newtmonkey wrote on 2024-04-19, 16:34:

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-04-19, 16:21:

I dunno I feel there are some old games that had a mix of interesting mechanics , or designs that haven't really been copied and make them special but might be considered not as accessible by modern standards.

...

So yeah maybe there's something in the whole notion of having to play it right.

Great examples! I agree with both, especially the Tex Murphy games as I'm currently playing Under a Killing Moon for the first time now, and loving it. It's clunky and weird, and to be honest, my first thought when I started the game was, "this first person mode is unplayable." But it only took a few minutes of playing to get used to it, and now it's fine. I like the fact that nothing else in the world plays like it (other than the other Tex Murphy games I guess).

I had a similar experience with System Shock. It's another one that feels completely overwhelming and bizarre when you first try to play it, but once you sit down and give it a few minutes of solid play, it makes total sense. The fact that it controls like no other game out there gives it a lot of character, and it's really satisfying to master the controls.

A lot of older games had more to offer than newer games in the genre or even the same series. X-Com/XCOM is a great example. While I enjoy the newer ones, the original has more to offer in several aspects. It's definitely more complex and many people enjoy the harder difficulty. The Elder Scrolls series is another good example, as it has steadily moved more towards the action side with fewer RPG elements. The Jagged Alliance series also followed a similar pattern, as the first two games haven't been matched.

Multiplayer has also had a considerable impact and flight sims are a good example to consider. In the past, we had flight sims with amazing single player content and dynamic campaigns that adapted to how your missions played out. The newer flights sims seem to focus more on multiplayer and often the single player content is a few scripted missions with little variety.

Ignoring graphics, newer games tend to focus more on streamlining the gameplay, which often involves simplifying things. It's also hard to continue innovating the games in a series, so a lot of sequels end up fixing what isn't broken. For me, strategy games provide the biggest examples of why retro gaming is worth getting into. There just aren't many newer games that can give you the same experience.

While there are some conveniences that make newer games more accessible, in my opinion not all of these "design innovations" are improvements: take the "Ubisoft way" with a cluttered UI which details every single step of every quest and side quest you can do and every point of interest marked like in a GPS. While that can help the player complete all the available content more thoroughly, it takes away any sense of discovery and feels more like homework, completely eliminating any immersive aspects of the game.

I actually enjoy being thrown into a new world and being lost in it, it's so much more fun to me to find my way around and just run into things without being prompted. Sure, you may miss a side quest or an item here and there, but it's much more rewarding when you figure out on your own how to tackle a difficult enemy or the solution for a tricky puzzle by exploring the environment at your own pace. Old games did things this way much more often, and it was usually not a defect or some limitation of those times, but rather an approach that is much more respectful to the player. I feel many people have been conditioned to expect that they need to 100% everything no matter what.

A similar thing applies to how the game story is conveyed, old games could not afford hours of cutscenes dumping every single detail of the plot like a mediocre Hollywood movie. Instead, they integrated these elements into the environment or in item descriptions (in particular for RPGs). But it seems you cannot ask the player to read a few lines of text nowadays, the attention span is too short and everything must be stated bluntly without any subtlety.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-04-19, 16:59:

No, the latest Doom game was shit for a Doom game. I think of it as Quake 3 amped to 11 with a doom skin. It's not you. heh. […]
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No, the latest Doom game was shit for a Doom game. I think of it as Quake 3 amped to 11 with a doom skin. It's not you. heh.

esports is where the money is at and it's infected the Doom games with that bullshit. You shouldn't have to be on crack to play a new Doom game but sadly that's where we are at.
You want multiplayer shit? Fine that's what multiplayer is for but leave the single player alone assholes.

The same thing happened with Diablo. It's was based off of a roguelike and then it digressed from there. Diablo 2 was still good but then it went massively downhill with D3.

Both cater to online game/esports gaming mentality. It used to be by gamers for gamers but they feel they have to follow the money and when the original team leaves and the replacement were brought up in a different environment then here we are. You have to program the game by the spreadsheet of required features which has to be approved by marketing to be as popular as possible to get that money.

Absolutely, the way esports/competitive garbage has infested everything is irritating. And yet when you ask one of those crazed Doom Eternal fans they will quickly point (alongside many insults and "Rip and tear!!1!1") that "Doom was always an arena shooter" with the same "gameplay loop" (I hate this term so much), even though they probably hadn't been born when the original Doom came out. I'm singling out that particular game because it seems to have the most mentally unstable hardcore fanbase out there, no offense to normal people that just like the game.

Companies have a conundrum. Games sell the most during their release window, and more games are released now than in the past. It used to be that you put out a good product and supported it and it could sell at full price for years. Back in the mid to late 90's it wasn't uncommon to only get 1 game of note released in a month and during the summer months get nothing at all, this was known as the "summer drought".

So the conundrum is how do you combat that issue. There are a few ways.

1. You release the game as a service so that support is continued to be rewarded with cash from subscribers.
2. You release simpler games that people can easily finish and release more iterations of the same thing with as little effort as possible.
3. Microtransactions

It's not all the companies greed that caused this problem, the success of the industry in general helped create some of the anti-consumer behavoirs. An attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator to widen your market causes issues as well.

I think we need another 80s style reset.

Nostalgia does play a role, but this is not all.
As a lot of people already pointed, game design rules were different back then, society was less cluttered and in general everybody had more time to enjoy things, so it was acceptable to make more difficult/cryptic games.
Some mechanics can be only found in older games, it’s not just the technology that was different but the whole game development context that was different.

Some criticisms seem like ...

... yeah, what the hell do you know Frodo, you've literally got a sink strainer on your head.

Many games I used to play I got thru sharing , demos and the crappy multipacks that had one decent title in it or wait 6 months after release to buy it cheaper as I couldn’t afford new games and downloading wasn’t an option either 🤣
Many games had been played to death and many got thrown to the back of the shelf I still find myself playing those as well but briefly.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-04-19, 16:59:

No, the latest Doom game was shit for a Doom game. I think of it as Quake 3 amped to 11 with a doom skin. It's not you. heh. ... […]
Show full quote

No, the latest Doom game was shit for a Doom game. I think of it as Quake 3 amped to 11 with a doom skin. It's not you. heh.
...
The same thing happened with Diablo. It's was based off of a roguelike and then it digressed from there. Diablo 2 was still good but then it went massively downhill with D3.
...
Mabye we should all pay Romero to crank out more doom maps. heh.

id, Blizzard, Rockstar all these games and companies are so far removed from what they were 20 years ago I don't consider them related anymore.
It's hard but you have to "forget" the previous games and think of the new games as new titles.

I'd consider Romero's maps more official than anything id releases, or say not that they could as no longer own the name but if Petroglyph released a C&C title would be more authentic than anything after C&C2/RA2.

remember when Wrack really pushed on having a bobby prince soundtrack and it was a retro fps and uh..... what's wrack again