A few years ago, I was feeling dispirited about being middle-aged and had come around to the conclusion that, at least when playing games, my general dissatisfaction and "meh" response to the games I was playing was probably a function of my age rather than anything about the games themselves. I was enjoying some games to an extent, but I wasn't being really grabbed by anything, and I was having a hard time sticking with much that I was playing. It seemed like a reasonable just-so story, and a particular exhausting one if you make games and theoretically are supposed to like them.
And then I picked up Hollow Knight, was utterly sucked into it in a deep way, couldn't put it down, and came out the other side doing the Principle Skinner meme - "Am I so out of touch? No, it's all those other games that have been wrong..."
So thank you Team Cherry, for helping remind me that 1) I really can love games deeply, even in my tired middle-aged-ness, and 2) sometimes the problem isn't that a person is being too judgmental, the problem is that the the lofty potential of their ideals really is, perhaps, justified, and other creative people (for a variety of understandable reasons, really - making games is a hard and costly business) mostly aren't even really aiming for such things.
When I was young there were two types of games I tended to enjoy: single-player games (e.g. Nethack, Half-life, Starcraft, & others with a good story and gameplay, or just deep gameplay) and LAN party games (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Total Annihilation, Quake II, and similar). LAN party games were more fun at LAN parties than online, and not just because server browsers all kind of sucked. Playing along with other people you can see in the same room is a very different experience from playing along with other people you've never met, can't see, and will never encounter again.
These days my friends are scattered across the country, with jobs & families, and so LAN parties are basically dead. And many new games don't even support LAN play, instead they tend to be optimized for online play with some sort of ranking system.
That leaves single-player games. And really good single-player games are rare, just like really good anything is rare. I find a lot of story-driven singleplayer games have good stories, but crap gameplay, so it's frustrating to try to complete the story. If the story is good enough & the gameplay bad enough I'll just cheat & treat the whole thing more like a book or movie instead of a game, but for a lot of games I just don't bother even with that.
But occasionally a game grabs me. The story is great, and the gameplay is at least good enough, or it's just really good gameplay that stays engaging for a long time (e.g. Slay the Spire). These are few & far between, because making really good games is very difficult.
As I age my tolerance for mediocrity decreases, partly because I already own a whole bunch of still-engaging games I can always play. So I agree with your points. The really great games are rare, far rarer than best-selling games.
FWIW there is a new-ish kind of intermediate genre between classic LAN/ranked multiplayer and single player, which is the whole “survival” genre. Generally speaking, they can be played as single player games, but also allow for small-scale co-op, synchronously or asynchronously. So even if you and a buddy have different schedules, you can make progress separately but still occasionally play together.
Valheim, Grounded, Ark, Satisfactory are a few among many others.
I do most of my gaming in the single-player indie space these days. It's really where the fun is. You have a deep time-tested catalog of beautiful and complete experiences that don't try to nickel-and-dime you with drip-fed content or recurring microtransactions. They're games first and foremost, not extraction machines. It's the opposite of the BS you see in big-budget titles.
Absolutely. I've been playing a lot of Stationeers (which, wildly, requires writing assembly on the in-game chips) and Satisfactory lately. Both are clearly labors of love by their small dev houses.
Same here. Hollow Knight and Elden Ring are the only two games in the last decade that I've put more than a few hours into. E.g I used to love Civilization, but none of them since 4 have done it for me. Same with Simcity2000. I'll play Madden or Fortnite with my kids, but I'm done mentally after 20 minutes.
The last game I liked like these was Morrowind back in 2004 or so. One of the great things about being a parent is sharing these kinds of things with your kids. I've already got Silksong downloaded on our Switch and XBox to play together when they get home from school in ~1 hr.
I believe there is a function of age to some degree, I 100% Assassins creed 2 at 14 and now I have a decade and a half of watching studios remake that goddamn game. They're all trying to make the best practice, safest game they can to reach the widest audience and end up bland with nothing new to offer those of us that have been playing a longer time.
Almost all my favourite titles of the last decade have been smaller titles, even the ones I bounce off I can appreciate them for trying something and missing the mark, there are genuine amazing works of art out there that a large studio simply can't produce.
I don't think the AAA games are 'wrong', to my bewilderment assassins creed sells like crazy each year despite near everyone in my friendship circle tapping out after the pirate one a decade ago, it's just if you play more than a couple things a year you outgrow the 'mainstream' titles.
The thing that stuck with me after learning about it is that AAA games aren't called AAA because they are supposed to be the best of the best or the most advanced.
AAA games are named after AAA investment ratings. A AAA game is supposed to be the most profitable investment for the publisher paying the upfront investment. And the market has gotten saturated with enough customers that doing new things to get more customers is more risky than doing the same thing to keep your existing customers.
I typically tend toward indie/small games as well, but there arw definitely some masterpieces put out by large studios. Have you played Red Dead Redemption or Cyberpunk? The amount of fidelity and content and refinement are just unmatched. I can't recommend them enough.
Also, if you like first-person puzzlers I recently picked up Supraworld and instantly fell in love, it's a gamer's game for sure and is one of the best platformers I've played in quite a while.
I've been keeping reviews in the last few years. Just privately, for myself. I started doing this because I couldn't remember what I did and didn't play, and had a "wait, I think I tried this before and didn't like it" deja-vu a few times.
Right now the rankings are: bad (388), meh (191), okay (71), good (63), superb (12). Turns out I dislike a lot of games. This is also why I started to just pirate things first and then buy if I like it; I have 558 games in my GOG library and I barely played (or like) >80% of it.
I can recommend keeping reviews by the way; I've since started doing this for tons of stuff, from games to films to TV episodes to wine to coffee, and writing things down really helps narrow down what you like or dislike about things. By keeping it private you can write whatever you like and don't need to do a "full" review. For example my entire review for Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound (rated "meh") is "Too fast-paced for my liking. Also don't really like the controls." And for me, that's enough.
I can write a long essay on why I like or dislike games, but to be honest I'd rather be playing Silksong.
Going over things, the dividing line between "good" and "superb" is somewhat arbitrary, so I included both, because well, why not? I did it like that to mimic the commonly used "5 star" rating, but maybe it should just be three: "bad", "okay", "good". Dunno.
Also note that I haven't played many games. I'm just now getting around to The Witcher 3, which is over ten years old. So...
"-" starts a new entry, followed by one or more titles, followed by "tag: value", followed by whatever I wanted to write (if anything) as Markdown. It lists "superb" first, alphabetically, then "good".
have you played ori and the blind forest? that's another nice single player platformer, though it eventually proved too hard for me (can't really do the pixel-and-timing-perfect moves and don't much enjoy trying)
And then I picked up Hollow Knight, was utterly sucked into it in a deep way, couldn't put it down, and came out the other side doing the Principle Skinner meme - "Am I so out of touch? No, it's all those other games that have been wrong..."
So thank you Team Cherry, for helping remind me that 1) I really can love games deeply, even in my tired middle-aged-ness, and 2) sometimes the problem isn't that a person is being too judgmental, the problem is that the the lofty potential of their ideals really is, perhaps, justified, and other creative people (for a variety of understandable reasons, really - making games is a hard and costly business) mostly aren't even really aiming for such things.