For me it's when the OS the game was made for/or was the most compatible at the date of release is no longer considered current.

Ten years or more sounds good to me. Five is just slightly outdated. If you're to follow Good Old Games' guidelines, it's currently like 2008 or before, unless of course you have a deal with a publisher, and then an "old" game can be one that came out in 2011. Err.. 😜

If no one talks about it, then it's officially old. Publishers, press, etc. act on a goldfish memory, since the prolongued interest of a game these days is less than 1 year with over restrictions and DLCs etc... and if there's DRM that's notoriously invasive, it'll be even shorter.

If no one talks about it, then it's officially old. Publishers, press, etc. act on a goldfish memory, since the prolongued interest of a game these days is less than 1 year with over restrictions and DLCs etc... and if there's DRM that's notoriously invasive, it'll be even shorter.

*cough*Spore?*cough*

MineSweeper and Freecell never get old.

I want my free copy of reversi!

Thing is some of the 5 year old games need some serious hardware to max out... Oblivion is the obvious one. NWN2 and Titan Quest can both make a fast Athlon X2/ Core 2 rig with a 8800GT or similar choke in places 😳 and they're old now?!

I usually tag everything older then a decade as 'old', but 'classic old' is reserved for 15+ years 😀

Heh, I doubt there's any definition of "old" that will work for everyone.

leileilol wrote:

If no one talks about it, then it's officially old.

..makes almost every just-released indie title old.

Stull wrote:

Ten years or more sounds good to me.

..rather arbituary. HL2 is 7 years old; some might say it's old, others would say it's still rather modern.

Dominus wrote:

For me it's when the OS the game was made for/or was the most compatible at the date of release is no longer considered current.

..so games released for vista are old now?

In the context of this site, I'd say "old game" is one that requires some work to get running on a modern system. As in, more so than on the systems it was released for.

Just like when hardware is released software is "Old" is when it's just released (or heck even before then). Because a developer may even be working on the sequel at that time....

I'd consider Vista kind of current, but that's another thing to discuss (when an OS can be considered old 😉)

Wait, what's a "modern" system? 😉

sgt76 wrote:

Thing is some of the 5 year old games need some serious hardware to max out... Oblivion is the obvious one. NWN2 and Titan Quest can both make a fast Athlon X2/ Core 2 rig with a 8800GT or similar choke in places 😳 and they're old now?!

Some of these games are simply not build for newer multi threading/multi core architechture. Oblivion for instance does not really take advantage of mutlicore architecture and does not benefit much from newer computers. It likes raw clock speed best. I played it on my Q6700 (Quad@2.66ghz) + Geforce GTX 460. Video card was not working much but the single working core @2.66 was bottlenecking the whole thing like crazy and fps was so-so. I momentarily overclocked my machine to 3.66 Ghz just to play it and it helped alot. Only way i could stay around a steady 60fps. Bethesda updated their engine a bit for Fallout3 so it can use multicores a bit better, and it shows.
Yet, its still not very optimized compared to some other engines out there.

That being said, i think oblivion aged very well, still a beautiful game. Does not feel old to me.. Perhaps the primitive pixel shader it uses does shows a bit of age. But you can forgive anything to such an awesome game 😀

To add to that, resolutions also kept going up. For example when Farcry came out, most played at 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768.

In order to play it at 1920 x 1080 with all details and the HDR enabled, you really needed a Geforce 8 series card to get 60+ fraps all the time.

Yes, I forgot to add i was playing oblivion in 1920x1200 with every settings maxed and the Ultra detailed texture mod installed 😜 I think you need at least a geforce 9x to run Oblivion with such specs around the 60 fps . But you just wont get there without the cpu clocking around 3.5 Ghz or more.

MaxWar wrote:

That being said, i think oblivion aged very well, still a beautiful game. Does not feel old to me.. Perhaps the primitive pixel shader it uses does shows a bit of age. But you can forgive anything to such an awesome game 😀

I dunno. There's bloom EVERYWHERE, so everybody and everything looks like its covered in cling wrap and the characters faces look pretty terrible when you zoom in for a conversation. The landscapes look nice enough I guess except when you look out at the distance and see everything turn to a soupy mess.

I fired it up not that long ago and I didn't think it really looked very good at all.

But maybe i'm being overly critical. I was really disappointed with Oblivion because I was a huge Morrowind fan and there were a lot of things they did in Oblivion which I didn't like.

DonutKing wrote:

I dunno. There's bloom EVERYWHERE, so everybody and everything looks like its covered in cling wrap and the characters faces loo […]
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MaxWar wrote:

That being said, i think oblivion aged very well, still a beautiful game. Does not feel old to me.. Perhaps the primitive pixel shader it uses does shows a bit of age. But you can forgive anything to such an awesome game 😀

I dunno. There's bloom EVERYWHERE, so everybody and everything looks like its covered in cling wrap and the characters faces look pretty terrible when you zoom in for a conversation. The landscapes look nice enough I guess except when you look out at the distance and see everything turn to a soupy mess.

I fired it up not that long ago and I didn't think it really looked very good at all.

But maybe i'm being overly critical. I was really disappointed with Oblivion because I was a huge Morrowind fan and there were a lot of things they did in Oblivion which I didn't like.

I have to agree about characters face up close in oblivion, also everyone kinda looks alike. They did not make a very impressive use of the pixel shader either ( doom3 is more impressive and is at least 2 years older). As for Bloom, i dont use it and prefer HDR, everything felt too saturated with bloom, although it seems to vary depending on you graphic card. The obvious strength of the engine was for rendering large and detailed environments. I have fond memories of Oblivion, i did play my share of Morrowind but not as much, never hooked me in the same way for some reasons. I never finished Morrowind but I Played through Oblivion at least thrice and somehow i still see it as beautiful, the same way i first saw it in 2006.

But i know what you mean by being "spoiled" by an earlier iteration of a franchise. I always frowned on DooM3, was a huge fan of DooM1, DooM2. I felt DooM3 had totally wrong gameplay to earn the name. To me it felt more like Half Life Satanic edition.

I had a traumatic experience with Oblivion when it came because of the high system requirements - even after mods (cut the grass, etc) and turning down/off graphical settings my system at the time was still struggling, and it looked horrible.

The graphics were always far too 'cartoony' for me, but I have high hopes for Skyrim - and this time I have a decent computer to throw at it!

badmofo wrote:

but I have high hopes for Skyrim - and this time I have a decent computer to throw at it!

Problem is its apparently going to use steamworks... Which means im not buying it.