Cyberpunk 2077. I just finished Act 2 last night and I’m (probably) about to begin Phantom Liberty.
Really enjoying most of the story and side quests so far!
The advertisements for the game didn’t mention it at all. But as soon as the game starts I was like “Wait is this Whidby Island”?
Which actually kind of backfired on me since for work I had to regularly drive through Whidby late at night. Some of the games monsters were hard not to think about alone at 3 AM. 😂
Technically it’s set in Washington, but fictional Bright Falls is based on Snoqualmie WA, North Bend WA (similar to Twin Peaks) and then also Crater Lake OR
If that’s what the devs said, sure. But the game does literally start with you taking a ferry to an island which always see very whidby/orcas/san juan.
But I’ll admit to my bias, I was driving through whidby at night on a regular basis when I played the game so they always seemed linked to me.
I’d say that in my experience, retro games or games with a retro design philosophy tend to be more enjoyable and replayable. The nostalgia helps with that, but I think a big part of it is never having to tinker with graphics settings or anything technical. You just boot it up and play.
I’d personally consider anything older than 2005 to be a retro game (or at least retro-adjacent) in my library. It feels like around that time there was a major shift in how games were made; some really benefiting from the new design philosophies but many falling very short of their hype and ultimate goals.
For me the biggest problem with modern games is the obsession with high fidelity graphics. The dev teams that create games without a focus on photo-realism or jaw dropping visuals are often the teams creating the best games in my eyes. See Heart Machine, ConcernedApe, Polytron, Ludeon Studios, Maddy Makes Games, etc…
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of good modern games. The retro design philosophy just resonates much stronger with me when I just wanna sit down and enjoy something. Shoutout to Maxis for making SimCity 4, that game is sucking up the hours lately. lol
I’d say that in my experience, retro games or games with a retro design philosophy tend to be more enjoyable and replayable.
I don’t like chiptune music, where music is designed to sound like it’s being played on an old console’s frequency synthesizer.
I think that there are some good arguments for low-resolution pixel art in terms of reducing asset cost while still having a playable game – the brain is good at filling details in. But I don’t think that that applies to music, that there are good cost trade-offs.
And while I don’t have a problem with low-resolution pixel art graphics, I do have to say that for some of the successful games that I’ve played with it, I’d really like to be able to buy an HD graphics pack. I’m kind of surprised by how infrequently it is that I’ve seen game devs do that. Cave Story did it. I’d like to see some games like Caves of Qud have HD DLC.
See Hyper Light Drifter for a retro-style game with an unbelievably deep soundtrack. Fez also has an amazing soundtrack. Both are nods to chiptune but with incredibly modern production techniques.
For me the biggest problem with modern games is the obsession with high fidelity graphics. The dev teams that create games without a focus on photo-realism or jaw dropping visuals are often the teams creating the best games in my eyes.
I think this is very much down to personal taste. While I don’t think a great game needs photo-realistic graphics, for me a game’s graphics do factor into my enjoyment of it, so it should at least feel like the devs put some effort into making the game visually appealing. That could be focusing on making the graphics beautiful, or stylised and quirky, or just incredibly cute. But if I’m gonna spend hours looking at something, I want it to look nice.
There definitely is a lot of crap that came out back in the day that we tend to forget, but there were also very different popular strategies for game making.
One of the most significant for me is the degradation of choice in RPGs. Many, certainly not all, of the RPGs I played as a kid and as a teenager would have elements of their story that could diverge to some degree based on your actions. The most typical results were things like a different ending or an otherwise hidden scene. Silent Hill was a good example of this. But you’d also have a lot of games where your choices immediately and totally altered the way things play out, like Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate. Your choices could affect not only the ending, but a whole lot on the way. Hell, the first Fallout game served up some major unforeseen consequences for an action that on the surface seems like a pretty straightforwardly good idea.
But ever since Mass Effect I’ve noticed an emptiness in choice making, and recently I saw an article that showed me why.
If you follow the branching choices in those early games like a flow chart, the choices on it were often significant divergences that don’t ever meet back up with the original iteration of the quest. But modern design techniques try to be efficient, so you’ve got a branching point at the point of choice, then it rejoins the main quest, and then later on it branches off briefly to check what you did and react to it, before going back to the main quest as though nothing happened.
It’s such a letdown. If you only play once and never save scum it’ll seem fine, but the lack of depth becomes readily apparent so quickly. It’s not like nobody’s still doing big branches too, but you can tell when they default to this and it feels so empty.
I’ve enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, but one of the things I notice, especially in act 3, is how slapped together some of these branching choices are. Also, as cute as the die rolling mechanic is, the constant clear and random success/failure state of all branching choices just leads to endless save scumming. The game doesn’t handle it like a divergence in one way or the other, it straight up tells you you failed.
In D&D the die rolls are fun and tense, but they don’t become this totally separate gambling subgame. Sometimes it’s important to get a bad die roll, and sometimes the result in terms of fun is way better than getting a good die roll. I never got that impression from BG3. It felt like a bad die roll meant missing content rather than getting different content, and I think that’s largely because of the literal framing of the die rolling UI and the associated sounds. A more neutral UI where you don’t know the DC of what you’re rolling for and it doesn’t scream at you that your roll wasn’t good enough might let people RP out the failure a little better. Comedy doesn’t hurt either, and is a great tool for DMs seeking to alleviate some of the pain of a bad roll.
Anyway, point being, I think there are some problems with modern game design philosophy that stem from seeking efficiency and greater visual fidelity and audio complexity over engaging game design. Shitty graphics and limited processing power mean you have to make decisions to bring the player into the world and get them to forget that their character’s head is like 8 pixels or whatever. So they have to exploit humanity’s adeptness at pattern recognition, but they also have to make what they’ve got count. They’re not overloading it with bloat and random branches just for the hell of it. A branching story was a branching story because they really wanted it to be.
I’m probably like 50% talking out of my ass, but I feel like if we had Tim Cain here with us he’d agree with me.
Though indie games do seem perfectly capable of avoiding this corporate optimization shit.
I don’t have any specific recommendations but I’m from the Pacific Northwest and it’s really interesting to me to see a post like this. Are you from there too?
Nope not at all haha, from Scandinavia myself. Just very much love the whole Pacific Northwest vibes seen in series like Twin Peaks and such. Really want to make a trip over just to have seen it once.
I slept on it for a real real long time, had it in my library for like a year before I got around to it. Ended up getting platinum on it my first playthrough I liked it so much.
If Valve does ever make HL3, it’s going to have to be ground breaking. Every Half Life game redefines what gaming is capable of. Eg HL: Alyx was an insane demonstration of what VR can do. I do think it’ll happen eventually, and may even partially be in development right now. But I don’t think we’ll hear anything about it for a very long time.
There certainly was a “golden age of gaming,” where the cost for a studio to exist and make a game was pretty low and they were more willing to experiment. The thing people forget is that there was so, so, so much trash and shovelware made during that era as well. We remember the incredible game that innovated and drove the medium forward, and we forget the movie tie-ins and genre knockoffs.
These days, AAA has forgotten how to innovate, and nearly all of it is being driven by indie titles. This is because, once again, the cost to develop is now so low that literally anyone can do it. The amount of trash and shovelware we’re getting is almost ludicrous though, so it’s a lot harder to find the great titles that are overlooked, but extremely high quality has a remarkable way of cutting through the noise.
Hardly the only, but not always the case either. I’d put some of it down to rose-colored nostalgia, some to the given fact that so much today is buying a base framework game and then selling 276 ‘addons’ to make it complete, and part to that back when systems didn’t have the power they do now developers couldn’t rely so much on all the flashy imagery and effects so they put more effort into the story and unique gameplay. A lot of smaller studio games pull that latter part off today still, but they’re sometimes harder to find.
Do you have any examples of smaller studio made games with flashy imagery and effects to match the good story? Really I'm just looking for game recs and want to get away from the usual "big" names for a bit.
I guess it depends on what you’re looking for and what you consider flashy. I tend to do most of mine from GOG these days just out of a preference for avoiding DRM on principal. Found a few interesting ones just of the ‘cheap enough that it doesn’t matter if it’s not great’ types.
A major marker of quality for me tends to be if something just feels polished, like the menus make sense rather than looking like someone just stuck things where they could without though, but it could still run on a potato without making things melt.
I'm really open to anything. I tend to lean towards RPGs or story games (Life is Strange, Dear Esther, and Stanley Parable for instance) but I play most anything.
Are you cherry picking the good games out of older libraries? I find people do that a lot when remembering. It’s a survivorship bias thing. The good ones get remembered more and the bad one forgotten, so they seem like the population is better.
Nah. I mean, I like old games quite a lot, but for all the gems, there’s a litany of duds. I do agree that anti-cheat and online multiplayer have hurt innovation, but the indie scene is where it’s at, if you want innovation or a focus on storytelling. Still, some of my best memories are with modern online games like Shadowbane, WoW, Warframe, Deep Rock Galactic, etc., and yet no game has yet replaced my experiences with the older Myst series.
Size of games is certainly problematic if you have a slower internet connection, but even SSDs are quite economical at this point.
If retro games are your jam, then awesome! But I think they’re just a single facet of the broader hobby of gaming.
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Aktywne