Gaming used to be a huge part of my childhood, but I've stopped gaming because new releases have been enshittified to the point where there's nothing worth playing anymore. I know that there are a small handful of games that other people actually enjoy such as Expedition 33 or SilkSong. But at least for me, the countless dev hours spent producing games released over the past 3 years, like AC Shadows, could be deleted with zero cultural impact. Needless to say, I don't even get disappointed anymore when the latest installment in [insert beloved childhood franchise here] turns out to be a disaster because that would imply that I had any hope left to begin with. The only game I've really been 'excited' for is GTA VI, and even then I'm predicting it will be a flop.
The major problem with modern games is the lack of innovation and progress. For a new game to be worth purchasing, it needs to exceed the watermark set by existing titles - either by providing new experiences and genres, or by adding substantial gameplay improvements to old formulas. There's no rational incentive to purchase something that isn't an improvement over what you already have. Games as a medium especially require novelty to keep players entertain. Modern games are just carbon copies older games, with at best, minor incremental improvements.
A good example of this is Borderlands 4. Had BL4 come out a few years ago, it wouldn't have been a bad game. But given the 100s of hours I've already spent in borderlands 2, the sequels, and other first person shooters, the idea of shooting more generic humanoid enemies with a Jakob's pistol just doesn't seem appealing anymore. Adding 'new' mechanics like an open world and Destiny style traversal isn't going to change that.
The irony is that BL4 is considered one of the better games, because it meets the low bar of not somehow being worse than the original. It has been well documented how wokeness, especially millennial theater kid writing has made games like Metroid Prime 4 unplayable. The issue with wokeness isn't just the ideology, but more-so how it is implemented. It always involves cutting content that players actually want, and thereby limiting player choice and agency. All this is done in the name of force feeding the same 3 political psyops that everyone except the Sentinelese have been systematically exposed to on a daily basis without alternatives or nuance.
Even wokeness is merely a symptom of the ineptitude of modern game devs, who can't hold a candle to the spirit of the old devs, who were constantly pushing the boundaries of available technology.
What is most indicative of their lack of imagination and enthusiasm for their craft is their discourse surrounding the use of generative AI. Instead of actually treating it as any other useful tool, most of them have attempted to 'embargo' it by declaring it 'problematic' and bullying other devs that try to implement it in their own games privately.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that game studios should use it cut costs and make their games even shitter by replacing human made assets with ai slop. What I'm saying is that there is definitely a use case for it, whether it be more interactive npcs, allowing for player expression, or even just localisation.
I just wish that game studios would actually innovate and risk failure, whether it be AI or VR, rather than release slop instantly dead on arrival from the first gameplay trailer. That they would actually try and deliver on their promises, rather than overhype and underdeliver at the expense of their reputation.
Heck, even Xbox deserved far more credit for releasing the Xbox Kinect, even though it flopped. For what it's worth I enjoyed the concept as a kid, even if the execution was objectively underwhelming.
Above all, what I miss the most was that sense of anticipation I had counting down the days to game releases when I was younger. Although it might seem cringe in hindsight, I aspired to become a game journalist because I loved to imagine how advanced video games would be in the future.
Perhaps, if mom had gotten her way, I would be more successful because I wouldn't have wasted my time on video games. But then I would have missed out on that magical sense of fictional immersion that you can't get in real life, no matter how good of an accountant you are.
Don't get me wrong, my life isn't bad by objective metrics, and I'm grateful for what I have. But it feels that adult life comprises of existence rather than anticipation. I don't think I'm alone. It's hard to articulate, but the vibes in modern society have gotten perceptibly worse. Techno-optimism has virtually disappeared. Free time is no longer for enjoyable activities, but passive doom scrolling.
Sorry for the long post, but I'm genuinely curious if anyone else feels the same way.
Woke killed modern culture dude. Gaming is one arm of the infection
100%
Infected it yes, but hasn't killed it yet imo.
I feel like it's a bit of a slow rot from the inside. How many times can these billion dollar companies eat major losses before their stock prices take a major hit?
Ubisoft has been on the decline for the last 5 years. Their stock has lost 97% of its value compared to 5 years ago.
They can do it forever. One company going down means nothing because it's just a subsidiary of a massive corporation that has endless pockets; they'll just transfer their destructive mission to the next company in line.
On a spiritual level, it has.
I have almost no interest in new titles. But I’ve been embracing both my backlog and replaying great 7th and 8th generation titles alot
Got back into CRT gaming and 6th gen and back has massive quality library that can keep you going for life lol
Yeah, there are so many cool older games that you can easily play through all of them and then start again.
I am currently playing Witcher 3 for the second time and I am having such a great time. The games I played in the last ~10 years are: Gothic, KotOR, Deus Ex (the original + the 2 newer ones), Assassin's Creed 1-2, Oblivion, Skyrim, Yakuza, Sleeping Dogs, GTA Vice City + San Andreas, Crysis, Kingdom Come, Cyberpunk, Witcher 1-3, Warcraft 3, Age of Empires 2, and some Paradox games.
In my opinion, all of these games are 10/10 games, so if I am ever bored, I might just start from the beginning again. I probably forgot countless must-play classics in that list, too.
If modern games are shit, just embrace old games. There are so many good games that you basically don't have enough time to play them all
Not just gaming. And it isn't just "woke".
Political correctness as a whole, centralization of internet traffic on social media adjacent like facebook, DEATH OF OPSEC, and now governments creating stupid regulations for ID verification (which only benefits scammers and hackers).
Tumblr banned adult content and in the other day, I was surprised to see people complaining over "sexualization of anime girls" everywhere. Then the preppy kids who claim to be socialists because they were told socialists were like the Robin Hood or the Goemon Ishikawa of modern days (when in reality it's all about hammer and sickle/che guevara aesthetics) appeared...
Woke is just one of the many problems that ruined the modern world.
You would consider the censorship of pornography to be part of "woke"/political correctness?
I would, but only in the sense that it caused the Tumblrites to flood into the rest of the internet like Twitter and Reddit and turn them into woke cesspools. Tumblr was once like a ground zero and quarantine zone for woke views that were routinely mocked outside of it.
Banning porn on Tumblr caused the little perverts to invade the rest.
Yes, that's what I'd claim too. The woke mob are by and large heavy consumers of pornography/written smut, while the most vocal opponents of pornography also tend to oppose the autogynephilia & ROGD epidemics for obvious reasons.
Tumblr banning adult content happened because Apple received reports of CSAM on the app/site, so they removed the app from their store until/unless Tumblr took action against it. Not sure why "Kurisu" sees fit to lump it in with woke/PC trends.
Short Answer? Yes.
Long Answer? Hell, Yes.
It's part of the same problem. The endless pearl-clutching and bland pussification of everything.
I think woke ideology killed most story and lore of the games. But also lack of innovation too is killing gaming.
Exactly. Woke is sold as innovation that is otherwise pretty much non-existent, every large title is hugely risk averse.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that game studios should use it cut costs and make their games even shitter by replacing human made assets with ai slop."
They don't need to. They replaced human-made assets with feminist-made slop.
It's killed my interest in most modern games, but there's still plenty of amazing old games I haven't tried yet, and strong new indie titles. So my gaming as a whole still feels like it's going strong.
This is the way.
There are so many awesome indie titles out there on top of older games and a few big modern games that are 100% worth it.
Gaming as a hobby is thriving, all we gotta do is a bare minimum of research and to wait for reviews then the chance of getting a dud is super small.
Not far off from how I grew up. I was only gonna get one game for Xmas or my birthday. I had to look into that shit. Even in the SNES era that was a hard choice.
Same, it was considered that I was "lucky" if I got one game per year during my childhood(there were a few years I didn't get any), IIRC the most I ever got in the same year was three until I hit the jackpot and jumped from the SNES to the PS2 and had access to pirated CDs that were dirt cheap.
One time a friend of mine straight up gave me a folder with about 40 ps2 games because he forgot it in my house and told me that I could keep it as he already had beaten them all and could just burn new CDs if he wanted any of those again, that was a good day. lol
A couple years ago I bought a everdrive cartridge for my SNES (still works to this day, that thing is a tank) that had every SNES game that was ever made and I still have a ton I haven't checked out yet, this on top of all the good games I know are out there that I haven't played yet means that I have absolutely no pressure to pay or play any slop that a company tries to push.
It has not ruined gaming, but it has made me more selective with my games and more prone to lingering on one game. Gone is the era of getting excited for every new release in essence. There's just way more skepticism when it comes to these things.
People just love to be doomer. It has the same feeling as “Tik Tok ruined my hobby” Don’t let the bad ruin the good.
We got E33, Megabonk and other indies, and Eastern games all supplying fun non-woke games .
Christmas in the 2000’s had me 10 new games. I haven’t bought 10 new games in the last 5 years
Damn, back in the 2000's I got one new game if I was lucky.
Well my mom was a shitty parent so would buy me a bunch of games so she could stay out at the bars all night. Not a sob story, just explanation. Video game have such a near and dear place in my heart since they were essentially my babysitter for most of my childhood. It really bums me out that I cannot get excited for new games these days and the industry tries to blame me… I’m still a kid at heart and just want games with great storytelling, characters, and action. I’m thankful I have the old games and am excited to share them with my kids when they get older. I hope society course corrects soon so we can all enjoy some modern masterpieces rather than this virtue signaling slop.
I get what you mean, in the meantime we just gotta vote with our wallets and wait for reviews before buying stuff.
We went from getting demo versions of games for free so that we knew pretty much exactly what we were signing up for to being pressured to preorder them before they're even finished in exchange for exclusives that should be in the base game in the first place, if we as consumers reject preorders and do the bare minimum of research into where our money goes I think things can return to how they were.
I also don't wanna be all doom and gloom, even today there are good games being launched, especially in niches like games from paradox. (EUV is pretty good if you like that kind of game, CK3, HOI and Victoria 3 too)
even worse for comedy
It just made me a retro gamer.
It didn't kill it for me, but it did make me much more picky about how I spend my time and money. Interestingly, all the woke trash in gaming actually did me a favor. I developed better time management, and, in my disgust with the message being shoved into everything, I took up a new hobby.
I avoid new games for sure. But retro gaming is on full blast for me.
Somewhat. I’m incredibly skeptical of story driven games now. I won’t even download a game on Gamepass if I see there’s some DEI or woke bullshit in it. That kind of stuff is only part of the decline in games. Hardly any games have good storytelling because writers either have been writing for the agenda or they’ve been conditioned to write so they don’t get cancelled. There are still plenty of good games but the “woke era” ruined a lot of good gamers and developers. It’s going to be a while before decent storytelling is the norm and not the exception.
Bro. You're thinking about it too much. Enjoy what you enjoy. Fuck the haters.
Not at all. I game as much as ever, the spotty quality of the current era just gives me more time to revisit the classics I've always wanted to replay and/or try older games I didn't have a chance to buy at the time.
I do feel your pain OP about not anticipating new stuff nearly as much as the old days. It's probably easier for me as a middle-aged person to go back to and enjoy 90s/00s gaming than the younger generation who grew up with a much higher quality of life standard.
I switched to almost all Asian films for things from 2004+ and or going back at filling in the blanks on US films prior to like 2000. There's a lot even for a guy with thousands of blu rays.
I also started learning Japanese, which is sort of ridiculous, but there are so many games that don't get ported or get destroyed in activism translations - it is both a challenge with double the reward as a I play - so satisfying.
Yes! I managed to get to N1 through that method, highly recommend. I still do consume Japanese content from time to time.
See, this is why staying in the past is incredible. There are literal treasure troves of old releases on PC and older consoles you can just download and play. I never stopped gaming because of that.
Entirely? Nah. They ruined some AAA companies they were able to worm their way into but we still get good games that come out without their "advisements". Expedition 33 was an amazingly fun game, even though they took their award away for a placeholder asset.
I'm still having a blast with Helldivers 2.
Helldivers 2 is a great little gem. Played it for a bit myself and yeah it's very fun. Especially when you get a group of friends together. But it's one of those rare games I've had fun even going in with randoms.
I might be the odd one out, but to me AAA gaming died even before the woke era.
As a PC player, it died toward the late 2000s, with PC games bastardized for the Xbox360 instead, an early sign that most gaming companies only cared about reaching a wider audience to the detriment of the integrity of the game. Moreover and most importantly, it was also the era of the widespread use of DRM protections that could mess up your computer, such as SecuROM and StarForce, which busted my optical drive. Ever since then, I have never purchased any game from companies such as EA and UbiSoft (except for Rayman Origins which was DRM free). I associated AAA games with a complete disregard for the consumer and their core audience.
imo it started with microtransactions.
You are so much more aware of the real problem with modern gaming than almost everyone else in the sub. The 360 era was most definitely the beginning of the end, where all the seeds that grew into to the weeds now choking the medium were planted.
I couldn't put my finger on why the games we were getting on 360 were so drastically different from ps2 back then, but I think the 360 had a lot of watered down PC-like games. Tons of shooters that you couldn't play with a kb/m and required aim assist to be functional.
Not gaming, i choose what i wanna play, but watching anything in the last 5-6 years, I prefer to watch older stuff that i watched before lol, can just be in the background to hear it. Like Stranger things is back, and man , i dont give a fuck about it anymore, its been so long that i lost interest
I was interested in Stranger Things during the first couple seasons, but they've just waited too long and now either have to write in the time changes or just expect us to suspend our disbelief when casting fully grown adults as children characters. It destroyed the investment I did have in it. Breaking Bad was able to to do it, Stranger Things doesn't have an excuse.
I still watch movies and play games, the hobby will never die for me. But it's rare that I play/watch anything new. There's still so much good stuff from the past I haven't experienced yet. The upcoming Dragon Quest 7 "reimagining" for example motivated me to start the original on PS1. Good stuff! I played through most of the Castlevania games in 2025 for the first time, too.
And it's fun trying out new ways to play older games (for example FPGA hardware) and building your own future-proof retro library. I recently modded my 3DS, too. It's a gaming goldmine!
For new things, the only AAA game I'm looking forward to atm is Resident Evil 9, but I'm curious what Nintendo has planned for the year. Generally, I still enjoy Nintendo games and Nintendo exclusives. Tomodatchi Life and Rhythm Paradise will probably be good fun.
i wasn't a big fan of popular franchises that end up becoming "woke" (like GOW, Spiderman, Uncharted, TLOU etc) so despite disliking said woke changes, it didn't strike too deep, or become something "personal" to me (most of the franchises i like are either long forgotten and abandoned, or are made by Miyazaki, so not exactly at the risk of going full retard woke anytime soon)
now, when Prince of Persia the lost crown was announced, and i saw the dogshit haircut of the MC, that made me not want to buy the game, so i sailed the high seas, and lo and behold, despite having some wokeness here and there, the game was borderline amazing, but judging by the subpar sales (1mil in the 1st year) and half an hour long credits, the game was an absolute flop (so the studio got disbanded by retards at ubislop)
and obviously the upcoming PoP Sand's of Time Remake is going to be absolute dogshit, because modern Ubislop can't make a good game to save their life
The only reason you are frustrated is that you are focusing on AAA to the exclusion of everything else, it wasn't that long ago that steam reached over 100.000 games, some are amazing. Smaller games and I'm just gonna throw a few randoms out there for people to look at, like:
Wall world
Mount&Blade 2
Cash Cleaner Simulator
Xenonauts
Crime Scene Cleaner
Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator
Dredge
Heart of the Machine
Dyson Sphere Program
Hardspace Shipbreaker ( story is shit but the gameplay is amazing)
Empires of the undergrowth
It's not that games are worse, it's that the AAA games have been taken over by ESG and DEI quota's, and honestly, indie games are eating their lunch by every metric possible.
No I just play older games PC and Emulators. So they can keep their slop I can play my back log. Not quiting just take a different route pal like me.
Yes putting agendas, politics, activism into a lot of games has definitely tarnished gaming for many of us. Same with movies for me, and I have to be very selective with any new game or movie that I consume, and I vote with my wallet.
As far as gaming goes though, I have a large backlog of solid titles to play because I spent so much time the last 15 years just playing online multiplayer, I missed some great games. There are some Fromsoft games, and last gen games like Witcher 3 on my backlog that will keep me busy for a long time, which enables me to be very selective with new games…I don’t need to buy any to have something to play if nothing good comes out.
I think it's mostly because no one designs their own game engine anymore and then fall in the trap of using existing assets for the game engine. E.g. from screenshots i can already see if a game uses unity or unreal engine
I just like videogames too much. But even when completely ignoring bad games, woke games or even good, usually japanese games that got unfortunately translated by woke morons, I still find stuff to play with.
But everyone here is right, probably avoid AAA entirely. I don't think ai slop is gonna fix anything at all besides killing true artistry even more. It's a tool for hacks and launderers, not competent people.
I stopped following the AAA space much a decade or more ago with a few notable exceptions. I still play older games and a few franchises here or there. I'm not giving up what makes me happy just because corporations are too stupid to protect their properties I just abandon those properties or pick and choose.
I don't have any FOMO anymore.
I read posts like this and I just think "get the fuck away from anything AAA"
Indie games are incredible, generally woke free or it's easy to just avoid it, cheaper, endless variety, the list goes on.
There's a ton of woke af indie games (usually government funded). But considering there are tens of thousands of games released every year. And at least a few hundred good to great. They're easy enough to avoid.
Indies have been going hard lately, true.
LMAO the wokes games are fucking indie dafq you mean hardly woke?
Maybe there are but like I also said, easy to avoid. If it sucks just don't play it
New vidyas are coming in fifty or more times faster than the 00s dood, you can afford to let a bunch of slop flow right past you and you wont be affected unless you got a terminal case of FOMO.
some slopit's? 95% slop lmao
stop playing in the pond scum.
Wait for steam nextfest. All of the non-woke games not covered by mainstream sources have playable demos there.
I had tons of fun with Nightreign this year. So if anything, they're saving me money. I buy less games, but I'm not gaming any less.
The combination of excessive monetization, dumbing down to pander to normies, games released unfinished, AND wokeness killed my interest.
I look at new games - woke, woke, psudeo-film, live service, woke, live service, live service, psudeo-film, game made for streamers, broken game, woke ... how can you have any interest when this is whats offered?
It's made anime and model kits my main hobby instead now. The only new game I bought in 2025 was Digimon Time Stranger.
Pretty much the same for me. My hobbies now are mainly just putting together Gundam, 30 Minute Missions or 30 Minute Fantasy models and watching (mostly) older anime and movies. As far as gaming, I haven't bought anything since RoboCop: Rouge City, and the few games I have been playing lately are mostly fan translated games, which can be hit or miss for translation quality, but the majority of them are still better than anything localizers put out.
They are trying to invade anime too
Tbh the woketardation of gaming, while problematic for sure, is a lesser issue in the current gaming wasteland.
The real nuke that has destroyed the industry is product enshittification, or what an exec would call monetisation.
While an absurd premise, "Player One" hits the chord of truth in its gamers making games for the sake of good games, vs mad monteziation gone full retard. We see this play out in our big AAA dev houses every year, sending shit quality rehash products with dark patterns monetisation.
To a very large extent woketardation is actually a subset of enshittification. The concept is that established franchises will be bought by loyal captured market gamers anyway, so let's get MORE sales by tarding shit up for the loud weirdo market.
Fortunately the loud weirdos dont buy games, even when "they can see themselves" in them. So that is backfiring hard.
The other problematic issue for the industry is these some woketards they want to sell games to, have all grown up doing IT degrees and ended up working at gaming houses after the Blizzard scandle sent them all on a mad DEI hiring spree.
Such peole are now wildly overrepresented in gaming house employment demographics. So for worse or worse, advocates of this cultural slop are still everywhere, and multiple huge publishing houses will have to collapse entirely (see Ubisoft) before the industry can recover from its own demographic disaster.
The silver lining is this collapse is absolutely unavoidable and already well in progress (see Ubisoft). Supplying a product in a market with no demand is hard coded to cause business failure no matter how hard you cry and scream that gamers are racist bigots. Maybe we are, but it doesnt matter - put the fries in the bag.
No, the online multiplayer loot box gambling with endless DLC with each their own ingame real money economies killed off my love of gaming. Also barely interactive CG animated films masquerading as single player games full of quality of life accessibility that neither respect the player's intelligence or ability killed off my love of gaming. Not to mention the uncountable procedural generated rougelikes that are TOTALLY DIFFERENT than AI art that spoiled the indie scene killed my love of gaming. Thematic wokeness has nothing to do with why videos suck so hard now. It's video games forgetting what makes the medium unique to other art forms that ruined gaming for me.
ROMs and Emulators are a great way to play games from a time they were made to entertain instead of push a message. I've been alternating between playing my Homebrewed NEW 3DS XL and my Steam Deck and found older games very enjoyable (3DS feels better to play on for DS and 3DS titles).
No, I would've probably outgrown it regardless. I'm just sad the younger generation has to put up with this bullshit that comes almost entirely from fat white liberal women in the West.
It's killing console game. With more and more people turning to older releases, the need for a PC able to run them is more important than ever.
Series S thrived initially due to FPS boost. We're going to see a trend towards older games. The most important thing is that these companies can't kill them.
It's amazing how much everything changed between 1955 & 1975 and how little has changed between 2005 & 2025.
Sad thing is, many things were better back in 2005 and it's only getting worse.
I used to love TV shows but I hardly watch them anymore
Same.
To be fair there are plenty of great games that didn't have much of an "impact", but I get what you mean.
It won't be a flop financially, it will be a massive success simply because of the massive hype and big name behind it. Unless the game is just beyond terrible at release there likely won't be much serious discussion about its flaws for the first 1-2 years after it's out.
And I'll be honest, I will (likely) get the game despite not expecting much out of it, simply because it is the new GTA and I did enjoy every game of the series up until now. (but I will wait for reviews)
Still, I would temper my expectations as well, absolutely everything we have seen from the game, officially or via leaks, does not inspire any confidence in me.
It really does feel like pretty much everything has been done several times over by now, so when I learn about a new game I often think to myself "Okay, but I already own XYZ...", every game claims to be innovative and unique, but it's rare for a game to really bring something new to the table.
However I do disagree that games absolutely need to have something novel to them, because it can be enough to simply do what you do well. Having "more of the same" isn't inherently a bad thing if it is still high quality content.
You've probably heard this before, but it's healthy to just dismiss big studios at this point and focus on small-medium studios and indie devs. There are plenty of games that aren't woke.
This is actually one of THE biggest issues that many overlook, it used to be that hardware, especially on consoles, but even on PC, was limited and this limitation bred creativity and forced devs to find clever workaround, push the hardware to its limits and make elegant gameplay design choices.
Nowadays hardware can be virtually boundless, so there's no need to optimize or do anything clever.
Doesn't even have to be something the player sees in the end, just optimizing and minimizing code without compromising on functionality can be a real challenge and something devs of the past sometimes did brilliantly, but nowadays you can absolutely get away with a wasteful mess of programming.
I know there's this Skyrim mod that enhances NPCs with AI, but the issue I would see otherwise is that AI is still too inefficient to really make this work. Running a local LLM takes up a lot of your resources, even a small model can easily eat up 50+% of your VRAM, which means the rest of the game has to compromise a lot. If you wanted to outsource the AI handling it would force the game studio to basically run their own AI datacenter and require the game to be always-online.
This is especially true since the top-line manufacturers of GPUs, like nvidia, have somehow not gotten the memo that players need more VRAM and now they are moving away from serving gamers altogether.
Though I would imagine at some point in the future there will be consumer made GPU's with AI in mind, so they have VRAM to spare.
To be honest, this is the biggest point. At some point you do have to admit that your parents were right and Video Games, as enjoyable as they can be, aren't productive as a hobby. You aren't really accomplishing anything and at some point you realize that most games are just fancy "numbers go up" or "press the button" simulators.
You also have to realize that unless a piece of media had a profound effect on you then you will likely just forget about it anyway. Like... you may spend 60 hours on a game, finish it, and a few months later you can barely even remember what it was about. So what was the point? Just to feel good in the moment?
And I'm not even anti-gaming, I love games, but as in all things in life, moderation is key.
Or maybe that's just how it is when getting older.
Sure, but if you are constantly exposed to this immersion it stops being magical and, worse, reality can seem too mundane to be worth engaging with... and that kind of means you can miss out on the other joys of life.
I know it sounds cliched and I'm not saying I'm any better or not guilty of this, but it really is a problem that one can simply solve by stopping.
Play original xbox
For me, a lifelong gamer playing since the 70s, what's killing the hobby for me is microtransactions, always-on-line BS, and the fact that a game i bought can be rendered useless without a server.
edit: and probably a host of other things I can't think of
It killed AAA. But IMO AA & indie is starting to thrive because of it (among other factors)
I tapped out of new gaming around 2014. For me the PS3 was the last great era of video gaming, where the last innovations were made and games stopped being fun. Everything's so story-driven now it's irritating; video games have become shitty interactive movies.
Nah, i'm playing a crapton of indies, and every now and then a good triple A comes out that isn't pozzed.
No, I just learned to put more research in before buying a game. Overall gaming is still thriving despite the flops and I think most of that era is starting to die off at least in gaming.
Yeah, It makes me visit this sub much less often.
I have so many backlog games i dont need new ones. 😄
Apolitical solo dev indie projects still exist. You just have to dig beyond the mainstream. I've learned to dig beyond the mainstream in the late 00s, because mass dumbing down of games for wider audiences already made mainstream titles not for me.
Just find your niche and dig, dig, dig. You'll find good things eventually. It's just going to take some work.
Asian devs are saving the industry.
IRT AI, I 100% agree on this. I think AI could be an amazing tool for games where NPCs are designed to be characters with personalities and knowledge and can fully interact with the player, yet this crazy cabal wants to ban it forever.
It’s because the people who ruin the games the most, and are the loudest on social media, are the people who would no longer have a job.
AI can’t replace good writing, or good art, but these people aren’t producing that. They are producing “woke slop” and shitty millennial writing, or churning out absurd live service content, and none of us would notice if AI took their goddamn jobs.
Anyone give a shit if AI generated a new fake gun in Call of Duty? why are we expected to stand up and boldly say “No! When activison releases another horrible boring season pass, I will be outraged unless a human created your crap! when you release a terrible, nonsense campaign, I demand that human beings speak the dialog I’m going to press ESC to skip over!”
These fuckers have been delivering us shit for years, and now I’m supposed to be on their side?
Yes, that's the minority capture playbook that the left has been using for everything.
It starts when a small group of individuals have a strong opinion/stake on something that most people don't have an opinion on. Said minority then amplifies their extreme opinion until it's the loudest voice in the room. Once they are the only voice in the room, they claim this as 'proof' that their minority position was how most people think all along, and that the original majority opinion is instead an extreme view that ought to be ostracised . The strategy works because humans are naturally consensus seeking.
In any case, my hope is that those on 'our' side don't fall for this. They beg for their jobs now, but just a few years ago when they were at their heyday (and even now), they were perfectly fine with gathering mobs to steamroll anyone who disagrees with them in the name of progress.
K I aint reading all that, but no there are still games coming out that arent woke like NG4, and there are tons of older titles you likely havent played.
Yes, thats why Im trying indie games or I am playing 10-15+ yo games.
Not really, with randomizers and romhacks, I play more games than I have in a long time
I play only old games or Asian games and avoid western titles. The few new games I'm looking forward to are all Asian (like Tides of Annihilation)
No. Plenty of good games still. I just don't buy and play the ones that are bad.
Honestly, not at all. Some potentially good series have been brought down by woke activists, but the truth is that most modern game design has limited appeal to me.
I played shooters for many years, I'm tired of them. I've played a lot of modern RPGs, some have interesting gameplay but there's more walking and cutscenes than ever, and I'm tired of huge empty worlds that aren't worth the effort to explore. Sports games are a mess, that and only genres have been ruined by DLC and microtransactions.
I'd just rather be watching TV or movies than playing games that are so completely similar to a dozen others that I've played to death. And so many games have forgotten how to be video games, and have become bad TV with cutscenes, or "experiences" of some sort.
I've enjoyed Street Fighter 6, Hollow Knight, Mario Wonder, and still play Starcraft 2. I appreciated It Takes Two, MGSV, and the recent remake of 3.
But so many new games just look like the same old thing. The complexity of game design has approached a peak, and many new games are less complex and interesting than some from 10 years ago. Some just have a gimmick which gets old quickly. Wokeness isn't responsible for any of this.
The only game I'm looking forward to is RE9. Expect the worst hope for the best.
I have a massive backlog that I've been putting off for a long time. Like right now I'm on my first playthrough of Fallout New Vegas.
Play indie titles with thousands of hours of content like Tales of Maj'eyal.
Nope. They just made my backlog shorter.
Mircrotransactions, "gaming as a service", digitilization of games and big money getting involved was the death of gaming, the woke nonsense is just a side effect and killed it further, but at least I know I ainr missing out on much because of it.
Mircrotransactions, "gaming as a service", digitilization of games and big money getting involved was the death of gaming, the woke nonsense is just a side effect and killed it further, but at least I know I ainr missing out on much because of it.
Once again, KiA proves that no one here plays games anymore. There is plenty of woke slop I won't go near, but there are still plenty of studios producing bangers. Most of the woke infection is based in Western AAA studios. Side note: anyone jumping on the "Nintendo bad" bandwagon is basically robbing themselves of entertainment.
Hell naw. If anything, it's made me shift my gaze towards indies. Especially for +18 games.
I have had to be more discerning, though.
I'm bored of AAA games but it's nothing to do with them being 'woke'. More just that they're almost all one of about four game templates and just got so dull to play.
Without a shadow of a doubt. Wokeness fully killed gaming and 95% of movies and shows for me.
Every so often, I will play mid to late 2000s/early 2010s games. Most of what I do now is go to the gym, hang out with my girlfriend, and put time into my studies.
In some ways, it's good that these rotten bastards killed media. If we still had the culture of 2007, games, movies, and shows would still be incredible and chances are I wouldn't have a girlfriend or a good career because of it.
There's plenty of good stuff out there being release even in these times. But if you only care about AAA gaming I understand.
Just play old games and don't reward people pushing an agenda with your money. It doesn't matter how much these companies want to push something. Once their revenue dries up the infection will die off. It's a self correcting problem.
I strictly play games pre 2015 on PC with a few exceptions for Warhammer games and or strategy games that use the correct dating system.
There are thousands and thousands of video games coming out each year. Ignore AAA, and you'll discover there's never been a better time to be a gamer. Stick with older titles, AA, and indies.
Inde games are quite fun. Look up upcoming games on youtube etc, you'll find some quality gems. For example: I saw Terra Tech Legion on some video today, and decided to try out the demo. I like it. It seems fun.
“The issue with wokeness isn't just the ideology, but more-so how it is implemented.”
No, the issue w “wokeness” in gaming is absolutely its “ideology”- ie, its openly antagonistic hatred of straight white guys which is more a predilection than ideology. Bigotry sucks as an approach to anything. It’s like arguing that Jim Crow wasn’t bad, but was just “implemented” the wrong way. “Jim Crow coulda been better, but they didn’t invest in more interesting segregation methods. Such a shame.” Nope, was just straight-up historical error and poisoned everything that it was implemented at all. The number of franchises that “wokeness” has destroyed should indicate that it was never a question of “how” to destroy franchises… That question is what the “woke” asked when they took charge of them…
It made me realize I’m a niche gamer and I enjoy primarily JRPGs, Metroidvanias, and Mario games. I could care less about mainstream slop.
Honestly, haven't been interested in new titles for years now. I've just been playing heavily modded games that I've owned for a close to a decade or more, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Zomboid, Rimworld, ect.
Absolutely. I've just got a Retroid handheld so I can replay all the games I grew up with. It's pretty cool, you can get achievements with "Retro achievements" so I'm playing through games in ways I never did before.
Was literally just saying this in phantom blade 0 group, I had quit gaming for years(gonna make a video about this), for real only playing old games with a very few select number of games that I played like GOW and such that came out I played a few of games and was completely turned off like TLOU2. BUT I FEEL A MAJOR SHIFT, and i think we are coming into a 2nd golden age of gaming PB0, Crimson Desert, Clockwork Rev, Mudang, and a bunch more have me hype again and I am excited to be a gamer again...
Zomboid has been picking up some steam too. Isometric Romero-style zombie survival game. Recently added animals like deer, cow, sheep, pigs, etc. Their developers have such a fucked up story too. From getting crowdstarting funds stolen by PayPal, to having laptops with original source code being stolen, to having bombs go off in their apartment complex. They're still updating that shit.
love zombie games
It's much slower paced than most modern zombie games, more survival than something like 7 Days or Left 4 Dead. But man I find it very fun and atmospheric. Takes place in early 90's Kentucky.
Does have Sandbox Settings though so you can make it more 28 Days Later style if you really want to. Its basis is Romero shamblers though. Huge Steam Workshop support too, so tons of mods.
Yeah, I think it's definitely possible that we will hopefully see another golden age sooner or later. Anata is a game that I'm looking forward to.
The issue is games are not made for kids anymore. Every single game is made to entertain 40 year old dads or 20 year old college students with 16 hours a day to play.
The old way of gaming is dying. Its a combination of woke killing AAA but also games are being made for profit and not for fun. The kids today don't play xbox or playstation anywhere close to what we did. They all moved to one stop gaming ecosystems like Roblox. The kids growing up right now will never wake up to Christmas with a videogame under the tree. They just don't care if its not in their gaming ecosystem of choice.
This is already showing itself in the gaming recession we are entering. People are buying less games because the gamers are dying off.
Nope. Still as much a gamer as I've ever been.
If it killed gaming for you, you were never really into it I guess.
Other than Chinese and Korean games that has sex appeal as their main selling point, Japanese games are still hanging by a thread, with all the Western nonsense the localization teams are pressured into adding. Hopefully this shit storm passes without them changing drastically like how the west has. I am literally not excited to play any recently released western game and not looking forward to buying anything made by a western team either.
no.
There are shitloads of good games though. Just not the mainstream AAA games (only good ones from last 5 years are Cyberpunk 2077 and KCD2, yes you read it write, you can kill minorities in-game, so game is based after all). For indies and AA there are shitloads of great games you can find.
I recommend Hollywood Animal, the basest game ever in this day and age. You can literarily befriend both 30's Germany AND the KKK and do quests like firing all big nosed people or all non-caucasian people. That game doesn't even censor the word nggr as "n-word". You can hire actors and other staff with traits such as Racist, Xenophobe, and Misogynist. 😂
Hyped and waiting for Witcher 4 especially. Always loved CDPR writing and music
Im going to spell out your problem for you OP.
You need to grow up.
You're not a kid anymore. You dont get to wait until adults make good things for you to enjoy.
You're the adult now. You're the one who should be making good things for next generation.
Nothing lasts forever, and even if it does, your ability to derive enjoyment would not.
That doesn't mean adult life is boring and monotonous. It means you need to re-adjust your mindset and derive enjoyment from new things because you want to, not because it was marketed to you during your formative years where you were easy to impress.
Pick up a new productive hobby that make you actively create content rather than passively consume content.
The thing is yes AAA titles have sucked. I genuinely cant think of the last good one I played. However AA titles have been popping off like crazy e33, kcd, helldivers, arc raiders, dos2, bg3, the list goes on and on.
It just made me a bit suspicious, like I have to think twice before I dump money for: a remastered (Censorship, like what happened with some Bandai Namco or Square Enix game), certain genre (like cozies and a few indie otomes on the side), it's not woke but behind the scenes have some devs/hr/social media handler that's chugs Kool-Aid (like 'Winter Burrow' and 'Sable', non-woke games that Sweet Baby Inc. "consulted" on, or 'Boyfriend Dungeon', heard that the devs have some woke beliefs.)
No, there are more good games now than ever.