[derefr]

A lot of it wasn't so much design inexperience as an intentional difference in design-style due to those factors B and C.

Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make it "more worth the money."

This was partially the quarter-eating arcade-game philosophy leaking into home-console gaming, and partially the knowledge that parents want the $50 they spend on a distraction for their kids to stretch as long as possible.

In the 80s, since games were size-limited (small tapes/cartridges and low memory headroom), this translated to games that were preternaturally challenging to stretch out their play-time. This is the classic "Nintendo Hard" game-design philosophy; but it's also responsible for grind-fest RPGs (another way of taking a small amount of content and padding it out.)

In the 90s, with lower size-limits, we instead saw the temporary emergence and flourishing of the really long game—everything was advertised by talking about how expansive the world was, and how many hours of content there were to get through. We still look back on this era as being responsible for the creation of many classic action-adventure and adventure-RPG games for this reason.

All this stopped when we hit the 3D era and art-asset production became the overriding cost of producing a game. Games weren't limited in "content" in the scenario/script sense, but they were limited in "content" in the unique-things-to-see sense. There was a temporary burst of interest in exploiting this divide directly (some early PSX games fiddled with procedural generation to overcome the problem), but this was limited to a few minor studios; the majority instead moved their games toward being increasingly high-production-value cinematic affairs.

With a fixed amount of stuff to see, getting the player to care about looking at it all more than once became the overriding concern; thus, replayability rather than difficulty became the goal. (Replay-value was always part of the design philosophy of some studios, but now it became part of the basic culture of the industry.) This is when you start to see things like "missions" and "achievements" emerge, that give you many things to do within the same few set-piece areas.

[flukus]

> Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make it "more worth the money."

I always thought the games being designed that way was to add replay value. You could get close to the end but then have to start over again because you missed something.

They also had the much better option of optional quests/points.

[derefr]

This is a valid way to look at things too. It's sort of a matter of semantics on how the meaning of the word "play", referring to video games, has shifted over time.

In the arcade-game era, a "play" was the outermost unit of gameplay. It's what you'd get in exchange for a quarter from an arcade machine: one attempt at beating the game (possibly with the assistance of mechanisms like extra lives.) So "re-play-ability", if it came up in the game-design vocabulary of that era, would refer to how effectively a game could continue to solicit quarters from a given player. This included difficulty, but also required a feeling of progression rather than frustration, and a decent minimum length for any given "play" (because no parent would keep giving their child quarters for a machine that eats one every minute or two.)

Coming with the era of battery-backed save files, the "play" (play-session) was replaced as the overarching unit of gameplay consumption with the play-through: the creation and on-and-off usage of the same save file, for weeks/months, until you get to some point where the game shows you a "The End" screen and you (in many games) get a percentage score for how many of the game's optional puzzles you solved. (Basically bringing to home consoles the conception of gaming that existed on time-sharing mainframe systems in the 70s.)

Both before and after the ability to restore progress, players could decide to quit a game before beating it, unless the game was good enough to drag them back in; and both before and after, players might continue to play after beating a game, to do better. But the arcade† and arcade-inspired eras definitely favoured the first kind of "replay value" compared to the progessive-play-through era.

† (Assuming that "beating" the game was a sensible thing to talk about. Many games of the arcade era would let pretty much anyone "get to the end" with the barest effort; the point of them was instead to compete on point-score or leaderboard-ranking. "Replay value", in these games, effectively referred to the same thing the term "depth" does in competitive games like chess: how well the game serves to measure skill difference in high-level play.)