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

[AnsemSoD1]

The ability to manually save in Minecraft.

 

[#lurker]

I just thought of another one.

In Project Gotham Racing 4 (2007), the main menu music remixed itself depending on what layer of the menu you clicked on. I remember spending a silly amount of time just clicking in and out of menus to make my own remix. A small detail that goes very far.

 

[AmpleApricots]

In everything that has an economy: statistics. Old games always had some kind of statistics screen where you had some graphs and numbers how things developed. New games do not have this. You're often absolutely blind to what you're actually doing.

 

[Jace on ice]

Being dropped into a hostile world and expected to just figure shit out.

I'm playing SMT V Vengeance right now and at the beginning of the game Aogami literally stops you from from playing the game to teach you basic shit like how to use items or heal or talk to demons.

This is a sequel to Shin Megami Tensai Nocturne, it is a niche game, It is not something a normie that plays COD or candy crush is ever going to play.

The only people that would ever choose to play this have either played prior SMT games or are at least familiar with turn based RPGs.

So why do these stupid ass tutorials exist?

 

[Necrosan]

Cool death animations. It's what made me love Fallout initially.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Specific to the XBox One area, games integrating themselves with "Smart Glass" and the consoles voice recognition.

I loved Endwar. Hugely underrated RTS for Xbox 360. The voice control gimmick was fun, and somewhat practical.

In Project Gotham Racing 4 (2007), the main menu music remixed itself depending on what layer of the menu you clicked on. I remember spending a silly amount of time just clicking in and out of menus to make my own remix. A small detail that goes very far.

That's really cool. Never heard of that.

In everything that has an economy: statistics.

Something I only saw in a few games (Runabout, Need for Speed, and Burnout come to mind) but it would keep a tally of the cost of your antics. So in runabout, every destroyed lamp post, car, and food cart would be tallied. In Need for Speed, there were even certain challenges that relied on making the "cost to state" of a police chase being in 6 or 7 figures. Even funnier in Undercover where you're supposed to be an undercover cop trying to stop a gang of street racers.

 

[NerdShamer]

So why do these stupid ass tutorials exist?

Probably to stop people from whining about accessibility issues. It's kind of weird, come to think of it

 

[#lurker]

Being dropped into a hostile world and expected to just figure shit out.

I'm playing SMT V Vengeance right now and at the beginning of the game Aogami literally stops you from from playing the game to teach you basic shit like how to use items or heal or talk to demons.

This is a sequel to Shin Megami Tensai Nocturne, it is a niche game, It is not something a normie that plays COD or candy crush is ever going to play.

The only people that would ever choose to play this have either played prior SMT games or are at least familiar with turn based RPGs.

So why do these stupid ass tutorials exist?

The first few hours of modern shit is almost always a waste of time thanks to forced tutorials. It makes starting new games a complete chore. The worst example I can think of was probably Assassins Creed 3 where the the tutorial section literally lasted 10 hours, no joke.

 

[Senwosret III]

Game size and optimization. Why does a game have to be 100+ GB when it is so poorly built and coded that a year-old PC can only run it at medium settings before overheating and dying? We don't need 4k graphics on everything just for realism, many old games were stunning at low resolutions.

The file size also limits the amount of games that you can have on your hard drive, unless you custom built your computer for that. It feels very anti-consumer, especially when playing on a budget. "You will only play our slop, because after us, you'll be barely able to save a Word document." I don't recall that being such a problem during the 2010's.

 

[ShadowAngel785]

Game size and optimization. Why does a game have to be 100+ GB when it is so poorly built and coded that a year-old PC can only run it at medium settings before overheating and dying? We don't need 4k graphics on everything just for realism, many old games were stunning at low resolutions.

The file size also limits the amount of games that you can have on your hard drive, unless you custom built your computer for that. It feels very anti-consumer, especially when playing on a budget. "You will only play our slop, because after us, you'll be barely able to save a Word document." I don't recall that being such a problem during the 2010's.

Which just means you recall wrong. HDD space and the size of games was ALWAYS a problem. Dragon's Lair in 1989 came on 13 5 1/4" Floppy Disks and you needed to install them all. Strike Commander with it's add-ons topped them, coming at 20 1.44MB Floppies. Origin in general had the reputation, that whenever they released a new game, you needed a new PC to play them. Ultima VII ate a total of 40 megabytes at a time when most PC's had maybe 240 MB HDD total.
It's completely ludicrious to think it ever was any different, except for that short time in the mid-90's when developers made games playable from CD and all you had to install was either just your save files or a miniscule amount of data to execute the game but that was quickly over. In 1999 i had a 20 GB HDD and thought i would never fill it. By 2001 i added a 40 GB to it and another 40 GB in 2002 and even then i constantly ran out of space. This is as old as gaming and never was any different. If anything today it's easy. SDD's are cheap. I got 10 Terrabyte M.2/SSD and 2 TB HDD and i basically never have trouble with my space now. It's i guess more of a console peasant/poor people problem nowadays, compared to back in the day when a 240 MB HDD costed 1000 dollars (1991 price!).

 

[7.62x38mmR]

I miss when games took themselves seriously and left all the inside jokes to easter eggs or the audience and their cliques. Instead of supplanting the main story with retarded marvelesque quips.

Imo a quippy personality can work, but you shouldn't apply it to every single characters in your story. Having an actual character whose personality is that of a trickster can work pretty damn well but nowadays everybody has to be a brainless idiot so instead of being funny it just makes you think everybody's retarded.
A goofy character works when there's a straight man to contrast with.
For example, the manga/series Lupin III's main character is a complete fucking shitter, but a lot of the humor works because it's putting his antics against the much more serious personalities of his colleagues, and when the later are supposed to make jokes they do it in their own way, one through dry wit and the other by being excessively straight and serious.
It's a damn 100% comedy-oriented piece of media that was supposed to only lasts for a few months and it still mogs the shit out of modern media with billions behind it holy fuck.

Edit : i couldn't properly insert the picture but here's a panel for example. It's not the funniest thing ever, but you can clearly how it plays into the personalities of the different characters.

 

[#lurker]

Game size and optimization. Why does a game have to be 100+ GB when it is so poorly built and coded that a year-old PC can only run it at medium settings before overheating and dying? We don't need 4k graphics on everything just for realism, many old games were stunning at low resolutions.

The file size also limits the amount of games that you can have on your hard drive, unless you custom built your computer for that. It feels very anti-consumer, especially when playing on a budget. "You will only play our slop, because after us, you'll be barely able to save a Word document." I don't recall that being such a problem during the 2010's.

I'm pretty sure they deliberately bloat modern games because it serves as a piracy dampener. It's much harder to pirate/distribute a 100GB game than it is 1GB.

 

[Senwosret III]

Which just means you recall wrong. HDD space and the size of games was ALWAYS a problem.

Thank you for the correction and the technical data. I guess I'm just poor.

 

[Wesker]

Survival Viewer in MGS.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Thought of another; typing/speaking vulgarities & slurs. You can't name your Bulbasaur FAGGOT or call someone a nigger in online multiplayer anymore.

During the fifth gen, you couldn't trade an unnicknamed Bulbasaur, Nosepass, or Cofagrigus. The filter Gamefreak used was one of those shitty ones that censored anything with a string of letters that happened to be on the banned word list. Bulbasaur includes the German insult sau, which means sow. The filter used ended up teaching players new insults and how to swear in multiple languages. You couldn't even name Pokemon innocent stuff like bite because that word happened to mean penis in another language.
List of banned words

Since these games came out in the early 10's, there's no way a kid didn't look up why they couldn't name their Rattata Bite.

 

[The handsome tard]

1- When their focus was to tell an engaging story in an engaging universe than try to be political. When I say political, Im sure everyone knows what I mean as Im aware that older games also had some "political" aspects but they were there as a supplement and not the whole meal. I cant see a minority in a modern game anymore without already expecting a lecture and that really sucks.

2-Also, I missed when devs were 100% okay with modding. Id released Doom's source code pretty early on and motivated players to "have fun" making levels.
Pretty much this meme



3- I much prefer when indie games go for a Doom/Build engine looking FPS rather than try to make it 3D. Why? Simple, they always try to make it look like PSX, which is the new slop trend. They can never quite capture the charm of the PSX graphics, mostly because we know its a choice and not a limitation they had to creatively work around.

Also I just like sprite work, that too.

So why do these stupid ass tutorials exist?

For children and men children like DSP

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Being able to name save files in PC games is mostly an indie game thing these days. It's nice being able to label your saves. It's also fun to go back to that playthrough years later and try to figure out what you were thinking when you named a file "Shodan's booty squad".

 

[LowlyPheasent]

Distinguishable teams. Gay skins have ruined like every shooter.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Cool death animations. It's what made me love Fallout initially.

I remembered when Unreal Tournament 2004 had an option for slow motion corpses, which made the death animations even more hilarious to watch! Odd game options such as Big Head mode in various games, is also something that is missed, since games today seem to try too hard to be "serious" and "realistic".

 

[T-21]

I remember some of silly features way back in PS1 era and forgot how it was a thing to begin with.

First is The World's Scariest Police Chases where silly speech mode will affect both story mode and free mode to make cops talk in zero sense with zero efforts at all to the point breaking the 4th wall, turn on low gravity mode to make you out of bound with very high air jump, make every car turn with real wheels with unlocked cheat, hell you can even change the city theme with either undewater theme or halloween theme which change the look of your character model, effects, props, basically almost everything.

Second is Medal of Honor where a certain cheat allows you to turn an entire mission into free for all scenario, everything one hit kill you, bullet ricochet, grenade bounces like basketball and so on. A certain feature in MOH: Undeground while in undercover mode also allows you to toy around enemies by pretending to photograph them then take out your gun to kill them silently which only works for few missions which helps a lot if you try to aim for gold medal run in hard difficulty.

Third a master code. NASCAR Rumble is one of the game where you can input the code to unlock everything if you just want to enjoy the game without being forced to do repetitive progressions. If you know, you know. It's a 10 digit code of alphabets and numbers which I somehow still remember in my aging brain till this day.

Lastly back to Medal of Honor. This one's Frontline which is a PS2 game and also has both master code and silly features you can use to unlock many things. Start from everyone using in-game props as helmet, hidden videos you cannot unlock unless you registered secret codes or master code and so on. It's also probably the only MOH game that allows you to recover your health by eating breads to recover small portion of health with a message "This bread is delicious." instead saying "Your health has been replenished with healing item.". A fucking bread.

Nowadays you'll need mods to replicate such things.