7 ms·
Outer Wilds, Baba is You, Blue Prince, Hades 1&2, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Clair Obscur, What Remains of Edith Finch, 10
by Novosell 8mo ago
Outer Wilds, Baba is You, Blue Prince, Hades 1&2, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Clair Obscur, What Remains of Edith Finch, 1000xResist, Return of the Obra Dinn, Roboquest, Rocket League, Dark Souls, etc. I could go on, and on, and...
Not rehashes. Original, phenomenal games covering damm near every genre and if there is a genre you're missing, I can find a modern game to match.
Do you actually engage with modern games?
- reactordev 8mo agoOk, I’ll give you Rocket League. That’s an entirely new spin on a genre I didn’t see coming. The rest are just RPGs or platformers you like. Good games, but not innovative. Yes, some new franchises have been born and some successful indie titles have been launched but most of the market share in the games industry is held by the top 5. Yes, I have over 1,000 games in my Steam library going back to 1999. I engage in most games that make the top 500 and have so since I was a teenager making games myself.
- mietek 8mo agoSo, is Outer Wilds a RPG or a platformer?
- reactordev 8mo agoOpen world game but also a mystery game as we’re a couple others mentioned above. Those go back to Carmen San Diego and Sherlock homes series. Open World, we’ve seen plenty of those.
- Rohansi 8mo agoComparing Outer Wilds to Sherlock Holmes is way too big of a stretch for me. There are mysteries in both, yes, but it's the mystery of the (game's) universe vs. crimes. I'm curious if you think this way about movies/TV too. It's very strange to me to just dilute things down to their genre(s) and then expect innovation to come out as new genres.
- gambiting 8mo agoWell, nothing new has been invented since checkers, if you really think about it hard enough and reduce everything to a few buckets of games that everything can fit neatly into, then everything is just a mystery game or just open world or just a platformer. Again, I have a feeling like you're just looking at it mechanically and not how these elements work together to produce a game that is larger than just the sum of its parts. Outer Wilds has puzzles and open world and mystery element to it - and all of those have been done before. But has anyone else combined them this way to produce a game with this narrative? No, I don't believe so(happy to be proven wrong, as always). Like the other commenter said - I hope I don't become jaded like this about video games, it still brings me joy to see how every new game twists the known formula a little bit more and in new and exciting ways, I believe there are several nieches where we haven't seen the game of that genre yet and I can't wait to see it emerge and how and who is going to do it.
- reactordev 8mo agoHave other games put together open world and mystery? Yes. I have a feeling you haven’t played those games otherwise you’d see the similarities. Yes, I am ABSOLUTELY looking at the mechanics of the game. I’m also looking for innovation. Take something someone tried (maybe it was a big part of their design) and make a full blown out version of it. Pushing the genre in either a new direction or opening one up. Outer wilds did neither. Not to say it wasn’t a good game. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m saying outside of those that played it, it will be forgotten. It changed nothing. It came, it endeared, it left.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- soulofmischief 8mo agoHave you played Outer Wilds though? I'd finished a playthrough of RDR2 in 2022 and thought I was done with gaming forever, that nothing would ever be able to touch that level of experience again. I stopped playing for months, completely having lost interest. Then I discovered Outer Wilds, went in completely blind, played in VR, and had one of the most engaging experiences of my life. It's a true gamer's game.
- TimorousBestie 8mo agoI hope I never become this jaded and cynical about video games.
- reactordev 8mo agoKeep playing them for 20 years :D
- Novosell 8mo agoI've been playing games since I could hold a controller basically, so 26-ish years, and I think modern gaming is phenomenal. I feel sad for you, but it is what it is. Just your loss in the end.
- reactordev 8mo agoModern gaming is a micro transaction DLC hellscape. Are you serious? Are they fun? Yes, they are designed to be addictive. So you spend money on pixels.
- charcircuit 8mo agoWhat’s wrong with paying for entertainment?
- reactordev 8mo agoNothing, that’s why I bought the game. Don’t shake me down for more money because you couldn’t forecast.
- charcircuit 8mo agoMicrotransactions are part of the forecast of revenue the game will make.
- 8mo ago
- gambiting 8mo ago>>Good games, but not innovative Calling outer wilds or Clair Obscur "not innovative" just tells me you haven't played these games from start to finish, and I don't mean any offence saying this. Unless you mean just mechanically?
- reactordev 8mo agoI have played both. I stand by my statement.
- YurgenJurgensen 8mo agoWhat’s innovative about Clair Obscur? Its battle mechanics are clearly heavily inspired by Paper Mario, Shadow Hearts, and Legend of Dragoon, it inherits a bunch of mid-level design stuff from Dark Souls, and its story structure is extremely standard, also borrows a lot of worldbuilding from Dark Souls with a hint of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Kingdom Hearts. It’s competent, somewhat refreshing and not actively consumer-hostile, and it’s a sign of how bad things have gotten that that’s all it takes to be heaped with praise.
- gambiting 8mo agoOh don't get me wrong - mechanically I actually think it's boring as hell, which is why I asked OP if he only talks about mechanics. But I will say that in terms of story and world building it's exceptional - so many games nowadays are just some kind of variation on a standard fantasy/scifi trope, CO has a completely "fresh" repertoir of enemies and locations that feel new, and I didn't have any clue where the story was going until act 3 - I think its exploration of grief and the ability to make you bond with characters while not unique, it's definitely up there with the best video games ever made(imho). >>also borrows a lot of worldbuilding from Dark Souls I see that comparison a lot and I don't see it, and I've played every From Soft game from start to finish. Maybe the painted world from DS3 is sorta-kinda similar, but not really?
- anyfoo 8mo agoSo Dark Souls is just another RPG, and not innovative?
- throwaway173738 8mo agoIt was the first rpg I played where there was so much attention paid to continuity you could see all the other areas in the skybox.
- anthk 8mo agoInnovative? Check Blade/Severance.
- YurgenJurgensen 8mo agoThat’s not a great example to pick, given that Demons Souls exists.
- reactordev 8mo agoAnd that was a successor to Kings Field… These kids don’t know.
- rpdillon 8mo agoWhat did you think after you got into room 46 of Blue Prince?
- phatfish 8mo agoOf course there are good modern games, but I agree there was something special about the first 3D generation of hardware (hardware cheap enough to be in home consoles at least) and the games it enabled. Only VR has come close recently, but that hasn't hit in the same way because it is still too expensive and cumbersome.
- reactordev 8mo agoThis. Half-life was amazing, and not because it was Quake 2. It was a story. Less about blowing stuff up with guns and more about uncovering the secrets of Black Mesa. Then came along mods… The first one was Team Fortress. Remember that? Still strong today as a ftp title TF2. The second one was a spec-ops style delta force mod (I can’t remember the name) but it gave the 3rd modder the idea that a modern setting could work. Counter-Strike was released as an early alpha on my forum and the rest was history. I mention this because this was a tuning point from fixed function pipelines to programmable pipelines (shaders). There was this awe of what we can do, what could be possible, and today’s modern games are a fulfillment of that. I feel this same sense of awe when it comes to some of these foundational models. It’s just incredible what they are capable of. In reality, while AAA titles have been pumping out annual titles to keep shares high and pigs fat, there have been some wonderful indie titles, smaller budget games, that have made a significant impact on the games industry as a whole.
- anyfoo 8mo agoI loved Half Life 2, and it was highly influential, but that influence lives on. Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Dark Souls, and Return of Obra Dinn were among the mentioned titles. All of these games tell a story, each of this game does it in its own, magnificent way. You act a bit like those kind of games are hard to find, but some of them are highly popularized best sellers that keep getting remasters (I don't mean remakes), and still find a huge audience in entirely new YouTube Let's-Plays alone.
- lgl 8mo ago> Half-life was amazing, and not because it was Quake 2. Half-Life used the GoldSrc engine [0], based mostly on Quake 1 and also some parts of QuakeWorld and Quake 2 [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldSrc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldSrc
- chongli 8mo agoThose may be some amazing games you listed but none of them scratch the itch that some folks have for twitchy NES games. For some reason, modern indie developers never try to emulate the tight, twitchy, highly responsive controls of NES games. Instead, they go for floaty, slow acceleration-based, more forgiving controls. The puzzle games in your list have no equal though. The NES is pretty light on puzzle / adventure games, though it did receive really nice ports of the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate) as well as Maniac Mansion, and it has a couple of unique ones with Nightshade and Solstice that blend in a bit of action while remaining primarily adventure games.
- anyfoo 8mo agoDark Souls and Hollow Knight were among the listed titles, come on.
- chongli 8mo agoThose may be difficult games but they don't have the twitchiness of a game like Super Mario Bros. They're on the order of 1/4s to 1/2s maneuvering (with great anticipation) whereas SMB is loaded with 1 frame tricks (1/60s). It's an order of magnitude difference.
- anyfoo 8mo agoHuh? 1 frame tricks are the top shelf of speedrunning moves, definitely breaking how the games are designed to be played by orders of magnitudes. Speedrunners use 1 frame tricks in more modern games as well. It is considered extremely hard even amongst the already insane speedrunning community, no matter whether the game is SMB, Odyssey, or anything recent.
- chongli 8mo agoOf course it's extremely hard but you can't do it at all on modern games with unresponsive displays. The point is that when you press the button in SMB, the action happens on the screen an order of magnitude faster than a modern game. Modern games have slow, floaty, laggy controls. It's not just games though. Computers have done the same thing [1]. Modern PCs are an order of magnitude slower, latency-wise, than an Apple II. [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- YurgenJurgensen 8mo ago2019, 2019, 2025, 2019, 2019, 2017, 2017, 2021, 2025, 2017, 2024, 2018, 2020, 2015, 2011. I only see three games here less than five years old. The oldest is from three console generations ago. Do /you/ actually engage with modern games? Remember the time you’re comparing to had 5-year console generations. This is like someone on the release date of the PlayStation 3 saying that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a “modern game”.
- framapotari 8mo agoElden Ring, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Dredge, Blue Prince, Balatro, Astro Bot, Hades II, Silksong, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Pacific Drive, Death Stranding 2, Split Fiction
- YurgenJurgensen 8mo agoIt’s too late for that. You crafted that list after seeing the criterion, so it does nothing to disprove the point that the games people think of when they think about “good modern games” aren’t actually modern.
- framapotari 8mo agoHaha what? Do you believe that it's somehow been proven that "people" think about good modern games in some specific way? Based on a comment from one person?
- YurgenJurgensen 8mo agoThis is not the first time this thread has been made, nor will it be the last, and there’s someone (or at least two people in this case) who does it every single time.
- framapotari 8mo agoWell in that case this is clearly the official opinion of The People.