If the switch proves anything it's that you don't have to pay $1600 for a GPU to enjoy amazing games. Or the other way round, if you pay $1600 for a gpu it does not mean that you'll be able to play any good games.
I think the technical limitations of the Nintendo Switch makes for more interesting games in general. Most of the games on my Xbox and PC tend to be FPS/Action games with very boring, brown and green "realistic" environments whereas games on my Switch tend to be bright and colorful with lots of 2D and pixel graphics and games in the vein of simulators, adventures, roguelikes etc.
Tangent: It's amazing that the popularity of XP to "level up" and HP to bring to zero has become. This was a new concept to me way back when Final Fantasy 3 (3 in the US, I think 6 in Japan) came out. It felt very niche and reserved for a specific type of game. Now those ideas are everywhere.
What's a common new game trend since then? I can think of these: randomized microtransaction packs, online multiplayer PvP and co-op.
Are there any established trends that I'm missing out on, or new concepts emerging that old gamers may not have come across?
The Battle Royale genre (Fortnite, PUBG, ect.) is the biggest new genre I can think of. The 100 player last-man-standing game mode probably wouldn't have been possible without the advancements in networking speed and infrastructure in the last 15ish years.
I was just wondering today why the BR format has taken over in recent years and I can't really come up with a technical reason for it. Red orchestra had 64 player pvp matches back in 2006 and I think Arma had similar sized game modes in that era too. I could see a BR mod for either of those, but it didn't happen (or at least take off). Maybe there's something I'm missing, but it seems feasible.
I think the gaming world just really latches onto tends. A few years it was survival/crafting games, before that RPG's. Good luck figuring out what's next!
From personal observation and experience, I believe the BR game mode got some traction after the first Hunger Games movie released. After that movie released, I remember all sorts of "Hunger Games" Minecraft maps appearing online. I downloaded, played and hosted a handful of these Hunger Games "last man standing" maps for family and friends to play.
After a few weeks of that, the game format grew stale, and I stopped playing HG maps. Then a few years later a whole bunch of BR games hit the scene and all I could think of was how similar they were to the Hunger Games Minecraft maps.
Interesting! I remember playing DotA as a custom map on Warcraft 3, then being amazed to see the League of Legends and DotA2 communities grow so large. I had no idea that the battle royal games started in Minecraft. That's fun to know.
The modern Battle Royale mode evolved from multiplayer mods for Minecraft and then ARMA made shortly after the 2012 movie Hunger Games which provided the essential ideas all together (elimination, lots of players, must explore a huge map for items).
I think Minecraft can't be overrated as a vehicle for experimentation in multiplayer modes. Not only did the game have a huge modding and multiplayer community and have support for large player counts and maps, but it's unusually easy to create for and the game itself has no built-in structured competitive multiplayer gametypes, which means there's tons of demand for people to make gametypes from scratch and there's no built-in code for how matches work that needs to be worked around for new ideas to be attempted. Many other online games have specific ideas of how matches work built-in that reduce the demand for brand new gametypes and could make implementing a gametype where matches work differently daunting.
- Early access. Back in the day the dev would pay you with a free copy of the game for helping with the beta. Now you pay the dev for the privilege of helping with the beta.
- Cosmetics. Tons of games have stuff you can buy (equipment, skins, etc.) to make your character look cool. Extra stuff that can be developed easily by an artist, doesn't affect game balance, and sometimes even costs real money.
- Battle pass. I've never bought one but I think you get stuff on two tracks for progression, a free track and a paid track. Progression resets and there are new tracks like 4 times a year or something. Makes people want to open their wallets for the paid track due to FOMO and "...but I already earned it!"
I think if you switch from free to paid you immediately get all the stuff on the paid track you've already progressed past. Also I think they want to charge you $10 four times a year, every time the new tracks come out.
- itch.io -- Sort of like Steam / Epic / GOG for indie developers too small to be on those sites yet.
Oh yeah, and terrain deformation! Cool concepts. I'm not sure which ones do it well. The Diablo series seemed cool, but now it just kinda seems like "yeah, it's more and more and more of the same", even though some of it is procedurally generated.
I like the Switch, but it definitely chugs, and I suspect had we not had the supply chain meltdown over the pandemic we would‘ve gotten a more significant hardware refresh.
As far as simulators go, I‘m playing Two Point Campus, and it definitely chugs and crashes occasionally.
A lot of the best 3rd party switch games are ports from PC games or games available on other consoles: spelunky, shovel knight, cup head.
I think the technical imitations can definitely hamstring their games, even the first party ones. breath of the wild comes to mind, and frequently dips into sub 30 fps which breaks the immersion factor.
But that's your choice. Almost all of my PC games are 4X and turn based RPGs. All of them make heavy use of a mouse and keyboard. And in addition, you don't need stupid 4 slot cards to play them.
It would be true if Nintendo still had support of a beast like Rare. Alas, there are very few if any companies that are willing to work with these limitations and create games specifically for Switch.
And the main reason the games are colorful on Switch is that Nintendo still, to this day, has a reputation of kids-only console. And Switch also pushed it towards "casual one-off gaming" which invites bright colors (think Candy Crush).
I'd say that only really started in the 7th console generation (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360)
Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition, but after that the other companies were trying to outperform each other in graphical fidelity while Nintendo released basically another Gamecube but with motion controls. And it was a hit!
Certainly the N64 (immediately prior to Gamecube) was supposed to be super high tech. They actually stressed the partnership with SGI in the marketing, and literally named the console after the word size of its CPU. In retrospect the former was pretty weird, since the public would not have known that name or anything.
Folks can quibble about the Gamecube if they like, but step back one generation and they were definitely trying to push the technology.
The 90s console wars were all about bits, even though no one knew what it meant other than "more bits = better". It was really Sega that started the bit-wars, releasing the Genesis while Nintendo was still selling the NES. They were very successful with getting kids to compare how powerful their console was to Nintendo's by slapping a giant "16-BIT" front-and-center on the top of the console and mentioning it in all the advertising. And that kinda stuck around for years.
Most of those kids didn't know what 64-bit meant, but they knew it must be better than their old 16-bit piece of junk. That's 4x the amount of bits, therefore the console was 4x better!
It was NEC that started the bit wars with the PC Engine in Japan. They heavily marketed its graphics as 16-bits, to have a quick way to explain the quality improvements over the Famicom.
> Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition
It gets forgotten about because it didn’t sell all that well and because the tiny little 1.8GB discs kept most of the multi-platform blockbusters off it, but the GameCube was significantly more powerful than the PS2 (though not as powerful as the Xbox).
There was an amazing effort post back when G4TV forums existed explaining why GC was on par or better than xbox using examples like Rogue Squadron and technical details. The main issue was that third party games didn't exist or were low effort ports to GC.
I wish I knew how to find the text of that post. The G4TV forums seem erased from history.
> I'd say that only really started in the 7th console generation (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360)
I think that's when they really started leaning into it again, but Gunpei Yokoi (Gameboy inventor) was a big proponent of the idea, which he called "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology". So it's been a part of Nintendos design process for a while before that.
It was fairly true for the NES and SNES generations as well. Each used a CPU five years old by then and a RAM size that was common in computers eight years prior. Really, for only the N64 console generation did Nintendo ever try to outdo its competitors on hardware specs.
What was the competition though? The NES pretty much single-handedly revitalized the home console market after the video game crash of 1983 by marketing it as a toy that happened to hook into a TV (R.O.B. the Robot, the light gun, all sold together), so it didn't really have any competition. Sega ended up slipping a 16-bit machine to market before Nintendo by a couple years with the Genesis, but the Genesis and SNES were directly competing for each of their respective lifespans, and both were fairly comparable, each having their own advantages in different areas.
I suppose you could compare to the Neo Geo which was far superior technically, but it was at such a high price point that it never made much of a dent in the market. That generation was pretty much defined by the SNES and Genesis.
There were also the Atari consoles. The 7800 was contemporary with the NES with slightly better specs, there was also the XEGS, and the Panther was in development at the same time as the SNES before it was cancelled for the Jaguar instead. They all flopped in the market, of course, but Nintendo didn't know that would happen while developing theirs, but they kept their hardware simple rather than ultimately overreaching like the Jaguar.
Maybe the cpu was more powerful (honestly idk) but the low memory of the N64 limited the textures and video features (never saw any video in an N64 game) in the games (see how flat texture-wise the textures of Mario64 are).
Sadly, pretty much all of the games I want to enjoy run terribly on the Switch to the point where I had to go back to my 800$ GPU to play them.
Pretty much every strategy / tactics game (outside a single one: Fire Emblem) runs terribly, below 30 fps, looks very burry and... the killing blow... has crazy long loading times. You can go grab coffee while Civ6 is loading and still won't be done by the time.
Quality control of games from Nintendo is very very poor. There are several games that came out which were unfinishable or unplayable and they just happily certified them.
... as long as you ignore the places where CDPR didn't actually finish debugging the game and errors abound, from innocent things like a pathing error in a pre-rendered character animation causing them to steamroll through movable objects in a scene to arguable game-breakers like a mission neither being succeed-able or failable because some key internal flag is in the wrong state, with the only solution being to roll back to a save before the error occurred.
I've beaten the game and NEVER had any issues like that, other than right after launch. You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time. The game is really quite good now and has been for some time.
> actually finish debugging the game and errors abound
Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this. I cannot count how many games have come out in this state and there wasn't an ridiculous backlash, just CP2077.
NOTHING comes out bug free nowadays, because we as an industry have this idiotic policy of shipping things ASAP
> You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time
I'd be happy to as soon as it's possible for me to complete or discard the "Get a gun" tutorial quest that is stuck in my quest roster. Stuck quests are a category of bug that stick badly in my craw; personal preference.
> Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this
Absolutely true, but there's degrees, and CP2077 was the buggiest game I played in 2021. When it works? It's... Okay, it's fine; I didn't find it as captivating as I hoped.
When it doesn't work, the results range from annoying to comical. I did have a good laugh the time that NPC got her handbag fused to her hand at a right angle, just gesticulating wildly in a conversation waving the thing around like an oven mitt. I did not have a good laugh when I got stuck in the floor crawling through an air vent to get into a locked room with a 'runner jacked into his chair, levitated off horizontally into the void so I couldn't move, and found that restoring from save took me all the way back to before I'd accepted the quest.
I'm old now; that shit eats into my finite time to enjoy games at all, and I have minimal patience for that category of error.
The first is "You misunderstood me. I'm hours into the game; that quest got stuck in the first hour or so, I didn't realize it was stuck, and rolling back to before I acquired it would basically reset all my progress. So it's just stuck there, like a splinter, reminding me how broken the game's mechanics are. Getting to live out twelve-year-old-me's fantasy of fighting Adam Smasher hasn't offset the irritation because that's my flavor of OCD."
But had the situation been as you expected, my response would have been "Because I respect my time more than these developers do and there's a literal sea of other games I could be playing that don't make me replay around script bugs."
Cyberpunk 2077 main issues are the very unequal main story and the extremely boring and repetitive side quests (also the driving gameplay but that’s fixable). That’s not things graphics can save sadly.
Switch software is incredibly expensive. if anything, PC Gaming proves that much more easily. My $300 laptop can run Factorial better than a Switch can.
you dont have to pay 1600 usd for a gpu on PC to enjoy Switch like indie games. even integrated graphics will let you enjoy thousands of non AAA games these days. what is your point?
Btw Factorio runs on any kind of PC well before it was on the Switch.