As I am, what is now classified, a classic gamer, I do often times get asked, ridiculed even, about how old games can be better than new. I can usually silence them with a basic answer, old games were more fun. Now this is an extremely simplified and somewhat objective answer. I will go over what makes most classic games better than the modern games that are coming out now.
I will start with the easiest to compare, gameplay.
Modern games are largely about pretty graphics and sometimes trying to tell a compelling story. The problem is that's all they do. I have a few really big titles that display this really massively. Heavy Rain, almost all the Call of Duty games, and most JRPG's released since the mid 2000's. I understand what they are trying to do, but most of these games are forgetting an extremely important thing. IT'S A GAME! When I turn on the ol' console, I'm looking to actually be a part of something, not feel like I'm watching a 12 hour movie that I have to fiddle with the controller. The worst offender that I know of is Xenosaga, a PS2 game. Xenosaga has a minimum of a 4 hour unskippable intro without gameplay. I say minimum as I gave up. 4 hours of my life I will never get back. I know this isn't exactly a new game, but it was around when this was becoming norm. And so many games have followed suit, as if this was a good idea (I'm talking to you Kojima).
Older games mainly focused on the gameplay. And there's a good reason for this. They didn't have anything else. Look at Super Mario Bros. A game release back in 1985, and had the entire disk space of around 35kb. That's .035mb. This small of a space wouldn't even render a single particle effect in a modern game. And yet, with something so basic, they produced a game that fans and newcomers are playing and enjoying, over 30 years later. Not all early games were good. E.T. being the fly in the proverbial ointment. But even in the old Atari days, 4 directions with 1 button, they had to make a game fun to play. If not, no one bought it, or they would even return it. Bless Nintendo for restarting the gaming industry in 1985.
As gaming progressed into the 90's we did see some graphical jumps into the 16 bit era. But gaming was relatively unchanged. Larger file sizes were able to be used, consoles were becoming more reliable and games did become prettier. And more buttons were added, allowing for us to do more. But the basic experience, aside from slight changes and improvements didn't alter much. Oddly, gaming was still very mascot oriented. This wasn't a bad thing back then as many of the mascots were still fairly young, but is did set certain companies in a future direction that would hurt them.
Gaming's next big step cam with the introduction of 3D in 1994-1996. I'm not talking about those pseudo 3D games like Wolfenstien and Dark Forces, but real 3D rendered games. The Playstation coming out, and shortly followed by the N64, this was the new direction. This allowed for some great innovation, and for some serious problems to develop. Although with problems, 3D was a hit. Games like Spyro and Super Mario 64 were well implemented and allowed for new developments in games. It also advanced the FPS into a better direction as well, allowing for real 3D environments.
But with the good and the glitter, started a rise of something that, while at the time seemed cool, was the start of what gaming has become today. The use of pre-rendered graphics to tell a story. The first big company to starry really doing this was Squaresoft (now SquareEnix). Games like the Final Fantasies and Vagrant story, while still excellent games, chose the direction of pre-rendered cinematics to pretty up the game and progress the story. Points in the game where you aren't playing, you're watching. As it was the early days, it wasn't to the point of being abused. But it was a start into a bad direction. There were a number of big name games that fell into this trap permanently.
The company that resisted (granted they didn't have much of a choice with their hardware) is Nintendo. Oh, Nintendo fell into it's own sins. The N64 did not have the hardware capable of pre-rendered cinematics, so they defaulted to what they were doing in the NES and SNES days, walls of text. Again, story telling through non-gameplay methods. And, realistically, since the SNES, Nintendo started the hand holding that exists largely in gaming today. Be it by extremely easy challenges, an inability to fail due to an excess of free lives, or just over explaining something that could have easily been a puzzle.
There were some superb games to come out of these era's. Unfortunately though, this era holds the sin of the birth of bad ideas. Bad ideas that still plaque gaming today.
Gaming has been a shockingly smooth progression from the early eras of 3D to now. Little things have been implemented, better controls, online, etc. But there was one franchise that really altered an aspect of gaming, and that would be Halo. Halo is the franchise that really made PvP a main staple for a game. Now Halo isn't guilty in having a tiny story and focused only on the online play. But they did lay the brickwork for it. The online was so popular, franchises like Call of Duty, Modern Warfare and the Battlefield games popped up. Sure they have a single player campaign.... Kinda. But you can tell it's slapdash, and the 100% main purpose of the games is the online matches. And from that, games that have no single player aspects have popped up. Games like Star Wars Battfront, Overwatch and Battlefield 1 for example. And I can't stand they are charging extremely high prices for these games that have zero playability if you don't have an open network (Or don't care about online). Fighting games can be sort of blamed for this, but console released fighting games always have some reasonably decent single player to it as well. To add, games that focus on multiplayer, with zero local multiplayer ruined a lot of what use to make multi-player games any fun.
There are modern games that do get it right. Games like Darksouls, Shantae and the Pirates Curse and Hollow Knight to name a few. And why are these games so good? They are harking back to something older. Be it just classic gaming styles and 2D platformers that are just fun, or games that might clearly be a modern game, but don't have the modern issue of hand holding just so it can tell the story it wants to. So few games are show don't tell, which is a shame as those are the games with the best story telling elements. What's interesting, most of the games coming out that do hit all the right buttons are being made on the indi market. I guess the indi market is where people exist to make what they WANT to make and not what is being dictated to them.
In the very early days of gaming, I can understand either a very simplified story, or no story at all. The disk space was so minute, that one text box could have cost the space needed for something like a boss battle. But as games progressed, they started to be able to weave quite powerful stories. But in these early days, they didn't skimp on the gameplay to do so. Now, everything is so set on making a game pretty, and rendering the neck hairs of the protagonist, it leaves them with a shortage of both time and disk space to do little else. And story focused games seem to be so set on telling you the story they want to tell, they give little to no way to deviate from their path. In some cases just taking controls away from you because heaven forbid you don't have the exact experience they have planned out.
There is one genre of game that has come out of the 3D era that really has been a strong movement, however. Sandbox games. Starting with Shenmue on the Dreamcast and progressing to the majority of AAA titles today, sandbox games to provide an experience that could never be truly replicated in older games. This direction has led to some of the most interesting games to be launched in the last 15 years. This has also led some games into a corner they shouldn't have gone into. Sandbox games that work, do so because it's a world that you can take just about any direction you like. And most of the time, will allow you to be a psychotic little nut bag. The games that fall down in this manner would be better served in a linear progression, as that's obviously the direction the games push. There are a few games that really fall into this pattern, No More Heroes and Batman: Arkham Asylum, and the first Assassins Creed are 3 good examples. For something that really is a good idea for some games, is just a terrible idea for those that really shouldn't use it.
I don't want to say that the progression of all gaming has been bad. That just wouldn't be true. But certain ideas, many of them bad ideas, have become common in nearly every game.
Just for arguments sake, there is one genre of game, that has only proceeded to get better with technology improvements. That is simulation games. Flight sims, driving sims, hell even farming and truck driving simulators have all benefited from this. Reason being, they only need to focus on one thing. Making gameplay as intuitive, and as realistic as possible. In the early simulation games, it was bad, real bad. Now it's near like doing the real thing. I have a wheel, and can use it to teach people how to drive using Gran Turismo or something similar as the driving program. But this does bring me back to my original point, basing a game around gameplay is what makes a game fun.
I think what game producers need to do, is make a fun game idea, and then come up with a story and world to build around it. This way, even if the story struggles at points, if you make the game fun, you can still play and enjoy the gaming experience.
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