That’s definitely elder millennial more than younger millennial
Yup, born in 1982 and I feel this way. I’m too old for competitive twitch-shooters (bloody shame that, I used to love them). Most other games are shit for online gaming.
Only thing I ever play online is survival games with my brother, who loves 500 I’m away from me. It’s more of a reason to talk for longer sessions though.
Same. I just watch StarCraft now. I was never that good to begin with, but playing now is likely to make my withered heart explode.
I’m young x and I feel this way as well.
Even in Classic WoW I prefer to run solo. I enjoy the presence of other people in the world and in cities, but I have no interested in becoming involved with them unless we need each other to complete a dungeon.
I also like to imagine joining guilds, but my idea of a guild died twenty years ago with the classic era of MMOs. Now being in a guild just means your immersion is forever ruined because you’re not allowed to play anymore without participating in the giant fuckfest that is the guild Discord server. Fuck Discord.
If I ever go back I should create a guild of casual loners with kids. We all respect each other’s space, provide support as often as we’re able, and stay the fuck off of Discord. You get kicked out of the guild if you even mention it. You have to use code if you want to communicate during a dungeon. “My, how the swallows doth fly…”, and then quietly log on with four companions and never speak a word of it again. Instant officer status if you have a private Ventrilo server.
This was basically why I switched to Guild Wars back in the day.
Then GW2 and still playing today. Still no guild.
Pugs were the best innovation. Rather just being near other people in the events. No group required.
I love online games that allow for this. - the “It’s a open world that you play solo”.
Fallout 76 and New World come to mind. You do your own thing in this giant shared world. You literally can walk over to help another human, then wave goodbye. If they try to start pvp with you, you can throw a lol emoji and walk away and fade off into the distance.
It’s basically like playing in a game world filled with super advanced NPCs. The other players are just there to make the world feel alive.
It’s how I play Minecraft. I play on the servers solo.
Sometimes just seeing others chat with each other makes me feel way less lonely.
Are you me???
One of the coolest arcade moments I can personally recall was in the arcade at Penn Station in New York City. White, 20-something exec in a suit and tie playing Tetris head to head against a little Asian girl.
I am 36 and my wife is 35. I do not enjoy online multi-player games, and my wife pretty much exclusively plays them. I think this is about people’s specific anxieties rather than age.
Wow, are you me? My SO and I are about the same age and also have similar tastes as you and yours. It’s almost like people have different tastes in video games…
Do all the shit-ass logistics I have to do to get people together for a night out, and then not go out? Or, play with a bunch of strangers, more than a few of whom are insufferable dicks? Hey, gfy on both counts.
TIL that millenials are just Gen X nerds.
that sounds like older millennials to me, tbh
younger millennials grew up on multiplayer and online games, which were widespread and extremely normalized by the time we were old enough
remember, the youngest millenials were 4 to 6 years old in 2000 and the mid 2000s was the big multiplayer boom for the industry
Halo, COD, Gears of War, Counter Strike: Source, Garrysmod, Minecraft, Trackmania, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Left4Dead, Diablo 2, all of these games came out while we were 6 to 14 years old
Younger Gen X here, sounds more like older Millennials to me, too. Multiplayer was fun when it was usually LAN parties of people you knew personally (or split screen), but once it became standard to play with strangers and/or people you’ve never met in real life I wasn’t interested.
Younger millennial (wish me happy 30th in a few months) coming in. I had my niche group of PC nerds who played CS:S, WoW and L4D basically on release. We all knew we were dumb ass kids coming into a scene. We got verbally destroyed in Vent and TS servers when doing ESEL CSS and dunked on while learning boss mechanics in MMOs.
I was always one to just want to have fun (shout out to surf_, aim_ag, and mg_ CSS maps). But I was in the trench as a plus one in a bunch of junk. I always felt like my other group of friends were out of the loop of gaming when they would just Autoaim headshot everything in sight on console COD4 and WAW, but I never got that group to try PC
After I graduated high school I just played dota 2 for two years until I was drained from comp play, then I just started queueing/playing games without caring about my rank. I’ll check meta of what I’m playing and know a tad beforehand, but I can’t be arsed to care about a winding down activity.
Tldr: Squeakers that played Source and/or 1.6 are adults now and are tired of comp play imo. One of my core group is still a Wow head and coaches raid clears, but we are just a bunch of tired adult stoners who dick around with FGs or rogue likes now.
that’s actually a really good point too
im pretty close to your age and even i will admit that a good single player game hits better than any multiplayer arena shooter out there
But there’s a few “silent co-op” games i really enjoy. Games where i can join a stranger, help them with a quest or boss and then leave. Im the oldest of 3 and i miss beating levels for my little brothers. Elden Ring, Dark Souls , Nioh, Monster Hunter, these all scratch the itch pretty well
When many people hear “multiplayer videogame” they think mmos or cod/quake/Unreal tournament clones
i would never start playing multiplayer halo if it came out today. But theres still LOTS of multiplayer games out there that i find very appealing.
Monster Hunter World was really the last game I really got into for that reason. If soulborne games are like that I might pick up the next one.
id happily play with you. my favorite franchise.
The co-op is silent. no chat, no text. You communicate via animations and gestures
you use an item to let people know youre interested in playing together, and if another player walks by the spot, they can see and interact with your “sign” and summon you to their game
Need to get my PC running again, or get a steam deck. Seems like the latter is more realistic at this point. I’ll keep it in mind!
younger millennials grew up on multiplayer and online games, which were widespread and extremely normalized by the time we were old enough
I think that one part of that shift was VoIP. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, if you were playing, say, Quake or similar online, you communicated via text chat. Subsequent to that, a lot of games acquired VoIP support, which I think helped make communication in online games more accessible to a broader audience.
But another factor that I think affects playing multiplayer games for a number of people is having kids. Like, you’re 18, you don’t have that many immediate responsibilities, maybe. But if your kid’s diaper needs to be changed or they produce some other emergency, getting an period where you can play realtime games with other people is maybe harder to get an uninterrupted time block for. Maybe slow turn-based games, like play-by-email type strategy games or something, stuff that doesn’t have the same time constraints, would be more-viable.
Older millennials and Gen X were the ones that organized a lot of the multiplayer groups on old MMOs and other multiplayer games. In a lot of communities they’re the ones that seem to reel the most whenever games make changes that break up content to make it cooperation less encouraged.
As a younger millennial who hit 30 recently, I understand the feeling of wanting to step away from multiplayer games due to toxicity. I have played games where having someone cuss at you on voice was the least of your worries due to doxxing and irl harrassment including people having their families and work places called.
The disrespect to SOCOM
listen bro i cant just sit here and name every multiplayer game from 2005
i played socom on psp and i was convinced this was the future, peak gaming
Go sign Stop Killing Games then
Link to the initiative. Sign now!
BTW, Sweden at 99.93% of the threshold. And Finland already at 114%! Thank god for the Nordic countries.
Sweeden reached 100%, Poland is 97.53%.
For me this is because I had dialup until 07
Im a middle Xer and one on one fighting games were huge. I was not into them but playing against a human was big.
Yeah and fighting games still are massive these days, it’s been great to see them explode back into the scene. However playing them online against random faceless strangers holds no appeal to me.
the major advantage that fighting games have in person is yhat it basically requires you to respect one another else get kicked out of thr venue and potentially get banned in local events. The being together in person allows comradery, and which is one of the reasons why FGC is very LGBTQ+ friendly, while things terminally online gets the worst people.
basically the level of anonymity and lack thereof of a good punishment for cheating is what holds online games back.
Well it used to be still pretty aggro in person, so anonymity wasn’t the only reason some people are assholes. Nobody was gonna get banned for anything short of destruction of equipment for the most part. That fgc is mostly gone but shows up every now and then.
why would you think its gone lol, FGC interest tends to grow every year, especially during major release years.
in fact it’s of the few communities where user demand is actually heard and met (e.g FreeMvC2 movement that spread during covid, gets a massive MvC collection announcement during the Switch Direct presentation this June.) Company relationships that have historically soured are back (Capcam and Marvel post MVCI, Capcom and SNK post SVC Chaos/CVS2 to thr point where Capcom introduces a guest character for the first time in mainline street fighter history. After previously lending Akuma for example in Tekken 7.
if anything, Fighting games have gotten bigger, and evo entrants generally show it
I honestly was never big on adversarial like that but I like coop.
I like playing online because single player generally becomes too easy. But I also don’t play online much anymore because the methods of getting online in a game fucking suck now. Random matchmaking being the only option is so, so, so fucking lame. It makes many people even more toxic than it was in the past. Being banned doesn’t mean jack shit since you’ll only be permanently banned for cheating (and even that’s iffy), so nobody gives two fucks about being civil. Not like you’ll ever see any of those players again anyway.
I’m born in the 80s and play competitive PC games every day. It’s just a question if you like competitive games. I also have to emphasize that there are round based competitive games, you don’t need to have quick reflexes.
Counterstrike and Starcraft used to be my jam. I’m less invested in the more modern games, where everything feels too frenetic and I don’t know any of the maps anymore. But I’m also deeply psychologically scared by the old TV show Reboot. You’re telling me every time I win a game of Mario Kart, a small neighborhood in the Computer World gets nullified? That’s horrible! I would never!
This isn’t a generational thing. I’m the same way, and I’m Gen X.
Same. I had my first console, the Atari 2600, in 1977 or 1978, when I was about 5. I’ve been playing video games for 45/46 years.
