LogFAQs > #950428792

GrabASnickers posted...

It feels like we'll hit a point where general game design sensibilities stop changing a whole lot and it's all just specs.

Indeed. As much as the 360 is as old now as the NES was when the PS2 came out (and the NES was unambiguously a retro system in 2000), gaming changed a whole lot more between 1985 and 2000 than it did between 2005 and 2020, such that I wouldn't call the 360 "retro." There's definitely an element of bias in there because '05-'20 has been a much smaller percentage of my life (~50%) than '85-'00 was at the time (~136%), but I can boot up a game from 2005 and not really notice that much of a difference from any modern game, aside from graphics. That's even more pronounced with how prevalent indie games have become, where there often isn't even a graphical difference because they lack the budget to take advantage of modern graphical capabilities. Controller upgrades have been relatively minor, rather than introducing any major new buttons to add to schemes, and the way those controllers were used hasn't particularly changed, either.

Chronologically, the PSWii60 generation could probably be considered retro, but so many of its games are largely indistinguishable from modern ones if you ignore the graphics that I don't think it's particularly reasonable to call them that. The transition to 3D was the last major paradigm shift in how games were designed, and after a generation of figuring out how that worked (many N64/PS1 games are super dated), not much has changed to really set modern games apart from those of that era.

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