If you could bring back one thing about retro games what would it be?

[Shoggoth2588]

-snip for length-

Number 4...No, Number 6! Wait no...Number 7!

Seriously though, I'm leaning towards releasing full, complete games. More specifically, games that expand upon their earlier incarnations. If this design philosophy were a thing, I realize Donkey Kong Country Returns would have been larger than Texas but playing DK64 and looking at maps of Thief 2 and Duke Nukem 3D when compared to the new versions of those same games just makes it clear that style has definitely been beating out substance in gaming...it's been that way for a while too.

I'd also love for Cheat Codes to come back...yeah some games have them but the achievement/trophy system makes you feel like an asshole for using cheats. What's worse is, when a game no longer has online servers those trochieveO's become impossible to unlock...it's a minor thing that shows a person if they have OCD...

 

[Callate]

Professional-caliber games that could be the work of one or two people without serious worries that a couple of failures would bring down not just a company's electronics division, but the whole company.

As far as widely-spaced saves, limited lives, crippling difficulty curves... No. I'm an adult now; I have better things to do with my life than spend hours re-playing the same segment twenty times because a game that was barely bug-tested, let alone play-tested, has an egregious difficulty spike. I did my time in those mines, and I've earned the right to say that no, I do not feel nostalgia for it.

 

[MorganL4]

The community. It used to be that if you wanted to game you had 2 options: 1 go to an arcade where there are other people who want to game. 2. Have a console and invite a friend over to play whilst sitting right next to you. Today most ALL play is done over the internet, I think it has been about a year since I last had a LAN party with friends, whereas it used to be that when you played games you WERE with friends by default.

 

[Racecarlock]

Not being afraid to go to the land of cake people which is currently being invaded by vegetables and you have to stop them with a lightsaber. And other such scenarios.

Now everything has to apparently be so god damn realistic and "emotional" that it seems the current endgame of gaming will just be a simulation of a poetry slam held at the "War and abstract symbolism" museum by a group of manic depressives. And one of the poems will contain approximately 7000 political points, each about as subtle as being hit in the face with a rake.

 

[Racecarlock]

The difficulty, pure and simple. No more easy modes that devaluate the value of having finished a game. I don't like the fact that some people can derp their way through games.

And why should everyone be forced up to your difficulty standards or just not play at all?

Are you seriously telling me that it's bad that people play games the way they want to?

 

[pilouuuu]

I would bring innovation and creativity back in games. Back then games seemed to always be unique and be constantly outdoing themselves in terms of creativity and technology. We never knew what to expect.

I remember the first time I played Lemmings and thinking to myself: "Wow, I never played something like this before." Now, it's all Call of Duty 7, Ass Creed 8 1/2 or whatever.

I also liked that a few years ago you were always expecting the new breakthrough technology in games. When Doom 3 was released it had amazing shadows, something totally new and innovating back then. Half-Life 2 had amazing characters among many other innovations. And in gameplay there were also innovations, like the amazing Gravity Gun.

I think that's it. The sense of awe is missing from games. Even with a new console generation there's barely any innovation.

 

[HellsingerAngel]

2.) Real disadvantages to failure, including widely-spaced savepoints, potential loss of character stat progression (bring back level downs! XP debt is for losers! )

8.) No voice chat unless players ~choose!!~ to use third-party VOIP software. Granted, a huge part of the reason why I don't like first-person shooters is because I'm bad at them. But an even ~bigger~ part is the other players who are given an avenue to constantly remind me of that fact, while simultaneously throwing sexual harassment and misogyny in my face.

Be careful what you wish for? It might just come true...

OT: Alphas being alphas, betas being betas and games being complete before the public can buy in and play them. I despise projects like early access and am getting fed up with open betas going straight into full release. They're extended roll outs under the guise of being a beta! It just sickens me that it's acceptable to release an unfinished product so long as you slap the "Early Access" or "Open Beta" sticker on them now.

 

[Robert Marrs]

Games that don't need constant updates to function properly. 15 years ago you had to make a game and make sure it worked as much as possible because you couldnt update it. While its nice that its a possibility, instead of it being used for emergencies in case a game has a bug that slips through the cracks its used to continue to develop games after you already paid for them. Shameful.

 

[flying_whimsy]

Of the three things that come to mind the one I miss the most are cheats. I miss cheat codes; I miss game sharks; I miss being able to play games the way I want to rather than the way everyone else tells me to.

The other two were quirky variety and arcades. Main point, though: cheeeeeeeeeeeats.

 

[Racecarlock]

The difficulty, pure and simple. No more easy modes that devaluate the value of having finished a game. I don't like the fact that some people can derp their way through games.

And why should everyone be forced up to your difficulty standards or just not play at all?

Are you seriously telling me that it's bad that people play games the way they want to?

If you started practicing a sport, only to discover that all the other participants were obese and that the entire game had been altered so no one could possibly fail, then you would be mad too.

It's true that single player games don't have a direct link like that, but there is an indirect link. Today people who can't handle properly difficult games play the mainstream games and are like "I just finished game X", which is like hearing "I scored 10 times last game" from someone who is not good at football, only to discover that they have changed the rules so that there is no goalkeeper and the goal is 4 times larger.

That is the worst comparison I have ever seen. Games are not sports, league of legends and starcraft excluded.

And people do play different versions of sports. Not official, mind, but still. Have you heard of the special olympics? Have you heard of wheelchair basketball? Your comparison is stupid.

Why do you suddenly get to decide how people should play games?

 

[Xan Krieger]

If I had to pick one thing though it would be how when a game was released it had to be a complete game due to the lack of an online service to provide patches. When you bought a game you knew it had been tested to make sure there were fewer if any bugs and you didn't have to spend time afterwards updating it (in some cases several times per week). Imagine that nowadays, if a game like Rome 2 Total War was released when it was done, not in advance only to need many patches later. If Dead Rising 3 didn't need a massive patch not long after launch. Sure it pushes back the release but it saves the consumer time.

Daggerfall (1996) was literally impossible to complete at release. This isn't really that new. I guess it's new for big budget console games, but PC games and smaller console games have always had these problems.

Either way it needs to stop.

I miss the length. 60+ hours used to be the norm, and even then you hadn't done all the side quests. Now the main story is like 10-20 hours at most, and only a few hours of sidequests.

When on earth was 60 considered the norm?! I play older games all the time - it's most of what I buy because I don't have much money - and I can barely think of *any* that have taken me 60 hours to beat the main story. In fact, I can't think of a single none-RPG, ever, that took 60 hours to beat, even with side content. Plenty of games can exceed that playtime, but that's because they're fun enough that you keep playing them, not because it took 60 hours to get to the ending.

OT: I'd like to see games focus LESS on story again. Contrary to what many seem to believe, older games typically had much less story than their modern counterparts. The reason you remember older stories fondly is because older games only had a story when they actually had one to tell. Nowadays it seems like you aren't allowed to release a game without a bunch of cut-scenes and scripted sequences feeding you a mediocre plot. I'd much rather most action games forget story and just focus all of their efforts on the gameplay. Heck, I'd like to see more RPGs do this, too. Too many RPGs with shit or mediocre mechanics get by on being story-driven and "cinematic." I wish more of them would take the Spiderweb model where they're hardly devoid of plot (in fact, the plots can be very good) but you never really stop playing, either.

Oh, and RPGs with real-time action based combat can either fuck off and die or learn to do it well.

I was about to say I had no idea then I remember Daggerfall is part of the Elder Scrolls series and suddenly it made sense. Seriously though thanks for telling me that, I'd never played it (being only 6 at the time I hadn't quite gotten used to the PC yet and watching my dad play Doom scared me, go ahead and laugh the death scream your character did horrified a young me). When I said what I did I was honestly thinking back to me on the consoles like the SNES or Atari 2600, never had to update those games.

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

hmmm, its there in indie, but i'd like to risk taking and less hand holding.

I'm not saying all games should be unique, but there are so many clones of clones of clones.
Also not saying all games need to be super hard, but leave us to figure some stuff out, B to Melee, X to Reload Right Trigger to Shoot is bloody standard now anyway.

Oh and wrestling control away from us forcing to look at what ever we must be looking at.

Feel like our choices are AAA or Indie. Is there no A anymore?

 

[Racecarlock]

The difficulty, pure and simple. No more easy modes that devaluate the value of having finished a game. I don't like the fact that some people can derp their way through games.

And why should everyone be forced up to your difficulty standards or just not play at all?

Are you seriously telling me that it's bad that people play games the way they want to?

If you started practicing a sport, only to discover that all the other participants were obese and that the entire game had been altered so no one could possibly fail, then you would be mad too.

It's true that single player games don't have a direct link like that, but there is an indirect link. Today people who can't handle properly difficult games play the mainstream games and are like "I just finished game X", which is like hearing "I scored 10 times last game" from someone who is not good at football, only to discover that they have changed the rules so that there is no goalkeeper and the goal is 4 times larger.

That is the worst comparison I have ever seen. Games are not sports, league of legends and starcraft excluded.

And people do play different versions of sports. Not official, mind, but still. Have you heard of the special olympics? Have you heard of wheelchair basketball? Your comparison is stupid.

Why do you suddenly get to decide how people should play games?

I just don't like the idea of some dumbass derping his or her way through a game that should be difficult. When I accomplish something difficult in a game, the idea that someone else is just lazily laying on the sofa, with the difficulty turned down, doing the same thing just fills me with rage. It used to mean something to have finished a game, Mega Man 9 brought that back, but then Mega Man 10 took it right back.

Too bad! This is how gaming is. You can't just decide that everyone should play on hard mode for some reason. This isn't a job, this isn't the military, this isn't sports. It's true you can decide the way you play, but you can't then force it on everyone else. That's not how people work.

This whole "lazy gamers" thing pisses me off because it implies that games are a job and not a hobby. Games aren't a job. This isn't the gym. This isn't a career. This is something people do for fun. Get over it.

 

[Mobax]

As someone who actually read the instruction manual, I would like to see those brought back to a point where they're more then a cover.

 

[Kinitawowi]

[li] Arcades.[/li]

[li] Some modicum of effort being put into a single-player mode.[/li]

[li] Multiplayer on the couch. [/li]

[li] PC games in proper boxes. It's ridiculous that a big DVD case now basically contains a download code. [/li]

[li] Self contained products, released as finished. No mentality has done more to damage gaming than "ship now, patch later". [/li]

[li] Proper expansion packs. It pains me to see so many people refer to D3: Reaper Of Souls as "DLC". [/li]

[li] Good Final Fantasy games. *zing* [/li]

 

[Treeinthewoods]

Honestly... not a damn thing. Games where the way they were back in the day because of technological limitations. If a time traveller had taken the NES controller out of my hand and started up Skyrim for me I would have lost my shit and never wanted to touch Mega Man or Super Mario again.

I still enjoy some of my older games like X-Com but I refuse to be blinded by nostalgia when so much awesome stuff gets dropped in my lap these days.

 

[FoolKiller]

Well, if I were to pick one... Oh, got it! You know how you could unlock different costumes for character(s) by doing tasks, rather then buying them with cash. This I want.

Ooooh.... I like it.

I want actual rewards for collectibles, not just an achievement/trophy.

 

[JazzJack2]

Skipping past the obvious choices like Challenge or more interesting and varied stories and art directions I guess I'd have to go for ambition. Games seem to lack the ambition to make their own authoritative statement, and to truly push themselves to the limits of what they could be, they're all just so safe nowadays. I mean look ELITE, a game that attempts to simulate a whole galaxy and it came out in 1984 and yet has more ambition, more scope and simply more balls than pretty much anything being made now even when computers and consoles are more powerful than ever.

 

[Aluwolf]

Can't really pick just one. The Super Nintendo era was objectively better than modern gaming in all ways that matter.

1.) Intro level design that teaches the player the basics as a course of gameplay, rather than through tutorial popups (see EgoRaptor's Sequelitis video about the MegaMan X series)

2.) Real disadvantages to failure, including widely-spaced savepoints, potential loss of character stat progression (bring back level downs! XP debt is for losers! )

3.) Greater focus on story and characters in RPGs, and lesser focus on graphics (Seriously, we've got photorealism already. Stop pushing graphics and start hiring writers who aren't shit.)

4.) Finished games on release day.

5.) Expansion packs with entire new games' worth of content, or at least DLCs with more than an hour's worth of story, rather than bare-bones, overpriced DLC.

6.) The brutal, painful death of the concept of 'pay2win' freemium business models. It's not okay to sell power. Basically, Secret World good, Warframe bad. (in monetization, anyway. Warframe's gameplay is at least rather fun for a while)

7.) The measurement of a game's playtime in days rather than hours. Remember back when you could buy a brand new Super Nintendo game for $35, and it would still be fun next year? Sorry, but a $60 RPG with only 40 hours of story is not okay. And post-story bonus dungeons don't cut it, either. The story is over, you won. So why do you care about an extra dungeon? Basically, dungeons and loot should serve as stepping stones to progress the story, not the other way around.

8.) No voice chat unless players ~choose!!~ to use third-party VOIP software. Granted, a huge part of the reason why I don't like first-person shooters is because I'm bad at them. But an even ~bigger~ part is the other players who are given an avenue to constantly remind me of that fact, while simultaneously throwing sexual harassment and misogyny in my face.


Anyway. Sorry for the wall of text. There're plenty of things that weren't as good back then as they are now. For example, we have less in the way of artificial difficulty nowadays. We seem to have learned that, if something is only difficult because it happens faster than even the twitchiest FPS fan can react, that's not actually difficulty, it's just bullshit.

I agree with most of that, except the bit where warframe is pay to win. It's essentially yeah you could pay, but everything you want is too stupidly easy to get without paying so why would you except to support them? The difference in progression between me, who has probably given them about 30 dollars and a friend who hasn't spent a cent is minimal. My warframe just has some more colors and stuff like that. Even the fact that they give us cosmetics for free is saying something.


As for what I want to see, more than anything is the soul of gaming to return. Before games were multi million dollar projects, people had fun, took risks and loved what they did. I still feel that in indie games, but it's hard not see the front page of a game store and see a bunch of games that all play similar to one another and take mechanics from one another because it's the safe thing to do. Then when someone like Rocksteady comes in and truly innovates everyone copies them for years to come. Rinse and repeat, it's so sad.

 

[FourCartridge]

If anything, I would die to see the return of arcade-like philosophies to the medium. I miss the days when games were meant to be fun. Stuff like Monkey Ball and Daytona USA (though I suspect this is mostly the bitter SEGA fan in me). Whatever happened to it's subgenres, like the arcade racer and beat-em-ups/SHUMPS? There's still stuf I like, like The Last of Us and Uncharted, but those are mostly story-based things that attempt to do something "profound" to the medium. Sometimes, I just want to have fun.

Granted, they were created with the intention of sucking quarters, but at least you had enjoyed them and came back every now and then.