Small features in games you miss - Reason #13532 why modern games are shit

[Javier]

I miss the way people had to make games in the past - with limitations. Games back then seemed to contain near infinite replayability. figured out how to implement features practically from scratch, created mechanics that we know and love today (sometimes by a complete accident), or all of the above. They created marvels that are impressive to this day that you can pick up and play with minimal effort required.

The best art comes when you challenge yourself, limit to only a select number of tools or space, and overcoming these challenges in creative ways. That's true not just for games, but music, paintings, movies, performances, etc.

 

[NerdShamer]

I miss how there wasn't an giant ass marker telling me where I needed to go next.

In Battlefield Vietnam (2004), they had a fully licensed soundtrack filled with Vietnam War era music that you could blast over the helicopter speakers (Apocalypse Now style) while you bombed the enemy team, who were forced to listen to your music as they died.

This is still feasible, just slash the budget for motion capture and research that'll inevitably go nowhere, and you'll have more than enough money for

I especially dislike when multiplayer games automatically censor you even when you're not playing online or playing on private servers with friends. I WILL call my friend a massive bipoccutetwinkr-slur NO MATTER WHAT

agree, but that's more of a wider internet/social issue.
Despite the "abhorrent" insults and slurs, I genuinely think people were way more mature 20+ years ago

Yeah, and it gets even funnier when the in-game voice clips are just people insulting each other

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

Moron gaming culture in general there's nothing wrong with grinding and by the end of it you just basically flick the main balls like he's a bitch

also the concept of save scumming is dumb if I spent three hours doing something I'm not going to not say before I go into a hard part of the game.


Four player split screen and games that had same keyboard playability that was fun trying to figure that out with your buddy on your computer.


Also Co-op when it comes to certain good Co-op when it comes to RPGs


obnoxious map markers

developers being homosexuals on social media I do not care about your politics make my game games and stop lecturing me about what I should or should not be doing I'm not paying you to be a politician.

Patching out my broken *** builds on Total War I'm gonna just let the creative assembly competitive Total War is never going to be a thing stop trying to make it a thing and listening to all the people complaining about you need to balance this no I should be allowed to use my long rifles shooting across the map because I formed all of these traits.
If you don't like those things don't use them.

Terrible gun design fallout new Vegas has the best gun design out of the entire series and fallout 4 completely has guns that look like someone who doesn't understand firearms created.

Not being able to flip down your tripod or do things with your gun to make all the fancy attachments do something.

Also terribly optimized file storage seriously fallout new Vegas is I think like 17 gigabytes nothing should be bigger than 25 that should be the maximum amount of storage you're taking up on my computer I shouldn't have to have 100 terabyte hard drive to play games that's an exaggeration but it's ridiculous the way people can't figure that out.
Just get a better computer I already have a $4000 gaming computer you need a $20,000 computer for games not to constantly crash on you.

Racially insensitive or sexually insensitive jokes to homosexuals blacks Jews or minorities

 

[Lance 45]

Hierarchical items, weapons, and enemies (outside of RPGs) and power fantasy. I know that's a dirty word these days, and that design is meant to be balanced, but sometimes you just want to go full rambo and mow down a bunch of guys with an OP machine gun of clear rooms of enemies with a bfg.

Whoever designed level scaling and forced it across the industry need to be hung drawn and quartered for their crimes against humanity.

The whole point of leveling in games was to be able to absolutely stomp everything outside of endgame as the reward for all your suffering and wasted time. or at least have some kind of stat advantage in PVE due to being a higher level and thus having some flexibility for creative off-meta character builds. Now the trash mobs just scale to the player's level and you may as well not even bother going past level 1. Since the experience is identical at level cap.

 

[Mike Matei's Penis]

I miss the way people had to make games in the past - with limitations. Games back then seemed to contain near infinite replayability. figured out how to implement features practically from scratch, created mechanics that we know and love today (sometimes by a complete accident), or all of the above.

Spyro PS1 trilogy vs the "Reignited" is a great example of this. All that Unreal overhead, fancy lighting and mismatched models and artstyles can't compete with the artistic style of a 1990's console being pushed to it's limits by code geniuses.

 

[Javier]

Whoever designed level scaling and forced it across the industry need to be hung drawn and quartered for their crimes against humanity.

There are cases where I could see level scaling be a great storytelling tool - for instance, if there is some sort of war arc within the story it would make sense for all countries' capitals to be at their strongest.

In general, most of the ideas have their place and time. "Everywhere" and "everytime", however, only applies to select few. This is certainly not one of those cases.

 

[Lance 45]

There are cases where I could see level scaling be a great storytelling tool - for instance, if there is some sort of war arc within the story it would make sense for all countries' capitals to be at their strongest.

In general, most of the ideas have their place and time. "Everywhere" and "everytime", however, only applies to select few. This is certainly not one of those cases.

Exactly. Level scaling can be an excellent tool when used with purpose. KOTOR 2 is a great example, where level scaling reflects the Sith's parasitic nature, feeding on the Force and becoming stronger alongside the player. It’s a brilliant narrative and gameplay integration.

That said, it feels like level scaling has become a crutch in some games, used to artificially create difficulty rather than thoughtfully balancing progression and catering to an extremely vocal minority who just want to label everything as "power creep" even if players went through endgame activities and earned it. Just because you watched a spiffing brit video doesn't mean a game's balance is broken. 100% you would never have even heard of half of these exploits had they not shared them.

 

[Local Wordmason]

There's this subtle thing that they used to do in games when space on the disk/cart was something that mattered. In lieu of normal tutorials where something simply tells you everything you need to know. The developers actually had the foresight to place new obstacles in a way that allowed you to learn what they did with no risk. That way, when you came across that mechanic again in the context of it being a dangerous obstacle, you knew how it worked, and how to prevent your death, because you learned what it does ahead of time.

Spoiler: Here's an example

This is a screen from the first level of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. A fantastic NES game, awesome music, some impressive graphics for the NES, and the most difficult of the NES Castlevania games, if you don't count Simon's Quest being hard because it's cryptic as all hell. Notable for having branching paths leading to different stages, and multiple characters other than our boy, Simon Trevor, that give extra replayability.

This is a great example of what I was talking about, and once you see it, I hope you will appreciate whenever it happens, like me.
You come in from the stairs on the upper left and immediately see a blue platform to your right that looks different. This is a platform that can be walked over, but when you start a jump on it, the platform flips over, which makes you unable to land on it while it's flipping. As you can see, even if someone were to learn this through failure to know about the platform, they simply get dropped down to the area below, being able to understand the trigger for why the platform flips, without being punished for it. Even being allowed to go back and do it again if they didn't understand why it happened. In the next area, you will have flying enemies coming toward you to hinder your progress, one of the ways to avoid them is to jump over them due to their movement pattern. Players will know that when attempting this, to take care when jumping on the blue platforms because they understand now what the blue platforms do, avoiding falling to their deaths. The platforms are meant to punish people that stand in place to jump over enemies with a vertical jump before moving forward. The solution is use a running jump to go over the enemies while not landing back on the platforms while they flip, or jump over the platforms entirely.

Its that kind of genius that makes me wholeheartedly believe that it was limitations that made games good. The people that wanted to make games did it for the passion, and wrestled with the limitations with ingenious solutions, so they could see their vision through. It's too easy to make games now, any faggot with a SDK and a shitty idea can put their garbage out in the world without having any of the knowledge that made their predecessors so great.

 

[Local FloRida-man]

I miss when having to leave the game to learn about something was considered a failure in game design. The oldest games used obtuse game design to sell game guides, increasing profit. By the ps2/360/GC era i feel like we moved on from that and games were expected to explain all the mechanics and lore IN GAME or at least in an accompanying booklet. But now we've gone backwards and every game requires a fucking wiki or dedicated autist youtube channel to figure out. Add in the ever evolving bullshit that is live service gaming and I'm done.

 

[News Enjoyer]

Working mirrors. I'm always impressed when I see one in a modern game.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I miss the way people had to make games in the past - with limitations. Games back then seemed to contain near infinite replayability. figured out how to implement features practically from scratch, created mechanics that we know and love today (sometimes by a complete accident), or all of the above. They created marvels that are impressive to this day that you can pick up and play with minimal effort required.

The best art comes when you challenge yourself, limit to only a select number of tools or space, and overcoming these challenges in creative ways. That's true not just for games, but music, paintings, movies, performances, etc.

Spyro PS1 trilogy vs the "Reignited" is a great example of this. All that Unreal overhead, fancy lighting and mismatched models and artstyles can't compete with the artistic style of a 1990's console being pushed to it's limits by code geniuses.

And yet attempts to return to that style of game development with romhacks, homebrew, or fantasy consoles results is angry screeching about "pixel shit".

Same goes for concepts. "A plumber that jumps on turtles and eats mushrooms to fight a mythical Japanese creature and save a princess" would get torn apart today for being "ran-dumb" or "unrealistic". "A fox that flies a space ship and to defeat a space monkey and his army of robots" would be "furfag shit". Even something as tame as Castlevania would have people questioning why he fights Dracula with a whip instead of something more practical.



A couple more to add.

Persistent bullet holes, bodies, and shell casings. It's fun in games like doom to clear an entire room, and turn around and see dozens of bodies, blood stains, and other damage.

Mystery. I miss when games had secrets and myths. Playground rumours about how to get to the island in the dam on Goldeneye, how to get the silver tunic in Zelda Ocarina of Time, or how to unlock a specific character in Mortal Kombat 2. These days any and all secrets are uncovered within a few hours of release because someone on the internet data mined it.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

Destruction, Physics and when games weren't an interactive movie. Funnily enough, the FMV-game was a genre and now every fucking AAA slop title is an FMV-game but labelled as an RPG because fuck you, give me money.

 

[#lurker]

Working mirrors. I'm always impressed when I see one in a modern game.

They just brute force it now with RTX. No optimization or talent needed.

 

[Local Wordmason]

Mystery. I miss when games had secrets and myths. Playground rumours about how to get to the island in the dam on Goldeneye, how to get the silver tunic in Zelda Ocarina of Time, or how to unlock a specific character in Mortal Kombat 2. These days any and all secrets are uncovered within a few hours of release because someone on the internet data mined it.

Reminds me of Toby Fox's fruitless attempts to ask people to not datamine his games. It's tragic really, despite how you feel about Undertale.

This was a file in the original release of Undertale called "abc_123.ogg" so it would appear at the top of the files when looking in Undertale's directory.
Transcript: "Hello. He-he-he-he-have some respect and don't spoil the game. It's impossible to have mysteries nowadays, because of nosy people like you. Please keep all of this between us. If you post it online, I won't make any more secrets. No one will be impressed. It will be your fault! He-he-he-he-ha-he-he-ha-he-he."

After people ignored his pleas, he updated the file to this instead.

Also he had comments in the scripts that had a more direct confrontation to people looking for secrets, despite not heeding his first message.

Part of this game's charm is the mystery of how many options or secrets there are. If you are reading this, please don't post this message or this information anywhere. Or doing secrets will become pointless. By the way, most of the seemingly unused text/files are used. If you can find the in-game context for an asset, you can show it off. But if you can't, it probably means you haven't looked hard enough. Anything truly unused I'll probably post myself, later. Living in a world like this, where people can simply cheat out the answers from the code... your impatience has REALLY damaged you, hasn't it?

Like the above message, after he was ignored he changed the message to this:

Greetings. You have made yourself completely clear. Understood. I, your humble servant, will follow you to the utmost...

Spoiler: Deltarune Theory Tangent

I theorize all of Deltarune is a ruse with threads and mysteries that will all end up being nothing, because Toby is making good on his threat to not make any more secrets. He probably had a bunch of crossover and a grand narrative planned, but knew it wouldn't happen when he saw that nobody would listen to him and keep it a secret. He trashed all his initial ideas, and took it upon himself to make a game that was devoid of secrets. He deliberately wrote, and programmed Deltarune in a way to make it seem like there's something under the surface when there isn't. He's releasing it in a chapter format so he can keep one step ahead of theorizers to ensure they're never correct. It tracks because Toby is known to be a massive troll. He probably hates most of the fanbase as it is, has made more money than he knows what to do with, and is now a widely renowned game composer. It would be fitting for a swansong, putting it to everyone that ruined the mystery of Undertale he was trying to create by datamining and endlessly theorizing rather than just sitting back and experiencing it. He's fucking with them by making them work for secrets that never existed in the first place. He even said upfront that Deltarune will only have one ending, and there's a running theme that your choices don't matter, contrary to Undertale. Even though this has been something known, you still have idiot Youtubers datamining and looking for anything that proves otherwise despite it being the truth. That just means they're falling for the trap exactly like Toby planned.

All of this info was sourced from The Cutting Room Floor which has even more shit like this.
It genuinely sucks how even good developers have their plans ruined, even when they nicely ask. Same goes for the whole debacle around the Binding of Issac ARG, if you want a similar more complex rabbithole.

 

[Lance 45]

They just brute force it now with RTX. No optimization or talent needed.

They'd sooner ban anyone asking how to go about implementing such features because they have no clue and dont want to be ousted as talentless hacks LARPing as "veteran" gamedevs.

 

[Lone MacReady II]

I miss amazing U/Is or "main menus", even cool death screens. The Prime Trilogy has amazing examples of all of these, pleasing U/I designs and creative art etc. When Prime 4 finally releases, I'll be able to tell at a glance if Retro Studios still "has it" or not by how they do the main menu.

 

[Homocull]

Reminds me of Toby Fox's fruitless attempts to ask people to not datamine his games. It's tragic really, despite how you feel about Undertale.

Sounds like the Streisand effect of datamining

It genuinely sucks how even good developers have their plans ruined, even when they nicely ask. Same goes for the whole debacle around the Binding of Issac ARG, if you want a similar more complex rabbithole.

This is why you do your ARG online if you want to be serious about it. If you're autistic enough you can virtualize and/or obfuscate your game (preferably both), but this is tranny-tier and assumes you're not using something like GameMaker or Unity; kids who have never touched a computer before can dump both of these.
Just make a good game, leave the "Gameplay Recording Paused Because You Have Entered a Blocked Scene" type shit at the door.

 

[Local Wordmason]

Sounds like the Streisand effect of datamining

I think all he wanted was to not have Youtubers making videos that laid out all the secrets, to give Undertale that feeling of mystery about a game like people in this thread say they miss. It was a simple appeal to self moderate so a mutual benefit could be achieved by letting everyone enjoy the mystery, rather than having a small handful ruin it for everyone. If anything it would be a perverse incentive, as the reason why people were even more keen to look for secrets was the fact that Toby put that message in the game in the first place in plain sight. After people proved they weren't willing to listen, he never actively tried to stop anyone.

At the end of the day I think its mostly because he was an amateur game dev and probably didn't have the ability to obfuscate like other solo devs known for secrets like Daniel Mullins and Billy Basso. Toby came from a creative background and not a technical one, which is why Undertale is so beloved for things like it's music and writing. Undertale's code is notoriously bad because Toby didn't know what he was doing. I don't think he ever expected Undertale to explode like it did so he didn't feel like he had to do anything other than ask nicely, even if he could have spent the effort on it.

 

[Two Dollars]

I theorize all of Deltarune is a ruse with threads and mysteries that will all end up being nothing, because Toby is making good on his threat to not make any more secrets. He probably had a bunch of crossover and a grand narrative planned, but knew it wouldn't happen when he saw that nobody would listen to him and keep it a secret. He trashed all his initial ideas, and took it upon himself to make a game that was devoid of secrets. He deliberately wrote, and programmed Deltarune in a way to make it seem like there's something under the surface when there isn't. He's releasing it in a chapter format so he can keep one step ahead of theorizers to ensure they're never correct. It tracks because Toby is known to be a massive troll. He probably hates most of the fanbase as it is, has made more money than he knows what to do with, and is now a widely renowned game composer. It would be fitting for a swansong, putting it to everyone that ruined the mystery of Undertale he was trying to create by datamining and endlessly theorizing rather than just sitting back and experiencing it. He's fucking with them by making them work for secrets that never existed in the first place. He even said upfront that Deltarune will only have one ending, and there's a running theme that your choices don't matter, contrary to Undertale. Even though this has been something known, you still have idiot Youtubers datamining and looking for anything that proves otherwise despite it being the truth. That just means they're falling for the trap exactly like Toby planned.

I don't think so. Toby is a massive troll, but Deltarune is his baby - more so than Undertale - and he wouldn't deviate from his original story just to spite people. He's also definitely internet-savvy and gaming community-savvy enough to know how leaks would play out; even the infamous Isaac ARG happened long before Undertale released, let alone Deltarune. Given how self-aware those games are anyway, I'd say those messages are just part of the experience since he knows (especially for Deltarune) that they would only buy him maybe a day tops.

 

[Local Wordmason]

I don't think so. Toby is a massive troll, but Deltarune is his baby - more so than Undertale - and he wouldn't deviate from his original story just to spite people.

Yeah that's why I spoilered it because its still a bit of a stretch, but just a fun thought. Everything I said also doesn't take into account all of the story things that may prove my theory wrong that haven't happened yet.

But hey its JUST a theory...