“Infinite content” games where studios are dedicated to make games that drip feed new content by making you grind for hours and hours.

Stuff like looter shooters, destiny and gacha games. They such wastes of life. Imagine all the good games and experience you could have had, instead of grinding to the powercap

An ever (even exponentially) increasing number of games made since the 1960’s are entirely simulated within “com-pu-ters”, which is far inferior to analogue implementations. They make me motion sick and the 3D first-person view ones are very disorientating to navigate in. It’s also a lot more difficult to modify them, such as tweaking the rules or proxying your own assets/pieces.

I can’t complain though, as there are many incredible analogue games being released today. In fact, we’re in rather a golden age! And 3D printing is great to produce whole games or one’s own miniatures for mere pennies.

Making a good game isn’t the highest priority anymore.

My tastes have increasingly narrowed with age as I know what I like most, and the niches I like are pretty detached from what mainstream AAAs chase after. That said, every year I find at least a few new releases that I enjoy. And I don’t think that will ever stop being the case. I ignore the games I don’t care about and play the games I do.

There’s also the fact that I’ve settled into a few games that I really love endlessly grinding, and so it’s hard for other releases to pull my attention away from just playing my favorites some more. I’ve got a backlog of JRPGs, a genre I know I’ve always liked, and yet I hardly make time to finish them anymore…

Lack of innovation, which has kind of always been a thing. When something does innovate, everybody else starts copying it. From Doom, to Diablo, to Minecraft to GTA.

There’s also just a general lack of feeling to a lot of big budget bullshit. Technically stable, polished gameplay, great aesthetics; but there’s no heart. No passion. Everyone involved was just there for the paycheck. It’s routine. I don’t really know how else to put it, but it’s the difference between art and simply a product.

I mean, there have always been bad games. There were bad games for the NES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games

It’s just that the ones on that list that people remember are the few that someone would still be playing thirty years later, the really exceptional ones. Typically, if someone in 2025 is thinking of an older game, they’re thinking about the best of the best from that time period.

I’ve seen arguments that a lot of “the good old days” mindset for many things comes from survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.

Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence as in correlation “proves” causality.

In architecture, for example:

Just as new buildings are being built every day and older structures are constantly torn down, the story of most civil and urban architecture involves a process of constant renewal, renovation, and revolution. Only the most beautiful, useful, and structurally sound buildings survive from one generation to the next. This creates a selection effect where the ugliest and weakest buildings of history have been eradicated (disappearing from public view, leaving the visible impression that all earlier buildings were more beautiful and better built).

Modern games rule. UFO 50, Path of Achra, Balatro, and Halls of Torment are all bangers that came out last year.

Now modern AAA games do suck because they have to make profit and expansion that competes with general index funds from the stock market rather than competing with other video games.

Go check out some of the lower budget weirdo games, you might find something you like.

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You can’t have this discussion “aside from corporate greed”.

That said, most older games also sucked. It’s Sturgeon’s Law. You just remember the good ones you played for hours and gloss the bad ones you dropped after five minutes or never played because they got 1-star reviews.

I disagree with this. I think we are in a game renaissance right now with many great games being released all the time.

What I agree does suck are Triple A games. Why do they suck? Well, they cost a lot of money to make. You need a team of dozens of people working over a long period of time along with lots of marketing. Millions and tens of millions of dollars can easily go into a modern AAA game.

So when you have millions of dollars of investor money behind you- you’re not going to take many risks. You’re going to be as conservative and formulaic as possible so that you can better predict what you will bring in through revenue. This is why there’s a new Call of Duty, FIFA, and Assassin’s Creed every single year. And they’re all virtually the same game with slight changes.

In my opinion if you want to see actual innovation and creativity, you (generally) have to look outside of these types of games. Not even necessarily niche indie games, but smaller scale developers. They don’t have nearly as much overhead and they tend to have passionate individuals with a vision. This gives them more flexibility.

So as a general rule of thumb, you’ll find more ambitious games coming from smaller developers. And with ambition comes both great successes and failures. But the cream rises to the top.

Pacing. One example:
In GTA Vice City, the first mission was “drive to that place”. The second mission was “beat up that fat guy”. The third mission was “smash those parked cars with a hammer”.
In GTA 5, the tutorial was a bank heist with explosives, automatic weapons, hostages, a shootout with cops, a car chase, and a betrayal by part of your gang.

What counts as a modern game? Been playing CDDA lately which is still in active development, does that mean it’s modern? Certainly isn’t AAA though. Been thinking of opening a pull request soon, had some small ideas the game could do with.

I’m playing “Stray” right now. I think it’s awesome. (It is from 2022 btw)

Modern games dont suck. Modern AAA games that only care about making God look poor suck. The aggressive monetization and season passes suck. Shit, some of the newer games are good games under all that.

Try Caves of Qud, Cassette Beasts, Nuclear Nightmare, Hellpoint, or any myriad of other indie games. They’re just as good as they’ve always been.

Movie games & heavy-focus on graphics & not optimizing your games for potato PC