What PC game in the past 7 years was ground breaking?

[Vindictus]

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s it seemed a new and ground breaking PC game was being released every month. Forums were a bee hive of excited PC gamers waiting for launch day.
Now days, it seems we rarely see any PC games that are ground breaking.
Instead, we see an endless stream of "rogue like" games, retro games, and a ton of rehashed "Diablo type" game clones , as well as clone after clone of eastern and "anime type" games.
The discovery ques on Steam are outright depressing as well.
What are your opinions?

[Kargor]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Vindictus:

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s it seemed a new and ground breaking PC game was being released every month.

Nope. There is more "groundbreaking" stuff if something is new, but the more games there are on the market, the more difficult it is to come up with something really new.

So, even then, most games were just applications of stuff that was invented long ago.

[Crazy Tiger]

Funny, I don't remember forums being a beehive of excited gamers in the late 90s and early 00s waiting for launch day.

I'd say this is a case of rose tinted glasses, OP.

[Xautos]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Vindictus:

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s it seemed a new and ground breaking PC game was being released every month. Forums were a bee hive of excited PC gamers waiting for launch day.

True and the golden years of gaming was late 90's to early 00's when genre's ideas and the like were all brand new to the gaming world. But also while some ideas weren't new, they brought a fresh prospective to it and reimagined the whole thing.

i very much miss those days and want to go back regularly!

[SeansShow]

I think the biggest problem nowadays is gaming is heavily trend focused, like we had the survival game trend and BRs as obvious semi recent examples. It kills companies for me, kills originality and kills buzz. If half those people had an original idea their tiny little heads would explode. Saturates gaming with the same tired old rubbish as well. Seeing developers of the calibre of Techland (Dying Light) even buying into the BR craze and making a decent albeit literally dead one themselves more or less affirmed my views on trend gaming.

Back in the day devs used to go bankrupt because they were so far ahead of their time nobody would buy into their ♥♥♥♥ (along with the rampant piracy back then). I remember when we used to get all those classic point and clicks, when Westwood studios and Interplay and Shiny were big companies, when Rare made classic games, when you had crackers like Mechwarrior coming out and massive force feedback sticks to play them on, when 90% of Tom Clancy games weren't kids games.....

when Valve used to make games LOL

Yeah im with you they were different times, outside of trend focused development though I still get the buzz and see a lot of good stuff it's generally not the stuff thats either mainstream or pushed in your face though, much of that I think is targeting children. Pros and Cons to both decades and times.

I love rogue likes, rogue lites, retro and indies though for what it's worth and I think there's an abundance of good ones on Steam.

[Ron]

I haven't noticed anything very innovative in the last 7 years.

There's an early access survival game that is taking in-game metabolism to the next level

https://store.steampowered.com/app/513710/SCUM/

[AustrAlien2010]

Never seen any games break any grounds before. That's some advertising hype-trend-word-slang-like-thing to say. They're just games. Quite an innocent thing to make. You probably followed some advertisement channel during those days, feeding you titles in a certain sequence.
Usually it's the engines that bring something new to the table.

They're a lot of games these days that do new things. It depends on what you've seen. But I'm not going to advertise them all here on the forum, because I don't know what you have seen. We've got curators for that. Also can't see any games on your profile, so can't say what you may think is "ground breaking".

Don't be depressed. Follow the right channels.

Hell, I find some titles great, that have been classified as complete garbage by the internet community. Just saying. I don't know what they consider "ground breaking". Just because I missed one title they advertised heavily, that alone changes my entire perspective on what I think is good.

[Kargor]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Edward Carnby:

I still think about the buzz surrounding the original Max Payne. The graphics were mind blowing at the time, and people were saying that within ten years there would be graphics so good that it would look like real people in games. Yeah, right! Graphics seem to be going backwards now. The market has been flooded with Commodore 64 type graphics and everyone is raving about how incredible those graphics look. Pixel art! Max Payne also had bullet time which has been copied and used right up to the present time.

First of all "bad pixel art" is not representative of the gaming industry; it's merely caused by Steam letting anything onto the store. $100 is no investment, so you don't need to have a proper game to put it on Steam.

Having said that, "realistic" graphics are extremely expensive, and might not look very good because it's... too realistic. Good graphics works even if it's not realistic, and it allows for all sorts of different art styles that make games actually look different from one another.

Also, a big chunk of the gaming industry still comes from good old Japan. You can see Anime influcences in the graphics department, the world building and the story telling simply because they have the talent readily available, and they are more aware than anyone else that animation lets you cut costs without sacrificing anything. You can build a fantastic world just as quickly as you could build a realistic one, and if you look at combat animations you can easily see the same techniques that have worked on TV for decades.

I very much prefer a lot of good games, over a few high-budget overhyped titles that spend millions on "realistic" character models while failing to make interesting characters, worlds, and stories.

[Edifier]

The only real ground breaking game in a long time on PC was Half-Life 2.

The way it handled story telling.
The physics. No game to date has yet to produce the same type of physics with the same type of satisfaction. Sending a brick into a Combine and sending him hurling down the street was just so much fun.
The graphics. At release it was pretty damn impressive.

But after that I can not remember a game doing ground breaking stuff. Crysis was though up there in terms of Graphics and spawned "But can it run Crysis?" meme.

There have been plenty of good and awesome games but that's just about it.

[^èa†èr^]

BF4 with its destruction on 64 person maps, ground vehicles, boats and aircraft on huge maps.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Well this is easy.

Undertale was released in September 2015. That's one already. Often hailed as mold-breaker for its heavy amount of gameplay-and-story integration and high density of event flags and choices resulting in a very emotionally-involved narrative. Another game similarly regarded as mold-breaking is Doki Doki Literature Club (September 2017), and another is The Stanley Parable (October 2013).

At least two long-famous JRPG franchises finally arrived on PC in these 7 years. Tales of Zestiria released on PC in October 2015; Atelier Sophie released on PC in February 2017.

They weren't the only major classic franchises to finally see a PC presence either. The Mega Man franchise for example finally got onto modern PC (i.e. not DOS MM/MM3/MMX) with Mega Man Legacy Collection, and finally released its newest entry, Mega Man 11, in October 2018.

More generally, 7 to 9 years ago is roughly the start of an explosion in indie games, imports/localization, and ports of old console games, reviving a lot of old or previously console-restricted genres that had been generally neglected in modern mainstream PC gaming.

[J4MESOX4D]

I wouldn't say there's been anything truly groundbreaking on the PC in the last 7 years. The late 90's to early 2000's saw a string of significant jumps from better 3D engines to online multiplayer. Going from Wolfenstein 3D to the likes of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 was a huge step forward in around a seven year period. Half Life blew the world away back in the day and games like Thief provided a genre that hadn't been explored much and was executed in some style.

A game like The Witcher 3 is from a common genre but represented a massive step up in presentation and quality so I'd say that's as good as it gets otherwise this 'gen' has been bloated by zombie titles and battle royale. I think a lot of AAA companies have got too greedy and not maximised the resources available to reach potential.

[cinedine]

Początkowo opublikowane przez SeansShow:

I think the biggest problem nowadays is gaming is heavily trend focused

Did you miss the wave of Doom clones, Diablo clones, C&C clones, Tycoons, MMORPGS ... gaming has always been trend focused. Just like today by copying games entire genres evolved.

[Marius]

I think this was a decade of graphical ground breaking stuff. Not gameplaywise.

Stuff like real time shadows, sweat on nba-players, and many more. Stuff like AA, able to use triple screens and all that.

[Count_Dandyman]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Marius:

I think this was a decade of graphical ground breaking stuff. Not gameplaywise.

Stuff like real time shadows, sweat on nba-players, and many more. Stuff like AA, able to use triple screens and all that.

Cases can be made for certain games being groundbreaking for gameplay but those games aren't always the best examples of that gameplay or genre just the ones that took the risks first and showed the ones that came later that it could be done and be successful.

Outlast would probably be one of the best examples for a game like that technically the limits of its teams capabilities show and it has been surpassed so much that even its sequel that they improved so much in is lesser than what came between them but it kicked off the first person survival horror trend.

[FPS]

When you start as a gamer, every game seems new and groundbreaking to you. You have several decades of hit games to choose from, mediocre and bad games tend to becaome forgotten, so it seems like only good games existed in those times.

As I see it, things are pretty much the same now, and during the last 7 years things became better with the rise of indie games with really unique ideas. Were they groundbreaking? I don't know, maybe.

Every entertainment industry lies heavily on repeating itself. On successful game brings tons of successors, clones and imitators. Do you remember the good old days of Doom-clones or CnC-clones? So I guess a groundbreaking game is the one that gets copied afterwards to a different degree.

I can provide some exmples of such trend-setting games: Dota 2 started a MOBA subgenre, Binding of Isaac and FTL popularized rogue-lite mechanics, PUBG started the whole battle royale hype.