Kids Can't Handle Old-School RPGs Anymore

[Ultra_Caboose]

Also, those students seem a bit silly. Sure, I'd probably try to play first without the manual too, but once I was confused as all hell, I'd go back to the manual and read it instead of just giving up.

This is pretty much my stance.
I still have a lot of my NES and SNES manuals from back in the day. A lot of them had a lot of backstory and interesting stuff in them outside of controls. Even today, I often don't read the manual cover to cover, but I will browse for interesting information.

I guess those students weren't up to the task Lord British had offered them.

To be honest, I don't think its that people are stupider or anything. Its just that we think about them differently.

If it doesn't grab you and make you want to keep playing its not doing its job. Thats not to say the Ultima IV is bad, its just that it was made for a different time, when people had way lower expectations of video games, no other option other than to keep playing it, and they had never seen the conveniences of pre-drawn maps and immediately available resources, so dealing without them was no big deal. You did what you do in a pen and paper game. You make a note, or draw it out.

Once you've used those resources and are used to having them, going back to a time without them just makes you feel lost and cheated (that feeling of there being no way of knowing what you were supposed to do until afterwards).

I don't know about you, but I actually get a bit of enjoyment out of figuring things out like that. Don't forget that things were limited due to limited technology. These games were on old floppy disks, and had very little computing power to work with. Had they been able to make a minimap or other kind of in-game map, they would've done so.

I also think its somewhat condescending to say that gamers back then had lower expectations. A game like Ultima had a story just as expansive as any Final Fantasy (quality is up to opinion, but I like them). People bought this game for the sake of experiencing an expansive adventure, even if the game didn't hold their hands and take care of all the hard stuff for them.

I understand where you're coming from, but I don't agree.

 

[Dreey]

Isnt this also the teachers fault for not letting the student play the other ultima games first? It gets weird when you suddenly meet a NPC you're supposed to know and it says things like: "Hey Avatar to be! remember me?" that can crush a persons immersion.

Its like watching "star wars the clone wars" the first time you see anything starwars.

So when the kids had no desire to see where the story went they just gave up.

 

[camazotz]

What did the manual actually tell you to do? I just can't imagine the game being that hard without it.

Although I played Ultima IV back when it came out I don't remember much about it (except being obsessed with it), but I do remember the later Pools of Radiance gold box SSI games for Dungeons & Dragons...you had to have the manuals, as they contained the interesting text bits in the game (you'd go to area X and it would have an NPC who directed you to a certain paragraph of text or description in the manual, using a funky code reader). Ultima IV may have had something similar, but I can't recall.

All I know is, I am glad that the days of manually typing in the latest computer game in to my old Trash 80 by hand is long gone. Seriously: there was a time when a PC Magazine would include a new game adventure inside; not on disk, but written out in BASIC for you to type in manually. That was the same time when purchased adventure games came on a spooled tape.

I have no nostalgia for those years....I have fond memories of good times with the games, but refused to go back and play anything before about 1995; the pain of realizing what a disgusting mess those early years were is too much for me, and I prefer my pristine memories of how awesome Wasteland, Pool of Radiance, Ultima, Lode Runner and even Zork were untarnished by the realities of what I was actually suffering through to enjoy those games!

 

[jpwoody]

I'm 20 and I've tried Ultima IV, it's definitely not a user friendly game but I did manage to explore and kill some Orcs. However saying kids can't handle oldschool RPG's isn't really fair, as I'm sure many kids in 1985 were either unaware of its existence or were baffled by it too.

PDF format? The best part about manuals was that they were books that you could read outside of the game. Having to alt-tab out every thirty seconds before you learn how to play the game properly is frustrating as hell. ...and yes, I am aware that you can print it off yourself, but it's never quite the same; manuals in those days were often works of art by themselves.

They could always print it off,

 

[Starke]

Honestly, I don't think that kids not reading the manual is an excuse for the game being hard to get into. If you can't explain yourself in-game, then how well can you possible explain the rules in the manual? And if you simply feel like not explaining how to play inside of the game, you are being lazy.

Having a manual is fine, requiring a manual is bullshit. What if you lost it? The game would have been nigh unplayable at the time, right?

Because back when Dinosaurs roamed the earth, you couldn't stick an infinite amount of crap onto the game disk. There literally wasn't space. So a lot of early games would use the manual to contain large chunks of text, because it was simply impossible to to include that in the game.

 

[Staskala]

Has anyone who complains about the spoiled gaming youth of today even played Ultima IV?

Even "back in the day", it was inaccessible to anyone new to the genre and I've never known anyone who got very far without some guide.
After all, the game forced you to talk to pretty much every single NPC, running from town to town in the hopes of getting some clue, which was more often than not, in vain. Or take the moongates, an aspect solely based on trial and error. The manual only helped you so much gameplay-wise, it's not like it gave you more than the very basics of your quest. For the Avatar.

Now, i'm not saying it was bad or anything (Side note: why do you always have to add this just to avoid fanboys getting all angry? I mean, shouldn't it be obvious that just because I disliked a few aspects, I don't actually hate the entire game?), but it got a heavy (or rather total) focus on exploration, which is something not everyone can get his head around.

So Ultima IV is inaccessible to players new to that particular brand of RPGs?
It always was.

On another note, I really liked thick, detailed manuals.


Edit: I should probably clarify that my knowledge about how Ultima IV was percieved upon release is based mostly on hearsay, I myself played it (with a walktrough) in 2004. So maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but from my personal experience and from what I gathered, I'd say it was never an accessible game. Feel free to correct me if everyone in '85 without prior experience in RPGs was able to just pick it up and roll with it.

 

[Demgar]

I remember reading the paper manual for many games as a kid (mid 80's), and ohthe anticipation! On the way home from the store in the back of my mom's car, or during lunch after opening Christmas presents. I just couldn't wait to play the game! "Wow, pressing B B A to call down a nuke on the aliens will be SOOO awesome!"

These days, I buy more games than back then, but I rarely even have a paper manual. If I do, I don't read it. A game that didn't tech you how to play it would be shunned. If I can't figure out how to do something, well that's what the browser window on my other monitor is for, right?

There's certainly a nostalgia factor to games with complex rules that require a veritable book to explain them, and unboxing the game in the car on the way home surely doesn't build the anticipation the way it once did. Maybe that's me getting older though. I can't honestly decide if it was better "back in the day", or just a case of rose-tinted glasses.

 

[Charley]

I'm 16 I feel a little shafted not getting being able to play some of these awesome old games (I just can't get a grasp on Mega Man).

Technically you've not been shafted, it's like not knowing how milk tastes if you're allergic to dairy. You're just inferior

I jest (mainly), but it's interesting. I wonder which way round it happened though, did games get dumber or did gamers? Presumably it's a self-perpetuating cycle but how do we bring it back? World of Planescape. That's how.

 

[crimson sickle2]

Interesting study, I'm 16 but ever since I played Fallout 3 I at least read through the controls before starting the game. I've also been able to almost beat FF5, (last dungeon). Don't know what to take from this, maybe that the rest of my age group is filled with pansies (maybe not).

 

[toapat]

The only RPGs which i have not read the manual cover to cover before playing are Diablo 1 and 2, partially because i dont have those

really, not reading the manual is lazy and asking to get fucked over if you arent playing an FPS

 

[Lukeje]

I'm 20 and I've tried Ultima IV, it's definitely not a user friendly game but I did manage to explore and kill some Orcs. However saying kids can't handle oldschool RPG's isn't really fair, as I'm sure many kids in 1985 were either unaware of its existence or were baffled by it too.

PDF format? The best part about manuals was that they were books that you could read outside of the game. Having to alt-tab out every thirty seconds before you learn how to play the game properly is frustrating as hell. ...and yes, I am aware that you can print it off yourself, but it's never quite the same; manuals in those days were often works of art by themselves.

They could always print it off,

As I said in the statement you quoted, yes. Did you read it?

Edit: My statement, not the manual.

 

[Swifteye]

I'm 19 so when games like ultima and all those really complicated point and click games were around I was playing things like math blaster and big thinkers. I used to read the manual too. back when games almost never told you how to use the controls. croc the legend of the gobbos I had to read it's manual to find out what certain objects do and some of my controls. Dynasty warriors for the same reason. Even now I teach my young friends the controls and they still don't get the whole press triangle in the middle of a sqaure sequence to get a different special move. Heck when spyro came out they started teaching you how to play the game and what the game was about in the cutscenes and dialouge. So after awhile it became obsolete.

Personally I see nothing wrong with no longer having to hunt for basic information like "what am I supposed to do?" Or "How do I use the controls?" Because that should be information that is the easiest to obtain. All that fervent hunting to just figure out what to do was like a wall between a normal or lower comprehension person and a geek with much high levels of understanding such things. I heard about ultima four from spoony's retrospective but a game like that is just too much. And don't we buy our games used for the most part? How many used games do you get with manuals these days?

 

[ryai458]

So the game was bad?

 

[Valdsator]

14 here, and I love to play old RPG's. I've bought Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Gothic (not sure if that counts as really old) from GOG.com, and I'm really enjoying them. I haven't played too much of Fallout though, as I still haven't finished the other two. Although, I haven't played such old RPGs like Ultima IV. I'm going to give it a try.

 

[runnerbelow]

I am fearful if these kids are the developers of the future. Ultima 4 and 5 are some of the best (if not the best) rpgs ever made. So they never read the manual? Did they frustrated trying to find out what the Mantras are? This makes me sad.

 

[fenderstrat]

i played it without reading the manual, a long long time ago... 1992 i think.
i didnt had any problems...

 

[fenderstrat]

double post, sorry!

 

[jpwoody]

lol I guess not

 

[gamer_parent]

I think this is all more of a function of games becoming more mainstream. You have to remember back in those days, games were a pretty niche hobby. you can't really play the game until you've mastered some basic computer configurations. (config.sys anyone?) As such, you can almost ASSUME that your player base is going to be of a certain personality type that is willin to spend time and dig through the game.

But mainstream consumers are not like that. Mainstream consumers, for the most part, want to be entertained first, and once they get hooked they might be inclined to start digging. That is, older generation of gamers, by virtue of selective bias, probably tend to enjoy the technical exploration aspect for the sake of it, while gamers now a days, by virtue of just of crossing larger demographics, will include people who are less inclined to do so.

Add to the fact that current generation of game design is all about making things maybe not easier per se, but more user friendly. After all, these are mass market consumption items. You can't expect every single person to pick this up to act like they're tech support personnel.

In fact, this [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_273/8159-The-Philosophy-of-Game-Design-part-1] could not have come at a better time.