Originally Posted by
recorderdude
I miss the limitations.
Look at today's games. You can practically draw the real world into them with the up-and-coming 3D graphics generation and you could damn near do it last-gen. Being able to do everything has made us revert to doing nothing special at all. The biggest game market has become FPSes focused on gritty, realistic environments, with forgettable orchestral scores, if any, and universally dull soldier characters, which, despite all that, are still at the peak of graphical and audial capability for the systems they're on.
Now, why exactly is every game looking and sounding as good as they possibly can a bad thing?
Breaking limits is what made the game industry THRIVE, and there's few left to break.
. . .
The way that the gaming industry introduced itself to us was, essentially, through huge bounds of graphical, audial and general innovation and breaking the status quo of popular games to create a new one. This would go on for decades with Mario setting the bar and inspiring tons of platformers, a great deal of which added their own twist, sonic rushing the gaming masses into the 90s and a glut of animal mascot games, mario 64 setting the bar for 3D Platforming, etc etc..
Now, when we look at these games today, we say "Sure, super mario bros, that was a great game"....was. We're not blown away with its colorful worlds and unique cast of enemies like we once were. We've gone through generations of graphics, innovations of every sort, and....I can't help but feel we've run out of them in the mainstream view.
. . .
That's not to say that there aren't still some great games this generation that aren't FPSes, but they're really not limit breaking. I've seen so much done on modern super-consoles that it's very hard for my senses to be blown away anymore by what indie games can do. Despite that, I still say "wow, the genesis could do THAT?" every time I reach the moth boss of alien soldier, or say "damn, they got the NES to sound THAT good?" every time I listen to the soundtrack of Mr. Gimmick. Limitation breeds creativity, and limits are few and far between by now. We can still be entertained, but we've been so spoiled by EVERY popular game reaching the pinnacle of graphical and audial capability that we can no longer appreciate games that really try to be something amazing but pale in comparison to the might of the rehashes.
I know that I can't hold back the march of technology and I pray that I am wrong, but, at this point, I doubt it.