regrettably, Meta is the state of the art for VR. the Meta Quest 3 is stunningly crisp for the price point. it’s almost retina-scale with the pixels, the head/spatial tracking is extremely accurate and doesn’t require any base station or wired attachment, and you can fluidly stream VR games from your PC wirelessly at 1080p and like 120fps with nearly no latency or reality sickness.

I played Myst and Riven while I was sick with COVID last year, and it was one of the top five visual experiences of my lifetime (along with seeing the Grand Canyon and taking psychedelics.)

Meta has also recently finally cracked the holy grail of non-chonky AR glasses with full FoV, though the gallium nitride waveguide process is quite expensive and yields are too poor for them to sell it. but they look like slightly nerdy glasses that let you see holograms superimposed on your vision, even outdoors in the light.

unfortunately, VR is still anti-social and there’s not much content there, and the company leading the way is awful. but even just for Riven alone it was worth it to me.

Strong rumors of Valve’s new VR launching this year. Quite excited for that. Otherwise, the status (in my opinion) is stagnant. I still have fun occasionally getting into VR though.

Don’t you dare knock Adventure!

That’s a good choice! Probably the most popular one of that year. I never had a 2600 and started with a 5200, so my knowledge of it is lacking.

My wife’s current fortnite addiction would suggest otherwise

Not true! I installed it and played for 5 minutes once!

Parents playing with their kids

Yeah but then osrs came along

Everyone who doesn’t play LoL will think you’re an idiot if you play ranked, that hasn’t changed in 15 years

Outside of shoot em up or hack and slash. Something with a good story that involved real coop to win. Not many.

No, it’s rated (E for children). I’m not a big fan of what it became or how inaccurate weapons were but it did offer something new to shooters when it came out with the construction mechanics and it has plenty of skill expression.

The more damning indictment is that something in the industry hasn’t displaced it, but it’s not like it’s any worse than a yearly Modern Warfare or FIFA release.

I’d say an even more damning indictment is that HellDivers gained the popularity it did.

That grind simulator game fucking sucks and is clunky and ugly, but it found success because the market is a trash desert.

Exactly. Several limits were loosened or removed entirely. The SNES was the first console with actual pixel transparency, the PSX, despite being weaker than the Saturn and the N64, was the king of the 90s. The jump in graphical and sound quality was always night and day from the Atari era all the way to the PS3/360 era (sound probably peaked in the PS2 era, with DVD quality)

Even on the PC, the jump from 3 years’ worth of advances was astonishing. Just compare the original Doom, 1993, with Quake, 1996

And here’s Quake 3, 1999

the goal is to get dopamine, move on when you stop getting dopamine

Is that the goal? I want more from my games than just poking my brain. I sometimes play games that challenge my reactions, sometimes ones that challenge my thinking. Superhot and Braid provided interesting time-related puzzles. Portal had some good lateral thinking puzzles.

I’m not exactly playing educational games, but when I played Assassin’s Creed games, the historical bits I found interesting were things I could learn more about outside the game. When I played Hearts of Iron 4, it was global politics around the time of WWII. Uboat and other sub games taught me a bit about submarine tactics in WWII. Oxygen not included taught me things I didn’t know about thermodynamics and materials, even if it is extremely simplified. Age of Empires and Total War were gateways to learn about medieval styles of warfare.

Even Sea of Thieves, which involves incredibly simplified sailing was what prompted me to learn about how square-masted sailing ships actually worked.

And, of course, all the flight simulators I’ve played over the years has taught me a lot about how to actually fly planes.

To me, if all you’re getting from a game is a bit of dopamine hits, you’re really missing out. It’s like watching the same movie over and over, or reading the same book over and over.

This is me except it’s RuneScape

Final Fantasy XIV has only been out for… Hmm… Well, yeah, I guess it’s gonna be one of those days.

I think you would notice a big difference from a 10 year old phone.

In my biased opinion, The Finals has a really interesting mechanic that you can’t find anywhere else. The destruction absolutely feels “next gen”, all the rubble is synchronized so everyone sees and actually interacts with the same destruction. It’s different than just blowing up a wall for an entrance, it’s a core part of the gameplay.

Personally and as a gamer since the 80s (and nowadays making games myself), I think the last great breakthrough improvement was procedurally generated game spaces, and that stuff dates back to Minecraft in 2009.

The improvements in visuals are well into the diminishing returns part of the curve, the richness and size of custom crafted game spaces has hit a cost ceiling (hence budgets in the $100 million mark for AAA games, even with partial authomatisation of things like model generation and painting via stuff like Houdini and Substance), and the only direction of growth I can see is the gameplay itself, where the improvements from the naturally emergent gameplay of multi-player were a one-off and have been more or less stuck at the same point for a decade.

For a while I had some hope that AI (specifically LLMs) would yield a massive jump in the richness of the game world in story terms (imagine an RPG were all NPCs have genuine complex stories with realistic interactions, all generated on the fly and even influenced by you) but plain LLMs have large hardware requirements merelly to interact with one person (powerful GPUs, at least 12GB of VRAM) on top of the requirements to run the game itself, so that kind of game improvement seems unlikely before the end of the decade.

I think Gabe Newell said in an interview, VR is actually moving to fast. There is no point in pushing a product to market and spending all that time and money needed for that, when by the time you make it to the market the research has moved so much, your tech and product is obsolete already.

At some point they will release products again and they will be amazing (hopefully) but we dont get the continuous advances like with grafics back in the day

Everything in game design is a meaningful choice. What does the choice of making the game for VR mean, exactly? I started this sentence planning to follow up with a few ideas but I’m honestly coming up short.