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I'm not sure how you can try to prove a point like this without bringing up modern-day Nintendo and Sega games, or even all of viable console competitors during the aforementioned golden age of gaming.

Baldur's Gate 3 was so good it made this game retroactively cease to exist.

sony does best, make women look good and cling to their games.

the reason games are so incredibly long now is that they have to be, to justify the 300 million dollar development cost. it’s a disaster all around.

Modern games are all about looking great and overtaking your free time. Games from the PS3/360 era and beforehand valued the player's time with engaging content and didn't feel overblown with fetch quests and wide-open expanses of tedium.

I still go back to Bioshock 1 and 2 and Dead Space 1 and 2 at least once a year. They just dont make em like that anymore. Callisto Protocol came close but it still just wasnt the same

Preach! Anyone who's 30+ remembers the golden age when you were excited to dive into a complete polished experience on release with a friend watching/participating, not worrying about the game having critical bugs or being half-baked. Even exclusive games from Sony don't generate the same excitement and are fewer and fewer. It's sad on one hand but on the other I can rest at ease knowing I'll have time to fill in the gaps with the classics on my backlist without it getting bigger in the process. "F" for the big budget blockbusters and make way dor the indies!

10-15 hours . . . I play each of the Bioshock 1 and 2 levels for weeks. I enjoy exploring the alt-50's environment and killing the respawned splicers in different ways as they say insane things. ❤

You said you won't vilify open world games but honestly that's where the problem started. I'm not saying all open world games are bad, you definitely get amazing ones. But it's the need to fill these open worlds with stuff that lead to these cookie-cutter repetitive tasks finding their way into so many open world games. Lets face it, even the Open World games we consider amazing, have the same repetitive tasks, we just have so much fun with them that we don't notice and/or care. In order to control pacing you need linearity, you need to be able to funnel the player from set piece to set piece. The less linear your game the more the player can waste time off the critical path. The truly good games are those that have quite a lot of linearity but sufficient side paths with interesting things to find to still provide you with exploration. However linearity was vilified and it its space we got open worlds filled with bloat to ensure they aren't empty which does indeed prevent them from being empty but makes them vapid and soulless. If we want break-neck pacing back then we have to be willing accept a return to more linear experiences. I'm game, are you?

Some are some aren’t that’s never changed

Spot on, I just don't have the time for massive collectathon waste of times anymore.

This is why the idea of “I want shorter games with worse graphics” proliferated

Attaché not attachment 😂😂😂

Looking to the past with rose tinted glasses ignores the baldur's gates, neverwinter nights, the witcher games, etc. There were a lot of games which were ridiculously long if you did the side quests. I do agree that it would be nice to see more story focused games than games that copied World of Warcraft with there kill 10 of this; or find 9 of that. That's why I stopped playing the witcher.

People who pay money to save time or speed up level progression in a game are insane. Games are supposed to be fun, right? I honestly don't understand the behavior. If a game made me grind for so long I'd just stop playing it and not spend even more money on a product that uses predatory tactics to try and extort money from me.

This hits the nail right on the head, kudos ! I especially like the shoutout to excellent games like SM2 and GOW Ragnarok, that while great did feel just a touch too busy

Missed it on epic. Anyone know if it will ever be free again. :/

I totally agree with you , Iam an old school gamer from the NES , Sega Master System era. Games were simple back then you went in played for a couple of hours beat the game and that was it. You forgot to mention the Metro games tho I feel those were really good games without the grind. One other thing to mention is , every game looks the same these days given a few that try to be different but all these so called AAA games are rinse and repeat , open world non sense. Another thing to blame is YT reviews if a game is like 10 hours long they will complain its only 10 hours long and you are not getting enough content for your money , quantity over quality.

I think I kinda like the original grumpier voicework more, actually. It seems more consistent with attitude and body language Leon conveys at the beginning, not to mention the overall situation he's in.

I blame streamers and content creators, too. This idea that games need to be filled with content all the time. Video games have changed for those mediums.

without it even being a deliberate choice, I've found myself playing only 20-30 year old games. They're so much more fun and engrossing.

I think the open world bloat is a bit like the investor driven movie industry. Every movie has to appeal to everyone, so it contains everything and is therefore a boring mess. Every game needs open world, crafting, RPG leveling, resource gathering, missions and bosses.

Hot take: Bioshock Infinite has some of the best writing in any game and was VERY unfairly overshadowed by the very good but unremarkable TLOU.

I agree! Especially with how you put it at the end, there's nothing wrong with a great, big game that takes a long time, but there's far, far too many AAA games that are trying to do it and they're simply not all worthy. The players who fuss over 'hours per dollar' numbers make me want to vomit. Good video!

Oh wow. This channel still exists?

I could not agree more. I'm 90 hours into Persona 5: Royal, 30 hours into Hollow Knight, and I just started Hi-Fi Rush. These games do not feel like they are wasting my time. They are incredible unforgettable experiences. I cannot, for the life of me, finish God of War: Ragnarok. I was so BORED! That game has so much bloating. It's literally 5 times shorter than Persona 5: Royal, and I still can bring myself to do it.

One complaint about the "when games peaked" is that it clearly fits in the "When I was young and loved them." timing. :D And claiming Celeste isn't bloated? The bloat's optional, but it's there, covered in strawberries and b-sides, and cleaning up a hotel. And a lot of Open World games, the pacing is episodic, it's in the individual missions, some of which can be fantastic.

Isn't Resident Evil 4 more a 15-20 hours game? It's pretty much the longest Resident Evil game? I think the remake took me over 20 hours to do everything.

I would be okay with 10 hour and better paced game if they where $50 instead of $70 (which is more like $90 in my country). I want 20+ hours with so much money. I spent 56 hours in Stellar Blade collecting almost everything (and that was before ng+). I was afraid forking over $90 because for that game because I was afraid it was going to be a 10-15 hour Devil May Cry length game, but glad it had all the side stuff to do. If they make games shorter they need to price them correctly. The new Russian game Indika is only 5-6 hours, but it's also only around $25-30. Which seems fair.

This truly sounds like an old man trying to say "Back in my day..." But then he only lists off around 6-10 good games from back in the day as proof that gaming has gotten worse today. But then completely ignores the literal hundreds of buggy bad games that also came out back then.

stellar blade feels like a really shoved in pick cause its got so much modern crappy repetitive side quests

Honestly yeah

I both agree and disagree. Some games today are far too long, but older games had the problem of things just kinda happening to progress the plot faster.

Perfect🤗 ❤❤❤❤❤

This is fake news you can't proof it so it didn't happen 😡

Finally the word I struggled to articulte what i thought. Pace was the word i was missing

This stacks with an issue I’ve observed over the years. One of the big issues of game developers to me has always been a “no going back” mentality. They see something as an upgrade, and decide it HAS to be this way from now on, when in fact the old ways aren’t broken. An example of this is the jump from 2d to 3d. Once they made the jump, everything went to 3d, even if the game was arguably better designed with a 2d design. Now we’re seeing it with open world and micro transactions. This is why small developers thrive. Instead of competing with “trendsetting” AAA, they’re using old formulas that people never lost enjoyment of.

When I played uncharted several months back I was jealous of people who grew up playing those game's I played all 4 and enjoyed every single one and lucky me Nolan north is coming down to Mississippi and even though I have a ps5 I would get a physical copy of uncharted and get them autographed

This video is essentially explaining why linear games are BETTER than all these endless, open world padding bs titles we get today even if he's saying it's not.

I prefer to replay a 10 hour game 5 times, than play most of the 50 hour games nowadays.

I think Eldin Ring did it right. It can be as direct or indiroect as you want it to be. Margit too difficult well go somewhere else, kill a fiew enemies to level up, etc.

Last of Us 2 wasn’t that poorly paced. It was in need of a restructure story-wise more than anything. All the Abby hate could have been avoided if you just told her story first, rather than villainizing her first and then trying to redeem her.

5:13 I’d have to agree. After this era ended is when I switched over to indie games because I just lost interest in big games that were basically me paying to play a collectible simulator with enemies and weapons

Great pacing is a lost art.

this game was awful

It's true. Always surprised how much I enjoy going back to a game from the 360 era. Back when I'd replay a game a few times rather than hearing complaints about hour counts.

It’s the same with movie there is just a massive bloat, poor planning, and bad writing. It also comes down fo industry cancer like sweet baby inc worsening the above problems to appease an audience that doesn’t really exist.

NES era games had their own problems... like often being unfairly hard to pad out the durability of the game, considering the small storage space of the cartridges. Now, often it's the complete opposite.

Pace

I would say DD is "tough but fair" because every death feels earned, and you can learn from it. After you learn the bosses, you can do them without getting hit. Eventually you realize that you aren't trapped in the room the boss/enemy... they're trapped in there with you. You're here to reap them, and reap you shall. That was my favorite revelation of playing. I would not say the same for Tunic. It's not "tough but fair", it more like "f**k you, go figure it out or go look online". Tunic jerks you around on purpose and hides key information from you to ... well, jerk you around. My favorite example was that I didn't know you could equip cards for like half the game. The quarry was absolute misery for me without the gas mask (which I had, but couldn't equip because the game never tells you about cards or how to equip them). Then I looked up how to equip cards and the quarry was a complete joke. So, it's not "difficulty" here, it's BS. It's a waste of my time. Tunic becomes unfairly hard after the 3 keys when you're a ghost and I switched to "no fail mode" to finish the game because I wasn't having fun anymore. Both look amazing and sound amazing. DD's story is far easier to understand but Tunic's is obtuse and not clear to me (yes, I've looked it up). Both worlds are incredible. I recommend DD to everyone. I do not recommend Tunic unless you are really into obtuse BS masquerading as "difficulty". DD encourages you to try, try again, and when you finally put that boss down, it feels good. Tunic puts up roadblock after roadblock without any real payoff. The Ruin Guard is a joke once you figure out the gimmick - it's still a tedious fight. The Librarian is a fair boss and I like him, just like the Scavenger Boss. But I would not say the same for the Heir (who has too much BS).