I believe it. I also believe it’s totally artificial. As in not our fault at all.
Back then, I could get RPGs like Guild Wars with insanely deep build systems and emphasis on experimentation. Real thinking man’s games.
But then they just assumed we’re all dumb, and dumbed down skill trees in damn near every RPG and RPG-lite thing. You basically have to play Diablo-like RPGs to get any of the good stuff now.
ScucciMane
The appeal of strategy isn’t gone it just isn’t done properly a lot of times. When I find a good strategy mechanic (I find it from all types of games from Madden to Shadow of War to Capitalism Lab) it really hooks me and keeps me engaged
wattur
With the ever-increasing psychological tricks of making games addicting profit generators, it makes sense.
If anyone is looking for strategic games where you have to plan out every move, try nuzlocking difficult Pokémon rom hacks. Radical red, emerald kaizo, run and bun, renegade platinum, etc. you really have to plan out every move while improvising based on your encounters. Pretty fun!
MonkeyMercenaryCapt
Bottom half subway surfer rules all.
Seriously, it’s nauseating how little attention span anyone has anymore.
chincerd
One issue old games had was moon logic puzzles that were insane, so you remove those and you are left with simple logic puzzles.
Second is the fact a type of puzzles in games or strategies have been done so much that they stop being noble and as such requiere zero thinking anymore, light switches, pressure switches, delaying the aoe effects to deal with swarm of enemies, focusing the healer first, etc.
Third is the removal of none meaningful choices in game progression, older games that had skill trees and choices in stats often allowed the player to screw themselves by choosing horribly like increasing strength on a mage character, games have try hard to make every choice at least acceptable even if for fun sake without making the player feel like they screw up.
You just have to replace all that with meaningful choices that aren’t there to pad the game time and where your planning doesn’t shoot you in the foot but you will realize it three hours into playing, which is why roguelikes became so popular, you screw up? You die, start over do better
SvennEthir
And then there are those of us that like creating Path of Exile builds.
Jaives
gaming became dumbed down because it became main stream. so it had to cater to everyone. the more complex a game is, the smaller its userbase is gonna be.
QueenDeadLol
Its also because gaming is mainstream now.
The average person you see on the street isn’t learning Path of Exile for 150+ hours, just to be able to do pinnacle bosses and meta-crafting.
The average person is going to take 1 look at Civ 6, Stellaris, and CK3 and say “fuck that.”
Fruit-Blood
Jokes on them. I was never interested in strategic thinking or planning. Unga bunga brute force all day everyday.
teoshie
tbh as I get older I just don’t want to think anymore
shackelman_unchained
Pfff. Say that to my 1000+ hours of civ.
ONE MORE TURN.
WorkReddit0001
This is why I enjoy the “survival” games built around logistics or physics simulation.
* Factorio
* Kerbal Space Program 1
* Space Engineers
* Stormworks
* Minecraft: Create mod + addons
* From the Deep
* Starbase
All of these games have varying degrees of depth to them with my favorites being Space Engineers and Stormworks. In SE it’s running a ton of physics calculations all the time and everything in the game is voxel based, so making an airtight vessel that you can walk around in while traveling around the star system is actually pretty rewarding.
Stormworks also simulates something similar with enclosed fluid volumes, buoyancy, etc, but the real fun is in the modular engines and microcontrollers. I had to learn LUA and a plethora of other things to eventually learn how to build an Engine Controller + 5/6/8 speed manual/auto transmission. It’s wildly complex and really rewarding when you get it down.
Just for context, I’m a middle-aged, married, man with a career + IRL social obligations and outdoor hobbies, if that adequately describes the quality of my gaming free time throughout the week.
rios02506
I love my strategy games but it does feel like they get dumber every year to the point where it’s simply a min max game. No political system works with AI or Multiplayer, everything is just about min/maxing, and every game now is an Avg base game with $100s of DLC(looking at you my beloved paradox). And like everyone else has said, loot boxes and dopamine hits make money and that’s all they care about anymore
RedshiftRedux
It’s a double edged problem and both sides are doing the cutting.
Developers- Stop dumbing down games so we actually feel challenged to earn things.
Gamers-(Only applies if you’re complaining about not being challenged) Stop looking up guides if it’s your first time through a game! Having prescience is a cheat code.
It doesn’t surprise me at all when you consider how stupidly easy most games have gotten, and the culture of watching 10 YouTube videos and reading 5 online guides before even booting up the game.
Recover20
Is that what they think or have game companies just stopped providing AA or AAA games with none of the above?
WaitAMinuteman269
An entire generation groomed by corporations to be addicts.
Souperman55
Wasn’t the most popular/acclaimed game last year Baldur’s Gate 3? A game that’s all about thinking strategically in combat, dialogue, choices, etc. I can’t think of a game I’ve played in the last which required more thought and planning than this game, so this article seems to be very selective.
GrouchyCategory2215
I think it’s more likely that just a whole lot more people classified themselves as “Gamers” now. It’s just a lot more broad and mainstream, and to appeal to that games have become “dumber” to make sure they all can catch that lowest denominator.
specifichero101
Ya a lot of video games have “quality of life’d” their way into being less challenging and more straightforward. Too expensive to make games that people get frustrated with and don’t want to play.
I played Returnal for the first time last year and it was a genuinely tough game to wrap my head around the challenge and the strategy. Like 10 hours to really settle into it, and then it becomes almost too easy once you figure it out and it’s extremely rewarding. Reading opinions about the game on Reddit can be very polarizing though. Its design and challenge piss some people off a lot to the point where they consider it poorly designed when it’s just a purposeful choice.
I think it didn’t sell that well because of those choices despite it being a near flawless execution of what it’s trying to achieve.
Elegant_Spot_3486
I still prefer both types of games. Sometimes I want mindless and other times I want the tactics and strategy.
nogoodgreen
I think that grouping everyone together under the label “Gamers” is insane. Theres tons of people out there who play nothing but Europa Universalis and Civ and Xcom, and some of those people also play Halo and Hades or Rocket League. Maybe people that play nothing but CoD or Ultrakill fall into this “Less interested in strategic thinking and planning” banner because they enjoy something more energetic and fluid where its less about the thought process and more instinct and reflex but call me crazy for thinking grouping everyone together on a chart thats a “Gamer” is what led to a ton of stagnation because games started being built to appeal to the widest possible audience of “Gamers” instead of focusing on what its themes and mechanics/gameplay loops should be.
RandoDando10
…meanwhile a game entirely based on Strategic thinking and planning is dominating Steam for the past few weeks.
Love ya Manor Lords
Stamperdoodle1
Disagree.
Gamers love strategic thinking and planning (well, some do – but no less than ever before).
The difference is game designers have been dumbing games down for decades to appeal to the lowest common denominator – at least in AAA games.
What was the last RPG to come out with a properly designed world that you had to plan your approach for? Where enemies aren’t all lazily “scaled” to your level whenever you level up? Elden ring was popular in large part because From Software are one of the last few developers out there creating games that reward LEARNING – not mindlessly following waypoints.
Humans_Suck-
Isn’t baldurs gate 3 one of the most popular games right now?
GamerGuyAlly
They just stopped making them in the scale they used to. They don’t make the super cash that casual audience games do so theres no point investing in them.
I’m old enough to remember Dungeon Keeper Mobile trying to gouge us, even the messy launch that was Sim City 4. Even now Cities Skylines 2 is a bad Cities Skylines 1. Companies aren’t trying to make mainstream deep complex games. The niches are successful though, give me a Grand Strategy any day. Anno does well. AoE is thriving 20 years on.
PKblaze
If your sample size grows it’s likely to diversify.
Gaming has grown from a niche hobby typically enjoyed by nerdier people into one with much broader appeal and therefore the audience is much broader.
28 Comments
I believe it. I also believe it’s totally artificial. As in not our fault at all.
Back then, I could get RPGs like Guild Wars with insanely deep build systems and emphasis on experimentation. Real thinking man’s games.
But then they just assumed we’re all dumb, and dumbed down skill trees in damn near every RPG and RPG-lite thing. You basically have to play Diablo-like RPGs to get any of the good stuff now.
The appeal of strategy isn’t gone it just isn’t done properly a lot of times. When I find a good strategy mechanic (I find it from all types of games from Madden to Shadow of War to Capitalism Lab) it really hooks me and keeps me engaged
With the ever-increasing psychological tricks of making games addicting profit generators, it makes sense.
Instant gratification, dopamine hits, skinner box mechanics, gambling loot boxes, FOMO, etc.
More strategic thinking and planning for me. >:D
If anyone is looking for strategic games where you have to plan out every move, try nuzlocking difficult Pokémon rom hacks. Radical red, emerald kaizo, run and bun, renegade platinum, etc. you really have to plan out every move while improvising based on your encounters. Pretty fun!
Bottom half subway surfer rules all.
Seriously, it’s nauseating how little attention span anyone has anymore.
One issue old games had was moon logic puzzles that were insane, so you remove those and you are left with simple logic puzzles.
Second is the fact a type of puzzles in games or strategies have been done so much that they stop being noble and as such requiere zero thinking anymore, light switches, pressure switches, delaying the aoe effects to deal with swarm of enemies, focusing the healer first, etc.
Third is the removal of none meaningful choices in game progression, older games that had skill trees and choices in stats often allowed the player to screw themselves by choosing horribly like increasing strength on a mage character, games have try hard to make every choice at least acceptable even if for fun sake without making the player feel like they screw up.
You just have to replace all that with meaningful choices that aren’t there to pad the game time and where your planning doesn’t shoot you in the foot but you will realize it three hours into playing, which is why roguelikes became so popular, you screw up? You die, start over do better
And then there are those of us that like creating Path of Exile builds.
gaming became dumbed down because it became main stream. so it had to cater to everyone. the more complex a game is, the smaller its userbase is gonna be.
Its also because gaming is mainstream now.
The average person you see on the street isn’t learning Path of Exile for 150+ hours, just to be able to do pinnacle bosses and meta-crafting.
The average person is going to take 1 look at Civ 6, Stellaris, and CK3 and say “fuck that.”
Jokes on them. I was never interested in strategic thinking or planning. Unga bunga brute force all day everyday.
tbh as I get older I just don’t want to think anymore
Pfff. Say that to my 1000+ hours of civ.
ONE MORE TURN.
This is why I enjoy the “survival” games built around logistics or physics simulation.
* Factorio
* Kerbal Space Program 1
* Space Engineers
* Stormworks
* Minecraft: Create mod + addons
* From the Deep
* Starbase
All of these games have varying degrees of depth to them with my favorites being Space Engineers and Stormworks. In SE it’s running a ton of physics calculations all the time and everything in the game is voxel based, so making an airtight vessel that you can walk around in while traveling around the star system is actually pretty rewarding.
Stormworks also simulates something similar with enclosed fluid volumes, buoyancy, etc, but the real fun is in the modular engines and microcontrollers. I had to learn LUA and a plethora of other things to eventually learn how to build an Engine Controller + 5/6/8 speed manual/auto transmission. It’s wildly complex and really rewarding when you get it down.
Just for context, I’m a middle-aged, married, man with a career + IRL social obligations and outdoor hobbies, if that adequately describes the quality of my gaming free time throughout the week.
I love my strategy games but it does feel like they get dumber every year to the point where it’s simply a min max game. No political system works with AI or Multiplayer, everything is just about min/maxing, and every game now is an Avg base game with $100s of DLC(looking at you my beloved paradox). And like everyone else has said, loot boxes and dopamine hits make money and that’s all they care about anymore
It’s a double edged problem and both sides are doing the cutting.
Developers- Stop dumbing down games so we actually feel challenged to earn things.
Gamers-(Only applies if you’re complaining about not being challenged) Stop looking up guides if it’s your first time through a game! Having prescience is a cheat code.
It doesn’t surprise me at all when you consider how stupidly easy most games have gotten, and the culture of watching 10 YouTube videos and reading 5 online guides before even booting up the game.
Is that what they think or have game companies just stopped providing AA or AAA games with none of the above?
An entire generation groomed by corporations to be addicts.
Wasn’t the most popular/acclaimed game last year Baldur’s Gate 3? A game that’s all about thinking strategically in combat, dialogue, choices, etc. I can’t think of a game I’ve played in the last which required more thought and planning than this game, so this article seems to be very selective.
I think it’s more likely that just a whole lot more people classified themselves as “Gamers” now. It’s just a lot more broad and mainstream, and to appeal to that games have become “dumber” to make sure they all can catch that lowest denominator.
Ya a lot of video games have “quality of life’d” their way into being less challenging and more straightforward. Too expensive to make games that people get frustrated with and don’t want to play.
I played Returnal for the first time last year and it was a genuinely tough game to wrap my head around the challenge and the strategy. Like 10 hours to really settle into it, and then it becomes almost too easy once you figure it out and it’s extremely rewarding. Reading opinions about the game on Reddit can be very polarizing though. Its design and challenge piss some people off a lot to the point where they consider it poorly designed when it’s just a purposeful choice.
I think it didn’t sell that well because of those choices despite it being a near flawless execution of what it’s trying to achieve.
I still prefer both types of games. Sometimes I want mindless and other times I want the tactics and strategy.
I think that grouping everyone together under the label “Gamers” is insane. Theres tons of people out there who play nothing but Europa Universalis and Civ and Xcom, and some of those people also play Halo and Hades or Rocket League. Maybe people that play nothing but CoD or Ultrakill fall into this “Less interested in strategic thinking and planning” banner because they enjoy something more energetic and fluid where its less about the thought process and more instinct and reflex but call me crazy for thinking grouping everyone together on a chart thats a “Gamer” is what led to a ton of stagnation because games started being built to appeal to the widest possible audience of “Gamers” instead of focusing on what its themes and mechanics/gameplay loops should be.
…meanwhile a game entirely based on Strategic thinking and planning is dominating Steam for the past few weeks.
Love ya Manor Lords
Disagree.
Gamers love strategic thinking and planning (well, some do – but no less than ever before).
The difference is game designers have been dumbing games down for decades to appeal to the lowest common denominator – at least in AAA games.
What was the last RPG to come out with a properly designed world that you had to plan your approach for? Where enemies aren’t all lazily “scaled” to your level whenever you level up? Elden ring was popular in large part because From Software are one of the last few developers out there creating games that reward LEARNING – not mindlessly following waypoints.
Isn’t baldurs gate 3 one of the most popular games right now?
They just stopped making them in the scale they used to. They don’t make the super cash that casual audience games do so theres no point investing in them.
I’m old enough to remember Dungeon Keeper Mobile trying to gouge us, even the messy launch that was Sim City 4. Even now Cities Skylines 2 is a bad Cities Skylines 1. Companies aren’t trying to make mainstream deep complex games. The niches are successful though, give me a Grand Strategy any day. Anno does well. AoE is thriving 20 years on.
If your sample size grows it’s likely to diversify.
Gaming has grown from a niche hobby typically enjoyed by nerdier people into one with much broader appeal and therefore the audience is much broader.