Old school gaming Vs New games : Thoughts

[lowzei]

Oldskool gaming to me means a smaller but focused gaming experience with attention to detail. Daring new game designs. Getting a game known without playing tutorials, reading the docs only if you really get stuck or after your solved the game. Today Indies more and more are filling the gap which was caused by the big publishers.

New gaming in a negative sense, means DRM, least common denominator, dumbed down game experience and producing more successors in less series. New gaming with some positive vibes means that there also can show up a great AAA game from time to time which due to budget reasons otherwise would have been impossible. It also means all the possibilities, the founded knowledge, todays development tools and digital distribution offers, especially for Indies. Braid, Machinarium, Torchlight, Legend of Grimrock are all children of this process. Whilst there are great classics, i also think the best is yet to come.

[Greco]

... Whilst there are great classics, i also think the best is yet to come.

I am crossing my fingers to that

[gasgas]

I enjoy the occasional hard game like this one but I am glad not all games are this hard. A big reason they used to make all games hard was to make the game last longer. Nowadays they make games last longer with massive game environments, massive dialogue options and 10 times as many quests.


I like hard games and easy games. I hope I continue to get both.

I think the more modern game is made for a bigger audience, thus lowering the standard becomes a must. And indeed a harder game takes longer to complete, but so do those games rich in background and quests. In my opinion games should have both features, they should be hard (or at least mind challenging) and full of new ideas, but they shouldn't be hard at the point the game becomes frustrating. I think legend of grimrock can't be fully considered old school, but more like modern game done correctly (in it's genre), even if is lacking a bit in the story.

Edit: also it was easier back then to figure out new entertaining ideas, now everything has already been seen.

[Gudadantza]

Old school is not a genre, It is a modern term and very generic.

If old devs could have got some of the nowadays evolutions in interface, some of them essentials in a decent game, they would have programed them.

Dont you understand that dungeon master or eye of the beholder 1988 and 1990 were extreme evolutions in easy to use mechanics with respect previous bards tales or gold boxes? They wanted a more big audience simplifiyng some roleplay aspects making them faster and showing real time versus the previous turn based rogue dungeon crawler.

I agree old school, is superior in other aspects, not in interface, and some of that games were harder due to the interface.

Some things have been forgotten, and others have been oversimplified. Treating the user like babies or retarded. But in the majority of the cases, is the user himself, sat in front of his console, who wants be taken as a retarded.

Industry only gave what the masses wanted and the logic demanded. But now on XXI century, are the masses themselves those which choose what they are offered.
there are different kinds of masses, and the indie scene, in the last times, or old school lovers, is one of the masses to be taken in account.

But remember that the improvements, the evolution in gaming and interfaces have the same importance in Dragon Age or in Machinarium.

[Germ]

I play MMORPG's but really still prefer single player CRPG's and I've come to the conclusion that the devs of MMO's feel it's a waste of time to add proper puzzles because they know the majority of players find a tough puzzle and instantly head to websites to find the solution so why bother spending ages devising cunning puzzles?
It's a symptom of both the availability of internet access and a lack of creativity in both programmers and players nowadays I feel.
One of my favourite RPG'ish games was the Wild Arms series on the old Playstation that had fiendishly fun puzzles,one puzzle had me stumped for around 2 weeks and finally solving it felt really amazing to me.

[amnnor]

I don't think you can say one is better than the other, except in terms of you own preference. I like both older games and newer ones. Different game styles and mechanics fill different desires. The puzzles in LoG are fun and some require a little thinking (I've only finished level 4 so far). It's a refreshing change and great in this game, but that doesn't mean it would be great in every game. Hopefully with the apparent success of LoG we see more games in this style.

[Greco]

I play MMORPG's but really still prefer single player CRPG's and I've come to the conclusion that the devs of MMO's feel it's a waste of time to add proper puzzles because they know the majority of players find a tough puzzle and instantly head to websites to find the solution so why bother spending ages devising cunning puzzles?
It's a symptom of both the availability of internet access and a lack of creativity in both programmers and players nowadays I feel.
One of my favourite RPG'ish games was the Wild Arms series on the old Playstation that had fiendishly fun puzzles,one puzzle had me stumped for around 2 weeks and finally solving it felt really amazing to me.

In my opinion it is not a matter of internet spread. After all, someone has to solve the puzzle first in order to submit a walkthrough. It is more a matter of lack of time both for the developer (puzzles take much time to be created, since it is not a trivial task like rendering, or programming but it requires a lot of mind effort), and the user in the sense that most contemporary players do not have enough time to spend on solving them. For me, though I prefer spending an hour twisting my mind a hundred times, than playing through 3 levels killing everything it moves (like for example in Diablo). Which, by the way I think is the game that killed the old genre rpgs. If you look behind you will surely see that diablo's publishing was clearly the turning point for old school rpgs. Due to its popularity all games followed more or less its recipe, with variations in the interface of course: Hacking, Slasing and Questing. I remember playing it 10 years ago. It was good, it was quick, I liked it and probably I will take on Diablo 3 when it comes out later this year. But was it challenging? Apart from clicking on everything that was moving and talking did it offer anything else? Let's take skyrim now, apart from its interface where does it differs from diablo. It is all killing and questing. These are some thoughts I had recently on gaming industry nd felt that I had to share with other gamers also.

[Ottyk]

I think that games were great up until around 2007. This was the point when big name publishers like Activision and EA became obsessed with money. Activision ruined classic games like Call of Duty, WoW and Guitar Hero by changing the game to capitalize on it as much as possible (For CoD and GH, releasing identical yearly games and for WoW making the game easier to attract casual gamer subscriptions).
Then there are things like day-one-DLC, Project $10 and DRM. Publishers have become obsessed with money and gameplay is no longer a priority. For this reason I now only play older games or indie games.

[Doom972]

I disagree about your first point. Games today are actually too streamlined in today's console-centric game industry. I find myself using one key for most actions. For example: In Mass Effect 2 and 3 you use the space button to interact with people and objects, skip dialogue lines, cover, get out of cover and sprint, unlike the first game which had a more old school approach that made use of different keys for different actions (Ironically, that game was originally planned as a console only title). About menus - I just don't see much of a difference.

I do agree that challenging puzzles are mostly non-existant among AAA titles. Publishers and developers are apparantly worried today's gamer won't have the patience to solve it (or try his hardest and go to gamefaqs) and would just rage-quit.

[dbgager]

Old school every time. When these games were made they had very little computing power and memory to play with so everything had to be planned to make it the longest and best experience possible.

These days we have army's of lazy programmers that waste memory and resources, usually making badly coded and bulky games. Not only that I am sure that they don't plan a game but make it up as they go along.

There are very few modern games that are worth the time never mind the money. And that's it, money, it's all about money and no love for the game. Game's made with love are usually major gaming hits, those for money, usually a waste of time.

By theway to support your statement I will post another question? Do anybody know a modern adventure which which lasts more than a day of playing? 20 years the gaming industry thrived of games (mostly adventure and RPGs), which took days, not to mention months to complete them. Not to mention that many times without a proper hint, it was impossible to make it to the end. It seems that today, with the death of adventures, which were the main carriers of puzzling, puzzling has died from every other game as well. But why? Is it because nowadays players (the teenagers mostly), are frustrated to complete a game. Is it because we have two many games available, so we want to finsish them the soonest possible so that we move to another games? Is it because publisher's don't want puzzling, because they want their players to have the fieling that they are great players and can cope well with every game, so that they can sell them more in short time? Is it because they push developers to complete the game in strict timeframes so that they put it to market early enough, which makes designing good puzzles impossible? Is it lack of imagination of the developers?
The answer is difficult, but I think that more or less it is all the above. Publishers are a pain in the ass for modern developers. For me it is not starnge at all, that the only worth playing games lately have come from indie studios and mostly from Europe, where pressure of publishers is not so intensive.

After all if 4 people have manage to create such masterpiece Grimrock is, then what 40 people should have achieve. But in the end it seems that small development groups are better that huge. In my country we have a very good saying about it, which goes like this (in free translation): "Where too many roosters crow, the dawn is delayed"!

Good post...Greco. I agree.