Wanting a PC focus, complexity, challenge and depth is NOT "nostalgia"

[soldant]

So it's not really nostalgia, it's finding what they can relate the audence to and what the budget allows.

Thing is that there's no requirement for them to remake the games of yesterday over and over again. There's nothing to stop them coming up with a fresh new system. The article noted that "retro" or "nostalgia" has become a marketing tool, a feature to splash across the box. It's the entire pitch for the game in some cases. It's like "Hey there, remember that old turn based strategy game? Well, we're effectively making that, except with different art! I'll take all your money please."

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with a Kickstarter remaking a CoD style game (and no, there'd be no lawsuits unless it was an actual CoD game, they can't go for them for having a modern warfare themed FPS). If it's something that people enjoy, then why not make it? I wanted to see a new XCOM, so I paid for Xenonauts (didn't Kickstart though, one payment is enough). There are lots of old games that I'd like to see a sequel to, or old mechanics I'd like to see resurrected. I can't 100% follow the RPG argument going on and I've never played cRPGs, but I like some of the mechanics that people are describing.

But that's not innovative and Kickstarter effectively won't drive gaming forward as some have suggested if all devs do is remake things from the 90s. It's just another iteration of what came before. Not everything needs to be innovative, which is good because some of the best games aren't innovative and some that innovate do a poor job of it and are crappy games, but the original article's point still stands. Kickstarter has always been about making a game that will make money when all is said and done, and nostalgia sells lately on the PC. But it's by no means innovation to bring back a dead gameplay mechanic.

[NathanH]

A few points, Soldant:

Something may not be innovative, but that doesn't automatically make it nostalgia-based. If you follow the system of a game developed a long time ago, but update it so that the interface and documentation is modern and can be easily followed, then you haven't innovated, but you're not appealing to nostalgia either, you're just making an improved version of an old game that never got the improved version its mechanics deserved.

Next, any of these major kickstarter games are going to have some sort of modern take on things. Even subconsciously they'll be influenced by modern culture and sensibilities. They're not going to be remakes, they're going to have new ideas.

Finally, it has been a long time since some of these types of game have been made. It's quite a lot to ask from a particular developer that they capture all the good ideas from a game that have been lost over the years, and also do lots of new things. Somebody earlier put it like this. A long time ago, a crossroads was reached, and a genre's development sped off down one road. If we want to explore a different road, the first step is to go back to the crossroads.

[JackShandy]

Nostalgia is over-hated. The entire videogame industry is only a few decades old. Looking back isn't miring ourselves in mawkish sentiment, it's just stopping for a while to get some perspective. We spend all our time burning our dead and rushing forward into the next new advance. It's absolutely worth going back and trying to see some of the alternate routes we could have taken. We're only the modern technological manifestation of a medium that's existed for centuries.

[r3dknight]

I agree, this is why Fallout 3 is bringing back a beloved franchise is a cause for much celebration, right?

[Mohorovicic]

"Alternate routes" not "blatantly worse routes".

[TillEulenspiegel]

We spend all our time burning our dead and rushing forward into the next new advance.

This trend was at its worst in the late 90s, when 3D was the new hotness. Even though at that point 3D looked like shit and played like shit, everything had to be 3D.

Compare 1995 with 1998. Progress!

It took years for 2D to become acceptable again (for anything other than casual games), and that's mostly thanks to indies and mobile platforms.

[soldant]

Something may not be innovative, but that doesn't automatically make it nostalgia-based.

That's true, in that it's an update to an older idea, but a lot of Kickstarters are pitching themselves based on nostalgia. "Hey, remember that game mechanic from 1996? Well, here it is! Again!"

Next, any of these major kickstarter games are going to have some sort of modern take on things. Even subconsciously they'll be influenced by modern culture and sensibilities. They're not going to be remakes, they're going to have new ideas.

They have new IP (except for some which are straight up sequels, like Wasteland 2, which got funded basically because Wasteland was good - apparently, I never played it) but plenty of them still tred the same ground that others did before them. Again, I never said that it's a bad thing to do that, it can be quite the opposite and each game should be assessed on its own merits. But that alone doesn't change the fact that they look back, not forward.

Finally, it has been a long time since some of these types of game have been made. ... If we want to explore a different road, the first step is to go back to the crossroads.

That's fine, as I said. You seem to have taken me to say that it's a bad path that they've taken, when it isn't necessarily bad at all. But the article questioned whether all of this going back to the past is innovative, and whether it will lead to innovation, and how that fits in with the idea that Kickstarter was going to be a way for devs to come up with fresh, exciting, new ideas free from the yolk of publishers. It's a tiny bit ironic that instead of the wave of new ideas, we're resurrecting old ideas (I say "we" because we're funding them after all). Obviously Kickstarter and the new model is in its extreme infancy, the afterbirth hasn't even yet been delivered with its mess of blood and flesh and... erm... afterbirth and...

Uh, anyway, we don't yet know if going back will take us forwards or just keep us stuck in a time warp. Again bringing back old mechanics and dead genres isn't a bad thing if the game is good, but I think that the article is essentially correct, for the moment, that the wave of innovation wasn't ushered in with Kickstarter. People tend to get more excited about projects promising to be oldschool or coming from devs relying on their oldschool credibility. Which is okay, but innovative? Not necessarily, and in that the article was probably right.

[NathanH]

Again, I think it is completely unreasonable to expect a developer to resurrect a long-forgotten type of game, update it to fit with modern standard and sensibilities, and do a lot of new and innovative stuff. First job is to resurrect the long-forgotten type of game and give it a modern coat of paint with a nice UI and good documentation and so on. If that's successful, then the next wave can start doing new things.

The article was being correct and stupid when it made the innovation criticism. It was being wrong and stupid when it made the nostalgia criticism.

I think the smaller scale kickstarter projects tend to be more innovative. That makes sense, because it's harder to sell unusual and speculative things to the large number of people you'd need for a big project. The big projects are more about doing things that publishers wouldn't back, rather than doing anything innovative. In some sense it is a bit disappointing that Obsidian don't look to be trying anything too exciting, because they could have got the funding with a more speculative idea, on account of their current reputation. Most of the other big projects are trading more on older reputations, which we can't trust so much, so they need to make their pitch less speculative.

[Nalano]

Again, I think it is completely unreasonable to expect a developer to resurrect a long-forgotten type of game, update it to fit with modern standard and sensibilities, and do a lot of new and innovative stuff. First job is to resurrect the long-forgotten type of game and give it a modern coat of paint with a nice UI and good documentation and so on. If that's successful, then the next wave can start doing new things.

Why is that the first job? Why is innovation not​ the impetus for everything?

[b0rsuk]

Projects like Castle Story and FTL are still getting funded, and I consider them innovative. Or at least, I can't remember any similar games.

[JackShandy]

Why is that the first job? Why is innovation not​ the impetus for everything?

Refinement is generally more important than innovation, because making good stuff is more important than making new stuff.

[Nalano]

Refinement is generally more important than innovation, because making good stuff is more important than making new stuff.

But this isn't a race to figure out how to cook the perfect steak. This is more along the line of putting a burrito in the microwave to satisfy some comfort cravings.

[arathain]

I'm not sure I agree, Nalano. Older cRPGs were doing some pretty interesting stuff, in terms of simulation and flexibility, among others. They were somewhat hamstrung by being unrefined and having clunky interfaces, rendering them a pastime for the patient or the free time-rich, and leading to their extinction. Surely there's tons of room to apply modern interface design, as well as doing a little concept refinement (for example, learning from the ever-present evolving Roguelikes, their closest surviving relatives), or from console games (Etryian Odyssey, say).

To stretch your analogy until it doesn't work anymore (average Internet time for this to occur: 1 post), it's more like carefully seasoning a stew to bring all the flavours into balance.

Do we really think that everything worthwhile in the genre has been done?

[JackShandy]

But this isn't a race to figure out how to cook the perfect steak. This is more along the line of putting a burrito in the microwave to satisfy some comfort cravings.

If your burritos take teams of professionals a year or more to microwave, sure.

[Nalano]

If your burritos take teams of professionals a year or more to microwave, sure.

All games, good or bad, take a year or more with a pile of professionals. What's your point?

[archonsod]

I never said the Dragon Age games were particularly innovative and neither do I consider them to be. Bioware in general hasn't deviated much from the formula that made Baldur's Gate 2 succesful and the same could be said of almost anyone else.

That kinda depends on what you're looking at. DA2 does some interesting things in terms of narrative, but it's laid on top of what is ultimately a typical MMO style system (although in that sense it's not the cod D&D they used for everything from BG up until DA, so ....).

Thing is, the innovation that has occurred is what people are decrying. For most of the past 40 years of cRPG's, it's been developers porting across pen and paper systems. The more actiony RPG's like Mass Effect are kinda the opposite of that; developers bringing in aspects of other computer games into the traditional RPG.

I don't think it's so much that the current "things-that-are-called-RPGs-now" are going about things the wrong way. Things like modern Diablolikes and fusions of action-RPG and choose-your-own-adventures like Mass Effect are exploring some interesting territory. What has been forgotten is that there is other territory to explore, and it's territory that's more consistent with pen and paper roleplaying ideas: define a character, choose an action from a large set of plausible choices in all manner of situations, and have the world react to the choice through the character's definition. Modern RPGs usually only have that behaviour in combat situations, if they even have it at all.

So did past RPGs. The fundamental problem you have with any RPG on the computer is that we don't yet have a sophisticated AI capable of playing the GM. As a result you have no real option but to limit the choices, except for combat which is sufficiently simple enough the computer can handle it. In fact, it's the more sandbox stuff such as what Bethesda tend to put out that's more consistent with the pen and paper RPG; the earlier games committed the cardinal sin of railroading the player (in fact, really you could say something like Baldur's Gate was closer to the adventure gamebook than it was an actual RPG). The problem there of course is that you have to sacrifice narrative to do it.

It's also kinda odd to marry the pen and paper model with complexity and depth. The pen and paper systems are naturally limited because the system generally needs to be calculable by a human within a reasonable period of time, which isn't a limitation we face on a modern computer. FPS style games regularly model what could be termed 'character' effects on accuracy, we can also (should we wish) model a physically realistic ballistics simulator capable of tracking everything from bullet trajectory to the effects of a given projectile on a given material. It doesn't feel complex to the player since it's just pointing the mouse and clicking, but the underlying system is inherently far more sophisticated than that used in any pen and paper system, which ultimately tends to abstract the number crunching involved into "randomly generate some numbers which must be higher or lower than this number".
Which I guess is part of the problem. It's all very well to demand more complex, challenge and depth but without being able to define what we mean by those terms it's something of an impossible task to expect a developer to be able to produce it. The combat model of say Mount & Blade is far more complex; on a system level; than any pen and paper melee system (barring perhaps Rolemaster anyway), yet we wouldn't generally say it was a more complex game than say Baldur's Gate.

[TillEulenspiegel]

Complexity (as a desirable quality) is better defined in terms of the number of choices a player has and the level of impact those choices can have on the game.

Being able to determine the precise 3D vector along which you swing your sword in M&B may present a near-infinite array of choices, but they are not particularly meaningful in the broader context of the game.

"We don't have strong AI" will always be a poor excuse for simplistic mechanics. I point you to Dwarf Fortress.

[JackShandy]

All games, good or bad, take a year or more with a pile of professionals. What's your point?

Man, what's yours? I'm saying the team of professionals probably don't consider their years work a microwave burrito. As far as I can tell you're saying "Who cares if the game's no good, it's fast and cheap." Well, I care. The people who spent all their time making it care. Maybe you buy games you don't enjoy just to fill up time on the train, but I don't think that type of gaming is relevant in a thread about old-school RPG's.

[soldant]

I point you to Dwarf Fortress.

Things Dwarf Fortress does well:
- Has a unique gameplay premise
- Has lots of choices

Things Dwarf Fortress doesn't do well:
- Interface
- Explaining itself
- Documentation
- Interface
- Warfare
- Everything else

DF is an oft-cited example of deep and complex gameplay, when really it isn't - the depth and complexity comes only from the nigh-impenetrable interface, which makes even the simplest tasks the most difficult to accomplish. The depth comes from having like a billion items, none of which are explained, and giving you absolutely no guidance on anything at all. Even with 3rd party addons to try to make the game a bit easier to play, it's still a goddamn mess.

Which is why I sometimes get concerned when people complain about "streamlining" - streamlining does not always equate to making things stupid. Streamlining is frequently the removal of pointless or useless mechanics that make the game harder to play for absolutely no reason. "Depth" as found in DF is not depth and is not good complexity. Needlessly cryptic interfaces, poor explanation of gameplay elements, a myriad of items which are in effect duplicates of each other, overly opaque mechanics with no reason - none of that is good depth or complexity!

I totally agree that 'complexity' should be based more on the player's choices, to a point. I'd further add that mechanics that require the player to become more involved with the game world adds complexity as well (say for example proper sniping mechanics in a sniper game).

[Nalano]

Man, what's yours? I'm saying the team of professionals probably don't consider their years work a microwave burrito.

Do I really have to break this shit down for you? Here:

We're supposed to like these guys because what they did ten years ago was innovative. The implication of this is that, given free piles of money, what they'd do now would be innovative.

Instead, we're demanding that they just keep doing what they did ten years ago. That's not asking to be wowed, or to increase one's palate. That's asking for comfort food.

Now, the reason this view was attacked as nostalgic is because certain grognards like to tout their favorite shit from the olden days as simply more complex than the consolefied kiddie bullshit of today. And I'd agree in the sense that the shit from yesteryear appeared - at least when I first played it - far more outwardly complex. We certainly had developers at the time bragging that their games "used almost all of the keyboard" and there were bosses that were patently unforgiving if you didn't read the Cliff Notes on Bards' level 4 abilities, but fuck that shit.

Seriously.

The gameplay itself was far more straightforward and hokey than stuff today. So many possibilities of attacking the exact same problem, because that's what dungeon crawls are. They play out largely the same way, no matter how you build your druid. Those limitations of the day were actual limitations, and not all of them can be explained away by the technology. Whenever I hear Wizardry or whomever describe their vision of the Bestest Game Evar™, they reminds me of an semi-autistic nerd I know who'd rather play with his Blackberry than other people: Those games he puts on a pedestal had incredibly narrow scope, even if they were wide in other respects. Meanwhile he attacks games that are wide where his are narrow, because they are narrow where his are wide.