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Why old games never die, but new ones do

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Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#311

Post by pasta67 »

tumsfestival wrote: post #236
jmyeet wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RPGs and MMORPGs are interesting genres for different reasons. The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc. A lot of RPGs are now real-ti…

>The RPG genre has largely died. By that I mean we have Bethesda games (notably Skyrim and Fallon 3 and New Vegas were huge in their time) and that's... about it. Well, apart from Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect I guess. We used to have a bunch of other franchises. Bard's Tale, Wizardy, the TSR D&D games, Ultima Underworld, etc. That's just not true, I think you're just not keeping up with new releases if that's your r…

I can't seriously regard Skyrim as RPG - it is simulation of RPG - visually pleasing, but no challenging enough. Too much loot in Bethesda games is really killing RPG vibe for me.

Yes there are some rpg games coming out... and I have played some of them and I can understand why I would also declare that RPG genre has died, because many of them are resurrected corpses of older games and are not bringing fresh ideas of their own. It can leave impressions of those who have never experienced previous era of rpg games. But then again I have no experience of even older era of first rpgs and might have similar opinion about games I enjoyed.

I have library of Wizardry games and I think I snatched that remake as well - I've only played Wizardry 8 and realized that it was different and worth exploring.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#312

Post by pasta67 »

zeroq wrote: post #61

The biggest problem today is ownership . There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only. You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place. I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure…

I really disliked Quake when it came out. Aestetically it was not pleasing and graphically even step back to DOOM2 imo. But there were players that had different views and played it... also probably they had shooter genre in higher priority while it was not on my top genre list - after racing, rpg and strategy games.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#313

Post by pasta67 »

komali2 wrote: post #177
chii wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so apparently, these 'users' are so lacking in agency that they willingly get milked. If so, they deserve it. There's still plenty of good games, esp. in the indie sphere, that aren't like the modern live-service-shit.

I think it's time we as a society let go of this 7,000 year old tendency to place all blame for people suffering from how a society is set up, on individuals. Don't you think we can find a way to do that without taking away people's agency? For example, I can find news articles from the 1600s where people lament how "the newest generation just doesn't want to work anymore." So, we've tried pinning it on individuals f…

There is nothing wrong on blaming individuals. The blame is not on what they are doing but what they are not doing and that is not becoming organized.

PS I for one do not blame anyone. If you enjoy something - that is not going to last forever.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#314

Post by smeeger »

old games will die as soon as all the millennials die. its so weird how much millennials love to read historical accounts of things that they already know. 90% of HN knows what it was like to play CS 1.6… but this article relates that information as if it were ancient knowledge being unearthed for the first time in centuries.

seriously, does anyone really think that a bunch of zoomers are going to be playing CS 1.6 in 20 years? of course not. those games will be dead

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#315

Post by bitwize »

spacechild1 wrote: post #131
platevoltage wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?

I actually once downloaded a copy of "Big Rigs" after watching AVGN's video. It still baffles my mind how this game could ever make it to the shelves. It is the most broken thing I've ever played. The infinite speed reverse gear is quite an experience, though.

I love how if you accelerate backwards long enough (in the BLJ of auto racing games), you will eventually be at a point in the coordinate system where the distance between adjacent floating-point numbers is large enough to be visible, leading to your truck's geometry beginning to "shimmer", and then warp and change shape in bizarre twisted ways.

Truly only a masterpiece could gift us with an experience like that.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#316

Post by platevoltage »

bitwize wrote: post #95
platevoltage wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?

Who isn't down for a round of Cheetahmen?

As someone who these days enjoys watching other people play bad games, or play good games wrong (speed running, or just making comedic content), I'm definitely not down to play that horrific garbage. I might go rewatch AVGN do it though.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#317

Post by komali2 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #237
komali2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's time we as a society let go of this 7,000 year old tendency to place all blame for people suffering from how a society is set up, on individuals. Don't you think we can find a way to do that without taking away people's agency? For example, I can find news articles from the 1600s where people lament how "the newest generation just doesn't want to work anymore." So, we've tried pinning it on individuals f…

The reason why blaming individuals is so popular is because everything else is ultimately some degree of obfuscation. The most problematic part of bureaucracies of all sorts (be they government or corporate) is the ability to arrange a structure so that nobody is at fault. Even systems analysis, if such a thing could be done cleanly would reduce to "It is the fault of who is capable of changing things for not doing s…

Your perspective makes sense from a sort of common sense angle, but I can't reconcile it with sociological studies.

For example, the 2022 Halloween Crushing incident in Seoul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_Halloween_crowd_crush?wp...

Whose "fault" was it? If we had a quantum supercomputer and video from every angle I bet we could calculate the first person to panic and start running. Have we successfully de-obfuscated the situation and found our culprit? I'm not sure, after all, two people away was a person about to panic as well, in fact they would have in exactly 2 seconds after the first person if the first person hadn't... In fact everyone on the crowd was on edge and on the verge of panic, hence why the crush was able to happen at all. So in that sense it's not really obfuscation to do a systems analysis on crowd dynamics to figure out why the crush happened.

And now hold on, whether we want to blame the individual that kicked off the panic or everyone in the crowd for not keeping their cool, is it fair, reasonable, or accurate to assign blame? These people hopped on a train and went to a Halloween party - surely it's reasonable to expect that on such a day, crowd control measures would be in place to keep them safe. After all, society keeps them safe from other things they don't really need to worry about - separating cars and pedestrians, keeping the water clean, flushing away their poo. Isn't it reasonable for them to assume that roads would be designed wide enough to accommodate a lot of people? That there'd be multiple exits? If so, then it's the fault of the bar for not communicating the tight pedestrian situation, or doing crowd limiting. Er, well, not just one bar, but the 20 that are in that area. Also the chief of police for not setting up proper crowd control, and the traffic commissioner for not instructing the chief to do so. Or mayor. Actually maybe the city planner for allowing such narrow areas to develop into popular bar areas at all. No not the city planner in 2022, the one in 1985 when they were rebuilding that area after the war.

I think especially in the western world there's a habit, maybe borne of western hyper individualism, to always try to find the individualist angle. "Well maybe people should take more personal responsibility for their safety!" And if people want to live that way I think they should be allowed to. Far away. Remotely, on farms or something lol. For those of us that prefer living more dense lifestyles in societies, I think it makes a lot more sense to take a systems analysis approach to these kinds of problems with reasonable good faith baked in.

Often it's not obfuscation, often situations simply are complicated to where it's impossible to blame the individual without contorting into strange value systems.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#318

Post by wpm »

AlienRobot wrote: post #196
Buttons840 wrote: post #4

We're lacking a middle ground in copyright law that would allow people to play Mario Bros 3 on the NES for free, but doesn't give everyone the right to use the Mario IP, or to resell it en masse. (It's only possible right now because of incomplete law enforcement.) The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it. Copyright and patents encourage creation and inventio…

It's impossible to take seriously the argument that copyright is broken because people can't play 1 famous game for free. At least say you want to pay Nintendo to play the game...

I’d argue it’s broken since the Ordinary Sausage guy was getting DMCA content claims on his YouTube videos where he himself sings parodies of well known songs with sausage themed lyrics in clear, blatant, obvious fair use.

Whenever DMCA let the C evolve into needs to be wiped cleaned and reset/rethought.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#319

Post by somenameforme »

whoisyc wrote: post #184
somenameforme wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterstrike 1, released 25 years ago, averages around 10,000 players 'online' at any given moment, pretty much exclusively for team based multiplayer [1]. That makes it more popular (by active player count) than e.g. Hogwart's Legacy. Most modern games not only really fail to bring anything new to the table, but often feel like the overall gameplay is general decline. For instance the gunplay in Counterstrike still…

You are proving GP and OP’s point. CS 1.6 was an exceptionally popular game in the GoldSrc days and that is why it survived and was chosen by you as an example. That is an exception not the norm. Plenty of FPSs from the same generation have been forgotten. How many people out there are still playing Day of Defeat? Or Counter Strike Condition Zero? Or any of the old Delta Force games? Or Daikatana (except for the lol…

There were also lots of exceptionally popular games that didn't survive simply because subsequent games were simply better. One example there would be Street Fighter 2. So the difference is that I'm arguing that games have staying power based on their overall quality, not their quality for a given era. When they're reasonably objectively surpassed, they tend to die off. If they doesn't happen, they tend to stick around.

This is true in modern times as well. Skyrim, for instance, remains a best-in-genre game that (like Counter-Strike) even its own creators are failing to surpass. And if it's not surpassed in the future then people will probably still be playing it in 20 years. By contrast if it turns out that the next Elder Scrolls game manages to take the same formula and just make it better, then Skyrim will probably gradually die off.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#320

Post by johnisgood »

okwhateverdude wrote: post #299
johnisgood wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nexuiz is still alive? There is OpenArena too, and lots of ioquake3 forks such as Tremulous, Urban Terror, etc.

Urban Terror low gravity CTF was an amazing game. So incredibly satisfying to get the jump just right to swoop up the enemy flag, and make the jump back to capture. I loaded it up some time ago and it was mostly a ghost town. Same thing with Tremulous. Could be my timezone. I really enjoyed the ioq3 total conversions.

Tremulous is more or less dead. Its players moved to Unvanquished, but it is still pretty empty. I remember back when the player count of Tremulous used to be in the hundreds. Good times, had a great childhood. :)
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