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Are Older Games More Satisfying?
Kwirl asks: "While the computer and console gaming industry is growing at a remarkable pace, the focus is usually on better graphics as opposed to stronger gameplay and plot development/story arc. I personally have several titles (Sims2, Half-Life2, Doom 3, MSFS2004, Unreal 2004) sitting on my shelf that were amazing games, but just couldn't hold my interest for long enough to really be considered a worthwhile investment. In the last couple of years I had thought that the answer to my gaming needs would come in the form of MMORPG's. I have purchased and played many of them, but all seem to come to a stagnant point where I recognize that only addiction would drive me deeper into the game, and not better gameplay (Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Everquest II). In truth, I have found myself spending more time playing old MUD's (TorilMud, Medievia) again, or even amusing web-based games ( KingdomofLoathing, PimpWar, NeoPets). I am curious to know how many other people here find themselves walking intentionally backwards along the technological timeline of games for your personal expenditure of free time? What games/sites do you feel give you the best return of satisfaction versus time spent playing the game over the long haul?"
The latest games are good, and have a wow factor the first time I play each of them, but they don't have any staying power. I always seem to go back to my megadrive/SNES games, and ScummVM.
Part of it is probably reminiscing, but mostly I think older games couldn't rely on great graphics, so they had to make up for it in other areas.
I just look for decent flash stuff on newgrounds and other flash portals.
I'm a 2D platformer at heart. The extra dimension allowed developers to get lazy, while the games that came from the 2D era had to be creative to set themselves apart from the hundreds of other 2D platformers.
To be honest, I think that a lot of people like older games because these they evoke memories from a more innocent/carefree time in the player's life (e.g. teen-age years, or college), rather than better gameplay.
I just gave a talk at a conference which talked briefly about this. One of the my points was that the large companies have no incentive to advertise about older games. Activision makes more money for every copy of DOOM 3 that is sold than they do when someone fires up the original DOOM. (There are also issues with losing the history of the industry, but that's a whole other rant.)
In the end, the newer games get more attention than the older games. Companies spend a lot of money convincing people to keep track of the new games and that technology drives "fun". This is how the companies make more money.
This is actually a very backwards way of thinking of some games. For example, online RPGs (aka MMORPGs) actually get better with age. A game like my own Meridian 59 has had several expansions and tweaks done to the game over the years. These games tend to be very bug-free and well-balanced. The game grows and expands over the years, and the game you can play now is often quite different than the game it originally was.
Finally, sometimes games change. I'm a huge fan of computer RPGs, but the games released these days are hardly RPGs. Instead of being able to create a character (or party), I'm forced to deal with a pre-made character and run him (or rarely, her) through a pre-set adventure. Sometimes I just have to fire up a Wizardry game or the original Final Fantasy as an antidote to the mostly passive games that are released these days. I guess they sell really well, but it's not the type of game I want to play.
I'll post the slides to my conference talk on my professional blog (http://blog.psychochild.org/) when I get the chance.
Some thoughts,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
- The set of all new games; let's say "from 2002 onwards" for concreteness.
- The set of all games from before 2002.
Now, consider your standard of "goodness". The questioner uses something he calls "satisfying"; there are many possibilities here. This is a meta-argument, so I really do want you to substitute your personal standards.Now, unless your standards truly contain something highly technology based, like "I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water", which set is going to contain more good games?
Is this really surprising?
Cherry pick from ~20 years of games, and compare that to the cherry-picked games from the last three years, and the former set will typically be larger.
That said, there are some ways modern games are legitimately better. Linear RPGs are one strong example, I think (though non-linear RPGs are, for a variety of reasons, effectively dead). I'm not saying all standards will have this result... just the vast majority of them.
I hope most people designing games don't have that attitude. I'd much rather buy a game that I know I can enjoy multiple times than one I'll never want to replay. I can play Super Mario 3 over and over again, even though I know where all the stuff is. There are a lot of SNES games that I've played multiple times through - I just have to give myself a few months to forget some of the details.
If I'm only going to play a game once, I'd rather just rent it.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
as Scott mc Loud would say 100x better, using symbols in drawing, or graphics allows the brain to treat the data it's presented in a totally different way than if the subject was looking a a detailled drawing. You instantly know when you look at a symbolic graphic that there's more to it that what you see.
Old games used symbols to display things on screen almost of the time, because the machines couldn't do more. But you didn't treat the things displayed on screen as if they were realistic drawings anyway, you knew they were just symbols which meant tree, kobold, or whatever and all the real action had to happen in your imagination.
So everyone in fact had a different, and extremly rich perception of the game.
Constrast that with 3D. The things you're looking at are generally not symbols, they're literally what you, or your character, see. That means your imagination can't interface with what is displayed. Those realistic, tangible objects aren't compatible with it.
That means that if the illusion isn't 100% perfect, the charm will be broken.
Now, you're just consuming a world someone as prepared for you, the same as everyone else. Before, your brain had to build it itself, but it was incomparable.
I've been playing Civ since it was just Civilization, and I can assure you that Civ3 was a huge improvement over Civ2. While there was certainly a graphical upgrade, a lot went on underneath too. If you played SMAC (Alpha Centauri) you'd see it was a sort of testing ground for Civ3, a lot of things that debuted there showed up with Civ3 (and some that sucked, didn't). Things like Culture and Resources are major changes, for example, and fundamentally alter how you play. There are also plenty of small changes that generally balance out some of the more annoying things about combat and city management and make an all around more enjoyable experience. I have absolutely no interest in going back to previous versions or to FreeCiv, and that's in spite of having to play Civ3 through Wine on a PIII-866 with crappy onboard video. It's that much of an improvement.
FreeCiv, sadly, is stuck in the past and flat out refuses to implement most of the Civ3 improvements. I suppose if you like Civ2 then you'll like FreeCiv with the Civ2 modpack, but frankly, if you like Civ2 you probably already own the real thing anyway. FreeCiv seems to be mostly popular with people who like to screw around with options and settings (like most OSS projects), rather than people who just want to sit down and play a good game.
The one thing Civilization had going for it that was lost in Civ 2 and 3 was the "conquer the world before lunch" aspect we would always go for. Game have become a lot more like epic weekend adventures. Civ4 plans to address this though, and I have a lot of faith in Sid Meier as a game designer (though I have no idea how I'll play it on this box). I also liked the unit building aspect of SMAC, but I don't expect to see that back soon.