I watch this guy from time to time, and he's one of the most spot on game reviewers out there. Must watch if you're into games at all.

https://youtu.be/ds-DWsO04TI

He has some other great, and funny reviews. Plus, he praised Trump in another video.

Lot of good points. It is 100% the consumer's fault though. Nobody asks about gameplay anymore, it's always "how are the graphics" first.

Look at your high skill shooters from recently... rainbow six, titanfall 2 has a high skill ceiling... and that's about it. Where do people spend their money? Call of Duty and battlefield. Battlefield isn't necessarily bad, but they get away with less game each year. If you paid for Call of Duty you're part of the problem and you have no right to complain about any game in general. Bloodborne, dark souls, etc are all great games that always garner tons of praise but they're hardly the commercial successes that assassin's creed and the yearly shooters are.

The good games are out there, but honestly until the masses stop supporting the lazy publishers nothing will change.

I blame nostalgia bias.   The gaming world is better than ever before.  There are very good games being made and there are games that are like older generations that come in the form of indy games.  

Just a small number of quick examples:

Good gameplay?

MGSV
Rainbow Six Siege

Good story?

The Witcher 3
Mass Effect
Telltale Games

I agree that part of it is nostalgia bias, but the other part is the more modern trend of game designers seeing themselves less as literal "game" designers and more as mixed media storytellers.

Games today are pushing the "games as movies" angle a lot, and what they really mean by that is that they themselves no longer see video games as simple "games of skill" but as immersive, emotion driven entertainment. In today's modern games a LOT of effort is put into making the games "feel" right and retaining the player focus in the world, and at times this comes at the sacrifice of old school "difficulty"... because they want the player to remain immersed "in the game world" and not be taken out of it by repeated spawn die spawn chains.

I also remember reading an article a long time ago in a gaming magazine that was discussing the postmortem analysis of an FPS game some time around the original Half Life. In the article they discussed the enemy AI and how the AI was originally programmed to be much more aggressive, and to use different "smart" tactics and work at the squad level to flank and press the player. But in play testing they kept getting reports of "cheating AI" and "unfair enemies", so they had to reign in the AI to the point that it was more or less retarded. I forget what game this story was on, but the magazine article was printed somewhere around 1998 or 1999.

Also all the reference games the critic in the OP video mentions are hardcore PC games. He doesn't really mention any of the "hardcore" console games like Goldeneye, which could be downright impossible on the hardest difficulty settings... particularly when you are fumbling with that N64 controller.

I also think the "laziness" in AI development came about because of the market shift to multiplayer gaming. Everybody I know who wants a "challenge" wants to play against other flesh and blood humans, not AIs. And the people like me who want to enjoy a good story and the "experience" of the game don't really care if the AIs are sentient... in fact, I DON'T want the AI's to be insanely difficult. I like them as the kneecapped retards they are, because it allows older, slower gamers like me to enjoy the game and still feel like I'm kicking ass and being challenged. If single player games were as frustrating and keyboard smashing as multiplayer is, I'd stop playing games right now... because multiplayer is SHIT for us slow old fogeys who don't have that cheeto fueled mountain dew twitch you younguns have.

Grand strategy for life.

LoL, no.

Guy in your video outed himself with one of his first comments.  "Are games better now or were they better in my era?"  Nostalgia bias.  His points are silly.  I loved Half Life and Half Life 2, but the AI was superior to new games?  No, it wasn't.  In recent games like the Division and Watch Dogs 2 the enemies will flank and attempt to out maneuver you.  Half Life 2's AI wasn't great and that game was easy.  I played through the game and the episodes.  Half Life 2 should be an example of one of the worst franchises ever because Valve never finished it.  

All new games are easy?  Yeah, a lot of them are because the basic experience is for the story really.  But if you want to get all of the achievements, it's not that easy.  But there are high quality games that are difficult, there's Dark Souls and others.  

We all tend to think that the games, or the movies, or the music, or the whatever, were the best when we were growing up, when it was our "era."  It just isn't reality.

I enjoyed playing Morrowind far more than any other Elder Scrolls game.  Do I actually think that it is "better" than Skyrim?  Hell no.  Morrowind was just one of the games of "my era."

I agree with this. There are tons of people that claim NES is the best gaming there ever was; because that's what they grew up with. I grew up with and love Half-Life, Diablo and Metal Gear Solid; but I don't think they're better than currently made games.

People also forget all of the trash games that also came out back then. There were a TON of them

The only game I enjoy playing still from the nes to ps2 is Final Fantasy Tactics. The vast majority of games simply do not hold up. At all. Simple shit like moving often feels like ass in old games.

Look, I played Team Fortress Classic competitively and won 5v5 UGC platinum. I'm extremely familiar with fps. Nothing has felt as good in movement as modern Tribes and Titanfall 2.

There are elements of old games that are great and all but some things just suck and need to be reborn or go away. 

I think you're missing his point. It's not that the games of yesteryear are better in every aspect, they're not. He clearly said some of the games don't hold up to today. Well, yeah, the graphical fidelity has been raised, along with production value, so of course not. Just like you said, we do have some nostalgia bias, I do as well. But, I can honestly say the new Killer Instinct on Xbox one plays much better than KI on SNES. But, I can also admit I had more fun playing the original. I can distinguish the two and apply my criticism equally and fair.

But, his main critique is that devs have done a pretty good job of numbing down, nerfing gameplay, and shoveling BS into what he calls AAA games, meaning, your most successful, critically acclaimed games. Of course there was tons of junk during NES, SNES, PS1, and so forth. That's not the point.

To his point in this review of the new RE7, he clearly points out the kind of garbage that the game companies put out today:l. Just watch this RE7 review:

https://youtu.be/L813q39qtEs

Now, google Resident Evil 7 reviews, and tell me what comes up.... yeah, 5/5, 90%, A+, GREAT, etc...

How can you give a game such high praise, and make people believe these are actually GREAT games, with all the flaws? Same thing has been going on with Call of Duty. They still get favorable rating, yet we all know that franchise has been shit for a while, NOT BECAUSE OF NOSTALGIA bias and me remembering COD4, but because the devs have been lazy, and shoving microtransactions, pay to win, DLC BS, while giving us less for the money, and the game is pretty much the same old shit just repackaged.

If we keep praising mediocrity dressed in pretty make up, it doesn't help the gaming industry.

And, I do play modern games, btw, and have an extensive collection of variety of games.

Gaming today sucks ass.....

Inhad everything from Atari 2600 to the Xbox 360 and in between. 20+ consoles and over 500 titles. Current gaming made me sell it all. The current culture of gaming sucks. 

I miss 40+ hours of game play
Imaginative delves into alternate realities and beautifully rendered environments
Like halo,mass effect,borderlands,skyrim,etc

imo everythings geared towards multiplayer with short or no campaigns at all
..spawn,shoot,die,spawn,etc
i know thats what the kids want nowdays
But just not my thing

Uh, the last several games I have played all offer more than 40 hours of gameplay.
Dragon Age III, Mass Effect 3, Metal Gear Solid 5, Fallout 4, etc.  I don't buy games that I am just going to play for a tiny bit of time.
Heck, I have hundreds of hours in DESTINY (which by the way has some beautifully rendered environments).

I think games now are better than ever. Lots of choice out there, great means of distribution, between prime shipping and online instant downloads. Old games feel slow tired and stale generally when revisited.
I've been playing console since NES and computer since DOOM 1.

I actually like RE7 quite a bit (as an old school RE lover).  But I'm not into this youtube game reviewer thing.   I just play and enjoy games that I like.

This guy knows.

I didn't understand the decline in gameplay until I recently got a console again.  Being a member of the PC master race since before 2000, I got to watch as games like Ghost Recon devolved from open-world shooters into pre-programed, no choice graphic displays.  I bitched about it for years until I finally just gave up gaming altogether.  Hell, even PC adventure (X-Wing/Tie-Fighter flight) games from the late 90s-early 2000s were more thoughtful than today's games.  

Now that I have a console, I understand the devolution in gaming because doing popular FPSs is hard with an Xbox controller.  Plus, when I just want to jump on and kill some pixels for a while without thinking or too much challenge, I gravitate to games like Battlefront, which is beautiful on the console.  The gameplay is not GhostRecon 1 level, but that's alright because I'm tuning in and turning off when I play a console game.

Back in my day, consoles were best paired with sports games.  Hockey and baseball on the Nintendo64 was so fun.  Even football.  Bond was a revolution back then, and I would compare it with a DICE game today.  

Long story short, bitching about the real problem of comparatively shitty computer games is like trying to convince Iranians life was better before 1979.

You're playing the wrong games.  And Ghost Recon 1 had terrible game play.

The rise of open-world style games has really been a revolution.

Just look at how fantastic Fallout 4 is. Play how you want, kill you want, fight how you want.
Dragon Age 3 - exploring every nook and cranny takes over 150 hours of gameplay.

Destiny - combing semi-open environments with co-op play has caused millions of people to sink 100+ hours into playing and replaying content for a variety of reasons.
Bosses that REQUIRE 4-5 people to beat, everyone on the same page.

In terms of storytelling, sorry, but it's just gotten better. Better music, better voiceovers. Mass Effect 2 and 3 have amazing production value. Top notch voice acting. AAA quality cutscenes.
If you don't like Call of Duty, don't play it. There's 100 other games out there that need some love.

Heck, look at how unique, fast, and fun the combat is in Titanfall 1 and 2. There's a game out there for everyone.

Like platformers? Rayman Legends on Xbox 1 (a bit old now) is one of the best platformers I've ever played.

There are bad games out there now. But there always have been. In fact, some eras of gaming have been pretty bleak (Sega CD, the rise of FMV games).
--------------------------

I went back to play Final Fantasy VII recently. It was regarded as a fantastic game at the time, and I have tons of nostalgia for it. But it really isn't. Slow, uneven pacing, bad animation. The good story still remains, but the good parts are wedged in between so much nonsense, esp at the beginning of the game.  This convinced me that my warm feelings for the old games are mostly grounded in nostalgia.

Nailed it.

The old Rainbow Six/Ghost Recon/X-wing games were the pinnacles of gaming for me.  ARMA 3 is the only game out there that's comparable.

Gaming started sucking the minute artificial progress gates became a thing.  It's the shittiest game design element that was ever imagined, designed for the singular purpose of making it seem like there's more content than there really is.

Even the legitimate progress restraints...earning game credits or resources...have been commercialized with paid-for boosts.

We're going to have to agree to massively disagree.

Maybe....

That being said, I strongly prefer FPS war-type combat multiplayer games.  Those games are better with more players.  I agree with you on some level, but any contender is going to have to be as good or better than battlefield.  Until then, I'll play battlefield.

BF2 on the PC was fantastic.  Joint Ops - even with the wonky physics - was incredible with a consistent group.

Until you remember that EVERYONE had like 4 grenades

There are good games out there but they are few and far between.


Battlefield 2 was the last good "omg where have you been all my life" multiplayer game.

I was a god in helicopters and jets up until they started nerfing the shit out of them.   100s of hours in both with the ability to pretty much rule a map.   Also was first loaded with a brand new SATA2 drive that got me into nearly every server first for stealing jets on each new map load.



There have been good single player experiences as well but the death of gaming has been EA with the fully developed games being released with content deliberately withheld to be a future paid content or "expansion."     BF2 european conflict and BF2142 was where this shit started and it evolved over the next couple years.    Look at BF4 now with premium content and paying for skins/guns.


This crap has made for some very lazy cash grabs and it is why I watch Angry Joe.   Corporate Commander is real.

Like I said.... for me it is gaming culture that has changed. Gamergate, formulaic titles with no originality, no difference in platforms, no specific platform titles, etc.....

When it was the 8bit, 16bit, 32bit/64bit, and 128bit era. Their was actual differences in hardware and specific software on each platform. Design was different so games were different. A Saturn did 2D gaming very well. A SNES had a better sound chip and Mode7 but Genesis had more adult themed titles. The N64 was magical with Golden Eye and Perfect Dark on weekends. The NES had a great title library but the Master System had fantastic graphics and great ports of Sega Arcade Titles. Etc, etc, etc....


Now everything runs the same hardware, has the same titles, and has the same features. Console gaming has evolved from being it's own thing to being water downed PCs since they all do the same shit now.

The culture itself sucks. Gamergate was horrible. Multiplayer has taken over gaming for the most part and single player is a forgotten part. Yes, there are a few good titles today but they're few and far between. DLC is also horrible. Instead of games being released in full. They're piecemealed out. 

Gaming is dead to me.

The original Ghost Recon?  The one where every enemy was a crack shot and would instantly spot and shoot you as soon as you were in range?  

I seemed to do fine with it.