Am I the only person who thinks it´s nonsense to compare graphics through VIDEOS? Videos are compressed! An ultra detailed texture will look the same as a medium detailed texture when both are compressed in a video!
@bottaboomstick There are still games that have no story, like in old times. But there are TONS of old games with great stories.
For a start, RPGs always had stories (all sorts of quality, but can you deny the quality of the story of Chrono Trigger for example)?
Wing Commander and Privateer games had good stories. Hey, even Tie Fighter had a great story!
Doom hardly had any story. Or Quake. But Half Life 1 had. Ultima Underworld was a first person RPG with story.
I am not sure, but I guess appreciating stories instead of just dying in slow motion may be related to age groups. I did appreciate less of the story of a game when I was a kid or a teen.
Would I have appreciated Mass Effect story the same if I had played it when I was 15? I doubt, but then, I also had little knowledge about Drake's Equation and the Great Silence Mistery.
Also, not being a native english speaker, I just lost so much info when I was a teen, because I couldnt grasp some stuff said or appreciate the nuances of a narrative in english.
In fact, when I started playing Mass Effect I thought it´s sci fi story was ridiculous... it was pathetic that different spacefaring species in the galaxy had all reached maturity and such so close to each other (I think the oldest species that arrived in the Citadel, the Asari, did it less than 4 thousand years before humans).
However, as the game progressed, I was mind blown by their solution to the Great Silence, and the fact that the galaxy has actually been inhabited for billions of years, but... well, that would be a spoiler, even if the game is several years old.
Danny, have you noticed (since you work in the gaming industry) if the enthusiasm for Oculus Rift is bigger among older people than younger people? If so, I wonder if there is a correlation between the theme of your video (older games having seen a bigger evolution in a short time and missing that) and Oculus Rift enthusiasm.
@bennybop80 interesting enough, Dark Souls is not that popular among so many of the old guard players. I am 35 and I hated it. I played many difficult games in the past (agh, Battletoads) and I do not have the patience anymore for games that make me replay the same section dozens of times... I find it simply irritating.
I disagree the blame is on consoles and cross plataform.
The lack of evolution in graphics is caused because there is little to evolvem even on PC. Even if you could make a game that looked EXACTLY like real life, the evolution from some current titles graphics to perfect photorealism would still be smaller than the evolution from Ultima Underworld/Doom (2d sprites in 3d environment) to Quake (3d characters, pickups, etc)
Very good video Danny. I am 35 and I started playing games on MSX 1 when I was like 7... Konami games like Magical Tree, Comic Bakery. Mostly 16kb games, still far away from the bigger 128 and 256k games that would be released a few years later on MSX with special extra ROM chips that came with the cartridges, and quite far away from the much better games of the MSX 2, (amongst which was Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2), which had better graphics (more than 16 colors!!)
Even though I have been playing for so long, and played great games in the past (I play the original XCOM at least once a year) I reject the theory of some old gamers that only crap is released nowadays.
Memory is selective. In everything including games. People tend to focus on the great games of their past, and forget the large quantity of mediocre games that were released back then, just as they are released now.
People remember Doom and forget the "Corridor 7s" and other hundred low quality copycats.
I am still in love with gaming however. There are some amazing masterpieces still being produced.
I am not afraid to say LA Noire for example is better than anything I played in all my Sega Genesis years and most games I played on my early PC years. Nor that I had more fun with Sleeping Dogs than with 85% of the games I played on DOS.
@stev69 well, actually, I love the graphics of Xenonauts. Let´s wait and see if they add support to high-res graphics and other graphic effects on OpenXcom.
Xenonauts is great, but I also suggest picking up the free OpenXCom and then buying the original 1994 game on GOG or some other place (OpenXCom requires the original files). OpenXCom fix lots of stuff from the original game, make it easy to play on Windows, adds several features and has EASY mod support... just add mods to a folder and choose in-game which ones you want to activate.
Plus, they have an Android version that works VERY WELL! I forgot all my other games on Android. I only play OpenXCom now!
I already said it before and I will say again: GAMESPOT, give us good old SCREENS for graphic comparisons, preferably images that we can open in different browser TABS, so we can switch back and forth.
It´s BETTER to switch back and forth than a video and the most important: jpeg compression is much better than video compression! We can´t expect us to analyze minimum detail differences in textures and shadows by looking at COMPRESSED VIDEOS!
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