Four Features By Which This Generation Will Be Remembered

As the dawn of a new generation of gaming rises, now is as good a time as any to reminisce. As we sit quarantined in front of our TVs or PCs trudging through our backlogs of shooters, RPGs, driving sims, or remakes – some of the more common themes and mechanics of this era of video games are as ingrained as they’ve ever been. However, not so long ago many of these themes and mechanics weren’t so common, or didn’t exist at all. Let’s take a look back at some of the features and functions that we think this generation of gaming might be remembered for.

Blurring the Lines Between Offline and Online

Online multiplayer made a prominent rise to glory in the days of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Thanks to Xbox Live services and Sony’s (finally) built-in connectivity functionality, gamers were seamlessly able to jump into primarily player versus player online arenas. Series like Call of Duty, Gears of War, and Battlefield were largely to thank for this. Fast forward a decade and what that has evolved into is a seamless experience between single and multiplayer.

You’re never really playing on your on when running around the planets of Destiny or dilapidated post-apocalyptic streets of The Division. We’d be hard pressed even to find a game that doesn’t require you to log in before seeing a main title screen. The Forza Horizon series even uses players from your offline friends list to populate the world’s non-human bots driving around in cars specific to those in your friends garage. This all comes together to make an in-game world feel constantly living, breathing, and most importantly, connected. The idea of playing in an always online world is genuinely a new one which has, over the course of this generation, become the norm.

Re-Emergence of Hardcore Difficulty

Growing up in the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo era, difficulty was largely due to hardware limitations. I’m most specifically referring to an inability to actually save your progress or utilize the world wide web to research strategies and tips in real time. However, jump back into any old school platformer today and we’ll quickly remember why so many controllers were broken and rage quits executed. Games were once terribly unforgiving.

Fast forward to the current generation of gaming and games with hardcore and unforgiving difficulty are once again alive and well in the mainstream. It is no secret that this is largely thanks to the team of masochists at From Software. Games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne have spawned their own genre of ‘SoulsBorne’ games that have bled from AAA entries all the way to indie titles. Strong sales and fan bases behind new IPs turned full blown series like Nioh, Focus’s The Surge, and even indie games like Salt & Sanctuary have shown that gamers are willing to spend hours being punished and learning stringent mechanics even if the game isn’t developed by From Software. This generation has proven we loved to be punished.

The Stamina Gauge

A secondary bar (usually blue) shown somewhere in the general vicinity of traditional green health bar has for one reason or another become commonplace in action games. It certainly isn’t a fixture in every game, but when a mechanic like this makes an appearance in a Zelda game, you know it’s caught on. Don’t get me wrong – I’m well aware that this is by no means a new concept this generation. But it certainly has seen an explosion in popularity as a mechanic in gaming.

I’ll once again refer back to From Software for this one. Managing your character’s energy to execute evasive maneuvers is as important in any SoulsBorne game as it is managing your health. It’s become an effective way to add depth to a number of different games. Using experience and other collectible assets to enhance your pool of stamina is something that is easily transferable into a wide range of games in any action game or even other genres. I personally gained an added respect for stamina after a recent playthrough of Days Gone. Seeing that alert on screen ‘Your Stamina Has Depleted’ when trying to create separation from one of the games forty hordes was almost the equivalent death in any other game.

Content, Content, Content

In the absence of being able to provide any concrete data on this, I can anecdotally assume that the average time spent on a single game by any given gamer has risen exponentially this generation. A large contributing factor to this has to be the first subject of this editorial. That being that, with mostly online experiences… most games don’t really end anymore. Even though we still have the ability to roll credits at the conclusion of the main story, we’re almost always presented with some box of text after those credits telling us ‘Now the real game begins!’

In many cases, this leads us to replay the same content over with added difficulty and/or the promise of higher tiered rewards. New Game Plus is a feature that has become a staple in many games, enticing us to have subsequent run throughs while carrying over experience or equipment. But what likely keeps us coming back for hours and hours even after we’ve seen the conclusion of the story is developers insistence on giving us new content to conquer. Whether this be free or paid downloadable content, there is usually an added apprehension to trade in a game after the campaign is completed. Season Passes and Add-On packs taunt us into procrastinating moving on in our backlog and giving something else the chance.

Have something that you will remember this generation for that we didn’t mention? Let us know on Twitter or on our official Discord!