Often, it's not really the "old games" but the "not the marketed shit". One of my favourite gems is Outward. It looks and feels a bit clunky, but you breathe love and passion for making games on every corner.
I just finished playing the original FF7 for the first time in like two decades. I always secretly dreaded trying to play it again, worried that it wouldn't have aged that well as a game, or that my nostalgia was propping it up as a masterpiece when perhaps it wasn't.
It sucked me in and I ended up doing a 100% completion playthrough. The experience has shifted my thinking and now I'm more willing to replay older games. Just last week I found my old CD Keys and started up Diablo 2, the original, not the remaster. Now I've been sucked into that.
I personally am finding that mechanically, these older games have systems with lots of depth and creativity. They give you so many options and choices, and they rarely explain all of it so your kind of left to just.. experience it. I am sure this is not true for every retro game ( and ditto for some new games ) but it is something I have been feeling when playing older games.
I wish I could offer some advice, I'm on windows 11. I downloaded the game files from Blizzards website (had to google it, its kind of buried), and used my CD keys from my game cases. Honestly I was surprised I didn't have to do much tinkering to make it work. I think all I did was make sure it launches with compatibility mode enabled in the properties of the .exe
Definitely try solo stuff with plugy. I installed D2 for a nice bnet session of baalruns but bnet was a bit riddled fuckhole. I tried plugy before uninstalling and it got me hooked on solo play for 3 more years.
I was going to try Plugy earlier this week but I just discovered Project Diablo 2 which comes with some of the QoL features from Plugy and more. It's been phenomenal! Absolutely check it out if you haven't.
Many retro games are better. AA games were made with heart back then & that made it possible to make games that are incredible both in terms of artistry, grandeur and gameplay. Games like Baldur's Gate 1-2, Chrono Cross etc are not possible in today's climate.
On the other hand we have been handed indie games like Celeste and Hollow Knight, so I don't know. Amazing games still exists, it's just not really comparable.
Play what you enjoy. The old games can look better because you skip through to the best ones over the last 50+ years. Many were buggy, had terrible controls or were just boring. You're probably not wasting your time on those.
Depends on the game. As great as retro games are, I could never give up newer indie titles like Baba Is You or Brok The Investigator, which would be much shorter games or have other problems if they were made for consoles pre-internet games download days.
Though I will say that retro games like Sonic 1 & 2 on Genesis or Ratchet and Clank on PS2 are pretty much infinitely better than the triple AAA slop they're throwing at us today.
Especially when we have companies (like sweet baby inc.) forcing characters to be changed to Mary Sue's all because we need inclusivity. I have no problems with inclusivity at all, but I have a major problem with poorly written characters in games that have absolutely nothing going for them besides being perfect.
I mean, let's not forget that the early consoles had their own pitfalls, a period of gaming that spawned tropes like 'Nintendo Hard' and 'Guide Dang It' in order to, among other things, pad out the length of what we would consider an otherwise barebones game, and to sell time on their hints and tips hotline. I do feel like there was less bullshit in the past, but it definitely still existed.
I'm with you. In fact I'll say even retro operating systems were better (no bloat, no spyware, easy to understand/configure/mod/hack around), as well as retro Internet (no Javascript crap, no browser fingerprinting/tracking, simpler HTML, super easy webdev) and retro computing (no soldered-on components, PCs were more modular and easy to repair)... heck, planet earth in general was better back then. We've been on a downwards spiral since the 2000s. Everything sucks now.
Just be careful not to idealize the past as some golden age of gaming. During the SNES era, worthwhile titles were few and far between on top of spotty regional availability on account of profitability (supposedly). The bar to entry for gamedevs was huge: the dev tools were obtuse and the distribution methods were shit and centralized (toy stores, computer stores, magazines). The offer was also ridiculously sanitized, at least on consoles.
It’s great that we can still enjoy the good games of the past, but I absolutely love what indies come up with nowadays. There are so many and they’re so creative! ❤️ Some talented big studio devs even manage to release something nice once in a while despite the organizational structure they work in. I never want to go back to gaming in the 90’s. Furthermore, I’m of the opinion that there are many past titles being hailed as classics solely based on some unconscious nostalgia for youth (I’m looking at you GOG).
Its just like with idealizing music eras. People remember the stand outs and forget the bad and mediocre stuff so it seems like everything was better in whatever time.
There definitely is a lot of crap that came out back in the day that we tend to forget, but there were also very different popular strategies for game making.
One of the most significant for me is the degradation of choice in RPGs. Many, certainly not all, of the RPGs I played as a kid and as a teenager would have elements of their story that could diverge to some degree based on your actions. The most typical results were things like a different ending or an otherwise hidden scene. Silent Hill was a good example of this. But you'd also have a lot of games where your choices immediately and totally altered the way things play out, like Planescape: Torment or Baldur's Gate. Your choices could affect not only the ending, but a whole lot on the way. Hell, the first Fallout game served up some major unforeseen consequences for an action that on the surface seems like a pretty straightforwardly good idea.
But ever since Mass Effect I've noticed an emptiness in choice making, and recently I saw an article that showed me why.
If you follow the branching choices in those early games like a flow chart, the choices on it were often significant divergences that don't ever meet back up with the original iteration of the quest. But modern design techniques try to be efficient, so you've got a branching point at the point of choice, then it rejoins the main quest, and then later on it branches off briefly to check what you did and react to it, before going back to the main quest as though nothing happened.
It's such a letdown. If you only play once and never save scum it'll seem fine, but the lack of depth becomes readily apparent so quickly. It's not like nobody's still doing big branches too, but you can tell when they default to this and it feels so empty.
I've enjoyed Baldur's Gate 3, but one of the things I notice, especially in act 3, is how slapped together some of these branching choices are. Also, as cute as the die rolling mechanic is, the constant clear and random success/failure state of all branching choices just leads to endless save scumming. The game doesn't handle it like a divergence in one way or the other, it straight up tells you you failed.
In D&D the die rolls are fun and tense, but they don't become this totally separate gambling subgame. Sometimes it's important to get a bad die roll, and sometimes the result in terms of fun is way better than getting a good die roll. I never got that impression from BG3. It felt like a bad die roll meant missing content rather than getting different content, and I think that's largely because of the literal framing of the die rolling UI and the associated sounds. A more neutral UI where you don't know the DC of what you're rolling for and it doesn't scream at you that your roll wasn't good enough might let people RP out the failure a little better. Comedy doesn't hurt either, and is a great tool for DMs seeking to alleviate some of the pain of a bad roll.
Anyway, point being, I think there are some problems with modern game design philosophy that stem from seeking efficiency and greater visual fidelity and audio complexity over engaging game design. Shitty graphics and limited processing power mean you have to make decisions to bring the player into the world and get them to forget that their character's head is like 8 pixels or whatever. So they have to exploit humanity's adeptness at pattern recognition, but they also have to make what they've got count. They're not overloading it with bloat and random branches just for the hell of it. A branching story was a branching story because they really wanted it to be.
I'm probably like 50% talking out of my ass, but I feel like if we had Tim Cain here with us he'd agree with me.
Though indie games do seem perfectly capable of avoiding this corporate optimization shit.
I can give so many but you'll have to narrow down your preferences a bit ^^
I've recently been playing Remnant 2, Songs of Syx, Age of Darkness, dotAGE, Helldivers, Valheim, Against the Storm... all really impressive and amazing games made by (relatively) small studios or AA developers with a passion for games. If you're completely new to the indie scene you probably can't go wrong with Hades, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, Terraria
Hero's Hour is a pixel art game that's about building an army. Really solid indie game! Also a fan of Revita, it's a roguelike but done very well and is mostly unique.