I don't think modern gaming ever sucked to be honest. It's just that the people who complain tend to have the loudest collective voice.
I think the writer of the article confuses DLC with expansions. DLC is either stuff that was ripped out of the original game and cynically sold back to us, or worthless crap that shouldn't have a pricetag but does. Expansions are (or should be) worthwhile and lengthy extensions to a game, and have been around for years, long before we all had broadband.
It's disappointing that games aren't very challenging anymore compared to what they used to be because if people get angry they ditch the game = less money.
and i'll also steal your Delorean. apart from point about DLC, i agree about him mostly. the reason people bitch and moan so much is that there are now much much less good games. eg, good game ratio back in dawn of gaming was like 50% whereas now down to 10%. But PC does help with that ratio.
Just Nostalgia for most people when you look back you'll remember the good games you played but you're memory is going to filter out the average and mediocre ones.
i thought DLC was simply extra content that one downloads over their internet connection whereas expansion tends to refer to content typically sold at retail. The two terms more or less mean the same thing. DLC is just more reflective of our times.
6 Reasons journalists tell you what you already know. This is just like "PC gaming isn't dying!" under a different name.
Great contribution, bro. This is absolutely the case. Previous gaming generations did contain gems like Soul Reaver, Deus Ex and System Shock 2, but for the most part they also contained a metric ton of awful, awful games. We tend to forget that when we look back, because awful games don't usually get remembered. Another thing we take for granted is good voice acting. Try playing any game from the early 00's, when voice acting was in its infancy, and it was absolutely terrible. I've been replaying Unreal II again recently, and let me tell you, it makes me appreciate Dead Space's voice acting, despite how much people complained that Dead Space's story and acting were 'mediocre'.
Lol well I could critique it but it was just so so bad. It also barely makes any sense and it's all over the place. He starts by saying we complain about load times? I have been gaming longer than that guy has been alive and I have never complained about load times. And load times today are nothing like they used to be. And if you have a ssd, they hardly even exist in most games. So he is writing an article about how people think modern gaming sucks and yet right from the start he has demonstrated that he doesn't even know why people say that. Then he tries to make a dodgy link between graphics and story, but his whole point is that the 'better' graphics we have today allows them to use objects and graffiti etc.. in the game world to tell the story, like that is some how something new and special and hasn't been done before, say... by the likes of System Shock 18 years ago, and other games even before that. Then he goes on to the predictable but annoying ZOMG WE HAZ BIG SANDBOX WORLDZ NOW! and I realised that this guy never even played older games. He never played Elite and realised it was an entire universe that they managed to fit on a floppy disk etc. He is trying to tell us that modern gaming is at least as good as older games, but he has no frame of reference. And if that wasn't bad enough, he then goes on to try to make a case for writing in games being better today than it ever was before, and he uses GTA4 as his example... Not even Bioshock or Psychonauts or Twilight Princess or something, but GTA4... Had he actually seen any of the hundreds of Adventure Games we had in pre-modern gaming, he might not be so quick to put it down. I gave up at that point. But his second page looks even more clueless.
I agree about his graphical detail bit being unconvincing (though I agree with his claim, for different reasons than the ones he gives). As for sandbox games, I think his point was not that there are open explorable worlds but that with modern technology and game engines, these sandbox worlds are now of sufficient complexity that they generate their own unique and interesting events and moments without any dev input. The more complex games get, the more individual and personal the player's experience can be. Elder Scrolls games, for example, have this in spades, especially Morrowind. No two peoples' anecdotes about that game are the same, and everyone has their own personal little moments that defined the game. The same goes for massively multiplayer things like Battlefield, albeit very different types of personal moments. Retro games struggled to offer anything like that because their mechanics, set pieces and environments simply weren't complex enough. As for writing, I don't deny that some old games had good writing, but the vast majority - the ones I've seen on Atari, Master System II and Megadrive, since those were my consoles - were hopelessly simplistic affairs devoid of writing. Adventure games were a tiny niche in a gaming world dominated by action-oriented games. I think his point might be expanded to this: good writing is no longer a niche genre in itself. Adventure game quality writing is now entering the mainstream titles, coexisting with action and good gameplay, which certainly is an improvement. I mean, retro adventure games had intermittently good writing and pacing, but they didn't have gameplay beyond crude, boring item puzzles and exploration, and the graphics were so atrocious that getting immersed was an active effort. Bioshock and GTA4 have amazing gameplay, great graphics and good writing; none are entirely novel or that important individually, but to get them bundled together is a step forward.
Red Dead Redemption. Brilliant writing, excellent voice acting and a hugely atmospheric world that actually felt alive. I would say it's one of this generations landmark achievements and would rate it higher than GTA4. My personal take would be all that we have now has always existed in the minds of the developers but technology now allows them to implement it.
I didn't think I'd have to point it out, but seems like a lot of people missed the 'jovial' nature of the article - one of the main reasons I personally enjoyed it. The site isn't a 'gaming' website, and it wasn't meant to be written as an in depth look at the development of the games industry, but more a tongue in cheek anti rant at all the people that grumble about the state of modern games.
It's just that I am one of those people The technology is miles ahead of how it was in the past, but not everything else is positive. In the good ole days, the games were great to play - even although the technology sucked. It was all about clever design and gameplay and the primitive technology didn't stop us from getting amazing games. Nowdays it seems like a lot of games rely purely on the technology to sell themselves and it's all style over substance, and graphics over gameplay. There is also the issue that games were generally brutally hard back then too, and it's really hard to find anything that challenging these days. And not only were pre-modern games often great, but the market itself was pretty great too. Like when he talks about indie games getting a chance to shine now, that might be a bit better today than it was 10 years ago, but before that, almost everything we played was indie scale anyway. Some of the biggest selling games early on, were made by small teams or even one person. It's only gaming in modern times which has become about $100million budgets and huge teams which squeeze out the little guy. The DLC issue is significant too. I am glad people are wary of it, because otherwise they would micro-transaction us all to death. It's only because people, thankfully, have not given these companies too much leeway that we aren't going through the nightmare scenario that he predicted. The concept is not bad, it's just that they can disguise things and the average buyer can't tell whether they are getting good value or not. For example you might be able to buy an addon for £2.50, but in the past you would have bought a full on expansion pack instead. It would have been 10 times the cost but it would have given you 20 times the content. Basically what I'm saying, not ALL modern gaming sucks, but a lot of it compares badly to old gaming, and the old timers who say it have very valid points. Sometimes anyway.
Not much different to gaming in the past then (bar the difficulty aspect which i will agree on) There've always been games that try to sell purely on hype and graphics
I thought you might be. Also, Expansion packs being worthwhile? Total Annihilation Core Contingency was worth £15, Battle Tactics certainly was not. Again, some were great, while there were lots of others definitely were not, just like today (as mentioned, Bad Companies 2s Vietnam expansion was amazing, as was Supreme Commanders 'Forged Alliance' and SC2s 'Infinite War'.) You may have spent a thousand hours gazing at Elites polygons, but that's because back when you were that age it was revolutionary and you were younger and more susceptible to being wonderstruck. If I gave you the same game now, with prettier graphics, but the same core gameplay (think Eve, but with less grinding), you'd likely enjoy yourself, but I'd be surprised if it captured the same level of magic that it did back in the day. However, give younger you the same game, and if he had to choose between that and original polygon styled Elite I'd bet he'd choose the one with the draw dropping vistas of beautifully rendered galaxies. You say that nowadays games choose graphics over gameplay, but the thing is, back in the day, crap games had crap graphics, now crap games have good graphics, but they are still crap games underneath, just like they used to be. The really good games of today have both, which you can't say about the games of yesteryear. Personally I'd rather live in the world filled with Indie games like Trine, Limbo and Frozen Synapse, as well as the £100m dollar games like Battlefield 3, Skyrim, GTAIV and Diablo 3 (not to mention some amazing console exclusives). I've been playing games for about 17 years now, and as far as I'm concerned, this is most definitely gamings 'golden age' (though someone really needs to make Freespace 3). And then of course there is Multiplayer gaming....
I agree. 30+ years here since the text based games on the BBC B before the wonder of Elite. I can't complain when I find enough games enjoyable that I still have half a dozen or so waiting in their wrapping.
It's hugely subjective anyway. For example, I thought Bioshock (which boiled_elephant holds up as a good example of writing, graphics and gameplay) was total dross that wasn't even half as good as System Shock 2 (or many other games) in the story department, was pretty good on the graphics (but suffered for using the Unreal 3 Engine) but was utterly abysmal for gameplay, which I didn't enjoy at all. While I think the graphics in Deus Ex: Human Revolution are pretty decent, and they've obviously made more effort on the story than, say, iD did for Quake 3... it doesn't hold a candle on the original Deus Ex... or even, to some degree, Invisible War. I like Disgaea... I also like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but I like them for different reasons and don't want the same thing out of each of them. Modern gaming doesn't suck... much like old gaming doesn't suck. It depends what you want out of a game. Although I wish there would be fewer 'me too' clones when it came to games. Something succeeds... and we have to suffer blatant rip-offs, rehashes and half-brained sequels for the next n years. And yet someone tries something novel and it sinks like a stone. This.
