Stop playing repetitive, competitive, multiplayer games. Especially the battle royale style ones.
Oh you just played another 20 minute match where you died to someone out of nowhere at the end, possibly a cheater, shouted bullshit at the screen, didn't win and didn't achieve anything? Better re queue to do it again! Hey while you're in the menus, do you want a new £15 skin? Do you want the battlepass QUICK BEFORE ITS GONE! THE SKINS WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY IF THE CONSTANT LOSSES DONT. I wonder why you're bored and depressed with gaming.
The most popular steam games? Constant repetitive, competitive, multiplayer games. "I do the same thing with the same guns on the same map every day and I'm bored. Gaming is boring."
competitive, multiplayer games. “I do the same thing with the same guns on the same map every day and I’m bored. Gaming is boring.”
Sounds a lot like football, except for the guns. Opposing team has new skins for every game, but the game loop is exactly same for every game, all the game. And the map, oh gods, the map! Notice the singular? Yeah, there's actually just one map. Some background textures change, but functionally it's always the same green rectangle with some lines drawn over.
My point, if I had one, would be that "boring, repetitive multiplayer games" are so much fun, for so many, that calling people to stop playing them is an exercise in futility.
That said, I find them un-fun, too. Mostly because I constantly get my ass kicked, but also because I enjoy slower, 4x and plot driven games more. To each their own.
See I tend to gravitate toward creative games. Minecraft is a little too open for me, but something like Satisfactory where "Here's a few square miles. Build a factory in it." can keep me going for months.
tbh I'd rather play a game like this where every round is a new experience or a different strategy than play a half baked "RPG" that holds no roleplay, no stakes, no difficulties or no strategies.
I mean that's more of an issue with the horrific monetization of those games, their abuse of FOMO, and shit matchmaking (and/or the player's shit skill). There's nothing wrong with the genre itself, some people just genuinely enjoy it. There's a reason it's popular.
I don't understand how there are so many youtube videos talking about how "gaming is dead" when we had so many big hits like this just this year alone
I think people who claim "gaming is dead" are just burnt out of games. Doing anything for long enough requires you to take a new perspective eventually, otherwise it feels so samey.
Whenever someone talks about how "games aren't fun anymore" and such I always think they either need to take a break and do something else or completely change the way they look at/play games, maybe with a different genre, franchise, era, challenge runs such as speedruns or fan mods, and so on.
I find open world games quite tiring in general, but unfortunately a lot of my favourite games are also open world.
I tend to split them up with other games. Like I finished Death Stranding, then played Death's Door before moving onto Horizon Forbidden West. Like little palate cleansers between main courses.
I think the pacing is the main issue. With open world it's easy to get stuck in a loop of clearing pointless icons or side quests off a map, figuring you'll have to do them eventually anyway, but before you get access to a better toolkit of fun, or get invested in a story. Should I do those tasks now with a handful of bland abilities, or later with better toys (but now it's too easy because it was designed for beginners)?
The agony of choice.
Anyone saying gaming is dead either doesn't play indie games, Baldur's Gate, or doesn't consider Nintendo to be "gaming." In either case, it's their loss. I've played so many amazing games this year.
Hammerwatch II and Sea of Stars just in the past few weeks. En Garde not far off. The hardest part of gaming is finding the time.
I mean fair but at the same time if I only played fps games then that's all gaming is to me.
So saying "gaming is dead" would apply since those are the only games I play.
This is a hypothetical btw I play more than fps and agree some companies are still producing quality content but you also can't deny that most companies have definitely lowered their quality.
Newsflash: your experience is not universal. Just because you exclusively like one genre doesn't make it accurate to say that that genre is gaming itself.
I didn't say that the Premier League was dead during the first third or fourth of last season just because my favourite team played like crap and frequently got unlucky in the few games they didn't. Because that would have been equally ridiculous.
Depends on what you're looking for in FPS games, but Battlebit Remastered is a good time.
And we all know if One game in One genre isn't on One console then gaming as a whole, the entire industry and hobby, is dead.
RIP in pieces Gaming.
I think it's because there's another brand of mfers out there that see good games and go "it's not for me, therefore nothing is".
Yes, you dislike Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur's Gate, hypothetical chucklefuck, here's your award. Can you tell us what you DO like besides that instead? I finished (eh) Noita and Sonic Roboblast 2 last week, and have started Triangle Strategy and Prey. All good shit. Good games exist in everywhere.
Complaining about shit on youtube brings clicks. It's harder to make "hey, here's a good game" video that will bring you attention, but shitting on stuff works every time.
I'm enjoying this game so much that I keep getting distracted with other things going on in the world to the point where the main story is taking all of eternity.
Buying games on release is for suckers and rubes. Stop being suckers and rubes.
I've been playing mostly retro and haven't been happier. Sounds like a sucker problem.
I almost never buy games on release anymore. Only for games I really want to support, like Final Fantasy 16 or Baldurs gate 3. Other than that, I always wait for sales. Save more money, games are "finished" and patched.
I'm loving Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy I was enjoying the story a lot. But the gameplay for 16 has been the most boring of all the Final Fantasy games I've played. Cinematically phenomenal yes, but actual combat has felt like a slog. When I fight enemies it's the exact same thing over and over, I'll already know who to attack first how many staggers and pulls I can perform on each enemy. It's made it hard to go back to the game.
I'm thinking I might just watch a YouTuber go through the game without the combats, mostly cause I was really enjoying the story. I'm still in Act 1 in Baldur's Gate 3, but loving everything so far. Also planning on getting some mods for BG3, saw some awesome mods already out and looking forward to playing my favorite class, Artificer.
Games aren't objectively better or worse than they used to be. AAA devs can release unfinished trash and patch it later, which I think is super annoying, but we enable this behavior when we pre-order games simply because it's the next iteration of our favorite series instead of just waiting to hear the impressions of other gamers.
Also, as an adult I lack the time and patience to play the same kinds of games I used to play, so I've had to adjust my play style to suit my schedule better. That means I enjoy casual singleplayer games more than what I used to play growing up. It also means you have to avoid the temptation to buy games you like, but you know damn well you won't ever actually play.
Games aren’t objectively better or worse than they used to be.
Untrue. Games were at their absolute worst during the Xbox360/PS3 era. Games still have a lot of problems but they're better now than they were then.
What the honest fuck are you on about?
I don't recall Dead space, gears of war, dead planet, rainbow six Vegas and Vegas 2, Halo 2 or 3 (to name a few) being "jingoistic Brown shooters".
Are you really under the impression that 2000s gaming was all extremely politically incorrect?
Bro gears is about as brown and jingoistic as shooters get
Halo is better on colours and varies on the jingoism a lot
Dead space is fantastic and also grey as shit (It makes sense for the game though so I can't make It a criticism though)
Ah yes the jingoistic shooter, minecraft. No, wait, Portal 2. No... Skyrim? Nope. Batman Arkham Asylum? Still not it. Dark Souls? Wait, that's not a shooter. Bioshock? Not jingoistic. Fez? Journey? Braid? Starcraft 2? Assassin's creed? Right, you meant GTA 4 and red dead redemption, right?
The point I'm making is that I know there was certain style of gaming popularized by COD, but it wasn't the entire generation. The X1/PS4 generation is also filled with bloated formulaic open world games (popularized by AC2, FC3 and Skyrim, all 360 era games BTW) but it doesn't mean the entire last gen sucked. Just because you played "shit" games during the 360/PS3 era doesn't mean the entire era is trash. It's your own poor decisions that made it trash, for you.
I'm turning 40 this year and what's been refreshing after not gaming for the last 5 years or so has been playing older games from the 2000s that I've missed. Great prices on these older titles and I've been having a blast playing them.
Similar situation here and I recommend playing roguelites (Hades, Vampire Survivors, FTL, Slay the Spire, etc). There's an appreciable power curve in each play through sitting. Each experience and play through is self contained and satisfying. There's good use of time rather than lots of "dead" time or loading/matchmaking time.
The world needs more Boondocks memes.
It amazing to see Gary Anthony Williams go from cool chill uncle to saying how scary a job application is 😄
The past few years where awesome for gaming and if you don't think so, you missed some great games.
Lots of stuff is just... tedious, if not also unforgiving.
That is on top of anhedonia and lack of money (though I pretty much exclusively play free games now, as I regret most purchases anyway).
Surely free to play games are the worst games, they literally have to monetise the gameplay. That's meant to be the part where you have fun.
I said free, fullstop. Meaning gratis. No microtransactions or even ads (if I can help it... kinda hard to find on Android, though I can ignore mobile/just use fdroid), so that's not the issue either. Also I typically don't play multiplayer games.
I often skip over of anything that calls itself a demo or shouts "Check out my new Steam game/crowdf-" etc before I know much else about it.
I'm glad due to lack of money and just change in my tastes in games/content in general has lead me to enjoy some pretty great indie titles that are at least not getting constant updates that try to fix millions of bugs.
I enjoyed Far Cry 3 recently on my PS3.
Then I got Far Cry 4 on my PC and it's kinda fucking awful.
I kind of like the candles rant, but it's otherwise pretty forgettable. Even 3 is only really famous for the first half of it with Vargas slowly losing his mind.
I always play them in three stages.
Sneak around with a bow and a knife.
Sneak around with what can be best described as a howitzer with a silencer.
Get bored and clear every remaining base with a ludicrously overpowered pile of solid gold machine guns.
IMHO yes. It is among my favorite games of all time.
The plot is of course nonsense (all far cry plots are garbage), but the core gameplay loop is tight, the shooting feels good and there's a diverse arsenal, you get a large selection of colorful sidekicks and animal companions, the most annoying mechanics of earlier titles in the franchise were fixed or removed in 5, and the entire campaign can be played coop after you escape from tutorial Island.
It doesn't take itself too seriously but it's also a internally consistent rural Montana simulator. Stealth mechanics feel great (subjective ofc) but more aggressive strategies work well too. The base game has plenty of content and goes on sale frequently.
It was everything I loved about FC3 but more of it and bigger and polished to a radiant shine, with a kitschy rural US setting.
I got a few of the older FC games when they were like 5 bucks each, launched FC5 yesterday and the first part felt sort of like a return to form.
I just wait until they're on sale at hpb or the used section at GameStop. Sure, there's some major drawbacks but, there's major drawbacks with buying recently released also.
Yep, I was getting a bit down on gaming. So I went back to one I love (Horizon Zero Dawn) and started one that's not usually my type (Hollow Knight). It's like I'm 12 years old all over again, and now I want to play every indie platformer out there lol
Switch it up when it comes to Metroidvania. I played a bunch and got burned out. All amazing games, of course. But playing that much of the same genre kinda made skip out on some of the recent ones. Ended up going from Shovel Knight to Mummy Demastered to Hollow Knight to Bloodstained to Dread to Sundered. I want to play Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Pizza Tower, and some others, but I haven't gotten that urge. I'll play a few minutes then quit and play something else.
Well that's me anyway. I'm sure I'll get that want back eventually, but it's been awhile. I'm just hoping the same doesn't happen to other games cause I'm still enjoying Deep Rock and Baldur's.
It's what happened to me with simultaneously playing 2 or 3 of these huge open worlds that demand 100 hours (I have a job, that takes me forever), I was getting tired of it. So now I'm playing smaller indie games too. And also playing what I actually want to play, not what I feel like I should because it is popular, a classic, or just because it is in my backlog.
Oh and also, it's ok if I don't finish a game, I can put 7-8 hours into it and then quit without guilt
I had finished Heretic on modern source port lately, and I had a blast, so no, gaming is definitely not dead, lol.
Blah blah blah AAA aren't the problem.
You are getting old, tired, and have more important shit to do.
AAA games are part of the problem.
When I have a chance to play a game, I'd like to play a game. Not have 2-4 hours of tutorials, 30 minutes of a cool story and then 5-30 hours of pointless side quests.
Blah blah blah blah this game doesn't suit my taste so the hobby is dead and going to collapse at any second.
I didn't say that at all.
I think there is a problem with over-tutorializing in AAA games. I don't think they are going away, or the hobby will collapse. I just think of the opening experience of Elden Ring versus Jedi Survivor. One puts you in the action and has a 30 minute optional tutorial dungeon, the other has tutorials pop up four hours in the game.
I don't play for long stretches, maybe two hours at a time. It's not satisfying for me to play a game three or four times and still be in tutorials. For me AAA games are the absolute worst at this.
If I'm having fun escaping the stressors of living life as an adult with two young kids, it serves a purpose, and therefore it by definition isn't a waste of my time. Just because someone thinks something is a waste of time, doesn't mean it objectively is a waste of time.
Flip that around. Just because you like to waste time and even feel like you need to waste time, doesn't objectively mean you're not wasting time.
Even if people objectively need to waste time, it doesn't matter how they waste it. The average time-waster such as gaming barely serves any purpose in itself. Someone becoming disillusioned with games isn't a problem, it's an opportunity for them to do something better.
When I was responding to you yesterday, I was trying to come up with an example of something we do that would be objectively a waste of time, but it was hard to think of something that almost everyone would agree 1) consumed your time, 2) you would do voluntarily, and 3) provided absolutely no benefit to you or anyone else.
Thankfully you replied and I have a perfect example: this conversation.
Stalker gamma really sucked me in earlier this year, greatly recommend it despite its steep learning curve.
Has this even been a problem for a few years? The only real guilty parties I can think of recently was Battlefield 2048 and that came out in 21.