Originally Posted by Taril
Originally Posted by Gray Ghost
I am eternally skeptical of the argument of old games being better and modern fans being dumber/inferior in some way. I think that the latter argument is always untrue, though the former argument is usually untrue but can vary game to game.

There is some validity to the claims, however only to certain extents.

"Old games were better" has the truth of "Old games were generally more complete when released" - Back when you couldn't just ship patches out the wazoo (Also back when gaming was more niche so it was more gamers making games for gamers and fewer corporates making games for shareholders) there was more emphasis on making a polished, functional product out of the gate. While most modern games aren't finished until a year after their release (If they finish at all).

"Modern fans being dumber/inferior" has the truth of games being more mainstream, so you get more casual gamers. You have things like whales funding terrible MTX practices, you have kids eating up slop like CoD, FIFA and Ubisoft games that are churned out using copy/paste as well as game "Journalist" types that cry whenever a game doesn't hold their hand through the entire experience...

These aren't end-all-be-all terms though. There are plenty of games being released that are well polished on release, that are designed for gamers and not shareholders. There are still hardcore gamers that want good games that don't hold their hand all the time.

You raise a lot of interesting points. Regarding the superiority or not of old games, I'd also like to point out that there were absolutely bad games madein the old days. Lots of really bad, poorly designed games that simply were not fun. They just were forgotten about because no one would ever talk about them, and there was no easy way for people to share their displeasure the way there is now. In those days, a bad game was bad because of genuine incompetence and inability most of the time. Nowadays, a team making a game probably has a higher baseline competence and ability than back in the early days because back then they were still figuring out a lot of what would and wouldn't work, and it was also harder to actually learn back then. When a game is bad these days, despite what most people want to believe, it's less because the people making it don't know how to make a game (though that can still happen) and more because as you say, they've got to deal with studio demands, shareholder expectations, etc. In my opinion a lot of games we call bad nowadays are still fundamentally competent and technically fine. The gaming floor is miles higher now than in the past.

Originally Posted by Liarie
Originally Posted by WizardGnome
The original games ARE outmoded and user unfriendly. For example, there's no marker showing the aoe of spells - you just cast fireball and learn the AoE and eyeball it, lol.

I'm also confused by your mention of Bioware - especially because I consider Bioware series like Dragon Age and Mass Effect to have *much better* writing than BG3.

Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth.That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?

Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!

Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!

Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!

Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire a husk of metal, it keeps going until it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip.

Recruit: Sir, yes sir!"

If only we could ever get this quality of writing in an RPG again. *sighs in old lady*

I'm actually gonna speak in defense of BG3 here. I think that the ME games are miles better written overall, but BG3 absolutely has moments of dialogue that at least match something like this. Right at character selection, The little intro dialogues for Lae'zel and Durge in particular are downright Shakespearean. BG3 is disappointing, but it has its moments. They simply never come together like other games do. I would argue that even "bad" RPGs all have their moments. They're just always that, moments.