Did you manage to adjust to various generations of video games?

Yes.

I’ve been gaming since the 80s and I played pretty much anything I could get my hands on and I think the nostalgia is more the evolution of games until it stagnated to now.
Myself I was limited to what I could get or afford my mum was sooo anti technology if it wasn’t for my dad we would never have had a computer until I moved out as an adult even back then games were expensive and rarely bought any from day one release usually waited 6months to a year for the discount.
I really enjoyed the games from the 90s there was such a variety and great community’s gaming started going down hill for me with time constraints and paywalls beyond purchasing the game.

Probably 2002 on is when I started to first feel major adjusting. Games got gigabytes in size to install without any run-from-disc options, music became more "epic" orchestral, unskippable company logos were more frequent, and there was the disc check paranoia that can become the surprise gatekeeper (which filtered me out of JoWooD and Enlight's kusoge at least). It's also the era when games started to have nonsense Windows exclusive perks and trivial regressions that's been normalized now.

I started tuning out when PC games began requiring online activation or an always online connection for single player. I switched my focus to console gaming from that point onward, but then games as a service became a thing, and loot boxes started infesting everything, which made me tune out once again.

Nowadays, I mostly play older games, with very few modern titles having any sort of appeal to me.

I ventured into both directions from my core period (early 90s). I found great games for C64, MSX and Spectrum. On the other side I also found awesome titles. I just choose much more carefully if a game really is worth the time.

I can enjoy games from the late 80s up to today if they are good. I have a couple of publishers blacklisted and I'm less interested in post-2018 AAA games games from before that. But over all I'm not concerned about not having anything to play. My backlog is so long that if I were to quit my job and dedicate my time to games, I'd still have years before I catch up to 2025.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-01-05, 07:46:

We all have gone through the thing of being nostalgic, clinging to games of a certain period because they probably where we enjo […]
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We all have gone through the thing of being nostalgic, clinging to games of a certain period because they probably where we enjoyed most, while games before a period and after a period never appealed as much as either they weren't as advanced, or they aren't of your type.

For example, I am decently happy with the games of the 1998 - 2016 years, something probably lacked before 1998 that never immersed me to gaming, and inversely games after 2016 changed something I never liked.

I often go back to playing CSGO (CS2 now) but something still feels different, yet more different has been Valorant. Yet PUBG managed to fit my style upto probably the first 1 and a half years, while Fortnite never clicked.

GTA (except Trilogy) and RDR seems a big exception to this rule for the new games, while Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, Battlefield, Call of Duty, FIFA greatly fit into my theory.

What are your opinions?

I feel the same (and i like the same period as well).
I kind of try several times to find why and i have a small list of possible reasons (that maybe applies to me only) :

- I have less time to play with family and other hobbies. (I consider hardware collecting a separate hobby)
- I started working in the 2010's and i work on computers all the day. I tend to do other things at home.
- I switched to Linux in 2007. Even if a lot of games can now run with Proton, not all of them.
- I don't have a powerful system (Have a 10yo desktop and a steam deck)
- I hate games that requires online accounts and that can't run offline. (I lived in a remote rural area between 2012 and 2014 with metered low bandwith high latency intermittent connection)
- Games are now mostly "service games" with periodic content release. When i start something i like to know that there is a finite goal to achieve.
- My friends play different games.
- Too many games are now remaster of old ones. Nothing groundbreaking. Graphics are improving but gameplay and feeling is the same or worse.

My biggest "failure to adjust" is that I simply cannot awake any personal interest in games that modern kids enjoy, such as Minecraft, Roblox or Fortnite. I acknowledge that they are awesome games, more than games - they are platforms for creating rich gaming worlds. And yet I don't care. I don't feel like playing them, or learning the platforms. My son tried a number of times to pull me in, but I maybe spent 1.5 hours total playing Minecraft and 0.5 hours playing "Doors" under his guidance, before I lost interest.

There’s an game called thunderscape I loved playing it took me years to complete I’d love to see a graphics remaster for it but I doubt I’ll ever see that.

Also never played any games that required a subscription I even have 2 Xbox’s and never used Xbox live

maybe spent 1.5 hours total playing Minecraft

well, I have to say that Minecraft is one of the few games that completely captured me. Especially at the beginning, that tremendous loneliness in this strange and hostile world was and still is a unique experience in my mind (Im talking about the survival mode of course). In a way, its the perfect version of Robinson Crusoe, completely deserted but not hopeless. I also feel you can learn something about the human condition in this game. Once you got some secure shelter and basic needs almost automatically we start shaping the environment around us. Either with monumental or (semi) religeous beacons and also start to heavily exploit and modify our surroundings. I eventually brought villagers to my initial "city" and it grew into something resembling some Manchu Pitchu or early Mesopotamian village. After about a year I lost that place due to some faulty savegame. Yet it still vividly exists in my mind as If I had really lived there for a short time of my life. Came out definitively after my time, but may well be one of the greates game of all times...

I started PC gaming, coming from Nintendo, when my family got a 486 DX2. Some of my first PC gaming experiences were Doom and Heretic, and I more or less rode the trends, and dabbled backwards from bargain bin collections, as time went on. I definitely fell of the wagon of "current thing" gaming, and if I had to try to pick any particular time it happened, I think it might have been after Bioshock Infinite. Not necessarily because it was the last good AAA game or anything, but because it's commercial failure and effective closure of the studio, despite rave reviews and outstanding sales, seemed to shock the industry towards moving to games as a service.

That said, I have enjoyed games since then, it's just a lot harder to find them. Sometimes it almost feels impossible. AAA has been overrun with gaas slop, indies are flooded with mechanically barren rogue likes and visual novels. Game reviews are a complete joke. If feels like you are just supposed to already know about games and know if you'll like them or not.

I'm sifting through my library for post Bioshock Infinite titles, and there have been bright spots for me. Control was really good, Doom 2016 (not Eternal). On the indie side, I really enjoyed Grim Dawn, Legend of Grimrock, Factorio, Battletech, Dyson Sphere Program, Per Aspera, and the whole Creeper World series.

And yes, for a span of time I got super into the Minecraft Alpha/Beta. Though I barely recognize the game now, and whatever draw it had for me is lost.

But yeah, if I had to try to pin down when gaming "lost" me, it would be after Bioshock Infinite I think. The changes it caused in the industry rendered it unrecognizable to me, and largely unfun.

Also....

"Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" ...

its actually quite awesome (Im about half way in...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIjFhUuouQs

The most memorable video game adjustment I remember having to make is when there was finally enough processing power available do more than the bare minimum. Like for original HL, TFF, CS- those are barebones levels. Walls with textures and players. If you saw something move on your screen, you twitched and shot at it. Then in later games, they started adding in distractions… I can’t remember which COD I was playing… maybe COD4 but a newspaper or tumbleweed would move across the screen, birds flew around and landed. I had to temper back my “twitch” response because shooting at distractions gave away your position.

For the most part, yes. I'll play anything that is fun regardless of when it was released.

The one thing I have shied away from has been multiplayer games. From mid-90s to early 2000s, I played a ton of multiplayer FPS games. But with the rise of microphones and teamspeak, other players started becoming too obnoxious to listen to.

These days I mostly play single player games.

I "stopped" gaming around 1996 when my first daughter born, and after this i did not get much interest in new games anymore

Late 90s to mid 2010s is most familiar to me. Didn't significantly stray from that timeframe. My brother used to have black-white Game Boy many years ago, the original one, I played some stuff on it when I was a child, but those memories have mostly faded. Older games are probably too old for me.

I relate to remark regarding distractions brought with graphical fidelity, all the moving grass and shadows in Battlefield 3!

UCyborg wrote on 2025-01-05, 21:08:

Late 90s to mid 2010s is most familiar to me. Didn't significantly stray from that timeframe. My brother used to have black-white Game Boy many years ago, the original one, I played some stuff on it when I was a child, but those memories have mostly faded. Older games are probably too old for me.

I relate to remark regarding distractions brought with graphical fidelity, all the moving grass and shadows in Battlefield 3!

Exactly the same time frame as mine. Although I must add games like Roblox and Minecraft never really interested me, probably because I wanted to see progress displayed in game rather than what I am doing, which added as a challenge.

RandomStranger wrote on 2025-01-05, 10:00:

I can enjoy games from the late 80s up to today if they are good. I have a couple of publishers blacklisted and I'm less interested in post-2018 AAA games games from before that. But over all I'm not concerned about not having anything to play. My backlog is so long that if I were to quit my job and dedicate my time to games, I'd still have years before I catch up to 2025.

I noticed a common feature in many "hyped" games post 2018 that would fall over to similar controversy as AC Shadows. That was a big killer for my interests. Also most games i enjoyed transformed to a large RPG styled game; I would rather enjoy a larger campaign with a limited level up worries.

I think the whole paradigm has shifted because of emulation, digital distribution and the indie scene. My backlog includes more games I can play in a lifetime, so even if I’m not the target audience for the industry, I hardly notice that.

That doesn’t mean I don’t play new games anymore. Chances are, right now is the best time it’s ever been for your favorite genre, because every niche gets at least a dozen new games every year. The fact that EA/Activision aren’t making the games you want doesn’t mean nobody else does.

Analog sticks were crap on the Atari 5200 and they are crap now. 😀 The last great console controller was on Saturn. I gave online gaming and DRM platforms a chance, but gave up on them permanently in 2011. There are other sectors of the games industry now which are similarly unappealing. (Despite all that, I still have a huge backlog of things I want to play. The games market is pretty well saturated.)