this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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You think they didn't do different things? Play different games?
Don't be an old crusty fucker
Some millennial have been playing WoW for over twenty years at this point.
This is me except it's RuneScape
Same
It was Mabinogi for me.
Final Fantasy XIV has only been out for... Hmm... Well, yeah, I guess it's gonna be one of those days.
This is an critique on the gaming industry, not the players.
I remember moving from the first sims to the second which was a spectacular difference, and then the sims 3 expanding on the tech with an open world. You could smell the future on the book that came in the box with the disc that you read on the way home.
Compare the early and modern versions of wolfenstein. The first game was revolutionary, can you tell apart generic stills from the last 3 games?
I haven’t seen much improvement to game mechanics or graphics in the last decade, personally. Just little nudges forward, sidegrades, or screaming drops back to the worst, most capitalist parts of the 80s
In my biased opinion, The Finals has a really interesting mechanic that you can't find anywhere else. The destruction absolutely feels "next gen", all the rubble is synchronized so everyone sees and actually interacts with the same destruction. It's different than just blowing up a wall for an entrance, it's a core part of the gameplay.
Red faction guerilla
Oh look, my favorite game! The devs treat the fans (both casual and competitive) so well!
I would hope it is more of the magic of dreaming of the future of video game graphics. It was so exciting to see the next generation of graphics come out.
I am hoping to see the same with VR. But unless there is some kind of technological breakthrough that they are willing to sell to consumers, I don't see it jumping forward very fast over the next few decades.
I think Gabe Newell said in an interview, VR is actually moving to fast. There is no point in pushing a product to market and spending all that time and money needed for that, when by the time you make it to the market the research has moved so much, your tech and product is obsolete already.
At some point they will release products again and they will be amazing (hopefully) but we dont get the continuous advances like with grafics back in the day
IDK, the modern high budget VR games are still pretty on-par with Half Life Alyx
Thanks! It is good to have something to look forward to! I guess that explains the massive dev time for the new steam headset!
Everything in game design is a meaningful choice. What does the choice of making the game for VR mean, exactly? I started this sentence planning to follow up with a few ideas but I'm honestly coming up short.
Personally and as a gamer since the 80s (and nowadays making games myself), I think the last great breakthrough improvement was procedurally generated game spaces, and that stuff dates back to Minecraft in 2009.
The improvements in visuals are well into the diminishing returns part of the curve, the richness and size of custom crafted game spaces has hit a cost ceiling (hence budgets in the $100 million mark for AAA games, even with partial authomatisation of things like model generation and painting via stuff like Houdini and Substance), and the only direction of growth I can see is the gameplay itself, where the improvements from the naturally emergent gameplay of multi-player were a one-off and have been more or less stuck at the same point for a decade.
For a while I had some hope that AI (specifically LLMs) would yield a massive jump in the richness of the game world in story terms (imagine an RPG were all NPCs have genuine complex stories with realistic interactions, all generated on the fly and even influenced by you) but plain LLMs have large hardware requirements merelly to interact with one person (powerful GPUs, at least 12GB of VRAM) on top of the requirements to run the game itself, so that kind of game improvement seems unlikely before the end of the decade.
There's been a lot of resources invested in improving local LLMs very recently, and Meta of all companies has been investing a ton of researcher time into local LLMs since the start of the AI boom with Llama and the like
Given the timelines for game development I'm still hoping for more emergent storytelling and gameplay at some point via AI, even if that's just to generate interiors for buildings that can't be entered and dialogue for silent NPCs
This is just perceived technological advances in the same span of time, not what games different generations prefer.
While Moore's Law isn't dead the slow down is apparent. From game graphics to phones and other areas of life, the perception is stagnation.
For example I'd notice little difference in a flagship android phone from 10 years ago or AAA video game compared to something that came out this year. Hell I might gain some features like a headphone jack or IR blaster.
You couldn't say the same if you went back 10 years from 2012 to 2002 tech. You'd go from a smartphone to a cellphone that probably didn't even have a color screen nevermind a camera, web browser, touchscreen etc.
I think you would notice a big difference from a 10 year old phone.
A flagship of 2015, like the Samsung Galaxy S6, is a medium-low specs phone of today (3GB RAM, 32GB storage), but with smaller screen. For most people that only use social media and messaging, it's perfectly serviceable.
They're physically bigger, higher resolution and thinner (but you can't easilly replace the battery when it inevitably dies) and the number of cameras went up from 1 to 3.
The difference between a phone from 10 years ago and one from 20 years ago is the difference between the 6th generation of the Apple iPhone and the Motorola Razr (a non-smart flip-phone) both lauded phones at their time.
The same massive deceleration in the speed of improvement compared to the period from the 80 up to the 2010s seems to have happenned all over Tech: my generation (Gen X) saw the appearance of consumer computing (Spectrum, Amiga, the original Mac back in the 80s) which accelerated to massive adoption amongs consumers and informatization of companies with the PC at the same time as mobile phones became mass market (the 90s), then the Internet and the digitalization of consumer technology with things like Digital Cameras (end of the 90s and the 00s), then mobile networked computing in the form of smart phones and tablets (late 00s and 10s).
What exactly is the great life-changing technological breakthrough of the late 2010s and the 2020s? The only one I can think of is the weaponization of Social Networks for mass manipulation, which is hardly an improvement.
I remember hearing various venture capitalists and the like talking about finding the next iPhone around circa 2012 because at that point phones were already starting to mature
I work with zoomers and tbf a lot of them play many different varied games but some of them genuinely still play roblox and fortnite into their late 20s/early 30s. But tbf to them there’s the millennials that have been playing shit like wow, eve, and osrs for 20 years