Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability.
Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability.
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can't count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you'd lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
Games were definitely buggy and I honestly think people forget how much better the quality is nowadays.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice. If you only have one game to play then of course you're going to replay it to death. If I have a steam library of 1000 games then I'm much less likely to.
A lot of this is just nostalgia for the past and the environment as opposed to games being any better.
This is just nostalgia.
Case in point, you can still play all of these old games. If you are willing to pirate, you can get access to thousands of games, most you never even played before, for free. You never have to pay for another game as long as you live and a still be playing new games from this era of "better" games.
I've done this myself. Played for like a month, and then for bored. And basically noone does that. I have the Nintendo switch access to old nes games. My kids never touch it. No one can really say because there is no novelty.
You know why? Modern games are way better. This isn't to say these isn't some annoying shit that goes along with them. But the old days weren't some magical time of gaming. It seems magical because it was new, especially to the people living during that time, and simply due to nostalgia.
I know I won't be popular, but I love modern gaming. I throw a game I'm interested in in my steam wish list. I wait for it to drop to below 20 dollars, and then I buy it.
The most recent games that I've put a ton of hours into are bg3 and anno 1800. No micro transactions, unless I missed something.
I also played a ton of supercell games: coc, cr, and bs. Many entertaining hours over years. Never spent a dime. Micro transactions other people paid allowed me to play for free. How is this not amazing?
I'm open to hearing competing ideas, but if you do you disagree with me, expect me to ask why you don't do the things above, and just answer the question in your post. If that's ignored, it will just indicate to me that you realize I'm right.
games back then were also more focused on quality
This is selection bias. You remember Metal Gear Solid, but do you remember Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft? Do you remember Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero? Bubsy 3D? The million-and-one licensed games that were churned out like baseball cards back then?
and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money
If we're going to say that a full-price game today costs $70, Metal Gear Solid would have cost the equivalent of $95. Not only that, but that was very much the Blockbuster and strategy guide era. Games would often have one of their best levels up front so that you can see what makes the game good, but then level 2 or 3 would hit a huge difficulty spike...just enough to make you have to rent the game multiple times or to cave in and buy it when you couldn't beat it in a weekend. Or you'd have something like Final Fantasy VII, which I just finished for the first time recently, and let me tell you: games that big were designed to sell strategy guides (or hint hotlines) as a revenue stream. There would be some esoteric riddle, or some obscure corner of the map that you need to happen upon in order to progress the game forward. The business model always, at every step of the medium's history, affects the game design.
"Value" is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of "stuff" to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
You didn't have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought...
Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.
The level of quality and number of bugs depends a lot on the era you're talking about, as well as the platform. As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work. My experience with console gaming was usually much more hassle free, though I have far less experience with it and don't have a modern point of comparison (last console I even used, not even owned, was the PS3).
My real point of "it was better in the old days", is the industry learning to exploit addiction. It's everywhere, and it's not just gambling. The longer you play the more likely you are to pay so even without loot boxes and the like, games are taking as much out of casino playbooks as possible. It's fucking revolting and should be criminal.
As someone who has had problems with addiction of various kinds in the past, it's so blatant to me. I can feel it playing into my vulnerabilities and it makes my blood boil. I avoid most gaming these days because I know if I let it become a habit, the next time life knocks me down I'll fall victim to this.
Game updates bring bad with the good, because devs often rely on them to deliver a full, playable game.
When you bought a game back in the day, you got a full, playable game on the media. It wasn't always bug-free, because... you know... it's software, but they had to at least quash all the showstoppers without the benefit of a Day 1 patch.
And don't get me started about DRM...
I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn't get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.
I think that feeling is why it's still my favorite PC game.
That was a large part of the charm for me in Tunic. The core mechanic was collecting pages of the instruction booklet as you adventured so you could learn the mechanics of the game. The other part of that being the manual was written in an unknown language* and you'd need to infer what the instructions meant using context clues. It was an absolute blast and hit the dopamine button when I figured out some puzzles.
*Btw, if you know, you know
A few days ago, I found out that one of the first games I ever owned, The Broken Land, was abandonware. I knew that it was generally considered a bad Diablo knock-off, but I had it remembered as at least the items and enemies being 'meaningful' in ways I don't see it today anymore.
Lots of games just look formulaic and predictable to me now. Like, there's a small and a medium potion, yeah alright game, I'm slowly getting too large of a health pool for you to not give me the big potions.
Well, I looked a little closer at the screenshots, and yeah, fuck me, the game doesn't even try to hide its formulaicness. Health potions are literally just PNGs with a number attached, in variants, small, medium, big. There's like 10 different PNGs of armor. And you'll frequently have just one or two enemy types copy-pasted all over an area.
I guess, that is why people call it a bad Diablo knock-off. But having been a kid without expectations when I played it, that had me remember specifically that part as comparatively good, when it was objectively pretty bad...
Yes, there was no online play or updates, so they couldn't steal back the game you paid for because they decided to stop supporting it one day.
Well yea:
- No online play meant game had to be played with people sitting next to you. You had to socialize;
- No updates meant games had to be finished when sold, none of the early access or battle pass bullshit;
- Games were made hard to artificially give longer play time but this resulted in sense of achievement when you beat the game;
- Booklets were actually awesome because you had lore in your hands which was written in a way not to spoil the game but hyped you to play further so you could get to that content.
Sure for the most part it's nostalgia, but technology brought as many, if not more, bad things as it did with good things. We've seen games get much better than old games and we've seen them much worse.
A couple of points.
We didn't need online access back then, we had LAN parties.
Most of the time you didn't need updates, because back then they were much more diligent about making sure a game released without bugs. Yes a few existed, but much less than what you see in today's games. A showstopper bug was death for sales, since it couldn't be fixed inexpensively.
And those instruction books, especially if you are into the artistry that they put into them, is sorely missed, truly.
Reading my Diablo 2 and WarCraft 2 manuals on the toilet were some of the highlights of my childhood
Taking my kid home with a new (used via GameStop) Nintendo game sucks. I excitedly hand him the case and theres like nothing for him to read.
oh fuck, those beautiful manuals just came rushing back into the surface from the depths they were buried under.
They had soul
Comparing modern game with games from the olden days is a little bit like comparing a savery steam pump with a modern internal combustion engine. Sure the general principles are identical but the complexity of the system is a manifold of the other.
I really love retro games, i have very fond memories of the C64 and SNES, but i am not a fan of the glorification of those games. Only a small part of the old games are still fun today and lots of them have bugs. Secret of Mana on the SNES for example has a fun bug where leveling all weapons and spells to max can create a overflow error in the final fight of the game, which removes the mana hero completely from the game, rendering the last fight impossible because only the mana hero can damage the mana dragon significantly.
Fun anecdote. The PAL version of Digimon World 1 had a serious bug that prevented your progress to recruit Ogremon, which you needed to recruit Shellmon, which you needed to recruit a bunch of late game digimons, and made your access to several areas extremely harder. A 100% completion was impossible. It was still such a neat game tho.
playclassic.games is a website
Of course I still have the manual of these old games. The characters were always hand drawn and properly described. For rpg they also used a nice medieval fantasy style. A lot of these descriptions were not even necessary but they were cool to have.
We don't miss these games because they were inherently better, but because they were fun in their own way, and enhanced creativity due to their own limitations. Also these were console games, so you had a specific time and hardware to play them. It's not like a moder multiplayer pc game, that somehow follows you beyond the gaming time, and that are played on the same machine you use to work.
Sometimes I feel like these games are exhausting when they take so much energy. Than you have updates, tierlists and a new meta every week. I used to sit down and play without thinking at anything else on old consoles. Still do. They don't send me unwanted notifications. Than you have all the lootboxes gacha stuff.
Games were technically limited but built a simple and fun experience.
I would have appreciated a more robust modding community for NES, etc.
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows; What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.I think there is something to respect about both types of games these days.
There's an analogy with the music industry too. Music recording before was for the "elite" who were sure that their music would hit. Nowadays, the music recording broadens to the public, ergo more less quality focused music is released.
The same goes with video games