Quote Originally Posted by edczxcvbnm View Post
I think gaming this generation became more focused on trying to tell a classically written story and by that I mean the type you would read or watch in other forms of entertainment. With this sort of mind set, games have become way more linear than ever. How can you get to the next story point if you can go off and do whatever? This sort of mentality has also lead to games becoming way easier because people like to see their stories complete. Thus all of the hand holding and other features that make games too easy.

When making the top 10 list of games for this generation, I kind of struggled a bit to come up with games I thought should be nominated. I felt so many of them wanted to be an incredible narrative experience but most utterly failed in that sense, even the big games. I felt like games have/are becoming more and more disposable entertainment.

I think more time needs to be spent on crafting the experience a person will have with a game. Whether that is a fun game in the purest sense like FTL or something that attempts a narrative experience like Red Dead Redemption. I think these games are memorable for that reason. I don't think Call of Duty is all that memorable because they focus on what would be cool/shocking instead of asking what sort of experience are they looking to craft (multiplayer).

That is my take on why you are becoming a bit more disinterested. As a person over 30 that doesn't a remember a time without videogames, I have seen genres rise and fall in popularity. You just need to figure out more what it is that you want and go get that and ignore the noise. Maybe you find that a certain genre is awesome in the indie scene (horror) or that there is a creative force behind games you really like (Suda 51). I think part of the reason older games might be considered better in some sense is that there were fewer creative forces crafting the vision of the game back in the day. Today it seems to have become too committee like :/
I agree with much of what you said.

I feel like we will look back on this generation as a transitory period between what games were and what games will become in the next gen. This generation did a lot of new things with storytelling in games, some working better than others (Heavy Rain, Beyond, the BioShock games, the Uncharted games, The Last of Us, etc.). It seems like video games were trying to strike the balance between what you would expect from a film in terms of storytelling, and being a video game. Naughty Dog seems to understand it pretty well now, as does Irrational Games, and I think moving forward we're going to be seeing a lot more games the blur the line between what is and isn't a video game (especially from the indie sector, where they're more free to experiment with games like Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, etc.). I think the definition of "video game" is going to be drastically different by the end of this upcoming generation.

The positive side of this, for people who enjoy classic style video games, is that the indie sector also houses a lot of developers very inspired by classic video games, and who wear their influences on their sleeves. I find a lot of indie games to be very derivative and uninspired, but I'm sure many gems following classic styles of crafting games will surface. Hopefully we can reach a happy medium of these new "interactive experience" style games and classic style video games, and everyone will be happy.

What I don't see happening is classic style games with large production budgets, which is really saddening. But at least we've got FromSoft. :P