Video Games Have Become More Dangerous Than Ever

[Spacescifi]

 

I prefer the games of decades ago to modern ones.

Why? Time. In general, games of the past had to respect the gamer's time more because the computers had limited processing and graphics.

Remember the days when you went to the video store for cartridges or Playstation CD's to rent and you could beat a game in only an hour's time?

 

I also think graphics are overrated, some of the games I enjoyed most were only 16 bit machine games, but the game mechanics made me like them anyway.

Imagine what a game could be if a designer went with 16 bit graphics while using modern computing processing to enhance the game overall?

Imagine a space sim like elite dangerous but fully newtonian that did not waste your time needlessly, and had a plot to go with it?

You could do it with time acceleraton enabled just fine.

One could combine the best of still screen visual adventure novels while combining 2D platformer gameplay, and also 3D newtonian flight for different segments of the game.

Some of my favorite games had features similar to this with mutiple nodes of play.

You may discuss.

Edited November 16, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

Yes, they were much better.

Spoiler

 

[IncongruousGoat]

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

I prefer the games of decades ago to modern ones.

I don't.

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Why? Time. In general, games of the past had to respect the gamer's time more because the computers had limited processing and graphics.

I think this is just the rose-tinted nostalgia goggles talking. Hasn't been my experience of older titles at all.

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

I also think graphics are overrated, some of the games I enjoyed most were only 16 bit machine games, but the game mechanics made me like them anyway.

Not exclusive to older games. Look at games like Papers, Please, Factorio, and Return of the Obra Dinn. Especially Return of the Obra Dinn. All very high quality, and all with rather low graphical quality compared to modern tripe-A games. Or KSP, even. Sure, it's better than any game you'd find 30 years ago, but by modern standards it doesn't look particularly good. This is especially true if you go back a few versions, before the recent part/texture overhauling. Or heck, if you go way back to the pre-.18 look. Didn't stop people from picking up the game. Plenty of indie games have gone for the retro aesthetic have made it big... and plenty that have tried for that aesthetic have flopped. Graphical quality is not negatively correlated with quality of mechanics.

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Imagine what a game could be if a designer went with 16 bit graphics while using modern computing processing to enhance the game overall?

See above. Already been done.

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

One could combine the best of still screen visual adventure novels while combining 2D platformer gameplay, and also 3D newtonian flight for different segments of the game.

Your gripe with Elite: Dangerous seems to be that it didn't do the one thing it sets out to do well, and your solution is to have it try and do more stuff?

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Some of my favorite games had features similar to this with mutiple nodes of play.

It's not sufficient to say that such games are fun, since they're typically hard to develop. It's hard enough to make a good game that only tries to do one thing. It's an entirely different level of difficult to have a game that does several radically different things without any of said things feeling out of place or notably worse-designed than the others.

The problem, I think, is not that games have been getting worse over the years. Rather, it's that there are simply a lot more games on the market, which makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff, as well as giving the impression of a flood of terrible titles.

EDIT: Also, why do you use the word "dangerous"? You seem to be arguing that they're worse, but a bad game isn't necessarily dangerous (and a dangerous game isn't necessarily badly made).

Edited November 16, 2019 by IncongruousGoat

[cubinator]

Games that are just thin fronts for the people making them to make money suck.

I don't know that I can accurately say video games are a form of art, but they often have many strong aspects of art. Games that are like art are wonderful - games that are just the devs having an idea and going for it, and sharing it with the world. Those games exist in new and old times. And there were still bad videogames back then, it's just we liked playing the good ones better.

 

Nothing like a good game of Xevious, though.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Or KSP, even. Sure, it's better than any game you'd find 30 years ago, but by modern standards it doesn't look particularly good.

It's a game about colored cones and cylinders with background of dust.

[Superfluous J]

8 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

In general, games of the past had to respect the gamer's time more

Tell that to all the unskippable cutscenes in most every game that's more than 5 years old.

EDIT:

..and the lack of saving anywhere. Oh yeah respect my time by making me hoof it back to that fight I've failed the past 8 times.

Edited November 16, 2019 by 5thHorseman

[kerbiloid]

... and to the endless attempts to reload a ZX Spectrum game from a cassette recorder because it restarted that Spectrum due to some bug.

Edited November 16, 2019 by kerbiloid

[TheSaint]

M.U.L.E. was the greatest video game ever made. It was all downhill from there.

10 hours ago, cubinator said:

Nothing like a good game of Xevious, though.

Oh, man. I dropped so many quarters into Xevious. If I had invested all of the quarters I dropped into Defender, Xevious, and Gauntlet, I could probably have been independently wealthy at this point.

[Nuke]

old timey game design had its merits. with regards to elite dangerous, i think it has more or less the same problems as elite 2 and ffe. granted i was only able to play it for an hour or two before i gave up. needless to say after hours mining metals, on landing i got the landing gear mixed up with jettison cargo, not only did i lose several hours of work i got a fine on top of it. i gave ffe several days, and i hadn't teched up in any meaningful way. all these games had a huge problem with grind. its at least an order of magnitude worse than the original elite. this doesn't have anything to do with the flight mechanics. in the original elite i could have a ship turn a sizable profit in a few runs and you would be fast on your way to having a ship that could explore other avenues of play. subsequent games i had to scrape by on hair thin margins. games like this really need a grind slider in the difficulty section, kerbal has one, and its nice to be able to shut down the grind on subsequent playthroughs to save time. games should not feel like work. 

the op's point about 'respect for time' is highly valid. the old standard of 40-60 hours of gameplay which was a common rule of thumb in 90s games. its a good rule because it suits both developers and players alike. if you give a gamer a game that never ends, they arent going to have time to play new games and that hurts sales and the industry as a whole. its also bad for the gamer because you burn out long before experiencing everything the game has to offer. the developer can get around their half of the problem by going f2p to make up for fewer titles by more nickel and dime payments. f2p really isnt new. in the 90s we had shareware and demos, it was so ubiquitous that i think 75% of my cd collection was purchased because i liked the demo/shareware version. dlc isnt new either, in that we had official (and in some cases 3rd party) expansion packs filling the same role. what f2p usually does differently is intentionally make games grindy to improve the bottom line at the expense of the gamer. its gone from number of games you buy to how long you play our game. after my first experience with f2p (mechwarrior online, which i still play out of sunk cost fallacy) i have decided that i will not play any more f2p games.

another huge problems modern games have is the lack of diversity. too many established genres and conformity to other games. adoption of systems that have become standard issue (achievements for example) which can be exploited to cover up bad/lazy core game mechanics. abundant asset reuse and use of stock assets make games look the same. games on a handful of game engines that all seem to share a similar look and feel to other sibling games on the same engine. niche genres are not taken seriously at all, and if you are a fan of those you are lucky you get a 3rd rate f2p or maybe an indie game. 

one final problem id like to touch on is the politicising of games, which i wont go into in any detail because of this forum's policy on the subject. like all media games have become another mouthpiece for various forms of ideological extremists. this has been a problem with tv and movies too, but its exceptionally alarming in games because of the appeal of younger audiences. id like to name some examples but im leaving them out because i dont want to start a forum war. 

Edited November 16, 2019 by Nuke

[Spacescifi]

14 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

I don't.

I think this is just the rose-tinted nostalgia goggles talking. Hasn't been my experience of older titles at all.

Not exclusive to older games. Look at games like Papers, Please, Factorio, and Return of the Obra Dinn. Especially Return of the Obra Dinn. All very high quality, and all with rather low graphical quality compared to modern tripe-A games. Or KSP, even. Sure, it's better than any game you'd find 30 years ago, but by modern standards it doesn't look particularly good. This is especially true if you go back a few versions, before the recent part/texture overhauling. Or heck, if you go way back to the pre-.18 look. Didn't stop people from picking up the game. Plenty of indie games have gone for the retro aesthetic have made it big... and plenty that have tried for that aesthetic have flopped. Graphical quality is not negatively correlated with quality of mechanics.

See above. Already been done.

Your gripe with Elite: Dangerous seems to be that it didn't do the one thing it sets out to do well, and your solution is to have it try and do more stuff?

It's not sufficient to say that such games are fun, since they're typically hard to develop. It's hard enough to make a good game that only tries to do one thing. It's an entirely different level of difficult to have a game that does several radically different things without any of said things feeling out of place or notably worse-designed than the others.

The problem, I think, is not that games have been getting worse over the years. Rather, it's that there are simply a lot more games on the market, which makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff, as well as giving the impression of a flood of terrible titles.

EDIT: Also, why do you use the word "dangerous"? You seem to be arguing that they're worse, but a bad game isn't necessarily dangerous (and a dangerous game isn't necessarily badly made).

The games that I am referring to that I admire are the console games of the 90's.

The original 2-D Sonic series I think is a prime example of a game that is good that does not take too long to play.

Other games of notable mention that had mutiple modes of play were the Star Wars series for the SNES. Unfortunately that series took a long time to actually beat. But it was notable for having 2-D platforming and 3-D flight in one game, albeit was just airplanes in space... but still it was a rare feature for it's time and still is as far as I know.

The danger of video games nowadays is the theft of valuable time. I used to play Oolite, which is a modernized clone of the original elite with many upgrades. But I grew to dislike it since it is basically a huge grind. You can spend hours and still not get paid well enough. And even if you enable massive cheats then all you have left to do is kill stuff.

As for game redesign in general, I think it would be a simple thing to include mutiple modes of play in a a game,  since even old games did it in the past.

The Star Trek TNG Sega Genesis game of the 90's (much better than the SNES clone) had RPG elements that allowed you to make choices that had some effect on the player's game. Basically, you had the option to at least talk your way out of starship scuffles, and if you chose to blast away every Romulan Warbird you ever encountered, you would run out of torpedoes sooner or later, your ship would accumulate damage, and you would pay by having to wait for repairs. On top of that, hostile vessels can warp in withput warning and fire on you during repairs... assuming your not orbiting a planet.

The game rewards being diplomatic, since then enemies at least give you the choice to talk things out. Be hostile and they will shoot you on sight, no talking at all.

The easiest thing to add in any game is a choice tree/rpg element. All it is is still screen pics with choices, which effect what level you go to. Simple. Or beyond that it could effect NPC behavior, which may be a bit harder to implement, but surely doable.

Even TNG on the Sega Genesis did that... albeit in a very limited way. Be nice and enemies can be talked out of shooting you. Have a regular pattern of blowing then away on sight and they will start firing on your spaceship on sight.

The game even allowed for a single save.

 

Edited November 16, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Superfluous J]

I find it odd that people on the KSP forums are complaining that games take up 1000s of hours of play time. That is a huge plus in my book. If that's what you're talking about when you say a game doesn't respect your time - that it's so engaging that you play it to the exclusion of all else for months or years - then I have to say more power to developers who make those games.

[Spacescifi]

58 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

I find it odd that people on the KSP forums are complaining that games take up 1000s of hours of play time. That is a huge plus in my book. If that's what you're talking about when you say a game doesn't respect your time - that it's so engaging that you play it to the exclusion of all else for months or years - then I have to say more power to developers who make those games.

 

The problem is most of that time is spent game grinding nowadays. Grinding JUST to beat the game. The alternative is pay to win instead of grind for days to win.... which is the STO and Star Citizen way apparently.

 

No matter how good a game is though, 8 hours of gaming a week is arguably excessive.... but nowadays that and more is required.... or else you can't beat the game in some cases.

 

For example, one guy did a speed run of No Man's Sky, skipping stuff he could explore just to beat the game. How long did it take him to beat the game?

Over 30 hours, so basically almost 2 days! Playing virtually nonstop!

 

That is ridiculous I say.

 

But developers will continue this trend so long they still can...

Edited November 16, 2019 by Spacescifi

[GDJ]

Look at Skyrim: It's 8 years old and still going.......
That's the true definition of "Grinding".

[StrandedonEarth]

I remember the old Ultima game on the NES, which advertised that it would take at least 100 hours to beat the game. I think there was one thing to unlock that simply wouldn’t until enough time had been out in to the game. 

Side note: the game came with a map, which in our case had fallen across an ashtray, leaving a scorch mark that happened to be on a useless island in the middle of the ocean. The lore became that that was where the “Tiltowait” nuclear blast spell was tested...

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

Grinding JUST to beat the game. The alternative is pay to win instead of grind for days to win....

Another alternative is to not play games you don't enjoy. One man's grind is another man's gameplay. For the most part I enjoyed No Man's Sky though I've no desire to play again. I don't play any game where you can (read: must) pay to progress faster.

I'll personally never understand the concept of playing a game for dozens of hundreds of hours and not enjoying it. If I put more than 100-200 hours into a game it's on my all time favorites list. If I don't like a game after 10 hours I'm cutting my losses and moving on.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, 5thHorseman said:

Another alternative is to not play games you don't enjoy. One man's grind is another man's gameplay. For the most part I enjoyed No Man's Sky though I've no desire to play again. I don't play any game where you can (read: must) pay to progress faster.

I'll personally never understand the concept of playing a game for dozens of hundreds of hours and not enjoying it. If I put more than 100-200 hours into a game it's on my all time favorites list. If I don't like a game after 10 hours I'm cutting my losses and moving on.

 

Grinding on difficult games had more to do with pride for me, though I cannot speak for everyone.

Grinding on games I enjoy means they must have goid character interaction

Nonetheless, it is an illusory form of success even if and when someone wins.

That is why I think games have become unhealthily long. Since unlike activities performed or progressing to 'levels' in real life, video games seldom give players any permanent 'buffs' in real life.

At best they are a dopamine temporary happy boost that goes away in seconds.

 

 

Ideally,I like games that are either intriguing, teach a lesson, or are an adventure.

 

No mattee what they shoukd be short.

This is one such game that can be beat in an hour and is intriguing.

 

https://pinheadgames.itch.io/forever-space

Edited November 17, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Waxing_Kibbous]

4 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

The problem is most of that time is spent game grinding nowadays. Grinding JUST to beat the game.

Looks at hours spent in that dinosaur forest in FF3... A game that cost like $80 in 90's dollars btw, I hope I got some play time from it.

I'm a gamer since the Atari 2600 days, I think the state of gaming today is pretty decent. A lot of old games had grinding, OG Zelda you to had to grind to get rupees, Fantasia was nothing but grind- basically any game that had a trade and/or XP system had some grind. Nostalgia is a powerful lens, but eventually I sold my consoles and games to make a PC rig and don't regret it one bit. Sure there is a lot of crap out there, but the gems of today are as good or better than the classics.

Edited November 17, 2019 by Waxing_Kibbous

[kerbiloid]

Also there is always the Dwarf Fortress.

[έķ νίĻĻάίή]

Honestly though, I prefer ksp style games more than anything. No objective unless you count missions or “complete the tech tree”. You can spend how long you want AND you can mod it

[Nuke]

19 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I find it odd that people on the KSP forums are complaining that games take up 1000s of hours of play time. That is a huge plus in my book. If that's what you're talking about when you say a game doesn't respect your time - that it's so engaging that you play it to the exclusion of all else for months or years - then I have to say more power to developers who make those games.

i think there is a fine line between replayability, and introducing artificially gruelling grind so you can claim higher value over other games. games like kerbal and minecraft certainly have a lot of replayability, but if you are a completionist you can get to the end of the game in a sane amount of time. if it takes you months or years to get to the end of the game, you are likely to burn our before experiencing everything the game has to offer, and therefore the games have less value per time played. 

Edited November 17, 2019 by Nuke

[KSK]

Re: old games respecting your time more. Go look up the term ‘Nintendo Hard’

Re: games as art (good) vs games as thin fronts to make money (bad) Totally depends on the game. I give you Dwarf Fortress as an example of game=art, which, out of the box (as it were) has some biggish flaws in my opinion. On the other hand, I play a couple of mobile ‘premium currency available for real money’ games which are clearly examples of game=thin front to make money. But I don’t spend money on them and they’re pleasant enough, if not particularly deep, games.

Re: Elite Dangerous with full Newtonian mechanics. It’s called Frontier (Elite 2). And honestly? The full Newtonian part was  kind of overrated. Combat became rather dull (at my level of skill anyway) - it wasn’t so much artful dogfighting using all six degrees of freedom so much as a series of high-speed gun passes. Intra-System travel, atmospheric flight, docking etc? I’d do all that manually on occasion but if I actually wanted to get on and play the game, the Autopilot was my first, last and best friend.

Re. Grind. I find this to be a very subjective and unhelpful term. In general though I don’t much care if a game is repetitive in places of playing through those repetitions is fun. I think there’s a subset of gamers who miss the part where a game can be mostly about the journey rather than the destination. 

 

[KSK]

On 11/16/2019 at 6:37 PM, Nuke said:

another huge problems modern games have is the lack of diversity. too many established genres and conformity to other games

I feel that at least some of this is down to player pressure. If a game in a particular genre tries to break away from certain expectations in that genre, it can often get pilloried by the more vocal elements of the fan base.

Try and do something a bit different and a recurring comment on your official game forum will likely be something along the lines of ‘don’t get me wrong - I love this game but it would be so much better if it had x, y and z features.’ Those features tending to turn the game in question into yet-another-genre-clone.

Then you get the WoWification of many genres. I use WoW as an example that I’m familiar with. I enjoyed it a lot back in the day and am dabbling in WoW Classic now, but not every game needs to hew to the same principles.

There will be a starter zone. Game concepts will be spoonfed one at a time. There will be a clearly marked progression path. Stick to that path and you will (mostly) not be allowed to fail. You will need the +1 club of kobold bashing to defeat the Blue Kobolds in a reasonable time. Once you have defeated the Blue Kobolds you will gain the +2 club of kobold bashing which you will need to vanquish the dastardly Red Kobolds.

Mind you, I’m definitely soured by the Elite Dangerous forums. One comment that I particularly recall was a request for a tutorial on how to leave a space station, including undocking etc. This despite the fact that when you’re docked (and not doing anything else like trading or refitting, there’s a prominent menu in the middle of your screen with ‘Launch’ as its first option.

Reading and a wee bit of thinking - is it too much to ask for?

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, KSK said:

Mind you, I’m definitely soured by the Elite Dangerous forums. One comment that I particularly recall was a request for a tutorial on how to leave a space station, including undocking etc. This despite the fact that when you’re docked (and not doing anything else like trading or refitting, there’s a prominent menu in the middle of your screen with ‘Launch’ as its first option.

Maybe he thought that this menu obscures the big red launch button.

[KSK]

Possibly. After I got accused of being elitist about the issue, I didn't bother going back to the thread.

 

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, KSK said:

Possibly. After I got accused of being elitist about the issue, I didn't bother going back to the thread.

 

Were you also accused of being Dangerous?