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[darthkarki]

Haven't read the whole thread but hope I'm not the first person to say...

Souls games.

100%. Forget microtransactions, gaas, acquisitions, everything else. Souls games are absolutely the worst thing to happen to the industry. Every other fricking game is a souls game now and they fricking suck. So much wasted opportunity. So many games that could have been amazing if they channeled DmC, God of War, any of the other incredible action games that are actually fun to play

Le sigh.

 

[lughnasadh123]

Social Media. Everything bad in gaming is linked to it.

 

[lestar]

Ubisoft open world mechanics

 

[nial]

Games becoming mainstream. It should still be a niche and everyone in it being bullied in school for it. Games should still be made by teams of 1-10 nerds in their basements or garages.

So, before 1983/1985?

 

[buenoblue]

Mooreberg wishes they could erase that thread they made

 

[Ultra Donny]

Digital Foundry

 

[Metnut]

Candy crush

 

[WhiteWaterM00se]

Microtransactions, inflated game budgets from trying to do too much, killing arcade style games, GaaS.

Roblox (for all the good and evil), Discord (see Roblox), the death Of Sports gaming compared to PS2, PS1, SNES generations.

Honestly, as I type this, i think the answer is GREED!

 

[hououinkyouma00]

Fortnite

This is my answer.

Ruined art styles for years, created a generation of retards, and ruined multiplayer games. Other games may have done similar things but Fortnite did it to a degree that actually mattered and actually changed things.

 

[alucard0712_rus]

Scalpers in 2020 and 2021.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Whichever game popularized the whole hero/montgage/self absorbed aspect of gaming. You can tell just by the cover art. I dont know which game started it off where it caught on, but I put some pics as an example. This kind of junk.

 

[Dirk Benedict]

Erase it from the mainstream, that way we take care of all of the problems at once.

 

[MasterDerico]

This gen.

 

[Lionel Richie]

Not erase by itself, but you know how Snoy wanted to partner with Nintendo for the PlayStation? I wish they would have partnered with Sega instead. So the Saturn and PlayStation would have merged into a single thing and every generation would also feature that partnership.

 

[MiguelItUp]

Microtransctions existing in purchased games.

In free to play games it makes sense, money has to be made somewhere. But in games that people have already purchased, it just feels absolutely greedy and unnecessary. Obviously it's just to get more money, but that content could easily be placed in the game without putting a price on it. It's always been gross, and it always will be.

You could remove all of the games that have done it, and I'm sure everyone would be fine.

 

[cartman414]

If exclusives would be erased and all things related to that, would Commodore still be around then?

Then that.

Plus, exclusives only turn people into douchebags so you can’t have a normal conversation, there is almost no unbiased gaming talks nowdays, very tiresome.

But not sure what would’ve happened if there was no Mario or NES since that’s all about exclusivity.
NES is said to have saved the gaming industry.

But I played on Spectrum and C64 before I played on NES and was perfectly fine with that, so idk

If it were only those two we'd be stuck with horribly balanced Eurojank.

Topic: Mehdi Ali. Irving Gould not working to sabotage Commodore.

 

[Tajaz2426]

My son when he was eight was watching me through the week or two playing FF9. I worked my tail off and I got over leveled as I suck hard at video games. I was at the final boss and I decided I would beat him and watch the ending the next day when I awoken.

At some point he woke up and beat the game. He hasn’t had a birthday or been found since.

 

[Larxia]

It's sad to say this because I used to love this series back then, but Assassin's Creed.
This is the one game that really derailed modern video games. It completely changed the industry. Before Assassin's Creed, there wasn't this concept of "Open World" as we know it, it wasn't even a term back then, and each game with an "open world" was doing its own thing, with a different game design, it wasn't a specific template that was set in stone.

But then Assassin's Creed happened, which first completely changed Ubisoft, absolutely all of their games had to follow this exact formula over and over, and every other publishers adopted this formula too, leading to all these open world being the same clone games, making you feel like you're just playing the same games over and over.

I would be super curious to look at an alternative timeline where Assassin's Creed / Ubisoft never existed, and see what the gaming landscape would have been like for the past 15 years.

 

[Fredrik]

If it were only those two we'd be stuck with horribly balanced Eurojank.

Topic: Mehdi Ali. Irving Gould not working to sabotage Commodore.

The 80s C64 and Amiga era gave birth to a ton of legendary devs. Rockstar, Psygnosis and Reflections, DICE, Factor 5, Code Masters, Core, etc the list is big. The GTA IP originates from DMA Design in the UK. Really there are lots of super talented devs from europe and with roots from that era. So I’d say it would be the same but less modern audience nonsense and we would have dodged the awful dpad era and kept the joysticks and evolved arcades and rotating sticks and track balls etc instead. Awesome!

 

[DaleinCalgary]

I don’t want to get rid of anything. If I don’t like it I don’t buy it.

 

[cripterion]

Phil Spencer?

Nah I kid. Honestly my first thought was horse armor too but I do believe we would have gotten to this point anyways. I'm tired of Gaas, lootboxes, season pass, deluxe editions, pre-order DLC, paid cosmetics.

I always think of the good old days firing PC games like Dark Age of Camelot or hell even the first 2 CoD were fun on PC. No drama just straight up multiplayer fun.

 

[Edellus]

GPS in maps and HUDs.

I think they largely devalue the traversal of most open world games. When they're on, I'm paying attention to the pointers instead of the scenery. And even when they can be disabled, most games aren't built with that in mind so finding places/stuff is near impossible due to the lack of description in the directions.

Games like Outward do it great. There is a map, but it is without a GPS and it just has landmarks in it. To find where you need to go you have to pay attention to the quests descriptions and then to the actual landmarks while roaming to know where you are and where you should go. It's full on exploration and discovery and it all feels earned.

 

[Puscifer]

In hindsight the Halo and the OG Xbox. Nothing it did was any more or less impressive than Agent Under Fire. We also started seeing hype being part of the games quality, which is stupid, I literally remember people saying "yeah Halo 2 was disappointing but the hype!!!"

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Wokeness

I want to return to a timeline where wokeness never existed

 

[Radical_3d]

This is so easy. Prevent all those ex Bizarre employees coming to Evolution, bringing with them the all the boring knowledge of making Metropolis Street Racing to the studio. And the price to pay is the game they made that I didn’t needed: Drive Club. So Evo would keep their old DNA of arcades and make something fun that’d have found fertile ground in the boring but successful PS4.

Best timeline with MotorStorm: Monument Valley Remake launching later 2024 as a PS5Pro launch title.

 

[Jesb]

TLOU2

 

[NikuNashi]

DLC.

Before DLC we had complete, fully tested, full games, in boxes, that were ours to take home and play without anyone elses involvement. What a shit show it is now.

 

[Allandor]

Plattform exclusivity

As it only hurts consumers. Now I have multiple devices next to my TV and all of them do more or less the same (waste of resources).

 

[Pantz]

Kinect

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

Losing Naughty Dog would of course also mean losing Jak & Daxter, but I think that's a sacrifice worth making for the greater good.

That’d barely be a sacrifice. Literally nothing of value would be lost, as J&D was always ND being trendchasers and making nothing new that others didn’t do better elsewhere.

 

[Tell’em Keb]

The gaming community

 

[consoul]

P.T.

Don't get me wrong. It's probably the best playable teaser ever made. I'd erase it because it's very existence is a painful reminder that Konami denied us Silent Hills. It's a tragedy I can never forgive.

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

My man. This fucking tacky franchise is shaping the imagine of PlayStation and I hate everything about it.

Let’s make a Time Machine and destroy the code for this abomination.

Better yet, on the day of the launch, destroy the code, so that Hermen Hulst no longer has anything and the launch is cancelled... There the CEO of Playstation scolds him and fires him... That would change the history of the company. for the best. ..And by the way, Jim Ryan will never be there.

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

XBox.
They been powerleveling themselves since day one to get this far. Alot of shitty practices started by them (XBL) paying for online, etc.
Competition is great. Wish it woulda have been from SEGA or something. Rather than Microsofts warchest of cash and really just their attempt to conquer something else.

I own all their consoles yes.

Totally agree, Xbox hurt the industry more than it helped...

And they still wanted to implement putting Batteries in their controls...

 

[Davevil]

Nintendo motion control and abandon the race for computational power

 

[Hudo]

Social media platforms. Getting game developers and mentally ill people on one platform where they can interact with each other was a mistake.

 

[Kenpachii]

renting digital licenses.

 

[BlackTron]

I'd like to erase carts from N64, but the idea was to save the system, not erase it.

 

[AgatonSax]

TLOU2

Yeah. As overly simplistic as that is, my perception is that a lot of this shit started with TLOU2.

 

[kainslayer]

Phill Spencer....lolol

 

[LazyParrot]

Online multiplayer FPS making it big on consoles in the PS3/360 Era. Set the genre back a decade on PC.

 

[Black_Stride]

The DreamCast ever failing.
Just erase that it failed and in the new timeline that console did very well and Sega continued making bespoke hardware with developers talented enough to actually make use of it.

 

[M1chl]

iPhone, Android, mobile games in short. Their economic model ruined everything

 

[Beechos]

Greed!

 

[Moriarty1889]

SBI and all other woke companies infecting and ruining games with their racist politics.

 

[DaGwaphics]

I guess it would have to be that damn horse armor.

 

[Mhmmm 2077]

SJWs

 

[mhirano]

Horse armor DLC, that starter all the microtransaction bullsh*t
And the Xbox 360 that made Microsoft arrogant ending up releasing the worst gaming system ever (XBox One)

 

[raduque]

Anita Sarkeesian

Zoey quinn

Changing my answer: the Internet

 

[TGO]

Yeah. As overly simplistic as that is, my perception is that a lot of this shit started with TLOU2.

No it's older.

Anita Sarkeesian got her hands on ND just before the release of TLOU, Neil had already did his little speech before the release of Left Behind.
And as throw away and innocent as it was, it was just to let people know Ellie was a lesbian.
And that's the problem, back then we didn't think nothing of it.
It wasn't anything new or controversial or anything.
It was just a " oh right, didn't get that her character in the main game "
Little did we know Sony would use DLC's to announce their characters sexualities
And we would be consistently hit over our head with it going forward.