Dusk is a 90s style shooter from the mind of a teenager (2016)

> Games have character levels, level ups and skill trees but why exactly? Does it make Project Warlock more fun? Certain game traits are replicated without thought.

Because simple gameplay loops like that keep people hooked to play them for longer. It's the cynical behaviorist approach to game design, and especially for online games that rely on people playing for longer times and/or paying for more content, that's a great way to extract money from players. Also, game designers are very much aware of it.

[0] https://twitter.com/Alucard__C99/status/1328887200944189445

Dusk is an amazing game. The gun, movement and general mechanics of the game are solid. The action is solid and the level and enemy design is great.

There are quite a few “wow” moments in the game.

For those that like these games I also recommend Amid Evil. The game is excellent and well worth a look for many of the same reasons.

Some of the other “boomer” shooters have been a bit hit and miss. Ion Fury was good but Tbh is a bit easy. prodeus is okay in bursts and wrath of aeon is solid but like the original quake can get a bit boring. Some of the other FPS games in the same vain have been "I've played it for a day and probably won't play it today".

These days I am playing Doom mods via GZDoom and there is soo much there now you could just play doom mods and never play anything else.

I have so much to write on this, sorry if it comes off as incoherent rambling. The gist of it is I think the 90s really were a special time in computer gaming, and it's not just nostalgia you're feeling. I'll try to list what came to mind.

- Just like the 60s-70s in music, product people had no concept of what a marketable game looked like, and were willing to fund much more riskier ideas. - Video game team sizes and budgets were smaller, allowing designers much more leeway, as well being able to personally oversee the production much better. - Although Moore's law was a thing before and after the 90s, It's the advancement during that time meant that games went from pixelated abstract bleep-bloop affairs, to being able to render and simulate complex 2D and 3D worlds. - Feeding in to my previous point, people were literally writing the book on modern game genres, like RTS, Sim games (who thought that managing a city could be fun?), FPS, etc. - John Carmack, I literally cannot overstate how impactful his contributions were to the FPS genre. With the introduction of Binary Space Partitioning in games (first in Doom in 2D, then a fully 3D version in Quake), he elegantly solved occlusion culling, collision detection, and 3D level editors in a masterstroke, while allowing 3D games to run on the meagre hardware of the times. Almost literally every FPS game used a BSP to represent its levels for more than a decade (Unreal, Quake and Source sure did).

Unfortunately, the console era which came after, has put a brake to this breakneck pace of development.Console games, especially in the PS1-X360 eras, were dumbed down for both technical limitations, and gameplay: - Studios sought to appeal to the masses, who didn't always appreciate the complex mechanics. - You just can't make as sophisticated UI for gamepads as for keyboard/mouse. This killed of multiple PC genres on console, the RTS most prominent among them. - Due to the primary storage medium being DVDs/CDS in the console space, developers had to contend with their limitations, such as slow transfer speed, and abysmal seek times (yes even compared to HDDs). This meant that levels needed to be more linear, and player freedom had to be restricted. RAM sizes were also tiny compared to PCs of the time, further increasing the problem.

I'm sure there's a ton of stuff that I missed.

The Civvie review of the original Shadow Warrior is hilarious. Highly recommended.

I don't think it's cargo culting, as much as it's a generation of gamers who were raised with the expectation of a "progression system". I remember back when EA was ridiculed for their statement about "giving a players a sense of pride and accomplishment" regarding requiring a long grind (or big payment) to unlock the most powerful characters in a Star Wars game. I've seen people beg developers to give them something pointless to grind for because they won't play a game without rewards. I think developers know how to make fun games, but I don't think most players want fun games because they've been conditioned to want addiction simulators with meaningless rewards.