Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
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“Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have,” Quantic Foundry said. “Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things.”
in other words, we’re burnt out and we just want some escapism …
It's not just that. Many games these days are so detailed, it's like having a second job that you don't get paid to do, but instead pay them to be "allowed" to do. No thank you.
Many games these days are so incomplete
throw in having to pay to beta test on top of all the other headaches …
Are gamers getting older? It would be interesting to see how this breaks down by age.
I'm getting older. I have 3 kids and no time. 10 years ago I had no kids and 3 time. Now when I play, I just put it on the easiest setting and play it like an interactive movie.
I hear this. My life is survival mode. Games are for turning off that part of the brain for a little while.
Yeah, I’ve played plenty of Civilization over the years, but I’m married now. I have a kid. I keep a note with what I’m doing because it might be a couple months before I play again. I could play more, but I want to spend time with my wife and my kid. Usually when I take time to play I want to play again the next night, but that’s often not feasible, and then it turns into weeks again.
I started playing Morrowind maybe 6 months back, got hours into the game and was having a good time. Then I didn't get a chance to play for a month, now I haven't gone back because I have no idea what I was doing since half the stuff doesn't seem to be written in the journal, and when it is, it assumes I remember who the person is or where I was supposed to be going. So I just haven't picked it up again.
To be fair, Morrowind is just that kind of game. It's been many years since I've played it, but I remember it being one of the last truly open world experiences I got from playing games. The plot drops you off in the first city and kind of just let's you go at it. I remember hours of just wandering until I ended up at the city of vivec, which is the mess of floating pyramid temple lookin jobbies out on a lake somewhere. I didn't know shit about anything but it was awesome and that was enough for me. Elden Ring almost brings this feeling back sometimes.
It was great while I remembered what was happening! But sometimes your only reference to a quest is something that says "Go out the door, take the third left, and look for an orange door" and you just have no idea even what city you were in when you got that note 😆
During the couple of weeks I was playing it, I didn't actually feel lost at all. But now trying to return to it just feels more like a chore than a good time. I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 now instead, I'm back in the era of quest markers!
My favourite journalistic practice is when outlets lump up everyone playing video games into a single group called "gamers."
Clearly this study is the result of including mobile gamers in with other groups.
Stares at most PDX games having increasing player counts
How much of this is the lack of people wanting to play strategy games vs the lack of good strategy games
Exactly! I absolutely love EU4 and am excited about the likely next installment. Unfortunately, I'm less excited about their other recent launches, because the depth of strategy just isn't quite there.
But then I look around and can't really find a comparable game. There's Total War, but y strategy there is pretty weak and more about battlefield tactics than actual grand strategy. Civ exists, but it's in a pretty different category (and not really my thing; I do like Civ IV though). I own a lot of strategy games, but most are kind of shallow. I love complex games with a lot of moving parts, which yields a lot of variation game to game, and that just isn't all that common outside of PDX games.
I would bet it's more like "gaming has expanded to a larger market". Gamers who were willing to fiddle with computers and online gaming, hell, up till the late 2000s are probably also the same type of people who are willing to be patient and fiddle with a complex game and learn where the fun is. Now playing a game is easy as 1,2,3 no matter where you get it, I'm not talking down on anyone, and I don't care if that's where the AAA trend is going, just that when the access gets easier the group expands to more and more casual audiences.
Also, console games have always been way more "casual" as those markets expand gamers kind of defacto have a larger preference for casual games.
I was deep into Strategy and lore – preferring games that ate hundreds of hours. Unfortunately these days my available gaming hours are reduced to a mere handful. It’s difficult to remember everything when I can only play sparingly.
Thus, I’ve resorted to smaller indie games that can be enjoyed in a smaller amount of time, with less of a learning curve. I’m a casual gamer now. What can you do?
I don't see the methodology in here, so any influence I could guess is pure speculation. The mentioned lack of strategy games is a possible culprit. This would also prevent people from discovering an interest, as new eyes wouldn't be on the genre. I'm sure a lot of people discovered they like some RPGs via Baldur's Gate 3. One I might suggest exploring is that as gaming expanded in audience to different types of people, the new members would proportionately be less interested in deep strategy skewing the average interest as a whole. As a guess, a lot of people who have gotten into gaming via their phone are more interested in things that can be done while focusing on something else or something with a shorter run time than the typical strategy game.
I think those craving strategy were some of the earliest adopters of gaming, especially once those games became increasing popular. It's no surprise then that their numbers would be diluted over time, especially once you start including mobile gamers (who I think are different enough to not really warrant being compared to other gamers). As someone who played some strategy games in the 90s, it was a wild time:
We are still getting a lot of good strategy games even in recent years, like The Last Spell, They Are Billions, Beyond All Reason, half the stuff SplattercatGaming covers...
I imagine that there is a lot of cross-over between strategy, city-builder, logistics and sim players especially if you single out Germany lol. All those genres are "shrinking" if you are only looking at them as a percentage of total gamers, but actually they slowly grow all the time.
I love 4x games, but playing a game of Stellaris for a week or more just to realize that I've inescapably fucked up and lost the game is disheartening. I just don't have the bandwidth to spend 40 hours per match. Yeah, you can make 4x games run a lot shorter, but it usually feels like you're doing something crazy to the game.
I bet it has to do with the average age of the gaming community getting older. I used to play Civ 5, EU4, CK2 all the time in college, when I have tons of free time and didnt care if I was up until 3 in the morning. Now that I have a life and a job, it takes like a week of 1-2 hour sessions to finish a game of civ 5, and the last time I played EU4, I played for several weeks and didnt even finish.
Is your username Taako_Tuesday as in The The Adventure Zone character?
I have like 3k hours in EU4 (I know, still a normie pleb) and still have not finished a single game.
My problem with strategy games is that they're too hard to get into. I tried to play civ 5, but they are a thousand mechanics and the tutorials are very bad.
The difficulty setting in strategy games shouldn't be "how smart is the AI?", it should be "how many mechanics do you want to manage at the same time?". That way you can start by playing on easy mode, then the next game on normal, then hard. Instead of that there are 10 difficulty levels and half of them are impossible, the other half you can beat by following the exact same strategy every time.
The difficulty setting in Civilization games has never been “how smart is the AI.” The AI always plays with the same level of “intelligence” (which is almost none). What the difficulty setting controls is how much the AI cheats (which is a ton at the highest levels) and how aggressive it is.
My problem with Civ 5 (as a player of the series since the beginning) is that they’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that doesn’t actually make it more interesting or challenging to play. At the same time, instead of improving the AI to make it more interesting and challenging to play against, they decided to hobble all of the strong strategies from the early games in a way that just makes the game more annoying to play.
The fun part of the Civ series has always been about building the largest, most technologically advanced empire and steamrolling all the AI’s cities. Since Civ 5 this has been flat out impossible due to the changes they made to the game which cause exponential corruption / waste for large empires and the inability to stack units which means large armies are extremely tedious to manage.
For me it's:
Could never get into strategy games except for mobile ones that I would play on long road trips or something.
I have always been the one who goes against the trends, and it looks like I still am. Strategy is one of the very few genres that I like, and if the game has no strategic element to it, I usually don't enjoy it.
But... I don't like overwhelming UIs and elements. I like simplicity, few elements and not many options, but a deep strategy.
UI feels like such an art nowadays. With computers being powerful enough to handle more complex simulations, we can potentially have insane amounts of data in a game. And game devs need to figure out how to present that information to the player without overwhelming them.
For example I think Victoria 3 does a pretty poor job of it, while a game like CK2 does an excellent job of it. It can be hard to get right.
Yep makes sense. I mean it's clear people hate deep systems when something like Baldur's Gate 3 becomes the undisputed Game of the Year /s
I don't disagree with your main point, but D&D 5e is a rather shallow rules system. It's needlessly complicated (15 strength gives you what bonus? How does readying an action work? Can you smite when unarmed?), but it's not really deep.
Used to play strategy games quite a lot 20 or so years ago. AoE, Homeworld, Red Alert. But I never got very deep into them.
The main reason I don't like strategy games anymore is that most of them simply boil down to micromanagement and actions-per-minute. That is not how my brain works. I hate micromanaging and multitasking. I love planning tactics, doing recon and analyzing the situation (as long as I don't have to do statistical analysis with spreadsheets for that), setting goals and executing plans.
Best strategy game I've ever played? X3: Terran Conflict. Once you set your plans in motion everything works pretty much automatically—you don't have to order your traders or military forces around constantly or set up product batches in your factories manually. You set up parameters by which your assets work, and aside from occasional tweaking and optimization you leave them to their own devices. Instead you concentrate on the actual grand strategy or a single battle at hand or putting out some random brushfire that needs your attention without the worry about your "villagers" standing around idle because they can't figure out there's a fresh patch of fish 100 meters to the left.
Plus you're there, in situ, as an actual participant in the world, not an abstract godhand hovering over the map. First-person strategy. Commanding two task groups steamrolling through a sector from the bridge of your cruiser, sipping coffee as turrets put on a massive fireworks around you is epic.
Games with “deep strategy” are largely not very good.
I still play a bunch of Stellaris and I go back to Age of Wonders 4 pretty frequently. Against the Storm is also addictive as hell. These 3 games have a sense of adventure that keeps them interesting.
I like Solium Infernum - which is pretty new - quite a bit, but it doesn’t have the staying power that those do. On top of that you have misfires like Humankind, Old World, Vicky 3, and the like. “Deep” is one thing, but fiddly and unnecessarily complicated is another… as is being under-developed in important areas like the endgame.
I think gamers are becoming less interested in a genre that has become saturated with dime-a-dozen mediocre cruft.
Strategizing feels dangerously close to work for me.
There’s plenty of games that require deep and extensive thought. I just wanna jump on turtles and fix this spaceship before I get tossed out of the airlock.
Someone who isn't into strategy games will play shallow strategy games like fire emblem because its anime and allows you to date anime girls with big boobs.
I've been saying this for like a decade now. The "interactive movie" gaming genre is boring as fuck and I hate that so many AAA games do this.
Even games with a decent amount of depth like RDR2 end up having like 10 minutes of cut scenes per hour.
I think the problem is that games with deep strategy are timeless, no real need for a new release.
That's too bad. Lotta good thinking games.
I really like 4X games but nothing new in that genre has really drawn me in. Stellaris was the last one that I really played a ton of and still do. I actually wanna start a new game with all the new expansions but playing without Gigastructures is heresy, hope it gets updated soon.
Strategy games are still my mainstay, but I'm always returning a few old familiar games. I've not bought any new releases in a long time. If too many other players are like me, then strategy game development is going to be in dire straits indeed.
Well there aren't that many strategy games, let alone rts, that are that engaging for single players in the long run. I'm equally not interested in playing generic skirmishes over and over again as I enjoy playing strategy games competitively online.
On the other hand playing any game competitively online is basically only possible if you have lots of time since you just can't compete significantly otherwise.
Makes sense, I love strategy games, but I end up playing more variety of “casual” games than these “in-depth” games. Simply because I stick with one in-depth game for a while, whereas I roll credits for casual games multiple times a month.