What games are you playing right now? Anything you'd recommend?

[G2ThaUNiT]

HoloDust said:

Vinther1991 said:

The other game I finished was good old F.E.A.R., another game I remember a lot of excitement about when it released, but I didn't play it until now. Absolutely phenomenal, close to FPS perfection, the gameplay and AI are on another level. Some of the particle effects still impress me and the physics are better than a lot of modern games. Only issue is the somewhat mondane environments. 75 % of the game is essentially spent in office building. Very same looking. It branches out a bit towards the end, but a bit too late maybe.

Yeah, F.E.A.R. is that game that lot of us keep wondering why industry since then can't seem to manage to make another with as good AI as it had back so long ago. But then again, industry can't seem to make a lot of things these days that were pioneered long ago, and keeps reinventing wheels every so often.

So much of it is due to people that did not grow up playing games and entered the gaming industry as a means to a career, rather than an enjoyer of video games, whether that be as a developer or executive. I'm only in my 30s and I remember when I was about to graduate high school how many of my classmates wanted to work on games because they knew how much money you could make. None of them actually cared about gaming in general. I even joked with some of them how I never even knew they played games, and they actually replied that they didn't lol.

Makes me miss the older days of gaming when it was pioneered by a bunch of computer science major nerds that loved gaming and wanted to make a game that they always wanted to play, and coming up with creative ways in doing so.

Reminds me of a couple of clips. One from David Jaffe in the 90s, and one of Gabe Newell in the Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary.

I feel like these kinds of mentalities are just not in the game industry anymore. At least not in the more mainstream side of the gaming industry. You can certainly find this level of thinking in the indie scene at least. But it's disheartening to see where the industry I grew up loving has gone in recent years.

Gabe has proven that Valve still has that enduring mindset with as recently as Half-Life: Alyx. That game felt like I was playing a 90s/early 2000s game again but modernized.