I just find the old school Doom/Quake high paced running and gunning the same 12 monsters over and over again in different maps without much of an in depth story just gets old really quickly.
For me at least, things like the player movement, combat, good controls, weapon feedback, enemy groups with different type mixups (orthogonol unit differentiation), environments, level design and flow, etc are enough to keep me interested - usually. Like if the simple base gameplay feels good, and the controls are good, that's usually enough to grab me and keep me around. Now the maps can get boring if you've played them a bajlillion times, but well-designed levels continue to be fun after years and years, and fights don't always play out the same. I can feel where you're coming from though. You need something to keep the game moving forward, and you need more variation, otherwise you get bored. Honestly I'm surprised that a lot of the simple games I play don't end up boring me. Back when my crew had LANParties, we got guys who didn't wanna play stuff like
UT and
Quake 3 or whatever cuz after a match or two they became incredibly bored with the games.
I only got through the first level of Hard Reset before I got bored and quit. (Luckily it only cost me $2.99 on sale. I didn't even bother to request a refund)
Okay I'm gonna kinda have to agree with you and Dan on
Hard Reset a little bit. It did have a budget, low-rent feel to it, and I recall wondering if I was actually gonna bother to finish it. Somehow I did, and the expansion too. But I can understand why you guys dropped it. It didn't have enough depth or variation. All the environments looked the same. Music was forgettable. Weapon selection was limited. Nothing about the game really stood out. That's why I forgot the game even existed. No one else I know was able to get into the game either. Again, I can't say why I was able to finish it. What I mostly remember the game for was the [H] article on it, where I learned about stuff like FXAA for the first time.
I recently played
Hellbound, another small indie game with graphics that are nothing to write home about, but it was so short it didn't outstay its welcome. I played it, I had fun, then it was done. Not many weapons there, not a wide variety of enemies, the levels were aiight (and there weren't that many), but I enjoyed how the game felt in terms of control, movement, combat, and weapon feedback. Good enough at least for 3 and a half hours. Music wasn't bad either.
Now on the other hand, I spent from 2016 to 2020 going through most of the Doom saga again.
Doom 1 a couple times (both with and without
Brutal Doom, by myself and in co-op),
Doom 2 (including stuff I've never played before like
No Rest For The Living),
SIGIL,
Doom 64, and in the middle of all that Doo
m 2016 and
Doom Eternal came out. Only game I didn't touch was
Doom 3.
Doom 1,
2, and
Doom 64 (my first experience with that one) were all an absolute f*cking blast. I had so much fun going through those games. So they definitely still hold up very much for me (and I got to see how great
Doom 64 is, now that it can be played on PC with mouse and keyboard - although you can also play it on XB1 with mouse and keyboard). Romero's
SIGIL is also awesome, and I am very much looking forward to Romero's new Doom 2 campaign.
It still play
UT99,
UT2K4,
UT3, and
Quake 3. I always install those games on every new PC I make for myself, and keep them installed throughout the life of that PC. Then again I still play a lot of classic console sh1t too. I went through
Super Mario World twice this year already, and I can never seem to ever leave
SMB3 alone. How many times have I been through
Zelda: Link to the Past? I go through
Mega Man X 1 and
2 multiple times a year. I still play my NES, Super NES, and Genesis, among other old consoles (and I also use emulators a decent amount). A lot of the games I loved back then I still love now, and still find them just as fun. I never got tired of
Doom 1 and
2. In fact I probably grew to love them more in the last 5 years than I ever have in my life before.
I also find that my love for original hardware and what it was originally capable of doesn't really die out over time. Graphics cards from the 2000s and 90s still put me in awe, as well as classic consoles. For example, the Super NES game
Axelay, I first discovered that in 2007, and when I did, the graphics blew me away. I'm still in awe by a lot of the graphics I see in old 16-bit console games or 90s PC games. I got a Neo-Geo MVS arcade board around 2014 or so (and my brother got an AES), and just like back in the day, I still can't get over the raw graphical 2D might of the Neo-Geo. The first
Unreal still looks really dang impressive to me.
Ion Fury is a 2019 game using the Build Engine and it made dang good use of that engine. Playing through
Black Mesa now, and it's a good reminder of how awesome Source Engine used to be.
I can understand how the graphics and art-style of some games put people off on them. I have a friend who refuses to play the Metroidvania series
Guacamelee because he hates the art-style. He also won't watch
Spartacus cuz he says the visuals make it look like a poor man's
300. I just won't automatically dismiss a game because of how it looks. Now if the graphics interfere with the gameplay, that's a different story. The game
Mad World on Nintendo Wii gave me a f*cking migraine, made my eyes hurt, and I couldn't make out sh1t in that game. The game had other problems besides how it looked, but the graphics were the main killer.
Dan is right though. When you make a game in this day and age, it shouldn't be too much for us to expect a certain minimum level of graphics.
When they can't bother with decent graphics, the developers rarely bothered with other aspects of the game's development.
Yeah that's kinda true.
