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 think nostalgia plays a pretty big factor in retro games. Like, yes, I agree that enshittification marches onwards and the state of the industry today is pretty lame.
Every time I’ve gone back to a retro game I find myself vaguely disappointed. Quality of life has come a long way, and development is iterative so it makes sense that games made twenty years ago are lacking some features that make life easier for the player. Things like fast travel in metroidvanias, or inventory and quest management, or just trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do next in an RPG are often quite lacking. Or at the least, they’re not up to today’s standards.
Survivorship bias plays a pretty big role here too. We remember the good games that stand out from the rest of them, and we forget about the crap. There was shovelware back then too, maybe not to the degree of the modern app stores with F2P games loaded with microtransactions and dark patterns, but they were there too.
Anyway, long story long, the trick in whatever generation you play seems to be to find games that respect your time as a player. I’d also recommend checking out indie games, they’re made with love, and you can find all kinds of retro-styled where you can tell the devs were passionate about games of the era.
Here’s a short list of games I’ve enjoyed that give me that retro SNES feeling:
We just had our second kid so any games have to basically be on the phone right now. Luckily, someone mentioned Wildfrost in the same breath as Slay the Spire and it has been awesome to play while holding the little one.
It’s a card/deck builder rogue like, but you’re deploying units into one of two lanes and positioning them for maximum effect. Each unit counts down until it attacks, but you have a handful of cards to directly attack as well. You run until you fight the final boss, unlock more stuff along the way, etc…it’s been a blast. The art style is cute (how big can Yuki’s snowball get? Try and find out!) and I love the soundtrack.
On iOS at least, the game is free to download and try out before purchasing (think it was $7). If you like Slay the Spire and similar games, well worth looking into!
I'm still working on Lies of P. I'm starting to feel like Jack Torrance in The Shining, but I am just half a chapter away from the end. Currently working on getting past the mid-chapter boss.
Yeah, I had a super hard time with her as well. Edit, spoiling the tip
spoilerOf note, if you haven’t figured it out, you can reflect her bolts when she is shooting at you from the air. Took me forever to figure that out and that helped a ton
If Valve can’t do something that will push their business and the whole industry forward, they’ll just do some other thing that will.
Doing sequels after sequels will only stagnate the franchise, making Valve lose time. For that, they rely on publishers like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft among others.
Splatoon 1 let you play five different minigames on the wii u pad, including a pretty solid rhythm game, while waiting, nothing else has come close for me
Valve these days don’t make things just to make money. They only make things that interest and excite them. HL3 would most likely just end up being more of the same, which isn’t exciting from a designer or developer point of view. They need a hook to get excited about it, and until that happens it’s just not worth the time or effort to do. In the meantime, they’re making plenty of money from Steam sales.
If this is some kind of question like “you can only play this in your lifetime” I’d pick up a DSi XL or closely a 3DS, I enjoy the DS library more, so it would be a downgrade doing it there, unless things have changed since the last time I checked.
The reasons are simple, it has tons of great titles and many of them have a high replayability value.
Everyone embraced smartphones and created a bigger market for games than there ever was before. Naturally when the mainstream latches onto something it becomes diluted and all about making a quick buck. Imo
The lazy answer for me is PS2, since that’s how I was able to play all the PS1/re-released games I missed out on. Pretty much all the Final Fantasy games, Chronl Trigger, Chrono Cross, Star Ocean… And then there was also FFX and Twisted Metal Black, some of the PS2 highlights for me.
I think SNES still has my heart though. I feel like most of the major titles were better (more perfected) than their N64 counterparts. The Legend of Zelda LttP absolutely consumed me growing up and is still my favourite game of all time. Many years later I find I’m still interested in games that look like they could have been released on SNES.
Same for me. Lots of consoles have lots of great games, and I really like the idea of the PS2 library’s depth and quality. I bought a 1TB MicroSD card for my Steam Deck OLED and loaded it with a 1TB image of curated roms from a private tracker thinking I’d play a lot of the ones I missed…
…But the only non-Steam game I’ve played is FF5 for the SNES. I’ve wanted to play it since I found out Final Fantasy “III” was a lie. The Steam Deck is the ultimate SNES RPG machine.
That and my SD2SNES in my childhood SNES gets a lot of play time with my 6 y.o. son. He’s almost able to beat world 1 of SMW solo, but he prefers Kirby Super Star, where he can beat world 1 and most of world 2.
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