action game someday. For example.

For me it's MS/Xbox being everywhere on everything and ruined System Wars since Xbox Won!! ;o

Amcry!! lol :P

Thanks Luxuryheart. I forgot about pushing 4K rapidly on an overspending budget. I personally never care for 4K at all. I just want fun, action-adventure games. I'm all in for raw graphics but as long as it makes sense for that game without overspending.

I have many, I cannot nail down one.

• Companies purchasing "timed exclusive" games.
• Style and graphics over content
• Studios expecting us to accept buggy games
• Too many "3rd party cover based action games with RPG elements"
• Too much CGI in games. If it's longer than 30 seconds, I don't want it.
• Console exclusive games

The snowflakes has validated me. Winter is coming.

all the usual stuff that we mention, repeatedly.

to be different i'm going to say the death of proper stealth games.

these days all that's left of stealth is just patches of tall grass and the ability to crouch. give the bad guys a lawn mower and it's all over

@Macutchi: The last major stealth game I can think of is Deathloop and that was a while ago. But you are correct.

That's a lot of content for 35 euro.

The base game has Norway, large parts of England and mythological sections.

DLC 1 adds Ireland

DLC 2 adds Paris

DLC 3 adds Jotunheim, which is larger than both DLC 1&2 combined.

All in all it took me 120 hours to beat this, which is pretty good I'd say. I think I spent around 120 on everything, all put together.

Bring back Tenchu.

This race to the bottom of chasing graphical fidelity with games... Games are already too expensive to make and take too long because they're so complicated. So this in turn causes most AAA games to be the same old sh*t over and over because Devs aren't willing to take the financial risk of trying something new.

Consoles like the PS5 Pro are part of the problem.

Also, games being too cinematic. Currently playing Alan Wake 2... good game but way too cinematic. A lot of AAA games seem to forget they're games, not movies.

I can’t stand how every game has microtransactions, and “seasons”. Also games seem to focus on having long cutscenes to show off graphics, but it just gets in the way of the fun aspect of gaming… the gameplay! I keep going back to older games and find them much more fun and rewarding. Modern games are designed to take advantage of dopamine receptors to essentially trick your brain into thinking you are enjoying it. Constant “unlocks” leveling up every aspect of the character, weapon or game.