Things you miss about old PC Games

TruffleShuffle

TruffleShuffle

TruffleShuffle

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There has probably been a thead about this already but...

What do you miss about old PC games?

For me there are two things. The first, and biggest, was old PC-CD Rom games that had CD Audio tracks on them. First i used to love that you could whack these CD's in your CD player and listen to them if you wanted to (Quake 2, Carmageddon and Wipeout were good ones for this). The other thing i loved about this was that once you had installed the game, you could put any audio CD in and the game would play that as the soundtrack (great for games like Wargasm, or Quake 1).

The second thing i miss is live action. I still love games like Ripper and 7th Guest that came on a library of disks and you actually got involved in the title becusae you had real people talking to you rather than animations. Who would want Christopher Walken in their face acting like a overworked homicide cop?
 
Manuals. Huge manuals with lots of really interesting game background information and tips. Especially in RPGs where the manuals would really flesh out the world, and were often in the style of magic books, or encyclopaedias. The Ultimas were the classic example of this.
 
Emergent gameplay - by which I mean, there's no attempt at AI in games anymore, it's all scripted sequences.

I miss games that just give the computer a set of rules to act by in a game and then let it loose to see what happens :)
 
Better stories, they just seemed to have the right balance between graphics and story.
 
What I miss most is the fact developers (nearly always) made choices based on game quality, not game quality vs. money spent ratio. It looks like developers had more passion back then but I'm not sure that's entirely true. It's just that money is everything in this day and age so most developers can't really do what they want to.

The emphasis on visuals over gameplay is rather sad on most games. Gameplay should be your one and only priority. Whatever extra you get after developing excellent gameplay is just a bonus. But graphics sell games so we go back to my previous point regarding quality vs. money. Money just ruins most games and I'm hoping someone comes up with a genius new way of developing games that decreases costs ten fold to allow developers to develop gameplay with passion again.

Manuals are nice too. But then again, most games don't require manuals these days and that's a huge loss. I want games you need to explore and learn over time instead of having a look at the controller setup and off you go.
 
Manuals - at least the ones that set out the story and introduce you to some of the characters and elements within the game whilst its installing or im at work xD

Longevity - Even FPS seem like they used to have a decent single player life without having to plug it full of mods to give it an extra kick.

When new ideas were new - sadly theres not that many innovations or original concepts left anymore. Its just old ideas that have been rebranded again and again and again - Im looking at you bullet time.

Point and clicks - slightly happy with the newer sam and max titles but I loved sitting around figuring out the nonsense that was filling the discworld, simon the sorcerer and all the lucas arts titles.

Humour - WHERES THE FUNNY AT?
 
Health bars. I dont want regenerating life in a cover-based shooter. Just give me 100 health and a crouch button, lay a few medpacks around and I'll be quite content :cool:

also yknow..an interesting plot's always appreciated. Give me Psychonauts over Modern Warfare 9000 any day :p
 
It's amazing how little the graphics actually matter in a good game.

For example, I absolutely loved Final Fantasy VII and VIII. At the time the graphics were pretty good, but not spectacular. Compared even to FFX they look dated, but I still think they are fantastic games.

These days it seems all anyone cares about is graphics. This ruins games by making them short [not enough time to make a longer game] and boring [no time and in many cases zero effort put into writing].

Look at Modern Warfare 1 and 2. Visuals are pretty good, but together they barely make a decent length game from years ago, and the story is pretty meh. The kind of thing you would expect from one of those dodgy films you find on Sky at 2am - functional, but uninspiring.

One of the best combinations of graphics, gameplay and story has to be Freespace 1 and 2. At the time the graphics in FS2 were some of the best around. The gameplay was brilliant, even though the space-sim genre had been around ages by then. The story? Wow! It sucked you in and wanted you to keep playing. The voice acting was brilliant. The graphics are dated by today's standards, but there hasn't been a single space-sim that has come close to how good that game was.
 
How they were made to run on as many different setups as possible..OpenGL,Direct3d, even software rendering ensuring just about everyone could play the game. My PC got very old overnight when they started porting 360 games over..quite badly.
 
When games were fresh and new, rather than the same regurgitated story and gameplay mechanics.

Also when people played games to have fun, rather than just abuse each other over headsets.
 
Proper add on packs that weren't released 2 weeks after the game. Also miss the big and awesome collector editions they used to do back in the day as opposed to lazy steel box/download code things of today.
 
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