On the shoulders of giants

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avengeds12345@reddit

Cities: Skylines (the first one, not the shitty second one) mogged SimCity real hard too

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AxzoYT@reddit

It mogged its own sequel it was so good

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Scisir@reddit

seriously how that sequel still isn't at least playable is beyond me.

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Runs like crap, less modding support (no steam workshop is actually braindead decision making by the devs), still no bicycles and probably some other features I’m missing. Why they didn’t launch the game with at least C:S1 as a baseline, then EXPAND apon it is beyond me.

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Sturgiz@reddit

You mean decision making by CEO's, managers, stakeholders? Highly likely they just see this as an easy cash grab based on the popularity of the first one.

Still it's absolutely crazy they're so braindead that they can't see that making a smashing baseline game invites good workshop content, which is like having a salary-free workforce that invites even more buyers, in turn improving profits even more.

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qwertyalguien@reddit

That's the thing. Colossal Order is privately owned, and THEY pushed the date, not PDX.

Based on what they've pointed and what's in the game, they wanted to deepen the simulation by a lot, but entered development hell and decoded to just cut content and ship with what they had.

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AxzoYT@reddit

They had basically guaranteed profits, and possibly the best selling sandbox game of all time, but they completely fucked it up

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AlphaPhill@reddit

It's so they can sell the same DLCs a second time, duh.

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PussyDestrojer@reddit

no bicycles is nuts, why would you REMOVE depth from your sequel

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TrungusMcTungus@reddit

If i didn’t know for sure that Paradox was still a whole, functional game dev studio, id think that CS2 was having a Kerbal 2 situation where the studio got bought out and stripped for cash. CS2 is a disaster.

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Gaunt-03@reddit

One word: Paradox.

There’s a reason Vic3 doesn’t have the cult like following of Vic2. Praying to God Eu5 js good on release

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Linnkk@reddit

As someone who has damn near 8k hours in Vic2, I was VERY upset by Vic3. Granted now in 2025 the game is actually a lot of fun (plsworkoncombatparadox). The first year of Vic3 I had to force myself to try and figure out how to enjoy the game because of just how bad it was on release.

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GodSpider@reddit

I feel like this is just normal for paradox no? I don't know a single paradox game that was good on release, and I love paradox games

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avengeds12345@reddit

It just refused to die, I love it

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Neomataza@reddit

D E T E R M I N A T I O N

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I_cut_my_own_jib@reddit

What's wrong with the second one? Didn't even know it was out

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Zutroy2117@reddit

The fact that Cities: Skylines was inspired by SimCity and turned out to be infinitely better than any SimCity game ever made really says something.

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liveatthegarden@reddit

I love city builders and tried to get into Cities Skylines, but it just made me feel dumb cause I couldn’t figure out power lines lol

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themightyscott@reddit

It's good, but it isn't as fun as the classic Sim City games (2000 and 3000) for me. Doesn't have the charm.

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WantonKerfuffle@reddit

Well its competition was Sim Shitty 5, a game that would have been far more playable had I just pirated it.

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hamandcheezus64@reddit

i bought cities for cheap recently and couldnt get into it. this was my first city planning sim or whatever you call it. Is the original worth getting instead?

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MildlySaltedTaterTot@reddit

Did you get Cities: Skylines 2? Or the original from a decade ago

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hamandcheezus64@reddit

2

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MildlySaltedTaterTot@reddit

DEFINITELY give the first a shot. In game hints n tips are fantastic at getting you introduced into the gameplay loop

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Known-Ad-1556@reddit

Doom Dark Ages sales have been lacking, and the response has been less enthusiastic than for Eternal.

Valve just needs to release an all-RTX game to complete the Grand mog

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draconk@reddit

Its not selling well because its fucking expensive, Doom is niche, never has been a big seller on release and it cost 80 fucking Euro/Dollars just at the start of a recession, of course it was not going to sell great. the 2016 one came out at 50€ and eternal at 60€, everyone is playing Dark Ages on Gamepass and they never release playcount on there.

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Kalabawgaming@reddit

Did not help that the hardware is expensive i cant run the game

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SabunFC@reddit

Yeah. I only played Doom 2016 this year at 720p Medium on my Intel Graphics potato. The videogame industry is crazy if it thinks I'll ever be able to afford a ray tracing GPU.

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NordicWolf7@reddit

I don't know your financial situation, but the used market might be worth it. I'm picking up a used 3080 to replace my used 4060 for around $300.

Really the big drag isn't just the GPU, it's the board, PSU, processor, etc that all make up a decent gaming computer package.

gl to you though bro, I hope your situation improves and you get some spending money and can get caught up on things.

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SabunFC@reddit

My financial situation is - living in 3rd world country earning 3rd world country currency. I'm going to sound like Elon but I think the videogame industry is being held up by Millennials and Gen X who are middle aged or about to become middle aged. When these people quit gaming, Gen Z and Alpha are going to be a much smaller demographic for videogames. The videogame industry is crazy if it thinks 3rd world people like me will be able to afford $1000 GPUs or $80 games or whatever crazy amount they want to charge in the future. Even if my financial situation improves, gaming will not be a priority. I am happy playing old games that my potato can handle. There are a ton of games released during my childhood that I haven't played yet. I don't like mobile games, but there is a reason why mobile gaming became huge - it's a lot more accessible to the average person because it's cheaper.

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NordicWolf7@reddit

Your assessment is correct.

I'm a big indie gamer, and I believe that small groups of passionate people who want to make art, not just money, will be the aftermath after these corporations kill themselves trying to bleed us dry.

There are so many games to play out there, new and old. I'm not sure how old you are, but I hope you have a much fun with those old games as I did when they were new.

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SabunFC@reddit

I'm one of those Millennials who is about to become middle aged.

I have been following the news about gaming and movies and it seems like the entertainment industry is eating itself right now by being extremely hostile to paying customers. From people not owning the things they paid for, to making games and movies that nobody asked for and then gaslighting the audience by calling them bigots, to making people pay top dollar for hardware and games that are poorly optimized. I've also seen reviews about how AI upscaling is ruining official 4K releases of classic movies like Terminator 2.

Piracy seems like the only way to preserve this stuff. But I think some games will be gone when the people who are passionate enough to keep maintaining them are gone. Some movies in their original state will also be gone unless people keep sharing Blu-ray rips or DVD rips. Personally I've never owned a Blu-ray player because this technology never became cheap, and my new potato doesn't even have a DVD player.

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NordicWolf7@reddit

As a 35 year old American, I understand. That's exactly what I've lived, especially lately. I've learned to stop worrying about it, but it is a little sad to see companies destroy their history and good will put of greed, but I also see tons of fresh creators with good ideas and great hearts making things and distributing them fairly and respectfully.

It's all happened before. There's a desert here where millions of cartridges were buried due to this same thing. It has happened before, and it'll happen again. At least we get to live through a version of it where we have the internet to gain access to so much data.

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SabunFC@reddit

With all the recent rapid development in technology like AI and even more surveillance, I just want to go offline with all my urh.. "collected" games and movies. It feels more and more like Uncle Ted was right - technology feels less and less like a tool for us, but more and more it feels like we are the tools to create more technology. I'm old enough to remember my dad paying for anti-spyware software, now not only does the OS behave like spyware, but now the spying is enhanced with AI. You remember Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, right?

A YouTube video recently reminded me of No One Lives Forever - another game from my childhood that I wanted to play but my parents couldn't afford a Playstation. Then I found out people can't even buy this game anymore, so I had to urh.. find other means to add it to my collection.

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NordicWolf7@reddit

If a company refuses to make their product available, especially to someone who paid for it, then they deserve to be pirated.

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SullyAddams@reddit

On top of all of that that, another factor is ton of people are still beyond pissed at iD and Marty Stratton for the way they treated Mick Gordon on Doom Eternal.

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MolacoCocao@reddit

Wasn't it 2.2 mil?

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Interesting_Rub5736@reddit

I watched the whole playthrough. Its buggy as hell. Try to alt-tab you crash the game (of course not on every pc), Some times you cannot you use your right click, and just straight up laggy. But it is pretty, has some cool areas and there is genuine fun in the game. Its just not up to the standard of the previous games. And its too expensive.

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BasicBitchTearGas__@reddit

If you up the game speed, the sounds of the cutscenes are still at original speed, even though they move faster as well

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iseeatriangle@reddit

I mean that sounds pretty reasonable given increasing the game speed sounds like undefined behavior

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BasicBitchTearGas__@reddit

I mean there’s a game speed setting in the difficulity settings, its not like I went into the files to do it

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iseeatriangle@reddit

I’m stupid and assumed something without playing the game my bad bro That’s a pretty big oversight then cmon people

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Double-Afternoon1949@reddit

does not help that the game is such slop i felt ripped off pirating it

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Godl3ssMonster@reddit

Haven't you seen the Doom 2016 and Eternal's sales? Doom is NOT niche.

It's all because of the price, people aren't willing to waste 80$ for a damn game (yet).

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Dje4321@reddit

Also doom just doesn't have a consistent enough identity to develop a hardcore audience. It's not like COD where you know what your gonna get with basically every release. When I buy a halo game, I know exactly what I'm getting myself I to. Each doom game has been wildly different in how it handles the "Doom" gameplay loop.

I'm not saying it's bad, IMO Eternals was one of the best quake-like fps games I've ever played. But it's that exact feeling that makes me hesitant about a new doom game.

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Qu1nn1fer@reddit

Its not selling well because I cant fucking play it! I have a 1660 that runs eternal beautifully, I cant justify upgrading for the new one

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Nokan96@reddit

It's incredible how much difference the price alone makes, Oblivion and Expedition 33 are also in gamepass and yet they are both still in the top 10 bestsellers of Steam after a month. And Steam top sellers don't take copies sold in account, they take revenue

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pyrospade@reddit

$80 might make sense on consoles where you’re kinda limited but it makes zero fucking sense on pc where there’s massive discounts every week and AAA games are given away regularly, people will just wait for the discount and play something else

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Icabod_BongTwist@reddit

to the tune of 21st Century Schizoid Man

"-- SEVENTY-NINE DOLLAR CONSOLE GAME!!!"

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SillyGoose_Syndrome@reddit

Checks out. Also, far as I recall, both previous titles were half price or less mere months after release.

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Bobly2@reddit

A big reason it’s not selling well is because it was day one on gamepass, and most people are playing it though that. I do agree there is less hype than eternal but eternal also came out in a perfect time. The pandemic just started, and doom 2016 was rapidly becoming way more popular because it was kinda slept on on release.

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Cs0vesbanat@reddit

Just finished Dark Ages. I enjoyed it very much.

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ScottWipeltonIII@reddit

Same. Though on this very subject, the story was just background noise that I couldn't have cared less about.

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j0shman@reddit

Where is this narrative of a commercial failure coming from? 800k ps5 sales and under 2 million game pass players means it’s a success, just not a humongous one under today’s market perception.

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ExtremeCreamTeam@reddit

Game Pass blows and doesn't make money for the dev / publisher.

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Ozuge@reddit

In your alternate reality where this is true, why do devs / publishers allow their games to be on gamepass? Obviously Microsoft pays them the good bucks to have their games there. Please think these sorts of outbursts out before posting.

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DickHydra@reddit

If that was true, no publisher or dev would put his games on there.

Hell, the devs of Expedition 33 just recently said that GamePass was a huge driver for their success, and the game still sold 3 million copies.

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j0shman@reddit

I mean MS own the publisher so why would they pay them

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Nokan96@reddit

Less that 1millon copies it's pretty bad for one of the oldest and most known franchises in gaming

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YeeHawWyattDerp@reddit

The age doesn’t matter, it’s a niche franchise. It’s by far my favorite IP of all time but it’s very much a niche product

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j0shman@reddit

But it’s a success, just less than expected

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DickHydra@reddit

Those 800k come from only a single source and are based on nebulous estimates. I wouldn't put much weight into that.

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Luke22_36@reddit

Anything Valve could foreseeably release would pop off hard.

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AlphaPhill@reddit

Remember Artifact?

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DickviperAU@reddit

The game is 80 fucking dollars and in game pass, of course sales are low

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GalaXion24@reddit

Even my friend who absolutely loves Doom Eternal and really wants Dark Ages looked at the price tag and said he's not buying it any time soon

Past a certain point people are just priced out of it.

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_Addi-the-Hun_@reddit

well, just like HL2 vs doom 3, the word is hl3 or something hl is going to be announced later this year, and will most likely release next year.

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Mr-Stuff-Doer@reddit

It’ll be announced once Silksong releases

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KirbyGlover@reddit

Hey didn't you hear, since Silksong was in the Nintendo Direct it's definitely for sure coming out this year!

(I'll believe it when the Steam page updates lol)

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Guillaume-Francois@reddit

I'll never not love Id for having released a bunch of rock-solid engines into free software; unless Valve does the same with source engine, I could not possibly be paid to give a shit about the company whose primary claim to fame is a DRM service (admittedly a fairly unobtrusive DRM service, but a DRM service nonetheless).

Also absolutely nothing Valve has ever made has ever come close to being as groundbreaking as the work Id released in the development of 3d graphics

Unfortunately Id today is not Id then; in fact Id became pretty soulless rather quickly, as seen by Quake 2 being an overall entirely lifeless experience.

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DemiVideos04@reddit

Valve isn't necessarily known for being groundbreaking graphics wise, even though hl2 had better graphics than anything else at the time, that's not why Valve's games are praised.

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Guillaume-Francois@reddit

I didn't say that their games weren't very good, and the Source Engine was in fact a big deal in its time (I would be through the goddamn moon if Valve gave it the same treatment Id gave the Doom and Quake engines). My point is just that some of Id's engines represent significant milestones in the development of 3d graphics, and no amount of "mogging" from Valve will top that; John Carnack is and shall always be a bigger deal, at from a historical computer science standpoint, a more significant name in gaming than Gabe Newell.

Though I am actually being a little unfair to Valve. They have made some very significant contributions to free software through their support of Wine and the development of Proton; if they pulled something out of their hat like producing perfect POSIX system call translation, I'd sing their gospel to the ends of the earth.

Plus, while Steam is a DRM service, it's really hard to overstate just how much less awful than its current competitors (save GOG's just letting you download the installers) it is, and needs to be further contextualized against its historical competition, like Games for Windows Live, which I would say it can be singularly credited with saving us from (and Gabe may yet save us from Windows, see above).

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Coakis@reddit

Source Engine was better at facial and body animations than Idtech 4 at the time too.

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deepdistortion@reddit

Also the art direction was better.

Doom 3 may have had the lighting tech, but my god is it ugly. Even when they aren't moving, the characters don't look right. And everything has weird proportions, way too chunky. The guns feel like they're edgy kids toys. I expect it to rattle like cheap plastic if you move around too quickly.

Half Life 2 ain't perfect, but the textures they used for people's faces are decent. The guns look and feel like guns. The weird sci fi stuff doesn't feel like it's all plastic crap I'd have bought from the dollar store when I was 7.

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Legacy107@reddit

HL2 graphics still hold up today IMO. Like yeah compared to modern titles they don't hold a lot of weight, but it punches well above games of it's time.

I recently finished Alan wake, and I felt that the textures and animations don't hold up as well as HL2, though it came 6 years later.

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deepdistortion@reddit

Yeah, a lot of studios can't quite get their graphics down like that. And the ones who can seem to focus on technical wizardry over stylization, which doesn't age well.

Like so many AAA games have hair that just looks bad in close ups. They try to simulate individual strands, and it ends up looking like a beat up Barbie doll. This could be avoided by just making the hair a polygonal mesh, and maybe putting in some small animation on the parts that stick out the most, but nOoOoOoOo, we gotta try to run a pixar-level sim in real time while optimizing for baby's first gaming rig. Meanwhile, smaller studios just make the hair a solid block and it looks fine!

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PhDingus2@reddit

Doom 3 was the first one without Romero leading the art design, right?

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deepdistortion@reddit

I was under the impression Romero was more involved with the level design and doing some miscellaneous programming stuff than the art. I think it was Adrian Carmack who was the head art guy. for the Doom games.

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PhDingus2@reddit

That’s definitely right for the first two, but the team started falling apart around the Quake launch, I don’t recall the exact details of who was where by doom 3

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Coakis@reddit

Romero had long left before Doom 3, as I understand it he spent much of his time after Doom 2 on Daikaitana, and then moved onto other projects afterwards

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Intelligent_Toast@reddit

The art direction in HL2 is legendary, rip Viktor Antonov.

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SoupaMayo@reddit

Unpopular opinion : Doom 2016 was good, but Eternal was crap, and Dark Age doesn't even look like Doom at this point. I just completely lost any hype as soon I saw the design

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Guillaume-Francois@reddit

Doom 2016 was fun but played more like Painkiller, with its focus on closed-off arenas, than either of the 90s titles.

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Knuckleshoe@reddit

Doom TDA is the closest to the original doom games. Tbh it has at moments a quake feel due to the art style. Its a good game and personally i prefer it to eternal.

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themightyscott@reddit

It's fun.

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Kerboviet_Union@reddit

There were a few major first person shooters in that early era.

Sof2 was a fucking awesome shooter that got dwarfed by half life.

Quake games and arena.

Unreal tournament followed quake with the arena vibe.

Tribes emerged with a very different style despite having similar game modes.

Consoles started to emerge here too, and that brought in halo, etc.

You can always crown valve king for the sheer creativity, but there were so many great titles that people would have fallen in love with if they knew about them at the time.

Seriously we didn’t have the platforms or promotional ease of social media like it is today; we had word of mouth, gaming magazines, and our narrow personal judgement with what to spend paper route money on.

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Neither-Phone-7264@reddit

genuine question was unreal tournament built using unreal engine 1 because i know epic games made it

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CalculatingLao@reddit

Is google broken at your house?

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Neither-Phone-7264@reddit

rude

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Kerboviet_Union@reddit

Yep. Unreal 1 was made in 95. The engine is credited to Tim Sweeney.

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Majkelen@reddit

I'm happy to see Tribes mentioned, it was such a unique franchise. Jetpack skiing with rocket launchers was a PvP experience that I've seen in no other game since.

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imhariiguess@reddit

Was such a big fan of quake as a child. Still bitter about how they handled the franchise

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Kerboviet_Union@reddit

It defined my childhood. Right up there with warcraft and diablo.

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xXHalalManXx@reddit

>inb4 half life 3 gets released with rtx, instantly dethroning doom

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DickHydra@reddit

I mean, it probably will come with RTX, although I doubt Valve will bake it into the game so that you can't turn it off.

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FewVermicelli4535@reddit

Every Source game has had ‘baked-in’ ray tracing since the beginning. It’s just not real-time and is pre-calculated as part of the map. With Source 2, they finally added parallax-corrected cubemaps, which fixed a lot of problems with this static approach.

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Majkelen@reddit

'baked-in' ray tracing? Isn't that just ambient occlusion?

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Sonikeee@reddit

My knowledge about the topic is quite shitty, but as far as i'm aware isn't ambient occlusion calculated in real time?

Source 2 lightning is calculated when the map is compiled, it's why the maps are so big in file size when compared to other games

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Majkelen@reddit

Yeah, ambient occlusion can be generated in real time (for example with screen space ambient occlusion), but often it's pre-baked into the map.

Also ray tracing handles reflections, diffusion and other effects so now that I think about it, it would definitely not be the same.

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MildlySaltedTaterTot@reddit

Making the much more expansive scenes in Portal 2 incredibly jaw-dropping in showing scale

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Luname@reddit

Well, Counter Strike has exactly zero story elements so Carmack was right.

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SoupaMayo@reddit

Carmack was talking about single player games

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mito@reddit

...and now I'm going to tell you that I had way, WAY more fun with D3 than I had with HL2 and its DLCs.

HL2 has exactly two interesting parts: Ravenholm and the Citadel. One a zombie murdering sandbox, the other a superpowered gravity gun sandbox, both with great atmosphere. The rest of it though you just forget about like a day later. I didn't care for run-down eastern Europe, or for the wooden attempts at displaying the interpersonal bonding of a mute protagonist with Alyx and her fancy facial animations, and Barney, Vance and Kleiner were complete non-entities to me - there were just dozens of dudes looking exactly like them in HL1, was I supposed to remember them fondly or something? Them specifically? Did they even have names back then before they exploded or ran into gunfire? I don't know, it just never worked for me.

HL2 had its gravity gun and lengthy vehicle sections, and people seemed to be way more impressed by the wide open areas in HL2 than by the claustrophobic horror vibe in D3, but D3 was just way more intense all the way through and looked way more atmospheric as well, lighting and all. Sound design as well, with all the creepy background space station noises going on. Could've done with more polygons on their models though, especially the heads. That HL2 did definitely better.

The weird occasional logic puzzles really had no need to be there though. And that atrocious melee shotgun. At least it didn't try to give a vague, layered narrative that's too convoluted for its own good and will never be satisfyingly resolved.

Yeah, I actually think HL3 is going to disappoint a lot of people. I'll be happy to be proven wrong though.

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Lopunnymane@reddit

Finally an actually real unpopular opinion - I completely agree, HL2 was utter dogshit in game design. The combat in every way was worse than its' predecessor. The characters bland and meaningless. Completely stupid physics puzzles and the worst I've ever experience of vehicle segments.

The only cool thing is the setting - practically the only reason HL2 is brought up these days is to talk about the Combine.

I wish people actually used reddit downvotes for what they were actually intended for - not disagreeing, but burying irrelevant comments. Your comment is actually a relevant discussion.

I genuinely dropped the game so many times at those stupid vehicle segments. Most of my friends have never even played Half-Life yet they hold it in some high regard - ridiculous.

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