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Author Topic: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?  (Read 7818 times)

Yolan

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Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« on: November 27, 2015, 01:18:22 am »

Just kind of curious how it is for other people. I've noticed another change in my feeling towards games since I passed 30 a few years back. It's been picking up even more this year (turning 33 in February).

Some back info, I've been a PC gamer since I was about 14/15, so going on for two decades soon. Wow. I've had gaps here and there, due to commitments or hardware restrictions, and while I found myself playing less as I got older I did get back into it quite a bit as indy gaming picked up.

Basically I'm finding two major changes in my feelings towards games though. One is a rapid drop off in interest towards most of them. When I was younger so long as the content was fresh (and even sometimes if it wasn't) I'd be happy. It's much harder for a game to interest me now though, I suppose because I'm just too familiar with the common forms.  That has ramifications for the feeling of difficulty. I've found that I can get around that in part thanks to modifications to make a game harder than it is in vanilla. Skyrim (Requiem), New Vegas (Project Nevada), Call of Pripyat (MISERY), Minecraft (Terrafirmacraft). If it wasn't for these kinds of mods a certain segment of games would just be completely boring for me now.
A second more recent change would be a much lower tolerance for investing time in having to learning how to play something. That's more recent, and kind of more scary, as I never used to mind having to study up on mechanics. Now, I don't mind a long learning curve now (actually I love it), but I hate a steep kind. I recently bought Thea: The Awakening, for example. Looks great. Definitely the kind of game I can see myself playing. But I just can't. There is so much information to absorb to get into it, and my mind just says... nope. Like it does a little effort / reward calculation behind the scenes and says screw it. If I was a teenager or still in my 20s I'd be all over that shit, but now when I get back from work the last thing I want to do is spend time interpreting dozens of tool tips for an hour before I start to understand what is going on. If I can learn while I play though (like in some sims, like Eurotrucker or SHIII then I'm good).

Anybody else had a similar experience? Of course, I don't expect that I would find gaming as compelling as an adult as I did as a younger person, and that's only natural. But it is kind of interesting. And although I'm getting really picky, I'm lucky enough to be alive at a time when there are a bunch of games which fall between the interesting/not too complex barriers I have now to match what I like (the long dark is one example).
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i2amroy

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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #1 on: November 27, 2015, 01:39:22 am »

There is so much information to absorb to get into it, and my mind just says... nope. Like it does a little effort / reward calculation behind the scenes and says screw it. If I was a teenager or still in my 20s I'd be all over that shit, but now when I get back from work the last thing I want to do is spend time interpreting dozens of tool tips for an hour before I start to understand what is going on.
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Sorry, couldn't resist. :P
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Yolan

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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #2 on: November 27, 2015, 01:41:23 am »

Hehe. Well, Dwarf Fortress I got into and learned before this was a problem. Besides which, I really just read about DF, rather than playing it.
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Biowraith

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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #3 on: November 27, 2015, 02:01:24 am »

I've been gaming for something in the region of 35 years now.  To be honest it's hard for me to really remember my mental state etc when I was a kid, but as far as I can tell the main things that have changed for me are:

 1) I don't really get excited about upcoming releases anymore and generally don't follow the development of games that are still in production - I'll make a mental note for games I think look like I'll want to play, and then forget about them until they're released.  I'll sign up to newsletters or kickstarter updates, then when they arrive I end up deleting them without reading them most of the time.

2) Related to that, I rarely preorder anything anymore.  Used to be I'd preorder most of the games I bought, then hope that whatever mail order vendor I was using would get it to me for launch day, with definite disappointment when I checked the mail to find it hadn't arrived yet.  Now I'm more likely to wait for a month or three after the game launches and probably wait for a sale (even though I can easily afford to buy them full price if I want).  That said, I do sometimes kickstart stuff.

3) I tend to play a more restricted range of genres.  As a kid I played pretty much any and all genres of games, but as I close in on 40 I'm sticking far more to my favoured genres (RPGs & strategy games) and venture into action stuff far less often than I used to (and pretty much never touch certain genres like platformers or sports games).  I think that's partly due to having a little less time to spend on gaming (though to be honest, not that much less - I have no life :p), but mostly that I like complexity in my games and by their nature action games tend to be less complex.  If I'm being honest with myself, maybe also that I'm just not as good at action games as I once was.

4) I'm far less likely to get sucked into an MMO than I used to be.  Not sure why, probably just cos they rarely do anything I find interesting anymore, each one I try feels the same as the last, and the 'new' stuff tends to feel like bullet points for the back of the box rather than anything of substance... although in fairness, in my experience my preferences don't align so much with the average MMO player, so a lot of it is just I'm not the target audience for whatever new stuff they're adding.

5) I'm less comfortable with multiplayer.  I mean as a kid multiplayer meant a friend or three huddled around the computer/console since it was before the internet was really a thing, which now isn't really possible since nobody I know has the time or inclination anymore.  But if I fastforward a bit to when online gaming became a thing, I was a lot more comfortable with multiplayer gaming in my 20s than I am now in my 30s.  A big part of it is my personality (defects), social anxiety and major aversion to confrontation (or even implied or potential confrontation, like friendly pvp or the possibility of screwing up and letting the team down in co-op), but for some reason that's putting me off playing even more than it used to.  It's really annoying, cos on a conscious level I'd really like to play more multiplayer games.

All that said I'm gaming just as much now as I ever did, and although my focus may have narrowed my interest hasn't really waned.  I've not found the steep learning curve thing to be a deterrent, unless it's in a multiplayer game.
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Bohandas

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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #4 on: November 27, 2015, 02:20:34 am »

Only 30ish but have been gaming my whole life, and

The documentation for most games seems to have gotten much worse. It ised to be you could press F1 on just about any game to bring up a help screen and you got a manual. Now you usually don't get either. Dark Queen of Krynn came with enough documentation that I could probably run it as a tabletop campaign.

First Person Shooters have improved.

Half-Life 2 was not as good as Half-life 1

Steam Greenlight has corrupted most of the people who used to make free games on Newgrounds and Kongregate.

City Builders have wallowed in mediocrity. The SimCity games (excluding Societies and Snap City) differ mostly just by the presence and type of obnoxious DRM and by the absence of codes from the later installments (which also lacked the quirky charm of the first two). Cities:Skylines is also basically identical to the lot of them but without the obnoxious DRM.


Programming seems to have become less elegant and efficient. A retro game that theoretically only has a little more content than a game actually from the early 1990's will often take up more space than the entire hard drive of the computer I had back then

Sonic the Hedgehog has transitioned very poorly into 3d

There seems to be a growing gap between casual and hardcore games

arcades never seem to have pinball machines anymore despite the fact that everyone has videogames in their homes now but they still don't have their own pinball machines

The time between editions of D&D seems to be going down. I think they're doing it just to squeeze more money out of their dedicated customers and so I refuse to buy any more of Hasboro's products.
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itisnotlogical

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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #5 on: November 27, 2015, 02:47:16 am »

The difference in gaming for me (about 14 years from earliest gaming memories to today) is more subtle.

Online gaming isn't as interesting anymore. Not in the "hurr hurr Yahtzee told me that MMOs are bad" sense, either. It seems like the average MMO gameplay is more individual-focused than it used to be. Most MMOs can be played effectively single-player for a long time. Auction houses make trade massive, so you don't have to actually talk to another player in order to buy something. I remember Runescape before the Grand Exchange rolled out; if you wanted to buy something that a shop didn't have, you had to run around and ask motherfuckers for it, hoping that somebody would speak up if they happened to have it. Not anymore.

And back when I was first exploring gaming, nobody talked down to you because of the kind of game you played. That's one thing that irritates me about every gaming community, yes even this one. If you told somebody that you played World of Warcraft, the response never used to be "Isn't that a one-button clickathon snoozefest that you have to pay $15 a month for? ;^)". Not to mention the shit that console and PC players sling at eachother. Or the fact that if you play mobile games, you might as well hand in your gamer card because nobody is going to take you seriously. I mean after all, how DARE you play something that's simpler and monetizes in a way other than direct purchase?

Or the rig shaming. Dear Lord the rig shaming. Maybe $600 is all I could spare and an HP laptop was the best I could do for that you prick. Maybe I want to buy a complete package that works the first time, instead of assembling parts for a year to build a NASA supercomputer running a hand-built Linux distro that can run fifty copies of Skyrim at 4k. Maybe, just maybe, playing Skyrim with some of the settings turned down is enough for some people?
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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #6 on: November 27, 2015, 03:19:22 am »

More pixels. Seriously, my first game was the original Oregon Trail on the Apple ][.

But I find that my take is the opposite of itsnotlogical. Gaming used to be all about the single-player experience, because it had to be. If you had multiplayer, it was with somebody sitting 3 feet away from you or closer (oh the days of playing Spacewar and trying to share a keyboard with your opponent...)

Now everything seems to be about online multiplayer. In the best case, this allows for new, emergent narrative to be created by the players. In the worst case, it's a lazy cop-out for designers.

And in the minds of some like myself, Hell is other people (online). I more or less stopped playing MMOs because of the rate at which I'd meet new people and then rapidly find myself hoping they got hit by a bus. I still play LoL, but its completely normal to have those kind of thoughts there.

That said, I think the indie revolution in gaming the last several years is amazing. I've seen games that never would have been published in the 80's or 90's because they're so different. I think in some ways, its a return to the roots of gaming. The early days, it was still a niche industry and the rules were still being written. So you could have games which, to our jaded and ossified sensibilities today, seem like genre-benders. Like M.U.L.E. or Legacy of the Ancients or Ultima II or Darkhorn.

I think the industry went through a patch in the 90's where it seemed that the only games you could get published were FPS, RTS or action RPG (or as we called them then, Doom clones, C&C clones and Diablo clones).

It's also been amazing to see that something that was considered a "nerd hobby" is now so mainstream and pervasive. If you had told me in 1981 (or even 1990) that television ads for computer games would become a normal thing, I wouldn't have believed it. It's a brave new world, and I'm mostly okay with it. :)
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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #7 on: November 27, 2015, 04:43:16 am »

Tolerance for things my mental perception decides is a treadmill without sufficiently spectacular bells and whistles along the way... is at an all time low.

1)I can't grind repetitive things for very long anymore... (MMO and RPG-like)

2)I can't stand repetitive mundane tasks... I'm making the same fucking adjustments every damn turn.  Absolutely nothing important has changed.  Why can't I set it so the game repeats that shit till something changes? (Strategy/Management/Turn-Based type games...)

3)My tolerance for babysitting individual units(when I have many more) is also at an all time low.  I can't be around to make sure you are fulfilling all your needs AND doing your job... especially when I've already set everything up so that you could take care of yourself and do what you are supposed to do.
(Prison Architect does this pretty well. I don't have to micromanage anything, with the exception of tunnel repairs, events, and rehiring.  I can just focus on building the prison while the game runs itself... and make adjustments in my own time[A lot of time is probably spent just watching how my prison ticks...].

4)I'd rather focus on the things I find interesting... Why can't I delegate the boring things I don't care about to the same AI as the equivalent NPC units/faction/whatever within the game?   There would be no inherent advantage/disadvantage if it has the same decision making algorithm as the AI...  This one is not as big a downer as the others at least. (Distant Worlds is pretty damn awesome for this.)
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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #8 on: November 27, 2015, 05:42:11 am »

I make enough money to do work semi-passively. Time isn't a huge problem. Money definitely isn't the problem it used to be - I'd starve a week for a graphics card; now it's like a few days wage. Heck, I just bought a nice monitor and laptop battery today and just charged it to my company. Resources to buy stuff is really good.

Also games here have gone significantly cheaper - like almost the price of pirated software thanks to Steam.

It's just that there's so much better things to do than play games these days. Instead of spending the weekend on DF, I could drive across the country, stay in a hotel, eat nice food. Or play with the family. Bring the kids to a water theme park (or just spray them in the backyard).

At one point, Alienware was like a dream. Now it's kinda meh... the games I play don't even need high specs, and the high specs aren't even that pretty.

If I wanted to do something grindy, I could just buy/sell stocks and make real money. It's about as fun as Candy Crush.

What I do find is that I'm playing mobile games a lot more now. It's not so much because of time, but because they're portable. I mean I could play a CYOA while my daughter watches cartoons, but it's harder to play something like Tropico.

I'm also waiting for my kids to grow up old enough to play something like Minecraft with. I guess by then there'll be VR.

Also back then, used to play games like Conquest of Elysium or D&D with my siblings. Now we just play overpriced card games on holidays. I get to play Guitar Hero with my wife though.

And it might just be me, but does it seem like games have gone the pay-to-win direction too much lately? There's a lot of alternatives, but I kinda miss the days we were complaining about EA squeezing money off expansions and sequels.
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Shadowlord

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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #9 on: November 28, 2015, 04:28:43 pm »

I started playing games when I was a kid on a C64/128, never had any of the consoles, moved to DOS gaming and then to Windows 3.1, Windows 95, etc.

One major change in RPGs: The addition of the journal / quest log. In the 80s and early 90s, there was no journal, no indication of what you had learned, or needed to do, or where you needed to go. Since with long games I play for a while, stop for a while, and resume playing later, I lose track of what I was doing if there isn't something to remind me. (I tried taking notes once in Ultima IV or V but couldn't make sense of them later, because they were just names of places and people :P).

It seems like games generally tended to get more complex in the 90s and early 00s and then lately some companies have been trying to make them simpler again. I'm wondering if the reason is that games cost so much more and the money is going to things other than coding, or if they think audiences won't want to deal with complexity, or that they can achieve depth with simplicity. I think they did reasonably well with XCOM (I have a few quibbles), but Spaceships sounded overly simple. I avoided Beyond Earth for a different reason - it sounded like they omitted the heart and soul of SMAC when they created Beyond Earth.

Games are bigger, yes, less efficient, yes. Once upon a time they HAD to be small. The Commodore 64 had no hard drive, 64 KB of RAM, and games usually came on floppy disks (5 1/4"), which held up to 166 kilobytes of data. Some games were small and you could fit several on one disk (if the copy protection was defeated). RPGs generally came on multiple disks and required disk swapping, just like every era's RPGs prior to Steam. In any case, they had to fit the code and data into the available RAM, which generally meant using assembly language, and for big games, reading from disks and/or disk swapping.

DOS only partially alleviated this - it only lifted the conventional memory ceiling up to "640 KB," some of which was used for the system and drivers, so even if you loaded as much high as possible, you were unlikely to get 600 KB. Although games could run in protected mode and access memory beyond the 640 KB ceiling, the code still had to be small enough to load in the first place. That and the small amount of RAM commonly available at the time (16 MB was a lot!) limited any game's size and imposed efficiency restrictions.

It's easier to code games using libraries and engines and high-level languages than by hand-coding assembly (or at least it's easier to learn how to, and easier to port it to additional systems/OSes, and to make it more compatible, etc). The downside is that those all add bloat. Fortunately hard drive space is cheap, and so is RAM (says a person who still only has 4 GB).

I think there were more genre-defying games on the C64, or rather, I think genres didn't exist yet, aside from really broad things like "RPG" and "arcade game." If I name some of my favorite (multiplayer) games for it, I can't figure out what genre any of them belong in except for maybe the last one, which is basically a 4x except there's no exploration: M.U.L.E., Spy vs Spy 1 and 2, Archon 1 and 2, and Lords of Conquest (a strategy game with provinces).

M.U.L.E. has a lot going on - the others are fairly easy to understand. Games have gotten a lot more complicated since then. They also seem more formulaic, at least AAA games, anyways. Indie games are held up as the antidote, but right now the flood of indie games is such that it feels like if I try to look through them to find the diamonds I'll never finish.

Nowadays a lot of games have "quick-time-events" where they show you a prompt for a button and you have to press it within a timer, or at a certain time, or mash it. Something similar existed in the 80s, however. summer games for example: "The dash is the most straining discipline: the one who shakes fastest right/left is also the first on the finish line..." There were similar movements required in other games, including Spy vs Spy (for combat, if you were in the same room, to hit the other player). There were other events that were far less annoying, of course. You probably don't want to go so far as to consider almost anything a QTE, like "I HAVE TO PRESS SOMETHING TO BLOCK? ARRRGH!"

A lot of the C64 games I tried were ports of arcade games - you had lives, and they weren't designed to be beatable unless you were really really good at them. They never really held much interest for me, but I'm sure they did for other people. I'm not sure if anyone still makes arcade games, but I get the feeling they might do okay on mobile. It's probably not a terribly accurate feeling, since the 'arcade game' is ~30 years out of date with the methods used to entice and entrap players today.

Of the DOS games I've played the most memorable were Master of Magic, Master of Orion II, early FPS Duke Nukem 3D (LAN MP was fun), The Summoning (an SSI isometric RPG set in a dungeon maze), Warlords II Deluxe, SimCity and SimCity 2000, Scorched Earth, Warcraft I and II, and X-COM (although I had not played X-COM until the 2000s).

You can sort most of those into genres fairly easily, unlike the C64 games I named. Some of them were either the basis for their genres, or came out shortly after the genre-establishing game, or were considered the pinnacle of the genre. Those genres have changed significantly since then, of course.

The 4x genre, both fantasy and space, has seen a lot of games. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was one of the most compelling not just because of the gameplay but because of the storytelling - the characters, and how they're weaved into the entire game and tie everything together. This lesson doesn't seem to have been grasped, though, or perhaps it just didn't sell well enough for anyone to think it should be a lesson. I'd chalk that up to being a complicated sci-fi 4x on an alien world, though. IIRC fantasy also sells better than sci-fi in general.

For RPGs, most have tended to have little choice which feels meaningful, but The Witcher series especially shines in this regard. Deus Ex and (Obsidian's) Alpha Protocol are others that have the characters or plot react to your actions, and (also Obsidian's) Fallout: New Vegas has multiple factions and lets you work to win a war for one of them or even take control for yourself. Bethesda's quests, by contrast, are almost all on rails (caveat: I haven't played fallout 4) - especially after Morrowind. I'm hopeful we'll see more games following the meaningful-choice model in the future.

FPSes are one genre which I don't play much anymore, except for FPS-RPGs (Tomb Raider, etc). Once upon a time I was pretty good at FPSes. I'm not sure if it's me or FPSes, actually. I tried the new Unreal Tournament a month ago and it seems like people move absurdly fast, I can't see them shooting, if I try to shoot at someone I miss every time, and I can't avoid being shot. OTOH, I tried Red Orchestra II's MP and did perfectly well. Of course, half the players were dumb bots, but the mechanics all made sense (even though bullets were still lethal, there was actually cover and teams and enemies wouldn't spawn behind you, but could sneak behind you, which I did to take out a machine gunner in a bunker at one point). For UT, it may just be the mechanics strongly favoring the best players, and everyone who gets dominated just drops the game and doesn't come back, leaving just the elite players behind to continue dominating everyone else who shows up to try it.

I played SimCity and SimCity 2000 back in the 90s, and when SimCity 4 came out I tried it but found it way too complicated. I've mostly ignored all the citybuilder sims since then. OpenTTD was fun for a while.

Scorched earth is an artillery game. There are many more, including Worms. Angry birds seems like a single player artillery game with no opponent, just obstacles and targets.

MOBAs didn't exist until fairly recently, and RTSes aren't anywhere near as prevalent as they were in their heyday.

I tend to nope out pretty quick if a game isn't actually fun, especially if it's grindy / has obvious skinner boxes. That tends to include most MMOs nowadays. Sometimes a game isn't grindy until you reach "endgame," and then you find it's incredibly grindy if you want to do any "endgame" content without throwing money at it.

Most free to play games seem to be a waste of time. I'm not going to give them any money. If I was, they'd be a waste of money too. They aren't good games. They're deliberately designed to take forever to accomplish anything. If I wanted that I'd play X3:TC or X3:AP (Hint: I don't).

90s adventure games soured me on the adventure / puzzle genre to the point that I almost always ignore a game in the genre if I realize it is one, without even giving it a chance, and if I do give it a chance, I've noticed that I tend to be far less forgiving than I am with other genres. When I played through Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, I mostly ignored the Riddler challenges. Occasionally I would stop and poke one, but generally I ignored them. That said, I enjoyed Portal and Stealth Inc 2 (but not Portal 2, which just frustrated me).

These days what I want most in a multiplayer game is for it to be turn based and to be pbem or something similar (dropbox would work) to support several players playing in different time zones at different times, to have features to handle players dropping out or substituting in, to have stuff to do each turn that is meaningful, to not take ages to load, to have a lot of depth... Basically, Dominions 4.

I'm happy that Steam has largely replaced disk-based DRM and shit like Starforce. It's a huge improvement, although some games still include SecuROM for some reason. ::)

(Also, a lot of games have tons of speech now. Only a few C64 games had speech, and only a few phrases, and they were synthesized. It was a marvel to accomplish it at all.)
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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #10 on: November 28, 2015, 04:51:27 pm »

Some of my gaming tastes have changed but overall there were drastic switches in that regard, taste wise. For the most part the Me from 10 years ago would at the very least be interested in the games I play now... and viceversa.

Mostly:
- I like TBS more, and RTS less than I used to. This has been a gradual change over the last 15 years.

- I like sandboxes a lot. I already did, but *more*

I've never been too fond of multiplayer and FPSs, so no big changes there.


Additionally, labor constraints have resulted in certain changes in gaming which are more due to scheudle and workload pressure than my own will

- I must be able to both leave and retake the game quickly. As such I hate savepoints and no-pauses. And big loading times, for that matter.

- I don't have as much time as I used to, and thus I need my gaming rewards earlier. As such, games with very big delays between tasks and rewards, because I *never* get to the fun bits. In particular, I have a very hard time enjoying Paradox games because I don't really have the time to sink into the micromanagement and wait for things to pan out. Another example, albeit a milder one due to mods: in Cataclysm DDA the game beginning has gotten progressively harder over the years... and I simply don't have the time or the patience to endure that early game hardship. So I modded myself some quickstart scenarios that I find interesting.

- Likely for the same reasons: even though I LOVE Baldur's gate-like and KOTOR-like RPGs, I lack the time to enmesh myself in the story, so I'm playing them far less lately. This saddens me. I have a backlog of to-play rpgs, of sorts.
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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #11 on: November 28, 2015, 05:37:18 pm »

I have to be online for nearly everything.  Sorry, I hate having to be hard connected to an outside network just to play a single player game.  I don't like platforms like Steam, Uplay, or Origin, but to play certain games I MUST use them, and they MUST be connected to the network (unless I engage in highly questionable activities.)  It isn't a change I like in gaming, nor is the move towards social media in gaming.  I don't have a Facebook account, I'm not getting one, and that suits me just fine.  Seeing constant requests to sign in through, share things on, upload to, etc. just makes me angry, because it is an unwanted intrusion in my personal space.
« Last Edit: November 28, 2015, 05:39:59 pm by NullForceOmega »
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #12 on: November 28, 2015, 05:48:06 pm »

(unless I engage in highly questionable activities.)

Do you engage in slavery, drug trafficking, or murder for hire?

If the answer to the above is "no", I doubt very much you engage in highly questionable activities


(agreed about the always online DRM thing, btw)
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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #13 on: November 28, 2015, 05:54:42 pm »

No facebook here either. Steam recently added a mobile authenticator app and bugs me to set it up. Naturally, they don't have a windows phone version.  ::)
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Antioch

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Re: Older gamers, how has gaming changed for you?
« Reply #14 on: November 28, 2015, 06:15:21 pm »

I too feel that most games hold my attention way shorter than they used to. When I was younger I frequently finished games just to see what came next, now when I don't like a game I just go "meh" and move on.

I get the same feeling as you when it comes to learning curves and difficulty. Also really turned off nowadays when I feel a lack of improvement in a game compared to its predecessor. It very often feels like "been there, done that". The same when it comes to grinding things, a couple of years ago I still played games like WoT and Warthunder, but since 1 or 2 years I can't stand the grind at all, it just goes "nope".

Hasn't really been a game at all that I was hyped for in recent years.

Also I get way more irritated by bad interface design, if I see 10 ways to improve an UI in 10 minutes of playing a game, than you are doing it wrong. Primarily a concern with most turn based games. Also the major reason I don't really play DF anymore, the UI is completely unnecessarily horrible. I don't really care about the excuses put forth about time management and all, I do not believe for one second that having a better UI will slow down your future development of a game. DF lategame is unplayable without a 3rd party management tool.

I also get these really big urge to start making a game myself, because I feel a lot of people put very little effort into thinking out how a game should flow and instead just tack on stuff as they go along and I feel like I could do better myself.
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