Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability.

grue, 2 months ago

They didn’t need updates because they gave you the whole game, (usually) more-or-less bug-free, the first time!

NielsBohron, 2 months ago

That’s some survivorship bias shit right here. I can’t tell you how many shitty, buggy games I played in the days of early console and PC gaming. Even games that were revolutionary and objectively good games sometimes had game-breaking bugs, but often it was harder to find them without the internet.

Plus, don’t you remember expansion packs? That was the original form of DLC.

Don_alForno, 2 months ago

There are different kind of DLC, and the kind that’s similar to actual expansion packs is usually not criticized (or not by most).

noobnarski, 2 months ago

Yeah, if a DLC isnt just content taken out of the main game (in a way that makes the main game worse) and is reasonably priced for the amount of content it contains, then it is a good way for developers to get paid for continuing development of a game after launch when it was already finished at launch.

The Witcher 3 DLCs for example were pretty good.

ricdeh, 2 months ago

Oh man, while I was reading the first part of your comment I was thinking of the Witcher 3 DLCs the whole time, I’m so glad that you mentioned them at the end there!

Empricorn, 2 months ago

THANK you. Fuck the upvotes, that person is objectively wrong. Maybe they just didn’t play that many games during the early PC/console era?

TankovayaDiviziya, 2 months ago

Expansion packs were more complete experience than DLCs sold piece by piece.

ampersandrew, 2 months ago

I don’t see how the amount of “completeness” can even be measured. Is it really so much worse that you can buy extra fighters for the Street Fighter 6 that you already own rather than buying Super, Turbo, and then Super Turbo at full price every time? Or that you can choose to buy just the stuff you want for Cities: Skylines for half the price instead of paying twice as much to get stuff that don’t care about along with it? Plus, expansions like Phantom Liberty and Shadow of the Erdtree are bigger than most entire video games from the 90s.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Console:

Except for when they did not, which was actually somewhat common.

But it also became quickly known, respectively stores stopped stocking buggy games. So in return, larger publishers tried their utmost to ensure that games could not have bigger bugs remaining on launch (Nintendo Seal of Excellence for example was one such certification).

But make no mistake, tons of games you fondly remember from your childhood were bugged to hell and back. You just didn’t notice, and the bigger CTDs and stuff did not exist as much, yes.

PC:

It was just flat-out worse back then. But we also thought about it the reverse way: It wasn’t “Oh this doesn’t work on my specific configuration, wtf?!” but “Oh damn I forgot I need a specific VESA card for this, not just any. Gonna take this to my friend who has that card to play it.”.

Strobelt, 2 months ago

Even the concept of taking your game to a friend to play it is basically impossible today

ampersandrew, 2 months ago

How do you figure?

LunarLoony, 2 months ago

Counterpoint: budget re-releases of games (e.g. ‘Platinum’ on PlayStation) were often an opportunity to fix bugs, or sometimes even add new features. A few examples:

• Space Invaders 1500 was a re-release of Space Invaders 2000, with a few new game modes.
• Spyro: Year of the Dragon’s ‘Greatest Hits’ release added a bunch of music that was missing in the original release.
• Ridge Racer Type 4 came with a disc containing an updated version of the first Ridge Racer, which ran at 60fps.
• Super Mario 64’s ‘Shindou Edition’ added rumble pak support, as well as fixing a whole bunch of bugs (famously, the backwards long jump).

Those are just off the top of my head. I’m certain there are more re-releases that represent the true ‘final’ version of a game.

otp, 2 months ago

That’s the exception rather than the rule. If you have the opportunity to make some changes in a new batch, why not take it?

Generally, when the game was released, it had to be done. If there were any major bugs, then people would be returning their copies and probably not buying an updated release. It’d also hurt the reputation of the developer, the publisher, and even the console’s company if it was too prevalent of a problem.

I don’t think anybody I knew ever got an update to a console game without just happening to buy v1.2 or something. There were updated rereleases, but aside from PC gaming, I don’t think most console gamers back then ever thought “I hope they fix this bug with an update”.

Jtskywalker, 2 months ago

I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn’t get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.

I think that feeling is why it’s still my favorite PC game.

DharkStare, 2 months ago

This was my exact experience. I read the book and looked through the map it came with. Morrowind was the game that caused me to change from FPS and Sports games to RPGs.

Jtskywalker, 2 months ago

Ahh, the maps were so good. I remember using the extremely detailed hand drawn map to help me locate the Cavern of the Incarnate, and other cool locations. I am sad that I didn’t keep them.

Blackmist, 2 months ago

I do miss manuals though.

SinkingLotus, 2 months ago

The appetizer before the main course.

ricdeh, 2 months ago

I think you can probably still get them for some modern games that were crafted with passion, through special editions and box sets. I think that the standard store edition of Total War: Warhammer actually came with a manual as well as a novella, and this was coincidentally the last physical copy of a game I bought.

RatBin, 2 months ago

Of course I still have the manual of these old games. The characters were always hand drawn and properly described. For rpg they also used a nice medieval fantasy style. A lot of these descriptions were not even necessary but they were cool to have.

We don’t miss these games because they were inherently better, but because they were fun in their own way, and enhanced creativity due to their own limitations. Also these were console games, so you had a specific time and hardware to play them. It’s not like a moder multiplayer pc game, that somehow follows you beyond the gaming time, and that are played on the same machine you use to work.

Sometimes I feel like these games are exhausting when they take so much energy. Than you have updates, tierlists and a new meta every week. I used to sit down and play without thinking at anything else on old consoles. Still do. They don’t send me unwanted notifications. Than you have all the lootboxes gacha stuff.

Games were technically limited but built a simple and fun experience.

ricdeh, 2 months ago

True. I feel that particularly with ranked shooters like Valorant and their competitive modes, playing becomes less enjoyable and more of a chore. In RPGs and strategy games on the other hand, I can lose myself for hours in wonder and awe at the gameplay, story, atmosphere, setting, etc. That’s why I’d much rather play something many people would consider less exciting like Crusader Kings 3 than Valorant, Overwatch, Counterstrike, League of Legends, etc.

rimjob_rainer, 2 months ago

They had soul

menemen, 2 months ago

Maybe I am old, but having no micro-payment bullshit is what made gaming better.

smeg, 2 months ago

Never been to an arcade, eh?

menemen, 2 months ago

Yeah, but Arcades are Arcades. They were also not really a thing in Germany (because they are 18+ in Germany). I only ever used them on vacations.

smeg, 2 months ago

My point is that they are representative of how gaming used to be. Good on Germany for treating addiction-based money-extractors as what they are though!

uienia, 2 months ago

Not really a microtransaction as much as a leasing payment

smeg, 2 months ago

I’d say they’re both microtransactions, just one is full-on pay-to-play

Cocodapuf, 2 months ago

You could buy most of those games for console though…

smeg, 2 months ago

Not before consoles existed you couldn’t!

Honytawk, 2 months ago

The cheap downgraded version, yes

Swedneck, 2 months ago

there are plenty of modern games without micropayments, play smaller indie titles.

Blackmist, 2 months ago

Or indeed some bigger games not from shitty publishers.

God of War, for example. A lot of Sony’s exclusives (and many are now on PC) are completely MTX-free. Even EA’s It Takes Two was free of them.

The issue is that they don’t make the return on investment that an exploitative multiplayer game does. So the big publishers prefer to make those.

Pika, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

It takes two is actually one step further, only one player had to own the game. It takes two had what was called a friend pass which as long as you weren’t the host of the game allowed you to play with any other player that had already purchased the game. So despite the fact that it was forced Co-op either split screen or online, only one player had to actually buy the game.

In this day and age it blew me away when I learned that because it’s just unheard of now.

Swedneck, 2 months ago

just buy indie games lol

EdibleFriend, 2 months ago

Those have manuals you can read on the ride home?

Buddahriffic, 2 months ago

These days I’m driving on the way home.

RagingRobot, 2 months ago

Actually there is a company called limited run games I think that goes all out and prints physical copies of some indie games with instructions and bonus stuff. It’s pretty awesome but takes a while to get it.

EdibleFriend, 2 months ago

Ok that is pretty awesome

Matriks404, 2 months ago

Dunno. I like both old and new games.

DragonTypeWyvern, 2 months ago

How dare you

blazeknave, 2 months ago

Taking my kid home with a new (used via GameStop) Nintendo game sucks. I excitedly hand him the case and theres like nothing for him to read.

dmalteseknight, 2 months ago

If you are talking about the late 90’s and early 2000’s there was plently of multiplayer games and saving was pretty much standard.

whoisearth, 2 months ago

I honestly think the generalization of parents here are GenX where we grew up on Atari, colicovision and then the original NES.

otp, 2 months ago

There were still plenty of 16-bit and even some 32-bit era games that didn’t have saving…or used passwords to save.

Or if you could save, did you have space in your memory card?..

Lesrid, 2 months ago

My neighborhood was just poor enough that basically no kid had a PS memory card. They were all jealous of my n64’s ability to save on the cartridges. When the PS2 and GameCube rolled around we just left the machines on all day again

otp, 2 months ago

At some point, I’d have passed on a new game and chosen to get a memory card instead, haha

Though I did get bitten with the RPG bug back then, so that probably colours my opinion. Not that I didn’t play the first half of FF7’s Midgar (aka. first act) dozens of times because I kept getting stuck.

It’s great that level select cheats were so prevalent back then!

ampersandrew, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

games back then were also more focused on quality

This is selection bias. You remember Metal Gear Solid, but do you remember Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft? Do you remember Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero? Bubsy 3D? The million-and-one licensed games that were churned out like baseball cards back then?

and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money

If we’re going to say that a full-price game today costs $70, Metal Gear Solid would have cost the equivalent of $95. Not only that, but that was very much the Blockbuster and strategy guide era. Games would often have one of their best levels up front so that you can see what makes the game good, but then level 2 or 3 would hit a huge difficulty spike…just enough to make you have to rent the game multiple times or to cave in and buy it when you couldn’t beat it in a weekend. Or you’d have something like Final Fantasy VII, which I just finished for the first time recently, and let me tell you: games that big were designed to sell strategy guides (or hint hotlines) as a revenue stream. There would be some esoteric riddle, or some obscure corner of the map that you need to happen upon in order to progress the game forward. The business model always, at every step of the medium’s history, affects the game design.

“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.

HopingForBetter, 2 months ago

Son, are you crying?

variants, 2 months ago

There’s just so much everything now a days. There’s tons of great new music and tons of great new games buried in all the new stuff thats being pumped out that it’s hard to find the gems. There’s lots of passionate people out there taking the time and effort to try and make the best

Carighan, 2 months ago

“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.

Exactly this.

Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
Games back then did expect you to pay extra - in fact quite a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.

insomniac_lemon, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.

That's commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.

Though lots of things are better now: the entire back-catalogue of games, more access to review/forums, free games (and also ability to create your own games without doing so from nothing) etc. Aside from when video store rental was applicable, early gaming was more take-what-you-can-get (niche hardware/platforms might still have that feel somewhat).

ampersandrew, 2 months ago

That’s commonly said but ignores other economic factors such as income, unspent money, and cost-of-living.

Inflation is derived by indexing all of those things. Some things are far more expensive or far cheaper relative to each other, but we approximate the buying power of a dollar by looking at all of it.

Cocodapuf, 2 months ago

a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.

Do you have an example?

I knew kids that bought strategy guides, I worked at a game shop that sold strategy guides, and as far as I could tell they were for chumps. People who has more money than creativity.

ampersandrew, 2 months ago

Cosmetic DLC feels like it’s for chumps too, but it’s lucrative. The best example is going to be Simon’s Quest, without a doubt. The strategy guide was in an issue of Nintendo Power. I’m sure they were also happy to let social pressures on the playground either sell the strategy guides or the game just by word of mouth as kids discussed how to progress in the game. A Link to the Past is full of this stuff too. The game grinds to a halt at several points until you happen to find a macguffin that the game doesn’t even tell you that you need. Without the strategy guide, you could end up finding those things by spending tons of hours exploring every corner of the map, but by today’s standards, we’d call that padding.

anas, 2 months ago

Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.

This has always been a weird argument to me. Did wages go up to match inflation? If not, they’re not actually getting any cheaper.

ampersandrew, 2 months ago

The median US household income in 1998 was $38.9k, and today it’s $77.3k.

son_named_bort, 2 months ago

I forgot about hint hotlines. They’d charge per minute and did everything they could to keep you on the phone. I called a hotline once and my parents weren’t too happy about it.

Etterra, 2 months ago

Could do without online play.

NielsBohron, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I do go without. The only time I ever play online is playing PvE games with my good IRL friends that live in different countries and states now, and that’s maybe twice a month.

No randoms, no tantrums when we make noob mistakes, no toxicity. When my friends aren’t around, I play single player games or play with bots instead of people. I highly recommend it.

mlg, 2 months ago

I remember when volvo invented lootboxes to make tf2 free to play instead of selling a $60 “AAA” title with a battlepass and lootboxes included.

Droechai, 2 months ago

They should have made the patent free to use as long as the game was free to play, like they did with the seat belt patent

ampersandrew, 2 months ago

If memory serves, Valve got the idea for the loot boxes from Korean free to play games. As far as I know though, they did invent the battle pass with Dota 2.

MeanEYE, 2 months ago

Well yea:

• No online play meant game had to be played with people sitting next to you. You had to socialize;
• No updates meant games had to be finished when sold, none of the early access or battle pass bullshit;
• Games were made hard to artificially give longer play time but this resulted in sense of achievement when you beat the game;
• Booklets were actually awesome because you had lore in your hands which was written in a way not to spoil the game but hyped you to play further so you could get to that content.

Sure for the most part it’s nostalgia, but technology brought as many, if not more, bad things as it did with good things. We’ve seen games get much better than old games and we’ve seen them much worse.

SuddenDownpour, 2 months ago

Fun anecdote. The PAL version of Digimon World 1 had a serious bug that prevented your progress to recruit Ogremon, which you needed to recruit Shellmon, which you needed to recruit a bunch of late game digimons, and made your access to several areas extremely harder. A 100% completion was impossible. It was still such a neat game tho.