On December 27 2011 22:43 writer22816 wrote: We don't play games like BW, CS 1.6, Quake, Fallout 1/2, PST, Baldur's Gate etc because of nostalgia. We play them because they're GREAT games, superior to most if not all of the games on the market today.
Labeling these games as outdated makes about as much sense as labeling classical music outdated. For that reason I also do not think we are the last generation.
Another question that I have often pondered about is: when will we start seeing games of BW-quality again? Given the recent trend of virtually all modern games being easy to play, targeted towards the casual gamer etc one cannot help but wonder if we will ever see a masterpiece like BW again. This issue is of course linked with the future of eSports as a whole. Personally I feel that, as video games lose their negative social stigma, and as the idea of competitive gaming becomes more accepted, eventually we will start seeing far more truly great games again.
Nowadays we get games that easily rival hollywood blockbusters, that allow you to connect and play with people all over the world in a relatively painless fashion (sorry but SC:BW's Battle.net interface is just disgusting).
SC:BW Battle.net interface is absolutly amazing, it is simple and efficient. This is one of the main reason of bw's success, you can find games in like 3s. You just lost all your credibility lol. I mean just take a look at bnet 2.0... haha
On December 27 2011 23:17 FFGenerations wrote: ssoo excitde cnat spel klazzart rigght zomg1 :D
it is sad to know that kids arent growing up with ff7 anymore ;( i guess when WE become parents itll be up to us to introduce our kids to it and spawn a new generation. same with cartoons (if disney can do it..!)
The thing is, there's a generation of gamers that are already sad that there's a generation of gamers that considers FF7 the first seminal work in the Final Fantasy series that people should be sad that others will not grow up with.
FFIV and FFVI shaped my childhood. FF7 was like my SC2.
On December 27 2011 22:43 writer22816 wrote: We don't play games like BW, CS 1.6, Quake, Fallout 1/2, PST, Baldur's Gate etc because of nostalgia. We play them because they're GREAT games, superior to most if not all of the games on the market today.
Labeling these games as outdated makes about as much sense as labeling classical music outdated. For that reason I also do not think we are the last generation.
Another question that I have often pondered about is: when will we start seeing games of BW-quality again? Given the recent trend of virtually all modern games being easy to play, targeted towards the casual gamer etc one cannot help but wonder if we will ever see a masterpiece like BW again. This issue is of course linked with the future of eSports as a whole. Personally I feel that, as video games lose their negative social stigma, and as the idea of competitive gaming becomes more accepted, eventually we will start seeing far more truly great games again.
I've been playing video games since Doom I (I was six years old at that time) and to be honest, I've only seen an increase in quality, not a decrease. Nowadays we get games that easily rival hollywood blockbusters, that allow you to connect and play with people all over the world in a relatively painless fashion (sorry but SC:BW's Battle.net interface is just disgusting). Games like Skyrim, BF3, Modern Warfare series (yes, I love those, all three of them), Gears of War, Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft, Bioshock series etc.
Games like that were just impossible to make in the nineties. I still play Doom 1 and 2 from time to time, only for nostalgia's sake. They're fun, but not nearly as fun as
Show me a game that can rivals movies like Terminator 2 and Aliens in terms of memorable action pack sequences and adrenaline rush , I dare say none ....
Personally, that would be Gears of War 2. There wasn't a single sequence that I did not find extremely memorable. It's still the best game of the series, in my opinion, and one of the hallmarks of the current console generation. That game is one of the few that really give me that "blockbuster"-feeling. Everything just fits: the polish, the scale of what's at stake, the characters, the atmosphere, etc.
I'm only talking about the Single Player Campaign here, by the way. I don't really care for Gears' multiplayer.
Playing system shock 2 is enough to give you chills , there is no incentive for the game to keep you alive, everything in that game wants to KILL You , No follow the blue line and reach the objective like deadspace , Conspiracies ? yes the scientist that you thought you are helping is actually the one behind the whole disaster , Aliens ? Humanoids ? Off springs ? Abomination ? You name it ,it's like a party for all the evils in the world has been invited in to the game .
Personally system shock 2 is enough to kick any competitors off it's list just base on it's storyline and game play that's if you can put graphics aside .
Listen to this and tell me when you get such a nice email from AI greeting you in the lonely corridor full of monstrosity and tell me that you won't scream in fear .
We're seeing lots of Indie developers creating games with bad graphics succeed. I don't think anyone can say that VVVVVV had good graphics, but that game did OK. Wii and DS both did really well, yet have inferior hardware to XBox, PS3, PSP etc. Well well, looks like casuals enjoy having fun over shiny graphics
As mentioned in previous posts, games have always been about shiny graphics. If anything, I feel gamers are moving further away from state of the art graphics in favour of fun gameplay than they used to (though that could be price related. Why buy a $60 game with great graphics when I can buy 10 equally good games with bad graphics for that price?).
On the one hand yes, as Gaming becomes more casual they have to attract the casuals, you can see this in all kinds of games, Modern Warfare, Starcraft 2 up to a certain degree, League of Legends. However on the other hand there are many gems among the big games, bear in mind that there are many and by many I mean a fuckton of developers and among them indie games aswell. Amnesia was a great game, Skyrim despite its criticism was still a very good game, Dragon Age was really good. I personally like Assasins Creed(although many would disagree I suppose) and Bioshock aswell.
The good(imo) games are still there, even among the most overhyped games, you just have to know where to look. However what makes a good game is open to interpretation ofcourse.
Also protip: Batman Arkham Asylum/City is a GREAT game.
On December 27 2011 22:43 writer22816 wrote: We don't play games like BW, CS 1.6, Quake, Fallout 1/2, PST, Baldur's Gate etc because of nostalgia. We play them because they're GREAT games, superior to most if not all of the games on the market today.
Labeling these games as outdated makes about as much sense as labeling classical music outdated. For that reason I also do not think we are the last generation.
Another question that I have often pondered about is: when will we start seeing games of BW-quality again? Given the recent trend of virtually all modern games being easy to play, targeted towards the casual gamer etc one cannot help but wonder if we will ever see a masterpiece like BW again. This issue is of course linked with the future of eSports as a whole. Personally I feel that, as video games lose their negative social stigma, and as the idea of competitive gaming becomes more accepted, eventually we will start seeing far more truly great games again.
Nowadays we get games that easily rival hollywood blockbusters, that allow you to connect and play with people all over the world in a relatively painless fashion (sorry but SC:BW's Battle.net interface is just disgusting).
SC:BW Battle.net interface is absolutly amazing, it is simple and efficient. This is one of the main reason of bw's success, you can find games in like 3s. You just lost all your credibility lol. I mean just take a look at bnet 2.0... haha
No, we are not the last generation. We are just simply paving the way for more people to realize that graphics does not define the quality of games. If anything, more attention to graphics usually lead to worse gameplay and other aspects of the game.
The weird thing is, for me at least, I love the SC:BW graphics. It's so in contrast with reality and has a distinct artistic swing to it which makes it extremely enjoyable to watch. Almost like seeing comic books come to life. The problem with newer graphics for me is the same with modern CGI. They try to focus too much on making it seem realistic, when in the end it's still a game and everyone knows it's a game they are playing. You won't be magically sucked into the gaming world so why not use the imagination to create something utterly mindblowing? I'm not saying I don't like newer graphics, some of it is absolutely stunning, but so much more could be done.
I guess the newer generation graphics with the improved textures are perhaps less of a strain to the eye, but then looking at a computer screen doesn't really make that go away anyway.
On December 27 2011 22:43 writer22816 wrote: We don't play games like BW, CS 1.6, Quake, Fallout 1/2, PST, Baldur's Gate etc because of nostalgia. We play them because they're GREAT games, superior to most if not all of the games on the market today.
Labeling these games as outdated makes about as much sense as labeling classical music outdated. For that reason I also do not think we are the last generation.
Another question that I have often pondered about is: when will we start seeing games of BW-quality again? Given the recent trend of virtually all modern games being easy to play, targeted towards the casual gamer etc one cannot help but wonder if we will ever see a masterpiece like BW again. This issue is of course linked with the future of eSports as a whole. Personally I feel that, as video games lose their negative social stigma, and as the idea of competitive gaming becomes more accepted, eventually we will start seeing far more truly great games again.
Nowadays we get games that easily rival hollywood blockbusters, that allow you to connect and play with people all over the world in a relatively painless fashion (sorry but SC:BW's Battle.net interface is just disgusting).
SC:BW Battle.net interface is absolutly amazing, it is simple and efficient. This is one of the main reason of bw's success, you can find games in like 3s. You just lost all your credibility lol. I mean just take a look at bnet 2.0... haha
Bnet 2.0 took everything that made Bnet 1.0 great and threw it out the window. It is really ugly but it is practical and easy to use which should be the emphasis when making a interface for making multiplayer match making.
The main problem i have is they keep making the games shorter, in order to please the casual community. As much as i liked skyrim, it was a bunch of short stories put in 1 huge game which had no link to each other. But that whole series always had appeal to me due to the fact of community based mods.
Also there's a weird conflation of "complicated" with "fun" and "casual" with "unfun".
Complicated mechanics can be fun. They simply can. BW is obviously fun. Full flight sims are fun. A "high skill cap" is a gameplay mechanic that can be fun. But it's not inherently fun.
Simplified mechanics can be fun. They simply can. Games like Angry Birds and Bastion are fun. Making a game have fewer complicating gameplay mechanics is a way to focus the game on its core systems. It's a tool that game designers for making games great.
This also means that if either choice does not work towards the game, it can be the wrong choice. Games can be inappropriately complicated or have no depth. But think of many of the best indie games or even some mainstream titles that just break a genre down to a single core system and just master it (maybe something like Super Meat Boy).
Some people see BW and SC2 and put forth the obvious truism ("SC2 is the easier game"). The issue is that this "casual" argument is not an end to itself. It doesn't prove anything. It doesn't even mean anything. The real question is: Is SC2, or whatever other game, so simplified that it cannot be fun to play or cannot be enjoyable to watch?
Because if the answer is "well, no, it is fun to play in its own way and fun to watch in its own way," then we've stumbled onto the true issue. It's not that SC2 or whatever other "modern" game is objectively worse, it's that you subjectively prefer another game. Partially that's due to nostalgia. Partially that's due to your own personal preferences. Partially that's due to the people that play each of the games. Whatever the reasons, those are all totally valid.
Preferences between what we enjoy to play and enjoy to watch are all great. You have to understand though that the whole "they don't make games like they used to" argument is really just an old person shaking their first at kids and lamenting about their "damn rap music".
Every generation thinks their TV, cartoons, music, and games were better than the current generation. All generations think that the next generation is losing their morals and becoming godless. Each generation thinks that when they grew up was a more peaceful time.
It's just natural. It's an effect of our biases coloring our experience. Many of these games that many of us are saying are classics that will never be topped are games we grew up playing when we were very young. Our formative gaming years. The years we played games with our parents and friends and when games were still new and fresh and exciting.
We've grown up, we've gotten a fair bit more cynical and a fair bit more wise. We don't quite see the world through "OMG AWESOME" and "OMG DESPAIR" lenses, but instead we see the world as a gradient of grays. It's natural then that the things that make us happy make us slightly less happy than when we were kids, and the things that made us sad make us slightly less sad than we were kids. This is perspective that kids simply cannot understand.
That's not to say that having these preferences is wrong. I'll probably always consider the SNES to be the greatest gaming system in history, and I'll never stop trying to convince people that will listen that 2D (or maybe pseudo-3D with cel shading) RPGs can make a comeback if someone gave them a shot. Those are my gaming preferences. I'll always be more of a Goldeneye guy than a MW or Halo guy. But that's ok. I'm not going to hoist my personal experiences onto others and try to convince them that they're somehow objectively better than theirs. It's a religious argument, and it's fruitless.
I greatly prefer shared nostalgia and reminiscing instead of inter-generational dick measuring.
This belief that all games these days have no content and are all about the look is a load of rubbish. Just because COD from MW2 onwards didn't care about its customer or story or gameplay doesn't mean all games don't, or moreso that the customer doesn't.
Batman Arkham Asylum - ground breaking game, awesome story and it had the luxury of amazing graphics. It didn't put the graphics first it's just that better graphics are part and parcel of the evolution of games. Always have been.
Starcraft 1 was a niche game just as Starcraft 2 is. FPS still dominates the markets and because FPS ships in an awful condition, crysis 2, Cod series after 4 to name but a few, people have got into this belief that all games are designed with the flashy graphics over the content. This isn't true, this has never been true.
This post brings a certain incident to mind. I was buying this game from my usual dealer and as expected we were talking about games, he was an old school gamer, he was 30 years old....and he said "nowadays you kids like graphics more than anything else..back then it was all about the gameplay.". That was back in 1999.
I started playing SCBW in 2010ish. Yeah, I played the campaigns a couple years after the game first came out, but it was a vod of nony that motivated me to pick it up again and try to play against other people. So it's really not nostalgia, but a search for a challenge. I'm competitive in just about everything I do, so SCBW was the way to go. It was the most hardcore thing I could do.
I played SC2 for about 5 months after it came out, and I had to abandon it. The game, while it had better AI, had lag in the mouse control, so it was actually harder to control the units and draw boxes. The maps have imbalances that can lead to pure build order wins/losses. None of the units have any kind of "wow" factor, and any that used to got nerfed. If the team that patches SC2 had worked on SCBW, we wouldn't have siege tanks, reavers, or defilers. MBS took me out of the game, it just seemed like it played itself, which is no fun. Having to tell SCVs to mine and F2 to my macro is part of what makes the game fun. And winning a SCBW game is SO much more rewarding. Plus, no lan latency. That was some b*******.
The bnet1 interface is vastly superior to bnet2 in terms of function. It looks old, but that's fine. It doesn't require any processing power to render, which makes it fast and clean. Plus, it's full screen it easy to read with high contrast, as opposed to bnet2 which is all flashy windows and white text over a tiny light blue window. It just doesn't work as well.
Gameplay will always prevail. Graphics, franchises, buzz are temporary, but in the end every kid wants the pure fun of gameplay, not just eye candy. Keep in mind that our generation is not the oldest gaming generation, and we did pick up much older games, whenever they were fun. So yeah, old or new, the gameplay is gonna be the decisive factor. Always.
On December 28 2011 00:49 whatusername wrote:
Is your password 'whatpassword' ? Congrats for 1k posts.
On December 28 2011 01:40 Purind wrote: We're seeing lots of Indie developers creating games with bad graphics succeed.
Indie developers are creating games that rely more on aesthetics and art direction rather than just rendering everything as realistically as possible. Good Graphics doesn't mean that you have to have more texture, polygons, better lighting and water effects. Art direction and Aesthetics are what makes Good Graphics.
There is a hipster syndrome and nostalgia involved in anyone who's been into gaming for a while. However, it's not just that. Most of the new games are designed so that 8 year old kids can buy them and beat them and they will never persuade me to play them just because of graphics.
Before, players designed games for other players. Now, games are designed for the customer. I choose to be the player, not a retard sitting at a game that plays itself and drool over graphics.
On December 28 2011 01:40 Purind wrote: We're seeing lots of Indie developers creating games with bad graphics succeed.
Indie developers are creating games that rely more on aesthetics and art direction rather than just rendering everything as realistically as possible. Good Graphics doesn't mean that you have to have more texture, polygons, better lighting and water effects. Art direction and Aesthetics are what makes Good Graphics.
Can't forget about good sound. Most sound design on games now is very dry and uninspired. Everything kinda has the same basic sound now, whereas everything really popped from the speakers in SCBW. You know how FPS games abandoned color and went for gray EVERYTHING? Same happened to sound design.
I'd like to believe you, but if we take a look at metacritic, MW3 is sitting at a comfortable 88%... while Half Life 2 is at 96%, far greater, it still stands that the critics give free passes to hyped games, despite them perhaps not being the best.
I'd just like to remember that when you're looking Metacritic scores up, always take a good look at the user score. The CoD series is a good example of this. The user score of their recent games goes well under 5 (out of 10).
It's hard to be nostalgic about something that is good right now. I mean that in terms of graphics too. I am watching games every week that were played that day. It's not like I'm looking at a VHS from the 80s and judging it only against other things of its time...
Honestly, StarCraft has a certain style of graphics that are enjoyable. They're not popular now (and honestly a lot of the new styles don't look that good to me), but just like pixel art they aren't necessarily bad. If something is old it doesn't automatically mean I can't judge it against today's standards and still like it. Shakespearean plays are old, is everyone just nostalgic for them? Is it just nostalgia that we read Shakespeare in its original forms, instead of updating the language to be more modern (at least in serious literature classes)? No, because you lose a lot. The graphics of Brood War have a lot of big advantages over the graphics of modern games. It's much easier to see each individual unit, the colours are more vivid, each explosion and death looks as important as it is. In modern games I find the units are small and their death animations understated. I can't tell what's going on. There's a hail of fire and then I'm not sure what happened but one side didn't die maybe? Blue goon soup on the ground is very helpful in seeing just what was lost. A tiny splat of a tiny marine on 1080p or whatever monitor looks like nothing happened. Maybe a bug was squashed. Even Broodlings in BW have more impressive deaths. Actually, it's not just modern games that had the problem of the understated death animation. Pretty much the entire command and conquer series (well, the 1 or 2 old ones I played) had this problem. A tiny insignificant thing died and there was no way to care because it just kind of flopped over and most of the time you did not even notice.
I think there are legitimate arguments to be made about what makes good graphics, but higher resolution and more polygons or an entirely different style (as the case was between BW, WC3, and SC2) are not by themselves good arguments. Between BW and SC2, it's a matter of opinion and what you look for in graphics. To me, SC2 on low settings is butt ugly and can hardly even be called more than an alpha version of a game (and yet many pros play on this setting because it has inherent advantages), and the max settings, while reasonably executed, have the disadvantages I listed above and don't really look pretty to me anyway. BW on the other hand is quite visceral and colourful and I genuinely like it and would probably play games with those graphics even if they were released today. Honestly all the new sidescrollers like donkey kong and mario that came out of wii would have looked better with pixels, and the 3d backgrounds and stuff were just overwhelming and distracting from the action. That's not nostalgia, it's literally just kind of nauseating to play when the art team packs as much random shit in the background as they can instead of letting it be a background. Half the time it was hard to tell what was a part of the game and what was just extraneous uninteractive content. Nostalgic? No. In art we have a word for putting random shit in something just because you can. It's called "busy" looking. Trim and purposeful usually makes the best art.
EPT
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