Fun fact: apparently Borderlands' artstyle was changed to what it fairly late into development relatively speaking, which is probably the reason it ends the way it does, because they didn't have to time to develop this artstyle and properly test it, AND write the ending, so they paniced, killed a siren, and said "ok kill ermm tentacle thing?" As for what I think will keep an audience, it's a tricky balance between high-level gameplay ala speedruns or competative, and casual playthroughs. the movement of a Celeste or SM64 allows for crazy speedrun tricks, but doesn't require them for people casually playing the game. The mechanic of shooting portals in Portal can make for excellent puzzle design as well as allowing for challenges like lowest portals or quickest time, and can also be used to break reality in the speedrun scene. There's a little something for everyone at any time in games that last forever. Whereas typically multiplayer online-only games can only really adopt people that know more and more about the game as time goes on (try introducing League or an MMO to someone when they have to keep in mind about a billion different things that will only grow as time goes on) as the communities around them grow more hostile to bad play (or more accurately not optimal play ala RP-ing in an MMO). There's a video that Dan Olsen aka Folding Ideas called "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" that goes more in detail with this concept in regards to WoW specifically, but a similar concept exists in a vast majority of multiplayer-only games where optimization leads to more victories.

Great video! You basically hit on everything I’d have to say on the topic. I guess i’ll just say that the Mario Galaxy games will be timeless classics that i’m so lucky to have had in my childhood.

What you're saying about stylization is very true. That's why it's pretty easy for me to go back to a lot of NES games, because they choose art style over realism. As a matter of fact, any video game that uses art style over hyperrealism, ages much better in my humble opinion. That's why even the GameCube version of Metroid Prime still looks good today, despite the remaster blowing it out of the water.

I'm really glad that Stardew is going to age well, I love that game so much!

Man, you're channel is so underrated!

danm good video. loved the bit on modding as im too deep into the modding sphere for most games i play. there are tons of games that have mods but the biggest 3 i know of that have massively transformed their games through modifying game files is skyrim which included a whole bunch of new maps seperate to skyrim itself like elsewhere, minecraft which has stuff like the aether mod and twilight forest which add soo much content and terraria which adds whole new biomes with a lot of mods, a new map for a couple others including one still in beta which i love the look of and even a mod that allows for the base map size to be extended further than the original large size which allows for better biome melding. on top of that you have more recent games like subnautica which have only recently been made more accessible for modding (literally just changed last month with a engine update included with the extra base parts update) that still has a huge modding scene with one of the big mods adding in a whole multiplayer system for the singleplayer game that has been going on for years starting develoupment of the mod during 2017.

uwu