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
You think they didn’t do different things? Play different games?
Don’t be an old crusty fucker
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.
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?
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
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 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.
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.
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
IDK, the modern high budget VR games are still pretty on-par with Half Life Alyx
Thanks! It is good to have something to look forward to! I guess that explains the massive dev time for the new steam headset!
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
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.
Me in 2004: Roblox
Me in 2008: Roblox
Me in 2014: Roblox
Me in 2018: Roblox
Me in 2024: Roblox
I mean… sure, but when i was a kid if I wanted a free game I had to pirate it but all you need nowadays is to have an epic game store account and you get a free legal game every week. I would have loved that as a kid.
Gen X version:
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(Had to cheat and put an arcade game for 1980, because I’m not aware of any notable console games from that year. In reality the console games from then looked much, much worse than Pac-Man)
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Came out in 1982, I was looking for a 1980 game. And boy, is that version notoriously awful!
That was 82!? And yeah, not great. Seemed awesome at the time though, being able to play on your own TV, without paying quarter!
Home console in 1980:
That’s a good choice! Probably the most popular one of that year. I never had a 2600 and started with a 5200, so my knowledge of it is lacking.
Even as a millennial this is one of the first games I played (and I still love it). I dumped the ROM so I can play it forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, millennials also got those
Minecraft for me lol, from age 9 to 20 (zoomer)
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.
I Love resident evil 4. Great game.
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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.
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.
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
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
Either only Fortnite, or a mix of that + Minecraft + Roblox.
Sounding like a boomer already lol.
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
this is just a millenial version of a boomer meme. you guys are really shaping up to become what you hated. complaining about kids these days not enjoying the same shit you did when you were a kid. what next, you gonna complain about how gen alpha are destroying the economy because they’re not buying avocados or something?
stop the inter-generational fighting, honestly, it’s cringe and a huge distraction from the fact that the rich fucks in charge are looting us for all we’re worth. let’s fight them, instead of eachother
you guys are really shaping up to become what you hated.
stop the inter-generational fighting, honestly, it’s cringe
Yeah I agree on the cringe part
Hey dingus, it’s not complaining about you, it’s about being sad for you that you’ll never experience that level of innovation since companies are all “minecraft fortnite skyrim again” and nothing else.
How did you take this personally? I saw it as a criticism of the industry
How are you so triggered by this? Holy fuck chill
I took it as a complaint against the industry not against the players.
Problem with your generation is that you get offended by anything. You just proved that point. This meme was just to understand the massive graphical improvement that has been going on through the years.
Zoomers will do this in 40 years too. Same as it ever was.
complaining about kids these days not enjoying the same shit you did when you were a kid
I have 0 idea how you could have read that from the image. It’s about the seemingly exponential improvement in graphics or just how fast things were changing in gaming.
stop the inter-generational fighting, honestly, it’s cringe and a huge distraction from the fact that the rich fucks in charge are looting us for all we’re worth
Bro, take a deep breath, that is just a meme. People can be nostalgic sometimes, there is nothing wrong with that.
except its not just nostalgia, is it? over 50% of this meme is dedicated to dumb culture war shit.
No it’s comparing the acceleration in graphics between the two time periods. If anything the bottom quote is more showing pity to the younger generation for missing out on the rapid advancement, not somehow calling them stupid for missing it.
This is how I took it as a millennial. Hit me in the feels too.
it’s not, at all. if it was comparing graphics between two periods why are all three of the bottom screenshots fortnite? why not compare red dead redemption 2, the last of us, and mario kart wii, or something?
or why not show world of warcraft for the top 3?
clearly it’s implying that zoomers only play fortnite or that games haven’t improved in 10 years, and that’s all a bunch of bullshit. baldur’s gate 3 was the first game ever to win all of the major awards.
I think it’s fair to say games have improved at a similar rate. there have always been masterpieces. I think there are more per year now, just because the industry is bigger.
but technical graphics have largely stagnated. partially because nobody can afford a new graphics card, partially because it gives diminishing returns. I also think we are largely past the point where technical limitations in graphics keep people from making any piece of art they want to, and actually using a lot of the capacity for stuff requires a ridiculous amount of work from an increasingly varied array of artists, for, again, massively diminishing returns.
you guys are really shaping up to become what you hated.
Don’t tell me what I hated.
lol chill
Shit like this made me think we would hit singularity around now,
Oh boy, was I naive
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
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.
Millennials did not play Fortnite.
My wife’s current fortnite addiction would suggest otherwise
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.
Parents playing with their kids
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 mean, they can still play the old games. My kiddo loved Kirby on the NES Classic
The point of the meme is the experience of witnessing the unique rate of progress in game engines, not the variety. There’s definitely more variety now than ever before, if you go looking for it l, and I say that as a 40 year old curmudgeon.
Exactly. Several limits were loosened or removed entirely. The SNES was the first console with actual pixel transparency, the PSX, despite being weaker than the Saturn and the N64, was the king of the 90s. The jump in graphical and sound quality was always night and day from the Atari era all the way to the PS3/360 era (sound probably peaked in the PS2 era, with DVD quality)
Even on the PC, the jump from 3 years’ worth of advances was astonishing. Just compare the original Doom, 1993, with Quake, 1996
And here’s Quake 3, 1999
HL1 vs HL2 shows a similar rate of progress
Graphically, I think the two Half Life are more akin to UT99 and UT2003, similar year of release, too. UT2004 didn’t change graphics, but I remember that, if you set everything on the graphics to maximum, the announcer will exclaim “HOLY SHIT!”
didn’t feel like it to me at the time, but I was glad they finally developed the technology to prevent Gordon’s boots from being slippery as fuck. god hl1 platforming was abysmal.
With the graphics specifically though, IMO half life 2 (2004) is more similar in terms of fidelity to Portal 2 (2011) than to Half Life 1 (1998). Which does make sense as Half Life 2 and Portal 2 were made in the same engine ofc.
Not the most active current popular games for them tho, if you’re around 18 rnow fortnite was prob the main/only mutiplayer title played, my friends and I played a ton of games, jumping every month to what was popular, its consistently been fortnite for kids for a while now, I have 18 year old nephews that have only ever played fortnite, which is honestly a non issue if that works for them, the goal is to get dopamine, move on when you stop getting dopamine
They can play the same game for years and I cant even open one of hundreds I have avilable to me most days, I think they and sports game player win, they seem happier.
the goal is to get dopamine, move on when you stop getting dopamine
Is that the goal? I want more from my games than just poking my brain. I sometimes play games that challenge my reactions, sometimes ones that challenge my thinking. Superhot and Braid provided interesting time-related puzzles. Portal had some good lateral thinking puzzles.
I’m not exactly playing educational games, but when I played Assassin’s Creed games, the historical bits I found interesting were things I could learn more about outside the game. When I played Hearts of Iron 4, it was global politics around the time of WWII. Uboat and other sub games taught me a bit about submarine tactics in WWII. Oxygen not included taught me things I didn’t know about thermodynamics and materials, even if it is extremely simplified. Age of Empires and Total War were gateways to learn about medieval styles of warfare.
Even Sea of Thieves, which involves incredibly simplified sailing was what prompted me to learn about how square-masted sailing ships actually worked.
And, of course, all the flight simulators I’ve played over the years has taught me a lot about how to actually fly planes.
To me, if all you’re getting from a game is a bit of dopamine hits, you’re really missing out. It’s like watching the same movie over and over, or reading the same book over and over.
Dopamine is simply a motivator idk why yall see it as a drug, the way your last sentence is phrases, any action you derive joy from is because you get dopamine from it, if the game bores you dont play it, is what im saying. Id get the sunk cost fallacy where id say I need to spend at least an hour a dollar for the game to be worth it, better off just not playing it if you dont like it, your time is always more valuable
Poking my brain gives me dopamine, I enjoy start and puzzle games that stress me out because of the dopamine, its the main driver, elden ring was pain and stress (my first dark souls) but the most dopamine ive ever gotten from a video game
My nephews (10 and 13) stayed with me a couple of weeks ago, and I got a chance to see them game. And yeah they are playing mostly Fortnite these days, but they love it. Further, it actually looks pretty intense. Like the editing and jockeying for a clean shot is more nuanced than what I was getting up to.
Like was my obsession with Quake 2 DM that much more elevated? True we had a lot more variety with mods and maps, but if I’m being honest most of my time was just spent running around Q2DM1/The Edge and a handful of other vanilla maps. I did love that Homer skin though, lol.
Anyway, I see them hooting and laughing and the whole time they’re chatting with their little friends from school. I can see the joy in it. I wish it wasn’t on this centralised, monetised, company platform. But I can see what they like in it.
E found it
Fortnite gets a lot of hate but they’ve built something unique.
And then lock it up.
something unique, better even, something fun.
It’s the metaverse in practice but don’t let any reptile people know that
