Quite simply, some games have stood the test of time, while others are really showing their age, and I'd like your opinions on that. What aspects of a particular game do you think are timeless, and ones that have aged poorly.
I ask this, because video games have been subjected to Moore's Law for the entirety of the industry.
I think it's a combination of various factors, and I separate this between the tangible and intangible here. The tangible being what we actually play and see, and the intangible being how we feel about it.
So to start off this discussion, let me give my opinion on this. I shall warn you, this is going to be a long opinion as I consider multiple factors of this.
CHANGING STANDARDS:
When asking the question, "Why do some games age poorly," it's prudent to address the concept of changing standards. For example, before the advent of HD, 3D was the standard back then.
How well or how poorly a game ages is fundamentally a consequence of changing standards. Saying that games get better every year or two due to Moore's Law does a disservice to the potential player.
For example, why would I ever want to play old games, when newer games have a higher polygon count on their models?
If the new standard looks better than the old standard, I would argue that the former statement shows inherent bias.
Thus, I would say that the changing standards argument is contextual not consequential. It's for this reason that I can make a sound argument for an old game still looking good compared to the standards of today. For example, F.E.A.R. still looks crisp and sharp even when comparing it to the standards of today.
ATTENTION TO GRAPHICAL DETAILS:
This play a big role on whether or not a game truly looks old. More attention given to the graphical details of a game also lead into the discussion of a game holding up. I argue a game has aged well when it meets or exceeds the standards at time of release, or still holds a candle compared to games made in the last 5 years.
An example of this would be the Crysis games. These games were made with the intent to far exceed the standards of their time, as well as hardware limitations of the time. As a result, the series still is used as a benchmark. Call the Crysis series a generic shooter all you want, but they made a statement and set a new standard in graphical fidelity that few titles ever get close to them.
It's not just Crysis that this happened with, many older PC games were also developed with the intent to run better on future hardware, and this pushes the industry forward, creating new standards. Thus Crysis and older PC games with the same design philosophy of pushing the boundaries plays into the perception of games ageing.
If we reel this view back a bit or condense it down, I believe that games with more attention given to lighting effects, and texture resolutions will tend to age better than those that don't, or couldn't have that same attention to detail. We don't even have to go to PC games that still hammer hardware to see this in action.
For another example, there's a reason that Super Mario 64 has aged far better than Bubsy 3D.
That's because Nintendo, on top of the stellar gameplay of Super Mario 64, put a lot of attention to detail in their 3D modeling work, texture resolution, lighting, and other factors. For the time, it exceeded the current standard.
When it comes to the two graphical details that play the biggest factor in a game holding up, are texture resolutions, specifically normal maps, and lighting effects.
Normal maps give the illusion of depth in the geometry of a model. Therefore it stands to reason that games that give a greater attention to detail to their normal map work will age inherently better than ones that meet expectations.
But why do some games age horribly, and others age well? I think this is due to various factors. For example, a game developed only for consoles will inherently age quicker due to the limitations in fixed hardware in an industry that's always improving.
No more clear an example of this can be demonstrated than with Condemned: Criminal Origins and F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon). These two games were made by the same developer, with Condemned being made for the Xbox 360, and F.E.A.R. being developed for the PC initially. As a result, F.E.A.R. looks far crisper than Condemned.
Condemned: Criminal Origins.
F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon)
Quite a stark difference isn't it? This isn't just shown with the games themselves, but development considerations, like the allocation of memory bandwidth with the PS3 and Xbox 360. There came a point where developers couldn't squeeze anymore juice out of those systems, prompting them to release newer consoles.
Notice, I'm not talking about what systems they were released on, but what their primary development was intended for.
As a result, one of these platforms between the two games can easily scale with and adjust the game to current standards, while the other can't. That leads into F.E.A.R. looking far better even though Condemned and F.E.A.R. were released the same year and made by the same developer.
What also plays into this is the screen resolution and whether or not it's viable to put better looking textures. The standard for 7-8 years was 1280x720 (720p). This meant the your average character model was 512x512 for their head, and 1024x1024 for their body.
This doesn't look bad when you're playing on a smaller screen with a smaller native resolution. However, scale that up to 1920x1080 (1080p) with a bigger screen and you're sitting the same distance with the same model resolution, texture resolution, and other factors, the game will look blurry and worse as a result.
This was the reason for pre-rendered cutscenes. This is usually the result of the developers not being able to do real time cutscenes due to the limitations of hardware. So they render it on their side and convert it to video on your game. This is inherently flawed, because pre-rendered custscenes were usually rendered in the standard of the time the game was released, which in some situations leads to good looking gameplay, but cutscenes that look worse than the gameplay. Add in the artifacts and compression ratio to this, and you can already see how this will age a game terribly.
Perhaps the biggest factor in a game aging terribly is simply design. If you design a game to the standard of the time, with no other elements or aspects of the design made to be timeless, the game will be doomed to age terribly. This is why a ton of older games made to be timeless still hold up to this day, despite their age.
For example, a lot of the "photo-realistic" games made in 2007, contained various shades of brown, with little to no color depth, making the game age terribly.
Think of your Call of Duty's and Battlefields for examples of this. Older Modern Military Shooters often show their age, while games like Doom, Quake, and Deus Ex, don't show their age as much.
Scale that up to today, and this is one of the reasons why I think games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Doom (2016) will age pretty well, because both games met and far exceeded the standards at the time of release, and a ton of attention to detail in all aspects of these games will cause them to inherently age pretty well.
To scale this to a Zelda example, there's a reason many people, including myself, weren't that impressed with the HD remake of Twilight Princess. The game had already aged so much that you can see inherent artifacts that were the standards of its time. Also its limited color depth and artistic design cause it to age more quickly than Wind Waker. Because of Wind Waker's art style and design, the HD remake of it was a stark contrast, and the color depth, and lighting effects of that game made improved character models, normal maps, and the improved lighting of the remake made it seem like a much better improvement over the HD remake of Twilight Princess.
Budget is also a big reason. The more money you invest into a product, like everything else, the better the result is usually. Ever wonder why Steam is filled with pixel art 2D side-scrolling games? That's the reason. Now, there are indie devs who even take that art style and through their dedication and passion, can make even pixel art look unique and timeless. It's one of the reasons I give massive credit to indie devs that strive achieve a standard that far surpasses the current standards of indie games.
Why do people remember Undertale and not the millions of other Earthbound clones? Because Undertale had real passion, and likely, budget to set itself apart from the crowd.
This is also why I totally respect the amount of work that goes into developing a game, but I have little patience for developers being lazy and only working to meet a standard, not working their balls off to make something truly exceptional.
There are ways for developers to circumvent the inherent aging process of video games. For example, if a developer truly cares, they will strive to make sure that 7 to 8 years down the line, the game will at least meet the standards of the projected future. This leads to a concept called "future-proofing."
For another Nintendo example, Nintendo put a lot of work into Breath of the Wild, and the visuals of that game alone, show an incredible amount of time, money, work, perseverance, stress, heart, and soul into them, to say nothing else of the other aspects of that game's design that likely took a similar amount of work, time, money, perseverance, stress, heart, and soul.
As a consequence, I feel Breath of the Wild will be a game that not only met expectations at the time of release, but far exceeded them, and likely will hold up to future standards.
As a result, the game also scales really well. For example, you get a stark improvement in the visuals if you run the game at 2560x1440 through an emulator. The game looks far crisper, and shows that Nintendo really put tons of effort in making sure it will scale well with the times as the game inevitably ages.
If a developer doesn't put that effort into making sure their games exceed expectations, they won't age well, and will result in a game looking awful on current hardware and standards. This is why some games don't scale well when you crank them to 1080p, 1440p, or heaven forbid, 4K.
All of this to say that visuals play a huge role in a game aging well. As much as we like to say that graphics don't matter, I argue that they do, and everyone feels that they do matter, though people have different ways of expressing it.
GAMEPLAY AND GAMEPLAY MECHANICS:
Gameplay and gameplay mechanics are also victims of changing standards. If you look back at games from 10 years ago, from any genre, you can see that at the time, games were largely different.
Games are usually worked on for years, then shipped off in a presumably perfect state based on the standards of that time.
By "perfect state" I mean the developer will release a game when they believe it to be in the best possible state for sale. But that state is limited to the amount of information that developer has in that time frame. A developer that has sharper ears and on top of all the work that goes into the game's development, pays attention to changing standards, will usually end up releasing a product that ages far better than others.
For example, why do many games these days not use tank controls anymore? Because developers and consumers have found far more elegant solutions to character movement.
When standards change, it's usually a result of a universal agreement between gamers and developers of a certain mechanic being better than the old standard. To bring it back to the tank control example, it's the reason why games these days aren't using tank controls anymore, because we've agreed and accepted that analog stick movement and WASD + mouse movement is far better than tank controls. When standards change, it's usually the result of the reception, and more importantly, the money made on a game using a certain mechanic.
Yes, money plays a huge role in this. People that tell you all about passion have a point, but passion alone won't get a game to succeed, for that, you need money.
But let me pose a question here. Does the new standard make the old standard bad, or was there merit in the old standard? Was the old standard inherently flawed but we put up with it, or did it have some artistic and game design merit and thus the change was unwarranted?
The answer I believe lies somewhere in the middle with most mechanics. No, sometimes new standards aren't warranted, and new standards are a bit more polished than the old standards.
Usually what prompts these changes are usually a few games that spark innovation in their respective genres. Remember the slew of 3D platforming mascots as a result of Super Mario?
This is a nice segue into some games aging poorly because they were copycats, and ultimately didn't understand the winning formula that made that game so innovative. As a result, they meet the new standards that the innovative title did, without adding anything new or interesting, leading to a legitimately poor clone of the innovative title, which ultimately leads to the game aging poorly because people just say, "Oh that's just a Zelda/Doom/insert-innovative-series-here clone!"
Sometimes aging isn't just demonstrated by looking back at two titles, hindsight is always 20/20 after all, sometimes this is just demonstrated by comparing a game to its competition.
For example, Clive Barker's: Jericho has aged like mold, was outdated at time of release, largely because its competition was Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and BioShock, note that I think that only two of those titles have aged well, that being Halo 3 and BioShock.
Another way of looking at this. Games should be fun, first and foremost, and if a game wasn't fun in 2005, how fun do you think it will be in 2015? That's what mechanical aging boils down to, if a game isn't fun, has terrible and counter-intuitive gameplay mechanics, that will age it like 40 year old horse****, moreso than visual standards will.
Now onto the intangible aspects of this, all of what I said previously were tangible aspects that can cause a game to age well or poorly. Now we talk about the intangible, or how we feel about a game.
If what I was arguing before left you with the impression that I think new standards are inherently better than the old standards, you've misled yourself.
What does it mean for a game to be timeless?
I argue that when a game's design isn't effected by time and the continual improvements in computational power due to Moore's Law.
Why is Majora's Mask still my favorite Zelda title, even though Breath of the Wild has better lighting effects, texture resolutions, higher polygon counts on models, better physics engine, and such?
Because Majora's Mask achieved something special, had a story that stuck with players for 19 years, had the same flawless gameplay mechanics, and added in something new that you can only experience with that title.
For another example, why do I say that the first F.E.A.R. game is the only good one in the series? Because the other two, despite having better visuals, higher polygon counts, and better physics, can't hold a candle to the first one. The first one hit everything in terms of an FPS game to me, decent visuals, satisfying gunplay, smart AI, and the fun factor, while the other two felt like they were castrated.
This is why some older games feel timeless, because their core ideas of what makes them tick are themselves timeless.
If we were to boil my opinion down to a sentence, games age because they aren't perfect, but some games have elements that are.
What do you guys think? Let's have a discussion about this!
I ask this, because video games have been subjected to Moore's Law for the entirety of the industry.
I think it's a combination of various factors, and I separate this between the tangible and intangible here. The tangible being what we actually play and see, and the intangible being how we feel about it.
So to start off this discussion, let me give my opinion on this. I shall warn you, this is going to be a long opinion as I consider multiple factors of this.
CHANGING STANDARDS:
When asking the question, "Why do some games age poorly," it's prudent to address the concept of changing standards. For example, before the advent of HD, 3D was the standard back then.
How well or how poorly a game ages is fundamentally a consequence of changing standards. Saying that games get better every year or two due to Moore's Law does a disservice to the potential player.
For example, why would I ever want to play old games, when newer games have a higher polygon count on their models?
If the new standard looks better than the old standard, I would argue that the former statement shows inherent bias.
Thus, I would say that the changing standards argument is contextual not consequential. It's for this reason that I can make a sound argument for an old game still looking good compared to the standards of today. For example, F.E.A.R. still looks crisp and sharp even when comparing it to the standards of today.
ATTENTION TO GRAPHICAL DETAILS:
This play a big role on whether or not a game truly looks old. More attention given to the graphical details of a game also lead into the discussion of a game holding up. I argue a game has aged well when it meets or exceeds the standards at time of release, or still holds a candle compared to games made in the last 5 years.
An example of this would be the Crysis games. These games were made with the intent to far exceed the standards of their time, as well as hardware limitations of the time. As a result, the series still is used as a benchmark. Call the Crysis series a generic shooter all you want, but they made a statement and set a new standard in graphical fidelity that few titles ever get close to them.
It's not just Crysis that this happened with, many older PC games were also developed with the intent to run better on future hardware, and this pushes the industry forward, creating new standards. Thus Crysis and older PC games with the same design philosophy of pushing the boundaries plays into the perception of games ageing.
If we reel this view back a bit or condense it down, I believe that games with more attention given to lighting effects, and texture resolutions will tend to age better than those that don't, or couldn't have that same attention to detail. We don't even have to go to PC games that still hammer hardware to see this in action.
For another example, there's a reason that Super Mario 64 has aged far better than Bubsy 3D.
That's because Nintendo, on top of the stellar gameplay of Super Mario 64, put a lot of attention to detail in their 3D modeling work, texture resolution, lighting, and other factors. For the time, it exceeded the current standard.
When it comes to the two graphical details that play the biggest factor in a game holding up, are texture resolutions, specifically normal maps, and lighting effects.
Normal maps give the illusion of depth in the geometry of a model. Therefore it stands to reason that games that give a greater attention to detail to their normal map work will age inherently better than ones that meet expectations.
But why do some games age horribly, and others age well? I think this is due to various factors. For example, a game developed only for consoles will inherently age quicker due to the limitations in fixed hardware in an industry that's always improving.
No more clear an example of this can be demonstrated than with Condemned: Criminal Origins and F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon). These two games were made by the same developer, with Condemned being made for the Xbox 360, and F.E.A.R. being developed for the PC initially. As a result, F.E.A.R. looks far crisper than Condemned.
Condemned: Criminal Origins.
F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon)
Quite a stark difference isn't it? This isn't just shown with the games themselves, but development considerations, like the allocation of memory bandwidth with the PS3 and Xbox 360. There came a point where developers couldn't squeeze anymore juice out of those systems, prompting them to release newer consoles.
Notice, I'm not talking about what systems they were released on, but what their primary development was intended for.
As a result, one of these platforms between the two games can easily scale with and adjust the game to current standards, while the other can't. That leads into F.E.A.R. looking far better even though Condemned and F.E.A.R. were released the same year and made by the same developer.
What also plays into this is the screen resolution and whether or not it's viable to put better looking textures. The standard for 7-8 years was 1280x720 (720p). This meant the your average character model was 512x512 for their head, and 1024x1024 for their body.
This doesn't look bad when you're playing on a smaller screen with a smaller native resolution. However, scale that up to 1920x1080 (1080p) with a bigger screen and you're sitting the same distance with the same model resolution, texture resolution, and other factors, the game will look blurry and worse as a result.
This was the reason for pre-rendered cutscenes. This is usually the result of the developers not being able to do real time cutscenes due to the limitations of hardware. So they render it on their side and convert it to video on your game. This is inherently flawed, because pre-rendered custscenes were usually rendered in the standard of the time the game was released, which in some situations leads to good looking gameplay, but cutscenes that look worse than the gameplay. Add in the artifacts and compression ratio to this, and you can already see how this will age a game terribly.
Perhaps the biggest factor in a game aging terribly is simply design. If you design a game to the standard of the time, with no other elements or aspects of the design made to be timeless, the game will be doomed to age terribly. This is why a ton of older games made to be timeless still hold up to this day, despite their age.
For example, a lot of the "photo-realistic" games made in 2007, contained various shades of brown, with little to no color depth, making the game age terribly.
Think of your Call of Duty's and Battlefields for examples of this. Older Modern Military Shooters often show their age, while games like Doom, Quake, and Deus Ex, don't show their age as much.
Scale that up to today, and this is one of the reasons why I think games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Doom (2016) will age pretty well, because both games met and far exceeded the standards at the time of release, and a ton of attention to detail in all aspects of these games will cause them to inherently age pretty well.
To scale this to a Zelda example, there's a reason many people, including myself, weren't that impressed with the HD remake of Twilight Princess. The game had already aged so much that you can see inherent artifacts that were the standards of its time. Also its limited color depth and artistic design cause it to age more quickly than Wind Waker. Because of Wind Waker's art style and design, the HD remake of it was a stark contrast, and the color depth, and lighting effects of that game made improved character models, normal maps, and the improved lighting of the remake made it seem like a much better improvement over the HD remake of Twilight Princess.
Budget is also a big reason. The more money you invest into a product, like everything else, the better the result is usually. Ever wonder why Steam is filled with pixel art 2D side-scrolling games? That's the reason. Now, there are indie devs who even take that art style and through their dedication and passion, can make even pixel art look unique and timeless. It's one of the reasons I give massive credit to indie devs that strive achieve a standard that far surpasses the current standards of indie games.
Why do people remember Undertale and not the millions of other Earthbound clones? Because Undertale had real passion, and likely, budget to set itself apart from the crowd.
This is also why I totally respect the amount of work that goes into developing a game, but I have little patience for developers being lazy and only working to meet a standard, not working their balls off to make something truly exceptional.
There are ways for developers to circumvent the inherent aging process of video games. For example, if a developer truly cares, they will strive to make sure that 7 to 8 years down the line, the game will at least meet the standards of the projected future. This leads to a concept called "future-proofing."
For another Nintendo example, Nintendo put a lot of work into Breath of the Wild, and the visuals of that game alone, show an incredible amount of time, money, work, perseverance, stress, heart, and soul into them, to say nothing else of the other aspects of that game's design that likely took a similar amount of work, time, money, perseverance, stress, heart, and soul.
As a consequence, I feel Breath of the Wild will be a game that not only met expectations at the time of release, but far exceeded them, and likely will hold up to future standards.
As a result, the game also scales really well. For example, you get a stark improvement in the visuals if you run the game at 2560x1440 through an emulator. The game looks far crisper, and shows that Nintendo really put tons of effort in making sure it will scale well with the times as the game inevitably ages.
If a developer doesn't put that effort into making sure their games exceed expectations, they won't age well, and will result in a game looking awful on current hardware and standards. This is why some games don't scale well when you crank them to 1080p, 1440p, or heaven forbid, 4K.
All of this to say that visuals play a huge role in a game aging well. As much as we like to say that graphics don't matter, I argue that they do, and everyone feels that they do matter, though people have different ways of expressing it.
GAMEPLAY AND GAMEPLAY MECHANICS:
Gameplay and gameplay mechanics are also victims of changing standards. If you look back at games from 10 years ago, from any genre, you can see that at the time, games were largely different.
Games are usually worked on for years, then shipped off in a presumably perfect state based on the standards of that time.
By "perfect state" I mean the developer will release a game when they believe it to be in the best possible state for sale. But that state is limited to the amount of information that developer has in that time frame. A developer that has sharper ears and on top of all the work that goes into the game's development, pays attention to changing standards, will usually end up releasing a product that ages far better than others.
For example, why do many games these days not use tank controls anymore? Because developers and consumers have found far more elegant solutions to character movement.
When standards change, it's usually a result of a universal agreement between gamers and developers of a certain mechanic being better than the old standard. To bring it back to the tank control example, it's the reason why games these days aren't using tank controls anymore, because we've agreed and accepted that analog stick movement and WASD + mouse movement is far better than tank controls. When standards change, it's usually the result of the reception, and more importantly, the money made on a game using a certain mechanic.
Yes, money plays a huge role in this. People that tell you all about passion have a point, but passion alone won't get a game to succeed, for that, you need money.
But let me pose a question here. Does the new standard make the old standard bad, or was there merit in the old standard? Was the old standard inherently flawed but we put up with it, or did it have some artistic and game design merit and thus the change was unwarranted?
The answer I believe lies somewhere in the middle with most mechanics. No, sometimes new standards aren't warranted, and new standards are a bit more polished than the old standards.
Usually what prompts these changes are usually a few games that spark innovation in their respective genres. Remember the slew of 3D platforming mascots as a result of Super Mario?
This is a nice segue into some games aging poorly because they were copycats, and ultimately didn't understand the winning formula that made that game so innovative. As a result, they meet the new standards that the innovative title did, without adding anything new or interesting, leading to a legitimately poor clone of the innovative title, which ultimately leads to the game aging poorly because people just say, "Oh that's just a Zelda/Doom/insert-innovative-series-here clone!"
Sometimes aging isn't just demonstrated by looking back at two titles, hindsight is always 20/20 after all, sometimes this is just demonstrated by comparing a game to its competition.
For example, Clive Barker's: Jericho has aged like mold, was outdated at time of release, largely because its competition was Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and BioShock, note that I think that only two of those titles have aged well, that being Halo 3 and BioShock.
Another way of looking at this. Games should be fun, first and foremost, and if a game wasn't fun in 2005, how fun do you think it will be in 2015? That's what mechanical aging boils down to, if a game isn't fun, has terrible and counter-intuitive gameplay mechanics, that will age it like 40 year old horse****, moreso than visual standards will.
Now onto the intangible aspects of this, all of what I said previously were tangible aspects that can cause a game to age well or poorly. Now we talk about the intangible, or how we feel about a game.
If what I was arguing before left you with the impression that I think new standards are inherently better than the old standards, you've misled yourself.
What does it mean for a game to be timeless?
I argue that when a game's design isn't effected by time and the continual improvements in computational power due to Moore's Law.
Why is Majora's Mask still my favorite Zelda title, even though Breath of the Wild has better lighting effects, texture resolutions, higher polygon counts on models, better physics engine, and such?
Because Majora's Mask achieved something special, had a story that stuck with players for 19 years, had the same flawless gameplay mechanics, and added in something new that you can only experience with that title.
For another example, why do I say that the first F.E.A.R. game is the only good one in the series? Because the other two, despite having better visuals, higher polygon counts, and better physics, can't hold a candle to the first one. The first one hit everything in terms of an FPS game to me, decent visuals, satisfying gunplay, smart AI, and the fun factor, while the other two felt like they were castrated.
This is why some older games feel timeless, because their core ideas of what makes them tick are themselves timeless.
If we were to boil my opinion down to a sentence, games age because they aren't perfect, but some games have elements that are.
What do you guys think? Let's have a discussion about this!