Modern gaming... is this decline actually a real decline in quality? or are we fooled by nostalgia?

[SimuLord]

For mainstream genres like FPS and RPG, you've got to have the rose-colored nostalgia glasses on if you seriously believe that games were that much better in the old days.

Planescape: Torment. Wizardry 8. Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate 2.

Well, looks like you're wrong. Really, the only modern RPG that can stand with the old ones is Mask of the Betrayer.

FF6

Is not an RPG.

Yes it is. Just because it doesn't fit into your thin line of what you think is an RPG doesn't make it not so.

Pretty sure your own definition discounts Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, if I remember our last conversation on this as well.

I've played Baldur's Gate. Both of them. Must be a "you had to be there" thing because in the late 90s I wasn't a PC gamer yet (didn't get my first gaming-quality PC until 2003.)

FF6 is a JRPG, and yes, that discounts it as "true role-playing", and I freely acknowledge my own nostalgia goggles because FF6 came out when I was 17 and still hugely into console RPGs.

As for modern RPGs, how modern? Is it 21st century? Since 2005? 2008-09? Morrowind, Oblivion, Mount&Blade (though that last one is debatable as an RPG.) Others might throw in the Neverwinter Nights games plus KotOR, maybe The Witcher.

I look at my personal top 25 list of best games and see eight released before 2000 and the bulk of the rest of the list comprised of games released between 2003 and 2005.

 

[Flack]

It depends on your generation, older gamers grew up with the classics that formed the very foundations for modern day games, and to them, anything new that is released is just built up on that.

 

[Woodsey]

It's blind nostalgia in most cases. How are games NOT getting better?

Technology is getting better, bigger and better ideas can now be fulfilled, more games are now getting stories that are actually good.

Of course my opinion is blighted by the fact I'm 15, but games that I played 8 years ago can't compare to games I play today, with the exception of 1 or 2.

I detest playing games from 15/20 years ago. Not only for aesthetic ugliness, but the stupid and frustrating gameplay, completely pointless tasks which would now only fill up a half an hour lunch break at most, bloody awful (if any) story lines.

I think the problem is nowadays a lot more games are being made (I'm guessing), and the good:bad ratio will be in favour of bad.

I'm not denying games their roots, but it can get pretty tedious reading constant comments from gamers on different websites hailing the supposed superiority of games from 10-20 years ago.

I always find it interesting to read about people who revisit games from the past, and it would seem that more often than not they find the games are unplayable and frustrating; to (mis)quote a popular saying: 'Never revisit your heroes'.

I can obviously appreciate games from the past will be better than games that are release today, but if you compare the AAA titles from 10-20 years ago, the extremely vast majority wouldn't hold up to those today.

Obviously this is all my opinion (before someone says I'm acting like I'm quoting fact) and I can appreciate other people's opinions who are different from mine, but it's definitely going to be a clash of different eras/generations.

 

[You_have_a_name]

I don't think that applies to me as probably about 90% of my favourite games are on the 360

Play older games! You havn't lived enough!

Anyway. I don't feel that quality is declining as much as people like to say it is.

I did play old games but i think new games are better than the majority of old games with some exceptions

 

[TheScarecrow]

I don't think that applies to me as probably about 90% of my favourite games are on the 360

Play older games! You havn't lived enough!

Anyway. I don't feel that quality is declining as much as people like to say it is.

I did play old games but i think new games are better than the majority of old games with some exceptions

What games did you play man?

 

[You_have_a_name]

I don't think that applies to me as probably about 90% of my favourite games are on the 360

Play older games! You havn't lived enough!

Anyway. I don't feel that quality is declining as much as people like to say it is.

I did play old games but i think new games are better than the majority of old games with some exceptions

What games did you play man?

my favorite old games were:
-all 3 Jak and dextar games
-every zelda game
-space station silicon valley
-super smash bros melee
-original spyro's
-first 3 Crash Bandicoot
-Worms world party
-mario 64

their were a lot off good games but i don't think their as good as oblivion, fallout 3 or bioshock personally

 

[darksakul]

The issue is developers, game publishers and other product manufacturers will always appeal to the lowest common denominator to bring up sales. Meaning you have high volumes of shit to appease dumb asses who filling to fork over large amounts of cash for a trendy[but shitty]item.

 

[TheScarecrow]

I don't think that applies to me as probably about 90% of my favourite games are on the 360

Play older games! You havn't lived enough!

Anyway. I don't feel that quality is declining as much as people like to say it is.

I did play old games but i think new games are better than the majority of old games with some exceptions

What games did you play man?

my favorite old games were:
-all 3 Jak and dextar games
-every zelda game
-space station silicon valley
-super smash bros melee
-original spyro's
-first 3 Crash Bandicoot
-Worms world party
-mario 64

their were a lot off good games but i don't think their as good as oblivion, fallout 3 or bioshock personally

I could suggest so many.... Did you not play the origional Half-Life?

 

[You_have_a_name]

I don't think that applies to me as probably about 90% of my favourite games are on the 360

Play older games! You havn't lived enough!

Anyway. I don't feel that quality is declining as much as people like to say it is.

I did play old games but i think new games are better than the majority of old games with some exceptions

What games did you play man?

my favorite old games were:
-all 3 Jak and dextar games
-every zelda game
-space station silicon valley
-super smash bros melee
-original spyro's
-first 3 Crash Bandicoot
-Worms world party
-mario 64

their were a lot off good games but i don't think their as good as oblivion, fallout 3 or bioshock personally

I could suggest so many.... Did you not play the origional Half-Life?

No

 

[Draco Kaiser]

Theres good games and bad games. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was great while the newer ones...suck. Halo 3 IMO is better than Halo C.E. mostly cause of the newer weapons and story.

 

[TelHybrid]

...and some lesser known titles such as System Shock 2.

Yeah, I think only two copies of System Shock 2 were ever sold, because I bought the game... twice. No-one else seems to have heard of this classic, I mean, I go on Bioshock threads and people are all like 'Dude, wtf is system shock? Sounds gay!!! I love Bioshock, it's the most original game ever, and totally not a spiritual successor to any other games whatsoever."
Yeah, no-one in the world has heard of System Shock, I go into Game and the storepeople are always like "Wtf is system shock? Never heard of it, but you should play Star Wraith 2, it's the biggest game this summer, everyone's playing it, I've never heard of your 'system shock 2' thingy, is that like Spore or something?"
I talk to my friends about games from late 90's, and they're all like "Yeah, i fucking love Half-Life and Ground Control, what the hell is system shock 2? Never heard of it, all i played when i was younger was Ghost Recon and Destruction Derby, but I seem to have this big gap in my memory that started on 11th August 1999 and lasts the next year or so. I don't remember playing any games from that time..."
Yea, system shock 2 was never mentioned by any big games critics or magazines, or hailed as "The greatest action-RPG of our generation", i heard the game just passed everyone by and failed commercially and as a piece of art. It will go up with the unknown gems of gaming like Savage or Project Eden. Yup, no-one ever played this game.

*pant pant* Okay, bile-spewing is over. Obviously what you wrote was just a throw-away line that you didn't think that clearly about. That's fine, and i hope you didn't take my hateful monologue too seriously, but in the name of Company of Heroes and everything that is holy, please don't say that System Shock 2 is a lesser known title any more. It makes you, and (when i do that stupid sarcastic rant) me, look like total muppets.

Again, sorry

Dude... they're just games... chill.

 

[Ericb]

Technology is getting better, bigger and better ideas can now be fulfilled, more games are now getting stories that are actually good.

But can you honestly say that thes technologies are really being used for all that they are worth?

This article by Shamus Young talks precisely about that. So much investment in producing bigger and better technology, but not experimenting with it beasides the safe "realistic brown/grey gritty" variety.

About the stories, we're still a long ways of achieving a well told story which doesn't go the way of cutscenes, outside of some blessed exceptions.

And the fact that cutscenes are something that are older than your are show that most developers only chose to go with what they already knew rather then experimenting with telling a story through the gameplay itself.

I detest playing games from 15/20 years ago. Not only for aesthetic ugliness, but the stupid and frustrating gameplay, completely pointless tasks which would now only fill up a half an hour lunch break at most, bloody awful (if any) story lines.

On one hand I do agree that there is a lot of old school gameplay that was very gimmicky and uncessary, even back in the day I detested somethings like being damaged through mere touch, endless fetch quests with no true pertinence to the situation presented (that one is still around today).

But on the other, specially after I studied visual arts, the shocking realization that a lot of old style graphics look a lot better than what is manufactured today with high end tech still kinda shocks me. Better color work, interesting lighting composition, nearly abstract use of shapes becausde of limited memory, so on and so forth. I can easily tell apart one game from the other up to the 32-bit era (even though polygons were already gettting fashionable by then).

After that, a lot of games started to really look like one another, all racing towards the folly of realism. Diving face first on the uncanny valley, really.

That doesn't mean that I think those days of 8-bit and 16-bit should return because, as I said, there were a lot of limitations and stupid design ideas going around that were simply detestable.

I'm just looking forward for the time when the majority of developers move past this whole western "badass" realism era of bad polygon sculptures and try somehing new, visually, narratively and especially in terms of gameplay. Wise progress, not greedy stagnation.

It's interesting to notice that as only a few years go by, most of the 3D graphics look really bad to people who loved then in their release years. You're not gonna see many people bad mouthing pixel graphics of way back when. There's even a lot of artists exploring that visual language in different media nowadays. In my college I saw a LOT of people exploring physical pixel art after studying pointilism.

There's gotta be something in it if even old teachers who never played a game found it amusing.

To end this ridiculously big post of mine, a fair question: How many of those old frustrating gameplays you've tried were so because they were actually poorly implemented? And how many of those were because they were challenging?

 

[Woodsey]

Technology is getting better, bigger and better ideas can now be fulfilled, more games are now getting stories that are actually good.

But can you honestly say that thes technologies are really being used for all that they are worth?

This article by Shamus Young talks precisely about that. So much investment in producing bigger and better technology, but not experimenting with it beasides the safe "realistic brown/grey gritty" variety.

About the stories, we're still a long ways of achieving a well told story which doesn't go the way of cutscenes, outside of some blessed exceptions.

And the fact that cutscenes are something that are older than your are show that most developers only chose to go with what they already knew rather then experimenting with telling a story through the gameplay itself.

I detest playing games from 15/20 years ago. Not only for aesthetic ugliness, but the stupid and frustrating gameplay, completely pointless tasks which would now only fill up a half an hour lunch break at most, bloody awful (if any) story lines.

On one hand I do agree that there is a lot of old school gameplay that was very gimmicky and uncessary, even back in the day I detested somethings like being damaged through mere touch, endless fetch quests with no true pertinence to the situation presented (that one is still around today).

But on the other, specially after I studied visual arts, the shocking realization that a lot of old style graphics look a lot better than what is manufactured today with high end tech still kinda shocks me. Better color work, interesting lighting composition, nearly abstract use of shapes becausde of limited memory, so on and so forth. I can easily tell apart one game from the other up to the 32-bit era (even though polygons were already gettting fashionable by then).

After that, a lot of games started to really look like one another, all racing towards the folly of realism. Diving face first on the uncanny valley, really.

That doesn't mean that I think those days of 8-bit and 16-bit should return because, as I said, there were a lot of limitations and stupid design ideas going around that were simply detestable.

I'm just looking forward for the time when the majority of developers move past this whole western "badass" realism era of bad polygon sculptures and try somehing new, visually, narratively and especially in terms of gameplay. Wise progress, not greedy stagnation.

It's interesting to notice that as only a few years go by, most of the 3D graphics look really bad to people who loved then in their release years. You're not gonna see many people bad mouthing pixel graphics of way back when. There's even a lot of artists exploring that visual language in different media nowadays. In my college I saw a LOT of people exploring physical pixel art after studying pointilism.

There's gotta be something in it if even old teachers who never played a game found it amusing.

To end this ridiculously big post of mine, a fair question: How many of those old frustrating gameplays you've tried were so because they were actually poorly implemented? And how many of those were because they were challenging?

Sorry if I re-iterate or don't completely align my answer to what you've said as I've had to skim read it a bit on shortness of time.

On your first point, I agree half and half, like you did with myself. On the one hand, a lot of developers copy others and churn out something totally unoriginal, drab and ugly for a quick turn in. But then, that's always been the case and always will be.

I find a number of the complaints against games to be unfounded, I've got numerous games with colour in. I think what people overlook is that the "brown" look is to create a gritty, rustier world.

It makes things look grim to present a certain type of world. Fallout 3, whilst I disliked it, was very sensible with it's colour. A post apoc world is hardly going to be full of blooming colours.

It's going to be dirty, burnt, the trees are going to be dead. And if you look at a place like that, that's what it looks like.

Same with the Gears of War games; you're in a war, things are being destroyed or decaying and rusting. The look of the world if it was real would lack much colour.

Just because people who copy this don't understand it doesn't make it suddenly wrong.

And I think on your second point, I could tell more games apart then I could from the styles of old games.

And in a quick answer to your last question I'd actually say it was on a pretty much equal level of both.

I really hate games where I'm get punished for playing, but the controls were never particularly sharp and I remember having played quite a few things where you're never told what does what, what's an enemy and what's going to help you, etc.

It's just my mind set, I'm very much a look to the future kind of guy when it comes to technology and games. And I think people like me are needed, and people who can look back and take a retrospective on 20 year old games and how they influenced games today are just as important to balance the likes of me out.

Being 15 I can't do that though, maybe when I'm 35 I will about games I'm playing now

 

[Ninjaottsel]

Its hard to be original and make new great games without some fans of the old games saying that they are not as good or just bad copies etc.

 

[Abengoshis]

These are true, but mostly for the Wii unfortunately. The game "ideas" may be better than they used to be, however developers are putting much less effort into games. This is why I support the likes of HVS, who want to make a difference.

 

[Abengoshis]

These are true, but mostly for the Wii unfortunately. The game "ideas" may be better than they used to be, however developers are putting much less effort into games. This is why I support the likes of HVS, who want to make a difference.

 

[Evan Waters]

I find a number of the complaints against games to be unfounded, I've got numerous games with colour in. I think what people overlook is that the "brown" look is to create a gritty, rustier world.

It makes things look grim to present a certain type of world. Fallout 3, whilst I disliked it, was very sensible with it's colour. A post apoc world is hardly going to be full of blooming colours.

It's going to be dirty, burnt, the trees are going to be dead. And if you look at a place like that, that's what it looks like.

Same with the Gears of War games; you're in a war, things are being destroyed or decaying and rusting. The look of the world if it was real would lack much colour.

Just because people who copy this don't understand it doesn't make it suddenly wrong.

Two things.

First, I'd recommend a movie called STALKER by Andrei Tarkovsky. It's long and slow and in Russian, but the point is, it takes place in a grim future but has some utterly gorgeous visuals. The first part of the movie is in sepia tone, so you could say it's the same emulation of "the world", but when they reach the Zone, there's a real beauty to it. (And some of those scenes were filmed in an abandoned chemical factory that posed a health hazard to the crew. This effectively means that actual biohazard sites are more attractive than what you see in the Killzones of War 3 aesthetic.)

Second, they always take it a little too far- yeah, maybe the ground is desolate, but people's eyes are still going to have color, you're going to have a range of flesh tones from white to pink to tan to brown, manufactured things are going to come in different colors, the sky is still going to change all sorts of colors depending on cloud formations and the position of the sun, even hazardous toxic waste can turn some really pretty colors though you wouldn't want to take too close a look.

Third- thing is, I can respect a game developer having reasons for a game looking a certain way, but don't they ever get tired of doing the same thing that everyone else is doing?

 

[Ericb]

Just because people who copy this don't understand it doesn't make it suddenly wrong.

I know that, and the Fallout series is a example of intelligent use of that kind of palette, because it's attached to a proper context (nuclear bombing). I was precisely criticizing the copy-and-paste examples, who used such colors for nothing more than to appear darker and edgier.

I really hate games where I'm get punished for playing, but the controls were never particularly sharp and I remember having played quite a few things where you're never told what does what, what's an enemy and what's going to help you, etc.

That's a clear example of a poorly designed game, for sure.

It's just my mind set, I'm very much a look to the future kind of guy when it comes to technology and games. And I think people like me are needed, and people who can look back and take a retrospective on 20 year old games and how they influenced games today are just as important to balance the likes of me out.

I don't see why those two points of view you're talking about should be mutually exclusive. A look in the past to see what worked and what didn't is just as good as opening the mind to what the possibilites are for tomorrow.

As someone researching that area, I'll tell that taking the stance of being directed toward both ends, I got to know many good games from any given time period. And hopefully many more as the industry progresses and as I dig through less known titles from ye olde platformes.

I just hope when you do hit 35, you don't wear your nostalgia goggles too much when remembering the good old days. The rose tint in their lenses alter your vision too much for you to trust what you are seeing. =]

Thanks for the replies.

These are true, but mostly for the Wii unfortunately. The game "ideas" may be better than they used to be, however developers are putting much less effort into games. This is why I support the likes of HVS, who want to make a difference.

I'm sorry, but who or what is HVS?

 

[minoes]

FF6 has a linear story with no input from the player.

Not an RPG.

After the World of ruin, the game becomes a free roaming RPG.

 

[Kelbear]

I'd say mostly nostalgia.

Every generation of games is filled with crappy games that you just forget about. When you think about Nintendo you remember Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, Contra...not ET!

And game design has evolved considerably since those days. You don't need to restart from the beginning every time you power the console on with today's consoles. Developers have learned not to make the player's path obscure. Not to force players to restart from the beginning of the game just because they died somewhere along the way. Imagine playing Call of Duty 4 and getting shot on the second to last level. Would you want to start again from the training camp? These principles seem obvious now because we've gotten used to a certain level of design sophistication.

The profession has grown over time, we should welcome the improvement. It faces new challenges now, they take much bigger risks because bigger budgets are at stakes. They need to battle publisher meddling and secure larger amounts of funding from investors who prefer to invest in boring sequels than a daring new project. Those who innovate can't just present an interesting project they cobbled together. They need to live up to higher standards.

It's the difference between playing Narbacular Drop vs. playing Portal. It takes a significant budget and a large team working together to produce games now. It's vastly more complex.

There's still the occasional indie developer that puts out games like Braid and World of Goo, but they're still not full-retail games. They are strictly confined to an indie niche and given indie-level expectations as a result. Nevertheless they are still examples of great modern gaming.

Still, there are a number of older games that really do stack up well even against modern games. Star Control 2 for example is still freaking awesome. Great gameplay, terrific story.