[JacobAldridge]

My gaming never really evolved past the golden year of 1998, when Age of Empires was greater than Command and Conquer, and Goldeneye on the N64 with three friends was better than sex (not that anyone gave me that option).

Every time I dip into modern games (usually watching a friend play), the complexity wears me out. So Romero’s point about ‘modern shooters turning into inventory games’ resonated - I’m not sure if I ever completed Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, but both definitely felt like you could just run with them and have fun in a way I don’t feel with today’s AAA options.

Maybe I’m just old. Or having too much sex.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

As another comment pointed out, modern shooters have actually become simpler overall since Halo popularized the limit on how many guns you could carry and regenerating health.

What's actually wrong, I think, is that most FPS's just don't have interesting gameplay. They've failed to learn the lesson DOOM taught: it isn't about the weapons and the shooting, it's about the movement.

What makes DOOM so fun isn't the aiming and pulling a trigger bit, indeed, DOOM can only aim in one dimension anyway. What makes DOOM fun is the way the enemies' behavior and attack patterns interact with your movement and positioning, and how your current weapon's mechanics are best exploited. It's about a complex and dynamic interplay of positioning and distance. Taking on multiple enemy types at once means solving a multiple variable problem in real time. Doom 2016 did a pretty good job getting this right.

[donatj]

> the complexity wears me out

This! The complexity of so many modern games turns me off from them. Have to learn a bunch of complicated systems? Sounds way too much like my day job.

[AlchemistCamp]

And programming as a genre has become popular...

Ever seen Lightbot, TIS-100 or Shenzhen I/O?

[Shivetya]

quite a few strategy games, looking at you PDX, are so damn close just being excel/access with pretty graphics they end up as a slog instead of fun.

however we have to acknowledge there many types of players, from those who min max to those who just want to point and click

[esyir]

I'll strongly disagree there on the shooters though. Old shooters has a plethora of weapons with inventory (perfect dark, goldeneye, half life) modern shooters have primary, secondary and sidearm. That's simpler, if anything. The shooter experience has been heavily streamlined.

[pathartl]

I think the article addresses this. It calls into question the disposable nature of guns in games now and how balance affects gameplay. We've seen this with the new CoD Modern Warfare where the over-under is way unbalanced and is being abused. When you're only given a primary and a sidearm, every other gun in the game becomes useless.

It becomes complex when you start adding perks to your overall character or class, or when you're able to upgrade weapons. That complexity increases exponentially when you throw in 30 other possible primary weapons that someone can be using, along with their skills and upgrades. That's why when we have a cycle of balance issues, there's always one gun that gets swapped as being the new favorite amongst players.

Of course there's some games that thrive on an uneven balance. There's a reason why the AK and M4 have been the most sought after weapons in Counter-Strike for nearly 20 years.