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launches Baldur’s Gate.exe ♪♫ “Brave, brave Sir Garrick, Sir Garrick led the way. Brave, brave Sir Garrick, Sir Garrick ran away.” ♪♫
New games are steaming piles of shit most of the time nowadays.
Old games were also typically steaming piles of shit. It’s just that the ones people still remember are the worthwhile ones, because the bad ones have gone into the dustbin of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
There were so many bad platformers for the Super Nintendo, but nobody is ever going to go back and play those or dredge them up.
Yeah that’s a good point. As a kid I felt like when I bought a game it’d at least be complete, but there were plenty of terrible games back then too.
Yeah, I’ll grant the completeness point. Internet access everywhere has kind of lessened what it means to “release”.
900 million population is more than enough.
(And that much better if they are all gamers :))I’m still playing Skyrim.
I was playing a bunch of Skyrim with mods last year! Awesome game.
There are just so many good games out there. No time to play them all. Also i think epic free games and this prime free game stuff contributed to it. I just started playing bioshock bc of it. Also on pc it feels so good to play an old game and just crank up every setting to max, 4k, install some mods, no ai upscaling but msaa 8x and not having to worry about performance even on mid range PCs. I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games since for me image clarity is much more important than how many polygons a gun has or how the puddle of water reflects light. Like even the new unreal engine 5 games cannot run maxxed out on a 5090 in 4k without upscaling. They only look good in trailers.
I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games…
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style, the graphical fidelity of today’s games was too far out of reach. BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction.
AAA games used to have character to them, now every person has to have 1200 individually rendered pores and a remaster every few years to make it look more realistic (cough cough The Last of Us)
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style>
BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction. >
I totally agree with you. Another good example is Alice: Madness Returns. Just booted it up for the first time yesterday and it looks so good, pleasing in a way.
[email protected] might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
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Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
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There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
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The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
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If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
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With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
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The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
And also, 60 EUR for a single game is a price at least I am not willing to pay for the average game, so in addition to getting a better game, I also get a cheaper one.
There is stuff worth paying that much out there, but it’s not Call of Duty Black Ops Eleventeen
Funny enough, black ops 2, a game from 2012, is still listed at full price at $60—or $100 if you want the DLC—online. On the other hand, the current black ops 6 only costs $70 and new content is free. Admittedly, 2 was a far better game in just about every regard from what I know. But the fact that a modern game is $30 cheaper than a 12 year old game is fucking insane. Activision is so bad with this shit.
Black ops 6 is so bad IMHO. It takes forever to boot up the game and then hits you with the “update available, quit & restart”. Then waiting another 5 mins to download the update, then another couple mins to reach the main menu again. Oh and what was the actual update? To hit me with an advertisement video of season whatever…with new purchases for dumb costumes etc. Like c’mon just let me play the damn game already! When Im finally in a match the gameplay feels rigged…like I’m playing slots in Vegas than an actual video game. The respawns appearing out of nowhere. I honestly believe what I’m seeing on my screen is not what the other player is seeing. Its like these game designers purposely made this game based on an algorithm rather than setting game rules and allowing the players to compete based on skill. Maybe I’m way off on this (and am just a terrible cod player lol) but would like to hear other people’s opinion on this.
all the advertisements, constantly wanting me to spend more money when the game was already expensive to begin with. The game play as described as above. Also the perks/tiers suck. Makes for a very unenjoyable experience. The game is just not fun.
I will say, the zombies mode is the best version in many years. For the low price of $0 through gamepass (which I get for free through an MS Rewards farming script), I can’t complain too much about it. But I wish they would just release a standalone zombies game at some point, it’s literally the only thing I like about cod and would gladly actually buy it (assuming it isn’t ass, which is like 50/50 with cod lol).
We’re at Black Ops 6 already? They made 6 of them? Are there other Call of Duty games as well since? I think the last I played was Infinite Warfare, I think I have WWII in my library unplayed.
I kinda lost track of the AAA treadmill.
I actually really have enjoyed the game itself but you aren’t fucking kidding about the rest of it. It’s truly insane how much friction there is between deciding to play and getting into a lobby.
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I see tf2, i click
Does “older games” only mean the initial public release? So world of Warcraft, Dota 2, Minecraft… all those games that are constantly updated etc. too?
Because that would be a really useless statistic. Many games are not a one time release and done thing anymore. They evolve over time. The games I listed have large player bases.
Exactly what I was thinking. While it’s a great headline the article is nonsense. What about early access? Did those players play any new games? How much time was spent afk? Were those old games new purchases? This is a cherry picked statistic and almost certainly doesn’t paint a clear picture or tell any story except “live service games work”
I don’t even know what the newest game I even own is… Helldivers 2? Except for Elden Ring and it’s DLC, I haven’t bought anything close to release for years. HD2 came out last year and I bought it last week.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring are the last 2 AAA games I bought close to launch for full price. Other than that, I picked up Hades 2 in early access. The rest of my library is all stuff that I bought on sale.
I do have Monster Hunter and Avowed on my wishlist but I think I’m going to be patient. If I do pull the trigger, it would probably be for Avowed because I want more Obsidian games. On a related note Grounded is $20 on Steam right now so I stopped that up even though I beat it back when I had Game Pass.
BG3 isn’t an AAA title. Larian is an indie studio.
Huh, I thought of them as AA. I get indie means independent which they are, but they’re a studio with multiple successful releases even before bg3.
Based on the size of the company and the budget for the game I’d at least call it a AA game. My real point is I paid full price for it and have absolutely no regrets.
Yeah, I’ve lost track myself. I just follow feeds that alert of me free deals.
I actually learned that I can’t even sort my Steam library by release date because of this thread. Otherwise I would actually know lol
I can agree with this: All the hype around KCD:2 led me to buying/playing KCD:1
I have a large backlog of five(?)+ plus year old games that are really good and I have yet to play. I’d much rather burn through those enjoying them on high settings instead of playing current games on low settings while trying to dodge crap monetization.
Honestly, most new games just fucking suck. They’re too expensive, often don’t run properly at launch even on excellent hardware, and those that don’t have micro-transactions built-in require you to purchase DLC to get the whole game.
On the other hand, the older titles almost always run well on my machine, have a ton of community DLC, and in general are just designed better because they were built to bring the player as much fun as possible, not to extract as much money as possible.
Plus, the quality content generated from 2005 - 2015 represents some of the best ever, and can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you even get into the 2010s. Why waste money on something that may not work, and that I likely won’t enjoy as much as the games I bought 10 years ago?
It’s why I usually wait at least a year after release to consider whether or not I’m going to buy a title.
For sure, and my backlog is huge. I have tons to still play. I’m just now getting around to gta5 on my steam deck. I also just finished re-playing the original ff7 with some mods that made it look way nicer than back when I played it on my ps1 in the 90’s. I could go another 5 years without catching up to 2020 if I wanted to.
New AAA games suck.
I either play indies or old AAA games. It all went to shit around the beginning of the PS4/X1 era, so yeah, my upper bound is about 2013.
I tend to agree with you, I think the downfall started in the ps3 era since that’s when online was in every console. I understand your idea that it was bad in ps4 era since devs had the time to figure out how to makes things worse due to the ability to use the internet to sell things/deliver patches.
Totally. Even with good new games, best to wait until they are cheap and completely stable. The impatience to play something the day it releases hasn’t been a thing for me since like 2010… which I agree with you were just generally better, more exciting times for the medium.
What’s your opinion on Dome Keeper?
Amen. I also have a ton of issues with contemporary game design—padding playtime with procedural generation, prioritizing graphics, world size, or narrative over gameplay… etc.
Nowadays, I feel as if every game tries to compete for “most game” while lacking cohesion and polished ideas.
And to top it off: non-optimized game size. I’m sorry—I don’t care if your game is $2.99, I’m not downloading 80GBs just to try a game I may refund an hour later.
I don’t know if I agree about new games. This is a bit of a problem with some AAA games though. The indie game scene is still thriving as far as I can tell, in some genres more than others. (E.g now is a great time to be into FPS games.)
A good old game can occupy you for many hours though, and it’s hard to make good games period. I’m not surprised that a few older games dominate the market.
Currently 100% of my time is spent on games that are “six or more years old”, and a lot of that is spent on games that are more than 30 years old. But! I’m playing newly-made community content for 30 y/o games. This kind of retrogaming is something that evades Steam statistics entirely because it usually means playing custom sourceports of old games which rarely are on Steam. One old game I play on Steam to contribute to this statistics is Skyrim.
For me, definitely older and indie (old and new). I don’t get a lot of time these days to sit at my PC. Using my steam deck primarily these days is part of the reason I’m playing older games, but seriously I have a problem with steam/gog/name a storefront/ backlogs. I have so many games already, great time to review what I bought because of hype but never played.
Yeah that whole conundrum, if you have the money to buy new games you don’t have the time to play them, if you had the time, you wouldn’t have the money to buy them.
It’s wild how good the cheap games are these days. I’m 30 hours into playing Noita, have hundreds of hours in Vampire Survivor.
And I got about 15 hours into Dragon Age: Veilguard before it occurred to me I could crack open the Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition and actually have an enjoyable experience.
I’m 30 hours into playing Noita
I kind of want more there. There isn’t DLC, and there aren’t clones.
I mean, yes, the game is large and very replayable, and I have a blast with it…but it’s also kind of the only option for that gameplay.
I also play it modded with health regeneration, because the difficulty level on the vanilla game is very high, and encourages very cautious play.
I would suggest trying Caveblazers, as it’s similar, but it’s more barebones and (I think) significantly harder.
Caveblazers
Thanks, purchased.
Was just now in another thread having nostalgia about this game: Reamlz.
It was distributed as freeware/ shareware back in the 90’s. You had to physically mail the producers cash if you wanted to get the expansions. I played through Balders Gate III recently and honestly, it doesn’t even come close to the replayability that Realmz had.
That’s a high bar to clear, but if you add it to the GOG Dreamlist, I’ll vote for it.
It’s already on there
Thanks. I gave it a search before asking, and I didn’t see it, but with the link you posted elsewhere, I just voted on it.
Never played it, but this type of game is up my alley. For what it’s worth:
Curious what makes Realmz so replayable. BG3 has so many unique storylines and endings you’d be hard pressed to play them all. Not to mention character classes and subclasses.
So Realmz is truly open world in a way that BG3 only pretends to be. In BG3, they create the sensation of this huge diversity of endings and paths you can take, but its all pretty much a fugazi: the illusion of choice when actually only a small number of endings are possible. In BG3, the choices add “color” along the way, but they don’t fundamentally change anything about the game, or what its about (like what even is the point of the game?). I have a whole essay of criticism I’ve developed on it, because I truly did enjoy it, but it was so… it pointed in the direction of how much possibility it could have but didn’t execute on it. Its really only an impression of what it claims to be.
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less. Then you get into some corner of the map in Realmz, and you find some cave or castle or dungeon to explore… and it just keeps going. And going and going and going. And instead of it being one monolithic story like BG3, its a world in which many BG3’s happen. The spider tower. The kobald army invasion. The castle in the clouds. The necromancers tower.
Another thing is, predictability/ “jail breaking”. Modern games have this expectation that we “know” everything that is possible for an item or method or whatever. This is a big departure from early games where we would often “find out” about what is possible. In modern games when something unexpected happens, the dev’s patch it and change the game. In old games when something unexpected happens… well… thats just part of the game. Dota is a great example of this, where basically, finding ways to break the game to come up with a new strategy was quite literally how the game was played. Its now devolved into a poor impression of itself. In realmz, I remember beating some adventure and its final wizard and getting a wand of polymorph. I used it on one of my characters and it polymorphed them into a red dragon and it killed the entire party. I highly doubt the game developers planned that as a possibility, but game development then was often about creating possibilities, not limiting them. Whenever anyone figures something like that out in BG3, they patch it and the game becomes a little more sterile, a little more boring.
Also, BG3 is just kinda… empty. Which I was really surprised by, considering how many studios create amazing, populated worlds with complex day night cycles and economies. In BG3, once you’ve pretty much cleared an area, thats it. Not much more to do other than advance to the next area. In Realmz, you had to watch your ass if you were really out there, because no-matter what state your party was in, a random encounter can happen at any time, and in that game, death is permanent. Also, wtf is with there not being a day night cycle in BG3? Like wth. I’ve got a damn vampire and they aren’t weak during the day and OP af at night?
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less.
Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series, to name another popular modern RPG) for that reason, I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.
Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.
Realmz was out about the same time as Spiderweb Software’s games (Exile series, later re-released as Avernum series). Both were popular RPGs for the Macintosh (though I believe both had Windows releases as well).
While I did play and enjoy Realmz back in the day, I personally preferred the Spiderweb Software games. More complicated interaction with the world, and I preferred the writing. Less-pretty, though the Avernum re-release was isometric and had new graphics. Have you ever tried them?
I don’t know if I can recommend them in 2025, but if you’re still enjoying Realmz, I figure that the Spiderweb Software stuff might also be something of interest.
EDIT: The current Steam sale, which runs for another two days, appears to have a bundle of all of their games on sale for 60% off. I didn’t personally enjoy the Geneforge series as much as the Exile/Avernum series, and the Avadon series is considerably simpler, and didn’t really grab me. But a lot of the games are also on sale individually, so…shrugs
EDIT2: It looks like Realmz has not seen a Steam release; thought I’d check to see if it was on Steam too.
I got that bundle at 92% off and it took me 2 years to finish. It was awesome
Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.
I might buy that bundle on just your recommendation. I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it, since I pretty much only play on my steam deck these days.
Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.
Hah! That’s some hardcore effort to make that game multiplayer!
I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it,
I mean, there were a bunch of RPGs in roughly that genre out in those years; IMHO, Realmz and the Exile series were the best out on the Mac.
goes poking around
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasoft
Hah! I didn’t know this. Back when Jeff Vogel — the Spiderweb Software guy — was just starting out, Fantasoft, the company that did Realmz, published the first three Exile games too.
goes through the rest of the list
I don’t think that anything else they published were RPGs, though I’ve played some of the non-RPG games.
It looks like there were also a bunch of scenarios released for Realmz. I’m trying to remember…I definitely remember playing City of Bywater. I don’t know if I’ve played the other scenarios, though.
If you haven’t played them and can round them up, might be that you’ve only played about a fraction of the content out for Realmz, if what you’re after is Realmz-like stuff. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realmz
While new scenarios were released throughout the game’s history, also typically packed along with the game in the next Realmz release, the game ultimately ended up with 13 official scenarios:
- City Of Bywater (developed alongside Realmz by Tim Phillips)
I’ve definitely played City of Bywater.
- Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs)
- Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips)
- Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)
I seem to recall the above names, though I don’t remember the scenario content, if I did play them. Nothing after this rings a bell at all.
- Destroy The Necronomicon (1995, Tim Phillips)
- White Dragon (1996, Jim Foley)
- Grilochs Revenge (1997, Sean Sayrs)
- Twin Sands of Time (1999, Sean Sayrs)
- Trouble in the Sword Lands (1999, Pierre H. Vachon)
- Mithril Vault (1999, Tim Phillips)
- Half Truth (2000, Nicholas T. Tyacke)
- War in the Sword Lands (2000, Pierre H. Vachon)
- Wrath of the Mind Lords (2002, Pierre H. Vachon)
EDIT: There’s also apparently a pretty-inactive Realmz subreddit at /r/Realmz. No GOG Realmz release either, though. Some abandonware sites appear to have it.
I’ve definitely played City of Bywater.
Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs) Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips) Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)Same. I also definitely played City of Bywater, and I know I had both Assault on Giant Mountain and Castle in The Clouds (this one was giants right?)
I’m stretching my memory too far. I remember the City of Bywater world map, but I can’t even remember the world maps for the other scenarios, if I indeed played them.
This abandonware site appears to have a Windows release:
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/realmz-bce
I have no idea what scenarios might be included, and I’m always a little leery about running binaries from random sites outside of a VM — abandonware can be a vector for malware — so I don’t know if I should recommend using it, but it’s there. There are serial numbers to activate what looks like all the listed scenarios in a comment there, so maybe it comes with all of them.
The company appears to have been defunct for the past 20 years, so I suspect that there isn’t going to be any legitimate re-release.
This abandonware site appears to have a Windows release:
Yeah I downloaded it while we were chatting. I’m going to try and get it running after work.
I find it kind of funny how games are becoming more mainstream, but every once in a while I still meet people that are like “games are a waste of time”. But then again I guess people said that about movies and tv and still do sometimes.
Also I’ve been playing guild wars 2 again. Base game is like 10 years old but it’s still fun
I think the people who often say this feel some personal guilt for how much time they feel they’ve wasted instead of doing whatever it is in life they have yet to achieve. It’s a matter of perspective.
