Is there a point in gaming anymore?

[MasterHamster]

...As we all know gaming has gone to hell...

Start over, do it right.

[Pull My Finger]

30 year old gamer here, started with a Pong console, moved on to the NES and so on. It might sound harsh, but here's the thing: when you grow up and become a halfway mature person with some confidence and values, responsibilities and an actual purpose in life, you'll be surprised how little it matters.

[Deleted]

Back at the birth of the games industry, games were made by gamers. A couple of guys bouncing ideas off of each other and creating games that they wanted to play. They added features because they thought they were fun. They made games challenging because they wanted to be challenged, they wanted games to last and to provide a sense of accomplishment on completion. They were only accountable to themselves.

Nowadays the majority of games are made by vast multinational companies whose primary goal is profit. Gamers still exist in these companies but they are buried beneath accountants, advertising and marketing guys etc. They don't make the games they want to play, they make the games that will sell the most. They don't make games challenging because they want you to buy a new one with next months pay. They opt for instant gratification over sense of accomplishment. They have to justify everything they do to shareholders whose only concern is maximizing profit.

The first group do still exist. To enjoy these games though you will have to let go of some of the features and production quality you have gotten used to. Indy game developers cant afford to spend 50 million on the latest 3d models and particle effects or on full voice acting to tell their story but they can give you a game that is more fun or a story that's more meaningful. The Indy game scene is flourishing and new and exciting ideas are being developed into new games every day. Even better is that platforms like steam are giving indy game developers the chance to make some real money as well. Just look at Minecraft for an example of an idea that would never have been picked up by a big publisher but that made its creator a lot of money and is considered a resounding success throughout the industry.

As an 'old school' gamer the games you grew up on are still being made - you just have to dig a little deeper.

[crushinator]

I would have to agree for the most part. WoW was my first MMO and really my first video game that I played on pc when I started college. I loved Vanilla, as it was about the environment and you had to make of it what you wanted. Yes it was a huge time sink but I had loads of fun playing with my friends. Wall walking, dungeons where you could go left, right, up and down and still get dead ends. Spending hours in BRD or doing tribute runs in Dire Maul. Getting to certain bosses and defeating them in high end 5 mans was a real accomplishment. Hell even the feeling of finally getting your self made 5 man together to go on your own epic journey just to get to a dungeonwas exciting. You made your own strategies and got what time you put into the game. YOU had to interact with the world.

Todays game has definitely lost that feeling for me. Everything is so linear, you can instantly get teleported to dungeons, battlegrounds. After the leveling process you might as well call it World of Hubcraft. Sadly MMO's revolve around subscriptions and the masses "aren't as good" as players who come on every day, nor can they invest the time. Now instead of feeling accomplished because you killed the last boss in BRD and got an awesome blue hammer its man you got purples to stroke your epeen and be like all the high end people. You dumb down Pve the next thing you dumb down is PvP. I find it hard to take arena serious anymore as its you pick the right combination you win most of your games if you play well. Some combinations are just so blatantly broken against others its a joke. I'd much rather have the hard earned pvp gear decide my success in such situations than class flavors. Essentially if you can dumb down the game, keep people happy and content you'll still have their subscription.

As far as game community it's a joke from what it used to be. Since people used to interact in the world on a regular basis you'd get to know both your faction and the opposite. Get in their vent, talk a little smack but at the end of the day it was a lot of fun. I could rant on and on about how this game has lost its luster, hopefully GW2 will provide some sort of epic feeling.

[Ravenblade]

[...]



Much with the casuals whining I've picked up a few tid bits that explain how they are that ignorantly idiotic

Gamers have no life and sit in their parent's basement all day?
Maybe but however gamers are skilled at games. It is our thing it's what we are into. We can do things much faster then casuals and some times we HATE spending all day to get 1 thing done say like daily pvp quest. While it takes casuals so long to do something we do it much faster because gaming is our thing. Like a car guy vs a rich girl who is into shopping and all of that. Who will be able to change the oil in their car faster? The car guy because cars are his thing it is what he is into and he enjoys it.

Gamers are aholes?
Not really we tend to be nice people however with all of the casual crap that people have been pulling for so long now we tend to get a bit fed up and sick of it. I mean really we have let you have your way hell we let you destroy our games we let you turn them into a joke simple content that you can all brag about. Yet you think we are the aholes for getting fed up?

Why They Are Here?
I would think that all of these casuals are now playing MMOS because it is the single cheapest hands down form of entertainment on the market.
Example going to a movie for 2 or 3 hours costs what? $5 - $10? k 2 hours out of 30 days? vs $15 bucks a month? Cable $60 - $80? vs $15 a month?

I play games to get away from all of the BS in real life to enjoy them and be happy so why would anyone tolerate lifes BS in a video game? Because all they need to do is cry about how they didn't get their way.

First off for a personal opinion you are talking a lot for "us" and "we". Either you speak for yourself, then it's your opinion otherwise it is not.

The first fallacy of yours is that casual gamers are not skilled and not dedicated. There you are wrong, casual gamers cannot be classified like that. Some casual gamers can be quite dedicated and skilled as well, I'd like to think the time off from games gives them a healthy distance to the subject as they don't tend to elevate game problems to world class problems.

The second fallacy of yours is that games are yours and not theirs, which is funny because the reasons you cite sound like you have earned it based on your merits which appear to be a generic definition of "being skilled". You never own a game, especially an MMO, you got the same privilege as the players you're despising so much.

The third fallacy is that people who think they are hardcore are always skilled people, I say this isn't always true, the more you play a game, the more patience you got the more you can iterate thus through a very long chain of trial and error you can improve your skills which means time is the only factor needed to improve - aka the infinite monkey theorem. Not many people are capable of rapid adaptation, in fact only a few are and these usually are above things and wouldn't rant against fellow "lesser" gamers.

Over the years I have seen definition of hardcore declining by quite a lot. When former casual and laid-back players call themselves hardcore now then you know that it's more about elitism vs. newcomers rather than honest standards. Last but not least it's the company which in the end decides that broadening the audience in order to stay in business or to improve upon existing standards is worth a bit of antagonizing of the entitled crowd.

[Krolikn]

Games were always about fun. With very limited gameplay mechanics and such games were automatically harder back then.

[Profyrion]

As we all know gaming has gone to hell.

I stopped reading there. That couldn't be farther from the truth.

The fact is, it's a great time to be a gamer. Gaming communities might be going downhill, but games themselves are better than ever. Your toxic commentary on gaming is part of the problem -- this thread is a prime example. If you want communities to improve or return to some previous state, start with yourself.

[Mroz123]

Why was those old games challenging?

It had poor and buggy controls:
- "It is really challenging to get on top of that tower. I spent 2 hours to get there. It is so good game"
- "Yeah, is is not challenging, it is simply impossible to jump f**king straight"

The game mechanics was not so obvious:
- "How the hell should I know I have to stick this monkey on this salami and throw it through the chimney?"

Challenging game should be challenging because you have to find good tactic not because you have to do the same thing until the universe let you pass.

[Ratyrel]

First, why do you need respect out of a game? That's like rubbing your win at monopoly in your family's faces for the next months. Games provide pleasure to their target audience, a target audience that has grown incredibly since the original inception of gaming and thus everyone should be able to enjoy them once they spend a substantial amount of money on them. As top notch games are incedibly expensive to make, they need to be accessible to bring that investment back in, be it by providing a choice of difficulty or by not being so hard in the first place. There will always be mindnumbingly brutal games like Dark Souls for people who like to punish themselves in their spare time, but I really hope they will never become the rule again.

[Deleted]

Why was those old games challenging?

It had poor and buggy controls:
- "It is really challenging to get on top of that tower. I spent 2 hours to get there. It is so good game"
- "Yeah, is is not challenging, it is simply impossible to jump f**king straight"

The game mechanics was not so obvious:
- "How the hell should I know I have to stick this monkey on this salami and throw it through the chimney?"

Challenging game should be challenging because you have to find good tactic not because you have to do the same thing until the universe let you pass.

This is just as true of some games released today as it was of some games made 20 years ago.

[Dalantia]

When I started gaming on the PC it was with MUDs..I went back to that MUD not too long ago and the community was terrible. I'd love to go back to PC gaming targeting the original gaming demographic.

The original gaming demographic is that terrible community. The snobs, the jerks, the people that dismiss you for something trivial.

You just don't have the benefit of being in their ingroup now.

[Grym]

I agree with OP in a way.

Back then, gamers were rare, and portraited as no-lifers (OK still do today), whereas today, it is much more generally accepted, more people means more range in skill level, and unfortunately, there are more in the lower average than the higher average. But they are a company, they are there to make money, if Blizzard have to choose a very hard or very easy extreme, they will choose the very easy as it will have more people in that bracket, sad, but nothing you can do about that.

Shamen SE totally ruined FF14, if only they kept the FF11 concept running (with some better boss mechanics) it would have worked out great and I probably would have jumped ship by now, as FF11 was brutal to new players and new players have to work their way up the raids and nothing get nerf'd, people in 4th expansion still getting stuck in 2nd expansion contents, and I prefer it that way, it is a shame that I left the game for other reasons.

The contents over time seems to be getting easier as the gaming community expands. While there are a lot of gamers that had to play Goldeneye on hardmode to find it fun, there are also some players out there that will play Doom on easy mode and even with God mode cheat on, do I agree with that? No, but do those players exist? Plenty of them. And gaming industry is trying to cater to them more and more as numbers seems to show that there are more of those type of players than players that prefer games on hard mode out there.

I wish there will be a next FF MMO and will go back to the way (brutal-ness wise) FF11 was back then.

I can always dream.

[Xeones]

This is just as true of some games released today as it was of some games made 20 years ago.

Yet the games with those problems released today get review scores reflecting that. You don't get people praising games saying "It took me 10 times longer than it should have because of broken controls/mechanics, BEST GAME EVER!"

[Alcomo]

I mean don't get me wrong i'm a nice guy but I really really think the casuals need to cut the crap and figure out their place. I mean they came into our world they started doing what MANY of us have done for much longer then they even knew what a controller was.<b> Should we not be respected? Should we not be looked up to as people who actually know their stuff rather then "hard core aholes"<b/>

Nope, because just by writing this you are just proving that you deserve no respect from the gaming community.

Also games were never hard the only thing that made them difficult was the lack of saving and controls. I have had more trouble with games like Hot Shots Golf then I ever did on any nes game. Raymans time trials are much harder then any oldschool mario. But gaming IS meant for everyone, if you don't like that fact then go make your own games. They are meant to be played by everyone, not just someone who gets a kick out of controller smashing masochistic crap.

Also hard =/= hardcore. Hard = needless attempt to have worthless bragging rights. People who want a challenge set a game to hard and deal with it. Us true hardcore gamers play because we love games. We love the stories, the gameplay, characters etc. We game because its our hobby, its what makes us happy. We have massive collections and treat our systems like children. We get teary eyed when watching Aerith die, get all nostalgia-ed over old games and we look forward to future games with anticipation. We DON'T complain about others enjoying the games with like. You are far from hardcore simply because only a casual would complain about gaming and other casuals wanting to be a part of it all.

[Deleted]

I remember in the past most games where single player, and expensive, so you would buy 1 or 2 games and they would have to last you a while so people really grew attached to the games they had, I remember playing abes exodus for like 4 years as a kid, nowadays games are made to be much more disposable, they need ti be entertaining from the get go, so games like final fantasy that took a long time to get into and understand are less likely to emerge in todays market, i also felt that back in the day developers where much more experimental, like new concepts and ideas for games

[Irondust]

You know, wow is not the only mmo in world

[Slappers]

I really don't get that hype about games being so much harder back in the 90s, I played a lot of NES, SNES, 64, PS1, PC and PS2. I can't really say I remember the games being so much fucking harder. The difference was that mainstream was "hard" back then, whilst mainstream today is easy. So you gotta search harder to find none-mainstreamgames.

[Restos3]

Grass is greener. It's like old people saying music was better in their day.

It was better

[Deleted]

It seems to me that you (OP) go from complaining about a lower difficulty in games, in general, to talking about the pitfalls and worst examples of interactions in current MMOs. I don't agree with you about games having a lower difficulty in general. Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, the Ninja Gaiden series, StarCraft 2 (granted, multiplayer only), Witcher 2 (and to some extent Witcher 1) are all games which, in my opinion, cater to hardcore gamers.

There are a lot of challenging games out there, at the moment. However, almost all of them are single-player.

[Deleted]

Hard games, easy games, good games, bad games.. it's all out there -- you just have to take a good unbiased & pessimism-free look.All I see is just another human growing old, feeling that he owns the world, that the 'world' owes him and should cater to his every need.