What was it about games in the 90s and early 2000s that made them feel infinitely more soulful than games now?

>DUDE THERE'S ONE GAME I DON'T LIKE EVERYTHING IS SHIT REEEE
lol
inb4 "hurrdurr post a list"

>NOOOOOOO THIS GAME CHOOSE TO NOT HAVE MUSIC!!!!
literal autism, get help

>no music
The game may have just been an interactive movie, but it did have an OST you jizzbrain

Yeah, you've got a point there. Undertale is honestly the only modern game that has given me the same feeling that older games have given me, and it's not just because of the retro graphics.
I wonder if the indie scene is our only hope.

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I think that's just nostalgia

>brainwashed kid calls others NPCs
lol, it's like speaking to a bot, so predictable

Developers creating their own engines that were different from each other giving each game its own feel.

Just go back to playing The Last of Us and Fortnite. Enjoy your smartphone games.

The jump to 3D meant that we were seeing genuinely ground-breaking, genre-defining games coming out very quickly. Things like 3D level design, camera control, z-targeting, lighting, physics, etc. were all being figured out in the short span of a few years while at the same time budgets and profits were increasing, games were getting bigger, people were trying new things with storytelling and gameplay. And despite the new technologies allowing for games to do entirely brand new things for the first time the limitations were still harsh enough to demand creative solutions.

???
Who said I play any of those games? lol is that your whole knowledge of "modern" games?

It's not JUST nostalgia. Games were legitimately better before they started adding online features.

The fact that we were younger and impressionable, and the industry had yet to trabsform in the bloated monstrosity it is today

it felt like things were progressing, toward a future. nowadays games just feel like they are running in place

meanwhile the nes, snes, n64, and ps1 are flooded with a mountain of shit games conveniently ignored because hey, the wii had shovelware and it's a new thing and only new thing bad

Even the shittiest games on those consoles felt soulful.
Like as much as Superman 64 sucks, it has soul. The Last of Us doesn't.

This.
Where my Bad Cat bros. at? That shit was peak soul hnnnng comfy~

You were too young to truly notice and admit the flaws, plus you weren't the one paying for them so any flaws probably didn't cause outright buyer's remorse. You were probably just happy to get a new game every few months so you played it to death no matter what it was.

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I think you can gauge soul in a game with a simple heuristic. If you were the studio, would you be proud of the game you created ?

And the answer is no for most games made in the west now. Slavic games still have it. Some Japanese games still do as well. Indie scene in the west also, to an extent

Lots of factors but essentially it's about money. Gaming was less of a business. Commercialization also brings in more casuals and suits. It turns from passion to job.

Several aspects.
The lowering bar of entry for everything from uni to jobs accelerated the decline of the average ability of employees. Coupled with outsourcing, it has lead to very mechanical job-like environments across all forms of art and entertainment at the high-budget level. Yet at the same time, low-budget entries also strongly lost in quality due to the aforementioned effect, in addition to much higher bar of entry for both technical ability and player expectation.
Not to mention the growing cost of life combined with many changes in the marketplace: it's borderline non-viable to do anything software-related in western and central europe (money-wise), causing a brain-drain of tech talents, while in the north american continent, you are now expected to work 70 hours workweeks on a 40 hours contract and will be sued if you work on something else on your off time.
Thus, hobbyists also have trouble keeping up and thus, free flash games (remember this 'bar of entry' I mentioned?) are now paid-for clones of yesteryear's flash games available on steam only (tm) and made in unity.
Back to the high-end, another critical aspect is the discovery that advertisement can be 100% of your business strategy and you CANNOT lose this way since consoomers are sheeples. Why try to make a good game in that case? Just pay more for advertising, which means you need better return to justify the higher expenses, which means you can't afford to take risks (which goes round and round and now everything's fucked).
Then, many changes in the software and hardware world alike has aligned to make game development even more hardcore if you truly believe in a vision: a culture of anti-testing (see: consoomer are sheeple, they don't care if the game ctd's on launch every time, just patch it sometimes next year), anti-quality and overall laziness (optimization being the last of anyone's worry across the board), programmable pipeline, muh vulkan...

soul is an absolute meme, I can't wait for it to die. It is literally no more than your changing perspective. When you're young, this stuff is more exciting and intriguing, so you view it with rose tinted glasses nowadays. You'll also feel the same way about games with similar artstyles/architecture in the future. Just face it, you've changed, probably even more than the games have.
I have some younger friends that swear that CoD MW1 and/or 2 are the best games ever made, then I find out it's also one of the first games they've ever played. So it isn't just us boomers.
Try to base criticisms on objectivity when judging games, I think it would make some of these opinions a lot less shit

Nostalgia.
Look forward people calling Fortnite soulful in 20-30 years from now.

Zoom zoom!
ZOOOOm zoom zoom zOoMoom.

The west was irrelevant & every single year aside from 2000 & 2004, a Japanese game won GOTY

It was before they grey and brown area of the mid to late 2000s fucked everything up

WWbabby spotted. WW is the opposite of soul. Its cringe incarnate.

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Yeah, I think it does have a lot to do with game companies having more people work harder to make inferior content. The McDonaldization of society.
Creating went from being something people wanted to do, to something they feel they have to do.

>debunked webm
Wind Waker is one of the most soulful video games of all time. Like, if you look up soul in a dictionary, the Great Sea should be the picture.
Anyway, don't get so hung up on the individual games. It's the idea that matters.

> ACFag spamming his autism again

Many variables, but the main thing is that marketers didn't have the influence of the internet to make safe decisions so every studio was taking risk and trying to one up the competition rather than following the lead.
Also, limited technology forced devs to think creatively and make obtuse decisions since graphics and memory were limited.

You could make an almost identical collage out of new releases in those same franchises for the past 5 years

>says this while bitching about The Last of Us and Fortnite
lol

And said collage would clearly prove the soullessness of modern variants, thanks for playing.

you're wrong actually

Don't you get it? New=Bad, these people will never see the truth, they'll just try to bury legitimate arguments with namecalling and insults.

I don't see how that's relevant.

That's not true at all. There's plenty of good new games, but when it pertains to high budget titles, they took far more risk and care back then.

There is plenty of SOUL on the market, you need to stop looking to games with hundred million dollar budgets though

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Zoom zoom elsewhere little zoomer shit.

You better be pretending.

OK zoomer

Outside the 'you grew up' part

The lack of graphics and general technology means you had to use your imagination more, and dig deeper to find reasons to like the game, so you grew a more connected bond with it because of what you had to put in

now everything is presented at face value and judged only on its own merit, not what you put into it

It's like why sometimes sloppy painting styles or sketches will look nicer than a full finished picture, your brain fills in the blanks the best way possible

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>they'll just try to bury legitimate arguments with namecalling and insults.

They couldn't just slap on super realistic models and buy assets. They had to work around graphical limitations and add style to make it look good.

I don't think it's just the limitations. I feel like people were trying to put more emphasis on aesthetics back then. Now it feels like no one cares about aesthetics anymore.

Love it when zoom zoom niggers try to say these things like they could name even one game in OP's pic.

Is that fucking Sonic Heroes?
LOL
O
L

the absolute state if GCbabies

sonic heroes is garbage

It's the Japanese game industry that's better than ever. It's the Western industry that has become shit.

Based

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>last of us
>no music
this is your brain on retard mode

niceee

What music is there in the game?
youtube.com/watch?v=aLg98S4sxsE

>says the fat marginalized retard venting his shit life on Yas Forums
>NOOO, things couldn't have been better back then, even though everything indicates they were and average IQ is sinking each year
>my life is shit so your must be too!

Is anything a bigger zoomer radar than someone who tries to play off old games as being purely nostalgia, or makes up some pseudo-psychology bullshit such as ?

You probably severely lack analytical skills if the only reason you can come up with such a large portion of people liking old games is because of nostalgia, or some fill in the blank shit lol. There was simply more effort, more variety, more releases, and more new and fresh ideas. It's so obvious if you just spend a few seconds analyzing past releases but you just parrot retarded shit other people tell you.

>What made soulful games feel soulful?
The simple fact that they were made with a soul and not with a accountability book.
In the past games were made exclusively by nerds, from the CEO to the studio janitor, now they are made by nerds enslaved by a CEO that doesn't even like videogames.