Gaming 10 years ago versus gaming of today.. by specialistx2324
If you are worried about how long this thread is, then don’t read it at all. But if you are interested in the meaning of this thread, then I encourage you to at least listen to some of the ideas that I have built over the last 20 years of my life.
I started off gaming since I was in elementary years starting off with Nintendo, sega genesis, and Atari.. games when I was a kid did not have all the nice graphics, sound, or content that games have today. One thing that games had back then was “a serious load of replay factor” PAC man is a game released in the late 70’s and you would go to an arcade joint and see people spend hundreds of dollars playing it for hours even days on end. Because from my point of view, games were made so people can have fun aside from their daily lives. The fun factor was even more important than making the millions. Game makers back in those days made only 10% of what today’s generation of game designers make.
Games back then from super Mario to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are crappy and unpalatable by todays standards. Back then they were the games that made gaming possible. And video gaming is a culture in todays society . Listening and making a rock band and video games had one thing in common: you got to play it to love it. Video gaming is a way of life, a way to create your killer ideas and put it into a silicone waffle chip/ cartridge so many more can live through your ideas.
Gaming was not always a bed of roses. An perfect example is the NEO-GEO system that costs $1000 and the games were not even a tenth of the price. It had killer games but the downfall of the gaming industry during the mid 80’s is a prelude in what is happening today.
I played video games throughout highschool even though I was always an honors student. I took 5-6 honors classes and in my senior year I took 4 Advanced Placement classes. I was not the best student in my school, but I worked hard for what I wanted. I started playing PC games during those years from DOOM I-II, DUNE, DUNE 2000, all of the warcraft games, Hexen, Killer Insinct( an arcade game), MDK, Quake, Duke Nukem, Mechwarrior 2, and my personal favorite : Wing Commander. Those games did not have a spec of the technology of today, but they had awesome programmers of that time. They had replay value, a awesome story line close to the caliber of Stephen King’s Novels. Every level of the game advanced the story line and you wanted to know what happened next. They had pretty good visuals at that time. Back then you could stop playing those games for a few months, go to your room and pick it up and keep on going where you left off. It was all about the fun, and if everyone had fun, then people like John and Adrian Carmack who wrote the DOOM FPS series felt that they have done their job.
It takes 4-6 years to make a viable game. Example: Blizzard Entertainment Inc. are notorious for Warcraft and the Diablo Series. They did not release games every year like some game designers of today. They took their time because gaming and game design had another dimension: ART. Games back then were both an art to make and an art to play. Blizzard had this concept perfectly done. One final comment about Blizzard: they believed that the best way to make money was not to fire off games to the public faster than a PKM round flying through the air. They believed in creating loyal fans of their games for years to come. Well that was true until World Of Warcraft came out.
In the last 5-6 years, there are three things that changed drastically, and I will elaborate on them individually.
Game replayability and gaming content: Both these concepts have changed in my opinion for the worst. Games 20 years ago had so much replay value and it was not about the money. Games today have an average of 4-5 days of replay value. Example: I beat FEAR in 2 days and only played for an extra day. I never ever touched FEAR again and all it is doing is sitting in the closet. Wing Commander IV and Prophecy, were the final two Wing Commander games under Chris Roberts ( if I remember correctly). I remember I played for 4 months for each of those games. They had In game movies with Mark Hamill ( Luke Skywalker from Star wars epic). Boy did he do an fantastic job in those in game moves of Wing Commander. Games were not just about how many enemies you sent to their doom. It was your actions that define what happened next in the game. Half Life One from 1998-1999 took me 3 weeks to beat, and it was the final awesome game of that generation.
Game Design: I remember the days when Voodoo 3DFX cards owned the market. For a card that had a 16MB of video memory, game designers did a whole lot in terms of graphics engine. Back then it was about a story of the character you were playing being good or being bad. It was about game play rather than special effects. It was about having hilarious happenings and lines like Duke Nukem 3D. It was about having Enemy AI kicking your ass from here to China as in Half Life.
Gaming design has drifted from good story lines and replay value to having the most special effects. That is what made The Matrix a viable movie to see to a certain point. Game designers of today are worried more about having all the nice graphics, sound, lights, animation, rather than substance. Remember when you buy a $50-$60 video game, 90 % of it is just another firework show. Shock and Awe is what they call it now. There is one game in my mind that has awesome replay value of the early 90’s, an awesome story line and killer graphics and lighting.: MAX PAYNE. That game won as much as 50 awards and not one game since then has ever beaten it. Star Wars Knight of the Old republic came pretty close. As they say: Close is not enough.
Game designers are worried about how much money they will make for 5 games released in 5 years than making 2-3 awesome and well done games in 5 years. Its all about the money and I don’t care how stable the game is : that’s is the mentality of game makes from UBI SOFT and DICE. Its all about the quick bucks. Back in the 70’s quick bucks in gaming is unheard of. Games today have awesome graphics, sound, gameplay, futuristic ideas and concepts but at what cost………………..
Gamers Maturity level: This is the most contraversal point of this thread and the most powerful. My mother always said “ Gaming is for punks” maybe she is implying that I am a punk. Am I, well lets see. I finished college, I am in a graduate program and I plan to become an Eye doctor someday. I worked and paid my way through college, I help out my parents, friends. I play sports, help build computers, write, work out, and have fun. So I guess that does not make me a punk. Part of what my mom says is true and that is quite evident in Online games. Ask yourself this question: If Battlefield 2 were to be a game of the past rather than a game of today, would you see the same crap that you see now? The answer is absolutely NO. Look at all the nonsense that you see in todays society . None of that crap existed 10-20 years ago. People who played laser tag back then don’t shoot teammates unless they are blind and stupid. Back then, there were a small number of multiplayer games, people had fun for the most part. Hardly anyone flamed each other. People just want to enjoy good competition and sportsmanship
People play games not for fun anymore. They play because its an addiction. Everyone has seen all those poor fools who play BF2 and World of Warcraft for 16-24 hours a day. I played half life and team fortress back in the days and I could never match the hours that some of these “hardcore gamers” play. I love half life and team fortress, but I only play for one or two hours a day. Why --- because I had fun and there is more to life than a damn tube. NO one back in the day played for so many hours like today, unless they are fanatics themselves.
I have played WoW for 3 months for at least 4-5 hrs a day. I stopped playing a long time ago because I realized that I was not having fun anymore and it started to become an addiction. Having fun and being addicted to something are two different things.
I am not writing this to tell you that you should not play video games for 16-24 hrs a day. If that is you choice to play from sunrise till sunset, then by all means do it all you want. But I will say this: game design companies are releasing junk faster than junk mail trying to make the money as fast as they can by making games with more special effects and graphics rather than making a game that reads and feels like a story. Games are supposed to be stories acted out in front of you in front of a video screen. Majority of gaming companies are not interested in the fun and replay factor. If you play games at the extreme hours that you play then you have fallen into the trap that they want you to be in. You do exactly what they want and you don’t even know it. You play this junk that they are releasing it thinking that it is the best thing on earth. And that’s the way they want you to think.
You start thinking like junk and you start playing like a punk and ultimately you have ruined the game for other players who play for fun . Look at the insane amount of hackers that CS Source and BF2 has. CS source has soo many hackers because valve did not want to take the time to create antihack commands in the game or antihack measures that were completely flawed. The game is junk therefore punks have ruined the game for others. Punks in this connotation of CSSouce means hackers in this case.
Gamers for the most part back in the day had respect for each other. Now gamers are saying “Fuck you this and Fuck you that”. OMG you dumb ass noob stop teamkilling me for a J-10 plane… Did this crap happened back in the early 90’s and 2000’s > HELL NO.
And this is the same crap that is killing games today.
Blizzard Entertainment had ways to make sure that everyone got along with each other in WoW, and dealt with issues between players harshly. They sure don’t want a bunch of morons flaming each other in the in-game chat.. Does DICE have that kind of measure-----NOOOOO. Why? Because they want to make the quick dollars rather than have mature decent loyal customers. “ you eat their junk, you become the punk”
Here is another good point for you people. Ten years ago if a game comes out and its sequel comes out 6-8 months later, people would not buy that crap right out of the shelf. People wont buy it period. And its sad for people to buy Battlefield 2142 less than a year after BF2 came out. People are worried about the quick thrill rather that something that last you a long time. Making a game is an art, it takes time, effort, hundreds of hours and many years of struggling to make a fine piece of work. It sounds like DICE just put 2142 in the microwave ( INSTANT RICE AND BEANS).
Video gaming is my favorite hobbie and fools like that are turning it into the newest drug in the market. Forget crack, ecstasy, marijuana, or household chemicals, you can have an unlimited high with gaming now these days. And it is sad that each day I find myself letting go of this hobbie because of the morons that have pissed all over it. Gaming is in my blood, but it is something I wont be doing forever. Too much stupidity and compromise from gaming companies and players alike. Being obsessed of video gaming takes away the fun and helping your friends have fun, not pissing each other off.
Fun has been confused with addiction, and where do draw the line. I can be the biggest bum in the world and I still wont play games on a 24 hr bases let alone do the same stupid stuff like you see in games like BF2.
Before you go to EB games to buy a $50.00 3 day thrill ride, be sure what makes you happy and what the real meaning of gaming is all about.
from what i am hearing today, i hear the demo for BF 2142 is crap and people that say that they have the game now are saying the game is "Step back" from bf2. i guess the evidence does not support the idea of going to EB games or Best Buy and picking up a copy.
I know I will be flamed for this… but at least allow me to say what I believe and what I feel . give me a chance to challenge what is wrong with gaming today and help make it right.
If you are worried about how long this thread is, then don’t read it at all. But if you are interested in the meaning of this thread, then I encourage you to at least listen to some of the ideas that I have built over the last 20 years of my life.
I started off gaming since I was in elementary years starting off with Nintendo, sega genesis, and Atari.. games when I was a kid did not have all the nice graphics, sound, or content that games have today. One thing that games had back then was “a serious load of replay factor” PAC man is a game released in the late 70’s and you would go to an arcade joint and see people spend hundreds of dollars playing it for hours even days on end. Because from my point of view, games were made so people can have fun aside from their daily lives. The fun factor was even more important than making the millions. Game makers back in those days made only 10% of what today’s generation of game designers make.
Games back then from super Mario to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are crappy and unpalatable by todays standards. Back then they were the games that made gaming possible. And video gaming is a culture in todays society . Listening and making a rock band and video games had one thing in common: you got to play it to love it. Video gaming is a way of life, a way to create your killer ideas and put it into a silicone waffle chip/ cartridge so many more can live through your ideas.
Gaming was not always a bed of roses. An perfect example is the NEO-GEO system that costs $1000 and the games were not even a tenth of the price. It had killer games but the downfall of the gaming industry during the mid 80’s is a prelude in what is happening today.
I played video games throughout highschool even though I was always an honors student. I took 5-6 honors classes and in my senior year I took 4 Advanced Placement classes. I was not the best student in my school, but I worked hard for what I wanted. I started playing PC games during those years from DOOM I-II, DUNE, DUNE 2000, all of the warcraft games, Hexen, Killer Insinct( an arcade game), MDK, Quake, Duke Nukem, Mechwarrior 2, and my personal favorite : Wing Commander. Those games did not have a spec of the technology of today, but they had awesome programmers of that time. They had replay value, a awesome story line close to the caliber of Stephen King’s Novels. Every level of the game advanced the story line and you wanted to know what happened next. They had pretty good visuals at that time. Back then you could stop playing those games for a few months, go to your room and pick it up and keep on going where you left off. It was all about the fun, and if everyone had fun, then people like John and Adrian Carmack who wrote the DOOM FPS series felt that they have done their job.
It takes 4-6 years to make a viable game. Example: Blizzard Entertainment Inc. are notorious for Warcraft and the Diablo Series. They did not release games every year like some game designers of today. They took their time because gaming and game design had another dimension: ART. Games back then were both an art to make and an art to play. Blizzard had this concept perfectly done. One final comment about Blizzard: they believed that the best way to make money was not to fire off games to the public faster than a PKM round flying through the air. They believed in creating loyal fans of their games for years to come. Well that was true until World Of Warcraft came out.
In the last 5-6 years, there are three things that changed drastically, and I will elaborate on them individually.
Game replayability and gaming content: Both these concepts have changed in my opinion for the worst. Games 20 years ago had so much replay value and it was not about the money. Games today have an average of 4-5 days of replay value. Example: I beat FEAR in 2 days and only played for an extra day. I never ever touched FEAR again and all it is doing is sitting in the closet. Wing Commander IV and Prophecy, were the final two Wing Commander games under Chris Roberts ( if I remember correctly). I remember I played for 4 months for each of those games. They had In game movies with Mark Hamill ( Luke Skywalker from Star wars epic). Boy did he do an fantastic job in those in game moves of Wing Commander. Games were not just about how many enemies you sent to their doom. It was your actions that define what happened next in the game. Half Life One from 1998-1999 took me 3 weeks to beat, and it was the final awesome game of that generation.
Game Design: I remember the days when Voodoo 3DFX cards owned the market. For a card that had a 16MB of video memory, game designers did a whole lot in terms of graphics engine. Back then it was about a story of the character you were playing being good or being bad. It was about game play rather than special effects. It was about having hilarious happenings and lines like Duke Nukem 3D. It was about having Enemy AI kicking your ass from here to China as in Half Life.
Gaming design has drifted from good story lines and replay value to having the most special effects. That is what made The Matrix a viable movie to see to a certain point. Game designers of today are worried more about having all the nice graphics, sound, lights, animation, rather than substance. Remember when you buy a $50-$60 video game, 90 % of it is just another firework show. Shock and Awe is what they call it now. There is one game in my mind that has awesome replay value of the early 90’s, an awesome story line and killer graphics and lighting.: MAX PAYNE. That game won as much as 50 awards and not one game since then has ever beaten it. Star Wars Knight of the Old republic came pretty close. As they say: Close is not enough.
Game designers are worried about how much money they will make for 5 games released in 5 years than making 2-3 awesome and well done games in 5 years. Its all about the money and I don’t care how stable the game is : that’s is the mentality of game makes from UBI SOFT and DICE. Its all about the quick bucks. Back in the 70’s quick bucks in gaming is unheard of. Games today have awesome graphics, sound, gameplay, futuristic ideas and concepts but at what cost………………..
Gamers Maturity level: This is the most contraversal point of this thread and the most powerful. My mother always said “ Gaming is for punks” maybe she is implying that I am a punk. Am I, well lets see. I finished college, I am in a graduate program and I plan to become an Eye doctor someday. I worked and paid my way through college, I help out my parents, friends. I play sports, help build computers, write, work out, and have fun. So I guess that does not make me a punk. Part of what my mom says is true and that is quite evident in Online games. Ask yourself this question: If Battlefield 2 were to be a game of the past rather than a game of today, would you see the same crap that you see now? The answer is absolutely NO. Look at all the nonsense that you see in todays society . None of that crap existed 10-20 years ago. People who played laser tag back then don’t shoot teammates unless they are blind and stupid. Back then, there were a small number of multiplayer games, people had fun for the most part. Hardly anyone flamed each other. People just want to enjoy good competition and sportsmanship
People play games not for fun anymore. They play because its an addiction. Everyone has seen all those poor fools who play BF2 and World of Warcraft for 16-24 hours a day. I played half life and team fortress back in the days and I could never match the hours that some of these “hardcore gamers” play. I love half life and team fortress, but I only play for one or two hours a day. Why --- because I had fun and there is more to life than a damn tube. NO one back in the day played for so many hours like today, unless they are fanatics themselves.
I have played WoW for 3 months for at least 4-5 hrs a day. I stopped playing a long time ago because I realized that I was not having fun anymore and it started to become an addiction. Having fun and being addicted to something are two different things.
I am not writing this to tell you that you should not play video games for 16-24 hrs a day. If that is you choice to play from sunrise till sunset, then by all means do it all you want. But I will say this: game design companies are releasing junk faster than junk mail trying to make the money as fast as they can by making games with more special effects and graphics rather than making a game that reads and feels like a story. Games are supposed to be stories acted out in front of you in front of a video screen. Majority of gaming companies are not interested in the fun and replay factor. If you play games at the extreme hours that you play then you have fallen into the trap that they want you to be in. You do exactly what they want and you don’t even know it. You play this junk that they are releasing it thinking that it is the best thing on earth. And that’s the way they want you to think.
You start thinking like junk and you start playing like a punk and ultimately you have ruined the game for other players who play for fun . Look at the insane amount of hackers that CS Source and BF2 has. CS source has soo many hackers because valve did not want to take the time to create antihack commands in the game or antihack measures that were completely flawed. The game is junk therefore punks have ruined the game for others. Punks in this connotation of CSSouce means hackers in this case.
Gamers for the most part back in the day had respect for each other. Now gamers are saying “Fuck you this and Fuck you that”. OMG you dumb ass noob stop teamkilling me for a J-10 plane… Did this crap happened back in the early 90’s and 2000’s > HELL NO.
And this is the same crap that is killing games today.
Blizzard Entertainment had ways to make sure that everyone got along with each other in WoW, and dealt with issues between players harshly. They sure don’t want a bunch of morons flaming each other in the in-game chat.. Does DICE have that kind of measure-----NOOOOO. Why? Because they want to make the quick dollars rather than have mature decent loyal customers. “ you eat their junk, you become the punk”
Here is another good point for you people. Ten years ago if a game comes out and its sequel comes out 6-8 months later, people would not buy that crap right out of the shelf. People wont buy it period. And its sad for people to buy Battlefield 2142 less than a year after BF2 came out. People are worried about the quick thrill rather that something that last you a long time. Making a game is an art, it takes time, effort, hundreds of hours and many years of struggling to make a fine piece of work. It sounds like DICE just put 2142 in the microwave ( INSTANT RICE AND BEANS).
Video gaming is my favorite hobbie and fools like that are turning it into the newest drug in the market. Forget crack, ecstasy, marijuana, or household chemicals, you can have an unlimited high with gaming now these days. And it is sad that each day I find myself letting go of this hobbie because of the morons that have pissed all over it. Gaming is in my blood, but it is something I wont be doing forever. Too much stupidity and compromise from gaming companies and players alike. Being obsessed of video gaming takes away the fun and helping your friends have fun, not pissing each other off.
Fun has been confused with addiction, and where do draw the line. I can be the biggest bum in the world and I still wont play games on a 24 hr bases let alone do the same stupid stuff like you see in games like BF2.
Before you go to EB games to buy a $50.00 3 day thrill ride, be sure what makes you happy and what the real meaning of gaming is all about.
from what i am hearing today, i hear the demo for BF 2142 is crap and people that say that they have the game now are saying the game is "Step back" from bf2. i guess the evidence does not support the idea of going to EB games or Best Buy and picking up a copy.
I know I will be flamed for this… but at least allow me to say what I believe and what I feel . give me a chance to challenge what is wrong with gaming today and help make it right.
