The Gaming Renaissance

What are burritos doing to VR "culture"?

Getting in illegally.

Don't you have to pay to get a VR headset?

You can download the headset too.
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We are at the start of that renaissance right now but most people don't realize because they are looking to the old guard and seeing nothing change.

Good modeling software is now free, good game engines are free (during development), with online distribution there is not need for publishers.
We are seeing medium sized games being made without a single suit involved for the first time in over 20 years.
The future is looking bright as those that are succeeding in this new environment are founding studios and will be able to move onto bigger projects in the future without needing money men to fund the development.

PS2, Gamecube, Xbox era

Very competitive era with a large focus on directly funding quality exclusive titles.
Graphical quality allowed good looking games while not being at the point where lazy devs could just shit out photorealistic titles with no regard for art style.
Lots of attention to niche markets
Smaller teams of around a dozen to two dozen people allowed a much more cohesive vision for development
Internet play without aggressive social media implementation
Many games still offered a challenge to those who wanted it
No stream culture meant much less focus on gimmick games that were "wacky" to appeal to retards

Of course, this isn't to say that generation wasn't full of garbage, shovelware, shady practices, AAA marketing machines, rehashes, etc. There was just a lot of exemplary releases that still shine as bright today as when they were released.

Who can say? I am sure those who lived before the Renaissance thought some other time was a height of culture. We might have already hit the peak or it is far off.

I'd say the "golden age" of gaming was probably 1995-2005. That's when most game development studios and review publications were staffed by people who legitimately enjoyed playing video games. Back then developers were never afraid to try out new ideas or gameplay systems, and games typically weren't made solely to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

This is the era that gave us classic games like Deus Ex, System Shock, Unreal Tournament, Fallout, Sim City, Arcanum, Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, Splinter Cell, KotOR 2, and Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. I struggle to come up with examples of games from the past 10 years that would match any of these in terms of depth or overall quality.

This is also back when beloved franchises like Command & Conquer and Jedi Knight were still thriving. Maxis hadn't yet developed the abomination that was Spore. EA didn't own DICE. Nickel-and-dime DLC packs weren't really an industry-wide practice yet. Modding was much, much more common for a wider array of games.

There were some good games that came out after this period, of course, like Hitman Blood Money, but the end of the 2000's are when things really started to go downhill. That's when you started seeing nonsense like console-oriented development, attempts to appeal to a wider market, corporatization of studio management, and monetization of "gamer culture".

This
We're still in the Dark Ages that followed with 7Gen and the financial crisis/Normalfag flood, but shit is changing and fast and theres a shitton of more variety and indie/AA now than before with people looking to the past for influence with AAA slowly decaying.

Soon OP, already more games I want to play this year than all of post 2007 7th Gen combined.

Well, if you look at the gaming crash at the end of the 80’s there are a number of similarities. There was a growing acceptance and embracing of gaming among the general population which led to a huge glut of supply, ultimately causing a crash. Then there was a focus on quality, most notably through Nintendo/NES and their seal and a rise in overall quality. Today we have seen a comparable rise in popularity and oversupply. Look at the AAA titles failing to make back their millions and regular consumers losing faith in the traditional big hitters like COD and Assassin’s Creed alongside the huge number of indie studios. While the market may have grown so large that something similar is unlikely, a renaissance by definition only comes after a dark age. If more average consumers keep rejecting big titles, then maybe it could happen.

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We're still approaching it, but it may be a long way out or outright aborted by decisions made by patent trolls, copyright trolls, and the FCC and ISPs. The gaming Renaissance will be a period that big publishers and developers will be largely pushed to the wayside, because dev tools will be good enough that a small team in mom's basement can make an amazing game in just a few months. We'll have as of yet unknown quantities of creativity and good games ripe for the picking at a very low cost, and nobody will even have the time to play all of the masterpieces available. It's all up to the quality and competition of development tools.

I view indie games as a mixed blessing. Some of them have been quality but the majority seem to be shovelware that claim to be innovative or deep, but really aren't. There is some potential there, of course, but I wouldn't rely on indie devs as being the potential saviors of the hobby.

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You just described literally all vidya throughout history.

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1998 was the best year in vidya, won't get better than that

Budget-free is still a dream. Tools are free but standards are near unreasonable compared to the 90s, and saturation is enough of a problem that the memes about your game matter ten times more than the game itself. Unless you pander to anyone and everyone and employ mobile development practices, your competition from both ends of the industry will roll over you.
You're not gonna get your video games back in this decade, or the next.

There always good games, there's always bad games.
Right now you are finding your nichi, jew.

You have to find an under-served niche where there is less competition and execute well.

Devs passionate by something else than hormone therapy and dyed hairs, aka Nerds, with nerdy glasses, and nerdy obsession with math, in charge of gaming again.
I blame social media; waste of time and talent.

I tried, user.
While I was busy taking the art back to the drawing board several times because of complaints, some Nip made (superficially) almost the same game with much better resources, cutting my chances from "this might work" to "none".

The Golden Age is generally considered to be between 1995 to 2005 because devs were forced to experiment to keep up with the then-new 3D capable hardware. Companies like Nintendo were developing games in a Skunkworks fashion just trying to push something new and exciting. They were doing things literally nobody had done before, and other devs followed. The result is OoT, Mario 64, Majoras Mask, GTA III to San Andreas, Half-Life 1 and 2.etc all came out within the decade of 1995 to 2005

The problem today is 3D is already well established. People aren't experimenting anymore. Games have become formulated

Really makes you think.

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It's vintage dated

I'd guess most people here aren't totally clear on what the Renaissance was

there is going to be no Renaissance. we will never return to the time where it was like 1996-2001.
online games are only worthwhile with a large playerbase, and the ongoing balkanization of communities means that the only games that will persist are the ones that are able to keep massive numbers of people playing even with churn, e.g. blizzEActivison shit.
great games will be made but they will be forgotton about in short order as two new games come to take your attention away. looking for the next great game is like looking for the next revolutionary rock bad, everyone is listening to so many different kinds of music now that even good albums no large percentage of people give a shit about. we'll never go back to an era of great games everyone plays, we are stuck with decent games in small, autistic communities, or large communities playing shit mediocre games like overwatch and cod.

What is the cost of this box?

When casuals and normalfags leave the gaming market and it crashes, we'll go back to the days of games made for gamers.
Expect to see creativity flourish and the quality of indie titles increase tenfold.

why is the op a copy from a year old article on pcworld.com. Is this what bots do?

pic for you, my lazy friend.

Keep going user-dev. Your hard work and polish will be what will stand out from ripoffs. Get the basics down and build on it.

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Maybe you don't know what it was either. Because the term "Golden Age" referrs either to Greek Legend early in human history before there was war until Zeus created storms forcing people to take shelter and start the Silver Age. Or the period in America history following the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Why tho? When you can build a good one with just about $800.

I was looking at custom builds for my next PC for inspiration. Seeing the time, love and care that people put into modding their machines, peripherals and consoles actually made me wonder about how the future of gaming will look. I'm really hopeful for the future but also afraid. I suppose that's why I created the thread, because I'm legitimately curious as to what others think.

I hope that the best days are yet to come, but sometimes, I'm not so sure.

Nice job with google, but that doesn't make "renaissance" and "golden age" remotely interchangeable. Even your description has nothing to do with it

WHEN ALL AAA QUIT RELEASING GAMES

I think we'll reach the gaming Renaissance when indie games can produce graphically complex games without the massive budgets.

But what if the ripoff is in fact better and I just can't compete?

This. If you look at the shit that pops up during events like GDC you can see devs and writers are just in a race to see if they can virtue signal harder than the next Twitter obsessed fuckwad. The suits at the top of dev studios and publisher are just interested in figuring out how hard they can fuck their customers before they stop getting thanked for it. No one cares about making a good game, it's all just politics and franchise milking.

Which is why you get randomly explosions in popularity for actually good indie games. Any SJW indie shit only takes off because the public mistakes it for something else. Maybe in a few years it'll equalize. The only problem is the indie devs who get huge don't try to build off their success, and always stay limited to the same scope of 1 person.

Well one thing to consider is that you can always go back and play older games, so in a way gaming is constantly getting better as more and more good games come out.