I've been in a PC gaming funk for quite some time now. I didn't buy nearly as many games last year as I used to buy and nearly all of the games I bought turned out to be disappointments. It appears that I wasn't alone. I just watched this video on YouTube and I believe the guys who made it are on to something. Have a look:
An older YouTube video in a somewhat similar vein is this one:
I installed two new games today and I can't get into either one of them. And it's been like that for a long time. :'(
Is anyone else experiencing this?
Yup a few years ago and then I got back into board and role playing games. Now I spend most of my computer time watching let's plays to learn games or systems, or reading pdf rulebooks and other game materials. Not an answer, I guess but I'm much more satisfied with my gaming time and experiences.
Hasn't happened to me...yet. I hope it never does because I love PC games so very much.
I'm going to watch the videos after I type this.
I have definitely stopped buying as many games. I don't agree that games aren't fun anymore at all. For me, it has become all about time. I simply have too many games to ever possibly finish in my lifetime. So, I've sort of reached saturation; at first I bought anything that was on sale because it was a good deal, but now I realize that if I buy 100 games at $5 that I never play, I haven't really saved any money.
The other, perhaps bigger part, is that my tolerance for learning new games has gone way down. I'm in this very comfortable position where I have maybe 10 games that scratch almost any itch I have, and so I tend to just go back to those...it's like the McDonalds of gaming. Maybe not the best food, but you always know what you're going to get, and you leave full and at least marginally satisfied.
You'll notice in my Friday posts I typically only have a handful of games that I keep going back to over and over. They're good games. So, I just don't need too much new stuff anymore.
Finally, with the frequent sales, if I miss something one month it will almost certainly pop up again...July through January is almost one big sale at this point.
I've gotten burnt-out on a few games and quit but for the most part I really love the ones I have and play. The trick for me is to not play any game too often to get tired of it and to move around on the games I play to keep them interesting. I also try to make myself finish games and not just grab the newest shiny thing. :-X
I really think digital diwnloads has become a big factor. In the past, I would need to send away for or travel to a store to pick up games....often a deterrent for buying a lot of games. Allowed me to stick with games longer. But now, downloading all the time, too accessible and too easy to do. Combine that with frequent sales, adds to the impulse nature.
I don't think the games are bad, I just have a short attention span because I always want to play the next thing.
I'm frickin' broke. otherwise i'd be buying. On the other hand my regretables are a lot higher than my glad I boughts. So maybe that's a good thing.
I went into a gaming funk for a number of years. I didn't buy many new titles, everything I bought had a "been there /done that" quality to it, and even titles that got rave reviews from folks I trusted (many of them from here) just left me feeling very "meh".
Those clouds have lifted a little bit, but I still only buy a fraction of the games that I used to. I think it's a function of knowing what you want, and pessimism around games that don't look like what you want.
After 2 or 3 years away, I've discovered a number of great games that have pulled me back. But there does seem to be a natural ebb and flow to these things.
Same. Got into a gaming funk. Then I got back into board games. Those seem to take up more of my time these days. (And way more money.... :tickedoff: )
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on January 22, 2017, 01:37:39 AM
Same. Got into a gaming funk. Then I got back into board games. Those seem to take up more of my time these days. (And way more money.... :tickedoff: )
I have bought four board wargames in the last month. I dont know - just seems they bring back memories of what drew me into the hobby in the first place. They just seem a better product - and have that thing I always read about first - chrome. I love chrome. All those little rules that make a situation special. Not that I have gone off say tiller games - just there is only so much you can do with a generic engine. That and what everyone else says - it is time that is the big factor. Have more games than I can properly play and need to focus more to go through them and ditch the ones that just dont deliver
Quote from: Toonces on January 21, 2017, 10:51:17 PM
I'm going to watch the videos after I type this.
I think the problem with the big name games like fallout and snacktime in Mordor and the singe-player stuff in typical FPS is that they aren't actually games at all. They are more like
poorly-directed visits to very bad movies. For games with editors I can make better scenarios in a few minutes than most games feature after large teams have turned them into
very painful versions of pop culture. I don't see the point in recycling bad movies and pop culture into something even more daft and calling that a "game".
Still, of course, I still buy lots of PC games. Air sims are always fun as are most ship and tank and sub sims (if they have editors or lots of online multi options) and there are some
instances of pop recycling that I like such as Invisible or XCOM. I'm ever hopeful that marvelous accidents like those keep happening.
I guess I will never burn out because I've never particularly believed that PC games were a good model of fun to begin with -- so I'm always looking for where the game model goes off the rails and accidently becomes interesting or at least has an editor or good mods or something.
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on January 22, 2017, 01:37:39 AM
Same. Got into a gaming funk. Then I got back into board games. Those seem to take up more of my time these days. (And way more money.... :tickedoff: )
We need the boardgame equivalent of a Steam sale every few months... my wallet hates me at the moment, but man is my collection looking good! 8)
I don't think this problem is anything "new".
I think there were several other periods in gaming history when the marketing departments turned off consumers, and damaged the gaming landscape: Atari "E.T." anyone?
I view this problem as almost exclusively with the "big budget" releases. As the video points out, "indie" developers are keeping the flame alive.
Still as Mark Twain said, 'history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.' So the market is a helluva lot bigger than it used to be...and the scale is much different. Distribution is also so different, as are the plethora of platforms. So what we are seeing now is different, and maybe more pernicious.
The excellent news however is that it has never been easier to develop and distribute "indie" games (at least on PC). I love seeing some really good things developed using tools like Unity personal edition, and sold on platforms like Steam.
IMHO will survive just fine, and actually come out of this slump for the better.
I have been trying to play what I have. That's really it.
Part of it is thankfully, my potato PC is hitting its limits. So again, a slight restriction, which means I get to play what I have OR GOG.com (even better)
I can wait for the ones I wanted in 2014-2015 new to go on sale.
I haven't had the dedication to it as much either, part of it is they are just so damn big, or in the case of Paradox's never ending DLC...never finished!
Luckily Stellaris isn't bad in that area.
and...as ghost said, I'm frickin' broke. I might get something with my Anniversary coupon from Matrix/Slytherine. Or even the Endless Legend collection/Endless Space (it's on my list) But really? I have been realizing I have too much. I keep wondering (Why do I need Game Title VI, when I haven't even played V or IV as much?) Bigger question is it going to run? (my potato is a bit weak in the RAM area I could use 8GB to beef it up, but the CPU, GPU, etc...you get the idea)
But the no-press release policy from Bethesda? Seriously? This is just as bad as the endless "No demo" excuses we've heard in the past.
I give credit to some developers allowing a free version such as; Order of Battle: World War II, Thea: The Awakening, Legends of Callasia, which allows you some gameplay to understand how it works and in the case of Order of Battle, trying out the 1st scenario of each expansion.
But I think it is we're getting either too much, or its just mediocre and in bigger cases the price tag.
Quote from: ArizonaTank on January 22, 2017, 12:59:27 PM
I don't think this problem is anything "new".
I think there were several other periods in gaming history when the marketing departments turned off consumers, and damaged the gaming landscape: Atari "E.T." anyone?
I view this problem as almost exclusively with the "big budget" releases. As the video points out, "indie" developers are keeping the flame alive.
The 2nd video was pretty touching in its plea to people to try to have fun not playing AAA "games" about (well what are they about?...not WWII any more, but I think I missed the AAA WWII period). I've always played a lot of WWII games and I think the attractions of such a topic are becoming
less and less like the blank slate of utter mayhem that AAA games seem to require. For example, there's an evolving narrative of understanding what the real dynamics of the actual event were (not something any AAA game would ever even offer up as a whiff in an optional addendum to a DLC) AND (perhaps more crucially) the stuff involved (guns, planes whathaveyou) have real and somewhat limited performance parameters.
Of course most games are happy to violate any of the above in lots of ways -- but there is some kind of actual outside-the-game world to which the game models have to interact -- and that interaction is one way that fun can enter the games more or less by accident. Which is to say -- its not that some kind of modeling on reality should limit a game, its that the trade-offs in such modeling can cause interesting things to happen that are unlikely in massive AAA games about (whatever those games are about -- see Far Cry 3 and 4 for some questions about what the game is about)...
If it's a third down, then my own take is this: people are much more shrewd when it comes to purchasing.
The trend in companies releasing unfinished games has altered buying trends. I think people now wait off on a day-one purchase, read the reviews from the public and then make a decision.
Case in point: Dishonoured 2. I was ready to make a day-one purchase but read the reviews. Still not bought it.
I did not get whether they included steam or other digital sales in that video. If not then I don't care as they don't know anything worth a damn.
As for my take. They can freakin buy the game and review it when it comes out with everybody else. That way they might actually play it before judging it. The smart people will wait until after release for a proper view point from real gamers.
My take though is that AAA titles have stagnated Hollywood style and people are just bored of the reskins. That is the yearly titles in a franchise that are not actually introducing anything new to play with. The experience is exactly the same as it was 15 years ago.
Having said that I got so bored this year while waiting for the likes of star citizen I did buy more games than I normally would and more games like battlefront and battlefield I would not normally bother with.
The everything seems to be a walkthrough instead of a game comment I agree with.
The games most often accused of a lack of innovation I have never played anyway, like GTA, Mafia, etc. so maybe that has made me immune to the malaise to some extent. If I played any of those games now they would blow my mind because I have never played any iteration of them ever.
I don't this has happened to me - yet
It's taken awhile but I liken my gaming to a teenager drinking, anything, everything, cheap, expensive, big ones at Christmas and birthdays
But as I've got older it's refined itself into what I know and what I like and that inherently reduces intake and if there is nothing that ticks the right boxes coming over the horizon than reach into the cupboard for comfortable classics until there is - again guaranteeing a reduction in purchasing
My limitation is time. It takes time to learn a game system. I tend to purchase only 4-6 game systems a year.
Example: I've been playing a lot of Order of Battle. I learned the system and then have been playing the various campaigns. I can get into the campaign without having to dig through yet another system. I'm a lot more likely to play a system I know (Strategic Command, Fallout, gold box D&D, etc....) than learning an entire new system. It took me 6 months to a year to get to my level of understanding of the Dominions games.
They are as big of a blast as they always have been. But I've never been one to even buy a game a month of a new system. Who can learn and really enjoy playing that many systems? And I have a bunch of great systems that I have not learned how to play yet (Twilight Struggle, Pathfinder, etc....).
Quote from: Gusington on January 23, 2017, 09:52:25 AM
The games most often accused of a lack of innovation I have never played anyway, like GTA, Mafia, etc. so maybe that has made me immune to the malaise to some extent. If I played any of those games now they would blow my mind because I have never played any iteration of them ever.
Finally got to watch the two videos. I found both to be very interesting. But like Gus, I don't play the type of game they mention most. My interest in pc gaming remains strong.
^Yes...feel the gaming energy flow through you!
(https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-15/s640x640/sh0.08/e35/12523663_532005566970839_387608469_n.jpg)
A lot of you talked about learning a new game system. I totally agree, I bought games during the Steam sale. I still play Panzer Corps all the time - love it. I was into the Battlefield series quite a bit, bought the last one and poof, lost all interest in fps games. Now, I am back into slow paced strategy games. I will tend to stay away from full priced games plus I also don't have the time to play everything.
Quote from: ArizonaTank on January 22, 2017, 12:59:27 PM
I view this problem as almost exclusively with the "big budget" releases. As the video points out, "indie" developers are keeping the flame alive.
Perhaps its the uncanny wall that an academic British game research team has postulated. Their theory is that you never get over the uncanny valley because the uncanny wall just gets higher and higher. They also postulate that the Japanese term shaine-wan (something like "not strange") that the originator of the term uncanny valley in 1970 has been mistranslated.
Anyway, so what happens is that the big budget releases pour more and more money into making "Human" seeming actors/agents in their games BUT these trigger a progressively more and more insidious disgust response (so in my case in the Mordor game I came to hate the human agents and prefer the Orcs because the Orcs stayed away from the uncanny wall while the human forms violated it more and more disgustingly) while Indie games like Invisible have cartoon agents -- these don't have the uncanny wall problem. Measurements of human brain responses to uncanny wall effects suggest that it is the repeditive action predictor neuronal networks that get progressively fed up with uncanny wall problems and that more technically sophisticated viewers just get more and more disgusted with the violations of the predictor networks.
So 1) the money AAA games spend just makes players more and more subliminally disgusted (and burnt out)
2) the more sophisticated players get burned out faster (due to uncanny predictor violations)
3) so gradually the more money the AAA games spend, the more subliminially disgusting they become (due to predictor violations)
MengJiao, can you define those terms? Your explanation seems... uncanny.
;)
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 25, 2017, 02:12:27 PM
MengJiao, can you define those terms? Your explanation seems... uncanny.
;)
+1
I usually enjoy learning a new system. It's probably the reason I purchased so many.
When the game starts getting bogged down in micro-hell, or I feel like I've figured out the mechanics enough to easily beat the AI, or I keep jumping around to learning other games and forget what I was doing in my Saved game, are the points I just move on and put it back in "the stack".
Learning a new system is usually fun and fairly easy to me, but it's not always the case. Such as flight sims where you have to do a bunch of mind-numbing hardware setup, and documentation of your setup, long before actually getting to the enjoyable learning bits. Wish they each came with full HOTAS presets, of all the popular ones, built in. Then it would just be a matter of writing it all down.
It's also annoying having to dig around internet searches to figure out how a game works. In-game documentation, you bastids! And, at the least, useful tooltips for everything.
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 25, 2017, 02:12:27 PM
MengJiao, can you define those terms? Your explanation seems... uncanny.
;)
In 1970 a Japanese guy working on robots postulated that as robots became more humanoid there would be a stage where they were not-quite human and this would cause people to find them more disturbing than machine-like robots or perfectly human robots. This notion has been codified as the "uncanny valley" and in neurobiology the theory is that the human brain automatically and subliminally models bodily motions (of its own body and others) and robots tend to violate the brain's predictive models of body motion. -- triggering the uncanny feeling of disgust or disturbance.
The assumption has been that as robots or game models of human forms improve, the uncanny valley response will go away, but recently academic researchers on games have proposed that there is an uncanny wall and as games get better at modeling people the subliminal feeling of disturbance just gets worse. It seems like this would be especially true of all the human drama heavy stuff that AAA games work at so hard with the result that they burn out their players with subliminal disgust based on violations of the predictive models in player's brains.
Meaning our brain doesn't expect perfection from Minecraft characters, but as they start to look more person-like, our brain's expectations grow, and this leads to rejection of the cut scenes, etc.? Interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's the primary factor at work here. Not for me, anyways...
Quote from: MengJiao on January 25, 2017, 06:04:22 PM
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 25, 2017, 02:12:27 PM
MengJiao, can you define those terms? Your explanation seems... uncanny.
;)
In 1970 a Japanese guy working on robots postulated that as robots became more humanoid there would be a stage where they were not-quite human and this would cause people to find them more disturbing than machine-like robots or perfectly human robots. This notion has been codified as the "uncanny valley" and in neurobiology the theory is that the human brain automatically and subliminally models bodily motions (of its own body and others) and robots tend to violate the brain's predictive models of body motion. -- triggering the uncanny feeling of disgust or disturbance.
The assumption has been that as robots or game models of human forms improve, the uncanny valley response will go away, but recently academic researchers on games have proposed that there is an uncanny wall and as games get better at modeling people the subliminal feeling of disturbance just gets worse. It seems like this would be especially true of all the human drama heavy stuff that AAA games work at so hard with the result that they burn out their players with subliminal disgust based on violations of the predictive models in player's brains.
Thanks for the clarification MJ. You're earlier post makes sense now. Perhaps we subconsciously prefer abstraction over ultra-realism?
Quote from: MengJiao on January 25, 2017, 06:04:22 PM
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 25, 2017, 02:12:27 PM
MengJiao, can you define those terms? Your explanation seems... uncanny.
;)
In 1970 a Japanese guy working on robots postulated that as robots became more humanoid there would be a stage where they were not-quite human and this would cause people to find them more disturbing than machine-like robots or perfectly human robots. This notion has been codified as the "uncanny valley" and in neurobiology the theory is that the human brain automatically and subliminally models bodily motions (of its own body and others) and robots tend to violate the brain's predictive models of body motion. -- triggering the uncanny feeling of disgust or disturbance.
The assumption has been that as robots or game models of human forms improve, the uncanny valley response will go away, but recently academic researchers on games have proposed that there is an uncanny wall and as games get better at modeling people the subliminal feeling of disturbance just gets worse. It seems like this would be especially true of all the human drama heavy stuff that AAA games work at so hard with the result that they burn out their players with subliminal disgust based on violations of the predictive models in player's brains.
Interesting, I kind of got that feeling when "Peter Cushing" was on screen during Star Wars Rouge One.
Quote from: bbmike on January 26, 2017, 08:27:21 AM
Quote from: MengJiao on January 25, 2017, 06:04:22 PM
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 25, 2017, 02:12:27 PM
MengJiao, can you define those terms? Your explanation seems... uncanny.
;)
In 1970 a Japanese guy working on robots postulated that as robots became more humanoid there would be a stage where they were not-quite human and this would cause people to find them more disturbing than machine-like robots or perfectly human robots. This notion has been codified as the "uncanny valley" and in neurobiology the theory is that the human brain automatically and subliminally models bodily motions (of its own body and others) and robots tend to violate the brain's predictive models of body motion. -- triggering the uncanny feeling of disgust or disturbance.
The assumption has been that as robots or game models of human forms improve, the uncanny valley response will go away, but recently academic researchers on games have proposed that there is an uncanny wall and as games get better at modeling people the subliminal feeling of disturbance just gets worse. It seems like this would be especially true of all the human drama heavy stuff that AAA games work at so hard with the result that they burn out their players with subliminal disgust based on violations of the predictive models in player's brains.
Interesting, I kind of got that feeling when "Peter Cushing" was on screen during Star Wars Rouge One.
Well played bbmike....you nailed it!
^Me too, but I think that's maybe because we knew what was going on. I did not get that feeling when Princess Leia appears at the end.
I thought CGI Leia was creepier than CGI Tarkin.
I thought that Leia was spliced together from old actual footage, I did not know she was CGI until afterwards...so maybe some of the points above are valid [for me]. If we don't know about the CGI or whatever perhaps we are better off, in movies anyway.
I kept thinking of Sid Meier's Civilization leaders while watching Tarkin. Tarkin was a few steps up but truly not that much different.
They were in the Uncanny Valley with both characters. I wish they had just recast Tarkin. I thought Wayne Pygram was fine as Tarkin at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
^I agree but I think we're both old-fashioned.
Quote from: mirth on January 26, 2017, 02:46:45 PM
I thought CGI Leia was creepier than CGI Tarkin.
Me too. I hadn't heard anything about either of them before seeing the film for the first time. I knew Cushing was no longer alive, but didn't know the replacement was CGI. I knew Leia was CGI the moment I saw her, but it may have been heightened because Carrie Fisher had died just a few days before.
Well, I came in here to post about my game-buying habits, but *tears up Rogue One cinema tickets* :'(
Because this is the place for on topic discussion?
Quote from: undercovergeek on January 26, 2017, 05:58:14 PM
Because this is the place for on topic discussion?
On what now?
Quote from: mirth on January 26, 2017, 06:04:41 PM
Quote from: undercovergeek on January 26, 2017, 05:58:14 PM
Because this is the place for on topic discussion?
On what now?
How to use the theme of the wall on the other side of the now-no-longer-uncanny-enough valley to interpret games and other computer-generated imagery. I realize now that I already used the uncanny valley thing to explain why people hated Rome II so much, but in that case it was the entire game world that I thought was giving people the subliminal creeps. Anyway, theoretically there are ways around the little problem the brain has with such things. For example, if you interpret the game objects as being manipulated by something else and not directly trying to enact its own actions. So that would explain why multiplayer is favored more and more these days.