[erikb]

The tl;dr to me feels like this: The games when I were young were cooler.

He argues against it and brings good arguments for what made the games of his youth cool, it's still missing the point. Guys ten years older than him won't enjoy the 90s titles as much, considering them too fancy etc. They would have also reasonable arguments why the 80s titles were better. The same goes if you ask a currently 14 year old child about the games he plays. He probably ignores most (like we do) and can state why he enjoys the ones that are good in his eyes.

Imho you can spend all your life being sad about missing the old days and hoping someone revives them, but instead it make you more happy to learn what makes the great new games great in their own regard. They won't be great in the same way Fallout 1 was great. They will be great in other regards, and discovering these can be as entertaining for a 40 year old as it is for a 14 year old guy.

[barrkel]

I think you're missing the point - you've leapt to a trite conclusion that enables you to dismiss what the author is saying.

The economics of AAA games have changed. A lot of money is spent on creating a cinematic experience - creating content, voice acting, level design, etc. is way, way more expensive than it used to be, because our graphical fidelity, storage capacity, etc. has increased. That in turn means that if a player plays through the game and doesn't see much of the content, the money spent may have been wasted. So designers have responded to economic pressures by creating more linear paths that force players to experience more of the expensive content, and use more scripted sequences to ensure a consistent experience. But they stop being games, to my mind, because they remove player agency.

The lack of agency - the ability of players to make choices that matter, rather than being one-way ratchets for story advancement - is something that's killing way too many games for me.

[erikb]

What are you saying beside that games you see today don't fulfil your standards (which is what I summarized the article to)? There are and always have been games with a very straight story line. This doesn't mean the games are bad (I think Half Life 1 here, which was awesome despite being linear). And there are loads of games with many choices. In some regards some modern games even allow you more choice than any game ever before (think GTA5, Skyrim, Minecraft).

Are you complaining about AAA games specifically, maybe? I don't know AAA games very well, because I don't like them much myself. But AAA productions (movies, books, music, games) always have some specific attributes that are unpleasant to people. That didn't change much with computer games, did it?

So yeah, you mgiht be right, that I don't get the point. But if that's the case I still didn't get it!

[barrkel]

What are you saying beside that games you see today don't fulfil your standards (which is what I summarized the article to)

Any criticism of X can be reduced to saying that X doesn't meet one's standards. But without investigating the nature and value of those standards, you're not addressing the argument being made. And I don't think you investigated the OP's standards; in fact, I think you dismissed them as nostalgia. It was borderline ageist!

[erikb]

The author evaluated what made the games fun, that he enjoyed back in the day, and then goes on trying to evaluate modern games to the same standards. That is nostalgia pretty much per definition. What I suggest to do instead is evaluating new games the same we he evaluated the old games when they were new to the world and he was new to gaming. He will find that many games don't get great points according to his evaluation but still will be great games and he can enjoy them a lot. Just not the same way.

And what's bad about asking people to broaden their horizon? I don't really get that. If you accept that new games can be good in their own regards suddenly you don't have 100 good games you need to replay because no games like that are made anymore. Suddenly you have 100000 games which are fun in very different ways, and you are sure to get your share of new great games forever. Wouldn't it be great?

Btw. Just yesterday I started playing a new game from a very old genre: Text Adventures (the game is called Heroes Rise). Thanks to mobile platforms there are a lot of games nowadays that are as great as the games old people complained about when the author was the young guy playing all the games that are now awesome (-ly nostalgic) according to him.

[kefka]

When you can only go so far technology wise (think SNES through PS1), the resources go to improving the games go other ways. This usually involves making a very good story, solid game mechanics, and character development. After all, the blitzy super hi-Rez 3D scapes cannot be done.

[dvhh]

I really think that the platform limitations were one of the best point of the games from this era. Where game developpers had to be more inventive with the constrains to build a sufficiently immersive world and rely a lot on the player imagination to fill the jagged pixed. I do not deny that the technological advances had made game more beautiful, but they also seems to make the defects more visible, and force the designer vision on the player's imagination.

[mercurial]

> I really think that the platform limitations were one of the best point of the games from this era.

That's were roguelikes come in. Though they have self-imposed limits, they are often pretty innovative (eg, CDDA, or the huge breadth of available classes in TOME).

[alchemism]

And, for that matter, the majestic complexity of Dwarf Fortress.

[TeMPOraL]

I'd say that the advent of 3D graphics made games look worse. Just compare StarCraft to StarCraft 2 - I honestly feel that the original, pixel-drawn game looked better. It's hard to get 3D right, it takes much more work to produce something that the brain won't find weird-looking or uncanny. SC1 had a dark tone and looked like a serious game; SC2 feels much more lightweight and comical, and I'd argue the big part of it was moving from 2D to 3D, which made all units look kind of silly.

[erikb]

While I have the opposite opinion about SC1-SC2 in some regards I can agree. There are also these games with 2D or pixely graphics which is a kind of beautiful that you can't achieve with 3D. That's why there are still hundreds of games developed with these graphics settings.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, pixel-graphics is a different artisfic medium and I'm happy that it's not forgotten, even though hard to find outside indie and casual sector.

RE SC2, I know that the source of majority of my issues with that game is a difference in vision. Creators stated explicitly in one of the interviews that to appeal to a wider audience they wanted the game to focus less on galactic politics and explore individual characters and relationships. Which is exactly the opposite of what I wanted or expected after living through the excellent story of the first game.

[adwf]

I thought the article was more a complaint about how AAA gaming is turning to cinematics more and more to wow gamers, rather than gameplay.

From one point of view, gameplay is almost the entire point of gaming. But from another, it's the games with great storytelling that make up my absolute favourite games of all time (Planescape, Baldurs Gate, etc.)

I think there's a group of designers who realised that you could try and make a great story with minimal gameplay, hype it sky-high and it'll sell regardless. This seems to be the current AAA model. Just look at the steady dumbing down of the Mass Effect series from game to game, or the horrendous Dragon Age sequel. Mass Effect 2 had some amazing cinematic set pieces, great voice acting, but some of the most boring gameplay I've ever experienced. Linear cover shooter, tediously simple rock/paper/scissors mechanics, overly simple leveling system, etc.

Saying it's just nostalgia is trying to sweep all these concerns under the rug a bit too much. There are definite differences in emphasis in what designers are trying to do with the games, eg. whether it has a cinematic/storytelling focus or a gameplay focus. I think that a lot of older games got the balance right, simply because they didn't have the capability back then to make it "all style and no substance".

The issue is that the large publishers are making money by adopting the hollywood blockbuster model. But every dollar they spend on marketing a crappy cinematic game, is a dollar they could be spending on developing an actual decent game to play. If you had an actual decent game made, it would sell itself and generate enough reputation to sell all the sequels too - just look at how long the Call of Duty franchise has lasted off the back of COD4:MW.

This is why I generally avoid AAA titles nowadays, especially ones that have been advertised and hyped beyond belief (current example: Destiny). I just know that a couple of months after the launch, genuine reviews will be coming out about the game and it'll turn out to be disappointing.

[potatolicious]

I agree with the gist of your post but I think the author was making a deeper point with it.

It's not just that storytelling has taken over at the expense of gameplay, it's that we haven't even really developed our own storytelling capability.

When games tell stories they stop the action, freeze player agency, and go into full Hollywood mode. Game studios trip all over themselves to excitedly tell us about how their new technology will allow them Hollywood-like cinematic camera angles (see: Mass Effect), movie-quality camera effects. Hell, a lot of games even letterbox the screen to give it a more film-like quality.

It's one thing to take storytelling expertise and technique from cinema, it's another to clone it obsessively and completely fail to develop your own storytelling medium. Imagine if movies were invented only for "filmmakers" to simply film a book from top-down and a hand turning the pages!

One game I've been enjoying is Kentucky Route Zero - the story I find is fairly normal, but the way it's presented takes pretty clear inspiration from traditional stage plays. This is cool - even if it is still derivative, but at least it's taking another medium and adapting it appropriately to a game.

[erikb]

I completely agree with your point. I'm more pessimistic about AAA in general, though. AAA always tries to maximize superficials, minimize the hard stuff, and pay more money for marketing than for development. It's the same in games, novels, music and movies. And your grandma could have said the same about the AAA products of her time (music, theatre), right? It's not a surprise.

There are lots of great games below AAA and even some AAA titles have good content by surprise (for example the interactive movie "The Last of Us" was great in my eyes, not as a game but as a movie, which you can enjoy for free on Youtube).

[jmatthews]

Tastes have changed as well. An AAA title is expected to have mo-cap, cut scene, bleeding edge graphics as a baseline. Once you hit the baseline only then can you start to explore the often lacking innovations at the mechanic level.

It's frankly the main reason it is such a promising time for mid tier indie developers. Games with interesting mechanics and concepts ARE getting traction and rewarding risk taking. Modern game development studies are ripe for disruption.

[onli]

> but instead it make you more happy to learn what makes the great new games great in their own regard. They won't be great in the same way Fallout 1 was great.

I think Fallout is a perfect example. When you look at Fallout 3 one can easily have that impression, that the good things from Fallout 1 and 2 are lost in modern games. But if you then go on and play Fallout: New Vegas, you see that even a modern game can still have everything good from back then, right now.

I think it's not about the time, it's about choice, about which games you play. For every call of duty there is a Deus Ex, Alpha Protocol, Spec Ops: The Line, a World of Goo or a Minecraft.

Apart from the subjectivity caused by nostalgia I think it is impossible to look at our times and the awesome games created today and to think there are no good ones. Games like Oblivion - which he cites as a negative example - are exactly the old sandboxes in which the player can act somewhat freely. And with auto-leveling of the enemies disabled via mod it was even not a bad game. But sure, the good games are not always the most successful ones, and there is crap on the market. But that is not new as well.

[ijk]

I'll go one further: Wasteland 2, obliquely referenced in the the article as a Kickstarter project, just came out. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm a bit close to it, but so far my personal opinion is that it's _better than Fallout 1_. Just one opinion, but I think it serves as a counter argument to the idea that none of these projects are worthwhile.

[ekianjo]

> Imho you can spend all your life being sad about missing the old days and hoping someone revives them

Oh come on. You dismiss a whole page of text to such a simple argument ? That old stuff was better than the new ? Did you even read the article ?

There are measurable ways to look at games, and it's actually very clear that while game hardware has been evolving very fast, game design and options left to the player have been decreasing exponentially with time.

Why do you think there's a retro game movement? No, it's not pure nostalgia, there are genuine reasons to prefer older games over the new ones we have in 2014. And in all media there are ups and downs, there are "golden ages" where stuff is discovered, invented, discovered, and darker ages where nothing much happens and it's just rehashing the same thing over and over again. You see this kind of things in every form of culture, why would Gaming be any different? Why do you think Games would be linearly progressing towards an ideal state ?

[erikb]

GTA5 has way more options than GTA1. This doesn't say anything about the general development but it should show that there are also these games where choices increased over time.

If you say that the number of choices in game design and options decreases over time, you should back that up with data. Otherwise it's just an opinion and as you've already read in my comment my opinion is different.

[ekianjo]

Well, Mass Effect 2 was just a long corridor instead of having actual levels like Mass Effect 1. The level system was way more simplified as well than in the 2nd. And Mass Effect 1 was a way more simple game than let's say, Baldur's Gate or NeverWinter Nights from the same studio years before.

We have yet to see ANY RPG being as feature full as Ultima 7, out in 1992. Real time weather changes, AI companions with personalities, open world, huge story, NPC who actually feel real (they work during the day, go back home and sleep at night). There's nothing like that still in 2014, despite numerous attempts and failed promises.

Where are the flight simulators ? They are completely extinct. The best ones were made in the 90s and the genre disappeared in the 2000s. They were complex games too.

GTA is maybe the only game that you can show as going against that trend. That does not mean the game industry as a whole is making more complex games as they go, quite the opposite.

[erikb]

Yes, I agree that there are more simplified games today than ever before. But the same is true for deep, detailed games. There are simply way more games AAA, Indie, and free/open-source. Ever heard of Dwarf Fortress, CataclysmDDA, or Skyrim (yes even AAA titles)? There are many games with more depth and details a single person can handle in a lifetime, look around. And if GTA doesn't offer more flight simulator than any of the 90s games, I don't know how you evaluate flight simulators. If it is the details in physics and control have a look at Kerbal Space Program (never played it, never was a fan of flight sims, sorry). If you want simulators in general have a look at Truck Simulator. There is even a harvester simulator but that might only exist in German, not sure.

I bet if you look around hard enough you might even find an open source implementation of your favourite flight simulator with better graphics. Wish you the best luck in finding one. :-)

[bobcostas55]

The games when he was young WERE cooler. Why is this such a difficult idea to understand? We are not at the pinnacle of art. 2014 is not the best year for everything ever.

If someone said Hollywood was better in the 70s than today, it would be a completely uncontroversial statement. Why is it so hard to accept that games may have been better at some point in the past?

[erikb]

Hollywood might have been better in the 70s (quite controversial statement to me, though), but movies had good and bad examples in the 70s as much as they have today. I'm a quite avid movie watcher in German, English and sometimes even Chinese. I can tell you there are loads of good movies, even today.

And there are awesome games today. I'm currently playing and enjoying Bard's Tail and McDroid. Before I played the new X-Com which I enjoyed a lot. And I've spent so many hours in Civ5 and Crusader Kings. While I enjoyed games 15 years ago with a passion I can't have today, I would never change playing the new games for the old ones. The graphics are better, the games are more complex, but better userinterfaces make them easier to handle.

[Leszek]

The 70s was ten years. 2014 is one year. Is it so unexpected for there to have been 10 times as many good games (or movies) in the 70s as in 2014?