7 ms·

Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away

Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.

wtvanhest 3y ago
Red Alert 2. That was such a fun game. One thing that has been majorly lost in games now is the ability to create levels too. I loved the creation part
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  it's still kinda there. Halo forge, fortnite creative mode, starcraft 2, mario maker 1+2, etc.
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  Creating a competent and usable level editor that you can publicly release is a lot of work, and unless you can somehow turn it into a major selling point for the game, you will be hard pressed to afford it. Dev time for games is expensive and if you're hacking together levels using a bunch of disparate tools including some third-party ones it might not really be worth it to make a tool that you can release.
  - zamnos 3y ago
    The ultimate "level editor" was released - Unity. It's infinitely moddable and you can even sell your mods for money.
    - short_sells_poo 3y ago
      There's a world of difference between making a new map/level and making a new game. The effort required for the former is measured in years, whereas the latter is mostly weeks to months (ignoring open world games where the level spans the whole game universe).
  - bleep_bloop 3y ago
    Level editing tools are created to build the levels by the devs. They just don't want to give them to players because they want to sell you additional content. Talking specifically about the usual suspects but hell, even some indie games are doing it now, in indie games it seems more popular to release a new game entirely which is basically 1.0 with new maps but thankfully there are tons of passion projects that get new content for years and years who really deserve more support.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      > Level editing tools are created to build the levels by the devs. They just don't want to give them to players because they want to sell you additional content. This is probably true as well, but the internet editor map editors use are often very different than what they would offer the community, requiring a lot of polish compared to what's used internally (and we all know that the 20% last polish takes 80% of the time) Although there are some games that offer the very same experience, like what Crysis had (with the CryEngine Editor) and ARMA series.
      - bleep_bloop 3y ago
        I don't disagree with your assessment and if anything it really opens the door for someone else to step in and offer these tools because if Skyrim, Minecraft, Gary's mod etc have shown us anything it's that these tools can create vast communities that will keep growing and supporting your work and any future releases. Just a shame to see so many companies prioritise profits over gameplay / replayability and community these days.
Aeolun 3y ago
When I talk to people older than me they think some of the NES games were the best ever released. But I look at the graphics and I just can’t get over it.
- dingusdew 3y ago
  This is super valid. I grew up with these games, and I have heavy nostalgia for them, but they were heavily limited by the hardware of the time. I think some series have had really good modern translations, like the New Super Mario Bros series which has a play-style very akin to the originals, but in a modern format and graphics. I would also consider Mario Maker an example of this as well. But these examples are generally rare and more often there has been a full shift to 3D gaming (Mario Galaxy/Odyssey etc) and side-scrolling is a thing of the past, because a lot of those traditional NES game styles are kind of limited and garbage compared to modern games. I still have my NES, and it still works, but I don't exactly find myself breaking it out all the time to play as opposed to playing a modern game in a modern format.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  I don't know how to call this but the ratio of magic versus graphics resolution fascinates me. 8bit games were often very crude, but you got the essential for a gamer's mind to rejoin for hours.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Anyone growing up in that era should have fond memories of arcade games that were far better than most NES games — there were still real arcades while the NES was current. However, try playing the first level of Super Mario Bros on original NES hardware. The game mechanics basically still hold up. All Atari 2600 games were worse than NES games, and primitive as anything. But try Breakout with paddles on an original 2600; again, the mechanics are good and it’s fun, at least briefly.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  All game generations have their 'best of' games. Of the 1700+ NES games maybe 50 or so are actually classics and worth your time. Then you have the band of 'nostalgia and tough', only play if you are in for a challenges, or it is a game you grew up with. Then 'do not bother' which is the majority of the games. The same is true for MSDOS games, Genesis, 2600, MSX, PS1/2/3/4, XBox, GB, GC etc etc etc. The majority of games out there are just not good or have aged poorly on the graphic/playability front. I personally would recommend only a very small handful of games on the NES. Also one issue with some of these older systems is they were meant to be played on a 15-20 inch PAL/NTSC screen with interlacing. You splat that across a 65 inch OLED they tend to look bad. Your brain is good at making up the detail.
csomar 3y ago
It's not an age-based bias. These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting. Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  > Very few games do that today I’d say quite a few. Just not AAA publisher shovelware.
- clhodapp 3y ago
  > ... These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting. > > Very few games do that today ... The big new Zelda that just came out does exactly this. They took the shell of the last game and spent six years just making things to flesh out the game much further.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    They spent 6 years making a game that is exactly the same at a high level with only slight changes to the details.
- mattmanser 3y ago
  High content, big budget, games still exist, e.g. Elden Ring + Zelda (as someone mentioned) are two recent releases. There's also plenty of sim games in the indie market, Factorio, Banished, Frostpunk. Then things that are close to the market like They Are Billions, Kenshi, etc. to name a few I've personally had time to play. Kenshi is a bit rough around the edges, but absolutely brilliant in terms of sandbox play. There's also the Endless series from Amplitutde studios, Endless Legend, Endless Space 1 + 2, that are of a vein of Civ games, plus they've recently brought out Humandkind (though to mixed reviews unfortunately). The popular sim genre in recent times has been more 3rd person building mixed with exploration, there was the wave of multiplayer ones like Minecraft, Rust, Arc Evolved, etc. And then single player ones like Subnautica, etc. So there's stuff out there if you want it, it's just not a very popular genre at the moment.
LarsDu88 3y ago
When these games came out, the PC game market was smaller with less competition. Programmers and game makers drew from what they grew up with which was table top board games. That's why the instruction manuals were thick (like a DnD manual), the rules were incredibly complex, and the learning curves were steep. These games were a product of their time and you definitely do have an age based selection bias!
- midasuni 3y ago
  I don’t remember a thick manual for red alert. Or much of a manual at all.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    There was definitely a manual, I remember that. I don't think it was huge though, but I remember reading it through on a car ride home (something like ~3 hours) so probably was around 100 pages.
  - LarsDu88 3y ago
    http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/manuals/Red%20Alert%201/Red%20Alert%20-%20English%20-%20New.pdf http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/manuals/Red%20Alert%201/... 99 pages long my friend. Checkout the manual for StarCraft, which gives you the entire backstory!
    - Arrath 3y ago
      I read and reread the manuals for StarCraft, Starsiege, and Starsiege: Tribes oh so many times
      - LarsDu88 3y ago
        Earthsiege 2, which I picked up for $9.99 back in the day had a real nice manual
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Later re-releases didn't have any. The red box one has a big manual.
duckmysick 3y ago
You're definitely onto something and it's not just an age bias. I can think of a few 2D games released in the previous decade that continued this trend: Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rimworld, Celeste, Hades.
- chakernada 3y ago
  Yes Rimworld! was thinking exactly the same thing.
- scotty79 3y ago
  You can see how much of a challenge it is to go into interesting game mechanics in 3d by looking at the development of Satisfactory.
- EtienneK 3y ago
  Hades is in my top 5 games of all time. Might even be #1.
- jonnytran 3y ago
  Hollow Knight
chakernada 3y ago
second that!
intelVISA 3y ago
A game couldn't be pretty back then it had to sell itself on other merits. I think we'll come full circle with generative ML tooling as games will have to compete in wider areas than just marketing & graphics.
- usefulcat 3y ago
  No, I think looks have always mattered; the only thing that’s changed are where the goalposts are located.
codingdave 3y ago
That is also just a few years before World of Warcraft came out, which drove everyone to focus more on multiplayer games. Not that we didn't all do multiplayer at LAN parties, but that is when it really switched to being done across the internet. FWIW, I have a pet theory that WoW took over at that point not because of the MMO concept (which already existed), but because their UX was so smooth. That was the first MMO that "just worked" to understand what you were trying to click. The others at that time would take multiple tries to click an object correctly. In any case, the success of WoW is what changed the direction of gaming a few years after all those games came out, so I'm agreeing with you that it was an incredible era.
- aceazzameen 3y ago
  You're right on the UX. But not just the UX, eeeeverything was polished with little details put into place around every turn. Nothing else was like it at that scale.
tgtweak 3y ago
All of which were very direct progressions on the gameplay depth and replayability. Also... grand theft auto 2 and gran turismo 2.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
The "best (according to me)" games are still 2D or 2.5D: Roguelikes Dwarf Fortress Factorio EU4 My theory is that deep gameplay and AAA 3D graphics are mutually exclusive because deep gameplay fundamentally requires "tile grids" of some kind, which don't lend themselves to AAA 3D graphics. (Diablo 1 and 2 kind of railed against this by taking the approach, "Hey, what if we took a tile-based roguelike and rendered it in isometric 3Dsortof?" At the time, that isometric 3Dsortof was state of the art, I guess.)
- badpun 3y ago
  I have very similar opinion. Presenting things in perspective projection (where things closer to you are taking up more space on screen, and are potentially obscuring things farther from you) is a very peculiar approach, applicable only to FPS and TPS games, where seeing things from the eye of the camera is actually the main gimmick. For some reason they are immensely popular, but they're only a tiny minority of available genres. For everything but FPS/TPS, an orthographic projection creates a much better view of what the heck is actually going on in the game, and thus leads to better gameplay.
- sofixa 3y ago
  Depends on the genre. I think few people can seriously say Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't have deep gameplay, and it is beautiful.
  - loweb1 3y ago
    I tried RDR2 for an hour but I was completely bored the whole time. It felt like I was watching a movie that occasionally made me hit some buttons. Did not feel like a game to me at all.
jvanderbot 3y ago
Homeworld, quake 2, Half-life, counterstrike, starcraft, diablo, 97 to '00. I cannot think of a more revolutionary span of games over 3 years.
- titzer 3y ago
  Quake II was 1997 and Quake 3 1999 (!). Also, you mention Counterstrike, but the original Half-life and Unreal were pretty revolutionary too.
- cooperadymas 3y ago
  85-88 is unrivaled. I am willing to fudge the 3 year span a bit because games were still released at significantly times in different countries, though you could sheer off either end and still have an extremely impressive list. Super Mario Bros 3 Zelda II Mega Man John Madden Football Battle Chess Tetris Contra Double Dragon Street Fighter Castlevania Metal Gear Metroid Mike Tyson's Punch Out Final Fantasy The Legend of Zelda Dragon Quest Super Mario Bros Adventure Island Paper Boy Gauntlet
- usefulcat 3y ago
  To this day my favorite game is still Total Annihilation (1997).
dr_orpheus 3y ago
I think Age of Empires 2 will always be in my top 10 list of favorite games. It's in a similar vein of just upgrading graphics, but I also really enjoyed the spin-offs built on the same game engine: Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and Age of Mythology.
- xvedejas 3y ago
  It's especially exciting that it's more popular now than it's ever been. With the 2019 re-release, it's pretty consistently been around #50 in top active players on Steam at any given time. And they keep updating it still. It's been a blast to get back into it and try to actually get decent at it. And the pro scene keeps getting bigger and bigger tournaments too.
mock-possum 3y ago
Don’t forget StarCraft, blows AoE and RA2 out of the water in terms of asymmetric RTS (and I say this as a huge fan of both the others)

wtvanhest 3y ago

Red Alert 2. That was such a fun game. One thing that has been majorly lost in games now is the ability to create levels too. I loved the creation part

meowtimemania 3y ago
it's still kinda there. Halo forge, fortnite creative mode, starcraft 2, mario maker 1+2, etc.
genocidicbunny 3y ago
Creating a competent and usable level editor that you can publicly release is a lot of work, and unless you can somehow turn it into a major selling point for the game, you will be hard pressed to afford it. Dev time for games is expensive and if you're hacking together levels using a bunch of disparate tools including some third-party ones it might not really be worth it to make a tool that you can release.
- zamnos 3y ago
  The ultimate "level editor" was released - Unity. It's infinitely moddable and you can even sell your mods for money.
  - short_sells_poo 3y ago
    There's a world of difference between making a new map/level and making a new game. The effort required for the former is measured in years, whereas the latter is mostly weeks to months (ignoring open world games where the level spans the whole game universe).
- bleep_bloop 3y ago
  Level editing tools are created to build the levels by the devs. They just don't want to give them to players because they want to sell you additional content. Talking specifically about the usual suspects but hell, even some indie games are doing it now, in indie games it seems more popular to release a new game entirely which is basically 1.0 with new maps but thankfully there are tons of passion projects that get new content for years and years who really deserve more support.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    > Level editing tools are created to build the levels by the devs. They just don't want to give them to players because they want to sell you additional content. This is probably true as well, but the internet editor map editors use are often very different than what they would offer the community, requiring a lot of polish compared to what's used internally (and we all know that the 20% last polish takes 80% of the time) Although there are some games that offer the very same experience, like what Crysis had (with the CryEngine Editor) and ARMA series.
    - bleep_bloop 3y ago
      I don't disagree with your assessment and if anything it really opens the door for someone else to step in and offer these tools because if Skyrim, Minecraft, Gary's mod etc have shown us anything it's that these tools can create vast communities that will keep growing and supporting your work and any future releases. Just a shame to see so many companies prioritise profits over gameplay / replayability and community these days.

Aeolun 3y ago

When I talk to people older than me they think some of the NES games were the best ever released. But I look at the graphics and I just can’t get over it.

dingusdew 3y ago
This is super valid. I grew up with these games, and I have heavy nostalgia for them, but they were heavily limited by the hardware of the time. I think some series have had really good modern translations, like the New Super Mario Bros series which has a play-style very akin to the originals, but in a modern format and graphics. I would also consider Mario Maker an example of this as well. But these examples are generally rare and more often there has been a full shift to 3D gaming (Mario Galaxy/Odyssey etc) and side-scrolling is a thing of the past, because a lot of those traditional NES game styles are kind of limited and garbage compared to modern games. I still have my NES, and it still works, but I don't exactly find myself breaking it out all the time to play as opposed to playing a modern game in a modern format.
agumonkey 3y ago
I don't know how to call this but the ratio of magic versus graphics resolution fascinates me. 8bit games were often very crude, but you got the essential for a gamer's mind to rejoin for hours.
KerrAvon 3y ago
Anyone growing up in that era should have fond memories of arcade games that were far better than most NES games — there were still real arcades while the NES was current. However, try playing the first level of Super Mario Bros on original NES hardware. The game mechanics basically still hold up. All Atari 2600 games were worse than NES games, and primitive as anything. But try Breakout with paddles on an original 2600; again, the mechanics are good and it’s fun, at least briefly.
sumtechguy 3y ago
All game generations have their 'best of' games. Of the 1700+ NES games maybe 50 or so are actually classics and worth your time. Then you have the band of 'nostalgia and tough', only play if you are in for a challenges, or it is a game you grew up with. Then 'do not bother' which is the majority of the games. The same is true for MSDOS games, Genesis, 2600, MSX, PS1/2/3/4, XBox, GB, GC etc etc etc. The majority of games out there are just not good or have aged poorly on the graphic/playability front. I personally would recommend only a very small handful of games on the NES. Also one issue with some of these older systems is they were meant to be played on a 15-20 inch PAL/NTSC screen with interlacing. You splat that across a 65 inch OLED they tend to look bad. Your brain is good at making up the detail.

csomar 3y ago

It's not an age-based bias. These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting. Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.

Semaphor 3y ago
> Very few games do that today I’d say quite a few. Just not AAA publisher shovelware.
clhodapp 3y ago
> ... These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting. > > Very few games do that today ... The big new Zelda that just came out does exactly this. They took the shell of the last game and spent six years just making things to flesh out the game much further.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  They spent 6 years making a game that is exactly the same at a high level with only slight changes to the details.
mattmanser 3y ago
High content, big budget, games still exist, e.g. Elden Ring + Zelda (as someone mentioned) are two recent releases. There's also plenty of sim games in the indie market, Factorio, Banished, Frostpunk. Then things that are close to the market like They Are Billions, Kenshi, etc. to name a few I've personally had time to play. Kenshi is a bit rough around the edges, but absolutely brilliant in terms of sandbox play. There's also the Endless series from Amplitutde studios, Endless Legend, Endless Space 1 + 2, that are of a vein of Civ games, plus they've recently brought out Humandkind (though to mixed reviews unfortunately). The popular sim genre in recent times has been more 3rd person building mixed with exploration, there was the wave of multiplayer ones like Minecraft, Rust, Arc Evolved, etc. And then single player ones like Subnautica, etc. So there's stuff out there if you want it, it's just not a very popular genre at the moment.

LarsDu88 3y ago

When these games came out, the PC game market was smaller with less competition. Programmers and game makers drew from what they grew up with which was table top board games. That's why the instruction manuals were thick (like a DnD manual), the rules were incredibly complex, and the learning curves were steep. These games were a product of their time and you definitely do have an age based selection bias!

midasuni 3y ago
I don’t remember a thick manual for red alert. Or much of a manual at all.
- capableweb 3y ago
  There was definitely a manual, I remember that. I don't think it was huge though, but I remember reading it through on a car ride home (something like ~3 hours) so probably was around 100 pages.
- LarsDu88 3y ago
  http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/manuals/Red%20Alert%201/Red%20Alert%20-%20English%20-%20New.pdf http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/manuals/Red%20Alert%201/... 99 pages long my friend. Checkout the manual for StarCraft, which gives you the entire backstory!
  - Arrath 3y ago
    I read and reread the manuals for StarCraft, Starsiege, and Starsiege: Tribes oh so many times
    - LarsDu88 3y ago
      Earthsiege 2, which I picked up for $9.99 back in the day had a real nice manual
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Later re-releases didn't have any. The red box one has a big manual.

duckmysick 3y ago

You're definitely onto something and it's not just an age bias. I can think of a few 2D games released in the previous decade that continued this trend: Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rimworld, Celeste, Hades.

chakernada 3y ago
Yes Rimworld! was thinking exactly the same thing.
scotty79 3y ago
You can see how much of a challenge it is to go into interesting game mechanics in 3d by looking at the development of Satisfactory.
EtienneK 3y ago
Hades is in my top 5 games of all time. Might even be #1.
jonnytran 3y ago
Hollow Knight

chakernada 3y ago

second that!

intelVISA 3y ago

A game couldn't be pretty back then it had to sell itself on other merits. I think we'll come full circle with generative ML tooling as games will have to compete in wider areas than just marketing & graphics.

usefulcat 3y ago
No, I think looks have always mattered; the only thing that’s changed are where the goalposts are located.

codingdave 3y ago

That is also just a few years before World of Warcraft came out, which drove everyone to focus more on multiplayer games. Not that we didn't all do multiplayer at LAN parties, but that is when it really switched to being done across the internet. FWIW, I have a pet theory that WoW took over at that point not because of the MMO concept (which already existed), but because their UX was so smooth. That was the first MMO that "just worked" to understand what you were trying to click. The others at that time would take multiple tries to click an object correctly. In any case, the success of WoW is what changed the direction of gaming a few years after all those games came out, so I'm agreeing with you that it was an incredible era.

aceazzameen 3y ago
You're right on the UX. But not just the UX, eeeeverything was polished with little details put into place around every turn. Nothing else was like it at that scale.

tgtweak 3y ago

All of which were very direct progressions on the gameplay depth and replayability. Also... grand theft auto 2 and gran turismo 2.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

The "best (according to me)" games are still 2D or 2.5D: Roguelikes Dwarf Fortress Factorio EU4 My theory is that deep gameplay and AAA 3D graphics are mutually exclusive because deep gameplay fundamentally requires "tile grids" of some kind, which don't lend themselves to AAA 3D graphics. (Diablo 1 and 2 kind of railed against this by taking the approach, "Hey, what if we took a tile-based roguelike and rendered it in isometric 3Dsortof?" At the time, that isometric 3Dsortof was state of the art, I guess.)

badpun 3y ago
I have very similar opinion. Presenting things in perspective projection (where things closer to you are taking up more space on screen, and are potentially obscuring things farther from you) is a very peculiar approach, applicable only to FPS and TPS games, where seeing things from the eye of the camera is actually the main gimmick. For some reason they are immensely popular, but they're only a tiny minority of available genres. For everything but FPS/TPS, an orthographic projection creates a much better view of what the heck is actually going on in the game, and thus leads to better gameplay.
sofixa 3y ago
Depends on the genre. I think few people can seriously say Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't have deep gameplay, and it is beautiful.
- loweb1 3y ago
  I tried RDR2 for an hour but I was completely bored the whole time. It felt like I was watching a movie that occasionally made me hit some buttons. Did not feel like a game to me at all.

jvanderbot 3y ago

Homeworld, quake 2, Half-life, counterstrike, starcraft, diablo, 97 to '00. I cannot think of a more revolutionary span of games over 3 years.

titzer 3y ago
Quake II was 1997 and Quake 3 1999 (!). Also, you mention Counterstrike, but the original Half-life and Unreal were pretty revolutionary too.
cooperadymas 3y ago
85-88 is unrivaled. I am willing to fudge the 3 year span a bit because games were still released at significantly times in different countries, though you could sheer off either end and still have an extremely impressive list. Super Mario Bros 3 Zelda II Mega Man John Madden Football Battle Chess Tetris Contra Double Dragon Street Fighter Castlevania Metal Gear Metroid Mike Tyson's Punch Out Final Fantasy The Legend of Zelda Dragon Quest Super Mario Bros Adventure Island Paper Boy Gauntlet
usefulcat 3y ago
To this day my favorite game is still Total Annihilation (1997).

dr_orpheus 3y ago

I think Age of Empires 2 will always be in my top 10 list of favorite games. It's in a similar vein of just upgrading graphics, but I also really enjoyed the spin-offs built on the same game engine: Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and Age of Mythology.

xvedejas 3y ago
It's especially exciting that it's more popular now than it's ever been. With the 2019 re-release, it's pretty consistently been around #50 in top active players on Steam at any given time. And they keep updating it still. It's been a blast to get back into it and try to actually get decent at it. And the pro scene keeps getting bigger and bigger tournaments too.

mock-possum 3y ago

Don’t forget StarCraft, blows AoE and RA2 out of the water in terms of asymmetric RTS (and I say this as a huge fan of both the others)