My neighborhood was just poor enough that basically no kid had a PS memory card. They were all jealous of my n64’s ability to save on the cartridges. When the PS2 and GameCube rolled around we just left the machines on all day again
At some point, I’d have passed on a new game and chosen to get a memory card instead, haha
Though I did get bitten with the RPG bug back then, so that probably colours my opinion. Not that I didn’t play the first half of FF7’s Midgar (aka. first act) dozens of times because I kept getting stuck.
It’s great that level select cheats were so prevalent back then!
The mods are shit too. I don’t know what their API is like but it’s clearly not good if you have this entire legacy of modded minecraft, a game which is (presumably) way better programmed and they’re actively paying people to do it, yet they can barely accomplish a 10th of the quality.
Even if they were good you’d have to interact with that horse-shit mobile game premium currency model (which absolutely should be made illegal) where you have to buy currency in packs with bigger packs having a discount and are never in sizes that are usable for a single purchase. Having to pay for mods is contentious enough as is, but putting it behind abusive MTX is going to be a deal breaker for the rest.
We’ll see if the trend holds in a month, a year, and a decade. I think the flaws holding it back will prevent any growth, charging money for mods is radioactive to the community as Railcraft had proven before they were forced by law not to paywall their updates.
Best case scenario we get the Google Play Store where people don’t make stuff because they want to, but because they want to make money, but like I pointed out that MTX scheme is absolutely going to result in bad and confusing payouts which will drive away even those people. If it turns out they’re paid in scrip- I mean minecoins, than at best you’re getting a bunch of kids who don’t understand labour exploitation yet.
EDIT: I looked into it and it’s mostly just kids who don’t understand how exploitative the whole thing is. The API is also extremely lacking.
This is selection bias. You remember Metal Gear Solid, but do you remember Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft? Do you remember Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero? Bubsy 3D? The million-and-one licensed games that were churned out like baseball cards back then?
and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money
If we’re going to say that a full-price game today costs $70, Metal Gear Solid would have cost the equivalent of $95. Not only that, but that was very much the Blockbuster and strategy guide era. Games would often have one of their best levels up front so that you can see what makes the game good, but then level 2 or 3 would hit a huge difficulty spike…just enough to make you have to rent the game multiple times or to cave in and buy it when you couldn’t beat it in a weekend. Or you’d have something like Final Fantasy VII, which I just finished for the first time recently, and let me tell you: games that big were designed to sell strategy guides (or hint hotlines) as a revenue stream. There would be some esoteric riddle, or some obscure corner of the map that you need to happen upon in order to progress the game forward. The business model always, at every step of the medium’s history, affects the game design.
“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
There’s just so much everything now a days. There’s tons of great new music and tons of great new games buried in all the new stuff thats being pumped out that it’s hard to find the gems. There’s lots of passionate people out there taking the time and effort to try and make the best
“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.
Exactly this.
Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
Games back then did expect you to pay extra - in fact quite a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.
Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
That's commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.
Though lots of things are better now: the entire back-catalogue of games, more access to review/forums, free games (and also ability to create your own games without doing so from nothing) etc. Aside from when video store rental was applicable, early gaming was more take-what-you-can-get (niche hardware/platforms might still have that feel somewhat).
That’s commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.
Inflation is derived by indexing all of those things. Some things are far more expensive or far cheaper relative to each other, but we approximate the buying power of a dollar by looking at all of it.
a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.
Do you have an example?
I knew kids that bought strategy guides, I worked at a game shop that sold strategy guides, and as far as I could tell they were for chumps. People who has more money than creativity.
Cosmetic DLC feels like it’s for chumps too, but it’s lucrative. The best example is going to be Simon’s Quest, without a doubt. The strategy guide was in an issue of Nintendo Power. I’m sure they were also happy to let social pressures on the playground either sell the strategy guides or the game just by word of mouth as kids discussed how to progress in the game. A Link to the Past is full of this stuff too. The game grinds to a halt at several points until you happen to find a macguffin that the game doesn’t even tell you that you need. Without the strategy guide, you could end up finding those things by spending tons of hours exploring every corner of the map, but by today’s standards, we’d call that padding.
I forgot about hint hotlines. They’d charge per minute and did everything they could to keep you on the phone. I called a hotline once and my parents weren’t too happy about it.
Ommmm I know that is why I got a steam deck? I love video games that don’t force you to buy a super expensive gaming rig.
I don’t really fuck with emulation though I want to (dunno where to get roms honestly) but there are so many banger indie games out there that barely use any resources to run, and honestly simpler graphics is almost always better for gameplay, development, and even aesthetics because it forces developers to adopt a style with their simplified vision of reality instead of just making things look super realistic.
I hate modern strategy games where the map is super pretty and 3D but impossible to read and all the menus are animated with tiny little buttons and hard to read text against textured parchment backgrounds…. it is clear as day that giving those game developers a more powerful computer to develop on was actually a catastrophic mistake in terms of UI readability.
I do go without. The only time I ever play online is playing PvE games with my good IRL friends that live in different countries and states now, and that’s maybe twice a month.
No randoms, no tantrums when we make noob mistakes, no toxicity. When my friends aren’t around, I play single player games or play with bots instead of people. I highly recommend it.
I played Resident Evil 4 (the original 2005, not the remake) for the first time last year. That same year, I bought Diablo 4, Starfield, Hogwarts legacy, and a bunch of other games.
RE4 from 2005 was the only game that I thoroughly enjoyed playing.
If memory serves, Valve got the idea for the loot boxes from Korean free to play games. As far as I know though, they did invent the battle pass with Dota 2.
lemmy.world
Aktywne