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Piggybacking off of my last comment, are there others who feel that modern games seem not to be as fun as games from late 90s to late 2000s? This may be nostalgia talking, but people around me game less than they did, and most games they play are MMO ones, as opposed to campaign-focused ones like Half-Life.
I have not played a whole lot of modern games, but their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before. In many cases, modern shooters feel quite slow compared to arena shooters like unreal tournament or Quake. I was looking at games to play and very caught my eye beyond the new doom games.
You need to carefully account for nostalgia tinting your perception.
I remember enjoying many video games immensely as a kid, constrained only by the number of hours my parents would let me play (and by my aging and decrepit pc).
As a teen, and then a young adult, I still enjoyed video games, to the detriment of my education.
These days, I go weeks without booting up my gaming laptop. I'm too tired to bother half the time, but there are also the constraints of not enjoying gaming with such a small screen and crammed keyboard, as well as the fact that the wifi coverage sucks ass.
Steam will helpfully tell me I have >3500 hours in Arma 3, probably over a thousand in Rimworld, several hundred in Total War Warhammer 3. I think I was past 1500 hours in Tarkov before I burned out on the grind and relentless wipes of progression without enough content to justify them.
And now that I'm moving to an apartment I expect to live in for a year or more, I'm rubbing my hands with glee at the idea of buying a gaming pc, all the bells and whistles.
Having a First World salary (even if paltry by US standards) means I can indulge my hobby. Now a high end GPU is only half a month's salary, as opposed to an upper mid range one being double back home.
Most of the games of my childhood were either pirated, or not on Steam, so I'm spared an exact tally on how long and often I played them. I loved Rome Total War on my anemic netbook. I love Total War Warhammer 3 on my (now relinquished) gaming pc and my laptop. I could play RTW, but I don't, because the new games are better by my taste, barring a few features. I'd have been all over Rimworld even as a kid.
So if you think that games aren't as fun as they used to be, it's more likely you're playing bad games, or that you simply don't have the time or energy to devote to them. I know the latter holds true for me, most of the time. Some genres have definitely died off or become relegated to indie titles, but that doesn't mean there aren't good games!
I don't think that it's nostalgia, purely because @mrvanillasky is like 15 years younger than me but we agree on the era when games were better than they are now. If it was purely nostalgia, you would expect that we would have different "those were the days" periods based on when we were growing up. Nostalgia might play a role (I don't think it does, but can't prove it), but I think there's evidence to say that there really was something special which isn't there any more.
I'm pretty sure he's a post turn of the millennium kid, so to an extent, when he talks about "90s" games, he's being exposed to cherry picked games from that era. Namely the absolute classics, the ones that stood the test of time, and thus were what were recommended to him when he was older.
At any rate, my most important contention is that it doesn't matter much whether the "average game" has gotten better or worse with time. There are too many games that are good by most metrics coming out for any human with a full-time job to exhaust faster than they release.
Well. Except if you have very niche taste. In which case it is possible you're stuck waiting for someone to release something that appeals to you.
No, I solely mean games like half life, deus ex, the quake and unreal games at the turn of the century and they were much more fun because they were faster. I enjoyed a game like Arkham Asylum the most since it came out in 2009 but quake and unreal tournament were much more fun.
I cannot name a single game in this era as impactful as the ones I have mentioned. I second @SubstantialFrivolity here. I am 24 and mostly pirated games too. My taste is quite mainstream but Far Cry 3, Arkham Asylum, Assassins Creed 2 were way better games than Far Cry god knows what number they are on now, Whatever Beat em up DC game they made and the black samurai assasins creed.
Arkham Asylum was a step forward like how New Vegas was a step forward. Games today actively regressed. Ioper who I would have tagged had I not been blocked has made some good points.
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