Or in other words, old man yells at cloud. Don’t take this too seriously, I don’t want to offend anyone.

I was recently watching some FF7 Remake / Rebirth technical analysis videos on Youtube, and while I can respect the persons who are doing and sharing these kind of analyses (it is valuable work!), the crowd (i.e. comment section) seems so… Spoiled, to me.

Of course with newer tech we should expect improvements in quality and performance, but the way I see it as a 40+ year old gamer, is that games have always had performance issues. Maybe developers are always too ambitious on whatever is currently possible? idk.

Of course I’m biased. I’ve always played (AAA) games several years after release, as I’ve never had the resources to invest to current gen tech. And I’ve always been satisfied, and I’ve had fun. People have complained forever about Bloodborne being 30 fps, but I’m still happily playing it in 2026 because it’s a freaking great game.

I don’t really know what I’m saying, this is just me rambling… Like for example in the FF7R, if you find 5 textures in a game that are a bit wonky on the resolution side in a 30-60 hour game, that doesn’t warrant complaining or being bitter about it. It seems like anything that isn’t flawless or perfect gets a ton of hate almost like, and it’s so weird to me. A millisecond of stutter here or there doesn’t either.

This ended up being kinda poorly written, I had more in mind when I started writing but I already forgot a lot what I wanted to say. But you get the gist? Anyone else feel like this?

  • There was a window of time in the mid 2010’s, around the peak of Unreal 4’s ubiquity, where you could crank games to Ultra settings and not even have to think about it. No time spent experimenting, tweaking individual sliders or toggles, nothing.

    PC hardware was relatively cheap, the consoles were powerful, and games still looked amazing, for a good 5-8 years. A generation of players came of age during this time without ever having to learn the vital skills of 1) tempering expectations and 2) tweaking settings. So they now see ANY friction, ANY dropped frames, ANY need to mess with settings, as a personal sleight. The PS5’s “Performance vs Quality” toggles are the ONLY thing they’ll tolerate now.