The article kinda dances around this point, but I think the largest reason "old games never die" is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuff that didn't inspire anyone to preserve it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#:~:text=The%20Lin...
What's different is that new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy. The game won't function unless it can phone home, stream assets etc. from their server, and they can and do plan to shut that server off at some point, forcing you to move on and buy new games.
Now what's really troubling is you can conceivably employ this approach with any form of digital entertainment. I think Netflix and the streaming industry in general aspires to convert movies into a planned obsolescence business model; in the beginning Netflix's selling point was that they had an archive of every DVD ever made, but now increasingly they're conditioning us to expect that stuff's going to leave the platform sooner or later. Why? If all we watch are the classics there's not much point to keep subscribing to a streaming service, just download/buy the classics, and then you're done. They are having trouble with this however because the movies they put out just aren't as good as the older stuff; I've read the data indicates that people are mostly watching 90s stuff on Netflix, so they can't purge it from the platform just yet. But they will try.
The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel. They switched to a planned obsolescence model one day and we just went along with it.
If you care about this, vote with your wallet. If you don't like a game's phone-home or planned-obsolescence "features," don't buy it (or wait for a deal and don't pay full price).
I personally buy very few games on Steam, I spend like 5 times as much on GOG.
> If you care about this, vote with your wallet
Much of the gaming population are not following this stuff as closely, and get burned once or twice before they realize what's happening. I think it's good to pressure companies ahead of time, and vote with your wallet when you can.
Much of the gaming population doesn't replay games. Why should I care if Major Game doesn't work any more, I've been playing Major Game 2. I had no intention of playing Major Game 1 again. The fact that their old game doesn't work anymore doesn't "burn" them, and they genuinely might not even notice. As long as they keep the game servers up and running long enough for the vast majority of people to get their enjoyment out of the game, no one feels robbed, and no one stops buying games as a result. The average person is not that savvy of a consumer.
Can I play CoD4 on xbox 360 anymore? Single AND multiplayer? I genuinely don't know the answer to that because I haven't tried within the past decade(+). Should I be able to? Absolutely yes. But I have a sneaking suspicion all the multiplayer servers are shut down.
> If you care about this, vote with your wallet.
While I'm not going to say you can't vote with your wallet.
You can also just vote with a vote ... Companies group up together all the time to create trade unions to advance legislation in their favor. There's nothing wrong with individuals grouping together for a non-commercial interest.
Frankly, there is not much difference - gog is already part of the problem.
With games, it's even worse because once the servers are gone, the whole thing can literally stop functioning. At least with movies you can still rip a Blu-ray or buy a DVD. And it's not just about making money anymore, it's about shaping consumer habits so we accept losing access as the default.
Planned obsolescence doesn't account for games like Concord
Live service shooters usually have a very short lifespan unless they can displace Overwatch, Valorent, Fortnite, or Destiny
Even Halo (Infinite) couldn't manage it
Stop buying this kind of game if you are expecting game preservation from one of the worst studios running.
Concord was dead even at the conceptual stage. The problem is these big AAA studios are always chasing the hottest new thing, never innovating for themselves.
It's the same problem with movies. They're so unbelievably expensive that nobody will dare pay for something that isn't already proven. But if you do something that's proven, there's a good chance it's just gonna come up second best. Worst case scenario, it comes out as uninspired slop, destined for the bargain bin, like Concord.
The article is not radiating original narrative and some mistakes can be made, but it is missing very big issue that modern game developers are able to solve with live games. All the old games became popular because they were heavily pirated. Sometimes that was the only reason. Up till 2010s I only played pirated games - even when they were on steam. The only reason why some of those games are in my steam/gog account now is because I had played those games as pirated copies. Not all of them were good games, though, but at least I can launch them and try again.
[dead]
Those games are the paper plates of the industry. Disposable crap not meant to last. They're rarely good in the first place because that same mindset leads to bad decisions for gameplay too.
RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Terraria, Minecraft are new(ish) games that have already lasted and will last longer.
>The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel
A barrel entirely of your own creation. Just don't buy their games and done. I've never subscribed to a game in my life and never gave a shit about the difference. Anyone at all can do this. You describe these games as if they were some vital service like email or cloud storage (and even those have solutions against companies that become abusive).
Final Fantasy was on release #11 by the time Steam was initially released in 2003.
> new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy
It's not this. It's simply that the level of quality and features and competition in modern games is so insanely high that developer time is devoted to other things and custom servers and modding is relatively niche and doesn't move the quality needle enough.
Time is limited and focusing on custom servers means less time spent elsewhere.
Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
Outside of computer games, there are plenty of games that have died off because the communities to play them no longer exist or the rules have been forgotten.
Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
Counterstrike 1, released 25 years ago, averages around 10,000 players 'online' at any given moment, pretty much exclusively for team based multiplayer [1]. That makes it more popular (by active player count) than e.g. Hogwart's Legacy. Most modern games not only really fail to bring anything new to the table, but often feel like the overall gameplay is general decline. For instance the gunplay in Counterstrike still "feels" much better than many modern shooters.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/10
You are proving GP and OP’s point. CS 1.6 was an exceptionally popular game in the GoldSrc days and that is why it survived and was chosen by you as an example. That is an exception not the norm. Plenty of FPSs from the same generation have been forgotten. How many people out there are still playing Day of Defeat? Or Counter Strike Condition Zero? Or any of the old Delta Force games? Or Daikatana (except for the lol factor?)
I don’t even think you can easily find people to play on pre-1.6 versions of CS these days, even though when I played CS on LAN I had friends who believed CS 1.5 to be the better version and insisted that we play that instead.
I think the Starseige Tribes community is still active. They have DOZENS of people, dozens!!
Not to hate on those who love old games but yeah, it's a much smaller community.
It's not all bad, smaller communities mean people know each other better. And there is no eSports money hanging over anyone, it's just a community meeting up to have fun once a week.
---------
The only reason Starseige Tribes is alive today is because of a large amount of hacking effort to port the game up from Windows 2000 to modern Windows. As well as hack the server software to run you own servers.
Other live games truly die. No one will ever play Concord ever again. Tribes loses support, but hackers can fix bugs and forcibly patch to modern systems
If there is a will, there is a way.
There were also lots of exceptionally popular games that didn't survive simply because subsequent games were simply better. One example there would be Street Fighter 2. So the difference is that I'm arguing that games have staying power based on their overall quality, not their quality for a given era. When they're reasonably objectively surpassed, they tend to die off. If they doesn't happen, they tend to stick around.
This is true in modern times as well. Skyrim, for instance, remains a best-in-genre game that (like Counter-Strike) even its own creators are failing to surpass. And if it's not surpassed in the future then people will probably still be playing it in 20 years. By contrast if it turns out that the next Elder Scrolls game manages to take the same formula and just make it better, then Skyrim will probably gradually die off.
Bit weird to compare a singleplayer game with little replayability to the genre defining multiplayer game of its time and try drawing conclusions from that.
Doom was the genre defining multiplayer game, and it released in 1993. And there were a ton of multiplayer shooters released in the 7 years interim. The only really distinct thing about Counter-Strike, besides its quality, is that it came to Steam from the very beginning. But the game had already become a classic before 1.6 launched on Steam and the idea of playing on/through Steam at the time was quite divisive.
Counterstrike was the defining game for a subgenre of tactical shooters, of which you can see that Valorant is a member.
CS was 3D shooter and not a DOS game - quite important distinction as it gave better(and nonpixelating) graphic. Pre 1.6 CS had many modifications already - frankly I stopped playing CS before 1.6 and had my fun.
Descent and Quake were both 3D shooters and DOS games, and Halo came out a year earlier with "better graphics"; CS was neither the first 3D shooter nor the first Windows game in its genre. Also, the first Counter-Strike was not a completely new game -- it used a modified Half-Life engine (which itself was built on the Quake engine).
Sure, CS was arguably the most popular and long-lasting of the FPS of that era -- but let's not pretend that that was because of technical superiority, it won out because of gameplay.
"of its time"
The main difference with the newer version is better graphics, but that comes at the expense of minimum specs, loading time, etc.
Isn't Hogwarts Legacy famously just not a good game?
On top of which, the author of the IP has increasingly aggravated a significant segment of their fan base.
It was extremely popular - for about as long as it took to beat the story. It has no multiplayer.
It’s entirely unfair to expect it to continue to pull numbers similar to a dedicated multiplayer game.
Very few single-player story games have much replayability, though they do exist (usually rogue likes or heavily moddable).
Can this be played somehow in the browser today? Without install etc.
There's quite a few ports to the browser running around, though most may get you in trouble with the game's owner.
Yet if you gather up a group of friends you can still play these old obscure multiplayer games because it didn't rely purely on the master servers being maintained forever.
No matter how many people I gather we can never experience any part of Concord.
Agreed, I can speak to any number of second or third tier multiplayer games in the 90s/2000s that had an initially active multiplayer community that slowly dwindled away.
Nox, published by Westwood for example.
One of my favorite time killers [0] on airplanes is no longer in the Apple App Store. It's still in Steam, but it looks like the developer let his website expire, and Apple culled his app.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hexcells-infinite/id1096540165
Like for example you can play every GameCube game that was ever released for the system. There's readily available archives you can download and well-known console mods available to play them. This kind of thing just isn't possible for newer games.
Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.
Older DRM is more commonly cracked because there’s more time to crack it. Though the arms race has grown way more sophisticated from the supply side
You can't play Phantasy Star Online for the GameCube anymore.
Completely wrong.
You can play it offline one player or split-screen with just the disc. You can play it online with the disc and a minimal amount of extra work. https://sylverant.net for instance is a PSO server that supports Dreamcast v1, v2, GameCube v3, Xbox v3, and PSO Episode 3 on GameCube.
https://github.com/fuzziqersoftware/newserv
There are private servers that you can connect to, no? I remember reading about it not that long ago!
You can, and you can even play it with Dreamcast and PC players: https://sylverant.net/
Even all the offline content?
That's not actually true.
There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.
For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.
So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.
Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
> make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for
So then they're playable just fine. You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
That's the crux of the matter, for older games there are many ways to keep playing them potentially forever. But for many newer games this might never be possible, especially for the multiplayer-only or always-online games, on top of the DRM. Maybe some regulation will push developers or publishers to release the components needed to make the game work (remove DRM, release the online components, etc.) once it's no longer offered for sale.
> You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
Only insofar as those PCs and consoles are still circulating, or the platform was big enough to have good emulators (and the distribution format was standard enough that you can still rip the ROM, and the emulators themselves can still be run on modern systems), or the game was big enough for someone to have been willing to write patches for it. If you don't have the technical knowledge and skills to work around these (or you don't have the time), then the game might as well be dead for you.
And of course, it can't have died enough at any point for everyone with a copy to have lost it, which is the fate of a lot of the old text adventures.
This is a good point. I'm still looking for a good way for my kids to play mindrover on windows 11, and I haven't found one.
Very old games are a problem for windows and have a significant higher chance of running out of the box with proton on linux
can you provide an example?
Every time people tried to make 20-30 year old games work I quickly test them on my Linux machines if they are available on the internet archive and so far they have worked out of the box every time. The last one was a German point and click game from ~28 years ago.
Adding them to steam and forcing proton is also simpler than something like bottles for me.
People try to run them on W10/11 and they won't start, the windows compatibility layer hardly gets them up and running.
The 2008 Prince of Persia is easier to get running through Proton than on Windows. For the Windows Steam release you have to disable the Steam overlay and some other tweaks to get it working
I think he means that trying to run some early win16 games will fail on windows, but run fine in emulation/wine, etc.
But of course, you can run dosbox on windows, too.
It's not like they were designed like that on purpose. It was a limitation of the technology of the time. If they could've made as many live service games back then, they would have.
This comparison is also unfair for a couple more reasons:
- It ignores the fact that when a game was released on CD back then... that's it. No updates. No patches. Nothing. You break it, that's it. Game ending bug that corrupts your save? TOO BAD. Oh, scratched your CD? TOO BAD. Maybe try one of these folk remedies with tooth paste or some such.
- And the flipside of that: that paying for live service games, you get consistent updates, new content, new cosmetics, etc, etc. You also get features like cloud saves. You don't have to worry about managing 100s of CDs or worry about a scratch on them or anything like that.
Is there a problem these days with online-only games being shut down? Yes, absolutely, and I hope the industry moves away from that.
Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
> It's not like they were designed like that on purpose. It was a limitation of the technology of the time. If they could've made as many live service games back then, they would have.
Not every game released today is a live service game and I'm pretty sure people would have had the same objections back in those days.
> Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
People advocating for video game preservation aren't advocating we all go back to CD-ROM. Video game preservation can be done digitally perfectly fine.
What people are advocating for is that games are designed to remain at least functional once the company doesn't deem it financially viable to provide services for that game anymore.
A game doesn't need to be live service to support cloud saves, though. There are completely DRM free games on Steam that support cloud saves. And PC games that released on discs back in the day still could get updates.
Edit: I also almost forgot, even for users without internet patches for popular games were often distributed on demo discs included with magazines like PC Gamer.
> Oh, scratched your CD? TOO BAD. Maybe try one of these folk remedies with tooth paste or some such.
Not folk remedies, you can take it to a game store and most have the equipment to resurface the CD.
Not all of that is true. Who played with the un-updated CD version?
All of us who never hooked the dreamcast up to the internet.
Dreamcast didn't have game patches over the internet. That wasn't a thing until the Xbox. You could, in rare occasions, download additional content (e.g. PSO had downloadable quests) but the vast majority of games were standalone.
We downloaded patches or get them as an extra with PC gaming magazines just fine. On CD's... everyone backed up them at ISO's and mounted them with dedicated software.
beware of using old cd though, the older it is the higher risk it'll shatter and damage the unit.
The unit being a $20 CD-ROM drive? Losing the disk would be a bigger problem than damaging the drive.
If you want to ply on original hardware, which people that use original cds typically do, the drive might be valuable or hard to replace depending on the system.
At that point I think the game is available as ROM file or at least the owner of rare one should make such.
MSX/C64 era: games are smaller than your average png icon
SNES era: games are smaller than a single photo or most bundled javascripts / cas
PS1 era: games are smaller than a random electron app
PS2 era: games are smaller than your average update these days
One of the things about the Angry Videogame Nerd that I enjoyed when he first came out (yeah, I'm that old) is that back in the mid-2000s, there was a lot of NES nostalgia, but it tended to focus on big-ticket games that were considered "good" -- Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. -- and shared experiences like blowing on cartridges. The AVGN showcased that there were also a lot of forgotten not-so-great games from that era -- games like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde -- which are worth examining today from a standpoint of why they were not so great. Was it developer inexperience? Were they cutting corners? What were they THINKING?!
This had the added effect of reviving interest in these old games. Today you can still play Hydlide or Silver Surfer on a real or emulated NES just as it was back then, and a NES library could hardly be considered complete without such games.
The real issue is that gaming today is a service, and that has implications for the longevity of games. City of Heroes and The Matrix Online are never, ever coming back -- not as they were, anyway, notwithstanding doujin efforts of dubious legality (see Blizzard et al. v. Jung et al. and the legal situation around bnetd) to reimplement the server backend for these games so they can continue to be played on unofficial worlds.
Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?
I actually once downloaded a copy of "Big Rigs" after watching AVGN's video. It still baffles my mind how this game could ever make it to the shelves. It is the most broken thing I've ever played. The infinite speed reverse gear is quite an experience, though.
This is my favorite review comment on that game: https://www.gamespot.com/big-rigs-over-the-road-racing/user-... e.g.
> This comment on society is driven home (or in fact, not driven at all) even further by the computer AI. It doesn't even leave the starting gate. Much like the dreams and aspirations we harbour as youth, reving our engines on a starting line where the crack of the pistol never comes. Meanwhile, those of privledge cruise to easy victory, unconcerned over such mundane things as rent or grocery bills or collideable landscapes.
I love how if you accelerate backwards long enough (in the BLJ of auto racing games), you will eventually be at a point in the coordinate system where the distance between adjacent floating-point numbers is large enough to be visible, leading to your truck's geometry beginning to "shimmer", and then warp and change shape in bizarre twisted ways.
Truly only a masterpiece could gift us with an experience like that.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147860/UFO_50/
Clearly y'all never played Clover 3D, which gave Mario 64 for run for it's money. I mean, Clover has at least one extra finger!
Who isn't down for a round of Cheetahmen?
As someone who these days enjoys watching other people play bad games, or play good games wrong (speed running, or just making comedic content), I'm definitely not down to play that horrific garbage. I might go rewatch AVGN do it though.
City of Heroes is actually back. Several of the community servers have a license from the publisher.
I would put focus in the survivorship bias too. He is looking and the survivors, and trying to figure out why they survived, and not the ones that didn't make it and could had some the same strengths, but still are not around anymore (and not even counted as "old games").
You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?
I was so looking for this type of comment.
There is no survivor bias, you [insert insult]!
So many of those games were really bad even at their time. BUT YOU CAN STILL PLAY THEM. I've tossed many games out of my catalogue and for some I wished they vanish from existence and they all have survived!
While article is recycling narrative - it has a reason, but your recycled opinion is not only wrong but has no reason other than lowkey nitpick article.
Oh, but there are "surviving" games, as they are still popular, and remixed, and emulated, and things like that. You have a Doom, a Tetris, Pacmans, Marios, even you have new editions of the series of the Monkey Island. That is one way to see surviving, still present, played, and with enough exposure in the media to still have a decent enough player base. And then you have curiosity items that may be in big bags of old games that are tried, discarded, but they are essentially forgotten.
That is one way to die, like a random book written 100 years ago that never became a classic and even if you can find a copy, it doesn't count as existing anymore for the current culture. A game that had enough players and cultural mindset, but that because the maker, the servers it used to run or whatever don't let them be played anymore can spawn copies and lookalikes with different names and get some player base, it is a different kind of death.
I think you missed the point. This isn't about which games we culturally care to keep. It's that even beloved games from 10 years ago are effectively gone to use because there's no way to break the DRM or resurrect live services to phone home to.
You're talking survivorship bias [1]. That and general nostalgia are common explanations for this but I find the explanations unsatisfying.
Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s? I mean there are games that are beloved years later (I'm looking at you, Zelda: Breth of the Wild) but the gaming landscape is fundamentally changed. We now have free to play games that have longevity (eg League of Legends, even Fortnite) and we also have "annual" games eg FIFA, Call of Duty, Madden.
But also micro-transactions has poisoned the well here. The psychology and mechanics of addiction work in the short-term but I don't think you'll see any longevity or nostalgia from playing these games in the future.
I'm reminded of an article I read some time ago about music where the question was (paraphrased) "Why don't we produce hits anymore?" Yes, there's popular music. There are extraordinarily successful artists. But nothing seems to have the staying power, cultural significance and instant recognition of music from the 1950s thorugh the 1980s.
Suffice it to say, I think there's something special about older games and the culprit is really the profit motive. Games were games, not just addiction-inducing vending machines for skins.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Games from the 2010s I still see people playing: FTL, Celeste, Undertale, Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Stardew Valley… there are definitely survivors from the 2010s. Your list may be different from mine.
Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
People are still playing EverQuest which is from 1999 and is still actively developed with new expansion packs coming out once a year. They have made a lot of changes to make it more friendly to solo players and small groups, and a lot of UI improvements, and you can play free with some limitations.
Here's a comment [1] with more details on what EQ is like nowadays.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588
Eve Online is over 20 years old, and still releases new game content, and has their annual FanFest get-together in Iceland.
https://eveonline.com
RPGs and MMORPGs are interesting genres for different reasons.
The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
A lot of RPGs are now real-time games. A lot of people, myself included, prefer turn-based RPGs because they're more "chill". But that genre largely doesn't exist now. This is a problem in strategy games too where Civilization is really the last big holdout for turn-based strategy.
And personally I hate the Bethesda character system.
MMORPGs have had 2/3 standout successors: Everquest then World of Warcraft (and arguably FF14). The gaming landscape is littered with the corpses of EQ (then WoW) challengers. It's interesting to ponder why but also the challenges of this genre.
MMOs are seemingly built on a "vertical" progression model. That is, newe content occurs above existing content to give something new to existing players. But this creates a greater barrier to entry to new players. This means the game makes earlier content faster/easier but that makes previous content meaningless.
EQ recycled old content with TLP (Time Locked Progression) servers to relive previous expansions. WoW has followed suit in recent years, first with the release of Classic WoW (which was massively successful) and more recently with LTMs (limited time modes) of older expansions (eg Mists of Pandaria Remix).
But there are huge challenges to palying multiplayer persistent games and this has been true for the entire life of the genre. Trying to find people to play with that want to do the same thing is a challenge. EQ and WoW focus on raids, which involve getting 10-72 people to be at the same time and place to tackle content. That's a logistical nightmare and an anethema to casual play. So play has skewed more to the solo or casual player, which creates its own problems.
The big mistake challengers made is focusing on user-generated content, namely PvP (player-vs-player) content. Studios like this because, done right, it's an endless stream of content and it's realtively cheap content too. The problem? 90% of MMO players have zero interest in PvP and this is borne out by the abject failure of PvP MMOs as well as PvP partcipation in WoW.
I played EQ (starting in 1999) and, much later, WoW. I really don't know how you rescue this genre but I think you need to find a balance between persistence and seasonal content. That is, persistent game state becomes an albatross around your neck. But if you invalidate someone's effort with new seasonal items, it disincentivizes people grinding out that gear and content.
>The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc.
That's just not true, I think you're just not keeping up with new releases if that's your real opinion. CRPGs aren't as big as they used to be in the 1990s, but we've had plenty of those recently too, in fact we're in sort of a small renaissance of the genre considering all the new ones coming out.
Off the top of my head there's 40K Rogue Trader, Skald Against the Black Priory, Colony Ship, Solasta, the Pathfinder games, Disco Elysium, The Thaumaturge, Wasteland 3 and they all came out in the last 5 years or so. If you go a little back you have the Pillars of Eternity games, Tyranny, Encased, the Divinity games, Age of Decadence, Torment: Tides of Numenara...
Recently we even got a remake of the first Wizardry and some of the newer japanese ones ported to PC.
I can't seriously regard Skyrim as RPG - it is simulation of RPG - visually pleasing, but no challenging enough. Too much loot in Bethesda games is really killing RPG vibe for me.
Yes there are some rpg games coming out... and I have played some of them and I can understand why I would also declare that RPG genre has died, because many of them are resurrected corpses of older games and are not bringing fresh ideas of their own. It can leave impressions of those who have never experienced previous era of rpg games. But then again I have no experience of even older era of first rpgs and might have similar opinion about games I enjoyed.
I have library of Wizardry games and I think I snatched that remake as well - I've only played Wizardry 8 and realized that it was different and worth exploring.
Expedition 33 had a huge launch and was a fantastic RPG experience. Far better to my tastes than games like Oblivion or Skyrim.
On the other hand, Overwatch 1 is dead because Blizzard said so.
> Like if this were true, shouldn't we be seeing similar survivors from the 2000s and 2010s?
We absolutely do: GTA SA, Team Fortress 2, Star Wars BF 1&2 (original one, not remaster abomination), private Lineage 2 servers with thousands of players, same for WoW, WarCraft 3, original Dota, LoL with millions player base, Dota 2. The list goes on and on.
I thought WC3 was 1990s but I went an checked: 2002. Weird. I so associate Warcraft (excluding WoW) with the 1990s.
The big one neither of us mentioned from the more "modern" era is Minecraft. It absolutely has staying power, still to this day.
GTA is an interesting one. GTA3, Vice City, GTA:SA and GTA4 were absolutely groundbreaking games, not only for their open world gameplay but also for their wit and satire. Arguably RDR and RDR2 fit here too.
But my hot take is that GTA5 was a terrible game. It lacked all the satire of the earlier games. The writing was terrible. I almost stopped playing the game when I became Trevor. And, unlike every earlier game in the series, I have never gone back to play it after finishing the story mode. GTA5, to me, was just a story to sell online play, which held no interest to me.
Anyway, my argument was there aren't any memorable games from the 2000s and 2010s or that there aren't games from these eras that people still play. It's that there are more from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when you consider there are more games in later years. So when the market was much smaller, any given game seems way more likely to be memorable.
It goes across game systems too: Commodore 64 (and Amiga), SNES, even the Atari 2600, N64, PS1 (and arguably PS2 but that was released in 2000 so it's on the cusp).
Now one might say this is a function of age. The music a person likes is typically what was popular when they were 14 years old. The same is kinda true for video games but anecdotally I see streamers in their 20s who play games from before they were born.
Think too of emergent game play, particularly speedrunning. This is a highly active community and it's all old games.
I don't think it is a generational thing or a lindy effect plain, and simple greed is what is killing modern day games.
Eventually they become a never ending grind loop for battle passes, points, buy more points, cosmetics priced as full fledged titles, loot boxes, etc. etc.
There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing, and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.
It is so uninspiring no easter eggs, no special levels, secrets nothing, login buy a battle pass, and do that recursively every x amount of months.
The idea that there’s nothing to these games just isn’t true. Take Fortnite, the quintessential “modern game” that popularized battle passes.
You don’t need a battle pass to play, in fact all purchasable things are purely cosmetic: they offer no gameplay value. Nobody is playing Fortnite for the cosmetics, they’re playing it because it’s fun! Why would you care about cosmetics in a game you don’t enjoy playing? It makes no sense.
“no depth”: patently false. Fortnite is one of the highest skill ceiling games around.
“no cool mechanics”: there are tons of cool mechanics, both at a gameplay level and meta level, with more being cycled in every season.
“no story”: admittedly the story is a bit opaque, but the community loves the big story events that happen every season.
“no easter eggs or secrets”: Sure there are! Each new season is filled with them, and there are entire wikis dedicated to cataloguing them.
Fortnite‘s dark design was the reason Epic was subject of the largest FTC gaming-related fine in history. $200m+
That wasn’t because of the dark design of Fortnite itself, it was mostly because their shop allowed users (including children) to make purchases with only a single click, without any confirmation, leading to a lot of accidental purchases. Definitely not a good thing, but also not indicative of some fundamental issue with the game’s overall design. They added confirmation and the ability to undo purchases over 5 years ago.
You clearly have a different understanding for meaning of the words and what is meant by them.
Look, there is no depth in Fortnite, just like there is no deepness in minds of kids that are under 10 and playing it.
Same for other points. Fortnite is arcade shooter - no one is expecting from it realistic mechanics, which would also ruin the game. Fortnite is a niche and it was kids game - some of them have grown up and moved on.
Give me an example or definition of what you mean by depth, and we can see if it fulfills it.
The tone of your post makes me think you’ve fallen into the logical trap of believing that because a game is enjoyed by children, that it can’t be also enjoyed by older people as well. See also: Minecraft.
A true sign of maturity is being able to enjoy a game on its actual merits, and not worrying about whether you’re playing a “kids’ game”.
it's well know the hit box for "the defaults" (slang to refer to players with free character designs) are slightly larger.
but yeah, it's by far the least egregious case indeed.
No, this is just plain wrong. The hitbox is the same one on all skins. On payed skin like peely for example, the skin is bigger and will be more visible, but the hitbox stay the same. This is pay to loose if anything.
https://www.esports.net/news/fortnite/do-all-fortnite-skins-...
Do you really consider "esports.net" a source for the internal implementation details of a proprietary video game?
I consider it better than 0 source at all. I also have access to the decrypted assets of the game and can personally confirm but the value of that is nil since I can't bring proof.
I'm pretty sure you could find dozens of sources confirming that too, but I don't have the time atm.
Confirmed here : https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/1agkxcd/the_gia...
(only one skin is a pay to lose skin with a bigger kit box)
There are indie games without those in-app purchases that capture the spirit of the old games.
Yes, these games are definitely out there. Makes me want to go through my Steam library; I’m sure I could list off dozens of games but I’ll just stick with one great example that comes to mind: Axiom Verge.
Is it your opinion of a game like Breath of the wild ?
Not so great games have existed as long as games existed. Parent's point is that the few good ones stay. And could imagine someone in 20 years replaying BOTW, or This war of Mine, same way Journey still has many active players 13 years later.
The article touches on multiplayer games which my comment reflected, they are after all the predominant genre that generates the most profit for companies, and of course are the most exploited.
I didn't say that there are no good new games anymore, there are of course good titles great games your example is one, but the market shifted because the cash is elsewhere.
If you compare the profit for a game like BOTW despite being huge success by unit sales, and the yearly profit of a game like Fortnite as some of the commenters pointed, or CoD you will see what I mean, those tittles literally print money with in game shops not unit sales.
I agree with you, and this was my main point in 20 years someone will replay BOTW because it is a great game, the ones that are made to simply print money will be replaced by others that prints money faster, and better.
> There is simply nothing to it
If this were true nobody would play the games? If people found no benefit or interest they wouldn’t play. Even if you think it’s literally just gambling, which I disagree with, people still find value in that even if it’s destructive.
> no depth
If this were true you couldn’t having skill based matchmaking. If there is no depth then everyone would be as good as everyone else. There would be no strategy to master.
> no cool mechanics
Subjective but I disagree.
> no story nothing
Chess has no story mode but it’s a game people still play. Why do video games need a story 100% of the time? I don’t get this critique.
> and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.
I disagree. Games today have learned from games of the past. I think most folks would find the mechanics of old games boring compared to games of today. I loved Super Mario 64 as a kid and bought it when they rereleased it for the Switch and found it so boring and infuriating (terrible controls) that I never finished the game. Same with Goldeneye — I played that game so much as a kid but there are so many better games with a similar gameplay loop today. I could probably find some fun in something like surf maps in CS1.6 but it wouldn’t hold my attention for very long.
> people still find value in that even if it’s destructive
I am probably in the 98th percentile of time playing video games, and have a lot of friends that play. I really don't disagree with most of your post, but this sentence grabbed me. A person "finding value" in something destructive is not a "different strokes for different folks" situation.
It's more likely they are caught in a desperate situation, either from chasing money that will never materialize or some other kind of high. The cycle of gambling long term is horrible. It's an addictive and destructive pattern with no end in sight, and it ruins lives, and not just the life of the gambler.
While it's rare for a similarly extreme situation to happen with online games, it's less about losing all of your money and more about losing all of your time. It's not uncommon for people to play these games more compulsively than anything, while having 0 fun. Some are self-aware enough to wish they weren't playing it altogether, while being unable to stop. And I realize this can come off condescending, but some people are unaware that they aren't having fun and are sad at the end of the day, unable to confront why. It would not be wise to fault the people themselves with this behavior. There are games designed to foster this compulsion.
I don't think this is unique to online games. There are certainly single-player games that can impart the same feelings. But there are bad design decisions that are more common to online games that are meant to create addiction. Take daily quests: Where they are present, they are the only decent way to progress in a game. They fucking suck, are universally hated, but people still play everyday, even if they don't feel like it. The game can obviously be balanced to provide better general progression and omit daily quests, which would let people play when they feel like it. But designers choose not to do this, because research shows people play more when they login every day. And the longer people are playing, the more likely they can be monetized.
And that's an inherent issue with recent online games that build a revenue model on micro transactions: They are trying to make you play as long as possible to maximize conversion. That's not a healthy relationship with a customer. These games are distinct from Chess, not because they lack depth or mechanics, but because they are fine-tuned to make you chase the next thing, forever. Many people recognize this, don't enjoy it, and can't stop. The same way many kids are hyper aware of their addiction to scrolling, but continue to scroll.
So yes, people play these games, but that doesn't mean they have value even to the player. They just have the bells and whistles to keep people hooked. For my own part, it's a constant battle to be aware of when I'm having fun and when I'm getting sucked into something unhealthy.
> There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing
I see we've reached "grumpy old man yelling at cloud" levels of rhetoric.
Sure, there's predatory micro transactions, but there's absolutely also neat new content and mechanics added to games like Dota or Fortnite. Dota just recently got a couple of fuck off huge patches that I saw the notes for (I don't play it myself but occasionally see things mentioned in the Deadlock community).
If we take the most charitable interpretation, it's asking a question that's more like "how come older games that achieve a certain player count will have a fatter tail relative to their peak player count?"
I'm not sure whether this is actually true, but it's a more interesting question.
Yeah, how many old games do people really remember and keep playing? Maybe a hundred? 2 hundred? That's out of tens of thousands of games.
Gonna go out on a limb and claim that 0 people are still playing Madame Fifi's Whorehouse [1]
[1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id,5170/Madam+Fifi's+Wh...
Well now i gotta find a way to play this
There's a copy available on the Internet Archive [1].
1. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
I remember Kaboom on the Atari 2600.
Now that game was worth every byte.
At the same time you still see projects like Beating Every N64 Game [0], so there's evidence that there's still interest even in the absolute worst games on the old consoles.
0: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrwJXOVKrLbIDAiT9b4Lkyz4d...
you're forgetting that modern games REQUIRE company releasing them to host a server, and there are no ways to host a community one. Some of them take enormous effort to create a fan server if it is even possible - as some games stream assets serverside, and if that isn't captured in some way beforehand...
you can still play those old "bad" games, they still exist.
This is simply wrong. Obscure and commercially unsuccessful games still work today, although it might be difficult to find the hardware needed to run them.
Even the successful games of today are likely to die eventually. Ubisoft's The Crew was relatively successful, but they shut down the servers and made the game unplayable. Now they're talking about at least adding an "offline mode" but core features of the game would still be unavailable to the customers who bought it.
The difference with games today is that many are designed to require a connection to company servers - and those servers cannot be self-hosted. Eventually it won't be profitable for the company to continue running those servers and they'll shut them down. Unless companies are forced to provide an EOL plan that allows customers to continue playing the games they bought (could be self-hosted servers, open source, patching out the server requirement, etc), modern games will continue to die at an increasing rate.
>is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
I don't buy this. Yes obviously there's a survivorship bias but here's some of the most popular games of 1998 alone, from memory:
Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Starcraft, RE 2, Mario Party, Baldurs Gate
Almost 30 years later we still play franchise spin-offs and remakes off these games, half of them invented entire genres. The year before that, Golden Eye, FF 7, etc. It's not just that those are the good games people remember, they're so dominant in our culture when you ask someone what their favorite game right now is they're likely to say Baldurs Gate 3 or a remake of FF 7.
If you go forward ten, fifteen years with the exception of FromSoftware and the Souls games, I don't think anything has made remotely as much of an impact as even one or two games listed above.
There are plenty of games made in the last years that will be remembered 10 years from now. The Horizon series comes to mind.
Games need time to become classics, because we need time to realize how impactful they were and how much they live in our memories.
This just sounds like everyone remembering music/movies/other art that came out when we were coming of age extremely fondly. Young people starting to game now will remember a different set of games from you.
It's intellectually lazy to attribute any judgement of media to nostalgia, and inappropriate in this case. Young people are the best example of this. If you look at what past games the current teenagers are interested in, it actually is games from the early console era. Even in game art it's evident. Great indie titles, see for example Animal Well or Celeste harken back to the pixelart era, nobody emulates ca 2009 3d realism. Because artistically it just looks uninspired.
There is such a thing as objectively productive and unproductive periods in any genre or medium. This applies to film as well. The last fifteen years have largely been dreadful and nobody is going to remember dozens of conveyor belt produced Marvel slop films. People will still watch Coppola and Kubrick in 30 years.
And that's btw 20-30 years before I was born, you see my birthdate in my username. I don't appeal to "what I remember" when looking at media.
> There is such a thing as objectively productive and unproductive periods in any genre or medium.
A few great movies are made in any period of history, along with a lot of commercial stuff along with B-D grade crap. Not all movies made in the last couple of movies are Marvel movies. It sounds like you picked great movies that were made in the past to watch when you were growing up, and those are the formative movies for you. It doesn't in any way negate what I said. It is still "what you remember".
Minecraft birthed a genre and crossed into a full on cultural event. Boosted by YouTube let's play and live streaming also growing very fast at the time.
There's also a big heaping helping of "many titles, same game". There's no reason to buy a new game when it's the same as the old game, but with half the functionality hidden in DLCs where the older title will have that from the start and likely be mod-friendly to boot.
Certainly people talk the most about the best games of a given generation, but I recently loaded up a 3ds with basically the top 50 games for it, then another 30 or so DS generation games, and so on down through GBA, GBC, SNES, NES... hundreds and hundreds of games I'm enjoying way more than some of the most played games of this generation e.g. Call of Duty or Fortnite.
So not to be an old fart but I think previous generations really were spoiled by a much better on average library. Then again there are many phenomenal indie games coming out lately. Some of the best games, in my opinion, of the last 30 years, came out this decade: Outer Wilds and Animal Well, for example.
Culture and creativity is simply in decline because money has corrupted everything. "The old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation" is sounds convincing but I don't think it hits the point.
It's no different than all other fields. Planned obsolescence is a real thing and has lead to the collapse in quality for everything. Games are also designed by C-suite and committees to target some juicy statistical player-base. Because it's all about profit, not art or quality. It's not a small team trying to make something they think is fun anymore. It's a type of enshittification.
Indie games are a shining ray of hope of course that the culture can change.
Just today there was a new article that shows this:
>That devotion to their chosen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-maest...
Thanks for that link. I was a fan of the original Dragon Age: Origins and hated what came after. Everything has to be an action hack and slash, brainless but pretty.
They got it wrong and I hope it hurts their pocket book.
We struck gold with Kingdom Come: 2 which is indie and RPG and perfect in every way. EA should have stuck to sports games.
Having the same thought... The games we still play today weren't just "old," they were exceptional and had communities passionate enough to keep them alive
Also known as “survivorship bias” [1]
Self-hosted servers and mods may have been the property that made them longed-lived, or maybe it was an emergent property of being long-lived.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias