Games: Then vs Now

Evergnar

All I remember is being constantly dizzy from blowing out cartridges. Life was much different then. Games were expected to work out of the box but we were less demanding about things like release dates, new content, ect.

Swordguy

games in the old days took 2 developers and a few months to make. now you have teams that cover different aspects of the game, and daily meetings for each team to tell the others what its doing, and what they need. sometimes, teams are in different locations of the world, and even speak different first languages. Nowadays, just to maintain something like an mmo, without doing any more development, would take at least half a dozen devs, and likely entry level devs that understand 5% of the game code at best.

AlexDougherty

Swordguy wrote: »

games in the old days took 2 developers and a few months to make. now you have teams that cover different aspects of the game, and daily meetings for each team to tell the others what its doing, and what they need. sometimes, teams are in different locations of the world, and even speak different first languages. Nowadays, just to maintain something like an mmo, without doing any more development, would take at least half a dozen devs, and likely entry level devs that understand 5% of the game code at best.

Indeed, games take longer to make for less play, they have become far more complicated, graphics alone take longer than whole games used too. Also games have more of a plot, more interactions, more complicated controls.

On the downside games are more buggy, and are changed after launch, often morphing into relatively different games.

UrQuan

As long as we're reminiscing, the first computer game I ever played on the Commodore 64 was one where my dad laboriously transcribed the code, character by character, from a computer magazine that had printed it out, because that was what you did back in the days when almost nobody had a computer, game stores were years away, modems were sci-fi, and the internet was an unthinkable concept. Heck, this was before we even had a floppy drive - the game was written onto a cassette tape. I don't remember if the game even had a name, but it was just navigating a maze. And it had a bug - there was one wall that you could move right through.

danno8

Ur-Quan wrote: »

As long as we're reminiscing, the first computer game I ever played on the Commodore 64 was one where my dad laboriously transcribed the code, character by character, from a computer magazine that had printed it out, because that was what you did back in the days when almost nobody had a computer, game stores were years away, modems were sci-fi, and the internet was an unthinkable concept. Heck, this was before we even had a floppy drive - the game was written onto a cassette tape. I don't remember if the game even had a name, but it was just navigating a maze. And it had a bug - there was one wall that you could move right through.

First system here was a Commodore Vic 20. We had a tape drive to, lol. Gorf was the first game I ever played.

Sometimes we can forget that taking a screenshot of eso requires more programming, memory...hell everything than an entire game required back in 1980.

And that screenshot would have completely blown the minds of us who were alive back then.

Falmer

Not sure that had anything to do with the games themselves, but rather the attitudes of the people playing them. Its a whole different generation now.

When I buy a game I don't like I rarely say anything. Never ask for a refund and certainly never visit their forums and post troll threads about the game.

Even just last summer during Steams sale, I decided to try Dark Souls. Terrible game, that the company didn't even attempt to port properly to the PC. Wasted $5 bucks. Didn't throw a fit, just wrote off that developer/publisher as ever getting future business from me, since I now know what to expect of their PC offerings. Same for The Bureau:Xcom.

Closest I came to forum ranting was with X:Rebirth. Left a few posts on their forums before the end, simply because I couldn't believe that was intended to be the game. That was a complete shattering of expectations, unlike I have ever experience before. Was like going to see the next Star Wars movie and end up with My Little Pony.