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Gaming was like breathing. It was the biggest part of my life as a teenager, one of my priorities as a college student, and eventually one of my most expensive “hobbies” as a young professional.
Then all of a sudden, after thousands of hours spent playing across genres and platforms, boredom hit me hard for the very first time in my early thirties. Some of my favorite games soon gave me the impression of being terribly long. I couldn’t help but notice all the repeating tropes and similarities in game design between franchises.
I figured it was just a matter of time before I found the right game to stimulate my interest again, but time continued to go by and nothing changed.
Is it that games have failed to innovate, or that real life is ultimately more engaging?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mth on Monday January 07 2019, @10:01PM (3 children)
If you go back and play random games from the 80's or 90's you'll quickly notice that they sucked a lot more than modern games. I played some terrible old games when debugging an emulator. The good games from those days still hold up, but the vast majority doesn't.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday January 07 2019, @11:03PM (2 children)
>they sucked a lot more than modern games
I'm not so sure. You're dealing with a big perceptual filter there that skews your judgement: old games look bad by modern standards, and we subconsciously project "ugliness" to also possessing lots of other negative qualities.
A great game can become engrossing enough that you mostly stop noticing the visual ugliness.
A merely mediocre game on the other hand - its ugliness puts all its other faults on prominent display. Faults that aren't necessarily actually any worse than those in a modern mediocre game.
That said - there has been a consolidation, of AAA titles especially, around really "tried-and-true" gameplay formulas. In essence just various "reskinning" of the same polished game formula with different graphics, ad infinitum. That does sort of set the baseline at "highly polished pablum". But is that that actually an undisputed improvement over "promising, but infuriating"?
(Score: 2) by everdred on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:33AM (1 child)
I don't mind the visual look of a lot of old games, but I do have a particular complaint with old FPS games that makes me wonder how I managed to play hundred hours of Doom and Quake in the 90s: a lot of them control horribly by modern standards. To my knowledge it was Half-Life that introduced the "WASD" layout, enabled full-time mouse-looking, and made the default left and right keys "strafe left/right" and not "turn left/right."
Trying to go back and play an old 3D game without remapping nearly every key can be a nightmare.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:33AM
WASD + mouse was in the original System Shock four years earlier, along with jumping, multiple levels of crouching and leaning, and (key based) looking up and down, though they also used keys for turning and didn't use mouse-look, instead having an old-school FPRPG-style free cursor to interact with the world and interface. Not bad for a contemporary of Doom. (And a truly excellent game, one of the all-time classics in my book. I've played through it several times over the years, longing for mouselook more strongly every time - until eventually someone made a patch that added it. I wonder if they ever got it working properly in the fully free-rotation cyberspace...)
2-axis mouse-look by default was definitely a big advancement, and it is hard going back. But while I would definitely say a modern game without mouselook would almost certainly be bad on those grounds alone, I don't think its fair to judge games created before it was dreamed up by those standards.