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Thread: Have Games Changed Too Much from the Old Days for You?

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    ServBot (Level 11) Steven's Avatar
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    To be honest, I've long lost touch with "modern" games. I really stopped at around PS2. My brother has the Wii U and I played it a bit one night, and the whole time I just felt like it wasn't "video gaming" at least not in the way I remember video gaming to be. I kept thinking I can't wait to go back to my trusty Super Nintendo, which never fails me.

    Call me an old fart, but I know what I love best, and I'm gonna spend my gaming time playing what I enjoy most.

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    For me it ends at the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. . . all the 32-bit and 64-bit systems had games whose graphics seem complex going by alternating camera angles required for some views.

    ~Ben

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    I haven't gotten a chance to read through most of the replies, or the entire original post, but for me there are a few genres that I don't enjoy modern incarnations of; namely platformers, and (3D) fighters.

    I used to love platformers. Mascot type platformers and action platformers, back when they were 2D, then Mario 64 came out and I was the only person I knew who absolutely did NOT like it. I don't like many 3D platformers at all, and I don't think I've ever actually played one all the way through to the end.

    The things that most people loved about it were what I disliked. I hated having the freedom to openly explore 3D worlds in a platform jumping because I felt that it broke the flow of the game. Having few boundaries in a 3D world meant wandering aimlessly. You no longer had to set up and time your jumps and attacks with caution and reservation or manage the time you spend on a single stage. The structure and gameplay mechanics of platformers were completely different when they went 3D. There wasn't any 'flow' to the stages, or at least that's how I felt about it. I don't think modern platforming games are 'bad', they just became something entirely different that really don't interest me.

    Having the freedom to wander through open playfields at my leisure without a sense of urgency, or the benefit of a serious or engaging narrative like in a more realistic action or horror title that would justify a 3D world ('to me' I mean) just seems really boring. I feel that way about some 'serious' sandbox games as well though. I know most people feel the opposite, but for me 'less' freedom of movement and more confines keeps me interested in a game, especially if there's something I'm focused on that's driving me. 'You can do whatever', just makes me not want to do anything at all.

    As for 3D fighters, they just always felt too random for me to get seriously into like I did 2D fighter. They don't have the same tight back and forth play mechanics as 3D fighters.

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    Pac-Man (Level 10) Emperor Megas's Avatar
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    I also really hate how long most games are now. One of the things I really enjoy about retro games are how short and sweet they are. I can blow through them in a few hours, tops. The older I get, the less time I have to sit around gaming, so if I can get through a game in a week with only a few hours invested here and there, that's awesome.

    I recently finished The Last Of Us in just a week (that's really fast for me), and it does what it does so well, I really had no complaints. It didn't drag on needlessly, and it never felt like a chore.

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    Excellent points, Emperor Megas. They express many of the feelings I have.

    I really don't like it when games are "too long." For me, the maximum length of a game in a typically lengthy genre like Role Playing Game should be no more than 30 hours, and even then it better be super compelling for me to complete. I prefer my RPGs to be 20 hours or less.

    Action games need to be even shorter. I'd say they should max out at 15 hours and have a preferred length of 4-10 hours.

    I think it is best when a game when first played takes less than 12 hours to complete, but once you master the game, it can be completed in less than 1.5 hours.

    And for a "speed gamer" like myself, arcade games are great! They are (more or less) able to be comprehended almost instantly, and you can play a "full" game in less than 5 minutes!

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    Man you and I think alike on that last post there almost 100%. I'm no speed gamer though, and I haven't seen an arcade I could use in a long time but when I could that about summed up how it worked. Pop in a quarter and in those 5min or more you got your value right then and there as they were designed to be quickly appealing.

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    I agree with some of the sentiments here, but I think too much nostalgia can lead to a pretty narrow point of view. With older games, I think it's important to recognize what they did poorly just as much as what they did well. There are plenty of old games that are challenging in part or wholly due to bad design. For example: I recently finished Planescape: Torment, an old PC RPG. Wonderful, compelling setting and dialogue. Just a really good story, through-and-through. The combat, though? Horribly tedious. Plagued by pathfinding problems. Bad NPC power scaling made me almost give up in the last third of the game. I still really love Torment, in part due to the nostalgia it inspired when I was a little kid, but I can recognize its shortcomings.

    I'll agree that there's a lot of chaff in the games released today, but from the things I'm reading online, it seems there's an upward trend of gamers looking past the superficial and demanding better design in their games, and there's plenty of developers, big and small, that are listening and actually trying to release quality games. I can't really relate on the point of not being able to have a peaceful, isolated experience. I like the social component of games. It's always been my philosophy that games are more fun to play with friends, regardless of whether the games are actually multiplayer or not. Don't you have any fond memories of playing through old JRPGs or platformers with a sibling or a friend?

    As far as difficulty goes, maybe the initial expectation for performance has gone down, but these days, adjustable difficulties are a pretty common standard of games. I think games giving players control over the difficulty of the game--whether that means adjusting it up for those who think games are too easy these days, or adjusting it down for people who haven't played games as long--I think that's more important than trying to find a single acceptable standard. Besides, if you want games that are unrelentingly challenging, they're still around. That's one of the reasons From Software has seen so much success recently, with their "old school" approach to difficulty in games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne.

    As far as pay-to-win goes, the genres that tend to attract competitive gamers are still populated by zero-sum games. Mostly I mean fighting games and RTS games, since a frightening number of shooters have wedged in some kind of cash shop component or time-gated progression, but, even then, many of them at least try to leverage online matchmaking in a way that places roughly equivalent opponents together. Heck, even the Smash Bros. series, which long favored casual play and actively sabotaged strictly competitive gameplay, has finally caved and given their competitive audience the rules and venue they so demanded. Usually, when I see pay-to-win issues, it comes in the form of free-to-play MMOs, and those are pretty easy to avoid.

    Regarding DLC... well, that's a tougher subject. I like the concept of DLC. I don't think it's wrong at all to release extra content for a game after its release to increase the game's longevity, and I'm willing to pay extra past the initial investment into the game if the DLC is substantial enough. Sure, there are some evil bastards that think things like hiding on-disc content behind the paywall of day-one DLC are okay, but those companies have caught a lot of flak from their consumers for it. There have also been some instances of companies releasing DLC content as free patches. DLC is still a relatively new concept, and most companies are still trying to figure out what's acceptable and what's not. Hopefully the consumers have enough power in their wallets and sense in their heads to guide them.

    If there's one thing I can agree with completely, though, it's that games shouldn't take too long to complete. The idea that time spent playing = more value per dollar spent is a problem both with consumers and companies. It's a trend that I think will pass, and hopefully soon. In the meantime, though, there's still the occasional game that manages to be refreshingly brief. I beat Metal Gear Rising: Revengance a little while ago, and my casual playthrough took only 10 hours, but the experience was so much better than plenty of games I spent 30-40 hours on.

    When it comes right down to it (and I think the title of the thread sums it up nicely) there's a point in everyone's life where we become "set in our ways". Eventually we just aren't comfortable with big change in certain things, especially something as capricious and subjective as video games, and decide to stick with the older stuff. If you aren't happy with the direction games have taken, I can sympathize. Personally, I think it's way too early to even think about giving up on new games, but I'm a young whippersnapper, so take my optimism with a grain of salt.

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