Features - QOTW: Are computer games better now than they were 20 years ago?

[kalniel]

What about modern turn based and grid based games?

[Willzzz]

Well I think they are the least changed, of course this tends to mean that they are also the least flashy and cool.

[wasabi]

20 years ago - no - they were pretty bad. 10 years ago was however the golden age. Half-Life, Deux Ex, Quake 2, Thief, Black and White, Command and Conquer. Then the consoles completely took over and everything went braindead.

[aidanjt]

In what sense? I can't find any correlation between graphics and fun, either positive or negative. There are bad games with bad graphics and good graphics, and vice versa.

Now age of game is different - but that's simply because when you look back you are more likely to remember the good games and forget the masses of bad games.

I said correlation, not causation. Game graphics advanced with age. But the cause is neither the age nor graphics which makes games suck, it's bad development focus. Sure, there was bunches of rubbish games way back when, but there wasn't billion dollar marketing campaigns polishing turds into something they're not.

[kalniel]

I said correlation, not causation. Game graphics advanced with age. But the cause is neither the age nor graphics which makes games suck, it's bad development focus. Sure, there was bunches of rubbish games way back when, but there wasn't billion dollar marketing campaigns polishing turds into something they're not.

There was for some games, just not as many.

[MrBozack]

I've been playing Lego City Undercover on the Wii U. The graphics are great, the gameplay brilliant.....

.......but the loading times equal the ZX81 or C64! Not that there weren't hundreds of games on those platforms which I loved.

I guess gaming has gone the full cycle. I think comparison is impossible. We're in the future now where consoles aren't made out of wood. It's like comparing classical with drum and bass. Tastes vary. There's good and bad - both now and then.

[krsboss]

But this link should illustrate how there dire games has existed since the old days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8mQHotlaFo (naughty language warning)

I was wondering how many posts I would have to read before someone linked the Nerd!

With regards to my gaming, I've had PCs since they started putting '86s on the end and though I had a ZX spectrum 48k, I've never owned any consoles apart from an N64.

As gaming has grown as a media, people's expectations from the game have also grown, we are no longer satisfied by simple 2D graphics and just setting the highest score, we want realistic 3D graphics and to compete online to see who has the biggest e-peen.

The arrival of playstation / x-box have opened up gaming to the masses, and more recently mobile phones / tablets have further spread the influence of 'gaming'. However in order to appeal to more people, we have to look more towards the lowest common denominator. This leads to the dumbing down of gaming, which to us hardcore gamers who have been playing games for 20 years plus, may seem bad, however more people paying to play games means that games can have bigger budgets which are simply not available to non-cross platform games.

Developers need also to realise however, that they still need to write games for the hardcore gamers who have been with them for the whole ride (it is easier to keep an existing client than to attract a new one). Some developer have realized this already and have put some real effort in to making games for the PC first, porting it to consoles second and though it's only March 2013, I would say that we have 2 games (Tomb Raider & Bioshock Infinite) that are better than any game that was released in 2012.

So, in summary, there were games 20 years ago that were great, and perhaps the proportion of great games seemed better back then as there were not so many games around to compare things against, however if developers spend real time to make a truly excellent game then modern games are so much better!

Cheers, krs

[csgohan4]

They don't make them like they used to e.g Supreme commander and even SNES games like Mario RPG, Secret of Mana series e.t.c

[george1979]

Old SNES games such as Zelda were awesome at the time but then modern games such as Skyrim or The Witcher 2 are arguably more immersive. Older games, from memory, seemed to have a much better focus on gameplay, mechanics and fun.
I feel a lot of current developers still don't know what to do with the power available to them, except to try and turn the graphics knob up to eleven. Certainly very few have managed to work a decent narrative into a game without sacrificing gameplay. Too many cutscenes, QTs and so on.
Worth remembering though that it is still a young industry so I'm looking forward to see how games develop over the next few years.

[AGTDenton]

While I started on an Amstrad - the SNES and PC Games from 1988 up to about 2001 was the best gaming years for me. After that good games have been few and far between. That said I've recently found a few non blockbuster titles and have enjoyed them from start to end, a few reminiscent of the old days.

[directhex]

People need to ditch the rose-tinted glasses. Gaming gets better every year.

Much as people have a massive fondness for the games of their youth, try and *actually* go back and play them. You'll find that, by and large, they're crap. There'll be a handful of games - maybe five - released in the lifetime of a system which don't drive you up the bloody wall within minutes due to design affectations that we simply won't stand for today.

Hell, I'd go a step further and say there isn't a single NES game worth playing - and I say that as someone with a reasonably extensive NES collection, with all the "10/10 buy this now" titles as reviewed by the mags of the day.

Are games easier than they used to be? Sure. They're also more fair. How often did we say "I TOTALLY PRESSED THE BUTTON!!!" at a failure back in the 80s and 90s, and how often now? A game where you feel you have no influence over your own demise is not a fun game, and that's almost all we had back in the oldern days.

And today, today we have fabulous experiences. Journey, for example, is better than almost any game from the SNES era, despite not being "hard". Okami is the best Zelda game ever shipped (spoken as a man with an autographed Zelda 3 cartridge).

Every year brings us new creativity and new experiences, refining and streamlining and above all never failing to try new things.

Can you come up with a selective list of modern turds to compare to retro classics? Sure. Easily. And I can do the reverse just as easily.

I've been collecting games since 1989, and I absolutely don't feel that the old games were better. A few gems stand the test of time, but honestly, I look forward, not backward.

[Scribe]

People need to ditch the rose-tinted glasses. Gaming gets better every year.

Much as people have a massive fondness for the games of their youth, try and *actually* go back and play them. You'll find that, by and large, they're crap. There'll be a handful of games - maybe five - released in the lifetime of a system which don't drive you up the bloody wall within minutes due to design affectations that we simply won't stand for today.

Have to disagree here, I often find myself downloading PSX classics on the PSN and replaying them intently to the end, this is after buying the latest games from X genre and setting it down after 10-minutes with boredom.

It depends on the genre, but RPGs generally have weaker stories and less scale and, despite best attempts to push it, open-world and event-driven RPGs aren't deep or convincing enough to pass-off as a 'story'; though not really the fault of modern game making, I also don't like vocal-tracks in many games, this is something I quite enjoyed leaving my imagination to and the voice acting is usually sub-par. FPS now generally suffer from poor game balance and gameplay/controls somehow often feel less satisfying; the ability to mod and customise has also been reduced in favour of easy console ports. MMO's sacrificed a lot when they moved from 2D to 3D, fine detail in scenes, resource balancing limiting gameplay, controls, which affect/limit social interaction (you only have two hands), this is why games like Lineage Eternal are gaining a lot of heat as of late. Strategies are dumbed-down and now far too simple, their re-playability has dropped and the number of eventual effective tactics has fallen; I will grant that AI has become more 'human' however and there is no longer the choice of simply too easy or godlike.

I could go on all day...

I want to see the industry invest more money in programmers and game designers, develop tools to accelerate the development process, rather than focusing budget on continuously churning out assets or attaining that extra 10% of performance.

[TooNice]

^ I am going to have to disagree the vocal-tracks, I am usually quite fond of them. Then again, they pretty much sound like anime, and I like anime so that's that. Not sure if it matters (probably not - I remember being quite fond of Starcraft voice-tracks too), but most games I play nowadays are in Japanese, and voice acting is pretty big over here.

I also disagree on strategy games. On the RTS side, pre-Starcraft games hasn't aged all that gracefully even in terms of depth of gameplay. For turn based games, I don't think that Total War is less than, for instance, Civ, as much fun as I've had with it. Granted, there is no massive tech tree, which is what made Civ/Master of Orion quite appealing, but the battles are also far more strategic. A smaller force can win against a bigger one (to a certain point) if you outplay the opponent. I also had a lot of fun with Valkyria Chronicles, which combines base and real time into an interesting hybrid.

We may have lost some genres, like 2D scrolling fighting games (Street of Rage et al.), but we have gained some awesome hybrids. Batman Arkham Asylum (haven't played it's sequel yet, will wait for the summer sales to grab it) for instance grabs took elements from Zelda (inventory, puzzle solving), fun combat system, stealth and a decent story (it's batman so the universe is kinda set, unlike a brand new RPG, but I thought it was pretty decent). This is not just a prettier but lesser version of something that has been done 20 years ago.

[abaxas]

Another issue to consider is 'seminal games'. Once a game has been defined by a standard it is hard to improve on that formula.

Some great examples of SSFIIT, star craft, the xcom games.

Other than graphically, how else can you improve on what has been proven to be near perfect and each time you try the game is somehow 'worse'.

[McEwin]

No.

Don't emulate and tell me they are. Sit down and play them the original way: They can be engrossing. Modern games have no soul.

[loyal986]

I am an old school gamer and for such reason i do like more the old games, last week I took an NES and I enjoy the 2D gaming, it reminds me my old me. I am not a player nowdays as I have alot of obligations. Nowdays games have very polished graphics and a good realism, but they lack the fun I had before. I am 27 now and I was 6-7 years old in nintendos time, and sega too, atari and such, but I know I was very adictive about gaming. Probably it was my age, and now playing with this nintendo I remember my childhood lol. Anyway, for me the old games were fun and adictive, it was that kind of tech and we were amazed by that, and now nothing is interesting as we expect anything and nothing amazes us. People tend to get bored when they get things for cheap and don't get something different and we are in a age-era where nothing is new, alot of things have bean discovered for us... Peace 2 you ppl