Same

Mr. Zeus

every AAA game in recent years sucks and most of them are scrapped before they're finished

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I feel like the last few years at least have had like one worthy game per year, which for someone with a lot of work to do and now a family, is plenty. I've yet to finish Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate III, and while I completed Cyberpunk, I never got around to the DLC.

I'm also cautiously optimistic for 2025, it honestly seems to be a great year if not too many games get delayed or turn out to be shit

I do certainly feel like between 2016 and 2021 or so, we barely got any good games. The biggest release of 2020 took a year or 2 to be decent and even then never lived up to its' hype because what was promised was simply too much.

Cethin

I don't get the Balatro addiction stuff. It's a good game, but after you've played it a few times it gets boring. Sure, "number go up" but it's like people have never played a video game before. There's so many Skinner boxes that, at least for me personally, it becomes numbing. I also don't easily get sucked into other manipulative addicting things in other games though, so maybe it's just something wrong with me.

What makes you continue playing Balatro after you've "figured it out?"

rockerface 🇺🇦

I find it fun

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Remarkable how none of that is true.

Elden ring, Baldurs Gate 3, Helldivers 2, Wukong, Marvel Rivals... List goes on, and that's just 2024. You .ight not like some genders, and that's fine, but there are good AAAs.

Also, with the number of AAAs reaching the shelves, what do you mean "most are scrapped"? Sure some games get cancelled from time to time, but saying that's most of them is just fantasy...

Cethin

Personally, I didn't like it. I think a lot of it comes down to two things: Do you care about the writing and the world they've built? If so, how critical of it are you (or alternatively, have you seen the sci-fi tropes done well).

Starfield has some really bad world building. In particular, it doesn't understand why we use sci-fi, and why it's tropes are interesting. it's to create an anologue of our world and to break it down, criticize, and point out it's flaws and ways to fix them.

Starfield is the least critical writing I've ever seen I think. The Earth is destroyed, and instead of using this to discuss us destroying the planet right now, it's just some technobable that has no parallels. Also, when fleeing Earth, they don't try to solve issues. They just set up new corporations doing the exact same stuff in other places. When the game presents a problem where taking down a CEO would be one of the best possible outcomes, it isn't an option. Literally everything you do in the game is maintaining the status-quo of the modern world, despite it being the source of so many issues in the game. You can't change anything and no one wants to either.

Starfield doesn't understand sci-fi. Fallout does a better job as a sci-fi series than Starfield does. If you're still interested, the gameplay is also slow and boring and there's almost no interesting stories or characters. Continue if you want, but I regret spending time on it for the price of $0.

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Minecraft-alikes?

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2 of those games are from 2022 and 2023

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With how much Factorio I've played, I'm down to less than $0.10/hr with the Space Age expansion. I'm nowhere close to done.

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Terraria

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Not every pixel-art game or voxel game is a Minecraft-alike. For example Hytale is fundamentally different.

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I mean, i do know AER. But it's not pixel art.

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Me with a:

Ryzen 5 5800x, RTX 4060 TI, and 32GB RAM.

Plays: Factorio and Minecraft

rockerface 🇺🇦

I've played like 50 hours of Factorio in 2 weeks, then it started feeling like a job. Not in a sense that it was a chore, but in a sense that I literally do this kind of automation and optimization at my job, and I enjoy the process.

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That's like minimal speks for properly modded Minecraft

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You could argue that Shadow of the erd tree puts elden ring in 2024 because it had so much content.

Bakkoda

Oh I totally see how you CAN do it. I've done it. A lot. Just nowadays i don't see why you would need to. Maybe a true 4k multi monitor setup but a 7800xt is cheap and great for 1440p and you can build a 1500 dollar rig (minus the monitor) and be pretty damn ok.

I tend to spend my money on homelab shit so my priorities have changed these pay few decades lol

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?

2016 we got Blood and Wine for Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 (which is a good game, just not a good Fallout game). Oh and we got Doom.

2017 wasn't that great for AAA, except for Nintendo. But we still got great games like Breath of the wild, Prey, Nier Automata, Hellblade, Hollow Knight, Undertale to name a few.

2018 we got Red Dead Redemption 2, Monster Hunter World, God of War.

2019 we got Death Stranding, Divinity Original Sin 2, Sekiro, Resident Evil 2

2020 we got Final Fantasy 7 Remake, The last of us 2, Hades

2021 is kind of a dud because of covid.

So I'm terms of AAA only 2017 and 2021 can really be considered duds. But indies released some absolute bangers between 2016-2021. For example Disco Elysium, among us, outer wilds, Stardew valley, inscryption etc.

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Yep. Hexcells Infinite hasn't overtaxed my RTX 3080 yet. That may have been a slight waste of money.

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Okay fair enough, I kinda lumped in B&W with the main game which came out in 2015, ignored Nintendo altogether because I've never owned a console, forgot about God of War because I've never owned a console, forgot about RDR2 because while it was absolutely immersive at the time and I blew 40+ hours in a single week during my vacation on it... It was somehow completely forgettable after the fact. Never liked Death Stranding too much, TLoU2 didn't affect me because... You get the gist.

Half the good AAA games that came out in that time period, I ignored because PS and Nintendo exclusives were out of reach to me as a PC-only gamer (at least Microsoft put their exclusives on Windows in that era - something Sony is now catching up on). Of the indie games - there's no real marketing, I never have any idea when any particular game came out. I thought Stardew Valley has been going on for like at least a decade, but apparently it's only been out since 2016.

TO be fair, 2018 also had Kingdom Come: Deliverance which was probably my favourite game between Witcher 3 and Baldur's Gate 3, though not the only one I enjoyed obviously.