Its not just me, games used to be better

[Albuquerque]

I feel like we've looked right past another core challenge in this thread... More than a handful of posts in this thread have complained how the umpteenth version of a game, or the remastered version of an older game, is somehow "not good" like how old games were. Why are you playing the same tired franchises, or even worse, remastered versions, but then somehow expecting something new and boundary pushing and different?

There are so many good games in the world, chances are some (many?) folks are missing them because they're trying to keep buying the same old rehashed garbage. Actually get out of your rut and try something completley different, as in, COMPLETELY different. Not a twitch first person shooter like all other ones in your pile, or not another remaster, or not another ... Whatever the cool Japanese 3rd person ones are. I mean something different like you don't have a single flavor of in your current big pile of stuff.

Use a different part of your brain, like you did dozens of years ago, and enjoy a new source of excitement.

 

[digitalwanderer]

I could never understand people saying that there is no change. It would be same if you said that the music and movies are of the same quality as 80s and 90s stuff, it's just your age. I couldn't disagree more. We really did have a golden age of console AND pc gaming...

It's my age? I was amazed when the arcade version of Pong came out when I was around 6-7 and I've been hooked on gaming ever since. I started with a home pong machine, breakout, and stunt cycle machine before the 2600 came out. I played Intellivision when it was new and you put the cellophane on your TV screen and it never fit right. I played Temple of Apshai on the Apple II before it became the Ultima series. I lived my teens in the golden age of US arcades and followed it 'til it died. I've played every major console released in the US before '95 and owned quite a few of them. I started playing MS flight sim on a 386 and had to set up my config to boot to DOS to run so many pre-windows/windows 3.1 games that it's not funny. Also spent a few decades with board games and pen and paper gaming. Been staying current on gaming for a while and I strongly disagree with the original statement of this thread as I feel games are much, much better today than they were before.

Where's your perspective on gaming coming from? Oh shoot, I forgot to mention my beloved VIC-20 and how much fun I used to have coding games on it. Seems relevant as it got me even more into gaming once I got a better appreciation for how much work went into them.

I feel like we've looked right past another core challenge in this thread... More than a handful of posts in this thread have complained how the umpteenth version of a game, or the remastered version of an older game, is somehow "not good" like how old games were. Why are you playing the same tired franchises, or even worse, remastered versions, but then somehow expecting something new and boundary pushing and different?

There are so many good games in the world, chances are some (many?) folks are missing them because they're trying to keep buying the same old rehashed garbage. Actually get out of your rut and try something completley different, as in, COMPLETELY different. Not a twitch first person shooter like all other ones in your pile, or not another remaster, or not another ... Whatever the cool Japanese 3rd person ones are. I mean something different like you don't have a single flavor of in your current big pile of stuff.

Use a different part of your brain, like you did dozens of years ago, and enjoy a new source of excitement.

Yup, so much of this! Yeah there are a TON of crappy remakes around, the GTA trilogy of sad stands out for me along with the Mafia series, but there are great games coming out all the time! It's just finding them can be hard.

I'd argue games like American Arcadia and Dave the Diver would count as a few that really surprised me lately. I don't know what I was expected and neither game reinvented the wheel but they were both insanely fun for me and a breath of fresh air.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Modern games aren't as good because developers aren't limited by hardware now, and haven't been for years.

It was the hardware limitations that lead developers to come up with creative solutions to solving hardware limitations, and this positively affected game design choices and meant they had to place more emphasis on story telling and gameplay mechanics.

I don't know. Indie games have lots of great design and mechanics. I think the issue is more that the big studios don't want to take risks because of financial investment, so they try to distill well established genres down to a formula. It's less risky to make a pile of cutscenes or an on-rail sequence that you barely play with a lot of exciting stuff happening then sit down and come up with something new that potentially no one will like.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Odd thread. There are way more games than ever before. If you look at everything, there are amazing games out there. From crazy AAA blockbusters with depth and complexity, to indie darlings that push boundaries in gameplay, presentation...everything. Meanwhile, a lot of historic games were plain crap. At the time they were amazing, but we didn't know any better, and couldn't achieve any better due to technical limitations of the hardware, or even early coders not understanding what was truly possible.

In short, it's no different now. You had the incredible 80s, and the incredible 90s, and the incredible 00s, and the incredible 20s. You can find landmark titles in any period.

If you are having trouble enjoying games now, it's not because they are worse. You've just likely outgrown gaming. I know I play far less, and find far less appealing, but I'm not blaming that on lazy devs or a burnt-out industry or any delusion that there's an objective measure of games being better in the past. The only thing I truly lament are some game types just fall out of favour, notably local coop. Some years ago there was a poll here what we thought of backwards compatibility, and back then I didn't care for it because I wanted sequels that improved. But those sequels don't happen, and so if I want to revisit a classic game just to remember it, I wish I had BC and all my library on one machine.

Being generous to the original point, if there's any validity to it, it'd be that a certain class of game from big-budget devs have lost some artistic investment for the sorts of reasons given. But for all the AAA devs who maybe took their foot off the gas because they could coast by on the engine's powers, there's an indie leveraging those engines to do amazing things that were plain beyond the scope of solo devs back in the day.

 

[cheapchips]

You had the incredible 80s, and the incredible 90s, and the incredible 00s, and the incredible 20s. You can find landmark titles in any period.

Obviously the less said about the 10s the better.