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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: 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.