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Hidden Wonders Gaming · Society · Technology Just Play Old Games Published: 2022-09-05 Lastmod: 2023-08-26 Table of Contents Introduction [#] There are millions of people who play video games--billions if you count phone games. Concurrent Steam users can be checked out here , the number hovered between twenty and thirty million people logged into Steam the weekend I wrote this article. There are also millions more playing games on consoles, not to mention phones and platforms other than Steam on PC. So yeah, a lot of people play games. A lot of people are profiting off of games as well. Random statistics link says that the game industry is a 4.34 billion USD business--actually, that’s wrong. That number is just for a single month in the United States only. The real number is 197 billion USD . It’s puzzling that this number is so high when most old games are available for free and a masterpiece like Hollow Knight is only fifteen USD. This article looks at modern games and shows how (for the most part) they suck compared to their older counterparts. Current Games [#] The only modern, AAA titles I play are Cities Skylines, some FromSoftware titles--not recently though, since Elden Ring didn’t impress me much--and the occasional Nintendo exclusive. However, even in these games I enjoy the flaws of modern games are apparent. Lets look at some of the commonalities of modern games to better understand why they’re so awful. Cities Skylines [#] First, allow me to talk about Cities Skylines. I love that game, and I have more than a thousand hours in it. However, a quick look at its Steam store page makes the problem clear: its price, including all of its DLC, totals almost three-hundred dollars . This company, Paradox, is infamous for its predatory DLC practices, and its because of exploitive tactics like these that the gaming industry has become so lucrative. Games like Fortnite have expanded on this, charging obscene amounts for the right to access meaningless digital assets like skins. This is the norm for even games that you have to pay for. Why people are paying money for this stuff is another question entirely, but for now it suffices to say that the presence of all of this paid content is a major reason why modern games are worse than their equivalent older titles. Elden Ring [#] Elden Ring took a step in the wrong direction compared to the Dark Souls series. The Dark Souls series--besides its most iconic elements like losing in-game currency upon death and a stamina system--is excellent because of its densely packed level design and interesting enemy designs. What Elden Ring has effectively done is stretched out the tight, refined world of a souls game and spread it out across a far greater physical distance. It was exciting to explore Elden Ring and experience its diverse environments, but wait a second, that boss is the same as the one from before only with different mob enemies thrown in, and that enemy is identical to the one from Dark Souls III. Actually, there are a total of ten Night’s Cavalry mini bosses in the game . Many other mini bosses are reused around four to five times in the game. And, nothing hurts me more when I walk into a boss room and see that I’ve already fought the bosses on a previous occasion, except I have to fight two of the bosses at the same time. Godskin Duo is a perfect example of this. Throwing multiple enemies at the player is generally not fun regardless of the game. Elden Ring is guilty of rehashed content, content that is reused again and again to pad out a game’s size. Assassin’s Creed games are notorious for this--as are all Ubisoft games--and most AAA titles with the open world tag suffer from the same fate. Even the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild suffers a similar problem with its vast empty spaces filled the same mini bosses and Korok seeds over and over again. What is meant to be an exciting, enjoyable game is dragged out into a long session of walking around and doing nothing most of the time, and--while it can be somewhat fun to explore maps like these when done correctly--it is always more fun to play a more densely packed game with varied gameplay than that same game stretched out for longer with lots of meaningless, empty space. The original Dark Souls is guilty of this as well, but to a much lesser extent; really, only the stray demon and Lost Izalith are rehashed. A final note on Elden Ring is hardware requirements: AAA games like Elden Ring require expensive hardware to run--my RTX 2060 struggles to run the game at 60fps. AAA games in general are already so expensive because of high upfront costs and frequently predatory DLC practices, and a high hardware cost on top of that is often just not worth it when equally fun games with more simplistic graphics exist. “Movie Gaming” [#] There are many games where you feel like you’re just playing a movie, watching endless cutscenes. This is not what a game is supposed to be. I don’t have much to say on them other than that I don’t play them, they’re dumb, and they’re one of the biggest reasons most AAA games are so bad nowadays. Especially awful are those games with dialogue where the NPC’s lips move out of sync with the character. When you have so much dialogue in your game that you can’t take the effort to make the cutscenes and dialogue sections fully lip-synced, maybe you shouldn’t even have them to begin with. “Trend Gaming” [#] There’s this strange segment of supposed “gamers” who follow the Internet bandwagon of playing whatever is most popular. Some trend games of the past few years include Fall Guys, Fortnite, Among Us, and Lost Ark. These are (or at least at some point were) all competent games, but I argue that the primary reason most people play these games are not because people actually enjoy them; rather, people play these games purely because of reasons like “it’s what people are playing right now.” In the case of Lost Ark it was especially strange. It seems to me there is this large segment of the population that is bored out of their minds and are just looking for “the next thing” to waste away their lives on. Many of my “friends” poured countless hours into this game while I could only wonder in perplexity at why they were investing both their time and money into this new game when, from my perspective, it just looked like rehashed Path of Exiles or Diablo. Or they could have just played old games. It saddens me that there exists these types of people who just jump to the most popular games in some attempt to fit in with others instead of playing genuinely fun games they would enjoy. The newest thing is not necessarily the best thing. “Social Gaming” [#] When I think of social gaming, I think of me and my cousins sitting down in a hot, stuffy room in front of a TV playing Super Smash Bros. Nowadays, tons of people play games online getting pissed at random strangers instead. Largely, these types of games are repetitive, but there are bigger problems with them. Mainly, these types of games are aggravating in the long run. They consume your life. They force you to compete with others in a competition where few come out on top. Games are to have fun, you shouldn’t be deriving achievement out of them that can be a substitute for doing actually productive hobbies like writing programs or writing articles for your website. To be clear, it’s natural for you to feel proud of beating a difficult game--it’s one of the major draws of older games, in fact--but it becomes problematic when the satisfaction of beating a game enables you to set aside the desire for satisfaction with your own life. Also, these games are dangerous because they can prevent you from interacting with people in the real world. I used to be very into a certain MOBA, and would find that my little comments I’d make to people during matches could satisfy my social urges. This, of course, is ultimately a lie. Social interactions online should not and cannot act as substituted for real life socializing. This is a danger I became aware of, and I have since tried to distance myself from games that involve social elements. This topic deserves its own article when I can articulate my reasoning for it better. New Games Overview [#] So, let’s quickly outline the problems with current games before we move on: Often less fun and repetitive, stretching the game length for the sake of it. Too much money for both the games and the hardware needed to run them. Frequent cutscenes in some games bore those who play them. People playing games as a form of socialization or fitting in is a major issue because games designed to cater to these players are especially addicting, toxic, and not fun on average. Now, let’s move on to the alternatives. Old Games are Better [#] Old games are better I say, but what is an old game and why is it better? When I’m considering “old” games, I’m pretty much talking about anything 2007 or earlier. I would consider the approximate cutoff as whenever Steam became the predominant way of purchasing PC games, the only exception being some games for consoles, especially handhelds like the DS and 3DS, which often kept much the charm of older games due to stringent hardware constraints. Civilization IV [#] My date for this is very subjective, because 2007 was the year Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword was released, a game I still play regularly today through wine on Linux . Civilization V is a game which completely destroyed IV’s emphasis on larger, overarching strategy decisions. This new title brought in a bunch of clunky, inferior systems and a more in depth yet cumbersome combat system. This type of combat system does not fit into a Civilization title because combat is not the point of the game; rather, combat is simply a means to an ends, another small part of your strategy. Emphasizing it like this ruins the game and breaks the AI. The UI is also vastly inferior in Civilization V because Civilization IV has the best UI of any video game. The UI is recent enough to not look archaic, yet old enough to still be incredibly information dense. City screens, various statistics screens, and the base UI all perfectly show you the information you need to make correct strategic decisions. The UI itself is very snappy. I’m not sure if it’s just the fact that the game is older so newer hardware runs it faster, but many newer strategy games have slower, clunkier UI. Civilization V was the first in the Civilization series to adopt this newer, slower, prettier looking UI. Information is not as readily available, and you can’t even move the map by dragging the box in the mini-map! The focus was on visual clarity at the expense of functionality, accessibility for new players at the expense of usability. This was a massive mistake, and for this reason alone I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy another strategy game as much as...