Things bad or dated games did well...

[The Enquirer]

that other games have failed to capitalize on?

The game will always have a special place in my heart and remains one of my favorite RPG's, however it is hard to deny that Knights of the Old Republic has not aged well. The combat in it has become extremely dated and the reason it's so well liked nowadays is because of it's rich story. A huge part of that is in it's moral choice system. You can shape and reshape the story within certain confines to your liking.

The moral choice system, as one would expect in a game who's lore revolves around good versus evil, has impacts on gameplay. However, what does not do is to block off gameplay elements based on how you would like to see the story progress.

In many games with a moral choice system, such as say, Infamous for example, if you want to unlock certain powers, you must play the game with a certain moral alignment, be it good or evil. In KOTOR your character has penalties and benefits applied to the costs for using certain powers, however none are off limits.

It's a system I wish other RPG style games implemented as it would lead to less restricted play styles and allow players to experience the full scope of the story the way they want to.

 

[DoPo]

Oni has a better flowing and more impressive third person combat than most other games I've seen attempt the same thing. Remember Me had a similar feel to it but you only have a limited amount of chained combos, while in Oni, they are free flowing. Batman/Shadow of Mordor (which essentially use the same system) simplify it down to "press direction and attack". Well, OK, you have two attacks or something and you can also, if you're fast enough, do counters but you have very little freedom in what moves you actually make. Oni, by comparison, allows you much more close control of what your character does, additionally, it throws additional options for combat depending on your angle of attack or what you're doing at the moment - if you're behind a person, you can break their back and throw them forwards (possibly staggering other enemies), or if running, you have access to few moves that benefit from momentum, alternatively, if facing an armed opponent, you could do a move to disarm them which additionally deals good damage, gives you the weapon and staggers this opponent, so you could, say, deal with his buddy then turn your attention back to the just recovered and now disarmed enemy.

Prince of Persia (the SOT trilogy, especially the last two games) does allow you to do similar things but arms you with swords, while in Oni you do it mostly unarmed. It just somehow feels better to punch your enemies to death rather than slice them.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Dated game: Morrowind. It was an open world game, with many sidequests that didn't overshadow the central quest.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

I don't know if this is on-topic but I've always felt like Wave Race was a franchise that had so much potential and just got left behind. I spent hours and hours playing that game with my dad and sister when I was a kid on my N64 and I think you could get really creative with the aquatic tracks and scenery.

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

Dated game: Morrowind. It was an open world game, with many sidequests that didn't overshadow the central quest.

I was about to suggest Morrowind, but specifically as an example of a [relatively] dated open-world narrative done right in terms of giving almost complete freedom for RP (it is a true RP'er), alongside a superb MQ that's organically and seamlessly interwoven into the world and story. None of Bethesda's open-worlders since have got close to it, and Fallout 4 seems to be a flat out contradiction of defined/forced narrative and game design.

And maybe this is stretching the thread topic a little, but another dated game that did things better than anything since or at present is Ghost Recon/GR:Island Thunder - y'know, for being a legit squad based tactical shooter... which don't seem to exist anymore (at least not on console?). It was fairly bare bones even when it came out, but it allowed for an immense amount of freedom as well as a fine balance between action and sim design.

 

[KaraFang]

Dated - thief and thief 2

Graphics were dated when they were released (T2 was laughable graphically)> But, it does stealth gorgeously and it's AI (at the time and even in some cases now) was damn good at hunting you down if you fucked up. Also, the maps were HUGE with no loading screens.

(one of the few AI's that if it sees you and you climb something with nowhere to go will WAIT for you to make your move down, throwing up insults as it waits.)

Best sound/light/dark/ visual acuity mechanics I have ever played.

The most recent one? So, so insulting.... godawful.

 

[CaitSeith]

Dated game that did something well? Alone in the Dark. It did survival horror really well: mansion full of monsters, fatal traps, limited ammo, clunky combat (debatable the weakest point), fixed camera angles, epic horror backstory (inspired in Lovecraft), puzzles based in the backstory... all these to give good moments of tension and relief. Such a shame that there has never been a remake of this game with more updated graphics.

Spoiler: Did someone said "dated game"?

The attack of the purple pixels.

 

[major_chaos]

Bad game: Almost everything about Red Faction Guerrilla was somewhere between mediocre and terrible, but the building destruction was absolutely fucking phenomenal and I would love to see it used in a better game with modern tech allowing for bigger scale destruction.

Old game: Battletanx was a unapologeticly silly game about fighting colorful theme gangs with tanks in post nuclear apocalypse ruins of america and it was great on nearly every level at the time. It also was not exactly a technological leader at the time and has aged very poorly, so it would be nice to see the setting and concept using a more detailed, modern, World of Tanks esque engine.

 

[Adamantium93]

A huge part of that is in it's moral choice system. You can shape and reshape the story within certain confines to your liking.

I would actually disagree with how well Kotor implemented moral choices. By giving the player a tangible reward for having more lightside or darkside points, the game incentivises choosing one and sticking with it no matter what, meaning that (if you want to have the most powerful character), you pretty much lock yourself into blindly following one or the other regardless of the situation. If you try and play a greyer character, you're effectively gimping yourself. This discourages role playing because now, instead of choosing an action based on what your character would do, you are choosing actions to game the system. It also has the problem where most of the darkside choices are simply being an ass for the sake of being an ass. Further, by having a binary moral system, it presupposes that there are only two potential moral codes and dismisses alternative conceptions of morality. Ok, that's a bit wankery, but basically it means that the game is judging every decision and has already made up its mind on what is a "good" choice and what is a "bad" choice.

I think Dragon Age: Origins had a much better moral choice system (its old enough to be on topic, right?) where the game doesn't judge your character but your companions do. The morality of any situation is left up to your own rubric. Whom do you put on Orzammar's throne? The Tyrannical but Progressive Dwarven reformer, or the Fair but Regressive traditionalist? Do you let the blood mage assassin go because he claims to turn over a new leaf, or do you avoid letting such a powerful practitioner of illegal magic run free?

There is no "good" or "bad" response to those situations and the game avoids such classification. Instead, morality comes from the consequences of your decisions on the world and the characters in it. This opens the door for roleplaying but also gives your decisions meaning. The morality is driven by the story itself and not by the desire to game the system for better spells.

 

[Lacedaemonius]

Action Quake mods really set the stage for "realistic shooters", starting with CounterStrike, but to say it's aged badly is an understatement. Quake in general looks like something a particularly talented child would make in a class using off-the-shelf tools. At the time of course, it was much more.

I think Descent also did something that I haven't gotten a taste of since. Along those lines, Spaceward Ho! was a fun game, wasn't it?

Finally, the Shadow Hearts series is probably the apex of JRPG for me.

 

[Hair Jordan]

This may seem like a left-field kind of answer, but I'm going to point out Mario Paint, back on the SNES.

I've seen very few "educational" games, since, aimed at children that had this level of artistry throughout their presentation. MP really bridged the gap between "entertainment" and creative "software" in a way that very little educational software does nowadays, in the era of throwaway apps. The game had an attention to "fun" details in a way that no one would waste time on.

For people that were in my circumstance in the 90's, with no access to computers, it was an amazing experience. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that the game was at least, in part, responsible for my future career as a digital content creator.

 

[Pyrian]

Along those lines, Spaceward Ho! was a fun game, wasn't it?

I adored the fact that your home planet was always 1.0g and 72degf, and everybody else was weird. But the way each combat tech level was fully twice the power of the previous combined with the logarithmic investment system (the more you spend, the less effective each succeeding unit of currency is) makes it almost impossible to reverse an early lead.

 

[Lacedaemonius]

Along those lines, Spaceward Ho! was a fun game, wasn't it?

I adored the fact that your home planet was always 1.0g and 72degf, and everybody else was weird. But the way each combat tech level was fully twice the power of the previous combined with the logarithmic investment system (the more you spend, the less effective each succeeding unit of currency is) makes it almost impossible to reverse an early lead.

Terra Uber Alles!!!

I remember when my buddy Ben figured out how the economics work, and broke the bad news to the rest of us. We honestly thought that we must have been missing something when we fell behind, and of course there was no Wikia for every game or Gamefaqs then.

 

[MCerberus]

C&C Renegade combined ridiculous RTS mechanics with super ridiculous shooter mechanics and didn't take it all seriously. That particular genre merge is dead.

Remember mutators? I miss them.

 

[Danbo Jambo]

As 008Zulu & Darth Rosenberg have already suggested, Dated: Morrowind.

The world which you're sucked into in Morrowind is absolutely stunning. Everything feels so organic and naturally interwoven that quests, side quests, objectives etc. all just feel like a natural part of a fantastic journey & adventure.

Neither Oblivion nor Skyrim have come close with their mathmatical, by the numbers approach.

Another slightly dated shout is Dragon Age: Origins. I personally think the tactical combat is almost perfect, with each battle forcing you into different reactions constantly.

 

[Trunkage]

Dated game: Morrowind. It was an open world game, with many sidequests that didn't overshadow the central quest.

I was about to suggest Morrowind, but specifically as an example of a [relatively] dated open-world narrative done right in terms of giving almost complete freedom for RP (it is a true RP'er), alongside a superb MQ that's organically and seamlessly interwoven into the world and story. None of Bethesda's open-worlders since have got close to it, and Fallout 4 seems to be a flat out contradiction of defined/forced narrative and game design.

I'm not disagree with you but I hope you realise why they changed? It was so easy to break the game. If I had a choice between quest dependant unkillable NPCs or that stupid message about breaking the prophecy come up, I would forever and always choose the former. Because the latter is far more world breaking to me. How would I know what would break the prophecy? How does that even make sense. I don't know if you remember that also being a huge problem in Daggerfall where you couldn't progress and you probably didn't know why.

I also didn't like how you had to pick one House in Morrowind. You were missing out on content and I eventually just made myself part of every house. Same thing happened with Fallout 4. Why couldn't I have an extremely hard too achieve but peaceful ending. Maybe not the 100% speech check of Fallout NV, maybe some more substantial but the result being the same.

 

[Frankster]

Things bad or dated games did well...

UFO series (for the record I actually quite enjoy them so wouldn't consider them bad, but a lot of people disagree with me on that): having an active and evolving geoscape map.
What do I mean by that? Well in the first game the aliens are using a bacteriological weapon, they basically want to cover the earth in this mass of brain tissue, and you get to see that on the map, this infection spreading little by little, trapping entire countries and populations, being a tangible reminder of what you're up against, the consequences of what happens if you fail being crystal clear. The feeling you get from watching this grey filth spread out across the world is chilling and you also have motivation to not let it spread. By contrast in the new Xcom, there's the AVATAR timer that functionally does the same thing, but the timer is a more crude, gamey and less scary sword of Damocles then seeing the physical progression of the Aliens goals on the map. This also has the side effect of altering game maps, so if you go do a mission on an infect parted of the earth...Expect to be visiting Cthulu's playhouse.


Later on in UFO Afterlight it's all about conquering Mars. At first the red planet is inhospitable and and full of enemies, but bit by bit, you make it yours, gradually making inhospitable areas more suitable for your troops (and less so for the aboriginal aliens!), until finally, you start seeing water emerge, some green appear and life start to flourish. The changes are small at first but speed up and then you start seeing actual oceans forming. All these mechanics serve to reinforce the feel of the game and make the final ending, when your main colonist takes off his helmet and is able to breath normally, so much more satisfying.

I'd love it if Firaxis took a few notes from these 2 games regarding the geoscape, make us feel protective of our little blue planet as the Aliens do all kinds of fucked up things to it. Being scared of a timer just isn't the same.

Spoiler: Some pics of UFO Aftermatch showing what I mean

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Old game: Battletanx was a unapologetically silly game about fighting colorful theme gangs with tanks in post nuclear apocalypse ruins of america and it was great on nearly every level at the time. It also was not exactly a technological leader at the time and has aged very poorly, so it would be nice to see the setting and concept using a more detailed, modern, World of Tanks esque engine.

Seconded. Also I see how your bad game led to your thinking about your old game since Battletanx made most of its buildings destructible too. The only exceptions were the fences around the level, which could somehow withstand a small nuke.

Most of the games I play now are old so I have a few, but the first one to spring to mind is Secret of Mana and its ability to play through a hybrid of Zelda and a Final Fantasy-style RPG with multiple players live. I know the recent Zeldas like the Four Swords games have been placing greater focus on that, but there's still a far greater emphasis on cooperative puzzle solving than Mana had, and less complexity in the combat.

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

As 008Zulu & Darth Rosenberg have already suggested, Dated: Morrowind.

The world which you're sucked into in Morrowind is absolutely stunning. Everything feels so organic and naturally interwoven that quests, side quests, objectives etc. all just feel like a natural part of a fantastic journey & adventure.

Neither Oblivion nor Skyrim have come close with their mathmatical, by the numbers approach.

Another slightly dated shout is Dragon Age: Origins. I personally think the tactical combat is almost perfect, with each battle forcing you into different reactions constantly.

I played Morrowind a little bit when I was a teenager, but even then, the game was horribly, horribly obtuse. I like having the freedom to go everywhere in a game from the very beginning, but some of the sidequests practically required you to look up a guide in order to complete, and it was easy to lose stuff forever. Morrowind desperately needed to give its players more information, instead of leaving vague clues...and in some cases, no clues at all.

But the dealbreaker was the combat. If I swing my weapon and hit something...I should actually hit something, instead of my sword magically passing through the city guard I pissed off by wearing some sort of ceremonial armor I picked up off of a random dead dude. It's why I'm waiting (probably in vain) for Skywind to finally be done.

OT: F.E.A.R. had some of my favorite FPS weapons of all time, and more recent games have had a hard time replicating the visceral effects your weapons could have. Pinning guys to walls with the HV Penetrator, disintegrating them with the Plasma Rifle and leaving behind a charred skeleton, dismembering them with the good ol' shotgun, or blowing them into tiny chunks with the Repeating Cannon was some of the most fun I had as a teenager. Most modern games don't have much in the way of weapon effects, which is why I think Bulletstorm was such an underrated game.