Anti-doom-and-gloom post

I was writing this out on my local !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk and realised I was basically making a patient gamers post, so here's a copy and paste:

Despite everything you might read from gaming journos about corporate greed destroying the gaming industry I still think it's an amazing time to be into video games. I'm absolutely spoiled for choice with games to play and I think it's just down to not caring about online multiplayer or getting caught up in marketing hype.

You don't have to pay through the nose to buy a fancy machine to play half-finished blockbusters, there are decades of classics that you can still play. Borrow a friend's old console and play some old games-of-the-year, find some random classics on Humble Bundle or GOG, see what random freebies I've posted in !freegames@feddit.uk, stick an emulator on your phone or find one that runs in a web browser.

Example: I played Metroid Prime after seeing a Lemmy post talking about. I could either:

Dig out a GameCube or buy a Wii on eBay for £5 and find a copy of the game at CEX if I fancy the retro experience
Buy the remastered Switch version if I fancied splashing out
Just pirate a ROM if I feel rebellious
Dump my own ROM and play it on PrimeHack if I feel like tinkering

This is just one example of a great game that passed me by, there are thousands of others out there. We have a crazy amount of choice not only of what to play but how we choose to play it. The bittersweet part is that this could all change so enjoy it while you can!

36 comments

The only problem of gaming is my time, i just don't have enough of it. There's like a tons of game i haven't play and the free game claimed from epic is untouched, but here i am, replaying Subnautica for the 4th time, slowly making progress.
- My gaming time has drastically reduced since our first kid was born. I still manage to get an hour or two in the evening (if we don't watch a movie/series or don't have plans). On the other hand, I noticed I started getting bored of lengthy games and wanted to switch to something else around the 20 hours mark.
  What helped me, is finding and playing well-rated singleplayer games that can be completed in only a few seatings, typically <10 hours. I use https://howlongtobeat.com.
  But I also come back to endless games (Escape From Tarkov or League Of Legends) when I have friends to play with. You gotta find the balance that fits your schedule and tastes, without turning gaming into a chore.
- So you do have the time but decide to just not play different games.
  
  It's like with watching TV Series. Why am I going through Firefly again instead of trying something new? Or reading The Expanse again?
  
  I did have time but not enough of it.
- I have the same problem. I only have an hour or two most days, if it happens at all. So I end up playing games that work well in short spurts and time gaps between sessions.
- Yeah, I get that, hence "spoiled for choice". It's not a bad situation to be in though, play what you enjoy!
- I've got so little time and so many things I want to do and need to do, I've just given up gaming all together. Maybe when I'm retired.

Just like all other subjects in life, you'll be a lot happier if you stay away from news and tabloids
- This sort of sentiment needs to be pinned at the top of every comment section on the web!

The equivalent community seeded on the site that starts with R and ends with eddit recently (a month ago) made it a rule that people can't make "therapy" posts which means people posting topics can't make them primarily about their grievances with personal time or with the industry. And the baseline quality of topics in that place went way higher.
I think there's a lesson to take from that: Try and not give a shit. Just find games you like, and play and talk about them. Make that the top priority, and make these concerns secondary - and you'll have a higher quality time with the hobby.
I personally have 0 idea why the news circles gave two weeks of attention to something like Suicide Squad. Game looked bad, reviewed bad, openly had manipulative features built in AND attached to update promises, and then releases and, whoa, turns out, surprise surprise, it IS bad. And yet, two weeks. Two weeks of random place just bringing up the bad game that is bad with a lukewarm stance. Fucking even Skill Up, which I avidly consume content of, gave it a whole hour of attention split across two weekly roundups. That is unhealthy. Games do NOT deserve attention just because they're marketed. And, in no way I can convinced of otherwise: It's objectively stupid to give it that. I just skipped any discussions related to it, will probably skip any discussion related to turtle rock, the studio, henceforth that doesn't start with "they made a return to form! XYZ is the best game they've made!" and my life feels unsurprisingly unaffected and I feel personally, unsurprisingly, less stupid.
- Try and not give a shit
  Good life advice all round!

It's also never been a greater time to be an indie game fan. There are loads of smaller games every year that are a really fun time. Pizza tower and lethal company were one of my favorite games last year.
I've yet to play Sea of Stars and Cocoon but they're high on my list of next games to play.
- I mostly play indie games, and there's just no way I'm keeping up with all the great games out there. I have like 100 unplayed games I'm interested in (and hundreds more I'm not), with like 20 of those purchased in the last couple months.
  Cocoon and Pizza Tower are also on my wishlist, but I just can't in good conscience buy them until I've gotten through some of the others I've picked up recently. They'll inevitably go on a good enough sale that I'll just get them though.

15 out of the 150 unplayed games in my library were released in the last two years. Two are AAA (Persona 5, Elden Ring) and two are what I‘d call AA (PAYDAY 3 (worst offender in pulling crap), Trine 5), the rest are indie games. Basically all of those games were bought on a discount during sales.
The only full price AAA game I‘m even considering buying in the next two years is Monster Hunter Wilds.
My biggest trigger regarding games at the moment is Paradox wanting 45 bucks for this year’s DLCs for Crusader Kings III; I fucking love that game and don‘t know what to do since I know that‘s an absolutely insane price tag.
But generally if you‘re patient, don‘t get baited by the newest shiny toy, and aren’t some sort of giga lawful consumer that won’t ever utilize emulation, you can have a blast with games now more than ever.
- Absolutely. There's a new game or expansion out that I know I'd love? Great, I'll pick it up in a sale in a few years, plenty of stuff to play in the mean time!
- I fucking love that game and don‘t know what to do since I know that‘s an absolutely insane price tag.
  🏴‍☠️

I think it's going to get even better in the next few years, too. The tools for 3d modeling are poised to improve in a way that makes it dramatically easier to create very high quality graphics. Nanite is one component of this, reducing the need for multiple levels of detail in polygon-based rendering. But 3d reality capture is improving too, both thanks to hardware like depth sensors and software like Gaussian splatting and NeRFs.
Indie games are just going to keep getting better, basically. As will AA games. I think the days of the AAA blockbuster may be numbered.
- I think the only way that large studios continue to justify their existence is in motion capture acting and detailed open world design. Everything else is now within reach of indies I think.
  Don’t just think of graphical improvements either. We can’t leave AI out of this discussion as it is a valuable tool for indie devs and I expect they’ll take advantage of it in the next few years. They aren’t going to replace main stories but I think AI will take the burden off of indie studios for simple dialogue options. Could even be trained to voice act for lesser roles or do some texture work.
  
  I kind of disagree about AI, I guess.
  I do think it's a valuable tool, but honestly there's not a ton that it does that you couldn't already do with an asset store. And there's a fair amount of risk associated with using AI in the near term. Folks already have a lot of qualms about the ethics of how those AIs were trained. And the first games that come out that rely heavily on AI are likely to be really janky--there are devs who will have tried to entirely replace a role on the team with AI, and the quality will suffer as a result. So I think in the near term there's going to be a pretty severe backlash against AI-generated stuff in games. Folks will say it all feels generic and low-effort; it'll be the new "asset flip."
  Long-term, I think it will have a place in the workflow for sure, the same way that store-bought assets do; you'll just need to adapt them to fit in with the feeling you're going for in your game, and hand-revise some things. But near-term, I think there will be a lot of folks who lose interest in a game if they find out there's AI involved. And that goes triple for AI voice acting. A bad human voice actor can at least be interesting, but AI has that uncanny valley quality that really turns people off once they notice it.

So I just dusted off my PS3 (with an air compressor).
Discs apparently work again, not sure if from the air or some other temporary thing (I've seen some say tilt and "let it warm up" like aging motors or something). Not seeing any issues now.
Controller's lights wouldn't even come on, but turns out it needed the original cable and connected to the PS3. Had to fix the L1 button but the triggers fell out (design sucks) making the triggers too sensitive and then I fixed those too. Seems to hold at least some charge and it obviously wasn't puffed.
Popped my R:FOM disc in, works great. Got the auger (to the level that starts in a tunnel, turrets+trenches).
Haven't gotten to FW stuff yet, seems straightforward and I have the compat. info I need.
Looking through the menus jogged my memory. The game I mentioned was a PSP mini (playable on PS3) and is called Deflector (gameplay at 1min+). Not really that interesting TBH, but seeing quite a few minis based on Flash games so it makes me wonder if you could convert Flash games somehow and how well it'd work for making new homebrew games especially if it can use other things besides Flash (though it does use PSP emulation so performance might not be the best). I also see a package for LUA, but it's old so not sure if it'd still work.
(Updated comment, original below)
I was just wanting to re-play one of my old games (Resistance: FoM), but that only brought up PS3 gloom because I can't easily run them.
I mean free games are nice, pretty much all I play now aside from things I bought on sale many years ago.
- Are PS3s expensive to pick up nowadays?
  
  I've got 2 already:
  my orginal 60GB version (YLoD, heatgun fixed a few+ times until it shut-off due to overheating for the first time so I gave up)
  one with a broken disc-drive I traded for, put my old drive (with ~~its~~ the console keeping its original disc-drive daughterboard) in and eventually it stopped reading discs (not sure if it burned out or firmware DRM timeout thing, cleaner disc didn't work)
  I could probably fix either but I don't want to spend money on it, plus given the situation I'd probably need to fix both.
  Can't rip my own disc (I have a blu-ray drive but not the right kind for PS3 ripping). Emu is a hassle esp. w/big files (and I have a 1050Ti). Bookmarks are dead (or need acct?) and I can't seem to find a demo image to see how well it'd run.
- I loved that game because it was co-op MP.
  
  I don't think I played the story co-op, but I played versus maybe 3 times. Splitscreen isn't good for that because screen-peeking.
  Resistance 2 had some interesting co-op/online stuff (XP system with unlocks, different stuff than story mode) that I mostly played solo IIRC (janky, still need 2 controllers). No broadband available until mid-2016, but I was able to play online via a distant neighor's wifi (they knew) at midnight for a few games and was probably the worst player thanks to high ping (rubberbanding).

I honestly don't understand that sentiment. People keep complaining about all of these manipulative games, yet I have so many games I own and on my wishlist (100 on each) that I just don't have the time for, so I'm good for the next couple years at least.
So yeah, maybe gaming will suck in a few years, maybe it won't. There are still great games coming out that totally respect my time, and I don't see any reason for that to stop. So if your friends are complaining about no good games, point them toward some of your favorites. Together we can show the big studios that traditional gaming is still very much in demand.
- My thoughts exactly! I think it's just our brains not wanting to accept change: it used to be that all the big games were great and just what we wanted, now the ones that get talked about are the soulless cash-grabs but the good stuff is still there. A film buff doesn't complain that cinemas are full of generic action films, they just ignore the marketing and choose from the decades of classics available.

Gaming journalism has been dead for so long the body's nothing but bones.

36 comments