Decline When did decline start to you?

[JDR13]

The day I discovered the Codex.

 

[Metronome]

It all went awry in the early 1970s when commercialization began. Video "games" should have stayed cloistered in academic circles. This could have been the hidden art form of true intellectuals. Alas, now it seldom offers much beyond degenerate escapism for the drooling imbecile to fritter away his meager wages on.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

shall we point the finger at the enablers:

Graphics cards - increase the power increase the bullshit

Unlimited internet - why limit your game to less than 1GB when you can churn out a nine hour film game @80GB

 

[Lilura]

Oblivion (2006) started the decline for me. Fallout 3 (2008) cemented it.

This.

For a TRU 'Dexer, there is no better example of decline.

 

[Daze]

Never played more than the tutorial of Fallout 3. Tried it at a friend and it never interested me. Discovered the greatness of Fallout 1+2 a few years later.

But for me the true manifestation of decline was Dragon Age 2.
Even though first Dragon Age is just popamole in hindsight. But i was young, dumb and full of cum.

Much weirder is that we now live in Dragon Age and Gothic 3 apologist times.
The dex and its double standards. Well...

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

To me the global decline began around 2006, especially when shit like DLC became rampant everywhere and suddenly things you used to call unlockables or cheat codes became DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT.

But I could go series-by-series of where I thought it began to suck as some vary wildly in timeframe and the same applies to genres. Warcraft for example, I think actually began to suck dick during WC3. I'm not talking "maps people created" WC3, I'm talking the WC3 you're expected to play if you hit ranked match. The WC3 only child rapists would like. Okay that's really harsh I'm sorry and I am now disgusted by my choice of words but I feel very strongly about how much WC3 disappointed me after I loved WC1/WC2.

Controversially, I think the Diablo-like ARPG was killed as an infant once Diablo II came out. I like D2, I played D2 a lot, I'd still play D2, but it fucking ruined every ARPG after with its poisonous "ITEMZ AND SCREEN CLEARING IN 2 SECONDS BITCHES" philosophy. Diablo 1 was a glimpse of what could have been, D2 ushered in the era of POE skill trees that resemble a blind person's drawing.

Ooooh now I'm in a ranting mood. Here's another one:

Street Fighter - I DON'T GIVE A FUCK WHAT Y'ALL NIGGAZ SAY, SF3 FUCKING KILLED THIS SHIT FOR 8 YEARS. People just wax poetry about Third Strike but you fuckers forget it took two goddamn versions of SF3 to even be deemed a decent enough game. Regardless of that, and again I don't want to hear any shit from some clown that think Oro is a household name, but that roster was fucking TRAAASH. Oooh, it was bad! Gill as the final boss? Gayest looking boss ever. I remember playing that on Dreamcast and my father came in the room during Gill's boss fight, I've never felt so embarrassed. I had to let him know I was stealing his Playboy magazines just to restore faith and earn my picture back in his wallet.

 

[Turuko]

Did op said that GTA 1&2 were not edgy?
The games with the dedicated fart/burp button?

 

[Valky]

Close to what a lot of others are saying in this thread, my natural instincts say that 2008 was where it all went to shit, with 2014 being the first good year since, and then 2017 being the second good year since, with 2020 looking like the third year where the incline is stronger than the decline.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Started with the original xbox. Made it easier for PC devs to move over. Ruined console games and dumbed our shit.

Then things went really shitty with the HD era. That gen killed all the mid tier developers and kicked off the DLC shenanigans, pre order nonsense and online pass for consoles (remember that shit?). It was also the tail end of that gen when we got the first loot boxes and pay to win.

 

[samuraigaiden]

The root of the decline, it's true origin, was circa 1995, when gaming industry began moving towards 3D polygonal graphics. Up until that point making videogames was craft work. The iterative nature of 3D enabled an unprecedented cutthroat approach to game development. Developers that had spend the last decade or more creating 2D games were asked to adapt or GTFO, a new generation was introduced to the Industry as we know it today. An evolutionary process was cut off, a new one began. Decline.

The adjustment to 3D was pretty fast, looking back on it. It was rough as hell at first but by 2000ish we had the classics Deus Ex and Thief 1/2. I don't think it had anything to do with anything. It's not like you couldn't make a great Fallout 3 in 3D in 2002, just no one did.

Maybe I didn't explain my point better. I was indicating a date, not saying 3D is responsible for decline.

Anyone who lived through will remember how forced the move to 3D graphics felt. Suddenly any 2D game automatically got a lower score for being 2D. Every single successful existing franchise had to produce a 3D iteration. The reason behind all this was money. Making 2D games the old-school way was not nearly as profitable as 3D had the potential to be. Videogames went from being a niche, enthusiast driven industry to starting the transition into what it is today. The move to 3D marked a shift in the mentality behind publishers' decision making.

As Frank Zappa put it when explaining the decline of the music industry:



Decision making went from "hey, we don't know what this is, put it out and let's if the kids like it" to, well, modern day EA and Activision. The moment that transition began to take form was when the industry decided to make everything 3D.

 

[Outlander]

The decline started whenever consoles wanted to have games other than platformers and sports games.

 

[mediocrepoet]

The decline started whenever consoles wanted to have games other than platformers and sports games.

So... when they first came out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Channel_F#Games

 

[The Decline]

The decline started whenever consoles wanted to have games other than platformers and sports games.

So... when they first came out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Channel_F#Games

Hey that was discontinued the year I was born.

 

[Silverfish]

I don't think it's where decline began, but Fallout 3 was where I started to notice. At the time, I knew nothing about the original games and I seriously wondered if F3 was some launch title for the first XBox that got lost in the shuffle and came out 8 years after the fact.

 

[KK1001]

Era of Decline for me is 2005 - 2012
Era of Bumpy Plateau is 2013 to Present, with mostly small studios of less than 10-15 making the overwhelming majority of good games

 

[Lemming42]

Started in 2004 (possibly sometime in 2003), ended around 2011. Though we still haven't returned to pre-decline levels just yet.

 

[Falksi]

Strange, I was thinking of starting such a thread myself yesterday.

The thing for me is that it hasn't been a straight line of decline. The two big dips for me were when SEGA & Nintendo lost their way to Sony, and the recent 2013+ era of Open World, trash copy-paste games. But I was late to the party with the Xbox 360, and have to say I enjoyed that era initially as I picked up a shed load of great games on the cheap around 2009/10

The peak was Megadrive + SNES + PC. Which essentially was all PC anyway come 1997 coz of emulation. Here is how I view it by system...........

Significant Games which have influenced The Declines:

• Rise of The Robots - When hype & focus on next gen graphics totally overshadowed gameplay. 1990 saw C&VG birth a stupendously amazing magazine called "Mean Machines", with some cracking humour. This had a wonderful balance of reviews, previews, & news. ROTR ushered in the era of previews & hype, when gaming mags became pure advertisements for games. A real decline enabler.

• Super Mario 64 - FFS, why in God's name did we ever try platform games in 3D? Despite the hype & praise for SM64, these games simply don't translate to 3-D as well as they do 2-D. Now over 20 years later the penny seems to have dropped, and it's no surprise we're seeing a mini revival & way more 2-D platform/metroidvania games than 3-D platformers. The format doesn't just work as well, and SM64 birthed years of copycats making us endure that.

• Tekken - Again, the transition to 3-D saw a dip in quality. Not as bad, but still a shed load of games awkwardly trying to master the formula & failing.

• World of Wankcraft - Why the fuck do I want to play online? Seriously, games are a detachment for me to lose myself in, or play with my mates locally. WOW influenced this whole multiplayer fad, and gave us years of multiplayer focused games as a result, which in turn spilled over into single player games with quest structures. Fucking evil shit.

• Oblivion - Uggghh. What a kick in the sack after Morrowind. Does any game embody conforming more than this? From a deep, atmospheric, alien world of wonder to shiny, buggy, mainstream blandsville.

• Dragon Age 2 - I see DA:O as a rare successful transition into the 3-D realm. It still retained enough elements from the CRPGs of old to keep me happy, and I was hoping it'd snag enough casuals in to make the more CRPG format sustainable. Instead they did away with that direction entirely, and decided to try and con PC gamers into embracing the "awesome button". Bunch of fucking cunts.

• The Witcher 3 - So they tried to destroy us with 3-D, they tried to destroy us by cramming MMORPG traits into single player games, and they tried to destroy us with the awesome button, so what else can they do? That's right, instead of not being absolute fuckwits who are so spinelessly shithousing weak that they follow every trend, they AGAIN decide to try and kill us off by copying the latest poison fad of "Open World" gaming. Yes this was around before, but if EVER a game did NOT need an open world it was TW3.

To summarize. They key killers have been:

• Initial transition to 3-D
• Multiplayer
• MMORPG questing
• "Awesome Button"
• Copy-Paste Open Worlds

Thankyou for your time.

 

[Open Path]

The true decline of PC gaming and video games in general, came with the massive popularization, the rise of multiplayer, the casualization, the transition towards digital format and finally, the change towards videogames as a service instead than as a product. All the dlcs, microtransactions, dumbing down, over-hype, pre-release purchases, youtubers, twitchers, mobile gaming, etc are consequences of that big paradigm shift in which a niche hobby was transofrmed in the first entertainment in the world.

Two graphs to iilustrate:

Even in a supposedly positive perspective, as the growth of titles number it's possible to see the huge change in the industry that happened around 2005-2006. The start of the decline match the exact moment in which for fist time in History "other platforms" -first mostly consoles and handhelds, later also mobiles and tablets- started to produce many more titles than PC, because that's an indicative of how casualized is the primary target for developers.

This recently updated graph from mobygames database shows this perfectly, with the dominance of consoles and start of mobile growth in mid 2000s, the appex of console-mobile dominance around 2012-2013, when thanks to indie boom, PC creativity recovered greatly, but the extreme growth of mobile market didn't allow it to regain its primacy.

In Crpgs case there was a clear first decline in 1994-1997 despite Realms of Arkania II, Daggerfall and Fallout, with not much more in 4 years -Diablo, Ultima 8, TES: Arena or Ravenloft-. Also those years in mid 90s supposed a brake or absolute final of many foundational series: Wizardry, Ultima, Gold Box, M&M and the transformation of many of the companies that led Golden Age.

The second great decline in crpgs started in 2005, and that year was probably among the worst for crpgs in entire History. In the next years were released the most terrible sequels and crpg genre was dominated by consoles times and style. Since 2012-2014 creativity returned... more or less, because the worst years in this new period are similar or inferior in quality terms than the best years of the "decline" period, so the new incline is fairly unstable. So if we compare:

2012: Legend of Grimrock, Tales of Maj' Eyal, Dark Souls port, FTL
2013: Expedition: Conquistador, Shadowrun: Returns
2016: Dragon's Dogma port, Fallout 1.5, Dungeon Rats

vs.

2007 Mask of the Betrayer, The Witcher 1, 7.62 High Calibre, Eschalon, Mass Effect
2009 Knights of the Chalice, Risen, Dragon Age: Origins
2010 Alpha Protocol, New Vegas, Mount & Blade: Warband


And in the case of 2019 I think is the most mediocre year since 2005 and I'm not sure if superior to 2006 or 2008...

 

[RNGsus]

It wasn't until I blew a bunch of money on a new cpu and gpu that I realized how shit and barren gaming truly is.

 

[Falksi]

The true decline of PC gaming and video games in general, came with the massive popularization, the rise of multiplayer, the casualization, the transition towards digital format and finally, the change towards videogames as a service instead than as a product. All the dlcs, microtransactions, dumbing down, over-hype, pre-release purchases, youtubers, twitchers, mobile gaming, etc are consequences of that big paradigm shift in which a niche hobby was transofrmed in the first entertainment in the world.

Two graphs to iilustrate:

Even in a supposedly positive perspective, as the growth of titles number it's possible to see the huge change in the industry that happened around 2005-2006. The start of the decline match the exact moment in which for fist time in History "other platforms" -first mostly consoles and handhelds, later also mobiles and tablets- started to produce many more titles than PC, because that's an indicative of how casualized is the primary target for developers.

This recently updated graph from mobygames database shows this perfectly, with the dominance of consoles and start of mobile growth in mid 2000s, the appex of console-mobile dominance around 2012-2013, when thanks to indie boom, PC creativity recovered greatly, but the extreme growth of mobile market didn't allow it to regain its primacy.

In Crpgs case there was a clear first decline in 1994-1997 despite Realms of Arkania II, Daggerfall and Fallout, with not much more in 4 years -Diablo, Ultima 8, TES: Arena or Ravenloft-. Also those years in mid 90s supposed a brake or absolute final of many foundational series: Wizardry, Ultima, Gold Box, M&M and the transformation of many of the companies that led Golden Age.

The second great decline in crpgs started in 2005, and that year was probably among the worst for crpgs in entire History. In the next years were released the most terrible sequels and crpg genre was dominated by consoles times and style. Since 2012-2014 creativity returned... more or less, because the worst years in this new period are similar or inferior in quality terms than the best years of the "decline" period, so the new incline is fairly unstable. So if we compare:

2012: Legend of Grimrock, Tales of Maj' Eyal, Dark Souls port, FTL
2013: Expedition: Conquistador, Shadowrun: Returns
2016: Dragon's Dogma port, Fallout 1.5, Dungeon Rats

vs.

2007 Mask of the Betrayer, The Witcher 1, 7.62 High Calibre, Eschalon, Mass Effect
2009 Knights of the Chalice, Risen, Dragon Age: Origins
2010 Alpha Protocol, New Vegas, Mount & Blade: Warband


And in the case of 2019 I think is the most mediocre year since 2005 and I'm not sure if superior to 2006 or 2008...

Well that's pissed on my chips hasn't it?

I feel like 6 inch Dave watching Mandingo walk into the room.

 

[Daedalos]

The moment I ended my single life

 

[Child of Malkav]

How did the switch to 3D affect gaming negatively? It's an honest question, I genuinely don't understand.

 

[HansDampf]

XBOX

 

[Child of Malkav]

XBOX? But there were 3D games even before that: Thief 1 and 2, Hitman Codename 47, Deus Ex 1, Tomb Raider, Descent, Doom, Ultima Underworld and a few others. And these were on PC, if I remember correctly.
Unless you mean that the 3d gaming took off in a good direction but XBOX kinda messed with that by setting a negative trend in developing games?

 

[Farewell into the night]

It started right with the beginning of the universe.

Same as incline.

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

After I played Gothic. Then every other game I played after was decline.