Which video games from the last 5 years do you expect to age poorly?
Some games from the past play a lot worse in hindsight than others. What recent, decently-liked video games do you expect to suffer this curse?
Any game with always online DRM that will inevitably be shut off at some point rendering the product completely unusable
I miss Quake Wars
That one you can still actually play. Its always had an offline mode with bots. I vaguely recall playing it on PC with an active server that you direct connect to via the ingame console using the IP but its been a while since I did that. I played so much of that game on xbox but parents didn't pay for xbox live so I spend hours playing with bots.
Starfield is already shit but in five years it'll look like bloody green shit
Time wasn't kind to the perception of Skyrim or Fallout 4, it's going to be brutal for Starfield
I think time has been pretty kind to Skyrim, the main problem was the insistence on re-releasing it a dozen times for no reason.
It didn't take time to dislike Fallout 4; I'd say it was just the opposite. People didn't like it almost as soon as it came out. It has taken time for many people to give it credit as a fun game just not a fun fallout game.
In my opinion, though, that's still a pretty damning criticism of a game called Fallout 4. But I digress.
You are way off on Skyrim. For starters, it's already older than the entire range op asked about and it's still a good game. Op asked for a game that's come out in the last 5 years and will be looked at somewhat poorly in another 5 years.
Well skyrim came out....2011. Over 12 years ago. And at this very moment, after 12 years, it's ranked at 54th on steam for current player count.
Fortnite after it collabs with a celebrity that gets canceled for being on the epstein flight logs
I just brought this up to my friend like an hour ago but:
Hey, remember when "They put Peter Griffin in Fortnite" was just a shitpost?
All the games that the person reading this loves and cherish
I think that someday people are going to look back on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and go "what did anyone ever see in this soulless open-world sandbox mush"
I've never played them but I'm thankful for Twink Link and Femboy Link
And because the moment to moment gameplay is enjoyable in terms of game feel.
For me the moment-to-moment gameplay of BotW is significantly marred by the awful durability system, where fighting a monster is always a drain on your resources and basically never a good idea.
Tears of the Kingdom has a much better gameplay loop in that regard, where fighting monsters gives you components to make better weapons to fight more monsters. However, it is also marred by an even wider and less defined concept, and just the whole existence of the depths in general, and also a focus on Just Cause style physics fuck-around gameplay that basically doesn't interact with any of the core systems. In other words, Breath of the Wild doesn't do it for me because the core gameplay loop sucks, and in Tears of the Kingdom the core gameplay loop was improved but all this other shit was tacked on that I don't think serves any purpose.
I played and completely beat (minus korok seeds) BotW and TotK and I just cannot understand the hype around these games which bothers me (me not understanding, not the hype itself) because I wanted to like it. I've spent too long trying to figure out what I didn't like about those games.
Amber.
Those are some of the only decent ones, though. Nearly every other sandbox/survival/open-world game will be relegated to the dustbin of history, though. Can't wait for the survival fad to die.
Yeah, they're quite possibly the only open world games that made traversal and exploration fun. In 5 years the only difference will be BOTW haters seething at it appearing in every top 100 of all time list.
Nah. I don't think that their reputation will increase (the gaming landscape is just way too fractured for that and "gamers" have shown they are fine just eating slop) but both of those games have given me joys and wonder that no other game has since I've stopped being a teen.
They're going to be remembered as masterpieces
I'm looking forward to that. Right now, I'm in the prophecy portion of the Cassandra myth.
Does anyone even remember the hype around Diablo 4? That was barely 7 months ago lol
I didn’t even realize it was being made at all and that there was an entire ad campaign for it until I went to KFC one day (which is rare) and saw it. Was pretty mind blown because I remembered when Diablo 3 came out. Haven’t played it tho lmfao.
Diablo isn't in the Diablo game. That's for the expansion pass.
I played 3 with some buddies on couch co-op and its the only reason it was any fun at all. Never even considered playing 4.
Blizzard had it's peak pre-crap division merger IMO.
They took the worst parts of Diablo 3 and decided to maximize the amount of MTX.
They can't even allow you to purchase more stash/inventory space because they programmed it so that every player loads every other players entire inventory and stash as soon as they load into the same area.
I understand I'm in the minority who just wanted a modern version of Diablo 2's mechanics but Diablo 4 is really bland once you beat the story
It crashed and burned after the first patch.
The Rick And Morty guy’s talking gun game
That was aged when it came out. I played the whole thing through games pass on launch, mostly because I just built a new pc and was trying everything. Boring gunplay, dated humor, overstayed its welcome. Mid-tier everything on top of being just not very fun.
Oh jesus that game just felt like a smug bro comedy routine from the mid 2010s projectile vomiting in my face filled with unimaginable bathos humor (I fucking hate what Marvel and internet nerds have done to bathos humor).
Half life Alyx. Hey! wanna play this new and pretty triple A release from gambling addiction magnates and epic gamers of Valve? Guess what fucko, you need to spend your precious money on a big stupid headset, oh yeah you also need a room to play in so you dont trip on the cables or knock your stuff down, you also need to upgrade your puny computer so it can handle the glorious sauce 2 graphics engine with raytracing and real time vertex nipple twister simulations, breathtaking isnt it
Yeah nah turns out the only breath you'll be taking is right before you puke your guts out since VR is physically impossible to use for a significant amount of people, oh and that shiny headset we recommend for our brand new game? Yeah you need to shell out two months of rent to get one, thats another breath you'll take when the tidy numbers of your bank account turn into a nice fat zero.
So yeah, that game was a huge grift, and we havent heard a peep from Valve on VR ever since, comforting my opinion that VR as a whole is a stupid and wasteful grift that can't work unless we come up with something like the matrix.
imagine they finally release Half-Life 3 for real and it's a fucking VR game
I'm 90% certain this is the goal.
Seated VR stuff like racing or flying games seems to be the real niche for it.
My buddy got a deal on a full sim racing setup on Craigslist and holy shit the difference between tv and vr headset is night and day. It's very immersive.
The one time I tried it for war thunder sim sucked because the resolution was too low to identify friend from foe and made it unplayable.
I don't own a vr headset, just borrowed them a few times because otherwise its totally not worth it.
For sim applications, it is game changing though.
Its still the only game I want to play in VR. Some of the other like, gun building type games look fun, but I'm not getting a VR headset until I get my pc upgraded to where I want it, and even then if I do, I'm sure as shit not getting valve's headset for like 1.5k. I considered a meta quest but then I'd be giving zuckerberg money.
This is true for VR in general. I got caught up in a treat frenzy and splurged on an Oculus Quest 2. Some games were actually fun for a while but after a few months I just returned to playing normal ass video games and now I mostly regret buying the thing.
Maybe I could see it having some staying power in those places with laser tag and stuff like that where you can actually run around with the headset but honestly I can't see most people justifying the upfront cost for a gimmick.
VR is the golf of gaming. Needlessly expensive, takes up too much space and resources, exclusionary, and shilled mainly by rich white dudes.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
VRchat and gorilla tag are by far the most fun things on VR and are pretty accessible when it comes to processing power actually.
I find that in VRchat the mic anxiety goes away when you're talking to a 3d model of Dr. Eggman or a Skibidi toilet. Something about the presence I dunno.
Strictly speaking it's not from the last 5 years but Rockstar was milking it dry until very recently: GTA5. I really hope that someday GTA5 is looked back on as the boring, unfinished piece of crap it is. San Andreas is a better game by several leagues and that shit came out on the PS2.
GTA 5
And it has been out for ten fucking years.
It feels like the gap between 4 and 5 was also really long but goddamn, its been a fucking decade.
As far as I'm concerned, the franchise started with GTA3.
7 years, GTA3, VC, SA, LCS, VCS, GTA4
5 year wait, then GTA5.
And that was 11 years ago.
I’m going through the story mode for the first time since release and it’s better than I remember but still hasn’t aged well overall. The radio sucks, the driving is worse than 4 imho, and Trevor is pretty much unnecessary as a character. The fact that the story was thrown to the wayside in favor of online also sucks.
I don't know because I only play good games
good games will eventually die out one day though. for one reason or another twt
Elden Ring, Horizon Zero Dawn and it's sequel forbidden west, Starfield, and every cookie cutter Ubisoft open world game and their clones. The new Call Of Duty and Battlefield games are also going to age really badly, just rebooting 10+ year old titles (modern warfare and 2042) will age poorly.
Elden Ring is a great game, but it going to be a lot of people's first experience with a fromsoft game, and they are not for everyone. The horizon games are more tech demos than video games, and the less said about cookie cutter open world games, the better.
Granted I'm old and impatient, but I tried playing Horizon and I couldn't get through 30 minutes. There were so many cut scenes that it didn't feel like a game.
I really liked Horizon Zero Dawn but the story hook of the game is way too far in IMO, and the story is probably the only reason I finished it. Like, I was trying to find reasons to like the game and failing and about to give up before you encounter the big metal door, and then I was like "Huh, maybe this is actually an interesting game after all." It just starts off really slow unless you're really into quasi father-daughter dynamics, which I can't say I particularly am. It is fundamentally a Ubisoft towers skinner box game with a Gamer Vision scanning thing and "Hm, guess I should go into that cave!" murmurs, and some of the enemies being metal versions of real-life creatures is really interesting for... a few hours, and then it just kinda isn't, and some of them are too tanky for no particular reason.
Horizon Forbidden West kinda just felt like the same game as the first but in a different setting and with different metal creatures. It similarly takes a little while to get to the actual story hook - finding HADES - and once again I really liked the story, but once again it's a Ubisoft towers skinner box with Gamer Vision. It's actually really embarrassing for the game that the main gameplay hook (at least, as I saw it), being able to ride flying monsters and fly around the map, was introduced virtually at the end of the game and has very few uses in the game. I mean, I guess you have a... glider... that is really just a parachute. And underwater sections, sometimes.
The end of Forbidden West actually pissed me off. Like, I was planning on finishing up the rest of the game's map and doing the rest of the quests and collectibles and stuff, just to get my money's worth I suppose, but I finished the main quest and decided that I couldn't really be assed. I really hate when game endings aren't self-contained. It was just "Oh, we're DEFINITELY getting a sequel to this, so we're leaving you on a cliffhanger and not actually giving you any closure at all." This kinda happened in the first game but like, the series could have ended there and you would have felt 95% satisfied. For this game, it was like 10% satisfied.
I'll... probably play the third game simply because I'm invested in the game's story at this point, but the gameplay loop simply isn't going to get better and I'm not looking forward to once again climbing up those towers and once again entering Gamer Vision and once again firing dozens of arrows into machines while in Slow Motion Aiming Gamer Mode.
Horizon is already in that camp, I'm afraid.
Any game that uses the Ubisoft exploration method of going somewhere to reveal icons on a map like Horizon or Breath of the Wild has already aged badly.
It was super cringe that even Spider-Man had to go around NYC activating towers. Although Spider-Man, Horizon and BotW are already over five years old, so technically outside of this thread.
Just going for NG+ on Elden ring felt terrible. Definitely will receive a lot more criticism once people have the benefit of hindsight.
It's hard to say - a lot of them are aging poorly so fast these days, especially with how they come out all glitchy. It's like Starfield was born and then drank from the wrong holy grail.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. Genuinely good things in its favor but the exploration/traversal is utter trash. The absolute second Open Wolrd stops being a buzzword, this will be a casualty
Damn, you beat me to naming Scarlet and violet, but my reason is because it has too much zoomer slang.
"Flex on" "L" "cringy", and there's pokemon with "smol" and "chonk" in their names. If gen ten has a fucking Skibidi toilet pokemon, I'm going to snap.
holy shit a Fairy/Poison type it's perfect
Agreed, but in a different way. I feel like Pokémon will create better open worlds in the next few years, making S/V feel last gen and dated.
Hopefully they run at more than 20 fps.
Cyberpunk it's the only game I've heard of in the past 5 years
I just realized no one else in the comments mentioned Hogwarts Legacy
Eh, I've beaten the game three times (pirated at launch with no patches, legit copy with lots of patches, and pirated 2.0 w/ Phantom Liberty) and wouldn't really say the game got any better in the intervening period. The graphical improvements are barely noticeable and imo the changes to the skill system didn't really make a big difference.
Idk, it feels pretty timeless to me
Another one: God of War reboot and its sequel. The empty open world, shallow loot mechanics, and worthless equipment system already felt archaic on release. The combat is yawn-inducing compared to the DMC-lite style of the original.
The gameplay is kind of whatever but the narrative is excellent
Oh yeah that's a good example. I'd say that most games that are frequently praised for their writing age poorly, because most video game writing is pretty bad, so once the sheen of having Kratos have an actual personality wears off the game kinda falls apart from there.
The Last of Us, probably. Naughty Dog makes games that wish they were movies.
The assassins creed games I would assume, their gameplay is stale.
Other RPGs with similar vibes. Hogwarts, that kinda stuff.
Call of duties, I hope.
RDR2 I think will be a worse experience in retrospect. The long intro, the restrictive missions... It's going to be the kind of game you remember fondly, but can't replay.
The horror games that do the Amnesia gimmick, like SOMA.
BG3. I have literally nothing to base this on, I like the game, it's great fun, but I just get the vibe that it will go the way of RDR2. All vibes no analysis here.
i don't much care for the GTA series
real answer i think the "rotting" of previously well-regarded games is actually driven by degrading pleasure capacity in the median gamer. if we try to imagine what kinds of experiences the gamer of the future will soon be unable to derive any joy from, i expect that any story driven game in which a woman has a speaking role outside of dating mechanics will be dustbinned as unrealistic and grating.
None because I am apparently immune to the "age poorly" thing because I still like Goldeneye, old JRPGs, Harvest Moon 64, and the Ps1 Resident Evils which are all considered to have aged poorly.
I mean I like Goldeneye too, but the last time I played it was with mouse aiming so that might not count.
Its rough on controller especially on higer difficulties but i largely enjoy it.
No one wants to hear this:
Disco elysium and all the other walking simulators.
I would say the opposite. It's an RPG with the combat removed, the part that always ages the worst. It's also fully voice acted.
You don't understand what a 'walking simulator' is.
it's really more of a shuffling simulator
Planescape Torment is still celebrated and it's a similar narrative heavy game
Torment has a functional ad&d engine.
It’s not a walking sim by any measure.
Also speaking as someone who played torment four times, including when it first came out, it’s possibly the worst infinity engine game unless there’s some weird mess hidden in the mists of time.
wrong, prison
walking simulators already had their "aged poorly" moment, and their "comeback thanks to an example with really good writing" moment, and now they're a niche genre that occasionally get something notable like The Looker.
Regarding Disco Elysium.
Walking simulators were poorly received from the start.
I kinda think the genre as a whole is spinning its tires.
hot take but palworld is everything S&V tried to be and more
Almost every battle royal, live service games and sports games
Any sports games. My brother has been a longtime player for years, but the database of players never gets updated.
Palworld's been out for maybe a week and I already never want to hear about it again
It feels almost AI generated. Like just pastiche of various popular online games with pokemon-like creatures. It's almost weird that it's like an indie passion project
Every crafting/survival game. I hate this trend so much
But......stardew valley 4 life, Dawg.
eh, open world / sandbox games have been popular for over a decade i dont see that going anywhere
People like it, but I dunno, it looks like one of these “anime vs evil” asset flip games that Stephanie Sterling makes fun of.