Oh man... a lot has changed, really :) . I've been gaming since the mid-nineties myself, so... yeah, I did notice a few differences :) . Here comes the second incoherent rant of the thread :P .
Yeah, back then games were harder, but they were harder for a reason: to make up for space limitations. A lot of practices that were commonplace back in the day are considered as archaic now by a lot of people: insta-kills, bottomless pits, even lives. But again, those things were there for a reason: either the game made you start over when you lost, or you completed it in no time. Yeah, imagine buying an expensive NES cart back in the day, only to hear your kid saying he/she beat the game in an hour... I'll tell you, after having played on a Sega Master System for over a decade, high difficulty by means of cheap deaths in old-school games is something I do not miss.
Another big change I'm noticing is how additional content is managed. As
machomuu said, expansion packs have existed for a long time on the PC, but here's the difference as far as I'm concerned: maybe I'm lucky and have played only the right games, but... IMHO back then, expansion packs were much more substantial. Take Blizzard's expansion packs for instance: Warcraft II and Starcraft I expansion packs, in addition to introducing new units, effectively
doubled the in-game content, and Diablo II's expansion introduced two new characters, an additional act and a major overhaul of the game mechanics, including a slew of new item and enemy types. Now, everything is sold piecemeal, and, granted, every piece of content is rather cheap (most of the time) but put together, they tend to be much more expensive, and much less interesting.
About non-substantial additional content, games back then had it too. But it was all unlockable. You know, sometimes I feel like all unlockable content was moved to DLC, and achievements/trophies were put in games simply to make up for that.
Something that I really don't like about the AAA industry is this mentality it has right now, as Jim Sterling put it, to make all of the money, instead of some of the money. Triple A games now can't afford to fail, or to even have moderate success (was it Tomb Raider that sold three million copies and was still considered a disappointment by its publisher?) . Budgets soar, and so do projected sales, and it is now rather common to hear that a studio put a lot of effort into a game, only for it to sell
moderately well, and the studio is now closed because of it. Nowadays, we have game developers that feel like they can't afford to fail, and so they dumb down games, copy successful formulas or make sequel after sequel instead of taking risks and trying new things, hire actors (not even VG voice actors, but Hollywood actors!) to voice characters and cash in on their names, put out insane amounts of DLC and include microtransactions. In the eighties or nineties, thanks to much lower budgets, a major game developer could afford to fail, could afford to take a risk and make an experimental game that sells badly, and recoup the cost of making that game with a next, "safer" game. Honestly, back in the day, there were games, like Beyond Good and Evil, that were commercial failures, but critical successes and cult classics. What game from a major developer in this day and age can fall under that category? I can't think of any, really, because they play as safe as possible.
And don't get me started on the recent, for the lack of a better term, SJW tendencies. Those who gamed since the nineties like I did, did you really care about the protagonist of Metroid, Psychic World, Beyond Good and Evil or many an RPG being female? Did you really think whether the games you played had any deeper meaning? Did you think about Birdo being trans in Super Mario Bros 2? I know I didn't, because those games rocked, they were fun to play, straightforward, uncomplicated, and didn't tell you to read between the lines. And, you know, I don't mind that games that favor feels or political messages over gameplay (sometimes excising the latter entirely) exist, they have an audience, more power to them. But when that crowd starts publicly attacking actual games (as in games where gameplay comes first) as being infantile or archaic or passé, any sort of difficulty in games being representative of "toxic masculinity" and nitpicking pretty much everything in a biased manner (like a certain pundit criticizing GTA 5 because you can kill women in it, never mind that you can also kill men, no, that's cool, that's expected) , and actual serious developers listen and
believe conform , that's when I have a problem. That, and complaints about video games being games in the first place: I don't remember who the gaming journalist in question was, but there was a guy on Twitter a few months back, who vehemently defended the notion that, if a video game does not have a political message or a deeper meaning, it is completely and utterly worthless, no matter how fun it is to play, because to that guy, gameplay does not matter. Yeah, according to a member of the gaming press, in a video
game,
gameplay does not matter. And there was another woman, also a Twitter user who I don't remember, who complained about battles in an RPG she was playing and how they kept her from leisurely enjoying the story, not because the battles were hard, but because
they existed in the first place... basically criticizing a video game for being a video game. Brilliant. But I'd rather stop with this subject right here and now.
The last paragraph aside (really, I'm done with that subject) , a game that I think represents quite well the shift in gaming that we underwent in the late-2000s, early-2010s is
Sonic Adventure DX of all things. Here's the thing: it was released on PC and GameCube in 2003, was a version of Sonic Adventure with enhanced graphics, an additional missions mode and Metal Sonic as an unlockable character. The unlockable character was entirely optional and not that interesting, but the additional missions mode and the already existing medal collecting system now had an awesome reward: collecting medals and completing missions would open to you the entire library of Sonic games for the Game Gear. I know emulation exists, but still... how awesome is it to have something like that in a game?
Now, it was recently re-released for 7th gen consoles and Steam. First of all, what you get for the base price is simply called Sonic Adventure, despite containing all the graphical enhancements of Sonic Adventure DX, but with DX version's content carved out. How do you get that content? Well, you buy the DX version as DLC. But you only get the secret character and the missions mode. The big reward, the Game Gear library, has been removed altogether, and replaced with... achievements.
To sum up: while porting an existing game to the current systems, the developers went out of their way to carve out a piece of it to sell it as DLC, and to top it all, they removed the unlockable games, probably because some of them can be bought elsewhere, so God forbid you get them for free. They took an already existing game and intentionally made it worse! But don't worry, there are achievements in this game now! Oh goodie >:(!
But it's not all bad, really. I don't think gaming has gone downhill or anything. And here's why:
- Games can now use more resources and be much bigger, giving you more bang for your buck and rendering the aforementioned practices (game overs etc) obsolete. And, again, while some people prefer their games to be mind-blowingly hard, I'd rather not spend my time getting killed over and over. Besides, those people can no longer worry, because hard games still exist.
- Games can be cheaper now, especially if you're a PC gamer and/or are a follower of the indie scene. And thank you, Humble Bundle!
- Ultimately, game creation became a lot easier, thanks to programs like GameMaker Studio, Clickteam Fusion, Godot Engine, Unity and, of course, RPG Maker! And while them becoming popular inevitably leads to more shovelware (hi, Digital Homicide!) , a lot of really good games wouldn't have existed without them, games like Freedom Planet, Undertale, Spelunky, as well as the two recently DMCAed high-quality Nintendo fangames. Anyone with a good idea can make a game! Now marketing it, especially with the abundance of video games in today's world, is another matter entirely...
- And thank you, Kickstarter! People who have good ideas, or veterans of the scene, such as the former Rare Team or Koji Igarashi, now can produce games that follow their own visions and wishes of the gaming public with decent budgets, instead of conforming to what AAA publishers have to say. Because we have been proven time and time again, that the AAA gaming industry, in addition to being irrational about their sales, is completely out of touch with what the gamers want. And yes, there are risks involved (I'll never back anything Keiji Inafune does ever again) but all in all, it's worth it.
