Are there games that you tried but just couldn’t get into because they feel outdated? Games that, in theory, you would enjoy, but don’t because the controls, graphics, writing, or mechanics just don’t feel good anymore. Games that, compared to today, just don’t hold up to your standards.
I recently tried playing Heroes of Might and Magic III, and I realized that a lot of the invisible language used through game design from that era, I do not understand. There are many things that the game didn’t explain, and I assume they were just understood by players. Not only that, but I imagine there was a lot of crossover between video games and board games back then, so maybe that language was used as well. I ended up downloading a manual and putting it on my second screen and I get it and played it, but it just wasn’t for me.
I also dropped Mirror’s Edge, but this time it was because of the graphics. It looks and feels great, but the graphics give me a headache. There is way too much bloom, and for some reason, there are some parts that look like the imaginary lens has been covered in Vaseline. This didn’t bother me before, but my eyes are not used to it anymore.
There are also games like the first two Tony Hawk Pro Skater games that I can’t fully get into because they’re missing mechanics from the later games. The levels and controls feel great, but they don’t feel complete without those mechanics. It keeps me from enjoying the games as much as the others.
a lot of the invisible language used through game design from that era, I do not understand. There are many things that the game didn’t explain, and I assume they were just understood by players
A lot of the UI/UX and game mechanics from HOMM3 were taken from Sid Meier’s games, like Colonization and Civilization. When you say you didn’t understand stuff in HOMM3, I want to ask if you’ve played CIV6 or CIV5 or other modern games in that same genre? If not, you’re going to be confused by them regardless of whether you’re starting with CIV1 or HOMM3 or CIV6.
Unpopular opinion for sure, but Vampire: The Masquerade. I’ve started so many playthroughs over the years but just cannot fall into it like other RPGs on account of its dated mechanics and graphics.
I assume you’re talking about VTM Bloodlines, the video game RPG? If you’re not playing with the fan patch, you need to. The game was never totally finished and was rushed out the door by their publisher, so it’d got a lot of jank and missing content. It’s probably a hard game to love, but if you get into it then it does so much better than a lot of other games.
I played with the fan patch but still didn’t get very far. It feels very weird to play an RPG in an early version of the Source engine. Would be neat to see the game get a Source 2 port with upgraded graphics and modernized mechanics.
Bloodlines 2 is coming out sometime. It was in development hell for a while, but it’s a new team working on it now and they released something about it recently. It may actually come out eventually.
Yes, Bloodlines, should’ve clarified. I’ve never looked into the patch but I’ve heard of it.
The funny thing is how much I love Fallout New Vegas, a game that gets thrown around a lot in the same discussions. Currently have several hundred hours of playtime on FNV across like five consoles and PC, but I’ve never been able to get into VTMB the same way.
I’ll second that the fan patch for VtM:B is pretty much essential for enjoying it. FNV had its bugs, but it was at least polished into a solid experience before release. VtM:B…wasn’t, unfortunately, but the patch gets it there.
Even so, I’d rather play a forward-port of Fallout: New Vegas to a newer engine with updated graphics, but I doubt that it’ll happen. Retexturing might be doable with AI upscaling or something like that, but I can’t think of an inexpensive way to remodel everything. If they’re going to do the kind of asset work that I suspect would be required, they’d probably be better-off just doing Fallout 5.
There’s the Tale of Two Wastelands mod that put Fallout 3’s content into Fallout: New Vegas, but it could just use the content directly, as the two were pretty contemporaneous.
Starfield’s engine runs vastly more smoothly for me than even Fallout 76’s, does a better job of streaming content into memory.
Also, I liked Fallout: New Vegas – one could change the world in many interesting and interacting ways, it had great DLC, I liked the New Old West setting, finding unique items felt really neat. But it had a number of warts, a number related to the engine, and I feel that sometimes people look at it with the gilding of nostalgia:
The game tended to load and save more-and-more slowly over the course of a game. Maybe with a present-day PC on solid-state storage, it’d be okay, but it got absolutely horrendous, especially on consoles.
It also, in my experience, tended to get less-stable over the course of a game.
Falling through terrain was an issue.
Enemy AI was pretty bad. I mean, it was par for the course for the time, but Starfield’s human enemies have gotten more-interesting behavior.
It wasn’t uncommon that I’d manage to break one quest or another on a given playthrough.
Some people really like the “skill point” system in Fallout: New Vegas and earlier, and dislike the shift to just doing perks in Fallout 4, to the point that there have been mods to forward-port the skill system forward. I don’t. One thing I liked about the Fallout series was that the SPECIAL points were significant enough that you could feel each point make a difference; this was a shift from the Dungeons & Dragons convention, where a single stat point often didn’t make much change. The skill points, however, broke with that, and a given level up didn’t make a really noticeable change.
The perks weren’t really balanced; some are clearly better than others. This isn’t to specifically criticize Fallout: New Vegas: that’s been true for the whole series. But it’s not on par with, say, a traditional roguelike, where there’s a very long, iterative development cycle where there are tweaks and rebalancing.
Some of the compromises that had to be made to get performance reasonable are really visible, like the walls around New Vegas, or the limited number of characters running around.
The view distance and weapon ranges were limited to the point that it was always kind of noticeable.
There was a lot of polygons clipping through each other. Not the end of the world, but it did impact immersion for me.
It feels like trying to play a really old Half-Life 2 mod that was never updated after the initial release. Which makes sense since it was the first Source engine game to be produced by a 3rd party. Also doesn’t help that they tried to make an RPG in an engine designed for FPS.
This is a weird one for me because it often depends on whether I paid for the game. I got the first Fallout game for free (from GOG or something), and when I inevitably became confused by the UI and objective I ended up giving up on it. If I’d bought the game (either today or back when it came out) I definitely would have invested a lot more time into it, and got past that initial hump. Back when PC games came on disc with an instruction guide, reading that was part of the experience. There’s definitely a awkward period around the early 2000s when games were becoming way more complex, but before in-game tutorials were regularly a thing. I find it hard to go back to a lot of those games.
Likewise I played the first hour of Resident Evil HD on my PS4 (free with PS+) and never had the motivation to get into it. After paying for it in a Humble Bundle, I played through the whole thing on Steam and loved it! The fact that I’d paid for it was able to outweigh the fact that the game was quite outdated. I guess I felt like I wanted to get my money’s worth.
Any game from 2005-ish onwards feels ‘modern’ enough that I don’t usually have this problem.
That’s interesting. I either refund them if I struggle a little too much on tutorials, or just leave it in the backlog for later (aka most likely never).
I should try doing that more though because they’re classics for a reason and maybe there’s still fun I can get out of them.
There are still games that require a lot of reading documentation to be playable. Come to think of it, some of my favorite games are like that, like Dwarf Fortress or the like.
Yes that’s true! I find that games like that have their own sort of niche, in which players usually know quite a lot about the game (from watching others play it online) before jumping in. And there’s an expectation that they’ll refer to the wiki regularly. These kind of games can’t have a tutorial that covers everything, because there’s way too much to cover.
That’s interesting, I kinda get the wanting to get your moneys worth out of it. I am a little surprised that even though I only played Fallout 1 and 2 a few years ago for the first time (not old enough to have played them at release) I really liked both of them. I thought the story was really solid. Much simpler than F3 or New Vegas, but still very good.
I’m a big Guild Wars 2 fan, though I don’t play that much anymore. Often in the game, Guild Wars 1 references, and stories told by players of how great it was, made me want to try it.
It still fully works, and can be played. But for me, it was a no-go. I could live with the graphics, and the environments were fine. Good music and sounds.
The interface killed it for me. Dozens of windows, shortcuts, clunky ways of doing things, the inventory. I couldn’t take it anymore after a few hours.
It’s not about disliking old interfaces. I basically live on the Linux-shell, and I still play xcom: ufo-defense. But the gw1 one is all over the place, like it hasn’t been planned but just happened by random people dropping into the studio and adding some stuff for the fun of it.
Come to think about it, it isn’t even about old games. I couldn’t play Xenonauts for the same reason. I suppose I just don’t enjoy clunky interfaces…
Morrowind was always this for me. I started the series with Oblivion and Skyrim. Those have their own issues, but at least you hit things when you hit them, and their leveling systems won’t actually screw you over if you don’t Excel it correctly.
SMB 1 and 2. The SMB1 engine was revolutionary, but I hate the controls. SMB2, the Western one, just never felt like Mario, even back then. I also mostly started on SMB3 which had much better platforming and controls and was actually a Mario game, so that’s probably why.
I consider myself, more or less, a “Zelda fan”, at least from LttP to about half of Wind Waker. I will never play the first two NES games, though. Aside from 2 being “pretty much not zelda”, 1 is so full of arbitrary wonk, “Guide dammit”, and “Nintendo hard” that I don’t feel like it even for historical purposes.
Lttp was the first game I remember ever picking out completely on my own. I have grown up with this game over the decades and I truly feel it’s one of the best games of all time, and like a top 5ish for me easily. Maybe higher depending how nostalgic I’m feeling that day.
The rest of them until twilight princess get regular playthroughs, and I thoroughly enjoy them every time I dig in.
Botw was great. Totk too!
I have never once felt an urge to play the very first Zelda that lasted longer than 30 minutes or so.
I got the PS1 anniversary edition which had Metal Gear Solid on it, and I don’t get how that game was ever as popular as it was. The handling is super janky, and the graphics is so dark that you basically cannot discern the environment and the enemy unless you stay still and watch for moving pixels.
PS1/PS2 MGS games are very odd when you first play them. If you get used to how the control and the very odd amounts of “realism”, then they can turn out to be lots of fun.
Gta 5. Story progression is just awful. You play a mission, it ends and you’re forced to do open world activities instead of continuing the story. Then just when you’re getting into the groove in the open world you get a call to do a story mission and it turns out to be shooting imaginary aliens. The missions are too linear and short. Gunplay is weak. Also the characters feel like they were written for 10 year olds who think swear words are funny.
Well yeah, GTA IV was all about the immigrant story, which is basically a series of people screwing you over because they can get away with it. I liked Niko and felt bad when he got screwed over, and enjoyed seeing good things happen to him.
GTA V, on the other hand, was essentially a criminal Moby Dick, but way worse because I hated all of the characters. Michael’s problems started because he has anger management issues (should’ve just divorced his wife), and compounded when he couldn’t give up the dream of a massive heist. Trevor is just evil, though he is almost interesting in the epilogue. Franklin is who I’m supposed to like, but when he gets money, he ditches all of his dreams (every time I switched to him, he’s swimming is his pool mid to late game). And then the entire focus of the game is heists, but there’s like 5? It should be something I can do whenever I want, like the gang wars in GTA SA, vigilante/ambulance side content in GTA III, etc. I wanted to play as Franklin and steal cars to start a dealership or something, but instead he just does whatever Michael wants him to do.
Other older RPGs just start off too slow, but that isn’t necessarily age related, but by design.
Morrowind, but only because I’ve lost where I was up to in my saved game from 3-4 years ago, not so much because of the mechanics; they didn’t bother me too much.
Diablo in its vanilla form is rough, there’s an amazing mod which sort of upgrades it to d2 style called bezzelbub. I recommend trying it with that if you cash jam D2 but my D1
I tried playing the original Deus Ex for the first time a couple of years ago and I sadly had to put it down before I escaped the tutorial. Early 3D graphics have not aged well, the controls were not very intuitive, and it just seemed like it wasn’t worth the effort. I then played and enjoyed Human Revolution though; I know, I’m an absolute peasant.
Give it a try again with GMDX. It’s a mod that modernizes Deus Ex mechanically and visually without losing the original vision like what “New Vision / Revision,” does
One thing that’s really interesting is once you get to the headquarters after the first level, the floors and things are super shiny and have actual reflections. Most modern games use screen space reflections now (although raytracing is fixing this), so things not on screen can’t be reflected. Deus Ex, and many games of the time, have better reflections than modern games. The graphics do look dated generally, but it’s funny how technology advancement can cause some things to be worse
Yeah most older 3D games I’ve tried I just can’t control that well.
A couple years ago I tried playing the original Tomb Raider and geez was that difficult to control. It really makes me appreciate how good the Mario 64 controls were
Tomb raider was essentially a 3d Prince of Persia. The level has tiles that dictate when jumps will actually trigger. Once you get the hang of this you can traverse quite smoothly around the level.
Suikoden III really should have used voice acting. I think it came out at the beginning of the voice acting era, but chose to make the player read everything. It’s a fantastic game otherwise, but that makes replays unappealing.
I don’t really understand what it is about HMMIII you don’t get. It is a relatively simple game concept, and the fundamentals has remained largely unchanged from iteration to iteration. I personally prefer III over most of the later ones exactly because of its simplicity (and none of those ugly 3D graphics).
For me what mostly antiquates a game is if it was primarily based on graphics which have been outdated, otherwise I don’t really have a problem even with much older games. But then again I also grew up playing games in the 80s, so I have been used to those my entire life. Some of the games which fascinated me on account of the complexity, like the early Ultima games (at least I and II), doesn’t exactly stand revisits, because they were very barebones compared to the later games in the franchise. Ultima V still holds up beautifully, simply because it is so complex behind those primitive graphics.
I started getting used to Ultima V, then i left it for a few days and had no idea what I was doing when I tried getting back into it! Maybe I should try one of the easier ones, maybe VI or VII?
HMM III was the first game I played in the turn based strategy genre. I had never played anything similar really, but I wanted to get into the genre and I decided to start with one a lot of people consider a classic.
My gaming knowledge started with the PS1 era playing games like crash bandicoot, THPS, and others like that. I didn’t get into PC gaming until around 2016 and now games I play are Death Stranding, DOOM 2016, Skyrim, BOTW, CSGO etc.
I’ve tried a wide variety of games besides those, and I truly didn’t know what the game was asking from me until I looked it up. Maybe the game gave me enough and I just didn’t connect the dots in my head. I’m not sure, but all I know is my experience which I struggled with
All I’m saying is that I’ve never met anyone who didn’t understand a game like DOOM or the classic Marios. There’s clearly a difference in language that isn’t as common in modern/more mainstream games. Not saying HMM III wasn’t mainstream during it’s time, but I’ve never heard anyone of my generation who has played it or heard of it
It’s a strategy, it requires planning and thinking. Comparing to FPS is crazy. Pick up gun and shoot.
HoMM3 is quite simple. Get towns and upgrade them. Make monsters. Kill. Most stuff you can learn and figure out as you play. It was the first game of that type I played. I’m not great at it, but that’s more because it’s hard to master, but you can still play a reasonable game.
It’s worth persisting as its one of the best games made and people still play it decades later.
The first witcher. The story seems really interesting and it has some great rpg elements but the combat is just so boring that I ended up startin witcher 3 without knowing the lore
I don’t think it actually matters for the Witcher series. They don’t tend to dwell too much on the events of the previous game.
I assumed that Yen was something from the Witcher 2 (that I skipped), but I don’t think she’s in that at all. If anything it relies more on the books for the backstory of each game.
Witcher 1 is a very odd game, gameplay-wise, that makes more sense when you realise it was initially some top down D&D game. It’s just presented as a regular 3rd person game that we now expect to play somewhat differently, rather than the odd “click the mouse at the right moment” system they went with. It’s worth it just for the story. Just turn down the difficulty as it’s really not worth struggling with, although for me the hardest boss in the game was a dog near the start.
Yeah I kinda realized the same thing. I might not know everything but witcher 3 with no extra information has been great and I havent felt like I don’t know enough to enjoy the lore
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A lot of the UI/UX and game mechanics from HOMM3 were taken from Sid Meier’s games, like Colonization and Civilization. When you say you didn’t understand stuff in HOMM3, I want to ask if you’ve played CIV6 or CIV5 or other modern games in that same genre? If not, you’re going to be confused by them regardless of whether you’re starting with CIV1 or HOMM3 or CIV6.
Unpopular opinion for sure, but Vampire: The Masquerade. I’ve started so many playthroughs over the years but just cannot fall into it like other RPGs on account of its dated mechanics and graphics.
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I assume you’re talking about VTM Bloodlines, the video game RPG? If you’re not playing with the fan patch, you need to. The game was never totally finished and was rushed out the door by their publisher, so it’d got a lot of jank and missing content. It’s probably a hard game to love, but if you get into it then it does so much better than a lot of other games.
I played with the fan patch but still didn’t get very far. It feels very weird to play an RPG in an early version of the Source engine. Would be neat to see the game get a Source 2 port with upgraded graphics and modernized mechanics.
Bloodlines 2 is coming out sometime. It was in development hell for a while, but it’s a new team working on it now and they released something about it recently. It may actually come out eventually.
Good to know. I thought it was canceled years ago. Thanks.
Yes, Bloodlines, should’ve clarified. I’ve never looked into the patch but I’ve heard of it.
The funny thing is how much I love Fallout New Vegas, a game that gets thrown around a lot in the same discussions. Currently have several hundred hours of playtime on FNV across like five consoles and PC, but I’ve never been able to get into VTMB the same way.
I’ll second that the fan patch for VtM:B is pretty much essential for enjoying it. FNV had its bugs, but it was at least polished into a solid experience before release. VtM:B…wasn’t, unfortunately, but the patch gets it there.
The patch is so important I’m pretty sure it’s bundled into the GoG version of the game. It’s essentially required at this point.
Even so, I’d rather play a forward-port of Fallout: New Vegas to a newer engine with updated graphics, but I doubt that it’ll happen. Retexturing might be doable with AI upscaling or something like that, but I can’t think of an inexpensive way to remodel everything. If they’re going to do the kind of asset work that I suspect would be required, they’d probably be better-off just doing Fallout 5.
There’s the Tale of Two Wastelands mod that put Fallout 3’s content into Fallout: New Vegas, but it could just use the content directly, as the two were pretty contemporaneous.
Starfield’s engine runs vastly more smoothly for me than even Fallout 76’s, does a better job of streaming content into memory.
Also, I liked Fallout: New Vegas – one could change the world in many interesting and interacting ways, it had great DLC, I liked the New Old West setting, finding unique items felt really neat. But it had a number of warts, a number related to the engine, and I feel that sometimes people look at it with the gilding of nostalgia:
The game tended to load and save more-and-more slowly over the course of a game. Maybe with a present-day PC on solid-state storage, it’d be okay, but it got absolutely horrendous, especially on consoles.
It also, in my experience, tended to get less-stable over the course of a game.
Falling through terrain was an issue.
Enemy AI was pretty bad. I mean, it was par for the course for the time, but Starfield’s human enemies have gotten more-interesting behavior.
It wasn’t uncommon that I’d manage to break one quest or another on a given playthrough.
Some people really like the “skill point” system in Fallout: New Vegas and earlier, and dislike the shift to just doing perks in Fallout 4, to the point that there have been mods to forward-port the skill system forward. I don’t. One thing I liked about the Fallout series was that the SPECIAL points were significant enough that you could feel each point make a difference; this was a shift from the Dungeons & Dragons convention, where a single stat point often didn’t make much change. The skill points, however, broke with that, and a given level up didn’t make a really noticeable change.
The perks weren’t really balanced; some are clearly better than others. This isn’t to specifically criticize Fallout: New Vegas: that’s been true for the whole series. But it’s not on par with, say, a traditional roguelike, where there’s a very long, iterative development cycle where there are tweaks and rebalancing.
Some of the compromises that had to be made to get performance reasonable are really visible, like the walls around New Vegas, or the limited number of characters running around.
The view distance and weapon ranges were limited to the point that it was always kind of noticeable.
There was a lot of polygons clipping through each other. Not the end of the world, but it did impact immersion for me.
It feels like trying to play a really old Half-Life 2 mod that was never updated after the initial release. Which makes sense since it was the first Source engine game to be produced by a 3rd party. Also doesn’t help that they tried to make an RPG in an engine designed for FPS.
This is a weird one for me because it often depends on whether I paid for the game. I got the first Fallout game for free (from GOG or something), and when I inevitably became confused by the UI and objective I ended up giving up on it. If I’d bought the game (either today or back when it came out) I definitely would have invested a lot more time into it, and got past that initial hump. Back when PC games came on disc with an instruction guide, reading that was part of the experience. There’s definitely a awkward period around the early 2000s when games were becoming way more complex, but before in-game tutorials were regularly a thing. I find it hard to go back to a lot of those games.
Likewise I played the first hour of Resident Evil HD on my PS4 (free with PS+) and never had the motivation to get into it. After paying for it in a Humble Bundle, I played through the whole thing on Steam and loved it! The fact that I’d paid for it was able to outweigh the fact that the game was quite outdated. I guess I felt like I wanted to get my money’s worth.
Any game from 2005-ish onwards feels ‘modern’ enough that I don’t usually have this problem.
That’s interesting. I either refund them if I struggle a little too much on tutorials, or just leave it in the backlog for later (aka most likely never).
I should try doing that more though because they’re classics for a reason and maybe there’s still fun I can get out of them.
There are still games that require a lot of reading documentation to be playable. Come to think of it, some of my favorite games are like that, like Dwarf Fortress or the like.
Yes that’s true! I find that games like that have their own sort of niche, in which players usually know quite a lot about the game (from watching others play it online) before jumping in. And there’s an expectation that they’ll refer to the wiki regularly. These kind of games can’t have a tutorial that covers everything, because there’s way too much to cover.
That’s interesting, I kinda get the wanting to get your moneys worth out of it. I am a little surprised that even though I only played Fallout 1 and 2 a few years ago for the first time (not old enough to have played them at release) I really liked both of them. I thought the story was really solid. Much simpler than F3 or New Vegas, but still very good.
I’m a big Guild Wars 2 fan, though I don’t play that much anymore. Often in the game, Guild Wars 1 references, and stories told by players of how great it was, made me want to try it.
It still fully works, and can be played. But for me, it was a no-go. I could live with the graphics, and the environments were fine. Good music and sounds.
The interface killed it for me. Dozens of windows, shortcuts, clunky ways of doing things, the inventory. I couldn’t take it anymore after a few hours.
It’s not about disliking old interfaces. I basically live on the Linux-shell, and I still play xcom: ufo-defense. But the gw1 one is all over the place, like it hasn’t been planned but just happened by random people dropping into the studio and adding some stuff for the fun of it.
Come to think about it, it isn’t even about old games. I couldn’t play Xenonauts for the same reason. I suppose I just don’t enjoy clunky interfaces…
Starcraft 1.
2 is still bearable but 1 looks like actual dogshit, especially the cutscenes
Did the remaster fix that? I couldn’t finish it for similar reasons
Morrowind was always this for me. I started the series with Oblivion and Skyrim. Those have their own issues, but at least you hit things when you hit them, and their leveling systems won’t actually screw you over if you don’t Excel it correctly.
SMB 1 and 2. The SMB1 engine was revolutionary, but I hate the controls. SMB2, the Western one, just never felt like Mario, even back then. I also mostly started on SMB3 which had much better platforming and controls and was actually a Mario game, so that’s probably why.
I consider myself, more or less, a “Zelda fan”, at least from LttP to about half of Wind Waker. I will never play the first two NES games, though. Aside from 2 being “pretty much not zelda”, 1 is so full of arbitrary wonk, “Guide dammit”, and “Nintendo hard” that I don’t feel like it even for historical purposes.
Zelda II is dope. You’re missing out.
Forreal though? The side scrolling one?
If you say it’s worth it I’ll plow through it.
Might be partially due to nostalgia, but I think it’s good. It’s just different.
Lttp was the first game I remember ever picking out completely on my own. I have grown up with this game over the decades and I truly feel it’s one of the best games of all time, and like a top 5ish for me easily. Maybe higher depending how nostalgic I’m feeling that day.
The rest of them until twilight princess get regular playthroughs, and I thoroughly enjoy them every time I dig in.
Botw was great. Totk too!
I have never once felt an urge to play the very first Zelda that lasted longer than 30 minutes or so.
I got the PS1 anniversary edition which had Metal Gear Solid on it, and I don’t get how that game was ever as popular as it was. The handling is super janky, and the graphics is so dark that you basically cannot discern the environment and the enemy unless you stay still and watch for moving pixels.
PS1/PS2 MGS games are very odd when you first play them. If you get used to how the control and the very odd amounts of “realism”, then they can turn out to be lots of fun.
Jank was the style at the time.
!
I heard good things about some of the earlier Star Wars games like Knights of the Old Republic and others… maybe Jedi Academy?
Struggled to get into them due to overall clunkiness and outdated menu stuff.
If someone could recommend a remake on Switch or Steam maybe with decent controller support? I might be convinced to give them another try…
Gta 5. Story progression is just awful. You play a mission, it ends and you’re forced to do open world activities instead of continuing the story. Then just when you’re getting into the groove in the open world you get a call to do a story mission and it turns out to be shooting imaginary aliens. The missions are too linear and short. Gunplay is weak. Also the characters feel like they were written for 10 year olds who think swear words are funny.
I’m hoping rdr2 is better
Gta 5 has such a bad story.
You’re basically just a bitch boy that’s in debt to someone and then you do a mission but then you’re indebted to someone else. Rinse and repeat.
Even gta4 did better.
Well yeah, GTA IV was all about the immigrant story, which is basically a series of people screwing you over because they can get away with it. I liked Niko and felt bad when he got screwed over, and enjoyed seeing good things happen to him.
GTA V, on the other hand, was essentially a criminal Moby Dick, but way worse because I hated all of the characters. Michael’s problems started because he has anger management issues (should’ve just divorced his wife), and compounded when he couldn’t give up the dream of a massive heist. Trevor is just evil, though he is almost interesting in the epilogue. Franklin is who I’m supposed to like, but when he gets money, he ditches all of his dreams (every time I switched to him, he’s swimming is his pool mid to late game). And then the entire focus of the game is heists, but there’s like 5? It should be something I can do whenever I want, like the gang wars in GTA SA, vigilante/ambulance side content in GTA III, etc. I wanted to play as Franklin and steal cars to start a dealership or something, but instead he just does whatever Michael wants him to do.
So yeah, GTA V kinda sucks.
I had to take a look at the date, because this feels like a 2018 comment…
Quite a few, but more recently:
Neverwinter Nights. Even the Enhanced Edition.
Diablo.
Other older RPGs just start off too slow, but that isn’t necessarily age related, but by design.
Morrowind, but only because I’ve lost where I was up to in my saved game from 3-4 years ago, not so much because of the mechanics; they didn’t bother me too much.
Diablo II holds up to me, and they did a wonderful job with the remaster!
Diablo in its vanilla form is rough, there’s an amazing mod which sort of upgrades it to d2 style called bezzelbub. I recommend trying it with that if you cash jam D2 but my D1
If I was offered a million dollars if I could continue where I left off in Morrowind (major, minor, side, or goals)… Yeah, I’ll be in tomorrow, boss.
Shovel Knight. I like 90s platformers, I own an SNES. It was just boring.
I tried playing the original Deus Ex for the first time a couple of years ago and I sadly had to put it down before I escaped the tutorial. Early 3D graphics have not aged well, the controls were not very intuitive, and it just seemed like it wasn’t worth the effort. I then played and enjoyed Human Revolution though; I know, I’m an absolute peasant.
Give it a try again with GMDX. It’s a mod that modernizes Deus Ex mechanically and visually without losing the original vision like what “New Vision / Revision,” does
Thanks for the tip, I started a few weeks ago and barely made any progress. Maybe this will help.
Ooh interesting, how easy is it to set up mods for DX? Reckon it’ll work on a Steam Deck?
I didn’t do it on the Deck but on Linux, so steps should be something like:
One thing that’s really interesting is once you get to the headquarters after the first level, the floors and things are super shiny and have actual reflections. Most modern games use screen space reflections now (although raytracing is fixing this), so things not on screen can’t be reflected. Deus Ex, and many games of the time, have better reflections than modern games. The graphics do look dated generally, but it’s funny how technology advancement can cause some things to be worse
Agreed. Can’t stand the outdated controls. Play Human Revolution instead.
Yeah most older 3D games I’ve tried I just can’t control that well.
A couple years ago I tried playing the original Tomb Raider and geez was that difficult to control. It really makes me appreciate how good the Mario 64 controls were
I can get past ugly early 3D, but bad controls are not something that I can stand. I didn’t like Tomb Raider back when it was new for that reason.
Similarly, I want to play Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, but the tank controls are just painful.
Tomb raider was essentially a 3d Prince of Persia. The level has tiles that dictate when jumps will actually trigger. Once you get the hang of this you can traverse quite smoothly around the level.
Suikoden III really should have used voice acting. I think it came out at the beginning of the voice acting era, but chose to make the player read everything. It’s a fantastic game otherwise, but that makes replays unappealing.
On the contrary, not being able to turn off voice acting can be a deal-breaker for me! Haha
I don’t really understand what it is about HMMIII you don’t get. It is a relatively simple game concept, and the fundamentals has remained largely unchanged from iteration to iteration. I personally prefer III over most of the later ones exactly because of its simplicity (and none of those ugly 3D graphics).
For me what mostly antiquates a game is if it was primarily based on graphics which have been outdated, otherwise I don’t really have a problem even with much older games. But then again I also grew up playing games in the 80s, so I have been used to those my entire life. Some of the games which fascinated me on account of the complexity, like the early Ultima games (at least I and II), doesn’t exactly stand revisits, because they were very barebones compared to the later games in the franchise. Ultima V still holds up beautifully, simply because it is so complex behind those primitive graphics.
I started getting used to Ultima V, then i left it for a few days and had no idea what I was doing when I tried getting back into it! Maybe I should try one of the easier ones, maybe VI or VII?
HMM III was the first game I played in the turn based strategy genre. I had never played anything similar really, but I wanted to get into the genre and I decided to start with one a lot of people consider a classic.
My gaming knowledge started with the PS1 era playing games like crash bandicoot, THPS, and others like that. I didn’t get into PC gaming until around 2016 and now games I play are Death Stranding, DOOM 2016, Skyrim, BOTW, CSGO etc.
I’ve tried a wide variety of games besides those, and I truly didn’t know what the game was asking from me until I looked it up. Maybe the game gave me enough and I just didn’t connect the dots in my head. I’m not sure, but all I know is my experience which I struggled with
All I’m saying is that I’ve never met anyone who didn’t understand a game like DOOM or the classic Marios. There’s clearly a difference in language that isn’t as common in modern/more mainstream games. Not saying HMM III wasn’t mainstream during it’s time, but I’ve never heard anyone of my generation who has played it or heard of it
It’s a strategy, it requires planning and thinking. Comparing to FPS is crazy. Pick up gun and shoot.
HoMM3 is quite simple. Get towns and upgrade them. Make monsters. Kill. Most stuff you can learn and figure out as you play. It was the first game of that type I played. I’m not great at it, but that’s more because it’s hard to master, but you can still play a reasonable game.
It’s worth persisting as its one of the best games made and people still play it decades later.
The first witcher. The story seems really interesting and it has some great rpg elements but the combat is just so boring that I ended up startin witcher 3 without knowing the lore
I don’t think it actually matters for the Witcher series. They don’t tend to dwell too much on the events of the previous game.
I assumed that Yen was something from the Witcher 2 (that I skipped), but I don’t think she’s in that at all. If anything it relies more on the books for the backstory of each game.
Witcher 1 is a very odd game, gameplay-wise, that makes more sense when you realise it was initially some top down D&D game. It’s just presented as a regular 3rd person game that we now expect to play somewhat differently, rather than the odd “click the mouse at the right moment” system they went with. It’s worth it just for the story. Just turn down the difficulty as it’s really not worth struggling with, although for me the hardest boss in the game was a dog near the start.
Yeah I kinda realized the same thing. I might not know everything but witcher 3 with no extra information has been great and I havent felt like I don’t know enough to enjoy the lore
Witcher 3 actually assumes you’ve read the books, too, so just playing 1 and 2 wouldn’t necessarily have informed you of what was going on.
Huh, good to know. I would love to read the books at some point
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Damn I didn’t know about that! I’m definetly going to try it out when it gets released