How much games have evolved over the past Decade

A whole Decade of gaming sounds like forever, and yet it feels as though that time flew by quicker than ever.

As hardware improves, programmers become more efficient with their code, game artists improve their drawing techniques, audio engineers get more advanced with their sound creation, designers create more complex ideas for game features and story lines, and everyone in between improves with their part of game creation, games only get better and better each year; proof of this can be seen with comparisons of the games made ten years ago, with the ones recently released.

Some games from around ten years ago:

1.The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)

Skyrim; a nostalgic and addicting game for many people with its open world environment, beautiful graphics, amazing scenery and great story. With the number of things there is to do, and such an immersive world, it’s no shock so many people sunk hundreds of hours into this game. The game struck a huge audience, with sales amounting to over thirty million copies, a small audience who still plays after ten years, and a barrage of people pleading for the next title to come out.

However, everything has its flaws, and the insane number of bugs is one of those things for Skyrim. Another is that even though the graphics were amazing at the time, the graphics are now very out of date compared to nowadays graphics, another is that the game isn’t very well balanced; for example, becoming rich is very easy, slaying dragons really isn’t that hard, and becoming overpowered is also pretty simple.

2. Dark Souls (2011)

Great physics, fair combat system, and a real challenge; something which over ten million people took up in 2011 – the amazing graphics are just a bonus. Specifically, it was the shear difficulty which drove the people to play the game; with just one, small mistake, the player dies. The characters are slow, the enemies do a crazy amount of damage, and the attacks are very unpredictable, so all odds are against you.

Of course, for these days the graphics aren’t very up to date even though at the time they looked amazing, and the mechanics are clunky and unrefined by today’s standards. These are just things which most games weren’t able to perfect at the time.

Some fairly recent games:

Forza Horizon 5 (2021)

Insanely realistic graphics, huge open world, smooth movements and great physics; yes please. Forza Horizon 5 was definitely up there in terms of best games of 2021, the feel of the game is just so relaxing and immersive, the destructive and very well detailed environment perfectly adds to the realism and flow of the game.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

Just like Forza Horizon 5, Red Dead Redemption 2 also has a huge open world with realistic graphics. The world feels alive – like it breathes, with beaming sunrays and swaying trees in every forest, as well as beautiful wildlife; the team haven’t missed a single detail in making it as realistic as possible.

Through a little bit of research, I have listed some of the reasons gaming has improved. Here are some sites I read from:

So why and how have games improved? Here are a few basic reasons:

1.Better graphics

As you can see from the comparison, there definitely is a significant aesthetic difference between the games from ten years ago to now, they’ve certainly come a long way. With better Graphics cards, better modelling software, better artists, more storage to work with, faster hardware and a bigger budget it’s no wonder that nowadays game graphics are becoming so realistic they almost seem like real life.

But how have they improved? What allowed them to improve?

When researching for the answer I came across a video, I found out the answer was pretty complex and not so straight forward. There are many factors for the improvement of graphics and I don't have a better way of explaining it, so I'll just show you. A great video to watch if you're interested:

2. Better AI

The NPCs have definitely improved with their user interaction – they definitely feel a lot more human and can hold a more realistic conversation, as well as this they have better reactions to various events around them. You rarely find AI bugs in recent games, like for example a wild animal running into a wall infinitely, NPCs getting stuck in awkward animations and enemies glitching out through walls. More complex algorithms, machine learning, data mining and many other methods like these got the AI we know to where it is now.

3. Implementing better features and Concepts

As more time goes by, game companies get to listen to their audience and build up better ideas for their games. From new game modes to new items, interesting abilities, weapons, storylines, plots, soundtracks, game styles and much more - games of this era have the full package.

One good example is League of Legends. A game released in 2009 which is still very popular, with around 50 million daily players in 2022! How do they do it? Firstly, it’s a free-to-play, with no pay-to-win items; all payments are for cosmetics. This makes it very noob friendly and quick to get started, the game at the time was a first of its kind in terms of genre. This made it very popular in the early stages but how did the company maintain and grow the audience? Frequent updates with new champions, new abilities, new cosmetics, graphical updates etc. Not only this, but the game was heavily pushed into E-Sports which made it even more popular and entertaining for the players. With all of this in mind, it’s no wonder the game is still popular to this day – the game developers have done an amazing job maintaining the hype for the game.

4. Hardware

Face recognition, voice recognition, virtual reality, augmented reality and wearable gaming consoles have changed the game when it comes to gaming experience, especially VR which has had a huge influence in the gaming industry. Whilst VR has been around for quite some time now, as time passes it’s getting more and more popular; one reason for this could be due to the pandemic – with more time being spent indoors the demand has increased significantly. Beat Saber, a game released in 2018, became insanely popular with sales amounting to over four million copies now, and was a big influence in the rise of VR.

Additionally, consoles and gaming PC hardware has improved significantly. It’s not rare to see people with crazy beast PC’s anymore; this allows for game companies to make CPU intensive games which take up a lot of memory. A decade ago, a standard game would be about 10GB – which is nothing compared to the 231GB Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and many other huge games which take up over 100GB of memory space.

 5. Story Telling in games has improved

Games actually tell good stories now. There used to be little to no story telling in video games, especially the very old games like Pacman, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong. Now its one of the main things to look forward to in a game; with a great story line and plot it just feels like there's a lot more purpose when playing a game - you don't just run around doing nothing. There was an era when games were basically trying to be movies in the 2000's, now games are becoming less of a movie where the end is predetermined and the player just follows along with only basic options which all lead up to the same ending. For a game to be enjoyable there needs to be more user interaction than just following along with the main plot. multiple different endings and side plots help with this, it allows a player to decide for themselves what parts of the game they want to explore, makes them want to carve out their own path and lets them decide how they want it to end - which is a lot more exciting, and a much greater user experience.

6. E sports and Streaming

Watching others has become very entertaining for players over the last couple of years, it used to be very weird to be watching someone play a game rather than play it yourself but now millions of people do it every day as entertainment. It also brings more attention to video games and brings out competition to gamers - you can see what the top players are doing, you can learn from them, learn from them and see them compete against other teams for a big cash prize at the end of the tournament. It's now very easy to look up some tips and tricks from your favorite streamers, as well as reviews and game-play of games without you having to get the game first.

7. Games Media

Gaming news is everywhere now; you constantly hear news about the latest games, updates and new features of existing games, as well as statistics involving the games industry - for example, at the time of writing this, I've found a LinkedIn post about the UK video games market is worth a record of £7.16 billion!

Thanks to @shaun-reeves for posting this and letting me know about it!

IGN, GameSpot, and Social Media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and many others make it easy to access information such as this, and lets fellow gamers share their interests with each other. Something which helps with this, is the fact that Gaming is now a mainstream culture.

8. Gaming is now part of Mainstream Culture

Gaming is now mainstream culture - it's very popular to people of any age, you can talk about them without coming across as a nerd anymore. People don't have to be scared of saying they're "gamers" anymore - they can embrace it as part of themselves. I remember my parents asking me what my dream was when I was still in early years of secondary school, I responded with "Anything to do with games; making games, playing games, programming games, drawing games- all of it. I don't care, just as long as there's games." This shocked my parents, they felt embarrassed about it at the time and didn't want to share my ambition with any of their friends as it didn't seem like anything worthy of becoming, they thought it would be humiliating if they said their kid wanted to do make games. As I performed well academically, they were probably expecting something more along the line of an Architect, Engineer, Mechanic or Doctor - professions I didn't really have a big interest in. However, I didn't really care about anyone's opinion and my passion did not die down one bit. As time flew by, we now live in an age where telling someone you make games isn't seen as weird or geeky.

9. Mobile Gaming

Allows you to play on the go, anywhere, any time and you can fit it into your pocket.

Gaming on a mobile device has never been so convenient. As technology and internet speeds improve, a tiny device which can conveniently fit in your pocket can also keep up with your desktop computer. With the rise of games such as Pokemon Go,PUBG mobile,Fortnite Mobile,Among us and many more, the demand for Mobile gaming is quickly on the rise, and manufacturers are responding rapidly with more advancements.

Mobile gaming has had a huge impact on the Gaming Industry and there's no doubt about it. Phones are now powerful enough to allow you to do this, and we're all grateful for it.

10. Steam and everything becoming digital.

Everything is being changed to digital now - no disks, just straight up buy and install.

And it's great! It's more convenient for people, as you used to have to go out to a game store to purchase a game - which is just effort. Its a lot more convenient to download games now from the internet, you also don't have to worry about scratches on discs, and don't have to worry about losing them - another benefit is that you also have a copy which you can easily install onto any device as long as you have the game bought on an account you can access from that device.

Steam: The revolution of digital distribution.

Steam fixed a lot of problems when it came to distributing PC games, which is why it rapidly took over the PC Gaming Market when it came out.

"The lack of retail focus on PC gaming simply didn't matter anymore" as "What launched in 2003 as a storefront for Valve's games gradually became the world's gateway to the entirety of PC gaming."

 By Keza MacDonald August 17, 2015. Link to Article: The 10 Biggest Changes of the Last 10 years in Video Games