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[cango]

What's the lure that the old games have that I can't catch with the new ones? One (at most two) playthroughs and I'm done mostly. Without mods they're not really anything. Is this a latest trend that aims to make modern games brief and disposible so that customers can keep buying new hypes?

The only reason I can put up with modern RPG's is that I keep finding myself searching for the things that I enjoyed when I first played RPG games when I was little. Something like looking for the first person you loved in every new partner you have afterwards. Isn't technology improving? Can't games support more variables now with new processors and memory technologies? Why not just make... -better- games?

One in-game building system in the newest Fallout game and we are all sold. That it makes the in-game objects in the story tangible, adjustable, more valuable. This simple feature we have been looking for for 3 games. Why did it take so long?

I think this is one of the reasons why indie gaming succeeded. Makers were gamers themselves. In commercial games we don't get this luxury so we have to keep rolling the dice to find the game that "we are looking for".

What are your thoughts?

[miauw62]

nostalgia

garbage games also existed in the 90s

also mediocre games

and good games also

[GiglameshDespair]

As an adult, you tend towards being less easily amused than you were as a kid. Older games, however, gain the benefit of nostalgia so thick you can cut it like cake. Indie games - particularly platformers - tend to rely on this so much it's almost unreal. Look at how much the word 'retro' shows up.  99% of indie games are clone trash.

Simply make "better" games? Better how? In FO1 and 2, you certainly couldn't build your own settlements. Combat was entirely dicebased, with little room for player skill. Whether you prefer that or not is up to you, but I've put a lot more hours in NV than I have FO1 and 2 combined. Graphics are better.

I like older games. I've got a hell of a lot of hours in some older things like Heretic, Doom, X-Com EU and TFTD. EU? Infinitely better with mods. One playthrough is much like another without them. It's a very good game, but it still has obvious flaws.

There was probably less hype, yes, because there was less advertisement, but there was also less information available to make an informed purchase. There are plenty of good games in the current generations.

[nenjin]

I dunno, I'm reaching a point where real nostalgia is hit or miss for me. Some things I pick back up and everything that made me love it still clicks. I pick up other things (that weren't just like a random garbage game I rented) and the perspective of being older makes it hard to enjoy it in the same way. So much of my nostalgia is rooted in believing games were really bigger than they were, and being able to really attach to stuff (aesthetics, characters, ideas.) Games didn't have to work very hard for me to more or less completely immerse myself in it. Didn't matter Mario was a 2d world with some crappy pixelated guy jumping around, it was a world and I was in it.

Being older things have to work a lot harder to sell themselves to me. And yeah, the Indie usage of platforming is stuff that as a kid would have totally engrossed me. These crazy art styles, stories and just enough gameplay to tie it together. As an adult my standards are in a different place....and I have a hard time seeing a lot of games as something other than an assemblage of visual themes and simple mechanics. Seen the sausage get made one too many times I suppose. Maybe that it's. As a kid it was easy to appreciate things holistically, unconditionally. Pair that with a truly good game and you have an experience that sticks with you through the ages. As you get older you start losing a bit of that ability to unconsciously enjoy something, or to enjoy it in your entirety instead of part of your brain always being elevated above it.

That said, I still can go back and play Castlevania games like I'm a kid again. Everything still clicks there, from the visuals and the aesthetic to the crunchiness of gameplay....and even down to the feeling that there's just one more secret somewhere I haven't seen.

[milo christiansen]

I find that many games I thought were awesome as a kid are far less interesting now. I have decided that it is a simple mater of more experience. I have played more games now, and so I see the flaws that were "just the way it was" back then. Some games I thought had great graphics back when I was 15 I think look horrid now, some games that had good controls back then are almost too annoying to play now.

So like the others say, nostalgia. That said, some games are just great, no matter how old.

[NullForceOmega]

I don't know what these guys are on about, I'm 33 and I still enjoy every game I own, granted my tastes are pretty specific (RPGs, RTS, a very few FPS, and some really kickin' space games).  I don't think games have gone down in quality per se, but I do think that it has become harder to find ones that are really fun and involving.  After all, the market has always been glutted with cash-grabs like Madden, CoD, AssCred, the marketing is just much more omnipresent, so it becomes harder to filter.

[itisnotlogical]

What's the lure that the old games have that I can't catch with the new ones? One (at most two) playthroughs and I'm done mostly. Without mods they're not really anything. Is this a latest trend that aims to make modern games brief and disposible so that customers can keep buying new hypes?

The only reason I can put up with modern RPG's is that I keep finding myself searching for the things that I enjoyed when I first played RPG games when I was little. Something like looking for the first person you loved in every new partner you have afterwards. Isn't technology improving? Can't games support more variables now with new processors and memory technologies? Why not just make... -better- games?

I'll reference my post from a while ago in Gaming Pet Peeves and make the claim that "more gameplay" doesn't immediately equal "better gameplay".

Sure Daggerfall has infinite dungeons and random generation and so much stuff to do and you can buy a house and look at all these skills. It's still cryptic, archaic, punishing, glitchy, and clumsy. What does it matter that there's a ton of language skills if they're totally vestigial and useless? What does it matter that there's (four-digit-number) of dungeons and towns in Daggerfall if I won't visit most of them and they're mostly identical anyways?

What does it matter that Diablo 2 has an infinite number of randomly-generated weapons if they're all crap and 90% won't apply to my build? What does it matter if Wind Waker lets you trade jelly for potions, if that's utterly useless busywork and I never did it? What does it matter if Doom 3 has audiologs if the story is shit and I don't care?

Meaningless content is bad content. Adding more things to a game just for the sake of having more things is not good. Look at all the really, really bad 2D-to-3D jumps (Mega Man X7 is an example); did adding more to those games make them better?

And that's just if the content is meaningless. If the meaningless content is required, to beat the story or for some other reason, then it's not just cruft; it's busywork. And that's bad too.

[milo christiansen]

I don't know what these guys are on about, I'm 33 and I still enjoy every game I own, granted my tastes are pretty specific (RPGs, RTS, a very few FPS, and some really kickin' space games).  I don't think games have gone down in quality per se, but I do think that it has become harder to find ones that are really fun and involving.  After all, the market has always been glutted with cash-grabs like Madden, CoD, AssCred, the marketing is just much more omnipresent, so it becomes harder to filter.

Oh, I still enjoy all my games, just not as much as when they were new. Don't you get tired of a game after a while? That's why you own more than one right?

[NullForceOmega]

Actually, once I pick one up I don't set it down until either it is finished or I am satisfied.  But again, I'm really picky about my games, there have been a few duds, but generally I get thousands of hours out of the games I buy.

[chaoticag]

Well, Daggerfall had a genuinely decent game core to it honestly. It lacked a lot of polish that you would not find in games that regularly, but it can be part of the charm. I think it's part of the way the game can be just fun, and another part of it is realizing the kind of ambition behind it all.

Obviously, it does have some glaring flaws, partly to do with the mating octopi method of stitching maps together, partly with how fast you can pretty much tip the balance of the game into your favor, sometimes without even trying.

... but such things can be novel experiences still to be honest, so can be worth something.

[Tawa]

Well, Daggerfall had a genuinely decent game core to it honestly. It lacked a lot of polish that you would not find in games that regularly, but it can be part of the charm. I think it's part of the way the game can be just fun, and another part of it is realizing the kind of ambition behind it all.

Obviously, it does have some glaring flaws, partly to do with the mating octopi method of stitching maps together, partly with how fast you can pretty much tip the balance of the game into your favor, sometimes without even trying.

... but such things can be novel experiences still to be honest, so can be worth something.

Definitely. Yeah, it was kind of buggy (it's exaggerated a lot, honestly; if you patch it up to 2.13 you more or less have to try to find the really weird and gamebreaking bugs, save for Void clipping and such,) but it had a lot of "heart" to it, so to speak; you can really see that the developers weren't looking for cash and decided that computer role-playing games were the best route, they wanted to make a really cool RPG and were confident that it would sell. Kind of like Dwarf Fortress, to be honest, minus the "it would sell" part. (DaggerFall? Dwarf Fortress? COINCIDENCE?)

The random generation leads to a lot of things you'll never see, yeah, but I think that's part of the charm. Let's be honest: when somebody posts on a message board or something about this bizarre and fun dungeon they found, did you ever find that dungeon on your own? Even though all the stuff in the game is already packed onto the disk, everybody's experience is different.

As an aside, I actually kind of like the horrific dungeons; although their presence is often rather strange (why the hell did, uh, "Yeomhart" build a giant maze full of demons and dead people underneath a dirt mound, again?), there's something about their complexity and absurdity that adds to the experience. It feels more like what older sword-and-sorcery considered a "dungeon", a labyrinthine hellhole full of powerful monsters and valuable loot, than the piddly little wine cellars full of enemies who stand no chance of killing you and age-appropriate amounts of treasure that Final Fantasy and Zelda call "dungeons".

This is kind of a tangent though. Daggerfall thread? I mean we already have a Skyrim thread but that's a Skyrim thread not a Daggerfall thread.

[Itnetlolor]

What's the lure that the old games have that I can't catch with the new ones? One (at most two) playthroughs and I'm done mostly. Without mods they're not really anything. Is this a latest trend that aims to make modern games brief and disposible so that customers can keep buying new hypes?

The only reason I can put up with modern RPG's is that I keep finding myself searching for the things that I enjoyed when I first played RPG games when I was little. Something like looking for the first person you loved in every new partner you have afterwards. Isn't technology improving? Can't games support more variables now with new processors and memory technologies? Why not just make... -better- games?

I'll reference my post from a while ago in Gaming Pet Peeves and make the claim that "more gameplay" doesn't immediately equal "better gameplay".

Sure Daggerfall has infinite dungeons and random generation and so much stuff to do and you can buy a house and look at all these skills. It's still cryptic, archaic, punishing, glitchy, and clumsy. What does it matter that there's a ton of language skills if they're totally vestigial and useless? What does it matter that there's (four-digit-number) of dungeons and towns in Daggerfall if I won't visit most of them and they're mostly identical anyways?

What does it matter that Diablo 2 has an infinite number of randomly-generated weapons if they're all crap and 90% won't apply to my build? What does it matter if Wind Waker lets you trade jelly for potions, if that's utterly useless busywork and I never did it? What does it matter if Doom 3 has audiologs if the story is shit and I don't care?

Meaningless content is bad content. Adding more things to a game just for the sake of having more things is not good. Look at all the really, really bad 2D-to-3D jumps (Mega Man X7 is an example); did adding more to those games make them better?

And that's just if the content is meaningless. If the meaningless content is required, to beat the story or for some other reason, then it's not just cruft; it's busywork. And that's bad too.

Only other argument I can find is whether you play for the story, or for the gameplay. Chrono Trigger made an interesting case of this, and oddly even made some cutscenes or NPC mentions make more sense (Re-translation mod could have also been better translated) in more recent playthroughs.

I mean, yeah, I spent a fair share of my time grinding through Magus's Castle to farm XP and money (Mostly free Mid-Ethers ), but after remembering what Ozzie said about hundreds of monsters throughout the castle, and even the animated cutscenes (opening movie) showing one hell of a battle going on in the castle, even NPCs mention how you wiped out their entire army (and not just because of cutscene powers post-boss fight) it makes a bit more sense. From a gameplay perspective, you'd be feeling "Well, duh, it's because I'm awesome.", but from the story perspective (with the gameplay taken into account (grinding through the ranks)), it was a chore, but nice to see what kind of impact that has.

I dunno, some are made for fun, others are made to tell a story, others are made just to wander through for no good reason. I dunno.

[wereboar]

Well, Daggerfall is just a better game than Skyrim even though it does have lots of glitches and controls are somewhat awkward. And not because it's old and nostalgic. I mean ES: Arena was in my opinion not a good game and it's even older.
I played both and content-wise Daggerfall is just way superior.

[GiglameshDespair]

I'm played both; I did not enjoy daggerfall.
Personally, I thought it was rather poor.

[Itnetlolor]

A thought kinda occurred to me. Playing through Final Fantasy X, and even X-2 again, those damn mini-games kinda make me want to play those games again (and for some of the lore as well again, why not.). I keep returning to play through some of the game, mainly for those games in the game, and meta-gaming them a bit while at it (provided the task isn't too tedious. Some coins will be found in that damned desert.). Hell, even the bestiaries are fun to look through at times. Sometimes pointless crap is part of why we return at times, not always the same story or gameplay for the n-th time, sometimes just to check out stuff or play through mini-games like an arcade in-universe (Naturally cheating or cheat engines should help as an anti-frustration feature if only going for that). Then again, I tend to wander mostly for the scenery at times. I dunno, I find myself often playing some games for reasons like that.

What came to mind was Blitzball from X, and Sphere Break from X-2. At least in the case of Blitzball from X, you got a decent reward for beating the game (not too easy, until you find some good players, and level up a bit). A character's Infinity+1 weapon. But like all other Infinity+1s, they're crap, until activated by a fetch quest (or treasure hunt, or even a masochistic endurance challenge through Thunder Plains) to obtain it. Basically, I guess, if you're the achievement hunter type, you earn these Infinity+1 weapons.

EDIT:
Hell, even X-2 had a pretty awesome (yet totally BS) puzzle in it somewhere (which I forget may also contribute to getting 100% in the game as well). Sure, you either had to fight countless monsters and such (of varying (usually BS) difficulty), or you can always use a moogle charm (or their variant of it), and do the puzzle minus the monster random encounter BS. Oh, and the BS doesn't end there, BTW; it gets worse. Spoiler Alert: All those monsters you fight in this puzzle location, also contribute as a factor, one way or another (mostly numeric; do you have a guide of some sort to help?). My best advice is to keep any and all monster-related variables 0, unless you're up for a real challenge. Pales in comparison to the Via Infinitio, however. After level 80-90 and beyond, it's nothing but BS, and the end boss at 100, ‼Have fun‼. Getting your characters to level 99 is the main reason for this. Even at Level 99, it's still BS, and you'll still have heaps of ‼Fun‼ fighting them.