Maybe graphical advancements have slowed down (especially since it takes half a decade to make a game now) but this feels a little disingenuous. Bottom is supposed to be Fortnite? I can see someone playing WoW or Quake or UT for 10 years since its release too.
Theres more variety in gaming today then there ever was, many more single dev games succeeding because they dont need to impress the likes of EA to publish their game thanks to the internet and free distribution. More platforms to choose from and multiplatform releases are more common.
The successes of one game are not reflective whole medium or the current state of gaming.
You can still find Unreal Tournament servers now. I checked it out recently because I used to play loads of UT back in the day, but everyone on there is so skilled I assume they must have been playing non stop for the past 25 years.
It’s also really ignoring how much Fortnite has changed over the years. It’s like saying 10 years of LoL and using the same three pictures from season 1.
Everyone who doesn’t play LoL will think you’re an idiot if you play ranked, that hasn’t changed in 15 years
Ranked in LoL was too stressful to me. That and StarCraft 2 I could never enjoy ranked in. Idk why. Other games didn’t have that same effect on me. I guess just too much shit to keep track of and it stresses me out.
That’s the average “modern thing bad” to you. Especially the ones shitting on things around kids
I really hoped we millennials would remember getting shit on constantly and maybe not do it.
10 years of being GenX:
year 1: monochromatic primary-coloured graphics on a ZX Spectrum/chunky sprites on a Commodore 64/dying of dysentery and NTSC colour fringing on an Apple II
year 10: 4096-colour 3D graphics and digitised sound on an Amiga/playing Microsoft Flight Simulator on a 1024x768 multisync monitor
I did 10 yrs of TF2. Better graphics might have come in that time, but I only noticed the phlogastinator.
Still using dead ringer after they nerfed it several times over lol
Pyro pre nerf had one of the most op build of degreaser (any) flare gun and axtinguisher
It was also very fun, along the lines of scout cleaver sandman pre nerf
Yeah holy shit, we really went through eras playing games, theyve pretty much only ever known fortnite, like modern 18 year olds
I mean, they’ve decided to stick with fortnite, roblox, minecraft, whatever. But, there have been thousands of great games released that they just chose not to play.
Sounding like a boomer already lol.
Nah, zoomers went through the whole indie horror game gauntlet, Minecraft, terraria, etc.
Edit Addendum: Also, don’t forget about games like Friday Night Funkin and the plethora of mods that it spawned. The Five Nights at Freddy’s fandom was basically a cult at some point and still memed. Cuphead was a big enough phenomenon to get it’s own animated series. Stardew Valley is another game that will doubtless have influence beyond it’s years. Motherfucking Undertale, sans memes, etc. VA-11 HALL-A was pretty popular for a while too. Don’t forget about Among Us. Lethal Company is still getting updates. SCP Secret Laboratory is another one people forget about, but is still a game with a dedicated player base. Kenshi…oh man great game released in 2018. Fucking Persona 5 and Metaphor ReFantaszio, great games. MiSide is a new game, a horror game that doubtless has a small yet dedicated following. No Man’s Sky is great, especially after they fixed it. Many Gen-Z doubtless remember Subnautica. Ultrakill is something that is quite special.
You may be right among us, lethal company, 5 nights, generation, they were raised by those types of games, not what we had, theres a fat difference still, but they definitely had variety, im not saying they didnt, if my friends and I had modern roblox/fortnite growing up we wouldve exclauively played that too, we only played what we could all play together so it would be the cod/sports game we all bought that year, ocassionally trying mid ftp titles like dcuo
Always gonna be ppl who branch out and those that dont, overall they got more variety for free than we did
All those games you mentioned are like what I played growing up and im mid 20s
thats not zoomers tho, thats over 18, 20+ at least, idk my nephews have never bought a game its just fortnite and/or roblox
Bro, older cohort Gen-Z is around 27 years old man. Unless you are talking about Gen-Alpha.
Oh were def talking about alpha then, were talking about highschool aged kids and younger zs been college
Either only Fortnite, or a mix of that + Minecraft + Roblox.
I’m playing Split Fiction with my wife right now and it’s one of the best coop player games I have played in awhile. Back in my childhood, the best we had was Toe Jam and Earl.
I feel like we had decent co-op games back then.
World of Illusion (the one with Mickey and Donald). The Chaos Engine.
Hell, a lot of arcade games had co-op modes, like Gauntlet.
Not many, I’ll admit, but at least it was more than one company making them.
Outside of shoot em up or hack and slash. Something with a good story that involved real coop to win. Not many.
Let’s be honest, if we wanted a game story in those days it was in the manual.
That’s actually pretty fair.
Real boomer energy. While graphics improvement flattened out, other things (that are more important) have continued improving.
Off the top of my head… Zoomers got: Disco Elysium, The Outer Wilds, Undertale, and a million other indies.
2 of those examples are 6 years old, and the other is turning 10 soon
Zoomers aren’t teenagers anymore. Well, some might be; I’m not sure where the cutoff is exactly, but the oldest zoomers might be 30 already.
Though I’d also say that millennials, Xers, and boomers got each of those games, too, if they were interested. Hell, even the silent and greatest generations probably have members that enjoyed those games, though probably not so much for the WW1 generation.
And in the other direction, I’ve enjoyed games that were popular before I was born, so if gens alpha and beta want to claim them as well, I’d allow it.
Minecraft for me lol, from age 9 to 20 (zoomer)
I mean, millennials also got those
Most of these titles don’t have mainstream appeal though. The example is true for the majority of players.
I do love me some indie games (probably 95% of what I play atm are Noita and Balatro) but I’ll admit it was really cool as a child / teenager / young adult to see the improvements over time.
You missed the entire point of the post
What’s the point? I thought I got it, and that I agreed, but now I’m not sure anymore.
Top post plays multiple types of games. Bottom posts entire gaming life is spent in one game.
Thanks. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but I also like variety.
Its not accurate at all. Sure some people now do only play fornite but people back in the day only played cs or tf2 or wow or runescape or any RTS. The difference is the games now get content updates whereas back in the day these people were playing the exact game over and over for 10 years.
You think they didn’t do different things? Play different games?
Don’t be an old crusty fucker
This is just perceived technological advances in the same span of time, not what games different generations prefer.
While Moore’s Law isn’t dead the slow down is apparent. From game graphics to phones and other areas of life, the perception is stagnation.
For example I’d notice little difference in a flagship android phone from 10 years ago or AAA video game compared to something that came out this year. Hell I might gain some features like a headphone jack or IR blaster.
You couldn’t say the same if you went back 10 years from 2012 to 2002 tech. You’d go from a smartphone to a cellphone that probably didn’t even have a color screen nevermind a camera, web browser, touchscreen etc.
I think you would notice a big difference from a 10 year old phone.
They’re physically bigger, higher resolution and thinner (but you can’t easilly replace the battery when it inevitably dies) and the number of cameras went up from 1 to 3.
The difference between a phone from 10 years ago and one from 20 years ago is the difference between the 6th generation of the Apple iPhone and the Motorola Razr (a non-smart flip-phone) both lauded phones at their time.
The same massive deceleration in the speed of improvement compared to the period from the 80 up to the 2010s seems to have happenned all over Tech: my generation (Gen X) saw the appearance of consumer computing (Spectrum, Amiga, the original Mac back in the 80s) which accelerated to massive adoption amongs consumers and informatization of companies with the PC at the same time as mobile phones became mass market (the 90s), then the Internet and the digitalization of consumer technology with things like Digital Cameras (end of the 90s and the 00s), then mobile networked computing in the form of smart phones and tablets (late 00s and 10s).
What exactly is the great life-changing technological breakthrough of the late 2010s and the 2020s? The only one I can think of is the weaponization of Social Networks for mass manipulation, which is hardly an improvement.
I remember hearing various venture capitalists and the like talking about finding the next iPhone around circa 2012 because at that point phones were already starting to mature
A flagship of 2015, like the Samsung Galaxy S6, is a medium-low specs phone of today (3GB RAM, 32GB storage), but with smaller screen. For most people that only use social media and messaging, it’s perfectly serviceable.
I work with zoomers and tbf a lot of them play many different varied games but some of them genuinely still play roblox and fortnite into their late 20s/early 30s. But tbf to them there’s the millennials that have been playing shit like wow, eve, and osrs for 20 years
I haven’t seen much improvement to game mechanics or graphics in the last decade, personally. Just little nudges forward, sidegrades, or screaming drops back to the worst, most capitalist parts of the 80s
In my biased opinion, The Finals has a really interesting mechanic that you can’t find anywhere else. The destruction absolutely feels “next gen”, all the rubble is synchronized so everyone sees and actually interacts with the same destruction. It’s different than just blowing up a wall for an entrance, it’s a core part of the gameplay.
Oh look, my favorite game! The devs treat the fans (both casual and competitive) so well!
Red faction guerilla
This is an critique on the gaming industry, not the players.
I remember moving from the first sims to the second which was a spectacular difference, and then the sims 3 expanding on the tech with an open world. You could smell the future on the book that came in the box with the disc that you read on the way home.
Compare the early and modern versions of wolfenstein. The first game was revolutionary, can you tell apart generic stills from the last 3 games?
Some millennial have been playing WoW for over twenty years at this point.
This is me except it’s RuneScape
It was Mabinogi for me.
Same
Final Fantasy XIV has only been out for… Hmm… Well, yeah, I guess it’s gonna be one of those days.
I would hope it is more of the magic of dreaming of the future of video game graphics. It was so exciting to see the next generation of graphics come out.
I am hoping to see the same with VR. But unless there is some kind of technological breakthrough that they are willing to sell to consumers, I don’t see it jumping forward very fast over the next few decades.
Personally and as a gamer since the 80s (and nowadays making games myself), I think the last great breakthrough improvement was procedurally generated game spaces, and that stuff dates back to Minecraft in 2009.
The improvements in visuals are well into the diminishing returns part of the curve, the richness and size of custom crafted game spaces has hit a cost ceiling (hence budgets in the $100 million mark for AAA games, even with partial authomatisation of things like model generation and painting via stuff like Houdini and Substance), and the only direction of growth I can see is the gameplay itself, where the improvements from the naturally emergent gameplay of multi-player were a one-off and have been more or less stuck at the same point for a decade.
For a while I had some hope that AI (specifically LLMs) would yield a massive jump in the richness of the game world in story terms (imagine an RPG were all NPCs have genuine complex stories with realistic interactions, all generated on the fly and even influenced by you) but plain LLMs have large hardware requirements merelly to interact with one person (powerful GPUs, at least 12GB of VRAM) on top of the requirements to run the game itself, so that kind of game improvement seems unlikely before the end of the decade.
There’s been a lot of resources invested in improving local LLMs very recently, and Meta of all companies has been investing a ton of researcher time into local LLMs since the start of the AI boom with Llama and the like
Given the timelines for game development I’m still hoping for more emergent storytelling and gameplay at some point via AI, even if that’s just to generate interiors for buildings that can’t be entered and dialogue for silent NPCs
I think Gabe Newell said in an interview, VR is actually moving to fast. There is no point in pushing a product to market and spending all that time and money needed for that, when by the time you make it to the market the research has moved so much, your tech and product is obsolete already.
At some point they will release products again and they will be amazing (hopefully) but we dont get the continuous advances like with grafics back in the day
Thanks! It is good to have something to look forward to! I guess that explains the massive dev time for the new steam headset!
IDK, the modern high budget VR games are still pretty on-par with Half Life Alyx
Everything in game design is a meaningful choice. What does the choice of making the game for VR mean, exactly? I started this sentence planning to follow up with a few ideas but I’m honestly coming up short.
Shit like this made me think we would hit singularity around now,
Oh boy, was I naive
My take from this meme is that Zoomers and later are more “captured” by a few big platforms than previous ones.
And perhaps earlier ones, too.
Like, my aunts and relatives are trapped on Facebook sharing Trumpy memes. Kids younger than me seems to be really into ultra-short videos or mobile-ish games. The only people I know that know how to use a desktop PC, beyond the bare minimum for work are… about my age? Other than a senior dev.
This is a huge generalization and small sample, but still. I’m not worried about other generations doing things I don’t like (that’s always true, and a good thing), I’m worried about them being more trapped.
My take from this meme is that Zoomers and later are more “captured” by a few big platforms than previous ones.
Steam games have been around for a lot longer than 10 years. So has Nintendo. There’s no reason a Zoomer wouldn’t have played Stardew Valley or Undertale or Mario Odyssey or Wii Tennis.
Like, my aunts and relatives are trapped on Facebook sharing Trumpy memes. Kids younger than me seems to be really into ultra-short videos or mobile-ish games. The only people I know that know how to use a desktop PC, beyond the bare minimum for work are… about my age?
I keep seeing this complaint. I’ll never understand it. I definitely know family that have mired themselves in Facebook memes. But its silly to pretend my Blessed Lemmy-4chan-channel is materially better than their Barbaric Facebook-4chan-channel. Honestly, just amazed they finally came around on computers at all. So many of my parent’s generation couldn’t even check email twenty years ago.
Similarly, the Office Space Millennials seem to have completely forgotten that their non-technical peers exist. Like they’ve never met an auto mechanic or a plumber or a doctor their age who has struggled with using a computer. I used to do IT for a physicians clinic and it was the Medical Assistants doing all the office work. The RNs and MDs couldn’t do shit. Which was ironic, because so much of the IT upgrade was about reducing staff size… but the MAs were the ones who grasped the tech the fastest while the actual medical staff avoided tech like the plague.
And sure, kids half your age don’t know DOS commands because they don’t use DOS. But there’s no shortage of Zoomer/GenA computer geeks. I ran into a gaggle of robotics club Alphas in downtown, near the local convention center, just last week. Every year my office fills up with interns who built their own PCs and threw up their own home PLEX servers for their parents who are my age.
Some of you are just so damned cloistered, insisting the three 14 year olds you know aren’t doing Angelina Jolie shit from Hackers in their basements before they’re even old enough to drive. But pull down your reading glasses, squint a bit, and you’ll see plenty of tech savvy folks younger than you.
Zoomers played Minecraft
Millennials and Alpha play(ed) Fortnite
You could also put 10 years of RuneScape or WoW for millennials and a plethora of games that came out between 2010-2020 for Zoomers
Millennials did not play Fortnite.
Parents playing with their kids
Not true! I installed it and played for 5 minutes once!
Yeah, I played a few times right when it came out, but put it down, didn’t feel like it was for me. I am currently 37, so pretty middle of the pack millennial. I’m sure someone born in '95 played.
My sister was born in 97, my brother in 93, and me in 90 and I always have to remind myself she isn’t, technically, a millennial.
No idea if she’s played Fortnite, though.
My wife’s current fortnite addiction would suggest otherwise
Runescape changed quite a bit in that 10 year span
Yeah but then osrs came along
And now there’s 2009scape!
Lol was gonna reply that, which osrs? XD
I’m a millennial who found access to the alpha version of Minecraft on a forum circa 2011. Millennials were the forerunners of Minecraft.
Fortnite came with a build-mode PVP that was a huge turn off for me and many old-head millennials. That game was primarily for Gen Z and Gen-Alpha.
In their defense, games starting from 2016 kinda stopped having any actually meaningful graphical upgrades.
Ehhhh a PS5 game can look a lot better than a 2016 AAA
I’m not saying it’s everything, and I’m not saying every meaningful upgrade is worthwhile, I’m just saying.
I’m not sure it’s about graphics. Fortnight was never king of graphics mountain. Its probably favored games in the consciousness. But i think millennials still apart of the Minecraft era
I think that’s the point they’re making.
I Love resident evil 4. Great game.
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Me in 2004: Roblox
Me in 2008: Roblox
Me in 2014: Roblox
Me in 2018: Roblox
Me in 2024: Roblox
Gen X version:
Year 1: Pong
Year 5: PacMan
Year 10: Super Mario Brothers
We got lied to so hard on cover art, it took decades to believe anything.
This site shows some top lies, and shows that Activision, didn’t lie so much.
I remember being so impressed with King’s Quest 7’s graphics that looked like a cartoon. Big improvement over KQ6, which itself was a big improvement over KQ5, which was so much of an improvement gameplay-wise over KQ4 that I gave up trying to play 4 after later getting it on some abandonware site (it was a “type what you want to do but the engine will have no idea what you intend unless you use the very specific wording they programmed into each scene”).
But yeah, before that, cover art often had little to do with the game itself. I have a vivid memory of receiving a birthday gift and experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions as I was excited to get a new video game, then dissapointed when I realized it might be a movie instead, follwed by happiness again when I noticed the Nintendo logo, confirming it was a game. The cover art just looked like the generic cartoon art that was popular in the late 80s/early 90s.
Oh and on that note, most cartoons sucked back then compared to today. I can understand why many people thought cartoons were just for kids because most of them back then were so awful only kids could enjoy them and even the better ones were usually only able to trigger wholesome kind of vibes (like most Disney ones prior to Aladdin). There were some exceptions, like Looney Tunes. But most of it was like minimum effort to sell some shitty toys.
Don’t you dare knock Adventure!
Man Super Mario Bros. was huuuuuuge
