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General discussion (archive)Games 10 years ago and now(22 posts)(22 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted July 03, 2011
Your glasses would need to have a very heavy rose tint to think that the situation was much better back then. It wasn't at all. In between the good games there was just as much shovelware crap out there then as there is now.

The main difference is that a lot of games are actually produced to a higher standard now than they were then. So there are a lot fewer games with completely game breaking bugs in them. Even major games were impossible to finish on release due to major game breaking bugs. That's not something I've noticed happen in recent years.

Overall the situation has improved. The problem is all the industry practices that haven't changed at all and now probably won't for some considerable time to come.
Posted July 04, 2011
Everything good in ones life always happen between the age of 0 and 20 so every good game, book, music, movie will be from that time. Nostalgia is the key word here since we remember the good and forget about the bad. Were games better 10-15 years ago? Sure some were but there were also much crap - the difference then was that a game didn't cost 110 mill USD to make so it was a little easier to take a chance with a new game concept. On the other hand we used to see an insane amount of sequels back then like King's Quest, Ultima, Police Quest etc. so I doubt there was that much more innovation back then.
On one hand I do think some of the best games are from 10-15 years ago like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Thief, BG1+2 and Daikatana (no just kidding :-) ).
In my own life I try to enjoy great games from the past (and thx to GoG this is now much easier) but also enjoy modern games without thinking they are crap. It is possible to enjoy games like Crysis, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 and Just Cause 2 and still remember and respect the past. I don't agree with the ADD that many young gamers seem to suffer from that means that if the graphics are not nice and shiny then they will loose interest.
I think we can honour the past and yet still find pleasure in the now and future.
Posted July 04, 2011
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jepsen1977: Everything good in ones life always happen between the age of 0 and 20 so every good game, book, music, movie will be from that time. Nostalgia is the key word here since we remember the good and forget about the bad. Were games better 10-15 years ago? Sure some were but there were also much crap - the difference then was that a game didn't cost 110 mill USD to make so it was a little easier to take a chance with a new game concept. On the other hand we used to see an insane amount of sequels back then like King's Quest, Ultima, Police Quest etc. so I doubt there was that much more innovation back then.
On one hand I do think some of the best games are from 10-15 years ago like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Thief, BG1+2 and Daikatana (no just kidding :-) ).
In my own life I try to enjoy great games from the past (and thx to GoG this is now much easier) but also enjoy modern games without thinking they are crap. It is possible to enjoy games like Crysis, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 and Just Cause 2 and still remember and respect the past. I don't agree with the ADD that many young gamers seem to suffer from that means that if the graphics are not nice and shiny then they will loose interest.
I think we can honour the past and yet still find pleasure in the now and future.
That was brilliantly said and I go behind those words also. Got nothing to add but this.. If game is made 2000 or after I think that is still quite new. =) Crysis beats quake IMO. Not perhaps in nostalgia but in gameplay.
I guess nobody made a lot of good games for year 2000 'cos people thought that they would die in Y2K.
Posted July 04, 2011
originality still exists
you just have to look a bit.
and if you look at indie developers, your chances of finding original games are increased
plants vs zombies may not be completely original but still,
i've read reviews of games that ONLY focused on innovation and i turns out that they were not always good. overdose kills, and this goes with many things.

i am not allowed to talk to much about nostalgia and the past and such because i'm only 17.
Posted July 04, 2011
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DrIstvaan: I began wondering about certain things. (These are more like rhetoric questions; I'm not necessarily looking for answers for these, just sharing them with you.)
-Was it a commonly shared feeling ten years ago that no more quality games were made? Or is it only a few gamers' delusion?
-If the state of PC games was even remotely as bad as the author wrote, how comes there are so many remarkable games from that period? (For example, just in that one edition, there were reviews of Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Insane and Ground Control Dark Conspiracy, all of which are available here.) Or if it wasn't, what could have made the author have such a negative disposition (and the editor partly agree with him) besides the obvious fact that many people seem to only notice bad tendencies?
-When people complain that today's games lack creativity, is it as much of an exaggeration as it was in 2001? Or is it truer today?
-Ten years from now, will as many of today's games be regarded as true gems that stood the test of time as there are from 2000-2001?

Discuss as you please.
2000-2002, I think, were when things started to change in the gaming industry in general (not just PC gaming) -- the XBOX and PlayStation 2 were released in those years and there was a lot of focus on those platforms by media as well as developers and publishers, so maybe that sparked his way of thinking? I don't think his opinion paints a correct picture of the state of PC games at the time at all though -- I mean, hell, Baldur's Gate II and its expansion were released in '00 and '01 and so were Diablo II and its expansion. Max Payne was released in '01. Neverwinter Nights was released in '02. Unreal Tournament 2003 was released in '02, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast was released in '02... And those are just a few examples of titles that are all considered classics today.

As for creativity... I don't know. I think developers were still being pretty darn creative in those days. And I definitely believe they continued to *want* to be creative in the years after, but as games became multi-million dollar projects, that became more and more difficult. It's funny -- his opinions seem more of a foreshadowing of what was to come than a true interpretation of how things were at the time.
Post edited July 04, 2011 by Lorfean
Posted July 04, 2011
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Antimateria: That was brilliantly said and I go behind those words also. Got nothing to add but this.. If game is made 2000 or after I think that is still quite new. =) Crysis beats quake IMO. Not perhaps in nostalgia but in gameplay.
There's no accounting for taste. ;P
Posted July 04, 2011
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4gamin: I find most developing tools either based on generic existing engine or requiring prog skills to be really good. Off topic: Are there tools that dont have these issues?
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wpegg: I think tools that enable innovation, will naturally require a high level of expertise in programming. The issue being that the more you want to go against the grain, the less a tool can help you, as it's designed for the norm. There were tools out in about 2000 ironically, that were promising everyone that they would be able to write their own FPS. They worked, you got to write a very basic doom clone. If you wanted to do more, you needed to move outside of their tool, and therefore needed to be a C programmer.

The best high level tool that I can think of at the moment that might appeal to you is Microsoft's XNA framework, though I'm not very clued up on that, so I don't know quite what it involves.
XNA is in no way considered to be a "high level tool" in any conventional sense. It sets out to implement a number of necessary low level, boring (and often difficult) nonsense everyone has to do but would rather not. Stuff like image loading, model loading, timers, and sprite management. It also standardizes the code needed to implement an application running on Xbox360, PC and supported mobile devices so you can mostly just do something once. The short way of looking at it would be a jump start into the game code. It also uses the fabulous C# language which is really good for non-superhuman programmers. There are some other options like Ogre, or Gamebryo but they are targeted less to the hobbyist than XNA.

Anyway I was pumped for games around then. Dreamcast was about to come out and 3d gaming was about to finally come into it's own. Before then I was sad that everyone wanted to make everything 3D on playstation 1 generation systems. That should have been the golden age of 2D graphics. Instead it was the golden age of crappy 3D. If there was any issue with 3D killing good games it was that it was done too soon, not that it was done.

Though I will say tomb raider still felt really epic and that couldn't be done in 2D.
Post edited July 04, 2011 by gooberking
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This is my favourite topic
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General discussion (archive)Games 10 years ago and now(22 posts)(22 posts)
(22 posts)