Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Games are Different. Are They Better?”.
Hi dll started playing Baldur’s Gate with my wife in split screen. Unfortunately, not too many games have split screen, couch Co-op these days, yeah. What are your favorites, either recent or old? How do the Halo games got a lot of play on the split screen? My dad – and I I was – I don’t know if I think it was Halo 2. – I don’t remember which one it was. It was either Halo 1 or Halo.
2. When you beat one of the missions, it would show the like the shield icon for the difficulty level. So like legendary, it had the like the shield and the two swords Crossing and the the skull on it. And then it had all the other ones, and we had this mission where we wanted every single icon for every single level.
So my dad – and I beat every single level in that Halo game on legendary and the other difficulties, and it was actually like kind of fun. Can I um derail this conversation for a second here and talk about how how the gaming culture has changed by having so many options for games? You would, unless you are a completionist and you’re like kind of into that, you would never play a game like that anymore, and I I really I I really realized this. I realized this as I was going through and there was some stupid puzzle where you’re like supposed to push orbs around um in chained, Echoes that I just my brain was hard and I didn’t feel like it. And so I I went to look up um a walkthrough for it, and then there was also I was trying to get some information on like Crystal, combining and, like you know, kind of the rules around that and finding resources for this game. There’S like a handful of Reddit threads on any given subject, but basically nothing – and this is a game that, from my understanding, was reasonably successful. But you compare that to trying to find like the way that people will obsessively deconstruct a game. Like you know, one of my one of my all-time favorites and, like my childhood, favorite game Final Fantasy VI. The way that people have dug into you know every little bug and miscalculation in the combat system and every possible uh combination of you know: weapons and Relics and espers and other items and whatever else right, um the way that people and and I’m sure, there’s exceptions To this, but but the way that the the common experiences that we shared were more common, I feel like if you were a gamer growing up in the late 90s early 2000s they’re grand scheme of things were there that many really good games for the Nintendo 64. Golden eye sure dark, dark Donkey. Kong, Mario Kart, Mario Kart was amazing party, Smash, Bros, sure smash and like we’re gon na, probably be able to come up with 10 or 20..
But nowadays, if I were to say, okay yeah, like how many good games are there for steam deck Star Fox, Are any, are any two Super? Mario 64.? That’S not the point. The point is that we’re talking about on the order of tens, whereas now we’re talking about a game Library Smorgasbord, on the order of thousands to the point where you and I could both be gamers – Play Nothing But like s, tier awesome games and have ever plays Absolutely nothing to talk about to each other. Do you get what I mean yeah part of that is the Historical Library of games, because I like as much as I’m I’m pumping up Baldur’s Gate and we had Eldon ring come out, which was just like incredible and there’s a lot of high hopes for Starfield And the new God of War games have been fantastic and they’re like there’s. There is actually good stuff going on right now, um. I I feel, like the frequency of good game releases, has maybe decreased in recent years, but there are still bangers coming out. You’Re talking AAA only right now, yeah there’s some some big time Indies, but I feel, like the Indies have slowed down a little bit too.
If I could possibly argue in the like Super Meat Boy era, it was all the time, but it was like the best thing to play. Was that just Humble Bundle pumping it? I don’t think so genuinely okay, so they don’t just just have less marketing. Now because, like I mean Dave, the diver diver was a diver breakout, hit fantastic, I’m not saying they don’t change right now, not saying they don’t exist.
Sure I feel like. Maybe it was Humble Bundle, I don’t know got people in chat are piping up. There was like a golden age of Indies, technically Baldur’s.
Gate 3 is an indie. They have no publisher, okay, okay, I’m actually. What you’re I mean.
That’S really cool and shows a lot of a huge amount of success for larion. There was a ton of stuff going around um of people being like. No one should be able to expect the quality level of Baldur’s Gate 3 because they obviously had a huge amount of funding from like the the DND owners, which I think is like Wizards of the Coast or something yeah.
I don’t know that Hasbro, basically yeah something like that and like Valerian Studio people were like what that’s not how this works like they didn’t pay us to make this like. What do you mean? Um yeah, I don’t know, I think it’s very cool that they’ve been able to find that much success, um basically on their own. I think that’s awesome. Uh dliss has been a net positive for gaming in general, in my honest opinion, but I have seen a couple videos recently suggesting it’s becoming a requirement for games to be playable thoughts on dlss being a necessity.
So, just before you even say before you respond to that, apparently it does play Atari 2600 and 7800 game cartridge is pretty cool. That’S pretty cool yeah um deals, that’s being a necessity. Yeah they’re, just so unoptimized or Graphics requires so much stuff. Yeah yeah.
There’S a lot of games coming out right now that are basically just like yeah. If you don’t have an RTX 4090 Good Luck running this at you know 4K 60. um. So if you have anything other than that, you’re, basically relying on dlss to get playable frame rates, 1440 people smooth frame rates, yeah um, it’s inevitable.
I mean look at how much the pace of GPU development like GPU raw performance Improvement, has declined from like a like. A a year-over-year standpoint I mean it used to be. We would get new generations of gpus once a year now we’re lucky to get a new generation of gpus every two years, three years um and honestly, like looking at how much money Nvidia is making on AI crap right now like billions and billions and billions a Day we may be moving into the end game of Nvidia caring at all about consumer Graphics. I I don’t know what to say man, because, yes, it’s still a significant portion of their revenue, but it is so much less profitable and it is so much more work and everyone kind of hates them for it. If I’m sitting there, I’m I’m Jensen right now. I’M wearing a leather jacket, I’m sitting here in my beautiful kitchen going.
Why am I even bothering I can make way less money and have everyone be mad at me, or I can make way more money and everything’s cool yeah unfortunate situation? I I commented before about how, like we just keep cycling into like exactly what would be the most beneficial for NVIDIA. I feel like that’s like if you want to figure out, like just investments in general, just figure out like what would be the most beneficial for NVIDIA to happen next in the world and just like playing right uh, because, like cryptocurrency blowing up and then you see Cryptocurrency going down and we’re all like, yeah and then they’re, just like the next best thing. Now it’s hyper corporate, I mean it’s, let’s go it’s it’s it’s clearly, not an accident. At this point you got to give them credit.
They have played the game extremely well. Yeah they were out there investing in Machine Vision and machine learning, general purpose Computing on the GPU. They there was a Clear Vision. .