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Digital Foundry: Are Gaming and Consoles becoming... Boring?

Those games aren't even close. You're just thinking about the open-world aspect, which is mostly like an Ubisoft title with movement freedom and small enemy camps and high points opening the map etc.
No, i am thinking of the systemic factor. Far Cry 2 has strong elements regarding transient arsenal due to use and weapon durability as well as other chaotic elements like enviromental destruction, physics and the fire-spreading mechanics which you're praising BotW for. MGSV whole combat revolves around creative use of the arsenal, allowing you to do things like knocking out enemies with empty magazines you throw or defeating a fire-based boss by calling in for rain (or if it just rains by chance)





Games like Prey or Dishonored even more so. Immersive sims like these were pioneering this "playground of systems" for a long time now
 
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If the top games were great again and weren't mid level like most that have been released in this generation, no one would be saying any system is boring, when GTA 6 lands, millions won't be bored, for a while at least.
 
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It's like you haven't played it lmao
That number of underlying system working together underneath it all had never been done before. That's why that other dev was so impressed. It made games like Horizon Zero Dawn seem paper thin. There are videos about that. BOTW was like a Bethesda game with physics and weight on everything but with added systems for elements for warmth, cold, wind, raining, drying lightning, time, snow, ice, fire etc. And everything just worked.
9 years later I struggle to list any other game that has catched up. Besides Tears of the Kingdom. What else is there??
Spare me the Nintendo bullcrap. Unlike so many Nintendo fans, I play games I look to have a pop at, btw I didn't like Zero Dawn either
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Maybe you should try Red Dead 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Hogwarts Legacy fo
 
No, i am thinking of the systemic factor. Far Cry 2 has strong elements regarding transient arsenal due to use and weapon durability as well as other chaotic elements like enviromental destruction, physics and the fire-spreading mechanics which you're praising BotW for. MGSV whole combat revolves around creative use of the arsenal, allowing you to do things like knocking out enemies with empty magazines you throw or defeating a fire-based boss by calling in for rain (or if it just rains by chance)





Games like Prey or Dishonored even more so. Immersive sims like these were pioneering this "playground of systems" for a long time now

Fire is one thing, they have a ton of systems running simultaneously. Again there is a reason why BOTW was so praised by not just players but other developers. The praise wasn't just about how it's open world. They had a long ass GDC talk about how they do the systems and the learning experience to make them and how to control it when everything affects everything, and how that openness could lead to new surprising gameplay scenarios that not even the devs had thought about. It's a highly systems focused playground.
 
Fire is one thing, they have a ton of systems running simultaneously. Again there is a reason why BOTW was so praised by not just players but other developers.
There's also a reason why it also gets criticized by many, fans included, with a lot of people thinking its a downgrade from older zelda games 🤷‍♂️

The praise wasn't just about how it's open world. They had a long ass GDC talk about how they do the systems and the learning experience to make them and how to control it when everything affects everything, and how that openness could lead to new surprising gameplay scenarios that not even the devs had thought about. It's a highly systems focused playground.
You'll find the same types of talks with many older games, i've seen interviews with Far Cry 2 devs using almost these exact same words when describing it. Like i said, this approach to game design is far from new.

I can even go further and say the execution i've seen in BotW isn't even particularly good. It suffers from the same issues earlier games that followed this approach had, like how it may look good on paper but during gameplay make little difference outside of specifically designed scenarios with specific approaches in mind (mainly dungeons in this case). Sure, you can technically throw a sword during a thunderstorm with just the right timing so it'll get hit by lightining that'll kill an enemy, but this is impractical in normal gameplay and its easier to just hit enemies with your stick.

☝️This in fact is where many more recent "systemic games" have been at and trying to improve on. Neither BotW or TotK make any attempt to properly address these issues and just cobble things together, a common criticism of TotK being that the construction system feels largely optional and gimmicky rather than a meaningful, integral part of the experience.
 
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A bit overkill, especially on Saturn, which was one of the best 2d systems ever.

Hope you didn't mind paying through the nose for this generation.

Yeah, slightly better 2d when everyone was doing 3D. Even Sega's own 'first party exclusives' aka arcade ports were 3D games.

Daytona USA running at 15fps with absolutely pathetic drawing distance was what made Saturn fail miserably.

And Saturn costed more than PS5 PRO ($399 is like $800 now) back then LOL.
 
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No, i am thinking of the systemic factor. Far Cry 2 has strong elements regarding transient arsenal due to use and weapon durability as well as other chaotic elements like enviromental destruction, physics and the fire-spreading mechanics which you're praising BotW for. MGSV whole combat revolves around creative use of the arsenal, allowing you to do things like knocking out enemies with empty magazines you throw or defeating a fire-based boss by calling in for rain (or if it just rains by chance)

I forgot what podcast it was, but I remember the devs on Far Cry 2 telling them they had to tone down the fire propagation because in testing a small fire ended up burning half of the game's map.
 
I forgot what podcast it was, but I remember the devs on Far Cry 2 telling them they had to tone down the fire propagation because in testing a small fire ended up burning half of the game's map.
This one

There's a funny anecdote about that. A few months after Dominic told me I had to propagate fire to everything, I had it working in my test environment, and I decided to give it a try in the game. I launched the game and decided to attack a small camp with five or six guards. There was an explosive barrel there, so I shot a single round into it. The barrel exploded and sets fire to the grass underneath, and the fire spread to the camp and set fire to the hut. The hut set fire to the trees nearby, and the flames reached a propane tank, which went flying in every direction, setting fire to everything in its path. One of the guards then caught fire and, in his panic, set more things on fire. Within two minutes, as far as I could see, literally miles of terrain were on fire. Every single tree, every hut, everything. The result was that I had killed every guard by shooting a single round and that my PC was now reduced to a crawling speed. So obviously, we had to make trade-off between realism and playability.
 
This one

Nah, but it's probably a story the developers told a lot. It was either Idle Thumbs or GFWL (or whatever it was branded at the time).
 
Video games HAVE become boring. The next big thing (VR gaming) never really got off the ground so we're now playing the same kind of games we did 20 years ago but with much better visuals.

My hope is that AI can bring something new to the table. Just imagine games like The Witcher 4 where every single character has an actual story to tell instead of the same 2 or 3 lines of scripted dialog. Imagine full fledged story driven quests that are unique for every single player. An open world that's literally a playground where you can do ANYTHING.
This sounds even worse
 
AAA traditional gaming is boring as fuck these days, it's true.
It's probably the best it's ever been, but when we've playing these for over 20 years and they only evolved mainly on the technical aspect, that's when it got boring as fuck for us.

Like for new audiences Spiderman 2 is probably peak gaming, but many of us are like "yea the Batman games i played 15-20 years ago were better"

In my case that's why i like these "eurojank" games so much lately, as a person who used to think during the 2000s-2010s that the typical AAA games were the best by far, these feel quite fresh, or indies like Brotato, Slay the Spire or Mewgenics which i find much more addictive than the nowadays' AAA where i normally struggle to finish the game.
 
There's also a reason why it also gets criticized by many, fans included, with a lot of people thinking its a downgrade from older zelda games 🤷‍♂️


You'll find the same types of talks with many older games, i've seen interviews with Far Cry 2 devs using almost these exact same words when describing it. Like i said, this approach to game design is far from new.

I can even go further and say the execution i've seen in BotW isn't even particularly good. It suffers from the same issues earlier games that followed this approach had, like how it may look good on paper but during gameplay make little difference outside of specifically designed scenarios with specific approaches in mind (mainly dungeons in this case). Sure, you can technically throw a sword during a thunderstorm with just the right timing so it'll get hit by lightining that'll kill an enemy, but this is impractical in normal gameplay and its easier to just hit enemies with your stick.

☝️This in fact is where many more recent "systemic games" have been at and trying to improve on. Neither BotW or TotK make any attempt to properly address these issues and just cobble things together, a common criticism of TotK being that the construction system feels largely optional and gimmicky rather than a meaningful, integral part of the experience.
There are GDC like talks about The Last Ninja and how System 3 created that in the 80s and made it so special. Doesn't mean similar games after it can't be more innovative, better and more advanced.
This whole conversation started with a comment that Nintendo is just making the same stuff again and again.
Is that true? No man. And BOTW is the perfect example of that.

Regarding the complaints for BOTW, it's mostly coming from those who never wanted any new game design in the IP. Or from the weapon breaking mechanic. Nobody cares, those things aren't erasing the things they did that was absolutely brilliant.

Either way, you're trying to rewrite the history if you try to say Nintendo weren't innovating in 2017 when BOTW released. They definitely did. It's a sum of all things game. They came kinda out of nowhere and designed an open-world game and brought in all systems they could find and made this gigantic playground out of it. At the time, for me it was a best game of all time situation.

Listen to what a couple devs say here:


And Nintendo talking at GDC:
 
In some respects they're right about console hardware getting boring because 2 of the boxes are AMD APUs that put largely the same results out (minus Sony have a Pro model), and Nintendo is rocking an Nvidia ARM chip again. It's getting harder to showcase generational improvements in graphics, while the cost of pushing graphics is limiting new IP that gets produced at the AAA level, so we get more familiar games.

That said, I really only feel let-down by western AAA + console first-parties, while eastern AAA is doing alright, and AA to indie stuff still keep pumping out exciting titles I can even keep up with.

Recently got a Logitech G29 racing wheel after a decade of not using one, and it's just made a bunch of games from old arcade classics (Daytona USA, Sega Rally 3, Outrun 2006) all the way to more modern titles (Dirt Rally 2.0, Need for Speed Heat, Tokyo Xtreme Racer) just way more fun than the standard pad experience. Gaming still great to me.
 
I'm 60 (yes I'm fucking old, I have an appointment with social security soon lmao) and I love gaming still, but there will never another paradigm shift like when arcades and soon after consoles shifted to polygonal/3d graphics with the playstation/n64 generation.
 
Weird ass topic.

Just quit the hobby DF and shut down the channel. Fucking pussies.
Or ya know, do what John Linneman does and find a niche and analyze graphics technology without the clickbait. DF Retro is the best shit they have going for them right now and watching him break down the creativity older devs had to employ pull off what they did is actually a joy to watch and take in and makes me appreciate what I played all those years ago even more.
 
It's probably the best it's ever been, but when we've playing these for over 20 years and they only evolved mainly on the technical aspect, that's when it got boring as fuck for us.

Like for new audiences Spiderman 2 is probably peak gaming, but many of us are like "yea the Batman games i played 15-20 years ago were better"

In my case that's why i like these "eurojank" games so much lately, as a person who used to think during the 2000s-2010s that the typical AAA games were the best by far, these feel quite fresh, or indies like Brotato, Slay the Spire or Mewgenics which i find much more addictive than the nowadays' AAA where i normally struggle to finish the game.
You hit the nail on the head, bro. We've been there, done that. Now we need something different to keep us interested in gaming.

For me, it was the Switch that kept me going. I was always interested in handhelds, but they used to be so limited and tiny, and now the world is our oyster.
 
I'm 60 (yes I'm fucking old, I have an appointment with social security soon lmao) and I love gaming still, but there will never another paradigm shift like when arcades and soon after consoles shifted to polygonal/3d graphics with the playstation/n64 generation.
Feck the PlayStation generation, the Saturn marked the jump to 3D for consoles, that said, we in the UK had Acon giving us a taste of 3D graphics and RISC CPUs long before the rest. When one was proud to be British before Blair sold us out to the EU & we got taken over by boats
 
Regarding the complaints for BOTW, it's mostly coming from those who never wanted any new game design in the IP. Or from the weapon breaking mechanic. Nobody cares, those things aren't erasing the things they did that was absolutely brilliant.
There are definitely somebodies that care. And as i said there are good foundational reasons for this, their game design approach with these systems wasn't particularly good (though not exactly bad either), and honestly i don't think it even had to. Nintendo often designs these games with kids in mind, and for them just having stuff to mess around in within the world is good enough.

Either way, you're trying to rewrite the history if you try to say Nintendo weren't innovating in 2017 when BOTW released. They definitely did. It's a sum of all things game. They came kinda out of nowhere and designed an open-world game and brought in all systems they could find and made this gigantic playground out of it. At the time, for me it was a best game of all time situation.

Listen to what a couple devs say here:


And Nintendo talking at GDC:

Devs trying to sell their game or randoms praising it doesn't really change the simple fact BotW's systemic approach to game design isn't new. Yeah, you could whittle down to very specific mechanics or elements, say whatever X or Y game i mention doesn't have A or B thing BotW had and thus it's somehow "not the same" and inferior, but you can do that with just about any game.

I could for example just as easily say Prey uniquely innovated systemic design, and when you bring up BotW or any other game with similar approach, asking how is Prey any more special than those, i could just go ahead and point out in Prey enemies can turn into random objects of the scenario and so could you, and because these other games don't have this mechanic they "aren't the same" and thus inferior.

BotW and the "sum of its parts" is only as unique as any individual game can be, and if you like it, fine. But it isn't reinventing the wheel, nor is it doing anything particularly new or innovative with it's approach or tech.
 
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A lot of disproportional hate towards DF in this thread, despite this being their response to a question asked by a viewer.

A question which is part of a wider 2 hour podcast btw, and is appearing on their clips channel because they spin every part of their podcast out into its own clip to boost engagement.
 
Western mainsteam AAA gaming has been boring for many years now. And by definition anything GAAS is addictive, repetitive and boring.

The rest of gaming (indies, some europeans, eastern devs) are very much not boring and are booming.
 
Consoles are boring to me in the sense that they are just like my PC except with lower end components and the consoles are walled gardens that get maybe 1 game per year that might interest me that I can't play on PC.

And it feels very bad paying $400-$899 on a box to play maybe 1 game per year that my PC can't play.

My PC, which PCPartpicker says is a $4000 box (I paid about 1/2 that before the market changed), is a lot more expensive, but I also play a lot of games on it and do other things to make money on it, so its a worthwhile purchase even at todays increased prices.

I doubt I ever buy another video games console since 99% of games are on PC.
 
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2026 has been an outlier because a lot of the big budget stuff has turned out really good. But in general, over the last 5 or more years, that sector has had a serious malaise. Push me to indie and I have to say I'm having a great time and spending less money on software and hardware. I'm hooked on Halls of Torment right now and I think every phone I've owned going back to Blackberry could have run it at max settings. My gaming time is still full, I just had to get creative about how to fill it.

I'm 60 (yes I'm fucking old, I have an appointment with social security soon lmao) and I love gaming still, but there will never another paradigm shift like when arcades and soon after consoles shifted to polygonal/3d graphics with the playstation/n64 generation.
I think AI powered "create your own photorealistic game" is still out there, but there will be no "next gen" until we reach that. Just a slowly simmering PS4ever. Which honestly I'm ok with. My PC is at a point where the only GPU upgrade is one thousand dollars and all it lets me do is turn up a couple settings, so I'm in no hurry.
 
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Tons of small publishers and indies putting out great games. Just ignore the mainstream safe games stuffed full of "content".

On a related note, I had a period a decade ago where I found games "boring" - it was depression. I was depressed. Once that was tackled I loved gaming again.
 
Yeah, slightly better 2d when everyone was doing 3D. Even Sega's own 'first party exclusives' aka arcade ports were 3D games.

Daytona USA running at 15fps with absolutely pathetic drawing distance was what made Saturn fail miserably.

And Saturn costed more than PS5 PRO ($399 is like $800 now) back then LOL.

Slightly? The Saturn curbstomped the competition that gen when it came to 2d.

Else we would have actually seen Radiant Silvergun or the AD&D Capcom games on the PS, for instance.
 
Well I guess I am a boring fucker… The last consoles that were even remotely interesting were the PS3/360 gen.

It's just a bunch of off the shelf PC parts now that are outdated as soon as they come out as it's no longer bleeding edge technology anymore. On top of that the games play no different than they did almost 20 years ago other than they look a bit better and have better frame rates. Top that off with the lack of any interesting exclusive titles….ZzZzZ! But still some will show up day #1 to buy the next gen that plays the same shit with 10 extra frames.
 
Slightly? The Saturn curbstomped the competition that gen when it came to 2d.

Else we would have actually seen Radiant Silvergun or the AD&D Capcom games on the PS, for instance.

If you think Radiant Silvergun was a Saturn exclusive because of its awesome 2D capabilities, then you're delusional.

Treasure ALWAYS had their games exclusive to a single system, and if you believe that the number of flying bullets on screen is any indication of the 'great 2D'

dodonpachi 01


PS1 had Dodonpachi which actually ran better than Saturn version with its higher res horizontal mode.

Also Saturn couldn't do the 'transparency effect' even in 2D, that's something even SNES is able to do.


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And, yeah the Capcom's D&D game that you needed the expansion memory to run LOL.

That's why Saturn is a failure even as a 2D system.

It couldn't even port 2D games properly without the help of the expansion pack.
 
If you think Radiant Silvergun was a Saturn exclusive because of its awesome 2D capabilities, then you're delusional.

Treasure ALWAYS had their games exclusive to a single system, and if you believe that the number of flying bullets on screen is any indication of the 'great 2D'

dodonpachi 01


PS1 had Dodonpachi which actually ran better than Saturn version with its higher res horizontal mode.

Also Saturn couldn't do the 'transparency effect' even in 2D, that's something even SNES is able to do.


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And, yeah the Capcom's D&D game that you needed the expansion memory to run LOL.

That's why Saturn is a failure even as a 2D system.

It couldn't even port 2D games properly without the help of the expansion pack.

Then why was Silhouette Mirage ported to the PS1? Treasure tried porting RS but the PS1 couldn't handle it.

And the Saturn wasn't handicapped without the 4 meg cart. It could already handle more sprites/animations than the PS1 could. Its versions of Grandia and Thunder Force V among others were superior. And so what if the Saturn used the 4 meg cart? At least it had it, whereas the PS1 didn't.
 
Hardware hasn't had a meaningful impact on game advancements in a decade now (ok, loading times), so that's kind of immaterial.
How's that? Real time hardware raytracing is a huge advancement, and since then there've been all these AI features to help consoles and lower end PCs support it better. And assuming that prices go down again, real time raytracing is only going to get better and better.

If you meant advances that are specific to consoles though, I agree with you. It's not like the mid-2000s anymore, PC is leading the way again :] .

Oh, apart from Nintendo of course. They're still always finding ways to innovate.

Artistic Artistic
No offence, but I'm not even going to watch the video. The title sounds miserable, and I try to stay positive.

If games are boring you, I'd say don't try to force it. Maybe try out other hobbies and stuff for a bit. Maybe even try your hand at making your own work of art. Like they say, everyone has one book in them, even if that "book" is actually a videogame. Games will still be there be when you come back :].

That said, on PC you have access to pretty much every game ever made, if you know how to look and keep an open mind, so can't say I've ever been totally bored of games. There's always new treasures waiting to be discovered, like with music and books and films.
 
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Then why was Silhouette Mirage ported to the PS1? Treasure tried porting RS but the PS1 couldn't handle it.

And the Saturn wasn't handicapped without the 4 meg cart. It could already handle more sprites/animations than the PS1 could. Its versions of Grandia and Thunder Force V among others were superior. And so what if the Saturn used the 4 meg cart? At least it had it, whereas the PS1 didn't.

It absolutely did handicap Saturn because it was mandatory to run games like X-Men vs Street Fighter when PS1 could run it without any of the bullshit. Even calling it slightly better than PS1 is an overstatement because there are list of 2D games that just didn't work without the expansion pack. And no, having to use 4 meg cart does NOT mean its superiority. Having 32X doesn't make genesis superior to SNES, it just made it more BS. No wonder why Saturn failed miserably as it did.
 
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How's that?
It's linear, and very incremental, progression of graphic fidelity and nothing else. RT introduction has been one of the smallest jumps in the past 25 years, and sure - if we look at path-traced Cyberpunk vs. the Witcher 3 that's a nice visual delta - but that's a decade apart, and includes 5 years of RT (and GPU) evolution. It wasn't a quick jump but a gradual evolution.
Basically the visual curve is getting flatter every day - and nothing else has meaningfully progressed in 25 years (not console specific), despite hardware getting more powerful.

This isn't to say games haven't innovated (especially outside of the big budget space, as I said - creativity has never been better), it just isn't anything that was really hardware driven for a long while.
 
Gaming? No.

Consoles? Becoming? They became boring 10+ years ago when the market shrank down to two console makers with both using the same h/w provider. Did DF miss this somehow?
 
It's linear, and very incremental, progression of graphic fidelity and nothing else. RT introduction has been one of the smallest jumps in the past 25 years, and sure - if we look at path-traced Cyberpunk vs. the Witcher 3 that's a nice visual delta - but that's a decade apart, and includes 5 years of RT (and GPU) evolution. It wasn't a quick jump but a gradual evolution.
Basically the visual curve is getting flatter every day - and nothing else has meaningfully progressed in 25 years (not console specific), despite hardware getting more powerful.

This isn't to say games haven't innovated (especially outside of the big budget space, as I said - creativity has never been better), it just isn't anything that was really hardware driven for a long while.
Game developers have been extremely clever to figure out hacks, basically, to get graphics in the old pipeline to look nearly as good as raytraced graphics. It's taken a lot of time and a ton of work by a lot of smart and creative people.

But the fact is that the more open a game is, the more work it takes to make graphics look good in the old pipeline. Mostly for global illumination and shadows, but also reflections. Raytracing removes the need for all of these hacky techniques, it just works, because it's using the real mathematics of how light works, more or less. So, rather than being limited by the limitations of a bunch of techniques that try to approximate raytracing, we're now limited by the user's hardware. I think that's huge, especially potentially for indie devs. It's now possible for anyone to have AAA lighting, shadows and reflections without having to spend ages setting them up.
 
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This is your weekly reminder how fucking piss-poor Digital Foundry have become over the years. I'm glad I unsubscribed. What a joke of a channel.
DF stated the Xbox 360 & PS3 should've stayed at 480p leave HD for PS4/X1. They claimed RTX 30 based Switch 2 Is somehow worse than the hardware within the PS4/PS4 pro because 1st gen games always look ugly. They got being Nvidia shills from their "DLSS 5" bombing hard.
 
The visual fidelity race is a different one and mostly separate from figuring out or advancing creative and interesting game mechanics.
yeah but its what most gamers seem to want.. at least in gaming forums.. got to have that grphxes!! and all these new consoles are just small PCs in a box. Nothing that makes them interesting graphically at all compared other each other. Thats what this question was about. Not " games today are boring " that a lot of people here seem to miscomprehended.

It was all inevitable of course as computers got more complex and standardized, but that doesn't make these consoles any less boring.
 
yeah but its what most gamers seem to want.. at least in gaming forums.. got to have that grphxes!! and all these new consoles are just small PCs in a box. Nothing that makes them interesting graphically at all compared other each other. Thats what this question was about. Not " games today are boring " that a lot of people here seem to miscomprehended.

It was all inevitable of course as computers got more complex and standardized, but that doesn't make these consoles any less boring.
There are lot of reasons for a person to play games and many of them has little to do with game mechanics.

There are many reasons for a person to drink beer and many of them has little to do with the beer itself.

Social reasons are very profoundly influencing us. And it's good to be social even if you are a nerd.
 
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