It’s not a controversial take, but survivorship bias is certainly strong with anything like this. People like classic rock because the bad songs from that era have faded into obscurity. The same goes for your favorite retro games; for every Ocarina of Time there was a Superman 64. For every Zelda there were 3 shitty LJN games.
The type of trash is just different. Instead of low-effort cash grab games, now we get high-effort overworked devs making a game that asks you to pay for it over and over again.
You even see this with games that were insanely cash grabby from ten or so years ago. Borderlands 2 made you pay for every level cap increase and tiny piece of updated content as it rolled out. The handsome collection fixed that, but it’s still true that it really tried to toll you at every corner. Game is still highly regarded though.
I dunno. I pulled Septera Core out of a bargain bin shoved together with some forgettable mech game for $10, and it was pretty great.
I don’t think effort is what makes the difference. Games now are designed increasingly in ways that are less ‘risky’ in terms of corporate measures of user satisfaction than they used to be. It’s the kind of measure of satisfaction that sees a quest marker constantly showing your destination as clearly preferable to having to actually look at the world and find your way around.
I’ve run into this with friends of mine who are into modding before. When they see one mechanic that negates another mechanic, or that degrades the output quality of another mechanic, they see it as wasted code. To me, that’s the essence of the tension and release in a game. You create a state the player wants to get to, then you put shit in their way and provide them with various ways of solving your obstacles. That’s basically narrative driven gaming in a nutshell, an interaction between barriers and ways of negating those barriers.
But like, I think that may be part of what’s missing sometimes in pushing these more like real-world convenience-oriented features akin to a GPS app. If you’re making a GPS app, you want it to work perfectly, but in a game it’s kind of more fun if it’s got a little bit of jank in it. Not the actual code, obviously, but the player’s interaction with the mechanic in the game world. A straightforward trip from point A to point B isn’t much of a story.
Honestly, I think it’s just more of the kind of watering down that’s inevitable as you get too much money wrapped up in a project. Corporate infrastructures and IPOs aren’t conducive to art. Or quality in anything else, for that matter. It doesn’t just affect what decisions are made in a game’s development, either. It affects how people are educated, who gets hired, how labor is divided.
There’s definitely something to be said for the effects of nostalgia and survivorship bias on the appearance of retro gaming in a modern context, but there also have been major changes that aren’t just about the decisions of individual companies.
Honestly, my argument that new and old games are both good would be to point straight at the Ratchet & Clank series.
In my opinion, it’s only gotten better with time, and the latest entry in the Series from 2021 is genuinely one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. It’s modern, cutting-edge, requiring a PCIe Gen4 SSD and a DualSense controller for the best experience. It’s just fantastic. New games, even AAA games, can be great so long as the project is being led by people who know how to make good games.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
The one time I've asked for a refund on steam was when I mistakenly bought the remastered instead of the original version of an old game I wanted, and found that it had been ruined by the addition of a (not easy to bypass and wouldn't run under wine) "launcher" that was there for the sole purpose of getting you to register an account and log in so they could collect whatever data they wanted.
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.
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