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[NW_Kohaku]

Also I'm generally dissapointed in games that are gyped up because of, most recently, Spore. That was kind of sad to play when I got it. It's like someone offered you  luxury sports car but then stripped out all of the luxury because they thought it might confuse learner drivers. And yes that was their justification for at least only having one kind of sight mode (as opposed to heat-vision, echolocation etc), because people might "think their graphics card was damaged". Seriously.

As much as I agree with what you said here, my biggest problem is that Spore also failed to deliver on its most basic promise. I didn't really feel like I had shaped anything about my species beyond its appearance. Sure, I got to make it a meat eater, I got to make it aggressive, but these are the thinnest shell of what I had created. I gave my species wings it didn't use, I gave it poison spitters it didn't use. Why didn't I have the tribe of ultra-violent flying poison spitting bad-asses I had imagined?

Its not that the older games were better, its just that they didn't have all the glitz that you can have with the modern systems, so they had to be more creative. There are some exceptions, for example, I fully think that Civ 4 is far superior to Civ 2. Civ 3 was crap, but that was mainly growing pains as they introduced resources and territory. Plus the golden ages in 3 weren't very good. I think 4 is better than 5, but that's just because of all the stuff in the expansion packs. I like the changes they introduced in 5, and feel that it will be better than 4 when it gets all its expansion packs. Its a game that's evolving and figuring out what are the best parts to add, and what needs to be changed.

Then you have stuff like Fallout 3. They took the most superficial parts of Fallout, the visual aspects of it, and shoved it into the same engine that Oblivion ran on. Oblivion felt like nothing more than a prettier version of Morrowind to me. Sure, there were some small changes, but overall, it felt like Morrowind. Skyrim has the same feel, like a prettier Oblivion. Sure, they've fixed some parts, but it feels really minor. Well, the loss of attributes and move to nothing but skills is a big change, but I feel its a step backwards. One of the core parts of RPGs, IMO, is the separation of character and player. Not only are there things the character can do that the player can't, the character might be smarter or dumber, the character might be stronger or weaker. However, back to Fallout, that respect of the character's attributes is lost. One of the things that annoyed me was having to squint to see tripwires when my character has a high perception, and therefore should be able to see them, and I, as the player, should have them highlighted for me. And on the subject of intelligence, well, compare these videos.
Stupid in Fallout 1
Stupid in New Vegas

Once again, its the most superficial overlay. In Fallout 1, all you could do is grunt, and the Overseer is speaking slowly and getting frustrated when you don't understand. In New Vegas, you can respond with speech that makes you look stupid, yes, but the scientist doesn't react like he's talking to a moron. He reacts like he's talking to a person of normal intelligence. To me, that's the problem with modern games. They don't put the attention to detail. And its the many small things that will eventually chip away at your suspension of disbelief until you lose it. Or at least its that way for me.

So in other words, old is better. 

No, older games were more creative in how they presented the game, because they didn't have the graphical capabilities that modern systems do. Modern games seem to be glitz over story. But there are exceptions. Dragon Age:Origins, while it had a few flaws, is a truly enjoyable RPG in the vein of great classic RPGs. The Mass Effect games have a truly engaging story, with an amazingly in depth world, despite its few flaws. And going back, Baldur's Gate had flaws, X-COM had flaws, the Ultima games had flaws. It is impossible to create a game without flaws. If the strength of your story, characters, and world outweigh the flaws, you have a good game. The popular games these days are mostly glitz and graphics with weak stories, worlds and characters. The only thing in Skyrim, for example, that I have no complaint whatsoever with is the scale of dragons. I've only put a few hours into the game, and feel they're a little too easy, but I hope that'll change as time goes on, you know the sorting algorithm of evil and all.

Yesteryear had as many bad games as there are today, it's just that we tend to look at the past with rose tinted glasses. Speak with any adult and they will consistently tell you that music/TV/radio/whatever was much better on the old days. And their parent say the exact same thing about older stuff. Really it's a constant of life that old people complain about younglins and their satanic immoral hobbies. It's unfortunate because we are currently on the beginning of the golden age of gaming, see: Dwarf Fortress. This game would be impossible 20 years ago.

You see, the problem I have with this exchange is that Dizzyelk wasn't saying just that "all new games suck", he offered up concrete examples. 

If you go to the Elder Scrolls forums, and talk with the people there, you'll see plenty of complaints about how Morrowind was the high point of the series, and how the quests in general have become shallower and shallower as voice acting was added in, including more and more famous actors whose time costs lots of money. 

In Morrowind, when they had speech trees, they didn't have to pay actors to all sound the same speaking them, it was all text, and they could have very deep and involved speech trees that reacted to your character statements.  After they focused everything on making the game for the XBox 360 player who will play Skyrim for a week and has no interest in the mods that Bethesda basically ripped off, and declared as the official features they used to make their new game different from the games before it, then all the choices had to be tailored to fit a bloated speech library, which generally meant you had no options whatsoever in quests other than to simply ignore the quest markers and not complete them.  All text was the same, completely regardless of what kind of character you were trying to play, which runs completely counter to the core idea of Elder Scrolls, which is that you were a total blank slate into which you could pour your own idea of what sort of character you wanted to be. 

In favor of the pretty sounds and pretty graphics, they produced a still-buggy game that completely compromised its own core gameplay enjoyment that it was supposedly offering to the player.  (Much like "Survival Horror" games that fail to be scary and make survival an easy and forgone conclusion...)

So yes, he's got a completely valid point when he shows you how Fallout 1 had really deep and involved conversation trees that actually reacted to what sort of character you were.

In fact, Arcanum went much further than that, and went out of its way to provide several completely different ways you could play through the entire game.  You could not just go as a wizard, a technological genius from the magic vs. science war that was going on in the background of the game, or a melee specialist, you could also go as a thief who simply evaded all the problems and stole the things they needed from the villains instead of killing them for it, and you could go as a pure diplomat who talked their way out of all their problems.  It was, in fact, entirely possible to talk the final boss out of his plans and into defeating himself.  That was because the game was dedicated to the notion of giving you as many alternate ways to play the game as possible.  It was its core gameplay that it offered players, and players loved the game for it.

Now, you see Deus Ex, which had positive crap graphics but much the same style of "almost any playstyle can potentially win, and there are at least 4 ways to solve any problem, from violence to stealth to technological cunning."  Then Deus Ex Revolutions, which is a supposed sequel that supposedly tried to recapture that, but where you still have to fight all bosses in run-and-gun battles with no options for hackers or stealthers to gain advantages their purely combat-oriented counterparts don't have. 

Now, take for example, EYE: Divine Cybermancy - a game with utterly shit graphics, buggy as anything, and no play balance that was relatively recently released by some French indie band of developers.  It's basically more a successor to the spirit of Deus Ex than Revolutions, since it manages to put together a game that offers very severely different types of playstyles into competition with one another for means to achieve your goals. 

The real problem here isn't so much "new things suck" as it is "AAA games that are developed for appeal to the widest audience possible tend to lack all game depth", while the games that show real innovation and depth tend to be the games that are developed by smaller indie developers that are running on a shoestring budget, have crap graphics, tons of bugs, and not so much play balance, but whose ideas are far, far better than the stale, bland gruel of "ideas" that have been focus-tested to the largest audience possible because AAA developers need to make up their money spent on obsessively advanced graphics and Hollywood star voice actors by selling no less than 10 million units in the first week of release alone, and are going to do that on promos alone, not good game play or developing a dedicated user base.

[Loud Whispers]

Speak with any adult and they will consistently tell you that music/TV/radio/whatever was much better on the old days.

Bah! You kids and your fancy pop! Music has been no good since the Baroque!

And you're probably older than me...

I quite disagree, its been nothing but a downhill slide ever since the first caveman banged two rocks together, and created the only TRUE music.

Quite. "Duh Duh Deh" was always my favorite.

Meh, new age mammal music that's never been up to par with the call of lizards.

[sjm9876]

Also I'm generally dissapointed in games that are gyped up because of, most recently, Spore. That was kind of sad to play when I got it. It's like someone offered you  luxury sports car but then stripped out all of the luxury because they thought it might confuse learner drivers. And yes that was their justification for at least only having one kind of sight mode (as opposed to heat-vision, echolocation etc), because people might "think their graphics card was damaged". Seriously.

As much as I agree with what you said here, my biggest problem is that Spore also failed to deliver on its most basic promise. I didn't really feel like I had shaped anything about my species beyond its appearance. Sure, I got to make it a meat eater, I got to make it aggressive, but these are the thinnest shell of what I had created. I gave my species wings it didn't use, I gave it poison spitters it didn't use. Why didn't I have the tribe of ultra-violent flying poison spitting bad-asses I had imagined?

Its not that the older games were better, its just that they didn't have all the glitz that you can have with the modern systems, so they had to be more creative. There are some exceptions, for example, I fully think that Civ 4 is far superior to Civ 2. Civ 3 was crap, but that was mainly growing pains as they introduced resources and territory. Plus the golden ages in 3 weren't very good. I think 4 is better than 5, but that's just because of all the stuff in the expansion packs. I like the changes they introduced in 5, and feel that it will be better than 4 when it gets all its expansion packs. Its a game that's evolving and figuring out what are the best parts to add, and what needs to be changed.

Then you have stuff like Fallout 3. They took the most superficial parts of Fallout, the visual aspects of it, and shoved it into the same engine that Oblivion ran on. Oblivion felt like nothing more than a prettier version of Morrowind to me. Sure, there were some small changes, but overall, it felt like Morrowind. Skyrim has the same feel, like a prettier Oblivion. Sure, they've fixed some parts, but it feels really minor. Well, the loss of attributes and move to nothing but skills is a big change, but I feel its a step backwards. One of the core parts of RPGs, IMO, is the separation of character and player. Not only are there things the character can do that the player can't, the character might be smarter or dumber, the character might be stronger or weaker. However, back to Fallout, that respect of the character's attributes is lost. One of the things that annoyed me was having to squint to see tripwires when my character has a high perception, and therefore should be able to see them, and I, as the player, should have them highlighted for me. And on the subject of intelligence, well, compare these videos.
Stupid in Fallout 1
Stupid in New Vegas

Once again, its the most superficial overlay. In Fallout 1, all you could do is grunt, and the Overseer is speaking slowly and getting frustrated when you don't understand. In New Vegas, you can respond with speech that makes you look stupid, yes, but the scientist doesn't react like he's talking to a moron. He reacts like he's talking to a person of normal intelligence. To me, that's the problem with modern games. They don't put the attention to detail. And its the many small things that will eventually chip away at your suspension of disbelief until you lose it. Or at least its that way for me.

So in other words, old is better. 

No, older games were more creative in how they presented the game, because they didn't have the graphical capabilities that modern systems do. Modern games seem to be glitz over story. But there are exceptions. Dragon Age:Origins, while it had a few flaws, is a truly enjoyable RPG in the vein of great classic RPGs. The Mass Effect games have a truly engaging story, with an amazingly in depth world, despite its few flaws. And going back, Baldur's Gate had flaws, X-COM had flaws, the Ultima games had flaws. It is impossible to create a game without flaws. If the strength of your story, characters, and world outweigh the flaws, you have a good game. The popular games these days are mostly glitz and graphics with weak stories, worlds and characters. The only thing in Skyrim, for example, that I have no complaint whatsoever with is the scale of dragons. I've only put a few hours into the game, and feel they're a little too easy, but I hope that'll change as time goes on, you know the sorting algorithm of evil and all.

Yesteryear had as many bad games as there are today, it's just that we tend to look at the past with rose tinted glasses. Speak with any adult and they will consistently tell you that music/TV/radio/whatever was much better on the old days. And their parent say the exact same thing about older stuff. Really it's a constant of life that old people complain about younglins and their satanic immoral hobbies. It's unfortunate because we are currently on the beginning of the golden age of gaming, see: Dwarf Fortress. This game would be impossible 20 years ago.

You see, the problem I have with this exchange is that Dizzyelk wasn't saying just that "all new games suck", he offered up concrete examples. 

If you go to the Elder Scrolls forums, and talk with the people there, you'll see plenty of complaints about how Morrowind was the high point of the series, and how the quests in general have become shallower and shallower as voice acting was added in, including more and more famous actors whose time costs lots of money. 

In Morrowind, when they had speech trees, they didn't have to pay actors to all sound the same speaking them, it was all text, and they could have very deep and involved speech trees that reacted to your character statements.  After they focused everything on making the game for the XBox 360 player who will play Skyrim for a week and has no interest in the mods that Bethesda basically ripped off, and declared as the official features they used to make their new game different from the games before it, then all the choices had to be tailored to fit a bloated speech library, which generally meant you had no options whatsoever in quests other than to simply ignore the quest markers and not complete them.  All text was the same, completely regardless of what kind of character you were trying to play, which runs completely counter to the core idea of Elder Scrolls, which is that you were a total blank slate into which you could pour your own idea of what sort of character you wanted to be. 

In favor of the pretty sounds and pretty graphics, they produced a still-buggy game that completely compromised its own core gameplay enjoyment that it was supposedly offering to the player.  (Much like "Survival Horror" games that fail to be scary and make survival an easy and forgone conclusion...)

So yes, he's got a completely valid point when he shows you how Fallout 1 had really deep and involved conversation trees that actually reacted to what sort of character you were.

In fact, Arcanum went much further than that, and went out of its way to provide several completely different ways you could play through the entire game.  You could not just go as a wizard, a technological genius from the magic vs. science war that was going on in the background of the game, or a melee specialist, you could also go as a thief who simply evaded all the problems and stole the things they needed from the villains instead of killing them for it, and you could go as a pure diplomat who talked their way out of all their problems.  It was, in fact, entirely possible to talk the final boss out of his plans and into defeating himself.  That was because the game was dedicated to the notion of giving you as many alternate ways to play the game as possible.  It was its core gameplay that it offered players, and players loved the game for it.

Now, you see Deus Ex, which had positive crap graphics but much the same style of "almost any playstyle can potentially win, and there are at least 4 ways to solve any problem, from violence to stealth to technological cunning."  Then Deus Ex Revolutions, which is a supposed sequel that supposedly tried to recapture that, but where you still have to fight all bosses in run-and-gun battles with no options for hackers or stealthers to gain advantages their purely combat-oriented counterparts don't have. 

Now, take for example, EYE: Divine Cybermancy - a game with utterly shit graphics, buggy as anything, and no play balance that was relatively recently released by some French indie band of developers.  It's basically more a successor to the spirit of Deus Ex than Revolutions, since it manages to put together a game that offers very severely different types of playstyles into competition with one another for means to achieve your goals. 

The real problem here isn't so much "new things suck" as it is "AAA games that are developed for appeal to the widest audience possible tend to lack all game depth", while the games that show real innovation and depth tend to be the games that are developed by smaller indie developers that are running on a shoestring budget, have crap graphics, tons of bugs, and not so much play balance, but whose ideas are far, far better than the stale, bland gruel of "ideas" that have been focus-tested to the largest audience possible because AAA developers need to make up their money spent on obsessively advanced graphics and Hollywood star voice actors by selling no less than 10 million units in the first week of release alone, and are going to do that on promos alone, not good game play or developing a dedicated user base.

What he said.

[Graknorke]

Speak with any adult and they will consistently tell you that music/TV/radio/whatever was much better on the old days.

Bah! You kids and your fancy pop! Music has been no good since the Baroque!

And you're probably older than me...

I quite disagree, its been nothing but a downhill slide ever since the first caveman banged two rocks together, and created the only TRUE music.

Quite. "Duh Duh Deh" was always my favorite.

Meh, new age mammal music that's never been up to par with the call of lizards.

Huh, you and your ridiculous "animal" noise.
Cilia-wiggle has always been the best music and you should appreciate it!

[alexandertnt]

My personal take:

No, older games were more creative in how they presented the game, because they didn't have the graphical capabilities that modern systems do.

I dont see how better graphical capabilities restrict creativity. I do, however generally also believe the good older games felt more creative. I think this is due to two reasons, the first is the smaller team, smaller teams seem to be able to put more heart into something instead of "comissioned" games. And also, because the ideas used were more original and fresh at the time.

Modern games seem to be glitz over story.

A game is not a book, it is not reliant on a story, and doesnt need one at all. This point seems purely subjective. Eg for me, I have no problem with glitzing over the story.

If the strength of your story, characters, and world outweigh the flaws, you have a good game.

This is also subjective. For me, I dont think any level of brilliant story or characters could outweigh any significan game flaws. It is the gameplay that the player spends 90% of the time dealing with. If this 90% is flawed...

As much as I agree with what you said here, my biggest problem is that Spore also failed to deliver on its most basic promise. I didn't really feel like I had shaped anything about my species beyond its appearance. Sure, I got to make it a meat eater, I got to make it aggressive, but these are the thinnest shell of what I had created. I gave my species wings it didn't use, I gave it poison spitters it didn't use. Why didn't I have the tribe of ultra-violent flying poison spitting bad-asses I had imagined?

This was the issue with spore for me too. I can deal with the cartoonish graphics, and the lack of adherence to evolution. But many changes felt like they did nothing, and had no effect whatsoever. As fun as messing around with the creature creator is, once it leaves the creature creator, it seems all sort of pointless.

One of the core parts of RPGs, IMO, is the separation of character and player.

Personally, I Dont like this. I would rather have some feel that I am my character, rather than some force pushing him around. I think RPG's should aim for the integration of the character and player, not the other way around.

and I, as the player, should have them highlighted for me.

I always particularly disliked this element. I dont want stuff to glow in my face, its completely immersion breaking for me.

So yes, he's got a completely valid point when he shows you how Fallout 1 had really deep and involved conversation trees that actually reacted to what sort of character you were.

In regards to "old games are better", I don't honostly see how this is a "completely" valid point. Personally valid,yes, but not completely. For example what if someone wasnt interested in those conversation trees? Or diddn't like the concept of a conversation "tree"? Or wasnt interested in a "conversation" with some random simulated person at all?

they focused everything on making the game for the XBox 360 player who will play Skyrim for a week.

I think its a bit unfair to make the claim that most XBox 360 players of Skyrim will only play it for a week. Everyone I know has been playing for much longer than that.

All text was the same, completely regardless of what kind of character you were trying to play, which runs completely counter to the core idea of Elder Scrolls, which is that you were a total blank slate into which you could pour your own idea of what sort of character you wanted to be. 

This is something that I always disliked about the ES games. They seem mostly unresponsive to my character. Even a simple acknowledgemen of my race/class would have been nice. But I find this problem applied to Morrowind, as well as Oblivion and Skyrim. They only occasionally reference your character.

The real problem here isn't so much "new things suck" as it is "AAA games that are developed for appeal to the widest audience possible tend to lack all game depth".

Some might counter this and say that if so many people bought the game, and buy the expansions, and buy the DLC, and etc, then they must be enjoying it, and that the AAA games must have done something right. I understand the awesomeness of personal appeal but...

by selling no less than 10 million units in the first week of release alone, and are going to do that on promos alone, not good game play or developing a dedicated user base.

claiming that 10 million people bought (and enjoy) a game that lacks game play is a bit of a stretch, without invoking the "sheeple" argument to invalidate their clear enjoyment of the game.



(this applies not just to games) I have always found that smaller groups (and individuals, eg Toady) have the highest potential, because of their ability to accurately and precisely craft a work of art. But to be honost most of it is shit (its the stuff you never see). But some of it is brilliant. With large AAA groups, they tend to have a higher average but lower potential, as each person is creating something not so-much from their own imagination, but off a story bord/diagram/sheet-music/whatever.

But I dont see how it is possible to declare that old games are definetely better than new games. This always seems to fault on the "sheeple" argument. For personal opionion, of course. But as for trying to "prove" that old games are better, I dont understand.

[NW_Kohaku]

How, exactly, is buying a game and enjoying it strictly related? 

As I said, the overwhelming majority of those players don't play Skyrim past 10-20 hours or gameplay.  Meanwhile, there are people still playing Morrowind today with mods that add whole new regions into the game and overhaul the ruleset.  Which of those two do you think got disposable pulp entertainment, and which really got a game they enjoyed? 

Anyway, while it's true that some of what Dizzyelk said was a subjective measure of a good game, what you have talked about are far more subjective measurements.

Every player is looking for some sort of core gameplay elements from their games for them to enjoy, and genre gives a big hint in what a player is looking for in a game.  If someone like Dizzyelk goes for RPGs and wants to talk about story and games trying to give a feeling of actual role-playing, you can pretty safely bet his core gameplay elements are narrative and expression.  Trying to argue against that is pointless - even if your subjective tastes are different, when you are judging an RPG that is inherently a genre about narrative and expression, then those are perfectly fair criteria.  Dizzyelk wasn't judging God of War on its dialogue trees, he was judging a game that expressly was of the genre that was supposed to be selling itself on the traits of its storytelling.

What's more, given how much you agree on the specific examples, it doesn't even seem as if your subjective tastes even are that different, anyway. 

The most you can say is that you prefer Western-style expression-heavy storytelling that asks players to be the character (I.E. the way TES works) as opposed narrative-heavy (I.E. the way Mass Effect works) methods of storytelling.  And you know what?  Both of those are completely valid core gameplay elements to go after, and they're both perfectly valid measures of judging RPGs. 

Just because Dizzyelk prefers more narrative than you doesn't mean your tastes are all that different, and it also doesn't mean that in a game that is geared towards narrative storytelling, Dizzyelk is in any way wrong to criticize the narrative techniques. 

What you've done is like telling Roger Ebert that he's wrong to criticize a movie for its qualities as a movie, because some people might have preferred to have gone to a basketball game, instead. You don't go to a movie looking for a basketball game in the first place, so yes, it's perfectly valid to judge an RPG by its RPG elements.

All-in-all this seems like arguing for the sheer sake of arguing, since I can't really see any sort of consistent point you are trying to make in this, other than that you disagree.

[dizzyelk]

As Kohaku has touched on most of everything, I'll just mention some specific points.

If the strength of your story, characters, and world outweigh the flaws, you have a good game.

This is also subjective. For me, I dont think any level of brilliant story or characters could outweigh any significan game flaws. It is the gameplay that the player spends 90% of the time dealing with. If this 90% is flawed...

If there are significant flaws, then the story and characters won't outweigh them. The games I had mentioned had flaws that, if the story and setting wasn't as good as it was, would make me hate the game. There was nothing more annoying in X-COM than the bug where parts of your base wouldn't be connected, and you had to blow the walls to get where the aliens were. Not only did it make me waste time, but resources. It seemed to happen to me at least half the times I had to fight a base defense mission. There's also the flaw where if you mind control a civilian to get them out of the line of fire during a terror mission, they'd turn hostile when they were released. Meaning you had to kill them, or the mission wouldn't end. And, the biggest of them all, the 80 item limit in combat. That's not enough for the large squads you could have at the end of the game to all have flares, grenades, weapons, reloads, and some medikits and scanners tossed in. And of course its subjective, everything is. Lots of people hate... lets say Twilight. Lots of people love it, as evidence by how much Twilight crap there is. There's a whole forum dedicated to a game that lots of people hate because its confusing and hard as hell to understand and get into, but lots of people love it because its the most in-depth world out there with amazing capabilities. Maybe you've heard of it, I think its called Dwarf Castle? Midget Fortress? Damn, I can't remember. 

One of the core parts of RPGs, IMO, is the separation of character and player.

Personally, I Dont like this. I would rather have some feel that I am my character, rather than some force pushing him around. I think RPG's should aim for the integration of the character and player, not the other way around.

Maybe its just that I came from being a pen and paper RPG background. But that separation is the important distinction between in-character and out-of-character knowledge. Other people at the table would call you on meta-gaming if your character used knowledge that they shouldn't have. And I feel that something like having the perception to see a trip line is in-character knowledge, and the highlighting is nothing more than a convention to pass it to you, the player. After all, in a P&P setting, the DM would roll against your spot stat, and if you fail, it would be one of those mysterious rolls that DMs do from time to time. And which worry you as a player. But if you pass, the DM would say you see a trip line, or a pressure plate, or whatever the trigger is.

The real problem here isn't so much "new things suck" as it is "AAA games that are developed for appeal to the widest audience possible tend to lack all game depth".

Some might counter this and say that if so many people bought the game, and buy the expansions, and buy the DLC, and etc, then they must be enjoying it, and that the AAA games must have done something right. I understand the awesomeness of personal appeal but...

Being on a forum for a game as dedicated to confusing detail as DF, I think its fair to say there are a few more hard-core gamers floating around here than usual. It isn't that AAA games didn't do anything right, its that there are no big title games dedicated to hard-core gamers. And, when stuff is designed by committee, as I'm sure most AAA titles are, you usually end up with, as Kohaku said, something developed to appeal to the widest audience possible, which means everything that's "hard" is easified, everything that's "confusing" is simplified, and you end up with a bland product that lots of people will like, yes, but not people who are devoted to the genre and looking for the challenge it offers.

But I dont see how it is possible to declare that old games are definetely better than new games. This always seems to fault on the "sheeple" argument. For personal opionion, of course. But as for trying to "prove" that old games are better, I dont understand.

Who's trying to prove anything? This is nothing more than a discussion of the classics and new games. Which can never be "proven" as it is all, as you've said, subjective.

[CodexDraco]

How, exactly, is buying a game and enjoying it strictly related? 

As I said, the overwhelming majority of those players don't play Skyrim past 10-20 hours or gameplay.  Meanwhile, there are people still playing Morrowind today with mods that add whole new regions into the game and overhaul the ruleset.  Which of those two do you think got disposable pulp entertainment, and which really got a game they enjoyed?

[Citation needed]
For what is worth, I though Skyrim is brilliant and I'm eagerly awaiting for the PC release of the DLC. Everyone I know that have played the game enjoyed it immensely for hundreds of hours. I'm sure there are people who only played it for a few hours, but I doubt is a significant minority, let alone and overwhelming majority. But in any case, how is the amount of hours a game was played related to the "enjoyment" these people got?

This article says you are wrong.

[Graknorke]

How, exactly, is buying a game and enjoying it strictly related? 

As I said, the overwhelming majority of those players don't play Skyrim past 10-20 hours or gameplay.  Meanwhile, there are people still playing Morrowind today with mods that add whole new regions into the game and overhaul the ruleset.  Which of those two do you think got disposable pulp entertainment, and which really got a game they enjoyed?

[Citation needed]
For what is worth, I though Skyrim is brilliant and I'm eagerly awaiting for the PC release of the DLC. Everyone I know that have played the game enjoyed it immensely for hundreds of hours. I'm sure there are people who only played it for a few hours, but I doubt is a significant minority, let alone and overwhelming majority. But in any case, how is the amount of hours a game was played related to the "enjoyment" these people got?

This article says you are wrong.

He actually was talking about console gamers. If that makes a difference.

[alexandertnt]

I posted because I had intepreted some of the responses as trying to "prove" that some games are just better. I apologise if this was not the case, and hope that it diddnt seem that I was trying to state that people's opinion are wrong.

If the strength of your story, characters, and world outweigh the flaws, you have a good game.

This is also subjective. For me, I dont think any level of brilliant story or characters could outweigh any significan game flaws. It is the gameplay that the player spends 90% of the time dealing with. If this 90% is flawed...

Snip

My response to this quote was, admittingly, probably reduntant. Given that the strength of characters/story etc are subjective and so are game flaws, the statement turns out to always be true.

And you know what?  Both of those are completely valid core gameplay elements to go after, and they're both perfectly valid measures of judging RPGs. 

Of course. I was saying that the quality of a game is purely subjective, that is doing the actual measurements depend on the person. Basically my post was a hasty attempt at expressing that the enjoyment of a game is purely dependent on the player (ie the "old games are better" concept doesn't seem to hold water when used as a sweeping statement. It is, of course entirely reasonalbe for someone to personally prefer older games to newer ones.).

How, exactly, is buying a game and enjoying it strictly related? 

As I said, the overwhelming majority of those players don't play Skyrim past 10-20 hours or gameplay.  Meanwhile, there are people still playing Morrowind today with mods that add whole new regions into the game and overhaul the ruleset.  Which of those two do you think got disposable pulp entertainment, and which really got a game they enjoyed?

[Citation needed]
For what is worth, I though Skyrim is brilliant and I'm eagerly awaiting for the PC release of the DLC. Everyone I know that have played the game enjoyed it immensely for hundreds of hours. I'm sure there are people who only played it for a few hours, but I doubt is a significant minority, let alone and overwhelming majority. But in any case, how is the amount of hours a game was played related to the "enjoyment" these people got?

This article says you are wrong.

He actually was talking about console gamers. If that makes a difference.

I also found this.

[NW_Kohaku]

How, exactly, is buying a game and enjoying it strictly related? 

As I said, the overwhelming majority of those players don't play Skyrim past 10-20 hours or gameplay.  Meanwhile, there are people still playing Morrowind today with mods that add whole new regions into the game and overhaul the ruleset.  Which of those two do you think got disposable pulp entertainment, and which really got a game they enjoyed?

[Citation needed]
For what is worth, I though Skyrim is brilliant and I'm eagerly awaiting for the PC release of the DLC. Everyone I know that have played the game enjoyed it immensely for hundreds of hours. I'm sure there are people who only played it for a few hours, but I doubt is a significant minority, let alone and overwhelming majority. But in any case, how is the amount of hours a game was played related to the "enjoyment" these people got?

This article says you are wrong.

Well, this:

He actually was talking about console gamers. If that makes a difference.

In fact, this came up in the Bethesda forums pretty heavily. 

Skyrim was designed specifically with the console gamers in mind, because they knew the PC gamers were going to stick around long enough to fix all their balancing fiascoes with modding the game.  They only cared about getting in console players (which make up something absurd like 85% of the people who buy the game), who overwhelmingly only buy the game in the first week of release, who overwhelmingly play it just to finish the main quest and a few side-quests, and don't stick around long enough to even have DLCs released.  (There's a reason Day One DLC is marketed to console gamers - studies in the industry show that players just won't stick around for DLC to be released, and once you've set down the previously-hot-new-thing for the new-hot-new-thing, you're probably not coming back if they release a new DLC for it.)

I'd also point out that DLC for Skyrim means much less to the PC gamers, however.  Horse armor was such a joke because it added nothing a modder couldn't add.  In fact, modding gave you ridable dragons, flying pirate ships, ridable bears or dreugh or pink unicorns that farted butterflies.  Paying for DLC gave you just a new model for your old horse.  Which one sounds more fun?

Unless the DLC adds something modders can't add themselves (or better yet, adds something that can then be modded, but only used by those who have the DLC in the first place) then DLC will probably not sell well to the PC gamers.  (That said, I haven't paid attention to what DLC is coming down the pipe - I haven't used the Bethesda forums since I got sucked back into these...)

I'd be surprised the average PC gamer playtime is so low, but then, that article is after only a few months of playtime.  (Which I think is why alexandertnt was capable of finding an article from 2 months later - nearly twice as much time for players to clock up more playtime - and it bumped up the average only 10 hours.)

Again, some people have been playing Morrowind for about a decade.  They are still making sales of the PC version of the game, while almost all sales of the X-Box version of Morrowind died off after the first month. 

It's all in the sort of person who plays which version - I really don't understand why anyone would play TES without modding, but apparently, the majority of players do, but those are the ones that throw the controller down after much less time spent actually playing.

(And EA did studies on what quests players went through if they were PC players or console players - console players stuck to only quests with characters like Grunt, while PC players were more likely to do every quest and much more likely to do quests like Miranda's personal quest, which surprised them because it was, in their words, "more touchy-feely" than they expected most players to want to play through.)

In fact, because of it, the Bethesda forums are a SERIOUS hotbed of PC-versus-console warfare.

[NW_Kohaku]

Of course. I was saying that the quality of a game is purely subjective, that is doing the actual measurements depend on the person. Basically my post was a hasty attempt at expressing that the enjoyment of a game is purely dependent on the player (ie the "old games are better" concept doesn't seem to hold water when used as a sweeping statement. It is, of course entirely reasonalbe for someone to personally prefer older games to newer ones.).

But again, this was talking about a rather specific case.  Fallout 1 and 2, and especially Arcanum really did have a focus on a particlar type of expression and narrative that Dizzyelk was lauding, which Fallout 3 very obviously did not have. 

The reason why the Troika team was formed in the first place was because Interplay was moving in a direction that made making those sorts of games any longer impossible.  Troika then collapsed itself after a few really wonderful games. 

Now, companies like Bethesda are taking over that have very different models, and those don't include the same focus on the types of storytelling Dizzyelk preferred.

Sure, you can say that this is just the free market deciding or something like that, but this is really the same problem as people complaining about the disappearance of the survival horror genre - it's gone into just being a gorier version of FPS because their niche audience doesn't sell well enough... but that doesn't mean their desire for a survival horror game has no meaning, and they should just appreciate what AAA studios feed them under the banner of "Survival Horror".

I, however, was pointing out that it's really just that you have to go away from AAA gaming to find titles that actually satisfy the niche demands, rather than it being a strictly time-based progression.

If there is any objective case to be made on the subject, it's the one that Dizzyelk and I were making - that just as horror games should be rated by how much they can unnerve and frighten the audience, role-playing games should be judged by how much they can make a player feel connected to and part of the story, and how well the narrative speaks to them or conveys whatever viewpoint it was trying to convey. 

There's also a serious case to be made for the notion that the more time and money spent on graphic elements, the less time and money will be left over to spend on gameplay elements or narrative elements.  (Especially when companies like Bethesda are hacking away limbs on the conversation trees with chainsaws because they don't want to pay their voice actors more to have more dialogue responsiveness...)  While corporate committees are painfully risk-prone, and heavily favor focus-tested rehashes of the same idea, an indie game has to be novel just to get any sort of attention whatsoever.  The whole model of the industry it works within naturally encourages me finding such games that add something new and interesting and a new narrative approach is something that is easier to program and cheap to implement for an indie dev.

I just rammed through a short mystery-style visual novel a few days ago.  It had a story that built up slowly to the point where I was engrossed in the narrative, in spite of having almost no gameplay elements to speak of but a DOS-style prompt.  I loved it, and most of my complaints about it were that there wasn't more.  Meanwhile, multi-million dollar budget FPS games fly by without me noticing.  I'm not even sure I want to buy Mass Effect 3 since Mass Effect 2 so disappointed me by becoming more FPS...

[Jelle]

Eh skyrim was ok but rather shallow, nothing compared to good old morrowind.
The scenery was breathteaking but the playable world was so small it's hard to get immersed in.
Feels more like an rpg turned theme park ride in the end, rush you into the story and throw tons of quests at you all at once.
Still good fun but nostalgia asides not the rpg morrowind was imo.

Not much more to add other then that. Other then agreeing improved graphics often leave the rest of a game to be desired. No point on making a good game if people are content with shiny graphics.
And ofcourse less risk involved in trying to be creative and innovative. Can't really mass produce in a creative manner either.

I'm mostly posting in surprise as to how the topic came to this.  Not that it's not worth discussing offcourse

[CodexDraco]

Holy wall of text batman!

Do you have a better source than the Bethesda forums? Because that is basically anecdotal evidence and doesn't help your point. The anecdotal evidence I posted earlier was about console players actually, I'm the only PC gamer in my group.

RE: Your DLC vs Mod rant. Personally I prefer DLC over mods most of the time, they are made by professionals and generally higher quality than mods (horse armor aside). Mods and DLC are both great for gaming and they show that  new is better, but that's a point I'm not interested to argue at the moment.

[alexandertnt]

Eh skyrim was ok but rather shallow, nothing compared to good old morrowind.
The scenery was breathteaking but the playable world was so small it's hard to get immersed in.
Feels more like an rpg turned theme park ride in the end, rush you into the story and throw tons of quests at you all at once.
Still good fun but nostalgia asides not the rpg morrowind was imo.

Not much more to add other then that. Other then agreeing improved graphics often leave the rest of a game to be desired. No point on making a good game if people are content with shiny graphics.
And ofcourse less risk involved in trying to be creative and innovative. Can't really mass produce in a creative manner either.

I'm mostly posting in surprise as to how the topic came to this.  Not that it's not worth discussing offcourse

I found the scenery quite grey and dull. But the shiny graphics have one major advantage over Morrowind - the animations aren't eye-bleedingly bad. (Then again Morrowind had unique animations for the beast races, which I appreciated even if the actual animations were bordering on silly).

Personally I prefer DLC over mods most of the time, they are made by professionals and generally higher quality than mods (horse armor aside). Mods and DLC are both great for gaming and they show that  new is better, but that's a point I'm not interested to argue at the moment.

On average they would be more professional, but thats due to the entry level of making mods (there is none). Though yeah, mods are great for games. (Im one of those people with a thing against DLC's, so no. No DLC's)