[TtEdN7jwT]

What I like about 90s shooters is how little fuss there is to get to the action. Doom, you launch it and can be killing things within 15 seconds. With modern shooters, it loading, loading, game selection, lobby, connecting, loading, cutscene, weapon selection, tutorial, realizing you need to grind to get better weapons, pay for better weapons, mission objectives, notified there's an update, enter your credentials, reset your password. Start game. die. wait in the lobby for the next round. maybe then you get your first kill. Mentally taxing. i miss the simplicity of old games.

[b0rsuk]

My hypothesis is that many game designers have actually forgotten what makes a game fun. Games have become a cargo cult of sorts. Games have character levels, level ups and skill trees but why exactly? Does it make Project Warlock more fun? Certain game traits are replicated without thought.

In my opinion games won't "grow up" as a medium if game designers let others shame them into implementing stuff that doesn't make games better. Like, meaningful moral choices, versus a game letting you play in a number of creative ways. Making a fuss about non-lethal approaches to challenges. The more cutscenes and story you add to a game, the more it becomes a graphic novel. Games aren't about telling stories. They're about generating them. That's what games do best and no other medium can come close - not radio, not movies, not books. The best games are the ones with a ton of mods, with a vibrant community, speedrunners inventing challenges and categories by themselves rather than relying on a programmed system of achievements. No one complains about lack of a story in basketball, chess or soccer!

Games are more about acting than theatre (playhouse) is. Only a few people act in a play, the rest are watching. In a game, everyone expresses himself through actions. The core of a game is acting, in a simulated world or within a set of rules. Games are not about immersion - you can get immersed in a book or a movie. Immersion is just something many best games do.

[dx87]

I don't think it's cargo culting, as much as it's a generation of gamers who were raised with the expectation of a "progression system". I remember back when EA was ridiculed for their statement about "giving a players a sense of pride and accomplishment" regarding requiring a long grind (or big payment) to unlock the most powerful characters in a Star Wars game. I've seen people beg developers to give them something pointless to grind for because they won't play a game without rewards. I think developers know how to make fun games, but I don't think most players want fun games because they've been conditioned to want addiction simulators with meaningless rewards.

[Loughla]

>I think developers know how to make fun games, but I don't think most players want fun games because they've been conditioned to want addiction simulators with meaningless rewards.

I have spent the last two or three years trying to find a fun android and/or console game (outside of some switch games), and I've never been able to put my finger on why the games in the app store, and many, many PC games are just not fun. But this is it.

They're not fun, they're a targeted level up system designed to be just hard enough to keep you from breezing through (until you die two or three times and can watch an ad to get a bigger gun), with level progression just slow enough to make you want to pay for experience.

They're not fun. Commander Keen and Leisure Suit Larry and Doom and Deathtrack and Hexen and The Lost Vikings and System Shock 2 and those kind of games were fun. I thought it might just be because I'm 35-45 years old and am being very 'get off my lawn' about it.

But that's not it. Those games were designed to sell because they were fun. New games, especially mobile games, are designed to be free and addicting enough to get you to spend real money.

[juanuys]

> Commander Keen and Leisure Suit Larry and Doom and Deathtrack and Hexen and The Lost Vikings and System Shock 2

Yes, and the very first Duke Nukem [1]. So much fun! I'm getting into game design this year, and will endeavour to make pay-once, short, super fun games. (I say short, albeit with replay value - I'd hate to string you along for 100+ hours with pointless side quests)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4a3_wazRPA

[StillBored]

I mean old games were designed to be addicting too, so that people would stand in the arcade and feed the machine quarters for hours. OTOH, those games were a lot faster paced/etc. I don't even think its possible to have the kind of super fast arcade level games on a touchscreen.

Which is maybe part of the problem. Old games had a joystick and two buttons. They were easy to learn, hard to master.

[b0rsuk]

I was about to tell you to play some board games. I forgot about the pandemic.

[vanderZwan]

> Games have character levels, level ups and skill trees but why exactly? Does it make Project Warlock more fun? Certain game traits are replicated without thought.

Because simple gameplay loops like that keep people hooked to play them for longer. It's the cynical behaviorist approach to game design, and especially for online games that rely on people playing for longer times and/or paying for more content, that's a great way to extract money from players. Also, game designers are very much aware of it.

[0] https://twitter.com/Alucard__C99/status/1328887200944189445

[hypertele-Xii]

The games industry no longer designs games; They scientifically engineer games to be as addictive and profitable as possible. This process is oblivious to any concept of "fun". Just another thing obsessive capitalism ruins.

Fortunately, the independent games development scene is healthy and booming - it's the easiest time for any given person to make a game than it has ever been in the history of our civilization. Many indies are simply not concerned with making money off of it. It's more of a hobby, a creative endeavour of self-expression, with a chance of fame and fortune.

Of course, not all indies have any idea how to design games, either.

[1_player]

I've been playing Ultimate Doom again and it's incredible how tight the experience is, the level design, the difficulty progression (of course I'm playing in Ultra Violence). I'm using the GZDoom frontend and I didn't have to configure it either, it automatically detected the WADs from the GOG installation folder.

I am _really_ enjoying it, even though I did play it in my teenage years already. Stoked to play Doom II for the first time when I'm done.

[b0rsuk]

You've been gaslighted into believing that DooM is primitive and archaic. Simply put, DooM perfected what it set out to be. No one ever bested it in the visceral, action-packed shooter category. Maybe a game will do in the future, but the path doesn't lead through denialism. You could say Quake 3 was a pinnacle of the fast, brutal first person shooter, but it was a duel game at its core.

[StillBored]

I agree with this, which is why I have a nes classic plugged into the TV too. Everyone who uses it vs the xbone agrees its 100% a better experience. I don't have to log into an account to play, it doesn't take 10 mins to update a game, etc. Two people grab controllers and within a few seconds are shooting/fighting/whatever each other. Plus the variety is much larger.

I think a lot of the problem is the commoditization and merging of genre's along with the overwhelming dominance of a small number of game engines.

This means that a modern RPG pretty much plays the same as a strategy or shooter. Which makes everything feel like a remake of something you have already played. Particularly as the games don't really have differing artistic styles anymore either because that is more a function of how the game engine works than what texture selection or lighting effects are used.

Maybe the best way to describe it, is that modern games are "cold".

[odessacubbage]

this is one of the main things drew me into fighting games. the best of everything they have to offer is concentrated into a 90 second round. you don't have to sit through 10 minute corridor sequences or grind to the endgame to actually do something cool, you can play a first to five over your lunch break and walk away completely satisfied with the experience.

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLHOEfsWmGM

[Dirlewanger]

Since the mid 2000s when all the suits who've never played a video game in their lives started taking over AAA game companies, they've had this weird obsession to make games as "cinematic" as they can. To match movies as much as they can. Now that I think about it, it's probably an inferiority complex (don't really know why either since video games have been surpassing movies in raw sales for years now). Hopefully with the success of Doom 2016, we'll continue to see reinvigorated focus on what mamakesde video games so great in the first place: the game play.

[Razengan]

The Japanese game industry still makes a ton of video gamey games and doesn’t have the obsession to be like movies or anything.

In the West this is mostly carried by indie studios now.

[krapp]

> The Japanese game industry still makes a ton of video gamey games and doesn’t have the obsession to be like movies or anything.

And yet the latest Silent Hill and Castlevania offerings from Konami were pachinko machines. Same greed, just different market incentives.