The 150gb is because of the meta battle between “main” games people play. There’s some data that most g*mers stick to playing one game after work/school and a few side games as well. The games that want to be your “main game” all have 120+ gb installs and require a certain amount of free disk space on top. This way, unless you’re rocking a few TB of storage, you have to uproot your habitually played game to try out another giant game.

I dont have a computer at the moment, but when I get my hands on one Ill probably just replay Fallout New Vegas and Bioshock lol

This is now a Tactical Breach Wizards thread! How is that game? I’ve been following its development on and off for years and it looks cool.

I have been looking for something to scratch the “cinematic, scripted, first-person action game” itch without the completely satanic politics of CoD, and I’ve found the new Indiana Jones game really good. The voice actor was grown in a vat to sound like young Harrison Ford, multiple characters (including the protagonist) directly and repeatedly say “I hate Nazis” and “it’s always okay to steal from Nazis”, and there’s a bit where you fight Nazis with an indigenous anticolonial resistance. Nazi collaborators consistently and violently get their comeuppance.

It boggles the mind how this shit can keep going on after so long, the same game being re-released every year. Who even needs AI slop when we can have humans putting out this shit that’s essentially just a premium form of generic content?

CoD is played for the MP exclusively since I’d argue at least 2012’s Black Ops 2 with the noteable exception of Black Ops Cold War. And even before then the tides were changing hard and fast beginning with Modern Warfare (the first one of the 3 that are all called just that).

It’s much more like Fifa or Madden where you buy the yearly releases not so much because they do anything meaningfully different from year to year but for ever so slight gameplay adjustments and a bunch of “new content”, mostly reskins and you juggle some names around.

First off, it was a 150GB download. What is this, a massive open-world game?

Which is also where this comes from. There’s like 64 player models each with give or take at least 5 skins plus all the guns plus 60 skins for that and I assume at this point you can also get a pet that follows you around with 18 models and 20 more skins per pet, none of which is compressed because that costs money and diskspace doesn’t

Even when Modern Warfare was new it always felt to me like the lesser alternative to Halo 3 (which came out the same year). The guns were both poorly balanced and less fun to use, there were no vehicles and no interesting multiplayer modes, no forge, no dual wielding or powerups, no deployables and only one type of grenade. Maybe it was more “realistic” to not have those things but it was a lot more fun to have them and it’s not like MW was trying to be a milsim with its fast movement and bullet spongy characters, it was just a shallow shooter that played fast and slick.

I played a lot of the original CoD, CoD 2, and original Modern Warfare. Then I stopped because even MW’s gameplay was getting dull. Then another 20 years went by and people are still playing this shit series that’s been shit for most of existence? What the fuck?

What made the original so great was its combined arms multi-player. One person on BAR, another on Thompson, one with a Springfield, and two more on Garands vs. two people with MP40s, one on MP44, and two on K98 because that’s what you needed on maps with tons of terrain and high lethality.

Then the second one came along where the multi-player was just okay-ish (not enough cover and too many grenades), but the single-player campaign was truly a spectacle. A lot of memorable moments with several maps that weren’t linear in their design.

Modern Warfare had a cinematic campaign with high quality voice acting and graphics, but was too linear in its design. Multi-player wasn’t good because it was modern…so everyone is using an assault rifle. But this was when Counterstrike: Source had been out for years with its vastly superior map design and variety of weapon options players had to make choices about due to the way resources were allocated. Why was a game with 2,977,490 eleventykajillion times the budget having less interesting gameplay than a game several years older?

CoD ended the era of bullet sponge arcade shooters and ushered in an era of high lethality, then drifted away from this as it made more and more sequels.

This is at why with all the whinging about how bad the activision-microsoft buyout is for gamers I continue to be in favor of it. Nobody should play acti-blizzards shit games in 2025 and if Microsoft wants to make it more expensive to do so that means some percentage of gamers are going to try something that isn’t distilled digital ass sweat

I mist admit to my guilty pleasure of watching videogamedunkey. But his video on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is possibly still the most prescient about how games have been fucked over time, and is very in line with your post. Would recommend a watch https://youtu.be/i1qnIBLNOG0

Whenever I meet someone and mention I like video games, and they go “…like call of duty?” I have to respond “nooo no no, not that slop”

I mean, I play a lot of mainstream stuff too (eg: fromsoft, larian) but this kind of shooter just rubs me the wrong way, and makes me kind of sad that’s the placeholder people have for games in general.

I tried one of the recent Call of Duty games after a similar time away (last one I’d played was the original Black Ops) and I actually had to Google how to get into the actual game. It wasn’t on the first page, I had to go to another page and look for a Campaign button.

I did a couple missions and found it bland, and one told me to go to a place that, when I went there, there was nothing there. It was telling me to go to this place (the tower on the ship, I assume the control tower) but there was nothing to do, no further instructions when I got there. Escaping from the prison part was fun. I don’t remember which one I played.

Very similar experience. Just underwhelmed with a game that is overproduced, over-marketed, and just not very fun.

I hear a lot of people talking about how GTA V is so bad because the sixth one is taking forever and online is boring. I suggest Cyberpunk. It’s got a lot of similar gameplay to GTA/Saints Row where you can steal cars and do crime, and it’s the hacking stuff from Deus Ex. They wanted to have sneaking in, but I guess they never completed that part. It doesn’t work. I try to sneak and everyone just detects me anyway. Bad guys drop perks and stat increases now, so there’s little reason to not just kill everyone you see now. And it’s fun to do. It works as a straight shooter if you don’t care much about the hacking stuff, you can build your character away from that, install a Sandevistan (it slows time when activated) rather than a Cyberdeck (what allows you to hack), and then just carry a gun or a sword and have at it. No multiplayer BS. No microtransactions. It will try to sell you one thing, a story mode expansion for $30, and it’s worth it. Or you just buy the complete version and it’s all included. The only other thing is, if you make an account with them, you can move your save between platforms, and they give you some shirts that advertise their online service, GOG Galaxy, and their other game series, The Witcher. That’s… pretty much it. As for how long it is? I’m like 8.5 days into my save. I’ve got the final mission unlocked, but there’s still a ton of content to do. So I could finish it, but there’s some specific things I need to do to get the ending I want.

Indies are still great, Silksong is probably my favorite game of the last 5 years, but AAA has been destroyed by growth.

Yeah, there was an “open beta” for some CoD game last year and I started the game, it made me create an account, which then restarted the whole game. Then I changed settings, restarted the whole game. It had at least 4 unskippable splash screens. Then I go to choose whatever game mode I wanted to play, it exits, starts the particular mode WITH MORE SPLASH SCREENS and I get into the queue. 7 Minutes later, i’m finally about to join a lobby and it crashed. Immediately uninstalled. Never touching the series again.

Folding Ideas has a video on Ghosts and how it was made. They’ve probably stuck with the approach of setpieces first, story second, so there won’t be much connective tissue between anything in the narrative.

And you know all the time and effort goes into the multiplayer. You’re one of the outliers looking for a single player experience to your slop