This post is quite a doozy lol.
I'm not too sure what a "director's cut" of Death Stranding would be considering the entire game is made from Kojima's insane mind.
The only thing that makes me interested is the potential on expanding the parts where you're in Hellish versions of historical battlefields, the idea and atmosphere behind those were cool as hell, but the gameplay was shockingly simplistic, expanding on those a lot should be one of the main focus.
There should also be a bunch of quality of life improvements as well like weapons shouldn't be items you carry like you carry everything else but should have their own slots as well as needing ammo and not a whole other gun etc.
But here's the thing, if you've played the game, you know the story, you know all the big twists, even if it's greatly improved it's never going to feel like a "been there done that" experience no matter how Kojima expands or changes the story unless he's wanting to get really crazy and tell an entirely different story or something, otherwise this is a complete waste of time and Kojima should just move on to something else, this is pretty disappointing.
I've got bad news for you Dom.
You're getting old.
This is nothing new with video games. The industry has always gone through style and tone changes. Most normal people stop being dedicated to games once they hit their 30's. At best they might just play a few niche titles that appeal to them. (or sports titles I guess for the real hardcore normies)
You're going to have a few story focused games, but you're not going to have a ton of them. Especially from AAA unless you want Sony's shitty diversity hire forced SWJ writing in them.
Games as a service and Esports are the future for at least the next 5 years sadly, maybe more if a new trend doesn't hit. Might be time to find a more productive hobby and just play the few titles that appeal to you. Or just join the old man club (lol I'm 31 too) with me and just bitch and moan and try to piss off as many gaymers as you can.
It's true, video games by their nature change radically from era to era and when you get used to way things once were and then everything changes it's hard to keep up, but you can pull that off maybe once or twice, but when things just keep radically changing eventually it just gets to be too much.
The esports/streamer era is truly where I feel like I'm losing the plot, I've watched some LPs, but the ones I've watched have mainly been ones highlighting some old and interesting game or some weird or bad game that's fun to laugh at with interesting commentary added to it, the idea instead of having to show up to a livestream on time to watch some yahoo play some latest competitive game, who the hell cares? Why not just play the game yourself? I don't get the appeal of that at all.
But on a personal and note and beyond just video games themselves, it's simply hard to say goodbye to your youth, over the last 5 years and change, growing older, losing a couple of family members, it's really been tough accepting change and moving on to something really different.
I think this is partially correct. It's too easy too blame it all on the "back in my day" syndrome though. A lot of it has to do with where gaming is at the moment. Back in the 90s the industry was big but still had to prove itself, therefore they tried harder.
Cut to 2021 and the industry is massive. Now people buy the new Playstation and Xbox with only 1-2 exclusives at launch or even planned. Creatively they don't have to try anymore most of the time.
The scale was tipped around 2007/2008, it's not just "back in my day" syndrome, that really was a major turning point, that's when gaming became popular enough that developers started catering more to normies and less to the hardcore, there's been plenty of great games since but a special magic was lost compared to 2007 and below, those were truly the peak days.
The industry is shit, don't get me wrong. But he'd be feeling what he is feeling regardless of how shit the industry is.
This is something that has happened my whole damn life.
1986-1996 was the time of the platformer.
1996-2006 was the 3D collect-a-thon. All I heard from my older cousins was how much games sucked now because they stopped doing platformers and everything had shitty controls because they were not used to 3D spaces (and they were pretty shitty controls). About the only thing they enjoyed were RPG's.
2006-2016 was the time of open worlds and the push towards everything being overly cinematic. While I enjoyed open worlds, this was when I started getting tired of gameplay being stiffed in exchange for overly long and overly produced cutscenes. This is also when my older cousins dropped out entirely as a lot of their favorite RPG's started playing linearly and were focused on visuals over the game.
2016-now has been the rise of battle royale/esports and the push towards games as a service. You're now seeing people our age dropping out because they're used to a game being a complete package and having some sort of narrative incentive or push to keep you playing.
It's normal. The new generation likes a new type of game and our generation just doesn't see the fun in it.
As far as the idea of the industry having to "try harder" back in the day, I'm sure most in the industry would claim they're working even harder today because they have to produce games that are far larger than anything before, with far more demanding graphics and animations. On top of this they have to produce stable netcode and keep everything running 24/7. They have to push for 60fps on multiple forms of software that are all outdated before they even release, Etc. Etc.
Like I said, games change radically from era to era, one thing I've noticed is there was a massive schism in gaming's past when the jump was made from 2D to 3D, a huge amount of a whole generation of gamers simply moved on when that happened, James Rolfe being a famous example, I also think of an older cousin of mine who was a big NES/SNES kid and we would play that and my Sega Genesis together, but he fell out of it for years in the 3D era, never owned a older 3D console himself, only rarely playing with me, he did later get into the PS3 for a while but I'm pretty sure he's stopped completely by now.
lol
You're still considered a young punk in the science fiction author crowd if you're in your 50's.
Fuck there are table top players who have played table top games for longer than people in their 30's have been alive. I mean you realize that we have uncovered game pieces for board games that are thousands of years old. Warhammer itself skews older because only established well off fucks can buy a gorillion tiny men to paint.
It's part of human nature, games appeal to us because it's an alternate reality we are more in control, with clearer set rules and boundaries than the chaotic nature of reality, that would be as appealing to an ancient person playing with stone pieces as a person playing a video game today.
Dom has made mention on how he wants adult games that have a topless mode, I'm guessing something else is at play
All I want is games to be able get away with whatever an R rated movie can get away and believe it or not sexual content can sometimes be relevant to a story, only a moron thinks all sexual content is gratuitous.
It's bullshit that games have been hindered as an artistic medium thanks to political correctness, it's exactly what we feared in the 2000s and fought tooth and nail to prevent, only to be stabbed in the back by spineless losers who lacked the guts to dare criticize a woman, I will never not be pissed off as fuck about this situation, it's bullshit on every level.
I dunno I think that's subjective. It seems to be the same shit to quality ratio we've had for decades IMO.
Like the 90's had the 3DO, Sega 32x, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, those were all hot streams of shit in the US.
And that's even before getting to things like the Virtual Boy, Sega Pico, and edutainment software games which all existed in that era. There was also Tiger Electronic handhelds, Atari Jaguar, and the Gamegear.
You've just blocked out the bad games from your memory. Much like how Neo geo and PC Engine/TG16 are not part of mainstream nostalgia despite also existing at the same points in time due to their higher price tag.
I have to disagree with this, there's always been tons of the shitty games but the shit to quality ratio is higher in the shit and lesser in the quality than in times past.
People used to complain about Tomb Raider and Twisted Metal having yearly entries over a span of about 4 years or so, by the time of Tomb Raider The Angel of Darkness people were sick to death of the series and it bombed, forcing a break and the series really reconfiguring before another bomb and another reconfiguration half a decade later and it still hasn't been a yearly series since.
Twisted Metal took a short break and came back with Black, which was fantastic, but that was the last Twisted Metal for over a decade and there hasn't been another one in the almost decade since.
Meanwhile Call of fucking Duty has had a new entry every single year for the last 18 years! (counting the spinoffs in 2004), there's not been a year without a Call of Duty game since fucking 2003! And the audience eats it up year after year, never getting sick of it, the one time they seemed like they were getting sick of it, with Ghosts in 2013, they then proceeded to keep buying it again every single year for the last 8 years, it just never fucking ends.
Whereas gamers were sick to death of Tomb Raider by game number 6, imagine instead if there had been a new Tomb Raider game every single year from the years 1996 to fucking 2014 and people kept buying them every single year, that's what Call of Duty has done.
If that's not a clear example of the devolution of creativity in games and the decrease in people's taste in gaming now versus then I don't know what is.
Given that a fucking banana taped to a wall is "art" now then Sonic 2 is a van gogh
Most of the games are art! was coping by game devs whose parents said "this is tim, he makes those electronic toys weird kids like". I literally knew one dev who was really sperging about it back in the day because his brother worked at a major national newspaper, his cousins had an engineering firm and he was the one making shitty indie games nobody played
It was people desperately trying to get games taken seriously as a "deep" medium with the irony being they had all been beaten to the punch by years with Silent Hill 2, which is a deeper game than anything a western dev has ever made and at this rate will probably ever make as "deep" is now synonymous with "political propaganda"
The correct response would have been to not give a shit what outsiders think.
I dont remember that being a thing outside of gamer circles who of course got blasted by the media for going against what their industry paymasters wanted
It started right off the bat with the launch of the Xbox 360, when people said the best reason to buy the console was because of Geometry Wars (a game invoking old school games) which was stupid because the 360 actually had one of the better launches a console has ever had, at least compared to the PS5 and XSX.
From there in the first few years of the 7th gen there was a lot of cynicism about the current state of gaming, games like Bioshock were met with "not as good as System Shock 2", Fallout 3 was "not as good as Fallout 1 and 2", almost everything was always met with cries of "not as good as the past"
I mean people weren't entirely wrong, after all Fallout 3 really is not as good as Fallout 1 and 2, but I also feel like people were too harsh on games of that era and that mentality in some respects led to guys like Jonathon Blow and Phil Fish trying to "save" gaming and only ironically making it that much worse by later bringing Woke politics into it, for all the accusations thrown at games of the 7th gen, at least shit was not Woke, which makes it all so refreshing today and any flaws forgivable.
If you mean 8bit style then thats another thing entirely since those games were closer to the likes of the Saturn in what was displayed on screen, no fucking was a Nes or a Genesis would've been able to run those games
I'm simply talking 2D games, if it was 2D then it was trying to bring back the "spirit" of the 8 bit/16 bit era, it didn't matter if it was technically beyond what would have been possible on the actual old hardware.
The problem is that those groups used that bullshit to climb the corporate ladder and now are in control, they are playing the long con and making more money than the devs who actually make the fucking games while ordering them around
It's disgusting.
Not empathy, fear. If it was empathy they would appeal to people, not threatening them with cancel culture and blacklist people that disagree with them, which is why most of the industry fell in line with their dogma
But it's the fear of not being empathetic enough, the fear of being called a bigot, our society puts such great emphasis on being "nice" to people but we take it beyond any logic and reason, sometimes not being nice is what's necessary.
If you go back enough everybody had a super wealthy relative who then pissed the money away. I could also be super rich and wasnt because of similar circumstances involving a great-great grandmother's will and her greedy sons, not gonna powerlevel either but again similar situation
Knowing my personality today I would be one to simply enjoy and be thankful for my wealth, but that's because I wasn't born into it, there's no telling what being born into it would have had on me.
Thing is I could really use that money now since my country is going to shit like Venezuela and I need to get out for real, not like SJWs saying they had to leave the country because of Trump
Sorry to hear that.
The og Gears trilogy really tried to get something going with the fascism angle and background but it lost that and instead its remembered for shit like coltrain's VA. Back then cliffyB still had his shit together, but then he drank the SJW koolaid. The new games are trying to be 2serious4you and fail completely. The gameplay is also bland and boring, theres no intensity to it
Gears 2 kind of feels like the culmination of what a "video game" had been up to that point, it was the ultimate "video game" video game, big burly dudes with chainsaw guns killing hideous monsters.
But from there things started changing, Gears 3 actually was surprisingly proto Woke, what with the reveal of
the COG actually being bad guys, the secret island where all the rich people went to hide to escape the horrors everyone else had to live with with and the new female Gears.
2011 is when the earliest signs of Woke popped up, same year the new Tomb Raider made it's debut, but it's all so mild compared to the nightmare of today.
See I actually dont have a problem with those games, I remember looking at DayZ and thinking "this would be more fun without the zombies" and I guess I was right but I didnt have the money nor connections to make it. Plus freemium games require tons of investment to get the ball rolling and you only start raking in the cash once enough people are playing it and paying for lootboxes and other shit. Same with fortnite, plus with the pixar-esque style and bright colors it was a given kids would love that
What I really didnt get back in the day was minecraft, it seemed boring as fuck, same with other build&survive games like rust and that other one I cant remember because idgaf. When they shoved that on fallout4 with the settlements it was jarring. I liked the weapon building part but DeadSpace 3 did that better, much better
See, I meant to mention Minecraft, Minecraft was indeed the very first time a popular game came out that I didn't get the appeal of at all.
Streamers is another trend that made me fell out of place, I didnt get why so many people were watching (and paying!) others to play games instead of playing the games themselves. Then it hit me that a lot of kids watching pewdiepie thought he was like a friend to them and they were lonely af IRL, and thats why they were watching him, same reason why simps pay thots thinking thats like having a girlfriend
View attachment 2253109
Yeah, the "friend/girlfriend simulator" aspect is a bit part of the appeal.
How sad is that we live in an age where that's a thing?
TBH fallguys was way more fad-ish, also agar.io
Sure, Fall Guys is an even better example, but you know what I mean, fad games that will be forgotten about in years, much like how almost no one still gives a shit about FNAF.
Meanwhile people talked about Resident Evil 4 for years and years and still do.
Eh, tlou1 was kind of a disappointment for me too, it wasnt a bad game but the AI was a bit shit and the downgrade from the demos was too noticeable. The problem is that it got blown out of proportion by the corrupt press, was called the "citizen kane of games" (and the sequel the schindler's list of games) when in reality it was specops:the line but with zombies, and that game had also been overhyped and I remember reaching the ripoff of fight club that was the ending and thinking "who the fuck can praise this?"
The lack of the AI as seen in the trailers was definitely a problem, gameplay wise it definitely could have been better but as a story I really do think it was brilliant and actually very relevant for today's world.
It reminds me of Bioshock Infinite, now that game was a real mixed bag, but it's story contains a very relevant message for today's world.
One year later gaymergays happened and it all became clear. And from the very first trailer you could tell tlou2 was going to be infested with sjw faggotry
There were signs, but it was mostly just Ellie being gay, which I didn't really have a big problem with, it's what they did to Joel though that's unforgivable, the character simply deserved better than that, it pisses on the entirety of the first game's story, Druckmann is a piece of shit.
I dont think those are going away any time, freemium is just too profitable and its only gonna get worse with cloud gaming. I thought stadia shitting the bed was the end of it but other companies are still pushing for it, and its gonna suck because if that goes mainstream then expect many games to be cloud-only and thus designed to only run on custom servers
Cloud service goes down and those games are lost forever
I can't see myself getting invested in a game that could vanish completely.
The industry got consolidated, many companies are gone (accolade, acclaim, THQ) or reduced to a shadow of their former self (Sega, SNK) and the ones that remain are too big and comfortable to try new things so they play it safe and put profitability over innovation. You see the same shit in other industries like cars, movies, music, etc. Remember the craziness of the PC industry in the 80s and 90s? nobody does that anymore, all computers are the same now
Don't forget Midway, they were a fun mid tier publisher that made games that were very "American" in a good way.
The sheer number of cool developers and publishers that went defunct over the course of the 7th gen is staggering, it was an absolute slaughterhouse.
Look at apple and all the new shit they made in the late 90s and early 00s, the cube, the G4 imac, the clamshell ibooks, where is that innovation now? the new imac its basically the same design as the G5 from 15 years ago, apple got big after the iphone so they dont care anymore, money keeps flowing in anyway, normalfags keep buying their shit no matter what
I miss that weird era of Apple.
The average gamer doesn't obsess over games. They typically play something on their phone on the shitter for a few minutes or they only play like 3 games a year. (typically a sport title, a shooter and one of the big hyped holiday releases)
When I say they start walking away from games in their 30's, I mean they stop obsessing over games in their 30s not that they stop playing them entirely.
This is why the Assassin's Creed games are so dense, they're made for people to play it all year long until the next one comes out.
This is why I recommend Dom stop focusing so much on games as his main hobby. He should find the few games he does like, but accept that the industry is going to continue going in different directions he will probably not enjoy so he should focus on the few games that comes out that he does enjoy.
Tabletop gaming is something I've been looking into, although I know that has it's own issues with Woke.
Your point about going broke is inaccurate. Generally speaking Nintendo has been notable for selling most of its hardware at a profit and generating profit year over year. Additionally, "if it wasn't for their rabid fanbase" is a strange argument against Nintendo or any company really. They have earned loyal customers... that's great! You can't begrudge them for that. And a lack of competition in the handheld gaming arena is hardly their fault. It also doesn't reflect a reality in which Nintendo has had competition in the handheld market consistently over decades. And despite years of Nintendo showing others how to find success with handheld games, the competition has not been up to snuff.
It speaks to the general quality of the product that Nintendo releases and the appeal that those products have to specific demographics. They're doing their job as a business pretty well. You don't have to like their product or enjoy the design paradigms that Nintendo employs, but your points against them are puerile at best and not borne out by the facts.
Also I feel like I should let you know that I am not autistic. Some people like to jerk me around and say that I am and I asked them to stop it. But now you know. Me. Not autistic. Not in the least. I would have told you this on your profile page like I usually do, but nigger jannies took away my ability to do that. Nigger jannies. Am I right??
There's a lot of cultural baggage surrounding Nintendo at the moment given how embarrassing a lot of the fanbase is, but all I know is Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of The Wild are easily the best games I've played over the last decade, Nintendo are only ones still putting out games as good as anything in the past.
Nintendo really may save video games again like they did in the 1980s.
