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>"For a long time we were pushing up against the limits of what the computer could do,” he says. “We were trying to get the most out of the available hardware a
by eezurr 6y ago
>"For a long time we were pushing up against the limits of what the computer could do,” he says. “We were trying to get the most out of the available hardware and then tap onto the players imagination to provide the rest. That was the art of game design, to provide that stimulus. You would imagine being a fighter pilot, or a pirate, or the king of a great civilisation.” Where some games are more like films, gorgeous to look at but where many of the artistic decisions have been taken for you, Meier’s games are more like novels, inviting the reader to fill in the gaps. His maxims."
Leaving the rest up to imagination is the key part IMO. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Simcity 2 & 4 (never played 3000), Warcraft II (and too some extent, III), Baldur's Gate I/II.. the graphics are just enough to tell you what's going on, and your brain fills in the rest of the details. I feel the closer graphics approach reality, and the more details their are, your brain begins to filter out those details, and notices the flaws/unpolished pixels, which ends up taking away from the immersive experience.
- grillvogel 6y ago90s PC gaming was a golden era
- sgillen 6y agoFeels to me like right now/this last decade is a golden era as well. Factorio, rimworld, binding of Isaac, dark souls + sekiro, xcom, civ 6, Divinity, paradox games, Minecraft, subnautica, rocket league. To name a few of my favorites.
- diffrinse 6y agoThe Last of Us Part II
- mywittyname 6y agoToday is absolutely the golden age. We stand at the point where making and selling a game is easier than it has ever been. I think over the years, people will continue to move away from PCs as a gaming platform to mobile devices, and shovelware from the casual, pay-to-play game companies will keep the market so saturated that it will be hard to discover great indie titles. PS. your list is missing Disco!
- jointpdf 6y agoThe term shovelware reminds me of the E.T. incident. A game so bad that Atari literally got out the shovels: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial
- chrisco255 6y agoReally? I feel like any damage mobile could do has already been done at this point. Mobile is no longer novel and has been saturated for many years. I haven't built a new PC in years but recently with the fantastic AMD chips and some great titles that I want to explore, I plan on doing it soon. Plus it would be nice to have a system I could tether a VR headset to if I want.
- Merem 6y agoI tend to agree with him (well, for me 95-2004 is the golden era) for the reason that it's mostly "been there, done that" nowadays. In addition, you have a lot of bad business practices such as microtransactions, lootboxes, terrible DRM (Denuvo, Steam etc), release of unfinished products and you can't even buy the games physically anymore. Apart from some indie games, nothing really seems worth it. As someone who started playing PC games at the beginning of the 00s, I'm mostly playing ones released in the 90s and early 00s. The main issue with older games is typically the UI and controls. Apart from that, they feel a lot more "fresh" due to its content and often times experimentation. In contrast, a lot of games these days stick to the same things and at best combine two genres into one (roguelites for instance). Or they take old ideas and just build on top of it. Very rarely you get something like "Return of the Obra Dinn".
- Shared404 6y agoFor me personally, I would add Hollow Knight to the list. That is one of the few games I intend to always have installed on at least one machine.
- drivebycomment 6y agoYeah. I think gaming market and the technology are doing just fine since it produced Hollow Knight. I really think it is one of the best games in history, and one of the greatest storytelling in an interactive, electric media. Such exquisite balance between simplicity and detail, music and visual, story line and game play, characters and background, etc. Waiting for Silksong...
- mercer 6y agoThen there's also Shovel Knight, Celeste, The Messenger, Stardew Valley, Undertale, and so on. We've never had it better as gamers!
- renewiltord 6y agoMinecraft is the best game I have ever played in 25 years of playing games. Nothing like it. A masterpiece. Once in a generation masterwork. Created an avenue for creativity for a generation. It's for the history books.
- Merem 6y agoDo you know Clonk? Minecraft is basically that, just in 3D and with some added things like a procedurally-generated world and stuff like hunger. But crafting, "blocks", extracting materials, mobs, multiplayer, creating new items, mechanics, scenarios etc for the game and so on were already there, many years before Minecraft. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Clonk-Endeavour-4.9.5.4-deutsch-screen.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Clonk-En... https://cc-archive.lwrl.de/shots/7.jpg https://cc-archive.lwrl.de/shots/7.jpg (with Stippel pack) Seems like it's really hard to come by screenshots these days. Things like the Stargate pack with working portals, Goa'uld etc were just great.
- renewiltord 6y agoIncredible. What a disappointment I did not come across these as a child. There's something to Minecraft, though, and I can't quite describe it.
- Kiro 6y agoClonk is great but not comparable to Minecraft imo.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y agoSome of the added things you mentioned plus the 3d aspect are vital to what minecraft is. The game starts in survival mode and slowly switches to building mode which is a very well executed and satisfying transition. The 3d aspect of it is important and so is the hunger. Hunger is the first bit of horizontal progression, then the rest comes from unlocking building resources and convenience. Vertical progression in comparison is quick and 99% of the mobs soon pose no challenge.
- mcv 6y ago
- GarvielLoken 6y agoTotally agree. Dark Souls threw every third person action game of the nineties down the trash. Same with the wargame series being the best rts game ever released, in complexity combined with real time and unit balance it's unparalleled. The only 90 games worth talking about anymore are the rpg games, the space simulators/rpgs and Homeworld. As in that you would actually prefer to play it instead of a modern game for none nostalgic reasons. And we still have games breaking new ground like Disco Elysium.
- freeAgent 6y agoEh, I think there are truly classic games from all genres from the 90s that are still relevant and played today. RTS games like StarCraft and Red Alert still have large followings. On the FPS side there’s the original Counter-Strike (well, “1.6” at least), Doom, Quake, and even stuff like Starsiege: Tribes which I’d say are still relevant and hugely influential. I have played lots of these games in recent years. I enjoy the relative simplicity of them compared to most modern day counterparts.
- Shared404 6y ago> Dark Souls threw every third person action game of the nineties down the trash. I dunno. Ocarina still holds up today, or at least the 3DS remake does. I don't know about the original.
- GarvielLoken 6y agoYeah, the Zelda series is alright. And the Zelda games for all consoles are still worth playing.
- jewelry 6y agoI'd argue it was a golden era for you as that's the best time of you to play game. My kids would say 2020 is the golden era of game as they started to enjoy minecraft and roblox now.
- smabie 6y agoI played a lot of games as a teenager in the mid 2000s, and they kind of sucked. The graphics aged terribly compared to something like SNES or N64 games and the game play wasn't that great. 2010-2020 has undoubtedly been the golden age of gaming, thanks to Steam mostly. Without physical discs, lower indie price point games could be sold and still turn a profit. From a quality and diversity standpoint, the last ten years have seen the best games ever made, a lot of them indies.
- groby_b 6y agoI'd suspect that might be related to when you grew up. I'm a child of the late 80's, and nothing will ever beat the experiences of Zaxxon, Manic Miner, Paradroid, etc. I do know gamers who were teens in the late 70s, and it's all about River Raid, Pole Position, Frogger. My guess is that, just like music, what you experience as a teen shapes you.
- pavlov 6y ago> “...the closer graphics approach reality, and the more details their are, your brain begins to filter out those details, and notices the flaws” This is often called the uncanny valley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
- phaus 6y agoI thought the uncanny valley specifically referred to things that are so close to realistic that it physically creeps people out because they subconsciously know somethings wrong. Not necessarily realistic graphics taking away the magic. We aren't even close to the level of realism in games that's creepy IMO. Probably another few generations of GPUs away from that.
- tuatoru 6y agoYeah, this phenomenon is more like the hi-fi treadmill, where the closer your sound system is to perfect reproduction, the more annoying the remaining flaws get. And so you upgrade...
- serf 6y agoit's not just that phenomenon. Daniel Dennett mentions an experience where a painting , with very little detail up-close, appeared to him to have all the detail of a photograph when viewed from afar[0]. It's not quite the same thing as the uncanny valley effect, for him it came about from his naive expectation of up-close detail being blown apart by his experience, when getting closer and closer to the painting, of realizing that the painting itself was almost incomprehensible up-close -- the detail was created by the way the abstract shapes created the illusion of detail from afar on a very large canvas. It was sort of an artistic physical version of rendering LOD tricks. He expresses it much better than I do, I recommend the TED talk or the Google talk where he highlights this example as a way to gain insight into what consciousness may be. [0]: https://youtu.be/fjbWr3ODbAo https://youtu.be/fjbWr3ODbAo
- freediver 6y agoIf you really want to experience your imagination being talked to directly, try MUDs instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg&feature=emb_logo
- StanislavPetrov 6y agoWe used to pay $6 an hour (~$14 an hour in 2020 dollars) to play MUD1 (British Legends) at 300 baud on Compuserve in the mid 80s (plus phone fees which were ridiculously high in the 80s).
- WhompingWindows 6y agoI'm fine with nice graphics, they don't remove me from immersion any more than older, more basic graphics. My issue is when there is no substance to the game, when it's mostly eye-candy. As a Starcraft/Civ/Witcher gamer, I like complexity and decisions and which "era" of game graphics is mostly irrelevant. The mixture of games I play with pleasure spans from 1990's to 2020s, graphics are like music, atmospheric but not pivotal.
- phaus 6y agoYou may be on to something. However, I think the biggest thing that detracts from many beloved franchises today is a design philosophy where everyone is hell bent on streamlining out all of the gameplay to the point where the gameplay isn't fun for people that liked gaming in the 90s and before. Warcraft II was amazing because it had really great RTS mechanics. Warcraft III was a great game, but it introduced hero units so powerful the game ceased to be an RTS and became a hybrid of the genre it eventually gave birth to. It already felt like a MOBA half the time when players could just power-level their hero and come decimate your entire army almost single-handedly because you focused on building.* *Not saying this was an optimal strategy vs really gifted players, I wasn't a WC pro and I only played on LANs back in those days.
- chrisco255 6y agoYeah they pulled that with one of the more recent SimCity games. I used to enjoy laying pipe, running electricity and setting up zoned grids on tiny squares, but they streamlined and oversimplified way too many of the enjoyable details from SimCity 2000 (best version in my opinion). Maybe modern game designers thought those were empty chores but I felt they added to the sandbox feel of the game.
- non-entity 6y ago> but it introduced hero units so powerful the game ceased to be an RTS Interestingly, one of the criticisms of new total war games is similar to this. Sadly that series seems to be going down the drain.
- foresto 6y agoI still see examples of this in modern games. Overwatch chose cartoonish visuals while other shooters aimed for realism, and the result is both more appealing to my eye and more performant. A few more years down the road, I suspect Overwatch will still look good, while its contemporaries' attempts at photo-realism draw attention to their own shortcomings in light of what the tech of the day will be able to render. Breath of the Wild is another example of stylized art instead of trying to look like a live action movie. It is imagination fuel in a way similar to a Miyazaki film. I think it will age well, too.
- the_benno 6y agoWind Waker on the gamecube is a perfect example of what you're describing. Almost 20 years old and I still think the cel-shaded graphics look great, especially when compared to its more "realistic" contemporaries.