PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now
Feels like Destiny.
Turns out that people like playing games that respect their time and aren't a glorified second job. Who knew.
that respect their time
I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.
and aren't a glorified second job
I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.
The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.
The games I play do respect my time but boy are they a second job. From Rimworld to Satisfactory, from Space Engineers to modded Minecraft... My job is a second job.
Tell that to everyone playing games like path of exile (which i admittedly have also played too much of in the past).
PoE, Factorio, etc
I seem to like games that require spreadsheets
Built a new killer rig last summer. Have spent 90% of my time with it playing HL1 mods.
Recently upgraded to a 7800x3D, 64GB DDR5, and a 4070... which I've been using to get back into modded Minecraft recently.
Same machine... The framerates I'm getting in Rimworld are off the charts.
Tbf, the larger modpacks can be pretty resource intensive.
7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
\ 6.4% were in League of Legends
\ 6.2% were in Roblox
\ 5.8% were in Dota 2
\ 5.4% were in Fortnite
That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
Free is an important reason why. Also, these games run very well on old machines. If you mostly play that and get a new rig, you don't have to spend a lot. Pc parts have gotten ridiculously expensive.
I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of "how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?"
I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.
But the thing is, if it's a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I've played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead --- well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money --- and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.
You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it'd still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I've played, because I've spent so many hours in the thing.
If people are playing these like crazy, you'd think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just...doesn't matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.
Its the replayability. I mean, look how many people are still playing chess. Stick a human intelligence on the other end of the stick and you've pretty much got it figured out.
I'm playing Counter-Strike 2
... exclusively on a modded server hosting a Warcraft mod
... that I found because I was searching for the same thing I played on CS:S over a decade ago
besides the lower bar of entry due to being free, Midias research has shown that the younger generation prefers online multiplayer, and as you grow older, you start to favor single player games more.
My personal hypothesis is that everyone likes online multiplayer initially because it's pretty cool, then you get bored it when you realise playing with angry randos is no fun. It's not that a younger generation prefers online multiplayer, it's that they haven't got sick of it yet!
I read every one of those and thought. Well that's a new game. Apparently I'm old.
Apparently I’m old.
Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Realmz/comments/qoowgl/assorted_realmz_files_codes_realmz_character/
These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.
Nothing like a comment about someone's grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you've played in its original form.
The amount of times I "finally sit down and watch that new Netflix show I've been putting off" and it's 7 years old. My kid is into "newer Disney stories" I don't know from my day... that are 25 year old films!
I don't get how people are still into those old games. I like new experiences too much
People don't get bored of playing/watching the same sports their whole lives
The game may be old but that doesn't mean a particular person has played it before.
Honestly, most new games just fucking suck. They're too expensive, often don't run properly at launch even on excellent hardware, and those that don't have micro-transactions built-in require you to purchase DLC to get the whole game.
On the other hand, the older titles almost always run well on my machine, have a ton of community DLC, and in general are just designed better because they were built to bring the player as much fun as possible, not to extract as much money as possible.
Plus, the quality content generated from 2005 - 2015 represents some of the best ever, and can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you even get into the 2010s. Why waste money on something that may not work, and that I likely won't enjoy as much as the games I bought 10 years ago?
It's why I usually wait at least a year after release to consider whether or not I'm going to buy a title.
New AAA games suck.
I either play indies or old AAA games. It all went to shit around the beginning of the PS4/X1 era, so yeah, my upper bound is about 2013.
I tend to agree with you, I think the downfall started in the ps3 era since that’s when online was in every console. I understand your idea that it was bad in ps4 era since devs had the time to figure out how to makes things worse due to the ability to use the internet to sell things/deliver patches.
I don't know if I agree about new games. This is a bit of a problem with some AAA games though. The indie game scene is still thriving as far as I can tell, in some genres more than others. (E.g now is a great time to be into FPS games.)
A good old game can occupy you for many hours though, and it's hard to make good games period. I'm not surprised that a few older games dominate the market.
For sure, and my backlog is huge. I have tons to still play. I'm just now getting around to gta5 on my steam deck. I also just finished re-playing the original ff7 with some mods that made it look way nicer than back when I played it on my ps1 in the 90's. I could go another 5 years without catching up to 2020 if I wanted to.
What's your opinion on Dome Keeper?
Totally. Even with good new games, best to wait until they are cheap and completely stable. The impatience to play something the day it releases hasn’t been a thing for me since like 2010… which I agree with you were just generally better, more exciting times for the medium.
Amen. I also have a ton of issues with contemporary game design—padding playtime with procedural generation, prioritizing graphics, world size, or narrative over gameplay… etc.
Nowadays, I feel as if every game tries to compete for "most game" while lacking cohesion and polished ideas.
And to top it off: non-optimized game size. I'm sorry—I don't care if your game is $2.99, I'm not downloading 80GBs just to try a game I may refund an hour later.
New games just don't have a 'punch' to it anymore. They are not not game breaking anymore.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with old games either. They are the same as they were, which is why reboots and remakes are so popular.
I want to agree but some games are really well done. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a good example.
However
I feel like many people are so focused on graphics and looks, like raytracing for example, that gameplay/story has become less important? Sucks but it is what it is I guess..
A good story isn't something groundbreaking that marketing teams can slap on the box in the same way they can with ray tracing dlss or whatever else I guess
People are reading the headline and assuming they're talking about older single-purchase games, but the article is actually referring to mostly MTX-driven games that get continuous updates.
And the data further shows, in Newzoo's own words, that these 908 million "PC players are heavily skewed towards older, live service games."
Remember that even things like Rocket League are about a decade old at this point, and games like LoL, Dota 2 and CS:GO are even older
Because crypto miners ruined gaming top end GPUs used to be $300 Max, now were looking in the thousands to have the best GPU for like 6 months, and you can't buy a used one because it could be a clapped out card used in a crypto miner
Bitcoin switched to industrial ASICs a long time ago, and Ethereum has completely moved away from proof-of-work mining in 2022, see: https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/merge/
The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.
GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked, no one mines with GPUs anymore, at least not for any major blockchain. GPUs are mainly being used with AI now
That doesn't mean that their effect on the GPU market will up and vanish overnight. Market correction doesn't usually go down as fast as it goes up.
Edit: add to that the tariff situation and the standoff with China and Taiwan (where all the processors for gpus are made), and you have a situation where things are just going to get more expensive no matter what.
The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.
I don't follow crypto trends so I hadn't heard about this either.
I had to look up proof-of-stake, and for Ethereum apparently is required to stake 32 coins to operate a node. Another google search shows me a single Ethereum coin is just north of $2k USD. So someone mining Etherium today needs to have more than $64k if Etherium to even run a node now?!
I don't think it's even necessarily that the GPU pricing has ballooned. I think the main reason is that that every new game has to compete with pretty much every other game ever made. For example I enjoyed Death Stranding and I am interested in Death Stranding 2, but I'm probably not getting in on launch because there's a big chance I'll probably start playing Stardew Valley for the n'th time, because I feel like that's what I want to play. I'll probably play DS2 when I get the Kojima itch.
IMO, GPU prices have an impact. Modern gaming has a bad habit of not optimizing games relying on people getting newer GPUs for performance.
Mix that with the pre-order/early access monetization, and we are to a point where games have made their money before release, and beans counters don't want to put money in QA because there is no quantifiable ROI (there is a ROI, but it is hard to quantify), which is a no-no in their world.
Indie games have a tendancy to be less GPU demanding, and thus, usually have a better performance experience
Yep, that's the thing. Games have to be bigger, better, more fun than ever before, and yet the publishers and management want it to be done quicker and quicker than ever before, so it's a pretty difficult thing. That, combined with bad working conditions and the public shitting on you because "game devs are shitty/greedy/etc" with developers being used coloquially to absorb all the blame that should be reserved for management, and things are in a pretty tough spot.
Though, at the same time, it's a better time now than ever before to actually be a gamer, because not only can you play any half-decent new games, but you can also play the entire library of older games, retro games, etc.
Why should I dump 60usd plus into a multiplayer focused game I'll maybe get to play 4 hours a week during prime times that is going to shrivel up and die in 2 years time when the next big thing comes out?
Or I can play all these games enjoy, have passionate modding communities adding to the game for free on top of me picking the entire thing up for maybe 20usd on sale if not less.
Most new AAA games suck, that's why. I miss when games were made with passion rather than for a quick soulless cashgrab.
Now they're made with marketable 'passion', 'dedication', and a team with 'a family atmosphere'. My personal favorite 'respect for the lore and previous games in the series' definitely never has made a triple A game worse for wear.
Disingenuous buzzwords with no objective meaning behind them are my favorite things to hear in a game. It tells me to steer clear as far away as I possibly can. Which is a shame because I'd like to be excited about vampire: the masquerade 2.
Steph Sterlings' recent video hits it directly. The big publishers see Balatro doing well, so they go copy Balatro. They spend a lot of effort looking for the next Balatro in all the wrong places. Their attempts to copy it will fail, because people who like Balatro will just play Balatro. This will continue until there's a new indie darling dominating the sales charts, and then they'll try to copy that.
The industry is deeply misguided.
Well. The nature of my backlog is like I wait for games to come down in price and by the time I get to them they're 10 years old haha.
I also have a habit of playing through the entire series before playing the newest one. I'm currently playing Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion which is the 4th game from Japan in that series but the 2nd to be released in US, SO I'm playing through it even though I don't like it and will beat the next two games to finally play Trails in the Sky which is the one I really probably should have started with.
I do that with all my games, like Doom Eternal looks cool and so does the upcoming Dark Ages, but I went back and played Doom 1 & 2. 64, then the updated remaster of Doom 1 & 2 when that came out, and now I'm working on Doom 3. I got one more whole Doom game before I even get to Eternal.
There are good new games, but i cannot afford to pay for them. Especially when I blow through them in a couple of weeks/days.
Which is why I pirate them as a lot of new games lack quality content, are often buggy, and riddled with dlc/micro transactions. Why risk my money on a buggy undeveloped game when I can 'test' them for free, at times I have gone back and paid for a game I really enjoyed… but that is super rare.
Plus GPUs are overpriced, especially with AI taking over as it is, the price is just going to go up.
Why bother with all of that when I can just boot up Factorio again. Additionally mods really make old games feel fresh again... And they are free.
My principle is "One euro, for one hour".
Does the game cost 40e? Am I unsure whether I'd enjoy the game for 40 hours? I'll get it for free first. Does it stick for that 40 hours or more, or will I get sure enough while playing to play that 40 hours at least? OK, take my money. No? It gets forgotten in my folder, and probably deleted later.
I have hundreds of games on steam.
I mostly play minecraft.
My games library is so huge, and I suffer from choice paralysis all the time.
You might get some use out of this Steam randomizer, I've used it before when I can't pick what to play. You can apply filters too.
Terraria. Every time I fire up the deck to buy a new game, a few days later I am back to Terraria.
I like the game (as well as the similar Starbound) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.
I suppose in a few months, after this current round of Minecraft, I'll be pulled into Terraria again. I had a pretty good head of steam on the way to finishing my 2 year old run of BG3 when I made the mistake of opening Minecraft... Terraria is about the only thing that could rival minecraft in addictive qualities for me. It has the added benefit that I can talk my wife into playing Terraria but she won't touch minecraft.
I'm still playing Skyrim.
I was playing a bunch of Skyrim with mods last year! Awesome game.
This would be a great time to promote !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
JOINED, any more ways to find sublemmings idk what are these called lol
!newcommunities@lemmy.world is a great place to discover new communities. As for big ones that already exist I’m sure there’s probably a list of big communities out there somewhere, otherwise browsing by All > Top 6 Hours or All > Hot will give you a good mix of everything. Then you can add communities you like from there
Edit: also lots of communities will shout out other communities in their sidebars. Check those too
I'm not patient, I'm just broke.
It forces you to be patient. You fit the bill
There are just so many good games out there. No time to play them all. Also i think epic free games and this prime free game stuff contributed to it. I just started playing bioshock bc of it. Also on pc it feels so good to play an old game and just crank up every setting to max, 4k, install some mods, no ai upscaling but msaa 8x and not having to worry about performance even on mid range PCs. I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games since for me image clarity is much more important than how many polygons a gun has or how the puddle of water reflects light. Like even the new unreal engine 5 games cannot run maxxed out on a 5090 in 4k without upscaling. They only look good in trailers.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works might be of interest, if you don't follow it.
But yeah...there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
There are some downsides, though:
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
And also, 60 EUR for a single game is a price at least I am not willing to pay for the average game, so in addition to getting a better game, I also get a cheaper one.
There is stuff worth paying that much out there, but it's not Call of Duty Black Ops Eleventeen
I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games...
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style, the graphical fidelity of today's games was too far out of reach. BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction.
AAA games used to have character to them, now every person has to have 1200 individually rendered pores and a remaster every few years to make it look more realistic (cough cough The Last of Us)
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style>
BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction. >
I totally agree with you. Another good example is Alice: Madness Returns. Just booted it up for the first time yesterday and it looks so good, pleasing in a way.
I bet a small portion of them don’t buy GPU every gen or ever other. 1080 Ti strong.
1070 gang for me
When people found out PhysX doesn't work on the new Nvidia cards I saw several people here on Lemmy say that it doesn't matter because almost no one plays older games. I seriously don't understand how anyone could think that, it's astoundingly stupid and ignorant.
Because we have a giant backlog of steam sales.
I can wait till a game is $5. I've got so many to enjoy already.
Darktide, you're worth $5. Admit it. Release a dlc pack with new maps gamemodes characters classes whatever if you want more money. But the base game is worth $5.
I wanna shoot the heavy bolter at shit. The sounds for the gun sound so satisfyingly chunky. Slap that hunk of metal in the emperor's name. Hell yeah
See you in 2-3 years
I usually wait until the triple A games at under $30. I have a backlog of games I still have yet to touch, so I don't feel the need to immediately buy games. At $30, even if I only play it for a few hours, it is a decent value per hour.
Me, reading the topic while playing Morrowind: "Yeah, that seems correct!"
That's just the starting grid of the annual Cliff Racer GP
Makes me feel like home 🥰
I can hear this picture
That reminds me— I gotta do another Fallout: New Vegas run.
Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it's a way to add some new life to the thing.
Yes, actually that was my intended next run! I just gotta remember how to set up everything.
I find it kind of funny how games are becoming more mainstream, but every once in a while I still meet people that are like "games are a waste of time". But then again I guess people said that about movies and tv and still do sometimes.
Also I've been playing guild wars 2 again. Base game is like 10 years old but it's still fun
I think the people who often say this feel some personal guilt for how much time they feel they’ve wasted instead of doing whatever it is in life they have yet to achieve. It’s a matter of perspective.
Currently 100% of my time is spent on games that are "six or more years old", and a lot of that is spent on games that are more than 30 years old. But! I'm playing newly-made community content for 30 y/o games. This kind of retrogaming is something that evades Steam statistics entirely because it usually means playing custom sourceports of old games which rarely are on Steam. One old game I play on Steam to contribute to this statistics is Skyrim.
For me, definitely older and indie (old and new). I don't get a lot of time these days to sit at my PC. Using my steam deck primarily these days is part of the reason I'm playing older games, but seriously I have a problem with steam/gog/name a storefront/ backlogs. I have so many games already, great time to review what I bought because of hype but never played.
Yeah that whole conundrum, if you have the money to buy new games you don't have the time to play them, if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money to buy them.
Does "older games" only mean the initial public release? So world of Warcraft, Dota 2, Minecraft... all those games that are constantly updated etc. too?
Because that would be a really useless statistic. Many games are not a one time release and done thing anymore. They evolve over time. The games I listed have large player bases.
Exactly what I was thinking. While it's a great headline the article is nonsense. What about early access? Did those players play any new games? How much time was spent afk? Were those old games new purchases? This is a cherry picked statistic and almost certainly doesn't paint a clear picture or tell any story except "live service games work"
I see tf2, i click
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I just didn't like games/am depressed/games are getting BETTER, actually.
Games as a whole are getting better, but AAA is getting worse.
Indies are so good right now, and most without crazy DRM!
Are they getting worse overall or are we just comparing all of the current AAA games to the best AAA of the past few decades? Or comparing the current versions of series to the high points, which might just be the first game in the series?
We definitely have a number of high quality AAA games that come out each year. Most prior years had a few high quality AAA games and a lot of mediocre or terrible ones too. It's kind of like music where the average quality over time is actually pretty consistent, but in any given year there are a lot of turds and there are certain trends that are common to those turds.
90% of every entertainment medium tends to be terrible, but when we look back we mostly remember the 10% that were good and only a few of the absolute worst to laugh at.
In general, I'd agree that games are getting better, if for no other reason that there are so many made these days that eventually you'll find something great.
If nothing else, the total volume of great games that are available to play keeps increasing because of massive improvements in backwards compatibility through steam and other online game distributors.
Factorio considered older?
Probably? I have memories from over a decade back so
I mean, Factorio's early access is the middle point between now and when God of War 2 was released. Meaning that when Factorio was on early access God of War 2 was as old then as Factorio is now.
The article puts the cutoff for "old" as being 6 years or more. Officially, Factorio was released in 2020, but we all know that any other studio would have considered it done years before that.
DLC is new..
So much more room to grow in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE
I'm playing Fallout 4 right now. It's not the only game I play by any means. Too many new games are overly focused on graphics or monetization. I'm always trying new games and the better ones often don't have the best graphics. We want 2010 gameplay. Hell, I'll still play Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY edition, but older games usually need resolution and texture upgrade mods. Fortunately a lot of great old games actually get them.
Older games = more than 2 years old? Then the same goes for readers, movie and TV watchers, etc media consumption most isn't from the current or previous years
I'm playing a new old game, because i'm playing the Suikoden Remaster. There for I have beaten the system by simultaniously playing both an 20+ year old game and a brand new game thats a few weeks old.
I got a steam deck on the way and I'm so stoked to use it for Suikoden. I hope they remaster number three!
Suikoden 3 needs far, far more than just a remaster.
It needs a full blown remake, both of the story, and the game, to get rid of that trinity sight mechanic. cause the constant shifting perspectives absolutely kept me out of the game, cause every time I start to get invested boom rip me out of it and make me control someone else for a long period. I understand what they were trying to do, but it was one of the most fundamentally bad game design choices i've ever seen.
Suikoden 4 has a similar problem. They would need to remake that, too.. and create a ton of new story and side content.. because S4 is like a 7 hour game, that only takes 40 hours to play because of the absolutely ludicrously insane encounter rate.. which is very blatantly used to pad game length time.
Suikoden 5, Hell.. I dont even need a remaster. Just wrap the PS2 version in an emulator and release it on PC and I'll be happy as can be.
The Steam Deck is actually wonderful for retro games. EmuDeck makes setting up emulators a breeze, and the roms can easily be found online legitimately ripped from your own copies of the game and loaded onto a MicroSD card.
I have a large backlog of five(?)+ plus year old games that are really good and I have yet to play. I'd much rather burn through those enjoying them on high settings instead of playing current games on low settings while trying to dodge crap monetization.
It’s the Baldur’s Gate saga for me right now, and I’m still in the BG1 campaign.
It is such a great game to play on the couch with a trackball while chilling with the family.
It's wild how good the cheap games are these days. I'm 30 hours into playing Noita, have hundreds of hours in Vampire Survivor.
And I got about 15 hours into Dragon Age: Veilguard before it occurred to me I could crack open the Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition and actually have an enjoyable experience.
I’m 30 hours into playing Noita
I kind of want more there. There isn't DLC, and there aren't clones.
I mean, yes, the game is large and very replayable, and I have a blast with it...but it's also kind of the only option for that gameplay.
I also play it modded with health regeneration, because the difficulty level on the vanilla game is very high, and encourages very cautious play.
11.35% of the human population.
I don't even know what the newest game I even own is... Helldivers 2? Except for Elden Ring and it's DLC, I haven't bought anything close to release for years. HD2 came out last year and I bought it last week.
Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring are the last 2 AAA games I bought close to launch for full price. Other than that, I picked up Hades 2 in early access. The rest of my library is all stuff that I bought on sale.
I do have Monster Hunter and Avowed on my wishlist but I think I'm going to be patient. If I do pull the trigger, it would probably be for Avowed because I want more Obsidian games. On a related note Grounded is $20 on Steam right now so I stopped that up even though I beat it back when I had Game Pass.
Yeah, I've lost track myself. I just follow feeds that alert of me free deals.
I actually learned that I can't even sort my Steam library by release date because of this thread. Otherwise I would actually know lol
Either oldish titles or Indies, mainstream game devs are pure malaria
Was just now in another thread having nostalgia about this game: Reamlz.
It was distributed as freeware/ shareware back in the 90's. You had to physically mail the producers cash if you wanted to get the expansions. I played through Balders Gate III recently and honestly, it doesn't even come close to the replayability that Realmz had.
Realmz was out about the same time as Spiderweb Software's games (Exile series, later re-released as Avernum series). Both were popular RPGs for the Macintosh (though I believe both had Windows releases as well).
While I did play and enjoy Realmz back in the day, I personally preferred the Spiderweb Software games. More complicated interaction with the world, and I preferred the writing. Less-pretty, though the Avernum re-release was isometric and had new graphics. Have you ever tried them?
I don't know if I can recommend them in 2025, but if you're still enjoying Realmz, I figure that the Spiderweb Software stuff might also be something of interest.
EDIT: The current Steam sale, which runs for another two days, appears to have a bundle of all of their games on sale for 60% off. I didn't personally enjoy the Geneforge series as much as the Exile/Avernum series, and the Avadon series is considerably simpler, and didn't really grab me. But a lot of the games are also on sale individually, so...shrugs
EDIT2: It looks like Realmz has not seen a Steam release; thought I'd check to see if it was on Steam too.
I got that bundle at 92% off and it took me 2 years to finish. It was awesome
Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.
I might buy that bundle on just your recommendation. I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it, since I pretty much only play on my steam deck these days.
Curious what makes Realmz so replayable. BG3 has so many unique storylines and endings you’d be hard pressed to play them all. Not to mention character classes and subclasses.
So Realmz is truly open world in a way that BG3 only pretends to be. In BG3, they create the sensation of this huge diversity of endings and paths you can take, but its all pretty much a fugazi: the illusion of choice when actually only a small number of endings are possible. In BG3, the choices add "color" along the way, but they don't fundamentally change anything about the game, or what its about (like what even is the point of the game?). I have a whole essay of criticism I've developed on it, because I truly did enjoy it, but it was so.. it pointed in the direction of how much possibility it could have but didn't execute on it. Its really only an impression of what it claims to be.
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less. Then you get into some corner of the map in Realmz, and you find some cave or castle or dungeon to explore.. and it just keeps going. And going and going and going. And instead of it being one monolithic story like BG3, its a world in which many BG3's happen. The spider tower. The kobald army invasion. The castle in the clouds. The necromancers tower.
Another thing is, predictability/ "jail breaking". Modern games have this expectation that we "know" everything that is possible for an item or method or whatever. This is a big departure from early games where we would often "find out" about what is possible. In modern games when something unexpected happens, the dev's patch it and change the game. In old games when something unexpected happens.. well.. thats just part of the game. Dota is a great example of this, where basically, finding ways to break the game to come up with a new strategy was quite literally how the game was played. Its now devolved into a poor impression of itself. In realmz, I remember beating some adventure and its final wizard and getting a wand of polymorph. I used it on one of my characters and it polymorphed them into a red dragon and it killed the entire party. I highly doubt the game developers planned that as a possibility, but game development then was often about creating possibilities, not limiting them. Whenever anyone figures something like that out in BG3, they patch it and the game becomes a little more sterile, a little more boring.
Also, BG3 is just kinda... empty. Which I was really surprised by, considering how many studios create amazing, populated worlds with complex day night cycles and economies. In BG3, once you've pretty much cleared an area, thats it. Not much more to do other than advance to the next area. In Realmz, you had to watch your ass if you were really out there, because no-matter what state your party was in, a random encounter can happen at any time, and in that game, death is permanent. Also, wtf is with there not being a day night cycle in BG3? Like wth. I've got a damn vampire and they aren't weak during the day and OP af at night?
Never played it, but this type of game is up my alley. For what it's worth:
@tonytins 6 years is old now? : couldnt care less about the competitive/pvp stuff but im playing x4 foundations most of the time currently and some genres dont get that many new entries anyway, like open world action games like gta5. Thats from 2013 and most other titles like mafia 3 or just cause 4 arent much newer either
I hear ya'. Technology (including games) progressed so rapidly that I feel older than I honestly should.
I recently replayed a game from 2004 that I remember playing in 2004... (KOTOR 2)
My most played game in my Steam library is Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus which came out in 2013. The newest game in my library is Atelier Sophie DX a rerelease of a 2015 game.
True in my case. All of my favorites either were released before 2020 or originally released before 2020 and I'm playing the re-release.
Only new IP I got excited about after 2020 was Project G.G. and I strongly doubt it'll ever see the light at this point.
if you mean i do spend my time playing nes and snes via emulator, you are right
92% of my playtime is Minecraft, makes sense.
Where my Civ 6 people at?! Wooo!
Civ4 is the best Civ.
I saw a stat on Civ VI steam page today that 45 000 people were playing it at that moment. That counts for something!
UnCiv yo
There is just so much time in a day and I think nostalgia does come to play with this as well. Gaming tends to correlate to being younger and having more free time, so by playing the same games you did back then you're reliving those days.
Just a thought anyway, I tend to play older games as well, but also newer games like Baldur's gate 3 or Path of Exile 2.
While I agree that some of the reasons are because of industry direction and affordability. I do have to mention also that it could also be because of nostalgia, familiarity, simplicity and people still chipping at their library.
Upvoted for mentioning simplicity.
I have been playing Galaga regularly since 1981. Still play it at least once a week.
& Indie games
launches Baldur's Gate.exe ♪♫ "Brave, brave Sir Garrick, Sir Garrick led the way. Brave, brave Sir Garrick, Sir Garrick ran away." ♪♫
Heroes 3 HoTA is still excellent and being actively developed.
Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was "oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I'll wait until I get a better PC." [wait 10 years] "My ADHD has gone worse, I can't play all this stuff"
I can agree with this: All the hype around KCD:2 led me to buying/playing KCD:1
I play Rocket League and ~30,000 MAME games on a converted Arcade 1up. I'm waiting for my payment to go through for Vintage Story though -- that one is fairly new!
