The strange reasons that draw people to old games

[temnix]

As I listen to the Tristram theme by Matt Uelmen, I think back on when I first played Diablo. It didn't have a numeral then, yet... and come to think of it, there is still only one. As I listen to the music, I say, I remember how my character trotted slowly and alone through the gloomy village, with its trees and weeds to the side, and realize that the old games simply had more space in them. Fewer people. Today, if you are not playing something that deliberately puts you on a desert isle, you are surrounded by NPC - walking around, standing about to give quests or just making up the scenery. Everything feels like a megapolis. When there are no people moving, they will try to have some birds regularly flying overhead or bugs buzzing by the feet. But with a 1990s game such as Diablo's surface or Baldur's Gate more and more pleasure comes from simply going around not meeting any crowds beside an occasional monster spawn. In fact, even the first Diablo's dungeons feel less crowded than the second's, even though action may be just as frequent. I don't know what makes up this difference, it was something unconscious in the changed habits and ideas of the developers - millimetres and milliseconds already away.

This is an odd reason to want to play old games - to get away from crowds, but it makes sense because games, like everything, reflect their time, and in the 1990s the world's population was around 6 billion, maybe even less. Today it is going on 7.5 - after just 20-odd years. And much of this population, still spread widely before in villages and small towns, has flowed to gigantic urban centers, swelling them beyond any memory of nature, privacy or quiet. It is no wonder that the concept of privacy is being scoffed at today: try keeping any in an anthill. The Internet doesn't even need to enter into this. There is one, two generations now of inner-city children solidly removed from first-hand experience of wild places - other than vacant lots or rooftops. And all this pseudo-medieval hamlet living in old reenacted fantasy, these plump tavernkeepers, smiths banging on things, has taken on a double nostalgic power: today I miss the days when people missed those other days. Videogame mechanics, too, with their new complexity play the role of another crowd. Today's players spend a ridiculous amount of time sorting out fine points of a myriad of abilities and effects. They did not argue about a 1.1 second bonus to cooldowns in 1998. Just by virtue of fewer mechanics to compete with role-playing elements (acting out of one's self and interacting with the world for a greater purpose) stood closer to the fore.

Curiously, as younger players, for some reasons of their own, wind their way to games like BG - or maybe instead as the older players change and assimilate new habits, ejecting inconvenient memories - this min-maxing and power-playing has been projected on the oldies. Nobody at all used to obsess about "builds" when these games first came out. It's hard to say when that began... a few years into the millennium, possibly. In the beginning you would just make a fighter-mage, keep rerolling stats until you got everything into the 16-18 range, I did anyway, and then just enjoyed how nice and powerful that was. Rerolling hit points on level-up sometimes, possibly. What else was there to do but put a star or two into long swords? From there you can already see how the future  appearance of "kits" had to tilt the picture, and later innocuous-seeming conveniences from Beamdog - health bars, sprite outlines, plastic-looking selection circles. This was the beginning of a busy world, where immersion was never implied. Today, I imagine, if a game is not aggressively a GAME, it feels like there is nothing to do in it to the players. And so for a modder to bring in some elements that are actually traditional and don't involve mechanics, or not obviously, such as dialogues, different approaches, items to buy and try, peaceful resolutions, just reading for any purpose, whether that is an item description, a conversation, a journal entry, all this is a hard sell to people coming from Skyrim or, hell's bells, Dota 2. They are simply not used to this calmer and more spacious experience. And those who have been around to remember probably prefer not to. Just listen to the technobabble around this place. You might think they are building rockets...

One of my favorite games from the same period as the Infinity Engine is Faery Tale 2: Halls of the Dead. There one of the greatest delights is exploring the countryside, just running about. Not that it is optional for getting around. A system of coach stations exists to move between different regions quickly, but passage is surprisingly expensive, and, there being no horses to ride, mostly the three brothers who are the heroes of the story lope in long strides through a lush countryside. It's trees after trees after trees. Sometimes they run into goblins, bandits or zombies, sometimes there will be a wild man in rags roaming restlessly in a tiny ruin, who, again surprisingly, is a tinker and can buy the party's staff, but on the whole you find the dungeons and landmarks that there are by running near them. A minimap exists, but it takes a double click to check and it is a peace of paper that you need to take care not to lose. How would that sort of thing go with this generation of players? I think they could adapt, they get to do a lot of adapting in this life, but would they actually enjoy something so formless? Their world is populated with student loans and Ukraine updates. They lack certain vital skills, I think, common habits and mental attitudes that were not passed down. The skills and attitudes that made the wastes of FTA2, Diablo or BG so easy and natural for myself in the 1990s and that make them therapeutic for me today. Their time capsule character is not to be confused with lugubrious nostalgia. Rather they keep alive the scenes, shapes and social distances that are still the norm for the spirits of old-timers. I think it is this that keeps people thronging on the forums and hovering about the games and not so much any great virtues of the games themselves.

Edited March 21, 2022 by temnix

[Awachi]

I don't know about the premise. My first crpg was Ultima IV in '85 or so, and besides the regularly occurring random encounters while wandering the wilderness, every "settlement" had lots of non-essential NPCs that did nothing more than add a lived-in feeling. Bard's Tale 3 (' 90? Crap, I'm old and forgetful) didn't need NPCs because an encounter happened every 4 to 8 steps. 

I feel certain that the "space" you're describing is entirely due to technological limitations, and had Blizzard or Looking Glass or Microverse been able to populate the environment with more, they surely would have. 

[marchitek]

This is very wide topic, I guess every one of us could talk about different thing here and we will still be "on topic". But I can try to tackle it. First of all term "old" is very unstrict. If I understand correctly, you count Baldurs's Gate and Diablo as "old" games. I think one can argue (not without right) that those are "modern" games. At the same time, one can argue (not without right) that all games currently are "old" games, since we still pick dialog options, instead of talking to microphone. Games handle to provide immersion in many different ways, but I wouldn't say we can divide those ways to "old" and "new", it is much more complicated subject.

If we define "old" as "cool when I was young" then it cannot be other else reason then nostalgia. I would also count as nostalgia those cases when child watch as parent/grandparent play some games and then come back to it in the future.

I believe some of players are interested in video game history and play a lot of "old" games, at some point this person can event think that "old" games are better then "current" games. But this is cognitive error. Bad titles from the past was more likely forgotten. This person plays in fact "good old games" not just "old games". Obviously, statement that "good old games" are good is tautological and there are many terrible "old" games.

I must say I have completely different perspective then you, I would never connect "role play" of the game with being "old". I think current cRPGs can offer even more immersion and role play then old titles. My teenage years was placed in 00s and I have never really been into games before "my era", so probably I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm just too young. Whatsoever, I always have respect to old people, even when they talk silly things, I hope for the same kind of favor from their side.

Edited March 22, 2022 by marchitek

[temnix]

I'll try to return the favor when I get old. If I remember. By old games I mean the ones before the advent of the technological connectedness paradigm, which happened around 2005. The virtual disappearance of the real single player experience began around then. It has been resurrected since then, but very specifically in response to a need for some privacy from the social networks and everything plugged into them. But 2005 or around is the year I would draw a jagged line. Some games still came a little later with the previous mindset of one man vs. nature or one man vs. other men (and it WAS men by default, too); the second game type you could have seen in early multiplayer games, Ultima Online, let's say. They were not homey. Today - well, World of Warcraft is actually quite old, too, but as something that tries to be hip it makes a good example: people did not use to walk around with a cute bird on their heads. This did not used to be a thing. So it's quite possible that you really haven't seen the pre-new-age games to be able to tell the difference. Although, if one was to go farther into the past, where *I* haven't been, or not much (I have played Lords of Midnight and a few others), there would be discovered still other distinctions and earlier steps on the ladder rising from the gloom. All of those steps that know about, though, confirm the direction of the change: from lonely mystery to crowds.

In response to Awachi: come on, the broad wild areas of Baldur's Gate were certainly a choice. And not an exceptional case either. The best example of a thirst for solitude I know of are the random encounter maps of the first Fallouts, those small patches of nowhere... Sapienti sat. And I have seen milling NPC on town streets too, before then, in Might&Magic VI, in Daggerfall, too... not very old games, but I did not have a computer until around 1996-1997. Yes, but those towns and NPC were a drop in the ocean of wilderness. The deserts and snows and oceans of Might&Magic VI I'll never forget, and nostalgia has nothing to do with it. To miss what you can't get anymore is not nostalgic any more than being hungry is nostalgia for food. The experience and the essential meaning of that experience simply aren't there. The first Diablo sent you down, down, down into Hell; the second sent you across scenic locations. There is a difference. If you were to dig into the minute changes out here, on the industry and society level, that were to go into this unbearable coddling that's normal today, it would be many things, all revolving around companies' newfound obsession with "customer retention." Let the manager ring his clients once a month and ask they are doing, in case they forget the company name. Here you have constant tiny updates, newsletters, FORUMS, pre-post-semi-closed-alpha releases, feature packs, promotional campaigns, plush toys and paperback lines and social media pages and all of the other noise. But let a videogame historian write a book about media conglomerates. I said enough.

Edit: Looking Glass! They were the people who made Thief, didn't they? Well, that's a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about. Garrett and the world of shadows. Some parts of the first Thief shouldn't be prattled about, though.

But since I had a mind to be profound, I should acknowledge that I understand that these changes all marked changes in civilization itself, its relation to technology, space - outer space, too, technology. The first Terminator movie was made in a culturally different place than the second, that is why they are different, not because special effects caught up. I understand there is no turning back the clock on perception, however, this is not about the clock. If I want an ocean, it's irrelevant to me whether humanity has decided to crawl over them in gigantic canisters and forget about caravels under sail. That might be a development, but then there is something wrong with the idea of development.

Edited March 29, 2022 by temnix

[ahungry]

Quote

"Nobody at all used to obsess about "builds" when these games first came out. "

This depends on your circle of friends/community I think - I spent a lot more time in d2 than d1, and making characters just to try out specific builds was a huge time sink my friends and I would do for replayability (hammerdin, lightning sorc etc.).  if you played in a community that didn't, and you yourself didn't - it could seem like that was the case.

One might state that things changed from d1 to d2, however BG1 only came out 1 year after d1 and again, making special builds was a big reason to play bg1 (including gaming with the intent to be powerful vs RP, for myself at least).

Even before d1, in 1995 was Star Wars CCG, and 4 or so years before that, MTG - both heavily lending themselves to "power gaming" or building optimal builds (decks) in my own adolescence - but again, it comes down to community - in a single player game, builds and min/max rarely matters - but as soon as you go multiplayer, things change big time due to the competitive nature of things.

[temnix]

Magic: the Gathering is not a fitting example here, even if you mean the computer version. Of course when a game is made specially to win, people will try to do just that. Even so the amount of brain-wracking over mechanics that started going into playing MtG and balancing its cards in the early 2000s was incomparable to the early sets. It had not been considered a problem if you won on turn three with Channel or something like that. If that happened too often, your group would just decide to ban a few of the cards. Powerful was thought fine, simple, big-brush mechanics were thought fine. Playing simply for fun at the local level. Enjoying the beautiful and original art. And then all those complex tournaments started to kick off, money prizes came in, plus the sliding Legacy format. Card rarity began to matter, a market formed, it was a snowball. Today... well, today MtG is so depleted that I wonder anyone plays it at all, but let's say ten years ago when it was still hot, it was already a labyrinthine field of tricks and know-how. AD&D's Player Handbook stated upfront, though, that AD&D is not a game played to win.

Diablo, the first one actually, pioneered this growth of complexity in computer RPGs. Its multiplayer was unique. The craze about set collecting didn't start with Diablo 2, oh no. But multiplayer Diablo was really something else, a game in itself, and the most original part of it, I think. A protuberance thrown out to the future. What is curious is that these attempts to shoot for the future were always in the same direction: complexity of interchangeable details, crowd mechanics and some kind of market. It is as if the game developers were imitating the globalizing, virtualizing economy around while still on the surface being epigones of Tolkien - or gothic fantasy in Diablo's case. Well, maybe they did grow tired of repeating the same patterns, having done simple hack and slash since the 1970s. But that's an outside perspective. Looking inside, I don't think it's possible to get bored of being a strong, young hero in a mysterious land with beautiful women and inhuman and superhuman forces. What is supposed to be the maturation from there - becoming an old guy, cynical, ironic and with two slots in Non-Fungible Tokens? Or an escapist born into escapism, as with the people who are 15 or 25 today? But this is a difficult topic, one that philosophers have written books about. I've said enough to make my point. Before was different from after, and after did not necessarily follow from before, and I like before much better, even though before will have no future except after. What I feel is like I've been sewn into a straitjacket of the only possible time line - a tight brown straitjacket with short sleeves...

Edited March 29, 2022 by temnix