Decline When did decline start to you?

I think the beginning of the decline for me was 2006/7 with the release of the original Bioshock, which was a profound disappointment as I thought it was going to be the next big immersive sim, and then the following year with C&C3, marking the very tail end of RTS games outside of Starcraft.

 

I think there's been a few big "Decline" jumps, the release of XBawks was certainly one. Does anyone else remember it when they gave they gave the free XBawk in the launch to the first ones in the line, or something, and the guy said something along the lines of "I was here just to see the launch, and I wouldn't have bought it anyway", or am I mixing it with something else?

 

What happened was that with the X-Box and PS2 the console and computer games were no longer for different markets with different audiences, but so much became multi-platform, except for massive multi-player games.

 

I remember Bioshock was the first game I rejected due to DRM. "Can only be installed five times? Forget it".

 

Wow, I don't remember that at all. That's pretty draconian. Maybe a region specific thing?

 

The decline may have been in full fling when Bioshock was released, but it definitely convinced me that game journalism, including places which did not seem like corporate mouthpieces, had completely lost it. The baseless fawning over a game with an exciting and novel premise, but utterly shit gameplay and dumbed down story, was a major warning sign about their ability to distinguish a masterpiece from a polished turd with a veneer of pseudo-intellectual blather.

"The Citizen Kane of gaming", indeed.

 

I actually found Bioshock to be a really good game. The setting was more original than Yet Another Military shooter, the game was gorgeous, combat was casual but pretty fun, weapons felt adequately powerful, plasmids were fun (even if usually not as reliable as bullets in the face), with exceptions, there was a real story and background, a limited economy where you could not buy everything. Level design (except for being beautiful) was really uninspired though.
All in all I think it was an extremely solid game, though the "pure FPS" part was roetgen 3.6 - not great not terrible.

2007 was also the year of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Portal and EU3. And the Witcher + Mass Effect, though those two are contentious obviously.

 

Except that they did cough up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_&_Lynch:_Dead_Men#GameSpot_controversy

 

That is a great counterpoint actually. STALKER was/is the great immersive sim of that decade.

 

I'd say that was the culmination point of the development that started with the release of Xbox and the subsequent death of the big budget PC game. Multiplatform games had become the norm, with some exceptions like certain strategy games and stuff from (Eastern) Europe.

 

I remember that I played the "drm-free" version, but uninstalled it after few minutes of gameplay. The arrow pointing to the next objective was too much for me. I have never played it after that.

 

Come on, now. Arrow could be disabled.

 

Love the folks saying "It's all fine now! Was badddd few years ago!". "Fine now" they say, as they point at mountains of pixelshit, "indie" garbage, and babby's first unity gaem on Steam, coded by millennial Soyboys holding their Switches/PS-xbox controllers whilst they work on their "re-imaginings" and zoomers who literally were born SO RECENTLY that PS3 predates their literal existence. Yes, generation of developers raised on Minecraft and Fortnite... fine now, indeed.

Decline? You could see it in early 2000s when everyone tried to do RTS games in full on 3D vs isometric/2.5D or classic top-down. Entire franchises disappeared. Old faithful fans were disgusted, new generation of console gamers saw the games as overly difficult. Ya sorta could see then that "this is not going to end well".

I mean, look at X-COM: UFO Defense circa mid 90s, where even the console PS1 port of the game was the same identical pain in the ass unforgivable game (albeit with ridiculously longer turn times since PS1 hardware did not have the compute power, which tells you game was a PC game first). VS nuXCOM of today: mandatory cut scenes galore, mandatory quick/glam cam shots, animu/superhero styled gfx, near-unicolor retro-but-not-really color pallete (everything is orange or brown), poorly implemented 3D where none was needed (ala RTS 3D games of early 2000s I mentioned above), etc etc.

By the time you got to about 2010, it was all over. Everyone was trying to make a CoD game...

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The existence of shit means nothing. There's always been shit. The dark days of roughly 2003-2013 were the worst because there were very few games released that were worth playing at all. That is no longer the case.

 

I know that, but it's presence says a lot about the game philosophy. The impression that Bioshock gave me was like playing a corridor shooter with some cut-scene. I don't like corridor-shooter in general, but in this case it was particularly bad coming from a self-nominated "spiritual successor" of System Shock.

 

Incredible. Thanks for sharing.

Games are still thoroughly fucked. There's been a slight game design recovery but it's not often a genuinely good game comes out. Half the time if it does, it's indie. What's more, business practices are truly fucked and in that regard things have only gotten worse.

 

Would've at least been funny if the limit was set to zero installs.

It depends on whether you rate it by decline-era standards or as a successor to System Shock 2. It wasn't the worst thing out there, but it was disappointing how dumbed-down it was compared to its "predecessor" that came out eight years earlier.

 

The companions were made so effective in the sequels that it entirely negated the gameplay element of escorting them. In the first game you have to make moment to moment decisions about how many companions to try to take with you. Try to escort too many companions at once and you might end up spending too much helping them and miss your next objective, etc. It was a vital element of the survival gameplay that tied into other mechanics (like making the limited inventory matter more, too, because you needed to make sure to have some backup food to heal companions with). The survivors all had various behaviors as well that you had to learn and keep track of, like one survivors might be a coward, while another survivor might be very effective with melee weapons. And finally learning the game inside out to where you can get all 50 survivors out of the mall felt great.

In Dead Rising 2 you can gather up every companion in sight and pay no attention to them because they are all the same and are almost immune to zombies.

And in Dead Rising 3 they entirely removed the escorting, the survivors teleport straight to the home base.

But yeah at the end of the day people like you just wanted a brainless sandbox you could carelessly run around in. And the developers complied and gradually removed every survival element, and of course subsequently the series died because what was left was a shallow nothing of a game.

 

I don't know man. I quit DR1 because my boss battle with some dudes from gunshop lasted several in-game hours. Probably shouldn't have bothered with them.

 

Why do the people who whine about games being "fucked" also seem to focus on shitty AAA crap Activision and the like crap out? If you only care about flashy graphics and big budgets then yeah, good luck getting another Quake anytime soon. But you shouldn't only care about that, because it's surface level bullshit. 10 years ago we got scraps from Xbox 360 focused AAA developers and not much else. Today we have a wide array of incline games to play, unless you're looking for new games in MTV ads.

 

For those who are more forgiving to Sony for palystation than Microsoft for xblawks, here's a reminder than Sony did poach game developers who made games for computers, such as Psygnosis who made several very good Amiga games. Not sure if they bought any other companies, but that's bad enough.

 

It's a real departure from the guys with gravity-defying bright yellow hair and purple power armour suits from UFO

 

Probably around the early 00's when 3DO died trying to chase after PS2 Crowd and so did Black Isle. Nothing screams decline as much as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (not to be confused with Fallout tactics).

 

Most of the people that voted NO! for this post are in fact Zoomers responsible for spreading Decline. I figured that would be worth pointing out.

 

Yeah in retrospect you can pinpoint the decline as starting with Resident Evil 4. In it you can see a very clear example of widespread celebration of a specific genre (survival horror) being dumbed down to cater to the braindead masses, with everything that made that genre special being excised in favor of "convenience," to the point where that genre disappeared entirely. Highly specialized genres with a lot of unique gameplay systems, that the player is responsible for learning and adapting to, being dumbed down in favor of turning all games into basically similar, banal pap is one of the clearest signs of decline. Basically globalization for video games.

I posted these in the The Last of Us 2 thread but I'll repost them here, since it's more relevant in this thread anyway, and really no one should be reading a Last of Us thread.

"In a highly welcomed move, Capcom has eliminated the ribbon-based save system that has been the backbone of the Resident Evil series. Now, you can save wherever you can find a typewriter, and thankfully they're located conveniently about the huge world." https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/01/07/resident-evil-4-7

and praising the general dumbing down of all the survival mechanics (this one is especially good because it shows that people were always decline enablers, developers just hadn't begun catering to them en masse):

"I have played all of the Resident Evil games, but rarely all the way through because of the series' unforgiving resource management. Ammunition was so scarce that I would often end up bulletless and surrounded by zombies.

I often found myself at the end of a major battle in Resident Evil 4 with only three bullets left in my weakest weapon, but I soon discovered that this was not the end, as the game will spread just enough ammo around the next area to keep you going. You will also encounter merchants who exchange the treasures you find in your travels for weapons and health items and will upgrade guns to improve their power or reload time."

Others were even wishing that the game was further steamlined and retardified:

"There's one aspect of play that sometimes interrupts Resident Evil 4's exquisite pacing, and that's the necessity of having to fumble around in your inventory. Though you can readily switch between a gun and your trusty knife at the touch of a button, switching between different guns (or using healing items) requires you to go in to the inventory screen. A more streamlined means of weapon switching would have been convenient,"https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/resident-evil-4-review/1900-6115968/