I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.
Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense of sameness?
Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.
I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.
Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.
If anything, now there is a discovery problem where the novel, incredible inventive games take longer to surface via word of mouth because there are so many. The quality and choice have never been higher. But that feeling that we’re all playing and enjoying the same things is gone.
Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life
'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense
of sameness?
In short, no. There were >19,000 games released on steam this year alone in all possible genres (most of them not FPSs or simulators). Even if 90% are "bad" (because 90% of anything is bad) the top 10% (1,900) still span every possible genre including many that didn't exist in the 80s. I suggest that if you're truly interested in finding some modern gems that you try to search for communities that revolve around your interests (for example on reddit).
How many of those are puzzle-based classical Adventure Games like the recent Lucy dreaming?
Many of the genres are baloney, at least the stuff that comes back in search results as recent - it's all Work Simulator, a slow grind, the ubiquitous first person shooter, horror or everyone's favorite hack and slash genre.
We're drowning in numbers, is all you're really telling me.
It’s not a genre I care about so I don’t know. What I’m saying is that discoverability is bad but the supply is there. You need to work to find it. I find the games I like most via recommendations on genre-specific subreddits and discord servers.
100% agreed. The golden age of gaming is right now, Kickstarter and Steam have opened up the field to smaller studios in a way that has never happened before.
The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games can seem soulless.
But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it and better games coming out right now that there ever has been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed by imitators which grow the niche.
I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs" (and maybe a tiny amount of vague Rogue-like-likeness). If you read much about old games (e.g. [1]) it is obvious that the history of games is full of evolutionary dead-ends and forgotten mainstream games (and entire almost-forgotten mainstream genres).
Yeah, it's hard not to consider the runaway success of games like Stardew Valley as counterexamples to the idea that the creativity is completely gone. But you wouldn't blame someone if they superficially looked at screentshots and thought it was a run of the mill retro pixel game. But it's wild to me that there are people who come from broken homes or rough childhoods who say the game was literally therapy for them and showed them a vision of domestic life or human interaction that they could realistically replicate or at least shoot for in real life.
I'm currently playing a game that is a blatent rip-off of Stardew Valley to the point where I frequently question why they were so obvious. (Or maybe those elements are rip-offs of Harvest Moon, I haven't played Harvest Moon to know.) Still, it's enjoyable. The design elements and places where it does diverge from Stardew Valley make it more enjoyable in my opinion.
As the saying goes, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."
Harvest Moon defines the "Turning round a dilapidated farm in a small village where you give everyone gifts all the time" genre. It all comes from there.
EDIT: Stardew Valley has so many QoL improvements over harvest moon though. The early HM games are punishing.
> I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs
Huh? That is also an artifact of what kind of games you follow. Just of the top of my head:
- colony sims
- strategy games (tactical/operational/grand-, with rt, rt+pause, turnbased options for each)
- racing games
- 4x games
- flight sims
- spaceflight sims
- rpgs
- survival games
- shmups/ bullet hell
- roguelike/roguelite
- exploration
- rhytm games
- horror
- factory builder / management sim
Monkey Island. The difficulty of the first game and the difficulty of the last game. The last game was still a game, but the challenge wasn't there. It just wasn't there. We might as well just be playing Progress Quest.
Monkey Island 1 and 2 have deep memories for me. I'll never forget playing Monkey Island 2 during a cold Christmas when I was a kid. The PC speaker music was great (King's Quest V was my other present and I still remember the opening music). One day I got the Sound Blaster on my 486 SX and it blew my mind.
The Monkey Island that came out a few years ago sadly felt like a puzzle-free story for children and their parents to sit together to play. Elaine lacked humor and cynicism, there was a child's voice in some of the narration, the graphics were strangely cubic and stylistic instead of warm, and the characters seemed caricatures of themselves (like season 5 of a comedy series where the writing devolves into self-referential insider jokes about the past seasons).
I feel terrible saying that.
Will Adventure games come back, or are we lost on the new ADHD world of interruptible short content?
