| Flouff said: I agree that a lot of gaming moments are filled with nostalgia, and memories make older games better than they really were, perhaps. But, after years of gaming, i think i am less suprised too. If recent games are far more solid and consistent experiences most of the time, they can become boring very fast. Add to this the limited time to play, that draws me to buy "safe" well known game, and i find less "unorthodox expericences" with the "wow" effect. Would like to test some of the games you listed ! |
Mmm! I can certainly understand the play it safe approach under those circumstances especially. I work about 60 hours a week, so I have a limited amount of leisure time myself. The way I respond to time constraints is to generally purchase smaller games that are cheaper, using reviews to mitigate the risks involved.
I share your sentiment that major games have become much more similar in design and appear to be moving toward a singular, unified type of design, in fact. In that sense I think they are, in fact, generally getting duller and more predictable. There are few major developers, and publishers, that are willing to take real risks and try new things today because it's just so expensive to make a AAA game now they want to be assured of a return on their investment more than ever. Part of me looks at that situation and is like "I miss the old days!!" But then I think about what made the old days better and it wasn't familiar names and franchises, it was that gaming was a smaller business that didn't have established franchises and genres to build off of and often didn't have a lot of resources to invest in things like focus group testing. Instead, people made games that they themselves wanted to play on the theory that if they liked them, someone else would too. That shoestring operation type of situation yielded a lot more creativity and risk-taking than is common in the AAA market today.
Maybe I'm waxing a little too poetic about the merits of independent development and such here, but venues like Steam and the like that are available today have breathed new life into this type of games development and it's brought me back from the brink of abandoning the medium altogether. If I felt confined to the AAA landscape, I probably wouldn't still be a gamer today.
