Some games from the past play a lot worse in hindsight than others. What recent, decently-liked video games do you expect to suffer this curse?
Palworld
And open world games. There are so many at the moment, I can only imagine people will grow tired of them.
Palworld’s been out for maybe a week and I already never want to hear about it again
It feels almost AI generated. Like just pastiche of various popular online games with pokemon-like creatures. It’s almost weird that it’s like an indie passion project
I’m going to boot up the copy I torrented earlier because I heard it was way less jank than most crafting games.
I played it for a few hours last night and it’s genuinely impressive how well everything works together, it’s all derivative of popular stuff but that’s most games since as far back as video games have been a thing. Just as a survival game I don’t think Ark plays as smooth after a decade or however long it’s been out.
I don’t care for survival games so I’m sick of hearing about it so damn much, but I think I still respect it
it’s like the apotheosis of all our dumb middle school game ideas
Yeah I don’t usually care for survival games but I’ll probably play it for a few weeks at least. Does take a lot of the tedium out of the genre when you get a fleet of Pikachus running over to craft your stuff or cartoon elephants watering the garden.
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Every crafting/survival game. I hate this trend so much
But…stardew valley 4 life, Dawg.
Farming sim with social gameplay
eh, open world / sandbox games have been popular for over a decade i dont see that going anywhere
People like it, but I dunno, it looks like one of these “anime vs evil” asset flip games that Stephanie Sterling makes fun of.
Any game with always online DRM that will inevitably be shut off at some point rendering the product completely unusable
I miss Quake Wars
That one you can still actually play. Its always had an offline mode with bots. I vaguely recall playing it on PC with an active server that you direct connect to via the ingame console using the IP but its been a while since I did that. I played so much of that game on xbox but parents didn’t pay for xbox live so I spend hours playing with bots.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Starfield is already shit but in five years it’ll look like bloody green shit
Time wasn’t kind to the perception of Skyrim or Fallout 4, it’s going to be brutal for Starfield
I think time has been pretty kind to Skyrim, the main problem was the insistence on re-releasing it a dozen times for no reason.
I guess I mean more in the critical view of the vanilla game (main story quest is insipid and nonsensical, mage progression is very badly balanced and unfun, leveling as a whole is a crapshoot, draugr deathlords and other boss enemies are unfun damage sponges, dragons are easily distracted idiots, world is comprised of 80% bandit population, etc).
Honestly if Skyrim modding wasn’t so mature and (relatively) approachable, the criticisms would be harsher, but considering that these days you can download preassembled modpacks that turn the game into 4KHD SEKIRO COMBAT ENB GLOBAL ILLUMINATION PARALLAX NEXT GEN REALISM HDT JIGGLE PHYSICS AND HARDCORE SURVIVAL that probably makes the average player pretty unconcerned with what the vanilla game is like.
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I come back to the Skyrim modding scene every six months or so. There is so much high quality OC for that game that I don’t think I’ll ever be done playing it (especially because I play the really trashy OC lmao).
Yeah as much as Skyrim is a weak point in the Elder Scrolls saga, I still look back on it fondly. Starfield will not have this legacy.
It didn’t take time to dislike Fallout 4; I’d say it was just the opposite. People didn’t like it almost as soon as it came out. It has taken time for many people to give it credit as a fun game just not a fun fallout game.
In my opinion, though, that’s still a pretty damning criticism of a game called Fallout 4. But I digress.
You are way off on Skyrim. For starters, it’s already older than the entire range op asked about and it’s still a good game. Op asked for a game that’s come out in the last 5 years and will be looked at somewhat poorly in another 5 years.
Well skyrim came out…2011. Over 12 years ago. And at this very moment, after 12 years, it’s ranked at 54th on steam for current player count.
Honestly, among g*mers I know, Oblivion and Morrowind seem to get more praise than Skyrim, but that could just be nostalgia and contrarianism.
Oh, my bad, I was trying to make the point that vanilla Skyrim has been regarded as less of a good game in retrospect rather than trying to say it fits what OP was asking for.
And yeah tons of people are still playing Skyrim. Vanilla Skyrim might not be a great game, but it’s a fantastic platform for installing mods. I’m literally in the process of setting up a modpack for it right now.
that fruit you picked was hanging looooow
Fortnite after it collabs with a celebrity that gets canceled for being on the epstein flight logs
I just brought this up to my friend like an hour ago but:
Hey, remember when “They put Peter Griffin in Fortnite” was just a shitpost?
All the games that the person reading this loves and cherish
I think that someday people are going to look back on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and go “what did anyone ever see in this soulless open-world sandbox mush”
I’ve never played them but I’m thankful for Twink Link and Femboy Link
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And because the moment to moment gameplay is enjoyable in terms of game feel.
For me the moment-to-moment gameplay of BotW is significantly marred by the awful durability system, where fighting a monster is always a drain on your resources and basically never a good idea.
Tears of the Kingdom has a much better gameplay loop in that regard, where fighting monsters gives you components to make better weapons to fight more monsters. However, it is also marred by an even wider and less defined concept, and just the whole existence of the depths in general, and also a focus on Just Cause style physics fuck-around gameplay that basically doesn’t interact with any of the core systems. In other words, Breath of the Wild doesn’t do it for me because the core gameplay loop sucks, and in Tears of the Kingdom the core gameplay loop was improved but all this other shit was tacked on that I don’t think serves any purpose.
For me the moment-to-moment gameplay of BotW is significantly marred by the awful durability system, where fighting a monster is always a drain on your resources and basically never a good idea.
I am the complete opposite. The durability system for me makes the combat considerably more interesting because it prevents me from just finding 1 single thing that works and using that. It forced me to use whatever I had available and I really enjoyed the creativity that forced on me. It’s a game that asks you to adapt.
I get really bored in other combat systems once I’ve established a winning formula. It just becomes repetition. There’s no more cerebral element.
It’s not like any of the weapons in Breath of the Wild are actually different from one another though. You mash the same button with all of them until the enemy dies. BotW weapons aren’t like Dark Souls weapons or something, they’re more like ammo in an FPS. There’s never a situation where the solution is anything but “select highest damage weapon, mash Y”
Have you tried dropping a large rock on an enemies head
I find myself switching between one handed if I expect to need a shield, spear if I want range, and two handed if I’m dealing with a group of enemies. Respectively lynels since I like to parry their attacks, bats, and the two handed charge attack comes in handy a lot.
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where fighting a monster is always a drain on your resources and basically never a good idea
Thank you. I wasn’t able to put my finger on why I hated it so much, after awhile.
In my explore and fight monsters game, I want to be rewarded, not punished, for fighting the monsters!
Just avoid the fights.
Right, I did. That’s the problem with the game. They put the fights there, and there’s no reason to participate in them so I didn’t. Then they put loot around the map, but there’s no reason to go find it so I didn’t. They put story around the map, but there’s really not much reason to go find it so I wish I hadn’t.
There’s really nothing in either of these games that actually feels productive to do aside from walking into the final boss room and smacking the final boss to death with a variety of funny sticks. Everything else is chores.
I don’t want to be productive. I wanna fuck around and see things. Tears of the kingdom is an excellent fuck around and see things game.
Just avoid the parts of the game that are fun and enjoyable because the design discourages it.
Imagine if you create an awesome combat system and then most players had to avoid it because of resource management.
Imagine if you created many systems and let players engage with them as they prefer
Imagine calling “preventing the player from fighting enemies for fun” a system.
It’s like saying not being able to open doors is a mechanic.
Nobody is preventing anybody from enjoying fights. Some people like the fights.
I played and completely beat (minus korok seeds) BotW and TotK and I just cannot understand the hype around these games which bothers me (me not understanding, not the hype itself) because I wanted to like it. I’ve spent too long trying to figure out what I didn’t like about those games.
Long-Winded Thoughts
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Open World: After over a decade of similar game design, I’m completely burnt on the concept. Inevitably, I’m going to run straight to as many towers as possible to fill the map out and then fast travel across the map as needed because it’s the most efficient thing to do, which is what it did for both games. Traversal in TotK was a cop to that, I feel, because the overworld was recycled. Everything from the towers flinging you into the sky to being able to build vehicles was to increase the speed you could explore. Unfortunately, upgrades to the battery were behind such a grind, it forces you to be efficient in your designs which always means the two fan-and-control stick combo.
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Progression: Completely lacking. One of the things I love about other Zeldas is going through the dungeons and accruing power ups that open up new methods of traversal and increase Link’s power throughout the game. BotW and TotK both give you all the tools you’re going to get in the first two hours and then tell you to enjoy the other hundred. There is gear, but the environmental effects in a lot of zones strongly encourages you to wear what’s required. Upgrades are behind quite a grind.
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Time vs Reward: There’s a lot to explore in these games and the sight of a far off platform that requires some kind of solution to reach draws me in. I’d spend a good 5-10 minutes getting to it only to be rewarded with 5 arrows or I’d look in yet another cave just to break two weapons digging through a bunch of rocks for a bunch of amber and a sapphire. Eventually, I just stopped doing it because the rewards never justified the time I’d spend doing it.
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Story Delivery: For me, a good story can outweigh gameplay I don’t like, but both games miss the mark for me here as well. The open world design they went with is at odds with story delivery because you can possibly go anywhere. Memories made sense in BotW, but the tear drop system in TotK is really confusing. Being able to get the story out of order (which I ended up doing), really defuses what little narrative tension the game has. I don’t know why they couldn’t just play the next cutscene when you get the next drop. It is also perplexing that finishing the dungeons in TotK ends with you getting the same exact sage cutscene telling you the same exact information with a little bit of vocal inflection depending on character.
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Dungeon Design: Recycled ___blight Ganon in BotW was a real letdown compared to past fun boss designs. In TotK, it was real disappointing that the dungeons all had the same fundamental design – unlock four locks and fight the boss. It was fine the first time I saw it, but when I realized that was all the dungeons were going to do, it sucked the enjoyment right out of me. Also, I understand that the journey of getting to the dungeons is part of the experience, but in both games, they were so lackluster and few in number that it felt like a waste of time.
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Shrines: The shrines are so fire and forget I question why they were even there beyond padding out the map. I would’ve vastly preferred breaking the total into groups to make the dungeons into proper dungeons or at least consolidating them into shrine complexes that were more meaningful rather than a timesink.
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Weapons: Yes, the durability system. I don’t have an issue with it per se, but its design encourages habits. What it encouraged me to do is hang all the cool race specific weapons on the wall because I couldn’t afford to replace one if they broke. I never used them. Also, the Master Sword running out of juice makes my eyes roll back in my head.
Amber.
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Those are some of the only decent ones, though. Nearly every other sandbox/survival/open-world game will be relegated to the dustbin of history, though. Can’t wait for the survival fad to die.
Yeah, they’re quite possibly the only open world games that made traversal and exploration fun. In 5 years the only difference will be BOTW haters seething at it appearing in every top 100 of all time list.
Nah. I don’t think that their reputation will increase (the gaming landscape is just way too fractured for that and “gamers” have shown they are fine just eating slop) but both of those games have given me joys and wonder that no other game has since I’ve stopped being a teen.
both of those games have given me joys and wonder that no other game has since I’ve stopped being a teen
I sincerely wish I understood this.
It’s fine, there’s no game that’s perfect for everyone, just games perfect for someone. If this isn’t one of yours then no worries.
I totally agree. I’m just usually pretty consensus on these things. I’m worried I’m getting old haha!
They’re going to be remembered as masterpieces
I’m looking forward to that. Right now, I’m in the prophecy portion of the Cassandra myth.
ITT games people dislike
Does anyone even remember the hype around Diablo 4? That was barely 7 months ago lol
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I didn’t even realize it was being made at all and that there was an entire ad campaign for it until I went to KFC one day (which is rare) and saw it. Was pretty mind blown because I remembered when Diablo 3 came out. Haven’t played it tho lmfao.
Diablo isn’t in the Diablo game. That’s for the expansion pass.
I played 3 with some buddies on couch co-op and its the only reason it was any fun at all. Never even considered playing 4.
Blizzard had it’s peak pre-crap division merger IMO.
They took the worst parts of Diablo 3 and decided to maximize the amount of MTX.
They can’t even allow you to purchase more stash/inventory space because they programmed it so that every player loads every other players entire inventory and stash as soon as they load into the same area.
I understand I’m in the minority who just wanted a modern version of Diablo 2’s mechanics but Diablo 4 is really bland once you beat the story
It crashed and burned after the first patch.
The Rick And Morty guy’s talking gun game
That was aged when it came out. I played the whole thing through games pass on launch, mostly because I just built a new pc and was trying everything. Boring gunplay, dated humor, overstayed its welcome. Mid-tier everything on top of being just not very fun.
I can’t believe they didn’t even change anything and basically copied Morty’s character exactly.
Justin Roiland can only do two voices, and Morty’s one of them.
Oh jesus that game just felt like a smug bro comedy routine from the mid 2010s projectile vomiting in my face filled with unimaginable bathos humor (I fucking hate what Marvel and internet nerds have done to bathos humor).
Half life Alyx. Hey! wanna play this new and pretty triple A release from gambling addiction magnates and epic gamers of Valve? Guess what fucko, you need to spend your precious money on a big stupid headset, oh yeah you also need a room to play in so you dont trip on the cables or knock your stuff down, you also need to upgrade your puny computer so it can handle the glorious sauce 2 graphics engine with raytracing and real time vertex nipple twister simulations, breathtaking isnt it
Yeah nah turns out the only breath you’ll be taking is right before you puke your guts out since VR is physically impossible to use for a significant amount of people, oh and that shiny headset we recommend for our brand new game? Yeah you need to shell out two months of rent to get one, thats another breath you’ll take when the tidy numbers of your bank account turn into a nice fat zero.
So yeah, that game was a huge grift, and we havent heard a peep from Valve on VR ever since, comforting my opinion that VR as a whole is a stupid and wasteful grift that can’t work unless we come up with something like the matrix.
imagine they finally release Half-Life 3 for real and it’s a fucking VR game
I’m 90% certain this is the goal.
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Seated VR stuff like racing or flying games seems to be the real niche for it.
My buddy got a deal on a full sim racing setup on Craigslist and holy shit the difference between tv and vr headset is night and day. It’s very immersive.
The one time I tried it for war thunder sim sucked because the resolution was too low to identify friend from foe and made it unplayable.
I don’t own a vr headset, just borrowed them a few times because otherwise its totally not worth it.
For sim applications, it is game changing though.
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Its still the only game I want to play in VR. Some of the other like, gun building type games look fun, but I’m not getting a VR headset until I get my pc upgraded to where I want it, and even then if I do, I’m sure as shit not getting valve’s headset for like 1.5k. I considered a meta quest but then I’d be giving zuckerberg money.
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Posting piracy links on hexbear is encouraged
I’ve considered doing this a couple times but I actually want to play it in VR.
I’m an early adopter of VR, and it IS a really amazing game.
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This is true for VR in general. I got caught up in a treat frenzy and splurged on an Oculus Quest 2. Some games were actually fun for a while but after a few months I just returned to playing normal ass video games and now I mostly regret buying the thing.
Maybe I could see it having some staying power in those places with laser tag and stuff like that where you can actually run around with the headset but honestly I can’t see most people justifying the upfront cost for a gimmick.
VR is the golf of gaming. Needlessly expensive, takes up too much space and resources, exclusionary, and shilled mainly by rich white dudes.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
two months of rent
My Valve Index cost $1000, which is half of what I was paying for rent at the time (and about 1/4 of what I would pay today in the same neighborhood)
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What the fuck how many roommates do you have, I live in a “cheaper” city and rent with three other roomates can be 700 a month still for leaky housing
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I live in a sub-500k population city and that number would make folks here think you’re joking for a small one room.
Yeah but renting is cheaper than owning rite
Yes, sometimes! But only if you have a huge downpayment and can fight investment firms hoovering up properties around here.
VRchat and gorilla tag are by far the most fun things on VR and are pretty accessible when it comes to processing power actually.
I find that in VRchat the mic anxiety goes away when you’re talking to a 3d model of Dr. Eggman or a Skibidi toilet. Something about the presence I dunno.
Strictly speaking it’s not from the last 5 years but Rockstar was milking it dry until very recently: GTA5. I really hope that someday GTA5 is looked back on as the boring, unfinished piece of crap it is. San Andreas is a better game by several leagues and that shit came out on the PS2.
GTA 5
And it has been out for ten fucking years.
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GTA 1 to 4: 11 years
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GTA 5 to 6: 12 years
It feels like the gap between 4 and 5 was also really long but goddamn, its been a fucking decade.
As far as I’m concerned, the franchise started with GTA3.
7 years, GTA3, VC, SA, LCS, VCS, GTA4
5 year wait, then GTA5.
And that was 11 years ago.
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I’m going through the story mode for the first time since release and it’s better than I remember but still hasn’t aged well overall. The radio sucks, the driving is worse than 4 imho, and Trevor is pretty much unnecessary as a character. The fact that the story was thrown to the wayside in favor of online also sucks.
I don’t know because I only play good games
there are no “good” g*mes sorry to spoil your “fun”
gonna make a Pissing On Feinstein’s Grave Simulator just to prove you wrong
will you charge for the kissinger and thatcher expansions?
yes, because otherwise you couldn’t pirate them
good games will eventually die out one day though. for one reason or another twt
I still play old good games like Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country, though. I do think that most pre-16bit games are absolute dogshit, though. The NES has SMB 1-3 and not much else worth playing except as a historical curiosity.
Contra and Punch Out were pretty good on NES, I also like recommending Klax to people who enjoy puzzle games because it’s pretty unique and fun!
Contra is another good one. Punch-Out as a game is really bare bones and the experience wears thin once the quirky characters get old, for me. Haven’t played Klax so I can’t comment.
Play Wario’s Woods!
90% of everything is crap, media from 10+ years ago seems better because we remember morrowind and forget azurik
just a heads up, Morrowind and Azurik were over twenty years ago, not just ten. I know you put a plus, but this is a fun opportunity to all commiserate about getting old!
yeah i said 10+ because it takes that long for the effect to start happening and i can’t remember a good/mid pair like that from 2014
i’ll remember how bad mass effect 3’s ending was forever though.
Baseball from the NES is my favorite sports game. The pure joy and fun I get from playing that with a friend has not equal in any other sports game.
recently made a RetroPie console with a thin client i had nothing else to do with. Downloaded a bunch of NES, SNES, 64, and GC games. NES games suck dude. Even SNES games, for the most part. a few hits, but even then, the hits were just because i had on nostalgia glasses.
The NES has SMB 1-3 and not much else worth playing except as a historical curiosity.
lmao it’s true, but that just makes it all the more special when you discover something like Metal Storm which genuinely rips even though nobody heard of it when it came out.
Megaman didn’t age well
Kirby’s Adventure was an all-timer. Still a joy to play.
Another great one I forgot
based tbh
good, maybe then I can dig into the backlog
Elden Ring, Horizon Zero Dawn and it’s sequel forbidden west, Starfield, and every cookie cutter Ubisoft open world game and their clones. The new Call Of Duty and Battlefield games are also going to age really badly, just rebooting 10+ year old titles (modern warfare and 2042) will age poorly.
Elden Ring is a great game, but it going to be a lot of people’s first experience with a fromsoft game, and they are not for everyone. The horizon games are more tech demos than video games, and the less said about cookie cutter open world games, the better.
Granted I’m old and impatient, but I tried playing Horizon and I couldn’t get through 30 minutes. There were so many cut scenes that it didn’t feel like a game.
I really liked Horizon Zero Dawn but the story hook of the game is way too far in IMO, and the story is probably the only reason I finished it. Like, I was trying to find reasons to like the game and failing and about to give up before you encounter the big metal door, and then I was like “Huh, maybe this is actually an interesting game after all.” It just starts off really slow unless you’re really into quasi father-daughter dynamics, which I can’t say I particularly am. It is fundamentally a Ubisoft towers skinner box game with a Gamer Vision scanning thing and “Hm, guess I should go into that cave!” murmurs, and some of the enemies being metal versions of real-life creatures is really interesting for… a few hours, and then it just kinda isn’t, and some of them are too tanky for no particular reason.
Horizon Forbidden West kinda just felt like the same game as the first but in a different setting and with different metal creatures. It similarly takes a little while to get to the actual story hook - finding HADES - and once again I really liked the story, but once again it’s a Ubisoft towers skinner box with Gamer Vision. It’s actually really embarrassing for the game that the main gameplay hook (at least, as I saw it), being able to ride flying monsters and fly around the map, was introduced virtually at the end of the game and has very few uses in the game. I mean, I guess you have a… glider… that is really just a parachute. And underwater sections, sometimes.
The end of Forbidden West actually pissed me off. Like, I was planning on finishing up the rest of the game’s map and doing the rest of the quests and collectibles and stuff, just to get my money’s worth I suppose, but I finished the main quest and decided that I couldn’t really be assed. I really hate when game endings aren’t self-contained. It was just “Oh, we’re DEFINITELY getting a sequel to this, so we’re leaving you on a cliffhanger and not actually giving you any closure at all.” This kinda happened in the first game but like, the series could have ended there and you would have felt 95% satisfied. For this game, it was like 10% satisfied.
I’ll… probably play the third game simply because I’m invested in the game’s story at this point, but the gameplay loop simply isn’t going to get better and I’m not looking forward to once again climbing up those towers and once again entering Gamer Vision and once again firing dozens of arrows into machines while in Slow Motion Aiming Gamer Mode.
I have no idea how they made fighting and controlling robot dinosaurs boring. It sounds like the coolest thing ever, yet somehow it’s just meh
Horizon is already in that camp, I’m afraid.
Any game that uses the Ubisoft exploration method of going somewhere to reveal icons on a map like Horizon or Breath of the Wild has already aged badly.
It was super cringe that even Spider-Man had to go around NYC activating towers. Although Spider-Man, Horizon and BotW are already over five years old, so technically outside of this thread.
Just going for NG+ on Elden ring felt terrible. Definitely will receive a lot more criticism once people have the benefit of hindsight.
It’s hard to say - a lot of them are aging poorly so fast these days, especially with how they come out all glitchy. It’s like Starfield was born and then drank from the wrong holy grail.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. Genuinely good things in its favor but the exploration/traversal is utter trash. The absolute second Open Wolrd stops being a buzzword, this will be a casualty
Damn, you beat me to naming Scarlet and violet, but my reason is because it has too much zoomer slang.
“Flex on” “L” “cringy”, and there’s pokemon with “smol” and “chonk” in their names. If gen ten has a fucking Skibidi toilet pokemon, I’m going to snap.
holy shit a Fairy/Poison type it’s perfect
Agreed, but in a different way. I feel like Pokémon will create better open worlds in the next few years, making S/V feel last gen and dated.
Hopefully they run at more than 20 fps.
